Shoulder Rehab for Desk Jockeys

Repair your shoulder and keep it healthy.

This is an unusual post, on self-help. It has been revelatory for me to go through this program, and it might be useful for others who experience shoulder pain, weakness, and lack of mobility. What presents as bursitis, impingement, bicep tendonitis, or even frozen shoulder is often a deeper and more common issue of mis-alignment and weakness in the whole shoulder, with chronic cramping of various muscles, brought on by years of hunching in our modern posture of always-forward attention to computers, phones - even books! In my case it was a lab bench that started the process.

It is hard to get a straight answer or analysis about shoulder problems, since it is a complicated and unusual joint. Small issues in the anatomy can cause big issues with soft-tissue irritation and pain, which may take years to develop, but present as sudden pain and debility. But one key concept is scapular rhythym- the fluid rising motion that the scapula should be following when you reach overhead. That can't happen if the scapula is not properly aligned. Which is to say, it should be flat against the back. When sitting in a chair with a solid back, do your shoulder blades lie flat against it? Or do they stick out against it, or even align to the side, not touching the chair back at all? When standing straight with your hands falling loosely to the side, do your hands face backwards? They shouldn't. They should be facing inwards, to your hips. Bad shoulder alignment affects your whole posture, and correcting it takes time, but yields wide-ranging benefits.

The syndrome is well-described here. Knowing shoulder anatomy is somewhat helpful, but not essential, really. The basic idea of the rehab program is to strengthen the back muscles that pull the shoulder blades back into proper position, after they have been stretched and weakened for so long by the hunched posture that over-weights the front-pulling muscles. The first step is to restore mobility and range of motion to all the muscles around the shoulder. So start with a series of stretches. Older people especially need lots of stretching to keep muscles working properly. Both the stretching and the strengthening would then be a life-long program, given that activities with forward posture tend to also be a life-long love affair.

• Door stretch: with arms up and elbows half-way up, like a stick-up, lay them against a door frame and push through forward with your body/chest to open up the shoulder and chest.
• Do the same thing with each arm singly, stretching each arm to 45 degrees back from the plane of the body.
• Facing against a wall, with one arm, reach straight up, then work the arm back through a full circle, turning sideways and stretching against the wall as you go around. Finish with a cross-stretch with the arm going in the front across your chest.
• With a broom handle, place it straight up behind one shoulder with the opposite hand, and reach back to it over the top with the same hand. Then pull forward and up with the opposite hand till you feel a stretch in the subscapularis.
• Brachiation: from a pullup bar, just hang for a few seconds with as much weight as possible.
• During the day, remember to stand and open up your shoulders periodically. Sometimes you can even get a crack out of your sternum, if you have been hunched for a while. A phone app reminder every 10 minutes may be helpful. 
• Against a shelf or seat about waist high, lay the front of your arms on it, and lower your trunk till you feel a thorough stretch, then lift about half your weight with your arms- repeat 6 times.
• Hitch arms together behind your back, grasping each opposite elbow. Bend trunk to the sides, stretching the obliques, bend forward and back. Turn neck to each side as far as possible, holding stretch.
• With your back towards a shelf or bar about shoulder-high, grab with your hands, and lower your body to stretch the front of the shoulder. The aim should be to get about horizontal with the arms going straight back, or slightly lower. Next, using the same shelf and position, bend each elbow in turn and lay it/forearm on the shelf behind you, lowering the body again. This is a more intense stretch with the same goal.
• On the floor, on a mat or carpet, make sure your scapula is flat against the ground. Then make angels, swinging arms through full range from sides to overhead, 10X; alternate arms, 10X more.

The next step is strengthening, to counteract the typically forward- directed actions we take all day, and make the posture changes permanent. There are many helpful videos and other instructions on the internet.

• With face down, on a support like a weight-lifting bench or table, lift the arms straight out and up to the sides, as far as possible. Start with no weights, then add weights as possible. 3X 12 repetitions.
• Same posture, but with elbows out and arms pointed forward. 3X 12 repetitions
• Rowing against resistance- using a rowing machine, or resistance band, or rope, pull about 1/2 your weight, 10 times at least. Start slowly with this exercise, as it can cause pain at first.
• With a relatively heavy resistance band, stretch between your hands in front, about shoulder-wide. While stretching apart as much as you can, work your hands up and down a wall, from arms fully up to fully down, 12X. Start slowly with this one as well.
• With a relatively light resistance band, extend arms straight forward and pull wide to the sides, out as far as possible, 12X. While you are at it, while extended, swing your arms back over your head and down to your lower back, for a good stretch.
• With a resistance band anchored to a pole or wall to the side, hold your elbows down at your side with hands straight forward. Pull the resistance band 90 degrees sideways, 20X each direction, strengthening both arms in the rotatory cuff.
• When all that is working OK, raise weights from the side, standing position, to fully overhead, about 10 pounds each side, 10X, strengthening deltoids.
• When all that is working OK, add push-ups and pull-ups.

When walking, attend to posture, leading with the feet, not the shoulders. When sitting, attend to posture, laying scapula flat against the seat.

That is the full program, though many other exercises and stretches can be added. Much of the damage and pain from this syndrome can be assigned to the anterior of the rotator cuff, (supraspinatus, subscapularis, and bicep tendon), and this program will not reverse the damage, but it will prevent further damage and allow effective operation of the shoulder without relying on, and irritating, the front of the rotator cuff so much. I think this issue is endemic and under-recognized. Much of the enthusiasm for muscle "trigger points" and deep massage comes from cramped muscles in the shoulder, neck and back regions. But typically, regular stretching is a better and longer-term solution, even if trigger point release provides rapid relief from pain. Every muscle can be stretched, so when you notice one giving pain or limiting range of motion, do some research on how to loosen it up, and add that to your program.

• Core vs periphery in economics and development.
• The call is out for suicide bombers.
• What a full renewable plan would look like.
• Is transparency enough?
• Why millennials are poor.

Russia and its Sphere of Influence

What happens if no one wants to be in your club? Review of "Putin's World: Russia against the West and with the rest", by Angela Stent.

History plods on, despite our pride in having achieved "modernity", so that everything can now stop and rest at our state of perfection. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Russia, where the past weighs heavily, affecting attitudes and policy in substantial contrast to interests and current conditions. Russia has been an imperial power for centuries, gradually beating most of its neighbors into submission and incorporating them into a multi-ethnic but hardly socially equal empire. This process was capped by the Great Patriotic War, aka World War 2, which ended with the USSR in control of new territories inside Europe, and others inside Japan, and with ideological friends in many other lands. It was not a happy empire, but it was a huge one, and the Russians were and remain proud of its achievement.

Then everything fell apart, and since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been trying to get it back. That would be a brief synopsis of Stent's book, which goes in very professional fashion through Russia's history, current relations, conflicts, and friendships all over the world. On the whole, Russia has over the last couple of decades managed its relations quite well, leveraging what little strength it has (lots of oil and gas, a ruthless attitude towards politics near and far, and a prodigious ability to suffer) into substantial strides back to relevance on the world stage.

But what should the West think and do about it? We came in for a great deal of criticism for our cavalier attitude during the breakup of the USSR. We advocated "shock therapy", and boy were they shocked! Without effective state control or cultural traditions of capitalism, what was a rotten system of communism turned into a laissez-faire wild west of rampant economic and political corruption. State control has now been re-asserted, but the patterns that formed in those days, which frankly reflect a long history of "informal" political relations throughout the region, persist to this day, despite verying formalities of democracy and rule of law. There remains a fundamental misunderstanding (and mistrust) of what political and economic liberalism means and how the West has gotten to its dominant position, despite centuries of study, copying, inferiority complexes, and deep economic and political relations. Russia remains instinctively authoritarian, not only due to the cleverness of Vladimir Putin, but apparently as a general cultural default. Maybe this did not have to be, maybe there was an opening in the early days of Yeltsin's rule, but our thoughtless and disastrous prescriptions at the time helped sow a bitter harvest. Now Russia equates democracy with weakness, and has decided to demonstrate that principle by deploying its most expert propaganda into our free media spaces.

It is generally realized now that China, in contrast, did things correctly, becoming a booming capitalist state while keeping absolute political control. That is how an properly authoritarian state manages things, (as previously modeled by various Asian tigers, particularly Singapore), and is now a model for Russia among many others. Unlike the Russian breakdown, China's ability to change its spots from communism to capitalism raises deep questions of whether liberalism and democracy are the best system, not only in human rights terms, but in their ability to manage capitalism. For it is clear, from both the Russian debacle and from the Chinese success, that capitalism is not self-perpetuating or self-managing. It relies inextricably on a strong state and legal system that sets rules by which competition among oligarchs, firms, workers, and other actors remains on the economic level, not on the military, political, or criminal levels. Democracy can be responsive to these issues, but we are, in the US, currently in the grip of a very destructive ideology that denigrates the state, is restoring corruption at all levels, and appears heedless of the future in economic, political, and planetary terms. The outcomes of this ideology became frighteningly apparent in our chaotic occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet the lesson may still not have been learned.

But getting back to Russia ... The nations of the former USSR have developed in almost linear relation to how closely they are positioned to Europe, geographically and culturally. The Baltic states turned relatively easily and completely to the European model. The middle area of Romania and Bulgaria, among others, have turned more slowly, but are also firmly in the pro-Europe camp. But those bordering Russia, like Belarus out east to Kazakstan, remain authoritarian and mired in "informal relations". Ukraine has tried to buck this trend and is deeply divided. Partly this is due to the large number of expatriate Russians living in these areas. But in any case, each has its own nationalism, and no one wants to re-unite with Russia to remake the old empire. Recent news stories show that even Belarus, Russia's most reliable and sycophantic ally, draws a line.

"Ultimately, Russia, China, and the states of Central Asia share fundamental ideas of what stability in the region looks like and how to maintain it. They are a group of authoritarian states dedicated to maintaining themselves in power and ensuring no Islamist or color revolutions threaten their rule. Whereas they view with great suspicion any Western attempts to open up their societies, Central Asian elites welcome Russian and Chinese support of the status quo."

So Russia is determined to have a club that few want to join. The ex-Soviet republics may share many cultural, political, and economic patterns, and cooperate to some extent in organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but Russia's dreams of expansion and re-integration are generally rebuffed. It has turned to invasions like the takeover of Crimea, South Ossetia, and the creeping war in Eastern Ukraine, treating its neighbors like piñatas to be whacked at will and bullied with fossil fuel subsidies and threats. It is reminiscent of the spoiler role Pakistan maintains in its region, fomenting unrest in Afghanistan lest that country ever have peace and positive economic development.

And then Russia demands that we all respect its "sphere of influence", as though we were still in Victorian times, playing some sort of great game on a map of the world, and heading in to World War 1. But this supposed sphere is entirely composed of unwilling and oppressed neighbors- not quite as badly treated as in Soviet times, but uniformly uninterested in recreating those glory days. Russia has no intrinsic or deserved "rights" in this respect, despite its vaunting desires- we need to keep offering self-determination and choice to its neighbors, as we do to all other countries around the world. Russia is armed to the teeth, and really needs no defensive buffer of this kind, nor is its cultural influence so positive that its bullying should be regarded as a family matter. Quite the opposite.

NATO countries of Europe, in blue.

Which brings us to NATO. We did not think through its fate very carefully when the cold war ended. NATO stood during the cold war as a defense against the USSR, pure and simple, plus a way to keep Germany pacified and integrated in Europe. When the USSR collapsed (foremost because its captive nationalities and "republics" wanted out), and the Warsaw pact dissolved, we half-heartedly offered coordination to Russia. But never really thought through what our military posture should be towards this new friend, or offered a comprehensive and durable peace. We were, however, eager to integrate as many of the newly ex-Soviet states as wanted to join, such as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, not to mention various members of the former Yugoslavia. That makes it look like a rather offensive affair, from Russia's perspective. And then Ukraine wanted to join as well. Integrating all these countries into a modern mutual defence organization was certainly positive for them, as one more element of their cultural headlong run away from Russia and communism.

But what is it really defending? One gets the distinct sense that, like in the post-WW2 era, NATO's purpose has become keeping the principal adversary of the latest war at bay. But whereas Germany was integrated into NATO, subject to continued occupation, though of a relatively friendly sort, now the enemy, i.e. Russia, is outside, and is not being killed with kindness, but rather being provoked by encirclement. All this is relatively obvious and not terribly objectionable now, now that Russia has become increasingly anti-Western, but that did not have to be the outcome. (Though Stent is dubious- she maintains that Russia's historical attitude strongly re-asserted itself after the breakup, and it would be chimerical to think that Russia would ever align fully with the West, such as joining NATO and allowing extensive occupation / collaboration by foreign forces- see the quote below) We drifted into it by inertia- by lazy thinking in our foreign policy and military establishments, not to say simple gloating. Would Russia have responded more positively if we had given them a better deal? Only if we had matched it with more effective economic reconstruction assistance as well. But neither of these things happened, and attitudes in Russia quickly hardened and became, understandably, rather bitter. Nevertheless, this does not justify an undeserved sphere of influence or renascent empire on Russia's part. Does Britain demand a sphere over France? Does Germany over Denmark? No. Did we invade Cuba when it turned to communism? Well, sort of and half-heartedly(!)

"As Putin consolidated his rule, it became clear to much of the world that a main reason for Russian's rejection of Western-style economic and political programs was because they are Russians, not because they were communists. Seventy years ago, George Kennan understood that communist ideology reinforced and exacerbated, but did not contradict, the characteristics of traditional tsarist rule. Communism had been superimposed on centuries of Russian autocracy and personalistic rule, and had, if anything, strengthened those traditions. The ideology was a means to consolidate the Bolsheviks' rule, mobilize society, and, with great pain, drag Russian peasants into modernity. ... The minority who supported Gorbachev and Yeltsin and believed that Russia should become more like the West both politically and economically, were outnumbered from the outset."

Reading this book reinforces that it is the US and the West in general that is the revolutionary agent afoot in the world. We are the ones fomenting color revolutions. We are the ones planting thoughts of human rights, rule of law, justice, and prosperity around the world. We think that all this is obvious, progressive, and unexceptional, but democracies are still the minority, and the other countries, notably including Russia and China, have developed a countervailing authoritarian bloc who studiously refrain from criticizing each other's miserable internal politics, and complain ceaselessly about those who do.

Democracy Index, with darker green denoting greater democracy. Note how China rates slightly higher than Russia, due to its better governance and more functional political culture, despite lacking any electoral process.

Are we right to do so? The issue of self-determination is perhaps the thorniest area where this ideology hits the real world- not everyone can or should have their own country. The USSR broke up over the failure of the center to, in the face of countless failures, justify holding on to its huge empire, and has now turned into 15 successor states, most with an ethnic character. Several of those successor states have experienced civil wars and separatist movements of their own. The fact is that few large countries have ever become large by voluntary means. Given generally peaceful conditions, most peoples with any kind of distinct culture want their own country, as is being expressed in such places as Catalonia, Scotland, Quebec, Kurdistan, and even 150 years ago in our own Confederate South. As Stent acidly points out, separatism is Russia's (and China's) bête noir, leading to its brutal repression of Chechnya, among many other places ... until it comes to Ukraine and Georgia, where Russia uses separatism in the most cynical way.

"Russia will push to jettison the post-Cold War, liberal, rules-based international order driven by the US and Europe in favor of a post-West order. For Russia, this order would resemble the nineteenth-century concert of powers, with China, Russia, and the United States dividing the worlds into spheres of influence."

But there was one place that had a "velvet divorce". Slovakia and the Czech Republic parted ways without bloodshed, because they were oriented to the European model, and negotiated their differences. As a foreign policy stance, we should not encourage separatism generally, but should always support peaceful resolutions and reasonable accommodations. One might add in passing that, if one holds an election to validate a minority breaking away, referendums of this sort should have a high bar, such as 75% , rather than the typical 50%. At any rate, this episode illustrates a key point- that the Western model is good, and tends to lead to peaceful and durable outcomes, because it is not repressive and takes people's interests and rights seriously. Repression can keep the peace for a while, but durable, prosperous peace (and good governance) is best kept with respect, moderation, and truthful communication.

So the order of preference, from all these historical lessons, is as follows. The worst government is none, representing chaos and unleashing the worst forms of power- criminal and informal military. The next best is authoritarian, which can range from brutally repressive, like Stalinist Russia, to repressive and even quite functional, if not benevolent, like China, Turkey, and Russia today. And the best is liberal (and functional!) democracy, which respects its citizens while maintaining a strong state. Unfortunately, democracies are difficult to run, have various inefficiencies, and are perpetually at risk of turning to authoritarianism, particularly when new technologies of propaganda arise that can hypnotize and misinform the populace, as happened during the fascist era, and is happening again today.

Does this mean that we should agitate for democracy everywhere and all the time? Yes, in short, it does. We can and must work with all governments as they exist, to manage what interests we have in common. But we should never mistake our instrumental relations with countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China for true friendship and ideological compatibility. We need to keep our eyes on the interests of people across the world now and into the future, which are uniformly best served by freedom and democracy, with strong and effective states founded on the active participation and decisive decision-making by their citizens. Authoritarianism can be an effective form of government, and sometimes a stepping stone to better conditions. But it is not a desirable end-point, and nor is its correlate, a spheres-of-influence world. And who knows? Maybe one of the democracies that we encourage will someday be in a position to save us in turn.

• One view of Russia's tangles with the West.
• Russia's "productive" role in Syria.
• What are the prospects for democracy in poor countries? Dim, but possible.
• Will Russia save the world?
• The toxic legacy of gerrymandering. And of Citizens United.
• Our tax law becomes even more corrupted.
• War has been declared.

On the Origin of Facts

Bruno Latour tours the Salk Institute, finds science taking place, and has a hard time deconstructing it.

There is a production process in science, by which the educational background, institutional setting, funding decisions, social accidents, and happenstances that form directions of research, hunches, hypotheses, and insights are stripped away, intentionally and systematically, to produce "facts" in a form ready for publication. This de- / re-contextualization serves to obfuscate the process and shamanize the practitioners, but more importantly it serves to generalize the resulting fact and put it into its scientific rather than social context. And it is the scientific context- the fact's objective existence- not the social context, that makes it powerful and useful for further construction of other facts. The social context forms part of the essential background / input, but the produced facts and insights are not by nature social, nor should they be received as such.

Experiments are instrumental in this transformation process, which goes from a hunch, to a collegial suggestion, to an hypothesis, to a testable hypothesis, to the hunt for alternative hypotheses and thus for experiments designed to exclude them and to support the main hypothesis, (if true), followed by group presentations and critique, outside peer review that adduces more alternative hypotheses and possible experiments, and finally to publication and collegial acceptance (or rejection and refutation). When all this is done, the murky origins of the hunch necessarily fall away and become trivially unimportant, (other than in memoirs and reminiscences), and the fact stands alone as supported with all the armament that science can bring to bear, both in its technical testing capabilities and its social structure of critique. It thence, if lucky, becomes a sentence in a textbook. In Bruno Latour's words, it is "freed from the circumstances of its production"

The above was a recounting of the conventional (and scientist's) perspective on the evolution of scientific facts. Whether this is the case is contested by social constructivism, a movement in philosophy that adheres to antirealism, which is to say that all of what we regard as outside "reality" is socially constructed, and thus science is likewise a social institution that generates conventions that by its social power it is able to foist onto a naive public, who in turn, like sheep, contribute their taxes to keep the scientific community wallowing in money and social power, cranking out yet more obscure and artificial "facts". Indeed, the very status of truth that is given to facts is fundamentally a social construct made up of a community of believing people, whatever their reasons and supposed evidence.

A few of Latour's works over the years. He declines to be post-modern, because he disagrees with the whole frame of modernity, as being somehow different from or non-continuous with the rest of history. And this attitude comes back to his dismissive attitude towards science and the enlightenment as being a break in kind from prior ways of understanding the world. It has just been fetishes all the way down.

Bruno Latour (along with his co-writer Steve Woolgar) waded into this controversy back in the 1970s with a French philosophical and anthropological background, to investigate what really goes on in a laboratory. He embedded himself into a leading laboratory and learned how it operated, informally and formally. This is recounted in the book "Laboratory Life" (1979; recent review), which, as usual for continental philosophers, is challenging to make sense of. The authors tend to straddle the two perspectives, both respecting and recounting the normal scientific activities and perspectives, (if rather laboriously), and then also persistently suggesting their contrary viewpoint and program that they bring to the project.

"Despite the fact that our scientists held the belief that the inscriptions could be representations or indicators of some entity with an independent existence 'out there', we have argued that such entities were constituted solely through the use of these inscriptions. ... By contrast, we do not conceive of scientists using various strategies as pulling back the curtain on pregiven, but hitherto concealed, truths. Rather, objects (in this case substances) are constituted through the artful creativity of scientists. Interestingly, attempts to avoid the use of terminology which implies the preexistence of objects subsequently revealed by scientists has led us into certain sylistic difficulties. This, we suggest, is precisely because of the prevalence of a certain form of discourse in the description of process. We have therefore found it extremely difficult to formulate descriptions of scientific activity which do not yield to the misleading impression that science is about discovery (rather than creativity and construction). It is not just that a change of emphasis is required; rather, the formulations which characterize historical descriptions of scientific practice require exorcism before the nature of this practice can best be understood."

Exorcism indeed! One might posit a simpler explanation- that science is, in fact, in the business of discovery, though with the caveat that what is to be dis-covered is never fully known beforehand, sometimes not even suspected, and thus there is a great deal of intutition, creativity, variation, and social construction involved in the process, and uneven and unpredictable results coming out. While the status of the resulting fact is never perfectly secure, and is supported by another social process of conventional agreement, that agreement is routinely granted once the preceeding critical hoops have been surmounted and leads generally to the vast pool of factual and "objective" information that finds its home in the academic literature, textbooks, college instruction, Wikipedia, etc. A pool that is further confirmed routinely by succeeding work and technical developments that depend on its objective factuality.

Latour does not, in the end, adhere to the hard program of social construction, for the simple fact that the object of the scientific story he recounts, the thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRF), was found, was found to be a specific and real substance, and went on to a respected place in medical practice and the textbooks, not to mention later earning a Nobel prize. There is real comedy in the attempt, however, as the anthropologist takes on the scientists at their own game, analyzing and plumbing their depths for structures and paradigms that they themselves hardly suspect, complete with diagrams of the laboratory, pictures of the roof and other apparatus, graphs of publication trends, and verbatim interviews with protagonists, underlings, etc. It is a sort of depth-psychology of one laboratory.

"But it would be incorrect to conclude that the TRF story only exhibits the partial influence of sociological features. instead, we claim that TRF is a thoroughly social construction. By maintaining the sense in which we use social, we hope to be able to pursue the strong programme at a level apparently beyond traditional sociological grasp. In Knorr's terms, we want to demonstrate the idiosyncratic, local, heteregeneous, contextual, and multifaceted character of scientific practices. We suggest that the apparently logical character of reasoning is only part of a much more complex phenomenon that Auge calls 'practices of interpretation' and which comprises local, tacit negotiation, constantly changing evaluations, and unconscious or institutionalized gestures. ... In short, we observe how difference between the logic of scientific and non-scientific practices of interpretation are created and sustained within the laboratory."

Granted, most of this is overwrought, but the true worth of this work was that these observers came into an eminent lab and paid minute attention to what was going on, and emphasized that what comes out of the sausage machine in publication and other products is far different than the materials that go in. While the conventional approach would emphasize the preceeding scientific observations and technical developments that led the leader of this lab to even contemplate that the purification of TRF from millions of dissected brains was possible and desirable, Latour emphasizes instead, and with some success, the social contingencies that surrounded the original uncertainties, the slow progress, the false leads and constantly discarded "bad results", the huge amount of money and effort required, and other nitty-gritty that forms the day-today of laboratory life. The latter emphasis is useful in accounting for how science gets done, but discards other crucial inputs, and is ultimately not at all convincing as a general theory of what science accomplishes or is.

I think the confusion arises fundamentally (apart from professional jealousy) from the fact that social constructivism is perfectly valid for some areas of our lives, such as arts, fashion, religion, morality, and to some extent, politics. Many problems do not have an objective criterion, and are socially constructed on an ongoing basis with criteria that boil down to what and who is thought good, whether for the individual, family, collective, etc. And the insistant denial of the total social construction of one's own field- as is understandably routine among scientists- is particularly vehement (and unfounded) in the case of religion and has lent the latter bizarre and extraordinary power through the centuries, which the deconstructivist project is entirely appropriate and well-prepared to investigate. And it should be said that many forms of primitive and pseudo-science partake of this form as well, if not of outright fraud. So the line is hardly stable or absolute. But when it comes to science as practiced in the enlightnement tradition, with a variety of safeguards and institutional practices that feature competition, peer review at multiple levels, and final public transparency, the approach falls flat.

• A contemporary accounting of this scientific race, last of a 3-part series.
• TRF is one of a series of "releasing hormones", operating between the hypothalamus and pituitary. Or should the word "is" be put in quotes?
• A critique of the critique.
• Mankiw takes on MMT, and obsesses about inflation, along mainstream lines.
• MMT replies.
• Limited liberty at Liberty University.
• Notes from the Taliban.
• Birds: who cares?
• A cult is exposed.

We Are All Special

A study in yeast finds that rare mutations have outsize influence on traits.

The word "mutation" is frowned upon in these politically correct days. While we may have a human reference genome sequence derived from some guy from Buffalo, New York, all genomes are equal, and thus differences between them and the reference are now termed "variations" rather than mutations.

After the first human genome was cranked out, the natural question was- How do we differ, and what do those differences say about our medical futures and our evolutionary past? This led to the 1000 genomes project, and much more, to the point that whole genome sequencing is creeping into normal medical practice, along with even more common panels of a smattering of genes analyzed for specific issues, principally cancers. Well, we differ a lot, and this data has been richly rewarding, especially in forensic and evolutionary terms, but only somewhat in medical terms. The ambition for medical studies has been extremely high- to interpret from our code why exactly we are the way we are, and what our medical fate will be. And this ambition remains unfulfilled. It will take decades to get there, and our code is far from controlling everything- even complete knowledge of our sequences and their impact on our development and medical issues will leave a great deal to accidents of fate.

The first approach to mining the new genomic information, especially variations among humans, for medically useful information was the GWAS study. These put the 1000 genomes (or some other laboriously accumulated set of sequences, which came tagged with medical information) into a blender and asked which variations between people's sequences correlated with variations in their diseases. Did diabetes correlate with particular genes being defective or altered? Despite huge resources and high hopes, these studies yielded very little.

The reason was that the notion of variation (or mutation) and especially the intricate field of evolutionary population genetics, was, among these researchers, in a somewhat primitive state. They only accepted variations that occurred a few times, so that they could be sure they were not just random sequencing mistakes. In a population of, say, 1000, any variation that occurs a few times has a particular nature, which is to say that it must be somewhat stable in the population and have a long history, to allow it to rise to such a (modest, but significant) level of prevalence. This in turn means that it can not have a severe effect, in evolutionary terms, which would otherwise have cut its history in the population rather short. So it turned out that these researchers were studying the variations least likely to have any effect, and for all the powerful statistics they brought to bear, little fruit turned up. It was a very frustrating experience for all concerned.

A recent paper recapitulated some of these arguments in the setting of yeast genetics. The topic remains difficult to approach in humans, because rare variations are, by definition, rare, and hard to link to diseases or traits. Doing so in a clinical study requires statistical power, which arises from the number of times the linkage is seen- a catch-22 unless one can find an obscure family pedigree or a Turkish village where such a trait is rampant. In yeast, one can generate lineages of infinite size at will, and the sequencing is a breeze, with a genome 1/250 the size of ours. The only problem is that the phenotypic range of yeast is slightly impoverished compared to ours(!) Yet what variety they can display is often quantifiable, via growth assays. The researchers used 16 yeast strains from diverse backgrounds as parents, (presumably containing a wide variety of distinctive variations), generated and sequenced 28,000 progeny, and subjected them to 38 growth conditions to elicit various phenotypes.

The major result, graphing the frequency of variations against their phenotypic effect. The effect goes up quite strongly as the frequency goes down.

These researchers claim that they can account for 73% of phenotypic variation from their genetic studies- far higher the rate seen for any complex human trait. They see on average 120 loci affecting each trait across the study, and 12 loci affecting each trait in any one mating. Based on past work with libraries of yeast strains, they could also classify the mutations, er, variations they saw coming from these diverse parents as either common (similar to what was analyzed in the classic GWAS experiments in humans, occurring at 1% or more) or rare. Sure enough, the rarer the allele, the bigger its effect on phenotype, as shown below. In rough terms, the rare variants accounted for half the phenotypic variation, despite comprising only a quarter of the genetic variation.

In an additional analysis, they compared all these variants to their relatives in a close relative of this yeast species, in order to judge which allele (variant / mutant or the reference / normal version) was ancestral, i.e. older. As expected, the rare variations that led to phenotypic effects were mostly of recent origin, and more so the stronger their effect.

"Strikingly, no ancient variant decreased fitness by more than 0.5 SD units, whereas 41 recent variants did."

The upshot is that to learn about the connection between genotype and phenotype, one needs significant (and typically deleterious) mutations, as geneticists have known since the time of Mendel and Morgan. Thus the use of common variants (with small effects) to analyze human syndromes and diseases has yielded very little, either medically or scientifically, while the study of rare variants has been a gold mine. And we all have numerous rare variants- they come up all the time, and are likewise selected out of existence all the time, due to their significant effects.

The scale of the experiments done here in yeast allow high precision genetic mapping. Here, one trait (growth in caffeine) is mapped against correlating genomic variations. The correlations home in on variations in the TOR1 gene, a known target of caffeine and a master regulator of cell growth and metabolism.

• Stiglitz on neoliberalism.
• Thoughts about Britain's (and our) first past the post voting system.
• Economists have no idea what they are talking about- Phillips curve edition.
• Hayek and the veneration of prices.
• Real trial or show trial?
• The case for Justice Roberts.
• Winning vs success.
• Psychotic.
• Lead from gasoline is being remobilized by wildfires.
• Winter has been averted.

Success is an Elixir

We are besotted by success. For very obvious evolutionary reasons, but with problematic consequences.

Why is the James Bond franchise so compelling? It got more cartoonish over the years, but the old Sean Connery embodied a heady archetype of the completely successful hero. A man as skilled in vetting wines as in flying planes, as debonair with the ladies as he was in fighting hand-to-hand, all while outwitting the most malevolent and brilliant criminal minds. Handsome, witty, and brutally effective in all he turned his hand to, there was little complexity, just relentless perfection, other than an inexplicable penchant for getting himself into dramatic situations, from which he then suavely extricated himself.

We worship success, for understandable reasons, but sometimes a little too much. As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. It is fundamental to our growth from childhood to adulthood, to demonstrate and be recognized for some kind of effectiveness- passing tests, graduating from school, becoming skilled in some art or profession, which is socially recognized as useful, maybe through the medium of money. The ancient rites of passage recognized this, by setting a key test, such as killing the bear, or withstanding some brutal austerity. Only through effectiveness in life can we justify that life to ourselves and to others. The role can take many forms- extroverts tend to focus on social power- the capability of bending others to their will, while introverts may focus more on other skills like making tools or interpreting the natural world.

The Darwinian case is clear enough- each life is a hero's quest to express one's inner gifts and capabilities, in order to succeed not only in thriving in the given environment, but in replicating, creating more successful versions of one's self which do so all over again. Women naturally fall for successful men, as James Bond so amply demonstrated, but as is seen in so many fields, from basketball to finance.

But all this creates some strong cognitive biases that have some influences that are not always positive. Junior high school is the most obvious realm where these play out. Children are getting used to the idea that life is not fair, and that they can communally form social standards and decisions about what constitutes success, which then victimize those on the losing end- what is cool, what is lame, who is a loser, etc. Popularity contests, like politics and the stock market, are notorious for following fashions that valorize what one generation may believe is success, only to have the next generation look back in horror and redefine success as something else. In these cases, success is little more than a commonly held opinion about success, which leads to the success of con men like our current president, who insists that everything he does is perfectly successful, and who inspires sufficient fear, or confidence, or suspension of disbelief, or is so ably assisted by the propaganda of his allies, that many take him seriously. Indeed, it is exactly the unaccountable support of his allies who surely know better that force others in the wider circles of the society to take seriously what no rational or decent person would believe for a second.

The status of minorities is typically a "loser" status, since by definition their beliefs and practices, and perhaps their very existence, are not popular. While this may be a mark of true Darwinian lack of success, it is far more likely to be an accident of, or an even less innocent consequence of, history. In any case, our worship of success frequently blinds us to the value of minorities and minority perspectives, and is a large reason why such enormous effort has been expended over millennia, on religious, legal, constitutional, and cultural planes, to remedy this bias and promote such things as democracy, diversity, due process, and respect for contrasting perspectives.

We are victimized in many other ways by our mania for success- by advertisers, by the gambling industry, by war mongers, among many others, who peddle easy success while causing incalculable damage. While it is hard to insulate ourselves from these social influences and judgements, which are, after all, the soul of evaluating success; as with any other cognitive bias, being in our guard is essential to avoiding cults, traps, and, ultimately, expensive failure.

• The news from Chris Hedges.
• Who produces value, where is the money going?
• History repeats itself.
• A look back, at Afghanistan.
• Life on earth is suffering.

Links Only

Due to the press of business, only links this week.

• Stiglitz on elites, neoliberalism, and the end of history.
• Inspired by Ukraine.
• Gaslighting on an epic scale.
• Or maybe religion is the problem? It was always a factually challenged affair.
• The gig workers of yesteryear- gyppo loggers in the Northwest.

Metrics of Muscles

How do the microstructures of the muscle work, and how do they develop to uniform sizes?

Muscles are gaining stature of late, from being humble servants for getting around, to being a core metabolic organ and playing a part in mental health. They are one of the most interesting tissues from a cell biology and cytoarchitectural standpoint, with their electrically-activated activity, and their complex and intensely regimented organization. How does that organization happen? There has been a lot of progress on this question, one example of which is a recent paper on the regulation of Z-disc formation, using flies as a model system.

A section of muscle, showing its regimented structure. Wedged in the left middle is a cell nucleus. The rest of these cells are given over to sarcomeres- the repeating structure of muscles, with dark myosin central zones, and the sharp Z-lines in the light regions that anchor actin and separate adjacent sarcomeres.

The basic repeating unit of muscle is the sarcomere, which occurs end-to-end within myofibrils, which are bundled together into muscle fibers, which constitute single muscle cells. Those cells are then in turn bundled into fascicles, bundles, and whole muscles. The sarcomere contains end-plates called the Z-disk, which attach actin filaments that travel lengthwise into the sarcomere (to variable distances depending on contraction). In the center of the sarcomere, interdigitated with the actin filaments, are myosin filaments, which look much thicker in the microscope. Myosin contains the ATP-driven motor which pulls along the actin, causing the whole sarcomere to contract. The two assemblies contact each other like two combs with interdigitated teeth.

Some molecular details of the sarcomere. Myosin is in green, actin in red. Titin is in blue, and nubulin in teal. The Z-disks are in light blue at the sides, where actin and titin attach. Note how the titin molecules extend from the Z-disks right through the myosin bundles, meet in the middle. Titin is highly elastic, unfolding like an accordion, and also has stress sensitivity, containing a protein kinase domain (located in the central M-band region) that can transmit mechanical stress signals. The diagram at bottom shows the domain structure of nebulin, which has the significant role of metering the length of the actin bundles. It is also typical in containing various domains that interact with numerous other proteins, in addition to repetitive elements that contribute to its length.

There are over a hundred other molecules involved in this structure, but some of more notable ones are huge structural proteins, the biggest in the genome, which provide key guides for the sizes of some sarcomeric dimensions. Nubulin is a ~800 kDa protein that wraps around the actin filaments as they are assembled out from the Z-disk and sets the length of the actin polymer. The sizes of all the components of the sarcomere are critical, so that the actin filaments don't run into each other during contraction, the myosins don't run into the Z-disk wall, etc. Everything naturally has to be carefully engineered. Conversely, titin is a protein of ~4,000 kDa (over 34,000 amino acids long) that is highly elastic and spans from the Z-disk, through the myosin bundles, and to a pairing site at the M-line. In addition to forming the core around which the myosin motors cluster, thus determining the length of the myosin region, it appears to set the size of the whole sarcomere, and forms a spring that stores elastic force, among much else.

Many of these proteins come together at the Z-disk. Actin attaches to alpha-actinin there, and to numerous other proteins. One of these is ZASP, the subject of the current paper. ZASP joins the Z-disk very early, and contains domains (PDZ) that bind to alpha actinin, a key protein that anchors actin filaments, and other domains that bind to each other (ZM and LIM). To make things interesting, ZASP comes in several forms, from a couple of gene duplications and also from alternative splicing that includes or discards various exons during the processing of transcripts from these genes. In humans, ZASP has 14 exons and at least 12 differently spliced forms. Some of these forms include more or fewer of the self-interacting LIM domains. These authors figured that if the ZASP protein plays an early and guiding role in controlling Z-disk size, it may do so by arriving in its full-length, fully interlocking version early in development, and then later arriving in  shorter "blocking" versions, lacking self-interacting domains, thereby terminating growth of the Z-disks.

Overexpression of the ZASP protein (bottom panels) causes visibly larger, yet also somewhat disorganized, Z-disks in fly muscles. Note how beautifully regular the control muscle tissue is, top. Left sides show fluorescence labels for both actin and ZASP, while right sides show fluorescence only from ZASP for the same field.

The authors show (above) that overexpressing ZASP makes Z-disks grow larger and somewhat disorganized, while conversely, overexpressing truncated versions of ZASP leads to smaller Z-disks. They then show (below) that in the wild-type state, the truncated forms (from a couple of diverged gene duplicates) tend to reside at the outsides of the Z-disks, relative to the full length forms. They also show in connection with this that the truncated forms are also expressed later in development in flies, in concordance with the theory.

Images of Z-disks, end-on. These were not mutant, but are expressing fluorescently labelled ZASP proteins from the major full length form (Zasp52, c and d), or from endogenous gene duplicates that express "blocking" shortened forms (Zasp66 and Zasp67, panels in d). They claim by their merged image analysis (right) to find that full length ZASP resides with higher probability near the centers of the disks, while the shorter forms reside more towards the outsides.

Compared with what else is known, (and unknown), this is a tiny step. It also begs a lot of questions- could gene expression be so finely controlled as to create the extremely regimented Z-disk pattern? (Unlikely) And if so, what controls all this gene expression and alternative splicing, both in normal development, and in wound repair and other times when muscle needs to be rebuilt, which can not be solely time-dependent, but appears, from the regularity of the pattern, to follow some independent metric of ideal Z-disk size? It is likely that there is far more to this story that will come out during further analysis.

It is notable that the Z-disk is a hotbed of genes that cause myopathies of various sorts when mutated. Thus the study of these structures, while fascinating in its own right and a window into the wonders of biology and our own bodies, is also informative in medical terms, and while unlikely to lead to significant treatments until the advent of gene therapy, may at least provide understanding of syndromes that might otherwise be though of as acts of a cruel god.

• On Joe Biden.
• CO2 is at its highest level in three million years.
• Pluto Press.

Redistribution is Not Optional, it is Essential

Physics-inspired economic models of inequality.

Thomas Piketty marveled at the way wealth concentrates under normal capitalist conditions, as if by magic. He chalked it up to the maddening persistence of positive interest rates, even under conditions where capital is in vast excess. Once you have a certain amount of wealth, and given even modest interest, money just breeds on its own, certainly without labor, and almost without thinking.

A recent Scientific American article offered a different explanation, cast in a more physics-style framework. It recounts what is called a "yard sale" model of a perfectly free economic exchange, where each transaction is voluntary and transfers net wealth in a random direction. Even under such conditions, wealth concentrates inexorably, till one agent owns everything. Why? The treatment is a bit like statistical mechanics of gasses, that follow random walks of individual particles. But where gasses are subject to constant balancing force of pressure that strongly discourages undue concentrations, the economic system contains the opposite- ratchets by which each agent greedily holds on to what it has. At the same time, poorer agents can only transact from what little they have, but stand to lose more (relatively) when they do. They thus have a stricter limit on how often they can play the game, and are driven to penury long before wealthier players. Even a small wealth advantage insulates that player against random adversity. Put that through a lengthy random walk, and the inevitable result is that all the wealth ends up in one place.

"In the absence of any kind of wealth redistribution, Boghosian et al. proved that all of the wealth in the system is eventually held by a single agent. This is due to a subtle but inexorable bias in favor of the wealthy in the rules of the YSM [yard sale model]: Because a fraction of the poorer agent’s wealth is traded, the wealthy do not stake as large a fraction of their wealth in any given transaction, and therefore can lose more frequently without risking their status. This is ultimately due to the multiplicative nature of the transactions on the agents’ wealth, as pointed out by Moukarzel." - Boghosian, Devitt-Lee, Wang, 2016

"If we begin at the point 1/2, the initial step size is 1/4. Suppose the first move is to the right, reaching the point 3/4. Now the step size is 1/8. If we turn back to the left, we do not return to our starting point but instead stop at 5/8. Where will we wind up after n steps? The probability distribution for this process has an intricate fractal structure, so there is no simple answer, but the likeliest landing places get steadily closer to the end points of the interval as n increases. This skewed probability distribution is the ratchetlike mechanism that drives the yard-sale model to states of extreme imbalance." ... "If some mechanism like that of the yard-sale model is truly at work, then markets might very well be free and fair, and the playing field perfectly level, and yet the outcome would almost surely be that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." - Hayes, 2002

It is important to emphasize that the yard sale model is a libertarian's dream. It models perfect freedom and voluntary economic activity, if on a very simplistic level. But its implications are profound. It describes why most people in a free economic system own little more than their labor. The authors supplement this model with three more parameters, to align it better with reality. First is a wealth advantage factor. Our free economic system is not free or fair as a matter of fact, and the wealthy have many economic advantages, from lower interest rates (on loans), better returns on investments, to better education and more political power. Obviously, this is hardly conducive to greater equality, but rather to sharper and faster inequality. Second is a redistribution factor, in recognition that taxes and other costs have a redistributing effect, however small. And third is an allowance for negative wealth, which characterizes a fair portion of most societies, given our addiction to debt. Using these extra factors, these researchers can easily model wealth distributions that match reality very closely.

Lorenz curves showing income inequality in the US, and its growth in recent decades. Higher income families are on the right bottom, and their cumulative share of income are dramatically higher than those of lower income families. This graph gives rise to the Gini coefficient. Since this graph is binned in quintiles, it hides even more dramatic acceleration of income at the highest 10%, 1% and 0.1% levels.

An example of a model curve. The teal area (C) represents negative wealth, a fact of life for much of the population. The intersection of curve B with the right axis represents a result where one person or family is has 40% of all wealth. We are not quite there in reality, but it is not an unrealistic outcome considering current trends. Gini coefficients are generally defined as the areas A/(A+B).

The article, and other work from this group, finds that the redistrubution factor is absolutely critical to the fate of society. Sufficiently high, it can perpetually forestall collapse to total inequality, or even oligarchy, which is the common human condition. But if left below that threshold, it may delay, but can not forestall the inevitable.

What is that threshold? Obviously, it depends quite a bit on the nature of the society- on its settings of wealth advantage and redistribution. But rather small amounts of redistribution, on the order of 1 or 2 %, prevent complete concentration in one person's or oligarchy's hands. To make a just society, however, one that mitigates all this accidental unfairness of distribution, would take a great deal more.

There have traditionally been several social solutions to gross inequality, after humanity gained the capacity to account and accumulate wealth. One is public works and the dole, which the Romans were partial to. In their heyday, the rich vied to attain high offices and fund great works which benefitted Roman society. Another is a debt jubilee, where debts were forgiven at some interval or on special occasions. Another, of course, is revolution and forcible reforms of land and other forms of wealth. Karl Marx, along with many others, clearly sensed that something was deeply wrong with the capitalist system when allowed to run unfettered. And despite all the ameliorating regulations and corrective programs since, we are back in a gilded age today, with all time highs of gross unequality. To make matters worse, we have been backsliding on the principle of inheritance taxes, which should prevent the transgenerational and wholly undeserved accumulation of wealth and power.

Redistribution turns out, on this analysis, to be essential to a sustainable and just society. It is not a pipe dream or violation of the natural order, or of "rights". Rather, it is the right of every member of a society to expect that society to function in a fair and sustainable way to provide the foundation for a flourishing life by building each member's talents and building the social and material structures that put them to effective use. Capitalism and free exchange is only one ingredient in this social system, not its purpose or its overriding mechanism. That is why the weath tax that has been proposed by Elizabeth Warren is so significant and has generated such interest and support. It speaks directly and effectively to one of the central problems of our time- how to make a sustainable system out of capitalism.

• Ah, the memories ...
• When a stroke takes away your hearing.
• An extra paper on gene duplicates.

Gene Duplication and Ramification

Using yeast to study the implications of gene duplication.

Genes duplicate all the time. Much of our forensic DNA technology relies (or at least used to rely) on repetitive, duplicated DNA features that are not under much selection, thus can vary rapidly in the human population due to segment duplication and recombination/elimination. Indeed, whole genomes duplicate with some (rare) frequency. Many plants are polyploid, having duplicated their genomes one, two, three or more times, attaining prodigious genome sizes. What are the consequences when a gene suddenly finds itself making products in competition with, or collaboration with, another copy?

A recent paper explored this issue to some small degree in the case of proteins that form dimeric protein complexes in yeast cells. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is known to have undergone a whole genome duplication in the distant past, which led to a large set of related proteins called paralogs, which is to say homologs (similar genes) that originated by gene duplication and have subsequently diverged. Even more specifically, they are termed ohnologs, since they arise from a known genome duplication event (this special class is interesting since for such organisms, it makes up a huge class of duplicates that all arose at the same time, making some aspects of evolutionary analysis easier). A question is whether that divergence is driven by neutral evolution, in which case their resemblance quickly degrades, or whether selection continues for one homodimer, for both homodimers, or even for the complex between the two partners, which is termed a heterodimer.

The authors go through simulations of several different selection regimes, done at atomic scale to known protein paralogs, to ask what effect selection on one feature has on the retention or degradation of other features of the system. Another term for this is genetic relationship is pleiotropy, which means the effects that one gene can have on multiple functions, in this case heterodimeric complexes in addition to homodimeric complexes, which often have different, even opposite, roles.

One example of a homodimeric protein (GPD1, glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase) that has an ohnolog (GPD2) with which it can heterodimerize. At top is the structure- yellow marks the binding interface, while blue and pink mark the rest of each individual protein monomer. The X axis of each graph is time, as the simulation proceeds, adding mutations to the respective genes, and enforcing selection as the experimenters wish, based on binding energy of the protein-protein interface, as calculated from the chemistry. That binding energy is the Y-axis. Dark blue is one homodimer (GPD1-GPD1), pink is the other homodimer (GPD2-GPD2), and purple is the binding energy of the heterodimer (GPD1-GPD2).

In a neutral evolution regime lacking all selection, (top graph), obviously there is no maintenance of any function, and the ability of the molecules to form complexes of any kind steadily degrades with time- the binding energy of the dimers goes to zero, at the origin. But if selection is maintained for the ability of each gene product to form its own homodimer, then heterdimer formation is maintained as well, apparently for free (second graph). Similarly, if only selection for a heterodimer is maintained, the ability of each to form homodimers is also maintained for free. At bottom, if only one homodimer is under positive selection, then the formation of the other homodimer degrades most rapidly, and the heterodimer degrades a bit less rapidly.

All this is rather obvious from the fact that the binding interface (see the structure at the top of figure for the example of GPD1) is the same for both proteins, so the maintenance of this binding interface through positive selection will necessarily keep it relatively unchanged, which will keep it likewise functional for other interactions that occur on exactly the same face, which is to say the heterodimeric interaction, when the homodimeric interaction is selected for, or vice versa, etc.

So why keep these kinds of duplicates around? One reason is that, while preserving their binding interface with each other, they may diverge elsewhere in their sequence, adopting new functions over time. This kind of thing can lead to the formation of ever more elaborate complexes, which are quite common. Having two genes coding for related functions can also insulate the organism from mutational defects in either one, which would otherwise impair the homodimeric complex more fully. By the same token, this insulation can allow variational space for the development of novel functions, as in the first point.

So, nothing earthshaking in this paper, (which incidentally included a good bit of experimental work which I did not mention, to validate their computational findings), but it is nice to see yeast still serving as a key model system for basic questions in molecular biology. Its genomic history, which includes a whole genome duplication, and its exquisite genetic and molecular tool chest, make it ideal for this kind of study.

• On the insularity of economics.
• Yes, the Federalist Society is a political organization.

Power

And lack of power.

The recent power shutdowns in California were maddening and disruptive. They also showed how utterly dependent we are on the oceans of fossil fuels we burn. With every convenience, gadget, trip, comfort, appliance, and delivery we get more enmeshed in this dependence, and become zombies when the juice is suddenly cut off. Not only is our society manifestly not robust, but every drop of fuel burned makes the problem still worse: the biosphere's decline to miserable uninhabitability. The children are right be be pissed off.

Do we have the power to kick this habit? This addiction makes opioids look like amateurs.  It won't be a matter of checking into rehab and going through a few weeks of detox. No, it is going to take decades, maybe centuries, of global detox to kick this problem from hell. Living without our fix of CO2 is impossible on any level- personal, social, political, economic, military. And the pushers have been doing their part to lull us even further into complacency, peddling lies about the risks and hazards they deal with as an industry, their own research into climate change and what our future looks like, not to mention our complicity in it.

Do we have the moral and political power to get off fossil fuels? Not when half of our political community is in denial, unwilling to take even one step along the 12 step path. I am studying the Civil War on the side, which exhibits a similar dynamic of one half of the US political system mired in, even reveling in, its moral turpitude. It took decades for the many compromises and denials to play themselves out, for the full horror to come clear enough that decent people had had enough, and were ready to stamp out the instution of slavery. Which was, somewhat like the fossil fuels of today, the muscular force behind the South's economy and wealth.

Do we have the technical and intellectual power to kick this habit? Absolutely. Solar and wind are already competitive with coal. The last remaining frontier is the storage problem- transforming intermittant and distributed forms of power into concentrated, dispatchable power. And that is largely a cost problem, with many possible solutions available, each at its price. So given a high enough price on fossil carbon, we could rapidly transition to other sources of power, for the majority of uses.

A 300 MW solar power plant in the Mojave.

Does the US have the power to affect climate change policy around the world? We don't have all the power, but have a great deal. If we were to switch from a regressive laggard to a leader in decarbonization, we would have a strong effect globally, both by our example and influence, and by the technical means and standards we would propagate. We could amplify those powers by making some of our trade policy and other relations more integrated with decarbonization policy.

Do individuals have the power to address these issues? The simple answer is no- all the virtuous recycling, biking, and light-bulb changing has little effect, and mostly liberates the unused fossil fuels for someone else to use at the currently criminally low prices. Individuals also have little power over the carbon intensity of the many products, services, and infrastructure they use. Maybe it is possible to eat less meat, and avoid fruit from Chile. But we can not unplug fully from this system- we need to rewire the system. It is fundamental economics that dictates this situation, which is why a stiff carbon tax and related regulation, with the associated political and moral will are so important.

Finally, does the State of California have the power to take responsibility for the PG&E mess? Absolutely, but probably not the will. The power shutdowns led to a common observation that the state should just buy PG&E at its bankrupt price and run it in the public interest. But keen observers have noted that the state's politicians would much rather have someone else to blame, than be saddled with a no-win institution that puts the blame on them. Power lines are going to cause fires in any case, unless we cough up the billions needed to put them underground. Customers will always complain about the price of utilities, so it is hard to see the state stepping up to this mess, or even reforming the public utilities commission, which has been so negligent as well.

• Why did the GOP nominate, and the American people elect, a Russian asset to the White House?
• Battle lines on health care.
• Point to Bernie.
• The church and psycho-social evolution.