Day of the Overseer, 49th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Yes, this blog uses AI-generated imagery for its pictures and has for several years now. I like it, and at least for me it solves the ethical problem of appropriation of other people's artwork. If your argument is that AI is stealing the work of others, you need to educate yourself on how generative AI actually works. 

However, the writing here is 100% human generated, assuming as I do that I'm a human. How would I know, though? Does merely believing I'm human make me one? But that's a sidetrack I don't feel like following today. 

Just for laughs, just to see what happens, I asked ChatGPT to write a post for this blog. Taking the title of this blog, here's what it came up with:

Some of the most powerful transformations happen when like meets like. In a world obsessed with differences, we often overlook the quiet, almost invisible ways similarity creates change: ideas blending into new perspectives, emotions finding resonance in others, communities forming through shared experience. Just as water seamlessly merges with itself, dissolving boundaries without resistance, we too have the capacity to connect, adapt, and evolve when we recognize what we have in common. Maybe the real lesson isn’t about chemistry at all, but about how fluid life becomes when we stop trying to stay separate.

If a person had written that, I might think they were trying a little too hard to sound "deep" or were virtue-signaling a tad too much, but otherwise say a job well done. Considering how little it had to go on, just the prompt "blog post for Water Dissolves Water," it's actually not a bad attempt at all. I'm pretty sure most people couldn't do better given that small bit of input and only one minute to write a paragraph.

I'm old. My formative years were in the 1960s and 1970s. I grew up pre-internet, and computers were things that filled rooms in places like IBM headquarters and had spinning reels of magnetic tape. Now, I see self-driving Waymo cars on the street, phones have become indispensable pocket computers with all the world's information at my fingertips, and artificial intelligence can create images and write essays as good or better than I can. I didn't really think that I'd live long enough to see science fiction become reality.

In any case, I'm not turning this blog over to San Altman. AI hasn't and won't start writing these posts. Even if you can convince me it can do that better than me, I still need something to do, some outlet to directly express myself, and I'm not about to start outsourcing myself. 

Even if I am fairly impressed by that paragraph above.

 

The Inlet, The Reddening, 48th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran) - I don't know why it happened, but when I turned my television on yesterday morning, it was tuned to the Fox News channel. 

I don't have my television set to a default station, so whenever I turn it on, it airs the last channel I was watching. Yesterday morning, the appearance of the Fox News channel means that I must have been watching that cesspool of misinformation last thing the night before. But I have no memory of watching Fox News that night and can't for the life of me imagine why I would have turned to it before bed. 

But regardless, the first thing I saw was two Fox hosts smugly announcing that the Strait of Hormuz was once again open and the inflated oil prices were rapidly dropping, and that the Stable Genius' prediction that it would reopen "naturally" and prices would soon return to normal have been proven true. "You see?," they were saying, the war was worth it, the ayatollah has been killed, and there was only minor and temporary disruption to the stock market and the economy.

Setting aside the morality or the consequences of assassinating the leader of another nation, no matter how despicable, the quick drop of the price per barrel of oil will not immediately be realized at the pump. Those prices, it's been said, tend to take the elevator to the top and the stairs coming down. But what really annoyed me in my 30 seconds of watching Fox News before I switched to another channel was the hosts' smug conclusion that the Stable Genius had been proven correct and had been right all along.

The unfortunate side effect of their smugness was that I wound up hoping the reopening wouldn't last and the Stable Genius would be proven wrong. I was cheering against my own and the world's well being. A closed Strait and skyrocketing oil prices puts not only my own retirement in peril, but negatively affects the entire world economy. Stable Genius Derangement Syndrome: my distaste for our so-called "president" has me cheering against my own economic interest. Ironically, my case of Derangement Syndrome came not because of the left's bashing of the President but was due to his media cheerleader's celebration.  

No Fox News this morning, thankfully, and no television, either, but I saw online that Iran has re-closed the Strait. This should be considered bad news, but my first reaction was, "Hah! Proves the Stable Genius was wrong!," not "Shit! Oil prices may never come back down again."

To be clear, I had let myself fall into Fox News' framing of the volatile and complicated situation in the Middle East. Before the Stable Genius decided to kill the ayatollah and bomb Iran, the Strait was open and had been open for decades. The price of oil fluctuated based on market factors of supply and demand, not the holding hostage of international waterways. But after a month of carnage, chaos, and disruption at the sole and inscrutable whims of the Stable Genius, the Strait is closed and the price of oil is stratospheric. 

The Stable Genius didn't re-open the Strait - which, remember, was open before his reckless adventures - but Iran did, and the reopening of the Strait is no "victory" for the U.S. or for the Stable Genius. At best, it merely puts a closing parenthesis on the damage and cost of the stupid war, and is no cause for celebration. No matter what the smirking white boys and their bleached blond cohosts on Fox News say.

Sixth Ocean, 47th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): The critical Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the greatest rate of slowdown are the most realistic. A collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

AMOC is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, disrupt monsoons in Africa and Asia, and add 50-100 cm to the already rising sea levels around the Atlantic. The system has collapsed in Earth’s past, and it's now at its weakest in the last 1,600 years as a result of climate change.  

AMOC collapse could also trigger the release of as much as 640 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from deep ocean water near Antarctica, heating the planet by an additional 0.2° C. 

The AMOC is slowing because air temperatures are rising rapidly in the Arctic because of global warming and the ocean cools more slowly there. The warming Arctic has already disrupted the polar vortex winds, resulting in the frigid air masses that came as far south as here in Georgia last winter. Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks to depth more slowly. This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, further slowing the sinking and forming an AMOC feedback loop.

 

Day of the Whale, 46th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): I heard the other day that child psychologists propose that children first develop a sense of self identity by watching their parents. They see their parents looking at something in the room, and come to understand that their parents are considering that thing. It could be the other parent, or some other person in the room, or the pet, or a piece of furniture, or, more and more often these days, a phone. 

At some point, they see the parent looking at them, and a mental model emerges that not only are they the thing the parent is looking at, and by extension, that they are a "thing." This preverbal realization that they are one of the things in the room, a potential subject of Mom or Dad's attention, is the start of a sense of identity, and of ego, self, and separateness.

I cannot confirm that, not having raised a child from infancy myself. But I know my cat, Eliot, has made a lifelong project of studying me, as his feeding and very survival depend on me. He's created a conceptual model of me in his mind, I believe, and understands that I perceive the world mostly through my eyes, and that the locus of my perception is in my face. When he's trying to interact with me, he's up in my face, trying to put himself into my field of vision. He can tell or assumes that I'm not paying attention to him when my eyes are trained on the television, or the computer, or a book, or more and more often these days, a phone.

But when I look directly at him, he knows that he's got my attention. I can tell this because I can elicit a "meow" from him simply by turning my head and staring at him. "Meow," might be cat-speak for "yes, I'm right here" or "whatcha looking at, motherfucker?," but in any case, he knows it's him I'm looking at.

And if he knows it's "him," he most likely has some concept of himself as a "thing," a living entity separate from all other living entities. He must have some level of awareness of something like an ego-self. I think this must be true of all social animals that rely on interacting with other members of their own or other species to survive.

To be sure, his self identity is very different than mine. While he knows that he is a separate and distinct entity from me, or from his late brother, Izzy, for that matter, and while he certainly has memory, I don't think he has a sense of a narrative biography. I don't think he recounts a tale of once being a feral cat at large in an urban neighborhood, and then being taken in at one particular house. Or of having a "brother" (actually, another stray that got taken in) and then losing that brother to old age and death. Without language, such narratives are difficult to create and maintain. When we visit the vet, he's familiar with the surroundings and isn't surprised by the activities, so obviously he remembers past visits, but I don't believe he thinks back to the last time we were there, or anticipates the next time we return.

Thomas Nagel asked "what's it like to be a bat?" If it's "like" something, then that something must have subjective experience and is therefore conscious. It's had to imagine what being a bat is like, but for many years now, I've been studying what it's like to be a cat, and one thing I've learned it that part of what that's like is wondering what it's like to be a human.

 

Day of the Sparrow, 45th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): I'm nearing the end of Michael Pollen's A Mind Emerges - I'm reading it slowly to let each chapter fully sink in before moving on.

I loved that in the Introduction, Pollen recounted the recent history (if that's not an oxymoron) of cognitive science, recounting the work of the philosophers and neuroscientists that had informed my understanding of consciousness - David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, and Giulio Tononi. 

I love the book - I give it five stars and two thumbs up. But a lot of the "latest" ideas Pollan discusses, the 2026 post-Chalmers, post-Nagel, post-Tononi thinking, sounded familiar to me and I realized how lucky I was 10 years ago to have listened to the Zen Brain series of talks recorded at Roshi Joan Halifax' Upaya Zen Center in 2012 and 2014. The twelve-part Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind series from 2012 and the twelve-part Zen Brain: Consciousness, Complex Systems, and Transformation from 2014 not only neatly fill the gap between Chalmers et al and the conversations Pollan had over the past few years, but also present several other thoughts and concepts from both a scientific and Zen Buddhist perspective. 

The Zen Brain speakers - neuroscientists, philosophers, Buddhist scholars, and Zen teachers - explore how cognitive science looks at the mind as grounded in the complex transformative processes of life, and how neuroscience sees the brain as a complex adaptive system that constantly reshapes itself in response to context, experience, and practice. The conversations focus on the themes of embodied cognition, emergent processes, and enaction - cognition as embodied action. 

The talks are recorded quite clearly and can be found by following the links above, or digging through the archive on the Upaya Zen Center website, or even accessed through the Apple podcast app. I highly recommend them.

I walked an 8.5-mile van Buren today, re-listening to the first three episodes of the 2014 series through headphones. A lovely way to spend a mid-April afternoon in Georgia.

Day of the Lemur, 44th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): Yesterday, it was revealed that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is at least partially funded by a foreign government working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech, Péter Magyar, the man elected to replace Viktor Orbán as President of Hungary, revealed that Orbán had been using Hungarian government funds to finance CPAC. Orbán had clearly been working for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October, Orbán told Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

CPAC had celebrated Orbán’s efforts to destroy the liberal democracy of Europe in order to replace it with what he called “illiberal" or “Christian" democracy. He replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believed undermined Hungarian culture, and rejected “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.”

Sound familiar? CPAC has been spouting Putin's propaganda for some 25 years now. 

But you know what? I don't even care. The world's climate is crumbling and an insane, megalomaniacal narcissist is fumbling around in the Middle East, the most volatile area on Earth, in the most reckless way possible. Worsening heat waves are supercharging hurricanes, and Typhoon Sinlaku has intensified in the last 24 hours to a Category 5 storm with 180-mph winds. Gray whales are dying in San Francisco Bay at an alarming rate, and Greenland's nearshore fisheries are collapsing. At this point, I'm pretty sure my body's already heavily contaminated from microplastics, PFAS, and pesticides. Scarcity of water will become the next global crisis, and already is in many parts of the world, and will further exacerbate global migration, inflaming the already present intolerance and economic inequality. So if 75 million morons think the world would be a better place if all families resembled a 1950's television sitcom (e.g., Father Knows Best), that's the least of my concerns.

It's hard to feel compassion or loving kindness for a nation that willfully gets on board a clown car heading off a cliff while loudly proclaiming that their god is telling them to floor the gas pedal.

 

Day of the Boar, 43rd of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Climate models indicate a strong likelihood (around 62%) that El Niño conditions will develop this year, with a significant chance of intensifying into a rare “super” El Niño event. Such events, defined by sea surface temperature anomalies exceeding ~2°C in the central and eastern Pacific, have historically driven severe climate disruptions.

A strong El Niño can shift atmospheric circulation, intensifying extreme weather and causing severe drought and heat across Australia, and parts of Africa, India, and the Amazon. Extreme rainfall and  increased flood risk may occur here in the southern U.S. and in parts of Asia.

Already, a dangerous super typhoon has formed in the Pacific and is expected to make landfall on Tuesday in the Northern Mariana Islands, bringing destructive winds, widespread heavy rain, and flooding. The tropical typhoon was producing sustained winds of 173 mph today. While it is expected to weaken slightly over the next few days, the storm will probably cross the islands as a category 4 or 5 typhoon.

Although no hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. last year, the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season was distinguished by three Category 5 hurricanes - the second-highest total since 2005. And that was without El Niño conditions.

I have a feeling this is going to be a very interesting summer.

 

Into Another, 42nd Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): The Stable Genius' approval ratings dropped below 40% this week as gas prices climbed to a national average of more than $4 a gallon. A Pew Research poll conducted in mid-March found that 60 percent of Americans disapproved of his handling of Iran, including 30 percent of Republicans. His approval rating on the economy has also reached a new low of 31 percent, a drop of eight percentage points in only two months, according to a CNN poll from late March.   

The cracks in the Empire's wall are slowly widening. Today, the far-right Hungarian president Victor Orban was defeated in his re-election bid. John Brennan, the former head of the CIA, has joined the calls for removing the Stable Genius from office under the 25th amendment, saying it "was written with him in mind." Last month, some eight million people, or 2.4% of the U.S. population, participated in the No Kings protests. The Supreme Court appears skeptical of the Stable Genius' argument against citizenship for persons born on American soil. MAGA podcasters and influencers are leaving the fold over the Stable Genius' erratic and nonsensical policies.

We have a long, long, long way to go to heal this nation, and none of these news bits in themselves are the cure, but we can't build a new society until the rotten facade of the fascist regime in place now is obliterated.

Blows against the Empire.

 

The Dull Gleam Monody, 41st Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): In an interview with the NY Times' Ezra Klein, American journalist, political commentator, and author Fareed Zakaria offered his evaluation of the Stable Genius' unauthorized and immoral war with Iran.

He points out that when the war began, Iran's nuclear facilities had already been “completely and totally obliterated,” at least according to the Stable Genius. While one should never takes the SG at his word, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission also confirmed that Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed and couldn't be restarted as long as they didn’t get access to nuclear materials, which were being denied to them. That was the situation at the start of the war. 

After the U.S and Israel's bombing was over, Iran had lost its military and its navy, but by the end of the hostilities, it had gained is a far more effective weapon than nuclear arms: it had realized and shown the world that it can destroy the global economy by simply blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Iran now seems poised to not only hold much of the world hostage with its strategic hold on the Strait, but it’s also going to monetize that stranglehold, gaining $70 to $90 billion of revenue every year, about twice as much as it made selling oil. Those payments will be felt by Americans at the gas pump, and also weakens the American petrodollar because payments for passage through the Strait are being made in crypto or in yuan, the Chinese currency.

Iran has also strengthened Putin because Russian is now making something on the order of $4 billion to $5 billion more per month because of the increased price of oil, which will probably stay elevated for a while.

In addition, it has also nearly destroyed the Western alliance. A frustrated and desperate Stable Genius, when he realized he wasn’t getting his way, decided to blame his failures on America’s European allies, as if had they somehow joined in, it would have made any difference. As Zakaria points out, when you have a bad strategy with unclear and shifting goals, it doesn’t really matter how many people you have cheering you on from the sidelines.

The benefits to the U.S. of the war are close to zero. Zakaria sees the war as merely a willful, reckless destruction of lives, of massive amounts of American military hardware, and of America’s global reputation.

It was a stupid, lousy strategy that has ended up with the United States much weaker than it was before, he concludes.

 

The Spirals of Elsewhere, 40th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): To put an end to greed, Zen Master Dogen advised, we have to depart from the egocentric self. In order to depart from the egocentric self, we need to realize the impermanence of all things. 

To depart from the egocentric self is to abandon ego-attachment, the assumption that there is a separate self that exists in the body or mind, and thinking it to be substantial and eternal. This is a fundamental delusion, Dogen advised. 

To practice egolessness and see the impermanence of all existence is to live without the greedy desires that seek fame and profit.

Greed is an extreme form of desire, and the Buddha's primary teaching is that suffering arises from our desires. Hence, it makes sense that greed - extreme desire - will give rise to extreme suffering. Putting an end to greed by recognizing the impermanence of all things, including the egocentric self, obviously puts an end to suffering.  

When I look at the Stable Genius, I see a man consumed with greed, with  an undying lust for more money, more gold, more power, more attention. I see a man suffering and suffering greatly, and his pain is eating his bloated body and destroying his mind, causing him to fly into fits of rage and anger with vows of retribution and revenge. He's starting wars, both cultural and social, as well as actual wars, invasions of other countries. 

The "man who has everything" and can't seem to get enough of anything. 

I'd feel sorry for him and I might on some level, but his greed, hate, and delusion are destroying this country in which I live and the whole world at large. I don't see the Stable Genius departing from egocentric self or recognizing the impermanence of all things in his lifetime, so the happiest outcome for him is probably for his lifetime to end. All that suffering, for him and the world, will be over. An end to his existence is the kindest thing I can wish upon the Stable Genius.      

 

Seething Center, 39th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): "If I can guide my thoughts to recognize there is no essence of me,  that my self is the unfolding of perceptions and that they're constantly changing," British neuroscientist Anil Seth told Michael Pollan, "I think it reduces the existential pain of illness, at least a little bit." 

When we are suffering, Pollan concludes, the impermanence of the self can be a comfort. 

Zen Master Dogen would not have disagreed. The primary point, he states in Zuimonki, is to separate from your ego. To do so, he taught, you have to consider impermanence. "Our life is like a dream," he says. "Time passes swiftly. Our dew-like life easily disappears." Since time waits for no one, we should try to do good for others as long as we are alive and not worry about our own selves or our reputation.   

I'm three-quarters of the way through Pollan's A World Arises. If this book doesn't end with him becoming a full-fledged Buddhist, he's missed the truth right in front of his eyes.

 

The Long Dim Under, 38th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): I didn't die last night in a global thermonuclear war and I bet you didn't either. We can be grateful for that much at least.

Shortly after completing yesterday's post, I saw the news online, Stable Genius Announces Two-Week Ceasefire in Iran. Of course he did. TACO. It was all just more bluster and bravado.

But the bluster and bravado were literally terroristic threats to "wipe out" an entire civilization, "never to return." "Bomb them back to the stone ages." Irresponsible and reckless rhetoric from the so-called leader of the so-called free world, the man with the nuclear launch codes at his bruised and short fingertips.

Is the crisis over? No. Israel's already resumed bombing Lebanon, because that's what they do, and Iran is still throttling traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. But most significantly, a mentally incompetent, narcissistic despot is still in the Oval Office, and the world won't be able to even start working our way back toward anything even resembling normalcy until he's, well, no longer breathing. That's not a threat. It's just an observation that peace is apparently incompatible  with his existence.

The same regime still controls Iran, except now they're both more hardline, and, oh, we just killed their father, brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews. They still have enriched uranium, but now more motivation that ever to develop a bomb. The flow of some 20% of the world's oil is still under their control. And we're alienated our allies, gave Russia a financial lifeline, and emboldened China to seize territory they see fit to take.

And don't even get me started on climate change, the gutting of environmental safeguards, economic inequality, and making racism acceptable again.

I'm not happy withthis world and things are only going to get worse.