After having his kingdom taken away, his nose cut off, and his tongue split, Justinian II sailed across the Black Sea

June 17th, 2022

By Water Beneath the Walls by Benjamin H. MilliganBenjamin H. Milligan opens his oddly named history of the rise of the Navy SEALs, By Water Beneath the Walls, with a short passage on an ancient amphibious commando operation:

In 705 CE, after having his kingdom taken away, his nose cut off, and his tongue split, Justinian II sailed across the Black Sea and led a small group of fighters under the impregnable walls of Constantinople by way of an unguarded aqueduct and captured the city. It was a victory that never should have been, by water beneath the walls.

Game of Thrones fans might compare this to the Fall of Casterly Rock. Justinian II‘s whole story is rather…Byzantine:

While his land policies threatened the aristocracy, his tax policy was very unpopular with the common people. Through his agents Stephen and Theodotos, the emperor raised the funds to gratify his sumptuous tastes and his mania for erecting costly buildings. This, ongoing religious discontent, conflicts with the aristocracy, and displeasure over his resettlement policy eventually drove his subjects into rebellion. In 695 the population rose under Leontios, the strategos of Hellas, and proclaimed him Emperor. Justinian was deposed and his nose was cut off (later replaced by a solid gold replica of his original) to prevent his again seeking the throne: such mutilation was common in Byzantine culture. He was exiled to Cherson in the Crimea. Leontius, after a reign of three years, was in turn dethroned and imprisoned by Tiberius Apsimarus, who next assumed the throne.

While in exile, Justinian began to plot and gather supporters for an attempt to retake the throne. Justinian became a liability to Cherson and the authorities decided to return him to Constantinople in 702 or 703. He escaped from Cherson and received help from Busir, the khagan of the Khazars, who received him enthusiastically and gave him his sister as a bride. Justinian renamed her Theodora, after the wife of Justinian I. They were given a home in the town of Phanagoria, at the entrance to the sea of Azov. Busir was offered a bribe by Tiberius to kill his brother-in-law, and dispatched two Khazar officials, Papatzys and Balgitzin, to do the deed. Warned by his wife, Justinian strangled Papatzys and Balgitzin with his own hands. He sailed in a fishing boat to Cherson, summoned his supporters, and they all sailed westwards across the Black Sea.

As the ship bearing Justinian sailed along the northern coast of the Black Sea, he and his crew became caught up in a storm somewhere between the mouths of the Dniester and the Dnieper Rivers. While it was raging, one of his companions reached out to Justinian saying that if he promised God that he would be magnanimous, and not seek revenge on his enemies when he was returned to the throne, they would all be spared. Justinian retorted: “If I spare a single one of them, may God drown me here”.

Having survived the storm, Justinian next approached Tervel of Bulgaria. Tervel agreed to provide all the military assistance necessary for Justinian to regain his throne in exchange for financial considerations, the award of a Caesar’s crown, and the hand of Justinian’s daughter, Anastasia, in marriage. In spring 705, with an army of 15,000 Bulgar and Slav horsemen, Justinian appeared before the walls of Constantinople. For three days, Justinian tried to convince the citizens of Constantinople to open the gates, but to no avail. Unable to take the city by force, he and some companions entered through an unused water conduit under the walls of the city, roused their supporters, and seized control of the city in a midnight coup d’état. Justinian once more ascended the throne, breaking the tradition preventing the mutilated from Imperial rule. After tracking down his predecessors, he had his rivals Leontius and Tiberius brought before him in chains in the Hippodrome. There, before a jeering populace, Justinian, now wearing a golden nasal prosthesis, placed his feet on the necks of Tiberius and Leontius in a symbolic gesture of subjugation before ordering their execution by beheading, followed by many of their partisans, as well as deposing, blinding and exiling Patriarch Kallinikos I of Constantinople to Rome.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Lake Issyk Kul is the Wuhan of the Black Death

June 16th, 2022

A new study of DNA from the “pestilence” victims in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan shows that they were indeed infected with the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that caused the Black Death:

The Syriac engraving on the medieval tombstone was tantalizing: “This is the tomb of the believer Sanmaq. [He] died of pestilence.” Sanmaq, who was buried in 1338 near Lake Issyk Kul in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan, was one of many victims of the unnamed plague. By scrutinizing field notes and more photos from the Russian team that had excavated the graves in the 1880s, historian Philip Slavin found that at least 118 people from Sanmaq’s Central Asian trading community died in the epidemic.

Slavin was on the trail of the origin of the Black Death, which devastated Europe a decade after the Kyrgyzstan burials. But he knew the medieval diagnosis of “pestilence” encompassed many horrific diseases. “I was almost 100% certain it was the beginning of the Black Death,” says Slavin, a medieval historian at the University of Stirling. “But there was no way to prove it without DNA.”

Now, Slavin is senior author of a new study of ancient DNA from the “pestilence” victims showing they were indeed infected with the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that caused the Black Death. The strain that killed them was ancestral to all the strains that rampaged across Europe a decade later and continued to kill for the next 500 years. The bacterium jumped from rodents to humans just before the Kyrgyzstan burials, perhaps after sudden changes in rainfall or temperature, the researchers propose this week in Nature.

“This is the place where it all started — the Wuhan of the Black Death,” says senior author and paleogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

[…]

The strain was closely related to ones found in rodents near Issyk Kul today. The authors suggest it spilled over to humans, perhaps from a marmot, which are abundant in the Tian Shan mountain region of northern Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan, and northwestern China. Sudden changes in rainfall or temperature could have led to surges in local rodent populations and the fleas or other insects they harbor. More rodents and their pests meant more opportunities to hop to a new host—humans—and adapt to it, says population biologist Nils Christian-Stenseth of the University of Oslo, who has shown a correlation between outbreaks of plague and warm, wet weather in Central Asia. He adds: “There are many good possibilities for plague reservoirs; you have the great gerbils, marmots, voles.”

The remaining mystery, he says, is how the Black Death traveled 3500 kilometers from Central Asia to the Black Sea, where historical accounts describe the Mongolian army hurling the bodies of plague victims into the besieged city of Caffa in Crimea in 1346 in an early form of biological warfare.

The meticulous archaeological records for each Kyrgyzstan grave offer hints, Slavin says. Many people were buried with pearls, coins, and other goods from the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and Iran; some were apparently traders. As they traveled, their camel wagons may have harbored rats and fleas, long considered likely vectors for plague.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

An engineer then predicted that it would take 45 years

June 14th, 2022

Fifteen years ago, Con Edison finally ended its 125 years of direct current electricity service that began when Thomas Edison opened his Pearl Street power station on Sept. 4, 1882, the New York Times reported

Con Ed will now only provide alternating current, in a final, vestigial triumph by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, Mr. Edison’s rivals who were the main proponents of alternating current in the AC/DC debates of the turn of the 20th century.

The last snip of Con Ed’s direct current system will take place at 10 East 40th Street, near the Mid-Manhattan Library. That building, like the thousands of other direct current users that have been transitioned over the last several years, now has a converter installed on the premises that can take alternating electricity from the Con Ed power grid and adapt it on premises. Until now, Con Edison had been converting alternating to direct current for the customers who needed it — old buildings on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side that used direct current for their elevators for example. The subway, which has its own converters, also provides direct current through its third rail, in large part because direct current electricity was the dominant system in New York City when the subway first developed out of the early trolley cars.

Despite the clear advantage of alternating current — it can be transmitted long distances far more economically than direct current — direct current has taken decades to phase out of Manhattan because the early backbone of New York’s electricity grid was built by Mr. Edison’s company, which had a running head start in the first decade before Mr. Tesla and Mr. Westinghouse demonstrated the potential of alternating current with the Niagara Falls power project. (Among the customers of Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street power plant on that first day was The New York Times, which observed that to turn on its lights in the building, “no matches were needed.”)

But direct current clearly became uneconomical, as the short distances that it could be transmitted would have required a power station every mile or less, according to Joe Cunningham, an engineering historian. Thus alternating current in New York began in the outskirts — Queens, Bronx, Upper Manhattan and the suburbs.

The direct current conversion in Lower Manhattan started in 1928, and an engineer then predicted that it would take 45 years, according to Mr. Cunningham. “An optimistic prediction since we still have it now,” he said.

Posted in Business, Technology | 7 Comments »

Schmitt wrote well, distilling the best parts of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu into prose accessible to the Marines who would do the actual fighting

June 13th, 2022

In 1989, then-Commandant of the Marine Corps Alfred M. Gray reenergized the post-Vietnam Marine Corps with the publication of Warfighting:

Thirty-three years later, the thin manual is known today as Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication One and still canonizes the fighting philosophy of the Marines. But Warfighting has always been controversial. It was written quickly and quietly, by one Marine captain working directly for the Commandant and with minimal input from the broader Marine Corps. Gray’s approach — jamming through innovation against strong headwinds — seems echoed today by Commandant David H. Berger’s efforts to change the design of the Corps with an audacious document called Force Design 2030 (FD 2030), a fact that seems somewhat ironic given the stiff opposition he faces from some of Warfighting’s most ardent advocates.

[…]

Al Gray remains a Marine Corps icon. Gray was an enlisted Marine; a veteran of combat in Korea and Vietnam who once walked into a minefield to save a wounded Marine. He was one of the Corps’ great mavericks, the kind of Marine who dared to break rules, and succeed greatly, in an organization known for rigid standards. As commandant, Gray typically wore camouflage utilities rather than dress uniforms and regularly punched enlisted Marines in the chest — hard — to show affection. Warfighting was Gray’s vision and he bent rules and ignored the conventions of the Marine Corps’ often mind-numbing bureaucracy to bring it to life.

Gray was an impatient intellectual in a Corps suffering through a post-Vietnam anti-intellectual malaise. Commanding the 2nd Marine Division in the early 1980s, he declared maneuver warfare the official doctrine of his division. Then-Lt. John Schmitt was a platoon commander in 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. He remembers being called to the base theater at Camp Lejeune along with every officer in the 2nd Marine Division, where Gray declared, “Maneuver warfare is the doctrine of Second Marine Division. Get on board or get left behind.” Though already a “maneuverist,” Schmitt could not have known how much that day would affect his future. Gray kept pushing forward with the maneuver warfare concept and in 1987 when he became commandant, he wasted no time cementing maneuver warfare as the Corps’ foundational doctrine, though years later he would say he regretted using the word doctrine instead of philosophy. It’s an important distinction as Warfighting is more about how Marines should think about warfare than how they should execute warfare.

In another maverick move, Gray ignored the line of colonels outside his office lobbying for the task of composing the document and assigned just one junior officer — then frocked Capt. John Schmitt — to write Warfighting alone and responsible only to Gray, an experience Schmitt now describes as “pretty surreal.”

[…]

As Schmitt was drafting Warfighting, building upon bottom-up momentum generated by informal Marine study groups, Gray brought Marine allies such as Van Riper and Cols. Michael Wyly and Patrick “Paddy” Collins to Quantico, Virginia, in what became known as the “Quantico Renaissance.” He also availed himself of outsiders like William “Bill” Lind and legendary Air Force Col. John Boyd to help plant his flag in the chest of an intellectually stultified Marine Corps. Lind was a controversial figure, an Ivy League scholar of German history with no military experience, a gap that did not prevent him from claiming to have started the debate over maneuver warfare in the 1970s. Boyd was best known for describing the OODA loop, an air-to-air combat concept he broadly applied to ground war theories. Lind and Boyd were both fans of the closely related German military concepts of Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” and Auftragstaktik, or mission command, and of Liddell-Hart’s belief in the indirect approach to warfighting.

Gray gave Schmitt minimal guidance. In fact, Schmitt says, Gray refused to give any direct guidance. Instead, the commandant spoke in parables, Schmitt recalled to Task & Purpose.

“I would ask him what he thought and he would look at me and say, ‘Let me tell you a story about Little Al Gray.’ What he was doing was maneuver warfare,” said Schmitt. “He made sure I understood his intent, but he left it up to me to figure out how to accomplish the mission.”

Gray met with Schmitt only twice during the writing process, then signed off on the draft with only one change. Where Schmitt had written within the introduction a charge for every Marine to read Warfighting, Gray inserted, “…and re-read.” If Warfighting had turned out to be just another military document; written, published and largely ignored, this would still be a remarkable story. But it wasn’t remotely ignored.

Schmitt wrote well, distilling the best parts of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu into prose accessible to the Marines who would do the actual fighting. Warfighting has since spawned a series of equally compelling, readable Marine Corps doctrinal publications, or MCDPs, on everything from campaigning to leadership to intelligence. Schmitt had a hand in many of these as well. Taken together, the books anchor Marine Corps training and education. But when it comes to institutional change, the messenger matters as much as the message.

Getting an organization of 200,000 people to buy into a book like Warfighting requires salesmanship, a painful lesson Commandant Berger is now learning two years into the life of FD 2030. Gray’s acolytes, including Van Riper, pushed hard to get Marines to adopt all aspects of maneuver warfare. The hard push was only partially successful.

[…]

Van Riper, Schmitt, and others in Gray’s inner circle needed all the help they could get in selling Warfighting in some parts of the Marine Corps, but while they were energizing Marines with the best parts of Warfighting, Bill Lind was alienating Marine leaders well-positioned to undermine Gray’s initiative.

It is hard to find Marines who served in the 1980s or 1990s who have fond memories of Bill Lind. Even before Gray ascended to commandant, Lind wrote an article in The Washington Post calling senior Marine officers inept for failing to prevent the 1983 Beirut barracks attack and personally criticized then-Commandant P.X. Kelley for refusing to embrace his ideas about war and tactics. In the same article, he described war as an intellectual chess match, taking the idea of winning without fighting to an unrealistic extreme. According to Lind, the purpose of a rifle is not to kill, but to suppress the enemy so he can be outmaneuvered. That notion didn’t wear well in a Marine Corps culturally centered on good old-fashioned rifle killing at close range.

Gray and Lind were both enamored of German military concepts from the world wars. But Lind pushed the German example to the point that it became repellent, often showing up unannounced and wearing an ersatz German officer’s uniform at Marine planning sessions, exercises, and training schools like the Infantry Officer Course. Lind had the often-infuriating habit of telling even the most talented Marine officers they were wrong or simply stupid before quoting German Wehrmacht doctrine to set them straight. Many of these officers — all aware that Lind had no actual military experience and that the Germans had lost both world wars — went on to become colonels and generals. They remembered Lind’s words and demeanor and could not have helped associating it with maneuver warfare, a lingering resentment well documented in Marine Corps War College professor Jim Lacey’s 2014 article, “The Continuing Irrelevance of William Lind.”

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

TPS’s plasma ignition system can increase engine efficiency by 20%

June 12th, 2022

Transient Plasma Systems replaces the conventional spark plugs in a vehicle’s engine with an ignition module that uses very short duration (nanosecond) pulses of plasma to ignite the fuel-air mixture within the cylinder:

TPS commissioned a testing company called FEV to evaluate the pulsed plasma system after fitting it to a highly efficient 2.5 L Toyota Camry engine that runs the Atkinson cycle, with a thermal efficiency of around 40 percent.

“Across the drive cycle, that is a really good engine. And what we were able to do was drop [the plasma ignition system] on, put a slightly different spark plug in the hole but still a spark plug and then our power supply, and they were able to get up to 6 percent increase in fuel economy. This, with the stock engine pulled out of a crashed car, with just being able to open up that EGR valve a bit more and adjust the timing, and then we were able to get that benefit,” he said.

“Essentially, if you were to open the EGR valve more with the stock ignition system, you would start to lose combustion efficiency and so you no longer get the overall benefit. Whereas with us they were able to open up that valve more and preserve the combustion efficiency and, therefore, that translates into better fuel economy because you have a lower temperature of combustion. You’re reducing heat losses,” Singleton told Ars.

The final stage of testing for TPS’s system is to prove its durability, but Singleton expects this won’t be a problem. “The technology uses all solid-state, high-voltage switches — these are switches that are used in applications where they’re run for millions and millions of shots. If you just did an analysis of the parts, you would say no problem, right? The testing that still needs to be done is, once you’ve put it into a package where it’s going to go to altitude and extreme heat, extreme cold, you just have to do some design validation and tweaking,” he said.

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

The notion of integrating stand-off weapons (SOWs) on the A-10 was first hatched 10 years ago

June 11th, 2022

There is a joke that discussions of getting rid of the A-10 started 2.5 minutes after the last one rolled off the Fairchild-Republic assembly line in 1984. How does a jet under constant threat of divestment adapt and evolve to support the ever-changing mission?

The notion of integrating stand-off weapons (SOWs) on the A-10 was first hatched 10 years ago, but never gained traction due to the threat of divestment. […] The first proposal was the ADM-160 Miniature Air-Launched Decoy, also known as MALD. Carried by the F-16 and B-52, the MALD is a low-cost combat capability that offers mission and combatant commanders the opportunity to saturate an air defense picture and increase the survivability of our 5th-gen assets. When planned and utilized properly, a few dozen decoys can wreak havoc on the defenses of a sophisticated potential enemy like Russia or China.

The A-10C has up to 10 weapons stations available. In today’s Air Force, where new fighters have fewer weapons stations in order to prioritize internal carriage and stealth, the A-10’s sheer volume of available weapons stations is a force multiplier. The MALD weighs about 300 pounds and has a range of approximately 500 miles. It is programmable and aims to duplicate the signatures and flight profiles of combat aircraft, inducing confusion and noise into the enemy air defense picture and complicating their tactical decision-making. A single MALD can be loaded directly onto a station, or two MALD can be loaded on a triple-ejector rack. This enables a single A-10 to carry up to 16 MALD, which is as many as a B-52 can hold and 12 more than an F-16 can. To further break it down, a four-ship formation of A-10s could bring up to 64 MALD to a fight. The A-10’s robust, agile combat employment capabilities (low maintenance footprint and ability to operate from unimproved or makeshift runway surfaces) combined with the ability to carry 16 MALD per aircraft, provides combatant commanders the ability to create multi-axis problems, target saturation, and horizontal escalation options for adversaries. No software integration with the jet’s central computer is required. Carriage and separation testing is the only cost to consider.

[…]

The second proposal, the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile or JASSM, is the next step in the A-10’s evolution of mission support. The JASSM is a low-observable, air-launched cruise missile, which has become so strategically important to combatant commanders, that it has been integrated onto the F-15E, F-16, F/A-18, F-35, B-1, B-52, and even the B-2. Initial assessments and theorizing suggests that the A-10 could potentially carry four to five of the missiles. For comparison, the F-15E is the only fighter that can carry more than two JASSM (the Strike Eagle can carry up to five JASSM), while the bomber fleet can carry between 12 and 24 of the munitions, depending on the platform. Although this may not have the same sticker shock associated with the MALD, the A-10 can offer combatant commanders an additional four to five JASSM per sortie, and leverage integrated combat turns (ICTs) to increase sortie production. Risk mitigation demands more SOWs employment, and the carriage capacity combined with the quick-turn capability of the A-10C should be considered as a means to increase the Mass the USAF can provide to a combatant commander. This is not about taking the JASSM away from bombers and other fighters. This is about bringing more weapons to bear in a shorter span of time, which is a critical component of massing fires.

[…]

Imagine a rapidly-deployable force of non-nuclear fighters that can operate from the most austere locations with a minimal footprint while providing long range fires, decoys, electronic attack, and mission support. That vision is achievable at minimal cost by using assets and capabilities that the Air Force already has, but simply needs to integrate. That is what stand-off weapon integration on the A-10 can provide to combatant commanders.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

Experts have been writing the aircraft carrier’s obituary for a century

June 10th, 2022

China already has a variety of ground-based radars, airborne sensors, and satellites that have made U.S. military planners apprehensive about sending aircraft carriers anywhere near Taiwan, but now, the South China Morning Post reports, a Chinese satellite equipped with artificial intelligence detected the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman during naval exercises off the coast of Long Island, New York, allowing China’s military to follow the ship’s movements:

Retired Navy. Capt. Jerry Hendrix said he has been worried about how U.S. aircraft carriers can be detected from space. Hendrix is a Navy expert who spent 26 years on active duty, during which he served on aircraft carriers and as a strategist on the Chief of Naval Operations staff.

Hendrix recounted to Task & Purpose how he read a news story years ago about an astronaut who spotted his former carrier while he was serving on a space station. From far above the Earth, the astronaut was still able to see the ship’s hull number through one of the station’s telescopes.

“It occurred to me that if a human astronaut in the space station was able to do this, that it probably is not that hard to look for aircraft carriers,” Hendrix said.

Indeed, there are not that many ships in the world that are as large, as fast, or that displace as much water as U.S. aircraft carriers, so Chinese satellites have plenty of clues to look for, Hendrix said. Even though super tankers are larger than aircraft carriers, they do not turn into the wind to launch aircraft.

“If you’re programming in through AI-specific attributes of an aircraft carrier that an aircraft carrier would do but a merchant ship of a similar size would not, then you’re able to make that detection from overhead imagery more quickly,” Hendrix said.

Artificial intelligence would also allow Chinese satellites to quickly distinguish an aircraft carrier’s electronic signature from background noise on the electromagnetic spectrum, he said.

[…]

There’s no doubt that threats against aircraft carriers are growing, but it’s also worth noting that experts have been writing the aircraft carrier’s obituary for a century. Indeed, the U.S. Naval Institute has compiled a list of articles from its “Proceedings” magazine going back to 1922 that debate the carrier’s worth.

One naysayer argued in 1925 that the Navy should use large dirigibles instead of ships to carry aircraft because airships can fly over both sea and land. A 1959 commentary questioned whether the Navy would get better use out of its money if it built more submarines instead of carrier strike groups. And one author wrote in 1999 that the cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan the previous year marked the beginning of the end for aircraft carriers.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 9 Comments »

Participants lost one-fifth of their body weight

June 7th, 2022

In a 72-week trial in participants with obesity, tirzepatide — a novel glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist — provided substantial and sustained reductions in body weight. Participants lost one-fifth of their body weight.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 24 Comments »

The America of the 2020s is not the America of the 1970s

June 6th, 2022

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, by Rick Perlstein, is the sequel to Nixonland:

Where Nixonland roughly covered 1964-1972, The Invisible Bridge covers 1973-1976. It starts with Watergate, progresses through the bumbling missteps of the Ford administration, and ends with Ford’s narrow defeat of a right-wing insurgency by Ronald Reagan in the 1976 GOP primary.

There’s no throughline at all to this book — no coherent plot. Where Nixonland was a tight, coherent story about liberal rage and right-wing reaction, The Invisible Bridge is a chaotic, meandering tale of exhaustion, confusion, oddity and pointlessness. Which means it’s a book about the 70s. It’s a portrait of a grumpy, bitter country traumatized by social conflict but not yet ready to heal. And as such, it reminds me very much of 2021 and 2022.

Did you know that in 1976, there were two separate assassination attempts against President Gerald Ford in the space of three weeks, both by leftist radicals in northern California? I think I had heard that, but the bizarre reality of those episodes really stands out as the centerpiece of the book. Two wacky lefties tried to kill the President, one after another, and the country basically just shrugged and went on.

Anyway, as in Nixonland, the parallels to the modern day are not exact, but eerie nonetheless. Watergate feels a lot like the coup attempt of January 6, 2021 — an event that horrified people, and kept them glued to their screens for weeks, but where all the action ultimately remained confined to the ranks of the elite. The President being revealed as a crook — and then trying to cover up his criminality by claiming quasi-dictatorial powers, only to be rebuffed by resilient institutions — produced no riots, no mass wave of unrest, no repeat of 1968. Exhaustion had set in by 1973, and people were just kind of relieved to see Nixon go.

Reading this book, it’s possible to see the bumbling, nonthreatening Ford administration as the beginning of a sort of healing process. With a friendly old man in the White House, people could finally afford to tune out politics a little. The lefty radicals were still doing their thing, but they were getting fewer in number and their increasing extremism was turning off more and more Americans. Liberal Dems cruised to a huge midterm victory in 1974 off of Watergate backlash, but managed few legislative victories and ultimately saw their moment pass. Meanwhile, the angry White backlash that had powered Nixon to victory was also losing some of its energy, as White Americans fled the cities for burgeoning suburbs.

There was one group of Americans, however, who felt no exhaustion, and whose activism was just getting started — social conservatives. They wove together a slow-building backlash against libertine sex culture with the remnants of racial resentment, and turned it against abortion and gays. This story really reaches its apotheosis in Perlstein’s next book, Reaganland, but you can see it get its start in The Invisible Bridge. And the Reagan of this book is far from the cuddly, pro-immigration Reagan of the 80s — he’s seen as a genuinely dangerous right-wing radical.

The Invisible Bridge doesn’t tell a coherent story, but it teaches some important lessons about American politics. It suggests that episodes of lefty rage — where progressives expect a better world, don’t get it, and resolve to tear everything down — burn bright and hot but burn out fast. It was only 11 years from the Watts riots to Squeaky Fromme. Meanwhile, conservative America is slower to rouse, but has the stamina to secure gains when everyone else is exhausted.

The America of the 2020s is not the America of the 1970s; much will be different this time around. But many of the fundamental processes at work in that era are still at work today, and understanding them can help shine light on the stuff we see in the news.

Posted in Policy | 6 Comments »

Dashed expectations turned to anger

June 5th, 2022

Nixonland by Rick PerlsteinNixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein, is as authoritative a volume as you’re likely to find on the history of how the unrest of the 1960s began, and how America reacted to it, Noah Smith says:

Perlstein leaves no ambiguity about what touched off the unrest: It was the Watts Riot of August 1965. That event set the stage for the big explosions of rioting in the summer of 1967 and after MLK’s assassination in 1968, both of which saw over a hundred American cities burn.

But the riots didn’t cause the 60s. Instead, Perlstein’s tale makes it clear that the unrest resulted from the confluence of several interrelated trends:

  • Black anger over ghetto conditions in American cities, liberal politicians’ attempts to solve the problem, and rightist backlash against those solutions
  • Cultural liberalization, especially the sexual revolution, among the middle class
  • The Vietnam War and the protests against it

The parallels between then and now are striking and immediately apparent. The widespread hope that the Kennedy/Johnson administration heralded a new era of liberalism in America outpaced reality, much like hope that Obama heralded a post-racial era outpaced reality — even though LBJ pushed through more substantive liberal policy than anyone except FDR, there was just no way even the famed “master of the Senate” could keep up with the wild expectations of the early 60s. And those dashed expectations turned to anger — anger over Vietnam, anger at the police, anger over ghetto conditions, anger at the dominant culture. Much as in the 2010s, dashed liberal expectations turned to anger in the form of BLM protests and riots. 2014 was our 1965, and 2020 was our 1968.

And what’s even more striking is how much the conservative reaction to 1960s liberal rage resembled the Trump era. Conservatives rallied around a leader they felt was reactionary, who would clamp down on urban Black unrest and antiwar hippies alike. Especially striking are Perlstein’s anecdotes about how right-wing counter-protesters felt they were standing up for Nixon personally — similar to the protectiveness MAGA people developed around Trump. (The irony, of course, is that in many regards Nixon governed as a liberal president, creating the EPA and OSHA and proposing universal health care and basic income! The only real similarity with Trump was in his authoritarian, paranoid personality.)

Nixon is, of course, the narrative throughline of this book, but in many ways he was just a symbol for a broader reactionary outpouring that eventually became the conservative movement of the 70s and 80s. That counterrevolution, which Perlstein has made it his life’s work to study, was far more violent, passionate, and downright scary than people realize. Americans were rightfully aghast when they saw Nazi symbols displayed openly at Charlottesville, but few realize how common those same symbols were at right-wing demonstrations in the 60s. People know about the MLK assassination riots, but few today have heard of the Hard Hat Riot. The counterrevolution was not televised.

And of course the culture war that started in the 60s is still with us today. That’s the thesis of Nixonland — which makes it all the more remarkable that the book was published in 2008, before Obama was even elected or Trump was on anyone’s radar.

Posted in Policy | 29 Comments »

Americans often say they want community policing

June 4th, 2022

Recent events remind us of Americans’ deep ambivalence and internal contradictions about policing:

Americans often say they want community policing, emphasizing de-escalation and outreach over proactive crime reduction and assertive policing. Many also oppose what they see as the “militarization” of police, rejecting the notion that American law enforcement should procure and train with tools such as sniper rifles and bullet-proof vests, let alone other more specialized equipment.

America in recent years has suffered a wave of anti-policing rhetoric, with the “Ferguson effect” beginning in 2014 and reaching a crescendo in the riots of 2020. Some radicals seek to defund them altogether.

But when an incident like Uvalde occurs, the public expects members of law enforcement to conduct what even America’s most elite special operations forces consider among the most challenging tactical tasks: a solo dynamic entry, room clearance, and structure search against a heavily armed perpetrator or perpetrators.

And the public is right to ask for this.

But few agencies select officers based on ability and willingness to perform this extremely high-impact/low-probability mission. Few agencies train officers to the high levels of proficiency required. The reality is that most law enforcement agencies require only the minimally mandated firearms qualifications, and at standards that are insufficient to meet the level of the challenge, in the event the worst should happen. Only a select few officers seek outside training and acquire the right tools, often at their own expense, to make themselves ready, lest they be called and found wanting.

Beyond bureaucratic training requirements, the task requires a certain mindset, a comfort with aggression, and a drive not doled out to all people in equal measure.

There are around 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. As much as it may pain us to admit it, not all of them will be warriors, a word that is overused in certain circles but nevertheless remains apt. And, of course, police work requires many other interpersonal skills and training, some of which are 180-degree opposite from the psychological traits required to storm into a room alone against a determined and heavily armed gunman.

As historian Victor Davis Hanson eloquently writes, America possesses a deep discomfort with those who truly epitomize the combat virtues. While America loves the action hero, we breathe a sigh of relief at the movie’s end not only because the villain has been dispatched, but also because the hero rides away.

If we are honest with ourselves, most Americans don’t want this type of highly capable and dangerous man (and most of them will be men) doing our policing. Not on the good days, when the sun is shining and the birds are chirping.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 16 Comments »

They were Twentysomethings with a lot of time on their hands and nothing better to do

June 3rd, 2022

An interesting pattern recurs across the careers of great scientists, Dwarkesh Patel notes, an annus mirabilis (miracle year) in which they make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two:

Einstein had his annus mirabilis in 1905. While he was still a patent clerk, he wrote four papers that revolutionized our understanding of the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity.

Newton’s annus mirabilis came to him between 1665 and 1666, when Cambridge responded to the Bubonic plague by sending its students home to quarantine. During that time, Newton, aged 22, developed the theory of gravity along with the language of calculus required to express it.

[…]

Many other great scientists — Copernicus, Darwin, von Neumann, and Gauss — also seem to have had an annus mirabilis.

Miracle years happen outside of pure science too. In his memoir, Linus Torvalds talks about how he spent the summer before turning 21 reading an operating systems textbook cover to cover, how later that year he built a terminal emulation program just for fun, and how he spent all his time working on this program until pretty soon it morphed into a full operating system called Linux. That was his annus mirabilis.

Even writers have miracle years. Just recently, the popular fantasy author Brandon Sanderson announced that in the year or two since the pandemic began, he has secretly written five extra novels in addition to the ones his fans knew he was writing.

Perhaps, he suggests, there’s a brief window in a person’s life where he has the intelligence, curiosity, and freedom of youth but also the skills and knowledge of age:

These conditions only coincide at some point in a person’s twenties. It wouldn’t be surprising if the combination of fluid intelligence (which declines steeply after your 20s) and crystalized intelligence (which accumulates slowly up till your 50s and 60s) is highest during this time. Stephan and Levine (1993) find that most Nobel laureates do their prize winning work in their late 20s or early 30s.

During his miracle year, Einstein was a patent clerk, Newton was a college student dismissed for quarantine, and Darwin was a trust fund kid who had just finished a long voyage aboard the HMS Beagle and still didn’t know what to do with his life. They had no obligations to research some old professor’s hobby horse using his particular technique or paradigm.

Given how many of the great scientific discoveries have come about during miracle years, he argues, we should do everything we can to help smart Twentysomethings have an annus mirabilis:

We should free them from rote menial work, prevent them from being overexposed to the current paradigm, and give them the freedom to explore far-fetched ideas without arbitrary deadlines or time-draining obligations.

It’s depressing that I have just described the opposite of a modern PhD program.

Posted in Education, Science | 3 Comments »

Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan

June 1st, 2022

The insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu preferred using “pythons and cobras…fungi and [his] tiny allies, the bacilli…[his] black spiders” and other peculiar animals or natural chemical weapons to kill his enemies:

Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan,… Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present… Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man.

Sax Rohmer, the novelist who created the character, died after succumbing to Asian flu in 1959.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

Liking it is not a matter of bad taste but of some sort of failure of political and moral sophistication

May 29th, 2022

The crowd, Freddie deBoer reports, has turned from performatively hating David Foster Wallace to performatively hating The Catcher in the Rye:

For the record, I think The Catcher in the Rye is… OK? It’s fine. It’s definitely a book of an earlier era and it felt as such when I read it as a teenager. I was hoping to connect with it on a deep level (uh, not a Mark David Chapman level) the way some adults in my life had, and I didn’t and was kind of bummed out. But it was fine. As is so often the case with these things, there’s a really dumbass reading of the book lurking in the discussion about it, which is that you’re somehow commanded to identify with Holden Caufield and to want to act like him. This is… not a good interpretation. You certainly can identify with him, but I don’t think that’s suggested very strongly, let alone mandated. As with Fight Club, another boy story for boys about boys being boys, you are invited to empathize with the alienation and loneliness of the main character while recognizing the juvenility and pointlessness of his reaction to it. But, well, now I’m actually engaging with the book, which is more than social media critics of books ever do. They never seem to want to go deeper than saying “TOXIC MASCULINITY” or whatever, which is particularly bizarre here. (Is the idea that Holden Caufield is supposed to be some sort of symbol of an idealized man? What?) It’s all uselessly Manichean — I know this headline is partially a joke but it makes me wince anyway. The important work is always to say a) this book/author is bad and b) liking it is not a matter of bad taste but of some sort of failure of political and moral sophistication.

[...]

Have you never imagined reading a book without wanting it to be a signifier of your entire personality? Do you know how many books I’ve read specifically because I hate the author and their outlook? Or, quelle horreur, you could consider reading a book without knowing what you think about it until you’ve read it! You know, the generative state of being open to forming a summative position based on the gradual aggregation of myriad minor judgments formed along the way? That would seem to be a major part of the point of reading.

[...]

It’s a sickness, the assumption that we must always tightly control every last aspect of our self-presentation, no matter how distinct from our true self, because someone on the subway with a $300k education and zero opinions they didn’t steal from podcasts might silently judge us. And as (this philosophy presumes) no one has a durable sense of self worth, being judged by strangers must be terrifying instead of meaningless.

Many have lamented the fact that professional criticism these days is often just a recitation of ways that a work of art does or does not conform to the childish moral calculus of “social justice.” And mountains of worthless reviews and recaps have been produced under these terms. But it’s important to say that this tendency is not solely or even mainly the product of ideological discipline and the desire to evangelize. Rather it stems from insecurity about one’s own subjective opinions. People who don’t trust that they are sophisticated readers or cinephiles or whatever gravitate towards tedious political checklisting because those political claims seem more transcendent and defensible and real than their own claims of taste. But this fundamentally mistakes the purpose of a review, and it’s very hard to understand why someone who is so afraid of standing by their own opinion would think to write one.

[...]

And it must always be remembered that, not that long ago, most media elites were not woke, but rather sneering neoliberals who mocked leftists as losers; the fact that media culture turned on a dime to embrace social justice fads makes it a certainty that, when that politics goes out of fashion in the coming decade, the media will flip flop right over again. No, the problem with media culture is not the politics but rather where those politics come from — not just from elite colleges or privileged childhoods lived in affluence, but from insecurity.

For the record, I found The Cather in the Rye phony and lousy.

I haven’t read any of David Foster Wallace’s novels, but I do keep going back to The String Theory.

In The Sum of Small Things, David Brooks points out, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information:

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

Posted in Media, Policy | 15 Comments »

Serial killing was something of a social contagion

May 26th, 2022

With mass-killing shootings in the news, Steve Sailer wanted to point out that not all bad things are destined to increase forever:

For instance, according to the Radford University Database of known serial killers, the number of serial killers soared during what Robert Heinlein predicted c. 1940 would be known as the Crazy Years (1960s-1970s) before declining more recently.

Rise and Fall of Serial Killers

It appears that the idea of serial killing was something of a social contagion that spread first among whites, then among nonwhites. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hitchcock’s hugely influential 1960 movie Psycho, often thought as the founder of the “slasher pic” genre, played a role in this real life phenomenon, although how to measure that is beyond me.

It’s also hard to say what caused the decline over the last generation. It could be that serial killing became less appealing to the handful of sickos attracted to doing it.

Or it could be fear of being caught increased. According to Bill James, cops were long particularly bad at catching serial killers because they’d been trained not to fall for the idea that somebody was murdered by a random stranger: instead, it had to be somebody who knew the victim, an ex-boyfriend or the like. So if they had five dead women on their hands, they tended to look for five separate killers. This had been a fairly productive prejudice, since it kept them from going down the wrong path most of the time. But the huge publicity attendant to Ted Bundy c. 1980 forced cops to get serious about the serial killer phenomenon.

Posted in Crime | 2 Comments »

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