Students Deserve Mentors

The best form of education is personal mentoring. More of our educational and work system should get back to that model.

We learned some important things from the Covid pandemic. One is that fiscal stimulus really works. Another is that mRNA vaccines are highly effective, and their rapid and flexible development cycle makes them a superior platform for future vaccines. And another is that social interaction is deeply important, especially for young people. We all got used to Zoom, but for school children, that was a poor substitute, when it was even possible. Children were left significantly behind both academically and socially.

A recent segment on the PBS NewsHour touched on this in a discussion of adolescent development. Its message was that learning requires challenging opportunities and human relationships. Adolescents are going on a heroic quest to become adults. They thrive on active engagement with the world and need models of successful adulthood to learn from. How to provide these key functions in an optimal way? We know how to do this- by apprenticeship and mentorship. This model has been understood forever, from the schools of Athens to the medieval trade guilds to the graduate schools of contemporary academia. My grandfather was a baker in Germany, and in his turn trained many apprentices and journeymen to be bakers. I went to graduate school, which turned out to be a glorified apprenticeship under a renowned researcher, then went on to a journeyman position (aka post-doc) with another mentor. This model is an education in many dimensions- the technical ingredients of a craft, the management practices that make a successful organization, how to participate in a larger community that pursues socially important goals, and the discipline and moral integrity it takes to be a competent adult, capable of leadership.

Example of a certificate of attainment of mastery, 1927, for a bricklayer, attested by his mentors and examiners.

However, as a society, we are reluctant to make these kinds of investments in children and adolescents. Efficiency demands that class sizes be large, colleges impersonal, and money squeezed out of the system. Companies clamor for fully trained job candidates, expecting students to go into debt in trade schools before being hired into a paying job. Few young people get the kind of lengthy, personal training that they would most benefit from. Mentorship becomes a hazard of chance, if a boss in an early job takes an interest, or a teacher decides to make extra time.

Principally, I fault the corporate system, which has sloughed off its civic responsibilities to train people and propagate cultural knowledge. The economy is full of interesting and important jobs representing exquisite technical knowledge and other expertise. As a culture and economy, we are not going to maintain a high standard if we keep losing these skills and knowledge with every generation. Just look what has happened to the industries we have ceded to China. Innovation hubs like Silicon Valley are successful in part because training becomes a shared enterprise. New companies benefit from a large pool of experienced workers, who can switch between organizations with ease. No individual company carries the whole burden of training, but as companies become larger and more specialized, they have to take on the costs of training a larger proportion of their incoming employees. Yet they still benefit from the cross-fertilization of being in a highly skilled employment ecosystem.

To better serve young people, we need to make integration into corporate skills training more accessible and normal. The idea that students should be battling for unpaid internships is absurd and insulting- all internships should be paid, and they should be longer as well. The German trades system is an example, where companies and government cooperate in providing training to young people. The companies get a much better familiarity with future hires, who are also better trained. Many trades/sectors have a communal "training tax", which all companies pay, and which funds salaries to trainees and other training costs. This is one accomplishment of the union system in Germany, which is much stronger and better integrated into their industries than that in the US.

This model could be made more general in the US as a federal program, crossing all organizations in the public and private sector, funding internships and training for more students than is now done, setting up a more lengthy and regular apprenticeship system. The training/salary costs would grade over the first few years of employment from tax-supported to company-supported. Lowering the burden of a young first hire, both in financial terms and terms of knowing the candidates better, should encourage more hiring and more training by employers. 

Companies are often citadels of hermetic wisdom, when they are not going off the rails as predatory enterprises. Integrating more young people and an additional purpose of training into US corporate culture would counteract both of these problems, while helping the youth and preserving / propagating cultural knowledge more effectively.

• Mentoring, Shanghai style.
• Surrender Dorothy!
• Mini-me and the future of Ukraine.
• Free buses work.
• Crypto, on the other hand, remains a criminal enterprise.
• Biology is not so easy. Really.

The Role of Empathy in Science

Jane Goodall's career was not just a watershed in ethology and primate psychology, but in the way science is done.

I vividly remember reading Jane Goodall's descriptions of the chimpanzees in her Gombe project. Here we had been looking for intelligent alien life with SETI, and wondering about life on Mars. But she revealed that intelligent, curious personalities exist right here, on Earth, in the African forest. Alien, but not so alien. Indeed, they loved their families, suffered heartbreaking losses, and fought vicious battles. They had cultures, and tools, deviousness and generosity. 

What was striking was not just the implications of all this for us as humans and as conservationists, but also what it overturned about scientific attitudes. Science had traditionally had a buttoned-up attitude- "hard science", as it were. This reached a crescendo with behaviorism, where nothing was imputed to the psychology of others, whether animals or children, other than machine-like input/output reflexes. Machines were the reigning model, as though we had learned nothing since Descartes. 

Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.

This was appalling enough on its own terms, but it really impoverished scientific progress as well. Goodall helped break open this box by showing in a particularly dramatic way the payoff possible from having deep empathy with one's scientific object. Scientists have always engaged with their questions out of interest and imagination. It is a process of feeling one's way through essentially a fantasy world, until one proves that the rules you have divined actually are provable via some concrete demonstration- doing an experiment, or observing the evidence of tool use by chimpanzees. It is intrinsically an empathetic process, even if the object of that empathy is a geological formation, or a sub-atomic particle. 

But discipline is needed too. Mathematics reigns supreme in physics, because, luckily, physics follows extremely regular rules. That is what is so irritating and uncomfortable about quantum mechanics. That is a field where empathy sort of fails- notoriously, no one really "understands" quantum mechanics, even though the math certainly works out. But in most fields, it is understanding we are after, led by empathy and followed by systematization of the rules at work, if any. This use of empathy has methodological implications. We become attached to the objects of our work, and to our ideas about them. So discipline involves doing things like double-blind trials to insulate a truth-finding process from bias. And transparency with open publication followed by open critique.

In the 20th century, science was being overwhelmed by the discipline and the adulation of physics, and losing the spark of inspiration. Jane Goodall helped to right that ship, reminding us that scientific methods and attitudes need to match the objects we are working with. Sure, math might be the right approach to electrons. But our fellow animals are an entirely different kettle of fish. For example, all animals follow their desires. The complexities of mating among animals means that they are all driven just as we are- by emotions, by desire, by pain, by love. The complexity may differ, but the intensity of these emotions can not possibly be anything but universal.

• "He will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government."

My Religion is Star Trek

Denial of death and the origin of evil- Ernest Becker on religion.

I have always wondered about the purpose of clothes. Nudists obviously do as well. Sometimes you need to keep warm. But most of the time, clothes are a cultural convention full of signifiers of taste, status ... and something else. That something else is the illusion that we are not animals. Positively, absolutely, something wholly different and on another plane of existence. Not animals. 

Even a century and a half after Darwin explained that we are animals, there are plenty of people who cling to various stories of denial. But these stories have purposes that go well beyond this ontological illusion. Because not only are we animals, but we are animals without meaning. Animals that will die. That is, no meaning is given objectively. So just as we clothe our bodies with fabric, we clothe our spirits with illusions of meaning, for otherwise we could not live. 

I have been following a provocative podcast series, which spent a couple of episodes on Ernest Becker, a mid-20th century philosopher in the US. He posited that we all follow a religion, in the anthropological sense that we live in cultural structures that give us meaning. Structures that are fundamentally illusory, because there is no there there. Meaning has always been generated by us, for us, subjectively by our psychological proclivities for social connection and drama. We are psychologically adapted to make and seek meaning, though in the final analysis, however powerful they feel, these are all conjured, not given. Take Disney as an example. Many people get highly involved with, and take solace from, the narratives Disney puts out, in its parks, cruise ships, movies, merchandise, and other channels. Relentless provision of mechanically assembled archetypes and other psychological triggers that activate / soothe, inspire, and motivate apparently has a substantial market. 

While atheists take no end of potshots at the absurdities and hypocrisies of formal religions, they also live (and must live) in some sort of illusion themselves. The idea that learning and science makes for a more "objective" value system and life of meaning may be less absurd, but is no more objective. These values come with a rationale and a story, one of service to ultimately human ends of knowledge and betterment. But that doesn't make them true- just another set of values that must be gauged subjectively. And when measured by the ironic criterion of Darwinian success in promoting reproduction, they often turn out to be lacking. At the most basic level, getting through the day requires some kind of motivation, and that motivation, when it goes beyond the most animal requirements, requires meaning, which requires us to have some story that narrates a purpose to a life whose end is otherwise irredeemably meaningless. 

There is a problem, however, to Becker. The more enveloping and functional the narrative of meaning, the more any competing narrative becomes alien and threatening. Indeed, threatening narratives become evil. Thus Judaism became the nemesis of Christianity, and Catholicism that of Protestantism. If the meaning of our lives, in a spiritual and eternal sense, is devalued by another story that has competing status, there is no limit to our horror at its doctrines or our dehumanization of its adherents. Thence to crusades, religious wars, pogroms, and the delicately named "communal violence". The management of narratives of meaning thus is perhaps the most critical aspect of human affairs, as all religious leaders have known forever.

One can see the US civil war through this lens. The people of the South, wedded to slavery, justified it through their theology and culture. They were mortally offended by the busybodies of the North who dared cast aspersions on their moral narratives and justifications, not to mention their economic basis. Where "Uncle Tom's Cabin" may have broken through the indifference of Northern culture, it was met with outrage in the South- a stout defense of their powerful cultural and religious narratives. The conflict was spiritual and existential.

Becker did not have terribly novel solutions to the problems of meaning and counter-meaning. Just the meta prescription that arose in the enlightenment, secularism and in all the branches of modern psychology. Which is that understanding this dynamic and taking one's stories less seriously is the path to social peace. It may not be the path to optimal personal meaning, however. How do you compare the smorgasbord of Disney, mainline religion, Western Buddhism, science, and a thousand other sects and value systems to a traditional society with one church, one story, and one universe? The power of social and spiritual unity must have been tremendously validating and comfortable. So there has been a big tradeoff to get to our current state of social and spiritual innovation, plurality, and anomie. It is evident that our political moment is one of deep spiritual revanchism- of revulsion (by the more traditional-minded) against all this plurality, back towards a more benighted unity.

• Only Catholics go to heaven.
• Religious zealots have no clue whatsoever.
• Homelessness as a problem of affluence, gentrification, and too-good policing.
• But crime in DC? We know where that is.
• Cutting off our health to spite our libtards.
• The state of cars.

Party Of The Future

Not the past ... what the Democrats can do to succeed.

The Democratic party has gotten a little lost, perhaps led a bit too well by Joe Biden, who wandered out of a more civilized and decent time. But focusing on personalities would be wrong- there are much deeper currents at work. While it remains hard to believe that billionaires have successfully hijacked the US government on the back of demogogic appeals to the uneducated, resentful, and bigoted, that is pretty much where we are. Those billionaires are dismantling the US government as fast as humanly possible, so it is imperative for the Democratic party to regain its grip on reality, and on a winning coalition.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the new administration is just how retrograde it is. Its obsession with tariffs comes out of economics at least a century out of date. There was the weird fetishization of William McKinley, and of a replay of our colonial interlude from the late 1800's vs Greenland, maybe even Canada. There is the rollback of the regulatory state, the literal gilding of the oval office, and blithe dismissal of the last hundred years of public health advances. Rather than making America great again, it is making America backwards again, waging a bitter war against the universities and any elites not bending the knee. At this rate, we are heading backwards by the week, to perhaps before the Revolution and onwards to the depths of the royal prerogatives of Henry VIII. Who everyone says was a very great king, by the way!

It is fine to complain, (while we still can), but the more important task is to come up with a better message and coalition, so that the US can get back to looking forward, instead of backward. One way to look at the electorate is in very broad thirds- one elite third, rich and business-centric, another elite third, college educated and liberal, and one third working class. 61% of the population have some college, and 45% have a college degree of some sort. The Democratic party has increasingly moved from its base in the working class to this educated portion of the electorate, and we should own up to what is in essence a battle between two elites- the business elite and the educated elite. These have very different ethics, at least at this late phase of capitalism, when business leaders (if we can call the president that) seem just as interested in business models of grift and fraud (subprime loans, lying about fossil fuels, crypto) as those that build the country. 

Face the past

This diametric difference in ethics is why the divisiveness is at such a fever pitch now. But Democrats made a lot of mistakes as well, of which I can mention four. First, immigration. The utter loss of control at the southern border was highly unpopular. It was unfair to everyone who participated in the (highly unfair, and punishing) legal immigration system. It showed scenes of chaos and lawlessness. And it was an economic threat to everyone on the lower end of the economic spectrum- exactly those demographics the Republicans were aiming at. Second, extreme woke. With the best of intentions, liberal elites set up increasingly abstruse and extreme theaters of correctness, demanding oaths of DEI adherence from faculty, celebrating every deviance from tradition- in the political sphere, in children's literature, and the ever-extending letters of the LGBT... etc. community. All this strenuous virtue signaling was highly distracting and estranging from the bedrock of political coalition-building: unity and common sense. Third was foreign policy, principally the disastrous Afghan withdrawal. For all of the Biden administration's competence in policy over a vast gamut, this was handled very poorly. Granted, it was a cake that was baked by the Trump administration's bad deal with the Taliban, and the management on the ground was run by the military, not the White House, but whatever the cause, it looked bad to catastrophic for US standing the world. And fourth is regulatory gridlock, sapping our ability to build anything, driving up housing costs specifically.

Democrats can not just wait out the madness in Washington, and expect to be elected as the default governing party. They have to face up to ways they have strayed from a winning coalition, and think deeply about fixing it and offering a narrative and program that is both responsible and welcoming to most Americans. 

Face the future

The basic problem of US politics is that we have some unpleasant truths to face. The frontier is gone, the climate is rapidly heating up, US international power is declining. We have rapidly switched from a rising, expansive, and optimistic power to a conservative and somewhat crabby power. Our last tango with a new frontier, that of space, ended up cruelly fruitless. Robotic scientific missions have been spectacularly productive, but manned spaceflight has gone from the height of optimism to another rote exercise in great power sclerosis. There is no there there, in terms of any economic, let alone demographic, frontier. And on top of that, the planet we are thus stuck on is becoming increasingly uncomfortable, even hostile. The future is looking a bit constricted, and more so because the rich elites have lost any sense of collective dedication, and devote themselves to screwing everyone else.

Republicans have addressed these issues by lying, denial, and fantasy, powered by their rabid media sphere. Obviously, Democrats have done and will do better. The current administration makes it clearer than ever what the regulatory state is about, and it is about helping people and restraining the powerful. Democrats need to keep beating the drum that financial protection, drug regulation, food inspection, securities fraud investigation.. these are all aimed at keeping the system fair for the regular citizen. They are not "the deep state", they are not very expensive, either. They are hated only by their antagonists- fraudulent businesspeople. More broadly, inequality is culturally corrosive and calls for taxing the rich more, not less. It is insulting to working people that income from capital gains (let alone carried interest) is taxed less than labor. Everything should be taxed the same- investments, labor, estates, changes in trust membership ... everything.

Build the future

At the same time, practicality has to take a front seat. Democrats need to alter course to promise that regulators keep their eye on the ball of efficiency- fulfilling their mission without tying the economy in knots. This applies particularly to building and zoning. The most liberal areas of the country are also the most conservative, in terms of real estate. The dread of "sprawl" has excused total stasis and lack of building, even as immigrants are allowed to flood in. The result is predictable enough. 

Next, the environment. Democrats did the responsible and foresighted thing with climate bills of the Biden administration. And that helped to build up the green transition. Too little, too late, but these were broadly popular, and need to be continued. The problem is that we are still facing a difficult transition, particularly from gas cars, and on a wide spectrum of other harms such as plastics, habitat loss, resource scarcity. Democrats need to take the long view here that sustainability is the ultimate goal. Everyone can see that our current practices are not fundamentally sustainable. Catastrophes ramp up in frequency and intensity. Democrats have to be the truth-tellers here, while pointing out that building green is beneficial across the board.

Lastly, education. Our education system lays the golden eggs, powering the future of better living standards and international competitiveness. It should be easy for Democrats to make the case against the war on education being carried out by the current administration. Yet, some rebalancing is needed. We have neglected the working class end of the system, and should strengthen community colleges to provide more low-cost trades education. It is appalling that the poor are preyed upon by fly-by-night trade schools in a rich country that supposedly has high standards of education and workmanship. 

Additionally, Democrats might address the deeper malaise among the young and in the culture at large by calling for national service. Two years for young people spent on serving others would be highly beneficial. Choices could range from military to conservation corps, and medical assistance. The main condition would be that these would be non-specialized, mixed groups so that participants work with people from all walks of life in the US, (or in the Peace Corps), broadening their experience and vision of what it means to be part of this country. Call this a form of civic education, essential to a democratic society.

Democrats have the tools, and need to reach out a bit to form a bigger coalition. The right wingosphere has successfully demonized learning, knowledge, and regulation, and it is all coming home to roost in the current administration. But the regulatory state was built originally not out of a college educated coalition, but a progressive working class movement, revolted by the corruption and inequality of the gilded age. Republicans can't help themselves but serve the rich and powerful. Democrats can re-align with their natural coalition.

• In many cases, going backwards requires lying.
• A brief history of environmental law.
• Wingnuts and lies in Poland.
• Thune and the utter dereliction of congress.
• Trampling all over whatever is left of the constitution.
• Hospice, or tax cuts?
• We are leaving the global stage.
• And carrying water for Russia.
• The next frontier, after zero carbon.
• FDA as a fully captured regulator.
• Another reason why crypto is so great.

A Very French Star Wars

Bruno Dumont's "The Empire" touches on the true meaning of Sci Fi. (Spoiler alerts!)

The online reviews are not very good, but to me, this film was both hilarious and profound. A bunch of scuzzy French villagers go about their normal business, fishing, arguing, flirting, driving around. Then, though the magic of acting, they betray another plot entirely. Some are extraterrestrials just taking human form, deeply engaged in some cosmic battle and sponsored by hulking space ships above, in the heavens. The kicker is that the space ship is topped by ... a gothic cathedral. At first, this just seems like a hilarious way to cut special effects expenses. Why not use the local cathedral to shoot the space ship interiors?!? But as you revolve all this in your mind, it starts to appear as though Dumont is making a more interesting point.

By the traditional theological story, aren't we all extra-terrestrials, trapped in human bodies, constantly fighting with the flesh and destined to return to a better realm? Conversely, isn't the standard science fiction story full of magical wonders and grand dramas and theologies? What if religion and science fiction are ultimately, as L. Ron Hubbard appreciated, the same thing? Transporter, resurrection; medical miracle, laying on of hands; Borg, Satan; tomato, tomahto. 

Unfortunately, sometimes the humanity takes charge, sex first and foremost fouling up the neat good vs bad dynamic. In the plot, neither side really does anything bad or good, reinforcing the absurdity of a film that comes off as a sort of French Terry Gilliam masterpiece. The "1"s come from the flying gothic cathedral and think of themselves as good, while the "0"s come from a flying Versailles, (which makes for a particularly ungainly space ship), and know they are demons. But they are all equally distracted by those human bodies.

The ending was, as far as I understood it, a disappointment. The armadas of mini-cathedral and mini-Versailles fighters are lined up for the final battle, à la Star Wars. But suddenly, they all get sucked into a wormhole, and ... end of film. It is almost as though Dumont holds out hope that there is a real deity, or at least higher being out there, to save humanity from this battle between these wonderfully absurdist extra-terrestrials. After the wind dies down, the local policemen and villagers are left to puzzle over the wreckage, and what these signs and wonders could have meant.

• Yes, the nutbars are still at it.
• Trump remains a useful idiot, but not for us.
• And the ultimate goals are becoming clearer.
• Inequality? Give me more of that, please.
• What humans have wrought.

Donald Trump is no Andrew Jackson

A few notes about the Jacksonian era.

One common historical touchpoint for our current epoch is the Jacksonian era, when a populist president presided over a significant increase in presidential power, carried into the White House by a ragtag rabble. Andrew Jackson stood against the elite power centers of the time, having been denied the presidency earlier by a shady deal that gave John Quincy Adams the office. Nor did he have much more love for the aristocrats of Virginia. He came from the backwoods of Tennessee, and a long career of fighting Indians as well as the English. Once in office, Jackson cleaned house and installed a patronage system that led to decades of increasing corruption, till the civil service was instituted. He also used the veto power, and made his cabinet secretaries subservient, to an unprecedented degree.

Jackson strengthened the party system and cultivated friendly media in a way that people at the time decried as divisive and dangerous. And, perhaps most strikingly, he oversaw the mass expulsion of Native Americans from the South. Jackson was a slaveowner and had no issue with the white supremacy of his day, whether against African Americans or Native Americans. Ironically, when France decided to not honor a treaty with the US, Jackson spared no effort to defend the nation's honor and rights. But when it came to the many treaties the US had signed with indigenous nations, many expressly meant for perpetuity, they were waved away like so much smoke.

On the other hand, Jackson was a successful general and businessman and won all the major battles of his presidency. And he was successful enough to anoint a successor, Martin van Buren. He was surprisingly eloquent and well-written and had a core set of principles that guided him and the nation. One principle was the importance of the constitution and the union. While previous presidents had thought the veto power should be confined to extreme legislative acts they regarded as unconstitutional, Jackson saw nothing in the constitution against using the veto on a policy basis, to weigh in on substantive issues as a popularly elected co-equal branch of government.

More importantly, he guided the nation through a nullification crisis with South Carolina with a sure hand. Always a hotbed of resistance and secession, South Carolina took particular issue with federal tariffs, which were set quite high to favor domestic industry. Industry generally located in the North. Jackson laid the groundwork for federal military intervention, promoted a tariff reduction, and issued a forceful and closely argued denunciation of "nullification" and secession that, in combination, squelched the movement of southern states against federal supremacy. This put off for a generation the crisis that Lincoln was fated to deal with.

One of Jackson's most interesting fights was against the Second Bank of the United States. Congress had chartered, from the Washington administration onwards, a national bank that was the sole interstate financial institution of the US. It was charged with facilitating the finances of the federal government, and with providing credit for internal improvements crossing state lines. But it was in essence a private bank that had only a fraction of its board appointed by the government and otherwise ran its business on a private basis as a commercial bank. In its opening years, it was generally undersized and not well run, and by the time of the second bank, had caused a couple of recessions due to its mismanagement. 

Finally, by the Jackson administration, it had come under competent management and was both expanding in all directions and doing a reasonable job of controlling the money supply and credit in the US, by limiting expansion of the state banks, (a significant source of opposition). It had, indeed, become the largest single financial institution in the world. But to Jackson, these were hardly points in its favor. He viewed it as a dangerous center of power, as though in our day JP Morgan were the only commercial bank allowed to do nation-wide business, with no competitors. The whole idea of a publicly-run central bank had not yet arisen at this time, and the national bank was more or less modeled on the Bank of England, which was a similar hybrid private entity. Unfortunately, instead of seeking reform of the national bank into a more modern and public-interest institution, Jackson pulled the only levers he had, which were to veto the rechartering of the Second National Bank, and then to follow that up with removing all federal deposits and putting them into state banks, effectively killing it. This had the unfortunate effect of dooming the US to almost a century of financial instability and poorly regulated banking. But on the whole, I am quite sympathetic to Jackson's position in killing the bank. It was a nascent form of anti-monopoly policy, which should have been taken up more systematically later in the century.

So, Jackson was very much of his time, not a visionary who could prepare the government for the vast growth in population, social institutions, and technology that were coming. But at the same time, he was not trying to drag the US backwards in time either. He did not cruelly run rampant through federal agencies, or foster international trade wars in search of a happier dream time of mediocre jobs and pay. The economic crisis that happened during his administration was not a tantrum he threw, but rather was caused by the national bank, as it consciously fostered a recession by withdrawing credit in an attempt to turn the people against Jackson. An attempt that failed because everyone knew what was going on, and which indeed showed the kind of power that Jackson was fighting against. Andrew Jackson did not view the federal government as an extortion racket or a throne from which bootlickers could be alternately fawned over and kicked in the teeth. He was thus, despite a few parallels, quite unlike the current occupant.

I am taking most of this material from an enjoyable biography by Jon Meacham. It is based mostly on correspondence, thus is quite chatty and focused on Jackson's domestic affairs. It is, conversely, frustratingly weak on the larger historical and policy issues of his day, particularly when it comes to the bank fight, which was so important for the country's future. 

• Remember the fantastic negotiations with Kim Jong Un? These are going about as well.
• Worst way possible.
• Love-bombing, Tump-style.
• A problem of meaning. And relationships.
• Whither the model train industry?

Sugar is the Enemy

Diabetes, cardiovascular health, and blood glucose monitoring.

Christmas brought a book titled "Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity". Great, I thought- something light and quick, in the mode Gweneth Paltrow or Deepak Chopra. I have never been into self-help or health fad and diet books. Much to my surprise, however, it turned out to be a rather rigorous program of preventative medicine, with a side of critical commentary on our current medical system. A system that puts various thresholds, such as blood sugar and blood pressure, at levels that represent serious disease, and cares little about what led up to them. Among the many recommendations and areas of focus, blood glucose levels stand out, both for their pervasive impact on health and aging, and also because there are new technologies and science that can bring its dangers out of the shadows.

Reading: 

• Outlive
• The many facets and forms of damage by high blood sugar, at the level of molecular biology.
• Recent analyses of blood sugar variability, from researchers at Stanford
• ... with tool for anyone with a CGM to upload their own data

Where do cardiovascular problems, the biggest source of mortality, come from? Largely from metabolic problems in the control of blood sugar. Diabetics know that uncontrolled blood sugar is lethal, on both the acute and long-terms. But the rest of us need to realize that the damage done by swings in blood sugar are more insidious and pervasive than commonly appreciated. Both microvascular (what is commonly associated with diabetes, in the form of problems with the small vessels of the kidney, legs, and eyes) and macrovascular (atherosclerosis) are due to high and variable blood sugar. The molecular biology of this was impressively unified in 2005 in the paper above, which argues that excess glucose clogs the mitochondrial respiration mechanisms. Their membrane voltage maxes out, reactive forms of oxygen accumulate, and glucose intermediates pile up in the cell. This leads to at least four different and very damaging consequences for the cell, including glucose modification (glycation) of miscellaneous proteins, a reduction of redox damage repair capacity, inflammation, and increased fatty acid export from adipocytes to endothelial (blood vessel) cells. Not good!

Continuous glucose monitored concentrations from three representative subjects, over one day. These exemplify the low, moderate, and severe variability classes, as defined by the Stanford group. Line segments are individually classed as to whether they fall into those same categories. There were 57 subject in the study, of all ages, none with an existing diagnosis of diabetes. Yet five of them had diabetes by traditional criteria, and fourteen had pre-diabetes by those criteria. By this scheme, 25 had severe variability as their "glucotype", 25 had moderate variability, and only 7 had low variability. As these were otherwise random subjects selected to not have diabetes, this is not great news about our general public health, or the health system.

Additionally, a revolution has occurred in blood glucose monitoring, where anyone can now buy a relatively simple device (called a CGM) that gives continuous blood glucose monitoring to a cell phone, and associated analytical software. This means that the fasting blood glucose level that is the traditional test is obsolete. The recent paper from Stanford (and the literature it cites) suggests, indeed, that it is variability in blood glucose that is damaging to our tissues, more so than sustained high levels.

One might ask why, if blood glucose is such a damaging and important mechanism of aging, hasn't evolution developed tighter control over it. Other ions and metabolites are kept under much tighter ranges. Sodium ranges between 135 to 145 mM, and calcium from 8.8 to 10.7 mM. Well, glucose is our food, and our need for glucose internally is highly variable. Our livers are tiny brains that try very hard to predict what we need, based on our circadian rhythms, our stress levels, our activity both current and expected. It is a difficult job, especially now that stress rarely means physical activity, and nor does travel, in our automobiles. But mainly, this is a problem of old age, so evolution cares little about it. Getting a bigger spurt of energy for a stressful event when we, in our youth, are in crisis may, in the larger scheme of things, outweigh the slow decay of the cardiovascular system in old age. Not to mention that traditional diets were not very generous at all, certainly not in sugar and refined carbohydrates.

• First, Twitter was turned into a dumpster fire, next the US.
• US government to be rebranded as X.
• Truth must die.
• "Not strictly constitutional"
• Let's go there.

A Housing Guarantee

A proposal for an updated poor house.

I agree with MMT economists who propose a job guarantee. That would put a floor on the labor market with an offer to anyone who wants to work for a low, but living wage, probably set below the minimum wage mandated for the private sector. State and local governments would run cleanups, environmental restoration, and care operations as needed, requiring basic discipline and effort, but no further skills. But they could use higher skilled workers as they come along for more beneficial, complex tasks.

Similarly, I think we could offer a housing guarantee, putting a floor on homelessness and misery. In the state of California, homelessness is out of control, and we have not found solutions, despite a great deal of money spent. Housing in the private market is extremely expensive, far out of reach of those with even median incomes. The next level down is housing vouchers and public housing, of which there are not enough to go around, and which is extremely expensive. And below that are shelters, which are heavily adverse settings. They are not private, chaotic, unpleasant, meant to be temporary, can be closed much of the time. And they also do not have enough space. 

A local encampment, temporarily approved during the pandemic under the freeway.

As uncompassionate as it sounds, it is unacceptable, and should be illegal, for public spaces to be commandeered by the homeless for their private needs. Public spaces have many purposes, specifically not including squatting and vagrancy. It is a problem in urban areas, because that is where people are, and where many services exist at the intersection of public and private spaces- food, bathrooms, opportunities to beg, get drugs, etc. Just because we have been, as governments and citizens, neglectful of our public spaces, does not mean we should give them over to anyone who wants to camp on them. I was recently at San Francisco city hall and the beautiful park surrounding it. But at lunch time, I realized that there was nowhere to sit. The plague of homelessness had rendered park benches untenable. We deserve to keep these public spaces functional, and that means outlawing the use of public spaces by the homeless. At the same time, provision must be made for the homeless, who by this policy would have nowhere to go in fully zoned areas. Putting them on busses to the next town, as some jurisdictions do, is also not a solution. As a rich country, we can do more for the homeless even while we preserve public spaces.

I think we need to rethink the whole lower end of housing / shelter to make it a more regular, accessible, and acceptable way to catch those who need housing at a very basic level. The model would be a sort of cross between a hostel, an SRO (single room occupancy hotels) and army barracks. It would be publicly funded, and provide a private room as well as food, all for free. It would not throw people out, or lock them in.

This poor house would not demand work, though it would offer centralized services for finding jobs and other places to live. It would be open to anyone, including runaway teens, battered women, tourists, etc. It would be a refuge for anyone for any reason, on an unlimited basis. The space and the food would be very basic, motivating clients to seek better accommodation. It would be well-policed and its clients would have to behave themselves. The next step down in the ladder of indigent care would not be homelessness, which would be outlawed in areas offering this kind of poorhouse, but would be institutionalization, in increasingly stringent settings for either criminal or mental issues. 

Such a poor house might become a community center, at least for the indigent. It would be quite expensive, but given the level of inequality and lack of care for people in various desperate straits, we need to furnish a humane level of existence between the market housing system and institutionalization. Why not give everyone a house? That is neither financially practical, nor would that co-exist well with the market housing system. Certainly, more housing needs to be built and everything done to bring prices down. But to address the current issues, stronger housing policy is needed.

Why not go back to a public housing model? It turned out that public housing was somewhat unrealistic, promising far more than it could deliver. It promised fully functional neighborhoods and housing, pretty much the equivalent of market housing, but without the ongoing discipline from the market via private financial responsibility by the residents or from the programs via their bureaucratic structures and funding, to follow through on the long term. The public authorities generally took a hands-off approach to residents and their environment, in line with the (respectful) illusion that this was the equivalent of market housing. And the long-term is what counts in housing, since it is ever in need of repair and renovation, not to mention careful use and protection by its residents. Building is one thing, but maintaining is something quite different, and requires carefully though-out incentives. 

With a public poorhouse model, the premises and residents are extensively policed. Individual rooms may descend to squalor, but the whole is built, run and maintained by the public authorities with intensive surveillance and intervention, keeping the institution as a whole functioning and growing as needed for its mission. There is going to be a sliding scale of freedom vs public involvement via financing and policing. The less functional a person is, the more control they will have to accept. We can not wash our hands of the homeless by granting them "freedom" to thrash about in squalor and make dumps of public spaces.

• Or you could join the squid game.
• Economic policy should not be about efficiency alone, let alone rewarding capital and management, but about long-term cultural and environmental sustainability.
• Could AI do biology?
• Carter was an evangelical. But that was a different time.

Money For Nothing: Two Views of Crypto

Is crypto more like gold or a simple scam?

I have to confess some perplexity over crypto. Billed as currencies, they are not currencies. Billed as securities, they are not securities, either. They excite a weird kind of enthusiasm in libertarian circles, in dreams of asocial (if not anti-social) finance. From a matter of fringe speculation, they are migrating into the culture at large, influencing our politics, and becoming significant economic actors, with a combined market cap now over three trillion dollars. For me, there are two basic frames for thinking about crypto. One is that they are like gold, an intrinsically worthless, but attractive object of fascination, wealth storage, and speculation. The other is that they are straight Ponzi schemes, rising by a greater-fool process that will end in tears.

Currencies are forms of money with particular characteristics. They are widely used among a region or population, stable in value, and easy to store and exchange. They are typically sponsored by a government to ensure that stability and acceptance. This is done in part by specifying that currency for incoming taxes and outgoing vendor and salary payments. They are also, in modern systems, managed elastically, (and intelligently!), with ongoing currency creation to match economic growth and keep the nominal value stable over time. Crypto entities would like to be currencies. However, they have far from stable value, are not easy to work with, and are not widely used. Securities, on the other hand, have a basis in some kind of collateral (i.e. the "security" part) like business ownership, a contract of bond interest payments, etc. Crypto does not have this either. Crypto has only its own scarcity to offer, a bit like cowrie shells, or gold. Crypto entities are not investments in productive activity. Indeed, they foster the opposite, as their only solid use case has been, at least to date, facilitating crime, as demonstrated by the ransomware industry, which asks to be paid in Bitcoin.

So how about gold? Keynes railed against gold as the most useless, barbaric form of wealth, inducing people to dig holes in the earth and cause environmental degradation. And for what? A shiny substance that looks good, and is useful in a few industrial applications, but mostly was, at the time, held by governments in huge vaults, notionally underpinning their currency values. Thankfully we are past that, but gold still holds fascination, and persists as a store of value. Gold can be held in electronic forms, making it just as easy to hold and transfer as crypto entities, if one is so-inclined. Critically, however, gold is also physical, and humanity's fascination with it is innate and enduring. Thus, after the apocalypse, when the electricity is off and the computers are not connected anymore, gold will still be there, ready to serve as money when crypto has evaporated away. 

Bitcoin barely recovered from an early crisis. 

How durable is the fascination with crypto, as a store of wealth, or for any other purpose, under modern, non-apocalyptic conditions? Bitcoin is the grand-daddy of the field, and seems to have achieved dominance, certainly the field of criminal money laundering and transfer, as well as libertarian speculation. It appears to have a special mystique, whether from the blockchain, its "mining" system, or its mysterious pseudonymous founder. The other forms of crypto range from respectible to passing memes. There is a fascinating competition in the attention space that constitutes the crypto markets. Since they do not have intrinsic value, nor governmental buy-in, they float entirely on buyer sentiment, in a greater-fool cycle of rises and falls. Crashes in the stock market are halted by fundamental value of the underlying asset. As the speculative fervor wanes, vultures step in to, at worst, liquidate the assets. But for crypto, there are no assets. No fundamental value. So crashes can and do go to zero.

There are also external factors, like the fact that many crypto entities have been outright scams, or the environmental costs of Bitcoin, or their facilitation of criminality, which may eventually draw popular and regulatory scrutiny. Boosters have been trying to get the Federal Reserve and other validating entities to buy into the crypto craze, and political contributions from newly crypto-riche holders and exchanges have transformed the landscape to one that seems increasingly sympathetic, especially on the Republican side. Thankfully, the smaller memecoins have market caps in the low millions, so do not present a threat as yet to the financial system, in the almost certain event of their evaporation once each meme passes. This blasé acceptance of "securities" that are pure schemes of speculation is a sad commentary on our current age. The sophisticated investor of today would not study corporate efficiency, market prospects, or finances. He or she would be conversant in current memes on social media, ready to jump on the newest one, and sensitive to the withering of older memes, in an endless conveyor belt of booms and busts. 

It is weird how people fail to learn the lessons of the past, from the tulip craze and other speculative booms. Where there is no value, there is likely to be a very deep crash. The libertarians among us, who may have been gold bugs in the past and now have flocked to the new world of crypto, may represent a psychological type that is ineradicable, so motivated to ditch the humdrum official currency for anything that offers a whiff of notional independence, (though being tethered to the new crypto infrastructure of exchanges and wallets is not for the faint of heart or independent-minded), that they can float these crypto entities indefinitely. But in the absence of deeper value, might their psychologies change to those of hawkers who get in at the ground floor and make out, while the schlubs who buy at the top are left holding the bag? It comes down to human psychology in the end- what is personally and socially valuable, who you think your counterparts are on the other ends of all these trades, and who (and what sort of motivation) is making up the institutions and communities of crypto.

• Star Trek was fighting the cold war.

Capitalism on the Spectrum

Prospects for the new administration.

Political economics can be seen as a spectrum from anarchic gangsterism (Haiti) to total top down control such as in communism (Cuba, North Korea). Neither works well. Each end of this spectrum ends up in a state of terror, because each is unworkable on its own terms. Capitalism, in its modern form, is a compromise between these extremes, where free initiative, competition, and hierarchical relations (such within corporations) are allowed, while regulation (via the state and unions) makes humane what would otherwise a cutthroat system of gangsterism and corruption. The organization and stability allowed by state-sponsored legal systems raises system productivity far above that of the primeval free-for-all, while the regulatory rules also make it bearable to its participants- principally the workers. The magic comes from a dynamic balance between competition and guardrails to keep that competition focused on productive ends (that is, economic/business competition), rather than unproductive ones (war, assassination, corruption, capture of the state, etc.)

The new Trump administration promises to tear up this compromise, slash regulations, and cut government. That means that the workers that voted for this administration, and who are the primary beneficiaries of the regulatory state, will be hurt in countless ways. The grifting nature of so many in this incoming administration is a blazing alarm to anyone who pays attention. Whether it is stiffing workers, bloviating on FOX, hawking gold sneakers, making a buck off of anti-vax gullibility, defrauding the government of taxes, promoting crypto, or frankly asking for money in return for political favors like petroleum deregulation, the stench of corruption and bad faith is overwhelming. Many of them, starting from the top, see capitalism as a string of scams and frauds, not exactly Milton Friedman's vision of capitalism. An administration of grifty billionaires is unlikely to rebuild US manufacturing, help workers afford housing, or fulfill any of the other dreams of their voters. Indeed, a massive economic collapse, on the heels of bad policy such as crypto deregulation, or a world-spanning trade war, is more likely, and degraded conditions for workers all but certain.

Freedom for capitalists means permission for companies to abuse workers, customers, the environment, the law, and whatever else stands in the way of profit. We have been through this many times, especially in the gilded age. It can spiral into anarchy and violence when business owners are sufficiently "free" from the fetters of norms and laws. When the most powerful entities in the economy have only one purpose- to make money- all other values are trampled. That is, unless a stronger entity makes some rules. That entity can only be the government. It has been the role of governments from time immemorial to look to the long term interests of the collective, and organize the inherent competition within society into benign and productive pursuits.

OK, more than a little ironic, but you get the idea.

On the other hand, there is a problem even at the golden mean of governmental rule-making over the capitalistic free-for-all, which is that the quality of the rule makers and their rules, their attention to real conditions, and their prompt decision making, all can decline into bureaucratic inertia. While this may not be a Stalinist system of top-down planning and terror, it still can sap the productive energies of the system. And that is what we have been facing over the last few decades. For instance, there is the housing crisis, where home construction has not kept up with demand, mostly due to zoning stasis in most desirable places in the US, in addition to lagging construction after the 2008 financial and real estate crisis. Another example is public infrastructure, which has become increasingly difficult to build due to ever-mounting bureaucratic complexity and numbers of stakeholders. The California high speed rail system faces mountainous costs and a bogged-down legal environment, and is on the edge of complete inviability.

Putting rich, corrupt, and occasionally criminal capitalists at the head of this system is not, one must say, the most obvious way to fix it. Ideally, the Democrats would have put forward more innovative candidates in better touch with the problems voters were evidently concerned with. Then we could have forged ahead with policies oriented to the public good, (such as planetary sustainability and worker rights), as has been the practice through the Biden administration. But the election came up with a different solution, one that we will be paying for for decades. And possibly far worse, since there are worse fates than being at a well-meaning, if sclerotic, golden mean of governmental regulation over a largely free capitalist system. Hungary and Russia show the way to "managed democracy" and eventual autocracy. Our own history, and that of Dickensian Britain, show the way of uncontrolled capitalism, which took decades of progressivism, and a great depression, to finally tame. It would be nice to not have to repeat that history.

• Daniel P. Moynihan was for the job guarantee.
• Housing in New Zealand.
• Nature's key scientists of 2024.
• A grumpy Krugman signs off.
• Notes on crypto and its grifting community.
• Who is for workers?
• MAGA to kill off the greatest public health advance, ever.

To the Stars!

Reviews of "Making it So", by Patrick Stewart, and "The Silent Star" from DEFA films.

When I think about religion, I usually think about how wrong it all is. But at the same time, it has provided a narrative structure for much of humanity and much of human history, for better or worse. It could be regarded as the original science fiction, with its miracles, and reports of supernatural beings and powers. Both testaments of the Bible read like wonder tales of strange happenings and hopeful portents. While theology might take the heavenly beings and weird powers seriously, it is obvious these were mere philosophical gropings after the true gears of the world, while the core of the stories are the human narratives of conflict, adversity, and morality.

In our epoch features a welter of storytelling, typically more commercially desperate than culturally binding. But one story has risen above the rest- the world of Star Trek. From its cold war beginnings, it has blossomed into a rich world of morality tales combined with hopeful adventure and mild drama. The delightful recent autobiography by Patrick Stewart brought this all back in a new way. Looking at the franchise from the inside out, from the perspective of a professional actor who was certainly dedicated to his craft, but hardly a fan of the franchise- someone for whom this was just another role, if one that made him an international, nay galactic, star- was deeply interesting. Even engaging(!)

As a Shakespearean actor, Stewart was used to dealing with beloved, culturally pivotal stories. And this one has become a touchstone in Western culture, supplying some of the models and glue that have gone missing with the increasing irrelevance of religion. It is fascinating how heavily people depend on stories for a sense of what it should, can, and does mean to be human, for models of leadership and community. Star Trek, at least for a certain segment of the population, has provided a hopeful, interesting vision of the future, with well-reasoned moral dramas and judgments. Stewart embodied the kind of leadership style that was influential far beyond the confines of Starfleet. And his deeply engaged acting helped carry the show, as that of Leonard Nimoy had taken the original series beyond its action/adventure roots.

Where the narrative of Christianity is obscurantist, blusteringly uncertain how seriously to take its own story, and focused on the occasional miracles of long-ago, Star Trek values the future, problem solving and science, while it makes little pretense of realism. On the other hand, it is fundamentally a workplace drama, eliding many important facets of humanity, like family and scarcity. Though in the Star Trek world money is worthless and abundance is the rule, posts on starships remain in short supply. There always will be shortages of something, given human greed and narcissism, so there is always going to be something subject to competition, economics, possibly warfare. Christianity hinges on preaching and conversion, based on rather mysterious, if supposedly self-serving, personal convictions. Its vision of the future is, frankly, quite frightening. Star Trek, on the other hand, shows openness to other cultures, diplomacy, and sharing in its eschatological version of the American empire, the Federation. (Even if they get into an inordinate number of fights with un-enlightened cultures.)

The Star Trek story is so strong that it keeps motivating people to make spaceships. Just look at Elon Musk, who, despite the glaringly defective logic of sending humans to Mars, persists in that dream, as does NASA itself. It is a classic case of archetypal yearnings overwhelming common sense, not to mention clear science. But that is a small price to pay for the many other benefits of the Star Trek-style world view- one where different cultures and races get along, where solving problems and seeking knowledge are the highest pursuits, where leadership is judicious and respectful, and humans know what they stand for.

In a similar vein, the Soviets, who led humanity into space, had their own fixations and narratives of space and the future. I recently watched the fascinating movie from the East German DEFA studios, The Silent Star, (1960), which portrays a voyage to Venus. It strikingly prefigures the entire Star Trek oeuvre. There are the scientists on board, the handsome captain, the black communications officer, the international crew from all corners of the earth, the shuttle craft, the talking computer, the communications that keep breaking up, and the space ship that rattles through asteroid fields, jostling the crew. While there are several pointed comments on the American bombing of Hiroshima to set the geopolitical contrast, there is, overall, the absolute optimism that all problems can be solved, and that adventuring to seek the truth is unquestionably the most exciting way to live. One gets the distinct sense that Star Trek was not so original after all.

It was time when technology had pried open the heavens for direct investigation, and what humanity found there was stunningly unlike what had been foretold in the scriptures. It was a vast and empty wasteland, dotted with dead planets and lacking any hint of deities. We had to create an alternative narrative, with warp drive and M-class planets, where humans could recover a sense of agency and engagement with a future that remains tantalizing, even if sober heads know it is as wishful as it is fictional. It is the story, however, that is significant, in its power to give us the fortitude to go forth, not out among the stars, but into a better, more decent community here on earth.

• The long Soviet fixation on Venus.
• The Star Trek that could have been.
• Some atheist cinema is, however, not so great.
• Biden's economic policies have been very good.
• Wrong. Vaccines did the work.
• We could have really stood with Ukraine.

Jimmy Carter, on Work

Jimmy Carter's "An Hour Before Daylight".

One marked contrast between the recent political conventions was the presence of former presidents. The Republicans had none, (excepting the candidate), not even the very-much alive George W. Bush, or past candidates such as Mitt Romney. The Democrats had two, plus Hillary Clinton, not to mention the current president, Joe Biden. There was additionally a representative of a fourth, Jimmy Carter, to say that he will be happily voting for Kamala Harris in the fall. It speaks to the extremist journey the Republican party has been on, compared to much more conventional (sorry!) path of the Democrats, with recognizably consistent values and respect for character and institutions, both their own and those of the country at large.

None of these Democratic leaders grew up rich. Each was formed in modest circumstances, before joining the meritocracy and working their way up. The Democratic party is now generally viewed as the party of educated people, government workers, and minorities, against the Republican coalition of the very rich and the very poor. One might summarize it as strivers through the educational system, as opposed to strivers through the capitalist system. For one group, being kind, smart, and hard-working are the annointing signs of god, while for the other, it is being rich. Some (usually Republicans) may think these are equivalent, but the current candidates demonstrate the opposite.

This theme is exemplified by the career of Jimmy Carter, who worked his way through Annapolis and a naval career partly spent in the naval nuclear program under Hyman Rickover, then worked his way to the Georgia governorship, the Presidency, and then kept on working through retirement, churning out books and doing good works. The finest of his books, (which are, frankly, a mixed bag), is apparently his memoir of his early life and environment, "An Hour Before Daylight". The theme, for me, was work- hard work. Carter grew up on a large farm, and worked constantly. The book's title comes, naturally, from when the farm day starts. There are pigs to feed, eggs to collect, cows to milk. There are fields to plow, trees to chop down, fences to mend, products to sell, and supplies to buy. The work was evidently endless, as it is on any family farm, and while Carter tells of many swimming, hunting, amorous, and other expeditions, it is the cycle of chores and worries around the farm that was clearly formative.

Jimmy with family, in his Sunday best.

But he was not the hardest worker. His family owned a lot of land, and in this segregated time during the depression, had numerous sharecropping tenants and employees, all black. Carter comments gingerly about this system, balancing his worship of his father with clear descriptions of the hopelessness of the tenant's position. They worked without dreams of attending Annapolis, or inheriting a large estate. Rather, debt was the typical condition, as the Carters ran the supply store as well as owning the land. Carter looked up to many of these employees and tenants, and recounts very close and formative relations throughout his childhood, with both black children and adults. At least until he was drawn, as the system had designed it, into the segregated churches and schools.

Jimmy at his most intense, a naval graduate.

It is hard to grasp, in our heavily urbanized and regulated existence, where work is a 9-5 job and we dream of weekends, family leave, remote work, and retirement, how much work went into a normal existance like this on a farm. Success depended not only on unstinting work, but on an even temper, shrewd foresight, family support, good community relations (including church attendance), and a lot of luck. The wealth and power of the US was built on this kind of scrabbling for economic survival and advancement. The capitalist system continually applied the screws, lowering prices for cotton when too much was being produced, a particular crisis during the depression. Carter tells of the continual inventiveness that his family devoted to new ventures, like selling flavored milks, roasted pecans, sugar cane syrup, boiled peanuts, and tomato catsup, all from their own crops. Not everything was successful, but there was a continual need, even in this out-pf-the-way rural area, to meet the market and keep coming up with new ideas for making money.

Most of all, Carter speaks with pride of his and his family's work. It provided their sustenance, and their relationships, and was thus intrinsically and automatically meaningful. Headed by a benevolent regime, at least as he understood it under his parents, it was an ideal world- busy, endlessly challenging, stimulating, and productive. This is what we need to think about in these end times of the loneliness epidemic and the plague of homelessness and meaninglessness. Religion was a strong presence, but hearing Carter tell it, it weighed relatively lightly on him and his family, (other than sister Ruth, perhaps, who became a renowned evangelist), being more a solace to the poor than a spur to the well-to-do. Their meaning came more from their community and their many and varied occupations. So when people speak of basic income programs, one has to ask whether that really addresses the problem. Much better might be a guaranteed job program, where everyone is offered basic work if they can not find it in the private sector. Productive work that benefits the community, along the lines of the WPA projects of the depression. Work is critical to meaning and mental health, as well as to our communities and nation.

• Zoning and housing.
• Religious nutters lose their minds.
• Another great use of crypto- pig butchering.
• Unbutchering one candidate's garble.
• It smells like the mob.

The Lucky Country

The story of California, the story of the US, and optimism about free frontiers.

I am reading "California, the great exception". This classic from 1949 by Cary McWilliams is stoutly jingoistic and pro-California. But it also provides a deeper analysis of the many things that made California such an optimistic and happy place. Mainly, it boils down to free land and rapid settlement by ambitious working people. The Native Californians were so weak, and so ruthlessly extirpated, that they did not present the irritating conflict that happened elsewhere in the US. California's gold was so widely and thinly distributed (as placer in streams) that mining was a matter of small partnerships, not huge businesses, as it became elsewhere in the West, in the deep hard rock silver and later copper mines of Nevada (Carson city and the Comstock lode) and Montana (Butte). The immigrants were of working age and enthusiastic to work, dismissing slavery and corporatism in favor of a rapacious entrepreneurialism. 

California never had a paternal territorial government, but transitioned directly from self-rule to statehood, its riches speaking volumes to the national government in Washington. And the national government was anxious lest secessionist sentiment spread to the still far-distant west, so it funded the building of a transcontinental railway, during the civil war when money must have been extremely tight. That feared secession was not to join the South, but rather to found a new and prosperous nation on the West Coast. San Francisco went on to serve as the financial capital of the West, particularly of western mining, creating almost overnight a collusus to rival the centers of the East. In due time, gushers of oil also appeared on the California landscape. It is no wonder that Californians became fundamentally optimistic, ready to take on huge challenges such as water management, building a great education system, and the entertainment of the world.

California was also blessed by weak neighbors on all sides. There were no foreign policy predicaments or military threats. It could nurse its riches in peace. It was, in concentrated form, the story of America- of a new continent limited more by its ability to attract and grow its population than by its land and the riches that land held. An isolated continent that wrote its society almost on a blank slate- a new government and a melting pot of people from many places. 

Bound for California, around 1850.

How stark is the contrast to a country like Ukraine, neighbor of imperialist Russia and before that host to the Scythians, Goths, and Huns. A flat land exposed on all sides, that has been overrun countless times. A fertile land, but always contested. The idea that history would stop, that Ukraine could join the West, and enjoy its riches in peace and security- that turns out to have been a dream that bullies in the neighborhood have a different view on. Better to beat up on the little "brother" than to build up both nations and economies through beneficial exchange and prosperity. Better for both to go down in flames than that the little "brother" escapes the bully's clutches into a more humane world.

But the happy place of the US and Calfornia has hit some rough patches too. It turns out that our resource riches are not endless after all. The foundation of material wealth- the agricultural land, the mines, the lumber- underwrote social and technological innovation. No wonder the US was first in flight, and led the way in electricity, automobiles, the internet, the cell phone. Now we have an innovation economy, and get much of our materials and lower-grade goods from far-off places. The people we have attracted and continue to attract are the new wealth, but therein lies a conflict. Places like California have huge homeless populations because we have ceased to grow, ceased to embody the hope and optimism of our lucky past. Conflict has raised its head. There is no more free land, or gold in the streams. Now, with the land all parcelled up and the forests mowed down, everyone wants to hold on to what they have, and damn those who come after. Prop 13 was the perfect expression of this sour and conservative mood- let the newcomers pay for public services, not us.

California is transitioning from a visionary frontier into a cramped, normal, and not especially lucky place. The fabulous climate is suffering under fire and drought. The population is growing significantly older, while next generation is educated less well then their parents. The app innovation economy has fostered a nightmare of surveillance and social dysfunction. The pull of a new frontier is so strong, however, that some of our richest people now imagine it on other planets. The irony of sending rockets, fueled by vast amounts of fossil carbon and compressed oxygen, to other worlds where there isn't even air to breathe, let alone plants to cut down, begs belief. It is the final gasp of a dream that somewhere, out there, is another lucky country.

• We are a front in the authoritarian war for the world.
• Truth will out, eventually.
• Aging is in the crosshairs.
• The sad fate of Russia's Silicon Valley.
• Do we vote for merely corrupt, or fully bought and paid for politicians?
• New advances in low power, low cost, low fright MRI.