Sometimes, a news story seems so ordinary that it barely garners any attention, even as it turns the world upside down. Sometimes, innocent frolicking on the surface distracts from a rot extending below. This is what happened last week, when the Biden administration announced its plans to send an additional $300 million to Ukraine, meant as a stopgap until Congress can finally pass a funding package. According to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, this aid package was made possible by “unanticipated cost savings” in various contracts with the defence industry to replace equipment already sent to Ukraine.
At first, it seemed like a benign piece of news. What, after all, is wrong with saving a bit of money? Yet the reality is far more complicated. What Jake Sullivan actually announced wasn’t merely a case of finding $300 million of change under a Pentagon sofa cushion, but another sordid act in the slow-rolling and underreported drama that is the ongoing collapse of the American military.
To understand why, it’s useful to begin with some basic facts about America’s military aid to Ukraine. When the Pentagon decided to send weapons to Kyiv, these were mostly taken from already existing stocks. This was unavoidable, for at least two reasons. First, US munitions production was wildly inadequate to cover wartime demands. Second, the lead time for new production was simply too long: many of the weapons ordered for Ukraine in 2022 would realistically only be ready for use after the war had concluded. And so, the United States stripped its own warehouses of equipment — and it didn’t stop there. In some cases, it looted ammunition and weapons from its own combat formations. In others, it stripped many of its allies, such as South Korea, of a large amount of their equipment, too.
All of which raises an important question: when one sends an already existing weapon to Ukraine because producing a new one is too impractical and slow, how much does that weapon really cost? Unfortunately, there isn’t a straightforward answer. For instance, some of the weapons sent to Ukraine were no longer in production, and in fact could not be produced anymore. This could be due to their electronic components being obsolete, the factories and tooling having been sold off, the manufacturer being defunct, and so on. So, while the US Army might indeed have paid around $40.000 for a Stinger missile in the mid-Eighties, extrapolating the cost of one today is at best a matter of guesswork. Even in less dramatic cases, where the munitions are still in production, costs can still be subject to extremely high volatility: the price of acquiring 155mm artillery shells for Nato allies has roughly quadrupled since the start of the Ukraine war.
For America, this made it possible to send huge quantities of Nato weapons to Ukraine, while merely guesstimating the real cost of those weapons. And unsurprisingly, this has massively incentivised making optimistic estimates: the less you say the shells and rockets are worth, the more of them you can send within your allotted replacement budget. Of course, if you lowball your cost estimates, or inflation and labour scarcity mean that it is no longer profitable for the defence industry to produce at that price, the end result is a form of budgetary looting. Something has been taken away, money has in theory been allocated to replace it, but either due to naivete, corruption or malice, that money is not sufficient to actually pay for replacements. Ultimately, you’re left with a big hole in your budget, and a big hole in your military readiness. Whether costs are intentionally lowballed or simply underestimated doesn’t matter; the result is the same. The US political class, having long believed that their country can go anywhere and do anything, are simply not in the mood to take no for an answer.
“Ultimately, you’re left with a big hole in your budget, and a big hole in your military readiness.”
Nor is budgetary raiding confined to the Ukraine war. When, for instance, Congress didn’t want to allocate funding for the extremely polarising issue of the southern border wall, the Trump administration briefly floated the idea of simply taking that money out of the US military. Elsewhere, the US Navy is currently planning to pay for its ongoing operations in the Red Sea by taking money out of funds it previously had allocated to badly needed modernisation programmes. In other words, the Navy’s budget is being cannibalised: critical future investments are being eaten up in order to sustain daily operations.
Why is this happening? In the interest of brevity, it’s sufficient to point out that the US no longer even has a regular budget process. Sadly, few people grasp just how dysfunctional Congress has become these days, and what consequences this has for many important institutions. More often than not, it fails to adopt a budget at all; and even when it manages to do so, the spending bills are chronically delayed. The most central, practical upshot of this is that most US spending is on a form of autopilot. For various reasons, making changes to spending, or reacting to new events or sudden needs, is becoming near-impossible.
When people today talk about the massive level of US debt ($34.5 trillion and rising fast) or the ongoing federal budget deficit (upwards of $1.6 trillion for fiscal year 2024), they often assume that these things are problems of the future. All agree that, at some point, these fiscal problems will start to truly harm the nation’s global standing; people simply disagree about when this will start happening. Unfortunately, the reality is that the massive debt load and the federal deficit is already beginning to destroy America from within. This is not a problem of the faraway future; it is a problem in the here and now.
With the fiscal sword of Damocles hanging over Congress, rather than assign additional funding to cover true cost increases, the name of the game is now budget trickery and budget raiding, shuffling money from one “pool” to another. But when that money is shuffled, it generally isn’t getting replaced. The “pool” that was drained in order to furnish money for something else remains empty, awaiting a refill that might never come.
It is this fundamental glitch in the US system that is now manifesting in all sorts of places, behind all sorts of headlines. So, when the Pentagon discovers some $300 million in “savings”, allowing for more equipment to be sent to Ukraine, this is in fact an accounting trick. But that trick belongs to a whole family of illusions, and their effect on the US military, taken as a whole, is rapidly becoming catastrophic. Thus, we now read stories about the US National guard temporarily cutting its retention bonuses in the middle of a massive recruitment crisis, or the Air Force removing special duty pay for many jobs within the service. Structural underfunding within the armed forces appears to be endemic.
Yet what’s particularly worrying is not even the lack of money per se, but the way in which the charade has been maintained. In the German movie Goodbye Lenin, the mother of an East German family falls into a coma right before the collapse of the Berlin wall. When she eventually wakes up, communism has already collapsed, and East Germany no longer exists. Her children, having been told that her mother’s heart probably can’t handle the shock of that revelation, then set out to create an illusory world around their mother. They raid pantries for older brands of foodstuffs, they put on fake news broadcasts, and they loot the attics of friends and neighbours for communist memorabilia.
Today, America increasingly resembles a sort of capitalist funhouse mirror version of this. Its political class is more of a grey-haired gerontocracy than that of the late Soviet Union, and they very much were born in a time when US wealth was limitless and US military power was without equal. Yet in order to protect that belief that nothing has changed, a much more systemic deception is being maintained; rather than pantries and attics, the US is raiding bonus funds for its sailors and soldiers and looting the money meant to maintain its ships and planes. All the while, the debts keep growing and the real budget (adjusted for inflation) keeps shrinking.
In Goodbye Lenin, maintaining the illusion that the DDR still exists becomes impossible in the end, and the ailing mother goes to her grave having realised that the state she lived her life in collapsed years ago. Whether Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden will share that fate is an open question. For now, the slash-and-burn inside the US Navy, Army and Air Force continues, as people such as Jake Sullivan work tirelessly to make sure their fragile elders don’t discover the truth.
Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist". But if race doesn't exist, how do we justify affirmative action, cultural appropriation, and all our other race-related practices? The consensus says that, although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.
A woman named Adeline Rivers drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1928. By the time her granddaughter Anita was growing up, family legend said that Adeline was a Mi'kmaq Indian who committed suicide to escape an abusive white husband. Anita leaned into the family legend and taught her own daughter Elizabeth to be proud of her Native American heritage.
As a kid, Anita would take Elizabeth to pow-wows (Native American ceremonial gatherings) where she would play with all the other young Native girls. As she grew up, many of her closest friends were Natives, and she practiced Native American dance. By the time she was a teenager, she had taken a Mi'kmaq name, wore Native clothing, and was involved in Native political causes. In college, she wrote a thesis on Native American issues, then got a PhD in same, then got a professorship at Berkeley. She married a Crow Indian and went on trips to various Indian reservations where she studied and wrote papers about the problems they faced, and she was informally adopted by one of the Native families she stayed with. She became one of the most influential Native American academics in the country.
At some point, maybe after going to the Mi'kmaq reservation during grad school to hunt down family members, Elizabeth must have noticed holes in her family legend; it seemed that her great-grandmother wasn’t really Native American, just some ordinary white woman who drowned for unclear reasons. Although nobody knows for sure, it seems like after realizing this, Elizabeth tried to hide it - maybe from herself, but at least from others. She kept claiming Native ancestry, and even writing about her (nonexistent) Native relatives.
After Elizabeth Warren and other high-profile cases brought the issue of fake Indians ("Pretendians") into the spotlight, some people from the Native community started going after Professor Hoover, challenging her to prove her Native descent. Over time the challenges got louder and louder, and eventually she had to admit she wasn’t Native after all. Some of her students wrote an open letter demanding that she resign, which said:
» We find Hoover's repeated attempts to differentiate herself from settlers with similar stories and her claims of having lived experienced as an Indigenous person by dancing at powwows absolutely appalling. [She has] failed to acknowledge the harm she has caused and enabled."
"Nearly four hundred people" signed the letter. Her graduate students stopped working with her and switched advisors. Her department tried to prevent her from attending meetings, and made her promise not to do work on any Indian reservations. The entire academic and Native American communities are giving her the cold shoulder. She wrote an apology letter saying that she had "put away my dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelery . . . I've begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better," but privately described her life as being in “ruins".
I find this really weird!
Elizabeth Hoover had some specific level of "lived experience" of growing up Native American. She seems to have believed she was Native up until her twenties. She went to pow-wows. She grew up with Native friends, and married a Native man.
Under the consensus definition, this life history should either be enough "lived experience" to count as a Native American, or not. And it seems from the article that - back when they thought she had a Mi'kmaq great-grandmother - everyone agreed her lived experience was enough to count as Native. Nobody said she didn't go to enough pow-wows as a kid, or have enough Native friends, or that if she wasn't born on a reservation it didn't count. They accepted her as a legitimate group member who had returned to the fold.
So why does it matter that, in fact, her great-grandmother had no Mi'kmaq blood? It doesn't affect her lived experiences at all! She had the lived experience of growing up thinking that her great-grandmother was Mi'kmaq - shouldn't that be enough? If tomorrow, a new discovery proved that her great-grandmother really was Mi'kmaq after all, would she become an Indian in good standing again? Would her rivals apologize for doubting her? If so, how does any of that affect her lived experience one iota?
It would seem like one of the following must be true:
Elizabeth Hoover is ethnically a Mi'kmaq Indian, just as much as if her great-grandmother had been a full member of the tribe.
Many pure-blooded Indians who were raised in Indian culture as a child and currently think of themselves as proud Indians - aren't Indians at all. After all, the consensus says their blood counts for nothing - only their lived experience. And Elizabeth Hoover had quite a lot of lived experience and still doesn't qualify. So you must need a very large amount of lived experience to count. Maybe you have to have lived on a reservation your whole life or something.
Race is at least a little based on genetics, and not on lived experience.
II.
Let’s start by talking about (3).
I'm against the claim that "there is no such thing as biological race" - it's one of those isolated demands for rigor that we don’t stand for around here. You can do cluster analysis on a bunch of genomes and circle the nice, legible shapes representing Europeans, Africans, etc.
People use the claim “there’s no such thing as biological race” for a lot of purposes, mostly to confuse and deceive people, but here it’s worth focusing on the tiny sliver of justification for such a claim: the biological clustering of populations isn’t exactly100% the same as socially-defined racial categories. This is unsurprising, since no two definitions of a word point to exactly 100% the same extensional cluster. All words are weird clusters of correlated traits that break down into a million dazzling-but-confusing facets the closer you look at them, and words describing race are no exception.
Consider for example the Jews. Jews do share some common genes, with interesting features like the Cohen modal haplotype and usually some similar Middle Eastern genetic background regardless of where they ended up.
But they also form a legal cluster: the people who are defined as Jews by the official halakhic definition - someone whose mother was Jewish, or who converted in an official ceremony. This can get arbitrarily complicated, with halakha (Jewish law) having opinions on how to sort out each weird edge case (like IVF!)
But they also form a religious cluster: people who currently practice the Jewish religion.
And they form a cultural cluster, consisting of people who consider themselves “cultural Jews” and have names like Weinberg and Goldstein and maybe speak a few scraps of Yiddish, even if these people are atheists.
None of these clusters are exactly the same. There are some people who are genetically 100% Jewish whose families converted to Christianity centuries ago and don’t even know they have any Jewish connection. There are extremely observant Orthodox Jews who aren’t Jewish by the halakhic definition, because at some point in their line a Jewish father married a Gentile mother and they raised their family Jewish without her officially converting.
(and each of these clusters breaks down even further! There are people who are halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis but not Orthodox rabbis. There are probably a few edge cases of people who are genetically Jewish according to 23AndMe’s definition but not Ancestry.com’s.There are people who are culturally Jewish in the sense of speaking Yiddish but not caring about Israel, and other people who care about Israel a lot but don’t speak Yiddish.)
But in real life there are very high correlations between all these clusters, such that someone who’s a practicing religious Jew is overwhelmingly more likely to be genetically Jewish than someone who isn’t, and someone of Jewish descent is much more likely to be culturally Jewish, and so on. So it’s reasonable to have a word “Jew” which unprincipledly smushes together cultural, halakhic, genetic, and religious definitions, so we don’t have to write an entire PhD dissertation to describe someone’s exact level of Jewishness to a communication partner.
I kind of imagine each of these definitions - religion, culture, genetics, etc - as an axis in concept space, and the category “Jew” as a hypersphere drawn around the exact typical Jewish person, whoever that is. You can be a Jew if you’re irreligious but have Jewish blood. And you can be a Jew if you have no Jewish blood but follow the Jewish religion. But if you neither have Jewish blood nor follow the Jewish religion, you’re not a Jew. Probably there’s some tradeoff here, where the less blood you have, the more you have to follow the religion before other people will consider you Jewish, and vice versa.
(the Jews are lucky because they have halakha.Even though halakha is just some rules that some random Jewish person and/or God invented, they’re a strong enough Schelling point that everyone else sort of kind of agrees to respect it when deciding who’s Jewish, even though non-Jews - and non-observant Jews - are under no obligation to do this.)
The category “Native American” must also work like this, right? It’s an unprincipled combination of lots of different facets - genetics, legal tribal membership, culture, lived experience, etc.
Suppose a white person was adopted at birth by the Mi’kmaq Indians, grew up on their reservation, speaks their language, never even met another white person until he was an adult (let’s add that for some reason he has unusually dark skin and eyes for a white person, so he didn’t look different from the other Mi’kmaqs and experience an unusual childhood on that basis). When he grows up, he is 100% identical to the other Mi’kmaqs in every way except genetically. Does he count as Mi’kmaq? I don’t know the tribal law on this issue. But common-sensically, if for some reason I have to decide this question - like that the other Mi’kmaqs decided to expel him from the tribe and I have to either sympathize with him or tell him he deserved it - in that case I think he’s pretty Mi’kmaq.
But suppose a genetically Mi’kmaq person was adopted by a white couple in Topeka and raised as a completely normal white child. Suppose she had light skin and never even knew she wasn’t white until she took a genetic test as an adult. Is she a Mi’kmaq? Um. I think if she was trying to “reconnect with her roots”, and felt some kind of deep spiritual attachment to Mi’kmaq culture on that basis, I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.1
I guess this means that maybe I sort of kind of grudgingly accept (3), that race is at least a little bit based on genetics (along with other things).
If that’s true, you could imagine drawing the bounding hypersphere for the category “Native American” in such a way so that Elizabeth Hoover would just barely make it inside based on her lived experience if she had 1/8th Native blood, but is just barely outside (even given the same amount of lived experience) if she doesn’t.
(I like the phrase “Native American hypersphere”. It sounds like something from an Erich von Daniken book.)
And I think, even though in theory we could use genetics, there’s a pretty strong argument for basing it on something like “lived experience”. That argument is: it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test, and “lived experience” is the only potential basis that prevents that.
Suppose you believe in “cultural appropriation”. That means that it’s bad and evil for someone to do too much work within a culture they don’t belong to.
On the other hand, everyone seems to think it’s really valuable to do work within a culture you do belong to. Native Americans who create great specifically-Native-American art and literature, or who open Native American restaurants, or who become leaders and activists within the Native American community, are hailed as heroes. We tell minorities that enhancing the culture and recognition of their specific minority group is one of the most valuable things they can do with their lives. Half of the art world is now minorities talking about the Their-Minority-Group experience.
You see the trap. You spend your whole life building on the culture of your identity group, because that’s what you were told to do. Then you get a 23andMe result and - oops, you weren’t in that group after all. Now retroactively, instead of being a hero, you’re a colonizer and imperialist who needs to be unpersonned to protect your group purity2.
So here’s another trilemma:
Either you stop worrying about cultural appropriation.
Or you stop using a genetic component in whatever definition of race you use to define cultural appropriation.
Or you accept that some well-intentioned people who tried to build art around their identity group will retroactively be vilified as colonizers, through no fault of their own, after their 23andMe results come back.
I definitely support 1 here. I think cultural appropriation is great. It produced a bunch of great works of art and nearly all good food. But I can understand why Native Americans don’t agree with this, and I don’t expect to be able to convince everyone of my position today. So that leaves (2) and (3).
(there’s a missing step here, something like 1.5: maybe people should stop caring about their cultural identity. This is attractive to me when I think about other people. But I place a decent amount of value on being Jewish, enough that if somebody told me that somehow I wasn’t Jewish, I would need to re-evaluate my self-identity at least a little. I don’t want to force other people to do something I wouldn’t go for myself.)
And (3) seems - kind of cruel and horrible. I don’t know, maybe there are exacerbating factors in the Elizabeth Hoover case - she did lie for a while, and maybe there was some sense in which she “should have” always known. But you can imagine a case where there weren’t these factors, and it still seems pretty cruel and horrible.
It also seems unnecessary! Nobody has discovered any gene in the Native American genetic cluster that significantly changes who you are as a person or affects your ability to participate in Native American culture. So using genetics as a basis in her case seems like destroying her life because of a completely meaningless finding.
IV.
I realize the more sensitive among my readers might be worrying that I, as a white person, have no right to criticize the Mi’kmaq Indians’ membership policies. This is a fair concern. But I worry that all of this is white people’s fault.
If I try to imagine why Native Americans care so much about these kinds of things, I come up with two issues:
If any (genetically) white person could choose to identify as an Indian, lots of them would, because Indians are cool. But there are many more white people than Indians, so they would soon outnumber the (genetically) real ones. Even if the white “converts” made some attempt to get the culture and social connections right, they could never get it exactly perfect, and the existence of Indians as a cultural group would be lost.
Natives don’t want other people competing for the limited number of good affirmative action jobs reserved for them, of which “professor of Native American studies” is an especially clear example.
Since they need some criteria to bar entry, and genetics are hard to fake, they use genetics.
In this sense, I suppose that “person’s life is unfairly ruined by a genetic test” is just a member in good standing of the general category of “person’s life is unfairly ruined by some hard-and-fast law”:
Someone does their surveying wrong and builds their casino two feet over the California/Nevada border, and has to demolish it and start over because gambling is illegal in California.
Somebody had a very minor mental health problem when they were young, and now they’re totally better, and they want to join the army, but the army bans people with a history of certain mental health problems.
An 18.001 year old has a relationship with a 17.999 year old (who claimed to be 18) and is prosecuted for statutory rape.
These are all unfair, but they’re all natural consequences of having laws at all, which have to make various trade-offs that reduce the complicated spectrum of fairness into a hard-and-fast “up to this point is okay, but past this point isn’t” binary determination.
I think it’s completely fair that Elizabeth Hoover isn’t allowed to claim membership in any tribe, or get affirmative action benefits (which AFAIK she never officially claimed), or collect money from Indian casinos.
But morality and social norms are supposed to be a different thing from law. In some spheres, it’s more important to have hard-and-fast rules enforced by the government in a supposedly unbiased way; in others, it’s more important to let communities make judgments using their own vague social norms. So it weirds me out to see Elizabeth Hoover’s communities, operating in the exact sphere where they have the most leeway to show kindness and understanding, operating as executioners.
So I admit I judge all of Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who have turned against her. They can legitimately be angry with her for not admitting she was biologically white the moment she figured it out, and for making up fake facts about her tribal heritage after that point. But they should be clear that they're angry at her for lying, not for "being a fake Indian".
(Probably there's some principle of standpoint theory that says that I as a white person am not allowed to judge Mi'kmaq Indians. Fine, far be it from me to challenge standpoint theory. But many of Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who turned against her are white, and I judge those people.)
In particular, I think this is a story about cancel culture. When people talk about the “planet of cops”, they mean that people import some the norms of law - zero tolerance, inability to consider extenuating circumstances, social unity in enforcing brutal punishments - into the sphere of morality, without also importing the other norms of law that make it possible to do those things justly (like independent judges and jurors who aren’t at high risk of being punished for their decisions, or people hammering out what the laws are beforehand).
I don’t know, I don’t have a great conclusion here. I wrote this post because everyone else was mocking Hoover and saying it was great that she was finally “caught”. Unless I’m misinterpreting her story, that doesn’t seem right to me. She seems like someone who’s been victimized by a perfect storm of our culture’s weird beliefs about cultural appropriation, intellectual/artistic focus on racial experience, cancel culture, and affirmative action. Whether or not you usually support these things, this was a unique case where a lot of seemingly-justifiable heuristics came together and destroyed someone’s life for no reason. I don’t know if we can do better, but I hope we think more about how we could.
Another advantage that Jews have over Native Americans is that, being a somewhat unified religion, there’s a conversion process. If someone who had been practicing Judaism their entire life and loved it a lot was unexpectedly found to be halakhically non-Jewish, everyone would give them the easiest conversion process in the world, snip snip and you’re done. You can read the Hoover story as a sort of tragedy caused by the lack of Native Americans having a similar institution.
They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry”.
This is weirdly tolerant (okay, aside from the Jewish conspiracy thing) compared to anyone in the Hoover story. In Bizarro-America, the only people who don’t think people’s value as human beings depends on their genetically-determined race are the white nationalists!
The delightful Stravinsky Fountain has reopened after being closed for many years for renovation. Located across the Centre Pompidou, the fountain was a collaboration between artists Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, who were married. The 16 works were inspired by composer and conductor Igor Stravinsky, and the brightly colored sculptures are by Niki de Saint Phalle and the black mechanical ones were created by Jean Tinguely.
The sculptures represent the Stravinsky musical pieces and are listed below.
The Firebird, The Musical Key of G, The spiral, The Elephant, The Fox, The Frog, The Diagonal, The Death, The Mermaid, The Nightingale, Love, Life, The Heart, The Clown’s Hat, and Ragtime.
Experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens, and much more. In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain,Shopping Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, Emily in Paris tours, and Chocolate and pastry tours.
Tours start at 275 euros for up to 3 people, and 85 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you, my insiders, Paris.
The European Union announced a €7.4 funding package and an upgraded relationship with Egypt on Sunday, part of a push to stem migrant flows to Europe criticised by rights groups.
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Claim (h/t @teortaxestex) “Most blind mathematicians work in geometry and topology. It is argued that the spatial intuition of sighted people is degraded by the triviality of retinal perception.”
2: Italy’sBasilica of the Holy House is supposedly built atop the house where the Virgin Mary raised Jesus. Why is the Virgin Mary’s house in Italy? Supposedly angels carried it there from Israel just before the Saracens’ final victory over the Crusaders. Sounds suspicious, but the house in the Basilica appears to be a genuine 1st century Palestinian dwelling. One theory: it was shipped to Italy by the Angelos family, and the angels story was a later mistranslation.
3: A surprising puzzle from @finmoorhouse: “Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface. You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country. What is the first country you hit?” Answer here.
5: Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle. In 2002, Ethiopia was the poorest country in Africa, but since then it's grown at 9%/year for twenty years, even as the rest of the continent languishes. Yaw tells a familiar story; Ethiopia was taken over by communists in the 70s, they caused mass starvation, but after they were overthrown the country shot up the development ladder. We can add them to the list of other successful ex-communist or liberalized-communist countries like Poland, China, and Vietnam. What’s the common factor? Plausibly land reform. The communists redistributed the land, this didn't help when the country was still under communism, but liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination. In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity". Ethiopia did other things right, but the land reform seems like the one that separates it from every other lower-income country trying to get on the development ladder.
6: It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart - BPodgursky’s defense of polygenic selection. This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication. BPodgursky’s counterargument is that this goes badly if the economy collapses and medications become less accessible. This is surely true, but seems like only a very weak argument compared to “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?” I’m honestly weirded out that we have to make this argument at all; still, it seems like we do, and BPodgursky does a good job.
7: Related: Awais Aftab has a new post about polygenic screening and how likely it is to perform up to its advertised standard in reducing schizophrenia risk. My response here.
8: @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals - plagiarism isn’t that important on its own, but “since copy-pasting is already against the rules, and is highly legible and verifiable, it seems like a relatively easy thing to enforce to get rid of the laziest and/or most incompetent >1% of the literature and the field.”
Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA
Fertility rates in China and Taiwan have reduced at similar rates over the past 50 years, suggesting that China’s one-child policy didn’t have a significant effect on curbing its population growth.
The median age in Niger is 14.9.
In the UK, more than half of crimes are estimated to be caused by alcohol consumption.
10: Claim: psi effects have not declined - studies trying to detect ESP find just as much of it today (with our greater attention to methodological rigor) as they did decades ago (h/t Rolf Degen)
11:George Psalmanazar (1679 - 1763) was “a Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa (today Taiwan) to visit Europe”. He explained away his white skin by saying that Taiwanese people lived underground. Psalmanazar invented an incredibly elaborate fake Taiwanese language, mythology, and custom, and was briefly an 18th-century-England viral sensation. Eventually some people who had actually been to Taiwan called his bluff, he confessed, and he settled down as a writer and theologian, befriending Samuel Johnson and other British intellectuals.
12: Did you know: by a 52-48 margin, black people approve of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to ban affirmative action at universities. Big age gap; older black people are mostly against, younger mostly for. But there’s some reason to think that many of them didn’t entirely understand the ruling and thought it banned pro-white racism or something; a majority of young black adults think the decision will make it easier for blacks to attend university.
13: Claim: venture capital firm A16Z testified to the British House of Lords that AI interpretability has been “resolved” and the logic behind AI decisions is now fully transparent. No AI researcher would support this claim (despite some recent promising first steps), suggesting A16Z either doesn’t understand even the very basics of the field it’s investing in, or else that they’re committing perjury. Zvi discusses here, CTRL+F “The Quest For Sane Regulations”.
14: Nongqawuse (born 1841) was a prophetess of the Xhosa people (related to Zulus, South Africa). When she was 15, she claimed the spirits told the Xhosa to kill all their cattle as a sacrifice; in exchange, they would bring utopia and drive away the encroaching British. The Xhosa believed her and killed all their cattle. In the ensuing famine, 75,000 out of 100,000 Xhosa died, and the British easily took over their territory.
15: A story about Khruschev (h/t @JackTindale, taken from The Soviet Sixties):
When Khruschev addressed a crowd of several hundred thousand people in the Uzbek capital Tashkent during December 1955, he got himself in an unseemly muddle. He opened by mistakenly calling his audience "Tajiks" and noting how well they were now doing in growing cotton, compared to their neighbors the Uzbeks. An aide eventually managed to tell him that he was, in fact, talking to Uzbeks rather than Tajiks. As was his way, Khrushchev tried to ride out the faux pas in style, telling the audience he had misspoken on purpose, in order to test their reaction, and then expressing his happiness that they had responded correctly to his joke.
17: There’s a verse in Chesterton’s Lepanto where he describes the ascended spiritual Mohammed as having a “turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas”. If you’ve ever wondered what that would look like, I recommend this StableDiffusion video by Herolias (warning: flashy, might be bad for epilepsy, you might have to go very close and/or very far from your computer to get the full effect). I recommend pausing mid-video to see how innocuous each frame looks on its own).
19: Claim: nine people in a family in Scotland have a mutation in the RIMS1 gene, which makes them go blind in their twenties and also apparently adds 20 IQ points. Large single-gene effects on IQ are not supposed to exist, but it’s theoretically possible that a rare mutation with a big downside could do it. I’m still a little skeptical, because this seems trivial enough that evolution should have found a way to do it without the blindness by now. But at least on a superficial reading the paper looks good.
20: Related: Sebastian Jensen at CSPI looks into the dysgenic hypothesis: are we getting dumber because more intelligent people are less likely to have children? Answer: this is happening more in poorer countries, less in richer ones. IQ decline per decade “ranges from as low as 0.01 points in the Estonia and Switzerland to 0.65 points in Panama, Romania, and North Macedonia”. USA is 0.38, which I think agrees with other estimates, although realistically immigration effects will dominate. “The fact that the rate of decline is so fast implies that even if IQ differences between nations are completely environmentally determined today, over the coming decades there may still be a significant [genetic] divergence between them.”
21 The Crash At Crush: In 1896, a railroad company decided to get rid of its spare trains by crashing them into each other at top speed as a “public spectacle”. What could go wrong? “Unexpectedly, the impact caused both engine boilers to explode, resulting in a shower of flying debris that killed two people and caused numerous injuries among the spectators.” And one for the nominative determinism bucket - the event was coordinated by Mr. William Crush.
22: Congrats to ACX commenter TracingWoodgrains, who has made a significant contribution to a national news story by finding new information on the FAA’s attempt to discriminate in favor of black air traffic control applicants. The FAA deprioritized a standardized test in favor of a “biographical questionnaire” - For example, you got zero points for having previous air traffic experience, but lots of points if you said your worst grades in high school were in science, or that you’d been unemployed for the past three years. Hundreds of qualified applicants who got top grades in the supposedly FAA-endorsed education system for air traffic controllers were turned away in favor of people who gave the “right” answers to the biographical questions, plausibly because these covertly selected by race. Then in addition to this they gave black organizations “keywords” that they could tell their members to get their resumes to the top of the pile.
24: The first case reports of cadaver-to-human transmission of Alzheimer’s Disease. In the mid-20th-century, the standard treatment for dwarfism was ground up pituitary gland from the brain of a dead person. Scientists have now found that dwarfs who got pituitaries from dead people with Alzheimers developed very early Alzheimers themselves, often in their 40s. I already knew Alzheimers involved misfolded proteins, so this shouldn’t have been surprising, but I still somehow failed to think of it as a prion disease. This shows that misfolded proteins are sufficient to cause Alzheimers (with a 30 year delay? Sure, I guess, maybe that’s how long it takes a prion to spread). I’m not sure what’s left of the Alzheimers origin debate. Should we just assume that this is a protein that tends to go prion-y after enough time, or is there more to discover?
26: Did you know: lots of religions have their own version of LEGO, usually with sets depicting their mythology or temples. Islam has Muslim Blocks, Hinduism has Indic Bricks, and Judaism has Binyan Blocks. But my favorite is Mormonism with - wait for it - Brick’em Young (h/t @seanw_m)
29: Two great essays on organ donation laws recently, The Fitzwilliam’s Organ Donation Law: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Works In Progress’ Compensating Compassion. The Fitzwilliam’s focuses on an underwhelming new Irish law, and also tells the author’s story (he tried to donate a kidney, but got rejected for being too young - he was in his twenties - which is one I’ve never heard before). Works In Progress surveys laws around the world; I’m especially interested in Israel’s approach (written up by MR here), which says that people who previously agreed to donate after their death get priority for organs when alive.
30: This is pretty obvious but at least we have numbers for it now:
…I said it was pretty obvious, like it’s a law of nature, but maybe that’s not true? Republicans thought they were winning as recently as 2020; Democrats were very close to thinking it in 2016. So you could also make an argument that whichever side doesn’t have the President thinks they’re losing, up until the Biden administration, when Democrats decided they were losing even though they had Biden. But Republicans thought they were losing until halfway into the Trump administration, then changed their minds, even though the Dems won the House that year. Why?
32: Which Movies Popularized Or Tarnished Baby Names: A Statistical Analysis. Daniel Parris finds that most big movies increase the popularity of the names of their main characters. It’s very hard to find cases where a negative portrayal of a character decreases popularity of a name, and in fact even very negative portrayals tend to increase it: “Damien”, “Freddy”, and “Lolita” went up after The Omen, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Lolita, respectively. This is in contrast to real-life bad press, which does decrease names’ popularity - for example, “Monica” went way down after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
33: Asimov Press: Scaling Phage Therapy. One of this year’s ACX Grants went to a phage research group, and I mentioned the contrast between the years of research on phages with generally good results and the limited clinical applications. This piece tells more of the story: bacteriophages do work, but they’re usually hyperspecialized to specific strains of bacteria, and it’s hard to keep a giant library of thousands of phage types around and then match whatever bacterium your patient has to the right phage. Still, people are working on it and the tech is gradually advancing.
34: Mass Disabling Event Denial: we’ve talked before about how you would expect Long COVID to be causing a lot more problems than we hear about, and so either Long COVID is overhyped, or we’re bad at hearing about things. This article argues for the latter, suggesting that the disability data look exactly like they would if Long COVID was a huge and growing problem, and for some reason it’s just being ignored:
35: List Of Things Unexpectedly Named After People. Baker’s chocolate was named after its inventor, Walter Baker. Main Street, San Francisco was named after shipping magnate Charles Main. And so on.
36: Claim: a study finds that completely anonymous comments sections are bad for discourse, real-name comments sections are better, and consistent-pseudonym comments sections (like Substack) are best of all! It doesn’t surprise me that consistent-pseudonym comments are no worse than real-name ones, but I don’t understand why they would be better, and I don’t feel like this link really explains it.
37: Did you know: Matt Taibbi used to play professional baseball in Uzbekistan - and, after that, professional basketball in Mongolia.
Iranians in the comments chiming in to say this matches their experience. Also, notice the 7.7% Zoroastrian! Official Iranian numbers say there are about 25K Zoroastrians in Iran, but this suggests more like 7 million! This Wiki article suggests that the 25K are ancestral Zoroastrians, and the other 6.975 million are people who are “expressing Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith”.
41: How bad is it to marry a cousin? New study suggests offspring of cousin marriages live on average three years less than expected.
42: A while ago I discussed the “scientific search engine” Consensus; I expressed skepticism that you could make it work without AIs that were good at natural language. Now it’s a few years later, we have AIs that are good at natural language, and Consensus has incorporated them. So how’s it going? I asked it whether SSRIs are safe during pregnancy. It said:
SSRIs usually are an option during pregnancy . . . risks include high blood pressure for the pregnant person and premature birth. These risks are small. Your health care team watches for them during your prenatal care. Most studies show that SSRIs aren't linked with birth defects. But an SSRI called paroxetine (Paxil) might slightly raise the risk of heart defects in babies when used during the first trimester.
I think the Mayo Clinic summary is much better. I’m still not at a point where I would use Consensus without checking its answers carefully.
43: New meta-analysis claims that exercise is at least as effective as SSRIs against depression (study, popular article). But Cremieux digs deeper and finds some of the included studies have effect sizes between 5 and 12, too large to possibly be real (he describes this as “like the effect size of taking a punch to the face on having a hurt jaw”). He thinks he’s identified some major coding errors that might be influencing the result.
44: You’ve probably heard of Jeanne Calment, oldest person ever. Maybe you’ve even heard that some people think the documents were fudged and her record is fraudulent. Now there’s a similar conflict over the oldest dog ever, whose 31 year lifespan so outclassed the previous record-holder (23 years) that the Guinness Book Of World Records will be investigating his title.
45: You’ve probably seen this, but: Nat Friedman announces that a team has won his competition to start decoding an ancient Roman library buried during the Vesuvius eruption. The first text seems to be a work by the philosopher Philodemus on the pleasures of life. In theory the buried library could hold more classical text than the total existing classical corpus (although much of it will be copies of works we already have).
46: Did you know: the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India. I’m not sure what to think upon learning this. Obviously Gaza’s main problems aren’t economic, and being invaded and bombed is bad no matter how good your economy is. But I also had a sense that Gaza was a uniquely bad economic basketcase even before the recent war. How good a measure is GDP when a country is under severe sanctions? What about when one country is mostly rural and the other mosty urban? Or is this just another case of Westerners being unable to comprehend the scale of suffering caused by ordinary global poverty?
The island of Andaman, off Taprobana, lies with the terrafirma between the east and west, and opposite it Paigu, between north and south. This island with its Andamanians has a circumference of about 500 miles; it is inhabited by an idolatrous, cruel people given to the use of spells and magic. Many say that on this island there is a lake in which, if you immerse iron, it becomes gold. I say this just to do justice to the testimony of many people.
49: Which branches of psychology are becoming more or less popular over time? (h/t @PsychoSchmitt) I think this is percent of published psychologists whose Google Scholar profiles mention working in a certain field:
Experimental psychology (and psychoanalysis) going way down, cognitive neuroscience going way up.
50:
51: Sotonye Jack, along with his other writing, interviews interesting people in tech, blogging, and academia. This month he interviewed me.
52: According to NYT, during his time in prison Sam Bankman-Fried has tried to convince the guards to buy the Solana cryptocurrency. In fairness to him, it’s gone up in value about 10x since his arrest. That means there’s some prison guard who got a hot tip from SBF to put his net worth in Solana, laughed because of course you don’t take investing advice from SBF, and then had to watch while as it dectupled in price over the next year.
53: @SilverVVulpes on the original response to in vitro fertilization - “magazines were calling it the biggest threat since the atom bomb”:
54: Eric Drexler’s 2019 report Reframing Superintelligence is one of the works of AI futurism that’s aged the best in our current LLM era, and I give him lots of credit for his successful prediction. Now he has a new AI futurism blog on Substack, AI Prospects.
55: …and if these aren’t enough links for you, you can find another seventy-odd links at Zvi’s February links post.