Fiction, more or less

How does historical fiction relate to scripture?

The New Yorker recently had an outstanding profile of Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and other works of historical fiction. While the genre doesn't generally get a lot of respect, Mantel and Robert Graves gave it gems of great accuracy as well as drama. One point was that good historical fiction never replaces facts from the past, and rarely makes up new ones out of whole cloth.

"She says, 'I cannot describe to you what revulsion it inspires in me when people play around with the facts. If I were to distort something just to make it more convenient or dramatic, I would feel I’d failed as a writer. If you understand what you’re talking about, you should be drawing the drama out of real life, not putting it there, like icing on a cake.'"

"Only rarely did she make something up out of nothing—almost always there was some hint in the sources to suggest it. Even many of her tiny, novelistic details came from the archives—often from the gossipy letters sent by ambassadors to their home courts. There was a scene in the sequel to “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Bodies,” for instance, in which a messenger gave Jane Seymour a love letter and a bag of money that Henry had sent her, although he was still married to Anne Boleyn; Jane gave back the money, then took the letter and kissed it, but gave it back unopened. That came straight from an ambassador’s correspondence."

We typically do not gain more historical knowledge over long periods of time. As time passes, records are lost and we recede further from the events at issue. More needs to be filled in (judiciously!) by way of the novelist's imagination.

For theology and religion, on the other hand, we have gained enormous amounts of knowledge, not so much about the historical facts surrounding their writing and subjects, but about the general scientific claims they traffic in- angels descending from heaven, seas parting, people rising from the dead. Trinities, ghosts, and afterlives.

Thus what passed muster generations ago as plausible tales of the supernatural (signs and wonders) now are known to be fundamentally impossible. The ground has shifted under the genre, so what once was awesome now seems tawdry and cheap.

It is an unfortunate position, perilously saved for the most devout by way of even harder-to-swallow claims of exceptionalism- that those historical actors and times were really different from our present fallen age. Rather than, say, that our age has better standards of editing, fact-checking, and scientific understanding.

It is just a small point, in the vast case  for atheism, but still worth making- that one should read historical fictions and romances long before giving credence to the far more egregious genre of scripture.

Incidentally, the profile of Mantel also notes that she lived briefly in Saudi Arabia:

"She couldn’t even go for a walk around the block, since if she appeared on the street alone men shouted lewd propositions at her or tried to run her over." Some respect for women, that. Sounds more like the way it looks- patriarchy and misogyny.

• Romney as prosperity televangelist.
• Can it get any worse? Romney ultimately responsible for meningitis outbreak.
• Lying for the lord, riding off with the money.
• Mormonism: a particularly rapid transition from establishment critique to water-carrier for its most damaging and retrograde aspects.
• Krugman: Horrors! Fiscal rectitude was supposed to screw the poor, not the rich!
• Plantinga is pro-fiction, pro-self delusion.
• More whistle-blowers are needed. "The fact that the business community fought ferociously against doing anything to encourage whistle-blowers is an example of what we call “revealed preferences” in economics.  Honest CEOs should encourage whistle-blowers."
• In praise of Dodd-Frank.
• Electronic voting is an even bigger disaster now.
• And whom does Mr. Burns endorse?
• Bailout image of the week..

Mitt's magical apology tour

What on earth?

[I apologize(!) to my readers for excessive focus on politics... this election should be over soon.]

In the last debate, on foreign policy, Mitt Romney was even more muddled and brazen than in the prior ones. He agreed with every substantive point Obama made, yet claimed that somehow he would do things better and differenter. He wanted to get tougher on Iran, while assuring everyone he didn't want to get into any wars or anything. He wanted to start a trade war with China, despite having been busy shipping jobs and capital there over the years. He wanted more peace in the Middle East, but by using the attitudes and policies of the Bush administration. He wanted to "help move Pakistan in the right direction", but agreed with the US troop pullout from Afghanistan and our aid policies to Pakistan. And as usual, he wanted to spend more money on the military, and much more on tax breaks, and magically balance the budget as well. It only makes sense if he is lying about everything except his self-confidence. He wants to be president very badly, but apparently being a stuffed shirt for the ongoing class war by the severely conservative right is about as high as his policy ambitions go.

But, among all the crocodile tears, what was most grating was his repetition of the "apology tour" meme. This vitriolic invention of the FOX cesspool, which Romney picked up and used as a title for his campaign book, is one of those primitive psychological constructions the Republicans are so adept at, like tax relief and death panels. During the debate, Romney said:

"We're also going to have to have a far more effective and comprehensive strategy to help move the world away from terror and Islamic extremism. We haven't done that yet. We talk a lot about these things, but you look at the - the record, you look at the record. You look at the record of the last four years and say is Iran closer to a bomb? Yes. Is the Middle East in tumult? Yes. Is - is al-Qaida on the run, on its heels? No. Is - are Israel and the Palestinians closer to reaching a peace agreement?"

Now, how would one actually go about moving the world away from extremism and towards something like, say, the Arab spring? One might take a tour of Arab countries and talk about universal values of human rights, democracy, and self-determination, while subtly making it clear that the Bush administration has been succeeded, via orderly and democratic means, by a quite different administration, no less focused on US national interests, but less bellicose about bulldozing other countries to get there, and possessing a vision of US interests as compatible with peaceful coexistence and mutual respect rather than "You're with us or you're against us".

Rhetorically, Romney wanted to double down on all the good things that Obama has done, (you almost thought an apology was coming for saying all those bad things otherwise!), but in a way that takes us right back to the bluster and sabre-rattling of the last administration which was so offensive and counter-productive. We have more friends now in the Arab world than when Bush was in office, particularly among the people rather than the dictators, because of better foreign policy.

Certainly, much remains to be done. For instance, the Palestinian peace process, which Romney explicitly blamed Obama for not advancing, isn't going to be helped by the US being Israel's lapdog, which is Romney's official policy. That isn't a vision of strength, as far as I can see. Just like our last president, Romney seems to have a rather immature horror of apologizing for anything, and something of a toy soldiers approach to world affairs, not to mention a tin ear for diplomacy, as we saw in Britain. We can do better.

[As a final note, there must be some good omen in a World Series between two of the bluest cities around.]

• Another take on the same subject.
• Romney's trust? Not blind at all, just run by his best friend.
• Romney lies, on the record and in court.
• Voter fraud? Yup, by the GOP.
• Romney-brand economics: a pack of lies.
  
• Billionaires have little social utility.
• Nor does Goldman Sachs. "That was the problem with Occupy Wall Street -- they didn't know what they were protesting."
• Yet expiring the worker's tax cut has "strong bipartisan support".
• Corruption in the USA.
• Cooking the books at Freddie and Fannie. It's all about bonuses.
• More taxes on the wealthy = more economic growth.
• Annals of IBM screwing its employees, continued. Talk about an asymmetrical economic relationship.
• The real scope of the H1B visa: a method to screw domestic workers.
• Economic quote of the week, from Paul Krugman, about World War 2 and economic recovery:

"... Hitler managed to override the usual objections to stimulus."

Wealth creates poverty

Inequality isn't just not nice, it is destructive.

In my reading about ancient Rome, author Michael Parenti (The Assassination of Julius Caesar) had a snappy phrase about economic dynamics: "wealth creates poverty". . (See it on youtube)

It got me wondering why this is such a durable theme and how it works in detail. Classical history is instructive as a perpetual contest between wealthy elites and the plebian masses. Rule by aristocrats was the rule, (property restictions were almost universal as tests for office and voting), but when they went too far, they faced revolt by the masses they depended on to till the fields, row the ships, and fight the wars. Several times the plebians of Rome took the civilized approach of seceding- "going galt", as it were. In contrast, aristocrats can not secede because they can not support themselves. They depend on their position in a working social system to be able to parasitize upon it.


Education

The aristocratic elite had one tool in antiquity that they no longer have, which is education and training. With our diffusion of education, especially writing, reading, and related communication technologies, there is much less differentiation conferred by the kind of education that was once available to only the upperest of upper crusts. As we see painfully in this campaign season, our candidates may be very smart, but are not particularly well-learned compared to an average person with a bit of motivation. Nor is their rhetoric any kind of model, as was supposedly that of the ancient Romans. (Though to my mind, Cicero seems more a windbag than a model of eloquence.)

Education was often confused with birth and inborn nobility, gentility, etc. But the more we know about human genetics and the vast amount of intermixing going on all over our history / prehistory, the less of a case one can make for inborn lineage differences that are truly distinctive and significant. (Just look at that Royal family!) Perhaps now with our more thorough assortive mating via intelligence testing, high school tracking, and university admission, there may be longer term effects, but I doubt that as well.


Debt

Debt is perhaps the most powerful direct weapon, and a constant source of misery and conflict in ancient Rome. Given the relatively limited needs of the rich, (who after all are rich because they spend less money than they have), there are far more people willing to be employed than needed, (especially once the rich have captured all the land), leading to labor competition, leading to low wages. Low wages lead often enough to the inability to maintain even the low existence workers are accustomed to, leading to a need for debt, like payday loans, credit cards, etc.

The rich do have money and may be willing to lend it, but typically impose onerous terms, as well as a legal system that supports their ability to collect. In ancient Rome, this meant debtors selling themselves or their children into slavery to satisfy debts. Today, it merely means countless families stripped of their assets and prospects by way of predatory mortgages, and a bankruptcy regime made significantly harsher just in time for the current crisis.

Many cultures have tried to restrict usery, or even outlaw lending entirely, such as early Christianity and Islam up to the current day. Not terribly practical, but on the other hand, regulating lending is (or would indeed be) a very powerful way to restrict this perennial source of opportunism and class entrenchment.


Fraud

Similar to debt, there are a wide range of other business practices by which the rich get richer. The hedge fund 2/20 payment system is an example, raking in money to managers who rarely provide commensurate benefits, while fleecing the slightly less well off in this case, rather than the outright poor. The investment world is full of such scams, from excessive mutual fund fees to nano-second arbitrage by Goldman Sachs, and insider trading. Of course is possible for poorer business people to fleece the rich as well. But they have less means to take this path, using, for instance, the professional assistance of high-priced lawyers. And the overriding power relations dictate that the poor are held more strictly to account in the legal and social system.

In Rome, the patricians basically stole the public lands that had been cultivated by the poor, through a combination of debt peonage, purchase, and outright force. Employing slaves instead on their new villas, they left the poor free Romans with little to do other than join the army or mill about in the slums of Rome.


Macroeconomics

Briefly, since I have discussed this elsewhere, the rich are rich in part because they save what they get rather than spending it. Excessive saving leads to low economic activity, squeezing those who work for a living, lowering wages, creating a spiral of depression- one of the most damaging economic phenomena. Being rich in antiquity often meant making gifts to the public- statues, temples, baths, games. But as the Roman empire ground on, such public spirit seems to have declined, and the rich became richer, building ever-larger gated communities (i.e. villas, the precursor to the feudal estate) and piling up their wealth, which was often only recirculated through political witch hunts, murders, and expropriations. Progressive taxation and inheritance taxes seem a more civilized method!


Politics

As touched on above, if the judicial system is run by the rich, and public policy is run by the rich, then it is likely to serve the rich. The Roman consitution went through several iterations where the people demanded powers, were placated by institutional reforms, which were eviscerated by later aristocratic innovations. When plebians were allowed into the Senate, their allegiance to their class (via the tribunate) slowly died and they became part of the ruling economic as well as social class. After Julius Caesar upended the Republican system by the threat of long-term dictatorial and popular rule, the ruling class first assassinated him and then came to a grand bargain with his successor Augustas in which he maintained their economic and social position, without any bothersome populism.

The current moment is vexing in this respect. The Republican party is commonly known to be the party of the rich. It is also well known to have authored the current economic crisis, by relaxing an entire ecosystem of regulations which then set the stage for mortgage fraud, underwriting fraud, credit rating agency fraud, and a variety of other predatory banking practices, after which the Republican party was principally responsible for showering money on those same institutions and same managers to bail them out.

One would think that their popularity would be low. But instead we appear to have a squillionaire Republican presidential candidate promising explicitly to relax financial regulations yet again and to forgive yet more taxes for the rich, all sold with the mantra that they are "job creators" who, by some magical means, if they are made as rich as Crassus, will trickle a little bit back down to the masses, rather than, say, building more gated McMansions for themselves as they have in the past, and off-shoring the remainder to the Cayman islands. And this candidate is polling at even odds to win. It is unthinkable in a true democracy.


Ideology

Which brings us to ideology. Even more than politics, if one controls the ideology and narrative of a society, (via the corporatized media in our age, and the intellectual and historian elite in Rome), then one does not have to resort to crass fraud and armed robbery maintain one's privileged position. Genteel fraud and robbery will do. In Rome, we still inherit the historical prism of the aristocracy, who were the only historians. Thus we regard the fall of the "Republic" as a catastrophe, even though it had relatively little to do with democracy as we understand it today, but as largely a Senatorial oligarchy atop a virtually fascist state.

In our day, the Republican war on the inheritance tax offers an object lesson. Repealing it is another item on the Republican candidate's agenda, as though freedom and the American way depend on liberating super-wealthy families from the specter of this "death tax". Yet why should the children of the rich inherit great wealth? While we may "celebrate success" as the Republicans reminded us during their convention, they want their children excused from exertion or the need for success of any kind, putting to the lie their professions of faith in "equal opportunity", an "opportunity society", and the like. In my book, inheritance taxes should be 100%.


So there is a contest for the wealth of a society, usually won by those who are already rich. The economic and other elites try to fleece the lower classes as docorously and thoroughly as possible while getting their services as cheaply as possible. They have many advantages, leading to the general historical rule that societies become more unequal with time unless specific policies (of redistribution, debt forgiveness, and other amelioration) are devised, or until a revolution occurs (France), or until the inequality so ripens into economic sclerosis that ruins the society utterly (Rome).

• Oligarchies self-destruct when they get too greedy.
• Must the lying be so mindless? What do Romney's problems with arithmetic say about our educational system?
• Tax cuts for job creators don't create jobs. And if they are revenue neutral on the wealthy- i.e. not actually tax cuts- they wouldn't do anything even in theory. So who buys this stuff?
• Watch the hands... Romney's hands in action. 
• Bill Black launches into an ocean of mixed metaphors.
• Fraud at Bain- who would have suspected at such an upstanding company!? An object lesson in how the rest of us are screwed by those with the most money to throw around.
• Debating a psychopath- probably not so easy. But psychopaths are really not so bad!
• IBM makes a business of breaking employment laws to become company of poorly paid Indians and highly paid US chiefs (plus US servants, as needed).
• Let's kill high frequency trading.
• Luck, economics, and just deserts.

Romney lets a cat out of the bag

Special post on the presidential debate.

Personally, I thought the president was equally incisive and together in the first debate. But obviously the media has its own frame to fill, and shouting down others and bullying seem to be the "presidential" qualities du jour. It plays to Mitt Romney's strengths, but saddens and disturbs me. This after a period when we heard so much about the badness of bullying. How ironic.

Anyhow, Mr. Romney made a statement that was very important. Not new, but I hadn't heard it quite so clearly before:

"But your rate comes down and the burden also comes down on you for one more reason, and that is every middle-income taxpayer no longer will pay any tax on interest, dividends or capital gains. No tax on your savings. That makes life a lot easier.
...
And I will not -- I will not under any circumstances, reduce the share that's being paid by the highest income taxpayers."

 [Editor's note.. the comments below provide significant context to this quote, in that Romney added that his no-investment tax promise applies only up to middle-income taxpayers.]

If Obama were paying attention, he might have answered with something like:

"Mr Romney just said that in his plan, taxes on capital gains, investment income, and dividends would be eliminated. What would that do to his own taxes? Right now, under the Bush tax cuts, Mr Romney pays about 14% in taxes, which is lower than most middle class families and which I regard as disgraceful. Under his own plan, he would pay zero in taxes. Zero in taxes, because pretty much all his income is investment income.

Now there is no way to make up for this with deductions, credits, and loopholes, because he would already be paying zero taxes. Deductions and loopholes would have no effect. Extrapolating out to everyone in his position, again, there is no way to make up all his proposed tax gifts to the rich with deductions, credits, and loopholes.

Mr. Romney may be doing quantum mechanics or something. Frankly, I don't understand a lot of complicated math. But if you use arithmetic, there is no way to make all this add up. No way to make up for the enormous and explicit tax gifts Mr. Romney proposes for the rich with any amount of deductions, credits, and loopholes. 

And I believe it is insulting to you as listeners and citizens that Mr. Romney stands here and says otherwise, without having the detailed plan and math to back him up. His statements about making sure the rich pay their share are pure hot air, contrary to everything the modern Republican party stands for, and to everything he said during the campaign up until a few days ago.

Add in the elimination of the alternative minimum tax and the estate tax, and, when you are looking at Mr Romney, you are looking at a future of the rich in America getting richer and the poor getting poorer, in perpetuity. Of Mr. Romney and people like him, stomping on the face of the average American, forever."

• Colbert had an insightful analysis of Romney's debate tactics and tax plan.
• Late addition- Salt Lake City Tribune endorses Obama.

Cut the cable!

Over the air broadcasting works great.

Sick of paying through the nose for cable? The transition to digital TV improved reception in most of the US for old-fashioned over-the-air (OTR) television. For the price of a modest antenna and a contemporary TV with a digital tuner, (or a tuner box), you can be be in business getting scores of channels in most metropolitan areas.

Cable TV began as a community solution to bad OTR reception. Communities would set up an antenna on a hill, and feed cables down to residents in the reception shadows. This turned into a lucrative business, and then with the advent of cable-only channels, into its own ecosystem of nation-wide TV content, from the bass fishing channel to ESPN.

The pricing model is very curious, however. Cable providers typically have monopolies in their service areas, competing only with OTA broadcasters and lately with satellite providers. So there is a competitiveness problem from the start. Secondly, they bundle all sorts of channels into only a few pricing tiers, leaving consumers with very little real choice. They have used their monopoly position to fund forays into other businesses, like content, movie studios, and internet service, which is again a quasi-monopoly. They transmit all the same advertisements from the OTA broadcasters they carry, so the consumer is in some sense paying twice for those channels.

Remember how during the recent Olympics, getting any significant internet coverage required having a cable subscription showing that you really didn't need internet access after all? Despite the obvious capability of carrying advertisements on internet video, the corporations in charge thought it more important to fence in their cable franchises than to extend viewership in the new medium. (Ditto for Hulu.)

If it were all rigorously regulated in the public interest, these failures of competition might be rationally corrected, but obviously, the cable companies are far more profitable than they would be in such a scenario, and send some excess dollars back into the political system in support of right-wing causes and their own continued deregulation & monopoly position, as well as into ancillary industries to build up even bigger monopolistic positions.

Anyhow, so there are reasons to dislike the cable incumbents, and look at other alternatives. The internet provides one avenue to a variety of more obscure interests, (at least until the cable industry kills net neutrality!), which cable TV serves so haphazardly with its fringe fare. And the OTA broadcasters are still there, churning out waves to all who want to watch.

Really, setting up an antenna can be a lot simpler than setting up a cable system. Digital TV happens in the UHF and high-VHF radio bands. The low VHF channels like 2 to 5 have been dropped, though you will still see channels called #2 whose actual radio frequency has been shifted upwards under the covers. This means that the largest, most unwieldy elements of old-fashioned TV antennas are no longer needed. So, while rabbit ears may be quite enough in urban areas, for roof-top or attic use you need only a pretty modest antenna to get digital TV:

Most broadcasters in this digital world offer not only their main channel that you are used to, but 2 or 3 (or even 20) side channels with miscellaneous programming. In all, I can pull in about 57 channels in the San Francisco Bay area, including many in fascinating languages I do not understand.

Obviously, you would not know about this from most of the media. We are inundated with come-ons from the cable companies with insulting teaser rates. No one advertises for OTA TV, even while they enthusiastically advertise on it. The cable companies have tried to kill internet TV in various ways, and seem to have successfully restricted options for people to record OTR content on modern DVRs. Very few such machines are available, other than the higher-end TiVo boxes, which again require their own subscription, not to mention sending detailed viewing data out into the ether.

So, there is a better way. Drop the OWN channel, and get in touch with your local grass roots, by surfing those amazing waves over the air.

• Verizon's bid to compete with cable dies- will join the cable-o-poly instead.
• Put a nickel on the drum, pay for Republican indoctrination.
• George Eliot, leading atheist.
• Plutocrat "wins" debate by lying with gusto and shouting down "moderator". Next debate, knives and brass knuckles.
• Romney doesn't know what he is talking about, or else has an astonishingly low opinion of the electorate ... as usual.
• Romney becomes mayor of Sesame Street.
• Our financial regulatory system is toothless and broken.
• Simon Johnson, begging for bank reform.
• Woodward hates Obama for some reason having to do with use of the telephone.
• Austerity, Bowles-Simpson, monetary necrophilia.. call it what you will, it is wrong.

Government is the killer app

The punic war, and a little more on group selection.

I've been reading a bit of Roman history, the Punic wars and the late Republic in particular. If you want to learn about group selection, this is a great place to start. The cohesion of groups was paramount, as was their judicious leadership. Make too many errors, and your city was razed and your population massacred. Or perhaps it was sold off into slavery. The price of communal failure was harsh, the rewards of success vast, whether one was close kin or not kin at all.

Rome excelled at pretty much one thing- government in all its forms. The typical activity of well-to-do Romans was a mix of law, soldiering, and politics, which they honed through hundreds of years into an ornate legal system, bloodthirsty militarism, merciless slavery, and stolid architecture. Their constitution was a mess, involving numerous bodies and elements, all in somewhat confused relation. It had, like its devoted student Britain, a mass of unwritten traditions and ever-evolving common law.

Early Rome was characterized by an extremely cohesive ruling class which occupied the senate, combined with modest input from a nominally sovereign popular assembly. Their consistency of judgement and constant aggressiveness allowed them to proceed from very unillustrious beginnings under the thumb of Etruscan monarchs to a Mediterranean-wide empire. Romans had very modest intellectual and artistic attainments, feeling perpetually inferior to Greece in this respect. They were cruel, practical, superstitious, fair in many dealings, and saw rhetoric as their highest art.

But with success and expansion, something about this republic went haywire, as the riches flowing in sapped the unity of the ruling class and bred corruption, the enormous armies in the field bled power from the senate to its appointed generals, and the nominal sovereignty of the assembly became real after the partial breakdown of the unwritten clientela system that fed senatorial dominance (in part displaced by the grain dole). Corruption grew and political violence, previously unheard of, ripened into senatorial murder squads, mob actions and civil war. The senatorial faction (optimates) evidently lost ideological control of the masses, and murdered a long series of popular leaders. Consul after consul edged closer to dictatorship until finally Julius Caesar swept the Senate aside for good. Ultimately, the senatorial class settled for political toothlessness in the empire of Augustus, in exchange for his careful preservation of their economic and social interests.

It is the usual story of aristocratic oligarchies challenged by members who take up the mantle of far-overdue popular reform, who through the vitriolic and murderous opposition of entrenched powers are forced into the position of dictators, which they eventually find rather amenable, (Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, etc.), leading to reversion to an even starker form of status quo aristocratic power as emperors, Fuerers, party chairmen, etc.

I see it as a lesson in two ways. First, in the importance of government, as against the Republican refrain of the last few decades where government is always "the problem", must be smaller, must always serve the rich, etc. and so forth. And second, in the importance of good government. Sure, if one governs badly, (certain recent Republican presidents come to mind), then government is going to be the problem.

But we humans have little power to do anything useful without our social institutions, and while private enterprise has its significant place, we also have many needs for common action that can not be filled by individual greed / voluntary enterprise alone. It is truly remarkable how thoroughly we have been dumbed down and deceived through this ideology of late, taking for granted the work of centuries and millennia.

Fittingly enough, the US Senate is, in our day, leading the way to institutional breakdown and corruption. Each Senator is known to think of her- or himself as presidential material, and they have devised ways to make themselves mini-presidents, at least of a negative variety, with the ability to block, veto, and filibuster any action. Executive appointments go unfilled, needed reforms are anonymously blocked, and the public's business is held hostage to unseen special interests and fringe agendas.

We are not at the point of armed gangs going from chamber to chamber in the US capitol, clubbing people to death. But we should take a hard look at the breakdown of our intitutions, at the heart of which is corruption by money and the unconstitutional arrogation of power by the Senate through its internal "rules". Our system is easily as oligarchical as Rome's, in the sense that the Supreme Court has deemed money to equal speech. While Rome had its attachment to rhetoric, tradition, circuses, and privilege, we have ours to the miracle of modern advertising methods, sound bites, and astroturfing- the alchemical transformation of money into power.

So don't look to the iPhone to save our civilization. The focus should be on the East coast, not the West. For all the communication we are now swamped with, how much of it counts? How much of it makes the world a better place? Who runs our TV systems and pours content into those fat pipes? Who makes the rules? Who tells the politicians what to say? Can we turn our gaze from the navels of Facebook out to the collective system that controls so much of our fate? Can we put people back into politics, instead of money?

• The Cato institute says it draws its name from a series of British pamphlets called Cato's letters. But more likely they draw inspiration from the ultra-conservative and pretty much fascist Catos the elder and younger of ancient Rome. The elder ended each speech with "Furthermore, I believe that Carthage must be destroyed."
• From the Cato letters ... "In all these cases, ’tis abundantly the interest of a nation, to promote credit and mutual confidence; and the only possible way effectually to do this, is to maintain publick honour and honesty; to provide ready remedies for private injustice and oppression; to protect the innocent and helpless from being destroyed by fraud and rapine."
• Also note letter 108 on morals and indeed animal rights. "I will suppose, for once, a dialogue between his Holiness and a lion ..."
• TED talk on trust and sharing ... and online reputation capital.
• Voting is a tiny step in a much larger process.
• Speech should be free- all of it.
• The great barrier reef is half as great, over the last three decades.
• Bikes are back, in Italy.
• Messiahs- more common than you might think.
• A Fed official lies for ideology.
• Bill Mitchell, plea of the week:

"The damage that arises from excluding the youth from the labour market is life-long and then some. This cohort will carry the disadvantage throughout their lives and typically endure unstable and low-paid work interspersed with lengthy periods of unemployment when the business cycle turns down.
But even more damaging is that they will find it harder to form stable relationships and if they do their children will inherit this disadvantage arising from the exclusion at this time of their parent(s).
It is unfathomable why this is not an absolute policy priority and the Euro leaders announce immediate job creation programs through the Eurozone targetted at youth, if they cannot bring themselves to introduce an unconditional job guarantee for all workers.
The costs of this folly are so large and so enduring that there is no fiscal justification that can be mounted to not introduce such a plan.
And if you think about it from a conspiracy theory perspective – that the EU elites are trying to destroy unions and the welfare state – it is still a pretty weird strategy to undermine the prospects of the future workforce in an era when dependency ratios are rising and there is a greater need than ever for increasing productivity growth."

Ecological overshoot and extinction debt

We have wiped out plenty of other animals. Ourselves as well?

With all the discussion of the Federal debt, another far more momentous debt is being ignored- the debts we are building up in the biosphere. Two papers discuss aspects of these debts, one about how to account for extinctions that have not happened yet, but which we have baked into the cake, and the other a general perspective on how badly we are living beyond our means overall.

Extinctions are extremely saddening to a biologist. They mark a loss of riches, of wealth, which is very unlikely to be made up. We are in the middle of one of the most severe extinction episodes in the history of life, entirely brought about by us. It will take tens of millions of years after our passing for earth to re-cover itself with new versions of the ecological complexity that humans have so greedily and thoughtlessly eradicated. That is, if we ever manage to give the biosphere any breathing space at all.

How bad is it? The paper on extinction debts, which focuses on the Amazon, notes that 80% of extinctions due to historical (past) habitat loss have yet to occur. This is because extinction takes some time to play out. When we are down to the last whimpering dodo bird, or carrier pigeon, or woodpecker, or condor, we are at the end of long process of habitat destruction, eradication, and ecological simplification.

Even if we care, it takes heroic efforts to keep such species on life support- efforts which often fail because there just isn't enough habitat left anywhere, or a lack of other conditions. The condor of Calfornia remains in doubtful condition because of continual destruction by electric wires and lead ammunition, among other problems, meaning that its status is by no means assured. And with the extremely small population sizes possible after even this effort, the long-term genetic prospects of such species remain quite bleak. Other vultures are in even worse condition.

No, the way to save species is to actually save habitat, on large scales and protected conditions that preserve the compelete ecosystems on which those species depend. Here is their estimate of extinctions in the Amazon, under business as usual conditions, only among vertebrate species:

Turning to humans, how bad is it for us? Even if we deny any moral or aesthetic interest in the preservation of other species, we are a species too, and we have been generating a debt of our own, eating ourselves out of house and home. The other paper (from 2002) catalogs humanity's consumption of various biosphere services, and concludes that we are using more (1.2 fold more at the time) earths than we currently occupy, suggesting that in the business-as-usual future, we will not only see our growth slowed, but will see a sharp reduction in living standards and/or population levels, due to the ecological overshoot we are currently committing. As with extinction debts, the full cost of over-consumption can take time to show up, with a population crash the typical result.

Our living standards have already been going down for some time. My run-of-the-mill house is made of extremely dense timber that would be virtually unobtainable today. Typical construction timber is no longer old-growth, but plantation-grown pine and fir that resemble balsa wood more than oak. Fish are smaller and scarcer, with many stocks utterly fished out. Peak oil is here, and price pressures are starting, ever so slowly, to change US living habits.

The researchers looked at our gross areas of environmental impact- farming, livestock raising, timber cutting, fishing, land use for habitation and industry, and CO2 emission. We use 0.28 earths for farming, 0.15 earths for timber harvesting, and 0.61 earths for our unsustainable CO2 emission. We use 0.18 earths for the other categories, totalling to well over one earth overall- numbers that have surely grown as Asian economies have developed pell mell.

Now, this computation is a bit fanciful, mostly a way to talk about the unsustainability of our current practices. Economics would claim that we can smoothly substitute or innovate our way out of any critical shortages. But the end of a fish stock is really an end. Our living standard goes down with every loss of this kind, both in market/consumption terms, and also in aesthetic terms. It goes down as well in unexpected ways as ecosystems that serve us become simplified, for instance as the oceans turn into seas of jellies and garbage, rather than the fabulously rich seas our ancestors enjoyed. It was a garden of Eden, indeed!

It is hard to forecast the future. We know for sure that we are already beyond the sustainable capacity of the planet, and are going way beyond it in the business-as-usual scenario. The issues extend far beyond land use, atmospheric pollution and biosphere degradation to water use, the availability of obscure minerals like lithium and helium, radioactive and other forms of toxic waste, ocean acidification, an epidemic of exotic species invasions, ... the list of overuse is endless.

As animals, we are programmed to reproduce as much as possible. The typical limits to biological reproduction have been disease, competition, and starvation. Humanity has made wonderful strides in escaping each of these limits by technological and social progress. It has truly been an astonishing and world-shaking accomplishment. But if our consciousness and organizational solutions do not rise to the next level of engagement with our long-term sustainability constraints, we will not only be poorer in the future in countless small ways, but may face another dark age, as we play out a massive ecological boom and bust cycle.

• Morsi tells us to correct the Palestinian situation, and he is right. (CSPAN)
• Group is spelled g*o*d. Mormon groupishness, cont.
• Muhammed = god as well. Islam seems essentially bi-deistic, as Christianity is tri-deistic or more.
• China: model for union-busting Republicans.
• Germany's export prowess rests mostly on underpaying its workers, and the surplus is wasted on loans to other countries.
• Speaking of which, European internal trade imbalances continue apace. Nothing real is being done.

• Economic production and class structure, in flux.
• Crocker on past policy.. harsh on Bush, soft on Pakistan.
• MMT godfather Godley described the current crisis in 1992: "If a country or region has no power to devalue, and if it is not the beneficiary of a system of fiscal equalisation, then there is nothing to stop it suffering a process of cumulative and terminal decline leading, in the end, to emigration as the only alternative to poverty or starvation."

Switching channels: Attention in the brain!

Selective visual attention in the brain is connected through the pulvinar area in the thalamus.

For most of us, a primary experience of consciousness is vision, and more specifically selective control of our visual experience. Our eyes take in far more than we can "process" at any time, so it is essential to limit this stream, at the same time that it empowers our sense of sovereignty, even if our attention is pulled by external events and easily manipulated by conjurers, film directors, and advertisers.

Visual pathways, early stages. Signals coming from the retina are channeled through the LGN to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. They percolate up through the V1 to V8 areas and branch into upper (dorsal) and lower (ventral) streams to other areas of the brain.

Vision flows in complicated pathways in the brain, from the eyes though a central waystation (geniculate nuclei in the thalamus) to the visual cortex at the very back of the brain for processing into ever more abstract and meaningful representations, during or after which it forks into two streams. The upper (dorsal stream) coming into the parietal cortex forms most of our unconscious visual awareness of motion and location, directing motor control, while the lower (ventral stream) heads back to the thalamus and into the temporal cortex, and seems to provide identification (what) information, (interconnected with memory), and emotional salience information. It seems to be the more consciously available pathway.

Of course we want to focus on the most emotionally salient information. And we want to notice aspects of both streams at the same time, for unified perception. A recent paper describes pathbreaking techniques in identifying and recording key routes of the visual pathway in macaques, and finds that an area in the thalamus may serve as an orchestrator of visual attention.

What is attention? In neuroscience, it is increasingly recognized as synchronized neural firing among distributed brain regions, binding together various processed aspects of a particular scene. While consciousness per se remains unresolved, attention has been the focus of great, er, attention. Most perceptual pathways appear to have feedback pathways going back from higher abstract thinking levels into their primary processing systems which can either shut off or call forth activity that is synchronized with the calling regions. In the visual system, there is the added problem of synchronization between the two streams.

Location of the pulvinar relative to the rest of the visual pathways.  This image depicts some of the visual pathway, but not the key connections studied in this paper.

That is where the current work comes in. The pulvinar area of the thalamus is sort of a transgressive part of the brain, sending connections to many higher cortical levels rather than residing within linear tracts of visual or other forms of processing. Indeed, most of the cortex maps to various and overlapping regions of the small and central pulvinar nuclei. And lesions in the pulvinar cause attention deficits. A decade ago, the pulvinar nuclei of the thalamus were proposed to play a role in this synchronization and binding for visual attention specifically:

"The scheme requires that multiple groups of neurons, distributed within and across separate areas, be capable of attaining synchronous firing by means of re-entrant circuitry (Tononi et al. 1992). It is by facilitating this process that the pulvinar could play a coordinating role in cortico-cortical communication." 

"Ultimately, the synchronized neural assembly is proposed to mediate the perceptual binding of different object features (von der Malsburg & Schneider 1986; Tononi et al. 1992; Eckhorn 1994; Singer & Gray 1995). If the pulvinar is a key element of the assembly, damage to the pulvinar should have a noticeable effect on feature binding. There is already some preliminary evidence in favour of this prediction, documenting one patient’s report of illusory conjunctions of colour and letter form (i.e. ‘misbinding’) in the visual hemifield contralateral to a pulvinar lesion (Ward et al. 2002)." -From Shipp, 2003

So the current researchers carefully mapped the connections they were interested in, between the ventral stream of the visual pathway (occipital V4 to the temporal-occipital border area, called TEO) and the pulvinar area of the thalamus. Using amazing MRI/DTI imaging, they could do this individually for each monkey they experimented on, finding precisely where the nerve projections from the two cortical areas overlap in the pulvinar (a method called tractography). That is where they stuck their electrodes, taking electrophysiology to a new level of long-range circuit specificity. They had electrodes both in the overlap area in the pulvinar and in the originating locations in the V4 and TEO cortical  areas, tracking precisely connected signals over long distances in a living (more or less!) brain.

Mapped connections between relevant areas, in schematic terms. Red arrows are forward processing (feed forward, FF), going with the flow of visual information, while green arrows are feedback signals (FB). The numbers refer to the cortical layer being targeted, and the greek symbols refer to the frequency band of the nerve firing. TEO refers to the temporal/occipital boundary region which is part of late-stage visual processing. The experiments were oriented to detecting the alpha-band signals going from the pulvinar back into V4 and the TEO, and telling whether they have coordinating effects.

The point was then to test whether the pulvinar leads the synchronization of visual signals going between the cortical areas, as though it generates attention based either on rapid perceptions in lower areas of the visual pathway (say, suddenly seeing a snake/stick), or on signals from executive areas that exert voluntary attention control.

The task the macaques were set was to follow a spot on a video screen and rapidly report whether the subsequent shape at that spot was one of two possibilities, for a juice reward. In the experimental cases, the spot was engineered to happen in what the researchers knew was the receptive field (RF) for the neurons they had previously mapped and stuck with electrodes. So the question was whether the monkey's rapt attention (verified with infrared gaze tracking) raised the level of synchrony among the areas being recorded, and whether the pulvinar played a leading role in setting that synchrony.

The authors present data showing that these visually connected pulvinar neurons fire more when the monkey is paying attention to their receptive fields. They also find that the frequency of this firing is maximal in the alpha band around 10 Hz. Firing during attention was also closely correlated between the points they connected anatomically- the pulvinar and the V4 and temporal-occipital cortices. And finally, they use a relative timing method (Granger causality) to argue that, when the monkey was attending to the receptive field of the recorded neurons, and was in the attending period between presentation of the cue-spot and presentation of the puzzle shapes, neuron firing in the pulvinar significantly led the correlated firing in each cortical area it was tied to, not the reverse.

Inferred causality (i.e. prior in time and closely correlated in activity) of neural firing, between the tested areas of the visual system in macaque. Significant signals and causality in the alpha frequency band (10 Hz) are only seen going from the pulvinar (PUL) to the cortical visual processing areas V4 and TEO which are sequential in the usual sequence of visual feature processing. This supports the theory that the pulvinar drives attention-related synchronicity across the the visual processing system.

So one can ask where the regulatory decision of the pulvinar arises from. One hypothesis is that we have an immaterial soul that directs these things. Just kidding! As mentioned above, our attention may be involuntarily drawn by features of the scene (some visual pathways connect to the amygdala), or by a higher voluntary decision. In either case, the model would be that once a receptive field was decided on, the pulvinar helps pull the perceptual scene together by coordinating the firing of much or all of the visual pathway for that receptive field, and perhaps coordinating it as well with higher levels that receive that information.

Model (from Shipp, 2004) for attention in the visual system. The pulvinar (VP) receives signals and returns feedback from all areas of the linear/parallel visual feature processing pathway, governing which features or receptive fields are synchronized and thus attended to. The pulvinar receives input to drive its selection of what to attend to from both high level (prefrontal and parietal and frontal eye fields; PEF, FEF) and from low-level areas (the superior colliculus, SC and amygdala, not shown.

The alpha frequency band seems central to vision: "Evidence suggests that the rhythmic excitability of alpha oscillations gates visual events, with the phase of the alpha oscillations being critical for the transmission of visual information."

And, since consciousness seems more closely tied with the gamma band of higher frequency oscillations, the current authors add: "Because low-frequency oscillations modulate higher-frequency oscillations, we tested whether attention increased cross-frequency coupling between alpha and gamma oscillations within V4 and TEO. To measure cross-frequency coupling, we calculated the synchronization index between cortical alpha oscillations and the gamma power envelope. Across the population, there was a significantly greater synchronization index for V4 and TEO during the delay period, when attention was directed to the RF location rather than outside the RF (sign tests, P < 0.05; fig. S3, A and B), suggesting that alpha oscillations contributed to the attention effect on gamma frequencies."

So there you have it.. a few steps towards a physical theory to flesh out the "spotlight of attention" theory that has been an important subject of recent cognitive psychology and neurobiology, not to mention armchair philosophy.

• Another review of this paper.
• A living death at Guantanamo.
• The Republican brand is not doing so well.
• Corruption in Washington.. why do we even bother to pay attention? But Sarbanes is proposing a small donor voucher system.
• Rick Perry: Satan is at fault.
• Labor day- a day to honor the 1%.
• Pakistan bans YouTube. Then declares national holiday of hate.
• Afghanistan.. just like Vietnam, with an even more corrupt state.
• A primer on money as debt.
• MERS can't foreclose, because it doesn't hold real titles.
• The US universal (rural) phone subsidy system is a corrupt, antique mess.
• Economics quote of the week, by David Ricardo via Mark Thoma, to the effect that some kind of redistribution or remediation might be in order in a capitalist economy that destroys its demand for labor by way of efficiencies, machinery, and off-shoring:

"... the same cause which may increase the net revenue of the country, may at the same time render the population redundant, and deteriorate the condition of the labourer. "

• Sir Roland Hanna at Budoukan

Please don't use the word "epigenetic"

A pet peeve, and a review of E. O. Wilson's "Social Conquest of Earth".

Of all current authors, I am probably most sympatico with E. O. Wilson, biologist and proselytist for the preservation of biological diversity. Wilson has many axes to grind, and sharpens several of them in his most recent book, on the social conquest of Earth. One is his atheism. As do many thinking people, he sees religion as a vestige- a culturally rich, but philosophically impoverished expression of our group nature in complex psychological projection. So it is slightly ironic that another of his targets is the pope of atheism, Richard Dawkins, foremost exponent of the "selfish gene" model that dismisses any possibility of group selection operating in evolution.

Rhetorically, it is no contest. Dawkins is the better writer. But substantively I go with Wilson, whose main point seems to be to gloat that he was right during his sociobiology crusade of the 70's to say that our social instincts are patterned by evolution- a point that is, frankly, old hat by now. Secondarily, he argues that, that human nature, the conflicted expression of those various instincts, is better explained by group selection than by kin selection. Indeed, towards the end of his life, fellow Harvard theorist Stephen J. Gould was reluctantly also groping in the direction of group selection, in even more inarticulate ways and despite his vitriolic personal battle against Wilson over sociobiology.

As Wilson makes clear, while the nucleotide may be the unit of inheritance, it is not the target of selection. Targets of selection are any unit of life that experiences failure or success in the grand race of life. If my heart fails, there may be any number of genes at fault, but my entire organism, with all my genes including the defective ones, go with it down the drain. Likewise, if the group I live in is cohesive enough to share ideas, learn new technologies, and exterminate other groups, then all our genes, including any and all that led to this success, also succeed. Indeed, groups can gain far more than the cost of cooperation, (i.e. it is not a zero sum game), regardless of who is related to whom within the group, suggesting that group selection can be quite strong.

In the long run, as recombination and sexual reassortment happen, the genes contributing most significantly to targeted traits are specifically affected in their frequency, which is also put down to natural selection, in reductionist shorthand. But it is always the phenotype that the the world sees and reacts to that is the direct target of natural selection, and this phenotype can be complex and expressed at the group level.

Specifically, Wilson dismisses the kin selection model that he had long followed, and that Dawkins popularized and sets so much store by. In brief, kin selection posits that our altruism, as generated by evolution, extends only so far as our genetic relationships, such that parents care for their children 50% as much as for themselves, and for their nephews only 25%, for their cousins 12.5%, and so forth. One can understand its seductiveness to those trying to find systematic formulas underlying the messy process of evolution.

One problem is that genetic relationship is actually far more difficult to measure than such a pat genealogical method would have it. We are 99% identical to chimpanzees, after all. So our true relatedness to other humans is really a graded and complex function, dependent on tribal history and much else. We seek marriage with tribe-external partners after all, which doesn't fit the kinship model at all.

For example, if one has ten children, one can hardly (rationally) run 50% chances of sacrificing one's life for each one. And indeed, if all were lost in some catastrophe, one might have the opportunity of having yet more children, so the theoretical math of kin-based sacrifice makes very little sense on its numerical face, even before one gets to the putative dedication of uncles, aunts, and more distant relations.

Unfortunately, Wilson can hardly tear himself away from his ants, termites, and other insects, in making these points, and somewhat weak comparisons to human societies. And this is a shame, because- as much as I also love them, and as much as they serve as a technical model for social evolution- in the large sweep of life on Earth, the social insects are not the revolutionary force Wilson makes them out to be, and focusing on them misses a much more important story. It is a problem Wilson shares with Ernst Mayr, another stable-mate at Harvard and fellow don of 20th century evolutionary theory- a resolute focus on macroscopic life.

To me, the prime transitions in the history of life are five: First, the origin of life itself, second, the origin of photosynthesis, third, the origin of the eukaryotic cell, which is the platform for all advanced life, fourth, the generation of multicellular organisms from eukaryotic cells, and fifth, the origin of humans, who have so dramatically surpassed all that went before and are terraforming the biosphere to god-knows what condition, before dreaming of doing the same to other ill-starred planets.

Now, the first two of these transitions were biochemical innovations. But the others were social in nature, which is why Wilson's book misses out so dramatically on a more interesting story when drawing comparisons to humanity. The eukaryotic cell is the fusion of at least two very different bacterial cell types into a shocking new entity. Whether voluntary or coerced, it was a matter of intense cooperation between what is now the mitochondrion that supplies oxidative energy, and what is now the nuclear genome and its complex organellar apparatus, which supplies the command and control, and which ballooned up to enormous proportions compared to any bacterial cell. Eukaryotic cells took the path of sloppy complexity rather than typical bacterial streamlining, and this made all the difference in the long run. Later, chloroplasts were added to the mix to come up with the plant cell, which has clothed the earth in green, and helped fill the atmosphere with oxygen.

The advent of multicellular organisms is even more clearly a case of social cooperation and group selection overcoming individualism to create a phenomenally powerful new kind of life. We are collections are cells that each have a full genome, yet think nothing of killing themselves for the good of the whole. Our cells are far more dedicated to the collective than the most robotic ant, and have formed structures that surpass any ant colony in complexity.. i.e. the brain, or come to think of it, an ant colony. [Late addition- Melvyn Bragg reviews the cell.]

Wilson's distaste for the molecular is also apparent in his breezy genetics, which brings me to the word "epigenetic".  This word has two different meanings, each of which are covered by other and better words. It is so extensively butchered in the lay press that I think the best we can do for it is to retire it completely.

The original meaning of epigenetic is any mechanism of generational inheritance that does not follow usual (Mendelian) mechanisms dependent on DNA sequence. A prime example is the little war that goes on in the embryo/fetus between the paternal and the maternal genomes. The DNA sequences of the genomes are not the problem. Rather, selected areas of DNA are marked in each gamete with additional chemical alterations that selectively cause some genes from the male genome to be expressed more or less, and vice versa in the female genome. The fight is for maternal resources, which the male genome wants to extract maximally (growing big fetuses) and the maternal genome wants to conserve for other children and the mother's health (smaller and less needy fetuses). Several genes that have roles in fetal and especially placental development are known to be competitively imprinted, with the allele from each parent either on or off in early development. This phenomenon is more precisely known as genomic imprinting.

The other meaning of epigenetic is cited by Wilson himself, in the midst of a truly atrocious piece of genetics: "If you are genetically prone to mesothelioma and you work in a building leaking asbestos dust, you are more likely that you co-workers to develop the disease. If you are genetically alcoholism-prone and socialize with heavy drinkers, you are more likely than your genetically less-prone friends to become addicted. The epigenetic rules of behavior that affect culture, and have arisen by natural selection, act the same way but have the opposite effect. They are the norm, and strong deviations from them are likely to be scrubbed out by either cultural evolution or genetic evolution, or both. Seen in this light, both genetic rules of gene-culture coevolution and disease susceptibility are consistent with the broad definition of 'epigentic' used by the U.S. National Institutes of Health as 'changes in the regulation of gene activity and expression that are not dependent on gene sequence', including both heritable changes in gene activity and expression (in the progeny of cells or individuals) and also stable, long-term alterations in the transcriptional potential of a cell taht are not necessarily heritable.'"


All I can gather is that Wilson simply means to say that the penetrance of various traits and disease susceptibilities is not 100%, due to our biological complexity. Again, Wilson is not molecularly inclined, which is unfortunate. But this second definition itself is a big mess. It is far more broad than the one given above, applying grossly to all biological development. Why do liver cells give rise to other liver cells? Epigenetics! Apparently all programs of cell differentiation that lock in a cell type and maintain that cell type in progeny cells is epigenetics. Or even changes in gene activity that are not heritable, but only "long term". No wonder people are confused. This should all simply be called biological development and differentiation.

Needless to say, the popular press doesn't know what to do with this term either. It is often presented as some fundamental challenge to Darwinian evolution, as though natural selection was now "facing a challenge" from "new findings" in epigenetics. As outlined for the first definition, genomic imprinting can indeed mess with Mendelian models of inheritance. But this is in no way a challenge to natural selection, and indeed remains completely dependent on gene sequences, just in a more indirect way than usual paradigm.

Suppose for instance, that a parent's or grandparent's experience of famine predisposes children to lower diabetes and cardiovascular disease risk. The mechanism behind this might be altered methylation of a few gametic genes, (conferred by an environmental effect on regulation of these methylase genes, combined with pre-existing target preferences among disease-affecting genes), which is carried through to one or two subsequent generations to alter gene expression and produce this phenotypic effect.

Such methylation patterns don't happen by magic, but by enzymes in turn regulated by other processes, such as an environmental effect of starvation. So the inheritance pattern might resemble the Lamarkian model in some superficial way, but ultimately, the source lies in the genes, their products, and their interaction with the environment. Whether the trait is in any way affected by natural selection over the long term, or is just a random effect in a complex system, there are genetics going on here, just not typical Mendelian genetics.

Anyhow, confusion is rampant, and partly due to the extraordinarily broad and ambiguous meanings of "epigenetic" as a word. So I would suggest that it not be used at all, and other more precise descriptions provided, without all the freight of novelty and mystery that "epigenetic" tends to bring in its wake. Incidentally, "emergence" has a similarly bad influence in the popular media, being little more than a signpost for "extremely complicated, so don't even ask".

Getting back to Wilson's book, the beginning and end seemed to me the strongest parts, where he speaks directly to his concerns and hopes for mankind. Religion falls clearly into the group selection theory, as one of our strongest psychological peculiarities and social glues. Just ask Mitt Romney and his fellow Mormons. Indeed, it has been doing a bit too good of a job, as you can see in the Middle East among many other places & times, rationalizing inhumanity in the name of the group.

When discussing religion with a believer, typically the last argument, after all the pseudo-science and reason have been left behind, is- how can you be moral without religion? This is a clear expression of the core religious value- of promoting the group values (what we commonly regard as "good" morals) over individual selfishness independence, disobedience, and skepticism. It is a serious social conundrum, but antiquated organized religions are hardly the best way to resolve it. With our increasingly planetary society and planetary problems, it is high time to tone down such groupishness and follow a different model, such as the secular Scandinavians do, to a more broadly responsible and conscious form of society.

• Jesus carries an M16.
• And you can call him up for whatever you might want. No, really.
• Speaking of phone calls, why does the joint Chief genuflect to a nutbar?
• Mitt's close relation to his group, and distant relation to his own brain: "In Salt Lake, they told me it was okay to take that [pro-choice] position in a liberal state." ... "With any bishop who excommunicates a woman, I will not question his reasoning. I will support the bishop."
• Utter corruption in the business arbitration biz.
• The beginnings of our current cycle of plutocratic capture of the political system, in the Nixon administration.
• Yes, Obama is an introvert- and that is a good thing. Lincoln was too.
• The chief rabbi, refracted though Peter Hearty, on how science is rubbish.
• Financial right-wingery rampant in Europe too.
• Money supply experts agree with MMT.
• US economic growth will not get better.
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe- smokin' blues guitarist and vocalist, 1960.

Tribe and country: Mitt's frame for America

The one hive or the many in existential competition- how do we want to live?

I listened with fascination to several speeches of the Republican convention. It is remarkable, really, in this age of video, facebook, powerpoint, writing, printing, and many other so-called revolutions in communication that the speech remains the coin of our political realm, just as it was in ancient times and beyond (with apologies to the political attack ad, surely an up-and-coming form of political communication). Even when every single word out of a politician's mouth is a lie, speech at length remains the unparalleled window into the person, a connection desired by both the speaker and the listener.

In the lengthy runup to Mitt Romney's speech, an elderly couple from his congregation (stake) spoke about how kind and thoughtful Mitt was as their pastor when their eleven-year old son was hospitalized, and then died, of cancer. Among much else, they mentioned that their son wished to be buried in his Boy Scout uniform. This got me thinking about the role of groups in Mormon life, and in America.

Romney himself, while gauzy with platitudes, offered a program of reducing the federal government while somehow supporting small businesses, reducing the deficit, cutting lots of taxes, and creating twelve million jobs. For all the opportunism, flip-flopping, lying, and numbers that don't add up, I think he is honest about his views about the federal role. He was characteristically stingy with praise for the government he seeks to lead, mentioning Neil Armstrong, the Statue of Liberty, and the raid on Osama bin Laden. On the other hand, he and everyone else at the convention focused ceaselessly on small business, family and faith:

"The strength and power and goodness of America has always been based on the strength and power and goodness of our communities, our families, and our faiths."

Sure, it is the purest distillation of platitude, but there is something more- a vision of what groups count in America and how they should relate. On the one hand, there is Romney's experience in a minority faith and in a ruthlessly competitive business environment. And on the other, there is the technocratic approach of Federal and other levels of government to create public goods and restrict internal competition on a rational, conscious basis, partly out of moral fairness, partly to reduce violent and other unnecessary conflict, but also partly to increase the overall efficiency of our business and other communities.

As a missionary in France, he participated personally in the great Darwinian struggle that is religion in America- to show one's faith, serve one's faith, and grow one's faith, planting flags all over the world. His service to his bereaved parishioners was one of countless expressions of his dedication to his faith and to no other. The couple's son imbibed this love of the group like mother's milk; the Mormons use scouting assiduously to train their young in this regard.

Likewise, in business, Romney participated in brutal tribal struggles, first to manage and advise businesses for competitive growth, and later to identify targets for asset-stripping and debt loading. He has not shied from winning through hostile maneuvers, destroying companies, buying off managements against shareholder interests, convincing banks to give unsustainable loans, environmental pollution, and many other methods that in any larger perspective would be counted as "sins". But in the service of his group and himself, much leeway is allowed.

The picture one gets is of a man dedicated to group competition in the rawest way. I am not such a group-oriented person, so I find this all a bit hard to understand. But Romney's frame seems to be of a light federal government presiding over a ruthlessly competitive landscape, and may the cleverest and hardest businessman win, may the most hive-like religion win, and may the devil take the hindmost. If one does not have a functional group allegiance, his prescription would be to get one. In his experience, the Mormons have a full social service system, and would probably have their own sharia-like legal system, were that possible. He already pays taxes/tithes to his religion/hive, so one can understand why paying another set of taxes to provide frequently similiar social services to others outside his faith would stick in his craw.

He sees the sub-groups and tribes in America as the proper frame of competition and ultimate improvement. Out of the crucible of inter-group competition comes success, and the Republicans worship nothing like competitive success. The convention featured successful people, real or imagined, who harped again and again on the need to not punish success, and reveled in their financial and reproductive success. Their main slogan petulantly and ceaselessly repeated their conviction that they and they alone had built their own successes.. no help needed from no educational system, public services, legal apparatus, federales, or the like.

Indeed, the ticket's tax proposals clearly relieve the successful of yet more taxes, making the unsuccessful pay instead. This would truly be karmic justice- an Indian caste-style system of rewarding and entrenching what looks from the outside like privilege and guanxi rather than broader concepts of fairness, a national community, or even a smoothly functioning or broadly prosperous macro-economy.

Sure, Romney has some uses for the federal government, especially in the no-holds-barred inter-group competition that is international affairs. Looking outward, the military serves the interests of our national group, even while the tree-huggers and one-worlders seek rationality and unification on that level as well. No, America is exceptional, will brook no limits to our power, and will rule the world right up until China pries the last M16 from our cold, dead, hands. Competitive in/out group tribalism informs the Republican perspective at all scales.

What follows from all this is that any regulation or redistribution that is rationally conceived on the governmental level, especially the federal level, to redress wrongs, to equalize opportunities, or soften the blows of fate, are fundamentally anathema to the Darwinian war within America among its many competing sub-groups. However glaring the need or clear the benefits from a public good, or however arbitrary and clearly remediable the workings of fate, Republicans- and Romney foremost among them- are deeply uncomfortable with any impairment of their ability to win- by fair means, or more significantly, by foul. A true competitor seeks any and all advantages, and doesn't whine about rules, fairness, or morals.

His conduct of the campaign is emblematic, changing positions with gymnastic precision, and lying through his teeth. His attitude is.. of course I am lying.. I'm trying to win an election, right? We're all adults here, and you know as well as I that I am lying. Just so long as you don't tell anyone, because as you know, I am a highly successful and socially dominant person, so my lies are OK.

It is evident that Romeny sees nothing wrong with paying a mere 13% of his income in taxes, even though each year he makes far more than he will ever need. Indeed, he has gone to heroic lengths to cheat the government out of every possible cent. And in Ryan's budget proposals which Romney applauds, he will be paying less than 1% in taxes. It is evident that Romney sees nothing wrong with screwing workers out of their benefits and jobs, as long as his company/hive wins. He can build companies and add jobs if that is what it takes to win, but if not, then that is what his competitive position demands. Nothing personal, it's only business. It is evident that Romney sees nothing wrong with voucherizing medicare and medicaid, along with cutting what remains of the social safety net, (similarly, Republicans seek weakened civil rights protections, environmental protections, and campaign finance rules), so that the groups he is part of can have a freer hand in the grand competition of making it in America.

I get it, of course. I've read Hayek. Competition is an irreplaceable tool in micro-economics and most other pursuits. Competition is a large part of how humanity got to where it is today, and how we operate. I watched the Olympics. But competition is not the whole story, either operationally in how best to run an economy from the macro perspective, historically in explaining how humanity evolved, nor morally in deciding what kind of society we want to live in. Even in efficiency terms, excess competition can be intensely negative, as shown by global financial crisis, our handsome dividend from freeing the financial industry from oversight in favor the free-form screw-anyone-you-can competition of which Mitt Romney is such a champion.

Who does the truly great things in our nation? Who does the pure research, the interstate highway building, the space exploration, the education, the civil rights enforcement, and the park preservation? Towards the end of his speech, Romney cited Steve Jobs as an iconic business innovator. Jobs would turn in his grave, but more significantly, his success was rather different from Romney's example. He cared about the product and the customer's experience more than the money. He was an artist after a sort. A hippie at heart. His success was built on countless public investments and non-competitive facets of our society, all the way from the transistor (enabled by ATT's monopoly position and essentially academic research arm), to the internet and public education. And Apple barely survived the monopolistic jihad of Microsoft, which but for the government's antitrust intervention would have snuffed Apple out completely.

What is the balance we want? We can see the stark costs of all-out intergroup competition through history and all over the world. Especially in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the Balkans. Societies that let inter-group competition get out of control tear themselves apart into smaller societies. Societies that let successful groups win to impose continuing inequalities and exempt themselves from common duties become feudal / caste-ridden. On the other hand, societies that suppress competition excessively, like the Soviets, tend to find it emerging on other planes, like the political. We surely need some, but we need it carefully channeled, regulated, and limited. Along these lines, the Olympics are a model of highly, even painstakingly, managed competition.

I come from a Star Trek mindset where ever-greater collections of societies (the Federation of Planets!) would gather together in peaceful and beneficial coexistence, facing existential (and dramatic) threats arriving only from outside. Here on Earth, we have serious planet-wide business to attend to, what with destroying the biosphere and all. The Republican program is understandable from a primitive psychological mindset, but would take us backward by a century, if not several.

• A nation of "takers"?
• Class war, ad infinitum ad obliviosum.
• Willful screw-the-poor and everyone else policy, British edition.
• Where is the war on poverty now?
• Whatever happened to unions?
• Oh, this is what happened to unions.. complete victory by money/business in politics, including total corruption of one party and partial corruption of the other.
• Obamacare rocks.
• Energy independence is a chimera... real security means using less oil.
• Geology and religion.. how much does one "owe" the other?
• Religion continues to yield dividends in terror.
• The Taliban is still there, still losing the battles and winning the war. There continues to be a fatal political, legitimacy, and power vacuum at the center- in Kabul.
• We really need fiscal policy.
• Political image of the week, from the super pack.