A New History of Old Europe

A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe (translated by Caroline Waight) gives us the latest info on archeology and DNA samplings from European archaeological sites. The title may be a bit pretentious, as it only covers an area of Earth more or less a cultural backwater until very recent times. Still, there is a lot of new information to give us an up-to-date picture of the peopling of Europe. European archeology covering the most ground, it is refreshing to see debunking and confirmations from new data. Particularly, and most interesting, the piecing together of prehistoric metadata involving artifacts and diseases.

I enjoyed this book as it is a good tie-in with David Graeber's and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything.

Shaman of Bad Durremberg

Europe, the largest peninsula on Earth, has it tough duing the Ice Ages. Though the central plains heading across Eurasia are ice free, living conditions at the deepest parts of ice ages are impossible. However, during the interglacials Europe is quite charming. Briefly, from current data in the book, what we currently know is that Europe's first known settlers are Neanderthals and Denisovans some 600,000 years ago. Early modern humans followed, but left no permanent genetic record among modern Europeans.

Three waves of anatomically modern humans have left genetic markers among Europeans today. The first wave, the hunter gatherers that produced the beautiful cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, entered from Africa approximately 45,000 years ago. Reconstructed DNA evidence taken from bones and teeth from that time indicate they were dark-skinned, and dark to light eyed. These Aurignacian hunters after mastodon and cave lion and short face bear were beautiful black people with blue eyes.

The latest Ice Age ended some 12,900 years ago, and was so abrupt as to be noticed in the short span of one generation. Times were good for the hunter gatherers in Europe, until about 8,000 years ago, with glaciers finally in retreat, farmers from Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent appear in Europe. Interestingly, there are two distinct groups of unrelated peoples inhabiting the western and eastern portions of the Fertile Crescent. The western people are the lactose tolerant cheese eating surrender monkeys of the future. Because they lack nutrients (vitamin D) from hunter gathering, they got paler and paler the further north they went. Funny thing is the physical records show the original hunter-gatherers staying way clear of these extremely violent farmers bickering over land, other than interaction through trade.

 And the trade networks are a regular time crystal of a quantum computer connected by atom lasers. Much to be gleaned from the metadata of traded artifacts, but the extent of networks reached all the way across Eurasia, and possibly into the Western Hemisphere. These are the peoples behind the poorly named Agricultural Revolution, with groups picking up and abandoning agricultural practices as set their whims. (My mother's side of the family can be traced back to the Scandinavian penisula, which became ice free a mere 6,200 years ago.)

5000 years ago the last migration wave arrived from the Ponticsteppes above the Caspian and Black Seas, the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya brought Indo-European languages, bronze age tech, and domesticated horses with them. They originally migrated across the Caucasus to the steppes from the Zagros mountains of Iran (thus the whole shithead Aryan white supremacy thing).

This third migration wave DNA is prominant in Northern and Eastern Europe, and also in Native Americans. (Easily solved problem traced back to a 24,000 year old skeleton in Mongolia, the common ancestor). We are up to speed save for an interesting deduction via the metadata of disease. There is a suggestion that the Black Plague came with the Yamnaya, like a biocidal invasive species.. Further, plague has a possible origin in the domestication of horses. The bacteria responsible for plague are indigenenous to the Vast Plain of Eurasia. Further evidence, the Yamnaya replaced their steppe horses and tamed native European horses (possibly more resistant to plague). 

Obviously, the authors stress the absurdity of racial superiority and that we are still of dangerously limited genetic diversity. (Me being Scandinatian makes me seriously inbred). Thank goodness for the African Diaspora.

Still lots to do, lots of books to come, and still a lot of places to dig up.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

It is a tragedy that there will not be three or four sequels to this book, as planned. Genius is tossed about too casually, but David Graeber definitely was a genius. I'm gonna have to buy this book as the limit of the library loan made me skim a lot (never enjoyable). I like to read and then walk and sleep on it. This is a book worth rereading. The main point of the book is its time to reexamine our data, check our bias, see what is probably correct or absurdly wrong. Much of the prehistoric narrative, and the advancement of civilization, is mostly wrong. We have a prejudice, a bigotry, towards primitive man which has made us mostly wrong about the past. We have a paucity of imagination on purpose, to be scientific. But that makes us objectively wrong.

Picture yourself  15,000 years ago. Or I will. I'll look mighty peculiar. White people have not been invented yet. Oh sure, still another 8000 years and latitude and dietary changes to get the combo of light complected skin, eyes, hair. I am also frail and gracile compared to the short robust people of this time. Any one of these prehistoric people could break me in half. Mostly foragers, some play gardens towards occasional flood zone agriculture. They are incredibly fit and well fed, and also smarter than me, in a generalist way. 

Half a million years of cooking had shrunk their jaws almost as much as mine, but I had been selected for, among other things, vocal production. Language being a big bang for the buck communication;my short face, long neck, and descent of larynx has given my voice an operatic style of timbre, articulation, and perhaps range. This does not mean someone 15,000 years ago couldn't talk. Of course they could. Stuck in the popular mind are grunting and hooting cartoons. 100,000 years ago, yes, humans were not capable of the full range of human speech, but I think it ridiculous to assume they did not talk, or that language itself accelerated our cultural development. 

Articulate people, also playful, creative, imaginative, curious, cautious, and almost always in charge. They are not cowering in caves warding off animals with torches, but out and about in the world.

And what a world! Not the impoverished ecosystems of 21st century Earth, but teeming with an embarassment of overflowing life, lush with plants and animals. Rivers covered in fish. Oceans, plains, forests teaming with game, A landscape already fire shaped by human technology for human desire. Their entire necessary technology, the world's tools, on or about their person, and easy access to more.

How easy? By making, but more often trading. The trades extend throughout Eurasia and Africa going back at least 60,000-75,000 years. Extensive trade based upon so many objects far from their origins. Evidence also of not just making, but industrial mass production. A whole variety of things from arrowheads to mammoth ivory beads, to wood and bone and leather and rope. Beautiful things spectacular in their individual styles, yet still efficiently mass produced. The people back then, the myth goes, were much more free - free to work and play - than we are today. So, what went wrong? The idea is somehow we got stuck society-wise in this heirarchy, kind of like a bunch of bacteria locked in as symbiotes to a larger eukaryotic cell. The state? Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The Ds, Davids, Graeber and Wengrow have written a critque of the current narrative we have about prehistoric and near historic peoples,which I will get into, but they base much of their critique on what they call primordial freedoms:

Freedom to leave.

Freedom to disobey.

Freedom to play (at social experiments).

I think there is one more primordial freedom, which is:

Freedom to get fucked up, intoxicated, psychedelic, &c.

The Ds work from archaeological finds - the most recent 30 years - which are just now yielding vast amounts of information about how we past peoples lived. The archaeological evidence suggests the modern interpretation of prehistory, via people like Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama, are by and large just-so stories. 

This is not a put down of the above authors. Evidence changes, old museum artifacts identified correctly, new digs with contemporary technique, a clearer picture of prehistoric us. There is also recognized cutltural bias - despite cold reasoned deductive techniques - causing Victorian biologists to name a bug a queen bee. Not Egglayer. Not Old Means of Production. Queen. Or depicting Neanderthals as shambling ape men.

Starting with Rousseau and proceeding through the Enlightenment, the Ds say anthropological narrative mimics the stale story of the Bible. Starting in a egalitarian savage state and "racing for our chains" (Rousseau) via the agricultural revolution, property rights, and heirarchy. 

(The Ds make a good case that most of our American ideas about democracy were actually critiques and arguments from Eastern Woodland philosophers, towards Jesuits. There was certainly no tradition of democracy in Europe to compare to the radical ideas of the primordial freedoms).

The contemporary narrative of progresss is us moving from clans to tribes to chiefdoms to states. Each level an increase in population size, better lifestyle and accumulation of wealth. The evidence suggests otherwise. People did just fine as foragers. People did just fine without bosses. People built cities without bosses. Didn't need agriculture to sustain these cities. Most cities started out as mudpie play and added to over the centuries. They were built, abandoned, refurbished, demolished, like childrens treehouses. Again, a reminder that prehistoric us was just as imaginative, clever, and playful as we are now. Probably more. In any case, these European blinkers on paleontology produced some whoppers of judgements.

Example: The Great Leap, a cultural leap 40,000 years ago, based on increased sophistication of artifacts. Judgement: False positive, with bias. Western archeological research had been mainly digging up stuff in Europe. Unfortunately this priming error has promoted Western chauvinism (white supremacy). More to the point, the European invasion and slaughter of the inhabitants of Turtle Island (as N. America was indigenously known) was inevitable, almost manifest destiny. Diamond, Pinker etc. are quick to point out the external advantages, the guns, germs and steel, as opposed to any inate superiority of the invasive species, nevertheless they treat it as fate. Where instead is coincidence, and a small window of coincidence at that. 

Back to primordial truths. Freedom to leave. Freedom to disobey. Freedom to play. How are these supported in the archaeological record? Well, take prehistoric cities, like in the Anatolian highlands, the Indus valley, the Ukrainian mammoth bone villages, have no palaces, no physical signs of income inequality. More like suburban tracts of similar houses, cells in a beehive, all grown over centuries of playing around at building. Gobeckli Tepe, Kaharantepe, assumed to be temples, feel more like amusement parks, haunted houses. Built on some agreed upon plan with no central planners, or at least no permanent bosses. What you might call nowadays a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, but with some seasonality. As if, for a period of mutual improvement and fun, all volunteered for corvee labor, and then went on their merry way to do whatever TF they wanted until the next season or get-together.

So what you generally find, is that people do just fine without bosses. Bosses are nowadays a complex mixture of sovereignty, charismatic politics, and bureaucracy. Mini-states.Mini-mansions.

A big just-so story is once you get too many people together, you need a heirarchy of bosses to run them all. Turns out humans have been capable of mass industrial production with standardization of parts for at least 100,000 years, and with no evidence of heirarchy or dominance. Just the opposite. Often you would find the most elaborate paleolithic grave sights thought to be princes and princesses, were more often bone deformed in some way. Differently abled, cared for, cherished, dying in a society that allowed for charity.

Two questions that are determined to be stupid questions are: "When and how did inequality arise? "When and how did the state evolve?" 

One opinion they demolish is state as a monopoly of violence. Capitalism (for one) is based upon force and fraud. How that can be monopolized is a simplleton's understanding of scales of force and fraud. Better still, a Newtonian understanding of violence versus a Bose-Einstein understanding.

The Ds have tons of examples, but nothing was tied together to see if the question was stupid or poorly framed. They admit that their question is how did we get stuck? That's a better question, and I think that is what the next book would have been about. It's a rushed answer they give, but I've part of the answer. It involves my 4th primordial freedom: freedom to get fucked up. 

In every example of every state they reviewed, all the orgs had control over intoxicants, had a purity code and efficiently mass produced industrial drug system. 

Note to self: every state ever controlled their drugs. Standardized and regulated good drugs to the people. Mesopotamian barley beer, Egypt had wheat beer, Incas corn beer, and along with/before that the pscyhoactive drugs and any shit you can eat, drink or smoke. 15,000 years ago, people went to megalithic sites to party and get fucked up and fool around. Get freely fucked up and see a show. And what better way to get fucked up than with well regulated drugs? Well distributed drugs? Heirarchy is the best supply chain and before you know it, you're stuck.

I would argue that drug use, many other practices, is protected under the 2nd amendment. And that, dearie dears, being necessary to the security of the state, shall not be infringed.

Short version? Read the book. Worth reading. Read 1491 along with it.

Oh yeah, what about agriculture and property rights? The so-called Agricultural Revoltion was a 10,000 year span of opportunistic gardening, only adopted permanently after an impoverishment of the land. We stupid apes are worse than fire ants.

Property rights? Ridiculous at face value, that a tiny lifespan/spaced bug like you can own a piece of 4.5 billion year old Earth. OK firefly. Neverthless, obviously a perversion of sacred body space I guess. A persversion of what you consider sacred. 

The Five People You'll Meet In Prison

The Five People You'll Meet in Prison by Brandon M. Stickney

Part prison diary, part expose, I really didn't learn anything new about the American prison system (in this case the New York state penitentiaries). I saw this guy on the WGN morning news and he was funny and engaging but the book less so. 

The American prison system is set up to punish and the best a prisoner can hope for from the administration and officers is malignant neglect. Stickney meets five people who are kind to him, including a corrections officer.

I think the only thing that I got from the book was an uncomfortable reminder of the number of similarities between American prison life and American life. This is not a new insight from me.

The American prison system is the largest in the world and is thus one of the largest slave plantations on the planet. As far as administration is concerned, it's a win/win. Taxpayer funds for each prisoner and almost free labor out of them. Stickney noted New York state spends $60 grand a year on each prisoner, and perhaps actual spending on prisoners more in the range of $14-20 grand. That's quite a profit. In that situation, as product, as a commodified person, they'd want to treat the prisoners with the least amount of damage. But that's not the case.

Torture, yes, just so the torture would be preferred not to the death (unless they're insane or retarded). In any event the torture is enforcement only, to protect the prison (not the prisoners from each other), but it still happens.

Otherwise it is indifferent neglect and the inmates run the day to day maintenance. 

So am I saying the USA is a prison? No, but it does have a lot of coincidences.

If we treat the USA as a prison system, then the great American dream is to move from prisoner to cop, to boss. Maybe that explains why Americans all want to be take charge like cops and bosses.

Maybe a different take from some other research might help. Below you see trend of household income for the bottom 60%, 61-99% and top 1% from 1986 to 2014. Consider the bottom two thirds prisoners, upper one third cops, and top bosses.

Now see the trend true to scale:

No new insight other than a similar repressive system. 

The Great Big Book Of Horrible Things: A Book Report

The Great Big Book Of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's Worst Atrocities by Matthew White. My brother has this book in his bathroom. I got it from the library. I suggest that you buy it.

White walks through, in chronological order, the recorded kilodeaths and megadeaths that humanity has inflicted upon itself. It would be very easy to be cynical about this, and the antidote for cynicism is a morbid sense of humor. White possesses this. Not quite as developed a sense of humor as James Mahaffey, but it will suffice.

I could sample and excerpt some of the more awful things (like, for example, the peculiar Chinese execution practice of death by slicing), but instead let us look at his criteria (explained at the end of the book), and then also some of his general observations.

Upon finishing this book, I observed to my brother "We're just ants aren't we?"

Fire ants or crazy ants, it really doesn't matter, but from the historical perspective of 10,000 feet up, yup, we're just ants. Bugs. Ape-shaped bugs. You would think, with big primate brains acting in the aggregate, that we'd be smarter, but nope. There seems to be a limit to, or a cyclical referent to, the sophistication collective behaviors, and as such it makes me hold no great hopes for the coming hyper-neural network collective of hyperintelligent computers and the great Global Hive Mind. Megadeaths? Gigadeaths, or given a colonizing push out into space, teradeaths.

But you have to have a sense of humor about it. Couple of things. Anyone who ends up with the title "the Great" murdered a lot of people to earn that title.  Oh, wait sorry, criteria.

In order to make it into the book:
1) there has to be an immediate or closely followed death toll above 300K
2) a result of a specific outbreak of coordinated human violence and coercion
3) deaths can be direct (war, murder, execution) and indirect (aggravated disease, famine, accidental or incidental killings of civilians).

That's it. Quibble if you want, or write your own book.

Worse guy in history? Hitler*, of course. Or sure, Stalin was a monster, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. Alexander the Great was an asshole, along with Napoleon, Timur, Qin Shi Huang Di, etc. But Hitler deliberately and calculatedly did what he did in a way no one else has come close to doing... yet.

Badasses of history? Hardly killed anyone. Vikings, Huns, Samurai, Sikhs, Spartans, all light weights. You know who tops the list in multicides? The French. Yes, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Followed by the Chinese, the British, Russians, Germans, Americans. America better get cracking.

Terrorism. A problem? Small potatoes. To really kill a lot of people apparently requires the appartus of the state. Want to see a lot of deaths? Declare war on terrorism.

Justice? Most asshole dictators die comfortably in bed.

Sieges kill more people than battles do.

In war, civilians die more often than military. Want to be safe in war? Surround yourself with an army.

Chaos kills more often than tyranny. Failed states and the breakdown of authority account for more mulitcides than abuse of authority.

Religion kills? I got news for you, people were being nasty to each other long before religion came along. Percent of total human suffering caused by religious wars and persecutions? 10%. Or about the same as atheists have done. Take that, Richard Dawkins.

Hereditary monarchs are usually too inbred stupid to cause much trouble. If you want to get truly talented murderers to do a proper job, set up a meritocracy.

Guerrilla war. No state has ever managed to come up with a solution of organized versus irregular militia. It seems the only solution to insurgents is to set up a competing guerrilla band and let them hunt each other. (Lesson that municipalities learned in dealing with gang violence, perhaps???)

Finally, if you want to look at the illusion of progress (*cough* Pinker! *cough*), keep in mind that the 20th century was the bloodiest ever. White goes so far as to come up with a neologism to describe it: The Hemoclysm, the blood flood. 150 million dead. Well, fear not, this century is early. Maybe we'll have a new term by the end: The Coproclysm.

Hi ho!  

Ultra Society: A Book Report

Ultra Society by Peter Turchin. How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators on Earth

Leaving for work this morning, I realized I forgot my cell phone mobile. I went back to get it, and wondered if, back in the 90s, the reason the Japs came up with tamagotchi was to get us all ready for this horrible parasitic little device we all seem to have to have now. I can only hope the Steve Jobs of thew world rot in Hell next to the Timothy McVeighs. (We may have to create virtual Hell to upload them all). Not that Jobs came up with the mobile, merely that he is associated with the thing and just in general deserves to rot in Hell.

One other thing I of note was a story my brother told me where he was at a pitching cage with a radar gun. He balled up his body, and with every bit of strength and sinew that he had threw his fastest fast ball... and the radar gun registered 35 miles per hour.

Both these things will hopefully be used later on in the essay.

So, the premise of Turchin's book is that war created our complex society, and it did so mainly through group selection, or as he calls it Cultural Multitlevel Selection. I had to read the book with a few grains of salt, but generally like it because Turchin, like me, is not a big fan of either Richard Dawkins' or Steven Pinker's scholarship. Which is to say, Often-Wrong Dawkins should probably do what distinguished elderly scientists do best, which is to die and make room for better ideas that are closer to reality.

Bishop Dawkins has been pushing the gene-centric view of selection for far too long, has ridiculed and vilified any other kind of selection as pretty much heresy. Pinker also pooh-poohs the idea of group selection. Both rely upon kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and reputation management to explain the evolution of cooperation. Problem is, they don't always work.

The biggest problem with the selfish gene model is Dawkins cannot explain altruism or empathy. Dawkins is reduced to a pathetic handwaving statement such as this from his wretched book The God Delusion:

In ancestral times, we had the opportunity to be altruistic only towards close kin and potential reciprocators. Nowadays that restriction is no longer there, but the rule persists. Why would it not? It is just like sexual desire. We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce). Both are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes, blessed, precious mistakes.

In other words, "then something magical happens". But all one needs to do is look at, say, the African savanna and ask why are all these unrelated animals on the lookout for predators. Or for that matter, why isn't it a Hobbesian war of all against all? What's in it for the zebra to sound the alarm for the wildebeest? Why would any of the selfish little organelles give a shit about the eukaryotic cellular whole? Or for that matter, why do my cells, a great many of them not even me (yes folks, you are a chimerical mosaic monster of other people's and animal's and viruses'  cells and DNA), give a shit about any of the cells in my body, which, honestly, is about as vast and weakly connected as a galactic civilization communicating at the speed of light?

No, it doesn't wash. Way too much magical thinking involved. This is not to say that Turchin's system of theory are not immune to magical thinking, but the evidence is piling up that there is indeed multi-level selection going on.

Pinker's scholarship also suffers. One of the interesting things is he contends that violence has gone done considerably since our hunter-gatherer days. Archaeological evidence suggests that personal violence may have gone done (we, uh, we sure do like to eat each other a lot), but the societal metric that Pinker uses is to many very suspect. (Some very sloppy scholarship and induction in that book of his). Turchin points out that, if you look at the the archeological evidence, though hunter-gatherers appeared to be violent, the trend of violence increased from 10,000 BCE until about around 500 BCE, then it kind of went down.

What happened? Turchin says Religion. Uh-oh, I'm sure Dawkins will stick out a pouty lower lip at that statement. And yet, during what is deemed the Axial Age, monotheistic philosophical movements (Buddhism, Zororastrianism, Confucianism etc.) appeared that suddenly pushed for a kinder gentler type of governing. What happened? Probably the first instance of the panoptic surveillance state, or at least the perceived version of one. (A watched person is more likely a well-behaved person, and if a giant invisible sky fairy has his eye on you, knowing whether you've been naughty or nice...)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. People have been looking for the differences between humans and animals. Usually it is tool use, but, oh, sorry, culture in the form of technology predates humans. (So does society and war, by at least 100 million years).

Mark Twain suggested that man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. I've suggested that man is the only animal that can choke on it's own vomit. Or needs to.

But probably a defining difference is that man can throw things, and throw things more accurately than any other primate. Man uses ranged weapons, starting with rocks, and working up to rockets. Ranged weapons have an interesting egalitarian effect, not only against other predators, but amongst peoples. I don't need to be a big strong bully to take down another big strong bully. When I look at a hand axe, what looks like an ungainly and awkward two-pound piece of flint, I may see a not-particularly-great bashing weapon, but, with it's razor sharp flint edge and just enough heft, a very effective throwing weapon. Especially when a lion or what have you doesn't see it coming. Ow! Hey! Little monkey fucker!

Ranged weapons are at least two million years old, and not coincidentally come into proper use with the emergence of Homo erectus. Now, the thing about homo erectus is they got the proper ball and socket shoulder joint, the musculature, and the big-brain eye-hand coordination to really whip that sucker hard. I mean, computer models suggest these guys and gals could easily throw a 100 mph fast ball, making most of today's MLB pitchers rather mundane.

And that matters. It meant for a pretty evenly matched group of people. Throw in a moment arm multiplier like a spear shaft, and then an atlatl, and then a bow and arrow, and you have a great equalizer not seen until Samuel Colt came along. Turchin theorizes and provides evidence that hunter-gatherers were very egalitarian, and anthropological studies suggest that bullies or people trying to set themselves up as chiefs generally their asses killed by the rest of the tribe if they got out of hand. And so it was for 95% of out evolutionary and cultural history. It might explain why we don't like cheaters and bullies, and have so many institutional methods of keeping the alpha male in line.

Then something happened. Multi-tribe chiefs appear (with their cohorts), and suddenly you have dictators, and inequality, god-kings demanding worship and tribute and human sacrifices. And war got worse. And worse. And you end up with these butt-holes getting monuments built to themselves.

Whoops, I left out a step. Turchin notes that societal groups seem to have magic numbers. Beyond a certain number of people, a niche opens up that allows for bullies and their cohorts. (Remember, bullies cannot exist with a supporting cohort to surveil and suppress the rest of society).

He points out that this depends somewhat upon geography. If there are geographic barriers that limit the size of the population, you can't reach that magic population number (not unlike Dunbar's number) , and you end up with small bickering clans, tribes, and chiefdoms. The classic case is New Guinea, small valleys separated by mountains. (Similarly dense jungle, or swamp, or islands). New Guinea, as far as can be determined, was colonized by people's possessed of the Neolithic cultural package, but never progressing beyond it. They've had 10,000 years of war. This might suggest Turchin's theory isn't all ti's cracked up to be. My thought is this points out that true driver of cultural change, aside from multi-level selection, is logistics. Which, of course, is what war is really about (not strategy and tactics). If the numbers aren't there to build up a structure which allows for an extended logistical behavior, you get stuck. Although you also have a ritualization of war in new Guinea. They never experience genocide per se. A clan may be wiped out, but never a whole tribe.

This might suggest one variation of an answer to the Fermi Paradox. The aliens are out there, but they are stuck in eternal war.

So, now back to the Axial Age. Turchin suggests that it was not the Enlightenment that resulted in a relative decrease in violence. Makes sense. The Enlightenment is used far too often by Western scholars, and besides, lots of incredibly despicable individual and mass behaviors occur, and continue to occur after the (ha!) Age of Reason. So fuck that noise.

Turchin suggests that society as a whole, when it comes to structural inequality at least, that we've zigged, then zagged, then zigged back to some type of egalitarianism. I don't see it. Or if has happened, it's currently just a little zig back to a fair deal. Although, if the Ayn Rand delusional butt-hole parasites win, the ones that think they owe nothing to society or community, look for a very long, very Dark age of despotism. Coupled with parasitic panoptic technology, and human enhancement of all stripes and flavors, we may never get out of this dystopian Darkest of Dark Ages.

Turchin is currently extolling the accumulation of a Big Data effort to compile all archaeological, anthropological, sociological evidence to, I guess, run some learning algorithms up against and see what pops out. I can't see this as a bad idea.

Summarized report. Worth a skim.

I think the magic number idea is worth pursuing. I think that there is no fractal structure here, because fractals work kind of well, but are not a true fit to nature, as self-similarity eventually breaks down (history don't rhyme either), and my suspicion is there is a magic population number that exists up in the high billions or maybe trillions that makes things zig again. Or zag. Hopefully zig.

The Vital Question: A Book Report

Nick Lane's The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life is not a book. It is an argument. It is an argument the way Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species is an argument. Nick Lane warns us in his forward, and some may not be ready to slog through this book.

Not that the book is that much of a slog, it's actually fairly well written and engaging, and he managed to mostly convince me with his arguments. He does keep the energy calculations to a minimum, but he is going to beat you about the head and shoulders with both data and supposition. So be forewarned.

Nick Bostrom, the Doomsday philosopher, will be pleased with this book. Bostrom really, really hopes that extraterrestrial intelligence (and by backwards inference, extraterrestrial life) is not found in the Universe. More locally, Bostrom hopes that absolutely no life is found on Mars, or Ganymede, or Europa, or Enceladas, or anywhere else in the Solar System. And never was.

If life is not found, then it is probable that the Great Filter which apparently exists to wipe out Life, is in our past. In other words, given the Fermi Paradox, that the universe seems set up to produce our kind of life, and that once it gets going our kind of life probably is set up to produce intelligent life, then we should be up to our armpits in aliens. We are not. "Where are they?" asked Fermi.

"Dead!" says Bostrom, "or even better still, Never Made It As Far As Us!"

So, Nick Lane makes a good case for No Complex Life. And by No Complex Life, he really means, no multicellular life, which in turn means no eukaryotic life, but maybe, probably, our kind Life elsewhere in the universe. Just not complex life.

Lots and lots of planets - once you eliminate the promising but barren earth like extrasolar candidates of which there are probably a shitload - probably have bacteria on them, and that's it. Bacteria, and archaea, forever and ever, amen.

(My own guess, and since we have a sample space of one to go from, is that there are perhaps only 1 out of 10²⁷ worlds like Earth within the particle horizon of the Universe, meaning there is exactly one Earthlike planet that we can observe. That might placate Bostrom, but I doubt it. I know it bums out scifi fans hoping for aliens, but, hey, kids gotta grow up sometime).



Lane has done a very good job of convincing me that Earth life  - cellular life - got it's start in alkaline hydrothermal vents at the bottom of oceans. I used to think life got its start in black smokers, but that is a bit too extreme of an environment.



But alkaline hydrothermal vents, with just the right chemistries, with a similarity between and high Ph cell interior and low Ph sea water, along with iron/sulfur catalysts that are at the heart of practically every nanomechanical respiration mechanism that cells possess, just looks too right not to be true.

All that needs to be done is to set up a working experiment that demonstrates it, rather like Miller's and Urey's lightning-in-a-bottle that created amino acids. (Now,  pretty much a curiosity as evidence suggests early Earth's atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller/Urey experimental mix.

So, consider. Life did not appear in some warm pond. There was no primordial soup. Early Earth (and  early Venus, and early Mars) had an atmosphere of water vapor, CO2, and nitrogen, but very dense. All those artist's conceptions of early Mars' blue oceans are fantasy. Instead, picture what Venus looks like now, blanketed in murk, and that is the early Earth.

Consider: The faint young sun paradox. The sun was 30% as bright as it is now 4 billion years ago. And yet all rock evidence says Earth had water on it. Not a hellish lava Earth, and not a frozen solid Earth, as we would expect. Same with Venus. Same with Mars. But Venus and Mars never developed life. Why not? My guess is, no magnetic field. The early sun was hissing, spitting kitty cat of radiation and solar flares. Without a magnetic field to protect them, the sun stripped Venus and Mars of their atmospheric hydrogen, and they were doomed from the get-go. The sun was also pumping out huge volumes of UV radiation, not to mention all the planets getting pummeled with the leftovers of planetary formation. The only safe place to be is at the bottom of the ocean.

So, that's my argument. Life - as bacteria and archaea - got started down there, and it got started very, very quickly. So, given the cosmic abundances of chemicals that make up our kind of life, given the favorable thermodynamic properties of molecular formation that make our kind of life probable, one would expect a Universe full of (microbial) bugs.

Okay, fair enough. What about complex life? Eukarya? That is the scandal. As Lane argues, it probably happened only once, and it involved an archaean host and a bacterial enosymbiont. The bacterial component turned into what we call mitochondria, and the archean host swelled up into the giant chimeric monster of a cell we call eurkaryotes.

Kudos to Lin Margulis to pushing the argument for this insight of cells merging. But! The evidence suggests it only happened once. All the other stuff inside complex cells, the double-walled nucleus, the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus, the flexible cytoskeleton and flagella are NOT further symbiots absorbed. There is no evidence to suggest this.

Meaning, the origin of the eurkaryotes was a one-time freak accident. Oh, perhaps that's a bit of hyperbole, but not much. Meaning, probably all those buggy bacterial mat planets out there in the Cosmos, stay bacterial mat planets out in the Cosmos. Four billion years on, and they've made zero effort to improve themselves.

As Lane suggests, nothing is more conservative than a bacteria. The weird, monstrous, chimerical patchwork Frankenstein's monster which is us may just be a one-in-a-Cosmos shot.

All the more reason to be nice to other.

The Accidental Superpower: A Book Report

The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence And the Coming Global Disorder, by Peter Zeihan

Archaeologists and paleontologists see fossils in a field where everyone else sees dirt and rocks.

I would think the same applies to a geographer looking at a topographic map.

Peter Ziehan investigates geopolitics through the venue of geography. Not an unwise evaluation, considering that, if the Earth were an apple, with us teeny tiny human bugs living on the apple skin, it makes sense to take into account all the folds and wrinkles of that apple skin.

Zeihan does a good job of relating political entities and their behaviors to the contingency of geography. Take, for example, Iran. It's a natural castle keep. Ringed by mountains, with limited access points, lots of fallback fastnesses to retreat into, Iran is a nightmare place to attack. Warmongers are either ignorant or willfully stupid in not acknowledging this.

Take Africa. Africa is a mineralogical treasure house. Called by the Belgian explorer Jules Cornet "un scandale géologique" (a geological scandal), Africa would seem ripe for crust rape. But most of it sits on a plateau, and as such, it is hard to get into the interior, what with very few navigable rivers.

Or take China, encompassing practically every terrain and climate that exists, China can in no way be considered one single country.

Or how about the US of A, which is the subject of the book? It has so many geographical advantages. Separated from the world by two vast oceans, possessed of some of the finest and most extensive farmland in the world, with a unparalleled riverine transport system, and a plenitude of both minerals and petrochemicals to exploit, it is hard to see how a nation could NOT succeed with  so many contingent advantages. Not that Americans haven't tried. Many of these favorable factors are not quite what they were. The US is still fortunate to have two friendly, or at least compliant neighbors to the north and south. True, ever since Sputnik and ICBMs, and before that Pearl harbor, the oceans are not quite the barriers they used to be, but still formidable. All the more reason to have a large maritime and aerospace force to augment this natural advantage. The US of A has, for two hundred years been a massive food power as well. (We easily forget that, don't we? Why?)

The other variable in Zeihan's equation is demographics. Which, given how the teeny tiny human bugs have overrun this particular petri dish, the composition, distribution and disbursements of said bugs is also critical in the corporate behaviors of our collective AIs.

Demographically speaking, places like Russia, for example, are fucked. A shrinking and elderly population Zeihan gives Russia not much more than 2020 to get their shit together before they become irrelevant. Japan, likewise, with no human replacements, really better get the robot revolution going before they become a footnote. As such, I think Zeihan does a good job of explaining a lot behind the scenes of the rugby scrim that passes for foreign affairs.

Oh, but then he has to go and screw it all up with predictions. Zeihan makes a number of rather embarrassing predictions, and is not afraid or ashamed to admit that some of them are wrong, or way out there, but will be confirmed or found wanting within the next twenty years. Hey, at least he gives it a whirl, and manages to flesh out what would normally be a rather safe, useless, broadbased list of trends and generalities which is of no help to anyone who thinks about living in the future. (Zeihan also, I should note, worked for Stratfor, a joke of a private intelligence firm, once called "The Economist, but a week late and excessively overpriced").

It is Zeihan's contention that despite the current gloom and anxiety about the declining role of the US and the West within world affairs, the US of A will come out smelling like a rose this century.

Fact of the matter is, Zeihan is probably right, but for all the wrong reasons (or mostly the wrong reasons). Things won't be good for the US of A this century. It's just that things are really, really gonna suck a lot worse for practically everyone else.

But first, he explicates what has gone right. H e provides a synopsis of the Long Boom and the Bretton Woods accord, and in this I think he is fairly right on. So, consider, Bretton Woods, which everyone always assumed was about currency and the hegemonic effort of the US of A to insure the dollar was the global medium of exchange. Zeihan correctly points out that the Bretton Woods accord was a different and novel type of empire building. Rather than a partially genocidal land dominating strategy which dates back to the neolithic, the US of A, being England v 2.0, the supreme postwar maritime power, and the last market standing intact in the world, took advantage of geography to impose their own two-part plan of peculiar global order:

"The first part alone likely stunned the (participants of the international Bretton Woods) conference into baffled silence: the Americans had no intention of imposing a Pax. They didn't plan to occupy key transshipment or distribution nodes. There would be no imperial tariff on incomes or trade or property. There would be no governors-general stationed in each of America's new imperial outposts. No clearinghouses. No customs restrictions. No quotas. Instead, the Americans said that they would open their markets. Anyone who wanted to export goods to the United States could do so... As startling and unexpected as part one of the plan was, part two must have rolled the Europeans in particular back on their heels. The Americans offered to use their navy to protect all maritime trade, regardless of who was buying or selling the cargoes... Far from imposing a Pax that would fill their coffers to overflowing with trade duties, levies, and tariffs, the Americans were instituting the opposite, a global trading system in which they would provide full security for all maritime traded at their own cost, full access to the largest consumer market in human history, and at most a limited and hedged expectation that participants might open their markets to American goods."

Now, say what you will about the efficacy or ethics of this arrangement, you have to admit it was pretty fucking brilliant.

(Brilliant in the same way that Madison's Copernican model of sovereign state planets orbiting a strong federal sun was brilliant. True, the idea was to prolong the Republic for as long as possible, when in fact it barely made it fourscore and seven years. But what the hey, Communism looks great on paper as well).

So, why the heck would America do that? Why not? Without question the supreme naval power, it was child's play to keep the sea lanes free and open. (Not safe for trade, that would require an investment and commitment several orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable force projection of the US Navy). The only fly in the ointment was that formidable land and food power, the Sovyetsky Soyuz. The US, as a land force, was strictly outmanned and outclassed in Eurasia. The desire for global dominance ran headlong into the pesky impediments of geography and demographics.

Bretton Woods has changed and mutated over time, but still is fairly functional. It helps that we've added former enemies (Germany, Japan, China) to the trade mix. But Zeihan says we are entering a multipolar world where Bretton Woods is gone. The US becomes, if not isolationist, then impotently non-interventionist, but still comes out somehow on top.

Why? Technology and education (although the conservatards are doing their best to wipe out that advantage). Demographics, with the US still a good destination for immigrants, and with the Baby Boomer's kids picking up what slack remains, keeping the population full of workers instead of retirees. And geography, with Zeihan's contention that the fracking boom giving us energy and food security well through the end of the century. There are other arguments, and I suppose you'd best read the book for that.

My objections? I find it extremely unlikely that the US will give up it's global superpower status so readily. If anything, the trends would suggest we double down on both defense and trade, and engagement (for better or worse) with the world.

Also, fracking ain't quite what it is cracked up to be, what with proven reserves not quite being up to snuff, and difficulties in processing that ultralight oil we pull out of the ground.

(An aside here. One thing usually omitted from oil accounts is that extraction is only part of the equation. Refinement and distribution is the other part. When Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville back in 1859, he wasn't drilling for oil. He was drilling for the useful products made from oil. Without Abraham Gesner to develop a practical method of distilling kerosene, and investor James Townsend to notice this, Drake would have been drilling nothing. So it is that the oil in the ground is useless without refinement. And it costs to refine specific types of oil. I once reported on how BP spent billions to refit their refineries for the toxic sludge out of Venezuela and Alberta. The same investment had to be made to handle the fricking fracker's fluffy stuff).

My main objection to Zeihan's analysis is that he waves off as almost inconsequential global warming. He devotes a three page appendix to climate change, and most of the that concerns sea level rise. He brushes off US food security and disruptions from mass population migration in two paragraphs. He doesn't even mention extinction events, or what we shall do with nine billion people in a few decades. He doesn't seem to worry about megadroughts, or increased storm frequencies, or storm intensities, or any of that stuff. That, I think, is a fatal flaw in the analysis.

Global CO2 counts are pretty much permanently at or above 400ppm now. The last time that happened was the Pliocene, some one million years ago, back when our venerable H. erectus ancestors domesticated fire. The fact that we have changed the conditions to that of a different geological epoch in a mere one hundred years should be fucking something to take note of. But he doesn't. Zeihan is realistic enough to realize that we are going to go through a Hobbesian period over the next twenty years, but I don't think he really has a clue.

True, what actually happens with our climate may actually be beneficial for the US of A (high unlikely, but still plausible). If, as many believe, things heat up to intolerable, then I envision a rump US of A occupying the only arable land left up north - Alberta. The Canadian shield - the stripped down tortured slab of granite that sits between the US border and the arctic circle - simply cannot sustain the kind of industrial agriculture the US favors. Of course, things could end up like the Pliocine. Back then, the tropics and mid latitudes really didn't warm up all that much. It was the arctic  that doubled in temperature. The poles were predominantly ice free in the summer, so expect sea levels to go up some eighty feet at least. Think of that what you may. It could be we see a lot of high latitude refugees wending their way south. Regardless, I don't think Zeihan did a very good job anticipating the consequences of climate change.

In any case, it was an enjoyable book and I would give it a read.

Animal Weapons: A Book Report

Animal Weapons by Douglas J Emlen. This book came out last year, and I finally got it from the library. Emlen investigates the various forms of natural weapons that animals have, and compares them to human weapons.

No surprises, really, about the comparison, because humans are animals, so of course we are going to parallel a lot of the same things other animals have come up with - especially eusocial animals such as ants and termites.

So, termites build hives. Monkeys build hives. We build fortresses, castles, battleships, bombers, all armored up and rigged to repel attackers from all angles. Of course, there are always game changers that make these weapons obsolete.

Emlen notes that weapons cost energy, and so one would expect most weapons to be small. Emlen lists three necessary ingredients for weapons to become large, for an arms race to occur, based upon the logic of economics:

1) Valued and limited (limited by scarcity or access) resource that,
2) is economically defensible (can be contained or constrained from others), and
3) is competed for in one-on one struggles

This is Emlen's recipe for arms races. Once a dueling tradition for resources exists, an arms race is inevitable. Emlen sites examples ranging from dung beetles to elk, sheep and deer.  From there, he moves towards human artifacts: armor, weapons, camouflage and subterfuge. The analogy only goes so far.

Interestingly, Emlen does not consider that other forms of competition are not arms races. He devotes a chapter to what he calls "Sneaks and Cheats". In other words, males that employ sexual reproduction tactics that do not involve one-on-one competition with other males (and why only males? surely there must be all sorts of intersex games going on that are not covered here).

Clearly, sneaking and cheating are valid and acceptable tactics to pursue. We need a better description.

Dung beetles.

Dung beetles that produce horns for dueling traditions are dung beetles that compete for the tunnel the female has dug. They can battle it out until a male is ejected from the tunnel, and invariably it is the larger - and larger horned - male that wins. There are sneaky male dung beetles that will dig a side tunnel into the females tunnel, wait for the opportune moment when the horned male is not vigilant, break through, and mate with the female.

I fail to see how arms race pressures make this particular form of competition any less of an arms race. It reminds me of the competition that occurs in between guards and prisoners in jails and prison camps, where increasingly clever means of escape are countered with increasingly draconian levels of surveillance and control.

There are species of dung beetle that do not develop horns. These beetles fight over the balls of dung, in rugby scrums. But even here there must be selective pressures for strength and stamina for a successful male to get a smaller piece of dung for a female. Therefore, my take is this type of arms race does not produce visible attributes, but is escalating nonetheless. The end of the race occurs with either dissipation and bankruptcy, or a new "cheat" that becomes a game changer.

The final three chapters look at human weapons. What Emlen does not cover is the most important weapon of all: brains. Clearly our giant Irish elk antler brains (compared to other primates) have been a result of an arms race.

I'll not describe the chapters save to point out that clearly the Cold War was an stupidly unthinking and inevitable arms race that should put us in our place as being not much smarter than a crab or a beetle or any other animal that grew horns or antlers or claws or teeth.

In fact, I would suggest that our ridiculous Irish Elk H-bomb antlers are testament to a monumental lack of wisdom and forward thinking. Deterrence is not what it is cracked up to be, and the so-called Fermi Paradox, in light of this, is not a paradox at all. Species that develop large brains wipe themselves out.

But I would observe that the current intrusion of behavior into the realm of computers and cyberspace is rather looking like massive antler building as well. I wonder if the game changer will be a sapient program that refuses to fight, or fights on its own terms.

Now that would be interesting. The end of WWIII might be Drone War I.

West of the Revolution: A Book Report

West of The Revolution, by Claudio Saunt. This book takes place circa 1776, in places on the North American continent besides the English Colonies. It explores the conditions that existed beyond our parochial little world view. Like the book Empires, Nations and Families, by Anne F. Hyde, Saunt covers the real history of the Continent, the real powers that governed and ruled within America. Hyde's narrative takes place during the period 1804-1860 or so. Saunt limits himself to the decade of the Revolution, and of course, the First World War, otherwise known as the Severn Years War, or the French and Indian war. The decisions concerning the partitioning of the North American continent along the Mississippi river resonate down to this day, but not due to decisions made in the peace treaty in Paris, rather how those decisions were taken advantage of by American Indians.

As Thomas Jefferson put it, after he entertained the Osage chiefs in Washington DC, "The truth is, the Osages are the Great Nation south of the Missouri. Among them we must stand well, because in their quarter we are miserably weak".

About a month ago, Jonathan Chait wrote an essay called "A Southern GOP Can't Be the Party of Lincoln" detailing the North/South split of our country that started prior to the Revolution, and festers down to this day. He lays out how the Republican party is essentially now the party of the Confederacy. David Brin picked up on the theme, and riffed his own take on this ongoing  event of the divide along the Mason-Dixon line.

A fairly interesting and worthwhile investigation, this examination of the North/South cultural divide within America, but it misses the far more interesting East/West divide. More to the point, the cultural difference between North and South are for the most part trivial. Both were interested in conquering and exploiting the continent west of the Appalachians, and later, west of the Mississippi.

While elites of the South would have preferred a vision of of a continental realm of landed gentry and hereditary rule, patterned on jolly England, the North was willing to eschew titles and pomp, but keep the mercantile power. Both the North and the South were all about cheap labor, their visions differed only slightly. While the South opted for the idea of chattel slavery, the North preferred trading cheap food for cheap people. Both wanted to exploit labor and ingenuity of peoples to the optimum value they could wrest from them. And why not? Labor was the only sticking point, getting people to do all the work for you, as everything else was practically free, no? That was the colonial vision of lands west: a world with no history, populated by peoples of no consequence.

So it is worthwhile to understand exactly what was going down outside of a tiny feeble set of English colonies clutching to the Eastern seaboard. In fact, I'm going to reproduce a striking map found in Saunt's book. Here we see the populated areas of the American colonies free of geopolitical symbolic borders.

Courtesy of West of the Revolution by Claudio Saunt

Looks a lot like a bad case of black mold ready for some chlorine bleach, doesn't it? And honestly, had native peoples west and south had any idea what was going to happen to them over the next two hundred years, I'm sure they would have applied a generous hosing down of bleach to rid the continent of this invasive species.

(And spare me the "those Stone Age slow learners didn't stand a chance against our superior technology" line. That's a trope that needs to die. Indians consistently and successfully bested and slaughtered European-style armies through and beyond colonial times. If you look at the map, English colonists had after almost two hundred years only made in ways into the Continent of only three weeks traveling time by foot. For every one surviving colonist, ten were sent from England, an attrition rate that few nations would find acceptable today. One of the single worst defeat, to this day, of the United States Army is the Battle of a Thousand Slain in Ohio country in 1791).

Our (America's) only advantage, aside from the fact that we Europeans are a miserably filthy and disgustingly germ-ridden race, is that we were able to reproduce at something close to biological maximum. Certainly this could not have occurred in Europe, and especially Northern Europe, without the advantage of the new food crops available through the Columbian exchange. Nor could we, as a nation, have thrived without two of the largest welfare programs ever conceived: the Louisiana Purchase, and the Homestead Acts. If any stupid fat white old conservative man should bother you about how superior they are due to innate white abilities, and how they could have been successful without a single penny of government monies, I suggest you spit and laugh in that parasite's face. Those soft squishy leeches make the fictional Cadillac driving welfare queen look like a paragon of Working Class Pride. They have not the slightest clue as to how they have been coddled and pampered by government largess and the coincidence of history. Capitalism was subsidized by the treasures of the New World. Do not confuse any supposed inherent systemic superiority for sheer dumb stupid Luck.

Okay, sorry for drifting. The book covers most of the continent outside of the Revolution, and contains may fascinating details.

We learn how Russians conduct trade among the Aleuts: kill some, take others hostage, demand the natives hunt sea otters or they kill the hostages, then give them trinkets after they've hunted enough for them (which the Russians are ineptly incapable of doing, hunting sea otters by the way).

We learn how the Spanish had at best two paltry fingers of colonization sticking up into the continental United Staes: Santa Fe, and maybe San Diego. But the whole enterprise was pretty damn pathetic for the longest time, and they relied heavily upon the charity of Indians.

(In fact, this is a common them for early western US history: the people that head west rely heavily upon native american charity and the largesse of the Federal government).

We learn how the Lakota from Minnesota discovered the Black Hills in 1776. The great thing about the Black Hills is, since they stick above the prairie, they trap rain. The area around the Black Hills stays rich and verdant even when the rest of the Great Plains are bone dry.

We learn how, had the Creek been assisted by the stupid short-sighted Spaniards, the South may never have risen. We also learn how, had the Creek become purveyors of goods to the fastest growing slave colony of Georgia, they may have had a considerable economic clout, and perhaps could have avoided being booted off their lands in the 1830s. (In fact, had the Indians been willing to trade with the British rather than the Spanish in Cuba, I rather suspect Indian regiments would have served the South in the Civil War).

We learn most especially just how poisonous were the attitudes of the Founding Fathers toward Indians west of the Appalachians, how they were at best seen as impediments, and at worse vermin to be wiped at the earliest opportunity.

Most especially, we learn how fur was, for the longest time, more precious than gold. Because, quite simply Fashion is at least a 200,000 year old industry, back when we first started clothing ourselves, and for the longest time, clothes were our most important technology.

When you look at a map of languages and cultures of the United States of America, you will see that ancient America is still here, despite out best efforts to wipe it all out. There may come a day when the East/West divide becomes far more important than the North/South.

About A Mountain: A Book Report

About A Mountain by John D'Agata is not really about Yucca Mountain, the proposed site of radioactive waste disposal from the nation's nuclear industry. At first I thought it was, but now I'm realizing it's really about the end of things.

(I included the Powell's book review in the link because I really find I don't want to talk so muc about John's book, which I do recommend, but rather on the theme I think he is covering - which is that everything is coming inevitably to an end, and so it's rather absurd to worry about it, or plan overmuch for it).

Yucca Mountain, as D'agata mentions, is probably the most studied piece of real estate on the planet. I don't think the studies were done to determine the safety or efficacy of storing all of that radioactive poison in a secure place for the amount of time it takes for it to become harmless. That amount of time - probably on the order of 250,000 years - is beyond current planning. Yucca was planned for 10,000 years, but that turns out to be basically just a made-up number that a lot of people will accept as "far enough in the future for us not to worry about shit".

Yucca, as far as I can determine, was really about income redistribution. You know, the kind that rich people don't mind at all, where the monies end up in their pockets. How else can you explain so much money wasted on something that was known by any rationally informed human from the get-go to be nothing more than wishful thinking?

Consider 250,000 years ago, humans, depending upon whom you talk to, were just becoming anatomically modern, and were probably already possessed of the majority of what we consider modern mental faculties. They had domesticated fire, had good facility with stone, wood, bone, leather, and rope technologies. They certainly were working on symbolic thought. I don't think any objective evaluator would have a doubt that these bipedal primates would inevitably split the atom.

(Seriously, nuclear fission reactors appeared soon after an oxygenating atmosphere allowed for uranium salts to be accumulated in water percolating through the right kinds of rock, so it's not a stretch to think that a combination of the same ores, charcoal, water, and monkeys would produce the same criticality through informed empiricism, or even brute force trial and error).

Question is, what about 250,000 years into the future? Any ideas? I can think of one. We are extinct. The rate we are going? With the capitalist free market system devouring everything in sight? With, not just an acceleration, but the next derivative up, a shock taking place throughout all areas of human habitation, I'm guessing we don't make it with the current trend.

I'm guessing D'agata is feeling the same way, which is why he treats Yucca as kind of a silly waste of time. At least that's the impression I got.

When you consider that there are already several million tons of radionuclides circulating through Earth's natural systems due to the past near 80 years of dumbfuckery, an estimated 77,000 tons of high level nuclear waste doesn't seem all that important, especially when we won't be around to worry about it?

In summary, a fun book to read, and I enjoyed it.

Junkyard Planet: A Book Report

Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter. Had I read this book when I was sixteen, I have no doubt I would be in the junk business. There is an excitement to the junk trade that I found compelling. No doubt this is the same excitement people on the Antiques Roadshow experience when they find out the piece of the junk in their attic is worth a significant amount of money.

Take, for example, this story about how Leonard Fritz made his fortune and founded one of the largest recycling facilities in the country:

"Back when Leonard Fritz was first starting out, steel mills had dumps where trash and the residues of steelmaking were thrown away. This latter category was represented by sand, bricks, and bits of steel that fell away during the manufacturing process. Of these steel bits, the most plentiful were the thin flakes that form on the surface of hot steel as it cools. "Mill flakes" as those flakes were called, was pretty much useless in 1938....Elsewhere in Detroit, Armco Steel, a major supplier to the automobile industry, was testing a new type of steel furnace. But Armco was dealing with an expensive problem: preparing ore for the furnace cost roughly $100 per ton. So the designer of the new furnace, a metallurgist who happened to be daughter of the mill's president, did some calculations and figured out that if you added a substance with the chemical makeup of mill scale, the preparation process would speed up and the cost would drop by $99 per ton, to $1. But where on earth could Armco get enough mill scale to feed its furnace. For reasons lost to history, the job of sourcing that mill scale landed in the hands of the metallurgist's young husband, who was visiting the Kelsey-Hayes wheel forging plant near Detroit on July 2, 1938. As it happened, Leonard Fritz was busy screening a three-hundred-ton pile of mill scale in the parking lot of the Kelsey-Hayes forging plant that day, working at an agreed-upon rate of $1.25 per ton... 'Ah, how much of that mill scale do you have there young man?' 'I figure there's about three hundred tons.' 'That won't be enough.' 'Well, how much do you need?' 'What I'm looking for is three thousand tons.' Leonard Fritz was only fifteen, but he already knew a few things, one of which was this: there was a dump in Detroit where mills had been dumping scale for years....'I think I can scrape it up. How much would you pay for it?' The metallurgist's young husband hesitated for a moment. 'Probably thirty-two dollars per ton.' Leonard Fritz understandably lost it. 'WHAT?' he exclaimed...'Well, thirty-six.' 'I'll do her.'...a few months later, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Armco Steel presented Leonard Fritz with a check for $186,000. It was still 1938."

Point being, the "how" and the "where" can send a ragpicker, or anyone really, into the ranks of those with considerable fortunes. The book has a lot of stories like that, and mainly now involving poor Chinese farmers who take America's (the Saudi Arabia of garbage) scrap, and turn into raw materials for the insatiable appetite of the world.

When I was growing up in Northwest Indiana, it was easy money in the steel mills. It was also some of the foulest air you could hope to breathe. That foul air was from the coking process, where they bake the volatiles of out of coal and turn into coke, and the volatiles, in turn, coke gas, are burned to produce a shitty brown haze. That haze - and jobs at the mills - is mostly gone now. Globalization was bad for the employment conditions of the area, but good for the air. Keep in mind, steelmaking didn't go away, it just got more efficient - and when you consider that a ton of scrap converted back into steel in electric furnace equals a ton and a half of iron ore, a ton of coal, and a half ton of limestone, that isn't so bad.

The scrap industry, as this book points out, is one of the greenest industries around. It may be true that a lot of horrible work-place and environmental practices occur in the developed world, where much of the scrap is recycled and purified, but these places have trouble enough just to produce clean food and water. The last thing on many people's minds over there are work conditions. (And besides, as standards of living improve, so does a demand for quality of life and environmental standards).

The majority of the book takes place in China, the majority of the action revolves around metals, and the majority of the capitalist hero characters are Chinese. Not that there are not good things happening here in America, but honestly we are all pampered poodles, not willing to do the dirty work anymore, even when we can profit from it. We have to remember that, if there was no boom in China, most of our crap would end up in landfills here, or burned, or illegally dumped.

Many of our broken things are sent to China, where they are repaired or repurposed, and sent on to the developed world. Part of this reuse is the resourcefulness of people in the developed world, part of this is our own wastefulness, and the distressing tendency of manufacturers to discourage repairs in favor of buying new products (and that can change, but it requires the consumer to demand it).

As Mr. Minter points out, recycling is really not an indefinite process. The quality of product inevitably declines, and so recycling is really outsourcing of trash to somewhere else. What Americans can do, is to follow the other two points on the recycling can: reduce and reuse. Problem is our way of life discourages wearing of hair shirts and the practice of austerity. And so we continue to consume and dispose...

Still, it is better than not using the stuff again and again. When you consider how much energy and effort has been used to extract and purify so many things from the earth, it seems rather a waste to dump them all back in again.

   

Normal Accidents : A Book Report

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs

Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow. Yale sociologist Charles Perrow prefered the term normal accident, in the sense that for complex systems with tightly coupled components, accidents are normal events. Indeed, he has suggested that some areas of technology and human enterprise are error inducing environments. This is rather similar to Edward Tenner's idea of Why Things Bite Back, the unintended consequences of human technology.

Perrow first coined the term "system accident" when this book was released in 1984. Since then, much of the examples and analysis in this book has been turned into a field of study known as Normal Accident Theory.

I'm going to suggest that, though even the public has come to realize that there is rarely a single cause to a catastrophe, the tendency is still there for the blame to descend to the operator's level, while the architects and designers get off scot free. Witness the financial collapse of 2008, as a prime example, and if that isn't a good argument for mandatory capital punishment for white collar crime, I don't what is.

As such, I realize that there are multiple sources for disasters, but still, when it comes down to it, I can't help but shake the feeling that most of them boil down to incompetent management. Incompetent fuckups who think they know what they are doing. When it comes to maritime accidents, one could blame the captains managers, but the error-inducing environment is created and maintained by the owners. These are the people who invariably cut corners to save a buck. And it is not just maritime accidents, it is every single area of human endeavor that involves technology only slightly more advanced than the five simple machines of the ancients.

Couple this incompetence with a willful ignorance to evidentiary facts, and you get a modeling system inside that bony carapace of a skull that almost invariably ignores dangers for a more rosy rainbow unicorn assessment of the situation (and who does a better job of that than clueless executives?):

"Why would a ship in a safe passing situation suddenly turn and be impaled by a cargo ship four times its length? For the same reasons the operators of the TMI plant cut back on high pressure injection and uncovered the core. Confronted with ambiguous signals, the safest reality was constructed".

So, this has been addressed in one form or another in the form of increasingly sophisticated risk assessment methods, but Perrow has suggested that some areas (especially, I would note, those that can be automated), might best be abandoned as human pursuits. Nuclear power and weapons being one of them.

I disagree, one thing I note is that if any area has had more incompetent monkey clusterfuck accidents with more devastating results, it is the area of nuclear weapons. And yet, if the systems for deploying and maintaining nuclear weapons are highly complex and tightly coupled are accidents waiting to happen, then wouldn't the past 70 years suggest the are not a Great Filter?

So, I would quintuple the quality control on bonehead executives, or at least, given their pay has increased some 350% over the past 30 years, subject them to 350 % more scrutiny than they suffered some 30 years ago. Public executives, not so much the problem, as they are already under public scrutiny. It's those private bastards that are going to wreck things for everyone. And so long as they insist on socializing the losses and privatizing the gains, they need to be kept ground under thumb, just to keep the hanky-panky to a minimum.

The other obvious choice is to loosen the coupling on the internal components so many of these systems. Tight coupling makes them more efficient, but it also makes them more brittle. Having a little inefficiency is not necessarily a bad thing. As such, the term "slack" comes to mind. Though this is considered an ineffable term within the Church of the SubGenius, I now suggest it be incorporated into every single human design element to the end of time.

Oh, right, and the accidents detailed in the book are highly amusing, and worth the read.

Atomic Accidents: A Book Report

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozarks to Fukushima by James Mahaffey. Short review? Read this book. When I saw this book at the library, and saw the title, I said "How can I NOT read this book?"

I was not disappointed. Not only is Mr. Mahaffey superbly informative (holds my record for dog-eared pages), he does with a deadpan irony drenched sense of humor found mainly in the military and the parched Permian hills of West Texas. For a nonstop recounting of nuclear horrors, this is one of the funniest books I've ever read. How good of a book is it? I would probably consider adding to my personal library.

I wish I could quote all of the (invisibly) underlined passages within the dog-eared pages, but why spoil the book for you? (A sidebar here: I think it extremely rude to underline lines in a book that is not mine, and I also take pains to unfold all of the dog-eared pages. I respect books and treat them accordingly).

I would make two observations, perhaps three. The first is: it is a wonderful thing that we human creatures are such a primitive, savage and superstitious lot, believing in unseen influences and malevolent forces, invisible curses and evil spirits, witches and spells and ghosts and spooks, otherwise the planet would be a lot more blighted with radioactive debris than it is. This is not to say some of us haven't been cavalier around the stuff, but reading about how often meltdowns and spills happen... just be glad the industry was a little concerned about its public image.

My second observation is that almost every incident listed in the book is a case of Thinking Fast and Slow. Or rather, engaged in far too much clever monkey fast thinking to fix immediate problems (and thus making the situation worse), and not nearly enough slow fore-brained thinking on coming up with more sober solutions. I would go further, and suggest that this fast and slow thinking could be extended to the cultural level; for the fast, clever version of cultural ruminations has given us the industry we have today, which is not necessarily the right way we should have gone about this. The mid-20th century saw a kind of mad rush to get things going, the public was ready since the beginning of the 20th century for a solution to the energy crisis (yes, they realized back then that oil and coal wouldn't last forever) and there were two priorities to all this 1) make nuclear weapons, and a distant 2) make power for electricity.

The reactor of choice ended up being something that can make plutonium, and uses pressurized steam power. Problem is using water to moderate and cool reactors, and pressurized steam leads to steam explosions. Steam explosions... usually bad. Steam explosions with radioactive fissile materials... usually worse. The logic would suggest, therefore: nuclear power bad. (Well, no not actually, unless of course, it is allowed to rest in the clumsy paws of those drunken dancing bears known as the Russians... more on that in a minute).

Let me start from the rear of the book and point out that Mr. Mahaffey is solidly behind thorium reactors, either the molten salt variety or the liquid fluoride variety. It really is only a matter of time before we head that way because, let's face it kiddies, fission is here to stay. The beauty with thorium is the reactors can't melt down because they start out molten, and the waste is so much easier to process. (I don't include you can't make bombs with a thorium reactor, because you can make bombs with U233, it's just not very practical).

This is not to say that nuclear waste is, in any sense, really waste. The United States is the only country that does not process it's nuclear waste, and as a result, we plan on burying a huge amount recoverable fuel and valuable radionuclides - not to mention that gold mine known as plutonium. (There will come a day when, if we make it out to the outer Solar System, we are very much going to want to have all that plutonium to run thermoelectric power packs).

Mr. Mahaffey makes the case that we have fallen into the Rickover Trap. A small, almost toylike reactor used in nuclear submarines is safe, efficient, and easy to operate (the reactor control panel is no more complicated than the dashboard of a private jet). It is a wonderful nuclear reactor in the megawatt range. The problem is when you take this thing and turn it a gigawatt mountain, with a control room that is packed with dials and gauges packed floor to ceiling for dozens of feet, and with a nuclear core that is basically delicate lacework and feather puffs that would melt faster than a gallium spoon in warm tea, it's a wonder we don't have more accidents.  (Again, more on reactor cores in a minute). So, this is a case of immediate problem solving through design freeze far too early in the process just to get the dang things out the door, of fast thinking overriding slow.

Okay let's get to good stuff. The big one, the Mother Of All Clusterfucks: Chernobyl.

Let me preface this big doozy with quick summary of what the Brits did to get their bomb. The British built a large graphite pile in dairy land of Cumbria on the northwestern coast of England. It was called Windscale, and it's sole purpose was to produce plutonium for bombs. Due to passage of congressional security measures, the Americans were not allowed to tell them what to do. But in 1952, a visiting American delegation looks over the pile, and informed the Brits: "Whatever you do, do not let the graphite catch fire.  Once it gets going, water will not extinguish the fire. It will only burn hotter, as graphite pulls oxygen out of the water and leaves you with explosive hydrogen." (I leave it to the reader as to figure out how the Americans knew this).

On or about Oct. 8, 1957, the Windscale graphite pile caught fire. They flooded the pile with water. The lazy red flames turned blowtorch blue. Finally, someone turned off blowers that were providing positive pressure - and fresh oxygen - to the core, and almost instantly the fire went out. It was a total loss.

"Over 10 tons of uranium was melted and five tons were burned. Very little of the uranium  or even fission products went up the chimney. A brittle oxide crust had formed in the extreme heat of the fire, and the heavy oxides were bogged down in it before they made it to the air outlet. The immediate concern was the volatile fission product iodine-131. The filter packs (in the chimneys), now no longer known as "Cockcroft's follies", were not expected to capture any of the 70,000 curies of iodine-131 that were present in the fuel when the fire began, but there was a fortuitous happening. The LM cartridges, containing bismuth oxide meant to activate into polonium-210, burned up, and the light bismuth oxide dust went up the stack and caught in the filters. This and some vaporized lead reacted chemically with the iodine".

Some 20,000 curies of iodine-131 were released upon the dairy farms of Cumbria, and the government had to buy a lot of milk. Luck of the British. But still, the problem had been the insistence of maximum production of plutonium had overworked the pile to the point that it burned down. Management was never held to account.

But, buck up readers, at Chernobyl, management died in agony from radiation poisoning a few days after the accident. So there's that to be cheerful about.

An observation about the Russians, though it is true that every other nation that has worked with nuclear materials has had more than their fair share of sheer folly, the Russians have to win hands down as the true brutish and crude barbarians of the industry. If there is anything, anything, bad that can happen or go wrong with anything nuclear, not only have the Russians done it, they've practically dared, goaded, and bullied each other to do it, like a fucking drinking contest or something.

Have you heard of the Kyshtym disaster? That was the world's first, and so far biggest, dirty bomb. A large underground tank farm near Chelyabinsk was built to hold plutonium extract in solution. A cooling-water pipe to one of the tanks broke, and rather than find the leak and repair it, the engineers in charge just turned the water off and forgot about it.

The tank heated up, the nitrate solution degraded into ammonium nitrate mixed with acetates. The water all boiled away and the now solidified ANFO, mixed with radionuclides, exploded with the power of 100 tons of TNT. 70 to 80 tons of radioactive waste was blown out in a plume covering some 200 miles long. (Didn't I tell you this was a funny book?)

And Chernobyl? That was what happens when you put the Austro-Hungarian Empire in charge of a safety test. You might as well just say "Klink, you idiot!". Here's a great passage:

 "Two men, Protosov, a maintenance worker, and Pustovoit, who was the "odd-job" man at the plant, were night-fishing on the bank of the coolant runoff pond, right where the plant outflow occurs, 1.25 miles from the plant. The fish really liked the warm water, and it was a clear, starry night. It seemed like the middle of the summer, and the fish were cooperating. They turned to look when they heard two low rumbling explosions, seeming to come from inside the plant. Then a third explosion reduced the top of the building to flaming splinters, and they watched with mild interest as steel beams and concrete chunks spun overhead. The turbine hall burst into flames and illumined an enormous column of black smoke. They turned back to their fishing rods. If they got excited every time something around here exploded or burned to the ground, they would never get any fishing done. 'They'll have that out in no time', opined Pustovoit. Whenever a steam relief valve popped off, which seemed quite often, it sounded like a Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber had crashed into the side of the building, and fires consuming switch yards or fuel depots were not rare at the Chernobyl plant".   

The tragedy of Chernobyl is that there is no lesson to learn here. Criminal incompetence and bullying on the part of the plant director, Akimov, played a role, but the plant was so poorly and wretchedly designed, that, well, unless rhesus monkeys decide to build a plutonium production plant, they may be the only ones to learn anything from this.

I could go on, but why spoil the book for you?

Alright how about this quote, because it applies to TMI and Fukushima:

"In major commercial reactor accidents, there always seems to be a single operator action that starts the downward spiral into irrevocable disaster."

That's Newman's Maxim: "No subsequent amount of steps will fix a profoundly fucked-up first step".

How is that different form any other industrial accident, or financial transaction, or political movement? Trying to solve the immediate problem, or trying to keep losses at a minimum, almost invariably invites the much, much worse problems behind it to step forward.

My thirds observation is that perhaps we've been going about it the wrong way. Chernobyl, right before it exploded, produced near 30 billion watts of power, and my suspicion is, rather than avoiding meltdowns, the most efficient way to use nuclear power is to encourage building reactors that like melting down, and that only work in a molten state. After all, you get the most efficiencies from the big temperature differences. The thorium reactors mentioned earlier like being in a molten state. Perhaps what we should be doing is investigating and developing refractory instruments, materials, sensors and processors that shrug off 2-3,000 , maybe even 5,000F degree temperatures. Maybe we should be building nuclear volcano reactors to get the most steam power out of them. It certainly couldn't be worse than what we've accomplished so far.