Compare. On the left, according to Mr. Vance, we have the exemplification of the problem with leadership in this country. On the right, his preferred female archetype. Moreover, were the woman on the right pregnant with another baby as she fed the first, better yet. And better still if she were pregnant with twins! Because on Mr. Vance’s worldview, experienced mothers, not childless cat women, make better leaders. Or maybe he’s just not a Swiftie, and his derision is really cloaked envy. Because surely he’s aware that Ms. Swift is her own economy. As such, given his unwavering reverence for avatars of capitalism, you would think Mr. Vance would find her GDP and economic independence praiseworthy, and in the spirit of full transparency come out and say so. While simultaneously noting that the mother on the right qualifies for child tax credits, which any swamp-cleaning republican would be quick to assure you, burdens the economy. Now, be honest Mr. Vance, which kind of woman more likely possesses superior leadership qualities? Or maybe a better question for you is: which model would you have your daughter aspire to?

A kiss of sorts from Dogasaurus. Supposedly they lick us to gain our affection, soothe themselves, show empathy, or simply because we taste good to them. I suppose two or more could be true at the same time.

…

What a difference a week makes. Who saw that coming. The False Idol had a close call, and a few days later the Somnambulist called it quits. With all this volatility in the political sphere, it’s hard to say whose names will appear next to the ovals come November.

It’s been widely reported the country is very divided right now. Some say our differences may be irreconcilable. “And then what?” Beats me.

If you’ve ever been divorced, you may recognize the most oft-cited reason declared on the final decree: irreconcilable differences. Marriage is a unique relationship in terms of its legally binding contract. There is no equivalent kind of contract underlying the relationship between us Americans, or, for that matter, between family and friends. Or between a man and his dog. When differences arise, and separation is not an option, you have to find a way to lick and make up. When it comes to human friends and family though, I wonder if it feels as though we need to surrender something important about ourselves to reconcile some difference with another. An unwillingness to surrender by one or both parties often leads to separation. Another option is to stay together while agreeing to disagree, but that can leave two people with a smoldering cold war of resentments to manage going forward. Might I suggest a third option. Next time you confront an irreconcilable difference, try disarming your adversary with a big lick smack dab in the middle of her face, “We good now?“

Where I write.

Imagine yourself, roughly four months from now, behind the curtain with a No. 2 pencil in hand, the empty ovals staring back at you. What are you gonna do? Your symptoms are real. Breathing is difficult, your eyes are sore, you’ve not slept well, you’re constipated, perspiring, when suddenly you’re beset with a constellation of even more symptoms brought on by the names next to those ovals. The world is counting on you to do the right thing. Which is what, really? A lump forms in your throat, the chest pain won’t go away. You feel faint. You’ve never had a nervous breakdown and wonder if this is what it feels like. You flash on what you were taught in high school, in that civics class you couldn’t wait to get out of. Suddenly, two images juxtapose in your mind: The vacuous stare of the old man at the podium paired with the inflatable orange Jesus in the UK sky. It’s down to a Somnambulist versus a False Idol. Seriously, what are you gonna do?

“The red ones are crazy!” What she (HW) meant was, if you interview a Husky at the shelter stick with the gray ones. Oops. Actually, to my eye she was more cinnamon than red, or even ginger, which is what HW meant when she said red, that and gray being the two most common flavors Huskies come in. And now that she’s blowin’ her coat, she’s transformed to something between dishwater and strawberry blonde. She likes water. We marvel to see her streak along the surf stirring a kind of Seagull Wave as a line of them rise and fall in sequence. For the most part our fellow beachgoers smile when they see her. The nicest ones swoon. Occasionally we’ll come across a prickly one. This person will see Chloe coming, freeze, then curl up tight like a cellar bug would to avoid detection. When that fails and Chloe comes close to introduce herself, we get the stink eye. My response is to never shout, “She’s friendly!” Because if you go online and read the vitriolic comments of people who are so put off by off-leash dogs in public spaces that they go online to vent, they often mock that response. I’d like to disarm them with kindness instead. Failing that, we feign apology and move along.

From Business Insider

Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that the decision created a “law-free zone around the President.”

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” Sotomayor wrote. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.“

Mr. Biden – Mr. President – are you seeing this? The Supreme Court has handed you a permission slip to eliminate your rival, without consequence.

What are you waiting for, sir?

David Brooks wrote a nice piece for The Atlantic titled You Might Be a Late Bloomer. It really resonated with me. Before I say why, let me say first that it’s unfortunate the article is pay-walled. While I believe good writers deserve to be paid for their work, meaning if you want to read pay-walled material then you should pay for a subscription, I also think there’s nothing necessarily unethical about using a feature of an Internet browser that’s able to capture the meaningful content of a web page and present it as plain text. So if you’re not a subscriber to The Atlantic, yet really want to read this article, here’s a Pro-tip: Open that link in a Firefox private window –> Toggle Reader View (F9) –> Reload the page.

OK, back to the show

Brooks’ thesis pushes back on the widely held belief that the achievement of excellence necessarily requires focus on a singular pursuit, plus a long time working to achieve it. Think of Malcom Gladwell’s widely acclaimed book, Outliers (which I have read). Many people’s takeaway from that book was that people who achieve uber excellence in some endeavor (Outliers) require 10,000 hours or more of practice. His exemplars include The Beatles, Bill Gates, top professional athletes, etc. And because it takes so long to practice, one is wise to get after it in life as soon as possible. Gladwell notes practice is not sufficient for success, there are uncontrollable factors like simple good fortune involved in becoming an Outlier. But my takeaway from the book was that he believes that lots of practice that begins early in life, combined with an unwavering focus on a singular goal, is necessarily important to achieving uber excellence.

Brooks argues there’s another way. He describes the life arc of certain people he calls Late Bloomers. You can read about his examples at the link. There’s an important difference in the life trajectory between Brooks’ Late Bloomers and Gladwell’s Outliers. The latter begin early, stay focused and practice their brains out. Late Bloomers by contrast lack focus, they try and fail (often repeatedly) at many disparate pursuits, and are acknowledged only later in life as exceptional at something (an age well beyond when most Outliers are sitting back counting their plaudits). Full disclosure: by no means do I consider myself either a Gladwell Outlier or a Brooks Late Bloomer. But the thing about Late Bloomers that really resonated with me were the psychological and motivational features associated with the archetype. Now there I saw some similarities with my own life’s arc.

For example, LBers are intrinsically motivated people; Outliers are extrinsically motivated. LBers are not motivated to do things by some external reward for doing them well, they are internally driven to learn what interests them, purely for the sake of learning it. Sometimes LBers appear obsessed with learning something (I can relate), which is psychologically different from the practice, practice, practice mentality of Outliers.

LBers are known to be repeated screw-ups, as Brooks calls them. Both early and often. He characterizes them thusly

Late bloomers often don’t fit into existing systems. To use William Deresiewicz’s term, they are bad at being “excellent sheep”—bad at following the conventional rules of success. Or to put it another way, they can be assholes. Buckminster Fuller was expelled from college twice, lost his job in the building business when he was 32, and later contemplated suicide so his family could live off his life insurance. But then he moved to Greenwich Village, took a teaching job at Black Mountain College, and eventually emerged as an architect, designer, futurist, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Again, I’ve not won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I’m certain I never will. But have I at times been an asshole, resistant to abide the normative rules of success during my coming up years? Sure, I’ll own that. And then to Brooks’ very next sentence

Late bloomers often have an edge to them, a willingness to battle with authority.

Oh yeah, I’ll own that too. I’ve been called “edgy” probably more times than I can count. And “willingness” to battle authority? Hell, I’ve always been willing to do that. Often enough I’ve even provoked the battles. One time many, many years ago in a corporate job I held, well before I “bloomed” you could say, I got sideways so bad with a department manager he angrily blurted out in a meeting that was a follow-up to my annual performance review, “You are the most insufferably arrogant person I have ever met.” At the time I wore that like a badge of honor (an attitude, I suppose, that only confirmed his diagnosis).¹ Looking back on it, maybe it was an early indicator I was destined to become a Late Bloomer?

LBers also demonstrate what Brooks terms diversive-curiosity. This in contrast to the Outlier’s focus on that one thing, driven by the promise of external reward. Related to diversive-curiosity, Brooks says LBers tend to be self taught, like autodidacts. I can’t really claim to be self taught – for goodness sake I’ve spent over twenty-five years of my life in formal education. But I’ve been all over the map during those years in terms of what I’ve chosen to learn; a focus on one particular science or discipline would in no way fairly characterize my intellectual life.

A couple other features that caught my eye, which Brooks says tend to the LBers: Crankiness in old age, and Wisdom. I can be fairly criticized for being in possession of a late-onset, oppositional mindset (as Brooks calls it), after all my years in corporate America. I agree with him that spending much of one’s life being self-directed, self-taught, etc., butting heads with authority and eschewing established norms – unlike the Outliers I’ve known who tended to coddle to that stuff – leaves one feeling cranky in review. So far as Wisdom goes, I believe in the Wisdom of Elders, I’ve even been known to get surly when it goes unrecognized. I don’t know that those two feature are unique to LBers, but they’re certainly consistent with them.

Anyhoo, check out the article, especially if you think you may be a Late Bloomer, or close enough. You might learn some things about yourself.

1. For the record, shortly after that meeting that manager was transferred to another district. A close colleague of mine who worked in that district told me that shortly after this manager settled into his new role, he enacted a few unusual and controversial office policies intended to improve workplace safety. Shortly after that he had to take extended leave from the office after he fell from a ladder at home. Subsequently, in the course of one of many company-wide layoffs, while he was still away on leave, they canned him. Meanwhile, shortly after the replacement manager in my district got settled, against his caution that I “think again” before doing this (although kudos to him he didn’t outright say don’t do it), I directly appealed to the vice-president of our division for a promotion. Six days after that he called me back to his office to say he’d reviewed my record, talked with some folks, and while he concluded I deserved a two grade promotion, he only had the direct authority to grant a one grade promotion, which he did on the spot. Some eighteen months later his replacement, the new vice-president, saw to it that I was awarded a second promotion.

An iconic tower about a mile down the beach from us. Made of steel, it was probably constructed circa 1915. Each night it was filled with water to support the needs of the salmon processors the next day. Some twenty years earlier this was the site of the largest salmon cannery in the world. Today, the tower makes a fine perch for raptors to spy prey from.

…

We’ve lived here just over a year now. OK, and? And…well, I dunno, it doesn’t seem like it’s been a whole year, that’s all. It seems to me like well short of a year. Time flies when you’re having fun they say. Yet time is invariant. So whether I’m an hour in the dentist’s chair experiencing a root canal, or in a five star hotel on a king-sized bed fitted with eight-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, enjoying an hour of languorous sex, shouldn’t matter in terms of the passage of time. An hour? Lmao! Go ahead and snicker all you want, but a root canal really can take an hour or more.

A few topics I’ve been reading/listening about lately. They seem connected somehow: Polyamory, alarming low birthrates across the world, the evolution of mate preference in ducks (it’s not what you may think), the emasculation of modern boys, and parents who regret having children.

Polyamory is a fancy word that refers to a lifestyle where the participants embrace the belief that more is merrier. My take is that polyamory is like sword swallowing, a demonstration you might ogle in disbelief, but not one you’d want to try for yourself. And when polyamorists aren’t having sex they’re talking about it, ceaselessly, according to one participant. You should not assume all polyamorists are pro-natalists. Pro what? Pro more babies. There seems to be a species of Groupthink that has formed into an advocacy promoting the idea that having more babies who will grow up to be super smart, and start up their own tech companies in San Francisco – and as adults make even more babies – is going to save the world. Because apparently Paul Erlich’s 1968 tocsin, The Population Bomb, turned out to be less of an explosion and more like a dud. Unless you exist in the largest slums in India, or certain places in sub-Saharan Africa. Then maybe Paul was right. But if you’re a tech-bro (or tech-sis) in San Francisco, to pay forward your genetic gift of brilliance, it behooves you to get those world-saving genes inside you, into as many new copies of yourself as possible. Be careful though. There is disquieting evidence that in developed countries as many as one in ten parents regret having children. Maybe these parents did not possess the “genetic gift” to pass on to their children that many new pro-natalists believe they have?

There is another, older species of Groupthink morally opposed to the goals of pro-natalism called – unsurprisingly – anti-natalism. Adherents of this worldview believe all humans should resist the urge to procreate; they claim that the fewer humans there are to experience the misery of this world, the better. Supposedly, the philosopher Schoepenhauer was an anti-natalist. In our modern era, certain gene determinists, people who believe that the constitution of your genome mostly determines the quality of human being you’ll become, argue that being child-free by choice represents the victory of mind over the imperative of its creator. To me, this is an illogical counter-argument they make which exposes a glaring contradiction. Namely, that the genes that make a human brain, a brain that concludes it doesn’t want children, were selected by evolution for reproductive success! If that contradiction isn’t as obvious to you as it is to me, email me, I’ll do my best to unpack it for you.

Speaking of reproduction – guess what species has the largest penis? The horse? Not even close. Simple physics explains how corkscrews work to extract a wine cork. Yet nobody – I mean nobody – knows how the Lake Duck’s corkscrew cock came to be so…well, huge and out of proportion to its body size. It’s a mystery, a marvel of biology. In the book I’m reading, the author floats the hypothesis that the serpentine vagina of the female admits only compatibly spiraled penises, so the two likely co-evolved as a means for the female to choose specific males to mate with. A drake without a suitably spiraled penis would not be able to penetrate the female far enough to deliver his seed where it needs to be to successfully fertilize her. Think lock and key. The author hypothesizes that this is the girls’ way of avoiding forced copulation with drakes she’s just not into. Forced copulation being a less inflammatory synonym that biologists use for gang rape. Because sorry to have to break it to you, but red-in-tooth-and-claw gang rape near the pond is, unfortunately for the female duck, usual

In the end, all creatures great and small, us included, are marionettes in a large circus we call life. There are real world inputs, and a creature’s experience of them. That’s it. Which circus tent you land in is not of your choosing, and has less to do with the constitution of your genome and more to do with the values of your lifelong sensory inputs, aka experiences.

What’s this? A news report that the Vatican is set to “overhaul” its process for discerning Virgin Mary fakes. You know, for the purpose of distinguishing authentic supernatural expressions of the Virgin Mary from hoaxes. The article ends with a statement from a practitioner of Marian theology (I didn’t know Marian Theology was a thing, did you?):

“What is positive in the new document is the recognition that the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Mother are present and active in human history,” he said. “We must appreciate these supernatural interventions but realize that they must be discerned properly.”

He cited the biblical phrase that best applies: “Test everything, retain what is good.″

You know, some days it’s hard for me to believe it’s been over two hundred years since the end of the Age of Enlightenment.

I keep saying it isn’t AI deep fakes on the Internet we should be most concerned about. It’s rather the continued good ol’ fashioned quackery foisted on us by BIs (Biological Intelligence) that should concern us most.