Haste of the Avenging Hound, 63rd Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Castor): I see in the news that the Stable Genius is angry that the UK, France, Spain, Canada, Australia, and other allies are not supporting the U.S. in its Iran adventure. Our black-out drunk Secretary of Defense called out “so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force." With diplomacy like that, how could they refuse to join in? 

FWIW, you don't get to bully your neighbors, threaten to annex them as the "51st state" or seize their territory, shove illegal and outrageous tariffs down their throats while accusing them of cheating on you, trash talk their leaders, threated to tear up decades-old alliances, and then turn around and expect them to come to your aid in an illegal war of choice that you started as a distraction from the nearly 4,000 times you're mentioned in the Epstein files.

It's well documented that the Stable Genius watches a lot of Fox News on a daily basis, apparently believing every word they speak. For decades, they've been calling for military strikes on Iran. Last year, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade pleaded with the Stable Genius to bomb Iran and when he finally did, they lavished praise on him, with Hannity saying the bombing would “go down in history as one of the great military victories.”

Could the encouragement by Fox News be the reason the Stable  Genius started this war? Or did it  have something to do with the increasing heat over the Epstein files? Or was it a tantrum over the Supreme Court striking down his tariffs? Or was he responding to pressure from Netanyahu or bribery from Bone-Saw Arabia? Or all of the above?

Friendly reminder that Fox News, CNN, CBS, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the NY Post are all owned and controlled by billionaire allies of the Stable Genius. They also control Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok, and more. They control the AI that drives the algorithms that feed your content. With info sources like that, is it any wonder we all find this war a little bewildering and confusing?     

The stated reasons for the war keep changing. First it was to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and then it was for regime change. Our b.o.d. DoD secretary said it was revenge for U.S. citizens killed by Iran and its proxies over the year. The Stable Genius, who's mind and worldview seems to have stalled in the 1980s, has even mentioned the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the American hostages (who were released over 40 years ago).

Whatever the reason, our so-called leadership seems to have forgotten that the removal of Hussein in Iraq only resulted in long-term instability, sectarian violence, insurgencies, and a fragmented, often corrupt political system still struggling with democracy. 

The 20-year intervention in Afghanistan ended in failure, despite over 2,400 American deaths and  $90 billion spent in security and nation-building. The U.S. was not able to establish a stable, self-sustaining Afghan government, resulting in the Taliban’s swiftly regaining control following the U.S. withdrawal. 

Removal of Gaddafi from Libya only created a failed state characterized by prolonged chaos, civil war, and a descent into fragmentation with rival governments in the east and west, militia proliferation, and foreign interference. 

The aftermath of Syria saw a mixture of jubilation over the end of five decades of Assad's brutal rule along with serious sectarian rivalry, a major realignment of regional power with Turkey, Qatar, and the US holding increased influence, and a nation still in considerable  flux.

War is never the answer and is always a symptom of other failures. War is what happens when other things don't work. The world is broken, the Middle East is broke, the U.S. is broken, and our leadership is broken. The center does not hold, and things are falling apart.

 

The Glass Limbo, 62nd Day of Childwiner, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): "Stop the war on the other side of the river!”

Were he alive today, I think the Buddha would be disappointed but not surprised at the latest war going on in Iran. He would have been disappointed but not surprised by any war - now, previously, or in the future. During his own time, there were wars between the feudal states of India, and he lived to see his own tribe, the Shakyas, exterminated by the neighboring kingdom of Magadha. 

To put it simply, the Buddha did not consider man to be an inherently warlike creature. He considered human nature to be naturally kind, generous, and empathic. But greed, hatred, and delusion arise out of ignorance of our natural state, clouding our understanding of our true nature and resulting in conflict and war - war between nation-states, war between men and women, war between man and nature. The solution is neither winner-takes-all nor split-the-spoils in a negotiated treaty, but to awaken to our true generous and peaceful nature.

"Stop the war on the other side of the river" is a very short koan in the Japanese Zen tradition. "The other side of the river" sounds like "the other shore," the allegorical location which one attempts to attain in spiritual practice (before realizing, of course, that we're already there). As an English interpretation of the dhāraṇī at the end of the Heart Sutra says, 

Gone, gone, gone to the other shore

To beyond the other shore,

Having never left.

Taken that way, "stop the war on the other side of the river!” could mean to stop the war over on the unrealized shore of ignorance. It could also mean to stop the struggle to attain the other shore.

I think the meaning is more subtle than that. How can one stop a war "on the other side," be it the other side of a river? Or the other side of the world? Or the other side of one's political or religious opinions? I can't teleport over to Iraq, and even if I could, I don't think popping up and saying "Stop it!" would make any difference.

The way to "stop the war on the other side of the river" is to abandon the idea of "the other side," which is to abandon the idea of a barrier separating the sides. There's a war "on the other side of the river" only because we divide ourselves by the river, or by an ocean, or a continent, or by political beliefs, or by ethnic differences. Separation and division leads to distrust and resentment, which leads to violence and war. 

"The monks of the East and West Halls were arguing about a cat," a different koan begins, and of course they were arguing - they already differentiated themselves as "East Hall" and "West Hall." "Stop the war in the West Hall," the monks of the East Hall were saying, while the monks of the West Hall were saying, "Stop the war in the East Hall."

The Buddha would have us forget the geopolitical and socioeconomic differences and intimately recognize each other as fellow sentient humans. We all were once children who only wanted to please our parents, we all want to keep our families safe and fed, and we all want to feel secure and be free to pursue meaning in our brief lives. But the three poisons - greed, hate, and delusion - make us mistrust each other, and we retreat into territorial positions and find ourselves in conflict with each other. 

"Stop the war on the other side of the river" mean to forget the river, to drop the idea of "the other side." To stop the war in Iraq, we need to drop the distinctions separating us from each other and awaken to our common nature. Our common nature includes you and I, self and other, and everyone needs to recognize our commonality - Americans and Iranians, the Stable Genius and the current Ayatollah (whoever that may be), even the Secretary of Defense and the Supreme Commander of the Republican National Guard. 

We're all far more alike than different, but you and I can't awaken others and all we can do individually is let go of our own greed, hate, and delusion, and then with an awakened mind, practice empathy and demonstrate loving kindness to all. One person at a time, each by their own effort. 

This plan won't end the war overnight - by my estimate, it would take about a thousand years, but that's all the more reason to start right now rather than give up in despair.

 

Day of the Once Without, 61st of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Today is the trickiest part of the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. The calendar consists of 366 days, like the Julian calendar in a leap year, so that a year can be evenly divided into 61 six-day weeks and each year will begin and end on the same day of the week. But it accounts for the Earth revolving around the Sun in 365¼ days by skipping one day in three out of four years, instead of adding a leap-year day every fourth year. You wind up in the same place either way - adding one to 365 days every fourth year, to skipping one of 366 days three of four years. 

The New Revised USC has the "extra" day on the 60th day of the year, the Fifth Twelve, which is also Leap Year Day in the Julian calendar. But since this isn't a leap year, this year we go right from Electra, the 59th day of Childwinter, to Aldebaran, the 61st day of Childwinter, without observing Helios, the 60th day of Childwinter. We "leap" from 59 to 61 three of four years, which seems to me more of a "leap year" than inserting an additional day once every four years.

You probably wouldn't have even noticed anyway, so there's that. 

Khamenei is dead, the United States and Israel continue to bomb Iran, Iran is firing missiles into the Arab states and trying to hit Israel, and still no one is really sure why. This feels a lot like how WWIII starts, but I'm not ready to think about that yet.

The Stable Genius ran on an America-First platform of ending foreign wars and regime change, but is now saying he started the war (without the Constitutionally required Congressional authorization) to effect regime change in Iran. I'm no fan of the Ayatollah or the Iranian regime, but I think flinging missiles into Tehran with Israel will make the world less safe, drive up the price of petroleum and along with it, virtually everything else, and not advance any tangible American interests.

Some say he did it because he was disappointed the recent mass protests in Iran weren't successful and didn't affect regime change. Others say he's doing it to distract the public from the Epstein files. Still others are saying it's because he hopes that a wartime President is less likely to face impeachment if the files are released and also as a prelude to suppressing or outright cancelling the 2026 elections (can't hold a fair election during wartime, amirite?).

There are those who follow the money, noting that the biggest beneficiaries of toppling Iran are probably Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (Qatar, UAE, etc.). These are also the same players who lavishly contributed to the Stable Genius' various enterprises, including a multi-million dollar, gilded luxury aircraft, a $2B "investment" in his son-in-law's businesses, and an equal size investment into the Stable Genius' cryptocurrency scheme. And remember, the first place the Stable Genius visited during both his first and second term was Bone-Saw Arabia. Follow the money - it can be argued it's what was owed the Arabs for all their lavish "gifts," under the guise of pretending to protect and cooperate with Israel.

War is never the answer. Killing and hatred only breeds more killing and hatred, a lesson we've seen over and over again in Gaza, in Northern Ireland, in central Africa, and in the Confederate South. Iranians who might have been accepting of U.S. support for regime change are shocked and awed as the bombs drop, and every bomb is but a seed for future terrorists and jihadists. 

This isn't ending well for anyone. T.S. Eliot, who was so wrong about so many things, was also wrong about the end - the world does end with a bang, the thunderous bang of U.S. guided missiles, and not a whimper.

 

The Unspoken Vows, 59th Day of Childwinter,526 M.E. (Electra): If you're 22 or younger, you've never lived in a time when the United States wasn't in some intractable war or another in the Middle East. Your whole life. War. The Middle East.

I'm truly sorry. I hope you find peace in your lifetime. 

Last night, the Stable Genius launched a bombing campaign against Iran, an unauthorized act of war and the very kind of action he campaigned against in 2024. His team of cracker-jack negotiators, i.e., his son-in-law and a real-estate partner, couldn't complete a treaty (or as he puts it, "a deal") with the Iranians fast enough to distract from the Epstein affair, so he turned his black-out drunk Secretary of Defense loose on a sovereign nation. The first military act, reportedly, was bombing a school for girls, because if that isn't a strategic target, what is?

"Everywhere in the world they hurt little girls.” - Cersei Lannister  

The war, without congressional authorization, approval, or even notification, is obviously illegal, although to my thinking, no war is moral or justified. Today, Israel announced that the bombing has killed Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been in power for over 35 years.

I am no fan of Iran's or of Khamenei, but if we've learned anything in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, it's that taking out authoritarians without a clear and imminent successor in place creates a dangerous power vacuum. Despite his title, the Ayatollah was "Supreme Leader" in name only - I understand that the Revolutionary Guard really runs the country, and with Khamenei gone, I expect various generals to start competing for dominance. Warlords and regional leaders will try to seize power, and terrorist organizations like ISIS will be able to flourish in the chaos.

The Stable Genius' reckless actions will have long karmic consequences and the whole world will pay a stiff price for many years to come.

War never changes. The details are trivial and pointless, the reasons area always purely human ones. The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire based on its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower. But war, war never changes. 

 

Broom Day, 58th of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Crazy pants weather. I walked today, a 7.9-mile Jackson, comfortably dressed in light sweatpants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Two days ago, I had to wear jeans and two layers of fleece, and four days ago, it was too cold to even go outside and walk.

The high temperature today was 66° F, but four days ago the high only reached 40° and the low was all the way down to 28°. There's still 15 more days left of Childwinter, but Spring keeps giving us these tantalizing little previews even as Hagwinter refuses to loosen her grip.

My life these days alternates between walking days, when I try to get in five to ten miles per hike, and sitting days, when I meditate for 90 minutes. Since there are biggest things going on in my life right now, I hyper-attuned to the weather.    

 

 

The Crippled Vision, 57th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Castor): Of all the Venn diagrams, the overlap that I like the least is that of politics and sports.  

My twin football allegiances are to the New England Patriots (pro) and the Georgia Bulldogs (collegiate). I've been a fan of both teams, through years thick and thin, since the early 1980s. Meanwhile, my politics include a complete and total contempt for the Stable Genius. In my mind, there is no overlap, no Venn diagram, between my football enthusiasms and my politics.

The Stable Genius wanted to buy the Patriots back in 1988, and I was glad back then that his attempt failed, even before I knew anything about his deplorable racism and political views. Back then, he was the guy who lured the Georgia Bulldogs' Herschel Walker away from the NFL, and I hadn't forgiven him for that (still haven't). I didn't want his greedy hands anywhere near my Patriots and was relieved when they were purchased instead by businessman Victor Kian. 

Kian was the owner of the Remington electric shaver company and famous for the tv ads in which he claimed he liked the razor so much that he bought the company. I don't remember if he ever said the same thing about the Patriots, but it feels like he should have. In any event, the subsequent owner fter Kian, Robert Kraft, was a close, personal friend of the Stable Genius. QB Tom Brady and Head Coach Bill Belichick also had ties to the Stable Genius. But those friendships and ties weren't playing on the field and had no relationship with the Patriots' success or my feelings about the team. I don't care that Kraft donated to the Stable Genius' inauguration fund, or that Tom Brady had a MAGA hat in his locker. All that had nothing to do with my cheering for the team. There was zero overlap of sports and politics.

I moved to Atlanta in 1980, the same year the Georgia Bulldogs won the college football national championship, and got caught up in the frenzy and jumped on board the Bulldogs' bandwagon. Georgia is a red state and some associate the team with the conservative values of the fans (it wasn't unusual to see Confederate flags in the stands), but I cheered for them because of their play and the athleticism of their players, not because of the politics of their fans.

Oh, but those were simpler times. Today, it seems like nothing can't be seen through except through a political filter, including sports, including the Georgia Bulldogs. Last week, the Stable Genius, his approval ratings tanking and his unpopularity at an all-time high, held a rally in Rome, Georgia, and had both Herschel and current Georgia QB Gunner Stockton on stage with him. Apparently, he was hoping for some popularity by association. Maybe he was cynically manipulating the star players, but Stockton went on to describe the meeting as "an awesome experience" and didn't object when the Stable Genius said the football star was a big fan of the President.

To be honest, I never gave a lot of thought to Gunner Stockton's politics. He's from a small, rural town in northeast Georgia, one of the reddest areas of a red state, so it's no shocker that he's a conservative. I probably would have guessed that if asked. 

The Stable Genius called Stockton a "big star" and predicted a "big year" for him. He told the crowd that Stockton is a "great quarterback" who is "only going to get better." I totally agree, but since it was the Stable Genius who said it, cheering for Stockton and the Dawgs is now viewed by many as approval or even endorsement of the Stable Genius. He's opportunistically hitched himself to the Bulldogs' bandwagon, hoping some of the Bulldogs' popularity rubs off on him. The Venn circles have shifted, and now sports and politics overlap. 

But you know what? I still like Gunner Stockton as a QB and I'm still going to cheer for the Georgia Bulldogs. I don't care who Gunner supports politically as long as he can still complete passes and scramble for clutch first downs. I'm not going to let the Stable Genius deprive me of my Dawgs, even if he did deprive the nation from getting to see Herschel Walker play in the NFL in his prime.

And you know what? I'm still going to eat those tasty Chick-Fil-A sandwiches despite the regressive views of its owner. If I can get a better deal on something at Home Depot, I'm shopping there. But I'm not shopping at Hobby Lobby. That's where I'm drawing the line because fuck those guys and besides, I've never once in my life found myself in the market for glitter paint, crepe paper, or glue sticks.

Finally, though, I wonder how the Stable Genius' praise of Gunner and the Bulldogs is going down over in Alabama. He previously was a big Crimson Tide fan, attending Crimson Tide home games and predicting last year that the team would "go all the way" in the college football playoffs. Does he know how much mutual animosity there is between the Bulldogs and the Tide? It's like Zohran Mamdani endorsing the Boston Red Sox. And if the Stable Genius tries to play both sides and praises Alabama next year, whatever good will he generated for himself with Stockton will not only disappear, but turn into anger, just as any karma he had accrued in Alabama is probably already gone. 

tl/dr: There's nothing the Stable Genius can't fuck up.

Body of Love, 56th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I have a question about the news. Why must it be delivered to us by big corporations? Print media, television, etc. - all the news outlets are owned by mega-corporations with profit margins, growth goals, and an understandable desire to minimize loss and liabilities. 

Follow-up question: what role (positive role, that is) do those billionaire owners have in the delivery of news to the public? Just what exactly, on a more-or-less daily basis, does Jeff Bezos do at the Washington Post?

Obviously, these billionaire owners want to imprint their own personal world views on the news that's delivered to us, and as the mega-conglomerates get larger and larger, we get fewer and fewer owners and fewer and fewer points of view.

Worse, the corporations own other companies and to meet their growth goals, they have to acquire still more companies, to the point that they've gotten so big and monopolistic that further mergers require government approval and waivers of anti-trust laws, so the billionaire owners kowtow to the government and self-censor to curry favor. Instead of holding the rich and powerful accountable, they end up being mouthpieces and propagandists for the powerful due to late-stage capitalism.

There are some independent journalists out there that bravely operate on low-cost to free platforms, like Substack and other social media. But each independent can only cover one or two news stories a day, and a full understanding of current events requires following a number of issues simultaneously for context, including politics, both national and local, economics, culture, and climate. As much as I can appreciate one writer's nuanced view on the situation in Gaza, for instance, and another's on warming trends in the Arctic, it's exhausting to endlessly search through social media for a full contextual understanding of all those events. 

Interdependence: What's happening in Gaza has a bearing on what's happening in Ukraine, which has a bearing on the Chinese intentions toward Taiwan, which will affect the production and cost of microchips and development of AI, which affects energy and climate change, which causes extreme weather events and could result in the cancellation of a game in the World Series. 

But I get it (I think) - it's expensive to operate a studio, even if you're "broadcasting" only on YouTube, there are costs in assembling and publishing an on-line  newspaper, and top writing and reporting talent understandably doesn't want to work for free or for life-of-poverty wages. Enter the big corporations and their built-in biases.    

If you're waiting on me to reveal the answer, sorry, I don't have one. The situation sucks. The government could step in Teddy Roosevelt-style, all rough-riding and trust-busting, and break up the news outlets and media companies the way they broke up Ma Bell, but since they've now got the media behaving the way they like, the government has little motivation to change the status quo. Someone else will have to take the lead.

Oprah? If she's reading this, a weary nation needs her help right now.

 

The Unrecovered Ocean, 55th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): The Ocean giveth and the Ocean taketh away. Today, I learned that French electronic and new-music composer Éliane Radigue has passed away at age 94. Impermanence is swift. 

An early collaborator in the field of musique concrète, Radigue carved a singular path with unparalleled vision. She pursued an exciting musical life, moving from electroacoustic feedback to electronic music with the help of her ARP 2500 synthesizer, and finally reinventing herself through fruitful acoustic collaborations with numerous instrumentalists, most notably through the Occam Ocean and related series. I posted many of her Occam compositions here on Universal Solar Calendar Ocean days  

In 2019, Nate Wooley performed an Occam composed specifically for him at Knoxville's Big Ears festival. 

A practicing Tibetan Buddhist, she spent three years under her guidance of her teacher, Tsuglak Mawe Wangchuk. Returning to composition, she completed Songs of Milarepa and Jetsun Mila. about Tibetan patriarchs. Since 2011, her Occam series consisted of acoustic compositions written for specific musicians, including but not limited to, Occam I through XXVII, Occam River I through XXVIII, Ocean Delta I through XIX, and Occam Hexa I through V.

Here's a video about Occam Ocean XXV. If the music sounds like one long note played endlessly (the full piece is nearly 45 minutes), you're right. But just as you never enter the same river twice, deep listening reveals subtle but surprising variations in harmonics and reverberation. In addition to a remarkably disciplined performance by organist Frédéric Blondy, it's but one of many remarkable compositions by Radigue.  

 

The White Spheres, 54th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Helios): It's no bomb cyclone here like the Northeast is suffering through, but it's damn cold again down here in the South. Another disruption of the increasingly unreliable Polar Vortex is underway and sending cold Arctic air far down across the country all the way to the Guld of Mexico.  

In addition, the La Niña conditions have ended and we'll be going into a El Niño later this spring and summer. The neutral pattern we're in right now between the two extremes nearly always bring colder than average temperatures, or so I'm told. El Niños also weaken trade winds, alter global weather patterns, and often bring increased rainfall to the southern U.S., so we can look forward to a soggy, humid summer.

I really want to blame the weather on the Stable Genius, but can't figure out how. 

 

The Supernatural Bride, 53rd Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Electra): Comic actor Dana Gould recently noted, "Thinking about Rush Limbaugh and how, now that he's dead, you never, ever hear about him. No one mentions anything he did, because what he did had no value. It contributed nothing worthwhile to the culture. Nothing of lasting value. He just made anger. Every day. Rising, blooming and fading like a fart. Then he died and was instantly replaced by a fleet of little replicas, farting fake fury five days a week. Creating nothing of interest or artistic value to anyone. Seriously, what an awful way to make a living."

I couldn't agree more. There's no "Limbaugh philosophy," no "Limbaugh teachings," not even a "Limbaugh style." He just spewed vitriol into the atmosphere to inflame the minds of angry listeners, who simply turned to their next source of invective, their next opiate, after Rush was gone.

Even beyond the fleet of little replicas to which Gould refers, we now have the millions of little comment bots relentlessly monitoring social media to post hateful words and comments on any post deemed outside the narrowest of MAGA world views. Adding nothing of value, nothing worthwhile, just hate. The mayor of Boston, Massachusetts posted the most anodyne of congratulations to the USA's men's hockey team for winning the Gold Medal in the Olympics today, and I saw nothing but smarmy, mean-girl comments making fun of her and her ethnicity, and complaining about taxation. They've been calling the state "Taxachusetts" since at least the 1970s, and the name is so well established that even spell check accepts the word "Taxachusetts" without corrections, but sure, there were no taxes in Boston until Michelle Wu came along.

Fun historical fact, speaking of Boston and taxes and all: the Boston Tea Party wasn't a protest over taxes as is commonly assumed. It was actually more a protest about government-sanctioned monopolies. American colonials didn't have a vote for members of the British Parliament and therefore couldn't be taxed (taxation without representation), so the government-controlled East India Company would instead ship all their tea from the Far East directly to England where it was taxed, and then would ship the tea from England over to the Americas. The colonists, frugal as they were, preferred to buy their tea at cheaper prices from the Dutch instead. However, the British government decided that the East India Company deserved a little more profit, and issued a ban on Dutch tea imports to the British colonies, forcing them to buy the more expensive and highly taxed tea from the British instead. The colonists were incensed about losing freedom to choose from whom to buy tea, rebelled, and stormed an East India Company vessel in Boston Harbor and dumped the tea overboard. 

It wasn't until four score and seven or so years later, during the Reconstruction of the Confederacy, that the event was called the "Boston Tea Party" and used as an argument that opposition to taxes was a sacred American tradition. Previously, the protest had been known by uncatchy terms like "The Destruction of the Tea." But southerners opposed to their tax money being spent on Black schools and social programs for the formerly enslaved started a protest movement not against the specific programs they detested, but over the very principal of taxation in general, and mythologized The Destruction of the Tea into an anti-taxation Boston Tea Party.

Same shit happens today. When Democrats are in power and money is spent of social welfare and fighting inequality, "taxpayer unions" and teabaggers emerge protesting not those programs (that would be racist), but protesting the general concept of taxation. But when Republicans control the government, taxes are still collected but the taxpayer unions and teabaggers are strangely quiet.  

It's cold again. Thursday, I was outside taking my alternating-day walk in a tee-shirt and shorts in 70° F weather, and today the temperature is falling below freezing, with wind-chill temperatures down to 12° overnight. Apparently, the polar vortex winds have broken down again, allowing arctic air to spill south, and while the Northeastern U.S. is getting pummeled by a nor'easter and heavy snow, we down here in the former Confederate States are suffering sub-freezing temperatures and blustery, 10-20 mph winds with gusts up to 35.  

To summarize, I never liked Rush, I'm excited that the USA beat Canada in Olympic hockey (even if I didn't quite say so above), and I provided an unrequested history lesson and bitched about the cold weather. Any questions?

Invisible Half Man, 52nd Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Speaking on Stephen Colbert's The Late Show, author Michael Pollen reminded me of something interesting. Brains, he pointed out, evolved to support bodies; bodies aren't a life-support system for brains. The brain controls our body's breathing and heartbeat, regulates various metabolic processes, and keeps us aware of various external threats and dangers. 

Going back to the age-old body-mind schism, people conventionally think that "they" are the mind, and hence their identity is somewhere in the brain. We exist somewhere inside our skulls, it's thought, peering out at the external world through the eye sockets. For centuries, science fiction and horror novels have obsessed on the idea of disembodied heads, brains kept alive in laboratories, and consciousness transferred to computers. But if the brain is merely a support organ for the survival of the body, and if personality, memory, and intellect are all but byproducts of that one particular organ, if we wanted to live forever, shouldn't we preserves the body below the neck instead of the head above?    

Body and mind are not two separate things. The brain is simply another organ, no different than the heart, lungs, stomach, and gall bladder. The latter excretes bile for some reason (I don't remember why) and the brain excretes thoughts and stores memories. Personality, intellect, and consciousness are all after effects of the brain's functions. "You" are your body, including the brain and everything that goes with it. "You" are as much your toenails as your awareness.     

All things are liberated and without fixed abode. When we think of water, we visualize it as flowing in rivers, pooled in lakes, and rolling in the waves of the great oceans. Of course, water takes many forms and flows over the earth and through the sky; it flows upward and it flows downward. It flows in a single winding brook, and it flows in the ocean depths. It rises up to form clouds, and it comes down to form pools. 

The way of water is to ascend to the sky, forming rain and dew, and to descend to the earth, forming rivers and lakes. There's nowhere on Earth that water doesn't reach - it reaches into flames and it reaches into rocks. If you look up the chemical composition of most minerals, you'll see H₂O somewhere in the formula. Our bodies are mostly water, and our brain is primarily made of water. We're basically skin-bags of water walking around and building things. Water reaches into the mind and its images, into wit, and into discrimination, and it reaches into the realization that we're just very clever forms of water.

Back on the 50th day of Childwinter, I noted that the warm weather meant that there's a lot of moisture in the unstable atmosphere, which portends thunder and storms. The thunder woke me up last night (water awakening water), and this morning I finally got out up of bed after a particularly loud thunderclap. It rained all morning, but despite the thunder, I'd hardly call the rainfall a "storm" - it fell reasonably gently, if persistently, and didn't try to take any trees down with it. It's let up now, and since today is a walking day, this skin-bag of water is heading out shortly to get in some mileage, more water flowing over the Earth.    

 

Day of Footfall, 51st of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Castor): "Where can the horizon lie when a nation hides its organic minds in a cellar, dark and grim?" - Oprah, I guess

I'm not going to write about today's Supreme Court decision striking down the Stable Genius' idiotic tariffs. It's all over the media, others who know more about economics than I are posting far better, more informed political and macroeconomic analysis, and it's all but just another headline in the constant shitstorm of this second SG presidency. We'll have a whole other set of headlines tomorrow.

I'm not writing about the Court or the tariffs, so what will I write about? . . . I don't know . . . Nothing else comes to mind. Maybe I'll just shut the fuck up and wish you a happy Friday.

Happy Friday. The tariffs are dead. Enjoy your weekend.