Oh look, another libertarian do-nothing

For reasons unimportant to this post, I was searching through this blog for past entries about Helen Dale, and was reminded that she had written this in 2013:

5. Libertarians in particular need to drop their widespread refusal to accept the reality of climate change. It makes us look like wingnuts and diverts attention from the larger number of greenies who spew pseudoscience on a daily basis. 

A year after that, she started her (brief) career as a staffer for David Leyonhjelm, the accidental Senator whose party's policy is still a facade for denialism:

Scientific evidence suggests that the Earth’s climate has changed throughout its existence, sometimes dramatically, and that changes in climate have impacted human civilisation. Much of human history has been subject to the effects of global warming or cooling – the origins of the Sumerian, Babylonian and perhaps also biblical stories of a great flood, for example, are probably due to a massive rise in sea levels following global warming 7,600 years ago.

Global cooling from 1300 to 500 BC gave rise to the advance of glaciers, migration, invasion and famine. The Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 AD led to the Vikings establishing colonies and trade routes.

Whether human activity is causing climate change or not, the important issue is whether governments are capable of implementing policies that mitigate it without reducing the prosperity of future generations.

Should the evidence become compelling that global warming is due to human activity, that such global warming is likely to have significantly negative consequences for human existence, and that changes in human activity could realistically reverse those consequences, the Liberal Democrats would favour market-based options.

And Leyonhjelm himself makes denialist quality tweets, such as:

 I also see (from her Facebook page, I think) that Dale is attending the Friedman Conference in Sydney later this month, which as I have already noted, is having climate change denialists Ian Plimer and "Jonova" as speakers.

What's the bet that Dale will not make a scene at the conference about it inviting as speakers only full blown climate change deniers?  

And that Chris Berg will appear on the ABC again and not be challenged about his similar status as fellow traveller with climate change denialism.  

Intense rain, climate change, again..

It's long been a theme here that new records for intensity of rainfall and resultant flooding, due to even the relatively modest increase in the atmosphere's water carrying capacity is likely the first big problem with climate change in many parts of the world.

And it's a hard one to deal with:   sure, in theory, you can argue that flood prone cities can prepare themselves by spending more on higher capacity drainage systems.  But replacing pipes and drains of one diameter that used to be adequate 100 years ago with significantly larger drains to cope with the increased frequency of intense, overwhelming rainfall, is  surely going to be very expensive; and for a regional government it is not going to be clear which particular location is going to face an unexpected downpour first.

Why on earth should I think that the economic modelling of climate change effects could be accurately making estimates of that when tallying up the figures for their estimates of when the benefits of climate change crosses the line of being clearly outweighed by the harm?    I would think they can put a rough estimate of of the cost of increased damage from flooding - they've got some historical guidelines for that - but as flooding increases, governments will be under pressure to pre-empt them by the expensive sorts of capital works that I would think is very, very hard to estimate.


Anyway, these thoughts were inspired by the news of (what sounds like) a new rainfall record in Hawaii, which has caused lots of damage:

A staggering rainstorm on the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Kauai is the latest clue that climate change-related impacts are already threatening the islands. On April 14 and 15, a gauge in Waipa recorded 49 inches of rain in 24 hours. For perspective, the rains from Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches last year, occured over a four-day span.  

The state is still assessing the full extent of damage, and Gov. David Ige recently announced a plan to help farmers who suffered losses during the storm. More than 220 people had to be airlifted to safety by the Army and National Guard as a major road was blocked by landslides. A herd of bison was carried off by the flood waters, with some animals having to be rescued from the ocean.

A group within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that investigates extreme weather and climate events is analyzing the storm to  determine whether the storm broke the national record for the most rainfall within a 24-hour period.

The current 24-hour record  is 43 inches, set in Alvin, Texas in 1979.

Setting a new record will be just the latest reminder that as the climate warms,  parts of Hawaii are already experiencing bigger torrential rains and will likely see more frequent tropical cyclones. Pao-Shin Chu, Hawaii’s state climatologist and a professor at the University of Hawaii, noted that his research showed that the Big Island has seen more frequent heavy rains in the past 50 years.

“If given a one degree C warming, the atmospheric moisture is expected to increase by 7 percent. With this additional moisture available in the air, it may help trigger heavy downpours if other conditions are right,” Chu said by email.

Of course, the damage caused in a rural area is not even necessarily preventable by better drainage.   It can be hard to retain a hillside if it collapses.

Here's a recent article, too, from DW about extreme weather being validly linked to climate change is increasingly proved by science.  Interesting that it deals with the Roger Pielke Jr claim that that increased costs from weather events is more related to increased building in risk prone areas (and therefore not proof there are more extreme events causing damage.)   The insurance industry doesn't believe it; scientists don't believe it.   And Pielke Jr's continuing contrarianism is fading from influence, anyway.  Good.

A cluster of a rare, unpleasant disease

Ocular melanoma?  Hadn't even heard of it, and for some unfortunate people from a town in the USA, there's a cluster of it for completely unknown reason.

Read about it at NPR.

Pascoe has a point

See his tweet here, about how way low company tax in the UK is not helping their economic growth much.  Read the thread too.   Perhaps I like his point further down more:

Everyone's an expert

Hey, I see via an extract at Catallaxy that Henry Ergas is critical of the Gonski 2 report on education, and this is what he thinks:

No one could sensibly blame the subsequent worsening on ­inadequate funding. Having grown by almost 30 per cent in real terms since 2000-01, public ­expenditure per student is at all-time highs. Nor are there too few teachers: while the number of ­students increased by 25 per cent during the past 40 years, teacher numbers rose 60 per cent, halving the student-teacher ratio compared with the 60s.

What has changed, however, is that how well students do in school no longer matters. University places used to be tightly ­rationed, and tertiary admission depended on the scores students received on completing secondary schooling; now, with 44 per cent of students proceeding to university and that proportion set to rise further, test scores scarcely have any enduring impact.

The contrast with the countries whose performance the report wants us to emulate could not be starker. Although the report seems entirely unaware of this fact, in Japan, South Korea and the Chinese-speaking jurisdictions — which invariably dominate the league tables — matriculation rankings are the primary factor determining students’ long-term prospects. Put in the language of sociology, these systems are sternly unforgiving, offering few or no second chances.

And even in Finland, whose ­approach is less harsh, Amanda Ripley’s widely acclaimed book, The Smartest Kids in the World, concludes that “school is hard, and tests affect students’ lives”, “creating a bright line” that shapes ­future career opportunities.

 He might have half a point here, but has he seen anything about the ridiculous extra curricular tuition system in Korea, in particular?   You can obviously go too far in that direction, making student's lives an absolute misery; but yeah, it'll make your education system's average performance look good internationally.  

And I'm not sure if it is true still, but I understood that the Japanese system used to be mainly about getting into a good university, but the degree of work involved in many of the arts/business university courses once a student got in was pretty easy.   

I also find it hard to be too critical of the "alternative paths" emphasis to get into university now.  I mean, I think it really is clear that some 17 year old students just haven't reached the level of maturity needed to devote themselves to higher education, but that may well change within a couple of years.

I also like the way that medical schools here do check the personality suitability of people to do medical degrees now.  

I don't think our education system is perfect, and it is really frustrating the degree to which teaching is pretty clearly prone to fads and ideas that flow in and out of popularity every decade.   I mean, I thought Naplan testing was a pretty obviously good idea, but didn't really realise that some teachers had opposed it from the start as setting up the system to be gamed by schools that would use the test in ways that were not intended.  The Naplan skeptics seem to have won the day, too.  Or at least, that is my impression.

Currently, when I look at the matter of how teachers are supposed to assess work submitted by my high school attending son and daughter, my overwhelming impression is that the academics are still very prone to overcomplicating the theory of teaching and assessment.   But even then, without my having studied teaching and education, I don't really know whether my gut reaction is right, or whether the assessment criteria they use now are much better than what used to exist.  

So the frustrating thing is that everyone thinks they are an expert, and it is very hard to judge the better way forward.   And it is always treated like a neverending crisis, yet we still end up feeling pretty comfortable that we're making new engineers, doctors and scientists who aren't endangering our lives with their incompetence.   So it can't be that bad, surely.  

The Russians prey on the paranoid streak in the US right

The Guardian reports:

Speculation about a US armed forces exercise that led some Texans to fear that the Obama administration was plotting martial law was stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign, according to a former director of the CIA.

Russian bots were so successful in planting wild ideas during a military exercise called Jade Helm in 2015 that Russian social media bandits launched another offensive the following year, attempting to influence the presidential election itself, Michael Hayden told MSNBC.

“There was an exercise in Texas called Jade Helm 15 that Russian bots and the American alt-right media convinced most – many – Texans that Obama planned to round up political dissidents, and it got so much traction that the governor of Texas had to call up the [state guard] to observe the federal exercise to keep the population calm,” said Hayden, who was CIA director from 2006 to 2009 after serving as director of the National Security Agency.

“At that point I’m figuring the Russians are saying: ‘We can go big time.’ And at that point I think they made the decision: we’re going to play in the electoral process,” Hayden said on Morning Joe on Wednesday.

So, the Trumpkin, wingnut Right don't realise how easily they are manipulated by a foreign nation's BS rumour mill, and when evidence to show that they were manipulated comes out, they have to reject it in order to deny their gullibility.

What a bad state for American politics.

Meet the future incels

A distinct lack of female faces amongst this group of American high school students having a counter protest to the March for our Lives gun restrictions rallies.   And what's the "Saturdays are for the the boys" meme?   Is that the day their divorced dads take them to the range?

Update:  This is the explanation of the relatively recent, US specific, "Saturdays are for the boys" meme.   It says that when it became popular:

Over the next few months, the hashtag took off, as men shared videos of their various acts of drunken debauchery with the hashtag on Instagram and Twitter. 

 So yeah, just what you want a bunch of young gun rights dudes to be hoping to get into - drunken debauchery with guns.

Hitler's bones

Slate talks at length about a new book published in France, in which the authors explain that a re-examination of a bit of jaw held by the Russians re-affirms earlier conclusions that it is from Hitler.   A piece of skull the Russians also hold - that's not so clear.  But the teeth in the jaw allow for some reasonable certainty:

Sognnaes and Ström did not have access to the actual jawbone and relied on testimonies of Hitler’s dentist and physicians, X-ray plates taken after a 1944 assassination attempt, and findings of the Russian autopsy to assert that “Hitler did in fact die, and that the Russians did indeed recover and autopsy the right body.” 

Charlier analyzed the teeth with a stereo microscope and was even able to dissect a few particles he involuntarily brought back with him in France, stuck to his laboratory gloves, and concluded that the jawbone presented to him is not a “historical forgery.” He asserts: “We are certain of the anatomical correspondence between the radiographies, the descriptions of the autopsies, the tales of the witnesses, especially those who made these dental prostheses, and what we had in hands.” Brisard and Parshina add, with similar confidence: “We can state that Hitler died in Berlin on April the 30th, 1945. Not in Brazil at 95, nor in Japan, nor in the Argentinian Andes. The proof is scientific, not ideological. Coldly scientific.”

One line struck me as a bit like something out of James Bond, or Mission Impossible:

The description of their investigations makes for a lively tale, full of appointments not honored, rude secretaries, and unexpected twists, like the purchase of a bottle of Armenian cognac to mollify an archivist or a visit to a storage room where all oxygen is expulsed at night to trap any illegal visitors.

Malthus, Thanos and workhouses

Given that the Avengers movie (not very wisely, in my opinion) gives the villain-in-chief Malthusian/environmental motives for laying waste to countless numbers of people across the universe, it's interesting that I just stumbled across a Philosophy Now article that looks at Malthus himself and his specious argument.

I see that Malthus actually changed his views in one key respect, but (so the article argues) his initial pessimism continued to be very influential:

In 1805 Malthus was appointed to the first professorship of Political Economy in England, at the new East India College in Haileybury, where he remained until his death. His Principles of Political Economy, published in 1820, was much more upbeat than the population Essay. Here, in fact, Malthus saw food production sufficient for centuries to come. Yet he did not alter later versions of the population essay accordingly. And those who controlled all the major journals in the field of economics ignored – indeed snubbed – his Principles. Thus when Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics the “dismal science” in 1849, it was due to Malthus’s population theory, not his economic theory....

....when Malthus says in the first Essay that the existing English poor relief laws “tend to increase population,” while doing nothing to increase the food supply, he thinks he is describing the actual world.....In the end Malthus is posing a hypothetical, not an actual problem. And hypothetical problems don’t require draconian solutions.

Besides, it’s not as if the existing Elizabethan Poor Laws, in force since 1601, were generous. Nonetheless the New Poor Laws of 1834 tightened the screws, mandating that workhouses be built in every parish as the sole source of poor relief, and that conditions there be worse than what the poorest free laborers could find on their own. Husbands and wives were separated from each other, lest they continue to multiply, and even from their children. Yet even so, workhouses could be better than life outside.

The situation provided plenty of material for Charles Dickens. In A Christmas Carol (1843) Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to donate to the poor. “Are there no prisons,” he snaps? “Are there no workhouses?” But “many cannot go there,” he is told, “and many would rather die.” Scrooge: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” As one Dickens scholar remarks, “Malthus hung over England like a cloud.”

The article notes that workhouses did not officially end in England until 1929 - much later than I would have expected.

Which led me to have a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on the matter of English workhouses.

It's quite interesting, and includes this photo from 1911 - barely over 100 years ago - of women eating dinner at the St Pancras workhouse:

It's good to have been born in the second half of the 20th century.

An over-egged argument with an element of truth?

He does go on at unnecessary length, but I could see his point, at least in parts:

Peak superhero? Not even close: How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism

Saudi Arabia - sort of joining the early 20th century 118 years late

A good article at NPR about the Saudis feeling some "culture shock" at the sudden attempt at modernizing social views by their new Crown Prince.

I didn't know baby photos had once been banned for religious reasons, for goodness sake:

Comedian Khaled Omar takes the mic and begins his act, lamenting how he has no baby pictures of himself. His parents ripped up the family photos in the early 1980s, when ultra-conservative religious authorities deemed photographs haram — forbidden, they said, by God...

Omar's punchline gets a good laugh: Now, he says, not only are photos suddenly not forbidden — but all the people who banned or tore pictures up are now happily posing for selfies. He still wants to know what happened to all his baby pictures.

Conservative towns are having a hard time accepting it:

While some rumblings of discontent are apparent in the kingdom's big cities, it's more obvious in smaller towns, such as Huraymila, about an hour's drive north of Riyadh, past plenty of camels and new construction in the desert. The town of wide boulevards and squat, sand-colored buildings has a conservative reputation. You can't buy cigarettes, and music in public remains unwelcome. When the government entertainment authority tried to stage a concert here a few months ago, the town refused to attend it.

They are also going to be encouraging tourism, for like, the first time ever?:

Consider the changes in April alone: The kingdom rolled out its plans for its first-ever tourist visas, held its first Arab fashion week and opened its first cinema in 35 years.

A 26-year-old man in Riyadh, wearing a thobe, a long white gown, says the changes are nothing short of shocking.

It's about the last country I would be comfortable visiting.  Well, maybe after North Korea. I can just imagine the ease with which one could be framed for doing black magic, or for looking lustfully at a woman, or something weirdly specific to their still antiquated beliefs.  I mean, seriously, this report is just from November 2017:

In the midst of Riyadh’s latest “anti-corruption purge” carried out by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a government body elsewhere was busy giving a course in defeating an alternative form of evil hiding between the walls… black magic.

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice concluded a training programme on Wednesday called the "development of scientific skills in the fight against witchcraft."

The course took place in Ramada al-Hada in the city of Taif, located in the Mecca province, southwest of the country.

The 27 participants of the programme were taught how to “scientifically battle witchcraft,” and received certificates of attendance from the head of the Taif Governorate, Sheikh Yahya bin Ali al-Hazmi.

Distressing comedy news

I missed that the ABC has renewed the woeful "Tonightly" with Tom Ballard.

It has been distressing me that it has also leaked like a broken sewer pipe out of ABC Comedy channel (why did they think it was worth doing that - they have been struggling to find enough old and new shows to fill it) onto the main ABC channel.

I dropped in on it last night to see if Ballard was still as bad as I formerly found him.

Yes, he is.  Still swearing like a bogan in a pub (to no effect other than as a sort of repetitive  punctuation), and with a delivery that is pretty much always begging for laughs: half acknowledging that the humour that he just tried didn't really work.   I read someone at Catallaxy, CL I think, described the audience as always giving "pity laughs", and for once, I think he is reading something right.

It's an appallingly underwritten show with an appalling host, and a pretty tiny audience.   I hope it's cheap to make, as I can see no other potential justification for not giving it a mercy killing. 

Low islands and climate change, revisited

Early in the life of this blog, I used to criticise the reporting of politicians and environmentalists claims about sea level rise being about to cause the more-or-less immediate demise of low lying Pacific islands.   The situation, when you looked at the details, was more complex, and this was hardly ever reported.

Move forward, and there was a recent report which climate ignoramus Andrew Bolt seized upon with glee - 

The Pacific nation of Tuvalu—long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels—is actually growing in size, new research shows.

A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu's nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery.
It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.

I meant to comment on it at the time, because, I thought, a mere small growth in the area of a low lying island (caused by currents pushing around sand and ground up coral, I believe) tells us nothing about the habitability of the island.   The immediate problem with sea levels that I had seen on some documentary shows was the ground water becoming replaced with salt water.  

An article at Carbon Brief explains this well, and supports my hunch from earlier this year.  A new paper suggests that many low lying atolls will be uninhabitable due to the groundwater issue earlier than expected - perhaps by mid 21st century.

Not everyone agrees - it would seem that New Zealand (which was the source of the "Tuvalu is growing" study) has some scientists who are busy downplaying the issue.   (Given New Zealand's reputation as a lifeboat island for South Pacific islanders, one wonders if there is a bit of a motivation for such studies.)

So, I still think my early criticisms of media gullibility on the issue were valid;  just as my criticism of climate change denialist's complete dismissal of the very same issue is valid now. 

Not just aged in oak, but made from oak

Not at all sure why anyone would bother even trying this, but the Japanese can be pretty innovative:

Discerning drinkers may soon be able to branch out after Japanese researchers said Tuesday they have invented a way of producing an alcoholic drink made from wood. The researchers at Japan's Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute say the bark-based beverages have woody qualities similar to which is aged in wood barrels. They hope to have their "wood alcohol" on shelves within three years.

The method involves pulverising wood into a creamy paste and then adding yeast and an enzyme to start the fermentation process.

By avoiding using heat, researchers say they are able to preserve the specific flavour of each tree's wood.

So far, they have produced tipples from cedar, birch and cherry.

I like this understatement further down:

The institute has a broad mandate for scientific study related to Japan's extensive woods and forests, but Magara acknowledged "wood alcohol" might not be the most obvious application for their research resources.

The blog for the over 50's incel crowd

My internal reaction to 99% of cartoon critic Tom's comments at Catallaxy:  "What a miserable sad sack." 

Made me laugh

What with the bizarre news from Trump's former "Dr Nick" looking doctor (not that people didn't suspect that Trump wrote his own medical endorsement), I was amused by this tweet:

More Avengers

I was reading the comments after a good review at The Guardian for Avengers:  Infinity War.    The great majority were very positive, and when Guardian readers endorse something so American, you know it probably is pretty good.

I also agree with David Roberts' tweet:

And there is amusement to be had in the sarcastic responses to the criticism made by Richard Brody at the New Yorker that you had to have seen the last 10 years of Marvel films to understand this one.  (Actually, as I explained in my previous post, I've missed plenty of Marvel movies, but seen enough that I knew nearly all of the main characters - and a couple of minor Avengers don't get to do much in this one anyway.)  It does seem silly to criticise a movie in a long line of sequels for being a sequel.   

Quite ridiculous

This case of the white Utah student wearing a Chinese dress to her prom, and getting attacked for "cultural appropriation" is quite ludicrous.   It's worrying that so many tweeted in support of the complainant Jeremy Lam.  His take on the matter makes no sense at all - why the heck isn't a white woman wearing the same dress that (allegedly) was a symbol of Chinese female empowerment not seen an endorsement of the (alleged) same positive meaning behind its creation?   And what of expensive European fashion labels having stores in Beijing and Shanghai?  Why isn't cashed up Chinese women buying, I don't know, a beret "culturally appropriating" from the French?  Actually, now that I Google it:

It’s a classic Shanghai sight: older Chinese men sporting rakish berets. The iconic headwear of the French never seems to have gone out of style among gentlemen of a certain age in Shanghai, a legacy formed during the period of the French Concession (1849-1945). Some hypothesize that since famous revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara also favored these practical chapeaux, Chinese men may have felt comfortable wearing them post-1949. Patrick Cranley’s been on the streets of Frenchtown and beyond, documenting the laokele (distinguished Shanghai gentlemen) and their berets.

So both the French and the Cubans should be complaining about cultural appropriation?   They don't?  Because complaining about cross border fashion is a nonsense!

He supports Trump

Evidence of the, um, surprising views held by some high profile Trump supporters.  A full quote from Kayne West:

In a montage of clips released on the site, West dropped in to chat with host Harvey Levin about being so appalled that people are still upset about slavery. An actual quote:

When you hear about slavery for 400 years—for 400 years? That sound like a choice! Like, you was there for 400 years, and it’s all of y’all? It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word prison, because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. It’s like slavery, Holocaust, Holocaust, Jews. Slavery is blacks. So prison is something that unites us as one race … the human race.

Update:  God knows why I should bother, but in an attempt to be "fair" to West, here's what Allahpundit  thinks he was trying to say, in a spectacularly so-unclear-it's-offensive fashion:

I think his slavery point is metaphorical, sort of. Quote: ““When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word ‘prison’ because ‘slavery’ goes too direct to the idea of blacks. Slavery is to blacks as the Holocaust is to Jews. Prison is something that unites as one race, blacks and whites, that we’re the human race.” Allowing yourself to be mentally enslaved is a choice. Unless you’re also physically enslaved, in which case, ah, you’re probably going to feel mentally enslaved whether you “choose” to or not.

Kanye West, interesting guy!

Historical pants

From Discover, earlier this year, a brief article all about pants in history:

From far above, the area around Yanghai cemetery looks like a collection of ground-dwelling wasp dens, drilled into a gravelly desert. It gets hot in this region of remote western China — up to nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and dry. That’s a hard-knock climate, but it’s perfect for preserving ancient artifacts. And if you zoom in on the region, and dig in, as archaeologists have, you’ll find tombs with well-kept secrets. Inside two of them, scientists found not just human remains but the remains of what covered those humans.

I’m talking about clothes, and not just any clothes: pants. These are the oldest pants (discovered) on Earth — more distressed than any jeans Gap can offer — dating back some 3,000 years. They’re tailored wool, and constructed from sewn-together pieces of uncut fabric. If Project Runway had magically predated television by about 2,930 years, the designer of these leg covers would have had a shot at the win.

Yeah, they are pretty fancy duds for 3,000 years ago:

As to how the fashion caught on, the article goes to explain that horse riding has a lot to do with it:

 “The design of the trousers from Yanghai seems to be a predecessor of modern riding trousers, which, together with other grave goods in the tombs, allows the assumption that the invention of bifurcated lower body garments is related to the new epoch of horseback riding and greater mobility,” says Ulrike Beck, researcher studying the design and construction of early clothing....

While these pants, and their equine-riding wearers, date back to between the 13^th and 10^th century BCE, leg-separating fabric didn’t catch on in Euro-“civilized” (Greek or Roman) culture for a while after that. Only barbarians, those cultured people believed, wore trousers. Take the Scythians, a group of Iranian nomads, or the Hunnu of Central Asia. The Greeks called Middle Easterners’ and Persians’ lower-wear “sacks,” and not in a nice way.

The Greco-Roman fun-making stopped, though, around the time those civilized statue-builders realized that mounted soldiers—cavalry—had a huge advantage over average-heighted people running around on their own two feet. To maintain military dominance, they needed to get atop the equines, to avoid tangling their tunics, and to protect their nether regions. And so, enter pants, which were also warmer as these people expanded northward.

When the Romans wore loose pants, they gave them a nice name: braccae, a word that later became the English “breeches.” And after the Romanics lost their military dominance despite their attire, the people in charge of Europe were full-on horse-riding pants-lovers.

I feel much better educated now...

Update:   This makes a good companion piece to my lengthy 2011 post about the history of cotton (even though the old Chinese pants above are wool.)     I like these self education posts - and have no idea whether anyone else ever does.