ASM826 posted about the excellent Fall Of Rome podcast. I heartily second this recommendation, and would point out that Dr. Wyman has another podcast called Tides Of History which includes a lot on the transition from late antiquity to the early modern period - and has started a series on paleolithic humans. It is wide ranging and eclectic, and if this is your Bag, Baby, then you'll dig it.
Robin Pierson picked up the baton where Duncan left things in 476 AD and is continuing the story of the Roman Empire - the eastern part, anyway) at The History Of Byzantium. He's up to the First Crusade now. One thing that I particularly like is that he has summary episodes at the end of every 100 years or so.
Dwight (you doread him every day, don't you?) left a comment pointing to Mike Duncan's excellent The History Of Rome podcast. It is breezier than The Fall Of Rome (especially after the first 10 or 15 episodes) but takes you from the founding of the Eternal City to the last Emperor in the west. Duncan's current podcast is Revolutions which covers the great revolutions of modern times, starting with the English Civil War of the 1600s and the American Revolution of the 1700s. His humor is there just like in The History Of Rome, but in a modern era. Recommended.
Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country - that it takes a long time to wreck a nation - but he didn't have Twitter. Sadly, we do. But history shows what it looks like as the wheels come off, and the Roman Republic was instructive to the Founding Fathers so it it well worth while to look at that slow motion car wreck. After all, our wreck might be in fast forward (depeche mode) with the help from Twitter.
The Founders intentionally fragmented power, with three branches of Government presumed to be antagonistic to each other and jealous of their powers. This structure was a result of looking at the structure of the Roman Republic where there was little effective power fragmentation - the Senate granted near supreme power to the Consuls, thinking that since they granted the powers, they were in the driver's seat. So how'd that turn out for them?
Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered.
- Julius Caesar, the last of the Consuls and the first of the Emperors
But by Caesar's time, the Republic was dead in all but name. It died at a particular point, when what everyone agreed were sacred Roman political lines - never to be crossed - were crossed.
The Romans called these lines Mos Maiorum, which is fiendishly hard to translate but sort of means "the way things should be done." Once those lines were crossed it was Open Field running which would only be settled by someone who knew how to score a touchdown without spiking the ball.
Julius Caesar could not not spike the ball, and so was assassinated. His nephew and heir Octavian could score - repeatedly - without feeling the need to spike the ball and so became the first Emperor. In between them, there was a lot of bloodletting in Rome. Octavian learned from all of the violence of his early days growing up in the end of the Republic; he became Caesar Augustus because he figured out how to gather power to himself while keeping the appearance of not gathering power to himself. That only worked for him because everyone was really, really tired of the violence and murder that had come before.
That came from the collapse of Mos Maiorem. Once that was gone, it was anything goes. The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must. Marius (Julius Caesar's Father-In-Law) posted proscription lists - lists of his opponents who were declared Enemies Of The State and who could be killed on sight. The killers got to keep the proscribed's possessions. As you'd imagine, a lot of false accusations led to a lot of folks being added to the Proscription Lists.
Marius' mortal enemy Sulla took that rule and did one better on Marius' supporters. Even Caesar himself went into hiding as a reign of terror seized the Roman elite by the throat. Fortunately for Marius he was dead, but the streets of the Eternal City ran red with blood. Sulla wrote his own ferocious epitaph: No friend has ever served me, and no enemy has ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full. Sulla was the Reckoning for Marius' supporters.
It feels like that's coming here. It no longer feels like there is a common "us" that both sides recognize. That's new in American politics. It's like a line has been crossed; the Mos Maiorum of the early days are held now in contempt. It's Winner Takes All; The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must. If you get lumped in with The Weak then it sucks to be you.
And so record numbers of Americans find themselves as first time gun owners this year. Millions of new gun owners - although it must be said that those are rookie numbers. They'll be higher come the election. It's a Bad Moon Rising, and no matter who wins the election that's going to accelerate.
Because Mos Maiorum is dead. The losers in 2016 refused to accept the results of the voter's choice, and that looks fair to repeat when Donald Trump wins by an even bigger margin this coming November. What is to be done, when rioting in the streets is the New Normal?
What was done in Rome? Alas, we can read about this in the writings of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (in the Agricola):
Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
The Romans didn't screw around.
The Democrats aren't screwing around, either. If you look at Portland, or Seattle, or Baltimore, or St. Louis - all you can think of is they've made it a desert and the Media is calling it "peaceful protest". The American public looks on, and many realize this.
I've written before about Game Theory, a branch of mathematics that tells us much about human behavior. In particular, Tit-For-Tat is a strategy where you play the opponent's last play against you. If they cooperate with you, you cooperate with them. If they oppose you, you oppose them. Like I said, there are Mathematical proofs that show that this leads to a stable outcome.
That's not what we have today. What we have is the Democratic Party and the professional Civil Service, and the Media and the Universities doing everything they can think of to overthrow the last election. But respecting the election results is the Mos Maiorum of the American Republic. That's gone.
And so Tit-For-Tat (and Cornelius Sulla) says there's a different way. It's the Reckoning.
This is perhaps a better sense of how half the country is looking on the riots, from the same film:
A third of the country no longer wants Mos Maiorum - the way things have been done - rather, they want The Reckoning. Another third of the country has already abandoned Mos Maiorum, grasping at any straw - including "peaceful" riots - to get rid of OrangeManBad. The other third has yet to realize that come the Proscriptions, they will have to choose a side.
If you ever wondered how the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire, just open the newspaper. It seems like the bloodletting has started; if so, it will not end until we have a later day Caesar Augustus who can end the bloodshed.
This Train Wreck would be known to the Founding Fathers, although they might have taken some satisfaction that they got two and a half centuries before the wreck of their plan. But Twitter has pushed everything into fast forward. The French call that depeche mode, which brings to mind the greatest cover of American Past ever recorded:
Ignore the hype. The data are not hype, and the hype is not data. This is the most important thing to know about the Coronavirus:
This is the weekly US COVID deaths as reported by the CDC. Even with the shift from "dying from COVID" to "dying with COVID" to "dying in the same Zip code as COVID" (like the Florida buy killed in a motorcycle accident whose fatality is included in the graph here), we see that deaths are way, way down and dropping further. The data are clear on this.
This is the second most important thing to know about the Coronavirus:
This is the US All Cause Deaths. You can see the annual spikes during the winter Flu season. This year is definitely not "just a bad flu season" - deaths are significantly up from two years ago (which was a bad flu season). The dashed line is all cause deaths minus Coronavirus deaths but again you see the deaths dropping. The last three dots are most recent reports which are incomplete and which will be adjusted upwards in the future as it can take 8 weeks for all deaths to be reported.
Data are from here, which is worth a read in full.
And this is where I was wrong and Aesop was right - this was not just a bad flu. The data are crystal clear on that.
However, the data did not justify shutting down the economy. The data did not justify preventing you from saying goodbye to Grandma on her deathbed. The data did not justify prohibiting public gatherings at funerals. The data did not justify shutting down Sunday church. The data did not justify shutting down the schools. The data don't justify mandatory mask wearing. The data don't justify the hype.
The data do justify intelligent measures to protect vulnerable populations. The data do justify additional health care resources to make sure the hospitals - and their employees - do not get overloaded. There are probably a couple others that could go here, but I'd be pretty surprised if it's more than a couple others.
But we are not governed by Philosopher Kings, which means that we get the worst of both worlds - we get forced infection of vulnerable populations, we have great stress in the health care system, and we have Autocratic tyranny that would have had the Russian Tsars scribbling notes.
In a younger and more vigorous age of this Republic, the politicians who imposed all this useless misery on the population would have been horsewhipped through the public square. The data don't say that, but we can figure that out all on our own.
A company that spurned talent it badly needed couldn't thrive. The same is true for a country.
But that isn't stopping the Trump administration from blithely driving foreign students into the open arms of other countries with its ill-advised immigration policies.
[thousands of words on how bad this policy is deleted]
An American IT staffing'n'consultancy company has been banned from running job ads that say only temporary work visa holders need apply.
In a settlement [PDF] with the US Department of Justice today, ASTA CRS agreed it will make all job postings available to anyone in America, including citizens. The dept pointed out that the job postings were discriminatory because they “specify a preference for non-US citizens who held temporary work visas.”
Huh. Now why would they have been doing that?
But the most extraordinary claims come in a posting from May 2016, when another former employee is detailed and damning. “Company run by Hyderabad people,” they note (Hyderabad is the tech center of India). “This is a H-1B fraud visa business. They recruit candidates who are in desperate need of jobs, for example, H-1B transfer candidates or foreign students. They train them for month or two in business analysis or QA and then they start to market them. They prepare false resumes with 8-10 years of fake experience [with] companies like Bank of America, Capital One, Goldman Sachs etc ... Once they are able to get a job, the candidate is paid between 25 and 28 per hour," with the agencies involved pocketing the rest.
It's Indentured Servitude. The workers have few rights, and the employer takes a big chunk of their earnings. You can't get that with US citizens. Nothing at Reason about this. Funny, that. However you feel about what the level of immigration should be, I think that everyone can agree that bringing in exploited workers with essentially no rights to redress is a Bad Thing.
Palmetto State Armory is selling Federal American Eagle .223 REM, case of 1000 rounds for $579.99. In this modern era of panic buying causing .223 prices to go to 20-something bucks for a case of 20, this seems like a pretty decent price.
A few months back, someone left a comment about this song. I wish I remembered who left that comment because this is from the day when Country Music sounded like country music. Even more, her story is really interesting.
She was born into a musical family - her father was Tex Dickerson, and her brother is songwriter Ron Dickerson. Her son Chris Scruggs is a country musician playing in Marty Stuart's band. It kind of makes you think of a redneck J. S. Bach and family.
But she was more than a singer, or even a singer-songwriter. She became country's first female producer in the 1980s. She scored a Grammy for a duet with Ralph Stanley. While she didn't write this 1984 hit, she did produce it.
When I saw you today I just turned away, Don't wanna see you, don't wanna see you so soon. 'Cause I've tried to pretend, that we were never more than friends. An' I've been tryin' to keep from cryin', and I've been:
Walkin' on pins and needles, Ever since you left me, darlin'. I feel the jagged edge of a broken heart. Walkin' on pins and needles, Never gonna hold you, darlin'. I feel the jagged edge of a broken heart.
So now I'm on my own learnin' how to live alone. And every night's another shade of blue. Even now, I see your eyes smilin' as you told your lies. It's no use tryin', I can't stop cryin': I'm bound to without you.
Walkin' on pins and needles, Ever since you left me, darlin'. I feel the jagged edge of a broken heart.
Now I'm afraid to walk in places, Seein' those familiar faces. Knowin' you could be there with them: So afraid that you'd see that I've been,
Walkin' on pins and needles, (Walkin' on pins and needles.) Ever since you left me, darlin'. (Ever since you left me.) I feel the jagged edge of a broken heart. Oh, walkin' on pins and needles, (Walkin' on pins and needles.) Never gonna hold you, darlin'. (Never gonna hold you.) I feel the jagged edge of a broken heart.
The island of Cyprus still makes what seems to be the oldest type of wine that we know about. Commandaria got its name from the headquarters of the Knights Templar in the 13th century, but the wine was old even then: King Richard the Lionheart (of Crusades and Robin Hood fame) has it at his wedding, but it far pre-dates that. You have to go way, way back to 800 BC when Hesiod described a wine called Cypriot Manna.
It is a sweet, fortified wine - if you've ever had Port or Icewein then I expect this would be similar. The grapes are harvested and then left in the sun so that evaporation concentrates the sugars. Today's Commandaria is aged several years in oak barrels - in ancient times the wine would have been stored in big terra cotta jugs.
I'd like to try this sometime, if only for the history of the thing.
You can read about a more or less recent tasting here.
Dan Carlin of Hardcore History has an hour long interview with Hanks about the film, the book, and how Hanks is a big fan of Carlin. You can get it here.
As the popularity of Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants grows, so too does the number of ways those assistants both do and can intrude on users' privacy. Examples include hacks that uselasersto surreptitiously unlock connected-doors and start cars, malicious assistant apps thateavesdrop and phish passwords, and discussions that aresurreptitiously and routinely monitored by provider employeesor aresubpoenaed for use in criminal trials. Now, researchers have developed a device that may one day allow users to take back their privacy by warning when these devices are mistakenly or intentionally snooping on nearby people.
LeakyPick is placed in various rooms of a home or office to detect the presence of devices that stream nearby audio to the Internet. By periodically emitting sounds and monitoring subsequent network traffic (it can be configured to send the sounds when users are away), the ~$40 prototype detects the transmission of audio with 94-percent accuracy. The device monitors network traffic and provides an alert whenever the identified devices are streaming ambient sounds.
A few thoughts:
This is a prototype, not a product. You can't buy it yet.
This is a pretty neat approach. I posted years back about just how powerful Traffic Analysis is, and how we used it in World War II.
If you want privacy you really shouldn't have one of the Alexa devices listening to you all the time.
A new directive from the Trump administration has cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of the loop for data from hospitals treating patients with COVID-19, a move which could have significant effects on what information about the pandemic is made public and how it is presented and used.
It's pretty clear that the White House does not trust the CDC. They have good reason not to ("Don't wear a mask"/"You have to wear a mask"/"Don't take HCQ"/"Maybe take HCQ").
The instructions also explicitly bar hospitals from reporting to the CDC in addition to HHS: "As of July 15, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the COVID-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site," the document explains, referring to the CDC's system.
...
In other words, for hospitals to receive federal aid, including access to one of the few knownbeneficial drugsfor treating COVID-19, they will have to comply with the administration's data directive.
Like I said, this is really interesting. Of course, the Usual Suspects® are complaining. I guess they haven't caught on how that's not a bug, it's a feature.
I want to highlight a few data points from the bottom part of the chart. A comparison to the Black Death or Smallpox is ridiculous so the interesting stuff in in the bottom two rows. Specifically Swine Flu (ten years ago, killed twice as many people as the Kung Flu has), the Hong Kong Flu (fifty years ago, killed ten times as many people as the Kung Flu has), and the Asian Flu (sixty years ago, killed ten times as many people as the Kung Flu has).
All of these occurred within my lifetime; the first occurred during the Obama Administration. There was no panic, no wearing masks everywhere, no closing beaches and churches, no wrecking the economy.
We have found a great dog park here in Florida, and I take Wolfgang first thing in the morning when it's still cool. He gets to play with the other pups, but then takes a lot of the day to recover from the heat. It's not like Maryland, where mornings would be high sixty or low seventy degrees - it's low to mid eighties even early.
There's a good walk in some nearby woods but I think it will be autumn before I start taking him on regular nature walks like you see in the picture above. I'm not complaining about the heat but I do think that Wolfgang will be a little more energetic once we're past summer.
There aren't many things that can make me sound like a grumpy old codger faster than listening to the new country music. I'm not a fan. Blast it all - those dang kids are back on my lawn ...
But The Queen Of The World is the Angel of my Better Nature, and she pointed out this song. You see, she loves it, and that made me want to listen to it. It reminds me a lot of the Allison Kraus version of "When You Say Nothing At All". And suddenly I find that those dang kids only went onto my lawn to mow the grass. They even bagged the clippings.
Brett Young was an up and coming College baseball pitcher when an injury put that career track on hold. With time unexpectedly on his hands he took up songwriting. This was from his first album in 2017, and it went triple platinum. Clearly, The Queen Of The World and I were not the only fans.
Yeah, the new country music isn't often very good, but when it's good it's very good indeed.
In Case You Didn't Know (Songwriters: Brett Young, Trent Tomlinson, Tyler Reeve, Kyle Schlienger)
I can't count the times I almost said what's on my mind But I didn't
Just the other day I wrote down all the things I'd say But I couldn't I just couldn't
Baby I know that you've been wondering Mmm, so here goes nothing
In case you didn't know Baby I'm crazy bout you And I would be lying if I said That I could live this life without you Even though I don't tell you all the time You had my heart a long long time ago In case you didn't know
The way you look tonight That second glass of wine That did it, mmm
There was something bout that kiss Girl it did me in Got me thinking I'm thinking
All of the things that I've been feeling Mmm, it's time you hear em
In case you didn't know Baby I'm crazy bout you And I would be lying if I said That I could live this life without you Even though I don't tell you all the time You had my heart a long long time ago In case you didn't know
You've got all of me I belong to you Yeah, you're my everything
In case you didn't know I'm crazy bout you I would be lying if I said That I could live this life without you Even though I don't tell you all the time You had my heart a long long time ago Yeah, you had my heart a long long time ago, mmm In case you didn't know, know, know In case you didn't know
One result of the Kung Flu is that companies are learning that their employees are able to work effectively from home, via video conference and messaging/collaboration applications. We're beginning to see the implications of this for commercial office space:
Fujitsu is to permanently shutter one half of its office real estate in Japan and will ask 80,000 locals to work from home permanently as it redefines work culture internally in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Under the auspices of the Work Life Shift campaign, Fujitsu is to study data of how employees use offices, with a view of giving them more tools and options to work from home, at hubs or be more mobile.
“For employees in Japan, this latest initiative will mark the end of the conventional notion of commuting to and from offices, while simultaneously granting them a higher degree of autonomy based on the principle of trust,”Fujitsu said today.
File this under "Well, duh!"
Fujitsu is fixin' to save a boatload on office rent. That savings will go 100% to the bottom line. Probably their employees will be happier, too - the Tokyo subway system is famously crowded, and not having to do 90 minutes each way on that will be a nice bonus for Fujitsu's employees. It will be a financial bonus, too, since they won't have to buy subway tickets. It's sure as shootin' Fujitsu won't be the only company that decides to do this.
The losers will be the companies that rent office space. And the subway system.
Obligatory disclaimer: I work for a company that makes video meeting apps. It's interesting, having done this for a decade; it's gone from "we're living in the future" to "well duh, everyone wants this".
