Oooh, pretty.

That’s something called the Athena Bowl, a treasure recovered from a buried hoard in Germany.

In 1868, soldiers from an Imperial Prussian Army regiment discovered a hoard of dozens of ancient silver artifacts while constructing a new shooting range near the city of Hildesheim in central Germany. The Hildesheim treasure included elaborate and expensive tableware, including the Athena bowl, that may have belonged to Publius Quinctilius Varus or another Roman military commander who fought against Germanic tribes in the first century.

Fortunately, it ended up in a museum. If I found it, I’d be proudly serving soup in it. In my neighborhood, though, all we ever dig up is the occasional fossil and worthless old rocks.

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 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.

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.

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.