‘Henry Kissinger, who died on Nov. 29, 2023 at the age of 100, stood as a colossus of U.S. foreign policy. His influence on American politics lasted long beyond his eight-year stint guiding the Nixon and Ford administrations as national security adviser and secretary of state, with successive presidents, presidential candidates and top diplomats seeking his advice and approval ever since.

But his mark extends beyond the United States. Kissinger’s policies in the 1970s had immediate impact on countries, governments and people across South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Sometimes the fallout – and it was that – lasted decades; in some places it continues to be felt today. Nowhere is that more true than Cambodia.

…’ ( Sophal Ear via The Conversation )

‘What his victory in America’s election would mean…’ ( via The Economist )

‘The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, almost all of it from cars and trucks. Yet the nation is starkly divided on the solution. An overlay placed on the states most hostile to electric vehicle policies would dovetail almost perfectly with those that voted for Donald Trump in 2020. According to a trade association quarterly report, deep red Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Mississippi, and North Dakota have the nation’s lowest rates of EV sales. And good luck finding a public charging station in the Deep South or the Great Plains….’ ( By Renée Loth via Boston Globe )

Almost every values-based difference in American society dovetails neatly with the Red-Blue divide. The only way to avoid being brutalized by the culture wars is to retreat to your corner. Incontrovertible to me that we don’t live in one country… and probably shouldn’t.

Not exactly, although there are some near misses. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the words that are nearly universal are mostly related to foods that originated in one place, and then spread around the world. Not having developed independently, you would not expect their names to have developed independently. ( Cindy Blanco via DuoLingo Blog )

‘Some neuroscientists now believe that the drugs’ mental-health benefits don’t come from tripping….’ ( Cornell-Weill director of psychopharmacology Dr Richard A. Friedman via The Atlantic )

The toolbar is irretrievable but following the space station in orbit. Surprisingly bright and visible from earth with binoculars. ( By Robert Lea published 1 day ago via Space )

‘Explaining the phenomenon of pareidolia, which causes us to see facial patterns in ordinary objects and surfaces. I also discuss illusions, paintings, and psychological research related to it….’

(Duncan Clarke via YouTube)

I have previously written on this phenomenon, which I love. Clarke says he thinks it arises from the fact that we are exposed to faces early and thus overlearn the skill of recognizing them. I think it is more than that — pattern recognition is not all one thing and face perception uses different, and favored, ‘software’ than object perception given its evolutionary advantages.

In observance of Guy Fawkes Day, as I have written in years past:

“Don’t you remember the 5th of November Is gunpowder treason and plot? I don’t see the reason why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot A stick and a stake, for Queen Victoria’s Sake I pray master give us a faggit If you dont give us one well take two The better for us and the worse for you”

Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night (Bonfire Night or Gunpowder Night), the anniversary of the ambitious but abortive Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a failed attempt by a group of persecuted English Catholics to assassinate Anglican King James I of England and. VI of Scotland in order to replace him with a Catholic. Guy Fawkes, who was left in charge of the gunpowder placed underneath the House of Lords, was discovered and arrested and the plot unmasked. Fawkes, along with other surviving conspirators, was executed in January 1606 (hung, drawn and quartered).

A law establishing the anniversary of the thwarted plot as a day of thanksgiving was quickly passed and became the annual occasion for anti-Catholic fervor, with the ringing of church bells and the lighting of bonfires, to the point of forgetting the deliverance of the monarch. “Although Guy Fawkes’ actions have been considered acts of terrorism by many people, cynical Britons… sometimes joke that he was the only man to go to Parliament with honourable intentions.”

Fun fact: it seems that the term Guy (which now simply refers to a man or even more broadly a person) became a pejorative to describe someone grotesque because of the conception of Guy Fawkes’ villainy.

Celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day persist through the British Isles and become occasions for revelling in the burning of effigies (“guys”) of the hate figures of the day alongside Fawkes.The ritual has included Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Boris Johnson, donald trump, and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein among others.

The annual festival has become much more about festive fun than solemn remembrance:

“One important aspect of the celebration is certainly venting! Shouting into the nights air is a wonderful release and an important part of the celebration through the centuries. There is something magic and healing about noise — cannons, bells and chants. Divide the group and assign each a different chant. Let them compete for noise and drama. Great fun. The chants are important aspects of freedom of expression and freedom to hold one’s own beliefs. Like much of that which is pure celebration chants need not be considered incantations or wishes of ill will at all times. Taken with the rest of celebration they contribute to a much more abstract whole where fun is the primary message for most.”

Some say that the celebration of Guy Fawkes Night helped shape the modern tradition of trick or treating, although it has ancient pre-Christian origins. Some American colonists celebrated Guy Fawkes Day and those fleeing the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s helped popularize Hallowe’en. By the 19th century, British children wearing masks and carrying effigies of Fawkes were roaming the streets on the evening of November 5 asking for “a penny for the Guy,” with any money gathered being used to buy fireworks — the explosives never used by the plotters —  to be set off while the Guy was immolated on the bonfire.

Many feel that Guy Fawkes (Bonfire Night) has a particularly Pagan feel. As with Hallowe’en, it may be no accident that Guy Fawkes Day coincides with the Celtic festival of Samhain, one of the moon festivals featuring large bonfires. Some think of Guy Fawkes Night as a sort of detached Samhain celebration and the effigies of Guy Fawkes burned on the bonfires compare with the diabolical images associated with Samhain or Hallowe’en. But, as one fan says, “Guy Fawkes Night has never sold out to Hallmark… Halloween is all about fakery – makeup, facepaint, costumes, imitation blood. Fireworks Night is about very real, very powerful, very hot flames.”

But the folklore of the holiday does continue to morph. We don’t celebrate the thwarting of the plot because we are happy with our oppressive rulers, and Guy Fawkes has gone from being reviled as a villain to revered as a hero. His reputation has gone from that of a religious extremist to one of a populist underdog, especially after Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta and its 2005 film adaptation, in which the masked knife-wielding V, who also plots to bomb the Houses of Parliament, lashes out against the fascist state in a dystopian future Britain. (It was Moore’s collaborator David Lloyd who developed the idea of dressing V as Guy Fawkes.) Since then, protestors have donned V’s mask as an all-purpose badge of rebellion in anti-government demonstrations and the anti-capitalist movement, particularly Occupy. The hacktivist group Anonymous has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask as their symbol. In 2011, it was the top-selling mask on Amazon and has been seen throughout the ongoing Hong Kong protests against Chinese repression. David Lloyd commented, “The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny – and I’m happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way.”

Here is a collection of verse in celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. You are also welcome to don your masks, listen for some fireworks, scan the horizon from a high place for bonfires dedicated to smashing the state, or free yourself from your unwanted burdens by watching them go up in flames.

‘Watching these Hot Wheels toy cars zoom down an empty waterslide made me feel like a kid again for 5 minutes. I love how the video is filmed from the POV of a camera rolling down the slide with the cars, making it feel like as a viewer, you’re sitting on top of it….’ (Boing Boing)

This is surprisingly comforting, and what a great collection of Hot Wheels cars!

‘It’s a crazy idea—and it unfortunately needs debunking…’ (Antonio De Loera-Brust, former special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State,via Foreign Policy )

A reprise of my traditional Hallowe’en post of past years:

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve.

All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North America, given how plentiful they were here. The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Nowadays, a reported 99% of cultivated pumpkin sales in the US go for jack-o-lanterns.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated with All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition, and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (You may be familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.)

Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well. As this article in The Smithsonian reviews, ‘In the United States, Halloween is mostly about candy, but elsewhere in the world celebrations honoring the departed have a spiritual meaning…’

Reportedly, more than 80% of American families decorate their homes, at least minimally, for Hallowe’en. What was the holiday like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has now become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? Before the era of the pay-per-view ’spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] put it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like? One issue may be that, as NPR observed,

‘”Adults have hijacked Halloween… Two in three adults feel Halloween is a holiday for them and not just kids,” Forbes opined in 2012, citing a public relations survey. True that when the holiday was imported from Celtic nations in the mid-19th century — along with a wave of immigrants fleeing Irelands potato famine — it was essentially a younger persons’ game. But a little research reveals that adults have long enjoyed Halloween — right alongside young spooks and spirits.’

Is that necessarily a bad thing? A 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul, young or old.

“Maybe at one time Hallowe’en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe’en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

The Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I’ve seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the evocative classics of the ’30’s and ’40’s when most eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here’s what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. “Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers.”

Boing Boing does homage to a morbid masterpiece of wretched existential horror, two of the tensest, scariest hours of my life repeated every time I watch it:

‘…The Thing starts. It had been 9 years since The Exorcist scared the living shit out of audiences in New York and sent people fleeing into the street. Really … up the aisle and out the door at full gallop. You would think that people had calmed down a bit since then. No…

The tone of The Thing is one of isolation and dread from the moment it starts. By the time our guys go to the Norwegian outpost and find a monstrous steaming corpse with two merged faces pulling in opposite directions the audience is shifting in their seats. Next comes the dog that splits open with bloody tentacles flying in all directions. The women are covering their eyes….’

Meanwhile, what could be creepier in the movies than the phenomenon of evil children? Gawker knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of the cinematic young:

‘In celebration of Halloween, we took a shallow dive into the horror subgenre of evil-child horror movies. Weird-kid cinema stretches back at least to 1956’s The Bad Seed, and has experienced a resurgence recently via movies like The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, and Cooties. You could look at this trend as a natural extension of the focus on domesticity seen in horror via the wave of haunted-house movies that 2009’s Paranormal Activity helped usher in. Or maybe we’re just wizening up as a culture and realizing that children are evil and that film is a great way to warn people of this truth. Happy Halloween. Hope you don’t get killed by trick-or-treaters.’

In any case: trick or treat! …And may your Hallowe’en soothe your soul.

Related:

• Tricks, Treats and Traditions – Some Useful Tips for Hallowe’en (southeasttourguides.co.uk)
• Weighing In on Hallowe’en (4mothers1blog.wordpress.com)
• Preparing for All Hallow’s Eve (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
• OCTOBER FINALE! Hallowe’en! (pm27.wordpress.com)
• Tricksey Treats (jasperlocalfood.wordpress.com)
• Hallowe’en Night divination game. (jenniferlinton.com)
• Hallowe’en Weekend (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
• All Hallows’ Eve (ramblingratz.wordpress.com)
• About Samhain or ‘All Hallows’ (bethtrissel.wordpress.com)
• Halloween: A Brief History (lakeside.com)
• 13 Facts You Never Knew About Halloween (businessinsider.com)
• A Tarot Circle Game/Encounter for Samhain (jameswells.wordpress.com)
• Hallowe’en; The Do’s And The Don’ts (jackcollier7.com)
• Get ye gone, ye evil spirits (annabelfrage.wordpress.com)
• ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ – Resources for Hallowe’en (davidbradshawenglish.org)
• Hallowe’en! (thepiepatch.wordpress.com)

‘There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps.

Street lighting and indoor lighting burned coal gas, which is sooty and noxious. It gives off methane and carbon monoxide. Outdoors, the flickering flames of the gas lamps pumped carbon monoxide into the air—air that was often trapped low down in the narrow streets and cramped courtyards of industrial cities and towns. Indoors, windows closed against the chilly weather prevented fresh oxygen from reaching those sitting up late by lamplight.

Low-level carbon monoxide poisoning produces symptoms of choking, dizziness, paranoia, including feelings of dread, and hallucinations. Where better to hallucinate than in the already dark and shadowy streets of Victorian London? Or in the muffled and stifling interiors of New England?…’ ( Jeanette Winterson via The Paris Review )

‘Course exploring impact of magic and witchcraft on society comes amid growing interest in folklore…’ ( Rachel Hall via The Guardian )

Related: Police visit Pennsylvania crystal shop over tarot reading

‘According to Pennsylvania law, fortune-telling is a crime….’ ( Zoe Greenberg via Philadelphia Inquirer )

‘‘I want to start a group to go to breakfast, 10 of us, and we each bring $100 to tip the waiter,’ Richard Brooks wrote on Facebook…’ ( via Washington Post )

‘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