UFOs, God, and the Evidence of Absence

Sometimes, what you can't see isn't really there. And why you may see it anyway requires some deeper consideration.

A recent New Yorker story resurrects the topic of unidentified flying objects. While drawing quite a bit of well-deserved humor from the field, it also teases some putatively serious observations, and notes that the field has gotten some high-level love from politicians like Harry Reed, Ted Stevens, and Marco Rubio. On the whole, it was disappointing to see mostly uncritical treatmtent of this retread story. Are any UFOs actually objects? The answer to that is almost universally no. Almost all turn out to be optical phenomena, which come in a startling variety that leave observers dumbfounded. The rest are mistaken aircraft, test rockets, balloons, and pranks of various sorts. Reports of UFOs have trailed off over the decades, as their cultural weight has diminished, and people's imaginations drift off to other preoccupations. Yet die-hards remain, finding conspiracies, coverups, and compelling evidence. What is one to say?

It is worth taking a big step back and asking why, over all this time, and over all the people who have been looking for clues, either for or against, nothing concrete has been found. There are no space ships, no alien bodies, no extra-terrestrial materials or technologies. There is nothing- nothing whatsoever to show for all the shocking observations, pregnant hints and leading questions. Nothing for all the political pressure and top-secret investigations.

We'd know if they were really coming.

It shouldn't have to be said, but I will say it anyway, that religion has similar evidence behind it. Namely none. For all the heartfelt convictions, the positive thinking, lovely intuitions, and entrenched tradition, the supernatural remains fugative from observation. Is this by definition? Not at all. Plenty of religious claims, and the ones that are most moving and effective in efforts of proselytization, are very this-worldly- the virgin births, the resurrections, the water from wine, the walking on water, the revelations directly from god, etc. 

While formal logic says that lack of evidence is not positive proof of absence, it is evidence for lack of evidence, which says alot about the momentous claims being made, about UFOs, as well as analogous conspiracies and super-powers. It is absurd to seek, after so many UFO sightings have been resolved as oddities of the atmosphere, of optical, even collective, illusion, innocent projects, or even pranks, for the "real" evidence, the true story behind the coverup, etc. It bespeaks an archetypal imagination, and, philosphically, a grasping at straws. 

Lack of evidence is a serious philosophical condition, in areas where evidence should be readily available and has been fervently sought. If aliens were routinely flying through the atmosphere, we have the technology to detect them. We have countless satellites looking down to earth as well as up into the heavens, at incredible resolutions. We are increasingly using radar to detect birds, in their migrating millions. Surely an alien spaceship would show up with little problem. Naturally, the aliens do not want to be detected, and have the technology to hide themselves from view, allowing only odd glimpses during unusual weather. Did I mention grasping at straws?

What was a scientific problem thus becomes, by process of elimination, a psychological problem. Why do alien and all-powerful beings have such a hold on our imaginations? Could it be that the constellation of childhood is phenomenally durable, causing us to assume/imagine parental figures in political, celestial, and philosophical spheres? We are right now falling atavistically into a renewed kingship psychological complexes with authoritarian figures, not only amongst the Republicans in the US, but all across the world from Brazil to India. After a couple of centuries of shaking off such fixations, it is disappointing how durable our imaginative and affiliative psychology is, and how fragile the discipline it takes to recognize that the parents are not out there, in whatever guise or color, and that we are fully responsible for our world.

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Aisha and Ali

Women's rights and the crackup of Islam.

I am reading the highly interesting book "The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad", by Barnaby Rogerson. It takes a docu-drama and highly hagiographical approach, yet works in a lot of facts as well. It covers one of the most dynamic and transformative periods in world history, when the newly founded religion, Islam, swept out of Medina to defeat and convert its old enemies in Mecca, then progressively the rest of the Arabian peninsula, into the Byzantine stronghold across Syria and the Near East, the Persian empire, and lastly The Byzantine rump state of Egypt and points west. Let no one mistake Islam for a religion of peace. 

Muhammad left no succession plan, and wise heads got together in turn to appoint the first three successors to lead the community, Abu Bakr, Omar, and Uthman. These were each, in their own way, strong and very effective leaders, just the fortune that Islam needed to press its jihad against each of the neighboring empires. Riches started to flow into Medina, and by Uthman's reign, religious restrictions were eased, wealth spread, slaves and concubines proliferated, and an enormous baby boom occurred in the desert. But Uthman had planted the seeds of destruction, by appointing only his relatives to run the provinces- the Umayyads.

Uthman's reign reeked of nepotism, and he ended up assassinated in a revolt by disgruntled provincials, who took up the standard of Ali. Ali was one of Muhammad's earliest and closest converts, a son in law, war hero, and in personal and thelogical terms, an obvious choice as successor (or Caliph). Ali was acclaimed as Caliph right after the assassination, thus gaining the immediate enmity of all the Umayyads. And there were other problems, which had clearly led the earlier meetings of the companions of the prophet to choose other successors. First, Ali was not an effective leader. A true believer, yes, but starry-eyed, unrealistic, and unskilled in the tribal politics that underlay the new empire and faith. 

Aisha, on her camel, directing the battle against Ali, near  Basra. Turkish depiction, 16th century.

Second, Aisha loathed him. Betrothed to Muhammad at age 6, married at 9, Aisha was his favorite wife, of a stable that grew eventually to 12. Aisha remains a sort of Mary figure in Islam, and was granted a higher pension than any other figure after Muhammad's death, in recognition of her special position. She had once gotten into hot water after being left behind by a caravan, and was brought back to camp by a handsome soldier the next day. Tongues wagged, and eventually the gossip got so bad that Muhammad conjured a revelation from god absolving Aisha of any blame, and bringing heavy punishments on her accusers. What was Ali's role in all this? He had casually advised Muhammad that wives were cheap, and he should just divorce the inconvenient Aisha and be done with it. 

Now, when Ali needed help in his new role as Caliph, Aisha remembered, and whipped up a couple of Muhammad's companions into opposition, and led them personally across the desert to Basra, and into battle with Ali, the battle of the camel, which camel was Aisha's command post. Aisha lost, was personally wounded, and went into a life of retirement in Medina under Ali's protection, helping compile hidiths, providing recollections of the old days, and running a school for women. But the war against Ali went on from this fateful spark, and he gradually lost support to the wilier Umayyads. Thus, Aisha stands as a pivotal figure in Islam and world history, responsible in part for the disastrous Sunni-Shia split, but also a clear standard bearer for women's rights within the world of Islam, an aspect that has clearly been in occultation for some time, especially in what are ironically regarded as the more fundamentalist precincts of the faith.

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Reach Out and Touch Some Gene

How activation of RNA transcription works.

One of the great themes of molecular biology that was established quite early was the notion of flexible regulation over gene expression. Only eight years after the discovery of the structure of DNA, and contemporaneous with the discovery of the genetic code that it harbors, Jacob and Monod proposed the operon hypothesis, whereby proteins responsive to outside conditions or other important circumstances (in their case, a protein that bound the nutrient lactose) control the mechanism of transcription of the RNA message from the DNA genome. Jacob and Monod dealt with a repressor, (called lac), which sits on a gene that encodes various lactose import and metabolic proteins. When lactose binds, this protein detaches from the DNA and releases transcriptional repression, allowing the regular apparatus to bind and start mRNA production.

This focus on repressors misled the field for a little while, since it turns out that there are activators as well, in bacteria as well as very abundantly in eukaryotes. New mechanisms of transcriptional repression and activation keep being found, but the main themes have become reasonably settled. Humans encode an estimated 1500 proteins that bind DNA at specific sites and regulate transcription. Add to that all the other apparatus of generic transcription, chromatin management, and indirect regulators, and easily an eighth of our genome functions in transcriptional regulation, which is the dominant mode (though far from the only one) of distinguishing cell types, tissues, and developmental states from each other, responding to stresses and hormones, and generally managing the dynamic internal diversity that comes with being a multicellular organism.

Historically, similar realizations were being made on the genetic side, for instance when Edward Lewis studied a large developmental locus of Drosophila which he called the ultrabithorax complex. Rearrangements and mutations in this region caused numerous transformations of body parts, with such fine gradations, complex patterns, and wide-ranging effects that he concluded that these loci encode regulators of other genes, and that the locus itself was revealing further complexities of the regulation of these regulators. This work began to be published in the fifites, and onwards through the seventies.

One particular focus of studies of transcription over the last few decades has been how activation works. The 1970s saw a dawning realization that many regulators, especially in eukaryotes, activate transcription rather than repressing it, and do so in a synergistic way from modular cassettes of DNA binding sites (called enhancers) that could be tens of thousands of basepairs from the gene being regulated. This led to a looping model, where enhancers bind a mix of proteins that may be specific to some developmental event or stage, and which may comprise both activators and repressors. This DNA-bound complex of proteins then loop around the intervening DNA to help assemble the generic transcription machinery at the start site of the gene. If the activators outweigh the repressors, (in a fashion that is not at all systematic or rule-based, but is graded in its activity, and still not fully understood), then that machinery fires off, polymerizing its way down the gene, extruding the mRNA message as it goes.

But what is the nature of this touching interaction? Many "activation domains" have been isolated, and there hasn't been a very informative theme to emerge from these studies, at least no universal protein sequence pattern. Indeed such domains tend to be unstructured and poorly conserved, with hints of negative charge and hydrophobic character- not much to go on. On the receiving side, among a plethora of studies of the core transcriptional apparatus, a dedicated complex called "mediator" was found to be a central receiver of activating interactions. Since it has over two dozen components, it explains to some degree the lack of uniformity among the activating protein domains reaching from enhancers. 

A recent paper wraps up some of this story by characterizing activating domains in rather thorough fashion. Most interactions in the cell, such as those between DNA-binding proteins and their sites on DNA, are very specific and detailed lock-and-key interactions that make use of steric and electrostatic complementarity. But the activation domain interaction is more of a velcro-like affair, where a broad surface of hydrophobic amino acid side chains, supplemented by a fringe of basic amino acids, binds activation domains that are, as mentioned above, characterized as largely hydrophobic, unstructured, and peppered with acidic residues. The principal target (75% of the time) of all these activation domains is one protein, mediator MED15 (also called GAL11), which has four receiving domains, though other targets exist. This all means that activation can add up synergistically- the more activators are available, the more can bind, and the more strongly bound the whole complex is. It is the perfect system to accomplish graded, sensitive adjustments of activation from modular sets of activators that vary over developmental as well as evolutionary time.

Simple model of the looping interaction from upstream locations (can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of base pairs away) to mediator proteins that interact with "activation domains", here "TAD" on DNA binding proteins. One example of an activating domain is shown, (B), which adopts a helical conformation to expose the hydrophobic residues on one face, (yellow), fringed by acidic (blue, E, but also basic Q residues). The next steps then clear nucleosomes and assemble the polymerase complex at the transcription start.

These researchers used yeast cells to comprehensively find all available activation domains from all plausible DNA-binding proteins (164 in this smaller genome). They tested a tedious series of 53 amino acid-long pieces from these proteins to find specifically active protein segments, and then put them through empirical tests and computer comparisons, ultimately developing a neural network model of what makes a successful activation domain. While they did not find anything unprecedented, they characterized what they found with much greater thoroughness, and then docked it in structural terms with the other half of the interaction, the protein mediator 15

This shows two of the four domains on GAL11 which recieves the binding of activator domains. The colored dots indicate where specific amino acids of transcriptional activator domains dock, computationally. Blue is the charged aspartic acid, docking with positively charged target sites, while yellow and red are the hydrophobic phenylalanine and leucine, respectively. The point is that the locations form a diverse cloud, not fitting specifically into any particular matching structures, and also that the interface is relatively flat, ready to accommodate a similarly flat and variable- possibly even unstructured- activating domain.

This shows two of the four domains on GAL11 which recieves the binding of activator domains. The colored dots indicate where specific amino acids of transcriptional activator domains dock, computationally. Blue is the charged aspartic acid, docking with positively charged target sites, while yellow and red are the hydrophobic phenylalanine and leucine, respectively. The point is that the locations form a diverse cloud, not fitting specifically into any particular matching structures, and also that the interface is relatively flat, ready to accommodate a similarly flat and variable- possibly even unstructured- activating domain.

What was particularly powerful was this group's computer algorithm that was able to find other activation domains, thoughout the human genome, with an accuracy of >80%. This is valuable both as a way to better characterize our genomes and biology, and also to demonstrate a more thorough understanding of how these domains work. Once the GAL11 protein is anchored to an enhancer or set of enhancers via the activating interactions, it (as part of a very large complex of its own- over 20 proteins) loops over to the transcription start site, where it cooperates with other proteins that are able to open up the local nucleosomes and other debris, and attract or activate an RNA polymerase, including extensive phosphorylation of the polymerase's tail. This prompts release of the initiating polymerase from the start site and disassembly of the initiating mediator+other proteins complex, to go off and activate some other gene elsewhere.

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Where Does Surplus Value / Profit Come From in Capitalism?

Marxists say it is stolen from the worker. Capitalists say it comes from risk-taking and managerial work. Who is really doing the work?

One of the pillars of Marxism is that capitalists steal labor from workers. All profits come from excess labor done by workers by the sweat of their brow, which capitalists, through various nafarious means, appropriate for themselves. The workday, for instance, is an artificial construct. What if all the necessary work could be done in three hours? Well, the labor agreement means that the employer has the right to eight. Therefore, employers extract as much value as possible from that time regardless was really needed to fulfill the actual job- value that ends up as profit in the pockets of owners, who do no work at all.

On the opposite side, Chicago school economists hold to a theory of marginal value, where every factor in production is fairly paid for its individual contribution, through the magic of the various markets- commodity, labor, financial, etc.- that they come from. Each of these markets is assumed to be efficient, thus rendering each input to production fairly bid for its contribution, and leading also to a dynamic re-ordering of production systems when conditions change, such as when some inputs become scarce (and their price goes up), or new technologies expand the availability of other inputs, like, say, computation power.

It should be obvious that each of these theories is a fairy tale, (a panglossian one in the neoclassical case), heavily motivated by ideology, while carrying grains of truth. Labor markets are not efficient at all, and businesses work night and day to keep them that way. At the same time, businesses capture profits from countless other streams than the exploited labor of their workers. And in fact, the whole purpose of business is to exploit miss-priced market opportunities- otherwise profit could not exist.

A recent pair of posts on Bill Mitchell's blog delved into the Cambridge controversy- an economist's spat of the early 1960's which was formative in left-wing economics. Many tangential issues came up, such as whether economic growth is more demand-limited or supply limited. But it also dealt with issues of the value of capital, the source of profits, and the accuracy of marginal value theory. To summarize rather brutally, left-wing economists from Cambridge, England argued that business profits were not market-based, but based on social and power relations, cultural tradition, and many other factors besides the markets. Economists from Cambridge, Massachusetts (MIT) argued a classical theory that profits were based in marginal theory on all the market ingredients, and particularly could be approximated by the current interest rate, representing the default alternative to business investment- that is, the marginal value of capital.

The result of the controversy was that the British school successfully pointed out some flaws in the American analysis, which the Americans admitted, to the effect that the general profit rate does not always follow capital intensity, and nor does the individual firm's investment schedule necessarily follow the logic of interest rate-driven margins either. From this molehill, the left made a triumphant mountain, while the mainstream regarded it as a minor hiccup from their ever-more baroque modeling of perfect markets and ideal economies.

Joan Robinson, principal proponent of the Cambridge England end of the Cambridge controversies.

All that said, it is worth being more specific about where profit comes from, and here I confess to going off the reservation of economic convention. While stealing extra labor is surely one of the time-honored methods of making a profit, it is far from the only way. Indeed, businesses can be seen as miners, always on the hunt for those special gems in the environment that cost less than they should, or can be sold for more than they cost. And the opportunities of this sort are endless in variety and scale. 

• difference between supply and demand
• difference between efficient producers and inefficient
• difference between using family members and paying workers from the labor market
• difference between dumping toxic waste and disposing it properly
• difference between hiring an amoral accountant and a lawful one
• difference between buying lower grade inputs for manufacturing
• difference between lying to customers, or not
• difference between running marketing campaigns, or not
• difference between paying taxes, or not paying taxes
• difference between suing competitors successfully, or not
• difference between buying competitors or competing with them
• difference between doing research to find new technologies, or not spending that money, or stealing that technology
• difference between lobbying the government successfully to make protective laws, or not

The scope for finding  money and making profit goes far, far beyond the conventional notion of arbitrage between capital goods and interest rates. Labor is also only part of the picture. Being a typically large part of most company's costs, its treatment and mistreatment is, however, an endlessly fruitful area for losses and gains, not to mention wider social tension. Money and profit can be found under any number of rocks, which is where the mantra of a "business model" comes from. Everyone and every business has some angle by which they make a living.

Are these gems of profit fairly priced in their factor markets? Don't be ridiculous. A coal company only makes money because coal is free. The earth makes no contracts, and nor does the air for the pollution sent up by the power plant that burns the coal. Turning free things, like enslaved or cowed labor, or personal data, or natural resources, or computer power, or shady accounting, or corrupt laws, into money, is the essence of "business models". Finding a way around markets, by collusion, by substitution, by doing without, by corruption, even by clever new technologies, are a business person's top priorities. So not only are markets, when they are used, hardly "fair" in any financial or social sense, but they do not begin to address all the sources of business profit or return to capital.

We can grant that most of this work of finding profitable gems is done by the capitalist or her managerial minions, thus should be accounted to the returns of capital, not to wages stolen from workers. Only in the classical mass industrial enterprise where the raw material costs are negligible and labor is the overwhelming factor would these converge into the same thing as envisioned by Marx. (Though the modern fast food industry, and gig "economy" come to mind as well.) Some of these gems can be valued financially, and can be regarded as capital, obtained via savings and investment and even competitively priced in a marginal accounting. But many cost nothing, and characterize the pursuit of business as more than a dry exercise in accountancy or economics, but rather as a cultural mode, descended from a long tradition of opportunistic ownership / exploitation / employment of others, of technological innovation, trade, and plunder.

Not to put a fine point on it, business is about greed, and in its natural state reverts to rapine and pillage. The Vikings were consummate businessmen, converting earnings into capital- long-boats and other weapons-, which were the backbone of their centuries of pillage all over coastal Northern Europe. Today, we can see a similar process in Afghanistan. The Taliban leverages ruthless terror into power., plundering as it goes along. They can then tell everyone how to live, collect the taxes, and run their many businesses, corrupt or not. 

Whether their state is "business-friendly", their example points to the intertwined nature of state systems and business systems of exploitation. States set the rules, in the ideal case driving business from brutal mafia and gang activities, which are generally socially destructive, if not entirely zero-sum, towards level and transparent playing fields that are at least somewhat constructive, pulling their profits from the mute vaults of nature and its resources instead of from social oppression. But all this depends on the wisdom and foresight of the state. Many "business model" gems mentioned above involve skirting the law, or engaging in activities the law has not even (or yet) contemplated, to make a buck. There is a constant arms race going on, between the "innovation" of private greed, and the capacity of the state to conceptualize, measure, and legislate against new areas of long-term harm. When the business class and Republicans bleat about taxes and "freedom", they (and their pet economists) are explicitly taking one side of this conflict, the side of irresponsible regression to unregulated, irresponsible, and destructive styles of "business". 

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They Thought They Were James Bond

Review of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA.

Why do we still have the CIA? Its track record is atrocious on both operational and moral grounds, and much of its role has been assumed by the NSA and by military intelligence. It is fundamentally contrary in principle to everything the US stands for, making its reputation, such as it is, damaging abroad, and making recruitment at home excruciatingly difficult. It is a testament, in the end, to bureaucratic inertia and its own skills in backroom politics and public relations that it survives at all.

Headquarters of a bloated bureaucracy

Tim Weiner tells a totally biased history of the CIA, proving a truism of intelligence that everything bad ends up on the front page and everything good remains under wraps. This book covers every disastrous escapade from the exploding cigars sent to Fidel Castro to the torture of prisoners in a farflung network of black prisons and those of our "allies" during the "war on terror". What is even worse, however, is how its sterling successes, like its fomented coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, or the arming of Pakistani proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war, turned out, in the end, even more disastrous than its front-page disasters. The Bay of Pigs made the US a laughing stock. But the melt-down of Iranian democracy haunts us and the rest of the Middle East, even the world, to this day.

The CIA has routinely lied to congress and to the president. It has, at other times, lied to the entire nation and world on behalf of the president, such as during the runup to the Iraq war. Its daily brief is notoriously bereft of deep analysis, and its ranks notoriously short of foreign language and cultural skills. 

Towards the end of the book, even while recounting a rising tide of mediocrity and error, Weiner oddly throws in repeated denunciations, evidently drawn from his stable of CIA veteran interviewees, of the underfunding and underappreciation of the CIA over recent decades. All in all, it is a difficult book (and situation) to make sense of. Yet it is clear that the CIA is a disaster zone, and we need to think carefully about how America's intelligence community should operate on a restructured basis.

One thing to note is that the US is simply not adapted, culturally, to run a great intelligence apparatus, as, say, Russia is with its KGB/FSB/SVR/GU. We are an open society with a well-founded dislike of deceit, and are not skilled at it. We also are a lawful society, unwilling to instill the kind of fear / terror that it takes to staff and run such shady operations. Aldrich Ames, for example, is enjoying a pleasant retirement at a medium-security prison in Terre Haute. Jonathan Pollard is now living a heroic retirement in Israel.

So, maybe we need some of the functions of the current CIA. But they should be made as compact as possible, not subsumed in the current bureaucratic dinosaur. The main function it does not need is the gathering of mundane foreign news via newspapers, low-level contacts, and fake visa officers, to create master "intelligence estimates". All that can and should be done by the State Department. Indeed, such functions should be increased with the addition of open person-on-the street contacts all over the world. We are frequently blind-sided by developments that intelligence agencies fail to see based on their derring-do, tradecraft, and focus in the highest echelons, and which normal people in that other society can easily see coming. These functions may even be replicated into red-team/blue-team competitions, with retrospective evaluations carried out to grow successful teams. The understanding of foreign cultures is a difficult task, and putting it into the hands of a white-bread secretive bureaucracy has not been fruitful. 

What would then happen to all the under-cover intelligence that we gather, mostly via the NSA and the satellite services of the NRO? These have been independent of the CIA for a long time. The CIA has not been "central" for decades. So we should dispense with the charade of special knowledge and integrated deep analysis, leaving that to the State department and perhaps the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA should be confined to espionage and covert operation in a focused way on current and future crises. It should not be meddling in Central American countries, running its own private foreign policy. It should not be trying to span the world with agents all over the place. It should not be trying to carve out bureaucratic slices from the NSA and other agencies with better track records.

Whether the CIA can even be successful in such a truncated remit is highly questionable, given its history. But at least it can then be judged more accurately, without all the distractions of routine newspaper reading, world-wide reporting, etc. It should stand or fall in whether it can supply high-level intelligence from our major adversaries- China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, and North Korea, in any way beyond our technical resources. And naturally, it goes without saying that its covert operations need to be kept on a tighter leash, run not only by the president, but put on specific timelines of reporting to the NSC (cleared in advance) and select congressional oversight bodies (reported within thirty days). Malfeasance, either in reporting or in execution, would result in consequences such that the CIA fires poorly performing personnel, and keeps only a select and small cadre, perhaps in competing teams.

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