**
THE FEAST OF TREES
Could you enjoy a festive banquet
if the host said, Eat and drink,
this is my flesh, my blood —
Could you partake
of this sublime
generosity if he began to bleed?
How different is the feast of trees,
beautiful even in their death —
splayed logs and limbs like open arms
surrendering to moss and saplings.
Or a eucalyptus grove
seared by fire, crowns intact,
trunks and leaves the same
pale unburnished bronze —
trees silenced into art,
motionless as Dante’s
Wood of Suicides.
The eloquence of thorns.
~ Oriana
The sight of the trees after one of our first great fires inspired this. The trees weren’t burned, but rather seared by the heat — the leaves actually stayed on. And they didn’t actually turn black — that happened to the remains of the chaparral brush above in the hills — they turned a gorgeous bronze color. If not for the deadness, it would have actually been a delightful sight — a unique still life.
But under normal circumstances, something even more marvelous happens. The old tree dies and falls. In forests that receive sufficient rain, we soon have a “nurse log.”
How different is the feast of trees,
beautiful even in their death —
splayed logs and limbs like open arms
surrendering to moss and saplings.
From Wiki:
~ “Various mechanical and biological processes contribute to the breakdown of lignin in fallen trees, resulting in the formation of niches of increasing size, which tend to fill with forest litter such as soil from spring floods, needles, moss, mushrooms and other flora. Mosses also can cover the outside of a log, hastening its decay and supporting other species as rooting media and by retaining water. Small animals such as various squirrels often perch or roost on nurse logs, adding to the litter by food debris and scat. The decay of this detritus contributes to the formation of a rich humus that provides a seedbed and adequate conditions for germination.” ~
Thus death feeds new life, and all is used, recycled, rich and lush again. This reminds me of a rabbi’s saying that we should give back all the love we’ve received — all those nutrients.
**
“THE ELOQUENCE OF THORNS” — OUR FEAR OF LOSS GREATLY EXCEEDS OUR HOPE OF REWARD
~ “We're going to flip a coin. If it lands on tails, you have to pay us $10. If it lands on heads, how much would you have to win for this bet to be worth it? If it's anything more than $10—and we're willing to bet it is—that's loss aversion in action. This trick of psychology says the pain of losing something is greater than the joy of gaining something.
This concept was coined by legendary psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman way back in the early 90s. The coin-flip scenario above comes from a real experiment Kahneman performs in his university classes. So how much do students want to win before the $10 gamble is worth it? As Kahneman told The New York Times, "People want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I've been doing the same thing with executives or very rich people, asking about tossing a coin and losing $10,000 if it's tails. And they want $20,000 before they'll take the gamble.
You're less likely to walk away from a blackjack table when you've lost a hand than when you've won one. You're more likely to become politically involved when your rights are threatened than you are if there's a vote on a law that would give you more rights. Loss aversion is even an explanation for why people stay in dead-end jobs: the fear of losing a steady paycheck is greater than the potential happiness of finding a job you really love.
Evolution has made pain a more urgent matter than pleasure, since avoiding pain is the thing that can keep you alive to procreate.
**THE OVERNIGHT TEST**
When faced with a decision you fear might be affected by loss aversion, the New York Times's Carl Richards suggests using what he calls the Overnight Test. His test deals with money and investments, but you could potentially use it for anything. Take something you're afraid of losing, even though you know you'd be better for losing it—camping equipment you're never going to use, a dead-end job, even an unpleasant friendship. Imagine you went to bed, and overnight someone got rid of it (sold the equipment for cash, got you a different job, ended the friendship). The next morning, you could choose to get back the thing you lost, or stick with the new situation. What would you do? If you'd stick with the new situation, there's your answer—lose what's holding you back and get on with your life.”
https://curiosity.com/topics/loss-aversion-says-that-the-pain-of-loss-is-stronger-than-the-joy-of-gain-curiosity/
from another source:
~ “In the book, Thinking Fast And Slow, Danny Kahneman uses Prospect Theory to explain that, as human beings, we fear loss far more than we value gain.
In the book and in his studies, Kahneman said that our perspective of reality is actually exaggerated at least double when we’re afraid of losing something.
But that’s only what he reported in his studies because he knew his work would be under a great deal of scrutiny. In more private settings, he has said his data actually shows that people inflate or exaggerate reality by 5–7X when they fear avoiding loss.” ~
https://medium.com/@benjaminhardy/to-have-freedom-in-your-life-you-must-stop-avoiding-this-one-thing-78cf4d77ec1c
LOSS AVERSION ~ Wiki
~ “In cognitive psychology and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people's tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose $5 than to find $5. The principle is very prominent in the domain of economics. What distinguishes loss aversion from risk aversion is that the utility of a monetary payoff depends on what was previously experienced or was expected to happen. Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. Loss aversion was first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
Loss aversion implies that one who loses $100 will lose more satisfaction than another person will gain satisfaction from a $100 windfall. The effect of loss aversion in a marketing setting was demonstrated in a study of consumer reaction to price changes to insurance policies. The study found price increases had twice the effect on customer switching, compared to price decreases.” ~
Oriana:
I'm very loss-aversive. I feel the pain of loss much more acutely than any joy of reward (well, maybe not any reward, but when it comes to money, certainly). My first thought while reading about risking the loss of $10 was that I'd have to have a 50% chance of gaining $100. And the years when I was extremely poor are long over! But those years of poverty brand you for life.
When it comes to effort, I'm nowhere as aversive to loss. Working hard is its own pleasure, so even if it comes to nothing, I can just shrug it off. Physical pain, as long as it’s relatively mild, does not scare me. But a lot of emotional stress — a difficult commute in a traffic jam, having to deal with unpleasant people — now this is the kind of “loss” that can keep me from doing something when the gain isn’t especially alluring. And when I look at what’s out there, nothing seems all that alluring (everything is riddled with problems) when measured against the stress involved in gaining it. That knowledge seems to have come with age: the reward has become less rewarding, while the stress has become magnified and harder to detox from.
This is why the "overnight test" is a fabulous tool, I think. Imagine that during the night, without being conscious of it, you were to lose the thing you're afraid of losing. You wake up and it's gone -- the job, the relationship, a certain amount of money. How terrible is it, really? Are you able to adjust to the new situation, or would you prefer things the old way? This “thought experiment” can shake us out of our defensive posture.
For instance, we could give away (or lose) a lot of what we own and never really miss it. Some people will admit that for them it would be 90% of all their stuff. Imagine all the space in the house you’d gain!
But material stuff is the easy part. It’s choosing between the non-material things that can be agonizing. Say it’s one partner versus another, when you’ve lived long enough to know that no partner is going to be without problems, and basically you are exchanging one set of problems for another — that’s where we see loss aversion most at work, and that’s where taking a risk often makes sense.
But we can’t know that for sure — and that’s just how life is. What helps me is the motto that no matter what happens, I’ll manage to cope with it somehow. I’ll soldier on. Until that fails — since the way life is, eventually there comes a point when life may be no longer worth living. If that point comes when you’re in your nineties, you’re terrifically lucky and still a winner.
Most fears don’t come true. It’s what we didn’t think of fearing that tends to happen — IF anything happens. And then it’s not the end of the world — until it is. But again, if that “end of the world” comes in old age, that’s not a tragedy — that’s how life works, after giving us uncountable riches. Let’s just make sure to give back all the love we’ve received.
How did I become so loss-aversive? My personal experience with taking a huge risk taught me some painful lessons. MY PERSONAL COLUMBUS DAY
October, my month of fate. Columbus Day: a strange personal coincidence since it’s the anniversary of my arrival in America. By now I know it’s pointless (and dangerous to my mental health) to wonder if I’d made a gigantic mistake, the greatest mistake of my life from which all the rest followed like the unfolding of a Greek tragedy. It’s my number one no-think zone.
But I can’t deny that I made a leap of ignorance rather than a leap of courage. To switch mythologies, I learned the hard the lesson of Lot's Wife. Do not look back and risk turning into the salt of your own tears. A person must refuse to live a life of regret; must look to what good can yet be accomplished, regardless of past mistakes.
Part of it was the premature closure of my life as a young girl. Now the heaviness of being an adult and having to cope by myself would fall upon me. I didn’t yet know how much I’d miss that relatively happy, curious, brave young girl. (Other young women told me that for them the Great Divide was getting married; “Where’s the young girl I was?” they’d later ask.)
When you leave your homeland, you often lose the people you love. What you’re not told that above all you’ll lose the self you love, yourself as you were in that city, in that landscape, with those people.
Of course I’ve also gained some things. I think I have a larger mentality for having grappled with the enormous difficulties of being an immigrant — of having experienced poverty, for instance. But that’s perhaps a rationalization, since I can’t predict how my intellectual and personal development would have proceeded if I’d stayed.
THE ONLY CERTAINTY: The price I paid in suffering is horrendous. To a prospective young immigrant: don’t even think about it. If life in your homeland is truly hard to endure, that may be the only good reason to leave. But if your life is rich and interesting (as mine was in Warsaw), don’t even think about it. Drop on your knees and deeply thank whatever gods you believe in that you that you have a homeland.
From a poem of mine:
In the morning I had a homeland.
In the evening I had two suitcases.
And yes, of course I thought that America was coast to coast Manhattan and Americans lived in skyscrapers.
Manhattan; Jan Pieklo“Henceforth I ask not for good fortune, I myself am good fortune.” ~ Walt Whitman
Oriana:
I think at this point I too could say that "I myself am good fortune" -- after lots of suffering, and then choosing not to suffer if I didn't have to. And past concentrating on people who did not want me here, who made me feel as if I were from another planet. That fit with my self-image as the eternal outsider, but it's possible to hold that self-image loosely, not to have it be so central. I'd no longer say, as I once did, "My primary identity is not a poet, not a woman, but an immigrant. That's what defines me more than anything else." Now I'm not really sure, and I'm fine with not being sure. It's not really that important, this question of "identity." I'd rather flow with momentary beauty.
**
“People are bored by happy tales, and with good reason: happiness calls up those parts of us that are most melancholy and lonely.” ~ Inês Pedrosa
Christian Schoe: Cloud TreesA MORAL PERSON VERSUS AN UNHINGED TYRANT: CAMILLO’S DILEMMA IN THE WINTER’S TALE
~ “Steven Greenblatt's new book, Tyrant, provides a concise and cogent look at Shakespeare's depiction of political tyrants, including but not limited to Macbeth, Richard III, and would-be demagogic tyrants such as Jack Cade (a fascinating character from one of the minor works, Henry VI, Part 3). Although Greenblatt is very politic, never mentioning any current U.S. politician by name, he explicitly considers the following tyrannical traits, reprising them from the Bard's canon while also asking how someone manifesting them could end up in a position of power and authority: impulsive, amoral, mendacious, pathologically narcissistic, verbally and physically abusive, misogynistic and dishonest.
Inspired in part by Professor Greenblatt's work, as well as my own fascination with Will, I began re-reading some of my Shakespearean favorites, including The Winter's Tale, a lesser-known fantasy/romance/comedy. In it, I encountered an intriguing tyrant-relevant situation, one not covered by Tyrant. Here — not for the first or last time — Shakespeare illuminates a deeply psychological, intensely practical issue that transcends time, place, and cultural specifics, speaking to a particular yet surprisingly universal human dilemma: what to do if you are stuck with a boss (or spouse, parent, teacher ...) who is mentally unhinged, and yet has considerable power and authority.
In The Winter's Tale, the problematic tyrant is Leontes, King of Sicilia, who has unaccountably developed a psychotic fixation that his wife, Hermione, has been having an affair with his best friend, King Polyxenes of Bohemia. It isn't true; in fact, all of Leontes' attendant lords know that the charge is utter nonsense, but none of them is willing to risk his — they are all male — position (or their life) by disputing the king's delusion. Leontes proceeds to demand that Camillo, his most trusted confidant and adviser, kill Polyxenes.
This places Camillo in an impossible situation: He is too moral to murder an innocent person (not to mention a sitting king), and yet, his own king makes it clear that if he doesn't do so, he will himself be killed. What to do? Camillo warns Polyxenes that his life is in danger, and then flees. It's certainly an option, albeit an uncomfortable one.
Reading of Camillo's conundrum, I found myself for the first time feeling some empathy for current appointed figures who are presumably moral and are confronted with similar dilemmas. Their boss may be unhinged, and although their lives aren't literally at risk if they express their worry, their careers may well be. It's a situation not limited to politics, and distressingly common in the wider workplace; moreover, when extended to cases of domestic abuse, personal safety is all too often threatened.
Telling truth to power is not for the faint of heart. It is even more difficult to act ethically when confronted with someone whose power is dangerously enhanced by mental instability. I am grateful not to be in such a position, while nonetheless wishing that those who are so situated would find the courage, decency and opportunity to do the right thing.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pura-vida/201810/whats-right-when-the-boss-is-wrong-camillos-conundrum
I can’t claim that this is much of an article. It doesn’t even mention Paulina, the queen’s friend and a very important character who does dare to speak truth to power and basically proves to be a female savior. But it is one of my favorite minor plays, and if this makes anyone read it or go see it, hurray! Much pleasure ahead, including songs and the comic villain Autolycus, a trickster and thief named after the maternal grandfather of Odysseus. The name means “lone wolf” — though in the Polish translation I'm familiar with, it was closer to Werewolf, in the diminutive to soften it. The mythical Autolycus was supposed to be the son of Hermes, the trickster god.
Autolycus, The Winter’s Tale, T.C. Wageman 1828Camillo is a minor character, easily forgotten. But given his dilemma, he does the right thing: he spares the life of an innocent man, and pays for it by ending his career at the Sicilian court and going into exile. Tough, Shakespeare seems to say: disobeying an unhinged tyrant is the only option, even if there are painful personal consequences.
Disobeying a demented ruler has recently come to light in the anonymous letter to the New York Times, where a White House official confessed to snatching away harmful documents away from the president’s desk (taking advantage of the latter’s memory deficit — out of sight, out of mind).
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By the way, The Winter’s Tale features another lost-and-found daughter, Perdita, who is a figure of grace and reconciliation. It’s thrilling to have some respite from the traditional violent male hero, and to have a an embodiment of gentleness instead, a loving young woman. Leontes becomes a tyrant because he has lost his soul — his ability to be loving. But in the magic of meadows and forests, all ends well: Perdita, the “lost one,” the eternal feminine, is found again.
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But Jeremy Sherman reminds us that universal love is not possible. We need to ask focus our love, to allocate it wisely.
LOVE IS NOT THE ANSWER; IT’S THE QUESTION
(virtue of selfishness vs. universal love? time to grow up out of both lies)
~ “At odds in U.S. political debate these days are two extreme moral codes:
1. It’s every family for itself. Our duty is to our own lineage. We‘re entitled to what our ancestors gained and our duty is to pass on to our children what we, in turn, gained. We owe nothing to other lineages.
2. We are a global community now, the inheritors of what our collective ancestors gained. Our duty is to future generations collectively.
In both codes we are indebted to ancestors, a debt we pay off to future generations. The difference is one of scale—one local, the other global.
Organisms have no moral code but if they had one it would be the first—every lineage for itself. That‘s the moral code of the right-wing, Koch brother, prosperity gospel libertarianism that has fueled a radical minority to stage a political coup against the majority.
The first code has the backing of Darwinian natural selection. Non-human life is every lineage for itself. By that standard, Trump and his kind are highly evolved. In the wild, such critters would prevail. The second code doesn’t come naturally to any of us. Humans can extend loyalty easily enough to the tribe, clan, culture, or nation, but not, in practice, to all of humanity. People make most bequests locally, not globally. Most inheritances still go to one’s own offspring.
Humans have language and with it, a capacity to empathize broadly—to imagine, learn, and understand how others feel. We don‘t just act by instinct on behalf of our own lineage.
Language frees us to declare codes at any scale. With words, we can declare that our debt is only to ourselves, our lineage, our culture or nation, to all of humanity, or to all of life. We can also declare that our debt is to some imagined higher authority—to Allah, Jesus, God, or the great spirit.
Appealing to an imagined higher supernatural authority can settle debate so long as everyone is on the same supernatural page. With human technology, also made possible by our capacity for language, we can move around and communicate over long distances. The tower of babble has come true, people talking different moral languages and insisting on different last words. Our imagined Gods are at odds with each other. It’s not clear what we owe to whom.
Our capacity for language unleashes technology that allows for greater mobility and communication, but not just. It also makes the consequences of our behavior more mobile. Driving a gas guzzler for convenience causes hardships across the globe. Bargain goods here create sweatshop conditions elsewhere. What humans do locally has global consequences we can‘t and often would rather not track. Language helps us ignore these consequences.
With words we rationalize locally by ignoring our consequences globally, rationalizing our way into a state akin to that of other organisms, ignorant of their consequences but with a difference, since our consequences have a much more extended range than that of other organisms.
There’s talk of universal love, but talk is cheap. Some cultures recognize this. The Chinese and Japanese rarely declare love: Don’t tell, show. Real love is demonstrated, not declared.
We each can demonstrate only so much love because we have limited energy and attention. We can declare abstract regard for the global collective but we can’t demonstrate love to all. We have to prioritize.
Spiritualists often speak of radiating loving energy, an imagined spiritual substance metaphorically parallel to a physical energy. If it were a physical energy, it would dissipate with distance in accord with the inverse square law. As with light, the farther from the source, the weaker the energy will be.
Therefore, there’s something to the parallel, but it’s not what the spiritualists embrace. In practice, we each have our radiated spheres of loving attention, effort, care, and influence. Unfocused love is like unfocused light, radiating out in all directions, dissipating with distance. That’s why in practice we focus our loving energy. We care where we point our care. We try to focus it right since for each of us it’s a limited resource.
Love-onomics or care-onomics should be a hot topic, the allocation of our finite love as demonstrated through attention and care in a world of near-infinite demand. In love-onomics and care-onomics, love and care aren’t the answer but the question. Where to focus and allocate them?
In politics, there are those who think as biology acts: Take care of you and yours, never mind people outside your sphere. Let them take care of themselves and theirs. If everyone does that, there should be enough to go round, but even if there’s not, tough luck as in biology.
There are others who counter that we should love and care for everyone, often implying that we have an infinite quantity of love and care, as though abstract regard for all is enough.
The sacred texts are ambiguous on the right scale of care. As Robert Wright illustrates with a careful scriptural analysis in The Evolution of God, parts of them read as though the sacred secret is universal love but other parts read as though love and care should be focused on members of the faith. "Love thy neighbor” can be interpreted as love everyone or love thy most likely neighbor, a member of the family or clan. Wright suggests that the sacred texts, all products of their time in history, gestured love to potential allies, often in sacred battle against outside enemies.
Is Jesus revered because he was universally loving or because he focused his love well? It’s not clear from the gospels and it’s surprising how rarely Christians wonder. He shows plenty of disdain for people who don’t believe him. He often reads as disdaining people for not being more universally loving.
That’s a common theme across religious and spiritual faiths: “We are the ones who believe in universal love. We have the big inclusive picture, and if you don’t agree with us, you don’t deserve our love.”
Be intolerant of intolerance. Hate hate. These are inconveniently self-contradictory pronouncements. People rarely notice the troublesome hypocrisy, the ambiguity in their spiritual commitments.
Today’s spiritualism doesn’t escape this hypocrisy. It treats spirit, love, care, and attention as infinite resources.
Is mindfulness a practice that affords you infinite care or a practice that enables you to better focus your finite care? Like Christians, mindfulness practitioners often ignore the question. They talk as though mindfulness is not an occasional practice like physical exercise but a state of mind one should be in always, a state that affords you infinite loving attention and therefore frees you from wondering where to focus it.
Even the Tao Te Ching is ambiguous on the question, though with a teasing self-awareness of the ambiguity. “Tao” means the way things are all together but also the way to be with the way things are, in other words, how to focus your care. The Tao dances back and forth between these two very different meanings with a paradoxically inclusive exclusivity: The Tao includes absolutely everything, but don’t be out of step with absolutely everything or you’re not included in the Tao.
Whatever we declare as our moral code, our walk counts for more than our talk. Whether we admit it or not, we do allocate our finite love and care. To the extent that we want to claim that we’re exceptionally loving and caring, we employ confirmation bias to make our case. We point to what we love and care about and ignore that we don’t love and care for other things.
I’m exceptionally loving, as is evident in how much I love my family.
Falling so in love with you proves that I’m exceptionally loving.
I care more than most. It’s obvious because I love Jesus and the unborn. It’s why I hate Muslims and abortion.
You outsiders may think I’m not generous but you’re wrong. I’m not selfish. I also believe that my fellow insiders deserve my generosity more than you outsiders do.
We rely on a token, trinket care or two to demonstrate that we’re universally caring.
Will Rogers said, “We’re all ignorant about something.” The same goes for our loving, caring attention. We are all unloving and uncaring about something.
We must do better about admitting to our limited love and the imperative we all face in choosing how to focus it. We must if we are to survive. With human technology, we no longer inherit just from our family line but from global culture. Our children won’t just inherit what we pass on to them but the world we pass on collectively. Billionaires can bequeath an island refuge to their offspring but that island won’t exist if the climate crisis remains unaddressed.
So is the right moral code universal collective love and care? No. It’s impossible. One way or another, we have to focus and prioritize. Our highest priority will always be local, but it can no longer be just local if we are to survive. With language, humans have the foresight to admit, if we’re brave enough, that you can’t optimize locally and pessimize globally for long.
Whatever the right moral code, we should finally admit to what we all do in practice. We allocate our finite love and care. Love isn’t the answer but the question: How should we allocate our finite love for the best local and collective effect? How can we pay out our debt to our collective ancestors by leaving an intact world to our offspring?
Option one, the lineage-only moral code, while natural, won’t work anymore. Human consequences spill too far and wide for that. With our technology, what goes around comes around over too great a distance. We will destroy our children’s chances if we don‘t think more globally.
But we can‘t just declare ourselves to be universal lovers, either. It's a self-aggrandizing lie. No one loves everything. It can't be done.
In politics, the mantra is, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the allocation and focus of finite resources. For each of us, the same goes for love. It’s the love-onomy, stupid. Where should we focus our loving effort for greatest effect in the service of not just local but collective, sustainable well-being?” ~ Jeremy Sherman
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201810/the-self-aggrandizing-myth-universal-unconditional-love
“The iron horse, a piece of artwork that had to be removed from the University of Georgia due to abuse by the students. The horse was created in the early 1950s an it appeared to be too modern for the students. The horse was placed in a field at the UGA Plant Sciences Farm.” I read some more on this — it was vandalized at least twice.
Oriana:
“Love is not the answer, but the question.” I try to “live the question” by practicing my “little way.” For instance, I try to chat amiably with people even if I don’t terribly feel like it, and it might seem more gratifying to just enjoy the landscape. But I discover that the joyful smile I get in return is often more rewarding than even a stunning bougainvillea.
As for the globalism/nationalism question — because ultimately that’s the big divide — I think a lot depends on “threat levels.” When we feel threatened by outsiders, as we did on 9/11 before we knew who was behind the attacks, there was no question of universal love. But when W started his war-mongering, a different mind set had already had the time to be restored in at least a portion of the population.
Mary:
Surely it is true universal love may well be dissipated until a mere abstraction, and focused love much more personal and limited in scope. Love may not be The Answer in any simple way, but surely we can achieve less hate.
That may be our best chance, our best choice--refuse to hate the stranger, however he is defined. Refuse to divide the world into us and them, friend and enemy, saint and sinner, master and slave. The world grows smaller and smaller. It becomes more and more impossible to continue blind to the fact that we are all in this together, and will sink or swim, preserve or destroy ourselves as a species, that the greed of some, and their hegemony, cannot continue in destructive practices that maintain their abundance at the cost of everyone else's poverty, because those practices have already destroyed the basis for providing that lofty and private citadel of wealth.
Even that Darwinian vision of eternal strife between and within species begins to be challenged. At least in examinations of the plant world intricate cooperative relations, systems really, have been discovered between trees and fungi--connections so vast and complete it becomes difficult to think of these partners as separate organisms---or even, to think of the discoveries concerning our own internal biome--comprised of organisms essential to us, whose effects and actions may be far more extensive than we can imagine--are we separate, or a collective?
In the same vein whales have recently been noted demonstrating inter-species cooperation, if I remember correctly, a beluga traveling with a pod of right whales--of course not much is known about this beyond observation. I have great faith in everything we don’t yet know — there is so much, so many wonders yet to discover!
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Oriana:
I don’t know anymore. All seemed easier before the election. Now with the indecency of the head of state daily in the news, all is in question, including whether we can feel anything but alienated from those whose views and values are nothing like our own. Before, we took some things for granted — we may disagree about militarism, say, but we’d never insult the parents of a fallen soldier. I personally never would, but now I know that there are people who would — just as they spray-paint swastikas on Jewish tombs or say that slavery was a good thing. That’s just too much for me to accept. I'm love-less in such instances — though later I may wonder about the wounds that would make someone so abusive toward others.
**
“The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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“Hoodlums and bullies always feel victimized, put upon — because even when they crow about being the greatest of winners, they are the ultimate losers, and they know it. No, one should not be hesitant to hurt their precious little feelings. When they go low — and they are always in the gutter — push back, strike back, give them a taste of their own bitter medicine.” ~ M. Iossel
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“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ~ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
HOW CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIANS DEFENDED HITLER
While it often gets glossed over today, Adolf Hitler was a popular figure in American politics back in the 1930s. He was seen as a person who brought order and stability — two things conservative Americans have always valued more than freedom and individual liberty — to Germany after a liberal Weimar period.
Men like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin all lined up to support Hitler, and Americans loved him. It was a love affair that didn’t last, and it’s one that Americans run from today. We want to paint ourselves as the heroes of this world narrative, after all. It’s a bit hard to do that after fawning all over one of the most despised people in human history.
Consider this letter to the editor purportedly published in Moody Monthly, a magazine put out by the Moody Bible Institute, back in October of 1933:
To the Editor:
After much prayer to our Saviour, I send you this word. I think you very much for your article in June about our brethren in Germany. God bless you that you give justice to Adolf Hitler, that you do not misjudge him. He tries as best he knows how to help Germany. You know that he was a Roman Catholic and he still knows little about the Bible. But he studies the New Testament, and we who know Christ as God and Saviour who died for our sins on the cross, love him, and we have to pray for him and not to believe everything his enemies speak about him.
I am a German. Two years ago I was on a visit in Germany for three months. All my relatives live in Germany. They are Christians that believe in the shed blood of Christ for our sins. They praise Hitler. They have full freedom to preach Christ crucified for our sins. We believe that Christ will come soon and that He will be merciful to Hitler too. Hitler’s father was a drinker, but Adolf lives with his mother and is a very good son. I am an old woman and pray for the coming of the Lord.
Sincerely yours,
Hedwig Nabholz
What I want to call attention to, though, is the language used by Ms. Nabholz: “He tries as best he knows how to help Germany” and “he still knows little about the Bible” but “he studies the New Testament” are directly parallel to some of the justifications that right-wing Christians gave for Trump.
As this letter shows, justifying strongmen is a long and storied human tradition — a long and storied human tradition because we’re too stupid to learn from it, even though the rhetoric barely changes at all, as we deftly demonstrated in 2016.
http://www.gopocalypse.org/check-out-how-evangelical-christians-defended-hitler/
In the light of history, Hedwig’s letter is a tragicomic masterpiece. I’ve recently concluded that the biggest divide between me and people I tend to disagree with is not so much party line as whether or not they are religious. The true believers who actually talk the church talk are the ones with whom I don’t share important values and attitudes. The depth of their ignorance and especially their lack of compassion were a surprise at first, given my understanding of Christianity as kindness, as caring about others — but not anymore.
JOHN CAGE ON THE “MEANING OF LIFE”
No why. Just here.
Mary:
Every day we remain in the presence of beauty and wonder is a gift we are so very very lucky to have. Yes, sadness, losses, disappointments, worries — but even so, even so.
Oriana:
“Just here” — without a why. I agree — but if not for the beauty, I don’t think I could endure the constant losses and disappointments. Whether or not beauty will save the world, as Dostoyevski dared hope, I'm sure it has saved many individual lives, mine among them. So yes: after nearly a lifetime of feeling unlucky, my life botched, one mistake after another, and so many illnesses, surgeries, travesties, disappointments — finally I’ve come to the conclusion that I'm very lucky after all. Why? Just to be here.
COLUMBUS AND THE POTATO REVOLUTION
~ “There really was no spicy food in the world before the Columbian Exchange,” said Nancy Qian, an economics professor at Northwestern University who has studied how the back-and-forth flow of new foods, animals and germs reshaped the world.
Researchers don’t know what use indigenous Americans made of the capsicum peppers that originated in Bolivia and Brazil. But as they spread around the globe, the zesty pods that are the ancestor of modern bell, cayenne and jalapeño peppers allowed cooks to conceal the tastes of foods that were still edible but going a bit off. Soon peppers would form the base of dishes around the warmer latitudes, from Vietnamese pho to Mexican salsa.
Before Columbus landed on Hispaniola, the European diet was a bland affair. In many northern climes, crops were largely limited to turnips, wheat, buckwheat and barley. Even so, when potatoes began arriving from America, it took a while for locals to realize that the strange lumps were, comparatively speaking, little nutritional grenades loaded with complex carbohydrates, amino acids and vitamins.
“When [Sir Walter] Raleigh brought potatoes to the Elizabethan court, they tried to smoke the leaves,” Qian said.
Eventually, starting with a group of monks on Spain’s Canary Islands in the 1600s, Europeans figured out how to cultivate potatoes, which form a nutritionally complete — albeit monotonous — diet when combined with milk to provide vitamins A and D. The effects were dramatic, boosting populations in Ireland, Scandinavia, Ukraine and other cold-weather regions by up to 30 percent, according to Qian’s research. The need to hunt declined and, as more land became productive, so did conflicts over land.
Frederick the Great ordered Prussian farmers to grow them, and the potato moved to the center of European cultures from Gibraltar to Kiev. "Let the sky rain potatoes,” Shakespeare wrote in "The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Their portability made them ideal to transport into the growing cities, feeding the swelling population that would be needed for a factory labor force.
“It’s hard to imagine a food having a greater impact than the potato,” Qian said.
Cassava, which remains the foundation of many African diets, had a similar nutritional impact as it spread from the Americas. Sweet potatoes, too, proved hardy in flood-prone fields. In China, some scholars credit the sweet potato with reducing the frequent uprisings against emperors, whom peasants tended to blame when floods destroyed their rice crops.” ~
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/10/08/christopher-columbus-potato-that-changed-world/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.474f09f92fe2
THE BIBLE AS THE WORD OF SATAN (wow, that he had the courage to say it!)
~ “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize.” ~ Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1792)
Yes, Enlightenment, sure. But to say anything so directly opposed to what you were indoctrinated with . . . . to think for yourself . . . to suggest that it would be more fitting to call the bible the word of Satan . . . (“Happy is he that dashes the heads of their little ones against stone.” And today, if someone heard a voice in his head telling him to kill his son, would we assume that the voice comes from god?)
(By the way, a car used to park near my house with this on its bumper sticker: “Accept Jesus or burn in hell forever!” Is that the REAL message of Christianity, the so-called religion of love, as Islam is the so-called religion of peace?)
Tom Paine also said, “My mind is my own church.” This would be daring even today, when again we are assured by many that we are no good and weak-minded.
Now, I realize that it’s too extreme to say that the bible is the word of Satan. Like so many “holy books” dating back to an era of oppressive hierarchies, it’s a mix of the word of god and the word of Satan: imprecations to take care of the orphan and the widow mingle with the urgings to commit exactly the kind of mayhem that produces orphans and widows.
Still, centuries ago it took courage to point out the hate-filled parts. I'm blown away by Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, men of genius, men of vision, and so astonishingly daring. And then: where did it all go? Why weren't the later presidents and statesmen of that quality?
*
HERPES VIRUS AND ALZHEIMER’S
~ “HSV1 infects most humans in youth or later and remains lifelong in the body in dormant form within the peripheral nervous system.
From time to time the virus becomes activated and in some people it then causes visible damage in the form of cold sores.
The Taiwanese study identified 8,362 subjects aged 50 or more during the period January to December 2000 who were newly diagnosed with severe HSV infection.
The study group was compared to a control group of 25,086 people with no evidence of HSV infection.
The authors then monitored the development of dementia in these individuals over a follow-up period of 10 years between 2001 and 2010.
The risk of developing dementia in the HSV group was increased by a factor of 2.542. But, when the authors compared those among the HSV cohort who were treated with antiviral therapy versus those who did not receive it, there was a dramatic tenfold reduction in the later incidence of dementia over 10 years.
Professor Richard Lathe added: "Not only is the magnitude of the antiviral effect remarkable, but also the fact that -- despite the relatively brief duration and the timing of treatment -- in most patients severely affected by HSV1 it appeared to prevent the long-term damage in brain that results in Alzheimer's.
Professor Itzhaki said: "It was as long ago as 1991 when we discovered that, in many elderly people infected with HSV1, the virus is present also in the brain, and then in 1997 that it confers a strong risk of Alzheimer's disease in the brain of people who have a specific genetic factor.
"In 2009, we went on to show that HSV DNA is inside amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's patients' brains.
"We suggested that the virus in brain is reactivated by certain events such as stress, immunosuppression, and infection/inflammation elsewhere.
"So we believe the cycle of HSV1 reactivation in the brain eventually causes Alzheimer's in at least some patients.” ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180712100515.htm
from another source, concerning DIFFERENT KIND OF HERPES VIRUS
~ "Two common herpes viruses appear to play a role in Alzheimer's disease.
The viruses, best known for causing a distinctive skin rash in young children, are abundant in brain tissue from people with Alzheimer's, a team of scientists reports Thursday in Neuron. The team also found evidence that the viruses can interact with brain cells in ways that could accelerate the disease.
"Our hypothesis is that they put gas on the flame," says Joel Dudley, an author of the study and an associate professor of genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in New York City.
The finding adds credence to a decades-old idea that an infection can cause Alzheimer's disease. It also suggests that it may be possible to prevent or slow Alzheimer's using antiviral drugs, or drugs that modulate how immune cells in the brain respond to an infection.
But the study doesn't prove that herpes viruses are involved in Alzheimer's, says Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, which helped fund the research.
"The data are very provocative, but fall short of showing a direct causal role," he says. "And if viral infections are playing a part, they are not the sole actor."
Even so, the study offers strong evidence that viral infections can influence the course of Alzheimer's, Hodes says.
Like a lot of scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. "Viruses were the last thing we were looking for," Dudley says.
He and a team of researchers were using genetic data to look for differences between healthy brain tissue and brain tissue from people who died with Alzheimer's.
The goal was to identify new targets for drugs. Instead, the team kept finding hints that brain tissue from Alzheimer's patients contained higher levels of viruses.
"When we started analyzing the differences, it just sort of came screaming out at us from the data," Dudley says.
The team found that levels of two human herpes viruses, HHV-6 and HHV-7, were up to twice as high in brain tissue from people with Alzheimer's. They confirmed the finding by analyzing data from a consortium of brain banks.
These herpes viruses are extremely common, and can cause a skin rash called roseola in young children. But the viruses also can get into the brain, where they may remain inactive for decades.
Once the researchers knew the viruses were associated with Alzheimer's they started trying to figure out how a virus could affect the course of a brain disease. That meant identifying interactions between the virus genes and other genes in brain cells.
"We mapped out the social network, if you will, of which genes the viruses are friends with and who they're talking to inside the brain," Dudley says. In essence, he says, they wanted to know: "If the viruses are tweeting, who's tweeting back?”
And what they found was that the herpes virus genes were interacting with genes known to increase a person's risk for Alzheimer's.
They also found that these Alzheimer's risk genes seem to make a person's brain more vulnerable to infection with the two herpes viruses.
But just having herpes virus present in the brain isn't enough to cause Alzheimer's, Dudley says. Something needs to activate the viruses, which causes them to begin replicating.
It's not clear what causes the activation, Dudley says, though he suspects some sort of change in the internal functions of brain cells.
Once the viruses do become active, they appear to influence things like the accumulation of the plaques and tangles in the brain associated with Alzheimer's. "They are sort of throwing a wrench in the works," he says.
The herpes viruses also seem to trigger an immune response in certain brain cells, Hodes says. These cells are part of an ancient immune system that has previously been implicated in Alzheimer's.
Most previous efforts to prevent or treat Alzheimer's have involved trying to reduce the plaques and tangles associated with the disease. Those efforts have failed to improve brain function even when they accomplished their immediate goal.
Those "distressing and disappointing failures" suggest it's time for some new approaches, Hodes says. And the new study suggests at least two.
One is to give antiviral drugs to people with high levels of herpes virus in their brains. The Institute on Aging is already funding a study to test this approach in people in the early stages of Alzheimer's, Hodes says.
Another approach is to prevent the brain's immune cells from reacting to the virus in ways that accelerate Alzheimer's, Hodes says. That's tricky, he says, because simply disabling the brain's immune cells could be harmful.
Even so, Hodes is optimistic.
"The more we learn about the disease process and the more targets we can address," he says, "the greater the probability we are going to slow or prevent the progression of Alzheimer's disease.” ~
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/21/621908340/researchers-find-herpes-viruses-in-brains-marked-by-alzheimers-disease
Herpes virus*
ending on beauty:
(so glad our fog is milky, and not the soot-polluted kind)
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
~ T.S. Eliot, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Anubis, Egyptian god of the Underworld
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