Brain: Is Size Everything?

Properties other than size also make human brains different.

There is no doubt that humans experience a unique sense of consciousness and form of cognition. While other animals like chimpanzees, dolphins, dogs, elephants, and crows are amazingly smart in general and have highly developed capabilities of their own, they don't touch our abilities for planning, remembering, focusing, and at the top of the list- language, both spoken and thought. It remains hard to characterize these differences, because we are still learning so much about the cognition of other animals, and because even with introspection, language, science, and the rest of our inquisitive armamentarium, our own mental processes remain opaque to a large degree.

However, there are clear differences, and how can they be expained? We turn out not to be the only animals with large brains. Sperm whales have brains about nine times as heavy as ours. Even some dolpins have bigger brains than we do. Monkeys typically have smaller brains than cows, despite much higher intelligence. Mice have brains that are, per body weight, almost ten times as large as ours. So size is not, by itself, the issue. There is more going on.

Biggest does not equal smartest. At least that is what we think.

On the other hand, over the last few million years, size has clearly meant something, as our brains have grown at a very rapid clip. So it appears that within a given lineage, size increases may serve as the easiest way to change cognitive capacity, and can serve as a proxy for intelligence. But it is far more hazardous to make comparisons between different lineages, since their architectures and thus capabilities may be very different. So who knows- maybe octopuses are smarter than we are, despite having smaller brains, and several of them.

But bigger is better, among our closer relatives.

For example, thanks to our particular architecture, we pack more neurons into a gram of brain than do whales, so we end up with as many or more brain cells as elephants and whales. And what is more, our brain being more compact gives those neurons a distinct advantage in speed / connectivity. There has been a good deal of work on the genetic level to look for genes and other genetic features that show accelerated evolution in the human lineage- quantitative work that can show with high confidence that some gene variation or regulatory site is novel and significant in humans. But linking that data to the human phenotype has been a challenge, as is true generally with human genetics. The best route has typically been to find other variations in the same area that lead to disease or other pathology, which can give strong clues about the overall function. Or providing mice with the human version of the gene, though the chances of seeing something informative, let alone amazing(!), by this route are rather slim.

Getting back to brain function, a recent paper discussed new work in the field, particularly on the properties of neurons themselves, which might help explain some of our mental distinctiveness. This was all done on brains from recently-living humans, which are understandably hard to get and hard to work with, in a brain slice+electrodes system. One finding is that we have a unique class of "super-neurons"- cells which fire so strongly that a single one can set off responses to the next neuron and thus to larger cortical circuits. This is not seen in other species (per their claim) and is unusual because in typical brain tissue / circuits, it takes converging firings from several or many upstream cells to bump a neuron into action- which is, after all, the whole point of information integration.

The efficiency possibilities are clear. If a percept can happen from the firing of a single famous face cell, (though these are likely to be part of a neural network, rather than regimented as one cell per face), then we need fewer of them to carry memories. The cells and synapses discussed here actually target inhibitory neurons, but the logic remains the same- that if single cells can control large-scale network activities, you need fewer of them, though their tuning and activity then are of paramount importance.

Two neurons meet... The intensely spiking pyramidal neuron (red) which firs first, and the post-synaptic, receiving cell  (blue) are portrayed (C) as they were stained and micrographed in the tissue. The layers of the cortical sheet are given roman numerals. Synapses between them are numbered in D. Panel B shows an averaged stimulus -> response graph of the two cells, showing that the receiving basket cell (bc) quite frequently fires (74% of the time) when the sending cell fires, despite their very sparse synapses. The lower graph (26%) shows the other events, when pyramidal cell firing evokes only a grudging sigh in the receiving cell. In other species, this is all one would see in such single-cell stimulus / encounters. Panel A shows that the receiving cell not only fires once, but several times per upstream spike.

"Although the ratio of triggering poly- versus monosynaptic postsynaptic potentials was 0.01 in the rat and 1.73 in the human in our hands, it should be emphasized that the human patients were treated differently during anesthesia and surgery, and the excitability of human neurons might be different in the external solution also used for rat experiments."

"However, the human neocortical neurons also exhibit specializations only reported in our species. One such feature is the capacity of excitatory principal cells to elicit firing in local inhibitory interneurons with a single action potential via very strong excitatory synapses. It has been suggested that this feature has specifically evolved to enhance coordinated firing of neuronal ensembles in higher brain functions."

Additionally, learning happens very quickly among these super-neurons, so that they do not regularly overwhelm their targets. After ten minutes of stimulation, the downstream cell had already learned to ignore the stimulus. So while most processing takes place in the usual integrative network pathways to come up with usefully transformed information, there seem to be cases when directness and efficiency rose in importance, in the human lineage, and thus led to the development of these super-neurons. This kind of study adds a cell-biology level to the much-better characterized, but as yet tenuously connected phenotypic and genetic levels of differences that make humans distinctive from their ancestors and fellow-beings on the planet.

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• How did we get to this partisan hellscape?
• But truth remains a value to some.

The Challenge of Collective Action

The left habitually under-appreciates the difficulties of collective action.

Joining the recent protests against our new president, I found myself marching along in a wonderful crowd, all with common purpose and strong emotion. But what struck me was the utter innanity of the chant- Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, etc... It was an embarrassing regression to a minimal, indeed infantile, common denominator.

Why? Why do leftist actions and protests routinely look so shambolic and fritter away their energy? Why are the high ideals not matched by high rhetoric and disciplined action? The Occupy movement added squatting to the menu of marching and chanting, but ended up in the same place- lodging a mostly inarticulate cry of protest against the System.

The same disappointments abound across the spectrum, though. The Dilbert cartoon lampoons the difficulties of corporate communication and management, among people who work together every day, yet still fail to communicate and collaborate effectively. Participating in organizations is difficult, at all levels. But that already supposes an organizational hierarchy, which is more than the deep left is willing to countenance. Can anarchists and egalitarians accomplish anything?

The System is made up of organizations of all kinds- corporations, parties, legislatures, think tanks, unions, magazines, clubs, non-profits- a wide range of institutions each with some kind of mechanism of translating personal, privately held intentions and desires into communal action. Each can get more done than a simple mob, by virtue of its mechanism- its hierarchical organization.

That is how inarticulate cries get translated into sustained action- through organization. The left creates organizations profusely, but does not typically sustain them very well. There are countless peace and justice movements, non-profits, and coalitions, which typically operate on a shoestring and have a tenuous and brief existence, due to their anti-organizational temperament.

The right is more temperamentally suited to organzation life. Hierarchy is ingrained and desirable, not an evil to be torn down. Existing organizations and orders of society are assumed to be good, not regarded skeptically, with a revolutionary glint. The corporation is a prime example of this, an organizational style that pervades our lives and politics, and is run, as a rule, by people of a right-ward temperament. Power is also understood better by those on the right, assuming as they do an organizational structure rather than a menu of nebulous ideals. The problems of gaining and using power are typically separated from those of justifying it, as hierarchy is regarded as good in itself. Thus we have the spectacle of Karl Rove rising through means that were completely immoral, but highly effective, through a succession of Republican youth groups. Thus we saw the utter nihilism of Newt Gingrich, and later Mitch McConnell, in their pursuit of power, in collaboration with a whole ecosystem of secret money, state-level gerrymandering, and media pollution.

And what is the point of all this? For the right, the preservation of hierarchy and order, of the rule by the strong over the weak, seems to be the point of whole exercise of having power. Organizational success results in successful organizations. Inquality and oppression of the powerless is part of the deal. On the other hand, for the left, the point is to make of the state a bulwark against the strong and powerful, so that inequality and injustice are reduced. But to do that, a super-powerful organization is required, i.e. the state itself, whose capture by either right or left is then the most momentous condition of society in general.

In this way, the right seeks its goals in natural fashion, while the left needs to use temperamentally unnatural and disliked methods to get to the same goal. The left thus faces an existential question- how to reconcile the dogged pursuit of power with the overall goal of taming power in society. This temperamental and philosophical problem is at the core of why democratic majorities are not enough, and why the right, despite representing in effect a very small sliver of the populace, regularly gains power.

One way to look at this is via the two-dimensional political temperament graph, plotting authoritarianism vs left-right orientation. Above, I have been conflating the two, since at least in the Anglophone world, there is high correlation of authoritarianism and right wing-ism. Indeed, one might add that the authoritarian dimension is far more momentous, historically speaking, than the left-right dimension, whatever their correlation. The diagram should look more like a vertically elongated diamond.

Left/Right vs Authoritarian/Libertarian layout from politicalCompass.org. I would disagree with their placement of the main candidates, as Trump is clearly more right-wing, perhaps to an unprecedented extent in US history, as shown by his actions of just the first week of his administration. The researchers may have been hoodwinked by his various lies and poses during the campaign. Clinton, in contrast, could hardly be as rightist as shown, let alone farther right than Trump. It is an example of misreading people's characters, even by experts.

Take the Bolsheviks, as an example. Ostensibly leftist, they were also mad with lust for power, and in the end were both successful in seizing power from a rotten system, and in totally betraying their ideology to create just another version of Russian despotism. Such dedicated, organizationally competent, and doggedly power-seeking people (i.e. authoritarian) are rare on the left, since they operate against the natural temperament and ideological tendencies, which are disinterest in hierarchy and institutional power, free love, free work, free couch crashing, etc. This is the original non-profit sector. This internal, psychic opposition makes such authoritarianism particularly unstable.

Similarly, the Black Panthers only survived as long as they did thanks to some very authoritarian tendencies- hard-asses who ran the show, brandished the guns, and enforced hierarchical organization in the face of overwhelming right-wing infiltration and opposition. Relying on left-ish authoritarians to run one's organizations is clearly a recipe for disaster, however, as their temperament tends to a greater commitment to authoritarianism (i.e. power) than to leftism.

The left thus faces a deep problem. One needs leadership and hierarchy, even though few on the left are temperamentally suited to it. And one needs an ongoing diet of activities that allow groups to bond and grow their commitments and competence. The corporation, with its ongoing struggle to win the marketplace, is a good example. Churches are another, with the various personal and social goals that merge into a more or less stable institution that can occasionally be active politically as well.

The university is another, more left-aligned institution, where the society's need for knowledge and human development is channelled into maintenence of a cadre of left-leaning academics. It is typical that our universities have never taken up leadership of a larger social mission, but remain dutifully atomized in small departments, indeed individual labs and scholars, who are as distant as possible from social action. It is an example of how the temperament and interests of the left combine with subtle but influential incentive stuctures imposed from above (the competitive grant system, constant budget crises) to neuter a possible source of left social comunity and leadership.

• Getting real about the Trump agenda.
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• On the importance of truth and epistemology.
• Example: climate change no longer exists.
• But facts lie on a spectrum, so to speak.
• VOA could be turned into Pravda.
• EPA about to be destroyed.
• Our decline is palpable.
• Cybercrime is a huge economy. We need a better, and more open, defense.
• Money is the only consideration now in the mainstream political system.
• Exhibit A: Goldman Sachs is back to running our government.

Cultural Trauma and Authoritarianism

What the Mongols did to the Muslim world, China, and Russia.

Russia is certainly in the news now, and what do you know, but over the holidays Santa Claus brought me Martin Sixsmith's history of Russia. It breezes all too quickly through the first millenium or so of Rus, from its semi-mythical origins in the 800's as yet another Viking outpost, like that of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons in England, and the Normans in France, England and later in Italy and Palestine.

Sixsmith paints a picture of a reasonably cosmopolitan and open society (centered in Kiev) in the very early period, though always quarreling and lacking centralized leadership and legitimacy, as was true for most other Western regions during the middle ages (and elsewhere in human history). All that changed in 1240, when the Mongols concluded a lengthy conquest, and put Russia under a severe yoke for the following 240 years.

While there has been quite an effort in recent years to rehabilitate the Mongols, one can make the case that the rise of Western Europe over all other areas of the world in the last few hundred years is due in large part to the destruction or hobbling of its competitors by the Mongols. This applies to China, to Russia, and most profoundly, to the Muslim world.

In Russia, the Mongols exterminated entire cities and forced the remainder to pay heavy tributes, as well as a lot of bowing and scraping, to their new overlords. But contrary to Sixsmith's portrayal, the Mongol rule was not terribly heavy-handed. They ruled through the local nobility, which, while neutered, was not destroyed. The Mongols also instituted some administrative efficiencies that accelerated institutional development. Perhaps the main effect, however, was the general trauma of violation and subjugation. With no natural borders, and predatory neighbors, the Russians evidently came to the conclusion that: 1. With regard to governing style, if you can't beat them, join them (i.e. the autocratic, despotic, and extremely effective military organization of the Mongols), and 2. That autocratic central power is the only way to keep Russia whole against its many neighbors. We in the US live in such a pleasant and peaceful neighborhood (Oh, Canada!), yet still are strikingly paranoid about Communism, Islam, immigration, etc.- take your pick. Imagine if those threats were actually real!

The enormous Mongol empire, 1200's.

Sixsmith certainly draws a line between this trauma and the continuing dedication of Russia to statism and autocracy, now exemplified by Vladimir Putin's nouveau despotism. China has ended up in a very similar place, from a much longer history of dynamic centralization, but similar subjugation by the Mongols. It is easy to draw the lesson that strength is the only way to survive in such a rough neighborhood. Yet it is a conclusion a little too-easily drawn by those already in power, whose only real interest is staying in power. Both China and Russia are exemplars of the extremes of depotic rule, particularly after it was given a whole new propagandistic lease on life by a Western ideology far more amenable and convenient than liberal democracy: communism. In China, it works tolerably well at the moment, but only by being radically tamed from the heights achieved by Chairman Mao.

But the saddest trauma was suffered by the Muslim world, which was at its height when the Mongols trashed Baghdad. In the centuries since, they have not gained a continent-wide empire (excepting the conquests and splendors of Mughal period), and have fallen progressively behind Western Europe. Whether the low point was the cavalier carving up of Muslim countries by the British (and French and Russians) after the fall of the Ottoman empire, or the current Islamist insanity, the Muslim world has had an increasingly frought relationship with the rest of the world, and with Modernity.

The Muslim approach to statehood and governance has always been lacking, based as it is on Muhammed as a singular and unreplicable example. A tribal and militaristic style succeeded after Muhammed's death, in channelling the energies of the unified community to winning an enormous empire. The caliphate then kept things together loosely, with religion as the core of identity. But it was always by civil war that God decided on the winners in the battle for the next ruling family. In Europe, the Catholic church (and its monastic affiliates) provided a much more stable model of governance, via election out of an oligarchy of cardinals. Later on, the Protestant reformation prompted ever greater attention to the role of the individual, as arbiter of celestial as well as terrestrial salvation. These threads of practice and theory led, in excruciatingly slow fashion, to the secular democratic state we have today.

When crisis threw Muslims back onto their religion as the bulwark of communal identity, there was little to go on to develop state institutions. Thus states tended to revert to tribal autocracy as the model. In the Arab core of the Muslim world, this remains the rule to this day. In outlying areas, however, such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey, (possibly Egypt and Tunisia), non-religious ideologies and influences have been more powerful, such as British colonialism, and the active Westernizing secularism of Ataturk. These countries have highly authoritarian tendencies, but have so far successfully cast aside enough of their Muslim ideological baggage to make democratic systems work to some degree.

This lack of legitimate state development in the bulk of the historical Muslim world, perhaps accentuated by the trauma of Mongol destruction, is central to its current complaints. It was central to their lack of resistance to Western imperialism, to their lack of effective post-colonial governance, to lack of human development and the economic development it leads to. It was also central to our disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US dreamed of quickly implanting democracy, only to be faced by a culture utterly unprepared for it, with far more fissiparous fish to fry. If God anoints the strong to rule over the weak, by way of warfare in general and jihad in particular, what is the point of legally bound representative state institutions?

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• We need a new economic deal, and we need it fast.
• Economic graph of the week: Corporations are paying less, workers are paying more.

Why Have Brain Waves?

A theory about the function of electrical brain oscillations.

The phenomenon of brain waves have been the topic of many posts here, because they are such a tempting target for brain-wide information synchronization and management. Disparate analogies such as radio broadcasting, and the clock-ing of CPU chips come to mind. Yet the phenomenon is complicated, with lots of noise and a variety of active frequencies, spanning a ten-fold range. There have been many clues about their function, such as correlation with various mental states, (attention, sleep, resting non-attention), but no coherent theory about what they do has arisen, yet.

A recent paper tries to rectify that, by dialing back the expectations of what brain waves are doing, and coming at the problem from a very basic level. Information, after all, is not being carried directly by these waves at all- they are too variable and weak for that. Information in the brain is carried by the individual cell activations, in the context of their anatomical connections, which together form patterns that dynamically model variable information states.

One problem for this system is that neuron firing needs to be sparse in order to be useful. If everyone fires at once, you have epilepsy, instead of information modeling and transfer. Inhibitory neurons help with this, dampening feedback loops and preventing runaway activation. But most phenomena that one wants to model are stable over time, or vary relatively slowly. If you are looking at a scene, little changes from one 50 millisecond frame to the next, which is why our MP3 and video compression technologies work so well. Modeling stable phenomena with sparse, randomly firing neurons leads to quite a bit of error, as shown in the author's panel b, below.

Theory for the usefulness of partial neuron synchronization for accurate data encoding. Panel b shows what happens when neurons (black slashes, for each firing) are unsynchronized, while representing a constant stimulus (signal, blue). The cumulative representation (black line) is not an optimal representation of the original signal (blue). In contrast, if the neurons still fire sparsely, but are clocked to a global rhythm, even a very rough rhythm (yellow) gives as good overall accuracy as the fully randomly firing ensemble, and shorter time intervals provide the possibility of greater accuracy (salmon, green). Panel d represents conceptually the tradeoff between random firing and synchronized firing, as measured in data reconstruction error. The optimum is somewhere in the middle.

The observation is general to all data, whether stable or not, actually. Some synchronization provides more accurate data representation over a completely random ensemble of neurons, especially if the neurons are firing sparsely enough that (as in panel a, above) none fire at exactly the same time. This is a very significant point, and by itself predicts that neuron oscillations will happen in roughly the way they are observed- widely enough to be observed and to entrain much of the neuron firing that happens, but not strongly enough to cause epileptic-like mass synchronized firing.

It turns out that that there is even more room for improvement, however. Ironically, adding a little noise can also be helpful for signal reconstruction. Since the network has to include inhibitory neurons to dampen overall feedback and also prevent simultaneous spiking of nearby neurons, they cause an additional degradation of final representation, especially since they have delays in their own response, as do the activating neurons. The problem is that despite the presence of inhibitory neurons, they can not always act fast enough to dampen spike trains, which tend to run away a bit before inhibition. Modelling this all out, the authors find that adding a bit of noise to the system helps prevent excess synchronization, with quite beneficial effects, seen in the next figure.

 "Thus, optimal coding was achieved when the balance between excitatory and inhibition was the tightest. Further, at the optimal level of noise, the spiking CV [coefficient of variation] value was near unity, implying irregular (near-poisson) single cell responses."

The population firing rate power (panel h) shows most clearly the dangers of the low or no noise regime. Adding just a little noise (blue) helps dampen runaway spike trains significantly, while also (panels e, c) improving data reconstruction accuracy. In each panel d,e,f, the stable dashed line is the orginal data to be reconstructed. CV = coefficient of variation, exc. = excitatory neurons, in. = inhibitory neurons, ram = root mean squat, an inverse measure of correlation between the original signal and the reconstructed signal. Lower numbers (error) are better.

Taken together, this work argues strongly that neural oscillations (aside from the sleep spindles and other slow-wave phenomena that have distinct maintenance purposes) have a loosely analogous role to clocking cycles in computers. They do not themselves convey any data, but facilitate better data modelling. Their strengthening during attention, motor activities, and the like would then be a sign of weak synchronization, which may be significant over large areas of the brain for assembling mental constructs, but not of anything like information broadcasting. I would take this as the leading theory, currently, of their function.

"Neural oscillations have been hypothesised to fulfill a number of different functional roles, including feature binding (Singer, 1999), gating communication between different neural assemblies (Fries, 2005; Womelsdorf et al., 2007; Akam and Kullmann, 2010), encoding feed-forward and feed-back prediction errors (Arnal et al., 2011; Arnal and Giraud, 2012; Bastos et al., 2012) and facilitating ‘phase codes’ in which information is communicated via the timing of spikes relative to the ongoing oscillation cycle (Buzsáki and Chrobak, 1995). 

Many of these theories propose new ways in which oscillations encode incoming sensory information. In contrast, in our work network oscillations do not directly code for anything, but rather, are predicted as a consequence of efficient rate coding, an idea whose origins go back more than 50 years (Barlow, 1961)."

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Which is More Real: Global Warming, or Jesus Christ?

An exercise in epistemology.

A recent article in the magazine Free Inquiry urged atheists to not get seduced by the theory that Jesus was a mythical creation, instead of a real person. This has been a persistent and highly interesting sub-current in the community, yet the academic consensus, even among non-believing scholars, is that Jesus really did exist. As the writer, Bill Cooke, states: "Part of the problem is that there is no convincing explanation as to why a body of mythological exegesis should have built up quite quickly around someone who never existed."

The consensus of the field is not that Jesus is entirely mythical, but rather that the religion that we have now as Christianity is mostly mythical, going far, far beyond whatever kernel Jesus provided. For example, Jesus was Jewish, and had no interest in founding a non-Jewish, let alone anti-Jewish, religion. He was likely a reforming preacher, and may possibly have presented himself as an inverted Jewish messiah. But the idea that he was god, or part of a trinity, or born on Christmas, or was resurrected, or will come again ... are total fabrications, even to discerning theologians who understand their history.

But all this gets far ahead of the point of the mythicist exercise, which is not to state in some fundamentatlist way that "Jesus never existed, so nya-nya!", but rather to point out the paucity of evidence for that existence, making of it a valid question rather than glorious certainty, and making of the Bible a multi-layered amalgam of myth, piled around a little pea which, while probably real, might also be myth.

There is no direct evidence that Jesus existed. No inscriptions, no contemporary texts, no mentions at all in any text until fifty years or more after his death. And those first mentions, by the Apostle Paul, have a curiously mythical character to them, never mentioning Jesus as a person in any distinct way, but only as the crucified apotheosis of the new movement. The Jesus seminar, to take one example, has tied itself in knots trying to figure out what slivers of the Christian corpus have anything to do with its founder.

Do electric Magi dream of animatronic gods?

So the epistemological status of Jesus as a human being is not secure, but rests, as mentioned above, on the measured judgement of historical scholars about the likelihood of this cult developing the way it did, with or without the putative founder. It is a circumstantial, and preponderance-of-evidence kind of argument, far from an empirical certainty. And the epistemological status of Jesus as a current being / target of devotion, who listens to our prayers, accepts our love from the hearts that we open to him, and will return to set everything right ... well, that is completely untethered from reality, naturally. There is no more evidence for this than there is for praying to pet rocks.

Compare this with global warming and our role in causing it, which is, ironically, the subject of wide disbelief, especially among the religious and others with financial or ideological interests in not believing it. It is, like religious belief, more or less invisible and a matter of careful inference, by a priesthood of experts with occult instruments and practices. But truly, the evidence is now available in profusion, both of its existence and its inexorable (if slow) and dire consequences.

Yet disbelief persists. If god is running things for our benefit, the earth could hardly be going to pot due our greed and negligence, could it? And anyhow, if Jesus is coming back soon, who cares? The idea that humanity will be around for thousands, even millions, or, inconceivably, billions of years into the future is foreign to a mindset where one's horizon is hardly farther than a generation past or future, and everything beyond that resides in an archetypal, dreamy haze.

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Make America Decline Again

Where is Trump going, and where are our institutions going?

My recent reading of Medieval history was particularly interesting in its analysis of the growth of institutions in Western / Northern Europe. It was a very slow, painful process, as the vacuum of Rome was replaced first by German kings with very primitive notions of the state and society, co-existing, with monks in their cloisters. Then came nascent states that used more bureaucratic structure (increasingly integrated with services from the church) to provide state services to larger territories and more people. Charlemagne built a great state, but it did not yet have the institutional staying power to last much beyond his sons. But over time, bigger and more effectively run states (Norman England, Capetian France) won the struggle for power in Europe, and generated not only bigger armies and bloodier wars, but also more peaceful and prosperous conditions at home.

Many of these institutions by which we live in peace with each other are written down, in constitutions and laws. But many are not. For example, the fact that a majority of votes in the Senate or House passes a bill is understood and obvious, but not actually written down in the constitution. It appears only by default when a 2/3 majority is required for such things as a passing a constitutional amendment or overriding a veto, and would be implicit in the ability of each chamber to make its own rules for administration. More topically, nothing prevents a president from having all sorts of business interests and foreign entaglements that might corrupt his or her administration. It is merely up to the voters to decide, and later the Congress to take up the matter if they have a mind to impeach.

Institutions live not only in our officials and constitutions, but in everyone's implicit expectations of how their society should run. The town meeting is a hallowed institution, by those who take part in it, as the only reasonable way to run a small political entity. They would not dream to call in a dictator from the outside, as was common practice in Medieval Italy.

Corruption is what happens when unwritten as well as written institutions weaken and go by the wayside, allowing the immediate motivations of greed and ego to replace the carefully honed traditions- if those traditions be worthy- and even common decency. An example is gerrymandering. It is obvious that the original intent, and the intent of any fair-minded person, would be that legislative districts should be evenly and regularly allocated to group together people who live close together. But well-gerrymandered state can scientifically allocate voters such that the party responsible gains far more seats that they deserve, which are then impregnable till the next census and the next exercise in drawing districts.

North Carolina's 12th district.

Corruption is not only an offense against fair play and moral decency, but typically against truth as well. No one is proud of being corrupt and abusing written and unwritten institutions. The trick is to claim one's fidelity while subverting in reality. And the cost of our large political system is that people are so out of touch with each other that they can no longer judge closely, or care to judge, or may not be educationally equipped to judge, the candidates for office, who each make the same claims to fidelity, truth and good character.

Which all makes our recent election so difficult to digest. The Democrats surely had their issues with fidelity to public institutions, with Hillary Clinton eagerly feeding at the golden trough of Goldman Sachs, and her husband raking in (charitably, of course) millions from foreign and other politically interested donors, a haul that one assumes is likely to dry up quite dramatically in the coming year.

However, all this pales in comparison to the orchestrated war on our basic institutions and our very understanding of truth that the Republicans have led for decades. Donald Trump campaigned openly on a platform of lies and execrable character. His business history is one of repeated bankruptcy, betrayal, cheating, and bullying. His knowledge of our institutions, and indeed of reality itself, is marginal. His abilty to articulate rational public policy was and remains nil, suited only to emotional outbursts via the 140-character medium of twitter. His emotional makeup was clearly unstable, and evidently psychopathic. And people voted for him.

Why? The battlefield had been softened up by decades of smear operations mounted by the Republican party through FOX news and other organs of the right. It turns out that hate sells, and thus leads to a sustainable business model of purveying emotionally tinged lies, leading to mis-directed hate, leading to more listener engagement, and more advertising dollars. It is reminiscent of the interwar period in Germany, when scapegoats were sought for: who lost World War I. They came up with the Jews, and a general lack of teutonic authoritanianism, in a self-feeding cycle of hate which polarized society to great, deadly extremes.

For decades, the Republicans have been seeking scapegoats for: who lost the culture war? Why are Americans becoming increasingly compassionate towards blacks, towards gays, towards atheists? What is going on, and could the clock be turned back- to make America great again? The backbone of this movement was naturally the right-wing religious believers, who, being temperamentally authoritarian, and having already swallowed one pack of lies, had little problem with a few more, like the whole wishlist from the business community, that wealthy people are the job creators, that government regulation is the main thing standing between rural people and good jobs, and that unions are evil. And that Donald Trump means anything he says or has an ounce of morals. And that the Clintons are unspeakably vile- far more so than those fine business organizations who sold so many fraudulent loans and other toxic waste that we are barely coming out of the recession they caused. And that global warming is a hoax, and that Bengazi was Hillary's fault, and ... well, the appalling list goes on, ad infinitum. They have a great deal of airtime to fill, after all.

The Republican war on our institutions has had a self-reinforcing quality. Given that they want to debilitate governmental institutions, whenever they get their hands on one, like the House of Representatives or the Senate, they make it non-functional, and in a self-fulfiling prophecy, the government indeed doesn't work, and the base can be riled up all over again to attack their chosen targets of hate. The base doesn't seem to make the connection between cause and effect, except when that connection is glaring, such as the government shutdowns that ultimately damaged Newt Gingrich- perhaps the earliest and most vociferous destroyer of American instutions in our generation.

The vacancy on the Supreme court stands as the absolute lowest point of Republican subversion. A shameless plot against norms and practices in place since the founding, in a doomed quest to reverse the course of social development. For however conservative and extreme the court gets, America at large is never going back to the image that conservatives have of it. Similarly, Donald Trump is busily appointing to each department a head who seeks to debilitate it and subvert its purposes and norms, so that corruption by the business elite can flourish. Education will see corporations in charge of charter schools, the EPA, corporations in charge of climate change policy, and the Labor department will see union busters in charge. The tax system as a whole will doubtless see giveaways to corporations and the wealthy that will make the Reagan administration look like a Trotskyite regime.

Is this what his voters wanted? I would hope and assume not. But they knew they were electing a con man, right? How could a ruthless billionaire with no previously recorded ounce of compassion for anyone outside his family do other than he has, hiring those he likes and trusts to run our country, which already is one of the most unequal in the developed world?

While all of politics is a matter of lies and half-truths; banal rhetoric with maximal tone and minimal content, the degree to which Trump could play this game with complete shamelessness and emptiness is not a matter of his talent alone, but of the decades-long evisceration of our public discourse and institutions, and particularly the Ministry-of-Truth programming that his base has been fed so effectively from the right-wing media. They do it not only in the service of their conservative ideals, but also for their true power base- the wealthy and corporations, who could never carry an election with their own votes, but if they destroy enough of our democratic and cultural institutions, and brain cells, can win anyhow, free and fair.

• Is compassion dead?
• Yes.
• Honestly, do we really need a middle class?
• How about some happy thoughts?
• "Liberalizing policies are justified in theory only by the assumption that political decisions will redistribute some of the gains from winners to losers in socially acceptable ways. But what happens if politicians do the opposite in practice?"
• Christmas is pagan.

Repression Makes Us What We Are

Notes on polycomb and histone interaction in developmental gene control.

While we have shockingly few genes in the genomes which engender our complexity, most of them are also turned off most of the time. It is repression, just as much as activation, that generates the patterns of gene expression that allow developmental ramification and specialization. This repression comes in several forms, from individual gene switches to the sequestering of whole chromosomes, such as in female X-inactivation. The stronger forms of repression can be what is called "epigenetic", which simply means they can last a long time, such as through several cell division cycles, or even across a generation. That means that they begin to mimick true genetic effects. However unlike true mutations, they can be programmatically reversed at some future time- otherwise they would not have any function. Thus "epigenetic" features are part of an organism's phenotype, not its genotype.

One general mechanism of long-term and long-range (that is, may extend over many neighboring genes, and large chromosomal regions) gene repression is the polycomb system, named after phenotypes conferred by some of its mutations in fruit flies, whose males have sex combs. This is a system that may descend on a chromosomal region if it is never needed again in the development of an organism, and keeps those genes off, locked up tight. This effect is also called "gene silencing", for obvious reasons.

There are several proteins that make up polycomb complexes, each with its own super-powers. Most of these powers revolve around working with histones- the small proteins that are the smallest packaging units of DNA in eukaryotic cells. Histones are not passive spools around which DNA wraps, however, but through a vast number of possible chemical modifications (methylation, acetylation, ubiquitination, at numerous different positions) are pivotal levers of control over on the availability of DNA to all the other denizens of the nucleus.

One typical core complex of histones, acting as a spool for our DNA. The DNA is actually much larger, covering most of the histone surface. Yet the histone tails stick out, ready to be modified and recognized by various other regulatory proteins.

One of the special characteristics of polycomb action is that it can spread along the DNA from a initiating site to nearby locations, in a progressive fashion. This is unlike a normal gene repressor, which just acts locally within a mixture of activators and repressors for one enhancer site upstream of one gene. How does polycomb do this, and how does it know where to stop?

There are two parts to the system, polycomb complex 1 and complex 2 (PRC1, PRC2). PRC2 acts first, binding to other proteins at particular DNA sites called polycomb response elements, and methylates the local histones H3 on lysines (K) 9 and 27, which are on the tails sticking away from the DNA and thus accessible. How does this get turned on? The targetting proteins are the ones that are themselves regulated to initiate the whole repression process. A second activating change is methylation of the local DNA, at CG dinucleotides, which tends to concentrate at silenced genomic locations, and helps initiate that silencing.

Methylation has a specific charge effect, eliminating the positive charge on the affected lysines, (or negative charge at the CpG DNA sites), thus helping the histones repel each other less, and pack together. But the marking of histones by various methyl, acetyl, and other groups on their tails has more subtle effects, since each modification is specifically recognized by other proteins, creating a complex code that regulates gene activity at very fine scales.

The second step, carried out by PRC1, which finds and binds to histone H3 methylated on lysine 27, is ubiquitination of histone H2A on lysine 119. As ubiquitin is a small protein, its attachement is a much more dramatic change than modifications like methylation or ethylation. And though ubiquitin is generally associated with marking proteins for destruction, here is doesn't have that effect, but rather has a regulatory role in stablizing and compacting chromatin structure. However, as a large complex with several activities, PRC1 may do other things to promote repression which are not yet known.

A recent paper delved into this a bit to ask how PRC1 is composed, and what activates it. It is not a stable or uniform complex, but a consortium of several proteins that converge when needed and whose components come in several flavors. It is apparent that repression even in this general polycomb class comes in different forms. Representative components are:

• RING1 or RING1B- this is the ligase that enzymatically attaches ubiquitin to Histone H2A
• PCGF1- This is a helper for the RING ubiquitin ligase activity.
• CBX2 or RYBP- a protein that binds to the H3 methylation site, and binds other proteins, especially PCGF1, and YY1. YY1 is one of the targeting transcription factors that can bind the polycomb response elements and help initiate repression.
• KDM2B- an enzyme that can de-methylate histone lysines, and binds to the CpG dinucleotides that, in part, target polycomb repression. It also has a protein domain with a role in targeting ubiquitination of other proteins (the F-box).
• BCOR- This protein interacts with other histone de-acetylases.

The point of this particular paper was to demonstrate the composition of one particular version of the PRC1 complex, and to show that the core subunits of RING1B and PCGF1 are sufficient for histone ubuquitination, but that they are stimulated by the addition of the subunit RYBP. The other subunits don't help ubiquitination in vitro, but have other roles (whether known or unknown) in regulating and directing the complex's activity in cells.

One example of a PRC1 complex, which ubiquitinates H2A histones. B shows an electrophoretic gel that separates the proteins by size. kD is kilo-Daltons. C shows a mass-spectrographic study of cross-linked complexes showing which parts of which components interact directly with which other ones.

Another finding is that the PRC2 complex recognizes not only the initiating factors at the polycomb response elements, but also the ubiquitinated histones left by PRC1. This is likely to be part of the positive feedback "spreading" mechanism by which polycomb extends its area of repression from those initiating sites on the DNA / chromatin. Unfortunately, the details of initiation, the exact mechanism of spreading, the implications of ubiquitination, and the reasons for limits on the dimensions of polycomb-repressed regions are still largely unknown, or only hinted at, so far.

That gives you a taste of the state of the field, from this recent paper. The polycomb system has been known for a long time, having been established genetically in fruit flies over 70 years ago, with the discovery of the original polycomb mutation. It is unfortunate that this field is not farther along, in the understanding of the individual components, and how this form of repression is initiated and limited.

• Yes, he has his own brown shirts.
• Meet your new friends.
• Cultures of stupidity.
• To hell with the whole thing...
• We can make all the jobs we want.
• Apparently, a feminized culture is a bad thing.
• Scientific epistemology, the value of negative results, and the canonization of facts.
• Institutional development in China, vs freedom.
• Can we call it treason, already?
• Religion is part of the reason for our new love of Putin.
• Mergers are good for someone, but not you.

"By utilizing new techniques to isolate the effects of mergers, they find no evidence that mergers increase efficiency, but do find evidence that they increase market power, meaning they allow companies to generate higher profits by raising prices."

Encounter With Aristotle

Leading Western cultures encountered Aristotle at critical times. What was the result?

This is a continuation of last week's appreciation of Norman Cantor's "The Civilization of the Middle Ages", which devotes a great deal of space to the renaissance of the twelfth century. This was when most of the extant writings of Aristotle- an enormous corpus- reached Europe, from various sources, including translations from Arabic and then later, translations from the original Greek, which had remained on file in Christian Byzantium.

I can not claim any expertise on Aristotle whatsoever; it is a mountain I have yet to climb. But his central position in both ancient and later philosophy is clear. This episode of recovery and rediscovery by Western Europeans after their long intellectual darkness is particularly interesting and momentous in many ways, not just to philosophy.

Aristotle.

Aristotle was the proto-scientist, to Plato's idealist. Christian thought had developed as a fusion of Judaism and Platonism. Ideals such as god, categories, spheres, were to Plato not only real, but the only real things at all, with particular, empirical manifestations being of far less interest, merely the deficient instantiations of ideals and inferences which an intensely abstract intellectual would find the only compelling things. Imagine that you had just discovered gravity. The examples of it in everyday life are interesting, but the universal idea of it is vastly more powerful and conceptually deep.

On the other hand, Aristotle, while not dismissing Platonic idealism, matched it with a regard for empirical complexity and existence. His biology is a good example, where actual observations and even dissection support a classification scheme without a lot of idealistic baggage. Aristotle believed in god, but in a sort of deistic version- the prime mover. Nor did he think we have immortal souls, but that all life forms have souls in various gradations that are just our vital motive forces, and which, at best, reunite with a universal soul at death, but in most instances die with the body. One can portray Aristotle as a stage in humanity's maturation, from childish magical thinking, where all concepts have to revolve around the self, to an ability to deal with reality forthrightly, with fewer mythical crutches, and more humility.

His huge and advanced corpus was clearly far beyond what the local philosophers and scientists of the Muslim, Jewish, or Western European worlds had achieved. Naturally, it challenged them in fundamantal ways. The greatest intellects of each tradition grappled with Aristotle and wrote commentaries: Averroes, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. Cantor writes:

"In both Moslem and Jewish thought, the attempts of great thinkers to deal with the relationship of revelation and the new Aristotelian science thus ended in defeat and disaster at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Islam turned away from science because it was considered heretical by religious leaders who were able to obtain the assistance of fanatical princes to destroy rational speculation. The general decline of vigor in Islamic civilization undoubtedly also played a part in the termination of the great scientific and philosophical movement in the Arabic world. Judaism at the same time turned its back on science and secular thought, partly again because of the hostility of orthodox leaders and partly because of the ghettoization of European Jewry which began in the twelfth century."

The result here was that, for all the heroic efforts of Averroes and Maimonides (and their followers and colleagues) to blaze a compatibalist path that shoehorned the two systems together, the larger community was not having it. Any shoehorning of elements of the faith, especially of the Koran, was unacceptable. One can surmise that the social functions of the respective faiths were recognized as such, and as more important than free searches for truth that were clearly sowing the seeds of heresy if not total obliteration of the faith.

Saint Thomas Aquinas.

On the other hand, the European scholastics such as Aquinas, in their innocence, had such faith in the truth of their faith that they did not even consider that another truth, whatever its source, could threaten it. Heresy was untrue, but true things necessarily had to be consistent with the Gospel and church. So Aquinas adopted Artitotelianism in large part, and insisted on compatibalist solutions- on the soul, on natural morality, on sensory empiricism. This took quite a bit of interpretive effort, but was rewarded by everlasting fame and sainthood- quite a different result than in the other religious traditions. Aquinas is still a bedrock of Catholic theology.

"It was his Aristotelian epistemology that allowed Aquinas to work his way to his conclusion. His whole system rests on the principle that knowledge comes not from the illuminating participation of the mind in pure and divine ideas, as was held by Augustinian Platonism, but that it is primarily built up out of sensory experience. As an Aristotelian he could not accept that Platonic theory of forms; to him it was not scientific, and any Christian philosophy that was based on a false epistemology would fail, as the twelfth-century realists had failed, in the face of nominalist attack. ... He admitted that  there are certain ultimate areas of the Christian faith to which reason cannot penetrate: it is impossible to prove the miracle of the Incarnation or the Trinity. But it is possible to prove rationally the existence and many of the attributes of God. Aquinas presented five proofs for the existence of God, all of which were based on the Aristotelian argument for the existence of a first cause. ... He proceeded to argue, with a validity that was doubted by many, that from this premise could be derived the Christian attributes of God as perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, and free.... Similarly, he proceeded from Aristotelian causality by way of logical argument to prove creation ex nihilo, and similarly from Aristotelian psychology to the human soul, and from Aristotelian ethics to Christian virtue."

Yet acceptance of the innovations of Aristotle, of natural theology and rational ethics, etc., obviously also sowed the seeds of theological destruction, since if god is read in his or her works- the book of nature- the more carefully you read, the less you may find, if that god does not actually exist there, and faith was the key ingredient all along. First the Protestants insisted in reading the books of nature and scripture for themselves, and then scientists discarded scripture entirely. Now here we are in the post-Newtonian and post-Darwinian epoch, shorn of any (natural) rationale for god other than Aristotle's wan prime mover, though even that remains only as an unknown possibility rather than a necessity.

Lastly, what of the status of Aristotle in the culture where his writings were originally preserved- Eastern Rome, or Byzantium? Obviously, despite their wealth and institutional stability, they had no more of a scientific or philosophical revolution in the first millenium than the Western Europeans had. They were just as, and perhaps more, besotted with Christian theology, in characteristically "byzantine" disputes over iconography in particular, such that free thought seems to have been in very short supply. There was evidently just enough attention paid to the classics to keep them in print, but little more.

The endless and exceedingly complex ruminations about the nature of the soul through all this time were especially remarkable and saddening in their vacuity. They expressed little more than a profound ignorance of biology, which is understandable, as we still are some ways from understanding how it all works. The vegetable, animal, and rational souls of the Aristotelian system were reasonable stabs at classifying the levels of consciousness / biological being. Nor did they, in Aristotle's hands, appear to be immortal, with all due respect to Aquinas's efforts, but at best universal as "forms" by way of Plato's idealism / realism about such things, not individually. Death, is, after all, such an obvious and final fact of life. The centrality of the afterlife- the promises on which the whole Christian corpus and attraction is based- led to the very unfortunate dominance of intuition and magical thinking over simple reasoning, which haunts us to this day.

• Champion of workers, or of extremely rich CEOs?
• After Pizzagate, one gun is not enough.
• Yes, the media are easily led.
• Could Trump be the messiah, after all those Christians voted for him?
• Thoughts about integration.
• Prospective cabinet has a "total net worth that exceeds the combined wealth of more than one-third of all Americans."
• The costs of a good foreign policy.

Why Were the Dark Ages so Dark?

Review of "The Civilization of the Middle Ages", by Norman Cantor.

Everyone thinks they are living in the modern age, at the cusp of technological and social development. At least till they get older, and realize that everything is, instead, going to pot. While we are always at the edge of time, we also live within the institutions and ideas of the past. That became painfully apparent with the recent election, when the electoral college went one way, and the popular vote went dramatically the other way, by a 2% margin.

Our culture and its institutions have been under development for thousands of years, and while the events of much of that time were not very well documented, that doesn't mean they weren't important. Norman Cantor's not terribly scholarly, but highly opinionated and readable overview of the Middle Ages (~500 to 1500) is one of the best sources I have read to understand this period. He takes an analytical view of why institutions developed the way they did, and offers frank views on what was helpful and what was not, in the cause of overall Western progress. No wonder this book is still in print, after over two decades.

His major theme seems to be the establishment of large, competent states as the endpoint of successful social progress. Each epoch is judged by the coherence of its political institutions, from the height of Rome, to the depths of post-German invasion Europe. Cantor is dismissive of the Germanic institutions of government, which were little more than tribal councils and endless warfare. Thus the tension between the new invaders and the inheritance they were so close to, from Rome proper, and from the rump Eastern Roman empire, aka Byzantium.

The invaders (apparently pushed by other invaders to their rear, like the Huns) didn't mean to destroy Rome, really- they just wanted to share in the bounty as well as in its institutions. But Rome didn't have a very welcoming immigration policy, and ended up fighting itself into oblivion. There are many interesting elements to the subsequent story, but I will focus on just a couple- the role of the church, and nature of law.

Once we get into the 500's and beyond, as Rome let go of England and other territories, and was sacked separately by the Visigoths, Vandals, and Ostrogoths, and then was reconquered for good measure by the Byzantines, things had really fallen apart. Various Germanic tribes were in charge of most parts of what was previously the Western Roman Empire, with little institutional memory descended from the Roman epoch. What was the one functional institution? The church. But it was a very long time before the church realized that it had a role to play in the general organization of society.

10th century depiction of St. Gregory, d. 604 at work in his scriptorium, with the help of the dove of the holy spirit.

The Benedictine order is by far the oldest form of Western monasticism, originating around 530 with the innovative communal organization, as opposed to the lonely ascetic hermit mode of the East. It was the Rule which organized each house, and gave it a strong, independent, and self-sufficient government. This was in marked contrast to the ambient governments outside its walls, which rose and fell with each dynastic squabble, and whose legal and bureaucratic concepts were virtually non-existent. Only after three hundred more years did the Franks under Charlemagne briefly raise the level of governance, with a Europe-wide kingdom that began a significant alliance with the papacy and developed rudimentary bureaucratic forms to keep the ship running in the personal absence of the king.

While that empire promptly fizzled within a generation or two, the seeds for greater alliance between the educated class (i.e. monks from the Benedictine houses) and the various Germanic rulers had been sown, and as we get into the later 900's and 1000's, monks are the standard administrators for governments across Germany and France. This enabled the Pope to gain power over the kings, whose ministerial staffs were at least partly loyal to the Pope. But the general effect was to raise the level of bureaucracy over the most basic to non-existent level it was at before, and give each state some institutional memory as well as a pan-European perspective (the language was Latin, after all).

By the time of the Cluniacs, (~1100) monks were really riding high on the hog, living well, in great demand, and running affairs all over Europe. In parallel, Cantor emphasizes the enormous innovations conducted by William the Bastard, conqueror of Britain in 1066. He set up a government of unprecedented thoroughness and durability that offered order at the cost of relentless taxation, not to mention the reduction of the previous Anglo-Saxon nobility to serfdom. This renovation of Germanic institutions of law and government was to serve as the springboard for English power for centuries to come.

Cantor also mentions the discovery of the Code of Justinian as an epochal event in Europe, around this same period. This finding did not have much influence in England, but elsewhere on the continent, it quickly provided a whole new view of law and the legal profession. For a newly urbanizing culture, it provided a newly relevant and exceedingly detailed template of jurisprudence from the urban cultures of Rome and Byzantium. And for kings, it provided a ruler-centric vision of law, as the extension of the will of the emperor. Thus the distinction that still exists between English law, with its juries of commoners, and continental law, where judges run the whole show. For the urban elite, it provided a new profession- that of lawyer, which together with the university system, slowly propagated bureaucratic, legal, and scholarly skills beyond the abbey.

What is important in all of this is that our institutions are precious achievements. Government may be the casual target of unending grumbling, abuse and criticism. But virtually any government is better than none at all. Freedom is not the absence of government, but quite the opposite, given that we are each other's primary predators and irritators. The union of justice with power has been the principal achievement of great civilizations, and is what has allowed all the other benefits, advancements, technologies, arts, and sciences to grow like a garden of flowers from a secure and prosperous populace.

• Jobs and work are a fundamental good.
• Against anti-knowledge in economics.
• "The bottom half of the income distribution in the United States has been completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s"
• "For babies born in 1980 — today’s 36-year-olds — the index of the American dream has fallen to 50 percent: Only half of them make as much money as their parents did."
• Trauma and stuttering.
• Post-truth ... say it ain't so!

The Poisoned Pen

Jefferson and the Republicans had their own (early) version of FOX news.

I am reading the McCullough biography of John Adams, which is a real hagiography. But it is also well-written, packed with information and insightful in many respects. His portrait of Thomas Jefferson is particularly harsh, as would be natural because he and Adams became bitter antagonists. Jefferson's main tool in their fights was the press. Specifically, secret relationships with the National Gazette, and its successor, the Aurora General Advertiser.

The polical parties of that time broke down along centralizing, pro-government (Federalist) and pro-agrarian, decentralizing, and Southern (Republican / Democratic). The latter were also, at least in the person of Jefferson, much more enamored of the French Revolution. Adams immediately saw the mob nature of that revolution, so different from that of the Americans, and forsaw chaos as well as its eventual descent into dictatorship. But there were many other sources of conflict such as the basic party splits over Southern vs Northern interests and ideologies, personal enmities, and personal ambitions.

The vitriol that came pouring out, once the founding era was swept away and the two-party system was established, is truly disturbing to behold. Secretary of State Jefferson employed Phillip Freneau in the State Department as a translator, but with little work. Freneau spent his main energies as publisher of the National Gazette smearing Jefferson's (and James Madison's) enemies within the administration, including Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and George Washington. (On the other side, Hamilton gave his favored printer, John Fenno of the Gazette of the United States, a large government printing contract.)

They made a great deal of hay out of a long debate fostered by John Adams as vice president on the proper forms of address towards the president. Adams favored something a little more grand like his highness, or something of the kind. For this he was painted as being a monarchist and wanting to subvert the independence that had so recently been achieved. Also that his lengthy stay in Europe as ambassador to France, the Netherlands, and Britain may have turned his head.

The language of these attacks was often hyperbolic and scurrilous. A birthday party for Washington was described as "a forerunner of other monarchical vices." Adams was described as being among the men who proposed "the principles of monarchy and aristocracy, in opposition to the republican principles of the Union and the republican spirit of the people." There was a reference to the "corrupt sqadron of the Treasury," and to Hamilton as "a vile sycophant". The Federalists proposed laws that are "injurious to liberty and enslaving to the happiness of the people." And Republicans concluded that "our Constitution was galloping fast into Monarchy."

It was a combination of party rivalry and tribalism, along with honest fears that the fragile experiment of American self-government could, if entrusted to the wrong hands, or blown off course by a crisis, end in tears. Today, we have a more settled system, indeed well-neigh an imperial system with its own problems of vast size, corruption, and unmanageability. And, thanks to the poisoned press of our own age, a president-elect far from the founder's ideals.

A lot has been made of how the elite media was out of touch from the angry Trump voters. But Trump was covered incessantly during the campaign, with the helpless passivity of a star-struck media long-used to a commercial role and to reality-TV imperatives. Just as in the founder's day, there were political operatives pulling the strings behind the faux-news curtain, such as Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon- operatives whose regard for the system and nation as a whole took a distant back seat to their vitroloic personal and tribal campaigns.

For all the complaints about political correctness, which seems to be the animating animus of the alt-right troll brigade, political correctness was a stranger to this campaign, and we are now the worse for it. Civility and decorum are not just fusty relics of a puritanical age, but basic ingredients, even institutions, of an operating political system. Strength and manliness are not indicated by grossness of expression, nor are honesty and truthfulness. There was no better con man than the insurgent candidate, Trump, whose obvious contradictions, lies, and mean-ness seem to have been swallowed with equal relish by media and supporters alike with the complimentary condiment of "controversial".

When the going got really rough, during the Quasi-War with France in the late 1790's, Adams and the Federalist party passed the Alien and Sedition acts, which allowed the administration to jail and fine anyone, especially those in the media, who insulted the President or otherwise made what were deemed false statements critical of the government. And Adams has rightly been pilloried then and since for not vetoing this obviously unconstitutional legislation, hardly a decade after passage of the first amendment.

So the internet is not a new thing, in its capacity to foster rumors, spread lies and invective, and keep its readers in thrall to a mean-spirited and partisan echo chamber. We have survived such media from the start. But that doesn't mean it isn't a problem. The US was blessed with a special period of media civility in the mid-twentieth century, due to the cultural bonds of the world wars and depression, and also to the uniquely restrictive technical landscape of radio and TV, which only allowed a few channels and thus special federal rules for equal time and public interest in media behavior. That was a time when corporatism in the media industry largely served the stability of political system.

Now is different, and we need to think hard about ways to preserve some sanity in a media landscape so incredibly diverse and free, yet at the same time so starved of resources that in-depth reporting, balanced perspectives, and public interest investigations are disturbingly scarce. Where corporatism has turned the media into a thoughtless race for clicks, if not the plaything of retrograde billionaires, and where trolls use twitter to win political office. We need to fight against this creeping post-truth condition, which was a continues to be exemplified by the information practices of the Soviet, and now Russian, state.

While the first amendment prohibits government from meddling with the freedom of other's speech, it does not prohibit it from sponsoring public interest media. We need a segment of distinterested media that is not driven by an ulterior agenda such as greed, partisanship, or more obscure ideology. Non-profits would be ideal purveyors of this, but they do not on their own have the resources to address this quite large need. The public providers PBS and NPR stand as great accomplishments of the last fifty years. This is where we can build a better media landscape, perhaps expanding them into print and enhanced, deeper reporting. The BBC is a model of such expansion, to evolve towards broader news organizations.

The danger, of course, is that the wrong hands at the top could break down the barriers of independence at these institutions, and turn them into especially powerful cudgels of partisan warfare- new Ministries of Truth. On the other hand, even if not explicitly directed by the government, their government funding might make them reluctant to look too deeply into offical corruption and instritutional breakdowns. One can already see this in the tendency of PBS and NPR news to avoid breaking dramatic stories about government problems. Yet who broke the Flint water crisis story? It was the ACLU, reported by NPR affiliate Michigan Radio.

The landscape we face now desperately needs better media. Abigail Adams wrote a remarkable passage to Thomas Jefferson late in his presidency, after a newspaper writer whom he had previously supported and colluded with to smear John Adams turned against him, extorted him and exposed Jefferson's correspondence as well as his relationship with Sally Hemmings:

"The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth. When such vipers are let loose upon society, all distinction between virtue and vice are leveled, all respect for character lost."

• On the media of today.
• On the importance of norms, and truth.
• Normalizing the unacceptable.
• A critique of capitalism and financialism.
• Is carbon waste worse that nuclear waste?
• The nature of decisions today.
• Shed a tear for that secular religion.
• Great negotiator gives away the store.
• Swamp drainer fills up the swamp.