Thomas Paine

Target of more than one early American smear campaign. Review of "The life of Thomas Paine", vols 1 and 2.

For an immensely talented, intelligent, and well-meaning man, Thomas Paine had remarkably bad luck at several key junctures of his life. The first was in marriage. No one knows what happened, but he and his wife quickly separated, more or less amicably, leading in part to his desire to move the American Colonies from his native England. Next was in his business dealings. He was not in the least a man of business, and gave away all his writings. This helped make them popular, but left him ultimately penniless. And the little money he had, he gave away freely. Lastly were his political problems in France and with enemies from the American Revolution, which landed him in prison during the French Revolution, and within a hair's breadth of the guillotine.

But he was very fortunate in his biographer, Moncure Conway, who published "The Life of Thomas Paine" in 1892, when lore and records about Paine were still reasonably fresh. Conway was a free-thinker, with deep sympathy with his subject, and this book is as detailed and supportive a biography as one might wish. We all know that Paine published "Common Sense", which cast the arguments for the American revolution in clear, populist language and sparked the national resolve to leave the British empire. He also published a series of follow-up pamphlets during the war, which he served as a foot soldier in Washington's army, that had equally important roles in supporting and funding the war effort, which was continually on the verge of financial and military collapse.

Paine was also an inventor, obsessed with building better bridges, using the improved forms of iron available at the time. This pursuit brought him back to England briefly, where he wrote "Rights of Man", as a response to Edmund Burke's somewhat reactionary "Reflections on the Revolution in France". "Rights of Man" was a comprehensive wrecking ball against monarchichal rule, and was very popular both in England and France. For this, the British government carried out an extensive campaign of villification, prosecuting him for sedition and libel. Paine escaped capture in just the nick of time, crossing the channel and entering France as a hero, feted with parades, and immediately elected to the National Convention.

There, he co-authored a constitution, whose fate illuminates those of the French Revolution in general, and Paine in particular. The National Convention was supposedly a temporary body, empowered, as were the American Continental Congresses and Constitutional Convention, to manage transitional affairs (at first, in France, in collaboration with the king), and to come up with a new constitution. But as crisis piled on crisis, the Convention split into parties- the Girondins and the Montagnards- the latter of whom decided that they didn't need a constitution anyhow, and could rule directly via revolutionary committees. The constitution was scuttled, rule of law went out the window, and the Montagnards, under Robespierre, proceeded to the Terror.

The most interesting and revelatory part of Conway's biography is his detailed account of how Thomas Paine ended up in prison. As a Girondin, and having argued forcefully against executing the king, Paine was definitely on the political outs. The Montagnards soon barred foreigners from serving in the Convention, depriving Paine of his seat. But why send him to prison in December 1793? Here we come to the machinations of the American ambassador to France, Gouverneur Morris. Morris is portrayed as a semi-Tory, supportive of George Washington's nascent reapproachment with Britain, which was consummated in the Jay Treaty of 1795. (Whose fruits would later arrive in the war of 1812.)

Unbeknownst to Paine, Morris also had personal enmities against Paine, who was the most famous and leading American in Paris, functioning in many ways as America's main envoy. The French government sought to remove Morris as ambassador, due to his pro-British, royalist sympathies, but were rebuffed by Washington, helped along by various misreprentations and lies from Morris. This left the French in an awkward position, vis-a-vis their only ally in the world, at which point they started listening to Morris and doing his bidding. And Conway strongly suggests that Morris let it be known at this point that the US would like Paine to be imprisoned, due to insinuations that Paine was a British citizen, a thorn to the Americans, and that Paine had encouraged the activities of the French ambassador to the US, Edmund Genet, who had angered Washington (and his sponsors in the Convention) by organizing pro-French millitias in the US to harry the Spanish in Florida, harass British shipping, and generally encourage party strife, among other vexations.

Conway puts Morris in the center of a plot to imprison, and preferably execute, Thomas Paine, of which just a couple of samples:

"But the fatal far-reaching falsehood of Morris' letter to Jefferson was his assertion that he had claimed Paine as an American. This falsehood, told to Washington, Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, paralyzed all action in America in Paine's behalf; told to the Americans in Paris, it paralyzed further effort of their own."
...
"It may be wondered that Morris should venture on so dangerous a game. But he had secured himself in anything he might choose to do. So soon as he discovered, in the previous summer, that he was not to be removed, and had fresh thunderbolts to wield, he veiled himself from the inspection of Jefferson. This he did in a letter of September 22, 1793. In the quasi-casual way characteristic of him when he is particularly deep, Morris then wrote: 'By the bye, I shall cease to send you copies of my various applications in particular cases, for they will cost .you more in postage than they are worth.' I put in italics this sentence, as one which merits memorable record in the annals of diplomacy."
...
"Told that they must await the action of a distant government, which itself was waiting, for action in Paris, alarmed by the American Minister's hints of danger that might ensue on any misstep or agitation, assured that he was proceeding with the case, forbidden to communicate with Paine, .they were reduced to helplessness. Meanwhile, between silent America and these Americans, all so cunningly disabled, stood the remorseless French Committee, ready to strike or to release in obedience to any sign from the alienated ally, to soothe whom no sacrifice would be too great. Genet had been demanded for the altar of sacred Alliance, but (to Morris' regret) refused by the American government. The Revolution, would have preferred Morris as a victim, but was quite ready to offer Paine."

Paine was eventually freed by the next minister, James Monroe, whom Morris did everything in his power to impede. Monroe claimed Paine as an American Citizen, and that was that. Morris, for his part, escaped in 1794 across the border to Switzerland after getting embroiled in various plots in Paris and becoming even more non-grata than before, and wound up his career in Europe as a royal toady, as Conway puts it: "The ex-Minister went off to play courtier to George III and write for Louis XVIII the despotic proclamation with which monarchy was to be restored in France."

Paine's final landmark work was "Age of Reason", his defense of deism. This led to the most thorough campaign of villification of his life, and long after. What was to the aristocrats of his day and particularly of the American Revolution a common philosophy became in Paine's treatment a popular and populist attack on established religions of all sorts, and the sanctity and veracity of the Bible in particular. Paine derided its fables and contradictions, and proclaimed a simple faith in god, whose evident works were plenty to engender belief, with no need for thrice-told miracles or gold-embroidered priests. While twenty or thirty years before, such a work might have been taken in the revolutionary spirit, America had fallen into a revivalist spirit by this time, and the resurgent methodists and other preachers led a campaign that blackened Paine's reputation for decades, and from which it has only gradually and partially emerged.

One wonders what the Quaker Paine would have made of his religion after Darwin and Lyell, who so thoroughly demolished the deistic reliance on god to explain the most far-reaching and perplexing natural phenomena. I am confident that Paine's intellect, which shines through his writing, would have grappled honestly with these changed circumstances and come out with either a far-attenuated deism, or given it up in favor of full atheism.

• There are many authoritarian institutions in our country.
• It is hard to negotiate with the Taliban.

We'll Keep Earth

The robots can have the rest of the universe.

The Apollo 11 aniversary is upon us, a wonderful achievement and fond memory. But it did not lead to the hopeful new-frontier future that has been peddled by science fiction for decades, for what are now obvious reasons. Saturn V rockets do not grow on trees, nor is space, once one gets there, hospitable to humans. Earth is our home, where we evolved and are destined to stay.

But a few among us have continued taking breathtaking adventures among the planets and toward other stars. They have done pirouettes around the Sun and all the planets, including Pluto. They are our eyes in the heavens- the robots. I have been reading a sober book, Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, which works through in painstaking, if somewhat surreal, detail what artificial intelligence will become in the not too distant future. Whether there is a "singularity" in a few decades, or farther off, there will surely come a time when we can reproduce human level intelligence (and beyond) in machine form. Already, machines have far surpassed humans in memory capacity, accuracy, and recall speed, in the form of databases that we now rely on to run every bank, government, and app. It seems inescapable that we should save ourselves the clunky absurdity, vast expense, and extreme dangers of human spaceflight and colonization in favor of developing robots with increasing capabilities to do all that for us.

It is our fleet of robots that can easily withstand the radiation, weightlessness, vacuum, boredom, and other rigors of space. As they range farther, their independence increases. On the Moon, at 1.3 light seconds away, we can talk back and forth, and control things in near real time from Earth. The Mars rovers, on the other hand, needed to have some slight intelligence to avoid obstacles and carry out lengthy planned maneuvers, being roughly 15 light-minutes from Earth. Having any direct control over rovers and other probes farther afield is increasingly impossible, with Jupiter 35 minutes away, and Neptune four light hours away. Rovers or drones contemplated for Saturn's interesting moon Titan will be over a light hour away, and will need extensive autonomous intelligence to achieve anything.

These considerations strongly suggest that our space program is, or should be in large part joined with our other artificial intelligence and robotics activities. That is how we are going to be able to achieve great things in space, exploring far and wide to figure out how we came to be, what other worlds are like, and whether life arose on them as well. Robots can make themselves at home in the cosmos in a way that humans never will.

Matt Damon, accidentally marooned on Mars.

Bostrom's book naturally delves into our fate, once we have been comprehensively outclassed by our artificial creations. Will we be wiped out? Uploaded? Kept as pets? Who knows? But a reasonable deal might be that the robots get free reign to colonize the cosmos, spreading as far as their industry and inventiveness can carry them. But we'll keep earth, a home for a species that is bound to it by evolution, sentiment, and fate, and hopefully one that we can harness some of that intelligence to keep in a livable, even flourishing, condition.

• Some impressive mind reading.

What Does the Cerebellum Do?

Pianists take note- fine motor and rhythym control happens thanks to this part of the brain. But it isn't just for motor control anymore, either.

The cerebellum is the mini-brain appendage that has finer crenellations than the cortex, as much surface area, (when unfolded), more neurons, more regular structure, and has long been associated with fine motor control, judging from cases where it is defective. But in recent decades, its functions have ramified and now are understood to affect many core brain functions like cognition, pain, and affect, in a supplementary way. Just as we have supplemented computers with special processing units like GPUs, evolution seems to have devised a separate processing unit for our brains.

Removing the cerebellum does not generate paralysis, but severe deficits in movement control (fine-ness, rhythm, timing, balance) as commanded by the higher levels of the cortex. That means the cortical motor commands are not routed entirely through the cerebellum, but are copied to it and supplemented by its outputs on the way to the spinal cord. In evolution, it started as a small module to improve balance (becoming what is now the most primitive part of our cerebellum, the flocculonodular lobe). This gradually extended, in mammals, to refining all sorts of motor control, in the central areas of the human cerebellum. And finally, its lateral lobes are now interconnected with many areas of the neocortex, including executive, memory, and other non-motor locations, evidently to refine, based on feedback, many aspects of our cognition. In the evolution of humans, the cerebellum changed the most, of all brain regions, between Neanderthals and ourselves, suggesting that even so late in evolution, better fine control, whether of motor, social or other functions, became dramatically more important, perhaps through such activities as the creation and use of our many tools, of stone, wood, fibers, etc.

Outline of the typical circuitry of the cerebellum. Main inputs come from the left, vi mossy fibers (MF), which touch directly on the output DCN cells. Their major processes, however, go to granule cells (GC), whose axons form a vast parallel array innervating the dendrites of purkinje cells (PC), which in turn inhibit the deep cerebellar nuclei neurons (DCN), which provide outputs. Separately, by the major theory in the field, some error inputs come into the inferior olive (IO), which has extremely strong inputs to the purkinje cells and can change their long-term behavior, thus constituting training.

The remarkable thing about the cerebellum is its structure- a regimented, once-through architecture that can not have reverberating, recurrent connections like more complex parts of the brain, but instead is massively parallelized, featuring purkinje cells with large but flat pancake-like dendritic trees, shot through at right angles with the parallel fiber axons of the granule cells. The flow of information is input via mossy fibers to the granule cells, which activate the purkinje cells, which inhibit the dense central nuclei cells, which are the source of all outputs. The dense central nuclei cells also get some inputs directly from the input mossy fibers. The overall logic seems to be that the granule cell - purkinje cell circuit selectively dampens what would otherwise be a direct input-output from the mossy fibers through the dense central nuclei cells.

One functional map of the cerebellum, from a very interesting general review of its functions. It is clear that while motor functions are strongly represented, the cerebellum engages many other cognitive issues.

Additionally, center parts of the cerebellum that are most relevant for motion are topographically mapped to body regions, much as the sensory and motor cortexes of the cerebrum are. This supports the idea that the main cerebellar function is a very regimented, if hugely adjustable and sensitive, information transformation from input to output.

There is one more input, from the inferior olive, which gets inputs from the spinal chord, and higher levels of the brain. These neurons have activating processes going to the deep central nuclei and particularly strong connections (climbing fibers) to a purkinje cells, one climbing fiber per target cell. These connections are strong enough to overwhelm all the granule cell inputs, and are thought to be the key "training signal", which, in response to pain or error, adjusts the strength of the granule cell-purkinje cell network. This seems to be what is happening under the hood, piano playing-wise, when one has the jarring experience of hitting wrong notes, and gradually finds that the fingers unconsciously and spontaneously learn to avoid them. What was perhaps a stop-gap tuning mechanism for critical needs of accurate motion turned out, however, to have wider applications.

Detailed tracing of the connections between hippocampus (injection site) and the cerebellum (imaged above). A virus was injected, which travels slowly in retrograde fashion up the axons of neurons projecting from other regions of the brain, in this case, neurons projecting from the cerebellum into the hippocampus. The images show staining (brown) of regions of the cerebellum, with cell bodies in blue.

A recent paper looked at hippocampal connections of the cerebellum, which seem to mediate spatial orientation / navigation- another fine-tuning kind of process. Defects in these connections are seen in autism, for instance. Experiments in mice show that the cerebellum provides some inputs to, and affects and alters activities in the hippocampus, known for roles in short-term memory, and navigation / orientation / mapping. These researchers undertook to track the detailed connections between the two areas, and also established that some portions of each organ oscillate together, at the theta (6-12 Hz) frequency. This oscillation is very strong in the hippocampus, characteristic of being in motion or needing short-term memory, and known to function in spatial navigation. Indeed, they sampled individual purkinje neurons in the cerebellum (of mice) that were phase-locked with this hippocampal rhythm. And they found that for some of these areas, the coherence of the rhythms increased detectably as the mice learned a new navigation task. The cerebellum, as all brain areas, has various rhythms of its own, and to find that some of those may entrain, or at least functionally correlate with, those of other interesting regions of the brain, is very interesting.

"... oscillations within the theta range are thought to support inter-region communication across a wide variety of brain regions. Our finding that cerebello-hippocampal coherence is limited to the 6–12 Hz bandwidth is in keeping with previous studies on cerebro-cerebellar communication in which neuronal synchronization has been observed between the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex."

• Stiglitz on Facebook.
• Should the government ensure full employment?
• Over the Rainbow, quiet arrangement.
• Lies, lies, and more lies.
• Heaven, retracted.
• Sleazy moronic rapist, still president.

En Garde, Libtard!

Review of "Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason", by William Davies

Davies' book offers a deep historical analysis of our current predicament- a post-truth culture of all-out political warfare. Unfortunately, it turns out to be rather disorganized and digressive, despite offering many interesting ideas and pithy mottos. So the reviewer's job becomes one of reconstructing what the argument should have been were it better-edited and organized. A brief outline is that Davies believes that the enlightenment (exemplified by the philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes- no mention of Locke, oddly) generated the idea that a peaceful civic space was possible if the state does two things- monopolizes all violent power, and generates institutions of fact-finding to put policy and political debate on a rational footing, thus founding what we know today as expert/elite-driven technocracy.

Fast-forward to today, and our political space has degenerated back into a semblence of warfare, where information is weaponized, our new internet media is more hospitable to trolls than thought, and political debates revolve around put-downs and insults. The authority of the technocrats has been seeping away for decades, and the natives are restless.

On the whole, I think the philosophical superstructure of this argument is largely trash. Technocracy was hardly heard of till the 50's, when the post-war status of physicists and scientists in general was at a high tide. Civility has waxed and waned dramatically over the decades and centuries, and seems to have more to do with the tides of war and national cohesion than with anyone's philosophy, however influential such ideas can be in the long term in a background way. And Davies' prescription at the end is for the elites to enter the culture and political war at full throttle, since no one cares about their facts, objectivity, or authority any more. That hardly seems to be a philosophically grounded, coherent, or long-term answer to the problem. One can say, however, that the composition of the governing elites has changed over time, from the theologians and aristocrats who are fossilized in the British House of Lords, to the more democratic-minded aristocrats of the enlightenment and American/French revolutions, to the scholarly products of the École normale supérieure, Harvard, etc. who tend to rule the roost, and especially the civil service, today.

"It is scarcely any surprise that politicians, businesses, and civil society actors would want to exploit some of the rhetorical magic of numbers for their own purposes, playing consultants to produce statistics to suit thier interests. ... So much trust has been placed in numbers tht anyone wishing to be trusted (for good reasons or ill inevitably cloaks themselves in a veneer of mathematical reason."

Anyhow, what are some other facets that Davies brings out? One is the varying nature of knowledge as seen by business people, military people, and scholars. While the latter laboriously pile factlet on factlet to create an enduring, public edifice of explicit knowledge, the former operate by the seat of their pants to integrate partial knowledge of the moment for effective action. The former value secrecy and intuition and feelings (especially the anlysis of the feelings of others, competitors, and audiences), while the latter try their best to block feelings from their scholarship, keeping it clean of partisanship and bias.

These are fundamentally different approaches to the world, yet our elite government institutions are largely modeled on scholarship- the painstaking assembly of facts and stakeholders, etc. to come up with well-vetted policy. Again, this is hardly a new distinction however. Davies makes a case that romanticism / nationalism / military thinking crept into the European political systems after the French Revolution, which so dramatically mobilized the populace of France to generate an unprecedented military machine. What were once two distinct things- civil life and military life, gradually became merged into the total war and military-industrial complexes of the current century. And this led to the information-as-warfare situation that we find ourselves in today, courtesy of that DARPA project.. the internet. All I can say is ... no- there is something else going on. We have had a partisan, even warring, press since the founding, and a yellow press, scandals, bickering, and many other media problems.

"As for so many other insurgents, the objective of the troll is not to gain power but to inflict pain. Rather than as a means of representation or reason, words become instruments of violence, which seek out human weakness then exploit it. Libertarians might argue that emotional harm is not 'violence', but this is contradicted by the behavior of trolls, who pursure emotional harm with a militaristic and sadistic relish."

"An alternative perspective on financial securitization and Facebook is that they are further cases of 'weaponization' of everyday institutions and promises. They exploit and weaken norms of trust, without building adequate replacements. Debt, housing, friendship and democracy have been around for thousands of years; the contribution of the financial sector or Silicon Valley over the past thirty years has been to find ways of manipulating and destabilizing them, so that society no longer feels secure. Nothing permanent is constructed by the invention of mortgage-backed securities or Facebook, but a great deal is damaged."

Where Davies gets a little warmer is in a direct indictment of the US and European elites. The most topical and telling example is of US illegal immigration. For decades, the two parties have been happy to encourage immigration, though for different reasons. The Republicans, beholden to business, want cheap workers. So they work to keep illegal immigrants illegal, which empowers businesses against them and makes possible a high-class life for the top end of town, staffed by gardeners, cooks, nannies, ethnic restaurants, and so forth, at bargain prices. Elite Democrats share in these benefits, and additionally get the votes (generally) of those immigrants who manage to become citizens, by way of being marginally more sympathetic to them. Who loses? Workers do. Illegal immigration has held down wages for decades, and enabled whole industries, particularly agriculture, to operate at well below a decent wage scale. Or more to the point, a wage scale that accurately reflects the domestic legal labor market.

".. the conflict between metropolitan and rural values was heightened, adding economic inequality to a set of existing moral controversies. Another way in which this split appears is in terms of graduates vs nongraduates. This conflict has been a feature of American politics since the 1960's, and now more or less determines the shape of the electoral map, with Democrats winning coastal regions, big cities, and university towns, and Republicans winning more or less everywhere else."

In this case the Democratic elites in particular have adopted an agenda that directly hurts its original constituents- working class citizens. The same can be said of NAFTA and of globalization in general. The benefits have flowed up to the top, while the lower classes have been sold down the river. All this is understandable from a theoretical economic perspective, which is a comfort zone for the elites, as total economic growth inarguably goes up with most forms of free trade. China has paticularly decimated working class communities across the country, taking whole industries and supply chains abroad. Davies argues at length that the abstract statistics typically provided and consumed by the elites, such as GDP and unemployment, have, perhaps by design, failed to accurately portray the conditions of much of the population, which is increasingly ignored, flown-over, under-employed, in economic decline, and despondent. And these are the conditions that lead to a sleazy, clownish demagogue, especially when the other candidate in the election exemplifies almost precisely the over-educated and entitled elitism that has lost so much credibility, mostly by being slowly coopted by the rotten values of their purported adversaries.

Another issue is general bureaucratic sclerosis. Nothing can be done or built at any reasonable cost, because between the unionization of public workers, their corrupt participation in elections, and the general growth of legal, environmental, and other liabilities, the capacity of public management to operate has been cut to pieces. Exhibit A is the California high speed train, which is an utter managment fiasco. Each of these developments has been well-intentioned, but together, they result in a system where infrastructure to accommodate all the immigration that Democrats in particular are sympathetic to never gets built, we end up with gridlock, and citizens revolt against mandates to alter zoning to pack more people into the existing, crumbing, infrastructure.

And yet another issue is the romanticisation of nature. Where farmers and the agricultural industry grapple with and against nature on a daily basis, the educated elites take increasingly moralistic and strident stands- against climate change, against habitat loss, against species loss, against cruelty, against meat, etc. Again, all these movements are extremely well-intentioned, even momentously important. But the disconnect between rural and coastal could not be more stark, leading to the kind of resentment politics that we are living through.

In the wake of World War 2, the elites had demonstrated they could not only resolve a depression, manage and win a vast global war, but create the unimaginable ... the atomic bomb. They had maximum credibility, which has been eroding ever since. It was these elites that Trump and the Republicans ran against, apparently unaware that they were in the elite as well, only with the difference that while Democrats seek generally to make our state and civic institutions work better and more fairly, Republicans want to make them work less fairly, or failing that, destroy them entirely.

There are natural cycles, perhaps, of war and peace, of corruption and reform, of division and civility. But over our long history, this administration is surely the lowest point of administrative competence and moral stature. We won't get out of it by hoping for more civility, or that someone would turn off the internet. This book does offer some glimmers of a solution, not in its last chapters, but in its indictment of the Democratic elites in particular. Voters yearn for truth. Trump gave them a breakthrough of sorts, identifying immigration as a (partially valid) source of resentment, and identifying de-industrialization as another one. Both those horses are mostly out of the barn, as is surely / hopefully the fate of the coal industry as well. Trump's policies on all these fronts have been anachronistic, if not cruel, farces.

Real policy and truthful communication on these fronts is what the Democrats are groping for. They need to take workers seriously, not only as a token thread in the rainbow tapestry, but as a core and directing constituency. Warmed-over apparachiks like Joe Biden hearken back to when Democrats were slightly less elitist, thereby generating some support from older cohorts, when compared to the technocratic darlings Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigeig. But the point is.. who will articulate and serve the interests of the working class with serious and effective policy solutions? Who will lay aside the identity politics, the various liberal hobbyhorses, and focus on the demographics that will win the next election, not just through demagoguery, but by facing facts with future-directed and constituent-directed policy? The energy is rightly in the progressive end of the party, with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose policies and passion speak to righting the tide of inequality with a far-reaching program of reform and reversal of decades of right wing policies, instead of being coopted by them or compromising with them.

"War provides recognition, explanation, and commemoration of pain, of the sort that policy experts and professional politicians seem unable to provide. One of the curiosities of nationalism is that, despite appeals to famous battles and heroes, it is most often kindled by moments of defeat and suffering, which shape identity more forcefully than victories. For romantic patriots, Britain was never more truly British than when fleeing Dunkirk or enduring the Blitz. The common identity of the American South is forged out of the experience, then memory, of defeat in civil war, as mourned by the Lost Cause movement of thinkers and writers. ... The major achievement of scientific expertise and modern government, dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, was to establish a basis for civic interaction, from which violence was eliminated. The boundary between war and peace was unambiguous, and a public respect for facts reinforced this. There are various forces at large in the twenty-first century that test this boundary, including technologies and military strategies that blur the distinction between war and peace. But there are also emotional reasons why that line is becoming blurred. Part of the appeal of war, at least as an idea, is that- unlike civil society designed by the liked of Hobbes, it represents a form of politics where feelings really matter."

Davies points out that the most salient emotion in politics is loss of control. Such losses are destabilizing and can lead to the resentments that can be stoked by demagogues, and result in war, political or military. The Republican Southern strategy was and is built around revanchism against civil rights, among much else. In personal terms, such loss can lead to drug abuse, which gives at least the illusion of control and comfort. Workers have been dramatically disempowered over the last several decades, mostly through the far-reaching ideology of the Republican party. Yet when asked to vote, they voted for a Republican to fix it, apparently because he effectively touched an emotional feeling of hope and resentment, and then offered a pack of lies as solutions. Democrats are surely better, but they have to fess up to their failings, and dedicate themselves to a thorough-going program of reform, reversing decades of their own corruption and anti-worker policies. Will all this be twisted by the right wing media into pretzels of illogic and hate? Yes. But no one can argue that the campaign we are going through right now does not give Democrats the opportunity to make their own case on a virtually infinite number of channels and platforms. It is up to us.

• The search for social peace has infinitely deep roots.
• Why do women do it?
• And now for something different.. a pro-Trump view.
• Labor should be getting far more money.
• Better automatic stabilizers are an obvious way to take a load off the central bank.
• Threats don't work if you are a clown.
• Impeachment can't come soon enough.
• The Taliban is doing very well in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, every time we meet with the Taliban, we degrade the capacity and legitimacy of the Afghan government.
• Arctic ice loss is going to flip the switch.
• China is the worst.