‘Public fascination with dissociation and its disorders has endured for many years — examples include the books “Sybil” and “The Three Faces of Eve,” both adapted into wildly popular feature films, each about a woman with “multiple personalities.” …Now people are capturing their experiences with dissociation and posting them on social media. …as conversations about mental health continue to migrate into public forums. But research suggests that much of this content isn’t providing reliable information. We asked several mental health providers to explain more about dissociation….’ (The New York Times)

One of my colleagues and mentors, Dr Judith Herman, psychiatric pioneer in trauma studies, is quoted as opining that dissociation is “way under diagnosed.” There is a sense in which she and others with similar views are right. I am constantly diagnosing dissociative disorders that have not been recognized by mental health professionals not familiar enough with their recognition, often resulting in years or decades of unsuccessful treatment and needless distress for patients whose difficulties have been misdiagnosed.

But the opposite problem is also emerging. Fueled by the easy online dissemination of psychiatric information both accurate and inaccurate, dissociation and dissociative identity disorder have joined a series of faddish diagnoses with which people self-label themselves. These have included chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, ADD and ADHD, bipolar disorder, and OCD. Encouraging patients to seek responsible diagnosis by trained and experienced professionals rather than doing the research themselves often leads to dismissive claims that we want to maintain a monopoly on esoteric knowledge that should be democratized and freely available. Self-diagnosis has come to be seen as a virtue, but it is anything but. It should not be seen in terms of the issue of access to the information. The old adage in the field, “A physician who treats themself has a fool for a patient” is truer still for a non-physician, and especially so in mental health care.

Sometimes a patient presenting with an insistence on having a particular diagnosis represents wishful thinking. The aphorism “You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear” is pervasive, but someone discerning pointed out that the “second ‘you’ in each clause is not actually ‘you’.” The important thing to figure out in their treatment is what part of them is longing to construe things that way and why. Sometimes you might simply assume that the insistence, for example, on having a dissociative disorder is because explaining things that way represents a hopeful move in the direction of applying the effective treatment. But many of us feel that there are no treatment approaches found to be of established specificity and effectiveness for dissociative experiences. This is different from the situation in, say, insisting that your life struggles are explained by having ADHD, when a request for treatment with a stimulant like Adderail is often not far behind. Or, sometimes, a patient’s investment in having a given disorder may represent a wish to be let ‘off the hook,’ in this age of rampant medicalization of behaviors and behavioral disorders and deflection of personal responsibility.

I think it is no surprise that the therapeutic advances in psychiatry creating the most excitement these days — ketamine, TMS, and psychedelic treatment — all to some degree share one appeal, that of being relatively ‘quick fixes’ in contrast to the preexisting modalities of treatment we have offered. Do they represent true exciting advances or simply what needs to be offered to appeal in times of changing political, economic, social and cultural conditions?

Related: New Study Evaluates Quality of Information on YouTube, TikTok About Dissociative Identity Disorder (American Psychiatric Association)

‘When two ions passed by each other without colliding, some of their virtual photons interacted and turned into real photons with very high energy. These photons then collided with each other and produced electron-positron pairs, which were detected by the STAR detector at RHIC. The scientists analyzed more than 6,000 such pairs and found that their angular distribution matched the theoretical prediction for matter creation from light….’ ( science and space via rightnes )

‘In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced [a problem analogous to Scylla and Charybdis]: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.

The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.

“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write….’ (Vox)

“The Witches’ Thanksgiving and the second harvest. Day and night are of equal length, looking forward to the days’ shortening. The Autumn Equinox is the time of the descent of the Goddess into the Underworld. We also bid farewell to the Harvest Lord who was slain at Lammas. Welsh legend brings us the story of Mabon, who dwells, a happy captive, in Modron’s magickal Otherworld — his mother’s womb. Only in this way can he be reborn.”

‘A newly discovered green comet is zipping by Earth and is now visible for the first time in more than 400 years.

Comet Nishimura was discovered by amateur Japanese astronomer Hideo Nishimura on Aug. 11 and named after him….’ ( Linah Mohammad via NPR )

‘Sarah Palin has a gift for uttering semi-coherent statements that make her out to be a victim of nefarious agents of the deep state. Whenever she or any of her MAGA compatriots stumble into mishaps or display questionable judgment and subsequently face repercussions, Palin is quick to weave a narrative of misunderstood heroes facing unjust punishment.

In a recent appearance on Newsmax, hosted by Eric Bolling, Palin voiced her discontent regarding the prison terms handed to members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for their attempts to overthrow the US government:

It’s so disheartening, the examples that you’ve given, Eric. It makes the populace lose a lot of faith in our government and that’s an understatement. Unfortunately, what this leads to, when we recognize the examples that you just gave, the two-tier different justice systems that apply according to politics, you know it makes the good guy think “what’s the use in being a good guy?” We’re gonna be punished, you know, we’re picked on, is what we are under this system. But we can’t feel helpless and hopeless.

Palin seems to suggest that she and her fellow pseudo-patriots should abandon their “good guy” personas. These “good guys” have been found guilty by a jury of their peers of participating in a seditious conspiracy to violently subvert the Presidential election and impose a dictator. It makes you wonder; what does she want them to do as “bad guys?”…’ (Boing Boing)

‘The rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse are skyrocketing. And it’s not just because of climate change, but we know that anytime this population is asked about climate change, it is clearly a source of severe distress,” he said. “People are deciding not to have children, people are worried about their future….’ ( Sarah Owermohle via Stat )

‘A woman in France recently enjoying coffee with her friend was struck by a small meteorite in what is considered an extremely rare event, according to local news.

The woman was chatting with her friend outside on a terrace when she was hit in the ribs by a mysterious pebble, French newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace (DNA) reported….’ ( Aristos Georgiou via Newsweek )

Update: ‘Meteorite’ that struck French woman was just a regular Earth rock

”The pictures CLEARLY show this is NOT a meteorite!’…’ ( By Robert Lea via Space, with thanks to Abby )

“Against a player you know to be naïve, you play Paper.” How to win, and why it works. ( via The MIT Press Reader )

‘He leaned across his desk, surrounded by enough high-powered computers to heat up his entire office, and stared at what could only be an impossible conclusion: Over the past fifty years, his calculations found, a third of North America’s birds had vanished. “Well, that can’t be right,” he thought. “I must have made a mistake somewhere.”

Smith, one of the hemisphere’s top specialists in bird populations, just sat for a while in his cluttered cubicle at the Canadian Wildlife Service, which was decorated with caribou antlers, a musk-ox skull, and early drawings from his twin boys. Then it dawned on him. “This would be a massive change, an absolutely profound change in the natural system,” he said. “And we weren’t even aware of it.”…’ ( Anders Gyllenhaal via Nautilus )

‘…(A) secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts (is) returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests. …’ ( Isobel Cockerell via Coda Story )

‘Who is Yevgeniy Prigozhin?

What is the Wagner Group?

What is the Wagner Group doing in Ukraine?

Where else has the Wagner Group operated?…’ (via The Washington Post )

‘Sara Imari Walker, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, has a radical new theory that purports to transform our understanding of what it is to be alive.

Most attempts to describe life use Earth as a blueprint. Instead, by pushing past cells and their chemistry to general principles about how complex objects come into existence, Walker claims to have reached a deeper understanding.

The idea, known as Assembly Theory, explains why certain complex objects have become more abundant than others by placing fresh emphasis on their histories. Now, Walker and her colleagues are testing the theory on lab-grown microworlds. In experiments, they have already discovered a threshold – namely the number of steps on the way to complexity – that seems like it must be met for something to be considered alive.

If Assembly Theory proves correct, she tells New Scientist, it will redefine what we mean by “living” things and show that we have been going about the search for life beyond Earth all wrong. In the process, she says, we could even end up creating alien life in a laboratory….’ (New Scientist)

‘Changes in the distribution of groundwater around the planet between 1993 and 2010 were enough to make Earth’s poles drift by 80 centimetres…’ (New Scientist )

‘We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it….’ (Alex Pareene via Defector )

‘Daniel Ellsberg, the U.S. military analyst whose change of heart on the Vietnam War led him to leak the classified “Pentagon Papers,” revealing U.S. government deception about the war and setting off a major freedom-of-the-press battle, died on Friday at the age of 92, his family said in a statement….’ ( Bill Trott via Reuters )

‘At a bar in a once-occupied Ukrainian village, dehumanizing messages on the walls were a stark reminder that the Kremlin wants to stamp out Ukraine and its culture….’ (The New York Times)

‘If you can’t afford an Apple Vision Pro but you’d still like to see what isn’t really there in front of you, just get yourself some tape, a ping pong ball, and a radio, try out The Ganzfeld Procedure:. Begin by turning the radio to a station playing static. Then lie down on the couch and tape a pair of halved ping-pong balls over your eyes. Within minutes, you should begin to experience a bizarre set of sensory distortions….’ (Austin Kleon)

‘I can’t deny what I have seen with my own eyes; I can’t let my own aversion to trump turn his supporters into caricatures. At the same time, they have aligned themselves with a malignant figure whose corruptions are undisguised. How can these things fit together?…’ ( Peter Wehner via The Atlantic )

‘Two studies published last year in Scientific Reports said that seeing or hearing birds could be good for our mental well-being…

Research has consistently shown that more contact and interaction with nature are associated with better body and brain health.

Birds appear to be a specific source of these healing benefits. They are almost everywhere and provide a way to connect us to nature. And even if they are hidden in trees or in the underbrush, we can still revel in their songs….’ (Richard Sima, Washington Post )

‘It turned out that Bach fugues were able to drown out the music in her head….’ (Nancy Lemann, The Paris Review)

‘Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for president with the same cynical mix of star power and misinformation that fueled trump’s rise in 2016….’ (Matt Bai, Washington Post )

‘A new book argues the court is undermining its credibility by rendering so many unsigned and unexplained decisions on its so-called ‘shadow docket.’…’ (POLITICO)

‘You could be forgiven for thinking the baseball cap was always there, perched upon humanity’s head from the very first day we walked on the Earth, as eternal as the tallest trees or the deepest ocean. But, of course, that’s not true.

In fact, long before baseball caps were the ubiquitous fashion choice for ballplayers, musicians, and Marvel heroes trying to blend in with a crowd, baseball teams didn’t even wear caps. That’s right: Had the game of baseball developed differently, perhaps we’d all be wearing big straw hats with our favorite club’s logo written across the front….’ (MLB.com)

‘What if our universe is just a tiny part of a much larger and more complex reality? What if our universe is actually inside of a black hole?…’ (Physics-Astronomy)

‘The largest explosion ever seen has been captured by astronomers—more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova, and 3 times brighter than the most radiant tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a black hole.

The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, was detected in 2020 in Hawai’i and California and has currently lasted over three years. For a frame of reference, supernovae are only visible for a few months….’ (Good News Network)

‘Leaping with joy, the Calgary Zoo proudly announced last week the birth of a Critically-Endangered lemur pup that will hopefully play a part in keeping its remarkable species on the globe with us. Born to parents Eny and Menabe, the pup is a black-and-white ruffed lemur, of which maybe 10,000 remain in the wilds of Madagascar….’ (Good News Network)

‘…If Colossal pulls off its genuinely massive undertaking, hairy, cold-adjusted Asian elephants will be tramping around Siberia within the decade. Pseudo-thylacines will be moving through the Tasmanian underbrush. But they world they’re being introduced to is very different than it was in 12,000 BCE or even the early 20th century.

The question is, what is the value in creating these proxy animals? Where should they live? Will they be created just to suffer?

“These are very smart people,” MacPhee said, “but it’s the absolute disinterest in animal welfare that bothers me the most.” Many animals will die young in the pursuit of de-extinction (like Celia’s clone), but they can also suffer abnormalities in adulthood, as did Dolly, who died at six years old after being plagued with arthritis and lung disease….’ (Gizmodo)

‘The “completely unique,” wolf-like Tasmanian tigers that thrived on the island of Tasmania before they went extinct in 1936 may have survived in the wilderness for far longer than previously thought, research suggests. There is also a small possibility they are still alive today, experts say….’ (Live Science)

‘A wildlife expedition guide has shared a video of the “most extreme bear interaction” he has seen in his 25 years on the job. The clip, which you can watch below, shows two huge male grizzly bears locked in a vicious fight for dominance at Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, Alaska….’ (Advnture)

More than eight minutes’ incredible video of the majesty and brutality, marred only by intermittent voiceover by the photographer.

‘”Phroggers” live a rent-free criminal existence hiding in occupied houses. Here’s how to live the life (or detect a phrog in your own home)….’ (Lifehacker)

‘ChatGPT is powered by machine learning systems, but those systems are guided by human workers, many of whom aren’t paid particularly well. A new report from NBC News shows that OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, has been paying droves of U.S. contractors to assist it with the necessary task of data labelling—the process of training ChatGPT’s software to better respond to user requests. The compensation for this pivotal task? A scintillating $15 per hour….’ (Gizmodo)

‘A study was published in Nature examining communication among chimpanzees. It found that chimps use “words,” and can combine the words into “syntactic-like structures,” the beginnings of phrases / sentences.

 

Chimpanzees produce ‘alarm-huus’ when surprised and ‘waa-barks’ when potentially recruiting conspecifics during aggression or hunting. Anecdotal data suggested chimpanzees combine these calls specifically when encountering snakes. Using snake presentations, we confirm call combinations are produced when individuals encounter snakes and find that more individuals join the caller after hearing the combination.

 

So chimps have a “word” for surprise/danger and a “word” for come quickly, and when they combine them when seeing a snake, they are forming a proto-sentence with the approximate meaning of “Holy crap, get over here!”…’ (Ruben Bolling, Boing Boing)

‘Vermont on Tuesday became the first state in the country to change its medically assisted suicide law to allow terminally ill people from out of state to take advantage of it to end their lives…’ (Lisa Rathke, The Associated Press via The Boston Globe)

‘The revelation raises new questions about apparent efforts to downplay and discredit accusations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh and exclude evidence that supported an alleged victim’s claims….’

— Stephanie Kirchgaessner via The Guardian

‘… they found that the parrots took advantage of the opportunity to call one another, and they typically stayed on the call for the maximum time allowed during the experiment. They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird, researchers say. Some of the parrots learned new skills from their virtual companions, including flying, foraging and how to make new sounds.

 

“I was quite surprised at the range of different behaviors,” co-author Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, an animal-computer interaction researcher at the University of Glasgow, tells the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. “Some would sing, some would play around and go upside down, others would want to show another bird their toys.” Two weak, older macaws, for example, became very close and even called out to one another “Hi! Come here! Hello!” from their respective screens.

 

The birds forged strong friendships, which researchers measured by how frequently they chose to call the same individual. Parrots who initiated the highest number of video calls also received the most calls, which suggests a “reciprocal dynamic similar to human socialization,” per the statement.

 

The experiment also brought parrots and humans closer together—on both sides of the screen. Some birds were even reported to have developed attachments to the human caretakers of their virtual friends….’

— Sarah Kuta via Smithsonian Magazine

Annals of the New Fascism (cont’d.):

‘The Texas Department of Agriculture announced two new dress codes for its employees — one for those born with a penis and the other for those born with a vagina.

 

The “Dress code and grooming policy,” according to the bizarre memorandum sent out Friday by the department’s genital-obsessed commissioner Sid Miller, states that “Employees are expected to comply with this dress code in a manner consistent with their biological gender.”

 

So, for instance, if a penis owner puts on something, say, even a necklace, that the DoA style police deem “feminine,” they will be “subject to corrective action” and “asked to leave the premises to change their clothing.” Same goes for vagina owners, who, theoretically, could be banished from the premises if caught wearing a pair of pants that the anti-freedoms commission deem “masculine.” …’

— via Boing Boing

 

‘Some of the things on the viral quiz are dangerous, while others are merely gross…’

–via Lifehacker

(Presented as a public service…)

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,

I fell in love with a wren

and later in the day with a mouse

the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,

I fell for a seamstress

still at her machine in the tailor’s window,

and later for a bowl of broth,

steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,

without recompense, without gifts,

or unkind words, without suspicion,

or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,

the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door –

the love of the miniature orange tree,

the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,

the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –

just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest

on a low branch overhanging the water

and for the dead mouse,

still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up

in a field on its tripod,

ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail

to a pile of leaves in the woods,

I found myself standing at the bathroom sink

gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,

so at home in its pale green soap dish.

I could feel myself falling again

as I felt its turning in my wet hands

and caught the scent of lavender and stone

— Billy Collins

Psychotherapists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, writing in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, argue in a way for aspects of making our profession obsolete.

There has been a demonstrable decline in the average number of confidants that most people have.  Psychotherapy has contributed to the fraying of the social fabric by implying that confidences are best saved for the ears of therapists rather than shared with close friends.  Many Americans are lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time”, as one recent study suggests, and many have heard from friends something along the lines of “This is too much for me to handle; maybe you should see a therapist.”

Overall, community has deteriorated drastically in our culture for complex reasons, including a deep distaste for depending on others and an overvaluing of independence.  This discourages reliance on friends.  Turning increasingly toward the mental health system medicalizes their problems and implies the promise of a quick solution through medication.  This emphasis on self-sufficiency imputes an almost magical knowledge and ability to therapists and hollows out the meaning of many friendships.

The skill of close friendship is disappearing and therapists must realize and remind their patients that therapy is not the perfect blueprint for everything friendship should be. It is a one-way relationship which excludes the joy of reciprocal empathy and understanding found in a true friendship. People are forgetting how to do their part to sustain friendships and therapists inadvertently make the problem worse through their skill at sustaining a relationship with very little help from the other person, creating a very unfortunate and inaccurate model of a good relationship.

Rekindling the joy of having someone one can talk to from their heart must not be forgotten as a core focus of therapy.  Therapists need to remind themselves and their patients that an important goal of therapy is, in a sense, to make itself obsolete, to make it possible for the patient to experience the same satisfaction, the same experience of being thoroughly known by another, outside of the therapy relationship.

It is important to take note of psychologist Sidney Jourard‘s 1964 observation in The Transparent Self of the necessity to have at least one person in your life with whom you “could truly be yourself”.  Relying on therapy alone will devitalize all the other relationships in the patient’s life, depriving them of degrees of connection and closeness. Enhancement of the patient’s interpersonal connectedness and quality of social supports should remain a core focus of psychotherapy.  Measures that assesses social consequences of psychological treatment should be a standard part of psychotherapy outcome studies.  Further attention should be paid to which specific psychotherapeutic approaches have the most salient effects on social connection.  The discipline called interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) stands out for an exclusive focus the interpersonal context and treatment strategies for improving close relationships.

Improvement of social adjustment is taken into account to different extents in different treatments for different health problems.  For certain conditions (depression and other mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.) all treatments including biological ones improve social adjustment.  In other conditions like schizophrenia, deliberately targeting improvement in social connections is required.  The importance of social network’s for maintaining sobriety shapes service delivery in alcohol and substance use disorders.

In the meanwhile, while awaiting the empirical research, some simple measures in all therapy relationships are likely to contribute to an improvement in patients’ engagement with others outside of the therapy.  Therapists have to pay attention to the quality of patients’ other relationships even if that is not the primary focus of their treatment. They should be explicit with their patients about the danger of refraining from important conversations in relationships with others.  They should point out that much of the relief, comfort, and perspective offered in the professional relationship can often, as easily and effectively from a friend.  With certain questions and worries, therapists should probably actually suggest, “Why don’t you take this to a friend?”

Related:

5 Differences Between Talking to a Friend vs a Therapist (avalonmalibu)

Your Friendship Will Always Be The Best Kind Of Therapy (thoughtcatalog)

How Is Talk Therapy Different From Talking to a Friend? (verywellmind)

 

‘Tropical vines are wandering, as they always have, but recent environmental changes are giving them an edge over other rainforest plants—a shift that could have enduring impacts on climates around the globe…’

–via bioGraphic

In short, woody vines evolved from trees, exploiting the advantage of not having to support their own weight by using adjacent trees to support them. Under the thrust of climate change, they are increasingly supplanting trees because they are more efficient at transporting water and finding sunlight . The worrisome thing is that they are less efficient at carbon fixation, so in a vicious circle their growth will accelerate climate change in measurable ways.

James Harbeck argues the English language would be better off without them:

• Most of them dont add anything useful.
• George Bernard Shaw did it and so can you.
• Many apostrophes are really only there for condescension (I found this his most interesting argument)
• Even when an apostrophe can add something sueful, we usually get by without it.
• They add confusion.
• Eliminating them would free them up for use as single quotes.
• It will make the rules better.

— via The Week

I rarely use apostrophes when Im typing text messages, but thats mostly because the spell checker usually adds them. And, when it doesnt, its no loss. Except to my snobbery about ‘writing right.’

(Now, on the other hand, dont get me started about the Oxford comma.)

CoCoRaHS (pronounced KO-ko-rozz) is a grassroots volunteer network of backyard weather observers of all ages and backgrounds working together to measure and map precipitation (rain, hail and snow) in their local communities. By using low-cost measurement tools, stressing training and education, and utilizing an interactive Web-site, our aim is to provide the highest quality data for natural resource, education and research applications. The only requirements to join are an enthusiasm for watching and reporting weather conditions and a desire to learn more about how weather can affect and impact our lives.Our Web page provides the ability for our observers to see their observations mapped out in “real time”, as well as providing a wealth of information for our data users.

For more information, please click here: Information about CoCoRaHS.

If you would like to sign-up as a volunteer observer and become part of our expanding network, please click here: “Join the CoCoRaHS Network“.

— via CoCoRaHS – Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network

‘The World Health Organization is gearing up to test vaccines against the Marburg virus—but the world is still not prepared to contain new viral outbreaks.

 

…Marburg shares plenty of characteristics with Ebola—the viruses are part of the same family. Like Ebola, it causes viral hemorrhagic fever, resulting in dangerous internal bleeding and organ damage. In some outbreaks, up to 90 percent of cases have been fatal; at the time of writing, five of the people in Tanzania’s eight confirmed cases have died. Symptoms take anywhere from a few days to three weeks to develop, and the virus can spread through human contact, particularly via body fluids of an infected person or corpse. Fruit-eating bats of the Rousettus family are the virus’s suspected host.

 

So similar are the symptoms that “in this village, most people believe it’s Ebola,” says Abela Kakuru, a resident of Ibaraizibu, which is a 10-minute drive from Bukoba’s affected villages. But there’s one big difference: Unlike with Ebola, no vaccines or antivirals have been approved for Marburg…’

–via WIRED

Oh, the sweet scent of desperation in the air. donald trump junior, paragon of moral fortitude, decided to take justice into his own hands on Truth Social by posting a photo of the daughter of the judge presiding over his father’s porn star hush money trial.As Junior learned from Daddy, the best way to win a case is through intimidation and badgering the family members of those in charge.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chimed in with a tweet that summed it up perfectly: “Because nothing says ‘innocent’ like threatening a judge’s family.”

— via Boing Boing

Or as a commenter said, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the orange tree…”

‘Paco Calvo…, who runs the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain where he studies plant behavior, says that to be plant blind is to fail to see plants for what they really are: cognitive organisms endowed with memories, perceptions, and feelings, capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future, able to sense and experience the world.

It’s easy to dismiss such claims because they fly in the face of our leading theory of cognitive science. That theory goes by names like “cognitivism,” “computationalism,” or “representational theory of mind.” It says, in short, the mind is in the head. Cognition boils down to the firings of neurons in our brains.

And plants don’t have brains.

“When I open up a plant, where could intelligence reside?” Calvo says. “That’s framing the problem from the wrong perspective. Maybe that’s not how our intelligence works, either. Maybe it’s not in our heads. If the stuff that plants do deserves the label ‘cognitive,’ then so be it. Let’s rethink our whole theoretical framework.”…’

— Amanda Gefter via Nautilus

Related: This is what a plant sounds like when it’s stressed

‘Listening to their distress calls could one day save water and help farmers….’

— via The Verge

‘Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars will dazzle us earthlings this week.

…Over the next couple of nights, the planets are expected to align.

It’s an opportunity to take a glimpse at a “planetary parade,” according to Rick Fienberg, senior contributing editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. And he says you won’t need a telescope — although some binoculars, an unobstructed view of the horizon, and clear skies will certainly help….’

— Manuela López Restrepo via NPR

Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes a good summary in Nautilus about the hardwired basis for people dividing the world into Us and Them, with disastrous consequences throughout human history ranging from micro aggression and innate bias to genocide justified by rationalized pretexts.

We discern Us/Them differences with stunning speed, as reflected in fMRI studies of facial processing. In particular, amygdala-based threat perception is rapidly activated when we are presented with an Other, along with reduced accuracy in the fusiform gyrus’ facial recognition. We rapidly categorize people’s threat category and ignore their individuality. Hormonally, the “pro-social” hormone oxytocin response is far greater in response to a member of your in-group. Other species of primates show similar distinctive physiological reactions when shown pictures of either strangers or members of their own group. The automatic unconscious nature of these responses and their neurobiological preservation across species attest to their evolutionarily deep-seated adaptive value.

But not only is there the amplified reaction to the other but the exaggerated self-congratulatory affinity with those of our in-group, equally hardwired, equally evolutionarily and unconsciously determined by self-preservation, and often equally irrational. As Sapolsky points out, “Us-ness also carries obligations toward the other guy”. For instance, at a sporting event, someone in need wearing one team’s colors is more likely to be helped out by a fellow fan than by an opposing one. This begs the question — what is the balance between our desire and inclination to be prosocial toward our in-group and antisocial toward outsiders?

“[A]t our core, do we want Us to do “well” by maximizing absolute levels of well being, or merely “better than,” by maximizing the gap between Us and Them? …[S]ometimes, choosing “better than” over “well” can be disastrous. It’s not a great mindset to think you’ve won World War III if afterward Us have two mud huts and three fire sticks and They have only one of each.”

“Thems” evoke some combination of a creepy impulse to avoid ( I have written before about how the feeling of ‘creepiness’ evoked by outsiders is akin to the emotion of disgust against potentially sickening rotten or infectious substances); fear-based fight or flight response to perceived threat; or ridicule and derision.  Psychological research shows that we have a complicated taxonomy of different kinds of “Thems”. Our lack of affinity toward them is categorized along different axes including benificence-malevolence and competency-incompetency. We find groups of people to be independently high (H) or low (L) in warmth and skill, generating four categories (HH, HL, LH, and LL) each of which evokes characteristic responses in us. People are also seen as belonging to multiple categories and we shift which we consider most relevant. (Unfortunately, one of the most deep-seated is skin color, of course, although “race” is not a fixed concept and some would claim it lacks any scientific validity apart from value judgment.)

Different aspects of Us-ness have different degrees of fungibility. We have no difficulty starting to jeer at the revered athlete after s/he is traded to an opposing team. But people aren’t traded from the WASPs to the BIPOCs. Although we frame our preferences for those of the in-group with cognitive rationalizations, given that they originate in emotional automatic processes the supposedly rational cognitions about them can be unconsciously manipulated. Those who practice political advocacy and advertising are masters at using subliminal influences we never recognize. As Sapolsky summarizes, “We all have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, evaporate in an instant.”

So, along the lines of how to work on making yourself an anti-racist, how can we make these dichotomies evaporate?

• Increasing contact
• Priming beforehand with counter-stereotypes
• “Replacing essentialism with individuation” (i.e. dampening our amygdala in favor of our fusiform gyrus?)
• Flattening hierarchies

Although there is calculated antisocial predation, most human aggression is not rationally planned but emotionally mediated, in response to (often unconsciously evoked) threat. So reducing violence has a lot to do with increasing awareness and deliberately countering these strong Us-Them dichotomies. As Sapolsky concludes, “[G]ive the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker…”
Or, this, which I have framed on my office wall, from Alan Ginsberg,

‘Well, while I’m here I’ll do the work — and what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.’

‘In her global exploits as a field botanist, Meg Lowman has found that strangler fig trees “occupy the most extraordinary lifestyle of any trees on the planet, bar none!”…

The fig is an ecological marvel. Although you may never want to eat one again.’

— via Nautilus

I was just admitted off the waiting list to access to Google’s Bard. I asked it for hints to recognize Bard-generated text, and then, one meta-level up, asked it to generate a potential blog post describing asking it for such hints. Here is what it gave me:

Bard: “Sure, here is a draft of a blog post about how to recognize text that Bard has generated:

How to Recognize Text Generated by Bard

‘We are a generation of adult babies. You can see it in the widely circulated – and largely untrue – idea that the human brain isn’t developed until the age of 25, which means that anyone younger is still essentially a child. It’s there in the notion that people with ADHD can’t text back their friends because they lack object permanence (a skill that babies develop at eight months old). It’s there in the narrative that, because gay people didn’t experience a normal childhood, they’re living out a second adolescence in their twenties and thirties. It’s there in the hegemony of superhero films and the cross-generational popularity of YA, whose fans insist that grown-up literature is only ever about depressed college professors having affairs.

You can see it in Disney adults; the rise of cuteness as a dominant aesthetic category; the resurgence of stuffed animals; people who identify as Hufflepuffs on their Hinge profile; people throwing tantrums when their Gorillas rider is five minutes late; people lip-syncing, with pouted lips and furrowed brows, to audio tracks of toddlers. Sometimes, it’s less about pretending to be a child and more about harking back to a lost adolescence: narrativising your life like it’s a John Green novel or an episode of Euphoria, bragging about crazzzy exploits like smoking cigarettes on a swing or doing cocaine on a Thursday; hitting 30 and still considering yourself “precocious”….’

— via Dazed

Overall, I see this trend largely as a symptom of our growing culture of narcissism, the prioritization of comfort and escapism over personal growth and responsibility in our society. I have previously written about the price we pay for what I believe is the mistaken notion that we should strive to be happy at all costs. Some of the most poignant victims of that ethos are the psychiatric patients I treat each day, suffering with no skills for tolerating negative affect and the expectation that the goal of either medication or psychotherapeutic treatment should be taking away their pain. In contrast is, depending on whom you choose to attribute it to, the Dalai Lama‘s or Haruki Murakami‘s maxim that “Pain is inevitable, suffering optional.” 

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on….’

— W.H. Auden

‘A new analysis of genetic samples from China appears to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs….’

— Katherine J. Wu via The Atlantic

Readers of Follow Me Here will be familiar with my admiration for the daily newsletter from Boston University history professor Heather Cox Richardson. Her commentary on daily developments in the authoritarian threat to democracy is immeasurably enriching, particularly on heavy news days like yesterday.

For instance, she discusses the issuance of an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes against the children of the Ukraine While I initially dismissed it as an inconsequential gesture since, of course, it is highly unlikely that Putin will be taken into custody and it will do nothing to end the war, Richardson explains how it may further isolate Russia, making it harder for leaders of other countries to associate with him just as Xi Jinping is about to make a state visit to Russia. Increasing evidence of Chinese material support for Russia’s war could lead to sanctions against its already-fragile economy.

Although the US is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that created the ICC, the warrant will also be significant here, further undermining the  American far right’s lionization of Putin, falsely portrayed as a champion of Christianity and children’s rights.

Richardson reflects on the advancing anti-democratic trends on display at the recent meeting of the Federalist Society, an organization founded in the 1980s to advocate for judicial restraint in service of the will of voters. It originally argued that years of pro-civil rights rulings by liberal judges represented corrupting democracy by “legislating from the bench”. However, now that the Supreme Court stacked with Federalist adherents overturned the right to abortion, the Federalist Society has shifted to the opposite view. The Society now believes that judges should interpret the Constitution to support right wing voters to counter “the tyranny of the majority”.

The idea that all legal and governmental processes of modern American society have been corrupted by liberal democracy and need to be destroyed and replaced was reflected in trump’s comments yesterday that the “deep state” and “not Russia” poses the greatest threat to Western civilization. This view was promptly endorsed by his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, forced out of office by lying to the FBI about his ties to Russia (before pardoned by trump). For those of you who have made the same mistake as I had of stopping paying attention to Flynn as irrelevant, he has been battling secular democracy on a far-right road tour across America to recruit an “Army of God” to put Christianity at the center of American life and governance. As a tour organizer said, “At this ReAwaken America Tour, Jesus is King [and] president donald j. trump is our president…” (As is my usual practice, I cannot bring myself to dignify trump by capitalizing references to him.)

Flynn and his supporters’ latest target is Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida, which they accuse of killing COVID patients by following FDA guidelines instead of treating them with the horse deworming drug ivermectin. They have organized a group called The Hollow 2A (complete with its own version of the Hitler Youth) calling for local activism with guns to “lawfully take back our country”. They plan to swamp the hospital board meeting this coming Monday to protest its “malpractice”. I worry we could see another January 6-like situation on Monday, and will be watching the news from Sarasota and the activities of The Hollow 2A carefully.

Many see such bombastic events orchestrated by the Orange Menace and his followers as attempts to divert attention from his mounting legal difficulties. (Despite the corruption and bankruptcy of liberal democracy, it still holds consequences worthy of inspiring fear?? Democratic civil process may not be dead yet!) The potential Sarasota insurrection occurs just as the legal noose appears to be closing more tightly around trump’s neck. CNN reported that the Manhattan district attorney’s office has been meeting all week to prepare for a possible indictment of trump as early of next week — preparations that are doubtless heavily slanted toward preempting a violent response against the New York State Court by the far right. And at the same time, the Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court threw out claims of attorney client privilege between trump and his attorney, compelling the attorney to testify in the investigation of his handling of classified documents after he left office.This may open the door to further criminal indictments.

— via Heather Cox Richardson

 

‘Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.

That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.

Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share of residents who are nonwhite, the share of white adults with a college degree, or both, are higher than the level in the nation overall. But Republicans hold a lopsided lead in the districts where the share of racial minorities and whites with at least a four-year college degree are both lower than the national level—and that is the largest single bloc of districts in the House.

This demographic divide has produced a near-partisan stalemate, with Republicans in the new Congress holding the same narrow 222-seat majority that Democrats had in the last one. Both sides will struggle to build a much bigger majority without demonstrating more capacity to win seats whose demographic and economic profile has mostly favored the other. “The coalitions are quite stretched to their limits, so there is just not a lot of space for expansion,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America.

The widening chasm between the characteristics of the districts held by each party has left the House not only closely divided, but also deeply divided….’

 

— Ronald Brownstein via The Atlantic

Is “…is not true of itself” true of itself?

Many wonder: why?

‘Across the country, conservative activists and politicians complain that drag contributes to the “sexualization” or “grooming” of children. Several states are considering restrictions…’

— via AP News

‘Whether or not masks “work” is a multilayered question — one involving a mix of physics, infectious disease biology, and human behavior. Many scientists and physicians say the Cochrane review’s findings were, in a strict sense, correct: High-quality studies known as randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, don’t typically show much benefit for mask wearers.

But whether that means masks don’t work is a tougher question — one that has revealed sharp divisions among public health researchers….’

— via Undark

‘You are not a parrot. And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this….’

— Elizabeth Weil via New York Magazine

‘Mayor Adams called on shoppers Monday to enter New York City businesses maskless from now on — a message aimed at reducing shoplifting, but one that runs counter to COVID-era prescriptions to mask up when in enclosed, public spaces….’

— via New York Daily News

Source of my unending listening pleasure.

‘Have you ever wondered when the next full moon will be? How about the first quarter moon? Now you can have all the dates and times for all the moon phases for the year at your fingertips by building your own moon phases calendar and calculator!…’

— via NASA/JPL Edu

‘A leading conservation research group found that 40% of animals and 34% of plants in the United States are at risk of extinction, while 41% of ecosystems are facing collapse….’

— Brad Brooks via Reuters

Are we on the brink of interspecies communication?

— Sophie Bushwick via Scientific American

‘Stuff has agency. Inanimate matter is not inert. Everything is always doing something. According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these truths, which many of us ignore. Non-hoarders can disregard the inherent vibrancy of matter because we live in a modern world in which the categories of matter and life are kept separate. “The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations, such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds as we speak,” she writes. Hoarders suffer at the hands of their hoards. But the rest of us do, too: that’s why a modern guru like Marie Kondo can become famous by helping us gain control over our material possessions. Bennett describes herself as something of a minimalist—but her minimalism is driven by a sense of the agency of things. “I don’t want to have such a clamor around,” she told me….’

—via The New Yorker

As one solution to the Fermi Paradox ( if they’re there, why don’t we see them?), some

‘suggest that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would be engaged in activities and locales that would make them less noticeable.

In a recent study, a German-Georgian team of researchers proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) could use black holes as quantum computers…’

— Universe Today via ScienceAlert

‘While many are watching when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might announce a run for president, he’s making noise — and drawing massive criticism — for initiatives in Florida, including proposed restrictions on press freedom….’

— Stephen Silver via 19FortyFive

Some of these are so second-nature I never stopped to think about them:

• “hanging up” the phone
• “stay tuned”
• going through the “wringer”
• on the “flip side”
• “turning” a device on or off
• a phone or alarm clock “ringing”
• “CC”ing someone on an email
• “film footage” and “that’s a wrap”
• “Cha Ching”
• “rolling up” car windows
• “taping” something to watch later
• the icon for “saving” a file

‘Schools are struggling to keep their shelves stocked as oversight by parents and school boards intensifies…’

— via The Washington Post

‘Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.

But the argument that texts ought to read “easily” slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture reader—the kind of reader who might mirror the majority of those at the helm of the publishing industry, but not the kind of reader who reflects a potential readership (or writership) at large….’

— By Helen Betya Rubinstein via Literary Hub

‘…All of this should be the encouragement studios need to return to more traditional release strategies. The alternative is a frightening one for anything not made on the biggest scale: a world where seeing movies in theaters becomes a boutique option in only the biggest cities, and where streaming deals are the only way to fund non-blockbuster projects. This would be immensely damaging to the art form and to the diversity of projects on offer for audiences, and it’s a path Hollywood can reject by putting its faith back in cinemas—and in the viewers who love going to them….’

— David Sims via The Atlantic

‘…[A]fter George Floyd’s murder — as companies faced pressure to demonstrate a commitment to racial justice — interest in the diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.) industry exploded. The American market reached an estimated $3.4 billion in 2020.

 

D.E.I. training is designed to help organizations become more welcoming to members of traditionally marginalized groups. Advocates make bold promises: Diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on.

 

The only problem? There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory training that blames dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about….’

— Jesse Singal, author of “The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.” via New York Times.

‘The remains of more than 110,000 Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Natives’ ancestors are still held by museums, universities and federal agencies.

A 1990 federal law called for remains to be returned to descendants or tribal nations.

Why haven’t these been?…’

— via ProPublica

‘Through a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, aliens could be transmitting signals using the sun, but a quick scan for such signals has turned up nothing….’

— By Adam Mann via Live Science

‘Buildworld curated a long list of buildings from around the world, the UK and the U.S. that are often said to be ugly. We identified all the design-themed tweets about these buildings on Twitter. Then we used a sentiment analysis tool called HuggingFace to analyse the percentage of tweets that were negative about each building’s design.

Key Findings:

The Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh is the world’s ugliest building, according to Twitter users.

The J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., is America’s ugliest building.

The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea, is the ugliest building outside of the UK and U.S….’

— via Builderworld

‘Italian start-up Cap_able is offering its first collection of knitted garments that shields the wearer from the facial recognition software in AI cameras without the need to cover their face.

 

Called the Manifesto Collection, the clothing line includes hoodies, pants, t-shirts, and dresses.

 

Each garment sports a pattern, known as an “adversarial patch,” which was developed by AI algorithms to confuse facial recognition software in real-time and protect the wearer’s privacy….’

— Pesala Bandara via PetaPixel

‘If a new variant of concern were to materialize, a version of the virus that fundamentally eroded our immune systems’ ability to fend off SARS-2 requiring a rapid updating of Covid vaccines, the public would need to take note… But in the absence of that, it’s really hard to see how it is actionable, or it’s useful, really, to anybody to know that oh, well, XBB.1.5 is taking over when we thought it might be BQ.1.1….’

— Helen Branswell via STAT

‘Analyses have found that 12 people—coined the “disinformation dozen”—are responsible for 65% of misleading claims, rumors, and lies about COVID-19 vaccines on social media. Their impact is most effective on Facebook (account for up to 73% of Facebook rumors), but also bleed into Instagram and Twitter. A scientific study published in Nature found that 1 in 4 anti-COVID-19 vaccine tweets originated from the so-called Children’s Health Defense—which is controlled by one man….’

— Katelyn Jetelina via Your Local Epidemiologist

‘Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields. Here, we analyse these claims at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric—the CD index—that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics. Subsequently, we link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view. We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology….’

— (abstract) Park, Leahy, and Funk in Nature

 

‘…The putsch called for… a massive army of veterans – funded by $30m from Wall Street titans and with weapons supplied by Remington Arms – to march on Washington, oust Roosevelt and the entire line of succession, and establish a fascist dictatorship backed by a private army of 500,000 former soldiers.

 

…[T]he coup was instigated after FDR eliminated the gold standard in April 1933, which threatened the country’s wealthiest men who thought if American currency wasn’t backed by gold, rising inflation would diminish their fortunes. …[T]he coup was sponsored by a group who controlled $40bn in assets – about $800bn today – and who had $300m available to support the coup and pay the veterans. The plotters had men, guns and money – the three elements that make for successful wars and revolutions.

 

…The planned coup was thwarted when …reported… to J Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who reported it to FDR. How seriously the “Wall Street putsch” endangered the Roosevelt presidency remains unknown, with the national press at the time mocking it as a “gigantic hoax” and historians like Arthur M Schlesinger Jr surmising “the gap between contemplation and execution was considerable” and that democracy was not in real danger. Still, there is much evidence that the nation’s wealthiest men – Republicans and Democrats alike – were so threatened by FDR’s policies that they conspired with antigovernment paramilitarism to stage a coup…’

— via Getpocket

‘During a Monday night game against the Cincinnati Bengals, 24-year-old Hamlin went into cardiac arrest after tackling another player. Medical personnel administered CPR on the field and restored his heartbeat, after which he was transferred to a nearby hospital, where he remains in critical condition.

As players and coaches of both teams gathered, some shedding tears and others circling in prayer, and fans expressed concern over Hamlin’s condition, figures on the far right immediately began spreading unproven claims that the COVID-19 vaccine was responsible for Hamlin’s collapse.

“This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly,” said Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Twitter, referencing a conspiracy theory that has been spread by right-wing pundits and Republicans like Sen. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) that COVID vaccines are causing athletes to die on the field.

Other far right figures — including conservative former candidates for political office, pundits and anti-vaccine figures — also joined in spreading the lies. “Prior to 2021, Athletes collapsing on the field was NOT a normal event. This is becoming an undeniable (and extremely concerning) pattern,” wrote far right activist Lauren Witzke, the failed Republican nominee for Senate in Delaware in 2020.

Platforms like Telegram were flooded with similar comments, with some accounts citing disgraced cardiologist Peter McCullough, who has falsely touted ivermectin as a cure for COVID-19, after McCullough said in an interview that the vaccine was related to Hamlin’s collapse….’

— via Truthout

Some Thoughts on the “Inspiresting”

A thoughtful history of the rise and fall of the TED talk phenomenon, and why, by Melbourne-based writer and journalist Oscar Schwartz, himself a TED veteran.

It is common knowledge that, beginning in the early 2000’s, TED talks began to take on a particular rhetorical style codified by its entrepreneur owner Chris Anderson.  In his book,

‘…Anderson insists anyone is capable of giving a TED-esque talk. You just need an interesting topic and then you need to attach that topic to an inspirational story. Robots are interesting. Using them to eat trash in Nairobi is inspiring. Put the two together, and you have a TED talk. ‘

Schwartz calls this fusion the “inspiresting,” finding it

‘earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism. Politically, the inspiresting performs a certain kind of progressivism, as it is concerned with making the world a better place, however vaguely.’

The problem is that, in Anderson’s view, all of this can be achieved without any serious transfers of power.  Politics is dismissed as toxic “tribal thinking” destroying the world changing potential of the free movement of ideas.  And TED was not the sole purveyor of the Inspiresting.  As Swartz cited:

‘Malcolm Gladwell was inspiresting. The blog Brain Pickings was inspiresting. Burning Man was (once) inspiresting. Alain de Botton, Oliver Sacks, and Bill Bryson were masters of the inspiresting. “This American Life” and “Radiolab,” and maybe narrative podcasting as a form, are inspiresting.’

Suddenly, circa 2010, everyone was sharing TED talks and TED (a not-for-profit) revenues  were exploding.  Fortune and fame were made from TED talks and the book contracts and speaking engagements they precipitated.  But, soon enough, quality control was compromised, not the least through the 2009 creation of the TEDx franchise allowing licensees to use the brand platform to stage independent events around the world. But it became increasingly clear that the ’emperor had no clothes.’ “Inspiresting” reasoning and rhetoric began to be pilloried by science bloggers and social critics. Evgeny Morozov wrote in The New Republic, “TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas worth spreading. Instead it has become something ludicrous.” A long profile of Anderson in The New York Times Magazine called TED “the Starbucks of intellectual conglomerates.” 

By 2013, Benjamin Bratton, a scientist giving a pitch for research funding before a donor, described — in a TED talk! —  being dismissed because his complex presentation (not in the TED-publicized rhetorical style) was criticized by the recipient as “uninspiring”, “not enough like Malcolm Gladwell”. Bratton described TED’s influence on intellectual culture as “taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing.”  He opined, “this is not the solution to our most frightening problems.  Rather this is one of our most frightening problems.”

TED became, some would say, little more than an ironic meme. For instance, you might post something banal in email, social media or your blog and close by saying, “Thank you for listening to my TED talk.”

The backlash against TED broadened to embrace the increasingly evident fact that the technocratic elite was just not playing a part in solving the world’s big problems.  Twitter had failed to bring democracy to the Middle East.  Social media were only free because our personal data was being mined and sold to advertisers.  Obama was not the political savior many had hoped him to be, especially around the banking crisis.  Upward mobility, social equality, and the utopian promises of technology were empty. TED talks continued, endlessly re-articulating Tech’s promise without any serious reflection, as if they could create the world out of nothing, with willpower and well-crafted oratory alone.  Boldness of vision was not tempered by much if any recognition of realities, particularly political realities, and the TED philosophy became little more than a magnet for overblown ambition and narcissism.

And in the meantime Trump became the US president. 

‘Yet the TED progeny continued to offer bold, tech-centric predictions with unfaltering confidence.  And they have continued to do so.…

[A]s the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy.’

— via The Drift

‘…[T]here is an argument, albeit one that would only comfort an economist, that today’s crises are both rarer and less severe than those of even the recent past. Consider the mid-1990s, a time that Americans tend to remember as one of global stability and optimism. If today were really a time of exceptional turmoil, then surely that world would look better in comparison?

In reality, the opposite is true. The mid-1990s saw genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. Years of war in Europe amid Yugoslavia’s collapse. Devastating famines in Sudan, Somalia and North Korea. Civil wars in over a dozen countries. Crackdowns and coups too numerous to mention.Such events were in fact more common in the 1990s than today. Prior decades were, in most ways, even worse.

But you are unlikely to remember every decades-old disaster as vividly as you might be able to recount, say, a terror attack or political crisis from this week.And reductions in such crises have only reduced the world’s problems, not erased them. No one wants to cheer a famine that is less severe than it might have been in the past, especially not the families whom it puts at risk, and especially knowing that future conflicts or climate-related crises could always cause another.

Still, the feeling that the world is getting worse is not universal. In fact, it is mostly held by residents of rich countries like the United States. Survey after survey has found that a majority of people in low-income and middle-income countries like Kenya or Indonesia tend to express optimism about the future, for both themselves and their societies…’

— via The New York Times

‘The calm deposition of the rings… has gone on millimeter by millimeter for millennium after millennium — advancing ripples in the tide of time….’

— Maria Popova via The Marginalian

Mr. Tyson, who began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and went on to become a revered figure in his home country, celebrated both for his music and for his commitment to the culture of Canada’s ranch country, died on Thursday at his ranch in southern Alberta. He was 89.

His family said in a statement that he died from “ongoing health complications” but did not specify further.

Mr. Tyson — whose song “Four Strong Winds” was voted the most essential Canadian piece of music by the listeners of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation public radio network in 2005 — lived most of his life as both a rancher and a musician….’

— via New York Times

This is the annual update of my New Year post, a longstanding FmH tradition. Please let me know if you find any dead links:

I once ran across a January 1st Boston Globe article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article. Especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions.

A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point. It is weighted toward eating traditions, which is odd because, unlike most other major holidays, the celebration of New Year’s in 21st century America does not seem to be centered at all around thinking about what we eat (except in the sense of the traditional weight-loss resolutions!) and certainly not around a festive meal. But…

Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.

Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”

The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:

“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors.
First Footing: The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”

Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.

In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru and elsewhere in South America, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. In Greece, there is a traditional New Year’s Day sweetbread with a silver coin baked into it. All guests get a slice of the bread and whoever receives the slice with the coin is destined for good fortune for the year. At Italian tables, lentils, oranges and olives are served. The lentils, looking like coins, will bring prosperity; the oranges are for love; and the olives, symbolic of the wealth of the land, represent good fortune for the year to come.

A New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.

In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. (If any of the grapes happens to be sour, the corresponding month will not be one of your most fortunate in the coming year.) The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year.
In Rio,

The crescent-shaped Copacabana beach… is the scene of an unusual New Year’s Eve ritual: mass public blessings by the mother-saints of the Macumba and Candomble sects. More than 1 million people gather to watch colorful fireworks displays before plunging into the ocean at midnight after receiving the blessing from the mother-saints, who set up mini-temples on the beach.

When taking the plunge, revelers are supposed to jump over seven waves, one for each day of the week.

This is all meant to honor Lamanjá, known as the “Mother of Waters” or “Goddess of the Sea.” Lamanjá protects fishermen and survivors of shipwrecks. Believers also like to throw rice, jewelry and other gifts into the water, or float them out into the sea in intimately crafted miniature boats, to please Lamanjá in the new year.

In many northern hemisphere cities near bodies of water, people also take a New Year’s Day plunge into the water, although of course it is an icy one! The Coney Island Polar Bears Club in New York is the oldest cold-water swimming club in the United States. They have had groups of people enter the chilly surf since 1903.

Ecuadorian families make scarecrows stuffed with newspaper and firecrackers and place them outside their homes. The dummies represent misfortunes of the prior year, which are then burned in effigy at the stroke of midnight to forget the old year. Bolivian families make beautiful little wood or straw dolls to hang outside their homes on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck.

In China, homes are cleaned spotless to appease the Kitchen God, and papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune. Large papier mache dragon heads with long fabric bodies are maneuvered through the streets during the Dragon Dance festival, and families open their front doors to let the dragon bring good luck into their homes.

The Indian Diwali, or Dipawali, festival, welcoming in the autumnal season, also involves attracting good fortune with lights. Children make small clay lamps, dipas, thousands of which might adorn a given home. In Thailand, one pours fragrant water over the hands of elders on New Year’s Day to show them respect.

Elsewhere:

• a stack of pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France.
• banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year, where it is also a good sign to find your doorstep heaped with broken dishes on New Year’s morning. Old dishes are saved all years to throw at your friends’ homes on New Year’s Eve. The more broken pieces you have, the greater the number of new friends you will have in the forthcoming twelve months.
• going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland.
• making sure the First Footer, the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland, is a tall dark haired visitor.
• water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits.
• cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin
• it is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.
• Belgian farmers wish their animals a Happy New Year for blessings.
• In Germany and Austria, lead pouring” (das Bleigießen) is an old divining practice using molten lead like tea leaves. A small amount of lead is melted in a tablespoon (by holding a flame under the spoon) and then poured into a bowl or bucket of water. The resulting pattern is interpreted to predict the coming year. For instance, if the lead forms a ball (der Ball), that means luck will roll your way. The shape of an anchor (der Anker) means help in need. But a cross (das Kreuz) signifies death. This is also a practice in parts of Finland, apparently.
• El Salvadoreans crack an egg in a glass at midnight and leave it on the windowsill overnight; whatever figure it has made in the morning is indicative of one’s fortune for the year.
• Some Italians like to take part in throwing pots, pans, and old furniture from their windows when the clock strikes midnight. This is done as a way for residents to rid of the old and welcome in the new. It also allows them to let go of negativity. This custom is also practiced in parts of South Africa, the Houston Press adds.
• In Colombia, walk around with an empty suitcase on New Year’s Day for a year full of travel.
• In the Philippines, all the lights in the house are turned on at midnight, and previously opened windows, doors and cabinets throughout the house are suddenly slammed shut, to ward off evil spirits for the new year.
• In Russia a wish is written down on a piece of paper. It is burned and the ash dissolved in a glass of champagne, which should be downed before 12:01 am if the wish is to come true.
• Romanians celebrate the new year by wearing bear costumes and dancing around to ward off evil
• In Turkey, pomegranates are thrown down from the balconies at midnight for good luck.

“It’s a bit bizarre when you think about it. A short British cabaret sketch from the 1920s has become a German New Year’s tradition. Yet, although The 90th Birthday or Dinner for One is a famous cult classic in Germany and several other European countries, it is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, including Britain, its birthplace.” (Watch on Youtube, 11 min.)

So if the Germans watch British video, what do you watch in Britain? A number of sources have suggested that it is Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, “even though it’s awful and everyone hates it.”

On a related theme, from earlier in the same week, here are some of the more bizarre Christmas rituals from around the world. 

Some history; documentation of observance of the new year dates back at least 4000 years to the Babylonians, who also made the first new year’s resolutions (reportedly voews to return borrowed farm equipment were very popular), although their holiday was observed at the vernal equinox. The Babylonian festivities lasted eleven days, each day with its own particular mode of celebration. The traditional Persian Norouz festival of spring continues to be considered the advent of the new year among Persians, Kurds and other peoples throughout Central Asia, and dates back at least 3000 years, deeply rooted in Zooastrian traditions.Modern Bahá’í’s celebrate Norouz (”Naw Ruz”) as the end of a Nineteen Day Fast. Rosh Hashanah (”head of the year”), the Jewish New Year, the first day of the lunar month of Tishri, falls between September and early October. Muslim New Year is the first day of Muharram, and Chinese New Year falls between Jan. 10th and Feb. 19th of the Gregorian calendar.

The classical Roman New Year’s celebration was also in the spring although the calendar went out of synchrony with the sun. January 1st became the first day of the year by proclamation of the Roman Senate in 153 BC, reinforced even more strongly when Julius Caesar established what came to be known as the Julian calendar in 46 BC. The early Christian Church condemned new year’s festivities as pagan but created parallel festivities concurrently. New Year’s Day is still observed as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision in some denominations. Church opposition to a new year’s observance reasserted itself during the Middle Ages, and Western nations have only celebrated January 1 as a holidy for about the last 400 years. The custom of New Year’s gift exchange among Druidic pagans in 7th century Flanders was deplored by Saint Eligius, who warned them, “[Do not] make vetulas, [little figures of the Old Woman], little deer or iotticos or set tables [for the house-elf] at night or exchange New Year gifts or supply superfluous drinks [another Yule custom].” (Wikipedia)

The tradition of the New Year’s Baby signifying the new year began with the Greek tradition of parading a baby in a basket during the Dionysian rites celebrating the annual rebirth of that god as a symbol of fertility. The baby was also a symbol of rebirth among early Egyptians. Again, the Church was forced to modify its denunciation of the practice as pagan because of the popularity of the rebirth symbolism, finally allowing its members to cellebrate the new year with a baby although assimilating it to a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. The addition of Father Time (the “Old Year”) wearing a sash across his chest with the previous year on it, and the banner carried or worn by the New Year’s Baby, immigrated from Germany. Interestingly, January 1st is not a legal holiday in Israel, officially because of its historic origins as a Christian feast day.

Auld Lang Syne (literally ‘old long ago’ in the Scottish dialect) is sung or played at the stroke of midnight throughout the English-speaking world (and then there is George Harrison’s “Ring Out the Old”). Versions of the song have been part of the New Year’s festivities since the 17th century but Robert Burns was inspired to compose a modern rendition, which was published after his death in 1796. (It took Guy Lombardo, however, to make it popular…)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
And here’s a hand, my trusty friend
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne

Here’s how to wish someone a Happy New Year around the world:

• Arabic: Kul ‘aam u antum salimoun
• Brazilian: Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo means “Good Parties and Happy New Year”
• Chinese: Chu Shen Tan Xin Nian Kuai Le (thanks, Jeff)
• Czechoslavakia: Scastny Novy Rok
• Dutch: Gullukkig Niuw Jaar
• Finnish: Onnellista Uutta Vuotta
• French: Bonne Annee
• German: Prosit Neujahr
• Greek: Eftecheezmaenos o Kaenooryos hronos
• Hebrew: L’Shannah Tovah Tikatevu
• Hindi: Niya Saa Moobaarak
• Irish (Gaelic): Bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit
• Italian: Buon Capodanno
• Khmer: Sua Sdei tfnam tmei
• Laotian: Sabai dee pee mai
• Polish: Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
• Portuguese: Feliz Ano Novo
• Russian: S Novim Godom
• Serbo-Croatian: Scecna nova godina
• Spanish: Feliz Ano Nuevo
• Swedish: Ha ett gott nytt år
• Turkish: Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
• Vietnamese: Cung-Chuc Tan-Xuan

[If you are a native speaker, please feel free to offer any corrections or additions!]

Which of these customs appeal to you? Are they done in your family, or will you try to adopt any of them? However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come… and eat hearty!

[thanks to Bruce Umbaugh (here or here) for original assistance]

Related?

• Lucky Foods for the New Year (wholefoodsmarket.com)
• New Year’s Day food traditions around the world (examiner.com)
• Lucky foods to Eat on New Year’s Day (kasamba.com)
• 10 Good Luck Foods (beatcancer2010.wordpress.com)
• Good luck food for New Year’s Day (mnn.com)
• New Year’s Eve Traditions 3 (languagelearnersandteachers.wordpress.com)
• How to Manifest Good Luck in the New Year (norinedresser.wordpress.com)
• New Year’s foods for prosperity and luck?
• What’s Cooking in January
• Pickle, Peach, Carp Drops Mark New Year
• It’s New Year’s Eve, You’re Drunk and Damnit, You Drove
• Regency Christmas Traditions: Hogmanay (trsparties.com)

‘…a 2:24 p.m. tweet in which trump blasted Pence for not having the “courage” to overturn the election results could “pass” the Supreme Court’s bar to prove his involvement in inciting an insurrection…’

— via Newsweek

‘Human personality is a broad spectrum, and there will always be those willing to do whatever it takes. However, the hypothesis positing a parasite-based alternative is fun to consider. It’s speculated (one person has speculated it) that the ‘alpha dog’ business mentality may be a side effect of Toxoplasma gondii, a parasitic microorganism that spreads through any number of varied animal hosts and influences their behavior in odd but ultimately self-serving ways. Infected wolves are more likely to break away from packs and go it alone… and apparently, infected humans are more likely to major in business and start their own companies. Does it sound a bit baroque? Absolutely. But when you look at the recent business decisions of Elon Musk, it seems plausible brain parasites might be at play……’

— via Boing Boing

I’ve written before about my fascination with Toxoplasma infection: here, here, and here, for example, if you want to delve further into the issue.

‘South Koreans will soon become a year or two younger, following an official change to the country’s age-counting system.

On Thursday, the country’s parliament, called the National Assembly, passed a set of bills requiring the use of the international age-counting system, where age is based on birth date.

South Korea currently uses three age-counting systems, but most citizens abide by the “Korean age,” where a person is 1 year old as soon as they are born, and gain one year on every New Year’s Day. And a baby born on Dec. 31 would be considered 2 years old the next day.

The change will go into effect this coming June….’

— Mary Yang via NPR

Portraits of recently extinct species

‘The history of modern extinctions is inseparable from the history of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. Of the roughly 800 animal species estimated to have gone extinct since 1500 — and that is only counting those documented — many met tellingly analogous ends: they have been hunted to death for sustenance or sport, killed off by intentionally introduced species and those stowed away on imperial ships, or forced to leave their native habitats as forests were cleared for fields to feed distant metropoles. Despite an enduring fantasy that humans are somehow distinct from the animal kingdom, the loss of biodiversity heralds a grave threat to our species as well — a species that relies upon an intimate interconnection with biological systems for continued life on this planet….’

— via The Public Domain Review

Consultant Tome Whitwell “learns many learnings” each year and publishes 52 of them in a year-end list that is really much more fascinating than most year-end lists. There are also links to his previous years’ lists in the post. 

— via Medium

I have directly linked below to some of the items I found interesting.

‘Americans also have a morbid fascination with famous people who die by suicide. Perhaps such a death speaks to a gnawing sense that there is a spiritual void at the epicenter of the capitalistic American dream: You can have it all and still be miserable. Since Bourdain died in a hotel room in Alsace, France, in 2018, there’s been something of a tug-of-war about how to remember him. Do we focus on the rich body of work that showed us the virtues of boundless curiosity and human resilience? Or do we obsess over the mystery of why the same person who showed us all those things ultimately said no to his own life? How do we reconcile the endless journey Anthony Bourdain took us on with the sad destination that it reached?…’

— Ben Rhodes via The Atlantic

‘We can be relieved, for the moment, that the right is in disarray. But we should not lose sight of the fact that some of the worst people in national and global politics are reorganizing and retrenching. They will be back….’

— via The Atlantic