The People of Deseret

Mormonism: From a prophet talking through his hat to a quasi-state with lessons for us all. Review of "The Mormon experience" by Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton.

What happens when god speaks to an otherwise unremarkable man, telling him to found a new religion? In the case of Islam, that prophet conjured a mishmash of Christianity and Judaism into a new doctrine that took its world by storm. The stronger subtext, however, was Arab tribalism. It is that tribalism that finds such rich expression in the martial and ceaselessly vitriolic aspects of the Quran, and in the problems we face internationally today.

Meanwhile, in upstate New York, another prophet received his revelation, and after authoring an even more bizarre scripture, (though likewise a pastiche of Old and New testament materials, in part), trod a similiar path of nascent church building, continuing prophecy, practical leadership, occasional skirmishes with enemies, mass migration, and even polygamy. As an aside, the book I am working from was written by Mormons, indeed by an official church historian, so while detailed and highly interesting, is hardly an unbiased account. A chapter on the role of women is particularly tortured in its apologetics.

The parallels are deeply interesting, yet the differences are stark. Mormonism flirted with armed resistance, but very sparingly, and has been a stable and exceedingly peaceful part of the national scene for the last century. Its proselytizing is determinedly, boringly, peaceful. Both religions emphasize charity within their community and separation from gentiles, (termed infidels in the Quran), yet Mormonism has always had a much stronger internal governance structure, even though it has never (to my knowledge) had pretensions of running a fully autonomous state or of providing a comprehensive legal code, as Islam has. Indeed, Mormons regard the US constitution as divinely inspired. Mormonism has been dedicated first and foremost to self-reliance, practical development and social togetherness, for its cultural subtext was American frontier can-do-ism, rather than Arab tribalism.

One might think the differences to be subtle, after watching lots of Westerns. Clans, clan wars, and plenty of six-shooters seem to characterize the epoch. But in reality, Americans were probably more obsessed with orderly self-government and institution building. The annals of early California are full of systems of law passed for transient mining camps, and an eagerness for setting up local and state governments. From the first charters that authorized colonization by the English and Dutch in North America and the long legal traditions and enlightenment that the colonists had left behind, to the newness of the land and the colonist's ideals of freedom in a promised land, Americans were experts in self-government. Indeed the Western is not typically a celebration of lawlessness, but  quite the contrary- is a cautionary tale of its baleful consequences. Every Bonanza show ends with the forces of law and order triumphant.

I digress because, coming out of this tradition, Mormons are compulsive organizers. From the first with Joseph Smith at the helm, they selected or elected apostles and other governing bodies. The succession after Smith's death brought an even more talanted organizer to the helm, Brigham Young, who managed the hegira from their freshly constructed city of Nauvoo, Illinois to what the Mormons called for some time the State of Deseret, now Utah.

The beehive symbolizes Mormonism and Utah.

The original territorial government featured Brigham Young as governor, and other church leaders in all other offices. This seemed completely natural at the time, and few even paid much attention to the formality of elections. When the Federal government attempted to appoint its own officers to oversee the territory, the Mormons simply ran all their affairs unaltered, using a shadow system where church officers held all the power and the obedience of the people. It took far sterner measures from the US government, including moves threatening to destroy the church entirely, before the Mormons acceeded to federal supremacy, normal political forms, and particularly the illegality of polygamy, which finally happened concurrent with the grant of statehood in 1896.

The beehive is a fitting symbol, expecially of the early Mormon experience, which in the early Utah period was one of extreme hardship leavened only by thorough social organization and communal support. Communal larders were set up from the tithes which were all paid in kind, and in turn fed the poor and placated the local Indians. Communal effort was essential to manage the scarce water, for agriculture was only possible by irrigation. When the Union Pacific railroad building project came through, Brigham Young arranged for Mormons to do the work in the territory, to prevent the immigration of undesirable elements. Then he used a large part of the proceeds to build his own railroad within the state. And in a thousand other ways, from the territorial militia to the building of the Salt Lake City temple, orderly government and communal activity was and remains fundamental to Mormonism. (How ironic, however, that beehives have a queen as their president, who has mated with multiple husbands.)

To some, this degree of togetherness can seem rather creepy, and there is a dark side of extreme patriarchy and conformity. Plural marriage, for instance, was not just an odd and occasional peculiarity, but a reward and sign of church leadership, reserved for top officials. It was Old-Testament patriarchy, and natural selection, in action, Mormon style. But there are also positive lessons for our national economic questions, which largely turn today (in the right-left spectrum) on how together we feel, and how high we wish to set the dial of brutal competitiveness and laissez faire, versus a more compassionate egalitarianism. Mormons are typically Republicans due to their social conservatism. Yet their social organization was at the outset virtually communistic, with high social mobility with the possibility of high office (for men), and thoroughly organized social support. This organization was highly effective, not only socially, but economically, taming an extremely forbidding wilderness and creating a strong state out of nothing. Mormons teach us yet again that it takes management and cooperation to run a successful society, not just competition.

Does it also take religion? Mormonism is explicitly Christian, which, hard as it is for an atheist to say, has contributed, on balance, a peace and compassion-oriented ethic or at least counter-weight to other social forces, over the last millennia. (As has Buddhism in its sphere, even more effectively.) Does strong social bonding require something beyond the Lockean contract, of a more spiritual nature? Does the civic religion of baseball, George Washington, and the Bill of Rights suffice to keep everyone in the US working on the common projects of e pluribus unum, or is a more comprehensive narrative required, of humans as embryonic gods, America as the promised land, and our lives in eternity built upon our diligence, faithfulness, and loving kindness in this life?

It is a difficult question when faced with the obvious social efficacy of bizarrely false and seemingly impractical doctrines- not to imagine that such doctrines are true, but to consider whether we as humans can be communally motivated, idealistic, and purpose-driven without them. We differ, some people being allergic to religious drama, and others being unfulfilled without it. Yet societies can not operate without some degree of fervor and common narrative, to clothe the brute competition that forms the base of natural and social existence, and emphasize more idealistic and cooperative ends. What we have on the national scene in the US is a fraying of this narrative, as the wealthy have pulled away, into their gated compounds and isolated social world, even while they control the political system and put anything resembling the public good on the back burner. The sclerosis and atomization are palpable. The Mormon church carried their narrative and communal principle to extremes, sorely testing the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, but also showing the effectiveness of communalism.

Turning back to the comparison with Islam, great communal projects, especially of a charitable nature, are hardly unknown in Islam, particularly during its golden age. But something about the traumatic collision with the West seems to have sapped the ability of the Islam to function as an effective governing philosophy or ideology. The impulse towards fundamentalism is sadly, and ironically, the opposite from what is needed, and is not just the province of a small extreme minority, but represents the leading direction in the world of Islam, from its twin leading sects / countries, Saudi Arabia and Iran. It took centuries for Judaism to adapt to the position of a minority religion during its diaspora, giving up its dreams of temporal (and Temple) power. Perhaps something similiar, (though hopefully less protracted, degrading, and traumatic), possibly coming from Muslim diaspora in Europe, the US or Indonesia, will be needed to burn off the bitter elements and steer Islam in a new direction.

• Yes, ISIS is Islamic. Ultra-Islamic.
• American misadventures in the Muslim world. Why so many bad choices and terrible allies?
• More on comparative religions.
• More somewhat aimless, yet apposite, discussion of "whence Islam".
• Is ISIS fighting a strictly Sunni-Shia civil war, or something a little more ideological and theological? And just how broad is its support?
• Taliban status report.
• Our State Department defends crime and immorality.
• Outstanding TED talk on the minds of animals.
• David Eagleman's wonderful brain.
• Honestly, if we are short of our inflation target, the solution is very simple.
• Is Uber evil, or not so bad?
• Wall Street votes Republican ... why does anyone else?
• Some notes on Adam Smith.
• Splitting hairs on printing money.
• Indeed, dropping the gold standard and fiscal stimulus saved Japan from the depression.
• While European policy has not done so.
• Sanders Snippet of the Week:

"We have a system, which during the 1990s allowed Wall Street to spend $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to get deregulated. Then, ten years later, after the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior of Wall Street led to their collapse, it is a system which provided trillions in government aid to bail them out. Wall Street used their wealth and power to get Congress to do their bidding for deregulation and then, when their greed caused their collapse, they used their wealth and power to get Congress to bail them out."

Babes in the Woods

Review of the film Restrepo, about US soldiers lost in Afghanistan.

Restrepo is perhaps the foremost cultural document of US involvement in Afghanistan, an documentary of platoon assigned to one of the hottest zones in the war. As film-making, it is very good, mixing post-action interviews and perspective with close footage embedded at the front. Restrepo is the name of an outpost in the Korengal valley of Kunar province some ways west of the Pakistani border, which this platoon founded and held against constant attack by the local population, Taliban, et al. The outpost and valley were later given up to the Taliban after further years of futility. (The film's sequel, named Korengal, is a sentimental pastiche of outtakes from the first effort.)

The men are exemplars of our armed forces; extremely young, immature, good-natured, and given enormous fire-power. They are shattered when a fellow soldier is killed, but kill their enemies with light-hearted glee. Their leader comes across as exemplary as well; disciplined, profane, and effective. Yet something seems sorely missing- knowledge about the social and political setting they have helicoptered into.

Much of the film is taken up with firefights, each side taking potshots at the other. The Taliban set occasional ambushes, but the US soldiers seem only to act as fire bait. They never seem to control the terrain. They set up key forts and mini-forts, and patrol on occasion. But the wider landscape is not theirs to control. Physically, the country is mountainous and thus favorable to guerrilla warfare rather than a mechanized army. And for all our space-based intel, it appears that knowing where the enemy is continues to be extremely challenging.

But the social landscape is even worse, completely incomprehensible to youngsters from the US. Sure, they have GPS, maps and doubtless all the intel our government can provide. But not knowing the local language is an enormous block. The soldiers are tongue-tied trying to relate to villagers through interpreters, hardly getting to first base, as it were, in the campaign for hearts and minds while they are busily tramping through the villager's homes and shooting up the countryside. Their lip service about projects and benefits for the villagers in return for cooperation could just as well have been spoken in Klingon.

Each village is manned by a skeleton crew of boys and ancient codgers. The women are sequestered, and all able-bodied men are off shooting at the Americans. Language barrier or not, the degree of possible cooperation could hardly be more clear. The film-makers don't investigate the local terrain either. They are fully embedded in that sense, not stepping beyond the wire of US control. Could they have clarified the degree to which, and reasons why, the local populace acceed to the terror of the devil they know over the foreign devil they had seen once before, in Soviet uniforms? Doubtful, I am sure, but the question virtually answers itself.

If the US were a traditional conquerer, this wouldn't make much difference. The Afghan men would be killed, the women sold off into slavery, and, as Rome did before us, we would call it peace. But we have renounced such wholesale terror and aim to behave by a higher moral code, as well as hoping to gain friends by practicing temperate and targeted warfare.

Were we even a traditional 20th century conquerer, we would have sent in far more more soldiers. The platoon of Restrepo is hopelessly out-gunned, despite their technical resources. If they had been welcomed as friends, a light footprint might have been sufficient. But at it was, near the border to Pakistan where the Taliban was comfortably ensconced as valued allies of the Pakistani government pursuing its bigoted war against all neighbors, in a rural region were the people are even more attached to their guns and religion (and control of their women) than they are in West Virginia, well, the welcome was not friendly at all. It was like being set down as a lonely platoon on the Ho Chi Minh trail and told to stop the traffic. In that case, as we now know, all the bombing in the world wasn't enough.

Our occupation of Europe after World War 2 succeeded largely because of cultural knowledge and affinity. We knew how to be friendly to a population utterly burned out by war, and even in Japan, we made friends in the wake of the nuclear bomb, due to Japan's strong Westernizing project that had been in motion for the preceeding near-century. In the Middle East, we seem to have very little cultural affinity. Islam is at the core of this, I think, as it combines a bigoted attitude towards infidels (and many forms of social and technical progress) with a lack of governing discipline that leads to endless free-lancing, militia formation, and romantic heroism. Why is government by a polygamous royal family in Saudi Arabia acceptable in the modern world, and accepted as the center and heart of the Islamic world? Yes, it resembles the feudal or even tribal orders of the past. But what kind of justification is that? When is the revolution in political theory and social justice going to happen in the Islamic world?

In Afghanistan, we started well ahead, as the population was not, on the whole, pro-Taliban. But social power is not always democratic, and in Afghanistan, it is a traditional and brutal competition between armed gangs, run by natural predators. Some youngsters from the US might have understood this, but not those in this man's army. Gang warfare is particlarly a matter of social knowledge, knowing were invisible lines are drawn, who is big, who is small, how far to push each person, and what each tag and sign signify. The soldiers of Restrepo are almost completely blind in this respect, which in combination with their other shortcomings made them rather unsuccessful.

But this was just a part of the larger policy. Where are we generally in Afghanistan? The country is slowly losing ground to the Taliban. The government is disorganized and corrupt. Without the US to prop it up and feed the maw of corruption, it is not really clear whether the central government is a going proposition. Which is somewhat odd for a culture so obsessed with morality and honor. Unfortunately honor is a very ambiguous sort of virtue, given to competitiveness and winning over all other considerations, causing suicide bombers to wear burkhas and the like. One may even take it as a cautionary tale for our own slow path towards hyper-competition and feudalism in the West.

After almost fifteen years of occupation / assistance, most Afghan's first allegiance still seems to be tribal rather than national. The cultural elite treat the national government as a part-time affair, good while someone else is paying the bills, but not essential to their power centers, which remain local, in the form of tribal structure, militias, local extortion rings, smuggling, and other pursuits that one might call organized crime. The police operate similarly, by bribery and abuse of citizens. We allied ourselves with the existing powers to get things done locally, while at the same time attempting to change the game nationally by setting up a veneer of democracy and modern bureaucracy in association with ostensibly friendly Afghans. It has been a confusing mess, as much to our own soldiers as to the Afghans whose hearts and minds we intended to change.

• Now that the Taliban has it so good, it can have fights among rival gangs.
• Evidently we have to get out of the Middle East because they really are nuts after all, and deserve their caliphate.
• Why the US needs to police the world, and needs more than kids to do it. Some good, some not so good arguments.
• On the other hand...
• A Mormon insurgent politely asks for change.
• What is going on in Asia and Japan, from a left perspective?
• More about the robots and unemployment, using the horse analogy.
• Decoding Republican love of small government.
• Neural oscillations track both speech and music.
• Image of the week- life expectancy across the US. The Red South needs better health care and lifestyle ... why are they so dead-set against it? Another aspect of feudalism.

Where Did My Soul Go?

Exploring the neurocircuitry of loss-of-consciousness seizures.

While the question of a physical basis of consciousness is batted around by armchair philosophers, it is no light or abstract matter for people whose consciousness doesn't work as it should. From coma to narcolepsy, epilepsy and schizophrenia, there are many ways that consciousness can be disturbed for organic reasons (not even to mention pharmacologic and recreational interventions). One type of epilepsy, absence seizure, is a particularly interesting example, characterized by brief (10 seconds) loss of consciousness with no other symptom, typically. The subject just stares into space, or lets the current action such as speaking slow to a crawl. Memory of this time is absent, and the subject is not conscious. Then everything picks up again as though nothing had happened. It sort of resembles a reboot of a machine or computer.

Epilepsy, of which there are dozens of kinds, generally is a syndrome of electrical/chemical over-activity and over-synchrony somewhere in the brain. Our normal state is a chaotic noise from which a surface EEG captures occasional regularities. Consciousness seems to be the occasional and restricted synchrony of coalitions of neurons reaching the various areas which give it content, whether visual, abstract, tactile, etc. Probably also not just any neurons, but coalitions anchored in the cortical and thalamic areas that are most closely associated with loss of consciousness when they are injured. Beyond this, it is not yet possible to say just what consciousness is in physical, anatomical terms.

Yet there is a good deal known about the electrochemical circuits of epilepsy, which is one route to learning more about consciousness in general. Many patients have been helped by careful investigation of where their seizures begin, and intervening by either removing some portion of that brain tissue, or implanting electrodes that give corrective shocks continuously. In the case of absence seizures, which may be a particularly incisive and minimal disruption of consciousness, the driver seems to be a circuit between the cortex and thalamus.

The thalamus sits atop the midbrain and brainstem, and is the gateway to the cortex, relaying sensory information from outside and motor signals back downwards. In the sensory direction, this is an inter-active process. The cortex sends many connections back, at least in part to direct the spotlight of attention to selected inputs. The thalamus also plays central roles in sleep/wakefulness, as it is the source of the slow wave patterns of deep sleep, and damage to it can cause coma.

But sometimes the cortico-thalamic connections get too strong, and evolve into a positive feedback loop of ~ 3Hz waves that characterize the absence seizure. In susceptible persons, (it is a syndrome of children, typically), brief hyperventilation can cause it routinely. This suggests a possible connection with the sleep circuitry, related to the yawning, dizziness, and other effects of hyperventilation.

EEG waves during an absence seizure, which lasts from a few to 20 seconds.

Obviously, the brain circuitry has been difficult to figure out. Not only is the brain in general, and the human brain in particular, hard to experiment on, but the thalamus is especially central and hard to get to. The authors of a recent paper resort to computational modelling, based on the experimental work of others (and their own prior work). The idea is to get as much of the detailed knowledge into a model as possible, and then ask whether the seizures can be reproduced, and if so, what can be done about them.

The answer is that .. yes they can. The model below describes what is known generally about the network involved. It brings in another key anatomical site, the basal ganglia, which sit right next to the thalamus and conduct signals from the cortex to it, substantially increasing the complexity of the network.

Circuitry diagram of brain elements and connections involved in absence seizures, as used in the current paper's model. Glutamate connections are excitatory, while GABA connections are inhibitory.

One theme is that not all connections in the brain are excitatory, as though neuronal connections were simple wires. The red (glutamate neuro-transmitter) arrows represent activating connections, while the blue (GABA) arrows represent inhibitory connections. Just like in organizational management or artificial circuitry, the careful balancing of positive and negative feedback results in optimal control. Here, after constructing a ~40 parameter model containing everything known about the circuitry, the authors find that an unusual and recently-found inhibitory circuit that points from the basal ganglia (GPe, globus pallidus externa) directly back to the cortex might be critical for damping absence seizures.

Dialing up the inhibitory circuit voltage (-Vcp2) from the globus pallidus externa to the cortex, to a modest degree, reliably shuts down the firing rate (Øe) that is characteristic of absence seizures.

A further example of their data, (below), plotting (A, B) the voltage (Vse) from the thalamus (SRN, specific relay nuclei) to the cortex, versus the delay of action (tau in milliseconds) of the inhibitory circuit between the thalamus internal nuclei, TRN (thalamic reticular nucleus) and SRN. Extending the delay, or increasing the excitatory feedback voltage, moves the graph up and right, towards higher-firing states, as show in the lower individual graphs. The absence-seizure type of firing is in graph D, corresponding to the light blue area of graph A.

The absence seizure oscillation (SWD) happens in a sort of sweet spot of voltage applied between the thalamus (SRN) to the cortex. The vertical axis (tau) describes the lag characteristic of the inhibitory circuit between the TRN and SRN areas within the thalamus, which is also influential over the absence seizure oscillation.

While this kind of modelling is no substitute for empirical investigation, it is tremendously useful to advance scientific theorizing and speculation about the systems at hand. Systems about which our knowledge is increasingly complicated to the point that we may not be able to understand them without the help of computerized models that can keep track of a myriad of details and dynamics. In this case, the hypothesis might be, that if treatment is really necessary, an electrode placed into the basal ganglia / globus pallidus externae, to stimulate its inhibitory action with modest constant voltage, may be one way to go about it.

• What's wrong with the office?
• Cringely on the state of the cloud.
• Upward redistribution, continued. With examples.
• Albuquerque offers a mini job-guarantee, which works very well.
• Jeb! screwed us over once, already.
• Republican deficits are OK, as usual.
• The labor market is still not working for labor.
• Economic mismanagement has permanent effects.
• Stiglitz, cont.
• Cruz, for the rich.
• Whither gun nuts? To civil and official disobedience, with a side of jaundiced constitutional interpretation.
• Isn't lying standard business practice?
• Annals of feudalism: training your H1B replacement.
• Green tip- use rechargeable batteries.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Rights, schmites. Gun fetishism is a psychological and social disorder.

It would be helpful in our gun debates if those opposing gun controls were named more accurately, not as "defenders of gun rights", or "staunch supporters of second amendment rights", and the like, but as gun fetishists. Reading their works makes it clear how intense their feelings are, and how unmoored from rational public policy, historical context, or constitutional history. Let alone from basic respect for human psychology. They are captivated by an heroic narrative of phallic power conferred by the gun, validating their social position, and enabling their defense, perhaps in a dramatic (not to say climactic) public showdown spraying bullets at dark miscreants, or as a last-ditch defense of the home bunker at the end times.

Unfortunately, while most people are responsible enough to carry that rather intense psychological valance without accident, and without cracking up, the idea that everyone is, and that we would be better off with free-flowing guns for the whole population, is empirically false, and thus a dangerous fantasy. Ironically, one gun blog that I read keeps harping on the idiocy of police gun usage. They use bad muzzle discipline. They barge in on the wrong houses. They shoot the wrong people. They try to hide behind procedure and the blue line. No kidding. But how is this an argument that we can trust the average gun-owning Joe to have better, more disciplined behavior? This line of argument also betrays the anti-state insurrectionism at the core of the gun fetishist's concerns. Which is quite ironic and in direct contradiction to the second amendment's historical roots which support a democratic, local, state, which is of course, what the well-regulated militia serves, and what does the regulation.

Rights are not natural, god-given, or inherent. They are political conventions; gifts we give each other to make society work smoothly and afford maximal happiness. The Bill of Rights had to be written down precisely because the rights it enumerated were not natural or inevitable. They were developed over the preceeding centuries in the English and Colonial traditions as ideals and social accommodations. The first amendment is exemplary, embodying the enlightenment lesson that established religions were good neither for the state nor for religion, and tended to foster civil war and corruption.

The second amendment is likewise an historical fossil, though far less relevant to us today than the first amendment. It specifically predicates the right to have guns on the need for a well-ordered militia. Today, we have well-ordered militias, but they are not based on citizen enrollment, let alone on the conscription of personal arms, but on an entirely different principle of professional enlistment and civilian / republican oversight and command. The broader right to keep arms was certainly cherished in the Colonies, as it still is in rural areas of the US that have a light police footprint and plenty of animals to shoot. But the second amendment doesn't address that convention. It is predicated on the specific historical situation the colonists found themselves in, where Britain tried to disarm a populace that was violently hostile to its imposed, foreign, rule. A populace that was happy with its existing local institutions of government.

The idea that guns in the hands of the populace are essential to fending off tyranny should have died with the civil war. No matter how many guns the South had in private hands, they were no match for a full military confrontation. Whatever one's view of the war's conclusion, whether the imposition of tyranny or a righteous victory, private guns made no difference. In the Wild West of the ensuing epoch, the prevalence of guns was not generally a boon to public peace and civil society, and many frontier towns made gun control one of their first orders of business. It would be truly ironic if in deference to people with significant mental health issues, we forgot this common sense legacy and went back to an open or concealed-carry gun free-for-all in the US.

For the focus of the NRA and the gun fetishists in general is frankly pathological. At the drop of a hat, they resort to phenomenal hyperbole, (Over my dead body! From my cold, dead hands!). They shriek about totalitariansm and god's commandment to defend their families from evil. They abominate the "gun grabbers" who would castrate them. So they stockpile guns in a never-enough compensation for whatever else ails them. Power is hard to come by, and it is inexorably ebbing away from the white male god-fearing class. No wonder that the Obama presidency has seen such vitriol and extremism coming from this political class, to its own detriment, really.

What to do about it? The first step would be to call this spade what it is. Not some reasonable, British-empire-resisting group with balanced public policy arguments. Not upholders of ancient and inalienable rights. But people with a screw loose: fetishists for a phallocentric symbol of a political order which is not going to come any closer when Hillary Clinton becomes president.

Speaking practically, is there a place for guns at all? Sure- in hunting, (as personally appalling as that is as some kind of "sport", and however poisonous in its use of lead), in self-protection in rural areas, and in simple collecting and possession. Guns should not be prohibited. But they should be allowed under very stringent conditions, in view of their extreme psychological valence and demonstrated harmfulness. Handguns, for instance, have no use outside of killing people, which makes the fact that there are over 100 million of them in the US somewhat alarming. Owners should be fully registered, and should have to take yearly refresher courses in safety and handling, have a safe to keep them in, legal liability for their control, and a continuously clean criminal and mental health record. There should be no open carry other than for uniformed officers, (or hunting in rural areas), and concealed carry only for specific needs approved and documented on the registration.

Sensible gun control would not get rid of all guns. Yet it is obviously effective in countries (i.e. every developed country other than the US) where it is public policy. While it is perhaps impolite to cast psychological aspersions on our gun nuts, they have brought it on themselves with the antics of the NRA and the broader gun-show, gun-crazy video game, gun-crazy Hollywood movie culture we have to deal with. Such raw, potent, fondle-able power is undeniably attractive, but it also corrupts. Guns keep corrupting impressionable (typically male) minds in very damaging ways, and we really can do better against this menace.

• A little history of English gun laws, militias, etc.
• WSJ: Guns are already so bad and so prevalent, that we can't do anything about them. Win!
• Religious people think it is a spiritual issue.
• True gun nuts hate the GOP.
• Just how expensive is free speech? Too expensive for you, that's for sure.
• Better banking for the poor.
• Yes to carbon pricing / taxing.
• The military can't do it alone in foreign policy, needless to say. One-year attention spans lead to endless conflict.
• A visit to the creation museum.
• Bill Gates: "Since World War II, U.S.-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area."
• State subsidies go to big companies.
• Markets reward lying ... how could we have known?
• Progress in statistics.
• But no progress in economics. WSJ Nobel laureates still dare not speak the words "low aggregate demand", but prefer to blame the Fed for low interest rates, and low interest rates for low corporate borrowing and investment. As though borrowers would borrow more at higher rates.

With a Little Help From My Chaperones

Ribosomes need hundreds of helper proteins during construction.

One of the premier machines of molecular biology is the ribosome. It weighs in at about 3 million daltons, or hydrogen atom-equivalents, and has a huge catalytic core of RNA surrounded by 79 proteins. Due to its ancient origin, mixed composition, and large size, it is also very complicated to produce, yet needs to be made in prodigious amounts. Its manufacture begins in its own organelle, the nucleosome, which is a small compartment within the nucleus where the many copies of genomic DNA that encode ribosomal RNAs get transcribed. Countless events happen thereafter, chemically modifying the RNA, adding proteins, chemically modifying them with various phosphate, acetyl, and methyl groups, and transporting the nascent ribosomal halves out of the nucleus to the cytoplasm. One irony is that the proteins added to the ribosome are all synthesized (by pre-existing ribosomes, naturally) in the cytoplasm and thus have to be transported into the nucleus individually before being re-exported as part of the assembled ribosome halves.

While most proteins and RNAs fold themselves and assemble naturally, based solely on their sequences / composition, the bigger they are and the bigger the complexes they participate in, the more help they tend to need from special proteins called chaperones. The ribosomal RNA uses 76 helper snoRNAs to get itself folded and modified correctly. For assisting the folding of proteins, there are two classes of helpers, general chaperones which help proteins fold by exposing them alternately to hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces, and specific chaperones that bind to one or a few target proteins, typically right as they come off the ribosome production line, to prevent them from aggregating with the wrong crowd, and to transport them to the right place for assembly. Assistance for ribosomal RNA folding may have been the original function of some ribosomal proteins which are now essential for function and permanent parts of the mature structure. But now the ribosomal proteins themselves need chaperones, to the tune of about 200, for proper assembly.

A recent paper discussed an example of a specific ribosomal chaperone, Acl4, which ferries the ribosomal protein Rpl4 to its mark. Rpl4 is an average-sized protein, about 50,000 daltons, but its structure is remarkably splayed-out, rather than compact. When assembled, part of its structure reaches into the exit tunnel of the ribosome, where newly synthesized protein chains come out, and seems to help them stay in the straight and narrow, especially hydrophobic segments that would be tempted to stick to themselves or other proteins, clogging the tunnel.

Structure of Rpl4. The blue part sticks into the protein chain exit tunnel, and is evolutionarily conserved, while the red part reads over the surface of the ribosome, touching several other ribosomal proteins, with unknown function.

Position of Rpl4 (red) on the ribosomal large subunit. PTC labels the peptide transferase center, or synthetic core of the ribosome, and the emerging amino acids chained into a protein are black circles. The hydrophobic knee of the nascent protein tunnel is where the key segment of Rpl4 (4) has a role, along with some other ribosomal proteins (17, 39).

But this ability to manage hydrophobic protein segments implies that Rpl4 is itself, in that region, hydrophobic, and thus prone to aggegation. This is in addition to the rest of the structure, which reaches across several other proteins on the ribosomal surface, in snake-like fashion. While researchers know that this latter structure is essential, they do not know yet what it does. This intriguing protein clearly needs help in assembly. The researchers hypothesized such a chaperone helper, and went out to find it using a tagged version of RPL4 with which they could easily co-purify whatever stuck to it, including several of its ribosomal protein colleagues. But there was one more protein, called Acl4. Unfortunately, the researchers didn't come up with this name themselves, but were scooped by others who published similar data only a few months before. So it goes.

Using a series of engineered deletions of the Rpl4 protein, the researchers show that Acl4 binds over the key hydrophobic area of Rpl4, as one would expect. They additionally show that Acl4 binds to Rpl4 even before it is fully synthesized, also as one would expect for a specialized protein chaperone. In yeast cells, neither protein is actually essential. Strains with either or both genes deleted still live, though grow very slowly. They would never survive in the wild.

Knowing the nuts and bolts of how our biological molecules operate, particularly the extraordinary lengths evolution has gone to fix and fine-tune systems that must have been functional enough in their much simpler, early incarnations, fosters an appreciation of the messiness of the molecular world. Sometimes huge size and complexity is a product of endless jury-rigging, not of exquisite design.

Drama of ribosomal synthesis, for a few actors. Rpl4 (green) is synthesized in the cytoplasm, and captured by Acl4 (purple). Then both transport to the nucleus, where they dock to the assembling ribosome, which is then in due time transported back out to its final destination. Acl4 cycles back by itself for another load. A minor pathway also exists in the absence of enough Acl4, where a generic nuclear transport conductor, importin, can bring Rpl4 into the nucleus, since Rpl4 contains the necessary targeting signals in its sequence.

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