The Hunt For A Coronavirus Vaccine Has Been Horrendous For Some Animals

 Yes, Cats and Dogs too. 

The hunt for a coronavirus vaccine has been horrendous for some animals. As part of the drive to save human lives, thousands of cheeky monkeys, ferrets, cats, mice and hamsters have been deliberately infected and experimented on in labs. 

Pfizer and BioNTech, the big pharma companies behind the vaccine that caused excitement yesterday, have treated monkeys and mice with contempt. While their human researchers have been protected with elaborate PPE, the animals in their care have been trapped and deliberately infected. Some were injected with an inoculation first and some weren’t.

For animal lovers, that creates a dilemma. In what circumstances will you turn a blind eye to animals being harmed?

Many people think that being vegan is just about not eating meat and animal products but it is really so much more than that. Veganism, as defined by the Vegan Society, is a bid “to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.”

Everyone wants to see the back of Covid-19 but, as an animal lover and a vegan, should I accept a jab that’s the result of animal cruelty? I say no – and not just for moral reasons.

There is convincing evidence that most epidemics and pandemics, including Covid-19, have actually been caused by humans “playing god” and exploiting animals. In August, a white paper found that nearly every major zoonotic disease outbreak over the last 120 years is inextricably linked to animal exploitation, including meat consumption.

The human cost is huge: even before Covid-19, two million people were dying from zoonotic diseases each year. A separate report from the UN said the number of zoonotic epidemics – the ones that can be transmitted from animals to people – is rising, from Ebola to Sars to West Nile virus and Rift Valley fever.

The authors warned that although the world is treating the health and economic symptoms of this coronavirus pandemic, governments are ignoring the root causes: humans’ destruction of nature and meat eating. 

We need to wake up. Since it was exploiting animals that got us into this mess, it’s both immoral and ill-advised to exploit more animals now.

- More Here

Max & Fluffy

One of my favorite pictures of them waiting together for me to come back after picking up the mail. 

A myriad of these simple moments unveils wonder after wonder but only if one learns to shed the self-centered view and observe the world through the eyes of better equipped and capable sentient beings. 

Death - End of Self Improvement

Joan Tollifon's book Death: The End Of Self-Improvement reminds me so much of my last months with Max. It was painful and sucked the life out of me seeing him suffer. But yet, it was more devasting to live in a society where this is not considered normal and refuse to understand even when death stares in front of our nose every passing moment. 

One of the final practical lessons from Max was to embrace the nasty bits of life since it also part of being "present" in the current moment. I caught myself clearly outside of the realm of any of societal thinking and graduated as Max's Balaji. 

Oliver Burkeman's review of Joan Tollifon's book: 

The problem with most books (and articles and podcasts) about “being here now” or “embracing the present moment” is that they really aren’t. As often telegraphed by their cover images (sunsets, flowers, mountain peaks) they’re about embracing the nice bits of the present. And they generally imply that if you follow their advice, you could float contentedly through life, relishing simple pleasures and finding wonder in the everyday. In other words, they’re about the ideal person you might become if you weren’t so prone to irritability, boredom, and gloom. So they’re not actually about embracing the present at all. They’re focused on escaping it, in pursuit of a better future.

None of which could be said about Death: The End Of Self-Improvement, the latest book by the spiritual teacher Joan Tollifson. That title alone is a bracing bucket of iced water to the head. Mortality is the ultimate reminder that our fantasies of someday finally becoming perfect are inherently absurd, because that’s not how the journey will end. All we have, in place of that imagined ascent toward perfection, is a succession of present moments – until, one day, we won’t have any more. And “when the future disappears,” Tollifson writes, “we are brought home to the immediacy that we may have avoided all our lives.” If you really want to be here now, forget flowers and sunsets. Contemplate death instead.

Tollifson does so, without flinching. Among other things, the book is a memoir of her own encounters with mortality: her mother’s death, and those of close friends, then an unsparing account of her own experience of ageing – the “sagging, drooping, bulging, wrinkling, and drying up”, then colonoscopies, cancer and chemo, rectal bleeding and stoma bags. Sometimes, the reader wants to flinch. But in a way that’s no bad thing: all of this is part of experience, too. It’s not nice. But any approach to life that brackets it off as some kind of mistake, something that mustn’t be acknowledged, isn’t engaging with how things really are.

Weird Wishes

Around this time last year, I wished more than anything in the world that Max did his zesty and yappy walk as he did for years. He was in the bed most of the day and did only an occasional couple of rounds of walk around the house to avoid atrophy. I knew my wish was asking for a miracle but yet  I wished and dreamed for it. 

This cold November walking with Neo with his constant pulling and jumping, I wish he does a normal walk with me so both can relax and enjoy the walk. This wish doesn't require any miracle but just some patience and in time with maturity, he will do so. 

A wish for a miracle which time couldn't offer and another wish which only time could offer. 

But the time I spent with Max is not shackled to anything in the universe, not even time. All the wishes fade away when I remember the luck I had in my life to spend time with Max. I am grateful. So darn grateful for what life offered us. 

Observe, Observe Perpetually - Lessons From Coronavirus

Following Michele de Montaigne's mantra of "observe, observe perpetually" in this eternal-impermanent world has been my obligation as a human being. It's much easy to identify lessons from hindsight wisdom and it's impossible to predict the future. But yet, being in the present and observing the present one can evaluate the old wisdom passed down for generations and on rare occasions, discover rare new wisdom hidden in the debris.

Rahm Emanuel (no one holds a patent to be wise; wisdom is in everyone's reach) once said:

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

This is an attempt to make sense of current events and the lessons can we learn from this. As of this moment, lots of old wisdom have been proved right and I am going to list them as well but at the same time, identify any new lessons that we can learn.

It is also an attempt to do beyond my biases, "boring" old traits for leading a good life, ancient wisdom, and try to pluck out "natural generalized knowledge" (commonly known as wisdom). There is no guarantee that I would be able to find anything new that hasn't been already told million times and in that case, this would act as a humble repeater of timeless wisdom distilled down for generations.

I will avoid tautological questions like - What is wrong with these people?

I am the least eligible person to jot down these since eerie as it is going to sound, the current way of life all the people in the world live is what Max and I used to live for 13 plus years...

• Stopped traveling for "pleasure" (very rare occasions traveled for work) since Max cannot go with me
• Avoided restaurants and usually did take out since it allowed me to have a meal with Max by my side
• No exotic places, pleasure means since walk with Max and rest of the time being at home with Max reading or watching a movie. 
• Working remote was the most pleasurable thing since I can be with Max more
• Time is more essential than money and being with Max made that second nature 

I can list down so many other things that are the new way of life for everyone in the world because of the lockdown while that was our way of life for 13 years. In this idiosyncrasy, we did find a way to live a simple life. A simple and ordinary life where time and thoughts were spared only on what mattered most. Many looked at us like nutcases for this way of life and now, eerie as it sounds... the entire world is living this way. 

What are the odds of this happening within 100 days of Max passing away?  If Max was alive now it would have close to impossible to get his regular treatment without his vet's constantly reminding me over the phone to put him "down". On the other hand, if Max was alive, he would have had me this entire year next to him 24x7. Maybe he would have gotten better. As Taleb says, there is no alternate history. 

I should be feeling vindicated but I don't. The way we lived is idiosyncratic and conscious of the fact that how little time we have together. I never once wanted the whole world to live exactly like we did. I am grateful that I could afford to lead a life where I was able to spare more time with Max but most of the people in the world don't have that luxury.

Cancer took my Max away but I do feel cancer is a great equalizer. Observing how humans behaved in the past few months under Coronavirus makes me wonder cancer is an evolutionary way of keeping precious life on earth safe. Even if we cure cancer, maybe a different deadly disease would evolve to maintain the balance in entropy. 

I will update this post as time unfolds with the lessons learned, lessons unlearned, and lessons updated - in the spirit of Montaigne's way of updating one's thoughts with time.

It is for this reason that experience of real life, appreciating one’s place in history, was such a wellspring for Hirschman, as it was for his inspiration, Montaigne, whose last essay was “On Experience.” Life, as Montaigne reminds us, is “a purpose unto itself.” The excursions into real life— as struggler against European fascisms, soldier in the US Army, deep insider of the Marshall Plan, advisor to investors in Colombia, and consultant to global foundations and bankers— were never digressions for Hirschman; they were built into the purpose of observing the world to derive greater insight, and from insights invent concepts that could in turn be tested, molded, refashioned, and even discarded by the course of time. These were the pendular swings from a contemplative life to a life of action and back again— pendular because they were codependent.

If biography is the art of the singular to illuminate a pattern, Hirschman’s odyssey can be read as a journey with no particular end, the life of an idealist with no utopia because he believed that the voyage of life itself yielded enough lessons to change who we are and what we aspire to be; to require and stay on course toward an abstract destination threatened to deprive the journey of its richest possibilities.

- Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman

Lesson 1:

Modernity has replaced wisdom with "self-serving" mental models. This is the reason why books such as  Poor Charlie's Alamanac and Black Swan sold more copies than Will Duhart's Lessons of History and Antifragile. 

Don't get me wrong, I did learn a lot from those books but they are guides to navigating human nature and become successful (via money, fame, etc.,) without societal change and covers nothing about morality nor doing the right thing. 

Reading has become a rare commodity and people who are readers are supposed to enrich their knowledge,  incorporate the learnings in doing the right thing in their everyday life. These readers are supposed to guide their immediate inner circle for starters towards making the right decisions and doing the right actions and instill a sense of responsibility beyond themselves. 

Unfortunately, reading and knowledge have become only a "how-to-guide" to success, fame, money, and happiness in whatever order it is convenient. they use it now mostly to serve themselves. Nothing wrong with serving oneself. Sharing intimate knowledge with the inner circle helps shape core values, virtues, and principles of life. These readers are high influence nodes in a network. 

We as a civilization have to pay massive costs if we lose these virtue networks. 

On the surface, it seems harmless but this pandemic has bought to surface this disease (the symptoms were lurking for decades). 

As long as one has the money, job, gun, food, alcohol, a constant flow of entertainment, etc.,  they "feel safe" from even a biological entity that has the potential to wipe out species. 

Even after almost a year of the world being shut down, our generation is still more worried about restaurants being closed than understand how precariousness and preciousness of our food supply. 

We continue to waste a tremendous amount of food every day since there is no moral reprimand from the virtue networks since they barely exist. 

To state the obvious, if my examples are wonderful books and it not worth even worth mentioning what religious and ideological writings can do virtue networks. 

Lesson 2: (Coming Soon)

Do We Really Want To Spread Human Bullshit In Space?

Sun will burn itself in a billion years, so we really have time to "fix" the genesis of non-stop bullshit via humans which evolves into pure evil. The trick is we will be capable of colonizing space before finding ways to instill humility and gratitude in humans. One doesn't need to be a genius to predict if former happens before the latter, Earth will be gone long before its's shelf-life.

A great piece warning the same - Why we should think twice before colonizing space?

In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification. At the same time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification. Space-hopping populations will create their own cultures, languages, governments, political institutions, religions, technologies, rituals, norms, worldviews, and so on. As a result, different species will find it increasingly difficult over time to understand each other’s motivations, intentions, behaviors, decisions, and so on. It could even make communication between species with alien languages almost impossible. Furthermore, some species might begin to wonder whether the proverbial “Other” is conscious. This matters because if a species Y cannot consciously experience pain, then another species X might not feel morally obligated to care about Y. After all, we don’t worry about kicking stones down the street because we don’t believe that rocks can feel pain. Thus, as I write in the paper, phylogenetic and ideological diversification will engender a situation in which many species will be “not merely aliens to each other but, more significantly, alienated from each other.”

But this yields some problems. First, extreme differences like those just listed will undercut trust between species. If you don’t trust that your neighbor isn’t going to steal from, harm, or kill you, then you’re going to be suspicious of your neighbor. And if you’re suspicious of your neighbor, you might want an effective defense strategy to stop an attack—just in case one were to happen. But your neighbor might reason the same way: she’s not entirely sure that you won’t kill her, so she establishes a defense as well. The problem is that, since you don’t fully trust her, you wonder whether her defense is actually part of an attack plan. So you start carrying a knife around with you, which she interprets as a threat to her, thus leading her to buy a gun, and so on. Within the field of international relations, this is called the “security dilemma,” and it results in a spiral of militarization that can significantly increase the probability of conflict, even in cases where all actors have genuinely peaceful intentions.

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The lesson of this argument is not to uncritically assume that venturing into the heavens will necessarily make us safer or more existentially secure. This is a point that organizations hoping to colonize Mars, such as SpaceX, NASA, and Mars One should seriously contemplate. How can humanity migrate to another planet without bringing our problems with us? And how can different species that spread throughout the cosmos maintain peace when sufficient mutual trust is unattainable and advanced weaponry could destroy entire civilizations?

Human beings have made many catastrophically bad decisions in the past. Some of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers had deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong—i.e., had done a “premortem” analysis. We are in that privileged position right now with respect to space colonization. Let’s not dive head-first into waters that turn out to be shallow.

And I would never ever leave planet Earth no matter what happens. This is the home where Max and I lived. This where I will die, period. 

Eternal Mahabharata

What is found here regarding the aims of human life righteousness, wealth, pleasure, and release may be found elsewhere, O Bull of the Bharatas. But what is not here, is found nowhere.

This blog had covered lessons from Mahabharata many times. It is the only ancient story that focuses mainly on the realities of life on earth (with no GPS and no ticket to heaven). The story unfolds after a mother dog curses a human after he kicks her puppy and that curse lasts for generations and ends generations later when an "almost" nobleman refuses to enter heaven without his dog. 

Gurucharan Das' phenomenal book Difficulty of Being Good is a great place to understand why the lessons from Mahabharata are timeless. 

The story tells us - Humans (including God) are a weird cocktail of good, bad, and myriad other weirdness. Don't fall for magic. Don't dwell in hope. Don't overestimate the goodness of human nature. Instead, always do the right thing. That is the one and the only thing that is in our control.  It is not even close to easy but one has to keep trying. That is the only thing ever worked in this world. So try.

Aeon has a beautiful essay on Mahabharata - Immorality, sexism, politics, war: the polychromatic Indian epic pulses with relevance to the present day

The Mahabharata is long. It is roughly seven times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and 15 times the length of the Christian Bible. The plot covers multiple generations, and the text sometimes follows side stories for the length of a modern novel. But for all its narrative breadth and manifold asides, the Mahabharata can be accurately characterized as a set of narratives about vice.

Inequality and human suffering are facts of life in the Mahabharata. The work offers valuable perspectives and vantage points for reflecting on how various injustices play out in today’s world too.

The Mahabharata claims to show dharma or righteous conduct – a guiding ideal of human life in Hindu thought – within the morass of the characters’ immoral behaviors. But the line between virtue and vice, dharma and adharma, is often muddled. The bad guys sometimes act more ethically than the good guys, who are themselves deeply flawed. In the epic’s polychromatic morality, the constraints of society and politics shackle all.

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Indeed, the Mahabharata’s promise to explore (among other things) immorality, politics, sexism, and identity problems as general features of human life rings true in our times.

Over the past several years, politics in India and the United States have taken dark turns as both countries turn their backs on the values of pluralism and embrace ethno- and religious nationalisms. Violence and death are heavily used tools by governments in both countries.

Sexism has never gone away. It is a critical part of the current surge of Right-wing ideologies and their embrace of male privilege. Moreover, the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are reasserting retrograde gender roles in many places across the globe. The pandemic’s toll on women’s physical safety, mental health and careers is great and growing.

Identity, too, plagues us. The caste system is still very much alive, in both India and the diaspora. We also struggle with types of oppression birthed in modernity, such as racism.

The Mahabharata makes no false promises of solving such problems, but it does offer us tools for thinking them through, now and in the future, even if – or perhaps especially if – that future looks dark. The epic itself foretells:

Some poets told this epic before.

Others are telling it now.

Different narrators will tell it in the future.

Happy Birthday Neo

You are adorable and happy as you are my Neo. I am sorry, I am not the same who I was with Max but I will try if nature decides to keep me around without Max. 

Happy Birthday little Neo.

Max Playing Frisbee - A Drone Video

 My Max playing as what life is meant to be lived. I miss you, Max. 

David Solan's Atlas Hugged!!

David Sloan Wilson has written a new book "Atlas Hugged" (pun intended), a devastating critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and its impact on the world. Her philosophy has and continues to ruin millions of lives like any other addictive substance except addictive substances are usually objective but this one is purely subjective mythological magic. 

Atlas Hugged e-book is free or you can buy the paperback. 

Thank you, David. Thanks a million for fighting magic with fiction. 

We sapiens need a constant reminder that nothing is permanent; which means ideology is nothing but sheer magic which proclaims it can successfully "pin" time to be a constant. 

Check out a few hilarious excerpts here: 

Everyone knows about the existence of cults and their disturbing ability to steal minds.  Otherwise normal people give away everything to wait for the second coming of Jesus or aliens from outer space.  Midas and my grandfather would scoff at those irrational beliefs, but the society that they founded had all the earmarks of a cult.  The first structure that they erected was a giant gold-plated dollar sign atop a granite column.  They also invented an oath that members were required to recite at frequent intervals:  I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.  The word “give” was banned from their vocabulary.  Every human transaction was paid for with the gold and silver coins minted on site.  Obviously, this was only possible thanks to the vast wealth of Midas Mulligan, who provided a bank account for each new member based on how much had been “stolen” from them in the form of taxes in the outside world.  While the members of other cults waited for Jesus or aliens from outer space, the Galtians waited for society to collapse while working to build a microcosm of the perfect society for themselves. 

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The first person to leave the cult was my grandfather.  He simply disappeared, just as he had disappeared from his engineering job.  This time he didn’t even leave a note or a boastful proclamation.  My father, John Galt II, was two years old and grew up knowing only the legend of John Galt I.  Then other members started to drift away.  Finally Midas Mulligan reached his breaking point and withdrew his financial support, observing wryly that the Galtians were more heavily subsidized than any socialist society.  Like fleas shaken from the back of a dog, the Galtians were forced to make their way back to the society that they’d mocked and seek the forgiveness of family, friends, and former business associates.

The Galtian movement was a failure in every way but one.  It had not resulted in a widespread strike of doers.  The static electricity engine was a folly.  The microcosm of the perfect doer society went the way of so many other utopian visions.  But Ayn Rant’s better-than-real cosmology was a survivor that had been propagated around the world by The Speech.  Everyone who fell under its spell became convinced, as fervently as any religious believer, that the path to salvation was to concentrate exclusively on making money for oneself.