August 1. Concussions have been in the news for a while because of the NFL, but I had no idea how serious they are until I got one. Two weeks after my accident, my body is mostly recovered but my brain is still foggy. Apparently it's common for post-concussion syndrome to last months. I have a constant barely noticeable headache, mild memory loss, my happiness ceiling is lower, and it's much harder for me to concentrate. The other day I tried to convert ten meters per second into miles per hour, something I could normally estimate in my head, and I couldn't even get started without pen and paper and even then I made a mistake.
So today I'm not smart enough for original thinking and I'm just going to post a few links, starting with this awesome headline: Climate change is weaponizing the atmosphere. Here's an article with a better photo of the recent Phoenix microburst, where clouds blast near-tornado force wind straight downward.
And two reddit comments sent by readers. One of the smartest people on reddit, Erinaceous, describes Permaculture founder Bill Mollison's political vision, which uses...
existing institutions and legal forms which largely serve corporate interests but turns them to the service of regenerative social ecological systems. Rather than sitting on our thumbs waiting for nations to collapse it gives us an effective means of using the existing nation states to become incubators for permaculture federations which would have some measure of independence from centralized means of control.
And this comment, on the subject of marrying for love, argues that the history of what we seek in partners mirrors Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from food and shelter to belonging to love to self-actualization. The commenter calls the last thing "nearly impossible", and I don't believe in the "true self", but I see a lot of couples where one or both partners successfully challenges the other to be a better person.
]]>