Mr. Krugman's Science, Part 1

Paul Krugman occupies a unique place within the intellectual punditry community, and I've often wondered how this came about.  For one thing, I suppose, not many academic economists (Mr. Krugman is a professor at Princeton, from whose stately halls the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, was emitted) write a regular column in one of the few remaining newspapers of actual national reach, in this case, the New York Times.  Which is to say, America's newspaper of record.  For another, there is the ubiquitous nature of his presence: he's a regular panelist on TV (ABC's "This Week"), he is interviewed frequently on talk shows (Morning Joe, CNBC, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers), and he blogs perhaps more than any other prominent pundit in the history of the internet.  It appears that he blogs all day long, if you follow the date stamps on his relentless posting, hammering out his wooden, repetitive prose in which he engages in nonstop self-adulation and boasting about the peerlessly accurate nature of his economic predictions, along with vicious attacks on many other economists and political enemies, a cohort that seems to multiply at an alarming rate, as Mr. Krugman goes out of his way to write nasty things about people he's just been with on television, or shared a panel with at an academic conference, or wrote something which challenges one of his cherished Keynesian axioms.

It helps also that Mr. Krugman is for all the Right Things.  The Huffington Post, for example, the liberal riposte to the numerous right wing sites (the Drudge Report, Red State, Powerline) idolizes Mr. Krugman, republishing his columns and blogs and usually including a summary of "Krugman's Greatest Takedowns," a compilation of Mr. Krugman's attacks on arch-villains such as Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and Chris Christie.  When you read such "classic" takedowns, you're struck by how lame they all are, how anemic in their thrust.  How dull.  Well, you think that way if you're like me.

What I admire is Mr. Krugman's conscious and deliberate construction of his persona as a showman and as the bete noire of the conservative side of politics.  That isn't easy to do if you're an economist, especially if you look rather ill-at-ease in your television appearances.  He won the Noble Prize for Economics (an award which was not part of the original Alfred Nobel will of 1895 but was endowed in 1968 by the Sveriges Riksbank, which funds the award) largely, I believe, because he used his column at the Times to denounce and attack the Bush Administration and the Iraq War from 2003 forward.  This played very well in Europe, of course, and raised Mr. Krugman's visibility markedly.  It appeared to me that the Nobel Committee had to rummage around in Mr. Krugman's back issues to find something that was academically interesting enough to justify the Prize, and came up with something (from 1988, I believe) about international trade.  Mr. Krugman discovered that if a country engaged in international trade establishes an industry (whether or not you might think such an industry is peculiarly suited to that nation's "natural" production), then other supportive industries will spring up around such an "anchoring" industry and give that nation a competitive advantage internationally.  This might strike you as perhaps one notch slightly above obvious common sense, but the Committee, having decided that this worthy American ought to receive the Prize for his outspoken resistance to the despised Bush Administration, needed to find something "original," and this is what they came up with.

I agreed with Paul Krugman's position on the Iraq War, and in those days he was very concerned about budget deficits caused by simultaneously (1) reducing the top marginal income tax rate on the plutocrats while (2) embarking on a large military buildup and invading two Muslim countries. Alas, his critique was no more effective in curtailing the massive American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq than anyone else in this country; the electorate is virtually powerless to stop the relentless incursions of the American military into any country it chooses.  All such decisions are made in the Emerald City of Washington, D.C., far from any accountability, and when we elect a liberal naif, such as the genial Mr. Obama, to take on the entrenched power of the military-industrial complex, we see how rapidly such an out-of-his-depth personality gets co-opted and turned into another spokesman for the status quo.  Guantanamo remains open, the wars in the Muslim world proliferate and accelerate, Bin Laden is shot with no thought given to his capture, the Obama Administration cooperates in the making of a hagiographic movie about the efficacy of torture in the war on terror.  And moving past the MIC into the rest of our Corporatacracy, the Wall Street banks remain Too Big to Control (let alone dream of prosecuting), Big Pharma runs the medical care industry (and Obamacare), and the "changes" are in rhetoric and in "social issues" such as who can marry whom and who can stay in the country legally, and whether a drug-addled citizenry can be convinced not to shoot each other so much if we reduce the ammo clips from 30 to 10 bullets.

In such a political climate, maybe the smart players, like Krugman and Obama, learn the best way to play the game as a nominal liberal is to make all the right noises (from time to time) while remaining a power player and stalwart supporter of the Establishment.  That is, as a liberal who is for all the right things provided that nothing substantial gets changed in the way we do things now.

As I continue this musing, I will consider the Keynesian economics of Mr. Krugman, and describe how I play one of my favorite intellectual games:  Guess what Mr. Krugman's position will be on this!

What's a collapsarian gotta do to catch a break?

Frequent readers realize that one of my anchoring theses is that the Collapsarian community (Dmitry Orlov, James Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, and many, many others) use Peak Oil as a kind of deus ex machina to bring on a much-wished-for cessation of what you might call American business as usual. This business as usual is characterized by an auto-centric (I here refer to automobiles and the petroleum-powered internal combustion engine) society of sprawling suburbs, which encourage the ubiquitous (and seemingly self-replicating) pattern of strip malls, office parks, clogged freeways, urban congestion, pollution and global heating (I have firmly adopted James Lovelock's more dramatic phrasing).  The idea is that the inability of the world's oil fields to keep up with burgeoning demand, especially as China and India modernize and demand more and more of a relatively fixed quantity of available oil, will lead inexorably to wholesale changes in our "living arrangements" (as James Kunstler puts it).

I sympathize, of course.  What I wish is that we had, as Mr. Kunstler fondly wishes also, a vibrant network of high-quality trains as alternatives to the tedium of interstate highway driving, or to the awfulness of flying on cramped airplanes where all amenities have been eliminated in the name of security and economy.  Of course, this nostalgia for a nonexistent present (the French would have a good phrase for that) is a complete fantasy.  If we did have such a train network, the passengers would be my fellow Americans, jabbering, texting, screaming into their cell phones, occupying three seats each with their elephantine girth, and so forth.  It's nice to think about, but it's a dream.  If, as Cormac McCarthy said about Texas, that it's "No Country for Old Men," then America is not a good country in general for people of refined sensibilities.  I am afraid that's what Mr. Kunstler and many others are actually complaining about, and it's not even that subtle in the Clusterfuck Nation diatribes that James Kunstler writes on a weekly basis.  They're fun to read because they're so intemperate and scathing, but it's like scratching a bad rash.  It feels good while you're doing it, but it provides no lasting relief.  When you're done lambasting your fellow Americans, you look around and realize you're still here.

Still, Peak Oil offered so much promise.  Won't it cut into globalization, for example?  Well, it probably will.  The high cost of oil (which will remain stubbornly high because of the cost of extracting the remaining reserves and increasing international competition) tends to add significant costs to the transport of low-margin goods, such as cheap crap from China mass produced in their gulag of slave factories.  Meanwhile, there is no doubt that the general broke-ass condition of the American economy at present has significantly impacted what you might call "discretionary driving" in America.  The very worthwhile website maintained by the U.S. Energy Information Agency, for example, reports:

"U.S. gasoline consumption peaked in 2007 at 9.3 million bbl/d and fell by an average of 3.2% (300 thousand bbl/d) in 2008 due to the recession and high gasoline prices, which topped $4 per gallon in June and July 2008. Gasoline prices fell in late 2008 and remained below $3 per gallon through 2009 and 2010, but gasoline consumption remained flat, increasing by just 0.1% in 2009 and falling slightly in 2010. Regular-grade gasoline prices rose in early 2011, peaking at an average of $3.91 per gallon in May 2011, and for the year averaged $0.74 per gallon higher than the year before. In response to higher prices, households again cut back on highway travel, and gasoline consumption fell by 2.9% (260 thousand bbl/d) in 2011 from the year before."

It's a definite trend.  A little of this (but not much) is because of the move to more fuel efficient cars, such as hybrids. Essentially, this is an economic adaptation.  We're mostly stuck with gasoline-powered vehicles here in America (with our 240 million cars and trucks), so for the time being conservation is the only way out.  Yet this goes so much against the grain of American Exceptionalism, you know? 

The Collapsarians don't want to hear it, but my guess is that engineers will begin adapting to America's relative abundance of natural gas.  Natural gas is the bête noire
of the Peak Oil cassandras, of course.  They hate the stuff.  It's because America has so much of it.  It's the damned shale that's in the way of the dream.  It's loaded up with natural gas, and you can get to it with horizontal drilling and fracking the tight sedimentary deposits where it reposes.

The industry people say we have a 200-year supply of natural gas.  You can imagine how that one goes over with the Collapsarian community.  Yet the Peak Oil theorists seem reduced to arguing that the real supply, the readily accessible stuff that is economically feasible to extract, is more on the order of 20 to 30 years.  Still, a lot of these Collapsarians are late-stage Baby Boomers (such as Mr. Kunstler himself), and what good does it do one's anodyne fantasy of a return to the relative gentility of the 1950's to be told we can keep doing things the way we're doing them for another thirty years? 

You see the problem.  A 30 year time horizon does not work with modern America's attention span. 30 yeas might as well be forever.  Cars can run on natural gas; it's not that big an engineering hassle. Cars can also run on electricity, which can be generated with natural gas, or with solar and wind power, which is the project Israel (which is tired of buying oil from its burnoosed arch-enemies) is working on successfully.  That's what's going to happen, if I know my fellow Americans, and I must by now.  Qatar is in the process of demonstrating, by the way, that jet airplane fuel can be made from natural gas.  They're flying planes now using the stuff, and they're just as efficient (maybe more so) than jet fuel made from petroleum.

Just give it up, my Collapsarian friends, and make the most of it.  Americans will give up their cars when you pry their cold dead hands from the steering wheel.

Saturday Morning Essay: the flatlining economy, part 2

I think I only took one economics course at Berkeley.  The class met in the cavernous Wheeler Auditorium, so it must have been a survey course of some kind.  What little I remember is that the class was so boring that it induced a kind of physical pain to attend lectures or even to think about the subject matter.

I thought then, and think to this day, that economics is not in any sense a science (dismal or otherwise), but is rather a loosely-constructed discipline that looks at lots of numbers that are involved in economic activity.  Thus, economics considers such matters as the employment rate, productivity, GDP, the money supply (the various M measures), money velocity, rates of interest and so forth.  Its practitioners, of course, became jealous of the scientific stature of academics in real sciences (math, physics, chemistry, for example), and in the natural course of events economists began to promulgate rules and "laws" which governed their "science," and then divided themselves into various theoretical camps which savagely attack each other for perceived heresies of one kind or another.  Thus, we have "Keynesians" and "Austrians" and "Neoclassical Keynesians" of the Keynes-Hicks variety with IS-LM modeling of the economy, and "freshwater schools" (around the Great Lakes, such as the University of Chicago) and "saltwater schools" (as at Princeton and the Haas Business School at Berkeley). 

Economics cannot be science for one very simple reason: it fails the first and simplest of scientific tests.  One cannot reproduce the results of an experiment testing an hypothesis on a reliable basis.  Economic activity takes place in the real world, which presents millions of variables changing and mutating at all times, and many of these variables are psychological in nature (fear, greed, ignorance of outcomes).  In such a situation, a discipline such as economics can be little better than heuristic; it gives you a general idea about what's going on, but a slavish adherence to notional "laws" is just as likely to lead the economist to error as to enlightenment.  Worse, it tempts the academic economist to look at theories to explain what would be immediately apparent if he simply looked out the window.

Thus, this is yet another reason that I like Jeff Rubin's book, The Big Flatline.  He's not an academic economist; he is simply looking at the sky-high costs of fossil fuel energy (particularly the most important fuel, petroleum) and drawing a series of logical conclusions from this data point.  The United States, for example, has built an economy which is dedicated, consecrated to the principle that gasoline-powered cars shall not perish from the earth.  We have 2.7 million miles of paved roads in the U.S. and A. (as Borat says).  It kinda blows my mind when I think that if I walk to the end of my driveway, I come to an asphalt road on which I could drive a car from that point to Bangor, Maine, and the wheels would never touch anything but asphalt, and there would never be an interruption of any kind in the continuity of the roadway.  We have to have cars, in most places, to get around.  If it gets expensive to get around because of the high cost of petroleum, then every form of business begins to suffer.  All of the input costs of market items increase, at the same time that American "consumers" (we used to be "citizens" until we were reclassified by economists) are loath to spend money because of the increased costs of living brought about by higher energy costs.

The effect of high petroleum prices (the world marker, Brent Crude, remains consistently over $100 per barrel) has shown up in American gasoline usage, which has fallen precipitously over the last five years, as much as two million barrels per day.  The best news about this is that American carbon emissions are actually falling, year over year.  This is a triumph; this offers real hope.  The United States, as a matter of federal policy, has done essentially nothing about global warming (I prefer James Lovelock's terminology: global heating).  The Waxman-Markley bill to curb emissions has gotten precisely nowhere, yet the American recession has accomplished what the bill could not.  American carbon emissions now are better than the projections made by the Waxman-Markley legislation.

This is wonderful news.  America is headed in the right direction on energy usage.  True, we went broke in order to accomplish this milestone, but in the long run that will be okay.  Because there will be a long run this way, whereas the desperate attempts to "reflate" the economy and bring back the consumerist fiesta through money-printing and borrowing humongous sums of money under "Keynesian" theory simply leads back to the same fatal trajectory we were on before.  Naturally, the "liberal" economists (another telltale sign of the unscientific nature of their field of study - are there liberal and conservative mathematicians?) hide behind the crocodile tears of their professed concern for the Little Guy, the American commoner, and his unemployed, impoverished state.  But what they are urging is a return to the status quo ante, the one that is built upon an environmentally unsustainable premise. 

And now we see, thanks to the broader perspective of writers such as Jeff Rubin and Gail Tverberg, that it's economically unsustainable as well.  We can't afford to live like that anymore.  It's true that these writers share a hidden bias (one that James Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov also share): they don't want to live like that anymore.  It's a disgusting, ugly rat race.  Modern American aesthetic values (the Big Box stores, the strip malls, the cinema multiplexes, the 18-lane boulevards, the sprawling suburban ghettoes of Malvina Reynolds's "Little Boxes" and giant vinyl-sided McMansions, the crap imported from China, the billboards, the decaying store fronts once housing small businesses, the giant agribusiness farms producing monoculture non-food, the obese and diabetic populace, the reality TV shows, the chains of hotel, fast-food and franchised everything else) - it's all shit, and those left with any sensibility all know that.  The collapse of this pile of trash can't come soon enough for many people.  It's a kind of societal death wish, a death necessary to make way for something else.

The unaffordability of the present mode of living, brought on by the inability to afford the cost of powering it the way we have, is the quickest way out, and there's nothing that can be done about it.  We have to change.  Everything must become more efficient.  We have to conserve energy in all of its forms.  We have to develop the alternative energies of wind and solar, as Northern European countries are doing.  Houses have to become smaller and more energy efficient.  Mass transportation has to be developed, along with bike lanes.  Supply lines have to be greatly shortened to reduce the cost of transporting food and goods to market.  No more apples from Argentina during the winter.  No more everything from China. Local orchards, local farming, relocalized everything.

But first things first, and as Shakespeare almost said: the first thing we do is, we kill all the economists.

High oil prices & the end of growth

Brent crude oil is currently trading on the market at about $109 per barrel.  According to Jeff Rubin in The Big Flatline, this price marks an effective block to future growth in the First World countries of North America, Western Europe and Japan.  "Growth," in the sense that Mr. Rubin (a Canadian and formerly chief economist with a large Toronto-based investment bank, but now once again a sojourner among mankind) is using the term refers to expansion of gross domestic product, GDP, that catch-all term that adds up the movement of money in payment for goods and services within an economy. 

It takes a while to develop an intuitive sense for why the price of oil means so much in terms of economic growth, but I have read much the same thing, from different angles in the writings of such deep thinkers as Richard Heinberg (The End of Growth), Gail Tverberg (in her excellent Our Finite World blog) and, of course, the take-no-prisoners, Russian enfant terrible, Dmitry Orlov.  Essentially, an economy runs on energy.  An economy has to be powered: it doesn't just happen. 

In the West and Japan, petroleum has served as the basic energy source since the development of the internal combustion engine.  Virtually all transportation in the United States (which uses about 19 million barrels of oil a day, 20% of the world's total production) is based on oil, by car, plane and ship. Agriculture, pharmaceuticals and the military are all heavily petroleum-dependent (the U.S. military, as an organization, is the single largest user of petroleum in the world).  Thus, the high cost of petroleum finds its way into the final price of just about everything we buy, or think about buying.

The idea is related to, but is not the same thing as, Peak Oil.  It is not that the world is running out of oil at the present moment; it's more that the low-hanging fruit has been picked, the easily accessible "Spindletop" kind of gusher that simply requires drilling down into dry earth and waiting for Black Gold to come fountaining up in a Beverly Hillbillies-type jubilee.  Now it's more like using a fleet of icebreakers to make one's way out into the Arctic towing a giant drill rig, then in the blackness of unending night and freezing temperatures drilling down for miles through a frozen sea bed into ancient rock formations.  Or digging up huge amounts of tar sands in the wilderness of northern Alberta so that bitumen oil can be squeezed out through a complicated and expensive process. 

We do all this because oil is marvelous stuff.  It's a liquid at room temperature and thus easily piped and shipped, it's energy-dense (it has twice the power per volume of natural gas), and it used to be very plentiful and easy to get to.  Especially in the United States, it used to also be reasonably cheap. These days, however, you may be like me and have become "gasoline price conscious."  In the good old days, when gasoline cost so little that you could fill your tank for twenty bucks, it probably did not affect your conscious decision-making all that much.  When it gets to the point where it costs fifty bucks to fill your tank, and you need a tank of gas per week to get to your job in the urban center which used to seem conveniently close to your suburban home, one's perspective begins to change.

This is the essence of the problem the United States now faces.  We are a "consumer economy" which relies on a kind of assumed "surplus" to keep all of our "discretionary" businesses going: the restaurants and bars, the tanning salons, the yoga and Pilates studios, the party planners, all of the "consultants," the plastic surgeons, all of those take-it-or-leave it lines of work which begin to disappear when the surplus goes away.  The "surplus" gets spent on running your car and heating your house, and paying the increased costs for food which must be fertilized, harvested and hauled to market using the same high-priced oil.

Politicians and mainstream economists do not like discussing things in this way (that is, in a realistic manner).  The Keynesians, such as the Grand Poo-Bah of economics at the New York Times, Paul Krugman, justify deficit spending by the government in anticipation of renewed growth (as a "kick-start" to the economy, as it gains "traction"); thus, so the reasoning goes, the current deficits (and the interest thereon) will be manageable in the future because growth will again provide a fiscal surplus through increased government revenues.  However: suppose this entire theory is wrong?  Suppose we are mired in economic stagnation and future growth sufficient to handle the increased debt service is not in the cards?

The political establishment wants even less to do with such an outlook.  It's vaguely "un-American." What are we, Danish or something? 

There's a lot more food for thought in Mr. Rubin's book, such as the international "zero sum" aspects of the oil market and the contours of a "post-growth" economy.  I'll write about those matters soon.

Chasing Ice on a Bad Knee

I recently viewed the film "Chasing Ice" about....well, let me allow the film maker, James Balog, to tell you what it's about:   

"Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of climate change. Using time-lapse cameras, his videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate."

That seems like a modest enough goal.  The purpose of my blog, by the way, is as part of my mission to change the tide of history by goofing around on the Internet.  But damn, those tides are persistent!

Anyway, Monsieur Auteur, I can relate.   James Balog is a tall, lean man with flowing hair who has been a photographer for National Geographic and who gazes into the stark northern sunsets with fierce determination.  He has a pretty wife and an adoring daughter who both simply accept that this important man must expose himself to the harsh climate and pitiless terrain of Greenland's glacier country in order to get the story in pictures.  Yes, Mr. Balog does seem startlingly like the lionized protagonist of The Bridges of Madison County, although unlike that fictional hero, Mr. Balog cannot "move like a panther" as his haunches ripple because he's got a messed-up knee that they keep operating on. 

The movie is about 80 minutes long, but only about 15 minutes are devoted exclusively to Mr. Balog's bad knee.  The rest of the footage is about two things: (1) How difficult it is to set up reliable time-lapse photography stations in Greenland, Alaska and Iceland; and (2) Taking unnecessary risks by rappelling into deep crevasses to get pictures of the interior of glaciers that you can see perfectly well already from up above.

The time lapse photography demonstrates, as the Mission Statement proclaims, that the glaciers in Greenland, Iceland and Alaska are retreating very fast.  Q.E.D., the climate is warming.  Mr. Balog himself was a skeptic as recently as 20 years ago because he didn't think puny "man was capable of altering the Earth's climate."  I've always thought that was about the stupidest rationale for climate change denial I've ever heard.  I first began reading about rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere in the book Moment in the Sun in 1969 (when the levels were only 6% above baseline levels, as opposed to about 35% now), and the one thing that never occurred to me was that "mankind" was not capable of changing the fundamental chemistry of the atmosphere.  I mean, why aren't we?  We spend all day, every day, releasing carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, digging up fossil fuels which took millions of years to form (storing carbon as they did so) and then releasing the stored gases all at once, at a pace thousands, millions of times faster than natural cycles. This was one of the main points of the late, great Barry Commoner's books, which, of course, no one paid any attention to.

Maybe if Barry had talked more about his bad knee, if he had one.  Anyway, the northern glaciers are retreating fast - you can see it in the time lapse photography.  It occurred to me, however, that the problem with this kind of "proof" is that it creates (along with the work of Al Gore) another unscientific straw man for the Deniers to attack, if they think of this line of attack and if they can be bothered to watch the graphic evidence of James Balog's bad ACL damage.  Namely, the retreat of the glaciers is subject to a set of positive feedback loops which takes it out of a linear relationship with actual atmospheric temperature rise.

James Balog, distracted and confused by the pain medication he must routinely take for his arthritic lower extremity, never mentions the mechanics of glacier melt and "deflation" and leaves you to think that the glaciers are rushing into the northern Atlantic (or Pacific, in the case of Alaska) simply because of warm air, "calving" icebergs of phenomenal size and at an unprecedented rate.  The warm air certainly starts the process.  But those interior "waterfalls" which Balog unnecessarily risked his life in order to see better (or at least from a different angle) are, I know from other reading, one of the main positive feedback loops that make glacier retreat nonlinear with actual temperature rise.  Essentially, all of the ice melt makes its way down to the interface between the bottom of the glacier and the bedrock beneath the glacier, and a kind of slip 'n slide is formed which accelerates the glacier toward the (warming) ocean water. 

Because he was on the DL, Mr. Balog was not there when two of his young colleagues, who had camped out in the Greenland ice country for 17 days waiting for a massive calving event, were eyewitnesses to one of the largest glacier break-offs in recorded history.  It was awesome and frightening to watch on film.  A chunk of glacier larger than Lower Manhattan, and with vertical cliffs higher than its tallest skyscrapers, churned and rolled and collapsed into the Atlantic, with a deep, rumbling roar that sounded very much like the end of the world.

Anyway, all ribbing aside, hats off to Mr. Balog.  It's a nice piece of work.  Impressionistically, his film gets the job done.  Who's got time for the science? Although, increasingly, the positive feedback loops are the problem as far as attempts to model climate change with computer simulation, so it would have been good to discuss such complexities in this film, since they're relevant to what was photographed. The softening tundra in Siberia and northern Canada giving up their vast stores of methane (a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2), the seabeds giving up their methane in response to warming oceans, the loss of albedo because of all the melting ice - it's very difficult to account for the multivariant interplay between all of these forcing events, and it's why climate scientists, more than the general public, are scared out of their wits.  Their models keep getting superseded by reality, and it's all in the wrong direction.

Global warming is only the weirdest, most dangerous development in the history of human civilization that we're talking about, after all.  Not only are there no easy answers, at this point there may not be any answers at all.  As Bill McKibben has written, no matter what we do now, we've only got about a 50/50 chance of averting catastrophic temperature rise.  And that's if we actually started doing something now, which I'm sure we will once the "economy recovers." 

Saturday Morning Essay: The Platinum Coin Gambit

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

I think it's a good idea to reprise this fine aperçu  from the great Friedrich periodically to remind ourselves that the lunacy we are seeing in high places in the United States is not actually unprecedented in either magnitude or duration. We should take what comfort we can from that observation.

 America, as we know, is plagued by money problems.  We have a fundamental mismatch between, on the one hand, the demands of hoi polloi (from the Greek: the masses) to be rescued from a dysfunctional economic system which no longer provides a reliable means of securing their vital heat; and, on the other, the resistance of the plutocrats (that higher stratum of American society which through either monopoly or participation in global commerce has commandeered all the money) to disgorge enough of their (often filthy) lucre to provide for these same hoi polloi. 

In simpler terms: wealthier Americans, who already pay a greatly disproportionate share of income and estate taxes (as opposed to Social Security taxes, which are more broadly spread), do not want to give up even more of their money in order to fund Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment, Social Security Disability, and welfare.  While the relatively affluent are greatly outnumbered by America's Wretched of the Earth, the American political system (through the marketing-based electoral system) is run on money, and so a balancing between the unruly demands of a democratic process and the rights and privileges of the aristocracy can be maintained. 

Yet it produces great tension, because the natives are restless.  They want as much money as they can get from the government, because increasingly that's all the money there is for them, and the government is funded, one way or the other, by the rich.  We have arrived (as societies periodically do) at that point in Marxist devolution where things could blow sky high.  Thus, we see dangerous symptoms of the dysfunction, such as the Debt Ceiling Crisis, appearing now for a return engagement following its roll-out in the summer of 2011.  Or the Fiscal Cliff, a trap of Congress's own devising to force another crisis.

And now: the Magic Coin.  Yes, it's come to that.  In a dramatic flourish straight out of the perfervid imagination of J.R. Tolkien, serious adults in the United States are considering fabricating Our Precious to bail us out of our fiscal difficulties.  Learned intellectuals such as the strange, troll-like Paul Krugman, who presides over the economic debate at the New York Times - he thinks it's a good idea.  The cultish membership of the Modern Monetary Theory movement - they say, why not? 

It "works" this way: using a statute in the United States Code Annotated (USCA) which obviously has nothing to do with its application here (the statute is clearly about specifying details for ordinary coins and authorizing the minting of commemorative coins), the Magic Coin people seriously suggest that a way for President Obama to circumvent the debt ceiling problem, which limits federal government borrowing, is to find another source of income besides borrowing.  And they believe they've found it in 31 U.S.C. § 5112.  Continuing with the logic:  since this statute makes reference to the minting of platinum coins in "any denomination," the Magic Coin advocates (apparently with a straight face) argue that this provision empowers the Executive Branch (through the Treasury) to mint a platinum coin with a face value of one trillion dollars, or whatever value the Treasury Secretary likes, simply by sending a memo over to the U.S. Mint with the instructions, "make me a platinum coin with an eagle on it, put the 'in God we trust' thingie in its beak, and around the edge, put a one with twelve zeroes after it.  Then take it over to the Federal Reserve and deposit it into our account. And don't accidentally use it in the Coke machine on the way there."

Thereafter, the U.S. Treasury would commence writing checks against the coin, all borrowing and issuance of Treasury bonds obviated.

It behooves us to pause and consider where we are in American history when ideas such as this gain currency, to coin a phrase about coining a coin.  I do think the Magic Coin gambit is helpful in the sense that it highlights the nature of  the increasingly insane games that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are playing in creating money out of thin air to keep the American project afloat. Because you can certainly argue that the Magic Coin is simply a variant of Quantitative Easing.

I think when all is said and done that the Magic Coin is symptomatic of a society that desperately wants to hang on to the illusion  of its traditional prosperity and of its cohesion as a society with a national identity, when both of these things are  long gone.  The economy has stopped working, it has stopped creating truly viable employment for the masses, we've been stuck at the same number of jobs for over ten years, and the jobs are of increasingly poorer quality, less remunerative in real terms, and the "hiring" numbers have to do with folks in the 55 to 70 year old demographic resuming the trades, professions and businesses they once pursued, relinquished, and then desperately sought to do again when they realized they were going to need the money.

Magical thinking shows up when you've run out of real ideas and real solutions, which is where we are now. You can avoid all the hard work, all the struggle, and settle down into a comfortable senescence with a National Get-Rich-Quick Scheme.

A Saturday Evening Post: the fiscal cliff and statistical thermodynamics, all jumbled up

"This postulate is necessary because it allows one to conclude that for a system at equilibrium, the thermodynamic state (macrostate) which could result from the largest number of microstates is also the most probable macrostate of the system."

Building therefore on the seminal work of James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish wundermann, and Ludwig Boltzmann (the Austrian Boltzmann): well, first I have to admit that statistical thermodynamics works better with inanimate entities like gas molecules in a glass box than it does with the United States Congress.

It's the end of the year, and on all the doomsday sites that I peruse from time to time, the doomsayers are reviewing their prognostications for the year just concluded (that being anno domini 2012, or B.C.E., if you read Richard Dawkins, as I do).  Most are astonished that the American economic system has not collapsed entirely.  They give various reasons for this, usually couched in the pseudo-techno speak that is the lingua franca of the Internet InstaVisionary.  We have "kicked the can."  We are "printing money in order to avoid the necessary re-set" of the standard of living.  And so forth.

Actually, I think the true answer lies in the fundamental mismatch between the needs of a self-proclaimed visionary (Karl Denninger, James Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, Tyler Durden, et alia) in commanding an audience of rapt Doomophiliacs and the actual, slow, boring processes involved in the devolution of a complicated system (such as the American economy, embedded as it is in the global economy and occupying a unique place among the nations of the world because of the size and maturity of its economic institutions).  To wit, if you say that the American economy will look very different in 2025 (as it very well might) and let it go at that, your readers will switch the channel to the gal writing the blog about how to build a house out of pipe cleaners, or whatever.

The American economy has been in a state of transformation since the early 1970's, and the process continues.  What one can say about where we are now is that the true function of an economy (providing the means for the populace, the 99% comprising the mass of American commoners, to earn a living and enjoy life) has gone seriously off the rails.  However, the forces attempting to perpetuate the macrostate most conducive to the overall needs of the populace are formidable indeed (they act purposefully, unlike the random Bernoulli motion of the gas molecules in the glass box).  And thus the transition is retarded, slowed, as the institutions attempt to retain the idealized macrostate, one formed in the collective consciousness in the 1950's or so.

This makes for lousy headlines on the Doomsday blogs, however.  "America continues on slow path toward transitional state."  That's just not going to glue the eyeballs.  The Doomers use the symptoms or characteristics of the changing macrostate to rush the prognostication.  The symptoms include:

1. A changing-out of highly-compensated employment for minimum wage jobs (the "crap jobs"  or McJobs of the New Economy).  In the single, monolithic "unemployment figure" (say, of 7.7%) this changed macrostate is not reported directly, because the political system seeks to reassure the electorate that the economy is making progress, although it isn't.  For this reason, the average compensation, in real terms, of American workers continues to decline, although prices paid for necessary goods and services (also in real terms) continues to go up.  This is called "losing ground."

2.  The better paying jobs of the Old Economy (manufacturing, production of high value-added things such as cars and computers) have been shipped overseas as part of global wage arbitrage, or have been replaced by automation, which provides a return on capital but does not pay a living wage to carbon-based life forms. This leads to the problem of Symptom No. 1, above.

3.  The "organic society" of interdependent parts, of which the American economy is perhaps the apotheosis, is highly sensitive to perturbations of its macrostate, since the humans comprising the system have little hope of actual existential independence; that is, the means to maintain their vital heat depend on the overall functioning of a huge and fragile economic contraption.  This vulnerability, as the American system has entered a long period of disintegration, results in a massive move toward dependence on the chief organ of the macrostate, the federal government.  We have seen, therefore, a tremendous increase in food stamp usage (to 50 million Americans, or about 16% of the populace), spikes in Social Security disability claims (utilized to anticipate the old age pension which follows later), Medicaid, and long-term unemployment.

There is little argument from anyone these days that the American political system is more or less completely dysfunctional, in the sense that what appear to be common sense "solutions" to these daunting problems are not in fact adopted.  I think this is a serious misreading of the real problem.  To a large extent, the devolving macrostate described above did not come about by accident or through inattention.  The three symptoms listed above (and a fourth, the complete failure of the economy to increase the absolute number of jobs for about a decade) all point in the direction of income and wealth inequality, and since command over the political system is highly correlated to wealth, the ultra-rich now control the political process, or can muster enough support (through obstruction in the House of Representatives, particularly) to game the system in such a way that the most obvious solutions cannot be used.

The most obvious "solution" is a form of socialism in which the wealth of the uber-rich is in effect confiscated, through "wealth taxes" (a direct charge against net worth, exacted annually) and other highly confiscatory taxation.  Since this is where the money is, as Willy Sutton told us, this is where the money to support a dependent population must be collected.  The rich, who are badly outnumbered by the hoi polloi, resist this obvious "solution" through their command over the political system.  It's all they've got, besides all the money.

To maintain the current favorable macrostate, the uber-rich will yield on the questions involved in the "fiscal cliff," after milking the process for all advantages possible (the lowest possible rise in the progressive tax system, for example, and changes in the entitlement systems, which Obama seems prepared to allow).  The "fiscal cliff" is a chimera which will evaporate soon, as the errand boys and girls for the rich (Congressional members) go through a pantomime of earnest consideration and then cut the best deal they can for their benefactors, while reassuring the electorate (who are needed to continue their positions of power) that their best interests are being served.

A slightly modified macrostate will ensue, with a dysfunctional economy continuing to stagger in the general direction of a Third World condition (for most Americans), with entrenched wealth inequality, and with nothing else changed.

Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree

Living as I do on shady lane, my house backed up against a slope to the south which occludes the sunlight from about mid-November until February 10 of each year, I tend to celebrate this time of year as the ancient Mayans and aboriginals in the British Isles (with their Stonehenge lens for the solstice) must have done:  As a celebration of the return of light.  Always a nice feeling to know that each day now becomes longer.  It's no accident that the two biggest holidays in Western civilization, Christmas and Easter (or Passover) happen on astronomical clocks, one celebrating the ascent of the sun in the southern sky, and the second the return of the Earth's fertility.

Since these festivals were already in place, religious priests commandeered the pagan observances for their own use in promoting mythology.  That's really too bad.  I've always thought it one of the marvels of history that ancient man (with no Tweeting distractions or sitcoms to watch) could figure out precisely, so that observatories could be built as at Chichen Itza, the comings and goings of the solar cycle, the phases of the moon, and many other astronomical phenomena.  Simply by watching and then figuring out how to measure.  It bespeaks an attitude of great patience and humility combined with ingenuity.

We've lost touch with that kind of folk wisdom, and substituted instead an utterly useless "mastery" of a preposterous mythology (the Christ story) which, from beginning to end, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.  Since many Americans have difficulty finding the United States on a map of the globe, I shudder to think what would happen if you asked them to describe with any particularity what the winter solstice is.  The virgin birth - this, they can tell you about.  I've sometimes wondered whether this is the reason that Americans have such trouble thinking clearly about sexual matters; being a "Christian" nation, we became inculcated with notions about sexual purity having something to do with morality, and once this dumb idea became lodged in the unconscious it was impossible to extirpate it.  Really, morality is concerned with assault and theft: all moral transgressions flow naturally from these two "sins."

In this sense, we've ceded a lot of ground to ancient cultures, who were more naturally attuned to the world they lived in.  So think of it this way: the Earth is tilted on its polar axis at an angle of 23.5 degrees, and it transits around the Sun in an enormous ellipse.  Maintaining this tilted attitude, sometimes the northern hemisphere tilts "toward" the sun, and sometimes it tilts away.  At the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the angle of sunlight is directly on the equator of the Earth.  If the Earth's ellipse were the track at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby day (a race of 10 furlongs), then we are on the backstretch now at the 5-furlong mark (a furlong = 220 yards, so that the Kentucky Derby is 1-1/4 miles long, or about two kilometers).

Heading for the finish line at the Summer Solstice in the latter part of June.  Should be a rousing finish as the winter of our discontent is again made glorious summer.

Saturday Morning Essay: finishing up on SSRI use and school shootings

Working my way out of this intellectual box canyon concerning SSRI use and school shootings, I would summarize as follows:  to an extent, the perception that an event such as that which occurred at Newtown indicates the end of civilization in America is the result of what statisticians would call emphasis bias.  For example, here is how Jim Kunstler appraised the meaning of the tragedy in his latest Clusterfuck blog post:

"Finally the USA has an act that perfectly expresses its true spirit as the horror show nation among nations: the random mass slaughter of little children by a maniac. Is it not so that the failure to protect little children from harm is the most shameful weakness an adult human can present?"

 I understand the reaction; however, calling America a "horror show" over and over does not really advance our understanding of the phenomenon of school shootings.  In a way, school massacres are sui generis, both in America and in the world at large.  They're very, very weird.  They also run counter to the general trend in violent crime in the United States.

In the past 20 years, for instance, the murder rate in the United States has dropped by almost half, from 9.8 per 100,000 people in 1991 to 5.0 in 2009. Meanwhile, robberies were down 10 percent in 2010 from the year before and 8 percent in 2009.  Christian Science Monitor.

That's a difficult statistic for a doomsayer like Mr. Kunstler to make sense of.  The country is becoming less violent, probably as the result of two social phenomena:  the graying of America (demographically, the United States has "matured out" of its prime crime-committing years); and the end or abatement of the cocaine craze of the 1980's, which introduced a lot of heavy-duty killing in connection with a drug which tended to make its users frigging nuts, and also brought into the USA a lot of badass dealers and soldiers of Colombian narco-gangs.

The solutions being proposed to the problem of school shootings seem to center around outlawing of assault weapons (a good idea) or a moralistic behavioral modification concerning violent video games (this is Wayne LaPierre's idea; this creepy, sepulchral figure from the NRA can be counted on to talk about everything except guns).  I honestly don't think video games are the problem; I think it's a poor way for children to expend their youthful energy, and I believe they would much better off playing in the real, as opposed to virtual, world, but if playing violent video games actually led to school massacres (all by itself), then not a child would be left standing in the American school system today. Kids (especially boys) play violent video games today with the same frequency and alacrity as we played "army" and cowboys & Indians when I was growing up.  Young males act out battle games, one way or another.

To understand the problem of school shootings would require a pretty serious multivariate regression analysis of sociological phenomena, but I would think that the known correlation between SSRI use and a certain irreducible occurrence of violent behavior as a "side" effect is worth exploring systematically.  What we can say is that databases show an astonishing co-occurrence between the rapid growth of anti-depressant use since the introduction of Prozac in 1987, and the rise in school massacres over the same time period.  To repeat: correlation is not causation. I realize that. However, we drug the hell out of kids today, to improve their "attention" (Ritalin) or elevate their moods (the full medicine cabinet of SSRI's and bipolar medications), and mainly to fatten the bottom line of powerful Big Pharma, while medical research (which Big Pharma tends to fund) and government (ditto) look the other way.  Most of these drugs do not perform better, over time, than placebos or simply waiting the problem out, but in a small percentage of people, they produce very sinister and murderous effects.

If there were some way to cull the rapid-firing assault weapons from America's armamentarium of 300 million firearms so that they were no longer available for illicit use, I suspect that the destruction in school shootings would drop precipitously.  That would be a very good thing, and it makes a lot more sense than training school teachers to pack heat.  But I doubt that it would put an end to school violence.  A kid with a six-gun can still take 5 fellow students with him before he inevitably turns the gun on himself in an SSRI-driven murder/suicide.  Lord knows that's a better outcome, but it's not a "solution."  For that, the truth would have to be aired out.

Mass Producing Maniacs in America

Prozac was introduced to the market by Eli Lilly in 1987.  It quickly gained favor among psychiatrists, or psychopharmacologists as they are often called these days, given their preference for treating all mental illness with psychotropic drugs, since it allowed the profession "to do something" about depression besides try to talk the patient into feeling better.  The mechanism of Prozac, generically called fluoxetine, was to "selectively" inhibit the re-uptake of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain's neurons.  Neurotransmitters do what their name suggests: they transfer energy from neuron to neuron across the synapses of brain cells.  Serotonin is essential to the maintenance of mood stability.

Since depressed patients taking Prozac began to "feel better" after an induction period on the drug, researchers (anxious to sell Prozac) backed into a diagnostic analysis: since readings of spinal fluid indicated that patients taking Prozac had increased levels of serotonin in the brain, the depression must have been caused by a "chemical imbalance" resulting in too little serotonin before administration of the drug.  This is similar to claiming, as Daniel Carlat notes in Unhinged - The Trouble With Psychiatry, that “By this same logic one could argue that the cause of all pain conditions is a deficiency of opiates, since narcotic pain medications activate opiate receptors in the brain.”

In fact, there is practically no scientific evidence for the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression.  All three books reviewed in an excellent piece by Marcia Angell in the New York Times Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/?pagination=false) make this point: psychopharmacology needed a theory which would fit the action of the drug, so the industry made one up.  Depression is caused by too little "natural" serotonin.  It certainly was a profitable way of thinking about the problem.  Prozac was followed by Paxil, Zoloft, Serzone, Celexa and similar anti-depressants, and we're now at the point where 10% (or about 30 million people) over the age of 6 years old in America are taking anti-depressants.

As Robert Whitaker notes most forcefully among the three writers, the problem with Prozac and its ilk is that messing around with the brain's delicate chemical transmission mechanisms has nasty effects, which Eli Lilly and the rest of Big Pharma of course call "side effects," although there is nothing incidental about them.  Artificially pumping up the level of serotonin in the brain (above the preexisting baseline which was, as noted, probably completely normal) naturally produces a "high" or euphoria, and depending on the metabolic idiosyncrasies of a given patient (can they metabolize all this serotonin flooding the synapse because of the presence of the drug), the patient may go all the way into depression's opposite pole, mania.  In other words, Prozac and other drugs acting on serotonin can produce maniacs.

It's worse than that, however, because the effects of anti-depressants (and other psychotropic drugs acting on other neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and norepinephrine) tend to continue even when the patient attempts to withdraw from the drug.  Marcia Angell summarizes this effect very neatly:

Getting off the drugs is exceedingly difficult, according to Whitaker, because when they are withdrawn the compensatory mechanisms are left unopposed. When Celexa is withdrawn, serotonin levels fall precipitously because the presynaptic neurons are not releasing normal amounts and the postsynaptic neurons no longer have enough receptors for it. Similarly, when an antipsychotic is withdrawn, dopamine levels may skyrocket. The symptoms produced by withdrawing psychoactive drugs are often confused with relapses of the original disorder, which can lead psychiatrists to resume drug treatment, perhaps at higher doses.

The brain cells, in other words, having adapted to the presence of a synthetic chemical which was interrupting natural function (re-uptake of serotonin), remain "stuck" in an up-regulated or down-regulated condition.  Thus, while conditions such as depression used to be, in the great majority of cases, self-limiting and brief in duration, we have, through the miracle of psychopharmacology, created an epidemic of people who are bummed out for good.

Or: become suicidal or totally psychotic, maybe even violently so.  Correlation is not causation, but it is highly suggestive, to say the least, that prevalence of anti-depressant use tracks more or less exactly the rise in school and public place massacres.  More soon.

We interrupt this Eli Lilly commercial to suggest a more plausible reason behind school massacres in America

I hate to ruin a good story line and distance myself from the renewed movement toward gun control in the United States.  It's the panacea du jour:  let's ban assault weapons and other rapid-firing firearms from widespread availability in the United States and all will be well.  This epidemic of school shootings will abate and we can feel safe again when our kids are in school.

Just one thing - there is something deeply illogical about that formulation of the problem.  Granted, once a killer (usually a "troubled" youth) flips, the easy access to military-style, rapid-firing weapons greatly enhances his destructive power.  That part is logical.  However:  in a sense there is an unspoken premise that in some way the assault weapon itself caused the massacre.  There the analysis breaks down.  That doesn't make any sense.  Nor does simply saying that the killer was "evil" or a "psychopath." 

A better question is to ask:  where are these evil, psychopathic killers coming from, do they have anything in common, and why are the patterns so similar?  To wit, the killer often seems to begin his rampage at home by killing family members, then proceeds to a school or other public place and kills multiple victims, then turns the weapon on himself and commits suicide.  Most of the massacres involve a mass murder-suicide sequence,  consistent with a decision to take a lot of people (often peers who shunned or excluded him) with him when his overwhelming emotional pain propelled him to suicide.

I generally find these days that if you want to understand a broad social phenomenon in the United States, the best place to look is somewhere that most people are not talking about.  The domination of Big Business (and corporate ownership of Congress and the Media) are such that you cannot rely on public discourse to identify the real source of problems.  As a good example, take the fixation on cholesterol levels as the key to understanding heart disease in the United States, and the related (and false) nutrional advice from doctors to stay away from saturated fat.  The commercial function of this advice is to sell Lipitor and related cholesterol-lowering drugs.  It has little or nothing to do with overall health.  Similarly, the "balanced diet" which has led to an epidemic of obesity in the United States is designed with subsidies to the monocultures of grain and corn farming in mind; nutritionally, it makes no sense whatsoever.  As a final example, the fixation on the "war on terror" is part of a propaganda campaign to justify the existence of a hugely oversized military establishment designed to fight this war "conventionally."  It has almost nothing to do with American safety, although one might want to keep in mind that the Predator drone strikes that are a salient part of this "war" have undoubtedly killed far more children of Newtown age than have ever died in American school shootings.  It's just that these children are mostly Pakistani and Aghani and are thus not within the consciousness (or conscience) of an American public which listens with rapt attention as the President comforts the good people of that small Connecticut town.

Which sounds, of course, like a radical analysis of American politics, but by now (equally of course) it's not.  Noam Chomsky's notion of "manufactured consent" and corporate control of the "national conversation" (the range of policy options which are allowed into the discourse) sounded very radical when he first proposed it, but by now it's conventional wisdom.  It's the way things work.

 So back to the question: what is setting these killers off?  One distinct possibility is that the killers are suffering from statistically-inevitable "side effects" of the psychotropic drugs known as SSRI's, such as Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, and numerous other spin-offs of fluoxetine (which was first used as a pain medication and was then discovered to have mood "regulating" effects).  It's possible that these are the most dangerous drugs ever devised by the alchemists of Big Pharma, that they do vastly more harm than good, and that their persistent use owes to a willful decision of the FDA and political establishment (read: Congress) not to notice (or study systematically) their massive downsides.

One of those downsides is to trip a fraction of the patients into patterns of "extreme violence" and "hostility."  A British study from 2006 on a limited class of SSRI's (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) found a consistent link between anti-depressant use and violent ideation or hostile acting-out.  http://www.news-medical.net/news/2006/09/12/20073.aspx  It was on the order of 1/2 of 1%, but let's think about the math of this situation.  As prominent as the school shootings loom in the public mind, they still remain relatively "rare" compared to the sheer number of schools and American children of school-going age.  Meanwhile, SSRI's are prescribed with the nonchalant alacrity of a neighbor throwing M&M's into the Halloween bags of trick-or-treaters.  Thus, the "cohort" or statistical "sample" is created by our drug-happy legions of SSRI-prescribing psychiatrists (although increasing numbers of them wonder if the routine use of Prozac and its affiliates is a good idea - see Robert Whitaker's book, The Anatomy of an Epidemic, which analyzes the roughly four-fold increase in mental illness rates in the United States which has occurred since the widespread use of SSRI's and similar mood-regulation drugs were introduced about 30 to 40 years ago).  A tiny fraction of the millions of kids or young adults on SSRI regimes will thus predictably become both violent (homicidal) and self-destructive (suicidal). The drugs cause this reaction. The connection between suicide and Prozac and Zoloft (in particular) has been apparent for a long time. Among these new crazy people, a certain small fraction will have access to powerful firearms, as Adam Lanza in Newtown easily did, or they will use their ingenuity to acquire one of the 300 million firearms floating around the American landscape.

There you have a plausible causation sequence.  It makes more sense to me than blaming it all on "video games" or the Devil.  Shouldn't someone look into it systematically? This isn't conjecture: a substantial majority of the school-killers have in fact been SSRI users (such as the leader of the Columbine massacre, pictured above).  This again follows naturally from the American way of dealing with the issue.  A young person has "emotional" problems = visit to a psychiatrist = prescription of powerful mood-regulating drugs = statistical inevitability of tragedy.  (Notice that the killers, from Columbine to Newtown, are often from nice, white, relatively affluent backgrounds, the kinds of places where the parents are most likely to seek immediate drug intervention if little Johnny has a problem with "concentration" in school or seems "withdrawn" for a couple of hours.)  The problem has not been systematically studied the way it should be, and I don't think it's paranoid to suggest that there are reasons Big Pharma would prefer we not look at the problem too closely. 

So Dianne Feinstein, Senator from California and reliable spokesperson for the military-industrial complex, tells us we've already figured out the answer, based on no analysis whatsoever that I can see.  The school-killers have access to high-powered weaponry, and they get up one day and decide to kill as many people as they can.  We can settle on that answer without interfering greatly with America's lively export business of guns, grains and obesity.  No need to rock the boat - Big Pharma is one of the keys to Obamacare, after all, and the pharmaceutical companies have a stranglehold on Congressional financing (on some of the necks that Wall Street and the defense contractors aren't already clutching).

Now, I will concede that society does in fact produce psychopaths capable of random violence, quite apart from any influence of psychotropic drugs.  But common sense ought to tell us that something else is going on here.  We're producing way too many "troubled youth" with a sudden propensity to blow away everyone they know.  You can reduce their range of available weaponry (and we ought to do so), but you will not really solve the problem of hostility reactions to psychotropic drugs.  And we won't get at that problem until someone starts talking out loud about the connection.

Saturday Morning Essay: A few further notes on the militant atheists

A friend of mine of many years duration (from first grade on - I am fortunate to have several such friends) and I have engaged in a running conversation, on different forums, about the question of whether life has a "meaning."  My friend seems troubled by my conclusion that life doesn't really "mean" anything beyond what we perceive with our senses. If you enjoy being alive, that's what life means; a little tautologous, but life is essentially an opportunity to be alive and to perceive reality, an opportunity we share with artichokes and banana slugs.

As with any attempt at communication, it's good to define terms at the outset.  What I'm talking about is the concept of a narrative "frame" for existence: a sense of purpose in life, or "destiny" that gives life a kind of extrinsic importance (as opposed simply to its intrinsic enjoyment).  My friend finds such purpose in Christianity, with its teleological focus on this life being a sort of audition for a supposed Afterlife, as described in the Bible.

It was for this reason that Friedrich Nietzsche, the German descendant of a line of Lutheran ministers, called Christianity the greatest "calamity in the history of mankind."  His argument that seeing this life as only a prelude to the Real Thing to Come placed our mental "center of gravity" outside of our terrestrial existence, which in turn led to all kinds of irrational outbursts and atrocities in world history (the Inquisition, the Crusades, the Tea Party). 

I actually find the more heated arguments of the "militant atheists" (Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens) a little misplaced and gratuitous.  I can see the point about the role of religion, based as it is on irrational thinking, leading to persecution, theocratic tyrannies, and the like.  But their arguments are actually circular, in my opinion.  If religion is simply a construct of the human mind (and what else could it be?) then there is no "objective correlative," as the militant atheists appear not to comprehend, brilliant as they are.  Religion does not impose irrational thinking on the human mind from without; religion is the product of irrational human thinking.  This is not really a distinction without a difference.  Although worship takes place in buildings, and religious clerics wear costumes and whatnot, religion, per se, doesn't really exist except as an abstract construct.  It begins and ends with the delusional state of mind of people engaging in a highly elaborate form of ritualized superstition.  By the same token, as Sam Harris has cleverly demonstrated, atheism similarly has no content.  It is not a "belief system."  It's simply what is left after the delusions are cleared up.

Thus, the eradication of religions is not really the salient point.  Intellectual persecution of religions produces an undesirable backlash. The assault on religion, a notional nonthing, sets up an unnecessary conflict, since by their very nature irrational belief systems are not susceptible to rational persuasion (I've had quite a bit of exposure to this problem).  Militant atheism is more of a commercial project than a serious intellectual endeavor, a way to sell books and demonstrate one's iconoclastic credentials, without having much effect. This is why non-scientists such as Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher have been able to pile on and probably sell more books (or tickets to movies) than Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, or Sam Harris, a neuroscientist.  The approach of Hitchens and Maher has been simply to display their logical erudition and lucidity, unlike the "childish" believers.

Nevertheless, atheism continues to progress in human societies (especially in the more intellectually advanced countries in Europe and in Russia) because of scientific progress.  Religions were founded on superstitions about the unknown and the uncertainties of human existence (vulnerability to the weather, abundance of game and other food, human and other animal predators).  The Earth was assumed to be at the center of a small universe, and it made sense, in our solipsistic way, to arrive through intellectual projection at the conclusion that It Was All About Us. 

Mankind has gradually become disillusioned on this point, but not because of the frontal assault on belief systems by the militant atheists.  Rather it comes about through education that is gradually and systematically acquired.  Richard Feynman described it as a process of learning how utterly insignificant human life is in the context of the cosmos as a whole.  In my opinion, this is why Europe and Russia are far less religious than America.  Their educational systems are significantly better than ours, and miles ahead in math and science.  They don't "teach" atheism; it comes about through the process of learning.  Becoming comfortable with "meaninglessness" is a gradual process, as with other mental disciplines, like solving quadratic equations or learning to construct piano chords.  I'm sure that Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris occasionally jar loose a thought process in a true believer that sets in motion a disillusionment with religion.  But the overwhelming majority of atheists in the National Academy of Sciences, for example, demonstrates the more likely way that atheism becomes one's belief non-system.

I think we're probably in the last throes of organized religion, that is, if modern civilization can hold itself together (if we revert to primitivism, then we'll be back to rain dancing soon enough). In my opinion, that will be a very good thing, for the reasons Sigmund Freud described in the closing passages of The Future of An Illusion, his meditation on the deleterious effects of religion on the psyche.  The usual argument against the eradication of organized superstition is that there will be a collapse in morality, yet it's always seemed to me (along the lines outlined above) that it was mankind who wrote the systems of ethics found in the holy books in the first place; thus, we're clearly capable of deriving a codified morality to govern civilized life.  And a secular, more comprehensive basis for morality would have the advantage of avoiding sectarian prejudices which give rise to Muslims killing Jews, and Christians killing Muslims, and probably were behind antipathies such as the Italians hating Yugoslavs, South Africans hating Dutch, and I don't like anybody very much.

Cliff diving north of Acapulco

"The misconception of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1953 American Mercury article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.^[10][11] Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration.^[12] A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.^"

<sup>Increasingly, I think the Disney Corporation has a lot to answer for.   For one thing, the movie "Old Yeller" was just short of deliberate child abuse.  Disney spent 90 minutes making the doomed mutt lovable and then finished him off in the final scenes.  Now, with the kind of superficial research possible in the Internet age, I learn that the whole lemming mass suicide thing is a myth, what the Aussies call a "furphy."  A load.  I recall that there was a wooden turntable for humans in the Fun House in Playland-At-The-Beach, in the San Francisco of my distant youth, but it was for fun (as should be the case in a Fun House) and not for throwing us all to certain death.

Despite the apocryphal nature of the lemming story, not a day goes by where I don't see the U.S. Congress compared to these close relatives of voles and hamsters, with the point of comparison being the willingness, even the sense of destiny, of Congress as it rushes toward its own cliff, this one fiscal in nature.  Indeed, the whole metaphor of "cliff" is probably derived from the lemming myth, which means that our Congress also gets its images from the Disney Corporation.  What next, multiplying buckets of water?

Meanwhile, down in Mexico, the PRI has been returned triumphantly to power.  The PRI, the organ at the center of Mexico's "guided democracy" from 1929 to 2000, spent twelve years in the wilderness, but now the gentle gente of Mexico have come to their senses and stopped their useless experiment with multi-party democracy.   I can't help but think we were part of the inspiration.  America pretends to have two parties, but for all practical purposes we just have two wings of our own PRI.

When I saw that "1929" as the initiating date for the long hegemony of the PRI, I knew something, and something violent, must have happened to get the PRI started.  I don't know if you've ever read any detailed Mexican history, but you're missing a treat if you haven't.  American history is totally bland by comparison.  We had the Revolutionary War, then the Civil War, then our participation in World War II (World War I was a cameo).  Those events would cover about a decade of Mexican history. The instability of Mexican government up until, well, 1929 was such that there was practically never a time when the Mexicans weren't at war with each other.  In the 1920's it was the Cristero War (Cristero meaning, roughly, "Christer"), and it came about because Mexico elected an atheist president, Plutarco Calles, something the U.S. has never done (at least an avowed atheist, although let's be real here - do Clinton and Obama really seem pious to you?). Calles essentially wanted to abolish the Catholic Church, a large undertaking in Mexico, as you might imagine, with complete secularization of schools and government and restrictions on the right of priests to appear in public. It sparked a rebellion by the Cristero army, with assistance from the U.S., which wanted to make sure Mexico didn't get any bright ideas about nationalizing the oil fields (another dreary monotony in American history) while they were persecuting Catholics.

The rebellion succeeded, the government was forced to relent in its anti-church crusade, and Mexico settled into the traditional aftermath of one of its wars, a decade of revenge murders, torture and multi-purpose atrocities. Then the PRI took charge and reliable corruption once again asserted itself. Along the way, Cardenas did in fact nationalize the oil fields in Mexico, and hired none other than Leon Trotsky (in exile in Mexico at the time) as one of his polemicists.  His arguments against American pretensions to ownership of Mexican oil fields are classic anti-imperialist screeds.  

On my various visits to Mexico, I've always found the commoners there far more realistic about the corruption of their federal government than their American counterparts; the latter insist on believing in the mythology of "ideological differences" between the parties.  One can line up the main elements of the federal budget and see at a glance where the problems are:  a medical system that costs far too much and a runaway defense budget.  If each of these two components were cut in half, the budget crisis would be solved, and at no real cost to the quality of life in America.  We pay twice as much per capita for medical care in the United States compared to comparable First World countries, yet rank 37th in the world in the quality of care.  The U.S. defense budget is premised on re-fighting World War II, which is no longer possible in the nuclear age.  We need a home guard and a nuclear umbrella; nothing else is sensible.

Such sanity is unthinkable because our own PRI, with its Janus-faced components, will not allow sanity, because it disturbs the power base of our elected-for-life D.C. bureaucrats.  So these large, bipedal lemmings (not nearly as cute as their Rodentia inspiration) will hem, haw, extend, pretend and do nothing effective, pulling back from the cliff in the nick of time.  For now.

We're gonna need a bigger turntable.</sup>