Wednesday, December 25, 2019


When Massachusetts was the battlefield in the war on Christmas


Theologically, the Puritans were perfectly right

Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch had nothing on the 17th-century Puritans, who actually banned the public celebration of Christmas in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for an entire generation.



The pious Puritans who sailed from England in 1630 to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them something that might seem surprising for a group of devout Christians—contempt for Christmas. In a reversal of modern practices, the Puritans kept their shops and schools open and churches closed on Christmas, a holiday that some disparaged as “Foolstide.”


A Puritan governor disrupting Christmas celebrations.

After the Puritans in England overthrew King Charles I in 1647, among their first items of business after chopping off the monarch’s head was to ban Christmas. Parliament decreed that December 25 should instead be a day of “fasting and humiliation” for Englishmen to account for their sins. The Puritans of New England eventually followed the lead of those in old England, and in 1659 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made it a criminal offense to publicly celebrate the holiday and declared that “whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way” was subject to a 5-shilling fine.

Why did the Puritans loathe Christmas? Stephen Nissenbaum, author of “The Battle for Christmas,” says it was partly because of theology and partly because of the rowdy celebrations that marked the holiday in the 1600s.

In their strict interpretation of the Bible, the Puritans noted that there was no scriptural basis for commemorating Christmas. “The Puritans tried to run a society in which legislation would not violate anything that the Bible said, and nowhere in the Bible is there a mention of celebrating the Nativity,” Nissenbaum says. The Puritans noted that scriptures did not mention a season, let alone a single day, that marked the birth of Jesus.


Increase Mather

Even worse for the Puritans were the pagan roots of Christmas. Not until the fourth century A.D. did the church in Rome ordain the celebration of the Nativity on December 25, and that was done by co-opting existing pagan celebrations such as Saturnalia, an ancient Roman holiday of lights marked with drinking and feasting that coincided with the winter solstice. The noted Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote that Christmas occurred on December 25 not because “Christ was born in that month, but because the heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those pagan holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].”

According to Nissenbaum, “Puritans believed Christmas was basically just a pagan custom that the Catholics took over without any biblical basis for it. The holiday had everything to do with the time of year, the solstice and Saturnalia and nothing to do with Christianity.”

The pagan-like way in which Christmas was celebrated troubled the Puritans even more than the underlying theology. “Men dishonor Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides,” wrote 16th-century clergyman Hugh Latimer. Christmas in the 1600s was hardly a silent night, let alone a holy one. More befitting a rowdy spring break than a sacred occasion, Christmas revelers used the holiday as an excuse to feast, drink, gamble on dice and card games and engage in licentious behavior.

In a Yuletide twist on trick-or-treating, men dressed as women, and vice versa, and went door-to-door demanding food or money in return for carols or Christmas wishes. “Bands of mostly young people and apprentices would go house to house and demand that the doors of prosperous people be open to them,” Nissenbaum says. “They felt they had a right to enter the houses of the wealthy and demand their high-quality food and drink—not meager handouts, but the stuff prosperous people would serve to their own families.” Those who failed to comply could be greeted with vandalism or violence.

Even after public commemoration of Christmas was once again legal in England following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Yuletide ban remained firmly on the books in Massachusetts for an entire generation. Although outlawed in public, the celebration of Christmas endured in private homes, particularly in the fishing towns further afield from the center of Puritan power in Boston that Nissenbaum writes were “notorious for irreligion, heavy drinking and loose sexual activity.”

In his research, Nissenbaum found no records of any prosecutions under the 1659 law. “This was not the secret police going after everybody,” he says. “It’s clear from the wording of the ban that the Puritans weren’t really concerned with celebrating the holiday in a quiet way privately. It was for preventing disorders.”

The prohibition of public Christmas celebrations was unique to Massachusetts, and under the reign of King Charles II political pressure from the motherland steadily increased for the colony’s Puritan leaders to relax their intolerant laws or risk losing their royal charter. In 1681, the Massachusetts Bay Colony reluctantly repealed its most odious laws, including the ban on Christmas.

Hostility toward the public celebration of Christmas, however, remained in Massachusetts for years to come. When newly appointed royal governor Sir Edmund Andros attended Christmas Day religious services at Boston’s Town House in 1686, he prayed and sang hymns while flanked by Redcoats guarding against possible violent protests. Until well into the 1800s, businesses and schools in Massachusetts remained open on December 25 while many churches stayed closed. Not until 1856 did Christmas—along with Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July—finally become a public holiday in Massachusetts.

This war on Christmas, to coin a phrase, lasted a remarkably long time in Massachusetts. More than 100 years after the Legislature repealed its ban on the holiday, the Puritan-infused hostility to Yuletide merriment remained palpable.

"When I was a school-boy I always went to school on Christmas Day, and I think all the other boys in town did," recalled Edward Everett Hale, the popular Boston author and preacher, in the December 1889 issue of New England Magazine. On Christmas Eve, Hale and his schoolmates might walk past King's Chapel — the city's first Anglican church, where Christmas services were held — and "see the men carrying hemlock for the decorations. But that was the only public indication that any holiday was approaching." When he lived in Worcester as a young man in the 1840s, Hale wrote, Christmas for many people was still a non-event. "The courts were in session on that day, the markets were open, and I doubt if there had ever been a religious service."

As late as 1856, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could still describe New England as being "in a transition state about Christmas." There was enough of the old Puritan animus to keep it from being a "cheerful hearty holiday," he said. But "every year makes it more so."

Eventually, of course, popular culture came down unreservedly in favor of Christmas. Santa Claus and light-strewn trees, midnight masses and Handel's "Messiah," holiday eggnog and gift-wrapped presents — today they're as much a part of Christmas in Boston and New England as in any other part of the country. In countless ways, American life is still influenced by those devout English Christians who sailed to New England four centuries ago. But not when it comes to Christmas.

God rest them merry, but that's one war the Puritans lost.

https://www.history.com/news/when-massachusetts-banned-christmas

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/23614/when-massachusetts-was-the-battlefield-in-the-war

Wednesday, September 25, 2019


Scientists have discovered evidence of an ancient kingdom previously thought to have been a mythical creation in the Bible.


The Old Testament described Edom as a neighbouring enemy state of Judea, located southeast of the Dead Sea where explorers would now find parts of Jordan and Israel.

It was spoken of extremely harshly, with some biblical texts indicating that it was complicit in the destruction of Judea and the holy city of Jerusalem.

Edom has been described as a place "where kings reigned before any Israelite king reigned", but is later said to have been defeated and plundered by King David of Israel.

Such tales have been scoffed at by plenty of historians down the years, but discoveries by a team of scientists and archaeologists in the area where it would have stood have raised new questions about its possible existence.

Researchers from the University of California and Tel Aviv University have been working at the supposed site in what is now known as the Arabah Valley.

There they excavated a copper production site dubbed Slaves' Hill, dating back more than 6,000 years, which yielded layers of smelting waste that have helped reconstruct a time when the region enjoyed a "technological leap".

Using a process called radiocarbon dating, which helps determine how old an organic object is, the researchers were able to put a date on the smelting waste - better known as slag.


The modern day Arabah Valley

Analysis of the minerals and metals within the slag was then used to work out how smelting techniques changed over the centuries, with lower concentrations of copper indicating that more had been extracted.

Efficiency improved dramatically in the second half of the 10th century BC and the techniques also became common across various sites in the region - indicating that other workers were picking them up.

Detailing the findings in the journal PLOS ONE, team leader Erez Ben-Yosef said the technological leap played a key role in the move from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

"Our study sheds new light on the emergence of the archaeologically elusive biblical kingdom of Edom, indicating that the process started much earlier than previously thought," he said.

"That said, the study's contribution goes beyond the Edomite case, as it provides significant insights on ancient technological evolution and the intricate interconnections between technology and society.

"The results demonstrate that the punctuated equilibrium evolutionary model is applicable to ancient technological developments, and that in turn, these developments are proxies for social processes."

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/ancient-kingdom-presumed-to-be-bible-story-could-be-real/ar-AAHPrBR?OCID=ansmsnnews11


Saturday, September 7, 2019


Modern-day Indians are descendants of one of humanity's most ancient civilizations


Ancient DNA evidence reveals that the people of the mysterious and complex Indus Valley Civilization are genetically linked to modern South Asians today.

The same gene sequences, drawn from a single individual who died nearly 5,000 years ago and was buried in a cemetery near Rakhigarhi, India, also suggest that the Indus Valley developed farming independently, without major migrations from neighboring farming regions.

It's the first time an individual from the ancient Indus Valley Civilization has yielded any DNA information whatsoever, enabling researchers to link this civilization both to its neighbors and to modern humans.

The Indus Valley, or Harappan, Civilization flourished between about 3300 B.C. and 1300 B.C. in the region that is now covered by parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and northwestern India, contemporaneous with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The people of the Indus Valley forged an impressively advanced civilization, with large urban centers, standardized systems of weights and measurements and even drainage and irrigation systems. Yet despite that sophistication, archaeologists know far less about the civilization than that of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, in part because the Indus Valley writing system hasn't yet been deciphered.

Gathering ancient DNA from the Indus Valley is an enormous challenge, Vagheesh Narasimhan, one of the leading authors of the new research and a postdoctoral fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School, Live Science, because the hot, humid climate tends to degrade DNA rapidly. Narasimhan and his colleagues attempted to extract DNA from 61 individuals from the Rakhigarhi cemetery and were successful with only one, skeleton likely belonging to a female which was found nestled in a grave amid round pots, her head to the north and feet to the south.

The first revelation from the ancient gene sequences was that some of the inhabitants of the Indus Valley are connected by a genetic thread to modern-day South Asians. "About two-thirds to three-fourths of the ancestry of all modern South Asians comes from a population group related to that of this Indus Valley individual," Narasimhan said.

Where the Indus Valley individual came from is a more difficult question, he said. But the genes do suggest that the highly agricultural Indus people were not closely related to their farming neighbors in the western part of what is now Iran.

"We were able to examine different associations between the advent of farming in that part of the world with the movement of people in that part of the world," said Narasimhan.

Farming, Narasimhan said, first began in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East around 10,000 years ago. No one knows precisely how it spread from there. Did agriculture pop up independently in areas around the globe, perhaps observed by travelers who brought the idea to plant and cultivate seeds back home? Or did farmers move, bringing their new agricultural lifestyle with them?

In Europe, the genetic evidence suggests that the latter is true: Stone Age farmers introduced Southern Europe to agriculture, then moved north, spreading the practice as they went.

But the new Indus Valley genetic evidence hints at a different story in South Asia. The Indus Valley individual's genes diverged from those of other farming cultures in Iran and the Fertile Crescent before 8000 B.C., the researchers found.

"It diverges at a time prior to the advent of farming almost anywhere in the world," Narasimhan said. In other words, the Indus Valley individual wasn't the descendent of wandering Fertile Crescent farmers. She came from a civilization that either developed farming on its own, or simply imported the idea from neighbors — without importing the actual neighbors.

Both immigration and ideas are plausible ways to spread farming, Narasimhan said, and the new research suggests that both happened: immigration in Europe, ideas in South Asia. The results appear today (Sept. 5) in the journal Cell.

Complex populations

The researchers also attempted to link the Indus Valley individual to his or her contemporaries. In a companion paper published today in the journal Science, the researchers reported on ancient and modern DNA data from 523 individuals who lived in South and Central Asia over the last 8,000 years.

Intriguingly, 11 of these people — all from outside the Indus Valley — had genetic data that closely matched the Indus Valley Individual. These 11 people also had unusual burials for their locations, Narasimhan said. Together, the genetic and archaeological data hint that those 11 people were migrants from the Indus Valley Civilization to other places, he said.

However, these conclusions should be viewed as tentative, warned Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, an archaeologist and expert on the Indus Valley Civilization at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the new research. Archaeological evidence suggests that Indus Valley cities were cosmopolitan places populated by people from many different regions, so one person's genetic makeup might not match the rest of the population. Furthermore, Kenoyer said, burial was a less common way of dealing with the dead than cremation.

"So whatever we do have from cemeteries is not representative of the ancient populations of the Indus cities, but only of one part of one community living in these cities," Kenoyer said.

And though the Indus individual and the 11 potential migrants found in other areas might have been related, more ancient DNA samples will be needed to show which way people, and their genes, were moving, he said.

Narasimhan echoed this need for more data, comparing the cities of the Indus Valley to modern-day Tokyo or New York City, where people gather from around the world. Ancient DNA is a tool for understanding these complex societies, he said.

"Population mixture and movement at very large scales is just a fundamental fact of human history," he said. "Being able to document this with ancient DNA, I think, is very powerful."


https://www.livescience.com/south-asians-descend-from-harappan-civilization.html

Thursday, September 5, 2019


Cows have the right of way, the phone book features nicknames and homes are sold with the furniture thrown in





Norfolk Island, which is roughly 1500kms off Byron Bay, has a host of fun facts under its belt — like how there are no traffic or street lights — but perhaps the most surprising is that the peaceful and picturesque South Pacific island has a median house price of $400,000.

A place most of us have heard of, but know little about, Norfolk Island was for a long time an Australian territory with quirky laws restricting the purchase of real estate to those who were born on the island, married an islander or bought a local business.

In 2015, the remote island underwent historic changes to ownership rules when the Australian government announced comprehensive reforms. Since then, the dreamy locale has opened up to a world of new househunters. Originally only people born on the island could buy there — but that’s now changed.

“It’s now the same as if you’re moving from Sydney to Melbourne, there are no restrictions whatsoever for Australians and New Zealanders,” said David Hall, a local real estate agent who has been selling property on the 35sq km island for more than a decade.

“Up until Australia took over, prior to that, it was different.  “The Norfolk Island Government had an immigration policy so you couldn’t just come here and live. You could buy a house, but only live here for up to three months and that was restrictive.

“The only way you could buy and live here permanently back then was to buy a business, run that business for five years, and then after that period if you’d behaved yourself, you could apply for residency.”

The Australian external territory, which was home to 1748 residents at the last Census, is located at the centre of a triangle made up of Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia.

It is just 8km long and 5km wide, has one solitary roundabout, no public transport, a maximum speed limit of 50km and peak hour only exists when the local livestock take to the streets.

As well as speaking English, locals have their own living language. Norfuk is a blend of eighteenth century English and Tahitian derived from the original settlers on the island.

While there were no indigenous people recorded on the island at the time of European settlement, the descendants of Tahitians and the HMS Bounty mutineers, including those of Fletcher Christian, were resettled on Norfolk from the Pitcairn Islands.

As a result, the Norfolk Island phone book has a “faasfain” (or fast find) section featuring nicknames, rather than surnames, because so many of the locals share just a few family names.

Mr Hall said life on the island is simple, but that’s just the way locals like it and now more mainlanders than ever are buying their own slice of the property paradise.

“The sales volume has gone up, probably nearly doubled since Australia took over and that’s been fantastic. People who want to retire are happy because they don’t have to work, they can come over here now and just retire. And why not, it’s one of the safest, cleanest and most beautiful islands in the Pacific,” he said.

“It’s so safe here that the only cars you find in the street that will be locked will be those of tourists, because they can’t get out of the habits of mainland Australia.”

While retirees are definitely taking note of Norfolk Island, with the median age almost a decade older than the rest of the country at 49, Mr Hall said there is also plenty on offer for aspiring residents of all ages.

“Kids can ride their bikes to school and don’t have to be taken by their parents. It is so safe you can walk the streets day or night, in complete safety. It’s unique, it’s really lovely. We don’t have street lights, but most people have a torch,” Mr Hall added.

Norfolk Island’s local school caters for more than 300 children from Kindergarten to Year 12 and according to Census 2016, there were officially only 16 unemployed people.

“If you’re over here and you’re not working, it’s because really you don’t want to work,” explained Mr Hall.

“We’re also getting more people who are working via the internet, now we’ve got the NBN,” he said, adding that there is a need for more traditional talent as well.

“We have quite a few really good builders, we have a couple of timber mills, three joiners, a heap of plumbers and electricians. But there is a shortage, basically, of tradespeople, because they’re all so busy.”

The unique island, which is home to just over 1000 houses, has an unusual real estate market unlike that of the mainland.

While the median house price might sit a little higher than some other remote Australian regions, Norfolk Island buyers get a lot more bang for their buck.

“They’re mostly fully furnished, right down to your knives and forks and crockery, to your beds and blankets and in some cases it’ll even include the car,” Mr Hall said.

“We probably need to do more in promotions, so that people know that they can come live here, and at a fraction of the price you’re going to pay in the mainland,” he said.

“The highest sale price last year was $1.2 million. It was lovely modern home with magic views. For something like that, you would probably pay $4 million to $6 million in Sydney.”

Although property data firms don’t collect sale prices for Norfolk Island, Mr Hall has determined that the median price last year was $399,000, up from $313,000 in 2014 which was a year before the ownership rule changes.

Investors have begun to take note of Norfolk Island, with a solid rental market according to Mr Hall, however anyone looking to ride the holiday rental wave should reconsider.

“We’ve had some people buy without even coming to look at the property, but what we really don’t need is any more short term accommodation, there is a lot of that here,” he said.

Property purchases do not attract stamp duty, instead there is a local “transaction levy” which is calculated on a sliding scale.

“Basically, it’s 2 per cent up to $250,000; between $250,000 and $500,000 it’s 3 per cent; and above $500,000 it is 4 per cent,” he explained.

Another financial quirk is that the island has no GST, so life’s vices such as alcohol and cigarettes are actually cheaper than on the mainland.

While the idea of a tree or sea change might be a dream for many worn out city slickers, Mr Hall warns that island life runs at a very different pace.

Island life is remote — a world away from Amazon deliveries and Westfield shopping centres — so Norfolk Islanders have had to become a resourceful bunch, living by the rules of self sufficiency and “reduce, reuse, recycle” long before hipsters took on the second-hand economy.

“Most people grow at least some fruit and vegetables at home because the climate is ideal for it, but not everyone does.  “If you can’t grow what you need you’ll probably find it at a roadside stall where there are honest boxes,” Mr Hall said.

For new furniture, household appliances or even personal travel, patience pays off. Airfreight and travel costs can be sky high given there isn’t a flight everyday and sea mail is slow.

“You can sometimes wait months for things to be shipped over.

For travel, if you plan your visits back to the mainland in advance you can get a good deal with flights. You just have to be prepared to wait, but it’s worth it,” Mr Hall said.

https://www.realestate.com.au/news/norfolk-island-rare-opportunity-arises-to-buy-property-on-australias-mystery-isle/

Thursday, June 6, 2019


Nigella Lawson says restaurants should not play music because it drowns out the taste of the food





I dislike loud music in restaurants too.  I always ask them to turn it down and if they refuse I just leave.  I sometimes ask first are they selling food or music and that sometimes makes a favourable impact

The loud thump of music is now something to be expected in many fashionable restaurants - but Nigella Lawson has said it leaves her unable to taste her food.

The cook and television presenter has said she is "allergic to all noise" including "music in shops and restaurants".

She added: "It is utterly draining. And it drowns out the taste of the food.

"I’ve always presumed that these decisions are made by people who feel uncomfortable without noise."

Chef Richard Corrigan, who has won two Michelin stars and cooked for the Queen, said he sticks to quiet jazz piano music in his Mayfair restaurants.

The restaurateur, who owns Bentley's Oyster Bar and Corrigan's restaurant, said: "Loud music, personally I'm not a fan of it in restaurants, I don't mind some music, some live piano like we have in  Bentley's and Corrigan's is good, but what you don't want is speakers over the table.

"A good playlist is as equal to a really good menu in the right environment. It shows soul and individuality. You need to stay away from restaurants that play Abba or Eric Clapton loudly."

He added that while those in their twenties may enjoy loud music as they eat their meal, getting older means that the noise is grating.

Mr Corrigan said: "Getting old is a great, great thing, but as we get old, noise to your eardrums of any description has a detrimental effect.

"It is more about age more than anything, as you get older you look for a bit more solitude.

"When Nigella was in her twenties, she probably did love music in a restaurant".

Paul Askew, Chef Patron of The Art School in Liverpool, said that "great food needs to be tasted in a softer, more gentle environment", adding that in his restaurant he tries to "create an oasis of calm and a sanctuary of restoration for the soul."

Oisin Rogers, who runs The Guinea Grill in Mayfair, said bad music can ruin one's appetite. He explained: "Music. Everybody loves it. It provides instant atmosphere. But if there's already a good vibe there's no need for it. Restaurants provide sensory experiences. Good sights, delicious tastes and flavours, beautiful aromas, textures that intrigue and pleasant sounds.

"Some get music really right...many don't. Canned music is often an irritant, an annoyance. It might please some folk, but never all. And if it is irritating, Nigella is perfectly correct, it's impossible to enjoy food while irritated."

However, some restaurateurs said music is a crucial aspect of eating out. Two Michelin-starred chef Sat Bains said: "I think it’s important to have music in restaurants, it creates atmosphere and is necessary at the beginning of a service when the room is slightly quieter. Obviously, it shouldn’t be booming but nice and subtle. The best type of music for me is guests chattering and having a good time."

Jason Atherton of The Social Company added: "Music is really important to me, I actually highlighted this to my restaurant teams this morning; you can be sat in the most amazing restaurant, tasting the most beautiful food but if there’s no music and the atmosphere is flat, the overall experience is ruined.

"I agree music shouldn’t be overbearingly loud and it has to suit the restaurant’s ambience, but it’s such an important factor in the guest’s experience to get right."

Tom Brown of Cornerstone in Hackney Wick agreed, explaining: "I think having good music playing is essential. At Cornerstone, it’s the thing that people comment on the most, after the food. When you go out it should be fun. You obviously want to be able to have a conversation and there’s nothing worse than sitting in a silent dining room."

Action on Hearing Loss recently found that some restaurants play music up to 90 decibels on busy nights, while recommendations from the charity suggest establishments keep it below 50db.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/05/nigella-lawson-says-restaurants-should-not-play-music-drowns/?WT.mc_id=e_DM1026490&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_FPM_New_ES&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_FPM_New_ES_2019_06_05&utm_campaign=DM1026490

Saturday, May 25, 2019


Students learn to speak Latin, `the un-dead language'


ARLINGTON, Mass - The Roman gladiators entered the cafeteria in a single-file line, thumping elongated cardboard tubes against duct-taped cardboard shields. They wore helmets, wrist cuffs, shin protectors.

"Sanguinem!" the eighth-grade spectators chanted from the sidelines, pounding the tables. Blood!

The annual gladiator battle at Ottoson Middle School is not only about whacking enemies with recyclable swords. It's also about bringing a supposedly dead language to life by doing something unheard-of in Latin classes of the past: speaking it.

In schools across Massachusetts and the country, teachers are throwing out the memorized charts of verb conjugations and noun declensions that were once essential to a Latin education, and instead emphasizing the spoken word. The goal is to make Latin more inclusive and more engaging for kids in 2019.

About 20,500 students statewide study Latin, the third-most popular language after Spanish and French, according to The National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey Report. It might seem strange that students are still signing up, but Latin teachers have a way of illuminating the language's charms: It is the foundation of fields from medicine to music to poetry, and it offers a portal to 2,000 years of history and literature.

Studying Latin "broadens the mind, gives students the opportunity to see things from a different perspective, teaches them a history that is different from their own, and opens up avenues for their curiosity and imagination," wrote Christina Kraus, a professor of Latin at Yale.

For the past 150 years, Latin was taught with a hard focus on grammar and translation ("I love the periphrastic," one teacher said wistfully, referring to a passive construction in Latin that expresses an obligation like "ought"). Before that, spoken Latin was the norm in classrooms, according to Diane Anderson, a lecturer in classics at UMass Boston. Over the years, grammar-focused Latin gained a reputation for being stuffy and exclusive.

The "living Latin" movement aims to excise the stuffiness and bring the language to a wider audience.

It's based on the idea that people learn language best by hearing it and by reading things they understand. Memorizing the rules of grammar doesn't matter as much.

"Second language acquisition is effortless and totally unconscious," said John Bracey, a Latin teacher at Belchertown High School who counts himself as one of a small number of black Latin teachers in the country. "It's an involuntary, bodily function. Your brain will acquire language under the right circumstances."

That means anyone can learn Latin, not just the kid who is great at memorizing or has a knack for intricate grammar rules. Students will learn grammar implicitly, but not through memorization.

At East Boston High, the majority of Holly Russo's Latin students are bilingual, speaking both English and Spanish. Having learned English as a second language is an advantage in a living Latin classroom, she said, while it might be a detriment under a more traditional curriculum where students must translate everything into English.

"The goal is for the students to be able to understand the language via the language itself, rather than getting them to understand it by translating it to another language," Russo said.

At the Ottoson School, Latin teacher Abbi Holt knew that her students were immersed in fantasy outside the classroom, reading the Percy Jackson novels, "larping," or live-action role playing with costumes and swords, and joining anime club. Holt saw ancient Rome as another fantasy world that her students could explore intellectually. "Latin is really good for the ones who are really questing and imaginative," she said.

Holt switched to teaching fully immersive Latin this year, using the spoken language as a way to delve into the fantasy, and fun, of ancient Rome. A clock in her classroom tracks how long she and the students can speak exclusively in Latin. Interspersed between the conversations are lively activities, including a Harry Potter duel with spells and counterspells hurled in Latin and a cooking project with authentic Roman food.

"It gets me more engaged than if I was just in a classroom learning it," said Aiden Klein-Taylor, 13, a larper who won the gladiator competition.

Living Latin has been slowly spreading throughout the classics world. The University of Massachusetts Boston hosts an immersive "conventiculum" every year for teachers and scholars who want to spend a week speaking Latin exclusively; similar programs have popped up around the country. (They've introduced some new words: telephonum for phone, rete omnium gentium for Internet, ludus canistrifollis for basketball.)

For scholars who learned Latin the traditional way, these immersive conferences can be jolting.

"The first two or three days, they're quite tongue-tied," said Anderson, who helps run the summer conventiculum in Boston. She had studied Latin for 30 years before attending her first immersion course and acknowledged she was afraid to suddenly speak the language she thought she knew so well.

After spending a week communicating in Latin, though, Anderson returned to the ancient manuscripts she studies and found that her comprehension had dramatically improved. Living Latin isn't really about speaking, she said; instead, it's about learning holistically, and ultimately bringing new understanding to ancient texts.

But some teachers fear that students who learn Latin solely through speaking, without a grammar background like Anderson's, won't be able to engage with classic texts. In Holt's classroom, for example, the students read novellas written in basic Latin.

"You need a grammar-intensive approach," said Theresa Raymond, who attended Girls' Latin School (now Boston Latin Academy) and taught Latin for more than 40 years in the Boston area.

In her view, the purpose of studying Latin is to be able to read ancient texts - her classes translated Pliny the Younger's account of the eruption at Mt. Vesuvius and Cicero on just wars. "You're not going to get them to that level by teaching them to ask if they can go to use the bathroom or whatever."

Raymond recalled visiting a living Latin class where the teacher spoke in sentences riddled with grammatical errors, and insisted that all that mattered was hearing the language.

"But they're hearing it wrong!" Raymond said. "I think we can make it accessible to all without watering it down."

At the Boston Latin School, where students are required to take at least three years of Latin, roughly a quarter of the 15 Latin teachers have dabbled in spoken Latin, according to Michael Howard, a teacher there, but the grammar-focused approach remains dominant.

The students at Ottoson in Arlington don't know what a declension is, and they probably won't be able to speedily translate Pliny's letter into English. But they can speak and understand basic Latin, something their predecessors, and many of their teachers' peers, cannot do.

In the Ottoson cafeteria, Philip Watson, 13, had duct-taped a prayer written in Latin directly to his forearm, which he translated roughly as, "Oh you are so smart, can you grant me swiftness, and in return I will give you iron." (His chosen god was Vulcan, an ironsmith.)

When his cardboard tube broke, his classmates shouted "Neca!" (Kill!) with passion, and soon he was just another fallen gladiator, crumpled on the field.

Alexandria Miettinen-Garrett, 13, fared better, making it to one of the final rounds. Her face gleamed with sweat from her last fight.  "We are the unique language," she said, "the un-dead language."

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/05/23/students-learn-speak-latin-dead-language/npU5YsHGXdD3OLAiaBpUhL/story.html

Thursday, May 9, 2019


How Boris silenced John Humphrys – with Latin


By Harry Mount

This morning, on the Today Programme, John Humphrys repeatedly asked Boris Johnson whether he supported Maria Miller. Every time, Boris stonewalled until he came up with the ultimate ruse – speak Latin.

"Nemo iudex in causa sua," Boris said, quoting the old legal maxim – "No one should be a judge in his own cause"; ie Parliament shouldn't decide the punishment of MPs like Miller.

Humphrys was silenced and Boris had had the last word – that was the end of the interview. As Boris well knows, Latin is the ultimate answer.

Latin gives the impression of planet-brained intelligence on the part of the Latinist. And, because there's an odd expectation that we should all know Latin idioms, no one questions it or asks for a translation. The interviewer is silenced; the interviewee triumphs.

You couldn't suddenly drop into German, or Swahili, in the middle of the Today Programme. You'd be considered bonkers and a translation would be demanded of you. But Latin is the interviewees' magic weapon. Res ipsa loquitur.



This appeared originally on April 8th, 2014 at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/harrymount/100074292/how-boris-silenced-john-humphrys-with-latin/

Thursday, March 21, 2019


OBITUARY: Tribute to Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen





by Victor Sirl

From News Weekly, May 21, 2005

Victor Sirl pays a personal tribute to former Queensland premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Joh wasn't born in Kingaroy, but he was its favourite son. No-one cares if he was born in New Zealand. Kingaroy was his home of over 90 years and that is why he was buried at sunset in a grave amongst the pine trees on the family property, Bethany, as he had requested.

For people from Kingaroy, Joh was not just a local hero but a friend. We lived in Kingaroy for only a few years and my father first met Joh in the 1960s at a Taabinga School picnic.

Joh had two young boys working on his property and brought them along as a bit of a treat. He worked very hard and he expected hard work from his employees, but he paid them well and treated them with respect.

Challenge

There was one occasion when a worker had refused to eat at the same table as aboriginal workers. Joh told his sister to get the man a tray and then told him to eat outside! And, much to Joh's sister Neta's amusement, the man did.

Word of this - in an era when normally a white man would be inside and aborigines outside - spread through the district like a bushfire. But that was Joh. He did what he knew to be right.

Joh's favourite singer, Kamahl, sang the Lord's Prayer at his funeral and still wears a set of cuff links his old friend once gave him.

Of course, Joh met many famous people when he became Queensland premier; but before all that he was a local identity and parliamentarian from a poor background who pioneered the peanut industry.

He had lived in a cow bail for many years, invented a peanut-thresher, built a business land-clearing and peanut-harvesting, and pioneered crop-dusting. Joh attended the Lutheran Church and, at 42, began a great married partnership with Flo.

Although Joh made quite an impact on Kingaroy, no-one guessed that the qualities he demonstrated would one day enable him to transform Queensland.

As premier, he was instrumental in building the coal industry, making the Gold Coast into a tourist playground and convincing the Japanese to pour millions into the economy.

He left Queensland's booming economy with a triple-A credit rating.

An ingredient of this success was one of Joh's most controversial acts as premier - abolishing death duties. The Liberals were against it and the move was even criticised by the then Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser.

But, as a result, people flocked to Queensland, including the wealthy so-called "white-shoe brigade", retiring to the Gold Coast.

Soon death duties, which compounded family grief, disappeared from Australia altogether because every state had to follow Joh's lead.

World Expo

Joh signed Queensland up for World Expo '88 when other states turned it down. As a result of Expo '88, the city of Brisbane was transformed forever. The South Bank complex, with its restaurants, hotels, gardens, board-walk and artificial beach, replaced derelict and unnattractive buildings.

As a politician, Joh won some incredible election victories. When he announced the 1974 election, the then ALP leader Percy Tucker yelled out the ALP campaign slogan, "Let's go", to which Joh retorted, "You'll go, all right!" In the subsequent election, Tucker lost his seat and his party representation in parliament was reduced to 11 members.

At no time while Joh was premier did the ALP ever gain over 50 per cent of the vote on a two-party preferred basis.

The Nationals, at their zenith of power, held many of the most populated seats, not just the small rural ones - a fact not widely acknowledged. This was true even before Joh's Nationals amazingly won seats in Brisbane.

But Joh's legacy to Queensland was more than just a political or economic one; it was psychological.

His former press secretary Allan Callaghan said the biggest thing Joh did for Queensland was to get Queenslanders to believe in themselves.

He told them they were living in Australia's best state - something which, today, even Labor admits. Before Joh's era, Queensland carried the tag of the "Cinderella State".

That's why, in the Sunshine State, the sun can never set on the legacy of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He has left a permanent imprint upon it, as characteristic as the Great Barrier Reef or his beloved Bunya Mountains. So many people are better off because of him.

For my family, the debt is very personal. An assistance package he once gave to dairy farmers leaving the land "kept a roof over our heads", as my mother puts it.

Sir Joh will not be forgotten - "Don't you worry about that".

  • Victor Sirl is not a member of any political party.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019


King Herod, a brutal ruler, a wily politician and a great builder

Temple remnant

King Herod, sometimes called "Herod the Great" (circa 74 to 4 B.C.) was a king of Judea who ruled the territory with Roman approval. While Judea was an independent kingdom it was under heavy Roman influence and Herod came to power with Roman support.

The Bible depicts Herod as a monster who tried to kill baby Jesus and, when he couldn't find him, killed every infant in Bethlehem. Historians today generally believe the story is fictional.

While Herod did execute one of his wives, and three of his children, he was also a prolific builder who renovated and expanded the Temple in Jerusalem, the most holy site in Judaism. He also helped save the ancient Olympic Games during a financial crisis.

Rise to power

While it's uncertain precisely where Herod was born, it's known that his father, Antipater (died 43 B.C.), came from Idumea (also called Edom), a region by the southern coast of the Dead Sea. His mother, Cypros, was from Nabataea, a wealthy kingdom in Jordan that included the city of Petra.

A Roman force led by a general named Pompey waged a military campaign in the eastern Mediterranean in 63 B.C. that forced the Hasmoneans, a Jewish dynasty that controlled what is now Israel, to agree to Roman rule. Herod and his father supported the Romans and they were rewarded for it with greater power.

By 43 B.C., Antipater, Herod and Herod's eldest brother Phaesael "exercised quasi-royal powers in the land with the agreement of the ineffectual and accommodating Hasmonean High Priest Hyrcanus II, who ruled only in name," Geza Vermes, who was professor emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University until his death in 2013, wrote in his posthumously-published book, "The True Herod" (Bloomsbury, 2014).

However, the control the three men had was tenuous. In 43 B.C., Antipater was assassinated by poisoning. Then in 40 B.C., the Parthians, aided by a revolt, took over Jerusalem, killed Phaesael, installed a loyal regime and forced Herod to flee to Rome. After his arrival in Rome, Herod sought out the support of Octavian and Mark Antony, who were allied at the time. The two agreed to make him king of Judea. Herod returned to Judea and, by 37 B.C., he retook Jerusalem and other parts of the region with support from the Roman military.

Herod's position was still weak, however. Family members from the Hasmonean Dynasty, who had been in power before the Romans arrived, resented the fact that the Romans had made Herod king of Judea. Herod married Mariamme, the granddaughter of the former high priest, Hyrcanus II, in an attempt to bring family members from the Hasmonean Dynasty into the fold. "She bore him three sons, Alexander and Aristobulus as well as a third son who died young in Rome, and two daughters," Vermes wrote.

Herod executed Mariamme in 29 B.C. over accusations that she had committed adultery and had tried to kill him. Herod had at least 10 wives and believed that Judaism allowed polygamy.

The king also executed his sons Alexander and Aristobulus in 7 B.C., and Antipater II, Herod's oldest son (whom he had with another wife) in 4 B.C. Herod accused the three sons of trying to kill him.

Herod confiscated property belonging to those who he believed did not support his rule. "The confiscation of the wealth of the hostile Jewish upper classes made him exceedingly rich and provided Herod with funds to pay for the continued goodwill of his Roman overlord, Mark Antony," Vermes wrote.

Additionally, Herod found himself in conflict with Cleopatra VII, the queen of Egypt and lover of Antony. Cleopatra VII coveted Herod's territory and used her influence with Antony to persuade him to turn over some of Herod's territory to her.

The alliance between Octavian and Antony came to an end in 32 B.C. and the two faced off in a civil war, with Antony controlling the eastern parts of the Roman Empire and Octavian the west. Herod supported Antony and ended up on the losing side as Antony was defeated at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C, and committed suicide in 30 B.C.

Herod sailed to Rhodes to meet Octavian, not sure what would happen to him. When he met Octavian, Herod took off his crown and told Octavian that he had supported Antony to the end, the ancient historian Josephus (A.D. 37-100) wrote.

"I am defeated with Antony and with his fall I lay aside my crown. I have come to you placing my hope of safety on my unblemished character, and believing that you will wish to know not whose friend, but what sort of friend, I have been," Josephus wrote (translation by English classicist G.A. Williamson). Octavian was so impressed that he not only allowed Herod to remain king but gave him back territory that Antony had given to Cleopatra VII.

Herod the builder

"Without a doubt he [Herod] was the greatest builder in the Holy Land, planning and overseeing the execution of palaces, fortresses, theatres, amphitheatres, harbours and the entire city of Caesarea, and to crown them all, he organized the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem," Vermes wrote.

The First Temple, which had been built by King Solomon, had been destroyed when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C. While a Jewish temple was built on the site in the late 6th century B.C., Herod built a new temple that was far larger. Historians today often call it the "Second Temple."

Although much of the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, a section of it still remains. "The monumental section that still survives is the famous Western (or Wailing) Wall in Jerusalem, a glorious memorial of the past for some, and the most holy place of Jewish worship for others," Vermes wrote.

Other famous sites Herod constructed include Masada, a clifftop palace-fortress decorated with beautiful mosaics; and the Herodium, a complex located 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) from Jerusalem that contains palaces, a bathhouse, a pool house and other structures that are constructed on top of a human-made hill.

Herod also helped save the ancient Olympic Games. He donated "a large sum of money for the financial support of the quadrennial Olympic games, the survival of which was threatened by lack of funds." Vermes wrote. And because of Herod's financial assistance, "the organizers of the ancient games elected Herod perpetual Olympic president and recorded it in inscriptions."
Did he kill Jesus?

Historians generally believe that Herod died in 4 B.C., although there have been arguments made that he died in 5 B.C. or 1 B.C. The Gospel of Matthew claims that he tried to kill baby Jesus and succeeded in killing all the other babies in Bethlehem in an event that is sometimes called the "massacre of the innocents." Today, historians generally regard these claims as untrue.

"The legendary 'massacre of the innocents' may reflect a Christian dramatization of Herod's execution of his own children," Peter Richardson, a professor emeritus of religion at the University of Toronto, and Amy Marie Fisher, an adjunct instructor of religion at the University of Edmonton, wrote in their book "Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans: Second edition" (Routledge, 2018).

Another story that mentions Herod, told in the Gospel of Luke, claims that Mary and Joseph (the parents of Jesus) had to be registered in a census at the time Jesus was born. This is also believed by modern-day historians to be untrue, as there's no evidence of a census occuring during Herod's reign.

"As for the census, whose purpose was to prepare the introduction of Roman taxation in Judaea, it could not have occurred during Herod's reign. As a friend of Rome, a rex socius or allied king, he was exempt from such interference," Vermes wrote, noting that no census occurred in Judea until A.D. 6.

The fact that the Bible claims that Jesus was born before Herod died creates a problem that scholars have long been debating. Was Jesus actually born in 4 B.C, before Herod died? Or, did Herod live longer than the historical records suggest, and not die until closer to 1 B.C? Or, is the Bible's claim that Jesus was born before Herod died not true? The answers to these questions have been debated by scholars for well over a century.

Grim ending

Rebellion brewed near the end of Herod's life. Shortly before Herod died there was a group that tried to pull down an eagle, a Roman symbol, from the Second Temple. Herod had the people involved with the act executed. The expectation of his death "began to release the tensions buried just beneath the surface of a calm kingdom…." Richardson and Fisher wrote.

Josephus claimed that Herod was so despised in his final days and Herod had become so bitter toward his own people, that he asked his sister, Salome, to kill many of them after he died. He supposedly gathered the most eminent men of every village in Judea, locked them up in a hippodrome, and gave orders to his sister Salome to kill them when he died.

According to Josephus, Herod announced, "'I know the Jews will greet my death with wild rejoicings; but I can be mourned on other people's account and make sure of a magnificent funeral if you will do as I tell you. These men under guard — as soon as I die, kill them all….'" Salome disobeyed, and released the prisoners when Herod died, Josephus added.

After Herod's death, a massive rebellion broke out in his kingdom and Rome had to send in military reinforcements.

No surviving images of Herod exist today. Herod did not put his image on his coins and rarely built statues of himself out of concern of offending Jewish beliefs that sometimes opposed "the representation of human figures," Vermes wrote.


https://www.livescience.com/64962-king-herod.html

Friday, February 15, 2019


Life, liberty and the pursuit of property


Do the radical left’s ideas about “democratising” the economy make sense?

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, many consigned socialism to the rubble. The end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union were interpreted as the triumph not just of liberal democracy but of the robust market-driven capitalism championed by Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain. The West’s left embraced this belief, with leaders like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schröder promoting a “third way”. They praised the efficiency of markets, pulling them further into the provision of public services, and set about wisely shepherding and redistributing the market’s gains. Men such as Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left north London MP as far from Mr Blair in outlook as it was possible to be, and Bernie Sanders, a left-wing mayor in Vermont who became an independent congressman in 1990, seemed as thoroughly on the wrong side of history as it was possible to be. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not quite four weeks old when the wall fell. Her childhood was watched over by third-way politics; her teenage years were a time of remarkable global economic growth. She entered adulthood at the beginning of the global financial crisis. She is now the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress, the subject of enthusiasm on the left and fascinated fear on the right. And, like Mr Corbyn and Mr Sanders, she explicitly identifies herself as a socialist. Their democratic socialism goes considerably further than the market-friendly redistributionism of the third way. It envisages a level of state intervention in previously private industry—either directly, or through forced co-operativisation—that has few antecedents in modern democracies.

For the American generation which has grown up since the downfall of the USSR, socialism is no longer the boo word it once was. On the left, a lot of Americans are more sceptical than they used to be about capitalism (see chart 1 on following page). Indeed, what might be called “millennial socialism” is having something of a cultural moment. Publications like Jacobin and Tribune bedeck the coffee tables of the hip, young and socially conscious. No film has ever made trade unions look cooler than last year’s “Sorry To Bother You”, written and directed by Boots Riley, a rapper and activist. When Piers Morgan, a British television presenter, found it impossible to believe that a young interviewee might come from a left beyond Barack Obama, her response quickly turned up on t-shirts: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot”.

The fight you choose

This currency aside, avowed socialists are still a rarity in America’s political class. But when Ms Ocasio-Cortez or Mr Sanders speak of the need for radical change, the disappointments and damage experienced in the past 30 years give their words resonance across a broad swathe of the less radical but still disenchanted left. These people saw their third-way leaders support misguided foreign wars and their supposedly robust economy end up in a financial crisis. They feel economic growth has mainly benefited the rich (see chart 2 on subsequent page) and that ideologically driven spending cuts have been aimed at the poor. They are angered by a global elite they see flitting from business to politics and back again, unaccountable to anyone, as economic inequality yawns ever wider (though the picture is more complex than that: see chart 3 on next page). The presence of Donald Trump in the White House underlines their discontent—as does, indelibly, the unchecked rise of greenhouse-gas emissions alongside global GDP, endangering, in many young eyes, their very future.

In response to this mood on the left, some parties which once embraced the third way have tacked decisively towards policies that seemed inconceivable ten years ago; see, for example, the embrace of Medicare for All by America’s Democratic presidential hopefuls. Other parties are dwindling into insignificance, overshadowed by more radical alternatives. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left candidate who championed a 100% marginal income-tax rate on high earners in the French presidential election of 2017, comfortably outpolled the country’s mainstream socialists. Indeed, in the first round he got a vote 80% that of Emmanuel Macron’s.

This swing within the left is not necessarily a new path to power. Indeed, many caught up in it fear quite the reverse. Having achieved a better result than many expected in the election of 2017, Labour still sits behind Britain’s chaotic Conservatives in opinion polls. Though some far-left parties may do well in the forthcoming elections for the European Parliament, they are unlikely to make up for the loss of support suffered by the centre left. Primary voters may be enthusiastic about the cornucopian environmentalism of Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” ; but many senior Democrats fear that it will scare away more voters than it entices.

Many on the right agree, with relish.

When President Trump asserted in his State of the Union address on February 5th that “America will never be a socialist country” it was not because he fears a socialist ascendancy. It was because he thinks that the majority of Americans, including many Democrats, will look askance at such a prospect. “America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control,” Mr Trump told Congress. “We are born free, and we will stay free.” Socialism versus capitalism is still an easy call for most Americans; socialism versus freedom is about as done as a deal gets.

Millennial socialists, though, have their own ideas about freedom. They are not satisfied with the protection of existing freedoms; instead, they want to expand and fulfil freedoms yet to be obtained. Spreading economic power more widely, they say, will allow more people to make choices about what they want in their lives, and freedom without such capabilities is at best incomplete. Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin, makes an analogy to India: what is the point of an ostensibly free press if a huge share of the population is unable to read?

Seizing power

Much of what the centrist left believed in the 1990s and 2000s has since been abandoned, not just by vanguardist millennial socialists, but by a broad swathe of left-wing opinion. The median supporter of left-wing parties is increasingly sceptical about free trade, averse to foreign wars and distrustful of public-private partnerships. What they still like is the income redistribution that came with those policies. They want higher minimum wages and a lot more spending on public services. Mr Sanders and Ms Ocasio-Cortez have energised young Americans by promising free college tuition; Labour promises the same in England and Wales.

Many entirely non-socialist Europeans will see nothing that remarkable about publicly paid-for health care and education: America starts from an unusual position in such matters. But almost any country would be staggered by a government initiative as all-encompassing as the Green New Deal resolution that Ms Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, a senator from Massachusetts, have introduced into Congress.

As well as promising emissions-reduction efforts on a scale beyond Hercules at a cost beyond Croesus, in framing global warming as a matter of justice, rather than economic externalities, it promises all sorts of ancillary goodies, including robust economic growth (which some hard-line greens will have a problem with) and guaranteed employment. It abandons the economically efficient policies that have been the stamp of America’s previous, failed attempts to bring climate action about through legislation, most notably those in the cap-and-trade bill Mr Markey sponsored in the late 2000s. This is hardly surprising; the most popular text on global warming in left-wing circles, Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate”, derides such market-based mechanisms.

Millennial socialists want to do more than boost the incomes of the poor, create better public services and slash emissions. “Keynesianism is not enough,” in the words of James Meadway, an adviser to John McDonnell, Mr Corbyn’s shadow chancellor. It is also necessary to “democratise” the economy by redistributing wealth as well as income.

In part, this is an economic argument.

Having a wage but no wealth increasingly means settling for a lower standard of living. In recent decades and in rich countries the share of total income accruing to owners of capital (in the form of profits, rent and interest) has risen, while the share paid to labour (in the form of salaries and benefits) has dropped. This means the incomes of people with lots of capital will diverge from those who have none. If the predictions made by Thomas Piketty, a French economist noted for his studies of wealth inequality, prove correct—something that many economists doubt—the total amount of capital in the economy will continue to rise relative to GDP, further compounding the advantage of wealth-holders.

But the argument for redistribution of wealth goes beyond economics—and its roots spread far beyond the socialist canon. James Harrington, a political theorist of the 17th century, wrote that “Where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power.” He saw a reasonably even distribution of wealth and the freedom of democratic politics as two sides of the same coin. His ideas were a strong influence on America’s founding fathers. John Adams wrote that “Harrington has shewn that Power always follows Property.” Though Thomas Jefferson plumped for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the rights to be mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, he was inspired by John Locke’s trinity of life, liberty and property, and his love of the yeoman farmer stemmed from his belief that those who produced their own food never needed to bend to the will of another, and thus were truly free.

Well before Karl Marx started to write about alienation, the idea that people treated only as factors of production would not only lack true freedom, but also other opportunities to reach their full potential, was a mainstay of Enlightenment thought. Adam Smith worried that the factory system, where workers simply turned up and followed the instructions of capitalists, would make its participants “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” John Stuart Mill, who valued political freedom above all else, also predicted that under capitalism people would become passive, dull wage-slaves; he wanted to see many more working in cooperatives. The echoes of Harrington, Smith and Mill are clear in the works that articulate the views of today’s left, from Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism” to David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs”. Globalisation, in their eyes, is less an engine for prosperity and more a generator of insecurity, unfreedom and unfairness.

Share-taking democracies

On this reading, today’s task is to redistribute the economy’s stock of wealth—and thus political power, freedom, self-worth and prosperity.

How best to do this is hotly debated.

Some are keen on a centralised path. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, a crowd-funded think-tank, touts “social wealth funds” through which the state could accumulate stakes in equity, bond and property markets, subsequently disbursing a share of the resulting income as a “universal basic dividend”. Norway and Alaska already have something akin to this, though funded by oil wealth. Others are sceptical of such measures. A policy paper commissioned for the Labour Party argues that such state-planning risks creating “a small private and corporate elite”, resulting in “little democratic scrutiny or debate”. Receiving a monthly cheque from the state social wealth fund would be nice, but would ordinary people feel empowered?

That concern is one reason why the left, generally well disposed to welfare spending, is divided on the question of universal basic income—despite, or perhaps because of, the support such schemes also have from some on the right. Mr Graeber and Andy Stern, an American trade unionist, are among those who have expressed support for the idea. Others worry that under such schemes “we gain ‘free time’, but we lose the historical agency we have as workers...we are seen as passive, alienated, taking as given a world shaped by others,” as John Marlow, an economist, argues in a recent edition of New Socialist, a journal.

A possibility for the centralised redistribution of wealth more compatible with the dignity of labour might be endowing all children with “baby bonds”, a policy Gordon Brown tried in Britain and which Cory Booker, another senator running for president, champions in America. But many see a stronger case for transfers of wealth at a sub-national scale, such as through the expansion of worker-owned co-operatives, which at present form a small proportion of firms in America and Britain.

Die Linke, Germany’s most left-wing party, has promised “to create suitable legal forms to facilitate and promote the joint takeover of enterprises by the employees.” In the Accountable Capitalism Act offered by Elizabeth Warren, another Democratic hopeful—though not, she insists, a socialist—workers would elect 40% of the members of corporate boards. That is not the same as seizing a chunk of the firm’s capital. But Senator Warren has other plans for redistributing wealth. She has proposed an annual tax of 2% on the wealth of Americans with a net worth of more than $50m, 3% on those worth more than$1bn. Perhaps the most radical detailed plans for the “democratisation” of an economy put forward by a mainstream party are Labour’s. It says that it will double the size of the co-operative sector if elected, and that private firms of over 250 employees will have to transfer 10% of their shares to a fund managed by “workers’ representatives”. Staff would be entitled to dividends from the shares; the representatives would have a say in how the company was run.

Modern times

As far as public services are concerned, shareholders of England’s water utilities would be bought out and “regional water authorities” created in their place, to be run by “councillors, worker representatives and representatives of community, consumer and environmental interests”. Similar steps would encourage local energy provision. Proponents of such reforms speak glowingly of Paris’s municipal government, which a decade ago brought its water companies in-house and has created a mechanism for enabling local people to hold the new operation to account.

Buying up chunks of the economy at the same time as greatly increasing public services would be a costly undertaking. Some on the socialist left try to wave this aside by invoking “modern monetary theory” (MMT), which holds that the primary constraint on government spending is not how much money can be raised through tax or bonds, but how much of an economy’s capital and labour the state can use without sparking rapid inflation. Adherents of MMT note the lack of inflation seen since the financial crisis, despite big deficits and governments printing money to buy bonds through “quantitative easing”. Many on the left have come to see the concerns that the right raises about deficits—which tend to surface only when it is not in power—less as economic prudence than a partisan politics of impoverishment.

Scholars such as Stephanie Kelton of Stony Brook University, who has the ear of various left-wing Democrats, suggest the very notion that spending must at some point be paid for by tax should be scrapped. Only when government spending pushes an economy beyond its capacity to produce goods and services should it be cooled using spending cuts and tax increases.

Let the billionaires bleed

Resistance to millennial socialism comes in various forms. Critics may believe that the socialist goals are bad ones; that, as a matter of fact, their policy ideas will not achieve those goals; that, even if the policies were to work, they would be too illiberal to stomach; or that, whether they work or not, they will cost the critic money. It is possible to hold all four of these positions at once in various degrees.

Take MMT. Most economists strongly resist the idea that governments can spend so freely, and such disagreement can easily be found on the left as well as the right. They also doubt that governments would, in fact, be able to cut spending or raise taxes when called on to do so by the tenets of the theory. And if a government were to do so, its actions could be quite regressive. Jonathan Portes of King’s College, London, points out that under MMT a country facing a combination of weak growth and high inflation, as Britain did in 2011-12, would require spending cuts rather than the increased stimulus called for by Keynes. The Labour Party, which was at that time decrying government austerity, has none of the sympathy for MMT seen in some of its fellow travellers across the Atlantic. “MMT is just plain old bad economics, unfortunately,” says Mr Meadway.

The non-MMT answer to “how to pay for it all” is usually to soak the rich. This is not always as popular a policy as some imagine, but today it does look like quite an easy sell in America. Unfortunately it yields less money than many on the left suppose. The best estimates of the extra revenues Labour might raise through the tax increases it plans for high earners suggest there may be none at all, in part because the rich may simply work less. The party is ignoring more reliable revenue raisers, like taxes on consumption and property. Yet its policies call for lots more government spending.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez has suggested a marginal tax rate of 70% on incomes above $10m; one estimate puts the extra annual revenue at perhaps $12bn, or just 0.3% of the tax take. The original New Deal cost a great deal more than that. Even if ambitious new steps were taken to stop the rich from hiding their lucre in tax shelters, a broader tax base would be required. There would be little help from Ms Warren’s wealth tax, which would discourage those whose wealth was the business that earned them their income and would be immensely hard to administer. Mr Sanders’s policy of increasing the inheritance tax, which introduces much less distortion, is a better one. But it would still be a hard sell for relatively little return.

Higher taxes on the rich can be about more than revenue. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two economists, argue in favour of Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s tax plan on the grounds that shrinking top incomes is necessary to prevent America from sliding into oligarchy. Such plans can be read simply as punitive populism: billionaires are not very well regarded on the left, and thinning their number has an appeal all its own. The rich are well aware of this. It would be wrong to assume that Michael Bloomberg, a businessman and former mayor who may run for president, was motivated by the threat to his considerable personal wealth when he recently suggested that Ms Warren’s wealth tax threatened to make America a new Venezuela. Though, taken at face value, his hyperbole shows a profound pessimism about the durability of American institutions, his broader point is that once you start saying some people are just too rich, where do you draw the line?

However paid for, efforts to “democratise” the economy have their own problems. It is possible for companies partly controlled by their workers to raise capital. The German principle of “co-determination”, which aims to give shareholders and employees an equal say in the decision making within firms, has not hit the country’s international competitiveness. But some investment will surely either be scared off or rationally choose other destinations, depending on the circumstances and/or your perspective.

There is also a risk of capture. A lot of people may feel they have better things to do of an evening than discuss metering policy down the water company. Trade-union officials and government lackies may feel differently. Experience suggests that firms run by people close to the state may come under pressure to give contracts to political insiders rather than to the best supplier, and that they will often give in. A worry from the left is that workers on boards might, in self-interest, behave as badly as they think capitalists do.

Even if there were not so many legitimate causes for concern, and even setting aside their own interests, many liberals and conservatives would still be against policies explicitly aimed at appropriating private wealth for the common good. They see the confiscation of private property as an infringement of liberty just as sincerely as some socialists see it as the road to a wider popular freedom. That is a powerful argument, all the more so if it is offered alongside its own set of more acceptable approaches to empowering those currently without the capacity to exercise all their freedoms.

The possibility of the Green New Deal being enacted in all its pomp is nugatory. Seeing the full range of Labour’s schemes for worker empowerment established is unlikely. And therein lies a paradox facing millennial socialism. An unremitting pursuit of radicalism could easily contribute to defeat for the broader left. A more incrementalist approach will be too slow to deliver for the impatient young, not to mention their elderly leaders. Unless, that is, precipitating events as head-over-heelsy as the fall of the Berlin Wall intervene. Judge them, then, in decades to come, when Ms Ocasio-Cortez is either forgotten—or the grande dame of a Washington risen again from the waves of sea-level rise through monumental public works.

https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/life-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-property/bnl-economist-20190215-41d7d881783



Thursday, February 7, 2019

Cafe owner turns down job applicant because 'British people have a poor work ethic'



He's right.  We see a lot of British workers in Australia and a normal comment about them is that "They wouldn't work in an iron lung -- JR

A Hove cafe owner has faced criticism after admitting he turned down a job applicant because "British people have a poor work ethic".

Jullian Preston-Powers, who is a supervisor at Intenso Espresso in Hove, East Sussex, went even further on his remarks after they were uncovered.

He said that the "very poorest type of employee is a British one, full stop".

Job applicant Victoria Atkins, 22, was scheduled to come in for a trial shift but sent a text to Mr Preston-Powers asking to reschedule after she was "soaked" in the rain on the way in.

He responded by rescinding his offer of a trial shift and adding that a "poor work ethic... is highly synonymous with being British".

The cafe owner sent a series of messages to Miss Atkins, including one where he championed one staff member who hadn't had a day off in three years because that was normal for "thin, healthy people who don't eat bacon".

He wrote: "Sorry you are having a stressful morning. It's probably better you did not succeed in getting the job because you can never be late for or miss work at our business. Ever.

"We are British, but generally cannot ever manage to hire British due to poor work ethics."

The Trades Union Congress has condemned his attitude and defended British workers, who the organisation claims "put in some of the longest hours in Europe".

Ms Atkins from Brighton, East Sussex, said: "He is very rude and nasty.

"I'd had a really bad morning and just asked if I could rebook the trial shift.

"I'd taken the bus and left plenty of time, but due to delays I soon realised I would be late.

"By this time I was soaking wet because the bus only went half way, and my friend lives on the same road as the cafe so I went there to shower and dry off.

"I was already a couple of hours late so asked if I could go at a later date, which is when he said no.

"Don't get me wrong, I understand why he didn't let me just do another shift, but his comments about British people having no work ethic were shocking."

She added that the comment about eating bacon left her "very, very offended."

Mr Preston-Powers defended  his remarks. He said: "Our experience of running a small, private, family-run coffee shop in Hove is that the very poorest type of employee is a British one. Full stop.

"The last candidate you want to take on - and we try ardently to hire everyone - is British.

"It is true, comprehensively, that every single one of the British employees that we've had will call in and have some issues, or be late.

"But when you have someone who comes from a country where there are no jobs and appreciate they have a job, they work every single hour.

"It's just a preference and making it very clear and being honest about what genre of people have the best work ethic."

A TUC spokesperson said: "If he's looking for the title of Britain's Worst Boss, it sounds like he's going about it the right way.

"It's illegal to discriminate against job applicants based on their ethnicity.

"Britain's workers have a very strong work ethic. They put in some of the longest hours in Europe and billions of pounds worth of unpaid overtime each year."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/07/hove-cafe-owner-turns-applicant-british-people-have-poor-work/

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Mistakes are the engine of language’s evolution


“I believe the children are our future,” sang Whitney Houston, making an obvious fact of life sound like a bold claim. Children will of course not only inherit the world, but shape it. And in their linguistic mistakes, their parents can get a sense of how.

Take the child collecting different kinds of animals in a video game: “I got a new specie!”, he cries. The source of the mistake is obvious. The child has heard the slightly rarefied word “species” and assumed it was the plural of something called a specie. Children do this kind of thing all the time as they learn language; generalising from things previously heard and rules previously mastered is the only way they can progress with such speed. In most cases, errors disappear on their own.

Yet tempting, specie-type mistakes happen not just among children, but their parents too. Some survive, and even thrive, until they displace an old form and become the new standard. Few English-speakers today know it, but there was once no such thing as a pea. People ate a mass of boiled pulses called pease. But just as with specie, at some point English people misanalysed pease as a plural, and the new singular pea was born. The same thing happened with cherry, from the Norman cherise, and caper (the edible kind), from the Latin capparis, both singular.

Another kind of confusion happens at the beginning of words. People once worked with a protective bit of clothing called a napron. But enough heard it as “an apron” that apron eventually supplanted napron completely. Other words beginning with vowels and preceded by “an” went through the same process: nadder became adder and nauger, auger (a tool for boring holes). In other instances, an n was added, not subtracted, by a mistake in the opposite direction: a newt was once a ewt, and a nickname was once an eke-name. (Eke is an old word for “also”.)

Not all such forms survived: while neilond, nangry and nuncle appear in older English texts, they never did replace island, angry and uncle.

Foreign borrowings are also a source of error-induced change. The French la munition was misunderstood by English-speak-ers with shaky French as l’ammunition, giving rise to the English word. Englishspeakers are not the only people who do this kind of thing, nor is French the only victim. The Arabic al-, meaning “the”, has been taken as an integral part of words borrowed from that tongue. So European languages are filled with alkali, algebra and the like. It is as if English had swallowed la munition whole as “lamunition”.

Sometimes borrowings are mangled not because their structure is misunderstood, but their meaning. A chef de cuisine, as it was originally adopted from French, was boss of the kitchen. Chef still means “boss” in French, but the English eventually took a chef to be a cook. Pariah trod a similarly improbable path: the word means “drummer” in Tamil, becoming the name of a downtrodden ethnic group which often performed ceremonial drumming. That “downtrodden” element of the meaning then became the only one in English.

The “pariah” example is instructive. This isn’t so much a word born of a single clear-cut mistake, as one that emerged from a gradual transformation: from drummer to outcast drummers to outcast, each step is short and intelligible. Only to Tamils might the English sense of “pariah” seem wrong. In English, “outcast” really is its meaning.

Every word is changing a little bit, all the time. Look at a few lines of Middle English, and it is nigh impossible to find words that have not altered in spelling, pronunciation, meaning, grammar—or all four. Consider Old English, and those rare examples become nearly zero. Even Shakespeare requires some practice to understand fully.

Many of the tweaks that have made those bygone Englishes into modern English could be seen as an “error” of some sort. Some such changes were systematic: all words with the same vowel gradually being pronounced with a different one, say. Others have affected just one word at a time, and so tend to be too subtle to catch the eye.

The naprons of the world are notable, then, not because they are exceptions, but because they are instances of a common phenomenon—language change through “error” —that happened conspicuously enough to make a tidy example. But modern English is deformed Old English and degenerate Middle English. In other words, like any living language, it is “error” all the way down.

https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/johnson-the-error-of-our-ways/bnl-economist-20190131-978f0fe2a17


Friday, January 4, 2019

Blue-Eyed Immigrants Transformed Ancient Israel 6,500 Years Ago



Thousands of years ago in what is now northern Israel, waves of migrating people from the north and east — present-day Iran and Turkey — arrived in the region. And this influx of newcomers had a profound effect, transforming the emerging culture.

What's more, these immigrants not only brought new cultural practices; they also introduced new genes — such as the mutation that produces blue eyes — that were previously unknown in that geographic area, according to a new study.

Archaeologists recently discovered this historic population shift by analyzing DNA from skeletons preserved in an Israeli cave. The site, in the north of the tiny country, contains dozens of burials and more than 600 bodies dating to approximately 6,500 years ago, the scientists reported. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

DNA analysis showed that skeletons preserved in the cave were genetically distinct from people who historically lived in that region. And some of the genetic differences matched those of people who lived in neighboring Anatolia and the Zagros Mountains, which are now part of Turkey and Iran, the study found.

Ancient Israel (then called Galilee) belonged to a region known as the southern Levant, part of a larger area, the Levant, which encompasses today's eastern Mediterranean countries. The southern Levant experienced a significant cultural shift during the Late Chalcolithic period, around 4500 B.C.E. to 3800 B.C.E, with denser settlements, more rituals performed in public and a growing use of ossuaries in funerary preparations, the researchers reported.

Though some experts had previously proposed that cultural transformation was driven by people who were native to the southern Levant, the authors of the new study suspected that waves of human migration explained the changes. To find answers, the scientists turned to a burial site in Israel's Peqi’in Cave, in what would have been Upper Galilee 6,500 years ago.

Unraveling an ancestry puzzle
Peqi'in is a natural cave, measuring around 56 feet (17 meters) long and about 16 to 26 feet (5 to 8 m) wide. Inside the cave are decorated jars and burial offerings — along with hundreds of skeletons — suggesting that the location served as a type of mortuary for Chalcolithic people who lived nearby.

However, not all of the cave's contents appeared to have local origins, study co-author Dina Shalem, an archaeologist with the Institute for Galilean Archaeology at Kinneret College in Israel, said in a statement.

"Some of the findings in the cave are typical to the region, but others suggest cultural exchange with remote regions," Shalem said. The artistic styles of these artifacts bear closer resemblance to styles common to more-northern regions of the Near East, lead study author Eadaoin Harney, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, told Live Science in an email.

The scientists sampled DNA from bone powder from 48 skeletal remains and were able to reconstruct genomes for 22 individuals found in the cave. That makes this one of the largest genetic studies of ancient DNA in the Near East, the researchers reported.

Blue eyes and fair skin
The scientists found that these individuals shared genetic features with people from the north, and those similar genes were absent in farmers who lived in the southern Levant earlier. For example, the allele (one of two or more alternative forms of a gene) that is responsible for blue eyes was associated with 49 percent of the sampled remains, suggesting that blue eyes had become common in people living in Upper Galilee. Another allele hinted that fair skin may have been widespread in the local population as well, the study authors wrote.

"Both eye and skin color are traits that are controlled by complex interactions between multiple alleles, many — but not all — of which have been identified," Harney explained.

"The two alleles that we highlight in our study are known to be strongly associated with light eye and skin color, respectively, and are often used to make predictions about the appearance of various human populations in ancient DNA studies," she said.

However, it is important to note that multiple other alleles can influence the color of eyes and skin in individuals, Harney added, so "scientists cannot perfectly predict pigmentation in an individual." 

The scientists also discovered that genetic diversity increased within groups over time, while genetic differences between groups decreased; this is a pattern that typically emerges in populations after a period of human migration, according to the researchers.

A dynamic past
By presenting DNA from the distant past, these findings offer exciting new insights into the dynamic ancient world and the diverse human populations that inhabited it, said Daniel Master, a professor of archaeology at Wheaton College in Illinois.

"One of the key questions of the Chalcolithic has always been to what extent the groups in Galilee were connected to the groups in the Be'ersheva Valley or the Jordan Valley or the Golan Heights," Master, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

"The publication of the artifacts from Peqi'in has shown many cultural links between these regions, but it will be interesting to see, in the future, whether those links are genetic as well," Master said.

The researchers' results also resolve a long-standing debate about the pivotal factor that changed the trajectory of the Chalcolithic peoples' unique culture, Shalem said in the statement.

"We now know that the answer is migration," she said.

The findings were published online Aug. 20 in the journal Nature Communications.

https://www.livescience.com/63396-ancient-israel-immigration-turkey-iran.html

Thursday, January 3, 2019

The great Texas emu bubble: An investment that never took off


What if tulips had been six feet tall and ran at 50km an hour?

The sun is a giant, gleaming emu egg in the sky, and if you gaze long enough at the Milky Way, you can see the long body of an emu formed from the stars. The world’s second largest bird after the ostrich, the emu is native to Australia and has long been a source of mythical inspiration—and sustenance—for Aboriginals. The big bird claims a place on Australia’s coat of arms, stamps and 50-cent coin. It even sparked a military deployment, the Great Emu War of 1932, when soldiers were sent to Western Australia to kill them and thereby save the farmers’ crops. The emus won.

From the 19th century, the three-toed bird started to spread its flightless wings and became a prized oddity in zoos worldwide. A century on, the emu was also seen as a potential source of red meat—a healthier version of beef. It was in this guise, as livestock, that the emu came to Texas in the 1980s. It did not end well for most of the emus, or most of their owners.

Enthusiasm and emu-friendly regulations saw the price of a breeding pair of emus, just a few hundred dollars in the late 1980s, rise to a whopping $28,000 by 1993. The next year it doubled again. The American Emu Association, an industry group, saw its membership rise 27-fold between 1988 and 1994, to 5,500 members, most of them in Texas.

The rationale for bringing the emu to Texas was that Americans wanted healthier meat, that the state has a long history of raising cattle for slaughter, and that, heck, it was the 1980s, and all sorts of weird stuff was happening. Some boosters also heralded the potential of ostriches, but emus won out over their ratite cousins. In its fundamentals, though, the Texas “emu bubble” of the 1990s was, like all investment bubbles, stoked by exuberance and greed. “Men, it has been well said, think in herds,” wrote the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in 1841 in his book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. Had Mr Mackay travelled to Lubbock or Midland a century and a half later, he would have believed that men think in mobs, as groups of emus are sometimes known.

From flowers to feathers

As in all bubbles, from 17th-century Dutch “tulipmania” to 21stcentury bitcoin, word of the wonders of the emu spread by all the social networks available, from word of mouth to small ads in local papers. Their boosters were keen to point out that there was more to emus than steak. They provided oil for lotions, skin for leather, feathers for clothes and enormous emerald eggs for four-person omelettes. Best of all, in terms of inflating a bubble, emus provided you with more emus, and thus an incentive to spread the word yet further and sell emus on to other would-be ratite-ranchers.

The state government also played a role in helping the emu market take flight. Between 1992 and 1995 the Texas department of agriculture reportedly gave out $400,000 in loans to encourage emu ranching. The state also offers tax breaks to people who use their land for agricultural purposes, which is enough of an incentive for some people to find animals to graze on their property even if they have no intention of farming; emus fitted the bill. And Texas law was, and is, extremely lax when it comes to the import of exotic animals. The state is believed to have more tigers living in captivity in backyards than exist in the wild worldwide.

The new emu owners were not experienced investors—or emu raisers. “We were clueless. We had never even raised chickens,” says Gina Taylor, who bought a pair of emus with her husband in 1995, soon after they moved from Dallas to a rural town called La Rue. They used a laundry basket with a heat lamp over it to incubate eggs in their kitchen.

Such a rough-and-ready approach seems quite appropriate for emus, which are somewhat scruffy beasts. But even if not sleek, they do have some redeeming features. They need much less land to graze than cows. They are quieter, too, except during the breeding season, when the females make booming noises and males grunt. Though this was not necessarily a selling point in Texas, the birds have a powerfully proto-feminist attitude to the patriarchy. Females choose males, rather than vice versa, sometimes going so far as to fight over them. Males take on the responsibility of incubating the eggs, refusing to leave the nest to eat or drink for weeks at a time, and then raising their chicks as single parents.

Divorced from the mob

However, those who anticipated a life of gentle emu-care and handsome profits found themselves disappointed. One challenge was that emus were not easy to handle. They are as tall as human beings, growing up to 190cm (6 feet 2 inches) and easily weighing 55kg (120lb). Being the only birds with calf muscles helps them sprint at up to 50kph (30mph), prompting some dramatic highspeed chases when they escaped. They can also kick. A young Hispanic man who had crossed one came into an emergency room in Austin in the mid-1990s with bad cuts and bruises shouting “Pollo gigante!” (Giant chicken!).

And raising the birds was not cheap. People ploughed tens of thousands of dollars into it. The emus required fencing and feed. The most forward-thinking emu owners bought expensive equipment to microchip their flocks, because emu rustling became a problem as values rose. So did emu fraud. Some retirees and speculators put their savings into emus that were sold to them but never delivered, sparking lawsuits over avian Ponzi schemes.

A few dozen restaurants in Texas briefly added emu to their menus, including Dunston’s, a popular steak house in Dallas, but consumers were hard to win over. Emu claims lower cholesterol and fat, and higher iron, but it is more expensive than beef and less familiar. Small farmers never co-ordinated to get the distribution or quality control they needed to make it a profitable, large-scale enterprise. Even emu enthusiasts did not make the meat a staple of their diets. “We occasionally ate an emu burger, but never ate any of our own,” says Ms Taylor.

As the hoped-for demand failed to materialise, the supply continued to increase. Emus lay 5-15 eggs in each clutch and can keep doing so for more than 16 years. With 12 surviving chicks a year, a single breeding pair can spawn 133 breeding pairs within five years and nearly 36,000 within ten years. The population boomed at precisely the moment it was becoming clear that Americans had no appetite for a new red meat.

The bubble popped painfully. By 1998 emus were worthless. Rather than keep paying to feed them, many owners just abandoned them. Some farmers cut their own fences, hoping their emus would leave and become someone else’s problem. When Parker county, west of Fort Worth, auctioned off 211birds it had rounded up in 1998, they fetched only $2-4 each. You can sometimes find emu-burgers at Twisted Root, a chain in Dallas, alongside elk-burgers. But not often.

One result is that there are mobs of feral emus in parts of Texas—farm survivors and their descendants. Occasionally they show up in small towns or nearly cause crashes as they cross country roads. Animalcontrol officers and police struggle to catch them. When they do, they often have no way to transport them, because they are too tall to fit into dog kennels.

Your correspondent went to visit a female emu that had been successfully corralled and now resides at the Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation, a non-profit centre outside of San Antonio. This one is probably descended from a farm emu hatched in the 1990s, but no one can be sure. Emus can live 30 years. She has been there for several years and spends her days walking the perimeter, like a watchman making constant rounds, although she is shy and does not want to come close, even for a treat of a sweet pumpkin offered freely through the fence. She seems to know that humans are fickle and untrustworthy.

The emus that were freed were the fortunate ones.

Some despairing farmers simply stopped feeding them, starving them to death. Others shot them. Two brothers outside Fort Worth decided to eliminate their emus with baseball bats to the head. They had killed 22 of their 100-strong mob before the police came, summoned by appalled neighbours. Some lobbied to charge the brothers with animal cruelty, but no charges were ultimately filed. “Texas likes to think of itself as the wild, untamed West, where man can do what he wants to do, to hell with who he’s doing it to,” explains Lynn Cuny, founder of Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation. “Animals are viewed as property, which people can discard or destroy like old pieces of furniture.”

The emu was not the last species to fall foul of human greed. Since the 1990s, many Texans have pinned their hope for riches on new animals, such as whitetail deer and long-horn cattle. And just as Texans have not learned from their experience with emus, nor has the world. More recently India experienced its own emu boom, with farmers piling into raising the big birds. They made the same mistake Texans did by focusing on hatching new birds instead of creating demand for the meat. The market collapsed in 2013.

From the human point of view, this is a tale of never learning. From the emu’s, it is adaptation in action, every economic fiasco an evolutionary opportunity. From the plains of Texas to the streets of India, emus are flapping those tiny wings they do not really have and making the most of wherever it is they find themselves. Let the wild emus roam.


https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/an-investment-that-never-took-off/bnl-economist-20181219-ee637710125