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A Fuzzy-horned Bumble Bee amid Rhododendron blooms

The past two days here have been unseasonably warm. Depending on who you ask, two unseasonably warm days in a row may be a portent of the end of times, or an unexpectedly delightful amuse-bouche of summer. HW leans toward the former, I the latter

Can you believe that May 1st marked three years since we moved here? Leaving Alaska and moving here involved an interdependent sequence of decisions on our part, of course, but in the larger scheme of things those decisions don’t feel, to me anyway, like choices, commonly understood. The past three years, and for that matter the past sixty-six years of my experience on earth, instead feels to me like it was predetermined. Not in any woo-woo spiritual sense, but in the sense that I don’t feel like I had agency directing the course of my life, where agency, as I understand what people mean by it, is the ability of an individual human brain to “choose” among alternative futures

Consider: I enter an ice cream store, place an order for a single scoop of vanilla in a waffle cone. In doing so, I choose a future state of the universe to be one in which I am seated outside on a park bench enjoyably lapping a vanilla ice cream cone. As opposed to an alternative state, where I am doing the same, except raspberry ice cream

Think about what work “I choose” is doing here, versus, simply (or not so simply!), “the speech center of my brain activated the vocal cords to activate the muscles of the mouth to form and speak the words (‘I will have vanilla’).” As a first take, many people will find nothing essentially different between the two descriptions of what’s going on. They may consider me daft, or excessively pedantic for the latter, but whatever. However, I would put it to you that those same people would insist there is something more going on upstream in the brain, more than just the laws of physics operating on material matter, the neuronal milieu, that would justify their defense of “I”

Most people would insist that “I choose” refers to something apart from the material brain, something in addition to it that interferes with the material universe, and in effect alters the state of the neurons in a manner not predictable – not even in principle – under the immutable laws of physics alone. Such people, in doing so, necessarily commit themselves to a belief in mysticism. I don’t mean that as a smear, merely as a way to call out two divergent beliefs that people hold regarding how nature works. Some of these people may push back on the charge of mysticism. They may acknowledge the laws of physics are real, yet say that there is something so incomprehensible about the human brain and how it works that it may as well be considered apart from the material universe. People like myself, however, who hold to strict, materialistic beliefs as to how all of nature works, will feel no urgent need to fill the gaps of uncertainty in modern neuroscience (there are many), certainly not with superstition

It’s not as if the atoms of carbon, in an amino acid, in a peptide, in a neuron, in the brain, interact any differently than the carbon atoms in a grain of dust on, say, Jupiter’s moon, Io. Both the neuron and dust grain are composed of elements on the periodic table and sourced from the ancestral matter. Both exist in the material universe. Both are subject to the same immutable laws of physics. Organization is different but so what. There is nothing controversial about any of this. If the immutable laws of physics can be used to predict the future state of a grain of dust, then surely, in principle, could the same could be used to precisely predict the future state of a neuron, and in due course be scaled up to the state of eighty-six billion of them. So by knowing the position and velocity of all particles at time T, that alone could, again, in principle, be used to predict the position and velocities of all particles at T+1, aka the future. And I would put it to you that that is all you’d need to precisely predict my vanilla future. Granted, it would be a lot to need to know; an incomprehensible lot to know, especially as the interval, T > T+1, becomes very, very small (a femptosecond, say). But think about what it would mean, so far as the human brain is concerned. It would mean that the brain is a transition state machine, that operates automatically in its representation of one state of the universe to the next. It would mean that I don’t choose my future because there is no “I” in the brain, no conductor pulling the strings as it were – that is: I don’t direct my thoughts, my brain automatically creates thoughts which direct my actions. It means that some time in the distant future our descendants will discuss among themselves how weird it must have been way back when for humans to think they were “responsible” for choosing their actions, believing they were apart from nature rather than part of it

The POTUS was tweeting again, as usual from his personal perch on the world wide web, a well known, titular source of truthful pronouncements

Not noted in the caption is what the patient is afflicted with. I thought about that for a second and then – head slap – he’s sick with TDS, of course!

Now, can you even imagine if some rando blogger on the Internet, virtually unknown, had posted this AI-slop as a snarky way to slander Christians? Blasphemy! The POTUS does it and he earns thousands of likes. What’s up with that

A deficit of trust exists in this country, between its citizens and their government institutions. It seems to me, and others I listen to as well

Each of us is born into an indifferent world. Give him a name, feed and protect him, get him a basic education, grow him up into an adult, nudge him to be productive, obey the laws of the land, then send him off and wish him good fortune. Copy/paste the next one in the bassinet. That is as much good will as we might reasonably expect a stranger to extend to a newborn in this world. This is because care for a new person’s well being falls off roughly in proportion to genetic distance from the parents. It is a simple fact of the human condition that beyond grandparents, possibly aunts and uncles as well, every newborn begins life in a world populated by indifferent strangers. Care is a finite resource, nobody possesses a bottomless well of it. Providing care for those in your genetic orbit moves your needle closer to empty, and one hopes one’s tank doesn’t run dry before the kids learn to care for themselves

A second fact of the human condition: no one of us can, in a way that ensures a durable outcome, care for all the world’s children. One can say she cares about a stranger’s well being, but the mere expression of caring about something is not equivalent to the action of caring for something. Some of the most affluent individuals in this world will incorporate to provide resources to strangers, some of whom will be children, sure – drilling deep wells in sub-Saharan Africa to provide clean water for example – but that is a kind of second hand care that I’m not talking about. A parent who reads to her child is evidence of care for the child, purchasing a dairy cow for a family halfway around the world is to care about caring. A person who knits you a cap cares for you; the hallmark birthday card merely says, thinking about you

A third fact of the human condition is the axiomatic if not also alarming truth that by simply being born into this world, the individual has assented to the preexisting social contract

Facts four and five are death and taxes

Facts three through five set you in relation to the government, which doesn’t care for you, or even, really, about you, they just want you to uphold your side of the contract, be productive and pay your fair share of taxes. In return, the government promises to keep you safe. When you’re born, they assign you a nine-digit number to keep track of you. If you never become productive, or stop being productive in old age, there’s something called the safety net. In times of war the government will select some people from the population, those most able to fight, and put them in harm’s way, reducing their individual safety, in order to keep the rest of the population overall safe. So they say anyway

Over many years, surely as long as I’ve been alive, we TheAmericanPeople have been endlessly reminded by the president that keeping us safe is his highest charge. Good day, citizens of America, presidents have always said. I will work tirelessly to keep you safe, that is my responsibility, your safety is my highest cause, no more beyond. Most often we hear this spoken during auspicious ceremonial speeches, like on inauguration day, or during solemn conversations with the country with the president seated in a high-back chair, aside a stone hearth, legs comfortably crossed, gentle flames lapping and embers crackling. Only the most cynical citizen or ideological anarchist would push back on this, the president’s oath

Somewhere along the way, though, trust in the government was broken. Certain intellectuals in society today believe this represents the largest existential crisis the country has encountered in modern times. Others are more sanguine, and more of the mind that this, too, shall pass. I’m not sure where I come down on this

From time to time, as noted earlier, certain AmericanPeople are going to have to be made unsafe to keep the rest safe. In doing so, some of these individuals will die while fighting to keep others safe, or return home wishing they had, or enter a lifelong battle with a constellation of incurable mental health disorders, maybe treatable with psychedelic drugs, nobody knows for sure

A caring father forbids his young daughter from taking a 10:00 PM run in Central Park. The daughter complains: It’s a city park, Dad, open to all, I have a right to run in that park whenever I want, you ought to let me go! Dad sits his daughter down, briefs her on what Aristotle meant in the Nicomachean Ethics by the prudent versus the practical. He adds that his ne plus ultra charge as a father is to protect his family from harm. The most practical way to avoid getting mauled by a bear is to stay out of the bear’s den, he says. You have rights, honey, but the bear has teeth and claws and doesn’t even care about you, or your rights. There are no bears in Central Park, Dad. Sure, he says, but bad actors in this world may take many forms. Dad, maybe if we learned more about bears we could understand why they want to maul us. Timothy Treadwell tried that in Alaska, honey, but the bear killed and ate him anyway, and his girlfriend, too. Maybe there’s a different approach that would work, Dad? I can’t rule it out, he says, but you can’t expect every extant danger to your safety in this world to be rendered benign simply because you come to understand its motivation to harm you. Wouldn’t you agree it is more prudent to run where, and when, you are less likely to encounter bad actors? Dad, no where is 100% safe. Indeed, we live in scary world. All our practical efforts to enjoy a good life are posed with risks to our safety, we ought to prioritize the safety of our values. So far as you and I are concerned, as my daughter you make my life good, by bringing you into this world I committed myself to keep you safe, and it follows you ought to keep yourself safe. Think of it as a kind of contract between us. By the way, back to your question about a different approach, even if you could practically de-fang every bad actor who may do you harm there are new people being added to this world all the time. You’d never get them all and it only takes one. Dad, I see what you’re saying, but isn’t avoiding bad actors the same thing as appeasing them? I don’t think so, honey. Giving in to bad actors, substituting their values for yours, is the ethics of Pacifism. If while out for a run you are accosted by a bad actor, unprovoked, who would do you harm, and you don’t resist, or fight back, that’s pacifism. On the other hand, avoiding the encounter in the first place does not involve the surrender of your values, it’s a prudential approach to protect them

Bravery is often recognized from afar, sometimes conflated with heroism, valor, concepts with no touch point in reality, what philosophers call floating abstractions. Have you noticed how readily a hero dismisses his label? Hell, I’m no hero, I wasn’t brave, I did what I did because I could not do otherwise

In various spiritual traditions pride is seen as a character flaw. They are wrong. Pride is an intentional property you keep to yourself. Nobody else is ever entitled to assign the value of that psychological feature in you. Actions some call brave others will view as shameful. That’s the problem with most moral judgements, people who make them suppose others are the authors of their own thoughts (and actions)

A dog returns to a burning house, licks his owner awake, along with the dog the owner makes it out, avoiding certain death by asphyxiation. No one calls the dog brave. There are no “genes” for bravery, no material basis whatsoever for bravery, not in the dog, and there’s no evidence that 50 million years of brain evolution added the property in the human brain. It’s merely a conceptual salve for the human condition, a metaphysical story we tell ourselves. Worse, is when you become the subject of someone else’s story. Tell your own story

Any world traveler will tell you to act prudently in your adventures to foreign lands. Even the government, in its publication of cautions and alerts to its citizen travelers, knows this. Another way it tries to keep you safe. Regardless of customs and traditions of the people living in those foreign lands, whether you like them or not, for goodness sake be careful, be prudential in your peregrinations, where you go, when you go, who you interact with, etc.

Maybe instead of bravery what we ought to admire about the soldier is his skill? But when the secretary of war is caught humming Onward Christian Soldiers prior to a press briefing no one is surprised, because it does not seem the man is able to understand the world outside his parochial moral framework. Amusingly, a very similar theocratic framework he says is the corrupt basis of America’s enemy du jour, only the deity is different. This is a laddish dry drunk who is a member of a church whose leader has stated on network TV in no uncertain terms that he would like to see the United States become a Christian nation, without any public school option whatsoever, where straight men marry straight women whose role is to submit to the husband and breed more Christians. He was asked: What about citizens who would resist? Well, he said, that will be a problem for the church’s missionaries to solve, wink wink. God works in mysterious ways and all that. And now, more recently, the vPOTUS has become, in addition to America’s fraud czar, a foreign missionary as well, traveling to Europe to admonish its leaders to steer their countries back to becoming more God-like, the right God, of course, not the one the POTUS mocked in a tweet, wherein he said in order to liberate Iranians from a murderous regime, he will need to annihilate them. Just Don being Don

A deficit of trust exists in this country, between its citizens and their government institutions

Humor, and its edgy cousin, ridicule, have had an important role in human discourse since, I suppose, the dawn of language, roughly one hundred thousand years ago. Five hundred years before Jesus arrived on earth the Greeks used ridicule in burlesque plays as a way to criticize Athenian war policies. In Medieval societies, satire was widely used by certain elites to shame public figures who acted dishonorably. Sound familiar? During the Enlightenment, possibly because humans began to take themselves too seriously, ridicule was viewed by some as incivility, even as others continued to defend it saying it was a weapon of truth, a valuable tool in opposition to bigotry and fanaticism. Fast forward to modern times, ridicule is widely acknowledged by bloggers and other mediums of despair as the last refuge for the hopeless. When individual human agency is futile to change, where you refuse to succumb and cheer the cause of your captors, thrust your arm at the sky, hold it rigid there with middle finger taught and laugh out loud, ridiculously loud. If nothing else, it’s the American Way

Uh, Orange One, a Pro Tip for you – Real men don’t buy other men shoes [1]. I mean can you imagine the ignominy, a more cringe-worthy expression of utter emasculation on display by males of the Sycophancy, being seen out and about kowtowing to their Supreme Leader in a pair of ill-fitted Florsheims? That must be quite literally the inverse of feeling Great Again. A good friend emailed me to ask what maga must-have is next – government-issued undergarments, approved by the Orange One himself? Something similar to the Mormon tradition. Quoting my friend directly: “Plenty of room for one’s package and roomy in the hips for women to pump out the next generation.” Brilliant! A nice touch of authenticity would be to custom stitch into the crotch area propitiating slogans like Trump Was Right or America First. And now, for a limited time only, when you pay with trump coin your second pair is free

1. I have, myself, purchased shoes for certain women in my life, but never for a man

The Supreme Leader ordered the killing of an aged Imam. Not surprisingly, the Israelis were in on it too. Epic Fury! I’m curious how many big tuff Warrior Ethos guys it took to come up with that name, or, for that matter, Midnight Hammer. Sounds like the titles of Clancy books. Ordinarily, when a world leader dies, deepest sympathies are effusively extended to the victim country by other world leaders, embassies, dignitaries, and various bureaus of mourning. This time pretty much all you hear is good riddance m’f*cker. Although, if you ask me, it would be a mistake to think nobody is mourning his death

Khamenei was the thirty-seven-year running Imam of Iran, a country of over ninety million people, the vast majority of whom are adherents to a sect of Islam known as Shia, not to be confused with the competing sect of Sunni, widely practiced in other Islamic countries, places like Saudi Arabia, northern Iraq, Egypt and others. About 1.6 Billion people in the world identify as Muslim, 85% Sunni, 15% Shia [1]. In a predominantly Shia country like Iran, the Imam’s role is to be the chief leader of the country’s mosques, the deliverer of sermons, chief authority in all religious education [2], in addition to other lofty roles that have to do with providing religious guidance. Unlike the Sunni variant, so far as I can tell, Shia Islam also regards the Imam, aka the Supreme Leader, as the sinless and inerrant descendant of The Prophet (Muhammad), and as such the infallible interpreter of right and wrong, kind of like how our Supreme Leader views himself. The point I want to make here is that Iran is a country of deeply pious people steeped in Islamic traditions that date back many hundreds of years. Far from separating matters of Church and State, as has been done in many other countries, in Iran the two are, since the 7th century, for all intensive purposes fused together. Not surprisingly then, religious people in Iran want to be free to practice their religion, publicly in full view of others during daily prayers, for example, or privately inside mosques. I understand that there are apps now, especially suited to young Muslims, that one can load on a smartphone and use to provide spiritual guidance and “instructions” for how to pray properly and demonstrate obeisance to Allah. The Imam in Iran is so deeply revered, he is (was), effectively, not only seen as the Supreme Leader, but more importantly, the nation’s Spiritual Leader. This reverence extends beyond the borders of Iran to Shia adherents around the world. Kind of like how our Supreme Leader wants us to believe he is revered around the world. But in the case of Khamenei, despite the unmistakable evidence of cruel despotism directed at his own people, his years-long admonition – Death to the Great Satans in this world! – enjoys a lot more support in the Muslim world than the Satans may want to admit, and thus will likely “complicate” the speedy compliance of their complete and utter surrender to the Greatest Satan. Is what I’m thinking

Meanwhile, the FLOTUS was sent on a new mission to the UN security counsel, where, fresh out of hair and makeup, seated with prestige at a long wooden table fashioned from American Ash, as chief advocate for the betterment of the world’s children, she had whispered in her ear the news that her husband had potentially just committed a war crime by bombing a girl’s school in Midan, Iran, killing the schoolchildren, 7-12 year old girls [3], and also, the whisperer continued, the president wanted you to know that in your absence, Ms FLOTUS, he made the executive decision to finalize the selection of the gold-matched drapes to be hung alongside the floor-to-ceiling windows in the new ballroom of his own design, the likes of which, he wanted us to assure you as well, the world has never seen. Consistent with its modern usage, the FLOTUS, on hearing this news, was described as nonplussed

1. A lot of people don’t know the vast majority of the world’s Muslims live in Asia, not the Middle East
2. Iran has public schools, but all education in those schools is religious based, promoting Islamic theology, beliefs and rules. There is no appetite for anything resembling a secular, objective education. For instance, most (not all) of the Iranian scientific workforce have schooled and trained abroad
3. Along with challenging topics in science, math and literature, the girls are inculcated in religious laws and traditions that will direct their own subjugation as women, reinforced by the chanting of political slogans and simultaneous stretching exercises

Why do I mention whales? Because soon we will be among them. Whale camp is a secret place with a Bortle night sky rating of 2 – 2! The whales will swoon us. Mother and baby. Do whales have eyebrows? We shall see. We hear they come that close. We are packed, prematurely perhaps, and ready to go. Just you wait and see.

Catherine O’Hara has passed. She was the most talented woman working in showbiz the past 40+ years, and if you disagree with me about that, by any measure whatsoever, I will unfriend you for life

Asked for relationship advice, Catherine had this to say

“People always say, ‘Communicate,’ right? ‘Tell them how you’re feeling.’ We do a lot of it with jokes,” she told PEOPLE in 2024 of her marriage. “We’ll make fun of each other instead of yelling at each other. Sarcasm helps!”

Beautiful

Over fifty Nibblets were mailed this year! This marks the seventeenth consecutive year (except 2024) that we (HW & I) have artfully crafted this missive, stuffed it in an envelope and then licked, stamped and mailed it to our many friends and family who, on the evidence of feedback received from them over the years, continue to have a perplexed curiosity in our shared, annual experiences. For me, composing the Nibblet is kind of like that one amusing thing your friends will say only you can do justice to, such that at some mixed party together they cajole you into performing it again and again, and so for their sake you keep it up. Actually, that’s not quite fair; this annual Christmas letter, by now more a New Year’s letter given we seem to be mailing it later and later with each passing year, at least for me (and I suppose HW as well), has become a labor of love. Because let’s be honest, HW and I (and our pup(s)) are as ordinary an American family as there is. So to know that certain people on the mailing list make a point of asking us as early as Q4 each year: “When is my Nibblet arriving this year!” well, it tickles us pink. One year, in fact, an alarmed recipient emailed me to say her Nibblet arrived in her mailbox soaking wet, unreadable, and could she please get a replacement

New friends here invited us to a New Year’s Eve party at their house, for which the ever radiant HW had prepared a fondue to be shared by all, shown here in our house prior to departure, the dipping components packaged and co-mingled in a shallow ceramic dish ready for transport, while the crock pot containing a melange of gooey cheeses was coddled and transported ever so carefully by yours truly. Not so carefully, however, as to prevent the basket inside which the crock pot had been placed from listing a bit during the carry out to the car, causing the glass lid on the pot to shift, enough that a small portion of cheese escaped and found its way onto my pant leg. HW to the rescue: she quickly deployed a Wet Ones from the car’s console and restored my appearance to eye candy worthiness. “Ugh, men.”

Not a lick of pretension or braggadocio was evidenced by any of our fellow partygoers, never mind that many of them, I’m quite certain, had impressive professional back stories to share. Some of the people in attendance we knew from prior interactions in and around the community. Catered food appeared on tables distributed throughout rooms in the house, intermixed with items others had brought (e.g. HW’s fondue), and the drinks were flowing but to a one everybody there was chill and genuinely festive, behaving without airs. I like that. Somebody said to me, Your wife is beautiful. I liked that, too. I rechecked my pant leg, the cheese stain was completely gone