Doug Muir

Some Americans have been talking about our shared European culture lately!  As CT’s resident American-in-Europe, I feel I must respond.  So, here’s a European culture story.  (This is Part 2,  You can find Part 1 here.)

Okay, so Imperia!  Big concrete statue on the shore of Lake Constance.  Medieval sex worker.  9 meters tall, weighs 18 tons, rotates once every four minutes.  Here she is again:

Let’s look at some details.

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Just north of the Alps, on the border between Germany and Switzerland, lies beautiful Lake Constance. And on the northwest shore of the lake is the lovely small city of Constance, Germany.

Constance is well worth a visit. A lot of German cities have rather bland or unattractive centers, thanks to the American and British air forces. But Constance escaped these attentions entirely, because the Allies didn’t want to risk any bombs landing in neutral Switzerland. So Constance has an unusually intact Old Town with lots of interesting old buildings, some going right back to medieval times.

Constance also has this:



A nine meter tall, 18 ton statue of a medieval sex worker.  She’s down at the harbor, on the lake.  She rotates once every four minutes.  Her name is Imperia.

You may reasonably ask, what?  And part of the answer is, she’s memorializing the Council of Constance, the great political-religious council that happened here 600-some years ago, from 1414 to 1417.  And you may ask again, what?

I’ll try to explain.  
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Now this Seth… did leave children behind him who imitated his virtues…. They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order.

And that their inventions might not be lost before they were sufficiently known, upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water, they made two pillars; the one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries on them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of Siriad to this day.

— Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus, Book 1, Chapter 2, 68-71

So first, a brief digression on Flavius Josephus. 

The Turncoat

Ah, Flavius Josephus.  Born Joseph ben Matthias, a Jew in Judea, he was a general during the Jewish Revolt against the Romans.  But then he switched sides and joined the Romans.  He then caught the attention of the Roman general with a flattering prophecy that the general would one day become Emperor.  (Which eventually happened.  Emperor Vespasian, 69-79 AD.) 


[this guy]

So Josephus became part of the Imperial staff.  He changed his name — “Flavius” was the family name of the new Emperor — and led efforts to get other Jews to switch sides.  (Mostly unsuccessful efforts.  Like, when he approached the walls of besieged Jerusalem, his attempts at persuasion were met with “howls of execration or derision, and sometimes showers of stones.”)  After the war was over, with several hundred thousand dead and Judea in ruins, Josephus ditched his Jewish wife and children, followed the new Emperor back to Rome, and wrote a best-selling history.   His Jewish War lays great emphasis on the wisdom, strategic brilliance, and noble character of the new Emperor; the invincible might, glory, and greatness of Rome; and Josephus’ own cleverness and correct choices(1).  While Judea was crushed under the Roman yoke, Josephus became wealthy and influential, picked up a trophy wife and a villa, and eventually retired to a life of ease.

(1) To be fair, he may have solved the first Josephus Problem.  It’s a  rare case where mathematical insight was actually life-saving!  Well, life-saving for Josephus anyway.

It might be possible to view Josephus as a pragmatic survivor who just joined the winning side.  But if you actually read his memoirs, Josephus’ character comes across pretty clearly, and he’s just so immensely pleased with himself. 

Anyway:

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Healthy babies, to be specific.  Because worldwide, infant and child mortality has fallen greatly; and is still falling; and will almost certainly continue to fall.  

In premodern societies, meaning pretty much the entire world before 1820 or so, between a fifth and a quarter of all kids died before their first birthday.  Then, of the survivors, roughly about another fifth-to-a-quarter died before their fifth birthday.  Then, of those survivors, about 10% died before their 20th birthday.  If you do the math, that means that every baby had roughly a coin-flip chance of living to adulthood.  The exact numbers varied by place, time, and circumstances.  But worldwide, that was the general state of affairs.




Today, worldwide about 96% of babies survive their first birthday.  Of all babies born worldwide, about 90% live to reach age 20. 

That’s a worldwide average.  In developed countries, those numbers are “over 99%” and “around 99%”.  In the most dangerous, backwards and unhappy corners of the world the numbers are much lower, but they’re still high by historical standards.  A baby born in Afghanistan or Niger or the Democratic Republic of the Congo today, in 2026?  Has better odds than a baby born in the England of George III and Pitt the Elder.

Nigeria today has an infant mortality rate about what the US had in 1946, when the Baby Boom got started.  The Boom peaked around 1952.  The infant mortality then (a bit over 3%) is about what you find in current-day Bangladesh. Pretty much the entire human race today faces a lower rate of infant mortality than that faced by our parents and grandparents. 

This doesn’t get much discussed, perhaps because it’s a “what about all the planes that land safely” kind of story.   Also, when one discusses long-term positive trends, academic friends may become restive and start murmuring about teleological errors and Whig History. 

But I think it’s really interesting.  That’s partly because it really is very good news, but also — putting my nerd hat on — because this almost certainly represents a permanent and irreversible change in the human condition.

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So the Trump administration has just pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, WHO.

WHO is the biggest and most important international health organization. It’s an arm of the United Nations.  It’s been around since 1948. Almost every country in the world is a member.

Most people have only the vaguest idea of what WHO is or what it does. Teal deer, they do a lot of different stuff, most of it pretty good. They were crucial to eliminating smallpox a while back. They come up with cool ideas like a list of essential medicines and health care products that are cheap and easy to produce, along with easy how-to guides on producing them. They do all sorts of research, especially on public health. They were deeply involved in controlling Ebola. (You haven’t heard much about Ebola lately, right? Thank USAID and WHO.)

To be fair, WHO also has some significant negatives. It’s part of the UN system, so it skews slow and inefficient. WHO leadership did not handle COVID well… I mean, they really did not handle COVID well. They made bad, dumb choices based on not offending (some) member countries, and then they doubled down. It wasn’t great.

But anyway! I have one personal story about WHO, from my time in development, below the cut.

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This was triggered by a post over at our long-term friendly-rival blog, LGM. That post, in turn, was triggered by something stupid that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently.

What Kennedy said: he thinks his distinctive hoarse, raspy voice is “spasmodic dysphonia”, which he suspects may have been caused by taking flu vaccines for years.  Because dysphonia is a KNOWN side effect of these dangerous vaccines!  So he stopped getting flu shots back in 2005.

Blogger Shakezula quite correctly deconstructs this nonsense (only one flu shot lists dysphonia as a possible side effect, and that one wasn’t available until after 2005; if dysphonia is a side effect, it’s ridiculously rare, and nobody seems to have ever encountered it).  But then they make a wrong turn:  they suggest that maybe RFK’s weird voice is genetic, because his sister also has a kinda weird voice.

No.  No no no.  
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“I am especially to speak to you of the character and mission of the United States, with special reference to the question whether we are the better or the worse for being composed of different races of men.”

— Frederick Douglass, Composite Nation, 1869

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the USA.  So, here’s a Thanksgiving cartoon from 1869, by the great American cartoonist Thomas Nast.



You may have seen it before.  But it’s an interesting piece of work, and rewards close attention.

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Bit of a joke there. What the paper is about is, we found a new planet, about 18.2 light years away. That means that we’re seeing the planet as it appeared 18.2 years ago, in the summer of 2007.

Summer 2007: the first iPhone had just hit the market, the last Harry Potter book was fresh on the bookshops, Rihanna’s “Umbrella” was all over the radio, and “The Big Bang Theory” was about to premiere on TV. Britain’s Tony Blair had just handed off to Gordon Brown, while in the US a freshman Senator named Barack Obama was quietly preparing his Presidential bid. And the world economy was sliding inexorably towards the Great Recession.

Anyway, the planet. The planet is a “Super-Earth“. That means it’s basically the same sort of planet as Earth: a ball of rock, probably with an iron core, possibly with an atmosphere. But it’s bigger than Earth, hence the “Super”.  Like, if the Earth was a golf ball, this planet would be more like a cricket ball or a baseball. Definitely bigger, but not so much bigger that it’s a different sort of thing.

Okay, so we’ve found lots of planets around other stars. Like, literally thousands of them.  And we’re finding more new planets every day. So what’s interesting about this one?


[this shows something like one quarter of the currently known planets. and yes, that lower right one is not a proper sphere.]

Well… maybe a couple of things. But first, a brief digression!

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A while back I wrote a series of posts about the 1998-9 Kosovo conflict.  If you’re interested, here they are:  Prelude to War,  The Serbian Ascendancy, Things Fall Apart, And So To War.  This post continues that story up to the unsuccessful Rambouillet peace conference of February-March 1999.

So by early 1999, the Serbian province of Kosovo was the scene of an ugly guerrilla war.  Civilian casualties were mounting rapidly.  There were bombings and curfews and disappearances.  Over 100,000 people were already refugees, and the situation was clearly going to get worse and not better. 

There was a concerted effort to solve the problem by holding a peace conference in the spring of 1999. This was the Rambouillet Conference, and its goal was to produce a peace agreement between Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians. It failed, leading directly and immediately to the Kosovo War.

Does an unsuccessful peace conference from the previous century hold any lessons?  Or is this purely of academic interest?  

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A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda. 

1)  Trolley time.  Let’s start with the trolley problem.  People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts.  First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer:

A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five people.  If it hits them, they will die.  If you pull a switch, you can divert the trolley onto a different track.  There is one person on that track, and they will die instead of the five.  Do you pull the switch?



And of course you answer “yes” and then you get sucker-punched with something like this:

Five people are dying of organ failure, from different organs.  If they get transplants they will live out their normal lives,  Without the transplants, they will die.  In front of you is a healthy person who has the organs that they need.  If you kill the healthy person you will save the five.  Do you kill them?



Okay so on one hand trolley problems can be a legitimate tool for exploring values and morality.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff you can unpack with them. But on the other hand these little bait-and-switches can be, frankly, very irritating.  They’re set up to put our rationality at war with our intuitions, emotions, and habits of thought. 

Yes, that can sometimes be a useful or at least informative exercise.  But for most of us, the likely response is going to be less “Hmm, maybe deontological ethics are more appropriate here than a simple utilitarian analysis” and more “Oh, ffs.  Now you’re just being ridiculous.”



We’ll return to this shortly.  First, a short digression on living green.

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I seem to have become CT’s resident moderate techno-optimist. So let me push back a little: here are five things that we’re not going to see between now and 2050.

1) Nobody is going to Mars. Let me refine that a little: nobody is going to Mars and coming back alive.  A one-way suicide mission is just barely plausible.


[spoiler:  he does get home]

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I do these occasional posts about science papers.  Some are just for fun.  But sometimes — honest! — there’s an underlying connection to the greater Crooked Timber project.

This post is one of that sort, because it’s about the limits of understanding.  Unsurprisingly, it involves biology. 

So we all learned back in high school that our nerves are sheathed in a coating, like insulation on a copper wire. The coating is made of a special substance called myelin.  If your tenth grade biology text mentioned myelin, it probably said something like “myelin allows impulses to flow along the nerves faster and more efficiently”.   Which is true!  It may also do some other things, but “myelin = faster and more efficient transmission” is what we all learned in sophomore biology back when, and it’s basically correct.



Occasionally something goes wrong, and either the myelin sheath doesn’t form right, or the body’s immune system gets confused and attacks it. This can lead to serious problems, conditions like multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Also, newborn babies haven’t finished forming their myelin sheathing yet.  That’s why newborns are so very weak and uncoordinated. That magic moment, around the three month mark, where the kid suddenly starts holding up their head, looking around, and intentionally reaching for stuff?   That’s when “myelinization” is complete.

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I was recently part of an online discussion that asked this question. People were talking about industry, democracy, civil society, world leadership, you name it. But nobody was asking the obvious question: when, in fact, will the sun set on the United States?

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There’s been a lack of cheer on this site lately.  The obvious response: some analysis of trivial, ephemeral pop culture. 

So, a question before the jump:  If I were to mention “the MacBride and Kennedy stories”, who would raise a hand and say “I know!” ?   — It’s okay to say “no idea”, btw. This is a fairly deep cut.  But here’s a hint:  it connects to a recently released summer blockbuster.  

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