Perpetual Anger, Perpetual Grievance & Perpetual Need For Political Enemies

I have been writing about this for decades now... it started with talk radio and cable news. I observed friends, neighbors, and co-workers perpetually angry albeit most of them were better off than I was at that time. 

It was very weird to me since growing up in India, I lived around some of the poorest people on the planet but yet they weren't angry. They were content and most importantly were normal in perpetual penury. 

Around the same time, I started listening to talk radio and cable news, it was addictive to say the least. A simple pattern started emerging. They were angry all the goddamn time. 

How can someone live their life watching hours of spewing anger inside their living room. It was clearly unhealthy. I threw my TV away and the rest is history. 

The moron that I was, I started telling people that this stuff is not healthy and makes them sick. Of course, they didn't change but the right wing thought I was leftist looney and left wing that I was rightish madman. 

This was dangerous territory to embark on since what's lost to creative destruction never comes back. Plus add to this syndrome, the apt titles of some of Tyler Cowen books - average is over, stubborn attachments, and complacent class. Plus add to this a heavy dose of self delusion as if they are one step away from being millionaires or billionaires - a perpetual unattainable desire driven life.  

To make things even weirder, even people who attain an unattainable lifestyle are also angry! Go figure!

The younger generation with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex blissfully unaware of any of these; are sucked into their cell phones and waiting one day to join the perpetual angry force. 

One side offers a solution which is the exact reason a spark became a wild fire and the other side wants to be angry perpetually :-) 

It's a fucked up situation never seen in history and we are living now make an unique history. 

I have no idea where this is going to lead.. I have no goddamn idea. 

Ironically, there is so much more to learn, discover - knowledge we know now is minuscule and there is infinite knowledge out there for us to embrace with awe, wonder, and grow as living beings. 

We can create so many jobs, we already have enough shelter, food, water - all that is needed is masses to embrace this thirst for knowledge and drive.

But alas not many are addicted to perpetual need for awe and wonder.  

Paul Katsafanas's essay is the most important piece you will read this year and understanding this disease is crucial for humanity to survive this century. 

So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition. When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?

Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention. Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation. Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation.

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Sometimes, movements face a vast set of obstacles and opponents. Take the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s. This movement had a clear goal: ending US involvement in Vietnam. It lasted for more than a decade and unfolded across multiple fronts, which ranged from marches to acts of civil disobedience to teach-ins to draft resistance. Participants faced real costs: jail time, government surveillance, public backlash, even violence. The targets of opposition shifted over time – from the Lyndon B Johnson administration, to Richard Nixon, to Gerald Ford. The tactics evolved: from letter-writing campaigns to draft-card burnings, mass marches, lobbying from wounded veterans, and testimony from grieving families. Nonetheless, this was a movement that aimed at a concrete goal. Opposition was necessary, but it was a means to an end. The focus remained on the goal, rather than on sustaining conflict for its own sake.

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As Martha Nussbaum has argued, anger can play an essential role in democratic life by expressing moral concern and galvanising collective action. Iris Marion Young has made similar points, showing how opposition can affirm shared values. And in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr claimed that ‘the supreme task is to organise and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.’ But there’s a difference between opposition that aims to realise a shared good, and opposition that is pursued for its own sake. Some movements use opposition as a means to build something they value. Others make opposition itself the point. That’s the distinction I want to highlight: between what I call contingently negative and constitutively negative orientations. Contingently negative movements treat opposition as a means to a positive end, a way of building something better. Constitutively negative movements are different: what’s essential is the continuous expression of hostility, rather than the attainment of any particular goal.

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But why would anyone be drawn to a constitutively negative orientation? Why are these orientations so gripping? The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards. Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility, offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.

To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms. Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed. They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.

Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have. If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure. In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks. Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want.

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With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly. In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals. We have definite ideas about what the world should be like. We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices. From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them.

But grievance politics operates differently. It begins not with ideals, but with unease, with feelings of powerlessness, failure, humiliation or inadequacy. Political and ethical rhetoric is offered that transforms these self-directed negative emotions into hostility, rage and blame. Negative emotions that would otherwise remain internal find a new outlet, latching on to ever-new enemies and grievances. The vision that redirects these emotions will cite particular values and goals, but the content of those values and goals doesn’t matter all that much. What’s most important is that the values and goals justify the hostility. If the world changes, the values and ideals can shift. But the emotional need remains constant: to find someone or something to oppose.

That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire. People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want? Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?

Devotion is capable of bringing deep, serene fulfilment without requiring an enemy

But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears. The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies. Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation – as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond. It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause. If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain. It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage. The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.

Debunking Simulation Hypothesis

Deepak Chopra style glib bullshit by self proclaimed "intelligent" sapiens are not different from other bullshit propagated by "unintelligent" sapiens (think fake moon landing, to seeing Jesus in Banana).

We need more common sense research like this one: 

The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it rest on intuition rather than clear definitions, and few attempts have been made to formally spell out what “simulation” even means.

A new paper by SFI Professor David Wolpert aims to change that. In Journal of Physics: Complexity, Wolpert introduces the first mathematically precise framework for what it would mean for one universe to simulate another — and shows that several longstanding claims about simulations break down once the concept is defined rigorously. His results point to a far stranger landscape than previous arguments suggest, including the possibility that a universe capable of simulating another could itself be perfectly reproduced inside that very simulation.

“This entire debate lacked basic mathematical scaffolding,” Wolpert says. “Once you build that scaffolding, the problem becomes clearer — and far more interesting.”

 

Meta Value - 44

I don't listen to everything that my mind thinks. Most of it is bull shit. 

The trick is to curate it constantly so the mind learns to produce less garbage over time. 

And remember "Mind" comes from the body which also includes the heart, brain, lungs, all other organs, microbiome and god knows what else we don't know. 

What I think is a cumulation of all those and more. 

Conversely, the irony is that being mindful of these cumulations so that the thoughts are grounded in reality so that my thoughts are less of a bull shit, 

Meta Values - 43

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Around the time Max came into my life, that famous quote from Kant sounded wonderful and I got hooked.

Now with Max in me, the things that amazes me, create awe and wonder in me are the simple and mundane ones. 

In other words, I grew out of that macro quote, and started focusing on micro ones. 

What creates awe is how tiny microbes create my morality? How did Moss and Lichens survive when Dinosaurs went extinct and how are they still surviving during this Anthropocene?

How do I exist in an organic form? How do birds and fish recognize individual humans while I cannot? 

How do humans do what they do knowing their mortality? 

Most of those questions weren't in the realm of questions around the time I was born, I am glad these are not only questions but we have some rudimentary answers to them too. 

How much of unknown truths come to light when I am gone?

The biggest of questions are the ones that haven't even entered the realm of questions. 

What are the questions that we are not even asking now?

It's a shame humans suffer and die of dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases when such thrilling questions need to be answered. 

Ask more questions, listen,  think and ask more questions - ad nauseam.

Max Holiday Card - 2026!

 

Guyana - The Only Country To Achieve Self Sufficient Food Supply!

The revelation comes from groundbreaking research published in the journal Nature Food, which analysed 186 countries to determine how well each could theoretically feed its population from domestic production alone.

The study’s results were stark: Guyana alone achieved self-sufficiency across all seven essential food groups – fruit; vegetables; dairy; fish; meat; legumes, nuts and seeds; and starchy staples.

Walk through any market in Georgetown, the nation’s capital, and the picture is clear: stalls stacked with local rice, root vegetables like cassava, fresh fish, fruit and other produce, much of it sourced from within Guyana’s borders.

Guyana hasn’t closed itself off from the world; it still trades like any modern nation. What sets it apart is that the country uniquely possesses the capacity to meet all its citizens’ nutritional needs from its own soil and waters.

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And what makes this accomplishment even more remarkable is Guyana’s approach to conservation. It has achieved food self-sufficiency not by destroying its natural heritage but by maximising its limited agricultural land. Whereas deforestation ravages much of South America as countries clear land for farming and cattle ranching, Guyana has preserved more than 85 per cent of its original forest.

“The climate in the coastal region of Guyana makes it highly suitable for crop production,” explains Nicola Cannon, professor of agriculture at the Royal Agricultural University in Gloucestershire, UK.

The numbers bear this out: the country sits between one to nine degrees north of the equator, blessed with year-round warmth, plentiful rainfall, high humidity, and, crucially, fertile clay soils deposited by the Amazon River system over millennia.

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While much of the world’s farmland is dominated by monoculture – single crops grown in vast, uniform fields – Guyanese farmers take a markedly different approach to cultivation. They intercrop – growing two or more crops together in the same field, with each occupying its own niche and drawing on resources at different times.

It’s a practice that most industrial agriculture abandoned centuries ago, but in Guyana it remains central to farming success. Coconut farmers plant pineapples or tomatoes between young trees as they mature. Corn and soya beans use the same soil: the beans ‘fix’ nitrogen naturally, while the corn draws on nutrients at a different point in the season.

When done right, the benefits can be substantial. Intercropping requires careful planning – pairing crops that naturally complement each other rather than compete – but when farmers get the balance correct, it can improve soil structure, enhance fertility, and help control pests without major chemical intervention. It also spreads risk across the growing season: if one crop struggles due to weather, pests, or market fluctuations, another can still thrive.

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Guyana seems to have avoided this trap through sophisticated practices now known as ‘regenerative agriculture’. Livestock is integrated into cropping systems, while erosion is kept at bay by ensuring living roots remain in the ground year-round. These methods actively rebuild soil health as well as prevent degradation.

“Living roots not only physically hold the soil together, they also secrete [carbohydrates] which encourage microorganisms,” explains Cannon. “This helps keep soils alive and aids residue decomposition.”

The result is a virtuous cycle where healthy soils support diverse crops, which in turn feed the soil biology that maintains fertility. It’s a system that could, theoretically, sustain itself indefinitely.

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How To Talk To Terrorists

When it comes to terrorism, governments seem to suffer from a collective amnesia. All of our historical experience tells us that there can be no purely military solution to a political problem, and yet every time we confront a new terrorist group, we begin by insisting we will never talk to them. As Dick Cheney put it, “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it”. In fact, history suggests we don’t usually defeat them and we nearly always end up talking to them. Hugh Gaitskell, the former Labour leader, captured it best when he said: “All terrorists, at the invitation of the government, end up with drinks in the Dorchester.”

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And lastly, it is claimed that Sri Lanka shows a military solution can work. But Sri Lanka doesn’t demonstrate anything of the sort. President Rajapaksa managed to defeat the Tamil Tigers only because its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran – who had been considered a military genius for most of his life – turned out to be a military fool, in the words of one of the Norwegian negotiators who worked on the peace process. If he had stuck to a guerrilla campaign rather than trying to beat the Sri Lankan army in a conventional war, he would probably still be in the jungle fighting now. And the measures used by the Sri Lankan army to wipe out the Tigers are not methods that could be used by any western government that respects human rights and the rule of law. Finally, although the war is over and there is, thank goodness, no sign of the resurgence of a terrorist campaign, the political problem of Tamil rights still remains unresolved, and trouble will continue until it is.

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The one thing I have learned, above all else, from the last 17 years is that there is no such thing as an insoluble conflict with an armed group – however bloody, difficult or ancient. Even the Middle East peace process, which has stuttered on for decades, will in the end result in a lasting agreement. The fact that it has failed so many times before does not mean that it will always fail, and an eventual settlement will be built on the past failures and the lessons learned from these failures, as was the peace in Northern Ireland.

It is remarkable how quickly a conflict can shift from being regarded as “insoluble” to one whose solution was “inevitable” as soon as an agreement is signed. Beforehand, and even up to a very late stage in the process, conventional wisdom states that the conflict can never be resolved; but before the ink is dry on the agreement, people are ready to conclude that it was inevitable. They put it down to outside events like the end of the cold war, to the effect of 9/11 or to changing economic circumstances. But this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Just as no conflict is insoluble, nor is it inevitable that it will be resolved at any particular moment in history. Believing that a solution is inevitable is nearly as dangerous as believing a conflict cannot be solved. If people sit around waiting for a conflict to be “ripe” for talks to start, or for the forces of history to solve it for them, then it will never be resolved. If the negotiations are handled badly, they will fail, which is why it is worth trying to learn from the experience of others. Dealing effectively with a terrorist threat requires political leadership, patience and a refusal to take no for an answer. What we need are more political leaders who are capable of remembering what happened last time – and prepared to take the necessary risks.

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Marchetti's constant

I never knew about Marchetti's constant. Fascinating finding.

Marchetti's constant is the average time spent by a person for commuting each day. Its value is approximately one hour, or half an hour for a one-way trip. It is named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, though Marchetti himself attributed the "one hour" finding to transportation analyst and engineer Yacov Zahavi.

Marchetti posits that although forms of urban planning and transport may change, and although some live in villages and others in cities, people gradually adjust their lives to their conditions (including location of their homes relative to their workplace) such that the average travel time stays approximately constant. Ever since Neolithic times, people have kept the average time spent per day for travel the same, even though the distance may increase due to the advancements in the means of transportation. In his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford attributes this observation to Bertrand Russell:

Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now—by driving him to a more distant residential area—effectually cancels out the gain.

 

Charlie Mackesy & The Illusion Of Control

Every weekend, I eagerly look forward to John Gray's articles. But these days, he is not regularly writing... and I miss his words. 

Last weekend he did write and as usual a simple but yet a beautiful piece - thoughts on the book Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm by Charlie Mackesy.

“‘The storm is making me tired,’ said the boy. ‘I know,’ said the horse, ‘but storms get tired too.’”

There are plenty of storms raging at present, but they will not last. Tomorrow is another day. The insight of the horse goes deeper: it is not only the menacing thunder of war and the gathering rumble of economic collapse that is tiring. The inward search for an end to the tumult is even more exhausting. Tales of sunlit uplands beyond the horizons give scant shelter to the windswept and lost. Theories that posit dark forces behind the blast will lead you further into the tempest. Best forget the stories; meander on together and you may find the journey itself worthwhile.

The dialogue between the boy and the horse comes from Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm, published in October 2025 as a sequel to his huge bestseller The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2019). A cartoonist, painter, illustrator and Instagram devotee, Mackesy produced a book – or one emerged spontaneously from within him – unlike any other. Presented in irregular, uneven handwriting, with words curving around sketches of the characters wandering through a sparsely drawn landscape, often on pages that are mostly empty and white, the text and the format are as one. There is no storyline. As the boy and his friends travel on, their dialogues are the purpose of their journey. As Mackesy writes in the introduction to this equally remarkable second volume, “It’s about four unlikely friends who have no idea where they are going or what they are looking for…”

No plan or purpose unites the four animals – for the boy, too, belongs in the animal kingdom – as they travel together. Each of them embodies a different way of being in the world.

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In Mackesy’s books there are no thrilling yarns. The absence of plot is the point. Relieving the reader of the burden of seeking any conclusion, they suggest a way of living that lets things come and go as they will. These are not sagas of heroism and courage in a battle against evil of the sort we find in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. No masterful wizard leads the humble band to any kind of triumph. The landscape they traverse shows no traces of Aslan, the divine lion and saviour figure, who sacrifices himself only to be miraculously resurrected in CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia – a fairy-tale rendition of a Christian myth. Mackesy’s tales are not parables of human rebellion against cosmic tyranny akin to that told in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, where secular Gnosticism – the belief in emancipation through knowledge that is the fading faith of the age – is recycled as anti-Christian allegory. In giving succour without doctrine, Mackesy’s diptych is uniquely delightful, an innovation in children’s books and an event in literature.

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The secret of Mackesy’s books is that they offer release from the struggle of trying to control one’s life or thoughts. When they can’t see any way ahead, he gently suggests, his readers should simply take another step. Like the four wayfarers of whom he writes, they have no journey’s end. The storm within is trying to map out your life in advance. Let it pass, and you can travel on.

As John Gray states - "These stories about a boy and his animal friends reveal the futility of trying to foresee what will happen to us."

21st & Number 21

Max was born on March 21st 2006. 

He came exactly 2 months later on the 21st. 

13 years and 9 months later, he was cremated on the 21st. 

Should I consider 21 and 21st as lucky or unlucky numbers?

I understand how my moronic species seeks patternicity in randomness, seeks meaning in randomness, and deluding oneself in finding meaning when there is a question out there to find meaning - and build culture, region and cults. 

Life is not full of randomness but life is randomness. 

We crawled out of the ocean by sheer randomness and we breath in and out every moment now by randomness. 

I refuse to be fooled by randomness but instead embrace it like air, water, and food - an essential source of life on earth. 

So do I consider 21 or 21st as a lucky or unlucky number? 

Neither. 

I am grateful that Max came into my life irrespective of some random date. I am grateful he had a good life and a peaceful death. 

I am immensely grateful for that without finding meaning, patternicity, self-delusion, ideology, nor any freaking meaning. 

The right questions to ask are - how can give back (and stop taking) for this beautiful life? how can I stop doing bad (much easier than doing good)? what I can do to reduce pain and suffering?

 

Six Years...

This day six years ago, the first day of holidays after lunch Max and I laid down on the floor of our living room for a nap. 

I woke around 3 pm and Max woke up too. But suddenly he had trouble breathing and within a minute he passed away. 

My Max took his last breath while I was watching him. I was broken but I was peaceful. I knew that organic creatures have a shelf life. I will take my last breath in the same house and in the same place in the living room - somehow I know this only wish and desire of mine will come true.

Today by sheer accident, a big plant in our home fell and by sheer coincidence, I moved the plant where Max passed away, added more soil to the plant and saved it. A place where one life left, another lived to see another day. This is life. Full of randomness. 

Today after lunch, I laid down on the couch to take a nap. Garph as usual jumped on me and sat on me purring and ready to take a nap. Neo was next to me looking outside, and not in the mood to take a nap. 

Before I dozed off, I was amazed how little things are the most beautiful moments. Six years ago, this day was the worst day of my life but I kept breathing... and today little Garphy and Neo needed me by them, 

I miss you Max. You gave me a beautiful life. An immensely beautiful life.

Why Aren't The Rich Fighting Against Autocracy (Anymore)?

Elites no longer have the incentive to fight for the rule of law at home. They can buy it abroad.

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Tracking Dogs Are Helping Wildlife & People Northern Tanzania

After a few minutes, one of the handlers leads a striking maroon-red Alsatian named Rosdaz, its nose to the ground, to the area between the tents and from there, to an open-air kitchen. Here, the handler directs five camp staff members and about 10 others, including me, to stand still as he presents the dog with one of the pieces of gauze. After a few sniffs, Rosdaz matches the scent to one of the staff members; the dog stands up on his hind legs and places his front paws firmly against the man’s waist. The man, dressed in a crisp, collared shirt, stands motionless and stares straight ahead, avoiding the gaze of his accuser.

Because Rosdaz is still young, the handlers decide they want a second opinion. Rocky is a more classic looking Alsatian with a sloping back and dusty grey coat. At 7 years old, he’s more experienced and bolder than Rosdaz. As one of Tanzania’s two original tracker dogs, Rocky has already made a name for himself. He and another dog, now based in the Serengeti National Park, once tracked a poachers’ trail for some 7 hours. Ultimately, the dogs led rangers to a hidden stash of ivory weighing 60 kilograms (130 pounds), representing tusks from at least a half dozen elephants (Loxodonta africana).

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This type of investigation, while not the team’s primary role, is an important demonstration of the dogs’ keen ability to track down individuals—from poachers to petty thieves—who have left even the slightest clue at the scene of their crime. The methods the dog team used here are the same as those used in the pursuit of some of Tanzania’s most lethal poachers. And in that high-stakes fight, there’s little time to lose.

Tanzania, which recently boasted the continent’s second largest elephant population after Botswana, lost more than 60 percent of its elephants to poaching between 2009 and 2014. Seeking effective low-tech solutions to the problem, rangers began considering using dogs to track down poachers in the bush.

The use of highly trained dogs like Rocky and Rosdaz was pioneered by the Tanzanian conservation organization Honeyguide. (The organization is named after a group of birds in the Indicatoridae family that are known to lead people to sources of wild honey.) Honeyguide first established a conservation tracker dog unit in 2011 in West Kilimanjaro and was one of only a few such programs in Africa.

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With the dogs’ ability to follow a scent—sometimes days-old—from crime scenes over many miles to poachers’ camps or villages, and to match scents collected at a scene to individual suspects, the dogs have proven their value to the rangers. According to Olekashe, this can be measured in the relative prices poachers charge to work in various areas. The higher the risk, the more compensation is required. “From intelligence, we know that a shooter’s charge can now be as much as 5 million Tanzanian Shillings ($2,200) in areas where we operate. Elsewhere, it may be 500,000 ($223) or as little as 200,000 ($89).”

Poaching incidents in Manyara Ranch have fallen as well. In 2014 and 2015, poachers killed 17 elephants inside the ranch. This number fell to zero in 2016, although three elephants were speared on the outskirts of the ranch in retaliation for feeding on farmers’ crops. Thus far, 2017 has been quiet, with no elephants poached or speared. “These days, not only does an elephant die naturally, its tusks are left intact,” Olekashe says. “This would have never happened before.”

In Tanzania’s Manyara Ranch, elephants were once the main targets of poaching.

Thanks to tracker dogs like Rocky and Rosdaz, elephant poaching at Manyara Ranch has since been greatly reduced.

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“I was fond of dogs before becoming a handler,” Isaack says. “Training improved my commitment to them. People were more accustomed to using dogs for hunting. Now we’re using dogs to stop hunting.”

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“In conservation, we have limited resources,” says Damian Bell, Honeyguide’s executive director. “While dogs are expensive to maintain, they have proven effective at helping government and community ranger teams curb poaching and crime.” Bell estimates that it costs at least $30 thousand per year to maintain an established dog unit. The rationale is that if dogs are helping to keep the region’s protected areas, campsites, and communities safe, they are not only fostering positive attitudes toward conservation, but also helping secure a vital sector of Tanzania’s economy. Tourism is a mainstay in the country where the northern circuit—together with the islands of Zanzibar—generate some 90 percent of the country’s $1.3 billion in tourism earnings annually. These funds help subsidize Tanzania’s lesser-known and more remote national parks.

- More Here

Meta Values - 42

A habit or trait which I once thought is "part" of me or worse "defines" me miraculously vaporizes one fine day.

Observing that moment when an "is" becomes "was " enthralls me with awe and wonder. 

I feel I am maturing, growing and changing as a living being. 

Hence I look forward to aging and embrace it. 

I am glad I am growing old. 

Carl Jung On The Art Of Aging Well

An ever-deepening self-awareness seems to me as probably essential for the continuation of a truly meaningful life in any age, no matter how uncomfortable this self-knowledge may be. Nothing is more ridiculous or unsuitable as older people who act as if they were still young — they lose even their dignity, the only privilege of age. The watch must be the introspection. Everything is revealed in self-knowledge, what is it, what it is intended to, and about what and for what one lives. The wholeness of ourselves is certainly a rationale…

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But what happens if a person doesn’t reach for wisdom, wholeness or gerotranscendence in elder years? Unfortunately, for those unable to respond to this new call for inner growth there is a tendency to experience depression, despair, fear of death and regret. Yet our western culture ignores that and continues to spread the idea that aging is best either denied or concealed, making it obvious that the biggest denial of all is the inevitability of death. And in spite of the goal of us all to hopefully avoid disease, disability, waning mental and physical functioning along with some disengagement with life, there will likely come a time when some, if not all, of those aspects become a part of our experience.

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Instead of glorifying the roles we played in the “morning” of our lives, Jung recommends that we let go of what we were and optimistically welcome where we are and where we are going. He said, “…an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.  And as a matter of fact, it is in many cases a question of the selfsame childish greediness, the same fear, the same defiance and willfulness, in the one as in the other.”

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Risk, Uncertainty, & Democracy

This multiplicity of meanings would have likely vexed Frank Knight, whose 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit argued that risk that differed from uncertainty or hazard on account of being calculable. ‘The essential fact is that “risk” means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement’, he wrote, drawing on the example of a champagne producer who knows that a certain percentage of bottles will break during production. Because the risk of breakage is predictable and quantifiable, its associated costs can be passed along to the consumer alongside other expenses, like labor (Knight Citation1921, 19–20). Uncertainty, on the other hand, involved that about which ‘the conception of an objectively measurable probability or chance is simply inapplicable’ (231). This was a distinction that John Maynard Keynes echoed both his Treatise on Probability (1921) and his comments on The General Theory: ‘About these matters [e.g. the price of copper in twenty years time] there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatsoever. We simply do not know’ (Keynes Citation1937, 214).

A century later, it is evident that Knight’s narrow definition of risk has been largely overtaken by a more expansive, and ambiguous, alternative. On the one hand, advances in risk modeling such as the Monte Carlo method – and the securities and derivatives it helped popularize – have enabled financial services firms to commodify and price risk in novel ways. Yet, as the contribution by Andrea Saltelli underscores, there are good reasons to look critically at the increasingly complex and often opaque mathematical models used in estimations of risk. Infamous in this regard is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, who claimed in 2007 that the bank had experienced ‘25 standard deviation events, several days in a row’. As John Kay and Mervyn King have argued in Radical Uncertainty (Citation2020), tools developed to understand risk cannot fully tame uncertainty. It is not just that models might not correspond with the underlying reality they purport to describe, but that the mere existence of a model projects an unwarranted sense of security.

[---]

As this brief survey suggests, thinking about risk, uncertainty, and democracy in the twenty-first century is a practice that cuts across disciplines, subject matter, and time periods. Trying to craft a comprehensive volume would be a fool’s errand, and the contributions included here only begin to scratch the surface. In lieu of comprehension, we have aimed to model a different way of thinking and speaking about risk – one that moves away from technocratic approaches to center the workings of power, and that can be applied to a broad range of analyses. We trust readers will find something worthwhile in our efforts.

- Full Paper Here

India’s Northeast Reveals A Path Beyond Factory Farming

India is a good example because it has states with human populations as big as some countries, and many of these have transitioned away from small-scale, extensive chicken production. While about 35% of chickens in India are still raised in small backyard flocks, most are now kept in indoor commercial systems. Large-scale free-range broiler farms and cage-free egg farms are very rare.

For their analysis, the authors looked at factors linked to intensive chicken farming, including the state’s wealth, human population density, level of urbanization, and local feed production like maize and soy. To spot the outliers, they checked for states whose actual intensification levels were far below predictions. Then they explored whether state policies could help explain this discrepancy.

The authors found that several states in Northeast India, especially Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Sikkim, have much lower levels of chicken intensification than expected, given their income levels. For example, Sikkim has the second-highest income per person in India but less than 1% of its chickens are raised on commercial farms. In these states, chicken production remains reliant on smallholders, unlike most of India where commercial farming dominates.

One possible reason for these outliers is geography, as the mountainous, forested terrain of the Northeast makes large-scale farming difficult. Another reason could be the region’s lower human population densities, meaning that the market might not be large enough to encourage commercialization.

However, in the authors’ view, the most compelling reason is strong policy choices. Sikkim became the world’s first 100% organic state, banning hormones, growth regulators, feed additives, and antibiotics. Similar organic farming regulations exist in Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya, with support from an organic agriculture program launched by the national government. These states also promote self-sufficiency in egg and chicken meat production through organic farming, and Sikkim has even invested in high-yield indigenous chicken breeds to improve productivity while keeping backyard systems.

The role of these organic policies is highlighted when considering Uttarakhand, a state with similar geography and population density to the Northeastern states but with high levels of chicken intensification. This suggests that the difference is less about physical conditions and more about policies shaping farming practices.

- More Here

How Iran Got To The Point Of Water Bankruptcy

I think we will hear more and more in every geography these two words "Water" & "Bankruptcy" in pairs. 

God bless my moronic species; it's a miracle how we got here. 

During Thanksgiving week,  there was a question about what are you thankful for. I said water and people were like ...  water? 

So even after reading about the Iranian situation nothing is going to change: 

Fall marks the start of Iran’s rainy season, but large parts of the country have barely seen a drop as the nation faces one of its worst droughts in decades. Several key reservoirs are nearly dry, and Tehran, the nation’s capital, is facing an impending “Day Zero” – when the city runs out of water.

The situation is so dire, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has revived a long-debated plan to move the capital from this metro area of 15 million people.

[--]

Iran’s escalating water and environmental problems are the predictable outcome of decades of treating the region’s finite water resources as if they were limitless.

Iran has relied heavily on water-intensive irrigation to grow food in dry landscapes and subsidized water and energy use, resulting in overpumping from aquifers and falling groundwater supplies. The concentration of economic activity and employment in major urban centers, particularly Tehran, has also catalyzed massive migration, further straining already overstretched water resources.

Those and other forces have driven Iran toward “water bankruptcy” – the point where water demand permanently exceeds the supply and nature can’t keep up.

[---]

The country needs to start to decouple its economy from water consumption by investing in sectors that generate value and employment opportunities with minimal water use.

Someone Had To Openly Say This - Taleb Did It!

To clear - I do respect Buffet and Munger. I build a temple for them when compared to contemporary morons (read Paypal mafia). 

and to be clear - Buffet and Munger optimized on legal money (Munger made a billion before his death investing in coal).

and to be clear - In capitalism all in game as long as it's within legal boundaries. They never crossed that line. 

Taleb's Tweet

My problem is they had so much money they could have shown a way to the younger generation by not investing in processed food (Heinz, Kraft Foods) et al., which has long term health effects. 

My problem is they had so much money they had options to bet on stocks sans second order effects but yet they choose not to do so. 

My bet is history will not treat them like messiahs they are treated now. 

A missed opportunity. 

Reading Rules

There are some gems are in Ryan Holiday's 2026 reading rules: 

• You should always be carrying a book.

• If you’re not reading with a pen, you’re not really reading.

• Books are not precious things. It should look like you’ve read the book. Mark it up. Fold pages. Beat them up. Books are not precious things.

• Forget the news, the best way to understand what’s happening in the world is by reading books.

• Don’t be a book snob. I find myself sometimes reluctant to read the latest super popular book. That snobbishness never serves me well. More often than not, when I get around to those bestsellers I kick myself — they were bestsellers for a reason! They’re great!

• If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers actually quit a lot of books. You turn off a TV show if it’s boring. 

• The rule for quitting books is one hundred pages minus your age. Meaning: as you age, you have to endure crappy books less and less. I give books a little more time than my 95 year old grandmother does.

• Good writers (and good books) are not hard to read.

• A long book must justify itself. 

• “What’s a book that changed your life?” is a question that will change your life. Ask people you admire for book recommendations. Emerson’s line was, “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”

• Look for wisdom, not facts. We’re not reading to just find random pieces of information. What’s the point of that? We’re reading to accumulate a mass of true wisdom — that you can turn to and apply in your actual life.

• When you find an author you love, read ALL the books they’ve written.

• If you see a book you want, buy it. Don’t worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. It’s not something you splurge on. It’s a necessity. 

• Our aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary. 

Two New Studies Dig Into The Long, Curving Path That Cats Took Toward Domestication

Instead, the study suggests, domesticated cats flourished in China only by following the Silk Road, arriving there around 1,400 years ago. It’s also possible that climate change led to agricultural and population shifts in the region, possibly affecting how much food was available to the lurking Asian wildcats, the researchers suggest.

The paper published in Science, by contrast, focused on Europe and North Africa. It builds on previous work that had suggested the ancestors of domestic cats were a blend of Near Eastern and North African wildcats.

For the new research, the scientists analyzed samples of nuclear DNA—the main genome of an organism, containing both parents’ contributions—from the same specimens that were examined in the older study, which had not looked at this type of DNA.

Particularly intriguing was taking a new look at cats that lived in Turkey thousands of years ago. “I was so excited to have a look at their nuclear genomes for the first time,” says Marco De Martino, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and co-author of the study.

Yet the new analysis suggested something dramatically different to the older work. These Neolithic felines were pure wildcat. The finding, similarly to the results of the analysis done in China, suggests that cat domestication unfolded much more slowly than scientists had thought.

“The cat is a complex species; they are independent,” says Claudio Ottoni, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and another co-author of the Science study. “They were not just staying with humans—they would still go around and mix with local wildcats.”

Both findings suggest truly domesticated cats arose far later than previously believed—perhaps as late as 2,000 years ago. If that timeline is correct, it underscores just how rapidly cats have settled into the human world—and how much we have to learn about our feline friends.

- More Here

The two papers:

• The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago

• The late arrival of domestic cats in China via the Silk Road after 3,500 years of human-leopard cat commensalism

What I've Been Reading

London is Tacoma before Tacoma is even a gleam in a Guggenheim’s eye. 

We pay attention to the wrong things. We make a mystery of Jack the Ripper. 

It’s not a mystery. It’s history.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser. 

Did anyone thought about asking this simple question of why there are less serial killers these days? Why?

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was considering ideas for her PhD while worrying about lead paint since she was pregnant. She happened to listen to Steven D. Levitt's (of Freaknomics) talk. 

She narrowed down on the topic of "early childhood exposure and crime rate" in her dissertation (which was published in 2007). Her question became the seed for Fraser's brilliant book. 

This is yet another example of why it so important to meditate on why question to get at-least some of the causality behind a symptom. 

The most important question for us to ask now is - what is the x in 2025 compared to x = lead in 1950 to 1990 (almost 40 years time span)?

My answer is - consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on. 

Most reading this including myself will not be alive in 40 years if and when such a study comes out. 

One can wait for the next 4 decades or embrace precautionary principle now and avoid those potential mental and physical effects. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

Here's good excerpt from the book: 

According to Patterson, the average American during of age of leaded gasoline is so filthy when it comes to lead contamination that he's comparable to Pig Pen in the Peanuts comic strip. "Thats what people look like with respect to lead," he says. "Everyone. The lead from your hair, when you walk into a superclean laboratory like mine, will contaminate the whole damn laboratory. Just from your hair."

Not only that but Patterson calculates that the blood lead level of pre-industrial  humans would have have been 0.016 micrograms per deciliter, far lower than that of anyone living in the industrial age, American, he concludes, are suffering from "enough partial brain dysfunction, that their lives are being adversely affected by loss of mental acuity and irrationality. He devotes himself to campaigning against lead gasoline and to proving that everything Robert Kehoe ever said or upblished about "normal levels" of lead in blood is wrong.

The issue is currently its just not American's but the whole goddamn world is stuck in processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on. 

Before even reading this book just last month I wrote: 

People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.

I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families. 

In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are  thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering. 

A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.

Take a moment and thank those men and women who fought so hard for decades to expose the effects of lead.  I bet "God" will appreciate that gulping dead bodies of Turkey.

Take a moment to identify the men and women are currently fighting to expose the cognitive and physical on human beings who are stuck in consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia.

What I've Been Reading

I cannot remember the last time I laughed out so loud while reading a book :-) 

This is a master piece with around 10 minutes of reading time. 

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla.

• Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 

• Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 

• Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 

• Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. 

• Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Benefits of Wandering Mind

Self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion.

- Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman via Jonathan Haidt's Babel - On The Death of Daydreaming

Meta Values - 41

In life, the most important traits in everything boils down to three P's. 

Patience, Persistence, and Perseverance. 

The sooner you grasp that, the better your life will be. 

Mine happened at 31 when Max came into my life. 

Wisdom Of Buffet

Very good consolidation of Buffet's wisdom: 

Humans behave the way humans behave, and they’re going to continue to behave that way in the next 50 years.

The proper temperament is far more important in investing than points of intellect. If you’ve got a reasonable intellect and the right temperament you’d get very rich, and if you’ve got the wrong temperament for it, you’ll get done in at some point. 

Human nature has not changed. People will always behave in a manic-depressive way over time. They will offer great values to you.

he better you understand human nature and are able to distinguish between different types of individuals, the better the investor you are going to be.

The veteran banker of Boston, the late Henry L. Higginson, asked one day by an investor what stocks he ought to buy with some idle funds replied, ‘Buy character.’ He meant that if one bought into any industry backed by men of experience and of high character and intelligence, one would at least be subject only to the usual risks of business, and chances of success would be excellent. On the other hand, no one could have faith in securities of any corporation operated by men of doubtful character.

In management you look for ability, trust & character.

We do not wish to join with managers who lack admirable qualities, no matter how attractive the prospects of their business. We've never succeeded in making a good deal with a bad person.

Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.

Patience - an indispensable quality. If one were asked to name the quality which as much as any other is essential to success in speculation, the answer would be ‘patience.'

The biggest thing about making money is time. You don’t have to be particularly smart you just have to be patient.

The stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Read 500 pages every week ... That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.

An ability to detach yourself from the crowd — I don’t know to what extent that’s innate or to what extent that’s learned — but that’s a quality you need.

The financial calculus that Charlie and I employ would never permit our trading a good night’s sleep for a shot at a few extra percentage points of return.

Loss of focus is what worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding.

Jonathan Safran Foer on Eating Animals

Ever since Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals came out, while Max was alive, I have been posting Foer's talk every year during Thanksgiving. 

So much irony in this day... billions get slaughtered after their short and miserable life full of pain and suffering.

Did I mention I love Robert Trivers and his "self-deception" hypothesis? 

This day is one of those days where human self-deception reaches a pinnacle. 

I am sorry for my fellow family who lost their lives today. 

10 Misconceptions About Evolution

• Evolution is “only a theory”  - Nope. 

• “Survival of the fittest” means that evolution favors those who are “strongest”  - “Evolutionary fitness” refers to reproductive success; more precisely, it’s a measure of the success of genes in getting themselves projected into the future and is achieved in many ways—including the ability to obtain food, to avoid becoming food for someone else, to overcome diseases, to adjust to local weather and climate, attract mates, and so forth. In a pioneering research report, male European red deer who were smaller and who bore less impressively developed antlers were often more “fit” than the hulking males, because these “sneaky fuckers” (don’t blame me: This descriptive phrase is part of the technical literature) copulated with the females while the more massive bulls were busy fighting antlero-a-antlero with other more physically developed specimens.  

• Evolution explains the origin of life (or it’s supposed to) - Nope. That is primarily a job for biophysics, biochemistry, and geology. 

• Evolution acts for the good of the species - It is estimated that something like 99 percent of species that have existed are now extinct, so if evolution is working for the good of species, it has done a terrible job! What really argues against “good of the species,” however, is the actual way natural selection operates. Although it is possible that species sometimes compete, and, as a result, better adapted ones replace their poorly adapted alternatives, evolutionary competition takes place almost entirely within species, not between them. 

• Evolutionary theory says that living things are the result of chance - No, it doesn’t. There’s a half-truth hidden here; actually, less than half. Natural selection’s power comes from differential reproduction, the logical, unavoidable process whereby some genetic variants are more successful—more fit—than others. As such, its raw material comes from genetic diversity, which is produced by mutations and, in the case of sexually reproducing species, the reshuffling of genes via meiosis and sexual recombination. These processes are essentially random. But that’s just the source of the building blocks employed by natural selection. Natural selection definitely isn’t random—it does the heavy lifting and fitting together, by picking and choosing among various options, with some genes being projected into the future more than their alternatives—i.e., our old friend differential reproduction once again. Then the process happens over and over, repeatedly retaining those that are more fit and abandoning those that are less so. 

• Because we rely more and more on brain power and less and less on our muscles, human beings in the future will have big heads and small bodies - It is similarly easy to get hung up on the Lamarckian assumption that insects, crustaceans, fish, and amphibians that inhabit pitch dark caves are often blind because they stopped using their eyes, which therefore disappeared. Not so. These evolutionary changes, which are entirely compatible with Darwinian natural selection, occur because eyes are useless in the dark—hence, they lose the selective advantage that they convey in lighted environments—and, moreover, they take energy to produce while also being vulnerable to injury and infection. So, go ahead and exercise, use your brains, and hang out in dark places if you wish … but your offspring won’t have larger biceps, bigger heads, or smaller eyes as a result. 

• Gaps in the fossil record argue against evolution - Of course there are gaps in the fossil record! It’s remarkable that we have any such records at all, given how unlikely it is that any given dead critter will be fossilized and preserved, to which we must add an additional low probability that these remains will be discovered and recognized as such, perhaps hundreds of millions of years later. As for “missing links,” picture a line between two taxonomic groups, with as yet unidentified species connecting them; now, identify something between (linking) them: Now you have two new missing links! So, any time we find intermediate forms, there will necessarily be “missing links,” because every time a linking specimen is found (such as the discovery of Australopithecines linking nonhuman primates and Homo sapiens), new missing links are produced. In short, the more fossils, the more “missing links.” 

• Human beings aren’t evolving any more - We are. It’s just that evolution is typically a very slow process, limited by selective pressures (differences in the reproductive success of different traits and the genes that underlie them), along with generation times. It is possible that human beings in the future will have evolved the ability to function and reproduce readily with microplastics and “forever chemicals” in their blood, not to mention Strontium-90 in their bones and DDT in their fat, or maybe enhanced ability to manipulate computer screens, if such individuals have more kids. Each person’s genotype is fixed, so as individuals, we don’t evolve biologically. But Homo sapiens does, and will continue to do so, unless all people and their genes reproduce identically. 

• Because of evolution, living things are always getting “better” - Not necessarily. Early in the Earth’s history, a few billion years ago, life was very simple. Since then, it has evolved increasing complexity and enhanced ability to flourish in a variety of environments. In that sense, living things have gotten “better.” But any notion of improvement is subject to human-centered bias.  

• Evolutionary biology isn’t a science because it’s a historical phenomenon and can’t be tested - Many sciences, notably astronomy and geology, engage uniquely with historical phenomena (we can’t experimentally manipulate stars or continents), and yet they generate impressive empirical testing, often based on detailed observational regimes along with falsifiable predictions. And there is no question of their status as bona fide sciences. Evolutionary biology is no different.  

- More Here

Moss Might Survive Nearly Two Decades in Space

Fujita and his colleagues first challenged the moss species Physcomitrium patens with space-like conditions in a lab, including extreme temperature swings, extreme UV radiation, and vacuum conditions. By assessing the impacts on three different structures from the moss—juvenile moss, specialized stem cells, and spores contained within reproductive structures called sporangium—they determined that the shielded spores had the best chance of making it among the stars. For example, the spores showed around 1,000 times more tolerance to UV radiation than did the stem cells.

The scientists chalked this up to the sporangium, which protects them from perils including UV exposure and extreme temperatures on Earth—a feature that has perhaps enabled them to ride out multiple mass extinction events.

Then, it was time for the ultimate test: In March 2022, the team handed off hundreds of spores to astronauts headed toward the International Space Station on the Cygnus NG-17 spacecraft. Once the crew made it to the ISS, they secured the spores on the station’s exterior. Spores were divided into groups and exposed to one of three different conditions: exposed to visible light uncovered but protected from UV radiation by a filter, blocked from any light (including UV) in a control group, or exposed to all the visible light and UV radiation hitting the ISS. After 283 days in the extraterrestrial elements, the spores returned to Earth.

“We expected almost zero survival, but the result was the opposite: Most of the spores survived,” Fujita said in the statement. “We were genuinely astonished by the extraordinary durability of these tiny plant cells.”

Testing revealed that more than 80 percent of the spores survived the experiment, and had germination rates of up to 97 percent for those not exposed to UV radiation in space. Meanwhile, the spores that weren’t shielded from UV radiation had a germination rate of 86 percent.The paper noted that a form of chlorophyll showed signs of damage in the spores exposed to space light but not in the spores kept in the dark.

With the data gleaned from the lab and space experiments, the team estimated that these moss spores could survive up to roughly 15 years in space. Now, this moss joins the ranks of other rugged Earthlings who have endured the space elements, including tardigrades and fungi.

The researchers say they hope that moss can aid extended human missions to other planets by providing oxygen and boosting soil fertility for crop growth on long cosmic journeys or on extraterrestrial outposts. 

- More Here

How Do The Pros Get Someone To Leave A Cult?

There are cults like we all "know" as cults. 

Then there is a toxic cocktail cults of ideology, culture, religion, politics, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, free-market, communism, human centrism, binary thinking lens et al., This cocktail cult is not called cult since billions of sapiens fall into this bucket. Somehow, this has been rebranded as something else - tribes. 

Then there are very very few people who are open minded to see these two cults and they make the wheels of civilization, kindness, decency, progress over time. These human had an ability to change their minds with time and grow as a living being. 

Thanks to those unknown humans for what they did so that I am able to live a very comfortable life. 

I hope I am doing a little of the same for the future when I am gone. 

We should have a lot more Ryan's and Kelly's in our worlds to help the cocktail cults:

What Ryan and Kelly do is unusual: they help people leave cults. Over the past 40 years, they have handled hundreds of cases – some simple and local, others stretching across borders and decades. They have been hired by families of both modest and considerable means. They say they have even been hired by government agencies, and that some cults they have investigated have left them genuinely afraid for their lives.

Although many people are involved in cultic studies and education, fewer than 10 people in the US do anything like what Ryan and Kelly do. And among those, only Kelly and Ryan practice their strange and unique method: embedding themselves in families’ lives, pulling on threads like marionettists, sometimes for years.

Their method goes something like this. A family reaches out about their daughter, husband, nephew or grandchild. Ryan and Kelly conduct an assessment that can take anywhere from a day to a week (they would not say exactly). They charge $2,500 for the assessment, then $250 an hour after that, interviewing the family until they understand the dynamics well enough to devise a strategy. Then, over months or sometimes years, they work to create the conditions in which a person might begin to question the beliefs their life has been built on.

Normally, Kelly and Ryan work by strengthening the existing relationships in a person’s life. It can be a long game. They will educate the family about the cultic group, and give advice about what to say (or not to say). They will bring in experts: psychiatrists, lawyers, priests that can provide perspective and counsel. The goal is to untangle the family dynamics that might have made someone vulnerable to a cult in the first place.

[---]

One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. “I can’t get into all the details,” Ryan said. “He was horrible, a horrible man.” Ryan and Kelly had been flying regularly to Australia to work on the case. The client’s niece, a girl in the group, was beginning to fall out with the cult. The leader had been arrested and was on trial for crimes related to the cult’s activities.

In their process, Ryan and Kelly require what they call 50 things: “You have to find 50 things that you could agree with the person on.” Ryan gestured to a painting on the wall in their living room. It was a strange, surrealist-looking canvas with a big Tesla coil in the center and lightning shooting out at some pigeons. Ryan said, “If you look at this piece of art and say, ‘That’s really ugly,’ then we’re going to start off … not on the right page, right?”

But if I could appreciate what he found appealing, then, he said: “I think you have the right to criticize it.” The number may seem arbitrary, but their goal is to find 50 things a family can appreciate about a cult before discussing what they do not agree with.

I put this number to Lalich and she said the notion of having to find 50 things seemed a bit extreme. “ I certainly could never find 50 things about my cult that I thought were good.” The spirit of it seemed right to her though, at least: that the family needs to tone down their rhetoric, or they will just push the cult-involved member away.

Hydromechanics Of Defecation - Most Mammals Need Only 12 Seconds To Poop

 or that mammal will be dinner to a predator. 

Its freaking common sense. 

I wrote about this few years ago: 

If someone breaks this rule daily then their health and/or diet is not good. There is something fundamentally wrong with their microbiome which in turn also affects their thought process, outlook of life and god knows what else we don't know. 

Hence, we could cautiously come up with a heuristic that not only eyes but "time to poop" is also a window to someone's character (I am not sure what soul means so let's stick to observable, known and simple words here). 

It should take 12 seconds. But that technical word "hydrodynamics of defection" is something new I learned today. 

AI Will Never Be A Shortcut To Wisdom

After nearly forty years teaching graduate students and advising some of the most inventive companies on the planet, I’ve earned the right to sigh a bit. But this isn’t about “kids these days.” In fact, it’s not about youth at all. The shift I’m seeing — this collapse of intellectual agility — is striking all generations. All cultures. All walks of life.

Studies on cognitive flexibility, coupled with anecdotal observations about the death of long-form journalism and the slow drift of reader attention, suggest something dire: We are growing unable to sit still with ambiguity. We no longer walk through the fog of a complex question — we skip across it, like stones. Our thoughts sprint, but the world is a marathon. And so, we are left with answers to the wrong questions.

What happens when we can no longer think through contradiction, paradox, tension? When climate change, homelessness, political division, and regional conflict are seen as disconnected problems with easy answers — when, in truth, they are tangled systems that resist simplicity?

The answer is only simple if you don’t understand the question.

This is the danger of living in a world where thinking is outsourced. Where cognition becomes project management. Where uncertainty is eliminated, not explored. Where truth is boxed and shelved, not wrestled with. If the world is a box of nails — individual facts, sharp and ready — then our minds become hammers. Tools of force and certainty. Banging out conclusions. Flattening nuance. And who builds a cathedral with a hammer? Who composes a symphony with a hammer?

This is no way to live. Because if you see the world as nails, you’ll mistake noise for knowledge. You’ll assume volume means validity. And when you no longer know how to recognize true expertise — because you yourself have never gained any — you will fall for the confident fool. The YouTube doctor. The Instagram monk. The LinkedIn philosopher.

[---]

If you want to reclaim your mind — not as a hammer, but as a compass, or a loom, or a garden — start here:

• Ask better questions.
• Be suspicious of certainty.
• Practice long-form attention.
• Sit with something confusing until it teaches you something.

We are not meant to be hammerheads in a world of nails. We are meant to wonder, to wander, to build. The true mind does not pound — it inquires, connects, reshapes. It listens to contradiction without collapsing. It plays. And most of all, it remembers that the world was never simple. It was just, for a while, flattened by search engines. 

- More Here

Karel Styblo’s Life Work Against Tuberculosis Created A System That Has Saved Millions

We not only moronic but ungrateful species who don't even know the names of hero's leave alone know their work. Btw., how many head of the name Norman Borlaug? The only human who saved billion lives. 

I bet most know the freaking names such as Aristotle to Columbus. 

On Dr, Karel Styblo's system: 

One of the most important scientists you’ve never heard of is Dr. Karel Styblo.

Styblo had a profound grasp of tuberculosis, in part because he survived it. He contracted tuberculosis while imprisoned at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria in 1944. After the war and over the next 40 years, as a doctor and epidemiologist, Styblo studied tuberculosis and learned to orchestrate all three parts of what I call the formula: See invisible threats, believe change is possible, and create systematic solutions. 

I previously wrote about the single question he asked me that changed my life. I had handed him a detailed report about tuberculosis in New York City, and when he asked me how many patients we had cured, I didn’t know the answer. The report detailed all who were diagnosed and treated, but not who had actually been cured. I was terribly ashamed. That simple question — Of the 3,811 patients with tuberculosis diagnosed in New York City last year, how many did you cure? — changed how I’ve thought and worked ever since. Styblo’s laser-like focus on outcomes underpins much of his systems and work.

Styblo’s genius is both scientific and practical. He studied tuberculosis and learned to orchestrate all three parts of the formula. He saw invisible trends. He established the concept of a technical package based on scientific and practical rigor. After a decade in Tanzania, he developed a powerful information system capable of transforming health care. He understood how tuberculosis spreads among people — and, even more importantly, how to scale a control program to reach an entire country.

Styblo’s tuberculosis control system has improved diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of more than a 100 million patients.

If You Cannot Change Your Mind...

It's most likely that you have enough money and/or little time to think clearly. 

Over thinking, motivated reasoning or ideologue et al.,  fall under the same bucket.

The best thing you can give back to this planet is spend your time playing video games , watching TV, doing something passive and bid adios one day.

Believe it or not, even unwillingly this is the best thing you will ever do. 

No matter what, you will always be on the wrong side of history.  This is not my prediction but evolution of this planet works by adaptation. 

Good bye and long good night stagnant mind. 

Can the “Flow State” Save Us From Distraction?

Reading this beautiful piece reminded me of something I never consciously thought about. 

I always took for granted that the "flow" state is just for my deep work but yet, there are so many little things I do which brings me to the flow state.

Cleaning my house, cooking, walking, working out, gardening, writing, and reading are some of those activities.

And looking at Max’s pictures. 

Csikszentmihalyi moved to the United States — and dedicated his life to the study of positive psychology, which might be described as the scientific exploration of what makes life worth living. The Hungarian American’s legendary work orbited questions of happiness, purpose and creativity. What are the conditions that help people thrive? What happens when our attention is fully aligned with our actions? What sort of life unfolds when effort becomes its own reward?

If Csikszentmihalyi’s work offers an official definition of flow, it is this: “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

It’s the sort of line you start highlighting before you’ve finished reading it. I remember where I was when I read it: in a coffee shop in the East Village, sitting amongst glowing laptops and somniferous surf rock, sipping a beer before grabbing dinner with a friend.

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As freewheeling as flow feels, as mythical as it sometimes seems, the state does adhere to a qualifiable superstructure. Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying people who regularly entered flow — from artists to surgeons and climbers to chess masters — and eventually identified nine “component states”: challenge-skills balance, action-awareness meaning, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, and autotelic experience.

That’s…a lot of words. What do they all mean?

Here’s a breakdown: In order to achieve flow, the performer must be well-matched to the activity at hand — not too expert, not too green. They should be challenged, not bored. Activated and engaged. The performer knows exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, including the many mini-steps along the way, and they have a clear sense of how they’re doing. But that’s about all they’re aware of. Time either slows to a crawl or flies by. Focus narrows to a pinpoint, shutting out would-be distractions. The performer forgets their ego (they neither consider nor care what they look like during flow), and abandons their needs (they don’t reach for snacks, or check the clock or wonder if they need a bathroom break). They simply float forward.

Once you’re in flow, it can feel bulletproof. As mental states go, it seems like a cheat code: temporary immunity to time, ego or distraction?! But reaching hyper-focus requires some entry-level focus. Unlocking flow is notoriously difficult; it demands a blend of creativity and curiosity, patience and practice. And the edge of flow is a tightrope. A phone notification, a self-conscious thought, one tiny shift in rhythm — they can all break your stride before you fully drop in.

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In other words: flow was a commodity, which could run dry without discipline. He chose to cherish it, to never take it for granted: “As flow became a primary activity in my life, I was eventually able to turn it into a method. No hard conjuring necessary. It’s almost on speed-dial at this point.”

Descriptions vary, but this is a common refrain amongst the artists and athletes who regularly enter flow. It’s hard to say they’re “finding flow” or “unlocking” it — either image suggests someone reaching out in the dark, fumbling with their keys. When you hone your attentional faculty day after day, year after year, flow is no yeti. It’s your next-door neighbor. Ying said as much: “I think that I expect to get to flow now. It’s not a rare or mysterious thing. For me, it’s the result of good preparation and willful focus.”

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In order to find true flow at work, though, the work has to matter to you. It has to feel meaningful, rooted in growth. You have to believe in it. And ideally, you’re already good at it — or at the very least, eager to get better. Whatever the task, there should be a clear sense of progression, and a sense that you’re fully present while doing it.

Tyranny Of Experts!

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’.

Dewan quotes a woman who went back, after an absence of some years, to a village where shrimp farming had been introduced: “I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables,” she said. “The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat… The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more… we must bathe in the saline river. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.”

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.

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The shared assumption in all of this seems to be that the great majority of people eliminated by the apocalypse will be the underclasses of the poorer nations. But what is the likelihood that this will actually be the case? While there can be no doubt that vulnerable people in the Global South will indeed suffer greatly on an environmentally disrupted planet, the ethnographic record suggests that the future may have some surprises in store for complacent global elites. Bengali farmers, for instance, no matter how poor, are by no means willing to go quietly into the night. On the contrary, they are clearly determined to confront the future on their own terms, privileging the values that are most important to them. In this effort, it is possible that the skills inculcated by subsistence farming will be an important source of resilience: that is, after all, precisely the thinking behind the ‘prepper’ and survivalist movements in the West. Indeed, it seems to me that the people who will be most at risk if a planetary catastrophe were to occur are those who depend on complex industrial systems for their day-to-day survival. Those who know how to live off the land may well stand a better chance of getting by when conditions deteriorate.

There is perhaps one other factor that could work to the advantage of ordinary people in the Global South: the fact that they do not share the pessimism about the future that is increasingly prevalent in the West. Indeed, doomsaying has now become so widespread in Europe and America that it is hard to know whether it represents a rational appraisal of the relevant data, or is merely an offshoot of a more general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline.

In my experience, it is exceedingly rare to encounter apprehensions of impending doom in India, or Kenya, or Indonesia. The absence of this generalised anxiety is probably the reason why apocalyptic fiction hasn't really caught on in India or elsewhere in the Global South. But it is also possible that Asian and African writers have abjured end-of-the-worldism for other reasons. “When all is said and done, this obsession [with apocalypse] may well be specific to Western metaphysics,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics (2019). “For many human cultures, the world, simply, does not end.”

- How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies , read the whole piece; its so grounded in reality.