Jodistrict

It’s not easy being green: Trump’s botched reflecting pool becomes 2,028ft metaphor https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/23/donald-trump-reflecting-pool-metaphor “Trump has wanted a monument to himself in Washington and he finally has one. It is this reflecting pool and it is a perfect metaphor of kleptocracy, failure, incompetence, a complete mess and it stands before the Lincoln Memorial, which he seeks to overshadow with his arch of triumph after losing the Iran war."

It appears to be more Trump corruption. "On May 11, nonprofit group The Cultural Landscape Foundation sued the Trump administration to prevent the project from continuing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Memorial_Reflecting_Pool I used to live in D.C. and that is where people usually gather to see the fireworks display on 4th of July.

See David Hume's critique of causality. Our minds are hardwired to project the feeling of anticipation onto nature, mistaking an internal association of ideas for an objective law of the universe. https://philosophyalevel.com/posts/hume-causation-problem-of-induction/

An interesting side note: Feynman had an interest in Artificial Intelligence going back to the 1980s. He worked on the Connection Machine, which was a massively parallel computer architecture meant to execute AI algorithms. He basically ended up saving the project using a novel application of physics. https://medium.com/@savkin/richard-feynman-and-the-connection-machine-4c3b70a126f2

When the Beatles came out, their music was an historic innovation and break from the past. It had never been heard before. It seems that their popularity was driven by their fans and then the public. The music industry followed and played catch up.

The op is closer to the truth. The immigrants who are being targeted by ICE are productive people doing jobs nobody else wants. They are actually contributing to the economy. Billions of dollars are spent on ICE to attack productive people. Productive people are replaced by law enforcement. An ICE agent isn't going to mow your lawn or wash your dishes. The allegations of “illegal criminals” is used to stir up the self- righteousness of the monkeys and make them feel good about themselves (think Planet of the Apes).

That is definitely cruel and unusual.

Iran has the power to destroy the world economy. They could do it tomorrow and it will be permanent. The only silver lining is that China doesn’t want this to happen. It would hurt them too. China supplies Iran with GPS data to guide their missles so they have some leverage over Iran. I believe that this is why Trump recently went to China. Now we are in the stage where Trump has to make it look like he won, even though it is obvious that this is a huge defeat for both American and Israel.

Shinzen Young is introducing the Ramona Project. It will be an LLM that acts as a personal assistant in mindfulness training. He is raising funds, and apparently for a $100 donation you can be among the beta testers who receive the Phase 1 version. https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/support-visionary-work-from-shinzen-young

If you panic, I wouldn’t recommend psychedics. They will amp up the feelings and make it much worse. With one caveat, I tried Ketamine and didn’t feel any fear. Ketamine is a dissociative which can disconnect you from fear. A better thing to try is Vipassana meditation, where you use body feelings as the object of meditation. For some reason, your mind thinks that your feelings are dangerous. If you can drop the story and fully experience your feelings, you will see that they that are just sensations.

There is always Socrates method of dealing with stupid people. Keep asking them questions until they realize for themselves that they don’t know what they are talking about. But then Socrates ended up being executed.

I did some investigation to see if it was using brute force or systematic search of possibilites, and this was not the case. It was a general system, not tuned to mathematics, and came up with the solution independently. "Instead, a general-purpose OpenAI reasoning model achieved this by independently bridging two completely separate fields of mathematics, finding a hidden conceptual shortcut that 80 years of human mathematicians had entirely missed."

This reminds me of the famous story about Richard Feynman's "funny pictures": "At the 1948 Pocono Conference, Richard Feynman introduced his revolutionary "Feynman diagrams" to solve a crisis in Quantum Electrodynamics, but the world's top physicists—including Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer—confused his visual shorthand for lack of mathematical rigor and heavily criticized his presentation. Feeling defeated, Feynman left the conference believing he had failed. However, a year later, physicist Freeman Dyson proved that Feynman's simple doodles were actually a precise mathematical shorthand that solved in minutes what traditional equations took months to calculate. These diagrams revolutionized subatomic physics, became the 20th century's most important advancement in the field, and won Feynman the 1965 Nobel Prize."

Evaluating Helen Keller’s life through the lens of deep meditation reveals a profound intersection between her physical reality and the deliberate practices of advanced yogis and contemplative scientists. 1. Journaling the Mind: Keller’s Meditative Reflections In her essays, particularly in The World I Live In, Keller recorded observations that mirror the journals of seasoned meditators tracking internal stillness: On the Inner Melodies: Long before she encountered formalized Eastern principles, Keller spent long evenings exploring her mind. She noted in The Story of My Life: "We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul...". On Beyond-Sensory Reality: Keller recognized that her true sight was completely independent of her eyes. She famously wrote, "I think I have shown in my daily life that my feet are on the earth while the tips of my thoughts touch the stars.". On the "Essence" over Appearance: Meditators strive to see the ultimate nature of things rather than their superficial forms. Keller arrived at this effortlessly: "It has been objected that I may not speak of singing birds... nor of the green ecstasy of young grass... But I claim it is the Essence of beauty I feel, and not the details that go to its making.". 2. Touch as a Somatic Anchor for Mindfulness In Buddhist Vipassana and modern somatic mindfulness, the practitioner uses physical sensations (like the breath or body scans) as an "anchor" to ground awareness in the present moment. Because Keller’s world was devoid of sight and sound, touch became her primary mindfulness anchor, which she elevated to a state of ecstasy. Somatic Intimacy with Nature: Instead of glancing passively at an object, Keller had to interact with it fully to know it. She noted that when sighted people look at things, they often "put their hands in their pockets," leading to vague and useless knowledge. The "Seeing Hand": Keller described her hands as wonderfully mobile lenses capable of picking up subtle energy. When interacting with her dog, she noted, "I wanted to catch a picture of him in my fingers... paradise is attained by touch; for in touch is all love and intelligence.". Tactile Oneness: This anchoring practice was so precise that she could feel the vibrations of a singer’s throat, the curve of a plant, or the emotional state of a person just by resting her fingertips on their hand. It was active, unhurried, single-pointed concentration (Dharana). 3. Keller vs. Modern Sensory Deprivation Experiments Today, people pay to use sensory deprivation tanks (float tanks) to induce altered states of consciousness, quiet the ego, and trigger deep meditation. Comparing Keller’s lifelong condition to a temporary laboratory environment highlights key neurological truths: While float tanks offer a temporary escape from modern overstimulation, Keller lived in that quietude permanently. She proved that when the heavy noise of the physical world is muted, the mind doesn't go dark—it expands

I always use the AI mode. I have been using it as an aid to learn Sanskrit and it has been fantastic for that purpose.