I found this piece on the earliest settlers of South America from Florida Atlantic University at Phys.org fascinating:

Using DNA from two ancient human individuals unearthed in two different archaeological sites in northeast Brazil—Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça—and powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, Florida Atlantic University researchers in collaboration with Emory University have unraveled the deep demographic history of South America at the regional level with some unexpected and surprising results.

Not only do researchers provide new genetic evidence supporting existing archaeological data of the north-to-south migration toward South America, they also have discovered migrations in the opposite direction along the Atlantic coast—for the first time. The work provides the most complete genetic evidence to date for complex ancient Central and South American migration routes.

Among the key findings, researchers also have discovered evidence of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of ancient individuals from South America. Neanderthals are an extinct population of archaic humans that ranged across Eurasia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic.

Results of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B : Biological Sciences, suggest that human movements closer to the Atlantic coast eventually linked ancient Uruguay and Panama in a south-to-north migration route—5,277 kilometers (3,270 miles) apart. This novel migration pattern is estimated to have occurred approximately 1,000 years ago based on the ages of the ancient individuals.

Findings show a distinct relationship among ancient genomes from northeast Brazil, Lagoa Santa (southeast Brazil), Uruguay and Panama. This new model reveals that the settlement of the Atlantic coast occurred only after the peopling of most of the Pacific coast and Andes.

“Our study provides key genomic evidence for ancient migration events at the regional scale along South America’s Atlantic coast,” said Michael DeGiorgio, Ph.D., co-corresponding author who specializes in human, evolutionary, and computational genomics and is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science within FAU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. “These regional events likely derived from migratory waves involving the initial Indigenous peoples of South America near the Pacific coast.”

Researchers also found strong Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) genetic signals in an ancient genome from Panama.

The DNA of the sweet potato has suggested to some that South America was settled from the Pacific hundreds of years ago. The human DNA seems to suggest that it took place millennia ago.

It’s always gratifying when someone with a much larger audience than I have manages to lurch onto a point I made years ago. In this case in his latest New York Times column Ross Douthat points out that conservatives and progressives have, in a real sense, swapped places:

One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.

These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.

By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.

In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.

His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.

And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,” “Trust no one,” is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.

which I pointed out quite some time ago. Sadly, Mr. Douthat does not go so far as to explain how something happened only that it happened.

I think I know how it happened. They got power. Once they had power they became loth to relinquish it, particularly when their personal business models became corrupt influence peddling. You need only consider the Clintons to see how that is true. They got hundreds of millions of dollars as long as Mrs. Clinton was the heir apparent to the presidency. When that fell through, the donations dried up. The practice is now so widespread and accepted not to mention lucrative among the nomenklatura, not just politicians but generals and civil servants, they don’t even think of it as corrupt any longer.

That’s how you can tell the system is corrupted. When something that’s obviously corrupt is no longer thought of as corrupt, the system itself has been corrupted.

In a thought-provoking column in the New York Times Thomas Edsall explains why the drift of working class voters away from the Democrats is not at all surprising:

In a September 2022 paper, “Tasks, Automation and The Rise In U.S. Wage Inequality,” Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an economist at Boston University, found that automation “accounts for 50 percent of the changes in the wage structure” from 1980 and 2016, reducing “the real wage of high-school dropout men by 8.8 percent and high-school dropout women by 2.3 percent.”

Task displacement — the replacement of workers with machines — has wide-ranging adverse impacts, they write: “A 10 percentage point higher task displacement is associated with a 4.4 percentage point decline in employment between 1980 and 2016, and a similar 3.5 percentage point increase in nonparticipation (in the work force).”

Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, emailed me to say that “it is extremely unlikely that we will create an employment miracle in manufacturing.” Even if the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Biden signed in August, is “successful in reshoring some manufacturing,” he argued,

I am afraid that will do very little to create good jobs for U.S. workers without college or advanced degrees. Semiconductors and advanced manufacturing are among the most capital- and skill-intensive sectors in the economy and ramping up investment in them — as worthwhile as it may be on geopolitical grounds — is one of the least effective ways of increasing demand for labor where it is most needed.

In addition, Rodrik wrote:

Many of America’s competitors have successfully increased the share of manufacturing in G.D.P., including Taiwan and South Korea. But in none of these cases has the employment share of manufacturing bounced back up. In fact, to my knowledge, there has never been a case of sustained reversal in the downward trend of the manufacturing employment among advanced economies.

There is, Rodrik observed,

broad and compelling evidence, from Europe as well the United States, that globalization-fueled shocks in labor markets have played an important role in driving up support for right-wing populist movements. This literature shows that these economic shocks often work through culture and identity. That is, voters who experience economic insecurity are prone to feel greater aversion to outsider groups, deepening cultural and identity divisions in society and enabling right-wing candidates to inflame (and appeal to) nativist sentiment.

In an April 2021 paper, “Why Does Globalization Fuel Populism? Economics, Culture, and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism,” Rodrik wrote that he studied

the characteristics of “switchers” in the 2016 presidential election — voters who switched to Trump in 2016 after having voted for Obama in 2012. While Republican voters were in general better off and associated themselves with higher social status, the switchers were different: they were worried about their economic circumstances and did not identify themselves with the upper social classes. Switchers viewed their economic and social status very differently from, and as much more precarious than, run-of-the-mill Republican voters for Trump. In addition to expressing concern about economic insecurity, switchers were also hostile to all aspects of globalization — trade, immigration, finance.

The irony of this abounds. The low-hanging fruit for manufacturing and lot of other jobs for individuals without college or professional degrees was already picked long ago. Why, then, do we continue to import such workers in the millions? Furthermore the task displacement that is primed to bear the greatest fruit is among professionals. I’ll just cite one example. Judges can be replaced by expert systems. Not only would such systems be as good as human judges they would be better. They could keep track of every precedent, know the entire background to the extent it could be known. They would not be swayed by emotion, political considerations, or personal benefit.

What prevents that? It isn’t the technology. The technology was available decades ago. The professionals themselves prevent it.

A propos of nothing in particular is anyone else as irritated by the new online format of the Washington Post opinion page as I am? In addition to the old subdivisions (columnists, op-eds, editorials, etc.) they have added focus topics. That means that the same pieces are now appearing as many as four times on the page and you need to scroll and scroll and scroll to reach the end of the page. I have no idea what they’re thinking. It’s actually harder to read than the old format was and very nearly the opposite of an effective web design.

I found Rahul Tongla’s piece at Brookings on the unfairness of pushing poor countries to reduce their carbon emissions aggravating for a number of reasons. Here’s the kernel of the piece:

The poor need more energy, and much of it will be clean energy which is already viable. It’s the last fraction of energy that is hard to keep fossil-free. It can be done – at a cost. That cost should disproportionally be borne by the rich, first as they go full zero and pay the early adopter premium, and second, through financial support for developing nations. The premium is important, not just to cover the cost of developing batteries, but also for green hydrogen to avoid industrial emissions.

Such support should be part of promised aid or concessional finance and certainly not more traditional debt. At COP15 in 2009, there was a pledge to provide $100 billion of annual climate support for the poor by 2020, but the form such support would take was never specified. Sadly, the pledged funds haven’t yet fully materialized, and the date has since been pushed back to 2023.

Many developing countries are asking for funds due to climate-related “loss and damage.” How much materializes remains to be seen. Regardless of what form it takes, all climate finance support should be flexible, allowing recipients to not just mitigate their emissions, but also pay towards adaptation and resilience.

I found it aggravating for a number of reasons. Let’s assume that carbon emissions are a risk (I do). Per capita carbon emissions are a red herring—they’re simply irrelevant. It’s the total amount of carbon emitted that drives climate change not the per capita carbon emissions.

All that is necessary to render anything the United States might do in reducing carbon emissions meaningless is for China and India to continue to increase their own carbon emissions. And that doesn’t even take Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, etc. into account. Consequently, if the strategy for dealing with whatever impact carbon emissions have on the climate is solely by limiting what we emit, it’s doomed to failure. It’s not the right strategy. Either the poorer countries must reduce their carbon emissions or a different strategy should be pursued.

That’s why I think the smart strategy is, yes, reduce our carbon emissions as is practicable by using wind, solar, and nuclear as appropriate but concurrently pursue carbon capture and sequestration. Don’t put all of our climate eggs in the renewables basket.

A second reason I found the article frustrating was this remark:

First, if all carbon is equal, then we cannot ignore historically accumulated carbon.

If we’re going to consider historic carbon emissions, shouldn’t we also take the historic failure to remove carbon from the atmosphere represented by deforestation into account? Poor countries are among the heavyweight champions in deforestation, China and India in particular.

Finally, every time I hear pleas for assistance from richer countries to help poorer countries reduce their carbon emissions it reminds me of a remark about foreign aid: foreign aid is taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. Let’s be pragmatic about it. Such assistance will inevitably result in payments to enable the highest-emitting individuals in poor countries to emit even more carbon while in all likelihood doing nothing to reduce their countries’ carbon emissions. No such plan should be undertaken without considerable oversight and I suspect the oversight itself will be intolerable.

The Cook Political Report has updated their analysis of the midterm elections. As of this writing they say there are 188 House seats that are safe, likely, or leaning Democratic, 212 seats that are safe, likely, or leaning Republican, and 35 seats that are toss-ups. If the toss-ups split evenly between the two parties that would mean 230 seats for the Republicans, 205 seats for the Democrats. If the toss-ups split 2:1 for Republicans, that would mean 245 Republican seats, 224 Democratic.

They haven’t updated their Senate analysis yet. I expect that Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball will update their House projections soon.

I continue to be skeptical of Nate Silver’s characterization of the election in percentage terms on the grounds that I think it’s a false analogy with probabilistic models of pulling pebbles from an urn. Consequently, an 18% likelihood of something has no meaning in the real world.

The United States Senate has produced a report suggesting that in all likelihood SARS-CoV-2 was unleashed on the world bu an accidental lab leak in Wuhan:

That should raise the temperature.

Their arguments are that

• Epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak Differs from Previous Natural Zoonotic Spillovers
• Missing Evidence of a Natural Zoonotic Spillover
• Problems with the Natural Zoonotic Hypothesis

namely

• The intermediate host species for SARS-CoV-2, if one exists, remains unidentified
• Unlike SARS, the genomes of early COVID-19 cases from the first months of the pandemic do not
  show genetic evidence of SARS-CoV-2 having circulated in another animal species other than
  humans
• SARS-CoV-2’s high binding affinity for human ACE2 receptors suggests that it is possible for it
  to directly infect humans without needing a period of adaptation in an intermediate host
• Based on the available evidence, Wuhan is the only location where SARS-CoV-2 spilled over into
  humans
• The low genetic diversity of the earliest SARS-CoV-2 samples suggests that the COVID-19
  pandemic is most likely the result of a single successful spillover of SARS-CoV-2

My own view is that we will never know for certain without greater cooperation from the Chinese government than has been the case to date and unless something changes that is unlikely to be forthcoming.

One way of changing things would be to allow civil cases against the Chinese government to proceed based on this report.

At Russia Matters in an interview by Fyodor Lyukanov scholar Graham Allison says it’s time for Russia, Ukraine, and the United States to seek an “off-ramp” in the war in Ukraine:

FL: The situation today is not good at all. Would you recommend that the sides–I mean, first and foremost, Russia and the United States—escalate in order to deescalate afterwards?

GA: If it were up to me, if I were the adviser to the adults in both Moscow and Washington, I would say we’ve escalated far enough to see how bad things could become if we end up in a world where nuclear weapons are used. I think the fact that over seven decades now states have concluded that nuclear weapons are not usable as part of ordinary international relations between great nuclear powers is a significant factor in the fact that we have had seven decades without great-power war—something that’s historically very anomalous. So, I believe that where we are now, both for Putin’s Russia and for the Biden-led U.S. and the Western alliance, it’s time to search for an off-ramp for all the parties. And I know there’s some energy going into that by the governments and I wish there would be more. I think we’ve escalated far enough to settle at this point.

For the life of me, I can’t see what such an “off-ramp” might be at this point. The mere suggestion of leaving any smidgeon of Ukrainian territory in Russian hands is castigated as appeasement on the one hand and leaving Russia without the port of Sevastopol is very clearly not negotiable for the Russians. What “off-ramp”?

The phrase “silent majority”, referring to those who do not make their views known other than through the imperfect prism of the their ballots, represents a concept that has been used by both parties but is most closely associated with the Republicans. The phrase goes back a lot farther than that, a couple of millennia in fact, as a euphemism for the dead. That’s similar to what G. K. Chesterton referred to as “the democracy of the dead” which is to say tradition.

In a piece at The Hill Douglas MacKinnon wonders if we are not about to see the “silent majority”, in a somewhat different usage determine the outcome of the midterm elections:

For decades, we have all heard of the “silent majority” in American politics. Today, for incredibly practical reasons, it may have morphed into the “secret majority.”

And why wouldn’t it? Back when the “silent majority” was coined as a term, whatever political opinion you might choose to express — generally more Republican, conservative and common sense from that demographic — you were not going to be fired from a job; you wouldn’t have your business picketed and shut down; you were not going to have anarchists and protesters march into your neighborhood; your children wouldn’t be targeted because of your views; you were not going to get viciously harassed on social media; you were not going to have your grade in college altered or be expelled from an institution of higher learning; you were not going to have your life turned upside down for simply having a different political or faith-based opinion in that version of the United States of America. We were indeed a nation conceived to ensure “liberty and justice for all.”

The America of 2022 is not the America of the past. The cancel-culture crowd has flipped that script.

Suddenly, the “secret majority” has come to the realization that, if they hope to live in peace and provide for themselves and their families, they must constantly remind themselves that they no longer have the liberty to speak their minds and the scales of justice have been hijacked by far-left politicians, district attorneys and advocates who push for open borders, the defunding of the police, identity politics and the rights of violent criminals over the victims.

Many from the “secret majority” believe that this woke, anti-liberty and anti-free speech movement has taken over the power centers of big business, Big Tech, the media, universities, hospitals, science centers, and the most influential unions in the country — in other words, institutions that either employ them or exert power over their quality of life decisions.

Knowing that, why would they ever speak out or voice a differing opinion? The fact is, many do not. They have shut down.

I don’t think his interpretation is 100% correct. I think that polling is broken because few enough people are willing to answer the pollsters’ questions honestly that they’re inherently biased. Those who respond are those willing to give the pollsters the answers they think the pollsters want, whether it’s because they align with their own, because they’re willing to lie, or because they’re mischievous.

However, we’ll know pretty soon—in just over a week. If the Republicans gain narrow majorities in the House and Senate, which is what I expect, I think we can reasonably speculate that if there is a “secret majority”, they’re still secret.