Antarctica- when does it melt?

The short answer: at 1000 ppm CO2.

Global warming has many consequences, most far more momentous for other organisms than ourselves. Whole ecosystems will die and regress to more primitive networks and members. But real estate agents have cause for concern as well, as sea levels rise and innundate low-lying areas. When and how high?

Sea levels have already risen ~20 cm over the last century. But far more is coming, as CO2 levels continue to rise along what seems to be a "business as usual" trajectory. The IPCC has offered various optimistic scenarios of international cooperation which have all come to naught. Coal is being burned at record rates. The critical graph is readings of atmospheric CO2, courtesy of Wikipedia:

From a pre-industrial level of ~285 ppm, already high by the standards of the last few hundred thousand years of the ice ages, we have broken through to almost 400 ppm. (ppm is parts per million, or 0.0001%, so the current percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 0.04%).

The atmosphere weighs about 5E18 kg, so each 0.01% or 100 ppm is about 5E14 kg, equivalent, in terms of wood, to 3.1E14 kg, which in terms of average forest density (~2400 kg per 100 sq m forest) corresponds to about 13 million sq kilometers of forest.

The land area of Earth is ten times that amount, which I hope offers some useful scale to the problem. About half our emissions are taken up annually by the oceans and forests, so the true scope is twice that size.

At any rate, where are we going? The IPCC graphs indicate that, barring action and assuming that CO2 emissions in 2050 are roughly double what they are now (scenario gray / VI), we would get to roughly 1000 ppm around 2100.

Click to see full size. The main point is the choice of remediation scenarios that get us (right graph) to various ultimate atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Brown and gray are the business as usual scenarios that we are currently following. 

The prospects of serious sea level rise come from the various frozen forms of water stored around the world. The IPCC consensus has sea levels rising only about 70 cm by 2100, but to me the dangers seem far more severe. To learn what a full melting scenario would mean, the USGS helpfully supplies the details:

• Greenland: 7m rise
• Antarctica west ice sheet- 8m
• Antarctica, rest-    65m
• Other glaciers, etc: 0.5m
• Thermal expansion- 1m

            Sum = 80 meters, or 262 feet.

So if everything were to melt, we would be in serious trouble. Whole states would practically disappear. This is quite aside from the many other brutal effects of such climate change all over the biosphere.

"A sea-level rise of 10 meters would flood about 25 percent of the U.S. population" 

Here is where a recent paper comes in, analyzing how Antarctica got so cold and snowy in the first place. We know that Antarctica iced over around 34 million years ago, but the precipitating circumstances (ouch!) have been in some dispute. Specifically, it is difficult to accurately estimate the atmospheric CO2 concentration from various fossil / chemical / geological traces. These authors focus mostly on better ways to deduce the CO2 record around this time, refining an estimate which indicates that atmospheric CO2 decline was the central driver of this process, and that falling below about 1000 ppm was the critical event.

This is the main graph, showing their inferred CO2 levels (colored circles) through the time at issue. The inset shows finer detail. Note that time goes backwards in the reverse direction, from recent to ancient. Obviously there is a noticeable decline around the time of Antarctic glaciation, and low atmospheric CO2 persists thereafter, lowering further (off the graph) going into our more recent epoch of ice ages. The gray lines are data from others, showing inferred CO2 levels from other analyses (∂18Oxygen in organic sediments, rather than the carbon isotope analysis the authors here focused on). The latter is more dramatic, but generally on the same trend.

Incidentally, Antarctica was pretty much in its current tectonic position by this time in Earth history. All this adds up to strong historical case that 1000 ppm CO2 is a plausible breakeven point for Antarctic melting. Such melting wouldn't happen overnight- it may take centuries, depending on how far over 1000 ppm CO2 we go. But clearly, among many other problems we are bequething to posterity is the likelihood that, if we continue along the business as usual trajectory, doing nothing about fossil fuel use, we will end up in hot water.

• "The global direct subsidy for fossil fuels is around ten times the subsidy for renewables."
• Some interesting notes on Milton Friedman and MMT economics.
• Moyers on inequality. The "economy" is not a natural phenomenon- it is a political process and result.
• Dodd: I won't be lobbying. ... How dare they use their freedom!
• Who takes the biggest risks? Workers do.
• Bain, at the public teat.
• What's the deal with SOPA, PIPA, and the internet blackout?
• Long view of the shortage of public goods.
• Let's steal a few things from religion!
• God makes the US exceptional, says Callista.
• Economic quote: Salon on debt...

"The speculative bubble happened for many reasons. The most important reason, we think, is that most Americans weren’t making as much money. Median wages stagnated. People couldn’t borrow to invest in the stock market, but they could borrow money from a bank very easily to buy a house. People thought investing in the housing market gave them leverage to make money quickly."

Elect Gekko

Mitt Romney brings a campaign of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

The Republicans have a problem on their hands. After a marathon of more or less collegial debates, and on the verge of wrapping up their process and annointing their nominee prior to actual voting, it starts to become apparent that the one candidate who is not certifiably crazy, and has bought his way to the top in best Republican fashion, might not be the right horse after all.

The Occupy movement is in hibernation, but its memes have succeeded in turning the tea-party tide. The 1%, the 99%, "Occupy", and pejorative "Wall Street", have become guideposts in our discourse. Slowly the GOP is waking up to the fact that while being the party of the 1% is one thing, having a candidate and leader who is the perfect embodiment of 1%-ism is something quite different. Romney is that candidate, and may face an even worse election day than John McCain did four years ago.

Romney is of the 1%, is funded by the 1%, supports the 1%. He is using his money to buy endorsements, bury his opponents, and take small states like Iowa by storm. But money can't buy the general election, at least not yet (not when the other side is another well-funded front for the 1%, more or less).

At any rate, Romney's story may just be a little too brazen even for our jaded and corrupt age. His tax plan raises taxes on the poor and lowers them for the rich. This after several long decades of rising income and wealth inequality that have eaten into the very fabric of our country, and which Romney himself did a great deal to advance.

Much of his work at Bain was dedicated to "aligning" the interests of company executives with those of shareholders, and away from those of workers, with the result that executives, him included, made gobs of money while workers were shown the door, had benefits reduced, pensions taken away, and their companies bankrupted. 22% of companies he touched ended up in bankruptcy, but not before debt was taken on and enormous bonuses paid out. Much of this virtuous alignment had to do with high-risk leveraging, executive stock "participation", and a consequent focus on the shortest-term results. What has it left us with?

Economic efficiency is not always a bad thing, and Romney had every right to be a vulture / arbitrageur in the system. But making this out to be some kind of virtue and model for presidential leadership seems a little hard to swallow, even for his erstwhile capitalist-touting GOP opponents. John Stewart jokes that they suddenly see themselves as the 99% ... of the 1%. The list of Romney's targets and deals at Bain makes dreary reading- sundry consumer retailers and low-tech manufacturers whose innovations and efficiencies lie in reading spreadsheets, firing workers, offshoring, and putting slightly less ruthless retailers out of business. Sure, if we need a new Dunkin Doughnuts CEO, Romney might be the guy. But president?

Mammon plays a leading role in Romney's campaign as well. Who supports him? The rich, of course, for the most virtuous of reasons! So not only does he have his own fortune to run on, but as a tailor-made, say-anything representative of the plutocracy, money comes his way like manna, ready to buy endorsements, ads, and votes. His lack of a center is apparent in his spontaneous remarks, and also came out in his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts. His ambition was to solve problems, and he did a great job with the univeral health care program, as he had with the Salt Lake Olympics previously. But who knows what "efficiencies" and problems he will latch onto on the national stage? Everything we hear is cant and regressiveness.

It reminds me of another expert technocrat, doctrinaire capitalist, economic "modernizer", administrative wizard, and all-around rich guy in American history- Herbert Hoover.

• Republicans become socialists- horrors!
• Restructuring the US, Gekko-style. Sell off Alaska!
• Lawrence Krauss gives a rather funny physics talk.
• Our new chief of staff: "Deregulation had nothing to do with the crisis."
• Haiti- not doing too well.
• Prospects for reducing fuel use in transportation ... taxes are required.
• "Necessitous men are not free men."
• Economics note of the week: 

Not actually a quote, since Bill Mitchell had no concise bon mot to offer. But he describes the perverse process by which neoliberal economics looked at lengthening unemployment periods (longer time taken to find a job) in recent decades after the Keynesian heyday of quasi-full employment, and concluded that workers were lazing about and decided to "prefer" jobless benefits to working. These economists & politicians then dedicated themselves to cutting unemployment and other welfare benefits to "encourage" job search.  

Obviously, however, the data said something quite different, which is that along with the increasing specialization of work, which makes job matching increasingly difficult, (i.e. friction in the labor market), the overall higher unemployment rates made employers more choosy, allowed them to cut worker pay and benefits at the same time that unemployment benefits were cut, leading to overall lowering of demand, made up temporarily by consumer and real estate debt. At any rate, prodding more people to look for work via improverishment when no more work is offered can hardly solve the employment problem. But it does destroy people's lives and impair overall prosperity.

Thomas Paine, tea-partier, ur-blogger, socialist

What would he write now?

Edmund Burke wrote a famous attack on the French revolution. While he thought King George's "American war" was unwise, he defended monarchy and all the peculiarities of the English government against the winds of rationalism and popular revolution blowing over the Channel (and from the colonies). Much of his vitriol was lent by the influx of French nobility who successfully stoked the fires of royalist counter-revolution throughout Europe. The later horrors of the French revolution certainly justified some of Burke's critique. And many aspects of his conservatism stand the test of time, such as the basic principle that measured reform (or even stasis) is often preferable to sudden revolution, out of humility before the many unknowns inherent in tinkering with a functioning social organism.

Yet the reply he got from Thomas Paine attained greater fame and influence. Paine's Rights of Man pursues multiple themes, including ridiculing Burke, defending the French revolution in rather glowing terms, (before the terror got underway), fomenting anti-tax revolt in Britain, and even proposing a comprehensive system of welfare and good works by an enlightened British government, using all the revenue left over once it had defunded the royal court.

Paine's surest avenue of attack is on Burke's defense of the English "constitutional" monarchy. In contrast to France, which had just written itself a constitution, Britain had none and still has none. Paine goes to great lengths to explain the difference between a proper constitution that explicitly sits above and controls the rest of the political system, and the regular laws and indeed unwritten customs & practices which Britain relies on to perpetuate its political system. Obviously what Burke meant as "constitutional" was the legal controls on the monarchy that had grown into the parliamentary system and continue to this day to progressively neuter the royal family. Especially Coke's Petition of Right. But without a formal consitution, it is hard to defend a "constitutional" monarchy.

More damning were Paine's various witticisms about royal government:

"Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdom, it is must necessarily follow that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary; and on the other hand, that cannot be a wise contrivance, which in its operation may commit the government of a nation to the wisdom of an idiot. The ground which Mr. Burke now takes, is fatal to every part of his cause. ... To use a sailor's phrase, he has swabbed the deck and scarcely left a name legible in the list of Kings; and he has mowed down and thinned the House of Peers, with a scythe as formidable as Death and Time. [i.e. the requirement that they embody wisdom]."

"As the republic of letters brings forward the best literary productions, by giving to genius a fair and universal chance; so the representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom from where it can be found. I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary; and I carryt he same idea into governments. An hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary suthor. I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons: but I will venture an opinion, that if they had, and had left their works unfinished, those sons could not have completed them."

"It could have been no difficult thing in the early and solitary ages of the world, whle the chief employment of men was of attending flocks and herds, for a banditti of ruffians to overrun a country, and lay it under contributions. Their power being thus established, the chief of the band contrived to lose the name Robber in that of Monarch, and hence the origin of Monarchy and Kings."

And in a prescient word to the British...
"As it is not difficult to perceive, from the enlightened state of mankind, that hereditary Governments are verging to their decline, and that Revolutions on the broad basis of national sovereignty, and Government by representation, are making their way in Europe, it would be an act of wisdom to anticipate their approach, and produce Revolutions by reason and accommodation, rather than commit them to the issue of convulsions."

Thankfully, barring Syria, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, hereditary monarchy has mostly ended its reign on earth. Democracies rule the world. Are they doing a good job?

Paine represents an interesting blend of progressive and tea-partier. He rails throughout the book in best blogger fashion against the oppressive taxation that supports royal courts and their hangers-on, clearly trying to incite the British against their system. But in the most detailed part of the book, he proposes specifically that most British taxes be retained and their revenue diverted to various socialistic ends, such as old-age pensions, educational allowances, and publicly-sponsored factories where anyone without employment could be employed as long as desired, among others. Really, a very forward-looking program, much of which has come to pass. The employment guarantee is particularly interesting and appropriate to bring back into our present-day discussion.

"Civil government does not consist in executions; but in making that provision for the instruction of youth, and the support of age, as to exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one, and despair from the other. Instead of this, the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors, and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them."

"When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are no in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness; when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government."

"Revolutions, then, have for their object, a change in the moral condition of governments, and with this change the burden of public taxes will lessen, and civilization will be left to the enjoyment of that abundance, of which it is now deprived."

But what would Paine write about our current system?  What is our moral condition? Despite all our progress, I think he would characteristically diagnose a deep and corrupting problem. Our representatives serve two masters- the voters, and separately, the moneyed and corporate class. As Lawrence Lessig has noted, our putative representatives spend about 70% of their time grubbing for money- from corporations, from the rich, from mass mailing missives, and the like. This time is not just lost from service to their consitutents and from cogitation on better policy, but is explicitly opposed to the public interest, as every payment is a quid pro quo, well understood by all sides, for favors that otherwise would not occur.

Right now, the financial industry has thoroughly corrupted both parties, forstalled prosecution and evaded regulation of its highly damaging gambling addiction, and indeed corrupted the economic profession itself through its web of consultancies. sinecures, and parroting institutions, to the point that the public doesn't yet thoroughly understand the basic nature of the crisis. Too big to fail, among many other ills of the financial casino, remains the law of the land, and another crisis is inevitable if nothing further is done, though it may take a decades to attain a sufficiently bubbly economic state.

To Paine, the proposition would be simple. Voters have been displaced as political actors in a system where our media and academic elite are for sale, or already owned by corporations with interests frankly opposed to the public interest, and where our erstwhile representatives sell themselves daily for the money they need, while contorting more (Democrats) or less (Republicans) to suit a publicly salable ideology of the public good. One might say that we support two wasteful and fawning royal courts- those of the two parties, each ostensibly vying for public favor while vying more energetically for funds from well-hidden and corrupting private interests. It is a constitutional crisis.

Paine's revolution was one of fairness- that state and politics should not be run by the few for the few, milking the many, but of the people, by the people, and for the people. In his world, money spoke loudly, but the media and elite leadership were not quite as thoroughly for sale as they are now. His media was not as technologically sophisticated, as pervasive, as distracting, as thoroughly corporatized, nor as powerful as it is today. We are a far cry from Benjamin Franklin's printing press and Paine's pamphlets.

The answer is to restore to the people critical levers of representative power, especially the lever of funding the nation's political life directly. Lessig's plan is to provide vouchers to all citizens that they can then contribute to politicians. All levels of government would disburse tax money to candidates in proportion to vouchers contributed by citizen supporters. Candidates would then be able to gain funds in direct proportion to their popularity, and cut their private money grubbing entirely. Perhaps vouchers could be dispensed continually, so that momentary swings in popularity wouldn't lock up a race prematurely.

We marvel at the amounts spent on modern political campaigns, but our political system is important and deserves generous funding, so that voters and candidates can interact effectively and learn each other's views. Systems of full and generous public funding will decouple our representatives from some of today's worst corruption.

But more needs to be done, especially to improve the media environment. Aside from campaigns, money now buys unlimited political speech and what is more, unlimited political flack-power from "think" tanks and other media / front / spin / astroturf organizations. On its own, that wouldn't be so bad. But where else can one turn for (balanced!) political coverage and insight if the rich own all the media megaphones? Our TV and radio spectrum is limited, and stations are sold to the highest bidder. Newspapers have become one-per-town monopolies due to the high-cost structure of the modern paper and to winner-take all network effects we have come to know so well from the computer and internet industries. Even if non-political commercial interests alone rule the airwaves, where does that leave citizens that advertisers are not interested in, like the unemployed and minorities?

While Paine would surely be pleased by the wide freedoms of the contemporary internet, he might be pained by the degraded and virtually inarticulate show of political soundbites, lying, and scare-ads that characterizes politics in the mainstream media (which masks the more salient hidden competition between moneyed interests). What to do? Here public interest and public funding should be advanced as well. Examples like the BBC and CBC show that major public media can be consistently neutral and effective in broadening access and raising the level of debate (excepting, for the moment, "Thought for the day", and also the entire Euro crisis political theater, and ...).

In short, public media deserves to be strengthened in the US. Ideally, all spectrum-using media would be compelled to provide commercial-free public interest programming, whether oriented to children, or to political coverage, or the arts. Secondly, public broadcasting support would be expanded so that second channels could be established nationally and coverage broadened. At our house, intriguingly enough, we get TV signals from stations funded by Russia and China, but the US government supplies only a pittance to fund our own public media- PBS and NPR.

Lastly, the loss of diversity and investigative motivation in newspaper monopolies could to be addressed by funding local newsgathering on a non-profit basis, perhaps as part of the above expansion of existing public media. With web publication as cheap as it is, minimal amounts of public money could create a grassroots investigative and newsgathering network that gives citizens important information and alternate perspectives on their local affairs, unencumbered by commercial imperatives. (This might be called the crank blogger employment act!) Obviously, there is risk in letting the government dabble in media sponsorship, but it has been done well, here and elsewhere, and the new media age provides enormous opportunities at relatively low cost, if the government is not otherwise corrupted.

Paine even had a prescient word about the EU:
"Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything with appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?
Just emerging from such a barbarous condition, it is too soon to determine to what extent of improvement government may yet be carried. For what we can foresee, all Europe may form but one great republic and man be free of the whole."

• Outstanding article on Roger Williams, who defended Rhode Island from invasion by Massachusetts!
• For those not following Krugman's blog, Hungary is heading towards one-party rule.
• We need global governance.
• A late-breaking Xmas song...
• Montana, at least is holding out against corrupt practices.
• Economic quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"As I explained in this blog – 'Historically high budget deficits will be required for the next decade' – the reason that Japan continued to grow despite the “massive loss of wealth” is because the government stepped in and maintained the flow of spending."

• Economic graph of the week- employment from Fed data.

Note how the proportion of the population employed is still at bottom at the end of 2011, and how the unemployment rate belies the lack of progress or recovery in actual employment, due to an imaginary decline in the "labor force"- we remain in a catastrophic situation for roughly 4% of the population, or ten million people, who are involuntarily unemployed, and whose situation has cascade effects throughout the labor markets.

Science and religion, version umpteen

Science is the culmination of the Western religious tradition. 

A striking thing about Eastern religions is their humility. They recognize that they are addressing human needs, which many other paths can also address. They are philosophically shy. Buddhism may be right, but if not, then no big deal.. it is just an offered solution to human suffering, and an expression of spiritual values and emotions that can take other forms. Hinduism offers more gods than you can shake a stick at ... take your pick and be happy. Shintoism has no truth at all, other than a conviction that nature, in its spiritual guise of Kami, is worthy of veneration- an almost pure biophilia.

In contrast, Western religion, at least in the monotheistic tradition as it developed out of late Judaism, (with additions of Greek philosophy), is obsessed with truth. We are right, our model of invisible reality is right, or else we will kill you. This appalling combination of spiritual and philosophical malpractice has led to monumental amounts of suffering.

On the other hand, this same obsession with correctness, truth, belief, and ontological competitiveness had one silver lining, which is that it led to Western science. At some point, crypto-theologians like Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Charles Darwin, who were interested in truth perhaps a little more than tradition and theology, struck out to new intellectual territory, away from received explanations and ontologies, and lo and behold! Truth with a capital "T" emerged, far more powerful and durable than the mouldering not even half-truths of theology.

It is terribly ironic that Western religions, faced with (let us call it Darwinian) competition from its offspring- a truthmaking tradition vastly more effective than their own, are banding together in hopeless ecumenical projects and rear-guard actions like conservative political tantrums and denialism, after having spent centuries evolving a kaleidoscope of divergent and often violently antagonistic confessions, each with its own "truth". I guess this is how it ends ... with a whimper.

Nevertheless, religion as a whole is surely not dead. What is dead are its claims to "philosophy", "knowledge" and "truth". As the Eastern traditions understand, (as do those few Western traditions that confine themselves to spiritual emotions), the human need remains for ministering, for belonging, and above all for deeply felt appreciation of the wonder of existence, particularly human value. All that remains, once all the "truth" has been burned away one way or another, is love.

• Populism- the empty vessel.
• More commentary on the South.
• Crony capitalism thrives when laws are enforced selectively, at the discretion of prosecutors and regulators.
• Economics quote of the week, From Michael Moran, on declining US influence:

"Longer-term, however, this [Japan and China denominating their mutual trade in local currencies rather than dollars] is a part of the long game played by Beijing. Since American financial “creativity” nearly threw the world into Depression in 2008, China, Russia, Malaysia, South Africa and others have called for the creation of a new global reserve currency not beholden to the dysfunction of the US political scene."

Brains a-building

Just how does the self-constructing computer self-construct?

The brain is probably the most exciting and complex frontier of biology. How does it work? How does the mind happen in amongst those 100 billion neurons? However, before we get to all those questions, the brain has to develop, all by itself in the fetal and infant body, from the most minimal ingredients and from an extremely spare blueprint comprising some fraction of the 25,000 genes of our genome.

One is tempted to call it a miracle, except that it happens all the time, all over the world, more or less dependably and following, as far as our incomplete knowlege reaches, no script but those of the physical / biological world. A paper came out recently highlighting the varying role of gamma oscillations in brain development, which seemed worth reviewing.

Many people may not be aware that brain development involves vast migrations of cells, from one place to another in the developing brain. "So, most neurons migrate from the site of their last mitotic division, near the ventricle, towards the outer surface of the CNS, where they integrate into specific brain circuits." (From a very nice review of the field.) Doubtless this inefficiency reflects a long evolutionary history, as do numerous other weird anatomical paradoxes of the body. An idea that didn't seem so bad in the infinitesimal brain of a gnat becomes a bizarre marathon of long-distance cell treks in our own. Which is a little ironic, because after they get to their final position, these neurons spend the rest of their lives in one position, with their plasticity confined to forming or deleting synapses among their far-flung axonal and dendritic branches.

"Vertebrates show far more widespread neural migrations than previously realized. In general, these migrations can be seen as DV [dorsal-ventral] or AP [anterior-posterior] migrations, pathways thought to be prominent in lower organisms but not in vertebrates. Indeed, genes discovered in C. elegans and Drosophila provide molecular mechanisms for the DV and AP migrations in higher vertebrates."

Schematic of a few major pathways of cell migration in early brain development. Neurons in the cortex all come from stem areas near the core of the brain. MGE is the medial ganglionic eminence.

Indeed, inhibitory interneurons and excitatory neurons are distinct cell classes, and orginate from different stem locations and migrate by separate pathways, but migrate into close proximity to make up the final brain network.

Later on during development, the micro-architecture of the cortical layer (the side-by-side columns of cells with related functions, occurring all over the sheet-like cortex) refines itself through feedback from connected areas. For instance, the columnar arrangement of our visual cortex maps strikingly to our visual fields and other salient properties of vision- a mapping which forms soon after the eyes first open (the "critical period").

The current researchers looked at whisker sensing areas in the rat brain, which organize themselves similarly as the visual system, into columns of discrete function. "In the rodent 'barrel' cortex, each cortical barrel column receives a specific input, conveyed via the thalamus, from a corresponding whisker." In the critical period for this region, (days 2-7 after birth), this area doesn't communicate much with other areas of the brain, but only with its whisker inputs and perhaps with local neighbors.

These columns are further divisible vertically into layers that extend over most of the cortex. The cells of these layers are somewhat distinct at each level, and closely connected to each other up and down the column, while inputs and outputs to other columns and other brain regions are typically differentiated by layer. Which is to say that inputs to the column from one area of the brain may typically come to a subset of layers, while outputs to some other brain region may emerge from another subset.

The key topic is the "early gamma oscillation", or EGO. Gamma waves are famous as the highest-frequency brain waves, which are the leading candidate for "binding" mental contents over long distances across the mature brain. The interesting finding here is that, unexpectedly, in early development, gamma oscillations happen but seem to have a quite different and simpler function- that of binding a developing neural zone to its sensory inputs, and thus helping it self-organize.

Layers:SG- supragranular, G- granular, IG- infragranular, Pia- the pia matter, or innermost membrane surrounding the brain. LFP- localized field potential, MUA- multiunit activity (individual spikes), CSD- current-source density (overall conductance/resistance).

In this figure, a needle electrode is shown as it is stuck vertically into one column of a rat brain, with cell bodies stained in green and electrode points shown as dots along the electrode depth. The graph shows the associated recording, with the rat's whisker touched by the experimenter at time 0. The 50 Hz gamma oscillation is obvious over several layers. The researchers claim that these gamma oscillations had been missed previously because typical surface recordings wouldn't catch them.

What are they doing? Normal gamma oscillations coordinate large regions of brain activity, but these have only localized coherence- with the whisker input. The next figures compare gamma intensity from different stimuli and at different ages:

PW means principle whisker (the one directly innervating the probed column), while AW means adjacent whisker, which innervates nearby columns. LFP is "local field potential", i.e. the Y-axis, while GR is granular layer, the middle one shown above, and SG means supra-granular layer, the one over it, which the researchers find ties up to nearby columns during development. The next figure shows graphic summaries of the same data by electrode depth, at postnatal day 5 (P5) and day 33 (P33). The sequence is clear- that low-level, exclusively local and whisker input-driven gamma oscillations at early times are followed by more powerful oscillations located in higher cortical layers and driven not only by the innervating whisker, but by nearby ones to a high degree. One can truly see the knitting together of neural networks over time.

The experimenters also probed the thalamus, which conducts the signals from the whiskers to the cortex, showing that the signal timing is appropriate. The gamma peaks in the thalamus ("VPM") lead those in the developing cortex by about nine milliseconds.

Indeed, if they remove brains entirely and probe slices that retain the thalamus-cortical connection (shown below, H), they can simulate whisker stimulation by electrical stimulation on the thalamic area (VPM) which creates artificial early gamma oscillations (aEGO's) in the cortical region. If these are carefully timed to sync with endogenous cortical neural firing, they strengthen their neural connections, which can be assayed by downstream currents out of the cortical layer (excitatory postsynaptic currents; EPSCs- the red vs the black graphs below). By this method of artificial "learning", evoked EPSCs are significantly stronger after a bout of thirty induced aEGOs than they were before, using low levels of aEGO stimulation to test with.

OK- that was seriously technical. But the lesson is that by enough poking, prodding, and taking things apart, we are beginning, in baby steps, to understand that most intricate and delicate mechanism- the wetware of our minds.

• Damasio on consciousness .. a bit boring/pompous, but topical.
• Afghanistan, turning back to warlord-ism, under official acronyms.
• Did we have a "Global banking glut", of the shadow banking system, not a savings glut?
• The South continues as an ungovernable cross to bear.
• Thank you, EPA.
• For the love of victimization narrative ...
• In finance, we are already a banana republic.
• Economics quote of the week, from Martin Wolfe, about income and wealth inequality:

"What is to be done? That demands a huge agenda. It must cover employment, education, corporate governance and financial reform and, however difficult, also elements of redistribution. It will be unavoidably divisive. So be it. This debate cannot be avoided if western democracies are to stay legitimate in the eyes of their peoples. That may not be true in the US. It is surely true in the UK. Warren Buffett has argued that 'there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won.' The remark has not made him popular with his peers. But he was surely right."

Burning bright

The earth is still warming. We are still dithering.

A recent report on climate change had an arresting graphic, showing where New York State is migrating to, in climate terms:

NY starts in its customary position in the mid-atlantic in the mid-20th century, and already now occupies roughly the position that Pennsylvania used to. Easily within a hundred years, and quite possibly sooner, NY is going to land where the Carolinas used to be, climatically speaking.

Climate change is often spoken of drily, in terms of degress of average temperature change and the like. But to anyone who knows the climates of these two areas, the differences are stark. Unbearable summers, no-snow winters, and a completely different biome, all within the life span of a single tree. A recent Scientific American article pointed out that another extreme warming episode happened in the early Eocene. Geologists are astonished at its speed, but they are thinking in geological time. It was nothing compared to the speed with which we are changing the climate now, 150 times faster.

All this means that not only are we as humans going to be mighty uncomfortable, but animals and especially plants are not going to make the transtion- there just isn't the time. Biological diversity will continue to plummet via extinction, adding this global climate catastrophe to the localized habitat destruction, ocean fish-killing free-for-all, tropical forest burning, megafauna killing, and so many other catastrophes we have already authored. Just what kind of a world do we want to leave to future generations?

I'll close with another graphic, of CO2 emissions from power plants in the US. The task should be clear. The economic equivalent of World War 2 that we are waiting for to energize our economy is staring us in the face.

• Some apocalypses are coming.. others aren't.
• More dithering.
• Pricing nature's services.
• Exxon graphs out peak oil.
• Postcard from Belgrade.
• This blog is coming to you ... ... more slowly than necessary.
• Lawrence Lessig on our government corruption.
• Does private long-term care insurance make any sense? Not really.
• Ode to the 99%.
• Economics quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"Imagine you had a headache and some economist tells you that you can cure the headache by bashing your head against a wall. So you duly bash your head against the nearest brick wall and not only does it hurt (perhaps drawing blood depending on the severity of the blow) but you note the headache is now worse. The economist then concludes you didn’t bash your head hard enough and instructs you to stick to the “rule” and give it another try – only this time go harder."
...
"As I have noted previously, other professions are held legally liable for their professional behaviour. If they consistently make large errors then they will be deemed unfit to practise.
The IMF economists are immune from these standards. They consistently make bold predictions and impose harsh austerity programs based on those projections. The predictions are consistently shown to be wrong when the data arrives."

Definitely not a dick-tionary

Mary Daly's feminist Wickedary of the English language.

Is the job of feminism done? More women than men are now in college, and the employment prospects of men seem to have taken a particularly significant dive in the current economic crisis. Yet the upper reaches of our society continue to be addled by testosterone. Presidential contenders compete over how shamelessly they can sweep their personal misogyny under the rug. The economic downturn can be largely chalked up to an army of besuited males gambling, cheating, "innovating", and cronying their way into financial armeggadon, and thence into the pockets of the government for bailouts and bonuses.

Women were among the most significant and prophetic obstacles to this headlong descent into what Mary Daly might term our financial phalloclasm- such key officials as Sheila Bair, Brooksley Born, and Elizabeth Warren. The Occupy Wall Street movement might usefully consider a name change to Castrate Wall Street.

bored, Chairman of the: any bore-ocratically appointed bore who occupies a chair- a position which enables him to bore others all the more.

Dragon: Primordial Female Foe of patriarchy whom the gods, heros, and saints of snooldom attempt to slay over and over again; Metamysterious Monster, Original Knower and Guardian of the Powers of Life.

Her-etical: Weird Beyond Belief.


Mary Daly passed away almost two years ago, and the brief mentions of her life in the media piqued my interest enough to read one of her works- "Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, Conjured in Cahoots with Jane Caputi". A "Webster" being "A Weaver of Words and Word-Webs". Daly was a poet and wordsmith, a philosopher and theologian, curiously educated and employed throughout her life by Catholic institutions, at least until her refusal to admit men to her advanced women's studies course at Boston University finally brought a discrimination complaint and retirement in 1999. She was a creature of the liberal 60's and Vatican II, when the church's windows were opened and fresh breezes such as Jungianism and Feminism found a brief audience.

Papal Bull: the most sacred form of bull. Wholly, Holey, Holy baloney.

Incarnation, The: supremely sublimated male sexual fantasy promulgated as sublime christian dogma; mythic super-rape of the Virgin Mother, who represents all matter; symbolic legitimation of the rape of all women and all matter. See Sadospiritual Syndrome.

omniabscence: essential attribute of the wholly ghostly divine father, who is acclaimed by the the-ological reversers as "omnipresent"; attribute of the dummy deity who is never there, no all there, and therefore does not and can not care.


Daly was also a great humorist. Her Wickedary is a hilariously ascerbic re-valuation of all values, setting women as "Biophilic", "Shrewd/Shrewish", and many other positive, inverted, new-age-y attributes, while condeming the "snoolish", "bore-ing" daddy-ocracy with its daddygods and Big Lies that destroy not only women in a mire of silence and oppression, but the entire biosphere, as becomes clearer by the day.

Biophilia: the Original Lust for Life that is at the core of all Elemental E-motion; Pure Lust, which is the Nemesis of patriarchy, the Necrophilic state. Compare necrophilia N.B.: Biophilia is not in ordinary dictionaries, though the word necrophilia is.

Broom: Hag-ridden vehicle propelled by Rage, Transporting Dreadful/Dreadless Women out of the State of Bondage.


Her favorite symbol was the Labrys- the double headed axe of antiquity with which she notionally split phallocentric words into new and better forms, like her famous construction Gyn/Ecology, and which also carried feminist and lesbian overtones.

Naming: Original summoning of words for the Self, the world, and ultimate reality; liberation by Wicked Women of words from confinement in the sentences of the fathers; Truth-telling: the only adequate antidote for phallocracy's Biggest Lies; exorcism of patriarchal labels by invoking Other reality and by conjuring the Spirits of women and of all Wild natures; Re-calling the Race of Radiant Words.

patriarchy 1: society manufactured and controlled by males: Fatherland; society in which every legitmated instution is entirely in the hands of males and a few selected henchwomen; society characterlized by oppression, repression, depression, narcissism, cruelty, racism, classism, ageism, objectification, sadomasochism, necrophilia; joyless society, ruled by Godfather, Son, and Company; society fixated on proliferation, propagation, procreation, and bend on the destruction of all Life   2: the prevailing religion of the entire planet, whose essential message is necrophilia.

foolosophy: fooldom parading as wisdom. See academentia.

phallosophy: inflated foolosophy: "wisdom" loaded with seminal ideas and disseminated by means of thrusting arguments.


It isn't only in its word-smithing and attitude that the Wickedary excells, however, but also in Daly's introductory essays, which are prose poems of revolt by the Revolting Hags of Wildness. One might note in passing that she puts all the male attributes in lower case, while the transvalued female terms are excited into capitalized status. A sample:

"Wielding our Witches' Hammer, Websters Dis-close the Glamour of words, their magical/musical interplay as they Sound and Resound together in complex combinations. We Dis-cover connections, not only among words, but among the realities they Name."

"Daredevil dolphins, declaring and end to jumping through hoops, take Muses for Be-Musing rides. Mischievious monkeys mimic men of science. Denouncing the latter as "missing links to nothing," whose sadistic kinks require final solution, the foment revolution. Encouraged by guinea pigs, rabbits, and mice, they "deconstruct" cages, mazes, treadmills, and other shocking tools employed by evil "experts"/fools."

"Other Spirited animals also Denounce. The formerly baited and "dancing" bears, for example, dance rings around rippers who have used them for atrocious a-Musement. Viragos dance with them, proclaiming the end of such tyranny. Sagacious Seals, Denouncing their "training" in prestigious aquariums- the degrading institutions where they learned to bounce balls in return for a fish- Bark Out Loud their Seals of Disapproval and Distain. Bitches Bark with them, Outshouting the users of animals, women, and words."

"Spinsters Spinning Widdershins- turning about-face- feel/find an Other Sense of Time. We begin by asking clock-whys and then move on to counter these clock-whys with Counterclock Whys- Questions that whirl the Questioners beyond the boundaries of Boredom, in to the flow of Tidal Time/Elemental Time. This is Wild Time, beyond the clocking/clacking of clonedom. It is the Time of Wicked Inspiration / Genius, which cannot be grasped by the tidily man-dated world.

The man-dated world is clockocracy- the society that is dead set by the clocks and calendars of fathered time. ..."


One might think all this overkill, and Daly certainly took things to extremes. She was quite enamoured of the society of bees, whose males are barely tolerated and cast off with their one and only mating flight. For humans too, she proposed limiting males to 10% of the population. I take it all quite tongue in cheek, recognizing that when it comes to religion and values, literal belief and systemic seriousness are the most dangerous falsehoods. Daly knew very well that the Dolphins were not taking the Biophilic Revolting Hags for rides in the surf, but used this mythic poetry to open her listener's imagination to a trans-value system, while indicting and getting a rise out of her antagonists.

"... Brainstorming, Be-Spelling women Distemper in both of these senses, throwing bore-ocracy out of its odious order and smoothly working adjustment by Raising Hailstorms and Tempests and Otherwise Exercising Disturbing Elemental Powers.
To Be-Spellers overthrowing dronedom/clonedom it is clear that such disturbance/derangement is absolutely necessary. The Spelling of Soothsayers throws the old order out of order, Dis-covering New/Archaic Orders. In this Stormy atmosphere other women begin to Realize their own Ecstatic E-motional Disorder. Finding her Rage and Hope, a woman observes the melting away of plastic passions that had possessed her, blocking the flow of Elemental Communicating Powers. The old guilt, anxiety, depression, bitterness, resentment, frustration, boredom, resignation and- worst of all- feminine full-fillment begin to disappear. Seeing these as pseudopassions injected into her soul by the fathers of fixocracy, she flushes them away. As she exorcises these plastic parasites she begins Be-Spelling. She finds it especially efficacious to begin Spelling/Be-Spelling Out Loud."


Looking at societies like contemporary Afghanistan and Pakistan, where an unoppressed woman can hardly be observed without being beaten or raped, and where the incessent quest for "honor" among males has made their societies a living hell for everyone, her proposals might, however, not be so far-fetched.

Courage to Sin [sin derived fr. Indo-European root es- to be]: the Courage to commit Original Acts of participation in Be-ing; the Courage to be Elemental through and beyond the horrors of Obscene society; the Courage to be intellectual in the most direct and daring way, claiming and trusting the deep correspondence between the structures/processes of one's own mind and the structures/processes of reality; the Courage to trust and Act on one's own deepest intuitions.

• Saudi malegarchy.
• Archetype of the monster.
  
• Speaking of which ... those communist Muppets!
• Did Rome fall due to inequality and debt-bondage?
• Too big to police? Corruption has won.
• Church, coming to a public school near you.
• Carbon spewage worse than ever.
• Apparently Hayek wasn't such a big fish after all.
• Afghanistan: $10 billion a year, or else we go all crazy again.
• Poor children need better resources and teachers, not worse.
• Intriguing view of the individual / institution divide.
• Yes, Newt actually wrote a dissertation.
• The cycle of authoritarian parenting, existential insecurity, and political extremism keeps turning.
• On the role of Darwinism in economic inequality.

Do wages cause inflation, or does money?

Oil, the Fed, and Stagflation ...  or: 'twas Arthur Burns that done it!

There are two basic observations that Milton Friedman made on inflation, and which still today consitute the economic mainstream. First is that inflation is a monetary phenomenon- if you have too much money, prices will rise even while the real economy stays the same size as before. He also authored the NAIRU concept- (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment)- i.e. the lowest unemployment rate consistent with stable prices.

To a naive observer, these are contradictory ideas. If high employment can cause inflation, then it isn't a montary phenomenon after all. But if monetary causes are paramount, then the NAIRU is merely a symptom rather than a cause, and all the supply-side, trickle-down anti-worker economics of the last few decades have been a cruel as well as wasted effort.

Perhaps there is more going on, and that is what this post is about. Going by what we have learned in MMT economics, the main money-creating mechanism is not the government, (i.e. via net deficit spending, however important that is from time to time), but banks, which create money every time they make a loan, and extinguish it when the loan is paid off (or written off). The bank mechanism is what central banks control via their adjustment of short term (and long-term) interest rates. Only they don't always do such a great job, and this channel of money creation is prone to much more volatility than the government's channel, which in turn necessitates the anticyclical fiscal / monetary policies of Keynesian economics.

How could persistent inflation and high wage demands affect the bank mechanism of money creation? Another tenet of MMT economics is that most lending is demand-driven, in that banks generally lend to any worthy borrower who comes in the door. Every loan is an asset to the bank, and its only total / legal constraint is capital, which can also be raised if its past bets have been sound, perhaps in the interests of growth and the dream of becoming "too big to fail".

One theory would be that inflation is consistently under-appreciated when it is gathering steam. Thus real interest rates tend to not catch up to inflation as fast as they should, creating an incentive for borrowers to ask for loans. In effect, real interest rates in an environment of rising inflation tend to be lower than they should be.

Thus when competitive pressures press on a company, it may be more willing to make up the difference with a loan, and justify that loan with recent growth, even if that growth was only nominal rather than real. The whole environment may become skewed towards monetary growth, in effect.

On the whole, this mechanism seems relevant, but not very strong, given a central bank that is paying attention to real interest rates. It also does not provide a direct channel for wage demands to fuel inflation, since companies are faced with competing demands for money all the time. Being in a hot labor market might cause firms to alter the share of revenue going to wages, but can't automatically give them the power to raise prices.

If the entire labor market were hot, all companies might be faced with the same increasing labor costs, allowing them to raise prices in unison without a competitive penalty. And then perhaps the workers are realizing commensurate wage gains across the board, allowing them to pay the increased prices. It all makes sense, except ... where is all the extra money supposed to come from? That part is very hard to see, unless the banking system funds the general expansion by excess lending, which the central bank is supposed to explicitly monitor and prevent. Price inflation has to come from general monetary expansion.

Other effects may come into play at the margins. Perhaps a hot labor market may cause workers to spend more of their money and save less, increasing monetary velocity, and thus inflation. Perhaps a general "boom" atmosphere causes lending standards to decline, causing monetary inflation. Low unemployment might thus correlate with inflation without being particularly causal. Nor would a particular level of unemployment be strongly associated with a particular level of inflation, which is the lack of relationship that is empirically observed.

Incidentally, a resource shock like higher oil prices is also unlikely to cause inflation directly, since any money spent on oil is withdrawn from other uses (though perhaps from savings, which would be temporarily inflationary). Again, unless monetary expansion occurs, an oil shock can't cause inflation, and indeed if vast amounts of dollars are exported to overseas oil producers, such a shock should cause net deflation instead.

In this scenario, it is possible that an oil shock leads to economic recession, and thus to monetary loosening, which does indeed cause inflation when coupled with declining real economic capacity due to the resource constraint. But loosening during such a recession might be a misuse of monetary policy, as done in the 70's (a paper on the era has details). Incidentally, inflation can arise from dramatic declines in economic capacity, as in Zimbabwe, where the real economy collapsed, without the monetary system contracting in unison- another form of monetary error, though in fairness, this is a very difficult adjustment to make.

The point I am getting at is that inflation does not seem to be caused by high or low employment, but rather by errors of the monetary and/or fiscal policy in trying to control a somewhat chaotic and time-lagged system. Labor demands are only that- demands. If their counterparts lack the money to meet those demands, inflation can't happen.

The Phillips curve, which eventually gave rise to the NAIRU concept, (here is a brief review), showed a general correlation between employment and inflation- an empirical finding that remains true. But as we all know, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, and I think that is the case here.

Friedman's ultimate argument was that monetary expansion can't be effective as a continual policy to reduce unemployment, which also remains valid, I think. (Not that this was central to Keyensian policy.) Monetary effects on employment are temporary, though at times like the present such temporary measures can have very long-lasting consequences, to counteract effects of monetary and real contraction. I have to admit that my many statements over the last couple of years about the Fed's general role ensuring full employment in normal times are probably not accurate or wise. In normal times, it should regulate inflation, (and regulate banks properly!), and leave employment policy to other branches. It would also be nice if it gave positive and useful advice on fiscal matters, though its track record there is abysmal- the less said the better!

Yet on the other hand, the deeper point I am getting at is that the war on labor carried out in so many ways over the last few decades, by increased low-wage immigration, by NAFTA, by "supply-side" economics, by union-bashing, and by ending the overall progressivity of the tax system ... was never about inflation, though it was often couched in those terms. Efficiency and productivity were other rationales, though these also applied curiously only to the lower classes.

It was about something quite different. It was about about squeezing more from lower-paid workers while finding ways to pay executives more. It was about redistributing income from the lower classes upward to the rich, who became lost in a self-aggrandizing narrative which Milton Friedman did so much to popularize. It was about reversing the pro-labor policies of the New Deal and the anti-poverty policies of the Great Society, frequently under the cover of fighting inflation. It was a royal restoration of Darwinian, winner-take all economics over Keynesian economics.

It is surely a human weakness to look up to the rich and powerful, assuming that their good fortune arises from good works, divine favor, or at least the favor of natural selection. But mostly, quite unnatural selection is at work, whether through government corruption, financial chicanery, or simple inheritance. The adulation of the rich is part of the social and media complex that has made the Occupy movement so necessary, yet also so tenuous.

What has the Darwinian restoration gotten us? It has eroded the middle class, sapped overall economic growth, promoted gambling by the investor class in place of productive investment, mired the poor in debt peonage, and corrupted our social and political systems into the bargain. Not a pretty sight, in my estimation.

And while right-ists continue to look for inflation under every bed, it is dead. It is high time to put this fight against inflation on the back burner and attend to the suffering that the last decades have wrought. One step would be to create a jobs-for-everyone policy, offering modest-paying public service work to everyone who wants work. The analysis above indicates that despite in essence outlawing unemployment, such a policy would have little effect on inflation. Yet it would have a huge positive effect on our culture and future prospects, in concert with suitably large investments in infrastructure and education.

• A few problems with Buddhism.
• Whose side is the SEC on, anyhow?
• Forgery begins to exact a price.
• For Newt, economic statistics is a combat sport.
• Securitize body parts?
• "The 1 percent got a gift-wrapped bonanza, while the 99 percent got the shaft."
• Citigroup gets an F.
• For reliable focus on bad news in the US, with a few fabrications thrown in, turn to RT.
• Afghan mafia terrorize Afghans. Where is the government? And, is aid = oil?
• Skidelsky on the economic crisis:

"The most terrifying thing to emerge from the Bank of England’s reports is that the Bank embarked on its experiment without any macro-economic model specifying how money was to be transmitted to income. In other words, QE was launched on a wing and prayer."

• Economic quote of the week, from Dean Baker, via Bill Mitchell:

"The European Central Bank (ECB) has been working hard to convince the world that it is not competent to act as a central bank." (Salon provides some background.)

... and Bill continues ...
"Further, I know it is twee for so-called progressives to keep telling us that the solution to the crisis for governments to “make the rich pay” but the reality is that might sound nice and be a useful policy on equity grounds but it is not the solution to the crisis.

The crisis is being extended because there is not enough aggregate demand to drive growth and income. Taking some purchasing power off the rich will probably worsen that situation although it would not be as damaging as taking cash off the lower income groups.

These distributional matters (whether the rich pay or not) should be separated from the main game – which isn’t to say I don’t support higher tax rates for the rich and lower tax rates for the poor."

Doublethink, religion, and the essential moral attitude

Being human means not being materialistic, even though one has to be materialistic from time to time.

One hears it all the time as an atheist: "How can you be moral?". Plenty of replies can assert or show by example how baselessness the accusation is, but still, what is behind it? There is something much deeper than a matter of divine command.. that if one does not accept the ten commandments as divine and absolute, one is utterly lawless. There is something more important going on.

A way into this issue came up for me in George Eliot's Middlemarch, which describes the Victorian hinterlands as almost expecting their doctors to be more or less irreligious, indeed doubting their competence if they flaunt great devotion.

"The Doctor was more than suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor which made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted; conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the storing of judgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill."

How intriguing! Is there perhaps a spectrum of interest, from the material to the spiritual, over which people of different temperaments are arrayed and in accordance with which they take up their professions and roles in life?

I had a science teacher in school who shocked us by stating that the materials of our bodies, if bought from the chemical supply catalog, would amount to only about $14 dollars worth, mostly in the calcium, I believe.

What is our value as humans? That is the central question of morality. Whether we see value in others, or conversely de-value and de-humanize others, is morally fundamental. Kant expressed this in his categorical imperative, that one should never treat a human as an instrument but rather as an end- a being of intrinsic and high value. The revolutionary ideas of human rights, civil rights, and all men being created equal ... these are not read from the book of nature, but from our sentiments and ideals, properly cultivated.

They also form the essential ground of modern society, where personal dignity, fairness and due process from social structures like corporations and governments are taken for granted (or demanded). One could describe this view of humanity as enchanted, as humanistic, or as religious, depending on one's taste.

Obviously, various professions and lines of work militate against such a well-cultivated view. Medicine comes to mind, as does economics, banking, insurance, business in general, being a dictator, and criminal pursuits more or less psychopathic. Human life has to be put into the scale from time to time and weighed against other, finite considerations. Like money. Insurers deal with the worth of a human life. Economists attempt to value all sorts of pricelss goods, like musical performances, life-saving drugs, food, paintings. Doctors violate our dignity all the time, certainly for higher ends and with practiced discretion, but the tension can be acute.

The enchanted and materialist views are highly incommensurate. So we live double lives, seeing each other, our dreams, and self-expressions as priceless, even as on the other hand these things must be priced out or treated roughly rather frequently.

Religion has been the institution dedicated to the spiritual - the infinite measure of value and connection, elaborating cosmic-scale myths of human value that, at their best, cultivate a virtually infinite regard for others, including, in many traditions, non-human forms of life, even for nature and the cosmos at large.

This is the point on which atheism is found so abhorrent- that it not only disbelieves the myth, but is thought to disbelieve the point behind the myth, which is the painstakingly erected conviction of human value by which societies live or die- the ground of all morals. That is why conventionally religious people tend to worry less which kind of religion one subscribes to, (excepting fanatics completely lost in the haze of their parochial myth), and more that one has a narrative of ultimate and overwhelming meaning to hang on to in the midst of our otherwise often dehumanizing existence.

But there is something lacking in this analysis. Do our feelings of meaning and value arise out of the myths we tell each other, or does it really work the other way around, that these myths express feelings already present, which are activated by a simple smile, or a feather found by the side of the trail? The many scandals of religion say quite clearly that its arts may nudge, but surely don't force its believers into consistently more humanistic practices and values.

We have developed countless ways to share and cultivate pre-existing and natural feelings of value and meaning, from Beethoven's 9th to the Zen Haiku. Religion, traditionally understood, has been one of these arts, and, as any art form, has had its fads, trends, ups, and downs. But it makes the audacious claim above and beyond its cultivation of human value that it also possesses special philosophical truth and scientific, or even more annoyingly, transcendental trans-scientific truth, which to the atheist is its downfall.

The absurdities of god, heaven and hell, regarded not as artistic expressions of our more or less primitive negotiation with existential finality, but as actual, scientifically valid propositions ... well, it is hardly worth talking about, except that people do indeed, in this advanced age, talk about them, write about them ad infinitum, get doctorates for making stuff up about them, and more. Unfortunately, brute insistance on such antiquated notions can do more to suppress true spiritual and humane feeling than any amount of irreligion.


Herewith, an example in poetry from the far-out feminist new age calandar WeMoon.

The Rapture

In the beginning there was relation.
In the end there's fear and separation.
Just the toll our soul takes, it's the shaking away
from the only god there ever was, the MotherGod-Nature
Patriarchy makes us hate her. Declares war on earth,

She birthed us and fed us throughout the green vastness of time.
Ecstasy's wet nurse,
She opened her purse of DNA molecules, fabulous rituals.
For a million seasons she planted a billion reasons for life to live
She was makin' Time

Once upon anti-entropic cycles of biologic time
deathless star breath inhabits every cell, tells us
we are mollusks and chlorophyl, iron and carbon,
we're memories of wilderness and earth- as essential as biology.

Swirling through Time from the first cell floating on the first sea
at the first outbreath of the world, that breath still circles,
chanting Yes! god is a womin who just says Yes!
and we gotta give Life support saying Yes!
And maybe these death throes are really birth pains
And maybe this chaos is labor, not apocalypse
And maybe what we need to do is push! Push through her hips.
Push! Push! Push through. The end of patriarchy is my rapture
And I ain't goin nowhere but Here.

 Oak Chezar, 2006

• Gazzaniga talks about brains, consciousness, punishment, and free will.
• People in search of hope.
• Occupy god!
• Occupy needs to organize.
• Cannibalism and rivers of blood- the first crusade.
• Photo blog on Afghanistan.. considering the history, we are doing pretty well.
• Just how does one exit the Euro?
• The squid, driving Europe down the drain. Also .. running for president!
• Is a second Credit Anstalt collapse coming?
• Cheating- the dominant strategy in modern finance.
• "I think our female desire is for emotional connection to transcend that inescapable loneliness of being a human being, and theirs is physical, so they go to these places where someone will touch them."
• Economics quote of the week, Bill Mitchell, in a post that bears a full reading:

"The entrepreneurs are disappearing in American and being replaced by rapacious wealth shufflers who add nothing to productive capacity or general prosperity."
...
"Buying a government bond or a share in a listed company is not investing to an economist. Entrepreneurs invest, hedge funds rarely invest."

Occupy Parquet!

A modest proposal for the NBA players locked out from the hardwood plantation.

As a casual basketball fan, I've been intrigued by the NBA lockout and contract negotiations. It shouldn't be a surprise that I side with the workers- the players, who have dissolved their union in order to attack the legality of the owner's lockout.

The players have been making 57% of the league's gross income. The owners claim that they have been losing money with this structure, and want more of the gross for themselves.

The players have certainly been doing their part, as the dramatic playoff and finals series last year showed. How have the owners been doing? Well, they say they have lost money. Which means that they aren't very good at math. They complain that free agency and lack of hard caps force them to over-pay / over-bid for players, as if someone had been holding guns to their heads. If the owners can't mount their infrastructure, marketing, dance troupes, and other activities with $1.6 billion, they should consider getting into other lines of business.

And when was the NBA supposed to be profitable enterprise anyhow? The whole point of having owners is that they are already rich and can give a little back to their communities (and massage their egos) by sponsoring contests of athletic skill that get endless free publicity and to give meaning to the otherwise meaningless schlumps that we are.

Perhaps the NBA has too many teams, and owners in smaller markets appear to struggle to keep their operations solvent. But the owners need to face up to this problem by revenue-sharing and philanthropy, not by taking it out of the player's hides. They are already a monopoly ... they should act like it.

Compared to the players, how much value do the owners add? Very, very little, in my estimation. The teams would be just as, or more, socially useful being publically owned or employee-owned. The current plutocratic ownership concept is a social construct that mirrors capitalist/philathropic relations elsewhere in the society, for very little reason or benefit, especially if the teams become profit centers rather than vanity centers. The fact that the owners can't properly manage a business monopoly and entrenched cultural institution hardly reflects well on them.

What I would recommend is that the players, now that they have disbanded from being part of the NBA structure, meet the lockout with a walkout. They should set up their own league and displace the NBA entirely. They should, in short, occupy the parquet themselves, as an employee-owned league. At first, they will be restricted to smaller venues and limited media, but I think in the age of twitter and youtube, they would gain the necessary buzz with ease, and become self-sustaining. The old franchises, like the ailing Warriors franchise that recently sold for a half-billion dollars, would consequently lose all value. If they gutted it out, the players would eventually be able to take over the old venues, including the classic Celtics parquet.

This conflict is just one small vignette in the larger economic narrative. The NBA owners clearly bought into the right-wing mindset that this would be a good time to crush unions and workers. The economic disaster that the 1% has authored has made them even more powerful over labor by way of extreme unemployment. But I'd suggest that the NBA owners ran into the buzz saw of the OWS counter-narrative, and the players have taken heart in a great deal of public support. The game is mostly mental, after all! The NBA is a uniquely worker-driven enterprise, with little rationale for capitalist ownership at all. The players may still cave, money managment perhaps not being their strong suit. But I think there is a better way, if they can hold out and boldly seize their future.

My suggestion for the new league name? HDL- Hoop Dreams League.

• Prosecutions / indictments are beginning, finally.
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• Dean Baker on the economics profession & unemployment, part 2.
• Video of OWS and Bloomberg's army.
• Are Americans a little insular?
• "People" no longer really count. Other "people" are in charge.
• Germany on the Euro- "it's all about me".
• Economics quote of the week: Alan Minsky on the OWS meme, trickle-up economics, and related issues.

"The man who Mr. Obama asked to be his mentor when he joined the Senate was Joe Lieberman. He evidently gave Obama expert advice about how to raise funds from the financial class by delivering his liberal constituency to his Wall Street campaign contributors."
..
"Wall Street has orchestrated and lobbied for a rentier alliance whose wealth is growing at the expense of the economy at large. It is extractive, not productive."

Area blogger takes incoming plutocratic fire

 
Original editorial. Replying editorial.

I doubt further commentary is needed.

But later correspondents added some conservative echos.


Though, come to think of it, perhaps a link to a recent New Yorker cover would be in order:

And, just to keep things light, a Roz Chast cartoon may be helpful as well: