Month: April 2024

Citizen Archeologists “Are Increasingly Making Important Discoveries”

(p. 11) The long, thin piece of metal looked like a scaffolding pole when Trevor Penny saw it on the banks of an English river last November [2023].

. . .

But his find that day was much more dramatic: a rusty Viking sword that had been there for more than 1,000 years.

. . .

When Mr. Penny, 52, realized what he had found, he contacted a local official responsible for identifying the public’s archaeological finds.

The discovery was “one further puzzle piece that can cast light on our shared heritage,” said that official, Edward Caswell, who documents Oxfordshire finds for the Portable Antiquities Scheme run by the British Museum.  . . .

“We do find Viking weapons, including swords, deposited in rivers in England,” said Jane Kershaw, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Oxford.

Many such weapons have been found in the north and east of the country, Dr. Kershaw said. She called the sword a “rare example” of viking activity in the area.

“It is outside the normal find zone for these weapons,” she said. “But the Vikings, they were active in that area. There is a lot that we don’t know about their activities.”

Hobbyists are increasingly making important discoveries, and Dr. Kershaw said it was critical that they report their finds. “It’s hugely valuable information,” she said. “As long as they are recording it, this is having archaeology that otherwise would be lost.”

For the full story, see:

Isabella Kwai. “Treasure Hunter Finds Viking Sword.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 17, 2024): 11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 15, 2024, and has the title “This Treasure Hunter’s Latest Find? A 1,000-Year-Old Viking Sword.”)

“He Lived as a Free Man and Died as a Free Man”

(p. A1) Thousands of people crowded a neighborhood on Moscow’s outskirts on Friday [March 1, 2024] — some bearing flowers and chanting, “No to war!” — as they tried to catch a glimpse of the funeral for Aleksei A. Navalny. The outpouring turned the opposition leader’s last rites into a striking display of dissent in Russia at a time of deep repression.

. . .

After a procession to the cemetery, Mr. Navalny’s coffin was placed next to his freshly dug grave. Video live streamed from the site showed his family members and then other mourners kissing him goodbye for the last time. Then his face was covered with a white cloth and the coffin was lowered to the Frank Sinatra song “My Way” and then the final song from “Terminator 2,” which Mr. Navalny considered “the best film on Earth.” Mourners slowly passed by, each taking a handful of dirt and tossing it into the grave.

. . .

Outside the church, people chanted, “Thank you, Aleksei” and “Love is stronger than fear,” according to videos from the scene. As they gathered next to the cemetery, mourners cried out, “peace for Ukraine — freedom for Russia!”

. . .

(p. A8) Some people traveled from far away to attend the funeral. Anastasia, 19, had flown in from Novosibirsk, 1,800 miles from Moscow, to be present.

“I came here because this is a historic event,” she said in a voice message from the neighborhood where the church service was held. “I think that he is a freer man than all of us,” she said of Mr. Navalny. “He lived as a free man and died as a free man.”

In Russia, it is considered bad luck to give living people an even number of flowers in a bouquet — those are reserved for funerals. But Anastasia said that many mourners carried bouquets with an odd number, “because for them, Navalny lives on.”

For the full story, see:

Valerie Hopkins. “Crowds Flood Moscow Streets Over Navalny.” The New York Times (Saturday, March 2, 2024): A1 & A8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 1, 2024, and has the title “Thousands Turn Out for Navalny’s Funeral in Moscow.”)

Musk Fights for Right of Individuals in Sweden to Enter into Contracts

(p. A15) Sweden is the West’s most corporatist society. Powerful interest groups, often described as “social partners,” use collective bargaining to set rents for apartments and wages earned in labor markets.

This model is being challenged by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is refusing to enter into collective wage agreements with Swedish trade unions. The unions have responded with strikes and blockades on Tesla operations in the country.

. . .

Liberal democracy presupposes fundamental rights and freedoms. Some of these, such as the freedoms of opinion, press and expression, are enshrined in the Swedish constitution. But the right of the individual to enter into contracts isn’t similarly guaranteed.

. . .

Liberal democracy is being threatened globally by growing populist and illiberal movements. The government in Stockholm should counteract this threat by strengthening people’s individual rights and freedoms in the Swedish constitution. If this happens, Mr. Musk will have given Sweden a great gift.

For the full commentary, see:

Lars Jonung. “Musk Fights Sweden’s Unions.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, February 14, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date February 13, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Most Israelis Are Refugees, or Descendants of Refugees; Some Who Survived the Holocaust

It is unpleasant to think about the Holocaust, so I don’t think about it very often. But the anti-Israel response of much of the world to Hamas’s murderous aggression on October 7, 2023, suggests that Holocaust deniers have gained considerable ground, even at prestigious U.S. universities. So it may be worthwhile to occasionally remind ourselves of the evidence of what happened.

(p. 10) “Cold Crematorium,” a memoir by József Debreczeni, an accomplished journalist and poet from Hungary, was originally published in Hungarian in Yugoslavia in 1950. The book remained obscure for decades, squeezed by Cold War politics — too Soviet-philic for the West, too Jew-centric for the East. It’s only now, more than 70 years later, that the book has been translated into more than a dozen languages and become accessible to the wider world.

Debreczeni recounts his deportation to Auschwitz, and from there to a series of camps. This isn’t the sort of book you can get a sense of from a plot outline. Debreczeni suffers; he survives (or, more accurately, he does not die); he observes. His powers of observation are extraordinary. Everything he encounters in what he calls the Land of Auschwitz — the work sites, the barracks, the bodies, the corpses, the hunger, the roll call, the labor, the insanity, the fear, the despair, the strangeness, the hope, the cruelty — is captured in terrifyingly sharp detail.

In Paul Olchváry’s exquisite translation, scene after scene, image after image — it is wrenching. Prisoners propping up a dead bedmate, extending his arm, so that they might receive an extra piece of bread. A prisoner expiring midsentence. The lice, “silvery-glistening colonies of larvae,” that torment, endlessly.

The details are so precise that any critical distance collapses — nothing’s expected, nothing’s dulled by cliché. It is as immediate a confrontation of the horrors of the camps as I’ve ever encountered.

. . .

The finest examples of Holocaust literature — and “Cold Crematorium” is so fine it transcends its category — aren’t merely bulwarks against obscurity; they do more than allow us to never forget. They offer a glimpse, one that is unyielding and unsoftened by sentimentality, one that is brutally, unbearably close.

For the full review, see:

Menachem Kaiser. “Death Camp Chronicles.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, February 25, 2024): 10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 23, 2024, and has the title “How to Talk About Auschwitz.”)

The book under review is:

Debreczeni, József. Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2024.

Dissenters from Orthodoxy Can Be Easily Blackballed When They Are Required to Write Diversity Statements

(p. A15) Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.”

. . .

The biology department’s motion mandates that every search committee issue a report on its diversity statement evaluations. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I have acquired the evaluations of more than a dozen job candidates.

To my knowledge, these documents—published in redacted form by the National Association of Scholars—are the first evaluations of prospective faculty DEI contributions to be made publicly available. They confirm what critics of DEI statements have long argued: That they inevitably act as ideological litmus tests.

One Texas Tech search committee penalized a candidate for espousing race-neutrality in teaching. The candidate “mentioned that DEI is not an issue because he respects his students and treats them equally,” the evaluation notes. “This indicates a lack of understanding of equity and inclusion issues.”

. . .

The biology department’s search committees also rewarded fluency in the language of identity politics. An immunology candidate was praised for awareness of the problems of “unconscious bias.” “Inclusivity in lab” was listed as a virology candidate’s strength: “her theme will be diversity, and she will actively work to creating the culture—e.g. enforce code of conduct, prevent microaggressions etc.”   . . .

Many critics rightly point out that diversity statements invite viewpoint discrimination. DEI connotes a set of highly contestable social and political views. Requiring faculty to catalog their commitment to those views necessarily blackballs anybody who dissents from an orthodoxy that has nothing to do with scientific competence.

For the full commentary, see:

John D. Sailer. “How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023 [sic]): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date February 6, 2023 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

Geology Scientists by a Large Majority Reject the Anthropocene as a New Epoch

(p. A1) The Triassic was the dawn of the dinosaurs. The Paleogene saw the rise of mammals. The Pleistocene included the last ice ages.

Is it time to mark humankind’s transformation of the planet with its own chapter in Earth history, the “Anthropocene,” or the human age?

Not yet, scientists have decided, after a debate that has spanned nearly 15 years. Or the blink of an eye, depending on how you look at it.

For the full story, see:

Raymond Zhong. “Geologists Say It’s Not Time to Declare a Human-Created Epoch.” The New York Times (Wednesday, March 6, 2024): A1 & A8.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 8 [sic], 2024, and has the title “Are We in the ‘Anthropocene,’ the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say.”)

Risk of Bat Disease Spillover to Humans Is Small and Decreasing

(p. A15) The World Health Assembly in May is poised to divert $10.5 billion of aid away from tackling diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Instead, that money will go toward combating the threat of viruses newly caught from wildlife. The assumption behind this initiative, endorsed by the Group of 20 summit in Bali in 2022, is that the threat of pandemics from spillovers of animal viruses is dramatically increasing.

That assumption is almost certainly false. A new report from the University of Leeds, prepared in part by former World Health Organization executives, finds that the claims made by the G-20 in support of this agenda either are unsupported by evidence, contradict their own cited sources, or fail to correct for improved detection of pathogens. Over the past decade the burden and risk of spillover has been relatively small and probably decreasing. The Leeds authors conclude: “The implication is that the largest investment in international public health in history is based on misinterpretations of key evidence as well as a failure to thoroughly analyze existing data.”

. . .

It is a misconception that population growth or prosperity leads humanity to encroach on wildlife habitats. The poorest people in Africa encroach on forest wildlife by hunting for bush meat; when they grow richer, they shop for chicken or pork instead. Humans visited bat caves more frequently in the distant past.

. . .

The prospect of spending $31 billion a year on pandemic prevention, a third of which would be new money and a third diverted from other programs, provides an incentive for international bureaucrats to ignore or misrepresent evidence that the problem is small.

But a dollar spent on spillover can’t be spent on something else, and the evidence is clear that sanitation, nutrition and vitamins are more cost-effective ways to save lives in poor countries—from infectious diseases as well as other causes.

For the full commentary, see:

Matt Ridley. “Why Scientists Love Chasing Bats.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, March 7, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 6, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

The University of Leeds report mentioned above is:

Bell, David, Garrett Brown, Blagovesta Tacheva, and Jean von Agris. “Rational Policy over Panic: Re-Evaluating Pandemic Risk within the Global Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Agenda.” REPPARE Report. University of Leeds, UK, Feb. 2024, URL: https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/downloads/download/228/rational-policy-over-panic.

Mirsky Saw Communist “Soldiers Shoot Parents,” Doctors and Nurses Trying to Help Students in Tiananmen Square

(p. A21) Dr. Mirsky was a professor of Chinese language and history at Dartmouth College when he visited China for the first time, in 1972. An antiwar activist and a self-described “Mao fan,” he went as part of a group representing the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a radical coalition dedicated to ending the war in Vietnam.

. . .

Not long after arriving in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, the visiting group was whisked off to meet what was described as a “typical Chinese worker family.” Mr. Mirsky came away impressed. The family seemed prosperous, with a nicely appointed home. Crime, the group was told, was nonexistent.

The next morning, on a stroll around the neighborhood, Dr. Mirsky bumped into the father from that “typical” family. He invited Dr. Mirsky, who was fluent in Mandarin, into his real home, a shabby apartment, and explained that the group had in fact been in a show apartment arranged by the Chinese authorities for “foreign friends.” The man said further that there was no shortage of crime.

“I returned to the hotel, stunned by what I had seen and heard,” Dr. Mirsky recalled in an account of the trip that was published in the 2012 book “My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats and Journalists Reflect on Their First Encounters With China,” edited by Kin-Ming Liu. Afterward, he wrote, he became “suspicious of every venue, every briefing, and every account of how everything should be understood.”

In just 48 hours, Dr. Mirsky went from being a “Mao fan” to a disillusioned skeptic, foreshadowing a similar shift in how left-leaning American intellectuals would come to see the Communist government in China.

“He had a sharp eye for the abuses of totalitarian dictatorship,” said Mr. Garside, the author most recently of “China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom” (2021). “He was early to denounce the evils of the Mao regime before it became fashionable to do so.”

Dr. Mirsky maintained that skeptical stance even as he made the transition from academia to journalism.

As China correspondent for The Observer, he was at Tiananmen Square in the early morning of June 4, 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army, acting on government orders, launched a bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters. About 3 a.m., he was leaving the scene to file a report with the newspaper when he came upon a group of armed police officers. When they found out he was a journalist, they beat him, fracturing his left arm and knocking out multiple teeth.

Dr. Mirsky managed to dictate his article, which would appear on The Observer’s front page, by phone. The next morning he returned to Tiananmen, where, he said, he saw soldiers shoot parents trying to enter the square to look for children who had not returned home. They also shot doctors and nurses who had come to help the injured, he said.  (. . .)

“Tiananmen Square became a place of horror,” Dr. Mirsky wrote in his article on the day of the crackdown, “where tanks and troops fought with students and workers, where armored personnel carriers burned and blood lay in pools on the stones.”

He was named international reporter of the year at the 1989 British Press Awards ceremony for his Tiananmen coverage.

. . .

Dr. Mirsky was unsparing in his criticism of China’s Communist rulers and the Western leaders whom he believed were overlooking Beijing’s rights abuses to preserve economic ties. Throughout his career he wrote of the Communist Party’s insistence on controlling the narrative of China and, in his view, the deleterious effects this had on Chinese society as a whole.

“For the Chinese, lying creates a universe of uncertainty in which one of the commonest answers to questions is ‘bu qingchu’ — ‘I’m not clear about that’,” he wrote in The Observer in 1993. “There is virtually no aspect of life outside the immediate family or close circle of friends where one can be certain about the truth.”

For the full obituary, see:

Amy Qin. “Jonathan Mirsky, 88, Scholar on China Affairs.” The New York Times (Thursday, September 30, 2021 [sic]): A21.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Sept. 29, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Jonathan Mirsky, Journalist and Historian of China, Dies at 88.”)

Mirsky’s account of the experience that changed him “from being a ‘Mao Fan’ to a disillusioned skeptic” appears in Mirsky’s section of the edited book:

Liu, Kin-ming, ed. My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on Their First Encounters with China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013.

The book by Garside, mentioned above, is:

Garside, Roger. China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2021.