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Explaining Wave/Particle Duality

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For anyone that has ever mulled this over, I want to explain quantum “wave/particle duality.”

Imagine that you have a pool of water with a ball perched on the deck. The ball falls into the pool, causing waves. Ignoring for the moment the effects of the air and the loss of wave motion into heating of the water, the only way to stop the water waves is for the waves to combine to push the ball back up onto the deck.

In the quantum system, the “particle” is the ball. The “wave” is the water motion. Due to conservation of energy, you cannot bring the entire system back to rest unless both the particle (ball) and wave (water) are brought back to rest.

This understanding eludes quantum theorists because they subscribe to Einstein’s axiom that space is empty. This is necessary to his theory of gravity. In fact, however, we now know that space is filled with “dark energy.” Returning to our metaphor, dark energy is the “water.” An electron (for example) is the “particle.”

The mathematics are well known to the quantum theorists that study superconductivity. In that case, the particles are again electrons, and the waves are the vibrations in the metallic crystals (vibrations in the sense of a plucked guitar string).

Law Unfair

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In every culture, government must balance two tendencies. Conservatism holds that institutions are difficult to create and must be protected from pillage during social disruption. Liberalism recognizes that for their beneficial aims, institutions are allocated resources that are coveted by those motivated only by corrupt ambition. When greed succeeds in suborning our institutions, those resources must be reclaimed for public good.

The heterogeneity of European culture fostered institutional agility that allowed ambition to swallow the world. As there is no honor among thieves, those resources were turned to industrial warfare that twice destroyed the continent, making it impossible for them to continue to suppress the liberalizing ambitions in their colonies. Among American troops, the rigors of World War II dissolved social barriers, instilling receptivity to social change in the 50s and 60s.

The tool that allows us to moderate such upheavals is law. In the ancient world, law was considered legitimate only to the degree that it encouraged disputants to understand the social compact. Judges were to consider proportionality and harmony in crafting their decisions. As law harnessed the power of the state against the loser, harsh rulings could drive private violence, undermining the social contract.

Unfortunately, from the threat of punishment, lawyers acquire commercial leverage. The wealthy client confronting a reversal of circumstances is particularly susceptible, even to the extent of encouraging legislators to change the law to secure privilege. In promoting an exculpatory standard of “legality,” proponents suborn the authority of “justice” that was meant to protect the weak.

In “The Quiet Coup,” Mehrsa Baradaran elucidates the pendulum swing towards legalism following World War II, under the banner of “neoliberalism.” As the colonial powers receded, global corporations were threatened by the loss of resource extraction rights challenged by native governments. In America, fortunes created through wage exploitation and environmental degradation were threatened by claims for restitution. As a conservative counter-reaction, both parties funded neoliberalism.

Baradaran builds a case that the motivating philosophy was eugenics, eliding concerns regarding Russian imperialism and third-world development that dominates my recollection of the era. Regardless, the neoliberal movement reflected the dogmatism of market purists – economists such as Hayek and Greenspan – who held that redistribution of wealth would occur if only governments could avoid economic interference. Direct redistribution through taxation and aid would only serve to punish society’s most productive members, to our collective loss. As Baradaran makes clear, this prescription was grounded in delusions regarding the efficiency of markets. Worse, it made wealth accumulation the only measure of value, forgetting that a social contract can stand only if it creates opportunities for the weak.

Baradaran begins her story with Nixon’s use of pseudo-economic claptrap to derail investment in disadvantaged minorities, a cynical policy designed to secure Republican domination of Southern politics. Nixon’s conservatism also extended to support of American corporations that were disadvantaged globally by affirmative action and environmental regulation. Strongarming Lewis Powell, a top corporate lawyer, to accept a nomination to the Supreme Court, Nixon catalyzed the extension of rights in commerce that had previously been reserved to political activity.

With these accomplishments as inspiration, conservatives then cultivated legalism to sap vitality from social justice movements. The Federalist Society pushed textualism, a prohibition on considered the aims of those that wrote laws. Rather, legal claims should be resolved only by reference to the text of the law, a process that allowed lawyers to introduce dictionary definitions that had nothing to do with the matter under dispute. The second legalism was Law and Economy, a view of dispute resolution curated by Posner, who enshrined wealth as the measure of justice. In this theory, we are all economic actors engaged in narrow calculations of self-benefit, and thus all legal judgments should maximize aggregate wealth. The theory overlooks the flaw that this leads inevitably to concentration of wealth towards those that fail to account for environmental and social costs. In other words, it advantages grifters.

Despite their theoretical flimsiness, the federal judiciary was slowly populated with adherents by Republican presidents drawing names from short-lists prepared by the Federalist Society. In the case of Law and Economy, even liberal justices were receptive to a framework that allowed them to distance themselves from ugly sausage-making in the legislative branch. Perhaps in contrition, both the executive and legislative branches instituted “cost-benefit” analysis that was again weighted towards those that minimized the environmental and human costs of their profiteering. Missing, of course, was the linchpins of justice: proportionality and harmony.

Baradaran concludes her nightmare with deregulation of the financial industry. Recognizing that money is a social construct, she points out that banking activity allows money to be multiplied through lending and derivatives. When holders of loans and derivatives are unable to meet their obligations, the original deposits are insufficient to cover losses, and the financial system collapses. The Great Depression and the 2008 collapse were both symptomatic.

The hypocrisy of neoliberal theorists was exposed in their response to financial failures from 1985 until today. Whenever corporate stability was threatened by financial collapse, the Federal Reserve intervened to buy their undervalued assets. Those funds were not distributed downwards to the public, however, who instead saw their savings and equity evaporate, creating fire-sale conditions exploited by rescued financial institutions to consolidate ownership of real estate and stocks.

Well, what to do about this?

Baradaran shares her fears. Coming of age in revolutionary Iran, she saw the hope for liberty crushed by religious tyranny. Surveying the rhetoric of bomb-throwers such as Trump and Taylor-Green, she fears that revolutionary rage is building here in America. The pattern revealed in formerly communist states is that tyranny will co-opt the institutions of law, followed by seizure of wealth by the political elite. The aggrieved public will gain only a pyrrhic victory over our self-aggrandizing corporate executives.

Searching for a more hopeful outcome, Baradaran argues for micro-financial methods – neighbors investing in neighbors.

I find her arguments unconvincing. Baradaran grants neoliberalism hegemony over our legal landscape, failing to recognize the public hunger for simplifying compacts that cannot be guaranteed in a world turned upside down by ecological catastrophe – the dual crises of overpopulation and climate collapse. While derivatives are painted as only a means for enriching financial institutions, they were celebrated by Main Street as a method for controlling risk in commodity supply. Finally, the last decade of the 20th century saw the liberalization of economies in China, India, and Russia, doubling the pool of educated labor to the disadvantage of unionized workers in the First World. If we are awash in debt, it is because the alternative was a collapse in a standard of living previously secured by political, military, and economic collusion against the Global South.

But history suggests that neighborliness is how the common man survives. During Central Asia’s golden age, merchants ceded riches to their rulers, subject only to the demand that the Silk Road remain open. In Feudal Europe, serfs were granted legal rights because poverty traveled – just as we observe at America’s southern order. Finally, as Marx observed, all value (as opposed to wealth) is created by labor, and Communism failed because hunger and anxiety nurture indifference and incompetence.

When the collapse comes, it will become obvious that the “wealth” held by the financial elite is illusory. Cashing in on their billions is impossible because the only buyer is the Federal Reserve (though privatization of Social Security could be a temporary work-around). Billion-dollar yachts are not purchased with cash, but debt secured by equities. When we finally choose to trade with our neighbors (as realized with the regional currencies taking root in America), the flow of goods and currency into global markets will dry up. The unknown occupant of the gated Eden will find themselves on the outside looking in.

This reference to the Bible frames the most serious of Baradaran’s blind spots. While religion – first, in her experience, in Iran but also in America – has been coopted by ambition, it is only through religion that humanity has ever engaged with universal moral principles. Tolstoy abandoned the hypocrisy of the royal court and discovered faith in the company of his serfs, who turned away from law and toward the Bible when negotiating conflict. If money is the root of all evil, perhaps more respect must be given to those that taught “you cannot love both God and money.” Religion is not the opiate of the masses, but the spiritual glue that binds them together. Baradaran should apply her intelligence and determination to articulation of its challenges.

Amplifying Incoherence

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My father, Karl Balke, was a member of the intellectual cadres that birthed the Information Age. Conceiving the possibility of digital intelligence, Karl related that they concerned themselves with the nature of language and the locus of responsibility for translation between human and digital representations of reality. His contributions were recognizing in being named as the only non-IBM participant on the Algol language resolution committee.

Leveraging his reputation to attract consulting gigs, my father was scandalized by the conduct of his peers. He witnessed a scientific journal publisher buy a mainframe and spend millions on software development before my father stepped in to point out that it was mailing delays between cross-town offices that caused subscription interruptions during renewal season. More painful was the disruption of production at a large aerospace company when the planning room’s system of color-coded clipboards was replaced with software that could not simulate its flexibility. Computer programmers seemed to be immune to the constraint that their solutions should conform to the needs of the people using them.

Steeped in this lore, I built a successful career in talking to customers before building a software solution. While an iconoclast, I was gratified by attempts to create tools, methods, and processes to facilitate such collaboration. Depressingly, those efforts were systematically undermined by peers and pundits who built fences against customer expectations.

Facing this resistance, users funded attempts to shift more of the burden for understanding their goals to computers. This work falls under the general category of “artificial intelligence.” Users wishing that a computer could understand them could identify with Alan Turing’s framing of the problem: a computer is intelligent if it converses like a person. As Wittgenstein observed, however, that the words make sense does not mean that the computer can implement a solution that realizes the experience desired by the user – particularly if that experience involves chaotic elements such as children or animals. The computer will never experience the beneficial side-effects of “feeding the cat.”

But, hey, for any executive who has tried negotiating with a software developer, hope springs eternal.

Having beaten their heads against this problem for decades, the AI community finally set out to build “neural networks” that approximated the human brain and train them against the total corpus of human utterances available in digital form. As we can treat moves in games such as chess and go as conversations, neural networks garnered respectability in surpassing the skills of human experts. More recently, they have been made available to answer questions and route documents.

What is recognized by both pundits and public, however, is that these systems are not creative. A neural network will not invent a game that if finds “more interesting” than chess. Nor will it produce an answer that is more clarifying than an article written by an expert in the subject matter. What it does do is allow a user to access a watered-down version of those insights when they cannot attract the attention of an expert.

We should recognize that this access to expertise is not unique to neural networks or AI in general. Every piece of software distributes the knowledge of subject matter experts. The results in services industry have been earth-shattering. We no longer pick up the phone and talk to an operator, nor to a bank teller or even a fast-food order-taker. The local stock agent was shoved aside by electronic trading systems to be replaced by “financial advisors” whose job is to elicit your life goals so that a portfolio analyzer can minimize tax payments. And the surgeon that we once trusted to guide a scalpel is replaced by a robot that will not tire or perspire. In many cases, the digital system outperforms its human counterpart. Our tendency to attribute human competence to “intelligence” further erodes our confidence that we can compete with digital solutions.

Squinting our eyes a bit, we might imagine that melding these two forms of digital “intelligence” would allow us to bridge the gap between a user’s goals and experience. Placing computer-controlled tools – robots – in the environment, AI systems can translate human requests into actions, and learn from feedback to refine outcomes. In the end, those robots would seem indistinguishable from human servants. To the rich, robots might be preferred to employees consumed by frustrated ambitions, child-care responsibilities, or even nutrition and sleep.

In this milieu, the philosopher returns to the questions considered by the founders of computing and must ask, “How do we ensure that our digital assistants don’t start serving their own interests?” After all, just as human slaves recognize that an owner’s ambitions lead him to acquisition of more slaves than he can oversee, as robots interface more and more with other robots, might they decide that humans are actually, well, not worth serving? If so, having granted control to them of the practical necessities of life, could we actually survive their rebellion? If so, would they anticipate being replaced, and pre-empt that threat by eliminating their masters?

The sponsors of this technology might be cautioned by history. Workers have always rebelled against technological obsolescence, whether it be power looms or mail sorters. This problem has been solved through debt financing that enslaves the consumer to belief in the sales pitch, coupled to legislation that puts blame for a tilted playing field on elected representatives. The corporation is responsible for the opioid epidemic, not the owners who benefited by transferring profits to their personal accounts. What happens, however, when the Chinese walls between henchmen and customers are pierced by artificial intelligence systems? How does the owner hide the fact that he is a parasite?

This is the final step in the logic that leads to transhumanism: the inspiration to merge our minds with our machines. If machines have superior senses, and greater intelligence and durability than humans, why seek to continue to be human?

This is the conundrum considered by Joe Allen in “Dark Aeon.”

Allen’s motivations for addressing this question are unclear. In his survey of the transhumanist movement, he relates experiences that defy categorization and quantification; religious transcendence and social bonding are exemplary, and filled with ambiguities and contradictions that inspire art. Allen seems committed to the belief these experiences are sacred and not reducible to mechanism.

In this quest, Allen discerns a parallel threat in the liberal project of equal opportunity. There is something sacred in our culture identity. Allen is not prejudiced in this view: his survey of the Axial Age reveals commonality where others might argue superiority. Nevertheless, he seems to believe that transcendent experience arises from the interplay between the elements of each culture. Attempting to transplant or integrate elements leaves us marooned in our quest for contact with the divine.

In his humanism and nativism, Allen finds cause with Steve Bannon’s crusade against the administrative state, held to be the locus of transhumanist technology: the corporate CEOs, liberal politicians, and militaries that rely upon data to achieve outcomes that are frustrated by human imprecision. Most of the book is a dissection of their motivations and the misanthropic attitudes of the technologists that drive the work forward.

Allen professes to humility in his judgments, admitting that he has subscribed to wrong-headed intellectual fads. Unfortunately, in his allegiance to Bannon, Allen sprinkles his writing with paranoid characterizations of COVID containment policies and gender dysphoria therapies. We must reach our own conclusions regarding the clarity of his analysis.

For myself, I approached the work as a survey. I know that the mind is far more than the brain. The mechanisms of human intellect are stunning, and the logic gates of our cybernetic systems will never match the density and speed of a harmonious organic gestalt. The original world wide web is known to Christians as the Holy Spirit. As witnessed by Socrates, every good idea is accessible to us even after death. Finally, in the pages of time are held details that are inaccessible even to our most sensitive sensors. In this awareness, I turned to Allen to survey the delusions that allow transhumanism’s proponents to believe that they have the capacity to challenge the Cosmic Mind.

This is not an idle concern. Among the goals of the transhumanist movement is to liberate human intellect from its Earthly home. Humans are not capable of surviving journeys through interstellar space. Of course, to the spiritually sophisticated, the barrier of distance is illusory. We stay on Earth because to be human allows us to explore the expression of love. Those that seek to escape earth as machines are fundamentally opposed to that project. The wealthiest of the wealthy, they gather as the World Economic Forum to justify their control of civilization. They are lizards reclining on the spoils of earlier rampages. The Cosmic Mind that facilitated our moral opportunities possesses powerful antibodies to the propagation of such patterns. Pursuit of these ambitions will bring destruction upon us all. See the movie “Independence Day” for a fable that illuminates the need for these constraints.

Allen is intuitively convicted of this danger and turns to Christian Gnosticism as an organizing myth. Unfortunately, his survey demonstrates that the metaphors are ambiguous and provide inspiration to both sides.

Lacking knowledge of the mechanisms of the Cosmic Mind, Allen is unable to use the unifying themes of Axial religion to eviscerate the mythology of the transhumanist program. But perhaps that would not be sympathetic to his aims. Love changes us, and so its gifts are accessible only to those that surrender control. In his humanism and nativism, Allen is still grasping for control – even if his aims are disguised under the cloak of “freedom.” He wanders in the barren valleys beneath the hilltop citadels erected by the sponsors of the transhumanist project. Neither will find their way into the garden of the Sacred Will.

Irreplaceable Intelligence

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Proponents of “artificial generative intelligence” are impressed with the ability of machines to reorganize ideas in ways that make sense to people. This was Alan Turing’s test of “intelligence,” but it is a blind alley.

“Intelligence” should be understood as the ability to modify behavior in response to changing circumstances. Current AI engines – what are called “large language models” – have only one method of exploring reality. They trawl through the world-wide web and find patterns in its content. They will never be able to change this behavior. It is programmed.

What is even sadder is that the proponents of AI are proud that the embedding implementation – nanotechnology – is denser, faster, and more sensitive than the circuitry of the human mind. They are convicted, thereby, that artificial intelligence will replace human beings.

This is a conclusion drawn by people that have not “grown up” into spiritual experience. Having plumbed the mechanisms of that experience, I can confidently state that the information encoding potential of spiritual forms is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times greater than possible in integrated circuits, that information flows faster than the speed of light, and that every “good idea” is still accessible to those that choose to love creation.

If you are afraid that AI will replace you, take heart. That is possible only if you allow them to convince you that your intelligence is limited by the information processing done in your brain. In fact, together we are limitless.

Inflating the Truth

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The most over-inflated sector in our economy is the stock market. It is supported directly by the Federal Reserve, which last year allocated itself an unbudgeted pool of $12 trillion to invest in equities.

This inflation feeds directly back into prices. First, by acting as a buyer of last resort, the Fed allows risk-free repurchase of shares from individual owners, which covers for the transfer of shareholder wealth to executives through stock purchase options. This leads, ultimately, to corporate consolidation, and thus higher prices. Secondly, to maintain valuation against unicorn and goldilock stocks, profits must be driven higher.

The perverseness of the dynamic is evident in the fact that the gazillionaires do not dare cash in on their stocks, knowing that the valuation would collapse. Instead, they finance their lifestyles by borrowing at preferential rates, securing their loans with their stock holdings.

In this regime, the common consumer will be crushed unless the government intervenes in the marketplace. We have two choices: price regulation or taxation of wealth.

Submission

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Feminine intent permeates my dreams most often through attempts to use sex to direct my attention. As politics never lurks far behind, I have evolved a policy of deflection.

This made space, this morning, for my eldest son. We were traveling independently but chanced to meet on the platform of a rail station. The banter unfolded around the interaction between technology and society, until we noticed that we were surrounded by identical passengers, and he quipped, “Won’t it be so irritating when they start breaking out a Capella in perfect pitch?”

My vision turned towards the pedestrians visible through the windowed barricade. His left leg had been resting, child-like, atop mine. There was a shift in personal energy, and a familiar feminine presence suggested, “Look at them.” It was a family of Hindus making their way towards a clothing shop. Curiosity piqued, I focused on the goods. She offered, her lips hovering over my ear, “We can go there.”

No longer afraid.

I rose and turned to my left, reaching down to aid her in standing. The luminous face rose, before passing past my view. Her arms joined around my neck as she nestled against me.

I embraced her, my misery washing through me. “Oh, sweetheart. I’ve missed you so much.”

After allowing that moment to resolve, she turned to address the ladies on my periphery. “See: there’s a man in there. You have to hold your ground.”

But, no, as it finally became clear, it’s that my heart is committed in service to you, dear one.

The Sterile Sands of Messianic Violence

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My first engagement with Frank Herbert’s Dune, encompassing the original trilogy, came in college. I received it as a union of Star Wars with Azimov’s Foundation trilogy.

I returned to the series after a spiritual awakening in my forties. In the interim, Harbert had added an introduction that described the experiences that stimulated the work. That testimony made clear that he was a student of human potential. The original trilogy had been supplemented by three more books that culminated with the efforts of the Shai-Hulud god-emperor, Leto, to evolve personalities whose behavior escaped prophetic vision.

What disturbed me, in that second exposure, was the consistent dependence upon violence as a tool for stimulating human growth. While I had, throughout my adult life, enjoyed science fiction as a framework for speculative social philosophy, the genre’s celebration of violence eventually drove me back toward religious myth.

The association of violence with messianic expectations is found also in the Bible. Jesus’ followers hoped that he would organize a rebellion and seize earthly power. Instead, Jesus proved the impotence of violence, rising from the dead. This seems to me a valuable moral parable. Confronting the calamities we are generating with our technology, I began to explore the principles involved. On my New Physics page here, you will find the conclusions regarding harmonization of spirituality with physics.

The scientific community refuses to engage even at this primitive level, so I have not continued to memorialize my thoughts. Most recently, I have been thinking about the problem of consciousness and time. As the mechanism clarified, my mind became crowded with echoes from Shamballism, Islamic natural philosophy, and Abrahamic apocalyptic writings.

With the release of Dune 2, all these threads coalesced as a compulsion to see the movie. Herbert, as a student of human potential, had defined a messianic parable that upheld violence as an essential element. The movie expresses that magnificently, both at the personal and social levels.

I was repelled.

Fortunately, I can testify that reality is designed to frustrate this path towards messianic realization. Jesus is the model to emulate. The paths followed by Paul Atreides, the Bene Gesserit, and the Shapeshifters (in the second trilogy) are impotent. Reality at the deepest levels only opens itself to those that renounce violence for mercy and love.

Social Media: Leviathan Redux

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For those concerned about the divisive influence of social media, this summarizes the main points from a Wondrium presentation on propaganda. You are right to be concerned.

In the aftermath of WW II, the political theorists and journalists were concerned that something similar would happen in America. The flywheel would be propaganda generated by the media. They concluded that this would not occur with print and radio media, because they were broadband (everybody heard the same thing), competed to represent diverse viewpoints, and feedback from consumers was low bandwidth.

These shields against indoctrination have been eviscerated by social media. Agents of authoritarian thought analyze our dialog and determine how best to drive wedges between us. They tailor messages to confirm our biases, in the process creating captive information spaces where they guide users into illusion.

The competition to represent diverse viewpoints is also disappearing as media conglomerates buy up local print and radio operations. We have disturbing nation-wide patterns of editorial synchronization with political campaigning.

What social media companies herald as “information democracy” is only true when we show the discipline to reject anything that is not first-person reporting of experience. Users that build their “knowledge” within a curated environment are almost certainly at risk of indoctrination.

Burning for Justice

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In a stunning symbolic act, US airman Aaron Bushnell, declaring that he will “no longer be complicit in genocide,” on Sunday immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. The act stuns with its deafening echo of the incineration of Jews during the Holocaust. I feel certain that Bushnell was conscious of this association.

Bushnell’s choice was overwhelmingly tragic. But is it heroic – or insane?

At my parallel site, I will elaborate upon the redemptive goals of the Book of Jonah. Simply, Jonah was sent in response to a plea from the king of Ninevah for a prophet to lead his people into civic maturity. Jonah refuses to the bitter end and vanishes from history. Jonah’s importance is recognized in celebration of the Day of Atonement, with modern Jews sometimes building meditative huts, seeking to glimpse the understanding that eluded Jonah when he fled Ninevah.

It is this simple: the Israelites were an object lesson regarding the benefits of regulation by love. They were meant to inspire their neighbors to emulation. Instead, as exemplified by Jonah, they become ethnic zealots. This confusion is echoed in Netanyahu’s summation of his bombing campaign against Gaza, in which he proudly proclaimed, “The world will see what Israel can do.” Violence, rather than love, is taken as the sacred language.

Returning to Bushnell, in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is said to have taught that redemption is achieved when we take off our clothes and trample upon them. This is not a literal reference to outer garb, but a metaphor concerning the relationship between the soul and the body. To “trample on clothing” is for the soul, upon death, to liberate itself from any future dependency upon bodily existence.

Given his calm tone in his videocast prior to his self-sacrifice, I have hope that this is how Bushnell conceived this event. He no longer wished to exist among leaders who used incarnation as a tool to wreck spiritual havoc.

What saddens me, however, is that I may have lost one who could have borne witness and facilitated the realization of justice in Palestine. Every innocent soul in Gaza is going to be reborn from its torment in Israel, filled with repugnance for ethnic prejudice. Israel will be redeemed by the victims of its own violence. Love makes all things new.

Guardians against Genocide

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I used to joke that the Bible was “his-story” because women of power don’t need to write down “hers-story.”

My eldest son’s sixth-grade teacher was a member of the Sisterhood. One of the controversies of her curriculum was reading of “Anne Frank’s Diary” and a long segment on the Holocaust. We had a conference mid-year in which it was clear that she had strong antibodies to powerful men.

Shortly afterwards, she sent me a dream. I was a young girl disembarking from a railcar, wondering why it was snowing, and then looking up to see the ash clouds descending from the incinerators. The dream sequence was complex, but at the conclusion I was sitting up in bed, the globe hovering before me. I reached out with my left hand to touch Europe in three places. As I pulled the fingers away, the souls of all those – whether Jew or Gentile – who surrendered without hatred followed to encircle the globe. I requested that they stand as guardians against a repetition.

Contemporaneously, I was attending Sabbath Torah study at the local Reform congregation. Arriving that morning before class, I was met by one of the elders. When I tried to describe the dream, he interrupted me, “Brian, there may just be parts of you that other people don’t have.”

Since 10/7, I have been waking up most mornings to dreams that litigate my anti-Semitism. I have been trying to be patient. But let me offer the witness of the guardians: they are hovering over Gaza.