How To Write?

There must be reasons why Eliot continues to be read and they are not. One is that through the course of his poetic career Eliot did not merely reflect his times, but showed a way out of them. Indeed a way out of all time.

- Why T.S. Eliot Still Matters

Neo - Quite A Few "First" Times This Month

• Touched water in the stream and went ballistic! 
• Went to a state park for a hike

• Caught a frisbee
• Started sitting in the front seat of the car
• Veggies n fruits became most of his treats

Gut Microbes - Small Step Towards Curing Allergies

The peanut-allergy mice, another report showed, had a genetic glitch that damages a receptor called TLR4 that sits in the membranes of immune cells and recognizes microbes. It looked as though the peanut-allergy mice lacked the normal cross talk that takes place between gut microbes and immune cells.

“That was my lightbulb moment,” Nagler says. Perhaps the trillions of microbes that live in us suppress immune responses to food by stimulating the TLR4 receptor. And perhaps perturbations in that teeming microbiome alter the suppression and cause a rise in allergies.

The idea meshes with historical trends. As societies modernized, people moved to urban areas, had more babies by cesarean section, took more antibiotics and ate more processed, low-fiber foods — all of which shake up microbiomes. The timing of these lifestyle shifts parallels the observed increase in food and other types of allergies, whose steep rise over a generation points to some environmental cause.

[---]

Over the next few years, researchers will learn more about harnessing the microbiome to fight food allergies. It won’t be easy. Genetics, diet, environmental exposures: All influence allergy risk. “It’s a big puzzle,” says Bunyavanich. The microbiome is only one piece of it — but she, Nagler and others are betting it will turn out to be a big one.

- More Here

What Kind of Country Do We Want?

Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at all—insofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design.

Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.

[---]

All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.

[---]

Behind all this there is a scarcely articulated variant of an old model, once prevalent throughout the West, that invoked national wealth as the summum bonum of collective life. For the purposes of the theory in its present iteration, the absurd wealth that has accumulated at the top end of polarization is reckoned as part of the national wealth no matter how solidly it is based in poverty. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, great engines of wealth built global empires that filled the world with colonialism, militarism, and racialism, as well as monuments and marching bands. These trappings of power generated the excited identification of the masses with the nation no matter how hostile the system was to their own interests.

[---]

This is to say that the kind of shame suffered most sharply by proud people has been put to use to sustain this ugly economic and social configuration, too opportunistic and unstable to be called a system. It offers no vision beyond its effects. Obviously the depletions of public life, the decay of infrastructure, the erosions of standards affecting general health are not intended to make America great again. They are, in the experience of the vast majority of Americans, dispossessions, a cheapening of life.

[---]

The theory that supports all this is taught in the universities. Its terminology is economic but its influence is broadly felt across disciplines because it is in fact an anthropology, a theory of human nature and motivation. It comes down to the idea that the profit motive applies in literally every circumstance, inevitably, because it is genetic in its origins and its operations. “Selfishness,” its exponents call it, sometimes arguing that the word in this context has a special meaning, though the specifics of the sanitizing are unclear. Behind every act or choice is a cost-benefit analysis engaged in subrationally. This is to say that thinking itself is the product of this constant appraisal of circumstance, which is prior to thinking, therefore not subject to culture, moral scruples, and so on, which are merely a scheme of evolution to hide this one universal intention from the billions of us who, in our endless diversity, make up the human species. Greed is good, or at least good enough to have brought us this far. For an important part of any population, these would be glad tidings—moral considerations not only suspended but invalidated, moralists revealed as hypocrites and fools as well, since they have no idea that the genius and force of evolution are against them. By its nature, this worldview is based in the moment, in any new occasion to seek advantage.

This view of things is radically individualistic, indifferent to any narrative of identity or purpose. It takes a cynical view of people as such, since no one’s true motives are different from those of the consciously selfish. Because there is only one motive—to realize a maximum of benefit at a minimum of cost—those who do not flourish are losers in an invidious, Darwinian sense. Winners are exempt from moral or ethical scrutiny since advance of any sort is the good to be valued. “Progress” is likewise exempt from the kind of scrutiny that would raise questions about the real value this process generates, reckoned against other value that is precluded or destroyed.

[---]

As Americans, we should consider our freedoms—of thought, press, and religion, among others—the basic constituents of our well-being, and accept the controversies that have always arisen around them as reflecting their vitality. Not so long ago they were something new under the sun, so if there is still a certain turbulence around them this should remind us that they are gifts of our brief history. We should step away from the habit of accepting competition as the basic model of our interactions with other countries, first because it creates antagonisms the world would be better off without, and second because recent history has shown that the adversary is actually us, and for ordinary people there is no success, no benefit.

And we have to get beyond the habit of thinking in terms of scarcity. We live in the midst of great wealth prepared for us by other generations. We inherited sound roads and bridges. Our children will not be so favored. Since the value of basic investments is not realized immediately, we cannot rationalize the expenditure. We are the richest country in history, therefore richer than the generations that built it, but we cannot bring ourselves even to make repairs. Our thrift will be very costly over time. The notion or pretense that austerity is the refusal to burden our children with our debts is foolish at best. But it is persuasive to those who are injured by it as surely as to those who look at a pothole and see a tax cut. Hiding money in a hole in the ground has seemed like wisdom to some people since antiquity. And there are many who are truly straitened and insecure, and are trusting enough to assume that some economic wisdom lies behind it. Legislators all over America, duly elected, have subscribed to this kind of thinking and acted on it.

We have seen where all this leads. It creates poverty, and plagues batten on poverty, on crowding and exhaustion. If the novel coronavirus did not have its origins in the order of things now in abeyance—other possibilities are even darker—that order was certainly a huge factor in its spread.

- Beautiful and poignant piece by Marilynne Robinson

What I've Been Reading

"You scratch my back, I scratch your back."

That has always been one notch above the golden rule. But we conveniently forgot to ask one simple question - What was the root cause of the "itch" to begin with?

Most of the time, the answer is we cause the itch. Then we want someone else to scratch the back and we cause an itch to someone else and so on. This ridiculousness has been going on since the evolution of apes.

The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown by Catherine Burns another book which covers again the story of scratching.

Now that we got the reality out of the way, some of the stories are fascinating - obviously, since it is biased towards the rare trait of "better angels of our nature" but a couple of stories don't involve scratching.

Here's Christof Koch's on how Francis Crick reacted to his cancer diagnosis and ultimately how Koch stopped believing in magic.

At lunch he discussed his diagnosis with his wife, talking about what needed to be done to accommodate him. But for rest of the day he worked.

That was it. There was no doom and gloom. There was no gnashing of teeth. There we no tears. It immensely, this living embodiment of an ancient stoic dictum: accept what you can't change. 

[---]

I finally found the strength to ask him, apropos that letter, "Francis, how do you feel about your diagnosis?" (Studiously avoiding any mention of the word death). 

Here again he was very much down-to-earth. He said something like, "Everything that has a beginning must have an end. Those are the facts. I don't like them, but I've accepted them, and I will not take any heroic measures to prolong my life beyond the inevitable. I'm resolved to live my life out with an intact mind. "

And so he did. Over the next two years, as cancer weakened his body, but never his spirit, we continued to write. We finished my book. I was just immensely impressed by how he could deal with this. I, of course, reflected on my own future demise, and whether I would be able to have this calmness, this composure, to meet my own end. 

[---]

With a view toward the inevitable, he gave me huge life-size portrait of himself sitting in a wicker chair, gazing out at me with a twinkle in his eyes, signed, "For Christof - Francis- Keeping an eye on you."

And so it does today in my office. 

I've never had another encounter with God, nor do I expect to, for the God I now believe in is much closer to Spinoza's God than the God of Michelangelo's painting or the God of the Old Testament. 

I'm sort of saddened by the loss of my belief in religion. It's like leaving forever the comfort of your childhood home, suffused with warm glows and fond memories. But I do believe we all have to grow up. 

It is difficult for many. It's unbearable for the few. But we have to see the world as it really is, and we have to stop thinking in terms of magic. 

As Francis would have put it, "This is a story for grown men, not a consoling tale for children."

Lessons NOT Learned From The Great Plague of Marseille

The Great Plague of Marseille was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in western Europe. Arriving in Marseille, France in 1720, the disease killed a total of 100,000 people: 50,000 in the city during the next two years and another 50,000 to the north in surrounding provinces and towns.

While economic activity took only a few years to recover, as trade expanded to the West Indies and Latin America, it was not until 1765 that the population returned to its pre-1720 level.

[---]

Due largely to Marseille's monopoly on French trade with the Levant, this important port had a large stock of imported goods in warehouses. It was also expanding its trade with other areas of the Middle East and emerging markets in the New World. Powerful city merchants wanted the silk and cotton cargo of the ship for the great medieval fair at Beaucaire and pressured authorities to lift the quarantine.

A few days later, the disease broke out in the city. Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed, and residents panicked, driving the sick from their homes and out of the city. Mass graves were dug but were quickly filled. Eventually the number of dead overcame city public health efforts, until thousands of corpses lay scattered and in piles around the city.

- More "Dejavu" Here

Three Distinct Sides Of Risk

• The odds you will get hit.

• The average consequences of getting hit.

• The tail-end consequences of getting hit.

The first two are easy to grasp. It’s the third that’s hardest to learn, and can often only be learned through experience.

We knew we were taking risks when we skied. We knew that going out of bounds was wrong, and that we might get caught. But at 17 years old we figured the consequences of “risk” meant our coaches might yell at us. Maybe we’d get our season pass revoked for the year.

Never, not once, did we think we’d pay the ultimate price.

But once you go through something like that, you realize that the tail-end consequences – the low-probability, high-impact events – are all that matter.

In investing, the average consequences of risk make up most of the daily news headlines. But the tail-end consequences of risk – like pandemics, and depressions – are what make the pages of history books. They’re all that matter. They’re all you should focus on. We spent the last decade debating whether economic risk meant the Federal Reserve set interest rates at 0.25% or 0.5%. Then 36 million people lost their jobs in two months because of a virus. It’s absurd.

Tail-end events are all that matter.

Once you experience it, you’ll never think otherwise.

- Read the whole piece by Morgan Housel

Betty Smith's Lessons On Gratitude - A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

As a young man, not too long after struggling to get my first job, I read Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (long before I read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations). Betty's Smith's humility and lines of gratitude in the preface of the book touched my heart and given my short experience that time in the real world, I was able to connect to her words in a literal sense (and I still do). Those lines still bring tears to my eyes.

There is a very thin line between being narcissistic and individualist. Just because the English language has a clear distinction between those two words doesn't mean people reflect on it and practice that difference.

There are so many little things I am grateful for; what I am today is the sum of all those myriad of little things. So many little things a lot of people did overtime for Max is what helped him not only have more time but have a quality time where he was even able to play frisbee while going through multiple cycles of radiation therapy, gallons of chemo pumped into him on a bi-weekly basis and innumerable chemical compounds in the form of pills multiple times a day.

These thoughts aren't hindsight gratitude. I was aware as and when these events unfolded, the gratitude I owe these people as well as to my random luck. It's so easy to bullshit myself with virtue signaling and delude myself that these qualities are miraculously "innate".

Robert Sapolsky in his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst paraphrases neurobiologist Donald Hebb which summarizes this (amongst many other things) beautifully...

It is not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment (is what is important). 

It is no more appropriate to say things like characteristic A is more influenced by nature that nurture than... to say that the area of a rectangle is more influenced by its length than its width.

Once again Sapolsky beautifully summarizes his entire book in a single paragraph:

If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “it’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead, everything just modulates into something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but we realize that ...” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent concludes the opposite. And so on. Eventually, it can seem hopeless that you can fix something, can make things better. 

But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasite disease. You probably don’t have to worry about the Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try. 

My good moral "areas" were influenced by so many little things and those little things still help me to try. So I tried and will keep trying to adhere to my responsibilities as a human being. It is as simple as that.

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

- Marcus Aurelius 

My first lesson on gratitude as far as I can remember which bought me tears - Betty Smiths words of as a struggling writer trying to find a job from the preface of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was one of those little-big things:

My book wasn't dedicated to anyone because I couldn't decide which person was most helpful to me in the writing of it. I thought of the mother who gave me life. I owe a lot to her and to my sister and brother who made my childhood a magical time. I am grateful to my children whose baby years made a life of pleasant contentment for me. There is something owing to a beloved friend and to an understanding husband; there is a debt to a loved teacher. The grocer who gave me affectionate credit during the lean writing years cannot be forgotten, nor the veterinarian who set my dog's broken leg and brushed aside my promise to "pay sometime," with a gallant, "Oh,  forget it!" 

I am indebted to chance acquaintances on trains and in bus stations for exchanged confidences about the everlasting verities of life. I am deeply obligated to a person who caused me much anguish because the grief made me grow up emotionally and gave me a little more understanding. I am tenderly grateful to an employer of long ago who on a hot August afternoon told me that the job I was applying for had been filled but who urged me to sit down and rest a minute before I went on to answer the next ad. He brought me a paper cup of iced water. My cup flowed over, literally, when I added a couple of tired tears to the water. 

All of these people hundreds more, in fact, everyone who touched my life for good or bad helped in the writing of my book. I could not dedicate it to one without being disloyal to the others. 

But I do want to dedicate this special edition-the edition gotten out solely because so many people were kind about The Tree. I want to dedicate it to you. I want to dedicate it to all of you who've read it and to you who are reading it now. And I want to say: "Thanks! Thanks a whole lot." 

Things, Pictures, Places & Talking to Max

The minimalist inside was put on a leash for years since Max was a puppy when I started diligently preserving all of Max's things. Max's toys, his first bowl, his towel after his first shower to his last toy, and his last pillow which he slept.. That pillow is supposed to be where I would lay my head when I take my last breath and/or my head would rest post my last breath.

The rationalist inside me always thought these little things would help "be with" Max for the rest of my life after Max. Now everything is safely packed and placed in few boxes. But in the mundanity of everyday life, I have to open the box, look at his toys, smell it, and be there physically. The whole process is very emotional and it is a process, to say the least. It's been almost 5 months and still haven't I opened those boxes. Sometimes, what the mind wants is not what the body wants.

I do have his last toy next to my bed which has his smell. That is going to fade slowly with time...
Things are things; they become special because of character instilled in them by the memories.

I do know for a fact that there would be times over the coming years when I will open the box and flood of memories will compete with the flood of tears.

Maybe human beings have an innate compass to understand the important Buddhist truth of impermanence. Maybe that's why someone of the oldest archeological pieces of evidence starts from drawings on the walls of the caves. We have an urge to capture time and bring some permanence to this eternal impermanence.

I am no different. Once again the minimalist who prefers the empty walls lost the battle when it comes to Max's pictures. There are pictures of his puppy days in physical albums since it was from a pre-smartphone era. Max's beautiful eyes reside in my wallet, on my desk, on my bedside, coffee mug, and pretty much the house is filled with Max's memorabilia.

Thanks to Steve Jobs and my past relationships (who were better photographers than I would ever be), I have thousands of moments captured in time. Pictures do have a meditative effect but they are constant reminders on how much I miss his beautiful and naughty eyes,  how much I miss playing with him, how much I miss kissing him and constant rumination on how to cultivate the parts of me which still survives without the parts which were lost with him.

Some of the worst times are when Google photos random "Rediscover This Day In..." alert lands my phone with no sense about my emotional state at that point and time. Sometimes, it's a beautiful surprise that brings a smile looking at the naughty guy doing crazy things. But there are times those "rediscover" photos devastates me.

Pictures are the only objective things through which I can see my Max without any self-deception and confabulation of memories. I am grateful to have live in an age and time where I can look at my Max at a moment's notice.

Ambulatoriness has enabled mammals not only to survive but also self reflect, plan, adapt, and be creative. The millions of miles Max and I drove, walked, stood still, swam, hiked, and those numerous places we were forced to visit in his final years and months to subside cancer evolving inside him. I haven't even begun to visit most of the places with Neo but we will in time. Even today walking with Neo in the park, I was melancholic and crying - and somehow, Neo sensed it and he walked without pulling me and stopped being a puppy for a few minutes. Walking the same path where Max smelt and left his markings would indeed bring me solace. Although, visiting his oncologist and the nurses with Neo one of these days is going to be rough. Very rough indeed.

There is a very profound sentence in my all-time favorite quote - Mind As A River which I never expected would apply to my life in a very very weird and unique way.

Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this "friction": the difference between our plans and what actually happens.

For 13 plus years with the curse of knowing what is coming and sheer meditation on memento mori made me meticulously plan and preserve Max's things, his pictures and savored every moment with him at home and the places we visited together to capture them in my mind's memory capsule.

But no amount of thinking in advance prepared me for the chaos of life and of the infinite possibilities of the moment and the moments and the moments I am living after Max.

One of the craziest things that emerged from those possibilities was my voice. My voice calling Max. My voice talking to Max. My voice telling Max's stories to Neo, Fluffy, and Garph. My voice wishing good morning to Max. My voice telling Max that I love him. My voice wishing him good night. My voice telling Max how much I miss him and wish he was here with me.

My voice which I despised for close to 45 years has indeed become the most comforting and soothing thing. In hindsight, it doesn't look much of surprise since the age-old wisdom has taught us so much about the power of self-talk. Talking one's heart out is the most effective thing in psychology and the cozy couches and ambiance in the psychologist's office are primed to make people open up and talk. To paraphrase Liz Gilbert - it was unexpected but unavoidable.

My dreams, disappointments, pains, sufferings, triumphs, the knowledge gained and lost, trickles of wisdom, family, friendships, relationships, efforts to strengthen the body and mind, work, studies, travel's or lack of it, sound sleep and sleepless nights and numerous collection of good, bad and ordinary life long moments culminated now to this single most comforting moment in time - kissing Max's ashes near his picture with his toy in my hand and my voice telling him that I love him and I miss him.

Now It's Taleb's Turn to Debunk Libertarians (And Their Pseudo Self Serving Intelligence)

I have called bullshit on libertarians beliefs in "miracles" and pure "magic" (the roots of it originates from Judaism and Christianity) which has very little to no practical purpose but they do cause immense harm.

They refuse to comprehend the simple difference between the importance of self-servings and self-sacrificing acts. At a macro level, they delude themselves into conveniently thinking that self-sacrificing for family and society are one and the same. Self-sacrificing for the family is self-serving and as a human being one has a bigger responsibility than that for civilization and morality to survive (leave alone flourishing).

Now Taleb in his own style disseminates them in this twitter thread:

1) Being flooded by first-order (scale-blind) "libertarians" (of the no masks, "freedom" to infect others variety), arguing that reactions to the virus (but not the virus) will cause hunger & famine.

Since when have these selfish sociopathic "libertarians" been concerned w/famine?

2) PRINCIPIA POLITICA shows the effects of scale/localism.

Systemic harm has no tort laws (you can't sue a virus) so you MUST use the Precautionary Principle.

Many libertarians are just cranks & sociopaths.

3) "LIBERTARIAN" is meaningless a designation if you live under silver rules and laws.

Localism is the only way to make what is called LIBERTARIANISM stand on its feet.

4) "Libertarians" are also incoherent: they deny stores the right to require masks & constrain their freedom yet ask for freedom...

Nothing to do with libertarianism: rather a collection of marshmallow brained psychopaths and misfits taking their hatred of humanity too far.

This Is Not An Apocalypse... This Could Get Worse Such As...

In waves of terror beginning in August 1918, when Lenin was injured in an attempted assassination, the new Soviet regime killed its own citizens on a previously unknown scale. During the two months that followed, around 15,000 people were executed for political crimes — more than twice the total number of prisoners of all kinds executed in the previous century of tsarist rule (6,321). Taken together, the casualties of the Revolution, the 1918 terror, the civil war and the ensuing famine cost the lives of around 25 million people in the territories of the former Tsarist empire — 18 times the number of casualties it incurred in the First World War (1.3 to 1.4 million.)

For the rulers of the new state, the breakdown of the old order was an opportunity to refashion society on a new model. “Former persons” — aristocrats, landlords and priests, together with anyone who employed others — were stripped of civil rights and denied ration cards and housing. Many dying of starvation or from hard labour in the concentration camps Lenin had established, these human remnants of the past watched as their entire way of life was erased. The same was true of the peasantry, whose recurrent rebellions were crushed with savage force. In the large-scale uprising in the Tambov region in 1920-21, Soviet forces used poisonous gas to clear forests into which the peasants had fled.

The famine that ensued killed around 5 million people in 1921-1922. The cause was not just drought and a bad harvest. As a result of the collapse of railways, health and waste disposal services, epidemic diseases such as typhus and cholera were rampant. Cities were depopulated and their wooden buildings demolished and used for firewood. Grain requisitioning and the export of agricultural produce created mass starvation of a peculiarly horrific kind. Russian may be the only language that contains two words for cannibalism. One — trupoyedstvo — denotes the eating of corpses, the other — lyudoyedstvo — killing in order to consume the victim. According to some reports at the time, public markets for human flesh appeared in famine-struck areas in which body parts from cadavers in the latter category commanded higher prices on account of their freshness.

- John Gray

Meat Is Not Essential. Why Are We Killing For It?

That question is from Jonathan Safran Foer and he has some deeper insights about the killing factories that I had no idea about until now:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meatpacking has long been the nation’s most dangerous occupation. It is not just the nature of the job; there is systemic disregard for the safety and dignity of the people working in the meat industry. An in-depth report by Oxfam documents that, for years, workers in U.S. poultry slaughter plants — including those operated by Tyson Foods, Sanderson Farms, Perdue and Pilgrim’s Pride — commonly wear adult diapers or simply urinate on themselves because bathroom breaks are routinely denied by supervisors under threats of retribution.

The industry has continued such cruel practices with relative impunity, because workers are too dependent on their jobs to effectively resist unscrupulous managers, and the public has continued to underwrite the abuse. But manslaughter is a new level of depravity. The magical thinking that imagines calling meat “essential” in a time when schools, bypass surgeries, and funerals are not, amounts to a sort of state-sponsored witchcraft.

In the past months, we have relied upon the bravery of essential workers. Most of us, including myself, have also bent language to our preferences. It is not “brave” for a delivery person to continue to work when he has no way to feed his family otherwise. Calling it brave is both condescending, and a method of masking our own guilt about people forced into those situations.

[---]

We often hear that people of color are putting themselves at greater personal risk during this pandemic, but the truth is they are being put at greater risk. White people generate 97 percent of all income from the operation of farms. Yet Latinx farmers alone comprise more than 80 percent of farm laborers. The fact that the overwhelming majority of people who will suffer from Trump’s slaughter order are black and brown, and that the overwhelming majority of the executives who pleaded with him to do it are white, cannot be ignored.

[---]

Companies such as Tyson Foods did it by inventing a business model that requires environmental destruction, worker exploitation, animal cruelty and conditions that create “novel” viruses. (Of the 16 strains of novel influenza viruses that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified as being of highest concern, all but two converted to human viruses in commercial poultry farms.) Letting the monstrous factory farm system fail would allow safer, more just and sustainable models of agriculture to gain a foothold. Yes, meat supplies would be lower, but food supplies would not be. We would have more than enough protein.

We Need To Remake The World We Left Behind

A beautiful piece by Matt Thompson on why just "surviving" the pandemic isn't enough:

My partner’s been making a verbal note every time he comes across a sign of hope. He calls these signs “seedlings.” A friend’s listless nonprofit finds a new purpose delivering boxed meals to isolated elders in an immigrant community. Seedling. A man runs bare-chested along a road beside the ocean, waving aloft a blue flag with a picture of the Earth. Seedling. We meet a group of our neighbors, who gather at a safe remove in the long yard we share, for what has come to be called “BYOB social-distancing happy hour.” Seedling.

[---]

Why is it, one might ask, that services such as hospitals and news organizations are closing when the public seems to need and want them most? The answer isn’t that we have bad nurses or bad reporters, or that people have turned away from medical authorities and the press has grown too liberal to gather a mass audience. The answer is that our economy had come to rest, over the years, on the cheap, endless consumption of things whose true costs were carefully hidden from us, a sleight of hand we called financialization. Amortize the cost of your phone over the course of a year, and it would almost seem affordable. Amortize the cost of your health into an insurance plan, and it would give you comfort until you needed it most. Amortize the cost of your career over the duration of a student loan, and only as you age would the price begin to grow. Amortize the cost of your house over a lifetime, and at least you would have something to pass on to your children. In this way, we became a nation of debtors, the prices for our lives set by the true owners of our phones, our houses, our health care, our education. The things we get without paying their full costs come from subsidies. The costs are all hidden. As long as people’s incomes are stable, the system works for almost enough people to keep it going.

[---]

And now we’ve been asked to be alone as much as we can bear, and decide what part of any experience we most value. There’s no choice here between “human lives” and “the economy.” Only a possibly endless series of choices about how we will live with others, and then how we will live with ourselves.

[---]

Perhaps it’s a stroke of grace that this war is against a dumb enemy—a virus that knows not even itself, that has neither the agency to be called life nor the strength for the death it brings to be total. Perhaps it’s to prepare us for a war against a smarter enemy, one that thinks it knows what living is, and decides it has no value. Perhaps that war is being fought inside us.

[---]

Last month, the show Radiolab played part of an interview with the musician Esperanza Spalding, a person somehow daring enough to face the world with hope blazing in her very name. It asked her to think of a sentence that she might want to pass on to the next generation, that could pack the most insight into the fewest words. Before she said the sentence, she told a beautiful story that might help her contemporaries understand the sentence’s meaning.

Spalding’s story was about what happened when conservation biologists reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone National Park. First, the uncontrolled populations of elk and deer, feeling the threat of a new predator, stopped overgrazing the low grasslands and started foraging higher in the hills. This let trees and other more robust plant life start to grow, strengthening river banks to the point that beavers started building dams. Larger animals and songbirds started returning to the park as these new ecosystems flourished. “So basically,” Spalding said, “this one species that had become dominant and very comfortable and at the top of their food chain—just the presence of them having to confront regularly and respond creatively to a little fear completely changed the health and the landscape and the sustainability of the ecosystem."

"So maybe it’s just that," Spalding said, offering at last her sentence: “the willingness to respond creatively to fear, without trying to eradicate the source of the fear.”

Kevin Kelly's 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

As I am growing older, this one piece of timeless advice had become self-evident and Kevin Kelly's backs it:

Trust me: There is no “them”.

Do what you can do in your lifetime and don't outsource your passions, values, and the right things to do in life thinking someone else will act on it. As long as I am breathing the onus is me and only me to do it.

In other words, there is no "Manhattan" project going on for moral progress.

The Sanskrit word "Karma: literally means action.  Reams and reams on "action" has been written in Buddism. The famous lines from Mahabartha (and Bhagwat Gita):

Yada yada hi dharmasya glanirbhavati bharata

Abhythanamadharmasya tadatmanam srijamyaham

Paritranaya sadhunang vinashay cha dushkritam

Dharmasangsthapanarthay sambhabami yuge yuge

Vivekananda's English translation of above lines goes something along these lines:

Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails, I manifest Myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from one age to another.

We are not Gods but the "I" in above lines are you and I. The onus is on us to act against evil. There is enough evil we humans create every nanosecond - we have more than enough opportunities to act on it.

If You Can’t Change Your Mind – You Are Not Using It!

Walking past the CBD boutiques, I noticed a sign in one of the women’s fashion stores that read: “If you can’t change your mind – you are not using it.” Perhaps they were referring to their refund and exchange policy, but in this case it made me think about how we use or don’t use our minds.

“Why do we hang on to some of unhelpful thinking patterns and beliefs that no longer serve us well?”

Why are we so focused on some of our unhelpful thinking patterns – and suffering as a result – rather than working towards changing them? We are often so stuck in our own way of living, without even questioning if our circumstances could be different, that we limit ourselves with our beliefs before we even try. We might not apply for a better job because we are focusing on potential barriers, we might not end a toxic relationship because of our fear that the next one will be even worse, and so we simply continue our life the way it is.

I know that it is not easy to take steps to change your life, but at the same time you owe it to yourself, at the very least, to get up and try. Start with something small, so if it is too risky to quit your job today and to follow your dream you can still begin creating healthier boundaries. Decide that you would like to have a different, more positive relationships, or to have a better self-care routine.  Start with these three steps to give yourself more flexibility and decide how you want your life to be different – or better.

- More Here

It was a Beautiful Day!

Being not into small talk, I despised the "weather" talks with acquaintances. Even with friends when there is nothing more say or a serious topic needs to be changed, they would start talking weather. Daniel Kahneman has done a bunch of studies on moving to warmer weather that doesn't make one happy.  Then, I read a study where the authors had great insight; these small "weather" talks help with the social dance with strangers. I am not big into social studies but that did help me subside my aversion to weather talks.

After over a month, parks here were open to the public. To top it off, it was a perfect spring day. A beautiful day. A beautiful day, Max would have loved playing frisbee and just strolling happily in the park. I miss my Max and I miss Max's me. Today, was the first time I had the courage to kiss his small strand of hair the nicest guy who cremated Max had cut and packed it in a plastic envelope.

Not sure, how many springs and summers I have to live through and miss Max. No amount of crying will bring him back. But yet, in the midst of this heartache and crying, Max has the power to bring a smile to face. Someday we will again become one in this big old space and time by becoming invisible particles. Until then, I will miss you.

I am I because I loved you and you loved me.

The Tyranny Of Diagnosis - Charles E Rosenberg

Constant human need and urge to find simple patterns in a complex system have perpetually caused more pain and suffering.

Almost 20 years later, Charles E Rosenberg's brilliant piece The Tyranny of Diagnosis is not only prevalent and thriving but now has made us focus on "paperwork" rather than prevention and preparation for current and future pandemics.

For the first time, I feel deep learning and graph algorithms can go a better job (not a panacea) in personalizing medicine than the existing "knowledge" based medicine which naturally forces massive generalization when none exists in idiosyncratic human and non-human animals.

One such problem is implicit in the way in which we use disease categories to perform the cultural work of enforcing norms and defining deviance. A second dilemma grows out of the difficulty inherent in fitting idiosyncratic human beings into constructed and constricting ideal-typical patterns, patterns necessarily abstract yet, in individual terms, paradoxically concrete. A third problem lies in medicine's growing capacity to create protodisease and disease states that shape everyday medical practice and thus individual lives. Fourth is what might be described as the bureaucratic imperative, the way in which the creation of nosological tables, guidelines, protocols, and other seemingly objective and practice-defining administrative mechanisms constitutes in aggregate an infrastructure mediating between and among government and the private sector, practitioners and patients, specialists and generalists, and—in the United States—insurers and providers. That infrastructure is as much a part of the experience of sickness as diagnosis or clinical management is; they are in fact indistinguishable.

[---]

A somewhat different set of dilemmas turns on the difficulty inherent in adjusting the individual to the general and the abstract. How is a particular case of tuberculosis or lupus, for example, related to the textbook's description or a treatment protocol's prescriptions? Agreed-upon disease pictures are configured in contemporary medicine around aggregated clinical findings—readings, values, thresholds—whereas therapeutic practice is increasingly and similarly dependent on tests of statistical significance. Yet men and women come in an infinite variety, a spectrum rather than a set of discrete points along that spectrum. An instance of cancer exists, for example, along such a continuous spectrum; the staging that describes and prescribes treatment protocols is no more than a convenience, if perhaps an indispensable one. In this sense, the clinician can be seen as a kind of interface manager, shaping the intersection between the individual patient and a collectively and cumulatively agreed-upon picture of a particular disease and its optimal treatment.

[---]

Our understanding of the biopathological aspects of disease and the technologies available to manage and understand them are a part of reality as much as are our clogged arteries or dysfunctional kidneys. It is in this sense that I employ the phrase tyranny of diagnosis. I might just as well have used the term indispensability. Diagnosis is a cognitively and emotionally necessary ritual connecting medical ideas and personnel to the men and women who are its clients. Such linkages between the collective and the uniquely individual are necessary in every society, and in ours the role of medicine is central to such negotiated perceptions and identities. The system of disease categories and diagnosis is both a metaphor for our society and a microcosm of it. Diagnosis is a substantive element in this system, a key to the repertoire of passwords that provide access to the institutional software that manages contemporary medicine. It helps makes experience machine readable.

In the act of diagnosis, the patient is necessarily objectified and recreated into a structure of linked pathological concepts and institutionalized social power. Once diagnosed, that bureaucratic and technically alienated disease-defined self now exists in bureaucratic space, a simulacrum thriving in a nurturing environment of aggregated data, software, bureaucratic procedures, and seemingly objective treatment plans. The power of the bureaucratized diagnostic function is, as I have suggested, exemplified in the willingness of physicians to employ the constraining—yet empowering—categories of such nosologies even when they remain skeptical of their validity. The routine use by clinicians of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and its often arbitrary categories remains a powerful example of this phenomenon. Equally revealing is the spectacle of individual sufferers and disease interest groups demanding the attribution of particular disease identities, of which chronic fatigue syndrome is a particularly visible example.

You Don’t Have to Be Nice - Avoiding Idiot Compassion

Buddhist monk Michael Gregory stressed on a lesser-known concept:

“Buddhists are supposed to be nice.” How many times have I heard that one? Buddhists are stereotyped as always being pleasant, soft-spoken and calm, and we aren’t always.

Of course, the Buddha taught the cultivation of loving kindness and compassion. The practice of Right Speech requires abstaining from rude and abusive language. Isn’t that the same thing as being nice?

Maybe not. Many Buddhist teachers have said that being compassionate and being “nice” are two different things. Most of the time, “nice” is mere social convention. It says nothing at all about relating to other people except on a superficial level. Even sociopaths can be nice (I have seen this with my own eyes). Sometimes the guy who is yelling and throwing furniture around is the one who cares.

“Idiot compassion” is a term attributed to the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, although he may have borrowed it from the Russian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff. Idiot compassion can take several forms.

The Rinpoche related it to “doing good” as an act of self-gratification.

“Idiot compassion is the highly conceptualized idea that you want to do good to somebody. At this point, good is purely related with pleasure. Idiot compassion also stems from not have enough courage to say no.”

“It refers to something we all do a lot of and call it compassion. In some ways, it’s whats called enabling. It’s the general tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see them suffering. Basically, you’re not giving them what they need. You’re trying to get away from your feeling of I can’t bear to see them suffering. In other words, you’re doing it for yourself. You’re not really doing it for them.”

“Nice” is often a strategy to avoid conflict. But isn’t avoiding conflict a good thing? Not always; there are times when engaging in conflict is compassion. Sometimes the urge to be “nice” is about maintaining a polite and pleasant facade over a situation we don’t want to confront.

There is a simpler explanation on Big Think:

Instead of offering a friend medicine, bitter though it may be when ingested, you feed them more poison—at the very least, you don’t take it away from them. This, she says, is not compassion at all. It’s selfishness, as you’re more concerned with your own feelings than attending to your friend’s actual needs.

Granted, saying uncomfortable things to someone close to you is no easy task. If they are violent or depressive, criticism could send them spiraling. Yet enabling is not good either. Stepping up and being a teacher in challenging situations requires great tact and care, and does not always work out how you intended it to.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Struggled With Reinhold Niebuhr's Pessimism on Human Nature

This is an old article I re-read here on the blog, it's brilliant. No question, I am with Reinhold Niebuhr on human nature. It's so ironic that Reinhold although a Christian pastor was a realist when it comes to human nature and didn't confuse it magical thinking.

Gandhi and King were lucky to have had the support from Brits and Americans during their respective even before they even existed. They knew about these support pillars before embarking on a non-violent path.  They confused that with magical thinking and human nature.

The basic question is here about human nature. Reinhold Niebuhr got it right. Read King's biased analysis of finding a way to "include magic" into reality. Too much religion in everyday life is prone to overfit the thinking into confirmation bias of magic (his phrase divine-human nature is nothing but a joke).

But my intellectual odyssey to nonviolence did not end here. During my last year in theological school, I began to read the works of Reinhold Niebuhr. The prophetic and realistic elements in Niebuhr's passionate style and profound thought were appealing to me, and I became so enamored of his social ethics that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything he wrote.
About this time I read Niebuhr's critique of the pacifist position. Niebuhr had himself once been a member of the pacifist ranks. For several years, he had been national chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.* His break with pacifism came in the early thirties, and the first full statement of his criticism of pacifism was in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Here he argued that there was no intrinsic moral difference between violent and nonviolent resistance. The social consequences of the two methods were different, he contended, but the differences were in degree rather than kind. Later Niebuhr began emphasizing the irresponsibility of relying on nonviolent resistance when there was no ground for believing that it would be successful in preventing the spread of totalitarian tyranny. It could only be successful, he argued, if the groups against whom the resistance was taking place had some degree of moral conscience, as was the case in Gandhi's struggle against the British. Niebuhr's ultimate rejection of pacifism was based primarily on the doctrine of man. He argued that pacifism failed to do justice to the reformation doctrine of justification by faith, substituting for it a sectarian perfectionism which believes "that divine grace actually lifts man out of the sinful contradictions of history and establishes him above the sins of the world."

At first, Niebuhr's critique of pacifism left me in a state of confusion. As I continued to read, however, I came to see more and more the shortcomings of his position. For instance, many of his statements revealed that he interpreted pacifism as a sort of passive nonresistance to evil expressing naive trust in the power of love. But this was a serious distortion. My study of Gandhi convinced me that true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. Between the two positions, there is a world of difference. Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power, as Niebuhr contends. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.
In spite of the fact that I found many things to be desired in Niebuhr's philosophy, there were several points at which he constructively influenced my thinking. Niebuhr's great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians. Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man's existence. These elements in Niebuhr's thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man's potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.

Many pacifists, I felt, failed to see this. All too many had an unwarranted optimism concerning man and leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness. It was my revolt against these attitudes under the influence of Niebuhr that accounts for the fact that in spite of my strong leaning toward pacifism, I never joined a pacifist organization. After reading Niebuhr, I tried to arrive at a realistic pacifism. In other words, I came to see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances. I felt then, and I feel now, that the pacifist would have a greater appeal if he did not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian nonpacifist confronts.

The next stage of my intellectual pilgrimage to nonviolence came during my doctoral studies at Boston University. Here I had the opportunity to talk to many exponents of nonviolence, both students and visitors to the campus. Boston University School of Theology, under the influence of Dean Walter Muelder and Professor Allen Knight Chalmers, had a deep sympathy for pacifism. Both Dean Muelder and Dr. Chalmers had a passion for social justice that stemmed, not from a superficial optimism, but from a deep faith in the possibilities of human beings when they allowed themselves to become co-workers with God. It was at Boston University that I came to see that Niebuhr had overemphasized the corruption of human nature. His pessimism concerning human nature was not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature. He was so involved in diagnosing man's sickness of sin that he overlooked the cure of grace.