Animal Research Doesn’t Need Better Messaging. It Needs an Exit Strategy

The problem is not poor communication by researchers, but systemic lack of transparency and accountability in animal labs. You cannot whitewash an industry that is fraught with infractions that clearly document negligence and abuse of animals in labs.

Industry defenders claim that animal research is “heavily regulated.” In reality, oversight is largely dependent on self-policing. The cornerstone of federal oversight is built on voluntary compliance through an “assurance” document submitted by the laboratory. Once this is approved, the federal oversight agency “grants considerable authority to institutions for self-regulation.” Compounding this problem, inspections by federal authorities are infrequent, often occurring only once every few years and are typically announced in advance.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of animals used in experiments—by most estimates numbering over 100 million mice—are not even covered under the US Animal Welfare Act. Internal oversight bodies, known as the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, are embedded within the very institutions they regulate, creating inherent conflicts of interest.

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Another common claim is that critics rely on outdated information. But delays in public awareness are largely a product of the system’s opacity. Accessing records requires the filing of formal public records requests that can take months or longer to process. Even official databases lag behind real-time conditions, when they are even available. What is perceived as “old news” is often simply the first moment the public is allowed to learn what has already occurred.

Perhaps the most striking attempt to downplay these issues is the comparison of laboratory violations to incident reports at daycare centers. The analogy collapses under even minimal scrutiny. The harms documented in research facilities—botched surgical procedures, burns, dehydration, strangulation, and fatal injuries—bear no resemblance to childcare incidents.

Even basic “housekeeping” standards are not consistently met in labs. Animals have died due to overheating, drowning, exposure, and unsafe enclosures. In one recent case, dozens of rabbits drowned in preventable accidents. These are not edge cases; they are part of a documented pattern that raises serious questions about the system’s ability to safeguard even minimal welfare.

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More importantly, the conversation should not stop at reform. Increasingly, scientific and regulatory communities are investing in alternatives that do not rely on animal use. Emerging methods like organ-on-chip technologies, in silico studies, advanced cell cultures, and more are now being prioritized by the US FDA and NIH for their ability to deliver human-relevant outcomes. These innovations did not emerge from efforts to defend the status quo, but from recognition that better approaches are both possible and necessary.

Animal research does not need a more effective communication strategy to explain away its problems. It needs a plan to move beyond them. With over 90 percent of animal experiments failing to produce meaningful results for human health, this is a system that is seriously underperforming because it is scientifically unsound. Add to that the failed oversight of millions more animals that can be reasonably cared for, and you have an industry that no amount of reframing can improve. The question is not whether the industry communicates the right message. It is whether the system, as it currently exists, can be justified at all.

- More Here

Fuck… thank god for Max otherwise I wouldn’t have lived with these miserable sapiens and hence probably for past 15 years I haven’t taken a single pill nor been to a doctor. 

Derek Parfit - What Is The Impact Of Thousands Of Small Environmental Or Personal Abuses Over Time?

One particular example I’ve always liked (especially since as a kid I had similar thoughts) provides a vivid illustration of the psychology underlying the dismissal of global warming. It shows that the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur out of sight or after so many steps as to seem distant. The example (embroidered a bit here) appears in Derek Parfit’s book “Reasons and Persons,” where he discusses the case of a man strapped to a hospital bed, say by a psychopath, in some indeterminate place with electrodes attached to his heart. Rotation of a dial on the other side of the world minusculely and imperceptibly increases the current in the electrodes and the stress on the man’s heart.

Perhaps a free piece of candy, a pleasant buzz, and a snapshot with the dial are on offer from a mysterious donor as an incentive to anyone in the distant location who twists the dial. Assuming it takes 10,000 people, each rotating the dial once to electrocute the victim, what degree of guilt, if any, do we assign to each individual dial-twister? After all, none of the dial-twisters know the poor man in question nor have they ever been in his part of the world. They might well doubt there is such a man if the situation isn’t clearly communicated to them or if it is ridiculed by a few influential people. Whatever their excuses, however, they are likely to be at least vaguely aware of rumors about the situation. How then do we deposit all these tiny bits of personal guilt into some moral bank account to save the victim. Or do we just shrug and dismiss the significant probability of ordinary indifferent people killing the distant stranger?

The real question of course is, What is the impact of thousands of small environmental or personal abuses over time? In the context of this rather morbid tale of a psychopath, most environmentalists would probably opt to stop rotating the dial or at least to rotate it very infrequently. 

- More Here

Animal Suffering...

Animals who are sick, in pain, cold, frustrated, or thirsty respond differently to experimental cancer treatments. Animal stress is not just bad for the animals but it’s also bad for the scientists’ data.

- How Animal Suffering Can Ruin Lab Experiments, Lab animal veterinarian

There Is No Such Thing As Grand Strategy - The Continued Influence Of A Bad Genre

So this all begs the question, if not grand strategy, then what? If we discard the idea that states possess a coherent, elevated ideological and philosophical design integrating all instruments of power across time, what replaces it? I would simply say that doing so would provide a far clearer view of what strategy actually is. If we return to Gaddis’s original definition, “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities,” strategy appears not as a grand design, but as a continual exercise in discipline, prioritization, and adjustment.

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A more realistic approach, then, is to focus on decision points rather than designs. Instead of asking whether a state has a grand strategy, we should ask how it resolves specific tradeoffs at specific moments. Where does it allocate marginal resources? Which risks does it accept, and which does it avoid? Which commitments does it reinforce, and which does it quietly allow to erode? These choices, taken together, tell us far more about strategy than any post hoc narrative of alignment ever could. This reframing also forces greater intellectual honesty about failure. When strategy is imagined as a grand design, failure is attributed to incompetence or moral weakness. When strategy is understood as constraint management, failure is often tragic but explicable. States misjudge adversaries, overestimate capacities, underestimate costs, and act on incomplete information. These are not deviations from strategy; they are the conditions under which strategy exists.

Finally, abandoning the grand strategy genre clarifies what strategic skill actually looks like. It is not the ability to synthesize everything into a single vision, but the capacity to say no, to sequence objectives, and to recognize when ambition has outrun means. It is judgment exercised under uncertainty, not mastery imposed from above. This kind of strategic thinking is less glamorous and far harder to narrate, which is precisely why it is so often displaced by grander abstractions.

There is no higher plane of statecraft waiting to be discovered beyond politics, budgets, institutions, and tradeoffs. What exists instead is the ordinary, difficult work of governance under constraint—choosing among competing priorities, allocating scarce resources, managing risk, and accepting imperfection. Abandoning the language of grand strategy does not mean abandoning strategic thought. It means stripping away a genre that flatters elites and replacing it with analysis that takes politics seriously. Strategy need not be grand to be real. It needs only to be honest.

- More Here

Culture Is The Mass-Synchronization Of Framings!

This can be good and bad too. Hence, I have an aversion for that word - "culture".

The genesis of almost all savagery, ruthlessness, and immorality against animals is from so called culture, 

This is an insightful piece on the same topic: 

A mental model is a simulation of "how things might unfold", and we all build and rebuild hundreds of mental models every day. A framing, on the other hand, is "what things exist in the first place", and it is much more stable and subtle. Every mental model is based on some framing, but we tend to be oblivious to which framing we're using most of the time (I've explained all this better in A Framing and Model About Framings and Models).

Framings are the basis of how we think and what we are even able to perceive, and they're the most consequential thing that spreads through a population in what we call "culture".

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Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist and play a role in mental models—that arose in those same arbitrary but self-reinforcing ways. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of Our Success, brings up several studies demonstrating the cultural differences in framings.

He mentions studies that estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800's to have been around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture at the time was much poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer and less-defined moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models. Other studies found that children in Western countries are brought up with very general and abstract categories for animals, like "fish" and "bird", while children in small-scale societies tend to think in terms of more specific categories, such as "robin" and "jaguar", leading to different ways to understand and interface with the world.

But framings affect more than understanding. They influence how we take in the information from the world around us. Explaining this paper, Henrich writes:

People from different societies vary in their ability to accurately perceive objects and individuals both in and out of context. Unlike most other populations, educated Westerners have an inclination for, and are good at, focusing on and isolating objects or individuals and abstracting properties for these while ignoring background activity or context. Alternatively, expressing this in reverse: Westerners tend not to see objects or individuals in context, attend to relationships and their effects, or automatically consider context. Most other peoples are good at this.

How many connections and interrelations you consider when thinking is in the realm of framings. If your mental ontology treats most things as largely independent and self-sufficient, your mental models will tend to be, for better or worse, more reductionist and less holistic.

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The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation. This ability is innate in all humans, regardless of culture: we are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

Overimitation ... may be distinctively human. For example, although chimpanzees imitate the way conspecifics instrumentally manipulate their environment to achieve a goal, they will copy the behavior only selectively, skipping steps which they recognize as unnecessary [unlike humans, who tend to keep even the unnecessary steps]. ... Once chimpanzees and orangutans have figured out how to solve a problem, they are conservative, sticking to whatever solution they learn first. Humans, in contrast, will often switch to a new solution that is demonstrated by peers, sometimes even switching to less effective strategies under peer influence.

— The Psychology of Normative Cognition, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis theirs.

We have a built-in need to do what the people around us do, even when we know of better or less wasteful ways. This means that we can't even explain culture as something that, while starting from chance events, naturally progresses towards better and better behaviors. That's what science is for.

Once the synchronized behaviors are in our systems, when we are habituated to certain shared ways of doing things, these behaviors feed back into our most basic mindsets, which guide our future behaviors, which further affect each other's mindset, and so on, congealing into the shared framings we call culture, i.e.: whatever happens to give the least friction in whatever happens to be the current shared behavioral landscape.

This is why, often, formal rules and laws do indeed take root in a culture: not because they're rules, but because the way they are enforced creates enough friction—or following them creates enough mutual benefits—that, like in the corridor lanes, crowds will settle into following them. This is also why, perhaps even more often, groups will settle into the easy "unruly" patterns.

 

Deep Congruence

Congruence is a quality discussed by many psychologists—Carl Rogers popularized the word, saying that, among other things, it is a necessary trait in therapists. He defined it (roughly) as a state of unity between your experience, your self-concept, and your outward behavior. Which is to say: you aren’t pretending. I think this is a solid definition, but it’s likely to be misread. It can sound like living up to a scorecard—I said I would be an academic, now I’m tenure track. If that were the only requirement, congruence would be fairly common, when in fact highly congruent people are uncommon.

Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered. What stops congruence from occurring are layers of denial that are unpleasant to pass through. Although congruence is a source of endless happiness, the path there can be devastating. To paraphrase a cliche, you may have to finally give up on experiencing a better past.

But must we define it? We know it when we see the genuine article in abundance. We can spot people who live in non-naive contentment, or unhurried action. Running into them is comforting if we seek integrity ourselves. Speaking to my teacher feels like drinking water from a lucky well, filled with life-restoring minerals. On the other hand, if we’re interested in maintaining some variety of denial, the company of highly congruent people is disturbing. The falsehoods we’re trying to maintain immediately ring false before them. They appear as highly but particularly resonant chambers, in which integrity echoes and bullshit dies immediately.

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Congruent people compel us because they have little to prove; they have converged on an inner authority. Thus, when you encounter them, you don’t feel like you’re being enlisted in their ongoing arguments with themselves. You’re not recruited to shore up their self-image, or resolve their dilemmas. You’re liberated to be as you are—talking to them feels like entering open space. Their love isn’t grabby and manipulative, and they can say hard truths from a place of simple observation. They can deeply understand you without needing to suck up your essence, or merge with it. Being listened to in this way, by a person capable of it, is psychoactive; you hear yourself anew.

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Seeking congruence can sound selfish. However, in practice, it rarely is. Given that our environments consist of others in pain, facing the totality of your experience and remaining self-serving requires being a real asshole. Most of us are less cruel than that, and capable of gradually moving towards increasingly skillful love for others. The highly congruent people I know tend to support everyone around them, in ways both obvious and not.

One reliable test to see whether you’re in a place of congruence is the existence of boredom. When you are in a state of congruence, at rest you don’t feel bored. Instead you feel peace. What needs to be done has been done or will be done, there is no need to flail against the silence.

I’ve heard from multiple sources that deathbed enlightenment is a real phenomenon. Which is to say: approaching death, many disintegrated and suffering people suddenly find acceptance. Congruence is coming after you; you can almost outrun it, if you try.

- More Here

The Four Pillars of High Agency

 

- Via Here

Is A Revolution Brewing In Evolutionary Theory? - Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).

This is one of the most important pieces you will read this year. Period. 

Full of insights to act on your everyday life (there are tips, it's up-to you to connect the dots). 

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

In his book On Human Nature (1978), the evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson claimed that human culture is held on a genetic leash. The metaphor was contentious for two reasons. First, as we’ll see, it’s no less true that culture holds genes on a leash. Second, while there must be a genetic propensity for cultural learning, few cultural differences can be explained by underlying genetic differences.

Nonetheless, the phrase has explanatory potential. Imagine a dog-walker (the genes) struggling to retain control of a brawny mastiff (human culture). The pair’s trajectory (the pathway of evolution) reflects the outcome of the struggle. Now imagine the same dog-walker struggling with multiple dogs, on leashes of varied lengths, with each dog tugging in different directions. All these tugs represent the influence of developmental factors, including epigenetics, antibodies and hormones passed on by parents, as well as the ecological legacies and culture they bequeath.

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Take the idea that new features acquired by an organism during its life can be passed on to the next generation. This hypothesis was brought to prominence in the early 1800s by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who used it to explain how species evolved. However, it has long been regarded as discredited by experiment – to the point that the term ‘Lamarckian’ has a derogatory connotation in evolutionary circles, and any researchers expressing sympathy for the idea effectively brand themselves ‘eccentric’. The received wisdom is that parental experiences can’t affect the characters of their offspring.

Except they do. The way that genes are expressed to produce an organism’s phenotype – the actual characteristics it ends up with – is affected by chemicals that attach to them. Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence the addition or removal of these chemical marks, which switches genes on or off. Usually these so-called ‘epigenetic’ attachments are removed during the production of sperm and eggs cells, but it turns out that some escape the resetting process and are passed on to the next generation, along with the genes. This is known as ‘epigenetic inheritance’, and more and more studies are confirming that it really happens.

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Likewise, the diverse, culturally learned foraging traditions of orcas – where different groups specialise in particular types of fish, seals or dolphins – is thought to be driving them to split into several species. Of course, culture reaches its zenith in our own species, where it is now well-established that our cultural habits have been a major source of natural selection on our genes. Dairy farming and milk consumption generated selection for a genetic variant that increased lactase (the enzyme that metabolises dairy products), while starchy agricultural diets favoured increased amylase (the corresponding enzyme that breaks down starch).

All this complexity can’t be reconciled with a strictly genetic currency for adaptive evolution, as many biologists now acknowledge. Rather, it points to an evolutionary process in which genomes (over hundreds to thousands of generations), epigenetic modifications and inherited cultural factors (over several, perhaps tens or hundreds of generations), and parental effects (over single-generation timespans) collectively inform how organisms adapt. These extra-genetic kinds of inheritance give organisms the flexibility to make rapid adjustments to environmental challenges, dragging genetic change in their wake – much like a rowdy pack of dogs.

Despite the excitement of all the new data, it’s unlikely to trigger an evolution revolution for the simple reason that science doesn’t work that way – at least, not evolutionary science. Kuhnian paradigm shifts, like Popper’s critical experiments, are closer to myths than reality. Look back at the history of evolutionary biology, and you will see nothing that resembles a revolution. Even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection took approximately 70 years to become widely accepted by the scientific community, and at the turn of the 20th century was viewed with considerable skepticism. Over the following decades, new ideas appeared, they were critically evaluated by the scientific community, and gradually became integrated with pre-existing knowledge. By and large, evolutionary biology was updated without experiencing great periods of ‘crisis’.

The same holds for the present. Epigenetic inheritance does not disprove genetic inheritance, but shows it to be just one of several mechanisms through which traits are inherited. I know of no biologist who wants to rip up the textbooks, or throw out natural selection. The debate in evolutionary biology concerns whether we want to extend our understanding of the causes of evolution, and whether that changes how we think about the process as a whole. In this respect, what is going on is ‘normal science’.

3 Antidotes To Your Suffering

So simple but yet a profound wisdom from George Saunders. 

I hardly meet anyone who lives by just one of these, leave alone all three.  

• You’re not permanent. 

• You’re not the most important thing. 

• You’re not separate.

And why is this simple wisdom not omnipresent?

In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act… Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

 

Living As A Crane!

Wonderful souls doing this rewarding work since 1973!

Thank you! 

The International Crane Foundation was set up in 1973, with the aim of safeguarding the world’s 15 crane species – most are endangered or vulnerable due to habitat loss, climate change and hunting. As senior aviculturist at the headquarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, I’m involved in everything from daily feeding to overseeing chick-rearing.

Whenever possible, chicks are raised by their biological parents or adopted by other adult cranes, but when that isn’t possible, we have to raise them, and teach them how to behave like cranes. Some chicks will later be released into the wild, so it’s important that they learn to stay away from people and other predators.

Young birds identify the first large moving object they see as their parent – a process called “imprinting” – so it’s important they don’t see us as humans while we’re raising them. At one time, feeding was done from behind a barrier to reduce interaction, but this wasn’t really practical.

One day, a colleague threw a sheet over himself. A lot of the staff thought he was crazy, but he started developing a more elaborate costume, adding feathers and even wearing pants that matched the colour of cranes’ legs.

Amazingly, the chicks responded well, and followed him as they would an adult crane. The outfits we use now have detailed puppet crane heads on one arm. The other arm is our “wing”. We did away with the feathers to make laundering the costumes easier. Now, any time we spend among the chicks is done in costume.

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It can be tiring work – my arms get sore. Usually we rotate who’s in the costumes every hour or two. Wearing them provides anonymity, so it’s easy to ham it up.

When I started here in 1986, I learned a small amount of crane vocabulary and could mimic the scolding sound made by adult cranes if chicks were fighting or putting themselves at risk. Now we hide an MP3 player under the costume and play recordings of real adult cranes. The coloration of the puppet heads also matches that of real birds – for example, whooping cranes have a patch of red skin, which they tilt towards other birds to warn if they’re too close. I’ll sometimes do that to get a chick to back off.

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Before they leave us, it’s important that the cranes are good flyers and able to get away from predators. Coaching them can be a challenge but we have a prairie where we encourage them by running and flapping, right up to the point where a real crane would leave the ground. We mimic adults’ “pre-flight” call and stretch out the puppet head. Whenever I see a video of us running and flapping, it does look kind of ridiculous, but the chicks get the idea. It makes me feel like a proud parent to see them take flight.

I do dream about work – sometimes, in my dreams, I would finally be able to fly. In others, my volunteers would take to the sky while I couldn’t, or I’d be the chick at the back of the flock, unable to keep up with the rest, and I would feel very sad.

Currently, 10 of the 15 crane species are still threatened with extinction, though the number of whooping cranes in the world has grown over the past 80 years from the low 20s to over 800. Ultimately, our aim is to help create a self-sustaining population where all the youngsters will be reared by real cranes, so we can get rid of the costumes. Although I would miss my interaction with the chicks, what an amazing outcome that would be.

 

Keanu Reeves - Building 15 Dog and Cat Rescue Sanctuaries Across the U.S

Thank you, Sir! 

You are an inspiration. 

“Wick’s Eternal”: The Heart of the Initiative

The name “Wick’s Eternal” is a tribute to Keanu’s iconic role as John Wick, a character who is well-known for his fierce love and protection of his dog, Daisy. This bond, as seen in the movie series, mirrors Keanu’s own relationship with animals. By naming his sanctuary project after this character, Keanu is reinforcing the message that animals are worth fighting for and that their safety and well-being are non-negotiable.

The project aims to offer animals a sanctuary where they are treated with respect and given a chance to heal from past traumas. The sanctuaries will be more than just shelters – they will be homes, providing comfort and safety for animals that have often been victims of neglect or cruelty.

The Sanctuaries: A Safe Haven for Animals

Keanu’s sanctuaries will be located in both urban and rural areas across the U.S. Each facility will be designed to cater to the needs of abandoned, elderly, and sick animals, offering a space where they can feel secure and loved. The design of each sanctuary reflects Keanu’s dedication to providing a high-quality environment for the animals. The sanctuaries will feature:

• Veterinary Services – Each sanctuary will have a state-of-the-art veterinary clinic offering medical care to the animals. These clinics will focus on treating common and chronic illnesses, providing necessary surgeries, and offering routine check-ups. Specialized care will be available for elderly animals, ensuring they receive the attention they need. 

• Hydrotherapy Pools – Many of the animals in need of a safe haven have physical ailments such as joint issues or arthritis. To help them regain mobility and improve their quality of life, hydrotherapy pools will be available. These pools offer a low-impact way for the animals to exercise and recover from injuries or age-related issues. 

• Trauma Recovery Areas – For animals who have experienced abuse, neglect, or trauma, the sanctuaries will feature designated quiet spaces where they can recover in peace. These areas will be designed to reduce stress, allowing the animals to heal both physically and emotionally in a safe, tranquil environment. 

• Spacious Outdoor Areas – Each sanctuary will feature expansive outdoor spaces where animals can roam freely, play, and socialize with other animals. These areas will be fenced in, allowing dogs and cats to exercise and enjoy the natural environment. These spaces are crucial for the animals’ well-being, offering them freedom and the ability to engage in natural behaviors. 

• Adoption Services – While these sanctuaries are a permanent home for some animals, others will eventually be adopted out to loving families. Keanu’s initiative is designed to ensure that no animal stays without a family for long. The adoption process will be thorough, ensuring that animals are placed with families who truly care about their well-being. 

• No Adoption Fees – Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Keanu’s project is that there will be no adoption fees for any animals. All services, from medical care to adoption, will be provided free of charge, ensuring that no financial barrier prevents an animal from finding a home.

 

Normative Male Alexithymia

Of-course there is a diagnosis for this!

Somehow this crap has become macho. 

Spontaneously at any given moment,  I cry out loud when I think about Max or something that reminds me of him or for no reason at all except breathing life in and out without him... 

I don't care about a moron who cannot do a single push up or pull up but can tight lipped and call themselves a macho. This is another reason culture is dangerous. People follow what their dad did or some dude did without proper reflection. Neuroscience as we know - emotions and reasoning are combined with zillion other pieces for not only every decision we make or not make but just plain living everyday as a normal living being. If a moron is shutting down emotions it is similar to walking naked all the time. It is not civilized, period. 

In recent years, the psychologist Ronald Levant has popularized the notion of “normative male alexithymia.” Alexithymia is the inability to recognize emotions (etymologically, it means lacking the words for feelings), and Levant argues that as boys are taught to repress their emotions for fear of seeming feminine, they lose the ability to identify them. Some research reveals that, at and before age 1, boys are more outwardly emotional than girls, but by age 2 they are less verbally expressive, and by 4 they are less facially expressive. By adolescence, the one emotion boys felt permitted to openly express was anger.

- More Here

I have high respect for men who I know have cried, and I reach out to them on my own. Well, crying is not only the emotion I gauge but men who show normal emotions without any filters. Those are the men I will be friends with for life. 

Truth & Unearned Certainty - Søren Kierkegaard

And from here on, when we talk about “faith,” we’re using Kierkegaard’s meaning — not belief in a doctrine, but the inner stance required to live with unanswered questions. 

If that sounds narrowly religious, it’s a misread. 

Kierkegaard is describing a stance that shows up wherever people have to act without guarantees: in innovation, in design, in leadership, and many other forms of work.

This pandemic is not just related to religion but also has spread into politics, nationality, culture and even sports, to personal preference of a goddam LLM.

Wise minds observed how humans embrace this pandemic with wide arms - this is a timeless trait of humans. These priceless observations from one such wise mind:

People were comfortable with answers being given to them before questions were even asked. Faith was spoken about constantly, often with confidence, but this confidence felt rehearsed. Kierkegaard couldn’t tell if people ever wrestled with or questioned their beliefs.

Eventually, he realized there was nothing to question. The system had already done the hard part. The role of the individual was to nod in agreement. This created a kind of harmony, but a shallow one… a collective certainty that never had to prove itself against anything real.

As he grew older, Kierkegaard saw how quickly certainty had replaced belief. Whenever a group becomes too sure of itself, it stops producing individuals capable of doing the inward work that faith requires. People learn to perform conviction rather than develop it. Say something often enough and you can skip the part where you understand (or question) it.

He noticed another pattern: People spoke confidently about truths they had never encountered firsthand, truths they had never risked anything to understand. And inherited certainty revealed an uncomfortable vulnerability: Once you depend on a system to hand you your conclusions, you tend to move as the system moves… and you move with confidence.

Kierkegaard wasn’t worried about disbelief. He wasn’t even worried about people changing their minds. His concern was unearned belief. Conviction without scrutiny and identity without introspection. The key here, is that the desire for certainty often poses as a strength, but usually signals the opposite:

A lack of faith.

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Systems (institutions) depend on predictability, and certainty delivers. It keeps people aligned, keeps roles stable, and keeps operations smooth enough that no one has to confront the inner workings. Churches, governments, workplaces, even families in their more rigid forms, all learn to reward conviction that doesn’t ask questions. Call it clarity or discipline or commitment, but the effect is the same: the more certainty people perform, the less individual they become.

This creates a loop that’s hard to break. People adopt certainty because it makes them feel secure. Institutions reinforce certainty because it makes people easier to manage. And the more those two forces reinforce each other, the more faith becomes something referenced rather than lived.

Unearned certainty has consequences. As it takes over, faith has nothing left to do. The questions don’t disappear, but people learn to avoid them. Individuals learn to shrink to fit the expectations of the system… and the system rewards the shrinking.

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It’s a familiar pattern. You don’t have to comprehend the complexity. You only need to sound aligned with it. Certainty becomes a performance of being well-informed, and systems reward the performance because it keeps everything moving in one direction.

This creates a strange contradiction. We now have unprecedented access to the full picture, but we rarely use it. We reach for summaries, frameworks, pre-digested opinions, and the moral scaffolding provided by the groups we belong to. We inherit not just the conclusions, but the emotional stance that comes with them. We feel confident long before we comprehend anything.

Getting information hasn’t been the barrier. The part no system can automate for us is the effort needed to understand the full picture.

People stop wrestling with ideas because the system makes wrestling feel unnecessary. Certainty is faster. Certainty is cleaner. Certainty signals belonging.

The tragedy is this: certainty has never been easier to acquire, and understanding has never required more from us.

 

On Suffering

I am writing these words while sitting in a comfortable chair in a comfortable 70 degree house. And, I suspect, you are too. Basically comfortable, that is. Physically. Maybe you’re a little cold, but not consumed by the screaming anguish of an icy ocean you cannot escape. Maybe stressed, but not asphyxiating.

It’s times like these I find it far too easy to ignore the most urgent, most serious, most fundamental problem in our world.

[---]

I think there is one way in which we gain a more true understanding. During a time of suffering, this crevasse dissolves and our mental representation of the experience converges with the experience itself. It is then alone we might catch a glimpse of suffering’s otherwise-unthinkable urgency.

And yet this urgency prevents its very own recognition. When we ourselves undergo the worst, our minds and bodies scream in a deafening tone. We do not regard the urgency, the suffering itself, in abstract or conceptual terms. They are not things to be pondered; they are instead experienced directly without the mediating influence of words and symbols. During such a time, empathy is not merely impossible but unthinkable. This is not a character flaw; even the most altruistic among us does not think of others while she is drowning.

Nonetheless, it is tragic.

During the rare occasion during which we viscerally understand intense suffering, it can be challenging to take action to help others. And when, thank God, the agony subsides and our minds return from its all-consuming hell, again capable of empathy, the visceral sense of urgency has taken flight.

[---]

There is no cosmic justice in suffering on behalf of others, but there is something like cosmic justice in acting to prevent and ameliorate the worst experiences in our world.

Factory farming seems a reasonable place to begin, but wild animals plausibly suffer in far greater numbers. Veganism, though morally commendable, is not the sole means by which to help; very few among us, including those who eat meat, actively want animals to suffer. Perhaps we might reduce suffering the most by complementing the question of personal dietary consumption with a focus on preventing the maiming and castration of farm animals without anesthesia, among other interventions.

Among our own species, let us rectify the critical shortage of pain relief in low-income countries. And let us stare the very worst conditions right in their face, though merely as a first step to their mitigation. Cluster headaches, akathisia, and locked-in syndrome come to mind. I will not provide links; you may search for them if you wish. The elimination of these and similar conditions may be one of the most morally urgent issues that we face.

There is nothing beautiful or poetic about pain or agony. The world is not just. There is no virtue, no hidden meaning to be found. And I hope that my words might help to reduce the worst among it.

- More Here

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

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

Jonathan Safran Foer on Eating Animals

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

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

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

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

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

How To Be A Lichen

Contain multitudes without inner conflict. Linnaeus classified lichens as plants — a notion no one questioned until Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter undertook her little-known scientific studies and made the revolutionary discovery that lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems. They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.

[---]

Cultivate healthy attachment that doesn’t syphon the energy of the other. Contrary to the common misconception, lichens do not parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate and often contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem.

Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of before. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes. They are the life that goes on living over the tombstones of the dead.

When you can’t change your situation, change your attitude. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for months, years, even decades. They survive in radioactive environments by entering a dormant state and releasing protective chemicals that block radiation and neutralize free radicals. They survive simulations of Martian conditions and even the black severity of outer space. 

[---] 

Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce asexually — by dispersing diaspores containing a handful of cells from each of their inner kingdoms or simply by breaking off pieces of themselves to grow into new organisms.

Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create loam from stone across the long arc of their lives. They are part of how mountains become golden sand.

Have great patience with the arc of your life. Some of the oldest living things on Earth, lichens grow at the unhurried pace of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I now live on and the continent on which I was born are drifting apart more than 250 times as fast. The Moon is leaving us four hundred times faster.

- More Here

The Simplest Argument For Veganism

I had a similar conclusion decades ago; the difference was I wasted a decade or so when Max was alive arguing. 

But thankfully, during the last few years of Max, I changed and realized these people don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their goddamn family. 

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. 

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste.

Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you?

Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

- Richard Hamming

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.

If someone is sad or suffering in your home; there is no way on earth you can jump around and pretend to have "fun". It is psychologically, morally, physically and mentally impossible to do so for normal human beings. But that's exactly what people are doing with this diet. So much suffering on their dinner plate they are inevitably becoming inhuman in their thinking. 

So I simply wait for them to die while I keep breathing after Max to make our fellow beings suffering’s a little less. 

I am not sure I am trying enough to make a change in this world. But I cannot keep breathing and not try; if one stops the other will automatically stop. 

Thank you for writing this immensely powerful short piece:

Imagine that you found out that your friend raised his own chickens. One day, he invited you into his house and you saw how he treated them. Dozens of chickens were chained up in a cage too small to move, inhaling the feces of those above them. Those chickens, you learned, had been debeaked, meaning their beak had been sliced off with a hot knife, without anesthetic. This probably felt like having their nose cut off.

When his egg-laying hens produced a baby male chick, he would drop it into a shredder because it was useless. He’d force the pigs to give birth in a little concrete cell too small to turn around in, and would kill them by forcing them into a gas chamber. Over decades, he’d genetically engineered the chickens to be so large that they could barely move, and the full weight of their bloated bodies was thus constantly pressed against the metal of the cage. And sometimes, to produce more chickens, he’d hold the female chickens down and inject them with semen from male chickens.

It seems like he is doing something evil! He should stop. Probably you would not return to his house of horrors. More likely, you’d call the police.

But here’s a plausible principle: if it’s wrong to do something, then it’s wrong to pay other people to do it. Because it’s wrong to kill, it’s wrong to hire someone else to kill. Because it’s wrong to rob a bank, it’s wrong to hire someone else to rob a bank. So if it’s wrong to treat animals badly, it’s wrong to pay others to treat animals badly.

But that is what you do every time you purchase meat from a typical source. You pay for the product of months of torment and mutilation. Factory farms treat the animals on them every bit as badly as your friend in the above hypothetical. Every one of the practices I described is routine on the factory farms that house more than 99% of animals killed each year. So if it’s immoral to mistreat animals, then it’s also immoral to pay for others to mistreat animals. This would mean nearly all meat consumption is seriously immoral.

And note: nearly all the excuses that you give for your meat consumption could be given by your hypothetical friend. He could note that meat consumption is natural, lions eat meat, the animals wouldn’t have otherwise existed, and so on for all the excuses for meat eating. But no one would buy those excuses when employed by him. They’re no more successful when employed by you.

Most people, after reading this, will not go vegan. They will continue eating animal products, even if convinced by the moral argument, because they enjoy its taste. To such a person, I don’t have much to say, for while it’s easy to give arguments for the immorality of meat consumption, it is much harder to convince people to follow where the arguments lead.

All I can say is that if you continue eating meat after knowing how the animals are raised, then you will have to grapple with a legacy of knowingly supporting the shedding of innocent blood, of supporting gassing, torment, caging, and merciless carnage doled out on the innocent because you were too weak to stop doing what you knew to be wrong. If we one day appear before God and are asked to justify our actions, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. At the very least offset.

In fact, I don’t think veganism is enough. We can spare thousands of animals from a torturous fate per dollar. We can make animals spend many fewer years in a cage with a single dollar. One who does nothing in the face of this holocaust will have to grapple with a legacy of inaction in the face of unspeakable atrocities; of ignoring the trillions of beings tortured, slaughtered, and dismembered because intervening would require trivial personal sacrifices. If there is a judgment day, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. Doing something about the population vastly larger than the entire human race being kept in nightmare torture facilities strikes me as a bare minimum.

My fellow beings, my larger family, although we share this blue planet together as our home, I am so sorry that I am not able to stop your suffering. I am trying...

Disavowal vs. Denial

The biggest disavowal trait is not climate change but killing animals. 

Interview with Alenka Zupančič, author of new book Disavowal

And it’s a very interesting concept, because we are used to this other concept, which is simple denial. You know, denial of climate change, denial of this or that.

But disavowal functions in a much more perverse way. Namely, by first fully acknowledging some fact—“I know very well that this is how things are”—but then going on as if this knowledge didn’t really matter or register. So in practice, you just go on as before. And I think this is even more prevalent in our response to different social predicaments than simple denial.

[---]

They are doing perhaps more damage. Or, what is even more important, they are entrapped in this kind of pas de deux with the direct deniers, because they present themselves as much more rational. They say, “Look at these stupid people. They just don’t believe in climate change. But we are enlightened. We know all about it.” But in the long run, nothing really happens. The practices remain just the same. You organize a couple of climate conferences, but growth still remains the principle of social functioning, and so on. So I think, not only is it more dangerous because it is more prevalent—I mean, there are many more people who are into this kind of disavowal functioning—but it’s also dangerous because there is this dance between the two.