From the garden...

It's hard to believe that the universe will ever see greater, unwarranted, grovelling endorsement of narcissism than that which surrounds Trump

New battleships: President Trump announced on Monday that the Navy would build two new “Trump Class” battleships, with the eventual goal of acquiring 25. The announcement by Mr. Trump was the latest example of the president rebranding an aspect of the federal government in his image. The Navy secretary, John Phelan, called the vessels “just one piece of the president’s golden fleet that we’re going to build.” 

(From the Washington Post.)

 (From the New York Times.)

Let's rush towards Christmas (and 70) with more depressing news!

I was only vaguely aware of estimates of dementia according to age, but this Nature article puts some more certainty to it:

Nearly one in ten people over the age of 70 have Alzheimer’s disease dementia, shows a first-of-its-kind study that paired blood-based markers and clinical assessments to study the disease in Norway¹.

That prevalence is in line with previous estimates for some other white populations². But there were also unexpected differences, including higher disease rates than anticipated in individuals older than 85...

The study, published today in Nature, shows that blood-based tools can improve epidemiological estimates of neurodegenerative disease.

But exactly how to use these tests remains controversial, warns Jason Karlawish, a geriatrician and co-director of the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Blood-based markers can be helpful for physicians treating people with dementia and for answering research questions, but they aren’t ready to be rolled out widely as health screening tools.

“It is the kind of test that, in the wrong hands, could cause a lot of harm,” says Karlawish, who was not involved in the study.

 Of course, things get worse the older you get:

Around 10% of participants over the age of 70 had dementia and AD pathology, showing both cognitive impairment and high pTau217, they report. Another 10% had mild cognitive impairments and high pTau217. And 10% had high pTau217 but no signs of cognitive impairment, which the authors refer to as preclinical AD.

These findings are broadly in line with expectations, but there were surprises, too.

Some 25% of people aged 85–89 had dementia and AD pathology, up from previous estimates of around 7% for men and 13% for women in this age group in Western Europeans3. And the incidence of preclinical AD in younger individuals was 8% in those aged 70–74, down from a previous estimate of around 22%.

Anders Gustavsson, a member of the team that compiled the earlier estimates, welcomes the latest data. “I’m not surprised that this study gets somewhat different numbers,” says Gustavsson, who is an adviser to the health-economics consultancy Quantify Research in Stockholm.

The discrepancies probably reflect selection bias, says study co-author Anita Lenora Sunde, a physician and dementia researcher at Stavanger University Hospital in Norway. Previous estimates were made by recruiting participants for brain scans, and people with dementia might not have wanted to or been able to participate. 

The article eventually gets cut off at a paywall, just as it notes that the study indicates (as many others seem to) that higher education may have a protective effect.   Good!

 

 

Mostly a problem from the Right

Axios has this good article about a recurring problem, and I will be naughty and post it here in full:

 

As police scoured New England this week for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University, a parallel manhunt erupted online, falsely targeting a Palestinian student.

• Authorities say the real suspect, a Portuguese national also linked to the slaying of an MIT professor, was found dead Thursday in New Hampshire.

Why it matters: Social media influencers who play detective after tragedies are getting it disastrously wrong — falsely accusing innocent people of crimes with little evidence, massive reach and virtually no accountability.

• The speculation often is stoked by ideological accounts that seize on "clues" reinforcing their worldviews. Corrections are exceedingly rare — and seldom travel as far as the original claims.

Zoom in: Mustapha Kharbouch was never named by police as a suspect in the shooting that killed two Brown students, including the vice president of the college Republican Club.

• But he was targeted online after his student profile disappeared from the university's website — a move MAGA-aligned accounts seized on as supposed evidence of a cover-up.
• Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Tuesday there were many reasons the pages could have been taken down — including to prevent doxxing — and warned that online vigilantes were heading down a "really dangerous road."

But the frenzy only accelerated from there.

• Popular right-wing figures and large anonymous accounts cast Kharbouch's identity — Palestinian, openly queer and outspoken on Gaza — as inherently suspicious.
• Some accounts even cited amateur "gait analysis" of Kharbouch at a pro-Palestinian protest as supposed evidence that he was the shooter, alleging he was a product of campus extremism.

"The past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare," Kharbouch said in a statement. "I woke up Tuesday morning to unfounded, vile, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian accusations being directed toward me online."

• "Instead of grieving with my community in the aftermath of the horrible shooting, I received non-stop death threats and hate speech," he added, before noting that his harassment is "nothing" compared to the plight of Palestinians.
• Kharbouch's lawyers said his web pages were taken down as a "precaution" after "far-right influencers posted hateful vitriol" seeking to connect him to the shooting.

Between the lines: Online sleuths have a long history of misfires, most infamously during the manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. But what has changed is the speed of misinformation, and the influence of those spreading it.

• Shaun Maguire, a prominent pro-Trump venture capitalist, claimed Kharbouch was "very likely" the shooter and falsely suggested that the slain MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, was Jewish and pro-Israel.
• Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with outsized influence in the Trump administration, continued to claim the shooter was a "Muslim who shouted 'Allahu Akbar'" — even after authorities identified the suspect as Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.

• Even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a senior Justice Department official, amplified claims that Brown's removal of Kharbouch's student pages was suspicious.

The other side: Not all crowdsourced attention after the Brown shooting was harmful.

• Authorities interviewed the author of a Reddit post that flagged a suspicious man and vehicle on Brown's campus, and garnered information that ultimately "blew this case right open," according to Neronha.

The big picture: In this era of hyper-partisanship, weakened content moderation and incentivized engagement, the Brown episode fits a familiar and troubling pattern.

• Earlier this month, the conservative website The Blaze retracted a story that falsely identifed a former law enforcement officer as the Jan. 6 pipe bomber — based on "gait analysis."
• In the wake of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack in Sydney, social platforms were flooded with misinformation — including AI-generated deepfakes — before authorities clarified who was responsible.
• For months, podcaster Candace Owens has promoted unsubstantiated allegations that Turning Point USA staff helped cover up Charlie Kirk's assassination, igniting a MAGA civil war.

The bottom line: Armchair sleuths thrive in the chaos after mass violence, amplified by platforms that reward speed and outrage. But it's innocent people who are left to absorb the fallout when the claims collapse.

As it says, the worst thing about this is how it is nearly always "consequence free" for those whose guesses turn out to be wrong.   

Windows regrets

Amongst the many things that have been annoying me greatly in the last few months (I can't wait for 2025 to end) has been the switch to Windows 11.  I put it off for as long as possible, and I guess I am glad I did at least that.

The persistent problem:  when I take the work laptop home and connect it to my home network (something I used to do regularly under Windows 10 with no issues at all), it connects to the internet, but will not see all websites.  It has a particular dislike for some big media ones - the New York Times and Washington Post (but, oddly enough, I can get to The Guardian) - and it has also affected banking websites.  I just get an instant message that it can't find the website.   It always lets me get to this blog, which allows me to complain, at least!  Emails are OK.

The thing is, on one occasion this happened, the laptop was able to do a diagnostic which fixed it.  I thought that was the end of it.   I recall getting a message saying what the fix involved, but I have forgotten what it said.  I also remember something about "this diagnostic tool is being moved/will no longer be available" or something like that.

And then, the problem returned the next time I bought the laptop home.  (I don't bring it home every night.)  I have tried running diagnostics again, but it just says I am connected to the internet, the network all looks OK.   It makes some other suggestions, which all seem useless.

Searching the internet for what causes it brings up many, rather complicated, issues to check.   It seems it is not one of the commonest issues.

Maybe I should try searching Reddit. 

Anyway, it is very annoying to have an issue which Windows once knew how to fix, and then has forgotten.

When is the replacement for 11 coming? 

 

Nice of it to put some effort in to wear Christmas colours...

Why do people excuse Trumpian inventions?

Of course, so many words have been written already on Trump's intensely narcissistic and offensive comment on Rob Reiner's death.   There were few who tried to support it, but in the local scene I saw that old JC at New Catallaxy, who I think occasionally might come here, refused to condemn it because Reiner had promoted the "Russia conspiracy" and been mean to Trump, so Trump could be mean in response (even in death.)

Even ignoring the fact that JC is part of the intense stupidity that has engulfed MAGA world that refuses to believe the reports of bipartisan committees on the involvement of Russia in support of Trump, what I don't get is this:  how can anyone possibly excuse the fact that Trump went on a narcissistic fantasy WITH ZERO EVIDENCE that Reiner was murdered because of his "Trump Derangement Syndrome".   I mean, it's an absolute invention (and an extremely unlikely one at that, given that the drug addled son was the suspect from the very start) that truly indicates a fabulist imagination so chronic that in many settings, you could see it cited as evidence for dementia and incapacity to make sound decisions.   

I mean, how are doctors going to reliably diagnose this man with dementia when he has invented bullshit, if not for his entire life, at least for the last couple of decades, and people just shrug and say "that's just Donald"?  

Given the attacks on Biden being tired and sometimes rambling, it just continues to be ridiculous that the media follows the MAGA line of "that's just Trump" when it comes to his continual lies and fabulist rhetoric.    

Complete science vandals

Against political point scoring

More on protein for us (almost) oldies

 In a Washington Post article:What a scientist who studies protein and healthy aging eats in a day:

The National Academy of Medicine says the amount of protein the average adult needs on a daily basis is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, or the equivalent of 0.36 grams per pound of body weight. That’s about 54 grams of protein for a 150-pound person — or roughly the amount of protein in a 4-ounce chicken breast and one cup of Greek yogurt. Some health influencers point out that this amount — known as the recommended dietary allowance, or RDA — is the bare minimum you need to avoid being malnourished and argue that you should be eating as much as one gram of protein per pound of body weight each day.

Phillips says the truth lies somewhere in the middle. He says that for optimal health, the average adult should aim to eat around 0.54 to 0.73 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily. Eating this amount — along with regular bouts of strength training — can help you build and maintain lean muscle as you age and stave off conditions such as sarcopenia.  

Well, that's annoying how they jump between grams per kilogram and grams per pound!   If you are going metric for one, why not for both?   

Perplexity tells me it converts to 1.19g to 1.61g per kilogram.   

My previous post on this topic settled on 1.2g per kilogram, so this still sounds right... 

Random interesting video

This guy presents his videos very well, but only has 21K subscribers.  Looking at his channel, it seems he had occasional higher numbers on his videos, but the Almighty Algorithm must really hate him or something, because his usual views are in the mere hundreds.  It's hard to see why he keeps doing it!

But anyway, I thought this video about human monogamy was interesting:

 

A great time...for doomscrolling

What with Rob Reiner being murdered, Trump making it about himself (and still having his defenders in the process), the attempt to blame all criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank as being unfair anti-Semitism and lack of control of protest - this is a really good December for unhappy doomscrolling.

Maybe 2026 will be better... 

   

Bondi shooting

Now, I did say here in August that I didn't see the point in countries saying they recognised a Palestinian state when it was still (and remains today) hopelessly unclear how one was to be governed, and worried that it gave Hamas some sense of encouragement. 

That said, what a stupid Right wing tosser freakout we are seeing in blaming Australia's recognition of the state (in September - I don't think I have ever commented on it) for the Bondi Beach terrorist attack.

On Twitter X, your guaranteed source for commentary by Right wing tossers from all over the world, the freakout was happening before anyone even knew definitely what was happening.  The ABC was blamed for not mentioning fast enough that there was a Hanukkah festival happening; Channel 9 ruffled feathers by having a Muslim reporter on the scene.

Campbell Newman - now a libertarian party figure after ruining Brisbane's King George Square as Lord Mayor, and going on to be the least popular Premier we have ever seen - was reliably hyperventilating, as was clown head Rowan Dean whose outrage (that the Albanese government caused it) was enough to launch his permed head into orbit.

And now the Opposition Leader we are all waiting to be deposed - Susan Ley - is politicising it before the dead are buried:

‘Clear lack of leadership’ over antisemitism, Sussan Ley says

The opposition leader says there has been a “failure” to protect Jewish Australians.

She says there is “palpable anger” in the community and a sense of “bewilderment”.

Antisemitism in Australia has been left to fester … We have seen a clear failure to keep Jewish Australians safe. We have seen a clear lack of leadership in keeping Jewish Australians safe. We have a government that sees antisemitism as a problem to be managed, not evil that needs to be eradicated ...

 We’ve seen synagogues fire-bombed, orchestrated by foreign terrorist states. Every single day for the last two years the lives of Jewish Australians have been made harder by this rising tide of antisemitism.

Ley says she’s spoken to antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal this morning, who has been urging the government to respond to her report. 

 Here's my prediction:   unless there turns out to be some specific intelligence warning given to the government of plans for this attack, this will not have the political blowback the Liberals (and even nuttier Right) think it will.   That's because all normal people will see it as a revenge attack, likely by individuals acting alone, for the extent of the attack on Gaza in reaction to the wildly stupid terrorist attack on Israel.  And of course, it wasn't warranted, and statements of sympathy to Australian Jews are entirely appropriate.   

But only the stupidest of the stupid would say that the Albanese government encouraged it.    

Spielberg UFO freakout

One of the more amusing things on Twitter/X at the moment is the way all of the wildly gullible and very, very serious UFO believers are freaking out over the posters that have just made an appearance promoting next year's Spielberg movie (which is a return to science fiction and UFOs in particular).

Does it mean his movie will be part of the super secret government plan to soften the public for the disclosure of the reality of UFOs, or what they are about, or whatever?   (Or is it just, you know, an entertainment? I know which take I believe.)

And in a way, I would say that it has rehabilitated Spielberg in the mind of the Right, which previously had been holding him in some disdain for being a Hollywood Lefty.  But now, given that the recent wave of wild UFO claims has obviously come from the conspiracy world that is the natural mindset of gullible MAGA, it would seem some of them are hoping Spielberg is a good'un will help their cause, after all.

The poster itself (given that the plot of the movie seems a well kept secret) is a pretty great one for creating conversation:   

 I especially like that it is a bluejay  cardinal silouhette featuring prominently:  what role, exactly, are birds going to have in this movie? I don't normally associate them with knowledge of interplanetary visitors.  

Another six months to find out... 

 

Count me as doubtful

The New York Times runs some commentary on the AI bubble situation:  Why the A.I. Boom Is Unlike the Dot-Com Boom.

I have heard this argument before, as some Youtube video argued that the money being put into AI expansion is largely cash the giant tech companies have brought over from the tax haven of Ireland, so who really cares if they blow it away, big time?  They are still making wild amounts of money from what they have been doing pre-AI, anyway.

The article does claim this (my bold), without further explanation:

A.I. is very different, Mr. Horowitz contended. The internet is a network, and its value increases as more people are added, he said. Online retailers in 1996 could reach only a small fraction of the population. Amazon now reaches just about everyone.

A.I., on the other hand, is a computer, Mr. Horowitz said. “Computers can be valuable immediately. A.I. is certainly valuable immediately,” he added. “A.I. products are working so well that we are seeing revenue growth that dwarfs anything that came before it.” 

Really? 

The irony is that, even before scores of new AI centres are built, there is an obvious online backlash against AI slop and its unreliability in many fields.   I myself could tell some stories about that from my work, but that would disclose a bit too much...

 

Fewer, but a bit more intense

An article at the Washington Post says that while it seems the numbers of religious young adult continue to decline, those left are perhaps a bit more intensely interested?   

Interestingly, it notes a rise in young Catholic enthusiasm in college, but I really wonder where they are coming from culturally.   I mean, I thought that there was no doubt that older American Catholics had embarrassingly swung towards Trump (due to the culture war, and abortion, I guess); but it would seem the leadership has started to talk out against him, and we do have a quasi liberal-ish American Pope.   For ages, conservative Catholics have claimed that those parts of the Church with a conservative, traditionalist bent were the only parts growing.  (Even though numbers were actually tiny.)   So, where do these alleged reinvigorated, spiritually seeking Catholics on the culture war/political spectrum?

The other part that is pretty odd sounding to me, a sports skeptic, so to speak: 

Zach Golden grew up going to church but never really connected with Christianity. A Baltimore high-schooler during covid lockdowns, he started meditating out of boredom and an affinity for “Star Wars,” which draws heavily from Taoism.

Now a senior at American University, Golden meditates and practices Qigong. Earlier this year he launched a program that combines sports and spirituality, exploring topics like how trauma impacts athletics and the way people experience their bodies and movement.

“We see all these things and we’re so numb. Our generation — we’re the test dummies for the internet and social media,” he said. “That’s what’s leading to what I guess is a spiritual revolution.”   

 Sports and spirituality?   

Is this some sort of artistic prank?

I'm late to the party, but as many people online have commented, the FIFA hastily invented peace prize (for easily bribed narcissists) has a weirdly creepy design:

  

 

Someone on X said "looks like it was based on a scene from the Walking Dead."   

Apparently, SNL's take was:  “FIFA actually invented a fake peace prize in Trump's honor, and that's why the trophy shows Trump's gnarled hands dragging Earth into hell,” 

This is what leapt to my mind when I saw it, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere, has already pointed it out:

 

 

American depravity (continued)

I like an essay on the depraved behaviour of the MAGA Right (with respect to their extra-judicial killing of alleged cocaine carriers far at sea) that begins with an anecdote from St Augustine's Confessions.   

But here it is, in the New York Times.

I am particularly concerned about how Trump doesn't even have to browbeat his sycophantic cheer squad in the Right wing media to not only excuse, but praise, his actions:  the capitalistic self interest in cheering every single thing the goonish administration does relieves him of that.  This is the where the American world has changed, for the dramatically worse.

Atrocities weren't cheered in Vietnam or even Iraq - they were hidden.   Now, why bother hiding them when you can rely on a large section of the media (the part that your followers watch to the exclusion of all other media) will never criticise or question.  

 

More on psychedelics

Further to my last post, when you go looking for studies on harm from hallucinogens/psychedelics, a hell of a lot of them start with something like "despite the rise in interest in psychedelics as potentially useful therapeutic tools in recent years, detailed and reliable studies about harmful effects have been lacking."    

Anyway, here are some of the more interesting things I have found, so far:

NMURx surveyed 267,268 adults representing 256,742,237 Americans (Table E1; available at http://www.annemergmed.com) over the study period. The prevalence of past year psychedelic use in nondecriminalized US states modestly increased from 2.4% (95% confidence interval [CI] 2.33% to 2.54%) in 2019 to 2020 to 2.84% (95% CI 2.74% to 2.95%) in 2021 to 2023. Oregon and Colorado rates have risen from 3.28% (95% CI 2.66% to 3.89%) in 2019 to 2020 to 5.44% (95% CI 4.63% to6.24%) in 2021 to 2023 

The background to that is that Oregon and Colorado " have already legalized and decriminalized the sale, possession, and growth of natural psychedelics for counseling, spiritual guidance, beneficial community-based use, and healing. As of August 2023, 22 states have active legislation on psychedelic medical use."  I don't know, but a state in which upwards of 5% having used a psychedelic in the last year sounds like a state with too many people using them.

 Going back to 2013, one open-access study found that regular users of psychedelics maybe had less mental health issues(!).   But the study itself acknowledges significant limitations.   And I see there is also perhaps a bit of the (many decades old) argument used regarding cannabis that if someone did get psychosis after doing the drug, maybe there were going to get schizophrenia anyway: 

There are very few case reports of prolonged psychiatric symptoms following psilocybin or mescaline [13], [52]. Almost all claims of psychiatric harm caused by peyote have been found on examination of medical records to be due to pre-existing schizophrenia or other causes [53], [54]. 

So, count me as suspicious of that study.

I see that the researchers in that study are quoted in a 2022 study which similarly seems determined to find that the risks are pretty low, and keeps emphasising that how they are used (you know, in a supportive, safe context, like a psych's office) makes it much safer.   Things like "how they are going to be used recreationally" don't get treated in much detail, for example:

 In unprepared individuals and/or in unsafe settings, effects of psychedelics may have the potential to escalate into dangerous behaviour (Johnson et al., 2008). Although very rare, there are reports of individuals jumping from buildings and ending their lives (e.g. Honyiglo et al., 2019; Keeler and Reifler, 1967). While these occurrences are uncommon compared with other psychoactive drugs – especially alcohol – they are widely reported in the media which contributes considerably to public perceptions of their risks.

And:

In Carbonaro et al.’s (2016) online survey about challenging experiences after consuming ‘mushrooms’, 11% of users reported putting themselves or others at risk of physical harm. This was often related to greater (estimated) dosage, difficulty of the experience and lack of physical comfort and social support – all of which can be controlled under clinical conditions. 

A study in Nature in 2023 is of limited use, given the small sample that it involved, but it's interesting that the abstract starts with the observation that a lot of studies seem to be biased towards the positive:

Recent controversies have arisen regarding claims of uncritical positive regard and hype surrounding psychedelic drugs and their therapeutic potential. Criticisms have included that study designs and reporting styles bias positive over negative outcomes. The present study was motivated by a desire to address this alleged bias by intentionally focusing exclusively on negative outcomes, defined as self-perceived ‘negative’ psychological responses lasting for at least 72 h after psychedelic use.  

Here's another questionable self selecting, self reporting, survey study, but it has this interesting part:

Taken as a whole, these studies provide convergent support for findings from clinical trials, including that psychedelic use (either lifetime or prospective) is associated with increased emotional well-being (19–26), reduced harmful substance use/misuse (i.e., illicit drugs/tobacco/alcohol) (27, 28), a tendency toward liberal political views and an enhanced sense of connection with nature (29, 30). These effects are reliably associated with the occurrence of various types of transformative mental states (e.g., mystical, emotional breakthrough, insight-type) during the acute psychedelic experience that have also predicted outcomes in clinical trials (6, 9, 11, 22, 31–33).  

 I can assure the reader that I did not become more Left leaning as I aged due to use of a drug!

 The study does turn up this figure for harms:

...not all participants reported unqualified benefit from psychedelic usage. Thirteen percent identified at least one harm, and these participants reported receiving significantly less mental health benefit from their psychedelic usage than participants not endorsing any harms. 

 OK, so a very recent study from Norway did some more survey stuff, and it's really hard to follow from the paper what they found!   It does have some interesting passages, though:

Adverse events as conceived in the context of clinical trials (e.g. any undesirable experience associated with the use of a medical product in a patient) overlap with the non-medical concept of ‘challenging experiences’ arising from self-experimentation with psychedelics. In clinical trials, the most common adverse events reported after ingestion of psychedelics are headaches, nausea and transient anxiety (Andersen et al., 2021). However, serious adverse events have been reported after the administration of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, such as severe suicidal (Goodwin et al., 2023) and cases of extreme anxiety induced by LSD requiring the use of benzodiazepines to contain the situation (Holze et al., 2023). In clinical trials, high anxiety during the psychedelic drug administration have been associated with worse clinical outcomes (Roseman et al., 2018). Anxiety following a high dose of psilocybin or LSD is also common among healthy subjects, as 30 % of participants in controlled studies experience fear and panic, and 17–34 % experience paranoid ideation (Griffiths et al., 2006, 2011; Schmid et al., 2015). Recently, there has been increased attention to possible negative effects resulting from both clinical and non-clinical use of psychedelics (Evans et al., 2023), and criticism of the field for not properly assessing and appreciating risks (van Elk and Fried, 2023). Challenging psychedelic experiences during acute effects are quite common, but to what extent and through which mechanisms they are implicated in prolonged negative effects needs more research. 

Well, that's a pity, because it's the more prolonged negative effect rate that I'm interested in! 

The next paragraph contains the now familiar refrain - more research needed:

The increased interest in psychedelics from researchers and the public merits translation of validated questionnaires for assessing the qualitative nature of subjective states and outcomes resulting from using these compounds. Epidemiological studies indicate that psychedelic drug use is increasing and that more people report difficulties during acute effects and seek help for post-psychedelic health complaints (Bouso et al., 2022; Miech et al., 2023; Simonsson et al., 2023; Tate et al., 2023). It is therefore paramount that researchers pay attention to negative and complex reactions to psychedelic drugs in the general population, as well as to their possible benefits. Measurements that capture these themes are also highly relevant in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, where processing difficult cognitive and emotional material is core to the treatment modality.

 Another paragraph talks about research that has looked at the adverse effects:

While not affecting most psychedelic users, there are indications that a significant proportion experience substantial distress and challenges with functioning after psychedelic experimentation (Simonsson et al., 2023). The types and precise causes of enduring negative effects after psychedelics are an ongoing area of research. At present there are studies and reports suggesting increases in anxiety, trauma-like symptoms, feelings of disconnection and dissociative experiences, depersonalization and derealization, existential confusion and loss in sense of purpose, and perceptual abnormalities such as Hallucinogen Persisting Perceptual Disorder (HPPD) (Bouso et al., 2022; Bremler et al., 2023; Evans et al., 2023; Kvam et al., 2023; Vis et al., 2021). In addition, there are credible reports of worsening and triggering of psychotic symptoms and manic or hypomanic states, induction of suicidal ideation, as well as negative impact on traits among people with personality disorders (Barber et al., 2022; Kramer et al., 2023; Marrocu et al., 2024; Morton et al., 2023). Having pre-existing psychiatric diagnoses is a risk factor for challenging psychedelic experiences in these studies, but not a prerequisite as it also occurs without known psychological risk factors and relates to variables such as higher dose, younger age, chaotic contexts, and absence of social support (Simonsson et al., 2023; Vizeli et al., 2024). These contextual factors appear to play a key role in the development of lasting negative effects and likely apply not only during the acute phase of a challenging psychedelic experience but also in the period afterward. In the future, we suggest that it is fruitful to study post-drug trajectories in combination with emphasis on the broad and varied range of mediating factors that interact with the psychedelic experience.  

Well, there's a hell of a lot of links there to go looking at, but I've spent enough time on this for now.  

Hallucinogens worry me

Sure, it's interesting that certain hallucinogens (most notably, DMT) produce similar types of peculiar results with most people (see machine elves), but after having the Algorithm send me to a bunch of YouTube videos from Comedy Central (of all places) in which "cool" people tell light hearted stories of their DMT trips, I am increasingly worried that cultural promotion of recreational tripping is going way too far.   (The videos seem to be 5 years old now, so I am late to notice them.)

In comments on any video about trips, there will be hundreds of people recommending how to do it right, so to speak.   There will be the occasional cautionary one, and there's a Joe Rogan clip of a guy who explains how it took 18 months to fully recover from his DMT experiences; but overall, it seems clear that there are too many people promoting it as an interesting or fun thing to do.

This just doesn't sit right with me.

People's mental health is something to be valued and treasured if it gets them through life on an even keel, so to speak.  To know a person with serious struggles with their mental health is to know how good it is to enjoy not having that problem.  Why risk it for mere recreational purposes?   

And it doesn't necessarily carry clear spiritual truths or lessons, as someone argued on Twitter recently:

Indeed, on that last point, why don't people just listen to what the members of the Beatles had to say about the empty promise of drug induced hallucinations?   

 

I have told the story before:  as a teenager I was impressed by Huxley's The Doors of Perception.   It's a cool idea to think that a drug lowers the brain filter to let you see a numinous world as it really is.  But it also becomes clear when you read more about the experiences of drug users that it is not really what is going on.

 

That said, I am not totally against the experiments in use of certain drugs by properly trained psychiatrists to see if they can help certain traumatised people.  (Although I am also already convinced that there is a great deal of hype around that topic,  too.)   

 

But I do have more and more sympathy as I age to taking the old Republican line on "this is your brain on drugs - just don't do it"  than the soft "do them, but just carefully, it will open your mind, man" experimental lines of the likes of Joe Rogan and whoever owns Comedy Central.

A new book on capitalism

A review here at the New York Times on the kind of book by an academic that sounds interesting, but which I can tell would take too much devotion to read in full:  "Capitalism: a Global History". 

A couple of extracts:

Previous histories have usually treated capitalism as a European invention, but Beckert, as ambitious as he is erudite, shows how capitalism arose as a global phenomenon, the peculiar behavior of a few merchants in places as far apart as Cairo and Changzhou.

By mapping the diverse origins of capitalism, Beckert reveals its protean and resilient character. Over hundreds of years, merchants created small enclaves of capital within port cities and elaborate networks of trust that stretched over long distances. Such connections, Beckert observes, helped them outflank and survive resistance from above, by landed aristocrats who thought “making money from money seemed closer to sin, sorcery or plain theft,” and from below, by “cultivators and craftspeople” who were loath to give up their local conceptions of prices set by “a shared sense of morality.” 

So far, sounds like it supports the generally conservative idea that capitalism is a more-or-less natural evolution arising out of how groups of people like to manage their lives.  But there are wrinkles, to put it mildly:

In these remote corners of the world European investors conducted a kind of civil experiment, extending the logic of the market to all aspects of life. Everything, especially human labor, was commodified and could be bought and sold for money.

And:

He offers an especially devastating critique of earlier mythologies of capitalism, showing how the “invisible hand” of the market does not peacefully guide world affairs, and how the development of capitalism was in no sense “natural.”

Like many books before it, “Capitalism” is not only a history but a moral indictment. The metaphor of monstrosity runs throughout Beckert’s pages. In his telling, the hand of capital is visible, cold, hard and vicious, and capitalism is a promiscuous creature, drawing on different kinds of labor, from enslaved to free and many in between, within various political frameworks, from democracy to dictatorship.

Two leading thinkers of the 18th century, the French philosopher Montesquieu and the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, argued that world trade promoted peace and harmony because it advanced mutual interest and interdependency.

What actually happened, and indeed was happening during the lifetimes of both men, was that trade was often militarized and violent. Armed fleets pointed their cannons at harbors to open markets for trade, and kings relied on bankers, when they weren’t trying to rein them in, to raise silver to outfit soldiers with guns and swords. Montesquieu was born in 1689. As Beckert points out, “between 1689 and 1815, Britain and France were at war for 64 years.” 

 

Goodbye to Tom Stoppard

I was always interested in Tom Stoppard, who seemed to be a clever, humane, and curious man.   (I am reminded in his obituaries that he supported Margaret Thatcher and called himself a "small c conservative" or "timid libertarian" - but this was back at the time before big C conservatives went all culture war nuts on science and immigration, so I don't hold it against him.  Besides, he had worked with Spielberg, so he can't have been a pain politically.)   

I actually saw his play Arcadia in Brisbane - one of the relatively few times in my life I have been to the theatre to see a drama instead of a musical.  I don't remember too much about it, to be honest, apart from recalling that I found it interesting and clever at the time.   (I do remember a discussion with my companion about how I thought it could have made one thing clearer, and she disagreed.)

Obituaries also note that he was married 3 times.   But people in the arts, you know?   If they have been married only once, they were probably an artist failure!

Anyway, I wish we had someone prominent like him now, in theatre, but I am not sure we do...