Pieces of an Asteroid, via Hyabusa2

Pieces of asteroid Ryugu brought back to earth by the Hyabusa2 spacecraft, much bigger than the sand brought back by Hyabusa1 in 2010. These pieces were knocked off the surface by shooting it with a steel bullet, which left a crater deep enough that some of them come from beneath the surface. Studying primitive carbonaceous asteroids is supposed to give us a window into the early solar system, and some people think the carbon on Earth's surface was brought here by asteroids of this type.

Anyway it's pretty cool that we can send a robot to an asteroid and have it bring rocks back for us to look at. 

DNA and Caribbean History

The native inhabitants of the Caribbean have always been something of a historical mystery. Their communities disintegrated rapidly under the assaults of the Spanish and their diseases, leaving the islands largely uninhabited by the early 1600s. The nearly empty islands, and the possibility of growing valuable crops on them, triggered a sort of land rush in which the European powers all tried to seize their own islands and have their own place in the sun. Without any natives to enslave, they brought in workers from outside. Early on this included many indentured servants and convicts from Europe, but eventually they relied almost exclusively on enslaved Africans. By 1720 the islands were populous again, this time inhabited by Africans and Europeans, and people were already wondering where the natives had gone.

David Reich's paleogenetics lab has now published a major study of old genes from the island, and they have some fascinating findings. 

First, the distant past. The islands were initially inhabited 6,000 or so years ago by hunter-gatherers genetically identical to those in Central America. Once settled they remained largely cut off from the mainland, developing "a very distinctive deep lineage." The population was low. Honestly it sounds somewhat like paradise, with a small population easily feeding itself from fishing, gathering turtle eggs, and so on. But something had to be keeping the population low, perhaps disease.

Then around 2,500 years ago Caribbean hunter-gatherers met the fate of most such people around the world: they were displaced by farmers from the mainland. So little was known about the Caribbean natives of 1492 that scholars debated where they came from, but based on the handful of surviving Carib words (hurricane is one) most guessed they came from Columbia and were related to the Arawak people. Genetics confirms this, conclusively tying Caribbean farmers to the Arawak. The genetics also shows that the hunter-gatherer population almost completely disappeared; they hung on for about a thousand years in a few places, including western Cuba, but they made almost no genetic contribution to the islanders of 1492. Nor did this data show any additional influx from the mainland later on, which contradicts claims made by many archaeologists working from changes in pottery types and the like.

As to what happened to the native islanders after 1492, the DNA shows that they did not completely disappear. Varying proportions of indigenous DNA show up in modern populations around the Caribbean: 14% in Puerto Rico, 4% in Cuba, 6% in the Dominican Republic. Which is interesting partly because Puerto Ricans look more like Native Americans than any other Caribbean people, making this a triumph of the "look and guess" school of paleoanthropology. Puerto Ricans have lately shown a lot of interest in reviving their native past, and these findings will no doubt encourage that movement.

The most controversial part of the new publication is going to be an argument that the indigenous population remained very low down to 1492:

Ancient Caribbean people avoided close kin unions despite limited mate pools that reflect small effective population sizes, which we estimate to be a minimum of 500–1,500 and a maximum of 1,530–8,150 individuals on the combined islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola in the dozens of generations before the individuals who we analysed lived. Census sizes are unlikely to be more than tenfold larger than effective population sizes, so previous pan-Caribbean estimates of hundreds of thousands of people are too large.

Spanish accounts seem to imply larger populations than this, and those Spanish estimates have proved to be fairly accurate for Mexico; why would they be so far off in the Caribbean? And why would there be at most 80,000 people on Puerto Rico and Hispaniola? Seems very mysterious, since agriculture based on maize and sweet potatoes supported much larger populations in the 1700s despite the brutality of Caribbean slavery.

Anyway this is fascinating, yet another way paleogenetics can shed light on questions archaeologists have despaired of answering.

Original article, NY Times story

Leonora Carrington and the Mad Longing for Freedom

Consider this essay Part II of my exploration of human frustration with the limits of our world. My first piece looked at our ambivalence toward the disciplined middle class existence that is our society's version of the good life: study hard, work hard, keep healthy, stay sober, etc. Today I look at something farther afield, the mad rebellion of artists and freedom lovers against the constraints, not just of our particular society, but of any imaginable society, and in fact of the physical world itself.

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) is my favorite Surrealist, and she also led a crazy life, so I eagerly dived into an article about her by Merve Emre in the December 28th New Yorker. Emre focuses on the human/animal/machine transformations and hybridizations that fill Carrington's paintings. sculptures, fiction, and even her “memoir.” 

The distinctions between human and animal, animal and machine, flicker in and out of focus in her early stories, but the fiction she wrote in the nineteen-fifties and sixties dissolves them lavishly. Here we find several barnyards’ worth of chimeras, extravagant beings who commune with all manner of “mechanical artifacts.” They are bearers of utopian hopes and victims of threats from ordinary humans. Consider her story “As They Rode Along the Edge,” a romance featuring Virginia Fur, not quite woman, not quite cat, with “bats and moths imprisoned” in her hair and a blind nightingale lodged in her throat.

This way of writing – Alice in Wonderland infused with Marxism, feminism, and shamanism – was part of Carrington's great revolt against the thing she hated most, Conformism. (She liked that capital letter.) Raised in a wealthy British family that tried to discipline her into a proper lady, she rebelled in every way she could think of, eventually (at 19) running off to Paris and never speaking to her parents again. Surrealist Art was the first thing in life that really captured her attention. She was an immediate hit in surrealist circles, modeling and acting as a muse. She was not satisfied with those roles, though, and made herself into an artist by force of will. She fled World War II and ended up in Mexico City, where she spent the rest of her life. 

A passage from Carrington's surreal novel, The Hearing Trumpet:

“It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves ‘Government’! The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy.”

“It has been going on for years,” I said. “And it only occurred to relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last.”

“Men are very difficult to understand,” said Carmella. “Let’s hope they all freeze to death.”

Emre comments,

The women have no use for frozen institutions. What they seek are living communities for all creatures, forged not through domination and cruelty but through care and mutual assistance. . . . Together, they forage mushrooms, raise goats, conjure bees whose honey they lick from their bodies, and make spinning wheels. They hope to people the frozen earth with “cats, werewolves, bees, and goats”—an “improvement on humanity,” Marian declares.

I encounter fantasies like these all the time: leave behind the people and their rules, their demands, their schedules, and live free, either in the woods with the goats or in anarchic communities governed by kindness and solidarity. And Carrington didn't just write about such freedom, she tried in a small way to make it real.

Perhaps what made the novel’s surreal ending conceivable was the environment in which it was produced, the artistic community that formed around Carrington in Mexico City. She arrived there in 1942, and found a city full of socialists and communists in exile, its arts scene presided over by the suspicious luminaries of Mexican Muralism. (Frida Kahlo apparently called Carrington and her circle “those European bitches.”) She married the Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz, had two children, and created a new “Surreal Family,” anchored by two friends, the photographer Kati Horna and the painter Remedios Varo. The family was a matriarchy, committed to dissolving the boundaries between the daily work of art and the daily work of care—a feminist project more enduring and surreal than any single romance or school of painting.

For the next several decades, the family experimented with traditional craftsmanship. Carrington’s studio was “a combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel, and junk-store,” her patron Edward James observed, impressed by the magic she could wring out of domesticity. Atop a table one might spy a cot for Horna’s daughter, with a parade of long-necked animals that Carrington had painted around the base; in later years, a folding screen, a gift for Carrington’s son Gabriel, with whom she would smoke the marijuana she grew on the roof.

There is something quite appealing about this, people supporting each other, not abandoning their children to work but incorporating child care into their days; real mutual assistance, not just rhetoric. It's something many contemporary women long for. But of course it was only possible because of that patron, Edward James, who inherited a vast industrial fortune that he spent supporting many avant garde artists. Later on Carrington made enough money as an artist to support the whole household, but very few artists ever achieve that level of success.

I see in Carrington a desperate desire to break free, not just of her own routine existence but of something much more profound. You see the same longing in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,  Thelma and Louise, and hundreds more road stories; you may have felt it in dreams of flying.

Now you might say that this is too much of a dream or fantasy to have many real world implications, but I disagree. I think this attitude is common among right-wing militiamen, anarchists, and the sort of left-wing sensitives who have been protesting on college campuses. Jack Kerouac and the Merry Pranksters were real people, as was Timothy McVeigh. Anarchist David Graeber's Debt: the first 5,000 Years is a magisterial work on the history of debt, markets, and the state by a real scholar, but insofar as he offers any solution it is the disappearance of government and a return to small-scale village life.

I would argue that dissatisfaction with the whole basis of our society is widespread and regularly pops up in a thousand ways, from radical politics to "Where are our flying cars?" memes. I sometimes think the whole trans movement is another expression of this basic longing to cast away all limits and live free. What is anarchism, at its base, but a fantasy of profound freedom? Much of our fascination with art and artists, especially rebel artists like Carrington, seems to me allied to this longing. I think people want avant garde art and revolutionary politics to go together because they see both as expressing our dissatisfaction with the cruel mundane and the possibility of soaring free.

Links 24 December 2020

Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, Empress Theodora, 1887

The fascinating history of the broomstick wedding, which somehow came to be shared by marginal groups all around the Atlantic, from poor Welsh farmers to poor Louisiana Cajuns to enslaved African Americans. I am fascinated by things that spread from one common person or another, beneath the radar of elite chroniclers; my favorite is hot peppers, which went global without any elite writer noticing.

12,000 years ago, European hunters liked to use arrow points made from human bone. Alas, the science can't tell us if they used their ancestors or their enemies.

Giving Republicans more information about the toll of the Coronavirus does not change their opinions, but instead increases their belief that the crisis is overblown. 

The mysterious phisher who has been getting authors to send him or her copies of unpublished manuscripts by posing as an editor or agent; nobody knows who is doing this, or why; this has been going on for years without any attempt to profit from the thefts. (NY Times)

Insect flight in extreme slow motion.

Jon Foreman creates interesting sculptures by arranging stones on the beach. Instagram here, article at  Laughing Squid.

Microsoft's description of the Solar Winds cyberattack, moderately technical but fascinating.

Good NY Times story on the lawsuits by voting machine companies against right-wing media operations that have been hyping election fraud.

Justin Amash introduces bill to end civil asset forfeiture, one of the issues on which I agree 100% with libertarians. Amash is retiring and the bill won't go anywhere, but still.

In Houston, a private investigator hired to look into electoral fraud rammed a truck and pointed a gun at its driver, thinking it contained 750,000 stolen ballots. It was hauling air conditioner parts. (Washington Post) The truly weird thing about this is the belief that electoral fraud would involve "stolen ballots" that would somehow still be out there in trucks or warehouses, waiting to be discovered.

The Covid Christmas sweater flashes and sounds an alarm when anyone gets within six feet.

Worldwide, livestock produce more greenhouse gases than cars, but studies have found that mixing seaweed into cows' feed can reduce their methane production by 80%.

The UT Austin computer science department developed a machine-learning system to help it evaluate applicants to its graduate school, then abandoned it. The parameters the system learned to focus on show the inherent shallowness of the applications process.

The decline in hunting in the US is leading to funding problems for wildlife agencies, which get most of their money from licenses and taxes on guns. (Washington Post)

The population of the Iberian lynx has risen from around 100 twenty years ago to nearly 1,000 today.

Geologists are making new discoveries about Mars working from an 8-trillion pixel image of the whole planet.

Thirteen strange animal feet.

Danish mink and the problem of human-animal disease transmission. (NY Times)

Feminism, Motherhood, and the Pandemic

Kim Brooks thinks the huge burdens that have fallen on women during the pandemic show that feminism's gains are fragile, reversible, and maybe wrong-headed in the first place:

It was around the middle of May that I began to realize how disastrous the pandemic was going to be for mothers. I felt it myself and I saw it all around me, the mounting fear, the feeling of helplessness and isolation as we realized that the institutions we depended on were failing women and children, and that there was no backup system in place. Mothers themselves were the backup system. . . . 

As any woman who’s ever tried to take more than a month or two of maternity leave knows, extended child-related lapses in employment are at best frowned upon and interpreted as a lack of professional dedication and at worst grounds for termination. Leaving the work force, even under the most dire circumstances, tends to be a one-way street. 

For working women, she writes, 

Feminism meant cheering on women trying to gain status in this broken system. There was no way out, but if you worked hard enough, you could try to move up.

Pondering this ongoing crisis, Brooks has come to question whether the two-career, nuclear-family marriage is a good model for society. Asking this question, she has found lots of datum points:

A few months ago, I stumbled upon another startling statistic related to family life under Covid-19. It turns out that in the United States, the survival rate of infants has gone way up during the pandemic. There are reports that premature births, one leading cause of infant mortality, fell significantly in the early months of lockdowns, when women in their final trimester of pregnancy were able to do something many of them cannot afford to do in normal times: Stay home from work.

Additionally, some suggest there have been protective benefits to infants of more attentive, home-based child care, with less exposure to the viruses and infections that circulate in institutional settings.

But what is the alternative to the two-career nuclear family? The money needed to raise middle class children has to come from somewhere, and with two-career couples bidding up the price of housing, that lifestyle is just hard for a one-income family to achieve, at least in the big metropolitan areas where most Americans live. It is not impossible, but it requires a different set of priorities. Brooks toys with some socialist ideas that both she and I think have no chance of becoming reality:

truly progressive policies like health care for all, paid leave for anyone caring for a baby and a universal basic income for anyone raising children in the home.

Besides the enormous cost, this isn't going to happen on a large scale because most women of our time find staying home with babies boring, unfulfilling, and isolating; pretty much the only thing we can think of to offer hard-working people in our society is a "career" or a "good job," with the status and stimulation that go with it.

Brooks is also attracted by the communal, extended family plus friends arrangements that some Americans, mostly poor ones, still use:

A friend of mine who has been un-schooling her daughter for years pointed out that some of the people least psychologically affected by the pandemic are those who “don’t expect the systems to work or to protect them, and have gained other survival strategies and ways or organizing and thinking about existence: home-schoolers, for instance, but also people living in communal housing situations or with extended family, people who have figured out how to live without working the way a lot of us feel we have to work.”

Perhaps, she suggested, rather than hurrying back to normal life, “we should see what we can learn from those who have successfully resisted it.”

Resisting the status quo is a concept I embrace, and I agree that these arrangements work for some women. But in my experience most grandparents etc. hate being treated as readily available babysitters, and juggling unconventional childcare arrangements always shows up  as one of the biggest stressors in the lives of single mothers.

Plus most of us just don't want to share our houses with a bunch of other adults. It's not our way. Still, Brooks keeps coming back to communal arrangements as the only plausible solution:

Another friend, a single mother who runs a gardening nursery and lives in a tiny house with her daughter, told me she wouldn’t have been able to survive this year without the support of her best friend. She lives nearby, is also a single mother, and the two of them instantly formed their own small bubble.

For her, the pandemic has crystallized her long-brewing feelings about the unworkability of the status quo. She has taken this year to further develop her plans for a woman-centered communal living project. She imagines a place where women in different ages and stages of life might come to live and share the work of child-rearing and care taking.

When I asked her why she thought more of these kinds of places didn’t already exist, she answered bluntly: “Because America and the world would collapse in 20 seconds if women were showing up for each other instead of being exploited for every form of labor.”

Brooks calls this "a feminism grounded in solidarity as opposed to 'success'."

That is something I entirely support, as I support any arrangement designed to promote human happiness as opposed to economic growth. If enough people talk about these sorts of solutions, maybe more people will be able to build small communities that work for them. But, again, it means dramatically changing our notion of a good life, which is no small thing.

A parallel with polyamory comes to mind; polyamory does solves many problems that trouble monogamous couples, but it can only work if people completely revise their expectations of each other. 

I think about this problem all the time, because of a deep sense that the two-career, multiple-child nuclear family is not a sustainable social system. It puts too much stress on all of us. Yet I have never seen any sort of solution that I thought was both possible and adequate to the scale of the problem.

Bob Dylan on Paul McCartney

I'm in awe of McCartney. He's about the only one I am in awe of, but I'm in awe of him. He can do it all, and he's never let up. He's got the gift for melody, he's got the gift for rhythm. He can play any instrument, he can scream and shout as good as anybody and sing a ballad as good as anybody. His melodies are, you know, effortless. That's what you have to be in awe of.

–Bob Dylan in this video

Solstice

Remember that tonight is the longest night, and from here on the light grows and the darkness wanes.

Today's Historical Generalization

Aristocrats are always, violent, corrupt, and greedy.

–Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000, p. 391.

The New Figurative Public Sculpture

Long ago, we had the sculptures of great men on horseback, pious saints, self-important mayors, etc. Then came the ravages of abstract modernism, blighting so many public spaces with grim geometry. But figurative sculpture never died, and it has seen something of a Renaissance lately as the public finally convinces the art mavens that we really don't like abstract modernism. Above, The Saltimbanques in Luxeubourg City, by Benedict Weiss, 1990.

King Arthur at Tintagel, Cornwall by Rubin Eynon.

Wind-driven kinetic sculpture by Anthony Howe. Gifs that show the motion here.

The Kelpies in Falkirk, Scotland by Andy Scott.

Hungarian sculptor Gbor Mikls Szoke has done a whole series of these huge animals, all made out of regular lumber. Not very permanent but certainly affordable.

Les Voyageurs, by French artist Bruno Catalano, in Marseilles. The missing sections have inspired all sorts of speculation: the parts of themselves people leave behind when the travel overseas?

Edgar Allen Poe by Stefanie Rocknak, in Boston.

Maman by Louise Bourgeois. This is the steel original, in Bilbao; there is also a black traveling version that has appeared around the world, to the horror of arachnophobes. 

Wonderland by Jaume Plensa, 2012, in Calgary.

And we shouldn't forget the giant whale tails by Maarten Strujis in Rotterdam, which recently saved a Metro train from falling into the river.

The Trials and Tribulations of Tobacco in Colonial Virginia

I've been reading a biography of Landon Carter Sr. (1710-1778), a Virginia planter who left behind a famous diary. Its fame comes partly from his ambivalence toward the American Revolution; he was all for it when it was about more rights for white property owners, but when others started talking about freedom, notably his slaves and his daughters, he began to worry that it had been a mistake. More on that when I get around to writing a review.

But as you would expect the diary was mostly about his own life as a tobacco planter. The diary's description of tobacco planting is very rich, detailed, and made me anxious just to read it. Raising tobacco involved dozens of separate steps and failure at any one step could ruin the whole crop. An entirely typical passage from Landon's diary goes, "This is the eleventh day that it has rained successively. But why complain? Has not every crop this year been ruined thus? Whole fields of tobacco have fired away with the blight. . . ."

Landon Carter was very rich, but as a farmer he endured the same worries and risks faced by anyone who grew the valuable weed, and since he was rich what he wrote about it was preserved. (Our other good account of the process is by another very rich man, Thomas Jefferson.) The tobacco year began in November, when the recently-harvested fields were plowed and hoed into mounds. Then the mounds had to be covered with brush that was then burned, to reduce the number of insect eggs and increase the fertility of the soil. This had to be done before winter so that not a day was lost in the spring. I have spent many of my Novembers working outside in Virginia, and I can tell you that the fields are often a cold, muddy mess.

In December or January, the next year's tobacco seedlings were planted in special, protected beds. Too much rain would kill them, or too much frost; too little rain and they had to be hand-moistened with water carried in buckets from a well or creek. Immediately after sprouting they were very vulnerable to pests, especially tobacco "flies" (actually beetles) that sometimes destroyed all the seedlings, leaving planters bankrupt. This happened to Landon Carter in one of the years covered by the diary; he had the resources to immediately replant but that made the planting so late that the fall crop was well below average.

As soon as the ground could be worked in the spring, manure was dug into the mounds that had been prepared in the fall. (On Landon Carter's plantation, this involved about 1800 wagon loads of dung, distributed among 264,000 mounds.) Then the seedlings were transplanted to the mounds, another anxious time when too much or too little rain would kill the plants. 

As the plants grew they had to be constantly tended. Weeds had to be hoed down between the rows, and the plant had to be shaped by lopping the crown and removing undesirable side shoots so it would put all its energy into the main leaves. Later in the summer came the tobacco horn worms, huge, fat, ugly caterpillars that could consume a whole crop but were large enough that they could be plucked off and stomped on. They came in the tens of thousands, but enough human labor could still keep up with them.

Then came the anxious moment of choosing when to harvest, one of the most stressful times for any farmer. Tobacco's growing season was barely short enough to make it practical in Virginia, so every possible day was needed, especially if (as so often happened) anything delayed the spring planting. And yet if the tobacco froze, it was ruined. It was best if the tobacco was cut while dry, but if you waited too long for it to dry, it might freeze or rot or wilt.

When the moment was chosen, after anxious consultation among the planter, the overseer, and the senior slaves, the cutting began. A skilled man chopped the plants off at the base and left them to lie in place for just enough time to "render them pliable," usually a few hours. Then they were "skewered", a sharp stake run through the stem near the base. These tobacco stakes, hundreds of which seem to have been lying around everywhere on plantations, caused many injuries. The skewered tobacco was then hung over fences or specially prepared "scaffolds" and left hanging until the plants were thoroughly wilted. Again, too much rain at this stage could ruin them. Then they were carried to the tobacco barn and hung in the rafters, another dangerous operation partly because anyone who fell was likely to land on one of the sharp skewers. Tobacco barns or houses were specially made structures with slat sides something like a half open Venetian blinds, to let in the wind but keep out the rain. The plants hung in the house until dry. If the weather was dry and windy, this happened naturally, but if it was wet or cold the process had to be helped by building charcoal fires, which had to be constantly tended less they burn the barn down. (Eventually tobacco farmers switched to gas fires, and I have found several patent gas drying systems in old tobacco barns over the years, fascinating steampunk contraptions.) The people tending the drying tobacco were constantly sniffing for the smell of the dreaded rot, a fungus that would ruin the crop and could spread very rapidly through a whole tobacco house. If any was smelled, a search had to be made for the infected leaves so they could be burned.

After a month or so in the tobacco house the weed was dry. This was tested by stretching the leaves over the knuckles of a hand; it should be slightly elastic, like leather, and difficult to break. If it crumbled, it was worthless and had to be discarded. 

The tobacco was then "struck", that is, lowered from the rafters, then "bulked," piled on the floor to sweat out some of its moisture. At exactly the right moment the bulked leaves had to be stripped from the stems and rolled into "hands." This operation was so time-sensitive that it had to be done all night until complete, which involved bribing the slaves to do the extra work with extra food and liquor. (In Virginia, slaves could be whipped for not doing the standard work, but for anything extra they had to be paid in extra rations or time off.) Inferior leaves had to be "stemmed," removing the main central veins.

Then the bundled leaves were ready to be "prised," that is, packed into casks. Thomas Jefferson said this was done with a lever made from a tree trunk 20 feet (6m) long, weighted with hundreds of pounds of stones (see the top scene in the picture at top). The casks were packed until they weighed as much as a thousand pounds.

The casks were rolled to the nearest landing, put on boats, and taken to a tobacco warehouse to be inspected. If they passed (Landon Carter's always did), they could be sold.

Notice that by the time one year's crop was prised, the plowmen were already out preparing the ground for the next year's planting. There was no break.

The complexity of this process and the risk involved goes a long way to explaining why Virginia became a slave society. A single person simply could not do all the work necessary to raise a quality crop; even a household with three or four workers had a tough time. The returns to scale were significant, making large operations much more efficient than small ones. And if the crop failed, as it regularly did, small planters could be ruined and lose their land. The price also fluctuated widely, depending on American production and European demand. Only large, well-capitalized operations could ride out the frequent crises. Virginia therefore came to be dominated by large plantations with many workers, first indentured servants and then slaves.

Tobacco production plummeted in Virginia after slavery ended; the plantation system was wicked but highly productive, and not until modern tractors, fertilizers and insecticides did any other system equal it. Tobacco farming moved west in search of new lands in Kentucky and Tennessee, since the vast labor needed to maintain soil fertility (burning, manuring, etc.) proved impossible to do without unfree workers. Tobacco was eventually brought back in some parts of the state by new types of tobacco, South American guano, and other 19th-century technical advances. But the share croppers who raised most of it were terribly poor, probably poorer than the slaves on a plantation like Landon Carter's had been. It was simply a rough business for anyone to take on alone.

The nightmare cruelty of African Slavery in the New World was largely driven by demand for crops that were very difficult for small, independent farmers to raise: sugar, first of all, but then also tobacco, indigo, and rice.

Who Should Get Credit for the Vaccines?

Stephen Buranyi has an Op-Ed in the Times today arguing that the new Covid-19 vaccines shouldn't make us feel better about big pharmaceutical companies. Buranyi obviously hates Big Pharma and tells us gleefully about all the movies in which they appear as villains. In a sense he is right about the current moment, because none of the vaccines was actually created by a big firm:

Every day now there are stories about the Pfizer vaccine (a collaboration between Pfizer and the German biotech company BioNTech); the Moderna vaccine (a partnership between the National Institutes of Health and Moderna); and the AstraZeneca vaccine (a front-running non-mRNA candidate, in fact created by scientists at the University of Oxford and developed and distributed by AstraZeneca). . . .

The mRNA vaccines in which people are now staking so much hope wouldn’t exist without public support through every step of their development. Moderna is not a pharma giant. The company, founded in 2010 after a group of American university professors acquired support from a venture capitalist, has been working on this technology for years. But Moderna’s original work rests on earlier discoveries by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania who have received funding for their research from the National Institutes for Health.

Once the race for a vaccine began, governments supercharged their efforts. Moderna has received about $2.5 billion in federal research and supply funding over the past year from the government’s Operation Warp Speed program, as well as shared technology the N.I.H. had developed for previous coronavirus vaccines. The N.I.H. also provided extensive logistical support, overseeing clinical trials for tens of thousands of patients.

Pfizer, meanwhile, likes to say that it eschews federal money to maintain independence. But it is co-producing and distributing a vaccine from BioNTech, a company that received more than $440 million in funding from the German federal government. The vaccine is based on BioNTech’s technology, with Pfizer stepping in to speed up development and manufacturing.

The story is actually much longer and more complex than Buranyi lays out, involving decades-long partnerships among governments, universities, philanthropists, and private firms. The role of the big firms in the current crisis has been to supply their expertise at manufacturing, testing, and distribution.

It seems to me that the rapid development of so many vaccines is a triumph, not for either big business or government, but for our mixed system. This argument reminds me in a way of what we saw in the computer world in the 1990s, when various libertarian geeks touted all the tech advances made in garages and predicted the demise of both governments and big firms. But without giant companies to make things like super-pure silicon, and the billions governments had poured into the development of computers and communications infrastructure, there wouldn't have been any chips for garage geeks to work with or networks for them to plug into.

In our politics we often have angry debates about the private sector vs. the government, but it can be difficult to say where one begins and the other ends. I personally see little point in trying to draw such a line. To me, things like the personal computer, social networks, and mRNA vaccines are products of our culture, and by that I mean something very broad and deep: competitive educational systems, a widespread delight in tinkering with new sorts of machines, a can-do mindset about our ability to solve technical problems, our enormous pool of scientific and technical knowledge, our ability to throw hundreds of billions of dollars into new economic sectors, our willingness to heap rewards on scientists and investors who make or fund the most useful advances. 

There are now more scientists in the world (8 million) than there were people in England when the scientific revolution got under way (5 million). 

The challenge we face, as I see it, is to promote fairness in our system, cutting back on the obscene wealth of the biggest capitalist "winners," and doing more for the poor and ignored, without undermining the amazing productivity and creativity of our civilization. Absolutely the big pharmaceutical companies have committed crimes, and this seems to be a recurring problem created by the profit incentives of capitalism; but on the other hand no socialist system has ever approached the wealth and creativity of ours. 

I make my living as a contractor to the US government. The reason agencies like the National Park Service hire people like me to do archaeology (and design roads, and build Visitor Centers, and a thousand other things) rather than doing it themselves is that my company can make money and still do it cheaper. The savings are created by the discipline of the market; if our price gets to high or our work too slow, someone else will underbid us. Governments also find it much easier to discipline or fire private firms than their own agencies. I regularly hear stories from my government friends about projects that were initiated by some government group years ago but never finished. If we never finished our projects, we would get fired; in fact we got our first contract with the National Park Service because the firm that held the contract before us couldn't finish their projects and got fired.

On the other hand I absolutely would not trust any capitalist entity with the long-term preservation of the world's natural and historical treasures.

So my personal experience is that a partnership between the government and private entities can achieve more than either could alone. And that seems to be the lesson of the new vaccines, and of a thousand other scientific and technical advances.

Predicting Trumpism in 1998

 Richard Rorty in Achieving Our Country, published in 1998:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Links 18 December 2020

Hitching Post, Iran, 1200s AD

Skekling, an ancient tradition in the Scottish islands. Mostly defunct, alas, although people occasionally try to revive it.

The Calson Letter Foundry (they cast printing type) in London in marvelous photographs from 1902. The basic process was unchanged from 1780 to 1937.

NASA and JPL are developing four-legged, robotic "Mars dogs" to explore Martian caves.

Some moths avoid bats by being able to hear their echo-location signals; others use noise-cancelling materials.

When Italian futurists declared war on pasta. And Georgia O'Keefe as a cook.

It's true that Covid-19 has mostly killed older people, but it has still killed more than 10,000 Americans aged 25-44. (NY Times)

French customs agents stop a man carrying 14,000 Roman coins; he says he found them in his back yard.

Trump showed the presidency needs serious reform; Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith have some ideas. (NY Times)

Genetic analysis of the mysterious skeletons from Roopkund Lake in the Himalayas. (The New Yorker)

The etchings of Douglas Smith, many of which look like illustrations to Victorian adventure stories.

The gigantic severance packages paid to fired college football coaches. 

Enormous, wind-powered "vertical farm" in Denmark for raising winter vegetables.

How does cultural diffusion actually happen? Sometimes when people take captives and bring them home.

About 50% of German doctors joined the Nazi party, far more than any other profession. Why? The essay at the link is tendentious, uses a truly grand slippery slope sort of argument, and did not persuade me of all its assertions, but the main point still bears consideration: German doctors had learned to declare some lives worthless, and to think of killing as a positive good for the state, years before the Holocaust got under way.

The Woman in White and Victorian Loneliness

I knew I would be doing a lot of driving this month, back and forth to Manassas twice a week and up to Syracuse to bring my elder daughter home for Christmas. So I checked a long audiobook to out of the library: The Woman in White, an 1860 classic by Wilkie Collins. This is often said to be a pioneering mystery story, and the suspense was novel enough that people following the story as it was serialized in a magazine started a betting pool as to what the Sir Percival's secret was.

I found it quite entertaining. I had listened to about 2/3 but it was coming due at the library, so last night I found the text online and read the rest. (A great advantage to reading old books.)

Two things struck me about it. The first is about the sort of woman who was deemed suitable to be a romantic heroine in the nineteenth century. The plot concerns a drawing master (Mr. Hartwright) who is summoned to a remote country house in Cumbria to instruct two young women, the heiress to the estate and her poor-relation companion. When Mr. Hartwright arrives, the heiress (Miss Fairley) is not at dinner because she has one of her headaches, and he is welcomed by the poor relation, Miss Halcombe. The poor relation is tall and ugly, but she is smart, witty, brave, resourceful, an adept manager of every social situation, the only one able to handle the crotchety old owner of the estate, and essentially the caretaker of the weak heiress. The heiress is beautiful, sweet, and tender-hearted, overflowing with gentle emotion, kind to everyone and everything, but she never says a single interesting thing and is as useless as a child in most of the intrigue that makes up the plot. So of course Hartwright falls madly in love with her, ignoring the competent, witty, brave, resourceful, etc. Miss Halcombe. It is so extreme that it has to be at least a bit of a joke: the readers are assumed to know that these are stereotypes, but such essential stereotypes that every romantic story must use them. (Reminded me of Kung Fu Panda, an endless string of jokes about how silly are the heroic conventions on which the story is nonetheless based.) 

In fact there is one character in the story who recognizes Miss Halcombe's superiority: the sinister Count Fosco, who assists the heiress' evil husband in getting rid of her and stealing her money. The Count so much admires Miss Halcombe's intelligence and courage that he falls in love with her despite his black heart and alters the sinister plot to insure she will not be harmed, which may have been the conspirators' undoing. I kept thinking that if Hartwright was too foolish to recognize her virtues Miss Halcombe should have run off with the Count to pursue sinister adventures across the globe. 

Serious question: how much does this matter? Did it have any real world effects that readers were fed a steady diet of beautiful, rich, tender-hearted, weak-willed heroines? Or did everyone recognize that this was an absurd convention? I am thinking about the feminist crusade against Disney princesses, and other such movements. I tend to think that it mattered, but only so far, and I waffle over how far that was. 

The other thing that struck me was that rich Victorians were very worried about loneliness. There is a constant effort to provide people with "companions," so pervasive that people with class and education but no money can survive their whole lives as companions to various rich people. Miss Fairley is provided with a whole series. Her husband brings Count Fosco into their house partly to assist with sinister plotting but also to have someone to talk to. It seems assumed that poor people, who must live in crowded tenements or villages, have plenty of companionship, but even respectable middle-class families often seem isolated and desperate for company. 

So it is perhaps the spread of wealth and respectability that contributes to our problems with loneliness? And should be bring back the professional companion?

Snow!

Lots of it. Taken from my porch at 1:40 eastern time today.

Today's Headline

King of Thailand Allegedly Ruling His Nation From German Ski Resort With a Retinue of Concubines 

According to the story, this is his idea of how to ride out the pandemic safely.

The Galloway Hoard, All Cleaned Up

Back in 2014, a metal detectorist working in southwestern Scotland found a fabulous hoard of silver treasures dating to the late 9th century, most likely buried by Viking raiders. The Galloway Hoard was acquired by the National Museums of Scotland in 2017.

It has now been fully conserved and is going on display. The most remarkable revelation is the detail on this cross, which is decorated with the symbols of the four evangelists. Dr. Martin Goldberg, one of the curators, said: 

It’s just spectacular. There really isn’t a parallel. That is partly because of the time period it comes from. We imagine that a lot of ecclesiastical treasures were robbed from monasteries – that’s what the historical record of the Viking age describes to us. This is one of the survivals. The quality of the workmanship is just incredible. It’s a real privilege to see this after 1,000 years.

The full hoard. 

Political Sectarianism

A group of 15 senior social scientists have authored a short paper arguing that "political sectarianism," as they call it, is greatly endangering America:

Political sectarianism consists of three core ingredients: othering—the tendency to view opposing partisans as essentially different or alien to oneself; aversion—the tendency to dislike and distrust opposing partisans; and moralization—the tendency to view opposing partisans as iniquitous. It is the confluence of these ingredients that makes sectarianism so corrosive in the political sphere. Viewing opposing partisans as different, or even as dislikable or immoral, may not be problematic in isolation. But when all three converge, political losses can feel like existential threats that must be averted—whatever the cost.

The authors say there are three main causes of rising sectarianism. First, the parties really have become more different, in the sense that most of the conservatives are now Republicans, and most of the liberals are Democrats, etc. But:

As distinct as Democrats and Republicans actually are today, partisans nevertheless vastly overestimate such differences. They view opposing partisans as more socially distant, ideologically extreme, politically engaged, contemptuous, and uncooperative than is actually the case, thereby exacerbating political sectarianism. For example, Republicans estimate that 32% of Democrats are LGBT when in reality it is 6%; Democrats estimate that 38% of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year when in reality it is 2%.

Second, the rise of partisan media, but you have read enough about that lately. Third, "elite ideological polarization":

In contrast to the equivocal ideological-polarization trends among the public, politicians and other political elites have unambiguously polarized recently on ideological grounds, with Republican politicians moving further to the right than Democratic politicians have moved to the left.

Personally I find all of these points both debatable and inadequate to explain the extreme feelings that are driving riots and support for overturning the vote. The Republican and Democratic parties have moved farther apart on some issues, but the divide is still minor compared to, say, that between the Bolsheviks and the Whites, or the Royalists and the Jacobins.

But I do think what we are experiencing is dangerous. It encourages people to forget about democracy and pursue winning at all costs, and democracy can only take so much of that. Thomas Edsall put together a piece for the Times in which he solicited comments from the study's authors and put them together with other material, which I think is much stronger than the original; I suppose that had to be carefully compromised to get a diverse list of eminent signatories. Edsall samples some of the right-wing voices who have been most strident in rejecting the recent election, like this from a certain MakeLiberalsCryAgain:

It’s INSANE. Many of these contested states have REPUBLICAN majorities in their legislatures. They had the power all along to stop this, and they haven’t done blankety blank. They held hearings to give the appearance of caring, but in the end, they all cucked out like the spineless, traitorous cowards they are.

And dinosaurguy, who said, “War it is.”

Statements like that should be ominous for Americans because they sound so much like what we heard at the beginning of our Civil War, when Southern leaders all took the position that to accept Lincoln's election without a fight was cowardly and spineless. Well, they got their fight, and it was worse than any of them imagined. What will ours look like? 

The Speed of Pandemic Spread

We are afraid that modern air travel and so on makes us more vulnerable to pandemics, but according to the data presented here, the 1918 flu spread faster than Covid 19, and the 1889 flu pandemic was only slightly slower:

If spread depends heavily on the modern ‘age of mobility’, the spread of recent pandemics should be supercharged relative to older pandemics with similarly infectious pathogens. But there’s nothing like that in the data. Across the four past pandemics we study, from 1889 to 2009, the time it took for the pathogen to reach the median person on earth only varied by *six weeks*.

….We separately show, for each of the four past pandemics, that the time-of-arrival has no negative relationship with mortality. Staving it off a bit longer did not save lives. Action behind the border did; inaction did not.

The Hermitage of San Bartolomé

In the mountains of north-central Spain, in the valley of the Rio del Lobos, is a medieval building. Right there ends everything I am certain of, because I cannot find out anything about it from the usual sources. Instead there is a vast amount of fluff from Templar-obsessed people who inhabit the scholarly fringe, not sane or rigorous enough to give me confidence in their assertions but with enough to say that they drew me in. See especially this little BBC documentary.

They call this building the Hermitage of San Bartolomé and say that it was built in the later 12th century when the Knights Templar owned much land throughout this district.

The site is spectacular, against the mountains at the head of a narrow valley. 

And behind the hermitage is this cave, inhabited in the Stone Age, and said to have been the site of cult activity in the Roman times: 

Situated equidistantly from the Iberian Peninsula’s easternmost and westernmost points in a remote corner of the Rio del Lobos Canyon, the site has long held significance to local inhabitants and was carefully chosen by the Knights Templars for its spiritual properties. In a nearby limestone cave, Ancient Romans celebrated Mundus Patet (the “festival of the dead”) and prayed to the Cult of the Mother Goddess. Legend has it that in the 1st Century AD, this was also where Bartholomew the Apostle (San Bartolomé) dropped his sword from atop a nearby mountain, declaring wherever the weapon fell to be his home.

Whoever built it, the hermitage is a remarkable building.

On the floor near the statue of the Virgin is this mark, known as the Flower of Life.

And just as you would expect in such a story about such a building, the sun shining rough the little window with its five-pointed star traces out the year across the floor

falling, on the Winter Solstice, directly on the Flower of Life. 

Is it true? I have no idea! But it certainly is fascinating, and on rainy December days like today that is enough for me.

Factory Jobs and Contemporary Politics: Russell Brand on the Brexit Vote

When I was sitting ten feet away from some friends last week, outside, next to a kerosene heater, I offered this proposition for debate: American democracy died when we let the factories close. I see that the same question has been on the mind of Russell Brand, as he tries to explain the Brexit vote:

While, on its face, the Brexit referendum offered voters a simple binary choice of either leaving or remaining within the European Union, in reality it came to be seen as something much more: an opportunity to either vote for the establishment or give it two fingers.

This rather unsophisticated reading of the troubling referendum was made easier by the prior dismantling of real political representation for ordinary British people, notably through the repositioning of the Labour Party in the 1990s as a kind of neoliberal, establishment-lite party under Tony Blair. During this time the purpose of the British left migrated from the pursuit of economic equality for the working class to a kind of performative, hollow optimism that masked an ideological capitulation to economic conservatism.

My belief is that, in the wake of this betrayal, a nostalgic yearning for fairness among working people led to a resurgent nationalism — and ultimately support for Brexit. The parties founded to represent working people were inviting them to discard the flags and icons of Britishness that had been historically mobilized (however cynically) to inspire their sacrifice, which is in part why the Remain campaign failed. Labour’s focus on cultural rather than economic equality meant there was nowhere for the working class to go but into the arms of the Brexiteers.

As a product of blue-collar Britain myself, I don’t believe these people are bigoted or backward, as they’re commonly rendered by the institutions that demonize them. I feel they just know that they’ve been stabbed in the back.

I am personally not sure that "stabbed in the back by the establishment" is a fair description of what happened to factory workers in the US and Europe, but I do believe that it is how many people see the economic changes of the past 30 years. It is also important to note that the Brexit vote was very close and that people of every socio-economic and ethnic group voted on both sides. (As in the two elections involving Donald Trump.) It is, therefore, not quite right to say that "the British working class" voted against the EU.

But I do believe that the collapse of well-paid work that men could get with limited education underlies every bad thing happening in the politics of the US, the UK, France, and probably many other places. You can see from wikipedia's graph of manufacturing employment in the US that while the decline in manufacturing jobs as a percentage of the total has been steady since WW II, the first sustained decline in real terms happened in the early 2000s, coinciding with NAFTA and the entry of China in the WTO. This got worse in the Great Recession; from 2000 to 2010, 6 million American factory workers lost their jobs.

I think this is a crisis, and anyone who thought it could happen without seriously roiling the nation was a fool. There remains, however, the question of what could be done about it. Trump's flailing has shown that caring about the problem is not the same as being able to solve it, and the current British government hasn't done anything about manufacturing at all. I wrote before about the dire things that happened when Chicago's steel mills closed in the 1970s, but those mills really were dinosaurs, incapable of achieving the efficiency needed to remain viable with any amount of investment. They were also environmental disasters. In Germany the decline would have been managed, and the government and the unions would have made great efforts to move the steel workers into other, similar jobs, but those mills were going to close, period.

Any serious attempt to bring back manufacturing would have to involve steep tariffs on imports, carefully thought out and imposed in a very broad-based way. That would be a big lift in either the US or the UK, and I am not at all sure the votes could ever be found to achieve it. After all manufacturing workers are a small minority of the population, and tariffs would mean higher prices for everyone else.

And manufacturing, of course, is just the beginning; self-driving trucks are on the horizon, and who knows what other innovations that will wipe out even more traditionally masculine jobs. So the crisis will continue, and our politics will never settle down.

The Roman Theater of Bosra, Syria

Behold the Roman theater in Bosra, Syria, and consider that it was probably build during the reign of Trajan and is therefore more than 1900 years old. It is 334 feet across (102 m) and held 15,000 spectators.

Should the war ever end and you ever get there, you could walk through this tunnel into the theater, just as people did in the days of Hadrian, of Septimus Severus, of Constantine. As to how it came to be so well preserved, well, partly the local stone is just very hard and durable, but there is more.

As you can see in this aerial photo it was built into an Arab fortress that dates to around the 10th century.

"Around" is the best I can do; UNESCO actually dates the fortress to "AD 481-1250." Anyway the fortress walls protected the theater, helping to keep it standing. Meanwhile the interior of the theater was turned into a palace and filled with three stories of rooms, all built of stone. After those were abandoned in the later Middle Ages, the whole place filled with sand, which also helped with the preservation.

In 1946 a major effort was begun to excavate and restore the theater. Here you can see the ruins of the medieval palace within the theater.

The restorers were only interested in the Roman theater, and the medieval palace was all demolished and removed. Here is the theater at the end of excavation, before anything was rebuilt. By comparing this to the photo at top you can see that some of the stage was reconstructed, but not really all that much.

What an astonishing survival of the Roman world.