Noah Karsky

Mushrooms Follow the Rain: An Ode to texasmushrooms.org

2026-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Drafted with AI from Noah's spoken notes, reviewed and edited by Noah.

There is a website called texasmushrooms.org that I stumbled upon one day that I think more people should know about. I’ve never really seen it referenced anywhere. Granted, I haven’t looked that hard. It belongs to Alexey Sergeev, a math professor at Texas A&M who has been photographing his mushroom walks in the forests north of Houston since 2007. Over nineteen thousand pictures of more than twelve hundred species by his own count, and still growing. The site is responsive, informative, and he takes real care in capturing these photos. I don’t know how old he is or how the site is hosted. I just know it’s glorious, and part of me has always worried it could go away one day. That worry is where this project started.

So I scraped the website and built something on top of it: a map and a calendar of seventeen years of one man’s mushroom photographs.

But first the backstory, because it’s a funny one.

The Email

Six or seven years ago, when I was first getting into mushrooms and also wanting to work on my data science skills, I emailed Alexey to ask if I could scrape his website. He replied thinking I was somebody else. There was apparently some other collaborator of his at the college whose name was also Noah, and he answered me like I was that guy. I don’t have the email anymore, but I’m pretty sure what he sent back was a simulation of a plane blowing up.

This was during the peak of the Russian election interference stuff. So here I am, a guy who just wanted to ask about mushrooms, and this super Russian stranger is sending me plane explosion simulations. I immediately thought I was going to end up on some FBI list just for having this in my inbox. I was laughing about it, and also a little bit actually worried about it.

I replied something like, that’s cool, however I’m mostly interested in the mushrooms. We kept in touch, I never got around to scraping the website back then; however eventually I asked him something better. Could I join him on a mushroom hike?

The Hike

He was kind enough to invite me out to a remote trailhead on the Lone Star Hiking Trail up in Sam Houston National Forest. Lindsey was super worried, because it was just me meeting some stranger from the internet alone in the woods, and I don’t know what I was thinking either. I just figured he was a cool old guy who could teach me about mushrooms. Which is exactly what he turned out to be.

Alexey is really quiet, sort of an eccentric man who talks very softly, and maybe some of that is just the language barrier. He hikes in jeans and just trucks along. He drives out, does his hike in the morning, and drives back, so he moves pretty quick through the forest. Except when he doesn’t.

Within minutes of starting we stopped dead at this little orange thing on the ground. He got down and spent a good three minutes photographing it. He will probably not like me bringing this up, but I’m pretty sure it was an actual orange peel. We never acknowledged it. We just kept hiking along and I laughed to myself. I keep that memory around as a reminder to stay humble. This is a guy who knows basically every mushroom in East Texas, and even he can spend three minutes carefully photographing somebody’s litter.

Because he really does know every mushroom. He entwines himself with the forest. He’s always touching the plants, which I love too, because I’m also a plant toucher. My wife hates it. He’ll pick up a mushroom and rattle off the Latin name like it’s nothing, then hand it to me like I’m supposed to know exactly what he’s talking about. I know a lot of the common names for these things. He basically doesn’t use them. He’s always keen to tell you about the rarity of a find, or about somebody he knows who’s studying some subspecies or trying to catalog the rust fungi. And every now and then a Tupperware container comes out of the pack and a sample goes in, for spore prints or for sending off to people.

By our last hike he had gotten more social and was making KGB jokes. He’s really funny once you get to know him a little. We like talking about coding, his website, and using AI for various things. We should collaborate more and I should reach out more, but I’m a punk. I’ve also still never joined him for the Central Texas Mycology walks he goes to, which is more punk behavior on my part. Someday I’ll take time off work and do the guided mushroom hikes. I’m sure there are other great people out there.

The Project

The long term dream is a mushroom prediction app. Something that answers the question, should I go outside and look for mushrooms right now? Someday I might come full circle and build that little application. In the meantime, I thought a nice visualization would be cool.

The Seasons

The centerpiece is a seasonal visualization. We wrote a function that gets the rough color of each mushroom and plots all 8,800 photos as dots along the day of the year they were taken, one row per year, each dot painted in the mushroom’s own color.

Getting the color right was the interesting part. We ran into scenarios where there was a lot of background in the photos, so everything came out as shades of brown. Leaf litter, dirt, bark. We had to correct for that, and I think we now do a little bit better of a job getting the true color of the mushroom. People don’t give enough credit to all the variations of mushrooms we get here in Texas, specifically north of Houston in Sam Houston National Forest. Amanita jacksonii colors are some of my favorite ones to find. And since Alexey photographs a lot of smaller mushrooms and doesn’t shy away from slime molds, some lichens and things have probably slipped into the dataset too. That’s okay. It’s a first pass at honoring the many, many thousands of photos he’s taken.

Behind the dots there are different ways to visualize it. One shows dryness, so you can see mushroom seasonality against how uncharacteristically dry it is, and another shows rainfall. The weather comes from Open-Meteo’s historical archive for the same patch of forest, which answers the question I could never remember, of where exactly we were sampling from.

On the mushrooms follow the rain page there’s also a really cool one that plots the distribution as a histogram through time, showing when each genus fruits. Super cool data visualization. And you can put all the years combined into one day of the year view, and it just shows thousands of dots of all various colors.

The Map

Alexey, it turns out, tracks his….exact path from his house….which we take advantage of! In a non-creepy way! Every day page has a track log attached, and the waypoint names match up with his photo filenames, which is why almost every photo in the archive has real coordinates.

The map visualizes all of his locations as H3 cells. I also wanted to supplement his data, so I scraped a bunch of iNaturalist observations in the same general area, kept as a separate layer you can toggle against his. It’s a pretty simple map interface where you can see his mushroom locations, the iNaturalist mushroom locations, and where the most mushrooms are being found.

There’s obviously huge bias towards location in all of it. People mostly take mushroom photos when it’s nice outside, when it’s not muddy, and only in certain areas. We don’t have an even distribution, so there’s lots of variables to account for. We’ll have to do some special geospatial data science to control for all that, and there’s probably some pretty cool stuff to do there that I haven’t dug into yet. I’ll do more with that in the future.

Go Look

The visualization site is live at noahkarsky.github.io/texas-mushrooms, and the pipeline is on GitHub.

But mostly, go look at texasmushrooms.org. The photographs and captions are all Alexey’s, and they’re glorious. Everything I built is just a frame around them.

Noah’s Notes

This section reflects Noah's personal take.

Alexey, if you ever read this: thank you for all your hard work documenting mushrooms for all of us to learn from and admire the wonderful world of mycology. It means more than you know.

Instructions Before Visiting Earth

2026-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

I was scrolling Instagram when a random, possibly AI-generated travel account served up a narration of the poem below. It is titled “Instructions Before Visiting Earth,” by James McCrae. Immediately the opening line grabbed my attention, its language and tone echoing the accounts of the many people who came to Dr. John Mack. He was a Harvard psychiatrist who studied the experiences of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. I loved listening to both of his books, “Abduction” and “Passport to the Cosmos,” and I highly recommend them. Back to the poem: on the linked source below, there’s a photo of McCrae holding a sign that reads, “The homesick alien in me recognizes the homesick alien in you.” At this point I am very convinced this guy just finished reading Dr. Mack’s books and was inspired to write this poem.

One thing that I like to entertain about the notion of “Source” and being an alien here on our Earth plane is that not all of us are back down here longing to return to Source. Some of us are new souls going through our first incarnation to live and experience the joys and sorrows of being a human. We have our own unique experiences and sensory inputs that we are building up during our time here and will eventually contribute to the larger collective consciousness. During our time here we form our own purpose and hopefully make a new personal connection with Source that honors everything in this universe. More on this and my thoughts about reality and consciousness in a future post. For now, enjoy the poem below, it is truly a beautiful piece of work and I hope it resonates with you as much as it did with me.

In the event that you wake up and find your soul separated from source and manifest into material form, don’t panic. Your condition is only temporary. You have been selected for the opportunity of human incarnation. This 3D simulation is designed to break up the monotony of eternity by giving you a fully immersive experience as a distinct ego identity. Your body will serve as your physical avatar as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality. There will be many distractions causing you to forget your true nature and origin. You will experience a range of emotions from joy to loneliness to despair. But remember – no matter what trials and traumas you encounter, your soul remains perfectly safe. At times you may feel lost or afraid. This is totally normal. If you ever need guidance, simply slow down your busy mind and bring your awareness to the quiet place inside yourself. On this planet, nothing is permanent. People and things will come and go. You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments only to lose everything you hold dear. So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself, and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace, for nothing is owned, only borrowed. As you walk among the people on the planet, try to be a good guest. Tread lightly. Remember that you are only visiting. Don’t make a mess. Listen more than you speak. Give more than you take. Don’t keep your soft heart locked inside a glass cage, protected from wear and tear. You’ll never make it out alive and time passes quickly. So come back with some battle scars and good stories to tell.

— James McCrae, "Instructions Before Visiting Earth"

Red Hat Retirement

2026-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Red Hat Resume was a short-lived project I put together back in January, at the height of the ICE situation here in the United States — a federal agency run as a machinery of intimidation and spectacle, state cruelty dressed up as ordinary administration. It was made for fun, to point out the corruption, the brutality, and the oppression being put forth by the Trump administration.

It was unveiled at my thirtieth birthday party. We got a kick out of showing it off to all my friends, and I got some quiet thank-yous from some of our more vulnerable friends who have loved ones who would be targeted by this Gestapo. It ran for a few weeks and saw double digit users test it. Then I retired it, and this blog post is how it will live on in the archives.

What Was It?

At its core, I wanted to design a system that encapsulates the personas of the kind of people who would support ICE and apply to become an ICE agent. I wanted a system that would let users generate resumes embodying the fully qualified recruit in a few button clicks.

The original idea was to flood the ICE application process with a pile of satirical resumes to gunk it up some, make recruiting harder to do. I chickened out on that part, largely because I didn’t know what the legality of it was, so we slapped a huge satirical use only label on it and kept the core functionality alive. That dual purpose confused most people, and I think the joke was lost on a lot of folks. When it did land, it was killer, because it generated fully qualified, clean-looking resumes with exactly the bottom-of-the-barrel qualifications that folks like Stephen Miller were looking for when he was staffing the Gestapo.

In the end it didn’t accomplish much in the grand scheme of things, but it was a fun exercise in highlighting the main perpetrators in this effort to control the population. It was fun to make, and fun to learn what actually needed to be set up on the front end and the back end.

How It Worked

A React single-page app on the front end, a FastAPI service on the back end, and a structured-output LLM call in the middle. The persona, domain, themes, and struggles the user picked got assembled into a prompt against a static, cacheable system prompt; the model returned a parsed resume object; a seeded, LLM-free planner filled in the education, certifications, and awards deterministically so the same inputs always produced the same credentials. If the model refused or the API fell over, a fallback assembled a resume straight from the theme exemplars.

The Combination Machine

None of the writing was freeform. The whole thing was built out of four independent input tracks, and the user picked from each one: a persona (23 of them), a domain (27), one or more theme packs (10 packs holding 95 hand-written exemplar lines between them), and any number of struggles (24) for the applicant to have heroically overcome.

Those four selections got mixed into a single prompt. The persona and domain set who is talking and what industry they’re pretending to have mastered. The theme packs supply exemplar bullets as seed material — not output, just the flavor the model was told to write in. The struggles get woven through every section, which is where most of the joke actually lands.

That prompt went out as the dynamic half of the request, sitting behind a system prompt that never changed byte-for-byte so it stayed cacheable. The model wrote fresh bullets in the persona’s voice and handed them back through a strict schema.

The point of splitting it up that way is that a fairly small pile of hand-written material covers an absurd amount of ground once you let it combine. Pull the levers below and see what the model actually received.

The People It Highlighted

Below is a capture of the wall of faces the site put on display — the main perpetrators of the ICE situation, in their own costumes.

The faces, costumes, and propaganda aesthetics that ran down the length of the site.

These are the people who lie to the public, gaslight the press, and make decisions that benefit very few at the expense of many. They push an agenda of oppression that drives people apart and makes America less of a celebration of diversity and freedom and more of a dystopian nightmare. I wait patiently for the day when they are all held accountable, and may their family and friends be forever ashamed of them.

The Army's Hidden Network: Task Force Delta and Remote Viewing

2026-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Noah’s Notes

Written by Noah.

The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) serves as the catalyst for much of what evolved into broader US remote viewing and other psi-research under characters Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. A collaboration between SRI and government entities turned into the projects we now know as GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, and eventually STARGATE. Major General Albert “Bert” Stubblebine III was a major supporter of Task Force Delta and saw that an extension of the work being conducted in this group be built upon to help the US Army solve complex problems using psychic abilities that exist within all people. I’ve dumped notes I have on these programs into our favorite AI friend to help synthesize these programs and people together in a digestible format.

Hopefully this will be a useful resource for anyone interested in the history of these programs, the people involved, and the connections between them.

AI-Assisted Synthesis

This synthesis was drafted with AI from declassified program records, academic literature, and secondary sources, guided by Noah.

The post-Vietnam US Army was a genuinely broken institution — drug abuse, racial violence, collapsed NCO authority — and that crisis opened a door. A cohort of progressive officers with behavioral science degrees launched the largest organizational development program ever run inside a military institution. At the same time, the same personnel network was funding research into psychic espionage.

This synthesis pulls together eight sections of research: the crisis context, Task Force Delta’s structure and methods, the full program chronology from SCANATE through Stargate, the Stubblebine node in detail, a key figures grid, four competing hypotheses with confidence ratings, an evidence quality assessment, and open investigative questions.

A few things worth flagging:

The H2 hypothesis — that Task Force Delta and the remote viewing programs were a single coherent project, not coincidentally adjacent ones — is where the evidence lands most strongly. The NLP pipeline is the key structural link. The same training cohort that included Maxwell Thurman under TFD’s orbit also ran through Stubblebine’s INSCOM command into the RV programs. That’s not incidental personnel overlap. It’s the same ideology operating through the same command relationships simultaneously.

The attribution problem for Desert Storm is larger than most treatments acknowledge. Every piece of secondary literature asserts the connection between TFD and the Army’s 1991 performance, but none of them establishes mechanism. The same period saw AirLand Battle doctrine development, major NCO Corps revitalization, and the M1/Bradley fielding. The TFD contribution is plausible — small-unit cohesion work is genuinely hard to reverse once embedded — but the evidentiary standard in the literature is asserted, not demonstrated.

On the RV → UAP genealogy: the simple-dismissal position is harder to hold than it looks. Puthoff in particular is not just a name that recurs across programs — he’s an institutional figure who transitioned from SRI’s remote viewing contracts directly to AAWSAP. That’s career continuity, not coincidence. Whether the underlying epistemological claims improved across that span is a separate question from whether the genealogy is real. It is.

Here Come the Planes

2026-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Some songs arrive as artifacts of a specific moment and stay there, sealed inside their context like insects in amber. O Superman is not one of those songs. Laurie Anderson wrote it in 1981 in response to a failed American military mission — helicopters sent to rescue hostages in Iran, crashing in the desert, achieving nothing — and the song should by all rights belong to that moment. Instead it keeps finding new ones. She performed it in New York in the weeks after September 11th and the lyrics required no edits. A generation later it resurfaced again, the same quiet dread attaching itself to new events with an ease that is more unsettling than any single political reading could be.

What the song understood — and what keeps making it current — is that the problem it diagnosed was never really about Iran, or any specific failure of American power. It was about the structure underneath: what happens when the systems we build to protect us become indistinguishable from the systems that threaten us. When the arms that hold you and the arms that kill you are the same word. When the technology is so total, so anonymous, that nobody pulls the trigger and therefore nobody dies — except that people do. Freeman Dyson, writing from inside the weapons establishment at almost exactly the same moment, called it the same thing from a different angle: technology has made evil anonymous. Anderson made that sentence sing.

Fixing the Obsidian YouTube Web Clipper: A Template Breakdown

2026-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

AI-Assisted Post

This post was generated with AI assistance.

If you use Obsidian for research and watch a lot of YouTube, the Obsidian Web Clipper extension should be one of your most-used tools. The pitch is straightforward: clip any YouTube video directly into your vault as a structured note, complete with metadata, an AI-generated summary, and the full transcript — all without leaving the browser.

The reality, at least recently, is that most templates floating around the internet are broken. YouTube has changed its UI twice in 2026 alone, and each change silently kills the transcript extraction. You clip a video, get a beautiful note with all your frontmatter, and then a completely empty transcript section. No error. Just nothing.

This post walks through exactly what the Web Clipper is doing, what broke, how we fixed it, and what the final working template looks like.

What Obsidian Web Clipper Actually Does

The extension is a browser-side scraper that reads a web page and transforms it into a Markdown note using a JSON template you define. When you click the clip button on a YouTube page, it does three things:

1. Extracts structured metadata from the page’s schema. YouTube embeds a <script type="application/ld+json"> block on every video page containing a @VideoObject — a standardized data structure with the video title, author, upload date, description, thumbnail URL, duration, and embed URL. The clipper reads this directly. This is reliable because it’s machine-readable data YouTube intentionally publishes.

2. Runs CSS selectors against the live DOM. For anything not in the schema — like the transcript — the clipper uses CSS selectors to find specific HTML elements on the page and extract their text. This is where things get fragile. If YouTube changes its component names or DOM structure, the selector silently returns nothing.

3. Calls an AI model with the extracted context. If your template includes a {{"prompt"}} block, the clipper sends that prompt along with the page context to a language model and injects the response directly into your note. This is how you get the auto-generated summary, key takeaways, and mindmap without any extra steps.

The Template We Started With

The original template in circulation looked like this for transcript extraction:

{{selectorHtml:ytd-transcript-segment-renderer .segment-timestamp, ytd-transcript-segment-renderer yt-formatted-string|join:"\n"|markdown|callout:("transcript","Transcript (YouTube)",true)}}

It targeted ytd-transcript-segment-renderer components and extracted both the timestamp and the text from each segment. When it was written, this worked. The problem is that ytd-transcript-segment-renderer no longer exists in YouTube’s DOM. The component was renamed as part of their February 2026 UI overhaul, and then renamed again in March 2026. The selector runs, finds nothing, and returns an empty string — no warning, no fallback.

The original also had a few other issues worth cleaning up:

Duration was pulled from #ytd-player .ytp-time-duration — a live player DOM element that isn’t always rendered when the clipper runs, producing inconsistent results
URL was pulled directly from {{schema:@VideoObject:@id}} which sometimes returns the embed URL rather than the watch URL, breaking the video embed in the note
The replace filter syntax on duration used replace:"PT","","S","" — passing two find/replace pairs to a filter that only accepts one, triggering a parse error in newer clipper versions
published and created were both typed as "type": "date" when created should be "type": "datetime" to store the full timestamp

What We Changed and Why

Transcript Selector

The core fix. The current working selector as of April 2026:

{{transcript}}

Yes — that simple. After going through two broken CSS selector approaches (both targeting the transcript engagement panel by target-id, both subsequently invalidated by YouTube DOM changes), the most reliable solution is the built-in {{transcript}} variable that the Web Clipper populates natively from YouTube’s transcript API rather than scraping the DOM. It doesn’t require the transcript panel to be open. It doesn’t break when YouTube renames a component. It just works.

URL Reconstruction

Changed from {{schema:@VideoObject:@id}} to:

{{schema:@VideoObject:embedUrl|replace:"embed/":"watch?v="}}

The embedUrl field in the schema is consistently present and formatted as https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID. The replace filter converts it to a standard watch URL. This produces a reliable link every time and makes the video embed render correctly in the note.

Duration Cleanup

Changed from a broken two-argument replace to a single clean operation:

{{schema:@VideoObject:duration|replace:"PT":""}}

YouTube stores duration in ISO 8601 format — something like PT1H23M45S. Stripping the PT prefix gives you 1H23M45S which is human-readable enough for a frontmatter field. The original attempt to also strip the trailing S used unsupported filter syntax and caused a validation error.

AI Prompt Block

The original prompt was passing {{transcript}} and {{selectorHtml:...}} references inside the prompt string itself, which caused unclosed string errors in the clipper’s template parser. The fix is to keep the prompt text clean — no nested variable references, no internal quotes — and let the clipper’s context system handle passing the transcript to the model automatically via the context field.

The Final Template

{
  "schemaVersion": "0.1.0",
  "name": "YouTube (Open Transcript) 2026",
  "behavior": "create",
  "noteNameFormat": "{{schema:@VideoObject:uploadDate|date:\"YYYY-MM-DD\"}} {{schema:@VideoObject:author}} - {{schema:@VideoObject:name|safe_name|trim}}",
  "path": "✂ Clippings/YouTube",
  "triggers": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch"
  ],
  "properties": [
    { "name": "title", "value": "{{schema:@VideoObject:name}}", "type": "text" },
    { "name": "channel", "value": "{{schema:@VideoObject:author}}", "type": "text" },
    { "name": "url", "value": "{{schema:@VideoObject:embedUrl|replace:\"embed/\":\"watch?v=\"}}", "type": "text" },
    { "name": "published", "value": "{{schema:@VideoObject:uploadDate|date:\"YYYY-MM-DD\"}}", "type": "date" },
    { "name": "created", "value": "{{time|date:\"YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ\"}}", "type": "datetime" },
    { "name": "duration", "value": "{{schema:@VideoObject:duration|replace:\"PT\":\"\"}}", "type": "text" },
    { "name": "thumbnailUrl", "value": "{{schema:@VideoObject:thumbnailUrl|first}}", "type": "text" },
    { "name": "genre", "value": "{{schema:@VideoObject:genre}}", "type": "multitext" },
    { "name": "watched", "value": "", "type": "text" }
  ],
  "noteContentFormat": "![{{title}}]({{schema:@VideoObject:embedUrl|replace:\"embed/\":\"watch?v=\"}})\n\n{{schema:@VideoObject:description|callout:(\"summary\",\"Description\",true)}}\n\n{{\"Analyze this YouTube video and generate the following sections:\\n\\n## Summary\\n\\nBriefly summarize the video in 3-5 sentences.\\n\\n## Key Takeaways\\n\\nList the 5-7 most important takeaways as concise bullet points.\\n\\n## Mindmap\\n\\nGenerate a Mermaid mindmap of the main topics using simple syntax only, no icons.\\n\\n## Notable Quotes\\n\\nList notable quotes from the transcript.\"}}\n\n{{transcript|callout:(\"transcript\",\"Transcript\",true)}}",
  "context": "# {{schema:@VideoObject:name}}\n\n{{schema:@VideoObject:description}}\n\n## Basic Information\n\n- Link: {{schema:@VideoObject:embedUrl|replace:\"embed/\":\"watch?v=\"}}\n- Channel: {{schema:@VideoObject:author}}\n- Duration: {{schema:@VideoObject:duration|replace:\"PT\":\"\"}}\n\n## Transcript\n\n{{transcript}}"
}

What You Get

When you clip a YouTube video with this template, Obsidian creates a note with:

Frontmatter — title, channel, watch URL, publish date, clip timestamp, duration, thumbnail URL, genre tags, and an empty watched field you can fill in later
Embedded video at the top of the note
Collapsible description callout — the full YouTube description tucked away so it doesn’t clutter your reading view
AI-generated analysis — summary, key takeaways, a Mermaid mindmap of the topic structure, and notable quotes, all generated at clip time with no extra steps
Collapsible transcript callout — the full transcript available for searching and reference

The note name format uses YYYY-MM-DD Channel - Title so your clippings folder sorts chronologically and is scannable by source.

Why This Matters for Research

The real value isn’t the individual note — it’s what happens when you have fifty of them linked together in Obsidian. The transcript becomes searchable across your entire vault. The Mermaid mindmap gives you an instant topic scaffold you can expand into your own notes. The watched property lets you build a Dataview query that surfaces everything you’ve clipped but haven’t processed yet.

For anyone doing serious research from video sources — whether that’s technical content, investigative journalism, academic lectures, or anything else — this turns passive watching into an active, queryable knowledge base. The clip takes about two seconds. The note it produces would take fifteen minutes to write manually.

The template breaks periodically because YouTube changes its DOM. Now you know exactly what to look for when it does.

I Asked an AI to Count the Reasons We're at War With Iran

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

I had Claude scrape and synthesize dozens of news articles, then built this interactive timeline of every public justification offered by Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, Witkoff, Leavitt, and Kushner — in order, with contradictions noted. I didn’t have to editorialize much. The record does it on its own.

The Virtues of the World (and What Leadership Forgot)

2026-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

While reading Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work by Rupert Sheldrake, I came across the concept of these virtues.

Wisdom and Knowledge
Courage
Humanity
Justice
Temperance
Transcendence

These are coined as the universal, cross-cultural, and morally valued strengths identified by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman. Sheldrake argues that much of what we engage with today pushes us away from these virtues and toward their opposites. This erosion is evident across media and public discourse, and conspicuously absent from our national leadership.

I don’t think it is fair to blame individual persons for why these are missing in culture; rather, I blame the recent years in which our society reworked itself to reward bad habits and behaviors. Amongst these virtues, my favorite is transcendence, which on the surface sounds very loaded and spiritual almost in a non-tangible unattainable sort of way. When I hear the word transcendence, I picture either a bald, meditating monk or a doomsday Christian nationalist. However, I think it is our key to getting this train back on the tracks. Before discussing how to repair this, we should examine the depth of the current decline.

First, on the topic of temperance, in an age where many have more than their basic needs met, we still crave excess and greater power. We have people on social media with massive followings pushing narratives of being the alpha and their followers rewarded them for it. When it comes to the epitome of leadership in America, many voters appear to reward performative dominance as a leadership trait. The issue is obviously multi-faceted, but some underlying drivers may include a lack of self-accountability, a reluctance to think independently, and a diminishing sense of personal agency.

Exploring additional ways I see lack of virtue, we are being led by an administration that strikes down opponents by gutting oversight committees and eroding mechanisms of accountability. So much for justice. I know the US had many issues of its own to get through, but I once believed we aspired to be a country capable of offering principled leadership to the world. Instead, we viewed some of these important programs as woke and wasteful. The US recently withdrew from over 60 international organizations and treaties, some probably dumb, but many working together to tackle societal issues at large. So much for humanity and carrying the torch of caring for Earth and for future generations.

Folks like Kash Patel, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi go in front of oversight committees, and one might expect them to have an ability to answer for what they campaigned for. A call for transparency, making America safe, and showing that we are prioritizing the needs of our most vulnerable citizens. Instead, we see them refuse to engage with the evidence laid out before them. There is no wisdom here, and they appear willing to ignore evidence and public concern; furthermore, those who are supposed to hold them accountable have NOTHING to show for it so far. Where is the courage to stand up to the bullies of today who are bleeding America of the core values it once stood for. I feel a deep sense of civic disappointment at what we are permitting to unfold.

I hope that others are asking themselves, why. Why is all this happening. Why are people complacent with leaders whose main focus is: how can I further solidify my power and what ways can I enhance my self-enrichment and the interests of elites. I read it as the system being built by the elite and powerful is working. Most folks do not get the privilege of stepping back and looking at the workings of it all. They are too focused on putting food on the table, too busy distracting themselves from mental health issues, and too mentally exhausted to step back and ask what kind of character we are collectively cultivating. No single individual is likely to redirect society alone, but if we can collectively, incrementally work to live a life filled with the key traits of transcendence I trust that we will begin to change the tide of things. It is through simple daily decisions to embody these values, we will begin to value better virtues in our peers and leaders. I believe it is through cooprative commmunities that we can begin change the “societal norm” and open more opportunity for those in power to feel shame for going against these virtues. By raising our collective consciousness, we plant the conditions for outcomes that benefit humanity rather than merely ourselves.

Inspiration

2025-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Some quotes that I find inspiring:

“Embrace uncertainty and incompleteness as natural conditions of consciousness and connection.”

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent. If we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death - however mutable - our existance as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

“An icon of humanity: Motionless, senseless, without head or tail, in dire need of protection and guidance.”

That’s all for now.

The Telepathy Tapes (updated)

2026-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

A podcast series documenting apparent telepathic abilities in nonspeaking autistic individuals

Giving Attention to QRNGs (updated)

2026-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Exploring the potential influence of human attention on quantum random number generators (QRNGs) and the quest for accessible quantum tools.

Things That Make This World Better (updated)

2025-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

A curated list of things that I think more people should know about and appreciate.

Where to Find Mushrooms in Houston (updated)

2025-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Mushrooms (updated)

2025-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Texas Mushrooms Project My biggest mushroom project so far is built around texasmushrooms.org, Alexey Sergeev’s photo diary of seventeen years of mushroom walks in the forests north of Houston. I scraped his archive and turned it into a live map and seasonal visualization: The visualization site: 8,800 photographs as a map and a calendar texasmushrooms.org: the original, and the best...