The Tragedy of Daniel Boone

Pathfinding and hunting his way through the paradise the Indians had built.

Daniel Boone is (or used to be) one of the most iconic / archetypal figures in US history and popular consciousness. His remains have been fought over, his life mythologized and serialized, and his legacy cherished as heroic and exemplary. It all began with his trusty rifle, with which he was the surest shot. He was a pathfinder, never lost in the vast wilderness he explored and helped settle. And he was a steadfast leader of men, rescuer of damsels in distress, and killer of Indians. What's not to admire? His definitive biography, by John Faragher, paints a more ambivalent picture, however.

Boone loved the woods- loved hunting, loved nature, and loved solitude. Given those talents and tendencies, he naturally strayed from the borderlands of North Carolina into the mountains, becoming a full time hunter and trapper. In a couple of early forays into what we now know as Kentucky, he hunted on a commercial basis, wasting the animals to pile up hundreds of pelts, which his employees / colleagues processed in camp. 

The biography emphasizes that what Boone found in Kentucky was a paradise- lush and full of game. The region, believe it or not, was full of not just deer and beaver, but bear and buffalo. It is the kind of eden that had been encountered by Europeans many times over in the "New World". Fisheries of unimaginable richness, skies full of birds, forests as far as the eye could see. Kentucky was not an uninhabited eden, however- it was the cherished hunting ground of native Cherokee and Shawnee, among others, who saw exactly what Boone saw, but responded to it differently. Not with plunder and destruction, but with care and stewardship.

Boone blindly shot away, and then followed his cultural programming further by leading his family and many others across the mountains to found Boonesborough, building a fort and defending it against numerous Indian attacks. The biography notes that Boone's parents had ten children, and he had ten children, and his children had similar sized families. One can imagine where that kind of reproduction leads, to desperate expansion and heedless use of resources. While acknowledged as the pioneer of Kentucky settlement, Boone was no businessman, and all his grasping for land in the speculative rush that developed in his wake came to naught. He was sloppy in his paperwork and was outlawyered and out-cheated at every turn. One may see the personality type of his adversary in the current senior senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell. Boone was all too honest and simple, having been raised a Quaker.

Portrayal of the siege of a stockade, not unlike that of Boonesborough, as Native Americans try to drive off the cloud of locusts denuding their land.

The game had been hunted out, the people had become unfriendly and dense underfoot, and Boone's property and business schemes had all fallen apart. In despair over what he had wrought in Kentucky, Boone pulled up stakes and moved out to the next frontier, near St. Louis. An extremely late hunting trip has him heading through what is now Yellowstone park, reliving for the last time the kind of eden that Native Americans had nurtured with their respect for the value and cycles of nature, and even more, with their light footprint as small populations.

European culture and immigrants have accomplished wonderful things in America. But decimating its natural wonders, resources, and native peoples is not one of them. Daniel Boone was caught up in the economics of inexorable population growth and the need to make a "business model" out of hunting and trapping. Well, what comes of that is not pretty, and not at all sustainable of what had brought him into the woods to start with.

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Magellan, the Movie

The story of Magellan's voyage is positively cinematic.

It has now been five hundred years since the first circumnavigation of the world, by Ferdinand Magellan. This feat doesn't generally get as much fame as Columbus's discovery of the Caribbean, even though Columbus didn't know what he was doing, and kept not understanding what he had done long after he returned. By the time, thirty years later, that some more of the new world had been explored, and the Portuguese had also entered the Indian ocean around the bottom of Africa, the overall geography of the earth had not advanced a great deal, still being based on Ptolemy's significantly (about 30%) too-small estimate. But the lure remained- how to get to the all-important spice islands in a more convenient way. 

And it was a very commercial lure. Magellan had little scientific interest in all this, per se. He was a mariner through and through, and had done extensive research with his colleagues, mapmakers, and astronomers. But most of all he was desperate to make some money after a wide-ranging, but not very well-paid, career with the official Portuguese fleet. He had visited India and what is now Malaysia, and had heard from a friend who had finally found the spice islands, and had decided to stay there. So when Magellan went to the King of Portugal to propose his westward voyage around the tip of South America, it was a strictly commercial venture, hopefully easier and shorter than the trip around Africa and through the Indian ocean. But the king was uninterested, as the Portuguese already were using the eastern route, and didn't seem much point in trying another, unknown one. Columbus had already tried that gambit and had not gotten much for it. Not much in the way of spices, at any rate.

So Magellan stormed off in a huff, renounced his allegiance to the Portuguese crown, and made his proposal to the Spanish king instead. Now that logic made more sense. The Spanish and Portuguese had come up with a colonial demacation line, the treaty of Tordesillas, that split the Atlantic, which is what gave Brazil to the Portuguese. But this line in imaginary fashion extended around the globe to the other side, and depending how big that globe was, might award the spice islands (the southern islands of the Indonesian archapelago) to Spain, not Portugal. Devising a route from the other side might get Spain there faster, and also avoid unpleasant conflict with sea lanes that were now busy with Portuguese shipping. So the expedition was approved and launched in 1519.

It is a fascinating story, and gets more and more interesting as it goes on, with exotic locations, spectacular discoveries, first contact with far-flung natives, mutiny, hangings, and maroonings. It is very well-told by Tim Joyner, in his definitive and meticulous 1992 book. One aspect that did not come up, however, was that Magellan and colleagues could have come up with a much more accurate estimate of the circumference of the globe by their thorough knowledge of latitude. Longitude- that was difficult to calculate, though his voyage made amazing advances in this respect as well. But if they were imaginative enough to consider that the globe was round in all directions, then the circumference around the poles, which was well within their ability to calculate with precision, would have told them that Ptolemy was way off, and that scurvy was going to be their lot in traversing the Pacific ocean (which Magellan named, incidentally).

A top-secret 1502 map of the known world, from Portugal. The coast of Africa is well-detailed, while farther areas are quite a bit murkier. Crucially, nothing is known of the southern extent of South America.

The last ship, of the five that embarked on the expedition, limped back into San Lucar, near Seville, Spain, three years later, bedraggled and desperately bailing out their bilge. But it brought back a treasure of cloves, as well as a treasure of information. The expedition had poisoned relations with numerious natives, not to mention the Portuguese, who quickly overtook and imprisoned the small contingent left at Ternate, one of the spice islands. In fact, Magellan himself died in a reckless attack on a thousand natives in what is now the Philippines. 

So the mini-series version would have to be told by someone else. And that should be Antonio Pigafetta, the self-appointed anthropologist of the expedition. A worldly fellow from Lombardy who had been employed at the Vatican, he was part of its ambassadorial delegation to Spain when he heard about Magellan's plans. He appears to have jumped at the chance for adventure, and kept detailed dairies of the events of the voyage, to which all subsequent authors are hugely indebted. He even kept a day log which he was surprised to see finally came up a day short- precisely the day that one loses when following the setting sun around the world. He seems to have been quite a character, who had high respect for Magellan, and whose adventurousness also saved him from scurvy, which tended to afflict the more squeamish eaters, who were put off by eating rats and whatever else came to hand. 

So there you have it, perhaps a twelve part miniseries spanning the globe, rich with drama, suffering, scenery, deceit, greed, blind ambition, valor, and victory, telling of one of the great adventures of mankind.

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(No) Sympathy for the Devil

Blaming ourselves for Russia's attack on Ukraine.

Here we are, in a time warp back almost a century. A European country has elected an authoritarian leader, on the support of a doddering president. That leader went on to resolve the economic and politicial crisis of the country, mostly by taking complete control himself and forming an increasingly repressive fascist state. Nationalist propaganda and lies were ceaselessly conveyed through the state media, paving the way for attacks on other countries, generally portrayed as critical to protect fellow countrymen being oppressed there. The aggression and the lying escalated until here we are, in a full scale international war, with distinct chances of becoming a world war. 

In the US, there are strange convergences of support for the Russian side of this conflict. Those on the fringe left can not tear themselves away from respect for the Russia that was the Soviet union and vanguard of world communism. Nor can they resist bashing the US. The far right is infatuated with the new Russia, with its super-Trump leadership, free-wheeling criminality, and clever propaganda, as many Americans were of Hitler back in the day. But a third stream comes from the foreign policy establishment- the realists, who think spheres of influence are the most normal, god-given organizing principles of international affairs. Thus China should be given its suzerainty over South East Asia, including Taiwan, and Russia over its near abroad, whatever the people actually living there may think. We are to blame for pushing NATO to Russia's borders, we are to blame for injuring Russia's sensitivities and pride, and we have caused their invasion of Ukraine, by luring Ukraine to the West with our sweet blandishments.

Well, each of those views is out of touch in its own way, but the last is especially curious. For what was the post-World War 2 order about, if not about civilized behavior among nations, letting each seek prosperity and freedom, in peace? The realist view would plunge us back into medieval power relations, or perhaps the three-sphere world of George Orwell's 1984. It consigns small countries to the depredations of bullies like Russia, who can not make friends in a civilized manner, but, in Ukraine, has strained every nerve to corrupt its political system, destroy its internet, and obliterate its sovereignty and economy.

It is obvious to all, including Russia, that NATO was and remains a defensive alliance, of countries intent above all else to rebuild after World War 2 without further aggressive encroachment by Russia. And once the Soviet Union fell apart, the Eastern Bloc countries fled as fast as they could to the West, not because they wanted to attack Russia in a new World War 3, but quite the opposite- they wanted to pursue the promise of freedom and prosperity in peace, without bullying from Russia. Russia's much vaunted "sensitivities" are nothing more than toxic, domineering nostalgia for their former oppressive empires, of both Czarist and Soviet times. As the largest country in the world, one would think they have enough room, but no, their sense of greatness, unmatched by commensurate cultural, economic, or moral accomplishment, demands bullying of its neighbors. More to the point, their current system of government- autocracy / fascism by ceaseless lying and propaganda, would be impaired by having their close neighbors have more open, civilized systems. 

All this has a religious aspect that is interesting to note as well. Ukraine recently extricated itself from domination by the Moscow orthodox church, becoming autocephalic, in the term of art. The process shows that even in this supposedly supernatural sphere of pure timeless principle, tribalism and politics are the order of the day. Not to mention propaganda, and fanciful philosophy and history. The narratives that Russia as spun about Ukraine and its invasion are particularly virulent, unhinged, and insulting, insuring that Ukraine would never, in any sane world, want to have anything to do with their neighbor. It is one more aspect of the Russian aggression that spares us from needing to sympathize overly with its "sensitivities".

So, what to do? It is not clear that Ukraine can withstand Russian attacks forever. They have stopped Russia in its tracks, thanks to a lot of Western assistance. They have millions of men under arms, compared to a much smaller invasion force. They have motivation and they have the land. But they need heavier weapons and they need to preserve their air power. With those two things, they could turn the tide and drive Russia out. Without them, they will probably only manage a stalemate. Western sanctions have imposed highly justifiable pain on Russia itself, but historically, such sanctions tend to have as much countervailing effect, consolidating pro-government attitudes, as the opposite. So barring a dramatic turn of events at the top of the Russian system, which is highly unpredictable and rather unlikely, we are facing a very drawn out and destructive war in Ukraine.

In a larger sense, we are facing something far more momentous- the rise and assertion of autocracy (not to say fascism 2.0) as a competing world order. Russia's pattern has been clear enough (and historically eerie)- escalate their aggression and ambition as far as they can get away with. And China is watching carefully. The ability of the West to punish Russia for its completely immoral and cruel attack on Ukraine, and deter future repetitions, will shape the next century. Russia has decisively broken the borders and tranquility of the post-World War 2 order, and that has caused many, especially in Europe, to wake up and realize that coasting along on US coat tails is not enough- they have to actively participate in sanctioning Russia, in resolving their dependence on Russian fossil fuels (as if that had not been patently obvious before), and strengthening the collective defence, as expressed in NATO. Western leaders should make it clear that Putin and his key lieutenants will never be allowed to personally enter the West without being shipped off the Hague for trial. And we should give Ukraine what it needs to defend itself.

Finally, what of our own culpability? Not so much in mistreating Russia, which we have done only to a slight degree, but in committing war crimes of our own, in attacks of our own, based on lies of our own, on innocent countries far distant. I am speaking of Iraq (which ranks first among several other cases). While our justification for that war was far better than Russia's in Ukraine, it was still poor, still caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, was grievously misconceived and mismanaged, and has left a political ruin, not to mention a geopolitical mess. This alone should make George W Bush rank among the worst of US presidents- significantly lower than Trump, who for all his destructiveness, did not destroy whole countries. We should be willing to put Bush and others who made those decisions to an historical and international account for their actions, in a spirit of historical rectitude.

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There Are no Natural Rights

Rights are always a political construct, which we devise and grant each other.

American politics is drenched with "rights". The Bill of Rights, natural rights, god-given rights, human rights. Both right and left use "rights" language to claim victimization and seek restitution. But the history goes back much farther, to the Magna Carta and beyond, into the heart of being a social species. Sociality means compromise, giving up some powers in return for other things, some of which are called rights. Good civilized behavior and diligent work entitles us to membership in the group, and benefits such as collective defense and shared resources. Since there can be long time lags between service and repayment, even extending over a lifetime or even multiple generations, a way is needed to keep track of such obligations. One way is to proclaim rights, such as a right to communal fields and pastures for members of the group, in perpetuity.

Thus rights are generally keenly felt as obligations and matters of long-standing, even eternal, usage. But all are social agreements, as our proclivity to murder and execute each other makes clear. If one does not even have an inalienable right to life, what are the others worth? They are neither natural nor god-given, but entirely human-given. They are rhetorical constructs meant to structure our communal relations, hopefully for good of all and the durable continuance of the system, but sometimes, not so much. Indeed, rights can be brutally oppressive, such as those of Brahmins in the Indian caste system, among many others.

Gun nuts frequently make a fetish of their rights- to guns, self defense, and in various convoluted ways to religious rights and duties. When rights have been written into the law, such as our constitution, that moves them into another rhetorical level- the legal system. But that just expresses and codifies agreements that exist elsewhere in the social system, and which the social system can, through its evolution, change. Gay rights have been an outstanding example, of the destruction of one rights system- that of normative sexuality and marriage rights- and the rise of a new set of rights oriented to personal freedom in the expression and practice of sexuality. Where in ancient times, fecundity was of paramount importance, that need has naturally fallen away as a societal imperative as our societies and planet creak under loads of overpopulation.

This mutability and social basis of rights leads to a lot of one-upmanship in rights discourse, like the attempts to found abortion rights in presumptively more universal or fundamental rights like privacy, autonomy, or women's rights, versus competing formulations of rights to fetal life with related arguments about the legal and life-like status of embryos and fetuses. All this speaks to the fact that rights are not discovered on tablets handed down by either god or Darwin, but are continually developed out of our feelings about our communities- what is fair based on what is required from each of us to live in them, and what they can reasonably demand and give in return.

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• Good riddance.

Eating the Wild Things

Despite humanity's long tradition of eating wildlife, it is high time to rethink it as a practice. 

The coronavirus outbreak certainly gives one pause, and time to think about what we are doing to the biosphere and to ourselves. It also makes one wonder about the wisdom of killing and eating wildlife. I have been reading a book about a different disaster, the struggles of the crew of the ship Essex, back in 1820. This Nantucket-based factory ship was hunting whales in the middle of the Pacific when, in an ironic, yet all too-rare turn of events, a huge male sperm whale rammed and sank the mother ship as the smaller whaleboats were out killing its relatives. Months of drama, extremity, and cannibalism ensue, (for the humans), after which a fraction of the crew survive to tell the tale. It seems to us now bizarre, and beyond wasteful, that street lights in Nantucket were lit with whale oil, and that people would sail all over the world's oceans just to kill whales for the oil in their heads and blubber. Humans have an instinct for survival, and for the most concentrated source of various goods, and, whether under the colors of capitalism or simple greed, think little of externalizing costs, no matter how brutal and far-reaching, whether eating each other, "fishing out" some rich source of food, causing extinctions, or setting Charles island of the Galapagos ablaze in an inferno (another episode that occurs in this ill-starred history). One must be "hard" in this business of living, after all.

Well, we can do better. Now, two centuries on, we are still abusing the biosphere. Some ways are new, (climate change, plastics, insecticides), but others are old, such as over-fishing. Factory ships are still plying the great oceans of the world, vacuuming up wild animals so that we can eat them. And not just do they derange whole ecosystems and litter the oceans with their waste, but they also kill a lot of innocent bystanders, euphemistically called "bycatch"- sea turtles, albatrosses, dolphins, whales, etc. Albatross populations are in steady decline, from very low levels and heading towards extinction, for one main reason, which is the fishing industry.

This simply has to stop. It is a tragedy of the commons, on a collossal scale, all for the atavistic desire to eat wild animals. Human overpopulation, coupled with technology, means that no wild animals stand a chance in an unregulated environment- not in Africa, not in Brazil, and not in the international oceans. We are killing them by a thousand cuts, but do we also have to eat them, as the final indignity and form of waste?

If we want to save the biosphere from utter impoverishment, humanity needs a change of heart- an ethic for keeping the wild biosphere wild, rather than running it like so much farmland, or so much "resource" to be pillaged, whether "sustainably" or not. Obviously, eating meat at all is a fraught issue- ethically, and environmentally. But surely we can agree that wild animals, and wild ecosystems, deserve a break? Conversely, where we have so screwed up ecosystems by eliminating natural predators or introducing invasive species, we may have to kill (and yes, perhaps eat) wild animals in systematic fashion, to bring back a functional balance. Go to town on feral hogs, boa constrictors, Asian carp, etc. (But try to do so without poisoning yourselves and the evironment with lead.) The point is that we are stewards of this Earth now, like it or not, and ensuing generations over the next hundreds and thousands of years deserve an Earth with a functioning biosphere, with some semblance of its original richness.

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Success is an Elixir

We are besotted by success. For very obvious evolutionary reasons, but with problematic consequences.

Why is the James Bond franchise so compelling? It got more cartoonish over the years, but the old Sean Connery embodied a heady archetype of the completely successful hero. A man as skilled in vetting wines as in flying planes, as debonair with the ladies as he was in fighting hand-to-hand, all while outwitting the most malevolent and brilliant criminal minds. Handsome, witty, and brutally effective in all he turned his hand to, there was little complexity, just relentless perfection, other than an inexplicable penchant for getting himself into dramatic situations, from which he then suavely extricated himself.

We worship success, for understandable reasons, but sometimes a little too much. As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. It is fundamental to our growth from childhood to adulthood, to demonstrate and be recognized for some kind of effectiveness- passing tests, graduating from school, becoming skilled in some art or profession, which is socially recognized as useful, maybe through the medium of money. The ancient rites of passage recognized this, by setting a key test, such as killing the bear, or withstanding some brutal austerity. Only through effectiveness in life can we justify that life to ourselves and to others. The role can take many forms- extroverts tend to focus on social power- the capability of bending others to their will, while introverts may focus more on other skills like making tools or interpreting the natural world.

The Darwinian case is clear enough- each life is a hero's quest to express one's inner gifts and capabilities, in order to succeed not only in thriving in the given environment, but in replicating, creating more successful versions of one's self which do so all over again. Women naturally fall for successful men, as James Bond so amply demonstrated, but as is seen in so many fields, from basketball to finance.

But all this creates some strong cognitive biases that have some influences that are not always positive. Junior high school is the most obvious realm where these play out. Children are getting used to the idea that life is not fair, and that they can communally form social standards and decisions about what constitutes success, which then victimize those on the losing end- what is cool, what is lame, who is a loser, etc. Popularity contests, like politics and the stock market, are notorious for following fashions that valorize what one generation may believe is success, only to have the next generation look back in horror and redefine success as something else. In these cases, success is little more than a commonly held opinion about success, which leads to the success of con men like our current president, who insists that everything he does is perfectly successful, and who inspires sufficient fear, or confidence, or suspension of disbelief, or is so ably assisted by the propaganda of his allies, that many take him seriously. Indeed, it is exactly the unaccountable support of his allies who surely know better that force others in the wider circles of the society to take seriously what no rational or decent person would believe for a second.

The status of minorities is typically a "loser" status, since by definition their beliefs and practices, and perhaps their very existence, are not popular. While this may be a mark of true Darwinian lack of success, it is far more likely to be an accident of, or an even less innocent consequence of, history. In any case, our worship of success frequently blinds us to the value of minorities and minority perspectives, and is a large reason why such enormous effort has been expended over millennia, on religious, legal, constitutional, and cultural planes, to remedy this bias and promote such things as democracy, diversity, due process, and respect for contrasting perspectives.

We are victimized in many other ways by our mania for success- by advertisers, by the gambling industry, by war mongers, among many others, who peddle easy success while causing incalculable damage. While it is hard to insulate ourselves from these social influences and judgements, which are, after all, the soul of evaluating success; as with any other cognitive bias, being in our guard is essential to avoiding cults, traps, and, ultimately, expensive failure.

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Domestic Terrorism

For all the mass shootings, domestic violence kills more people and terrorizes them far more severely. A tribute to Andrea Dworkin.

We are enraged by the continuing insanity of the NRA and the legion of gun nuts it represents. A murderous phallic-worship cult so transfixed by the object of their adoration that simple human decency, let alone humility, fall by the way. But the mass shootings by young brain-washed men with automatic rifles, which form the media focus, are a minor problem compared with the more prevalent and damaging form of domestic terrorism and murder: domestic violence.

Roughly 2,000 people die yearly from domestic violence, half of which involve guns, and some of which are familicides that also count as mass shootings. In comparison, about 300 people have been dying in mass shootings per year over the last decade, though the statistics are disparate under various definitions and research methods. The gun violence archive lists 253 so far in 2019, 340 in all of 2018; 346 in 2017, 382 in 2016, 335 in 2015, and 269 in 2014.

Mass shootings count as terrorist incidents, since they are typically driven by an ideology of hatred that is expressed explicitly as motivation, and may also target a hated group, or, out of frustration, just a vulnerable group of opportunity. The intention is evidently to instill fear in society, excite copycats, and change the culture towards the desired hatred setting. But how effective are they? Not very effective at all, since their rarity insures that we as general citizens need not have, and do not have, fear of public places or other venues where such shootings take place. Yes, we are angry about the senseless carnage made possible by military fixations and equipment prevalent in some of our not-very-mentally-healthy subcultures. Yes, we are disgusted by the ideology, such as it is, and its leaders, first and foremost our dear president. But terrorized? Not at all. The elaborate security theater introduced in airports, and increasingly in schools, is a sad and wasteful consequence, but hardly bespeaks "terror". Rather, it represents the best our bureaucracies can manage to raise increments of policing and prevention, with the end result of keeping the populace calm, if not irritated and bored out of its collective mind.

Terror is something else entirely. Terror is when you are trapped in a place with no escape. A place where, if you try to leave, your chances of being killed are higher than if you stay. A place, where if you stay, you can look forward to unending torment, vicious abuse both physical and mental. A situation where, if you leave, you can count on being hunted for years, with lethal weapons. That is the reality of domestic violence. Andrea Dworkin blamed pornography, which I do not. But pornography is part of a larger culture of dehumanization and objectification, consisting of casual rapists like our president, pimps who traffic in women and girls, dedicated patriarchies such as the Catholic and Mormon churches, even Sports Illustrated, which traffics in a yearly turn into soft porn, among many other social institutions.

Objectification is not unique to sexuality, but results from any desire. The store clerk is a mechanism to obtain what we want, and is of little personal importance to us as shoppers. War could not happen without the objectification of the enemy. Nothing personal! But it is certainly ironic and distressing that the most personal relationship of all is driven by desires that can so easily head down impersonal, even spiteful, hateful, and violent channels when thwarted and frustrated, or even if let run free, by way of ideological or psychological perversion.

It is noteworthy that much of our language around sex is violent and used to express violence. Being "screwed" is not a good thing, but a bad thing. The gun nuts mentioned above marinate in a cult of masculinity and sexualized power so divorced from reality and humanity that it should form an intrinsic "red flag". Again, it is the powerful, even existential, motivating desire of sexuality which generates a quest for other forms of power and control, leading some down a path of violence and dehumanization.

As Andrea Dworkin wrote, in her inimitable style:  "Life and Death"

"These are women who thought that they had a right to dignity, to individuality, to greedom- but in fact they couldn't walk down a city block in freedom. Many of them were raped as children in their own homes, by relatives- fathers, uncles, brothers- before they were 'women'. Many of them were beaten by the men who loved them- their husbands, lovers. Many of them were tortured by these men. When you look at what happened to these women, you want to say, 'Amnesty International, where are you?'- because the prisons for women are our homes. We live under martial law. We live in a rape culture. Men have to be sent to prison to live in a culture that is as rapist as the normal home in North America. We live under what amounts to military curfew, enforced by rapists. We say we're free citizens in a free society. But we lie. We lie about it every day."

So it is a deep issue, a pressing issue of human rights, health and well-being, and continues in the age of #MeToo, which is only slowly filtering through the culture. What should be done? We can not all go back and get better upbringings, probably the single most influential causal / protective factor. A great deal has been done to set up hotlines and women's shelters, and to recognize that leaving an abusive situation is very difficult. But I think more can be done, principally by taking the position that a relationship where one person has reached out to police, or an abuse hotline, or a shelter, is already dead, and the helping institutions should do all they can to enable its parties to dissolve it and move on. That means not getting bogged down in a lot of mediation. Rather, the focus should be on setting the battered spouse into a new life, rapidly putting all the shared assets and income flows into escrow, and using them fairly, under official supervision and eventual division, to help each party live independently. Whether the batterer is charged criminally is a separate matter. The evidence in these cases tends to be poor, the parties unwilling to extend their trauma and drag their lives through the courts. Either way, separation is the more urgent and practical need, and one party's witness is quite sufficient for that.

Q: People think you are very hostile to men.
A: I am.
Q: Doesn't that worry you?
A: From what you said, it worries them. 

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Battle For the Truth

The battle of Midway- success comes from dedicated engagement with reality. Not from fantasy.

Memorial Day brings up the Greatest Generation and the battles it fought to keep the World Wars away from the US, and save other countries from tyranny along the way. One of the greatest of those battles was at Midway, about half a year after Pearl Habor. It carries some object lessons in why this generation was so successful, and what makes America great. I am watching Battlefield 360, a History Channel program that profiles the aircraft carrier Enterprise. The production is absurdly over-the-top and padded with cheap filler, yet also full of compelling history.

The story of this battle, as for all others, is a search for truth, which then leads to success. A mere 33 years after the Wright brother's first flight, the US christened aircraft carriers like the USS Enterprise, which carried 90 airplanes. Mastering flight was the first step to a new form of long-range mobile warfare. The US had broken the Japanese naval code, enabling us to know the truth of what Japan planned for its invasion of Midway. The US ran an experiment to nail down the meaning of one word in the code, which clearly denoted a place, but which place? The truth came out when the Japanese took the bait and relayed our (fake) news that Midway was short of water. The word was their code name for Midway.

The US had learned quite a bit about the dangers of fire aboard aircraft carriers, which are awash with fuel, bombs, and artillery rounds, which led to a variety of novel equipment and training, such as CO2 purging of fuel lines before facing attacks, fire-fighting foams, and dedicated, pre-positioned fire control crews. This led to the Enterprise being able to take three direct bomb hits and not sink, while in the battle of Midway, the US sank four enemy carriers with only a couple of bombs each. The Japanese had not learned the value and truth of protective design and effective fire suppression.

The US had radar, a new way to find out the truth of enemy positions, so critical to both defense and offense. As in the old board game of battleship, naval warfare is a game of cat and mouse. The more you know, and the more you can blind your opponent, the more successful you will be. The search for truth has been so integral as to be almost unconscious in our military (not to mention "intelligence") culture. And in the post-war era, it led to a broader cultural commitment to education and research which has formed US preeminence in physics, chemistry, and biology, among many other fields, including notably climate science.

Which all leads one to wonder why lying is now one of our leading national characteristics. Who does our president regard as the enemy, and who the friend? Why is, for him, truth in journalism so dangerous? What is the morality of a whole party lying habitually about fundamental economics, about public interest regulation, about democratic values, and about the future of the planet? What has happened to us?

• Damage control on Yorktown.
• Wall Street wants docile Democrats.
• Cancer cure ... the hardest part.
• Some thoughts about the crazy.
• It is not entirely clear why we side with Saudi Arabia over Iran.
• Meanwhile, it is worth sticking with Afghanistan.

"I Think the Second Amendment is There For a Reason."

A Senator alludes to insurrection against the state he is sworn to uphold.

This is not a new phenomenon. Before the Civil war, many senators and other politicians from the South tried their best to undermine the federal government, going so far as to capture armories and other supplies for the looming conflict. Today, a similar mind-set arises from similar sources- the Southern and Southern-inspired strategists of "State's rights" and a new decentralized feudalism. On guns, their argument is that the free ownership of guns allows the insurrectionists a fair chance against a totalitarian state, much as the original colonists waged a guerrilla war against Britain.

One first question is - in what way is our democracy defective? Does it over-represent the totalitarian, state-centered interests? Only if one construes those to be represented by the Republican party, ironically. Does it over-regulate and construct collective and long-term interests against the wishes of short-term greed and small-minded ideologues? Yes, it certainly does, but we have the "democratic" process to thank for a dramatic pushback, in the form of unchecked spending by corporate and other greedy interests, flame-throwing conservative media, plus the Russian government. It is hard to see where these complaints can find purchase, in such an atmosphere.

A second question is, even supposing that our state is or could be tyrannical in some irremediable way, where does one draw the line on armaments? What arms are valid for this hypothetical use, and which are not? We all seem to agree that nuclear bombs are not proper for civilian use. But why? Is it that the danger they pose is far beyond what is reasonable to put into the hands of one person, without some organized institutional oversight? Is it that we do not want to live in a MAD society, each armed to the teeth, in a petrified defensive crouch, waiting to see what the next madman will do?

This logic applies down the line to other military weapons, naturally, given that our fellow citizens (even presidents) are not to be relied upon to be uniformly sane and good-natured. Great firepower implies great danger and great responsibility. Where do machine guns fall in this scale, for that is what the semi-automatic and other assult-style weapons amount to? Obviously, in light of the many mass shootings in the US over recent years, they fall into the dangerous class of weapons that should be restricted to organizations with structured oversight. That, of course, was the original meaning of the second amendment, with its justification through an organized, state-supporting milita, something which has been lost on our Supreme Court, not to mention our rabid gun nuts.

The Civil war should have disabused our home-grown insurrectionists from any notion of armed resistance against whatever bogeyman they make the "guvmint" out to be. People power is the only effective power. They can never win without a political movement. Their arms are merely a fascistic decoration, not an effective form of policy. That we let off the Bundy gang so lightly was a travesty, both legally and politically. But their intended revolution against government control of government lands never took off on a popular, armed basis, and now is being accomplished from the inside, in the new administration, via the "democratic" process.

There is a mental health issue afoot, and it is that people with military-grade guns are mentally ill, as are open-carriers and other maximalist acolytes of the NRA. These attitudes are uncivil, insurrectionary, and deranged. The idea that others will be politically and socially intimidated by their weapons and various forms of rage is absurd and insulting, apart from spineless politicians, who don't seem to understand the first thing about our constitution, their duties, or statehood in general.

• Pakistan is still at it. Not even Trump lies quite like the Pakistanis lie.
• An infrastructure nothing burger.

Native American Cleansing, Army-Style

Review of Keith Murray's "The Modocs and Their War".

It was a brief national sensation during the Grant administration, but now a forgotten episode in the ethnic cleansing of the West. A tiny band of obscure Native Americans in Northern California resisted the US army for a year, engaging over ten times their own numbers, turning whole army units into demoralized fleeing cowards. A splinter group of the Modocs, numbering about 65 fighting men, were induced to go to a reservation in Oregon around 1865, but naturally found the experience unappealing, and decided to return to their native lands. With the US distracted by the Civil War and its aftermath, they were left alone for several years, while the settlers that were encroaching on their lands threw up increasingly bitter complaints.

Lava beds at Tule lake

One feature of these native lands, around Tule lake on the border with Oregon, are lava beds with very rugged topography. While barren, these also make excellent natural fortifications. The Modoc band, with their leader Captain Jack, made thorough use of them to hold off a determined Army attack on January 16 and 17, 1873, inflicting about 50 casualties while suffering none of their own. In fact, the Modocs throughout this episode ran circles around their enemies in tactics, logistics, scouting, and intelligence. In contrast, the Army of the West was a notorious home to cast-offs and hirelings, with little motivation and very great expense. There was an actual F-Troop involved, bringing quite appropriately to mind the old TV show about Western Army incompetence and corruption.

Eventually, the Army brought in hundreds of soldiers, plus units of friendly Native Americans, and hunted the Modocs down after they had thoroughly exhausted their supplies, not to mention their shaman's spiritual powers. Four of the leaders were hanged, and the rest shipped off by train to a reservation in Oklahoma, where the Modoc nation survives, barely.

I highly recommend this book, which dates from 1959. It is painstakingly researched, clearly told, and well-, sometimes sardonically, written. Murray reflects on the failings of the US Army, when faced with highly motivated and guerrilla resistance. He reflects:

"When the student of the Indian troubles turns from men or events to generalizations, he is struck with the obvious fact that the most serious aspect of the Modoc War was that the government had clearly learned nothing from its experience. Even while Captain Jack was awaiting execution at Fort Klamath, the civil government of Oregon expressed concern over the actions of certain Nez Percés of Joseph's band living in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon" .. which then led to similar mistreatment, broken promises, incompetence, and a long and tragic war of resistance.

The portents for Vietnam are alarming here, not to mention the displacement and mistreatment of the Palestinians. But to stick to domestic affairs, the overall dynamic was one of moral turpitude and greed on a national level, which the Army was put in a hopeless position to manage and mitigate. While the (Northern) US is justly proud of its moral position in the Civil War, its position towards Native Americans was one of ethnic cleansing, not to say extermination. The press of manifest destiny and the homesteading / settler movement encroached relentlessly on Native American lands. Treaty after treaty was signed, then ignored or reneged, boxing Native Americans into smaller and smaller reservations. We may call them concentration camps. They are on the worst possible land, in the most remote corners of the nation.

Territories of the Nez Percé. Green shows original treaty lands,  while the inner orange shows what they are left with today.

The irony is that only a few decades after the last of the Indian wars, the country woke up, in some very small degree, to its destruction and rapine of its natural inheritance and started establishing national parks to preserve a few of the most beautiful areas. If the Native Americans had been treated with decency and fairness, with large national lands that were protected from the depredations of settlers, we would today have a much more significant system of wild areas, in addition to preserving many more Native Americans and their diverse cultures. We can only be thankful that the freed slaves were not likewise driven onto barren reservations in the West, over trails of tears.

• The lies are the message, and the power.
• The tax bill is an impeachable offense.
• Fraud is now OK.
• Medicare is next.
• Is collusion with Israel worse than with Russia?
• Cable, unbound.

Vegas

A brief post.

Since no ideological, political, or religious motive has yet emerged for the massacre in Vegas, I would tend to interpret it as a terminal case of gun nuttery. We have long heard how violent video games and movies were supposed to be damaging our brains. Well, I think gun fetishization is an even stronger deranging influence. One can read it in the gun blogs, where a discourse of fear and power, of tactical preparedness and no retreat turn into a machismo echo chamber. And actually owning guns seems to have similar effects, turning owners minds to the power they wield, somehow generating the need for more and more, and more elaborate fantasies of what to do with them. Apparently 3% of gun owners own half the guns in the US. It is a disease, is culpable, and should be in the DSM.

• How to be a good parent.
• The 2009 infrastructure spending program turned instead into a fiscal lifeline for the states.

Bullets of Poison

Lead, condors, and the toxic legacy of right-wing politics.

Of the many ways we have ravaged our environment, some of the most heartbreaking are the silent killers- DDT, other insecticides, PCBs, trash, CFCs, CO2, PFOA, and lead. The same technologies that have conjured out of our environment the many wonders of modernity have also unlocked demons, like plutonium and other radioactive poisons, which we struggle to control and dispose of.

But our thoughtless dumping of pesticides and other poisons doesn't even rate that kind of drama. It took an especially gifted writer, Rachel Carson, to bring the ravages of DDT to light 50 years ago, and we have since slipped into an amnesia through which other poisons like the neonicotinoids have seeped into astonishingly widespread use, making arthropod wastelands of our most fertile country.

One of the more insidious poisons is lead. Through the Flint water crisis, we have learned once again that lead is pervasive, and an enormous health threat. Why have we tolerated it for so long? It has taken painstaking public efforts to get lead out of gasoline, out of paint, and out of new water pipes. Yet it is still common in old pipes, and in coal ash, killing and impairing Americans continuously. And it is common in firearm ammunition.

Poisoning oneself and one's family by hunting with lead is one thing, and tragic enough. But it turns out that other animals can be even more strongly affected, particularly the California Condor. This magnificent bird, North America's largest, is, naturally, attracted to carcasses and viscera left by hunters, and is not a picky eater when it comes to lead. But even if they were, it would be impossible to avoid lead from such carcasses, since lead bullets leave a wide swath of fragments and contamination in the victim. Condors also have particularly strong digestive juices that mobilize more of the lead they ingest than do those of other predators and scavangers, making lead the leading cause of death among the painstakingly re-established and tiny wild population. Indeed, that population can not grow until lead is eliminated from its food supply.

California has, with great political effort, established a ban on hunting with lead ammunition, to take effect within a couple of years. The Obama administration likewise set up a ban on use of lead ammunition in federal wildlife refuges. But the new administration, in line with the rest of its immoral and mindless policies, reinstated the use of lead ammunition. It is one more example of the sheer meanness and spitefulness that seems to pervade this sector of American politics- a segment of the elite and the electorate that could not care less about nature, about justice, and about the future in general. As long as they are "winning" over their perceived enemies, in a zero sum spiral of death, scientists, truth, justice, and the future of humanity, not to mention the biosphere, can be damned. Even the US Army has recognized that the costs of creating enormous toxic waste dumps out of their firing ranges and conflict zones (not to mention the manufacturing stream) is too high a price to pay, and has switched to unleaded ammunition. (Though uranium- that is a different story!).

A similar story has played out tragically in India, where an antibiotic used in cattle turned out to kill vultures, wiping out the population, and causing some very unpleasant ecological consequences in a country in dire need of efficient trash and carcass collection. While we should not stifle all progress with overly cautious regulation, once a tragic consequence from some technological innovation (or ancient practice) becomes apparent, we should recognize our own power in the role of the government to set rules for the good of our long-term collective interests- interests which surely include preservation of our own health and that of wild animals.

• Defenseless animals are next.
• Krugman: it isn't just science at stake, but civilization.
• The irony of Texas.
• Silencers- as American as apple pie.
• Bias in the biomedical literature.
• Incentives only go so far. Character counts for a lot as well- about half.
• Problems with the upcoming Vietnam War.

I Like Looking at Westerns, Not Being In One

Where are the gun nuts taking us?

I admit it.. I love Westerns. The classics channels have my number. When you carry the law on your hip, drama is liable to break out at any moment. For a family show, Bonanza sure stacked 'em up. For dramatic purposes and moral edification, the Western is one of the finest genres, right up there with medieval-ish science fiction-ish power-drama. If our love of drama (like our experience of dreams, in part) is about social play and modelling, focused on training to face tough choices that come up rarely in real life, but have extraordinary consequences when they do, the payoff from Westerns is obvious.

But watching is one thing. Being in the middle of it is something else. The point of our communal "real" life, politics, law, etc., as opposed to our dramatic alter-lives, is to make horrible choices, compelling a they are dramatically, as rare as possible, not more common. I get it that you as a gun-toting open-carry-ist are the last hero standing between my precious bodily fluids and that cold-blooded robber. Or worse yet, a Hillar-ized jack-booted federal agent. But the reality is quite different.

The reality is that guns make us less safe, not more. The police are going into conniptions about facing an ever increasing tide of guns. They don't want the "help" from all those open-carry-ists. The Republican convention is a no-gun zone. Why? Not because crime won't happen. It is because guns are dangerous to everyone around them, even to the very well-trained. Western towns set up gun controls as soon as they could- as soon as the law became stronger than the outlaws. Why? Because guns are unsafe, and if everyone has one, someone with less training and dedication to the constitution than the dedicated, well-trained, and articulate gun nut is going to come stumbling out of a saloon and shoot up the town for whatever purpose, or none. Look at Afghanistan, a country awash with guns, and a sort of contemporary wild west. Is that a safer place to live? A better place to live?

Unfortunately, addressing the fantasy life of gun nuts is easier said than done. Apparently statistics and reason doesn't make you stop wanting to buy, clean, stroke, and carry your gun around. And this fantasy extends to insurrection and terrorism. A blog I follow regularly issues threats, both veiled and explicit, against the "gun-grabbers". Unique among grievances in our country, the gun nuts think the very power they are guarding so zealously is the means of its and their defense, leading naturally to revolutionary rhetoric- the kind of thing that would be unconscionable in any other community or venue:

"Yea, Hopkins just went from being a stooge to being an enemy.  Understand, Hopkins, that universal background checks will bring out the guns, and not in a good way, if you know what I mean.  That is a line that cannot be crossed by anyone.  It won’t happen, and your willing adultery with the Bloomberg position is most disappointing."

"Finally, it gives me amusement and pleasure to point out the obvious.  You can never effect this outcome because we have the guns.  Understand?  You can’t take them from us because you eschew them and we don’t.  What?  You didn’t really think we’d give them up, did you?  And you didn’t really think those cops would want to be gunned down as they try to confiscate weapons, did you?"

"God grants me the right (and even duty) to go armed and conduct myself in a manner consistent with self defense.  Not you, and not the constitution, and not black robed tyrants.  That means that whatever the outcome of this “day in court” to which you refer, the right to self defense is still present because God said so."

"But it’s not over with.  Know who your local police are.  Make sure to let them know in no uncertain terms, without them knowing who you are, that it is all just beginning.  Make your points in the shadows, not in the light of day.  Make it clear to them that you will not tolerate infringements on your God-given rights. ... Make your points until the police no longer want to wage war on otherwise peaceable citizens.  Make your points in the shadows. That’s how this should go down.  Do you understand?"

And this is not to mention Donald Trump's recent casual incitement of the assassination of his opponent.

So we are faced with a heady macho-psycho-Freudian-theological brew of perceived potency, with strong ties to American history and heritage, but also to much more deeply seated emotional issues.  Other countries have been able to lower the temperature around guns. Why not us?

• Guns cause murder.
• Trump and the mob.
• Protectionism the way the pros do it.
• Software development, time, and scrum.
• Marxist take on Chavismo: not socialist enough!
• Life: we are killing it.
• On the triumph of Bayes, of induction and of guessing generally.
• IBM fail.
• Leotard watch.
• Essential curriculum: empathy.
• The Afghan hinterlands count too.
• Yet another market failure.
• Is Italy next-it?
• Human memory is very bad.