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.

[---]

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.

[---]

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.

- More Here

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.”

[---]

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.

[--]

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.

- More Here

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.

[---]

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.

[---]

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.

- More Here

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).

[---]

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.

[---]

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.

[---]

“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.”

[---]

“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…

[---]

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.

[---]

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.”

- More Here

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.