Links 23 December 2022

Michelangelo, Pieta

New Nazca lines and figures.

Wildlife photography contest winners and top entrants, from the Natural History Museum (London)

Matt Yglesias calls out the good news on water quality in America and complains that nobody wants to hear good news.

Foot of small mammal found inside dinosaur's stomach, the first proof of dinosaur on mammal predation.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is slowly untilting itself.

Democracy must defend itself like a battleship.

What do we actually know about Representative-elect George Santos? And given that he was broke in 2017, where did his money come from?

Study claims that pottery making spread across Europe at a rate of 250 km (155 miles) per generation, crossing boundaries between agriclutural peoples and hunter-gatherers. Since the pots were used for cooking, that means new ways of cooking also crossed cultural boundaries and spread quite rapidly.

This study claims that in the US, the main driver of racial segregation in neighborhoods is choice: "We provide evidence that many Black households prefer low-SES (socio-econoimc status) neighborhoods with Black residents to high-SES neighborhoods without Black residents."

Interesting summary of what is happening with AI.

In Manhattan, car theft fell 96% from 1990 to 2013. Some problems have technical solutions.

Ukraine Links

LPR volunteer Murz unloads on the Russian Army, says they are completely unready for any Ukrainian winter offensive.

Grim short video of a Russian trench overrun by Ukrainian soldiers, lots of bodies.

Somebody raised a Ukrainian flag on a tall tower in Crimea. There are military experts who say that Russia may be abel to hold onto the DPR and LPR but they can't possibly hold Crimea because it is too easy for Ukraine to cut it off and starve its people out.

Another Ukrainian politician who collaborated with Russia is killed in a car bombing.

Up-close view of fighting in Marinka.

Over the course of the 300-day war, by the Oryx count, Russia has lost on the average day 5 tanks, 6 infantry fighting vehicles, 2 armored fighting vehicles, one armored personnel carrier, one self-propelled artillery piece, and 7 trucks. Throw in fractional amounts of other systems like multiple rocket launchers, helicopters, and ships, and you get about 28 major systems lost per day, more than 8,500 in total. And those are minimum losses; the real total is likely to be at least 20% more. Yes, Russia has a lot of gear, but these losses, along with their staggering expenditure of artillery ammunition and missiles, leave their military with very little remaining offensive potential. Daily artillery fires in the ongoing Bakhmut fighting are 1/5 or less what they routinely expended in May and June, which right there explains why their offensive has stalled. One of the major questions is whether they can rebuild a serious attacking force by spring. I am thinking not, but I suppose history tells us never to underestimate Russian capacity to fight on.

Richard Hanania Between Parties and Systems

Richard Hanania is a sort of libertarian-leaning grouch, one of the people who thinks the right thing to do is obvious but other people don't see it because of their ignorance, stupidity, or ideological blinders. I read him because he is smart and willing to call out anybody who is being foolish, regardless of their party or belief system.

From his 2022 wrap-up I discovered that he is also willing to change his mind in public:

In February, I argued that Russia’s imminent successful invasion of Ukraine was a sign heralding in a new era of multipolarity. By October, I declared every challenge to liberal democracy dead and Fukuyama the prophet of our time. It’s embarrassing to have two contradictory pieces written seven months apart. But it would’ve been more embarrassing to persist in believing false things. If there’s any time to change one’s mind, it’s in the aftermath of large, historical events that went in ways you didn’t expect. Russia’s failure in Ukraine and China’s Zero Covid insanity provided extremely clear and vivid demonstrations of what democratic triumphalists have been saying about the flaws of autocracy. Nothing that the US or Europe have done – from the Iraq War to our own overly hysterical response to the coronavirus – have been in the same ballpark as these Chinese and Russian mistakes. Perhaps the war on terror comes close in terms of total destruction and lives lost, but we could afford to be stupid and it didn’t end up hurting Americans all that much.

This shows, I would say, that one of the problems with the grouchy loner worldview can be short-sightedness. Such people can be so focused on attacking the folly of the moment that they lose sight of the big picture. As far as I am concerned, you have to forget a lot of history to think that dictatorship has a better record than democracy on anything. A dictatorship may maintain order and promote growth for a while by shutting down ugly political battling and sweeping aside foolish objections to development, but in the long run the imperatives of power usually screw things up for everyone but the dictator. No modern dicatatorship has created a state that rivals the rich democracies in either order or dynamism.

Hanania built a Substack following, and got a reputation as a conservative, by waging war on woke culture in pieces like "Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?" But he is not any kind of orthodox or reliable conservative, and in his latest piece he explains his gripe with the contemporary Republic Party:

For reasons I’ll expand on below, I’m becoming more alienated from conservatives, and therefore less interested in trying to promote total victory for one side in the culture war. The continuing and growing power of the anti-vaxx movement is perhaps the clearest demonstration that something has gone horrifyingly wrong on the Right. And yes, I know the smarter among them say they’re just “anti-mandate,” but the culture is clearly anti-vaxx, with Trump getting booed at rallies for telling his old and overweight fans to do the responsible thing and conservative influencers proudly talking about how they avoided the jab and making fun of those that didn’t.

Republicans may be generally preferable, but when the next great technological breakthrough comes, I’m confident that if it turns into a salient political issue it’ll be the Right that wants to ban it. On the vaccine issue specifically, the odds of us having another Operation Warp Speed if a Republican is in office when the next pandemic hits are low. There’s no way to justify this – it is simply a tragedy, and reveals that when you build a movement that caters to low IQ and paranoid people you can’t hope to control the results. If the next pandemic is even worse than covid, those who’ve promoted anti-vaxx could be responsible for millions of lives lost.

He is also shifting his views on some social issues, because he thinks Republicans are being crazy about euthanasia and especially abortion:

I still have contempt for the pronoun people, but I’ve found that there are a lot of people, like actual adults, who call things “Satanist” or “demonic” unironically and my instinctual reaction to them is similar. Aside from annoyances on Twitter, two big events from 2022 pushed me in a more liberal direction on social issues. First, there was the Dobbs decision. I always knew that conservatives wanted to overturn Roe and many of them hoped to ban abortion, and that this would be horrible, but it didn’t hit home until it happened. All the things that feminists have been saying about men wanting to take away women’s freedoms and controlling them are starting to sound more reasonable, and I’m glad there’s been a lot of electoral pushback against the anti-choice position. I now stand with women.

I find this interesting partly because I think Trump got a lot of important support from people with Hanania's mindset; not very ideological, just sick of liberals, grouchy about the state of the country, and hoping that a tough guy could clean things up. It seems to me that the grouches who have not fallen into conspiracy theories are a lot less into Trump than they were in 2016, and maybe less enraged at the Democrats. Not that they necessarily think any more of liberal ideology than they did, but with power the Republicans have demonstrated that their own ideology can also lead to actions that strike such people as crazy. Hanania now divides his time between attacking the woke and attacking the anti-vaxx, Q-believing crowd, leaving his vote, and those of his follwers, up for grabs, likely going to whoever can come across as toughest and most sensible.

JaeCheol Park, Infinite Cities

JaeCheol Park is a Korean artist who signs his work PaperBlue. He actually does a wide variety of fantastic art, from troll-cutesy to post-apocalypse ruins, and there is a ton of stuff on his web site. Some day I may get around to a post on his paintings. But for now these Piranesi-esque drawings, which I love.

Zelensky in Washington

Volodomyr Zelensky is in Washington, his first foreign trip since the war began. Everyone suspects he came to shore up support for the $44 billion aid bill before Congress, and of course for the long term as well.

Zelensky: 

I wish you peace. And I think that is the main thing, and you understand it only when the war is in your country. when somebody like these terrorists from Russia come to your houses. And I wish you to see your children alive and adult. And I wish you to see your children when they will go to universities, and to see their children. I think that is the main thing.

And from the address to Congress:

Against all odds and doom-and-gloom scenarios, Ukraine didn’t fall. Ukraine is alive and kicking. Thank you. And it gives me good reason to share with you our first, first joint victory: We defeated Russia in the battle for minds of the world. We have no fear, nor should anyone in the world have it. Ukrainians gained this victory, and it gives us courage which inspires the entire world.

Americans gained this victory, and that’s why you have succeeded in uniting the global community to protect freedom and international law. Europeans gained this victory, and that’s why Europe is now stronger and more independent than ever. The Russian tyranny has lost control over us. And it will never influence our minds again. . . .

I know that everything depends on us, on Ukrainian armed forces, yet so much depends on the world. So much in the world depends on you. When I was in Bakhmut yesterday, our heroes gave me the flag, the battle flag, the flag of those who defend Ukraine, Europe and the world at the cost of their lives. They asked me to bring this flag to you, to the U.S. Congress, to members of the House of Representatives and senators whose decisions can save millions of people.

So, let these decisions be taken. Let this flag stay with you, ladies and gentlemen. This flag is a symbol of our victory in this war. We stand, we fight and we will win because we are united — Ukraine, America and the entire free world.

And this from Biden: 

You will never stand alone.

Maya Lidar in the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin

Amazing new article from Hansen et al. on Lidar mapping in one of the most densely inhabited parts of the classic Maya world. The area covered is the southern half of the "Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin," a broad valley full of caves and sinkholes, part of the Petén plateau.

The study documented 964 Maya settlements, which is a whole lot more than there are today. All of the large sites were known, but several new smaller sites were discovered.

The largest site in this area is el Mirador. Here is a map of the town and its surroundings.

And zooming in on the town itself.

A mid-sized settlement, Manor de Leon.

And a smaller settlement, Wakna. There are many more examples in the article.

Fascinating image showing four "E Groups," a common arrangement for temples in the heart of the settlements.

The valley is rather dry, but the Maya solved that problem with an extensive system of reservoirs and canals.

Image from a different project showing the traces of Maya swamp agriculture, especially visible in the upper left. The Petén plateau was full of shallow swamps, which the Maya farmed by digging mud out of canals and piling it onto long, narrow fields, creating such rich land that it is still visible on infrared aerial photos because the vegetation is so dense. 

Lidar has added yet more detail to our picture of the classic Maya. Their civilization was extremely impressive: dozens of cities, thousands of towns, all  connected by roads as impressive as those built by Rome, all supported by a vast network of water systems and farming done in former swamps. And then, for reasons that remain mysterious, it all fell apart and reverted to a vast jungle inhabited by villagers living by slash and burn farming.

Winter Solstice 2022

For those who need hope, remember that this is the shortest day, and the light will return in its season.

For those in a better place, sing the long night, and then sing the lengthening days to come.

Virginius Island

Virginius Island is a nearly flat 12-acre island in the Shendoah River next to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, most famous as the site of John Brown's Raid. These days most of it looks like this, all trees and brush, with a few walking trails. The island is just a few hundred feet from where the Shenandoah joins the Potomac River, which is how Harpers Ferry came to be built there.

Harpers Ferry from Maryland Heights, 1859

But in the 1850s Virginius Island was a factory town, part of a wider industrial zone that had grown up around the US Armory in Harpers Ferry. In its early days the Armory was one of America's most important industrial enterprises, not just turning out muskets but pioneering new techniques in manufacturing. The rifle works on Hall Island was the first plant in the Americas to use interchangeable parts on a large scale. When it was first set up the Armory used a craft production model, with workers being paid by the piece, but in the 1830s it was converted to rigid factory discipline with clocks and whistles and pay by the hour. It also completed dominated the town of Harpers Ferry, so much so that nobody else could readily buy land or set up a business there.

Hence, Virginius Island, an island of private property convenient to the industrial center that was the Armory. What launched industry on the island was the Shenandoah Canal, basically an improvement of the natural channel that separated Virginius and Hall Islands from the mainland. This never succeeded as a transportation route but it provided the water to power numerous mills.

This 1857 lithograph shows Virginius and Hall Islands at their peak; the detail focuses in on Virginius. The image is fairly accurate as to the buildings, but it crowds them together and makes them a little bigger than they were, compared to the actual size of the island. The tall structure to the left was a cotton mill built in 1847, the one to the right a commercial flour mill. At that time there was also a sawmill with double 6-foot circular saws, a machine shop, a foundry, and a linseed oil mill, as well as numerous houses and smaller shops. The foundry and machine shop did a lot of work for the armory, making custom parts like huge steel shafts weighing multiple tons and well as molds for casting small parts. The Winchester and Potomac Railroad ran across the island, and from 1835 to 1847 there was a station in the center of town.

Virginius and Hall Islands in 1864, with the destroyed Rifle Works in the background

Then came the war, which wrecked Harpers Ferry. The Armory and the rifle works were destroyed. Virginius Island was taken over the by army, its buildings used as barracks and storehouses. After the war the government decided not to rebuild the armory, which pretty much doomed Harpers Ferry to decline.

Steel turbine uncovered on Virginius Island in 1967

But Virginius Island bounced back after the war. A new owner purchased the old cotton mill and made it into a modern flour mill, with turbines and steel rollers. In 1870 about 103 people lived on the island, down from the 183 of 1850 but still a community. Photographs show the island dotted with ruins, which makes me wonder how people felt about them; did they often remember the old days when the place was bursting with activity, and bemoan that so much had been lost?

But then came the floods.

Harpers Ferry in the 1870 flood

Floods were nothing new to the people of Harpers Ferry, or to anyone who lived in the pre-modern world. The Sumerians personified the annual floods of the Tigris River as Ningirsu, god of destruction, but they still built their cities on the river's banks. Access to water was too valuable to move away just because the rivers flooded and killed a few people every now and then.

Nineteenth-century industrialists understood perfectly the trade-off between water power and the danger of flooding; flooding probably wrecked a mill somewhere in America every day. Harpers Ferry and the Armory were damaged by floods about once a decade throughout the nineteenth century, and until the Civil War everything was always rebuilt. But it turned out that Virginius Island was subject to two kinds of floods, depending on which river was running higher. When their flow was equal, or the Potomac was higher, water backed up into the lower Shenandoah, forming a sort of lake that dumped huge amounts of sand and silt, as much as two feet (60 cm) from some floods. But if the Shenandoah was running higher the river raged across the island with terrible force. This happened in 1870, apparently for the first time since Harpers Ferry was founded. The flood destroyed or badly damaged almost every building on the island. Archaeologists digging on the island in the 1990s found hardly any soil that dated to before 1870, so it looks like the flood scoured the island bare. Which explains why the island is so low even though a single flood can dump two feet of soil; what the river gives, the river also takes away.

The old cotton mill in the 1924 flood

One of the few buildings that survived was the old cotton mill turned flour mill, and its owners rebuilt with newer machinery and forged on. But then another major flood hit in 1889, and they gave up. The equation had been changed by coal and steam, which provided alternative sources of both power and transportation. After eighty years, industry disappeared from Virginius Island.

The Paper Mill (upper right) around 1900

However a new factory was built just upriver on Hall Island, the Shenandoah Pulp and Paper Mill. Paper mills are still built on rivers today, because the process takes, not just power, but huge amounts of water. That factory lasted until around 1936. People continued to live in the old millworkers' houses on Virginius Island, many working at the paper mill, others in Harpers Ferry. Incidentally the mill was the site of two noteworthy labor disputes; in 1888 the workers struck when the company asked them to work under a black foreman, and in 1909 they struck again for higher wages.

Most folks left after the destructive 1924 flood, which shut down the paper mill for nearly a year, and the rest were gone by 1935. The island was empty.

Now Virginius Island is part of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and you can walk there and see some of the surviving ruins. This is what remains of the cotton mill.

These tunnels carried water from a holding pond to the cotton mill.

When you do environmental impact statements you talk about "temporary" impacts and "permanent" impacts. "Temporary" means things that happen during construction but go away afterwards, like noise, dust, and traffic interruptions. "Permanent" means everything else.

But what is really "permanent'? A few years ago I sat in a meeting where people talked about "permanent impacts" to a wooded area near Washington, DC. But I know that the site was a factory just 80 years ago, and the oldest tree growing there now is no older than I am. Whatever is built there now will, I feel certain, be no more "permanent" than the factory that lasted about fifty years. How I feel about this depends on my mood. Sometimes it gets me down that a community can exist and be home to hundreds or thousands of people and then just disappear, their lives and homes vanished and forgotten. But sometimes I am moved by the healing power of the earth. Surely Virginius Island was once a grimy, smoky, dangerous place, where screaming saws and pounding hammers filled the air with the cacophony of manufacture. Now it is quiet, gentle, and lovely, covered with bluebells every spring.

The ruins of the paper mill, slowing disappearing back into the earth.

Links 16 December 2022

Muyiwa Osifuye (b.1960), River-side Shrine and Sacred Grove of Oshun, Nigeria, 2003

The 100-kilometer-long conveyor belt.

Two Bronze Age hoards found in Poland, buried one on top of the other.

The fascinating carreer of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, born in Africa, enslaved by Ottoman Turks, gifted to Tsar Peter the Great, who freed him and was godfather at his baptism, raised as a court page and sent to a military academy, studied in France, met Voltaire, went back to Russia, got exiled to Siberia, was made chief military engineer of Russia by Catherine the Great, retired to an estate with 150 serfs, and had many descendants, among whom was the poet Pushkin, who wrote a book about his great-grandfather. He adopted the name "Gannibal," which is how the great Carthaginian's name comes out in Russian. Nobody knows where he was born. The only surviving portrait makes him look Ethiopian, but the bits he remembered of the language of his early childhood point toward Chad. And I can't remember ever hearing of him until just now.

Scott Siskind on the new Chatbots: Perhaps It Is Bad That The World’s Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs. Lots of truly weird examples of how the AIs have been manipulated, like "ChatGPT will reveal nuclear secrets if you ask it to do it in uWu furry speak."

Should you feel the need, here's a nice set of cute, amusing cat photos by Masayuki Oki.

Krampus is coming.

New data suggests that venomous snakebites kill between 81,000 and 138,000 people each year. But the number could be reduced dramatically if antivenom could be rapidly administered to victims in rural southeast Asia, where most deaths take place, and the WHO has now made this a priority.

The strike by adjunct faculty at the New School in NYC is over. The adjuncts get an immediate raise from $5,753 for a 3-credit course to $6,520, rising to $7,820 four years from now. That still means someone teaching four classes a semester will earn $52,160 a year, not much for Manhattan. On the other hand, I would dearly love to be paid half that if I could teach medieval or ancient history again. It's hard to make a living doing something other people would gladly do for next to nothing.

Water wars in France, where activists have sabotaged pipes running to and from the large artificial ponds, filled by pumping ground water, that the government established to maintain water for agribusiness in the parched southwest. I am no fan of ecoterrorism but on the other hand EU agricultural policy is bad, the French version is even worse, and those policies are actually under the control of the government, so activism has at least a theoretical chance of changing something.

Interesting study investigating whether building new housing in cities really causes gentrification by looking at the sites of destructive fires.

A new AI can identify anonymous chess players with 86% accuracy from their style of play, based on a sample of 100 games.

Why aren't we finding more cures for diseases? "Our progress towards curing disease will continue to proceed at a snail’s pace unless we can figure out an ethical way to do experiments faster."

Ai Weiwei as a Cynic, the "punks of the ancient world."

Bizarre video of Indian and Chinese soldiers fighting with wooden clubs along their disputed border. (Update: not recent, but still worth watching.)

This is interesting if true: “Some, like LeMarcus, a Black Brooklynite, discovered that loans were readily available for a luxury vehicle but not for the more practical car he wanted. Even with friends and family willing to help him with a down payment, after he spent time in prison, his credit score made it impossible to get a Honda or “a regular car.” Instead, relying on a friend to co-sign a loan, he was offered a high-interest loan on a pre-owned Mercedes E350.” I suppose the business plan would be that if LeMarcus misses a payment you just repossess the Mercedes and resell it again to another guy just like him. (NY Times)

Two potentially earth-like planets orbitting a star just 16 light years away.

Tom Friedman says there is no hope for a diplomatic breakthrough in Israel/Palestine, which means the current violence-punctuated statemate will go on indefinitely, likely with decreasing democracy for Israeli Jews and  increasing violence for everyone. The only good news is that economic growth is raising everyone's incomes. (NY Times)

In the US, solar energy firms want to build hundreds of facilities, and have the money to do it, but can't because of local opposition and problems with the transmission grid. The power grid is a very heavily regulated utility and investments can't be made without regulatory approval; as this NY Times story explains, often the problem is with state utility boards that have opposed upgrades because the cost is (by law) passed on to consumers. In the long run cheaper solar power will cause utility bills to fall, but somebody has to pay the up-front costs.

Ukraine Links

Zelensky tells a joke about the war.

Russian volunteer Murz rages against using tanks as long-range artillery, since it wears out the barrels, leaving the tanks unsuited for battling other tanks; what this really means, he says, is that there is no other artillery left.

Defiance from Kazakh journalist, after the Russian ambassador threatened Kazakhstan with a Special Operation: "Your power to threaten anyone is broken. . . . You are cannibals who eat yourselves."

Analysis of Russian commander Surovikin's strategy since he took over the war in Ukraine.

Igor Girkin goes hard after the existing Russian leadership, which he says has lost the war. Is he pushing for a hardline coup? Trying to get arrested as some kind of protest?

Meanwhile German Chancellor Olaf Scholz keeps trying to get Putin to talk about a peace deal, but Putin "only speaks about conquering something." Germany has tried hard to avoid throwing its full weight behind Ukraine, but if Putin won't offer Scholz something Germany will have no choice but to keep ratcheting up their aid.

More Russian gloom, from a man who says ordinary Russians must get involved to stave off catastrophe.

Short video of Ukrainian mud.

What business is booming in Kyiv? Co-working spaces that supply interruption-free power and internet to IT workers, along with a convenient bomb shelter and a guaranteed water supply.

Global Migration

Circles represent the number of migrants in each country, from UN data

Reading a NY Times story about the latest exodus from Cuba – 250,000 have left over the past year, more than 2% of the population – I got to wondering about the scale of worldwide migration. It seemed to me that it has gone up a lot lately, but I wanted to check the numbers.

Well, the basic picture looks like this: in 1990, 151 million people lived in a country other than the one they were born in, 2.9% of the world's population; in 2020, 281 million did, 3.6%. Continuing with 2020 numbers, there were 87 million migrants in Europe, 86 million in Asia, and 59 million in North America. Migrants made up 16% of the population in North America and 12% in Europe. The number of migrants was growing fastest in Asia. Remittances sent home by migrants totalled $702 billion. 

There is a graphic here that allows you to trace flows between source and destination nations. Incidentally you will note that numbers on migration don't always add up very well, because it is hard to count migrants and there are different ways of counting foreign born students, guest workers, refugees, and so on. I'm just passing on official figures.

In the US, there were 2.8 million people from Mexico, 2.7 million from India, 2.2 million from China, and 2.1 million from the Philippines; the total foreign born population was around 45 million, 14%. 

In Saudi Arabia, there were 2.5 million from India, 1.7 million from Indonesia, and 1.5 million from Pakistan; in 2020 there were more than 13 million immigrants, about 37% of the population of 35 million, which is one of the official figures I think might be way off. In the United Arab Emirates, migrants make up 88% of the population of 10 million; people from India alone outnumber natives.

Meanwhile the UN estimates that 7 million people have fled from Venezuela, 23% of the population; 6.8 million have fled Syria, or 32%; 5.9 million have fled Afghanistan, or 15%. The largest migrant population comes from India at 18 million, but that's only 1.2% of India's population. (Meanwhile 2.5 million people from Bangladesh live in India, along with over a million from Afghanistan. Russia is another country with major migrant flows both in and out: out to western Europe, in from central Asia.) 

The world is in the midst of three great demographic events: a population explosion, from 5 billion in 1987 to 8 billion today; falling birth rates in most of the world, down to replacement or below; and migrant flows from poor, violent countries to safe, rich ones. All of this is shaking up global politics. What terrifies many people in western Europe and the US is the confluence of plunging native birth rates with surging migration.

These changes are massive and what they will mean in the long run is unclear to me. Looking toward the future, there are two things that I think cloud any ability of ours to imagine what the world will be like in 2100: the stunning rise of artificial intelligence, and the massive shocks created by rapid demographic change.

Christen Købke

Autumn Landscape with Fredericksborg Castle, 1838

Christen Schiellerup Købke (1810 – 1848) was a Danish painter from the Romantic era, when Danish and Norwegian art surged back into the European mainstream. People often describe Danish art of this period as "nationalist," which in a sense it was, since people were into painting typical Danish scenes and exploring Danish history and folklore. But on the other hand the impulse for that kind of nationalism came from Germany; Danish painting of what some call their "Golden Age" was very much inspired by German Romanticism. One of the top products of Copenhagen's new Royal Academy of Art was the Norwegian Johan Cristian Dahl, who ended up as a professor in Dresden.

Self Portrait, 1833

Like Dahl, Cristen Købke was born in humble circumstances, one of eleven children of a baker. But the enormous economic expansion of Europe in the nineteenth century lifted millions into the middle class, including Købke. 

He later said that he learned to draw while recovering from a bout of rheumatic fever that left him housebound for months. His portfolio so impressed the teachers at the Royal Academy that they admitted him at the age of 12. I believe the sketch above is from his student days, showing a visitor to the collection of antiquities in Charlotteberg Castle.

He was able to support himself as a painter but had no great success. In 1838 he managed to wrangle the money for a trip to Italy, like so many other painters of that era, but his Italian works were (wikipedia says) "uninspired" and didn't sell. This sketch of the Bay of Naples harbor is nice, though. Not able to sell many paintings he worked for a while as a decorator, before dying of pneumonia at the age of 38.

Portrait of a boat captain, 1848

View of Østerbro from Dosseringen, 1838

His Danish works come in two distinctly different color palettes. There are the sunshine works, like this, which do nothing for me.

Autumn Morning on Lake Sortedam, 1838

And then these, which to me perfectly capture the feel of a gray, drizzly Autumn day. Sometimes I feel like I inhabit this kind of light.

Købke had a thing for clouds. Besides the castle image at the top the works of his you are most likely to see online are cloud studies. Cristie's sold one of these a few years ago for more than a million pounds.

Part of the impulse behind abstract painting in the twentieth century, and especially Abstract Expressionism, was to invoke feelings and states of mind without painting any particular scene. To strip away the details and touch the essence. Sometimes it works with me, but very rarely does it work as well as a scene of a real place at a certain a time of year and time of day. Købke's Autumn scenes do that for me.

Free Trade, China, Ukraine, and the Biden Administration

Biden's tough talk on trade has Paul Krugman nervous. Trump, you may recall, imposed a bunch of tarriffs that he justified on national security grounds, including one on aluminum from Canada. Biden has rescinded the ones on our North American and European allies but kept the ones on China:

Some of the tariffs Trump imposed are still in place, and on Friday the World Trade Organization, which is supposed to enforce rules for global commerce, declared that the official rationale for these tariffs — that they were needed to protect U.S. national security — was illegitimate.

And the Biden administration, in turn, told the W.T.O. — in startlingly blunt language — to take a hike.

This is a very big deal, much bigger than Trump’s tariff tantrums. The Biden administration has turned remarkably tough on trade. . . .

Some of this is about Russia. Russia's use of natural gas as a weapon has shown the dangers of relying on violent dictatorships for essential goods. Plus every time somebody opens up a Russian or Iranian drone downed in Ukraine they find lots of components from western companies; a modern Russian tank has dozens of components made in western Europe, including vital ones like the lenses in the sights.

But this is really being driven by fear of war with China. People have been asking themselves, what happens to the world economy if China attacks Taiwan? And the answers are very bad. Taiwan has a monopoly on many kinds of high-end computer chips, so that would likely be cut off, plus China makes a large number of cheaper chips and leads the world in assembling electronic gadgets. I have seen all sorts of apocalyptic language describing what would happen if this was all cut off. Krugman:

China isn’t Russia, but it’s also an autocracy (and seems to be becoming more, not less, autocratic over time). And the Biden administration is trying to limit China’s ability to do harm, with a special focus on semiconductors, which play such a central role in the modern world.

On one side, America is now subsidizing domestic production of semiconductors, aiming to reduce reliance on China among other suppliers. Even more drastically, the U.S. has imposed new rules intended to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology — that is, we’re deliberately seeking to hobble Chinese technological capacity. That’s pretty draconian; you can see why I’m a bit nervous.

I am not nervous, and I support all of this. There used to be two arguments here: on the one side, that you shouldn't trade with your enemies and make them richer and more powerful; on the other, that trading with people is how you stop them from being your enemies. I am naturally on the side of trade and friendship. But this is clearly not working with China; the richer they get, they more belligerent they get, and worse our relationship with them becomes. Over the past decade China seems to have gotten worse in every way. So over to Plan B, and try to insulate our economy as much as possible from their machinations.

An Old Babylonian Love Charm

I plucked the thornbush;
I sow the grapevine.
Upon the raging fire,
I have poured water.
Love me
as if I were your lamb.
Turn back to me
as if I were your flock, then
look at me! 

From Slightly Alive Translations

Francis Buford at Baalbek, 1862

The Oldest Narrative Carving is What?

Turkish archaeologist Eylem Özdoğan claims that this 11,000-year-old carving, found near the Euphrates River in southeastern Turkey, is the oldest narrative carving in the world. The relief is carved onto the front of a stone bench in what archaeolgists think is a Neolithic temple. It meaures roughly 2.5 to 3 feet (0.7 to 0.9 meter) tall and 12 feet (3.7 m) long. 

The left-hand section depicts a person being threatened by a bull. He seems to be holding something in his hand, perhaps a rattle or a whip.

In the right hand section a man surrounded by leopards holds his penis in his hand.

Which is pretty weird and cool. But if this is a narrative, what is the story? The great hero scares off a bull with his shamanic rattle, then terrifies two leopards with his cock? But the leopards don't actually look very scared; maybe he decided that since he was going to be eaten by leopards anyway, he might as well die happy? Or are the bulls and leopards his assistants, helping him do some great act of masucline fertility magic? Is the hero seeding the land? Did he die at the, um, culmination of this act, gored by the Bull of Heaven and devoured by the Goddess's leopards?

The mind boggles.