Nature and the Corporation

Douglass North on the role of institutions in our society, part 1. "Understanding the process of economic change"

Institutions, in the thinking of this book and its general field of institutional economics, are the rules of the game of life, while people and their organizations are the players. The practice of going to workplaces and being forced to work there for eight hours, and then going home.. that is an institution of modern societies, based partly on unwritten traditions, and partly on explicit rules written in laws, regulations, organizational guidelines, etc.  The fabric of our lives, and particularly the efficiency and success of our economies, depend on the details and quality of institutions, which set the parameters and incentives throughout the system, which the actors then grapple with, trying to either to satisfy them in competition against other actors, or to evade them, or to alter them through legal, polical, or social means. 

For example, North cites other writers who have concluded that one of the fundamental defects of the Muslim world, as it fell behind the Northern Europeans in economic and cultural terms through the Middle Ages, was the complete lack of the cultural institution of the corporation. Muslim commercial law centers around partnerships, typically very small partnerships between an investor and a merchant, which form anew for each trade mission. But until modern times and reforms inspired by the West, there was no legal form for corporations, which are so fundamental to the Western economic model, providing durable legally and financially independent homes for entrepreneurial teamwork and innovation. Corporations obviously tap into natural human tribalism, offering the familiar setting of small group cohesion and competition, and helpfully cross-cutting against other cultural organizations and power centers such as actual clans, tribes, nations, and religious groupings.

This is a very powerful view of how culture and economics interact. Are corporations all good? Obviously not. They are given rules by the culture at large, though traditional practices and by legal structures when those unwritten rules prove insufficient. Child labor, fraud, tax evasion, family-destroying work schedules... the ways corporations have to make money in socially destructive ways, and thus the ways in which they need to be regulated, are endless. And it is our collective view of these harms and our capacity through social and legal structures / sanctions to address them that manifest in the strength and quality of our institutions.

And here is where one looks back in horror at what has happened to our institutional structures over the last few decades. Donald Trump was merely the apotheosis of lawlessness and institutional destruction that has been the program of the Right for decades. It was enunciated most charmingly by Ronald Reagan, (earning him high grades from historians), but he was only repeating the thoughts of intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman who made such persuasive cases for the "freedom" part of free enterprise. I recall especially the spellbinding nature of Friedman's narratives, which contrasted the sclerosis of communist economies with the vibrancy of free markets. Friedman was a hedgehog, advocating one big idea and bulldozing through any nuance or complication. And I regard him as the most influential cultural figure responsible for the general inequality and institutional weakness we find ourselves facing today.

A typical nostrum from Milton Friedman. As though "freedom" was self-explanatory and absolute. Rich people take it to mean something quite different from how others take it, and therein lies the destructive magic of this ideology. 

For he was spinning fairy tales, quite simply. The free market was always good, the government was always bad in his telling. Ham fisted regulation and intrusive economic policy were only one target of attack. Money and inflation was another, and one of the most damaging wedges of this argument. The government is necessarily in charge of the money, by printing it and managing its value through the interest rate, banking regulation, and other mechanisms. But the private sector and general economic conditions are obviously enormous factors as well, creating a complex system of feedbacks and unanticipated events. But Friedman gleefully pinned all the blame for inflation on the government, pronounced a false simplicity in his monetarist program, and used it to further bludgeon the state to get out of the regulatory business. If the government couldn't even get something as simple as the money supply right, how could it possibly have the intellectual wherewithal to regulate the internet, or corporate mergers and concentration, or industrial policy vs other countries? This was the kind of thinking that led to people buying gold, and eventually to the thought that we should get back on the gold standard, one of the greatest lunacies of right-wing politics. (Which Friedman would never have subscribed to, incidentally.)

This intellectual and rhetorical attack, so richly supported and cheered by business interests and the rich, led to the following decades of revolt by the Right against all forms of regulation and enfetterment by the government, to the point now that Republicans speak blithely of defunding the IRS, as if defunding the government and enabling vast tax avoidance consitutes the most natural and virtuous motivation that anyone could imagine. And the gross over-simplifications that Friedman engaged in, his rhetorical excesses, are reflected in more general anti-intellectual trends like the denialism and warfare waged by the right against climate change, among many other topics of urgent and common interest. He, Nobel Prize winner that he was, disastrously debased our intellectual debates on politics and economics. His narrative framing (and that of the whole Chicago school) shaped a generation and more, misleading us into false certainties and terrible policies.

Now, our institutions are in tatters, given that half of our political system is in open warfare against the very idea of productive regulation of economic affairs and a positive role for the state in managing elementary unfairnesses and corruptions that are mounting across our political and economic systems. No wonder that on the world stage, our system is no longer in the vanguard, but is faced with a fundamental challenge coming from states (principally China) whose political systems remain in the driver's seat in managing social institutions, including economic institutions of all kinds, even while harnessing markets in extremely successful ways. 

The question is not whether the government is good or bad, or whether corporations are good or bad. Both institutions have critical and positive roles to play in our prosperity. Both are tools, not ends in themselves. Both need rules to operate effectively- government to be refreshed (via elections, education, research, and new talent) by ever-expanding public perspectives on how society can be improved, and business by an active set of institutions and rules set down by the government to channel all that greed to productive directions instead of the socially destructive directions it inevitably takes when rules are absent. (See Haiti, post-war Iraq, and Afghanistan for examples.) Indeed, it is not going out on a limb to state that business people who spend their time railing against regulations, legal strictures and other institutions designed to make economic markets fair, socially responsible, and productive are not really interested in business at all, but in plunder.

"Because there is a widespread prejudice among many neo-classical economists that simply an absence of government intervention is a sufficient condition for good economic performance in a particular market, it is important to stress that the performance characteristics of any market are a function of the set of constraints imposed by institutions (formal rules- including those by government- informal norms, and the enforcement characteristics) that determine the incentive structure in that market. As noted in the discussion of institutional change in chapter 5, if the incentives reward piracy then that will be the outcome. Any economist who doubts the importance of this observation has only to examine the characteristics of various factor and product markets in Russia in the 1990s to be convinced that it is the incentive structure derived from the institutional framework that is decisive. The rash of entrepreneurial malfeasance in large U.S. corporations in 2001-2 has reflected the evolution of the institutional framework that has altered relative prices to provide incentives for such anti-social behavior."  p.77

 

• Notes on China's economic trajectory. Institutions will be the main determinant.
• Vaccines? Schmaxines!
• Democrats- and the planet- have a problem in coal country.
• What is it with Republicans and basic health & decency?

Sneakey Eating

An evolutionary perspective on overeating syndromes.

Most animals have a simple problem in life- find enough food to live and survive. But social animals, if they are even slightly advanced, share food, and thus alter this basic equation. They have to find ways to store and share food in a way that sustains the group, whether that is starving the old, or feeding the helpless larvae that can not feed themselves. Humans have always faced this dilemma, but don't have the rigid programming that insects do.

Humans can lie, and steal, and then lie some more. It isn't pretty, but sometimes it gets the job done. Humans can regard rules as optional, a flexibility that is a perpetual threat to institutions, norms, cultural patterns, and ultimately to group success. We recently went through an administration that regarded norms as suggestions, laws as annoyances, and then wondered why their behavior attracted so much hatred, and such low historical esteem.

This dynamic comes to mind more concretely in the case of overeating syndromes, which exemplify the conflict between the individual and the group. In a prehistoric setting, food was almost always scarce and precious. In all native cultures there are elaborate practices of public food sharing and eating, which contribute to surveillance by the community of what everyone is eating. Anyone who violates such social structures must have been severely penalized.

Public, communal eating is a fundamental human practice.

Imagine then that someone feels a compulsion to eat more than their share. Such a compulsion would be highly advantageous- if successful- to enable survival when the others in the group might be starving or malnourished. Some extra weight might well mean the difference of making it through the next winter or not. But being caught could dramatically alter the calculus. Primitive societies had harsh punishments for violating critical norms, including ostracism or execution. What then? 

I would suggest that this background sets the stage for overeating syndromes that commonly combine secret eating, often at night, stealth, and stealing. In a world of plenty like today, it is stigmatized and medicalized, and due to the abundance of food, relatively easy to navigate and thus easy to gain weight from. But pre-historically, it would have been far more fraught, and challenging, probably less likely to result in easily observable weight gains. Like other issues in social life, this conflict would take the form of an arms race between cheaters and rule-enforcers. It would be a cognitive battle between effective surveillance and punishment, vs stealth and the intelligence required to not get caught. So one can view it as one impetus among many other evolutionary forces that shaped human intelligence, and in light of its considerable incidence in modern populations, an arms race that was never resolved. Indeed, it is the type of trait that comes under balancing selection, where a high incidence in a population would be self-defeating, while a low incidence yields a much more successful outcome.

• Satire- not so funny when you are the target.
• Making every home a part of the energy solution.
• Constitution? Who ever heard of enforcing it?

How a Nervous System is Maintained

Researchers have mapped how transcriptional programming specifies C. elegans neurons.

Model systems in biology have led the way into knowledge of body development. Fruit flies have been the target of intensive work on the genetic origins of morphogenesis and body plan specification, finding successive action by maternally deposited proteins or mRNAs, gap genes, pair rule genes, and homeotic genes to specify ever finer segments of the body. 

An even simpler model system was later developed, in the tiny worm C. elegans, a nematode, which is smaller, faster-developing than the fruit fly, and also transparent. This organism is attractive for some neurobiology studies, (despite lacking a brain), since its nervous system is both simple and stereotypical- every worm has 302 neurons, of 118 types, laid out in pretty much the same pattern, all easily visible. 

The neurons of C. elegans, in overview. Only the cell body locations are shown, not their various axonal and dendritic processes.

A recent paper therefore looked into the question of how these neurons are specified- how they maintain their identity through the life of the worm, after their original development. The fruit fly genes mentioned above that lay out the body plan are almost all transcription regulators- proteins that regulate the expression of other genes by binding near them and turning on (or off) transcription. A cascade of such regulators allows complex programs of refinement and specification to be carried out, to the point that individual cells are told what they are supposed to be and what features they are supposed to express. These patterns of transcription eventually get cast in stone by the durable repression of unneeded genes, and feedback loops that perpetuate the expression of whatever ones at the end are required to maintain the particular specified type. These are also transcription regulators acting at the end of the line of the developmental pathway, and are called "terminal selectors", since they regulate /select the final sets of genes to be expressed in that cell type which manifest whatever it is supposed to be. 

So a question is- what kind of terminal selectors are active in the stereotyped neurons of C. elegans? Are there just a few for each neuron, used broadly to control all its distinctive genes, or are there many different ones deployed in a complex combinatorial code of transcription regulators to control the final gene expression and the cell type? What they found was that these worms use mostly the former method, and much less the latter. But there can be over 20 such regulators deployed in combination to set up some of these neuronal cells.

For each neuron type (top graph, bottom axis), the associated transcriptional regulators are either common (blue) or rare and particular (green). Common regulators are used to broadly bind to and activate many or most of that neuron's specifically expressed genes. The bottom graph shows the various regulators (bottom axis), and counts how many neuron types they operate in (Y-axis). Some of these regulators are used by many neurons, yet by their cooperation with other regulators can be relied on to specify a particular cell type.

The methods these researchers use are two-fold. One is to sequence all the RNAs of each specific neuron (generally called single cell sequencing). This was used to find all the specifically (differentially) expressed genes of each neuronal cell type, whose upstream regions were then investigated to find the binding sites for all the known transcription regulators of C. elegans. This catalog of target binding sites, genes and their binding regulators could then be compiled to ask whether each cell type had a characteristic pattern ... and generally they do. A second method was to consult a previously developed collection of many "reporter" genes, which had each been fused to bit of DNA encoding a fluorescent protein, which then were screened as being expressed specifically in one or another neuron of C. elegans. This collection of 1000 genes was likewise scanned for its regulatory sites and binding transcription regulators, and the authors found completely concordant results- that here too. the same combinations of regulators were used time and again to activate the specific genes of each neuron. 

Analysis of one gene, and one regulator, through evolutionary time. One key analysis to find regulator sites on a gene was to ask whether its sites were conserved in related species. Here, the ODR-7 DNA-binding regulator has binding sites both upstream and within the olrn-1 gene. Sites are shown in purple, the gene transcription start is shown with the big arrow at top, and the gene's coding exons are shown in black blocks downstream of the start site. The locations of the sites are not well conserved, but their presence is quite well conserved, here on a gene that is expressed in AWS neurons, and necessary for them to occur. 

So development, specification, and maintenance of the body are encoded by the genome largely via a program of regulators that are placed where they are supposed to be, and then successively activate, out of the genome, further parts of the control series in defined regions, and finally regulate the genes required to manifest the body plan in particular places, by expressing (or repressing) genes for the ion channels, cytoskeletal formation, neurotransmitters, and all other specific bric-a-brac of each cell type.

• How farmers think about nematodes.
• But some people love them.
• A strange and sinister religion.
• The Taliban preaches good governance.
• Let's be like Maine.
• RIP Rumsfeld.
• Voting has been a big constitutional issue, with at least five relevant amendments. But now the federal government has no role in enforcing the constitution. Just how many more amendments are needed?
• Covid graph of the week- Where were covid deaths undercounted?

Tuning Into the Brain

Oscillations as a mechanism of binding, routing, and selection of thoughts.

The brain is plastic, always wiring and rewiring its neurons, even generating new neurons in some areas. But this plasticity does not come near the speed and scale needed to manage brain function at the speed of thought. At that perspective and scale, our brains are static lumps, which somehow manage to dynamically assemble thoughts, visions, impressions, actions, and so much more as we go about our frenetic lives. It has gradually become clear that neural oscillations, or electrical brain waves, which are such a prominent feature of active brains, serve centrally to facilitate this dynamic organization, joining up some areas via synchrony for focused communication, while leaving others in the dark- unattended and waiting for their turn in the spotlight. 

The physical anatomy of the brain is obviously critical to organizing all the possible patterns of neural activity, from the most unconscious primary areas of processing and instinct to whatever it is that constitutes consciousness. But that anatomy is relatively static, so a problem is- how do some brain areas take precedence for some thoughts and activities, while others take over during other times? We know that, very roughly, the whole brain tends to be active most of the time, with only slight upticks during intensive processing, as seen in the induced blood flow detected by methods such as fMRI. How are areas needed for some particular thought brought into a dynamic coalition, which is soon after dissolved with the next thought? And how do such coalitions contribute to information flow, and ultimately, thought?

Oscillations seem to provide much of this selectivity, and the last decade of research has brought an increasingly detailed appreciation of its role in particular areas, and of its broad applicability to dynamic selection and binding issues generally. A recent paper describes a bunch of simulations and related analytical work on one aspect of this issue- how oscillations work at a distance, when there is an inevitable lag in communication between two areas. 

Originally, theories of neural oscillation just assumed synchrony and did not bother too much with spatial or time delay separations. Synchrony clearly offers the opportunity of activating one area of the brain based on the activity of a separate driving area. For instance, primary visual areas might synchronize rhythmically with downstream areas and thus drive their processing of a sequence of signals, thus generating higher level activations in turn that ultimately constitute visual consciousness. Adding in spatial considerations increases complexity, since various areas of the brain exist at widely different separations, potentially making a jumble of the original idea. But on the other hand, feedback is a common, even universal, phenomenon in the brain, and requires some amount of delay to make any sense. Feedback needs to be (and anatomically must be) offset in time to avoid instant shut-down or freezing. 

Perhaps one aspect of anatomical development is to tune the brain so that certain coalitions can form with useful sequentially delays, while others can not, setting in the anatomical concrete a certain time-delay characteristic for each anatomically connected group. Indeed, it is known that myelination- the process of white matter development during childhood and early adulthood- speeds up axonal conduction, thus greatly altering the delay characteristics of the brain. Keeping these delays tuned to produce usable coalitions for thought could be a significant hurdle as this development proceeds, and explain some of the deep alterations of cognition that accompany it. The opportunity to assemble more wide-ranging coalitions of entrained neurons is obviously beneficial to complex thought, but just how flexible are such relations? Could the speeding up of one possible coalition destroy a range of others?

The current paper simply makes the case that delays are perfectly conducive to oscillatory entrainment, and also that regions with higher frequencies tend to more effectively drive downstream areas with slightly lower intrinsic frequencies, though other relationships can also exist. Both phenomena contribute to assymmetric information flow, from one area to the next, given oscillatory entrainment. The computer simulations the authors set up were relatively simple- populations of a hundred neurons with some inhibitory and most excitatory, all behaving as closely as possible to natural neurons, modestly inter-connected, with some connections to another second similar population, and each given certain stable or oscillatory inputs. Each population showed a natural oscillation, given normal behavior of neurons (with inhibitory feedback) and a near-white noise input baseline that they injected for each population. On top of that, they injected oscillatory inputs as needed to drive each population's oscillations to perform the experiment, at particular frequencies and phases.

The authors manipulated the phase delay between the two populations (small delta), and also manipulated the frequency mismatch between them (called de-tuning, big delta). This led to a graph like shown above, where each has its own axis and leads to a regimes (red) of high entrainment (B) and information transfer (C). The degree of entrainment is apparent in the graphs in D, taken from the respective black points in B, with the driver population in red, the receiver population in blue, as diagramed in A. In this case, practically all the points are in red zones, and thus show substantial entrainment.

While this simulation method appears quite powerful, the paper was not well-written enough, and the experiments not clear enough, to make larger points out of this work. It is one small piece of a larger movement to pin down the capabilities and exact nature and role of neural oscillations in the brain- a role that has been tantalizing for a century, and is at last starting to be appreciated as central to cognition.

Based on the following articles:

• "Transmission delays and frequency detuning can regulate information flow between brain regions"
• "Rhythms for Cognition: Communication through Coherence"
• "Portraits of communication in neuronal networks"

• Solar is coming to industrial energy.
• Accounting for your life.
• Bill Mitchell on immigration.
• Taliban will be aligned with Pakistan, Russia, Iran.. possibly China.
• Eliminate left turns? It would be a start.
• Loyalty questionaire in Florida.
• A little too late, the lowdown on face masks.

Who Can be a Shaman? Who Must be a Shaman?

Pasaquan and the modern Shamanism of St. EOM, Eddie Owens Martin.

While not religious, I am fascinated by religion. This mode of thought and experience is obviously instinctive, patently irrational, and strenuously defended and rationalized via theology, apologetics, and other formerly respectable modes of thought, not to mention jihad and other sorts of brute power. We are (mostly) in a much better position today than in the old days when every political system had its state religion, and woe betide anyone caught thinking crosswise. Yet in the even earlier days of our species, religion was much more free-form, and while the instinct of religion is/was shared universally, its expression varied widely among far-flung, isolated peoples. We may generally call it shamanism. The first ingredient was an acceptance that some people care a lot more about spiritual matters than others do. Typically this is because they are misfits, maybe mentally disturbed, and have a heightened appreciation of the unreality of this reality that we think inhabit. Mind-altering drugs provide a glimpse of this widened perspective, and naturally comprise a central part of many shamanistic sacraments.

It is striking how the shared appreciation of an alternate reality, whether though official scripture, traditional dogma, or via ecstatic worship practices or mind-altering drugs, contributes to social bonding and personal psychological healing- which are the ultimate positive impacts of religion. Maybe the starkest naturalistic reality, now that we have evolved to appreciate its full horror, is incompatible with psychic health. Maybe an alternate, colorful, humane, and supportive reality is essential, and is particularly binding and healing if everyone shares it, almost regardless of its particular nature or irrationality. But on the other hand, even religions of intolerance, war, human sacrifice and cannibalism have sustained long-lived cultures, so the binding may take precedence over the humane-ness.

Ideologies and value systems are in play as well. Societies run on particular views of what is right, who counts, what is meaningful, etc. While these touch on empirical reality in some respects, their values and social apparatus are relatively untethered, free to valorize some, deprecate others, and place values on obscure things and odd activities. A misfit will be, by definition, more likely to suffer under the ambient ideology and prone to seek an alternative. Whether the shaman supports the current culture or seeks to subvert it, her work is critical in framing a social ideology that most other members of society hardly even know exists, and are not generally capable of shaping or grappling with consciously.

At its best, shamanism provides more than a narrative or theory about the unseen forces that run the world. It also centers the society with a purposeful narrative of its existence and the essential part each member plays in its continuance. It can heal individuals via the power of this social cohesion- as even medical science is beginning to recognize- since even without any objective medicine whatsoever, the rituals of care, support, and confidence are themselves powerful expressions of our social nature and aids to healing.

But what about today? We are heading into a post-religious world, where neither shamanism nor mainline theology rings true, capitalist ideology reigns, and social atomization is in part the result. It was jarring and intriguing to run across an odd TV program about an autodidactic shaman in Georgia, Eddie Owens Martin, who died in 1986. As a gay man in rural Georgia of the early 1900's, he fled to New York and led an underground life, which led to a career in fortune telling. Eventually he inherited a property in Georgia, and moved back on his own terms, using the proceeds from his fortune telling to build a spiritual retreat / theme park, with ornate decoration throughout.

St. EOM painting from Pasaquan

The connection between fortune telling and other facets of free-form shamanism are obvious. Martin, who renamed himself St. EOM, was obviously a charismatic person, and attracted helpers who attended ceremonies and helped with the painting. There was a hair theme, where Martin thought that he received messages from the gods through hair that had to be pointed upward. After he went bald, he resorted to pointing the ends of his extensive beard to the sky in order to maintain this connection. And what about all the symbology? It seems to consist of benevolent faces and highly colorful geometric designs, as are common in other spiritual and ceremonial settings. It looks like an effort to capture positive and healing material from the archetypes, which are partly eternal, and partly influenced by the culture of the day, where multiracial themes of harmony were coming to prominence.

All this reminded me strongly of two other shamans of the day, Carl Jung and Walt Disney. Where Martin was a spontaneous and demotic shaman, Jung come at it from a scholarly, indeed logorrheic perspective, producing book after book of memories, dreams, reflections, and rationalizations by which he straddled the scientific and credulus approaches to spiritualism. Most evocative was his Red Book, which features highly colorful dreamscapes full of pregnant symbols and meaning, harvested from his forays into the inner world of his own fixations and archetypes.

Lastly, Disney obviously shared the fantasy and dream motivations of Martin, though seemingly without much of the spiritual baggage. Disney was also moved in some mysterious way to make these fantasies concrete by creating theme parks where this positive message of colorful suspension of reality was given relentless and popular expression. These are demotic shamanism on a vast scale, drained of any deeper significance other than the lightest symbology that fleetingly speaks to part of us that hopes for an escape from the humdrum and pressing constraints of reality.

• Another healing fantasy in glorious animation- Secret of the Kells.
• Private schools- the real scandal is that they exist at all.
• Slavery.
• Crytocurrencies are a criminal accelerant- and should be banned. Not to mention being an environmental disgrace.

Mitochondria and the Ratchet of Doom

How do mitochondria escape Muller's ratchet, the genetic degradation of non-mating cells?

Muller's ratchet is one of the more profound concepts in genetics and evolution. Mutations build up constantly, and are overwhelmingly detrimental. So a clonal population of cells which simply divide and live out their lives will all face degradation, and no matter how intense the selection, will eventually end up mutated in some essential function or set of functions, and die out. This gives rise to an intense desire for organisms to exchange and recombine genetic information. This shuffling process can, while producing a lot of bad hands, also deal out some genetically good hands, purifying away deleterious mutations and combining beneficial ones.

This is the principle behind the meiotic sex of eukaryotes with large genomes, and also the widespread genetic exchange done by bacterial cells, via conjugation and other means. In this way, bacteria can stave off genetic obsolescence, and also pick up useful tricks like antibiotic resistance. But what about our mitochondria? These are also, in origin and essence, bacterial cells with tiny genomes which are critically essential to our well-being. They are maternally inherited, which means that the mitochondria from sperm cells, which could have provided new genetic diversity, are, without the slightest compunction, thrown away. This seriously limits opportunities for genetic exchange and improvement, for a genome that is roughly 16 thousand bases long and codes for 37 genes, many of which are central to our metabolism.

One solution to the problem has been to move genes to the nucleus. Most bacteria have a few thousand genes, so the 37 of the mitochondrial genome are a small remnant, specialized to keep local regulation intact, while the vast majority of needed proteins are encoded in the nucleus and imported through rather ornate mechanisms to take their places in one of the variety of the organelle's locations- inner matrix, inner membrane, inter-membrane space, or outer membrane.

The more intriguing solution, however, has been to perform constant and intensive quality control (with recombination) on mitochondria via a fission and fusion cycle. It turns out that mitochondria are constantly dividing and re-fusing into large networks in our cells. And there are a lot of them- typically thousands in our cells. Mitochondria are also capable of recombination and gene conversion, where parts of one DNA are over-written by copying another DNA molecule. This allows a modicum of gene shuffling among mitochondria in our cells. 

The fusion and fission cycle of mitochondria, where fissioned mitochondria are subject to evaluation for function, and disposal.

Lastly, there is a tight control process that eliminates poorly functioning mitochondria, called mitophagy. Since mitochondria function like little batteries, their charge state is a fundamental measure of health. A nuclear-encoded protein called PINK1 enters the mitochondria, and if the charge state is poor, it remains on the outer membrane to recruit other proteins, including parkin and ubiquitin, which jointly mark the defective mitochondrion for degradation through mitophagy. That means that it is engulfed in an autophagosome and fused with a lysozome, which are the garbage disposal / recycling centers of the cell, filled with acidic conditions and degradative enzymes.

The key point is that during the fission / fusion cycle of mitochondria, which happens over tens of minutes, the fissioned state allows individual or small numbers of genomes to be evaluated, and if defective, disposed of. Meanwhile, the fused state allows genetic recombination and shuffling, to recreate genetic diversity from the ambient mutation rate. Since mitochondria are the centers of metabolism, especially redox reactions, they are especially prone to high rates of mutation. So this surveillance is particularly essential. If all else fails, the whole cell may be disposed of via apoptosis, which is also quite sensitive to the mitochondrial state.

In oocytes, mitochondria appear to go through a particularly stringent period of fission, allowing a high level of quality control at this key point. Additionally, mitochondria then go through exponential growth and energy generation to make the oocyte, at which point those which more quality control discards the oocytes that are not up to snuff.

All this adds up to a pretty thorough method of purifying selection. Admittedly, little or no genetic material comes from outside the clonal maternal genetic lineage, but mutations are probably common enough that beneficial mutations arise occasionally, and one can imagine that there may be additional levels of selection for more successful mitochondria over less successful ones, in addition to the charge-dependent rough cut made by this mitophagy selection.

As the penetrating reader my guess, parkin is related to Parkinson's disease, as one of its causal genes, when defective. Neurons are particularly prone to mitochondrial dysfunction, due to their sprawled-out geography. The nuclear genes needed for mitochondria are made only in the cell body / nucleus, and their products (either as proteins, or sometimes as mRNAs) have to be ferried out to the axonal and dendritic periphery to supply their targets with new materials. Neurons have very active transport systems to do this, but still it is a significant challenge. Second, the local population of mitochondria in outlying processes of neurons is going to be small, making the fission/fusion cycle much less effective and less likely to eliminate defective genes and individual mitochondria, or make up for their absence if they are eliminated, leading to local energetic crises.

Cross-section of a neuronal synapse, with a sprinkling of mitochondria available locally to power local operations.

Papers reviewed here:

• "Mitochondrial fragmentation drives selective removal of deleterious mtDNA in the germline"
• "Avoiding organelle mutational meltdown across eukaryotes with or without a germline bottleneck"
• "Germline selection shapes human mitochondrial DNA diversity"
• "Mitochondrial Fusion, Fission and Autophagy as a Quality Control Axis: The Bioenergetic View"
• "Optimizing mitochondrial maintenance in extended neuronal projections"

• Get back to work. A special, CEO-sponsored cartoon from Tom Tomorrow.
• They are everywhere.
• Shouldn't taxes be even a little bit fair?
• The economics of shame.

This Starship has Gone off Course

Review of the Star Trek Discovery series.

At risk of outing myself, I do occasionally watch Star Trek franchise material. Their original series was incredibly hokey by today's standards, but contained a beloved kernel of curiosity and adventure, and the franchise later matured into a thoughtful and inspiring series in The Next Generation. The ensuing series, such as Deep Space Nine and Voyager, kept to similar themes, and had fine moments (such as the spiritual environment of Bajor, and its supernatural orbs, within their orb cabinets). The last series of the original franchise, Star Trek Enterprise, was sort of a dull affair, with particularly wooden acting, before it veered, in its last season, into total "war on terrorism" territory with torture and other gratitous violence. My watching of the movies has been spotty, and I won't comment on those, as they are not really at the heart of the franchise, as I see it.

What makes (or made) Star Trek special was its modicum of thoughtfulness and philosophy, in a medium and genre otherwise ridden with thoughtless stereotypes, plots, and action. Its genre originated in the Western, but evolved into something all its own, which now can be endlessly replicated, mocked, and spoofed. While fights, killing, and other elements of typical plots abound, there are also elements of curiosity, scientific pursuit, ethical conundrums, and genuine compassion. It is in some ways a workplace drama, but about people who are all passionate about the work they do, making its world one to look forward to, and its tasks ones of adventure. At its very best, it can interrogate relevant social dilemmas in a way that is distanced enough to be entertaining and novel, while incisive enough to pack a punch.

A lengthy and rich history, but what does the future hold?

The three more recent renditions of Star Trek have included an independent series by Seth McFarlane, (The Orville), and official reboots from Paramount including an animated series (Lower Decks), a Patrick Stewart vehicle (Star Trek: Picard), and its main series, Star Trek: Discovery. The Lower Decks offering has been delightful- a very snappy, funny, and intelligent spoof of the whole Star Trek concept,  (and those who watch it), located on the USS Cerritos, named after perhaps the most uninteresting city in California. Only one season has been put out so far, but it has been superb, and fundamentally consonant with the founding Star Trek ethos.

The Orville series has been perhaps the best of the new bunch, despite not being an official part of the franchise. All the names have been changed- such as a "Planetary Union", in place of the United Federation of Planets. While it was originally conceived as heavy on the humor- some quite juvenile- McFarlane was clearly (and perhaps invountarily) taken with the Star Trek concept, and has progressed, as the episodes went on, to more adventurous and serious plots, ending up with complex time travel and one of the most thrilling episodes of TV I have even experienced (season 2.20, concerning the Kaylons, whose name may derive from the Mary Kay franchise ... who knows?). With the third season, his ambitions may have outstripped his resources, in addition to running into a Covid-induced hiatus. That season may never appear.

Meanwhile, Paramount put most of its effort into the Star Trek: Discovery series. This is set slightly before the original series, and features tremendous production quality, and a typical mixed cast of aliens and ethnicities on the bridge. But something seems to have gotten lost along the way. We are immediately launched into a war with the Klingons, who are now so festooned with makeup that they look like giant toads. Rather than exploring strange new worlds and civilizations, we are cast right into a heart-pounding deathly fight with a baroque enemy, complete with gratuitous torture and operatic pomposity on both sides. It is like we have landed in a Die Hard 2 reboot instead of a Star Trek series. "Discovery", indeed!

One would think that, to an erstwhile fungal researcher, the mycelial spore drive central to the Discovery plots would be a welcome bit of fictional technology. The premise is that an invisible (if sparkly) fungal mycelium pervades the galaxy, allowing suitably tuned neural systems to map it out and then follow its paths by travel that is not warp 5, not warp 10, but instantaneous in time. The crew's first tuned neural system was a humble tardigrade microbe, blown up in the show to monster proportions and strength. Later they develop an interface to a crew member, who sacrifices his sanity to the need for speed. Even given the modest standards of Star Trek tech talk/science-y fiction, all this is absurdly ridiculous. While tardigrades may be able to stand exposure to space, they can hardly live there. Likewise with fungi and their mycelia, (not the same as spores), which need water like anyone else. These technologies are so transparently and carelessly grabbed from decade-old issues of Science News that it is embarrassing. If the writers could not come up with something even remotely plausible, it would have been better to devise a nonsense bit of techtalk, which has a storied history in the franchise.

On the whole, Discovery has been a severe disappointment, at least to someone with minimal tolerance for empty action plots. As of episode 9, I can only watch a few minutes at a time before hitting action-trauma overload. Thankfully, there is streaming. It would be unimaginable to watch this the old-fashioned way, as everyone did who was fortunate enough to see the original series over its first few decades of broadcast and syndication.

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• The biosphere is falling apart.
• Need a solar car port?
• What a course on inequality would look like.

UFOs, God, and the Evidence of Absence

Sometimes, what you can't see isn't really there. And why you may see it anyway requires some deeper consideration.

A recent New Yorker story resurrects the topic of unidentified flying objects. While drawing quite a bit of well-deserved humor from the field, it also teases some putatively serious observations, and notes that the field has gotten some high-level love from politicians like Harry Reed, Ted Stevens, and Marco Rubio. On the whole, it was disappointing to see mostly uncritical treatmtent of this retread story. Are any UFOs actually objects? The answer to that is almost universally no. Almost all turn out to be optical phenomena, which come in a startling variety that leave observers dumbfounded. The rest are mistaken aircraft, test rockets, balloons, and pranks of various sorts. Reports of UFOs have trailed off over the decades, as their cultural weight has diminished, and people's imaginations drift off to other preoccupations. Yet die-hards remain, finding conspiracies, coverups, and compelling evidence. What is one to say?

It is worth taking a big step back and asking why, over all this time, and over all the people who have been looking for clues, either for or against, nothing concrete has been found. There are no space ships, no alien bodies, no extra-terrestrial materials or technologies. There is nothing- nothing whatsoever to show for all the shocking observations, pregnant hints and leading questions. Nothing for all the political pressure and top-secret investigations.

We'd know if they were really coming.

It shouldn't have to be said, but I will say it anyway, that religion has similar evidence behind it. Namely none. For all the heartfelt convictions, the positive thinking, lovely intuitions, and entrenched tradition, the supernatural remains fugative from observation. Is this by definition? Not at all. Plenty of religious claims, and the ones that are most moving and effective in efforts of proselytization, are very this-worldly- the virgin births, the resurrections, the water from wine, the walking on water, the revelations directly from god, etc. 

While formal logic says that lack of evidence is not positive proof of absence, it is evidence for lack of evidence, which says alot about the momentous claims being made, about UFOs, as well as analogous conspiracies and super-powers. It is absurd to seek, after so many UFO sightings have been resolved as oddities of the atmosphere, of optical, even collective, illusion, innocent projects, or even pranks, for the "real" evidence, the true story behind the coverup, etc. It bespeaks an archetypal imagination, and, philosphically, a grasping at straws. 

Lack of evidence is a serious philosophical condition, in areas where evidence should be readily available and has been fervently sought. If aliens were routinely flying through the atmosphere, we have the technology to detect them. We have countless satellites looking down to earth as well as up into the heavens, at incredible resolutions. We are increasingly using radar to detect birds, in their migrating millions. Surely an alien spaceship would show up with little problem. Naturally, the aliens do not want to be detected, and have the technology to hide themselves from view, allowing only odd glimpses during unusual weather. Did I mention grasping at straws?

What was a scientific problem thus becomes, by process of elimination, a psychological problem. Why do alien and all-powerful beings have such a hold on our imaginations? Could it be that the constellation of childhood is phenomenally durable, causing us to assume/imagine parental figures in political, celestial, and philosophical spheres? We are right now falling atavistically into a renewed kingship psychological complexes with authoritarian figures, not only amongst the Republicans in the US, but all across the world from Brazil to India. After a couple of centuries of shaking off such fixations, it is disappointing how durable our imaginative and affiliative psychology is, and how fragile the discipline it takes to recognize that the parents are not out there, in whatever guise or color, and that we are fully responsible for our world.

• Religion and Q.
• More on aerosol spread of SARS-CoV2, with pictures.
• Notes on qualified immunity.

Aisha and Ali

Women's rights and the crackup of Islam.

I am reading the highly interesting book "The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad", by Barnaby Rogerson. It takes a docu-drama and highly hagiographical approach, yet works in a lot of facts as well. It covers one of the most dynamic and transformative periods in world history, when the newly founded religion, Islam, swept out of Medina to defeat and convert its old enemies in Mecca, then progressively the rest of the Arabian peninsula, into the Byzantine stronghold across Syria and the Near East, the Persian empire, and lastly The Byzantine rump state of Egypt and points west. Let no one mistake Islam for a religion of peace. 

Muhammad left no succession plan, and wise heads got together in turn to appoint the first three successors to lead the community, Abu Bakr, Omar, and Uthman. These were each, in their own way, strong and very effective leaders, just the fortune that Islam needed to press its jihad against each of the neighboring empires. Riches started to flow into Medina, and by Uthman's reign, religious restrictions were eased, wealth spread, slaves and concubines proliferated, and an enormous baby boom occurred in the desert. But Uthman had planted the seeds of destruction, by appointing only his relatives to run the provinces- the Umayyads.

Uthman's reign reeked of nepotism, and he ended up assassinated in a revolt by disgruntled provincials, who took up the standard of Ali. Ali was one of Muhammad's earliest and closest converts, a son in law, war hero, and in personal and thelogical terms, an obvious choice as successor (or Caliph). Ali was acclaimed as Caliph right after the assassination, thus gaining the immediate enmity of all the Umayyads. And there were other problems, which had clearly led the earlier meetings of the companions of the prophet to choose other successors. First, Ali was not an effective leader. A true believer, yes, but starry-eyed, unrealistic, and unskilled in the tribal politics that underlay the new empire and faith. 

Aisha, on her camel, directing the battle against Ali, near  Basra. Turkish depiction, 16th century.

Second, Aisha loathed him. Betrothed to Muhammad at age 6, married at 9, Aisha was his favorite wife, of a stable that grew eventually to 12. Aisha remains a sort of Mary figure in Islam, and was granted a higher pension than any other figure after Muhammad's death, in recognition of her special position. She had once gotten into hot water after being left behind by a caravan, and was brought back to camp by a handsome soldier the next day. Tongues wagged, and eventually the gossip got so bad that Muhammad conjured a revelation from god absolving Aisha of any blame, and bringing heavy punishments on her accusers. What was Ali's role in all this? He had casually advised Muhammad that wives were cheap, and he should just divorce the inconvenient Aisha and be done with it. 

Now, when Ali needed help in his new role as Caliph, Aisha remembered, and whipped up a couple of Muhammad's companions into opposition, and led them personally across the desert to Basra, and into battle with Ali, the battle of the camel, which camel was Aisha's command post. Aisha lost, was personally wounded, and went into a life of retirement in Medina under Ali's protection, helping compile hidiths, providing recollections of the old days, and running a school for women. But the war against Ali went on from this fateful spark, and he gradually lost support to the wilier Umayyads. Thus, Aisha stands as a pivotal figure in Islam and world history, responsible in part for the disastrous Sunni-Shia split, but also a clear standard bearer for women's rights within the world of Islam, an aspect that has clearly been in occultation for some time, especially in what are ironically regarded as the more fundamentalist precincts of the faith.

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• Lies are a feature, not a bug, of sociopathy.
• We have not been serious about contact tracing in the US.
• Darwin- on target again.
• As if shipping weren't bad enough.

Reach Out and Touch Some Gene

How activation of RNA transcription works.

One of the great themes of molecular biology that was established quite early was the notion of flexible regulation over gene expression. Only eight years after the discovery of the structure of DNA, and contemporaneous with the discovery of the genetic code that it harbors, Jacob and Monod proposed the operon hypothesis, whereby proteins responsive to outside conditions or other important circumstances (in their case, a protein that bound the nutrient lactose) control the mechanism of transcription of the RNA message from the DNA genome. Jacob and Monod dealt with a repressor, (called lac), which sits on a gene that encodes various lactose import and metabolic proteins. When lactose binds, this protein detaches from the DNA and releases transcriptional repression, allowing the regular apparatus to bind and start mRNA production.

This focus on repressors misled the field for a little while, since it turns out that there are activators as well, in bacteria as well as very abundantly in eukaryotes. New mechanisms of transcriptional repression and activation keep being found, but the main themes have become reasonably settled. Humans encode an estimated 1500 proteins that bind DNA at specific sites and regulate transcription. Add to that all the other apparatus of generic transcription, chromatin management, and indirect regulators, and easily an eighth of our genome functions in transcriptional regulation, which is the dominant mode (though far from the only one) of distinguishing cell types, tissues, and developmental states from each other, responding to stresses and hormones, and generally managing the dynamic internal diversity that comes with being a multicellular organism.

Historically, similar realizations were being made on the genetic side, for instance when Edward Lewis studied a large developmental locus of Drosophila which he called the ultrabithorax complex. Rearrangements and mutations in this region caused numerous transformations of body parts, with such fine gradations, complex patterns, and wide-ranging effects that he concluded that these loci encode regulators of other genes, and that the locus itself was revealing further complexities of the regulation of these regulators. This work began to be published in the fifites, and onwards through the seventies.

One particular focus of studies of transcription over the last few decades has been how activation works. The 1970s saw a dawning realization that many regulators, especially in eukaryotes, activate transcription rather than repressing it, and do so in a synergistic way from modular cassettes of DNA binding sites (called enhancers) that could be tens of thousands of basepairs from the gene being regulated. This led to a looping model, where enhancers bind a mix of proteins that may be specific to some developmental event or stage, and which may comprise both activators and repressors. This DNA-bound complex of proteins then loop around the intervening DNA to help assemble the generic transcription machinery at the start site of the gene. If the activators outweigh the repressors, (in a fashion that is not at all systematic or rule-based, but is graded in its activity, and still not fully understood), then that machinery fires off, polymerizing its way down the gene, extruding the mRNA message as it goes.

But what is the nature of this touching interaction? Many "activation domains" have been isolated, and there hasn't been a very informative theme to emerge from these studies, at least no universal protein sequence pattern. Indeed such domains tend to be unstructured and poorly conserved, with hints of negative charge and hydrophobic character- not much to go on. On the receiving side, among a plethora of studies of the core transcriptional apparatus, a dedicated complex called "mediator" was found to be a central receiver of activating interactions. Since it has over two dozen components, it explains to some degree the lack of uniformity among the activating protein domains reaching from enhancers. 

A recent paper wraps up some of this story by characterizing activating domains in rather thorough fashion. Most interactions in the cell, such as those between DNA-binding proteins and their sites on DNA, are very specific and detailed lock-and-key interactions that make use of steric and electrostatic complementarity. But the activation domain interaction is more of a velcro-like affair, where a broad surface of hydrophobic amino acid side chains, supplemented by a fringe of basic amino acids, binds activation domains that are, as mentioned above, characterized as largely hydrophobic, unstructured, and peppered with acidic residues. The principal target (75% of the time) of all these activation domains is one protein, mediator MED15 (also called GAL11), which has four receiving domains, though other targets exist. This all means that activation can add up synergistically- the more activators are available, the more can bind, and the more strongly bound the whole complex is. It is the perfect system to accomplish graded, sensitive adjustments of activation from modular sets of activators that vary over developmental as well as evolutionary time.

Simple model of the looping interaction from upstream locations (can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of base pairs away) to mediator proteins that interact with "activation domains", here "TAD" on DNA binding proteins. One example of an activating domain is shown, (B), which adopts a helical conformation to expose the hydrophobic residues on one face, (yellow), fringed by acidic (blue, E, but also basic Q residues). The next steps then clear nucleosomes and assemble the polymerase complex at the transcription start.

These researchers used yeast cells to comprehensively find all available activation domains from all plausible DNA-binding proteins (164 in this smaller genome). They tested a tedious series of 53 amino acid-long pieces from these proteins to find specifically active protein segments, and then put them through empirical tests and computer comparisons, ultimately developing a neural network model of what makes a successful activation domain. While they did not find anything unprecedented, they characterized what they found with much greater thoroughness, and then docked it in structural terms with the other half of the interaction, the protein mediator 15

This shows two of the four domains on GAL11 which recieves the binding of activator domains. The colored dots indicate where specific amino acids of transcriptional activator domains dock, computationally. Blue is the charged aspartic acid, docking with positively charged target sites, while yellow and red are the hydrophobic phenylalanine and leucine, respectively. The point is that the locations form a diverse cloud, not fitting specifically into any particular matching structures, and also that the interface is relatively flat, ready to accommodate a similarly flat and variable- possibly even unstructured- activating domain.

This shows two of the four domains on GAL11 which recieves the binding of activator domains. The colored dots indicate where specific amino acids of transcriptional activator domains dock, computationally. Blue is the charged aspartic acid, docking with positively charged target sites, while yellow and red are the hydrophobic phenylalanine and leucine, respectively. The point is that the locations form a diverse cloud, not fitting specifically into any particular matching structures, and also that the interface is relatively flat, ready to accommodate a similarly flat and variable- possibly even unstructured- activating domain.

What was particularly powerful was this group's computer algorithm that was able to find other activation domains, thoughout the human genome, with an accuracy of >80%. This is valuable both as a way to better characterize our genomes and biology, and also to demonstrate a more thorough understanding of how these domains work. Once the GAL11 protein is anchored to an enhancer or set of enhancers via the activating interactions, it (as part of a very large complex of its own- over 20 proteins) loops over to the transcription start site, where it cooperates with other proteins that are able to open up the local nucleosomes and other debris, and attract or activate an RNA polymerase, including extensive phosphorylation of the polymerase's tail. This prompts release of the initiating polymerase from the start site and disassembly of the initiating mediator+other proteins complex, to go off and activate some other gene elsewhere.

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• Herd-immunity and eradication of Covid? Highly unlikely.

Where Does Surplus Value / Profit Come From in Capitalism?

Marxists say it is stolen from the worker. Capitalists say it comes from risk-taking and managerial work. Who is really doing the work?

One of the pillars of Marxism is that capitalists steal labor from workers. All profits come from excess labor done by workers by the sweat of their brow, which capitalists, through various nafarious means, appropriate for themselves. The workday, for instance, is an artificial construct. What if all the necessary work could be done in three hours? Well, the labor agreement means that the employer has the right to eight. Therefore, employers extract as much value as possible from that time regardless was really needed to fulfill the actual job- value that ends up as profit in the pockets of owners, who do no work at all.

On the opposite side, Chicago school economists hold to a theory of marginal value, where every factor in production is fairly paid for its individual contribution, through the magic of the various markets- commodity, labor, financial, etc.- that they come from. Each of these markets is assumed to be efficient, thus rendering each input to production fairly bid for its contribution, and leading also to a dynamic re-ordering of production systems when conditions change, such as when some inputs become scarce (and their price goes up), or new technologies expand the availability of other inputs, like, say, computation power.

It should be obvious that each of these theories is a fairy tale, (a panglossian one in the neoclassical case), heavily motivated by ideology, while carrying grains of truth. Labor markets are not efficient at all, and businesses work night and day to keep them that way. At the same time, businesses capture profits from countless other streams than the exploited labor of their workers. And in fact, the whole purpose of business is to exploit miss-priced market opportunities- otherwise profit could not exist.

A recent pair of posts on Bill Mitchell's blog delved into the Cambridge controversy- an economist's spat of the early 1960's which was formative in left-wing economics. Many tangential issues came up, such as whether economic growth is more demand-limited or supply limited. But it also dealt with issues of the value of capital, the source of profits, and the accuracy of marginal value theory. To summarize rather brutally, left-wing economists from Cambridge, England argued that business profits were not market-based, but based on social and power relations, cultural tradition, and many other factors besides the markets. Economists from Cambridge, Massachusetts (MIT) argued a classical theory that profits were based in marginal theory on all the market ingredients, and particularly could be approximated by the current interest rate, representing the default alternative to business investment- that is, the marginal value of capital.

The result of the controversy was that the British school successfully pointed out some flaws in the American analysis, which the Americans admitted, to the effect that the general profit rate does not always follow capital intensity, and nor does the individual firm's investment schedule necessarily follow the logic of interest rate-driven margins either. From this molehill, the left made a triumphant mountain, while the mainstream regarded it as a minor hiccup from their ever-more baroque modeling of perfect markets and ideal economies.

Joan Robinson, principal proponent of the Cambridge England end of the Cambridge controversies.

All that said, it is worth being more specific about where profit comes from, and here I confess to going off the reservation of economic convention. While stealing extra labor is surely one of the time-honored methods of making a profit, it is far from the only way. Indeed, businesses can be seen as miners, always on the hunt for those special gems in the environment that cost less than they should, or can be sold for more than they cost. And the opportunities of this sort are endless in variety and scale. 

• difference between supply and demand
• difference between efficient producers and inefficient
• difference between using family members and paying workers from the labor market
• difference between dumping toxic waste and disposing it properly
• difference between hiring an amoral accountant and a lawful one
• difference between buying lower grade inputs for manufacturing
• difference between lying to customers, or not
• difference between running marketing campaigns, or not
• difference between paying taxes, or not paying taxes
• difference between suing competitors successfully, or not
• difference between buying competitors or competing with them
• difference between doing research to find new technologies, or not spending that money, or stealing that technology
• difference between lobbying the government successfully to make protective laws, or not

The scope for finding  money and making profit goes far, far beyond the conventional notion of arbitrage between capital goods and interest rates. Labor is also only part of the picture. Being a typically large part of most company's costs, its treatment and mistreatment is, however, an endlessly fruitful area for losses and gains, not to mention wider social tension. Money and profit can be found under any number of rocks, which is where the mantra of a "business model" comes from. Everyone and every business has some angle by which they make a living.

Are these gems of profit fairly priced in their factor markets? Don't be ridiculous. A coal company only makes money because coal is free. The earth makes no contracts, and nor does the air for the pollution sent up by the power plant that burns the coal. Turning free things, like enslaved or cowed labor, or personal data, or natural resources, or computer power, or shady accounting, or corrupt laws, into money, is the essence of "business models". Finding a way around markets, by collusion, by substitution, by doing without, by corruption, even by clever new technologies, are a business person's top priorities. So not only are markets, when they are used, hardly "fair" in any financial or social sense, but they do not begin to address all the sources of business profit or return to capital.

We can grant that most of this work of finding profitable gems is done by the capitalist or her managerial minions, thus should be accounted to the returns of capital, not to wages stolen from workers. Only in the classical mass industrial enterprise where the raw material costs are negligible and labor is the overwhelming factor would these converge into the same thing as envisioned by Marx. (Though the modern fast food industry, and gig "economy" come to mind as well.) Some of these gems can be valued financially, and can be regarded as capital, obtained via savings and investment and even competitively priced in a marginal accounting. But many cost nothing, and characterize the pursuit of business as more than a dry exercise in accountancy or economics, but rather as a cultural mode, descended from a long tradition of opportunistic ownership / exploitation / employment of others, of technological innovation, trade, and plunder.

Not to put a fine point on it, business is about greed, and in its natural state reverts to rapine and pillage. The Vikings were consummate businessmen, converting earnings into capital- long-boats and other weapons-, which were the backbone of their centuries of pillage all over coastal Northern Europe. Today, we can see a similar process in Afghanistan. The Taliban leverages ruthless terror into power., plundering as it goes along. They can then tell everyone how to live, collect the taxes, and run their many businesses, corrupt or not. 

Whether their state is "business-friendly", their example points to the intertwined nature of state systems and business systems of exploitation. States set the rules, in the ideal case driving business from brutal mafia and gang activities, which are generally socially destructive, if not entirely zero-sum, towards level and transparent playing fields that are at least somewhat constructive, pulling their profits from the mute vaults of nature and its resources instead of from social oppression. But all this depends on the wisdom and foresight of the state. Many "business model" gems mentioned above involve skirting the law, or engaging in activities the law has not even (or yet) contemplated, to make a buck. There is a constant arms race going on, between the "innovation" of private greed, and the capacity of the state to conceptualize, measure, and legislate against new areas of long-term harm. When the business class and Republicans bleat about taxes and "freedom", they (and their pet economists) are explicitly taking one side of this conflict, the side of irresponsible regression to unregulated, irresponsible, and destructive styles of "business". 

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• What's happening in the lumber business.
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They Thought They Were James Bond

Review of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA.

Why do we still have the CIA? Its track record is atrocious on both operational and moral grounds, and much of its role has been assumed by the NSA and by military intelligence. It is fundamentally contrary in principle to everything the US stands for, making its reputation, such as it is, damaging abroad, and making recruitment at home excruciatingly difficult. It is a testament, in the end, to bureaucratic inertia and its own skills in backroom politics and public relations that it survives at all.

Headquarters of a bloated bureaucracy

Tim Weiner tells a totally biased history of the CIA, proving a truism of intelligence that everything bad ends up on the front page and everything good remains under wraps. This book covers every disastrous escapade from the exploding cigars sent to Fidel Castro to the torture of prisoners in a farflung network of black prisons and those of our "allies" during the "war on terror". What is even worse, however, is how its sterling successes, like its fomented coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, or the arming of Pakistani proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war, turned out, in the end, even more disastrous than its front-page disasters. The Bay of Pigs made the US a laughing stock. But the melt-down of Iranian democracy haunts us and the rest of the Middle East, even the world, to this day.

The CIA has routinely lied to congress and to the president. It has, at other times, lied to the entire nation and world on behalf of the president, such as during the runup to the Iraq war. Its daily brief is notoriously bereft of deep analysis, and its ranks notoriously short of foreign language and cultural skills. 

Towards the end of the book, even while recounting a rising tide of mediocrity and error, Weiner oddly throws in repeated denunciations, evidently drawn from his stable of CIA veteran interviewees, of the underfunding and underappreciation of the CIA over recent decades. All in all, it is a difficult book (and situation) to make sense of. Yet it is clear that the CIA is a disaster zone, and we need to think carefully about how America's intelligence community should operate on a restructured basis.

One thing to note is that the US is simply not adapted, culturally, to run a great intelligence apparatus, as, say, Russia is with its KGB/FSB/SVR/GU. We are an open society with a well-founded dislike of deceit, and are not skilled at it. We also are a lawful society, unwilling to instill the kind of fear / terror that it takes to staff and run such shady operations. Aldrich Ames, for example, is enjoying a pleasant retirement at a medium-security prison in Terre Haute. Jonathan Pollard is now living a heroic retirement in Israel.

So, maybe we need some of the functions of the current CIA. But they should be made as compact as possible, not subsumed in the current bureaucratic dinosaur. The main function it does not need is the gathering of mundane foreign news via newspapers, low-level contacts, and fake visa officers, to create master "intelligence estimates". All that can and should be done by the State Department. Indeed, such functions should be increased with the addition of open person-on-the street contacts all over the world. We are frequently blind-sided by developments that intelligence agencies fail to see based on their derring-do, tradecraft, and focus in the highest echelons, and which normal people in that other society can easily see coming. These functions may even be replicated into red-team/blue-team competitions, with retrospective evaluations carried out to grow successful teams. The understanding of foreign cultures is a difficult task, and putting it into the hands of a white-bread secretive bureaucracy has not been fruitful. 

What would then happen to all the under-cover intelligence that we gather, mostly via the NSA and the satellite services of the NRO? These have been independent of the CIA for a long time. The CIA has not been "central" for decades. So we should dispense with the charade of special knowledge and integrated deep analysis, leaving that to the State department and perhaps the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA should be confined to espionage and covert operation in a focused way on current and future crises. It should not be meddling in Central American countries, running its own private foreign policy. It should not be trying to span the world with agents all over the place. It should not be trying to carve out bureaucratic slices from the NSA and other agencies with better track records.

Whether the CIA can even be successful in such a truncated remit is highly questionable, given its history. But at least it can then be judged more accurately, without all the distractions of routine newspaper reading, world-wide reporting, etc. It should stand or fall in whether it can supply high-level intelligence from our major adversaries- China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, and North Korea, in any way beyond our technical resources. And naturally, it goes without saying that its covert operations need to be kept on a tighter leash, run not only by the president, but put on specific timelines of reporting to the NSC (cleared in advance) and select congressional oversight bodies (reported within thirty days). Malfeasance, either in reporting or in execution, would result in consequences such that the CIA fires poorly performing personnel, and keeps only a select and small cadre, perhaps in competing teams.

• Ministry of Love, in Eastasia.
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• Big soda- lethal and corrupt.
• The joy of piano.