Fragility Of Our Civilization

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.

- Last lines of Reinhold Niebuhr's master piece The Irony of American History

Timothy Snyder's apt warning from 2015 is getting more relevant in 2024 - Hitler’s world may not be so far away:

Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct”. Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realised. A historian must be grateful to Wanda J for her courage and for the trace of herself that she left behind. But a historian must also consider why rescuers were so few. It is all too easy to fantasise that we, too, would have aided Wanda J. 

Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we can dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. It is our very forgetfulness of the circumstances of the Holocaust that convinces us that we are different from Nazis and shrouds the ways that we are the same. We share Hitler’s planet and some of his preoccupations; we have perhaps changed less than we think.

The Holocaust began with the idea that no human instinct was moral. Hitler described humans as members of races doomed to eternal and bloody struggle among themselves for finite resources. Hitler denied that any idea, be it religious, philosophical or political, justified seeing the other (or loving the other) as oneself. He claimed that conventional forms of ethics were Jewish inventions, and that conventional states would collapse during the racial struggle. Hitler specifically, and quite wrongly, denied that agricultural technology could alter the relationship between people and nourishment.

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The green revolution, perhaps the one development that most distinguishes our world from Hitler’s, might be reaching its limits. This is not so much because there are too many people on earth, but because more of the people on earth demand ever larger and more secure supplies of food. World grain production per capita peaked in the 1980s. In 2003, China, the world’s most populous country, became a net importer of grain. In the 21st century, world grain stocks have never exceeded more than a few months’ supply. During the hot summer of 2008, fires in fields led major food suppliers to cease exports altogether, and food riots broke out in Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. During the drought of 2010, the prices of agricultural commodities spiked again, leading to protests, revolution, ethnic cleansing and revolution in the Middle East. The civil war in Syria began after four consecutive years of drought drove farmers to overcrowded cities.

Though the world is not likely to run out of food as such, richer societies may again become concerned about future supplies. Their elites could find themselves once again facing choices about how to define the relationship between politics and science. As Hitler demonstrated, merging the two opens the way to ideology that can seem to both explain and resolve the sense of panic. In a scenario of mass killing that resembled the Holocaust, leaders of a developed country might follow or induce panic about future shortages and act preemptively, specifying a human group as the source of an ecological problem, destroying other states by design or by accident. There need not be any compelling reason for concern about life and death, as the Nazi example shows, only a momentary conviction that dramatic action is needed to preserve a way of life. 

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Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations will jar expectations about the security of resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can effect the conflations Hitler pioneered: between nature and politics, between ecosystem and household, between need and desire. A global problem that seems otherwise insoluble can be blamed upon a specific group of human beings.

Hitler was a child of the first globalisation, which arose under imperial auspices at the end of the 19th century. We are the children of the second, that of the late 20th century. Globalisation is neither a problem nor a solution; it is a condition with a history. It brings a specific intellectual danger. Since the world is more complex than a country or a city, the temptation is to seek some master key to understanding everything. When a global order collapses, as was the experience of many Europeans in the second, third and fourth decades of the 20th century, a simplistic diagnosis such as Hitler’s can seem to clarify the global by referring to the ecological, the supernatural or the conspiratorial. When the normal rules seem to have been broken and expectations have been shattered, a suspicion can be burnished that someone (the Jews, for example) has somehow diverted nature from its proper course. A problem that is truly planetary in scale, such as climate change, obviously demands global solutions – and one apparent solution is to define a global enemy. 

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Americans, when they think about the Holocaust at all, take for granted that they could never commit such a crime. The US army, after all, was on the right side of the second world war. The reality is somewhat more complicated. Franklin D Roosevelt sent racially segregated armed forces to liberate Europe. Antisemitism was prominent in the US at the time. The Holocaust was largely over by the time American soldiers landed in Normandy. Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of the hundreds of death pits of the east. The American trial of guards at the Mauthausen concentration camp, like the British trial at Bergen-Belsen, reattributed prewar citizenship to the Jewish victims. This helped later generations to overlook the basic fact that denial of citizenship, usually by the destruction of states, permitted the mass murder of Jews.

A misunderstanding about the relationship between state authority and mass killing underlay an American myth of the Holocaust that prevailed in the early 21st century: that the US was a country that intentionally rescued people from the genocides caused by overweening states. Following this reasoning, the destruction of a state could be associated with rescue rather than risk. One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice. In fact, the succession of events precipitated by the illegal invasion of a sovereign state confirmed one of the unlearned lessons of the history of the second world war.

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Though no American would deny that tanks work in the desert, some Americans do deny that deserts are growing larger. Though no American would deny ballistics, some Americans do deny climate science. Hitler denied that science could solve the basic problem of nutrition, but assumed that technology could win territory. It seemed to follow that waiting for research was pointless and that immediate military action was necessary. In the case of climate change, the denial of science likewise legitimates military action rather than investment in technology. If people do not take responsibility for the climate themselves, they will shift responsibility for the associated calamities to other people. Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible. A vicious circle can begin in which politics collapses into ecological panic. The direct consequences of climate change will reach America long after Africa, the Near East and China have been transformed. By then, it will be too late to act.

The market is not nature; it depends upon nature. The climate is not a commodity that can be traded but rather a precondition to economic activity as such. The claim of a right to destroy the world in the name of profits for a few people reveals an important conceptual problem. Rights mean restraint. Each person is an end in himself or herself; the significance of a person is not exhausted by what someone else wants from him or her. Individuals have the right not to be defined as parts of a planetary conspiracy or a doomed race. They have the right not to have their homelands defined as habitat. They have the right not to have their polities destroyed.

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In the case of climate change, we know what the state can do to tame panic. We know that it is easier and less costly to draw nourishment from plants than animals. We know that improvements in agricultural productivity continue and that the desalination of seawater is possible. We know that efficiency of energy use is the simplest way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. We know that governments can assign prices to carbon pollution and can pledge reductions of future emissions to one another and review one another’s pledges. We also know that governments can stimulate the development of appropriate energy technologies. Solar and wind energy are ever cheaper. Fusion, advanced fission, tidal stream power and non-crop-based biofuels offer real hope for a new energy economy. In the long run, we will need techniques to capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. All of this is not only thinkable but attainable.

States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated. The study of the past suggests why this would be a wise course. Time supports thought, thought supports time; structure supports plurality, and plurality, structure. This line of reasoning is less glamorous than waiting for general disaster and dreaming of personal redemption. Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible. No conception of a durable state can compete with visions of totality. No green politics will ever be as exciting as red blood on black earth.

But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant. The pluralities of nature and politics, order and freedom, past and future, are not as intoxicating as the totalitarian utopias of the last century. Every unity is beautiful as image but circular as logic and tyrannical as politics. The answer to those who seek totality is not anarchy, which is not totality’s enemy but its handmaiden. The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labour of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity and survival.

And one of favorite lines I remember often when I get complacent: 

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of error left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. … The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

-  Robbery Under Law by Evelyn Waugh

Meta Values - 32

Living a modest human life in any part of the world, we destroy non-human lives just with our modernity. 

Hence, I am mindful of not destroying anything on this planet, instead focus on the easier task of protecting everything and anything and the much harder task of creating without destroying. 

Meta Values - 31

It is much easier to ignore irrelevant stuff than to seek wisdom. 

List of some high level stuff I learned to ignore over the decades: 

1. Sports

2. News

3. Most of politics

4. Stock Tickers

5. Talks about good old days a.k.a nostalgia

6. Talks about future

7. Most of small talk

8. Learning human languages 

9. People who add no value to life

10. External validation 

11. Unnecessary luxuries and most luxuries

12. Arguing  

13. Signalling

All of the above and more, I have embraced in the past and suffered immensely. Now, I have taught myself to ignore. 

On Wisdom

Wisdom is a complicated trait. It starts with pattern recognition—using experience to understand what is really going on. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg provides a classic expression of this ability in his book The Wisdom Paradox. “Frequently when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary,” he writes. “The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

But the trait we call wisdom is more than just pattern recognition; it’s the ability to see things from multiple points of view, the ability to aggregate perspectives and rest in the tensions between them. When he was in his 60s, Cézanne built a study in Provence and painted a series of paintings of a single mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, which are now often considered his greatest works. He painted the mountain at different times of day, in different sorts of light. He wasn’t so much painting the mountain as painting time. He was also painting perception itself, its continual flow, its uncertainties and evolutions. “I progress very slowly,” he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard, “for nature reveals herself to me in complex ways; and the progress needed is endless.”

“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker. “Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.” For some late bloomers, the exploration never ends. They have a certain distinct way of being in the world, but they express that way of being at greater and greater levels of complexity as they age.

Wisdom is an intellectual trait—the ability to see reality as it really is. But it is also a moral trait; we wouldn’t call a self-centered person wise. It is also a spiritual trait; the wise person possesses a certain tranquility, the ability to stay calm when others are overwhelmed with negative emotions.

- David Brooks, You Might Be a Late Bloomer: The life secrets of those who flailed early but succeeded by old age

Happy Birthday Fluffy!

Max's little gal turned 8! 

She brings Max mannerisms to my life daily; what else I can ask for?

Happy birthday my love. 

Meta Values - 30

Meditation is overrated plus hard since there is no benchmark and so open-ended. 

Breathing exercises are underrated and easy and one can get instant feedback. 

No one tells you this: Breathing exercises are prerequisite for meditation. 

I am learning this the hard way. 

I am still work in progress. 

The Phageome - A Hidden Kingdom Within Your Gut

You’ve probably heard of the microbiome — the hordes of bacteria and other tiny life forms that live in our guts. Well, it turns out those bacteria have viruses that exist in and around them — with important consequences for both them and us.

Meet the phageome.

There are billions, perhaps even trillions of these viruses, known as bacteriophages (“bacteria eaters” in Greek) or just “phages” to their friends, inside the human digestive system. Phageome science has skyrocketed recently, says Breck Duerkop, a bacteriologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, and researchers are struggling to come to grips with their enormous diversity. Researchers suspect that if physicians could harness or target the right phages, they might be able to improve human health.

“There will turn out to be good phages as well as bad phages,” says Paul Bollyky, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Stanford Medicine. But for now, it’s still not clear how many phages occupy the gut — perhaps one for each bacterial cell, or even fewer. There are also bacteria that contain phage genes but aren’t actively producing viruses; the bacteria are just living their lives with phage DNA tagging along in their genomes.

And there are lots of phages still unidentified; scientists call them the “dark matter” of the phageome. A big part of current phage research is to identify these viruses and their host bacteria. The Gut Phage Database contains more than 140,000 phages, but that’s surely an underestimate. “Their variety is just extraordinary,” says Colin Hill, a microbiologist at University College Cork in Ireland.

Scientists find phages by sifting through genetic sequences culled from human fecal samples. That’s where researchers found the most common gut phage group, called crAssphage. (Get your mind out of the gutter — they were named for the “cross-assembly” technique that plucked their genes out of the genetic mishmash.) In a recent study, Hill and colleagues detailed a light-bulb shape for crAssphages, with a 20-sided body and a stalk to inject DNA into host bacteria.

It’s not clear whether crAssphages make a difference to human health, but given that they infect one of the most common groups of gut bacteria, Bacteroides, Hill wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Other common groups, which also infect Bacteroides, include the Gubaphage (gut bacteroidales phage) and the LoVEphage (lots of viral genetic elements).

Phageomes vary widely from person to person. They also change depending on age, sex, diet and lifestyle, as Hill and colleagues described in the 2023 Annual Review of Microbiology.

Though phages infect bacteria and sometimes kill them, the relationship is more complicated than that. “We used to think that phage and bacteria are fighting,” says Hill, “but now we know that they’re actually dancing; they’re partners.”

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Phages also keep bacterial populations from getting out of hand. The gut is an ecosystem, like the woods, and phages are bacteria predators, like wolves are deer predators. The gut needs phages like the woods needs wolves. When those predator-prey relationships are altered, disease can result. Researchers have observed phageome changes in inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), irritable bowel disease and colorectal cancer — the viral ecosystem of someone with IBS is often low in diversity, for example.

People try to re-balance the gut microbiome with diets or, in extreme medical cases, fecal transplants. Tackling phages might provide a more fine-tuned approach, Hill says. As a case in point, scientists are seeking phages that could be used therapeutically to infect the bacteria that cause ulcers.

Be grateful for the trillions of phages managing your gut’s ecosystem. Without them, Hill suggests, a few kinds of bacteria might quickly come to dominate — potentially leaving you unable to digest some foods and subject to gas and bloating.

The wild and wondrous phageome is a dance partner for bacteria and humans alike.

- More Here

PETA - The Nonprofit Is A Punchline. It’s Also Forced The World To Face Factory Farming, Animal Cruelty, & Our Own Hypocrisy.

The famous quote from Bhagavad Gita:

Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails, I manifest Myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from yuga (age) to Yuga (age). 

But this evil agains animals has been going too long but no god came. But god came in the form of PETA. 

If you are against PETA and mock them without knowing their history and the change they bought to the world then its time for you to read this piece: You’re wrong about PETA

PETA — you’ve heard of it, and chances are, you have an opinion about it. Nearly 45 years after its founding, the organization has a complicated but undeniable legacy. Known for its ostentatious protests, the group is almost single-handedly responsible for making animal rights part of the national conversation.

The scale of animal exploitation in the United States is staggering. Over 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for food every year, and it’s estimated that over 100 million are killed in experiments. Abuse of animals is rampant in the fashion industry, in pet breeding and ownership, and in zoos.

Most of this happens out of sight and out of mind, often without public knowledge or consent. PETA has fought for over four decades to put a spotlight on these atrocities and trained generations of animal activists now active throughout the country.

Peter Singer, who is widely credited for galvanizing the modern animal rights movement, told me: “I can’t think of any other organization that can compare with PETA in terms of the overall influence that it has had and still is having on the animal rights movement.”

Its controversial tactics are not above critique. But the key to PETA’s success has been its very refusal to be well-behaved, forcing us to look at what we might rather ignore: humanity’s mass exploitation of the animal world.

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The group’s rapid rise from obscurity to household name was propelled by its first two major investigations into animal abuse. Its first target, in 1981, was the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland.

At the now-defunct lab, neuroscientist Edward Taub was severing the nerves of macaques, permanently leaving them with limbs they could see but could not feel. He aimed to test whether the maimed monkeys could nevertheless be trained to use these limbs, theorizing that the research could help people regain control of their bodies after suffering a stroke or spinal cord injury.

Pacheco got an unpaid position assisting with experiments, using the time to document the conditions there. The experiments themselves, however grotesque, were legal, but the level of care for the monkeys and the sanitary conditions at the lab appeared to fall short of Maryland’s animal welfare laws. Having gathered enough evidence, PETA presented it to the state’s attorney, who pressed animal abuse charges against Taub and his assistant. Simultaneously, PETA released shocking photos Pacheco had taken of the confined monkeys to the press.

PETA protestors dressed as caged monkeys picketed the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had funded the research. The press ate it up. Taub was convicted and his lab shut down — the first time this had happened to an animal experimenter in the US.

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For its next act, in 1985, PETA released footage taken by the Animal Liberation Front, a radical group more willing to break the law, of severe abuse of baboons at the University of Pennsylvania. There, under the auspices of studying the effects of whiplash and head injuries in car accidents, baboons were fitted with helmets and strapped to tables, where a sort of hydraulic hammer smashed their heads. The footage showed lab staff mocking concussed and brain-damaged animals. The video, titled “Unnecessary Fuss,” is still available online. A slate of protests at Penn and the NIH followed, as did lawsuits against the university. The experiments were discontinued.

Almost overnight, PETA became the most visible animal rights organization in the country. By bringing the public face to face with violence carried out against lab animals, PETA challenged the orthodoxy that scientists used animals ethically, appropriately, or rationally.

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The animal experimentation and animal agriculture industries are deep-pocketed and deeply entrenched — in taking them on, PETA picked uphill, long-term fights. But bringing the same tactics against weaker opponents has brought quicker results, shifting norms on once-ubiquitous uses of animals, from fur to animal testing in cosmetics, with mega-corporations like Unilever touting PETA’s approval of their animal-friendly credentials.

The group has helped end animal use at circuses (including at Ringling Brothers, which relaunched in 2022 with only human performers) and says it has shut down most wild big cat cub petting zoos in the US. Its many-faceted approach has drawn attention to the sheer breadth of ways that humans harm animals for profit outside the public eye, like in its campaigns against the use of animals in gruesome car crash tests.

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PETA has also become, out of necessity, a force for defending the democratic right to protest. When the industries intimidated by PETA and other animal rights groups doing undercover investigations pushed so-called “ag-gag” laws to prevent whistleblowing on factory farms, the group joined a coalition including the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge them in court, winning several state-level First Amendment victories for animal rights activists and corporate whistleblowers.

Over 40 years, PETA has grown into a major institution, with a 2023 operating budget of $75 million and 500 full-time staff, including scientists, lawyers, and policy experts. It is now the de facto face of the American animal rights movement, with public opinion on the group split.

Chris Green, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (with whom I used to work at Harvard’s Animal Law and Policy Program), told me: “Like Hoover for vacuums, PETA has become a proper noun, a proxy for animal protection and animal rights.” 

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Despite almost 45 years of work, PETA has not convinced even a meaningful minority of Americans to eschew meat. Since it was founded, meat production in the country has doubled.

But to see this as a failure misses the scale of the challenge and the forces arrayed against it. Meat-eating is a deeply culturally-entrenched habit, facilitated by the ubiquity of cheap meat made possible by factory farming, the hydra-like political influence of agricultural lobbies, and the omnipresence of advertising for meat. PETA spends $75 million per year on all of its staff and campaigns, with some percentage of that aimed at opposing meat-eating. The American fast food industry alone spent about $5 billion in 2019 promoting the opposite message.

Shifting the behavior of the public on something as personal as diet is a problem no one in the animal rights movement (or the environmental or public health movements, for that matter) has solved. Peter Singer, when I speak to him, concedes that to the extent he envisioned a political project in Animal Liberation, it was one of consciousness-raising resulting in a consumer movement like an organized boycott. “The idea was that once people know, they won’t participate,” he told me. “And that hasn’t quite happened.” 

Nor has PETA’s work resulted in truly transformative federal legislation, like taxes on meat, stronger animal welfare laws, or a moratorium on federal funding for animal experiments. What’s needed to achieve this in the US is brute lobbying power. And when it comes to lobbying power, PETA, and the animal rights movement as a whole, is lacking.

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“The better metric is how many activists are getting active, how many people are engaged in non-violent sustained action on behalf of your cause,” he said. “Today, unlike 40 years ago, you have hundreds of people storming factory farms, hundreds of thousands of people voting on state-wide ballot initiatives … PETA more than any other organization is responsible for that.”

When it comes to pollinating ideas, PETA has sown countless seeds of animal rights activism. Virtually everyone I spoke to for this piece, including many critics, credited some aspect of PETA’s operations with motivating them to get involved in the movement, be it through flyers at a punk show, undercover videos disseminated on DVD or online, or Newkirk’s own writing and public speaking.

Jeremy Beckham might not have helped start the Salt Lake City VegFest, or even become vegan, if not for the PETA protest at his middle school. Bruce Friedrich, who founded the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit promoting alternative protein, was PETA’s campaign coordinator for that protest. Today, former PETA staffers teach at universities, run plant-based meat companies, and have senior positions at other nonprofits.

PETA has also shaped the work of other groups. A number of animal rights movement insiders I spoke to argued that large animal welfare groups like the Humane Society of the United States would not have committed serious resources to anti-factory farming work if not for PETA cutting a path for them. Legacy animal welfare organizations now do the grunt work — filing litigation, posting public comments on proposed regulations, getting ballot initiatives in front of voters — necessary to make incremental change. They deserve their own share of the credit for the successes of recent decades. But they have also benefited from PETA acting not only as an inspiration to them but as an animal rights bogeyman to others.

A senior staffer at a major animal welfare advocacy group told me: “Having PETA out there doing all these bombastic, questionable things, it makes other animal protection organizations look like more reasonable partners when advocating for legislation, regulations, or other institutional change.”

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We’re all living in PETA’s world

In making sense of PETA, start not with the group, but with the crisis it is trying to address. Humans mete out violence against animals on an almost unimaginable scale. It is a violence that is ubiquitous and normalized, carried out by individuals, organizations, companies, and governments, often entirely legally. Not only have few people attempted to tackle this violence seriously, most don’t even recognize it as violence. How do you challenge this status quo, when most people would rather tune out your arguments?

PETA, an imperfect but necessary messenger, offered one answer, as best as it could.

Today, more animals are bred and killed in horrendous conditions than at any other point in human existence. Over more than 40 years, PETA has not achieved its goal of ending speciesism.

But it has, nonetheless and against the odds, forever altered the debate around animal use. In the US, animals are, for the most part, out of circuses. Fur is considered taboo by many. Animal testing is divisive, with half of Americans opposed to the practice. Meat-eating has become the subject of spirited public debate. Perhaps more importantly, there are now many more groups committed to animal welfare. There is more donor money. More politicians are speaking out about factory farming.

Progress in any social movement is slow, incremental, and bumpy. But PETA has provided a blueprint. It started with a strong and nonnegotiable ethical and political goal and realized it could have the most impact over the long term through professionalization and developing a wide supporter network. It was unafraid of controversy and confrontation, making sure people knew the name PETA.

 

Humans and Other Animals - The Movie

Happy Birthday Garph!

My little Buddha turned seven today!

I have no idea what good deeds I did in this lifetime and previous ones to have you in life. 

Thank you my dear.