Jonny Robinson on Seeking vs. Knowledge

A simple but yet wise thoughts from Jonny Robinson:

Would you rather have a fish or know how to fish? Again, we need some more information. If having the fish is the result of knowing how to fish, then once more the two halves of the disjunction are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and this combination is the ideal. But, if the having is the result of waiting around for someone to give you a fish, it would be better to know how to do it yourself. For where the waiting agent hopes for luck or charity, the agent who knows how to fish can return to the river each morning and each evening, throwing her line into the water over and over until she is satisfied with the catch.

And so it is with knowledge. Yes, it’s better to know, but only where this implies an accompanying attitude. If, instead, the possession of knowledge relies primarily upon the sporadic pillars of luck or privilege (as it so often does), one’s position is uncertain and in danger of an unfounded pride (not to mention pride’s own concomitant complications). Split into two discrete categories, then, we should prefer seeking to knowing. As with the agent who knows how to fish, the one who seeks knowledge can go out into the world, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, but in any case able to continue until she is satisfied with her catch, a knowledge attained. And then, the next day, she might return to the river and do it all again.

A person will eventually come up against the world, logically, morally, socially, even physically. Some collisions will be barely noticeable, others will be catastrophic. The consistent posture of seeking the truth gives us the best shot at seeing clearly, and that is what we should praise and value.

Good Bye Freeman Dyson

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences. 

- Freeman Dyson

You were the last man standing from the classic physicists. Thank you sir for all the wisdom and discoveries. We will all prerish but you will be remembered for centuries to come.

In his memory, let's cherish and not abuse technology.

Best Movie Scenes - Was It Worth It?

Sometime when I was around 31/32 years old, I fell in love in Max. I don't remember the exact moment or day but all I know is something unique happened to me that changed my mind and body.

I also knew consiciously what I was getting into. I was building a solid foundation for life long pain of losing him someday and living without him for longer than living with him. I broke one of the fundamental priciples of stoicism:

Stoic love is moderated by a sense of future loss, by the potential for betrayal, for the reality that our own feelings might change over time as well. Having accepted these basic condition, the irrationality of these powerful, biological feelings we have becomes a little more rational—and life a little more manageable.

As a matter of fact, I reveresed that princinple. Mindful of future loss, I loved him more and my time had became synonymous with our time together.

There is a beautiful lyrics from a 1960's Hindi song which I think is true for my relationship with Max.

It is a strange story, Where it starts and where it stops, What destinations are these, Niether they nor we could understand it.

[---] 

You have become so close to someone that you went far away from everyone else. 

The question naturally comes after decade of breaking stoic pricinples, becoming far from everone else and now having to continue life without Max - Was it worth it?

I think, I already answered that question here:

I had the pleasure of immense "Moral Luck" to spend 13 years with Max. I am eternally grateful for that time. I would gladly pick any day of those 13 years to be with him in an eternal Ground Hog Day.

In the movie City of Angles, Nicholas Cage's character sums up nicely the answer to that stupid question -Was it worth it?:

I would rather have had one breath of her hair, one kiss from her mouth, one touch of her hand, than eternity without it.

P:S:
One of the most suprising things I learned in the recent years was how much Tim Ferris's changed since his dog Molly came into his life. Tim is kind of type A personality and highly competitive guy; at cursory social level comparison - Tim and I are very different personalities (with blots of depression and stocism being the commonality between us).

Here's is Ryan Holiday asking him that as the very first question and another episode where he talks about how life could be after Molly. A reader comment's:

Hi Tim, I’ve enjoyed and leared much from your books and podcasts for three years. I’ve also enjoyed many books you recommended in your podcasts. Well, your comments about your dog Molly brought tears to my eyes. I’ve had three yellow labs over the span of 20 years. The third lab passed away only a month ago. I would give up almost everything I own to have them back with me again. 

East to Eden - History of Apple

In the foothills and valleys of the Tien Shan range, the new apple found itself in a genuine paradise. Bears, deer and wild pigs lived in the spreading woodlands, eating the wild fruit in autumn and selecting the sweeter, juicier apples while bees laboured in the pollination department of the same evolutionary project. The bears, living in the abundant caves of the Tien Shan, were avid fruit-eaters, and pips could pass through their guts unharmed to germinate in the dung. As Juniper pointed out, the baseball-glove claws of bears are perfectly suited to the grasping of apples. He had seen how enthusiastically they will vandalize a tree bearing a favourite sweet apple, dragging off whole branches in a kind of rough pruning. Out on the steppe, huge herds of wild horses and donkeys also browsed on the ripe apples and helped them spread westwards and south along the range towards what is now Almaty. Like the bears, they kept on selecting the larger, juicier, sweeter apples, so that as it spread west, the apple gradually became larger. At the same time this evolutionary pressure changed it from a ‘bird’ fruit with edible seeds to a ‘mammal’ fruit with poisonous seeds. The bitter taste of apple pips is cyanide, and the smooth, hard, teardrop seed coat evolved as the perfect streamlined vehicle to pass intact through an animal’s guts.

Juniper believed that by the time the ‘new’ apple had populated the northern slopes of the eastern Tien Shan and reached near Almaty, it had evolved into something like its present size and culinary appeal. Later, as human populations began to travel back and forth along the old animal migration routes between east and west, they helped to spread the new fruit. People call these routes ‘The Silk Roads’, but they were in use five or six thousand years before the discovery of silk, which lent its name to the route only during the period from ad 0 to 400. In the early days, said Juniper, camels would have been the means of transport along the routes, but, although they are as fond of apples as any other herbivore, their digestive system is so efficient that not even apple pips will survive it. Then, around 7,000 years ago, something momentous happened on the plains of Kazakhstan. The horse was domesticated, and soon started to travel the trading routes. The more direct northern trade routes led from Shanghai and Xian via Urumchi in north-west China to Almaty, Tashkent and Bokhara, then through Anatolia all the way to the Mediterranean coast. During winter the Tien Shan Mountains were impassable in the snow, so traders took the long way round to the south. But when the snows melted in July, the caravans turned north and until the first snows in November travelled through the Ili Valley and the Tien Shan range via Almaty, passing through fruit forests on the way.

- More here from Late Roger Deakin with a brilliant introduction and postscript by Robert Macfarlane.

The food we eat is divine and it is god. But yet most don't respect and worse waste so much.

There is a wise story in Mahabratha on wasting food; Lord Krishna would fill his hunger with a single grain of rice which was going waste.

I always carry these beautiful lines from Wendell Berry's essay "Pleasures of Eating" in my wallet as a constant reminder:

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. 

Exposome - Tracking A Lifetime Of Exposures To Better Understand Disease

“We think about all health and illness as a combination of genes and the environment, and now it really is time to fill out the environment side of that equation,” says Julia Brody, a toxicologist affiliated with Brown University and the leader of the Silent Spring Institute, which studies environmental links to breast cancer. “We’ve made an enormous investment in understanding the genome and almost nothing comparatively to focus on the exposome.”

Impossible or not, researchers are forging ahead, breaking off bits and pieces of a lifetime’s exposure to put under the microscope. Still, discussions continue about how to make real progress and how to collect and examine information in a meaningful way.

Some scientists are advocating for more air monitors in cities and homes. Others are developing wearable monitors that soak up pieces of the environment as people move through their day. Some are trying to match tracking data from cell phones to satellite indicators of air quality, helping to assess individual exposures based on a person’s locale and movements. Still other researchers are looking inside the body, hoping to identify chemical footprints that distinct exposures may have left behind.

[---]

It was a concern for unexplained diseases that led cancer researcher Christopher Wild to first come up with the term “exposome” in 2005. Wild had closely followed the race to sequence the human genome, which had successfully concluded two years prior, and worried that, in its eagerness to advance genetics, the world had forgotten the importance of environmental exposures in health. It’s a sentiment that has only grown stronger in recent years as genetics has failed to yield clear links to many cancers and other diseases. A recent study looked at the prevalence of 28 chronic conditions in twins and found that genetics explained less than 20 percent of the risk in most of the illnesses examined. Even in asthma — which ranked highest in terms of genetic contribution — genetics explained less than 50 percent of the risk. For leukemia — on the other end of the rankings — genetics explained only 3 percent.

[---]

Simply getting a handle on how many chemicals are out there is harder than it sounds. A recent study attempted this in 100 consumer products. Toothpaste contained 85 chemicals, while one plastic children’s toy contained about 300. Across all the products, the study detected 4,270 unique chemical signatures and tentatively identified 1,602 of those. But only 30 percent of those 1,602 chemicals could be matched to public lists of known ingredients in consumer products or compounds of toxicological interest.

“There’s got to be tens of millions — hundreds of millions, if not more,” says Jon Sobus, an environmental health scientist at the US Environmental Protection Agency and coauthor on the consumer products study. “Where does the number of chemicals end?”

- More Here

A Single-Dose HPV Vaccine Would Have A Big Impact On Cancer Prevention

Up to half of cancers are preventable — they never have to occur. While cancer typically afflicts older individuals, most of cancer’s instigators plant their seeds during childhood. That means decisive action early in life can prevent cancer-related suffering and death for countless individuals as adults.

This fact, combined with emerging information about a preventive strategy against the human papillomavirus (HPV), creates a potential game changer in the fight against cancer. HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection, can cause several cancers: cervical cancer in women, penile cancer in men, as well as some throat, anal, and other cancers. In the U.S., the number of cancer cases linked to HPV have soared by nearly 45% over the past 15 years.

In 2006, the FDA approved a safe and effective HPV vaccine that, when administered between the ages of 11 and 26, can prevent almost 90% of HPV-related cancers. (The vaccine produces the strongest immune response in 11- and 12-year-olds, before they are exposed to the virus). The vaccine currently requires two doses, with the second given six to 12 months after the first. Unvaccinated men and women ages 27 to 45 can also get the HPV vaccine and should consult with their physician about the benefits given their individual health needs.

[---]

Thanks to Nobel Prize-winning science, we know that millions of cancers — up to 15% of all new cancer cases each year — can be prevented from ever starting by eliminating infectious agents responsible for them. HPV alone, which affects nearly all adults in their lifetimes, causes one-third of these preventable cancers.

The body’s immune system usually clears out an HPV infection. But the virus persists in some people, causing HPV-related cancers in more than 600,000 men and women worldwide each year, the majority of them (85%) in low- and middle-income countries where cancer treatment is suboptimal or nonexistent. In these low-resource settings, cancer prevention may be the best option to save lives.

- More Here

Milk Consumption During Teenage Years and Risk of Hip Fractures in Older Adults

Abstract

Importance  Milk consumption during adolescence is recommended to promote peak bone mass and thereby reduce fracture risk in later life. However, its role in hip fracture prevention is not established and high consumption may adversely influence risk by increasing height.

Objectives  To determine whether milk consumption during teenage years influences risk of hip fracture in older adults and to investigate the role of attained height in this association.

Design, Setting, and Participants  Prospective cohort study over 22 years of follow-up in more than 96 000 white postmenopausal women from the Nurses’ Health Study and men aged 50 years and older from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study in the United States.

Exposures  Frequency of consumption of milk and other foods during ages 13 to 18 years and attained height were reported at baseline. Current diet, weight, smoking, physical activity, medication use, and other risk factors for hip fractures were reported on biennial questionnaires.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Cox proportional hazards models were used to calculate relative risks (RRs) of first incidence of hip fracture from low-trauma events per glass (8 fl oz or 240 mL) of milk consumed per day during teenage years.

Results  During follow-up, 1226 hip fractures were identified in women and 490 in men. After controlling for known risk factors and current milk consumption, each additional glass of milk per day during teenage years was associated with a significant 9% higher risk of hip fracture in men (RR = 1.09; 95% CI, 1.01-1.17). The association was attenuated when height was added to the model (RR = 1.06; 95% CI, 0.98-1.14). Teenage milk consumption was not associated with hip fractures in women (RR = 1.00 per glass per day; 95% CI, 0.95-1.05).

- Full paper here 

The point is to reduce (or even stop) milk intake. It's crazy that people drink so much milk every day with an illusion of calcium causing so many sufferings to dairy cows. 

Cruelty Persists Since We Fear The Idea Of Personal Change

I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the centre of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.

We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.

- That was Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar acceptance speech. Thank you, sir.

So here you go. Most people I know are non-religious and they think they are the center of the universe. And sponsor this cruelty every day.

Disconnected is not the correct word. We are disconnected from cancer but we all care about finding a cure for it. We are disconnected from the stock market but we all care about making money through it one way or another.  The correct word is - most people don't care. I think it is important to use the correct words and phrases.

So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

- Benjamin Franklin

For once in life, we need to heed to Gladwell's thoughtful proposal to "embrace the uncomfortable luxury of changing one's mind."

Swimming Spot

Neo visited Max's favorite swimming plot today - A perfect spring day before spring.
This is the first time, I went there without Max for over 13 years.

There's something about a place you've been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone... they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul.”

― Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows 

The Warning Signs - Intimations of an Ending

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of error left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. … The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history. 

- Robbery Under Law, Evelyn Waugh

There is something unique and beyond imagination going on here... they have unleashed the worse demons of our nature. They have caught the tiger by the tail and I think, it's too late to revert anything back. It is going to be bad, really bad for the world unless... lessons of history and morality are unleashed to demolish these demons. It might sound impossible but it can happen easily. Until then this brutality continues while the mobs of "good" and "decent" humans celebrate this fanatism.

If decent people I grew up with and some, who even raised me as a kid can not only elect and tolerate a monster but celebrate... well as usual, why I am not surprised by this human capacity for barbarism and idiocy? What people don't reflect on is that every time barbarism raises, a new "normal" becomes the norm. The next generation of barbarism naturally tries to "up" this new norm and this becomes a vicious cycle. I am not clairvoyant but any moron could understand this even if they read and understand little into human history.

I have great respect for Arundhati Roy; she has the balls that I never had. For over 25 years she has dedicated her life to something remarkable. People like her is what makes me say the change can happen easily. Please read her new piece and reflect on what your celebrating, Intimations of an Ending: The rise and rise of the Hindu Nation:

In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves—its size and changing shape, its depth and diversity. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company. India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world, at least not yet, but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic.

[---]

Not all the roaring of the sixty thousand in the Houston stadium could mask the deafening silence from Kashmir. That day, 22 September, marked the forty-eighth day of curfew and communication blockade in the valley.

Once again, Modi has managed to unleash his unique brand of cruelty on a scale unheard of in modern times. And, once again, it has endeared him further to his loyal public. When the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill was passed in India’s parliament on 6 August, there were celebrations across the political spectrum. Sweets were distributed in offices, and there was dancing in the streets. A conquest—a colonial annexation, another triumph for the Hindu Nation—was being celebrated. Once again, the conquerors’ eyes fell on the two primaeval trophies of conquest—women and land. Statements by senior BJP politicians, and patriotic pop videos that notched up millions of views, legitimised this indecency. Google Trends showed a surge in searches for the phrases “marry a Kashmiri girl” and “buy land in Kashmir.”

It was not all limited to loutish searches on Google. Within weeks of the siege, the Forest Advisory Committee cleared 125 projects that involve the diversion of forest land for other uses.

[---]

In December 2014, a two-judge bench of the Justices Gogoi and Rohinton Fali Nariman ordered that an updated list of the NRC be produced before the Supreme Court within a year. Nobody had any clue about what could or would be done to the five million “infiltrators” that it was hoped would be detected. There was no question of them being deported to Bangladesh. Could that many people be locked up in detention camps? For how long? Would they be stripped of citizenship? And was India’s highest constitutional court going to oversee and micromanage a colossal bureaucratic exercise involving more than thirty million people, nearly fifty-two thousand bureaucrats and a massive outlay of funds?

In the less fertile chars that I visited early last month, the poverty washes over you like the dark, silt-rich waters of the Brahmaputra. The only signs of modernity were the bright plastic bags containing documents which their owners—who quickly gather around visiting strangers—cannot read but kept looking at anxiously, as though trying to decrypt the faded shapes on the pages and work out whether they would save them and their children from the massive new detention camp they had heard is being constructed deep in the forests of Goalpara. Imagine a whole population of millions of people like this, debilitated, rigid with fear and worry about their documentation. It’s not a military occupation, but it’s an occupation by documentation. These documents are peoples’ most prized possessions, cared for more lovingly than any child or parent. They have survived floods and storms and every kind of emergency. Grizzled, sun-baked farmers, men and women, scholars of the land and the many moods of the river, use English words like “legacy document,” “link paper,” “certified copy,” “re-verification,” “reference case,” “D-voter,” “declared foreigner,” “voter list,” “refugee certificate”—as though they were words in their own language. They are. The NRC has spawned a vocabulary of its own. The saddest phrase in it is “genuine citizen.”

[---]

How do you translate this in modern terms if not as the National Register of Citizens coupled with the Citizenship Amendment Bill? This is the RSS’s version of Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, by which German citizens were only those who had been granted citizenship papers—legacy papers—by the government of the Third Reich. The amendment against Muslims is the first such amendment. Others will no doubt follow, against Christians, Dalits, Communists—all enemies of the RSS.

The Foreigners Tribunals and detention centres that have already started springing up across India may not, at the moment, be intended to accommodate hundreds of millions of Muslims. But they are meant to remind us that India’s Muslims truly belong there, unless they can produce legacy papers. Because only Hindus are considered India’s real aboriginals, who don’t need those papers. Even the four-century-old Babri Masjid didn’t have the right legacy papers. What chance would a poor farmer or a street vendor have?

This is the wickedness that the sixty thousand people in the Houston stadium were cheering. This is what the president of the United States linked hands with Modi to support. It’s what the Israelis want to partner with, the Germans want to trade with, the French want to sell fighter jets to and the Saudis want to fund.

We can only hope that, someday soon, the streets in India will throng with people who realise that unless they make their move, the end is close.

If that doesn’t happen, consider these words to be intimations of an ending from one who lived through these times.

Embrace The Uncomfortable Luxury Of Changing One’s Mind

I always believed - "Changing our minds" is more important than "Love". Changing mind is one of the most fundamental elements from which everything including love builds on.

It might surprise many to hear this - Dogs do that more often and easily than any other species that I know of. More on this later, but understand that the roots of dog's unconditional love come from their learned (not innate) capacity to change their minds often.

None other than Gladwell says it beautifully (and he has done that to himself over and over again):

That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being — to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.

[…]

If you create a system where you make it impossible, politically, for people to change [their] mind, then you’re in trouble

Please Support Dr. Kwane Who Helps

Please donate @GoFund to support Dr.Kwane's noble work.

Dr. Kwane Stewart was already an experienced veterinarian when he decided to help the less fortunate in his community. After spending an afternoon offering medical care to the pets of people experiencing homelessness, he learned an important lesson: These animals provided more than companionship to their owners — they also offered love, hope, and security. What Dr. Kwane initially thought would be a one-off experience has since turned into a nine-year mission to help four-legged pets across Southern California and beyond.

[---]Between his street work and partnerships with other organizations, Dr. Kwane has helped roughly 400 animals since 2011, including a fair share of cats — and once, even a Burmese python.While some of the individuals he approaches can be a little hesitant to accept help at first, Dr. Kwane says they are usually relieved and thankful by the end of their pet’s examination. Many even shed tears of joy. With each new animal he helps, Dr. Kwane says he gains a deeper understanding of the unique bond that exists between those experiencing homelessness and their pets.

“Their relationship is on a totally different level,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many times people told me their animals are their reason for getting up in the morning.”

- Read more about Dr.Kwane's work here

Dr. Aysha Akhtar in her beautiful book, Our Symphony with Animals has written reams about homeless people's struggle to care for their pets.

We are acknowledging the interconnectedness of our lives with other animals. Their well-being is not separate from ours. On the contrary, we share the same fate.

Moving forward, how we choose to be with animals will depend on how willing we are to be with them. Not as predator and prey, not as master and servant. But as kin, as partners, and as friends, strolling shoulder to shoulder along the dips and rises that stretch before us. We lose nothing when we do so. What we gain is our health, our happiness, our humanity. And friendships that are irreplaceable.

Please do support Dr.Kwane's work.

Country Roads, Take Me Home… To My Friends: How Intelligence, Population Density, And Friendship Affect Modern Happiness

Abstract

We propose the savanna theory of happiness, which suggests that it is not only the current consequences of a given situation but also its ancestral consequences that affect individuals' life satisfaction and explains why such influences of ancestral consequences might interact with intelligence. We choose two varied factors that characterize basic differences between ancestral and modern life - population density and frequency of socialization with friends - as empirical test cases. As predicted by the theory, population density is negatively, and the frequency of socialization with friends is positively, associated with life satisfaction. More importantly, the main associations of life satisfaction with population density and socialization with friends significantly interact with intelligence, and, in the latter case, the main association is reversed among the extremely intelligent. More intelligent individuals experience lower life satisfaction with more frequent socialization with friends. This study highlights the utility of incorporating evolutionary perspectives in the study of subjective well-being.

- Full paper here (It's a very good paper and they have covered good ground towards truth)

Infinite Loop

Max was sleeping next to me. I was taking a nap. I work up around 4pm. Max woke up too.
Then he started breathing heavy which turned into gasping for air. I was saying out loud Max it's ok Max relax. Then he stopped breathing.

No matter what I write here, say to others, how I feel day in and out - this scene comes back a few times every day or week and lasts about 30 seconds to a minute. I feel completely helpless. I feel I could have done something. I grid my teeth. I have no tears. I feel pure helplessness and anger. And it goes away. This is the only time I don't cry.

This infinite loop is what I think something that people call PTSD. It doesn't matter what name or diagnosis it is classified under since it hurts. What happened on December 20th was the worse few minutes of my life. It completely makes sense why this infinite loop runs inside of me every once in a while. I might have to live with it for the rest of my life. And maybe that is the last lesson Max taught me - a visual lesson of memento mori.

I love you, Max. I miss you.

Libertarian Bullshit and Conscience Of A Human Being

Since Max passed away, I avoid giving time to people who conveniently refuse to see a simple morality plus one that is so easy to follow - help avoid animal suffering.

I have seen Max suffer for over 18 months with cancer but yet people don't mind stabbing a pig or cow or chicken or fish. To make it worse - everyone I know (I mean everyone) at some point or other puts on a stupid smile while discussing this simple piece of morality. As J.D Salinger's Holden would say - I could puke every time they smile.

There is one consensus amongst current ethic writings - future generations would look down on us for what we are doing to animals now. I disagree with that point. We have to start looking down on them now.

Michael Huemer lays down this simple piece of morality (plus splendid points to avoid distractions using endless bullshit discussions which never leads anywhere) - The Conscience of a Human Being

My best guess is that the vast majority of human beings are motivated to avoid moral wrongs only when those wrongs either (a) are socially disapproved, or (b) conflict with the dictates of the powerful.

[---]

But the largest and most obvious example of the failure of conscience is one that many libertarians have difficulty seeing at all. It is the treatment we give to members of other sentient species. The most abject cruelty, cruelty that would horrify us if perpetrated against any other human being, scarcely troubles us when it is done to members of another species. Nearly all meat and other animal products available in the market today are produced on factory farms, under conditions that we would not hesitate to call “torture” if any human being were subjected to them. Worldwide, 74 billion animals are slaughtered for our gastronomic pleasure per year, nearly ten times the entire human population. It is a plausible guess that a decade of factory farming causes more total pain and suffering than all the human pain and suffering in history.[3] If non-human pain is even a little bit bad, therefore, the total quantity of suffering must make this among the world’s greatest problems.

Yet many human beings see nothing wrong with this situation and—even after being apprised of the above facts—will feel no compunction as they bite into their next burger. Many others will admit that buying factory farm products is wrong, yet will struggle to find the motivation to actually modify their own behavior in light of this. Why is this? My best guess is that the vast majority of human beings are motivated to avoid moral wrongs only when those wrongs either (a) are socially disapproved, or (b) conflict with the dictates of the powerful.

[---]

If animal cruelty is a problem, what, if anything, ought we to do about it? I do not know the full extent of our duties, either to animals or to other humans. But I know something of our duties; I know the bare minimum that we ought to do. At a minimum, we ought to refrain from inflicting enormous pain and suffering on other beings for the sake of obtaining comparatively small gastronomic pleasures. This is a special case of the general principle that one should not cause extremely bad things to happen in order to obtain small benefits for oneself. This is not a subtle or complicated principle. This is the basic core of morality. If we do not accept that, then I don’t know why we would accept any moral principles at all.

We not only should avoid directly torturing other creatures; we also should not pay other people for such torture. One does not avoid responsibility for a wrong by outsourcing it to others. If, for example, the president hires some soldiers to torture terror suspects, the president is at least as responsible for the torture as the direct torturers. Nor would he escape responsibility if he merely tells the soldiers vaguely to “get some information” from the suspects, while knowing that the soldiers will in fact seek the information through torture. The lesson is that it is wrong to pay another person for a product, when one knows that the other person has produced the product through extremely wrongful behavior and will continue to do so as long as he continues to be paid. Thus, at a bare minimum, a person of conscience must refrain from buying products from factory farms.

We may indeed have stronger duties, both to people and to animals. Perhaps we should not purchase animal products even from humane farms. Perhaps also we must speak out against cruelty and other severe wrongs. I do not focus on such stronger duties here, as there is limited space, and I think it most important to address the most clearly wrongful behavior that almost everyone is doing on a daily basis, particularly when most seem unaware of the wrongness of this behavior.

[---]

I am a committed libertarian. Yet my first commitment is not—nor should yours be—to libertarianism. Our first loyalty, as human beings, must be to the good and the right. Members of other sentient species on the Earth may not possess the same liberty rights as human beings (that is a matter for debate), and thus the ethical treatment of these other creatures may not be addressed in a distinctive way by our political ideology. Their mistreatment may also fall outside the range of what our society presently condemns or punishes. But it most certainly is possible to treat these other creatures wrongly, and when such wrongful treatment occurs on a massive scale, a scale to dwarf any suffering by our own species, that should be a matter of concern to all rational beings, libertarian and non-libertarian alike.

From Nuclear Family To Forged Family

A new piece by David Brooks hits the nail.

We are born alone and die alone but it is stranger (who we never met and most likely never ever meet again) would have held us first (a doctor or nurse) and in the end, it would be stranger who will dispose of our body. We lose the sense of this reality and don't give enough importance to these 'strangers' (which could human-animal and non-human-animal) in our life. Tim Urban in his column Tail End gives a more on the face statistics on how much time we spend with family.

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, 

“The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class.”

Like their heterosexual counterparts, most gay men and lesbians insisted that family members are people who are “there for you,” people you can count on emotionally and materially. “They take care of me,” said one man, “I take care of them.”

These groups are what Daniel Burns, a political scientist at the University of Dallas, calls “forged families.” Tragedy and suffering have pushed people together in a way that goes deeper than just a convenient living arrangement. They become, as the anthropologists say, “fictive kin.”


Over the past several decades, the decline of the nuclear family has created an epidemic of trauma—millions have been set adrift because what should have been the most loving and secure relationship in their life broke. Slowly, but with increasing frequency, these drifting individuals are coming together to create forged families. These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment. The members of your chosen family are the people who will show up for you no matter what. On Pinterest you can find placards to hang on the kitchen wall where forged families gather: “Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile & who love you no matter what.”

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Two years ago, I started something called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. Weave exists to support and draw attention to people and organizations around the country who are building community. Over time, my colleagues and I have realized that one thing most of the Weavers have in common is this: They provide the kind of care to nonkin that many of us provide only to kin—the kind of support that used to be provided by the extended family.


Lisa Fitzpatrick, who was a health-care executive in New Orleans, is a Weaver. One day she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car when she noticed two young boys, 10 or 11, lifting something heavy. It was a gun. They used it to shoot her in the face. It was a gang-initiation ritual. When she recovered, she realized that she was just collateral damage. The real victims were the young boys who had to shoot somebody to get into a family, their gang.


She quit her job and began working with gang members. She opened her home to young kids who might otherwise join gangs. One Saturday afternoon, 35 kids were hanging around her house. She asked them why they were spending a lovely day at the home of a middle-aged woman. They replied, “You were the first person who ever opened the door.”

A Synesthesia Project by Bernadette Sheridan

As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery, we're terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques is to take the kinds of memories our brains aren't good at holding on to and transform them into the kind of memories our brains are built for.

- Josha Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

This a brilliant project by Sheridan where you can find the "color" of your name! There are some classifications like days, some numbers, etc. I do associate with colors but not names.

She explains the idea behind the project:

Synesthesia is a rare sensory trait shared by about 4% of the population, and it comes in many forms. People who “see” or associate letters and numbers with specific colors have grapheme-color synesthesia, and it’s the most common form. Other forms of synesthesia involve seeing or feeling musical notes as colors or textures, having visualized representations of time, and in rare cases, even tasting words.

After many years of struggling to describe my synesthesia visually, I created a website called Synesthesia.Me. It features simple geometric portraits of these color combinations. The specific renderings are based on my own unique synesthesia color alphabet. Every synesthete’s color alphabet is unique, although there are certain universal matches for specific letters. For example, red is often cited as a common color for the letter A.

What Is The Secret Of Safe Memories?

Last night I was tired but Neo was jumping all over me - out of the blue, I held him tight so that he cannot move and said, "Neo Locked"!

I have completely forgotten about this for years until last night that I used to do the same with Max during his puppyhood. When he wanted to play or go out, I would hold him tight and tease him "Max Locked",  he would make funny noises and try to get out of the hold. Eventually, I would let him win and he would jump all over me again. We used to play this game often but weirdly, I didn't remember about that until last night.

Stephan Hall in 2013, wrote about this ground-breaking research by Daniela Schiller which kind of explains why I forgot about that for years but it came back to me last night.

Schiller, 40, has been in the vanguard of a dramatic reassessment of how human memory works at the most fundamental level. Her current lab group at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, her former colleagues at New York University, and a growing army of like-minded researchers have marshaled a pile of data to argue that we can alter the emotional impact of a memory by adding new information to it or recalling it in a different context. This hypothesis challenges 100 years of neuroscience and overturns cultural touchstones from Marcel Proust to best-selling memoirs. It changes how we think about the permanence of memory and identity, and it suggests radical nonpharmacological approaches to treating pathologies like post-traumatic stress disorder, other fear-based anxiety disorders, and even addictive behaviors.

In a landmark 2010 paper in Nature, Schiller (then a postdoc at New York University) and her NYU colleagues, including Joseph E. LeDoux and Elizabeth A. Phelps, published the results of human experiments indicating that memories are reshaped and rewritten every time we recall an event. And, the research suggested, if mitigating information about a traumatic or unhappy event is introduced within a narrow window of opportunity after its recall—during the few hours it takes for the brain to rebuild the memory in the biological brick and mortar of molecules—the emotional experience of the memory can essentially be rewritten.

“When you affect emotional memory, you don’t affect the content,” Schiller explains. “You still remember perfectly. You just don’t have the emotional memory.”

I think, its established now that memories so precarious and constantly get rewritten but here is the irony regarding the "safest" memories (which is not common knowledge yet).

In Schiller’s view, then, the secret to preserving a memory doesn’t lie in protein synthesis in the synapses or the shuttling of neural traffic from the hippocampus to the exurbs of the brain. Rather, she believes, memory is best preserved in the form of a story that collects, distills, and fixes both the physical and the emotional details of an event. “The only way to freeze a memory,” she says, “is to put it in a story.” Which ultimately brings us back to her father.

When she first told the story about Holocaust Memorial Day at The Moth in 2010, Schiller speculated that the sirens functioned as what psychologists call a “conditioned stimulus”—a sensory cue, very much in the Pavlovian tradition, that triggered a painful memory. And in light of her work on reconsolidated memory, she began to think that by sitting at the kitchen table sipping his coffee, her father was rewriting his painful memories by associating them with a pleasant activity.

But even her personal story about memory, like memory itself, has begun to update itself. Last year, for the first time, Schiller’s father briefly spoke about his teenage years—about the selflessness of his mother and uncle in a time of great deprivation, and most of all about his close relationship with his younger sister, who perished in the Holocaust. Schiller now suspects that her father’s reluctance to recall those traumatic events is a way of protecting and preserving memories so beautiful that he wants never to rewrite them and risk losing their power.

Since then, they’ve reverted to their usual three-word conversations about the Holocaust. “Because they are so precious, these are memories you don’t want to change,” she says. “The safest memories are those you never remember.”

Even if Schiller's theory is partially true, then what happened to me was beautiful!

More than a decade ago, without any conscious effort on my side, the little playtimes I had with Max were tagged as "safe". My guess is because my positive emotions were at its peak, nature knew that was important to me. As the years went by, I "forgot" about it in order to keep the memories "safe" (and avoid being rewritten). It's just crazy to even think how our mind-body loop operates!

I hope, I have tons of memories of Max which I don't remember and I hope, it comes back when I least expect to bring a smile.

P.S:
I didn't remember about this research either but accidentally while searching this blog for Stephen Hall, I found this as well. 

Finding Max in Fluffy

Life is full of surprises; pleasant surprises that happen outside the boundaries of our imagination.

Fluffy came home as a kitten - less than a year old. She grew up for the past 3 years observing Max's mannerisms, habits, happiness, annoyances, pain, suffering and other things which as a human I cannot observe nor comprehend.

Don't get me wrong, Fluffy is a quintessential "free-thinking" cat that people have written about for centuries. But now without Max and in the company of two newbies Graph and Neo, she still follows Max's routine and subtle nuances of his mannerisms.

As a kitten, she used to get angry and annoyed watching Max get to go out with me and not her. But slowly, we made an unspoken deal that she can stay within the patio if she promises not to jump outside. She has kept her promise to date - I can trust her to stay in the patio even if I go inside. This unspoken trust is also, I think she learned from Max.

She wants me to hold and kiss her before each meal, she comes to the door when I get home, she follows me while I change to get her treats, she knows its time to go out (to the patio) when I put a cigarette between my ear gap, playing hide n seek, following me to the bed and I think, the onus is on me to observe more as time goes by. It goes without saying, all these mannerisms

Weirdly, during his final weeks, Max refused to eat and had to hand feed him. Since he wasn't mobile much, he would happily eat his meal while I told him stories of Fluffy's naughtiness. Looking back now, I think, there was an invisible bond between them which I cannot comprehend.

It's a beautiful miracle, in reality, unfolding in front of my eyes, a little cat version of Max now filling his big shoes every day.

Who would have thought a small cat would have so much similarity with Max when there is Neo, who not only is the same species as Max but also the same breed.

In Mexican tradition, they believe that everyone dies three deaths.

• The first death is when our bodies cease to function; when our hearts no longer beat of their own accord, when our gaze no longer has depth or weight, when space we occupy slowly loses its meaning. - I was there with Max when it happened and there was nothing I could to stop it.

• The second death comes when the body is lowered into the ground, returned to mother earth, out of sight. - After kissing his nose, toes and all over for one last time, I left his body with the caretaker of the cremation center. I hugged him and asked him to take care of him well. That was the last time I ever saw him. 

• The third death, the most definitive death, is when there is no one left alive to remember us. - The biggest part of his final death will come not when I die but when Fluffy will be gone. I say this because nature has given her a better range of senses and emotions to observe Max better in 3 years than I did in 13 plus years. I cannot prove it but I think it is true. Nature has cursed us to make up shit when none exists while other animals are blessed to see things as they are. 

My emotions and rationale of seeing Max in Fluffy end here. Not for once, I planned to see Fluffy as a surrogate for Max nor I want to do that in the future. It just happened to be a pleasant surprise.

Fluffy is unique and she is just Fluffy the cat as she is. I am still learning so much from her as I did with Max. It is so easy to learn from dogs since we co-evolved for thousands of years but cats open up a new spectrum of frequencies and dimensions which we never knew existed. 

In her brilliant book How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Backwell captured the essence of what made Montaigne - Montaigne.

"Perhaps some of the credit for Montaigne's last answer should therefore go to his cat - a specific sixteenth century individual, who had a rather pleasant life on a country estate with a doting master and not to much competition for his attention. She was the one who, by wanting to play with Montaigne at an inconvenient moment, reminded him what what is was to be alive. They looked at each other, and just for moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes. Out of that moment - and countless others like it - came his whole philosophy."

I am so grateful and blessed to relate and comprehend what that means. When I look in Fluffy's eyes, I do get a constant reminder of what is to be alive. I want to leap across the gap, not for just a moment but repeatedly as long as I live. In each leap, I see something new and learn something new. And that keeps me going in this life without Max.

Best Movie Scene - Operation Dinner Out

Taleb popularized the phrase "fuck you money" and especially in this capitalist-driven world, there is a lot of truth to it.  But most of the profound changes in the world happened because very few people had the courage to say "fuck you" without any money or power.

We all know names like Rosa Parks and Gandhi but every generation had few good unknown people who stood up for what is right. This has nothing to do with fighting wars or being a soldier. What matters most is standing up in everyday life for what is right so that nothing bad can grow into a monster in the future (which in turn causes future wars and terrors). These unknown faces have eradicated badness in its nascent stages.  The world is still livable and a good place because of the courage and sacrifice of these unknown faces.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

One needs to constantly hone their practical wisdom in order to say fuck you without fuck you money. In Reclaiming Virtue, John Bradshaw wrote:

Practical wisdom is the ability to do the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason.

In one of my favorite books (but lesser-known) Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, Stephen Hall quotes Adam Smith:

In a lovely evocation of that timeless fork in the road between material and spiritual well-being, he spoke of two different roads - one of "proud ambition and ostentatious avidity," the other of "humble modestly and equitable justice" - that await our choice. 

Two different models, two different pictures, are held out to us, according to which fashion our own character and behavior; the one more gaudy and glittering in its coloring; the other more correct and exquisitely beautiful in its outline: the one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the other attracting the attention of scare any body but most studious and careful observer.  

They are the wise and the virtuous chiefly, a select, though, I am afraid, but a small party, who are the real and steady admirers of wisdom and virtue. The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshipers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshipers, of wealth and greatness.

In the movie Spy Games, Robert Redford on his last day at CIA spends every penny he has to rescue Brad Pitt while the bureaucrats at CIA refuse to do so.

His goodbye salute with flair while exiting Langley gates always reminded me that one can live and say fuck you without any fuck you money if one has the right moral code for doing the right thing. And Redford makes it look so much easy, fun and stylish.

Technology gets better everyday. That's fine. But most of the time all you need is a stick of gum, a pocket knife and a smile.

- Nathan Muir (Robert Redford's character)

Cost of Cancer Kills Before Cancer Does

Today Feb, 4th is World Cancer Day; couple of articles on how cancer financially ruins families.

A Cancer Patient Stole Groceries Worth $109.63. She Was Sentenced to 10 Months:

The lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, said the punishment was overly harsh and offered to personally repay the grocery store.

The Financial Toxicity of Illness:

The links between cancer regimens or outcomes and economic ruin do not constrict only the elderly. Young adults with cancer have two to five times higher rates of bankruptcy than seniors, many of whom can depend on Medicare and Social Security. Most of the parents of kids with cancer experience work disruptions because of the need to accompany their children to lengthy treatments; about 15 percent quit their jobs or are laid off. Pediatric patients who live in poverty tend to relapse more often than well-off kids: housing instability, poor nutrition and unavailable transportation take a toll.

A cluster of insured patients suffers the acute or sub-chronic monetary injuries of cancer treatments because of the astronomical price of new protocols. The first CAR T-Cell immunotherapy drug was priced at about $475,000 for a one-time treatment. Enasidenib for acute myeloid leukemia costs about $25,000 a month. 

This is the reality of how we treat humans in the most powerful country in the world. Now, one can imagine what happens to dogs and other animals. Yes, they kill them. These people enjoy their puppy-hood, adulthood and use them for their "joy" but when the times comes to take care of them in their old age, they use euphemisms to justify their killing.

Of-course there are lot of outliers. I am grateful that I was able to treat Max during his worst times but not many families aren't that fortunate.

Max's oncologist Dr. Ann K Jeglum was awarded the veterinarian of the country in 2015; she gave one thing no one has ever able to give me - more time with Max. I am forever grateful to her and her team (Lisa, Kathy, Kim and others) who loved Max and helped him ease his pain.

There are a lot of outlier families who can use financial help for the treatment of their dogs and cats. 

If you can afford it, please donate to:

Write check to VCORF (Veterinary Comparative Oncology Research Foundation)
Mailing Address:
VCORF
739 E. Nields Street
West Chester, PA 19382

Their website is https://www.vosrc.net/

You can add a note:  "In the memory of Max Sundaresan" and/or "To Give Beauty More Chance".

Please understand this donation is not only to help families who cannot afford cancer treatment for their loved ones but also would help fund cancer research which would benefit "humans" as well.
Dr. Jeglum holds a patent for Melanoma Vaccine.

If anyone is wondering - everything and whatever little I have, will be donated to VCORF fund when I am gone.

Thank you for your help.

Your donations will reflect on that "unselfish impulses" of humanity and would make Reinhold Niebhur smile.
  

The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.