Star Larvae

It Can't Happen Here (Until . . . . )

2012-01-07T08:05:00.000-11:00

America's ongoing descent into a corporate state roused me finally to pick up Sinclair Lewis' cautionary novel about the rise of a Fascist regime in the United States, "It Can't Happen Here." First published in 1935, when Fascism had rooted itself in Europe, the story captures troubling tendencies in American popular media and popular mentality. Think demagoguery and mob psychology.

The passage below testifies to the timeliness of Lewis' cautions about insidious relationships between private banking and government. Senator Windrip is a political rising star who runs for president and whose ascendance is fueled by his skillful exploitation of jingoism and associated populist sentiments. Speaking is R. C. Crowley, the local banker of Fort Beulah. He is addressing an informal gathering of the modest town's professional class. But in particular he is addressing a skeptical Doremus Jessup, the local newspaperman and the novel's protagonist.

"I don't like all these irresponsible attacks on us bankers all the time. Of course, Senator Windrip has to pretend publicly to bawl the banks out, but once he gets into power he'll give the banks their proper influence in the administration and take our expert financial advice. Yes. Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again."

How well does this shoe fit the politics of the United States in 2012?

Then Lewis comments on the integrity of political campaigns, when a Windrip supporter admits that the candidate's promises amount to nothing, "just molasses for the cockroaches."

I'm just sayin'.

The capitalist enterprise needs to rid itself of the monetary parasitism of private banking

2011-12-17T12:49:00.000-11:00

The page at left is from Money and Banking, a publication in the Everyday Economics series put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. This section, called How Banks Create Money, begins,

"Banks actually create money when they lend it. Here's how it works: Most of a bank's loans are made to its own customers and are deposited in their checking accounts. Because the loan becomes a new deposit, just like a paycheck does, the bank once again holds a small percentage of that new amount in reserve and again lends the remainder to someone else, repeating the money-creation process many times."

This sounds innocent enough, but notice the peculiar nature of the money that banks create. The money exists entirely as debt. When you take out a loan from a bank, you owe the money back to the bank. With interest.

Notice that the bank does not loan you money that it has sitting in some vault. When you take out a loan, the bank merely credits your account. It makes credit appear. In exchange for your new indebtedness (that, after all is what your loan is, a debt that you owe to the bank), you get to put up collateral, often your home.

If you pay back the loan, then the bank possesses the money (your payment), which it now owes to no one, even though your incurring a debt brought the money into existence in the first place. The bank also possesses the interest you paid.

If you don't meet the terms of the loan, then the bank takes possession of your collateral, a real asset that it acquires through no risk or sacrifice on its part.

For these reasons, it cannot be said that banks earn their money. To say that they do is to obliterate any sense of the word, "earn". The money-creation system described here (fractional reserve lending of monetized debt), subverts the capitalist virtue of earning one's money. Banks might "earn" their money, but they do not earn it. Banks are the enemy of capitalism, and the capitalist enterprise needs to rid itself of the monetary parasitism of private banking.

The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan

2011-11-27T06:07:00.000-11:00

The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan from Randall Acronym on Vimeo, a footnote to very good lecture, below, by McLuhan scholar Arjen Mulder, on McLuhan's ideas with commentary on his Catholicism. All from V2_, an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

2011-10-16T10:50:00.000-11:00

After wasting pages on an ad hominen argument that belabors the New Age movement's adoption of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, Ward finally gets down to the serious business of trying to refute/debunk Lovelock's hypothesis.

The Gaia hypothesis, varying from weak to strong versions, involves the notion that Earth's biosphere actively regulates the chemistry and temperature of its fluid environment--the atmosphere and oceans--to keep the planet bio-friendly. Ward cites extreme fluctuations in atmospheric chemistry and temperature in Earth's past, ascertained from geological evidence, and proposes mechanisms by which the biosphere's own metabolic processes could have contributed to the extremes. The extremes reduced Earth's overall biomass, and, so Ward argues, the biosphere not only fails to maintain a healthy environment for itself, but positively contributes to disrupting the environment and reducing the planet's biomass. Hence, the Gaia hypothesis is disproven and Ward's Medea hypothesis, that life poisons its environment and so is inherently suicidal, is corroborated.

The argument is not convincing for a few reasons. For one thing, life always participates in anabolic (building up) and catabolic (tearing down) processes. The two feed each other, and the combined system is called metabolism. To focus on the downside is not to discredit the circuit.

Ward settles on biomass as the "bottom line" measure of the health of the biosphere. But do we assess the health of any organism solely by mass? Evolution has produced advanced technological civilization. What more could be expected from a living planet? More and more and more bacterial tonnage? Biomass per se is not an indicator of anything in particular, except biomass.

In a previous book, Ward (and co-author Donald Brownlee) suggested that glaciations serve evolution as genetic filters, weeding out the less fit. So he's familiar with the idea that die-offs can serve a constructive evolutionary purpose, even if they reduce biomass.

What Ward fails to address, and what is central to Lovelock's original idea, is the anomalous resistance of Earth's fluid environment to entropy. Why are the atmosphere and oceans not sitting stable in a state of chemical equilibrium after all these millions of years? Volcanism, mineral erosion and other geochemical processes continually stir the pot, but surely it is an oddity that the random variability never has crossed a threshold that would've sterilized Earth.

Part of Ward's problem seems to be that he fails to connect Gaia with evolution.

A fetus also pollutes its environment, and up to a point it's not a problem, because the environment not only is set up to handle the toxins, but also positively to support the developing life. Up to a point. A fetus that stays in the womb too long becomes Medean--life threatening--at which time it needs to move to a more accommodating environment.

That's the situation we're in.

Ward has no enthusiasm for space colonization, but thinks it's wiser to try to adapt to this planetary womb. Such short-sighted thinking definitely is Medean. Ward's book presents a half-baked recipe for a self-fulfilling stew.

Occupy MN Launches Rally

2011-10-09T06:30:00.000-11:00

&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Occupyu
Friday was a great kickoff for Occupy MN.

500+ people convened in downtown Minneapolis at the ~~Government~~ People's Plaza. At 2:00 MPD's Segway Squad stopped traffic to accommodate a march to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. The chant, "End The Fed" filled the air as the crowd asserted its numbers, and the banksters looked out over the protesters from inside their fortress. O, to be a fly on the wall by the watercooler.

Corporate media say the movement has no concise message. But the last thing the movement needs now is a manifesto. Then it becomes about picking apart words. Keep it loose. Keep it free. And network, network, network.

Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground

2011-08-03T15:17:00.004-11:00

The sell copy inside the front flap of Among the Truthers’ dust jacket calls Kay a journalist. But Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground evinces none of the objectivity that one would expect from a journalist. Canadian Jonathan Kay is an editorial writer and columnist who has been working to debunk the 911 truth movement essentially since its arrival. This book continues his quest.

In it, Kay sallies forth with a broad brush, surveying a mélange of familiar targets of ridicule—Senator Joseph McCarthy, purveyors of tales of Atlantis, anti-Semites, skeptics questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, academic deconstructionists, and others, along with 911 truthers—targets that share no logical relationship. They share only an implication of being related every time somebody utters the phrase, "conspiracy theory".

One brand of glue Kay uses to try to hold together his conspiratorial herd of cats is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a scurrilous document that purports to be a collection of notes taken from lectures given by Theodor Herzl, in which the outspoken Zionist outlined a Jewish takeover of the world. Outside hardcore anti-Semitic circles, the document universally is dismissed as a fake. But the Protocols surfaces again and again in Kay's narrative as if he felt a need repeatedly to smear anyone who rejects official proclamations by associating them with this example of hateful propaganda.

Digging to the historical roots of his subject, Kay observes, "British colonial rule under King George III truly was designed to keep Americans in a state of perpetual subservience, and to steal the fruits of their industry. Over time, resentment of this fact grew into a deep suspicion of government power more generally."

The Monarch’s Court might have replied to Kay’s assessment as follows:

The oppression of the king was "truly" a "fact"? No, Mr. Kay. You don't understand. Good King George sought only to protect and care for the vulnerable colonists. Conspiracy theories swirled through the colonies, and this was unfortunate, but the colonists were a peculiar sort of people, prone to delusions and paranoia. Certainly your own ruling class acts always and only in the best interests of your laborers, as did King George. Why would you imagine that the rulers of the past were differently constituted from your own? You seem to have imbibed the kool-aid of Messrs. Jefferson, Franklin and Paine. They are such rabble as needs to be debunked in a book about the wrong-headedness of mistrusting authority.

During his quixotic journey, Kay effectively achieves the opposite of his intended effect, because he repeatedly admits that history provides many real-world precedents for the events and official narratives that raise eyebrows among today's conspiracy theorists, ". . . including the unsatisfying Warren commission Report on the JFK assassination, the secret bombing of Cambodia and the military cover-up of My Lai, a program of foreign coups and assassinations by the CIA, and other questionable activities officially denied and only brought to light after the fact [.]" Add to this list the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the plots hatched under Operation Northwoods, and you’ve got plenty of reasons to dismiss blanket dismissals of conspiratorial suspicion. The theorists too often are on target.

In discussing a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists, the secretive Bilderberg Group, Kay shoots himself in the foot again. "Over time, something called the 'Bilderberg Group' evolved into a once-a-year, off-the-record talk shop for a rotating cast drawn from the world's foremost politicians, corporate leaders, and intellectuals—Davos without the cameras, essentially." But Kay admits that, "Even most educated readers are unlikely to know much about the Bilderberg Group."

Really? And why is that? Aren't the most educated readers the ones who would be most conscientious about informing themselves regarding the comings and goings of the world's foremost politicians, corporate leaders and intellectuals? Is something frustrating their attempts to stay informed? Do the mainstream media fail to inform because they are ignorant of the Bilderberg Group and its calendar of events? They would need only to consult any of many conspiracy websites to discover where and when the Group meets. It's no secret among Bilderberg investigators. But the mainstream media fail to inform the public regarding these meetings of the world's foremost politicians, corporate leaders, and intellectuals. What gives? And why the secrecy on the part of the group? If the world's foremost politicians, corporate leaders, and intellectuals are just exchanging cookie recipes and showing off pictures of their grandkids, then why the cloak and dagger? What do they need to hide? The questions are endless.

Kay accommodates readers with an answer. He leans on a colleague, publisher Conrad Black, to explain. Black "has attended more than twenty Bilderberg conferences, and even sat on the group's Steering Committee for the better part of two decades." Cool. So this fellow has an inside seat. What does he say goes on at the meetings? Kay quotes him:

"In my time, starting at the end of the 70s, it had become a Western Alliance meeting place—with a few others, i.e., Swedes, Finns, Irish, Austrians, Swiss, and an Icelander—where attendees discussed how to deal with the Soviets, how to organize and manage Western economies. [. . . .] It was an atmosphere of hauts functionnaires, altruistic businessmen, and self-important people, sufficient in what they fancied to be their influence and right-mindedness."

(Kay fails to mention that this colleague in 2007 was convicted in U.S. federal court of three counts of mail and wire fraud and one count of obstruction of justice and sentenced to 6-1/2 years in jail. Ah, the company we keep . . . .)

OK, let me get this straight. Self-important people, sufficient in what they fancy to be their influence and right-mindedness, meet in secret to organize and manage Western economies. Whew, I was afraid it was going to be a conspiracy. I guess it’s just bad luck that their policies always manage to further enrich the wealthy and impoverish the poor. Maybe they need a new consultant.

Kay shoots himself in the foot once more when he dredges up commie-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy as an example of a conspiracy theorist, but then concedes, parenthetically, that "(one should not overlook the grain of truth in his assertions—despite the mendacity of his trumped up charges, there were in fact Communist agents in the U.S. government, as later revelations would confirm.)" So, McCarthy's suspicions were merely imprecise, not inaccurate. Let’s give each side half a point.

Then there's this: "The CIA in particular, an organization whose MK-ULTRA mind-control and chemical-interrogation experiments truly were something out of a conspiracist's nightmare, seemed to symbolize a world in which average citizens were targeted by their own government.” Seems to symbolize? No. They really, actually, factually did target average citizens. It's not symbolism. It's history, documented. Indeed, the CIA’s heinous MK-ULTRA program is an excellent place for a newbie to these matters to start researching justifications for conspiracist thinking.

It's tempting to conclude from so many examples of conspiracy thinking that turn out to be justified that Kay himself is conspiring (with his typesetter? Heh-heh, who knows?) to soften opposition to conspiracy theories. But that would be delusional thinking. Let's move on to the crux of Kay's conspiratorial biscuit, the 911 Truth movement.

Apparently untrained in critical thinking, Kay knocks 911 truthers for "having notebooks full of esoteric debating points about avionics, building demolition, NORAD flight-tracking procedures and a dozen other scattered subjects" in lieu of a coherent alternative to the official narrative. Kay wants truthers to put the rhetorical cart before the grammatical horse.

Collecting raw data is the necessary first step (the grammar) needed to attain wisdom according to the traditional critical thinking method of the trivium. When one has sufficient relevant data, then the process of analysis of the data begins (the logic), and one draws conclusions from the logical analysis of the data that are consistent with the data and with logic. Only then is it suitable to provide a narrative (the rhetoric). But Kay wants truthers to jump straight to their version of what happened. However, to obtain all of the relevant data would require a new investigation, conducted by an apolitical commission with international participants and observers and subpoena powers. Kay fails to advocate for such an investigation. He would rather be handed a set of premature conclusions to debunk.

From there he goes on to indulge his fantasy of being a psychologist by offering readers a typology of conspiracy theorists. My favorite of his proposed types is the crank, whom Kay says has the defining feature of "an acute, inveterately restless, furiously contrarian intelligence." You know, like Edison or Einstein. "Many cranks,” he says, “have an Asperger's-like obsession with arithmetic, flowcharts, maps and lengthy data lists." You know, like the minds at NASA who figured out how to get people to the moon and back. "The crank can be satisfied only once he has personally established the truth of his theories using nothing but primary sources and the rules of logic." "Nothing but" might be extreme, but a reliance on primary sources and logic is not a sign of softheadedness.

Kay is downright disingenuous when it comes to WTC 7, the third tower of the World Trade Center complex to fall on that fateful day. He says,

"Even many architects and structural engineers who've never heard of Richard Gage [head of Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth and tireless public speaker] will concede that the collapse of WTC 7, a fairly typical 1980s-era structure located about a football field away from WTC 1, was unusual."

"Unusual"?

No. It was unprecedented. It was (and remains) a singular event. Never before had office fires brought down a steel-framed skyscraper (except the two that went down earlier that day, but they were hit by airplanes). WTC 7 collapsed perfectly vertically into its own footprint, falling for a brief period at free-fall speed, behavior typical of a controlled demolition.

In conclusion, the author has traveled a safe and familiar journey to produce a book of hyperconventional opinions that will appeal to a popular audience. No doubt the book will reassure many readers that ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, BBC and the rest, despite their variations in emphasis, tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the interests of informing a free electorate. And anyone who presumes to distrust these corporate voices joins a vile tradition that slithers forth from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and believes that a conspiracy lurks behind every bush.

The More Things Change . . .

2011-06-11T05:08:00.029-11:00

You can read the article about the ruling class' appetite for human flesh here: http://bit.ly/kerva1

Now we know what those little hors d'oeuvres-y things at the royal wedding were. Corpse medicine.

What, Me Worry? - and these are the people who set sail to civilize the savages? Now Prince Charles claims a lineage that links the British Monarchy to Vlad the Impaler! The bloodline that connects the bloodthirsty royals to Vlad branches off into the Bush family. Just saying.

. . . The More They Stay The Same.

The ruling class still contracts with traffickers in human flesh. The missing money? The purchase of horrors? Recall, Rumsfeld was defense secretary under President George W. Bush.

The Wirehead Problem and Money as AI

2011-05-22T05:45:00.003-11:00

Here is a potential problem facing engineers of artificial intelligence: A sufficiently intelligent agent will work to tap its reward source directly, without doing otherwise useful work. In this video Tim Tyler invokes the heroin addict for comparison. He concludes that a superintelligent agent will calculate the long-term effects of becoming a junkie and likely will conclude, as most people do, that it's not worth it.

Tyler goes on to counter this argument by conjuring a monopolistic threat. What if the superintelligent agent wiped out its competitors? Then, under the dynamics of a monopoly, it would grow flabby and careless, because there would be no reward in making effort in any other direction. And this situation would become conducive to its yielding to the tempation to become a junkie.

It looks like the threat already has landed. The U.S. dollar/federal reserve note is the superintelligent agent Tyler warns against. The U.S. dollar has tapped it own pleasure center, and in an accelerating cycle of masturbations it has exhausted itself.

Each step in the deregulation of the U.S. banking system brought the dollar closer to its source. Finally, when the real-estate bubble burst, the fallout revealed that the originators of money, the private banks, had crossed a deregulatory threshold, and they had exploited the lifting of essentially all conditions on the granting of loans. Because banks originate dollars by crediting loans, unconditional lending became the U.S. dollar's unfettered tap into its own pleasure center, its source. Now the junkie is going through withdrawal. And if the U.S. dollar gets fired from its job as the world's reserve currency, losing its monopoly privileges? Cold turkey.

Money as superintelligent agent reveals a bias in AI theory, or at least in AI practice, insofar as AI focuses on circuits and programs and patterns of atoms. But money is pure abstraction. It can take any form: seashells, printed paper or electronic accounting entries. Higher intelligence doesn't get bogged down in precise material specifications. It is conceptual.

Consider that money can do many things that you cannot. Indeed, it uses you, and the rest of us, to do its bidding. It is not an enabler, as we're taught to think. We are its enablers. Look at the wonders it has created with our help.

The terrors that it has instigated? Our myth systems teem with wrathful deities and gods of destruction. Maybe the religious sensibility knows something about the superintelligent abstraction that provokes and persuades and thereby gives form to the world. G-d is a junkie?

Can Natural Selection explain cell differentiation?

2011-05-15T05:12:00.000-11:00

Darwin used the phrase "Descent with modification" to summarize his theory of evolution. Despite many particulars that more recent science has amended to Darwin's theory, the basic idea of descent with modification remains. The descendant modifications are taken to be driven by varying degrees of "fitness" to environments. Even according to today's NeoDarwinian (or Modern Synthesis) model, the modifications observed in descendants are taken to be the result primarily of adaptations to environmental contingencies, operating under the mechanism of variation + selection, which runs without the benefit of any plan or program that might provide direction. And this "blind" process has produced all the phenotypes that were or are or will be. (An emerging Extended Synthesis model relies less on exogenous factors to explain phenotypes. Its influence on the discipline of evolutionary biology is yet to be known.)

However, another case of biological descent with modification apparently does benefit, or is assumed to benefit, from a guiding plan, or program. That is the descent of various tissue types from an undifferentiated zygote during ontogeny. This poses a paradox.

If natural selection is so powerful a causal agent that it can generate all the phenotypes that make up an ecosystem, then why is it necessary to suppose that there occurs in a zygote some sort of genetic plan or program that guides development of the organism? Why not just chalk it up to natural selection -- competition and cooperation among the cells in the organism? What evidence is there of a developmental program?

All the cell types that make up the body of a complex organism share the same genotype but differ as to which genes are active and which not. And that info must be heritable, hence a source of variation ("copying errors"). But any variation among cells in an embryo might provide an advantage to some cells and/or disadvantage to others. So, the stage is set for natural selection.

The tissues that make up a complex body and their symbiotic interdependencies are just the happenstance of competition among the cells -- is that a defensible proposition? The fit survive and go on to take their place in the somatic ecosystem of the body. The unfit go extinct. A clear case of unguided evolution. No need for a developmental program.

I am NOT proposing that this is what happens. I am only asking the question: What OBSERVATION could disprove this argument -- that the cells descend with modification from their common ancestor, a zygote, through a process of variation + selection?

comments at

http://www.thescienceforum.com/Can-Natural-Selection-explain-cell-differentiation-30656t.php

Darwin Eclipsed & The Rise of Evo Devo

2011-04-23T04:49:00.003-11:00

The development of any complex organism reveals a weave of relationships between the organism's phenotype and its genotype. I will focus on four of these relationships and argue for a new interpretation of the genetic data:

First, although the skin, liver, muscle, brain and other cell types that compose a body are morphologically and functionally diverse, they are not genetically diverse. They all inherit the same genotype from their common ancestor, a zygote. That is, during the descent with modification from a zygote to its descendant cell types, DNA is conserved. Diverse phenotypes do not require diverse genotypes.

Second, Because all cells in a body (excluding parasites and symbionts) inherit the same genotype, they necessarily inherit many genes that they do not need. Skin cells don't express genes specific to the functioning of liver cells, for example. Neither do muscle cells express genes specific to the functioning of brain cells. And so on. The excess DNA in each cell type includes genes needed to create and operate all the other types. But from the point of view of a given type of cell, the DNA for the other types is junk.

Third, the expression of genes in any particular cell type, and the timing of their expression, is controlled by other genes that act as on/off switches. This is how a single genotype expresses multiple phenotypes (skin, liver, muscle, etc.) in a single body -- by turning various genes on and off here and there at various times.

Fourth, a zygote carries genes that will be required by its descendants. The zygote anticipates the needs of the skin, liver, muscle, and other descendant cell types and carries their genes, even if the zygote itself does not express them. These, then, are some of the characteristics of development. They include conservation of DNA, junk DNA, switches that conrol the expression of cellular phenotypes, and genes that anticipate the needs of descendants.

Now, when we look at the genetics of evolution, we find all the same hallmarks. Since genetic sequencing and analysis have come online, the parallels between development and evolution--between ontogeny and phylogeny--have come sharply into focus. A new discipline within evolutionary biology, called evolutionary developmental biology, or Evo Devo, is trying to shoehorn the new genetic data into the old, Darwinian, paradigm. But comparative genomics is rewriting the book of evolution into something that readers of the first edition might not recognize as the same work.

Consider:

First, insects, fish, birds and primates are morphologically and behaviorally dissimilar, but not because their genotypes are to any comparable degree dissimilar. Genetic sequencing and analysis tell us that these creatures all inherited same basic genetic toolkit from a common ancestor. That is, despite all the phenotypic variation, DNA is conserved across species during evolutionary descent.

Genes for limbs are pretty much the same from limbed species to limbed species, whether the wings are on a dragonfly, a bat, or a bald eagle. The underlying genes are about the same. Evolution, like development, conserves DNA. Researcher Sean Carroll, an architect of Evo Devo, comments, “Comparison of genomes tells us that not only do flies and humans share a large set of developmental genes, but that mice and humans have nearly identical sets of about 25,000 genes, and that chimps and humans are almost 99 percent identical at the DNA level. The common tool kit and the great similarities among different species genomes present an apparent paradox.” (All Carroll quotes are from his book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, The New Science of Evo Devo.) Yes, the great similarities do present a paradox. Because they make evolution look like a large-scale development.

Second, all species carry unexpressed "junk" DNA. Carroll calls this DNA "dark matter" because most of it "contains no instructions and is just space-filling 'junk' accumulated over the course of evolution. In humans, only about 2 to 3 percent of our dark matter contains genetic switches that control how genes are used."

So, even if a small percentage of the "junk" is actually performing a function in a given organism, by switching genes on and off, the majority of it is truly junk (at least to those who carry it around unexpressed), which makes evolution look like development.

Third, the control of phenotypic expression in any species is controlled by genetic "switches" that are themselves turned on and off by regulatory proteins. These switches provide a mechanism whereby conserved DNA can express dramatic phenotypic variation across species. This observation is foundational to Evo-Devo, which treats species as variants produced by the conbinatorics of genetic switching.

Fourth, we notice that ancestral species carry genes required by remote descendants. Ancestral genomes anticipate the needs of phenotypes to come. An example emerges from the sequencing of a sponge, the Great Barrier Reef sponge, Amphimedon queenslandica. A news article in Nature (The Amphimedon queenslandica Genome and the Evolution of Animal Complexity, Vol. 466, Pages 720–726, August 5, 2010) covering the sequencing of the sponge's genome reveals that the hoary creatures harbor a tool kit of metazoan genes:

"The genome also includes analogues of genes that, in organisms with a neuromuscular system, code for muscle tissue and neurons."

A curious finding. The article continues:

"According to Douglas Erwin, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, such complexity indicates that sponges must have descended from a more advanced ancestor than previously suspected. 'This flies in the face of what we think of early metazoan evolution,' says Erwin."

"Charles Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, agrees. 'It means there was an elaborate machinery in place that already had some function,' he says. 'What I want to know now is what were all these genes doing prior to the advent of sponges.'"

The conundrum for normal evolution theory is clear. Why would a common ancestor of the sponge and animals with neuromuscular systems have needed such genes? Plus, the ancestor would have had to have arisen within a very narrow window. Fossil evidence of sponges goes back 650 million years; it constitutes, the authors note, “the oldest evidence for metazoans (multicellular animals) on Earth.” So, what use would any species even more primitive than sponges have for the neuromuscular genes?

Here's a longer quote from Sean Carroll that summarizes the unexpected findings that genetic research is yielding and the significance of Evo Devo in light of the preceeding observations:

"The first and still perhaps the most stunning discovery of Evo Devo is the ancient origin of the genes for building all sorts of animals. The fact that such different forms of animals are shaped by very similar sets of tool kit proteins was entirely unanticipated. The ramifications of these revolutionary findings are powerful and manifold. "First of all, this is entirely new and profound evidence for one of Darwin’s most important ideas—the descent of all forms from one (or a few) common ancestor. The shared genetic tool kit for development reveals deep connections between animal groups that were not at all appreciated from their dramatically different morphologies.

"Second, the discovery that organs and structures that were long viewed as independent analogous inventions of different animals, such as eyes, hearts, and limbs, have common genetic ingredients controlling their formation has forced a complete change in our picture of how complex structures arise. Rather than being invented repeatedly from scratch, each eye, limb, or heart has evolved by modification of some ancient regulatory networks under the command of the same master gene or genes. Parts of these networks trace back to the last common ancestor of bilaterians (Urbilateria), and earlier forms.

"Third, the deep history of the toolkit reveals that the invention of these genes was not the trigger of evolution. The bilaterian tool kit predated the Cambrian, the mammalian tool kit predated the rapid diversification of mammals in the Teritary period, and the human tool kit long predated apes and other primates. It is clear that genes per se were not 'drivers' of evolution. The genetic tool kit represents possibility—realization of its potential is ecologically driven."

This last comment begs the question, "How did all that potential get into the ancient genomes?" It's as if Earth's earliest life had zygote-like powers of anticipation. Researcher Michael Sherman argues for a similar conclusion in his paper, "Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa" (Cell Cycle 6:15 1873-1877, Aug 2007).

So, do the genetic parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny add up to anything?

They do. They suggest that ontogeny and phylogeny constitute two scales on which operates a common process of descent with modification. This suggestion implies that both the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic expression of phenotypes is susceptible to environmental contingencies. This is a mundane, noncontroversial observation. Environments are known to influence whether phenotypes become tall or twisted, atrophied or robust, as with vitamin deficiencies in animals and photo- and geotropisms in plants.

But the counterpoint to that observation is inescapably controversial: The data that inform Evo Devo imply that both the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic expression of phenotypes unfolds according to a program. Phenotypic expression in both cases conforms to a process of development. It conforms to the unfolding of a life cycle.

So, if species differentiate in an ecology and across a planet as cells do in and across an embryo, whose life cycle has been unfolding during the evolution of phenotypes on our planet?

My candidate for the ontogeny underlying phylogeny is the stellar life cycle.

Stars constitute a genus of organism. The stellar life cycle includes a larval phase. Biological life constitutes the larval phase of the stellar life cycle.

What Darwin Got Wrong

2011-03-09T15:32:00.005-11:00

Life evolves seemingly endless varieties. To account for the varieties, Charles Darwin invented natural selection. He gave his invention the task of bestowing upon organisms whatever traits they have or had or will have.

What Darwin Got Wrong argues that the mechanism of natural selection is inadequate to this task. The book’s authors, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (avowed atheists we learn), argue that Darwin overstated the power of natural selection, that it cannot account for how organisms got to be how they got to be. The authors don’t cite missing fossils of transitional forms or appeal to irreducible complexity, a la intelligent design argument. They just pick away at the putative logic of natural selection until nothing remains but grandma’s common-sense intuitions. They conclude that Darwin granted a truism wings to which it was not entitled.

The book attacks selectionism on various fronts, from its inability to field counterfactuals (if the arctic environment had been green, would polar bears have green fur?) to limitations placed on creaturely form by physical mechanics. But the star larvae hypothesis is interested primarily in the accounts of internal, or endogenous, constraints on the variability of phenotypes, the observable forms of organisms. The internal constraints leave environmental, or exogenous, influences with little from which to select. As the authors put it, natural selection at most can tune the piano; it cannot compose the melody.

The book, in short, is about the conceptual rigor, or lack of, of the NeoDarwinian theory. The Neo- part is important, because the authors support their case with findings from genetic sequencing and analysis. In particular, they lean on a new discipline called evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo, which has evolved from the discovery that DNA is conserved during evolution. This means that the genetic makeup of organisms, their genotypes, varies little across species, relative to the great diversity of phenotypes across species. How does a relatively limited genetic toolkit translate into so many forms of creatures? That is the question.

The answer apparently lies in the action of “master” genes and their protein-based “switches.” These systems control whole suites of genes, turning them on and off during development. The authors cite, for example, a master gene designated Otxi, which influences the development of several seemingly unrelated organs. They point out, ". . . in particular, since the Otxi ‘master’ gene controls the development of the larynx, inner ear, kidneys, and external genitalia and the thickness of the cerebral cortex, selective pressures sensitive to changes in the functions of the kidneys (due to bipedal station, or different liquid intake and excretion resulting from floods or droughts), or the fixation of different sexual patterns, may have had in turn secondary effects on the expansion of the cerebral cortex and the structure and function of the larynx.”

They use this example to show that the key theoretical construct of “selected for,” such as selection for long necks among giraffes or for a complex cerebral cortex among humans, cannot deliver what it is supposed to deliver. It can’t tell an adaptive trait from a trait that coincidentally rides along with an adaptive one. Too few genes, it turns out, are available singly for selection. Genes tend to come hierarchically bundled.

The authors argue, “[E]volutionary theory purports to account for the distribution of phenotypic traits in populations of organisms; and the explanation is supposed to depend on the connection between phenotypic traits and the fitness of the creatures whose phenotypes they belong to. But, as it turns out, when phenotypic traits are (locally or otherwise) coextensive, selection theory cannot distinguish the trait upon which fitness is contingent from the trait that has no effect on fitness (and is merely a free rider). Advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, natural selection can’t be a general mechanism that connects phenotypic variation with variation in fitness. So natural selection can’t be the mechanism of evolution.”

Nature cannot “select for” particular adaptive traits because in any given generation, only whole phenotypes are available for selection. All of the genes underlying a selected phenotype are selected. And evo-devo further complicates this already complicated picture. It asserts that only whole ontogenies, entire sequences of phenotypes expressed during life cycles, are available for selection. The sequential expression of sometimes wildly divergent phenotypes (think caterpillar to butterfly) during a life cycle is tightly constrained by developmental regulation, further restricting the potential formative power of natural selection.

The authors don’t mince words: “Contrary to traditional opinion, it needs to be emphasized that natural selection among traits generated at random cannot by itself be the basic principle of evolution. Rather there must be strong, often decisive, endogenous constraints and hosts of regulations on the phenotypic options that exogenous selection operates on.”

And

“[N]atural selection badly underestimates the significance of endogenous factors in the determination of phenotypes: we think that the thesis that organisms are random generators of phenotypes can’t be sustained even as a first approximation to an explanation of why there are the phenotypes there are.”

If natural selection cannot explain how creatures got to be how they got to be, what can explain it?

The authors don’t propose an alternative to selectionism and look to research to throw out more clues. But an alternative might be right under their, and our, noses. Evolution might be just what the new science of evo-devo indicates that it is: the developmental unfolding of a life cycle, the ontogeny of an organism.

Darwin’s phrase, “descent with modification,” describes evolution and development equally well. Both processes involve descent with modification from a common ancestor. In the case of evolution the descent is of varieties of species, and in the case of development the descent is of varieties of cell/tissue types.

When regulatory proteins serially activate and inhibit various genetic “switches” in an organism the result is the ontogenetic development of the organism. The sequence of genes being turned on and off and their locations in the body steer development in a predictable direction, generating forms characteristic of the species. All of the descendant cells, no matter how modified from their common ancestor, the zygote, inherit the ancestor’s entire genetic allotment. That is, during this process of descent with modification, DNA is conserved.

Now evo-devo comes along and paints a similar picture with regards to evolution. The new science points to “toolbox” genes discovered to be common across diverse species (and families, orders, classes, and even phyla) and the regulatory systems that turn these foundational genes on and off. DNA is conserved not only in ontogeny, but also in phylogeny, it turns out. Evolution generates new species in much the same way that an embryo generates new structures and tissue types, by flipping genetic switches. In this way, evo-devo weakens the selectionist model and suggests a developmental model instead. No doubt few evo-devo advocates would endorse such a radical interpretation.

Nonetheless, when the authors of What Darwin Got Wrong point to master genes, toolbox genes, genetic switches, protein-based regulatory systems, and other endogenous factors as the primary directors of phenotypic form, they are telling us that in the new, evo-devo, model of evolution the origin of species is an ontogenetic, developmental process. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck . . . .

Classifying evolution as an ontogeny relieves the environment from having to account for phenotypes, something the authors insist that it cannot do. They assert, “. . . multiple levels of internal constraints on possible phenotypes make the notion of evolution as the product of external selection operating on phenotypic variations generated at random radically untenable.” In a developmental model of evolution, however, the environment doesn’t bestow medals of fitness on adaptive phenotypes, but functions as it does in ontogeny. A developmental model of evolution demotes the environment, subordinating it to the needs of ontogenetic programs. In this supportive role, it can function well or poorly, and in so doing facilitate or retard phenotypic expression. Nature in this model cannot select, as in the Darwinian model; it can only nurture or neglect. The environment does not pick any particular path, but it will feed or starve whoever ventures.

The old, and since discarded, formula was “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” The arrival of evo-devo and the arguments in What Darwin Got Wrong stand the formula on its head. Embryos don’t replay the record of their evolutionary history. Rather, evolution unfolds as a process of development. Evo-devo, it seems, is a misnomer. The new understanding should be called devo-evo, or developmental evolutionary biology, with the emphasis on developmental. When we observe modification with descent managed endogenously, we are observing development and so should feel justified in adopting a developmental model of evolution and in retiring the theory of natural selection.

The arguments in What Darwin Got Wrong support the general argument of the star larvae hypothesis. The hypothesis argues explicitly that evolution is an ontogenetic process—a stage in the life cycle of an organism. Terrestrial evolution is the larval stage of the stellar life cycle.

Loose Science or Tight Magic(k)?

2011-02-06T07:02:00.000-11:00

I snapped this at the Met. Engraving on the side of an Egyptian tomb. What is this fellow up to? Recharging his battery?

The Illustrated McLuhan #2

2010-12-26T14:17:00.000-11:00

"What remains to be recognized is that a very able person may often choose to freeze or anesthetize large areas of his mind and experience for the sake of social and practical success or the pleasures of group solidarity."

from

The Mechanical Bride

By Marshall McLuhan

DNA Says Evolution is Not as Contingent as Imagined

2010-11-13T08:59:00.003-11:00

(Darwin Isn’t Dead. He Just Smells Funny.*)
*Apologies to FZ

Something funny is afoot in the biological sciences. Labs peering into DNA are seeing things that nobody expected. And because the received view of evolution failed to predict these findings, and because it has little room to incorporate them, a crisis is brewing for the theory. Something more than selecting random variants is going on in evolution.

The data coming out of DNA sequencing and analysis suggest that the something more has to do with a preferred direction in evolution. Phylogenetic descent seems now to be a developmental unfolding. Several discoveries point to this conclusion:

1. Junk DNA. This is not a particularly new discovery. It’s been known for some time that all species carry around a lot of junk, DNA that appears to lie dormant. What aspect of evolution theory predicts that long stretches of inactive DNA would coast along inside organisms, seemingly contributing nothing to their survivability? Nobody saw it coming. It was an empirical surprise.

But in the context of ontogeny, the development of organisms, it is exactly what is to be expected. Each cell in the body of a complex organism inherits the same genes from the ancestral zygote, the original fertilized ovum. Despite all possessing the same genes, brain, liver, kidney, and skin cells, for example, distinguish themselves phenotypically. Each cell type looks and acts differently from the others. But, because they all inherit the same genes, there must be a lot of junk DNA in each type of cell. Brain cells don’t need genes that function uniquely in liver cells, nor do kidney cells need genes that function uniquely in skin cells. But all the cells inherit all those genes from their common ancestor, the zygote, whether they need them or not.

When it comes to cell types in a body, an invariant genetic inheritance necessarily is the case, with lots of junk in each cell as a result. Ontogeny demonstrates that diverse morphologies, or phenotypes, need not correspond to any proportionate diversity of genotype. “Adaptive radiation” of cell types in a body proceeds just fine without genetic variation.

Evolution appears to operate similarly.

2. Conservation of DNA. Genetic material across species, though not invariant, turns out to be much less variable than observable differences among species would suggest. DNA is highly conserved across species. In their article, Regulating Evolution (Scientific American, May 2010) researchers Sean B. Carroll, Benjamin Prud’homme, and Nicolas Gompel comment,

For a long time, scientists certainly expected the anatomical differences among animals to be reflected in clear differences among the contents of their genomes. When we compare mammalian genomes such as those of the mouse, rat, dog, human and chimpanzee, however, we see that their respective gene catalogues are remarkably similar. [. . . .] When comparing mouse and human genomes, for example, biologists are able to indentify a mouse counterpart of at least 99 percent of all our genes.

The perplexed authors elaborate on the new findings:

. . . to our surprise, it has turned out that differences in appearance are deceiving: very different animals have very similar sets of genes.

The preservation of coding sequences over evolutionary time is especially puzzling when one considers the genes involved in body building and body patterning.

The discovery that body-building proteins are even more alike on average than other proteins was especially intriguing because of the paradox it seemed to pose: animals as different as a mouse and an elephant are shaped by a common set of very similar, functionally indistinguishable body-building proteins.

Surprise? Puzzling? Paradox? Why does evolution theory suffer so many bouts of the unexpected now that genomes are yielding their secrets? If the received theory of evolution were solid, wouldn’t new genetic details have slots waiting for them in it? Shouldn’t new genetic data bolster the theory, rather than generate surprises, puzzles and paradoxes for it to resolve?

Why didn’t evolution theorists predict that phenotypic and genotypic differences across species would turn out to be so disproportionate, that so few genes would produce so many species? Nobody saw it coming. It was an empirical surprise.

3. Genetic switches. The differentiation of cell types in a developing organism is managed by homeobox genes. These genes function as master “switches” that trigger the expression and repression of other genes. By selectively turning other genes on and off at various stages of development, homeobox genes effectively control the varieties of tissues that will populate a body. This oversight function partly answers the riddle of junk DNA. Some genes that can appear dormant actually code for proteins whose phenotypic activity is the modulation of other genes. The regulatory genes are not junk.

Now, due to the work of Carroll, Prud’homme, Gompel and others, it looks like evolution uses regulatory genes in the same way.

Instead of spinning off variant cell types, the cycling on and off of genetic switches in the context of evolution spins off variant species. This discovery, of the importance of genetic switches in evolution and its helping to account for the low level of genetic diversity across species, was an empirical surprise. Nobody saw it coming.

The explanatory power of this discovery has produced a new discipline within evolutionary biology, called evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo, a science that gives regulatory genes a starring role in evolution.

4. Anticipatory genes. A new organism, a zygote, a fertilized egg carries many genes that ride along unexpressed—until they are needed by descendant cell types. The zygote anticipates, in its genetic catalog, the genes that remote descendant cells will need, even if those genes contribute nothing to the survival of the zygote itself or its immediate descendants. The zygote divides into two cells, and the two into four, and the four into eight, and so on. The cells that make up these early stages are said to be totipotent cells—they can bear descendants of any cell type. Later, after a degree of specialization, cells become pluripotent—they can give rise to several cell types, though not to all. And the specialization continues from there, with descendants inheriting from their ancestors the specialized genes they need, along with the rest of the genome.

This is to be expected in the context of a developing organism.

But it turns out that ancient species also carry genes that seem to anticipate the needs of descendants. A news article in Nature covering the sequencing of the genome of the Great Barrier Reef sponge Amphimedon queenslandica, reveals that the hoary creatures harbor a “tookit” of metazoan genes:

The genome also includes analogues of genes that, in organisms with a neuromuscular system, code for muscle tissue and neurons.

A curious finding. The article continues:

According to Douglas Erwin, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, such complexity indicates that sponges must have descended from a more advanced ancestor than previously suspected. "This flies in the face of what we think of early metazoan evolution," says Erwin.

Charles Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, agrees. "It means there was an elaborate machinery in place that already had some function," he says. "What I want to know now is what were all these genes doing prior to the advent of sponges.

The conundrum for normal evolution theory is clear. But, rather than propose that the genes needed by organisms with neuromuscular systems are in the sponge for the anticipatory purpose of providing those genes to descendants who will need them, the scientists invent an imaginary ancestor of the sponge that needed the genes. But the ghostly ancestor would have had to have arisen within a very narrow window. Fossil evidence of sponges goes back 650 million years; it constitutes, the authors note, “the oldest evidence for metazoans (multicellular animals) on Earth.” So, what use would any species even more primitive than sponges have for the neuromuscular genes? Nobody saw it coming. It was an empirical surprise.

But the sponge genome is only one example. Research is finding case after case of ancestral species that harbor genes essential for remote descendants. Another example: It turns out that a species of unicellular protozoan carries genes essential for metabolic processes specific to metazoans. The researchers who discovered the surprise genes and published their data (PNAS – 2010 107 (22) 10142-10147) explain,

One of the most important cell adhesion mechanisms for metazoan development is integrin-mediated adhesion and signaling. The integrin adhesion complex mediates critical interactions between cells and the extracellular matrix, modulating several aspects of cell physiology. To date this machinery has been considered strictly metazoan specific. [. . . .] Unexpectedly, we found that core components of the integrin adhesion complex are encoded in the genome of the apusozoan protist Amastigomonas sp., and therefore their origins predate the divergence of Opisthokonta, the clade that includes metazoans and fungi. [. . . .] Our data highlight the fact that many of the key genes that had formerly been cited as crucial for metazoan origins have a much earlier origin (emphasis added).

And the surprises just keep coming.
A news release (11/24/2005) issued by the journal Trends in Genetics announces that

Corals and sea anemones (the flowers of the sea), long regarded as merely simple sea-dwelling animals, turn out to be more genetically complex than first realised. They have just as many genes as most mammals, including humans, and many of the genes that were thought to have been "invented" in vertebrates are actually very old and are present in these "simple" animals.

The full text of the release is available at http://www.sars.no/resear ch/technau_Science.pdf
Newer (2007) sequencing and analysis results corroborate the anemone anomalies.

Another example comes from research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which found human genes in a marine worm. The news release (11/24/2005) announcing the discovery is at http://www.embl.de/aboutus/communication_outreach/med ia_relations/2005/051124_heidelberg/index.html

Additional research has found that genes essential for human nerve cells to communicate with one another are present already in bacteria. This research is described in a NIH news release (6/1/2004) at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/genes.cfm

What is particularly striking about these findings, taken together—and what is particularly interesting to the star larvae hypothesis—is not only that they were unanticipated by the practitioners who engineered the current theory, but also that they make the evolutionary process look an awful lot like a developmental process, like a stage, or stages, in the life cycle of a developing organism.

The findings are paradoxical only for a theory that sees evolution as pure contingency. If evolution is recognized as the developmental unfolding of a life cycle, then the findings

that much of its genome is unexpressed in any particular species,
that phenotypic variation dwarfs genotypic variation (DNA is conserved),
that genetic switches play key regulatory roles in phylogenetic descent and
that ancestors carry genes needed in the future by remote descendants

are to be expected, because they are what we find when we study the differentiation of cells types in complex organisms.

To propose that evolution is programmed in a way similar to that in which the development of an organism is programmed is anathema to current evolution theory. The current theory has no room for teleology. But the new research findings point directly to such a conclusion. As happens in the history of science, scientists have to decide whether to stretch the normal paradigm to try to cover a growing collection of anomalous data or to construct a new paradigm based on the data.

And as soon as the dust settles on that biological revolution, a new funniness will be afoot. It already is. Quantum genetics, anyone?

The Illustrated McLuhan #1

2010-10-26T14:25:00.001-11:00

"The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody."

from
Take Today, The Executive As Dropout
by Marshall McLuhan

911 Controlled Demolition: If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck . . . .

2010-10-16T05:48:00.000-11:00

That's Grosz!

2010-10-02T06:58:00.000-11:00

Artist George Grosz captured the decadence and corruption of Weimar Germany in his satirical paintings.

This painting he titled "Circe" after the goddess who used drugs to turn loathsome persons into animals.

I don't think my editorial captioning needs any comment.

Feel free to disagree.

The Swastika is the Lowest Form of Graffiti

2010-09-28T13:41:00.000-11:00

WTC7

2010-08-28T06:05:00.001-11:00

See for yourself! Watch the emperor's new clothes drop to the ground ::: http://buildingwhat.org/

Dismal Wretched Bliss

2010-08-08T13:58:00.006-11:00

in anticipation of the New World Order ::::::::::

As the world awakens to startling news, tumult:

“. . . nouncement coming out of a government laboratory that is sure to shake things up.”

“That’s right. Apparently everybody’s been wrong about something we all took for granted. Who could imagine that two and two is anything but four? That’s old-school thinking now. Unless you’re up to arguing with the government’s new RBC, the Really Big Computer, you better get used to the idea that two and two is really . . . five.”

“Great. I'm supposed to balance my checkbook now?”

The cohosts cut their titters short.

“For more on this remarkable development, let’s go to economics correspondent, Lilly Cunningham, at the RBC facility, outside Washington D.C.”

“Thanks, Dianne. I’m here at the RBC, the Really Big Computer, where government scientists say they’ve discovered that two and two is five. This is a . . . well, a . . . shocking . . . announcement, to say the least. It’s hard to believe, but the proof is solid, according to Dr. Anton Wilson, who oversees the RBC facility. He says it all comes down to a deeper understanding of numbers.”

A prerecorded Wilson explains.

“Ve haf taken great care to check our results, and ze accuracy of ze program has been verified by ze uhzer government computers, and at zis point ve are completely confident of our results. Ve realize zat zis discovery vil haf fundamental consekvences for our society, und ve are now sharing zis invormation vis ze public so zat ve can begin ze process of a smooze transition to ze new arismatik.”

As the news spreads, it ignites waves of disbelief. The president addresses a befuddled nation when he goes before the cameras that evening.

“Last night, I conferred with top advisers in the White House and the Pentagon about a remarkable discovery made at the RBC, the Really Big Computer. And based on those discussions I authorized the technical staff in charge of the RBC to begin informing the public about those discoveries. I know that today was a confusing day for many of you. But, by uncovering a longstanding error in simple arithmetic, Dr. Anton Wilson and his team at the RBC have made a valuable contribution to the knowledge of mankind. We owe them our thanks.”

The president summarizes the research and spreads more kudos, then gets to the point.

“. . . therefore I am establishing a new cabinet-level department, the Department of Arithmetic Security. This department will serve the critical function of ensuring for the nation the numerical integrity of all calculations, scientific, financial, and those involved in the serious enterprise of . . .”

He pretends to get lost in his speech, pretends to find his place, then continues.

“. . . student homework.”

The punch line falls flat. He continues.

“Electronic files containing numerical operations not sanctioned by the Department of Arithmetic Security may be seized as evidence of hostile intent. This precaution might seem extreme, but I am asking all Americans, as a matter of public safety and security, to cooperate fully with their local authorities. Maintaining the integrity of public records is essential, as the experts implement the changes that will be required, if we are to prevail during this time of transition.”

The president takes questions from virtual reporters, their pixilated, shimmering faces moving in sequence in small on-screen pop-up windows.

“Mister President, this is truly unbelievable. How could people have gotten it so wrong for so long? Come on, two and two is four. Is this really a . . . .”

“I don’t think there’s much to gain by looking back. No doubt, mistakes were made, and in due time historians will sort it out. My concern it with the future, ensuring a safe, secure America for all of our citizens, er . . . residents.”

He drinks from his water glass

“Mister President, you mentioned the Pentagon. What’s the military side of this situation?”

“Certainly, there are those who might take advantage of the situation, or try to, by spreading rumors that our defenses are compromised. Cyberterrorism is one possibility, to be sure, during the switchover of national security and intelligence records. There will be multiple challenges for the Defense Department and the intelligence community related to this transition, but I have full confidence in our military leaders and know that they will . . . .”

The president falls into a familiar folksy drone, and, a few questions and answers later, the news conference ends. The television networks’ reassuring personalities step in then to frame the situation.

“The president exuded a commanding calm as he confirmed for the American people what many of us had heard only this morning. Don’t you think, Herbert? ”

“That’s right, Walker. He had to quell fears and reassure the public that a plan is in place to deal with the ‘new math.’ As far as numbers go, I guess it’s a whole new ballgame.”

“I’ll tell you what, Herbert, if anyone has trouble with the new numbers, they can always ask a kid for help. Two and two? Three and three? Who knows anymore?”

The topic of the new, official arithmetic instantly becomes a stock of partisan talk. The political Right, at home on radio since Hitler, offers firebrands, such as airwave celebrity Lush Rimbaud, to feed a public hungry for his stylized brand of exasperated indignation.

“. . . is just more government intrusion. If you love big government, then fine, let them roll right over you. But I say, let the market decide whether two and two is five, six, seven, or eight—or ninety six and a half! We don’t need big government telling us how to add up numbers. This is ridiculous—more Big Brother bureaucracy from Washington. I’m sick of it.

Jane, go ahead.”

“Doritos, Lush. Let me tell you, the nanny-state has gone too far this time. My son is in the fifth grade, and he’s put a lot of work into his science fair display and, I think—but, of course, it doesn’t matter what the parents think . . . .”

“You got that right. If your kid is in a public school, kiss your rights as a parent GOOD-BYE. But go ahead. What about this science fair thing?”

“Well, my son spent days making this display for the science fair. He did a lot of research and decided to challenge this two and two thing. He says it’s four and that he can prove it. Well, the teacher flunked him!! Flunked him on the project. Kept him out of the fair. Can you believe it? She said it was a science fair, not a fantasy fair! What does that mean? Lush, I can’t believe it . . . .”

“I can believe it. This is exactly what big government is about. And, while we’re at it, how about those elections and juries? We know they don’t work, but the government keeps wasting our hard-earned money on these frivolous . . . .”

One end of the political spectrum has to be balanced by an equal volume of gas from the other end. The haughty Left finds its voice on TV. Perhaps as an echo of Murrow’s deflation of McCarthy, Leech Olderman appeals to horse sense and propriety, but pontificates with a high-mindedness that verges on camp.

“. . . sure the deniers are out there . . . on the loony fringe. These are the same people who imagine a wary God planting fossils to test our faith. Guess what folks—the Earth goes around the sun. Some knuckle-draggers thrashing around in the hinterelands will always cling to the old ways. But it’s time to get with the program, people, two and two is five. At some point, you gotta wake up and smell the algebra.

“Here’s a clip from last night, Focks News’ Bilbo Rily spewing bile on his poor viewers. Take it, Bilbo.”

Bilbo’s image, intentionally distorted for sinister effect, appears and speaks with overwrought earnestness.

“If this new numbering scheme is legit, how about turning over the program? Where’s the software? We don’t know how the RBC figured this thing out. Maybe it’s got a bug. Computers get viruses, you know. But this president refuses to make the program public. What are you afraid of, Mr. President? Daylight? Transparency? Put it on the Internet!”

Olderman returns onscreen and stifles a snicker.

“So, now Bilbo knows more than the world’s smartest computer? Ya. Stick with tic tac toe, Bilbo, and you might not hurt yourself. Do you really think it’s a good idea to politicize arithmetic, make simple counting some kind of partisan debate? There’s word for what would ensue. Try anarchy. Get your head on straight, my fellow. You make yourself look the fool.”

A populist movement ousts the president in the next election, and the manufactured spokesmodel for the Left is replaced by a manufactured spokesmodel from the Right. Policies remain unchanged, but Rimbaud turns his script around and starts telling listeners that all good gun-loving, dope-hating patriots aiming for Heaven better support the new president. Olderman flips over his script, too, and warns that the new president’s numerical policies were crafted by corporate lobbyists and that the country is looking like a soviet-style surveillance society on the verge of being equipped with gulags and torture dens for numerical dissenters.

A mathematicosocietal shift ensues during the following months. The grand delusion of the new arithmetic works its way deeper into the public consciousness. Public service announcements give the new policies a fashionable cachet, with the “Five Is The New Four” and “You Deserve More Than Four” campaigns. Commercial advertisers try to exploit the zeitgeist with sloganeering. A dieting club promises, “It All Adds Up To a New You.” A tax preparer tries, “We’ll Put Your New World In Order.” A cult of Roman numeral revivalists pops up.

The children pose a sticky problem for policy enforcers. They tend to point out the emperor’s new clothes. They say the darndest things about how numbers add up. The problem registers and is dealt with.

“. . . now a tragic story with a promising ending. Young Angelina Putto was just five years old when she developed a problem with numbers. As we see too often these days, it was one number in particular that caused her problems. That number, you’ve probably guessed, was four, and little Angelina was addicted to the idea that it’s the sum of two and two. Angelina’s not alone in fighting this lingering problem among the young. But a new state-funded program involving a breakthrough drug, Penterol, is helping Angelina and thousands like her . . . .”

Months melt into years, and lives return more or less to normal as the number jumble settles. Emboldened by the success of their project to disarm the public, to nurture the public gullibility—a project codenamed Operation One-For-The-Money—the Controllers move on to Operation Two-For-The-Show. On a fateful morning the country awakens to a startling announcement from the White House.

“Emergency legislation drafted last night by the Congress arrived on my desk this morning, and, thanks to the hard work of our legislators, I was able to sign into law the Federal Reserve Command Act, which establishes a new entity to serve the public, the Federal Reserve Command. The chartering of this new corporation was deemed necessary by the Congress and by my staff to ensure that military decisions vital to our continued security can be made in an environment free of political interference.

Our defense forces deserve a strong and independent strategic command that is not subject to the partisan maneuverings and pork-barrel favoritism that all too often infect political decision making. Chartered as a private corporation, the Federal Reserve Command will be staffed by private-sector professionals drawn from the areas of military and law enforcement strategy, high-tech, and command operations. The new corporation’s governing board will consist of executives from Boeing, Halliburton, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Xe Services and other experienced partners of our uniformed military . . . .”

This announcement produces no notable response from the public. Delighted by the ease with which they can subvert checks and balances, the Controllers roll out Operation Three-To-Get-Ready. The president addresses the public.

“Today I am pleased to announce that I have signed into law the Federal Reserve Farming Act, which establishes a new regulatory body, Farm Fed, that will be responsible for overseeing production of all products intended for human or animal consumption. This new regulatory authority is necessary to ensure that all Americans retain access to ample, available, and safe sources of food. Farm Fed will operate as a private corporation, independently of the federal government. Chartering Farm Fed as a private corporation frees its professionals to pursue their watchdog responsibilities without political interference.

“Although the creation of this new authority is an important step toward the goal of safeguarding the public food supply, Farm Fed’s scope will extend beyond the nation’s field crops and stockyards. It also will oversee the nation’s bioengineering laboratories. It is critical for our country’s security and economic competitiveness that the proprietary intellectual property of our bioengineering innovators and entrepreneurs be protected. Bio-pirating remains a threat to the food supply and must be dealt with decisively. Toward that end Farm Fed will enforce patents covering genetically modified organisms and will be responsible for issuing all crop seeds.

“Seeds not issued by Farm Fed will be considered contraband and their possession a federal offense. Now, I understand that home gardeners and hobby farmers will not appreciate this new arrangement. But we simply cannot allow individuals to threaten the health of the entire nation by growing unregulated plants whose seeds or pollen might contaminate newly engineered field crops.
“I believe strongly that without the meddlesome intrusions of government, Farm Fed, as a private corporation, will best be able to execute its mission according to the highest standards of public service. Therefore, and especially to protect proprietary interests, Farm Fed will set its policies in secret, out of the distorting glare of the public spotlight. To ensure the success of Farm Fed, I am appointing to the governing board a team of seasoned agribusiness executives who have an intimate technical understanding of food research, production, processing and distribution.”

He goes on to name to the board various executives from Monsanto, Tyson, Cargill, ConAgra, ADM and the like. Some months later the public awakens to yet another White House announcement, the public side of Operation Four-To-Go.

“During the challenging months that have led up to today’s announcement, many of us in public service have observed a dimming of the American spirit. Ours is a nation wrestling with its soul. The lingering economic crisis, foreign wars, and natural disasters have taken a toll on the hearts and minds of the American people. And public opinion polls bear out this worrisome perception. Into this situation have stepped charlatans, offering reassurances that they cannot deliver. Dangerous cults have taken root and are tearing apart the spiritual foundations on which our country was founded.
“We in public service, whom the American people have entrusted with positions of authority, must act to address these troubling developments. To attack the problem of creeping spiritual malaise, today I have signed into law the Federal Reserve Church Act, which establishes a new regulatory institution, a strong and independent religious oversight watchdog panel. The Federal Reserve Church is chartered with ensuring that all Americans are free to conduct their spiritual affairs in a wholesome faith-based environment. The Federal Reserve Church will ensure that religious institutions do not take on excessive risk in their theological doctrines.

“Mindful of the important tradition of church and state separation, we have chartered the Federal Reserve Church specifically as a private corporation outside of the federal government. Given this status, it will not be subjected to partisan politicking, nor to legal formalities that constrain the federal government, such as financial audits.”

Just as he starts wrapping up, something goes wrong. Hackers intercept the president’s teleprompter script and edit his concluding remarks. Unwary, the president continues.

“. . . because each and every American is a valued contributor to our great enterprise, rest assured that we whom you have entrusted with supreme authority will care for and protect you. We will continue to do everything we can to secure our comprehensive control over your lives. We are determined to do everything possible to ensure that you remain forever . . . our obedient . . . slaves . . . .”

Taken aback by his own words, the president stops, looks around, and his face goes pale. The broadcast audience hears silence and then,

“. . . . WHAT!? WHAT!? Cut!! Son of a bitch! Who put that . . . . Cut the mic . . . . Oh, shit! . . . .”

The next day a new commercial blitzes across the media landscape.

“TriCorp brings the three branches of government together into one convenient service center, to better serve you, the citizen consumer. No more drawn-out procedures slowing things down. No more confusing checks and balances, no more doubletalk getting in the way of maximal efficiency. That’s right, the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial functions of government have been streamlined and brought together under one virtual roof. Now ask yourself, what did the government ever do right in the first place . . . ?”

“TriCorp. A division of Royal Monarch Enterprises."

The People Must Believe That They Are Not Manipulated

2010-07-31T13:32:00.001-11:00

"The people must believe that they are not manipulated—in order for them to be manipulated effectively."

So says Winston Smith, protagonist of George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984. Orwell/Smith was echoing a sentiment attributed earlier to Goethe:

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

u believe u r not manipulated? u believe u r free?

The Problem with America's Debt Problem

2010-07-31T09:43:00.000-11:00

In a recent Washington Post column, Michael Gerson says, "America's debt problem is mainly an entitlement spending problem."

He is WRONG.

There is NO shortage of money--for the simple fact that the government can create as much money as it needs out of thin air. Somebody in the Treasury Dept just has to enter the correct character strokes on the right computer and - wa-la - the Federal Reserve conjures into existence as much money as is needed.

Inflationary you say?

HA - you haven't been paying attention. We're in a DE-flationary spiral. The money supply has been steadily SHRINKING. This economy needs NEW MONEY, not a redistribution of tender from my pocket to Lloyd Blankfein's.

Increases the debt?

OK, eliminate the step involving the Federal Reserve. Instead of issuing Treasury Bonds and trading them for legal tender, just declare (Congress can do this) the bonds themselves to be legal tender. End the Fed, and one more parasitic bureaucracy bites the dust. Good riddance. Call in and retire the existing bonds, and say goodbye to the national debt.

Comrades, when you hear corporate mouths, such as Gerson, tell you to sacrifice and accept austerity, look the [expletives] in the eye and reply calmly, "No thanks."

That's all.

Just Say No.

Connecting the Dots

2010-07-24T03:07:00.002-11:00

Somewhere between the propaganda-spewing corporate mainstream media and the UFO-tinged Illuminati-mongering conspiracy networks is an informed core of sane, honest whistleblowers, connecting the dots to create a helluva ugly picture, which might be titled, Global Machinations of the New Feudal Lords.

Join in the dot connecting. Anyone can play. Here’s how to get started:

www.deepcapture.com
michael-hudson.com
baselinescenario.com

If you'd rather watch a PowerPoint, try this introduction:

www.deepcapturethemovie.com/

BUST THE TRUSTS: Tax the Rich to Break Up Demand-Side Monopolies

2010-07-10T04:51:00.002-11:00

What’s the matter with monopolies, anyway? Do we need anti-trust laws?

For one thing, capitalist theory goes, monopolies foul up the supply-and-demand dynamic that keeps a market economy honest. Industry delivers the most value and prosperity to the most people if we just leave pricing, production, and quality to be sorted out by supply and demand, goes the theory. Alternatively, a centrally planned, communist, economy can seem to work fine—if you’re one of the oligarchs in charge. But centralized controllers tend not to spread the wealth around, as centralized banking in the United States demonstrates.

Competition, in particular, is a key cog in the machine that distributes wealth, by keeping supply and demand in balance. Suppliers without competitors are free to disregard the demands of consumers. Monopolies have no incentive to keep prices down or product quality up or customer service responsive. They put a drag on the free-market economy by defeating the self-correcting mechanism of supply-and-demand.

So, a monopoly system flunks the test of delivering the full benefits of a market-based economy. But the traditional idea of a monopoly covers only the supply side. An equally pernicious market distortion can occur when there’s a demand-side monopoly. That’s when buying power (demand) is concentrated in too few private hands.

Demand-side monopolies are just as efficient at distorting markets and stalling the capitalist engine as are their supply-side counterparts. When personal fortunes become excessive, that side of the equation comes to represent the demands of too few people. Excessive concentration of private capital frustrates demands that otherwise would force suppliers to innovate, improve quality and keep prices low. The familiar “pump and dump” cycle of market manipulation illustrates another serious downside of demand-side monopolies, of large private fortunes.

When private fortunes enjoy overwhelming purchasing (demand) power, then the distinction between a market system and a centrally planned economy becomes a nominal one, because both will function in the same way. Both will fall under the dictates of the monopolistic oligarchy—whether it controls the demand side, the supply side, or both—and the general population will suffer impoverishment.

If anti-trust measures serve the greater good when enforced on the supply side, to break up large corporations, then they might work as remedies on the demand side, too, breaking up large private fortunes.

“Tax the rich” is just another way of saying, “break up demand-side monopolies.” It is a call to explode a shackle so that the invisible hand of the market can get back to work.

Social Mediation

2010-06-06T08:59:00.000-11:00

Social Media = Social Mediocrity:

rue
or

alse?

Chirality of Ethos

2010-05-22T08:38:00.005-11:00

Chemists call molecules chiral when the molecules come in mirror-image pairs. The term is applied to molecules that share a common chemical formula and are built from the same numbers of the same kinds of atoms. They differ in the geometrical arrangement of the atoms. That’s all. Same content, just rearranged to create mirror-image reflections. The right- and left-handedness of chiral chemistry provides a handy metaphor for the politics of Left and Right: mirror images built from a common substance and a common formula.

For reasons probably unimaginable, chemistry came to mind when I found the movie Return Engagement on the Internet Archive (it follows the Bob Costas interview). The movie documents a series of debates between notorious pitchman for the colorful ‘60s psychedelic counterculture, Timothy Leary, and G. Gordon Liddy, notorious henchman for the disgraced U.S. president Richard M. Nixon. This odd couple toured the U.S. in the 1980s, staging debates that pitted Leary’s libertine individualism against Gordo’s conservative authoritarianism.

In debate Leary preaches a gospel of self-discovery and invites individuals to liberate themselves from the suffocating conventions of polite society, to spread their wings and fly free from the strictures of the hive. Liddy counters by accusing Leary of reckless self-centeredness and hedonism. He argues for the duty of individuals to subordinate their desires to the needs of social orderliness. Gordo preaches a communitarian, collectivist ethos.

WAIT A MINUTE.

Liberal? Conservative? Is anybody paying attention?

Tune into partisan polemic today and you get a mirror image of the Leary-Liddy debates. The Left is all about community, and if you hear invocations of freedom and liberty, it’s more likely coming from the Right. Listen to right-wing talk now and you’d think community was synonymous with gulag. So, between 1984, a fitting year to make such a movie, and today, what happened to political Left and Right?

They became what they beheld.

The Right adopted the “Do your own thing” ethos and adapted it to the cult of the business entrepreneur. The Left internalized a tut-tutting stance, condemning the “greed” of the self-centered striver, while striving itself to be “socially responsible.”

How long before the mirrors switch again and Lefties snap, “Don’t tell me what to do” with Righties castigating them for shirking their responsibilities? Stay tuned.

Banality of Evil

2010-04-24T11:03:00.004-11:00

I can’t tell if the bigger threat is government taking over private corporations or private corporations taking over the government. The two processes seem to be on a collision course.

Under the influence of neutron-star-dense concentrations of private capital, the public sector squirts out from the political Right as “protection” and from the Left as “care.” These two ostensibly benevolent wings eventually coalesce into an iron fist that claims for itself all the rights and privileges of personhood and the authority to tax, regulate, and conscript, a creature parasitic on Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

All of the monarchy,

With none of the royalty.

"The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history, and then it was seen that all past history was the history of class struggles, that these warring classes of society are always the product of the modes of production and exchange, in a word, of the economic condition of their time; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis from which, in the last analysis, is to be explained the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions, as well as of the religious philosophical and other conceptions of each historical period."

Frederick Engels

From Herr Eugen Duehring’s Revolution in Science

Sex and Death: Evolution Undefined

2010-03-21T11:53:00.004-11:00

Conceptually, evolution theory seems simple:

Individual organisms vary in their various traits. Some are better adapted to survive in their environmental niche than others, because they possess (more and/or more highly) adaptive traits. Because the better adapted organisms succeed disproportionately in begetting offspring, the adaptive traits become more prevalent in the next generation. Over many generations, this process of filtering and concentrating the heritable traits of organisms has spawned diverse forms of life, with genes transferring traits from parents to offspring.

I think I squeezed in all the relevant keywords.

This description works at an abstract level, but close up, the theory's fuzziness becomes apparent. What is a niche, anyway? Or an adaptation? Or a trait? Or an organism? Or a gene?

These questions make Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths’ Sex and Death a worthwhile read for anyone interested in probing the rigor of the received view. It turns out that researchers in the biological sciences have yet to settle on agreed-upon definitions of the above terms. Evolution theory is compromised by its own hazy vocabulary.

For example, do ecological niches exist independently of the organisms that fill them? Or are they defined by their occupants? Is average temperature sufficient to define a niche? Temperature and water salinity? Temperature, salinity, and the density of predators? “Niche” is, if not an essential, at least a supporting concept in evolution theory, but it amounts to a conceptual blur. Nobody can say what the necessary and sufficient conditions are to define a “niche.”

Organisms have many “traits.” But are they all “adaptations”? If so, why bother calling them “adaptations”—if it’s just another word for “trait”? If some traits are not adaptations, then what criteria can we use to distinguish those, presumably incidental, traits from adaptations? Nobody knows.

But then we have to ask, what counts as a trait? A compound eye? Or just the lens? Or the eye plus the optic nerve? That is, what’s nature’s granularity when it comes to carving up organisms into more and less adaptive “traits”? The theme of this “grain problem” runs throughout the book. At every turn, the authors use it to unsettle the received view.

While we’re at it, what counts as an organism? An ant? But a lone sterile worker has no capacity to beget offspring. Or, is the whole ant colony the organism (sometimes called a superorganism)? The authors underscore the “organism” problem with other examples from the invertebrates,

“Some colonial organisms also have bizarre life cycles. The Siphonophora—jellyfish-like colonial hydrozoans such as the Portuguese man-of-war—are so integrated that it is hard to say whether they consist of many cooperating organisms or a single organism. The various cells (the zooids) within the man-of-war are specialized: there are floatation specialists, propulsion specialists, killer cells, and sex cells. In this respect, the man-of-war seems to be a single organism. On the other hand, each cell within the colony has an independent origin in a fertilized egg. In contrast to the zooids that jointly form a man-of –war, cellular slime molds spend most of their life as independent cells. But when food runs out, they aggregate into a single body, which develops specialized parts. Some of the cells form a stem, ending in a group of cells that specialize in making spores. So these cells too seem to spend part of their life as individual organisms, and the rest as parts of an organism.”

And it’s not just invertebrates that pose the problem. Ninety percent of a human body’s cells are bacterial, not human. So, what constitutes the human “organism”?

“Gene” probably is the least salvageable term. In the early days of post-Crick-Watson genetics, a gene was taken to be a contiguous sequence of nucleotides that coded for a particular protein, the one-gene-one-protein model. But as scientists discover protein synthesis to be a remarkably complex process, that model has gone up in smoke. It’s not clear that anything discernible in a strand of DNA corresponds to “genes.”

Log onto a news website, and watch the content load. The page you get is a mosaic of content pulled from news servers, ad servers, filters and recommenders of various kinds. The content served is the product of dynamic algorithmic operations. Nothing in the system of servers and databases corresponds to the static concept of “page,” and the same appears to be true when it comes to protein synthesis inside cells. Nothing in the system of DNA’s servers and databases corresponds to “gene.” In any case, DNA turns out not to be necessary for evolution, anyway.

So the theory of evolution rests on a bed of semantic mush. The theory seems to boil down to saying merely that, if you wait long enough, life’s forms diversify. The lack of definition of its operative terms is a significant breach in the edifice of the theory, I think.

Have the Intelligent Design advocates effectively exploited the breach? Misguided as the scriptural literalists among them are, the IDers perform a service by holding the scientists’ feet to the fire. So there you have it, IDers, Go sock it to ‘em!

The subtitle of Sex and Death is “An introduction to philosophy of biology.” What a reasonable place to start. As is this.

Corporate Personhood, the sequel

2010-01-23T06:10:00.002-11:00

Now that the Supremes have granted full, or nearly full, constitutionally protected personhood to corporations, publicly owned companies won't need SEC or other legal approval to merge. Just a marriage license from the local court house. We might expect other interesting fallout, too:

"Nix the anti-trust and anti-collusion laws, because we, as the corporate members of the American Price-Fixing Institute, are simply exercising our right peaceably to assemble. Now get out of here, and close the door."

"Speaking for myself, I am innocent of all crimes related to the atrocities being investigated, but speaking as Unspeakable Weapons Corp. Inc., the company pleads the fifth and refuses to answer any more questions. Nyah-nyah!"

"As CEO of Racketeer and Extortionist Bank, I have no issue with legislation that places a ceiling on my compensation. However, the bank itself argues that placing limits on executive compensation constitutes cruel and unusual punishment."

"I am here to cast two ballots in this election, one on behalf of myself, and one on behalf of Frankenfood Bioswill Industries, Inc."

Down the Memory Hole

2010-01-23T05:47:00.001-11:00

On the “Today” show, a friend of John Edwards talked about Edwards’ admission that he fathered his mistress’ child. According to the Washington Post: "Today" reported that Edwards did not come on the show himself because of the ongoing federal investigation into whether he used campaign money to cover up the affair.

Wait a minute. The feds are going after Edwards because they think he might have used campaign money to hide his mistress? What happened to priorities?

Remember when Attorney General Eric Holder was poised to investigate the truly heinous crimes of the Bush administration? Once upon a time, Holder was going to hold W and his minions accountable. That story turned into just another piece of media flotsam that got flushed down the memory hole.

So, the Justice Department lacks resources to pursue torturers, but finds time to investigate misuse of campaign funds? Change we can believe in?

Cultural De-evolution

2010-01-04T11:04:00.002-11:00

AN EYE FOR AN I?

OY!

Big Brother Bernanke

2009-12-25T08:20:00.011-11:00

WAR IS PEACE.

LOVE IS HATE.

BLACK IS WHITE.

BERNANKE
IS A HERO.

McLuhan, the Economist

2009-11-18T14:37:00.008-11:00

Marshall McLuhan used various analogies to explain his celebrated, confusing formula, “the medium is the message.” In one, he likened the content of media to “the juicy steak held out by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” Media dangle in front of us all kinds of allurements. Whether we’re news junkies, sports fans, avid consumers, or gossip column devotees, media demographers have us targeted. They’ll invest millions to research our habits and attitudes to help them hone their content to seduce us into handing over to them our precious time. But behind the enticing content and the operations that engineer it, a panoply of technologies roils away, magnifying, reviving and retiring one another in an accelerating process of innovation, assimilation and succession. This constantly shifting technological background recalibrates our sensory and cognitive experiences, day after day, year after year, shaping and reshaping our psychological biases and expectations—our comfort level. Media massage us unconsciously. That is their primary effect, to which McLuhan called our attention.

Another analogy McLuhan used was that of the cocktail party at which someone tampers with the thermostat, notching it up or down a few degrees. If the climate-control system of a modern building constitutes a medium, and anyone who reads McLuhan’s opus, Understanding Media, will see that all technologies fall under his purview as media, because all extend some physical or psychical human capacity, then the thermostat illustrates how a medium can bear no message other than itself. In the case of the thermostat, no message distinguishes itself from the medium. But changing the temperature in a room will create a new psychological space; the occupants will feel new sensations; their concerns will shift; they will orient themselves differently in the space and towards one another. They will adapt to the environment created by the medium, but no alphanumeric message will have been sent from it, no semantic content will have issued from it, nothing that a dictionary could help decipher will have been uttered, printed, broadcast or posted online by that thermostat. Its message is felt, but it’s not a linguistic one.

The common element in these analogies is that they reveal a figure/ground relationship. The juicy steak is a distracting figure; the thermally modified room an uncomfortable ground. McLuhan’s project was to get people to pay less attention to the baubles of content and more attention to the invisible ground. Training oneself to attend to the psychosocial effects of media as environments, and to spend less time critiquing their contrived contents, helps insulate a mind against the content engineers’ hypnotic ambitions. McLuhan was prescribing a therapy when he urged us to shift our focus from figure to ground.

So, what does this have to do with economics?

One half of today’s economy plays an important role as message—juicy distraction—as packaged and delivered by the news-manufacturing and punditry industries. That half is concerned with government appropriations and taxes, congressional budget haggling, that is, with fiscal policy. This is the sideshow that people visit to root for liberals and conservatives grinding their axes.

But fiscal policy has a bitter half, the shadow twin, a subterranean half that lurks beneath the economic ground. This economic mirror of fiscal policy mediates, invisibly, the staging of the fiscal Left-Right (melo)drama. The hidden half of the economy has to do with the background against which fiscal policy is debated: who originates money in the first place? How do they move new money into the economy? Who’s on the receiving end of the new money? And under what terms do the receivers get the money? Money itself is conjured by fiat, so who attends the great power of turning nothing into spendable cash will control the ground on which our personal prosperity or impoverishment figures. (At least we have the Left-Right puppet show to entertain us.)

Coverage of the current economic meltdown makes it clear that corporate media work hard to make the partisan tax-and-spend debates as contentious as possible. This keeps the public preoccupied with the message of fiscal policy and diverts attention from the medium of exchange, the economic ground: monetary policy. We would do ourselves a great favor if we shifted our attention from the overt economic figure to the covert economic ground. We need to re-set the economic thermostat.

It is shameful that in the free democratic republic of the United States, a taboo persists against scrutinizing the Federal Reserve cabal of private banks, which sets the country’s, and through the IMF and World Bank the world’s, monetary policy. This cabal is a private business that operates independently of government oversight. But the mainstream media are very efficient at marginalizing people who break the taboo. And so public attention stays focused on the staged wrestling match between perennial fiscal contenders Socialist Left and Capitalist Right.

It’s temping to see the current pop culture fascination with zombies as a mirror. Maybe we’re trying to snap ourselves out of our collective dream. Entranced by the alluring, insistent voices of media, we have become a nation of zombies. But don’t expect people conditioned to fixate on media content to give up their preoccupation. As McLuhan also noted, somnambulism—sleepwalking—is a highly motivated state.

Or, if that seems too insulting, cool off with this analogy. There’s a droll saying that goes, “If you kill one person, you’re a murderer. If you kill a hundred thousand people, you’re a conquerer.” Apply that to economics, and it runs something like this, “If you run a ponzi scheme involving $billions, you’re a contemptible crook (e.g. Bernie Madoff). If you run a ponzi scheme involving $trillions, you’re the venerable Federal Reserve Bank.

Christian Eschatology

2009-11-08T05:43:00.003-11:00

Hell is the mythic form of Earth, an intuition or premonition of a possible future state, terrestrial and bleak, hot and enslaved by incarnations of wickedness. Heaven, similarly, is the mythic form of a possible future, one that is not of this Earth, extraterrestrial, weightless, juvenile, omniscient.

Christian eschatology hits the nail almost on the head. It’s off by an extraneous supernaturalism.

"Seek simplicity and distrust it."
-- Alfred North Whitehead

Autism, Aspergers, Neurodiversity & Evolution

2009-10-25T09:55:00.000-11:00

I've corresponded sporadically with a guy named Andrew Lehman, whose websites contain his thoughts on evolution and autism. He makes the case that autism is an evolutionary adaptation. Not only is it here to stay, but autism will become increasingly prevalent in each new generation. Mr. Lehman regards autism as an expression of the evolutionary mechanism called neoteny, which occurs when aspects of normal development are delayed, producing adults with juvenile features. Neoteny also figures in the Star Larvae Hypothesis (here and here).

Mr. Lehman constructs elaborate arguments about the origins of autism that have to do with intrauterine exposure to hormones, such as testosterone and estrogen. He advocates acceptance of neurodiversity, or normalizing the Autism-Aspergers spectrum of behavior. We'll see if neurodiversity ever gains a visibility in psychology or civil-rights politics comparable to that of biodiversity in ecology and environmental politics. Though, already businesses are learning to exploit the unique qualities of people with autism/Aspergers, such as their sustained ability to focus and attend to details. If you find this sort of thing intriguing, check out Mr. Lehman's main websites http://www.shiftjournal.com/ and http://www.neoteny.org/. (I cannot imagine how he finds the time to update these sites as often as he does.)

Here is an edited comment I left on the Shift Journal site:

Maybe autism is a label for a particular clumping of tendencies within the broader sweep of the pandemic of psychological syndromes and disorders. No doubt the pharmaceutical industry plays a role in the coining of new mental and behavioral maladies, but on the face of it there seems to be an explosion of neurodiversity in the current generation of children. OCD, ADHD, bipolar, autism/Aspergers (how about peanut allergies?) and other clumps skew the psychographic profile of this generation. Maybe these tendencies were always present in the population at their current levels, but, for sociocultural or medical-diagnostic reasons, did not attain much visibility. Now, there are no secrets.

Have you considered the postmodern neurodiversity explosion as a psychological version of the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity? All kinds of critters arrived suddenly on the scene about 530 million years ago, giving natural selection a trove of resource material to work with. Needless to say, countless of the new species remained extant only briefly. The fittest begat phyla still with us. It might be that evolution will cull most of the new neurological phenotypes, and, though all might have neotenous roots, natural selection will favor relatively few, and those few will set the stage for a shift in humankind's evolutionary trajectory. See, Founder Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect

Here are a couple videos hosted by people with Autism/Aspergers. I'm impressed by their earnest, well-spoken appeals.

And see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PCKa3TNO8 (embed code not available)

Mockery of Democracy II: Federal Reserve

2009-10-18T09:01:00.018-11:00

In August 2009, President Barack Obama re-appointed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, months before Bernanke’s term was set to expire. In making the announcement, the president vowed to “continue to maintain a strong and independent Federal Reserve.”

But why, Mr. President? Why do we need a strong and independent Federal Reserve?

Obama’s Treasury Secretary and former head of the New York Federal Reserve, Timothy Geithner, delivered the rationale. In an August 2009 Digg Dialogg hosted by the Wall Street Journal, Geithner defended the Federal Reserve’s opaqueness when it comes to monetary policy. “[Y]ou want to keep politics out of monetary policy,” he asserted.

But why, Mr. Secretary? Why do we need to keep politics out of monetary policy?

Didn’t our strong, independent, nonpoliticized Federal Reserve fail to prevent the mess we’re in? Didn’t the Fed’s monetary policy, which kept interest rates too low for too long, enable this recession? We need a strong and independent Federal Reserve? Really? Why?

Well, maybe we do. The putative wisdom of Obama and Geithner got me thinking. After all, if it’s a good idea for monetary policy to be free of politics and under the control of a strong, independent private cartel (even though the U.S Constitution assigns monetary responsibility to Congress*), then why shouldn’t other Constitutional responsibilities of the federal government be handled privately?

For example, why not a strong an independent military? By Obama-Geithner logic, a military junta operating outside government control would be a good thing, so that military decisions don't become politicized. Yes, a rogue army is what we need. Keep politics out of it.

Or why not a strong and independent diplomacy corps? Let lobbyists enter into treaties with other countries on behalf of the citizenry of the United States. We don't need a politicized State Department negotiating with the rest of the world, do we? Neither national defense nor national diplomacy should be political footballs, should they? Surely private interests can decide more clearly than elective office holders.

In fact, the same logic would apply to every decision. Really, think about it. Is any decision-making process improved by being politicized? Why do we need government at all? It just--yech!--politicizes the important decisions of the day. Indeed, let’s take privatization of government services all the way and establish a monarchy. If the elected legislature of a democratic republic can’t be trusted with monetary policy, why trust it with anything?

Hopefully this reductio ad absurdum of Obama-Geithner (-Bernanke) logic makes the point that there’s no real justification for putting monetary policy on a pedestal, beyond the reach of normal political scrutiny and regulation. Protestations to the contrary amount to hand waving. Indeed, given the pollution of our economy with toxic assets during the past several years, it’s clear now that public scrutiny and regulation of monetary policy are overdue.

The government monitors and regulates polluters who pour toxic waste onto public lands. Federal regulators constrain pharmaceutical companies, whose products must be deemed safe and effective before they can be dumped on the public. Why should new products developed by the financial industry not also have to pass muster, not also have to pass a test to prove themselves safe and effective, before they are dumped into the economy? Toxic assets are toxic assets, whether chemicals or exotic financial instruments. Wall Street needs to be tightly regulated along with all the other polluters and for all the same reasons.

At the macro level economists segment the economy into two sectors: Public and Private. But, to reflect the real economy, this traditional segmentation needs to be augmented by a third sector. Let’s call it the Pirate sector. The Pirate sector of the economy operates by a distinctive set of rules that distinguishes it from the other two sectors.

The Public sector consists of elected officials, at the local, state, and federal levels, and their attendant bureaucracies. This sector is subject to regulation, internally, by the system of checks and balances among its legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and externally, by the threat of discipline by voters on election day. Rightists use the epithet “Socialist” against people who advocate greater economic leeway for this sector.

Corporations and other for-profit entities comprise the Private sector of the economy. This sector is subject to regulation by the Public sector and by the “invisible hand” of the market. Market discipline means that the potential benefit of large profits is counterbalanced by the potential cost of incurring large risks. Leftists, at least traditionally, have used the epithet “Capitalist” against people who advocate greater economic leeway for this sector.

But now a stealthy third sector has lumbered from behind the scenes and into the spotlight. Let’s call it the Pirate sector. It consists of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street’s large commercial and investment banks, along with top players in the insurance industry, it seems. This sector cannot be overruled by any branch of government, not the judiciary, not congress, not the president—or at least its most powerful component, the Federal Reserve, cannot, as former Fed chair, Alan Greenspan, boasts in the video segment at the end of this post. The Pirate sector operates outside of our democratic system of checks and balances.

And this sector’s prospects for enormous profits are not balanced by prospects of incurring a corresponding enormity of risk, as in the normal Private-sector market mechanism. The Pirate sector is not subject to market discipline, because bailouts, whether directly to its financial institutions or indirectly through government insurance (e.g., the FDIC) or government bailed-out private insurance (e.g., AIG), take risk out of the equation.

The Federal Reserve cannot be disciplined by the market and cannot be overruled by the elected government. It and its orbiting financial services partners constitute a distinct third sector of the economy, with the fed setting monetary policy and the for-profit financial industry cashing in on that policy. Fed bailouts shift the risk to the taxpayer while executive compensation policies keep profits private.

In the WSJ/Digg Dialogg, Treasury Secretary Geithner says that the fed’s current level of transparency is adequate, that the fed’s actions (outside of making monetary policy) are on public display and that people can judge for themselves whether it is acting responsibly. Great. What good does it do to judge an institution as acting irresponsibly if NO ONE can overrule its policies? Former Fed head Alan Greenspan brags: NO ONE has the authority to overrule the decisions of the Fed. A totalitarian dictator by any other name . . . .

The corruption of the U.S. monetary system cries out for sweeping reforms. One way to restructure the system fundamentally would be to convert the banking industry into a public utility. The elected Congress should re-assert its Constitutional prerogative to determine monetary policy and issue real dollars, instead of Federal Reserve Notes (I.O.U.’s owed to private for-profit banks), at fixed interest and use the interest collected to offset the tax burden that weighs on the public. “Capitalists” might complain that government should not get into the banking business. But more to the point would be the corresponding “Socialist” complaint that banks need to get out of the governing business.

_______________

*With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, Congress abdicated its monetary responsibilities and conceded monetary authority to a private banking cartel, the Federal Reserve.

Topless, Bottomless, Womb, Ocean

2009-10-01T14:33:00.002-11:00

Proletariat's Prayer

2009-09-26T03:42:00.002-11:00

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR BIWEEKLY BREAD.

Mockery of Democracy: Federal Reserve

2009-09-20T13:48:00.006-11:00

Is the U.S. federal government not to be trusted, because it is the tool of socialists who want to centralize power and control? Or is the U.S. federal government not to be trusted, because it is the tool of capitalists who want to centralize power and control? What do these questions have in common? Are they operationally indistinguishable?

The Project/Object opus

2009-09-06T13:17:00.007-11:00

In his biography, Zappa, author Barry Miles, quotes a 1988 interview with FZ:

“The conceptual continuity is this: everything, even this interview, is part of what I do for, let’s call it, my entertainment work. And there’s a big difference between sitting here and talking about this kind of stuff, and writing a song like ‘Titties and Beer’. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s all part of the same continuity. It’s all one piece.”

Zappa built an opus. “Conceptual continuity” is the term he and his fans used to describe the cohesion that bound together the disparate elements of Frank Zappa’s life’s work: surf music, avant gardism, do wop, potty humor, Suzy Creamcheeze, poodles, First Amendment advocacy, eyebrows, Beefheart, German, usw. He called his opus the Project/Object.

The quote from FZ underscored for me this simple, trenchant insight of psychologist James Hillman:

Creative people are occupied not so much with creativity as they are fascinated with an opus.

The creative Frank Zappa left behind an opus, his project.

In college I worked for a short time as a reporter for the campus newspaper and had the opportunity to interview the famous atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, in town for a fundraiser. I had the temerity to ask her why she was so preoccupied with preaching the gospel of atheism. She snapped back, “Your life has to be about something.”

The Curse of the Keywords

2009-08-09T13:53:00.005-11:00

I’ve been forced by a search engine optimization (SEO) project at work to confront the hegemony of keywords. These insidious locutions are words and phrases that function as hallowed text in the Google era. The magical incantations are elevated by their statistical, not semantic, character.

It might seem an irrelevant complaint, audio and video having their way so handily with print/type/text in cyberspace.

But some of us like to write and read, and SEO lobotomizes us. “Optimization” turns syntax, semantics, and grammar into stuffing to tuck in around keywords, the precious cargo. SEO stupidizes language for the convenience of computer collation. Keywords are language turds; too many make prose stink.

For example, if, while writing normal prose, you have to refer to a subject repeatedly, you have to be creative. You paint the thing with various brushes; you use indirection to bring out nuances. You tap your mental thesaurus.

But no more, at least not online. Now, you're supposed to keep repeating those keywords, the exact words, repeating and repeating them. Rote repetition is a good thing to do. Gotta drive up that keyword density.

In the shadow, or service, of SEO, writing converges on the literary stylings of a fifth grader or a newly enrolled student of English-as-a-second-language. Pursuing the grail of a high search engine ranking necessarily constricts vocabulary and discourages metaphors, similies, analogies, examples, and probably every other kind of literary device that makes reading enjoyable.

And, while we’re assessing the damage, let’s anticipate the passing of those humble servants, the pronouns. They deserve our respects for many centuries of reliable service. But those services are no longer needed. Here lies an obsolete part of speech, R.I.P.

The economy of SEO is clear. SEO makes it easier to exploit offshore labor in the manufacturing of text. The next step seems obvious: entirely computer-generated prose. Input a list of keywords and let the SEO Wizard go to town, writing prose for its mate, the indexing spider. Computers writing for computers.

No wonder the kids gravitate toward audio and video. The next generation likely will regard readers of written English as we regard readers of hieroglyphics.

(So, dear God, please tell me, why don’t browsers have a read-aloud function? If Adobe can put it into Acrobat, why can’t Mozilla put it into Firefox?)

Ooooops

2009-08-08T09:48:00.005-11:00

A random error produces value. Darwin must have been a stamp collector.

Chains we can believe in‏

2009-07-25T15:54:00.006-11:00

Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to post online, for at least five days, all pending legislation so that the public could review it. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh, assholes.

Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh, assholes, I’ll detain anybody I want for as long as I want.

Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to end the war in Iraq. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh. Six months into the Obama administration, the Democratic majority in Congress approves another $106 billion for the war. That's bad enough. But then Obama says he will use "signing statements" to ignore parts of the bill--after attacking Prez. W. Bush for doing the same thing!! Oh, and the sections that Obama wants to exclude are provisions regulating U.S. aid given to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Can't cross his banker buddies, now can he?

It goes on and on:

Taking Bush's position, administration denies msnbc.com request for logs
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn't have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present.

Meet the new boss. Same as the olde boss.

Fearful Symmetry

2009-07-04T06:22:00.005-11:00

The political Left and Right perfectly balance each other in a coordinated pincer movement, the objective of which is to skewer the middle class (well under way) and ultimately institute a global slave economy—packaged as protection and care.

At the behest of the financial controllers, the left and right departments of the political system expand government’s coercive power from behind blustery rhetoric about the evils of intrusive government (intrudes too far into markets says the Right, too far into personal privacy says the Left).

Global warming and terrorism illustrate this Left-Right symmetry.

Here’s a passage from George Will’s 6/22/09 Newsweek column:

“Nowadays, green reasoning is the first refuge of scoundrels. Global warming has become like God: It is an explanation for everything and an all-purpose excuse for the political class to do whatever it wants to do—what it has a metabolic urge to do—and that is boss people around. It can maximize its opportunities for doing that if it maximizes the number of people dependent on government, and the number of ways in which they are dependent.”

The ostensibly observant Will fails to note that homeland security reasoning is another first refuge of scoundrels and that terrorism also has become like God, explaining everything and giving the political class an excuse to boss people around (have you tried boarding a plane lately?)

Whether climate change is imminent and if so whether human industry plays a role, I don’t have the scientific understanding to say. Whether terrorists are at our doorstep, however, seems doubtful. The U.S.-Mexican border has remained wide open since 9/11, with uncounted thousands of visitors crossing into the U.S., backpacks full of God knows what, undocumented and untraceable. And yet, the border states have not suffered terrorist bombings, suicidal or otherwise. The door is open, the bad guys are not walking through. The threat is overblown.

But the terrorist threat functions for the political Right exactly as the climatological threat functions for the political Left. Both are pretexts for monitoring and controlling you and me.

Psychology of Alchemy

2009-06-26T11:16:00.001-11:00

Theology of McLuhan the Prophet

2009-06-21T05:24:00.005-11:00

The surveillance environment of cameras everywhere (officially in and on government buildings and private businesses and unofficially in everyone’s pocket or purse) intercepted phone and email traffic, biometrics and RFID, along with voluntary, eager self-disclosures through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., serves the community’s need to know. (The need is guaranteed, whether to ensure that you adhere to the dictates of homeland or climatological security. Choose your partisan poison.) In this environment, privacy is dangerous (what are you hiding?), and the book becomes an illicit drug that incites anti-social behavior. Reading silently in solitude breeds subversion and sedition. All must plug into the matrix.

From Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage :

“Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional idea of private, isolated thoughts and action—the patterns of mechanistic technology—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electronically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful, and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes’.”

In any situation, no one’s thoughts or actions are so private as to escape God’s omniscience. Technology is re-creating for us the infallible omniscience (omni science) of divinity. The subjective aim that God supplies to the advance of universal creativity pulls along our intuition of our own technological potential. Actualizing that potential, we recreate nature in our own image, giving rise to new universes.

Neural Plasticity in Outer Space

2009-06-10T14:02:00.001-11:00

Seek out novel sensorimotor feedback experiences to forge new neural circuitry:

Quantum Entanglement: It's All In Your Head

2009-06-10T13:22:00.002-11:00

Interesting article on using the language of quantum entanglement to model word assocations.

http://www.physorg.com/news154180635.html

excerpt:

"This kind of research is an example of an emerging field called “quantum cognition,” the aim of which is to use quantum theory to develop radically new models of a variety of cognitive phenomena ranging from human memory to decision making. Although speculative, this research is gaining momentum. For instance, later this year, the highly regarded Journal of Mathematical Psychology will publish a special issue of quantum models of cognition."

Admittedly, the authors say that they are not proposing a model of quantum psychology, but just borrowing descriptive language from quantum mechanics. Still, I think that the usefulness of quantum mechanics concepts and vocabulary will prove indicative of future research findings, in which quantum mechanics increasingly will be appropriated for explanatory modeling, and eventually the quantum mechanics-derived models will transition from being implicit to being explicit explanations of consciousness.

Viva La Evolución

2009-05-24T03:23:00.003-11:00

"Pandrogyne" Genesis P-Orridge comes at transhumanism from hir own unique angle. Here, in the second part of a four-part interview, SHe advocates genetic engineering to enable hibernation during space travel. The weightlessness of space will impose its own influences on the human phenotype.

Cyberfetus Matrix

2009-04-19T03:23:00.009-11:00

Here is an early vision of extraterrestrial citizenry, an inspired rendering from the early days of the theory (thank you, MacPaint).

Proliferation of the cyberfetus, perhaps through cloning, follows a neotenous trajectory in the weightless, technology-dense environment of the space colony. Today, phone and internet carry much of our social connectedness, and our descendants will become increasingly symbiotic with their media infrastructure, as communications and tracking devices become increasingly somatically integrated. The rendering here suggests a persistence of electromechanical connections, but in the weightless cyberfetus matrix, chemical media—e.g., hormones, enzymes, neurotransmitters—probably initially will compete with, then complement, then supercede electromagnetic channels.

Not framing the transition in terms of neoteny, Herbert Marcuse nonetheless saw that technology, spawned from the repression of libido, completes itself in the liberation of libido. He writes in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia,

"The achievements of repressive progress herald the solution of the repressive principle of progress itself. It becomes possible to envisage a state in which there is no productivity resulting from and conditioning renunciation and no alienated labor: a state in which the growing mechanization of labor enables an ever larger part of the instinctual energy that had to be withdrawn for alienated labor to return to its original form, in other words, to be changed back into energy of the life instincts. It would no longer be the case that time spent in alienated labor occupied the major portion of life and the free time left to the individual for the gratification of his own needs was a mere remainder. Instead, alienated labor time would not only be reduced to a minimum but would disappear and life would consist of free time."

The Need to Teach Religion

2009-04-18T07:29:00.004-11:00

A while back on this blog I recommended that the public schools include religion as a subject in the standard curriculum. I've learned since that outspoken atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett makes the same recommendation. I feel vindicated, finding myself in such eminent company. His gist, and mine, is that religion is most dangerous when people don't understand it.

Welcome to Post-Democracy America

2009-03-23T09:10:00.017-11:00

It was a vile screed.

The Spotlight, a tabloid published by a group called Liberty Lobby, warned its readers that Communists, negroes, Jews, Catholics, immigrants—and the Federal Reserve—threatened the purity and wholesomeness and righteous authority of the United States of America. I encountered The Spotlight in a factory where I worked when I was a student. The factory owner had a box of the papers delivered each week, to which employees could help themselves.

Reading The Spotlight was my first exposure to what respectable folk and journalists call "conspiracy theory." To my mind the paper was a curiously crazy right-wing rag, alternately unintentionally disgusting and unintentionally comical. I was struck at the time by the commingling of attacks on the Federal Reserve with race baiting and anti-semitism. I wondered why these redneck hate mongers were paranoid about bankers.

As misguided as the editors of The Spotlight were about non-Whites, non-Protestants, and leftover hippies, they seem to have thrown their net wide enough to pull in some genuine threats, as we're seeing now — now that global financial markets are underwater, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has accelerated off the charts, at least partially because of Fed policies. The Liberty Lobby, John Birchers and their kind have done the United States a double disservice. Fundamentalist populists not only have spread White supremacist bile and other sordid hate mail, but by associating scrutiny of the Federal Reserve and its privileged status with their xenophobic venom, they succeeded in casting a taint of kookiness onto any examination of the Fed's origins, operations and accountabilities. They helped insulate the Fed from proper public scrutiny. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might suspect that the whole thing had been a plot from the beginning to set the Fed outside the bounds of normal journalistic investigation. (Liberty Lobby was put out of business in 2001 by a lawsuit related to accusations it printed regarding the Kennedy assassination. Good riddance, though it has come back in miniature, online.)

Whatever paranoid tendencies I have are stoked daily now that it's becoming clear how privileged the executive class is as it exists among the country's largest banks. There might be token wrist slappings here and there or a ceremonial condemnation of executive bonuses that amount to a sliver of the total bailout swindle, but by and large the people at the top of the Federal Reserve system of banks and associated financial institutions remain in place, collecting their generous compensation packages and wielding their vast influence to shake down the economy.

Those who occupy the financial stratosphere remain unfazed by elections. Political parties and candidates apparently function in their hands as disposable tools to be picked up or discarded at will. The elite executive class similarly is unfazed by markets, being compensated equally for performance and nonperformance. Doesn't a corporation's board of directors have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that executive compensation is tied to performance, as in increasing shareholder value? That's a fine theory, but the executives choose the board, which in turn sets executive compensation. It's a clubby world at the top. I wish I could handpick the people who set my compensation. I might even signal to them my availability to join their boards and, you know, one hand washes the other. This mutual aid society for the financial elite, the system of interlocking directorates, ensures with rare exceptions that even when executives fail to deliver shareholder value (shares in the major U.S. banks now sell for pocket change), the responsible chieftains will remain ensconced.

And somewhere in the global financial mess, there must be fraud. No one would have purchased the toxic assets unless the value of those assets had been misrepresented. But will criminal charges be brought, will anyone besides expendable flunky scapegoats be prosecuted? There's been no indication so far. Besides, our laws of incorporation invent legal fictions, called corporations, to protect personal fortunes from corporate missteps. Talk about leverage.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo

In short, the top-level, most connected bankers, even the deadbeats, are not subordinate to anyone. They occupy the top office of the control pyramid, despite the quaint reassurances that mass media spoon feed to the public about an elected government being in charge. More saccharin, yum, yum.

Untouched, unscathed, unruffled, a bemused Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, the eye of the hurricane, surveys his bequeathed estate from sea to shining sea. He is a dictator answerable to NO ONE. Given the inability of elections, laws, and markets to deliver a just system of accountability, what should be taught in civics classes today? That all that business about democracy, elections, the consent of the governed, the balance of powers, and all the rest of it is a bunch of fairy tales? Maybe. Weave those fantasies in with the mythic rivalry between capitalists and socialists and you've got a realistic curriculum for the current generation.

Capitalism and socialism, those wacky kids, poking each other in the eye and calling each other names, a regular Punch and Judy sideshow: "Am I a Democrat or a Republican? I'm both and neither. Never mind that man behind the curtain. Let my slapstick transfix you!"

It's an obsolete rivalry, folks. OK, break it up and go home.

For one thing, a premise of the capitalist/socialist rivalry, that the public and private sectors are distinct entities, has evaporated. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, central players in the current debacle, are government owned corporations, mutant entities whose operations span the supposed gulf between the public and private sectors. And consider the revolving door that connects federal office holders with Wall Street board rooms and lobbying consultants. Same people, different letterhead. What about the privatizing of government functions? If I'm a peacekeeper in Kabul, what difference does it make if my paycheck says U.S. Army or Blackwater ? In either case the money is taken from the taxpayer and given to me, via the Pentagon. Where there is an intervening private contractor, it's just another layer in the bureaucracy, skimming salaries at taxpayer expense.

And don't forget about the venerable tradition of budgetary earmarks and pork that codify through legislation the transfer of public monies into private hands. Indeed, all government procurement networks redistribute wealth from taxpayers to private beneficiaries. Corporations lay off employees, who then collect unemployment from the government, which pays those benefits from monies pulled from private hands by taxation. And now we have the spectacle of Too Big To Fail (TBTF). The banking and auto industry bailouts, by eliminating the possibility of failure, pull the rug out from under capitalism. TBTF? There's a cure for that. It's called anti-trust.

Then there's the nuclear bomb of all public/private demolitons, the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is presented to the public as if it were an agency of the government, and most people probably believe that it is, but the Federal Reserve is a system of privately held banks whose shares are not available for purchase by the public but are held by a small clutch of elite shareholders.

Capitalist/Socialist? Don't bother. The public and private sectors of the economy are so intricately interwoven and intertwined and interdependent at this point that economic models based on some categorical distinction between the two sectors are just incoherent. "Public sector" and "private sector" are no more than tropes that radio talk jocks spew.

But how about Master/Slave? Now there's an economic distinction that remains meaningful.

When I was a youngster futurists populated my prospective adulthood with personal helicopters and lawn-mowing robots. The promise of technology was wealth and leisure for the masses, because machines would do the work. The technology arrived, right on schedule. Automation delivered the promised per-capita productivity improvement. So, given the new industrial efficiencies, where's the wealth and leisure for the masses? As Sarah Palin might say, "I ain't seein' it."

What was wrong with the crystal ball?

It apparently failed to account for something. That overlooked variable seems to have been the ability and willingness of the gilded class to redistribute wealth from our pockets to theirs, without guns or political revolutions, but simply by sucking pensions into the financial markets (the 401k swindle), then deregulating and manipulating those markets. At least Bush failed to suck in Social Security or that would have been wiped out too.

If it's time to restructure the economy, let me suggest that we go through a simple exercise and ask ourselves, "What should an economic system do?" The problem is that we (are encouraged to) confuse means and ends. An economic system should not be graded in terms of markets, taxes, profits, or other abstractions. The success or failure of the economy should be defined in terms of feeding, clothing, housing, and educating everybody. There's enough wealth to do it. If markets get the job done, great. If centralized planning does it, great. Those things are potential means. They possess no intrinsic merit. Their merit derives only from their results.

Moral of the story, getting back to The Spotlight: If you want to insulate your interests from criticism, get on the enemies list of some outspoken bigots. Getting lumped in with targets of bigotry will coat you in Teflon. "You're criticizing me? Look, those bigots are criticizing me too. You must be a kook like them." This tactic is glaringly evident in official attempts recently to link criticism of the Federal Reserve and criticism of globalism to "violent" "terrorist" groups. Only an enemy combatant would chant, "End the Fed"?

Fortunately, a new generation is growing up that, thanks to Ron Paul and others, effectively has decoupled the redneck mentality from a critique of the Federal Reserve and never internalized the taboo against questioning monetary policy along with fiscal policy.

Then again, if only the conspiracy theorists had praised to the hills the piety and patriotism of the Federal Reserve. Then we might not find ourselves becoming reduced to slavery, indebted financially to such vile masters as the plutocratic kleptomaniacal oligarchy that owns the presses that print the money.

Militant Atheists Stir the Pot

2009-03-05T11:18:00.001-11:00

An interesting debate—Hitchens and D’Souza are capable and entertaining—but frustrating, because the debaters fail to tease apart several discrete issues:

Do people inspired by religion or secularism tend to behave virtuously or wickedly?

Does any answer to the above question have any bearing on the existence or non-existence of God?

What are the merits and demerits of the philosophical, logical, scientific and theological arguments for and against the existence of God?

Even if the arguments for the existence of a supreme being prevail, would those successful arguments necessarily have any bearing on the status of the Bible or any other scriptural writing?

The current atheism-religion debate launched by Hitchins, Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and other militant atheists tends to conflate these issues. Much is at stake, and I commend the new breed of atheists for their in-your-face style (lord knows the other side has been in everybody’s face for a long, long time). But clarity isn’t served by rhetoric that veers herky-jerky from morality to theology to cosmology to anthropology, etc., without ever spending enough time in one place to dig in.

The Man Who Destroyed America

2009-02-22T08:58:00.007-11:00

IF YOU VOTED for George W. Bush for president, then you must search your soul deeply and find that place where your gullibility lies, and purge from your soul that place and cast it into the furnace of hell and watch it burn until you know that it is consumed beyond any chance of resurrection, and swear by God then that you never again will drop your guard and be taken in by a facade of patriotism and religiosity.

The Bushes and their cohorts have no interest in the welfare of the United States of America. Their only regard for the republic and its democratic institutions lies in their capacity to be commandeered. As president, Bush prostituted the country to serve the interests of the emerging global control system, in which the Bushes and their circles operate.

The control system is undaunted by distinctions between the public and private sectors, between political parties, or between ideologies. It is a supranational, suprapolitical movement that rests on three legs:

1. The financial sector that in the United States revolves around the Federal Reserve system of banks, and globally works through the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and similar organizations

2. The energy sector that constitutes John D. Rockefeller's legacy, the transnational petroleum industry

3. The military sector, made up of the Pentagon and its procurement networks, martial enforcement power encircling a financial black hole.

Review the legacy of George W. Bush's presidency, and you will see that he worked diligently, behind a ruse of incompetence and homeland security, to advance the interests of these controlling sectors of the emerging world system.

It remains to be seen whether the current economic collapse is the product of an overreaching miscalculation on the part of the globalists, in which case they might be at risk and will work to, at least partially, right the ship, or whether the current situation reflects a plan to deflate the middle class and impose on humankind a global feudalism that reduces the strata of world society to two classes: master and slave.

In the meantime, let history remember George W. Bush as the man who destroyed America.

Swiss watches, Italian shoes, French wine, and American cars

2009-02-08T09:44:00.002-11:00

The TARP auto industry bailout has less to do with the U.S. economy than with America as a mindset. Economically, the auto industry got a big bailout already, on January 1, 1980, when the law allowing 401(k) accounts went into effect, providing a new way for U.S. corporations to fund worker retirements. As corporations phased in 401(k) plans, they phased out the old pension plans, which they said burdened them when competing against foreign manufacturers.

Apparently, at least as for the auto industry, it wasn’t enough. In December 2008, the big three begged Congress for more help, and after a round of ceremonial debate, a generous bailout of $24.9 billion was granted. But why? Any economic hit to the U.S. economy from the collapse of the big three would have been short term.

Just how would the demise of the big three impact the economy? The suffering of employees, extending down the supply chain, would be very real, as it would be in the wake of any large corporate demise. But the bigger picture would be anything but dire.

If the big three automakers perished, their best engineers, business managers, sales reps and other key employees would start new ventures. Entrepreneurs would fill the void with new car companies—built on new technologies, new production methods, and new distribution channels. And venture capital, not government bailout money. And if there was a shortage of private seed money, the government could provide. If government funding is the proper way to stimulate nascent industry, as is presumed by the recent bailout, why should the public sector favor proven losers, why not seed upstarts?

Economics cannot be the reason for the auto bailout. Market resiliency would fill the gap left by the big three in a heartbeat. So why invest $billions to prop up industrial dinosaurs?

As Tevye would explain, “Tradition!”

GM, Chrysler and Ford are no longer essentially manufacturing businesses. Sure, they slap together a few chassis, which nobody wants, but that’s incidental to their real role, which is cultural. They are organs of the collective psyche. Manufacturing cars is part of America’s identity. Psychologically, the big three are mythic players in America’s field of dreams.

And the auto executives know this. They know that their enterprise is part of the American mythos. The U.S. auto industry is so much a part of the identity of the United States that auto executives know they are immune to the disciplines of the market, that sentimentality will trump reason. Like the monopoly of professional baseball, the big three auto makers are vouchsafed their tri-opoloy by national sentiment. Nothing to do with economics. They are saved into perpetuity by a collective nostalgic pining for America’s manufacturing glory days. Making cars is as much our national pastime as pitching fastballs. And Detroit occupies as cherished a place in Americana as does Yankee Stadium.

Other countries have had centuries to incorporate their native crafts into their national identities. With technology speed-up, the United States has done it in less than a century. Just as the Swiss have their watches, the Italians their shoes, the French their wines, Americans have their big honkin’ cars.

The United States’ frontier sensibility has succumbed to domestication. We have joined the old world. We navigate by quaintness.

Good God, Why the Ungodly Fear of God?

2009-01-18T11:21:00.004-11:00

I got a treat a while back in my inbox. A man named John Smart invited me to join an online community, the Evo-Devo Universe (EDU). Mr. Smart had found the star larvae site and liked what he saw (or thought he did). He said he thought the ideas on the site complemented other ideas being developed in the community. I looked at Mr. Smart’s own site and the EDU site and got excited about hooking up with these brazen visionaries.

I can understand Mr. Smart’s interest in star larvae. Here’s an excerpt from EDU’s Project Page:

Problem. Recent developments in cosmology, evolutionary developmental biology, and complexity sciences are providing new but scattered ways to understand our universe in a broader, ‘meta-Darwinian’ framework in which selectionist evolutionary and replicative, hierarchical developmental processes appear to generate complexity at multiple scales.

Solution. These results and hypotheses need to be explored, criticized, analyzed and possibly integrated into an expanded conceptual framework, by an interdisciplinary scholarly research community, Evo Devo Universe (EDU).

Links to members’ sites on the EDU People page lead to lots of fascinating angles on evolution, information theory, cosmology and other topics.

I replied to Mr. Smart, maybe too provocatively. I started expounding on people who have creative insights but become overly preoccuppied with establishing scientific credentials. I wrote,

People I encounter who have an interest in speculative cosmology, or whatever we might call our endeavor, tend toward extremes of scientific rigidity or New Age wooliness. At least, that is my observation. I try to keep my thoughts on these matters somewhere in the middle. The scientific types tend to be preoccupied with establishing scientific credentials for their ideas. While I have bolstered my speculations with scientific references, where I am able, I have grown less concerned with receiving blessings from science. My project is philosophical, theological, political, psychological and has many other dimensions, including the scientific. I don't feel a compunction to position all other dimensions subordinate to the scientific. I think that humankind can be served by conceptual breakthroughs in philosophy, theology, etc., as much as by breakthroughs in science. (Of course science has a certain privileged veto power, and if any idea I propose is scientifically disproven, I will have to abandon or reformulate that idea.)

He wrote back, having looked deeper into the starlarvae site, and withdrew his offer to join the EDU community. The scope of the community’s research themes specifically excludes

Non-naturalistic orthogenesis or teleology, intelligent design, supernaturalism, and theology.

So, by weaving in theology, I disqualified www.starlarvae.org from joining the club. On the site, I refer to the supernatural only dismissively or if I need to place an idea in a historical context. But I crossed the line. Mr. Smart was put off also by my dba, Advanced Theological Systems. I explained to him,

The name Advanced Theological Systems is perhaps a misguided lark, but it makes me chuckle. I worked for a while in the high-tech sector, and "Advanced [fill in the blank] Systems" became such a cliché of organizational nomenclature, I couldn't resist dropping in "theology" for the irony vis a vis sci/tech.

If I ever exorcise the theological threads from the site I'll approach you anew. I understand your apprehension. Somewhere in the blog I write about theophobia, which you might have a mild case of. It's a common affliction among many of my friends. And it unfortunately relinquishes God, with all his sociopolitical clout, to hands that I would rather not see wielding such clout.

The “Exorcise” comment referred to his offer to reconsider, if I ever scrubbed theology from the site, his invitation to join the EDU community.

It never occurred to me that the theological angle (and I’m not sure I could formulate precisely what it is) would be a showstopper. But I was fascinated. I asked him for permission to post our email exchange here on the blog, but he demurred, saying that he would have taken more care with his words if he’d been writing for a public audience. I think that’s fair, and I’m respecting his wishes.

Maybe I should quit being surprised by big thinkers who bristle before God. Poor God, so misunderstood.

Ontogeny, Phylogeny, Teleology and Evolution’s Empirical Conundrum

2008-12-28T06:53:00.014-11:00

Scientists and philosophers of science have proposed various metrics by which to assess the merits of scientific theories. An often cited one is Karl Popper’s requirement that a theory be in principle empirically falsifiable. For example, the discovery of rabbit fossils in Precambrian geological strata would demolish Darwinian theory. Another often cited measure of merit is a theory’s ability to make accurate predictions. This has always been a difficult hurdle for Darwinian evolution. What predictions can the theory make?

Unfortunately for Darwinian theory, the difficulties are several. They include the time scale required, the need to rely on necessarily incomplete fossil remains, and the small sample (one planet). But something new has changed the situation. Darwinian theory now is in a position to belly up to the bar and, like other respectable scientific theories, make some bold predictions.

What has changed is our ability to analyze DNA. Genomic sequencing and analysis projects are in full swing around the world. Researchers are using new technologies to, not only sequence DNA, but also statistically analyze those sequences across species. So, Darwinians, what’s going to come of it? If you understand how changes in DNA propagate through generations within a species and into new species, if you understand the sources of genetic novelty, if you understand why some genes are preserved in a species and others selected out, then let’s have some predictions.

What will ongoing genetic sequencing and analysis turn up that will corroborate Darwinian evolution and falsify rivals?

But before we try to pin Darwinists to the mat, let’s entertain a relevant thought experiment, as an intermission:

Let’s suppose that we observe a complex process, one that involves discernibly discrete entities. We might call these entities organisms. We notice that over time, as the process progresses, the organisms give rise to new organisms. And we notice that older organisms perish.

We notice that the descendants differ from their ancestors. As more generations turnover, the forms of the descendants vary more dramatically. Morphological forms, and their attendant functions and behaviors, proliferate through the population of descendant organisms. And, having been fortunate enough to observe the process from its outset, we know that the multiplicity of forms descended, ultimately, from a single ancestral form.

An intriguing process. How to account for it? Let’s consider two competing theories.

(1) We might conjure an explanation that invokes a more or less deterministic influence, one that bridges the generations and guides the process as it works its way from the ancestral form to the many descendant forms. Such an influence would be teleological. We might call this formative influence a genetic program. Its action across the generations would constitute development, an unfolding of pre-programmed potential into a multiplicity of forms.

(2) Alternatively, we might conjure an explanation that invokes nondeterministic, nonteleological factors. We might say that the process is the result of two interacting subprocesses, one being unpredictable changes that exaggerate variation among the members of a generation, and the second being the varying numbers of progeny that members of each generation leave behind. We might call the first subprocess random mutation and the second process natural selection, and we might posit a relationship between the two that causes descendant populations to display a diversity of morphologies (and functions and behaviors) based on pure chance and environmental selection. There is no preprogrammed potential unfolding, just selection among various traits among individuals and a disproportionate retention in descendant generations of the selected traits.

Now comes the hard part: determining which explanation best accounts for the observed process of descent. Being conscientious scientists, we want empirical corroboration. What observations might we make, in principle, that could determine which explanation has the greater merit? How would one distinguish, empirically, a teleological process from a Darwinian one? What would one look for to detect the presence or absence of a program?

Phylogeny: Polymorphous descent from a common ancestor. In principle, what sort of observation would establish the presence or absence of a program?

Ontogeny: Polymorphous descent from a common ancestor. In principle, what sort of observation would establish the presence or absence of a program?

One observation that would help clear the air is the discovery of an information code in the organisms that expresses itself as the organisms’ various morphological traits. The codes for the traits we might call genes. If we were to find genes in ancestors that lay waiting, unexpressed, but are preserved and jump to life in descendant species, this would bolster the case for a programmatic process. A Darwinian process would not predict such a discovery. Darwinism includes no anticipatory mechanism whereby genes needed in the future would be present, though dormant, in ancestors. Only a teleological theory would predict an anticipatory genome. Anticipatory evidence would suggest a pre-coded program underlying the process of multi-generational morphological diversification.

And this is precisely what we observe in ontogeny. We observe that genes dormant in the fertilized ovum do not express themselves until the time comes for them to produce muscle cells, liver cells, brain cells, etc. Then these dormant genes spring to life. Their expression unfolds sequentially to create descendant species of cells of multifarious types.

Or at least this is the prevailing account. Alternatively, maybe it’s just a coincidence that genes dormant in the fertilized ovum are useful in descendant cell types. Maybe nature is resourceful and discovers uses for the inherited supply of genes. It might be the case that the differentiation of cell types during embryonic development has nothing to do with any precoded program. Maybe it’s happenstance, the result of random mutations and natural selection.

This line of thinking probably is not worth pursuing. But is phylogenetic descent really that different? Would the discovery of descendant genes in ancestors argue for a programmed phylogeny, or would it argue only for the happenstance of random mutations and natural selection?

These are no longer rhetorical questions, because genomic sequencing and analysis is finding unexpected, unpredicted instances of descendant genes in ancestors. Does Darwinian evolution predict that the genomes of primitive species should contain genetic programs for newer, more complex species—?The discovery challenges the logic of normal evolution theory, because it suggests that evolution, as ontogeny is thought to do, unfolds from a pre-programmed genetic potential. These findings are ongoing:

A news release (11/24/2005) issued by the journal Trends in Genetics announces that

"Corals and sea anemones (the flowers of the sea), long regarded as merely simple sea-dwelling animals, turn out to be more genetically complex than first realised. They have just as many genes as most mammals, including humans, and many of the genes that were thought to have been "invented" in vertebrates are actually very old and are present in these "simple" animals."

The full text of the release is available at http://www.sars.no/research/technau_Science.pdf

Newer (2007) sequencing and analysis results corroborate the anemone anomalies. Another example comes from research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which found human genes in a marine worm. The news release (11/24/2005) announcing the finding is at http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/aboutus/news/press/press05/press25nov05/index.html

Additional research discovered that genes essential for human nerve cells to communicate with one another are present already in bacteria. This research is described in a NIH news release (6/1/2004) at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/genes.cfm These and other anomalous (in the Darwinian context) results of genome analysis are collected at http://www.panspermia.org/oldgenes.htm.

This page of Brig Klyce’s "Cosmic Ancestry" web site includes commentary on the relevance of these findings to panspermia. The discovery of advanced genes in primitive organisms suggests that the evolution of life on Earth constitutes an ontogeny—the ontogeny of Gaia.

If a process of descent is programmatic, then it would seem to be dependent on some kind of timing mechanism. What triggers the production of new descendant types? How does the developing embryo know when to kick out a new cell/tissue type? In the case of ontogeny, researchers posit various chemical signals from within the organism and/or from its gestating parent as potential triggers. In the case of phylogeny the timing triggers are harder to determine.

Nonetheless, various candidates present themselves. Phylogeny might also be paced by chemical signals. Organisms exchange chemical signals all the time, through eating one another, through exchanges of pheromones. Terence McKenna argues that ingestion of plant drugs among our primate ancestors played a role in human speciation. Other environmental triggers might include the terraforming of Earth’s atmosphere by the release of oxygen from photosynthesis. Glaciations might act as triggers. Industrial pollution is another candidate.

Maybe the prevailing accounts of ontogeny and phylogeny are artifacts of the time scales involved. If we could observe a sped-up movie of evolution might we perceive a programmatic development from the first to the most recent species—the gestation of a pregnant planet from impregation to delivery? If the embryonic development of a long-lived organism required a few billion years, might it not look like a Darwinian process?

So how do approaches to evolution stack up as scientific theories based on their abilities to predict? A teleological, programmed model, predicts that genes active in descendant species can be found already in distant ancestors. What does the Darwinian model predict? Genomic sequencing and analysis is in the early stages. There’s time to render predictions. The star larvae hypothesis predicts an accumulating pile of anomalous data that will stretch the Darwinian model to the breaking point. Those data, however, will find themselves well integrated in a new paradigm, one that proposes an overarching ontogeny that envelops evolution and repositions biology into the role of larvae to the stars.

2008-11-08T15:20:00.016-11:00

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

Rare McLuhan Audio

2008-10-19T08:13:00.018-11:00

I rescued from cassette this talk that Marshall McLuhan gave at Johns Hopkins University in the mid 1970s. I have not found an audio file of this talk anywhere online. So far as I know it's an original contribution to the archive of McLuhan audio. Enjoy (audio starts at about 00:04).

This blog includes many posts that explicate and apply McLuhan's insights.

(note added 7/17/2010) : I've had trouble getting audio players to work right on this page. If you can recommend a reliable player to embed here, please let me know: heresiarch[at]starlarvae.org .

Rare McLuhan audio

SUPERCLASS, the Global Power Elite and the World They are Making

2008-10-05T11:41:00.016-11:00

A moneyed elite controls the world. That’s conspiracy theory. And that's just the way it is, according to David Rothkopf, author of Superclass. Rothkopf hobnobs with this elite. His resume includes a stint as director of Kissinger Associates. (Yes, that Kissinger.) He describes mingling with the multibillionaires at Davos. But the book is not an exposé. The author describes the structure of the elite, the astronomical magnitude of individual fortunes, the revolving doors that connect the U.S. Defense, Commerce, and Treasury Departments with the board rooms of the Fortune 100, and he seems perfectly pleased with it all.

Rothkopf’s purpose is less than clear. At times he plays the anthropologist and renders an objective, dispassionate account of rites and rituals among the upper tiers of the global control hierarchy. He narrates a kind of travelogue of interesting journeys among the high and mighty.

Ostensibly, Rothkopf also is trying to debunk conspiracy theories. He portrays the elite as people with a strong work ethic who embrace honest capitalism. They’re just smart operators. Nothing conspiratorial. But he seems oblivious to the prospect of the sheer magnitude of the elite’s wealth and influence delivering an outcome that for all practical purposes is identical to that of the successful execution of a conspiracy. When the wealthy can shuffle back and forth between the highest executive levels of the public and private sectors, then conspiracy might be an imprecise notion, but not one fundamentally flawed. Rothkopf describes a vast financial control elite whose machinations carry it ever nearer to total global control. A conspiracy by any other name . . . .

Late in the book, Rothkopf does address conspiracy theories directly and plies the old saw about people being scared by the apparent randomness of events and then seeking comfort in the idea that events are managed from behind the scenes. He writes,

“Conspiracy theory is the comfort food of politics. Actually, it is more than that. According to psychologists, it fills a fundamental desire to balance perceived causes with perceived consequences and thus satisfies our sense that bad outcomes are not the product of happenstance.”

He then offers a couple facile quotes from psychologists:

“If we think big events like a president being assassinated can happen at the hands of a minor individual, that points to the unpredictability and randomness of life, and that unsettles us."

and

Conspiracy theories are “psychologically reassuring because what they say is that everything is connected, nothing happens by accident and that there is some kind of order in the world.”

What psychobabble. Insipid.
If conspiracy theories are so reassuring, so warm and fuzzy, then why does a prominent conspiracy magazine go by the name, Paranoia? Why not, Milk and Cookies?

Think about how empty is this dismissal of conspiracy theories. They put people at ease? Puh-leeze.

Take as an example the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis. What is the more comforting belief, that the bridge fell because budget cuts reduced inspections, because the warnings that were offered were ignored, because the bridge was overloaded with equipment during repairs, because the original construction used inferior materials—in other words, because of human foibles and bad luck?

OR, is it more comforting to believe that the bridge was brought down deliberately by evil agents conspiring behind the scenes?

The idea that conspiracy theories are comfort food is ridiculous. Just the opposite is true. They are bitter fare. Start espousing conspiracy theories, and your loved ones eventually will start asking you questions like, “If you actually believe that, then how can you sleep at night?” The conspiratorial view is unsettling.

Indeed, people looking for comfort amid the seeming randomness of big events turn to the reassuring tones of network television and mainstream print media to be told that all is as it should be and that our elected leaders are on top of things. The alphabet soup of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, BBC, and NPR constitutes the comfort food of politics.

Of course, one can defend the concentration of wealth in the hands of so few with an assertion that those with wealth are deserving of it. But this leads to a Darwinian tautology:

Who are the wealthy? The deserving.

Who are the deserving? The wealthy.

Come January’s transfer of power, we’ll see how many Bush administration officials and how many congressmen ousted by the election dash over to Wall Street to catch the monies they just pitched over there. Maybe this was the real reason the bailout had to be rushed. The bill had to be signed before the new administration and congress took office. Fresh leadership might have come under pressure to consider the welfare of people outside the millionaire’s club.

It worked by skulduggery, but an autonomous executive class has positioned itself on top of the American masses. The concentrated wealth that this class wields renders inoperable any distinction between public and private sectors. Beyond the reach of democratic institutions and insulated from the discipline of markets, the executive class alternately assumes public office to ratify its wishes then retires to the boardroom to pocket the results in a perpetual cycle of self enrichment.

Conservative: Someone who hates socialism when it benefits poor people but loves socialism when it benefits the wealthy.

And the winners are
J. P. Morgan Chase
Goldman Sachs
Citigroup

Philosophical Disputation

2008-09-18T13:41:00.003-11:00

One reason this blog has languished is that I've been airing, or baring, my thoughts in a more interactive environment, at a philosophy forum site. Once you log in, you can view a log of my comments there HERE.

RANDOM CHANCE BOGUS

2008-07-07T13:22:00.004-11:00

Insofar as (otherwise) scientific accounts of nature invoke chance and randomness, they admit their weakness as scientific accounts.

Chance and randomness are fudge factors. They play the same role in scientific thinking as is played by miracles in religious thinking. And they reduce scientific thought to quasi-religious thought.

The question to anyone who explains anything in terms of chance and randomness is, "What are you talking about?" Take quantum physics as an example of a discipline that leans heavily on randomness. "Random" in quantum mechanics seems only to mean that physicists can’t predict the outcome of quantum processes. But that just begs the question, Why can’t the outcome be predicted? There are only three possibilities:

1) The outcome is not predictable, because, though deterministic and in principle predictable, the process involves a causal chain too complicated to unravel.

2) The outcome is not predictable, because it "just happens," that is, it is an event that occurs without having been caused. This would seem to pose a problem for science. At least miracles have causes, albeit supernatural ones. But for an event to occur with no cause whatsoever? (In quantum physics the outcome of a quantum collapse is taken to be random, even though triggered by an environmental factor, or, in the case of Roger Penrose’s Objective Reduction, the collapse is caused by gravity. But in any case, the collapse can in principle produce any of a number of outcomes, only one of which actually occurs. Which one occurs from among the possibilities is not predictable, and so the spectre random is invoked as a gloss that lets the scientists elude the responsibility of causal elucidation.)

3) The process is not predictable, because a subjective agent decides, or at least influences, the outcome.

Scientific thinking leans on chance and randomness in some cases when scientists observe seemingly teleological effects, as in the seeming directedness of evolution from simple to complex organisms, but scientists are professionally prohibited, and probably temperamentally inhibited, from invoking teleological explanations. Hence, the usefulness of the gap-fillers, chance and random.

To see in more detail why chance and randomness are conceptual fuzz and need to be expunged from scientific thinking, exposed as spectres, consider the classic example of a deck of cards, shuffled in the normal way or arranged according to a rule.

Shuffling is taken to be a randomizing of the deck, so that if you were to pick a card from position thirty in a thoroughly shuffled deck, the identity of that particular card would be a matter of chance. You can’t predict it. But the card at position thirty in a nonrandom deck, one that is set up deliberately in a contrived pattern according to a rule, should be predictable. This is how these things typically are understood.

But the opposite seems actually to be the case.

The position of any card in a shuffled deck is usually figured to be given by chance, but what’s occurred during the shuffling of the deck is that the indeterminism has been removed, and the process has become deterministic, with a determined outcome. The positions of the cards in the deck are determined by deterministic physical determinants: the stiffness of the cards, how much they’re bent back, how quickly and with how much force you roll your thumbs over the edges and so forth, starting with the original ordering of the cards in the deck. So if you knew all the physical variables, you could, in theory, predict which card would end up at position thirty. Because there’s no indeterminism involved, an algorithm will solve the problem. It’s just a matter of the physical characteristics of the cards, and how much force is imparted to them,how much they bend, and so forth.

So actually you could predict the so-called chance or random result. The “chance” or “random” aspect of the shuffling—the absence of deliberate ordering—is precisely what allows card positions to be predicted. The exclusion of indeterminate causes makes the outcome predictable.

Now, if you’re given a deck of cards, and you’re told that someone has arranged them in a particular pattern and then suddenly died or been abducted by aliens, then you have no way to determine—to predict—which card is at position thirty. Given no additional information, there’s no calculation you can do based on the physics of the cards and the initial arrangement that will tell you where any particular card is or which card is at any particular position. Additional information is needed to figure it out: the rule by which the cards were arranged.

The "random" arrangement is the predictable arrangement. The nonrandom arrangement is the unpredictable one.

The dead or abducted person’s choice in arranging the cards, the rule they select, is presumably not deterministic. That person had a range of choices and decided on one. They might have chosen a convoluted rule or a simple one. To someone who doesn’t know the rule, if it’s a convoluted one, say like find the first ace and double the value of its ordinal position in the deck and square that number and divide by five and take the second digit of the remainder for the next card . . . something like that, the result might well look like a random arrangement to someone who doesn’t know the code. Once the code and the initial arrangement are known, one can use an algorithm to determine card thirty. This is cryptography.

This example underscores a problem with the naïve view of information and information theory. There’s no way to determine whether a seemingly random set of signals actually is random—"does not encode information"—or whether the set of signals is highly ordered and contains a great deal of information, unless one knows that a code or rule was used to arrive at the order. And one knows what the rule was. Or if one knows the initial physical conditions and all of the physical variables involved. In other words, it is impossible to determine a priori the signal-to-noise ratio of any set of pulses.

Take, as another illustration, solar radiation, or sunshine, a seemingly "random" mixture of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. What is the information content of sunshine? It tells us about the nuclear reactions occurring inside the sun, so it has some information content. But it also tells the plants it strikes in which direction to face their leaves. Does that imply additional content? In the case of conscious minds deliberating over wavelengths so as to discern something about solar physics, sunshine is taken to contain information, and solar researchers are involved in information decoding. But the response of the plants is "automatic," not deliberate, and few people would interpret it as an instance of information processing, only energy processing. But what is the meaningful difference?

The notion that information is somehow inherent in physical nature makes sense only if we assume that there is a natural code. I suppose we WANT to believe that information inheres in nature. And so we’re led necessarily to some kind of crypto-theology. In other words, if there’s information in nature, then there’s a code (design), and then there’s a coder (designer). Any philosophy that takes information to be an inherent aspect of physical nature is necessarily a theological philosophy. One way around this, for congenital theophobes, is to deny that information inheres in nature and to admit that it inheres only in conscious minds. Same thing with computer memory. The strings of 0's and 1's are geometrical configurations of electrons in spacetime in the physical circuitry, but only a mind can determine whether any information is present.

I’m not sure many scientifically minded people would sign onto that necessity.

The Dark Father

2008-05-26T14:59:00.004-11:00

The Dark Father

The dark father shakes your hand. He shakes his head. He’s an invisible force. He can’t afford to be detected. Fame is beneath him.

The dark father wails that you abort, while he aborts you. He takes a torch and burns up the forests and the jungles. He’s incestuous. He tortures orphans with Bibles dipped in acid.

The dark father catalogs your genes. He plants your tumor. He harvests your organs.

The dark father luxuriates in private jets. His wide stance stretches from Ottawa to Mexico City. He incubates in a controlled demolition. The dark father mummifies himself inside a false flag. He cultivates calamities then commits atrocities. He builds weapons of mass contingency, irony, and solidarity. He sells them to himself. He never gets caught. The spontaneous conspiracy of networks conceals him. His favorite line, “. . . a small elite managed to escape.”

The dark father picks his successors and assassinates them. He picks his nose. He promotes an egalitarian classless society and a monolithic majoritarian one. He doesn’t care about society. He swipes two point three trillion dollars from the Pentagon. He twists his rosary into a noose and taunts, “Would you rather be safe or free?”

He’s a savant. He is incunabula of the owl. He’s environmentally friendly. He gauges your carbon footprint, files it next to your fingerprint. He’s profeminist. He taxes tits. He pays women to give their children to schools. The dark father prays more prayers than the church allows. He’s a faith-based nihilist. His intelligent designer engineered marijuana, whose fibers he spins into prisons. The dark father drafts a constitutional testament. He writes the constitution right out of it. He says the constitution is economically inefficient. He’s the serpent who tells the truth.

His journalists search no further than politics. Anything that deflects the definition of ownership. Anything constrained to spectacle. He pays the pundits to debate the relative usefulness of the various lies. The dark father strikes with a swollen breast and a clenched fist. His left hand grabs the remote. His right tunes the radio. He’s the Central Scrutinizer. He’s a skull and a bone. He’s your average pinhead.

The dark father promotes elections, the opiate of the masses. He plants a sign for each candidate. He plants a chip in each citizen. He eats your children. He eats his own children. He eats all the children. It keeps them from organizing.

The dark father turns onto waterboarding. It leaves no mark. He tunes into Judge Judy and Judge Marco and Judge Rudy. They dispose of juries. He drops out of checks and balances. Too much paperwork. The dark father charges interest on air, collects it from the IRS. He conjures currencies. He conflates markets and morality, pockets the efficiencies of globalization. He dictates his own history. He majored in shadows, got his pedigree from the Ivy League. He’s atmospheric. He’s the most postmodern primitive, the late archaic futurist.

The dark father got an inside job with the new world order on nine eleven. He lies through pomp and ceremony. Power? Too vague. He covets the concrete, CONTROL.

Journalism, R. I. P.

2008-04-06T14:38:00.005-11:00

Declining newspaper circulations, the rise of the blogosphere, fraud scandals, fair and balanced Faux News and its imitators, media consolidation, and, of course, the epidemic of “spin” –all contribute to public cynicism about the integrity and vitality of the fourth estate. Well, now it’s official. Journalism is dead, fossilized. Its mummified remains are on public display at the journalism museum, or Newseum. Next time you’re in Washington, D. C., be sure to pay your respects to the remains of a once noble enterprise, journalism. We hardly knew ye.

Bush's Homeland Security Wisdom

2008-03-01T04:53:00.007-11:00

I figured out why President Bush is so certain that his policies will make us more secure.

He believes that the terrorists hate us and want to kill us because we are prosperous and free. At least, that is what he says.

So, his strategy has been to make us less prosperous and less free, a strategy that, with the help of Congress, he has successfully implemented.

Therefore, the terrorist threat is reduced.

And, therefore, to completely eliminate the threat, all we need to do is completely eliminate our prosperity and freedom.

That guy is smarter than I thought!

Anticipatory (Intelligent) Design Science

2008-01-01T07:48:00.001-11:00

Buckminster Fuller riffs on the apparent design of Universe. Human beings access the design principles of Universe through their capacity to generalize. We have plenty of resources to feed, clothe, house everyone on Earth. Scarcity is a myth. But neither messiah nor political reform will make it happen. Only anticipatory design science delivers the goods.

Space Collective Video

2007-11-23T10:43:00.000-11:00

Quantum Philosophy

2007-10-28T14:24:00.000-11:00

Just posted this to Stuart Hameroff's Blog, at http://stuarthameroffblog.com/

The quantum shockwave that hit physics in the 20th Century is hitting biology in the 21st.

Can you say, “Paradigm shift”?

If Stuart is right, and biological processes as diverse as vision and photosynthesis, let alone consciousness per se, are driven by (or receive organizing information from) the funda-mental level of the universe, then we have to wonder what other processes rely on, or actualize, the Planck scale’s Platonic forms. While Stuart and other professional researchers nail down the technical evidence and arguments, I am more interested in the speculative philosophy that will complement quantum biology.

For example, it seems that if some behaviors of unicellular organisms are influenced by quantum information processing—that is, if Stuart is right—then we’re justified in asking what the range of such influence might be. If we accept the premise that biological metabolisms access quantum information, then we may as well admit that we’re in a whole new ballgame. For example, Stuart’s presentation on cilia got me thinking . . . .

The light-processing (quantum-information-extracting) cilia in the rods and cones of a human eye function like the light-sensitive flagella of protozoa, as Stuart explains in his presentation. What he does not mention, though I assume he is aware of it, is that the eukaryotic protozoa that possess cilia and flagella likely received those organelles from bacteria—spirochaetes—during endosymbiosis. This is Lynn Margulis’ revision of evolution theory’s model of the emergence of eukaryotic cells. Margulis proposed years ago that the first complex cells developed from symbiotic communities of bacteria. Initially rebuked by the scientific community, she persevered, and, with new techniques of genetic analysis supporting her ideas, she prevailed. The Margulis model of bacterial endosymbiosis is generally accepted as the most plausible account of the evolution of eukaryotic cells.

Is a prokaryotic endosymbiosis that produces the more complex eukaryotic cells best explained by purely chemical operations or by formative inputs from other souces, such as Platonic information at the Planck scale? Here’s where we hit a very sensitive scientific nerve, because we—Hameroff, et al.—propose that organisms receive information from sources other than those mediated by the senses. A conventional scientist would dismiss the very idea as being an invocation of supernaturalism, of extrasensory perception—a violation of the scientific doctrine of empiricism.

Any attempt to link the behaviors of organisms to information input from a nonlocal source (presumably Platonic information is not limited by the speed of light, because it does not propagate, but simply exists fully accessible at/from every location in spacetime) inevitably will start to resemble a doctrine of intelligent design, with the Platonic forms playing the role of the intelligent designer. This would seem to deliver to scientists a trump card that corresponds to the God card of religionists.

If any natural process eludes a precise accounting in terms of all its causal events and mechanisms, religionists have always been able to point to God’s influence, divine intervention, “Intelligent Design.” As quantum biology develops, scientists increasingly will be able to invoke their own God of the gaps: Platonic information from the Planck scale. This revision to the philosophy of science not only opens the door to the spiritual dimension, as Stuart points out, but also to teleological models of evolution and human history, such as the one developed at

www.starlarvae.org.

Techgnosophy

2007-10-21T09:01:00.000-11:00

As content management across the Internet matures, to where, as of this writing, content gets retrieved and distributed on the fly routinely from disparate sources, each of which might hold only a small part of the requested content. The retrieval sequence proceeds according to rules of modal logic operating on content metadata. The agglomerated content gets synthesized and sequenced at the point of end-user delivery. BitTorrent manages and delivers content by this model.

The biological cell manages content the same way. Each protein molecule synthesized is content delivered according to a request. The cell is the end user. But the delivery of the proteinaceous content occurs by way of a vast content management system behind the scenes. It’s hard to find in the processes of that system anything resembling a one-to-one correspondence—between anything and anything else—as in the old one-gene, one-protein model of genetic expression. The protein delivered does not correspond to any contiguous sequence of genes in the cell’s DNA, but is a product of genetic snippets gathered from many places, and edited and re-arranged before the final sequence is fed into the ribosome. This has been going on, on Earth—let alone elsewhere—for a few billion years.

Nature is the apotheosis of technology. Our evolutionary and historical path already is well trod. Nature has done it. Events of the temporal world unfold along a metabolic pathway that leads from the organic to the inorganic and back again inside the feedback loop of the stellar life cycle. Human technology and its industry, seemingly antagonistic toward nature, constitute a phase of nature’s reproductive cycle. Taking the step to the next phase is the immediate opportunity.

A New Marriage of Brain and Computer

2007-10-10T15:29:00.001-11:00

Google corporate hosts Stuart Hameroff explaining quantum consciousness (OrchOR).

Bodies and Tissues of Organisms

2007-09-30T04:43:00.001-11:00

Nuclear Anatomy Lesson

Let's Be Reasonable

2007-09-17T14:20:00.001-11:00

I’m watching Bill Moyers (sitting in for Charlie Rose) interviewing the Bright philosopher Daniel Dennett. The controversy they commit themselves to, the seemingly interminable science-religion debate, seems beside the point, even obsolete, philosophically. Politically, the debate demands attention, but to commit oneself to one partisan end or the other is to function as a useful idiot for people who might not share your interests. After all, careers and fortunes are at stake. Not everyone with an argument to make is honest and altruistic, whether he brandishes a cross or an equation.

The debate implodes philosophically because it rests on a false dichotomy: science or religion. Like other polarized debates, the truth in this one likely lies somewhere in the middle. The task is to synthesize a syncretism—to jettison the superstitions and think creatively.

First, let’s unpack the two extremes and see what's inside. Cracking open religion, we sift through doctrines and dogmas, ritual practices, canonical writings, secured sanctums, reverence toward founders and exemplars, and tools for neutralizing heretics. Inside science we also find doctrines and dogmas, ritual practices, canonical writings, and so on. You get the picture. So let's figure out what to keep and what to toss.

First off, let’s dump the doctrines and dogmas. The rituals serve a purpose—cultural in the case of religious faith and, in the case of laboratory methodologies, as processes that generate empirical data. The canonical writings we can’t take exactly literally. Even the received history of science is interpreted variously by historians.

But the writings have literary and other cultural and academic value. The scriptural and apocryphal stories, the grand narratives, of a religious or secular culture help the tribe cohere, even if its citizens don’t take the stories literally. The myths and mythologies of the tribe serve as a map its collective psyche; they narrate the broad themes of experience—perhaps only within the culture, perhaps more broadly. The stories, we keep, for the depth they add to experience.

(Hardboiled rationalists might object, finding depth psychology too airy-fairy. In that case, we can scientize myth by supposing that the myth-making propensity travels with the genes, not an unnatural supposition given the role of genes in guiding brain formation. So the myths function in the realm of psychobiology concomitantly as the genes in the realm of sociobiology. Religion minus doctrine and superstition becomes ethics and mythology, with the legitimacy of the guiding myths limited to the allegorical. And in a slightly different but corresponding way the same is true for the grand narratives of science.)

Back to the unpacking. The sanctums serve to mystify, and we might want to demystify what goes on there through education, but the priestly chambers and the laboratories and technical meetings do no overt harm. Reverence toward founders and exemplars can deteriorate into cults of personality, so that’s something to watch. And the notion of heretic would seem to vanish if we eliminate doctrines and dogmas.

So, let’s drop the baggage of doctrine and dogma and stop literalizing the written canons. That much would open the debate to creative resolution (and redeem the heretics).

And let’s be clear that superstition and doctrine are not exclusive to religion and that rejecting religious doctrines doesn’t necessarily lead to atheism and fealty to the proclamations of scientists. The plotless history and future promised by the philosophy of science doesn’t seem any more inviting than do the rigid doctrines and superstitions of religion. Science says we need to reject meaning per se, because it is nothing more than a byproduct of brain metabolism. Our experiences, as epiphenomena of neural metabolism, have no intrinsic value, in the philosophy of science. Nothing can matter, scientifically speaking, because nothing actually exists but spacetime, physical particles, and physical energies. Value, meaning, and purpose exist only derivatively, as subjective noise.

We have to reject the weird nihilism of science as being as doctrinal as religious doctrine. Despite the insistences of scientists, we don’t know whether conscious experience is epiphenomenal or phenomenal. The felt free will of our experience has always been a monkey wrench in the deterministic machinery of science. Descartes tried to meet the challenge by positing two kinds of matter: physical and mental. This dualism continues to unsettle science, because the laws of physics as formulated by scientists do not allow nonphysical causes, such as mind, to affect physical objects. But I can make my arm move by willing that it happen. The path back from the moving arm through the muscular contractions and the nerve impulses to the origin of the signal in my brain leads back to my original intent to raise my arm, and not to anything else.

I make decisions that are not predetermined by the laws of science, and this fly in the ointment of science maps neatly onto the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. Scientists generally are not keen to connect these dots—free will and quantum indeterminacy—and wooly New Age philosophers have rushed in to fill the void, but the dots, through it all, remain, waiting to be connected. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff present a model of consciousness based on a specific neural process that leverages quantum indeterminacies in the brain. Their work, even if incomplete in its details, points the way toward a nondeterministic scientific phenomenology—an empirical ontology of consciousness.

Can God be far behind?

The Racist Heart of Conservatism

2007-09-01T06:58:00.000-11:00

I’ve tried to keep polemic out of this blog. I always admired McLuhan’s ability to spew psychosociological aphorisms inflected politically but without ever being overtly political. It’s largely because you can’t pin him to any position on a left-right spectrum that McLuhan floats without a natural home in the academy. But I must lack McLuhan’s savoir faire, because I can’t find an indirect way to put it:

THE HEART OF CONSERVATIVE POLITICS IS RACIST.

Why do they want to live in gated suburbs? To be far from dark skin. Why do they commute to work in quasi-military vehicles? To protect themselves from dark skin. Why are they fanatical about owning guns? To make sure dark skin keeps its distance.

They love free markets and consumer choice and despise the “nanny state.” But they love to regulate markets in the most severe way and deny consumers choice and arm a supernanny state in the name of the drug war. They love “federalism” and “states’ rights” and celebrate the autonomy of the states to function as “laboratories of democracy.” But when the citizens of a few states voted to make marijuana available to medical patients, the federal government flexed its muscle and threatened doctors with de-licensure. No one on the conservative side complained about this federal interventionism. Why when it comes to drug policy do conservatives run from their principles? Because the primary effect of drug policy is to lock hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned people in cages.

They despise the “death tax” but love the death penalty. Why? Because it disproportionately kills dark-skinned people. Why did New Orleans suffer such a horrible neglect from the Bush administration after hurricane Katrina? Because the skin of New Orleans was too dark. Why do they hate mass transit? Because it might deliver dark skin to their gated suburbs.

And so on.
The blood that runs through the veins of conservatism is racist.

Eugenic Dreams of the Power Elite: Part 1

Eugenic Dreams of the Power Elite: Part 2

Eugenic Dreams of the Power Elite: Part 3

Eugenic Dreams of the Power Elite: Part 4

It Takes a Village to Raise the Dead*

2007-07-28T12:52:00.000-11:00

Clarke's 3rd Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If technology performs (or redefines) miracles, then a survey of miracles might suggest directions in technology. Raising the dead has a famous precedent. Maybe the resurrection was a high-tech trick. Jesus said he was not of this world. And when the trick was over he said his goodbyes and flew home (another tech trick):

"And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight."
Acts of the Apostles 6:9
*Acknowledgment: The title of this post comes from Firesign Theatre's Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death.

FORTUNE COOKIE

2007-07-26T15:34:00.000-11:00

If I'm going to believe people I don't understand, what difference does it make if they're mathematical physicists or fundamentalist theologians? If I don't understand something, what criteria do I use to determine whether it's gobbledygook or a fuller understanding? We're not compelled to believe what we don't understand. We are free to be agnostic. Agnostic with regard to theology. And Agnostic with regard to science. Rationalism and mysticism are two ways of thinking about things. Each delivers benefits and detriments, which can be charted. Which comes out on top? Forget it. We don't have to choose. Our freedoms include the freedom to create cosmologies, theologies and metaphysical systems of whatever complexity—a la carte. We can all be Rortian ironists, ironically, by creating new metaphysical philosophies. Philosophy is a creative art that has to have as its objective breaking the conventions of the tribe, in our case the dualism of rationalism and mysticism (as generalizations of our various guiding dichotomies).

The Vice of Habit

2007-06-27T14:09:00.001-11:00

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits." Mark Twain

Virtue in the broadest sense has to do with breaking habits. Your own, not your neighbors'.

Culture opposes virtue, because it contrives and offers habits.

Salvation from vice consists of de-enculturation.

Call it character development, psychological maturation, or spiritual growth, the proper outcome of introspection is the breaking of habits.

Tools that automate habit-breaking serve, at least potentially, virtue. Enough said.

Advice of the Moment

2007-06-02T13:43:00.000-11:00

Never ask a mechanical pencil to do a screwdriver's job.

McLuhan Audio Files

2007-05-27T07:53:00.000-11:00

The McLuhan LP, The Medium is The Massage, always struck me as a disservice to McLuhan, because it's so dorky despite the cogency of McLuhan's ideas. Maybe it strikes today's first-time listeners as quaint and endearing. I hope so. But the avant-wimpy audio effects are likely to make you cringe.

The Dick Cavett appearance is particularly fun for the McLuhan-Capote exchange and the lame puns that enliven the end of this "interview."

Edwin Newman gives McLuhan lots of time to pontificate and riff. Expostulate.

Much to ponder in all these posts, at http://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html

TELOPHOBIA

2007-05-24T14:43:00.000-11:00

Here’s an example of telophobia (fear of teleology) in contemporary science writing, from "The Ages of Gaia" (Bantam, 1990) by James Lovelock (Pseudomonads are microorganisms that produce macromolecular nucleation sites that cause water droplets to condense from the atmosphere):

"Pseudomonads have an ancient history, and maybe their ice-nucleation trick goes back to the Archean. If so, were they the rain makers that led the colonization of the land? A question that always arises at this point in speculation is: How did it happen? Surely the bacteria did not decide to make the ice-nucleating substance. At this point, serious–minded microbiologists grow anxious and fear the proximate occasion of teleological heresy. Fortunately, we can easily make a plausible model of the evolution of close coupling between a large-scale environmental effect and the local activity of microorganisms—a model, moreover free of any taint of purpose."

He goes on to make the case that the ability to freeze water must have benefited the ancestors of extant pseudomonads and that the talent therefore spread from generation to generation of the microorganisms. The effect of rain on later evolution is merely incidental. (Try to imagine what the Earth’s biosphere might be like if rain was an occasional atmospheric quirk rather than an ecological driver.)

Lovelock might be more sensitive to accusations of "teleological heresy" than most scientists, because early criticism of his Gaia concept targeted Gaia’s teleological implications. Nonetheless, nature is perfectly capable of executing plans, as happens every time a fertilized ovum matures to adulthood. Don’t plans serve purposes?

In fairness to Lovelock and other telophobes, then, "taint of purpose" needs a clearer definition. Purpose might be defined in a limited way, in terms only of human ways and means, in which case no scientist need fear the teleological heresy when describing nature. Alternatively, it might be sensible after all to assign purpose to all kinds of cause-and-effect sequences in nature. What exactly is it that Lovelock thinks might make microbiologists uncomfortable?

If we ask a computer programmer about a section of code, she might tell us that that section of code ensures that when a particular dialog box appears on a user’s screen it contains data pulled from a particular field in a particular database, so that’s the purpose of that section of code—to make that data appear in the right place at the right time. It seems straightforward.

Now, if we ask a geneticist about a section of DNA—genetic code—and he tells us that that section of code ensures that a particular protein contains a particular amino acid at a particular position in the sequence of amino acids, we might in this case be less eager to say that the code has a purpose, for fear of committing “the teleological heresy.”

But in both cases a coded sequence contributes something necessary and specific to a larger program. Purpose is granted in the one case; but not in the other. Might the relevant concepts be too imprecisely defined? Let’s see if we can achieve clarity by scrambling them even more.

Let’s say that DNA hackers drop new genes into the genome of a variety of tomato and that the new genes ensure that the fruits of the plants contains large amounts of caffeine, or sugar, or [insert favorite substance]. In this case some of the genes in the revised tomato genome have a purpose, but the rest do not?

Here’s a sequence of genes. Look it over carefully. Which ones have purpose?

What if the sequence of inserted genes incorporated some genes from the original tomato genome—then would those genes be transformed from being purposeless to being purposeful, even though they correspond to the same amino acids after the insertion as before? This thought experiment should serve as therapy for anyone suffering from telophobia.

Maybe the problem gets fixed if the operative term is changed from purpose to function.

Is the function of a thing merely whatever the thing can be observed to do—or only what it is intended to do? The function of a jet engine is to propel a plane. But the engine also produces heat. That is not its function, though the function of some devices is precisely to produce heat. It looks like function is a function of human intent. This is a troubling observation, because it means that although we observe nature doing things, nothing in nature has any function whatsoever. The stomach makes food suitable for passage through the intestine. Do we really want to say in the next breath that stomachs have no function—serve no purpose?

The terms attached to teleology: purpose, meaning, function, code, plan, program, information—these all are problematic concepts, because they subside in the no-man’s land between science from religion. And for that they hold the promise of a reconciliation of the mighty ideological antagonists.

Scientific telophobia is understandable, given the vagueness of the terms that carry the "heresy of teleology." An unwary scientist might too easily step off the nihilistic path of scientific orthodoxy into a pile of sentimental/superstitious teleological goo. But the solution to the teleological conundrum is not to cast meaning, purpose, etc., into the wilderness, but to give precise operational definitions to these problematic terms.

Just think—someday we might actually know what we're talking about. Nah.

Rethinking the Social

2007-04-22T14:41:00.000-11:00

In “The Human Use of Human Beings,” cybernetic pioneer Norbert Wiener proposes a thought experiment that challenges our notions of the social:

“It is easy to make a simple machine which will run forward toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior [. . . .]”

So, would such a situation constitute “social behavior”? Let’s take Wiener up on the challenge and raise the stakes. It might be that in a collection of such robots repeating patterns would condense out of the chaos. Some robots might form stable relationships with other robots based on mutual attraction. Such pairs might hook up with other pairs, or trios, or other groups and settle into meta-organizations. A whole hierarchy might emerge with its nested levels of societies within societies kept stable by approach-avoidance feedback among individuals.

Wiener’s allegory of the robots must have been meant to suggest something about human beings; it begs the question as to whether human society is nothing more than a collection of automatons attracted to and repelled from one another by instincts, reflexes, and cultural conditioning, or habit—that is, by biological and social programming. A secular mind might be attracted to such a model, which need not be taken to the extreme. Maybe we average 90 percent automatic, with the exact proportion varying from person to person. But before embracing this simple notion of the social, we should look at where a consistent application of it will lead.

We can, for example, apply the technological allegory to inanimate nature. If we replace the lights and light sensors on Wiener’s robots with positive and negative electrical charges, then Wiener’s allegory describes the behaviors of atoms, which are attracted to and repelled from one another by their electrical charges, by which they organize themselves into the hierarchy of increasingly complex levels of feedback-stabilized organization that we call Nature. Chemistry amounts to a systematized sociology of atoms.

A consistent application of Wiener’s allegory begs the definition of the social, whether it should be defined restrictively as pertaining only to biological organisms or loosely as pertaining to all approach-avoidance behaviors of entities of any sort whatever, particularly when the behaviors collectively produce stable and complex structures and processes. Whether we decide on the former or the latter, we are left without a clear principle that distinguishes societies of ants from societies of robots or atoms—animate from inanimate societies.

Except that an inanimate society is an incoherent concept.

Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop

2007-04-14T12:27:00.001-11:00

Pervasive legacy of audio sampling

False Dichotomy

2007-03-31T10:58:00.000-11:00

If you come down dogmatically on either side of the evolution/intelligent design debate, you don't understand the issues. If you come down dogmatically on either side, you are professing an allegiance to a doctrine. If you are dogmatically allied to a doctrine, you are lost. The web page shown above is a good example of the false dichotomy that typifies discourse surrounding the debate. The first set of questions is

Evolution or Creation? Did the Vast Universe Evolve, or was it Designed and Created?

as if the choices posed were mutually exclusive. But a designed universe (and the life in it) could evolve as well as any other universe. An evolving (developing) universe (and the life in it) might be designed or not. The choices are not mutually exclusive. The assumption of their mutual exclusivity is an artifact of the warring doctrines. Same thing with the second set of questions:

Does God Exist? Would He expect us to assume? Or does He expect us to Prove it?

There is no logical contradiction in answering all of these questions in the affirmative: Yes, God exists. Yes, God expects us to assume His existence. Yes, God expects us to prove his existence.

The Great Chain of Being revisited

2007-02-10T09:21:00.000-11:00

Western thinking from Plato through The Elizabethan Age conceived of Creation as structured hierarchically in the form of a "Great Chain of Being." The chain ascended from the smallest germ up through the plants and creatures to humankind and ultimately through the spheres of the firmament to reach the throne of God. The extraterrestrial links in the chain were, within Catholicism, detailed in the form of the Orders of Angels.

Few thinkers today would regard such metaphors as more than anachronisms, a primitive conception of the natural (and supernatural) order. But in the context of the star larvae hypothesis, the Chain of Being presents a more complete picture of evolution than does the standard scientific view. What the Chain lacks, and science provides, is the temporal, dynamic dimension—the process.

The Chain of Being is a cross-section of a temporal progression—a developmental sequence that leads from the terrestrial to the extraterrestrial. The Chain was conceived of at a time when Creation was regarded as static (a place for everything, etc.). Once we assign phylogeny (the evolution of species) a subordinate position within an overarching ontogeny (the stellar life cycle) we effectively resurrect the Chain of Being, but in an ecological context. Evolution is the metamorphosis of stages in the life cycle of a genus of organism—the stellar organism. The apparent directionlessness of evolution (Gould, Dawkins) is replaced by a processional sequence that, when viewed in cross section, takes the form of a Great Chain of Being. The historical intuition was essentially right; it just failed to take into account the underlying dynamic process.

The Advance of Civilization

2007-01-28T05:45:00.000-11:00

Can be viewed HERE.

Zappa and Fuller as Rortian Ironists

2007-01-20T16:15:00.000-11:00

Two candidates for Rortian ironist status: Frank Zappa and Buckminster Fuller. Each invented an idiosyncratic vocabulary. Neither is the exemplar of a genre. Zappa defied the status of genre exemplar not (only) by creating an eccentric self-referential, self-consistent oeuvre—the project/object characterized by conceptual continuity and xenochrony—but also by mastering genres and then enlisting them and commanding them as words within a personal (musical) vocabulary. The Rortian ironist need not invent (need not be a modernist), but can practice irony through montage and collage (be a postmodernist, the corresponding method in that context being pastiche).

Fuller is a somewhat different type of ironist that seems nearer Rorty’s intended meaning. A uniquely singular visionary. In this regard, Fuller seems to anticipate Rorty and challenge the extreme to which Rortians are willing to go to celebrate ironism. The dude was out there with his unique vision and vocabulary, but it smells so strongly of a metaphysic that Rortians will be reaching for clothespins. “Did you get a whiff of that?”

Environmental Myopia: Smart-but-Dumb

2007-01-13T17:12:00.000-11:00

Just after the new year (2007), the Washington Post ran a story about Monica Lewinsky graduating from London University with a degree in social psychology. Lewinsky, for you youngsters, made news during the Clinton administration for her, uh, coquettishness. The title of her LU thesis, “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity,” impressed Post reporter Libby Copeland. “A revelation on this order [the loftiness of Lewinsky’s topic—H],” wrote Copeland, “suggests Lewinsky belongs to a fascinating subspecies, dumb-but-smart.”

In 2002, Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson published “The Future of Life,” a book that suggests Wilson belongs to another fascinating subspecies, smart-but-dumb. That Wilson is smart is beyond dispute, given his two Pulitzer Prizes, among other accomplishments. He’s a heavy hitter, academically, but reaches beyond his grasp and street smarts in, “The Future of Life.”

Wilson lapses into cliché when he moralizes about humankind’s Earthly toll. He’s right that the planet has a limited “carrying capacity,” but a mushrooming human population trapped on a small planet is not a problem that will be remedied by a “universal environmental ethic.” Sure, we can huddle together and breathe shallowly, or we can move to a roomier crib. Wilson dismisses the idea of extraplanetary expansion, however: “Surely these are not frontiers we will wish to explore in order simply to continue our reproductive folly,” he snorts. What contemptible misanthropy.

Imagine a fetus, perhaps her mother’s ham on rye had been in the sun for too long, who falls into a trance and envisions life outside the womb. And imagine the little fetal cells responding to the expansive vision with, “Surely we would not wish to continue our reproductive folly out there.”

In outer space exponential rates of reproduction might not be folly, as they are on Earth, but an adaptation. The environmentalist foible lies in Wilson's assertion that we should be asking ourselves, “How best can we shift to a culture of permanence, both for ourselves and for the biosphere that sustains us?” Insofar as permanence implies stasis, Wilson’s question is merely reactionary, like the notion of immutability traditionally attached to God’s perfection. The prospect of an unnatural, authoritarian rationing of resources and control of reproduction—in the name of the new “ethic”—is what confinement to Earth necessarily spells. Permanence of the human enterprise, in a desirable form, can be secured only through extraterrestrial expansion.

Wilson clues us into the psychology behind his ethic when he characterizes Earth’s relationship to humanity as, “. . . our cradle and nursery, our school . . . .” But Wilson’s inner child isn’t satisfied to embrace these childhood institutions. He wants to go all the way, to the womb. “To [Earth’s] special conditions we are intimately adapted,” he says, “in every one of the bodily fibers and biochemical transactions that gives us life.”

The Freudian psychology behind environmentalism—planet as maternal womb—is archetypal. “Mother Earth” did not spring from today’s environmental movement. She is an archaic conception/metaphor. (If Wilson wants us to take the metaphor of Mother Earth literally, fine, then let’s acknowledge natural and human history as her gestation.) We have reached an historical juncture at which, for the sake of our own survival, we must re-direct the Freudian craving for connection to the maternal organism onto the exo-womb of weightless space. Only there will the human enterprise find a permanent home worth occupying. And one that it can’t destroy.

“The great dilemma of environmental reasoning,” Wilson concludes, “stems from [the] conflict between short-term and long-term values.” On this point he could not be more insightful. At least no more so than Monica Lewinsky might be.

McLuhan's Thunder

2006-12-19T14:55:00.000-11:00

McLuhan’s last book (not counting the posthumous volumes) was "Take Today", a mélange of McLuhan’s “probes.” It was not a commercial success. Nonetheless, McLuhan used several angles to try to get the publisher to promote the book. When the Watergate scandal broke, he saw an opening and pitched the book to Jovanovich anew. Here’s a great passage from the biography of McLuhan, "Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding", by W. Terrence Gordon:

Jovanovich discounted the opportunity: “Any attempt to give Take Today a pertinence and importance in this avalanche of imagination-boggling information and practical interpretation seems utterly hopeless in any feasible way. It would amount to little more than a whisper in a hurricane” To this McLuhan replied: “Your remark about Take Today as ‘a whisper in a hurricane’ echoes the complaint of the practical man about the poet: ‘the poet’s head is in the clouds,’ to which Victor Hugo replied ‘And so is the thunder.’”

Original Sin ?

2006-12-17T11:19:00.001-11:00

When Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden, they left as infants, a form of being that they had not known previously. The Fall was not an expulsion from innocence to experience, but from experience to innocence, a potentially more terrifying transition.

A fall from innocence to experience is felt as constraint and regimentation—a feeling of frustration, even violation.

A fall from experience to innocence is felt as vertigo and freefall—and ultimately dissolution.

Favorite Sentence

2006-12-17T05:47:00.000-11:00

Found this doozie in Laurence Wilmot's "Whitehead and God" (p.82):

"But for this necessity, it would have seemed more rational at this point to say that God's envisagement constitutes the general metaphysical character of creative advance by his primordial characterization of creativity to be the substructure for a spatio-temporal universe for which the eternal objects constitute the potentialities for actualization in the world process in which the actualities are self-creative after having received from God their initial subjective aim at definiteness."

Retro Design Inspirations

2006-12-16T13:34:00.000-11:00

Not sure if this graphic design style has a name. How about Hopeful Humanism?

Synchronicity Dept.

2006-11-26T07:36:00.001-11:00

A couple weeks ago I posted about Conservatives using the rhetoric of "the Nanny State" to feign Libertarianism (here) and the hypocrisy of this rhetoric in light of Conservative support of the drug war. I mused about Conservative drug warriors launching into protest should drug-war logic be used to protect us from the greater threat of unhealthy food. A few days ago Mallard Fillmore proved me clairvoyant:

Metaphysician Mailer Grapples with Ironist McLuhan

2006-11-22T17:21:00.003-11:00

SEE THE VIDEO HERE: http://www.spike.com/video/norman-mailer-vs/2780997

Rorty Frames McLuhan, Mediated by Hartshorne

2006-11-19T09:33:00.000-11:00

Philosopher Richard Rorty discovers another example of the Medium is the Message. In “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, in the chapter, Private Irony and Liberal Hope, he distinguishes between two kinds of intellectuals: the metaphysician and the ironist. The metaphysician believes that abstract nouns, such as truth, justice, and reality, correspond to actual metaphysical/ontological entities—that truth, justice and evil per se actually exist and that the intellectual project conveys us ever nearer a full understanding of these realities. The ironist does not believe that the intellectual enterprise involves a successive approximation of understanding toward truth, justice, etc., but just that vocabularies succeed one another and that the intellectual enterprise is about coining new metaphors so as to convert the loyalties of others to one’s preferred vocabulary—without humiliating them; that would be cruel. Cruelty is Rorty’s standard of evil:

"The ironist tells [people] that the language they speak is up for grabs by her and her kind. There is something potentially very cruel about that claim. For the easiest way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. Consider what happens when a child's precious possessions—the little things around which he weaves fantasies that make him a little different from all other children—are redescribed as 'trash,' and thrown away"

A metaphysician confronted by an ironist is maybe not so much humiliated as thrown off balance, spun into a vertigo. Read or listen to McLuhan being interviewed. The interviewers work hard to retain sociopolitical propriety, to fit McLuhan's insights into the familiar categories. But the suspicion creeps in that they are being put on, and McLuhan's interlocutors tended to become either headstrong or gun shy. I'm not sure they were humiliated so much as appalled.

McLuhan was a great pioneer of what in academia these days is called, simply, theory. He seemed to care little for the departmental distinctions between literary criticism, sociology, history, philosophy, the humanities, and the sciences. He just rode roughshot along and across the borders of the traditional disciplines. He was overtly dismissive of them, so much so that in “The Mechanical Bride” he mocked Mortimer Adler’s “Great Ideas” endeavor, comparing the cards in the card catalog to tombstones. Today McLuhan’s interdisciplinary approach is a normal mode of academic writing, though there’s little evidence that today’s academic writers possess the wit and facility for metaphor that distinguish McLuhan.

Rorty argues that there is no reality to which our words correspond, at least not one recognizable as any kind of traditional metaphysical reality. The vocabulary (medium/cause) is its own (provisional) endpoint (message/effect). It is its own content, simultaneously medium and message. This realization frees us to formulate the words we want to use rather than those we might feel obliged to use for the sake of propriety. This is a liberating aspect of ironism, and one that McLuhan took full advantage of.

But McLuhan’s pious Catholicism confounds Rorty’s ironist/metaphysician dichotomy. McLuhan disdained the criticism that amounted to saying he flip-flopped; to him a fixed point of view was an artifact of the literate mind, and he was proselytizing for a mentality not so limited. He operated like the consummate Rortian ironist, inventing his own vocabulary and parlaying it into public discourse, not allowing himself to be pinned down on any ground of good and bad. The critique of McLuhan is precisely the critique of the metaphysician confronting the ironist: that s/he is flaky, inconsistent, unwilling to take a stand, all of which amounts to the gripe that the ironist lacks a metaphysical doctrine and the conclusion that therefore s/he isn’t worth taking seriously. McLuhan endured these slings and arrows, but he did not quiver. Behind his ironism was the hardcore metaphysics of Catholicism.

Rorty perhaps is too eager to dismiss metaphysics. Philosopher Charles Hartshorne recognized, like Rorty, that our ultimate dependency for understanding rests on our own definitions of terms. In “The Divine Relativity”, he illustrates by challenging the meanings of Absolute and Relative (Contingent) in the context of theological discourse:

“Either ‘absolute’ is our own human concept, or we have no right to use the word; if it is our concept, it is our responsibility to fix its meaning. Knowing the meaning of absolute, and of relative, we cannot fail to know the relations of these conceptual meanings to each other; for nothing determines these relations but just the meanings themselves.”

But Hartshorne can’t leave it at that. He is a metaphysician. He continues, “It is in another direction that we must look for impenetrable theological mystery. And there is no lack of it.”

I have to side with Hartshorne and the metaphysicians. Rorty seems to imply that the propagandists and radio polemicists are the new intellectuals, because (he seems to be saying) might makes right, if “might” is understood to be metaphor-manufacturing skills. Hartshorne understands the ironist objection to metaphysics. But he is not satisfied to relinquish the pursuit of metaphysics to an endless succession of vocabularies. More exists than sets of vocabularies that re-describe past vocabularies, which amounts to Rorty’s ontology. For instance, my perception of this room and my sensations of being hungry, say, exist, so the metaphysical question remains, what is the nature of that which exists? Even if I only believe that I perceive the room, then that belief exists. If anything at all actually exists then metaphysics remains the endeavor to understand something actual. I suppose that, in the context of Rorty’s thinking, to deny metaphysics is to deny the existence of nonlinguistic experiences.

Hartshorne’s career seems to have been about working out the precise logic of the necessity of God’s existence—while debunking the misguided (illogical and ill-defined) theologies of popular religion (would Rorty consider that cruel?). I suspect that a good part of Rorty’s and the Brights' objection to metaphysics lies in their rejection of the flabby theologies of the popular religions. Hartshorne developed a logically very tight philosophical theology that even an ardent skeptic can benefit from studying. To dismiss theology on the basis of the televangelists’ folk-metaphysics is like dismissing science on the basis of a crank’s theory about canals on Mars.

So, back to McLuhan. We can understand McLuhan’s Medium is the Message by using the concept of “framing”. It’s an important idea, one that George Lakoff might get credit for naming, but the idea was put into play long before. Republican PR strategists effectively used the concept when they coined “Patriot Act,” “Death Tax,” and the other glosses and persuasions of cant and the tropes that for too long lent Teflon to the W. Bush administration. McLuhan in effect said that the medium is a frame in this same sense. In other words, we can think of the metaphors “Patriot Act” and “Death Tax” as media. Their content few people could articulate in any detail, but the message is clear even without the articulated content, because the medium carries the actual import. It is the message.

The unconscious (irrational, figurative, symbolic, emotional, qualitative, connotative) effects of media (e.g., language) supersede (by pulling the rug out from under) in import in the psyche their conscious (rational, literal, semantic, logical, quantitative, denotative) effects. The message (import) is the medium (unconscious).

Or, as Victor Hugo put it, "Good taste is the first refuge of the witless."

George Will, Social Engineer.

2006-11-04T16:45:00.000-11:00

Here’s a letter I sent to Newsweek that the editors declined to publish, though they published several responses to Will's column that expressed similar sentiments:

“George Will seems to be suffering from innumeracy. If he counts the ban on Internet gambling as only Prohibition II (The Last Word, 10/22/06), then he’s in need of remedial instruction in simple counting. How could he so cavalierly omit from his reckoning the war on drugs? What more integral product of the nanny state could one summon? The real Prohibition II is the one that fills our prisons with nonviolent patients of the natural pharmacopoeia of cannabis, coca, and opium. (What was that wacky Intelligent Designer thinking?) If Will, the libertarian wannabe, is bothered by the government restricting Americans’ choices, 'ostensibly for their own good,' and the concomitant 'paternalism,' then let him champion drug legalization.”

Whatever the relative merits and demerits of the drug war, it remains the consummate test of the intestinal fortitude of those Conservatives who flaunt a doctrinaire libertarianism. These are the people who bemoan the “nanny state” and would ratchet up to the heavens their defense of the rights of the consumer and the virtues of an unfettered marketplace if ever the do-gooders succeeded in setting criminal penalties for the consumption of trans-fats or the attainment of obesity through sloth. Ironically, or hypocritically, these people argue that it is a good idea for the police to intervene if somebody imbibes a joint of cannabis. The juicy fun of watching the drug war is seeing how it forces these pseudolibertarian conservatives to defend government intrusion into the flow of capital. On moral grounds. Once they do that, they are reading from the Liberal scriptures. They might say it’s on the grounds of public health that they defend the drug war, but then let’s draw up the list of the most prevalent avoidable causes of death and injury—the government keeps such stats—and start at the top and work our way down until everything people do that causes more death and injury than drugs is also made illegal. Not many politicians will line up for that. Sure, let’s enlist government to redirect the flow of capital in the name of righteousness, to engage in “social engineering.” (For you youngsters, Conservatives brandished this term during the Reagan years to discredit as Commie the welfare, education, and healthcare policies of Liberals. Now that Conservatives are advancing their own social agendas through the mechanism of the federal government, they have excised from their vocabularies this derogatory term.) Ah, social engineering. What can we do with public monies in the name of morality? How about housing the homeless, teaching the children, and caring for the sick?

'Times, They are a Changin'

2006-10-13T15:32:00.000-11:00

Found somewhere on the Internet:

In the 60s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

Rhetorical slog

2006-10-06T17:45:00.000-11:00

Overheard on a local talk-radio station: "We tell it like it is the way we see it."

Archetypal Medium is Archetypal Message

2006-10-06T14:09:00.000-11:00

Another example of the medium is the message, from James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology:

Our word idea comes from the Greek eidos, which meant originally in early Greek thought, and as Plato use it, both that which one sees—an appearance or shape in a concrete sense—and that by means of which one sees. We see them, and by means of them. Ideas are both the shape of events, their constellation in this or that archetypal pattern, and the modes that make possible our ability to see throught events into their pattern.

Asked by Edwin Newman, "Why is the medium the message? Why is not the message the message?" McLuhan replied blithely, "Where would you look for the message in an electric light? Or in a candle? The medium and the message are one." Hillman, in effect, asks, "How would you distinguish between the medium and the message in an idea?" Somewhat contrary to Hillman, theologian Charles Hartshorne rejects the medium/message conflation when it comes to experience per se:

“Experience has to have a content; it is experience of something. Philosophers have argued about the proposition, 'Perhaps all we directly experience is our own mental state at the time.' But mental states are just experiences over again, so that the proposition means, 'Perhaps our experiences are of nothing except themselves.' We must reject the absurd idea that any experience can thus furnish its own sole datum. A mere awareness of that same awareness is nonsense. Discarding this nonsense, let us see what the data of experience can be . . . .”

from Hartshorne's The Logic of Perfection

Marx Explains McLuhan’s Gnomic Aphorism

2006-09-23T11:18:00.000-11:00

The Medium is the Message.

Thus announced Marshall McLuhan—and the fallout continues.

“What could he mean?,” pointy heads have been asking each other for more than a quarter century. “Certainly the message is the message. The medium is a neutral carrier. There IS a difference between Shakespeare and stock market reports. Surely it matters whether the media carry one or the other. The particular medium is unimportant. What matters is the content.”

This is how McLuhan gets refuted, ostensibly.

But wasn’t there a precedent? Karl Marx said something much like McLuhan, but didn’t incur the same criticism (though Marx has incurred much other criticism). Marx said that changes in the means of production alter the relationships among social classes. He said, in effect, the medium is the message.

In Marxist analysis, the introduction of new technologies—once called labor-saving devices—into a society upsets the social order. When the upset is dramatic, a violent revolution might ensue. But the change in the means of production comes first. Revolution is an effect of changes in relationships among social classes, not a cause.

Now, nobody said, “Wait a minute there, Karl. You can’t just say that new technologies rearrange societies. What are those means of production producing? Labor-saving devices are just neutral carriers. There IS a difference between washing machines and bayonets. Surely it matters whether the means of production produce one or the other. The particular means of production is unimportant. Human labor, machine labor, who cares? What matters is the content.”

The medium is the message.