Preliminary Pieces of AI

We already live in an AI world, and really, it isn't so bad.

It is odd to hear about all the hyperventilating about artificial intelligence of late. One would think it is a new thing, or some science-fiction-y entity. Then there are fears about the singularity and loss of control by humans. Count me a skeptic on all fronts. Man is, and remains, wolf to man. To take one example, we are contemplating the election of perhaps the dummbest person ever to hold the office of president. For the second time. How an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is supposed to worm its way into power over us is not easy to understand, looking at nature of humans and of power. 

So let's take a step back and figure out what is going on, and where it is likely to take us. AI has become a catch-all for a diversity of computer methods, mostly characterized by being slightly better at doing things we have long wanted computers to do, like interpreting text, speech, and images. But I would offer that it should include much more- all the things we have computers do to manage information. In that sense, we have been living among shards of artificial intelligence for a very long time. We have become utterly dependent on databases, for instance, for our memory functions. Imagine having to chase down a bank balance or a news story, without access to the searchable memories that modern databases provide. They are breathtakingly superior to our own intelligence when it comes to the amount of things they can remember, the accuracy they can remember them, and the speed with which they can find them. The same goes for calculations of all sorts, and more recently, complex scientific math like solving atomic structures, creating wonderful CGI graphics, or predicting the weather. 

We should view AI as a cabinet filled with many different tools, just as our own bodies and minds are filled with many kinds of intelligence. The integration of our minds into a single consciousness tends to blind us to the diversity of what happens under the hood. While we may want gross measurements like "general intelligence", we also know increasingly that it (whatever "it" is, and whatever it fails to encompass of our many facets and talents) is composed of many functions that several decades of work in AI, computer science, and neuroscience have shown are far more complicated and difficult to replicate than the early AI pioneers imagined, once they got hold of their Turing machine with its infinite potential. 

Originally, we tended to imagine artificial intelligence as a robot- humanoid, slightly odd looking, but just like us in form and abilities. That was a natural consequence of our archetypes and narcissism. But AI is nothing like that, because full-on humanoid consciousness is an impossibly high bar, at least for the foreseeable future, and requires innumerable capabilities and forms of intelligence to be developed first. 

The autonomous car drama is a good example of this. It has taken every ounce of ingenuity and high tech to get to a reasonably passable vehicle, which is able to "understand" key components of the world around it. That a blob in front is a person, instead of a motorcycle, or that a light is a traffic light instead of a reflection of the sun. Just as our brain has a stepwise hierarchy of visual processing, we have recapitulated that evolution here by harnessing cameras in these cars (and lasers, etc.) to not just take in a flat visual scene, which by itself is meaningless, but to parse it into understandable units like ... other cars, crosswalks, buildings, bicylists, etc.. Visual scenes are very rich, and figuring out what is in them is a huge accomplishment. 

But is it intelligence? Yes, it certainly is a fragment of intelligence, but it isn't consciousness. Imagine how effortless this process is for us, and how effortful and constricted it is for an autonomous vehicle. We understand everything in a scene within a much wider model of the world, where everything relates to everything else. We evaluate and understand innumerable levels of our environment, from its chemical makeup to its social and political implications. Traffic cones do not freak us out. The bare obstacle course of getting around, such as in a vehicle, is a minor aspect, really, of this consciousness, and of our intelligence. Autonomous cars are barely up to the level of cockroaches, on balance, in overall intelligence.

The AI of text and language handling is similarly primitive. Despite the vast improvements in text translation and interpretation, the underlying models these mechanisms draw on are limited. Translation can be done without understanding text at all, merely by matching patterns from pre-digested pools of pre-translated text, regurgitated as cued by the input text. Siri-like spoken responses, on the other hand, do require some parsing of meaning out of the input, to decide what the topic and the question are. But the scope of these tools tend to be very limited, and the wider scope they are allowed, the more embarrassing their performance, since they are essentially scraping web sites and text pools for question-response patterns, instead of truly understanding the user's request or any field of knowledge.

Lastly, there are the generative ChatGPT style engines, which also regurgitate text patterns reformatted from public sources in response to topical requests. The ability to re-write a Wikipedia entry through a Shakespeare filter is amazing, but it is really the search / input functions that are most impressive- being able, like the Siri system, to parse through the user's request for all its key points. This betokens some degree of understanding, in the sense that the world of the machine (i.e. its database) is parceled up into topics that can be separately gathered and reshuffled into a response. This requires a pretty broad and structured ontological / classification system, which is one important part of intelligence.

Not only is there a diversity of forms of intelligence to be considered, but there is a vast diversity of expertise and knowledge to be learned. There are millions of jobs and professions, each with their own forms of knowledge. Back the early days of AI, we thought that expert systems could be instructed by experts, formalizing their expertise. But that turned out to be not just impractical, but impossible, since much of that expertise, formed out of years of study and experience, is implicit and unconscious. That is why apprenticeship among humans is so powerful, offering a combination of learning by watching and learning by doing. Can AI do that? Only if it gains several more kinds of intelligence including an ability to learn in very un-computer-ish ways.

This analysis has emphasized the diverse nature of intelligences, and the uneven, evolutionary development they have undergone. How close are we to a social intelligence that could understand people's motivations and empathise with them? Not very close at all. How close are we to a scientific intelligence that could find holes in the scholarly literature and manage a research enterprise to fill them? Not very close at all. So it is very early days in terms of anything that could properly be called artificial intelligence, even while bits and pieces have been with us for a long time. We may be in for fifty to a hundred more years of hearing every advance in computer science being billed as artificial intelligence.

Uneven development is going to continue to be the pattern, as we seize upon topics that seem interesting or economically rewarding, and do whatever the current technological frontier allows. Memory and calculation were the first to fall, being easily formalizable. Communication network management is similarly positioned. Game learning was next, followed by the Siri / Watson systems for question answering. Then came a frontal assault on language understanding, using the neural network systems, which discard the former expert system's obsession with grammar and rules, for much simpler statistical learning from large pools of text. This is where we are, far from fully understanding language, but highly capable in restricted areas. And the need for better AI is acute. There are great frontiers to realize in medical diagnosis and in the modeling of biological systems, to only name two fields close at hand that could benefit from a thoroughly systematic and capable artificial intelligence.

The problem is that world modeling, which is what languages implicitly stand for, is very complicated. We do not even know how to do this properly in principle, let alone having the mechanisms and scale to implement it. What we have in terms of expert systems and databases do not have the kind of richness or accessibility needed for a fluid and wide-ranging consciousness. Will neural nets get us there? Or ontological systems / databases? Or some combination? However it is done, full world modeling with the ability to learn continuously into those models are key capabilities needed for significant artificial intelligence.

After world modeling come other forms of intelligence like social / emotional intelligence and agency / management intelligence with motivation. I have no doubt that we will get to full machine consciousness at some point. The mechanisms of biological brains are just not sufficiently mysterious to think that they can not be replicated or improved upon. But we are nowhere near that yet, despite bandying about the word artificial intelligence. When we get there, we will have to pay special attention to the forms of motivation we implant, to mitigate the dangers of making beings who are even more malevolent than those that already exist... us.

Would that constitute some kind of "singularity"? I doubt it. Among humans there are already plenty of smart people and diversity, which result in niches for everyone having something useful to do. Technology has been replacing human labor forever, and will continue moving up the chain of capability. And when machines exceed the level of human intelligence, in some general sense, they will get all the difficult jobs. But the job of president? That will still go to a dolt, I have no doubt. Selection for some jobs is by criteria that artificial intelligence, no matter how astute, is not going to fulfill.

Risks? In the current environment, there are a plenty of risks, which are typically cases where technology has outrun our will to regulate its social harm. Fake information, thanks to the chatbots and image makers, can now flood the zone. But this is hardly a new phenomenon, and perhaps we need to get back to a position where we do not believe everything we read, in the National Enquirer or on the internet. The quality of our sources may become once again an important consideration, as they always should have been.

Another current risk is that the automation risks chaos. For example in the financial markets, the new technologies seem to calm the markets most of the time, arbitraging with relentless precision. But when things go out of bounds, flash breakdowns can happen, very destructively. The SEC has sifted through some past events of this kind and set up regulatory guard rails. But they will probably be perpetually behind the curve. Militaries are itching to use robots instead of pilots and soldiers, and to automate killing from afar. But ultimately, control of the military comes down to social power, which comes down to people of not necessarily great intelligence. 

The biggest risk from these machines is that of security. If we have our financial markets run by machine, or our medical system run by super-knowledgeable artificial intelligences, or our military by some panopticon neural net, or even just our electrical grid run by super-computers, the problem is not that they will turn against us of their own volition, but that some hacker somewhere will turn them against us. Countless hospitals have already faced ransomware attacks. This is a real problem, growing as machines become more capable and indispensable. If and when we make artificial people, we will need the same kind of surveillance and social control mechanisms over them that we do over everyone else, but with the added option of changing their programming. Again, powerful intelligences made for military purposes to kill our enemies are, by the reflexive property of all technology, prime targets for being turned against us. So just as we have locked up our nuclear weapons and managed to not have them fall into enemy hands (so far), similar safeguards would need to be put on similar powers arising from these newer technologies.

We may have been misled by the many AI and super-beings of science fiction, Nietzsche's Übermensch, and similar archetypes. The point of Nietzsche's construction is moral, not intellectual or physical- a person who has thrown off all the moral boundaries of civilization, expecially Christian civilization. But that is a phantasm. The point of most societies is to allow the weak to band together to control the strong and malevolent. A society where the strong band together to enslave the weak.. well, that is surely a nightmare, and more unrealistic the more concentrated the power. We must simply hope that, given the ample time we have before truly comprehensive and superior artificial intelligent beings exist, we have exercised sufficient care in their construction, and in the health of our political institutions, to control them as we have many other potentially malevolent agents.

• AI in chemistry.
• AI to recognize cells in images.
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali becomes Christian. "I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable."
• The racism runs very deep.
• An appreciation of Stephen J. Gould.
• Forced arbitration against customers and employees is OK, but fines against frauds... not so much?
• Oil production still going up.

Portents of Overpopulation

The many ways we can tell humans have overrun the planet.

I was reading a slight book on the history of my county, built around photos from our local historical society. What struck me was how bucolic it used to be, more agrarian and slow paced, yet at the same time socially vibrant. A scarcity of people makes everyone more positive about meeting and being with other people. Now the region is much more built-up, with more amenities, but less open space and seemingly less social mixing. All this got me thinking about the social indices of overpopulation.

There are many ways to evaluate human overpopulation. Famine and starvation is perhaps the simplest, a specter that was thought to be imminent in the 1970's, with "The Population Bomb". Lately we have become aware of more subtle problems that the planet has due to our numbers, like pervasive plastic pollution, deranged nitrogen and other chemical cycles, and climate heating. There has been a constant descent down ladders of resource quality, from the mastodons that were hunted out thousands of years ago, then fisheries destroyed, then ranges overgrazed, to the point that we are making hamburgers out of peas and soy beans now. Minerals follow the same course, as we go farther afield to exploit poorer ores of the critical elements like copper, aluminum, rare earth elements, helium, etc. 

Sustainability is not just a word or a woke mantra. It is a specter that hangs over our future. Will humans be able to exist at our current technological level in a few hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand? There is no way that will be possible with our current practices. So those practices unquestionably have to change. 

But apart from the resource constraints that overpopulation presents, I have been struck by the sociological factors that point in the same direction, and are spontaneous responses to what is evident in the environment. In my community and the state of California, there is a vocal debate about housing. Localities have settled into a comfortable stasis, where no new housing is zoned for, existing housing values go up, and existing residents are happy. But the population of the state continues to go up, housing becomes increasingly unaffordable, and the homeless lie all over the streets and parks. There seems to be a psychological state where most current residents see the current situation as sufficiently dense- they are not interested in more growth, (We don't want to become LA!). They instinctively sense that we have collectively reached some kind of limit, given our technological setting and psychology.

Declining birth rates across the developed world point in the same direction. Perhaps the expense of raising a child into the current lifestyle is too high, but there may be something more basic going on. Likewise the broad acceptance of gay / LGBTQ lives, where previously the emphasis was on "natural" and fertile growth of the human population, without any consciousness of limits. People seem less social, less likely to go out from their cocoons and streaming pods. Political divisiveness may also be traceable to this sociological turning point, since if growth is off the table, the pie is static, and political and economic competition is increasingly zero-sum instead of collective and growth-oriented. Public works fall into this trap as well, with public agencies increasingly sclerotic, unable to plow through conflicting entrenched interests, and unable to grow, or even maintain, our infrastructure. One could invoke a general anti-immigrant sentiment as another sign, although anti-immigrant campaigns have featured periodically throughout US history, usually mixed, as now, with racial selectivity and animus.

Imaginatively, dystopias seem to rule over the science fiction universe, as Hollywood seems to take for granted a grim future of some kind, whether inflicted by aliens or AI, or by ourselves. Heroes may fight against it, but we do not seem to get many happy endings. The future just looks too bleak, if one is looking far enough ahead. It is hard to generate the optimism we once had, given the failure of the technological deliverances of the twentieth century (fossil fuels, nuclear power, fusion power) to provide a truly sustainable future. Everyone can sense, at an intuitive level, that we are stuck, and may not get a technological fix to get us out of this jam. Solar power is great, but it is not yet clear that the triumvirate of wind, solar, and batteries are truly enough to feed our need for power, let alone the growing appetites of the not-yet-fully developed world. And if it is? Human populations will doubtless grow to the point that those technologies become untenable in turn, with a hat-tip to Thomas Malthus. 

We should be proud of the many great things that this period of prosperity has allowed us to accomplish. But we should grieve, as well, for the costs incurred- the vast environmental degradation which at the current pace is accelerating and compounding through many forms. Humans are not going to go extinct from these self-induced crises, but we will have to face up to the absolute necessity of sustainability over the long term, or else "the environment" will do so for us, by reducing our populations to more sustainable levels.

• Similarly in China...
• A turning point in Chinese attitudes.
• The Gym Industrial Complex.

Eco-Economics

Adrienne Buller on greenwashing, high finance, and the failures of capitalism viz the environment, in "The Value of a Whale".

This is a very earnest book by what seems to be an environmental activist about the mistaken notion that capitalism gives a fig about climate change. Buller goes through the painstaking economic rationales by which economists attempt to value or really, discount the value of, future generations. And how poorly carbon taxes have performed. And how feckless corporations are about their climate pledges, carbon offsets, and general greenwashing. And how unlikely it is that "socially conscious" investing will change anything. It is a frustrated, head-banging exercise in deflating illusions of economic theory and corporate responsibility. Skimming through it is perhaps the best approach. Here is a sample quote from Buller's conclusion:

Given this entrenched perspective, it is unsurprising that resistance to the kinds of bold change we need to secure a habitable planetary future for all and a safe present for many tend to focus on what we stand to lose. Undeniably, available evidence suggests that 'addressing environmental breakdown may require direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in wealthier countries'. This is an uncomfortable idea to grapple with, but as philosopher Kate Soper writes: 'If we have cosmopolitan care for the well-being of the poor of the world, and a concern about the quality of life for future generations, then we have to campaign for a change of attitudes to work, consumption, pleasure, and self-realization in affluent communities.' There is a sense that this future is necessarily austerian, anti-progress, and defined by lack. Indeed, the same media study cited above found discussion of economies defined by the absence of growth to focus on bleakness and stagnation. Comparatively little attention is directed at what we stand to gain - but there is much to be gained. Understanding what requires us to ask what the existing system currently fails to provide, from universal access to health case and education, to basic material security, to free time. It certainly does not offer a secure planetary future, let alone one in which all life can thrive. And it does not offer genuine democracy, justice or freedom for most. Absent these, what purpose is 'the economy' meant to serve?

Unfortunately, the book is not very economically literate either, making its illusions something of a village of straw men. Who ever thought that Royal Dutch Shell was going to solve climate change? Who ever thought that a $5 dollar per ton tax on CO2 emissions was going to accomplish anything? And who ever thought that the only reason to address climate heating was to save ourselves a dollar in 2098? All these premises and ideas are absurd, hardly the stuff of serious economic or social analysis. 

But then, nothing about our approach to climate heating is serious. It is a psychodrama of capitalism in denial, composed of cossetted capitalist people in the five stages of grief over our glorious carbon-hogging culture. Trucks, guns, and drive-through hamburgers, please! Outright denial is only slowly ebbing away, as we sidle into the anger phase. The conservative Right, which mixes an apocalyptically destructive anti-conservative environmental attitude with a futile cultural conservatism, is angry now about everything. The idea that the environment itself is changing, and requires fundamental cultural and economic change, is an affront. The eco-conscious left is happy to peddle nostrums that nothing really has to change, if we just put up enough solar panels and fund enough green jobs. 

Objectively, given the heating we are already experiencing and the much worse heating that lies ahead, we are not facing up to this challenge. It is understandable to not want to face change, especially limits to our wealth, freedoms, and profligacy. But we shouldn't blame corporations for it. The capitalist system exists to reflect our desires and fulfill them. If we want to binge-watch horror TV, it gives us that. If we want to gamble in Las Vegas, it gives us that. If we want to drive all around the country, it makes that possible. Capitalism transmutes whatever resources are lying around (immigrant labor, publically funded research, buried minerals and carbon, etc.) to furnish things we want. We can't blame that system for fouling up the environment when we knew exactly what was going on and wanted those things it gave us, every step of the way.

No, there is another mechanism to address big problems like climate heating, and that is government. That is where we can express far-sighted desires. Not the desire for faster internet or more entertaining TV, but deep and far-reaching desires for a livable future world, filled with at least some of the animals that we grew up with, and maybe not filled with plastic. It is through our enlightened government that we make the rules that run the capitalist system. Which system is totally dependent on, and subservient to, our collective wisdom as expressed through government. 

So the problem is not that capitalism is maliciously ruining our climate, but that our government, representative as it is of our desires, has not fully faced up to the climate issue either. Because we, as a culture, are, despite the blaring warnings coming from the weather, and from scientists, don't want to hear it. There is also the problem that we have allowed the capitalists of our culture far too much say in the media and in government- a nexus that is fundamentally corrupt and distorts the proper hierarchy of powers we deserve as citizens.

The US games out in 2012 how various carbon taxes will affect emissions, given by electricity production. These are modest levels of taxation, and have modest effects. To actually address the climate crisis, a whole other magnitude of taxation and other tools need to be brought to bear. The actual trajectory came out to more renewables, no growth for nuclear power, and we are still burning coal.

Let me touch on just one topic from the book- carbon taxes. This is classic case of squeemish policy-making. While it is not always obvious that carbon pricing would be a more fair or effective approach than direct regulation of the most offensive industries and practices, it is obvious that putting a price on carbon emissions can be an effective policy tool for reducing overall emissions. The question is- how high should that price be to have the effect we want? Well, due to the universal economic consensus that carbon pricing would be a good thing, many jurisdictions have set up such pricing or capping schemes. But very few are effective, because, lo and behold, they did not want to actually have a strong effect. That is, they did not want to disrupt the current way of doing things, but only make themselves (and ourselves) feel good, with a slight inducement to moderate future change. Thus they typically exempt the most polluting industries outright, and set the caps high and the prices low, so as not to upset anyone. And then Adrienne Buller wonders why these schemes are so universally ineffective.

Carbon prices in California are currently around $30 per ton CO2, and this has, according to those studying the system, motivated one third of the state's overall carbon reductions over the current decade. That is not terrible, but clearly insufficient, even for a forward-thinking state, since we need to wring carbon out of our systems at a faster pace. Raising that price would be the most direct way for us as a society to do that. But do we want to? At that point, we need to look in the mirror and ask whether the point of our policies should be addressing climate heating in the most effective way possible, or to avoid pain and change to our current systems. Right now, we are on a sort of optimal trajectory to avoid most of the economic and social pain of truly addressing climate change, (by using gradualist and incremental policies), but at the cost of not getting there soon enough and thus incurring increasing levels of pain from climate heating itself- now, and in a future that is measured, not in years, but in centuries. 

The second big point to make about this book and similar discussions is that it largely frames the problem as an economic one for humanity. How much cost do we bear in 2100 and 2200, compared with the cost we are willing to pay today? Well, that really ignores a great deal, for there are other species on the planet than ourselves. And there are other values we have as humans, than economic ones. This means that any cost accounting that gets translated into a carbon price needs to be amplified several fold to truly address the vast array of harms we are foisting on the biosphere. Coral reefs are breaking down, tropical forests are losing their regenerative capability, and the arctic is rapidly turning temperate. These are huge changes and harms, which no accounting from an economic perspective "internalizes". 

So, we need to psychologically progress, skipping a few steps to the facing-it part of the process, which then will naturally lead us towards truly effective solutions to get to carbon neutrality rapidly. Will it cost a lot? Absolutely. Will we suffer imbalances and loss of comforts? Absolutely. But once America faces up to a problem, we tend to do a good job accepting those tradeoffs and figuring out how to get the results we want. 

• An earth systems perspective.
• I hope you are appreciating this free-range, hand-made, artisanal prose.
• Loneliness.
• Plastic is a thing too.
• Natural gas and the future of Europe.
• Maybe having cars parked everywhere isn't the best idea.
• Thoughts on the drug war.

The Pillow Creatures That Time Forgot

Did the Ediacaran fauna lead to anything else, or was it a dead end?

While to a molecular biologist, the evolution of the eukaryotic cell is probably the greatest watershed event after the advent of life itself, most others would probably go with the rise of animals and plants, after about three billion years of exclusively microbial life. This event is commonly located at the base of the Cambrian, (i.e. the Cambrian explosion), which is where the fossils that Darwin and his contemporaries were familiar with began, about 540 million years ago. Darwin was puzzled by this sudden start of the fossil record, from apparently nothing, and presciently held (as he did in the case of the apparent age of the sun) that the data were faulty, and that the ancient character of life on earth would leave other traces much farther back in time.

That has indeed proved to be the case. There are signs of microbial life going back over three billion years, and whole geologies in the subsequent time dependent on its activity, such as the banded iron formations prevalent around two billion years ago that testify to the slow oxygenation of the oceans by photosynthesizing microbes. And there are also signs of animal life prior to the Cambrian, going back roughly to 600 million years ago that have turned up, after much deeper investigations of the fossil record. This immediately pre-Cambrian period is labeled the Ediacaran, for one of its fossil-bearing sites in Australia. A recent paper looked over this whole period to ask whether the evolution of proto-animals during this time was a steady process, or punctuated by mass extinction event(s). They conclude that, despite the patchy record, there is enough to say that there was a steady (if extremely slow) march of ecological diversification and specialization through the time, until the evolution of true animals in the Cambrian literally ate up all the Ediacaran fauna. 

Fossil impression of Dickinsonia, with trailing impressions that some think might be a trail from movement. Or perhaps just friends in the neighborhood.

 
For the difference between the Ediacaran fauna and that of the Cambrian is stark. The Ediacaran fauna is beautiful, but simple. There are no backbones, no sensory organs. No mouth, no limbs, no head. In developmental terms, they seem to have had only two embryological cell layers, rather than our three, which makes all the difference in terms of complexity. How they ate remains a mystery, but they are assumed to have simply osmosed nutrients from their environment, thanks to their apparently flat forms. A bit like sponges today. As they were the most complex animals at the time, (and some were large, up to 2 meters long), they may have had an easy time of it, simply plopping themselves on top of rich microbial mats, oozing with biofilms and other nutrients.

The paper provides a schematic view of the ecology at single locations, and also of longer-term evolution, from a sequence of views (i.e. fossils) obtained from different locations around the world of roughly ten million year intervals through the Ediacaran. One noticeable trend is the increasing development or prevalence of taller fern-like forms that stick up into the water over time, versus the flatter bottom-dwelling forms. This may reflect some degree of competition, perhaps after the bottom microbial mats have been over-"grazed". A second trend is towards slightly more complexity at the end of the period, with one very small form (form C (a) in the image below) even marked by shell remains, though what its animal inhabitant looked like is unknown. 

Schematic representation of putative animals observed during the Ediacaran epoch, from early, (A, ~570 MYA, Avalon assemblage), middle, (B, ~554 MYA, White River and other assemblages), and late (C, ~545 MYA, Nama assemblage). The A panel is also differentiated by successional forms from early to mature ecosystems, while the C panel is differentiated by ocean depth, from shallow to deep. The persistence of these forms is quite impressive overall, as is their common simplicity. But lurking somewhere among them are the makings of far more complicated animals.

Very few of these organisms have been linked to actual animals of later epochs, so virtually all of them seem to have been superceded by the wholly different Cambrian fauna- much of which itself remains perplexing. One remarkable study used mass-spec chemical analysis on some Dickinsonia fossils from the late Ediacaran to determine that they bore specific traces of cholesterol, marking them as probable animals, rather than overgrown protists or seaweed. But beyond that, there is little that can be said. (Note a very critical and informed review of all this from the Discovery Institute, of all places.) Their preservation is often remarkable, considering the age involved, and they clearly form the sole fauna known from pre-Cambrian times. 

But the core question of how the Cambrian (and later) animals came to be remains uncertain, at least as far as the fossil record is concerned. One relevant observation is that there is no sign of burrowing through the sediments of the Ediacaran epoch. So the appearance of more complex animals, while it surely had some kind of precedent deep in the Ediacaran, or even before, did not make itself felt in any macroscopic way then. It is evident that once the triploblastic developmental paradigm arose, out of the various geologic upheavals that occurred at the bases of both the Ediacaran and the Cambrian, its new design including mouths, eyes, spines, bones, plates, limbs, guts, and all the rest that we are now so very familiar with, utterly over-ran everything that had gone before.

Some more fine fossils from Canada, ~ 580 MYA.

• A video tour of some of the Avalon fauna.
• An excellent BBC podcast on the Ediacaran.
• We need to measure the economy differently.
• Deep dive on the costs of foreign debt.
• Now I know why chemotherapy is so horrible.
• Waste on an epic scale.
• The problem was not the raids, but the terrible intelligence... by our intelligence agency.

Join Ukraine

It is time to make Ukraine part of NATO and dispense with the charade of arms-length relations.

The war in Ukraine has been a pure crime from the start, founded on lies and imperialism of the most old-fashioned sort. The West has long shied from directly allying itself with Ukraine, because Ukraine is so physically and culturally close to Russia. So in deference to old ideas of neighborhoods, spheres of influence, and defensive buffers, and the like, we have respected that we might create a large mess by taking NATO so close up to Russia's borders and self-interest. 

Well, the mess has happened, and not by our doing. Ukraine has on its own progressively rejected the Russian sphere over the last decade, and for a variety of very good reasons taken steps to become an independent, functional Western-aligned democracy. (Unlike, say, Belarus.) Russia has in response taken the most brutal approach to bullying- killing and maiming what they can not take by corruption, threats, and diplomacy. Ukraine has fought back valiantly, but will be trapped in an endless frozen / slogging conflict unless it gets definitive help from the West.

There are two endgames in sight. One is that Russia keeps up its attack, in an effort to destroy or at least hobble Ukraine, physically and politically, perhaps even genocidally. Russia at this point has taken the worst the West has to offer, and the best defense the Ukrainians have to offer. It has been beaten off partially, but far from completely. From what we have seen, Putin can, and probably intends to, keep up the pressure on Ukraine indefinitely. Ukraine would become another Chechnia or Syria. This is not a good end-game, either for Ukraine or for the future of international relations among civilized countries- a wolf stealing back an empire, sheep by sheep.

Current state of the war in Ukraine.

Another endgame is that the US and allies intervene, make Ukraine peremptorily a member of NATO, join the fight, and definitively eject Russia from Ukrainian territory, including the Donbas and Crimea. Given what we have seen so far, this is for NATO a militarily achievable objective. These allies would naturally make it clear that attacking Russia proper is not our aim, though may be necessary if Russia attacks other NATO countries or persists in raining missiles / aircraft from across the border. 

The major question is how Russia might choose to escalate / retaliate. It has threatened nuclear war, in not so many words. I think such a course is highly unlikely, since Russia is trying to build a historical legacy here, not destroy one, or destroy itself. Deterence still holds, on both sides. Not to mention the fact that Western bombs are much more likely to be actually operational, given what we have seen of the Russian military. Additionally, adding Ukraine to the NATO umbrella with its various explicit guarantees will provide that much more deterrence against a nuclear attack on Ukraine, arguably forestalling such a worst-case outcome, even given the madness at hand.

Far more likely would be an assortment of alternative spoiler activities, like increased cybercrime and perhaps attacks in space on our satellites, maybe a few potshots into Europe, at the Baltics, etc. Projection to other areas of the world is highly unlikely, given that Russia would have its hands full on its neighboring front, and will lose a great deal of military capability over time. All these are acceptable costs, I think, for the durable lesson a repulse of wanton criminality would teach both Russia and China.

On the other hand, we should never demonize Russia per se or bar its future entry into Europe, given a change of government and heart. Their main problem is Putin and his imperial / delusional / autocratic system, not the people at large. Just as Ukraine (barely) beat off Putin-style corruption in their political system, Russia could as well, some day, and durable peace in Europe depends entirely on this happening as soon as possible. Which will in turn be brought closer, the sooner Russia is definitively evicted from Ukraine.

Remember the first Iraq war? Iraq had invaded Kuwait to take over its oil fields, and generally to express its contempt and superiority, including a historical claim that it was not, actually, a separate country. The US argued that this was in intolerable violation of sovereign borders and international norms. But the motivation was really just about the oil, not to preserve the democratic government of Kuwait, of which there was none. Nor was there a pre-existing alliance, but rather we conjured one on the spot out of convenience, cobbled together out of our various friends and petro-clients. The current case for alliance with and defense of Ukraine is far more compelling.

---

As this post was going to press, an opinion piece appeared by Jeffrey Sachs, promoting negotiation. He sees the same destructive stalemate developing as outlined above, (as do many others), and his solution is for the West to offer one thing- a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine will not join NATO. In return, Russia would vacate Ukraine to pre-war boundaries. Some may recall Sachs as a key advisor of the post-Soviet transition, and exponent of rapid transitions to capitalism, i.e. shock therapy. While the approach produced a transition, it is commonly looked at, retrospectively, as excessively shocking, and conducive to the uncontrolled and corrupt disposition of assets that led directly to the wild west of the post-Soviet transition, rise of the oligarchs, and the ensuing kleptocracies, the worst of which is Russia itself. So the track record is not great. In the current case, it is hard to make out an actual negotiating position from what Sachs proposes. Russia is in Ukraine, certainly by this point, for far more than a promise -cross our hearts- that Ukraine stays out of NATO. It is clear that Putin's aim is to quash Ukrainian democracy and freedom, so that Russia will not have a peskly neighbor better off and better governed than itself. It wants another Belarus, either by decapitation or by decimation.

My proposal above would form, on the other hand, an actual negotiating position vis-a-vis Russia. The West would offer two options. The first is that Russia vacate Ukraine to the 2021 lines and stay out, and that Ukraine remains independent and outside NATO, at least for the time being, but without future assurances. The other is that we immediately ally NATO with Ukraine, join in force with air and land power, and push Russia out of the Donbas and also out of Crimea, forceably and permanently. Again, we would make it clear that while attacks into Russia might be necessary to gain airspace control and repel artillary, etc., the ultimate lines would be set in advance, and not go into Russian proper, pre-2013. This would be a productive negotiating position, capable of inducing Putin to think carefully about his options. Losing Crimea would be the fulcrum, as well as the prospect of rapid integration of Ukraine into NATO as its front-line state.

• Ukraine is a linch-pin.
• Why our tax filing system is so nuts.
• In case you were wondering whether Republicans have lost their minds.
• High gas prices are good, not bad.
• Climate policy is not cutting it. We need higher carbon taxes. And to preserve tropical forests.
• Let's keep Mars safe from humans.

(No) Sympathy for the Devil

Blaming ourselves for Russia's attack on Ukraine.

Here we are, in a time warp back almost a century. A European country has elected an authoritarian leader, on the support of a doddering president. That leader went on to resolve the economic and politicial crisis of the country, mostly by taking complete control himself and forming an increasingly repressive fascist state. Nationalist propaganda and lies were ceaselessly conveyed through the state media, paving the way for attacks on other countries, generally portrayed as critical to protect fellow countrymen being oppressed there. The aggression and the lying escalated until here we are, in a full scale international war, with distinct chances of becoming a world war. 

In the US, there are strange convergences of support for the Russian side of this conflict. Those on the fringe left can not tear themselves away from respect for the Russia that was the Soviet union and vanguard of world communism. Nor can they resist bashing the US. The far right is infatuated with the new Russia, with its super-Trump leadership, free-wheeling criminality, and clever propaganda, as many Americans were of Hitler back in the day. But a third stream comes from the foreign policy establishment- the realists, who think spheres of influence are the most normal, god-given organizing principles of international affairs. Thus China should be given its suzerainty over South East Asia, including Taiwan, and Russia over its near abroad, whatever the people actually living there may think. We are to blame for pushing NATO to Russia's borders, we are to blame for injuring Russia's sensitivities and pride, and we have caused their invasion of Ukraine, by luring Ukraine to the West with our sweet blandishments.

Well, each of those views is out of touch in its own way, but the last is especially curious. For what was the post-World War 2 order about, if not about civilized behavior among nations, letting each seek prosperity and freedom, in peace? The realist view would plunge us back into medieval power relations, or perhaps the three-sphere world of George Orwell's 1984. It consigns small countries to the depredations of bullies like Russia, who can not make friends in a civilized manner, but, in Ukraine, has strained every nerve to corrupt its political system, destroy its internet, and obliterate its sovereignty and economy.

It is obvious to all, including Russia, that NATO was and remains a defensive alliance, of countries intent above all else to rebuild after World War 2 without further aggressive encroachment by Russia. And once the Soviet Union fell apart, the Eastern Bloc countries fled as fast as they could to the West, not because they wanted to attack Russia in a new World War 3, but quite the opposite- they wanted to pursue the promise of freedom and prosperity in peace, without bullying from Russia. Russia's much vaunted "sensitivities" are nothing more than toxic, domineering nostalgia for their former oppressive empires, of both Czarist and Soviet times. As the largest country in the world, one would think they have enough room, but no, their sense of greatness, unmatched by commensurate cultural, economic, or moral accomplishment, demands bullying of its neighbors. More to the point, their current system of government- autocracy / fascism by ceaseless lying and propaganda, would be impaired by having their close neighbors have more open, civilized systems. 

All this has a religious aspect that is interesting to note as well. Ukraine recently extricated itself from domination by the Moscow orthodox church, becoming autocephalic, in the term of art. The process shows that even in this supposedly supernatural sphere of pure timeless principle, tribalism and politics are the order of the day. Not to mention propaganda, and fanciful philosophy and history. The narratives that Russia as spun about Ukraine and its invasion are particularly virulent, unhinged, and insulting, insuring that Ukraine would never, in any sane world, want to have anything to do with their neighbor. It is one more aspect of the Russian aggression that spares us from needing to sympathize overly with its "sensitivities".

So, what to do? It is not clear that Ukraine can withstand Russian attacks forever. They have stopped Russia in its tracks, thanks to a lot of Western assistance. They have millions of men under arms, compared to a much smaller invasion force. They have motivation and they have the land. But they need heavier weapons and they need to preserve their air power. With those two things, they could turn the tide and drive Russia out. Without them, they will probably only manage a stalemate. Western sanctions have imposed highly justifiable pain on Russia itself, but historically, such sanctions tend to have as much countervailing effect, consolidating pro-government attitudes, as the opposite. So barring a dramatic turn of events at the top of the Russian system, which is highly unpredictable and rather unlikely, we are facing a very drawn out and destructive war in Ukraine.

In a larger sense, we are facing something far more momentous- the rise and assertion of autocracy (not to say fascism 2.0) as a competing world order. Russia's pattern has been clear enough (and historically eerie)- escalate their aggression and ambition as far as they can get away with. And China is watching carefully. The ability of the West to punish Russia for its completely immoral and cruel attack on Ukraine, and deter future repetitions, will shape the next century. Russia has decisively broken the borders and tranquility of the post-World War 2 order, and that has caused many, especially in Europe, to wake up and realize that coasting along on US coat tails is not enough- they have to actively participate in sanctioning Russia, in resolving their dependence on Russian fossil fuels (as if that had not been patently obvious before), and strengthening the collective defence, as expressed in NATO. Western leaders should make it clear that Putin and his key lieutenants will never be allowed to personally enter the West without being shipped off the Hague for trial. And we should give Ukraine what it needs to defend itself.

Finally, what of our own culpability? Not so much in mistreating Russia, which we have done only to a slight degree, but in committing war crimes of our own, in attacks of our own, based on lies of our own, on innocent countries far distant. I am speaking of Iraq (which ranks first among several other cases). While our justification for that war was far better than Russia's in Ukraine, it was still poor, still caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, was grievously misconceived and mismanaged, and has left a political ruin, not to mention a geopolitical mess. This alone should make George W Bush rank among the worst of US presidents- significantly lower than Trump, who for all his destructiveness, did not destroy whole countries. We should be willing to put Bush and others who made those decisions to an historical and international account for their actions, in a spirit of historical rectitude.

• In praise of Washington's teaming minions.
• New thoughts on an old book.
• A song for Ukraine.

Toxic Nostalgia

Making Russia great again.

What is it about the past? Even though we are condemned to live in the future, we can't stop fantasizing and fetishizing the past, and wanting to go back. On the gentle side, Proust wrote nothing but loving remembrances of his (sometimes mortifying) past, trying to evoke its moods, textures, smells, and feelings. But why does nostalgia so often curdle into bloodlust and terror? For that is where the Russian autocrat is going with his nostalgia for the Soviet era when Stalin ruled even more autocratically over a well-cowed populace extending from Hungary to the Pacific. Ah, those were the days!

It isn't just our current crisis- far from. The Trumpists want to make America great... again. The Muslim jihadists are bent on reproducing the pre-eminent dominance of Islam of 1300 years ago. The Serbs hearken back to their own grand empire of 700 years ago. Shia muslims fetishize their losses and in a theology of repair and redemption. Jews have both bemoaned their losses of their great kingdoms two millennia ago, and militantly sought their promised land back. And fundamentalists of all stripes yearn to get back to the basic tenets of their faith- the pure origins of incendiary belief and miracles.

It all seems a little over-determined, as though the operative emotion isn't nostalgia exactly, but powerlust, seizing on whatever materials come to hand to say that we as some tribe or culture are better and deserve better than we've got. While the future remains ever shrouded, the past is at least accessible, if also rather protean in the hands of dedicated propagandists. In Russia's case, not only did Stalin help start World War 2 by co-invading Poland, but the prior holocaust/famine in Ukraine, followed by the transplacement of millions of Russians into Ukraine.. well, that all makes this current bout of nostalgia far from sympathetic, however well-twisted it has been for internal consumption. Of course the propaganda and the emotion is mostly instrumental, in a desperate bid to fend off the appearance of happy, secure, and prosperous democracies on Russia's borders, which is the real danger at hand, to Putin and his system.

In remembrance of Russia's great patriotic war, which it helped start.

Yet, such nostalgia is strongly culturally binding, for better or worse. Rising states may have short histories and short memories, resented as the nouveau-rich on the world stage. They are not "as good" in some essential way as those whose greatness has passed into the realm of nostalgia. Worth is thus not in the doing but in some ineffible essentialist (read nationalist/tribal) way that is incredibly resistant to both reason and empathy. It is analogous to "nobility" in the class structure within most societies. In the US, we seem on the cusp (or past it) of our time atop the world stage. Do we then face hundreds of years of regret, comforting ourselves with tales of greatness and seething resentment?

With echos of a deeper past.

• Could the West have been smarter; more generous?
• Apparently, we are all going to die.
• Tires are bad.

What Would be an Effective Carbon Tax?

Carbon taxes could be effective if they are high enough. None are high enough now.

Look around, and you are struck by the myriad ways we use and waste fossil fuels. Live pigs are shipped by the airplane load from the US to China. Wildfires caused by global warming are fought with tanker airplanes. Plastic shopping bags by the trillion are churned out for single use followed by permanent entombment. Back-country hikers rely on helicopter rescues to get them out of jams. And of course we burn them with abandon for transport, heat, and electricity. Fossil fuels are far too cheap- from merely an efficient use perspective, quite apart from their disastrous role in climate heating, other forms of pollution, and overall sustainability.

The last decade has seen astonishing progress in renewable energy technologies, bringing them to par price with fossil fuels or even cheaper. But this price relationship is misleading, since it only reflects the low-hanging fruit of adding sporadic power to a grid that runs largely on fossil fuels with highly flexible dispatch characteristics. Making progress to a fully renewable and stable grid, and extending this to transportation, industrial processes, and chemicals will take vastly more work, including technologies not yet in hand.

We have such a long way to go to decarbonize.

The most  effective way to do this is to price the vice: price CO2 emissions. A uniform price will reach all the uses of fossil fuels, (I would add biomass as well, which generate CO2 emissions just the same), and harness the same capitalist motivation that has spent decades thoughtlessly expanding their destructive use. Government regulation can do a great deal, and is gradually driving coal to oblivion. But it will not be enough to drive the more complete transition that is needed, especially at the speed required. Climate heating is already rampant and highly destructive. 2040 is a mere 18 years away- nothing in infrastructure terms, and not much more in transport vehicle lifetimes. Natural gas remains the fuel of choice across the electric grid, residential, and industrial applications. Within twenty years, it needs to be demoted to minor status.

So what would be an effective carbon tax? One can take the baseline to be the carbon cap and trade system instituted by California, which ends up as an auction price for carbon emission credits. This is a very light tax with lots of exceptions, which has had a commensurately light effect. The price currently stands at ~$23 per ton of CO2 emitted. This is equivalent to about 22 cents per gallon of gasoline. This is not going to change many people's behavior, obviously. At ten percent or less of the retail price, this scale of tax is not going to drive a transition to electric vehicles. Overall in California, this tax brings in roughly a billion to two billion dollars per year, and is thought to be having a beneficial effect, but only as a fractional part of a much broader portfolio of regulations and policies.

In Sweden, the carbon tax is over $130 per ton. This is more significant, on the order of a dollar per gallon of gasoline. Again, there are so many exceptions, especially for heavy industry, that it touches only forty percent of emissions. Overall, it has caused only an eleven percent reduction in transport carbon emissions. Europeans pay much higher prices for motor fuels to start with, for many reasons beyond the carbon tax, so the relative effect of even such a larger tax is small. Europeans already use gasoline at a rate roughly one fifth that of the US, so are already very thrifty. We can expect in the US to have much greater elasticity to higher fuel prices, assuming a bit of political maturity instead of whining about our god-given right to cheap gasoline. 

At the same time, unless alternative fuels, forms of transport, or social behaviors appear, especially in the truck and other heavy vehicle segments, this kind of tax would still have limited effect and serious economic costs. So the modeler and prognosticator has to wonder where the response to carbon taxes will come from. The pandemic showed that we can telecommute very effectively, thereby saving prodigious amounts of fuel. Tesla has shown the way in electric vehicles- a segment that had previously been brutally decimated by GM in various bait-and-switch schemes. Hybrid technology is edging into in larger cars and transit. It will take a big price signal to switch these markets in a dramatic way. Even doubling the price of gasoline, which in the US would take a carbon tax on the order of $400 or more per ton of CO2 emitted, would only bring our fuel prices to those of Europe, which still drives, has traffic jams, and emits vast amounts of CO2 from the transport sector. Such a tax would bring in about $400 billion per year in the US, easily within the normal taxation and economic capacity of a $20 trillion economy.

Yet now there are replacement technologies, so a carbon tax will, in classic economic fashion, create change, not just disgruntlement and economic pain. It will also bring forth more replacements, while working at every margin to drive conservation. Do we need continued technology investment? Absolutely. Do we need more public policy and infrastructure investments, such as reducing give-aways to the fossil fuel industries, charging them for their many immediate as well as long-term harms, and reconfiguring electrical grids and natural gas grids? Yes. A carbon tax is an accellerant to save the biosphere from incalculable harm. Its revenue can be administered right back to citizens or into the government accounts, displacing other taxes. So its net economic effects could be minimal, even while its effects on economic reconfiguration and conservation would be strong. 

• All laws must be enforced, or what good are they?
• No wonder the internet has gone to the dogs.

Remembrance of Climates Past

As the climate heats up, we are heading back in time, very rapidly.

Climate change is the challenge of our times and of our planet. However attractive it is to not care, to ignore it, to hide in traditional ways of thinking, to let inertia have its way, inexorable change getting worse by the year. The American way of life can not go on, and will not go on as before. This year has been a remarkable demonstration of the range of catastrophe, from melting Arctic villages to Pacific Northwest heat waves, California wildfires, record draught on the Colorado river, hurricanes running out of letters, and catastrophic floods in Europe. Migration crises around the world point to another implication- that as the global South becomes unlivable, increasing hordes of people will be knocking on the borders of the Northern countries, who have authored the mess.

To get some perspective on the change, we can look backwards into the geological record to see where we are going, and how fast. Earth has had a very diverse climatic history, from its beginning in a Venus-like cloud of high CO2 and no oxygen, to "snowball earth" freezes, to torrid warm periods extending to the poles. Over the last few billion years, earth's climate has had a fundamentally, if slowly, self-correcting mechanism based on CO2 production and consumption. CO2, needless to say at this point, is the main variable in our atmosphere's tendency to retain or give up solar heat. Volcanoes liberate CO2 from geologic and organic buried carbon. Organic carbon can also be liberated by fires and decomposition of organic carbon, including exposed coal, methane, and oil deposits. On the other hand, the biosphere fixes and buries carbon, and on an even more vast scale the weathering of exposed rocks drives the formation of carbonate minerals that lock up atmospheric CO2. When conditions are warm, weathering of rocks accelerates, as can organic fixation and burial, drawing down CO2. When conditions are cold, ice sheets cover the land and inhibit both organic fixation and rock weathering, allowing CO2 to build up in the atmosphere.

These cycles mean that over a scale of millions of years, earth does not get caught irretrievably (as Venus has) in an inhospitable climate. Instead, our recent ice ages ebbed and flowed, back and forth as the CO2 balance in the atmosphere responded fitfully to geologic conditions. The dramatic snowball periods, which occurred just before the Cambrian period, came to an end even though the earth-wide snow cover dramatically reduced solar absorbance. But it also reduced weathering and organic fixation of CO2, so eventually, CO2 built up to the very high levels needed to overcome the snowball effect and the climate snapped back to very warm conditions.

A key point in all of this is that climate change over earth's history has been driven geologically, and thus has been slow. Slowness has critical effects in allowing the biosphere to adapt. The typical driver is a new spate of volcanic eruptions, which release lots of CO2. This takes thousands of years to happen, so while this can be fast in geologic terms (a prime example is the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, which took maybe 20,000 years to drive the climate from very warm to quite torrid, roughly 55 million years ago). However, the homeostatic mechanisms kicked in, and this torrid phase only lasted  a couple of hundred thousand years. Another example has been the slow uplift of the Tibetan plateau, which exposed a great deal of rock to weathering, thus drawing down atmospheric CO2. This is thought to have driven the cooler temperatures and glaciations of the last few million years.

A notorious exception is the K-T boundary extinction, where an asteroid hit the earth and changed the climate overnight. And life suffered correspondingly, with all the dinosaurs wiped out. (Well, all except for birds). Whatever was not pre-adapted somehow for this instant crisis failed to make it through. The stress this put on the biosphere is obvious, catastrophic, took many millions of years to recover from, and changed the trajectory of evolution dramatically.

An extremely rich graph of the last 70 million years of earth's climate, from a recent benchmark paper. Temperatures are shown on top right, while the isotopic findings that undergird them are shown on top left (temperature proxy based on oxygen isotopes) and bottom left (carbon concentration proxy based on carbon isotopes). The overall trend is correlation between the two, with CO2 the primary driver of higher temperature, and subject to swings for various geologic and biological reasons. Temperature is also affected secondarily by orbital mechanics and other factors. Even the Eocene high temperatures were driven by CO2, though the correlation is not so clear here.

What does all this mean for our current trajectory? The graph above helpfully supplies the current IPCC scenarios of temperature change, under stringent, medium, and business as usual scenarios. The temperature today (green) is already equivalent to conditions of about five million years ago. So in time machine terms, we have travelled, in the span of a century, five million years of climate history, to before the recent ice ages. We are already beyond the stringent scenario, obviously, so the only possible futures we have to look forward to are the medium and no-action scenarios, which, within the next fifty to one hundred years, will put us, in time machine terms, fourteen and forty million years into the past, respectively. And what of the century after that? CO2 stays in the atmosphere for many thousands of years, so not only do we have to reduce emissions now, we will have to remove those that have already happened. Climate stewardship will be humanity's job whether we like it or not.

The biosphere can not cope with this rate of change. While we often think in narcissistic terms of how humans will suffer, we are the lucky ones, being the most adaptable creatures ever devised by evolution. Our problems are nothing compared to the rest of the biosphere. The ability of animals to migrate or shift their ranges is highly strained by the availability of the rest of their essential networks, mostly based on plants at the base of the ecological network. And plants are not going to have the ability to migrate at these speeds and generate new ecosytems in more northerly areas. To us, the speed of climate change is slow, barely discernible on a lifetime scale. But in earth history terms, it is blindingly fast, just a blip over an asteroid impact, and far faster than normal ecosystem dynamics, let alone evolution, can cope with. Uncounted species are falling by the wayside, victims of another great extinction in earth history in this, the anthropocene geological epoch.

Time machines are exciting tropes of science fiction, allowing amazing journeys and byzantine plot twists. But usually, the outcome is not good, since changing the time line has unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic effects. Typically, a ruse is employed to extricate the heroes from the twisted plot, and everyone sighs with relief at the end when the normal time line is restored. Our climate path is not heading for such a happy ending. We are gambling, now consciously and willfully, with not only our own civilizational existence, but with the progressive and rapid degradation of the entire biosphere, on this warp-speed trip into the geological past.

• Trendy Democrat turns to the dark side, leaves climate action in tatters.
• Capitalism is ultimately at fault, channeling our greediest instincts and empowering the greediest people.
• If we are serious, we would have a substantial carbon tax, and one thing that would kill would be crypto.
• Bill Mitchell on Marxism and melioration.
• The Balkanized streaming and video landscape.
• Origins of the horses and domestication.

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.

• Religion and Q.
• More on aerosol spread of SARS-CoV2, with pictures.
• Notes on qualified immunity.

On the Transition to Godhood

Kicking and screaming, humanity is being dragged into a god-like state.

We thought that harnessing electricity would make us gods. Or perhaps the steam engine, or the first rocket ship, or the atomic bomb. But each of those powerful technological leaps left us wanting- wanting more, and wanting to clean up the messes each one left behind. Next are biotechnology, gene editing, and robotics. What to do?

The fact is that we have powers that traditionally were only given to gods. Vast raw physical powers, the ability to fly, and the ability to communicate with anyone, anywhere, instantly, and to know practically anything at a touch. But the greatest of all is our power to derange the entire biosphere- destroying habitats, exterminating species, filling our geologic layer with plastic and radioactive debris, and changing the composition and physics of the atmosphere. 

We have not come to terms with all this power. Indeed half of our political system can't stand the thought of it, and lives in the fantasy that nothing has changed, humanity is not trashing its home, and we can live as profligately as we wish, if only we don't look out the window. Even more disturbingly, this demographic generally holds to a fantasy god- some bearded male archetype- who will either make magically sure that everything comes out OK, or alternately will bring on the end times in flames of wrath and salvation for the select, making any rational worry for the environment we actually live in absurd.

Judgement day is coming!

This, at a moment when we need to grow into our awesome responsibilities, is naturally disheartening. Growing up out of an infantile mind set, where our parents made everything OK, is hard. Adulthood takes courage. It takes strength to let go of fantasy comforts. But the powers of adulthood are truly god-like, especially in this age. We make and remake our environments, look deep into space, into the past and the future, know and learn prodigiously. We make new people. 

Is is clear, however, that we are not taking these powers seriously enough. Overpopulation is one example. We simply can not go on having all the children we want, taking no responsibility for the load they are putting and will put on our home, the biosphere. As nascent gods, we need to survey our domain holistically and responsibly, looking to its future. And right now, that future is rather bleak, beset by irresponsible actors resistant to their higher calling.

• What to do about all the lies?
• Another view of god.
• Don't drive everywhere.
• General breakdown.
• How did South Korea do so well? Rigorous contact tracing and quarantine enforcement.
• Greed in shorts.
• Direct air capture of CO2.

A Crisis in Public Management

What is the common thread between the US SARS-Cov2 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement? Dysfunctional public management.

It is curious how the George Floyd crisis came up during the Covid 19 pandemic. Were people a little stir-crazy? Perhaps. Were people fed up with the callous culture war being waged from the White House? Definitely. But I think there is more to connect these crises- deep problems in American public management. Our problem with the pandemic speaks for itself. While many other countries, large and small, have eradicated this virus and proceeded to re-open their economies, (Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, China, Taiwan, to name a few), we obviously have not, and continue to lead the world in new cases, day in and day out. What is wrong?

I think the main thing that is wrong is that our public health officials do not know what they are doing, and do not even conceive of the problem correctly. Their ambition has been to flatten the curve to reduce hospital congestion. This sentences us to, at best, a continous slow burn of viral cases, spiraling up when people get too careless, and quieting down after lockdown rules are re-instituted. It is clear that public officials completely lacked the ambition to fully contain and eradicate the virus. Doing that would require mobilizing an army of contact tracing and containment deputies, and enforcing quarantines on traced contacts, possibly with phone-based apps. We in Northern California had an ideal opportunity during the April-May time frame to fully control the virus. But did we? Not at all. The public officials contented themselves with testing and publicizing the daily trickle of cases, and having the police close public parks and other venues of congregation. Never was eradication even in the conversation, nor the appropriate powers and staff contemplated, as far as I can tell. Then, when the economic cost of even these half-hearted lockdown and distancing measures became too much, we re-opened, with the natural result of a rising tide of cases.

By not even conceiving that they should and could mount a total eradication campaign, our officials, from the local to the national levels, gave up before the game even began. And why was there this complete lack of ambition? First, we have not been used to this kind of disciplined, society-wide activity. Our social, not to mention political, system, is so atomized and uncohesive, dedicated to individualism, that an actually effective Chinese-style lockdown seems to have been inconceivable. But still, Canada has managed it at least partially- our closest neighbors, geographically and culturally.

Another obvious issue is the lack of a coherent health care system. The public health portion of it is an atrophied vestige, devoted more to bureaucratic stasis and policy quibbling than to actual intervention, uncertain whether it is a safety net for the poor, or a guardian for everyone. Higher officials should have realized that the given infrastructure would be and remains completely unable to mount the effort needed- which is thorough testing, contact tracing, and enforced isolation of contacts. A new organizational infrastructure needed to be built immediately, which was done in other countries, but not here. This is an obvious failure of public management, both in imagination and in execution.

In China, green means go.

Just as the pandemic shines a ghastly light on our public health organizations, the death of George Floyd, and the many prior cases of brutality and murder shines a similar light on another sector of public management- the police. Most police do great work in difficult conditions. Problems arise from a (large) sub-culture of callous disregard, inherited from Jim Crow and other authoritarian elements, combined with weak public management. One issue is unionization. Public employee unions have been toying with the electoral system for decades, running influential campaign ads and altering local elections and public policy to suit their interests. No wonder that we now have a public pensions crisis, absurdly early retirements, double dipping, secrecy for key records, and a litany of other abuses of the public purse and trust. Policies that make it virtually impossible to fire public employees are only one part of the problem, but one that is most central to the George Floyd case. Unlike the situation in public health, the rogue policemen are overzealous, rather than under-zealous. But the management issue is similar- who runs these organizations, do they have the full public interest in mind, whom do they serve, and do they have effective control over their employees? Answers to these questions are not pretty.

We are faced with two brands of corruption when it comes to public management. One is the Republican brand, which hardly cares about the public interest at all, only private interests. Anything they can do to drown the govm'nt in the bathtub, and allow natural feudalism to reign, giving social and economic power to the powerful, is OK with them. This means supporting white power and a traditional racial hierarchy, attracts sympathetic authoritarian types to police forces, and then winks at their indiscretions in enforcing the "natural" order.

The other is the Democratic brand, which cares so much about public service that it gladly ties itself up in knots of bureaucracy and procedure (and pensions, and consultants, and politically correct meetings, due process, and translators, and environmental review, and...) ending up incapable of accomplishing anything, or holding anyone to account. The Democratic brand is also pro-union, adding a whole other level of dysfunction and mismanagement to an already difficult situation. To bring in yet another example, the California high speed rail project is an object lesson in this style. Tens of billions of dollars have been poured down a bureaucracy dedicated to good pensions, due process, poor land acquisition practices, and continual underestimation of the fiasco they are participating in. The expected path of this train now looks more like an amusement park ride than a bullet train, and will only go from Los Angeles to somewhere in the central valley. As a citizen, it is incredibly frustrating to watch this waste and ineffectiveness.

The countries that have been most successful against Covid-19 have been the most cohesive societies, either by nature or by authoritarian force. Cohesiveness correlates with good public management, since it represents shared objectives and understandings about values and ways of doing things. Cohesiveness helps smooth the way between ideals and implementation. The US stands, clearly, as one of the least cohesive societies in the world, particularly after the trauma of the current administration. Is there strength in diversity? Up to a point. But there is more strength in unity.

• We are not good at collective action, at least these days.
• Public health.. what is that? Is it safety net care for the poor, or is it health for everyone?
• Thoughts on building better public institutions.
• Happy thoughts on the current administration.