Are Archaea Archaic?

It remains controversial whether the archaeal domain of life is 1 or 4.5 billion years old. That is a big difference!

Back in the 1970's, the nascent technologies of molecular analysis and DNA sequencing produced a big surprise- that hidden in the bogs and hot springs of the world are micro-organisms so extremely different from known bacteria and protists that they were given their own domain on the tree of life. These are now called the archaea, and in addition to being deeply different from bacteria, they were eventually found to be the progenitors of eukaryotic cell- the third (and greatest!) domain of life that arose later in the history of the biosphere. The archaeal cell contributed most of the nuclear, informational, membrane management, and cytoskeletal functions, while one or more assimilated bacteria (most prominently the future mitochondrion and chloroplast) contributed most of the metabolic functions, as well as membrane lipid synthesis and peroxisomal functions.

Carl Woese, who discovered and named archaea, put his thumb heavily on the scale with that name, (originally archaebacteria), suggesting that these new cells were not just an independent domain of life, totally distinct from bacteria, but were perhaps the original cell- that is, the LUCA, or last universal common ancestor. All this was based on the sequences of rRNA genes, which form the structural and catalytic core of the ribosome, and are conserved in all known life. But it has since become apparent that sequences of this kind, which were originally touted as "molecular clocks", or even "chronometers" are nothing of the kind. They bear the traces of mutations that happen along the way, and, being highly important and conserved, do not track the raw mutation rate, (which itself is not so uniform either), but rather the rate at which change is tolerated by natural selection. And this rate can be wildly different at different times, as lineages go through crises, bottlenecks, adaptive radiations, and whatever else happened in the far, far distant past.

Carl Woese, looking over filmed spots of 32P labeled ribosomal RNA from different species, after size separation by electrophoresis. This is how RNAs were analyzed, back in 1976, and such rough analysis already suggested that archaea were something very different from bacteria.

There since has been a tremendous amount of speculation, re-analysis, gathering of more data, and vitriol in the overall debate about the deep divergences in evolution, such as where eukaryotes come from, and where the archaea fit into the overall scheme. Compared with the rest of molecular biology, where experiments routinely address questions productively and efficiently due to a rich tool chest and immediate access to the subject at hand, deep phylogeny is far more speculative and prone to subjective interpretation, sketchy data, personal hobbyhorses, and abusive writing. A recent symposium in honor of one of its more argumentative practitioners made that clear, as his ideas were being discarded virtually at the graveside.

Over the last decade, estimates of the branching date of archaea from the rest of the tree of life have varied from 0.8 to 4.5 Gya (billion years ago). That is a tremendous range, and is a sign of the difficulty of this field. The frustrations of doing molecular phylogeny are legion, just as the temptations are alluring. Firstly, there are very few landmarks in the fossil record to pin all this down. There are stromatolites from roughly 3.5 Gya, which pin down the first documented life of any kind. Second are eukaryotic fossils, which start, at the earliest, about 1.5 Gya. Other microbial fossils pin down occasional sub-groups of bacteria, but archaea are not represented in the fossil record at all, being hardly distinguishable from bacteria in their remains. Then we get the Cambrian explosion of multicellular life, roughly 0.5 Gya. That is pretty much it for the fossil record, aside from the age of the moon, which is about 4.5 Gya and gives us the baseline of when the earth became geologically capable of supporting life of any kind.

The molecules of living organisms, however, form a digital record of history. Following evolutionary theory, each organism descends from others, and carries, in mutated and altered form, traces of that history. We have parts of our genomes that vary with each generation, (useful for forensics and personal identification), we have other parts that show how we changed and evolved from other apes, and we have yet other areas that vary hardly at all- that carry recognizable sequences shared with all other forms of life, and presumably with LUCA. This is a real treasure trove, if only we can make sense of it.

But therein lies the rub. As mentioned above, these deeply conserved sequences are hardly chronometers. So for all the data collection and computer wizardry, the data itself tells a mangled story. Rapid evolution in one lineage can make it look much older than it really is, confounding the whole tree. Over the years, practitioners have learned to be as judicious as possible in selecting target sequences, while getting as many as possible into the mix. For example, adding up the sequences of 50-odd ribosomal proteins can give more and better data than assembling the 2 long-ish ribosomal RNAs. They provide more and more diverse data. But they have their problems as well, since some are much less conserved than others, and some were lost or gained along the way. 

A partisan of the later birth of archaea provides a phylogenetic tree with countless microbial species, and one bold claim: "inflated" distances to the archaeal and eukaryotic stems. This is given as the reason that archaea (lower part of the diagram, including eukaryotes, termed "archaebacteria"), looks very ancient, but really just sped away from its originating bacterial parent, (the red bacteria), estimated at about 1 Gya. This tree is based on an aligned concatentation of 26 universally conserved ribosomal protein sequences, (51 from eukaryotes), with custom adjustments.

So there has been a camp that claims that the huge apparent / molecular distance between the archaea and other cells is just such a chimera of fast evolution. Just as the revolution that led to the eukaryotic cell involved alot of molecular change including the co-habitation of countless proteins that had never seen each other before, duplications / specializations, and many novel inventions, whatever process led to the archaeal cell (from a pre-existing bacterial cell) might also have caused the key molecules we use to look into this deep time to mutate much more rapidly than is true elsewhere in the vast tree of life. What are the reasons? There is the general disbelief / unwillingness to accept someone else's work, and evidence like possible horizontal transfers of genes from chloroplasts to basal archaea, some large sequence deletion features that can be tracked through these lineages and interpreted to support late origination, some papering over of substantial differences in membrane and metabolic systems, and there are plausible (via some tortured logic) candidates for an originating, and late-evolving, bacterial parent. 

This thread of argument puts the origin of eukaryotes roughly at 0.8 Gya, which is, frankly, uncomfortably close to the origination of multicellular life, and gives precious little time for the bulk of eukaryotic diversity to develop, which exists largely, as shown above, at the microbial level. (Note that "Animalia" in the tree above is a tiny red blip among the eukaryotes.) All this is quite implausible, even to a casual reader, and makes this project hard to take seriously, despite its insistent and voluminous documentation.

Parenthetically, there was a fascinating paper that used the evolution of the genetic code itself to make a related point, though without absolute time attributions. The code bears hallmarks of some amino acids being added relatively late (tryptophan, histidine), while others were foundational from the start (glycine, alanine), when it may have consisted of two RNA bases (or even one) rather than three. All of this took place long before LUCA, naturally. This broad analysis of genetic code usage argued that bacteria tend to use a more ancient subset of the code, which may reflect their significantly more ancient position on the tree of life. While the full code was certainly in place by the time of LUCA, there may still at this time have been, in the inherited genome / pool of proteins, a bias against the relatively novel amino acids. This finding implies that the time of archaeal origination was later than the origination of bacteria, by some unspecified but significant amount.

So, attractive as it would be to demote the archaea from their perch as super-ancient organisms, given their small sizes, small genomes, specialization in extreme environments, and peripheral ecological position relative to bacteria, that turns out to be difficult to do. I will turn, then, to a very recent paper that gives what I think is much more reasoned and plausible picture of the deeper levels of the tree of life, and the best general picture to date. This paper is based on the protein sequences of the rotary ATPases that are universal, and were present in LUCA, despite their significant complexity. Indeed, the more we learn about LUCA, the more complete and complex this ancestor turns out to be. Our mitochondrion uses a (bacterial) F-type ATPase to synthesize ATP from the food-derived proton gradient. Our lysosomes use a (archaeal) V-type ATPase to drive protons into / acidify the lysosome in exchange for ATP. These are related, derived from one distant ancestor, and apparently each was likely to have been present in LUCA. Additionally, each ATPase is composed of two types of subunits, one catalytic, and one non-catalytic, which originated from an ancient protein duplication, also prior to LUCA. The availability of these molecular cousins / duplications provides helpful points of comparison throughout, particularly for locating the root of the evolutionary tree.

Phylogenetic trees based on ATP synthase enzymes that are present in all forms of life. On left is shown the general tree, with branch points of key events / lineages. On right are shown sub-trees for the major types of the ATP synthase, whether catalytic subunit (c), non-catalytic (n), F-type, common in bacteria, or V type, common in archaea. Note how congruent these trees are. At bottom right in the tiny print is a guide to absolute time, and the various last common ancestors.

This paper also works quite hard to pin the molecular data to the fossil and absolute time record, which is not always provided The bottom line is that archaea by this tree arise quite early, (see above), co-incident with or within about 0.5 Gy of LUCA, which was bacterial, at roughly 4.4 Gya. The bacterial and archaeal last common ancestors are dated to 4.3 and 3.7 Gya, respectively. The (fused) eukaryotic last common ancestor dates to about 1.9 Gya, with the proto-mitochondrion's individual last common ancestor among the bacteria some time before that, at roughly 2.4 Gya. 

This time line makes sense on many fronts. First, it provides a realistic time frame for the formation and diversification of eukaryotes. It puts their origin right around the great oxidation event, which is when oxygen became dominant in earth's atmosphere, (about 2 to 2.4 Gya), which was a precondition for the usefulness of mitochondria to what are otherwise anaerobic archaeal cells. It places the origin of archaea (LACA) a substantial stretch after the origin of bacteria, which agrees with the critic's points above that bacteria are the truly basal lineage of all life, and archaea, while highly different and pretty archaic, also share a lot of characteristics with bacteria, and perhaps more so with certain early lineages than with others that came later. The distinction between LUCA and the last common bacterial ancestor (LBCA) is a technical one given the trees they were working from, and are not, given the ranges of age presented, (see figure above), significantly different.

I believe this field is settling down, and though this paper, working from only a subset of the most ancient sequences plus fossil set-points, is hardly the last word, it appears to represent a consensus view and is the best picture to date of the deepest and most significant waypoints in the deep history of life. This is what comes from looking through microscopes, and finding entire invisible worlds that we had no idea existed. Genetic sequencing is another level over that of microscopy, looking right at life's code, and at its history, if darkly. What we see in the macroscopic world around us is only the latest act in a drama of tremendous scale and antiquity.

• Platitude.
• There are a lot of single-celled eukaryotes.
• Hitting bottom.

Truth and the Silo

Living in a silo, and wondering what is outside.

The first season of Apple's Silo series was beautifully produced and thought-provoking. Working from a book series of the same name which I have not read, it is set in a devastated world where about 10,000 people live in a huge underground silo. As the show progresses, it is clear that the society got a little totalitarian along the way. We are introduced to a "pact", which is the rules set up ~150 years ago, when a revolution of some undescribed sort happened. Now there is a "judicial" department that sends out goons to keep everyone in line, and there are the rules of the pact, which seem to outlaw fun and inquiry into anything from the past or the outside. It also outlaws elevators.

On the other hand, the population has a window to the outside, which shows an extremely drab world. A hellscape, really. But due to the murky nature of political power and information control within the silo, it is hard to know how real that view is. I won't give away any spoilers because I am interested in exploring the metaphors and themes the show brings up. For we are all working in, living in, and raised in, silos of some sort. Every family is a world more or less closed, with its own mood and rules, generally (hopefully) unwritten. The Silo portrays this involution in an incredibly vivid way.

(Third) Sheriff Nichols meets with the (second) mayor in a lovingly retro-decorated set.

It is fundamentally a drama about truth. One could say that most drama is about seeking truths, whether in a literal form like detective and legal dramas, or in more personal forms like romance, coming of age, and quest-for-power dramas. The point is to find out something, like how attractive the characters are, who will betray whom, who has lined up the better alliances, what a person's character is really like. Why read a story unless you learn something new? Here, the truths being sought are in bold face and out front. What is outside? Who really runs this place? What built this place? Why are we here? Why is everyone wearing hand-knit woolens? And the lead character, Juliet Nichols, is the inveterate truth-seeker. A mechanic by inclination and training, she really, really, wants to know how things work, is proud of mastering some of that knowledge, and is dedicated to dealing with reality and making it work. This quest leads her into rebellion against a system that is typical for our time ... at least in China, North Korea, and Russia. A surveillance and control state that watches everyone, pumps out propaganda, outlaws contrary thought, symbols, and objects, imprisons those who disagree, and ultimately sends inveterate truth seekers outside ... to die.

The nature of truth is of course a deep philosophical question. A major problem is that we can never get there. But even worse, we don't necessarily want to get there either. We automatically form a narrative world around ourselves that generally suffices for day-to-day use. This world is borne largely of habit, authority, instinct, and archetypes. All sorts of sources other than a systematic search for truth. For example, the easiest truth in the world is that we and our group are good, and the other group is bad. This is totally instinctive, and quite obvious to everyone. Religions are full of such truths, narratives, and feelings, developed in the least rigorous way imaginable, ending up with systems fired in the crucible of personal intution, and the imperatives of group dynamics and power. But truth? 

Lighting tends to be a little dark in the Silo, as are the politics.

The Orwellian society is curious, in a way. How can people's natural thirst for truth be so dangerous, so anti-social, and so brutally suppressed? Due to the processes mentioned above, each person's truth is somewhat distinct and personal, each person's quest goes in a different direction. But a society needs some coherence in its narrative, and some people (say, our immediate former president) have an intense yearning for power and need to dominate others, thus to bend them to their own version of truth. Reality distortion fields do not occur only in the tech industry, but are intrinsic to social interaction. The Silo, with its literally closed society, is a natural hothouse for a social fight for dominance and control of reality. Oh, and it has a eugenic program going on as well, though that is not a big focus in the first season.

One can almost sympathise with the fascists of the world, who see truth as functional, not philosophical. Whatever glorifies the state and its leader, whatever keeps the society unchanging and sheltered from uncomfortable truths and surprises. Who needs those pesky and divergent people, who just want to make trouble? And the more baroque and unhinged the official narrative has become, the more dangerous and easy the work of the social sabateur becomes. If the emperor has no clothes, it only takes a child to ask one question. In the Silo, there are various underground actors and uneasy officials who are losing faith in the official line, but where can they go? Is their doubt and desire for the facts more important than the continuation of this very tenuous and smothered society? Could a free-er society work? But why risk it?

In our contemporary world, the right wing is busy making up a parallel universe of obvious and button-pushing untruths. The left, on the other hand, is pursuing a rather righteous investigation into all the mainstream truths we grew up with, and finding them lies. Is the US founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism? Or on democracy and opportunity? Is capitalism salveagable in light of its dreadful record of environmental, animal, and human abuses? It is not a comfortable time, as the truths of our society are shifting underfoot. But is the left unearthing the true truth, or just making up a new and self-serving narrative that will in time be succeeded by others with other emphasis and other interests? 

History is a funny kind of discipline, which can not simply find something true and enshrine it forever, like the laws of gravity. There is some of that in its facts, but history needs to be continually re-written, since it is more about us than about them- more about how our society thinks about itself and what stories it selects from the past, than it is about "what happened". There are an infinite number of things that happened, as well as opinions about them. What makes it into books and documentaries is a matter of selection, and it is always the present that selects. It is a massive front in the formation / evolution of culture- i.e. the culture war. Are we a culture that allows free inquiry and diverse viewpoints on our history, and welcomes observations that undercut comfortable narratives? Or are we a more Orwellian culture that enforces one narrative and erases whatever of its history conflicts with it?

The top level dining room has a viewport to the outside.

The Silo is definitely a culture of the latter type, and its history is brutally truncated. Yet interestingly, character after character nurtures some object that violates the pact, representing a bond with the forbidden, hazy past - the forebears and former world that must necessarily have existed, even as nothing is officially known about them. The urge to know more, especially about our origins, is deeply human, as is the urge to keep one's society on an even keel with a unified and self-satisfied narrative. This tension is built up unceasingly in the Silo, which is as far as we know a unique and precious remnant of humanity. It asks the question whether its stability is worth so much oppression and ignorance.

Parenthetically, one might ask how all this connects to the dystopia outside. The Silo is only painting in extreme colors trends that are happening right now in our world. As the climate gets weirder, we spend more time inside, increasingly isolated from others, entertaining ourselves with streaming offerings like the Silo. Its apocalypse appears more nuclear than climatological, but for us, right now, a dystopia is unfolding. After decades of denial and greed, the truth of climate heating is no longer at issue. So what if the truth is known- has gotten out of the bag- but no one wants to act on it? Another form of courage is needed, not any more to uncover the truth, but to meet that truth with action- action that may require significant sacrifice and a fundamental re-design of our Silo-like system of capitalism.

• Leave your silo, please.
• How many lies can one person believe?
• How one Confederate resolved to move on in Reconstruction.
• Want to turn off your brain for a little while? How about some stutter house?

Missing Links in Eukaryotic Evolution

The things you find in Slovenian mud! Like an archaeal cell that is the closest thing to the eukaryotic root organism.

Creationists and "intelligent" design advocates tirelessly point to the fossil record. Not how orderly it is and revealing of the astonishingly sequenced, slow, and relentless elaboration of life. No, they decry its gaps- places where fossils do not account for major evolutionary (er, designed) transitions to more modern forms. It is a sad kind of argument, lacking in imagination and dishonest in its unfairness and hypocrisy. Does the life of Jesus have gaps in the historical record? Sure enough! And are those historical records anywhere near as concrete and informative as fossils? No way. What we have as a record of Christianity's history is riven with fantasy, forgery, and uncertainty.

But enough trash talk. One thing that science has going for it is a relentlessly accumulating process by which new fossils appear, and new data from other sources, like newly found organisms and newly sequenced genomes, arise to clarify what were only imaginative (if reasonable) hypotheses previously. Darwin's theory of evolution, convincing and elegantly argued as it was originally, has gained such evidence without fail over the subsequent century and a half, from discoveries of the age of the earth (and thus the solar system) to the mechanics of genetic inheritance.

A recent paper describes the occurence of cytoskeletal proteins and structures in an organism that is neither a bacterium nor a eukaryote, but appears to be within the family of Archaea that is the closest thing we have to the eukaryotic progenitor. These are the Asgard Archaea, a family that was discovered only in the last decade, as massive environmental sequencing projects have sampled the vast genetic diversity hidden in the muds, sediments, soils, rocks, and waters of the world. 

Sampling stray DNA is one thing, but studying these organisms in depth requires growing them in the lab. After trolling through the same muds in Slovenia where promising DNA sequences were fond, this group fished out, and then carefully cultured, a novel archaeal cell. But growing these cells is notoriously difficult. They are anaerobic, never having made the transition to the oxygenated atmosphere of the later earth. They have finicky nutritional requirements. They grow very slowly. And they generally have to live with other organisms (bacteria) with which they have reciprocal metabolic relationships. In the ur-eukaryote, this was a relationship with the proto-mitochondrion, which was later internalized. For the species cultured by this research group, it is a pair of other free-living bacteria. One is related to sulfur-reducing Desulfovibrio, and the other one is related to a simpler archaeal Methanogenium that uses hydrogen and CO2 or related simple carbon compounds to make methane. Anaerobic Asgard archaea generally have relatively simple metabolisms and make hydrogen from small organic compounds, through a kind of fermentation.

A phylogenetic tree showing relations between the newly found organisms (bottom) and eukaryotes (orange), other archaea, and the entirely separate domain of bacteria (red). This is based on a set of sequences of universally used / conserved ribosomal proteins. While the eukaryotes have strayed far from the root, that root is extremely close to some archaeal groups.

Micrographs of cultured lokiarchaeal cells, with a scale bar of 500 nanometers. These are rather amoeboid cells with extensive cytoskeletal and membrane regulation.

Another micrograph of part of a lokiarchaeal cell, showing not just its whacky shape, but a good bit of internal structure as well. The main scale bar is 100 nanometers. There are internal actin filaments (yellow arrowheads), lined up ribosomes (gray arrowhead) and cell surface proteins of some kind (blue arrowheads).

What they found after all this was pretty astonishing. They found cells that are quite unlike typical bacterial or even archaeal cells, which are compact round or rod shapes. These (termed lokiarchaeal) cells have luxurious processes extending all over the place, and a profusion of internal structural elements reminiscent of eukaryotic cells, though without membrane-bound internal organelles. But they have membrane-bound protrusions and what look like vesicles budding off. At only six million base pairs (compared to our three billion) and under five thousand genes, these cells have a small and streamlined genome. Yet there are a large number (i.e. 258) of eukaryotic-related (signature) proteins (outlined below), particularly concerning cytoskeletal and membrane trafficking. The researchers delved into the subcellular structures, labeling actin and obtaining structural data for both actin and ribosomes, confirming their archaeal affinity with added features. 

A schematic of eukaryotic-like proteins in the newly cultured lokiarchaeal Asgard genome. Comparison (blue) is to a closely related organism isolated recently in Japan.

This work is the first time that the cytoskeleton of Asgard cells has been visualized, along with its role in their amoeboid capabilities. What is it used for? That remains unknown. The lush protrusions may collaborate with this organism's metabolic partners, or be used for sensing and locomoting to find new food within its sediment habitat, or for interacting with fellow lokiarchaeal cells, as shown above. Or all of these roles. Evolutionarily, this organism, while modern, appears to be a descendent of the closest thing we have to the missing link at the origin of eukaryotes, (that is, the archaeal dominant partner of the founding symbiosis), and in that sense seems both ancient in its characteristics, and possibly little changed from that time. Who would have expected such a thing? Well, molecular biologists and evolutionary biologists have been expecting it for a long time.

• Fossil fuel consumption is still going up, not down.

Credit where Faith is Due

The enormous, and sometimes underrated, value of faith and credit in the US financial instruments and institutions.

To hear the chaos caucus in congress put it, the country can go to hell, because their pet peeves- abortion, culture war, gay rights, gun rights ... have already gone to hell, so how much worse can it really get? Well, it could get a lot worse. We are a rich country for many reasons, but an important one is good management at the federal level of our financial and monetary affairs. It is this stability that undergirds not only the currency, but also economic expectations of the future, as expressed in inflation, and markets such as the commodities, bond, and stock markets, not to mention political stability, such as it is.

Every dollar is a credit instrument, staked on the faith and credit of the United States. Without that faith, it is worthless. Even with that faith, it is a debt of the government, counted under the vast rubric of "the federal debt". The more money we have (or that is out in the wild somewhere), the more that debt is. And that money has proliferated remarkably. Quite a few small countries have formally dollarized their economies, such as Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Palau, and Panama. Many more countries use dollars as a defacto currency or black market currency, including much of the criminal world. Most countries hold large reserves of dollars to anchor their international trade and financial stability. So we should not be surprised that our federal debt is very large. Does anyone (maybe our children!?) have to "pay it back"? Not really, since all those dollars can keep floating around forever. That is, until some other country's currency becomes the reserve currency of the world, and those dollars become either worth less, or we buy them back with that new currency. Forestalling that day should be one of our major foreign policy and economic goals.

Another dimension of the credit of the US is the formal debt, in bonds that the Treasury department issues to account for spending that was not matched by incoming taxes. The Federal Reserve accumulates Treasury bonds as it issues new dollars, but these bonds come with the obligation to keep paying interest. While this makes it convenient and profitable for other countries and rich people to hold bonds instead of dollar bills, (and earns the Fed itself plenty of notional money), it puts us on the hook for endless payments (of newly minted dollars) to support those interest payments. This is a rather dangerous situation, since the level of interest is not always under tight control. Depending on your view of financial affairs, the interest rate is dictated by the market, or by the Fed, or by the general level of inflation, which in turn influences the actions of both the market and the Fed. In any case, the interest on thirty trillion dollars is a heck of a lot more at higher rates than at low ones. This strongly motivates the Fed to use all its tools to curtail inflation and keep long term interest rates under control.

A graph of the price/earnings ratio of the SP500 collection of stocks, over the long term. This ratio indicates the length of time holders of stock are willing to wait for their returns to come in, in years. Notice how in the last few decades, the P/E ratio has persisted at significantly higher-than-historical levels, indicating, despite ups and downs, increased faith in the long-term stability of the economic and financial system. There may be other reasons- better regulation, technological innovation, 401K rules, lowered taxes, etc. But financial markets like the stock market are sensitive indicators of the credit given to our institutions.

All this comes back to the sound management of our financial affairs. We have a lot of room to maneuver due to economic expansion, both at home and abroad, which makes ongoing federal debts a built-in necessity. But we do not have endless room, and taxation plays an important role in making up the difference between money we can freely spend/issue to satisfy growth without inflation, and the rest of the money needed for government operations. What that gap is, is difficult to say, in the same way that the causes and time course of inflation are hard to pin down, but there is a gap, which taxes cover. Incidentally, in the MMT view of things, taxes reduce the level of private spending and consumption to make room for government spending, vs actually "funding" the government, which issues the money in the first place. But either way, taxes are an essential part of the financial cycle, and haphazardly forgiving tax obligations (or hobbling enforcement) is just as bad management as profligate spending or lax control of interest rates and inflation.

All these factors are part of the credit of the United States, and have been under fire from the right wing for several decades. When they are not cutting taxes of the rich or spending mindlessly on the military, they are shutting the government down or muttering about the deep state, the evils of the civil service, and how we should get back on the gold standard. Meanwhile the whole stability of our position as a rich economy and leader among nations hangs in the balance when thoughtless policy and extreme politics encroach from the fringes. Can the US run things better? Absolutely. Are there tradeoffs between humane and cultural virtues and financial / economic success? Absolutely. But from our founding era, when the Treasury Department under Alexander Hamilton established the US debt as a powerful instrument of union and stability, the credit of the US has been an underappreciated pillar of our position both domestically and internationally. Toying with it, via artificial crises and bad policy, is correspondingly an under-appreciated danger to our way of life.

• Business needs more regulation.
• Misogyny has a new hero.
• Hospitals are becoming scarcer and poorer. In part due to medicare "advantage".
• My congressperson is on the job.
• The state of solar.