How stupid is Trent Franks?

Maybe not as stupid as you think.

Yesterday, Rep. Franks (AZ) drew a lot of criticism for a speech he made in support of a bill he is sponsoring to shorten the latest date at which a woman could get an abortion. In his comments on the bill, he said something stupid about rape which drew a lot of moans about how Republicans just can't resist going there. However, in this case, the tempest might work to his advantage. It creates a distraction so no one notices that he's lying about what the bill says.

Franks defended not allowing a rape exception into his bill by saying:

"Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject- because you know the, the incidents of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low, but when you make that exception, there's usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case, that's impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation, and that's what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment." 

Most people who commented on it focused on the phrase "the incidents of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low." With this, they said, he crossed the Akin line and showed himself to be a medically illiterate boob. Today, he issued the the standard "I phrased my very important point badly" defense and the controversy is all the fault of baby-killing Democrats. He says the very important part of his statement was what came after that phrase.

What he said next is pretty confusing, so let's take a second to unpack it. His arguement goes like this: A) rape exception clauses usually require women to report their rape within 48 hours, B) all women who have been raped do report their rapes within 48 hours, C) all women who have been raped make the decision to terminate their pregnancy before the end of their second trimester, D) it is "impossible" for any raped women to still be pregnant after six months, E) therefore there is no reason to have a rape exception. There are a lot of things wrong with this logic.

First, it's not logical. Jump straight from A to E. Rape exclusions require "this" and, if "this" happens, there is no reason for a rape exclusion. But, if there is no requirement, how do we know "this" will happen. Simple, it's required by the rape exclusion, therefore we don't need the rape exclusion. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Next, look at B-C-D and the ridiculous impossibility of it. It is "impossible" that there would be a woman who wouldn't report her rape. Is he kidding? I've never seen a study that didn't say the majority of rapes go unreported. Okay, maybe that's not what he meant. Maybe he only meant C-D. It's "impossible" that there would be a woman who was confused and hadn't made up her mind before she was faced with the point of no return, the end of the third trimester.

Maybe, we should cut him some slack on the "impossible" logic. Clearly, he was exaggerating in an attempt to manipulate his audience, the American people. At some point or another, everyone uses exaggeration to win an argument. We can see what he really meant at the beginning part of his statement, the controversial part. The number of raped women who are still pregnant at the end of the first trimester is "very low." He made that clear in another part of his statement, "To say that we wait until then, to say that there's a rape or incest involved, is waiting too long."

Then again, maybe we should not cut him any slack. His real argument is that women who can't make up their mind by then have "wait[ed] too long" and don't deserve compassion. His real argument is not that the exception is unnecessary. If that was the case, what harm would do to put it in? He claims Democrats are raising the rape issue to distract from the real issue. If adding the exception would deprive the Democrats of their argument, wouldn't the politically canny thing to do be to have put that exception in in the first place? Of course not. He does not want an exception under any condition. The real issue for him is to make it impossible for women to get an abortion. Period. In a away, he needs the Democrats to make a lot of noise about compromise to cover the fact that he's a no compromise extremist.

If that sounds like it's giving him too much credit for cleverness, consider this: all this noise about rape is distracting from his big, bald-faced lie. Let's go back to his original statement"

"And in this case, that's impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation..." 

And his clarification:

"The rape thing was something the Democrats injected. I never would have dealt with that issue. Our bill doesn't deal with that because it's the beginning of the six month."

His bill isn't about a ban after six months. His bill is about pushing the ban from twenty-four weeks--which is actually five and a half months--to twenty weeks which is just over four and a half months. He lied in his original statement and in his clarification, he repeated his lie.

Trent Franks might not be the Machiavelli of the Southwest, but he is clever enough to use a controversy to cover his deception. We should give him credit for being a clever liar.

Note: I rewrote the beginning because the lede was buried to far down the page.

Leibniz's unicorn

Otto von Geuricke was not a fool. During his lifetime he was a philosopher, diplomat, Mayor of Magdeburg for thirty-one years, and a respected scientist and inventor. It was for his work the last two capacities that he is probably best remembered. Geuricke invented the vacuum pump and performed public experiments with it that made him a welcome member of the European scientific elite. With that resume, it might surprise modern readers to find him calmly describing a unicorn in his main scientific work before moving on to more important topics.

His description is short. In its entirety, it reads:

It happened in the year 1663 in Quidlinberg, that on the Mountain the common people call Zeunickenberg, where lime is mined, inside the rock a unicorn skeleton was found. The rear portion of the body, as is common in a beast, lay back, head up, but, extending lengthwise from the brow was a horn, the thickness of a human leg, and so in proportion to the length of almost five cubits. Primarily through ignorance, the skeleton of the animal was broken and extracted in pieces. Together with the head with the horn and some ribs, spine, and bones, were given to the Reverend head abbess of the place.

The passage gives no indication whether Geuricke ever saw the bones himself, though he had plenty of opportunity to do so. Quedlinberg is less than thirty miles from Magdeburg and much of Guricke's technical innovation was aimed at making mining safer and more efficient, so he must have visited the mining regions. However, there is nothing in his writings to indicate that he ever looked further into the story. Guericke was an important enough scientist that his books were read and discussed by the scientific elite all over Europe. The Quedlinberg unicorn was mentioned a few times over the next few years and would have been forgotten except for the fact that the great Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz repeated the story and produced a drawing of the skeleton.

In the years 1691-3, Leibniz was working on a geological history of that part of Germany as a Michener-style prologue to his history of the house of Brunswick and their lands. A large part of his work dealt with fossils. The presence of entire strata of salt water seashells on high ground disturbed and intrigued Seventeenth Century natural philosophers. Leibniz catalogued and analyzed the shells in his region. Following that, he looked at some of the other difficult organic remains buried in the mountains. Buried ivory was right at the top of the list.

Buried ivory had several names, one of the most common, at least to people who spoke Latin, was "unicornu fossili"--fossil unicorn. At that time, the word "fossil" was evolving from its original meaning of "something from the ground" into its modern meaning of "petrified organic matter." Another transformation happening at the time had to do with the word "unicorn." The belief in, and giving a damn about, the animal unicorn peaked during the Renaissance. Unicorn horn was a protection against poisons and a universal antidote should you be poisoned. No one was anyone unless someone wanted them dead. Unicorn horn’s medical powers were not limited to poison. It was also useful in treating “Scurvy, Old Ulcers, Dropsie, Running Gout, consumptions, Distillations, Coughs, Palpitation of the Heart, Fainting Fits, Convulsions, Kings Evil, Rickets in Children, Melancholly or Sadness, The Green Sickness, Obstructions, and all Distempers proceeding from a Cold Cause." Fragments of unicorn horn were worth more than their weight in gold. A complete horn was worth more than a medium sized town.

Its very success doomed the unicorn. Nothing about the unicorn could stand up to extended scrutiny. From one side, physicians questioned the idea of a universal antidote. Nature was composed of pairs of opposites, hot vs. cold, wet vs. dry. How could the same medicine counteract a wet poison and also a dry poison? Naturalists hunted the world for the unicorn animal and found hints and claims, but no actual unicorns. By the late Seventeenth Century, faith in the existence of an actual unicorn animal was fading fast. Several different writers demonstrated that the straight spiral horn, so beloved by medieval artists, actually came from a sea animal caught in the icy waters surrounding Greenland. Other pieces of unicorn horn were shown to be walrus tusks, elephant ivory, or cheaper substances such teeth and bones of farm animals. The last great hope for unicorn believers was fossil ivory. Finding ivory in the ground was pretty amazing. Guericke adhered to the belief that it actually grew there. Not that it was a plant, but that it was real ivory created by some generative power within the earth. If fossil ivory had such had such a wonderful origin, crediting it with diverse medical powers was no great stretch of the mind.

When Leibniz repeated Guericke’s story, he made it clear that, in his opinion, unicornu fossili was the remains of real animals. What’s more he was sure it was the remains of known animals. He allowed that in rare cases it might ivory of elephants washed into the North by the Biblical deluge, but he confident that in most cases it was the remains of walruses and narwhals that had lived there when the shoreline of the North Sea was far to the south of its present location. Still, Guericke was a man of impeccable reputation and the story was an interesting one. Following his recounting of the story as told by Guericke, Leibniz added: “The same has been reported to me. An illustration was added which it is not inappropriate to submit here.”

Leibniz’s unicorn. Source.

Leibniz never finished his history. In fact he never went any further than writing the geological preface. Both the text and the drawing sat in his papers until 1749, over thirty years after his death. In that year, Ludwig Scheidt, the librarian of the house of Brunswick, edited the treatise into chapters and had the drawings Leibniz had collected engraved onto printing plates. The result was published in Latin and German as Protogaea, or A Dissertation on the Original Aspect of the Earth and the Vestiges of Its Very Ancient History in the Monuments of Nature. The unicorn appeared on the same page as the tooth of a mammoth (referred to as that of a “marine animal”) and carried the caption “Image of a skeleton excavated near Quedlinberg.”

The image and description have gone on to become quite famous. While the bizarreness of the image has a lot to do with that fame, the image has a valid claim to being a significant milestone in paleontology. Science writers often call it the first paleontological reconstruction. To call it that, requires a few qualifiers. Every time a medieval parish priest laid out some large bones and imagined his village had discovered a giant, he was making a paleontological reconstruction of sorts. What made the Quedlinberg unicorn special was that published and directed at a scientifically literate audience.

But that’s not the whole story of the Quedlinberg unicorn. Over the years, both Guericke and Leibniz have been credited as the artists. Guericke is an unlikely source. His book was well illustrated and, if he found the story interesting enough to add to his book, it seems that he would have used the illustration if he had had it in his possession. Leibniz is definitely not the artist. He explicitly says he received the drawing from an unnamed person whose account backed up Guericke’s. As I mentioned above, Leibniz and Guericke was not the only writers to draw attention to the story. The most interesting publication happened in 1704, while Leibniz was still alive. In a catalog and commentary on the great collections of Europe, Michael Bernard Valentini published a version of the reconstruction. Valentini wrote that the illustration was based on a sketch by Johann Mäyern, a counselor at Quedlinberg. Valentini’s illustration is of much lower quality than Leibniz’s. Was Mäyern Leibniz’s other source or was there a third drawing that they both copied? Unless Mäyern’s original drawing shows up, we will probably never know.

Valentini’s unicorn. Source.

In the early Twentieth Century, the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel took an interest in the Quedlinberg unicorn. Abel had already casually mentioned the story in several of his books before he decided to get serious and try to figure out what the skeleton really was. They actual bones had long since disappeared and no other drawings or descriptions had ever been made of them. The best evidence he had to work with was Leibniz’s drawing. Abel immediately recognized that this not a single skeleton that had been reassembled in a whimsical manner. The bones came from at least two individuals and two different species. The skull is that of a woolly rhinoceros. The teeth, scapulae, and vertebrae are from a mammoth. Most of the spine has been reassembled backwards and upside down. What at first glance look like ribs are really dorsal spines that are part of the individual vertebrae. The loop at the bottom is the first cervical vertebra. And the horn; what is the horn? It’s too long to be a walrus tusk and too wide to be a narwhal tooth, Leibniz’s preferred explanation for fossil ivory. Rhinoceros horns are not made of bone or ivory. They’re made of keratin, the material as hair and finger nails. It’s unlikely that the learned burgers of Quedlinberg would have mistaken that for a unicorn horn. That leaves a mammoth tusk, which easily meets the length and width requirements. It takes a little more speculation to explain its being straight and not curved. There are two possibilities here. One is that the tusk was badly enough broken up that the people who reassembled it had the freedom to make it any shape they wanted. The other possibility is that it came from a different kind of extinct elephant, such as the palaeoloxodon, a species that went extinct about 15,000 years before the mammoth and that had much straighter tusks.

There is a cave near Quedinberg called the Einhornhöhle or Unicorn Cave. Even before the gypsum miners on Zeunickenberg found their strange skeleton, the locals had been bringing bones out the local caves and selling them to apothecaries as “genuine” unicorn horn. This explains why the Quedlinberg burgers had unicorn on their minds as they tried to make sense out of a pile of broken bones. No doubt, someone had the idea of getting in on the unicorn trade. But the price of unicorn horn was crashing in the late Seventeenth Century and any plans they might have had never came to fruition. Leibniz visited the area in 1686 and crawled through several caves, but didn’t find any unicorns, which explains his noncommittal tone when he repeated Guericke’s story six years later.

That’s not the end of the story. In the Nineteenth Century, paleontologists explored the caves in the Harz Mountains and identified the bones of dozens of species of Pleistocene mammals. In the Twentieth century, the local governments realized the tourist potential of the caves and dug comfortable entrance tunnels into them. There are several small museums in the region proudly showing off the bones. There are several full sized models of the unicorn on display. One of them guards the entrance to the Einhornhöhle. Tourist shops sell paperweights and t-shirts adorned with Leibniz’s drawing. The Quedlinberg unicorn lives on.

Another unicorn and how I came to write the book

The mammoth book grew out of an idea for a single blog post. I love forbidden history and catastrophist books, such as those about Atlantis and Velikovskyism. It doesn't take long when reading these to notice that the all depend on a limited bits of evidence to prove vastly different theories. Among the favorites are the Great Pyramid and frozen mammoths. Out of curiosity, I decided one day to look at the history of mammoth discoveries to figure out what was known at the times different Atlantis writers wrote since it wouldn't be fair to criticize them for not knowing something that hadn't been discovered yet. As the blog post got out of hand, it occurred to me that this long essay could perhaps become a small book. I had four books on mammoths at the time. I figured those four and a couple of books on paleontology would be all I needed. I wasn't that serious about it; it was just an idea.

Just as the blog post had gotten out of hand, the essay began to get out of hand. In each of the books I found discoveries and ideas that I wanted to know more about. I began mining the bibliographies of those four books. I found minor mistakes in them and differences of interpretation that bothered me. I mined the bibliographies a little further. One day I shelled out almost eighty bucks for a Nineteenth Century book and realized that I was starting to get serious. Atlantis had vanished from the idea and it was all about mammoths. About five years ago, I realized I really was writing a book. When I began spending more and more time tracking down primary sources for various bits of data and context, I realized I was also writing the dissertation that had never happened when I dropped out of grad school.

And then I entered my translation phase. When I first got serious, machine translation was still pretty iffy, but it's improved dramatically over the last few years. Whereas I once groaned at the thought of doing a few paragraphs of a modern language, I now think nothing of ten pages of Latin. Naturally, this has meant digging into even more original sources. Sometimes this means even when an English translation is available, I'll go to the original to make sure I'm not missing anything. This is how I made my latest discovery.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz is probably best known for inventing calculus. But he was much more than a mathematician; he wrote about philosophy, medicine, physics, linguistics, history, and politics; he tinkered with lamps, clocks, pumps, and invented an adding machine; I've heard he mixed the best Bloody Mary in all Germany and danced a mean Polka; he also took a shot at geology and paleontology. In 1690, his patron, the Elector of Hanover, commissioned him to write a history of the province of Brunswick. Leibniz chose to start with the geological prehistory of the land as a background for the human and dynastic history. He didn't get any further in his history. Thirty years after his death, this essay was published under the title Protagea.

Leibniz's contribution to mammoth history appears in Protagea. Leibniz recounted a story told originally by Otto Gericke, the inventor of the vacuum pump, of the discovery of some unicorn bones near Quedlinberg in the Harz Mountains. He also published a reconstruction of the unicorn skeleton that he received from an unnamed second source. The teeth are probably mammoth's teeth and the skull is probably from a woolly rhino, but the horn, which was reassembled from pieces, is clearly a mammoth's tusk that was straightened by the reconstructors. The unicorn drawing is a standard part of mammoth lore.

I had read that Leibniz's text description was lifted from Gericke's almost word for word. The "almost" got my attention. Yesterday, I decided to compare the two to see if Leibniz had left out or changed anything (he hadn't). Gericke's description is in his book on the vacuum pump. Don't ask me why; that's just how they rolled in the Seventeenth Century. Naturally, the book is in Latin, but so is the first edition of Protagea, making a direct comparison possible. While hunting for the passage in Protagea I came across a familiar word "mammotekoos"--mammoth bones. This word appears two pages before the unicorn story but it has never been mentioned in any previous book on mammoths.

I know of only one other mammoth writer who has mentioned Leibniz’s mammotekoos, but not in the context of mammoths. Claudine Cohen, a French historian of science, published The Fate of the Mammoth in 2002. About a third of her book covers the same material that I'm covering. She uses Gericke and Leibniz unicorn as the launching point for one of her chapters, but she missed the mammotekoos. Ironically, in 2010 she edited and published an English translation of Protogaea with commentary. In the chapter where mammotekoos appears, she has a small footnote on the word. If she had written the Protagea commentary before her mammoth book she would have been able comment on the relevance of the word in the context of mammoths and all I would be able to do would been to agree or disagree with what she said. Ha-ha, now I get to go first.

Alright, what is there to say about Leibniz and the word mammotekoos? The context of his use is a passage about bones found in the caves of the Harz Mountains. These caves are a treasure-trove for paleontologists. Many of the caves contain bones of Pleistocene megafauna such as cave bears, woolly rhinoceros, and mammoths. Leibniz took the, then common, position that these bones had been washed there by the Biblical Deluge. He also held to a less common idea that the North Sea had once extended as far south as the Harz Mountains. This idea was necessary to explain seashells in lower strata. In Protagea, he suggests that the latter could also be used as an explanation for unicorn horn and other fossil ivory, in that they were probably really walrus tusks.

Here is the quote. It's a mix of Cohen's translation and a little grammatical editing by me. 

So there was nothing to stop foreign animals to be brought to us by the force of the waves, although I find elephants less believable because they could belong to the Rosmarus [walrus] I mentioned above. The teeth reportedly dug up in Mexico are perhaps of the same kind since no elephants are found in America today. I would say the same thing of those heavy teeth, like the bones of whales, called Mammotekoos by the Moscovites and attributed to the elephant, as Witsen reports. Yet, I will not obstinately deny that true elephant’s bones are sometimes found. Certainly, we have seen teeth and a part of the tibia and other bones taken from the Scharzfeld cave. No one could say whether they came from an elephant or similar animal; whether in the past they might have been more widely scattered throughout the world than today; whether their nature or the nature of the world had changed; or whether they had been moved from a far country by the rushing waters.

 Leibniz is clear that the bones in the Harz Mountains are not something that can be taken for granted; they are problem that needs to be solved. He lists several possible solutions and lets us know his preferences: the Biblical Deluge for most bones and a further south coastline for most of the ivory. He also recognizes that the ivory is the biggest problem and allows that some of it could be elephant ivory. For real elephant ivory, he still prefers the Biblical Deluge but admits that it is possible the elephants could have been native the region, but that would mean either elephants were different in those days or that the environment was. That final point is an interesting foreshadowing of things to come. The environmental solution would not have been entirely outrageous as many philosophers believed the Earth had been uniformly pleasant with a year-round growing season and that seasons were part of the wreck of the world brought by the Flood.

This passage is important in that Leibniz is the first writer to bring together European fossil elephants, giant bones from the New World, the majority of which would have been mastodons, and the Siberian mammoth and recognize them as probably related species. Of course, his solution that they were all walruses is wrong, but not unreasonable for the times. The Witsen Leibniz mentions as his source for mammotekoos Nicholaes Witsen. Witsen knew ivory. As a Dutch merchant he had been to the East Indies and to Africa where he had purchased the tusks of both Asian and African elephants. He knew about Siberian mammoth ivory because he had been to the markets of Moscow and interrogated the ivory merchants there. In his book on Russia and Siberia, Noord en Oost Tartarye, he recognized that mammoth ivory looked like real elephant ivory. He wouldn't go so far as to say it really came from elephants only that, if it did, it could only be because dead elephants were washed there by the Flood. Witsen did not mention walruses, but he did say that most mammoth ivory came from the Arctic coast. By the time of Witsen and Leibniz, Europeans had known about the Russian ivory trade for over 150 years. Leibniz, who had not seen a mammoth tusk, appears to have assumed that mammoth was no more than another name for walrus. He was not the last to make that assumption. As late as thirty years later, after whole tusks and other bones of mammoths had been carried to Western Europe for examination, Theodore Hase could still publish a fifty-eight page tract arguing that mammoth was another word for walrus.

This passage in Protagea offers something for Leibniz scholars, though I'm not sure if it rises above the level of curious trivia or not. Leibniz devotes quite a few pages to fossils so I'm sure everything I said above about Leibniz’s attitudes regarding fossils has been said in the past; only my emphasis on elephants and mammoths is original. The word mammotekoos is a point that can be used to date that part of the Protagea. It is known that Leibniz worked on his history through 1691-3. Witsen's Noord en Oost Tartarye was published in 1692, placing Leibniz’s composition of that passage in the second half of the period. If Leibniz had published Protagea as a separate volume as soon as he finished it, his would have been only the third time any form of the word mammoth had appeared in print.

This is why my book is taking so long. Not only have I spent almost three years translating and retranslating primary sources and lost most of another year due to personal crises, I also have these obsessive moments when I'll spend two days analyzing a half of a paragraph. On the other hand, it's this kind of obsessiveness that leads me to make new discoveries. Up above where I said Protagea could have been the third time any form of mammoth had appeared in print, the Oxford English Dictionary would tell you it would have been the second, with Witsen as the first. I know of an earlier one. As far as I know, I'll be the first person to draw attention to it. That alone should be a good enough reason for you to buy several copies of the book when it comes out.

And now, since the original purpose of looking at Leibniz was to comment on the Quedlinburg unicorn, I should get to work on that. I'll post a partial rough draft with the amazing drawing later today or tomorrow.

Book update

Five weeks ago, I sent my completed proposal and polished chapter to an editor who had expressed an interest in it. I haven't heard anything and I've essentially lost hope for that outcome. I know, with fiction manuscripts, it can be months before a response comes back, but I have been told that things are much quicker with non-fiction proposals. So, what's next? I'm going to rework the proposal a little and look into getting an agent.

Problem of the day: One part of the proposal that I need to improve is the biography, which should be approximately the same text that will be used on the book's dust jacket. I have a really lame biography. I have no relevant credentials or experience and no publications. Even claiming I've been interested in mammoths for a long time is a bit of a stretch. I have a small plastic mammoth that I've carried around since kindergarten, but mammoths have only been a big deal for me since around the time I started blogging ten years ago. I am confident that I know more about my topic--history of mammoth knowledge--but, how do I demonstrate my authority. Suggestions?

New mammoth comes with grains of salt

Frozen mammoths are rare. That's why I was excited to hear this morning to that a new one had discovered. Over the last three centuries, only seventy-three frozen mammoths with skin or flesh attached have been reported. Most were only partial--a foot or a piece of skin--some were only seen with nothing being recovered. However, despite being exciting news, there were several things about the story that set off alarms in my head and made me cringe.

First, is the headline and hook to the story: "Russian scientists make rare find of 'blood' in mammoth." The significance of the blood is explained in the story. Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the team examining the mammoth explained:

"When we broke the ice beneath her stomach, the blood flowed out from there, it was very dark. This is the most astonishing case in my entire life. How was it possible for it to remain in liquid form? And the muscle tissue is also red, the colour of fresh meat."

Liquid blood strikes me as more than astonishing; it borders on completely impossible. Thawed blood, yes. Remaining liquid for over ten thousand years surrounded by rock-hard ice and frozen flesh, no. Grigoryev says they found the blood on the underside of the carcass. This means they had already chipped and thawed their way to that spot, that it had already been exposed to heat when he dug into it.

The bit about the color of the meat is pure melodrama. This is something that is said about most discoveries of frozen Pleistocene animals. When Pfitzenmayer and Herz excavated the famous Berezovka mammoth in 1901, they commented on how fresh the meat looked. They also said the smell of the thawed meat was so bad that they could only work short shifts digging it out before they had to run for fresh air.

My second alarm was, perhaps unfairly, the presence of Grigoryev himself. Grigoryev is a partner with disgraced Korean cloner Hwang Woo-suk. Hwang, for those who don't know or remember, is a very skilled scientist whose career imploded in 2005-6 over fraudulent claims that he had cloned human stem cells. Naturally, the liquid blood is being touted as a big step forward in eventually cloning a mammoth. The cloning angle appears in the first sentence of the story.

The presence of Hwang and the cloning frame don't necessarily disqualify Grigoryev. Last year, he announced the discovery of another mammoth, a young male that they named Zhenya. The announcement included a great deal of hype about it being the most complete mammoth ever recovered. At the time I had never heard of Grigoryev. However, despite the hyperbole and his being new to the scene, it appears the discovery was legit. Zhenya was excavated and moved to St. Petersburg where Alexei Tikhonov, an old hand at mammoth research, confirmed that it really is an important find.

The third alarm, for me, is the photograph attached to the story that purports to be an actual shot taken at the excavation. The photo shows a person in cold-weather gear, a surgical mask, and nitrile gloves. The person is down on one knee in front of a large hunk of the mammoth that has already been loaded onto a sled. The person appears to be filling a test-tube and we are left to believe the person is extracting blood from the carcass. The caption reads: "A researcher in Yakutsk on May 13 next to a carcass of a female mammoth found on an island in the Arctic Ocean." A second picture shows a different person's hand holding up a test tube with a few drops of blood in the bottom.

Perhaps I'm being picky, but there's no way that is can actually be a shot of the vignette suggested. Even if they found liquid blood in the mammoth when it was in the ground, it would not have stayed liquid while they excavated that piece of meat and loaded it onto a sled. The site is described as "a remote island in the Arctic Ocean." Despite the sunlight in the picture and news of record Arctic sea ice retreats, it is still very cold up there this time of year and no matter how warm the surface air gets, it remains well below freezing year-round in the permafrost.

Another reason I don't like the picture is the hunk of mammoth behind the researcher. What is that piece? Maybe it's just pareidolia, but it looks like the head and shoulders of the mammoth with its trunk dramatically raised over its head. There is no way the trunk could have stayed in that position while it froze. Maybe it was on its side while it froze? The story makes clear that that was not the case. They say the stomach was in water and the meat of the back and head were eaten by scavengers. So, the mammoth was upright and the scavengers probably got the trunk. That makes this the stomach and a leg, though the shape and position make it had to figure out just how this fits into a complete mammoth. If that is the stomach, where the blood was found, it makes another part of the story hard to understand. The mammoth location is being kept secret, they say, because the researchers don't want anyone else to steal it. If they've already excavated the stomach, they pretty much have the whole mammoth out of the ground. So, again, just what is that hunk of mammoth on the sled?

As a final gripe, let me say why I hate the cloning frame for mammoth stories. Cloning is not the news part of this story and does not belong in the lede sentence. At most, cloning is background material. The news part of the story is the discovery itself. Of those seventy-four frozen mammoth discoveries that I mentioned, this is only the fifth I know of that is a female and this one was the oldest when she died (most reports don't know or don't mention the sex). That is what should be the big deal about this news, not that someone thinks maybe they could possibly attempt to make a clone from this mammoth at some undefined time in the future. If they are able to recover satisfactory material to attempt a clone, that would be a story in its own right. If they made the attempt, that would be another story, whether they were successful or not. And, of course, if they successfully cloned a mammoth or bred a mammelephant, that would be one of the biggest science stories of the century. None of those things have happened. The news here is that a rare old female mammoth has been discovered.

The story is bad science reporting, pure and simple. It's science by press release. It allows sensationalism to bury the real science. Cloning and "will it tell us why they went extinct" stories are lazy and ignorant writing. It's crap and I do not like it. Please stop.

UPDATE - The official press release from North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk is a little more detailed and a lot less sensational that the PhysOrg notice. It has a less ridiculous picture and says that most of the mammoth is still in the ground and will stay there until the summer when an international group of mammoth specialists will come look at the site. The cloning angle is barely mentioned and only in the last sentence.

As for the blood, some more details were given about that, "The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities below the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out. Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to –10°C. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties." If that's true, that would be quite an exciting discovery. Mammoth blood did do a better job of carrying oxygen at low temperatures than does the blood of living elephants, but, so far, no one has even suspected the presence of cryoprotective properties. Why should they. We've never had a speck of evidence that mammoths hibernated and we've never found liquid blood in any other frozen carcase. I remain skeptical.

The Halle unicorn

In the southern parts of the German speaking lands the earth produced amazing things. It was not uncommon for brewers, storing their beer in cool caves, to come across the skulls of enormous bears or miners to bring up pieces of brown coal with the images of leaves miraculously pressed into them. In 1577 an oak tree near Luzern was knocked over in a storm and beneath its roots were revealed bones which the famous surgeon Felix Platter asserted were those of a man nineteen feet tall. In 1605 a horn of extraordinary size and beauty was discovered in the ground near the Free City of Halle in Swabia.

The horn could have been sold. There were many buyers for such oddities. This was not an unusual fate for something unique. Many churches had collections of unusual objects that were brought out on holy days to impress the parishioners with God's majestic and mysterious ways. In time, weather and handling would destroy such objects--there was a moral lesson in that, too. The Halle horn was different. Some cleric or town father decided that it was special enough that they arranged for a permanent display; it was placed in a frame of iron that was hoisted up high in the church of St. Michael above the town market. There, no one could damage it.

The Halle horn. Source.

Near the frame, they posted a poem:

Tausend Sechshundert und Fünff Jahr,
Den Dreyzehend Febuarii ich gefunden war,
Bey Neubronn an dem Hällischen Land,
Um Bühler Fluss zur lincken Hand,
Samt grossen Knochen und lang Gebein,
Sag Lieber, was Arth ich mag seyn.

One thousand six hundred and five years,
The thirteenth of February I was found,
At Neubronn in the Hall country,
On the left bank of the Bühler River,
With me were large bones and long bones,
Tell me dear, what might I be.

I doubt that it was a serious question with big cash prizes. The poem was just a bit of fun. The frame made clear what the correct answer was. It was a unicorn horn.

In those years, the learned men of Europe had begun questioning the reality of the unicorn as an animal. No one had ever seen or captured a unicorn. Biblical and Classical scholars questioned whether the word unicorn in ancient texts really meant the same thing as the animal pictured in Medieval bestiaries. Dutch and Portuguese travellers brought back descriptions of the rhinoceros, an animal that could convincingly be argued to have been the source of the legends.

What was less questioned was the existence of the substance called unicorn horn. No apothecary's kit was complete with out a good supply of powdered unicorn horn. It had 1001 uses. The most important was as a protection against and an antidote to poison. Although the heyday of Renaissance poisoning was past, anyone who was anyone still had someone who wanted them dead and it was better to be safe than dead. Over the years, many substances had been marketed as real unicorn horn. Unscrupulous doctors had been
known to grind up teeth and bones and even chalk and market it as the real thing. The learned professors were not sure what true unicorn horn was. Some said it was the strangely twisted tooth of a kind of whale found near Greenland and Iceland. Others said it was a kind of subterranean ivory called "unicornu fossili" or "ebur fossili" that was dug up in southern Germany. You can guess which position was favored in around Swabian Halle.

Taking all that into consideration, maybe the riddle was serious as well as playful. Look again at the frame. The two unicorns in the ironwork have long thin and straight horns as different as possible from the wide horn that curls around them. Maybe the unicorns are not the answer but, rather, a hint. The correct answer is not "a unicorn's horn;" it's "unicorn horn." The medicinal properties of unicorn horn are acknowledged by the metaphorical figure on the right who holds the Rod of Asclepius, the serpent encircled baton that symbolizes healing. The allegorical figure to the left of the horn holds a celestial sphere, possibly signifying the astrological element that was still believed to be an important part of healing.*

The horn was still there over a century later. St Michaels survived a siege during the Thirty Years War and it survived two major city fires that destroyed over a third of the city. During the rebuilding that followed the fire of 1728, many pieces of unicornu fossile were dug up. This got Friedrich Hoffman, a professor at the university and the German who identified German measles, thinking about the ivory. By Hoffman's time the belief in the medicinal power of unicornu fossili was on it's way out.

When he wrote down his thoughts a few years after the fire, Hoffman was writing the final chapter on unicorn horn. He wrote a review of the literature of the previous century and gave himself the task of figuring out just what unicornu fossili had been. His conclusion was that it had been many things. He was inclined to think much of it had been jokes of nature, objects formed inside the earth that mimicked the appearance of bones, shells, and human artifacts. He also concluded that some real elephant ivory had been found in Germany and elsewhere Ernst Tenzel had identified beyond any doubt the skeleton of an elephant found at Burgtonna thirty years earlier. The ivory found in Russia called "mammont" was also most likely from elephants. And, despite it's extreme curve, he was sure the horn in St. Michael's was also an elephant's tusk.

The Michaelskirche Mammutzahn today. Source.

The church of St. Michael has survived three more centuries. Though the industrial revolution mostly bypassed Halle and thousands of her citizens emigrated, the church was never allowed to fall into disrepair. Even though the Allies bombed the nearby rail station and Luftwaffe base, the old town was mostly spared. Today tourism helps maintain the church. And the horn is still there. Though it is clarly a mommoth horn. the town hasn't given up on its unicorn heritage. Halle is home to a American style football team. The name of the team is the Unicorns.

* If anyone can help with the other two symbols or any other aspects of the allegorical figures, let me know. 

Sylvia Browne is the worst person in the world

I think the story of the three women in Cleveland who were rescued after ten years of captivity is pretty wonderful in a "wonderful relief after being pretty horrible" sort of way. In looking for some instant background to fill out their stories, most of the press has mentioned the fact that Amada Berry's mother died a few years after she vanished, brokenhearted, believing her daughter was dead. If they had followed that sideline a little further they would have discovered a truly disgusting element in it.

Like any parent, Louwana Miller was desperate for any news about her daughter, any tiny glimmer of hope. When all the authorities could tell he was that they were still hunting, she eventually turned to less orthodox sources for information and encouragement. A year and a half after Amanda's disappearance  Louwana Miller appeared on an episode of Montel Williams’ syndicated talk show with the self-proclaimed psychic, Sylvia Browne. In front of the live and broadcast audiences, Browne told Miller, "She’s not alive, honey."

Miller was devastated  She took down her daughter's pictures, cleaned out her room, and gave away many of her belongings. When she died a few years later, her friends said it was of a broken heart.

Browne is a complete and utter fraud. Every year she plays the odds by predicting that some Hollywood couple will have marital problems and that there be hurricanes during the hurricane season, along with some other vague predictions. At the beginning of the following year, she cherry picks the two or three things she guessed right and announces them as proof of her amazing powers. Most of the time, this is pretty harmless entertainment. Other times it's a cruel deception. This was one of those times.

Browne was, once again, playing the odds. In the majority of cases, abductees are killed within a few days of their disappearance  The longer they are missing, the closer the odds of their safe return approach zero. Missing teenagers are often runaways and can turn up months or years later. But, the abduction Gina DeJesus from the same location a year later made it extremely likely that she had been the victim of a serial killer and that both women had been raped, killed, and buried in shallow graves. Browne played the odds. In this case, she could be confident that time would prove her guess correct, that her bluntness could be portrayed as a tough love type of kindness in telling Amanda's mother to stop mourning and get on with her life.

This time, Browne's gamble didn't pay off. She needs to pay the casino and she needs pay big. Sylvia Browne is not just a fraud, she's a callous and cruel fraud and needs to be labeled as such. Today, Sylvia Browne is the worst person in the world.

MiniScopes: Oklahoma is not OK edition

This one is less of a debunking than it is picking apart a FaceBook meme. A conservative friend in Alaska put this one up today. It's supposed to be showing how Oklahoma is a conservative paradise. I was halfway through it before I realized the writer's purpose wasn't showing how Oklahoma is a conservative nuthouse for us to point at and laugh.

Oklahoma is the only state that Obama did not win even one county in the last election... While everyone is focusing on Arizona’s new law, look what Oklahoma has been doing!!!!
An update from Oklahoma:

Arizona? I thought we were all still focussed on Boston and terrorism. I guess I wasn't paying that much attention this week. Which Arizona law? The "No Gun Left Behind" bill or some other? There are so many dumb Arizona laws to focus on these days. Oh well. Once more into the breach my friends!

Oklahoma law passed, 37 to 9 an amendment to place the Ten Commandments on the front entrance to the state capitol. The feds in D.C., along with the ACLU, said it would be a mistake. Hey this is a conservative state, based on Christian values...! HB 1330. Guess what.......... Oklahoma did it anyway.

This has been ruled unconstitutional over and over and will cost the taxpayers of Oklahoma hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of dollars to find out that it's still unconstitutional.

Oklahoma recently passed a law in the state to incarcerate all illegal immigrants, and ship them back to where they came from unless they want to get a green card and become an American citizen. They all scattered. HB 1804. This was against the advice of the Federal Government, and the ACLU, they said it would be a mistake. Guess what.......... Oklahoma did it anyway.

This will be completely unworkable and expensive to attempt. How exactly are they going to deport all the "illegal immigrants" they round up? Oklahoma law ends at the Oklahoma state line. They'll need federal help to move their prisoners any further. Oh, I suppose Rick Perry might agree to ship them across Texas and dump them in Mexico. I suppose Mexico would have to repatriate Mexican citizens. What about non-Mexicans? Rick Perry is not going to let Oklahoma dump them is Texas. Without federal help, they're not going to ship them any further than one of the surrounding red states. Does the new law suppose the taxpayers of Oklahoma will spring for tickets to fly each prisoner back to his or her home country? And, while we're on the subject of cost, where will they incorporate all their prisoners? They're going to need to build some new jails.

Recently we passed a law to include DNA samples from any and all illegal's (sic) to the Oklahoma database, for criminal investigative purposes. Pelosi said it was unconstitutional SB 1102

They might be able to get around the constitutional right to privacy if they take the time to try and convict each prisoner, which would be expensive and time consuming. And, no matter how low the cost of DNA testing becomes, it will always cost something.

Several weeks ago, we passed a law, declaring Oklahoma as a Sovereign state, not under the Federal Government directives. Joining Texas, Montana and Utah as the only states to do so.
More states are likely to follow: Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Carolina's (sic), Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi and Florida. Save your confederate money, it appears the South is about to rise up once again. HJR 1003

Oh boy, nullification and a threat of secession. Didn't we fight a civil war over this? Wasn't Oklahoma on the losing side in that one? (Spoiler: Yes and Yes) Assuming we don't choose to bomb them into submission (again), how good for their economy is it going to be when the Union removes all of its military bases, fires all the federal employees, and bills Oklahoma for its share of the national debt?

The federal Government has made bold steps to take away our guns. Oklahoma, a week ago, passed a law confirming people in this state have the right to bear arms and transport them in their vehicles. I'm sure that was a setback for the criminals  The Liberals didn't like it -- But....Guess what........... Oklahoma did it anyway.

What "bold steps to take away [your] guns"? The toothless background check amendment that didn't pass? The right to bear arms is still protected by the Constitution and doesn't need extra state laws to stay that way. Without a new Constitutional amendment, the most aggressive thing we liberals can do is debate just what the existing Second Amendment means and what reasonable limits can be placed on it. And both are legitimate subjects of debate.

Just this month, the state has voted and passed a law that ALL drivers’ license exams will be printed in English, and only English, and no other language. They have been called racist for doing this, but the fact is that ALL of the road signs are in English only. If you want to drive in Oklahoma, you must read and write English. Really simple.

Go outside and look at some traffic signs. The great majority of them are either symbols or place names. Every license exam I've ever seen requires prospective drivers to know the signs. Its not that hard for non-English speakers to learn to recognize a few dozen phrases without being fluent in English. I can read the menus well enough to order in a dozen languages even though I can only speak English. You don't want us to call it racist? Fine, we'll call it xenophobic, nativist, or any other synonym for bigoted. If the sheet fits, wear it.

By the way, the Liberals don't like any of this either
Guess what...who cares... Oklahoma is doing it anyway.
If you like it, pass it on, if you don't then delete it...Thanks
Guess what: the people I'm sending this to will send it on. Well, at least the ones who love and believe in freedom will.

It must be nice to live in a state with enough money laying around that they can take on the extra expenses of attempting to carry out these laws and fight the inevitable court challenges.  But....Guess what........... They don't have money laying around. Oklahoma is just another deadbeat red state. For every dollar the pay to federal government, they take $1.36 (2005 figures). Who pays the difference? We liberal producers in the blue states have to subsidize the lazy moochers in the red states.

At least it must be nice to live in a state where all the state's problems are solved giving the legislature free time to waste passing unenforceable, unworkable, unconstitutional, and mostly symbolic laws.

It's amazing how much the modern conservative movement is based on spite. Just last week, a study was released showing that conservatives will be less likely to buy something, that they would otherwise have bought, if you say it's good for the environment  Reread the Oklahoma bragging points again; almost all of them list offending someone--the ACLU, the feds, pelosi, liberals--as a positive point. No matter how wrong headed an idea is, if they think it will offend some imaginary liberal, they're for it. Along with refusing to accept that they lost the last election, spite is one of their primary motivations.

I will give the writer one thing, he or she is not so lacking in self-awareness that they'll claim to be American patriots or "constitutional conservatives." They are neither. Spite is more important than either of those ideas. They are perfectly happy to celebrate unconstitutional actions and even suggest treason if it means getting their way and offending liberal strawmen.

Let me suggest a new slogan for them: Oklahoma--We'll wipe our butts with the Constitution if we think it will offend a liberal.

Book update

After lots of procrastination and fussing, I finally sent off the book proposal last night. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or terrified at the moment.

The CSA constitution in light of the secession ordinances

Over the last four years, conservatives have tried to own the constitution, just as they have for the last half century owned the flag and patriotism. And, once again, liberals are making a monstrous mistake by not fighting for it. Liberals also love and support the constitution. That we interpret it differently than conservatives does not mean we do not believe in it.

I read the Constitution. I keep a little one right here on the desk next to a copy of Archy and Mehitabel. These are the only books on the desk. I also read other constitutions. A few years back I went through all the state constitutions to see what they said about religious rights. Every so often I read the Confederate Constitution. Like the secession ordinances, it's a very interesting view into what was important to them at the time they seceded.

Let's review the secession ordinances. Five of the eleven seceding states gave reasons for doing so. Those states were South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Texas and Arkansas. The one reason they all agreed on was that the victory of the Republicans in the recent election made them sure that abolitionists would use the power of the state to end slavery. The next most common complaint was that the northern states refused to enforce fugitive slave laws. Three states specifically cited slavery being excluded from most of the western Territories. Two were upset that Black men were allowed to vote in the North. Arkansas was upset that slave owners were prevented from bringing their slaves with them when traveling in the North and Texas was upset that the federal government didn't do enough to prevent Indian attacks.

All this is preface to the Confederate Constitution. These were the immediate stated reasons for secession. Surely, there were other, broader issues that they cared about? Yes, there were. That's still true today. Different regions have different priorities. Depending on the makeup of their populations, their economies, and and their geographic positions, some things will matter more than others. The Confederate Constitution reflects what mattered to the slave-holding states in 1861. Today, I'll talk about how the Confederate Constitution dealt with their grievances over slavery. In the next installation of Treason Appreciation Month, I'll look at what it has to say about big government and states' rights.

How did the Confederate States of America get their constitution? The United States Constitution was the result of months of deliberation by some of the greatest minds of the thirteen states and tested by more months of public debate before being ratified. That's not how the Confederates did it. In fact, their Constitution was an afterthought.

On January 11, 1861, Alabama was the fourth state to secede. While the previous three secession ordinances speak only for their specific states and the immediate moment. Alabama's ordinance envisioned a common front among all slave states, whether for defense, negotiation, or other purposes. By resolution, Alabama invited all of the slave states to meet in Montgomery on February 4 "for the purpose of consulting with each other as to the most effectual mode of securing concerted and harmonious action in whatever measures may be deemed most desirable for our common peace and security." When the convention met, they were pretty much decided on forming a new federation and promptly empowered a committee to write a constitution. They gave them two days to do so. Fortunately, one of the members of the committee already had a constitution in his pocket and by the due date they had completed the task and already had copies to pass around the convention.

Considering the short work involved, it should surprise no one that the Confederate Constitution is nothing more than a revision of the Union Constitution. They did not begin anew from first principles; they simply changed those parts they didn't like. The easiest change they made was to go through and change the word "United" into "Confederate" wherever it appeared.

Next, they added God. Today, it's common wisdom among Christian nationalists that the founding fathers intended the US to be a Christian nation. They just, uh, forgot to mention that when they wrote the Constitution or when they wrote that amendment about established religion. What did the good Christians of the Bible belt do to fix this? I think most modern Christian nationalists would say "not enough." To the Preamble, they added, "invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God." Where dates were mentioned, they used the form "year of our Lord." Other than that, they gave squat to Christianity. The First Amendment was carried over unchanged into their Constitution.

What else did they change? There are a number of line by line comparisons on the internet. That's the best way to go. The first time I read the Confederate Constitution was in a paperback book of Civil War documents published in the seventies with brackets and fonts to indicate what the Confederates kept, added, changed, and deleted. It was fascinating, but it took a lot of close attention and note-taking to understand. The internet version I most often go to these days is this one. I like the simple two-column comparison with a third column for comments.

The Confederate Constitution is very clear on the issues of slavery. Whereas the US Constitution never uses the word "slave"--using instead circumlocutions like "Persons bound to Service--the Confederate Constitution makes clear exactly what they mean by using the word "slave" whenever they mean slave. As far as the issue of slavery is concerned, the most important clause in the entire constitution is in the list of things Congress cannot do: Article I, section 9, part 4, "No ... law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." The common complaint in the secession ordinances was that they feared the Republicans would attempt to use the power of the central to abolish slavery. This clause puts that fear to rest. Three of the other complaints are specifically dealt with.

The US Constitution already had a clause dealing with with fugitive slaves (Art. IV, Sec. 2, Pt. 1). The complaint of the southern states was that the northern states refused to enforce it. This should not have been a problem in the Confederacy, unless non-slave states were admitted at some date in the future. Their only changes to the clause were to make it more clear and emphatic.

Arkansas' complaint that slave owners were prevented from bringing their slaves with them when traveling in other states was dealt with in a very clear manner. Article IV, Section 2, Part 1, which in the US Constitution reads "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States..." was changed by the addition of "...and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired." Again, this should not have been a problem in the Confederacy, unless non-slave states were admitted. The final clause prevents any kind of shenanigans whatsoever.

The issue of taking in additional states was something that the architects of the Confederacy had on their minds. Pro-South groups existed throughout the West. If the secession crisis had happened a year later, there might very well have been a friendly territory carved out of southern California. After the shooting started, the leaders of the main tribes in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) agreed to join the Confederacy. Rather that go east to fight the Union, Texas sent part of its armies west where they created a territory called Arizona. The Confederate Constitution kept the the same provisions as the US Constitution that allowed the central government to administer territory not belonging to any individual state, to organize territorial governments, and to admit territories as new states (Art. IV, Sec. 3). Naturally, a new clause was added that required all territories to allow slave owners to bring their slaves and guaranteed that all new states would be slave states. one unexplained difference between the two constitutions it that the Confederate Constitution required a two-thirds majority in congress to admit a new state while the US only required a simple majority.

The final complaint in the secession ordinances was that northern states allowed free Black men full citizenship, including the vote*. One of the clauses of the Amendment offered by Arkansas to save the Union was that freedmen in  other states be disenfrancised. South Carolina cited racial equality in the North as one of the insults suffered by the South. Texas indignantly proclaimed that it was an "undeniable truth that the governments of the various States ...  were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity." While the other complaints were dealt with in a very specific manner, this one is not.

Since the reason for the secessions and the formation of the Confederacy was the preservation of a system of race-based subjugation  it's curious that nothing is said in the Confederate Constitution about limiting citizenship, or the vote, or anything to just the White race. The word "White" never appears. Did they think it was too obvious to mention? That would be an odd thing to think. All of the revisions made to the Constitution relating to slavery, were made to make explicit things they believed understood by all that had been interpreted by the rest of the Union in ways that hurt slave owners. How difficult would it have been to shove in a sentence that said only White folk could become citizens and exercise the rights of citizenship. Perhaps, to them, it was so obvious that they didn't think to mention it.

Next: Big Government, States' Rights, and the Rest of the Confederate Constitution.

* I was always under the impression that Louisiana Freemen did have the right to vote. Does anyone know the details on this?