It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.
I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.
The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.
We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.
Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change. Kenzo: What game? Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse
Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.
This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.
Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.
But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.
I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.
The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.
It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn
There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.
The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.
Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.
“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling
Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.
One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.
I like to manage my days with buffers around my routines and obligations. I find tight schedules to be tiring and unhelpful as I manage my energy, pain, and workload. A packed calendar raises my cortisol.
I believe I am easily stressed by shouldering too much, but I also fear I am on a downward health trajectory which will require more time, energy and effort. I am beginning to contemplate reworking my style of effort management as conditions on the ground change. Can I schedule my way out of a spiral down? What is my Pareto optimal plan here?
My 2025 has been significantly worse than my 2024 and an almost entirely different realm of issues than I faced prior to that. As I compare, 2022 and 2023 were entirely different worlds than my 2025. I thought I was pretty sick then but improving my inflammatory markers has nuked my HRV & stamina.
The stress of a permanently lowered baseline of biometrics makes me feel despair even as I have new tools at my disposal to mitigate them.
Will my whole life be dedicated to the care and feeding of my broken body? Is that something I can live for instead of simply living with?
I just don’t know how much effort will be put into managing this new baseline and what the effort to reward ratio looks.
Is there a Pareto principle I can apply to permanent disability which I can, and maybe even should, emotionally accept? Or do I soldier on hoping that my middle aged body may repair itself if I do absolutely everything right? And what am I doing all of that for?
It just seems as if no matter the time management, advanced medical care, constant research and daily effort I only get worse. I’ve been under a scalpel three times this year.
Each time I think I have found a new drug or treatment modality I am quickly slapped with second order side effects. And then those side effects have new side effects as I treat them.
It’s the pimp my ride recursion of biohacking, but instead of liking a thing and adding it to my car, I’m adding more and more mitigation measures to manage the results of the biohacking.
Any positive aspects of my year (passing the right to compute bill into law, progress in my startup portfolio) seems pale in contrast to emergency surgery, slow burdensome recovery and the arrival of mortality. I’m only at the halfway point of life (and a little bit past that for the year) and I feel done in completely.
I have had a shock that is in reality not a surprise. The inevitable and the most surprising thing coincide rather often I’ve found. I imagine shock is as means reverting a phenomena as any.
All things are inevitable in hindsight. One can greet something as inchoate and far reaching as the Fourth Turning and still be a bit surprised to find it applying to you.
I believe we are about to find out a lot about our social contract soon. How the tensile strength of relationships hold under personal and national and global stress. If we are accelerating then any frictions on that process are going to sizzle and snap.
There is freedom to be had in future shock. Knowing you are repeating history and doing what you can to break the worst of it. Knowing no one can do any thing. That ultimately all any one of us can do is what we personally can do. She done what she could.
Putting the right frequencies into the universe isn’t just woo-woo witchy girl nonsense. The general call “CQ” is for anyone listening.
The transmission is a broadcast for anyone who can read. I like to think of social media like blogging as a much more expansive and elaborate form of the tradition.
Transmitting the letters CQ on a particular radiofrequency means that the transmission is a broadcast or “General Call” to anyone listening, and when the operator sends “K” or says “Go Ahead” it is an invitation for any licensed radio station listening on that frequency to respond.
Humans may have evolved for much smaller scale socialization but we enter a networked world several centuries ago. The CQ sign was established protocal in 1884 according to the Practical Telegraphist.
The urge to diversify and reach out across different networks and communities is being applied across many new closed garden internet nodes which are competing for attention and information share.
I am considering what it means to build in a world where anyone can surface almost any information at any time. The will and desire to do something in the network is its own limiting factor. But leveraging the possibilities of you find the right niche can open a lot of possibilities. So when someone issues a general call go ahead. Answer!
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.Donald Rumsfeld
Much hay was made over how ridiculous this sounded at the time. It was the title of an Errol Morris documentary. Naturally the origins of this phrase are more complicated than a soundbite from a politician.
I find it to be a pretty useful framework. I have to imagine the Lockheed folks are irked that their clever coinage has come to be associated decades later with Rumsfeld and the Neo-conservative boondoggle of the war on terror.
I feel as if I’m in a persistent state of unknown unknowns these days. It’s not a new feeling either. I know what I don’t know and how vast a space is contained therein.
I know precious little and find that I know less as I get older (maturity being a helpful tutor in that manner). Which admittedly sucks.
Being uncertain of what I don’t know is just the natural state of being. Yet I’m regularly trying to add more to the small set of known knowns in my life. I hate not knowing how to have less pain and poor health in my life.
The experimentation I do on my body is part of my attempts to shave off a few more of unk-unks by trying to add more knowledge. And I just wish I could feel even a little bit physically better. But that seems to be in the unknown unknowns these days.
American medicine failed me but Istanbul has excellent medical if you are motivated enough to travel to fix intractable problems. And I most surely am motivated.
Add in the daily guidance of consumer grade LLMs taking input from myself and my family doctor and I managed a pretty miraculous recovery. Yes the bots are friendly but my physician agrees. It’s a very successful clinical outcome.
That’s Perplexity if you are curious. I like their mobile application and model choice options. Though pity any poor hacker who gets in as they are going to see some gnarly pictures if they make that bad decision.
Alas I am noticing the folliculitis troubles flaring again just as I’ve begun a fitness recovery protocol. Which you will notice in the image if you read the above image closely.
Alas progress is never a straight line. The flare up is bad enough I’ve opted to start another round of antibiotics (my fifth in this process) so any remaining bugs of the MSSA varietal cannot manage any retrenchment.
I’m showering with the scrub up washes surgeons use, I’m swabbing my nasal cavities with muciprin, and I’ll do a Cephalexin course.
Having fully passed through the onboarding loading dose regimen of Bimzelx with significant side effects, I need to see if it stabilizes. All this suffering will be for nothing if I give up now. But I must get to a place where I’m not constantly fighting infection and it can maintain lower inflammatory biomarkers. How this goes is anyone’s guess.
Nostalgia can be a bitter poison if you believe the world is getter worse. Optimistic people try to point out the many ways in which our lives are better only to find poisoned barbs dipped in statistics of all ways things are worse.
That poison absorbs into our frail hearts when aimed well. I see how things are worse just as well as any pessimist. Choosing optimism requires us to find antidotes to those poisons, lest we have a full blown case of what the French call “Ressentiment”
It is a terrible disease. Ressentiment literally translates to the English resentment but rancœur (bitterness), amertume (acrimony), and animosité (ill-will) are all part of its dangerous pathology.
In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sketched out how this feeling of weakness justifies and creates value systems as a defense mechanism of the ego. Rather than overcome these feelings, the ego insulates you in a value system where one never need address real failures or weaknesses.
There is much to criticize in his work, and I am not a Nietzschean myself. But it’s easy to see how much we all live in jealousy and inferiority from time to time. Some of us live there always.
Many moral systems raise up the weak in virtue in order to protect them. Christianity is one of them. There is value in protecting and improving the lowest of us even if I disagree that we should see the powerful as morally inferior. Power and strength and beauty are virtues as well.
As we envy the past or those whose past decisions made our present lives harder we must be cautious that we have not absorbed the poison of ressentiment. Do not justify harm in its name. Do not justify jealousy or envy. Rise up and spit out that poison. Our world can be better and you can be better as you work towards that goal.
One of the most unsettling aspects of having a deep tissue infection surgically removed is watching the hole fill itself back in from the bottom up. It doesn’t look like normal tissue as it regrows.
When deep tissue wounds heal from the bottom up, the new dermal tissue appears white because it consists of immature collagen fibers and lacks proper vascularization during the initial stages of repair. Via Perplexity
I happen to take a collagen supplement which is looks like tiny little white balls in a capsule. Collagen is a hot aesthetic supplement for making your hair and nails grow but it benefits your fascia as well. It’s a popular supplement with biotin for overall health of one’s tissues.
I am aware of a number trends in the space to generate and promote the growth of collagen as I happen to follow the arc of Korean plastic surgery as it led to many successful cosmetic products. Collegen became popular in America through aesthetic practices and social media.
And yet with working in cosmetics and taking it as a supplement I hadn’t ever experienced a chunk of tissue growing back personally. It’s all been, well, literally cosmetics. And now it’s growing back and it’s really anything but attractive.
I am also concurrently bringing a hyperbaric chamber to Montana so we can do hyperbaric oxygen therapy protocols for ourselves and for the community. I am interested in their benefits for chronic issues but they have also proven themselves in the treatments of skincare wounds in diabetic and burn patients.
Ironic that I should have immature collagen fibers lacking vascularization at this moment and will soon have access to state of the art treatment for it but I have to heal this one the old fashioned way.
It’s my hope that we are going to improve our treatments for chronic issues in the future but in the here and now my acute issue is being handled the old fashioned way with lots of care and research and rest.
