Fight For the Biosphere

The Story of the Earth Liberation Front: If a tree falls.

What is sacred? No one lives without deep values, whether conscious or unconscious. When I recently travelled to a small midwestern town, I was struck by its devotion to its institutions of reproduction- the high school, the church, the football game, the picket fences. Small town American is under perpetual siege from the outside, from the Amazons, Wallmarts, cheap drugs, bombarding media, and changing values. From capitalism in general, though no one would put it that way. Getting young people to stay instead of heading out to the big city or the coast is one challenge. Another is facing a flow of poorer immigrants who do want to come, but who drop the bottom out of the local labor market and are difficult to assimilate. The FOX and Sinclair propaganda channels harp constantly on "traditional values", as though applying a magic incantation against change (even as they and the right end of the political spectrum work to remove what fetters are left on capitalism, and to destroy the public goods & institutions that these communities rely on). No wonder Trump found a fearful and responsive electorate.

But everyone has their god- communists worshipped the sacred revolution, into whose maw millions were fed. And into the bargain had their trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. To others, capitalism is a glowing, sacred value, and to some extent for good reason. The adoption of capitalism in China has brought about the most massive and rapid transition out of poverty, ever. (Even though the means to get there has been ecocidal technology.)

But these major ideologies and religions are weakening in our time. People are becoming disaffiliated with the cultural structures and institutions that used to cultivate sacred values, whether those of explicit religion or of its various modern ideological substitutes. The balance is often made up, on a personal level, by "nature". This is our instinctive and "natural" religion- the groves of the pagans, the auspicious birds and other animal spirits, the awesome scale and impurturbability of the surrounding vista, not to mention our own mystifying biology.

A fairy ring in a wooded grove.

The dedication to conservatism that pervades small town America is deeply in conflict with respect to this deeper set of values, as well as being counter-historical. A mere six or seven generations back, these lands were peopled by Native Americans, before being invaded by pioneers. These pioneers found, in their westward expansion, an undreamt-of natural abundance of game, fertile soil, and plant and wildlife of all sorts, which they promptly set about chopping down, shooting, poisoning, and generally extirpating. The illusion of stasis upon which rural Americans are so intent on staking their politics belies tectonic shifts to their natural surroundings and supporting ecosystem.

For the world is on fire. It is not just the loss of wolves, and the invasion of exotic species, and the relentless spread of pesticides, and countless other piecemeal assults that are degrading what we imagine to be perennial nature. It is global warming that is making nature itself a shadow of her former self. California has been literally on fire the last couple of years. Seasons are palpably shifting. Droughts are spreading. The Arctic sea ice is dwindling. Corals are dying en masse all over the world. Wildlife has been halved over the last half-century. Forests continue to be burned and clear-cut.

Those who see the sacred in nature are deeply appalled and affronted by all this. In the late 90's and early 00's, the Earth Liberation Front formed to take direct action against this desecration, not just by protesting, but by attacking those responsible for the clear-cutting, especially of old growth forests. The Northwest is full of roads that have a thin screen of trees to shield the innocent driver from vast clearcuts hidden behind. What are called "National forests" are in reality more tree farms than forests.

El Dorado "national forest"

The documentary "If a Tree Falls" is a moving story of a fight in defense of sacred values, against the modern Maloch of the timber industry. Whether this fight is noble or not is one of the themes of the piece. But the timber cutters have another set of values, more in line with the conventional property and rapine program of American capitalism, and get to brand the ELF activists as "terrorists".

The irony of the ELF actions is sadly unmistakable, using fossil fuels like diesel oil to burn down the buildings of the forest destruction complex, (i.e. the forest service and the timber companies), which will be immediately rebuilt using yet more timber. The bulk of the film profiles one of the last holdouts from Federal investigation and prosecution, Daniel McGowan. A pudgy, unprepossessing terrorist indeed, he gradually comes into focus as unshakable in his deep sense of sacred values which are in total opposition to the established order. Likewise, the prosecutors and investigators are profiled at some length, embodying their dedication to the values of law and order under the existing system. Yet they are visibly uncomfortable with what those values ultimately stand for and accomplish in this case.

Capitalism is fundamentally amoral, and exists to serve whatever we as private people want to have. It is a tool, not a value system. If we want houses made of wood, it supplies that wood, no matter the incidental cost to public lands and the animals and plants that live there. If we want electrical power, it will burn the coal to supply that power, and transmit it over fragile lines that regularly cause devastating conflagrations in high winds, abetted by global climate heating. We can not blindly trust capitalism to safeguard our long-term interests, let alone our sacred values, from our short-term needs. That is the work of government. And the last people to whom we can entrust that government are those who own and benefit from the capitalist system.

• Conservation vs conservatives.
• Pakistan shows who its friends are.. the Taliban.
• "Free speech" in Europe is a little different than in the US.
• The media is not so great in Britain, either.
• Facebook remains a cesspool. 
• Burn it up. The destruction of social trust favors Republicans.
• Fellow sleaze, in a completely illegal appointment.
• The US excels in diagnosing and treating rare diseases.
• Economic graph of the week... Left cities are economically more equitable, which is perhaps not saying much.

Economic mobility in various cities, vs overall employment growth.

Science is not the Answer

Bryan Appleyard has some complaints about the new priesthood and its corrosive effects on the old verities, in "Understanding the Present: Science and the soul of modern man".

This is a genuinely exciting book (dating from 1993) about modernity- our age where science in all its facets has not only transformed practical existence, but also our spiritual lives, de-mystifying nature and tossing religions, one after the next, onto the scrap heap. Appleyard is not happy about it, however- far from. He is tortured by it, and while he can not stomach going back to religious orthodoxy, whether of fundamentalist or mildly liberal varieties, nor can he accept the new regime, which he views, somewhat mistakenly, as scientism. That is the belief, fostered (in Appleyard's view) by the gushing popularizers like Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski, and Richard Dawkins, that science can not only solve all our questions of knowledge, but forms a new technocratic morality of reasonable-ness and tolerance which, if properly worshipped, could resolve our social, political, and spiritual problems as well.

The first half of the book is far better than the second. Setting up the problems of modern spirituality is far easier than solving them. In broad strokes, humanity used to be at home in heavily archetypal religious realities. While actual reality did intrude from time to time, the fables of Christianity, to take the main example in the West, were (and for some, still are) magical tales which gave us hope of a benevolent meta-reality and a pleasant afterlife. But intellectuals kept trying to make sense of them, until they "sensed" them completely out of existence. Appleyard cites Thomas Aquinas as perhaps the finest of these intellectuals in the theological tradition. His main work was to reconcile Aristotle, the pre-eminent scientist of antiquity, with Christian orthodoxy. This was taken as the height of theology, not to mention truth in general. But it planted the seed of modernization and logic- if something is logically or empirically true, it must necessarily be consonant with the Catholic religion, which is by definition true. Thence downwards through the enlightenment, Newton, the  industrial revolution, existentialism, liberal theology, to the plague of atheists we see today. The Catholic church tried to draw the line with Galileo and the heliocentric model, but that did not go well, and a few hundred years down the road, they gave up and said they were sorry.

"Science was the lethally dispassionate search for truth in the world whatever its meaning might be; religion was the passionate search for meaning whatever the truth might be."

All religious pretensions to scientific truth have been exploded, and the only choices left, as Appleyard sees it, are regression into fundamentalism, continuation to the endpoint of modernist anomie where humans are morally worthless or even negative destroyers of pristine nature, an acceptance of science itself as humanity's triumphalist project, which through its powers and gifts can give us all meaning, ... or something else. Appleyard spends much of the second half of the book on the fourth option, discussing quantum weirdness, chaos theory, computational incompleteness theories, and related fields which put the lie to the determinist dreams of nineteenth century science. Science does not know everything, and can not know everything, thus there is some gap for us as humans to be free of its insidious, deadening influence- a humanist space.

There are many things wrong with Appleyard's take on all this, some of which are contained in his own arguments and writing. Science has long held to the fact/value distinction, as he discusses at length. Even such a solidly scientistic enterprise as Star Trek recognizes regularly that Spock can neither supply all our values, nor even on his own terms operates without idiosyncratic values and meaning. The world of Star Trek is morally progressive and rational, but its motivations and meaning come from our human impulses, not from an algorithm. Exploration, skimpy uniforms, and great fight scenes are who we are.

"The key to the struggle, it cannot be said too often, is the way in which science forces us to separate out values from our knowledge of the world. Thanks to Newton we can not discover goodness in the mechanics of the heavens, thanks to Darwin we cannot find it in the phenomenon of life and thanks to Freud we cannot find it in ourselves. The struggle is to find a new basis for goodness, purpose, and meaning."

But then Appleyard frequently decries the new scientistic regime as having destroyed morals in general.

"... all moral issues in a liberal society are intrinsically unresolvable and all such issues will progressively  tend to be decided on the basis of a scientific version of the world and of values. In other words they will cease to be moral issues, they will become problems to be solved. The very idea of morality will be marginalized and, finally, destroyed."

This makes no sense, as he himself concludes by the end of the book. It seems to be a matter of looking for morals and meaning in all the wrong places. After a long excursion through the death of scientific determinism, he consoles us that science doesn't, and can't know everything. Thus we can go about our lives with our own values, desires, and dreams without paying much mind to any moral teachings from the scientific priesthood, which didn't exist anyhow. Whew! Determinism is a complete red herring here. Science studies all of reality, whether complicated or simple. If broad swathes can be subsumed into the master equation of gravity, that is wonderful- empowering on practical and psychological levels. But sometimes the result of all this study is a large database of genes and their properties, whose complicated interactions preclude easy prediction or codification (harkening back to the cataloguing of Aristotle and Linnaeus). Or sometimes it is a prediction system for weather which, despite our best efforts, can only see a limited distance into the future, due to inherent limitations to any model of a chaotic reality. That is OK too. Such pursuits are not "not science", and nor does such ignorance furnish us with free will- that comes from adaptability. The results of our studies of reality do not imply much about our meaning and values in any case, even as they defang the oddly materialistic superstitions and totems of yore. Our powers of understanding may be amazing, and fetishized by the educational system and science popularizers, but are not the foundation of our moral humanity.

Scientific studies of ourselves have, however, been enlightening, uncovering the unconscious, Darwinian designs, ancient urges, and a great diversity of ways of being. They have also clarified the damage we are doing to our environment via the wonders of modern life. This has informed our self-image and hopefully our values, but hardly determined them. Humility is the overall lesson, as it has been from all the better religious traditions. Appleyard decries relativism, the liberal tendency towards excessive humility- suspicion of one's own culture, and excessive regard for those of others. But isn't that merely a slight overshoot / correction from the madness of colonialism, slavery, genocide, rampant technology, greed, and war that has been the Western history over the last couple of centuries? Isn't it a spiritually healthy step back? In any case, it is an example of human values at work, perhaps more influenced by our prosperous condition than by any dictates from science.

Appleyard's fundamental complaint is against the new priesthood that has taken over management of the wonders of creation, but has at the same time failed to address our human needs for solace and meaning. Indeed, some of its high theologians delight in telling us that the universe, and ourselves, are utterly meaningless. Appleyard constantly weaves god into the discussion, while taking no exlicit pro-god position. He can not bring himself to bite that bullet, but rather is content to complain about being thrown out of Eden for the sin of too much knowledge. Well, it was always a cheap trick to read our fate in the stars or in goat entrails, and to read our meaning in ancient wonder-tales. These methods were merely externalizing values that came from within. The patriarchial systems of theology express most clearly the interests and desires of the men who run them. So we are, in the modern dispensation, merely reduced to a state of honesty about stating what we want, without the false veils of magic, authority, and supposed moral objectivity. And that change seems, at least to me, beneficial for our moral situation, overall.

• Can morality be reasonable? Which animals are worth helping?
• Typical enviro screed about saving space for nature...
• Forest loss continues apace.
• Roubini forcasts disaster, as usual. With details.
• We saved the wrong people in the last financial crisis.
• Financial sleaze.
• Who cares about truth anymore?
• Our common economic statistics are not cutting it.
• Japan is doing very well, thank you.

Alexander Wilson, Ornithologist

Curiosity drove Wilson to study, describe, and paint birds- founding scientific ornithology in America.

What makes birds so compelling? Birding can be a matter of fanticism, with competitive list making, and expensive and arduous travels. They are both beautiful and talented, endowed with the magic of flight, which humans have only learned laboriously over the last century. They are cheerful and communicative, singing and chattering in notes we can relate to, if not understand. And they are extremely diverse, and turn out to be the successors of some of the charismatic animals of all time- the dinosaurs.

But in colonial times, birds were more appreciated for food than for watching. Countless wild birds ended up sold at market, one fate that sealed the doom of the passenger pigeon. Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) was no slouch in the hunting department, as a crack marksman who shot countless specimens, and dined on many of them. But for his time, he was also a pioneer in sensitivity towards birds, perhaps not surprising as ornothology was his second career choice, after poetry. A recent biography, though rather disorganized, is an excellent introduction to his work and times.

Wilson was a weaver and poet in Ireland, and then a schoolmaster in America, but finally found his calling when he came in contact with William Bartram, the leading naturalist of the newly minted US. Bartram was just the gentle, dedicated, and respected lover of nature that Wilson needed as a mentor. His gardens were extensive and his travels through much of the Southern countryside a model for Wilson's future years of tramping through all areas east of the Mississippi in search of birds ... and also customers.

One plate from Wilson's work. Note the phenomenal detail and realistic poses.

For publishing in Wilson's time was on the kickstarter model. The 9-volume American Ornithology was accepted by the publisher only on condition of Wilson collecting sufficient subscriptions to fund its production, which was lavish. Each volume had about nine plates, engraved and over-painted with color, in addition to Wilson's text describing the features and habits of the  pictured birds. Wilson therefore went on long trips to drum up interest and subscriptions, focusing on the wealthy elite of each region, who would be most likely to have the means to buy his expensive production. The subscribers would then receive copies of Wilson's columes as they came off the press in subsequent years.

Notably, Wilson had very little luck with the tight-fisted New Englanders. But he had much better luck at the President's House, paying a visit to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had himself published a guide to the birds of Virginia, and was keenly interested in Wilson's work and book. Indeed, he made his cabinet officers take out subscriptions as well! It was in a related vein that Jefferson later ordered the Lewis and Clark expedition to study the geography and biology of the vast Louisiana Purchase territory and points west to the Pacific. Imagine such intellectual depth and engagement in our current age!

Wilson's portrayal the the Pileated, Red-headed, and Ivory-billed woodpeckers.

Wilson studied as many of his specimens in their natural habitat as he could, and took many captive for further study. His detailed descriptions and paintings were, at their best, far more realistic and accurate than anything that had come before. He asked penetrating questions and resolved mysteries with detailed investigation, creating new species or uniting badly named and split species as needed. In his intense curiosity and willingness to pursue evidence and experiments he is reminiscent of that great naturalist to come, Charles Darwin. In one episode, Wilson wounded and captured an ivory-billed woodpecker, the largest woodpecker of all and a species now sadly extinct.

"Not far from Wilmington [North Carolina], he shot and killed two Ivory-billed woodpeckers and slightly wounded a third. With the two specimens in his pack, he wrapped the injured bird in his coat, placed it in front of him on the saddle where he could keep hold of it, and rode into Wilmington where he planned to spend the night. As he rode through the streets and up to the hotel, the piteous cries of the woodpecker attracted a worried crowd. They joined the landlord in a relieved laugh when Wilson dismounted and unfolded his coat, revealing the furious woodpecker. 

After he registered, Wilson took his pack and his woodpecker to his room, then left to tend his horse. Upon his return, ho could hear chopping sounds as he ascended the stairs to his room. He opened the door and the woodpecker cried out, possibly in frustration at being discovered in its effort to escape. It had climbed the window frame and cleared a fifteen inch square section of plaster that now lay in chunks on the bed. It had also cut a hole larger than a man's fist through the lathing and begun chiseling on the back side of the exterior weatherboards. In less than an hour it would have escaped."

Some birds are not the cheerful songsters around the yard, but ferocious and spirited. But whatever their temperament, between habitat destruction, rampant pesticide use and other pollution, light pollution, the introduction of invasive species, and now global warming, we have fewer species and individuals now than Wilson experienced, in a steady rain of ecological destruction.

• A culture of complete white collar impunity.
• Whatever happened to freedom of religion?
• Optimists are at fault!
• Why the east side is the bad side.
• Treason? Yes, it is obvious.
• Vietnam all over again.. a delusional military.
• Taxes affect income. They do not affect propensity to work.
• Do sleazy people make better capitalists and capitalism? No.

Too Damn Many People

We are in a population crisis.

Virtually every serious crisis we are experiencing now, from anti-immigrant attitudes, to climate change, lack of housing, homelessness, inequality, warfare, drought, desertification, traffic, scarcity of natural resources, and loss of wildlife, share a common root cause of overpopulation. Like any wonderful thing, it is the dose that makes something great turn into something less great.

The top line of damage is of course environmental destruction. In the last 50 years, the population of wild animals has fallen by half. CO2 in the atmosphere has doubled, which promises an eon of pain for the biosphere. The oceans are awash with trash, and all habitats from the arctic, to prairies, coral reefs, and rainforests are either being directly destroyed by humans and / or are being impaired indirectly by our global effects.

Summer arctic sea ice in dramatic decline.

Politically and socially, the idea that Europe should welcome millions of refugees from Africa and the Middle East, driven themselves by environmenal degradatation and overpopulation, and the conflicts they generate, is creating an understandable backlash. Just as global heating is reducing water and arable land, populations are growing all over these regions due to a modicum of medical and agricultural technology, combined with lack of human development. But is further human development the answer? From an environmental perspective, hardly- while development typically reduces birth rates, it explodes appetites and capacities to degrade the ultimate resource- the Earth- its minerals and biosphere.

An example is China. China carried out one of the most important environmental policies of all time when it instituted the one-child policy. It was, thanks to its draconian nature, effective in keeping population growth under control. Now China has a billion more people than the US, but it could easily have been two billion, in far more miserable condition. It played a big role in enabling the ensuing economic development, which has made China the biggest emitter of CO2 in the world, and generated countless other environmental problems, of global as well as local scope. They are building coal-fired power plants at a breakneck pace, and will be almost doubling worldwide coal-fired power capacity over the next decade or two. This is not driven by population, but by development of existing populations.

We are living far beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth, and our long-term choice is to either live sustainably or to have fewer people. Both seem impossible options, given that true sustainability is far more arduous than what any country has attempted to date, and is very hard to envision. Carrying capacity has many different aspects, from aesthetic features that come with a healthy biosphere, to critical minerals, water supply and agricultural capacity. Each of these has different relations to human population, and different elasticities based on our needs and technology. But we can safely say from the many ways we are degrading the global environment that we are well beyond many individual capacities, especially those that pertain to the biopshere in general, and animals other than ourselves.

Population is unfortunately, precisely the area where we care least about others. Our desires for family and legacy are very personal, often construed as a human right of some sacred or sovereign nature. But summed over the globe, it amounts to another tragedy of the commons, where my chastity merely makes room for someone else's profligacy.

There is no population bomb in the traditional sense. The agricultural technology we have, and the economic systems that drives its use, will insure all can be fed to some degree. There is a bomb, however, in a larger environmental sense. The degradation of the biosphere by humans is a slow-motion attack, as though several nuclear bombs were unleashed every year, rendering large areas uninhabitable, and sprinkling the rest of the globe with all sorts of trashy, choking fallout. These bombs are going off steadily and silently, year in and year out, till we will end up living in a global trailer park.

• Sectarianization?
• Economic injustice? We are great again.
• Very little wage growth here. Economic graph of the week:

The Sierra Club as a Religious Organization

Yes, and a good one, too.

The divides in the US have many dimensions, but a significant one is religious. Conservatives crow about their traditional religion- Christianity- and then, bizarrely, vote for Trump. What they really seem to be for is patriarchy and its traditional society-wide hierarchy (based on male-ness, but also on its accessory patriarchal religion and on race). Their model in the South shows that a bare-majority or even minority race can maintain power for decades in an ostensibly democratic society if enough levers of social, political, overt, violent, as well as covert power are used consistently. The movement against Confederate monuments is a watershed in consciousness of the thoroughgoing way the social gestalt of the South has been shaped by its treasonous and revanchist elite.

As far as rural and Southern America are concerned, the bicoastal elite live in another country entirely. In that country, we tend to think we have no narrative, no gestalt at all, but purely a functional this-is-the-way-it-is approach to reality and truth. A committment to reason, science, innovation, good public policy, social justice, etc. But of course, that can not be true. We have a narrative as well, and nothing illustrates it better than the Sierra Club.

This is the home of the shamans of environmentalism- the tree-huggers, whale watchers, and activists, inhabiting a completely different narrative from that of traditional Christianity and patriarchial conservatism. Its roots go deep into paganism and the natural reverence humans have for nature. It is a nature religion, but not animistic. There are no anthropomorphic deities or weird powers. We are the gods, but are fallen, now that we have inherited this awe-ful responsibility of taking care of a world that we have so hopelessly befouled. There is no bearded or other male figure behind the curtain. The Sierra Club conducts pilgrimiges, has its saints, sacred places and its version of the end-times, preaches to its believers, and expounds at every opportunity an ideology of love of and care for nature. It has its fetishes for untrammeled, unspoiled locations, its secret misanthropy, its revelations of human insignificance. And even jihad, if you count GreenPeace in the same sect.

A recent article by Gary Kamiya in the Sierra Club organ makes its religious nature particularly clear:

... Which takes us back to the wilderness within. No matter how refined we may think ourselves, at some level we are all still wild creatures, made up of the same materials as the mountains, the deserts, the oceans, the distant stars. "Wilderness" carries a connotation of chaos and anarchy, but that's misleading. Our inner wilderness is no more disorderly than the world itself is. A wild mind is a balanced mind. The wild world may be deeper and more heterogeneous than the city world, but the difference is only a matter of degree. The sense of wilderness is our birthright, and we can experience it anywhere. "The wilderness as a temple is only a beginning," Snyder writes. "One should not dwell in the specialness of the extraordinary experience . . . to enter a perpetual state of heightened insight." The real goal, he says, is to see all the land around us, whether in the country or in the city, as "part of the same territory—never totally ruined, never completely unnatural." 

Of course there is still absolutely nothing like a face-to-face encounter with deep wilderness. Once at Buck Lake, I was awakened by the screaming call of a pack of coyotes racing unseen through the 3 A.M. darkness, the shrill sound moving fast along the mighty granite ridge across from my campsite, then fading into the distance. That sound still rings in my memory, a quicksilver affirmation of the strangeness and holiness of the world.

The language and sentiments are clearly religious. But there is no theology, no theos at all. It suits the "spiritual-but-not-religious" mindset, whose sprituality is affective and natural, not burdened by over-thought (yet underbaked) theology and relic supernaturalism. Science isn't a problem here, but another way to appreciate the glory of what we love on so many levels- our world and biosphere.

Is all this good? People are naturally religious, creating and needing frames of meaning beyond mere subsistence and reproduction. The Republican Party and current administration shows what can happen when such a frame becomes completely moribund, paying lip service to Catholic and generally Christian dogmas while throwing any semblence of actual moral principle to the wind and practicing shameless greed. It is a revolting spectacle on every level. True religion fosters empathy and puts us in touch with our core values and commonality, not just among males, or with fellow countrymen, or even with humans, but with all beings.

• Silent holocaust.
• More lies.
• Are human desires endless, and therefore work endless? Only if money is distributed equitably.
• Does all our productivity get channelled to the top, or to those doing the work?
• How to design drugs with knowledge and computers.

Bullets of Poison

Lead, condors, and the toxic legacy of right-wing politics.

Of the many ways we have ravaged our environment, some of the most heartbreaking are the silent killers- DDT, other insecticides, PCBs, trash, CFCs, CO2, PFOA, and lead. The same technologies that have conjured out of our environment the many wonders of modernity have also unlocked demons, like plutonium and other radioactive poisons, which we struggle to control and dispose of.

But our thoughtless dumping of pesticides and other poisons doesn't even rate that kind of drama. It took an especially gifted writer, Rachel Carson, to bring the ravages of DDT to light 50 years ago, and we have since slipped into an amnesia through which other poisons like the neonicotinoids have seeped into astonishingly widespread use, making arthropod wastelands of our most fertile country.

One of the more insidious poisons is lead. Through the Flint water crisis, we have learned once again that lead is pervasive, and an enormous health threat. Why have we tolerated it for so long? It has taken painstaking public efforts to get lead out of gasoline, out of paint, and out of new water pipes. Yet it is still common in old pipes, and in coal ash, killing and impairing Americans continuously. And it is common in firearm ammunition.

Poisoning oneself and one's family by hunting with lead is one thing, and tragic enough. But it turns out that other animals can be even more strongly affected, particularly the California Condor. This magnificent bird, North America's largest, is, naturally, attracted to carcasses and viscera left by hunters, and is not a picky eater when it comes to lead. But even if they were, it would be impossible to avoid lead from such carcasses, since lead bullets leave a wide swath of fragments and contamination in the victim. Condors also have particularly strong digestive juices that mobilize more of the lead they ingest than do those of other predators and scavangers, making lead the leading cause of death among the painstakingly re-established and tiny wild population. Indeed, that population can not grow until lead is eliminated from its food supply.

California has, with great political effort, established a ban on hunting with lead ammunition, to take effect within a couple of years. The Obama administration likewise set up a ban on use of lead ammunition in federal wildlife refuges. But the new administration, in line with the rest of its immoral and mindless policies, reinstated the use of lead ammunition. It is one more example of the sheer meanness and spitefulness that seems to pervade this sector of American politics- a segment of the elite and the electorate that could not care less about nature, about justice, and about the future in general. As long as they are "winning" over their perceived enemies, in a zero sum spiral of death, scientists, truth, justice, and the future of humanity, not to mention the biosphere, can be damned. Even the US Army has recognized that the costs of creating enormous toxic waste dumps out of their firing ranges and conflict zones (not to mention the manufacturing stream) is too high a price to pay, and has switched to unleaded ammunition. (Though uranium- that is a different story!).

A similar story has played out tragically in India, where an antibiotic used in cattle turned out to kill vultures, wiping out the population, and causing some very unpleasant ecological consequences in a country in dire need of efficient trash and carcass collection. While we should not stifle all progress with overly cautious regulation, once a tragic consequence from some technological innovation (or ancient practice) becomes apparent, we should recognize our own power in the role of the government to set rules for the good of our long-term collective interests- interests which surely include preservation of our own health and that of wild animals.

• Defenseless animals are next.
• Krugman: it isn't just science at stake, but civilization.
• The irony of Texas.
• Silencers- as American as apple pie.
• Bias in the biomedical literature.
• Incentives only go so far. Character counts for a lot as well- about half.
• Problems with the upcoming Vietnam War.

Genocide, Lebensraum, and the American Dream

Overpopulation is the normal condition, with intermissions after genocide.

As a recent article pointed out, the American Dream has undergone some changes. Where in the Depression, it was an idea of human decency, equal opportunity, and basic living standards for all, it has more recently become more focused on a prosperity gospel, with owning a house as the centerpiece of "making it". This presents great problems, since our society has become so sclerotic and unequal that defining our civic values by such inflated metrics leaves a very large and increasingly restive population behind. One hears echos of "Let them eat cake".

Long before either epoch, however, the American Dream was one thing- free land. Land for the desperate paupers of Europe, land for anyone willing to work, land for the taking and "proving". Rich, beautiful, verdant, and virgin land. With occasional interludes for gold rushes where the free-for-the-taking wealth was underground rather than on the surface. It was a Dream built on the genocide and dispossession of the previous occupants of all this land- the Native Americans. While most of that work was done silently by European diseases, the nascent colonial states were not shy about cleaning up the loose ends, with a manifest destiny of taking ownership of all useful lands of any kind across the continent, leaving the native peoples, when they were not killed directly or by mistreatment, in reservations on the most miserable land available.

Why, then, were we so exercised about the policy of the Nazis in the next century to spread eastward, over the great prairies of central Europe, in search of "Lebensraum"? Was it that those prairies were already occupied? Or was it that they were occupied by people significantly more similar to ourselves, not susceptible to the European diseases, and aready farming, and ready to complain in comprehensible languages? That of course is a bit unfair, since the Nazis authored a much wider range of mayhem, through Europe and world-wide, than just their push to the East. But it is worth re-evaluating our national epic and mythology in this light, since it brings out fundamental forces that recur through history, and promise rocky times ahead.

As Thomas Malthus observed, the natural state of any population of organisms, including humans, is overpopulation. Remissions of this state can happen by predation or catastrophe. Genocides, devastating wars, plagues, droughts, and the like can provide brief respite from this normal, cramped condition. The discovery of the Americas by Europeans was one such event, (as it had been for the Clovis people and their predecessors as well), providing an escape valve, given a total lack of compunction about stealing the lands of others. Another such event has been the technological development of the West, especially our use of fossil fuels, which have magnified our powers and particularly our farming capabilities, with new fertilizers and machinery. This has meant that through the last roughly 300 years, we (especially in North America) have faced a substantially relaxed Malthusian constraint compared to most human cultures. I recently read the biography of the famous jocky Ron Turcotte, who narrates his childhood in New Brunswick thus:

"We have four kids. A big family now is six. Back then, when we were growing up, families of twelve or thirteen were common. One family had twenty-three. We had a very strict priest. if you didn't have kids, you weren't doing what God put you on earth for." ... "The priest would come in, and if there wasn't one baby in diapers, one in the womans' arms, and one in the oven, he'd say the couple was not doing its Christian duty."

So here we are, at a state of dramatic overpopulation, using the lands, air, and minerals of earth far, far beyond her ability to sustain us, using fossil fuels which can never be replaced and which are heating the climate and destroying the biosphere. In the US, we are coming to a state of culture and class war that is a sign of stasis/crisis. The pie is not growing bigger. Overpopulation generally means, culturally, that there is an excess of workers relative to productive capacity, which gives power to capital and those who already have power. It is the kind of situation that leads to inequality, castes, feudalism, and sclerosis.

There are no more frontiers, and we are already living far beyond earth's carrying capacity. By the natural processes of selfish greed, our home is turning into a dump. For example, we are not, in all honesty, close to resolving our carbon dependence, among many other limitations- emissions are rising, not falling, let alone reversing damage already done. In the US, our population is rising relentlessly, yet we have not built significant roads for decades, or even maintained the ones we have. For various reasons of self-interest and cultural drift, we are collectively unwilling even to face up to the population we have, let alone make room for more, were that even desirable. So until we resolve our long-term sustainability issues, we should focus on population reduction, ideally with a universal one-child policy.

While the American Dream has narrowed to one of personal greed, we are at a point when we can and need to think globally, for the long term. The dream should be one of sustainability, over hundreds and thousands of years, given the momentous consequences of our current technologies and lifestyle. Giving in to rampant population growth, however natural it may be, dooms us to an ever more impoverished country and planet. It would be a tragedy, alongside the related tragedies of denying the very reality of climate change, and weakening our scientific and social consciousness of its future course and consequences.

• When psychopaths go to work.
• Though the difference from anti-social personality disorder is not very clear.
• It is all the fault of IT.
• Subversion is raising protests.
• Beauty and the brain.
• Consciousness is real?
• No wonder people in the UK are cranky.
• Drug companies- the answer is single payer.
• The Afghan government can not hold on to its own territory.
• Keynes and interest rates.

Clean(er) Nuclear Power?

Thorium as a better nuclear power system.

The US has made progress reducing carbon emissions, mostly by substituting fracked gas for coal. This is not a long-term solution however, only cutting carbon emissions to half, instead of to zero. The climate needs more help faster, if the biosphere is to survive the anthropocene.

Renewable power sources have become economically viable, but not quite system-viable, since they are intermittent. Progress on grid-scale power storage has been very slow. The best power storage system remains gravitational water pumping/storage, which is available in relatively few places. In the absence of a good power storage and intermittancy management solutions, solar and wind energy simply can not be relied on for more than about 25% of grid energy. While most of the carbon emissions problem is one of public policy and communal action, this is an example of a remaining technical hurdle.

While I hope those issues are solved, the rest of the world, especially the developing world, keeps turning to coal, which is a planetary disaster. We need something better, in operational, economic, and planetary terms. One solution that has been floating around the margins has been nuclear power from thorium. We are familiar with nuclear power from enriched uranium- the pressurized water reactors that have been chugging away for decades both on the power grid and in aircraft carriers and submarines. (Related reactors) These reactors require quite a bit of uranium 235 (using the same systems as bomb-grade enrichment but to lower levels, and generate quite a bit of extremely long-lived waste, especially trans-uranic waste products like plutonium. Indeed, one of the reasons they were selected was that they generate plenty of bomb-making material.

On the other hand, there is another method of nuclear power generation, using thorium. Thorium is not fissile itself, and is four times as abundant as uranium, and doesn't need to be enriched. Indeed, there are virtually limitless supplies. Once placed in a running reactor and bombarded by neutrons, thorium breeds uranium 233 which is fissile, and generates power. The decay series of this isotope is far more favorable than uranium 235, in terms of making far fewer transuranic products, (fewer bombs), and allowing better recycling. Indeed, the ultimate amounts of long-term waste from a thorium reactor are about a thousandth of that from a U235 reactor. The reactor design is very hot, but unpressurized, and comes with safety features that significantly outstrip U235 reactors. (The gung-ho nerd-tube version.)

Since the main issues of conventional nuclear plants are safety and waste disposal, this is all very good news. How does it all work? A demonstration plant was built and run by the US in the 1960's, but was shut down because it did not provide a path to bomb making materials. This seems now a bit short-sighted, yet the basic principles were demonstrated. The main features are that the fissile fuel exists as a liquid rather than a solid, at rather high temperature (600˚C to 700˚C, which leads to higher electricity generation efficiency), and needs an extra circulating loop of another fluid to transfer heat to turbines. This second fluid has typically been lithium/fluoride/berylium mixture, (the same as the fuel, only without the thorium/uranium), of which berylium is particularly toxic. But apparently the berylium could be left out, so this might not be a necessary element of the design.

The fuel cycle is that unenriched thorium 232 is either included in the liquid fuel, or blanketed around the outside of the reactor. It captures neutrons which transmute it to protactinium 233, which decays in a matter of weeks to U233, whose half-life is 160,000 years. U233, the actual fissile fuel, is then burned to completion in the system, leading to various smaller waste products including noble gasses, cesium, strontium, and other elements whose longest half-lives are on the order of 30 years, (though quite toxic and hard to handle). Very little of the waste is up-converted to transuranic elements like plutonium and neptunium that are especially long-lived. Indeed so little is produced that such elements can be added right back to the fuel, along with recycled U233, to be destroyed by further fission. This assumes an on-site method of pyroprocessing or distillation that can separate the burnt waste from the fissile material to be recycled, to the tune of about 200 kg of fuel elements reprocessed per day. The overall cycle leads to far more efficient use of the fuel, however, hundreds-fold less waste, and particularly less long-lived waste relative to the conventional U235 reactor cycle.

A second significant problem is how to start these reactors, given the need to generate the U233. The Oak Ridge experimental reactor was seeded with U235, for instance. Starting up a fleet of such reactors from scratch would require quite a bit of our stockpiles of enriched uranium. And while melt-down is impossible, given the already melted state of the fuel and the ease of diluting it or spreading it to a non-critical state, it presents significant shielding and handling problems, like any nuclear reactor. Here is a point-by-point critique.

Time scales of the budgets of various elements in a thorium/U233 reactor. If initiated with transuranics like plutonium, (yellow), they would burn off to a low steady state by about 50 years. That level is a small fraction of the total fuel mass, and never needs to be disposed of as long as the reactor is running and its fuel is thoroughly reprocessed. Th=thorium, U=uranium, Pu=plutonium, Np=neptunium, Pa=protactinium, Cm=curium, Am=americium TMSR=thorium molten salt reactor.

The thorium reactor is extremely complex- there is no doubt about that. It is unlikely to be made into a plug-and-play system that could be transported to remote or undeveloped areas, or run with little expertise. It would take a decade or more of serious research to make practical utility scale designs and plants. Not only is there a great deal of high-temperature, high-radiation plumbing, but it needs onsite fuel reprocessing of materials that are extreme gamma emitters, and thus can not be handled directly, even with gloves. Additionally, parts of the reactor like key graphite neutron reflectors & heat exchangers would need to be replaced or refurbished every few years.

The current light water pressurized U235 reactor technology is also complex, and has proven itself to be highly problematic. It generates large amounts of unimaginably long-lived waste, demands large amounts of hard-to-enrich fuel, and has been demonstrated to be unsafe in the short and long terms, requiring heroic levels of engineering for utility use. This is what broke the back of current reactor technology around the world, making it economically inviable, despite the fact that a large fleet of plants are being run ever more efficiently (with due respect to the Fukushima and other disasters like Three Mile Island and the San Onofre plant in California.)

Compared with the tens of billions of dollars that have been spent on fusion power research, the thorium system is significantly more realistic, addressing the need for baseline power that is extremely pressing. Perhaps renewable power and power storage will be solved and take the place of fossil fuels. I certainly hope so- we need to get to zero carbon as soon as possible.

• Climate change is by far our most important problem.
• The Republican approach to solar power.
• Another cause of Flint- lax local news media.
• Financial reform... unfinished business remains.
• Shenanigans ... or fraud?
• Liar's loans are even coming back.
• The Sanders frame for political change.
• Sanders knows about MMT, which may be transformative.
• An excess of testosterone?
• Things really are better in social democracies.
• Economists in denial.
• Our friends in Afghanistan: "... officers and other members of the Afghan army are selling weapons and other materiel to the Taliban. U.S. military commanders and advisers say the practice is systematic and widespread."
• Government-enabled feudalism in IT.

Sociomolecularbiology

Society affects gene expression and development, and genes contribute to social traits and behavior.

Is it any news that we are biological beings? That all aspects of our being, from toenails to theology, are biologically based? That was the premise of sociobiology, the science of the behavior and evolution of social organisms. Of which we are one. Unfortunately, the smell of eugenics was still too strong in the political atmosphere to allow thinking about how our genes affect our behavior, so that splash by E.O. Wilson died down and the science went on by other names.

That work has found, among other things, many connections between our psychology and our physiology. It should be no surprise that we are profoundly affected, to the point of suicide and other forms of death, by information that first arrives to our brains. Our immune systems are sensitive to social state, as are digestion, mood, activity, etc. Hypertension is one of many long-term consequences of stress, for example. This close relationship leads to to idea that we might be able to judge happiness by objective measures, rather than exclusively by self-report. And that would open up new vistas in morality, particularly morality vis-a-vis other species.

But it goes the other way as well, as our social capacities are based on biology. Psychological traits of great complexity can run in families, and scientists are only starting to gain glimpses of genetic alterations that cause such traits and their variation. The very ability to be flexible, to learn and adapt, is itself obviously of genetic origin. The question, typically, is how much people differ in significant social traits and how much we should care about that. We pride ourselves on meritocratic systems of education, business, and government that weed, select, and reward those who are gifted, who also align with and master the social system. But are we just rewarding something that the persons themselves had little to do with, just as criminals typically have little responsibility for their genetic or social deprivations, or actors for their looks? We may be, but reward we must, as a sociological necessity, if we want societies to benefit from good rather than bad talents.

Is it also an evolutionary necessity? Should those who succeed in the existing social system be rewarded with more reproduction? Typically we do not and should not have sufficient confidence in the universality or durability of our social system to make that case in its most brutal, eugenic sense. However, we should not be blind to the genetic underpinnings of social success and all its consequences. For example, the trend toward intellectual atheism that is so fervently touted in other areas of this blog fights a rate-dependent battle against the higher reproductive success as well as intellectual insularity of religious populations. What is the deconversion rate compared to the biological and ideological reproduction rate? Is religiosity a positive trait for humans? How much to we care about our evolutionary trajectory, a path we are on whether we are conscious of it or not?

Anyhow, as an example of the genetic implications of sociality, a recent paper described a gross increase in genetic complexity that accompanied the social evolution of bees. They found a measurable correlation between social complexity and gene regulatory complexity, which is a step in addressing the question of the interrelation of genes and behavior, in general.

Bees come in many social levels, from solitary to "eusocial", a term the E. O. Wilson made up to describe animals that are not  just polite and social as we and many other animals are, but behave as super-organisms, with genetically determined castes with division of labor, and restriction of reproduction to a small subset of those castes. The members of such a collective have no independent existence, die when the hive dies, and are seen by evolution as a group that has group-level traits that are extensively selected for.

Phylogenetic tree of the species considered. Solitary bees are marked in blue, simple sociality in green, more advanced sociality in yellow, and full-blown eusociality on red. 

The researchers basically lined up lot of genomes, from various levels of social organization among the bees, and looked especially at promoter regions, where the primary control over gene expression happens. They found a striking increase in complexity, which is to say number of binding sites for regulatory proteins, all over the genomes of the more social species. Indeed there was a 10-to-1 bias of genes that gained promoter binding sites over those that lost sites in the more social species. This is a dramatic effect, and makes sense in terms of the "mode-switches" required on a genetic level to create castes with separate developmental and behavioral traits out of one ancestral species.

Bias found among orthologous bee genes (that is, the same between each species) between those that gained promoter regulatory sites in more social species (blue) and those that lost them (red). The X axis is not genes, but the individual regulatory proteins whose DNA-binding sites were identified.

They also found, interestingly, that the particular genes involved in these increases were not the same in different social insect lineages. They took different genetic / evolutionary routes to eusociality in detail, even though they ended up with similar properties. So this is a kind of convergent evolution that shows that group selection and the sociality it selects for did not just arise multiple times in life's history out of some kind of molecular happenstance, but is an optimal ecological solution that attracts quite a bit of selection, as we can tell by the dominance of social species, both in the insect world and in our own.

Overlap among the various social lineages of which genes showed rapid, positive evolutionary selection. The result is that there is very little overlap, indicating that there are many ways to skin the social cat.

• Termites, same story is pending.
• Sociological reflections on WD Hamilton.
• Review of Churchland, on the brain and morality.
• More on body-mind interconnections.
• What the Y chromosome says about out of Africa models.
• Do voters understand economics, from today's ideological, corporate media?
• Global warming doesn't mean more plants, it means more desert.
• Breaking up big SDI banks would be "un-American".
• Notes on currency manipulation.
• Notes on division of labor, and why technology is probably more important to the organizational structure.
• NIH talk on depression- current research status and promising developments.

Bacteria Form Communities Too

Moral issues among the tiniest life forms.

Sometimes it takes a village, even for bacteria. Famous for being mindless, pitiless, evolutionarily-honed automatons, it turns out that bacteria have need of community and have ways to detect and signal that a community is ready for action. Not only that, they have ways to punish cheaters who do not pull their weight for the collective, tiny as it might be.

A recent computational biology paper developed game theory models based on bacterial dynamics to explore what signals are needed for group cooperation and how they evolve. Suppose that some bacteria face a food source (say a piece of wood) that requires acidic pH to digest. One bacterium isn't going to make much headway by itself. But if a thousand gather and crank out some protons in unison, they could make themselves a feast. Then what if one of them decides to loaf around, eating its fill but not producing any acid to help digestion?

This presents a series of problems. First, each bacterium needs to be able to tell whether there are enough colleagues about to make a collective / individual effort worthwhile. Second, it needs to know whether such a decision is shared by the others, so that they act in unison. And third, of course, they need to devise some way to punish or mitigate cheating and loafing.

Incidentally, these authors refer routinely to a personified "Nature", as in "We shall assume that Nature may choose between two different states ...". This is somewhat off-putting, and doubtless a consequence of being computationally oriented, making them wish to make it clear when they are speaking of natural cases, versus in silico, modelled cases. This should, however, not create any presumption of a theology of some shadowy entity behind the curtain or pan-consciousness, etc.

The authors simulated basic game theory conditions where individuals either signal or do not signal, with varying costs, and either cooperate or do not, responding or not responding to the majority signal around them. The idea was to vary the costs and benefits, and introduce mutants that employ other strategies, to ask what conditions lead to stable conditions, especially those resembling the world we actually see, where cooperation is, among bacteria, reasonably common.

In fairness, they asked themselves quite limited questions, focussing on whether signalling systems routinely evolve under conditions where cooperation is beneficial. Obviously, the answer to this is going to be yes, under any state where the conditions vary and are not adverse, requiring cooperation, all the time. The strategies they entertained were brutally simple- either signal or don't, and either cooperate or don't. So there was little subtlety.

Bright / beige areas show where most of the simulated populations reside under various conditions, while practicing the cooperative, signalling responsive strategy. The Y axis is cost of signalling. Very high costs (as a proportion of the benefit gained) do inhibit signalling, but this is biologically not very realistic. The various graphs then show: 1. selection pressure for the cooperative benefit, which strongly stablizes cooperation, as well as signaling  2. As the cost of cooperation rises, populations are OK with higher signalling costs, given a relatively high selective constraint for cooperation, (gamma 𝛾 is set at 5). 3. If the rate of bad conditions rises to high levels, it makes no sense to signal that fact, really, and populations cooperate, either without signaling at all (i.e. all the time) or in response to a lack of signal.

One further problem is that the authors have given themselves the simplification that only one mutant form can exist at a time, either invading and taking over the whole population, or dying out before the next mutant strategy comes onto the scene. That means that a shirker strategy of benefitting from the cooperation of others may briefly invade a more cooperative population, but can never realistically take over the population when the benefits of cooperation (i.e. selective pressure for cooperation) are set high.

Thus the main question that we would realistically have about cooperative strategies, which is about the stable rate of shirking in otherwise cooperative populations, and the evolution of counter-strategies of detection and punishment, never come up in this analysis.

Thankfully, there is other work in the field that has established punishment strategies, though not yet any active surveillance and detection strategies, which might be beyond bacteria's cognitive capacity. In one example, the human pathogen Pseudomonal aeruginosa secretes small amount of cyanide, which the cooperators are resistent to, but the cheaters are not.

Small as they are, bacteria face basic dilemmas of survival and group action. They have the glimmerings of moral needs and one can readily see how increased capabilities led to increasingly complex behaviors of evasion, deception, and group control that we express in our moral systems.

• Another paper on the collective propensities of bacteria.
• Some notes on the origin of the Origin.
• Hello, eco-pod.
• Some questions are lies. Many of them, actually.
• MMT at the BOE.
• Obscene spending by the rich. But honestly, the real problem is that they don't spend enough.
• Workers need more power. Freedom for companies does not equal free markets.
• The case for vacation.
• A private company committing fraud? We are shocked!
• Fiscal policy would have been very effective. Paying people more would likewise be very effective.
• All you can really fault the Fed, in policy terms, is for not pushing for more fiscal policy. This paper also makes the important point that higher unemployment equals higher inequality.
• Organized crime is dead.. long live finance.
• Bill Mitchell on the full employment period and policies, vs our feudal age.
• Walmart hires according to pure managerial and business merit, reinforcing the idea that CEOs deserve extraordinary pay and power on a marginal utility & productivity basis.

Death of a Species

Callous indifference and business-as-usual greed dooms the delta, and the delta smelt.

As ecological icons go, the delta smelt isn't much. A small silver fish, like a zillion others. But it lives in the way of dredgers, bulldozers, farmers, shippers, and a thirsty multitude. It was put on the endangered species list in 1993, and has kept right on dwindling, until in the most recent count, a single smelt was found. One.

The San Joaquin / Sacramento / San Francisco Bay delta used to be a very large estuary of marshes, reeds, rivers, and islands that gradually fed the great rivers of the Sierras into the Bay and thence through the Golden Gate the Pacific ocean. Fresh water met briny in constant tidal and rain-fed flows. Smelt were obviously not the only beneficiary of this rich ecosystem, but countless shellfish, mammals such as beavers, insects by the billion, and birds by the million. The delta was a major stop on the Pacific flyway for migrating birds. And it was the conduit for several species of now-endangered salmon.

Comparison of the delta as it was, and as it is now. Virtually all its marshland and most of its complex river habitat is gone.

Despite the popular image of California as a state of nature and natural wonders, it has been pillaged in the name of greed from the beginning. The Spanish mission system started the ball rolling by enslaving and decimating the native peoples. Then the gold rush led to thorough destruction and pollution of the rivers, while working its way upwards into the hardrock mines of the Sierra. Next was agriculture, which in California became a rapacious and short-sighted industry, well-illustrated in the now-obscure novel by Frank Norris, The Octopus. Then it was onwards to a thorough re-plumbing of the state by the water lords of Southern California. The latest incarnation of this get-rich quick ethic was the dot-com bubble, by which Silicon Valley took investors all over the world to the cleaners.

The little smelt and all the natural riches it stands for had little chance, of course, when there was free, fertile land to be had by diking, draining, and dredging. A state which had some inclination to protect the spectacular, yet conveniently remote and barren, high Sierras, had no appreciation for the ecological values of wilderness in the bottomlands, even for flood control, which is increasingly difficult as so much of the "reclaimed" land is under sea level, protected by primitive, flimsy dikes. With the extended drought and the vast rerouting of fresh water, the delta has begun to flow backwards, introducing salt as well. But the state, being owned by its commercial interests, leaves public and ecological policy to die a quiet death, along with the smelt.

The planetary climate and biosphere face similar forces of corruption, greed, inertia, and neglect, which will just as soon see it die with a whimper than plan in a public and morally forward thinking spirit for future generations of all species.

• Notes on our friends the Saudis.
• Secularization hypothesis finds new support.
• Further notes from the religion of peace.
• The odd history of US fundamentalism.
• Bruce Bartlett just can't take the corruption any more.
• Even if corruption is quite natural.
• Notes on real estate redlining.
• Economics is not yet a science.
• Silence on fiscal policy is dereliction by central banks.
• Bill Mitchell on the Australian budget process. A cartoon.
• Aetna raises its minimum wage: "The pay raise and benefit program for low-wage workers will cost Aetna only $26 million, while the CEO alone made $15.6 million last year, though most of it in stock options."
• Some problems with TPP.
• Class and money beats performance.
• Essay on the new frontiers of brain science, and its changing nature.
• 110 year old infrastructure for trains? We can do better.
• Two banks find a judge with a spine, after they lied to convince Fannie and Freddie to go subprime.
• Economic graph of the week: Stiglitz on inequality.