Wise Man Amongst Moronic Neighbors In NJ!

A Mercer County homeowner’s decision to rewild their yard is sparking debate among residents who say the vegetation creates visibility concerns for pedestrians and cyclists.

The property, located in West Windsor, features a native plant garden that extends to the edge of a corner lot. A sign posted at the front of the yard states it is a certified wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.

Residents raised concerns during a Sept. 15 township council meeting, arguing that the landscaping obstructs sight lines at the intersection and could negatively affect nearby property values.

Others questioned how native gardens should be maintained and whether current township regulations are sufficient to address them.

The homeowner, Bradley King, defended the property at the council meeting, saying it provides a habitat for wildlife and pollinators.

“I am a haven for many animals on my property that we all care about deeply,” King told the council, adding that he has young children and is “equally concerned about ticks and lyme disease as anyone else,” referring to residents’ concerns about pests.

King said he is willing to discuss neighbors’ concerns and that he supports efforts to find a compromise.

“I encourage and embrace my neighbors being at liberty to do as they wish with their private property and I just wish the same consideration from my township,” King said.

Native landscaping is gaining popularity

More New Jersey residents are trading in their hard-to-maintain grass lawns for an alternative that invites migrating birds, insects and pollinators to thrive in the space.

Michele Bakacs, an associate professor and county agent with Rutgers Cooperative Extension, said the native planting movement has inspired more homeowners to support birds, pollinators and other wildlife by creating meadows of flowers and grasses on their properties.

Bakacs works with New Jersey residents interested in establishing native landscapes.

Homeowners who create nature-based landscapes should consider factors such as sight lines and visibility when planning their yards, she said.

For homeowners with corner lots, one practice involves setting the meadow back from roads and sidewalks, Bakacs said.

Jean Epiphan, an assistant professor at Rutgers University and an agriculture and natural resources agent, said communities are continuing to revisit landscaping regulations as interest in native plants grows.

“And so there’s a lot of movement, maybe a little slow in this direction, but there is movement,” Epiphan said. “And town by town, people are making changes.”

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Councilwoman Andrea Mandel said she had seen the property prior to the council meeting and had observed vegetation extending into areas that may already be in violation of township regulations.

The council has not taken formal action, but officials indicated they would continue reviewing whether existing rules adequately address native landscaping while balancing safety concerns raised by residents.

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Meta Values - 52

Never-ever confuse knowledge & technological progress with progress in human morality. It never happened nor will happen in the future. 

Thank you John Gray for teaching me this during my wonder days with Max. Thank you, sir. 

First step improve my morality and make marginal progress in morality in future is to understand John Gray's wise words. 

There is no such thing as progress, that is, of things getting better: science and technology may improve, but the human animal will not; purpose does not exist independent of human construction, history and civilizations have no grand plan, no superior march towards glorious progress, nor can that purpose be a moral redemption of mankind.

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If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.

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Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Upper Limits Of Biology

In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away to win by 31 lengths, nearly three quarters of a football field. The other horses were so far behind they weren’t even in the television frame. Fifty years later, billions of dollars have been poured into breeding and training, yet Secretariat’s record still stands.

This is the paradox of the thoroughbred: breeders have spent centuries trying to create a faster horse, but in doing so, they may have bred away the very genetic diversity that would allow the horse to keep improving, or even to remain robust.

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As genetics has played such a large role in breeding horses, it is small wonder that horse breeders are moving with the frontiers of science. The world’s first cloned horse, called Prometea, was born in 2003. Horse cloning is now big business, despite an American Jockey Club ban, as other equine sports, including show jumping and polo, allow clones.

In 2024, the Argentinian company Kheiron announced the production of the first CRISPR-edited horses: Polo Pureza, an award-winning mare, was the foundation for five gene-edited clones with increased explosive speed. According to reports, the company modified the MSTN gene, so that the animals would develop more muscle fibers and potentially run faster as a result. Even so, the prospects for exceeding current records through gene editing are slim. Today’s racehorses are already tightly optimized for speed, balancing strength against the cost of carrying additional muscle mass. Adding more muscle is relatively low-hanging fruit, and if this were the key to unlocking greater speed, selective breeding would likely already have brought it about.

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At the Belmont Stakes in 1973, Secretariat ran in a category of his own. His extraordinary performance seems to have been the result of many unlikely factors aligning. After he died, Secretariat’s heart was reportedly measured at almost 10 kilograms – twice as much as normal. This appears to have been a physiological fluke, however, as it isn’t a trait reliably passed down to offspring. Combined with his unusual stamina, exceptionally powerful legs that allowed him to cover 25 feet per stride, favorable race conditions, and a skilled jockey, this produced a race time that has still never been matched half a century later, despite advances in breeding, training, nutrition, and veterinary care.

Secretariat offers a glimpse of the upper limits of biology. But as racehorses have pushed against that limit to become faster and more powerful, their population has become more fragile as the gene pool has narrowed. Our 4,000-year pursuit of the ultimate horse may not have much further to run.

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How Not To Forget What Matters - Anti-Stultitia To Hypomnēma

The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”

is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.

You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.

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During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

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The most famous example of this practice is the meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote in his tent as plague swept through the camps during the military campaigns along the Danube River, but it seems to have been a fairly widespread practice among the “cultivated class.” A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation—insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on—and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way.

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The hypomnēma was a mechanism for centering your mind on what matters, and for gradually refining your understanding of what matters. It was, to use a word from Plutarch, a tool for ethopoiesis (ethos meaning “character” and poiesis “making”), a tool for turning truth into character. By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing—you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.

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Ocean Came To The House

What Nobody Teaches You About the Holocaust

I had heard hundreds of “Holocaust Survivor’s Stories,” but never one like this. And the reason is brutally simple: almost none of them survived. Auschwitz was a horror—no sane person disputes this—but Jews could survive Auschwitz. Thousands did. They lived to write memoirs and testify at trials and speak at Shabbat dinners and fill the halls of dozens of museums across the Western world. You have never met a survivor from Sobibor because there were practically none. You have never met a survivor who fled to the woods of Belarus because there were almost none of those either.

The story we tell ourselves about the Holocaust is the story of the survivors, which means it is the story of the camps, which means it is overwhelmingly the story of Germans killing Jews through an industrialized system of extermination. This is not false. But it is not how most Jews died. I’m not going to engage in concrete numbers because it’s definitionally impossible to come up with anything concrete, but I will roughly estimate upwards of 75% of the Jews that died in the Holocaust didn’t die in camps or ghettos.

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Americans do not think about logistics or supply chains so the camps narrative feels perfectly natural to us. The Nazis rounded up the Jews, put them on trains, shipped them to camps, killed them. Simple, neat, mechanistic - very German.

Now think about this logistically and logically: there were six extermination camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek. They were all located in occupied Poland and most were not fully operational until 1943. The Final Solution was formalized in 1942.

Now consider where the Jews in Europe actually lived. The vast majority of European Jews, millions, didn’t live in Berlin or Amsterdam or even Warsaw but in the small towns and cities of eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. The shtetls. The Pale of Settlement and its successor communities. Many in places like Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Minsk, Brest, Lviv, and even more scattered in ten thousand smaller towns.

Here is a fact that is well-known to railroad historians and almost completely absent from the popular narrative: German and Russian rail gauges were different. The Russian Empire used a broader gauge—1,520 millimeters versus the European standard of 1,435 millimeters. 

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The timeline makes the camps-centric narrative even more untenable for the eastern Jews. By the time Treblinka was operational in July 1942, by the time the extermination infrastructure was running at anything like capacity, the majority of Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line were already dead. They were not gassed. They were not transported anywhere. They died where they lived and they were killed overwhelmingly not by Germans but by their neighbors.

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As a Jew, this is a hard thing to say, and a harder thing to feel. You want your murderer to care enough to murder you. The reality is in some ways worse: the Wehrmacht rolled through these towns, sometimes confiscated supplies, occasionally issued anti-Jewish decrees or assisted the Einsatzgruppen (German mobile killing units), and then moved on to the real war. They left the Jews to the locals. And the locals were hungry.

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Here is the fact that most completely demolishes the popular narrative: the majority of Holocaust victims in the East were already dead before the extermination camps were fully operational.

The Wannsee Conference took place in January 1942. Treblinka opened in July 1942. Sobibor in May 1942. Belzec in March 1942. Chelmno, the earliest, began operations in December 1941. Auschwitz-Birkenau's gas chambers became operational in early 1942 and reached full killing capacity later that year.

The mass shootings in Lithuania were substantially complete by December 1941. The Babi Yar massacre occurred in September 1941. The Romanian massacres in Bessarabia and Bukovina took place in the summer and fall of 1941. The initial sweep of killings across Ukraine and Belarus occurred between June 1941 and early 1942. So when you talk about the Holocaust, this is actually what you’re referring to more so than camps.

There is, in fact, a documented moment that captures this timeline perfectly. In Fall of 1941 reports reached Hitler that the locals in the occupied territories were killing Jews on a massive scale. His response was not to order it stopped. It was not to order it accelerated. It was something closer to a shrug. The Jews were dying, the locals were handling it, and he had a war to fight. The formalization of the Final Solution, the bureaucratic machinery, the camps, the deportation schedules, came after the spontaneous genocide in the East was already well underway. It was, in a horrible sense, an attempt to systematize and extend to Western Europe a process that had already consumed the Jews of the East.

This does not make the camps less evil. It does not make the gas chambers less horrific. It does not exonerate Germany or diminish German responsibility for creating the conditions under which the killing occurred. But it fundamentally changes the story from one of German industrial genocide carried out primarily in camps, to one of a continent-wide eruption of murderous violence carried out primarily by local populations against their own neighbors, facilitated and encouraged by a German occupation that was too busy fighting the largest war in history to do most of the killing itself.

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The Holocaust is primarily a story of neighbors and ditches and bullets and fire and cold. Of neighbors turning on neighbors in an instant. It happened not in a handful of purpose-built facilities in Poland but in ten thousand towns and villages and forests and swamps across a thousand miles of Eastern Europe. A horror story carried out not mainly by Germans but by Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Romanians, and Croats.

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Kalendar & Wisdom Of Thoreau

I think that the man of science makes this mistake–& the mass of mankind along with him,” he wrote in his Journal in 1857, “that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you–as something independent on you–and not as it is related to you. . . . With regard to such objects I find that it is not they themselves–(with which the men of science deal) that concern me. The point of interest is somewhere between me & them (i.e. the objects)” (11/5/1857, Journal Transcript 24:610).

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Thoreau’s Kalendar, in its attempts to integrate human and more-than-human timescales and to extend moments of wonder at the abundance of the natural world, exemplifies the power of a radically expanded conception of time. As an elegy to a life lived in nature, it is also a testament to the irreversibility of time’s arrow.

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Is This Artemis II Timelapse The ‘Pale Blue Dot’ For Our Times?

 

Mutualistic Partnerships Between Species Abound Across Nature

I then found many more examples of this — the maximum was five different species of ants living in one plant. So I did a wide range of experiments to understand what was going on. The first possibility was that these ant species were simply not very aggressive. To test this, I took workers from one of the species of ants and put them near workers of the other species to see whether there would be conflicts. And yes, there were. But what was interesting was that in field lab experiments, when you kept the nests apart, the ants could share a nearby sugar source without killing each other.

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The ultimate test was to disrupt these compartments. When I removed the wall between two different species of ants, I found they would fight to death. After half an hour, few ants would be left alive, even though they’d been living there for years. The plant suddenly ended up without any ants at all.

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They are rather unique, though species that have bacterial symbionts — humans included — do promote the growth of different bacteria in different areas of the body, which is arguably a kind of compartmentalization. Bodies also have mechanisms to prevent bacteria from entering areas where they can cause disease. When otherwise beneficial skin or gut bacteria enter our bloodstream, for example, they can become very dangerous. This shows that mutualism is always a matter of balance and control.

Many plant roots have similar protections to prevent the fungi that help them absorb nitrogen and phosphorus from growing too far inside, where they can cause damage. They also often host different strains of bacteria or fungi in different compartments, so they can selectively reward or punish them based on what they contribute.

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I think this is the major pathway to evolution of obligate dependence in which species really depend on each other for survival. Both species might lose the ability to perform certain functions, say digesting certain nutrients, producing certain vitamins or defending themselves from predators, because they are provided by the partner. It’s an automatic evolutionary mechanism that makes species dependent — and vulnerable. When one species goes extinct, the other one is likely to disappear as well.

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The Examined Life Is Not the Optimised Life

That question is the old one about what makes a life worth living, and it is here that the optimising frame seizes up. We tend to imagine meaning as a reward stored behind achievement, a prize handed over once we are finally successful enough, secure enough, healed enough, lean enough. 

Yet almost none of the experiences people actually name as meaningful arrive in that fashion. Sitting up through the night with a dying parent is not pleasant and cannot be hacked, and still the people who have done it will tell you it was among the most meaningful things they ever lived through. Raising a child is the same. So is standing beside someone whose world has fallen in, telling a truth that costs you something, starting again after a loss that levelled you. 

What all of these share is that they refuse to be controlled in the way optimisation needs its objects to behave. Love shrinks into something lesser the instant you try to engineer it. Grief, rushed, sours into something false. The experiences that give a life its weight tend to be precisely the ones that happen to us, that we undergo rather than arrange, and a frame built entirely around tightening our grip will keep sliding straight off them.

This is usually the point at which an old line gets quoted, and generally a little too comfortably. Socrates, on trial for his life and offered his freedom on condition that he give up philosophising, refused, and told the court that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. 

We have flattened that into a fridge magnet, a mild encouragement toward a bit more reflection. He meant something a great deal less soothing. He was claiming that a life run entirely on borrowed assumptions, never once questioned, never brought up hard against the matter of what is actually good, has forfeited the very thing that would have made it a human life rather than a well-managed animal one. And the examined life he had in view is not the optimised life in a toga. 

The optimised life asks how to perform better against goals it has swallowed whole and never inspected. The examined life turns round and inspects the goals, which is a far riskier undertaking, since the inspection may well cost you the goals you have built everything on.

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At the centre of nearly all these old exercises sat one discipline, the training of attention, and it is attention above all that the optimised life ruins. The Stoics had a word, prosochē, for a continuous mindfulness of what one was doing and becoming, a steady presence to the moment one was actually in. 

It is the opposite of the divided, metricised, faintly anxious attention most of us now carry through our days, one eye forever on the screen that will tell us how we are performing. 

You cannot examine a life you are not present to, and you cannot be present to a life you are perpetually trying to improve, because the improving self is always half-turned toward a future in which things will be better arranged. The harder we work at optimising our experience, the less of it we are ever actually here for.

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The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living. Our own age has produced a remarkable substitute for it, the optimised life, busy and measured and impressive and somehow still thin. Between the warning and the substitute lies that small and unfashionable stretch of ground where philosophy still earns its keep, not as an ornament for people with time to spare, but as the practice of asking, honestly and while it still matters, what a life is for.

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