Domineering Freeloader Decides Communism is the Answer

General, executioner, economic development czar, and head of the national bank of the Cuban revolution: the biography of Che Guevara, by John Lee Anderson.

Ernesto Guevara began life as a reckless, adventurous, and very intelligent kid. His first inspiration was medicine, indeed medical research on leprosy and other diseases common in South America, and he got a medical degree. But toiling away on small problems in the lab didn't fit his temperament, and he decided to bum around South America instead, living off the generosity of others, running up debts, fast-talking his way out of jams, and building up an implacable hatred of the US. A common thread through his travels from Argentina through Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and points north was the overwhelming influence of the US, usually corrupting the local political system for the benefit of mining interests in the south, and for the benefit of agricultural interests in Central America. Eventually he got caught up in the liberal quasi-socialist reforms of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, later fleeing to Mexico after a US-supported right wing coup.

It was there that he fell under the spell of Fidel Castro, eventually becoming, despite his evident non-Cuban origins, Castro's right-hand man at the head of the communist revolution in Cuba. Not that it started as communist. No, Fidel was a master politician, and started as an anti-communist, currying favor with the Cuban population and the US. But both his brother Raul and Che were dedicated communists by that point, in thrall to Stalin and Mao, and their influence, combined with the logic of perpetual, one-party / one-person power, brought Fidel around to a gradual process of revealing, after the revolution had already gained power and Che had executed resistent elements of the army and police, their new (red) colors. Then came feelers to Moscow and the rest of the eastern bloc, the Cuban missile crisis, and that is pretty much where things stand still today.

Che and Fidel, when times were good.

Anderson's biography is definitive- fully researched, well written, and judiciously argued. He portrays Che as a seeker- a youth on the prowl for good times, but also for a purpose, which he ultimately found in full-on socialism. He found himself most fully during the early fight in the hills of Cuba- a trial by privation, exhaustion, and blood- where he put revolutionary principles to work organizing his men, making alliances with the local peasants, and executing deserters and traitors. Che's socialism was a pan Latin-American Bolivaran ideal, where all the countries of Central and South America would band together- possibly even unite- under state socialism as inspired by the peasant revolutions of Russia and especially China. It was both austere and visionary- a whole continent escaping from under the yoke of the great oppressor- the US.

It is clearly a religious conversion- the epiphany of a wholly captivating ideal. Che became Castro's second in command by his great intellectual and leadership talents, but even more by his absolute dedication to the cause- the cause of liberation from oppression. Unfortunately, after cleansing the army and securing Fidel's rule, Che was assigned to make the economy run, and here he came up against the immovable obstacle- reality. Socialism is healthy in small doses, but communism has not, in Cuba as elsewhere, been able to run an economy. Motivation to work needs to be supplied somehow, and if it is not by the lash of money and its lack, then terror will have to do the job, and poorly at that. Che did what he could, but the system he had fought so hard to establish was impossible to operate, and his thoughts turned back to his first love- revolution.

It is here that we see mostly clearly the religious nature of Che's motivations and of communism generally. If he were a rational researcher in the template of medical or other research, he would have sat back and realized that communism was not working in economic and social terms, let alone in terms of personal individual liberation. And then he would have adapted intellectually and tried to figure out a middle way to preserve Cuba's independence while running a realistic economic system. Possibly even elections. Unfortunately, by this time, Cuba had settled into a dependent relationship with Russia, which bought its sugar and gave aid, preventing either economic or political independence. Cuba is today still relatively poor, in the middle to lower ranks of GDP. Not as poor as Haiti, however, (or North Korea), and therein lies a message, which is that the Cuban revolution remains relatively humane, despite its many debilities and lack of political, social, and economic freedom. The collapse of the Soviet Union shocked the communist government into slight openings for private business and a heavy dose of tourism from Europe, which sustain it today.

But instead of recognizing the errors and failures of his dream, Che fomented more revolutionary cells all over Latin America and Africa, paying special attention to one sent to infiltrate Argentina, one that he was to join himself and die serving in 1965. One can not fault his dedication or consistency, but one can question the intellect that took him and so many other idealistic freedom fighters over the twentieth century into communism only to author monumental disasters of political and economic mismanagement. To think that dictatorship would resolve the class struggle, and produce washing machines and military might ... it had to be a religious movement, which unfortunately, once in power, became incredibly difficult to dislodge.

The motive force obviously was the US. We, through our callous and greedy treatment of our backyard over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and our betrayal of the paternalistic impulse of the Monroe Doctrine, not to mention similar failures of principle in the Middle East and Vietnam, motivated the intense anti-Yankee hatred of idealistic men such as Che Guevara, and the peasant resistance that, at least in Cuba, gave him and Castro support. It is a fascinating history of what the US has wrought, and how our failure to hold to our own ideals has come back to haunt us over and over again.

• It has been abusive, unnecessary, toxic, and we will need some time to work it out of our system.

Fair and Balanced

Momentary virality is not the best way to construct and distribute news. Nor is fear-based button-pushing. But what can we do about it?

Our political system almost ran off the rails over the last few months, and the ultimate cause was the media, which on the right-wing side has shaped an alternate reality of breathtaking extremism and divergence from reality. Outlets like Rush Limbaugh, FOX news, NewsMax, and Sinclair Broadcasting have fundamentally reshaped our political discourse, from a place fifty years ago where facts and problems were generally agreed upon, and policy discussions founded on those facts conducted- if not in a civil manner, then in a functional manner in legislative bodies like the US Senate. Now Limbaugh is broaching secession.

Rush, in his lair.

Even the Reagan era, conservative as it was, hewed to basic democratic principles and a centrist media environment. But then came Bill Clinton, and in response, Newt Gingrich, blazing a scorched-earth trail through the House of Representatives, followed soon by the establishment of FOX news as a relentless and shameless propaganda organ for the right. Now, even FOX is reviled by true believers as not extreme enough, as the end of the Trumpian epoch comes shudderingly into view. Which is worse- the internet melee of Russian disinformation and viral Q-conspiracies, or the regimented lying brought to us by corporate right-wing media? It is hard to tell sometimes, and both have been disastrous, but I think the latter has been substantially worse, forming a long-running environment of cultivated lies, normalized idiocy, and emotional trauma. Why anyone watches it or listens to it is beyond me personally, but clearly many people like to have their buttons pushed and participate in a crudely plausible vision of a black, white, and bloviatingly Christian (or un-Christian, depending on your theological ethics) world. 

Government censorship is probably not going to happen in this case. Even if we changed our legal system to allow it, the right wing would manage to subborn those regulatory bodies, as they have the Supreme Court, Senate, and the White House. These media outlets don't breathe oxygen, however, they breathe money- money that comes from advertisers who appreciate their ability to reach a uniquely gullible demographic. But those advertisers are not political. They are fomenting our divisions and destroying our political system for purely transactional reasons. It is, we can note in passing, another classic and ironic breakdown of the free market. 

The rational response, then, is to boycott the sponsors in systematic fashion, publicizing who advertises with which outlets, for how much. Several of these sites and petitions are already happening. But it is clear that they have not gained enough traction to have much effect. Only when the most egregious and appalling violations of decency occur does any attention rain on the channels and scare away sponsors. The tracking, petition, and boycotting system needs to have better centralization. Perhaps like the eco-friendly food labels, we need truth-friendly labeling of companies at the point of consumption, marking those (MyPillow! SmileDirect! Nutrisystem! Geico!) who are pouring money into these cesspools of psychological manipulation and political destruction.

Sure, this kind of accountability would heighten political divisions, causing a polarization of the business world, which has (supposedly) tried to keep itself out of the fray, and invite counter-boycotts of, say, NPR or MSNBC. But business has not been unbiassed at all, rather, through every organ, from chambers of commerce to K-street lobbies and Ayn Randian talk shops, they have pushed the right wing agenda in tandem with the propaganda organs that broadcast relentless pro-business and anti-public interest messages. It is high time to hold the whole ecosystem to account for the state of our country, directly and financially.

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Where has Inflation Gone?

Inflation stays low amid vast public deficits and good employment and economic growth trends. What happened?

Those of us who grew up in the 1970's are permanently scarred by its economic malaise- inflation. As earlier generations were affected by their reigning economic conditions, from depression to prosperous expansion, we had a hard time shaking our syndrome, and keep looking for inflation around every corner.

But inflation is nowhere in sight, and no matter how much the government spends, it doesn't seem to matter. Prices simply haven't budged, past a very staid 1-3% inflation rate, for the last decade and more. It has put the lie to a generation of Republican scare-mongering, and is overall quite perplexing. Granted, the 2008 recession was extremely severe, was insufficiently addressed by fiscal spending, and is still affecting us in terms of lost economic capacity and lost employment. The current pandemic has been even more disastrous for employment and small business conditions. Yet, I think the question still stands- why are we now spending so much time fighting deflation, where we used to fight inflation?

I think the usual answers of global trade, declining worker power and unionization, and automation are significant, but there is one more that should be added, which is income inequality. Inflation is measured not in yachts and space ships, but in normal goods like groceries and appliances. The economy of these goods is largely ruled by lower income segments, and reflects pretty directly their income. At the higher end of the income and wealth scale, people tend to save rather than spend, which is why they are wealthy to start with. And what the rich do spend money on tends not to hit the basic inflation metrics very hard, like exclusive real estate, vanity philanthropy, and vulture capitalism. Their money does not, in any proportionate way, enter into the inflation-causing real economy.

State of inequality in the US, which has been growing much further during the Trump administration and the pandemic.

So one can imagine that, instead of looking for causality from inflation to income inequality- which may be a fool's errand- it actually works the other way around. High inequality is a societal condition where wages stay persistently low, at a subsistence level, (or even below), which saps both the cultural capital and the inflation-causing capacity of the working class and poorer sectors. At the same time, it funnels vast amounts of wealth to the already wealthy- money that mostly just gets squirreled away into the stock market, foreign bank accounts, government bonds, and other investments that are more or less unproductive, especially of inflation. It also causes a race for yield, which we see resulting in very low market interest rates- another result of inequality.

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Computer Science Meets Neurobiology in the Hippocampus

Review of Whittington, et al. - a theoretical paper on the generalized mapping and learning capabilities of the entorhinal/hippocampal complex that separates memories from a graph-mapping grid.

These are exciting times in neurobiology, as a grand convergence is in the offing with computational artificial intelligence. AI has been gaining powers at a rapid clip, in large part due to the technological evolution of neural networks. But computational theory has also been advancing, on questions of how concepts and relations can be gleaned from data- very basic questions of interest to both data scientists and neuroscientists. On the other hand, neurobiology has benefited from technical advancements as well, if far more modestly, and from the relentless accumulation of experimental and clinical observations. Which is to say, normal science. 

One of the hottest areas of neuroscience has been the hippocampus and the closely connected entorhinal cortex, seat of at least recent memory and of navigation maps and other relational knowledge. A recent paper extends this role to a general theory of relational computation in the brain. The basic ingredients of thought are objects and relations. Computer scientists typically represent these as a graph, where the objects are nodes, and the relations are the connecting lines, or edges. Nodes can have a rich set of descriptors (or relations to property nodes that express these descriptions). A key element to get all this off the ground is the ability to chunk, (or abstract, or generalize, or factorize) observations into discrete entities, which then serve as the objects of the relational graph. The ability to say that what you are seeing, in its whirling and colorful reality, is a dog .. is a very significant opening step to conceptualization, and the manipulation of those concepts in useful ways, such as understanding past events and predicting future ones.

Gross anatomy of the hippocampus and associated entorhinal cortex, which function together in conceptual binding and memory.

A particular function of the entorhinal/hippocampal complex is spatial navigation. Reseachers have found place cells, grid cells, and boundary cells (describing when these cells fire) as clear elements of spatial consciousness, which even replay in dreams as the rats re-run their daytime activities. It is evident that these cells are part of an abstraction mechanism that dissociates particular aspects of conceptualized sensory processing from the total scene and puts them back together again in useful ways, i.e. as various maps.

This paper is conducted at a rather abstruse level, so there is little that I can say about it in detail. Yet it and the field it contributes to is so extremely interesting that some extra effort is warranted. By the time the hippocampus is reached, visual (and other sensory data) has already been processed to the conceptual stage. Dogs have been identified, landmarks noted, people recognized. Memories are composed of fully conceptualized, if also sensorily colored, conceptual chunks. The basic idea the authors present is that key areas of the entorhinal cortex provide general and modular mapping services that allow the entorhinal/hippocampal complex to deal with all kinds of relational information and memories, not just physical navigation. Social relations, for example, are mapped similarly.

It is important to note tangentially that conceptualization is an emergent process in the brain, not dictated by pre-existing lists of entities or god-given databases of what exists in the world and beyond. No, all this arises naturally from experience in the world, and it has been of intense interest to computer scientists to figure out how to do this efficiently and accurately, on a computer. Some recent work was cited here and is interesting for its broad implications as well. It is evident that we will in due time be faced with fully conceptualizing, learning, and thinking machines.

"Structural sparsity also brings a new perspective to an old debate in cognitive science between symbolic versus emergent approaches to knowledge representation. The symbolic tradition uses classic knowledge structures including graphs, grammars, and logic, viewing these representations as the most natural route towards the richness of thought. The competing emergent tradition views these structures as epiphenomena: they are approximate characterizations that do not play an active cognitive role. Instead, cognition emerges as the cooperant consequence of simpler processes, often operating over vector spaces and distributed representations. This debate has been particularly lively with regards to conceptual organization, the domain studied here. The structural forms model has been criticized by the emergent camp for lacking the necessary flexibility for many real domains, which often stray from pristine forms. The importance of flexibility has motivated emergent alternatives, such as a connectionist network that maps animals and relations on the input side to attributes on the output side. As this model learns, an implicit tree structure emerges in its distributed representations. But those favoring explicit structure have pointed to difficulties: it becomes hard to incorporate data with direct structural implications like 'A dolphin is not a fish although it looks like one', and latent objects in the structure support the acquisition of superordinate classes such as 'primate' or 'mammal'. Structural sparsity shows how these seemingly incompatible desiderata could be satisfied within a single approach, and how rich and flexible structure can emerge from a preference for sparsity." - from Lake et al., 2017

Getting back the the hippocampus paper, the authors develop a computer model, which they dub the Tolman-Eichenbaum machine [TEM] after key workers in the field. This model implements a three-part system modeled on the physiological situation, plus their theory of how relational processing works. Medial entorhinal cells carry generalized mapping functions (grids, borders, vectors), which can be re-used for any kind of object/concept, supplying relations as originally deduced from sensory processing or possibly other abstract thought. Lateral entorhinal cells carry specific concepts or objects as abstracted from sensory processing, such as landmarks, smells, personal identities, etc. It is then the crossing of these "what" and "where" streams that allows navigation, both in reality and in imagination. This binding is proposed to happen in the hippocampus, as firing that happens when firing from the two separate entorhinal regions happen to synchronize, stating that a part of the conceptual grid or other map and an identified object have been detected in the same place, generating a bound sensory experience, which can be made into a memory, or arise from a memory, or an imaginative event, etc. This is characteristic of "place cells", hippocampal cells that fire when the organism is at a particular place, and not at other times.

"We propose TEM’s [the computational model they call a Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine] abstract location representations (g) as medial entorhinal cells, TEM’s grounded variables (p) as hippocampal cells, and TEM’s sensory input x as lateral entorhinal cells. In other words, TEM’s sensory data (the experience of a state) comes from the ‘what stream’ via lateral entorhinal cortex, and TEM’s abstract location representations are the ‘where stream’ coming from medial entorhinal cortex. TEM’s (hippocampal) conjunctive memory links ‘what’ to ‘where’, such that when we revisit ‘where’ we remember ‘what’."

Given the abstract mapping and a network of relations between each of the components, reasoning or imagining about possible events also becomes feasible, since the system can solve for any of the missing components. If a landmark is seen, a memory can be retrieved that binds the previously known location. If a location is surmised or imagined, then a landmark can be dredged up from memory to predict how that location looks. And if an unfamiliar combination of location and landmark is detected, then either a new memory can be made, or a queasy sense of unreality or hallucination would ensue if one of the two are well-known enough to make the disagreement disorienting.

As one can tell, this allows not only the experience of place, but the imagination of other places, as the generic mapping can be traversed imaginatively, even by paths that the organism has never directly experienced, to figure out what would happen if one, for instance, took a short-cut. 

The combination of conceptual abstraction / categorization with generic mapping onto relational graph forms that can model any conceptual scale provides some of the most basic apparatus for cognitive thought. While the system discussed in this paper is mostly demonstrated for spatial navigation, based on the proverbial rat maze, it is claimed, and quite plausible, that the segregation of the mapping from the object identification and binding allows crucial generalization of cognition- the tools we, and someday AI as well, rely on to make sense of the world.

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