The Lucky Country

The story of California, the story of the US, and optimism about free frontiers.

I am reading "California, the great exception". This classic from 1949 by Cary McWilliams is stoutly jingoistic and pro-California. But it also provides a deeper analysis of the many things that made California such an optimistic and happy place. Mainly, it boils down to free land and rapid settlement by ambitious working people. The Native Californians were so weak, and so ruthlessly extirpated, that they did not present the irritating conflict that happened elsewhere in the US. California's gold was so widely and thinly distributed (as placer in streams) that mining was a matter of small partnerships, not huge businesses, as it became elsewhere in the West, in the deep hard rock silver and later copper mines of Nevada (Carson city and the Comstock lode) and Montana (Butte). The immigrants were of working age and enthusiastic to work, dismissing slavery and corporatism in favor of a rapacious entrepreneurialism. 

California never had a paternal territorial government, but transitioned directly from self-rule to statehood, its riches speaking volumes to the national government in Washington. And the national government was anxious lest secessionist sentiment spread to the still far-distant west, so it funded the building of a transcontinental railway, during the civil war when money must have been extremely tight. That feared secession was not to join the South, but rather to found a new and prosperous nation on the West Coast. San Francisco went on to serve as the financial capital of the West, particularly of western mining, creating almost overnight a collusus to rival the centers of the East. In due time, gushers of oil also appeared on the California landscape. It is no wonder that Californians became fundamentally optimistic, ready to take on huge challenges such as water management, building a great education system, and the entertainment of the world.

California was also blessed by weak neighbors on all sides. There were no foreign policy predicaments or military threats. It could nurse its riches in peace. It was, in concentrated form, the story of America- of a new continent limited more by its ability to attract and grow its population than by its land and the riches that land held. An isolated continent that wrote its society almost on a blank slate- a new government and a melting pot of people from many places. 

Bound for California, around 1850.

How stark is the contrast to a country like Ukraine, neighbor of imperialist Russia and before that host to the Scythians, Goths, and Huns. A flat land exposed on all sides, that has been overrun countless times. A fertile land, but always contested. The idea that history would stop, that Ukraine could join the West, and enjoy its riches in peace and security- that turns out to have been a dream that bullies in the neighborhood have a different view on. Better to beat up on the little "brother" than to build up both nations and economies through beneficial exchange and prosperity. Better for both to go down in flames than that the little "brother" escapes the bully's clutches into a more humane world.

But the happy place of the US and Calfornia has hit some rough patches too. It turns out that our resource riches are not endless after all. The foundation of material wealth- the agricultural land, the mines, the lumber- underwrote social and technological innovation. No wonder the US was first in flight, and led the way in electricity, automobiles, the internet, the cell phone. Now we have an innovation economy, and get much of our materials and lower-grade goods from far-off places. The people we have attracted and continue to attract are the new wealth, but therein lies a conflict. Places like California have huge homeless populations because we have ceased to grow, ceased to embody the hope and optimism of our lucky past. Conflict has raised its head. There is no more free land, or gold in the streams. Now, with the land all parcelled up and the forests mowed down, everyone wants to hold on to what they have, and damn those who come after. Prop 13 was the perfect expression of this sour and conservative mood- let the newcomers pay for public services, not us.

California is transitioning from a visionary frontier into a cramped, normal, and not especially lucky place. The fabulous climate is suffering under fire and drought. The population is growing significantly older, while next generation is educated less well then their parents. The app innovation economy has fostered a nightmare of surveillance and social dysfunction. The pull of a new frontier is so strong, however, that some of our richest people now imagine it on other planets. The irony of sending rockets, fueled by vast amounts of fossil carbon and compressed oxygen, to other worlds where there isn't even air to breathe, let alone plants to cut down, begs belief. It is the final gasp of a dream that somewhere, out there, is another lucky country.

• We are a front in the authoritarian war for the world.
• Truth will out, eventually.
• Aging is in the crosshairs.
• The sad fate of Russia's Silicon Valley.
• Do we vote for merely corrupt, or fully bought and paid for politicians?
• New advances in low power, low cost, low fright MRI.

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.

• Networked businesses are a free-market nightmare.
• White Jesus.
• Earworm of the week: a lovely rendition of Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now.

Damned if You do, Damned if You Don't

The Cherokee trail of tears, and the Palestinian conundrum.

History is a long and sad tale of conflict, interspersed with better times when people can put their animosities aside. Just as economics deals in scarcity and its various solutions, history likewise turns on our inevitable drive towards overpopulation, with resulting scarcity and conflict. Occasionally, special technological, spiritual, organizational achievements- or catastrophes- may allow periods of free population growth with its attendant bouyant mood of generosity. But more commonly, groups of people covet each other's resources and plot ways to get them. This was one of the lessons of Malthus and Darwin, who addressed the deeper causes of what we see as historical events.

The "New World" provided Europeans with an unprecedented release for their excess populations, especially the malcontented, the desperate, and the ambitious. They rhapsodized about the "virgin" lands that lay open, generally dismissing the numerous and well-organized natives present all over these lands, as "savages", occupying a lower technological and theological level of existence. There were plenty of rationalizations put forth, like Christianizing the natives, or "civilizing" them. But the hypocrisy of these formulations becomes clear when you consider the fate of the Cherokees, one of the "five civilized tribes". 

By the early 1800's, a couple of centuries of contact had already gone under the bridge, (as narrated by Pekka Hämäläinen in "Indigenous continent"), and native Americans were all integrated to various degrees in trading networks that brought them European goods like guns, pots, knives, and novel practices like horse riding. The Cherokees, occupying the lower Appalachians and piedmont between what is now Georgia and Alabama, were more integrated than most, adopting European farming, living, schooling, and governing practices. They even owned African American slaves, and wrote themselves a US-modeled constitution in 1827, in the script devised the scholar Sequoya.

Did this "progress" toward assimilation with the European culture help them? Far from! Their excellence in farming, literacy, and government raised fears of competition in the white colonists, and the Georgia state government lobbied relentlessly for their removal. Andrew Jackson finally obliged. He pressured the Cherokees to re-open their status as a settled nation, devised a removal treaty with a minority party, and then sent all the Cherokees in the region (about 16,000) off on the Trail of Tears, to the barren lands of Oklahoma. These Cherokees lost roughly a quarter of their population along the way, in a brutal winter. Compare this with the partition of India, where about twelve percent of the refugees are thought to have perished, out of roughly 16 million total.

A small part of the annals of ethnic cleansing, US edition. Needless to say, the "Indian territory" ended up a lot smaller than originally promised.

 

Georgia was thus ethnically cleansed, and does not seem to experience a great deal of regret about it. The logic of power is quite simple- the winner gets the land and spoils. The loser is lucky to not be killed. That the Europeans were significantly more powerful than their native antagonists doesn't change the logic, though it might appeal to our empathy and nostalgia in retrospect. The Cherokees and other Native Americans might have been accepted into US society. They might have been given one or two states for their sovereign governments, as the Mormons managed. There were a lot of possibilities that might have made us a more interesting and diverse nation. But at the same time, most Native Americans participated fully in the politics of power, terrorizing each other, making slaves of each other, and killing each other. They were not innocents. So the fact that they came up against a stronger power was hardly a novelty, though in this case that power was blundering and cruel, shared very few of their cultural coordinates, and was highly hypocritical about its own.

All this comes to mind when viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel won the major Middle East wars that so dramatically emasculated the Palestinians, first in the civil war that left Jordan and Egypt in charge of the Palestinian areas, then in the 1967 war that left all these areas in Israeli hands. But what to do with them? On founding, Israel was a liberal, New Testament kind of country, with humanist values and lefty kibbutzim. The then-recent Holocaust also caused a bit of hesitance when it came to either killing or exiling the losing Palestinians. Indeed, given that its neighbors Jordan and Egypt lost these wars, it would have made some sense at that time to deport all the Palestinians, of which there were about one to two million. But rather than do that, or make a firm border, Israel immediately started encroaching into Palestinian territory with security areas and "settlements", and has set up an ever more elaborate, though selectively porous and self-serving, security and boundary system.

Both sides have a schizophrenic reaction to the other. On the Palestinian side, the psychology of losing has meant quietism and acquiescence by some, but resentment and militantcy by others. Both lead to a spiral of worse treatment, the weakness of the former inviting abuse, and the desperate depredations of the latter inciting revenge, "security" measures, and tighter occupation. The provocations by each side are unendurable, and thus the situation deteriorates. Yet, in the end, Israel has all the power and the responsibility to come up with a long term solution. Over the decades, Israel has morphed from its founding ethos into something much more conservative and Old Testament, less beholden to the humanisitic ideals of the post-WW2 period. The wanton killing, starvation, and collective punishment of Gaza makes visible this moral breakdown.

The Palestinians can't win either way, either through Hamas's implacable hatred and impotent attacks, nor through the acquiescence of the Palestinian National Authority, which, in thanks for its good behavior, has received the creeping expansion of Israeli "settlements" on its land. These now take up, according to a detailed map, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the land of the West Bank. Overall, the options are: 1) to expel the Palestinians outright, which appears to be, for Gaza at least, where Israeli policy is heading, (made more ironic by the realization by historians that the Biblical Exodus never actually took place), or 2) to continue to muddle along in a torturous occupation with creeping dispossession, or 3) to grant Palestine some kind of autonomy and statehood. Assimilation, (4), long dreamt of by some, seems impossible for a state that is fundamentally an ethnic (or theological) state, and whose whole raison d'etre is ethnic separation, not to even mention the preferences of the Palestinians. Though perhaps assimiliation without voting rights, in sort of semi-slavery or apartheid, is something the Israelies would be attracted to? Perhaps insignia will need to be worn by all Palestinians, sewn to their clothing?

Map of the West Bank of the Jordan, color coded by Palestinian marginal control in brown, and settler/Israeli control in red.

What should happen? Indigenous Americans were infected, decimated, hunted down, translocated, re-educated, and confined to a small and very remote system of reservations. Hopefully we have have progressed a little since then, as a largely European civilization, which is putatively shared by Israel. Thus the only way forward, as is recognized by everyone outside Israel, is the two-state solution, including a re-organization of the Palestinian territories into a final, clearly demarked, and contiguous state. Israel's current political system will never get there. But we can help the process along in a few ways.

First, it is disappointing to see our current administration shipping arms to Israel at a furious pace, only to see them used to kill thousands of innocent, if highly resentful, civilians. Israel has plenty of its own money to buy whatever it needs elsewhere. We need to put some limitations on our military and other aid relationships, to motivate change. (Though that raises the question of Israel's increasingly cozy relationship with Russia). Second, we should recognize Palestine as a state, and bring forward its integration into the international system. This will not resolve its borders or myriad security and territory issues viz Israel, but it would helpfully motivate things in that direction. Israel has constantly cried wolf about the lack of a credible partner to negotiate with, but that is irrelevant. Israel is perfectly capable of building the walls it needs to keep Palestinians at bay. But then it wants pliant workers as well, and a peaceful neighbor, security viz Jordan and Egypt, territorial encroachments, and many other things that are either destructive, or need to be negotiated. 

By far the most constructive thing that could be done is to freeze and re-organize the Jewish settlements and other periphernalia that have metastasized all over the West Bank. There is no future without a decent and fair solution in territory, which is the third big thing we need to press- our own detailed territorial plan for Palestine. For one thing, Israel could easily vacate the whole corridor / valley facing Jordan. That would give a consolidated Palestine a working border with a country that is now peaceful, quite well run, and friendly to both sides. There are countless possible maps. We just need to decide on one that is reasonably fair and force it on both sides, which are each, still after all these years, apparently unwilling to imagine a true peace. This means principally forcing it on Israel, which has been the dominant and recalcitrant party the entire time.

The Cherokees are now one of the largest indigenous populations in the US, at roughly a quarter million, with their own territory of about seven thousand square miles in Oklahoma. They have internal and partial sovereignty, which means that they deal with their own affairs on a somewhat independent basis, but otherwise are largely subject to most laws of the enclosing governments. The Cherokees could easily have been assimilated into the US. Only racism stood in the way, in a mindset that had long descended into a blind and adversarial disregard of all native Americans as "others", (the irony!), competitive with and less than, the newly arrived immigrants. We could have done much better, and one would like to think that, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years on, we would have.

In the end, the West (read as European civilization, as developed out of the ashes of World War 2) is either for or against wars of aggression, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and human rights. Israel has won its wars, but never faced up to its responsibilities to the conquered Palestinians, and has tried to have it both ways, to be viewed by the world as a modern, enlightened state, even as it occupies and slowly strangles the people it defeated decades ago. 

• Slovenly strategic thinking. But really, visionless long-term politics.
• One Gazan speaks.
• Settler colonialism.
• Who's the victim?
• Shades of Scientology ... the murky networks of the deep evangelical state.
• In California, solar still makes sense.

Myth and Science

Stories we tell about how things work.

I am reading an ancient book about ancient myths, covering some of what was known of the ancient world's stories circa the mid-20th century (that is, the "developed" ancient world of Egypt, the Near East, China, India, etc.). The authors occasionally seem exasperated that their colleagues- the ancient authors of these stories and myths- do not always take their stories as seriously as scholars themselves do, after having so painstakingly learned the relevant languages, unearthed the precious tablets, papyri, inscriptions, and other sources, compared different versions, and interpreted them in light of the historical setting. No, ancient myths can be playful affairs, evolving in dramatic complexity, freely mutating to serve the needs of the moment in their mutable oral traditions. This is especially true the farther back you go into ethnographic history, such as into the stories of the Inuit and other First Peoples of North America. It is evident that ancient societies varied widely in their theological and mythological sophistication, and particularly how closely entwined these were with the centers of power.

Inuit mythologies and their custodian, the shaman.

The scholarly apparatus around myth studies has a very earnest and modernist cast, which derives from two sources. First is Christianity, which as an extreme political and social elaboration of ancient religions has progressively reified and codified its myths. Inheriting a grab-bag of disparate ancient myths and stories, Christianity shored up its social position and theological bona fides by insisting that it was all true. The more sclerotic and far-reaching its bureaucratic structure, the more tightly it held to the absolute truth of its dogmas. A second aspect was the enlightenment and the rise of scientific modernity. That world view was not interested in playful myths of psychodrama, but in hard truths of how the world really works, stripped of the colorful trappings. Competition with this world view helped to further push religious dogmas in an absolutist direction, to that point where today, both Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalist Islamists insist that their scriptures are literally true, handed down from an all-powerful god who really exists and is not fictive construct meant as a playful expression of our scientific ignorance on one hand, and our love of social drama on the other. Anthropologists took their cues from all this, assuming that the precious myths they were studying had to be expressions of a society's absolute truths, organizing principles, and deepest motivations. But perhaps they were originally ways to pass the time and enchant a few youngsters.

Science is telling stories, too. Are they really so different? On the one hand, our need to orient ourselves in the world remains unchanged from ancient times, so the core purpose of explaining reality and society through complicated tales of causes and effects remains. And to a lay person, the explanations of quantum mechanics or cosmic inflation are no less impenetrable than myths about gods and dragons. Thus the scientists who are the custodians of these stories find themselves in the ironic position of a new priesthood, cultivating the cultural narrative around origins, natural phenomena, biology, and the like, while extending these stories in systematic ways that the priests (and alchemists, and shamans, and druids) of yore could only dream about, if they could even conceive of such reliable beliefs untethered from social drama and social control. But today's scientists can't and won't inject ancillary drama into these stories, so they will remain split off from their traditional roles and uses.

So the telling of dramatic stories and the consequent management of society through the narratives of origins, myths, and meaning- if ancient myths really did fulfill these functions, which is perhaps an anachronistic construction on our part, or at least varied widely with the nature of ancient societies- are skills having nothing, really, to do with the scientific enterprise of today, and thus nothing to do with this new priesthood. Who takes these roles?

Theology would seem the natural place for the living and socially relevant myth. But theology has split definitively from science, from history, and indeed from reality, nurturing narratives that are absurd while claiming they are true, and which in their antiquity and provincialism are impossibly remote from our current concerns, morals, and social ability to relate even allegorically. Theology has thus become lost in a sterile wilderness, doomed to be cut off from its mythical and social power. Even the more liberal and elastic precincts, if they do not insist on absolute literal truth, adhere to the crusty old stories of the Bible, which while occasionally artistic, are mostly a maddening hodgpodge and, frankly, boring. What was riveting in antiquity about lengthy ancestor lists, angry gods, virgin births, and ascending into the clouds is ridiculous today. 

The story-telling mantle has obviously been taken over by Hollywood- by the Marvel series, Star Treks, Star Wars, Potter series, and similar epics of modern fantasy. They bend reality in classically mythical ways, make up their own theology as they go along, (and throw it away as casually with the next installment), and communicate constantly updated social mores. The graphics are otherworldly, the stories and morals are updated, but the fundamental sophistication of these stories can't really be said to have advanced much. They are speaking to human nature, after all- a conversation between our inborn archetypes and the social and technological conditions we find ourselves in.

The key point is that Hollywood myths are taken as intended- as fertile and mind-expanding fantasies with social and moral lessons that are (hopefully) beneficial and relevant for our times. They are not trying to claim their myths as true- that would be absurd. Thus they do not collide with either scientific or theological claims, and use myth as it was originally and truly intended- as the dreamlike realm of symbolic human drama, full of lessons, yes, but not scientific ones, or even pseudoscientific ones.

• An outstanding dissection of just how bad US policy and behavior was in Afghanistan.
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• Dead ender racism.
• A mutagenic drug to save us all.
• How about those great vaccines?
• Some nice piano.

The Extermination of Tibet

China is culturally cleansing Tibet. "Seven Years in Tibet", by Heinrich Harrer, and "My Land and My People", by the Dalai Lama.

It may be falling off the world's radar screen, but Tibet remains a tragically oppressed land, well worth our remembrance and sympathy. Two books, "Seven Years in Tibet", and "My Land and My People" describe the heartbreaking slide from a happy, innocent, and isolated region to the Orwellian horrors that succeeded and continue today. One of the first significant acts of the new communist government of China, fresh from its civil war against the government that actually faught the Japanese, was to fulfill not any orthodox communist aims or development for its people, but the most rapacious and ancient ambition of Chinese governments, to subjugate its neighbor to the West, Tibet. Amid a blizzard of lies, China invaded the virtually defenseless state, oppressing Tibetans from the start in an ever-escalating war of cultural extermination. After almost ten years of trying to get along with the overlords and calm the waters, amid general rioting, the Dalai Lama fled in a dramatic escape from occupation, to welcome refuge in India, where he and the Tibetan exile community remain today.

Tibet was, frankly, a medieval culture, with economic relations ranging from nomadic to feudal. But medieval in the best sense, of a people thoroughly engaged in a set of archetypes that yielded a richly nourishing, dramatic life experience as well as a durable social structure. Tibetan Buddhism is very demanding, taking a fair fraction of men and resources into monasteries where they live off the rest of population and devote themselves to philo/theological hairsplitting. But they also devote themselves to various traditional arts, and most of all to the cultivation of peace and compassion- the touchstones of Buddha's solution to the suffering of this world. After a long and martial history, Tibet eventually put itself under the control of its most respected leaders, the Lamas, creating a system that was peaceful and benevolent, if also hidebound and conservative.

Take the story of how the current Dalai Lama was found and put in power. It is a veritable fairy tale of portents, dreams, signs and wonders. It has a sort of Wizard of Oz quality, which obviously resonanates, not only with us as a romantic tale, but with Tibetans as a great origin myth. And one can make a case on a practical level that choosing a humble and obviously bright peasant child to rule one's land may be a superior method to one which relies on the most ambitious people to sell themselves in some way to various institutions of power, and to the populace every four years. How often do we fantasize that any halfway intelligent person could do as good a job as the current office holder? Especially if that person were from early on steadfastly dedicated to the cultivation of peace and compassion in him or herself and others?

Likewise, the Dalai Lama's secret and arduous escape from Tibet was again the stuff of legend, binding him to his own people, and endearing him to people around the world. The Tibetan system values spiritual attainment, expressed in the extremely pacifist ideology of Buddhism, combined with a great deal of pre-buddhist folk religion and symbology. The culture was thus temperate and peaceful, perhaps too peaceful for its own good, but surely a model to emulate in our spiritually unbalanced times. The Chinese, in contrast, brought rapacious domination, racism, and cruelty. They were and remain atheist. But it seems that their compassionless spiritual vacuity (which is quite a different thing) was more important, leading them (especially through the cultural revolution) to despoil the cultural treasures, institutions, and people of Tibet.

We may wonder whether China is more culpable in all this than the US was in its virtual extermination of Native Americans and their many cultures. The answer is clearly yes. The gulf between the American cultures was far wider, and the state of historical consciousness lower. Native Americans had no continent-wide governments of centuries standing, no meticulously recorded written histories and philosophical traditions, and little basis for common ground or negotiation with the colonists and their successors. We have belatedly granted Native Americans limited sovereignity in their institutions and barren territories, while China keeps pouring more Han Chinese into Tibet and keeps 100% social control. The world had just fought a war to end all wars, and to liberate peoples from totalitarian military oppression, including those of South Korea. But Tibet was a bridge too far- we could not lift a finger in China's back yard, and now hardly say a peep.

• Some numbers.
• Expert talk.
• This, as most other times, would be a good time for a job guarantee.
• Who is in charge here?
• How dare she?
• Poor people deserve less.
• Buddhist action thriller of the week- Milarepa.

Native Americans and Genetics

A fraught story.

The recent profusion of DNA studies of human lineages have clarified a lot about human history- where we came from and where we have travelled over the millennia. All this depends on samples from native populations- the ones we came from. It is only apparent that we came out of Africa if there are stable African populations that constitute the source and retain the vast diversity of our oldest homeland. But what if the natives do not want to be sampled? What if they are woke to the colonialist and genocidal legacy of the science / scientists doing the sampling, and want no part of it?

That is what happened, in part, in the recent flap over Elizabeth Warren's announcement of Native American heritage. Native South or Central American, that is. As told by a couple of experts, the lab that performed the analysis could not get permission to use North American samples, so used DNA from populations elsewhere in the Americas. Since Warren is herself from North America, indeed Oklahoma, and since the history of native peoples throughout the Americas is known to be relatively recent, expanding over last 15,000 years at the outside, the method is clearly valid in inferring, indirectly, some North American native ancestry for Warren.

So why the guff she caught from the Native American community? It was quite puzzling to hear their representatives trying their hardest to pour cold water on her claim, as though they were getting talking points from the FOX propaganda channel. Despite her not claiming to be a tribal member or wanting to be, they trotted out their arcane rules for membership, which certainly wouldn't accept anything so white as DNA testing. But lo and behold the tribe- the Cherokee in this case- use fractional blood relations determined from a list compiled by white people of the US government back in 1902. There are no good answers here, after half a millenium of disposession, destruction and abuse, but denying the obvious is not one of them.

The deeper issue is the appropriation and objectification of Native Americans and their culture by others, from here to Germany and beyond. Playing cowboys and indians, putting on Karl May dramas, naming sports franchises ... we have a very fraught relationship of romanticization and trivialization, little of which has anything to do with real Native Americans, particularly those living today who wish to be custodians of their own culture even while still suffering under the various debilities of their treatment by the dominant culture. I was part of this myself, in the Boy Scouts, which still play at being Indians, mortifyingly enough. Then the history of eugenics, and the plundering of native treasures, archeology, and burials, etc. has put so-called scientists in a particularly bad light.

This forms the backdrop of the notorious fate of the Kennewick man, an archeological find that led to bitter, drawn-out controversy. The almost complete skeleton, found in Washington state at the Columbia river, was 9,000 years old, and by morphology was more similar to other peoples such as the Jomon aboriginal people of Japan than native Americans. Ironically, it was DNA testing that confirmed affinity with Native Americans after all, after which the remains were given to the local Native American nations, including the Umatilla, which buried them at an unpublished location. From the native perspective, this fed into the narrative that their history is eternal and static, meaning that any pre-Columbian artifacts or remains found on what is currently their land is associated with their culture in some way, despite the thousands of years that may have passed and migrations that may have happened, and thus presents the right of possession and cultural use. One gets the distinct impression that Native Americans do not really want to know their own deep history, preferring a religious narrative of having been forever in the Americas, instead of having wandered in a few thousand years before the Europeans did.

From a scientific perspective, the episode was a travesty of political correctness, as a 9,000 year old skeleton could have no imaginable cultural connection to the current inhabitants of the area, while being an inestimably rich source of knowlege about this early post-glacial time of North American settlement. This antiscience attitude is perhaps a fair harvest for all the harms and hurts inflicted over the last few centuries, science being one of the most domineering and distinctive expressions of Western culture. Still, the loss to general knowledge rankles.

One Cherokee representative spoke of how irritating it is to repeatedly meet people who claimed to be part Cherokee, expecting some positive pat on the head. But those people wouldn't dream of moving back to the reservation, or taking part in Cherokee culture, as is undoubtedly true of Elizabeth Warren as well. It is a "heritage" without practice and of dubious significance. Nor may they be alive to the sense of loss and injury this represents, as such blood mixing may not have been voluntary, but the result of rape and rapine of various sorts.

Nevertheless, it would seem advisable for Native Americans to get off their metaphorical high horses and be more welcoming to the diversity that exists in the US. Even if the pride that Warren feels in her minuscule Native American ancestry is somewhat false, romaticized, and lacking in practice/practical effect, it is still pride, unmistakably, rather than its opposite. Citizens of the US generally take pride in vibrant Native American cultures and take steps through the government to help them, via direct aid, educational assistance, gambling concessions, and other benefits, after and in compensation for, the deeper history of genocide, reservation confinement, ethnic cleansing, and cultural extermination. The relationship is surely a difficult, guilty one. No one wants to alter the definitions that American Indian nations have developed for their formal membership. But their wider membership of genetic descendants is also a positive asset, in pursuit, not of assimilation, but of friendly relations with the wider, shared culture.

• Stiglitz on inequality.
• Meanwhile, the Taliban may not be popular, but they are persistent.
• Class action? Good luck.
• What are you if you enjoy lying? 
• Homelessness is a growing crisis of inequality and government sclerosis.
• Now for some nice piano.
• And some nice paintings.

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.

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Genocide, Lebensraum, and the American Dream

Overpopulation is the normal condition, with intermissions after genocide.

As a recent article pointed out, the American Dream has undergone some changes. Where in the Depression, it was an idea of human decency, equal opportunity, and basic living standards for all, it has more recently become more focused on a prosperity gospel, with owning a house as the centerpiece of "making it". This presents great problems, since our society has become so sclerotic and unequal that defining our civic values by such inflated metrics leaves a very large and increasingly restive population behind. One hears echos of "Let them eat cake".

Long before either epoch, however, the American Dream was one thing- free land. Land for the desperate paupers of Europe, land for anyone willing to work, land for the taking and "proving". Rich, beautiful, verdant, and virgin land. With occasional interludes for gold rushes where the free-for-the-taking wealth was underground rather than on the surface. It was a Dream built on the genocide and dispossession of the previous occupants of all this land- the Native Americans. While most of that work was done silently by European diseases, the nascent colonial states were not shy about cleaning up the loose ends, with a manifest destiny of taking ownership of all useful lands of any kind across the continent, leaving the native peoples, when they were not killed directly or by mistreatment, in reservations on the most miserable land available.

Why, then, were we so exercised about the policy of the Nazis in the next century to spread eastward, over the great prairies of central Europe, in search of "Lebensraum"? Was it that those prairies were already occupied? Or was it that they were occupied by people significantly more similar to ourselves, not susceptible to the European diseases, and aready farming, and ready to complain in comprehensible languages? That of course is a bit unfair, since the Nazis authored a much wider range of mayhem, through Europe and world-wide, than just their push to the East. But it is worth re-evaluating our national epic and mythology in this light, since it brings out fundamental forces that recur through history, and promise rocky times ahead.

As Thomas Malthus observed, the natural state of any population of organisms, including humans, is overpopulation. Remissions of this state can happen by predation or catastrophe. Genocides, devastating wars, plagues, droughts, and the like can provide brief respite from this normal, cramped condition. The discovery of the Americas by Europeans was one such event, (as it had been for the Clovis people and their predecessors as well), providing an escape valve, given a total lack of compunction about stealing the lands of others. Another such event has been the technological development of the West, especially our use of fossil fuels, which have magnified our powers and particularly our farming capabilities, with new fertilizers and machinery. This has meant that through the last roughly 300 years, we (especially in North America) have faced a substantially relaxed Malthusian constraint compared to most human cultures. I recently read the biography of the famous jocky Ron Turcotte, who narrates his childhood in New Brunswick thus:

"We have four kids. A big family now is six. Back then, when we were growing up, families of twelve or thirteen were common. One family had twenty-three. We had a very strict priest. if you didn't have kids, you weren't doing what God put you on earth for." ... "The priest would come in, and if there wasn't one baby in diapers, one in the womans' arms, and one in the oven, he'd say the couple was not doing its Christian duty."

So here we are, at a state of dramatic overpopulation, using the lands, air, and minerals of earth far, far beyond her ability to sustain us, using fossil fuels which can never be replaced and which are heating the climate and destroying the biosphere. In the US, we are coming to a state of culture and class war that is a sign of stasis/crisis. The pie is not growing bigger. Overpopulation generally means, culturally, that there is an excess of workers relative to productive capacity, which gives power to capital and those who already have power. It is the kind of situation that leads to inequality, castes, feudalism, and sclerosis.

There are no more frontiers, and we are already living far beyond earth's carrying capacity. By the natural processes of selfish greed, our home is turning into a dump. For example, we are not, in all honesty, close to resolving our carbon dependence, among many other limitations- emissions are rising, not falling, let alone reversing damage already done. In the US, our population is rising relentlessly, yet we have not built significant roads for decades, or even maintained the ones we have. For various reasons of self-interest and cultural drift, we are collectively unwilling even to face up to the population we have, let alone make room for more, were that even desirable. So until we resolve our long-term sustainability issues, we should focus on population reduction, ideally with a universal one-child policy.

While the American Dream has narrowed to one of personal greed, we are at a point when we can and need to think globally, for the long term. The dream should be one of sustainability, over hundreds and thousands of years, given the momentous consequences of our current technologies and lifestyle. Giving in to rampant population growth, however natural it may be, dooms us to an ever more impoverished country and planet. It would be a tragedy, alongside the related tragedies of denying the very reality of climate change, and weakening our scientific and social consciousness of its future course and consequences.

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Death of a Species

Callous indifference and business-as-usual greed dooms the delta, and the delta smelt.

As ecological icons go, the delta smelt isn't much. A small silver fish, like a zillion others. But it lives in the way of dredgers, bulldozers, farmers, shippers, and a thirsty multitude. It was put on the endangered species list in 1993, and has kept right on dwindling, until in the most recent count, a single smelt was found. One.

The San Joaquin / Sacramento / San Francisco Bay delta used to be a very large estuary of marshes, reeds, rivers, and islands that gradually fed the great rivers of the Sierras into the Bay and thence through the Golden Gate the Pacific ocean. Fresh water met briny in constant tidal and rain-fed flows. Smelt were obviously not the only beneficiary of this rich ecosystem, but countless shellfish, mammals such as beavers, insects by the billion, and birds by the million. The delta was a major stop on the Pacific flyway for migrating birds. And it was the conduit for several species of now-endangered salmon.

Comparison of the delta as it was, and as it is now. Virtually all its marshland and most of its complex river habitat is gone.

Despite the popular image of California as a state of nature and natural wonders, it has been pillaged in the name of greed from the beginning. The Spanish mission system started the ball rolling by enslaving and decimating the native peoples. Then the gold rush led to thorough destruction and pollution of the rivers, while working its way upwards into the hardrock mines of the Sierra. Next was agriculture, which in California became a rapacious and short-sighted industry, well-illustrated in the now-obscure novel by Frank Norris, The Octopus. Then it was onwards to a thorough re-plumbing of the state by the water lords of Southern California. The latest incarnation of this get-rich quick ethic was the dot-com bubble, by which Silicon Valley took investors all over the world to the cleaners.

The little smelt and all the natural riches it stands for had little chance, of course, when there was free, fertile land to be had by diking, draining, and dredging. A state which had some inclination to protect the spectacular, yet conveniently remote and barren, high Sierras, had no appreciation for the ecological values of wilderness in the bottomlands, even for flood control, which is increasingly difficult as so much of the "reclaimed" land is under sea level, protected by primitive, flimsy dikes. With the extended drought and the vast rerouting of fresh water, the delta has begun to flow backwards, introducing salt as well. But the state, being owned by its commercial interests, leaves public and ecological policy to die a quiet death, along with the smelt.

The planetary climate and biosphere face similar forces of corruption, greed, inertia, and neglect, which will just as soon see it die with a whimper than plan in a public and morally forward thinking spirit for future generations of all species.

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From Weed to Maize

A large-scale investigation on the evolution of corn finds lots of regulatory change.

When Darwin wrote his book on the origin of species, his strongest examples came from pigeons, which at the time were very popular domesticated animals. Just like dogs and cats, pigeons displayed a profusion of breeds and characteristics, all quite clearly descended from a single progenitor species, by way of artificial selection. The speed of artificial selection is amazing, but its relentless focus on desired, superficial traits can lead to problems in temperament, disease susceptibility, and subtle congenital defects.

As mentioned in a recent post, most evolutionary change takes place in regulatory relationships within the genome, rather than as structural changes in encoded proteins. Fine-tuning the binding site of some transcriptional regulator, or moving its site nearer or farther from a gene, tends to have smaller, graded effects on the organism than a change, for example, to that same transciption regulator's own protein sequence, which may affect its interaction with to thousands of sites all over the genome.

A recent paper took a deep dive into the changes that happened in the maize genome on its way to our tables as the king of American agriculture. They reiterate the power of small scale change in a gene's regulatory elements, which they term the cis elements, which is to say, mutations in the DNA local to the gene, typically in upstream sites that bind various regulatory proteins which promote or repress transcription.

"Changes in the cis regulatory elements (CREs) of genes with functionally conserved proteins have been considered a key mechanism, if not the primary mechanism, by which the diverse forms of multicellular eukaryotic organisms evolved. Variation in CREs allows for the deployment of tissue specific patterning of gene expression, differences in developmental timing of expression, and variation in the quantitative levels of gene expression. Furthermore, modification of CREs, as opposed to coding sequence changes, are assumed to have less pleiotropy and consequently have a lower risk of unintended deleterious effects in secondary tissues. The importance of CREs for the development of novel morphologies is supported by the growing catalog of examples for which differences in gene specific CREs between closely related species contributed to the evolution of diversity in form."

The authors sequenced a large crop of RNAs from the tissues of maize and from its ancestor teosinte, to see how their genes are expressed, and, in combination with knowing the genomic DNA that had been sequenced previously, whether changes in gene expression could be tied to specific genome mutations that happened during domestication. The maize genome has more genes than that of humans, 39,423, and 17,579 of them had sufficient expression in these tissues (the RNAs came from the immature ear, the seedling leaf, and the seedling stem) to be analyzed. To give an idea of the scale of current technology, they gathered roughly four billion sequence reads from their RNA libraries.

The majority of the genes they analyzed (82%) were expressed in each of three tissues, while about three percent each were specific to only one or two tissues. The main point of the paper was to attempt to figure out which genes had changed in expression between teosinte and maize, and further, what had caused this, either mutations local to the altered gene, (acting in "cis"), or mutations to DNA far away (acting in "trans") that encodes regulatory proteins whose alteration would affect many other genes as well.

To do that, they used hybrids between teosinte and maize, sampling their RNA as well. In these hybrids, versions of the same gene (alleles) from each parent co-habit in the same cell. So if their expression remained different, it could be chalked up to local effects on each allele's DNA. Conversely, if their expression became similar, (while being different in the parental strains), then the parental difference is likely to be due to regulators that are encoded elsewhere and affect the sampled gene similarly, whatever its origin and local sequence. A very clever scheme, one has to say.

Master graph of genes (dots) assigned to categories of regulatory change, either local to the gene sequence (cis, in black), or due to changes in a non-local regulator (trans, in red). The conclusion is based on the gene's respective behavior when co-housed in the same plant, i.e. the hybrid progeny of a maize X teosinte cross. The logs on each axis refer to logs of the ratio between maize and teosinte, in either the parents (X axis) or in the hybrids (Y axis).

The identity / parentage of the alleles in the hybrids could be kept straight by way of minor DNA variations sprinkled throughout the sequences of their expressed RNA. Teosinte and maize have been separated by about eight thousand years, enough time for quite a few (mostly silent) mutations to accumulate in each genome. But the interesting differences between them would be those that were specifically selected in maize to make it into the dramatically different plant it is today- stalk branching, ear size, ear morphology, growing speed, hardness of the seed, etc. What were those mutations and how can they be found? This paper unfortunately does not get to that detail. They note that 70% of all the genes showed significant changes in expression, and that the sets of differently expressed genes were ~70% different in each of the three tissues. All of which is quite remarkable.

What they are more interested in is defining large sets of genes that might be interesting as ingredients of the special properties of maize. To start, they assume that genes under selection pressure would have had local changes to their regulatory DNA. This is not entirely correct, though. Some far-away change might have been selected for if it had strong effects regulating some target gene / trait, without having too many side effects. While this is difficult to imagine and likely rare, it is by no means impossible or without precedent. Nevertheless, they bundle up all the genes with local or local + distant changes, and call them their "CCT" set (for cis and cis+trans changes in regulation profile). These are the black and purple dots on the graph above, and amounted to about 5500 genes.

They further filtered that set by asking for high consistency and high expression over all their samples, (or different parental and hybrid cross strains), and came up with sets of varying stringency, from very few (69) genes to a much less stringent set (~2326) genes. This had the defect of discounting genes whose expression was very low, either before (in teosinte), or after (in maize). Anyhow, it was a rough-and-ready method to whittle down their data to some interesting candidate genes, depending on how stringently they set the dials. One problem was that gene expression is naturally more variable in teosinte, being a genetically diverse and wild plant, (despite their using inbred strains, which must not have been quite as inbred as they thought), than it is in maize, being heavily in-bred and virtually clonal.

The larger the expression difference of a gene between teosinte and maize (X axis), the more likely that difference is due to local "cis" regulatory effects (Y axis). This is reflected also in the previous graph of genes with higher expression differences on the higher slope lines.

The rest of the paper, unfortunately, is a litany of woe, as they find that their sets of specially selected genes do not agree very well with those that other researchers have isolated using other methods. For instance, one group used a micro-chip based method with fixed DNA samples detect RNAs that are expressed differentially between modern maize and teosinte, and found their own list of such genes:

"However, the absolute level of correspondence between the two studies is rather low. For example, of the 350 leaf genes identified as DE [differentially expressed] by RNAseq [the current paper's method], only 24 (7%) were also identified by the microarray study [the other paper's method]. Thus, while the overlap between our two studies is statistically significant, the two methodologies resulted in largely different lists of DE genes."

It is somewhat depressing that this many years into the genomic age, the large-scale technologies being touted and used to gather presumably quantitative gene expression data of this sort can generate such divergent results. Technically, I believe this is due to their need to have high expression under all conditions, which is contrary to most of the other methods used, which prize very high contrast, i.e. very low expression in one sample vs higher expression in another, to identify candidate genes. Nevertheless, each collection of genes must have some gold amongst the placer and thus this paper is surely the career-building effort of some post-doc who will give job interviews on the ambition of panning through these genes to find ones that have individually significant effects on the unique properties of maize.

"This study shows cis and trans regulatory differences account for ~45% and ~55% of regulatory divergence between maize and teosinte, respectively (Table S1). These values suggest relatively equal contributions of these two mechanisms to regulatory divergence. However, this ignores the contribution of cis effects to large expression differences where cis accounts for nearly 80% of the expression divergence."

A final interesting point is that roughly half the expression differences were traceable to the "trans", or non-local, mechanism. This might seem to go against the assumption outlined above that local mutations in gene regulatory sequences should predominate, but it may take only a few individual changes in regulators or their networks to cause changes in the expression of many of the genes assayed here, while each expression change classified as "cis" or local requires a separate change to that gene's sequence. So the overall number of local regulatory changes in this data set will vastly outnumber individual changes elsewhere, and the authors note additionally that the expression changes that were quantitatively highest were virtually all due to local mutations.

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Alta California, filibusters, and the exceptional nation

A little California history. Mentioning General Vallejo, by Allan Rosenus, and 75 Years in California, by William Heath Davis.

Is the US exceptional, and exceptionally good? Are we the exceptional nation just because we have the biggest navy, or for some more positive attribute? Are we generous, or greedy? Do we confer democracy and good government on other nations and stand as a beacon of hope to the downtrodden, or do we confer kleptocracies and rob the downtroden of the little mite they have through pernicious trade deals and relentless consumerism?

We have shown many faces to the world over the years, and the recent JFK assassination anniversary was a chance to reflect on some of them. Oswald was apparently incited to some degree by the (true) stories he had heard in Mexico of the plots carried out by the US to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba, over and above the Bay of Pigs invasion. Our history in Latin America generally is a rather uninspiring one of rampant meddling and empowerment of the worst elements available. If one looks up the term "filibuster" on Wikipedia, one is met with a cavalcade of such instances of "manifest destiny", where Americans tried, with more or less success, to take over various Latin states, which must have seemed ripe for the picking, in an imperialist kind of way. For filibustering is unlawful predation, hostage taking, free-booting, meddling, etc. in another country, only later becoming that parliamentary gridlocking device.

The history of California is a fine example of this tradition. I have been reading two books: "General Vallejo", an excellent biography by Alan Rosenus, and "Seventy Five years in California", a beautifully written and very detailed memoir by William Heath Davis, an early merchant.

Spain set up a trail of missions up the California coast starting in 1769, enslaving the native indians with the Catholic church's one-way ticket to heaven, forming ranchos where the padres were in charge, each had a small military detachment to maintain control, and a vast flock of "conversos" to do the work. Who incidentally a died like flies from the treatment, the novel diseases, diet, etc. Mexico revolted from Spain in 1821, and the departments of Baja California and Alta California came under Mexican control, the missions were divided up and granted to, typically, former military officers. Such grants gradually encroached inland, past the coastal areas where the missions were originally confined. General Mariano Vallejo, who commanded the Presidio at San Francisco in 1833, among other posts, was granted large ranchos in the Sonoma area, north of the bay.

The rancheros slaughtered a portion of their stock each fall for hides and fat alone, leaving the rest of the carcasses, which attracted bears, which gave rise in turn to the excitement of roping and killing bears. California now has no grizzly bears, and maybe 30,000 black bears.

Mexico's hold over California was remarkably tenuous. Its own post-revolutionary government was tumultuous and unstable in the extreme, so its capacity to pay for or pay attention to the far-away province of Alta California was meagre. Mexicans looked down at their Northern rustic brethren, who used their enormous ranchos to run thousands of cattle and horses, their hides and tallow being pretty much the sole export of the province for the pre-US period, along with the furs of wild animals such as otters. The racheros carried on the Padre's practice of enslaving the native Americans, paying them solely in clothes and food, which was sometimes served from common troughs.

Indeed, it was a close-run thing whether California was going to side with the South or the North in the brewing Civil war. However, the predominant cultural influence from the US came from Boston, whose merchants (including William Davis) had traded up the coast since the Mexican accession,  (Richard Dana's Two Years Before the Mast is another great book in this historical literature), and married into the Californio social system.

"The native Californians [Californios, not Indians] were about the happiest and most contented people I ever saw, as also were the early foreigners who settled among them and intermarried with them, adopted their habits and customs, adn became, as it were, a part of themselves." - William Heath Davis, 75 years in California.

The exception was Sutter's fort. John Sutter was a Swiss/German adventurer and neer-do-well who after various failures around the world arrived in California (1839) with a small German entourage and enough charm to buy up Fort Ross, the Russian outpost North of San Francisco which was shutting down for lack of otters, which they had hunted to extinction. Sutter promised payment in goods (to be sent to Sitka, the remaining Russian outpost) to be raised around his land-grant near what is now Sacramento, also obtained with a good bit of charm from the Mexican authorities. While far from the coast, Sutter's fort (equipped with the materiel from Fort Ross) was still on navigable waters (the American and Sacramento rivers, and strategically placed at the foothills of the Sierras to intercept immigrants coming overland from the East. It soon became a hotbed of Americans and pro-American sentiment.

"Having accomplished my purpose of landing Captain Sutter at the junction of the American and Sacramento rivers with his men and his freight, the following morning we left him there, and headed the two vessels for Yerba Buena [now San Francisco]. As we moved away Captain Sutter gave us a parting salute of nine guns- the first ever fired at that place- which produced a most remarkable effect. As the heavy report of the guns and the echoes dies away, the camp fo the little party was surrounded by hundreds of the Indians, who were excited and astonished at the unusual sound. A large number of deer, elk, and other animals on the plains were startled, running to and fro, stoping to listen, their heads raised, full of curiosity and wonder, seeming attracted and fascinated to the spot, while from the interior of the adjacent wood the howls of wolves and coyotes filled the air, and immense flocks of water fowl flew wildly about over the camp. 

Standing on the deck of the 'Isabel' I witnessed this remarkable sight, which filled me with astonishment and admiration, and made an indelible impression on my mind. This salute was the first echo of civilization in the primitive wilderness so soon to become populated, and developed into a great agricultural and commercial center."

Enter John C Fremont, Major in the US army, whose assignment was to find the source of the Arkansas river. While the US was heading to war with Mexico over Texas, government policy at the time was to be a nice as possible to the Californians and not give any cause for grievance. But greed and glory were overwhelming temptations, and Fremont, who was evidently a persuasive and charismatic figure, led his troop of some 50 soldiers through surveys through the West, into Oregon, and down into California. There he began agitating for a takeover of California, under what seems to be a general sense of imperialism, manifest destiny, ambition, greed, etc. And perhaps competition with the other imperial powers of England and France. At first he kept the US out of it by not using his own soldiers, rather inciting a rabble of malcontents around Sutter's fort to start the proceedings.

Led by William Ide and the stuttering Ezekiel Merritt, this posse descended on General Vallejo's ranch in Sonoma in June, 1846 and took him prisoner, back to Sutter's fort. As Vallejo was the leading figure of Northern California at the time, this esentially decapitated local resistance, in case any was contemplated, which it was not. The Californios had had several revolutions against their governors from Mexico, and other political disagreements, but never were blood shed or manners forgotten. In contrast, Vallejo and several other prisoners were treated poorly, losing a great deal of weight, and the Anglo rabble stole countless horses and other livestock throughout the area. Along the way, they proclaimed a somewhat comical "California Republic", complete with flag, whose mascot was mocked as looking more like a pig than a bear. Fremont took increasing control, and on a foray out to Marin county, ordered three Californios captured in San Rafael to be shot in cold blood.

The original "bear" flag of the bear flag revolt.

It all created a great deal of bad blood between the Anglos and the Californios, and was completely unnecessary, as the direction of the political winds had long been clear. Leading Californios, especially Vallejo, were pro-American, favored development and competent government for the state, and preferred the nearby Republican power to a European imperial monarchy such as England or France. Indeed, U.S. Commodore Thomas Jones had captured the capital of Alta California, Monterrey, in 1842, holding it for a day before, amid a flurry of apologies, lowering the US flag once again when it was made clear that his belief that war had been declared between the two countries was in error. Not a shot had been fired, let alone a drop of blood spilled.

As it happened, while the Bear flag revolt was developing, war had indeed broken out between the US and Mexico over the Texas territory. US Commodore John Sloat pulled into Monterrey on July 7, 1846 and this time proclaimed California a US posession for good, and without any trouble. Upon meeting Fremont, he chewed him out for his filibustering, against orders. Eventually Fremont was court-martialed for his various departures from orders and policy, but let off the hook through his political connections and returned to service in the Civil war, only to be dimissed again by President Lincoln for corruption and insubordination. Vallejo for his part was eventually impoverished through a combination of bad business decisions, excess generosity, chicanery by Anglo partners, and finally a callous decision by the Supreme Court against some of his land claims.

The adventures and meddling of the sort that Fremont engaged in are by no means isolated in US history, under either official or unoffical auspices. The exceptional nation, with manifest destiny, muscular Christianity, a white man's burden, family values, and occupying a shining city on a hill, can do whatever it takes to remake the world in our image, which is naturally the best image imaginable.

Surely we have very beneficial things to offer others. But looking back, we have also run brutally roughshod over so much in the drive to conquer- natural, native, and foreign- that some grief and humility is also called for.

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• Upstairs, downsourced.
• Money, not surveillance, is killing democracy.
• Bizarre moment on air force one ... but were they naked?
• Economics graph of the week... real wage trends.