Links of the Month: September 2026

image by AI; my own prompt; words from ‘1984’ Part of how the human brain ‘makes sense’ of things, and fits them into our belief system and ‘worldview’ is by trying to understand them in the context of our existing beliefs. We seek to know eg Why, given what we (think we) know, did this happen? How does it ‘fit’ with the processes that currently seem to function (well or badly) in the system(s) this event affects and operates in? We each have a certain (more or less limited) capacity to live with uncertainty and ambiguity. So when something happens that we cannot ‘make sense’ of given what we think we know, we can tolerate ‘not knowing’ to a certain degree and for a certain time. One of the consequences of this tolerance is that we can learn to adapt to a ‘new normal’ and ’normalize’ behaviours or events that don’t ‘fit’ with our previous worldview. As an example, a US president unlawfully kidnapping and/or murdering another country’s president, or threatening to annex the country’s…