The Last Day; My Own Particular Brand of Odd

Invocation for a New Year

May you

be enchanted by life.

May you . . . 

wonder,

wander,

ponder;

Lose your sense of self

through connection

to your surroundings,

large and small,

distant and immediate,

personal and natural,

Feel awe every day;

Marvel in the ordinary;

Connect to the rhythms

of the cycles of

waking and sleeping,

lightness and darkness,

warmth and cold,

growth and decay,

activity and recovery,

productivity and rejuvenation;

Find your cycles are spirals,

each revolution through the familiar

providing new perspectives,

deeper truths,

added insights,

accumulated layers and lessons and practices;

Lightly embrace the inevitability of

sadness and illness,

weakness and weariness,

anger and frustration,

guilt and embarrassment,

as ephemeral and temporary;

Boldly embrace finitude and powerlessness,

nonsense and ignorance,

the power of not knowing,

the awesome mysteriousness of it all;

Look for the good

in yourself,

in others,

in everything;

Know you are connected,

interconnected,

woven into the web,

reciprocal,

defined by mutuality;

Seek to learn,

understand,

change,

grow,

improve what you can,

know that helping others helps you;

Be equally helped and loved in return

in positive spiraling cycles;

Tell stories that

make the world better,

that

create belief in a better world;

Be curious,

Be silly,

Be adventurous,

Be empathetic,

Be accepting,

Be wise,

Be one,

Be embedded in existence.

I don't have many rituals for celebrating the new year, don't go to parties or make resolutions, but I always try to acknowledge it in some way with a post here. This is it this time.

The one other thing I've consistently done for many years is create a "favorites" book list or two related to my work as a librarian. I have always been a Youth Services Librarian, so have always created lists of youth and teen books. My library has undergone a restructuring in 2024, though, that has eliminated "Youth Services" as an official department and job designation, so now I'm simply a Librarian. My reading habits have shifted a bit, so this year's wrap-up list is a bit different.

Books I Read in 2024 That I Rather Quite Liked

"When people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir--here's what *MY experience* was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop." - John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed. "Be eclectic and enigmatic." - Me. "Be obscure and inscrutable." - Also me.

• The Mysteries by Bill Watterson
• The Weirdness of the World by Eric Schwitzgebel
• Monster Portraits by Sofia Samatar
• The Remarkable Rescue at Milkweed Meadow by Elaine Dimopoulos
• Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words by Jenni Nuttall
• Grounded by Aisha Saeed
• The Collectors, ed. by A.S. King
• 
  Abuela, Don't Forget Me by Rex Ogle
• Mid-Air by Alicia Williams
• The Story of Gumluck the Wizard by Adam Rex
• Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World by Kristin Ohlson
• The Eternal Return of Clara Hart by Louise Finch
• Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
• The Broken Lands by Kate Milford
• The Eyes & the Impossible by Dave Eggers
• Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough by Dina Nayeri
• The Fight for Midnight by Dan Solomon
• Scurry by Mac Smith
• Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir by Pedro Martin
• Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene
• Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling
• Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra
• Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky
• The Book of Stolen Dreams by David Farr
• Kariba by Daniel Clarke
• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
• Thieves' Gambit by Kayvion Lewis
• The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony by Jay Van Bavel
• Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso
• Middlewest by Skottie Young
• Assassin's Apprentice (graphic novel), Vol. 1 by Robin Hobb
• The Daughter's War by Christopher Buehlman
• Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
• Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine
• Kindling by Traci Chee
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison
• Eye of a Little God by A.J. Steiger
• The Five Impossible Tasks of Eden Smith by Tom Llewellyn
• The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher
• The Supernatural Society by Rex Ogle
• Ultraviolet by Aida Salazar
• Unraveller by Frances Hardinge
• Hummingbird Season by Stephanie Lucianovic
• Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot

"Favorite" might be too strong a word for some, perhaps even many, of them, but that's my list.

Speaking of end-of-year-lists, I noticed interesting themes in Adult Nonfiction here:

[My] Library’s Most Checked-out Books in 2024

1. “Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere”
2. “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year”
3. “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: Staying Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in Our Current Chaos”
4. “Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms”
5. “The Backyard Bird Chronicles”
6. “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom”
7. “Mere Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition”
8. “What An Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds”
9. “Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts”
10. “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church”

God, Birds, and Calm.

I am a conduit for nonsense.

An add for t-shirt with that phrase has been showing up on my Facebook feed lately, and I rather quite like it.

Top quote from Christmas Day: Our eldest, 11, handed my wife the gift he got for her and before she could unwrap it said, "I hope you like it; I'm sorry we ruined the one you used to have when we were little."

"Don't ruin the surprise by giving it away before she sees it," I said.

"We've ruined SO many things over the years, that doesn't narrow it down at all."

(It was a replacement Doctor Who Tardis beach towel.)

I have always yearned to be some combination of Strider, Gandalf, and Hobbit. A blending or synthesis, junction or layering.

Now, I don't mean Aragorn at the end of the tale, the elf-friend of high blood lineage who becomes king, but his more anonymous guise as Strider when the adventurers first meet him. Mysterious, a bit dangerous and intimidating, and stealthy. The capable outdoorsman who knows the land and all the trails, skilled in survival and combat. The overseer of the wilds, connected to nature, and protector, from the shadows, of the people.

Gandalf the wise and wily. Deeply experienced and knowledgeable. Knower of secret and arcane lore. Relatively simple in appearance, manner, needs, and expectations, yet immensely powerful when called upon. The inveterate wizard, master of magic.

Hobbits for their modest contentment, appreciation for the simple and mundane. Peaceful, hard-working, happy, and humble.

There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

...

Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.

...

I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.

-----

Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.

"Who is that?" Frodo asked, when he got the chance to whisper to Mr. Butterbur. "I don't think you introduced him?"

"Him?" said the landlord in an answering whisper, cocking an eye without turning his head. "I don't rightly know. He is one of the wandering folk--Rangers we call them. He seldom talks: not but what he can tell a rare tale when he has the mind. He disappears for a month, or a year, and then he pops up again. What his right name is I've never heard: but he's known round here as Strider."

-----

Gandalf is often described in The Lord of the Rings as quick to anger, and equally quick to laugh. His deep wisdom and compassion clearly derived from the patience he learned in Valinor, just as his care for all creatures of good will must have come from his strong sense of compassion for the weak. Both his patience and sense of kindness were revealed again and again, extending even to the servants of his enemies.

Keen observers of Gandalf often detected a veiled power, usually revealed in his eyes, which appeared deep and wise. He was alternately affectionate and brusque; he often surprised others with his bluntness when time was of the essence. Gandalf consistently upbraided foolish behaviour, but also richly rewarded those who acted with good intentions.

Hobbits appealed to him more than to the other Wizards, and he went often to the Shire for respite from errands. His attachment was likely because the Shire was of more bliss and peaceful than other inhabited realms of Middle-earth.

I can't claim to know exactly what that combination looks like, but all three resonate with me and inform who I try to be.

Perhaps it looks a little bit like my new sun hat for Christmas.

In my younger years I never enjoyed wearing hats--too cumbersome, hot, itchy, and uncomfortable. I trained myself to wear cool, wide-brimmed sun hats when we had kids, though, for the sun protection. And now I've gotten so used to it that I don't like to go without.

Which had me contemplating this past year getting something more quality than the cheap ones I have. Every time I looked for ideas, though, what I found came with associations I don't want to claim as an identity: cowboy, pirate, outback, Indiana Jones, gambler, etc. I wanted something that is my own particular brand of odd. And, after much searching, think I found something that will do the trick.

[Spouse] bought it for me as a gift and I've spent the days since adding some flair to make it more unique. It's taken a lifetime of insecurity, but I think I'm finally ready to let my inside show a bit more on the outside. Not for cosplay, but for regular use. My new "look," if you will.

(For the curious - The golden sun coin in the center is Shire Mint Post's interpretation of Mad Sweeney's lucky coin from Neil Gaiman's American Gods; [Spouse] got it for me for a previous Christmas a few years back; it was the whimsical little mouth blowing leaves that solidified my decision to use it. The feather I found by the staff door walking out of work a few months ago, a gift from the skies just lying there waiting to be found; I've had it on my desk until now. The thick coin with runes tucked into the band is Shire Mint Post's viking Vegvisir Wayfinder coin, another previous gift; according to the Internet, the three symbols fully showing mean Guidance, Protection, and Direction. The oak leaf and acorn are wood carvings I made recently hoping to find a use along these lines. The dragonfly I bought on Etsy a few years back to represent a companion animal for one of my D&D characters. I'm not sure where the quill and scroll coin came from, but I had it in my treasure chest. The simple wooden feather pin was something we kept from my mom's jewelry collection.)

I was going to hold off on adding more general content until the next post, but I love this quote that George Lakoff shared on Facebook so much that I've decided not to wait.

The brain is not neutral; it is not a general-purpose device. It comes with a structure, and our understanding of the world is limited to what our brains can make sense of. 

Some of our thought is literal—framing our experience directly. But much of it is metaphoric and symbolic, structuring our experience indirectly but no less powerfully.

Some of our mechanisms of understanding are the same around the world. But many are not, not even in our own country and culture. Our brains and minds work to impose a specific understanding on reality, and coming to grips with that can be scary, that not everyone understands reality in the same way. 

That fear has major political consequences. Since the brain mechanisms for understanding reality are mostly unconscious, an understanding of understanding itself becomes a political necessity.

-- "The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics"

The brain is not neutral. Even if we strive for neutrality, our brains won't go there. It's an important awareness to have.

And since I'm sharing that . . . I also found this article intriguing. (I'm sure George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, would approve.)

How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?

English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result.

In 2010, a new goddess, about two feet tall and cast in bronze, was set to appear in a village within the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She looked nothing like the deities of Hindu mythology. In lieu of Durga’s bright saris or Lakshmi’s opulent jewels, she wore a wide-brimmed hat and the robes of the Statue of Liberty. She wasn’t riding a lion or a swan; she stood on a desktop computer. Instead of a sword or a spear, she held a pen in one hand and the Indian constitution—with its promise of legalized equality—in the other. Her name was Angrezi Devi, the Goddess English, and she was intended for India’s Dalits, or “untouchables.”

“The Goddess English can empower Dalits, giving them a chance to break free from centuries of oppression,” her creator, the prominent Dalit writer Chandra Bhan Prasad, declared. He saw English as an immensely valuable resource for the Dalit. “Will English-speaking Dalits be expected to clean gutters and roads?” he asked. “Will English-speaking Dalits be content to work as menials at landlords’ farms?” An atheist, he designed the goddess in order to infuse English into the Dalit identity, propelling his people from a feudal subaltern standing to the ranks of the modern and independent. “Learning English has become the greatest mass movement the world has ever seen,” he wrote.

He had a point. An estimated 1.5 billion people—roughly one in every five human beings—speak English, making it the most widely used language in the history of humanity. With an official status in the U.N., NATO, the W.T.O., and the E.U., it reigns as the dominant “lingua franca of the world,” Rosemary Salomone writes in “The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language” (Oxford). Like other colonial tongues, it spread first through “conquest, conversion, and commerce,” she notes, but its spread today is powered by a fourth process, what Salomone calls “collusion.” Around the globe, people pursue English and the opportunities it promises. “Korean mothers move their children to anglophone countries to learn in English,” Salomone observes. “Dutch universities teach in it. ASEAN countries collaborate in it. Political activists tweet in it.” . . . 

Many researchers find another reason to worry about the spread of English: the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Languages, they argue, influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality. . . . 

"Each of my languages comes not only with its own patterns of sound and methods for arranging words but also with its social habits and its judgments about what to forgive, what to condemn, and what to revere,” Julie Sedivy writes in “Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Born in what was then Czechoslovakia, Sedivy grew up in a “linguistic bedlam,” hopping between Austria and Italy before settling down in Montreal. She was acquainted with five languages by kindergarten and went on to study how people learn and process language. Science suffuses her book, yet, as a way of knowing, it coexists with experience; the resulting volume isn’t so much a standard pop-sci book as it is a rhapsodic meditation on loving, taming, and forgetting words. She senses that distinct cognitive styles are tied to the different languages she speaks, comparing them to personalities bickering for the spotlight. “I am a cacophony of voices, influencing each other, at times assisting each other, at times getting in each other’s way, always vying for turf,” she writes.

Testimony from polyglots like her has invited a more sophisticated take on Whorf’s ideas. What if language is less like a yoke than like a wind, nudging us in various directions? . . . 

In a recent review of the research literature, the language scientist Damián E. Blasi, along with Majid and others, listed the many cognitive domains that English seems to affect, including memory, theory of mind, spatial reasoning, event processing, aesthetic preferences, and sensitivity to rhythm and melody. Languages help shape the worlds we inhabit less through a few grammatical rules than through countless subtle distinctions. John McWhorter might have been right that the effect of any single linguistic feature is minor. But, as Isaac Newton realized when developing calculus, innumerable tiny effects create large-scale patterns. . . . 

Although Prasad disagrees with the ideologues of the B.J.P. about the proper place for English in India, they all agree that English is powerful. Putting aside the economic opportunities it unlocks, they see the language as a psychosocial force—one that is rooted in its foreign origins and that, rather like Hinduism’s divine triumvirate, can create, sustain, or destroy social orders. Bourdieu’s suggestion that the spread of English represents a form of cognitive hegemony is one that Prasad and the B.J.P. accept, whether as a blessing or as a curse.

Our brains and minds work to impose a specific understanding on reality, and coming to grips with that can be scary, that not everyone understands reality in the same way.

And, since I've started down this road, one more.

The Walmart Effect

They find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. . . . 

Fully assessing the impact of an entity as dominant as Walmart, however, is a complicated task. The cost savings for consumers are simple to calculate but don’t capture the company’s total effect on a community. The arrival of a Walmart ripples through a local economy, causing consumers to change their shopping habits, workers to switch jobs, competitors to shift their strategies, and suppliers to alter their output. . . . 

Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.

In theory, however, those people could still be better off if the money that they saved by shopping at Walmart was greater than the hit to their incomes. According to a 2005 study commissioned by Walmart itself, for example, the store saves households an average of $3,100 a year in 2024 dollars. Many economists think that estimate is generous (which isn’t surprising, given who funded the study), but even if it were accurate, Parolin and his co-authors find that the savings would be dwarfed by the lost income. They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios. . . . 

Workers in counties where a Walmart opened experienced a greater decline in earnings than they made up for with cost savings, leaving them worse off overall. Even more interesting, he finds that the losses weren’t limited to workers in the retail industry; they affected basically every sector from manufacturing to agriculture. . . . 

The theory is complex, and goes like this: When Walmart comes to town, it uses its low prices to undercut competitors and become the dominant player in a given area, forcing local mom-and-pop grocers and regional chains to slash their costs or go out of business altogether. As a result, the local farmers, bakers, and manufacturers that once sold their goods to those now-vanished retailers are gradually replaced by Walmart’s array of national and international suppliers. (By some estimates, the company has historically sourced 60 to 80 percent of its goods from China alone.) As a result, Wiltshire finds, five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent, with most of the decline concentrated in “goods-producing establishments.”

Once Walmart has become the major employer in town, it ends up with what economists call “monopsony power” over workers. Just as monopoly describes a company that can afford to charge exorbitant prices because it lacks any real competition, monopsony describes a company that can afford to pay low wages because workers have so few alternatives. This helps explain why Walmart has consistently paid lower wages than its competitors, such as Target and Costco, as well as regional grocers such as Safeway. “So much about Walmart contradicts the perfectly competitive market model we teach in Econ 101,” Wiltshire told me. “It’s hard to think of a clearer example of an employer using its power over workers to suppress wages.”

Walmart’s size also gives it power over the producers who supply it with goods. . . . 

Walmart does not use its power wisely.

Back to the theme of time passing, here's a word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Dystoria

n. a feeling of irrelevance from the broader forces of history; the sense that your life has no relationship to any great mission, no generational hardship, not even an enemy—feeling as harmless as a droplet skittering down a window, that could’ve just as easily taken part in a tidal wave.

Latin dys-, bad + historia, history. Pronounced “dis-toh-ree-uh.”

And, to conclude, the final paragraph of that book's concept of Nodus Tollens (The Sense That Your Life Doesn’t Fit Into a Story).

As you thumb through the years, you may never know where this all is going. The only thing you know is that there’s more to the story. That soon enough you’ll flip back to this day looking for clues of what was to come, rereading all the chapters you tried to skim through to get to the good parts —only to learn that all along, you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

There's more to the story.

Invocation for a New Year

May you

be enchanted by life.

May you . . . 

wonder,

wander,

ponder;

Lose your sense of self

through connection

to your surroundings,

large and small,

distant and immediate,

personal and natural,

Feel awe every day;

Marvel in the ordinary;

Connect to the rhythms

of the cycles of

waking and sleeping,

lightness and darkness,

warmth and cold,

growth and decay,

activity and recovery,

productivity and rejuvenation;

Find your cycles are spirals,

each revolution through the familiar

providing new perspectives,

deeper truths,

added insights,

accumulated layers and lessons and practices;

Lightly embrace the inevitability of

sadness and illness,

weakness and weariness,

anger and frustration,

guilt and embarrassment,

as ephemeral and temporary;

Boldly embrace finitude and powerlessness,

nonsense and ignorance,

the power of not knowing,

the awesome mysteriousness of it all;

Look for the good

in yourself,

in others,

in everything;

Know you are connected,

interconnected,

woven into the web,

reciprocal,

defined by mutuality;

Seek to learn,

understand,

change,

grow,

improve what you can,

know that helping others helps you;

Be equally helped and loved in return

in positive spiraling cycles;

Tell stories that

make the world better,

that

create belief in a better world;

Be curious,

Be silly,

Be adventurous,

Be empathetic,

Be accepting,

Be wise,

Be one,

Be embedded in existence.

A Blend of Boldness and Despair

This is your present and future,

and little can be done to stop it.

A fragmented media means

fragmented truths and standards.

Discerning reality will get harder.

They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality.

The equation is simple: The more authoritarianism in the world, the more dissidents.

They wanted to live authentically in societies that asked them constantly to lie.

“A blend of boldness and despair in the same mind and the same person.”

What dissidents teach us is not to normalize.

They are outliers

not because they run toward oppositional views

but because they simply insist on pursuing

their interests,

their curiosities,

their desires and

unique ways of being human.

A statement is not fact;

Just because someone said it doesn’t mean it is accurate.

A fact is not data;

It may be an isolated truth and not representative.

Data is not evidence;

It may not be conclusive. 

Evidence is not proof;

It may not be universal but instead limited to a specific context.

We need to contextualize and validate the information we share

 — as well as the information shared with us.

The answer you find may not be as black and white as you want;

Life is nuanced like that.

Some politicians have promoted false information.

That is a testament to how quickly misinformation spreads

 — and how hard it is to combat once it does.

The nonstop negative press about it has turned it into a political liability.

Please do not feed the fears.

When we help others,

it can boost our own happiness

and psychological well-being;

it boosts our physical health, too.

This is your present and future.

The above culled from the curated collection of articles that follow, largely shared without comment.

Axios AM: December 20, 2024

Media vs. Reporting

This reality highlights the difference between media (what people consume) and reporting (a set of standards for pursuing fact-based information). In the new world order, media and reporting are tossed together with a mix of truth, opinion, and nonsense.

This is your present and future, and little can be done to stop it. A fragmented media means fragmented truths and standards.

That puts even more pressure on you as a news consumer to discern what and who you can trust for reliable, actionable information. It demands skepticism and patience when hot news hits fast.

You need to be skeptical of people or sources unless you feel confident they routinely get it right. You need to be patient in not overreacting to — or oversharing — stories that hit your dopamine button.

Discerning reality will get harder.

What Dissidents Can Teach Us

These contemporary dissidents share a mindset, what Václav Havel once called an “existential attitude.” They did not wake up one day and decide to take on the regimes of their countries. They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality—an Iranian woman who decides to no longer wear a hijab, a Uyghur teacher who tries to share his people’s history—and collided with societies that demanded conformity and obedience. Dissidents are born out of this choice: either assert their authentic selves or accept the authoritarian’s mafioso bargain, safety and protection in exchange for keeping one’s head down. Those rare few who just can’t make that bargain—they transform into dissidents.

The equation is simple: The more authoritarianism in the world, the more dissidents. And we are undeniably in an authoritarian moment. According to a report last year by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, when it comes to global freedom, we have returned to a level last seen in 1986. About 5.7 billion people—72 percent of the world’s population—now live under authoritarian rule. Even the United States, vaunted beacon of democracy, is about to inaugurate a president who openly boasts of wanting to be a “dictator on day one,” who regularly threatens to jail his opponents and sic the military on the “enemy within,” and who jokes about his election being the country’s last. . . . 

The modern template for the dissident emerged in the postwar Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc satellites. After Stalin’s death in 1953, expressing discomfort with one’s place in the Communist paradise was no longer necessarily fatal, and a new underclass of pariahs--many poets and scientists among them--became a subversive force.  One misconception about the Soviet dissidents is that they were revolutionaries; they were not, for the most part. They did not have a political project. They wanted to live authentically in societies that asked them constantly to lie. If their country was supposed to be one of laws, then they demanded that it abide by those laws. If there were obligations to uphold human and civil rights--like those mandated by the Helsinki Accords signed by the Soviet Union in 1975--those should be respected. The ideology behind this approach, to the extent that there was one, went by a particularly unsexy name: legalism. What angered these objectors to no end was the idea that they should look the other way, which is what the majority of people--for their own self-preservation--did. . . . 

They are people who “don’t want to be versions of themselves that they can’t live with.”  . . . 

Nathans also pointed to another peculiar aspect of the dissident’s personality, “a blend of boldness and despair in the same mind and the same person.” Such people lived in circumstances where change felt impossible, at least within their lifetime. And yet they didn’t give up. “Dissidents have a remarkable ability to appreciate the hopelessness of what they’re trying to accomplish, but persevere nonetheless,” Nathans said. “They don’t treat hopelessness as a reason to be cynical or passive or do things that are just purely performative and symbolic.” . . . 

What dissidents teach us is not to normalize. . . . 

Crossing the Rubicon that Havel described, thinking and acting in ways consistent with one’s true self, involves blocking out the system of rewards and punishments that every society offers its members. Effort is required to become adept at what the Soviet poet (and exiled dissident) Joseph Brodsky once called “the science of ignoring reality,” seeing through the transactional and provisional surface of life to the meaningful depths of principle.

Dissidents are not just sitting behind glass waiting to be broken in case of emergency; they are keeping at bay the forces of repression and conformity as they exist in the world, right now. . . . 

They are outliers not because they run toward oppositional views but because they simply insist on pursuing their interests, their curiosities, their desires and unique ways of being human.

How to Disrupt Misinformation with the “Ladder of Misinference”

The framework is constructed of four steps. They are:

1. A statement is not fact. Just because someone said it doesn’t mean it is accurate.
2. A fact is not data. It may be an isolated truth and not representative.
3. Data is not evidence. It may not be conclusive. 
4. Evidence is not proof. It may not be universal but instead limited to a specific context.

For each step, each rung up the ladder, we risk exaggerating our claims when the supporting evidence becomes too flimsy. We may portray a statement as a fact, a fact as data, and so on, even when they aren’t. To prevent this misinference, Edmans notes, we need to contextualize and validate the information we share — as well as the information shared with us — to see which rung best supports the claim. . . . 

“Information is never cast-iron proof — and that’s okay; it can still be useful. Perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good. But when quoting a story, statistic, or study, we should be clear on what it is and what it isn’t, and not climb the ladder of misinference,” Edmans writes.

Even with the ladder of misinference, the answer you find may not be as black and white as you want. Life is nuanced like that.

Louisiana Forbids Public Health Workers from Promoting COVID, Flu and Mpox Shots

They were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop. . . . 

Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department's work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department's clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.

The new policy in Louisiana was implemented as some politicians have promoted false information about vaccines and as President-elect Donald Trump seeks to have anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And some public health experts are concerned that if other states follow Louisiana, the U.S. could face rising levels of disease and further erosion of trust in the nation's public health infrastructure. . . . 

Staff at Louisiana's health department fear the new policy undermines their efforts to protect the public, and violates the fundamental mission of public health: to prevent illness and disease by following the science. . . . 

The California Job-Killer That Wasn’t

In the six months after California’s new minimum wage came into effect in April, the state’s fast-food sector actually gained jobs and done so at a faster pace than much of the rest of the country. If anything, it proves that the minimum wage can be raised even higher than experts previously believed without hurting employment. That should be good news. Instead, the policy has been portrayed as a catastrophic failure. That is a testament to how quickly economic misinformation spreads—and how hard it is to combat once it does. . . . 

Since the early 1990s, economists have conducted dozens of studies of more than 500 minimum-wage increases across the country. “The bulk of the studies conducted in the last 30 years suggest the effect of minimum wages on jobs is quite modest,” Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has conducted multiple meta-analyses of the minimum-wage literature, told me. “Sometimes they actually result in higher employment.” . . . 

That doesn’t mean raising the minimum wage had no negative consequences. Reich and his co-author, Denis Sosinsky, found that the higher minimum wage caused menu prices in California fast-food chains to rise by about 3.7 percent. Reich points out that this number pales in comparison with the 18 percent raise that the average fast-food worker received because of the new law. . . . 

Notwithstanding the law’s broadly positive real-world consequences, the nonstop negative press about it has turned it into a political liability. . . . 

The biggest losers from this misleading narrative won’t be Californians themselves. It will be workers in the 20 states that still have a minimum wage at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE FEARS

When Kindness Becomes a Habit, It Improves Our Health

Whether it's volunteering at a local food bank, or taking soup to a sick neighbor, there's lots of evidence that when we help others, it can boost our own happiness and psychological well-being. But there's also growing research that it boosts our physical health too.

Discerning reality will get harder,

a mix of truth, opinion, and nonsense.

This is your present and future;

A blend of boldness and despair.

Life is nuanced like that.

Simply insist on pursuing

your interests,

your curiosities,

your desires and

unique ways of being human;

and on helping others.

Existence Is Both Bizarre and Dubious

A preview of what follows, in poetic form:

Monster and treasure

in one package

Wisdom is always clothed

in flowing robes

Love is for the ones who

love the work

Your instincts,

personality, and 

preferences 

aren’t flaws – 

they’re features

Our need to

repair relationships

is a deep-rooted instinct

Forgiveness is

a survival strategy

that allows us to

save ourselves

from being scornful

You are my other me

Deep curiosity

can stir our hearts and spirits,

becoming a force for

meaningful connection

and transformation

Not all brain cells are found

in the brain

Swarms that gather

and commune

in great enough numbers

to develop

a collective consciousness

and identity as a person

Bizarreness

is a fundamental,

universal quality

of all

philosophical arguments

I feel small and confused,

but in a good way

I find something wonderful

in not knowing

Don't say, "I'm running by the school to pick up our child," as you mosey out the door. Instead, stride purposefully through the threshold to the Wild proclaiming, "I go in search of adventure, hoping to return well stocked with monsters and treasure."

If you achieve the prior statement, you will have achieved the latter. Monster and treasure in one package.

I made a meme:

In the subconscious, ingrained frames, myths, and stories of my brain, wisdom is always clothed in flowing robes; and, as my self-concept adjusts to my slowly aging state and accumulated life wisdom, I find myself being drawn to dressing accordingly.

A poem.

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper

Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back

in the grasses.

I hear you. I know

this life is hard now.

I know your days are precious

on this earth.

But what are you trying

to be free of?

The living? The miraculous

task of it?

Love is for the ones who love the work.

When change halts--when you stop learning and progressing--depression kicks in. (From: Look Again by Sharot and Sunstein.)

Ready to Pounce

I love this wisdom.

Brain Food #606

Stop fighting your nature. Start winning with it.

You’re born with certain core traits. Fighting them is like being a sprinter forced to run marathons – exhausting and futile. But these “limitations” can become your biggest advantage.

Your instincts, personality, and preferences aren’t flaws – they’re features.

When something seems to be holding you back that you can’t change, the key is to change your environment. What’s a headwind in one situation is a tailwind in another.

The introvert’s edge in sales: Don’t fake extrovert energy. Win through deep research and lasting relationships. While others work the room searching for a transaction, you can build long-term relationships.

Not a morning person? Embrace it: That 5 AM workout routine you keep missing? Stop punishing yourself. Build your peak performance hours into your schedule.

Are you obsessive about the details? Use it to your advantage. While others skim the surface, your thoroughness spots opportunities they miss and avoids costly mistakes they make. What others see as obsessiveness becomes an uncopyable competitive edge.

The most successful people don’t fight their nature. They architect their environment to amplify it.

Stop asking: “How do I fix myself?” Start asking: “How do I position myself where my natural traits are assets?”

Embrace yourself and rely on your strengths.

The Shadow Self

I am a fan of restorative justice.

Restorative Justice Fits Human Nature More Than Retribution Does

As recognised by ancestral wisdom and Indigenous practices, our need to repair relationships is a deep-rooted instinct

The traditional penal system is based on retributivism, the idea that wrongdoers deserve to be punished for their crimes. Under this system, justice is served when proportionate suffering is imposed on the offender, which essentially takes the form of exclusion from society. Prison is not just a place where offenders are secluded to keep society safe; it also carries the symbolic meaning of deserved social rejection. The whole process of achieving justice through punishment involves little or no real communication between wrongdoers and victims, who are instead required to delegate the management of their conflict to third parties (professionals, state institutions and so forth). As highlighted by the criminologist Nils Christie in his work ‘Conflicts as Property’ (1977), the parties involved are ‘robbed’ of their conflicts, which are instead left in the hands of those who are not directly involved. This system rests on a fundamental premise, rooted in both psychology and anthropology: individuals are intrinsically unable to resolve disputes without external intervention, and this external intervention must be punitive in order to meet society’s demands. A wrongdoer must pay for the harm caused, and our culture assumes that the only way to achieve that end is through imposing suffering. As a matter of fact, traditional criminal justice expresses the human drive for revenge. It is indeed institutionalised revenge. . . . 

The core of restorative justice (RJ) has little to do with classical theories of punishment. In fact, its justification lies beyond the concept of punishment, as it seeks primarily to address harms, resolve conflicts and repair relationships. RJ is about healing, mutual communication and empathy; it focuses on needs more than deserts. There is no place for punishing wrongdoers in the restorative paradigm, because the very idea of crime takes another meaning: it is not the result of an evil mind freely choosing to commit evil actions. Rather, it is a damaged relationship. As a result, justice itself is understood as relational and implies restoring social connections, healing social wounds. RJ seems also to be the bearer of an opposing idea of human nature, in which people are seen as essentially capable of healing relationships and willing to get things right, and justice is achieved when enabling this to happen. So, advocating for RJ also means supporting and expressing a more optimistic view of human nature. . . . 

We’re so used to the idea of punishing offenders that it would seem unnatural and wrong if we didn’t . . . But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if human psychology is more in line with the restorative approach to justice than the retributive approach to justice? . . . 

Humans possess a strong prosocial instinct motivating them to cooperate and repair relationships spontaneously and that, as a result, RJ is more consonant with human psychology than traditional criminal justice . . . 

So what does evolutionary psychology tell us about the whole thing? Well, we certainly have an instinct for punishment, but it might be overrated. According to the retired judge Morris Hoffman in The Punisher’s Brain (2014), our evolutionary path selected both our punishing and forgiving predispositions, as both retaliation and the forswearing of retaliation have adaptive functions that allowed our ancestors to survive. If you don’t immediately get why forgiveness would have been adaptive, consider what constant reprisals in hunter-gatherers societies would have meant in terms of wasted time and energy, especially when survival is already precarious. A risky move, don’t you think? That’s exactly what our ancestors learned over millennia: punishment is extremely costly in nature. It’s not a trivial matter. And, most of the time, refraining from punishment actually increases the odds of survival. As suggested by Hoffman, forgiveness is a survival strategy that allows us to ‘save ourselves from being scornful’.

What’s even more striking is that displays of remorse seem to soften the urge for retaliation and promote forgiveness. . . . 

Remorseful actions have an implicit message, which expresses something such as ‘You do not need to punish me, for I am doing it by myself,’ thereby anticipating and replacing the dangerous impact of vengeance. By mitigating revenge through remorse, some sort of restoration of the initial state (that which precedes the wrong) takes place. . . . 

These insights from evolutionary psychology resonate with the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples whose traditions are deeply rooted in restorative practices and revolve around maintaining social harmony.

No one loses their humanity when they cause harm. Our response should be based on that humanity.

Flames

From the book Ultraviolet by Aida Salazar:

Let us agree to be guided by this wisdom.

En lak ech*--you are my other me.

If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself.

If I disrespect you, I disrespect myself.

If I am good to you, I am good to myself.

If I honor you, I honor myself.

[*Mayan: "You are my other me."]

Of which I wrote: A vivid story about first love, first heartbreak, and struggling with the overwhelming nature of big feelings, complicated by machismo culture and ingrained toxic masculinity. A whiff of inauthentic adult moralizing in the narrative voice, but otherwise relatable. 

A worrying new trend.

Homebuyers Can Access Neighbors' Political Leanings with New Real Estate Platform

House hunting gets political. New service offers access to neighborhood voting data.

Tech startup Oyssey believes social data – like age, education and income demographics – is influencing buyers more than the physical conditions of a home. . . . 

We already "other" each other in far too many ways. We need to look for our commonalities, not judge each other for our differences.

Helpful:

How to See the Humanity in Anyone

Practising a form of ‘deep curiosity’ can help you connect with yourself and others, even if they’re on the ‘other side’

Psychology research studies have shown: the more we come into contact with people who are different from us and see them as unique humans, the less we feel threatened by them. And that, even with polar-opposite views or life stories, we can find common ground and a shared humanity. . . . 

One way we can build better relationships – even across political or social differences – is to practise what I call ‘deep curiosity’. . . . 

At its deepest levels, curiosity has the power to do much more than give us informational anecdotes for cocktail hour. It can stir our hearts and spirits, becoming a force for meaningful connection and transformation. It can strengthen our relationships to ourselves and each other, help us navigate disagreements better, revive decades-old marriages, or heal from past pain or trauma. It invites us to ask questions that involve nuance and surprise. Rather than: ‘What should I do to make money?’, it prompts us to ask ourselves: ‘What makes me feel truly alive?’ Instead of asking someone: ‘Are you a Democrat or a Republican?’, it inspires us to ask them: ‘What values are important to you?’ Rather than: ‘Where did my ancestors come from?’, you might ask yourself: ‘How do I stay connected to them throughout my life?’

By practising deep curiosity, instead of dismissing or judging people who hold different political perspectives than you, or who have an identity that seems to clash with your own, you can bring a sense of genuine interest, humility, understanding and shared humanity. I’ve discovered that, if you do this, you’ll begin to see improvements in your relationships with your families, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, neighbours and strangers. You can even use deep curiosity to improve the way you treat yourself.

Deep curiosity isn’t just something you have or don’t. It’s more like a muscle, something that strengthens when you exercise it. The more we use it, the more likely we’ll get the benefits. Not only does it help us to connect, psychological research also shows that practising curiosity makes us more likable, better leaders, and reduces anxiety and fear – which is why many therapists use it as a tool. . . . 

1. Practising deep curiosity can help you connect with yourself and others. It’s not just intellectual; it’s about searching for understanding in a way that can stir your heart and spirit.

2. Let go of your assumptions, biases and certainty. Deep curiosity is a muscle you can strengthen, beginning with detaching yourself from the mental shortcuts that you usually rely on.

3. Prepare your mindset and setting. Planning ahead for how you will act and speak in social situations can help you practise deep curiosity with greater intention.

4. See the dignity of every person, including yourself. One way to do this is to ‘turn toward’ people – notice their bids for your attention and invite them to tell you more.

5. Welcome the hard times in your life. It’s easy to fight or withdraw when you’re feeling overwhelmed. By learning to slow down and embrace your negative emotions, you’ll be better placed to recognise your own needs, find meaning in your experiences and connect with others.

We already "other" each other in far too many ways. We need to look for our commonalities, not judge each other for our differences.

An interesting tidbit: Not all brain cells are found in the brain.

From These Neurons in the Abdomen Help Form the Gut-Brain Connection.

One of my favorite science fiction series for youth is the Railhead trilogy by Philip Reeve, consisting of Railhead, Blacklight Express, Station Zero. Mixed into this story about heists, exploration, intergalactic war, and more is an exploration of the idea of consciousness and personhood.

There Artificial Intelligence beings in the form of robots, train locomotives, and god-like guardians. Some are tied to physical bodies and locations and some aren't. Is the person the intelligence or the body? What happens when the same intelligence duplicates itself into different bodies who head into different parts of the galaxy, losing their network connection and changing through new and different experiences.

There are alien species with all manner of physical bodies, languages, and perception experiences. How different can they get before we become unable to recognize their experiences as conscious, their existence as persons?

And there are my favorite, the hive monks, beings consisting of insect swarms that gather and commune in great enough numbers to develop a collective consciousness and identity as a person. Memories that get passed through the hive and outlive the existence of any single insect, but preserved in the collective consciousness.

I recently wondered if Eric Schwitzgebel has read the Railhead series and, if not, if I should reach out to recommend it to him since I'm convinced he would love it. Here are my thoughts about his latest book, The Weirdness of the World.

If mainstream scientific cosmology is correct, we have seen only a very small, perhaps an infinitesimal fraction of reality. We are life fleas on the back of a dog, watching a hair grow and saying, "Ah, so that's how the universe works!"

What a delightfully fun book! It's a playful philosopher playing around with ideas. But not in an effort to find or create weirdness. No, his main point is that the greatest philosophical minds have all reached conclusions about our understandings of reality, humanity, and the interplay of the two that, by virtue of their own logics, lead to very strange places. The opening even includes a "taxonomy of weirdness" to define and delineate the different terms he will use to describe all major theories and fields of thought (weird, bizarre, dubious, wild, and theoretical wilderness). He believes bizarreness is a fundamental, universal quality of all philosophical arguments.

In the most fundamental matters of consciousness and cosmology, neither common sense, nor early twenty-first-century empirical science, nor armchair philosophical theorizing is entirely trustworthy. The rational response is to distribute our credence across a wide range of bizarre options.

This is not simply a wild claim; he is a top philosopher explaining and expanding on the work of other top thinkers.

Philosophers who explore foundational metaphysical questions typically begin with some highly plausible initial commitments to commonsense intuitions, some solid starting points. . . . They think long and hard about what these seemingly obvious claims imply. In the end, they find themselves committed to peculiar-seeming, common-sense-defying views. . . . In almost 40 years of reading philosophy, I have yet to encounter a single broad-ranging exploration of the fundamental nature of things that doesn't ultimately entangle its author in seeming absurdities. Rejection of these seeming absurdities then becomes the commonsense starting point of a new round of metaphysics by other philosophers, generating a complementary bestiary of metaphysical strangeness. Thus philosophers are happily employed.

After starting by making these claims about the weirdness of the world, Schwitzgebel spends the bulk of the book demonstrating that absurdity. Chapter 3, for example, makes the case:

If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious--that is, the United States literally possesses a stream of conscious experience over and above the experiences of its citizens and residents. If we look in broad strokes at the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as indicative of the presence of conscious experience--complex information processing, rich functional roles in a historically embedded system, sophisticated environmental responsiveness, wide information sharing, complex layers of self-monitoring--the United States, conceived of as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as parts, appears to have exactly those properties. It thus appears to meet standard materialist criteria for consciousness.

To make the argument, he necessarily explains what philosophers mean by "materialism," "consciousness," and a host of other academic terms and ideas. He wonders about how--or whether--we can ever tell if garden snails have consciousness. If Artificial Intelligence might become conscious and what that means for the morality of personhood. The possibility of infinite multiple universes. And more.

And the key idea underpinning his entire enterprise:

I love philosophy best when it opens my mind--when it reveals ways the world could be, possible approaches to life, lenses through which I might see and value things around me, which I might not otherwise have considered.

Philosophy can aim to open or close. Suppose you enter Philosophical Topic X imagining three viable, mutually exclusive possibilities, A, B, and C. The philosophy of closing aims to reduce the three to one. It aims to convince you that possibility A is correct and the others wrong. If it succeeds, you know the truth about Topic X: A is the answer! In contrast, the philosophy of opening aims to add new possibilities to the mix--possibilities that you hadn't considered before or had considered but too quickly dismissed. Instead of reducing three to one, three grows to maybe five, with new possibilities D and E. We can learn by addition as well as subtraction. We can learn that the range of viable possibilities is broader than we had assumed.

For me, the greatest philosophical thrill is realizing that something I'd long taken for granted might not be true, that some "obvious" apparent truth is in fact doubtable--not just abstractly and hypothetically doubtable, but really, seriously, in-my-gut doubtable. The ground shifts beneath me. Where I'd thought there would be floor, there is instead open space I hadn't previously seen. My mind spins in new, unfamiliar directions. I wonder, and the world itself seems to glow with a new wondrousness. The cosmos expands, bigger with possibility, more complex, more unfathomable. I feel small and confused, but in a good way.

and

Children have a flexibility of mind and an interest in theory building. They get a kick just out of exploring the world, trying new things (well, maybe not asparagus), breaking stuff to see what happens, and capsizing tradition. They annoyingly ask for the why behind the why behind the shy. Mature, boring adults, in contrast, prefer to find practical applications for what they already know. For example, adults want their new computers to just work without their having to learn anything new, while children play around with the settings, adding goofy sounds and wallpaper, changing the icons, and of course ultimately coming to understand the computers much better. . . .

Childlike philosophy toys with wild ideas at the boundaries of our understanding. Are these ideas useful or true? Can we plug them in straightaway into our existing conceptions and put them to work? For me, if I was already sure they were false and useless, that would steal away their charm. But to be in a hurry to judge their merits, to want to expunge doubt and wonder so as to settle on a final view that we can put immediately to work, to want to close rather than open--let's not be in such a rush to grow up. What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?

Embracing that everything we can understand about existence is both bizarre and dubious is not only fun, it's good for us. And so is this book.

Some additional quotes:

In each of our heads there are about as many neurons as stars in our galaxy, and each neuron is arguably more structurally complex than any star system that does not contain life. There is as much complexity and mystery inside us as out.

-----

It would just be too sad if the world had no space for speculation about wild hypotheticals.

-----

I find something wonderful in not knowing.

-----

It is progress to create doubt where none existed before, if that doubt appropriately reflects our ignorance. It is progress to appreciate possibilities we hadn't previously recognized. It is progress to chart previously unthought landscapes of what might be so.

-----

It's such a common pattern in our lives--reaching a conclusion based on theoretical reasoning and then failing to be moved by it at a gut level. The Stoic sincerely judges that death is not bad but quakes in fear on the battlefield. The implicit racist judges that her Black students are every bit as capable as her White and Asian students but her habitual reactions and intuitive assessments fail to change.

-----

I conjecture that this will occur. Our technological innovation will outrun our ability to settle on a good theory of AI consciousness. We will create AI systems so sophisticated that we legitimately wonder whether they have inner conscious lives like ours, while remaining unable to definitively answer that question. We will gaze into a robot's eyes and not know whether behind those eyes is only blank programming that mimics humanlike response or whether, instead, there is a genuine stream of experience, real hope and suffering. We will not know if we are interacting with mere tools to be disposed of as we wish or instead persons who deserve care and protection. Lacking grounds to determine what theory of consciousness is correct, we will find ourselves amid machines whose consciousness and thus moral status are unclear. Maybe those machines will deserve humanlike rights, or maybe not. We won't know.          

I find something wonderful in not knowing.