Incarnation and Reincarnation

Souls don't reincarnate. Heck, they don't even exist. But DNA does.

What a waste it is to die. All that work and knowledge, down the drain forever. But life is nothing if not profligate with its gifts. Looking at the reproductive strategies of insects, fish, pollen-spewing trees, among many others gives a distinct impression of easy come, easy go. Life is not precious, but dime-a-dozen, or less. Humanity proves it all over again with our rampant overpopulation, cheapening what we claim to hold so dear, not to mention laying the rest of the biosphere to waste.

But we do cherish our lives subjectively. We have become so besotted with our minds and intelligence that it is hard to believe, (and to some it is unimaginable), that the machinery will just cease- full stop- at some point, with not so much as a whiff of smoke. Consciousness weaves such a clever web of continuous and confident experience, carefully blocking out gaps and errors, that we are lulled into thinking that thinking is not of this world- magical if not supernatural. Believing in souls has a long and nearly universal history.

Reincarnation in the popular imagination, complete with a mashup of evolution. At least there is a twisty ribbon involved!

Yet we also know it is physical- it has to be something going on in our heads, otherwise we would not be so loath to lose them. Well, lose them we do when the end comes. But it is not quite the end, since our heads and bodies are reincarnations- they come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the DNA that encodes us. DNA incarnates through biological development, into the bodies that are so sadly disposable. And then that DNA is transmitted to new carnate bodies, and re-incarnates all over again in novel combinations through the wonder of sex. It is a simple, perhaps trite, idea, but offers a solid foundation for the terms (and archetypes) that have been so abused through theological and new-age history.

• The Taliban still stands with Al Qaeda.
• Trauma and the Ring.
• Those darn astrocytes.
• Impeachable offenses? Plenty.
• Corporations are at best amoral, and routinely immoral.
• Fisheries are running thin.

The End of Theology

Final part of three posts on Mormonism- into the current age. Review of "The Mormon People", by Matthew Bowman.

Prophets found religions, but bureaucrats run them. It has ever been so, an evolution that is recapituated in Mormonism. Mormonism's phophet, Joseph Smith certainly existed, which is more than we can say for sure about Jesus, though his golden tablets have a more tenuous grip on reality, to say nothing of the pseudohistory he cooked up in the Book of Mormon. The enthusiasm which Mormonism generated at the start, and the strong, if not universal, attachment and devotion its converts had to Joseph Smith as the self-proclaimed revelator and prophet, is incredible in a skeptical age, to skeptical people. Thousands of converts were eventually moved to pile their possessions on handcarts in Iowa, and wheel them on foot over a thousand miles to Salt Lake City. Smith's successor, Brigham Young, received roughly one revelation, and after that, further (highly infrequent) revelation was left to the committee that runs the church.

It has been a rapid evolution from crazy inspiration to buttoned-down middle-of-the-road-ism, exemplified in the newest temple in Salt Lake City, the LDS conference center, an incredibly lush and expensive building (on the inside), built with enormous discretion mostly below-ground and well-screened from the outside, with only a slight, modernist spire. Mormonism started with a revolutionary mind-set, moving out of reach of the US to set up its own theocracy, which grew and flourished for several decades. But after a war, enormous pressure from the US, and some strategic changes of course, it has shifted its outlook and become a bulwark of American-ism, spreading middle class values all over the world among its converts.

The LDS conference center, in Salt Lake City. Which is also a temple, under the covers.

Along the way, Mormon theology has shifted as well. There were the explicit accommodations discarding polygamy and racism. There were more subtle changes from strict adherence to Smith's revelation to progressive scientific inquiry and reasoned argument, popular in the early twentieth century when Christianity was still widely and generally thought to be consistent with the newest findings in astronomy, physics, archeology and other sciences. And then a turn to creationism when the realization began to dawn that science presented insurmountable problems and needed to be opposed or co-opted, not only on the main front of the origin and nature of man, but particularly for Mormons on the archeological evidence (or lack thereof) for the Jewish origin of native Americans, the existence of whiter Nephites vs the redder Lamanites, the great culminating battle between them, and the travels of Jesus in the New World, among many other issues.

This all led to the main evolution of Mormonism, which has been to de-emphasize theology altogether, in favor of a strong social system with sufficient ritual to awe, but more focus on keeping its adherants so busy with offices, committees, gradations of status, services to all ages from youth to old age, that little time or energy is left for theology. The mission is a good example. This task is unimaginably arduous. All young men and many women go out for two years as a culmination of their upbringing in the church, to hand out Books of Mormon to unwilling passers-by, and serve by their clean-cut appearance as advertisements for the LDS church. Are they theological experts? Hardly. While the main point seems to be to re-affirm the missionary's own dedication to the church by this boot camp experience- a sense of being part of an elite or a despised few, with a special mission in fallen times- the proposition to potential converts revolves far more around the concrete social structures of the church than its miscelleneous revelations and claims to be the true and restored priesthood of Jesus. Indeed, seeing youngsters of nineteen called "elders" and "Aronic priests" does not inspire respect for such claims of superiority in god-given revealed priestly authority, in comparison with such more staid institutions as, say, the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

The problem of theological and spiritual decline. LDS elders distribute the sacrament.

This analysis was one unexpected pleasure of Matthew Bowman's book on the history of Mormonism, that while the founding of Mormonism is naturally the most curious and remarkable part of the story, his treatment of the later evolutions of the instution and its rationalizations is fascinating, subtle, and well worth reading.

It is thus difficult to pin down what precisely orthodox Mormon belief is. Mormons who wish to enter the temples must affirm their belief in Jesus Christ's devine sonship and atonement, in the truth of Joseph Smith's divine mission to restore Christ's church, and in the priesthood authority of the present leaders of the church. That is all, and particular key terms in those beliefs remain intentionally undefined. Through the church's 180 year existence, Orson Pratt, B. H. Roberts, Bruce McConkie, and many other authors have each offered up versions of Mormonism, and though ideas from many Mormon writers have seeped into the common discourse of the church, none is considered a final authority on what Mormons must believe. In an interview with Time in 1997, a journalist asked Gordon B. Hinckley about the doctrine that God was once a man, which Joseph Smith seemed to advocate. "I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it," he said. The reply was less an evasion than a recognition of the modern place of theology in the church: the focus of Mormonism is very much not on the particulars of belief but whether a member is in the pews every week, holds a calling, and can be relied upon if a bishop is looking for somebody to drive an elderly widow to the hospital. 

There is no trained Mormon clergy. The Church Educational System today espouses not only the conservative theology of Bruce McConkie but also his lack of interest in scholarship outside his own tradition. CES's work resembles a youth ministry more closely than it does the seminaries of other faiths. Similarly, leaders of the church today, unlike James Talmage or John Widtsoe or McConkie, avoid writing books about theology in favor of devotional or homiletic texts. This trend is likely intentional. After the public disputes over evolution in the 1930's and after correlation (a preemptive strike against potential doctrinal schism) the leaders of the church have decided to leave theological dispute alone.

Theology is like clothing. We know implicitly and unconsciously what course matter lies beneath, but do not want to see. Truth is hidden, and what covers it is not truth, really, but a contrivance developed to enhance our self-image and social existence, via bright dramatic colors, a stylish cut that, while following the natural form in some respects, alters and improves as well. Clothes ease social life, helping us keep boundaries, announce our allegiances, beliefs, and status. Many people like to wear uniforms, as a sign of belonging and status. Yet the impulse to innovation and novelty is irrepressible as well, creating sects of fashion and adornment. Styles change with the times, for incidental, technogical, or no reasons at all, fostering constant change in which theologies and theological institutions best meet the anxieties of the moment. Clothing builds progressively in an unending evolution, from work fabrics to jeans, to riveted jeans, to prewashed, stretch, and now ripped. So do theologies, which build one upon the next, each claiming to be the restored and true church.

Death is probably that truth which it is most urgent to hide, so theologies take its amelioration or suppression most seriously, even when each person, in their bones, knows the truth. Even that most sensible of theologies, Buddhism, professes reincarnation, though it violates some of its own central tenets and is obviously a cultural inheritance from Hinduism. Not even those who have escaped rebirth die, in the Buddhist system, but dwell permanently in nirvana, a sort of heaven. Temperamental differences lead to a great variety of styles and approaches, some people reveling in dense fabrics and shell-like protection, others in flamboyant display, still others yearning for nudism. The varieties of spiritual clothing are just as obvious, and just about as arbitrary. Great designers and other creators (think David Bowie, James Harden, Japan of the Edo era) come up with new approaches to clothing, while most hew to conservatism, which shapes the uniforms of millions. Clothing has both mundane and exalted elements, just as church life has its ecstatic moments and humdrum ones- its inspired creators and the trailing edge of missionaries struggling to get even one person to listen to the good news.

In clothing, all this obfuscatory effort of hiding reality has been practically rewarding and artistically elevating, and at worst harmless. In religion, on the other hand, for all its artistic dividends, theology has been a philosophical disaster of the first order. New versions always appear, as the need for spiritual clothing appears to be timeless. Yet we can only celebrate the cooling and bureaucratization of previously extreme theologies into bland uniforms of conventionality.

• Once I was a beehive, a charming, if sappy, look into Mormon culture.
• Fake news, from DOJ.
• Classic projection lie, to distract from the Trump=Epstein equation. Who elected this psychopath?
• Election security is not going very well.

Domestic Terrorism

For all the mass shootings, domestic violence kills more people and terrorizes them far more severely. A tribute to Andrea Dworkin.

We are enraged by the continuing insanity of the NRA and the legion of gun nuts it represents. A murderous phallic-worship cult so transfixed by the object of their adoration that simple human decency, let alone humility, fall by the way. But the mass shootings by young brain-washed men with automatic rifles, which form the media focus, are a minor problem compared with the more prevalent and damaging form of domestic terrorism and murder: domestic violence.

Roughly 2,000 people die yearly from domestic violence, half of which involve guns, and some of which are familicides that also count as mass shootings. In comparison, about 300 people have been dying in mass shootings per year over the last decade, though the statistics are disparate under various definitions and research methods. The gun violence archive lists 253 so far in 2019, 340 in all of 2018; 346 in 2017, 382 in 2016, 335 in 2015, and 269 in 2014.

Mass shootings count as terrorist incidents, since they are typically driven by an ideology of hatred that is expressed explicitly as motivation, and may also target a hated group, or, out of frustration, just a vulnerable group of opportunity. The intention is evidently to instill fear in society, excite copycats, and change the culture towards the desired hatred setting. But how effective are they? Not very effective at all, since their rarity insures that we as general citizens need not have, and do not have, fear of public places or other venues where such shootings take place. Yes, we are angry about the senseless carnage made possible by military fixations and equipment prevalent in some of our not-very-mentally-healthy subcultures. Yes, we are disgusted by the ideology, such as it is, and its leaders, first and foremost our dear president. But terrorized? Not at all. The elaborate security theater introduced in airports, and increasingly in schools, is a sad and wasteful consequence, but hardly bespeaks "terror". Rather, it represents the best our bureaucracies can manage to raise increments of policing and prevention, with the end result of keeping the populace calm, if not irritated and bored out of its collective mind.

Terror is something else entirely. Terror is when you are trapped in a place with no escape. A place where, if you try to leave, your chances of being killed are higher than if you stay. A place, where if you stay, you can look forward to unending torment, vicious abuse both physical and mental. A situation where, if you leave, you can count on being hunted for years, with lethal weapons. That is the reality of domestic violence. Andrea Dworkin blamed pornography, which I do not. But pornography is part of a larger culture of dehumanization and objectification, consisting of casual rapists like our president, pimps who traffic in women and girls, dedicated patriarchies such as the Catholic and Mormon churches, even Sports Illustrated, which traffics in a yearly turn into soft porn, among many other social institutions.

Objectification is not unique to sexuality, but results from any desire. The store clerk is a mechanism to obtain what we want, and is of little personal importance to us as shoppers. War could not happen without the objectification of the enemy. Nothing personal! But it is certainly ironic and distressing that the most personal relationship of all is driven by desires that can so easily head down impersonal, even spiteful, hateful, and violent channels when thwarted and frustrated, or even if let run free, by way of ideological or psychological perversion.

It is noteworthy that much of our language around sex is violent and used to express violence. Being "screwed" is not a good thing, but a bad thing. The gun nuts mentioned above marinate in a cult of masculinity and sexualized power so divorced from reality and humanity that it should form an intrinsic "red flag". Again, it is the powerful, even existential, motivating desire of sexuality which generates a quest for other forms of power and control, leading some down a path of violence and dehumanization.

As Andrea Dworkin wrote, in her inimitable style:  "Life and Death"

"These are women who thought that they had a right to dignity, to individuality, to greedom- but in fact they couldn't walk down a city block in freedom. Many of them were raped as children in their own homes, by relatives- fathers, uncles, brothers- before they were 'women'. Many of them were beaten by the men who loved them- their husbands, lovers. Many of them were tortured by these men. When you look at what happened to these women, you want to say, 'Amnesty International, where are you?'- because the prisons for women are our homes. We live under martial law. We live in a rape culture. Men have to be sent to prison to live in a culture that is as rapist as the normal home in North America. We live under what amounts to military curfew, enforced by rapists. We say we're free citizens in a free society. But we lie. We lie about it every day."

So it is a deep issue, a pressing issue of human rights, health and well-being, and continues in the age of #MeToo, which is only slowly filtering through the culture. What should be done? We can not all go back and get better upbringings, probably the single most influential causal / protective factor. A great deal has been done to set up hotlines and women's shelters, and to recognize that leaving an abusive situation is very difficult. But I think more can be done, principally by taking the position that a relationship where one person has reached out to police, or an abuse hotline, or a shelter, is already dead, and the helping institutions should do all they can to enable its parties to dissolve it and move on. That means not getting bogged down in a lot of mediation. Rather, the focus should be on setting the battered spouse into a new life, rapidly putting all the shared assets and income flows into escrow, and using them fairly, under official supervision and eventual division, to help each party live independently. Whether the batterer is charged criminally is a separate matter. The evidence in these cases tends to be poor, the parties unwilling to extend their trauma and drag their lives through the courts. Either way, separation is the more urgent and practical need, and one party's witness is quite sufficient for that.

Q: People think you are very hostile to men.
A: I am.
Q: Doesn't that worry you?
A: From what you said, it worries them. 

• How not to build infrastructure- Australian broadband whipsawed between right and left.
• Real gun nuts can't stand the NRA.
• And naturally, the answer is more guns.
• Methods of bad faith.

Awash in Authoritarian Atavism

Most institutions in the US are authoritarian, not democratic. 

How far we have come from the independent, agrarian ideal of Thomas Jefferson! Through the first century of the Republic, most citizens were self-employed, principally as farmers and shopkeepers. This bred an ethic of independence, self-reliance, and self-motivated political and civic participation, as noted by de Tocqueville. Then we all started working for corporations, and were sucked into a political system of work that was anything but democratic. Unions were an attempt to re-inject democratic principles into this workplace, at least in opposition to the main actor, management. But they have withered as well in our current age, as the corporation has become ascendent, and state regulation has largely taken the place of unions to remediate the worst problems of corporate amorality.

It all starts with the family, which, at least from the child's perspective, is very much an authoritarian institution. Care is exchanged for obedience. Hopefully love is exchanged as well. Viewing powerful people is known to be psychologically valent- we are to some extent inherently authoritarian. Churches generally replicate this structure, most explicitly in the Catholic system, with El Papa at the top, giving stern, loving, and infallible leadership. One of our most characteristic home-grown churches, the Mormon church, has an equally top-down authoritarian and patriarchal hierarchy. It was with the most extreme reluctance that its leaders gave up polygamy which had served as an extra reward and evidence of divine / patriarchal favor, to be followed by an eternity of connubial bliss.

The current LDS leadership of prophets, seers, and revelators.

These templates pervade our society, with even small towns that should be run by town councils giving up their executive functions to town managers. One of our political parties is dedicated to the proposition that authoritarianism is better than democracy, and pursues every possible means to make that transition. But it is really the corporation that takes up most of our waking lives and exemplifies the pervasiveness of authoritarianism today. In a typical corporation, there is an oligarchical board that is supposedly in charge of corporate strategy. But its members are typically chosen by management and are managers of other corporations, so fully entrenched in the authoritarian power structure. There are shareholders who supposedly own the corporation, elect the board, and supposedly vote about critical strategic issues. But nothing could be further from a democracy. It is management that proposes all the candidates, issues, and conducts all communications, and it is extremely rare for any contrary perspective or action to come to light. And the recent movement back to private corporate ownership has moved the dial even further away from any semblance of democracy.

The effects of this are clear, in the amorality and growing destructiveness of American corporations. For all the talk of "stakeholders", they steer all spare money to management and shareholders, and think nothing of destroying communities and workers, to be replaced with offshored supply chains or automated machinery as feasible. Our main streets have been eviscerated, our media prostituted, our environment abused, our government corrupted. The public good, which is what democracy exists to safeguard and nurture, means nothing to authoritarian institutions whose only purpose is the capture money by any means fair or foul and whose governance gives no place to greater considerations. Corporations have also invaded our democratic processes by way of the modern intermediaries of political participation- political consultancies, mass advertising, and PACs, not to mention old-fashioned funding / corruption of individual politicians, parties and institutions, and capture of regulatory agencies.

No wonder that our fellow citizens, after marinating their lives away in undemocratic social institutions, have little experience or taste for the rigors of democracy, and fall to the mean morality, domineering presumptions, and infantile ideas of demagogues. This will require some grass-roots psychotherapy to correct. One such corrective might be the work council system, as practiced in Germany. Every work place of any size has a democratically elected council of workers, which discuss and agitate for worker interests. They also elect worker representatives to the corporate board, up to half its members, depending on company size. This system gives workers real power in the workplace and a practice of participatory democracy, both of which are sorely lacking in the US.

• The eggs are OK.
• Explicit... tiny desk by Lizzo.

Thomas Paine

Target of more than one early American smear campaign. Review of "The life of Thomas Paine", vols 1 and 2.

For an immensely talented, intelligent, and well-meaning man, Thomas Paine had remarkably bad luck at several key junctures of his life. The first was in marriage. No one knows what happened, but he and his wife quickly separated, more or less amicably, leading in part to his desire to move the American Colonies from his native England. Next was in his business dealings. He was not in the least a man of business, and gave away all his writings. This helped make them popular, but left him ultimately penniless. And the little money he had, he gave away freely. Lastly were his political problems in France and with enemies from the American Revolution, which landed him in prison during the French Revolution, and within a hair's breadth of the guillotine.

But he was very fortunate in his biographer, Moncure Conway, who published "The Life of Thomas Paine" in 1892, when lore and records about Paine were still reasonably fresh. Conway was a free-thinker, with deep sympathy with his subject, and this book is as detailed and supportive a biography as one might wish. We all know that Paine published "Common Sense", which cast the arguments for the American revolution in clear, populist language and sparked the national resolve to leave the British empire. He also published a series of follow-up pamphlets during the war, which he served as a foot soldier in Washington's army, that had equally important roles in supporting and funding the war effort, which was continually on the verge of financial and military collapse.

Paine was also an inventor, obsessed with building better bridges, using the improved forms of iron available at the time. This pursuit brought him back to England briefly, where he wrote "Rights of Man", as a response to Edmund Burke's somewhat reactionary "Reflections on the Revolution in France". "Rights of Man" was a comprehensive wrecking ball against monarchichal rule, and was very popular both in England and France. For this, the British government carried out an extensive campaign of villification, prosecuting him for sedition and libel. Paine escaped capture in just the nick of time, crossing the channel and entering France as a hero, feted with parades, and immediately elected to the National Convention.

There, he co-authored a constitution, whose fate illuminates those of the French Revolution in general, and Paine in particular. The National Convention was supposedly a temporary body, empowered, as were the American Continental Congresses and Constitutional Convention, to manage transitional affairs (at first, in France, in collaboration with the king), and to come up with a new constitution. But as crisis piled on crisis, the Convention split into parties- the Girondins and the Montagnards- the latter of whom decided that they didn't need a constitution anyhow, and could rule directly via revolutionary committees. The constitution was scuttled, rule of law went out the window, and the Montagnards, under Robespierre, proceeded to the Terror.

The most interesting and revelatory part of Conway's biography is his detailed account of how Thomas Paine ended up in prison. As a Girondin, and having argued forcefully against executing the king, Paine was definitely on the political outs. The Montagnards soon barred foreigners from serving in the Convention, depriving Paine of his seat. But why send him to prison in December 1793? Here we come to the machinations of the American ambassador to France, Gouverneur Morris. Morris is portrayed as a semi-Tory, supportive of George Washington's nascent reapproachment with Britain, which was consummated in the Jay Treaty of 1795. (Whose fruits would later arrive in the war of 1812.)

Unbeknownst to Paine, Morris also had personal enmities against Paine, who was the most famous and leading American in Paris, functioning in many ways as America's main envoy. The French government sought to remove Morris as ambassador, due to his pro-British, royalist sympathies, but were rebuffed by Washington, helped along by various misreprentations and lies from Morris. This left the French in an awkward position, vis-a-vis their only ally in the world, at which point they started listening to Morris and doing his bidding. And Conway strongly suggests that Morris let it be known at this point that the US would like Paine to be imprisoned, due to insinuations that Paine was a British citizen, a thorn to the Americans, and that Paine had encouraged the activities of the French ambassador to the US, Edmund Genet, who had angered Washington (and his sponsors in the Convention) by organizing pro-French millitias in the US to harry the Spanish in Florida, harass British shipping, and generally encourage party strife, among other vexations.

Conway puts Morris in the center of a plot to imprison, and preferably execute, Thomas Paine, of which just a couple of samples:

"But the fatal far-reaching falsehood of Morris' letter to Jefferson was his assertion that he had claimed Paine as an American. This falsehood, told to Washington, Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, paralyzed all action in America in Paine's behalf; told to the Americans in Paris, it paralyzed further effort of their own."
...
"It may be wondered that Morris should venture on so dangerous a game. But he had secured himself in anything he might choose to do. So soon as he discovered, in the previous summer, that he was not to be removed, and had fresh thunderbolts to wield, he veiled himself from the inspection of Jefferson. This he did in a letter of September 22, 1793. In the quasi-casual way characteristic of him when he is particularly deep, Morris then wrote: 'By the bye, I shall cease to send you copies of my various applications in particular cases, for they will cost .you more in postage than they are worth.' I put in italics this sentence, as one which merits memorable record in the annals of diplomacy."
...
"Told that they must await the action of a distant government, which itself was waiting, for action in Paris, alarmed by the American Minister's hints of danger that might ensue on any misstep or agitation, assured that he was proceeding with the case, forbidden to communicate with Paine, .they were reduced to helplessness. Meanwhile, between silent America and these Americans, all so cunningly disabled, stood the remorseless French Committee, ready to strike or to release in obedience to any sign from the alienated ally, to soothe whom no sacrifice would be too great. Genet had been demanded for the altar of sacred Alliance, but (to Morris' regret) refused by the American government. The Revolution, would have preferred Morris as a victim, but was quite ready to offer Paine."

Paine was eventually freed by the next minister, James Monroe, whom Morris did everything in his power to impede. Monroe claimed Paine as an American Citizen, and that was that. Morris, for his part, escaped in 1794 across the border to Switzerland after getting embroiled in various plots in Paris and becoming even more non-grata than before, and wound up his career in Europe as a royal toady, as Conway puts it: "The ex-Minister went off to play courtier to George III and write for Louis XVIII the despotic proclamation with which monarchy was to be restored in France."

Paine's final landmark work was "Age of Reason", his defense of deism. This led to the most thorough campaign of villification of his life, and long after. What was to the aristocrats of his day and particularly of the American Revolution a common philosophy became in Paine's treatment a popular and populist attack on established religions of all sorts, and the sanctity and veracity of the Bible in particular. Paine derided its fables and contradictions, and proclaimed a simple faith in god, whose evident works were plenty to engender belief, with no need for thrice-told miracles or gold-embroidered priests. While twenty or thirty years before, such a work might have been taken in the revolutionary spirit, America had fallen into a revivalist spirit by this time, and the resurgent methodists and other preachers led a campaign that blackened Paine's reputation for decades, and from which it has only gradually and partially emerged.

One wonders what the Quaker Paine would have made of his religion after Darwin and Lyell, who so thoroughly demolished the deistic reliance on god to explain the most far-reaching and perplexing natural phenomena. I am confident that Paine's intellect, which shines through his writing, would have grappled honestly with these changed circumstances and come out with either a far-attenuated deism, or given it up in favor of full atheism.

• There are many authoritarian institutions in our country.
• It is hard to negotiate with the Taliban.

We'll Keep Earth

The robots can have the rest of the universe.

The Apollo 11 aniversary is upon us, a wonderful achievement and fond memory. But it did not lead to the hopeful new-frontier future that has been peddled by science fiction for decades, for what are now obvious reasons. Saturn V rockets do not grow on trees, nor is space, once one gets there, hospitable to humans. Earth is our home, where we evolved and are destined to stay.

But a few among us have continued taking breathtaking adventures among the planets and toward other stars. They have done pirouettes around the Sun and all the planets, including Pluto. They are our eyes in the heavens- the robots. I have been reading a sober book, Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, which works through in painstaking, if somewhat surreal, detail what artificial intelligence will become in the not too distant future. Whether there is a "singularity" in a few decades, or farther off, there will surely come a time when we can reproduce human level intelligence (and beyond) in machine form. Already, machines have far surpassed humans in memory capacity, accuracy, and recall speed, in the form of databases that we now rely on to run every bank, government, and app. It seems inescapable that we should save ourselves the clunky absurdity, vast expense, and extreme dangers of human spaceflight and colonization in favor of developing robots with increasing capabilities to do all that for us.

It is our fleet of robots that can easily withstand the radiation, weightlessness, vacuum, boredom, and other rigors of space. As they range farther, their independence increases. On the Moon, at 1.3 light seconds away, we can talk back and forth, and control things in near real time from Earth. The Mars rovers, on the other hand, needed to have some slight intelligence to avoid obstacles and carry out lengthy planned maneuvers, being roughly 15 light-minutes from Earth. Having any direct control over rovers and other probes farther afield is increasingly impossible, with Jupiter 35 minutes away, and Neptune four light hours away. Rovers or drones contemplated for Saturn's interesting moon Titan will be over a light hour away, and will need extensive autonomous intelligence to achieve anything.

These considerations strongly suggest that our space program is, or should be in large part joined with our other artificial intelligence and robotics activities. That is how we are going to be able to achieve great things in space, exploring far and wide to figure out how we came to be, what other worlds are like, and whether life arose on them as well. Robots can make themselves at home in the cosmos in a way that humans never will.

Matt Damon, accidentally marooned on Mars.

Bostrom's book naturally delves into our fate, once we have been comprehensively outclassed by our artificial creations. Will we be wiped out? Uploaded? Kept as pets? Who knows? But a reasonable deal might be that the robots get free reign to colonize the cosmos, spreading as far as their industry and inventiveness can carry them. But we'll keep earth, a home for a species that is bound to it by evolution, sentiment, and fate, and hopefully one that we can harness some of that intelligence to keep in a livable, even flourishing, condition.

• Some impressive mind reading.

What Does the Cerebellum Do?

Pianists take note- fine motor and rhythym control happens thanks to this part of the brain. But it isn't just for motor control anymore, either.

The cerebellum is the mini-brain appendage that has finer crenellations than the cortex, as much surface area, (when unfolded), more neurons, more regular structure, and has long been associated with fine motor control, judging from cases where it is defective. But in recent decades, its functions have ramified and now are understood to affect many core brain functions like cognition, pain, and affect, in a supplementary way. Just as we have supplemented computers with special processing units like GPUs, evolution seems to have devised a separate processing unit for our brains.

Removing the cerebellum does not generate paralysis, but severe deficits in movement control (fine-ness, rhythm, timing, balance) as commanded by the higher levels of the cortex. That means the cortical motor commands are not routed entirely through the cerebellum, but are copied to it and supplemented by its outputs on the way to the spinal cord. In evolution, it started as a small module to improve balance (becoming what is now the most primitive part of our cerebellum, the flocculonodular lobe). This gradually extended, in mammals, to refining all sorts of motor control, in the central areas of the human cerebellum. And finally, its lateral lobes are now interconnected with many areas of the neocortex, including executive, memory, and other non-motor locations, evidently to refine, based on feedback, many aspects of our cognition. In the evolution of humans, the cerebellum changed the most, of all brain regions, between Neanderthals and ourselves, suggesting that even so late in evolution, better fine control, whether of motor, social or other functions, became dramatically more important, perhaps through such activities as the creation and use of our many tools, of stone, wood, fibers, etc.

Outline of the typical circuitry of the cerebellum. Main inputs come from the left, vi mossy fibers (MF), which touch directly on the output DCN cells. Their major processes, however, go to granule cells (GC), whose axons form a vast parallel array innervating the dendrites of purkinje cells (PC), which in turn inhibit the deep cerebellar nuclei neurons (DCN), which provide outputs. Separately, by the major theory in the field, some error inputs come into the inferior olive (IO), which has extremely strong inputs to the purkinje cells and can change their long-term behavior, thus constituting training.

The remarkable thing about the cerebellum is its structure- a regimented, once-through architecture that can not have reverberating, recurrent connections like more complex parts of the brain, but instead is massively parallelized, featuring purkinje cells with large but flat pancake-like dendritic trees, shot through at right angles with the parallel fiber axons of the granule cells. The flow of information is input via mossy fibers to the granule cells, which activate the purkinje cells, which inhibit the dense central nuclei cells, which are the source of all outputs. The dense central nuclei cells also get some inputs directly from the input mossy fibers. The overall logic seems to be that the granule cell - purkinje cell circuit selectively dampens what would otherwise be a direct input-output from the mossy fibers through the dense central nuclei cells.

One functional map of the cerebellum, from a very interesting general review of its functions. It is clear that while motor functions are strongly represented, the cerebellum engages many other cognitive issues.

Additionally, center parts of the cerebellum that are most relevant for motion are topographically mapped to body regions, much as the sensory and motor cortexes of the cerebrum are. This supports the idea that the main cerebellar function is a very regimented, if hugely adjustable and sensitive, information transformation from input to output.

There is one more input, from the inferior olive, which gets inputs from the spinal chord, and higher levels of the brain. These neurons have activating processes going to the deep central nuclei and particularly strong connections (climbing fibers) to a purkinje cells, one climbing fiber per target cell. These connections are strong enough to overwhelm all the granule cell inputs, and are thought to be the key "training signal", which, in response to pain or error, adjusts the strength of the granule cell-purkinje cell network. This seems to be what is happening under the hood, piano playing-wise, when one has the jarring experience of hitting wrong notes, and gradually finds that the fingers unconsciously and spontaneously learn to avoid them. What was perhaps a stop-gap tuning mechanism for critical needs of accurate motion turned out, however, to have wider applications.

Detailed tracing of the connections between hippocampus (injection site) and the cerebellum (imaged above). A virus was injected, which travels slowly in retrograde fashion up the axons of neurons projecting from other regions of the brain, in this case, neurons projecting from the cerebellum into the hippocampus. The images show staining (brown) of regions of the cerebellum, with cell bodies in blue.

A recent paper looked at hippocampal connections of the cerebellum, which seem to mediate spatial orientation / navigation- another fine-tuning kind of process. Defects in these connections are seen in autism, for instance. Experiments in mice show that the cerebellum provides some inputs to, and affects and alters activities in the hippocampus, known for roles in short-term memory, and navigation / orientation / mapping. These researchers undertook to track the detailed connections between the two areas, and also established that some portions of each organ oscillate together, at the theta (6-12 Hz) frequency. This oscillation is very strong in the hippocampus, characteristic of being in motion or needing short-term memory, and known to function in spatial navigation. Indeed, they sampled individual purkinje neurons in the cerebellum (of mice) that were phase-locked with this hippocampal rhythm. And they found that for some of these areas, the coherence of the rhythms increased detectably as the mice learned a new navigation task. The cerebellum, as all brain areas, has various rhythms of its own, and to find that some of those may entrain, or at least functionally correlate with, those of other interesting regions of the brain, is very interesting.

"... oscillations within the theta range are thought to support inter-region communication across a wide variety of brain regions. Our finding that cerebello-hippocampal coherence is limited to the 6–12 Hz bandwidth is in keeping with previous studies on cerebro-cerebellar communication in which neuronal synchronization has been observed between the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex."

• Stiglitz on Facebook.
• Should the government ensure full employment?
• Over the Rainbow, quiet arrangement.
• Lies, lies, and more lies.
• Heaven, retracted.
• Sleazy moronic rapist, still president.

En Garde, Libtard!

Review of "Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason", by William Davies

Davies' book offers a deep historical analysis of our current predicament- a post-truth culture of all-out political warfare. Unfortunately, it turns out to be rather disorganized and digressive, despite offering many interesting ideas and pithy mottos. So the reviewer's job becomes one of reconstructing what the argument should have been were it better-edited and organized. A brief outline is that Davies believes that the enlightenment (exemplified by the philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes- no mention of Locke, oddly) generated the idea that a peaceful civic space was possible if the state does two things- monopolizes all violent power, and generates institutions of fact-finding to put policy and political debate on a rational footing, thus founding what we know today as expert/elite-driven technocracy.

Fast-forward to today, and our political space has degenerated back into a semblence of warfare, where information is weaponized, our new internet media is more hospitable to trolls than thought, and political debates revolve around put-downs and insults. The authority of the technocrats has been seeping away for decades, and the natives are restless.

On the whole, I think the philosophical superstructure of this argument is largely trash. Technocracy was hardly heard of till the 50's, when the post-war status of physicists and scientists in general was at a high tide. Civility has waxed and waned dramatically over the decades and centuries, and seems to have more to do with the tides of war and national cohesion than with anyone's philosophy, however influential such ideas can be in the long term in a background way. And Davies' prescription at the end is for the elites to enter the culture and political war at full throttle, since no one cares about their facts, objectivity, or authority any more. That hardly seems to be a philosophically grounded, coherent, or long-term answer to the problem. One can say, however, that the composition of the governing elites has changed over time, from the theologians and aristocrats who are fossilized in the British House of Lords, to the more democratic-minded aristocrats of the enlightenment and American/French revolutions, to the scholarly products of the École normale supérieure, Harvard, etc. who tend to rule the roost, and especially the civil service, today.

"It is scarcely any surprise that politicians, businesses, and civil society actors would want to exploit some of the rhetorical magic of numbers for their own purposes, playing consultants to produce statistics to suit thier interests. ... So much trust has been placed in numbers tht anyone wishing to be trusted (for good reasons or ill inevitably cloaks themselves in a veneer of mathematical reason."

Anyhow, what are some other facets that Davies brings out? One is the varying nature of knowledge as seen by business people, military people, and scholars. While the latter laboriously pile factlet on factlet to create an enduring, public edifice of explicit knowledge, the former operate by the seat of their pants to integrate partial knowledge of the moment for effective action. The former value secrecy and intuition and feelings (especially the anlysis of the feelings of others, competitors, and audiences), while the latter try their best to block feelings from their scholarship, keeping it clean of partisanship and bias.

These are fundamentally different approaches to the world, yet our elite government institutions are largely modeled on scholarship- the painstaking assembly of facts and stakeholders, etc. to come up with well-vetted policy. Again, this is hardly a new distinction however. Davies makes a case that romanticism / nationalism / military thinking crept into the European political systems after the French Revolution, which so dramatically mobilized the populace of France to generate an unprecedented military machine. What were once two distinct things- civil life and military life, gradually became merged into the total war and military-industrial complexes of the current century. And this led to the information-as-warfare situation that we find ourselves in today, courtesy of that DARPA project.. the internet. All I can say is ... no- there is something else going on. We have had a partisan, even warring, press since the founding, and a yellow press, scandals, bickering, and many other media problems.

"As for so many other insurgents, the objective of the troll is not to gain power but to inflict pain. Rather than as a means of representation or reason, words become instruments of violence, which seek out human weakness then exploit it. Libertarians might argue that emotional harm is not 'violence', but this is contradicted by the behavior of trolls, who pursure emotional harm with a militaristic and sadistic relish."

"An alternative perspective on financial securitization and Facebook is that they are further cases of 'weaponization' of everyday institutions and promises. They exploit and weaken norms of trust, without building adequate replacements. Debt, housing, friendship and democracy have been around for thousands of years; the contribution of the financial sector or Silicon Valley over the past thirty years has been to find ways of manipulating and destabilizing them, so that society no longer feels secure. Nothing permanent is constructed by the invention of mortgage-backed securities or Facebook, but a great deal is damaged."

Where Davies gets a little warmer is in a direct indictment of the US and European elites. The most topical and telling example is of US illegal immigration. For decades, the two parties have been happy to encourage immigration, though for different reasons. The Republicans, beholden to business, want cheap workers. So they work to keep illegal immigrants illegal, which empowers businesses against them and makes possible a high-class life for the top end of town, staffed by gardeners, cooks, nannies, ethnic restaurants, and so forth, at bargain prices. Elite Democrats share in these benefits, and additionally get the votes (generally) of those immigrants who manage to become citizens, by way of being marginally more sympathetic to them. Who loses? Workers do. Illegal immigration has held down wages for decades, and enabled whole industries, particularly agriculture, to operate at well below a decent wage scale. Or more to the point, a wage scale that accurately reflects the domestic legal labor market.

".. the conflict between metropolitan and rural values was heightened, adding economic inequality to a set of existing moral controversies. Another way in which this split appears is in terms of graduates vs nongraduates. This conflict has been a feature of American politics since the 1960's, and now more or less determines the shape of the electoral map, with Democrats winning coastal regions, big cities, and university towns, and Republicans winning more or less everywhere else."

In this case the Democratic elites in particular have adopted an agenda that directly hurts its original constituents- working class citizens. The same can be said of NAFTA and of globalization in general. The benefits have flowed up to the top, while the lower classes have been sold down the river. All this is understandable from a theoretical economic perspective, which is a comfort zone for the elites, as total economic growth inarguably goes up with most forms of free trade. China has paticularly decimated working class communities across the country, taking whole industries and supply chains abroad. Davies argues at length that the abstract statistics typically provided and consumed by the elites, such as GDP and unemployment, have, perhaps by design, failed to accurately portray the conditions of much of the population, which is increasingly ignored, flown-over, under-employed, in economic decline, and despondent. And these are the conditions that lead to a sleazy, clownish demagogue, especially when the other candidate in the election exemplifies almost precisely the over-educated and entitled elitism that has lost so much credibility, mostly by being slowly coopted by the rotten values of their purported adversaries.

Another issue is general bureaucratic sclerosis. Nothing can be done or built at any reasonable cost, because between the unionization of public workers, their corrupt participation in elections, and the general growth of legal, environmental, and other liabilities, the capacity of public management to operate has been cut to pieces. Exhibit A is the California high speed train, which is an utter managment fiasco. Each of these developments has been well-intentioned, but together, they result in a system where infrastructure to accommodate all the immigration that Democrats in particular are sympathetic to never gets built, we end up with gridlock, and citizens revolt against mandates to alter zoning to pack more people into the existing, crumbing, infrastructure.

And yet another issue is the romanticisation of nature. Where farmers and the agricultural industry grapple with and against nature on a daily basis, the educated elites take increasingly moralistic and strident stands- against climate change, against habitat loss, against species loss, against cruelty, against meat, etc. Again, all these movements are extremely well-intentioned, even momentously important. But the disconnect between rural and coastal could not be more stark, leading to the kind of resentment politics that we are living through.

In the wake of World War 2, the elites had demonstrated they could not only resolve a depression, manage and win a vast global war, but create the unimaginable ... the atomic bomb. They had maximum credibility, which has been eroding ever since. It was these elites that Trump and the Republicans ran against, apparently unaware that they were in the elite as well, only with the difference that while Democrats seek generally to make our state and civic institutions work better and more fairly, Republicans want to make them work less fairly, or failing that, destroy them entirely.

There are natural cycles, perhaps, of war and peace, of corruption and reform, of division and civility. But over our long history, this administration is surely the lowest point of administrative competence and moral stature. We won't get out of it by hoping for more civility, or that someone would turn off the internet. This book does offer some glimmers of a solution, not in its last chapters, but in its indictment of the Democratic elites in particular. Voters yearn for truth. Trump gave them a breakthrough of sorts, identifying immigration as a (partially valid) source of resentment, and identifying de-industrialization as another one. Both those horses are mostly out of the barn, as is surely / hopefully the fate of the coal industry as well. Trump's policies on all these fronts have been anachronistic, if not cruel, farces.

Real policy and truthful communication on these fronts is what the Democrats are groping for. They need to take workers seriously, not only as a token thread in the rainbow tapestry, but as a core and directing constituency. Warmed-over apparachiks like Joe Biden hearken back to when Democrats were slightly less elitist, thereby generating some support from older cohorts, when compared to the technocratic darlings Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigeig. But the point is.. who will articulate and serve the interests of the working class with serious and effective policy solutions? Who will lay aside the identity politics, the various liberal hobbyhorses, and focus on the demographics that will win the next election, not just through demagoguery, but by facing facts with future-directed and constituent-directed policy? The energy is rightly in the progressive end of the party, with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose policies and passion speak to righting the tide of inequality with a far-reaching program of reform and reversal of decades of right wing policies, instead of being coopted by them or compromising with them.

"War provides recognition, explanation, and commemoration of pain, of the sort that policy experts and professional politicians seem unable to provide. One of the curiosities of nationalism is that, despite appeals to famous battles and heroes, it is most often kindled by moments of defeat and suffering, which shape identity more forcefully than victories. For romantic patriots, Britain was never more truly British than when fleeing Dunkirk or enduring the Blitz. The common identity of the American South is forged out of the experience, then memory, of defeat in civil war, as mourned by the Lost Cause movement of thinkers and writers. ... The major achievement of scientific expertise and modern government, dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, was to establish a basis for civic interaction, from which violence was eliminated. The boundary between war and peace was unambiguous, and a public respect for facts reinforced this. There are various forces at large in the twenty-first century that test this boundary, including technologies and military strategies that blur the distinction between war and peace. But there are also emotional reasons why that line is becoming blurred. Part of the appeal of war, at least as an idea, is that- unlike civil society designed by the liked of Hobbes, it represents a form of politics where feelings really matter."

Davies points out that the most salient emotion in politics is loss of control. Such losses are destabilizing and can lead to the resentments that can be stoked by demagogues, and result in war, political or military. The Republican Southern strategy was and is built around revanchism against civil rights, among much else. In personal terms, such loss can lead to drug abuse, which gives at least the illusion of control and comfort. Workers have been dramatically disempowered over the last several decades, mostly through the far-reaching ideology of the Republican party. Yet when asked to vote, they voted for a Republican to fix it, apparently because he effectively touched an emotional feeling of hope and resentment, and then offered a pack of lies as solutions. Democrats are surely better, but they have to fess up to their failings, and dedicate themselves to a thorough-going program of reform, reversing decades of their own corruption and anti-worker policies. Will all this be twisted by the right wing media into pretzels of illogic and hate? Yes. But no one can argue that the campaign we are going through right now does not give Democrats the opportunity to make their own case on a virtually infinite number of channels and platforms. It is up to us.

• The search for social peace has infinitely deep roots.
• Why do women do it?
• And now for something different.. a pro-Trump view.
• Labor should be getting far more money.
• Better automatic stabilizers are an obvious way to take a load off the central bank.
• Threats don't work if you are a clown.
• Impeachment can't come soon enough.
• The Taliban is doing very well in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, every time we meet with the Taliban, we degrade the capacity and legitimacy of the Afghan government.
• Arctic ice loss is going to flip the switch.
• China is the worst.

The Subtle Mechanics of Regulatory Enhancers

Synergy is an overused buzzword elsewhere. But in biology, it has real meaning.

Our genes are mostly off, yet each cell needs some select portion of the genome turned on to do its job. Gene expression is an enormous field of study, encompassing the full life cycles of both mRNA and proteins, and much else. But turning the transcription of a gene on is by far the most powerful and typical way to control its expression. This is done by regulatory proteins that bind the DNA near the gene, either nearby at segments called promoters, (which is where the RNA polymerase complex is assembled), or far away at modular segments called enhancers. Proteins bound at enhancers are thought to loop around by way of the flexibility of DNA to touch the proteins bound at the promoters, forming a somewhat disordered protein mush that is more active (firing off more RNA polymerases) the bigger it is, and the more of its components are activating vs repressing.

A very general flow of early drosophila embryonic development, from egg to gastrula and from rough-out to finer position specification.

The fly model system has been a wonderful place to study enhancers, since it has a lot of them, they are clearly modular for different developmental tasks, and they frequently have critical and very visible influences on the fate of tissues in the adult. A recent paper used one developmental gene, hunchback (hb) to study in detail how its expression pattern is developed from the proteins bound to its enhancers.

Experimentally labeled micrographs of hunchback expression (in mRNA form, bottom) as driven by bicoid protein (middle), expressed from bicoid mRNA messages (top). How does the sharp midline cutoff of hunchback expression develop from the hazy gradient of bicoid protein, its primary transcriptional activator? We can ignore the odd posterior hunchback band, which is driven by some non-bicoid inputs. At this early stage, the drosophila embryo is a bag with cells mostly on the surface, and has not yet begun the body segmentation process, though glimmers are beginning on the molecular level, as shown here.

Hunchback was named for the shape of the larva of the fly when this gene is mutated. They are missing most of their thoracic segments. Hunchback is a very early gene in the lengthy and complex chain of events that specify the developmental pattern of the fly. It encodes a DNA-binding regulator that acts on the next set of developmental genes, the gap genes. It is expressed in a simple pattern of - on in the front/anterior, and off in the posterior, of the early embryo. A good deal of it is supplied by the mother in the egg, so it has been difficult to tease apart the effects of that inherited pool of mRNA, vs those of new gene expression within the embryo. But this paper studies only the embryo-based expression pattern, specifically using broken up parts of the enhancers to figure out how they generate a very sharp half-embryo-on / half-embryo-off pattern.

Some upstream portions of the hunchback gene from drosophila. Modular enhancer cassettes lie upstream, and the one studied in the current paper is the P2 enhancer, right next to the coding area of the gene, which for these experiments has been excised and put upstream of an easily assayed reporter gene, LacZ. 

The researchers study one of the three hunchback enhancers- the one that drives this early anterior-only expression (P2, above). The regulator that binds to this enhancer (at 6 distinct sites) is bicoid, a fully maternal factor supplied in the anterior part of the egg. (Mutants of bicoid have no head- the problems of mutants get more dramatic the earlier you go into the developmental cascade.) Bicoid has a very gradually tapering / diffusing distribution, from high in the anterior to low in the posterior. The six sites that bind bicoid in this main hunchback enhancer are known to have cooperative effects, and thus could account for the (non-linear) sharpness of the hunchback expression pattern- high in the anterior, then dropping off sharply at the midline. In this way a much more gradual gradient of bicoid is recomputed into a finer dividing line between front and back. This is a dynamic that is employed over and over again as finer divisions are made throughout development. Yet the authors maintain that this DNA site binding cooperativity is, on its own, not quantitatively sufficient to account for the pattern, and go in search of other explanations for how the bicoid and other factors drive this high-definition pattern.

As bicoid binding sites are removed from the hunchback P2 enhancer (left), the expression of the test gene becomes shallower in its anterior-posterior gradient and migrates towards the anterior.

Later on they cop to the fact that their system is more complex than they portrayed it at first. The enhancer they are working with (isolated from the rest of the enhancers and driving a fluorescent reporter gene) may have a few binding sites for some other factors, including krüppel, tailless, zelda, and indeed hunchback itself, forming a small positive feedback loop. When they scrubbed out those extra sites, expression was quite a bit farther from the wild-type condition, pushed towards the anterior (below). As extra demonstrations, they individually knock out hunchback protein expression, which clearly accounts for some of this effect, pushing expression of the wild-type enhancer farther anterior. And they do a similar demonstration for zelda, which has a similar, though much smaller, effect.

Some further experiments with a purified enhancer, where all non-bicoid sites have been removed (top, red). It is clear that the other sites (present in the wild-type P2 enhancer, black) have a key role driving expression to a more posterior position, but have little roll in the steepness of the cutoff of hunchback expression. Specific regulators are knocked out of the embryo and assayed on the wild-type P2 enhancer in the lower panels, hunchback and zelda, respectively, to show their individual effects.

Next, in search of the additional cooperativity factors, they make deficiencies in several of the common transcriptional components that occupy, not the enhancer, but the promoter where the RNA polymerase is going to be assembled. This is a bit tricky, since these will have quite general deleterious effects, complicating interpretation. But one example is shown below- CBP (Creb Binding Protein). This is an enzyme that modifies histones and is a common part of the core transcription complex, and knocking down its activity shifts the hunchback expression curve not only anteriorly, but also to a more shallow profile, indicating that this protein helps the cooperative effects of multiple bicoid activator proteins bound at the enhancer to take effect. This leads to a clear model of the system whereby the bicoid proteins are only partially cooperative among themselves as they bind to DNA. But their cooperativity is enhanced by all of them binding in concert to their targets in the core transcription complex, one of which may be this CBP protein, or others attached to it (below).

A sample experiment with the full enhancer, in a fly where the expression of one of the core transcription components, in this case CBP, has been knocked down. Not only is expression reduced in the sense of moving anteriorly, but the slope of the expression vs the gradient of bicoid is also reduced, indicating that this defect reduces the effective cooperativity of the six bicoid proteins bound at this enhancer. 

Surprisingly, this work mostly recapitulates work done twenty years ago in the same system. That earlier work had demonstrated that bicoid binds to its DNA sites in a cooperative fashion, specifically in directionally-specific pairs clearly suggesting a single side-by-side cooperative interface on the protein. It also showed that interactions with the core transcriptional apparatus, in that case TAFii60 and TAFii110 in yeast, could account for remaining amounts of cooperativity among the six or more bicoid binding sites on the hunchback enhancer. Thus all this is hardly news, whatever the new mathematical machinery brought to bear by Park et al. in the current paper (and this from Harvard, no less). By this point, we would be expecting to see a full structural reconsitution and recapitulation of the transcriptional activation system, with titrations to demonstrate its accuracy with respect to the concentrations of bicoid found in vivo.

Whatever the pace of progress, however, it is of small bricks like these that knowledge of biological mechanisms is built. Even this system, which is so well defined and long-studied, has endless complexities that arise when one looks closer than the schematic models that were originally advanced to explain it. For example, a recent paper discussed how bicoid activates some genes in the very posterior of the embryo, despite occurring at vanishing (nano-molar) concentrations. They showed that aggregations arise in the posterior that, despite the low average concentration, provide high local concentrations, and thus, plausible transcription activation activity by bicoid. Then there is the complexity of the core transcriptional apparatus, which has clearly impeded efforts to fully delineate the cooperative structures that form between it and activating / repressing regulators bound at peripheral sites.

• RNAs enter the mix at enhancers and promoters as well.
• Loving the Dead.
• Jared Diamond on the current situation.

Battle For the Truth

The battle of Midway- success comes from dedicated engagement with reality. Not from fantasy.

Memorial Day brings up the Greatest Generation and the battles it fought to keep the World Wars away from the US, and save other countries from tyranny along the way. One of the greatest of those battles was at Midway, about half a year after Pearl Habor. It carries some object lessons in why this generation was so successful, and what makes America great. I am watching Battlefield 360, a History Channel program that profiles the aircraft carrier Enterprise. The production is absurdly over-the-top and padded with cheap filler, yet also full of compelling history.

The story of this battle, as for all others, is a search for truth, which then leads to success. A mere 33 years after the Wright brother's first flight, the US christened aircraft carriers like the USS Enterprise, which carried 90 airplanes. Mastering flight was the first step to a new form of long-range mobile warfare. The US had broken the Japanese naval code, enabling us to know the truth of what Japan planned for its invasion of Midway. The US ran an experiment to nail down the meaning of one word in the code, which clearly denoted a place, but which place? The truth came out when the Japanese took the bait and relayed our (fake) news that Midway was short of water. The word was their code name for Midway.

The US had learned quite a bit about the dangers of fire aboard aircraft carriers, which are awash with fuel, bombs, and artillery rounds, which led to a variety of novel equipment and training, such as CO2 purging of fuel lines before facing attacks, fire-fighting foams, and dedicated, pre-positioned fire control crews. This led to the Enterprise being able to take three direct bomb hits and not sink, while in the battle of Midway, the US sank four enemy carriers with only a couple of bombs each. The Japanese had not learned the value and truth of protective design and effective fire suppression.

The US had radar, a new way to find out the truth of enemy positions, so critical to both defense and offense. As in the old board game of battleship, naval warfare is a game of cat and mouse. The more you know, and the more you can blind your opponent, the more successful you will be. The search for truth has been so integral as to be almost unconscious in our military (not to mention "intelligence") culture. And in the post-war era, it led to a broader cultural commitment to education and research which has formed US preeminence in physics, chemistry, and biology, among many other fields, including notably climate science.

Which all leads one to wonder why lying is now one of our leading national characteristics. Who does our president regard as the enemy, and who the friend? Why is, for him, truth in journalism so dangerous? What is the morality of a whole party lying habitually about fundamental economics, about public interest regulation, about democratic values, and about the future of the planet? What has happened to us?

• Damage control on Yorktown.
• Wall Street wants docile Democrats.
• Cancer cure ... the hardest part.
• Some thoughts about the crazy.
• It is not entirely clear why we side with Saudi Arabia over Iran.
• Meanwhile, it is worth sticking with Afghanistan.