New York Street with Moon; Georgia O’Keeffe, 1925*
A PRAYER THAT WILL BE ANSWERED
Lord let me suffer much
and then die
Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear
Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before
Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it
so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love
Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain
And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee's head
~ Anna Kamienska, tr Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh
In case you’re wondering about that first line, well, that’s old-time Catholicism: “suffering is good for you.” She was obviously brought up in the Catholic cult of suffering, and since this is a prayer poem, here it is. Even so, for a first line, that is startling — even to me, familiar as I am with the weird logic that suffering earns us quicker entry into heaven (because of less time in Purgatory: you “pre-suffer”).
True, it could be argued that most people suffer much before dying — whether in the immediate sense of the final illness, or throughout lifetime. No one is spared suffering, no one. So perhaps the poet means the universal condition — yes, this prayer will granted.
But some lucky people die a sudden death, or at least a quick one — not like years and years of cancer.
Now we don’t think that kind of suffering has any special meaning or merit, and there is a lot more interest in effective pain relief for the dying (addiction is not an issue).
One could argue that the first lines don’t stem from Catholicism, but are simply ironic: yes, a prayer requesting suffering will be answered for sure. Based on other poems I've read, Kamienska seems a believer, but in her own way. Not a hellfire sort of person. Love-oriented.
One can also read a bit of cynicism in the last line — though at least it's not a bird painfully smashing into a clear pane. But maybe the bumblebee illustrates the concept of humans as almost hopelessly stubborn and blind -- yes, we keep on bumping our heads against the same obstacles over and over (I just dealt with a government agency — many hours for the sake of very uncertain benefits).
*
But most of the poem is not about suffering (well, somewhat) or irony — it’s about the world continuing after the speaker is gone. For some reason that continuity important to us, according to studies: we want humanity to continue, the world to continue. Borges argued that the continuation of humanity is our only immortality.
Another strong theme is the side-by-side coexistence of pleasure and pain. And the lines are excellent:
Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before
Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it
so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love
Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain
And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee's head
*
Ocean Beach Pier*
A SURPRISING REASON TO WORRY ABOUT THE FALLING BIRTH RATE
~ “There is research linking falling fertility to rising populism.
In the world’s largest cities, where populations are densely concentrated and growing, economies are generally thriving and cosmopolitanism is embraced. Where populations are sparse or shrinking, usually in rural places and small cities, economies are often stagnant, and populism sells.
Why does it hold such appeal in these places? Nativist, nationalist rhetoric—“Make America (or Whatever Other Country) Great Again” — appeals because it promises to restore the rightful economic and cultural stature of “common people” . . . Where populations decline, populists arise— more often than not, promising to reverse history and restore past glory if not demographic dominance.
That vague sense of “unease” seems to be the crux of nationalist and populist sentiment. Rather than being predominantly motivated by racism — though it often is that — populism seems like a wide-ranging desire to return to the glory days, before things changed so much. In a 2011 academic article, Anna Sofia Lundgren and Karin Ljuslinder describe how populism and an aging population might be related. Populist rhetoric requires an enemy that is meant to be defeated, they write, and in this case, that enemy is a lack of native births — a trend that’s portrayed as unnatural:
‘What is central to populism is not just the constitution of an enemy, but also the location of that enemy outside of the system. In the studied case this meant setting aside the possibility that the processes of population aging are inherent to modern societies. For example, modern aspects such as improved and increasingly technology-intensive equipment, more expensive medical care, better living conditions, norms of ‘‘finding oneself’’ before starting a family, increased demands for higher education and so on, all contribute to higher average age rates and lower fertility rates. These are all things that most people find central to an individualized democratic modern lifestyle and which they do not wish to change. By ignoring how our way of living and thinking contribute to a situation of population aging, populist discourse produces population aging as not only a threatening enemy, but also as an external enemy that is conceptualized as inexorable.’
A study from 2016 in Belgium underscored how the powerlessness, the rapid demographic change, and the xenophobia all fuel a kind of anarchic and bleak perspective on the country’s future. It found that “populist attitudes are grounded in a deep discontent, not only with politics but also with societal life in general.” People who feel more vulnerable in various ways, that study suggests, are drawn toward populism as a sort of coping strategy.
This is where I could see falling birth rates playing a role in populism. Seeing your small town vanish, watching your friends grow old and die and not leave anyone behind — it can make you feel kind of, well, vulnerable. Places don’t tend to feel complete without young people. The desire to avoid that absence is natural, but left unchecked, it can be xenophobic, too. In the most extreme cases, it might make you drawn to the promise that your kind of people will rise again.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/a-surprising-reason-to-worry-about-low-birth-rates/561308/
The article above uses the term “populism” to mean right-wing populism. And currently populism is mostly right-wing. But its definition doesn’t specify right-wing attitudes.
from Wiki: “In politics, populism refers to a range of approaches which emphasize the role of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite". There is no single definition of the term, which developed in the 19th century and has been used to mean various different things since that time.
A common framework for interpreting populism is known as the ideational approach: this defines populism as an ideology which posits "the people" as a morally good force against "the elite", who are perceived as corrupt. Populists differ in how "the people" are defined, but it can be based along class, ethnic, or national lines. Populists typically present "the elite" as comprising the political, economic, cultural, and media establishment, all of which are depicted as a homogenous entity and accused of placing the interests of other groups—such as foreign countries or immigrants—above the interests of "the people". According to this approach, populism is a thin-ideology which is combined with other, more substantial thick ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism, or socialism. Thus, populists can be found at different locations along the left–right political spectrum and there is both left-wing populism and right-wing populism.
Populist leaders typically portray themselves as outsiders who are separate from the "elite". Female populist leaders sometimes reference their gender as setting them apart from the dominant "old boys' club", while in Latin America a number of populists, such as Evo Morales and Alberto Fujimori, emphasized their non-white ethnic background to set them apart from the white-dominated elite. In instances where wealthy business figures promote populist sentiments, such as Ross Perot, Thaksin Shinawatra, or Silvio Berlusconi, it can be difficult to present themselves as being outside the elite; however this is achieved by portraying themselves as being apart from the political, if not the economic elite, and portraying themselves as reluctant politicians.”
Natasha Kissell: Omen I, 2016*
“I have no unifying theory of things. To me, situations and people are always specific, always of themselves. That is why one travels and writes: to find out. To work in the other way would be to know the answers before one knew the problems; that is a recognized way of working, I know, especially if one is a political or religious or racial missionary. But I would have found it hard.” ~ V. S. Naipaul in his 1990 lecture at the Manhattan Institute, “Our Universal Civilization”
Oriana:
That specificity of true writers, their unwillingness to be missionaries (i.e. propagandists), is why authoritarian regimes persecute writers. Specific situations tend to reveal the complex humanity of individuals and the lies of the official propaganda.
Let’s detox ourselves with the beauty of rocks:
Namibia, Lower Ugab Valley*
A FORMER WHITE NATIONALIST SPEAKS OUT ON CHARLOTTESVILLE
~ On the car plowing into people and why he thinks someone would do that
I think ultimately people become extremists not necessarily because of the ideology. I think that the ideology is simply a vehicle to be violent. I believe that people become radicalized, or extremist, because they're searching for three very fundamental human needs: identity, community and a sense of purpose.
If underneath that fundamental search is something that's broken — I call them potholes — is there abuse or trauma or mental illness or addiction? In my case, many years ago, it was abandonment. I felt abandoned, and that led me to this community. But what happens is, because there are so many marginalized young people, so many disenfranchised young people today with not a lot to believe in, with not a lot of hope, they tend to search for very simple black-and-white answers.
Because of the Internet, we now have this propaganda machine that is flooding the Internet with conspiracy theory propaganda from the far right — disinformation — and when a young person who feels disenchanted, or disaffected, goes online, where most of them live, they're able to find that identity online.
They're able to find that community, and they're able to find that purpose that's being fed to them by savvy recruiters who understand how to target vulnerable young people. And they go for this solution because, frankly, it promises paradise. And it requires very little work except for dedicating your life to that purpose.
But I can say that they're all being fooled, because the people at the very top have an agenda. And it's a broken ideology that can never work, that in fact, is destroying people's lives more than the promise that they were given of helping the world or saving the white race.
On Charlottesville as a turning point for this country politically and philosophically
I believe that the world has now seen what we have been sweeping under the rug for many many years — thinking we were in a post-racial societ . . . I think that this catalyst shows the world, 1: that it's a problem, a real problem, that exists in our country; 2: that white extremism should be classified as terrorism, and now that we attached the terrorism word to it, it will get more resources. It will be at the top of people's minds.
What people need to understand is that since Sept. 11, more Americans have been killed on U.S. soil by white supremacists than by any other foreign or domestic group combined by a factor of two. Yet we don't really talk about that, nor do we even call these instances, of the shooting at Charleston, S.C., or what happened at Oak Creek, Wis., at the Sikh temple or even what happened in Charlottesville that weekend — as terrorism.” ~ Christian Picciolini
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/13/543259499/a-reformed-white-nationalist-speaks-out-on-charlottesville?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170815?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170815
Mary:
The idea of ideology as simply a vehicle for violence seems to apply easily to what we see in instances like Charlottesville and other acts of terrorism. But the violence itself is coming from a tremendous reservoir of rage — just look at the faces in the photos — twisted into masks of fury — faces we've seen before — in photos taken during the civil rights movement and the struggle for school integration — unforgettable faces full of rage and hate. Why this great surge of fury? I think it is rooted in fear, in the perceived threat to those who feel they are or will be cheated out of their due, their rightful (traditional) place in a world where power lies in the hands of wealthy white men.
But these are not the wealthy — these are the marginalized, the disenfranchised, who want to cling to, or reinstate, that old American dream — any man can achieve the promise of a better life. They feel not only do they have the most to lose, but they will lose everything, the last shred of that old dream, in a world of diversity, equality, and democracy. Everything a black man, a woman, an immigrant, a refugee, obtains or earns, every step they take forward, is something stolen from these angry men, one more possibility refused them They don’t want to be part of a crowd, and becoming a minority is the threat of annihilation for them, for that old America they mourn — that lopsided, repellent dream they remember with such nostalgia . . . the kind of nostalgia for a romanticized ugly history portrayed in Gone With the Wind, and all those statues of Confederate generals recently being removed from public spaces.
This hatred and rage of course has other dimensions as well: social, psychological, economic, cultural. But I believe for us the keystone is this country's history of slavery — a foundation that has shaped our world to this day. The past is not past. If the Arab world hasn't gotten over the Crusades, ours has not gotten over the Civil War. To think we live in a “post-racial” world is now demonstrated as the utmost foolishness.
Oriana:
You are so right, Mary: we’ve seen those screaming, hate-twisted faces before. These are the white people yelling at the little black girl being escorted to a public school by US marshals. These are the crazy church ladies stating with unshakable certainty that god will forgive murder and adultery, but will not forgive racial integration.
“We will not be replaced!” the neo-Nazis chanted in Charlottesville. At the time I didn’t understand what that was about. Articles about demographics — how the whites are on their way to become a minority — passed me by since I live in a majority Latino city (the South San Diego County has been that way forever, it seems) and I'm completely used to it and don’t find it the least threatening. On the contrary, I find Mexican immigrants especially worthy of admiration for the hard work they do — work for which there are no other takers. Not only are they not a threat — they make a huge contribution to the country.
There are now more articles about slavery and the Civil War than ever before, it seems. That was THE war, and in a way it never got resolved. The South immediately started twisting defeat into false history that glorified their side and the “noble cause” of white supremacy. The astonishing number of monuments to Confederate “heroes,” the streets and schools named after them — that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The history of slavery is indeed foundational.
But since you mentioned “Gone with the Wind” — that book, which I read still in Warsaw, but in English, astounded me with the phrase “white trash.” The poor whites were apparently just a step above the black slaves. Scarlett blames her mother’s death on the contagion spread by these inferior whites. How dare they live in such wretched, crowded housing, subsisting on unhealthy food? The hatred of the poor, including poor whites, is strangely intertwined with the history of slavery. The past is indeed not even the past.
Let me detox by looking at my favorite president — and favorite member of his cabinet, Frances Perkins.
83 years ago, on August 14, 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act into law — and it was in large part thanks to a remarkable woman from Massachusetts: Frances Perkins. Coming out of the Great Depression, Frances Perkins was FDR’s Secretary of Labor — the first woman in US history to hold a cabinet position, and a chief architect of the New Deal. **
NEOLIBERAL ECONOMICS’ ORIGINS IN WHITE SUPREMACY
~ “To understand the neoclassical revolution in economics and its connection with white supremacy, it is worth extending the history of the nineteenth century that Nancy MacLean recounts to include Reconstruction and the circumstances under which it ended.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the era of the “Second Party System,” the national debate about economic policy was over the federal provision of public goods, or “internal improvements.” At the time, South Carolina statesman (and two-time vice-president) John C. Calhoun espoused the philosophy that the only political right that matters is the right to own property. Anything that interfered with that right, according to Calhoun, is ipso facto illegitimate, and in order to preserve it, property-owners should have veto power over government policy to guard against tyranny of the propertyless majority.
But the only property that Calhoun was concerned with was the property of slaveowners, and he wanted to prevent the government overreach of any accretion of federal power for “internal improvements” that might bolster the power of that property to someday overturn the system of their subjugation. As Richard Hofstadter put it, Calhoun was “The Marx of the Master Class.” He despised democracy because he saw it as a threat to capitalist white supremacy, and he despised public goods because he discerned the threat they posed to antidemocratic social and racial hierarchy.
But Calhoun and the antebellum proslavery political interest is not the most apt historical precedent for Buchanan and Public Choice, even if it is the most obvious. The better antecedent is rather the political movement that overthrew Reconstruction in the 1870s and reinstalled former slaveowners, the so-called “Redeemers,” in positions of supreme power across the South. Like Buchanan’s Public Choice theory during and after the civil rights movement, this strategy married reactionary southern white supremacy with a not-explicitly-racist free market economic and political agenda. MacLean does not mention this history but she should have. She includes in her conclusion only a passing reference to late-nineteenth-century America as the model end-state for Buchanan’s and his heirs’ political advocacy.
In order to regain the power they had lost to the new black electorate under Reconstruction, the Redeemers forged a de facto alliance with a class of elite northerners, what in her book The Reconstruction of American Liberalism (2002) the historian Nancy Cohen calls “liberal reformers.” Following the Panic of 1873, class conflict came to dominate the national political debate. The lynchpin of the Redeemer strategy was activating the first wave of American-style “free market” economics to galvanize northern elite opinion. While initially the liberal reformers were careful not to adopt explicit racism in their appeals, race-coded rhetoric increasingly crept into northern publications such as the Nation. The American Social Science Association, for instance, which was formed after the Civil War to organize professional and quasi-professional research and “reform” movements, took on an increasingly partisan and ideological tone, crystalizing an elitist, reactionary political interest that sought to withdraw government from “interference” in the market, particularly in the South.
The two chief ideas that linked the liberal reformers and Redeemer interests were, first, that black people would not supply their compliant labor in the way that white supervisors, planters, and would-be industrialists needed in order for the southern economy to prosper; and second, that instead of working, freedmen displayed a talent and predilection for politics as an alternative means of supporting themselves as sponges off of the state. Frequently these two ideas were combined, for example in the notion that as newly autonomous workers, freed blacks had not yet acquired the civic understanding necessary to fully participate in government, and hence could not be trusted to wield power — because they were doing so in ways that impeded economic development, which in turn required their subservience as a quiescent labor force. As Cohen writes, “The freedmen’s alleged failure as an economic man and his propensity and talent for politics opened a window for the old proslavery theory of the childlike African to reenter in new-fashioned Darwinian dress.”
Crucially, this is exactly the same critique that Buchanan and his ilk later mounted against the civil rights movement: empowering labor, especially black labor, was dangerous to economic development. Moreover, state fiscal policies borne of popular democracy and characterized as redistributive—for example, public goods such as an integrated public school system—constituted an illegitimate perversion and subordination of government to “statist,” “rent-seeking” special interests.
Academic economists of the Gilded Age also espoused the view that inequality, whether between groups or individuals, was driven by innate characteristics and heredity. The more historically stable and wider those disparities, the stronger the evidence that they could not be overcome through so-called “class legislation.” The northern intelligentsia soon advocated both that Reconstruction be abandoned in the South and that Jim Crow–style policy be adopted in the North, namely the criminalization of unemployment and austerity in the face of economic contraction. As Cohen summarizes, “The doctrine of laissez-faire could become pretext, principle, and rationalization for the calls to remove federal protection from Reconstruction governments—for the reformers’ antidemocratic program to confine the genie of universal suffrage.”
*
If public education had to be integrated, and the federal government was not going to back down in the face of state resistance, why not just eliminate public education altogether? It was a means to buy off moderate white opinion while keeping the racial hierarchy intact and thwarting the federal government’s “interference” in Virginian affairs. While the rest of the state balked, the Prince Edward County school system took that radical step, staying closed for five years rather than integrate and instead handing out private school vouchers.
Public Choice theory evolved to explain what happened when, for the first time in a long time, black people won the vote. It reinterprets the outcome of the struggle for civil rights as the capture of government largesse for the benefit of social leaches who would otherwise “fail” in a fully free market. If the insight that Public Choice has to offer is just that governments are sometimes inefficient, democratic politics may not always serve the public interest (however defined), and special interests vie for power, then it is not a very original theory. What is original about it is also what is antidemocratic about it: the reinterpretation of social movements with political aims as inherently illegitimate and prone to “interfere” in “natural,” and also optimal, economic outcomes.
Among economists, Buchanan certainly led the way on the civil rights backlash. But he was not alone. The year after Brown v. Board was decided, Milton Friedman independently proposed an idea of school vouchers that mirrored Buchanan’s: rather than integrate public education, why not just end it? The theory of human capital — the idea that what workers earn in the labor market is a result of an individual’s education and marketable skills — also arose in this era to direct scholarly attention away from systemic discrimination and employers’ power over workers as explanations for wage inequality. And the new field of New Household Economics tried to rationalize gender inequality as arising from choices by women and men to undertake different roles in the household versus the labor market. New Household Economics could even be further interpreted as a means to cast doubt on the idea that involuntary unemployment is a social ill, or even that it is possible, if the “real” explanation for not having a job is the worker’s own “choice” to instead work in the household.
MacLean contends that the intellectual-political machine that started with Buchanan and has continued to this day with right-wing billionaires is unlike anything that has ever happened in American history. This is because the Buchanan–Koch nexus does not seek to simply sway public opinion, but rather to subvert and overthrow it.
As this review has made clear, I am in sympathy with MacLean’s characterization of the Virginia School as profoundly antidemocratic and anti-academic, but it is very hard to sustain any argument that says that something going on in the present is fundamentally different than anything which came before it. After all, the political movement based on a combination of right-wing economic policy and overt white supremacy has existed throughout this country’s history, and it achieved great success at controlling economic policy in the Gilded Age—the very era that Buchanan and his circle point to as their ideal.
MacLean clearly fears and suspects the latter, and provides good reason, showing how the right-wing economic and social agenda adapted its tactics and rhetoric since the years of massive resistance. While the closest it previously came to seizing national power was installing Calhoun as vice-president and Roger Taney as chief justice of the Supreme Court, it can be argued that in 2016, it succeeded in electing a president, and in 2017, it ushered in white supremacist street violence at the university where Buchanan did his most influential work.
https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-book-explains-charlottesville
John Calhoun, 1849*
HEAT INEQUALITY
“When July’s heatwave swept through the Canadian province of Quebec, killing more than 90 people in little over a week, the unrelenting sunshine threw the disparities between rich and poor into sharp relief. It was the poor and isolated who quietly suffered the most in the heat – a situation echoed in overheated cities across the world. In the US, immigrant workers are three times more likely to die from heat exposure than American citizens. In India, where 24 cities are expected to reach average summertime highs of at least 35C (95F) by 2050, it is the slum dwellers who are most vulnerable. And as the global risk of prolonged exposure to deadly heat steadily rises, so do the associated risks of human catastrophe.
Last year, Hawaiian researchers projected that the share of the world’s population exposed to deadly heat for at least 20 days a year will increase from 30% now to 74% by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are allowed to grow. (It will rise to 48% with “drastic reductions”.) They concluded that “an increasing threat to human life from excess heat now seems almost inevitable”.
Urban areas are reaching these killer temperatures faster than those that are less populated. Cities absorb, create and radiate heat. Asphalt, brick, concrete and dark roofs act like sponges for heat during the day and emit warmth at night. Air conditioning is a lifesaver for those who can afford it, but it makes the streets even hotter for those who can’t.
The World Health Organization says that 60% of people will live in cities by 2030, and the more densely populated they become, the hotter they’ll get. Considering that recent predictions warn temperatures in South Asia will exceed the limits of human survival by the end of the century, every degree counts. Even this year, 65 people have perished from nearly 44C (111F) heat in Karachi, Pakistan – a city used to extreme heat.
But the impact is not evenly distributed. For example, there is a strong correlation between an area’s green spaces and its wealth; when shade from tree canopies can lower surfaces’ peak temperature by 11–25°C, “landscape is a predictor for morbidity in heatwaves”, says Tarik Benmarhnia, public health researcher at University of California San Diego. A review paper he recently co-authored found that people living in less vegetated areas had a 5% higher risk of death from heat-related causes.
Air pollution is more deadly in these areas, too, as nitrous oxides generate ozone when heated by the sun, inflaming airways and increasing mortality risk. “These problems are worse,” says Benmarhnia, “for vulnerable or low-income populations living near traffic in poor housing with no air conditioning.”
But air conditioning will remain out of reach for many, even as it increasingly becomes a necessity. In 2014, Public Health England raised concerns that “the distribution of cooling systems may reflect socioeconomic inequalities unless they are heavily subsidized,” adding that rising fuel costs could further exacerbate this. And when we need to use less energy and cool the planet, not just our homes and offices, relying upon air conditioning is not a viable long-term plan – and certainly not for everyone.
Most of the research into heatwaves and public health has focused on western countries; Benmarhnia says more studies have been done on the city of Phoenix, Arizona, than the entire continent of Africa. But the problem is global, and especially pronounced across urban slums such as the ashwiyyat in Cairo, where temperatures during the city’s five-month-long summers have peaked at 46C (115F).
Traditionally Egyptians built low buildings close together, forming dense networks of shaded alleyways where people could keep cool during summer. But the rapid construction of high-rises and decreasing green spaces have made one of the fastest-growing cities in the world increasingly stifling. Subsidy cuts have brought about a rise of 18-42% in electricity costs, affecting many poor residents’ options for cooling down.
Compounding the threat posed by the changing climate is the refugee crisis. The two are intimately linked, with extreme weather events often a factor in social, political and economic instability. A paper published in the journal Science in December found that if greenhouse gas emissions were not meaningfully reduced global asylum applications would increase by almost 200% by the end of the century.
In at least one of the world’s hottest countries, steps are starting to be taken. India recently announced that a series of common-sense public health interventions have led to an enormous reduction in heat-related deaths – from 2,040 in 2015, to a little over 200 in 2017. Successful measures included unlocking the gates to public parks during the day, distributing free water, and painting the roofs of slum communities white, knocking 5C off internal temperatures.
Montreal first implemented a similar heat action plan in 2004, reducing mortality on hot days by 2.52 deaths per day, but as the heat waves intensify, it is likely that this will need to be reassessed. Nadler says the devastating impacts of global warming are only just beginning to dawn on everyone. “Cities will have to rethink how we prepare for these emergencies and what we’re able to offer to all of our citizens – from the most affluent, to the most vulnerable.”
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/13/heat-next-big-inequality-issue-heatwaves-world
Oriana:
Measures like painting surfaces white and creating shade (landscaping + construction) can mean a life-saving 10 degrees difference. It all sounds like a band-aid, I know. Yet building a covered patio that shades the eastern side of my house has arguably been the best investment of my life.
Shade-providing roofs could also be covered with solar panels. There are many solutions, but the will to act needs to be there, and the focus — instead of pointlessly bombing the Middle East.
SUN SPOT CYCLES
~ “The sun's pockmarked surface is always shifting. Sunspots and solar flares rise and fall every 11 years, a cycle associated with regular reversal of the star's magnetic field. Huge quantities of plasma—known as coronal mass ejections—fly into space, which can disrupt satellites and other electronic signals if they reach Earth. More solar activity during the cycle also amplifies auroras and warms Earth's temperatures slightly. Yet careful study has shown that longer periodicities exist, too. The Gleissberg cycle, first identified in 1862, strengthens and weakens the 11-year cycle over the course of a century (88 years on the average). One paper posits that the Gleissberg pattern is caused by a slow swaying of the sun's magnetic pole. The Suess-DeVries cycle lasts about 200 years, whereas the Hallstatt cycle runs on the order of 2,400 years. Still, the sun can also be erratic, making it tricky for physicists to predict future sunspots, says Alexei Pevtsov, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colo.: “There's an element of randomness.”
Dust or clouds dim the sun enough that large sun spots are visible to the naked eye. Arabic, European, Chinese and Maya astronomers all noted them. The first known drawing of sun spots dates to 1128 C.E.” ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sunspot-cycle-is-more-intricate-than-previously-thought/?sf195703043=1
Sunspots, the Space Station, and the Moon during the solar eclipse, August 2017**
WE ARE HEADING FOR A SOLAR MINIMUM
~ “High up in the clear blue noontime sky, the sun appears to be much the same day-in, day-out, year after year.
But astronomers have long known that this is not true. The sun does change. Properly-filtered telescopes reveal a fiery disk often speckled with dark sunspots. Sunspots are strongly magnetized, and they crackle with solar flares—magnetic explosions that illuminate Earth with flashes of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. The sun is a seething mass of activity.
Until it’s not. Every 11 years or so, sunspots fade away, bringing a period of relative calm.
“This is called solar minimum,” says Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. “And it’s a regular part of the sunspot cycle.”
The sun is heading toward solar minimum now. Sunspot counts were relatively high in 2014, and now they are sliding toward a low point expected in 2019-2020.
While intense activity such as sunspots and solar flares subside during solar minimum, that doesn’t mean the sun becomes dull. Solar activity simply changes form.
For instance, says Pesnell, “during solar minimum we can see the development of long-lived coronal holes.”
Coronal holes are vast regions in the sun’s atmosphere where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows streams of solar particles to escape the sun as the fast solar wind.
Pesnell says “We see these holes throughout the solar cycle, but during solar minimum, they can last for a long time - six months or more.” Streams of solar wind flowing from coronal holes can cause space weather effects near Earth when they hit Earth’s magnetic field. These effects can include temporary disturbances of the Earth’s magnetosphere, called geomagnetic storms, auroras, and disruptions to communications and navigation systems.
During solar minimum, the effects of Earth’s upper atmosphere on satellites in low Earth orbit changes too.
Normally Earth’s upper atmosphere is heated and puffed up by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Satellites in low Earth orbit experience friction as they skim through the outskirts of our atmosphere. This friction creates drag, causing satellites to lose speed over time and eventually fall back to Earth. Drag is a good thing for space junk — natural and man-made particles floating in orbit around Earth. Drag helps keep low Earth orbit clear of debris.
But during solar minimum, this natural heating mechanism subsides. Earth’s upper atmosphere cools and, to some degree, can collapse. Without a normal amount of drag, space junk tends to hang around.
There are unique space weather effects that get stronger during solar minimum. For example, the number of galactic cosmic rays that reach Earth’s upper atmosphere increases during solar minimum. Galactic cosmic rays are high energy particles accelerated toward the solar system by distant supernova explosions and other violent events in the galaxy.
Pesnell says that “During solar minimum, the sun’s magnetic field weakens and provides less shielding from these cosmic rays. This can pose an increased threat to astronauts traveling through space.”
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/news-articles/solar-minimum-is-coming
A visible light image of the sun and an X-ray image*
“THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS NOT BE HAPPY; IT IS TO BE USEFUL” ~ Emerson
~ “Did Aristotle lie to us when he said, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence”?
I think we have to look at that quote from a different angle. Because when you read it, you think that happiness is the main goal. And that’s kind of what the quote says as well.
But here’s the thing: How do you achieve happiness?
Happiness can’t be a goal in itself. Therefore, it’s not something that’s achievable.
I believe that happiness is merely a byproduct of usefulness.
Don’t get me wrong. I love to go on holiday, or go shopping sometimes. But to be honest, it’s not what gives meaning to life.
What really makes me happy is when I’m useful. When I create something that others can use. Or even when I create something I can use.
For the longest time I found it difficult to explain the concept of usefulness and happiness. But when I recently ran into a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the dots connected.
Emerson says: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
You don’t have to change the world or anything. Just make it a little bit better than you were born.
When you do little useful things every day, it adds up to a life that is well lived. A life that mattered.
The last thing I want is to be on my deathbed and realize there’s zero evidence that I ever existed.
Being useful is a mindset. And like with any mindset, it starts with a decision. One day I woke up and thought to myself: What am I doing for this world? The answer was nothing.
And that same day I started writing. For you it can be painting, creating a product, helping elderly, or anything you feel like doing.
Don’t take it too seriously. Don’t overthink it. Just DO something that’s useful. Anything.” ~
https://dariusforoux.com/happiness-usefulness/
Darius is not an exciting stylist. He uses simple words in trite combinations (a skillful writer is after simple words in unusual, novel combinations). The only reason I’ve decided to include this is that the underlying idea is so clear and powerful: forget about the pursuit of happiness. Try to be useful instead.
This change of focus is revolutionary. It’s like deciding to provide the best value instead of trying to make money and more money. Usually the money will follow, but not as a result of a direct focus. First, try to provide the best value. Concentrate on that.
Why does something as simple as holding the door open for a mother struggling with a stroller make us happy? My best guess is that as social animals — and this goes back millions of years into our primate past — we evolved to feel good when we help someone else. Usually such an interaction also involves some degree of affection: smiling, a soft tone of voice, receiving thanks and good wishes — and affection, even from a stranger, is rewarding in itself.
But even without that pleasant bonus, there is power to the idea, here reduced to its essence:
“The purpose of life not to be happy. It is to be useful.”
This is not some transcendent “purpose of life,” designated from above. It’s what seems to work for most people to create a sense of having a purpose in life — which in turn makes us feel good. It’s about being able we touch the lives of others in a positive way, however small. Everyone does it in a different way, since we are unique, with different skills.
The Victorians used to put it in a stern manner: “We are not here to feel good. We are here to do good.”
And Dickinson put it in verse:
If I can stop one Heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one Life the Aching,
Or cool one Pain,
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.
~ Dickinson, 919, 1864
But that can be intimidating — is it in our power to stop one heart from breaking, or lessen someone’s pain? And what if we must cause some degree of suffering to accomplish what we perceive as a greater good, as in dismissing an undesirable employee or a disruptive student? What kind of good are we supposed to do?
The answer is obvious for a surgeon — or a comedian, a chef, a solar-panel installer — but many of us are at a far remove from being able to render that kind of highly skilled service. Fortunately small things are enough. St. Therese the Little Flower realized she could not be a great mystic — so she settled on her “Little Way” of performing small deeds of kindness — be it merely chatting with a crotchety old nun that everyone detested and no one talked with.
Some people have children mainly in order to feel useful to someone. Others acquire pets for the same reason. Even having plants to take care of has been shown to improve the health of the elderly.
And now and then we don’t even have to do anything — just be there. Just our uniqueness is enough — just being there for another, with our unique presence. The greatest gift we can give another is simply our being, Heidegger once wrote to Hannah Arendt. Even when it seems that we have nothing to give, it turns out that we always have something to give: just our being there.
Horses appear to be happy just standing in a pasture next to another horse, but in that criss-cross pattern. When horses love each other, that's the quiet way they show it. Perhaps it’s about being in the other horse’s electromagnetic field. We don’t know. But I have noticed that someone quietly sitting in the same room with you also contributes. Unless we are attending a lecture, it’s not about who does the most talking.
*
“I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred orange and scrub the floor.” ~ DH Lawrence
Oriana:
Who knew that DH, while not shocking his readers writing about sex, did things like make orange marmalade? Which is not exactly easy . . . But anything beats brooding. “Do something useful” is immortal advice — even if it's useful just to ourselves, e.g. we prepare our lunch (never mind it’s rather early for lunch — just do your mental and physical health a favor and add an item, like mushrooms with onions). Hence, I suspect, the enormous popularity of cooking and gardening. Aside from certain specific pleasures, these are activities, and doing things is an effective anti-depressant. So if you're into home-made pasta, hop to it. The answer, take it from me as a seasoned brooder, does *not* lie within. It lies “without” (outside) — in external-focus activities. And if those activities are useful, so much the better.
THE “REAL MAGIC” OF TECHNOLOGY A GREATER THREAT TO RELIGION THAN SCIENCE
~ “We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.” ~ Rudolph Bultmann (German Lutheran theologian known for wanting to de-mythologize the gospels, author of Religion without Myth (coauthored with Karl Jaspers, 1954)
This is so in line with Milosz's statement that what makes religion so out of kilter with the modern world is primarily technology. While many give all credit to science and especially the theory of evolution, I think Milosz is right about technology. Most people have a poor grasp of science, and evolution in particular is quite complicated; by contrast, you don’t have to understand how an iPhone works in order to use it. Technology is “real magic” that mostly works versus imaginary magic such as prayer that mostly doesn't work (and that’s after learning to pray only for plausible outcomes — not for something like regrowing an amputated limb).
The ancient world was one of magic and superstition; the bible was written by men who had no idea “where the sun went during the night” (it doesn’t go anywhere; it’s the earth that rotates; now think of the question of where consciousness [“the soul”] goes after death). But more than that, they didn't know about bacteria and other pathogens (Jesus, alas, wasn’t enthusiastic about hand washing), so there was a lot of mortality of the sort that today is prevented thanks to public hygiene. Travel was slow and dangerous, and information scarce. “Unclean spirits” were all around, making mischief . . . all kinds of invisible beings were milling around, apparently controlling what humans couldn't control except through “lucky charms” and animal sacrifice and other means that today strike us as bizarre. We can't get back to that mentality. May its most negative remnants perish soon (and we do indeed see some decline: while the belief in angels holds steady, the belief in hell and the devil has plummeted)
The gist Milosz’s argument, however, was that technology gives people a greater sense of control over their lives. Thanks to technology and modern medicine, we have much less fear of premature death: we assume the average woman will survive childbirth and the average child will survive infancy and early childhood. We can also get to distant places with astonishing (by the standards of the past) speed and safety. We can communicate with both our loved ones and with people trained to help us in emergency.
Religion thrives on lack of that sense of control. When we feel helpless, prayer seems better than nothing, and belief, even if forced, takes the appearance of insurance “just in case” that an Invisible Someone Up There might take offense at non-belief (and that Someone might also, just might, violate the laws of nature in order to help us). In the main, however, Bultman states what should be obvious but still isn’t (maybe because of the long-lasting effect of childhood indoctrination): the mostly effective magic of technology outcompetes the mostly ineffective magic of religion.
The problem is that Bultman appeals to logic, and logic and religion never met. Nevertheless, when the gap becomes outrageously wide, change can gradually creep in. Or, some claim, it can happen pretty suddenly, in one generation.
*
WHAT? NO ANIMAL SACRIFICES TO YAHWEH?
“William James opined at the turn of the twentieth century (1902): “Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to take seriously.” But a century later, few would agree publicly with Thomas Nagel when he candidly says he would not want such a god to exist. . . . If pressed, many people insist that the anthropomorphic languages used to describe god is metaphorical, not literal. One might suppose, then, that the curious adjective “God-fearing” would have faded into disuse over the years, a fossil trace of a rather embarrassingly juvenile period in our religious past, but far from it. People want a god who can be loved and feared the way you love or fear another person.
“Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in — whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually — agree with each other in recognizing personal calls,” James observed. “Today, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.” ~ Daniel Dennett, “Breaking the Spell”
“Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to take seriously,” according to William James, writing in 1902. And yet not long ago on NPR I heard a fundamentalist minister argue that in order for the Second Coming to be complete, the Jews need to rebuild the Jerusalem temple and reinstate the ritual of animal sacrifice there. “There’s been no sacrifice since 70 AD!” the minister exclaimed, indignant at such a terrible religious lapse.
Obviously not everyone has the modern mentality that’s repelled by the killing of a lamb — or any other living thing — as a form of worship. That’s the power of severe early indoctrination: the archaic mentality is sanctified since it produced the bible. Of course the worship of other deities also prominently featured animal sacrifice, but fundamentalists aren’t put off by these similarities — if they are even aware of them. If something was practiced in the biblical times, it must have been good.
(For me, however, the very fact that the worship of Yahweh consisted chiefly of animal sacrifice was one more piece of strong evidence that he was like Zeus or Baal: another fictitious deity, similar to the others, mostly cruel and capricious, demanding blood. As for “Without blood there is no forgiveness” of the Epistle to the Hebrews, what a barbarous regression! And yet that barbarity is the very foundation of Christianity.)
Re: sola scriptura:
SIGNS AND NON-WONDERS
Sundays I worship at my favorite library, which requires that I drive on the freeway. But what’s this on the overpass where I'm used to seeing a big white truck with a billboard that says JESUS SAVES? A small yellow truck with the sign: GOLDEN BOY BAIL BONDS.
No, not “Golden State.” Golden Boy — perhaps implying that gold jewelry will be accepted as collateral. And not as good as “Discount Bankruptcy.” I am all for the separation of church and freeway, but this did not feel like an improvement. But the worst still lay ahead. Soon I was following a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said NUKE AFGHANISTAN UNTIL IT GLOWS.
So it goes.
**
HOW TO SIT TO HEAL YOUR BACK
~ “To figure out how to shift your pelvis into a healthier position, Sherer says to imagine for a minute you have a tail. If we were designed like dogs, the tail would be right at the base of your spine.
"When you sit with a C shape in your spine, you're sitting on this tail," Sherer says. "It's kind of like a dog with its tail between its legs, who is scared and frightened."
To straighten out the C shape, Sherer says, "we need to position the pelvis in a way that this tail could wag."
In other words, we need to untuck our tails. To do that, Sherer says, you need to bend over properly when you go to sit down.
"Bend over?" I ask. "Do I bend when I sit down?"
"Yes!" Sherer exclaims. "Every time you sit down, you bend somewhere."
And where you bend determines how you will sit.
If you bend at the waist, which many Americans do, then you will likely sit with a C or cashew shape.
If you bend at the hips, you're more likely to sit correctly with your tail untucked.
A weaver in India, sitting with his “tail untucked” and a straight spine"Bending at the hips can be hard for many people to figure out," Sherer says. "It's a bit counterintuitive."
But she has a trick to help people learn.
"Stand up and spread your heels about 12 inches apart," she says. Now, put your hand on your pubic bone — like a fig leaf covering up Adam in the Bible, she explains.
"When you bend over, you want to let this fig leaf — your pubic bone — move through your legs," she says. "This creates a crease between your pelvis and legs.” ~
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/08/13/636025077/to-fix-that-pain-in-your-back-you-might-have-to-change-the-way-you-sit
Left: hip-hinging, table-top back versus the C shape that comes from bending at the waist (panning for gold on Madagascar)Oriana:
It's definitely not easy at first. You have to remember to push out your buttocks to the back of the chair. Doing deep hip-hinging squats helps acquire the new habit.
**
THE USES OF SORROW
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
~ Mary Oliver
*
Night by Greta Hällfors-Sipilä, 1931
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