Day of Niagara, 31st of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Asian countries, including China and India, are stepping up their usage of coal to make up part of the loss of oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz, adding to the war's already staggering carbon footprint. The Stable Genius announced that he's "seriously considering" pulling the U.S. out of NATO, giving Putin the gift he's wanted for decades. The Stable Genius also eased up on the oil sanctions imposed on Russia, another gift, and allowed a Russian tanker to deliver oil through the embargo that had been placed on Cuba. The umpire in last night's Red Sox-Astros game lost count of balls and strikes, and allowed a Houston batter to continue at the plate even after his third swinging strike. 

The world's going to hell along at least a dozen doomsday scenarios. I try to imagine the world five years from now and don't see many scenarios where things aren't apocalyptically bad. I have maybe 10 years left of life, probably no more than five good ones, so my losses will be somewhat minimized, but it's the children I feel sorry for. 

No future, indeed.

 

Plaint of the Host, 30th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Aldebaran is the first of the six-day week in the New Revised USC, the equivalent to a Monday in the Julian calendar. As I had traveled back from Knoxville and Big Ears yesterday and this is my first full day back home, today feels like a Monday to me. Fitting it's Aldebaran.

I sat today for the first time since the Fourth Day of the Zenith, the 22nd of Spring. I was too busy to sit during the festival - hell, most days I was too busy to eat or sleep, much less sit. Knowing a gap was coming up in my schedule, I allowed myself to also miss sitting on the day before I left, so I could complete some chores like laundry, shopping, packing, etc., so today was my first time sitting in nine days.

It was worse last year. My records show that in 2025 I missed 12 days around the Big Ears festival, and after resuming sitting twice, I missed another two weeks for some reason or another before I got back in the rhythm of sitting every other day again. That gap in last year's schedule is a stark reminder of the need for vigilance to maintain my practice. 

Axios reports that the oil shortage triggered by the Iran war will spread globally in a slow-motion crisis, much like the covids did five years ago. The shock will unfold sequentially rather than simultaneously, a rolling supply disruption moving westward, dictated by shipping times and buffered unevenly by regional inventories. Asia is feeling the pain of lost supply now, but the pain is still muted elsewhere.

The average gas price in the U.S. is $4.02 today, up from $3.06 in January and a preview of the pain to come. Prices could get high enough to force people and companies to stop using oil, eventually taking cars and trucks off the road, ships off the sea, and planes out of the sky.

In his post-apocalyptic, post-peak World Made by Hand novels, James Howard Kunstler imagines the downfall of society and the modern world begins with severe disruptions to the global supply chain. In the novels, the disruption is started by a terroristic act on a container vessel, but in the reality we're all living through now, the disruption is predicated by the Stable Genius' terrorism in Iran and followed by Iran's blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, which could eventually collapse the entire global supply chain.

As you might guess, things don't go well for the world in the novels.

 

The Topaz Glove, 29th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): I'm back from Big Ears, exhausted but happy for all the great music I heard. I only got about five hours of sleep each night since Thursday, so I'm quite exhausted now.  It was tiring, but worth it.

However, please be patient and give me one more day before I resume the usual posting. Thank you for your kindness. 

 

Day of the Ascendant, 28th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Last day of Big Ears 2026. I actually wrote and posted this several days ago and post-dated it for today, so for all we know I may have ascended myself by now, carried off to the celestial heavens on open-form improvisational music. I may be sleeping off a bender along the railroad tracks under the Gay Street bridge or I may have turned my car around on the way up for some inexplicable reason and never arrived up here. Who knows? I sure as shit don't.

But if all's gone according to plan, today I'm taking in the final day of the 2026 Big Ears festival and will head back home tomorrow, when "normal" (whatever that is) posting will resume.   

 

The Overheard Rites, 27th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): The Third Day of Big Ears in one possible version of the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. If I had more time, I might be tempted to write something about all the rites I've been overhearing at the festival this year, but that would be forced and corny so it's probably just as well I don't have the time.  

It's also No Kings Day here in the United States. Find a local protest and get out there are be heard. 

 

Bridge of Dread, 26th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): Big Ears, Day 2. You know the situation - there's a time for blogging and there's a time for music, and this is the latter.  

 

Godsong of the Pale Blue Women, 25th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Often, while I'm in my alternating-day meditation, I'll have a stream of thought that I'll want to post here in this blog. But after I'm done and sit down in front of the computer, I find that either the thought was way more involved and convoluted than I could possibly try to capture in a single blog post, or that I can capture portions of it but can't find a starting point to jump in on, or, most often, that I can't remember the "genius" idea I wanted to write down. The memory is like a dream, vivid at first, half gone by the morning's first cup of coffee, and completely forgotten by noon. 

Leave it to Michael Pollan to describe the ephemeral nature of thought far better than I can ever hope.  Our so-called thoughts, he writes in A World Arises, "are preverbal, often showing up as images, sensations, or concepts, with words trailing behind as a kind of afterthought - belated attempts to translate hose elusive wisps of meaning into something more substantial and shareable." 

Exactly. We understand and know what we're thinking without needing the words to nail it down. I might forget a person's name or a movie title, but I know full well who or what I'm thinking of and don't need a label in my mind to identify them. A smile, a nod, and a simple "thank you" might have made my day, and I recall the sensation without having to tell myself it was, say, Joan White from accounting, and when I tell someone else how much I appreciated the gesture, I find that the name "Joan" is suddenly gone because I didn't need the proper noun for it to exist in my memory. 

Also, while I might use full sentences to reconstruct a thought ("last night, I was thinking about a sunset I once saw in Lanzarote"), when I was actually remembering that sunset last night, my mind didn't form the words "a sunset I once saw in Lanzarote." In my mind, I just imagined the reddish sky over the ocean blue, and felt the fading warmth of the crepuscule sun. Our memories, the stories we tell to ourselves, depend on words, but the faculty of memory, the way they actually arise in our minds, doesn't need language - we already know what we're thinking.  

In Ulysses, James Joyce accurately mimicked the mind's stream-of-consciousness wording, but it's difficult and sometimes annoying to read the words. "Hmm, mustn't," Leopold Bloom thinks to himself. "On the dresser, the letter. Breakfast, eggs. Nearly time." If he were trying to tell someone else what he was thinking right then, he'd say he was trying to not think about what his wife was doing back at home at that very moment, because he saw the letter from her lover on the dresser thar morning saying they would be trysting within the hour. But all those words aren't how thoughts arise, and "Hmm, mustn't. On the dresser, the letter. Breakfast, eggs. Nearly time," is much closer, and that's how Joyce writes it in Ulysses (actually, something like that - with apologies to Mr. Joyce, I'm too lazy to go look that passage up to get the exact wording, but you get the idea).

I'm driving to Knoxville today and don't have the time to post much else here today. I may not return to posting until The Topaz Glove, the 29th Day of Spring (March 30 to y'all), but I may post some late-night or early-morning updates about the Big Ears sets over at Music Dissolves Water and on Instagram, if you know how to find me there.   

Car. Long trip. No time. Music first.

 

The Ant Garden, 24th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): One thing old Angus MacLise would never have anticipated was the four-day Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. I firmly believe MacLise would have appreciated and enjoyed it, and participated in it with his friends Lou Reed and John Cale and La Mont Young (who had a composition premiere here a couple years ago), but MacLise passed away some 30 years before the festival even began.  

But in an imaginary, alternative time line, one wonders if MacLise would have been tempted to add four days of Big Ears to his Universal Solar Calendar (i.e., Day of Big Ears, Second Day of Big Ears, etc.). I've been tempted to add it to my New Revised USC, but the dates aren't the same every year (it's generally the last full weekend in March), and the whole purpose of the New Revision is for annual repeatability and regularity. Can't have a name day that's the 25th of Spring one year and the 23rd another year.     

All of which is probably the most awkward and nerdiest way possible to say the Big Ears music festival starts tomorrow, and I'll be going. There's no single bucket-list, must-see performer appearing this year. However, I'm looking forward to hearing some of John Zorn's sets in his third residency here in the past four years, including the first reunion of his original Masada quartet (1994-97), as well as guitarists Fred Frith, Jeff Parker, Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, and Mary Halvorson, all of whom I've seen at least once or more before at previous Big Ears since 2018. Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan will be presenting her outstanding septet and drummer Ches Smith will be performing with his new Clone Row band. Even drummer Dave Lombardo of the band Slayer will be there for a set with Zorn and keyboardist John Medeski. A first (for me, as well as many others, I suspect) will be the legendary but elusive downtown musician and artist Charlemagne Palestine, a contemporary of La Mont Young who probably knew MacLise. 

Pat Metheny is making his Big Ears debut this year and I haven't seen him since 1987, but I'll miss his 2½-hour set tomorrow night due to conflicts with other performances at or about the same time. Ditto Laurie Anderson, who I saw at Big Ears 2024 and who returns this year for several performances, including a duet with Zorn. But again, conflicts and schedule issues. 

The ghost of Lou Reed hangs over this year's festival. Not only is his widow, Laurie Anderson, performing, as is his pre-Velvets contemporary Charlemagne Palestine, but there will be an installation piece on Sunday at an old Greyhound station of Reed's guitars leaning against amplifiers to create a continuous feedback drone, accompanied by various, as-yet unannounced musicians selected by Anderson. 

The festival is like an ocean - so big you can't even drink half of it in. At any given moment, there may be as more than a dozen performances on separate stages, and one can only be at one place at a time. That can get frustrating, especially if you have FOMO, and the Zen approach is to just enjoy the set you're experiencing at any given moment and not think about all that you're missing. 

The way I look at it is Big Ears in a major event, an international gathering of an astonishing number of world-class musicians, all performing, collaborating, and improvising together in the unlikely location of Knoxville, Tennessee, a mere four-hour drive away. The event is not about me, or any other single listener, but we get to be some small part of the titanic happening. 

And for that we should be grateful.

 

Fifth Ocean, 23rd Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Fifth ocean of the year, second of this spring. 

It's now almost comically apparent that the Stable Genius had no strategic plan for the war in Iran, and had fully expected Tehran to surrender after the first day of bombing. 

You can't blame him, though. He's used to dealing with the Democrats.  

Fifth Day of the Zenith, 22nd of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra):  Oh, fun! There's yet another new climate-change study out! Always a big day in the WDW household! 

This one, State of the Global Climate, 2025, was prepared by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, and documents  the rapid, large-scale changes to Earth's climate, and their impacts on human health and natural systems, including contributions to food insecurity, and displacement of people, i.e., the mass migration of climate refugees. 

Let's start with the basics. The temperature of the Earth changes in response to the rate at which energy enters and leaves the planetary system. That's a common-sense, and hopefully non-controversial, observation - if more energy enters the system than leaves, the planet warms up; if more energy leaves than enters, the planet cools off. 

Greenhouse gases reduce the rate at which energy leaves the system. That's a basic physio-chemical fact, not an opinion or some far-fetched theory, but its inconvenient truth has lead some to try and cast doubt on that. Think of an actual greenhouse - the glass panes let in warming solar energy, but trap the heat inside the structure, leading to an accumulation of excess energy (i.e., heat). The atmosphere works the same way, but instead of glass panes, with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane, nitrous oxide). 

In 2024, the last year for which figures are available, the atmospheric concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide reached their highest level in 800,000 years. The concentration of CO₂ (423.9 ppm) was 3.5 ppm more than in 2023 and 152% of the estimated pre-industrial concentration (in 1750). Based on proxy data (e.g., geology, glaciology, etc.), the current concentration of CO₂ is higher than at any time in at least 2 million years.   The increase is due to continued CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels, increased wildfire emissions, and the reduced capacity of the oceans, forests, and other eco-systems to absorb CO₂. 

The past three years were the warmest three in the 176-year combined record of land and sea-level temperatures. The year 2025 is the second or third warmest year, depending on the dataset used, slightly cooler than the record warmth of 2024, due in part to the transition from El Niño at the start of 2024 to La Niña in 2025. 

However, the warming seen at the surface represents just 1% of  the excess energy trapped by greenhouse gases. The vast majority of the excess energy – around 91% – has been absorbed by the oceans in the form of heat. In 2025, the oceans reached a new record high temperature. As well as absorbing the heat, the oceans have also absorbed around 29% of the man-made emissions of CO₂ in the past decade. Although this helps to buffer the effects of climate change, it unfortunately also alters the chemical composition of the ocean water, reducing  the pH in a process known as ocean acidification.

Another 3% of the excess energy warms and melts glacial ice.  The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have both lost significant mass since satellite records began. The last ten years have seen eight of the ten largest ice retreats of individual glaciers since 1950. 

The extent of sea ice in the Arctic has decreased in all seasons since satellite measurements began in 1979, and the annual maximum extent in 2025 was the lowest or second lowest in the observed records. The extent of sea ice around Antarctica had been showing a small long-term increase up until 2015, but since then has decreased significantly and the past four years have seen the four lowest Antarctic sea-ice minima on record. 

Of course, both the warming of the ocean and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets on land have contributed to the long-term global rise in mean sea level. The rate of global sea-level rise has increased since satellite measurements began in 1993, an is rising faster and higher than previously suspected.

Extreme weather, including flooding, droughts, cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes, continue to drive new and protracted displacement of people globally, with particularly severe consequences in fragile and conflict-affected regions. These events have not only destroyed homes, infrastructure and ecosystems, but also undermine resilience and pose serious risks to people on the move and those already living in displacement  – many of whom are excluded from national preparedness and response plans.

Not mentioned in the U.N. report, but the ongoing war in Iran is not only releasing staggering amounts of CO₂ but will likely result in a rebuilding on the fossil-fuel production infrastructure, locking the world into a renewed cycle of fossil-fuel dependency. While it's impossible to predict all of the regional and global geo-political outcomes of the war, past conflicts have results in mass migrations putting more people at higher risk of the affects on the changing climate.  

 

Fourth Day of the Zenith, 21 of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Imagine a group of climate scientists trying to verify the record of Earth's temperatures, snowfall, and precipitation for the past 1,000 years. Climate records exist for the past 150 or so years, but I doubt I'm the only one who questions the accuracy and precision of global temperature measurements in the 1870s. So climate scientists examine ice cores from Greenland, tree rings, lake-bottom sediments, and other indirect indicators of climate and temperature.

Now, imagine that those scientists learned that a monastery in Tibet had not only been keeping detailed and meticulous rain- and snowfall records for the past 1,000 years, but also documenting their methods for taking the measurements. I think it's safe to say the scientists would be very interested in examining that record.

But Western scientists, at least, who are studying consciousness seem very unwilling to consider the observations and findings of Buddhist monks in meditation. The remote monasteries of Tibet, China, and Japan have been directly observing human consciousness since the time of the Buddha (roughly 500 B.C.E.) and recording their observations and conclusions, but that's considered "religion" or at the very least "subjective data," and off limits to modern science.

This isn't an "anti-science" screed by any means, but part of the reason that science works and works so well is that it's based on objective and impartial observations, and experiments that are reproducible and findings that can be confirmed by other, independent scientists. But consciousness, by its very definition, is subjective and personal. It's what a person experiences and what it's like to have that experience, and that kind of touchy-feely, intangible, and irreproducible phenomena is complete anathema to science. 

So instead, scientists study neurons and the biological functioning of the brain and learn amazing things about neurology and neuroscience, but don't learn a thing about actual consciousness. They perform psychological studies and experiments on humans, but their observations and findings are reduced to behaviorism, and they miss the boat entirely on consciousness. 

Most of what the West knows about consciousness has come from philosophers, artists, and a handful of renegade psychiatrists. But in Tibet, Kyoto, and elsewhere, there are many monasteries that have functioned like observatories for centuries. Their records are every bit as detailed and precise as astronomical observatories as they study consciousness and the mind, recording their findings and developing theories on their results. 

Scientists have studied the monks, hooking them up to EEGs to record brainwaves and neural activity, etc., but they are missing what it is the monks are observing. It's like an astronomer showing up at any ancient celestial observatory and studying the telescope, not the recorded observations.

Personally, I don't agree with all of the theories that the Tibetans have derived from their observations and study. I think their conclusions are too steeped in Tibetan culture and mysticism, but I'm still intensely interested in what they've observed and even if I find some of their theories implausible, those theories still speak to the experience of their observations.    

 

Third Day of the Zenith, 20th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): I had been wondering about this, but unlike the price per gallon of gasoline, I wasn't sure how to research the answer. But reporting today in The Guardian reveals that the Stable Genius' war in Iran has emitted 5.5 million  tons of greenhouse gases in its first 14 days, roughly the same as a medium-size, fuel-intensive economy like Kuwait and more carbon than the 84 lowest emitting countries combined.

• Destroyed buildings surprisingly constitute the largest element of the estimated carbon cost. About 20,000 civilian buildings have been damaged so far, with total emissions of 2.6M tons of CO₂ equivalent.


• I had thought fuel would be the second biggest source, with US bombers flying in from as far away as England to carry out raids over Iran. However, analysis has shown it to be the second largest, with between 40M and 70M gallons of fuel consumed by aircraft, support vessels, and vehicles in the first 14 days of the war.


• Between 2.5 and 5.9 million barrels of oil have been burned in the war, including the Iranian retaliations on its Gulf neighbors.


• Destroyed military hardware, including four U.S. aircraft, 28 Iranian aircraft, 21 naval vessels, and about 300 missile launchers, resulted in release of 190,000 tons of CO₂ equivalent.


• The bombs, missiles and drones themselves (6,000 U.S. and Israeli strikes inside Iran, about 1,000 missiles and 2,000 drones from Iran, and 1,900 interceptors fired to defend against them) contributed about 60,000 tons of CO₂ equivalent.

In short, the war has been a climate disaster. And just as bad, the disruption to fossil-fuel supplies will probably lead to more oil drilling. Historically, every US‑driven energy shock has been followed by a surge in new drilling, new LNG terminals, and new fossil‑fuel infrastructure. This war risks hard‑wiring another generation of carbon dependence.

This is not a war for security. It’s a war for the political economy of fossil fuels – and the people paying the price are Iranian civilians and working‑class communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Meanwhile, the weather outside is cuckoo-bird crazy pants. Tuesday afternoon, I was out driving in freezing sleet. Today, I walked a 7.1-mile Jackson in shorts and a tee in 80° weather.

 

Second Day of the Zenith, 19th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): The price per gallon of petroleum and gasoline are skyrocketing due to the Stable Genius' war in Iran. The average estimated price in the U.S. is now $3.91/gallon and rising.  "Yeah," the online trolls on antisocial media say, "but it's still cheaper than it was under Obama."

I looked it up. Surprise, surprise, they're not right, but they're also not quite as wrong as I had thought they'd be. 

In 2008, the last year of George Bush's presidency, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. was $3.27/gal, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Due to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, the price dropped by almost a dollar to $2.35/gal in Obama's first year in office (2009). During the subsequent years, the price rose back up to $3.64 in 2012, and I remember Newt Gingrich campaigning for President carrying a five-gallon gas tank around with him everywhere he went to remind voters of the cost of oil. During Obama's second term, the price dropped down to $3.36 in 2014, and then in 2015 and 2016, the oil market crashed due to a global oversupply of petroleum, and the price of gasoline fell all the way down to $2.10 by Obama's last year. I didn't hear Gingrich commenting on that.

So, in summary, during the Obama years of 2009-2016, the average price for a gallon of gasoline was $2.10 to $3.64, with an average cost of $2.93/gal, which is less than the current $3.91, even at its peak. The trolls are wrong. 

During the Stable Genius' first term, the price of gasoline stayed below $2.64/gal, and then fell all the way to $2.17 during the covid pandemic of 2020 due to low demand.  

In 2022, during Biden's presidency, Putin invaded Ukraine, upsetting European supply lines and causing a global panic. The price of gasoline shot up to $3.97/gal that year before settling back down to $3.30 in Biden's last year (2024). So the MAGA trolls could correctly say that the current price of gasoline is still lower than the peak price under Biden, if only by six cents, but even then that was only for one of his four years. And the reason for the current high prices aren't Putin's invasion of Ukraine or anywhere else, but the Stable Genius' invasion of Iran. He brought this down on himself.

If I were a right-wing troll, I would adjust the numbers for inflation. The peak price of gasoline under Obama in 2012 was $4.30/gal in inflation-adjusted dollars, and the peak price under Biden was $4.10 in 2022, adjusting for inflation. Both peaks are obviously above the current price (for now) of $3.91. But aside from cost comparisons, the reasons for the Obama and Biden peaks weren't the reckless actions of those presidents, while the current spike is unquestionably due to the Stable Genius' adventures in Iran along with his black-out drunk, weekend-news host Secretary of Defense.

 

Day of the Zenith, 18th of Spring, 526 M,E, (Aldebaran): There are six five-day events in the original Universal Solar Calendar, scattered more-or-less randomly throughout the year. When I set up my latest New Revised USC, I divided the year into six seasons instead of the original five, and moved some of the five-day events so that one occurred during each season. 

The five Days of the Zenith were originally the 21st to the 25th days of Spring (April 3 through 7) in Angus MacLise's five-season USC. Those days became the 33rd to 37th days of Spring in my six-season revision. However, I moved them up by a couple weeks to the 18th through 22nd days of Spring so that tomorrow, the Vernal Equinox, falls during a Day of Zenith. Seemed astronomically befitting. 

Just so you know. Let's move on. 

Yesterday, I noted South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms maintains that uncertainty creates feelings, and feelings give rise to consciousness, or at least that's how Michael Pollan explains it. The Buddha taught that ignorance (which we can correlate with "uncertainty," right?) is the necessary precondition, or substrate, for mental models, and mental models are the necessary precondition, or substrate, for consciousness. Feelings don't come up in the Buddha's 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination until four more steps after, not before, consciousness.

Everyone loves a controversy and everyone queues up to watch a fight, but I don't think there's necessarily a disagreement between Solms and Buddhism. First, as I pointed out yesterday, the Buddha had a different definition of consciousness than what Solms was talking about. The "hard-problem" consciousness discussed nowadays is closer to what Buddhists call "mind," which is considered the deepest, most basic, essential manifestation of the mind - the metaphorical heart of the mind, the mind before thoughts arise. On the other hand, "consciousness," in Buddhism is considered just the perception, or "feeling," of sensations impinging on the six sense organs. 

Not to make it more complicated, but to give some more perspective, in Buddhism there are actually 18 forms of consciousness, each associated with the six senses, including the mind. There's consciousness associated with the sense organ itself ("eye consciousness" through "mind consciousness"), there's consciousness associated with the sensation ("sight consciousness" through "thought consciousness"), and then there's the realm of each different sense ("realm of sight" through "realm of mind consciousness").         

Introducing a foreign language usually just complicates things, but since the Budhist concepts are so different and the English words so slippery, let's use some Sanskrit terms. Ignorance, in Sanskrit, is avidyā, which I think is essentially the same as Solms' "uncertainty," although I could be wrong (it happens). 

The Buddha's "mental models" are samskāra, which I believe we can all agree is something completely different from Solms' "feeling" (vedanā).   

Finally, the very different concept of consciousness in Buddhism is called vijñāna (not to be confused with vedanā), while the more analogous "mind" is hsin (okay, that one's Chinese - I don't know the Sanskrit equivalent).

So to put it all together, Solms says avidyā gives rise to vedanā, which gives rise to hsin (avidyā > vedanā > hsin). The Buddha's teaching has avidyā existing before samskāra, which exists before vijñāna (avidyā > samskāra > vijñāna), with vedanā appearing only much later and hsin not even mentioned at all. And before there's any more confusion, the >'s above are meant as directional arrows, not "greater than" signs. 

My point is that two statements that may appear to be in opposition are, on closer examination, talking about separate things and therefore not is disagreement. Solms' theory is about avidyā, vedanā, and hsin, and the Buddha's teaching is about avidyā, samskāra, and vijñāna. Also, while Solms has one thing creating or causing the next, the Buddha merely has each as a necessary precondition or substrate of the following, but causation is not necessarily the link between them.

I don't know if all this is illuminating or confusing to others, but I needed to go through the exercise to clarify my own thoughts. This is my blog, and these are the thoughts in my head today, so I'm going to write about what I'm thinking.

Enjoy your Vernal Equinox tomorrow!

 

Day of the Gamelan, 17th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): According to his Wikipedia page, Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. According to Solms, as Michael Pollan explains it, consciousness is generated from feelings, and feelings, in turn are a result of uncertainty. 

One of the hard problems of consciousness is defining just what it is we're talking about. Buddhism has the advantage of two different terms when we talk about consciousness. What the Buddha called "consciousness" (vijnana) wasn't all that big of a deal. In Buddhism, vijnana takes six different forms, each associated with a sense, so that there's a touch consciousness, a visual consciousness, and so on up to consciousness of thought, our awareness of thinking. Each form of vijnana arises from contact of an object with the organ corresponding to a sense, and the brain is considered the organ that perceives thoughts. The Buddha, therefore, would probably have agreed with Solms that consciousness arises from "feeling" our thoughts.   

But consciousness, as considered today, with it's model of self or personhood, it's memory, it's emotional states, and so on, is probably closer to what is called "mind" in Zen. Mind, hsin in Chinese, shin in Sino-Japanese, and kokoro in Japanese, can be translated as mind, heart, spirit, soul, outlook, interiority, thought, and so on. I usually encounter it in the literature as "heart-mind," not meaning the mind of the beating heart, but the deepest, most basic, essential manifestation of the mind - the metaphorical heart of the mind, the mind before thoughts arise. In that latter sense, kokoro, the pure, true mind, the mind before we layer all the bullshit of thoughts and rationalization on it, can also mean absolute reality - the mind beyond distinction between thought and matter, between the abstract and the concrete.

When the Buddha taught in the 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination that the appearance of consciousness was dependent on the prior existence of samskara, or mental models, he wasn't talking about mind (kokoro), but merely our awareness of thought (vijnana). Kokoro ultimately refers to the entire Chain of Dependent Origination in which we are born, live, and die, according to contemporary Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura. Ultimately, the chain is a circle - the top link, old age and death, is a precursor to the bottom link, ignorance, so there's no real start or end to the chain. As such, there is no ultimate cause or origin to mind, conscious experience as we think of it today, in Buddhism, making speculation on what it arises from a meaningless question. 

 

Krakatoa Day, 16th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): From what I've seen in my own personal experience,  few teachings of the Buddha are more misunderstood than the 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination. 

I'm not going to get into the whole thing here. Suffice it to say, the teaching presents a dozen conceptual links, from old age and death down to ignorance, each dependent on the link below it for its existence. The confusion starts because many assume that the chain is somehow causal, and each link somehow creates the next link above. 

Based on how I just framed it, you probably suspect that I don't agree with that view. The link just below the last or highest link on the chain, old age and death, is birth. You can't have old age and death without first having birth, but it doesn't feel right to say that birth is the cause of old age and death (although it's sometimes said the life is a fatal condition).    

No, I see each link as a necessary substrate to the link above it. For example, you can't have fire without fuel, but fuel doesn't necessarily cause fire. Other phenomena, like ignition and oxygen, are also reuired substrates. Similarly, you can't have old age and death without birth, even though birth doesn't cause old age and death.

We can apply that substrate model to the first three, bottom links of the chain: ignorance, samskara, and consciousness. I use the Sanskrit samskara rather than the various English translations, because those various translations, which include intention, impulse, mental models, mental formations, and even memory, cause a lot of the confusion. Is ignorance the substrate for intention or is it the substrate for memory? Does consciousness require impulse or does it require mental formations (whatever those are) as a substate?

I think it can be readily shown that the Buddha meant mental models or mental formations, which are basically the same thing, as are Erich Fromm's "mental maps." Ignorance does create our mental models and they don't spontaneously arise out of ignorance, but we form them to help us understand what we don't know. As Michael Pollan puts it, we form them to help us predict the behaviors of the world around us in order to keep us safe. And one of those mental models is that the thinker is a separate thing from the rest of the universe - "I" am somewhere inside this skull, and outside of it are "others." It's "me" that's experiencing these senses, storing these memories, and forming these models.

"Consciousness," in this sense, means an awareness of one's self.  And it's our mental model of a separate self that's a necessary substrate for consciousness to appear. The awareness is consciousness - we're aware of our self - and while the mental model doesn't create the awareness, it creates the object of awareness. So without the model, there's nothing to be aware of and hence no consciousness, just like no fuel means no fire.

The rest of the 12-Fold Chain can be viewed the same way - to the next step, name and form, and so on all the way up to birth and old age and death. But right now, I've been thinking mostly about consciousness.  

 

Day of the Doldrums, 15th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Are robots sentient? Are they conscious and do they have an inner self-identity? 

I'm not talking about your Roomba or one of those automatons on an assembly line in some food-processing plant. I'm talking about the synths, cyborgs, replicants, and androids that we see in science fiction. Yes, I know they don't exist yet, but if you were to meet Ash or Bishop from the first Alien movies IRL, would you consider it to have the same level of consciousness and self-awareness as a human?

You might think you have a ready answer in your head, but if you've never met one how would you know? You might think you're answer is "no," but if you were to actually encounter one is it possible you'd be swayed by it's personality and presence? Or if your answer is "yes," might you be turned off by some artificiality in its appearance and by its formulaic conversation?

If you saw the movie Companion (spoiler ahead), did you feel differently about the synth when she was in "girlfriend mode" than you did toward the end when her robotic arm was exposed and she was pretty indiscriminately killing people?  

Video games are another way to find out. No, games are not real life, and yes, they're scripted and often try to deliberately lead you to one conclusion or the other. But I argue that in the immersion that occurs over the 40 to 100 hours it takes to complete a modern game, your true feelings toward the robots will come out. You might go all "bad guy" against them in a game, like the Black Hat in the first season of Westworld, or you might respect their autonomy, like his white-hat alter ego. 

The Fallout games have a wide variety of robots and synths to help you figure just where your own personal uncanny valley lies, especially Fallout 4. Some robots are far from human, like the Mr. Gutsy's and Codsworth, who look more like a flying octopus than a person, or the Robobrains that look like giant Roombas with a glass dome containing what appears to be a human brain. The Protectrons are classic, 1950's Robby the Robot robots, and others are sleek, even sexy, bipeds, like the Assaultrons. Then there's the synths, who range from the first generation, who are obviously manufactured, to second gen characters like Nick Valentine, to third-generation models who are indistinguishable from organic humans. A subplot in the game concerns citizens of the Commonwealth becoming paranoid thinking their friends and families are being kidnapped and replaced with identical synths. There's even a human girl who becomes convinced that she herself is actually a synth.

Playing the game, I had to problem smashing, shooting, or otherwise destroying the Mr. Gutsy's and the Robobrains, and the Assaultrons were so aggressive and deadly I'd kill them without remorse before they first killed me. But I got squeamish about harming the synths, even first generation, unless first attacked. Were they like people with memories, desires, hopes, fears, and an inner life, or were they just machines useful only for whatever purpose they were manufactured? I'd no more abuse Nick Valentine than I would any human NPC in the game.

There's a pivotal scene in the game Detroit: Become Human where your feelings and attitudes towards synthetics are really put to the test. In the scene, two detectives go to the home of the inventor of the game's exact-replica synths. The inventor is similar to the Oscar Isaac character in the movie Ex Machina. The manipulative genius tells them he has information about the murder they're investigating, but will only share it if one of the detectives first shoots a beautiful female droid point blank in the head to test his theory about attitudes toward androids. You, as the player, have to make the choice to pull the trigger and kill what looks and sounds like a person and possibly solve the murder, or walk away empty handed but having spared a "life." The game could go either way - you're truly free to choose. What would you do - pull the trigger or hit the road? 

If you haven't played these games, you might think you know how you'd respond in these situations, but when playing the games, it feels different after actually encountering the entities in question, interacting with them for days and weeks on end. Especially in  the Detroit game, as the beautiful android in jeopardy is also the voice and face of the game's AI that has been assisting you the whole game.

What I'm saying is that the game experience can give you a more honest, visceral indication of how you'd actually respond than the theoretical, intellectual answer you might think you have.

FYI, I spared the woman in Detroit. Fuck that asshole inventor and his manipulative head games - I'm not breaking so much as a piggy bank much less killing a droid for his egotistical amusement.

 

Day of the Palisades, 14th of Spring 526 M.E. (Castor): I'm thoroughly enjoying my reading of Michael Pollan's A World Appears. I'm reading it very slowly, as every few pages I come across one statement or another that makes me want to put the book down and think for a while. Meditate on it a little, and then come back and re-read it again to make usure I got it right before moving on.

According to Pollan, in just one of many fascinating observations, there's a leading model of perception known as the Bayesian mind. "The Bayesian brain hypothesis," Pollan writes, "holds that perception is less a matter of taking the world in through our senses than a matter of generating a continuous stream of predictions about what's happening in the world based on our prior experiences and the laws of probability." 

"Our senses exist," Pollan writes, "mainly to refine, or error-correct, our minds' best guesses as to what we're experiencing." In other words, our minds don't exist to interpret our senses, our senses exist to interpret our minds. 

This is a most worthy addition to the set of ideas I've come to rely upon in my understanding of samskara, mental models, and subconscious thought. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm wrote, "Man needs a map of his natural and social world, without which he would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently. He would have no way of orienting himself and of finding for himself a fixed point that permits him to organize all the impressions that impinge upon him."

"Whether he believed in sorcery and magic as final explanations of all events, or in the spirit of his ancestors as guiding his life and fate, or in an omnipotent god who will reward or punish him, or in the power of science to give answers to all human problems - from the standpoint of his need for a frame of orientation, it does not make any difference. His world makes sense to him, and he feels certain about his ideas through the consensus with those around him. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. But the map was never entirely wrong - nor has it ever been entirely right, either. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living."

Fromm found it impressive that he could find no culture or individual in which there did not exist such a frame of orientation. "Often an individual may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that he responds to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as his judgment guides him. But it can be easily demonstrated that he takes his own philosophy for granted, because to him it is only common sense, and he is unaware that all his concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference."   

Fromm's description of our "mental maps" is strikingly similar to the Buddhist samskara (mental formation) and to Pollen's description of the Bayesian mind. A person develops mental models based on their prior experience, including what they've been taught and what was impressed upon them, and then can predict the likely events of the near future based on that model. In the Bayesian model, we don't perceive the object per se as much as a potential for a certain outcome, be it danger or pleasure.

For example, two different people might see the same dog at the same time. One person might perceive a chance of getting bit or at least aggressively barked at. The other person might perceive a "good boy," a loyal and nonjudgmental friend. The difference is based on prior experience and what they've been taught. Similar are the differences when two separate people see someone of a different gender, race, or religion, or an immigrant, or a homeless person. We're perceiving imagined potential, not the actual phenomenon. We're constantly sizing everything up, categorizing our surroundings and what we encounter as either "dangerous" or "pleasurable," and frequently ignoring the rest that don't fall firmly into either category.

The Bayesian model seems to exist in the sweet spot of the Venn diagram of samskara, potential, and subconscious thought.

 

Maelstrom, 13th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): To "borrow" (plagiarize? steal?) from the Upaya Zen Center's "Special Statement," Water Dissolves Water finds itself grieving the tragic loss of life in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ukraine, Gaza/Israel, and the thirty other wars and genocides raging on our planet at this moment. We stand upright and open as we call not only for a cease fire, but a ceasing of war in our time. Our hearts cannot turn away from the truth of pervasive suffering, sorrow, and death as a result of war. And for this, we urge that this be a time of deep dialogue reaching past differences, of recognizing that the terrible cost of war passes through generations, that the impact of war on our earth is inestimable, and that we must realize our basic humanity and sanity for the sake of all at this time and those who are yet to be born.

 

The Silent Guest, 12th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): As I said yesterday, war is by definition a failure and nothing good comes from it, despite mankind's enthusiasm for the activity. 

During the first days of the Stable Genius' war on Iran, 167 people were killed when a missile struck a girls’ school in Iran , apparently because the Pentagon was using outdated targeting data. One of Iran's hundreds of counterattack missiles hit a makeshift command center in Kuwait, killing six US troops and wounding dozens more. None of those tragic deaths needed to or should have happened.

Due to a lack of foresight and planning, tens of thousands of US citizens were stranded in the region as the State Department tried to figure out a way to evacuate them. Due to a lack of foresight and planning, the U.S. has allowed Iran to effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's oil passes. 

The air strikes that killed the Ayatollah also killed many of the successors favored by the Stable Genius. In his first address regarding the war, the Stable Genius told the Iranian people to “take over your government” although no viable opposition party yet exists and with no indication of how that takeover should be done. 

The first six days of the war alone reportedly cost $11.3B, and it isn’t clear if that figure includes the cost of the military buildup or the cost of our missile defense. The ultimate toll of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz on the world economy remains to be seen. 

I could gloat over these failures of my country, but I don't want to see us fail in this effort. I don't want the U.S. to lose this war. I want the the U.S. to end this war - just stop it, right now. The Stable Genius, not content in just destroying the U.S., is harming the world order in miscalculations and mistakes that will be felt for decades. It's already too late to stop the harm now, but we can still stop now before the harm gets even worse. 

Stop the war. Now.

 

Fourth Ocean, 11th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Fourth ocean of the year 526, first ocean of this spring. 

So how are you enjoying the war? War is never the answer - war is usually what happens when all other options are exhausted. War is by definition a sign of failure - failure of imagination, failure of leadership, failure of diplomacy. 

I had to add the word "usually" to the paragraph above, because the Stable Genius apparently started bombing Iran with no clear purpose or goal in mind - there was no impasse reached, no breakdown in communication or negotiation, no intolerable threshold crossed. Some say it was done as a distraction from the most recent, shocking revelations in the Epstein files. Some say it was a payback to the Saudis and Arab states for their generosity and contributions to the Short-Fingered Vulgarians' various financial enterprises. Some say it was because Israel told him to and the SG/SFV thought he was supposed to do whatever Bibi tells him. 

Some simply admit they, and the Stable Genius, don't know.

Now the Iranians are threatening shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz with sea mines and drone attacks in the most predictable response to being bombed one can imagine. Last year, the Iranian Parliament voted to shut the strait when the Stable Genius first bombed Iran, so it doesn't exactly take supernatural abilities of prognostication to foresee the the threat to the strait this time around. 

Any military commander worth their salt would know to secure the Persian Gulf first before commencing a war on Iran.  Any teenager with video game experience would have know to secure the Gulf first. But the Short-Fingered Vulgarian and his black-out drunk Secretary of Defense like to cosplay as tough-guy warriors and went straight to the "fun" part - bombing missions - and now literally the whole world is quite literally paying the price for their stupidity and recklessness as global oil costs skyrocket.

People on social media are saying the Stable Genius will be remembered as the worst president in American history. I don't believe that. I think the Stable Genius will be remembered as the worst leader in world history.

 

Day of the Rains, 10th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): To be sure, Dogen arrived at the conclusion that grass and trees are conscious not from a deep botanical study of arboreal structure and functions or from reading philosophical essays by David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel.    

To Dogen, everything is everything. To Dogen, everything was mind and since everything was mind, everything has the same substance and nature as everything else. The self is mind, mountains and rivers are mind, grasses, trees, and even land are mind. And because they are mind, they are living beings. "The sun, the moon, and the stars are mind itself. Because they are mind, they are living beings and they have Buddha Nature."

When we look at the world, we see self and others, we see mind, we see man and nature, mountains and valleys, life and death, and the conscious and the insentient. But when all is mind, there is no self and others, no man and nature, no mountains and valleys, no life and death, and no consciousness or unconsciousness. But because it is like this, there is self and others, man and nature, mountains and valleys, life and death, and the conscious and the insentient. Still, sunny days, while adored, cloud over and rain arrives when it's least welcome.

It was a surprisingly sunny and warm 82° outside today. I walked a 5.6-mile Monroe and as I always do, I stopped and laid my hand on my favorite tree on my route, a spectacular Pennsylvania ash. There's a spot on its trunk where its braided bark is worn down, and every time I pass it, I put my hand for a minute or so on that exact spot. Every single time. The spot almost perfectly matches the size and shape of my hand, if I hold my thumb and index finger apart and the other three fingers together. 

I doubt the tree is aware of my presence or my touching it, but I become aware of the tree, more than I would by simply walking past. Laying hands on that one particular tree has become a part of my routine, and my walks wouldn't feel the same without it. My routines become my rituals and my rituals begin to feel sacred.       

Day of Mourning, 9th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): 

Students of the Way, the reason you do not attain enlightenment is because you hold onto your old views. Without knowing who taught you, you think that mind is the function of your brain – thought and discrimination. When I tell you that mind is grass and trees, you do not believe it. . .  When it is said that mind is grass and trees, you should understand that grass and trees are mind. (from Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Book 4, Chapter 7).

I've started reading Michael Pollan's A World Appears, his new (2026) book on the subject of consciousness.  Talk about up my alley - my personal area of dharma research has long been samskara (mental models or schema), consciousness, and the self, and the introduction, at least, of Pollan's book reads like a review of themes I've been discussing here since at least 2007, when I first mentioned philosopher David Chalmers and the "hard problem" of consciousness, Thomas Nagel's "what's it like to be a bat?" thought experiment, and Giulio Tononi's ideas about neural connectiveness.  

Pollan contends that consciousness extends beyond humans and even brains, and that even plants may be conscious in their own way (Dogen's mind of grass and trees). He notes that people most likely to ascribe consciousness to non-sentient things such as plants are those who've tried psychedelics and those who practice meditation. I was an enthusiastic consumer of psychedelics for a period in my life (roughly 1971 to 1976), and I've been a regular practitioner of Zen meditation for the past 26 years, so according to Pollan, I'm likely to recognize consciousness far beyond the grey human matter.     

His prediction is correct, at least as far as this one-man sample set is concerned. You will never convince me that my cat, Eliot, doesn't have consciousness - an interior experience and a sense of self identity. And if my cat is conscious, then so too are dogs ("Does a dog have Buddha-nature?") and many other organisms - consciousness likely extends way beyond mammals and charismatic megafauna, in my opinion. 

Trees and other plants obviously lack brains and nervous systems and do not experience pain or possess emotions like animals. However, evidence suggests they possess a form of plant sentience, allowing them to sense and interact with their environment and react accordingly. Roots act like decentralized "mini-brains," sensing water, nutrients, and obstacles to navigate the soil. 

Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory portrays trees as deeply conscious, social, and intelligent beings, rather than mere inanimate objects. Through his fictional characters, Powers provides evidence that trees communicate, share resources, learn, and form complex, sentient networks that constitute a form of forest-level awareness. "If you link enough trees together," Powers claims, "a forest grows aware." Some have described forests as a collective, intelligent superorganism.  

Physically, trees even sort of resemble neurons, and while a single neuron doesn't possess consciousness, a network of neurons, e.g., a brain, can, just as a single tree might or might not be conscious, but a network of trees, e.g., a forest, may. An aspen forest in Utah has recently been recognized to actually consist of a single organism - a massive, 106-acre colony of over 40,000 genetically identical trees sharing a single root system. Considered one of the world's largest, heaviest, and oldest organisms at roughly 13 million pounds and thousands of years old, it is a single, connected entity.

Trees can use chemical, electrical, and hormonal signals to warn neighbors of danger, such as insect attacks, and share nutrients and communicate through underground fungal networks, often described as "fungal synapses" or humorously as the "wood-wide web." They can recognize their own species and even assist kin, indicating a sophisticated level of interaction constituting a form of intelligence.

Ethically, it's probably better to assume most all living things possess consciousness and govern oneself accordingly under that assumption, than to assume the opposite and inflict suffering where it could otherwise be avoided. 

Thirteenth-Century Zen Master Dogen recognized the mind of grass and trees. Powers and Pollan make a strong case for plant consciousness. This contemplative urban monk with former psychedelic experience does not disagree.

 

The High Winds, 8th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): Not to sound like Debbie Downer, but the overdrawn, polluted, fragmented, and invaded freshwater ecosystems across the country are in crisis. Marine and terrestrial ecosystems are also degraded, with reduced biodiversity. An estimated 34 percent of our country's plant species and 40 percent of its animal species are at risk of extinction. Human pressures are diminishing the clean water, food, health, livelihoods, and protection from storms and fire that healthy natural systems can provide.  

So the National Nature Assessment was set to say in a first-of-its-kind assessment of the health of nature in the United States. The assessment had started on Earth Day, 2022, when President Biden signed an executive order authorizing the report, but in January 2025, weeks away from completion of a first full draft of the assessment, the Stable Genius disbanded the effort. However, the researchers went ahead and completed it on their own and released a 868-page draft last week as the Nature Record, a new name to reflect a new, independent effort. 

The draft will be reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the same organization that would have reviewed the report had it remained under the auspices of the federal government.

The assessment was completed by about 125 researchers who were not federal employees, mostly working on a voluntary basis. The report primarily synthesizes existing research, so its individual findings are not new but rather a scientific consensus by which policymakers and the public can make informed decisions.

In addition to canceling the nature report, the Stable Genius has also taken aim at national climate assessments, which are mandated by Congress and have been published since 2000. He dismissed the authors and instead released a separate report by the Department of Energy that downplayed the threat of climate change. Scientists condemned that report, and in January, a judge ruled that the way the it had been commissioned by the government had violated the law.

Not reporting problems doesn't make them go away. If anything, willful ignorance of problems only allows them to fester and get worse. But I'm getting the distinct impression that the Stable Genius isn't interested in solving problems.

 

Day of the Roots, 7th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I propose that somewhere in a remote section of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, there is a colony of ants. Some of the ants claim the existence of highly intelligent beings, "humans" they call them, from somewhere outside of their nest, maybe even from beyond the mountains, but they have no proof. 

"If humans exist," the skeptical ants ask, "Why haven't they come visit our colony?" Surely, they reason, these intelligent humans would be curious about the customs and mores of the colony and would want to communicate with the ants. The believers counter that the humans would obviously want to do all that and more, but given the colony's territorial nature and the way they attacked the wasp that tried to visit, the humans are either afraid or intimidated to appear.

That's how I feel about both UFO conspiracy theorists and the Fermi paradox skeptics. The Fermi paradox is the contradiction between the high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, based on the billions of stars and planets in the universe, and the lack of evidence or contact with any such civilizations. 

I believe that given the countless, near-infinite number of stars and planets in the universe, there is lfe out there somewhere on some planet other than Earth. Statistically, if the right combination of amino acids started life here, it must also have happened sometime, somewhere else.  The vast majority of planets are not suitable for organic life as we know it, but there are probably millions (billions?) of other planets where the spark could have started. On some subset of those planets, intelligent life may have evolved, and a subset of those planets may have developed life far more intelligent than us.

But here's the thing - if a species was so vastly more intelligent than us that they managed to figure a way to overcome the space/time challenges of traveling millions of light years, have mastered quantum physics to the point that they can harness relativity to their own purposes, what interest would they have in this ant colony Earth? We're no more capable of learning what they could have to offer than those ants in North Carolina are of translating Shakespeare form English to Chinese, or solving quadratic equations. 

Look, I'm a compassionate person and I also have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals, but if I somehow realized that the North Carolina ants were about to engage in a vicious territorial war with an adjacent colony, a war that would end badly for both, my reaction still wouldn't be to attempt to communicate with the ants and intervene in the war. No, I'd think, "Oh, so that's what they do," and that would be that. So why do we think super-intelligent extraterrestrials would want to get involved with us and stop a potential nuclear war, even if it were disastrous to this planet?

I bring all this up because today The Guardian reported that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) institute is suggesting that space "weather" may be making radio signals from aliens hard to detect. Stellar activity, such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near “a transmitting planet,” can scramble such transmissions, potentially explaining the radio silence observed in SETI's searches.

“Plasma density fluctuations in stellar winds, as well as occasional eruptive events such as coronal mass ejections, can distort radio waves near their point of origin, effectively ‘smearing’ the signal’s frequency and reducing the peak strength that search pipelines rely on,” according to a SETI press release.

They are not incorrect about those challenges, although I do wonder why they're only realizing the problem now. But I disagree with any assumption that extraterrestrial intelligence has any intention on communicating with us. Especially that they're trying to but can't get through because of those pesky plasma fluctuations. 

For all that we know (and we don't know very much), extraterrestrials have already observed us, have garnered all of the data and information they want or need, and have moved on. They may even still be here, occupying some extra-dimensional space right here in our midst. 

How would we know?

 

Day of the Fronds, 6th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Oh, fun! There's another new climate-change study out! This one, as reported by the NY Times, found that previous studies of sea-level rise have underestimated just how high the water actually already is. It turns out hundreds of millions of people worldwide are already living dangerously close to the rising ocean than previously estimated.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that coastal sea levels are, on average, eight inches to a foot higher than many maps and models of the world’s coastlines indicate.  The discrepancies are most pronounced in Southeast Asia and Pacific nations, where coastal sea levels are up to several meters higher than commonly estimated.

The study concludes that scientists have often been working from the wrong starting point when calculating what land and populations might be affected in the future. In other words, they were underestimating where coastal sea levels already are. Of course, people who are exposed to tidal floods know exactly where the ocean is.  

The problem centers on a decades-old method that compares satellite-based measurements of land elevation to what scientists call the “geoid model,” which estimates average sea level based on the Earth’s gravitational field. This method, once considered state-of-the-art and commonly taught in graduate schools, doesn't take into account factors like currents, winds, and tides, which can also influence sea levels but are not included in the geoid model. Sea levels are most accurately estimated when all factors are considered and combined correctly.

Some 90 percent of the papers reviewed in the study relied only on the method of mapping sea levels using Earth’s gravitational field. Another 9 percent of the papers, most of which are relatively recent, did use both kinds of data, but failed to combine them correctly.

In general, the findings indicate that hundreds of millions more people — particularly in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Maldives, and other Southeast Asian and Pacific nations — are living closer to sea level than widely assumed by Western experts and policymakers. In other words, methods of studying sea-level rise that seemed to work relatively well for coastlines in Europe or the U.S. lead to bigger discrepancies in other parts of the world.

Day of the Lamb, 5th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Welcome to Spring. And with the new season, a welcome return of the Spring avatar, the Earth Mother. 

Speaking of Mother Earth, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the past three years have been the hottest three-year period on record. Greenhouse gas concentrations are hitting record-breaking levels even while the planet’s carbon sinks, the natural systems that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, are becoming depleted. The CO₂-induced warming has also been compounded by a recent drop in sulfur pollution that had provided temporary relief. 

The extreme heat in recent years was due in part to natural fluctuations such as solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, and the El Niño weather pattern. A previous period of accelerated warming was the result of the strong El Niño of 1998. The relative slowdown in warming that followed was incorrectly interpreted as evidence of a pause in global warming. The question now is how much of the current increased temperatures are the result of unforced variability (i.e., natural climate cycles).or forced responses (i.e., anthropogenic climate change).  

A recent study excluded the effect of natural factors behind the latest temperatures by applying a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets of the Earth’s temperature. The study found that even without taking natural causes into account, global warming accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2° C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35° per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is the highest since methodical measurements of the Earth’s temperature began in 1880. 

If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5° C limit of the Paris agreement within the next five years. One of the datasets, supplied by the EU’s Copernicus service, indicated the world will cross the 1.5° threshold this year if the rate of warming does not slow. Analysis of the other four datasets showed a breach in 2028 or 2029.

Global heating of 1.5-2° C may be enough to trigger near-apocalyptic “tipping points,” with the chances of catastrophe increasing at higher levels of warming. In the short-term, climate change will make heat waves hotter and allow storms to unleash more rain.