- Google AI Overview
The official online home for Humanae—the acclaimed chromatic skin-color photography project by artist Angélica Dass—can be viewed directly at the Angélica Dass Humanae Portfolio. [1, 2, 3, 4]
About the Project
Angélica Dass Humanae Project
Word-built world: dividual
- Google AI
Dividual is an adjective that primarily means divisible, divided, or shared in common with others. While traditionally classified as an archaic linguistic term, it has experienced a modern resurgence in philosophy and anthropology to describe social identity and data tracking. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Core Definitions
- Archaic Definition: Capable of being divided, separate, or distributed among multiple entities (e.g., John Milton famously wrote of the moon holding its “dividual” reign with lesser lights). [1, 2]
- Philosophical & Digital Definition: An entity that is not an indivisible whole (unlike an individual), but is instead constantly split, quantified, and reduced into data points, tracked behaviors, or component parts. [1, 2]
- Anthropological Definition: A person whose identity is interlinked with and inseparable from their community relationships, obligations, and shared responsibilities. [1]
Key Differences: Individual vs. Dividual
| Feature | Individual | Dividual |
|---|---|---|
| Core Meaning | Indivisible; a single autonomous unit. | Divisible; split into parts or networks. |
| Modern Context | A unique human being with personal rights. | A user profile broken into tracking data points. |
| Social Focus | Independence and self-reliance. | Interdependence and shared connection. |
The metaphysical implications of the dividual challenge the foundational Western assumption of the “individual” as a solid, indivisible, and autonomous substance. Instead of viewing existence as a collection of isolated “things,” a dividual metaphysics views reality as a fluid network of relations, flows, and constant transformations. [1, 2, 3]
Here are the primary metaphysical implications of the dividual concept:
1. Relational Ontology (Being-as-Relation)
- The Shift: Traditional metaphysics (from Aristotle to Descartes) is based on substance ontology, where a thing exists independently on its own. Dividual metaphysics uses relational ontology. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
- Implication: A person or object does not have relationships; they are the sum of their relationships. Existence is not a collection of separate dots, but the lines connecting them. You do not exist prior to your interactions; you are continuously produced by them. [1, 2]
2. The Illusion of the Boundless Self
- The Shift: It dissolves the strict metaphysical boundary between the “inside” (the mind, soul, or self) and the “outside” (the world, others, and nature). [1]
- Implication: The skin is no longer a hard metaphysical border. Thoughts, emotions, and bodily states are seen as porous, constantly absorbing and transmitting elements from the environment. The self is an open ecosystem, not a closed fortress. [1]
3. Process Philosophy (Becoming vs. Being)
- The Shift: It aligns heavily with process philosophy (such as the work of Alfred North Whitehead). It prioritizes becoming over static being. [1]
- Implication: Because a dividual is constantly being divided, distributed, and recombined, identity is never fixed. You are not a permanent noun; you are a continuous verb. Change is the fundamental reality, while stability is just a temporary plateau. [1, 2, 3]
4. Distributed Agency
- The Shift: Traditional metaphysics places “agency” (the power to act and choose) squarely inside the individual consciousness.
- Implication: Dividualism implies that agency is distributed across networks. A choice is never purely your own; it is co-produced by your biology, your cultural tools, your digital algorithms, and your physical environment. Human and non-human elements fuse to create action. [1]
5. Multiplicity and Assemblages
- The Shift: It replaces the metaphysical ideal of the “One” (unity, purity, wholeness) with the reality of the “Many” (multiplicity, fragmentation). [1, 2, 3]
- Implication: As philosophers like Gilles Deleuze argued, entities are “assemblages”—temporary collections of heterogeneous parts. A human being is a dividual assemblage of organs, bacteria, digital data profiles, ancestral memories, and social roles, all operating simultaneously without needing a single, central “core.” [1, 2, 3]
Summary of Metaphysical Shifts
| Concept | Individual Metaphysics | Dividual Metaphysics |
|---|---|---|
| Fundamental Unit | Substance (The thing itself) | Relation (The space between things) |
| Identity | Fixed, permanent, unified | Fluid, temporary, multiple |
| Reality | Being (Static) | Becoming (Dynamic process) |
| Boundaries | Closed, independent | Porous, interdependent |
The concept of the dividual aligns profoundly with Eastern metaphysics. While Western philosophy historically prioritized the independent “substance” of the self, Eastern traditions have spent millennia mapping reality as a fluid, interconnected web.
Here is how the metaphysical implications of the dividual manifest across major Eastern traditions:
1. Buddhism: Anatta (Non-Self) and Pratītyasamutpāda
Buddhism offers perhaps the most direct metaphysical parallel to the dividual by explicitly denying the existence of a permanent, indivisible individual soul.
- The Five Skandhas (Aggregates): Buddhism teaches that what we call the “self” is actually a temporary assemblage of five constantly changing parts: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. You are a dividual process, split into these fluctuating components.
- Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda): Nothing exists in isolation. Everything arises in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions. The individual is an illusion; reality consists entirely of relational links.
2. Hinduism: Advaita Vedanta and Indra’s Net
While certain schools of Hinduism affirm an ultimate soul (Atman), its relationship to the universe mirrors dividual metaphysics through radical interconnectedness.
- Indra’s Net: This famous metaphor describes a vast cosmic web where every knot contains a jewel. Each jewel reflects all other jewels in the net. No single jewel possesses independent identity; its very existence is a reflection of the whole. [1]
- The Illusion of Separation (Maya): The belief that you are a separate, autonomous individual is considered cosmic ignorance (Maya). Metaphysically, your boundaries are porous, and your true nature is seamlessly integrated with the absolute whole (Brahman).
3. Daoism: The Flow of Qi and Yin-Yang
Daoism rejects static categories of “being” in favor of constant transformation, viewing humans not as fixed individuals but as knots in a cosmic current.
- The Self as a Vortex: In Daoism, a human being is a temporary concentration of cosmic energy (Qi). Just like a whirlpool in a river, it has a recognizable shape for a moment, but it is never separate from the water flowing through it.
- Dynamic Interdependence: The Yin-Yang shows that opposites are not separate entities but mutually constituting parts of a single process. You cannot define the self without the “other.”
4. Confucianism: The Relational Self
While less focused on cosmic metaphysics and more on social metaphysics, Confucianism defines a human being entirely by their social location.
- Identity as a Matrix: In Confucian thought, you do not exist prior to your roles as a child, parent, sibling, or citizen. You are the intersection of your obligations. If you strip away all relationships, there is no hidden “individual” left underneath; the relations are the essence of the person.
Comparison: Western Dividualism vs. Eastern Metaphysics
| Dimension | Modern Western Dividualism (Deleuze/Data) | Eastern Metaphysics (Buddhism/Daoism) |
|---|---|---|
| The Cause of Division | External forces (Algorithms, capital, tracking). | Internal and cosmic reality (Nature of existence). |
| View of Fragmentation | Often alienating or a mechanism of control. | Liberating; the key to breaking suffering. |
| Ultimate Goal | Resistance, political awareness. | Enlightenment, harmony, alignment with the Dao. |
Book: “How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others”
How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others
T.M. Luhrmann
The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith
How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people–as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort–by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others–helps to explain the enduring power of faith.
Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more.
A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits–but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.
About the author
T.M. Luhrmann
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is currently the Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann (born 1959) is an American psychological anthropologist best known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and psychiatrists. She received her AB summa cum laude in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981, working with Stanley Tambiah. She then studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, working with Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner. In 1986 she received her PhD for work on modern-day witches in England, later published as Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (1989). In this book, she described the ways in which magic and other esoteric techniques both serve emotional needs and come to seem reasonable through the experience of practice.
Her second research project looked at the situation of contemporary Parsis, a Zoroastrian community in India. The Parsi community enjoyed a privileged position under the British Raj; although by many standards, Parsis have continued to do quite well economically in post-colonial India, they have become politically marginal in comparison to their previous position, and many Parsis speak pessimistically about the future of their community. Luhrmann’s book The Good Parsi (1996) explored the contradictions inherent in the social psychology of a post-colonial elite.
Her third book, and the most widely acclaimed, explored the contradictions and tensions between two models of psychiatry, the psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) and the biomedical, through the ethnographic study of the training of American psychiatry residents during the health care transition of the early 1990s. Of Two Minds (2000) received several awards, including the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology (2001).
Her fourth book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (March 2012), examines the growing movement of evangelical and charismatic Christianity, and specifically how practitioners come to experience God as someone with whom they can communicate on a daily basis through prayer and visualization.
Other projects she is working on include a NIMH-funded study of how life on the streets (chronically or periodically homeless) contributes to the experience and morbidity of schizophrenia.
(Goodreads.com)
Pete Hegseth’s Obsession With Manhood Is Nuts
Milicent Cranor 08/17/26 (WhoWhatWhy.org)
The secretary of war puts the T in toxic masculinity.
Last month, Pete Hegseth, US secretary of war — and I do mean war — further polluted the air already fouled with misinformation: He amplified the false impression circulated by the online manosphere that high testosterone levels make one a better fighter.
This seems to have led many civilian men to seek out sources — legitimate or not — to get this manly hormone into their systems, whether they need it or not. (And if they don’t need it, they may suffer the dreadful effects of its abuse — such as testicle shrinkage!)
As you probably know, Hegseth demanded that all soldiers over the age of 30 have their testosterone levels tested. And look at the language he used:
He wants a “High-T Department of War.”
He wants soldiers on the “leading edge of lethality.”
And if a “warfighter’s” testosterone is found to be deficient, he has the “option” of getting hormone replacement therapy. (Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets such therapy, and he is definitely lethal, though not as a soldier. His decisions on vaccines have resulted in untold death and misery.)
Since our soldiers in the Middle East do their killing not by hand-to-hand combat but by operating lethal machinery — the role of “High T” in modern warfare is not clear to me.
Possibly Hegseth believes a man with high testosterone will be not only physically, but psychologically fit; that is, he should have the right lethal attitude. Kill! Kill! Kill!
Ironically, some of the most lethal, most murderous leaders in history — men who ordered others to kill — apparently had low levels of testosterone themselves. There is some truth in this British World War II song, at least as it applies to Hitler:
Hitler! He only had one ball,
Göring had two but they were very small,
Himmler had something sim’ler
But Herr Goebbels had no balls at all.
Adolf Hitler apparently did have only one ball — although the cause of his condition is still being debated.
And then there’s Napoleon, another killer. He had a condition known as “micropenis.” His doctor surreptitiously removed the organ during his autopsy and, ever since, it has been passed around, unpreserved, in a small presentation box, to various collectors.
The organ has been described as a “shriveled eel” and “a bit of beef jerky.” Of course in its dried out state, it wouldn’t look its best, but indications are, his equipment was abnormally small.
And there’s other evidence Napoleon’s testosterone levels may have been beneath Hegseth’s standards. According to Napoleon’s doctor, François Antommarchi, after stepping out of his bath, the Emperor said to him (translations vary):
“See Doctor, what lovely arms, what smooth white skin without a single hair! What rounded breasts — any beauty would be proud of a bosom like mine.”
In addition to Hitler and Napoleon, there are droll stories about lethal contemporary characters — men you can’t avoid reading about every day — men whose names I shall not mention.
These stories describe in detail what some would characterize as “embarrassing inadequacies” (not necessarily hormone related), that could be especially triggering to an appearance-obsessed, malignant narcissist. You can guess who they are. Google is gagging over the inquiries.
But what these unmentioned men — with their unmentionable private issues — truly lack is a conscience. And to a degree that is grotesque. Their actions have resulted in countless deaths and ruined lives.
***
I wonder what Hegseth’s own testosterone levels are.
And I wonder if he knows how much alcohol diminishes one’s testosterone levels.
A doctor once told me about all the drunks he’d seen down in the Bowery who had full heads of hair — owing to low levels of testosterone thanks to booze. According to the peer-reviewed medical journal Andrology, which reported the results of multiple analyses involving 10,199 men:
“The meta-analysis showed that alcohol consumption overall is related to significant reduction in circulating concentrations of total testosterone.”
(Note to the technically inclined: Men and women both have testosterone and estrogen, but in different proportions. In a man, low testosterone results in “unopposed estrogen,” which in turn results in nice head hair, but low body hair. On the other hand, if a woman is very low in estrogen, she has “unopposed testosterone” and may have sparse head hair, but a full mustache.)
Pete Hegseth certainly has plenty of hair on his head that is probably his own — and for decades, apparently, he’s had plenty of alcohol in his system.
Whistleblowers from the Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), led by Hegseth until 2016, alleged that he was repeatedly drunk while performing official duties. More recently (December 3, 2024), NBC News published this story, based on interviews with 10 current and former Fox employees: “Pete Hegseth’s Drinking Worried Colleagues at Fox News.” And Hegseth’s former sister-in-law alleged in an affidavit that Hegseth was frequently drunk, during which time he abused his wife.
Hegseth denies these stories. Of course he does. Just as he denied texting overly specific war plans on Signal. (Go here for choice details.)
In any case, it sounds like he’s had more than a drink or two.
Besides alcohol, recreational drugs like heroin and cocaine affect testosterone levels, which may explain why former drug user Kennedy needs hormone replacement therapy. (He also needs brain replacement therapy, but none is available.)
But there is something far more dangerous to your masculinity and, indeed, to the entire human race and other forms of life on this planet. Namely, petroleum, aka oil.
***
Sooner or later, in one form or another, oil seeps into everything in our lives.
It seeps into nearly everything around us — in the form of tiny bits of plastic — which are made from fossil fuels.
Microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs), which are even smaller, abound in the air, the soil, the water, our food, and not just from the plastic packaging. MPs have been found in the animals we eat (fish muscle, for example) and in the fibers of fruits and vegetables.
And MP/NPs are in nearly every organ of your body. They are in your brain (7 grams in the frontal cortex, where you do your thinking), in your retinas, in your blood vessels, your heart, liver, and so on. And in your reproductive equipment, male and female.
In this story, I am focusing on males because, according to our secretary of war, males need their testosterone in order to be on the “leading edge of lethality.”
NPs have been found in human semen, in human testicles (and in the testicles of dogs, studied because their lives are deeply intertwined with ours), and in human penises. To see more proof of the danger, go here, here, and here.)
The drop in sperm count in developed countries began approximately 50 years ago. The subject is controversial, and different causes are cited, but I can’t help noticing that 50 years ago happens to be about the same time we started using really humongous amounts of plastics.
And plastics seem to be here to stay. The world is shifting toward renewable power, and to offset declining fuel sales, major oil and gas companies are turning to plastics as “Plan B.” According to the Center for International Environmental Law, “Just as the world begins to realize the dangers of plastic pollution and take action to reduce it, industry is poised to invest billions in expanding plastic production.”
***
In the meantime, though infested with plastic, we should all try to take good care of ourselves.
Men, if you suspect you have abnormally low testosterone levels — or if you’re an accomplished hypochondriac — you can view this long list of symptoms presented by the Mayo Clinic — but bear in mind that many of these same symptoms are caused by psychological factors. Better to discuss the issue with a urologist.
Here are some good, up-to-date articles on the safety of testosterone therapy:
Is Testosterone Therapy Safe? Take a Breath Before You Take the Plunge
Statement on Testosterone Replacement Therapy
Management of Adverse Effects in Testosterone Therapy
What Men Should Know About Testicular Shrinkage and Testosterone Therapy
Trump, Kennedy, et al. want to make it easier to get prescriptions for testosterone. Given what these people say about vaccines, you should be cautious about accepting anything they say about anything else.
Your lifestyle can greatly affect your hormone levels (as well as everything else) — high stress, inadequate sleep, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, and, as previously mentioned, drugs and alcohol. You’ve heard it all before.
Avoid this book: Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who believes “No menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood, the collapse of masculine strength.”
Avoid using red laser therapy on your groin. See this story in Vanity Fair: “Tucker Carlson: Tan Your Balls If You Want to Be a Real Man.”
- Milicent CranorMilicent Cranor is a senior editor at WhoWhatWhy. She has worked as a creative editor at E.P. Dutton, a comedy ghostwriter, and editor of consequential legal and scientific documents. She has also co-authored numerous peer-reviewed articles for medical journals.
Rudolf Steiner on organs of perception
Steiner circa 1905
“Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.”
~ Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian New Age guru, philosopher, occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant and speaker with the dead. Wikipedia
Born February 1861, Donji Kraljevec, Croatia
Died March 30, 1925 (age 64 years), Dornach, Switzerland
Scientists find 3 supermassive black holes on the verge of collision inside a distant galaxy
By Keith Cooper
Published yesterday (Space.com)
A greedy galaxy that existed less than 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang is hoarding supermassive black holes.
A trio of heavyweight black holes are entangled in a dance of death that will quite possibly see them gradually all merge to form an even greater behemoth.
Scientists have discovered the black holes in a galaxy that is so far away its light has taken 12.5 billion years to reach us, meaning we see it as it was less than 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. And it’s offering strong supporting evidence that one of the ways black holes grew so massive so quickly in the early universe was through mergers.
“This is the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in the distant universe,” Hannah Übler, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany who led the study, said in a statement. “It suggests that processes in the early universe were efficient at bringing massive black holes together, setting the stage for the massive black-hole mergers we expect to detect with future gravitational-wave observatories.”
The galaxy that plays host to the black holes is catalogued as J0148-4214 and is so far away (their redshift is 5.0167) that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which made the discovery, could not see the black holes directly. Instead, the Integrated Field Spectroscopy unit on the JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) measured the motion of hydrogen gas swirling around at high velocity in the accretion disks encircling each black hole.
“The JWST data allowed us not only to identify the three black holes, but also to estimate their masses, accretion rates and the stellar mass of the galaxy,” Giovanni Mazzolari of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics said in the statement. “We find a total stellar mass of about 1.3 billion suns, and the black holes represent a significant fraction of that.”You may like
- A ravenous black hole in our backyard could be our window into the ancient universe
- James Webb Space Telescope weighs ‘sleeping giant’ black hole from 10 billion light-years away — and it’s 6 billion times our sun’s mass
- James Webb Space Telescope catches 6 galaxies merging into one of the largest galaxies in the universe
Two of the black holes reside at the center of J0148-4214, separated by 620 light-years. One of these black holes has a huge mass of 80 million times the mass of our sun, while its companion is a relative pipsqueak at 600,000 solar masses. Yet despite its diminutive stature, the smaller black hole is growing at a tremendous rate by accreting gas faster than the Eddington limit. This is the theoretical maximum rate at which material can fall towards a black hole; if the rate is any higher then the accretion disk around the black hole becomes so dense and hot that radiation from the disk blows material back out again, stifling the black hole’s feeding frenzy. This means the smaller black hole will only be able to keep growing at this rate for a short time before negative feedback calls a halt.
The third black hole is 5,500 light-years out from the center of J0148-4214 and has a mass two million times greater than the mass of our sun. This is about half the mass of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*. It’s thought that this third black hole, and quite possibly the second one too, found their way into J0148-4214 via mergers between galaxies.
“These results are extremely exciting,” said Roberto Maiolini of the University of Cambridge, who was a participant in the findings. “They suggest that black-hole merging may be an additional, fast route for their rapid growth in the early universe.”
Mergers between black holes produce bursts of gravitational waves. Current gravitational-wave detectors — including The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan — are able to detect the high frequency, short wavelength gravitational waves from the mergers of stellar-mass black holes, the kind formed in certain supernova explosions. To detect the much longer wavelength, shorter frequency gravitational waves produced by the merger of supermassive black holes such as those in J0148-4214 requires a space-based detector with a baseline many millions of miles long.
To that end, the European Space Agency plans to launch LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. If all goes to plan, by the mid-2030s. LISA will feature three spacecraft in triangular formation, each side of the triangle being 1.55 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) long. The three spacecraft will beam lasers at each other, looking for deviations in the travel time of those laser beams as evidence for the passing of a long-wavelength gravitational wave.What to read next
- James Webb Space Telescope discovers how black holes feed themselves
- Supermassive black holes may be surrounded by dark matter clusters, new ‘echo map’ technique suggests
- James Webb Space Telescope discovers a black hole that formed before its host galaxy. Scientists aren’t sure how
With regards to J0148-4214, however, there is a caveat: The third black hole might not be on a collision course with the other two. Instead, it could be heading out of the galaxy.
It’s the classic three-body problem: How do three objects orbiting one another interact?
The two smaller black holes may have entered J0148-4214 as a binary pair. Then, as they were drawn closer to the 80-million-solar-mass black hole, the more massive black hole could have snatched the 600,000-solar-mass black hole while exchanging angular momentum with the two-million-solar-mass black hole to fling it away at high velocity. We see a similar effect in our galaxy with hypervelocity stars that are racing out of the Milky Way. These speedy stars used to be part of a binary pair of stars that got too close to Sagittarius A*, which is the black hole at the center of our galaxy. One half of the binary was captured by the black hole and the other was flung away.
Currently, there is no way to measure the direction of motion of the third black hole in J0148-4214 and confirm whether it will merge with the other two black holes or escape. If it did escape, it could still be wandering alone and dark in intergalactic space even now, 12.5 billion years later.
The findings are presented in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Kentucky Middle School Sends Students Home on First Day of Class With AI-Generated Educational Materials Full of Inexcusable Hallucinations, Including a Map Labeled With “North Dahota” and “Olkchoma”
Joe Wilkins
Mon, August 17, 2026 (Futurism via Yahoo.com)
Key takeaways powered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.
Kentucky parents are outraged after discovering that horribly inaccurate educational materials handed out to their middle school students were generated with AI.
According to local station WDRB, students at Farnsley Middle School in Southwest Louisville were sent home with a packet chock full of AI hallucinations on their first day of the school year. The most obvious tell was a map of North America, which contained some jaw dropping misspellings of state names, misplaced cities, and hallucinated territories that don’t actually exist.
Kentucky, for example, was mislabeled “Venecky,” while states like Texas and Louisiana were reimagined as “Taxas” and “Lookoong.” Though South Dakota made it out unscathed, its northern counterpart was branded “North Dahota.” Other notable entries are Arizona and New Mexico, which became “Arizone” and “New Mizone,” while Oklahoma degenerated into “Olkchoma.”
Even when the AI render got its names right, the locations are horribly mangled, in one instance pinpointing Cuba’s capital city of Havana as situated on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
Some states like Michigan and California didn’t merit any names at all, while others are split into imaginary realms. South of Vancouver (spelled “Venneouer”), for example, is the mythical land of “Beehie,” which according to the map shares its borders with Washington state.
“Arizona is Arizone. Illinois starts with a V,” Stacey Morris, a Kentucky mom whose son brought home one of the packets told WDRB. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
Images shared on social media show other parts of the packet with similar problems, like a periodic table of the elements showing Magnesium with an impossible atomic mass of -3.08, and a map of the solar system where Mars has been labeled “Marc.”
“Planetary distance are temporatory earth, equater the elenonts and regnestiom org toed dishligns,” the packet declares, verbatim. “Net to scale.”
A parent discovered that her daughter’s middle school in Kentucky has been having their students use agendas that are ai generated pic.twitter.com/7ToGyTwLFQ
— Michael (@TheMG3D) August 15, 2026
In a statement to WDRB, the school district’s executive officer of communications said they “spoke with the school today about inaccuracies in their agenda, and they are communicating with parents about the issue.” After the discovery, the school admin reportedly emailed teachers about the packet, ultimately advising them to rip out 17 pages of AI-generated material before handing them out to students.
For adults who know better, it might just be another case of silly AI hallucinations. But to present this material to middle school students — who may just be starting to conceptualize the world beyond Kentucky for the first time — is egregious, and the long-term consequences are hard to overstate. While the generative AI tool may have butchered the material, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of whichever educator hit print without giving the packet even a passing glance.
Last week, we brought you the story of parents homeschooling their kids using AI chatbots to plan lessons and curricula. One parent, the controversial influencer Savannah LaBrant, specifically bragged that she was using ChatGPT to teach her kids “where the states are and how to locate them.”
If this is the quality of material used to educate our kids, it’s no wonder students in the US are performing worse on standardized testing than almost ever before — a metric which is sure to keep plummeting in the years to come.
More on AI and education: Tech Giants Pushing AI Into Schools Is a Huge, Ethically Bankrupt Experiment on Innocent Children That Will Likely End in DisasterView comments(294)
(Contributed by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)
Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
(Image from Wikipedia.org)
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Can Empathy Be An Organizing Principle For Civilization? Yes or No
Edwin Rutsch Aug 14, 2026 Empathy Expert Interviews Edwin Rutsch and Tim meet to explore whether empathy can function as an organizing principle for civilization. Edwin argues from a secular perspective that mutual (“wholistic”) empathy and deep listening can serve as the foundational bedrock for societal conflict resolution and governance. Tim contends that while empathy is an essential moral virtue, civilization also requires objective truth, moral value judgments, and structural frameworks to function effectively. Tim Orr is an ordained Evangelical minister, seasoned academic, and passionate advocate for interreligious dialogue. He serves as a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), where his scholarship focuses on the intersections of religion, ideology, contemporary antisemitism, and public life. Dedicated to fostering understanding across divides, his digital ministry and platform are centered on building bridges, uniting hearts, and helping faith flourish. A contributing writer for The Times of Israel, his published essays include “Beyond the Red-Green Alliance: Empathy and Structural Asymmetry” and “Toxic Empathy is Not Love – and It’s Dangerous.” https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/autho… / tim-orr-a0959524 Edwin Rutsch is the Founding Director of The Empathy Center, as well as a leading organizer in the global Empathy Movement. Over nearly two decades, he has dedicated his work to bridging social, cultural, and political divides by establishing mutual active listening as a foundational social practice. Edwin is the developer and primary advocate of the Empathy Circle framework—a structured, highly scalable dialogue practice used worldwide across educational, community, and conflict-resolution settings. Through his initiatives, including the public-dialogue Empathy Tent project, global Empathy Summits, and hundreds of recorded interviews with scholars and thought leaders, he works to foster empathy as a primary social value and everyday skill. Building the Empathy Movement
The Wisdom of Water: Alan Watts on the Ocean and the Meaning of Life
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Four billion years ago, in the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the world where serpentine is forged, chemistry trembled with the promise of consciousness and matter began its long metabolic pilgrimage toward mind. Perhaps our saline cells remember it: how we, pilgrims of the possible, crawled out of the tide pools to climb the trees, then came down from the trees to live under a canopy of one hundred trillion synapses animated by the oceanic yearning to make meaning of our mortality. Perhaps the ocean, with its primeval drama of life and death, will always remind us of where we came from and where we are going. Rachel Carson knew this when she contemplated the peculiar effect of facing the open ocean, the way it fills us with “an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”
Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) captures this with uncommon poignancy in a 1960 talk titled “Love of Waters,” found in the posthumously compiled lecture collection Zen Rascal.
Writing from his studio — a floating library on an old ferryboat tied to the waterfront of Sausalito just north of San Francisco — Watts begins with a fine contribution to the canon of literature’s best reckonings with time:
Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it’s not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It’s timeless time. Because I know I’m listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years. And it takes you out of the world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks, for some reason or other, always seem to be marching, and armies never march to anything but doom. But there’s no marching rhythm in the motion of waves. It harmonizes with the breath. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It’s the breathing of eternity, like the Brahmā of Indian mythology, who inhales and exhales, manifests and dissolves the worlds endlessly, for ever. As a mere conception, that sounds appalling and monotonous — until you listen to the breaking and washing of waves.
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)
Observing how all the waste and want of our civilization are “transformed in the beneficent presence of the sea,” he considers the mysterious mechanism of the transformation in what reads like a prose poem:
And yet in the ocean, this poetic dimension of life coexists with the teeming brutality of predator and prey, the merciless drama of death. In a stirring reminder that the evolutionary is inseparable from the existential, Watts writes:
[…]
There’s no way of getting around it, is there? The gull isn’t rapacious or greedy. It’s just that his being alive at all is the same thing as eating crabs. Sea birds are transformations of fish. Men are transformations of wheat, chickens, and steers. And a love for the food is the agony of the food. To object to this inseparability of pleasure and pain, life and death, is simply to object to existence. But, of course, we cannot help objecting when the time comes. Objecting to pain is pain.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai, 1831. (Available as a print.)
With an eye to the price of consciousness, Watts observes that the human animal, with its ability to stand outside of itself and think about itself — that is, “to comment on life” — has curled into a profound confusion about its own existence: By standing aside from life in order to think about it, we evicted ourselves from it and, as Watts puts it, “found it alien.” A generation before Ursula K. Le Guin wrote so movingly about subject vs. object in the meaning of life, Watts invites us out of this dualistic self-expatriation from the living world:
[…]
To be human is precisely to have that extra circuit of consciousness which enables us to know that we know, and thus to take an attitude to all that we experience. The mistake that we’ve made — and this, if anything, is the fall of man — is to suppose that that extra circuit, that ability to take an attitude to life as a whole, is the same as actually standing aside and being separate from what we see. We seem to feel that the thing which knows that it knows is one’s essential self. That, in other words, our personal identity is entirely on the side of the commentator. We forget that self-consciousness is simply a subordinate part and instrument of our being; a sort of mental counterpart to the finger-thumb opposition of the human hand.
And which is you, the finger or the thumb? Look at the stages of differentiation. First: the organism from its environment — and with this, knowledge of the environment. Second: the distinction of knowing knowledge from knowledge itself. But all this, like the finger-thumb opposition, is a difference which does not divide. The thumb isn’t floating in the air alongside the rest of the hand. At their roots they’re joined. And at our roots we are joined to the whole subject of nature.
Painting by Oliver Jeffers from his series Measuring Land and Sea
Watts ends with a mighty corrective for the far-reaching damage Descartes has done and does us still:
I think our difficulty is that our consciousness is too superficial, as if all our sensation were in the tips of the fingers and not in the palm. Our comments on life are insufficiently balanced by the clear sensation that what we are talking about as ourselves, and ourselves in a sense far more basic and real than that extra circuit which knows knowing… Were we as spatially distant from the Earth as one atom of an orange from another, I suppose we should be somewhere out by the Moon.
[…]
I think this is why I love the ocean. It’s the most difficult part of nature to mess up with emblems and symptoms of man’s dissociated consciousness. It’s an environment in which the awareness of our roots can awaken, in which space (so real because of the light and color) can be seen to be joining things instead of separating them. Yes. And I’ve just discovered that knocking on the wall of space and consciousness was my own heart beating.
Couple with astronomer Rebecca Elson’s spare and lovely poem “Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe,” then revisit Watts on becoming who you really are, learning not to think in terms of gain and loss, and the only real antidote to fear.