The Guardian

A carved wooden post from the Nazca Culture of Peru, 1 to 700 CE.

Get Down Mr. President

My teenage kids have just started playing a game that they learned about from one of those Facebook sharing exercises, an answer to the question "what is the silliest game you and your friends used to play?"

It goes like this: in a group of people, one will put his hand to his ear, Secret Service-style. When other people notice, they will do the same, until there is only one person left who does not have his hand to his ear. Then they jump that person and wrestle him to the ground, shouting "Get down, Mr. President!"

Fiction, Conspiracy, and Exploding Mangoes

In 1988, Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq died in a plane crash. Nobody in Pakistan thinks it was an accident, but the actual identity of Zia's murderers has never been revealed. Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif wrote a novel called A Case of Exploding Mangoes about the murder and the conspiracy theories surrounding it. He recently spoke to NPR about the book:

Like all young reporters, I was like, this is going to be my big story, and I started working on it. After a few months, I realized that there was no way I was going to get to the bottom of it. There were layers and layers and layers of deception and cover-ups to cover the other cover-ups. Then it occurred to me that I would just make up my own facts. If no one was willing to tell me who did it, then as a fictional character, I'll raise my hand and say, 'Well, I did it,' and I'll write a book about it. And so, basically, it was a failed journalist's revenge. . . . The funny thing is, after the book came out, a lot of people — and some of them were heads of intelligence agencies — I've run into them at a party or at a social gathering, and they take me into a corner and say, 'Son, you've written a brilliant novel. Now tell me, who's your source?' I used to find it a bit scary at the beginning that, my God, these people are running my country and they actually believe all the lies that I've written.

In such a case, is there anyone who knows the whole story? I suppose that depends, in a sense, on the size of the conspiracy. If one guy ordered his crack team of five operatives to do the job, then he knows. But what if it was a matter of lots of nodding and winking and cryptic statements among a bunch of parties until one poor sergeant thought he had been told to do it? Is there one mastermind who understands the whole situation, or is it just as murky to everyone involved?:

Nerve Cell Transplants to Treat Chronic Pain

Some people suffer from chronic pain because of damage to their nerve cells. In these cases, the problem seems to be a shortage a signaling molecule called gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA). Now researchers at San Francisco University have reversed chronic pain in mice by transplanting into their spinal chords cells that produce GABA. The researchers

extracted immature precursors of GABA-releasing neurons from the brains of fetal mice, and injected them into adults with injured spinal nerves, whose paws were extremely sensitive to touch. He delivered the neurons to the dorsal horn—a structure in the spine that receives sensory information from around the body. Loss of GABA signalling in the horn is thought to underlie many hard-to-treat pain conditions.

The transplanted neurons survived and gave rise to mature GABA-releasing cells, which formed connections with the local spinal circuits. Within a month, the sensitivity brought on by the rodents’ injured nerves had been completely reversed.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether this will work in people, and it raises the question of where we might get a supply of fetal human nerve cells. Attempts to use engineered stem cells have not worked nearly this well.

The Medieval Bronze Doors of the Basilica of San Zeno, Verona

I have a thing for medieval doors, from the simplest plank constructions to the wonderful art works installed on some cathedrals. Here is one of the most famous, from the Basilica of San Zeno in Verona, Italy. This is the North Panel.

The basilica was first constructed in the 10th century, but it was completely rebuilt after an earthquake in 1117. The oldest above-ground parts of the current structure were finished by 1138 when the church was rededicated, but it remained under construction until 1398.

The bronze plates on the doors were made over a long period of time, by several different masters working in different styles. The oldest are believed to have been made by the Saxon masters of Hildesheim in the 11th century, and therefore predate the building of which they are now part. This is the South Panel.

Details.

Wet Mars: the Noachian Epoch

An artist's conception of Mars during the Noachian Epoch, 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago (according to the latest theories,anyway).

It was during the Noachian Era that Mars had surface water, which flowed into the ocean that covered most of the northern hemisphere and left all of these hydrological features.

Wang Shu, Chinese Architect

This year's winter of the Pritzker Prize is Chinese Architect Wang Shu. According to the jury, his architecture

opens new horizons while at the same time resonates with place and memory. His buildings have the unique ability to evoke the past, without making direct references to history. 

Above and top are the Ningbo Museum of History, of which the jury said

Wang Shu´s buildings have a very rare attribute—a commanding and even, at times, monumental presence, while functioning superbly and creating a calm environment for life and daily activities. The History Museum at Ningbo is one of those unique buildings that while striking in photos, is even more moving when experienced. The museum is an urban icon, a well-tuned repository for history and a setting where the visitor comes first. The richness of the spatial experience, both in the exterior and interior is remarkable. This building embodies strength, pragmatism and emotion all in one.

And this is the Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion, which Wang designed for the Shanghai Expo.

I can't say I am a huge fan, but the Pritzker has been given to the designers of much worse stuff.

Michael Fumento Attacks Angry Conservatism

Michael Fumento, long-time conservative activist and writer, has written a powerful attack on contemporary conservatism. He is disgusted by the antics of the Limbaughs, Malkins, and Breitbarts who compete with each other to say the nastiest things about liberals, as if angry insults were a substitute for reasoned politics:

Civility and respect for order – nay, demand for order – have always been tenets of conservatism. The most prominent work of history’s most prominent conservative, Edmund Burke, was a reaction to the anger and hatred that swept France during the revolution. It would eventually rip the country apart and plunge all of Europe into decades of war. Such is the rotted fruit of mass-produced hate and rage. 

What bothers him even more is that these "conservative" icons seem not to care much about conservative politics, but only about making money:

RightMarch.com accompanied the Obama-cum-tyrant message with an offer to “Blast Fax” every member of Congress for $139 – for a profit of about $139. Surely these people have their fingers crossed that President Obama is reelected.

I go back and forth in my own mind about these issues. Sometimes I think that angry incivility is a real threat to our political discourse, and sometimes I think it is a silly distraction.

At the end of the piece Fumento gets to something that I think, as all my readers know, is a lot more important, the dearth of ideas on either the left or the right to get the median household income rising again, reduce inequality, and generally get the country on a more positive footing. Maybe part of the reason shouting is so prominent in our politics is there aren't many good ideas around worth discussing in a serious way.

A Grotesque Alphabet from the 17th Century

From BibliOdyssey.

Two Roman Curse Tablets: Crush Fistus! Strangle Porcello!

The Museo Archeologico Civico di Bologna, in Italy, has announced that two lead curse tablets have been rediscovered in their collection and translated. The tablets have been lying around the museum basement, ignored, since the nineteenth century. (Wonder what else is lost down there?) The two tablets probably date to the 4th Century CE. One targets a Roman Senator named Fistus (Crush, kill Fistus the senator. . . . May Fistus dilute, languish, sink and may all his limbs dissolve. . . .), the other a veterinarian named Porcello. (Destroy, crush, kill, strangle Porcello and wife Maurilla. Their soul, heart, buttocks, liver. . . )

Detail and drawing of the Fistus curse. The figure with snakes for hair may be the goddess Hecate, who was, among other things, the goddess of witches and black magic.

The curse against Porcello.

I wonder if placing these tablets in the ground helped people get past their anger, or just made them more miserable when the curses didn't take immediate effect.

What is the Future of Conservatism?

The question ahead for American conservatives is whether they envision their future as a multi-ethnic coalition in favor of enterprise and individualism—or as a Bloc Québécois for older, white people. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have embraced this latter future, and profited immensely by it. Nobody's firing them.

--David Frum

Those Big Spending Conservatives

Well, folks, there you have it. Where is the evidence that Republicans care, in any way, about reducing spending or balancing the budget? Or the truth, for that matter, since they can't stop ranting about what a big spender Obama is.

And where is the evidence that tax cuts somehow reduce spending, or that tax increases increase spending? There is no such evidence, and every Republican who says so is lying.

Daedalus in Sicily

All his life he was building something, inventing something.
Now, for a Cretan queen, an artificial heifer,
so as to cuckold the king. Then a labyrinth, this time for
the king himself, to hide from bewildered glances
an unbearable offspring. Or a flying contraption, when
the king figured himself so busy with new commissions.
The son of that journey perished falling into the sea,
like Phaeton, who, they say, also spurned his father’s
orders. Here, in Sicily, stiff on its scorching sand,
sits a very old man, capable of transporting
himself through the air, if robbed of other means of passage.
All his life he was building something, inventing something.
All his life from those clever constructions and from those inventions,
he had to flee. As though inventions
and constructions are anxious to rid themselves of their blueprints
like children ashamed of their parents, Presumably, that’s the fear
of replication. Waves are running onto the sand;
behind, shine the tusks of the local mountains.
Yet he had already invented, when he was young, the seesaw,
using the strong resemblance between motion and stasis.
The old man bends down, ties to his brittle ankle
(so as not to get lost) a lengthy thread,
straightens up with a grunt, and heads out for Hades.

--Joseph Brodsky

Two Major Clinical Trials for Alzheimer's

From Nature News. The US government has announced $50 million in new funding for Alzheimer's research, including two major clinical trials. One of the trials

builds on the fact that Alzheimer’s begins to attack the brain 10–15 years before symptoms appear — a conclusion confirmed by new imaging tools that allow the disease to be monitored in living people.

This trial will receive $16 million, and is the first attempt to avert the onset of Alzheimer’s by treating people who have not yet developed symptoms. It is a five-year study using an antibody called crenezumab, made by Genentech of South San Francisco, California. Already in phase II trials in patients with mild-to-moderate symptoms, the drug is thought to work by binding to fragments of amyloid-β — insoluble, neuron-damaging peptides that aggregate in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s — both neutralizing it and making it easier for immune cells in the brain to eliminate it (see ‘Neural defenders’). The Banner Alzheimer’s Institute (BAI) in Phoenix, Arizona, together with a team at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia, will test the drug against a placebo in 300 symptom-free people, two-thirds of whom carry a rare genetic mutation that makes them certain to get the disease. Mild cognitive impairment sets in at a median age of 44 in people carrying the mutation, and full-blown dementia at 49, decades earlier than is common with the more typical sporadic form of the disease.

The other trial

will receive $7.9 million and is being led by Suzanne Craft, a neuropsychologist at the University of Washington and associate director of geriatric research at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, both in Seattle. It will test an intranasal insulin spray against placebo in people with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s. Insulin receptors are abundant in synapses in brain regions that are important for memory and cognition, and in Alzheimer’s, amyloid-β can knock out the receptors and disrupt memory formation. Flooding rat brain cells with insulin has been found to block the fragments and protect the receptors (F. G. De Felice et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 1971–1976; 2009). When Craft tried the strategy in humans by giving intranasal insulin to people with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s, the results were impressive: about three-quarters remained stable or improved cognitively over the four months of treatment, Craft says.

Every bad thing people say about the government is as true of the medical research establishment as of HUD or the DOD: excessive bureaucracy, maddening paperwork, careerism, waste, and so on. Does that mean that this research is not worth doing?

Mark English

Mark English was born in Texas in 1933. He started his artistic career painting signs for businesses in small Texas towns, because it was better than picking cotton. After he attended the University of Texas he became an illustrator, and for decades his work appeared in major magazines, corporate brochures, and the like. In 1983 we was elected to the illustrators' hall of fame. He did not begin painting for gallery sales until 1995, and he has been quite successful. His style has evolved quite rapidly over the years, swinging from expressionist to something almost cubist. I love his vision of the western landscape. These pictures all come from his web site, where they are posted without titles or dates.

When it Comes to the Budget, Clinton and Obama have been More Conservative than Bush

Bruce Bartlett:

Mr. Clinton consistently governed as a fiscal conservative and Mr. Bush as a liberal. However, Mr. Clinton was not a conservative by today’s standards, but rather by those of an earlier generation. That is to say, he actually cared about the budget deficit and was willing to raise taxes to reduce it – as Ronald Reagan did 11 times, and George H.W. Bush courageously did even though he knew it would probably cost him re-election.

Today’s conservatives oppose tax increases so strenuously that many were willing to default on the nation’s debt last summer rather than raise taxes by a single penny. They overwhelmingly believe in a nonsensical theory called “starve the beast,” which asserts that tax cuts automatically reduce spending and tax increases never reduce the deficit because they invariably lead to spending increases.

The Clinton and Bush 43 administrations are almost perfect tests of starve-the-beast theory; the former raised taxes in 1993, while the latter signed into law seven different major tax cuts, according to a Treasury study. If there were any truth whatsoever to starving the beast, we should have seen a rise in spending during the Clinton years and a fall in spending during the Bush years. In fact, we had exactly the opposite results.

Andrew Sullivan:

There isn't a debate about Clinton's and Bush's records. The former was a conservative; the latter a big government spender and borrower who so crippled this country's finances it could barely survive the financial crash that was the exclamation point to the wreckage of the last Republican era.

And, I would add, Obama has been an even more conservative spender than Clinton. When it comes to the budget, the Republicans of our era are anything but conservative.

Philip K. Dick's Paranoid Gnosticism, or, the Theology of Superhero Anarchism

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick considered himself a prophet. His stories, he thought -- Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau -- might be set in the real future, to which he had access through his visions. Simon Critchley has a series of articles at the Times web site on Dick's theology that I find fascinating. It strikes me that in one way Dick was a prophet, because his paranoid view of the universe seems to explain much of what has happened in our popular culture over the past 40 years.

Dick's spiritual arc began with an event that his followers call "the golden fish":

On Feb. 20, 1974, Dick was hit with the force of an extraordinary revelation after a visit to the dentist for an impacted wisdom tooth for which he had received a dose of sodium pentothal. A young woman delivered a bottle of Darvon tablets to his apartment in Fullerton, Calif. She was wearing a necklace with the pendant of a golden fish, an ancient Christian symbol that had been adopted by the Jesus counterculture movement of the late 1960s. The fish pendant, on Dick’s account, began to emit a golden ray of light, and Dick suddenly experienced what he called, with a nod to Plato, anamnesis: the recollection or total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. 

Over the following decade, Dick had many more visions, and he tried to understand them better by writing about them. Eventually he covered 8,000 pages with exposition, diagrams, and notes, a sample of which was finally published last year.

Dick was a gnostic of the dualist school. He believed that this world was created, not by a good god, but by an evil being who intended for us to suffer. Like the ancient gnostics, he thought that through understanding, gnosis, our souls could escape from the trap of this physical universe and return to the purely spiritual world where they belonged. As Critchley puts it,

Gnosticism declares a radical dualism between the false God who created this world – who is usually called the “demiurge” – and the true God who is unknown and alien to this world. . . . for the Gnostic, evil is substantial and its evidence is the world.

Dick modernized this old idea in interesting ways. First, he posited that despite the machinations of the demiurge, the true god did manifest himself to the trapped souls of our world. Dick thought he had reached the true godhead in his visions. He also thought the actions of the true god could be perceived through some things about our world, especially the laws of nature and patterns in the flow of information. "Information" sometimes appears in Dick's work as a sort of divine messenger, bringing us the truth about the universe beyond our material prison. Dick believed that time as we perceived it was an illusion of the demiurge, and that the future and the past all existed simultaneously, which is why he thought he could see the future in his visions or gain understanding of it through the information flow.

Dick's theology also had a strong political emphasis. He believed that the political powers of our world are the slaves or agents of the dark power. He called political power The Empire, and he believed that to accept the earthly power of governments and corporations was equivalent to worshiping the dark god who created our prison. The truth he gained in his vision included both the understanding that this world was made by an evil god as a prison for our souls, and the knowledge that all the political and economic powers we acknowledge are only agents of the dark god -- which explains why they try to oppress us and keep us ignorant and miserable. The Empire is only a manifestation of the Black Iron Prison that is this world.

I ask you, does not this vision underlie a vast swath of our contemporary culture? The sense that corporations and governments together comprise some sort of Empire bent on frustrating and enslaving us runs through our politics from the anarchists to the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street. All true political believers have a gnostic, theological vision of the part that ignorance plays in keeping most of us enslaved, and the way that their "Truth" has liberated their minds. These are not just political ideas, but parts of an overarching vision of the universe in which the other side appears as the agents of a mysterious dark power. Dick's notion that the flow of information, properly understood, could give us access to hidden truths seems like a credo for the Internet age. The hero of The Matrix, the most explicitly gnostic film of our time, starts as a hacker, and his first hints about the truth come through his computer screen. Critchley says that the "dominant mode of understanding of fiction in our time" is

the idea that reality is a pernicious illusion, a repressive and authoritarian matrix generated in a dream factory we need to tear down in order to see things aright and have access to the truth. And let’s be honest: it is simply immensely pleasurable to give oneself over to the idea that one has torn aside the veil of illusion and seen the truth — “I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis."

I don't mean to say that Dick invented any of this. Like most prophets, he only gave expression to the spirit of his age. The fear of secret societies and their machinations is an ancient one, and the notion that the high priests of our civil religion are really agents of evil is just as old. Dick updated these ideas with his vision of the dystopian future, attacking the modern age at its point of supposed strength: progress toward a better world. No, he said, this world is too firmly in the grip of dark powers and their minions for progress to mean anything but more efficiently monitored slavery. Only the few, those with true insight and great courage, can hope for anything better.

Annular Eclipse, Yesterday

Tokyo.

The Philippines.

New Mexico.

Kansas.

Archaeology in Southern Maryland

I spent the day with my crew down in southern Maryland, not far from St. Marys City where the colony began. Above, setting up the first units on the site, with the St. Marys River in the background.

View up the river from down on the beach.

And on the beach, a gunflint made of English flint, well worn from a couple of centuries in the water.

Still life with brick fragment (lower right) and crab shell.

High Taxes?

In 1972, American households earning the equivalent of $1 million a year, in 2010 dollars, paid an average income tax rate of 47%. In 2010, they paid an average income tax rate of 25%.

Spiral Galaxy NGC 1672

Hubble photograph in visual light.

Kabuto: Samurai Helmets and Masks

These elaborate samurai helmets date to the peaceful Edo period (1603-1868), so they were mostly for show. But the tradition of warrior masks seems to be old in Japan, as in other places. They protected the face and also solved the problem of putting on a fierce expression in battle, never easy for green soldiers. Worn by noble samurai for ceremonial occasions, the armor of the Edo period became a major art form, and master craftsmen devoted years to creating the most spectacular examples.