The Unknowable and Inevitable Mourning

I’m curious about the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, and the more I read, the more closely they all appear to intertwine until they’re sometimes indistinguishable. 

Buddhism overlaps with Stoicism, which influenced Albert Ellis’s REBT (then CBT and all its variations). They dig down to acknowledge and question mistaken core beliefs. Plato inspired some of Freud’s work, which mixed with Sartre and Camus to become the existential psychotherapy of Irvin Yalom and Otto Rank. They have a focus on the acceptance of death, which comes back around to the Buddhist prescription to meditate on our bones turning to dust. Yet, despite a general theme being repeated, it’s striking how hard it is to get out from the minutia of daily life to attend to it.

This mix can be found on Dan Harris’ channel, 10% Happier, which I stumbled on when he had comedian Bill Hader as a guest. Harris was a journalist who had a panic attack on air, then turned to meditation for help. I dove into his 2014 book, in which he chronicles his skeptical and very gradual buy-in to the whole idea in a very relatable way. He debunks a few well-known gurus over the course of the book, and then he ends up guided by a few contemporary Jewish Buddhists, including psychiatrist Dr. Mark Epstein (an unfortunate last name in these times). I went back to re-read his 1998 book, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart to flush out some concepts.

ACCEPTING CHANGE

”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ~ Heraclitus

These are both books that hope to show us a way to calm our mind enough to be able to think more clearly. Epstein calls the Buddha the original psychoanalyst who teaches us to take a step back from our monkey mind, or the “imperialistic tendency of mind” (prapañca) that can get us spiralling from one tiny error at work towards a vision of living in a cardboard box. We overthink all the time, but it’s possible not to do that. We don’t have to let the spiralling continue. Harris has a metaphor I like of our overwhelming thoughts and feelings bombarding us like a waterfall: we can take a step back to stand safely behind the waterfall to watch it all go by. Harris and Epstein agree that we need to practice this strategy of stepping back through meditation.

“Mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now — anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever — without getting carried away by it. We want it, reject it, or we zone out. … Mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall.”

I still don’t meditate with any regularity. While I believe it’s likely a healthy habit to form, like joining a gym, I’m still in that good enough state where it doesn’t feel necessary. I also think it’s possible to be behind the waterfall without meditation, even if it might not be as easy.

They claim that the superpower of meditating isn’t about controlling or managing the ego, but seeing that it has no substance. We’re watching a litany of moments of joy and terror play out, but we aren’t that. The waterfall just keeps moving, and nothing is really stable, and that’s okay. Absolutely. That just makes sense, and that kind of argument was made by Hume and Locke as well. We’ve all had experiences of losing ourselves in flow states or in creating or in play or in sports or having sex, but our mind always comes back to a list of tasks to do or some past events to dwell on. I agree that a meditation practice likely helps to keep us in the here and now a little more to quiet that litany or to hear it differently. It’s not about stopping the waterfall, but no longer being blasted by it. I think of it like the difference between being in a forest hearing a cacophony of noise, which feels chaotic, compared to being able to identify a chickadee, a woodpecker, a hawk… and understanding what that means about the forest’s current state. It’s no longer noisy when it’s clearer to us.

We all tend to just live out our prior conditioning without thinking too much about it, and then we get annoyed when we don’t end up where we intended. William James wrote a whole book on Habits, what the word means and how to notice them and alter them. Even without meditation, the more we notice our conditioned responses to our inner and outer world, the more we can respond to events instead of habitually reacting to them. James was first to mention the plasticity of the mind, and now we better understand how neural pathways can form and change. However we understand it, it takes the same kind of work to notice it all and take a step back from it.

Harris uses Tara Brach’s acronym RAIN to remember to Recognize what’s going on internally, Allow it, and Investigate it, but with Non-identification. That feeling or thought isn’t me, it’s just what’s happening within me. We can notice our immediate physical reaction to an event — maybe our face is flushed and our chest tight — and recognize that we’re feeling angry without identifying as an angry person. It’s pretty much the “processing” of psychotherapy. By noticing it, it stops having quite so much power over us.

“The Buddhists were always talking about how you have to let go’, but what they really meant is ‘let it be’. Or, as Brach put it in her inimitable way, ‘offer the inner whisper of: yes.’ … Sitting with your feelings won’t always solve your problems or make your feelings go away but it can make you stop acting blindly.”

We’ve heard this same message from existential psychotherapist Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946): “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” And Nietzsche said something similar in Twilight of the Idols (1889):

“One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts. . . . All lack of intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist a stimulus: — one must respond or react, every impulse is indulged.”

Three poisons in our mind: greedy rooster, hateful snake, and indifferent pig

NON-ATTACHMENT

Buddhists famously believe that all suffering (dukka) is from having attachments, so suffering is reduced by eliminating desire. Epstein suggests dukka might be better thought of as ‘unsatisfying’ or ‘stressful’. Nothing in the world will last, which makes it forever unsatisfying and unreliable. Epstein illustrates the concept with a story of Freud on a walk with a friend who was missing all the beautiful scenery around them. This walk provoked Freud to develop a theory to understand why we avoid beauty:

“The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind. … The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted.”

Freud realized people at both ends are “trying to fend off an inevitable mourning.” This is what the Buddha calls attachment (depression about impermanence) and aversion (anger at impermanence). Epstein further explains, “Only by cultivating a mind that does neither, taught the Buddha, can transience become enlightening.” It’s easy to see how this aversion to beauty also affects our needs for intimacy. We want things but can’t bear the tension of knowing it will inevitably end but not knowing when or how. We’re on a “one-way journey toward separateness,” but we don’t have to be.

“Separateness, independence, and clear boundaries are not glorified in Buddhism the way they are in our culture. They are seen instead as potent sources of suffering, as illusions that perpetuate destructive emotions like hatred, jealousy, and conceit.”

It doesn’t mean that we must stop all desire, though. We can enjoy things we love and avoid things we hate, but “the key is not to get carried away by desire. … Buddha calls everything we experience — sights, sounds, smells, etc. — the ‘terrible bait of the world.’” We keep getting hooked over and over, and noticing that in order to stop the spiraling can get easier with practice. In Harris’ words, “A few slippery little thoughts … can weasel their way into the stream of my mind and pool in unseen eddies, from which they hector and haunt me throughout the day.” I think we can all relate to that. But the takeaway from these books is that, while it takes an effort to let those thoughts just flow on by, it’s a game changer! I understand it as setting goals, but notice that first hint of clinging to that goal as if it has to happen like this or everything will be ruined. Ideally, goals are directions, not destinations.

We do also have to interrogate our goals, though, because we lie to ourselves that as soon as the next thing happens, the promotion, party, vacation, relationship… then we’ll be happy. That’s part of what makes us cling to events, and then, “the pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.” Or, as the stoic Epictetus said,

“If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches, but take away from his desires. … Riches according to nature are of limited extent, and can be easily procured; but the wealth craved after by vain fancies knows neither end nor limit. He who has understood the limits of life knows how easy it is to get all that takes away the pain of want. … The first duty of salvation is to preserve our vigour and to guard against the defiling of our life in consequence of maddening desires.”

We have a natural tendency to attach, avoid, or be indifferent, but we can train ourselves to change our default setting from these three to compassion.

Harris discusses one problem with current mindfulness training is that it often misses this “central plank in the Buddhist platform.” There’s a kindness that’s part of Buddhist teachings that helps us acknowledge that we don’t need to keep beating ourselves up when we make a mistake in order to be more perfect next time. That flagellating strategy doesn’t work, but it’s really hard to trust that it doesn’t work once it’s become our go-to motivator. We can meet it over and over with compassion.

“In the Buddha’s day, he first taught generosity and morality before he gave his followers meditation instructions. … the Buddha even compiled a list of the eleven benefits to practicing metta [loving-kindness meditations]. … The attempt itself was a way to build the compassion muscle the same way that regular meditation built the mindfulness muscle.”

ON MEASURING

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” ~ William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology

Harris has a section of the book full of proof, citing studies from Harvard and Yale using MRIs to show brain changes after meditation. I’ve written about the drive for evidence before. The meditation studies are often criticized for having a very small sample size or unclear measurement criteria, but also, this buys into the worst part of the psychological model that still triumphs over philosophy and spirituality. We love to measure things. We love certainty, to finally know something for sure. I’m not convinced we can have certainty when it comes to human nature. We’re fascinatingly unpredictable as individuals.

from Donald Carveth

Even when there’s a strong correlation to demonstrate the usefulness of a certain modality in psychotherapy or of meditation or even a medication, it typically means this works better than nothing for a significant number of people. However, there are always the tail ends of a normal distribution curve that don’t quite fit with the model: the “abnormal” part. A strong correlation tells us that this is a good starting point to try, and meditation might help, but it doesn’t mean it will work for me.

Psychology gives us an illusion of certainty instead of provoking us to accept the uncertainty of human nature. We’re told in these books to get comfortable with ambiguity, while being given assurances that it’s all backed up with data! What I love about philosophy is that it invites questioning forever. It’s not an attempt to find the final answer, but to provoke debate in order to get to an even better landing spot. What I love about spirituality is the idea that there are some things that are unknowable. There are, and will always be, mysteries in life. We can slap labels and numbers on them all we like, but things aren’t as clear or predictable as we’ve been led to believe, and that can be exciting! It’s a wild ride, and meditation is an idea that might help, but who knows what will happen next! Unfortunately, measurements are more marketable.

Epstein uses a West/East delineation instead of disciplines: the West wants to solve all the puzzles, so the unknown of inner emptiness feels distressing and scary enough that we distance from it, when instead, Eastern practices have us transform our relationship to it. “Buddhism authenticates a feeling that nearly all Westerners seek to deny, that psychotherapy endeavors, unsuccessfully, to eradicate. … I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.” He discusses a nonjudgmental awareness that is able to hold dissatisfaction and feelings of imperfections and impermanence. It’s similar to Marsha Linehan’s Distress Tolerance practice, which she learned from living at a Zen monastery. Epstein writes,

“The hollow space became an enriching space as well as a scary one. … One of the most important tasks of adulthood is to discover, or rediscover, the ability to lose oneself. … When we are afraid to relax the mind’s vigilance, however, we tend to equate this floating with drowning and we start to flounder. In this fear, we destroy our capacity to discover ourselves in a new way. We doom ourselves to a perpetual hardening of character, which we imagine is sanity but which comes to imprison us.”

We need to make friends with the unknowable.

ON STRIVING

“Do you want to improve the world? / I don’t think it can be done.” ~ Lao Tzu

Harris has another section in which he tries to fit the competitiveness of his profession with Buddhist practices. He recognizes that we often get upset when others succeed because we feel like we deserved that trophy or promotion or praise. “The answer is in nonattachment to the results. … When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome.” But are striving and competing examples of right thought, action, and livelihood?

There’s a flavour to this part of the book that’s a bit unsavoury. It’s as if Harris is trying to look for loopholes so he can continue to strive and compete as hard as he always had while ascribing to Buddhism. It seems clear that trying isn’t a problem — putting forth our best effort isn’t incompatible with Buddhism — but the search for a work-around feels uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because we’re currently surrounded by pretend Christians who have so many ways to rationalize why it’s okay that they’re amassing fortunes, demonizing whole groups of people, and gleefully breaking all the big rules from idolatry to adultery. I’m a little sensitive to attempts to water down ideals to make ourselves feel like we’re hitting them rather than accepting we’re all just works in progress. I’m really bad at not coveting, but that just means I’m a typically fallible human being. Looking for a way to make it okay to covet feels sneaky. We have to concede that we’re not quite there, likely forever not quite there, and keep working on it.

He has perhaps a useful consolidation, though, for that fear of getting behind when everyone around you is busy and productive and you’re choosing to take the time to meditate: If you’re worried, then it’s because you have no faith that the practice of sitting still actually gets you ahead. But, then again, is it okay to meditate in order to get ahead? Is it provoking a reassurance that we’re still winning instead of a non-attachment to the finish line? I prefer the response he quotes from Sharon Salzberg:

“Often it’s not the unknown that scares us, it’s that we think we know what’s going to happen — and that it’s going to be bad. But the truth is, we really don’t know. … Fear of annihilation can lead to great insight because it reminds us of impermanence and the fact that we are not in control.”

She suggests that, if we can really accept that we don’t know the future, then we can relax because it’s all unknowable anyway! It’s all the negative scenarios we imagine that keep us fretting, and they’re all just in our head.

IMPERMANENCE

In his discussion with Kieran Setiya, Harris explains how nonattachment differs from denial. Loosely paraphrased, Setiya comments that the idea that we shouldn’t be pained by things restricts intense feelings, which isn’t something to get rid of because it keeps us in touch with others. Harris explains, it’s not about denying grief, but being open to whatever you feel but not being swamped by it: neither drowning in it or compartmentalizing to manage it. It’s interacting with people while understanding that we’re all impermanent, so you’re aware of it and have the wisdom to see it.

Harris calls this spinning “preemptive mourning” in the best way, but I see it more as noticing and letting go of an attachment to a fantasy that anything can last forever. Like with any expectation, it’s just a story in our head that we made up, and then we get mad when reality goes off-script. If we really accept death, then we can maybe love others and life even more fully. It’s not that we’re grieving in advance, but that, like Freud suggested, we catch a glimpse of grief, and run the other way, causing all sorts of misery. This comes back to that Salzberg quote: we think we know the future, and it looks horrible (what we love will leave or die), but the truth is that the future is unknowable. With any luck, we could die first and never suffer the loss of others! Like the Buddhists, Stoics, Epicureans, and Existential Psychotherapists all write about, if we can get comfortable with grief then we can have more full and authentic lives. We just have to make peace with the impermanence of it all. Unfortunately, that’s ridiculously difficult.

15% just for Showing Up!

Changes are coming for Ontario high school students if the newest legislation is passed. It was just tabled, and is already at 2nd reading, so I imagined it's going to be pushed through for a September implementation. (Here's the media briefing and legislation and from the horse's mouth.)

One of the most contentious changes is that instead of being evaluated on their ability to demonstrate their understanding of content and application of skills, 10-15% of student grades must come from participation and attendance. So, instead of the grade being a measure of how well each student is doing compared to a standard that's set by the province, it will be a manipulative tool to get more kids in the room. The alternative to using grades to get kids to stay in class is being interesting, helpful, and welcoming, but apparently those traits are harder to come by. 

More than being pedagogically unsound, grading attendance will disproportionately harm students who are dealing with a mental illness, fighting chronic illness, disabled, impoverished, and/or struggling in an unstable home. Lots of kids can't make it to class for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to do the work. Penalizing these kids just adds another burden to them instead of working with them to help them find their own best way to learn. 

Final exams during the exam period will also be mandatory. That's not even the case at universities anymore! I highly doubt this change is for pedagogical reasons, but to ensure those weeks are used. The alternative could be to spread that time throughout the year and acknowledge that teachers have several assessment days during each term. 

I do support final, overall assessments, however. I believe it helps to solidify ideas if students are asked to show, and do the work to think about, how to put it all together. That's an important skill that's missing when finals are just dropped entirely. And setting aside a week where they all have to show up sometimes gets kids to make an effort that otherwise wouldn't be made. But, by then end of my 31-year career, I had landed on having a choice of final assessments, and assigning a weighting to them that best fit each student. So they'd write a paper that helped them work with the concepts, then write an exam, and whichever got the higher mark was worth significantly more. One bad day shouldn't destroy someone's average. 

Other highlights: a "condensed" BEd program of one year, reducing the role of trustees "to remove the distraction caused by trustees", and now the Director of Education will be called the flippin' CEO!! 

On Heroes and Role Models

Simone Weil

A couple months ago I wrote that we should not feel blame-worthy if we can’t do all the most courageous things in order to protect our neighbours or help stop a war or try to undermine the entire system. There are less courageous things we can do within our capacity. While that’s true, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to push ourselves to do a little more, and it doesn’t make the people who do the incredibly courageous things any less laudable.

We have heroes for a reason. The people who put themselves in danger when they stand up to injustice often present ideals of action. They’re never perfect embodiments of living, nor should we expect them to be. After all, they’re still human. But people who are noted for their courage, persistence, strength, generosity, etc. help remind us what it looks like, giving us a direction to move towards.

This recognition came to light in reading Kieran Setiya’s Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. In his chapter on injustice, he explores the life and work of Simone Weil.

The Atlas Junk Tank

I've been so immersed in American news these days, it's a conscious effort to check out what shenanigans Ford is pulling in Ontario. Of course, it's just more of the same bullshit: Trump-lite. Destroy the useful buildings, like the Science Center, and rebuild some garbage spa or ballroom or a tunnel, whatever you can dream up, likely all as a means to pocket money through subcontracting scams, like they did way back in the Iraq invasion, where there was one contractor for every 1.4 U.S. soldiers.  

Digital Warrior on Bluesky explains the cause of the connection succinctly:

"If you've been wondering why Canada's right wing sometimes sounds like the US right wing, a lot of it is imported infrastructure, not organic debate. Same story beats, same villains, same panic triggers tuned for repetition and amplification. Start here [Tyee article]. This piece names Canadian media nodes tied to AtlasNetwork partners and maps the full pipeline in plain terms. Think of it less as a news story and more as a supply chain diagram for political narratives. Atlas Network is the backbone. It connects, funds, trains, and promotes hundreds of think tanks globally so local groups can push the same deregulation agenda with local accents. It scales ideology through partnerships, not elections. The mechanism: money funds research, research manufactures credentialed experts, and experts become recurring guests or hosts. That is how advocacy gets laundered into news. Viewers get repetition, not transparency, and it starts to feel like consensus. 

On Useful Anger: Cohen's All the Rage

How can we possibly approach the world today without being in a constant stage of rage? Philosopher and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s All the Rage suggests how to make this feeling more useful to us. 

He writes from a range of perspectives, everything from political uprisings to the patients in his office, and from how rage plays out in the world to how it manifests in our own minds, all with a thread of climate change activism throughout. Ideas are illustrated with examples from fictional characters, historical figures, and his own family. It hardly seems possible to do all that in just 195 pages, yet the book is a thought-provoking and entertaining read, comfortably shifting from micro to macro issues to explore four kinds of rage.

DEFINITIONS

In day-to-day conversations, we use “rage,” “anger,” and “aggression” almost interchangeably. We do the same for “emotion” and “feeling” and for “drive” and “instinct.” The book uses these terms more precisely, so a bit of a glossary might be useful. The order of events that occurs when we’re outraged becomes important. Cohen explains that aggression is often the way we respond directly to a stimulus, and anger is what happens after that first spark of action, when we choose to hold it back. He explains it succinctly in an interview with The Philosopher:

“Aggression is a kind of stimulus response. It’s what we do with a provocation, which might be an injury; it might be a humiliation, an insult of some kind, something that arouses us to retaliation. Aggression is the way that we get rid of that load of stimulus in action. … Anger is a way of holding on. Feelings are ways of holding on to stuff. When we can’t bear to feel something we instead discharge it in action. … Anger is something that you’re left with when action is unavailable to you or perhaps when you try to take the experience to a higher level, i.e. to maintain it in the consciousness as something to experience and process psychically rather than discharge in an action. That’s why psychoanalysis tends to think of anger as a human achievement.”

It’s not the case that we’re insulted, then feel anger, and then rationally decide to act or not act, even if it sometimes feels like that. Instead, the impetus to act is immediate following an enraging stimulus, and the restraint is what leads to the feeling of anger. I think that’s the idea. It’s counterintuitive to me, so it’s useful that it was repeated a few times in the book.

Choosing Bits from the Bible

This post from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is just distracting fluff, but it's such a curious collection that I want to give it a second look (video of him here). 

If we take "BIBLICAL" to mean "in the Bible," and "Bible" to mean specifically the Old and New Testaments, then those first three claims are accurate in that they appear in the Bible, but there's still some wiggle room around what they mean AND whether or not they're moral or reasonable. There are many, many passages of the Bible we ignore for better or worse. More on that later. And, of course, anything in the Bible is almost necessarily political. It's chock full of rules and laws that people had to follow or face the consequences, not unlike our current legislation. It's part of a long line of versions of legislation from the Code of Hammurabi to all those American Amendments. But let's look at these claims one at a time: 

It's All a Charade

File this under, "Things we already know or ought to know."  

The BMJ just published a feature called, "Why Covid-19 is 'A Vascular Disease Masquerading as a Respiratory One.'" The quotation inside the title comes from Andy Benest, vascular biologist at the University of Nottingham. He further explains, "The virus enters through the airways but exerts its systemic effects through the vasculature. The common denominator in the lungs, heart, kidneys, and brain." (h/t Chantzy)

This personification of a virus, a non-living entity, removes our responsibility as if there's no way we could have known because it's so stealthy. Except we did know. 

Back in August 2020, five and a half years ago, the Journal of Neuroimaging published a study titled, "Covid-19 as a Blood Clotting Disorder Masquerading as a Respiratory Illness: A Cerebrovascular Perspective and Therapeutic Implications for Stroke Thrombectomy." They said, 

"Several reports have been published of patients with ischemic strokes in the setting of coronavirus disease 2019. The mechanisms of how SARS-CoV-2 results in blood clots and large vessel strokes need to be defined as it has therapeutic implications. ... Once SARS-CoV-2 enters the blood stream, a cascade of events unfolds including ... formation of cross-linked fibrin blood clots, leading to pulmonary emboli (PE) and large vessel strokes seen on angiographic imaging studies. There is emerging evidence for Covid-19 being a blood clotting disorder and SARS-CoV-2 using the respiratory route to enter the blood stream. As the blood-air barrier is breached, varying degrees of collateral damage occur. Although antivira and immune therapies are studied, the role of blood thinners in the prevention and management of blood clots in Covid-19 needs evaluation. ... Understanding the mechanisms of blood clotting can potentially help prevent or mitigate end organ damage beyond the respiratory illness in Covid-19."

It took ten years, from 1971 to 1981, for enough people to understand how latently deadly HIV is, and then another five years more to get public health on board on massive education campaigns to prevent the spread. Every bit of educating before the mid-80s was from ad hoc communities of people who were on the front lines, watching friends and family die of the disease, and distributing pamphlets of information by hand. Covid affects all the major organs, including brain functioning. Even mild Covid. I'm curious and a bit terrified at what we'll see in 2030 if we still can't remember that we've known it's a vascular disease since the first year! 

The Perfidious Lust for Unbridled Power

Saving this here. It's the beautifully penned order, in full, from Fred Biery, U.S. District Judge, a federal judge who ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Arias and his father. This photo of Liam was attached to the order, with Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35 written below it. Respectively, "Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." and "Jesus wept."

Opinion and Order of the Court

Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conego Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law. The government has responded.

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures. 

Apparent also is this government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:

    1. "He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People."       
    2. "He has excited domestic Insurrection among us."
    3. "For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us."    
    4. "He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures."

"We the people" are hearing echos of that history.

And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized. ~ U.S. Const. amend. IV.

Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer. 

Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration's detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned. 

Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.

Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: "Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?" "A republic, if you can keep it." 

With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.

Honouring Our Capacity

I've had several conversations this week about how to be in a time like this when the U.S. government is so overtly corrupted. I'm just the upstairs neighbour in Canada, but we're high on the list of countries to be overthrown. Even without being in that position, it's hard to be aware of the world today and not be in a constant state of rage. I mean even more than before. I want to fast forward to the end when all the bad guys go to prison, but that will only happen with ongoing action from as many people as possible. However, that type of action doesn't necessarily have to be heroic or extraordinary. This is just my two cents from a distance that's looming closer.

INACTION AS COMPLICITY: What's Enough? 

Viewing newly accepted levels of violence in the U.S. is overwhelming and frightening. A few people have posted lists of things we can do to help, but I wonder if, for many people, it's asking too much. This might be a controversial view at a time when it feels like we all need to get on board to shift the world back to a less selfish and violent place, but the perspective that we all are complicit if we don't act might do more harm than good.

Covid Study References

I sometimes write without linking to studies because I've posted all the studies so many times already, but here's a bunch of useful ones when evidence is necessary.

THE PROBLEM:

Covid isn't a cold at all; it's a vascular disease (affecting the circulatory system) that produces microclots, which can lead to blood vessel damage, strokes, and loss of brain tissue (Frontiers in Microbiology, 2021, Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, 2022, Cardiovascular Diabetology, 2022). Heart disease risk soars after even a mild case (Nature 2022), as well as the risk for heart attacks (Journal of Medical Virology, 2022). Dr. Funmi Okunola explained how Covid causes hypercoagulability, which damages the endothelium, increases strokes, pulmonary embolisms, and deep vein thrombosis, and Professor Danny Altmann explained how clearly mild Covid can be seen to affect the brain in a 2024 video. After an acute case, it hibernates in the body (like chicken pox and HIV), then can cause worse effects years later: the "SARS-CoV-2 spike protein accumulates and persists in the body for years, especially in the skull-meniges-brain axis" (Cell Host & Microbe, 2024). We still know relatively little about Covid, how long it can last, and all the things it can do to the body. HIV started out looking like a bad flu lasting a few weeks, then ten years later, people started dying of AIDS. Nobody knows for sure what the 2030s will look like. It currently still kills more people than car accidents, even as it adds to the number of collisions (Neurology, 2024). It might be wise to continue to take precautions. 

59% of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is from people who don't have any symptoms: 35% from people who are presymptomatic and 24% from people who are carrying it without developing symptoms, like Typhoid Mary (JAMA, 2021), so only masking when around people who are visibly sick, like my doctor does, avoids less than half of the potential transmission in the room, especially in primary health care. 

The Brave and Stalwart

As a quick reminder, well-fitting N95s/FFP3s work amazingly to avoid measles, the flu, and covid. I haven't been sick in years, and I love it!! The only inconvenience is not eating food with people who aren't cautious. I throw on a mask before going inside a public building. It's second-nature now, like putting on a seatbelt when I get in a car. Pretty simple and effective. Really, it's a no brainer.

But Jon Stewart (with Jon Favreau and Tim Miller) saw fit to make fun of people like me: crazy people who continue to avoid getting sick. In case you've forgotten, or if this is news to you, unlike the flu, which is brutal this year, Covid stays in the system, hibernating and attacking internal organs, the brain (sticking glial cells into clumps), and the immune system. The only other virus that attacks the immune system like this, causing lymphopenia, is the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). So, call me crazy for avoiding getting a virus with similar effects as AIDS. 

One-Liner (or so) Film Reviews for 2025

I embraced retirement fully this year by watching a ridiculous number of movies and shows (despite actually continuing to work). These are in the order I watched them, and I highlighted my top favourites (13 of them) and runners up (21 of them) in the more current shows and films. I watched a lot so you don't have to!

The Pluribus Utopia

The recent show Pluribus has got me thinking differently about the kind of ideal state that might be a laudable direction and how to get there. The show is overtly about a hive mind interconnection, that started with a lab-leaked experiment, which affects almost all of the world except for 13 people who have natural immunity. We follow the trajectory of one of these anomalies, Carol, who gives them their titular name, not for "many," a direct translation, but as her own invention: "the plural of succubus."

There will be no significant spoilers here; this isn't about the show specifically, but about its depiction of a perfectly efficient and seemingly happy and altruistic society. Is Carol the last one left in the cave, or is she the only one who made it to the outside?

The hive all works together effortlessly as one, with a prime directive to do no harm, as they distribute food worldwide with the utmost equity. They don't step on bugs or swat flies. They will eat meat if it's already dead, but they won't kill it themselves. They also won't pluck an apple from a tree. They don't interfere with life. They can't lie overtly. It's all very pleasant. The hive won't harm a living body; however, they didn't mind obliterating the human spirit of 8 billion people without explicit consent, rendering their ethics questionable.

The Cyclical Nature of Chores

Emma Wilkins' excellent piece "On Housecraft" in The Philosopher, discusses Helen Hayward's book, Home Work: Essays on Love & Housekeeping in such a compelling way as to provoke some thoughts without having actually read the book in question. So this is a critique of a review of a book I haven't read, but on a topic most of us relate to intimately.

Like me, and many of us, Wilkins hates cleaning and is working through how to make the drudgery more palatable. She's "more likely to make the bathroom less dirty than property clean." Likewise, to take the confessions even further, cobweb strands are clearly visible from where I'm currently sitting in my kitchen.

Wilkins and Haywood raise a long-standing struggle for fairness in this field and pin the problem on daily chores being beneath our dignity, so they explore elevating the art of cleaning and finding personal benefits in the work. These paths might help, but I wonder if it could also help to revere the battle around equity and to lower and ground this regular exertion.

NOBLE AND ADVANTAGEOUS EFFORTS 

Haywood has found a way to embrace housework as a method of demonstrating caring. As an artform, it can become a noble pursuit to have a well-kept home. Wilkins writes that our disdain for chores is relatively new as Aristotle recognized that,

"...'oikonomia' or 'household management' contributed to the wellbeing of the community, thereby serving a higher purpose. … It’s not surprising that, in a secular individualistic culture, cultivating servant-hearted humility holds little appeal. Work done in the home might not earn us money, or praise, or even gratitude. But the more we’re motivated by care, and love, the more noble the work is."

Myth and Motivation: On Dopamine

There are contradicting views and explanations of what dopamine is and does and how much we can intentionally affect it. However, the commonly heard notions of scrolling for dopamine hits, detoxing from dopamine, dopamine drains, and craving dopamine, appear to be more like a story we've constructed to understand our actions than a scientific explanation, and I'm not convinced it's the best narrative to help us change our behaviours, particularly around tech-based habits. 

As a hormone, it's released by the adrenal glands (above the kidneys) into the bloodstream for slower, more general communications where it primarily helps to regulate our immune system. As a neurotransmitter, it provides fast, local comms between neurons in the brain where it does a lot of different things including affecting movement, memory, motivation, mood, and mornings (waking up). It makes up 80% of the "catecholamine content" in our brain, the ingredients that prepare us for action. Our levels fluctuate throughout each day, so you don't have to try to cram all your work into the early hours of the morning.

It's largely discussed as the heart of our quest for pleasure, yet for decades studies have concluded that dopamine doesn't affect pleasure, since we get a dopamine release before a rewarding activity, not after we've completed it. Instead, it affects how the brain decides if an action is worth the effort. A 2020 study found that increasing it with meds like Ritalin can motivate people to perform harder physical tasks. People with higher levels of dopamine are more likely to choose a harder task with a higher reward than an easier, low-reward task. Low dopamine doesn't reduce focus, but it's believed it provokes giving more weight to the perceived cost of an activity instead of the potential reward. Lower levels lead us to save energy.

So why do we think we crave it or, paradoxically, need to try to intentionally deplete it?

Not Just a Health Issue

Professor Lidia Morawska just won a quarter million dollar science prize for her work in proving that Covid is airborne, against the WHO's public announcement to the contrary back in March 2020. Her efforts saved lives.

"A renowned expert in air quality and health, Morawska, of the Queensland University of Technology, began contacting international colleagues. She eventually gathered 239 scientists globally to highlight the risk of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The public pressure eventually prompted the WHO and other authorities to update their public health guidelines. ... 'Science and scientists are nowhere near as listened to as in the past, and decisions are not based on science.' It is a problem she hopes to tackle by bringing scientists together as she did during the early years of the pandemic."

That feels like a lifetime ago, long forgotten by many, yet illnesses and death from Covid haven't retreated. 

A US study tracked 150 million workers and absences "since the end of the so-called public health emergency in 2023" to find that absences continue to be 12.9% higher than before the pandemic. "Absences were highest in occupations with the greatest exposure to the public." And last month a global insurance firm "pegged that number of excess deaths at 2% above the pre-pandemic annual mortality rate. ... That's roughly the equivalent of two fully loaded standard commercial jets crashing and killing everyone aboard every day." They cited long Covid as a significant factor. Andrew Nikiforuk reports in The Tyee, 

There Will Be Time

I've hit a weird anniversary that I'm not sure what to do with: thirty years in the same place. It seems significant because it's double any other place I've ever lived and exactly half my life. I like when numbers line up like that. My house closed on the 1st of November 1995, but I didn't officially moved in until Friday the 3rd. 

I was in my parents' place from age 2 to 17, and it was so boring to have such a stable home life. That sent me moving place to place for the next dozen years or so. At one point, my dad offered me the house when he moved out to live with his new wife, but I was still restless, so I declined. I sometimes can't believe I turned that down! I didn't want to live in my childhood home even though it was amazing with a beautiful forest out back; it mattered more at the time to carve my own path.

In the first five years of my place, I did all the big things I needed to do, and now I've been hitting the end point of all of all that work. Of course the maintenance turnover coincided with retiring. The furnace died in the middle of winter. After fixing one little thing after another to eke out another year, my repair dude told me it had cancer of everything: "That furnace owes you nothing!" The water heater followed soon after. Then this summer I fell through my 25-year-old cedar deck boards outside. I had to fall through a second time before replacing it all. 

New Air Quality Guidelines

Health Canada published new Guidance for Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Professionals that acknowledge that Covid can be spread through airborne transmission. 

"Indoor air quality is considered an important environmental determinant of health. ... Good indoor air can often be achieved using the following three strategies: reducing or eliminating the sources of air contaminants, ventilating by replacing contaminated indoor air with filtered air from outside, filtering the indoor air ... and education of occupants and building staff on best practices for maintaining good indoor air quality. ...

Epidemiological studies on CO2 concentrations and health effects showed that individuals exposed to CO2 concentrations greater than 800 ppm were more likely to report mucous membrane or respiratory symptoms than those exposed to lower CO2 levels. ... Installing demand-based ventilation relying on CO2 sensors may also be an effective strategy. ... Avoid overcrowding indoor environments with more people than the HVAC system can accommodate. Increase natural ventilation by opening windows. ...

The concept of using indoor CO2 levels as an indicator of ventilation has been discussed for decades. With increased public awareness of the importance of ventilation and commercial-availability of CO2 monitors, there is a renewed interest in using CO2 monitoring as a method for quantifying ventilation. ... Continuous measurements can also be used to see how levels change over the course of the day and whether there are certain locations or certain times of day that are more problematic. ...

With some viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, transmission was also found to occur from particles remaining suspended in the air and travelling longer distances, hence the benefit of wearing masks, effective ventilation and building air filtration, and stand-alone air purifiers that utilize high efficiency particulate air filters when and where appropriate to reduce the risk of transmission. ... There are no exposure limits for the range of microbial agents found indoors that can cause disease, as these are dependent on the infectious dose needed to cause an infection. Levels should be kept as low as possible. ... Effective ventilation is important for reducing indoor transmission of respiratory infectious diseases and includes ... increasing indoor/outdoor air exchange with exhaust fans and mechanical ventilation systems, filtering air efficiently, and opening external windows and doors. Ventilation can help reduce viral transmission in indoor spaces by preventing the accumulation of potentially infectious respiratory particles in the air. Good ventilation, combined with other personal protective measures, can further reduce the risk of infection.

Managing So Much Suffering

It feels like I understand the idea that all suffering comes from expectation in a way I didn't used to. Now it seems so obvious, but I'm not really sure what flip was switched. It's not just that if we stop expecting to get things, we'll be happier, but how ridiculous it is to expect anything to stay the same at all, much less get better, ever. And that understanding seems to help reduce some anxiety over the things that can't be easily changed. Suffering is inevitable, but it can be somewhat diminished in order to have more contentment. We can change what counts as suffering, and we can change our perspective around tragedies, so maybe we can also change how we can continue to bear witness to, or experience, absolute atrocities.

One simple way to reduce suffering is to narrow the definition. Comedian Michelle Wolf jokes, "It's hard to have a struggle and a skin care routine," which clarifies that we might be considering some difficulties as suffering in a way that doesn't fly when we widen the scope of our horizons. Pain is pain and can't definitively be compared, yet I believe many of us have an automatic judgment in our heads that lists events in a hierarchy. Typically suffering from having to do a task we don't want to do, like write a boring report or clean out the fridge, or from wanting luxuries we can't afford, like another trip, might be relegated to the bottom as whining. The pain from it is there, though: the agony and stress from uninteresting maintenance that's necessary to further our own existence or the grief over lost opportunities. Furthermore, it can develop an extra layer of shame on top of the suffering if we try and fail to elicit sympathy for having so much food that some is left to rot and needs to be cleaned. When we realize we can't afford that trip after all, this is a suffering we are expected to bear without complaint.

They're Heeeerrrrrreeee!

You might be able to book a Covid shot in Ontario right now with priority given for people who are high-risk, and on October 27th for the general public. That high-risk priority category is significantly looser than it is for who gets a second shot per year, maybe acknowledging how few come out for this shot in the first place. It includes anyone who is at high risk, but also anyone who has significant exposure to birds or mammals, anyone racialized or part of an "equity-denied" community, health-care workers, and more. 

It's still here and still causing damage. In the US, the current wastewater rates are about 2/3rds of last winter's peak. It's baffling that they want to wait for the general public until after our Thanksgiving!! In the past, uptake is so low that it's curious they still stagger the appointment openings for a month later. In the states, people have been getting shots for weeks. We're in the upward trend of very high infection rates coupled with very low immunity in the population since we're almost all a good six months from our last vaccination. That's a deadly combination.