What Does the Cerebellum Do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

En Garde, Libtard!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Subtle Mechanics of Regulatory Enhancers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battle For the Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Machines Read Yet?

Sort of, and not very well.

Reading- such a pleasure, but never time enough to read all that one would like, especially in technical fields. Scholars, even scientists, still write out their findings in prose- which is the richest form of communication, but only if someone else has the time and interest to read it. The medical literature is, at the flagship NCBI Pubmed resource, at about 30 million articles in abstract and lightly annotated form. Its partner, PMC, has 5.5 million articles in full text. This represents a vast trove of data which no one can read through, yet which tantalizes with its potential to generate novel insights, connections, and comprehensive and useful models, were we only able to harvest it in some computable form.

That is one of the motivations for natural language processing, or NLP, one of many subfields of artificial intelligence. What we learn with minimal effort as young children, machines have so far been unable to truly master, despite decades of effort and vast computational power. Recent advances in "deep learning" have made great progress in pattern parsing, and learning from large sets of known texts, resulting in the ability to translate one language to another. But does Google Translate understand what it is saying? Not at all. Understanding has taken strides in constricted areas, such as phone menu interactions, and Siri-like services. As long as the structure is simple, and has key words that tip off meaning, machines have started to get the hang of verbal communication.

But dealing with extremely complex texts is another matter entirely. NLP projects directed against the medical literature have been going on for decades, with relatively little to show, since the complexity of the corpus far outstrips the heuristics used to analyze it. These papers are, indeed, often very difficult for humans to read. They are frequently written by non-English speakers, or just bad writers. And the ideas being communicated are also complex, not just the language. The machines need to have a conceptual apparatus ready to accommodate, or better yet, learn within such a space. Recall how perception likewise needs an ever-expanding database / model of reality. Language processing is obviously a subfield of such perception. These issues raises a core question of AI- is general intelligence needed to fully achieve NLP?

I think the answer is yes- the ability to read human text with full understanding assumes a knowledge of human metaphors, general world conditions, and specific facts and relations from all areas of life which amounts to general intelligence. The whole point of NLP, as portrayed above, is not to spew audio books from written texts, (which is already accomplished, in a quite advanced way), but to understand what it is reading fully enough to elaborate conceptual models of the meaning of what those texts are about. And to do so in a way that can be communicated back to us humans in some form, perhaps diagrams, maps, and formulas, if not language.

The intensive study of NLP processing over the Pubmed corpus reached a fever pitch in the late 2000's, but has been quiescent for the last few years, generally for this reason. The techniques that were being used- language models, grammar, semantics, stemming, vocabulary databases, etc. had fully exploited the current technology, but still hit a roadblock. Precision could be pushed to ~ %80 levels for specific tasks, like picking out the interactions of known molecules, or linking diseases with genes mentioned in the texts. But general understanding was and remains well out of reach of these rather mechanical techniques. This is not to suggest any kind of vitalism in cognition, but only that we have another technical plateau to reach, characterized by the unification of learning, rich ontologies (world models), and language processing.

The new neural network methods (tensorflow, etc.) promise to provide the latter part of the equation, sensitive language parsing. But from what I can see, the kind of model we have of the world, with infinite learnability, depth, spontaneous classification capability, and related-ness, remains foreign to these methods, despite the several decades of work lavished on databases in all their fascinating iterations. That seems to be where more work is needed, to get to machine-based language understanding.

• What to do about media pollution?
• Maybe ideas will matter eventually in this campaign.
• Treason? Yes.
• Stalinist confessions weren't the only bad ones.
• Everything over-the-air ... the future of TV.

Whom do You Trust?

We have placed our lives in the hands of Silicon Valley companies. Do they earn and keep that trust?

It used to be that banks made a big show of trustworthiness and stability. They would build classical edifices of stone to signify their solidity, and use names like "trust", "fidelity", "savings", "citadel", etc. This dates back to the 1800's, when there was no regulation, and banks could collapse from one day to the next, taking all their depositor's money with them. We got a brief taste of that in the recent banking / credit crises- the savings and loan debacle, and the 2008 subprime catastrophe. But generally, banks these days are rather boring from a depositor perspective, more concerned about appearing friendly and neighborly than awesomely immovable. Deposit insurance and other regulations have removed virtually all the risk of retail banking, and computers have simplified and automated its accounting mechanics. On the other hand, bigger investors (and borrowers) would have been wise to pay more attention to the trustworthiness of such institutions and their products through the subprime, securitization, and housing bubble periods, when so many were sold a bill of goods.

In this new computerized world, our faith turns out to be more at risk elsewhere, among the custodians not so much of our money, but of our selves in all exposed dimensions - messages, emails, pictures, documents, conversations, backups - our data. Our financial data is still of highest concern, but now that communications have migrated to myriad "platforms", we have so much more to worry about. What used to be securely private is now much less so. Electronic communication used to be confined to ATT, which came under significant regulation. Now it is a wild west of whoever can convince us to try a new service sure to enhance our lives or reputations, and all for free. Google led the way with incredible search capabilities, followed by Amazon, Myspace, Facebook, Paypal, Twitter, iTunes, Instagram, Roku, Pinterest, Linkedin, Netflix, Reddit, and countless other purveyors and services. Every one requires an account, with lock and key, every one collects our data, and most monetize it for ads, spam, and who knows what else.

Do they merit our faith? This becomes an increasingly urgent question as more of our lives migrate to digital form, and the companies we deal with gain increasing power by virtue of their custody over those forms. Are they responsible fiduciaries? Facebook and Google offer an instructive contrast. Google lives mostly by search, and while using ads, has carefully kept the search space clean enough to facilitate use. Its YouTube subsidiary is perhaps its most social media-y, pushing suggestions drawn from the user's viewing history. Since stochastically, this will ramify outwards into new areas, it can facilitate those looking for more extreme content to head in that direction. But different companies clearly carry different ecosystems and ideas of where to draw the line.

Facebook has been notorious for its obscure, ever-shifting intefaces, its constant foisting of new content and tools, and its devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to user data and privacy. Everything is open, except its own operations. All data is ripe for pushing to advertisers, and whatever it takes to get more clicks goes. Where Google remains dominant and comfortable in its search sphere and ancillary businesses, Facebook had made a scientific project of developing the most addictive tools to get people uncomfortable in their social networks, forced to like and be liked in an endless and downward hedonic treadmill. As an introvert, I am largely unaffected, but others seem to be hopelessly ensnared in the depressing exercise of social comparison.

Then there is the fake news. The new platforms act as publishers with vast powers of propagation, to viral degress unheard of in past ages of humdrum paper publishing. But at the same time they eschew the responsibility of publishers to vet media they purvey and provide a gatekeeping function that has been a critical, if unacknowledged heart of the rights of the free press. We have yet to get used to this world where power and reach are unconnected with curated cogency and minimal economic marketability.

Reputation is coming to the fore, as it once did for banks. Apple is making a great deal of its security and login operations, that they as a philosophy and business do not sell user data, being in the hardware business instead. Facebook has taken a big reputational hit through its bad behavior, particularly its release of data to the Republican-affiliated trolls in England, but also for its many other practices and attitudes. Governance is another issue. Facebook is extremely unusual in its monarchical shareholder model, where the founder has all the voting power, and the public none. How was this allowed as a "public" company?

Regulation is needed, on many levels. That has been the time-tested way to address market failures in the face of new technologies and market practices. Reputation alone is a poor way to police companies that have grown too big for many, if not most people, to do without. Antitrust, corporate governance, user data protection and use restrictions, transparency of data custody, and responsible free speech curation are all areas that need work. We should have a government that is willing to do that work, instead of one that lurches from one tweet to the next.

• Stiglitz on the next chapter of capitalism.
• What does socialism mean, today?
• What on earth are people thinking, supporting Biden?
• There is more to say.
• On lies.
• The cold war is back, and trilateral.
• Some arguments against a job guarantee, which actually sound more like arguments for it.
• Winter is coming. (Press "max")

Backward and Forward... Steps to Perception

Perception takes a database, learning, and attention.

We all know by now that perception is more than simply being a camera, getting visual input from the world. Cameras see everything, but they recognize nothing, conceptualize nothing. Perception implies categorization of that input into an ontology that makes hierarchical sense of the world, full of inter-relationships that establish context and meaning. In short, a database is needed- one that is dynamically adaptive to allow learning to slice its model of reality into ever finer and more accurate categories.

How does the brain do that? The work of Karl Friston has been revolutionary in this field, though probably not well-enough appreciated and admittedly hard for me and others not practiced in mathematical statistics to understand. A landmark paper is "A theory of cortical responses", from 2005. This argues that the method of "Empirical Bayes" is the key to unlock the nature of our mental learning and processing. Bayesian statistics seems like mere common sense. The basic proposition is that the likelihood of some thing is related to our naive model (hypothesis) of its likelihood arrived at prior to any evidence or experience, combined with evidence expressed in a way that can weight or alter that model. Iterate as needed, and the model should improve with time. What makes this a statistical procedure, rather than simple common sense? If one can express the hypothesis mathematically, and the evidence likewise, in a way that relates to the hypothesis, then the evaluation and the updating from evidence can be done in a mechanical way.

Friston postulates that the brain is such a machine, which studiously models the world, engaging in what statisticians call "expectation maximization", which is to say, progressive improvements in the in detail and accuracy of its model, driven by inputs from sensory and other information. An interesting point is that sensory input functions really as feedback to the model, rather than the model functioning as an evaluator of the inputs. We live in the model, not in our senses. The overall mechanism works assiduously to reduce surprise, which is a measure of how inputs differ from the model. Surprise drives both attention and learning.

Another interesting point is the relationship between inference and learning. The model exists to perform inference- that is the bottom-up process of judging the reality and likely causes of some event based on the internal model, activated by the input-drive attention. We see a ball fall down, and are not surprised because our model is richly outfitted with calculations of gravitation, weight, etc. We infer that it has weight, and no learning is required. But suppose it is a balloon that floats up instead of falling- a novel experience? The cognitive dissonance represents surprise, which prompts higher-level processing and downward, top-down alterations to the model to allow for lighter-than-air weights. Our inferences about the causes may be incorrect. We may resort to superstition rather than physics for the higher-level inference or explanation. But in any case, the possibility of rising balls would be added to our model of reality, making us less surprised in the future.

The brain as a surprise-minimizing machine. Heading into old age, we are surprised by nothing, whether by great accumulated experience or by a closure against new experiences, and thus reach a stable / dead state. 

This brings up the physiology of what is going on in the brain, featuring specialization, integration, and recurrent networks with distinct mechanisms of bottom-up and top-down connection. Each sensory mode has its specialized processing system, with sub-modules, etc. But these only work by working together, both in parallel, cross-checking forms of integration, and by feeding into higher levels that integrate their mini-models (say for visual motion, or color assignment) into more general, global models.

"The cortical infrastructure supporting a single function may involve many specialized areas whose union is mediated by functional integration. Functional specialization and integration are not exclusive; they are complementary. Functional specialization is only meaningful in the context of functional integration and vice versa."

But the real magic happens thanks to the backward connections. Friston highlights a variety of distinctions between the forward and backward (recurrent) connections:

Forward connections serve inference, which is the primary job of the brain most of the time. They are regimented, sparsely connected, topographically organized, (like in the regular striations of the visual system). They are naturally fast, since speed counts most in making inferences. On the molecular level, forward connections use fast voltage-gated receptors, AMPA and GABA.

Backward connections, in contrast, serve learning and top-down modulation/attention. They are slow, since learning does not have to obey the rapid processing of forward signals. They tend to occupy and extend to complimentary layers of the cortex vs the forward connecting cells. They use NMDA receptors, which are roughly 1/10 as fast in response as the receptors use in forward synapses. They are diffuse and highly elaborated in their projections. And they extend widely, not as regimented as the forward connections. This allows lots of different later effects (i.e. error detection) to modulate the inference mechanism. And surprisingly, they far outnumber the forward connections:

"Furthermore, backward connections are more abundant. For example, the ratio of forward efferent connections to backward afferents in the lateral geniculate is about 1 : 10. Another distinction is that backward connections traverse a number of hierarchical levels whereas forward connections are more restricted."

Where does the backward signal come from, in principle? In the brain, error = surprise. Surprise expresses a violation of the expectation of the internal model, and is accommodated by a variety of responses. An emotional response may occur, such as motivation to investigate the problem more deeply. More simply, surprise would induce backward correction in the model that predicted wrongly, whether that is a high-level model of our social trust network, or something at a low level like reaching for a knob and missing it. Infants spend a great deal of time reaching, slowly optimizing their models of their own capabilities and the context of the surrounding world.

"Recognition is simply the process of solving an inverse problem by jointly minimizing prediction error at all levels of the cortical hierarchy. The main point of this article is that evoked cortical responses can be understood as transient expressions of prediction error, which index some recognition process. This perspective accommodates many physiological and behavioural phenomena, for example, extra classical RF [receptive field] effects and repetition suppression in unit recordings, the MMN [mismatch negativity] and P300 in ERPs [event-related potentials], priming and global precedence effects in psychophysics. Critically, many of these emerge from the same basic principles governing inference with hierarchical generative models."

This paper came up due to a citation from current work investigating this model specifically with non-invasive EEG methods. It is clear that the model cited and outlined above is very influential, if not the leading model now of general cognition and brain organization. It also has clear applications to AI, as we develop more sophisticated neural network programs that can categorize and learn, or more adventurously, develop neuromorphic chips that model neurons in a physical rather then abstract basis and show impressive computational and efficiency characteristics.

• Where is the outrage?
• Follow the money.
• And at work as well.
• Is America a full-on gerontocracy?
• Ideology and economics.
• On labor power.
• A more sanguine view of solar energy potential.
• The fascinating mechanics of opioid physiology.

Postmodernism: License to Lie

A continuation of the Enlightenment project turned around to burn it all down, and our political system went along for the ride.

The discontents of modernism are legion. It is soul-less, rational, scientistic, dehumanizing. And the architecture is even worse, exemplified by the glass box skyscraper. Modernism was the stage after the self-satisfied Victorian age, our last unconscious period when Westerners felt confident in our myths, our cultural superiority, and our untroubled right to all the fruits of the Earth. Modernism came in the wake of Nietzsche and World War 1, which left all those certainties in tatters, followed by an even more destructive World War 2. But from America rose a new unbounded ethos of progress through cooperation and science, leading to the UN, the EU, the conquering of air and space, and the comfortable dispensation of the fossil-fueled late Cold War West.

The long-term theme has been increasing consciousness, from the Enlightenment onwards, adopting ever more realistic views of the physical and social world. Art was first to experience this startling realism. Then politics, with the slow destruction of the myth of monarchical and aristocratic superiority. And finally religion, from the work of Nietzsche and Darwin, among many others. Throughout, science has been steadily dis-enchanting the world, removing Earth from the cosmic center, mystical vitalism from the chemistry of life, and God from among our forefathers and mothers. With modernism, we had reached a new level of consciousness. We could look at ourselves as one among many world cultures, accepting "other" forms of religion, art, and world view as good, perhaps even co-equal, with those of the West. Frills and decoration were out, myth was relentlessly exposed, and we sought to plumb the psychological depths as well, exposing our complexes and deep motivations.

Then in 1970's France, the postmodernist school took it up another notch, trying to show that all our remaining certainties were also questionable, and could be deconstructed. Whatever narratives we live by, even the most attenuated reliance on general progress through the evident workings of civic, capitalist, and scientific institutions, were unmasked as just another forum for power politics, patriarchy, and elite control of the society's metanarrative. Build all the skyscrapers and Hubble telescopes you want, it all boils down to Game of Thrones in the end. All narratives were destabilized, and not only was nothing sacred, nothing had meaning at all, since interpretation is an ever-flexible tool that gives authority to the reader/viewer, with little left over for the author (or for "reality"). Anything can be read in innumerable layers, to mean ... practically anything. The narratives we can not help but to live by are all ripe for deconstruction, but then how does reality relate to our (limited) cognition of it? That gets us right back to the foundations of philosophy in the Platonic cave.

This approach clearly follows the modernist and psychoanalytic line of excavating ever deeper into our sources of motivation, meaning, and narrative. Indeed, other disciplines, like anthropology, psychology, and even economics (in its study of institutions) have long preceeded the postmodernists. But one has to ask two big questions. First, is there some limit of analysis beyond which, even if the analysis is valid, human functioning is so destabilized that, for all the intellectual benefits, we end up inert, stripped of larger motivating narratives and reduced to mere units of immediate consumption, mediated by our TV sets and phones? Second, have they gone too far? Is the postmodernist analysis actually valid in all its implications? An excellent article in Areo chews over some of these problems.

Being scientifically and psychoanalytically inclined, I would have to answer no to the first question, and yes to the second. While unproductive over-analysis can lead some people to inertia, any correct analysis in psychological, cultural, or other terms can not help but illuminate the human condition. This is in general a big plus, and not one to be discarded because it is uncomfortable or destabilizing to our customary life and traditions. We dealt with Darwininan evolution, (well, most of us did), and can still reach for the stars. Sources of narrative and motivation are vast and perpetually self-created. Losing the old gods and myths is not a serious problem if we have new and significant tasks to replace them with. For example, nothing could be more dire than global climate heating- it is the central problem of our time, and tackling it would give us collective, indeed eschatological, meaning. What makes this moment particularly painful and fake is not that we lack an animating myth or center, but that we are dithering with regard to the true and monumental tasks at hand, blocked by a corrupt system and various defects of human nature.

The second question more pointed, for if the postmodernist analysis is not generally true, then we hardly have to worry about the first question at all. This is a very tricky area, since much of the postmodernist critique is valid enough. We live by many myths and narratives. But its earthshaking claims to destabilize everything and all other forms of truth are clearly false. Many fields, not just science, have a living commitment to truth that is demonstrably valid, even if the quest is elusive, even quixotic. Take the news media. While the tendency to endless punditry is lamentable, there is a core of factual reporting that is the product of a great deal of worthy dedication and forms a public good. Whatever the biases that go into selecting the targets of reporting, their products, when true, are immune to the postmodern critique. The school board really did fire its superintendent, or put a bond on the next election ballot. The fact that we have a president who fears "perjury traps", labels all truthful reporting about him "fake news", and allies with propaganda outlets like FOX and RT should not put anyone in any doubt that truth, nevertheless, exists.

Why some religious people have cottoned to the postmodern approach is somewhat mysterious and curious, for while postmodernism has mightily attempted to destablize reigning cultural orthodoxies, particularly those of science, it is hardly more kind to clericalism or religion in principle. At best, it may allow that these are at least honest about their (false) mythos/narrative basis, unlike the devious subterfuges by which science channels its bourgeois interests into claims to the really, really true narrative, which thus have posed the more interesting challenge in the postmodern literature. But make no mistake, if religion were the reigning cultural power, the deconstructionists would make mincemeat of it.

What makes Deepak Chopra so laughable?

But postmodernism has nevertheless filtered down from the academy to popular culture, destabilizing verities and authorities. Did they seek to have Republican policians declare that "we make our own reality"? Did they foresee the internet and its ironic capacity, not to make us all Orwellian drones with the same beliefs, but to let us stew voluntarily in propaganda-laced echo chambers, losing touch with reality all the same? At issue is the nature and status of factual authority, which we are so shockingly confronted with in this political moment. Coordinated assaults on our capacity for reason, from the wingnut right and its unhinged media, the new masters of the internet, the Russians, and the lying sleazebag who found his moment amongst the chaos, have posed this problem in the starkest terms. What is truth? Are there facts? What is an authoritative narrative of leadership, of care for the future and the nation? Should public policy be responsive to facts, or to money and nepotism? What is the point of morality in a fully corrupt world? Why is gaslighting a new and trending word?

The postmodernists insisted, as does our current president, that every category and supposed fact is a mask for power. They saw hobgoblins of social construction and violent dominance in the most innocent scientific facts and institutions. Such an attitude might be provocative and occasionally fruitful, but it has been taken way too far, rendering fields most affected (in the humanities) stripped of coherence, let alone authority. Leaving us with a modern art bereft of ideals other than shock, and the most banal literature and identity-based histories. It is also a sort of zero-sum-ism, needlessly oppositional and Manichaean. In their haste to unmask and tear down all idols and intellectual achievements that unify humanity, they have generated a sort of war against all meaning which is deeply anti-human- not just deconstructive, but destructive.

Yes, our narratives are in perpetual conflict. Different religions, political viewpoints, and cultures have distinct narratives and each seeks to win the hearts and minds in order to rule human soceity. The Reformation offers abundant examples of this, as does our current political scene. But at the same time, reality itself forms another, and very influential, locus in this conflict. For all the other narratives claim to be accurate views of reality, whether claiming that god is real, Catholicism is the true church, or that Republicans have a more accurate and effective view of economics and human nature. Each stakes its claims on discernment of how reality works, including the moral and other aspects of what people really want out of their social system. Do they want a king to look up to, or a representative government that may be more moderate and effective?

So narratives are not just thrashing our their conflicts on an entirely archetypal / mythical / power basis, as the postmodernists seem to assume. Rather, they are negotiating views of reality, including moral and social realities, which can be interrogated in large degree by reason generally and science specifically. Creationism and climate change denialism are just the most flagrant examples of narratives that seek social dominance on the backs of religious delusion and/or simple greed. And for all the equivocation of the postmodernists, they can be definitively dismissed given the knowledge we have outside of these or other narrative claims. The growth of mature consciousness means expanding our abilities to judge the reality-claims of narratives in a dispassionate way, considering both physical but also the psycho-social realities we share, and progressively leaving our psychological baggage behind.

• Coal is dead.
• The long road ahead against Alzheimer's. Though that article oversells our ignorance.
• Do shareholders come first, or workers and communities?
• Who is doing the harassing in the Persian Gulf?
• Rachmaninoff 3, after the instructive intro, ~5:30.
• Sanctity of life.
• Endless corruption.
• Better automatic stabilizers?

What Happened to the Monarchs?

Monarch butterflies are in crisis.

Flying over the Midwest, it is easy to see the impact of humans. The land is neatly tiled into monoculture farms, with hardly a wild spot in sight. Unseen is the chemical crusade that has happened over the same time period, making insects and weeds sparse on this land as well. All this has contributed to a phenomenally productive agriculture, making our food with almost factory-like consistency using a variety of high-tech machinery, chemicals, and plenty of CO2 emissions. But each of these assaults on nature has also multiplied the plight of (among many others) the Monarch butterfly, which eats weeds, is an insect, and migrates over astonishing distances in a multigenerational trek to communal wintering sites. While Eastern populations of Monarchs are in decline and in peril, the condition of the separate Western population, which circulates up the Sierra and back down the Pacific coast, is dire, headed towards extinction.

"... the Midwest lost more than 860 million milkweeds between 1999 and 2014, mostly in agricultural fields" -Entomology Today

Monarch butterflies have a curious method of migration. While birds live several years, and thus may commute several times over their lifespan, (for instance from Northern breeding grounds to Carribean or South American wintering sites), Monarch butterflies live only roughly a month. But they also migrate over long distances, either from Mexico up through the Eastern US and Midwest, or from Coastal California across Central California, to the Sierras, then North to Oregon and Washington, then back down in fall. Like birds, the Monarchs use these routes to move through optimal habitats as the Northern Hemisphere goes through its seasons. But the migration must encoded in their genes, not learned from experience or from others, since it takes several generations to make the trek, somewhat like the colonization space ships of science fiction, which would go through many generations to get to, say, Alpha Centauri.

Now a rare sight.

It also means that Monarchs rely on suitable environments (which is to say, the milkweed) every step of the way. And our technologies of weed, insect and physical habitat extermination are making enormous swathes of their routes uninhabitable, not to say lethal. The Western population is down from millions in the 1980's to 30,000 today. This is not sustainable, and likely to drop to zero unless big changes happen to render the landscape less lethal. Thankfully, there are many milkweed species, many of which can grow widely in the region, if allowed to.

But this is just a small example of the harm humans are doing to the natural world. We are a plague, and have initiated a new age in biology- the Anthropocene, complete with our own mass extinction event. While the process is well underway here in California, it is only beginning in regions like the Amazon and Africa, whose human populations are growing steadily and whose natural environments are being decimated and whose wildlife is declining, including being directly killed and eaten. Climate heating will kill off far more species, until we end up in a world of mega-cities separated by monoculture croplands and nature reserves that will be faint shadows of a vanished, and richer, world.

• A study in lying, corruption, debasement, and character.
• And going back in time, ditto.
• The mess Arthur Burns left behind.
• But is the Fed overly skittish now?
• Should we be giving foreign aid to the Targaryens?
• How about we fly less, and let the Monarchs fly more?

Cancel the National Debt

Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders should stand up and say that they will eliminate the national debt.

National debt clocks seem to go in and out of style with the political fortunes of Republicans. When they are in power, the bond vigilantes are at bay, clocks get put away, and tax cuts and wars blow up the deficit with hardly a finger-wag. But when tables turn, watch out! The debt becomes a national emergency, and think of the children, who will have to pay it all back!

After a few cycles of this nonsense, many have realized the mythical nature of the whole construct, first and foremost the school of MMT economics. Conventional conceptions of the debt are significantly out of date. For one thing, no one is going to have to pay this debt back. It is continually rolled over, and if we attempted to pay it back out of a fiscal surpluses, it would be disastrous, contracting the economy for lack of net spending from the government, which is the source of money for net economic expansion. (Ignoring the banking sector for the moment.)

Back when our money was not made and managed by the government, but rather based on some commodity like gold or silver, the Federal government was as constrained as anyone else- to match spending with income. It had two choices to pull money out of the larger economy for its own needs- taxation or borrowing. Taxes tend to be broad-based and quite unpopular. Borrowing, via bonds, (which were, in a way, the original fiat money), on the other hand, targets quite specifically those who have money to spare - the rich - so is politically efficient. But borrowing also indebts the state to the ongoing interest payments, which may temporarily come from further borrowing, but must ultimately come from taxation (or increased inflation, if the government can influence the monetary system and wishes to abuse its credit). Thus we had war bonds during the Civil War and the World Wars of the last century.

A bond, issued 1936

Now we are in a slightly different world, that of fiat money, where the federal government runs the monetary system completely and explicitly, with the power of printing money, but also the duty of controlling inflation. There is no more scarcity of gold, or scarcity of money, for that matter. It is an elastic system, under conscious control. Now the government creates money via its spending, and that money is meant to supply the expansion of the whole system- our economic growth, our hunger for imports and the matching hunger of foreigners for dollars, our savings needs, etc. Yet we still have a statutory requirement to match net spending (over taxation) with bond issuance- thus the growing national debt. (again, ignoring the banking sector for the moment). That statutory requirement is a relic of the old system and should be scrapped.

Not only that, but we should also end the re-issuance of debt, gradually exchanging it, as it comes due, for regular dollars instead. That way, we could save the hundreds of billions of dollars ($389 billion in 2019) we give to rich people and foreign countries in interest payments on their bond holdings. $30 billion alone goes to China, to reward them for the currency manipulation they engaged in back in the 2000's to take our manufacturing jobs. That is quite a deal! In this way, we could retire the national debt, not by paying it down through higher taxes, but simply by converting it to dollars, which we can create with a keystroke, just as we created the bonds in the first place.

The idea that our practice of bond issuance prevents inflation, by draining dollars from the economy, is problematic in terms of scale. Bonds are hardly a frozen form of money. For individual holders, our debt functions as the equivalent of money. They are savers, and holding dollars or bonds makes relatively little difference- they are not going to go on spending binges over the loss of 3% interest. On the other hand, on the macro-economic scale, the swap of dollars for debt would change the complexion of savings, since this rentier class will still seek income. They will seek to invest this money productively, and if safe government bonds are not available, they will tend to invest in the real economy, such as loans, real estate, companies, etc. This may drive some inflation, so we would have to be on our guard. But it would also drive real investment, which would be a good thing, and would drive down interest rates, also a good thing, especially in view of the troublesomely high rate of interest over time recorded by Thomas Piketty. The implementation would be controllable- if inflation appeared as a result, the program could be slowed down or reversed at any time. Perhaps we should start with a mere trillion dollars exchanged per year.

To get a picture of the overall scale, the US has about $100 trillion of overall wealth, of which about 20% is Federal bonds. But about a third of those bonds are held in the government, such as the Social Security accounting fiction of a "trust fund". And as noted above, the Fed owns about 10% of the debt in addition. So the remaining amount is, in the larger scheme of things, not enormous, and while monetizing it will alter investment practices, is unlikely to be catastrophic.

In conventional economic terms, this proposal would dramatically alter the money supply and bond markets, moving the LM curve (in the IS/LM model) right-wards, increasing output, decreasing interest rates, and causing inflation. The Fed spends much of its time managing the Federal bond market, selling and buying bonds in its efforts to control short term interest rates. After the 2008 crisis, the Fed accumulated $2-3 trillion, about a tenth of all bonds outstanding. It was accused of monetizing the debt by buying so much, lowering interest rates and pumping dollars into the system instead. But inflation stayed very low. We are in a somewhat more normal regime now, but over the last decade, the Fed has never attained its inflation target, so in those terms, one can say that, instead of trying to raise interest rates by selling bonds, as they have been doing over the last year, they should just continue monetizing the debt, until it is all gone, then send those bonds to the shredder.

Are there other ways to manage interest rates and inflation? This is where MMT has some problems, and fails to (to my knowledge) truly grapple with control of the monetary system. Suppose the pool of Federal bonds were 1/10 the size it is now or less, which would be much more manageable in fiscal terms. The Fed might own most of them at any one time, but might not have, in its view, the firepower, or the depth of a market to trade in, to affect interest rates across the board. It might need to trade in corporate bonds instead, which might not be the worst thing. Perhaps it should be using other tools, however, as its ultimate aim is to regulate lending and inflation, towards which control of interest rates is only a (blunt) mechanism. It is lending by banks that creates money in the private system, leading to speculative bubbles, inflation, and contractions and depressions. This money is much more labile (in the form of loans/credit that are subject to being paid back or called in, among other risks) than that coming from government spending. Thus the need for close regulation.

In China, for instance, the state owns the big banks, and can direct their lending explicity. No need to mess with the putatively free interest rate market. Similarly, the Fed regulates the banks, and could, for example, raise underwriting standards or capital requirements in boom times, lowering them in slack times. Another approach, of course, is using the government's fiscal policy. By spending more or less, or altering taxation, (such as changing the withholding rates), the Federal government can easily (if such spending alterations are easy) affect the inflation rate, which is after all the point of the interest rate control policy. In this way, interest rates can generally be kept low, bond issuance be ended, and the value of the money be kept stable. Ironically, despite MMT getting the rap of advocating fiscal profligacy, the real consequence of MMT is that the government would have to be even more disciplined and conscious in its monetary policies, (yet also more democratic), than the current system of leaving all the hard choices to a technocratic Fed, while spending more or less blindly, in policy terms (until a crisis hits, and even then, still shooting in the dark).

Getting back the debt reduction plan, would such a program contribute to the global savings glut? Yes, by discontinuing what is clearly the premier safe investment world-wide. But that is just too bad- we will benefit far more by cleaning up our books and saving ourselves the interest being paid out than we lose. At one stroke, we would free our political discourse from this charade of fiscal probity, free our government of the payment of hundreds of billions in interest- an enormous and seemingly endless stream of subsidies to the rich, and increase domestic investment.

• A contrary view on MMT.
• On the history of debt instruments.
• Baltimore- another kind of student loan.
• Impeachment, yes.
• An online ad tax?
• The academic life.. manuscript hostage negotiations.
• Remember when Republicans complained about executive overreach?