Madison on Mars

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock--Margaret Hasley

A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions. Organic farming uses more land than conventional. Technology has put us on a path to a cleaner, greener planet.--Ridley

Preclinical studies and clinical trials have shown that intermittent fasting has broad-spectrum benefits for many health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurologic disorders. Animal models show that intermittent fasting improves health throughout the life span, whereas clinical studies have mainly involved relatively short-term interventions, over a period of months. It remains to be determined whether people can maintain intermittent fasting for years and potentially accrue the benefits seen in animal models. Furthermore, clinical studies have focused mainly on overweight young and middle-age adults, and we cannot generalize to other age groups the benefits and safety of intermittent fasting that have been observed in these studies.--nejm

Second Sleep is very good but it is tough.

It’s a very important and mostly overlooked point that a key difference between socialism and capitalism is that socialism is a “system” that necessarily requires a top-down “consciously created system manipulated by it creators” — elected officials and government bureaucrats — and free-market capitalism is an unplanned, organic, anti-systematic, bottoms-up form of economic organization directed by spontaneous order and impersonal market forces. And the main difference between socialism and capitalism? Capitalism works. --Perry

                                 Madison on Mars

The talk about a Mars colony is beginning to warm up. The motives are many between NASA and SpaceX, some wildly optimistic, some just crushingly depressing. But a common theme is, how to govern the colony. Of course, everyone feels obligated to make their own improvement on the U.S. Constitution--which contains the always-welcome opportunity to bash the Americans. But, despite the profound philosophical and practical appeals of the U.S. founding documents, the source for inspiration has drifted toward unintended communities in the past and what we can learn from them. I.E. Shipwrecks. Shipwrecks! Nothing better than setting up a political structure using as a blueprint an unplanned catastrophe. The elites probably see anything done without their control is exactly that. 

Acting as if these events have a lot of commonalities other than disaster, these people are dissecting these events for clues. In a recent article by Michael Shermer in Quillette,
"lessons from the Federalist Papers may be less useful than lessons from what may be called unintentional communities, such as shipwrecked sailors stranded on remote islands. These are explored by the evolutionary sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his 2019 book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society ."
"At the core of all good societies, theorizes Christakis, is a suite of eight social characteristics, including: (1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity; (2) Love for partners and offspring; (3) Friendship; (4) Social networks; (5) Co-operation; (6) Preference for one’s own group (“in-group bias”); (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism); and (8) Social learning and teaching.

To test this hypothesis, Christakis analyzed a database of shipwreck survivors over a 400-year span from 1500 to 1900, with initial survival colony populations ranging from four to 500, with a mean of 119. (The number of rescued survivors ranged from three to 289, with a mean of 59.) The duration of these unplanned societies ranged from two months to fifteen years, with a mean of twenty months."

"Some of the survivors killed and ate each other, while others survived and flourished. What made the difference? 'The groups that typically fared best were those that had good leadership in the form of mild hierarchy (without any brutality), friendships among the survivors, and evidence of co-operation and altruism,' Christakis concludes. The successful shipwreck societies shared food equitably, took care of the sick and injured survivors, and worked together digging wells, burying the dead, building fires and building escape boats. There was little hierarchy…While onboard their ships, officers and enlisted men were separated, but on land, successful castaways integrated everyone in a co-operative, egalitarian and more horizontal structure."

An inviting one is The Bounty mutiny and its aftermath.

Shermer continues. "Arguably the most famous of these unintentional communities began taking form in the early morning hours of April 28, 1789, when Fletcher Christian, a Master’s Mate and acting lieutenant on the HMS Bounty, seized control of the ship from Captain William Bligh. Christian released the captives into a 23-foot launch (all but one of these men would survive), and sailed the Bounty into the mists of history. A decade later, when the only surviving mutineer, John Adams, was found on Pitcairn Island, he would relate a cautionary tale for future Martians about how not to set up a new society.

The Bounty originally had departed Portsmouth on December 23, 1787. Ten months and 27,010 miles later, it arrived in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, where it was anchored for five months, plenty of time for the young male crew members—along with Christian, the leading mutineer—to become romantically involved with native women. After departing Tahiti, a number of the smitten men grew restless without their love interests, and bristled under the discipline imposed on them by Bligh for relatively minor offenses. This is what led to the explosive response that fateful April morning in 1789.

After seizing the ship, Christian and his followers returned to Tahiti (folllwing a brief and bloody attempt to settle on the island of Tubuai). But on September 23, 1789, they left Tahiti for good, knowing that death awaiated them when the Royal Navy tracked them down. At this point, the Bounty was carrying a total of nine male mutineers, six Tahitian men, and eleven Tahitian women. On January 15, 1790, they arrived at one of the remotest rocks in the Pacific, Pitcairn Island. There, they unloaded the ship, and later torched it in a final gesture of commitment to their new life on this far-flung outpost.

A 1790 painting by Robert Dodd depicts mutineers casting off Captain William Bligh and 18 others.

The seeds of failure already were apparent in the sex ratio: 15 men, 11 women. Not good. After three years, the woman living with mutineer John Williams died, so he took the wife of one of the Polynesian men, leading to jealousy, violence and, on September 20, 1793, retribution. Five of the mutineers ended up dead, including Christian, along with all of the Polynesian men. In the years after the massacre, one mutineer committed suicide, another was murdered, and another died of asthma. By 1808, the only male survivor was Adams, who told the tale of the Bounty’s fate and the horrors of Pitcairn Island in the years following his discovery by American sealers in 1808. (He lived until 1829, and eventually was granted amnesty for his role in the mutiny.)

The mutineers failed to find the right balance between hierarchy and egalitarianism. Both Bligh and Christian were products of the Royal Navy, very much steeped in its rigid protocols. On the Bounty, it was the hierarchical tensions between Bligh and Christian that led to the mutiny. And on Pitcairn island, corresponding tensions between Christian and the mutineers, and between the mutineers and the male Taitians, when added to the sex-ratio imbalance and accompanying jealousy and violence, led to almost everyone’s demise.

The lessons from Pitcairn are clear enough: Start off with a balanced sex ratio, structure a political system more horizontal than hierarchical, eliminate bigoted attitudes, and accentuate co-operation and attenuate competition."

So, the sociologists and amateur kingdom-builders are leading the way to new and better human associations, using as models, calamities. It is hard to believe anyone takes these people seriously. But they have an ace. We've got a lot of confidence in models. But as Charles Krauthammer wrote, “You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933...Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”