Does anyone object to invading Hitler’s privacy?

I don’t.

When Hitler blew his brains out in the bunker, he splattered the upholstery with blood. An American soldier cut out a swatch of bloody cloth and kept it as a morbid souvenir, eventually donating it to a museum, and recently, geneticists sequenced the sample. Guess what they found?

Most of the interpretations were ambiguous, but they did find one specific abnormality in his genome.

The research is due to be published in a scientific journal, but the key finding is this: Hitler had Kallmann syndrome, a genetic disorder that hinders the normal progression of puberty and the development of sexual organs. Derogatory songs from the war about Hitler’s anatomy may have been meant in jest but, it transpires, they were not just accurate but probably did not go far enough.

A 1923 medical examination of Hitler, which was uncovered in 2015, showed that the Nazi leader did indeed have an undescended testicle but, while we do not know exactly how it manifested, Hitler’s newly discovered genetic condition would have also affected his testosterone levels. It means he had a one in ten chance of having a micropenis. This is suggested by stories from the First World War, where Hitler was bullied over the size of his genitalia.

The genetic finding, while definitive, can only allow for speculation in terms of its impact on Hitler. However, it seems likely that he would have struggled to form sexual relationships, and one historian believes this could prove critical in our understanding of Hitler’s rise to power.

Speculation. That’s an important word. There’s only a limited set of conclusions one can draw from the genetics…but hey, some people are going to go wild with it.

Alex J Kay, a historian at the University of Potsdam, who specialises in Nazi Germany and is a key authority in the documentary, said: “This would help to explain Hitler’s highly unusual and almost complete devotion to politics in his life to the almost complete exclusion of any kind of private life.

“Other senior Nazis had wives, children, even extramarital affairs. Hitler is the one person among the whole Nazi leadership who doesn’t. Therefore, I think that only under Hitler could the Nazi movement have come to power.”

Ugh. No. Those are some sweeping conclusions to draw from a genetic sequence. The geneticists seem to be well aware of the limitations of their analysis, but fortunately for their sensational documentary, they managed to find an irresponsible historian to draw excessive conclusions.

History repeats itself, again

It is my habit to read quietly before bed every night, and I vary between cheesy sci-fi and classic literature. Lately I’ve been re-reading (after a long interval) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, because I figured I’d better catch up on my anti-white American history before it gets banned by the Republicans.

It is not an uplifting story.

It is a story of continuous betrayal and horrific murder, and white Americans do not emerge as heroic or noble. The Indians are also not particularly heroic — they just want to live their lives, and sporadically explode in violent reprisals, and are also capable of horrific, monstrous acts. White America, though, has the numbers and the guns and the willingness to use them that leads to the carving up and seizure of Indian lands, and the confinement of tribal peoples to reservations. It turns out that Americans are not good or honorable people.

For example, here’s an excerpt, an account of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.

Robert Bent, who was riding unwillingly with Colonel Chivington, said that when they came in sight of the camp “I saw the American flag waving and heard Black Kettle tell the Indians to stand around the flag, and there they were huddled—men, women, and children. This was when we were within fifty yards of the Indians. I also saw a white flag raised. These flags were in so conspicuous a position that they must have been seen. When the troops fired, the Indians ran, some of the men into their lodges, probably to get their arms. … I think there were six hundred Indians in all. I think there were thirty-five braves and some old men, about sixty in all … the rest of the men were away from camp, hunting. … After the firing the warriors put the squaws and children together, and surrounded them to protect them. I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. I saw one squaw lying on the bank whose leg had been broken by a shell; a soldier came up to her with a drawn saber; she raised her arm to protect herself, when he struck, breaking her arm; she rolled over and raised her other arm, when he struck, breaking it, and then left her without killing her. There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children. There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side. Captain Soule afterwards told me that such was the fact. I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them. I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out. … I saw a little girl about five years of age who had been hid in the sand; two soldiers discovered her, drew their pistols and shot her, and then pulled her out of the sand by the arm. I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.”

This Chivington SOB is a truly monstrous villain.

In a public speech made in Denver not long before this massacre [the Sand Creek massacre] Colonel Chivington advocated the killing and scalping of all Indians, even infants. Nits make lice!” he declared.

The book was written in the context of the Vietnam War and it’s clear that we learned nothing in the intervening century. But I kept thinking, not of Vietnam, but of Israel. They learned well from us.

You are trying to occupy a land inhabited by indigenous people, who you outgun and confine? Ethics be damned, you can murder them at will, because your manifest destiny gives you that right, and any resistance is an excuse to slaughter. There are just too many parallels.

I would hope that we could learn from our past and have sense of humility and shame. I fear though, that we are going to outsource our history to PragerU and we’ll learn nothing.

A very Chesley Bonestell future

Walt Disney and Werner von Braun teamed up to tell us how we were going to get to the moon…in 1955. There’s a certain familiar esthetic to the exercise — shiny, long pointy spaceships with fins, a huge multilevel rotating wheel a 50-man (literally, there are no women) space station, swarms of robotic-looking construction suits. They ditch the fins for their lunar vehicle, since you don’t need them in space…but they do keep the sleek pointy shape.

Every bit of it is wrong, in hindsight. I’m impressed with the elaborate models and the chiseled, handsome men who are floating about in the excessively roomy cabin, but von Braun’s vision of the future was all hype and glitz and was as ridiculous as anything Elon Musk proposes.

You may have heard about Minnesota winters…

I’m going to be passing through Clontarf today, and I’ve long wondered about that strikingly Irish name in a region settled by Scandinavian and German settlers. There has to be a story behind that, and I found out what it was. The Catholic Church had shipped over a lot of Irish people to live in Minnesota, creating what were called the Connemaras (after the region in Ireland they came from), surprising them by settling them in new small towns in the western prairies. The experiment did not work.

The history of this community can be traced to the arrival of a sizeable group of immigrants from the Connemara area of Ireland. They had been persuaded to come to Minnesota in the 1880’s by Archbishop John Ireland and were initially located on farms in the western part of the state. For a variety of reasons, the experiment was a failure and many of the settlers came to St. Paul and settled along the banks of Phalen Creek between Third and Seventh Streets below Dayton’s Bluff.

So Clontarf is a relic of brief Irish colony in my part of the state. Then I was left wondering about that “variety of reasons” that led them to fall back from this region to the big city of St Paul.

I learned about the winter of 1880-1881 from a compilation of newspaper articles published in Morris at that time.

I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been) at how dependent the towns out here were on the railroad — I knew that these were all railroad towns, and even that Morris was named after some minor executive at the railroad company, but in the 19th century those rails were the lifeline for all these communities. Winters were rough, some more so than others, and it was predictable that the Catholic Church had provided poorly for the Irish. It’s a shame that the railroad is so poorly maintained now, and only freight is carried on it now, and not always successfully — we had a train derailment a few weeks ago.

Let’s all look forward to a Minnesota winter!

Airshow today!

I’m driving to Granite Falls, MN this morning. It’s only about an hour SSE of Morris, so I’ll still be in the middle of nowhere in west central Minnesota. A while back, though, I was searching for local museums and discovered this one: the Fagen Fighters WWII Museum. I was surprised. This looks like a big deal with all kinds of old US aircraft from the the 1940s, and many of them still fly. I’ve been planning to visit it all summer long, but those plans got wrecked by a torn meniscus that limited my mobility — I’m feeling much better now, so I think can handle walking around some hangars and watching airplanes fly by. My brother and I used to bicycle out to local airports all the time just to watch private planes buzz by, so this is going to bring back memories.

I’ve been to the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, as well as the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle, and while this museum is a bit smaller than those, tomorrow is special: they’re celebrating the 250th anniversary of the US Navy & Marine Corps, so an additional assortment of aircraft are flying in. How can I resist? I want to see a P38 Lightning, an F4U Corsair, and an F6F Hellcat. Eighty year old airplanes still flying!

Tickets are still available, so if you’re a Minnesotan interested in this sort of thing, maybe I’ll see you there.

“Anatomically fulsome”

A couple of medieval scholars are arguing over a dick pic. Apparently, the Bayeux tapestry depicts more than just a battle — it has numerous images of penises.

The Oxford professor George Garnett drew worldwide interest six years ago when he announced he had totted up 93 penises stitched into the embroidered account of the Norman conquest of England.

According to Garnett, 88 of the male appendages are attached to horses and the remainder to human figures.

OK, so a handful of warriors were flopping out of their gear, and the tapestry artists were careful to include that detail. The debate is over how many people had a wardrobe malfunction.

Now, the historian and Bayeux tapestry scholar Dr Christopher Monk – known as the Medieval Monk – believes he has found a 94th.

A running man, depicted in the tapestry border, has something dangling beneath his tunic. Garnett says it is the scabbard of a sword or dagger. Monk insists it is a male member.

I’ll let you decide. Here’s the figure in contention. Penis or dagger?

“I am in no doubt that the appendage is a depiction of male genitalia – the missed penis, shall we say. The detail is surprisingly anatomically fulsome,” Monk said.

Heh. “Anatomically fulsome” — I’ll say. That thing is hanging down to his knees and is so massive that he’s got to run with his legs spread wide. I wonder if it was stitched by his girlfriend.

Another day in my history of evolutionary thought class

Today I’m teaching a perilous topic: the eclipse of Darwinism. There was a period of several decades where you could make an honest intellectual argument against evolution, roughly from the time it was first published (1860) to the development of population genetics (say, roughly 1920). All the arguments since then are fundamentally garbage, but before then, some smart, reputable, qualified scientists did have sincere disagreements with the theory. Also there were some terrible arguments against Darwin, but I’m focusing on just the intelligent principled arguments.

One part of Darwin’s problem is that we have to admit that there were some gigantic holes in his theory — in particular, he didn’t have a good theory of inheritance. He tried to come up with one, his theory of pangenesis, which was a combination of Lamarckian and blending inheritance. It was wrong. It was also incompatible with his theory of evolution.

What I’ll be arguing, though, is that there was a greater problem than the flaws, and that was not that people were punching holes in The Origin. Good criticism is a treasured thing in science, and critical evaluation of an idea is essential to refining and improving it. Eventually, the people ripping on Darwin’s model of inheritance were going to produce a much more solid theory.

I’m going to make the somewhat controversial claim that the people who were burying evolution were the ones who were must uncritical and gung-ho about the idea — the ones who wholeheartedly embraced Darwinism, warts and all, and extended it in unproductive ways. That means that today I’m going to talk about two people who were disastrous to Darwinism while simultaneously acting as prominent cheerleaders for it.

So yeah, I’m going to rake a couple of historical figures over the coals, specifically Haeckel and Herbert Spencer. We’re going to discuss the positive claims of a couple of prominent 19th century boosters of evolution, and I’m going to make the case that their excesses were a contributing factor to the eclipse. Worse, their version of evolution was popular and persuasive and despite their rejection as good science, we’re still dealing with people who think recapitulation and “survival of the fittest” are great shorthand summaries of the principle of evolution.

The reading I’ve assigned for the week is this article, The Beauty and Violence of Ernst Haeckel’s Illustrations, which is an extremely harsh condemnation of Haeckel’s views. “Haeckel’s visions of nature were less objective depictions of life and more projected notions about the proper ‘order’ of nature,” it says. I’m telling the students to read Haeckel critically and also to regard this article skeptically. I’m hoping maybe they’ll be provoked into good, vigorous debate in the classroom, and that they’ll put together some thoughtful essays on the topic.

Today I’m doing a “fool’s experiment” in the classroom

Fridays are the worst, from a teacher’s perspective, and Mondays are great. Students start out the week full of enthusiasm and slowly deflate, so today I’ve only got 50% attendance…and that’s typical. I try to pack Mondays with all the deep information, while on Fridays I try to do something different.

We’ve been talking about Darwin this week. I’ve given them an in-class exercise to browse through the Darwin project and begin to put together a short essay. Here are their instructions.

In your next essay, you’re going to be a real historian: I want you to read a few samples of primary historical references from Charles Darwin, and interpret and explain what he is writing about.

The Darwin Correspondence Project (https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/) is a massive archive of letters to and from Charles Darwin, containing about 15,000 documents that have all been indexed and made publicly available. I want you to dive into this pile of letters, pluck out a few, and read them carefully. You may have to do additional research to figure out who these long dead people were, but the Darwin Project has actually done a lot of that work for you.

Write a 750 word essay that explains the context and meaning of the letters you choose. Unlike most scientific writing, this kind of essay encourages quoting your source — but don’t use up more than 250 words in direct quotes.

You get to choose the topic of the letters. Some might contain heavy scientific arguments, others might be friendly chit-chat, some are questions about that flower you were supposed to mail to me. They’re all good and interesting! Peek into the mind of a famous scientist, and you’ll find both deep revelations and mundane conversation.

In class: before you go, summarize to the group what you intend to write about, or tell us something interesting that you found.

I’m in class, working in parallel with them, and occasionally interrupting to get an idea of what they’re focusing on. I was most interested in Darwin’s “fool experiments“. These were experiments where you figured that it would never work, or that the answer would be obvious, but you go ahead and do the experiment anyways.

‘I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them’, was one of the most interesting things the zoologist E. Ray Lankester ever heard Darwin say. ‘A great deal might be written as comment on that statement’, Lankester later recorded, but he limited himself to stating that ‘the thoughts which it suggests may be summed up by the proposition that even a wise experiment when made by a fool generally leads to a false conclusion, but that fools’ experiments conducted by a genius often prove to be leaps through the dark into great discoveries.’

That’s a really good idea. I should go do a fool’s experiment this afternoon, maybe I’ll be surprised.

My students are right now digging into Darwin’s religious beliefs, his love life, his speculations about the age of the earth, and are going to give me the details next week. This should be fun.

Testa di cazzo!

To some people, today is Columbus Day. Those people have a cultish dedication to believing that a rapist, a thief, a slaver, and an oppressor was a hero — I guess nowadays we can believe there will be subset of the citizenry who ignore the facts to invent a cherished symbol. To be fair, here’s a bit from the Friends of Italian-Americans.

Even by today’s impossible utopian standards, Columbus was without a doubt the greatest hero of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. He was a capitalist in the age of Empires, and what he did began the downfall of imperialism. He was a scientist in the age of superstition. He was a civil rights activist in the age of oppression. And he was a pacifist in the age of war-mongering. Thus, Columbus was an icon and a paragon.

For a quick dismissal of their claims, consider that they condemn Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States by citing a PragerU video.

I think this is a better summary of Columbus’s character.

Italian-American Trade Unionists of America Condemn Columbus on Columbus Day The Italian-American Trade Unionists of America (IATUOA) has once again reaffirmed its condemnation of Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day.
“We only mention the son of a bitch’s name once a year and it’s when we announce that he’s a son of a bitch on his name day,” the IATUOA Executive Committee announced from a dark, smoke-filled room in the Italian-American Club of Shamokin, PA.
The IATUOA, founded on the principles of cultural solidarity through bargaining, mutual aid, shared dining experiences, and anti-imperialism, believes Columbus represents the antithesis of these core values. Based on his writing and contemporary accounts, Columbus was a greedy, self-indulgent strunz, a jerk-off that gleefully engaged in the enslavement and genocide of indigenous people for personal gain and fame.
Further, this fucking guy, supposedly Genoese, rarely spoke or wrote in Ligurian or any Italic language. What kind of “Italian” does that?
Italian-Americans deserve recognition and a holiday in the United States, but also deserve a figure worthy of their name. “If you’re gonna name the fuckin’ day Columbus Day, you might as well go-all in and make the fucking holiday Columbus/Mussolini Day to piss on a few more graves,” the IATOUA Executive Committee further scoffed.

Missed opportunity

Today is the anniversary of that day when people show paintings of the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, and I ask, “General Grant, why are you shaking hands with that piece of shit?” I also wonder if American generosity to bloody-handed traitors might have something to do with our current habit of appeasement to Nazis, anti-Semites, and insurrectionists.

The surrender, 9 April 1865