Here is a list of pursuits aside from bird-watching that are potent means of psychological hygiene:

• Embroidering;
• Knitting;
• Fishing;
• Hunting;
• Berry-picking;
• Mushroom-gathering;
• Walking in the woods (but without any music);
• Puzzles (but they’ve got to be real puzzles, not the online ones);
• Non-competitive chess (again, not online);
• Drumming;
• Stringing beads (non-commercially);
• Singing in a choir (again, not for money. All of this has to be done as a hobby and not for a living);
• Staring into a fire;
• Making a herbarium;
• Attending religious services.

And the cheapest of all: day-dreaming. This is a great and very accessible source of energy.

If you are gravitating towards any of these activities, this means you have very good instincts and a fair degree of psychological health. If not, try to explore some of them to see if you might like at least one.

A friend is telling me how she was trying to figure out which house on our street is mine.

“OK, it’s definitely not this house with red lanterns because Clarissa is too worldly not to get the significance of living in a red-light district. She mentions the environment sometimes, so this house that is lit up like an opera theater can’t be hers. And this one with a huge inflatable snowman would just freak her out. And this one is decorated in such a vulgar way that it can’t be hers. Oh, here is a tree with a little red bow on every branch. This must totally be Clarissa’s house!”

Has anybody heard about this:

I work across a lot of pieces of research, but I’d say the frontiers are trying to understand how much effectively turning down the sun, solar geoengineering, actually reduces the climate risk that people care about: Crop losses, ice sheets melting, temperature extremes, or what have you.

There’s no question it reduces the global average temperatures; even the people who hate it agree you could reduce average global temperatures. . . .The answer is, it works a lot better than I expected. It’s really stunning. It looks like it can cut, like, 80 percent of the total variation in climate, which is really stunning.

In some ways we should be singing it from the rooftops. But the scientific community is so painfully scared of talking about it. These papers come out, and people find the best ways to say, well, it sort of works, but it’s really awful.

The fact is, people really appear to have found a way to significantly reduce the climate risk — by more than half, which is a big deal.

This sounds like the best news ever, if its true. Why isn’t anybody rejoicing?

A job announcement posted by Chronicle of Higher Ed:

Open Position

Core Faculty in Transformative Inquiry

School of Consciousness and Transformation

 

 

Position Description:

The Transformative Inquiry program of the California Institute of Integral Studies announces a job opening for a core faculty position at the assistant professor level to teach online doctoral and masters courses.

The Transformative Studies doctoral program is designed for individuals who want to engage in innovative, transdisciplinary research, combining rigorous scholarship, creativity, and self-inquiry.

The Transformative Leadership MA is designed for individuals who want to lead by example, mobilizing their creativity towards personal as well as social transformation.

This has been the first 24 hours in 7 months when not a single Ukrainian soldier was killed in Ukraine. Putin doesn’t want to feed the Donbass Region and is now regrouping for a new strategy. What that strategy will be is yet unknown.

In the meanwhile, Ukrainian volunteers – who have financed the entire defense effort – are wrapping New Year’s gifts for the soldiers. Most of whom are also volunteers. This is the grandest example of a civil society in action I have ever seen. For 7 months, people are maintaining a very successful defense operation against an enemy who is vastly superior in terms of weaponry, resources, and manpower. All of this is done while avoiding any interaction with the corrupt governmental officials.

The US Congress has made a decision to give monetary aid to Ukraine but that is a mistake. If you want to give money, give it to these volunteer organizations. Otherwise, it will all be stolen by corrupt bureaucrats. A lot of money has already been donated to the Ukrainian army. People were donating their last dollar or two to help the army in combat. But all of those resources – all of them – were stolen by governmental mafias.

And while I am at it, North American slavists kind of suck. The Ukrainian friend was at a conference,  and an eminent American scholar announced in his talk that there is an ethnic conflict in Ukraine that has caused a civil war.

The friend asked him if he had any evidence to support this (truly outlandish) claim.

“Yes, I  saw a video on YouTube,” the eminent scholar responded.

I already knew that slavists were a bizarre bunch, ever since a visited the Chair of the Department of Slavic Studies at McGill and saw that he was sitting under a huge portrait of Putin and a tiny little portrait of Pushkin.

I’m thinking there must be a reason why Slavic Studies is a dying field.

The Ukrainian friend and I also discussed how phenomenally offensive it is that the Russians are making such a meal out of Ferguson and using it in their stinky propaganda war.

Stupid freaks.

Am I dreaming or is it true that the Senate unanimously passed the bill to provide weapons to Ukraine?

God, I thought this would never happen.
Now the House needs to pass it. I hope Obama will not stand in the way.

Thank you, Senate! I think I love you.

I just spent 4 hours with a friend from Ukraine wondering if this ever was going to happen. And then it just happened. Wow.

A Ukrainian friend came by to share a cup of coffee. I served some baklava, a cake, some crackers , and placed a chunk of Manchego cheese on the table.

“Ah, salo!” the Ukrainian friend commented, eyeing the cheese.

Another excruciatingly stupid article, this time about politics. What is it with people today? Has the avitaminosis set in already?