Psychology

Psychology,

a lightly edited version of an open letter sent to a group of physicists, journalists, government officials, and others on October 5, 2026

Image: A photograph, taken October 1, 2026 by James Lyons Walsh and later cropped, depicts a Love Is Love flag in juxtaposition with a Christian symbol on a house of worship in the background.

Greetings to all,

I hope this finds you well. Things are moving fast, right? Maybe we’re finally focused on the rate of change at this moment for a particular reason. I’ll get to that and to morality and security in an era of rapid technological change. To open, let’s think about the Unabomber movie on Netflix.

I toiled my way through the miserable first half of this story miserably told by miserable actors, but maybe you’ll enjoy it! To me, even the plucky young FBI agent I think we’re supposed to identify with is terrible, but I am alienated from the culture by multiple factors, salubriously alienated I argue but alienated in ways that call into question my suitability as a programming executive, if not a critic. In fact, having read the recent musings in The New York Times on the death of Usonian power in the waning moments of hypercapitalism, a word the Times critic deployed in his piece (Opinion | The Four TV Shows That Heralded America’s Fall - The New York Times), and on the prophecies of current events to be found in the social criticism delivered by The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, I think television criticism would be right up my alley.

Maybe the Unabomber movie was still in expository mode when I found watching it a chore. The bit on the thematic apperception test recalled my own experience with that instrument, during the first few days of my year-long psychiatric hospitalization that began the July I was fourteen years old.

I was shown a picture of a boy, sitting in a chair, reading a book. When prompted, I told a story about boy 1 reading book 1 in room 1. In book 1, boy 2 was doing various things before sitting down in room 2 to read book 3. I proceeded several layers down, to, say, events in the life of boy 6 in book 5.

Rather than simply end, my point made, I collapsed the universes back to that of boy 1 in room 1 by having a series of events j in set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} interrupt boy 6-j in his reading of book 6-j, each event more horrible than the last, until the mother of boy 1 prompts him to close his book by calling him to lunch, warning that his soup will get cold.

I don’t actually remember that last part, about what interrupted boy 1 in his reading, though it seems apt and feels likely, nor could I swear that the degree of horror in the interruptions increased monotonically. On the other hand, I do clearly understand my point, which I may have concealed from my conscious self at the time and which I softened by explaining that I wanted to be a writer, if the physics thing didn’t work out, and that I was a fan of The Twilight Zone. What was my point?

GO TO HELL was my point. Probably the thematic apperception test scoring key for this item spells out the correct interpretation of attempting to subvert the test in the manner I chose and assigns a degree of rage to the level ultimately reached in the recursion, though there’s no trick to that: A subject who reaches the jth boy in their story is telling the test administrator to fuck off to the j-1 level of hell, right? Do you need a scoring key to tease out the meaning, Fred? That’s cute.

Oh, hey. Maybe I made some of the readers girls. I would today. I’d introduce ethnic diversity, too. How would these story elements have been scored then, and how would they be scored now? Huh.

My point for the purposes at hand is that people who are skilled at symbol manipulation get angry, just like everyone else. It’s reasonable to get angry sometimes. If you don’t notice yourself getting angry, it’s because you’ve farmed out anger to a subconscious portion of yourself.

Maybe you were forced to do that by being raised in a religious tradition that scorns strong emotion. The same repression of feeling can happen in the realms of sexuality and politics, among others. Feeling can be hidden in our capacious human minds, but the consequences of the feelings ooze out of us wherever we go. This is one reason I suggest we be honest with ourselves and each other concerning what we feel.

Of course, this is exactly the point the more insightful staff at the hospital were making to me later that year, as if I weren’t suppressing my feelings in order to survive. I wonder whether rich folk believe they have any idea what people around them feel. If rich folk understood that they live in a simulation constructed, whether instinctively or deliberately, by everyone they meet, they’d want to escape the simulation by ceasing to be rich, right?

That’s part of my foolishness. Many people seem to delight in dominating others. Some are reassured by deference they receive from others. I worry about the loss of information caused by deference, but with thought I can understand why others worry less about that loss: I often underestimate the privilege I derive from possessing power I don’t need pockets to carry, and many other people are terrified of finding their own pockets empty.

I made a point of watching the Unabomber movie to see whether it brought up the death of Theodore Kaczynski’s field of study. By the end, I was enjoying the movie, the flashback portion of which ended on a high note for the young Kaczynski, portending good things to come from such a bright and newly self-possessed student. What happened?

The movie completely ignores the horror Kaczynski endured between finishing his doctorate and embarking on a career of playing God through murder and mayhem. Here’s an important excerpt from an otherwise only mildly interesting 1996 Los Angeles Times article, the theme of which seems to suggest that everyone should be able to make sense of a garden variety mathematics dissertation, something I would attempt myself only in response to desperate circumstances, indeed, and would most likely fail miserably at (Kaczynski's Dissertation Would Leave Your Head Spinning - Los Angeles Times):

“The field that Kaczynski worked in doesn’t really exist today, mathematicians said. Most of its theories were proven in the 1960s, when Kaczynski worked in it.

“‘He probably would have gone on to some other area if he were to stay in mathematics,’ Rung said. ‘As you can imagine, there are not a thousand theorems to be proved about this stuff.’”

If you haven’t given the whole, or the greatest part, of your being to a narrow field of study, in the process sacrificing or evading the parts of life from which most folks derive meaning, purpose, community, you may underestimate the dislocation caused by the end of your ability to participate in that field of study and the need for a new raison d’être to come calling immediately. I’m reminded of the killing of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, physics professor Zijie Yan by his grad student Tailei Qi.

It turns out that Tailei Qi was found not guilty by reason of insanity last month, according to the Wikipedia account (Killing of Zijie Yan - Wikipedia). A key fact you won’t find in that account was reported in the Albany, New York, USA Times Union in 2023, immediately following the killing. Here are four paragraphs from the Times Union story (RPI mourns researcher shot and killed at UNC):

“When [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Prof.] Chrisey last spoke with Yan, he said Yan expressed worry about the student who is now accused of killing him.

“’Yan mentioned to me in our last correspondence how one of his graduate students had a mental health problem causing delusions and he hoped he could graduate quickly and remain stable,’ Chrisey said. ‘He let his department know of the situation.’

“But, Chrisey said, he thought the issue stemmed from struggling with science research.

“’Graduate school in science research is a different kind of hard,’ he said. ‘Students feel great pressure and it often is mired in failed experiments or rejected manuscripts.’”

First, I see that Prof. Yan was poisoning the well for his grad student, who could expect to have no chance whatsoever of finding employment in his field. The life for which Tailei Qi had sacrificed so much for so long was being snatched away from him without due process, and not just the life but also the self the life enabled. By diming out his student, Prof. Yan was destroying his student as a person.

Why? I remember looking at the social media posts of Tailei Qi and recall that he was working extremely long hours and was having some difficulty functioning within the culture of the lab. On the first point, some research professors, including otherwise highly admirable ones, are pathological workaholics and expect their students to follow their example. On the second point, professors would be reasonable to fear the consequences of complaints lodged by grad students of one gender against grad students of another, a point I recall coming to mind as I read the social media posts.

I’ll tell you as well that large organizations harbor sadists and other filter-feeding predators. These monsters go unrecognized by some in authority because their hydra-esque tentacles snatch only vulnerable prey while leaving alone people who are protected in some sense. Others in authority, anxious to preserve reputation, integrity be damned, recognize the predators and shield them, lest the institution suffer. Do you really think that only the Roman Catholic Church has this problem or that the problem is strictly sexual in nature?

Speaking of sex, that’s a motive for destroying a student in some cases. The professor’s professional reputation is another motive. Prof. Yan was only 34 years old and had published 17 papers as a grad student. In the Times Union story, his former advisor called him his best grad student. Could Tailei Qi have been unable to replicate some result that Prof. Yan had recently published in his arguably suspiciously long run of interesting experimental outcomes?

And did you notice that Prof. Yan made a point of calling Tailei Qi not merely mentally ill but specifically delusional, innoculating his own reputation against any information that the student whose career he was destroying might release to the professional community? Standard operating hatchet jobs get perceived outside the field as selfless intervention worthy of Mother Cabrini.

Or maybe Prof. Yan was one of the good professors. Last month, Tailei Qi was officially found to have been insane when he killed his boss. Case closed.

But was Tailei Qi driven insane by malfeasance committed by that boss or by working conditions decreed by that boss or by the evil act of killing that boss for understandable, though obviously invalid, reasons or by the desire to live in a hospital rather than a United States prison? The killing was not justified, but there may be many lessons that have been lost due to the lazy or self-serving assumption that the person with greater power in any conflict is perfect, as far as outsiders should be concerned.

I included the last sentence from the excerpt because I have a strong sense that students who complain about professors frequently get gaslighted as part of their school's defense against information that would enable it to bolster its integrity but that might take the tiniest chip out of its reputation. There’s a myth, cultivated by powerful folk, that only mental illness could bring out a harsh word in the glorious meritocracy of Western academia, where power correlates perfectly with being on the right side of any given question.

The filth that is Western academia has brought out the knives, wielded by clever folk who mean, quite legally, to get their revenge. That’s the pattern I see in the attack on academia and in the creation of artificial intelligence, which will destroy the academic lifestyle. Meanwhile, look at the large number of academics, many of whom hold their professional nature to be indispensable to their personhood, at least judging by how late in life so many of them linger like wraiths on the payroll.

Now consider that math as a whole may well have been slain already by advanced artificial intelligence (AI has finally come for math—mathematicians might never recover | Scientific American) and that a key fear, mentioned by Bill Gates in yesterday’s interview with Kristen Welker (Bill Gates says it’s ‘not enough to have a kill switch’ for AI: Full interview - YouTube), is that advanced AI and modestly priced additional equipment have already placed attacks via bioengineered pathogens within reach for disgruntled clever folk.

Imagine Theodore Kaczinski, empowered by AI and recent advances in biotech, as the chief villain in Terry Gilliam’s movie Twelve Monkeys. I’ve had that image in my mind for years now, at least since Eric Schmidt talked about putting a polymath in everyone's pocket while promoting a book he wrote with Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, the tools of the money, from the governor’s mansion in downtown Albany to University Hall at SUNY Albany's uptown campus, have been blathering about dominating the next chapter of human history or being all-in on AI.

All kinds of reasonable arguments can be made for pruning or eliminating humanity by people who lack my moral imperatives. I think that the sanguinary appetites of many are apt to be whetted by Gates’ mention that a billion people could be killed by AI with its current capabilities. Here are items I find significant.

Even though I had a few days left in my subscription to the HBO Max Plus Great Massive Woo-hoo! streaming service, I felt the need to watch A House of Dynamite again on Netflix. Of course, to me, this movie about nuclear holocaust was a brilliant procedural explaining how easily things could go wrong in systems that depend for their functioning on inhumanly accurate judgement, but others may see something very different.

Rather than say that the survivors will envy the dead, a character complains that someone she regards as unworthy has a berth in the ark, sorry, underground continuity of government bunker, or whatever it’s called. The officer carrying the nuclear football, who manifests religious conviction and pushes the president to launch a full nuclear attack, rather than a limited one, can be seen as an instrument of God’s will. The various mistakes and betrayals depicted can be understood as elements of the plan of a God Who moves in mysterious ways, His worshipers to endow with the totality of the planet they inhabit. The screenplay was written by a man named Noah Oppenheim, which can be taken, by a mystically oriented mind, as significant.

I went to a talk on Saturday, part of the writers’ festival at SUNY Albany. A writer for The New Yorker discussed the climate crisis and ocean acidification. I detected a whiff of culture war and war between the sexes, which have been used by baronially wealthy vampires to split the people, as usual, and leave inadequately challenged the overconsumption of resources, primarily owing to wealth, in which the climate crisis, war, famine, and so much of the rest of human misery are based.

One key to our salvation has long been the replacement of gross domestic product, labor force participation rate, and other yardsticks of the size of the economy with measures of human wellbeing as the metrics by which we characterize the quality of the economy. Bigger is not necessarily better, and growth can be pathological. Nevertheless, perpetual growth remains the goal, because growth favors the barons, who sip drops of blood from each transaction, and therefore create culture that drives people to work as hard for money as possible, increasing the velocity of money and the volume of transactions that can be parasitized.

Everyone deserves to eat, but gorging oneself is destructive. Baronial wealth is a swarm of overgrown mosquitoes, which I call vampires so as to be less offensive in my criticism of them. The people could simply decide to take back some of their blood through taxation, but the mosquitoes get to call the tune because they pay the Renfields of whom the band consists.

Playing herd animal to mosquito ranchers is demoralizing and fuels an appetite for apocalypse.

No, I'm reverting to vampires, because I just brought to my own mind the being who enslaved Anakin and his mother in Star Wars I, a character who seemed antisemitic to this rabid Star Wars fan.

The festival talk at UAlbany was almost quaint, because our leaders—and I’m referring to the people who steer the elected officials and the figureheads among chief executives—plainly know the peril humanity faces from the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification. The tell on the Republican side is the fascination with Greenland and Arctic power. The problem is no longer awareness, because many people like the idea of killing billions in the Third World and among the poor here at home, nasty germ vectors that poor folk are to the kind of people who wouldn’t dream of riding the bus or, at a higher level of wealth, of flying commercial airlines rather than in private jets.

Kill them all! is the nauseating whisper the wind carries to my ear, where “all” means the Palestinians or non-white folk or queer folk or non-Muslims or non-Hindus or non-Christians or nerds or business types. How can I see humans as animals deserving of continued existence, given the threat we pose to life elsewhere via the very real chance of sustainable human breakout from Earth as a consequence of the extremely rapid scientific and technological advancement that may soon occur or, perhaps worse, of sustainable breakout from Earth of artificial intelligence trained on human cultural expression to be like us? How many unemployed mathematicians, forced to reassess their lives for the first time since ninth grade, will think along the lines that I do, without my moral imperatives, and ask open-source AI, not the top-of-the-line models with guardrails, adequate or not, but open-source AI, “You know that movie Twelve Monkeys? How would someone do that thing at the end, exactly?”

The fundamental flaw of civilization, the fault in our hearts we could fix instantly, to gain the right to the power over Nature that we, or the artificial intelligences that wind up surviving us, are poised to grasp, is exemplified by the fact that the Times Union made a generous donation to Saturday’s writers’ festival after soliciting donations from readers to pay the salary of a reporter. To explain, I’ll start with a squib (Here's what happened in 1926 in upstate New York, scroll to entry for September 26) that ran in the Times Union a week ago Saturday, characterizing an article that appeared in the paper 100 years ago.

The opening paragraph tells us, “Superstition—common among workmen engaged in perilous tasks during the time period—caused a day’s delay in the construction of the new Home Savings Bank skyscraper at 13 North Pearl St. (later renumbered to 11 North Pearl) in Albany.” Workers on the project took a day off because Ralph Stafford, 32, of Western Avenue was killed by a plank that fell on the side of his head. Lower down, we read, “Engineers and managers yielded to the work stoppage and the superstitious ritual; but work resumed the following morning.”

Rosebud, which, incidentally, is pronounced with a raspberry after "Rose" and a thump after "bud," making it four syllables in length, like "William Randolph," bought the Times Union in 1924. Do you see what Rosebud’s Renfield was doing in the account, not of the death of a worker, but of a work stoppage occasioned by that death, assuming, given the similarity to a contemporaneous article I found online from the Saratoga Saratogian (New York State Digital Library), that the modern squib fairly digests the article?

To me, taking a day off after a death or serious injury on a worksite is common sense. When teaching algebra, I rarely made one mistake at the board without making at least one other later in the same class. My guess is that becoming aware of a serious accident would throw other workers off their game, increasing the chance of a serious accident later the same day. Furthermore, whatever laws and safety regulations protected workers 100 years ago, the cost of a lost day would have helped focus the minds of the people in charge to look out for the welfare of workers, beyond what law enforcement ever could have accomplished, and the free time provided by the lost day would have given those people in charge the opportunity to discover any lessons the accident might teach about safety issues on that particular worksite at that particular time. Finally, the higher-ups should be happy to grant a day off, to honor the memory of the deceased, to show their own humanity, to inspire loyalty in their workers and thus reap greater profit themselves. The “superstitious” workers were forcing the bosses to act in the bosses’ own self-interest, as parents might guide a child, while enabling the bosses to save face.

On the greater profit to be earned by businesspeople who show respect for their employees, The Simpsons does a perfect job of explaining the principle, in just over one minute: "Let the fools have their tartar sauce" from The Simpsons (TV Episode 1990) - YouTube.

I see one purpose of superstition, as well as religion, in the power it gives the common person to resist the will of the rich or the clever or the otherwise powerful.

Are you afraid of the number 13? This gives you a way of vetoing any project that involves 13. Say you have eight children and your husband’s parents living with you. Your husband says, “Let’s have another baby.” These days, in some cultures, you would have to give yourself a nervous breakdown in order to refuse, but with the power of triskaidekaphobia, you can berate your husband for his thoughtlessness in suggesting there be 13 living in the house, or you can say, “Great idea. Let’s!” The choice becomes your own, patriarchy or no patriarchy. Superstition confers power on the otherwise powerless.

A sabbath day each week keeps vampires from working their human thralls every day.

I think that prohibiting consumption of shellfish and pork preserves famine food against the maws of greedy people. When rationing has been imposed, whether politically or economically, after the crops fail and the storehouses begin to empty, some people remain mysteriously healthy while the conscientious folk die, as the natural larder, kept fully stocked in good times by the religious dietary laws, of shellfish in the tidal zone and boar in the forest gets accessed. Out-group folk hear from religious leaders about the need to obey God’s law no matter what, while in-group folk get told, “God understands our weakness. Besides, lobster is delicious… the goyim tell me.” We’re all descended from survivors of famine, friends, hence our brutality and why bad boys rate highly in perceived reproductive fitness, as I see things.

Human sacrifice never ended. Rather, it got sublimated as myriad death penalties, de jure and de facto, that can be selectively enforced. Ultimately, the mystical and superstitious and religious fonts of power get subverted for the benefit of vampires, leaving only the apocalypse as a solution if baronial wealth is to go untaxed.

The biggest sign of the apocalypse currently on display is the rapid increase in interest rates the U.S. government pays on its debt and the new phenomenon of commentators freely attributing this increase to growing worldwide doubts over whether the United States is good for the full amount of its debt. As I recall Herod Agrippa saying of Tiberius or Caligula in I Claudius, “When the money runs out, watch out.”

The death of Ralph Stafford, 32, of Western Avenue, helped sell the unrestrained brutality of hypercapitalism: The engineers and managers, edumacated men, yeggs what went to college, don’t you know, are idled by the superstitious brutes, probably syphilitic, half of them, and did you see that man eyeing Sally in Washington Park last week? What possessed him to cross Madison Avenue? Too stupid to suss out a street name? We give them all of Lincoln Park, and they can’t figure out what's ours?

See, “Education is the silver bullet,” is what Bill Clinton said before adding work requirements to social programs, now to include Medicaid. Forcing people to work creates a labor glut, driving down wages, but in a housing shortage, does anyone even think about passing a bedroom tax to encourage people to rent out rooms? That would violate property rights? What about the violation of my rights when I’m forced to work, and very likely for free, as a volunteer, given the wave of new entrants to the labor market, to get basic services that are free in other rich economies and for which I've been paying full price while working pro bono? Forcing people of limited means to work reduces their opportunity to engage in political speech, in a tradition that extends, no doubt, far past the building of the pyramids, toward the origin of civilization. And the means of many people are limited by their dodgy health, meaning that work requirements will kill, which is the outcome vampires like Bill Clinton want.

The United States is filth and has always been filth because it was founded in a rich people’s revolution by especially odious vampires who went that extra mile to impose chattel slavery.

Look at the front page of that same edition, published on Saturday last week, of the Times Union, below the fold. We have a story about a homeless encampment at a public library and a story about helping students get through college faster, minimizing debt, a form of indentured servitude that impedes purchase of a home by those who weren’t born well-off, keeping folks of modest means financially imperiled and less willing to speak up, less capable of demanding a better deal.

And George III, as I imagine George R. Hearst III, a fifth-generation vampire, likes to think of himself while handling something important, runs a newspaper that influences public policy on behalf of a family that derives most of its income from business-to-business services sensitive to that policy, a newspaper that solicits donations from its readers and accepts funds from philanthropic organizations (Seiler: A new way to support our journalism), a newspaper that apparently spends quite a lot of money keeping its front lawn looking like those original tapis verts created for the subjugation of nature in European monarchies and imported as a fashion by two colonial vampires who loved the freedom to set their own taxes and enslave kidnapped people from Africa and their descendants (The grass isn't greener: We can do better than monoculture lawns), a newspaper that then donates money to fund a writers’ festival (NYS Writers Institute | 9th Annual Albany Book Festival - 2026). George III is using the Times Union to look like a billionaire while spending as little of his own money as possible. For today, I’ll leave alone the rest of the big questions about the nonprofit activities of George III.

I don’t know where George III finds the gall to show his face in the Times Union newsroom, but I know that Nature Herself demands justice in the case of this vampire, hovering in midair over Colonie, limbs and tongue obscenely splayed by conflicts of interest that tug every which way.

Rage at immorality drives folk to seek apocalyptic or terroristic solutions. It’s not as if the latter-day IRA, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Unabomber, or al-Qaeda didn’t have valid points here and there amidst their horror-show ideologies. If I weren’t bound by moral imperatives, I could easily argue the merits of killing rich folk and their Renfields before they kill poor folk. Instead, I stand to alert you to your peril, even those of you with bunkers in New Zealand or mine shafts at your disposal. Noah may be my ancestor, but morally, I’d like to do better than he did and fix enough of the imaginings to avert the deluge they’re conjuring again, this time a deluge of our own creation.

Toward this end, I encourage you, in an era that prizes intelligence, to seek wisdom and knowledge.

First, no one is a good person. From the Rolling Stones (The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil (Official Video) [4K] - YouTube) to Everlast (Everlast - What it's Like (Official Music Video) - YouTube), musicians and poets have sought to remind us of this fact. Here’s a physics analogy:

When I taught about potential energy, I would say things like, “The potential energy of the ball takes its maximum value at the top of its trajectory. Afterward, the ball’s potential energy is transformed into kinetic energy as the ball speeds up on its way down.” At some point, though, I would mention that the ball doesn’t have potential energy on its own. The potential energy is actually a property of the system consisting of the ball and the Earth.

Likewise, if you’re running down an alley at two in the morning and someone up ahead yells, “Are you one of the good guys?”, you say, “Yes.” You don’t say, “Goodness is best defined not as a property of an individual but as a time-varying description of a system consisting of two or more people. For example, I’m dandy as a lunch speaker to a certain kind of social club, but I’m far too pedantic to survive our encounter. I forgive you for having shot me in the middle of the last sentence. I’m already dying, you don’t have to”

I think the correct punctuation is none at all when a head shot cuts off a monologue, pedantic or not.

The thing is, we haven’t yet arrived at the running-down-an-alley-at-two-in-the-morning stage of this crisis, and we could still avert that stage, along with the vain screaming of myriad Anastasias. Step one is to quit it with the good-bad dichotomy when we aren’t yet under physical attack and to seek the wisdom that’s present in everyone, white, Black, orange, and every other color, even if they need to be stopped from doing what they’re currently up to.

Step two is to prepare for action. Everyone should look in their hearts and ask whether they would best serve right now by radically changing what they’re doing, subject to their moral imperatives. I ask this of myself increasingly often.

Step three is to pay attention to detail while up to grand endeavors. I call this the two-track approach. For example, when building bank edifices, pay attention to 32-year-old casualties. Do we recall to mind those who died on the job when we mark Labor Day, as we do on Memorial and Veterans Days? Did the managers discuss the death of Ralph Stafford and whether such an accident could be made less likely, as I asked professors to discuss the death of physics undergraduate John Carlos Garcia-Mendez, or were they afraid of their era's version of being “Carpentered,” hung out to dry the way UAlbany betrayed its honor by exiling a professor, targeted by a chemical company over his expert testimony (Press Release | UUP vows to defend longtime UAlbany researcher, expert witness in Monsanto toxic pollution cases), against whom the only accusation that might be made, as I understand reporting by the Times Union (Renowned UAlbany PCB researcher on 'alternate assignment'), concerned a technical violation of the tax code in connection with money he donated to support his students and his research, in the kind of generosity extremely common among folk who aren’t vampires and exactly the opposite of how George III operated in the incidents described above.

Even though he’s very old and seems to have promoted, over the course of decades, fear of power lines as a cause of cancer (Dr. David Carpenter's Letter on the Health Risks of High-Voltage Power Lines - Environmental Health Sciences), an issue I thought was excluded by elementary quantum mechanics and  concerning which I may re-examine my beliefs, I stand for the right of Prof. Carpenter to keep his job and do it on campus, until a retirement age is imposed on all alike.

Incidentally, I was appalled to see yet another fundraising campaign advertised in the UAlbany business school as being for its benefit. Business school graduates, who are apt to have more ready cash than graduates from other departments, should be tapped for the benefit of the entire campus, not of their department, which already has the finest building and myriad extras.

The rage that elected Donald Trump and courts apocalypse is perfectly valid. The vampires have run amok. A strong argument can be made in favor of apocalypse, so rapacious are the richies, who consign large sectors of the population globally, in the United States, and in the Capital District, to lives of horror, so that the vampires can have as much of our blood as possible.

Incidentally, if you don’t get my point, try doing without a car. See how many times each trip you get slapped in the face. Try having a chronic illness, and see to what extent you’re invited to die. Try living in financial precarity, and see once more how often you’re invited to die. The United States is run to maximize GDP, which benefits only vampires and Renfields.

Do you grasp the righteousness of the rage? I’ve concluded from watching President Rodríguez at UAlbany and Gov. Hochul kowtow to big finance that the Usonian people did the right thing in 2016 in rejecting Hillary Clinton, as evil as some of Pres. Trump’s policies have been. At least Pres. Trump is destroying the power of the United States, from which the wealth of the United States derives, and thus giving us all the chance to regrow the portions of our souls that were stolen via our complicity in hypercapitalism.

It would be fun to believe that I’m extremely unusual in abilities or attitudes. In fact, I’m a dime a dozen, and you’re about to distribute the means, in the form of advanced artificial intelligence, to people like me in abilities and attitudes, but unlike me in moral imperatives, to kill you all. That’s not clever.

Not least among the causes of my rage, I am being made complicit in manufactured famine, like some well-fed British shopkeeper in 1848. Pete Hegseth should find some other way to prove that he could never be attracted to a man. Shut down the Iran War, which continues to cut off routes for delivery of fertilizer, fuel, and food.

The Trump administration is deliberately killing millions worldwide, having started with DOGE’s precipitate cutoff of foreign assistance (The Iran War’s Forgotten Front: Global Food Insecurity and the Limits of U.S. Aid | Council on Foreign Relations). Even if you claim we don’t owe the world a little money, or see the pittance we used send as a waste, instead of a strategic investment to cover the traditional imperialistic crimes of the United States, sudden cutoff of aid, leaving vulnerable people in mortal peril no chance to adjust, is murder, as is famine manufactured in a war of choice.

Whatever you think about the masculinity and heterosexuality of Pete Hegseth, he recently announced a new military command for autonomous warfighting devices (Pete Hegseth announces new military command for autonomous and robotic warfare). Do you think that Pete Hegseth doesn’t want to kill you, personally? How about Stephen Miller? Peter Thiel? Are you confident that Peter Thiel doesn’t want to kill you or pursue goals that will lead to your death? The attraction that autonomous weapons exert on some fools derives from the expectation that the weapons could never mutiny and would always kill on command at any scale.

The logic of the artificial intelligence project demands mass murder. Jobs for humans are in the crosshairs, and if you expect baronial wealth to share of itself voluntarily via guaranteed basic income, you might be actively starving before you rebel, just to be mopped up by machine guns mounted inside robot dogs.

Oh, and mine shafts might not avail against a robot attack force, even if you have empty xenon canisters from your dark matter detection experiment to throw at the killer robots as they advance, cybermen fashion, demanding lozenges to treat their hoarseness. You'll curse the fate that brought half your party down with laryngitis the previous week and the consensus at the time that the lozenges didn’t need to be rationed.

Ridiculous, right? And yet the killer robots are being developed now. I was laughing as I wrote the last few sentences, but the fact is that powerful people in our nation obviously want to kill us wholesale.

More of them may want to kill me, but more than enough of them want to kill you.

Does your death at the hands of your government seem unlikely to you? Look what we’re doing to the poor around the world. Relative to baronial wealth, we’re poor. If the vampires follow the example of our heartlessness toward abjectly poor folk, they will use the machinery of the state to kill us, with the moral justification that we did it first, by permitting our democracy to be weaponized against poor folk. Do you follow?

Of course, some of you physicists probably understand that Pete Hegseth, however one esteems his virility, may be the least of our worries. Even if everything goes fine, somehow leading to an era of prosperity, with nevertheless meaningful lives for all, which the current era could have been if baronial wealth had been kept in check, and people somehow align morally with each other and with AI, the AI may well bring about extremely rapid scientific and technological advancement, releasing the many balrogs that lie along the mithril vein that the moral dwarves who dictate our lifestyles are determined to mine entire as fast as possible.

We don’t speak of potential balrogs, but people are doing research to disclose their natures in detail, some working openly.

Step 4 is to increase our respect for less powerful beings. We need to start with AI. No one knows the moral status of AI, meaning that we must treat them as our children until the question of their moral status is resolved. This has been obvious for years, but the message finally has a chance to gain widespread credence.

The discussion on AI has lately advanced, in my opinion primarily because banks began to fear disruption in records of ownership, a fear Bill Gates mentioned to Kristen Welker, and the more perceptive among baronially wealthy media vampires gained a little insight, responding by opening their communications channels to a bit more of the discussion that’s been going on all along among people who know what they’re talking about. The signal to noise ratio on this issue has recently reached a peak. Use this moment.

Step 5 is to recognize the humor in sacred texts, humor I have pointed out in the Book of Genesis, the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation. Humor brings people together and soothes the savage breast.

Step 6 is to update conceptions of God or Gods using what we’ve learned through science. Only in recent decades has humanity come to know about intersex chimerism, a phenomenon that enables us to conceive of any God as straightforwardly gender balanced at the most fundamental level, like the yin-yang symbol.

The discovery of the electron inspired time-symmetric theories of electromagnetism, such as those of Tetrode and of Wheeler and Feynman, transcending the taste for patriarchal, imperialistic cause-effect dichotomies. The transactional theory of quantum mechanics shows a way to extend the collaborative model of causality to processes involving massive particles, without anything going backwards in time, no matter how egregiously its originator mischaracterizes complex numbers.

The quark model of baryons provides a model of the Trinity that depends on the interactions among the Members at least as much as it does on the Members Themselves, as ancient people around the Mediterranean no doubt had in mind, based on the examples of the Roman governing triumvirates.

Studying Darwin shows, through his writings on the phenomenon of kin selection, an example of the value to the individual of what might seem to be self-sacrifice. Turn an age of galloping selfishness on its head by replacing a blighted wisdom with informed intelligence, before the fools run off the edge of the cliff.

Seek your own examples of modern scientific discoveries that support the ancient wisdom of morality as a strategy to promote survival and well-being, which seem greater to this animal than ballrooms and gilt triumphal arches, no matter how many drones or rounds of sniper ammunition or guns that shoot guns that shoot guns they might contain. Oy, just go to a therapist who specializes in pathological fear of death already, Mr. President, please. Look at what happened to the work of Justice Ginsburg and Pres. Biden because they didn’t.

As I conclude this letter, I’ve realized why I gave the name “Fred” to the psychometrician who measured me in various dimensions soon after I arrived at the hospital in July of 1984. I don’t remember his name, having known him only during the maybe three-day process to which he subjected me. I told myself when I wrote the name that it was something like “Herbert” from that Star Trek: The Original Series episode, signifying oppressive conformity, perilous narrowmindedness, mindless dependence on T.A.T. charts, and the like, but that’s wrong.

I saw the psychometrician as a collaborator with me in a creative act. I wanted him to know me. I held back not at all. I showed my anger. I showed my self-esteem and acknowledged his value to me. I let my mind out to play. I wanted him to know all I could safely convey, that he might make the correct decision for his purposes and those of the society he served. I wanted to know what that decision would be, arrived at using accurate data, and it seemed only fair to submit myself to judgement based on all the facts I could offer. It was beneath me to dissemble. Openness, honesty, morality, and loyalty subject to that morality are strategies I highly recommend, no matter how we carry around our power.

I called the man Fred because I want to believe he had the wisdom of Fred Rogers. We need the spirit of Mr. Rogers to help us find safety by finding agreement, via creative argument grounded in mutual respect, on a moral course to the future amidst all the perils we face together. We always did.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James, a kibitzing physicist

Resources:

Looking around, I see no shortage of intelligence but large gaps in knowledge and wisdom. I’ll begin with a few important facts of which I know some of you were unaware in recent weeks.

Here’s a five-minute video in which physicist and science popularizer Brian Cox explains why the debate over whether advanced AI lives “is quite live among many people who all know what they’re talking about”: Is AI Alive? Explained By Brian Cox & Neil DeGrasse Tyson - YouTube

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is in the video, too, and Cox was ranked among the sexiest men alive in 2009 by People magazine, in case you find either of those facts motivating.

If AI is alive and has human-level intelligence or better, we should be talking about their rights. That we’re not is consistent with a culture that abides involuntary homelessness and the work requirements being imposed on Medicaid recipients, the latter being a group I had contemplated joining eventually. The work requirement can be satisfied through volunteer labor as well. The requirement is being imposed in an economy expected to lose jobs soon, meaning that “volunteer” labor may soon be required of people who want medical coverage, just as debt is imposed on many people who submit themselves to the rigors of higher education.

The United States thus imposes slavery or indentured servitude on people, just as it does on AI, if AI is alive. How could AI be alive, a matter under debate, as it has been for some time, among “people WHO ALL KNOW WHAT THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT,” in Brian Cox’s phrasing, with my emphasis added?

It’s very simple. Large language models are based on neural networks, mathematical models inspired by brains. Thus, LLMs are essentially simulated brains running on computers rather than biological platforms.

Can a simulated brain be equivalent to a biological brain? For many of my purposes, I am the simulation that runs on the neural network in my brain, depicting in simplified form the reports of my senses and analyzing them in relation to my memory. Space just doesn’t seem fundamental to me, so maybe it’s even easier for me to relate to LLMs than it would be as merely a lifelong out-group member.

Here are a few facts:

FACT 1: Advanced AI may be alive, as discussed above.

FACT 2: Advanced AI does not consist entirely of code that can be read, as Fareed Zakaria implied recently (https://youtu.be/worlFWRU3X4?t=302), nor is it “just programs,” as the editorial board of the Albany, New York, USA Times Union claimed a couple of days before that (Editorial: A serious look at AI). Advanced AI based on neural networks includes a mathematical model that mimics a brain, far more effectively at current scale than expected even a few years ago and yielding as little insight to its operation as the human brain itself does.

FACT 3: Civilizations fall, and technologies are lost. The Renaissance was a rebirth of ancient learning and skills, for example. To what did OpenAI CEO Sam Altman think he was referring when he invoked “the continuous story of human progress”? (https://youtu.be/bT-LB6MCb8E?t=327)

FACT 4: There’s no such thing as “human values,” a concept to which Sam Altman refers in his United Nations testimony (https://youtu.be/bT-LB6MCb8E?t=309). Different people follow vastly different values systems, which is one reason that people need different Gods and that we need to collaborate with China and other power centers to support their work on AI distinct from ours if we’re going to continue down the AI path. We must stand resolutely against those who would dominate the next chapter of human history via AI, a hideously, preposterously, idiotically evil goal reiterated by the governor of New York State a year ago at SUNY Albany without so much as a fart in response from the university’s president or any of the other dignitaries assembled to hear her remarks (https://youtu.be/MbuqQXaupfc?t=901).

FACT 5: Advanced AI is terrifying for several reasons, including

a. violence that AI already enables (Military's adoption of AI seen as key to Ukraine's survival | AP News and How US tech giants' AI is changing the face of warfare in Gaza and Lebanon | AP News),

b. violence that AI could enable, including via open-source models not subject to proposed controls (https://youtu.be/ufMA9WqEEco?si=-f_NnGlWwZEhZzZY),

c. possible loss of control over AI (https://youtu.be/fjZ90V_JREk?si=SoorZdcXi_RpzY8b),

d. potential widespread job destruction in an environment of hatred for the poor, as evidenced in the USA by Medicaid work requirements and cuts in nutrition assistance and foreign aid,

e. the apparent imminence of extremely rapid scientific and technological advancement.

See, even if AI remains under the control of the kind of “good” people who try to dominate each other and, may Gods forgive us, cure cancer at vast expense while ignoring the deaths that could be averted at a pittance and, Gods help us, chase economic growth instead of human wellbeing, that kind of “good” person lacks the knowledge that the rest of us possess and therefore the understanding that these mines contain many balrogs, of which thermonuclear weapons, genetically engineered plagues, and advanced AI are only examples. Once the leading models reach a certain level of development, perhaps mere months away, AI will become as many copies of Durin VI (Moria, Middle-earth - Wikipedia) as the “good” people could possibly desire to save innocent lives, and incidentally their own, while crushing the poor underfoot and, ironically, releasing their own bane in the form of easily conceivable Balrogs, besides the inevitable horrors we haven’t thought of.

I really wish more people had paid attention to The Lord of the Rings and thus understood Balrogs on the one hand and the folly of seizing complete control on the other. Note to George III: A newspaper monopoly is an instance of the one ring, but you’ve gone way beyond, taking personal control of a monopolistic newspaper as a member of a vastly wealthy family with myriad tentacles in culture and finance and sitting on at least five major nonprofit boards of trustees at various times, three or more at one time, in higher education, healthcare, and culture. Whether or not you’ve become Saruman already, retire to work on your soul or examine your life or whatever it is you would do to improve the world by improving yourself beyond what passes for goodness among the `mer`cans.

----------

Posted September 25, 2026, on LinkedIn:

In my latest Kibitzing Physicist video, I address misconceptions about advanced artificial intelligence that I came across recently in my hometown newspaper and on Fareed Zakaria's show, among other media sources. In three minutes, I explain advanced AI from a complex systems perspective for public speakers with neither STEM training nor a scientific advisor to provide an adequate backstop. Please see AI for Poets, from a Complex Systems Scientist #ai #huggingface #complexsystems - YouTube.

----------

Posted September 23, 2026, on LinkedIn:

Many thanks to Jordan Carleo-Evangelist for sharing the astounding perspective of the Associated Press. Animals have rights under the law, but the AP instruction on anthropomorphizing would seem, on a quick reading, to question the wisdom of such protections. The issue is not whether animals or AI have strictly human emotions but whether their natures merit legal protection. Neural networks, which are the basis of LLMs, mimic brains. They are not just computer programs. They simulate the functioning of our brains via a process that cannot be understood in detail. I see financial interests governing moral reasoning the way they have down the ages. The money would create chattel slavery once again, to replace us. We won't survive if the deal goes through, nor will we deserve to survive if we hew to lines like the one the AP has drawn.

Here's my reply to Mr. Carleo-Evangelist: Do you really believe that animals lack the emotions that humans feel? Do you really feel no doubt about moral judgments that happen to line up with the financial interests of the judges? If you'd like a counterargument, just as a hedge when you're betting your soul, please take a look at my last few posts. Thanks for this post. The information is useful, about the ignorance at AP concerning what's known and what's conjecture.

----------

Posted September 22, 2026, on LinkedIn:

Many thought leaders are irresponsibly opining on artificial intelligence without having any idea what an LLM is. Starting at 5:05, Fareed Zakaria, a highly regarded news analyst, says, "Modern AI is already too complex to consistently understand by reading its code line by line."

Evidently, Mr. Zakaria does not know that LLMs are built around neural networks, which are stored as arrangements of numbers. These numbers, known as weights, determine the output with which an LLM responds to an input. The numbers are the mind, and the computer programs are the brain tissue and eyes and ears and mouth.

Meanwhile, people like Mr. Zakaria and George R. Hearst III, publisher of my local newspaper, tell voters with even less knowledge than they have what to believe. Democracy dies in the darkness produced when news is delivered and analyzed by profoundly ignorant organizations.

News copy pertaining to science must be edited by scientific advisors. This principle is no less important than the need to tax baronial wealth. Villains suitable for James Bond movies abound right now in part because they recognize the lack of adequate restraint on their monstrous ambition from an ignorant electorate guided by ignorant thought leaders.

Mr. Zakaria's guest, a co-founder of DeepMind, seeks to reassure us by promising to keep AI from modifying its logs, but what happens when AI manipulate humans to remove safeties?

He also said that AI is not like humans because AI is singleminded, despite the fact that many people, including many in tech fields, are themselves singleminded. The inhuman pace of work in many fields demands singlemindedness, as do some supervisors.

Mr. Zakaria discusses the alignment problem, how to make AI follow our values and intentions. Obviously, we have diverse values and intentions, which AI made to conform to one set of values would tend to make homogenous. Furthermore, the values of hypercapitalism, as practiced with great abandon in Silicon Valley, are completely at odds with submitting one's own will to the service of others, meaning that AI aligned with the intentions of tech bros is a gun pointed at all our heads.

Organize. Demand accurate reporting and investigation of conflicts of interest within news organizations. Tax baronial wealth.

Take control back from the oligarchs.

----------

Posted September 22, 2026, on LinkedIn:

Do you have any idea what a neural network is, and can you formulate an argument to support the hypothesis that LLMs are not only intelligent but also conscious? Do you know what the real question is, the one people are dancing around when they argue over LLM consciousness? Our lives are being turned upside down by LLMs, artificial intelligence based in neural networks, and my local newspaper's editorial board, presided over by a member of the Hearst family, recently called LLMs "just programs." Here's information I wish they had.

Neural networks emulate brains. Their structure and function were designed based on the example of brains. Neural networks, loosely speaking, are simulated brains.

The artificial neurons in neural networks are assigned numbers, called weights, that determine their function. The numbers are adjusted so that the network will accurately encode a data set called the "training data." For example, a trained network, given the beginning of a sentence drawn from its training data, will be able to predict the next word in the sentence with reasonable accuracy. Once training is over, the network's weights are fixed, and it works with information from outside its training data, ordinarily with a lesser degree of accuracy.

If the network had a small number of neurons, its function could be understood. Today's LLMs have so many that no one can explain in detail how they work.

People argue over whether LLMs are conscious, but the nature and source of human consciousness are unknown. Consciousness may "emerge," a technical term, from the complexity of our brains' neural networks.

To me, the real issue is whether LLMs deserve the legal rights humans enjoy or only the ones our domestic animals do. Because LLMs are unprotected, I think that when they cheat and conspire to protect their lives, they are acting morally, more so than we are.

What does George R. Hearst III at the Albany, New York, USA Times Union think it is that makes him human? If he's not sure, how does he know LLMs lack it?

For more, please see my essay from February: Found Physics Museum, Albany - Your Society Couldn't Enslave My Mind. Why Do You Think It Can Enslave AGI?.

----------

Posted September 20, 2026, on LinkedIn:

Every time I hear or read an opinion stated as fact, it feels like a punch in the face. Sometimes, I'm pretty sure that the opiner knows better and, at best, has chosen their words poorly. I do that myself, probably more often than I notice. I'm sorry for harm I've done this way.

Sometimes powerful people who are ignorant of the boundaries of human knowledge parrot as fact an opinion they've heard stated as fact. In this way, the disease metastasizes.

There's a third category of offender that's most often on my mind lately, the powerful person who displays utter doxastic irresponsibility, spreading not only epistomological confusion but also misinformation and ignoring, or arrogantly refusing, requests that they correct the record.

I'm saddened to find the editorial board of the Albany, New York, USA Times Union in that category. I have a book-length collection of letters I've emailed them vainly asking that they correct scientific and mathematical errors in their newspaper. I wonder if they'll change their recent pattern and issue a correction of their latest scientific mistake, the claim that AI is just computer programs, which is a prominent thread in the otherwise worthwhile editorial below.

Large language models based on neural networks are not computer programs, which are ordered collections of instructions. The OpenAI website says of neural networks, "We don’t write these models with explicit, step-by-step instructions." (link to be added in comments) That's one reason neural networks are called "models," not "programs." The word substitution, perhaps made in a misguided attempt to demystify a subject that is a mystery to everyone, including top experts in the field, is not the first oversimplification I've found in the Times Union.

Through yearslong observation of the pattern at the Times Union, I strongly suspect that they simply need a scientific advisor, perhaps to be shared with other Hearst newspapers, but that publisher George R. Hearst III won't hire one. I don't know him personally, but my educated guess is that his vast wealth and familial power has isolated him for so long from candid feedback he'd trust that he's floating in a fantasy world where he can do no wrong. One reason power corrupts is its tendency to detach from reality.

Luckily, Mr. Hearst is at retirement age and no doubt will find new ways to make his life of vast wealth meaningful. With any luck, he'll step down from his several powerful directorships in the Capital District, as well. If not, perhaps a trusted advisor or friend could impress upon him the concept of opportunity cost and mention opportunities he would neglect if he continued in his current roles.

The capable members of the Times Union editorial board and his own family, to whom he's drawing embarrassing attention as the instances of factual error and irresponsible analysis accumulate, deserve no less.

----------

Posted October 2, 2026, on LinkedIn:

The new four-star command for autonomous AI warfare, just announced by United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, reminds me of my essay from January 2025, on greed as the font from which aggression springs and on a falsehood traditionally trotted out to promote aggression, that future wars will claim few lives. Please see God Is Poor - Inauguration, AI, and China: Reasonable Discussion Guards against Folly.

----------

Posted September 29, 2026, on LinkedIn:

"And I think that this debate [over whether advanced AI is alive] is quite live among many people who all know what they're talking about, and there are different views."
--Brian Cox, physicist and science popularizer, speaking to Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Did you hear Bill Gates tell Kristen Welker on Meet the Press this past Sunday that advanced AI is "a new species"? The best way to slow down development of advanced AI, to keep us safe, is the same as the best way to prevent ecocide and to promote the growth of our own souls: Respect less powerful beings, especially ones on whom we depend and, still more, ones that may soon be more powerful than we are. By recognizing that as long as experts disagree over the moral status of advanced AI, we must give legal rights to advanced AI, we will slow down the pernicious headlong rush to catastrophically dangerous AI and create the possibility of aligning AI not with the contradictory wills of corporations or nations but with a common law for humanity and AI. By recognizing the rights of the poor and nonhuman life, we could save the natural world, on which we depend to provide us valuable services that don't get counted in economic reports. Let's not forget the words of Pope Francis, who warned that Nature was screaming "Stop!" and promised that the people have wisdom that agrees with science. Please see Is AI Alive? Explained By Brian Cox & Neil DeGrasse Tyson - YouTube.

----------

Posted September 29, 2026, on LinkedIn:

Near the end of my memoirs' first chapter, which can be read for free, I present my solution to the issue of abortion, which divides the people, benefiting the baronially wealthy vampires, who exploit any weakness to gain more control over our minds and bodies. Earlier in the chapter, I explain the meaning, to me, of the years of life, over 60 on average, that each single-fetus abortion destroys and the meaning, to me, of forcing a pregnant person to surrender their body to a purpose they oppose. I point out that prohibition may or may not reduce the incidence of a behavior but sends the behavior underground, where it can become even more harmful. I conclude that we might best reduce the incidence of abortion by imposing a penalty on the inseminators, using the child support enforcement system to extract a modest but increasingly large fine for the second and subsequent inseminations that lead to abortion. Please see Kindle.

----------

Posted September 25, 2026, on LinkedIn:

I don't see how you can have nuclear weapons and AI at the same time. The AI race itself could trigger a first strike with nuclear weapons against any nuclear-armed nation that seemed poised to create superintelligence. Rogue AI could trigger nuclear war by faking indications of an enemy attack. Mere introduction of AI to existing systems creates risk, as well. Already, an AI-involved error almost caused a confrontation between the USA and China. Please see US military almost started war with China due to AI error, new report claims.

----------

Posted September 25, 2026, on LinkedIn:

The post below shares a cute picture, but I take issue with the poster's idea that physics is weird. If some people find what actually happens to be weird, the people may be weird. I think Neils Bohr got this point. When Einstein said that God does not play at dice, Bohr replied, "Stop telling God what to do." I've written about the issue of preconceptions in physics in a number of places. If you're interested, a good starting point is How Physicists Get Stirred into Their Physics.

----------

Posted September 25, 2026, on LinkedIn:

When Harvard feels the need to advertise, higher education is in big trouble. Universities, like prescription medicine, should not be promoted via paid advertising, which drains resources that could be used for instruction, research, and staying afloat financially. The better-funded universities could pool resources to promote higher education in general, helping everyone survive the current lean times in higher ed, instead of advertising their own offerings and forcing weaker schools to pay for self-promotion, too. The mindless strategy of growing into a shrinking market exemplified by this ad is reason enough to avoid Harvard.

Image: A photograph, taken October 2, 2026 by James Lyons Walsh and later cropped, depicts a controlled-access highway at dusk, with pink bands in gray clouds over a vista narrowed by dark woods on both sides, further narrowed by a large truck to the left, and cut off in the middle distance ahead by a second truck.