Environmentalism is anti-American

Book Review of the biography of Rachel Carson, "On a farther shore".

Are we part of nature, or above it? Did god give it to us for our domination, or did we wriggle from its bosom to the condition of (bare) consciousness and power that threatens to undo the patient work of millions of years of evolution? Thousands of years ago, we had already killed off all our immediate ancestors in the hominid line and countless other species of megafauna. Now we have taken over most of the arable land of earth, comandeered much of the fresh water, polluted the rest of it, as well as the oceans, killed off many more species, doubled the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the fixed nitrogen in the biosphere, and are facing ocean acidification and dramatic climate heating as an irreversible future fate.

But two generations ago humanity (and that would be the US) created the most immediately alarming and noxious dangers of all- nuclear weapons with their attendent radioactivity, and a fusilade of biocides and other poisons emerging from the postwar chemical industry- pesticides, herbicides, plastics, drugs, "food" additives, cleaners, etc. After a cavalier start to the era, when Las Vegas visitors turned out with their sunglasses to watch nuclear tests, the far-reaching dangers came increasingly to public consciousness, resulting in the above-ground nuclear test ban treaty of 1963, and the establishment of the EPA in 1970 and banning of DDT in 1972.

The reduction of nuclear radiation has been enormously successful, with negligible impact from current uses. The Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters have been the sole, and very large, blots on a very good record of radiation control (negligible amounts were released in the Three Mile Island disaster). Whether we want to use more nuclear power or not for the sake of climate change is a reasonable question.

Our record on control of biocides and other environmentally harmful chemicals, on the other hand, is far less impressive. Their use is less individually dramatic than that of nuclear technology, but their scale is mind-boggling. Every home and garden center hosts a biocide department that reeks to high heaven. DDT may have been banned, but an endless supply of other biocides have been concocted that are applied over the best land to kill all insects on it. The holocaust is ongoing.

"In 2006 and 2007, the world used approximately 5.2 billion pounds of pesticides"

Rachel Carson played a large role in our budding environmental awareness, both in her early work in books like "The Sea Around Us" that celebrated the beauty and interest of the natural environment, and in her last prophetic work on the dangers of the new pesticides, "Silent Spring". This biography is a worthy testament to her drive and talent which formed out of very unlikely materials (being a self-made professional woman in the 1950's) an earth-shaking message.

Indeed she could even be regarded as a significant religious leader, inspiring love for the world, and issuing prophetic warnings about its mistreatment at the hands of humanity, due in part to a lack of spiritual awareness, or misdirection. Humans have an innate religious sensibility about nature, and all the old religions treat it with reverence. The Celts had their sacred groves, worship of trees, and custom of bringing holly and mistletoe to their dwellings at the winter solstice. Unfortunately, the monotheisms, with their worship of a blown-up self-image, put nature into the shade as something to be dominated, something lost anyhow (Eden), even dirty and unclean. The unholy mix with post-war technologies allowed the dream to become a reality ... to "purify" the world of insects, vermin, disease, and all kinds of uncleanliness.

Obviously there is a great deal of good in cleanliness. But we learn that even our own health benefits from some amount of infection and dirt, lest our immune system idly turn its attention on our own tissues by mistake. Which is not to mention the wider ecological benefits of moderation and species diversity, and particularly in less wanton destruction of insects and other unheralded organisms that may not be the "stars" of our nature shows.

While we have banned the most noxious chemicals, (thalidomide, DDT, aldrin, lead arsinate, etc.), our systems and policies are simply not up to the task of protecting ourselves or the environment in a more comprehensive way. They are not precautionary, but rather wait for some dramatic harm to come to light before starting studies and investigations that take forever. The neonicotinoid insecticides are still being applied by the ton, despite their clear harm to bees (not to mention to all other insects).

Why? Principally, it is the agricultural and chemical interests, and their conservative allies, that fight chemical control policies every step of the way. There was once a time, when the EPA was founded, when conservatives were true to their name and cared about conservation, not only of their power, but of the environment as well. Those times are long gone, as the interests of the 1% diverge increasingly from those of the rest of society, indeed of humanity in general. Their loud patriotism tells us that government is bad, taxes always too high, scientists are all lying, and corporations always tell the truth. The worship of self has turned from a projected image of god to the even worse god of Mammon.

"It had only taken a few short centuries to move from a time when we gazed out at the ocean and wondered what was over the horizon. Now, she said, "our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars." Based on the experience of her own generation- which had brought the world to such a dangerous crossroads- Carson said it was now time for the inheritors of earth and it many difficulties to finally prove human mastery not of nature, but of itself. "Your generation," she said, "must come to terms with the environment."

• Wildlife is in dramatic decline.
• Bees are in especially dramatic decline ... collapse.
• Fly less to fight climate change.
• On the psychology of evil, corruption, ideology, contradiction, hypocrisy, and other forms of humanity.
• In the new economy, nice guys finish last.
• Cute kids ... these days.
• The recent US military campaign has little immediate effect. ISIS keeps gaining ground, and "One estimate puts the number of overall desertions for the Iraqi Army at over 90,000."
• How and why the Fed shores up the global dollar system.
• But banks run the Fed, so of course ... the Fed serves Goldman.
• Goldman, Lehman, Enron.
• AIG as a money-laundering bailout. "Alternatively, maybe Mr. Geithner simply felt that Goldman and the like had a more legitimate claim to billions of dollars in funds than the taxpayers who were footing the bill."
• Bonanza gets one in against the bankers (Episode 284, The Trackers)
• Pray our way, or the highway.
• To screw workers, employers talk out of both sides of their mouths.
• This week in the WSJ, annals of irony: "But does anybody in the government feel it is necessary to be truthful about anything anymore?"   
• Economic graph of the week.. just how dramatically our economy has changed over the last 60 years. We've already had a class war, and we lost.

Prosecutors Gone Wild

Truth is the first casualty of bureaucracy. Review of "Licensed to Lie".

Sidney Powell is a defense lawyer and erstwhile prosecutor who got tangled up in defending one of the Enron cases, launching an unwelcome odyssey into prosecutorial malfeasance. Her book is an excoriation of the prosecutors, Justice department, courts, and justice system as a whole as it took shape under the Bush Administration and continues under Obama. She summarizes everything in a final chapter that helpfully names names in bold type.

The case was the "Barge" trial, which accused a set of Merrill Lynch functionaries of colluding with Andrew Fastow to conduct a sham transaction whereby Enron "sold" a set of electric generating plants (on barges in Nigeria) to Merrill Lynch so that Enron could book a sale, while actually guaranteeing that Enron would buy the Barges back in a matter of months. The point was to help Enron temporarily cook its books and goose income. In the whole spectrum of Eron cases, and certainly in terms of harms alleged, this one was quite minor.

The defense disputed the entire case, and maintained that the transactions were actual sales, and that no one in Merrill Lynch did anything wrong. Powell's particular client, whom she picked up at the appellate level, was James Brown. His testomony was consistent on this and related points, both in grand jury testimony and at trial ... that his understanding was that the transaction was legal, if inadvisable.

Unfortunately, the defense was not allowed to use all of Brown's testimony, or much testimony from elsewhere, because the prosecution played keep-away with the evidence in the case, intimidated relevant witnesses, and pursuaded the court to adopt bizarre legal theories, jury selection processes, and jury instructions. Prosecutions generally have a duty to give the defense any exculpatory or even relevant information, called the "Brady" materials. Since the government typically runs the investigation, the prosecution is the party with all the evidence. Defendants do not have the resources or the powers to do as much investigating. This natural assymetry is supposedly resolved by the "Brady" rule. But of course, prosecutions are sorely tempted, and have every motivation, to hide such material if they find it inconvenient to their case. As they would.

It is a fundamental issue of whether the legal system exists to find truth, or whether it exists to win prosecutions. In the Enron cases, the government was under extreme political pressure to win, and to put some scapegoats in jail. The public, and especially the public in Houston where all the trials were held, was in no mood to split legal hairs about procedure. They wanted blood. Powell's tale is remarkably engaging, even gripping, for a narrative about US appellate processes that in this case dragged on for almost a decade. Her client served one year in jail, railroaded in by prosecutorial shennanigans that are, frankly, breathtaking.

First, the legal theory of the prosecution was, in part, that Brown and colleagues, by supposedly arranging a sham transaction, had deprived Enron shareholders of "honest services". This was a novel, even non-sensical, doctrine, and was reversed on appeal. Secondly, the prosecution alleged that, by its theory of the case, Brown had lied to the investigators and juries, thus perjuring himself. Thirdly, they alleged that all the evidence attesting to the legal nature of the transacation was ass-covering, belied by separate verbal promises they alleged had been made by Fastow and others to Merrill.

The problem with all this was that their own evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Fastow's own interviews mentioned explicitly that he had offered only a best-efforts promise to re-market the barges to other companies (which was indeed done and did occur, and was legal). But those interviews were suppressed by the prosecution, which relied on non-direct evidence from secondary players whom it pressured to testify according to their theory by threats of indictment. Fastow had already agreed to turn state's evidence in return for a reduced sentence (10 years, reduced eventually to six years, which was shockingly minimal in light of his masterminding the entire Enron debacle. He also probably retains some of his ill-gotten gains.)

Indeed, eventually Powell and colleages obtained detailed transcripts and notes from the Brown prosecution where the prosecution (or prior investigators) had highlighted in yellow the precise exculpatory testimony that would have easily acquited Mr. Brown and belied the entire theory of the prosecution. It was thus made quite plain that the prosecution had committed (and continued to cover up) gross misuse of their powers, which had the effect of destroying several innocent people's careers. Even after this information came to light, the judge in the original case continued to unwaveringly support the prosecution, blatantly ignoring defense arguments of gross malpractice, and despite having been overturned on several crucial issues on appeal.

This would have remained a typical defense attorney cry into the void except that another case came along during the same period featuring several of the same higher level officials in the Department of Justice- the case of Senator Ted Stevens. Similar tactics were used to develop a false theory of the case, hide exculpatory testimony, and railroad his jury to conviction (I hasten to add that I have no political sympathy with Stevens or indeed author Powell, who seems a red-as-they-come Texas Republican).

The (appellate) judge in that case did what the Brown judge did not do, which was, (in addition to reversing the case), to blow the whistle on the prosecution and call for a special prosecutor to investigate the Department of Justice's prosecution. The resulting report laid bare blatant abuse of the Brady rule and other forms of malfeasance- the same pattern that Powell was experiencing in her case. Unfortunately, this report neither took the highest levels of the Justice Department into its scope, nor had an discernable effect on any Department employee. Except for one: Nicholas Marsh, a low-level prosecutor on the Stevens case committed suicide as the investigation was underway. All the others either landed in cushy private firm jobs, or were promoted to higher levels in the government. One became a White House Counsel to Obama.

There are good political reasons to incentivize certain prosecutions. The late financial meltdown was clearly undermotivated in the prosecution department- no one went to jail for clearly illegal as well as phenomenally damaging acts and practices. Whole industries riven with illegal practices have been held harmless for their actions. There may also be a lack of legal tools to perform such prosecution and render justice. For instance, none of the fines that the Department of Justice has extracted from the various banks (investigations and findings that have remained secret, thus useless in the cause of justice) came from individuals. They come from the future earnings and innocent shareholders, not from the managers who actually performed the illegal actions and destroyed their companies and / or the economy at large, and who even in all likelihood remain in their jobs. Perhaps the legal structure to hold the responsible officers to account, not to mention claw back their ill gotten gains, does not exist (yet, though the Sarbanes-Oxley laws were supposed to have resolved some of that, yet were not deployed for the financial crisis non-prosecutions)

Whatever the case, the answer is not to run an illegal prosecution against minor actors who committed no crime, in a kangaroo court. Our country is better than that. What is equally disturbing is that this continued from one administration to the next, clearly signalling a fundamental lack of accountability in the department's bureaucracy and an unwillingness by the new administration to put its mandate into action. In so many instances, the Obama administration has kept the actors, and practices, of the old intact, prosecuting whistleblowers rather than listening to them, deporting and mistreating immigrants in droves, and keeping the military-industrial-espionage complex humming. The change has been much less than promised.

Powell's money quote: "Blind judges do not render blind justice."

• A Holder retrospective.
• Hope in Afghanistan, or endless dysfunction? "A thousand beggars can live under one quilt, but two kings cannot share a kingdom."
• Not just military-industrial, but now military-industrial-espionage complex.
• Rent extraction by finance. Is what they do useful? Or is it sheer embezzlement?
• The government is losing all the revenue that goes instead into tax avoidance.
• Pat Robertson: our genocide better than your genocide.
• Right wing Christians ... reality is not a strong suit.
• Climate, schmimate- science will deal with it, right?
• Guns 'n apple pie- and don't let Gabby Giffords tell you different.
• Yes, you are dying ... and truth is the answer.
• Germany vs the Euro, cont.
• That magical number two.
• Pension funds got suckered into the hedge fund scam. And who pays? Not the retirees.
• Yes, the inflation fight is not really about inflation.
• Reality is outstripping perceptions of the new feudalism.
• One more reason the 70's were a dreadful decade- it was when economics went awry.
• The psychology of free will.
• Again, just what is an economy good for?
• "As Krugman goes on to note, the nation’s 400 richest households, who paid more than 50 percent of their income in taxes at midcentury, now fork over less than one-fifth of their income."

What is the Opposite of PTSD?

On the Arthurian and Homeric battle hymns.

I have been reading Mallory's tales of King Arthur, and wondering at the lovingly described jousting, ado-ing, dueling, damsel-saving, and battling. Why so much space devoted to minute variations of the most tedious material? Why is Sir Launcelot the main character of the romance, not King Arthur? Why such a flood of testosterone?

We have heard a great deal about PTSD, where ex-soldiers can't get scenes of trauma out of their heads. We also have just been through the anniversary of World War 1, with ongoing head-scratching about why the cosmopolitan and civilized countries of Europe let themselves descend into the depths of hell. A generation with PTSD resulted, especially in France, which supinely rolled over in the next war, unwilling to face up to the developing reality.

Mallory reminds us (as Homer did long before) that war is joyous. Men live most vividly in war, and always have. They (I am generalizing wildly on a postulated average) have evolutionary settings that care for others and engage in all the other positive morals of quotidian life, but in addition, are fixated on power, danger, honor, competition, and ultimately, war. Those who succeed through these trials come out glowing with pride, as did our greatest generation, at least many. They are feted by others, lionized, valorized and given all good things, especially social power. Not for nothing was John Kennedy's administration named "Camelot". The tellers of tales have no better material, in the culture that this process produces- the patriachy.

PTSD is the dark side of this psycho-socio-genetic legacy, especially now that chivalrous rules of engagement no longer apply, and the horrors of war come upon everyone, winner or loser. Few came out of the trenches of WW1 with glowing pride, and few again come out of our recent wars in Iraq or Afghanistan so crowned with honor and success. The US military occupies an uncomfortable tension between the mechanization, routinization, and sanitization of war, vs the need to keep its soldiers motivated and charged-up for battle.

This leads to the currently most notorious lovers of honor, chivalry and blood- the islamists of IS, Al Qaeda, et al. To read the autobiography of a Taliban leader, there was no better time, nothing more vivid, than the time he spent killing infidels (or just rival factions) and bonding with his band of brothers. So it is on all sides. The question is ... not who is violent, but who is fighting for positive ends for the human community at large. Who is upholding an ideology and system that serves the general good rather than creating chaos?

The chivalric system had its good points. The Arthurian tales are filled with good knights fighting bad knights who imprison, rape, and plunder. It was a nascent form of state legitimacy, under an aristocratic oligarchy. Now we have higher standards of legitimacy, cast in terms of universal democracy and human rights. But Islam is not in the same mind-space, still fixated on patriarchy if not theocracy. Its idea of chivarly and human rights are quite different (indeed far more traditional) from those current in the West.

But is this true of the population at large, or is it only true of the extreme, the disaffected, the anti-West, and the callous rulers who use any convenient ideology to direct resentment away from themselves? That is the question that the West, and the US in particular, has been grappling with as we try to spread "democracy" in a Middle East where democracy is such a strange flower; where legitimacy flows from scripture, tradition, and turban rather than from a legalistic, post-enlightenment philosophy.

It wouldn't be a pressing issue, except that we all happen to live on the same planet. While those in the West struggle to keep the joy of war confined to the football field or the videogame, and locked within a disciplined military, elsewhere it flourishes in age-old existential terms, freed, ironically, by the chivalrous and respectful reluctance of leading powers to use the virtually infinite military violence they have at their disposal.

• Being a warrior today.
• Fanatical religiosity ... but why in the US military? (Correction)
• Better living, through plastic.
• Allied with Al Qaeda, Iran, and Hezbolla, against IS ... can it get any stranger?
• More in the annals of violent self-pity: Russia.
• Yes, it was, and still is, all Bush's fault.
• To zero carbon with a carbon tax. And for free.
• Arrested for manner of walking ... the Ferguson case and police ass-covering.
• Plato and the GO-PAC of his time.
• Bad justice, continued ... bribery and corruption are OK.
• Krugman for the Nth time.. economists failed us miserably.
• And are still failing ... the irony of Germany vs Keynes.
• The ratings agency cesspool? Still there.
• Fraud in business ... a normal condition.
• This week in the WSJ, annals of climate denial: "While the past two decades have seen progress in climate science, the field is not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it." ... "Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere's natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%."

The Origin of Life

Some papers on the earliest steps from geology to biology.

One of the great questions, second only to the origin of the universe (multiverse) and perhaps the nature of thought in the brain, is how life got started on Earth. (Leaving aside, of course, the even more daunting question of peace in the Middle East.) Of the three, the mind is well on its way to definitive solution, and the origin of the universe is rather unlikely to ever be solved, or at least there is no prospect that I can see, despite enormous advances in cosmology. The origin of life occupies a middle ground, so far off in time that certainty may be impossible, but bounded enough by our knowledge of the ambient conditions and their rich aftermath that detailed and plausible theories can be, and have been, advanced.

The papers reviewed here are not new, (dating from from 1997 and 2003), but provide background for my post two weeks ago about the divergence of Archaea and Bacteria, and constitute what I think remains the leading hypothesis for the origin of life (elaborated in more recent papers 1, 2, 3). (Other recent origin of life refs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) This hypothesis situates the scene of action at thermal vents at the ocean floor, where highly reduced and alkaline geological fluids percolate up into an ocean that was, at that time, far less oxidizing than today, but still, due to the prevalence of CO2, several logs more oxidizing and acidic than the geochemical fluid.

As still seen today, this fluid deposits rich chimneys of iron sulfide wherever it emerges, in a porous matrix that could host untold chemical complexity. And there are / were a full spectrum of more moderate vents, with lower temperatures and less harsh chemistries. These locations attract theorists of the origin of life because they provide a great deal of potential energy, in a form that life still uses: the electro-chemical gradient in the form of acid / base (protons) and oxidation / reduction (electrons).

They also provide the key elements (sulfur, iron, nickel, tungsten) that are needed, and the kinds of enclosed, yet semipermeable, spaces that would be needed to accumulate the compounds needed as proto-cells. So the 1997 paper by Russell and Hall delves into the kind of proto-metabolism that the energy gradients and structures at these locations might have provided. The Earth was saturated with CO2 at the time, as free oxygen had not yet been photosynthesized into existence.

But let's take a step back and ask what is needed for life. The basics are a membrane or some other compartment to keep inside and outside apart, an energy source, a metabolic system to harness that energy to create the molecules on the inside, like complex carbon molecules of our form of life, and a genetic replication system that controls the metabolism and other characters, so that they can be selected via Darwinian evolution.

Not all of these things have to happen at the same time, and the goal for figuring out how geology generates life is to locate conditions where as many of the earliest requirements are present for free in the geological environment, and deduce what had to happen at which stage thereafter. A great deal has been made of the RNA world (references 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) as a near-certainty in the progression from proto-life to the last common ancestor of all life. Our ribosome, for one thing, carries its clear signature. But this is a very late stage in the origin of life. The RNA world presupposes metabolism, a cell structure, and a replication system, even while it gives rise to a translation system that sets forth on the protein- and DNA-centric course we are on today.

So, energy is a must. Nothing can happen without it, but it can take many forms, from lighting discharges to sunlight, to chemical gradients from stable geological sources. As discussed in the previous post, chemical gradients remain the bread and butter of cellular energy, and are the most likely original form, leading to the hypothesis that undersea hydrothermal vents are an excellent candidate setting for consistent gradients of pH and redox, among other chemicals, approximating our current chemiosmotic metabolism.

Overview of Russell & Martin theory, with CO2 reduction occurring in mineral "bubbles" at the hydrothermal / oceanic interface.

Prior to biological, lipid-based membranes, such vents also supply porous rocks and somewhat sealed bubbles of rock that could serve as chambers or "cells" for pre-biotic chemistry. And lastly, they provide the actual enzymatic chemicals that remain at the core of our coupled redox metabolism- condensed iron and sulfur complexes that conduct electrons between proteins and across membranes while pumping protons in the opposite direction or reducing carbon compounds.

Example of a contemporary iron-sulfur  (Plus nickel) cluster that forms the heart of many enzymes that reduce (or oxidize) carbon compounds, in this case carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, given water and a proton acceptor such as ferredoxin, another iron-sulfur protein.

What was the most elementary metabolism? Somehow, carbon compounds must have been reduced from the high level of CO2 and CO on early Earth to the sugars and polymers that form the basis of life, such as ATP, NAD, ribose, and the various metabolic intermediates of the Krebs cycle (which we use to break down food to CO2). The authors present a reverse Krebs cycle as the founding metabolism, where carbon compounds are built up (i.e. reduced) using electrons as well as catalytic surfaces furnished by Fe-S minerals mediating between external acid to internal alkaline conditions.

Basic energy scheme where a chemical gradient is used by iron-sulfur compounds to do enzymatic work, such as hydrogenating (reducing) CO2.

"It is the interfacing of the alkaline hot springs with the acid ocean that brings about the precipitation of an iron monosulphide (mackinawite) membrane. Electrons could have been transferred across such a membrane. Also the hydrogenating potential of the mackinawite could have been enhanced by the presence of nickel (Kouvo et al. 1963; Vaughan 1969; Morse & Arakaki 1993)." 

"Iron monosulphides such as mackinawite can contain up to 20% nickel (or cobalt and copper), probably tetrahedrally bonded between the sulphur-sulphur layers (Vaughan 1970). The FeS membrane considered here may have only adsorbed a few per cent of nickel, enough to force the cleavage of the hydrothermal hydrogen at the nickel site with the production of a transient hydride. The left-over proton would be neutralized with hydroxide in the protocytoplasm. The electrons could be transported through the membrane along the iron layer situated along (001), conducting
toward the final electron acceptor such as Fe(III) on the outside of the membrane. The atomic hydrogen could then hydrogenate the CO2 molecules bound on adjacent iron sites."

"In particular, Shock (1992, 1996) has carefully calculated the metastabilities of carboxylates, ketones and alcohols as inorganic carbonate in seawater mixes with hydrothermal solutions, with their fugacities buffered by both quartz–magnetite–fayalite (QFM) and the more oxidized pyrite–pyrrhotite–magnetite (PPM) mineral suites. The fugacity of carbon dioxide is taken as 10 bars, the presumed atmospheric pressure in the Hadean (Walker 1985; Kasting et al. 1993). ... Shock (1996) demonstrated that the possible synthesis of organic molecules between 50 and 250degC is sensitive to the fugacity of the hydrothermal solution, which must be buffered by QFM for all inorganic carbon to be converted to organic molecules. This is still a conservative choice, since 4.2 billion years ago the redox state of the mantle was probably two or three log fO2 units below that of the quartz–fayalite–magnetite buffer (Arculus & Delano 1980). Remarkably, Shock (1996) demonstrated that at temperatures below about 150degC, the longer chained polymers (dodecanoate is the longest chain considered so far) will theoretically be most represented of all the organic molecules, and that they could be generated at no energy cost."

An imagined reverse TCA or Krebs cycle, where carbon compounds are grown from humble beginnings using the free energy of the redox and pH gradients at the vent structures. What would guide the soup in any direction or to any particular compounds (including chirality) is not clear.

Given the right conditions, things might have proceeded quite rapidly ... millions of years would not be needed.

"The far-from-equilibrium conditions in which these geo- chemical processes and mechanisms operated would have been widespread for a limited period of Earth history, and would have provided ample opportunity for such a unique sequence of events leading to the minimal cell, the common ancestor of all life on this planet. Although coupled to a long-lived hydrothermal system, the actual gestation period for organic synthesis and the self-assembly of organic protocells capable of fledging and replication from within the iron monosulphide hatcheries would have to have been rapid, and may have taken weeks or months, rather than the millions of years normally assumed for the emergence of life."

The second paper takes the story onward through subsequent steps of probiotic evolution, where the metabolism becomes more ramified with phosphate (on ATP) as another energy currency, and  nascent protein and RNA enzymes develop out of the organic soup. And finally the mineral membranes are supplemented and replaced by organic ones, given some ion channels and membrane-bound enzymes to carry out metabolism. This sets the stage for escape as free-living organisms.

Cartoon of the general model of Russell and Martin, with organic pro to-metabolism generating carbon compounds which then undergo chemical evolution towards the RNA world, and eventually to organic membranes and cell walls that allow complete escape from the mineral womb at the hydrothermal vent setting.

I can hardly convey the entire theory, and at an outline level it seems reasonable. But what was the force or principle that made the carbon compounds become more complex and self-organize into an RNA world with enzymes and coding / reproduction schemes? That remains a major question (but see the collection of RNA world references cited above). Energy alone, even when channeled in some approximation of the later major microbial metabolism to a profusion of organic molecules, does not, on the face of it, direct complexity or productive competition between mineral bubbles. (The authors have a later paper that claims that conditions "forced" life to emerge, but its details are not available, and the argument seems geochemical, not biological, so it does not seem to address the competitive issue.) We can refer to the anthropic principle to say that whatever led to us must have survived somehow, but that is a far weaker theory than one that drives events based on the chemistry of the time. So I think these concepts are a strong start to a theory of the origin of life, but as yet far from the whole thing.

• Above the law- why pardoning Nixon set a bad precedent.
• Realism and Ukraine.
• "There was so much more reason for the U.S. to respond to 9/11 by invading Pakistan than there was Afghanistan."
• Who should pay for Detroit?
• "For middle-class Americans trying to save for retirement in a 401(k), bank fees take about $2 of every $5 over a lifetime of investing."
• Japan continues its curious ways of monetary sovereignty.
• The Chicago school thinks deflation is not so bad.
• MSM getting a little lefty!
• Our divided country- is speech speech, or is money speech?
• Did Apple solve payment security via biometrics?
• Quiverfull education.. a bit oxymoronic.
• Watch out: Deepak is really pissed, and has a nonphysicalist ontology on his side.
• Enron echoes "In short, Congress has consistently eroded the disincentives designed to keep corporate managers from lying to their shareholders and creditors"
• This week in the WSJ: Even someone at the Hoover institution recognizes the lack of prosecution, and the utter corruption of the financial system. "We also point out that when the Fed finally acted, it not only rescued the banks, it also bailed out their shareholders as well as the executives who had helped steer the banks and country into the crisis. In contrast, when the government rescued General Motors, it forced shareholders and bondholders to take huge financial losses and executives to be fired."

On the Truthiness of Morals

Are morals subjective or objective? A philosophical argument that really does have an answer.

It is hard to believe some of the topics that remain "live" in philosophical debate. Like the existence of free will, or the Christian trinity, or the existence of souls. Can you detect a theme here? Ideas from our religious history tend to have a very firm grip, coming as they originally did from our unconscious archetypes in the first place, no matter how little rational sense they make in a post-enlightenment intellectual world, i.e. reality. Philosophy departments the world over straddle a somewhat pernicious tension between keeping old philosophical questions alive out of honest historical study and respect for the past, versus, frankly, out of professional interest in having something to do and the safety of sticking to received perplexities, which is pretty much the opposite of what philosophy is supposed to be about.

I think the area of objective vs subjective morality is in this general position (See a lengthy discussion and series of apologetics by a proponent of moral objectivism). In theistic terms, morality is created by god, and either commanded via its prophets and scriptures, or, in more liberal versions, implanted by way of evolution to give us, if not universally moral behavior, at least close to universal discernment of what is good. The point of all this is sort of unclear, if god is all-powerful in the first place. Are we some kind of toy or weird experiment developed for its amusement?

And make no mistake, for the vast majority, religion is a its core a moral and moralistic enterprise. Scratch a theist, and you will find someone who believes that without god, all is permitted and society will fall to ruin. Indeed, the intense emotion these positions engender tell you right off the bat that something is fishy about the assertion of objective truth to morality. There are good evolutionary reasons for this nexus of groupishness and righteousness, of course, which makes it so odd that ...

Remarkably, the pull of objective morality goes far beyond the community of theists. Many philosophers, including the highly esteemed Derek Parfit, and even leading contributors to the atheist flagship magazine Free Inquiry, hold to the moral realist / objective position. Which is that morals have some kind of objective basis or "truth" value independent from our subjective pleasures and pains. This is a species of philosophical idealism, which generally believes in the reality of ideals, whether mathematical, like the ideal geometric forms, or moral, like those we feel ourselves striving for in some great communal project. Some even believe the ideals realer than the mundane reality under our feet. The connections to theism should be self-evident.

Parfit's recent work was reviewed by Peter Singer:

"Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1+1=2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit's defense of objectivity in ethics."

I do not see how this argument leaves the station. While there is a great role for moral reasoning in summing up our pains and pleasures to an optimized global judgement, the worm at the bottom of all this calculation remains pain and pleasure ... the very antithesis of objectivity, and the soul, if you will excuse me, of subjectivity.

This work was also reviewed by James Alexander (needs to be approached by a general internet search, not via this link):

"Parfit states the case against Political Theologians, against Nietzscheans, and against Kantian Constructivists as strongly as possible. His own position is unlike all of these in being resolutely impersonal. There is no privileged God, no privileged subject, and no intersubjective order emerging from the interaction of privileged subjects: there is, instead, an objective moral order. For Parfit this is an absolute presupposition: “If there were no such normative truths, nothing would matter, and we would have no reasons to try to decide how to live.” (Vol. II, p.619.) This view is what Parfit calls ‘Non-Metaphysical Non-Naturalist Normative Cognitivism’, or ‘Rationalism’ for short."

Excuse me, but this is nonsense. There is no need to go all axiomatic about where our reasons for "how to live" come from. They come from our inborn desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Or however else one might like to phrase it. They are fundamentally subjective, which one can cast either as the evil and selfish dictates of the struggle for existence, or our hard-won capacity to weigh our subjective interests in communities of interdependence.

Whatever one's view, morals begin as the simple, subjective dictate to stay alive, avoid pain, and seek pleasure. (And to get exactly as much ice cream as Bobby does.) The fact that we can record the past and forecast the future, and the fact that we depend on others for virtually every facet of our existence means that our moral universe is incredibly complicated, spinning from those simple beginnings an endless negotiation about what each person might reasonably want & get in a society where others are similar moral beings with their own aims and pains. In the reigning system of democracy, we have come to a stable stand-off where the right to be a subjectively guided human is accorded to each person, with maximal freedom to pursue happiness coupled with minimal freedom to impinge on the pursuits of others. (Except for corporations, which are specially blessed immortal, amoral, and politically omnipotent persons.)

None of this needs objective morality in any respect. The idea that what we think right and best is also objectively good, while the Nazis (to take a convenient shorthand) are incontrovertable, objective evil ... well, that is simply a fantasy, though one that is incredibly seductive and occasionally quite useful. Even if every person on the planet agrees with such judgements, they remain anchored in the founding motivation that what is good for us collectively is good, and the reverse is bad- a totally self-centered and subjective criterion for morality.

Suppose, for instance, that the world community of dophins used their powers of speech to tell us something truly momentous. That they are the superior beings on Earth, and we should, (by objective morality), spend all our efforts to make the planet better for them, not for us. What would we say to that? But ... all of our philosophers say that making the world better for humans is what it is all about. One can not imagine this being very persuasive. If the dophins could drop bombs on us, would we respect them then? Or perhaps if they showed us their ability to feel pain, would we accept them as equals, let alone as superiors?

Hopefully this helps to show that not only are morals descriptively subjective, expressing how we have always generated and used them. But any normative system telling us what we should be doing is likewise inescapably based on subjective criteria as well- what we think in our wisdom, is good for us. Whether "us" is individual or collective leads to the endless dramas of our lives, in art and reality- the tension that religion labors so hard to resolve, but which remains inescapable.

The historical struggle to extend collective moral behavior to ever larger groups does not depend on any objectivity in morals, either, other than the trivial objectivity they may gain from being written in the form of stones and books. We evolved to cleave to our own group and kill the other group. So how one defines the group is of monumental moral importance. The advent of agriculture and other technologies to support ever-denser populations generated enormous societies with fluid groupings. In our age, the nation has taken pre-eminent position as the group that stands ready to demonize others, take their land, and exterminate them. While it is laudable that groups of hundreds of millions have managed to become internally peaceful, it is, hopefully, clear that the basis of such "moral" behavior is no more objective than it ever was.

• And Robots? What do we owe them?
• Word on truthiness.
• 'Nother word on the truthiness of conservative austerity.
• Mythicized history, or historicized mythology? We don't have much to go on.
• Nor did Bill O'Reilly have more to go on. "I should estimate that reporting the historical truth about Jesus falls somewhere between documenting the facts about Robin Hood and Superman."
• A few notes on Wahabism. Think of the Christians!
• It is time for a right to work. Yes, a real right to work. A real job, real pay.
• Afghans are not very clear on the concept: "Qari Bilal, the IMU leader, was freed by the Afghan government at the direction of President Hamid Karzai, Afghan officials in Kunduz have told TOLONews, which identified Bilal as "a senior al-Qaeda leader who was released from prison on two separate occasions." He leads more than 300 fighters in Kunduz province and "has masterminded numerous suicide attacks and overseen the planting of roadside bombs throughout the province."
• On the general nature and ancient origin of the ATP synthase.
• What are, or were, unions for?
• Washington Post to compete with the Washington Times.
• Finance remains the enemy, and needs to be cut down to size. Specifically, we need accountability through less debt, less tax-deductibility, more equity exposure, and long-term clawbacks of ill-gotten gains.
• Merkel, Russia, and the coming winter.
• "Despite what you may think, Americans, on average, are driving more miles every day, not fewer, filling ever more fuel tanks with ever more gasoline. U.S. oil consumption is on an upward trajectory, climbing by 400,000 barrels per day in 2013 alone."
• This week in the WSJ: climate denialism still about. "The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began."

Life's Deepest Divergence

Why do the membrane chemistries of Archea and Bacteria differ so much?

Hypotheses for the origin of life increasingly tend away from quiet ponds & soups and towards the more dramatic undersea vents with their billowing pumes of geochemicals. Life needs energy, and these have energy in abundance, in the form of chemicals rather than light, which took much longer to harness. Perhaps the leading current hypothesis speculates that a constant stream of highly reduced and alkaline brew of sulfides and carbon compounds allowed nascent chemical complexity to build up in this roiling, rocky boundary zone.

That may form the basis of another post. But one aspect of this theory is that membranes were relatively late to the party. Semi-isolated nodules / holes could occur in the rocky matrix that allowed just the right amount of flow of small metabolic chemicals while anchoring the larger organic, (pre-biotic) macromolecules. Only the transition to living free in the ancient seas necessitated increasingly tight membranes, cell walls, etc.

A recent paper uses this theory as the springboard for a theory for the divergence which is the deepest among currently living organisms- that between Archaea and Bacteria. Eukaryotes were an immensely complicated fusion of Archaeal and Bacterial cells which happened much later on, and is another story altogether. Archaea and Bacteria share a vast majority of core systems such as DNA-based genetics, RNA-based transcription and translation, ribosomes, circular DNA, lack of internal organelles, and most of the basic, carbon-based metabolism, with phosphate energy carriers on ATP and its relatives. They differ in their use of RNA polymerases (Archaea have three, as do Eukaryotes), in their transcription factors and histones (Archaea have histones, and more complex transcription factor system, simlar to that of Eukaryotes), and in details of DNA replication. Their cell walls have different chemistries, and most oddly, their membranes have quite different chemistries. It is noteworthy that Archaea tend to inhabit the most extreme environments of temperature, salinity, acidity, etc., suggesting that they may reflect their ancient heritage in ecological terms more so than do Bacteria.

The chemistries of membrane lipids are strikingly different between Archaea and Bacteria. The lipid, head group, and linkages on either end of the glycerol core are each distinct.

Membranes have magical properties. In modern organisms, they keep all large molecules, and many small ones, out of the cell using only the thinnest layer of two molecules- the bilayer. This bilayer molecule has a charged or polar headgroup (the P and glycerol / 3-C backbone above) which keeps water happy on one side. And it has fatty tails, which is to say long (CH2)n chains, which make water very unhappy, and form the stable center of the bilayer sandwich, which repells all sorts of charged ions as well as water.

Since such a membrane seals out ions, which are the life-blood of metabolism and of life in general, such a membrane presupposes a large cast of (protein) ion channels which allow selected ions in/out, or in advanced cases, pump them actively. Thus the well-sealed membrane can not have been a terribly early event in the story of life. The current authors propose that early membranes were quite different, and quite leaky, establishing the sort of partial, controlled traffic that the earliest cells needed to replicate or supplement their early rocky homes. Thus the transition to tightly sealed membranes occurred later on, after life had gotten quite far along, and after the Archaeal / Bacterial split.

What are these reactions that could happen in a leaky cell, at a sea-floor vocanic plume? To introduce this requires take a brief detour into the chemiosmotic theory- one of the most elegant and significant theories in biology, after those of evolution and DNA structure. ATP had long been known to be the basic energy currency of biological organisms, being converted to ADP and AMP in a constant cycle of re-use. But in 1961 Peter Mitchell proposed another biological energy currency- electricity in the form of ionic differences around membranes. The issue was where the cell's ATP charging capacity comes from. It seemed localized to mitochondria in Eukaryotes, but the mechanism was unknown.

An ATPase in the mitochondrial membrane diligently manufactures ATP from the chemical burning of food that happens in the mitochondrial matrix, but how the energy from the one process fuels the other was quite mysterious. And when this ATPase was studied more closely, the mysteries only piled up. It is an ion transporter, of H+, of all things, and is present in all cells, indeed conserved from the original ancestor of all life. It can break up ATP (giving it the "-ase" name) in the lab, when spinning freely with no H+ gradient, but in real life it is tightly stuck and oriented in the (inner) mitochondrial membrane, using the significant H+ gradient across the membrane as its fuel to run in the opposite direction, synthesizing ATP. And that is the heart of the story. The mitochondrion acts like a battery, in that its ATP production driven by H+ pumping is indirectly coupled the H+ production that is a product of glycolysis and the Krebs cycle elsewhere. In this way, the Krebs cycle can do its thing, at its own rate, and build up the fuel of high H+ outside without having to be physically linked to the ATP-producing enzyme complex. This concept also applies to chloroplasts and to all non-Eukaryotic cells. As weird as it seemed for cells to be spending their hard-earned fuels just pumping protons willy-nilly into the outside (i.e. into the ocean for single-celled organisms), the energetics work out. The cell (or mitochondrion for Eukaryotes) is a tiny battery.

That is the closely coupled system with an internal H+ generation system and a tightly sealed membrane. But suppose we are at an earlier stage, when energy didn't come from a well-worked out internal food-burning Krebs cycle, but from a kind of arbitrage on outside chemical gradients? Then having a sealed membrane would be counter-productive. The scenario the authors envision is where a proto-cell is lodged in the rocky vent matrix, with geochemical fluids passing on one side, at, say pH 10, and sea water on the other side at, say, pH 7. A three pH unit difference is very large; enough free energy to do a great deal of work, if harnessed to an ATPase that runs off the H+ gradient.

Author's model for their simulations, where the lower flow is the alkaline geochemical vent product, and the upper half is sea water, more or less. The wide H+ gradient between them provides energy to the green ATPase that produces ATP from ADP.

In this scenario, the membrane needs to be semi-permeable to allow all the ions to pass. Its only real role is to tether the ATPase, which the authors assume still conducts H+ orders of magnitude more readily (while generating ATP) than the semipermeable membrane does. The authors run numerous simulations of permeabilities, pH gradients, ATPase concentration, and of ancillary ion transporters. For example, as proton permeability declines, the usable gradient declines to zero, since even as the ATPase uses the protons coming in, they have no where to go back out of the cell, nor can OH- ions come in to neutralize them. (Run your own simulations using their software!)

"However, 1%–5% [surface area of the membrane covered by] ATPase in a leaky membrane (10−3 cm/s) retains a −ΔG of close to 20 kJ/mol. With 3–4 protons translocated per ATP synthesized, this gives a −ΔG for ATP hydrolysis of 60 to 80 kJ/mol, similar to modern cells and sufficient to drive intermediary biochemistry, including aminoacyl adenylation in protein synthesis."

As membrane permeability declines (colored cases), the energy available via the simple H+ gradient (Y-axis) drops to zero with time through the simulation (X-axis).

The next innovation is to introduce a Na+ / H+ antiporter, which is a protein in the membrane that exchanges sodium for protons 1:1. This is electronically and typically energetically neutral, but has dramatic effects on the ability of this protocell to manage its permeability and use the H+ gradient. Sodium has much greater difficulty getting across even a leaky membrane than the smaller H+. I should note that the authors assume that the ATPase can use Na+ as well as H+, which has some plausibility given the primitiveness of the system. They also assume that all their protein transactions only happen on the acid (sea water) side of the cell, which is much less plausible. Given the high H+ gradient from the acid side of the cell, it drags Na+ out, creating a supplementary gradient of high Na+ outside to inside, which the ATPase can use, in addition, to the protons, to generate ATP.

The net effect of all this is three-fold. It immediately raises the available energy of the H+ gradient by about 50%. It also sends the cell on a selective trajectory towards sealing its membrane, since the ion flows can now be managed entirely through the proteins in the membrane, and the H+ gradient yields more energy the more H+ are funneled through the ATPase. Lastly, it favors the generation of active H+ and Na+ pumps that expel these ions under some conditions, such as metabolic energy from light or from eating other life forms. Naturally this sets the stage for freeing the nascent cells from the vent ecosystem, if they can find another source for H+ gradients, i.e. food.  It also incidentally explains the universal property of our cells having very low Na+ concentrations, though our ionic levels otherwise approximate those of sea water.

When a Na+ / H+ antiporter (SPAP) is present, the energetics of the H+ gradient improve markedly in the author's simulation. But the effect is available only at highly alkaline conditions (graphs B and C).

"Crucially, SPAP [sodium / proton anti-porter] is also a necessary preadaptation for the active pumping of protons, and for decreasing membrane permeability towards modern values. Whereas pumping H+ in the absence of SPAP gives no sustained benefit in terms of −ΔG, the presence of SPAP in a leaky membrane allows pumping of H+ to pay dividends. −ΔG now markedly increases with decreasing permeability, for the first time giving a sustained selective advantage to higher levels of pumping and tighter membranes."

With the Na+ / H+ anti porter present, and with an additional pump (powered by some kind of novel metabolism) that exports H+ or Na+, dropping the permeability of the membrane (X-axis) pays consistent dividends (blue).

Needless to say, if tightening the permeability of the cell membrane was a later development after so many other critical mechanisms (genetic coding, enzyme production, leaky membrane maintenance, crude energy metabolism) had developed, then it stands to reason that the principal chemical components of the modern biological membrane might differ between forms of life that had already diverged into what became the two earliest domains of life.

The paper is a bit unclear, though reading the methods helps tremendously, supplying needed detail and organization. The overall scenario for the origin of life in these very dynamic and energy-rich settings is reasonably persuasive, and it is good to see people taking the next step to figure out how nascent cells might have gotten over some of the notable humps of the process.

"Our findings allow us to propose a new and tightly constrained bioenergetic route map leading from a leaky LUCA [last universal common ancestor] dependent on natural proton gradients, to the first archaea and bacteria with highly distinct ion-tight phospholipid membranes. These bioenergetic considerations give striking insights into the nature of LUCA, and the deep divergence between archaea and bacteria."

• Our own form of renewable energy is going mainstream.
• PSA on sugar.
• The ladder of shameless media lies, from facebook to fox.
• Greece, New York descends into appalling entanglement with religion.
• Couple of columns on replacing welfare/EITC with universal basic income.
• Unemployment statistics ain't what they used to be.
• Unemployment maps of Europe ... a disaster.
• Even in the best of times and places, sclerosis reigns. California is ridden with public unions, systemic corruption, and weak public management.
• Defrauding the government, Microsoft version.
• Krugman: "It’s not just facts that have a liberal bias; so does careful, open-minded analysis."
• The tide turns against shareholder value maximization.
• WSJ- fraud of "only" $9 billion should not be prosecuted.

Das Krazy Kapital

Reflections on Marx's economic text, Das Kapital.

Well, his heart was in the right place. After the French revolution and its complex aftermath had gone grievously astray from its égalité promises, Marx decided that the immense wealth generated in the epoch of industrialization was going to finally be sufficient to bring the utopia to pass. If only it were rationally organized! I am working from a classic heavily abridged edition put out by the Modern Library and edited by Max Eastman at perhaps the height of Communist respectibility in the English speaking world, 1932.

It is very hard to believe that this book launched a thousand demonstrations, millions of AK47's, dozens of dictatorships, and a century of misery for millions of people. It shows the incredible power of confident obfuscation and false hope. Yes, religions have known this forever, but still, having it framed in this pseudoscience-y way really hurts. It reads like a crank manifesto, with occasional gems of lucidity set within a vast heap of intellectual-sounding blather. Quite a bit of time is spent creating cracked accounts of national income, profit and loss, the circulation of capital, etc. The bottom line is that Marx was in no way an economist, but a polemicist and propagandist of great political rather than economic acuity. His work on the 18th Brumaire, not to mention the Communist Manifesto itself, far transcends his economic work, even if Das Capital contains a few seeds of economic insight.

His touchstone is the conviction that all surplus value comes from labor. Nothing else "makes" money. Not the free resources lying on the ground, not the inventiveness of the entrepreneur, not the far-sightedness of the capitalist, not the marketing & trading accumen of the merchant. Every dollar that the capitalist makes is on the back of some laborer who is made to work partly for his own bread, and during the balance of his employment time, for the capitalist. It is one of those great monomaniacal theories of everything that the monomanic batters like a ram through every wall of reason's ramparts.

The surprising thing is that he does provide a rather sensible (if exceedingly brief) presentation of one aspect of the opposing view at the time:

"The French economist Condillac wrote in 1776, in an essay on commerce and government: 'It is false taht, in the exchange of commoditiies, equal value is given and obtained. The contrary is true. Each of the two contracting parties, invariably gives a smaller value for a greater one ... Why? The value of things resides solely in their relation to our wants
...
Exchange value appears primarily as the quantitative relation in which values in use of one kind are exchanged against values in use of another kind. A definite quantity of one commodity is regularly exchanged for a specific quantity of another: that constitutes its exchange value- a relation which changes constantly according to time and locality. Thus does exchange value seem to be something accidental and purely relative, i.e. (as Condillac expressed it) it seems 'to consist solely in the relation of the commodities to our wants.' A value in exchange inherent in commodities appears thus an impossibility. Let us consider the question more closely. 

[... there follows a couple of turgid pages of implausible sylogisms ...] 

Thus it is only the quantity of labor or of working time socially necessary for its production which determines the exchange value of a commodity."

So Marx starts in reality, and ends up in his own private world of economics, which, being volume 1, chapter 1, forms the premise of everything that follows, more or less. While all this is flattering to the worker, and conducive to a labor-centric and mechanistic view of economics, it is nevertheless so far from reality that one wonders how anyone could possibly read onwards. But there are certainly flashes of interest, such as damning quotes from earlier writers:

"As early as 1696 John Bellers says: 'For if one had a hundred thousand acres of land and as many pounds in money, and as many cattle, without a laborer, what would the rich man be, but a laborer? And as the labourers make men rich, so the more labourers, there will be the more rich men ... the labour of the poor being the mines of the rich.'  So also Bertrand de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century (1728): 'It would be easier, where property is well secure, to live without money than without the poor; for who would do the work? ... As they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. ... it is in the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get ... for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy. ... it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied."

Well, this certainly lays it all out, eh? Labor is certainly a necessary ingredient to all economic activity and wealth. But its value is devilishly hard to measure, indeed impossible most of the time, and all sorts of other activities in the economic (and governmental) system both create and destroy value. But Marx presses on...

"There is not a single atom of its [capital] value that does not owe its existence to unpaid labor. ... When viewed as a transaction between the capitalist class and the working class, it makes no difference that additional labourers are employed by means of the unpaid labour of the previously employed laborers [i.e.capital]. The capitalist may even convert the additional capital into a machine which throws the workmen who made it out of work, and which replaces them by a few children. In every case the working class creates by the surplus labor of one year the capital destined to employ additional labor in the following year. 

The accumulation of the first additional capital of $10,000 presupposes a value of $50,000 belonging to the capitalist by virtue of his 'primitive labor', and advanced by him. The second additional capital of $2,000 [all this assumes an annual return/profit of 20%] assumes, on the contrary, only the previous accumulation of the $10,000 of which the $2,000 is the surplus value capitalized. The ownership of past unpaid labour is henceforth the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labor on a constantly increasing scale. The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate."

Well, well- shades of Thomas Piketty. Of course, the self-perpetuating nature of wealth and privilege was hardly news in his day any more than in ours. Marx gives it a faux-quantitative gloss by way of a wealth of assumptions, but loses in the process virtually everything of interest about the capitalistic system.

Marx did see other self-feeding aspects of the process, such as the way fewer workers end up doing more work:

"The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of labourers, goes on therefore yet more rapidly than the technical revolution of the process of production that is accelerated by the advance of accumulation; and more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the variable part of capital as compared with the constant.[]  In proportion as the productiveness of labor increases, capital increases its supply of labor more quickly than its demand for laborers. The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the formaer, forces these to submit ti over-work and to subjugation under the dictates of capital."

He spends some insightful pages on the transition from feudalism, where the lower classes had some right to sustenance and to land, at the cost of freedom and low status, to the modern system of private property, where the former feudal owners may have cleared the estates of farmers in favor of sheep, and in any case took ownership in the radical modern notion untethered by any social obligation. The poor were then turned into "independent contractors", i.e. sharecroppers, or out entirely to form the proletarian army of the industrial age.

"The laborer could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondman of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labor regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers inot wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeios historians. But, on the other hand, these new freemen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire."

Again, Marx's strength is not in accountancy and technical economics. It is in broad social critique with historical awareness and incendiary sarcasm. To finish up, I'll add a quote on national debt, showing a bit of Marx's woozy analysis while he has his finger on something truly important. Something Alexander Hamilton, for example, understood far better.

"The system of public credit, i.e. of national debts, whose origin we discover in Genoa and Venice as early as the middle ages, took possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing period. The colonial system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-house for it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e. the alienation of the State- whether despotic, constitutional, or republican- marked with its stamp the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is thier national debt. 

The public debt becomes one of the powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter's wand it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The State-creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apare from the class of lazy annitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation- as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every State loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven- the national debt has goven rise to joint-stock companies, to dealing in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage [speculation and stock manipulation], in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy."

Marx goes on for a couple of pages of meandering outrage, but fails to clearly analyze the nature of this particular beast. Which basically goes for the rest of this work as well.

I guess the real issue is that money and its concentrated form, capital, has a somewhat mesmerizing physicality which misleads us into thinking that it constitutes something intrinsically valuable and real. But it is a notional / legal accounting for labor and other goods owed- a matter of credit to its very core. If the future workers on whom this claim is made fail to see the claim as legitimate, due to any number of causes- the corrupt way it was concentrated, the age-old privilege and unjust social rules that give it to the idle and worthless- then they may revolt against this entire system of accumulated credit and decide to work for themselves instead.

Unfortunately, the extreme complexity and lack of resilience of the existing economic system makes blowing it up virtually unthinkable. We are all enmeshed in it, and can not imagine reconstituting even its most essential operations with any speed from new principles and with new actors. Thus the choice of revolution is the direst and most destructive extremity. Our real choice is typically between sclerotic decline at the hands of incumbent receivers of rent, (and social and political power), or continuous reform driven by those who have power and both understand the system thoroughly and are disinterested enough to wish for its general and durable prosperity. Which is not an easy combination to attain, now or ever. Communism's most enduring, positive legacy was to serve as the spectre that prodded reform in the liberal West, towards the modern regulatory, social welfare, middle class state. But no sooner did that spectre vanish at the end of the cold war than the old forces of rapacious capital retook the fields of ideology and power.

• Keynes and the robots.
• Birds really don't have it easy with us humans around.
• Protests in black and white.
• Another cold-blooded killing.
• GOP- now what Democrats used to be: party of racism and the old South.
• In China, criticism is OK, collective action is not.
• Is your city biophilic?
• The Justice department's outrageous, craven, secret deals with banks.
• Finance is a parasite.
• Stagnation is a policy choice.
• This week in the WSJ, annals of extenuation:

"More than 90% of the young black men killed by gunfire today are not killed by police but by other black men."