A Parasite's Perspective - Kevin Lafferty

Relationships Are Everlasting Stories

Out of the blue, I listen to this beautiful old Tamil song after decades. It minded me of those four days in October 2019... it had a happy ending. Max is not here anymore but he came home and that beckons everlasting peace in my short life. 

The English translation (which losses much of the essence) goes like this: 

Relationships are everlasting stories

Feelings are like short stories 

One story can conclude 

While its end might lead to another

Only happiness beckons hereafter 

Only happiness beckons hereafter 

[---]

Your heart feels heavy 

I am here from you

I will bear the burden 

The corner of your eyes 

Why are they wet?

I will soothe those tears 

Your sorrows would end 

The mist would clear 

Oh milky cloud 

I will blend in your renewed beauty 

[---]

Life is like a song

And the melody is growing 

Every day will be filled with happiness 

So far you have only seen sorrow

From now on there will be only happiness

A new melody of happiness is starting now

A fresh flow of water in the river,

And it's merging with the ocean

Similarly, our bond has joined again today 

And happiness is born

[---]

Relationships are everlasting stories

Feelings are like short stories 

One story can conclude 

While its end might lead to another

Only happiness beckons hereafter 

Only happiness beckons hereafter 

Max's first day, first photograph 05/21/2006

This relationship of ours was a short story but yet, it is a small part of the least understood and everlasting human-animal bond. 

These simple bonds will not only outlive self-centered humans but someday might save and protect this beautiful planet. 

Thank you Max for giving me a glimpse of life before I fall. 

Your Immune System Is Your Greatest Asset — Here’s How to Care for It

Complex systems need huge respect and patience. The immune system is the mother of all complex systems in a living body (more important than the brain). Food, microbiomes, a clean-chemical-free environment, exercise, calm mind are some of the myriads of simple things that make up a good immune system life long. 

But yeah, it easier to dwell in conspiracy theories than meditate constantly on complex systems. 

For the past 17 years, I have interviewed people with medical evidence for recovery from incurable illnesses. Like the now disproven idea of spontaneous generation, there’s also nothing spontaneous about spontaneous remission. In cases that were previously considered flukes with no medical or scientific value, there are actually identifiable factors associated with how these individuals created abundant health and vitality in the face of great odds. The healing of their immune systems is a critical part of their stories.

It turns out that you don’t have a heart problem, a diabetes problem, a blood pressure problem, a cancer problem, or an autoimmune problem as much as you have a chronic inflammation problem. Chronic inflammation is an immune system gone awry, damaging the body it was designed to protect. If you want to decrease the amount of chronic inflammation in your body, then you need to heal your immune system.

You have an amazing immune system, with brilliant cells and cell-subtypes, all of which want to unleash their superpowers and keep you healthy and vital. For that to occur, you need to give your cells the proper conditions. One of the most important things you can do is give yourself real food, mostly plants, and largely eliminate processed foods, sugar, and refined flours from your diet.

Food is either medicine or poison, depending on what it contains, so you want to eat a clean diet. Don’t over-medicate. Flush your lymphatic system regularly with lots of water. Get plenty of rest. Spend time with people you love who make you laugh.

- More here

What I've Been Reading

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. 

- William James

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova. In Maria's own words, if you get only one thing out of this book, it should be this: 

The most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn't multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose. 

I did stop and reflect on what I read and write here... human intelligence and exceptionalism are overrated but yet, I read and write a lot on the importance of knowledge (not exceptionalism). The reason being the former can be understood only with the latter (it is never a chicken and egg problem). In other words, parochial knowledge present in most adults is more harmful than no knowledge at all. 

If you have read Conan Doyle and/or watched the modern BBC version of Sherlock Homles then please do yourself a favor and read this book. 

Maria has sketched out some brilliant ideas on how to improve this scare faculty in most of the sapiens. You might want to excuse her for some of the physiological experiments/researches she quotes and focus your attention on how she captures Sherlock's methodological approach to intuition development. 

• Homles recommends we start with the basics. As he says in our first meeting with him, "Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer being by mastering more elementary problems." It not for nothing that Holmes calls the foundation of his inquiry "elementary." For, that is precisely what they are, the very basis of how something works, and what makes it what it is. 

• The scientific method in a nutshell: understand and frame the problem; observe; hypothesize (or imagine), and deduce, and repeat. To follow Sherlock Holmes is to learn to apply that same approach not just of external clues, but to your every thought - and then turn it around and apply it to every thought of every other person who may be involved, step by painstaking step. 

• This is the scientific method at its most basic. Holmes goes on step further. He applies the same principles to human beings: a Holmesian disciple will, "on meeting a fellow-moral, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the facilities of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for." Each observation, each exercise, each simple inference drawn from a simple fact will strengthen your ability to engage in ever-more-complex machinations. It will lay the groundwork for new habits of thinking that will make such observation second nature.

 (What a thought! It was Max, not Holmes who taught me these simple tricks of observation.)

• In order to break the autopiloted mode of thinking, we have to be motivated to think in a mindful, present fashion, to exert effort on what goes through our heads instead of going with the flow. To think like Sherlock Holmes, we must want, actively, to think like him. Motivated subjects always outperform. 

• The final piece of the puzzle: practice, practice, practice. You have to supplement your mindful motivation with brutal training, thousands of hours of it. There is no way around it. As Holmes often notes, he has made it a habit to engage his Holmes system, every moment of every day. In so doing, he has slowly trained his quick-to-judge inner Watson to perform as his public outer Holmes. Through sheer force of habit and will, he has taught his instant judgments to follow the train of thought of a far more reflective approach. And because this foundation is in place, it takes a matter of seconds for him to make his initial observations of Watson's character. That's why Holmes calls it intuition. Accurate intuition, the intuition that Holmes possesses, is of necessity based on training, hours, and hours of it. 

• What we store in our brain's attic matters. Holmes famously didn't care if the Earth went around the sun or the moon. Holmes explains to Watson, "A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain attic." Brain attic is a precious real estate; tread carefully and use it wisely. 

• Uncluttered brain attic, yes but not stark. An attic that contained only the bare essentials for your professional success would be a sad little attic indeed. It would have hardly any material to work with, and it would be practically incapable of any great insight or imagination. Holmes's all-important caveat: the most surprising of articles can end up being useful in the most surprising of ways. You must open your mind to new inputs, however unrelated they may seem. 

• The so-called Motivation to Remember (MTR) is far more important at the point of encoding - and no amount of MTR at retrieval will be efficient if the information wasn't properly stored to being with. 

• Timeless advice from Holmes: "Read it up - you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."

• We pay attention to everything and nothing as a matter of course. Choosing wisely means being selective. It means not only looking but looking properly, looking with real thoughts. It means looking with the full knowledge that what you note - and how you note it - will form the basis of any future deductions you might make. It's about seeing the full picture, noting the details that matter, and understanding how to contextualize those details within a broader framework of thought. 

• The Holmes solution? Habit, habit, habit. That, and motivation. Become an expert of sorts at those types of decisions or observations that you want to excel at making. Reading people's professions, following their trains of thought, inferring their emotions and thinking from their demeanor. Sherlock illustrates four important elements: selectivity, objectivity, inclusivity, and engagement

• Observational process (Bayesian update): you can set goals to help you filter the world, but be careful lest you use these goals as blinders. Your goals, your priorities, your answer to the "what I want to accomplish" question must be flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. If the available information changes, so should you. Don't be afraid to deviate from the preset plan when it serves the greater objective. 

• Heisenberg uncertainty principle in action: the fact of observing changes the thing being observed. Even an empty room s no longer the same once you're inside. You cannot proceed as if it hasn't changed. This may sound like common sense, but it is actually much harder to understand in practice than it seems in theory. Understanding a situation in its fullness requires several steps, but the first and most fundamental is to realize that observation and deduction are not the same. To observe, you must learn to separate situation from interpretation, yourself from what you're seeing. 

• Another words of wisdom: Nonchoices are choices too. 

• An observant mind, an attentive mind, is a present mind. It is a mind that isn't wandering. It is a mind that is actively engaged in whatever it is that it happens to be doing. And it is a mind that allows System Holmes to step up, instead of letting System Watson run around like crazy, trying to do it all and see it all. 

• Richard Feynman frequently voiced his surprise at the lack of appreciation for what he thought was a central quality in both thinking and science. "It is surprising the people don't believe that there is imagination in science. Not only that view patently false but it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail what has already seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult."

• We tend to think of creativity as an all-or-nothing, you-have-it-or-you-don't characteristic of the mind. But that couldn't be further from the truth. Creativity can be taught. It is just like another muscle-attention, self-control - that can be exercised and grow stronger with use, training, focus, and motivation. 

• Holmes pays one of his rare compliments to Inspector Baynes: "You will rise high in your profession. You have instinct and intuition." What does Baynes do differently from his Scotland Yard counterparts to earn such praise? He anticipates human nature instead of dismissing it, arresting the wrong man on purpose with the goal of lulling the real criminal into a false complacency. 

• One of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action and switching all his thoughts on to lighter things whenever he had convinced himself that he could no longer work to advantage. 

• The most important thing that a change in physical perspective can do is prompt a change in mental perspective. Even Holmes, who unlike Watson doesn't need to be led by the hand and forcibly removed from Baker Street in order to profit from some mental distance, benefits from this property. 

• Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi once said: whenever a task proves difficult or takes time or doesn't have an obvious answer, I pretend I'm in jail. If I'm in jail time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it will take a week. What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.

• More wisdom: when all avenues are exhausted, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. 

• The improbable is not yet impossible. As we deduce, we are too prone to that satisficing tendency, stopping when something is good enough. Until we have exhausted the possibilities and are sure that we have done so, we aren't home clear. We must learn to stretch our experience, to go beyond our initial instinct. We must learn to look for evidence that both confirms and disconfirms and, most important, we must try to look beyond the perspective that is the all too natural one to take: our own. 

• Avoid mindless existence. Education never ends, Watson. Holmes's message to us isn't as one-dimensional as it may seem. Of course, it is good to keep learning: it keeps our minds sharp and alert and prevents us from settling in our ways. But for Holmes, education means something more and questioning your habits, of never allowing System Watson to take over altogether - even though he may have learned a great deal from System Holmes along the way. It's a way of constantly shaking up our habitual behaviors, and never forgetting that, no matter how expert we think are at something, we must remain mindful and motivated in everything we do. 

• Overconfidence is bad. Very bad indeed. Observe these four sets of circumstances where overconfidence predominates. First, overconfidence is most common when facing difficulty: for instance, when we have to make a judgment on a case where there' no way of knowing all the facts. This is called hard-easy effect. Second, overconfidence increases with familiarity. Third, overconfidence increases with information. Finally, overconfidence increases with action (as we actively engage, we become more confident in what we are doing). 

• The genius and humility of Sherlock can be inferred from the following sentence in Yellow Face: "Watson, if it should ever strike you that I getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you."

• Holmes may have his Norburys. But he has chosen to learn from them and make himself a better thinker in the process, every perfecting a mind that already seems sharp beyond anything else. We too, never stop learning, whether we know it or not. At the time of "The Red Circle," Holmes was forty-eight years old. By traditional standards, we might have thought him incapable of any profound change by that point in life. 

• It is most difficult to apply Holmes's logic in those moments that matter the most. And so, all we can do is practice, until our habits are such that even the most severe stressors will bring out the very thought patterns that we've worked so hard to answer. 

 (You don't have to believe this but I have lived this not too long ago. The worst phase of my life when Max was suffering, me being an emotional wreck and surrounded by self-centered humans who have no to little understanding of the human-animal bond - had to make fast decisions, think clearly, and yeah, work-in-a-field which needs constant thinking to pay for Max's treatment. Yes, practice, practice, practice in good times - comes to your rescue during worst of times)

• Holmes even knew about the importance of fasting. "The faculties become refined when you starve them," says Holmes when Watson urges him to consume at least some food. "Why, surely as a doctor, my dear Watson, you must admit that what your digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the brain. I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. Therefore, it is the brain I must consider. 

• Watson understood his friend's need for solitude when Holmes asks him to be left alone: "I knew that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial."

• As Holmes warns over and over, it is the least remarkable crime that is often the most difficult. Nothing breeds complacency like routine and the semblance of normality. Nothing kills vigilance so much as the commonplace. Nothing kills the successful hunter like a complacency bred of that very success, the polar opposite of what enabled that success to begin with. 

• It's easy to see Sherlock Holmes as a hard, cold reasoning machine: the epitome of calculating logic. But that view of Holmes the Logical Automation couldn't be further from the truth. Quite the contrary. What makes Holmes who he is, what places him above detectives, inspectors, and civilians alike, is his willingness to engage in a nonlinear, embrace the hypothetical, entertain the conjecture, it's his capacity for creative thought and imaginative reflection. 

Certainly we should take care not to make the intellect the god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader. 

- Albert Einstien. 

Finally, understand this: 

Never forget that even Holmes had to train himself, that even he was not born thinking like Sherlock Holmes. Nothing just happens out of the blue. We have to work for it. But with proper attention, it happens. It is a remarkable thing, the human brain. 

As it turns out, Holmes's insights can apply to most anything. It's all about the attitude, the mindset, the habits of thinking, the enduring approach to the world that you develop. The specific application itself is far less important. 

Peter Belvin wrote another phenomenal book on Sherlock Holmes - A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes. You can check out my notes/review from 2013 here. 

The Hunt For A Coronavirus Vaccine Has Been Horrendous For Some Animals

 Yes, Cats and Dogs too. 

The hunt for a coronavirus vaccine has been horrendous for some animals. As part of the drive to save human lives, thousands of cheeky monkeys, ferrets, cats, mice and hamsters have been deliberately infected and experimented on in labs. 

Pfizer and BioNTech, the big pharma companies behind the vaccine that caused excitement yesterday, have treated monkeys and mice with contempt. While their human researchers have been protected with elaborate PPE, the animals in their care have been trapped and deliberately infected. Some were injected with an inoculation first and some weren’t.

For animal lovers, that creates a dilemma. In what circumstances will you turn a blind eye to animals being harmed?

Many people think that being vegan is just about not eating meat and animal products but it is really so much more than that. Veganism, as defined by the Vegan Society, is a bid “to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.”

Everyone wants to see the back of Covid-19 but, as an animal lover and a vegan, should I accept a jab that’s the result of animal cruelty? I say no – and not just for moral reasons.

There is convincing evidence that most epidemics and pandemics, including Covid-19, have actually been caused by humans “playing god” and exploiting animals. In August, a white paper found that nearly every major zoonotic disease outbreak over the last 120 years is inextricably linked to animal exploitation, including meat consumption.

The human cost is huge: even before Covid-19, two million people were dying from zoonotic diseases each year. A separate report from the UN said the number of zoonotic epidemics – the ones that can be transmitted from animals to people – is rising, from Ebola to Sars to West Nile virus and Rift Valley fever.

The authors warned that although the world is treating the health and economic symptoms of this coronavirus pandemic, governments are ignoring the root causes: humans’ destruction of nature and meat eating. 

We need to wake up. Since it was exploiting animals that got us into this mess, it’s both immoral and ill-advised to exploit more animals now.

- More Here

Max & Fluffy

One of my favorite pictures of them waiting together for me to come back after picking up the mail. 

A myriad of these simple moments unveils wonder after wonder but only if one learns to shed the self-centered view and observe the world through the eyes of better equipped and capable sentient beings. 

Death - End of Self Improvement

Joan Tollifon's book Death: The End Of Self-Improvement reminds me so much of my last months with Max. It was painful and sucked the life out of me seeing him suffer. But yet, it was more devasting to live in a society where this is not considered normal and refuse to understand even when death stares in front of our nose every passing moment. 

One of the final practical lessons from Max was to embrace the nasty bits of life since it also part of being "present" in the current moment. I caught myself clearly outside of the realm of any of societal thinking and graduated as Max's Balaji. 

Oliver Burkeman's review of Joan Tollifon's book: 

The problem with most books (and articles and podcasts) about “being here now” or “embracing the present moment” is that they really aren’t. As often telegraphed by their cover images (sunsets, flowers, mountain peaks) they’re about embracing the nice bits of the present. And they generally imply that if you follow their advice, you could float contentedly through life, relishing simple pleasures and finding wonder in the everyday. In other words, they’re about the ideal person you might become if you weren’t so prone to irritability, boredom, and gloom. So they’re not actually about embracing the present at all. They’re focused on escaping it, in pursuit of a better future.

None of which could be said about Death: The End Of Self-Improvement, the latest book by the spiritual teacher Joan Tollifson. That title alone is a bracing bucket of iced water to the head. Mortality is the ultimate reminder that our fantasies of someday finally becoming perfect are inherently absurd, because that’s not how the journey will end. All we have, in place of that imagined ascent toward perfection, is a succession of present moments – until, one day, we won’t have any more. And “when the future disappears,” Tollifson writes, “we are brought home to the immediacy that we may have avoided all our lives.” If you really want to be here now, forget flowers and sunsets. Contemplate death instead.

Tollifson does so, without flinching. Among other things, the book is a memoir of her own encounters with mortality: her mother’s death, and those of close friends, then an unsparing account of her own experience of ageing – the “sagging, drooping, bulging, wrinkling, and drying up”, then colonoscopies, cancer and chemo, rectal bleeding and stoma bags. Sometimes, the reader wants to flinch. But in a way that’s no bad thing: all of this is part of experience, too. It’s not nice. But any approach to life that brackets it off as some kind of mistake, something that mustn’t be acknowledged, isn’t engaging with how things really are.

Weird Wishes

Around this time last year, I wished more than anything in the world that Max did his zesty and yappy walk as he did for years. He was in the bed most of the day and did only an occasional couple of rounds of walk around the house to avoid atrophy. I knew my wish was asking for a miracle but yet  I wished and dreamed for it. 

This cold November walking with Neo with his constant pulling and jumping, I wish he does a normal walk with me so both can relax and enjoy the walk. This wish doesn't require any miracle but just some patience and in time with maturity, he will do so. 

A wish for a miracle which time couldn't offer and another wish which only time could offer. 

But the time I spent with Max is not shackled to anything in the universe, not even time. All the wishes fade away when I remember the luck I had in my life to spend time with Max. I am grateful. So darn grateful for what life offered us. 

Observe, Observe Perpetually - Lessons From Coronavirus

Following Michele de Montaigne's mantra of "observe, observe perpetually" in this eternal-impermanent world has been my obligation as a human being. It's much easy to identify lessons from hindsight wisdom and it's impossible to predict the future. But yet, being in the present and observing the present one can evaluate the old wisdom passed down for generations and on rare occasions, discover rare new wisdom hidden in the debris.

Rahm Emanuel (no one holds a patent to be wise; wisdom is in everyone's reach) once said:

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

This is an attempt to make sense of current events and the lessons can we learn from this. As of this moment, lots of old wisdom have been proved right and I am going to list them as well but at the same time, identify any new lessons that we can learn.

It is also an attempt to do beyond my biases, "boring" old traits for leading a good life, ancient wisdom, and try to pluck out "natural generalized knowledge" (commonly known as wisdom). There is no guarantee that I would be able to find anything new that hasn't been already told million times and in that case, this would act as a humble repeater of timeless wisdom distilled down for generations.

I will avoid tautological questions like - What is wrong with these people?

I am the least eligible person to jot down these since eerie as it is going to sound, the current way of life all the people in the world live is what Max and I used to live for 13 plus years...

• Stopped traveling for "pleasure" (very rare occasions traveled for work) since Max cannot go with me
• Avoided restaurants and usually did take out since it allowed me to have a meal with Max by my side
• No exotic places, pleasure means since walk with Max and rest of the time being at home with Max reading or watching a movie. 
• Working remote was the most pleasurable thing since I can be with Max more
• Time is more essential than money and being with Max made that second nature 

I can list down so many other things that are the new way of life for everyone in the world because of the lockdown while that was our way of life for 13 years. In this idiosyncrasy, we did find a way to live a simple life. A simple and ordinary life where time and thoughts were spared only on what mattered most. Many looked at us like nutcases for this way of life and now, eerie as it sounds... the entire world is living this way. 

What are the odds of this happening within 100 days of Max passing away?  If Max was alive now it would have close to impossible to get his regular treatment without his vet's constantly reminding me over the phone to put him "down". On the other hand, if Max was alive, he would have had me this entire year next to him 24x7. Maybe he would have gotten better. As Taleb says, there is no alternate history. 

I should be feeling vindicated but I don't. The way we lived is idiosyncratic and conscious of the fact that how little time we have together. I never once wanted the whole world to live exactly like we did. I am grateful that I could afford to lead a life where I was able to spare more time with Max but most of the people in the world don't have that luxury.

Cancer took my Max away but I do feel cancer is a great equalizer. Observing how humans behaved in the past few months under Coronavirus makes me wonder cancer is an evolutionary way of keeping precious life on earth safe. Even if we cure cancer, maybe a different deadly disease would evolve to maintain the balance in entropy. 

I will update this post as time unfolds with the lessons learned, lessons unlearned, and lessons updated - in the spirit of Montaigne's way of updating one's thoughts with time.

It is for this reason that experience of real life, appreciating one’s place in history, was such a wellspring for Hirschman, as it was for his inspiration, Montaigne, whose last essay was “On Experience.” Life, as Montaigne reminds us, is “a purpose unto itself.” The excursions into real life— as struggler against European fascisms, soldier in the US Army, deep insider of the Marshall Plan, advisor to investors in Colombia, and consultant to global foundations and bankers— were never digressions for Hirschman; they were built into the purpose of observing the world to derive greater insight, and from insights invent concepts that could in turn be tested, molded, refashioned, and even discarded by the course of time. These were the pendular swings from a contemplative life to a life of action and back again— pendular because they were codependent.

If biography is the art of the singular to illuminate a pattern, Hirschman’s odyssey can be read as a journey with no particular end, the life of an idealist with no utopia because he believed that the voyage of life itself yielded enough lessons to change who we are and what we aspire to be; to require and stay on course toward an abstract destination threatened to deprive the journey of its richest possibilities.

- Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman

Lesson 1:

Modernity has replaced wisdom with "self-serving" mental models. This is the reason why books such as  Poor Charlie's Alamanac and Black Swan sold more copies than Will Duhart's Lessons of History and Antifragile. 

Don't get me wrong, I did learn a lot from those books but they are guides to navigating human nature and become successful (via money, fame, etc.,) without societal change and covers nothing about morality nor doing the right thing. 

Reading has become a rare commodity and people who are readers are supposed to enrich their knowledge,  incorporate the learnings in doing the right thing in their everyday life. These readers are supposed to guide their immediate inner circle for starters towards making the right decisions and doing the right actions and instill a sense of responsibility beyond themselves. 

Unfortunately, reading and knowledge have become only a "how-to-guide" to success, fame, money, and happiness in whatever order it is convenient. they use it now mostly to serve themselves. Nothing wrong with serving oneself. Sharing intimate knowledge with the inner circle helps shape core values, virtues, and principles of life. These readers are high influence nodes in a network. 

We as a civilization have to pay massive costs if we lose these virtue networks. 

On the surface, it seems harmless but this pandemic has bought to surface this disease (the symptoms were lurking for decades). 

As long as one has the money, job, gun, food, alcohol, a constant flow of entertainment, etc.,  they "feel safe" from even a biological entity that has the potential to wipe out species. 

Even after almost a year of the world being shut down, our generation is still more worried about restaurants being closed than understand how precariousness and preciousness of our food supply. 

We continue to waste a tremendous amount of food every day since there is no moral reprimand from the virtue networks since they barely exist. 

To state the obvious, if my examples are wonderful books and it not worth even worth mentioning what religious and ideological writings can do virtue networks. 

Lesson 2: (Coming Soon)

Do We Really Want To Spread Human Bullshit In Space?

Sun will burn itself in a billion years, so we really have time to "fix" the genesis of non-stop bullshit via humans which evolves into pure evil. The trick is we will be capable of colonizing space before finding ways to instill humility and gratitude in humans. One doesn't need to be a genius to predict if former happens before the latter, Earth will be gone long before its's shelf-life.

A great piece warning the same - Why we should think twice before colonizing space?

In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification. At the same time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification. Space-hopping populations will create their own cultures, languages, governments, political institutions, religions, technologies, rituals, norms, worldviews, and so on. As a result, different species will find it increasingly difficult over time to understand each other’s motivations, intentions, behaviors, decisions, and so on. It could even make communication between species with alien languages almost impossible. Furthermore, some species might begin to wonder whether the proverbial “Other” is conscious. This matters because if a species Y cannot consciously experience pain, then another species X might not feel morally obligated to care about Y. After all, we don’t worry about kicking stones down the street because we don’t believe that rocks can feel pain. Thus, as I write in the paper, phylogenetic and ideological diversification will engender a situation in which many species will be “not merely aliens to each other but, more significantly, alienated from each other.”

But this yields some problems. First, extreme differences like those just listed will undercut trust between species. If you don’t trust that your neighbor isn’t going to steal from, harm, or kill you, then you’re going to be suspicious of your neighbor. And if you’re suspicious of your neighbor, you might want an effective defense strategy to stop an attack—just in case one were to happen. But your neighbor might reason the same way: she’s not entirely sure that you won’t kill her, so she establishes a defense as well. The problem is that, since you don’t fully trust her, you wonder whether her defense is actually part of an attack plan. So you start carrying a knife around with you, which she interprets as a threat to her, thus leading her to buy a gun, and so on. Within the field of international relations, this is called the “security dilemma,” and it results in a spiral of militarization that can significantly increase the probability of conflict, even in cases where all actors have genuinely peaceful intentions.

[---]

The lesson of this argument is not to uncritically assume that venturing into the heavens will necessarily make us safer or more existentially secure. This is a point that organizations hoping to colonize Mars, such as SpaceX, NASA, and Mars One should seriously contemplate. How can humanity migrate to another planet without bringing our problems with us? And how can different species that spread throughout the cosmos maintain peace when sufficient mutual trust is unattainable and advanced weaponry could destroy entire civilizations?

Human beings have made many catastrophically bad decisions in the past. Some of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers had deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong—i.e., had done a “premortem” analysis. We are in that privileged position right now with respect to space colonization. Let’s not dive head-first into waters that turn out to be shallow.

And I would never ever leave planet Earth no matter what happens. This is the home where Max and I lived. This where I will die, period. 

Eternal Mahabharata

What is found here regarding the aims of human life righteousness, wealth, pleasure, and release may be found elsewhere, O Bull of the Bharatas. But what is not here, is found nowhere.

This blog had covered lessons from Mahabharata many times. It is the only ancient story that focuses mainly on the realities of life on earth (with no GPS and no ticket to heaven). The story unfolds after a mother dog curses a human after he kicks her puppy and that curse lasts for generations and ends generations later when an "almost" nobleman refuses to enter heaven without his dog. 

Gurucharan Das' phenomenal book Difficulty of Being Good is a great place to understand why the lessons from Mahabharata are timeless. 

The story tells us - Humans (including God) are a weird cocktail of good, bad, and myriad other weirdness. Don't fall for magic. Don't dwell in hope. Don't overestimate the goodness of human nature. Instead, always do the right thing. That is the one and the only thing that is in our control.  It is not even close to easy but one has to keep trying. That is the only thing ever worked in this world. So try.

Aeon has a beautiful essay on Mahabharata - Immorality, sexism, politics, war: the polychromatic Indian epic pulses with relevance to the present day

The Mahabharata is long. It is roughly seven times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and 15 times the length of the Christian Bible. The plot covers multiple generations, and the text sometimes follows side stories for the length of a modern novel. But for all its narrative breadth and manifold asides, the Mahabharata can be accurately characterized as a set of narratives about vice.

Inequality and human suffering are facts of life in the Mahabharata. The work offers valuable perspectives and vantage points for reflecting on how various injustices play out in today’s world too.

The Mahabharata claims to show dharma or righteous conduct – a guiding ideal of human life in Hindu thought – within the morass of the characters’ immoral behaviors. But the line between virtue and vice, dharma and adharma, is often muddled. The bad guys sometimes act more ethically than the good guys, who are themselves deeply flawed. In the epic’s polychromatic morality, the constraints of society and politics shackle all.

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Indeed, the Mahabharata’s promise to explore (among other things) immorality, politics, sexism, and identity problems as general features of human life rings true in our times.

Over the past several years, politics in India and the United States have taken dark turns as both countries turn their backs on the values of pluralism and embrace ethno- and religious nationalisms. Violence and death are heavily used tools by governments in both countries.

Sexism has never gone away. It is a critical part of the current surge of Right-wing ideologies and their embrace of male privilege. Moreover, the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are reasserting retrograde gender roles in many places across the globe. The pandemic’s toll on women’s physical safety, mental health and careers is great and growing.

Identity, too, plagues us. The caste system is still very much alive, in both India and the diaspora. We also struggle with types of oppression birthed in modernity, such as racism.

The Mahabharata makes no false promises of solving such problems, but it does offer us tools for thinking them through, now and in the future, even if – or perhaps especially if – that future looks dark. The epic itself foretells:

Some poets told this epic before.

Others are telling it now.

Different narrators will tell it in the future.

Happy Birthday Neo

You are adorable and happy as you are my Neo. I am sorry, I am not the same who I was with Max but I will try if nature decides to keep me around without Max. 

Happy Birthday little Neo.

Max Playing Frisbee - A Drone Video

 My Max playing as what life is meant to be lived. I miss you, Max. 

David Solan's Atlas Hugged!!

David Sloan Wilson has written a new book "Atlas Hugged" (pun intended), a devastating critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and its impact on the world. Her philosophy has and continues to ruin millions of lives like any other addictive substance except addictive substances are usually objective but this one is purely subjective mythological magic. 

Atlas Hugged e-book is free or you can buy the paperback. 

Thank you, David. Thanks a million for fighting magic with fiction. 

We sapiens need a constant reminder that nothing is permanent; which means ideology is nothing but sheer magic which proclaims it can successfully "pin" time to be a constant. 

Check out a few hilarious excerpts here: 

Everyone knows about the existence of cults and their disturbing ability to steal minds.  Otherwise normal people give away everything to wait for the second coming of Jesus or aliens from outer space.  Midas and my grandfather would scoff at those irrational beliefs, but the society that they founded had all the earmarks of a cult.  The first structure that they erected was a giant gold-plated dollar sign atop a granite column.  They also invented an oath that members were required to recite at frequent intervals:  I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.  The word “give” was banned from their vocabulary.  Every human transaction was paid for with the gold and silver coins minted on site.  Obviously, this was only possible thanks to the vast wealth of Midas Mulligan, who provided a bank account for each new member based on how much had been “stolen” from them in the form of taxes in the outside world.  While the members of other cults waited for Jesus or aliens from outer space, the Galtians waited for society to collapse while working to build a microcosm of the perfect society for themselves. 

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The first person to leave the cult was my grandfather.  He simply disappeared, just as he had disappeared from his engineering job.  This time he didn’t even leave a note or a boastful proclamation.  My father, John Galt II, was two years old and grew up knowing only the legend of John Galt I.  Then other members started to drift away.  Finally Midas Mulligan reached his breaking point and withdrew his financial support, observing wryly that the Galtians were more heavily subsidized than any socialist society.  Like fleas shaken from the back of a dog, the Galtians were forced to make their way back to the society that they’d mocked and seek the forgiveness of family, friends, and former business associates.

The Galtian movement was a failure in every way but one.  It had not resulted in a widespread strike of doers.  The static electricity engine was a folly.  The microcosm of the perfect doer society went the way of so many other utopian visions.  But Ayn Rant’s better-than-real cosmology was a survivor that had been propagated around the world by The Speech.  Everyone who fell under its spell became convinced, as fervently as any religious believer, that the path to salvation was to concentrate exclusively on making money for oneself.