Since it has proved impossible to gather the “usual suspects” into one room for intensive, brutal interrogation, let’s proceed with informed speculation.

Emotional involvement contaminates our thoughts. Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, Vladimir Putin has betrayed our hopes for a modern, peaceful, westernized Russia. It appears that, since the financial meltdown, Putin lost faith in the West as the image of the shining path, and chose instead to re-author Russia’s path on the basis of a personal vision. We say about democracy that, of all the alternatives,  it is the least bad. Putin chose not to buy into that. Seeking another road for perfection, he chose something so ancient, it is surprisingly undead: Plato’s Republic.  Putin observed that, while paying lip service to Communism, the Communist Party of China is actually a privileged ruling class that has with rather brilliant success modernized a society with blazing speed. The main difference between the modern, and classical embodiments of the Republic is in the qualification of the members of the ruling class.  While in Plato’s Republic, fitness to rule is the direct consequence of both selection and education, modern membership is about as pure as a Mafia induction ceremony.

It is repugnant to us that, in both China and Russia, members of the ruling class are immune to challenge by those outside it. But curiously, China has recently mounted an active immune response to corruption. With extreme contrast, Putin, in order to solve an otherwise unsolvable problem, co-opted leading elements of the criminal class. Russia, in addition to being a very misshapen version of Plato’s Republic, is a kleptocracy.

There is an enduring misapprehension among many  so-called analysts that Putin rules Russia. These people have seen too many B sci-fi flicks, where the alien steps off the flying saucer, and says, “Take me to your leader.” Curiously, we know for ourselves that we elect persuaders, not leaders, but we don’t seem to get it with other societies.

Even in the most totalitarian societies, loyalties must be constantly reinforced or recreated. Two of the most horrible examples, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia, were not exceptions. With an astuteness about plurality rather shadowed by his monstrous obsession, Hitler divided the power structure among competing fiefdoms. Stalin, impeded by ideology from having anything to divide, chose to simply kill off practically everybody of importance periodically.

Putin chose a third, more humane method. His huge stash has one purpose: to buy Russia. He may shortly be forced to use some of it. But returning to the contamination of our thoughts, Putin  has been such a let-down, there is the strong temptation to pin the murder on him, simply out of blind rage at where he has taken Russia.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Russia is the most indefensible of countries. The battle count of Russia’s army is puny, her borders huge, and her people soaked in ennui and alcohol. Perhaps Putin thought this was the most important problem. So he revived the Cossack caps and uniforms, and, metaphorically,  the  snare drum of Kurt Vonnegut‘s The Sirens of Titan, that beats a rhythm to incite the brainless to fight. He revived nationalism. But nationalism is its own first cause. Once willed into existence, it needs nothing to keep it going.

Putin’s character permits the murder of Nemtsov, but does not prove that he did. There have been many suspicious murders in Russia. Some of them were of individuals who may have had information that would undermine the credibility of the Russian “elite.” A particularly determining factor is whether such an individual could provide corroboration from sources that are outside of Russia. Documentation of Putin’s “stash”, which resides mainly outside of Russia, would be a cause for assassination. To put it another way, an individual who makes allegations about activities inside Russia is relatively harmless, because corroboration is difficult or impossible. But if the chain leads outside of Russia, it’s a different story.

Vladimir Putin presents one of the more unusual pictures of a world leader. He appears personally modest, and, aside from the fact that he lives in a palace, seemingly has little to enjoy from life, other than the sense of proper (to him) execution of a job. If, by another turn of history, he had come from a different background, with a grounding in Western values, he might be esteemed on this side of the fence. This adds to the tragedy. But his tenure has so far demonstrated a notable absence of “crimes of passion”, and considerable skill as a tactician. His tactical flexibility is what has so frustrated the policy wonks.

So the question is posed that, with the assumption that Putin is a masterful tactician, what tactical advantage would have accrued by ordering the murder of Nemtsov? Petro Poroshenko says that Nemtsov was going to reveal Russian links to the Ukraine conflict. Who doesn’t know this already? What kind of “smoking gun” could Nemtsov have had? These days, dirt travels on a thumb drive, so how could it die with Nemtsov?

That is the extent of the pros of “Putin ordered murder of Nemtsov.” The cons have several elements.

1. Part of Putin’s “enlightened” management of dissidence is the permission of controlled demonstrations, which serve several purposes:

• The opportunity to see and document dissidents.
• Gauge popular will.
• Provide an escape valve.
• Present the semblance of democracy.

It appears that the control of Nemtsov’s partisans was in good order. Nemtsov was marginal, and the propaganda machine was and is working well, with no evidence of spread or enlargement of Nemtsov’s faction.

2. The KGB, and the successor FSB, were and are masters of the art of murder. They could make him get sick and die suddenly, die slowly, lose his mind, lose his legs, or simply have the flesh fall off his body. People could spend years arguing over the simple fact of whether Nemtsov was murdered.

3. A martyr, however minor, has been created.

This inclines my opinion that the murder is due to elements of less sophistication than Putin’s masters of social control. His dilemma is pointed out in “Putin, Rodeo Bull Rider”, when I wrote,

…But they have a problem. By now,  the oligarchs have gotten the message that, if they betray the rebels, some people who are handy with guns and have long memories will obtain what they call justice. It would be hard to distract these disaffected people, because it is hard to become fat, happy, and lazy in Russia. Life is just not that easy there.

If Putin and his inner circle decide to do the right thing, they are then faced with arranging the mysterious disappearances, accidents, falling down stairs, getting run over by cars, etc., of hundreds of people. These days, arranging even one unfortunate accident can take years.

Why would the murder occur just outside the Kremlin? In killing Nemtsov there, the perpetrators sent a message to Putin: “Do not betray our hopes, because you are not safe.” The Russians, masters of the profane vernacular, would say that the perps have a finger up a delicate part of Putin’s anatomy. He would not be the first ruler murdered by the palace guards.

This is a bonanza for open source intelligence. Against the perpetual darkness of the Russian power structure, a lightning flash illuminates a minute part of the byzantine workings of the Russian State, heralding, perhaps, another Time of Troubles.

My opinion is that Nemtsov was murdered by the rebels. I’ll provide the reasoning later, after all the suspects have been gathered in a room, and subjected to intense, brutal, ruthless  interrogation.

(See Did Putin Order Nemtsov Murder? and Nemtsov Murder, Analysis Notes.)

In the U.S., we have a tradition called OJT, or on-the-job training, which means you get thrown into a job that you’re not prepared to do, you learn and adapt, and sometimes win kudos for a job well done. OJT is part of the American myth, but unlike other myths, it can be real. OJT provides an end-run around the fossilization of a society by development of various  mandarin classes, and hierarchies that enforce  exclusivity by credentialing processes that become increasingly bizarre and irrelevant over time.  The admission requirements for dental school are an interesting example.

In the spirit of OJT, as with President, we might say about the job qualification for Secretary of State: There are none written in stone, and many written in grease paint. And so, Secretaries have traditionally been drawn from this country’s version of the jirga, the council of elders, who, it is assumed, by their positions in society, and vague qualities of “experience” and wisdom”, as demonstrated by the exercise of “judgment”. The use of quotation marks is not stylistic, but intended to convey the relativity of these qualities. This experience of having exercised judgment is frequently confused with character, or being trustworthy of the job and capable of representing the national interest without collision with personal moral quirks. For example, we would not like to unexpectedly discover that our Secretary of State places the interests of another state above our own, even when the morality is ambiguous. Many Secretaries of State have been lawyers, even though the relationship of the many of the most profound strategies of international relations use the pretense of law as a cloak, rather than a foundation.

Henry Kissinger may be unique, at least among U.S. Secretaries of State, in that he has both taught the skill and held the office. The rarity of this distinction is in itself interesting. The qualification of membership in the “jirga” is at odds with an academic background in the subject. To be an “elder”, one has to have exercised judgment in public life, while academe emphasizes detachment. While being a professor is almost an anti-qualification, the bridge is books and papers, and a social network composed of a fusion of academe and think tanks. Kissinger had both, with the book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and the support of Nelson Rockefeller.

Kissinger’s practice of Realpolitik has left a controversial moral legacy. Ironically, he discusses the moral issue at length, and without apparent bias, in his book, Diplomacy, which in the twenty years since publication has deservedly acquired the status of a monument. Since the U.S. has been a superpower since the Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet sailed the globe in 1907, it has enjoyed the luxury of  foreign policy options not affordable to other nations. U.S. Foreign policy is composed of varying proportions of Wilson’s idealism, and the pragmatic security-through strength of Theodore Roosevelt. In any instance the proportions of the moral high road versus the current exigency are the set by the executive branch with some consideration, or manipulation, of the opinions of the electorate.

Kissinger pays homage to Wilson’s moral vision, but emphasizes that it is empty, and even harmful, if ineffective. He offers the timing of U.S. entry into World War I. Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for an early entry. Kissinger argues that Wilson’s reluctance and delay cost lives. Perhaps, in his tenure as Secretary, his reasoning became too indirect for moralists to accept. But Kissinger’s record is attractive to other governments as a proficient, effective example of Realpolitik in practice. With the exception of the principled nations of Western Europe, there are few examples of Wilsonian-analogous thought. These days, Realpolitik is embraced enthusiastically, even by many nations that are internally democratic. And so Kissinger has a consulting business, with a very select clientele: heads of state. One of them is Vladimir Putin.

Kissinger emphasizes that Putin is not a friend, but a client who wants to know how things work. (Note for open source intelligence: this is a very important tidbit.) One would be a fool to pay Kissinger’s consulting rates, and not read his books. Putin is no fool. Ergo, he read Diplomacy.

Next: But what did he get out of the read?

The lack of detail about the Yemen conflict, as portrayed by open source media, presents an initial choice for the open source analyst.  The IARPA crowdsourcing experiments, out of mathematical necessity, couched questions as “dial-a-pie-chart” probabilities of an outcome, as reported by recognized open-source media. Occasionally, a question was retracted, when it was decided that, based upon the actual outcome, the original terms of the question were undecidable. Ironically, one retracted question was  whether then-president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, would leave power by a certain date. Anticipating the difficulty of determining whether Saleh was in power or not, the question was elaborately worded to envision all possible scenarios. Saleh, who was famous for leaving-but-not-leaving, managed to evade all of them.

But unless you are a participant in a crowdsourcing program, you have the luxury of defining your goals in a more expansive, if less scoreable fashion. You might want to know more about Yemen for other reasons, such as the price of oil. Referring to the previous post, you might want to determine when Yemen has been “securely bought”, meaning that Iranian influence, through Houthi proxies, has been securely contained.

A number of analytic techniques have been mentioned in this blog:

• Occam’s Razor, which is used all over the place
• process of elimination
• psychoanalysis
• empathy, as in “every good predictor contains a model of the system”
• child psychology
• thought-containers
• sources of ideology
• classical geopolitics
• fencing with facts

and many others.  But in the confusion of Yemen, there is the absence of the focal point that gets one started with tool selection.

Deduction is absent, as is induction, and the rest of the vocabulary of formal logic. Jean Piaget identified an age, and a stage of mental development, called the “age of formal operations”. But formal reasoning is an accessory to a more ancient mechanism. Whether formal reasoning exists discretely, or as some kind of “condensate” hovering around the basic neural processes is not known, but it is of keen interest to IARPA.

That formal logic is not the key to intelligence has  been proven; it was sadly found out in the 80’s, in the last big surge of AI research. In those days, researchers thought of the AI problem as “how-to-stretch-the power of a supercomputer as much as possible.” Since simulating a neural network was inconceivably wasteful, the thrust was  to implement AI through fancy, structured logical systems. Very fancy Block Worlds were constructed, and a few autonomous vacuum cleaners, and that was the end of it.

Although formal reasoning is not the base layer of mentality, you may  gravitate towards it, and so be  frustrated by the vagueness of Yemen. One of the most ancient traditions is that of the wise judge, who carefully ascertains the facts of a case, and renders a decision based upon traditions of jurisprudence. Another tradition is that of the mediator, who attempts to understand the concerns of both parties, so as to serve as an instrument of compromise.

These traditions push the nagging sense  that to be responsible, one has to understand the details of the problem. When one serves as judge, it is appropriate. But generating intelligence always begins with vagueness. Sometimes it evolves to judgment, and sometimes it stays vague. That’s the nature of the game. But while errors of thought, and of mental habit, are of infinite variety, consider: formal education does not offer much for problems swirling in vagueness. The educators have left it to scratch and sniff.

Perhaps it would help with the confusion of how to approach a Yemen-type situation to name it. Perhaps the how-to of approaching a Yemen-type situation has already been covered somewhere in blizzard of academic publication, but we’ll start from scratch. But first, let’s consider the inner, primal You. At birth, your brain was not a tabula rasa, but pre-equipped with helpful gestalt images that jump-start the infant’s understanding of the environment.

A behavior-based theory about the brain has the defects of all theories about black boxes: the theory itself contains input from a gestalt, so it is self-referential. Nevertheless, the Gestalt Principles of Grouping are an important proto-theory. It helps us understand how animals like dog and cows, which cannot do the NY Times crossword, seem to enjoy solving puzzles.

The Gestalt organized abilities of the brain are layered on top of something even more primitive: the pattern matching machinery itself. One of the favorite words on the lips of IARPA scientists is “Lyapunov Function.” If you are mystified at how the brain can create patterns out of nothingness, the Lyapunov is the answer. While actual techniques of learning-network construction have advanced since discovery of the Lyapunov magic bullet, the existence of a Lyapunov is proof that a thinking machine can self-organize.

Since at least some parts of your brain (and notice that, in accordance with modern writing guidelines, it’s now “your brain” as opposed to “the brain”), run according to Lyapunov’s magic, here’s a sketchy explanation. Since things in general,  wristwatches,  storm-water runoff, people in Barca-loungers, and soufflés , tend to lose energy and go downhill, the Lyapunov mimics energy. If a bunch of neurons and a problem-to-be-solved, such as matching a pattern, collectively have a Lyapunov, they want to “cool off”. So if we put these neurons inside a bag with the problem, such as the organization of Yemen, and shake the bag in a special way, the stuff in the bag will “relax”, and the outcome will be a state. The state is a readout of one or more of the neurons, and it could be a pattern-match.

This is the most primitive form of reasoning, and this is how you should approach the Yemen problem. Simply activate your collection of gestalts, and your personal Lyapunov will hand you the answer. Go have a cup of coffee while you wait.

It could be that simple, or impossible. You won’t know until you reach down inside yourself. Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men? To find out, you must study your own shadow, unfettered by the formalisms of academe, the conventions of polite society, or best wishes for mankind.

The short-lived recent strategy of the Houthis seems to have been to legitimize certain gains, the specifics and realities of which are not visible in open sources. Houthi declarations were full of respect for political process, which, historically, is not what they are about.

The Houthis are a tribe, members of the Zaidiyyah sect, a Shi’a variant. Almost nothing in the fractious religious dogma of these sects is of interest in predicting behavior, except for one thing. Zaidism, like Twelver Shi’ism, codifies a hierarchical approach to religious knowledge, in which every believer is required to choose an Imam to follow. The choice is his, but he must make it. The rest of the myriad details, such as who can be an Imam, who is infallible and who is not, is not really germane to the present, although it could matter if Iran extends a pseudopod to the Arabian peninsula.

Put as simply as possible, the Shia are like Catholics, with a complex hierarchy of religious authorities. The Sunni are like Protestants. The lack of central authority is why there are so many Protestant sects, in comparison to the few, dealt-with schisms of the “Universal Church.”  Robert Baer notes that Sunni Islam is the more fertile ground for extremism. This is usually explained as the influence of Wahabism, but the absence of a hierarchical restraint is also important.

So,  unlike the “spontaneous generation” of ISIS, which was allowed, if not encouraged, by the lack of Sunni hierarchy, all forms of Shia Islam provide a logical  point of influence in the form of compression of the upper hierarchy. This is what makes it possible for Iran to cause the sophisticated political posturing of a tribe that just a few years ago, in the Sa’dah War,  attempted to carve an autonomous state out of a waste land surrounded by enemies.

But Iran’s finesse didn’t work. The Houthis are a large minority, but there are just too many tribes with guns in Yemen. Sobering up from the daily Khat binge, they are checking their magazines.

I feel sorry for Hadi. He seems a decent man, too good for his country.

Reports from multiple sources, including Al Jazeera, are that the Houthis and  President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi have made a power sharing deal.

Here we resort to psychoanalysis.  In the West, the strong tinge of personality characteristic of politicians is sublimated by institutional practice.  While  France had the challenge of a “not French”  Sarkozy, and Italy the clownish Berlusconi, in both cases, the  systems reacted against their personal traits in favor of a “national character.”

In the Middle East, the opposite is true. In the long tenures of charismatic and/or reactionary regimes, government becomes imprinted with personal character. Metaphorically, King Abdullah of the House of Saud swings every executioner’s sword, Syria’s Assad tortures every  Mukhabarat prisoner,  and Turkey’s Erdoğan is the authoritarian father-figure. Egypt’s El-Sisi, with an unusually delicate touch for the region,  muffles the screams of the opposition to obtain the level of decorum he requires.

The above players seek stasis, which, in the region, is the opposite of chaos. Both they and their opponents have, for their respective goals, the equivalents of energy budgets. Each side has the goal of spending as little of their budget to achieve the immediate goal, but the conservative regimes spend less, because their time horizons stretch to infinity.

So in the Middle East casino, there are two types of players. The conservative regimes underplay their hands.  But the revolutionaries, whose only world is a rapid state of flux, chronically  overplay. They may not be consciously aware that, if they stand still, they die, but the distinction between the conscious mind, and the unconscious, is a purely Western one.

This offers a conclusion that cannot be obtained by reading the fine wording, if it even exists, of the agreement between Hadi and the Houthis: that it is merely tactical. It is trite but appropriate to call them pawns. Hadi was not originally a pawn, but has been devalued by events. Although some doubt the significance of the Houthis because they are not Twelvers, they are of great value to Iran as a wedge on the Arabian peninsula. The Iranians are superb at both strategy and tactics, with a time horizon entirely comparable to their conservative Sunni adversaries, and not terribly picky about the religious purity of their proxies. Their advice to their Houthi clients can be assumed to be excellent, and may moderate the tribal instinct to overplay.

This is a struggle the House of Saud must win at all costs. The oil-price-crash is partly attributable to the essential need to starve the Iranian economy of dollars, until the Saudis securely buy Yemen. Love  is for sale.

A specialist on Yemen, with human contacts, and access to intelligence products, could make a detailed map of politics and power. With a few flies on the wall, he might manage to be one step ahead of what is visible.

On the other hand, he might not. One of the discoveries of the IARPA projects in crowdsourcing intelligence is that specialists tend to overweight details, as in the colloquial expression ” He can’t see the forest for the trees.”

I had good success with a scenario of a certain similarity once posed as an FWE (Forecasting World Events) question. Having no knowledge of the particulars other than a map, I attempted to size the inertia, or lack, of an unstable internal political situation against external forces. It gradually emerged that the internal system, to the extent that it existed, was a pushover.  The country was extremely poor, which meant that influence could be bought on the cheap.

So it is with Yemen, the only country on earth that is literally running out of water, where men of all ages pass the days in a daze of khat. The psychology of such a place is different from here, where many of us worry and work ourselves to death. In Yemen, anybody with bags of money can have himself an army.

The current situation is the result of attempting a modest social improvement by the replacement of autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh with a pluralist, Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, who according to this AFP article, “failed to bring stability.” Why is the indictment so vague? Have we run out of prying journalists?

The details remain unstated because the alleged issues of dispute are probably not the real ones. This looks like a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with Al Qaeda occupying every vacancy. And what happened to Saleh? Without ascribing any particular veracity to Al-Monitor, “Deposed President Saleh Still Pulling Strings in Yemen” states that Saleh, who had been fervently anti-terror while recognized as a U.S. ally, has found himself new friends, in Al Qaeda.

The media has not covered this well. But the open source analyst has resort to a general rule that, if beneath the dignity of the specialist, is surprisingly predictive, Having failed to achieve political stability via social evolution, the Saudis will do some buying. They might even buy Saleh again.

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. In Yemen, the land of the poor, the dollar rules all.

The battle for the airport of Donetsk is a tragedy in which the actors know their parts too well. Perhaps the Ukrainians should adopt a variant of the Polish national anthem,  Poland is Not Yet Lost. Belying the title, the purpose is supposed to have been to buck up Polish soldiers, two years before the country was erased from the map.

According to CNN, Russian troops have entered Ukraine.  Quoting Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk , “Tanks, GRAD multiple rocket systems, BUK and SMERCH systems…”

The BUK is an effective anti-aircraft missile system, which was last present in the Ukraine when Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down. The GRAD and SMERCH are descendants of the Katyusha rocket truck of World War II.

Since the Donetsk airport is important in the establishment of political boundaries, and untenable for the Ukrainians to hold, it is a reasonable calculation by the Russians to seize it by direct action. From their point of view, the sanctions cannot get much worse. The decay of Western cohesion on the isolation of Russia will be “date stamped” by the last significant Russian incursion. So their unspoken mantra is something like, “What more can they do to us? Let’s get it over with.”

Perhaps the Russians would have preferred to use tanks, which, though heavy weapons, don’t present quite the logistical challenge of a procession of rocket trucks. But there has been mention of transfer of U.S. TOW missiles to Ukraine. The TOW is a sophisticated weapon that can make assault of a strong point by tanks a bad proposition for the attacker.

But brief comments by soldiers stationed in the airport give the impression that the defenses have not been hardened. For a soft target, the GRAD is ideal. It is a simple, optically aimed but unguided system with an incredible rate of fire. It is driven to a suitable launching point, where the entire battery is emptied in about 30 seconds. It then leaves before counter-battery fire can commence. If it does, all that is lost is one empty truck.

The GRAD rockets themselves have small warheads with little penetrating power, but Russia has hundreds of trucks. The Ukrainians slaughtered, Russian tanks have temporary use  as ramparts while the rebels dig in. The SMERCH is a heavier rocket, but sheer economics suggests it will be used sparingly.

 While the Ukrainians know their part well, and play it with Shakespearean perfection, the Russians are improv players. They’ll be playing Goldfinger to the hilt.

The earliest conception of life was of the divine spark, transmuting inanimate matter. Whether this was an ongoing process of spontaneous generation, or a “first cause”, was emphatically addressed, as all high school biology students know, by Louis Pasteur, and by others with successive refinement.

But very early on, the muscle contractions of frog legs caused by electricity generated by early batteries, coined “Galvanism” after the inventor of an early battery, popularized the notion that the electric spark could replace the Divine (Napoleon was an early adherent.) The temptation to play God attracted hoards of fiction writers, and finally, chemist Stanley Miller,  in collaboration with Nobel prize winner Harold Urey. With an electric spark through a cloud of ammonia, mimicking the conditions of primordial earth, the Miller-Urey Experiment synthesized organic compounds that are primary constituents of life. Sidney W. Fox and Kaoru Harada elaborated this with additional steps that produced proteinoid microspheres, primitive globules which are temptingly deemed protocells, that could reproduce a generation or two before dissolution, and which demonstrated some elements of metabolism. Quoting,

Microspheres have multiple properties that are similar to those of cells. The microspheres produced were mostly uniformly spherical and Fox believed that the shape and uniformity mimics that of coccoid bacteria. He also believed that the uniformity meant that there was a sophisticated system that kept the microspheres at equilibrium. The microspheres were able to asexually divide via binary fission, could form junctions with other microspheres, and developed a double membrane corresponding to that of a cell.[7]

But the experiment’s creation shared, poetically speaking, the fictional myth of the nonviability of the spawn of those who play around with forbidden things.

When artificial life was finally created by the lab, in the form of Mycoplasma laboratorium, it was noted with little more fanfare than a talking parrot, and was forgotten more quickly. It was the design of genetic engineers seeking a simplified organism, stripping out every nonessential enzymatic pathway inserted their genome into a bacterial husk. Although the genomes of many organisms have now been sequenced, it leaves a problem generally considered intractable in its totality: understanding all the enzymatic pathways of the cell. The genomic origins understood, the dynamics remain incredibly murky.

The creation of life was a breakthrough robbed completely of surprise by a biological science that had passed through the stages of morphology, physiology, and biochemistry to an elaborate informatic system stemming directly out of the double helix of Watson and Crick. Every high school biology student from the mid sixties on who was among the lucky ones exposed to a modern curricula was told, in no uncertain terms, that life would be understood, because:

1. Life is a process, not a thing.
2. The Rosetta stone of life, the DNA double helix, had been obtained.
3. Years of hard work had already produced some results, such as viral structures.

Actually, there was some luck. Taq, the high-temperature-stable DNA polymerase, so crucial to  PCR cloning, so as to produce the quantities of DNA necessary for sequencing, was  discovered in hadobacteria  in Yellowstone National Park. Genetic engineering is crucially reliant on Taq. Isn’t it poetic?

A generation of biologists have spent their lives manipulating the informatics of living things, in such a way that accustoms the mind to a little mental separation between the idea of life, and the flesh and blood, xylem and phoem, nuclei and plasma. The wet stuff seems to  have a monopoly  on the execution of the idea, but perhaps this is illusory.

Next, while Ukraine bubbles and stews, we’ll consider how some stretch in the idea of life is useful, both as a tool in the categorization of processes, and in the identification of the real thing in unfamiliar places.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

–The Walrus and the Carpenter, by Lewis  Carroll

To the dedicated humanist, the discussion to follow may appear similarly disconnected. But we are neither the center of the universe,  nor on the periphery of our own. There is much to be gained by stepping outside the humanistic viewpoint, and viewing the show from the outside. Early attempts at broadening the humanistic perspective include Robert H. March’s Physics for Poets, and elective courses on Skinnerian “rat psychology.” This supposedly resulted in “well rounded” individuals, suitable for depiction in Greek statuary. But there is little evidence that all this rounding is organically useful to students of politics and international relations.

So liberal arts remains mired in the past, the refuge and favorite of people who feel weak at math and strong with words. This is why we have, in addition to policies, policy analysis. Perhaps it is also why  we think of the divisions of humanity as stemming from cultural differences, rather than the reverse implication: the need for division of humanity causing cultural differences.  An interesting example of this is  the ancient state of Khazaria, which in the 8th century singularly adopted Judaism as the state religion. It was a cultural distinction made in the service of political autonomy.

Most of the problems of history are confused in this way: the  arrow of causation, the direction from cause to effect, is framed by ancient viewpoints, implicitly constrained by revolving around consciousness, conscience, and spirituality. But it’s not necessary to discard those things. After plowing through Henry Stapp’s Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, you may conclude that the complexity of the brain offers a reservoir of quantum mechanical uncertainty in which free will may securely hide, safe from prying eyes of the deterministic mindset.

So the mechanistic universe may be one more myth, a relic of the debate about whether efficacious consciousness can exist in a deterministic world. You may now indulge without guilt in the advances in complex systems, self organizing automata, and alternative life forms, without putting your humanistic heart at risk. There is much to be gained.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms, it’s an idiomatic expression to say about ideas (and a lot of other things), “Someone imagined it, and the idea took on a life of its own.” Perhaps we owe a debt to the author of this apocryphal expression, which accidentally discovers a reasonable approximation: Ideas can behave as  life forms. Of particular interest is the sudden growth of the Islamic State, blazing  like a fire tornado, its imminent demise, and the sinking feeling that analyzing the particulars of ISIS leaves something out. As a generality, it will happen again and again in future histories, differing in detail, but running the same general course.

Next: Ideas as life forms.