Not even feudal

The many pieces of the Pakistan puzzle. Review of "Pakistan: A hard country", by Anatol Lieven

The good news is that Pakistan is quite a stable country, in the opinion of the author, a King's College, London scholar with who has travelled and interviewed extensively all over Pakistan (excepting where he would be killed, in the vicinity of Waziristan!). The bad news is that much of this stability is due to the most backward elements of its society- the immovable tribalism, corruption, poly-theism, and divisiveness of its politics, which prevent any single revolutionary movement, Islamist or otherwise, from sweeping the country or breaking it apart. And the one thing all Pakistanis agree on? That they hate the U.S. and India.

It is an excellent book, delving into more details than I thought possible for a Western author. Each province is discussed in some detail, each party explained, and the obscure workings of the military and graft system untangled, at least slightly. He commends the hard-working nature of Pakistan's politicians, who have to juggle an unending stream of favors, bribes, nepotism, and more or less formal militias and street fighting, leaving little time (or desire) for grand visions, party ideology, or good government technocracy.

But let's back up a little. Pakistan was founded (67 years ago this week) from the dissolution of British rule over India, in Britain's dramatically weakened state after world war 2. The Muslims of India knew they would never get to rule in a future Indian democracy, (despite their history of presumably glorious Mughal rule), and, among many other things, asked for a legally stipulated 50% share of all government positions. Well, that was typical ... and hardly realistic, so what started as an abstraction, threat, and bargaining chip - partition- turned into a slapdash reality, as a boundary commission composed of Cyril Radcliffe and colleagues (who knew nothing of the area) took a month to draw a border, known as the Radcliffe line. Mixed communities on both sides were quickly ethnically cleansed, and what was a roughly 20% Hindu population in the future Pakistan became less than 1%. Hundreds of thousands died, and many millions fled to their newly declared religio-ethnic homelands.

While the haste of line-drawing was certainly a defect, one has to say that the competing model taking place in Israel/Palestine, where a line is never ever drawn, is hardly better. But it was really the implementation that failed- the British cut and ran within two months, and virtually no one on either side was prepared to take over their new nations, let alone manage (i.e. police) the gradual disentanglement of centuries of mixed living. Who was more at fault? Well, India still has roughly as many Muslims as Pakistan does, at about 13% of its population, so just going by the numbers, the ethnic bias of the Muslim side seems distinctly stronger. After partition, Pakistan proceeded to start three wars against India, each of which it lost. It also lost its co-religionists in Bangladesh who originally constituted "East Pakistan", and who were regarded as distinctly inferior by their Western brothers. Nor was Pakistan ever taken seriously by the Islamic world at large as its leading nation and beacon, as it had hoped.

A miscellaneous picture from contemporary Pakistan. Breakfast on the train, by Steve McCurry.

So Pakistan arose in tumult, wedged between two highly artificial boundary lines, and while more or less purely Islamic, still contains multitudes, including all possible sects of Islam. The refugees from India formed a special community and party in Karachi, founded on their special sacrifice for Islam (the Muhajirs), which again, the other communities are not terribly impressed with. The Punjabi farmers constitute the heart and majority of Pakistanis, ringed around by India on one side, and their tribal cousins the Sindis to the east and south, the Pashtuns to the north, and the even more tribal Balochs to the far east on the border with Iran. Each community is of course riven itself with various political lineages and ethnic allegiances. Indeed, the only national and highly functioning "tribe" of sorts is the army, which preserves a prim and disciplined, but not always intellectually penetrating, legacy from the British and more recently its U.S. relationships.

For example, the Pakistanis routinely blame the US for "forgetting" about them and about Afghanistan, after the Soviets were driven out. But we didn't live next door. Pakistan did, and its military establishment and ISI kept funneling money and arms into the Afghan civil war, and thereafter supporting the Taliban. Lieven discusses in detail how the ISI saw the unrest and strife in Afghanistan as a model for what Pakistan could also do to Kashmir. Promoting development in Afghanistan doesn't seem to have crossed anyone's mind in Pakistan.

Two other critical sources of fracture are, as Lieven portrays it, language and the judicial system. The official language is Urdu, which is largely Hindi written in an Arabic-like (via Persion) script. It is used by only a minority of the population, and what is more, is frowned upon by the true elites who speak English. Most of the population speak one of the many local languages- Punjabi, Sindi, Pashto, Hindko, etc.

Yet the justice system runs on English, due to its British precedents and structure (save for trial by jury, which was left out of the bequest, oddly enough!). So the vast majority of the population can not speak the language of their own justice system, let alone write it (indeed, literacy overall in any language is about 57%). And most of the functionaries who must operate in English do so tenuously. Combined with pervasive and flagrant corruption, this means that cases can grind on, Kafka-esque, for decades, amid misunderstandings and hidden influences. This means in turn that both officialdom and private citizens take matters into their own hands as a matter of course, using "encounter killings" on the part of the police, and blood feuds, kidnapping, general violence and riots by the latter.

An informant in Swat tells Lieven: "A khan politician would use his gunmen to seize some poor farmer's land and his political connections to stop the administration doing anything about it. Then he would say to the farmer, 'Sure, take me to court. You will pay everything you have in bribes, you will wait thirty years for a verdict, and the verdict will still be for me. So what are you going to do about it?' Well, when the TNSM [local Taliban branch] came up that farmer could do something about it. He joined them."

It also means that the alternative systems of justice offered by the Taliban, advertised as Sharia, (though typically owing as much to the tribal code of pashtunwali), is for all its flaws, extremely popular with Pakistanis in Pashtun areas and beyond, mostly because of its great rapidity and effectiveness. Crime, drugs, and "licentiousness" can be cleaned up virtually overnight. Yet upon closer inspection, the beneficiaries grow a little less enamored of the Taliban's justice, bought as it is at the price of totalitarian terror, and capricious, often downright un-Islamic, barbarity.

Indeed, the whole sense of justice is slightly different than Westerners might imagine. Lieven mentions the concept of honor or reputation (izzat), prevalent not just in tribal areas, but all over Pakistan, indeed all over southwest Asia: "Walsh speaks of izzat as an individual matter, but it is equally important to famillies, extended families, and clans. Indeed, most crimes committed in defense of izzat (and for that matter, most crimes in general) are collective crimes, as other family members join in to help or avenge their injured kinsmen in battle, to threaten witnesses, to bribe policemen and judges, or at the very least to purjure themselves in court giving evidence on behalf of relatives. This is not seen as immoral, or even in a deeper sense illegal. On the contrary, it takes place in accordance with an overriding moral imperative and ancient moral 'law', that of loyalty to kin."

The larger political system is likewise fractured, with overlaid westernized, feudal, and tribal institutions. The upper levels of government operate ostensibly on a western model, with prime minister, president, parliament, etc. But scratch the surface, and the substrate looks much more like a tribal system. The main parties are basically hereditary fiefdoms. For instance, the PPP of the Bhuttos are waiting for Benazir Bhutto's son to come of age to take over from the lackluster husband Asif Zardari. Their program has virtually nothing to do with ideology or approach to governance, but rather with patronage down a chain of smaller office holders to the local big-man system that runs most of Pakistan. Rural landholders are commonly referred to as the "feudals", but I think that oversells their powers of organization and governance. There are many tribal elements involved, and not just in the explicitly tribal areas.

The fuel of this system at all levels is patronage, graft, deceit, and corruption, whereby taxes are forgiven and neglected, jobs handed out, police actions directed for polical ends, and contracts let for projects that are never built. This leads to a dynamic where each party can only be in power briefly, since its empty popular campaign promises never are or can be fulfilled, nor enough graft generated to satisfy all adherents, leading to a cycle of disappointment and party-switching, not to mention governing mediocrity.

The author, like most observers, is starkly judgemental and anxious to see Pakistan modernize. But what would that mean? As people, we are all competitive, and Pakistanis are clearly prize specimens of competitive spirit, accessorized with a variety of narcissistic delusions, from the superiority (indeed the truth) of Islam on down to Pakistan's leading role in the Ulema, their superiority over India, obsessions with tribal honor and patriarchy, their especially toxic feeling of superiority over Afghanistan, and in general the various successes they would have but for the evil conspiracies of the US.

The problem is, delusions aside, that this competition is mostly zero-sum. One political party wins so that it can take the jobs away from the other party and give them to its incompetent hacks. The military promotes the perpetual war with Eastasia so that it can keep eating the lion's share of the budget, not to mention billions in aid from the US. But the society at large does not benefit. Tribal competition may be great for genetic evolution, killing the unfit and distributing spoils to the most ferocious and clever. But it does not (on any acceptable time scale!) generate cultural or economic development. That only happens when human competitiveness is channeled into constructive pursuits, the capitalist system being a prime exemplar, and professional governance another. The hidden hand is fueled by human competitiveness and existential necessity just as surely as are the most bitter tribal feud. But it creates far more wealth and public good (when properly regulated!). Pakistan's per-capita GDP ranks 141 in the world, out of 187 countries, significantly behind India, among many, many others. Much is due to complete lack of population control, but that is only one facet of Pakistan's deep failures of civil and institutional development.

What to do? From the US perspective, my prescription would be for the US to end monetary aid to Pakistan, or at least put it on the same footing, per capita, as our aid to India, which would amount to the same thing. The stunning process by which, after many decades of alliance, we are thoroughly and universally detested in Pakistan, points to very deep psychological issues which money does not help, within a relationship which could be called abusive. Anyhow, what Pakistan needs from us and from the West generally is not money, let alone aid to its military, but content- intellectual, managerial, governmental, institutional, philosophical. We should be on the friendliest possible terms on all those fronts, but not in ways that blackmail us into giving them money for their efforts (or lack thereof) towards being a basically civilized state. The cold war is long over, and Afghanistan has far more urgent need for our aid, for, among other things, defending itself against Pakistan. We have shown that we can do without military transport through Pakistan. China's relationship with Pakistan is far from being a threat to our interests either. Just as our process of leaving Afghanistan promises to ease a great deal of bitterness and tension there, disentangling our relationship with Pakistan would do likewise, benefiting both countries.

An interviewee in the Mohmand agency on the Afghan border talks about his brother: "He joined the Taleban because he believes in Islam, and because the Americans attacked Afghanistan without cause. Afghanistan is an occupied country like Kashmir. He and other Taleban do not want to fight the Pakistani army, but they have no choice because the army is attacking them on the orders of America. The Taleban would like to make an agreement with the government here so that they can go and fight in Afghanistan. But America doesn't allow the government to do that. It wants war in Pakistan so that Muslim will kill Muslim."

• Another typical, duplicitous day with India: "On Tuesday, Salman Khurshid, India's Minister of External Affairs, told reporters that there was a sense of shock in New Delhi over the 'ceasefire violations by Pakistan,' and a spokesman for the ministry confirmed that the tensions in Kashmir would delay secretary-level talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbors (Dawn).  In his statement, the spokesman for the ministry said, 'For peaceful dialogue to proceed we need an environment free of violence and terror. And certainly what has happened last week doesn't fit into that.'"
• Is Pakistan getting serious about its internal terrorism?
• Egypt looks headed back down a similar path as Pakistan, as a militariocracy.
• A little commentary from a British onlooker.
• Another zero-sum activity that gives us nothing.. day trading.
• How it works in Pakistan-on-the-Mersey.
• Studies in US corruption.
• Indeed, our mortgage crisis is one long litany of unprosecuted criminality and corruption.
• Conventional, even elite, wisdom isn't very good. Everyone, please think for yourselves!
• Not only is the 401K "system" off-loading risk from employers to financially unskilled workers, and allows employers the a la carte option of zero cost for providing a "retirement benefit", but the plans are also structured to fleece employees. Great job, congress!
• Tempest over the IMF & Rogoff.
• Robert Bellah as closet theologian and evangelist.
• Religion and intelligence.. hmmmm.
• Liberals unclear on the science concept.
• On the psychology of evolution. Why we don't believe in it. I can add one more facet of likely disbelief. Humans are very groupish and tribal. We are attuned to very small gradations of difference between ourselves and others.. even non-existent differences cooked up in ethnic fantasies. This is one reason why some Americans are called African-American as a matter of course, while virtually none are called German-American or Russian-American. So the idea that a monkey is our "uncle", as it were, if many times removed, is instinctively disturbing, unless we have, as the article notes, adopted a very abstract and long-range view of time and change in biology.
• Economic quotes of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"The deficit should be whatever is required in each period to ensure that effective demand is at a level that is consistent with achieving potential output – that is, full employment. That might require a continuous sequence of deficits forever. Most likely given the historical behaviour of the external sector and private domestic sectors in most nations."

• And.. from Bill Black:

"Given the fact that the CEOs of large fraudulent lenders are criminally liable for tens or even hundreds of thousands of acts of mortgage fraud we should be seeing our prisons overrun with elite white-collar criminals.  Instead, the DOJ has no convictions of the elite bankers who led the control frauds that caused the crisis."

The god that failed

The boys of 1945, and degrees of humanity.

I don't know what people get out of horror films, but I do know what we get out of the holocaust literature. A sickening sense of moral depravity, of every value turned upside down, and of a world crying out for justice. There is also a sense of absolute Darwinism at its most brutal, both in the genocidal tribalism of a Germany gone mad, and in the grinding imperative to stay alive for every one of the exceeding few who survived.

This is occasioned by reading Martin Gilbert's "the Boys", about one remnant of Polish Jewry liberated from the concentration camps at the end of world war 2 and sent to England for recuperation. 732 children in their mid-teens, more or less, mostly boys, had undergone this harrowing journey, losing everything and everyone, and coming out through various strokes of luck and backbreaking labor into a world which generally went on without much ado, back into its normal grooves and preoccupations.

The outstanding part of the book is the first half, where the survivors tell their tales, frequently after decades of silence during which they were busy likewise getting on with their lives. Gilbert solicited their stories, and we can be thankful that many obliged, with great care and detail. They cover the nature of life in Poland before the war, which was a mixed bag of strong antisemitism in some communities, and unprejudiced positive coexistence up until the German occupation in relatively few others. Then of course the descent into hell. The restrictions, the dehumanization, the ghettos, the shipping to and fro, the labor camps, the starvation, the lice, the gas chambers.

"A few days after the deportation from Kozienice, the Jews working at Szyczki were given permission by their Polish overseer to conduct the Kol Nidrei even service, with which Yom Kippur - the day of atonement- begins. 'As a result', Moneik Goldberg recalled, 'some people figured that nothing would happen if they didn't report to work the next day. I was still observant at the time and wanted to stay in. There was a man, Moishe Zowoliner, whom my father had known very well and he had written him to ask him to look after me. He made me go to work that morning. When we returned to the barracks in the evening the SS from Radom were there. We were all marched to a clearing in the forest nearby. Those who had stayed in were already there. They had dug a ditch and upon our arrival they were all massacred, and we were ordered to fill the ditch with dirt. That was the first massacre I witnessed - on Yom Kippur 1942. I was fourteen years old.'"

Few of the survivors in this group remain religious. They are very much Jewish, but god for them seems to have pretty much failed as a concept. One typical query, from Meir Sosnowicz, now Michael Novice:

"There was another, very important question: 'Where was God?' I prayed to Him to redeem us. I acknowledged His presence. I looked for the miracles of redemption which we had learned about during our Bible studies at home and at school: the Exodus from Egypt, the story of Korah, who was punished immediately for his sins. The sins of Pharaoh seemed much less than the sins of the Germans and their cohorts. How long could God allow these obscenities to continue? Where was He? The redemption seemed a long time coming. Would it ever come? The question reminded me, in a very small way, of when, as a child, I hurt myself, and my mother was not around, it seemed for ever until she came. Where was my mother? I was confused. Today we say that God hid himself, turned his face from us, answered 'NO' to our request. I know that to this day I can not understand what He had in mind, to allow all this to happen for so long a time and to so many good and innocent people."

And do they regard religion good in a more general sense, spurring good morals and humanity?

"'While my behavior towards individual Germans and Poles is very forgiving,' Jack Rubinfeld wrote, 'I am fully aware of the enthusiastic participation by the majority of Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians in the hatred and gross mistreatment of the Jews. As a group, I have not forgiven them. For me, the main responsibility lies within the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant clergy and churches, that planted and nourished the seeds of this hatred. After so many generations of calculated cultivation, it became part of their genes or cultural landscape. Unfortunately for the believers, even hell is an absolute truth.'"

One of the additionally shocking aspects of the story was that after their liberation, many of the victims went back to Poland to their erstwhile homes. They were met there with killing squads, now of the native inhabitants, who perhaps were so full of the German ideology, perhaps so unwilling to face their own guilt and possible loss of ecnomic advantage, that they did their best to bring that final solution to a grim conclusion. Several of the boys describe hair-raising escapes at this time, which finally sent them on their way to England, Israel, and the US as totally, utterly bereft refugees.

For Poland now has a Jewish community of roughly 20,000, less than one percent of the original number. And it is interesting to reflect what a long and strong history Jews had in Poland. For over five centuries, it was a golden place, a Mecca(!) for Jews being driven out of Western Europe and Russia. Indeed at one time, Jews in Poland consituted the majority of all Jews world-wide. It is astonishing to think about.

It gives some perspective to the idea that the US is some kind of promised land for Jews. However well things go at the moment, and improve for many minority groups including Jews, there have been such cosmopolitan cultures and promised lands before. It is impossible to predict hundreds of years into the future. On the other hand, going the tiny Jewish country route in a more-or-less hostile world obviously has its risks as well.

Another aspect of the story made me reflect on the US. The survivors tell of the remorseless process of dehumanization that the German policies carried out, clicking the ratchets of restriction, segregation, expropriation, deportation, and down and down, till it ended in ashes around the crematoria. These were all conscious policies engineered out of a fundamentally competitive attitude. The Nazis felt superior in countless ways to the Jews, and wanted their land, their possessions, and everything else they had. And just to turn the screw even more, they played Jews off against each other in their misery, using some to run the ghettos, others to run aspects of the labor camps, even as the Germans themselves rolled the competitive dice on the larger stage by making war against the entire world.

Our own culture traffics in competitive dehumanization as well. To see homeless people trundling their carts around a city, and hear of prisoners in endless solitary confinement is quite disturbing. These people have lost a more individually specific Darwinian struggle, judged by some social process- "the market" in the former instance, and our justice and incarceration systems in the latter. Homelessness in particular seems a specific result of a national ideology: the right-wing combination of individual freedom and low communal responsibility. A bi-partisan commitment to the "competitive spirit". So we see ill-fed and desperate ghosts in our midst, whose only crime was to be born with or into some problem- maybe a bad family, propensity to addiction, or mental derangement- by which they fail the struggle, and become non-persons.

• Social capital was a positive asset to the Nazis, not a negative one, at least in their original quest for power.
• Evolution, music, and sociality.
• Sexism in action.
• Hooray for the girl scouts.
• The common belief fallacy, and what to do about it.
• And religious kowtowing making inroads at the State department as well.
• As if we didn't know already ... David Brooks is not very bright.
• What makes buses low-status?
• Vast methane emissions are not helping the environment.
• Workers should be paid better.
• Economic quote of the week, about what China needs to rebalance its economy towards a consumer focus, which means giving more money to ... consumers. A good idea, not only for China.

"Three strands are needed: firstly, reducing the incentives for investment by putting in place fairer resource prices, interest rates, and distributing dividends from state-owned enterprises, secondly, boosting household incomes through higher wages and lower social security contributions, and thirdly, lowering precautionary savings by continuing to strengthen the social safety net and increase spending on pensions and healthcare."

Expecting good music?

Review of a book on music theory: Sweet anticipation, by David Huron.

Music is one of the more mysterious pleasures of the human condition. Why do we like it? How can composers tap into our deep emotions using notes? Why has modern music gone off the rails? Why do different cultures and time periods make different music? How many different musics could there be?

An author who claims to have many of the answers is David Huron, of Ohio State, whose book, "Sweet anticipation" proposes an psychologically based theory for some aspects of music appreciation, centered around how we predict events, evaluate prior predictions, react to events, and generally relate to the future. (He gives a very nice talk on many of these issues here.)

I can't do much justice to his book in a very brief essay, but will offer a few points. His philosophical basis is very naturalistic- that the brain is a machine for predicting the future, to help us flourish there.

"In many ways, expectation can be regarded as yet another sense: a sense of the future. In the same way that the sense of vision provides the mind with information about the world of light energy, the sense of the future provides the mind with information about upcoming events. Compared with the other senses, the sense of the future is the closest biology comes to magic. It tells us not about how the world is, but how the world will be. It arose through natural selection's myriad efforts over millions of years to produce organisms capable of clairvoyance and prophecy. A stockbroker might value the ability to predict the future as a way to becoming rich. But for Nature, the value of predicting the future is the more precious gift of living longer."

He presents a detailed scheme, graphed through time, of how we relate to any event, with higher mental and evolutionary functions residing farther away from the event itself, and more ancient functions closer. Long beforehand, we imagine and dream about it, whether it is bad or good. As we get closer, tension rises, as we prepare a more physiological response, and register more specific expectations about it. Right after the event occurs, we may have basic flight/fight responses, later tempered by more mature reflection about the actual meaning of the event.

Interestingly, he adds another response immediately after an event, which is a prediction success response. Whatever an event's significance and affect, our success in predicting it provides another and rather immediate kind of affective jolt. If we are going to get poked in the arm for a vaccination, expect that it hurts, and it then hurts, we at least take some satisfaction in the successful prediction.

This is a critically important response for learning, giving rapid feedback to our prediction machinery. For instance, learning to play an instrument, there are countless wrong moves, and somehow, we have an internal reward system that notes what happened back in time to create correct actions, and reinforces those circuits in some fashion based on an emotional satisfaction with the few correct moves. This system is, frankly, still very hard to understand.

For music appreciation, this scheme of expectation and reward, borne of far more general biological imperatives, leads to many typical musical phenomena. Like the stereotypical ending of Western music where notes descend into a resolving chord. We expect it, so the composer is sort of obliged to provide it. But then rebellious composers try to mess with our heads. Huron makes a particular point of Richard Wagner, who apparently made a career out of avoiding typical endings in his pieces. Which can heighten tension and strengthen ultimate enjoyment, but may get tedious over time as well.

We expect notes to follow each other in pretty close succession. Scales are very common in music, while large jumps are more rare. Key signatures are maintained for some time, then modulated in gradual fashion, if at all. Very few people have perfect pitch, rather, most of us appreciate music in a relative way, hardly noticing when a song has been transposed to a different key. This is sensible, given our amazing capacity to consistently interpret spoken language from speakers with vastly different pitches and timbres.

Expectations happen at at least two distinct levels- the memory of a particular piece, and the more general expections surrounding the genre of music, and perhaps the overall cultural approach to music. Any of these can be confounded to create surprising effects- surprises can that entertain when our higher cognition kicks in to say that they are harmless / playful.

"Two general lessons might be highlighted from among the arguments presented in this book. The first is that many musical devices can be plausibly traced to the 'deep structure' of evolutionary psychology. The mental mechanisms involved in musical expectation are biological adaptations that arose through natural selection. At the same time, musical expectations are intimately linked to culture. The expectations listeners form echo the structures of the acoustical worlds they inhabit. In the case of music, those acoustical worlds are defined largely by culture. Both culture and biology shape the phenomenal experience of musical expectation."

The one quibble I would have with Huron is that he attempts to extend his theory of expectation as the foundation for our responses to music to tonality. Substantial space is devoted to tabulating the commonality or rarity of particular chord or note sequences, making the case that Western listeners like what they hear pretty much only because they hear it alot. We have a middle C based culture, but it could have been anything else (like twelve tone-ism, for instance!). Other cultures enjoy quite different tonalities as well as rhythyms. And I would strongly disagree. The way that Asian audiences have taken Beethoven et al. to heart is a testament to the universality of music, and I would counter that there are deep immovable aspects to tonality that provide the basic magic of music. It is not clear that the direction of causality goes from frequency to appreciation nearly as much as it goes from appreciation to frequency.

Sure, there are many variations and musics around the world, and it can take some effort, and even childhood training, to appreciate some of the more exotic forms. Culture has a great influence, and even within a culture, musical fashions change continually. For one thing, the speech patterns we grow up with have strong effects on our ultimate perception of music. Yet it is not clear that, for instance, mothers sing to their children in very different tones around the world, nor is it true that anything at all can come to be a deeply moving musical experience. Twelve-tonism and the antics of John Cage remain pedantic curiosities, not because we have not been exposed to them quite enough times, but because they fail to tap into relatively immovable, inborn pleasures of sound.

Pleasures that long predate any kind of formal music per se, but come up in our interactions with nature around us, in the sing-song patterns of our spoken sentences, and in our spontaneous humming and other nonverbal communications. Great amounts of information (especially emotional information) are conveyed during face to face encounters by the slightest inflection or tone. All this would be hard to wedge into a theory based only on expectations formed out of a statistical templating by the most common sounds, but has to be based to some extent on inborn relations to tonality.

"In Western culture, most aesthetic philosophers  use the word 'pleasure' to imply a sort of crude bodily sensation, the 'pleasure principle' is regarded as some unrefined and perhaps demeaning motive, unworthy of sophisticated people.  Few ideas have been more harmful in impeding our efforts to understand the arts."

• The beatbox ur-voice ... but is it music?
• You want family values? Pay people decently.
• Millennials- not very millenarian.
• In praise of Marriner Eccles.
• Would Larry Summers need viagra to provide a firm currency?
• The systematic destruction of common goods.
• Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, "Last Monday it emerged that the Taliban has killed 2,748 police officers just in the past four months."
• Corrupting markets ... all in a day's business for JP Morgan.
• What is the Fed and who should be Fed chair?
• Say it ain't so! Psychopathy in finance.
• Economic quote of the week, from J.K. Galbraith:

"Let us take supply-side theory at its face value, however modest that may be. It holds that the work habits of the American people are tied irrevocably to their income, though in a curiously perverse way. The poor do not work because they have too much income; the rich do not work because they do not have enough income. You expand and revitalize the economy by giving the poor less, the rich more."

Superhero aquaporin

How does water get into and out of our cells?

Water is an amazing molecule. Common, but complicated. Clear, essential, and taken for granted, but also chemically very weird. Water is more prominent as one goes out in the solar system. The Oort cloud is a vast, cold swirl of ice and dust, from which Earth is thought to have obtained most of its water by bombardment, after the original light gasses were driven off in the earliest hot phase of planet formation.

We are 60% water. Biology originated in water, and all biochemical reactions take place in water as the solvent. One of the first steps to the origin of life may have been controlling water by forming oily membranes to separate inside from outside, creating primordial cells.

Biological membranes are very slightly permeable to water, and less so as one adds cholesterol. By the time one gets to all existing cells in the evolutionary story, there is a need for special proteins that conduct water through the cell membrane at a high rate. These are all passive pores, (not pumps, which would require extra energy), though they can be regulated in various ways to turn on and off. Our kidneys are full of them, with at least six different genes encoding water pores, called aquaporins.

Cells typically regulate their water balance not by pumping water itself around, but by manipulating ion concentrations (of sodium, potassium, and chloride, principally) within. They can build internal water pressure (turgor pressure) by pumping an excess of an ion inward, and waiting for diffusion to attempt to equalize the concentrations inside and outside by sending water after the ions into the cell.

But here is where the aquaporins come in. In bare membranes, this diffusion process is way too slow for most cases of regulation, so cells need a passive, specific, and high-volume way to let water in and out, faster than the membranes themselves allow. And the toughest part of this is making such a channel specific to water alone. Making a hole in a membrane is not difficult. Many pathogens do just that to kill cells. An aquaporin needs to conduct H2O only, not salts, not hydrogen ions (protons), and not OH- ions, either. It is a job for a very intricately structured protein.

A recent paper described a very high-resolution X-ray structure of an aquaporin from yeast cells, taken as a model for all kinds of aquaporins. Typical protein structures come in at around 2Å resolution, which is enough to follow a protein backbone around and get a good idea of the overall protein structure. This one is 0.88Å, a remarkable achievement for membrane proteins, which tend to be very difficult to crystalize and solve (prior work). 

The quality of this structure is so high that the researchers can tell the difference between an electron cloud shared (conjugated) between the carbon on amino acid Gln137 and its oxygen (red), and an electron cloud more evenly shared elsewhere in the structure, between the carbon on Glu51 and its two oxygens. X-ray crystallography provides only electron densities, from which the identities of the associated atoms and molecules must be deduced.

The overall structure determined by this group, in cut-away cartoon view, with water molecules as red dots. SF is the "selectivity filter", and NPA is another well-studied area, with a "asparagine-proline-alanine" protein sequence.

This resolution allowed the researchers to see individual water molecules snaking their way through the central channel (at least very roughly, there was still some motion that blured them out) in the low-temperature frozen crystals, something very rare in protein structural studies. Because yes, as you would guess, aquaporin channel is a big protein structure that exists entirely to create a narrow channel running through its center.

Youtube provides a computer simulation run by other researchers using another model aquaporin. Brownian motion of the peripheral waters dominates the video, while the waters inside the channel bounce around more slowly. But quickly enough to pass at a rate of billions per second! The channel shows distinct charged areas, blue (+) and red (-), which organize the slightly dipolar water molecules as they slip through. One of the water molecules is highlighted in yellow so you can track it. The simulation shows two particularly narrow regions, upper, near the large blue blob, and also a lower one, where the waters have to squeeze through.

"A single human aquaporin-1 channel facilitates water transport at a rate of roughly 3 billion water molecules per second."

Fine.. but anything could run through here, at least anything smaller than water, which being a three-atom molecule, means that most single-atom ions would be smaller. What makes this channel selective for only water? Here we turn from structure to electrostatics. The channel works by funnelling each water molecule through a channel that is not only narrow, but also lined in very specfic ways to test that each molecule passing is actually water.

Example of a site where one water (#4) is extensively coordinated to tell by shape and charge that it really is water.

"MD [computer simulation / molecular dynamics] snapshots illustrate how this geometry achieves exceptional water selectivity, because all four H-bond donor and acceptor interactions are filled as water moves through the SF [selectivity filter] (C). The presence of four closely spaced water-selective sites optimizes the aquaporin SF’s ability to discriminate water from other small molecules. Hydroxide ions, in particular, suffer a geometric penalty, because they cannot simultaneously donate H bonds to the backbone hydroxyl of Ala221 and to Nε of His212. Conversely, all H-bond interactions are distorted from ideal water geometry, and this avoids binding water too tightly, such that efficient transport is compromised."

A larger view of one of these "selectivity filters" is shown below, where side chains from the protein (in green and blue) reach out to touch the water molecules, shown smaller than their real effective size so that we can see what is going on. Pairs of waters are shown in progressive positions in the channel. The researchers conclude that the pair move in lock-step from one pair of positions to the next pair, all of which show up in the structure, but only two of which can be occupied at a time.

Pas de deux of two waters through the selectivity filter, which coordinates them closely with slight positive charges from Arg227 touching the negative water dipole on the oxygen, while the slight negative charges on Gly220 and Ala221 touch the positive dipoles of the hydrogens.

Which brings up the most sensitive issue, which is that water needs to be sensed very carefully on all sides to bring the right shape through, and kept from bringing along H+ protons, or coming through in OH- form- but not be held so tightly that it can't get through at all. So all these touches are done like in a car wash, on the fly as the water molecules come through one by one.

It is great to see basic scientists digging deeper into the basic mechanisms of life, unearthing knowledge whose application may be very far off, but whose beauty and elegance is a permanent and worthy achievement in itself.

• Advanced guide to protein crystallography.
• Free the whales!
• Goldman, doing god's work corrupting markets and stealing from the rest of us.
• Doesn't "guest" labor sound so nice?
• A theologian responds to the Martin case: time to be an atheist!
• What's wrong with Detroit? Right and left wing prisms.
• The answer for social security ... expand it.
• Is the economic ideology tide turning?
• North Carolina takes up the supreme court's challenge to prevent voting by the "wrong" people.
• Foxes running the climate change hen house.
• Searle on souls.

Injustice, hoodies, and gun nuts

Reaction to the Zimmerman trial.

Apologies for a political post, but I was surprised by the Zimmerman verdict. While second degree murder was indeed a stretch, a verdict of voluntary manslaughter seemed a foregone conclusion. When one participant in an altercation is dead, the remaining evidence is unavoidably tainted and partial. There should be a presumption of responsibility on the killer, not simply an assumption of innocence.

In this case, there was no question who killed whom, and who was armed. The only question was why, which led to the legal hairs being split down the degrees of murder. Zimmerman gave us very little to go on in the core of this case, not even testifying in his own defense. After doing everything he could to provoke a confrontation, he evidently got into a confrontation, and bit off a little more than he could chew, with Martin, (as the trial seemed to establish), beating him from above.

Those circumstances don't justify murder, as far as I understand it. If you start a fight, you don't get a free pass to murder just because the other person fights back. The whole "stand your ground" concept thankfully didn't come up in this case, because Zimmerman wasn't on his own ground, except in the guise of a neighborhood vigilante and faux-cop. So the defense was simple self-defense, based on a decided lack of evidence, the main source of evidence having been conveniently killed by the defendant, while the defendant was tellingly silent on the key events that precipitated the fight. It is a case where lack of evidence speaks volumes.

In the larger picture, we rely on our justice system to deter communally destructive behavior. And the kind of race-tinged vigilate-ism that this verdict approves is certainly toxic and destructive. America used to stand for law, justice, and, you know.. the American way. The South keeps getting in the way of such decent ideals, however. And justice in Florida seems to retain a distinctively Southern flavor, exemplified by this jury. A juror has said that Zimmerman's heart was in the right place, and that the jury was not racist at all. If only the dead could speak, eh?

Incidentally, this case is also a classic example showing that guns kill people. If Zimmerman didn't have a gun, both these people would still be alive today. The gun enabled an idiot to execute the target of his suspicions and hatred with little thought, or, more to the point, careful, polite, interaction. His emotions were to some degree understandable, in a dumbly profiling, stereotyping kind of way, since the neighborhood had seen several crimes over the prior few years. Still, the gun spelled the difference between amateur policing and murder.

• Some other self-defense cases that give pause. And statistics.
• Stevie Wonder takes action.
• Maybe black people should carry more guns?
• "Florida leads the nation in the number of death row inmates who were subsequently exonerated."
• Jesus- real or imagined? Rebel hot-head or mystic cool cat?
• Further annals of narratives, magic, and "dopey sheep".
• Javascript may have hit a performance wall, in the garbage department.
• Stiglitz on Myriad, rent, and the inequality of intellectual property.
• "Respected" economists say everything is fine.. no more jobs needed.
• H1B visa fraud- no wonder they can't find qualified domestic candidates!
• Pakistani girl has Taliban on the run.
• Should we travel in pneumatic tubes?
• Economics quote of the week, on Bernanke at last calling a spade a spade. Not that Republicans care.

"But he warned that Congress itself remains the greatest obstacle to faster growth. Federal spending cuts are reducing growth this year by about 1.5 percentage points, he said. While the Fed expects the impact to diminish next year, he said there was a risk Congress would create new problems for the economy."

The women are at fault

Bernard  Lewis offers an hypothesis about Muslim cultural development.

Just before 9/11, Bernard Lewis published a provocative book about the Islamic world titled "What went wrong? The clash between Islam and modernity in the Middle East." There is very little discussion about the causes, but a great deal of historical detail showing that the muslim world has indeed fallen behind the West, (or North, or however one wants to term it), and is bitter and has long been perplexed about the situation.

To recap a bit from his conclusion:

In the course of the twentieth century, it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam thta things had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared with its millennial rival, Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the primacy and therefore the cominance of the West was clear for all to see, invading the Muslim in every aspect of his public and-more painfully- even his private life. 

Modernizers- by reform or revolution- concentrated their efforts on three main areas: military, economic, and political. the results achieved were, to say the least, disappointing. The quest for victory by updated armies brought a serious of humiliating defeats. The quest for prosperity through development brought, in some countries, impoverished and corrupt economies in recurring need of external aid, in others an unhealthy dependence on a single resource- fossil fuels. And even these were discovered, extracted, and put to use by Western ingenuity and industry, and doomed, sooner or later, to be exhausted or superdeded ... Worst of all is the political result: the long quest for freedome has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships,  modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.

He makes the additional point that even while the Muslim world has been so bitterly conscious of falling behind, other countries, especially in Asia, such as Korea and China, have zoomed past them into modernity. What is the problem?

Lewis offers only the most off-hand comments to this question in his conclusion, but one of them caught my attention in the most riveting way:

"For others, the main culprit is Muslim sexism, and the relegation of women to an inferior position in society, thus depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people, and entrusting the crucial early years of the upbringing of the other half to illiterate and downtrodden mothers."

This knits up so many threads that one's head spins. For instance, one issue is that Islam was once the most advanced culture, at least in the hemisphere, if not the world- open to Greek and Roman learning, building on it, and passing it on to others. For its time, Islam gave high regard to women, with rights to inherit and have their own property. Even polygamy was not originally formulated as an excercise in male dominance and competition, but of caring for widows and other isolated women (of whom there were many after the wars of Muhammed) who might otherwise become beggars or prostitutes.

So one might say that Islam was at one time in a leading position with regard to women's rights, and as long as that held, it also held relative cultural leadership in the broadest sense. One can well imagine the influence that educated and civically engaged women have on their children, and the converse effect that a relentless confinement to family, clan, and tradition have. As previously noted, our parents give us meaning, and they also provide us with horizons and ambitions, whether small or large minded.

Another issue is the relative development of different countries, especially within the Islamic world. Why is Afghanistan saddled with the Taliban, while Egypt has the more moderate, though still a bit crazy, Muslim Brotherhood? Could the relative oppressiveness of the burkha and the veil (and all that they signify about the position of women) have something to do with it?

The fight for women's rights in the Islamic world is not just a matter of goo-goo feelings and Western domination, but addresses the very core of cultural development in the long term. One can hypothesize that every gain that women make in education, cultural engagement, and rights, yields, a generation down the road, a society less prone to blood feuds and more engaged in further education and higher cultural development, built by men and women inculcated with the ideals of their mothers.

• End times and climate heating.. or is it just historical myopia?
• The dismal science.. not a science, at least not yet.
• But yes, we have plenty of money.
• Can you say "age discrimination"?
• Climate heating denial, in full swing over at the WSJ.
• China vs Earth.
• A review of Morsy's role in the Egyptian mess.
• Ural accordion (bayan) trio, sounding like an organ. (Minute 6+)
• Bach on accordion- no kidding!
• Evidently, hunting, killing black people is OK, particularly if they defend themselves.

Our plastic memory process

Dynamic and adjustable memory associativity in the brain.

A funny thing about memory is that it bleeds. It takes on schematic properties that allows other concepts to associate with it, notoriously as free association, but also during learning, trauma, metaphor, and creativity. PTSD is a problem where too many things trigger bad memories and those bad memories generalize to mean far more than the bare incidents in question. If the memory of one distasteful event is to be useful, its core elements need to be recognized and generalized to enable avoidance not just in that exact setting again, but of future patterns that are similar to some regulated degree. So how similar is similar?

Surprisingly, memory generalization can be studied, and a recent paper described connections between the hippocampus, frontal cortex, and an intermediary structure called the nucleus reuniens, showing that some of these connections affect the degree of memory generalization when either destroyed or enhanced. The nucleus reuniens is part of the thalamus which is smack in the middle of the brain, with important roles in consciousness and alertness, among much else.

This is all done with mice, using cutting edge techniques. The test was to have the mice experience a shock in combination with an alert sound in one cage, and then to test response to the same sound (tone condition) or to no sound in various settings, like the same cage, or similar cages, or a somewhere completely different. Normal mice do not show fear outside the original cage context, unless you ring the same tone that was  associated, Pavlov-style, with the original fear training. But mice that have had their medial prefrontal cortex areas ablated (mPFC), or their nucleus reuniens ablated (N. reuniens), show continued fear in new cages. I could not tell how universal this fear expression was ... were the mice just totally frozen now, fearful of all conditions? That was not clear.

Genetic ablation of various mouse brain structures specifically affects the degree of fear memory generalization, as tested by fear expressed in an altered context, relative to the original context (cage) or the original tone sounded during fear training. The role of the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) had been known previously, but the equally important role of the nucleus reunions had been unknown.

At any rate, the coup de grace was for the researchers to use some clever molecular technology to ablate only the neurons connecting the PFC with the N. reuniens, by injecting the mice with one genetic element of a lethal cocktail (a gene for tetrodotoxin hooked up backwards to a promoter of expression) in the mPFC, and the other element (a recombinase that flips the toxin cassette into the expressing orientation). Each was labeled with a fluorescent protein to show where the injections took place:

Locations of injection of two genetic constructs, in a mouse brain section, whose products combine to destroy connected neurons. Green shows the medial prefrontal cortex, injected with the flipped toxin gene, and pink shows the N. reunions, injected with the recombinase gene that activates toxin expression.

Neurons transport this kind of expressed protein through their cell bodies, even out to the farthest axons. They also let some into the synaptic vesicles that send neurotransmitters across the gap between neighboring neurons (axons and dedrites). This means that a small amount of the recombinase would be transported from the injected region into the target area where its projections go, and be able to induce expression of the toxin in those target neurons that received the complementary injection, killing them. The figure shows the result, where control mice with non-expressing injections show normal fear-context dependence, while mice that got the full treatment in the nucleus reuniens and prefrontal cortex show more generalized fear, like mice that had their whole nucleus reuniens ablated.

Specific ablation of neurons connecting the mPFC and N. reuniens results in expanded memory generalization (TetTox bars, green), while neuronal activity enhancement (NL2KD bars, blue) in the same neurons generates the reverse effect of lower memory generalization. Response to the tone or the whole training context remains normal in all cases.

They even were able to do a converse experiment, using the recombinase to induce, instead of a toxin, a repressor of neuroligin 2 which represses neuronal transmission, essentially enhancing transmission between the two injected areas (the blue bars, above). These show the (modest) opposite response of lower fear response in the altered context (than control mice with sham treatment), with similar response in both the original cage and the trained tone. This provides quite a strong argument for the specificity of what they are seeing- that the nucleus reuniens is a critical way-point for signals from the prefrontal cortex that tell the hippocampus that a memory is relevant to more specific conditions than it might be inclined to apply them to otherwise. As in most things, the prefrontal cortex refines and inhibits our deeper brain processes.

Lastly, they used the very latest technology to convert the nucleus reuniens neurons to be light-inducible in their firing (optogentics), by injecting a gene for channel rhodopsin, which converts light into membrane potential which in the neuron can induce action potentials. This method allows researchers to run the affected cells at any firing rate they wish, up to 50 times per second, driven by a light guide directed right into the structure in the brain they are interested in.

Optogenetic experiment, where light is conducted into the site of an injected channel/rhodopsin gene which allows researchers to use strobed light to fire neurons at will, and also fluoresces red.

They used two driving methods, one a constant 4Hz (4 firings per second; tonic) and the other bunched in fifteen firings within a half-second, at five second intervals (phasic). The experimenters evidently came up with these patterns through trial and error, and they had opposite effects, when run while training the mouse to the fear condition (shocks to the feet in a cage). Running the tonic pattern during training yielded lower fear later in altered contexts (lower generalization), while the phasic pattern yielded higher fear. Neither one affected the response of the mice to the true fear condition of the original training context and/or tone.

Optic driving of the N. reuniens during memory training yields opposite effects on ultimate memory generalization, depending on the pattern of neuronal firing driven- phasic or tonic.

The idea from this work is that while the hippocampus stores specific memories, other connected areas allow those memories to be generalized to *similar situations, accounting for allegory and much else about our mental operations. There is a two-way circuit from the hippocampus to the nucleus reuniens and on to the medial prefrontal cortex, where memories exist in more abstract form. Here, the researchers show that for at least one type of memory, the obscure nucleus reuniens links the two, with an active role in whether a mouse's memories flood in during distantly related situations, or only in the more restricted context of the original experience.

Related mechanisms are likely to be relevant to the binding problem of how separate features of an experience or scene are linked by our minds into a unitary experience with various possible abstractions and composite or derived properties, i.e. consciousness. The way we associate new experiences with prior memories and knowledge, either freely or sparingly, should work similarly and be intimately connected with the degree and quality of our creativity.

• Ode to small business- the ones that care about people.
• A less romantic take on our revolution.
• Some comforts and discomforts of religion.
• And Hitchens ... OK after all.
• Just the facts, at the Zimmerman trial.
• Perhaps drugs should be made the old-fashioned way, in academic labs.

Myth & music

The languages we love.

Claude Levi Strauss wrote an exceedingly brief book, "Myth and Meaning", one chapter of which is titled "Myth and Music". He offers the hypothesis that, compared to the basic core of human spoken language, music and myth each lack an element, forming a sort of coding triangle:

"Now you can compare mythology both to music and to language, but there is this difference: in mythology there are no phonemes; the lowest elements are words. So if we take language as a paradigm, the paradigm is constituted by, first, phonemes; second, words; third, sentences. In music you have the equivalent to phonemes and the equivalent to sentences, but you don't have the equivalent to words. In myth you have an equivalent to words, an equivalent to sentences, but you have no equivalent to phonemes. So there is, in both cases, one level missing. 

If we try to understand the relationship between language, myth, and music, we can only do so by using language as the point of departure, and then it can be shown that music on the one hand and mythology on the other both stem from languages but grow apart in different directions, that music emphasizes the sound aspect already embedded in language, while mythology emphasizes the sense aspect, the meaning aspect, which is also embedded in language."

I can't say I think much of this setup, (indeed his book is but a weak rendition of Jungian concepts), but it does get one thinking about the relations between these languages. I would offer that music is absolutely primary. Its evolutionary roots are extremely deep, expressing and sharing emotions among birds and insects, not to mention all mammals.

The next level up from music is practical language, used for parenting, household organization, hunting parties, and the like. The musical aspects of our phonemes and sentences are weakened in the interests of more finely coded communication, as words take the place of purely musical expressions. Still, poetry (and various onomatopoeias) harkens back to a time when all sentences were more or less musical, more emotionally meaningful, less coded.

From there, languages develop increasing coding capacity, which can be used for many things. Here is where myths come in, as one of perhaps two thematic branches of language use. One branch is the didactic, analytic language, which eventually develops toward Witgenstein and mathematics, where, if the content is not poetic, nothing else about the language betrays any musicality whatsoever.

The language of myth goes in quite a different direction and expresses quite different things- our dreams and emotions. One telltale is that myth is happy to be embedded in a culturally integrated way with strong connections to music, image, and other arts, as a unity of performance. Myths are no more logical than our dreams are; they express an emotional and human logic that is essential to our being, nurturing a sense of self, community, history, hope, and imagination. Why do all our movies & novels have happy endings? Why are the cop show criminals always caught? These myths carry out the elementary function of keeping our spiritual sense of order and hope alive.

This is all to say that one shouldn't confuse the nature or purposes of didactic versus mythical languages. They are fundamentally different, and the weird necessity that modern religions often have of insisting that their myths cover both bases, are perfectly correct, contain all knowledge, and must never be doubted is another case of emotional language being used- some relatively ugly emotions, to be truthful.

• Economic quote of the week:

Alas, in their self-appointed role as purchasing agents in health care, American employers have arguably become the sloppiest purchasers of health care anywhere in the world. The chaotic price system for health care is one manifestation of that sloppiness.
...
Another result has been that ... a decade of health care cost growth under employment-based health insurance has wiped out the real income gains for an average family with employment-based health insurance.

Lucid dreaming

Of dreams, fairy tales, and religion.

Our brains are always going. Awake or asleep, something is always bubbling, until death do us in. Emptying the mind is a hopeless task, as meditators learn to their chagrin, though one can focus on smaller and smaller objects, and increase one's discipline of focus.

Most activity is fully unconscious, wheels turning to support our breathing, blood pressure, vision, etc. But the conscious parts are likewise going virtually all the time, apart from the deepest levels of sleep, and send up a constant stream of drama in the form of dreams, images, plans, regrets, and desires- waking and sleeping.

When we are not making up our own, we like nothing more than to experience in those of others- watching movies, gossipping, reading books. Why is that? Computers do some of the computation we do, (more or less!), but without all this drama. They are not motivated agents. That is the divide between our world and the one where robots take over- as of now, they don't have any motivation ... a drama motor running all the time, putting out dream images, desires, and ambition.

I've been reading fairy tales, and watching the illustrated dreaming of Henry Darger. Tales like Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella are by turns cautionary morality plays and hopeful live-happily-ever-after dreamscapes. Pared down and packed with every archetype, kings come riding over every hill, stepmothers thwart every princess, and big things happen in threes. Fairy tales seem like lucid dreams, with no preamble, context. or excuses- just pure drama dredged right up from our emotional core.

While we all dream, some people are far more gifted (or cursed!) with the ability to experience and express dreams in the waking state. Of the brother Grimm's sources, none was as prolific or precise as Dorothea Viehmann, who contributed many of their stories. But her stories came from other folk sources. She had an extraordinary memory to collect and transmit them.

Henry Darger, on the other hand, was a reclusive product of early 20th century Illinois orphages and asylums who generated an enormous fantasy world, which he spent a lifetime recording in ream after ream of typescript and hundreds of paintings and collage. Probably, we all experience easily this much imagery and drama, in dreams. But very few experience it so clearly in waking, or are so compelled to tell the story, listener or no. Carl Jung was another example.

Art for art's sake, by Henry Darger.

Our cultural life, however, depends on people so gifted, who bind us together in shared fantasies, of movies, novels, ceremonies, and the like. Our humanity is expressed in intense desire and the drama of fulfilling it in world where it often runs directly athwart the desires of others. Thus the epic Glandelinian war of Darger's opus, with its heroes the Vivian girls. Or the latest Superman, Spiderman, Hobbit, Potter, etc.

Which brings, us, as usual, to the topic of religion, which falls squarely into this category of art: enacted fantasy with a head-spinning brew of every conceivable archetype, cosmic-level drama, and the can't-top-this promise of living-happily-ever-after. It is a story. One that has come so naturally to us through the ages in countless guises, rising from the same basic psychological truth and origin. One that has been refined into the crack-i-est of narrative crack cocaine. One that tops it all by not saying "once upon a time", but by claiming truth and demanding belief from its mystified and yearning votaries.

Is it really so hard to tell story from reality? Reality is, to our awareness, just another story, and sometimes a mightily depressing one that pierces our narcissim. One of the great accomplishments of the enlightenment was to begin a definitive separation between nonfiction and fiction across the culture, using immense intellectual discipline, in combination with intellectual accelerants such as printing. The development of science was only one facet of a deeper process. It is a long, long road- indeed never ending, since human nature itself remains unmoved.

• Get the lead out of all ammunition. Not just for birds, but for hunters as well, of course.
• Citigroup now writing our banking laws.
• The Fed starts to realize that it isn't tracking the right numbers; money isn't all it's cracked up to be.
• Krugman comments on rent: "Since profits are high while borrowing costs are low, why aren’t we seeing a boom in business investment? ... Well, there’s no puzzle here if rising profits reflect rents, not returns on investment."
• Solar viability still in question- needs carbon tax to stabilize.
• Shale oil and gas supplies look essentially unlimited. So we can't wait for supply constraints to save the climate.
• How can some workers in the US be paid ¢22 an hour?
• Dennett on closeted clergy.
• A tempest in the atheist teapot- only for the intrepid!
• Green tip: telecommute!
• Economics quotes of the week (NYT editorial): "If a business really needed workers, it would pay up. That is not happening, which calls into question the existence of a skills gap as well as the urgency on the part of employers to fill their openings."
• And, Simon Johnson on too big to fail: "Hank Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury and former head of Goldman, felt strongly that the continued existence of his firm was essential to the well-functioning of the world economy."
• And, market fundamentalists still at work (Bill Mitchell): "Mankiw’s example assumes at the outset that 'people earn the value of their marginal product'."
• And, at the nexus of government, economics, and Afghanistan: 

More than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment have been shredded, cut, and crushed into scrap metal as the U.S. military prepares to withdraw all combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 (Post).  Because complicated rules govern equipment donations to other countries, and few would even be able to retrieve it from Afghanistan, military planners have destroyed equipment worth more than $7 billion, turning it into scrap metal the Afghans use in construction projects or as spare parts. 

Where have all the fishes gone?

Can we ever get our ecological act together?

Picking up on last week's theme of fighting against the declining baselines of what humans perceive as "normal" ecology, as they exploit their way down the food chain and wreak various other types of havoc on our world, a prime example is fishing. We have known forever that any body of water has only so many fish, and in lakes it is quite possible to "fish out" a species. But the ocean? Yes, we've known for at least a century or two that ocean fisheries can be fished out too.

An outstanding podcast from the CBC interviewed the author of a new book about this history, who makes the point that fishery depletion was a public and contentious issue in the 19th century, and fishermen where very resistent to the über-exploitative methods like bottom-trawling that, several decades later, left much of the eastern seaboard such an ecological shambles. Time after time, our collective apparatus- the state- proved toothless and cowardly in the face of technological "advancement", private interests, and races to the bottom which wound up as tragedies of the commons.

But I'll turn to something more contemporary- an article about current fisheries management that has similarly depressing messages about the appalling lack regulation, even now, decades, indeed centuries, after all the issues have been crystal clear. If we can not manage our relations to fish in the face of short-term greed, how will we ever deal with CO2?

The paper is a global analysis of overfished stocks, and asks what the optimal policy would be, and how far we (or the relevant governing bodies) are from that policy and why. As is customary with contemporary fisheries "science", they take the most blinkered and mercenary attitude, asking not for ecological health in general, or restoration of fantastic yields seen in distant history, but only for the "Bmsy", or the maximum sustainable yield of fish biomass. The idea that other fisheries might depend in turn on the studied fishery, or that wild animals might rely on it, or that such fish populations might not have as their only end the servicing of human appetites ... that doesn't seem to enter their heads. Nor does the true historical scope of possible fish populations and yields.

At any rate, even on strictly Bmsy terms, which is to say the simplest dollar and cents approach, the fisheries they look at are grievously mismanaged. Species that could be restored in ten years are on trajectories to be restored in 100, if that. (Note that the halibut fishery is completely closed due to virtually none being left, which leads to the coincidence of the business as usual and other curves below.)

Projected recovery times for various collapsed fisheries of the northwestern Atlantic, under business as usual,  no fishing at all, and moderate fishing at the Bmsy (see text) levels.

The Bmsy is typically taken to be 0.3 times the current population of the fish, assuming a typical rate of reproduction, which largely goes into the maw of the fishing fleet. This is why the difference between no fishing and Bmsy fishing in the graph above is so small- that taking merely one third of the population each year is not such a big bite out of a rapidly reproducing species. For a slowly reproducing species, like sharks, the factor is going to be much smaller, but that is not discussed in the paper.

So it is apparent that under the current regulatory regimes, the hunters of these emblematic species and many others are not controlled, and can not control themselves from vacuuming up absurdly large proportions of the already depleted populations of these fish, directly in opposition to their own economic interests, in the long term.

"Regardless of their depletion level, at current fishing mortality rates, recovery to Bmsy remains a distant target for the majority of stocks that are now depleted (n=62 stocks in our analysis)."

The authors go on to make the additional point, which hardly needs making, that the length of time a species has been in a highly depleted state itself affects the time it will take (if ever) to recover. Whether this arises from permanent habitat destruction, (like from bottom trawling), or from ecological reconfiguration of their relation to other species, or gross genetic alterations like reductions in size in response to fishing pressure, or from loss of genetic diversity, or for other reasons, such species have a hard, hard road.

Fish are almost as invisible as CO2- out of sight, out of mind. And this problem also reflects the degradation of our public institutions and quality of public thinking, part of a long tradition of kow-towing to private business and individual "freedom", which authored such epic catastrophes as the dust bowl. We can do better.

• The Fed talks about our conditions- the credit markets are still in bad shape. The Fed's money creation has little effect, as long as banks and other participants are not lending.
• CO2 emissions at all-time high.
• Nicaragua intends to build a canal, with Chinese and Russian help. How serious is it? Hard to tell.
• Some economic history- breakup of the Ruble currency area.
• B of A lied as a matter of course ... shocking! Disclosures about foreclosures.
• Supply side theory ... oops!
• Green tip- foam filler is a great way to weatherize, seal cracks, and insulate.
• Economic image of the week- returns to capital vs labor. The talk turns out to be about inequality, looking into the void of our current public policy, in a TED-style way.