Losing Our Minds at the End of the World

@losingourmindspod

A podcast about life in the Anthropocene created by Clay (@babadookspinoza.bsky.social). Artwork by Hayley Doyle (@hayleydoyleart.bsky.social). Contact us at: LOMatEotW@gmail.com

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Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· May 31

From Pride two years ago: “Queer as in Fuck You”: www.patreon.com/posts/105384...

Queer as in Fuck You
Losing Our Minds at the End of the World
Jun 1, 2024
For many years, the first decades of my life, I was terrified of people. I could feel the weight of this fear whenever I was around them and sometimes even when alone, as well as I could sense the tantalizing release that might follow ridding myself of it, and it was my lifelong project to stop caring what they thought of me. I made a lot of progress in my twenties, but wasn't completely sure how much. Realizing I was nonbinary at 29 really called my bluff. There was never any question for me of staying in the closet, and I was forced to locate a real foundation of internal strength, self-love and fearlessness I didn't know I had.
I can't say "happy Pride" this year, because of the state of the world and of the US. I can't tell you everything will be great if you come out of the closet. It's extremely dangerous, in fact.
Since coming out I've been driven out of a (social work!) grad program and a job, and l've opened myself up to mountains of abuse online and off. But through all of it I've known I'm in the right, and I haven't wavered in my conviction. I genuinely do not give a fuck, like I always wished I wouldn't, and it has been so freeing even as it sends new hardships my way. When I go out in public with makeup, nail polish and a mix of "men's" and "women's" clothes, the stares and rude comments don't disturb my peace. To be sure, this is out of necessity. But I wasn't sure I could do it until I did.

I can only remember a single cis person who ever spoke up for me when it mattered. I've learned I can't rely on them to stick their necks out. A lot of them are scared, too. I'm not. If something needs saying, I'm the one who'll say it. I always wanted to be that person (and to some extent always have been, but it took me choosing to live in such a way that many people around me, liberal or conservative, would think I was a joke, for me to let go of the last of my debilitating fear of others' judgment. I answer only to myself, my reason and my own conscience, my understanding of God/the universe, and the people whom I love, whose opinions I respect. I don't respect transphobes, and I don't respect being cowed into silence and complicity by them—so why would I respect the opinions of such people? I get the feeling that a lot of the hysterical anger directed towards us is that people know that, if they discovered themselves to be trans or nonbinary, they would never have the courage to go out in public visibly gender-nonconforming. Most people wouldn't. It shouldn't take tremendous courage, but it does, and everyone knows it.
So if you're in the closet, all I can say to you is that you shouldn't underestimate either the shit you'll have to deal with or the freedom that comes with forcing yourself not to give a shit about the uninformed opinions of the worst people alive. I never go out in public without at least my collapsible baton. I shouldn't need it, but I absolutely do, and fully expect to have to draw it someday to save my life. I'm always ready. And if it ends up costing me my life, to live fully as myself, then I only hope I can take one of them with me so they can't hurt anyone else.

Because that's the thing: it's not just about me anymore. It stopped being about just me the moment I realized I'm nonbinary. One of the reasons I am so adamant about being myself so publicly, visibly and unapologetically is that I know I'm in a much better position to defend myself (for a number of reasons) than many others. I worked with teens for many years at mental hospitals, about a third of them trans or nonbinary. Whenever I face abuse in person or online, I remember them and think: if these people can do it to me, they can and will do it to more vulnerable people as well. This is one reason there was no question of staying in the closet for me-what a coward I would be, leaving teenagers to become targets in their efforts to live fully while I hid and did nothing to protect them, lying to the world so as not to stand in solidarity with them, as one of them! I intend to stand in front of them and absorb as much of the abuse as I can. But here the word "coward" should be held lightly because again, most
people do not have this kind of courage. I don't think everyone in the closet is a coward. But nobody out of it is.
So may you all have a Pride that reveals to you what is really important in this life. May you have a Pride of self-discovery, of giving yourself over fully in devotion to the things and people you love that give you life and nurture you, that bring out the best in you. May you have a Pride filled with righteous anger, becoming vehicles of divine justice, saintly compassion, superhuman courage and otherworldly strength. I wish that for all of us, though I wish it wasn't such a Herculean task simply to be ourselves. We are too beautiful, our light shines too bright
—and in that excess is everything I'd been looking for in myself.
I hope you find what you're looking for, too. Kill your idols and become your own. Don't live your life according to the wishes of people filled with hate and fear, lacking any imagination or compassion, who know nothing o…

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· May 7

Hello, Losers! I hope you're all managing to manage. This is a major announcement concerning changes and additions to the subscription tiers and detailing new, upcoming segments and recurring events within the project. Please read! www.patreon.com/posts/157633...

The new subscription tier ladder looks like this:
Homo spero ($2/mo):
• Project Discord access
• Occasional updates and early announcements
• Ability to comment and discuss in subscriber spaces
• Community polls/questions participation
• Supporter status and the host's eternal thanks and good fortune for the rest of your days
Homo conexus ($5/mo):
• All lower-tier benefits, plus...
• All bonus episodes
• Recurring Q&A/listener mail episode
• Access to recurring "Digital Salon" open discussions
• Early access to selected episodes/writing
• The host's undying appreciation and a blessing on your house
Homo vigilans ($15/mo):
• All lower-tier benefits, plus...
• Recurring "Long Now" segment (deep historical dive into everyday shit)
• "Red Pen" propaganda analysis/critical media literacy series
• Book club access
• Ability to submit questions/topics for episodes
• Participation in collaborative projects
• Searchable "living archive"/resource map
• "Syllabi" and annotated reading list

Homo communis ($25/mo):
• All lower-tier benefits, plus...
• Access to workshops/guest speakers
• Exclusive recurring "Off the Record" segment series
• Fiction nights/readings
• Early previews/drafts/fragments
• Behind-the-scenes development material
• Access to recordings of any live events
• The blessings of a grateful nation!
Homo finis ($50/mo):
• All lower-tier benefits, plus...
• Shout-out on every episode
• Invitation to any future live events
• Name listed as project patron/supporter
• Invitation to annual patron gathering/livestream
• Occasional mailed artifact/zine/PDF anthology
• Helping fund free public access
• Physical thank-you item eventually
• Supporting the podcast at the highest level-thank you!
• The host's platonic love and the love of all the peoples of the world!

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· May 3

From “Diamonds, Tetrahedrons and Community”: www.patreon.com/posts/100789...

Earlier in that episode, I also note that diamonds derive their hardness from the strength and number of the bonds between carbon atoms. In diamonds, every carbon atom is connected to four others in a tetrahedral arrangement that makes diamonds the hardest and least compressible substance known to occur naturally. Because of these properties, diamonds are able to be used to simulate the enormous pressures found deep inside planets like the Earth; diamond anvil cells can produce pressures of up to 770 gigapascals (7.7 million times the average atmospheric pressure at sea level on the Earth).
What I hope to show here is that this is not an irrelevant science lesson. We can learn a lot from carbon! Because the strength and number of the bonds between us will also determine our collective strength; will determine, in the moment of crisis, whether we break or stand firm, whether we lose everything or gain it all back.
When two people form a strong connection, it is not just the joining of those two. If we imagine humans as nodes in a network, the joining of two people is the joining of two branches that include everyone those two people can trust and rely on in times of crisis, all of whom are now connected to each other through the new connection. If the people in those branches know each other directly rather than merely through those two, then the network becomes all the stronger for it, and indeed this is how it usually happens: mutual friends become friends themselves, mutual comrades become comrades. Given this, we can see that connections and networks grow exponentially; they snowball until they reach a critical mass at which point nothing can stop them.
When we build connections (around broad principles of respect for human life, antiracism, trans rights, etc.) within and between populations of people, those networks run like backbones through our communities and keep them from breaking under the strain of the present moment.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

On the Creation of Laws and Outlaws: ICE, Border Patrol and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 www.patreon.com/posts/142266...

On the Creation of Laws and Outlaws: ICE, Border Patrol and the Fugitive
Slave Act of 1850
Oct 28
Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting The Modern Medea depicts the arrest and capture of Margaret Garner (see below).
Source: Wikipedia
*This essay was written in the Spring of 2017 as my

Hundreds of undocumented immigrants being held at a for-profit detention center in Tacoma, WA went on hunger strike earlier this month, demanding an end to inhumane conditions and outrageously low
wages paid for their labor at the facility. The hunger strike ended after the GEO Group, which operates the Northwest Detention Center, agreed to some of the hunger strikers' demands (for instance, promising to meet basic nutritional standards with the food served to prisoners), but today the hunger strike is back on, the operators of the facility having reneged on their initial promises and retaliated against the hunger strikers, transferring several to other facilities and actually-somehow-serving worse food than before.

The exploitation of detained immigrants in facilities like these-being paid only as much as $1 a day to be spent on overpriced commissary items-is tragic, but certainly not a departure from the history of immigration over the U.S.-Mexico border, which is essentially one of opportunistic exploitation based on the demands of major employers, and the complicity-sometimes merely acquiescence to these employers, oftentimes enthusiastic participation for short-term political gain—of the government. The desire for an easily-exploitable workforce which can be threatened and abused with practical impunity has created a perfect storm of intersecting structural violences facing some of the most vulnerable people on earth, their station neatly summarized by the cruel yet ubiquitous (and functionally accurate, if morally preposterous) epithet by which the value of their lives, and the possibilities for their futures, are measured and weighed by an often hostile and callous public: "illegal."

I say this insulting term is "functionally accurate" because the U.S. government has made these immigrants outlaws, in the most expansive sense of the word: not only are they constantly faced with the threat of deportation and of state or vigilante violence, but they are denied almost any legal status whatsoever; they are outside of the law, though they are not safe from its reach. They are forced to live outside of the law, and thus lack its protection-but have perhaps better reason to fear catching its attention.
This essay will explore the nature of violence that at once alienates the undocumented from the law
and binds them to it, referring, where appropriate, to historical examples of other "outlawed people," particularly fugitive slaves in the 1850s. I take up several of Giorgio Agamben's insights on the nature of the sovereign to flesh out the relationship between law and outlaw, and incorporate the writings of Étienne Balibar and Elaine Scarry to explain this relationship and …

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

In an Octopus’ Garden at the End of the World: www.patreon.com/posts/141902...

In an Octopus' Garden at the End of the World

The California two-spot octopus
My cat is dying.
My beloved Figaro—a slight, jet-black cat we got at a local animal shelter about a decade ago (when he still bore the ill-fitting name "Washington") — has an

unidentified mass growing in his digestive tract.
He's on steroids and anti-nausea meds, to slow or possibly reverse the mass' growth and to treat his accompanying vomiting, respectively, but over the last few months he has lost a lot of his former weight and energy. The vet gave him about 6 months to live about 6 months ago.

The octopus stands out as a particularly potent and tragic example of perimortem behaviors encoded by natural selection. "ITlhe final days of a female octopus after it reproduces are quite grim, at least to human eyes," writes Matt Wood for UChicago Medical in a review of a 2018 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology shedding light on the death process of the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides). "Octopuses are semelparous animals, which means they reproduce once and then they die. After a female octopus lays a clutch of eggs, she quits eating and wastes away; by the time the eggs hatch, she dies. In the later stages, some females in captivity even seem to intentionally speed along the death spiral, banging into the sides of the tank, tearing off pieces of skin or eating the tips of their own tentacles.""

Many more people besides are throwing their lives away carelessly, between road rage deaths and people who refuse to mask or get vaccinated.
People eagerly call for this place to be bombed and that place to be invaded, for these people to go without food or water or shelter. People are killing kids for playing pranks or just for pulling into their fucking driveway.
Noble deaths, tragic deaths, reckless deaths, hateful deaths, jealous deaths, vengeful deaths, random deaths...
Just so much death.
How do we create a world that invites our
continued participation in life, that nourishes and empowers and allows us to take full advantage of what ought to be the most marvelous gift: a mind from the clay! The heretofore unfeeling, unthinking universe finally being able to enjoy itself. That would be wonderful. I think about such a world often, even though I can barely imagine it.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

A New Peace or “New Gaza”? www.patreon.com/posts/140836...

For two years we have watched the millions of Palestinians in Gaza endure some of the most
vicious horrors of the 21st century. Millions of tons of rubble are all that is left of so much of Gaza's infrastructure, homes and important cultural sites, while the fuel and equipment to clear the rubble and rebuild have been blocked from entering by Zionist authorities and their collaborators. An unknown number in the thousands of people remain buried where they died, crushed under their falling homes or starved and suffocated while waiting for rescues that would never come. A million children have been repeatedly traumatized, displaced, and starved. The whole Strip has been without adequate medical care since long before October 7, 2023, and two years of famine, disease and bombardment have left indelible marks on the physical and mental health of everyone in Gaza, particularly on growing children. Gaza now has by far the world's largest population of child amputees. These all constitute…

The absence of war alone is not peace. The fighting can be stopped temporarily by international fiat and by the exhaustion of bodies and weapons, but if the political injustice underlying the fighting is not corrected, then we know there will always be more fighting. The existence of "Israel" has always been and must always be dependent on the genocide of Palestinians, and all the smirking, useless talk of a "two-state solution" by politicians
and organizations in the West is just that: talk. In reality, peace is going to require decolonization, which has only been arrested in Palestine compared to the rest of the world (where at least formal decolonization has largely taken place since the 1960s) because of "Israel's" special ability to claim, falsely, the legacy of the Holocaust as its raison d'être and to weaponize claims of antiSemitism against any anti-colonial criticisms. The genocide has seriously undermined the apparent legitimacy of these tired…

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

Bloodsuckers: The Vampire-Bite of Capital www.patreon.com/posts/113218...

"There is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role, since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find themselves in it.
Men no longer recognize in it the social character of their own labor. It is as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn. The 'proper' feature of specters, like vampires, is that they are deprived of a specular image, of the true, right specular image (but who is not so deprived?)." - Jacques Derrida,
Specters of Marx
When reports came out last year that tech billionaire and venture capitalist Peter Thiel was interested in injecting himself with the blood of young people to keep from aging, the story-true or not—wasn't as hard to believe as it probably should've been. Thiel's own history of funding research into anti-aging technology contributed to its plausibility, but the idea of an obscenely wealthy man using the blood of the poor to extend…

To Karl Marx, the cynical and macabre antics of the superrich would have been less interesting than the power dynamics behind them, and whether or not he would have called Thiel himself a vampire, he would-and, in fact, did-say that of the economic system that spawned Thiel. "Capital is dead labour," Marx writes in Volume I of his magnum opus Capital, "that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him." That the vampire analogy isn't just a bit of exaggerated imagery is borne out by the fact that Marx employs it numerous times in other writings-and twice more in just the same first volume of Capital. "The prolongation of the
working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour."

The analogy is correct for more reasons than the fact that the capitalist steals something from the worker as a vampire steals another's blood. There's something fundamentally vampiric about capitalism that can't be captured in the same way by the analogies "leech" or "thief" (the latter arguably not even metaphorical). Nor would analogies that emphasize capitalism's unfeeling or inhuman nature ("zombie," robot," etc.) do justice to the full horror. To really crack open the coffin lid in the light of day and get a good look inside, we'll first have to go over some of Marx's terminology more closely, before using (in particular) Bram Stoker's Dracula as a point of comparison to the monster Marx describes. We'll find that "vampire-like" is possibly the only way Marx could've really captured the workings of modern capital in a single phrase.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

Trust the Disgust: On the Death of Joy www.patreon.com/posts/111103...

Kamala Harris would like to frame her campaign around the notion of "joy." Contrasting herself with Donald Trump's message of a United States in decline and his doom-and-gloom imagery, the Harris campaign aligns rather with the forces of good, with love and happiness and the feeling you get when you eat your grandmother's chocolate chip cookies and sugar and spice and everything nice. I saw a recent guest on Al Jazeera explain it this way: "If Donald Trump represents doomscrolling, the Harris/Walz campaign represents hopescrolling."

But joy isn't a state of moral goodness; it is an emotion, a feeling, arguably the real battlegrounds of this election, and I must offer another because I cannot speak of the Harris campaign without it:
Disgust. Repulsion. Stomach-churning moral revulsion, the visceral negation-reaction to the unacceptable and threateningly unbelonging, perverse elements encountered in the world. The gag reflex can be triggered by the stomach or by the conscience-protective in both cases!-and seeing a war criminal campaigning around "joy" while raining Hell on Earth down on the survivors of genocide in Gaza provokes only the strongest feelings of sickness in me. Would that it were so simple as vomiting this unacceptable knowledge out of my brain.

Kamala "I'm speaking now" Harris dares to speak of "hope," "compassion, "democracy," about her vision for a supposedly brighter future, and worst of all: "joy." She helped murder the hope and joy of millions in Gaza along with (certainly by now) hundreds of thousands of civilians, probably half of them children. Her enthusiastic membership in a genocidal administration, her gleeful taking of the torch from the war criminal Biden-one of the most
deeply reviled and deeply evil men alive today-makes her culpable. Her campaign is the death of compassion, her policy toward "Israel" the denial of democracy for millions of Palestinians, survivors of genocide for eleven months and for 76 years, in Gaza and the West Bank and the rest of Palestine.
She intends to continue the essential US support for the most brutal apartheid regime the world has ever seen, in Palestine—a hellish vision of the future.

Calling all of this "hypocrisy" feels inadequate. It's more disturbing than that. I don't feel disgust because Harris is saying one thing while doing another; that almost goes without saying in US politics. What disgusts me is that her supporters don't even see it as true hypocrisy. They do feel joy at these things. Harris must be speaking of the
"joy" of a mass murderer who's gotten away with it and plans to kill again, the self-righteous joy of true zealots as they soak their swords in blood. These butchers. It's absolutely sickening that anyone can let themselves take pride in any of this without feeling deep, unshakeable and irreversible shame. I guess we'll see. But it's clear that Harris supporters live, or want to live, on another planet where up is down, good is bad, wrong is right and all things are permitted in the service of empire. Where the murder of innocents is something joyful. A complete moral inversion.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

The Doom is Coming from Inside the House: www.patreon.com/posts/110773...

After Kamala Harris became the nominee, I criticized her, as l'd been doing, for her role in a genocidal administration, her role in selling this genocide to the public. It was apparent early on that the administration intended to make her the kinder face of genocide, having her be the first to say "ceasefire" (although I'll never forget, nor should anyone!, that she followed it with a long pause and then added, "...for at least six weeks..") and expressing sympathy for Palestinians in vague, noncommittal terms we're all familiar with. What I didn't know was how well it was working on
everyone.
Over and over again, my criticisms are now met with a constant refrain: I have committed the
dreaded sin of doomposting.
The corollary to "doomscrolling" - that is, scrolling through stories and posts about the fact that the world is ending (but with a negative connotation that seeks to blame the individual for engaging in it) - doomposting is creating what doomscrollers scroll through.

If this all strikes you as particularly stupid, you're not the only one. I had this to say about it a while ago:
"Doomposting" is a stupid thing to say unless someone's refusing to admit reasonable hope into their analysis. The world provides the doom; we all feel it. Let's not pretend it's only the fault of people trying to talk about it! Like
"eco-anxiety, it individualizes the systemic. I've been accused of this many times over the last day or two because I'm not all-in for Kamala Harris, which speaks to the term's potential for counterrevolutionary abuse. Like what a coincidence that, when we need to talk about these things most, a new taboo appears!
Dangerous. Obviously, there's a style of posting that I find unhelpful that's just boom-boom-boom, horror after horror without any indication that there's anything to be done about it. But there's a lot to be done! Sticking our heads in
the sand right now is what will actually doom us. It's as if bumming people out is what's going

to hurt people, and not the many things actually hurting people and actually bumming out anyone who's paying attention. Reassigning blame to preempt any productive conversations that might convince people of the need for change.
There's research to back me up on this! It turns out that we're all supposed to be feeling not-good about the state of the world. A University of Bath study found that showing people footage of wildfires and other alarming climate change-related phenomena unsurprisingly increased their
"eco-anxiety" levels... but that this further led to action, so long as it was not presented as hopeless.
That is: doom-and-gloom imagery actually prompted action when it wasn't presented in such a way that the viewers felt hopeless. Hope was the key that turned fear into action.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

The Name of the Father: www.patreon.com/posts/110770...

The Name of the Father
I prayed to God when I was young but he had his own problems
He was rewriting his commandments and it was not going well
He was practicing his godly voice and berating himself for every stutter
He was appearing in all his glory before a full-length mirror, ashamed of his nakedness
He was scrambling to clean up after his miraculous accidents but there were too many and more happening each moment
He was begging his worshippers to please, speak one at a time, and softly, or better yet shut up so he can listen for his own thoughts, if they should come
He was trying to work up the nerve to call his estranged son
He was curing his hangovers with holy spirits
He was procrastinating in mysterious ways
He was calling out his own name, in vain He was filling his pockets with rocks so

heavy he could not lift them and walking with resignation into the unparted sea
He did not die
He cannot die
God prays to me now from the watery deep
haltingly, not wanting to bother me God prays to me now mumbling excuses for his impossible job God prays to me now defeated and terrified
of my mundane, living judgment God prays to me now asking for forgiveness asking not to be forgotten God prays to me now and I thusly answer:
It is all good.
It is all known.
Your sins will be forgiven.
Your existence will be remembered.
Your works are great and terrible.
Your creation sparks and sputters and

belches its quickening
and unstoppable and irrevocable expansion across space and time
with no goal but with a sealed fate and will join you in the crushing quiet of the bottom of the ocean of oblivion one day where you and I will be reunited where you and I will embrace where you and I will rest
and the arrogance of our ridiculous sins will buoy them up out of our exhausted and indistinguishable corpses
swirling and mixing together beyond recognition
and carried off by the currents to the true forgiveness
and what neither of us began will
finally
end.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

Fake Plastic People: www.patreon.com/posts/110711...

Fake Plastic People

Microplastics are everywhere. I mean everywhere.
Plastic doesn't biodegrade easily, one of the things we first liked about it so much, and theoretically it can continue to break down to the molecular level
as it persists in the environment. Microplastics (and the smallest of them, "nanoplastics") have been
found on the highest mountain and in the deepest...

What will the effects of this be? We have virtually no idea, but it's not going to be good.
This is the age of plasticization: becoming life-sized plastic Barbie dolls, tragic living monuments to our love of commodities and our hubris, each our own private dump, bodyfills of waste. Humans no longer merely produce plastic, but are produced by it. We are Homo plasticus, inscribed with the proof of our inseparability from the nature we pollute and exploit, polluting and exploiting ourselves in the process, collapsing the subject-object relation.
Alienation from our own bodies. Capital is a jealous god that demands the highest sacrifices from us.
Like a blood pact, now the same fossil fuels flow in all our veins. How can we fight what beats in our very hearts and burrows into our own minds?
Through dark sorcery, we have brought plastics to life in our own living bodies.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

Still Just a Rat in a Cage: Notes from the Underworld (Content warning: addiction, relapse): www.patreon.com/posts/110218...

Many readers will be familiar with the claim that rats given access to morphine will self-administer the drug to the point of death, forsaking food and sex in favor of the morphine, which is indeed what some studies found. In the late 1970s, Bruce K.
Alexander designed a study to test his suspicion that those earlier studies had produced the very conditions explaining this phenomenon by keeping rats in small, isolated metal cages. The resulting
"Rat Park" studies were conducted in a large
space, with toys and wheels for play and exercise, and ample room for mating and socializing. The results of the studies seemed to confirm
Alexander's hypothesis: the rats showed little interest in medicating themselves to death when in a supportive environment that met their basic needs.

The legacy of these studies is hotly contested, and it would be overstating the case to suggest that environmental stressors are the only tactor in the development of addictions. But it points to an important truth: that drug use, particularly that which turns into addiction, is very often self-medication of distress that may have clear environmental causes.
So what kind of cage do we find ourselves living in, here at the brink of global calamity?
I can't do this project in a halt-baked, uncommitted way. I have a right to retain the privacy I want to. But my feeling is that, if I can't be honest about my own mental health, what's the point of doing a project called Losing Our Minds at the End of the World?
So I'm going to talk about what's been happening with me recently. Major trigger warning on what follows; depending on where you are in your recovery, my experiences could be triggering, and that's the last thing I want to do. And I'm well aware that I will face criticism and judgme…

...l've now relapsed, as is so common in recovery, and I speak to you now, unfortunately, through the rolling fog of alcohol. However, in dialectical fashion, it has revealed some deep truths to me which I wish to commit to writing lest I forget them:
I don't want this-for myself, or anyone else. The question is always: do you take this world as it is, with all its joys and horrors, or do you renounce it and run from it into the siren arms of anesthetization, whatever form that might take for you? weep and rage for the horrors of this world, for the babies I see torn limb from limb in Gaza and the babies who go hungry in my own country, and every other nightmare caused by our ruling class and the fact of being embodied creatures in a world of violent reality. And it would be easy to blame my drinking and mental health on the state of the world; indeed, there's certainly a lot of truth to that.
But still-what may be the miracle of life itself, my ability to say this to you, since I don…

And I know the promises of an addict mean so little, but still, I promise you all and myself that I am done. Come what may, I will face it without alcohol. This moment is too important for illusions of any kind. Come what may, my life means more to me than the annihilation of my senses, than a pleasant haze of bullshit nonsense induced at the expense of my health and potential. I hope it can mean more to the world than that. I want more.
And, in taking advantage of this compromised state one final time, wherein the tears flow freely and I seem a good deal more naked emotionally, I want to express my deep, deep love for you all. Even the ones of you I don't know personally-my heart aches and beats and bleeds for your joy and prosperity. I don't know how else to say it, but nothing human is alien to me-no one, at least, leaving aside the true butchers and monsters who have abandoned their humanity. My comrades, the ones whose hearts tremble at every injustice: Thank you for your company…

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

Ep. 4 - Who Speaks for Earth? Ch. 1 - At the Bottom of Everything: www.patreon.com/posts/109708...

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

Dying in America: www.patreon.com/posts/109320...

Dying in America
What an American way to die!
The fear of other people and the fear of dying alone.
What an American way to die!
In a hospital room with the meter running.
What an American way to die!
A million souls raptured out of their clothing on their way to work and only we unworthy remain in
"a tight labor market."
What an American way to die!
Choking up the reds for your white sheets and blue gown.
What an American way to die!
Another lamb slaughtered and the stock market goes wild, frothing with bloodlust and frenzy, cash falling from the hospital ceiling like a game show.
What an American way to die!

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

Words, Words, Words! in a Material World www.patreon.com/posts/108369...

So what are we to make of the power of language in such times as these? I have read many heartbreakingly beautiful words from poets, intellectuals and activists during these nine months, words that seemed to have incredible power, which kept me sane to the meager extent I still am, and yet the genocide continues. The ideas of peace and liberation seem not to have the power of the bombs and bullets, of the immense wealth created through genocide and warmongering. The pen seems infinitesimally weaker than the sword, much less the checkbook. What of all we have said? Has it mattered? Has any of it amounted to anything?
Kurt Vonnegut famously said, "During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this
weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."

One who knew the power of language was Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian poet and protessor well-known on Twitter (@itranslate123) for his biting critiques and uncompromising moral clarity. Refaat was martyred in an IOF airstrike on December 6th of last year, not two months into this current genocide (itself an acceleration of the Nakba, ongoing since 1948), a blow all of us who knew him, and of him, felt. He was no doubt targeted for his words against the Zionist regime. Zionists, too, know the power of language, as their hysterical policing of rhetoric in the public sphere and their long history of assassinating intellectuals shows.
Before he was murdered, Refaat spoke often on the power of language, of words' ability to move the world. I don't know if he was approaching it from
the same direction as I, with concerns about idealism, but nevertheless he forcefully defended the power of "mere" words to change our world.
'I'm an academic," he said. "The toughest thing | have at home is a…

"Of course we always fall into this trap of saying, 'she [Fadwa Tuqan] was arrested for just writing poetry!' We do this a lot, even us believers in literature... [We say] 'Why would Israel arrest somebody or put someone under house arrest, she only wrote a poem?' So we contradict ourselves sometimes; we believe in the power of literature changing lives, as a means of resistance, as a means of fighting back, and then at the end of the day, we say
'She just wrote a poem!' We shouldn't be saying that. Moshe Dayan, an Israeli general, said that
'The poems of Fadwa Tuqan are like facing 20 enemy fighters! Wow. She didn't throw stones, she didn't shoot at the invading Israeli jeeps, she just wrote poetry. And I'm falling for that again-I said she just wrote poetry.... And the same thing happened to Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. She wrote poetry, celebrating Palestinians' struggle, encouraging Palestinians to resist, not to give up, to fight back-She was put under house arrest, she was pu…

for years. And therefore, I end here, with a very significant point: Don't forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry. When the Zionists thought of going back to Palestine, it wasn't like
'Oh, let's go to Palestine! It took them years, over 50 years of thinking, of planning, politics, money and everything else. But literature
played one of the most crucial roles here....
Palestine in Zionist Jewish literature was
presented to Jewish people around the world...
[as] Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land. Palestine flows with milk and honey. There is no one there—so let's go.
[But] there were people-there have always been people in Palestine. But this is an example of how poetry can be a very significant part of life."

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 28

Milk and Honey: www.patreon.com/posts/106860...

Milk and Honey
Just now
Living in the United States, I can't escape talk of
"the Promised Land" from preachers and performatively pious politicians, nor can I escape the legacy of the use of such language to describe Turtle Island—the only home I've ever known, forever alienated from me by that history of theft. The idea of a land of freedom and prosperity promised by God has been a powerful one for millennia.
And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites. (Exodus 3:8)
Whether as an aspirational vision of social progress or as justification for imposing white supremacy over Indigenous lands, speaking of The Promised Land is guaranteed to win over people with its intoxicating, simple message: there is a better world out there for us….

Perhaps nothing more than another interesting hypocrisy, perhaps the crux of the whole thing-l don't know. But the anti-immigrant hatred coming from our loudest Bible-thumpers is revealing, because it's all about the land-and to whom it was "promised"-by God, by fate, by right of might. It's all about the land. The land sustains life.
It's not only the stage on which life happens but the playwright. It is life, it is of life.
A land promised is a life promised, and people will do incredible things to secure life for themselves and the people they love.
What climate change we're already locked in for will necessitate a complete reshuffling of humanity. Billions of people are now living in places that will either be underwater or too hot to survive in the coming decades. We don't have long-we MUST change how migrants are treated.
Earth is home to us all. The carbon emissions of the Global North are responsible for the rising waters and temperatures that will force many in the Global Sou…

Our current system of militarized borders and nation-states is incompatible with the task at hand.
We need world revolution in the next few years to prevent billions of people from being killed, starved, imprisoned, perhaps even enslaved, or becoming oppressed underclasses wherever they're forced to flee. The global coordination required is impossible under current conditions.
Our safety and wellbeing in the Global North depend on the safety and wellbeing of everyone else. If we're too late to learn this fact-this ancient but urgent wisdom that when you are not well, I am not well-and put it into practice, we'll succeed only in creating a Hell on Earth to which we'll all eventually succumb.
Stopping the burning of fossil fuels would require revolution even if none of this were true. This is a pivotal moment for humanity wherein we'll either perish in waves of brutal chaos until there's no one left, or throw off the chains of capitalist exploitation and build a new world on the basis o…

It's about to get so much worse.
A constant tide of literal bodies washing ashore at the end of long journeys to reach a land of safety, their corpses received instead only by lands of coldheartedness, racist inhumanity, miserly clinging to what's not ours—the worst of us that can lead us to cannibalize the lives of others to sustain a pathetic middle class existence for ourselves that will soon be impossible anyway, a mundane nightmare soaked in the blood of millions already, an existence that is our prison, and indeed our executioner, but which is worshipped as our only salvation by the fascists!
The bourgeois "American dream," a known and notorious lie so many still ache to believe today.
We have to combat the fascist backlash in the Global North to increasing numbers of migrants, mostly refugees from the violence and devastation our governments and economies have wrought. Anti-immigrant fears are the fascists' route to power, to strangling our revolution in its womb.
The old worl…

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Queer as in Fuck You www.patreon.com/posts/105384...

Queer as in Fuck You
Jun 1, 2024

For many years, the first decades of my life, I was terrified of people. I could feel the weight of this fear whenever I was around them and sometimes
even when alone, as well as I could sense the tantalizing release that might follow ridding myself of it, and it was my lifelong project to stop caring what they thought of me. I made a lot of progress in my twenties, but I wasn't completely sure how much. Realizing I was nonbinary at 29 really called my bluff. There was never any question for me of staying in the closet, and I was forced to locate a real foundation of internal strength, self-love and fearlessness I didn't know I had.

So may you all have a Pride that reveals to you what is really important in this life. May you have a Pride of self-discovery, of giving yourself over fully in devotion to the things and people you love that give you life and nurture you, that bring out the best in you. May you have a Pride filled with righteous anger, becoming vehicles of divine justice, saintly compassion, superhuman courage and otherworldly strength. I wish that for all of us, though I wish it wasn't such a Herculean task simply to be ourselves. We are too beautiful, our light shines too bright-and in that excess is everything I'd been looking for in myself.
I hope you find what you're looking for, too. Kill your idols and become your own. Don't live your life according to the wishes of people filled with hate and fear, lacking any imagination or compassion, who know nothing of how rich and beautifully weird human life can be. Live a life entirely your own, one that's never been lived before. Don't let the
opinions of despicable people move you an inch.
Even a moment of freedom in truth is worth 100
years imprisoned by lies.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Ep. 3 - Doom and Shrooms: Lessons from the Fungal Kingdom with Dr. Patricia Kaishian: www.patreon.com/posts/104432...

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Desperate Times and the Desperate Measurement of Time www.patreon.com/posts/103678...

What is a desperate move? It is a move that someone in a comfortable position wouldn't make because it stands little chance of working or because it comes with heavy costs or risks, but which has become worth the costs/risks because
of the dire circumstances. Desperation is the natural instinct to survive at any cost, to cut our losses and employ any means necessary. For our ruling class, desperation will mean doing whatever is possible to avoid losing their wealth, power and privilege, their right to rule over others. A warming world in chaos (in so many ways, as we noted in Episode 1) creates such desperate circumstances.
If you think our ruling class is above nuking D.C. to make sure the people don't take it for ourselves, then you don't know who we're dealing with.
Circumstances simply haven't become dire enough for them to show their hand like that. But look at the unhinged and brutal response to campus protests in solidarity with Gaza. The desperation is evident in the frenzied and incriminating response from pigs, administrators and authorities across the country, because the huge shift in public opinion and the passion for the cause of Palestinian liberation shown by students actually constitutes a threat to the wallets of these genocide profiteers.

But bracketed in that brutal equation is everything I have ever loved, everything anybody has ever loved! The stakes are precisely the entire world. The horrors of Al Shifa Hospital will be visited upon all of us wherever we are in the world very soon.
The only way to avoid Hell on Earth all over the Earth is to stop this genocide now and punish those responsible, to take power away from those who aided and abetted it in our governments, media, universities... all our institutions must now be de-Nazified, the plague of Zionism eradicated completely, those of capital and imperialism pulled up by the roots and burned. Anything short of this in the coming decades (using the plural here may be unduly optimistic) will doom us all. The two million Palestinians in Gaza are to be defended by any means necessary, so even if none of this were true, our task would be the same. But this will not stay in Gaza. It won't be long before the US government is denouncing you as a terrorist and defending…

But look at all those who are already fighting! We have every reason to be hopeful as long as we fight, all of us, together. Let us organize ourselves into a behemoth and crush our enemies before the
rising waters of history wash us all away, friend and foe alike. Circumstances are more dire than ever, with the IOF now seemingly moving into Rafah to attempt to complete this genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They must not succeed! We now have some desperate moves of our own to make.
Our turn is come, and we make no excuses for the terror. All eyes on Rafah!

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

To Be Attacked By The Enemy: www.patreon.com/posts/103504...

This is what remains of the UCLA encampment now (photo credit @HuntedHorse on Twitter):

This dead expanse of trash and suffocated emptiness is what the ruling class wants to make of the entire world. The vibrant community based in solidarity with Palestine that had flourished here is what we want instead. Socialism or barbarism,
liberation or death. These are the stakes - and why we're going to win.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Losing Our Minds Theme (Solo Piano Version): www.patreon.com/posts/102727...

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Ep. 2 - The Anti-Zionist Struggle at Columbia University with Layla Saliba: www.patreon.com/posts/102281...

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Feedback, Relax and Enjoy the Show www.patreon.com/posts/101833...

Feedback, Relax and Enjoy the Show

In Episode 1, I mention feedback loops in relation to climate change. Warming leads to less ice, which leads to less light reflected back out into space, which increases warming, etc. etc.
Warming allows the air to hold more water vapor (a greenhouse gas), which increases warming, etc. etc. Vicious circles that can turn small changes into runaway catastrophes. It's worth looking at feedback loops more closely, first as a general phenomenon, then in relation to the "Losing Our Minds" part of this project.

Defining feedback loops is somewhat
controversial, but they can be well-understood as any process in which the outputs of the process circle back and become inputs; any process where the results of the process affect the process itself. There are two kinds of feedback loops: positive and negative. Most people are probably more familiar with positive feedback loops, like placing a microphone near its amplifier: the sound increases itself until the amp is shrieking at maximum volume. But negative feedback loops are just as important to understand. Whereas positive feedback loops amplify disturbances and lead to out-of-control effects, negative feedback loops are the opposite: they stabilize a situation and buffer it against changes. An example of this could be predator and prey populations in nature: an increase in the deer population of an ecosystem will lead to an increase in the wolf population, which will in turn reduce the deer population and thereby reduce the wolf population. There is an equilibrium to every ecosystem that balances millions of species against each other in a harmonious, if often chaotic, constancy. Usually when these systems do change, it's because of positive feedback loops leading to disruptions that can't be counterbalanced by the negative feedback loops present in that system.

So what does all this have to do with this project?
Well, everything, in a way, because feedback loops are not a topic so much as a fundamental aspect of reality, and to understand the end of the world we need to understand how that world may change or resist change. We ourselves will have to make some drastic changes and resist others if we are to survive this century.
Turning to the question of losing our minds, the phenomenon of feedback loops can provide some insight into how this might work. The world, in various ways, is in a state of collapse. That at least is my contention here, and seems to be how everyone is perceiving the situation, which for the present purposes makes it sufficiently real to impact our behavior. The stress of looming (and already-present!) climate catastrophe, the knowledge that nothing is being done about it, and the general deterioration of everything else (worsening economic conditions, destabilizing geopolitical situations, ecosystems collapse, etc.) leads to people feeling worse, quite understandably. As the world deteriorates, it stands to reason, that stress on us all is going to increase, leading to changes in our behavior that in fact hasten the deterioration of the world: people are more stressed and so they are leaning more heavily on drugs, getting into more accidents, getting less sleep, having more overdoses, having less patience with each other and creating hostility in their relationships, etc.

"How complex systems fail" is multiple failures at once, where something that wouldn't normally be a problem becomes a catastrophic failure because something else backing it up isn't working either. So as the world gets worse, we feel worse, we perform worse, and the world gets even worse, etc. etc. A positive feedback loop.
So knowing that we are in a runaway feedback loop of shit, how do we manage to extricate ourselves from it? You probably guessed it: stabilizing, negative feedback loops. We need to establish conditions in our own lives and in our communities that can absorb the impact of a world that is doing its best to drive us all insane.
What does that look like? I'm open to suggestions!
But right now my thinking is centered around a few important possibilities:
First, social connections. As has been stressed before in these written pieces, connections are going to be THE deciding factor. The strength and number of our connections will determine, at the moment of crisis, whet…

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Interdisconnection: a Tale of Two Internets www.patreon.com/posts/101107...

We vastly outnumber our oppressors, the exploiters and butchers creating Hell on Earth for so many right now and for generations to come. But if we can't act as one, our numbers are meaningless, only describing the extent of our fragmentation-a vast archipelago of isolated human islets with no chance against the rising waters of a warming world.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Diamonds, Tetrahedrons and Community: www.patreon.com/posts/100789...

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Ep. 1 - The Beginning of the End: www.patreon.com/posts/100739...

I see many people flippantly comment on the end of the world, but I see almost nobody willing to dwell on the topic long enough to ask the more interesting questions, to map out all the interconnected nodes of a dying system to better understand the problem, and to allow ourselves to be a little philosophical about it.
I mean it's the end of the world, for Christ's sake! And the end of the world begs the question: what is this world that's coming to an end? And do we know it as well as we think we do? What if the world ends and nobody has anything interesting to say about it? I mean it's probably a little beside the point, but that thought plagues me, like, really? We had a good run, that's it? So at the very least I think we can find ways of having next-generation conversations about this topic, because we've really been treading water for the past 20 years, the script hasn't changed... This storm was made worse by climate change... Scientists say we have to stop burning fossil fuels... Nothing is done about it... Back to you! The data gets updated, the predictions get worse, the warnings get more desperate, but the conversations around it haven't really matured, at least not the ones I've heard, for the most part (I mean, there are people doing great work around this, of course, but in general I think people will know what I'm talking about here. I want this show to be able to talk about the crisis of this moment, how to be alive right now, how to avoid what's coming, and how to deal seriously with the possibility that that won't work. And if we are one of the last generations of humans to be able to experience this world, as it is at least, then I don't want fear clouding my vision, I want to see it clearly before it's gone, before I'm gone. I want to appreciate its beauty and its vastness and its absurdity, I feel that almost as a duty: to bear witness, to soak it all in. And I feel very strongly that my ability to live a meaningful life depends in part on my un…

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Distance, Proximity and Ethics in a World of Interbeing www.patreon.com/posts/100318...

I think it's easy to convince people geographic or cultural distance is ethically significant in part because most of the people in our lives are "close to us"; most of the ethical obligations we tend to worry about are to people nearby in distance and culture (shared languages, shared cities, etc.). Or at least, that's how it has often seemed.
But we no longer live in that world. We can and do affect people's lives across the globe with our words & actions. US bombs fall on Gaza. US tax dollars pay for the tanks and bullets that cut down starving civilians gathering for food. US diplomatic cover allows "Israel" to create a famine.
And sure enough, in every major city in the country for five months now, many millions in the US have found it ethically necessary to be out in the streets demonstrating against this genocide. Why? Why, in spite of distance and language? You might as well ask: "why care about ANYONE?"

And indeed some tedious self-proclaimed thinkers have answered this question with: you shouldn't-you should only care about yourself. But why, then, should you care about yourself?! If it's due to
"interests," then what about your shared interests with all of humanity, to create a just, peaceful and beautiful world? What about your interest in being a person you yourself could respect? Egoism can be dismissed easily for these and a number of other reasons, and is. It is not a respected philosophical position (though it may be an unfortunately common personal ethos nevertheless).
Related is the xenophobic notion that "your people" ethically outrank others. (Here I am not disputing the important cultural bonds that often exist between people who share some nation or creed, etc., but the dehumanization and ethical difference claimed on the basis of these differences

Certainly a popular, powerful idea: that sharing a language, race, country, etc. imposes additional ethical obligations—or, more crucially, that NOT sharing these lessens/eliminates ethical obligations. But who are "your people?"
"Am I my brother's keeper?" Wherever you choose to draw the line, these are the same question. All of humanity is "your people." Not a naive and idealistic perspective but a robustly skeptical, clear-eyed and wise one sees our interdependence, what a Buddhist might call "interbeing." In the age of climate change, major powers rivalries, economic globalization, COVID-19, and the Internet, does anyone truly doubt how interconnected we are, how our lives are part of the same vast equation-not only with other humans but indeed the entire biosphere of Earth?

We're all equally human, and there are as many ways of being human as there are humans, but this fact does not change the moral considerations.
So why should dropping a bomb on a sheltering family or a refugee camp be ethically "better" than stabbing someone? It seems to me that violence plus cowardice is generally worse. But deeper than that, this idea reflects a colonial logic that privileges technological superiority.
What's long been said of colonized peoples' resistance is that the colonizer conducts "warfare"
while the colonized engage in "terrorism." We've come to associate the low-tech warfare of resistance with "terrorism" while seeing the technology of the colonizer as more civilized, even as it rips human bodies apart all the same. Casting the question of violence in this light serves a deeper ideological purpose: the colonizer's technological superiority is itself proof of their moral goodness, since that is what enabled them to develop said technology, the propaganda goes.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 27

Bare Witnessing: Reflections on Changes in Myself after Five Months of Genocide in Palestine www.patreon.com/posts/996205...

Bare Witnessing:
Reflections on
Changes in Myself after Five Months of Genocide in Palestine
Just now
I want to say a few words about the changes I've noticed in myself from watching the Gaza genocide unfold. I hope this isn't self-indulgent; I have talked extensively on the situation for Palestinians in Gaza and will continue to do so, as this is clearly the most important thing about this moment. But these changes I feel in myself I also see happening in other people, so I would like to reflect on them a bit in case others can relate, so that we may better understand what permanent changes to our societies have been wrought by watching these live-streamed horrors for five months and seeing everyone's reactions thereto, our own included.

Since October 7th I've certainly been shocked to my core by the violence, the cruelty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, the endless stream of horrific videos and images of precious children now turned to incomprehensible masses of flesh and bone, headless babies, someone's whole world difficult to look at, as well as the psychopathic comments of Zionists around the world that make my skin crawl, mocking dead and orphaned children-that all has changed me, maybe in necessary ways but surely not for the better. I can feel the weight of it all even now as I write. I can feel that it is never leaving me. That I have lost something I won't ever get back-perhaps innocence, perhaps something more important than that. But I knew evil like this existed.

I guess I was less sure about good, and so overwhelmingly that has been what has surprised me most about this, and probably has effected the greatest changes in me. First, the heroic Palestinians in Gaza: the armed resistance and the
doctors, journalists, ambulance drivers, nurses, fishermen, parents, siblings, the scores of men and boys digging survivors out of the rubble with their bare hands after each bombing, the women and girls sewing diapers for newborns out of recycled PPE. I've never seen whole generations of a people resisting together like this before, I had never seen solidarity like that, and I don't really know how to say what it has meant to me to see this fierce, unshakable, determined resistance to genocide, from the armed fighter running up to an IOF tank with only a grenade and a prayer to God, to the little girl comforting her younger sister in the crowded hospital after their parents were killed.

Seeing the bravery, the righteous defiance of an evil, colonial nuclear power that wants to erase them and drive them from their land... I don't have
the words. I cry whenever I think about it. I'm crying right now. Maybe one day I'll be able to talk about it intelligibly. Not yet. But I'm very glad for whatever change it has brought in me; I can tell I need it, and will need it again soon. I think maybe it's hope, or
something similar. That's part of it. It's also a certain heightened awareness, an easier fellow-feeling; the nerves of my moral organ are more sensitive now. The roots of my heart twist and clutch their way through the whole world now, and I feel the tugs of others' suffering even more keenly than before. But more than that, I can't say.

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Mar 4

We are out of time!

Guardian headline:
Global sea levels have been underestimated due to poor modelling, research suggests
Analysis shows average levels are 30cm higher than thought, and up to 150cm in south-east Asia and Indo-Pacific

Losing Our Minds at the End of the World@losingourmindspod· Dec 31

Revisit these posts from 2025! A New Peace or “New Gaza”?: www.patreon.com/posts/140836... In an Octopus’ Garden at the End of the World: www.patreon.com/posts/141902... On the Creation of Laws & Outlaws: ICE, Border Patrol and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: www.patreon.com/posts/142266...