archy

The Halle unicorn

2013-05-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

In the southern parts of the German speaking lands the earth produced amazing things. It was not uncommon for brewers, storing their beer in cool caves, to come across the skulls of enormous bears or miners to bring up pieces of brown coal with the images of leaves miraculously pressed into them. In 1577 an oak tree near Luzern was knocked over in a storm and beneath its roots were revealed bones which the famous surgeon Felix Platter asserted were those of a man nineteen feet tall. In 1605 a horn of extraordinary size and beauty was discovered in the ground near the Free City of Halle in Swabia.

The horn could have been sold. There were many buyers for such oddities. This was not an unusual fate for something unique. Many churches had collections of unusual objects that were brought out on holy days to impress the parishioners with God's majestic and mysterious ways. In time, weather and handling would destroy such objects--there was a moral lesson in that, too. The Halle horn was different. Some cleric or town father decided that it was special enough that they arranged for a permanent display; it was placed in a frame of iron that was hoisted up high in the church of St. Michael above the town market. There, no one could damage it.

The Halle horn. Source.

Near the frame, they posted a poem:

Tausend Sechshundert und Fünff Jahr,
Den Dreyzehend Febuarii ich gefunden war,
Bey Neubronn an dem Hällischen Land,
Um Bühler Fluss zur lincken Hand,
Samt grossen Knochen und lang Gebein,
Sag Lieber, was Arth ich mag seyn.

One thousand six hundred and five years,
The thirteenth of February I was found,
At Neubronn in the Hall country,
On the left bank of the Bühler River,
With me were large bones and long bones,
Tell me dear, what might I be.

I doubt that it was a serious question with big cash prizes. The poem was just a bit of fun. The frame made clear what the correct answer was. It was a unicorn horn.

In those years, the learned men of Europe had begun questioning the reality of the unicorn as an animal. No one had ever seen or captured a unicorn. Biblical and Classical scholars questioned whether the word unicorn in ancient texts really meant the same thing as the animal pictured in Medieval bestiaries. Dutch and Portuguese travellers brought back descriptions of the rhinoceros, an animal that could convincingly be argued to have been the source of the legends.

What was less questioned was the existence of the substance called unicorn horn. No apothecary's kit was complete with out a good supply of powdered unicorn horn. It had 1001 uses. The most important was as a protection against and an antidote to poison. Although the heyday of Renaissance poisoning was past, anyone who was anyone still had someone who wanted them dead and it was better to be safe than dead. Over the years, many substances had been marketed as real unicorn horn. Unscrupulous doctors had been
known to grind up teeth and bones and even chalk and market it as the real thing. The learned professors were not sure what true unicorn horn was. Some said it was the strangely twisted tooth of a kind of whale found near Greenland and Iceland. Others said it was a kind of subterranean ivory called "unicornu fossili" or "ebur fossili" that was dug up in southern Germany. You can guess which position was favored in around Swabian Halle.

Taking all that into consideration, maybe the riddle was serious as well as playful. Look again at the frame. The two unicorns in the ironwork have long thin and straight horns as different as possible from the wide horn that curls around them. Maybe the unicorns are not the answer but, rather, a hint. The correct answer is not "a unicorn's horn;" it's "unicorn horn." The medicinal properties of unicorn horn are acknowledged by the metaphorical figure on the right who holds the Rod of Asclepius, the serpent encircled baton that symbolizes healing. The allegorical figure to the left of the horn holds a celestial sphere, possibly signifying the astrological element that was still believed to be an important part of healing.*

The horn was still there over a century later. St Michaels survived a siege during the Thirty Years War and it survived two major city fires that destroyed over a third of the city. During the rebuilding that followed the fire of 1728, many pieces of unicornu fossile were dug up. This got Friedrich Hoffman, a professor at the university and the German who identified German measles, thinking about the ivory. By Hoffman's time the belief in the medicinal power of unicornu fossili was on it's way out.

When he wrote down his thoughts a few years after the fire, Hoffman was writing the final chapter on unicorn horn. He wrote a review of the literature of the previous century and gave himself the task of figuring out just what unicornu fossili had been. His conclusion was that it had been many things. He was inclined to think much of it had been jokes of nature, objects formed inside the earth that mimicked the appearance of bones, shells, and human artifacts. He also concluded that some real elephant ivory had been found in Germany and elsewhere Ernst Tenzel had identified beyond any doubt the skeleton of an elephant found at Burgtonna thirty years earlier. The ivory found in Russia called "mammont" was also most likely from elephants. And, despite it's extreme curve, he was sure the horn in St. Michael's was also an elephant's tusk.

The Michaelskirche Mammutzahn today. Source.

The church of St. Michael has survived three more centuries. Though the industrial revolution mostly bypassed Halle and thousands of her citizens emigrated, the church was never allowed to fall into disrepair. Even though the Allies bombed the nearby rail station and Luftwaffe base, the old town was mostly spared. Today tourism helps maintain the church. And the horn is still there. Though it is clarly a mommoth horn. the town hasn't given up on its unicorn heritage. Halle is home to a American style football team. The name of the team is the Unicorns.

* If anyone can help with the other two symbols or any other aspects of the allegorical figures, let me know.

Sylvia Browne is the worst person in the world

2013-05-07T11:33:00.000-07:00

I think the story of the three women in Cleveland who were rescued after ten years of captivity is pretty wonderful in a "wonderful relief after being pretty horrible" sort of way. In looking for some instant background to fill out their stories, most of the press has mentioned the fact that Amada Berry's mother died a few years after she vanished, brokenhearted, believing her daughter was dead. If they had followed that sideline a little further they would have discovered a truly disgusting element in it.

Like any parent, Louwana Miller was desperate for any news about her daughter, any tiny glimmer of hope. When all the authorities could tell he was that they were still hunting, she eventually turned to less orthodox sources for information and encouragement. A year and a half after Amanda's disappearance Louwana Miller appeared on an episode of Montel Williams’ syndicated talk show with the self-proclaimed psychic, Sylvia Browne. In front of the live and broadcast audiences, Browne told Miller, "She’s not alive, honey."

Miller was devastated She took down her daughter's pictures, cleaned out her room, and gave away many of her belongings. When she died a few years later, her friends said it was of a broken heart.

Browne is a complete and utter fraud. Every year she plays the odds by predicting that some Hollywood couple will have marital problems and that there be hurricanes during the hurricane season, along with some other vague predictions. At the beginning of the following year, she cherry picks the two or three things she guessed right and announces them as proof of her amazing powers. Most of the time, this is pretty harmless entertainment. Other times it's a cruel deception. This was one of those times.

Browne was, once again, playing the odds. In the majority of cases, abductees are killed within a few days of their disappearance The longer they are missing, the closer the odds of their safe return approach zero. Missing teenagers are often runaways and can turn up months or years later. But, the abduction Gina DeJesus from the same location a year later made it extremely likely that she had been the victim of a serial killer and that both women had been raped, killed, and buried in shallow graves. Browne played the odds. In this case, she could be confident that time would prove her guess correct, that her bluntness could be portrayed as a tough love type of kindness in telling Amanda's mother to stop mourning and get on with her life.

This time, Browne's gamble didn't pay off. She needs to pay the casino and she needs pay big. Sylvia Browne is not just a fraud, she's a callous and cruel fraud and needs to be labeled as such. Today, Sylvia Browne is the worst person in the world.

MiniScopes: Oklahoma is not OK edition

2013-05-06T11:15:00.001-07:00

This one is less of a debunking than it is picking apart a FaceBook meme. A conservative friend in Alaska put this one up today. It's supposed to be showing how Oklahoma is a conservative paradise. I was halfway through it before I realized the writer's purpose wasn't showing how Oklahoma is a conservative nuthouse for us to point at and laugh.

Oklahoma is the only state that Obama did not win even one county in the last election... While everyone is focusing on Arizona’s new law, look what Oklahoma has been doing!!!!
An update from Oklahoma:

Arizona? I thought we were all still focussed on Boston and terrorism. I guess I wasn't paying that much attention this week. Which Arizona law? The "No Gun Left Behind" bill or some other? There are so many dumb Arizona laws to focus on these days. Oh well. Once more into the breach my friends!

Oklahoma law passed, 37 to 9 an amendment to place the Ten Commandments on the front entrance to the state capitol. The feds in D.C., along with the ACLU, said it would be a mistake. Hey this is a conservative state, based on Christian values...! HB 1330. Guess what.......... Oklahoma did it anyway.

This has been ruled unconstitutional over and over and will cost the taxpayers of Oklahoma hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of dollars to find out that it's still unconstitutional.

Oklahoma recently passed a law in the state to incarcerate all illegal immigrants, and ship them back to where they came from unless they want to get a green card and become an American citizen. They all scattered. HB 1804. This was against the advice of the Federal Government, and the ACLU, they said it would be a mistake. Guess what.......... Oklahoma did it anyway.

This will be completely unworkable and expensive to attempt. How exactly are they going to deport all the "illegal immigrants" they round up? Oklahoma law ends at the Oklahoma state line. They'll need federal help to move their prisoners any further. Oh, I suppose Rick Perry might agree to ship them across Texas and dump them in Mexico. I suppose Mexico would have to repatriate Mexican citizens. What about non-Mexicans? Rick Perry is not going to let Oklahoma dump them is Texas. Without federal help, they're not going to ship them any further than one of the surrounding red states. Does the new law suppose the taxpayers of Oklahoma will spring for tickets to fly each prisoner back to his or her home country? And, while we're on the subject of cost, where will they incorporate all their prisoners? They're going to need to build some new jails.

Recently we passed a law to include DNA samples from any and all illegal's (sic) to the Oklahoma database, for criminal investigative purposes. Pelosi said it was unconstitutional SB 1102

They might be able to get around the constitutional right to privacy if they take the time to try and convict each prisoner, which would be expensive and time consuming. And, no matter how low the cost of DNA testing becomes, it will always cost something.

Several weeks ago, we passed a law, declaring Oklahoma as a Sovereign state, not under the Federal Government directives. Joining Texas, Montana and Utah as the only states to do so.
More states are likely to follow: Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Carolina's (sic), Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi and Florida. Save your confederate money, it appears the South is about to rise up once again. HJR 1003

Oh boy, nullification and a threat of secession. Didn't we fight a civil war over this? Wasn't Oklahoma on the losing side in that one? (Spoiler: Yes and Yes) Assuming we don't choose to bomb them into submission (again), how good for their economy is it going to be when the Union removes all of its military bases, fires all the federal employees, and bills Oklahoma for its share of the national debt?

The federal Government has made bold steps to take away our guns. Oklahoma, a week ago, passed a law confirming people in this state have the right to bear arms and transport them in their vehicles. I'm sure that was a setback for the criminals The Liberals didn't like it -- But....Guess what........... Oklahoma did it anyway.

What "bold steps to take away [your] guns"? The toothless background check amendment that didn't pass? The right to bear arms is still protected by the Constitution and doesn't need extra state laws to stay that way. Without a new Constitutional amendment, the most aggressive thing we liberals can do is debate just what the existing Second Amendment means and what reasonable limits can be placed on it. And both are legitimate subjects of debate.

Just this month, the state has voted and passed a law that ALL drivers’ license exams will be printed in English, and only English, and no other language. They have been called racist for doing this, but the fact is that ALL of the road signs are in English only. If you want to drive in Oklahoma, you must read and write English. Really simple.

Go outside and look at some traffic signs. The great majority of them are either symbols or place names. Every license exam I've ever seen requires prospective drivers to know the signs. Its not that hard for non-English speakers to learn to recognize a few dozen phrases without being fluent in English. I can read the menus well enough to order in a dozen languages even though I can only speak English. You don't want us to call it racist? Fine, we'll call it xenophobic, nativist, or any other synonym for bigoted. If the sheet fits, wear it.

By the way, the Liberals don't like any of this either
Guess what...who cares... Oklahoma is doing it anyway.
If you like it, pass it on, if you don't then delete it...Thanks
Guess what: the people I'm sending this to will send it on. Well, at least the ones who love and believe in freedom will.

It must be nice to live in a state with enough money laying around that they can take on the extra expenses of attempting to carry out these laws and fight the inevitable court challenges. But....Guess what........... They don't have money laying around. Oklahoma is just another deadbeat red state. For every dollar the pay to federal government, they take $1.36 (2005 figures). Who pays the difference? We liberal producers in the blue states have to subsidize the lazy moochers in the red states.

At least it must be nice to live in a state where all the state's problems are solved giving the legislature free time to waste passing unenforceable, unworkable, unconstitutional, and mostly symbolic laws.

It's amazing how much the modern conservative movement is based on spite. Just last week, a study was released showing that conservatives will be less likely to buy something, that they would otherwise have bought, if you say it's good for the environment Reread the Oklahoma bragging points again; almost all of them list offending someone--the ACLU, the feds, pelosi, liberals--as a positive point. No matter how wrong headed an idea is, if they think it will offend some imaginary liberal, they're for it. Along with refusing to accept that they lost the last election, spite is one of their primary motivations.

I will give the writer one thing, he or she is not so lacking in self-awareness that they'll claim to be American patriots or "constitutional conservatives." They are neither. Spite is more important than either of those ideas. They are perfectly happy to celebrate unconstitutional actions and even suggest treason if it means getting their way and offending liberal strawmen.

Let me suggest a new slogan for them: Oklahoma--We'll wipe our butts with the Constitution if we think it will offend a liberal.

Book update

2013-04-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

After lots of procrastination and fussing, I finally sent off the book proposal last night. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or terrified at the moment.

The CSA constitution in light of the secession ordinances

2013-04-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

Over the last four years, conservatives have tried to own the constitution, just as they have for the last half century owned the flag and patriotism. And, once again, liberals are making a monstrous mistake by not fighting for it. Liberals also love and support the constitution. That we interpret it differently than conservatives does not mean we do not believe in it.

I read the Constitution. I keep a little one right here on the desk next to a copy of Archy and Mehitabel. These are the only books on the desk. I also read other constitutions. A few years back I went through all the state constitutions to see what they said about religious rights. Every so often I read the Confederate Constitution. Like the secession ordinances, it's a very interesting view into what was important to them at the time they seceded.

Let's review the secession ordinances. Five of the eleven seceding states gave reasons for doing so. Those states were South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Texas and Arkansas. The one reason they all agreed on was that the victory of the Republicans in the recent election made them sure that abolitionists would use the power of the state to end slavery. The next most common complaint was that the northern states refused to enforce fugitive slave laws. Three states specifically cited slavery being excluded from most of the western Territories. Two were upset that Black men were allowed to vote in the North. Arkansas was upset that slave owners were prevented from bringing their slaves with them when traveling in the North and Texas was upset that the federal government didn't do enough to prevent Indian attacks.

All this is preface to the Confederate Constitution. These were the immediate stated reasons for secession. Surely, there were other, broader issues that they cared about? Yes, there were. That's still true today. Different regions have different priorities. Depending on the makeup of their populations, their economies, and and their geographic positions, some things will matter more than others. The Confederate Constitution reflects what mattered to the slave-holding states in 1861. Today, I'll talk about how the Confederate Constitution dealt with their grievances over slavery. In the next installation of Treason Appreciation Month, I'll look at what it has to say about big government and states' rights.

How did the Confederate States of America get their constitution? The United States Constitution was the result of months of deliberation by some of the greatest minds of the thirteen states and tested by more months of public debate before being ratified. That's not how the Confederates did it. In fact, their Constitution was an afterthought.

On January 11, 1861, Alabama was the fourth state to secede. While the previous three secession ordinances speak only for their specific states and the immediate moment. Alabama's ordinance envisioned a common front among all slave states, whether for defense, negotiation, or other purposes. By resolution, Alabama invited all of the slave states to meet in Montgomery on February 4 "for the purpose of consulting with each other as to the most effectual mode of securing concerted and harmonious action in whatever measures may be deemed most desirable for our common peace and security." When the convention met, they were pretty much decided on forming a new federation and promptly empowered a committee to write a constitution. They gave them two days to do so. Fortunately, one of the members of the committee already had a constitution in his pocket and by the due date they had completed the task and already had copies to pass around the convention.

Considering the short work involved, it should surprise no one that the Confederate Constitution is nothing more than a revision of the Union Constitution. They did not begin anew from first principles; they simply changed those parts they didn't like. The easiest change they made was to go through and change the word "United" into "Confederate" wherever it appeared.

Next, they added God. Today, it's common wisdom among Christian nationalists that the founding fathers intended the US to be a Christian nation. They just, uh, forgot to mention that when they wrote the Constitution or when they wrote that amendment about established religion. What did the good Christians of the Bible belt do to fix this? I think most modern Christian nationalists would say "not enough." To the Preamble, they added, "invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God." Where dates were mentioned, they used the form "year of our Lord." Other than that, they gave squat to Christianity. The First Amendment was carried over unchanged into their Constitution.

What else did they change? There are a number of line by line comparisons on the internet. That's the best way to go. The first time I read the Confederate Constitution was in a paperback book of Civil War documents published in the seventies with brackets and fonts to indicate what the Confederates kept, added, changed, and deleted. It was fascinating, but it took a lot of close attention and note-taking to understand. The internet version I most often go to these days is this one. I like the simple two-column comparison with a third column for comments.

The Confederate Constitution is very clear on the issues of slavery. Whereas the US Constitution never uses the word "slave"--using instead circumlocutions like "Persons bound to Service--the Confederate Constitution makes clear exactly what they mean by using the word "slave" whenever they mean slave. As far as the issue of slavery is concerned, the most important clause in the entire constitution is in the list of things Congress cannot do: Article I, section 9, part 4, "No ... law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." The common complaint in the secession ordinances was that they feared the Republicans would attempt to use the power of the central to abolish slavery. This clause puts that fear to rest. Three of the other complaints are specifically dealt with.

The US Constitution already had a clause dealing with with fugitive slaves (Art. IV, Sec. 2, Pt. 1). The complaint of the southern states was that the northern states refused to enforce it. This should not have been a problem in the Confederacy, unless non-slave states were admitted at some date in the future. Their only changes to the clause were to make it more clear and emphatic.

Arkansas' complaint that slave owners were prevented from bringing their slaves with them when traveling in other states was dealt with in a very clear manner. Article IV, Section 2, Part 1, which in the US Constitution reads "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States..." was changed by the addition of "...and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired." Again, this should not have been a problem in the Confederacy, unless non-slave states were admitted. The final clause prevents any kind of shenanigans whatsoever.

The issue of taking in additional states was something that the architects of the Confederacy had on their minds. Pro-South groups existed throughout the West. If the secession crisis had happened a year later, there might very well have been a friendly territory carved out of southern California. After the shooting started, the leaders of the main tribes in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) agreed to join the Confederacy. Rather that go east to fight the Union, Texas sent part of its armies west where they created a territory called Arizona. The Confederate Constitution kept the the same provisions as the US Constitution that allowed the central government to administer territory not belonging to any individual state, to organize territorial governments, and to admit territories as new states (Art. IV, Sec. 3). Naturally, a new clause was added that required all territories to allow slave owners to bring their slaves and guaranteed that all new states would be slave states. one unexplained difference between the two constitutions it that the Confederate Constitution required a two-thirds majority in congress to admit a new state while the US only required a simple majority.

The final complaint in the secession ordinances was that northern states allowed free Black men full citizenship, including the vote*. One of the clauses of the Amendment offered by Arkansas to save the Union was that freedmen in other states be disenfrancised. South Carolina cited racial equality in the North as one of the insults suffered by the South. Texas indignantly proclaimed that it was an "undeniable truth that the governments of the various States ... were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity." While the other complaints were dealt with in a very specific manner, this one is not.

Since the reason for the secessions and the formation of the Confederacy was the preservation of a system of race-based subjugation it's curious that nothing is said in the Confederate Constitution about limiting citizenship, or the vote, or anything to just the White race. The word "White" never appears. Did they think it was too obvious to mention? That would be an odd thing to think. All of the revisions made to the Constitution relating to slavery, were made to make explicit things they believed understood by all that had been interpreted by the rest of the Union in ways that hurt slave owners. How difficult would it have been to shove in a sentence that said only White folk could become citizens and exercise the rights of citizenship. Perhaps, to them, it was so obvious that they didn't think to mention it.

Next: Big Government, States' Rights, and the Rest of the Confederate Constitution.

* I was always under the impression that Louisiana Freemen did have the right to vote. Does anyone know the details on this?

Shetland mammoths were bigger than shetland ponies

2013-04-07T16:19:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, some surveyors in the Shetland Islands north of Scotland came across an interesting piece of bone. It was about a foot in length, thick, curved and broken at both ends. They thought it might be a piece of walrus tusk, but it was unusual enough that they took it to Val Turner, the island archaeologist. Turner is not a paleontologist, but she knew enough to realize this was not a walrus tusk. She bundled it up and sent it to the Paleontology Museum of Uppsala University in Sweden.

Based on the nature of this blog, I'm sure you can all guess what it is. If I was there I could have told them in less than a minute that it was a piece of tusk from a proboscid, and determined whether it was from a mammoth or a modern elephant (the trick is to look at something called Schreger lines). That is what Uppsala told Turner.

Why is this a big deal? Sections of mammoth ivory are found all over the North and this one is a pretty ratty looking piece. What makes this piece unique and explains Turner's inability to identify is that no evidence of mammoths has ever been seen on the Shetlands.

The islands were completely buried under the ice during the last glacial maximum. Because so much water was locked up in the ice caps the oceans were several hundred feet lower during the glacial maxima. Britain was attached to the mainland and most of the North Sea was dry (or ice covered land). Mammoth ivory is fairly common in England and Ireland and trawlers regularly bring up mammoth bones and ivory from the sea.

This brings up two possibilities to explain the ivory. First, is that a small population of mammoths established themselves on the islands after the ice melted, but before the ocean had risen to its current level. Second, is that this is a piece of ivory washed up from the North Sea during a storm. Hurricane force storms are not uncommon in those parts.

For now, the Shetland Amenity Trust has closed the area where the tusk was found. This week, experts from Uppsala arrived to hunt for other mammoth bones. I'll be watching for follow-up news.

Reading is fundamental

2013-04-06T20:53:00.000-07:00

Speaking of reading core documents, reading your job description is always a good idea. This is from the Oklahoma Democrats page.

Below is an email exchange that was a call for help from State Rep. James Lockhart (D) – Heavener who requested help from his colleagues at the Oklahoma State Capitol, but was greeted with an extremely anti-education response from Rep. Mike Reynolds (R) – Oklahoma City.

Lockhart to Reynolds
Subject: Re: Our brightest students…..

No but we sure give out tax credits to a lot of companies that I question whether or not they actually need them. Over 5 billion each year!

What we are seeing is the first generation of Americans who will earn less than the previous, be less educated, earn less and have less access to healthcare.

Basically we are doing a poor job of improving the lives of the people we represent. That is pretty clear in the fact that most people think we either don’t care about them or are unable to do something about improving their standard of living.

I am here to try to improve the quality of life of the average person in however small a way possible.

I would suggest you do the same

The answer, sent a day later:

It is not our job to see that anyone gets an education. It is not the responsibility of me, you, or any constituent in my district to pay for his or any other persons (sic) education. Their GPA, ACT ASAB, determination have nothing to do with who is responsible. Their potential to benefit society is irrelevant.

It's not the legislature's job to see that anyone gets an education. Hmmm. Let's look at the OK constitution and see if he's right.

Section XIII-1: Establishment and maintenance of public schools.

The Legislature shall establish and maintain a system of free public schools wherein all the children of the State may be educated.

What do you want to bet he calls himself a "constitutional conservative."

It's Treason Appreciation Month

2013-04-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

Or, as they call it in the Old South, Confederate Heritage and History Month. There is enough in this topic for a full month of posts (at my speed, that could mean three). Let's start by looking at the article that alerted me to this. John Avlon, a southerner by birth, wrote a good piece over at The Daily Beast. After receiving a press release from the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrating the month, Avalon became curious enough to call their PR person, Ray McBerry, for more information.

But what did shock me was this quote from the press release: "So much is portrayed by Hollywood today that Georgia and the South were evil; when, in reality, the South was the most peaceful, rural, and Christian part of America before war and Reconstruction destroyed the pastoral way of life here."

The South under slavery: "peaceful, rural, and Christian." This isn't heritage, this is wholesale historic revisionism. And it is ugly stuff.

[...]

"The way that slavery was in the Old South is not in keeping with the way it has been portrayed," McBerry insisted.

Instead he offered up a pastoral vision of mutual respect between slave and master.

"Many people still try to say that the war was about slavery," McBerry continued. "Nothing could be further from the truth... It was about a federal government that was out of control and imposing its will on the states--a federal government that was acting beyond the scope of the Constitution. Ironically, some of the very issues we are debating today."

Go read Avlon's piece. It's good stuff. For now, let’s take a quick look at McBerry outrageous statement that "Many people still try to say that the war was about slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth." This is nonsense. The war was about slavery. In almost every discussion of the Civil War, Confederate apologists show up to shout that it wasn't about slavery, it was about economics, it was about culture, it was about how much sugar to put in iced tea. Wrong. The Southern states seceded because of slavery. The war was fought to keep the Southern states in the Union. Therefore, the Civil War was fought over slavery.

Don't take my word for it. Let the Southerners speak for themselves through their secession resolutions.

South Carolina was the first to succeed, doing so in December 1861 as soon as the Electoral College confirmed Lincoln and the Republican Party as the winners of the election. The title of the resolution makes it clear that they intend the document to be a simple statement of the reason they are seceding "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." They use the word "causes" in the plural form so we should expect a list of the many different reasons that have led them to this drastic step. And, on reading it, we will be completely disappointed in that expectation.

The resolution is a little over 2200 words long. The first half is a little civics lesson on the Declaration of Independence and on the ratification of the Constitution laying out their argument for the legality of secession. Next, they give one reason for seceding: slavery. It's framed as several different complaints, but all of them are aspects of slavery.

Their chief complaint is that the Northern states won't enforce fugitive slave laws. Because of that one thing "these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated." Following this, they complain that Northern states allow abolitionist societies to exist and exercise their right of free speech. Next they claim that "a sectional party" hostile to slavery (the Republicans) succeeded in electing a president. Finally, they make a rather oblique comment about free Black men--"persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens"--being allowed to vote in the North.

Next up to secede was Mississippi. Their ordinance of secession is modeled on the Declaration of Independence and includes a fairly substantial list of grievances--all relating to slavery--with this introduction:

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."

Florida's resolution is the shortest. In one 138 word sentence, it simply says, "we quit."

Alabama's resolution gives as its reason the election of Lincoln by "by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions" of Alabama. Which domestic institutions could that be? They also invite fourteen other states to join. What do you suppose those states had in common?

Next up, Georgia. Clocking in at 3300 words, this by far the longest of the ordinances of secession. They begin their list of complaints with this sentence: "For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery." The Georgia resolution does make a digression away from the subject of slavery to complain about federal support for Northern manufacturing industries in the earlier part of the century through tariffs and by building lighthouses (?). After admitting that the federal government no longer does that, it coverts than fact into a slavery oriented conspiracy narrative. Lacking protective tariffs, the North decided to destroy slavery.

Louisiana followed Florida's model and passed short resolution saying simply that they were leaving the union.

Texas was the last of the pre Fort Sumter states to secede. Their resolution is a little confusing because they continually refer to the USA as the confederacy (the CSA not having been formed yet). Their list of grievances is becoming familiar by now: the Northern states won't enforce fugitive slave laws, that they allow abolitionist groups to exist, that they allow Black men to vote, and that they have succeeded in limiting the number of Western territories that could become slave states. Texas makes only one complaint that is not slave related and that is that the federal government has not done enough to fight Indians on their borders.

Six days later, the Confederate States of America was formed in Montgomery, Alabama. The conference appointed Jefferson Davis as provisional president and Alexander Stephens as vice president. In a speech given of March 21, 1861, Stephens made clear why the Confederacy had been formed: "The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution." The Confederacy was founded "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."

Following the establishment of the Confederacy, the remaining eight slave states took a wait and see approach to events. Arkansas held a convention on secession and voted to stay in the Union. Following the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops to pull the Confederate states back into the Union, four of those eight states voted to leave the Union and join the Confederacy. Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee all passed resolutions similar to those of Louisiana and Florida, simple legal documents stating that they were no longer part of the Union.

Arkansas had a slightly different ordinance of secession than the other states, in their pre-Sumter convention, they had drawn up a list of grievances and proposed eight constitutional amendments to deal with them in the hopes that this would preserve the Union. In their ordinance, the recalled convention stated "in addition to the well-founded causes of complaint set forth by this convention," their reason for seceding was that Lincoln had, in effect, declared war on the other slave holding states by calling up troops. What were the causes of complaint listed at the first meeting of the convention? They were the usual suspects, the Northern states won't enforce fugitive slave laws, that they allow Black men to vote, and that they have succeeded in limiting the number of Western territories that could become slave states, and that they voted the Republicans into the White House.

Arkansas' draft amendments once again make clear that the only real issue at hand was slavery.

The president and vice president should be elected alternately from slave and non-slave states.
The division of territory in the West becomes permanent and any new territories gained follow that division.
Congress cannot legislate on anything relating to slavery unless it is to strengthen it.
The federal government must enforce fugitive slave laws and if a slave escapes, the federal government must reimburse the owner for his lost slave.
The Northern states have to enforce fugitive slave laws.
Slave owners shall be free to bring their slaves with them when traveling in non-slave states.
No future amendments dealing with fugitive slaves or the three-fifths principal can be passed without unanimous consent of the states.

Among the four remaining slave states, the legislatures of three (Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky) voted to stay in the Union. In Kentucky, a separate convention was organized in the fall of 1861 to secede and depose the governor and legislature. The reason given for secession was that Lincoln and Congress were tyrants waging war on them. The reason for deposing the state government was that they were supporting the North and abusing martial law.

In the final slave state, Missouri, a convention at the beginning of the year voted to stay in the Union. Following Lincoln's call-up of troops, the pro-Confederacy governor, Claiborne Jackson, refused and declared neutrality. This led to a mini civil war within the state. Coups, conspiracies, and skirmishes followed. In the summer, the convention met again and voted to stay in the Union, again. In late fall, Jackson and the pro-Confederacy members of the legislature met in the far Southwest of the state and voted to secede. The primary reason they stated was that the state had been invaded under orders of the tyrannical Republicans in Washington.

To recap: among the resolutions that did list reasons for seceding, the overwhelming reason given was slavery. The only other reasons listed were the federal government not doing enough to fight Indians (TX), the federal government warring on other slave states (AR), and invasion federal troops (KY and MO). None of the resolutions mentioned big government as the problem.

The Civil War was fought over slavery.

One year later

2013-04-03T19:21:00.003-07:00

I was just reminded that it's been a year since my baby sister died. Sometimes, I forget and think of something I want to tease her over. Then I remember. I will always be grateful that number one sister flew me up so I could be with her. She was in a coma and we had to make the decision to unplug her. When she finally went, her husband and I were there holding her hands. All morning the hospice people and grief counselors came by and introduced themselves. Just a little before, a harpist came by and asked if she'd like to hear anything. Her husband asked if the harpist knew and Led Zepplin. She did, and she played it for us.

Bonnie McKay (1959-2012)

Life's little pleasures

2013-03-27T16:06:00.002-07:00

I just sharpened the kitchen knives and celebrated by slicing a tomato really thin.

The teeth of giants

2013-03-22T18:31:00.000-07:00

In 1645, the twenty-seventh year of the Thirty Years War, Swedish armies inflicted a devastating blow to the Imperial forces in Bohemia and swept into Austria with the aim of capturing of Vienna. The Imperial capitol, was not prepared to give up easily. The Swedes soon found themselves digging in for a long siege, negotiating with allies for support, and building fortifications around the occupied countryside. Upriver from Vienna, in the Krems district, while digging trenches, a group of Swedish soldiers discovered the bones of a giant.

The discovery took place on St. Martin's Day, November 11. The soldiers had been ordered to build a series of defensive fortifications around an old tower at a place called Laimstetten. The winter was not making their job any easier. Rain and groundwater filed the trenches. The engineers in charge ordered the men to dig a series of deep drainage ditches down the hillside. It was in one of those ditches, at a depth of three or four klatters (eighteen to twenty-four feet), in a layer of yellowish soil that smelled of decay, that they ran into a cache of enormous bones.

The most impressive bones are described as being a skull as large as a medium-sized table, arms as thick as an average man, a shoulder-blade with a socket large enough to hold a 24 pound cannonball, and teeth weighing up to five pounds. Someone in charge ordered the diggers to save the bones so that they could be sent to learned men in Sweden and Poland for study. Two more giants were uncovered in the trench but, with a war to be fought, they were left there and nothing more was said about them.

Here, the account of the discovery does the soldiers a great injustice. Many of the bones, including the skull, fell to pieces as they were brought out. Naturally, the workers got the blame for mishandling the bones. In fact, it would have been difficult to save most of them. Ancient bones, that have not petrified, are very fragile things. Collagen rots and acidic water carries away many of the minerals. As the bones dry out, deprived of the surrounding soil that maintained their shape for so long, the bones can literally turn to dust, just like in the movies. Only the densest parts of bones survive very long out of the ground without careful preparation. Skulls, which look so solid, are not among the best survivors. Sinuses honeycomb the face which, in many animals, is really nothing more than a series of thin plates. As it was, only the shoulder-blade with its amazing socket, a leg bone, and some teeth were in good enough condition to be sent away for study.

The sources tell us that rest of the bones, including at least one good tooth, were taken to the nearby Kremsmünster Jesuit abbey. Another tooth was sent to Habsburg Emperor in Vienna for his collections. Two others eventually made it to churches in Germany. This presents us with a little mystery. For the Lutheran Swedes, the abbey should have been viewed as an outpost of the enemy. Worse, it was a Jesuit monastery. In the Protestant world at that time, Jesuits were regarded as ninjas of the Pope: amoral spies and saboteurs capable of any evil in the service of their master. Did the Swedes invite a group of probable spies into their military defenses, as a courtesy, because they thought the Jesuits might be interested in something they dug up? Did the Swedish commander pick out one of the better fossils and send it to the Habsburg Emperor, the leader of the enemy alliance, out of a sense of good sportsmanship? The earliest account of the discovery, was written by Matthew Merian six years after the fact, and makes it sound as if that's exactly what happened. What's more likely, is that the Jesuits collected the bones after the Swedes were gone. By then, they would have been exposed to the elements for eight months and the teeth would have been the best prizes left among the remains. It's also likely that it was the Jesuits who sent the a tooth to the Emperor and not the besieging Swedes who did so. Sadly, there are no records to confirm this at the abbey, now owned by the Benedictines.

Matthew Merian, Theatrum Europaeum, 1651. "Truthful size and image of a tooth, from that broken body which was dug up at Krems in lower Austria in the year 1645 weighing eight and a half medical ounces or one half pound." Source.

Merian's description of the discovery and the bones is short--about 350 words--but he was a first-rate engraver and produced a detailed image of the tooth at the abbey. Merian made no attempt to explain the giant bones and teeth, however the implied explanation is that they are the remains of a giant human. Any modern zoologist or paleontologist will be able to identify the tooth at a glance; it comes from some kind of elephant. At a second glance, they will tell you that it is the tooth of a mammoth. Merian could not have made the mammoth identification, the word would not be introduced into Western Europe until forty years after his death and even then it would only apply to the ivory. If any ivory was recovered with the Laimstetten bones, Merian never heard about it. Even identifying the bones as elephantine would have been difficult for him. In his day, only a handful of elephants--assuming you have very large hands--had made it north of the Alps. Even written anatomical descriptions of elephants would not be available until after his death.

Petrus Lambecius (Peter Lambeck), Commentariorum de augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarese Vindobonensi, 1674. "Tooth of twenty three ounces, found in the year 1644 at Krems." Source.

In 1664, Emperor Leopold I hired Peter Lambeck to be his royal librarian and court historiographer. In this role, one of Lambeck's primary duties was to organize and catalog the Emperor's various collections. The Krems tooth appears in the first volume in a chapter dedicated to giants' teeth, a bucket of three hundred year old grain, and a two-headed chicken. The grain and the chicken were both normal sized. Lambeck barely mentions the actual teeth in the collection writing, instead, an extended meditation on the nature of giant teeth. Were they the teeth of true giants, tricks of nature (i.e., stones shaped like bones), or were they the teeth of some other animal, like a whale, elephant, or Carpathian dragon? In his use of extended block quotes from St. Augustine, Athanasius Kircher, and others, Lambeck would have been a natural born blogger. As to the Krems tooth, Lambeck gives a one sentence description of the discovery, misstating the year as 1644, and provides an illustration.

Happelius (Eberhard Werner Happel), Größte Denkwürdigkeiten der Welt oder so genannte Relationes Curiosae, 1689. "Giant Tooth." Source.

The next mention of the Krems giant comes in the popular journal Relationes Curiosae by the novelist and historian Eberhard Werner Happel. Happel's description is nothing more than a paraphrasing of Merian's description. What's new is his illustration. Despite the low quality of the illustration, it is clear that this is a completely different tooth than either the Krems abbey tooth in Merian or the or the Imperial Museum tooth in Lambeck.

Writing in the next century, Hans Sloane figured that Happel's tooth was the tooth dug up at Laimstetten in 1645 and that Lambeck's tooth was a different tooth dug up the year before. Lambeck says the tooth was found "under fortifications near Krems." He doesn't say who was digging the fortifications. If you assume that it was the Austrians who were preparing fortifications, Sloan's theory makes sense. I have two problems with Sloane's theory. First, in 1644, the Swedish army was nowhere near Austria; the main theater of the war was in Northern Germany. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that the Austrians would have expended much energy building fortifications four hundred miles away from the fighting. Second, I question how Happel obtained his image of the tooth. Happel spent his entire life in Northern Germany. Even if he did travel to Vienna, he would not have found the Imperial collections open to the public. I think I know where he found the drawing.

Petrus Lambecius (Peter Lambeck), Commentariorum de augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarese Vindobonensi, 1674. "Monsterous teeth of the Ancient Giant, Og King of Basan." Source.

Four years after the publication of the first volume of Lambeck's catalog, another giant tooth passed through the Imperial Museum. The tooth had been sent from Constantinople by a seller who hoped the Emperor would pay twelve thousand ducats for it. The seller claimed that the tooth had been found in a tomb in Jerusalem under an inscription in Chaldaic which read: "Here lies the giant Og." In the old Testament, Og of Basan ruled a kingdom east of the River Jordan. He and his people were destroyed by Moses and the Hebrews. According to some traditions, Og was the last of the true giants. Despite these extravagant claims for the tooth, the Emperor decided to keep his ducats and sent it back to Constantinople, but not before Lambeck made an engraving of it. The tooth of Og was included as an appendix in the sixth volume of Lambeck's catalog.

The illustrations of Og's tooth in Lambeck and the Krems tooth in Happel bear a strong resemblance to each other. Both show a well weathered elephant's tooth with no roots. Happel's illustration faces the opposite direction than Lambeck's, which was a common occurrence when hand engraved illustrations were copied.

After Happel, Merian's story was repeated from time to time, but no more illustrations of the teeth were made. By the end of the century, several anatomies of elephants had been published in Europe making it possible to identify the teeth. In the new century, although it was possible to identify specific teeth as elephantine, the belief in ancient giants still persisted in some circles. As late as 1764, Claude-Nicolas LeCat could get a hearing by the French Academy for his paper on giants, essentially arguing that so many prestigious authors of the past could not be wrong.

In 1703, Georg Henning Behrens made a charming argument against the teeth coming from giants. Behrens did not deny the reality of giants, he simply thought the teeth were too big. Behrens reasoned that Og was the biggest man in the Bible. In Deuteronomy, it is written that his bed was nine cubits long--thirteen or eighteen feet, depending on your cubit. Since beds are always longer than their owners, let's say he was eight cubits tall (a normal man is four and a very large man might be five). If we assume both Og and the Krems giant had the same basic proportions than a normal man, we find the Krems Abbey tooth is three hundred, ninety-six times the size of a very large man, which is clearly ridiculous.

The Kremsmünster Abbey tooth identified by Othenio Abel in 1912. Source.

In 1905, the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel traveled to Kremsmünster abbey to help Fr. Leonhard Angerer organize their fossil collections. Abel had gathered many of the items in the collection, including a complete cave bear skeleton, which he mounted. Abel had a special interest in mammoths, having hypothesized that pygmy mammoths were the source of the cyclops legend. Abel had read about the 1645 discovery and decided to try to identify the tooth in question. By then the abbey had accumulated a few more giants' teeth. In 1770, a merchant named Meyer in Krems found six mammoth teeth while digging a cellar and donated them to the abbey. By comparing the Merian drawing with the teeth in the Abbey collection Abel found one very good candidate for the Laimstetten tooth, but Fr. Angerer had doubts. The tooth that Abel identified weighed 628 grams. Some bits probably fell off over the years, but not enough to make a big difference. Merian gives two wildly different weights for the tooth. In the text he says it weighed five German pounds, about 2800 grams. On the illustration he says it weighed 8.5 medical ounces, 256 or 297.5 grams, depending on which system he was using. Neither measure is even close to Abel's tooth. The best we can say about the tooth that's currently on display at the Abbey is that maybe it is the right one.

The anonymous Swedish soldiers and Herr Meyer have not been the only ones to find ancient bones in the Krems district. Many mammoths have been dug up along that stretch of the Danube over the years along with thousands of human artifacts. Hunting camps have been identified and, in 2005, the grave of two human babies, probably twins, was discovered. The two had been sprinkled with red ocher and covered with a mammoth scapula. So far, no new human giants have been found.

Today is a special day

2013-03-22T11:39:00.003-07:00

I woke up this morning to find that it had snowed in the night. Not a lot, maybe a half or three quarters of an inch. This the only snow I've seen here this season. It's melting away and will probably be gone by dinner. The only real problem with the snow is that it took out the power. The computer has a good battery and I can get a wireless connection with my phone, so no problem there. But this has meant no stove and no stove means no coffee and that is problem. About a half hour ago, I couldn't stand it anymore and I went out to get a latte (a treat I very rarely allow myself).

Oh yeah, today is also my tenth blogiversary. Maybe I'll fix something special for dinner.

Mini-Snopes: Congressional pay edition: again

2013-03-05T20:26:00.001-08:00

I've run into two different versions of this in the last few days. I suppose it's tied to the same populist frustration as the last one.

Let's be clear. Neither members of Congress, nor the President, nor the Vice President get their pay for life. That is bullshit. Think about it for a minute. Do you really think some one-term, House member is going to get his pay for life after only "working" for two years? Even if you're going to be extra cynical and say "they would if they could" the correct answer is, they couldn't and they never will.

Members of Congress get a civil service pension just like the person delivering your mail or sending you your tax return does: it's a formula based on the number of years they worked for the government times their highest pay grade times a fractional multiplier. The total cannot equal their final pay, even if the were boyhood friends with Jefferson Davis like Strom Thurmond was. Ever since they began to pay for Social Security and Medicare in 1984, they have been eligible to collect from them.

I'm all for economic populism, but let's focus on the right things. How much pay Congress makes is not important. How much pay you make is. How much Social Security and Medicare your parents, grandparents or you collect is. How much food, rent, and medical support other vulnerable American get is. If you've fallen into the the trap of hating the poor, then do it for the veterans. Many of them are poor, old, hungry, and sick. Everyone loves the veterans, in theory. It's too bad they don't care as much for the civilians that the veterans were protecting.

About that congressional pay

2013-03-05T19:48:00.001-08:00

Some time ago, early nineties or late eighties, at my age it all runs together, I thought of a new way to figure Congressional pay. At the time, the minimum wage hadn't been raised in years and people who really were trying to play by the rules were slipping further and further behind. Bush the Elder even proposed a sub-minimum wage for food service workers.

My idea was for a constitutional amendment that would define the pay of members of Congress, the President, Vice President, Members of the cabinet, and a few other appointed high positions (today I would add the Supreme Court) not in dollars, but in multiples of the minimum wage. No one gets a raise unless everyone gets a raise. And, to keep an especially mean Congress from foregoing a raise just to screw the poor, my plan included a trigger. If Congress doesn't act to adjust the minimum wage during a two year session, the minimum wage goes up by the rate of inflation plus one tenth of one percent, but the rulers salary stays the same (that is, the formula for their pay adjusts down).

Mini-Snopes: Congressional pay edition

2013-03-05T09:57:00.001-08:00

I'm sure you've seen this or some variation of it. It's good for a chuckle and some good, old fashioned, anti-Washington, populist rage, but it's bullshit.

First, it's bullshit because it's unconstitutional. According to the 27th Amendment, Congress cannot cut (or raise) their salary within a term. Any change in pay will not take effect until the next term. Let's take a look:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

I know many "Constitutional Conservatives" and "Originalists" like to say that the Constitution is not a living document. Article V, the one about amendments, the Founders were only kidding. Many act like only certain amendments after the first ten count. Here's where knowing a little history comes in useful. This amendment was part of the Bill of Rights. Twelve amendments were passed around in 1789. Only ten were ratified by enough states to make it into the Constitution at that time. This one was ratified by seven states.* This is not a new idea. This comes from the Founding Fathers themselves.

There might be some wiggle room to suspend their pay, but they'd get the full amount after the deal was made.

The second reason that it's bullshit is that, well, it's bullshit. Even if we cut or suspended their pay, they make over $170K per year. How many of them would really hurt if they had to go without pay for a couple weeks. Very few. Meanwhile they would dig in their heels (or keep them dug in) shouting for all to hear that the gridlock is entirely the other party's fault. Democrats will continue to claim that bipartisanship and negotiation means both sides give a little to find a middle ground. Republicans will continue to claim that bipartisanship and negotiation means Democrats agree to vote for the Republican program and agree to take most of the blame for the unpopular parts. In the end we would get almost the exact same deal that we're going to get anyway. The Democrats will give far more than the Republicans and both parties will loudly proclaim "never again." The only difference will be that the deal might come a few days earlier.

* The last of the original twelve was a bizarre formula for increasing the size of the House as the population grew. If ratified, The House would have about five thousand members today.

State of the book, 2/28/13

2013-02-28T20:35:00.002-08:00

Since the book is moving along fairly well lately--that is, I'm running out of things to research and actually writing it--I thought I'd start giving regular updates. Regular readers know how much my life sucked last year. It was basically a lost year for me. Except for a few weeks, the year was taken up by either by dealing with or being curled up in a ball because of end-to-end personal catastrophes Things quieted down toward the end of the year and I was finally able to do useful work again in mid-January.

So, here we are. It's the last day of February. Over the last couple weeks I have completed and polished my book proposal. Unlike article proposals, non-fiction book proposals can be quite long. The usual advice for articles is that the proposal should be no longer than two pages. Book proposals, on the other hand need to go into a number of issues such as marketing, illustrations, and include at least one polished sample chapter. When I researched proposals I discovered that a forty page proposal wasn't unusual. "Holy crap!" I thought, "do I have that much to say about the book?" My current draft is forty-one pages long. I'm still wondering if I should have said more. For example, my author's biography is two sentences long.

That's the state of the book. The proposal and chapter are written and rewritten and going to my trusted reviewer/editors for comments. I've started into another chapter. The next big deadline will be sending it out the door a little over a year later than I had expected.

Just how badly do we treat our teachers

2013-02-17T20:35:00.000-08:00

This chart just showed up on my Facebook feed.

It's an odd chart, with no explanations. I think most of my friends will have the same reaction as I did, a resigned sigh over how badly we treat teachers in this country. Unfortunately, there were other reactions. Of the twenty or so comments I read, this is the stupidest.

Ryan Kaiser Lol just goes to show that all those extra hours they work do nothing for the outcome of our students and if they turned out more students with better skills I would opt to pay them more but until then keep slaving on teachers that are not producing and thank you to all those who are.

Mr. Kaiser's English and logic teachers need to hang their heads in shame, though perhaps there were extenuating circumstances, such as--oh, I don't know--overwork. I suppose he's one of those who think we need to kill their unions,raise the price of their insurance, take their pensions, and give them guns (logic teacher hangs head in shame second time).

The countries are selected from the members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), but several have been left out, Canada (if you want to comment on social metrics in the US, our slightly poorer, but culturally highly similar neighbor is usually a good data point to include), Sweden, Israel, and most East European countries. Why were those excluded? What's the deal with Sweden and Turkey? Is GDP per capita the best metric for pay? Why not compared to average or median income or some kind of cost of living index? We would do a little better on either of those measures. How did they determine hours worked? The 1500 hours they credit the US teachers as working is apparently based on nine months of 40 hour weeks. Most teaches I know would have a hearty laugh at the idea they only work 40 hours. Then they would reach for a glass of box wine and break down weeping. Is the hours estimate as unrealistic for other countries?

Who cares? As Mr. Kaiser says, "the floggings will continue until morale improves!

The worst possible example

2013-02-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

The Washington pundit class is in love with the idea of bipartisanship and compromise for their own sake. That is, they don't really care what actual laws are passed or policies adopted as long as they represent bipartisanship. If you were going to argue for this, you would probably look for good examples from the past of both sides giving a little to move forward on an important issue. But, what if you were looking for a bad example? What if you wanted an example of compromise that brought shame on the American form of government? What would be your choice as the worst possible example of compromise and bipartisanship in American history? It might be this one:

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—"to form a more perfect union"—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.

Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.

James Wagner, the President of Emory University in Atlanta, wrote those words in an editorial entitled "As American as … Compromise" for the university's alumni magazine. I'm not sure when the winter issue of Emory Magazine began hitting people's mailboxes, it could have been months ago because no one ever reads these Letter from the President columns. But it began getting attention yesterday, including attention from the Black Student Alliance.

For those who aren't sure what he's talking about, this is what is usually called the "Three-Fifths Compromise" in the US Constitution. The Constitution requires the federal government to take a census every ten years and to use the census numbers to apportion seats in the House of Representatives. Each state is told how many seats they get and the states draw their own congressional districts according to their own processes. That sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Well it wasn't. The Southern states had, within their boundaries, a huge number of people who were not allowed to vote, who weren't really citizens, African slaves. The Northern states had a much larger population of real citizens than the South. The Southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention assumed that the main divisions in the new congress would be regional and wanted more power for their region. They demanded that slaves be counted in the apportioning of House seats, giving them more power in Congress and in the Electoral College. Northern delegated argued that the apportioning of House seats should reflect the number of voters in each state. Eventually, a compromise was reached allowing the Southern states to claim three-fifths of the number of slaves in each state for the purpose of apportioning of House seats. Wagner was holding up one of the most shameful examples of compromise in American history as a shining example of doing things right.

There is one popular misconception about the "Three-Fifths Compromise" and that is that it implied that African slaves were three-fifths of a person. This is often brought up as a grave injustice against the ancestors of African-Americans. That would have been an improvement of their lot or, at least, a concession that they were entitled to a certain amount of human dignity. Prior to the Civil War, slaves were not people at all; they were property; they were zero-fifths of a person. The only concessions that African slaves were even marginally human was their forced conversion to Christianity and the fact that laws were eventually passed making it illegal to kill a slave without first conducting a sham trial.

I imagine that when President Wagner arrives in his office Tuesday morning he will find several unpleasant message waiting for him including requests for interviews from local and even national media. Someone from the University's press office is probably already spoiling his three-day weekend. What will happen next is that he will issue a standard non-apology apology. He's sorry IF anyone took offense. He won't admit he was wrong to say it; he's just sorry he created a shit-storm. He'll call it a "misstatement," meaning his argument is valid, he just chose a bad example.

So, what was his point? It's hard to tell because, even without that horrifying example, its a really badly written column. He starts out saying some "distinguished public servant," speaking on a forum last Fall, mentioned political polarization, the Constitution, and compromise. He them pulls out the three-fifth compromise as a shining example that we should try to emulate. Then he mentions the fiscal debate. He's halfway through the column now. This, he says is just like trying to consider different view points in a university. Then something about teaching liberal arts classes at a research university. Maybe he's arguing for creationism in the biology classes. It's impossible to tell what compromise he's talking about.

I cannot imagine anyone defending this mess except those who think every word in the constitution was dictated by God and white supremacists (just to be clear, I'm not saying the two are the same). In any case, It's not going to be fun to be James Wagner for the next week or so. He'll be lucky to get out of this with his job.

Update: And he's already issued the non-apology apology: " Certainly, I do not consider slavery anything but heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman. I should have stated that fact clearly in my essay. I am sorry for the hurt caused by not communicating more clearly my own beliefs. To those hurt or confused by my clumsiness and insensitivity, please forgive me."

That other Russian meteor

2013-02-15T18:44:00.001-08:00

Many of the news stories about the Chelyabinsk meteor have mentioned the Tunguska event of 1908. This is a piece I wrote on the 100th anniversary of that explosion. Enjoy.

********

One hundred years ago today, something exploded over Siberia.

The weather in central Siberia on June 30, 1908, a Tuesday, was warm and mostly clear. Ten days after the summer solstice, the days are not appreciably shorter than they are on that longest day. In Siberia, that means the days are very long. North of the Arctic Circle the sun does not go down at all. Instead, it approaches the south and rolls along the horizon for a few minutes at midnight before beginning to rise again. Five degrees south of the circle, it dips just barely below the southern horizon a little before eleven and rises back above it just after one in the AM. At midnight it is still light enough to read a newspaper outdoors on a clear night. People and animals adjust to the long days by rising early and staying up late. There will be time to sleep during the long nights of winter.

At a little after seven in the morning, settlers near the north end of Lake Baikal saw something bright appear in the sky, crossing to the northwest leaving a trail behind it. As it touched the horizon, it was transformed into a column of black smoke in which flames could be seen. Soon after, they felt a thump in the ground and heard a series of bangs that they compared to artillery in the distance. Other villagers to the west of them gave similar descriptions. Later scientific expeditions would locate the ground zero of the explosion in a remote area among the tributaries of the Podkamennaya (Stony or Upper) Tunguska River. Seismic stations around the world recorded the ground movement and set the time at precisely 07:17:11 AM.

The closest people to ground zero were Evenki reindeer herders camped along the Chambe River forty kilometers away. They reported being thrown in the air by the shock, along with their tents and belongings. They saw trees broken off by the shock and the forest set on fire. Several herders were injured, but the only reported death was an old man who probably had a heart attack. One herder, Ilya Potapovich, later reported that his brother was so shocked by the explosion that he didn't speak for years after. Their herds were scattered and many reindeer perished in the fire.

The devastated forest at Tunguska photographed twenty years later.

At the Vanavara trading post, seventy kilometers from ground zero, people were knocked to the ground, with enough force to lose consciousness. Windows were broken and buildings damaged. The heat was painful, but not hot enough to start fires. Two hundred kilometers south, the ground shock and wind were strong enough to knock people and animals off their feet. Six hundred kilometers southwest, an eastbound train on the Trans-Siberian Railroad shook so hard the engineer feared the train might be derailed and brought it to a screeching halt.

When all of the reports were collected in the 1920s, it revealed that the object in the sky was visible 700 kilometers away and the explosion was heard over 1200 kilometers away.

Sibir a regional newspaper published in Irkutsk was the first to make an official notice publishing on July 2:

In the N Karelinski village (200 verst N of Kirensk) [one verst equals 1.0668 kilometers] the peasants saw to the North-West, rather high above the horizon, some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards. The body appeared as a "pipe", i.e. a cylinder. The sky was cloudless, only a small dark cloud was observed in the general direction of the bright body. It was hot and dry. As the body neared the ground (forest), the bright body seemed to smudge, and then turned into a giant billow of black smoke, and a loud knocking (not thunder) was heard, as if large stones were falling, or artillery was fired. All buildings shook. At the same time the cloud began emitting flames of uncertain shapes. All villagers were stricken with panic and took to the streets, women cried, thinking it was the end of the world.

Another Siberian paper, Golos Tomska, wrote more cynically on the fourth:

The noise was considerable, but no stone fell. All the details of the fall of a meteorite here should be ascribed to the overactive imagination of impressionable people. There is no doubt that a meteorite fell, probably some distance away, but it's huge mass and so on are doubtful.

A few other local newspapers added their stories through the rest of the short Siberian summer, but by late August, when the nights were growing noticeably longer and cooler, the mysterious blast of June was forgotten amid other concerns.

The most likely path of a meteorite based on witness recollections in the 1920s.

Although the Tunguska blast did not raise any attention outside Siberia, the effects of the blast were noticed across the Northern Hemisphere. The dust from the blast was injected into the stratosphere and circled the globe creating spectacular sunsets and bright night skies for the next few days. In London, cricket games continued after midnight. In Scotland, farmers used the extrra daylight to harvest the hay crop. In the cities and countryside of Northern Europe, intelligent observers wondered about the cause of the displays. Newspapers in London, Berlin, Prague, and New York sent reporters to interview astronomers. The most common answer given was that the bright skies were probably unusual auroral displays brought on by energetic eruptions on the sun. A few experts admitted that the displays didn't show the normal characteristic sheets and scintillations of an aurora, but they didn't have a better explanation on hand. Some of the older observers, expert and amateur, came closer to the truth when they compared the skies to the displays that followed the eruption of Krakatau in 1883. The mystery was soon forgotten in the face of other news. There were crises in Central Europe to worry about and it was the regatta season.

European Russia paid even less attention to the mysteries of nature than their neighbors to the West. Ever since the disastrous war with Japan in 1904-05 the empire had been in a state of crisis. The stress of the war brought about a revolutionary situation that was only calmed by the Tsar agreeing to the formation of a parliament. Three separate elections were held during 1906-07 before a government could be formed that could work with the Tsar. Meanwhile, unrest continued in the countryside with peasants burning manor houses and the army burning peasant villages right up till the end of 1907. At the same time as the government tried to establish some kind of domestic peace, it also had to establish a safe diplomatic space in which to rebuild its military strength. Russia's diplomats tried unsuccessfully to balance between Germany and Austria on one side and Britain and France on the other without committing to either alliance. As if all of that wasn't enough, the constitutional ideas of the Revolution of 1905 appeared to have infected Russia's neighbors to the South, Turkey and Persia, adding more crises and instability for the rulers to deal with. The result was that in the cities of European Russia the ruling elites had little attention to spare for exploring Siberian mysteries. No official attention was directed into the explosion at Tunguska until after the World War, the Revolutions of 1917, and the following Civil War were over and the country had had a few years to catch its breath.

The man who brought the mystery of the Tuguska explosion to the attention of the world was Leonid Kulik. Kulik had ideal credentials for the job. Although of a bourgeois background, the son of a doctor, he had been expelled from school for pro-Bolshevik revolutionary activities. He continued his education in forestry, physics, and mathematics in the years before WWI, with occasional breaks to be arrested for continuing revolutionary activities. Working in the Urals as a forester, he had come to the attention of Vladimir Vernadsky and acquired an interest and quick education in geology. The Revolution found him in Tomsk, Siberia teaching mineralogy. He joined the Red Army and served till the end off the Civil War, when he was discharged with honor. He took a museum job in Petrograd (the less German sounding name given to St. Petersburg in 1914) studying under Evgenii Krinov, the country's leading authority on meteors. Thus he came to the problem with a broad education, influential intellectual patrons, impeccable revolutionary credentials, and a familiarity with Siberia.

In 1921 the Soviet Academy of Sciences approved an expedition to Siberia to collect information on meteors. The Purpose of the expedition was not particularly scientific. Some had the idea that utilizing the concentrated ore of iron meteorites they might jump-start the recovery of Soviet industry. No doubt the people who approved the expedition were influences by a number of discoveries of giant iron meteors in recent years. In 1894, the Arctic explorer Robert Peary located the Cape York meteorite in Greenland consisting of nearly 35 tons of almost pure iron-nickel alloy. In 1902, an American entrepreneur located the Willamette meteorite in Oregon, which weighed in at 15.5 tons. Most impressive of all, in 1920 a farmer near Grootfontein, Southwest Africa (now Namibia) found the Hoba meteorite with 66 tons of alloy. Kulik was made the head of the Siberian meteorite expedition.

As Kulik was boarding his train to the Far East one of his colleagues handed him a page torn from an old calendar that had a news article about a meteor fall in Siberia in 1908. Almost every detail of the article was wrong. It described a red glowing stone landing near the railroad and curious passengers standing around to watch it cool. However, from the date and location in the story, Kulik was able to figure out what had happened. He prepared a questionnaire about the event that he gave to people across Siberia. Comparing witness accounts he was able to calculate approximately where the streak in the sky should have touched down. Kulik had no doubt that the 1908 explosion was a meteorite.

Despite his confidence, it would take Kulik six years to convince the academy to fund another expedition. During that time he corresponded with other researchers in that part of Siberia and published his theory. S.V. Obruchev, a geologist, interviewed some of the locals in 1924. A.V. Voznesensky, former director of the Irkutsk observatory, did his own interviews and calculated the ground zero for what he also believed was a giant meteorite. He published his findings in 1925. In 1926, I.M. Suslov, an ethnologist working among the Evenki people conducted over sixty interviews and published his work. The force of this collected testimony enabled Kulik to overcome the Academy and get funds for an expedition in the spring of 1927 to ground zero. At this point, no outside had seen the damage caused by the explosion, though Suslov's witnesses described a great area where the trees no longer stood.

In February of 1927, Kulik and an assistant traveled from Leningrad (as Petrograd had been renamed) to Taishet, a station on the Trans-Siberian Railroad 900 kilometers from the believed epicenter of the Tunguska explosion. From there they traveled by horse-drawn sledge and cart to the Vanavara trading post. After recovering for a few days, Kulik began negotiating for a guide to take him to the center of the blast. The local Evenki had developed a strong aversion to the region which they believed had been cursed by Ogdy, their god of thunder. Eventually, Kulik convinced Ilya Potapovich, the brother of the herder who was probably closest to the explosion, to take him there.

After a false start, the group traveled by horse and reindeer north to the River Makirta. As soon as they crossed the river, they began to find whole stands of trees broken off and knocked over. On April 15, Kulik and his group climbed the highest hill they could find to survey the forest. From that vantage, Kulik reports that as far as he could see to the North, the forest had been leveled and burned, with all of the fallen trees pointing south. In all, 80 million trees were flattened over an area of over 2000 square kilometers. Potapovich and a second guide refused to go any further.

Kulik returned to Vanavara and hired some laborers to take him to the center of the blast area. He expected to find a large crater there, like the one that was becoming a famous attraction in Arizona. He found the exact opposite. Kulik could tell, from the direction the trees had fallen, where the approximate center was. Instead of a crater, he found a circular stand of trees still upright, but with all their branches blown off. Kulik deduced that his meteor had broken apart above the ground and the force of that shattering had blown downward, stripping the trees directly below and knocking over the trees further away. Kulik also noticed circular potholes, sometimes tens of meters across and filled with water. He decided these must be the small craters that the fragments of the meteor made. Unfortunately, the summer thaw was now well underway and the countryside was turning into a sea of mud. After taking some photographs, Kulik's group returned to Vanavara.

Back in Leningrad, Kulik's report got considerably more attention than his 1921 report had. Western scientific journals wrote him up. Observatories and scientists began combing through records from 1908 to find out how they could have missed the explosion. The mysterious bright nights of the summer of 1908 were recalled and declared solved. In London, C.J.P. Cave unveils a set of records from a device called a microbarograph. This device invented in 1903, was able to ignore normal changes in air pressure, such as storm fronts, and record tiny fluctuations in pressure. Cave shows that six of these devices recorded four waves of pressure in rapid succession exactly five hours after the explosion in Siberia.

With the whole world watching, the honor of Soviet science was at stake and the Academy quickly approved another expedition for the next year. At first the 1928 expedition didn't seem to have much hope of adding to the information gained the previous year. Kulich, three assistants, and a film maker surveyed the blast area, but the equipment they brought was not up to the task of drilling in the soggy ground or detecting buried metallic objects. When food began to run low, Kulik sent the others home.

They couldn't have arrived at a better time. Umberto Nobile's attempt to reach the North Pole by zeppelin had ended in a crash on the return leg and the crew was left stranded on the Arctic icepack. The Soviet Union dispatched a state-of-the-art icebreaker to rescue them. Day after day the world watched the dramatic rescue take place. No sooner was the drama over, than three scientists arrived from the wastes of Siberia to announce that their leader had refused to leave his work and was stranded there. They had a nice documentary film to go with their story. The press corps turned their attention ninety degrees and looked to Siberia for the next adventure.

The ethnologist I.M. Suslov, who had worked among the Evenki and knew the area, led the rescue expedition. He took along an army of reporters. When they arrived, Kulik put everyone to work digging for meteorite fragments. No one found anything. At the end of the summer, the whole group returned to Leningrad to examine their findings. Kulik and Tunguska were world famous.

There was no question of the Academy refusing a 1929 expedition. This time Kulik had an army of engineers and fifty carts of supplies. Kulik's boss at the museum, Krinov, also came along. They spent two summers and a winter making major excavations at a number of sites around ground zero. The lack of meteor fragments was causing some controversy. Arctic geologists pointed out that the pothole formations were a permafrost structure found all over the North. Krinov and Kulik got into a fight over the exact epicenter of the blast and stopped talking to one another. By the end of the summer, it looked like Tunguska research was over for a while. Kulik's health had been severely degraded by the rough trips. Russia was pulling into isolation under Stalin. The World Depression and new crises in Europe had taken over the interest of the news reading public. Finally, there was no money left for research.

Kulik managed one more expedition in 1939. By now aerial surveys had precisely mapped the blast area and a road and airstrip had been built to make travel to the site a holiday compared to his journey's of the previous decade. Kulik was planning another series of annual research trips when the war interrupted. His short 1939 trip was his last. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Kulik, who was almost sixty, joined the militia and fought in the defense of Moscow. He was wounded and captured by the Germans and died of typhus in a prison camp in April 1942. When the Soviets mapped the back of the moon, they named a crater for him.

Leonid Kulik memorial stamp issued in 1958 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Tunguska explosion. The cause of the blast was still very much a mystery when the stamp was issued.

To Kulik and many others, it was obvious from the very beginning that the Tunguska explosion was the result of some type of meteorite. However, a large portion of the world scientific community resisted the idea. The lack of a crater or fragments of the impactor were major sticking points, to be sure, but even if they had been found, many would have tried to explain them away. They just didn't like the idea of big things hitting the Earth. Their hostility came from two scientific battles fought in the early part of the nineteenth century.

The founding of the science of geology was made especially difficult because it seemed to go in the face of the Biblical narrative in Genesis. Prior to the Enlightenment, it was commonly believed in the Western world that the Earth was only a few thousand years old. The whole idea of a separate history of the Earth was meaningless, because the Earth was only a few days older than human history. The formation of the Earth was a simple matter of divine will and the structure of the Earth's surface was all conveniently explained as the scars of the Mosaic Flood. The Copernican revolution created the first cracks in this cozy view of the universe. By making the universe much bigger than the Biblical-Aristotelian worldview allowed, astronomers created a need for more time to let cosmic processes work their way out. An older universe had more time for gentle processes, like erosion, to explain the shape of an older Earth. The idea that gradualistic processes were sufficient to explain the mountains and the seas was particularly hard resisted by English speaking Protestants. In fighting to establish geology on a naturalistic basis, scientists in Britain and the United States took an equally hard line against anything that appeared miraculous or catastrophically sudden.

At the same time geologists were fighting to establish the Earth sciences on a rationalistic basis, astronomers were settling a long-standing controversy over the nature of meteors. It may come as a surprise to some to discover that the very idea of meteorites is a new one that was strongly resisted by many in the scientific community. According to the Aristotelian science that was endorsed by the Church, meteors were an atmospheric phenomenon similar to the Northern Lights. When Western thinkers began to reject the miraculous, they lumped reports of rocks falling out of a clear sky together with rains of blood or frogs as something not to be believed. The streaks of light called meteors had nothing to do with things falling from the sky.

The conversion of the scientific world to the idea that rocks really did fall out of the sky came rather quickly. Between 1794 and 1803 a number of meteor falls were well documented in Italy, England, and India. The climax was a meteor shower over L'Aigle, Normandy on April 23, 1803 that dropped over 2500 stones. So many rocks witnessed by so many people was more than could be denied.

To fit the idea of meteorites in with the non-catastrophic, or uniformatarian, view of geology a compromise was struck: it was agreed that meteors really existed, but that they were always small and insignificant as a geological process. This was easy to believe at first. When no one knew where meteors came from, it was easy to say they were by definition small, for example, they might be rocks tossed out by lunar volcanoes. A better understanding of comets and the discovery of asteroids challenged this compromise by adding big rocks in strange orbits to the prevailing model of the universe.

The nebular hypothesis of the origin of the Earth also presented a challenge. In this theory, the Earth was formed by the agglomeration of comets and asteroids in the early solar system. The uniformitarian paradigm absorbed this idea by making the age of bombardment a one-time era in the distant past. Large rocks once hit the Earth, but they don't do that anymore. All visible craters, therefore, were judged to be volcanic in origin and all large meteorites discovered, like the Willamette, Hoba, and Cape York meteorites, were judged to be very ancient, relics of the formation of the Earth. This resistance to allowing the possibility of large meteorites in modern time was mast extreme among American scientists. The Barringer Crater in Arizona was dismissed as volcanic in origin, despite a total lack of evidence, and all of the craters on the Moon were explained as ancient volcanoes.

The resistance to the idea that a large meteorite might be behind the Tunguska explosion created an opening where wild ideas were allowed to proliferate. The ideas can easily be divided into three types: natural objects falling from the sky that are natural but stranger than normal meteorites, natural causes coming up from the earth, objects of intelligent design coming from Earth or space.

The most commonly mentioned natural but strange object from space is a tiny black hole. This idea was first stated by A.A. Jackson and Michael P. Ryan in a 1973 article in journal Nature. Jackson and Ryan described a black hole with a event horizon radius less than a millimeter across. It entered the atmosphere creating a tube of superheated air that created the visible passage across the sky and the damage to the forest with no crater. The black hole itself passed at an angle through the Earth and exited in the North Atlantic. Its exit point off the western end of the Azores should have created an equally spectacular display, but none was reported.

When Kulik was still alive, a fellow Russian, Vladimir Rojansky suggested the possibility the Earth could be bombarded by small anti-matter meteors. In 1965 two American physicists, again in the pages of Nature explored the possibility of an anti-matter meteor explaining the puzzling aspects of the Tunguska blast. The authors admitted that an anti-matter meteor would erode during the entire course of its passage through our atmosphere rather than save most of its energy for blast at the end.

The idea of mirror matter, a type of matter with the particle spins reversed, was proposed in 1956 by two Chinese-American physicists. Mirror matter provides a mathematical solution to some problems of symmetry, but it should be completely undetectable. In a self-published book in 2002, Robert Foot, an Australian physicist, suggested a mirror matter asteroid exploding the upper atmosphere could have provided the energy for the Tunguska blast while leaving no trace of itself. The biggest problem with this theory is that mirror matter has never been found and isn't even widely accepted as necessary by most physicists.

In 2001, a German writer suggested leaking methane from a natural gas field might have caused the explosion. Andreii Olkhovatov of Moscow, postulates something he calls geometeors, an eruption from the Earth caused by an electrical linkage between some kind of meteorological activity and an earthquake. The key problem with all from-below theories is that they ignore the testimony of the dozens of people who saw some thing streak across the sky toward Tunguska before the explosion.

Jack Stoneley, in his 1977 book Cauldron of Hell: Tunguska brought up the possibility that the explosion was the largest incident of ball lightening ever seen, but even he wasn't that enthusiastic about the idea, only mentioning it before going on to give the most space to the idea of a spaceship crashing in Siberia. Others have developed variations on this idea comparing the collapse of the ball to a natural atomic bomb.

The most famous alternative theory is the crashing spaceship, which can incorporate anti-matter or an atomic explosion coming from the spaceship engines. Aleksandr Kazantsev, an engineer who also writes science fiction, wrote the earliest version of this scenario. In 1946, Kazantsev published a short story called "The Blast" about aliens coming to steal water from Lake Baikal whose ship malfunctions and explodes. Kazantsev was clearly influenced by descriptions of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the year before. In 1963 Kazantsev developed his idea into a book length work of non-fiction. This is a favorite theory of the UFO crowd and of science fiction fans and has received dozens, if not hundreds of treatments over the last sixty years.

Nikola Tesla: A Serbian with a death ray?

One of my favorites is what I call the oops theories. There are two of these. The first, which appeared in Russia in 1964, is that aliens on a planet orbiting the star 61 Cygni saw the explosion of Krakatau and thought we were trying to communicate with them. Their answer, sent by a super tight laser pulse, burned up a big chunk of Siberia. Messages like that are the extraterrestrial equivalents of sending e-mails written with the Cap-Lock on. The second is home grown. In this theory the brilliant physicist and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla accidentally blew up the Tunguska forest while testing a death ray at his lab at Wardenclyffe on Long Island. When he realized how dangerous it was he dismantled his lab. Of course it would have taken Tesla twenty years to realize how dangerous it was because that's when the first reports from Kulik's expeditions reached the West.

The UFO magazine Nexus published a novel explanation in their 2004 and 2005 issues. The forests at Tunguska, they tell us, are home to mysterious underground installations built by sophisticated ancients. Every few centuries these installations come to life to defend the Earth from rogue meteors and alien invasions. The 1908 blast was just the latest battle waged by these heroic machines.

In describing the Tunguska explosion, a literary tradition has been established of comparing it to a nuclear weapon and describing its power in megatons. The Tunguska blast was equal to about twenty megatons (million tons) of TNT. Hiroshima was about twenty kilotons (thousand tons), one one-thousandth the size of Tunguska. There are good reasons for this comparison. A very hot, concentrated blast, above the surface of the ground accurately describes both the Tunguska and Hiroshima explosions.

But the main reason for the comparison probably has more to do with literary sensationalism than accuracy. Atomic blasts are one of the most frightening things that the post WWII generation can imagine (after clowns). The nuclear weapon comparison allows writers to paint vivid scenarios of what would have happened if the object had detonated over a populated area. The area of blown down trees is approximately the same size as a number of major cities including Washington, DC. It is frequently pointed out that the blast was at the same latitude as the Russian capital of St. Petersburg. If the Earth had been turned four and a half hours further when it met the object, the explosion would have happened over the northern industrial suburbs of the city and burned the entire metropolitan area to the ground.

In one way, the comparison is very false. Whatever exploded at Tunguska, it was not radioactive. The heat of the blast was great enough that it emitted x-rays, elements were ionized, and strange chemical reactions occurred, but these were the result of extreme heat, not of radioactive decay or fission. The atomic comparison brings on thoughts of modern weirdness and opens the door to ideas of strange forms of matter, spaceships, or super weapons. A more natural comparison would be to rank it next to other natural disasters.

In earthquakes, a twenty-megaton explosion releases about the same energy as an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter Scale. The world sees about a twenty each year that are this strong or worse. The World Series earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1989 was in this range. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 unleashed about 1000 megatons of energy and the Alaska earthquake of 1964 unleashed about 30,000 megatons.

Even a moderate hurricane has many times more power than that. Hurricane Katrina had an energy equivalent of over 8000 megatons or 400 times the size of the Tunguska blast. There are two important differences here: size and time. A hurricane spreads that energy over several thousand square kilometers and builds gradually over hours. Tunguska spread out from a spot only a few meters across and traveled three or four times faster than the strongest hurricane.

Volcanoes make the best comparison to meteors because they come in all sizes and can leak their energy out or deliver it in an explosion. Mount St. Helens delivered about seven megatons in its May 18, 1980 eruption. Krakatau's 1883 explosion is estimated to have been about 100 megatons. The explosion that took away most of the Greek island of Thera in the seventeenth century BC was six to ten times stronger than that.

And Having Writ... by Donald R. Bensen. A humorous alternative history novel published in 1978. The story centers on the extraterrestrial crew of the spaceship that almost crashed at Tunguska. Now stranded on Earth, they do everything they can to jump start WWI in order to advance human technology to the point where they can build a new spaceship and go home. Unfortunately, their best efforts keep causing peace to break out. When this book was published, the idea of the Tunguska spaceship was so familiar to me that using it for an alternate history made perfect sense and needed no explanation.

Over the years, the wilder explanations of the cause of the Tunguska blast have ensured it a place in popular culture. It has appeared in novels by writers as diverse as Stanisław Lem (a spaceship), Spider Robinson (Tesla), Larry Niven (a black hole), and Thomas Pynchon (an Awakened Chthulu like force). It has been mentioned in television shows and movies like Stargate SG-1, Star Trek, Dr. Who, Hellboy, Ghostbusters, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and the latest Indiana Jones. Tunguska was a major plot element in two episodes of the fourth season of The X-Files. An adventure game "Secret Files: Tunguska" is published by Deep Silver. It is even now the name of an herbal energy drink.

Tunguska Blast energy drink made from the same herbs that grow in the mysterious Tunguska region.

While these ideas have kept the name Tunguska alive in the popular mind, conventional researchers have continued to visit the site and collect evidence of a more prosaic meteorite. They have gathered what most believe is convincing evidence that a large body entered the atmosphere from the southeast and exploded at an altitude of some kilometers over the ground zero stands of trees that remained vertical. The main argument among most scientists is over the nature of the meteorite, whether it was a comet, a stony asteroid, or an iron asteroid. The composition of the meteor determines the altitude and power of the blast. Computer models have shown that most of the features of the blast can be explained by an airburst, just as Kulik believed. One of the strongest supports for the comet theory is the timing of the blast. Every year, in late June and early July, the Earth passes through a meteor stream called the Beta Taurids, which are fragments of Comet Encke. The strongest evidence for a stony asteroid is fine particles of dust found embedded in tree sap from the region and dated to 1908.

The most recent revelation from the site came from a team in Italy who examined Lake Cheko eight kilometers north of ground zero. They believe a fragment of the exploding object made it to the ground and is in the bottom of the lake. They will be returning in 2009 to excavate the lake bottom and see if they can recover something that will end the debate.

Besides simply being an persistent mystery that has engaged minds for a century, Tunguska has real relevance to our lives. In 1908, the world had many places like Tunguska that were so remote a giant meteorite could strike and still go almost unnoticed by the outside world. Today, there are fewer places where that is possible. A strike like Tunguska today could have global consequences. Obviously, a strike in a populous region could kill millions, but even the most remote regions are now tied into the global economic infrastructure. Siberia is criss-crossed by oil and natural gas pipelines. Even if people and infrastructure are missed, a large strike could have temporary climactic effects resulting in major food or economic crops failing for one or more years. An increasing number of historians are beginning to believe that meteorites and volcanic eruptions explain certain plagues, famines, and even the fall of empires in the past.

The smooth survival of our civilization might depend on getting to know more about the objects with which we share our solar system. But even if we never have to face a civilization busting threat from space, the knowledge we gain from Tunguska is priceless and the story is a great yarn. Happy birthday, old rock, snowball, spaceship or whatever you were. It's been a fun century and the adventure shows no sign of stopping.

Boltunov's drawing

2013-02-06T18:11:00.001-08:00

In the winter of 1803-4, Roman Boltunov, a merchant from Yakutsk, worked his way down the Lena River selling and trading his goods. At that time of year, the main currency of the native Sakha and Evenki* would have been freshly trapped furs. In March, Boltunov reached Kumak Surka, the last village before the Lena Delta. There, the local headman, Ossip Shumachov, showed him two very nice mammoth tusks, which Boltunov promptly bought for fifty rubles in goods. Mammoth tusks weren't exactly rare on the coast east of the delta, and he was always happy to buy them if they were in good condition. What was special about this pair was where Shumachov said he found them: They had still been attached to a mammoth.

Anyone who spent any amount of time in Siberia knew about mammoths. Their horns or teeth or whatever they were sometimes found in the northern part of the country, usually in the coast or on the banks of rivers and they were valuable. Over the last forty or fifty years a whole profession of ivory hunting had grown up around them. The mammoth animal itself was a mystery. No one had ever seen a live one. On very rare occasions, dead ones were found on river banks, their flesh still bloody, as if they had died only days before. The Siberians, Russian and native, had many legends about them. One of the most common was that seeing a mammoth corpse was bad luck and that they should be avoided. On the other hand, educated Russians from the West and other Europeans were quite interested in mammoths and would even pay for information about them.

Since Shumachov didn't seem particularly afraid of the mammoth, Boltunov was able to convince him to take him to place where the rest of the carcass was. This involved more than a day trip. The mammoth remains were on the far side of the Bykovsky Peninsula facing the Arctic Ocean. The route led across the Lena and over a high range of hills, two days each direction. But Shumachov was proud of his find and maybe a few more goods were exchanged to encourage him.

It was snowing heavily when they got there. Scavengers had already gotten to this large block of free meat and eaten parts of it. Much of the face had been torn away. Still, the majority of it was still there and in one piece. Boltunov cleared away enough snow to get a good look at it and examined the head. What he saw was bigger than any animal he had ever seen or heard of. It was covered with long rust-colored hair. It had a fat body and thick legs. He made some measurements on the spot. Later on, he wrote down some of the details and, on the opposite side of the same sheet, made a drawing from memory. He was correct that the trip would be worthwhile; when he returned to Yakutsk the head of the merchant’s guild bough his notes and drawing. This is the first reconstruction that we have of a mammoth that is based on more than just bones.

Two years later, the drawing came to the attention of an Adjunct member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Mikhail Adams, a botanist who passed through Yakutsk on his way to collect specimens on the lower Lena. Though he was not impressed with the drawing—he described it as "very incorrect"—Adams dutifully forwarded it to the Academy with the notice that he was going directly to Kumak Surka to see if anything of the mammoth could be saved. The Academy was extremely excited by the discovery and published Boltunov's notes as a letter in their popular Russian language newspaper, Technological Journal.** Adams continued the coast and was able to recover most of the bones, three quarters of the skin, and a large sack of hair.

Sixty years later, Karl von Baer went looking for Boltunov's drawing. Baer is usually remembered as the father of embryology, but he also did geological research in the Russian Arctic and was interested in mammoths. Baer could not find the original in the Academy archives but he knew copies of it had been sent abroad. Wilhelm Keferstein at Göttingen University was able to find one among the papers of Johann Blumenbach. Baer suspected that it might even have been the original. It’s probably a copy. Wilhelm Tilesius, writing around 1810, said the original was still in the Academy archives. Keferstein sent Baer a sketch based on Blumenbach’s document and a transcription of the notes on the document. Baer was nice enough to write it up and publish it where I could find it. Copies of Keferstein's sketch were published in several journals at the time. The drawing along with the hair and skin samples are preserved in the Göttingen museum.

Roman Boltunov’s reconstruction of the dead mammoth on Bykovsky Peninsula, 1804. This is the first reconstruction of a mammoth based on more than bones. Source.

Adams wrote that the drawing was "very incorrect…something between a pig and an elephant." Tilesius called it "a poor drawing of a monstrous figure…a most inexperienced and unskilled work." At first glance it's hard to disagree with them. But, considering the information he had to work with, it’s not a bad reconstruction. It demonstrates an intelligent mind and an active curiosity attempting to extract the most information possible from a small amount of information. It is very possible, even likely, that Boltunov had never seen a picture of an elephant and had no reference point for elephantness. He would, however, have seen a boar. Most large mammals he would have been familiar with—dogs, cattle, horses, reindeer—had long relatively thin legs and heads that rose up from the body. Only bears and pigs had thick bodies, heavier legs, and heads that protruded forward from the body. Whether consciously or subconsciously, he used a boar as a model to fill the gaps in his knowledge.

The trunk was gone when he saw the carcass; the base of the trunk could very well have resembled a pig's snout. The tusks in his drawing look bizarre; one seems to be pointing up while the other points down. Baer believed that Boltunov was inexpertly trying to indicate that he believed the tusks should have pointed outward. Even in Baer's time, most scientists believed they pointed outward. The tusks are correctly placed in the upper jaw, not in the lower as they would have been in a boar. The way the tusks are pushed together in the snout is also correct. Mammoth’s tusks start much closer together than those of living elephants. At the top of the drawing is a separate drawing a mammoth’s tooth, which would have been very different from any mammal he was familiar with.

The drawing shows tiny ears on top of the mammoth’s head, which do not match Boltunov's written description. In the latter, he says the ears were six arshins (about eleven inches) long and on the “outside” of the head. I suspect this contradiction means he wrote his notes and made his drawing at two different times. The eyes are far too high on the head. This I think is a result of faulty memory. The skin around the eyes and top of the head was still there when Adams arrives two years later. The body is more elephant-like than boar-like, boxy with pillar legs and a short tail. The only boar-like details on the body are what appear to be fetlocks and thin hooves. Finally, Boltunov drew little lines around the mammoth that show the hair running the full length of its body.

Adams would have done well not to have dismissed Boltunov so quickly. Boltunov saw the mammoth a full two years before Adams when the carcass was in much better condition. By comparing Boltunov's observations with his own, Adams would have avoided some of the mistakes that he made. The mammoth still had its tail when Boltunov saw it. He not only drew the tail, he measured and took note of its length. The tail was gone when Adams arrived and he concluded that the mammoth never had had one. Most of the hair was still on the mammoth when Boltunov saw it and his drawing shows hair the same length over most of the body. Most of the hair had fallen off by the time Adams arrived and, based on where he found hair on the ground, he concluded that the mammoth had a great mane.

Adams was remarkably incurious about the mammoth. His memoir of the trip to recover it is more of a travelogue than a scientific paper. Other scientists complained about his lack of relevant details, but it never occurred to any of them to contact Boltunov (or Shumachov, for that matter) to collect information from a witness who was very curious. Except for Baer’s 1866 paper, I can find no reference to Boltunov that treats his drawing as anything other than an example of how wrong ignorant Siberians could be. Of course, cultural arrogance is hardly unique to that century. The scientists of the time could have gained useful information by mining Boltunov's notes and drawing for data. They could have gained much more if they had written to the governor and had someone interview him. Even though Boltunov has little to tell us today about mammoths, he has plenty to tell us about Boltunov and how people of his time, location, and class viewed their world. Maybe it’s time to take Boltunov's drawing a little more seriously.

* Sakha is the preferred name by those people who, until recently, were called Yakuts by outsiders. The Evenki are the largest of several peoples who are usually lumped together as Tungus.

** This is not the same as the official journal of the Academy, Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, which was in Latin. Later, they would make the very sensible decision to keep the French title and publish the articles in German.

An early description of permafrost

2013-02-03T17:37:00.002-08:00

At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, permafrost was a very strange idea to European scientists. The word wouldn't be coined until 1943. The earliest descriptions from the century before were simply of frozen ground running deeper than it should. The idea was completely alien to anything they understood. If the ground was deeply frozen, how could trees grow? Any mining engineer could tell you that it gets hotter as you go down, not cooler. No, they determined, deeply frozen ground was just a myth of superstitious natives.

In 1806, while traveling on the Arctic coast near the Lena delta, Mikhail Adams made some passing references to permafrost that included, as far as I can tell, the first short descriptions of ice wedges and patterned ground. Adams came to the coast attempting to recover a frozen mammoth. Prior to his trip, fewer than a half-dozen mammoth carcasses had been described and one woolly rhinoceros had been recovered. None of these descriptions described them as being frozen, only buried. Adams, in describing his mammoth specifically went into the fact that it had first been sighted in frozen soil. While at the discovery site, he made some casual observations of the place where it was found that included more details than simply stating that the ground was frozen.

First, a few words about permafrost. Permafrost is much more that frozen mud with a foot or so of mushy mosquito maternity wards (tundra) on top, though that's what it mostly is. It's actually a very complex geological phenomenon that still isn't completely understood. Permafrost can contain walls of almost pure ice (ice wedges), mysterious round hills that look like burial mounds (pingos), thousands of small oval ponds that appear and disappear (thermokarst lakes), and rings on gravel beaches and mile after mile of honeycomb patterns on the ground (patterned ground).

Patterned ground is caused by ice wedges. Very simply put, cracks form in permafrost in polygonal patterns similar to cracks in dried up lakebeds during a drought The case is different but the appearance is the same and the permafrost patterns are much larger. During the summer, melt water fills the cracks. The next winter, the ice expands, as ice will and that widens the crack. The next summer more water can get in, which widens the crack even more. Repeat for a few decades and the permafrost will be thoroughly broken up into a pattern. Because the ice wedge also expands upward, it will create the rice paddy pattern below (Fig. 1). Later in the summer, when the wedge has melted some, the pattern will be the exact opposite with the cracks being lower than the permafrost blocks.

Fig. 1. Patterned ground. Source.

Back to Adams. The place where Adams recovered his mammoth was a bluff overlooking the sea. Rather than looking at the permafrost through a hole dug into it from above, he has able to see a huge slice of it. The bluff he looked at was well over a hundred feet tall and several miles long. The mammoth had eroded out of a relatively high point on the bluff and tumbled to the beach. While waiting the boat that would take him and his mammoth back to civilization, Adams climbed the bluff to a place near where the mammoth had first appeared. He described it thusly:

Sa substance est une glace claire pure et d'un goût piquant, elle s'incline vers la mer, sa cime est couverte d'une couche de mousse et de terre friable d'une demie archine d'épaisseur.

My translation of this is:

Its substance is pure clear ice and has a pungent taste, it leans towards the sea, its top is covered with a layer of moss and soft earth half an archine thick [14 inches].

Two different English translations were published, essentially identical to mine. This passage caused some confusion for Nineteenth Century scientists. All other mammoth carcasses discovered in that century were found in frozen mud, not clear ice. Furthermore, the expeditions that visited the site found only mud. They chalked it up to the fact that Adams was a bit flaky and, outside his field, he was botanist, his work was rather sloppy. However, the existence of ice wedges might redeem Adams' reputation. At least, in this instance.

It just happens that Mamontovy Khayata, the place where the mammoth was found, has been the site of a joint German/Russian permafrost research project for the last twenty years. The picture below (Fig. 2.) is of the bluff in 2002. The light section of the bluff is a section of ice wedge. Beyond it is muddy permafrost and beyond that, the beginning of another ice wedge. It's most likely that Adams did, indeed, find clear ice that tasted terrible.

Fig. 2. Mamontovy Khayata. Source.

On to the polygons. After examining the bluff, Adams walked inland to collect plant samples. He also poked at the tundra to see if the thickness changed. He saw a great amount of drift wood both on the shore and on the hills. The wood on the hills his Evenki hosts called Adam's wood. The wood on the beach, which came down the Lena every spring, they called Noah's wood. First Adams' comments on the Lena floods:

J'ai vu dans les grandes fontes de glaces des grosses mottes de terre se détacher des collines, se mêler à l'eau et, former des torrens épais et argilleux qui roulent lentement vers la mer.

All three English translations agree on the substance of this sentence.

I have seen, in great thaws, large pieces of earth detach themselves from the hillocks, mix with the water, and form thick and muddy torrents, which roll slowly towards the sea.

The next sentence is the one that I think describes patterned ground.

Cette terre forme des figures de coins qui s'enfoncent entre les glaçons.

The first published English translation (1807) reads:

This earth forms in different places lumps, which sink in among the ice.

The second English translation (1820) reads:

This earth forms wedges which fill up the spaces between the blocks of ice.

Finally, my crude translation:

This earth forms figures, which settle among the ice.

Mine, more or less, agrees with the first, but I've discovered errors in the first. The very reason I've made my own translation is to figure out which one is right when I discover variations. I've also retranslated two German translations because I'm that anal.

In context, the earth (terre) he mentions must be the same muddy earth that he saw during the spring thaw. That would be the same frozen mud that makes up the majority of permafrost. This ice (glaçons) should be the same as the ice (glace) he saw on the bluff face. Knowing what we know about permafrost, it makes much more sense for the earth to be surrounded by ice and not for the ice to be surrounded by earth. The Germans agree with me, though they also call the earth wedge-shaped (diese Erde bildet sodann keilförmige Figuren, welche sich zwischen den Eisschollen festsetzen). If anyone is fluent in French I'd like your opinion on this passage.

Ultimately, it's not important whether or not he got all of the details right. The important thing is that, at that early date, he mentioned the figures on the surface of the ground and correctly identified the underlying structure as being made up of separate parts of ice wedges and regular frozen mud permafrost. At a time when many scientists didn't even recognize the reality of permafrost, that was quite an accomplishment.

Best dating advice

2013-01-31T19:06:00.000-08:00

Based on the picture, I'm betting the advice is "don't go out with a fifteen year-old; you'll end up in jail."

Happy Gun Appreciation Day!

2013-01-19T17:48:00.000-08:00

You've probably heard that today is Gun Appreciation Day, a stunt concocted by DC media consultant Larry Ward, who is not the same as Larry Ward, the voice of Jabba the Hut. Gun Appreciation Day is the latest in a series of appreciation days announced by conservatives hoping to duplicate the success of Chik-Fil-A Appreciation Day, a stunt cooked up by Mike Huckabee and Fox News to counter a mild boycott of the anti-gay activities of the restaurant's owners. The day drove hundreds of thousands of conservatives to buy chicken sandwiches to show those liberals whats what. It got enormous media coverage, especially on Fox. After they all went home the restaurant quietly announced that they would be changing their policies toward their gay employees. All of the appreciation days since have been miserable failures.

Gun Appreciation Day appears to breaking the losing streak. Ward has tapped into the paranoia felt by so many Second Amendment absolutists since Obama was elected four years ago and that has gone into overdrive since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Ward announced today for GAD, no doubt because it's the closest gun show weekend to the presidential inauguration. It's also two days before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a juxtaposition that many find offensive. Ward handled the criticism like the pro he is explaining that he thought that encouraging people to buy lots of guns was a way of honoring the famous pacifist who was assassinated with a gun in 1968, then he launched into an ahistorical argument about how if we had armed all the slaves we brought over from Africa they would have been able to end slavery themselves.

Controversy sells. GAD has had scads of coverage, even from the gun-hating, mainstream, liberal press. Gun fans held rallies at most state capitals, gun shows across the country are reporting great turnouts, and dealers are making buckets of money by jacking up their prices in anticipation of Obama outlawing all guns and sending jackbooted thugs to the homes of conservative constitutionalists.

So, crowds, sales, rallies, it's all good news right? Mmmmm maybe not.

In Raleigh, NC, three people, including a sheriff's deputy, were wounded when a shotgun gun accidentally discharged at the show's safety check-in booth.
In Medina, OH, a gun dealer was checking out a semi-automatic pistol he had just bought shooting an old friend if his in the leg and arm.
In Indianapolis, IN, a man was loading .45 he had just purchased when ha accidentally shot himself in the hand.
~~In Tupelo, MI, an accidental discharge grazed one man and injured a four year-old child with bullet fragments after hitting a wall.~~
~~In Marietta, GA, an man was shot in the ankle by a friend who was showing it to a third person.~~

For those of you who are counting, that's ~~eight~~ five people injured at ~~five~~ three shows. It's now 5:30 on the west coast and some of these shows go well into the evening, so this might not be the final count. I'm sure this is not the the kind of publicity Ward and his sponsors were hoping for. The gun lobby tells us that more guns in society will make us safer. Gun Appreciation Day is making just the opposite argument.

In the days to come, when talking heads debate gun safety, we will hear lots of harrumphing and sentences that begin "Well, responsible gun owners...." The problem with any argument that includes that phrase is that there are an awful lot of irresponsible people in the world. More people carrying guns means more irresponsible, immature, and clumsy people will be carrying objects that are one oops away from killing someone or maiming them for life.

No one who has any influence on anything is trying to take away your all your guns. The people who are saying that are lying. Some of them are trying to sell you something. Some of them are paranoid extremists. Some of them a trying to keep you scared for political purposes. This madness has to stop.

UPDATE: After making fun of people who don't check the dates on news items, I failed to check the dates on my news items. Two of them did not happen today. The correct count is five people at three events.

Mini-Snopes vs. British crime statistics

2013-01-17T14:55:00.002-08:00

Yesterday, a conservative friend of mine posted on Facebook that gun crime numbers in the UK have gone through the roof since the government banned guns. Of course they didn't ban all guns, but that's beside the point. It took some pushing to find out his source. It came from Jim Hoft's blog on the site of the libertarian magazine Human Events. The Human Events blog post was, in turn, a block quote of a column on the far right site Townhall by News Editor Katie Pavlich. The quote my friend gave began with this:

Since NBC sportscaster Bob Costas gave us an anti-gun lecture two weeks ago during Sunday Night Football, we've heard a lot from progressives like Juan Williams, Bob Beckel and anti-gun advocacy groups about how countries in Europe with strict gun control laws don’t have problems with gun crime. We've also heard the reason the United States has a "gun crime problem" is because we allow citizens to own handguns however, the numbers on violent crime committed using a gun tell a different story.

That's Pavlich's introduction to a block quote from the British conservative tabloid, The Daily Mail. Here's the key part of the Mail's article:

The Government's latest crime figures were condemned as "truly terrible" by the Tories today as it emerged that gun crime in England and Wales soared by 35% last year.

Criminals used handguns in 46% more offences, Home Office statistics revealed.

Firearms were used in 9,974 recorded crimes in the 12 months to last April, up from 7,362.

It was the fourth consecutive year to see a rise and there were more than 2,200 more gun crimes last year than the previous peak in 1993.

Figures showed the number of crimes involving handguns had more than doubled since the post-Dunblane massacre ban on the weapons, from 2,636 in 1997-1998 to 5,871.

That sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? That sure blows a hole in the liberals' argument that fewer guns make us safer. Not only does it not make us safer, it makes us less safe. When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns! And, for some reason, fewer guns seems to make criminals more likely to use theirs. So, why aren't we hearing about this on the news? Yes, I know the mainstream media is run by anti-American liberals, but why aren't we hearing about on Fox or talk radio? Could it be that it's complete BS? Yes, it could. If Pavlich had bothered to look at the top of the page on the Mail article, she would have noticed that the article was published on January 10, 2003, Those "Government's latest crime figures" refer to the 2001/2 reporting year. The figures are over ten years old.

Locating the correct figures and making sense of them took some work. When I did find them, this is what my crunching revealed. The British reporting figures are for England and Wales only. Northern Ireland is omitted because they are a special problem. Scotland has a different legal system, so the the definitions of crimes don't match up with those of its two southern neighbors. In the England and Wales statistics, total gun crimes includes air guns and fake guns. I eliminated air guns, which made up about half of the total gun crimes statistic. For the first two years below, fake guns were not separated out. The real gun figure should be a couple hundred smaller. The Daily Mail article includes fake guns in its figures.

In 1996, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton entered the grade school in Dunblane, Scotland, a town of less than 8000. He carried four handguns. Over the next few minutes, he killed sixteen five and six year-olds and one teacher who tried to shield the kids with her body. He wounded ten other children and three adults before killing himself. The next year, the government passed laws banning almost all handguns manufactured after 1917.

In 1996, the year of the Dunblane massacre, there were 6063 gun crimes in the UK (that includes fake guns).

In 1997, the year they phased in the new law outlawing handguns, the number went down to 4904, a 17% drop in one year.

In 1998, they separated fake guns from the real gun statistics.

In 2000/1, the number of gun crimes was up to 6683. That's the first number the Daily Mail article mentions. It's a huge increase. The UK was in the midst of an epidemic of drug-gang violence at the time.

In 2001/2, the second year in the Daily Mail article, the number had gone up to 8778, however, this number was inflated by some changes in definitions and reporting. In any case, everyone agrees that it was an increase over the year before.

Beginning in 2003, the numbers started going down and have continued ever since.

In 2010/1, the last year for which figures are available, the number had dropped to 5411. That's about ten percent lower than in the year of the Dunblane massacre. For comparison, in that year, the US had over 300,000 gun crimes.

These figures do not support the popular conservative argument that more guns equals less crime. Even if there was a rough correlation, it's naive to think that that one variable is the only factor determining how much crime we have. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation.

There are rational arguments that can be made on both sides of the gun control debate. Naturally, I find some more convincing than others. Your mileage may vary. No one is helped by using lies and BS to push their agenda.

PS: At some some point, Pavlich did find out that the Mail article is extremely out of date and admitted it (Hoft has not). Rather than simply say "oops" and move on, she went hunting for different statistics to support her argument. The Mail came to her rescue with a 2009 article referencing the 2007/8 figures. I guess five year-old figures are better than ten year-old figures.

The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year--a rise of 89 per cent.

I went back to my sources to figure out what the hell they're talking about. Both Mail articles used figures that included fake guns. My figures for real guns are 4643 in 1998/99 and 7403 for 2007/8. That's a 62% increase--big, but it's not 89%. That increase needs to be taken in the context of a six year trend of gun crimes decreasing and that the newer number uses methods that result in higher numbers than the earlier figure.

That's all fine and dandy, but what explains the difference between 89% and 62%. Here's something I missed my first time through. After the handgun ban went into effect, fake gun crime increased. In 1998/99 there were 566 fake gun crimes and in 2007/8 there were 2562, well over four times as many. The lesson here is that when guns are outlawed, outlaws will use toys.

Bonus fun fact: In her original article, Pavlich did not just rely on the Mail article to argue that more guns make us safer.

On top of these figures, the notoriously violent city of Washington D.C. just saw its murder rate fall below triple digits for the first time since 1963 and just four years after the Supreme Court overturned the city's handgun ban in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Boo yah! Who needs foreign statistics when we have genuine American anecdotes we can use. Okay, it's not really American, its a liberal, east-coast, big city. But that's even better since it shows the failure of nanny-state, socialist elites. Except it doesn't. Pavlich was good enough to provide us with a chart to make her point. It only covers murders, but that's a good stand-in for crime, especially violent crime.

Let's see, the gun ban was overturned in 2008. If her argument is valid, we should see a dramatic downturn in murders as soon as that happened. And look, there is a dramatic downturn in murders--starting in 1992 while the gun ban was in effect. In fact, the number of murders went down about 60% while the gun ban was in effect. After the gun ban was repealed, the decrease in murders continued at about the same pace. That does not support the argument that more guns means less crime. It does, however, support the argument that there might be some other factors that need to be considered along with the numbers of guns in our society if we really want to reduce violent crime.

I, mini-Snopes

2013-01-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

In all the time I've been blogging, I've often checked out where people come from when they visit archy, but I've never looked their entrance page. That's the one that tells me what they were looking for. About two weeks ago I started doing that and was amazed to see that most people were coming to look at an old Snopes-style debunking posts I'd written. Because there is a real Snopes out there, it had never occurred to me that my debunking had anymore value than just me blowing off steam. It just drives me crazy that people I know and like get taken in by chain letter like things on Facebook. The specific one that has been getting the most attention is this one playing on resentment towards the supposed cornucopia of benefits that undocumented immigrants get for coming to America.

When I mentioned this on Facebook, I suggested maybe I should open my own mini-Snopes. A couple friends said maybe I should. Thinking about it, I wish I could. The post I'm working on right now is a perfect example of the problem with this sort of rumor-mongering. There is an anti-gun control piece spreading across the internet today. A very little bit of research (really, less than a minute) revealed that it's BS. By the time I started looking into it, the lie had been picked up by two very big right wing sites. From there over 6000 blogs, fora, and what-have-yous had picked it up and were spreading it. Those who were brave enough to leave the right wing bubble were using it to troll left wing and moderate sites.

After hours of research and writing, I'll put my debunking up on my blog. I will. But, about seventy-five people a day visit my blog. I have no idea how many actually look at my front page or just determine that I have no nude pictures of Ann Coulter and move on. If people Google around trying to find out if something like this is true, where will my little blog rank on the six hundred pages of results? If Snopes picks it up--they might or they might not--they'll rank several hundred pages above me. I wish there were hundreds of mini-Snopses out there, even if they are just people who copy/paste our debunkings into fora after the right wing bubble children copy/paste their unsubstantiated propaganda there.

Moving back a couple paragraphs, for me, what is the cost-benefit analysis for doing this? On the plus side: 1) it allows me to blow off steam when I see my friends being manipulated, 2) I might educate them, and 3) they might be a little less credulous in the future. Okay, I put that last one in there for humorous purposes; no one escapes their bubble. Which leads us to 4) I'm funnier than Scopes. That helps.

On the minus side: 1) comprehensively researching these things takes a lot of time. Look at my debunking of the 90-foot plum tree. This is something I've been pondering for years. I own many of the sources I needed to research it. I spent well over a week writing that piece, off and on with my serious writing. For each of these Scopes things, I need to bring myself up to speed in a new field, track down the origin of the rumor, compose and write a response. And, it's best if I do it in a couple of news cycles. 2) There is more to number 1), but we needed a break here. Okay; are we all rested up? Good. 3) We were talking about how long this takes. Writing one of these things within news cycle time can take all of my time for a full day. For reasons I have mentioned before, I have very little free time. I must finish the book. Short breaks to write these things is good for clearing my mind for more mammoth writing; longer breaks fall into the minus side of the cost-benefit analysis.

So, four small things for, and one very, very large thing against. The objections really come down to two: 1) no one will notice (lots of linky-love will help there (PZ, I'm looking at you)) and 2) Time is money and I can't afford either. Is it worth trying to monetize such a small blog? The mighty and majestic Bora Zivkovic seems to think it is. I've always been shy of this because getting a 33 cent check each month would just be an insult I don't need to invite. However, if I had some money coming in from the blog, it might justify the time spent giving the rubes what they want (that's a literary reference and not an insult. Okay?).

Apropos of nothing, I wonder if blogging has hurt the business of talk therapists. Read the debunking I linked to. Read the one I'll probably finish tomorrow (depending on your timezone). Now that the comments are working again, give me your advice. Or just anonymously send me your money. I'm sure we can make that work.