A Tale of Two Treasures

Two successive posts on The History Blog point out the importance of antiquities law.

First, Ritually bent sword from Bronze Age/Iron Age transition found in Denmark. The sword is above.

Ritual deposits including a ritually bent sword have been discovered in a bog near Veksø northwest of Copenhagen, Denmark. The small cache of objects date to the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, around 500 B.C., and the sword actually incarnates the transition, being made of bronze with iron rivets.

They were discovered by Claus Falsby on his first outing with a metal detector. He contacted museum organization ROMU which manages archaeological responsibilities for central and western Zealand. ROMU archaeologists immediately went to the site and excavated it, discovering additional objects. In total, the cache now consisted of the bronze sword with iron rivets in the handle sinuously bent into a s-curve, two small bronze axes (known as celts), two or three large ankle bangles called vulrings, a fragment of a large fibula and an object of unknown purpose.

Close-up of the black showing the herringbone pattern created in the forging process; the folding was done to get the right mix of iron and carbon in the steel.

Second, Nationally important Bronze Age hoard recovered from looters:

A late Bronze Age (ca. 950–780/740 B.C.) hoard of national importance found near Gryfino in Poland’s West Pomeranian Voivodeship has been rescued by authorities after it was illegally excavated. Anonymous individuals sent pictures of the objects to each other before they were emailed to the Provincial Conservator of Monuments in Szczecin who then called the police.  . . .

The hoard contains more than 100 objects, 73 of them remarkably large. It includes more than 30 bronze neck rings, weapons, shield bosses, jewelry, phalerae (metal discs) from horse harnesses, silver spikes, the handle of a vessel, sickles and spearheads. Three of the objects are of national importance, unique on the archaeological record of Poland: a brooch made of circular hoops with decorated sheet-metal domes, a long pin and the axe which were not locally made and came to Gryfino from southcentral Europe, probably the Alpine region. The axe socket contains remnants of wood from the haft, which will give archaeologists the opportunity to radiocarbon date the axe head and determine what kind of wood it was mounted to.

The finder or finders used a metal detector but Polish law regulates their use to prevent exactly this kind of shenanigan, and the looters obviously did not have the necessary permits to conduct a metal detector search. That in itself is an indictable offense, but to add insult to injury, it’s clear from the photographs that they destroyed at least one clay container in which the treasure had been buried 3,000 or so years ago and ran roughshod over the archaeological context, acts punishably by a term of up to eight years in prison.

What is the difference between the collegial enterprise described for Denmark and the illegal "shenanigans" in Poland? National law.

In Denmark, Britain and Norway (at least) the authorities work with metal detectorists and property owners and reward them for bringing their finds to the government's attention. In Italy, and, it seems from this article, Poland, the authorities ban amateur archaeology and prosecute the people who do it. As a result, the things they find simply disappear, unless they are foolish enough to brag on Facebook about it.

Free Speech and Riots in Britain

The prosecution of people who made inflamatory posts during Britain's recent anti-immigrant riots has led to a lot of anger and angst over speech. Some people – notably Elon Musk, but he is far from alone – have accused the British government of setting up an oppressive police state for things like this:

Some people have also objected to a 15-month prison term for Julie Sweeney, 53, of Cheshire. After seeing a photo on Facebook of people helping repair a mosque that was attacked during a riot in Southport, Ms. Sweeney posted: “Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.” She pleaded guilty to a charge of sending a communication threatening death or serious harm. Her lawyer argued for leniency, saying she was her husband’s primary caregiver. But the judge, Steven Everett, said, “Even people like you need to go to prison.”

As I see it, many people treat the internet as a sort of fantasy world where they can say anything because there are no consequences. They want Twitter/X to be just like sitting with their mates in the pub, with freedom to say whatever pops into their heads. And, indeed, the internet is where many, many people have most of their conversations.

On the other side, government spokesmen say things like:

I don’t see why the internet should be regarded as any different than when someone stands on a soap box and addresses a raging crowd.

That is, a place and situation where words matter a lot.

The liberal establishment has a deep fear that bad things are happening on the internet, that dangerous ideas are circulating and getting into the heads of impressionable young men, and that this will somehow lead to a civil war or right-wing takeover. My sons, who spent a lot of time in online swamps as teenagers, are frankly baffled by this attitude. They think the whole business is a grand joke, just kids experimenting with their freedom to say shocking things. The notion that anyone would take it seriously is just weird to them, like thinking that Dungeons and Dragons is training kids to become sword-wielding assassins.

And then the riots broke out in Britain, fueled by false rumors that a knife-wileding killer was a Muslim asylum seeker, riots in which people were hurt and property destroyed. On the one hand it was a farce, a bunch of grouches larping at revolution, easily crushed by the government. On the other hand, a hotel full of asylum seekers was surrounded by an angry mob that threatened to burn them alive and beat up the cops who tried to stop them, and that doesn't strike me as something we ought to tolerate.

But I have to say that new PM Keith Starmer's comments make me nervous:

“We’re going to have to look more broadly at social media after this disorder.” He also applauded the courts for sentencing people for their online behavior, not just for taking part in the riots. “That’s a reminder to everyone that whether you’re directly involved or whether you’re remotely involved, you’re culpable, and you will be put before the courts if you’ve broken the law.”

What does "remotely involved" mean? You can just glance at Russia or China to see how far certain governments have stretched the definition of "remotely involved" in lawbreaking.

The case that has drawn the most attention is that of the woman accused of starting the furor, Bernadette Spofforth, 55, described by the NY Times as "an online influencer and mother of three." She was arrested and released on bail but has not been charged. The Times:

Disinformation researchers say she appears to have been the first to falsely claim on X that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker, in a post suggesting that his name was Ali-Al-Shakati. By the time she deleted the post later that day, it had been viewed almost 1.5 million times and reposted by prominent conspiracy theorists. Ms. Spofforth, who has previously spread misinformation about Covid-19 and climate change, told The Sun, a London newspaper, that she had copied and pasted the post, and “fell into the trap of sharing misinformation.”

Love that little gloss about Covid-19, because so far as I can tell spreading false information about the pandemic is a charge that could be leveled against almost everyone on the planet, starting with the CDC and all the people who said we had to close the schools.

I'm not posting about this because I think I know the answer. In a situation like the British riots, the line between free speech and incitement to riot is both hard to draw and important. But I want to put myself down as being very suspicious of any plan to arrest people for "remote involvement" in violent acts they had nothing to do with planning or committing.

Killing Owls to Save Owls

The northern spotted owl shot to fame as a powerful weapon in the long-running fight over old growth forests in the northwest; millions of acres of forest were eventually set aside to insure its survival. But now the owls are declining again, and not because of anything people are doing:

Barred owls, which are considered native to the eastern United States, are increasingly appearing in the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests where the threatened northern spotted owls breed and live. Where the two birds overlap, the barred owls tend to outcompete the northern spotted owls, taking the best nest sites and harassing, killing or occasionally mating with spotted owls.

To protect spotted owls from this new menace, the US government has just authorized states and individuals to kill all the barred owls they can find, potentially hundreds of thousands. I agree with these three philosophers (NY Times) that this is a terrible idea. It is not likely to succeed, but ever if it were, it would still be a terrible idea.

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.

Restoring or preserving those historical base lines is only going to get more difficult. In some cases, it will be impossible — and this might be one of them. It is unclear that killing barred owls will do anything but merely slow the northern spotted owl’s eventual extinction. When barred owls were previously removed in a before-and-after experiment in areas of Oregon and Washington, the number of northern spotted owls still declined. The removal slowed that decline, but even with the planned killings, the barred owl is here in the West to stay.

We should strive to care for ecosystems given their current ecological realities. Ecosystems are dynamic and have always changed over time as organisms move around. And now, humans are inescapable drivers of ecological changes. Climate change and wildfire have accelerated the dynamism of ecosystems. Killing barred owls will not restore the forests to the way they were in 1850.

Looking Back at the Streaming Revolution

At the NY Times, musician Elizabeth Nelson reviews a documentary, co-produced by Eminem, that hails the original online music pirates as the heroes of a wonderful revolution. Nelson is unconvinced, and offers these two possible takes:

The story they want to tell, in an emphatically triumphalist tone, is that the early pirates were David and the music industry was Goliath. But then the industry realized that David was actually pretty cool: All turned out well, and music was solved forever.

I may be speaking as a working musician here, but from my perspective — the perspective, I think, of almost any nonmogul with a stake in the industry — this is an obviously insane interpretation of events. The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with. There are the Spotify playlists peppered with songs generated by fake artists that Spotify owns the rights to, allowing the company to recapture its own royalty payments. And at the same time, there is the fact that nearly every space where consumers could once interact with music unsupervised by corporate gatekeepers — record stores, mail order, merch tables — has been put on life support.

I have long considered online music piracy to be the just comeuppance of an industry that refused either to sell the public what they wanted or price what they were selling anywhere near what people wanted to pay. Back in 1990, if you heard a song on the radio by an artist who intrigued you, the only thing you could do was to go out and pay $18 for a cd that, as often as not, had only one good song, the one you had already heard. I did this at least ten times, and I resented it. I remember reading critics at the time who said that people were begging for singles, not albums, but the industry mostly refused to sell them and when they did they charged $5-7. I understood that downloading was theft, but, again, I had zero sympathy for anyone in the music industry.

I think the amount of money non-famous artists used to make from album sales is often exaggerated these days. Other than the biggest stars, only cranky hermits could really earn a living just off sales. Touring was always how musicians made it, and it still is. Live music is bigger than ever before. Many musicians regard their appearances on Spotify more as free ads for their live shows than as a meaningful revenue stream.

As for corporate sameness, well, that is pretty much the top lament of our cultural era. My experience, however, has been completely different. Thanks to YouTube I have discovered more new music over the past five years than any comparable period of my life. Viz., all the Nordic Ambient music I have discovered, artists like Waldruna and Sigur Ros. How would I have discovered this music in 1990? How would I have stumbled onto Eivor, singing in Faroese? I can't imagine. As I recall, the way it worked was that you had to have a friend who was a music obsessive who spent 20 percent of his income on obscure albums he ordered from catalogs. Absent such a friend who happened to be plugged in, you were out of luck. (Whatever Elizabeth Nelson thinks, a record store was absolutely not a space where you could interact with music without corporate gatekeepers.)

It is true that the algorithms of YouTube and Spotify are mostly useless, to a degree that baffles me; given all the money there to be made by a service that really made good recommendations, why can't anyone make it work? But only a small amount of reading and exploration is enough to find some names of artists and bands who sound interesting, and rather than having to plunk down $18 to find out what they sound like you can just pop online and listen.

From my perspective, this is the greatest era ever to be a lover of music.

Tim Wu Wants to Regulate Social Media

At the NY Times, Tim Wu protests the Supreme Court's view that the editorial choices of social media platforms represent "free speech":

Over the past decade or two, however, liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly anything that can be called “speech,” regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation. It has come to protect corporate donations to political campaigns (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010), the buying and tracking of data (Sorrell v. IMS Health in 2011), even outright lies (United States v. Alvarez in 2012). As a result, it has become harder for the government to protect its citizens. . . .

In the name of protecting free speech, courts have also made it difficult for lawmakers to protect people’s privacy and repeatedly struck down efforts to protect children. For example, Vermont passed a law to prevent pharmacies from selling prescriber data in 2007, but the Supreme Court struck it down in 2011, presuming that the sale of data is a form of speech. And last summer, after California passed a law to prevent social media companies from tracking and extracting data from children, a federal court blocked it, arguing, in effect, that the surveillance of children is also a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

The next phase in this struggle will presumably concern the regulation of artificial intelligence. I fear that the First Amendment will be extended to protect machine speech — at considerable human cost.

In our era, the power of private actors has grown to rival that of nation-states. Most powerful are the Big Tech platforms, which in their cocoon-like encompassing of humanity have grown to control commerce and speech in ways that would make totalitarian states jealous. In a democracy, the people ought to have the right to react to and control such private power, as long as it does not trample on the rights of individuals. But thanks to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment has become a barrier to the government’s ability to do that. Free speech rights have been hijacked to suppress the sovereignty of humans in favor of the power of companies and machines.

I think this is a strong argument in theory, but in practice I wonder about trusting state legislators to make these choices for us. As even Wu admits, the Texas and Florida laws in question in this case are pretty bad and might force platforms to promote the feeds of people who threaten to sue them.

The Philosophers' Stolen Castle

Matt Levine explains:

I have always kind of thought that a clever form of effective altruism would be “we build a giant casino for crypto gambling, we skim a percentage of the handle, and we use it to buy mosquito nets to save poor people from malaria.” I once suggested to Sam Bankman-Fried that this might be what he was up to at FTX, his crypto exchange. Just moving money from low-valued uses to high-valued ones, very neat and utilitarian.

A less clever — but faster? — form of effective altruism would be “we build a giant casino for crypto gambling, then we steal all the money and use it to buy mosquito nets.” Arguably that is closer to what Bankman-Fried was actually up to, though that’s not quite right either. FTX actually recovered most of the client money, but also it does not seem to have notably devoted a ton of customer money to effective charitable works on behalf of the world’s poorest.

“We build a giant casino for crypto gambling, steal the money and use it to buy a castle for effective altruist philosophers” is even weirder? Like that’s a good assignment for a philosophy class? “Explain, using utilitarianism, how this is Good.”

Because one of the things that was done with Sam Bankman-Fried's donations to the Effective Ventures Foundation was to buy Wytham Abbey (photo at top) in England for around $18 million. The plan, apparently, was to use the manor house as a retreat where the thinkers of effective altruism would meet with their billionaire funders and come up with ways to make the world better. Unfortunately for that dream, after FTX went bankrupt Effective Ventures decided to return the money Bankman-Friend gave them, and to do that they had to put the house back on the market.

Levine's blog isn't set up so you can link to individual posts, but this is part of his post dated May 9.

Modern Constitutional Law

Interesting article in the NY Times about teaching constitutional law in an era when the Supreme Court is ever more willing to reject precedent. One law professor says,

One of the primary challenges when one is teaching constitutional law is to impress upon the students that it is not simply politics by other means. And the degree of difficulty of that proposition has never been higher.

Another:

While I was working on my syllabus for this course, I literally burst into tears. I couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense. Why do we respect it? Why do we do any of it? I’m feeling very depleted by having to teach it.

This being a NY Times article, the onus is all loaded onto the current conservative court, but I think that is unfair. I strongly support abortion and gay marriage, but I can't find either one in the Constitution.  If I wanted to put a non-political interpretation on all of this, I would say that as the Constitution gets older and older it is less and less able to provide guidance on our issues.

And I suspect that is true. Honestly, though, I find the notion that there was ever anything apolitical about interpreting the Constution ridiculous. The Constitution says nothing about race, but somehow past generations of justices found a lot of race in it. The Court upheld the internment of Japanese Americans and flip-flopped in a big way on Federal regulation of business activity. I can't see any past golden age of justice in America, or of respect for the Supreme Court.

So if there was really some kind of consensus judicial philosophy in the Cold War era, the consensus was simply that pushing political agendas too hard would be bad politics. That no longer seems to be true; now most Americans are perfectly happy to see the Court ram their political preferences down their opponents' throats, so that is what the justices are doing.

And while law professors are torn about all of this, law students are not:

I said something to the effect of, ‘It’s important to assume that the people you disagree with are speaking in good faith.’ And a student raises his hand and he asks, ‘Why? Why should we assume that people on the other side are acting in good faith?’ This was not a crazy person; this was a perfectly sober-minded, rational student. And I think the question was sincere. And I think that’s kind of shocking. I do think that some of the underlying assumptions of how a civil society operates can no longer be assumed.

Others I spoke to agreed with this assessment. “We’re witnessing a transformation in the New Deal consensus. . . . Our students are increasingly rejecting it, progressives and conservatives. They are less judicial supremacists. They are more willing to question courts.” He added, “We have to figure out what the new world is going to look like. I don’t know.”

This is the challenge we face as a nation: holding it all together as the arguments get ever angrier and less constrained.

Bukele's El Salvador

Interesting piece by Geoff Shullenberger about the reign of El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, most famous for suspending the constitution to jail all the country's gang members. Bukele is descended from Christian Palestinians and came into politics through the left-wing FMLN party. He was expelled from the FMLN in 2017 and founded his own party, New Ideas. He ran for president in 2019 and won; most observers thought his victory was due to the nation's exhaustion with the older parties of the left and right, which had alternated in power since the end of the Civil War and seemed incapable of improving the economy or controlling the violence that made El Salvador the murder capital of the world.

Under Bukele violence went down some and the economy was pretty good; people say, although this has never been proved, that he reduced crime by cutting some kind of deal with El Salvador's powerful gangs. Then in March, 2022, Bukele announced a state of emergency and his government launched a nationwide program of mass arrests, jailing 70,000 to 75,000 people they accused of being involved with the gangs. Human rights groups screamed, and even Bukele's supporters admit that thousands of innocent people were jailed, but violent crime fell by 50%, dozens of neighborhoods were freed from gang rule, and Bukele instantly became the most beloved leader in the world. He ran for an unconstitutional second term this year, and on February 4 won 80% of the vote in an election most observers think was pretty fair.

Shullenberger is ambivalent about this, as I think most outsiders are. I mean, violent crime isn't much of a problem in North Korea, either. But Bukele is not just a thug, and he cannot really be classified as a conservative. Among other things, Bukele spends a lot of time denouncing outside interference in El Salvador, and blaming its problems on the Americans:

He summarized the last four or five decades as an unbroken string of violations of Salvadoran sovereignty, mainly by the United States. First came the civil war, an “international war” that made El Salvador “one battlefield more” between foreign powers; then, the 1992 peace accords—“another of the tricks we’ve been subjected to in our history,” which “brought no peace,” only new forms of violence; then, the deportation of gang members from the United States, prompting new generations to flee. The same story, again and again: a population subjected to unending brutality by external forces, all due to a lack of sovereignty and self-determination. “From now on, we will build our own destiny,” Bukele declared.

Bukele sometimes talks like a socialist, arguing that

the power exerted by gangs amounted to an acutely oppressive form of neoliberal privatization of public space, in which those who couldn’t afford walled compounds and private guards found their lives dictated by the whims of organized crime.

Shullenberger:

I asked the Honduran-Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, known for his paranoid, darkly hilarious novels about the region, what he made of the young president’s rise. He replied with a simple point that is often overlooked: “Bukele’s popularity is not the product of having defeated the gangs.” That happened in 2022, well after he had crushed the opposition, first in the 2019 presidential elections and then in the 2021 legislative elections, and consolidated the institutions of state power in support of his agenda. In this sense, it was his popularity that enabled the defeat of the gangs, not the other way around. It is hard to imagine the apparent lockstep loyalty of state institutions would be what it is today without the public support behind the president’s projects, and without many within them being believers in the project they are undertaking.

In Castellanos Moya’s account, Salvadorans coalesced around Bukele because they were “hypnotized by the promise of the new” the young leader embodied. In other words, it was the imaginative capture of the public by Bukele’s charismatic appeals that enabled the institutional capture. It is an argument one would expect from a novelist: Power over the imagination precedes political power and makes it possible. But I found this conclusion hard to dispute. . . 

“Terror is the given of the place,” Didion wrote of El Salvador in 1982. Castellanos Moya told me something similar: “The form of social domination in El Salvador throughout time has been terror: The army, the security forces, the guerrillas and the gangs have been the instruments of that form of domination.” Today, terror no longer haunts the streets of central San Salvador, but it hasn’t been eliminated altogether, merely relocated and concentrated, as the glossy videos of the Terrorism Confinement Center (capacity: 40,000) make clear.

To Shullenberger, the case of Bukele is among other things a parable about how populist third parties come to power, and what people want from government: freedom from violence, and a positive vision for the future. Shullenberger says Bukele's only weakness seems to be the economy, which is ok but nothing like the modernizing transformation he has promised. But if growth does take off, Bukele could easily keep winning unconstitutional elections for decades.

Sexual Assault on Campus, the Ongoing Saga

At Yale, the latest blow-up in the ongoing war over sexual assault on campus and what universities can do about it. NY Times:

In a 2018 disciplinary hearing at Yale University, Saifullah Khan listened as a woman accused him of raping her after a Halloween party.

The woman, who had graduated, gave a statement by teleconference to a university panel, but Mr. Khan and his lawyer were not allowed in the room with the panel. Nor could his lawyer, under the rules of the hearing, cross-examine her.

Instead, they were cloistered in a separate room, as her testimony piped in by speakerphone. He felt, he said, “there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my situation.” As he feared, Yale expelled him.

Mr. Khan’s criminal trial, months earlier, was markedly different. His lawyer cross-examined the woman in ways that horrified women’s rights advocates: How were you dressed? How much did you drink? Did you send flirty texts? And unlike the Yale hearing, the prosecutors had to prove his guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The difference between those two hearings — in process and outcome — led Mr. Khan to make an unusual move: He sued his accuser for defamation for statements she had made during the Yale hearing. That lawsuit, filed in 2019, is challenging the way universities across the country have adjudicated such sexual assault hearings.

It is not some patriarchal plot that makes rape cases difficult to try. It is a very old principle of Common Law, originating in the Statute of Treasons enacted under Edward III, that no one can be convicted of a felony on the basis of one witness's unsubstantiated testimony. Since in most rape cases there is only one witness, the victim, the desire to get justice for rape victims runs smack against one of the pillars of legal fairness in our system. 

One of the compromises we make in America is to allow prosecutions to proceed based only on the victim's testimony, but only if the victim submits to wide-ranging cross-examination that will establish to the jury (on this theory) whether the witness is credible. Of course this is a sham, in that juries are no better than anyone else at recognizing who is lying. As a basic matter of epistemology it is, I think, all but impossible for us to ever really know what happened in case where the only evidence is the testimony of two witnesses who disagree. But that is how we do it.

Of course university disciplinary hearings are not criminal trials but civil proceedings, so they are not bound by the standards of evidence in the criminal law. Among other things, they do not allow the cross-examination of witnesses. But this introduced another twist into the Yale case. It is another old matter of common law that you cannot file a suit for defamation because of testimony given under oath in a trial; perjury is a criminal matter that only the state can prosecute. But since the Yale hearing was not a trial, well:

Normally, such a lawsuit would not have much of a chance. In Connecticut and other states, witnesses in such “quasi-judicial” hearings carry absolute immunity against defamation lawsuits.

But the Connecticut Supreme Court in June gave Mr. Khan’s suit the greenlight to proceed. It ruled that the Yale hearing was not quasi-judicial because it lacked due process, including the ability to cross-examine witnesses.

“For absolute immunity to apply under Connecticut law,” the justices wrote, “fundamental fairness requires meaningful cross-examination in proceedings like the one at issue.”

Since cross-examination was not allowed, said the court, the Yale hearing was not even “quasi judicial” and thus merits no real respect from the law.

If you want the details of the original incident, the Yale Daily News has them here. This story also mentions that Khan is suing the university for $110 million and the grounds that he was expelled without being allowed to properly defend himself against the rape accusation. This is what his lawyer said after he was acquitted in his criminal trial:

We’re grateful to six courageous jurors who were able to understand that campus life isn’t the real world. Kids experiment with identity and sexuality. When an experiment goes awry, it’s not a crime.

Here again we run into the problem that university disciplinary hearings for sexual assault feel to the people involved like trials. The victim is seeking justice, the accused is trying to defend his life and reputation. But because they are not trials, they are not protected by any of the sacred aura that surrounds actual criminal courtrooms. Hence, at least in Connecticut, the witnesses can be sued for defamation. According to the Times story, university lawyers across the country are now trying to figure out if witnesses in their Title IX proceedings might be subject to defamation lawsuits and what they might do about it.

The root cause of this mess is having universities carry out what are in effect trials for rape. On the one hand this seems to be required by Title IX, the federal law that guarantees women equal access to education; it's hard to get an education if you're constantly worried about getting raped, and it would be bizarre for universities to sanction people for, say, verbal harassment while throwing up their hands at actual sexual assault. On the other hand, by holding what look and feel like rape trials in a setting outside a proper courtroom we enter into a netherworld where nobody seems to know what rules actually apply and what justice actually looks like.

We are nowhere near to resolving any of this.

Declining Choice in the Digital World

 At the NY Times, David Streitfeld complains that the digital world, which should open up more information to everyone, is in some ways actually restricting it. If you own a physical copy of a book or cd, you can do whatever you want with it: sell it, lend it, give it away. But publishers are doing all they can to keep you from doing any of those things with a digital resource like an ebook or digital audio file. Not only that, but digital services can and sometimes do simply erase things from their servers, yanking them out of the world; if we were talking about physical objects, copies of them would exist somewhere, like in libraries, but digital resources can much more easily disappear.

Some attempts to digitally archive disappearing physical resources have been attacked. For example the digital archive of music from 78 rpm records, some of them more than a century old, has been threatened with closure by the music publishers' association.

Part of this has to do with our horrible copyright laws. It's simply ridiculous that a recording issued on a 78 rpm disk in 1948 and out of print since 1949 is still protected by copyright. Another factor is that it costs money for digital providers to keep digital material available for sale or rental, so they have a habit of regularly pruning their lists:

When Netflix shipped DVDs to customers, there were about 100,000 to choose from. Streaming, which has a different economics, has reduced that to about 6,600 U.S. titles. Most are contemporary. Only a handful of movies on Netflix were made between 1940 and 1970.

The internet has made some kind of information much more readily available, but it has not led to the paradise of free information for everyone that we imagined back in the 90s.

Yemeni Artifacts "Returned" but Don't Actually Go Back to Yemen

I just learned that in February a ceremony was held to mark the "repatriation" of 77 artifacts to Yemen. The artifacts had all been seized from known smugglers, including Mousa Khouli, who sold looted artifacts via a store in New York. 

But, given that Yemen is in the middle of a civil war, and the US doesn't actually recognize the faction that controls most of the country (the Houthis), the Yemeni embassy agreed to the artifacts being kept at the Smithsonian for the time being. Which is an interesting model for other art from war-torn countries with suspect governments: the nation's ownership of the material is recognized, but their physical return is delayed until some theoretical peaceful future.

Love these funeral monuments, which date to 500 to 200 BC.

Meanwhile, at the Memory Disorder Unit

The Memory Disorder Unit in Massachusetts is “the federal prison system’s first purpose-built facility for incarcerated people with dementia.” Katie Engelhart in the NY Times:

There is a prisoner who thinks he is a warden. “I’m the boss. I’m going to fire you,” Victor Orena, who is 89, will tell the prison staff.

On some days, Mr. Orena is studiously aloof — as if he is simply too busy or important to deal with anybody else. On other days, he orders everyone around in an overwrought mafioso tone: a version of the voice that, perhaps, he used when he was a working New York City mob boss decades ago, browbeating members of his notorious crime family. This makes the real prison warden laugh.

On a recent morning, Mr. Orena sat in his wheelchair beside a man with bloodshot eyes. I asked them if they knew where they were.

“This is a prison,” Mr. Orena said, brightly.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he frowned. “I don’t know.” . . .

Down the hall from where Mr. Orena was sitting — past the activity room with the fish tank, where a cluster of men were watching “King Kong” on TV — there is a cell belonging to another man who wakes every day to discover anew that he is in prison. Some mornings, the man packs up his belongings and waits at the door. He explains that his mother is coming to get him.

“She sure is,” a staff member might say, before slowly leading him back to his cell.

Because of the long sentences we hand out to violent criminals, America now has thousands of very old men in prison, only a few of them in facilities that provide them any special care or treatment. Every time I read about this I get a feeling of the surreal; surely the long-term imprisonment of doddering old men in diapers is one of the weirder things going on in American today. Obviously these men can't just be released but I wonder how much more it costs to keep them in prison than in some other kind of facility.

State Surveillance and Ransomware

Section 702 is a controversial part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed with a bundle of other amendments in 2008. It allows the government to force telecoms and internet companies to grant access to the information they have on their customers, without a warrant. The FBI uses it millions of times a year, sometimes for dubious purposes:

In March, the leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s working group devoted to 702 renewal revealed he had been the target of wrongful searches. Last month, the administration declassified two court opinions that showed the bureau had used the spy tool to search for information about individuals who participated in the 2020 George Floyd protests.

But with Section 702 up for renewal this year, the Biden administration is releasing information on how the government has used Section 702 in the past:

The U.S. government used controversial digital surveillance powers to identify the individual behind the crippling ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in 2021 and to claw back a majority of the millions of dollars in bitcoin the company paid to restore its systems, according to senior Biden administration officials. . . . In another instance, the government used information gleaned under those powers — known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — to identify and mitigate an Iranian ransomware attack against a nonprofit organization's systems in 2022.

So, yeah, the powers you can use to defeat ransomware hackers can also be used to harass protesters.

In general I am more afraid of Nazis and ransomware gangs than the FBI, and I would like for the government to put them behind bars. If only we could trust them.

Andy Warhol, Art, and Originality at the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court recently held, 7-2, that Andy Warhol violated Lynn Goldsmith's copyright when he re-used her photograph of Prince to make one of his famous silk screen portraits. (Sotomayor wrote the decision; Kagan and Roberts dissented) The ruling is very narrow, emphasizing that Warhol sold his image to magazine, when the original was also sold to a magazine, which was just too much like duplicating for the court.

But this is just one of an endless series of similar dilemmas that Warhol left behind. To the extent that his career was about anything other than self-promotion, it was about attacking the very notion of artistic originality and integrity. He loved the idea of selling works as his that he had never physically touched, everything done by assistants or machines. He loved asking other people for ideas, then selling them as his own. What, he once asked, is the difference between asking someone to suggest a subject and finding it in an old book? He deliberately blurred any boundary between original works and copies. It amuses me to no end that the art world simply cannot absord his attack on their core values, leading to lawsuits over which works are or are not "authentic" Warhols. He would have found that hilarious. 

In the NY Times, Richard Meyer argues that the Court was wrong: "Throughout his career, the artist was concerned not with copyright but with the right to copy, which he saw both as a creative method and a design for living." Warhol even once tried to duplicate himself:

When he tired of being himself, Warhol sometimes asked others to step into the role. In 1967, he hired the actor Allen Midgette to appear as Warhol on a national lecture tour. When, after the first few lectures, the ruse was exposed, Warhol responded, “He was better at it than I am.” From the artist’s perspective, Midgette was not only better at delivering remarks and answering questions from a public audience. He was better at being Warhol.

Warhol did not just copy, he attacked the notion that there was any difference between copying and creating. Our legal system, it turns out, cannot absord this any more than the art market can.

But it is a real issue: how original does any work of art have to be to qualify as an artist's own work? Take music; most of it is made within genres that set very narrow limits on the sounds and progressions and instruments that a composer can employ, and on the topics a lyricist can take up. To what extent is any pop song "original"? How many notes in a row can it share with some other song before that counts as copying? There is an old joke post about the Blues that goes around the internet, including a list of the names that women can and cannot have (Sadie, yes; Kimberly, no), the places the singer can be (prison, yes; golf course, no), and so on. It's funny because it's true, because all genres of art depend on very restricted sets of ideas and images.

In the 21st century, a vast amount of art relies on "sampling." Rappers sample beats and phrases; collage artists include iconic photos; comedians make jokes about each other's jokes. Meyer argues that Warhol was a prophet of this vision of art in a world absolutely inundated with images; not creation, but plucking something from the flood and calling it one's own.

We're going to see a new version of this confusion over art made by AI. Suppose I sit down with MidJourney and have it make illustrations for one of my new novels, and it copies the style of some well-known digital artist, or samples buildings and items of clothing from several artists. Who owns what? Do I get any credit for designing the scenario and specifying, say, "great wizard city with towers and flying boats about to be overwhelmed by a giant wave"? But then that was hardly original, was it? Suppose somebody finds that MidJourney copied an outfit from a video game character. But then suppose that outfit was basically just a doublet from a Botticelli painting and a sword from a 1970s book cover; does combining those in one character count as original?

And so on.

It may be that the trouble spawned by AI will be insoluble, and ruin art as a way to make a living. I doubt it; I think we will just continue to have the same fights we have had ever since copyright was invented, and the same struggles over what is original and what is just the same old thing.

Refugees

Interesting NY Times article about Sudanese doctor Hiba Omer, who has remained at her post in a Khartoum hospital as something close to a civil war has broken out around her:

I will never leave Khartoum. I will stay here, until death. I have a responsibility, and I will be staying until we do our job. It is a professional commitment.

Which brings me straight to a question I have been wondering about lately: what does the flight of refugees do to the places they leave behind? According to the UN, there are around 33 million refugees who have crossed international borders to escape from violence or oppression. Without wanting to judge any of them, I sometimes wonder how any country is supposed to recover from a civil war if millions of its most energetic and productive citizens have left. For an extreme case like South Sudan, where more than 20 percent have fled, I imagine this is crippling. On the other hand, what would they really accomplish by staying in South Sudan?

The reason there is anything to say about this problem is that the international refugee apparatus probably encourages people to become refugees. When the UN set up a chain of refugee camps in Kenya to house people fleeing civil war and famine in Somalia, some poor Kenyans went to the camps, which I would say is good evidence that the camps can exert an attractive pull. Each person in a troubled country makes a calculation based on how bad things are, how bad the trip to somewhere else is likely to be, and what will be waiting at the end of the trip. If refugee camps with adequate food are set up just over the border, it seems to me inevitable that this will induce more people to flee.

On the other hand, if those people stayed, no doubt some of them would be tortured or killed, or starve to death.

Sometimes the ability of people to flee across the border and be sheltered in UN camps becomes a problem of its own. The best example I know is the way the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide fled to the Congo, where they were put up in refugee camps, which were then taken over by the genocidal militias, which used the camps as bases for launching attacks on the new Rwandan government, which responded by attacking the camps, which was the trigger for a decade of civil war in the Congo.

There is also the question of what happens to the people in the camps and where they go. Some never go anywhere, and their children become some of the millions of stateless people in the world, with no home to go to even if they wanted to go there. But sometimes when the camps are closed, as when Kenya forced the closure of its camps for Somalis, the people somehow go somewhere without their being a humanitarian crisis. Which says to me that sometimes people stay in the camps when they could go back, or go somewhere else.

Of course there can be major refugee flows without the UNHCR being involved, for example, the 5.5 million people who have fled Venezuela since its economy went into free fall. That, I would say, is a clear case in which the departures have badly hurt the country they left, since most of the leavers were economically productive opponents of the government. Could a wicked, incompetent government stay in power indefintely by encouraging all of its able enemies to leave?

If the people who most want work and freedom leave, is the nation weakened?

I suppose that is an old question. In the late 1800s millions of Poles left the Russian, German, and Austrian empires, millions of Irish left British-ruled Ireland, and millions of south Italians left Italy. I believe that at the time there were big debates over whether the migrants were the most energetic people or the ones who had failed. But given how well they did in the US, Canada and Argentina, I can't believe there was anything much wrong with them.

I think the steady stream of people leaving Ireland across the whole period from 1923 to 1980 certainly changed Ireland. The people who left were on the whole more liberal and modernizing than those who stayed, allowing the conservative Catholic faction to take control of the nation and retain it for decades. For decades, Irish dissidents congregated in London, along with all the Irish who wanted to get divorced or have an abortion. If more had stayed, how might things have been different?

Whenever Americans announce that they are going to leave the country if their side loses the next election, I think, "quitters." If you think it is important who wins elections, maybe you should stay and work toward that end.

I am left wondering to what degree I should think that way about other people who flee their countries, and to what degree I should simply want to help all who need it, and extend a welcome to all who need a home.

David Grann, "Killers of the Flower Moon"

David Grann has now written a whole series of best-selling nonfiction books, a remarkably successful record. His method is to find sensational stories that were once famous but have been mostly forgotten and bring them back for a new audience. I very much enjoyed The Lost City of Z, a story of exploration and disappearance in the Amazon that was front page news in the 1920s but had faded to the point that I had never heard of it. The story told in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2016) is not as thoroughly forgotten, but certainly most Americans had never heard of it. Grann's is a great formula because you know the stories will sell; after all, they already did, less than a hundred years ago.

The Osage were once one of the great tribes of the plains, rivals of the Lakota and the Comanche for supremacy. But they were devastated by disease, betrayed by their white friends, defeated by the Cherokee, and pushed onto smaller and smaller reservations. In 1878 they bought a godforsaken corner of Oklahoma from the Cherokee and settled there, thinking that surely nobody would bother them any more on land of such little value.

Then, in a year variously given as 1894, 1895, or 1897, oil was discovered on the Osage reservation. It became the hottest oil patch in the world, a place where fortunes were made and lost overnight; three of the famous oilmen who got their starts there founded the companies called Getty, Sinclair, and Phillips. The Osage became the richest people, per capita, in the world; Osage chiefs were the Arab sheikhs of the 1920s. In 1923 alone the 3,000-member tribe's revenue from oil leases was 30 million dollars. People say that "Black Gold" became a common term when an Osage horse by that name won the Kentucky Derby in 1924.

It is worth noting, given the current brouhaha about Indians being sent to boarding schools, that some of the new Osage millionaires spent their money sending their children to the most expensive boarding schools in the country. People are these days trying to deny that Indians ever did that of their own accord, but that is just wrong.

All of this wealth brought a trampling herd of criminals, grifters, and fortune-seekers to Osage County, determined to get their hands on some of that Indian gold. They were aided by a system, imposed by the Federal government, that ruled on which Osage were competent to manage their own money. Those who were not had to employ white "guardians" who controlled their funds and charged them handsomely for the privilege of accessing their own fortunes. Businesses regularly charged Osage several times as much as whites for the same services. Osage were cheated, robbed, scammed, and extorted by a whole system of leeches who were often backed corrupt officials in the county and state governments. They called it "the Indian business" and it made a lot of white people rich.

All of that is no more than you would expect. But the story of the Osage has a much darker side, so disturbing that it is hard to believe even about the America of the 1920s. 

The profits of the oil were distributed to the Osage under a system of "headrights." Headrights could not be bought or sold, only inherited. But if an Osage married an outsider, the headright could pass to the spouse or the mixed-blood children. This launched numerous schemes to marry into Osage wealth and get control of it. One local resident was observed saying to another, "Why don't you just marry a squaw and take her money?" And Osage kept marrying outsiders, for reasons that remain obscure in Grann's book. Some of the Osage hated this and women who married outsiders could be ostracized, but the marriages went on. I wondered if maybe some of the newly wealthy women were trying to escape from Osage culture, and in particular its patriarchal idea of marriage. But anyway there were deep tensions within the Osage that helped to divide and weaken them.

There were also rumors, beginning during World War I when the oil checks first made people rich, that Osage were being murdered for their money. The murders, people said, were covered up by a white power structure of politicians, businessmen, oil barons, and guardians who exploited Osage when they were alive and just killed them when they got inconvenient. But this was all murky and unproved.

Then in 1921 a series of high-profile killings of wealthy Osage caught the nation's attention. From 1921 to 1926 at least 20 wealthy Osage were murdered, a time the Osage call the Reign of Terror. Local law enforcement made no progress in solving the crimes. Some of the Osage were millionaires, so they hired private detectives to investigate, but that never led to anything, either. Eventually the complaints caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had just become the head of something called the Bureau of Investigation or BOI. At that point BOI agents had no real police powers – they could not make arrests or execute search warrants, for example – but Hoover was determined to make them into something much more like a national police force. He decided that the Osage murders were the perfect case to make his agency's reputation.

So in 1925 Hoover sent one of his best agents from Texas to Osage County, letting him assemble a picked team of both undercover and above-ground operators. Within a year they had cracked an important group of cases, convicting both the trigger men and the local boss who organized an insidious plot to kill Osage and inherit their headrights. The triumph helped make Hoover and the (soon to be) FBI. But, as I said, it applied to just a few murders of the at least 20 that had been committed. Which may have been a small part of the actual total. Grann argues that the real number of murders was much higher, likely in the hundreds. The BOI had opened one crack in the local mafia of politicains, lawyers, crooks and thugs who were preying on the Osage, but it seems likely that most cases were never solved and most perpetrators never caught. One white lawyer friendly to the Osage was murdered on the street in Washington, DC, when he went to talk to the Justice Department about the killings; everyone assumed he was killed because he knew too much about the "Indian business," but nothing was ever proved. The murders also went on after the "Reign of Terror" officially ended, likely until the 1930s when the Depression and the drying up of the oil made the Osage poor again.

It's a terrific book, and if it sounds like your kind of thing, read it.

There are some questions, though. The number of murders is murky, as Grann admits. Many of the possible murder cases involved Osage who allegedly died from alcohol poisoning. Some of them may well have been intentionally poisoned. But during Prohibition thousands of Americans died from poisonous moonshine; it was a major nationwide problem. Nobody denies that the Osage drank a lot of moonshine. Which doesn't mean some of them were not murdered, but it makes it impossible to know for sure which deaths were homicides. Grann also tries to estimate  the number of murders by comparing the death rate of the Osage to that of the nation as a whole, but in fact all Indians of that period had much higher death rates than whites or blacks, and the rate varied widely from tribe to tribe, so the high Osage death rate is suggestive but doesn't prove anything. Still, I finished the book believing that at least fifty Osage had been murdered for their money and that the crimes had been covered up, and the money leeched away, by an astonishingly corrupt system that reached at least to the governor of Oklahoma.

The second thing that struck me was the strange passivity of the Osage. In 1921 there were Osage still living who had fought the Cherokee and the US government in the 1870s; plus, more than a hundred Osage had volunteered to fight in World War I. Yet in the face of what looks like an organized murder campaign against their nation they did very little. There was one point where good evidence emerged against a man and some Osage threatened to kill him if he weren't arrested, but that was the only case I noted where any Osage even threatened violence. Of couse any Osage who did kill a white man would likely be executed, but that did not deter many other Indians of that period from acts of violence. For a young man to sacrifce his own life in defense of his tribe was (and remains for some Indian nations) an honored tradition. 

The weird passivity starts with people who told friends they were afraid they were being poisoned by their friends or even their spouses but don't seem to have done anything to defend themselves. They kept living with the spouses they feared, kept buying moonshine they thought might kill them. Why?

And why did the Osage nation as a whole do so little? They had leverage; they could have refused to issue more oil leases until the murders were solved. They could have forced the oil barons to take action against the corrupt county officials who were covering this all up; in 1925, no county sheriff stood a chance in a fight against the Gettys and the Sinclairs. But the Osage did nothing of the kind. They did not even boycott the businesses of the men they suspected most strongly.

Grann says at one point that the Osage felt trapped in a vast fog that covered their whole reservation, stretching across the white world beyond it. They could not tell who were their friends and who their enemies; they did not know what to do or where to turn for help. The people eventually exposed as murderers all posed as friends to the Osage. Maybe the Osage suspected they weren't really friends, but they absolutely needed help from white lawyers and officials, and how could they tell whose friendship was sincere?

And this gets me to what I see as the second tragedy that lies behind the astonishing evil of the murders. What happened to the Plains Indians between 1870 and 1896 was the utter destruction of their way of life, the loss of their homes, and the loss of their world. This operated, not just at the political or cultural level, but psychologically. They were unmoored. Indian men were also unmanned, completely cut off from the activities (buffalo hunting, war) that defined them as men. In the strange passivity of the Osage through the Reign of Terror I think we can get a glimpse of how utterly destructive this loss was to the people who lived through it.

The good news is that both the Osage and the American nation have moved on. The number of Osage has rebounded and is now around 20,000, roughly what it was in 1800. In 2011, the US government reached a settlement with the Osage, paying $380 million for their part in mismanaging the Osage's oil weath and other trust funds. This happened because, on the one hand, the Osage have found their footing in the new America and are much better able to navigate the system, better able to distinguish friends who might help them from leeches out to rob them. On the other, the US government is less out to rob and subjugate Indians, and in some quarters even trying to undo some of the harm done in the past. Which is not to say that everything is fine now; Grann talks to people still haunted by the Reign of Terror and what it says about the fate of Indians in a white world. But the worst times are now very much in the past.

CRISPR Therapy for Sickle-Cell Disease: Progress Report

The first patients with the dreaded sickle-cell gene were treated with gene editing therapy back in 2019. After three years, all 31 seem to be doing ok. (Articles on the therapy: here, here)

So what now? The treatment is very complex. It involves removing bone marrow from the patient, editing the DNA of the hemocytoblast cells that produce red blood cells, and putting billions of those cells back into the body. No information on the cost has yet been made public but it is surely in the millions of dollars. There are about 100,000 people in the US who have the condition, most of them black, many poor. That's a big burden for Medicaid and the rest of the insurance system.

And globally, most of the 20 million people with the condition live in Sub Saharan Africa. What happens when they start migrating to the US and Europe and applying for asylum on the basis that without this treatment they will die?

Other people question the treatment because nobody knows how long it will last. Hemocytoblasts don't live forever, and presumably the new ones the body makes will have the sickle cell gene. Can we afford to give people this treatment every decade?

CRISPR technology is advancing rapidly, so presumably the cost of the gene editing and cell cloning steps will come down. But bone marrow surgery is a mature technology and it is likely to remain very expensive. I suppose in the long run the solution will be to use gene editing to remove the faulty gene from the population, but then again I suppose that will have to wait on an effective vaccine for malaria. 

This is going to create a lot of ugly fights in years to come.

A thought comes to mind: the reason we don't have flying cars, as people like to ask, is that we are spending our resources helping people live longer, healthier lives.

Fulbrights and Languages

When you apply for a Fulbright fellowship to study in a foreign country, you get points for knowing the language well. Unless you grew up speaking it, in which case you get no points in the language proficiency section. Since Fulbright fellowships to most countries are intensely competitive, this makes people who grew up speaking the language unlikely to win.

This is being challenged in court by the children of immigrants who believe that it unfairly discriminates against them. (NY Times) And it does discriminate against them. The question is, do the stated goals of the Fulbright program, which inlcude promoting international friendship, intercultural relations, and the study of foreign languages, make that discrimination ok? The Fulbright is not particularly interested in sending students back to the countries their parents came from, because that doesn't create new cultural connections, doesn't encourage students to study foreign languages, and, they say, doesn't really encourage students to think internationally. They absolutely do not want to send mainly children of recent immigrants to study in the countries their parents came from. Is that unfair discrimination?

There are lots of ways that American institutions discriminate against native speakers of languages. For example in high school I participated in a statewide competition for German students which explicitly banned those who grew up in German-speaking homes. Is that unfair?

The Fulbright program wants to broaden people's horizons, not reinforce already existing interests and connections. It wants people to study new languages in school, not improve the ones they speak at home. But, against that, the program as it stands absolutely does discriminate against the children of immigrants. Some of the people interviewed by the Times said this felt like double discrimination to them, since they had to fight their way through the educational system in English – and only elite graduate students can even apply for a Fulbright-Hays grant, so these people have already made it a long way – and then face discimination again for the thing that made education harder for them in the first place.

(As a personal aside, I felt like a DeSantis/Trump supporter when one woman who was born in Jordan suggested that the people she was competing against were privileged white folks who could learn languages by foreign travel and fancy summer language institutes, because I spent my summers earning money for school and never set foot outside the country until after I won my Fulbright, which was the only way I could afford it. Hmph.)

Based on the Times story, it looks like the people administering the Fulbright-Hays grants will respond to these suits by greatly de-emphasizing the whole section on language proficiency. I don't blame them, but that again means compromising one of their goals, promoting the study of foreign languages.

I think this connects to the broader debate over college admissions and affirmative action because it pits the right of students to fair treatment against the right of institutions to have goals. No university says its goal is to educate the applicants with the best grades and test scores. The actual goal of elite schools, whether they say it or not, is to shape the future leaders of the country and the world. (I mean here, not just politicians and CEOs, but the leadership in academia, nonprofit foundations, the arts, etc.) Because the American leadership class is now multi-racial, they want a multi-racial student body. Because the American leadership class is nothing like majority Asian, they do not want a majority Asian student body. They understand that grades and test scores are only loosely correlated with leadership potential, so they want to use other criteria in selecting their students. But this seems radically unfair to students who find that they would need much better records than those of different ethnic backgrounds.

I think the Fulbright folks are right that sending students back to the countries their parents were born in does not efficiently promote their goals. I also agree that their policy is discriminatory. What to do about that, I don't really know.

One-Sentence Character Studies of Mass Shooters

The NY Times is running a long, sad feature that consists mostly of one-line statements made about mass shooters. A typical sample goes like this:

He was bankrupt and had liens on his property.
Eight killed and six injured in San Francisco on July 1, 1993

He was evicted and his wife and daughter left him.
Six killed and one injured in Paso Robles, Calif., on Nov. 8, 1992

His wages were being garnished for child support.
Four killed in Watkins Glen, N.Y., on Oct. 15, 1992

He began hearing voices and talked about committing violence.
Four killed and 10 injured in Olivehurst, Calif., on May 1, 1992

He lost his job and his water heater broke.
Five killed and one injured in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Feb. 9, 1996

He had schizophrenia and stopped taking his medication.
Five killed and three injured in Bronx, N.Y., on Dec. 19, 1995

He was upset about a performance evaluation at work.
Four killed in Los Angeles on July 19, 1995

He was fired and had sought help at a mental health clinic.
21 killed and 19 injured in San Ysidro, Calif., on July 18, 1984

He was upset that his wife had left him.
Six killed in College Station, Tex., on Oct. 11, 1983

He ranted in his classroom and was suspended from teaching.
Eight killed and three injured in Miami on Aug. 20, 1982

He was in a pay dispute with his employers.
Six killed and four injured in Grand Prairie, Tex., on Aug. 9, 1982

He became reclusive and avoided all social interactions.
Four killed and one injured in Coraopolis, Pa., on July 21, 1980

He began hoarding food and planning for the end of the world.
Five killed and 11 injured in Daingerfield, Tex., on June 22, 1980

He thought his family and co-workers were trying to poison him.
Four killed in Warwick, R.I., on June 17, 1978

The message of the authors is that most of these people were obviously risks to the community, but either nothing was done about them, or not enough, and they call for much more investment in community mental health care. Based on what I know, that seems to be true in some cases but not others. Hundreds of thousands of American men have their wages garnished for child support, and many are mad about it, but most never shoot anybody. Most people hoarding food for the coming collapse of civilization seem pretty harmless, too. Looking backward it is easy to say of many, "he was obviously headed for trouble and somebody should have stepped in," but without knowing the future that becomes very difficult, and in some cases you would have to look much more deeply than this to have any clue that a real crisis was coming.

One Born Every Minute

From Matt Levine, here is part of the SEC complaint against the people running a fraud called CoinDeal:

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Neil Chandran, Garry Davidson, Michael Glaspie, Amy Mossel, Linda Knott, AEO Publishing Inc, Banner Co-Op, Inc, and BannersGo, LLC for their involvement in a fraudulent investment scheme named CoinDeal that raised more than $45 million from sales of unregistered securities to tens of thousands of investors worldwide.

According to the SEC’s complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Chandran, Davidson, Glaspie, Knott, and Mossel falsely claimed that investors could generate extravagant returns by investing in a blockchain technology called CoinDeal that would be sold for trillions of dollars to a group of prominent and wealthy buyers. 

Chandran, a recidivist securities law violator and convicted felon, claimed to own a unique blockchain technology that was on the verge of being sold for trillions of dollars to a group of reputable billionaire buyers (“CoinDeal”). Chandran further claimed his business required interim financial support until the sale transaction closed. Together with and through other named Defendants, Chandran targeted mostly unsophisticated investors with false and misleading promises and representations that investments in CoinDeal would soon yield extremely high returns from the imminent sale of his business. Ultimately, there was no sale, and no distribution of proceeds, because CoinDeal was a sham. . . .

Chandran typically provided status updates on the supposed deal, including but not limited to: the involvement of foreign central banks and the United States Department of Homeland Security; the latest board meetings of the consortium of wealthy buyers; the role of certain political figures; and the causes of “temporary” delays to the sale closing. These updates were designed to lull investors and induce them to continue investing in CoinDeal.

One of the excuses they used to explain why the payout was delayed was that business titans were jockeying for leadership:

Based on information from Chandran, Davidson falsely stated, during a teleconference on March 6, 2021, that Billionaire 1 and Billionaire 2 were each under consideration as the potential CEO for the CoinDeal business enterprise. Billionaire 1 is the founder and executive chairman of a large online retailing company. Billionaire 2 is the CEO of an electric car company. During the same teleconference, Davidson falsely stated that CoinDeal had a market capitalization of $50 trillion.

Trillions!

The best part is this table that was sent to investors showing their potential returns:

So the top investoris were promised a return of 56 million percent. What you have to wonder is, if you're getting all those billions, why do you also need a free Bentley?

Incidentally, defendant Linda Knott was not part of the original CoinDeal group; she heard about them, invested $1,000 of her own money in their scam, and then set up a fund that would allow people who didn't have the $500 minimum investment to get on the CoinDeal gravy train. According to the SEC, she raised $749,000 this way, pocketing $79,000 and investing the rest in CoinDeal.

What an astonishing collection of fools. As Levine says, CoinDeal's email list would be worth a fortune.