Claudia Barzan has gone underground again — in an unspecified location. *
DUSHKA
Dushka, my Soul, don’t be so proud
of not being made of ordinary stardust.
When I go you too will go.
Some say it will feel just as it did
before being born. But Dushka,
before I was born — open any
history book — it was murder.
Dushka, do you remember
the red streetcars in Warsaw?
And the chestnuts rioting in bloom
in front of the Polytechnic?
We took Wawelska Street,
the long way home so we could pass
the small park of the first kiss.
Dushka, it was New Year’s Eve,
snow on my eyelashes,
silence on bare branches.
For thirty years now
I’ve lived with a Norfolk pine.
People say I should cut it down,
its roots buckle the sidewalk. But one
high noon on its tip I saw
a mockingbird sing his imitation
of a car alarm, so how could I cut down
my thousand-green-fingered pine?
A neighbor said, “In another thirty years
I said in thirty years
I don’t think I’ll be alive.
I am taking the mockingbird
with me.
~ Oriana
Mimus polyglottos *
THE ENIGMA OF THE INFINITESIMAL
You’ve seen them at dusk, walking along the shore, seen them standing in doorways, leaning from windows, or straddling the slow-moving edge of a shadow. Lovers of the in-between, they are neither here nor there, neither in nor out. Poor souls, they are driven to experience the impossible. Even at night, they lie in bed with one eye closed and the other open, hoping to catch the last second of consciousness and the first of sleep, to inhabit that no-man’s-land, that beautiful place, to behold as only a god might, the luminous conjunction of nothing and all.
~ Mark Strand
Oriana:
I’ve tried and tried to do exactly that: catch the precise moment of falling asleep, that sudden erasure. But of course the closest we can come is sense the approach of sleep, the brother of death, showing us “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” — telling us not to be afraid.
Also, there is this advice from the great scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 - 1536)
Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite and worth remembering. ~ Erasmus
Magritte: Decalcomania, 1966*
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WAS PROHIBITION REALLY A COMPLETE FAILURE?
~ ““‘Everyone knows’ that Prohibition failed because Americans did not stop drinking,” historian Jack Blocker wrote in the American Journal of Public Health. He summarized what’s now the conventional wisdom: “Liquor’s illegal status furnished the soil in which organized crime flourished.”
But there’s a lot wrong with these present-day assumptions about Prohibition.
Carry Nation with her famous hatchet. Being 6' tall (i.e. taller than most men at the time) probably bolstered her self-confidence.
People like Carry Nation, as extreme as they were, were driven by real problems caused by excessive drinking, including alcohol-induced domestic violence and crime as well as liver cirrhosis and other health issues. This was perceived as a widespread problem, at least in popular media: George Cruikshank’s 1847 series of drawings, The Bottle, portrayed a father spending all his family’s money drinking and, eventually, killing his wife by attacking her with a bottle. And as historian David Courtwright documented in The Age of Addiction, per capita alcohol consumption increased by nearly a third from 1900 to 1913, largely due to advancements in brewing that helped make beer much cheaper.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the evidence also suggests Prohibition really did reduce drinking. Despite all the other problems associated with Prohibition, newer research even indicates banning the sale of alcohol may not have, on balance, led to an increase in violence and crime.
It’s time to reconsider whether America’s “noble experiment” was really such a failure after all.
Alcohol is still a problem in the US today
The perception of failure, experts argue, is one major reason America has not taken much action on alcohol in recent decades, even as booze is linked to more deaths each year than any other drug besides tobacco.
“The legacy of Prohibition and the interpretation that was given to the Prohibition experience was that alcohol control policy and controlling the availability simply did not work, so the focus should be on the individual abuser rather than the availability of alcohol,” Philip Cook, a public policy expert at Duke University, told me.
America continues to be plagued by alcohol-related problems. There are 88,000 deaths linked to alcohol each year — more than drug overdose deaths, car crash deaths, or deaths from gun violence. There are policies that could reduce the number of deaths, such as a higher alcohol tax. But there’s been little reception to these kinds of policies, as Cook told me: “I’ve spent much of my career documenting the benefits of higher alcohol taxes. And for the most part, I think that’s fallen on deaf ears, politically.”
He said that’s driven, at least in part, by the failure of Prohibition, which drove people to see alcohol control overall as ineffective. I’ve seen this in some of my own work: After Vox published my case for raising the alcohol tax, a fairly common response from readers was represented by this comment: “This would be ‘Prohibition Lite.’ We know how Prohibition turned out.”
Prohibition reduced drinking
For Carry Nation, the battle against alcohol was personal. Her first husband, Charles Gloyd, drank to excess. Pregnant, Nation went back to her parents, knowing that staying with “a drunken husband” would leave her “helpless” and with “no means of support.” Six months after Nation gave birth, and a mere 16 months after their wedding, Gloyd died of “delirium tremens or from pneumonia compounded by excessive drinking,” according to Fran Grace’s Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life.
Prohibition meant to address these problems by reducing drinking. On that metric alone, it succeeded.
This is not controversial among experts. When I asked Courtwright, a drug historian at the University of North Florida, whether Prohibition led to more drinking, he responded, “No well-informed historian has believed that for 50 years.”
Courtwright’s The Age of Addiction has the statistics: “Per capita consumption initially fell to 30 percent of pre-Prohibition levels, before gradually increasing to 60 or 70 percent by 1933.” That suggests a 30 percent reduction, at a minimum, in consumption — although that was less than the initial effect, as people figured some ways around the law.
Some experts give lower estimates. A 2003 study from economists Angela Dills and Jeffrey Miron, a libertarian critical of prohibiting alcohol and other drugs, found that national Prohibition reduced liver cirrhosis deaths — a commonly used proxy for all drinking at the time — by 10 to 20 percent.
Even the lower estimate, though, indicates that national Prohibition and state-level bans led to a reduction in drinking. (In this sense, it might be worth referring to “prohibitions,” plural: Some states enacted their own prohibitions before 1919, and some kept prohibitions after national repeal — Mississippi’s was the last to go in 1966. So the exact cutoff for when prohibitions started and ended can be messy, but nationwide Prohibition had its own effect since it was so big.)
Why did drinking fall? In short, prohibitions increased the price of alcohol and difficulty of getting it. The monetary price itself increased — “when the nation’s 1,300 breweries could no longer legally produce full-strength beer, urban prices rose between five- and tenfold,” Courtwright wrote in The Age of Addiction. To get alcohol, people then had to find out how to make it themselves or develop connections with people who had a source of booze. The quality of the alcohol, too, was often worse than when it was legal.
With lower consumption came benefits, historians have found. Courtwright, again:
Asked why her husband, a shipyard worker, was drinking less, a New Jersey housewife replied simply that it was due to liquor’s poorer quality and higher cost. Across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, the number of patients treated in Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol wards dropped from fifteen thousand a year before Prohibition to under six thousand in 1924. Nationally, cirrhosis deaths fell by more than a third between 1916 and 1929. In Detroit, arrests for drunkenness declined 90 percent during Prohibition’s first year. Domestic violence complaints fell by half.
There were costs too, Courtwright told me: “The iron law of prohibition is you will have fewer consumers, but each one will, on average, be worse off and more disruptive than consumers in a legal market.”
For example, the remaining drinkers were more likely to drink more potent forms of alcohol — it’s easier to smuggle one bottle of whiskey than multiple bottles of beer. More potency meant more intoxication for individuals, which meant more negative effects among them. (Not to mention the booze was more likely to be poisonous, due to misguided federal regulations.)
Prohibition may not have increased crime after all
Even if Prohibition did lead to less drinking, what about Al Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? Surely the big increase in these types of crime wasn’t worth the benefits.
But it’s not clear Prohibition really did cause, on net, more violence.
Prohibition did lead to more violence in some places, particularly big cities where a black market and organized crime took off. But as Prohibition reduced drinking, it also reduced alcohol-induced violence, like domestic abuse. So the increase in organized crime may have been offset by a drop in more common, and less publicly visible, types of violence driven by alcohol.
Alcohol is known to induce violence. In modern times, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence estimated alcohol is a factor in 40 percent of violent crimes, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated that alcohol contributed to 47 percent of homicides.
Domestic violence was of particular concern in the early 20th century, especially for the women leading the charge on Prohibition. The movement for Prohibition was closely linked to women’s suffrage, with Susan B. Anthony herself advocating for stronger alcohol laws and Prohibition.
So what were Prohibition’s overall effects on crime? Emily Owens, an economist at the University of California Irvine, analyzed the effects of national Prohibition and state-level prohibitions in studies published in 2011 and 2014.
She found, contrary to popular perceptions about Prohibition and crime, that prohibitions were associated with lower murder rates — as much as 29 percent lower in some cases. Where crime did increase, it wasn’t always prohibition but other factors, like the swift urbanization that was occurring in the era, that were mostly to blame. Once you control for other factors, she told me, fluctuations in homicide during the 1920s “appear to be more closely connected to these [non-prohibition] changes.”
The Roaring ’20s were a wild time, with rapid urbanization, improvements in mass communication and transportation, and general social rebellion. All of that likely led to more violence, including organized crime, than there would have been otherwise. So Prohibition alone can’t be blamed for more organized crime — and it potentially reaped benefits with reductions in other kinds of alcohol-related violence, such as domestic abuse.
“The public perception that creating this illegal market for alcohol opened up an opportunity for organized crime to earn a lot of revenue, that’s something that’s not disproven. That could still definitely be true,” Owens said. “However, it doesn’t outweigh the less sexy, less movie-friendly story about alcohol and violence, which is that it affects family members, it affects kids, it affects violence that happens inside someone’s home.”
Some research, such as a 2015 study by economist Brendan Livingston, produced similar findings to Owens’s studies, suggesting prohibitions — both capital P and lowercase — were linked to reduced crime and violence, at least temporarily.
America may have overcorrected after Prohibition
There’s evidence that setting a higher alcohol tax, imposing a minimum price on alcohol, limiting the number of alcohol outlets in a given area, revoking repeat alcohol offenders’ right to drink, and much more could help reduce drinking and its risks. Crucially, the evidence suggests these policies would affect not just casual or moderate drinkers but heavy drinkers, too. Experts say this could be achieved without the risks and downsides Prohibition presented.
But lawmakers and the public have not been amenable to these kinds of policies. The last time Congress took up the alcohol tax, in 2017, lawmakers cut it (with support, of course, from the alcohol lobby). The tax hasn’t increased since 1991, lagging behind inflation with every passing year.
Cook said, and elaborated on in his book Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control, that this neglect of alcohol policy doesn’t match the evidence. But Prohibition has skewed the public’s and lawmakers’ perceptions of such policies.
Alcohol policy “needs to be considered in light of an accurate interpretation of the history of Prohibition,” Cook said. “Instead of saying that Prohibition was a failure so alcohol control is a nonstarter, turn that around and say that Prohibition on its own terms was successful to some extent. And there’s no reason to reject this overall approach [of alcohol control] just because of a misread of history.”
There’s a balancing act to strike. Prohibition had benefits when it came to health and some areas of crime and public safety, but it had a negative impact on pleasure, freedom, and other areas of crime and safety. That’s true in general for alcohol and other drug policy: Policies can impact freedom, pleasure, health, crime, safety, or a combination, but almost always with downsides in one or more of these categories as well — with different effects depending not just on the policy but the type of drug, too. Maybe a higher alcohol tax or some other approach would achieve a better middle ground than Prohibition did.” ~
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibition-alcohol-public-health-crime-benefits
Prohibition in action: Pouring out alcohol *
It seems evident that what will work to reduce the damages, personal and social, of alcohol abuse, is not prohibition, but regulation. That, and a change in the social perspective on this ancient tradition of alcohol use for pleasure, celebration and even medication, a habit as much cultural as individual. Of course regulation curtails freedom, but when the time is ripe, the exchange of certain freedoms becomes acceptable, to achieve advantages in health and safety that we have come to see as more important and more desirable.
For example, driving and smoking — two activities heavily regulated, where the actual regulations are not fiercely resented and rebelled against, but accepted as just and necessary, even righteous, by almost everyone. The rejection of smoking is particularly recent, and part of a cultural re evaluation. Not only are there many fewer smokers, those who cling to the habit and push against the new regulations are regarded with scorn. Their habit has not been legally outlawed, simply made more expensive and more limited. Yet in many ways smokers have become social pariahs, pushed out of public venues and generally unwelcome. These are not legislated changes but part of a cultural re evaluation of an activity once seen, until very recently, as sophisticated and inoffensive, acceptable everywhere. Restaurants , airplanes, hospitals, offices, even college classrooms, open to smokers well into the 80's, unimaginable now.
How did this happen?? Largely through a very public process of exposé and education, forcing us all to learn and acknowledge the devastating toll of smoking on the body, and the long history of the tobacco industry's denial, concealment and obfuscation of those ill effects. Even the mythology, the film stars with their glamor, the Marlboro man with the old west as his stage, couldn't survive the change in social attitude toward smoking and smokers. Now the old scenarios, ones we actually grew up with, seem almost unimaginable.
These changes, these regulations, for driving and smoking, have become so much a part of the fabric of everyday life, they are almost invisible, and go unquestioned. Other instances of dangerous freedoms are present as areas of conflict, and primary among them substance abuse and firearm availability. We have seen that "wars" on drugs are not only ineffective but counterproductive. Gun regulation can hardly be mentioned without a response so fierce it is almost hysteria. Yet we have seen gun regulation work successfully in other countries, while our own gun violence continues to escalate.
I think what we need to be able to regulate these things is something much like the education of the public that happened with tobacco. There has to be a cultural sense of agreement before regulation can become effective and accepted. In the case of substance abuse, including alcohol, we are faced with a history that extends almost to our beginnings, heavily represented in our most central mythologies. The gods got drunk, and Jesus turned water into wine for a wedding celebration. Intoxicating substances have been part of social and religious ritual world wide, just about forever. And we want freedom here to make a personal choice, so the regulations that are imposed are either minimal or ineffective.
With guns we have a particular issue in the US, embedded in our Wild West mythology and our dedication to individual freedoms. No matter the degree of inaccuracy in these stories, they dominate the culture. I don’t believe effective regulation can come without changes in cultural attitudes. What such changes require apart from education — I’m not sure. It has been said that here we love our guns more than we love our children, but we love our mythologies more than anything on earth, and cling to them tightly, even when it hurts.
Oriana:
I totally agree. And sure, we already have some degree of alcohol regulation, but nothing like the rigorous public eduction that preceding the increasing bans on smoking. And when you consider that still within our lifetime there were ads in which a man dressed as a physician would announce, “This is the brand I recommend to my patients” — wow, it shows how much can be done when there is a will. And this despite Big Tobacco’s money!
You are so right about the power of mythology — and alcohol has a mythic tradition that goes back millennia. And while no amount of smoking is good for the human body — all smoke inhalation is bad, including incense — there is disagreement as to the effects of small amounts of alcohol. It’s only last year that a large study concluded that ~ “No amount of alcohol is safe, according to The Global Burden of Diseases study, which analyzed levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries from 1990 to 2016.
While the study's authors say that moderate drinking may safeguard people against heart disease, they found that the potential to develop cancer and other diseases offsets these potential benefits, as do other risks of harm. The report urges governments to revise health guidelines to suggest lower levels of consumption.
"Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none," the report states. "This level is in conflict with most health guidelines, which espouse health benefits associated with consuming up to two drinks per day."
The study looked at a broad range of risks posed by alcohol consumption, including diseases, driving accidents and self-harm. According to the report, alcohol led to 2.8 million deaths in 2016. It was the leading risk factor for disease worldwide, the study found, accounting for almost 10 percent of deaths among those ages 15 to 49. Drinking alcohol was also a leading cause of cancer for people older than 50.” ~ https://www.npr.org/2018/08/24/641618937/no-amount-of-alcohol-is-good-for-your-health-global-study-claims
The study has of course provoked criticism. We need more nuanced studies — we always do. But perhaps we also need to look at something glaringly obvious: smoking and heavy drinking — alcoholism — and the consumption of sugary junk food, while we are at it — have a strong correlation with poverty. That’s the proverbial can of worms that we as a culture would prefer not to open.
PS. We may indeed be witnessing the beginning of a change in attitudes toward regular drinking. ~ “Instagram accounts like Sober Girl Society and Sober Nation have tens of thousands of followers, as does Ruby Warrington, author of the book Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol, which was released last December.
And while there is virtually no downside to taking a break from drinking alcohol — or quitting altogether — science is just beginning to study the ways abstinence might be good for you.
Short breaks improve health
So far, there are a handful of studies that point to some benefits of abstinence for even moderate drinkers — in addition to the widely recognized benefits for people who have alcohol use disorder.
A 2016 British study of about 850 men and women who volunteered to abstain from alcohol during Dry January found that participants reported a range of benefits. For instance, 82 percent said they felt a sense of achievement. "Better sleep" was cited by 62 percent, and 49 percent said they lost some weight.” ~ https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/23/732876026/breaking-the-booze-habit-even-briefly-has-its-benefits?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” ~ George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946
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INTELLECT IS IN — WITH THE DEMOCRATS
~ “What unites [Warren and Buttigieg], and separates them from Sanders and Joe Biden, is their unabashed intellectualism. Both have made braininess central to their political brand. And it’s working—a fact that offers a window into the changing culture of the Democratic Party.
Warren and Buttigieg don’t showcase their smarts in exactly the same way. Warren does it with deep dives into policy: proposal after detailed proposal on subjects such as housing, climate change, child care, college tuition, and antitrust. Her campaign sells Warren has a plan for that T-shirts. She talks gleefully about “nerding out” on policy, and when asked at a CNN town hall whether she preferred being a politician or a professor, she replied, “Oh, teaching, are you kidding?”
If Warren plays the brilliant professor, Buttigieg plays the brilliant student. Among the people who introduced him when he announced for president was a former teacher who began her remarks by describing how he had wowed the judges at a high-school economics competition sponsored by the Federal Reserve. Type Pete Buttigieg into Google, and one of the prompts you get is “languages.” News reports often mention that he speaks seven, and this spring a video of him speaking Norwegian went viral. In April, he filmed a video in French offering his condolences for the fire at Notre-Dame.
What’s new is that Warren and Buttigieg are leaning into their credentialed intellectualism rather than worrying that it will make them appear elitist. Bill Clinton’s anxiety about appearing smarter than thou seemed borne out when George W. Bush used Al Gore’s academic affectations against him in 2000. After a widely discussed New Yorker essay in which Gore confessed his fondness for Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s book Phenomenology of Perception, Talk magazine asked Bush to admit a weakness. He answered slyly, “Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something.”
As late as 1994, according to the Pew Research Center, voters who had graduated from college were 15 points more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats, and voters with graduate degrees were almost evenly split between the two parties. By 2017, college graduates’ partisan leanings had flipped: They now favored Democrats by 15 points. Among Americans with graduate degrees, the shift has been even starker. The Democratic advantage, which stood at two points in 1994, had grown to 32 points by 2017.
As a result, the educational composition of the two parties has diverged. From 1997 to 2017, the share of registered Republican voters who finished college stayed the same. Among Democrats, it rose by 15 points. This shift has influenced the way the two parties see education itself. In 2010, Democrats were seven points more likely than Republicans to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on America. By 2017, they were 36 points more likely.
Warren and Buttigieg have realized that intellectualism mobilizes Democrats. Unlike Biden and Sanders, they both poll significantly better among voters with college degrees, who in recent decades have grown substantially as a share of the Democratic primary electorate. Buttigieg’s reputation for detailed, thoughtful answers—as showcased in his widely hailed CNN and Fox News town-hall events—has helped elevate him above his closest generational rival, Beto O’Rourke. And Warren’s unabashed wonkery has helped her close the gap with Sanders on the party’s left flank.
Warren and Buttigieg are also likely benefiting from the contrast with Donald Trump. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a president who was really smart. I mean really, really, really smart,” declared Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, at Buttigieg’s announcement rally. “Someone who spoke multiple languages, including having a beautiful command of English.”
If Warren or Buttigieg wins the nomination, the 2020 presidential race will feature the most profound intellectual contrast in modern American history. It’s difficult to envision a debate between Warren, who asks crowds, “Do I have any net-metering wonks out here?” and Trump, who claims that tariffs are a payment China makes into the United States Treasury. Or between Buttigieg, who speaks about John Rawls and James Joyce, and Trump, who speaks about “Two Corinthians.”
It’s likely Republicans would try to turn intellectualism into a negative for either Warren or Buttigieg. After all, the general electorate is neither as highly educated nor as favorably disposed toward higher education as Democratic primary voters. It’s a tactic that’s worked in the past. What’s harder to know is what will happen if a Democratic nominee wears these attacks as a badge of honor. To the debates over whether America is ready for a woman or a gay president, Warren and Buttigieg are adding an additional wrinkle: Is it ready for a nerd president, too?” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/2020-democratic-candidates-nerdiness-good/591673/?utm_content=edit-promo&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2019-06-14T10%3A00%3A13&fbclid=IwAR1tFXNRu-S36a1VgSOK7hihFvrUPM-zP7k6qTYWOIDghtyDiyFbLplBKuY
Mayor Pete and his husband, Chasten*
Oops! Here I meant to insert a pearl of wisdom, but now see that the elephant entanglement is a better choice after all.
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~ “In the early weeks of 2005, [the famous architect Philip] Johnson died, at the age of ninety-eight, in the most elegant sickroom imaginable, the Glass House, the open-plan interior of which had been outfitted with a hospital bed that, along with around-the-clock nursing care, made it possible for the architect to spend his final days overlooking the site of some of his happiest moments as a cultural power broker. His rigorous aestheticism persisted to the very end. Lamster poetically reconstructs his exit scene:
A gentle snow began to fall through the New Canaan woods. Johnson had always thought the Glass House was most magical that way; the falling snow created the illusion that you were rising on what he called a “celestial elevator.”
Philip Johnson (seated) in his Glass House*
One of Johnson’s clients was Donald Trump.
“In 1983 DT hired Johnson to design Trump Castle, a $200 million condominium tower at Madison Avenue and 60th Street that would have featured a moat, drawbridge, crenellations, and pinnacles coated in gold leaf. “Very Trumpish,” a deadpan Johnson commented to the Times.
Fortunately that project fell through, though Trump turned again to Johnson, who in 1995-97 refashioned the exterior of Gulf and Western Building, now the Trump International Hotel and Tower, with gold-tinted glass as stipulated by his patron. Although in private the architect was withering about his crassest client, he intuited the importance of flattering him profusely.
The bankruptcy-prone developer also tried, unsuccessfully, to engage Johnson in a partial remake of his foundering Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. Their day trip to inspect the gaudy property produced an exchange that encapsulates both Trump’s phallic strutting and Johnson’s shrewdness. As Lamster writes, the host offered his guest his own philosophy of women:
T: You have to treat them like shit.
Johnson: You’d make a good mafioso.
T: One of the greatest.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/04/18/philip-johnson-godfather/
Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, California, designed by Philip JohnsonTHE FREUD-EINSTEIN LETTERS DISCUSSING WAR AND ITS PREVENTION (1931-32) (a brief excerpt)
“And so we come to our last question. Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called “intelligentsia” that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form–upon the printed page.” ~ Einstein
“To conclude: I have so far been speaking only of wars between nations; what are known as international conflicts. But I am well aware that the aggressive instinct operates under other forms and in other circumstances. (I am thinking of civil wars, for instance, due in earlier days to religious zeal, but nowadays to social factors; or, again, the persecution of racial minorities.) But my insistence on what is the most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between man and man was deliberate, for here we have the best occasion of discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible. I know that in your writings we may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action.” ~ Freud
Here we see that Einstein puts hope in Freud’s knowledge of human psychology, while Freud — long before the development of nuclear weapons — seems to have faith that Einstein’s discoveries on the frontiers of physics might “blaze the trail” toward world peace.
The author who published these excerpts was actually writing about Islamic extremists:
~ When we are "on" strong sacred values, we just aren’t thinking straight, to put it bluntly. And if challenged on those values, people often become morally outraged, willing to sacrifice life, limb, and the safety of their own families in conformity with what their group holds dear. They think this way even when the price is so great that destruction is all but assured. Efforts to prevent violence based on rational interventions are unlikely to be effective because radicalized individuals aren’t functioning as rational actors.
It is becoming evident that any kind of belief systems associated with such powerful ideations, whether political, religious, cultural, or otherwise, may be an evolutionary dead-end. Strong belief shapes cognition, limiting the ability to think flexibly, and is associated with narrower, more constrained personality, among other things. When people are embroiled in armed conflict, they don’t care so much about the consequences, becoming numb to the physical costs and rewards of their actions. ~ Grant Hilary Brenner MD.
He goes on to suggest that less perceived peer pressure to engage in violence has the potential to weaken a radicalized individual’s willingness to commit violence.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201906/the-brain-radical
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BILLIONAIRES TEND TO HAVE MORE SONS
~ “Throughout history, couples have gone to extraordinary lengths to choose the sex of their child. In the middle ages, women believed they could swing the odds of having a son by asking their husbands to turn their faces eastwards during sex. Others disagreed – husbands should be seduced over a cocktail prepared with red wine and fresh rabbit’s womb.
If that didn’t do the trick, the 18th Century French anatomist Procope-Couteau had a rather extreme measure. Men who’d “give their left testicle for a baby boy” should do exactly that, he said. He claimed the surgery was no more painful than extracting a tooth.
We now know that bad weather makes for more baby girls, as does fasting for Ramadan or suffering from morning sickness. Meanwhile mothers with dominant personalities, a taste for breakfast cereal or billionaire husbands are more likely to have baby boys. Crucially, a predisposition to having more sons or daughters is encoded in our genetics – men with more sisters tend to have girls while those with more brothers tend to have boys. What’s going on?
In fact, the odds of having a boy vs. having a girl have never been exactly 50:50. Worldwide, there are around 109 boys born for every 100 girls. This might seem like a lot, but it’s necessary. Men have weaker immune systems, higher cholesterol, more heart problems, a greater susceptibility to diabetes, higher rates of cancer and lower chances of surviving it. They make up over two-thirds of murder victims, three-quarters of traffic accident fatalities and are three times more likely to commit suicide. Mothers have to have a higher proportion of sons in order for an equal number to survive.
The relative odds of conceiving sons or daughters have been baffling scientists for decades. The phenomenon was particularly mysterious to Charles Darwin, who meticulously studied the proportion of male and female offspring in a number of animals.
He was convinced that the elaborate features of many male animals, such a peacock’s tail, must be a consequence of a dire shortage of the opposite sex. In these species, he figured, more competition had favored males which stood out from the crowd.
There was just one problem. In every species he studied, there were almost (but not exactly) the same number of males and females; the variation was not nearly as wide as he had expected. After failing to find any convincing evidence, eventually he abandoned the whole topic, remarking “…I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution for the future.”
Back in 1972 Robert Trivers turned his attention to Darwin’s problem. “I said whoa – now there’s an idea worth devoting my life to,” says Trivers. Together with a colleague, Dan Willard, he developed one of the most famous theories in evolutionary biology. It’s known as the Trivers-Willard hypothesis and it goes like this.
Let’s assume you can choose the sex of your children – and the game is to leave as many descendants as possible. You have a gamble to make. If your children are male, who knows, they might become the next billionaire tycoon, or US President (or both), with plenty of girlfriends to choose from.
It’s a scientific fact that high social status is attractive to women. Fertile women prefer more dominant men and the lucky few who achieve money or influence tend to marry younger, more often and have more extra-marital affairs than their peers. If your son is a success, it could be a big evolutionary win. But if he isn’t, he may find himself unable to find a partner at all.
In many animals – red deer, elephant seals, gorillas – the stakes are even higher. Successful males may have harems of hundreds of females, while low-ranking or weak males may never reproduce or die trying.
Then there’s the issue of resources. Because they tend to be larger, sons require a lot more food than daughters and in many societies they’ll require more education and money. To produce a son capable of becoming a dominant, high-status male, parents will need to make a big investment.
With these factors in mind, Trivers proposed that in favorable conditions, such as where the parents were high status or food was abundant, it would make evolutionary sense for parents to produce more sons. But in less favorable conditions, natural selection should favor parents who produce more daughters, since females don’t face such fierce competition. Even if they aren’t particularly attractive or socially successful, it’s likely they’ll have at least some children.
“At the time I gave the joke that this was the perfect theory because it would take 20 years to prove me wrong. But 11 years later I was proved right,” says Trivers.
Back in the 80s, scientists discovered that in red deer at least, dominant females have a 60% chance of giving birth to a son. But could this also be true in humans? The first evidence came from an unlikely source. In 1958, China’s ruling party announced an ambitious new project: the Great Leap Forward, which they hoped would propel the nation of peasant farmers to industrial glory in the space of a few years.
Families were ordered to abandon their farms as the country prepared to step up steel production by 30%. Gardens were turned into makeshift smelting yards as possessions – from cooking pots to tractors – were melted to artificially inflate the total.
Before long, the country was transformed – but not in the way the government had hoped. Just a year after the project began, grain output had dropped by 15%. A year after that, it dropped again. Within four years of the famine setting in, 45 million people were dead.
Nearly four decades later, economist Douglas Almond found himself poring over Chinese census records to find out what had happened afterwards. But he wasn’t looking at the records of the victims – he wanted to know what life was like for their middle-aged children.
Together with colleagues from Columbia University, he compared the records of those born soon after the famine with information about the province in which their parents were born. Some areas were affected more than others, so the team were able to compare the prospects of those whose mothers had gone hungry with those whose mothers had not.
What they found was alarming. Though the children hadn’t experienced the famine themselves, those from famine-stricken regions were less likely to be literate, employed, self-sufficient and tended to live in smaller homes. Women tended to marry later and men were lucky to marry at all. Finally, across the whole sample, those born to affected mothers were significantly less likely to be born male in the first place. The effect even seemed to carry over to their children, who were also more likely to conceive daughters.
To estimate the size of the effect, remember that worldwide there are around 109 boys born for every 100 girls. But between 1960 and 1963, the number of male children born in China fell to just 104 boys for every 100 girls, a difference of around 5% according to a later study on the famine. The ratio didn’t return to normal until 1965.
We now know that from smoking to war, to climate change, unfavorable conditions predispose women to having more girls. On the other end of the scale, women with more dominant personalities, a diet rich in high calorie foods (such as breakfast cereal), or married to U.S. Presidents tend to give birth to more sons. For billionaire fathers, the odds of having a boy are 65%.
At this point you might be wondering why, with all these influences at work, the ratio of men to women in the world isn’t wildly unequal. Surely a disaster on the scale of the Great Chinese Famine should have produced a generation primarily of girls?
According to Keith Bowers, an ecologist at the University of Memphis, there are good reasons why the population never veers too far from the gender balance. “Sons need more food than daughters, so consistently over-producing males create a more competitive family environment,” says Bowers. If all parents had sons when times were good, they may struggle to find a mate or territory when they grew up. Meanwhile, those with a genetic predisposition to over-produce daughters while everyone else is having sons would have a big advantage. “Over time you’d expect roughly equal numbers of males and females to be born,” says Bowers.
Perhaps it’s time to put the cereal away, leave your testicles alone and accept that, in the end, the chances of having a boy are – and should be – roughly 50:50.” ~
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161014-why-billionaires-have-more-sons
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PRICE’S LAW: ONLY A FEW PEOPLE GENERATE HALF OF THE RESULTS
~ “At my first sales job, I had about 25 colleagues who did the same work. After the first month, I noticed something peculiar.
Only 4 of my co-workers brought in more than half of the total sales. I was 17 years old at the time, and I had no idea why that was. These folks were the superstars on the floor — the untouchables.
Little did I know that this relation holds true for almost everything in business. It’s called Price’s square root law.
Value Creation Is Not Symmetric
Derek Price, who was a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject.
Price found out the following (now called Price’s law):
50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
In my example, that means 5 people (square root of 25) should bring in 50% of the sales. That means Price’s law is pretty accurate. On my floor, 4 people brought in about 50%-60% of the sales.
After my first job, I noticed the same ratio at every single company I’ve worked with. The contrast was the biggest when I worked in London for a major corporation, where top sales performers were rewarded big.
Again, the number of people who were rewarded were the square root of the total salespeople. It’s also true for our family business. In every workplace, the relationship between value and people is asymmetric.
Only a handful of people are responsible for the majority of the value creation. It’s very similar to the Pareto principle (the difference is that Price looked at the relationship between people and the work they produced). [Pareto’s principle is also known as the 80/20 rule: e.g., 80% of the profits come from 20% of the products. One of Pareto’s own examples was that 80% of his peas come from only 20% of his pea plants.]
Do Something You’re Good At
That’s the best career advice one can get. Peter Drucker said it for decades. And when you do something you’re good at, you can provide more value.
Look, life is not symmetric nor linear. Only a few people in every domain are responsible for half of the results.
Hence, find the domain you can be the important minority — you’ll also get the majority of the benefits.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/price-s-law-why-only-a-few-people-generate-half-of-the-results
Oriana:
The exact mathematical proportion isn’t the point. The message here is that only a few people do most of the work (step into any office: it’s actually blatantly visible) — only a few products generate most of the profit — only a few poems, paintings, etc have emotional power — or call it “magic.” But it’s very difficult to draw practical implications. We also have the emotional need to keep on trying new things — even though most of these will be unsatisfying.
Most restaurants are bad — but we have to do some exploring to discover the good ones. We have to generate ten ideas so that perhaps one or two will work. Yes, by all means do what you’re good at, but once in a while try something new and different. Be excellent at something, but also just “go with the flow” and sample the richness of the world.
Finally, there is the idea that certain things are worth doing even badly. I’ve met mediocre painters who were radiantly happy. Which is ultimately more important: generating the most “value,” or loving what you’re doing? If the two coincide, great. If not, go for what makes your heart sing.
Ballet class in a poor neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya*
WHAT MARX REALLY SAID IN THE FAMOUS RELIGION = OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE PASSAGE
“Marx saw religion as a symptom of a cruel economic world: people had religion because their lives were rotten; make their lives better and religion will melt away. . . . Tradition had it that well-fed, educated, cosmopolitan people often wander away from religion, whereas their hard-scrabble neighbors thank god for their crumbs.
In an 1844 paper on Hegel, Marx wrote: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.’ The task of history, therefore, is to ‘establish the truth of this world.’ For Marx it is social revolution, not science, that will finally dissolve religion.”
~ Jennifer Michael Hecht, “Doubt: A History”
Milosz, who had a huge interest in the decline of religion as the central phenomenon of modernity, had a different suggestion: not so much prosperity, and not science, but TECHNOLOGY. It’s feeling less helpless that’s crucial, Milosz said. It’s going to the doctor rather than praying. It’s using the cell phone to call for rescue if needed. It’s having all kinds of stimulation and entertainment outcompeting church services and events.
(Freud also saw the feeling of helplessness as the origin of religion — but he went back all the way to infantile helplessness.)
Also, I think we live in a more compassionate and less punishment-centered world, at least in the West, so the longing for a “better place” becomes less relevant. It's easier to accept that this is OUR place — not a way station, but our HOME, to be cherished and enjoyed, without hoping for the proverbial pie in the sky. But for that attitude to become prevalent, there is indeed a need a sufficient prosperity and security.
And of course people are less likely to revolt against a cruel economic world if they are promised eternal bliss in the afterlife — if they meekly obey the masters. But Milosz had something to say about this too: “It’s difficult to convince a modern person that real life begins only at the moment of death.”
THE PUZZLE OF WHY AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE ATTACKS MAINLY WOMEN
~ “Autoimmune diseases turn people’s own immune systems against their bodies. In the United States alone, women represent 80 percent of all cases of autoimmune disease. Women are 16 times more likely than men to get Sjogren’s syndrome, in which the immune system goes after the glands that make tears and saliva, and nine times more likely to have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, in which it sets it sights on the thyroid. Sjogren’s forced Venus Williams to drop out of the U.S. Open in 2011. The singer Selena Gomez underwent a kidney transplant after suffering complications from lupus, which is eight times more common in women.
Some scientists now think the placenta itself might be the reason why women are so disproportionately affected. In a paper published last week in the journal Trends in Genetics, Melissa Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, along with her colleagues from Arizona State University, put forward an explanation called the “pregnancy-compensation hypothesis.” It suggests that women’s immune systems are engaged in a fierce tug of war with placentas, even when the organs aren’t actually present.
Here’s how the theory goes: Women—and all other placental mammals—evolved such that they would be pregnant for many of their adult years. Before the advent of birth control, that was pretty much the fate of the female sex. In modern hunter-gatherer populations, Wilson told me, it’s not uncommon for women to have eight to 12 children each.
When the placenta grows during pregnancy, the organ sends signals to the mother’s immune system to change its activity so that the mother’s body doesn’t eject the placenta and the fetus. This might even mean turning down the immune system in some ways, or for some periods of time. If the immune system gets turned down too much, though, it risks leaving women sensitive to pathogens, which would also be bad for the fetus. So instead, the mother’s immune system ramps up in other ways throughout adulthood, Wilson and her colleagues think, so as to remain vigilant against germs even when some of its parts become dormant during pregnancies.
Things get complicated, however, when those pregnancies don’t actually occur. Women today tend to have far fewer children—less than two on average in the United States, according to the CDC. Wilson reasons that without a more or less constant pushback from placentas during pregnancies—the pushback that women’s immune systems have evolved to anticipate—the immune system can get too aggressive, too ramped up. It starts looking for things to attack that aren’t dangerous, which is how autoimmune diseases set in.
This is certainly not the first theory for why women suffer from more autoimmune disease than men do. One has to do with a protein called BAFF; another has to do with the fact that women have two X chromosomes instead of one. The way Wilson sees it, the pregnancy-compensation hypothesis synthesizes many of the previous theories into one and provides the evolutionary explanation behind them. “They were all right,” she says. “But everyone was looking under their own streetlight, and we just waited for it to be daytime.”
Johann E. Gudjonsson, a professor of skin molecular immunology at the University of Michigan, found that women have more of a molecular switch called VGLL3 in their skin than men do, and that all this VGLL3 might be what causes a heightened immune response in women. In this case, then, the VGLL3 might be how the body ramps up the immune system, but the pregnancy-compensation hypothesis might be why it does so.
Similarly, Hal Scofield, a professor of pathology and medicine at the University of Oklahoma, says that it appears there are lots of genes involved in the immune response on the X chromosome, and since women have two X chromosomes while men have only one, women have more of those immune genes. The placental theory that Wilson’s team devised could be the reason this happens. Because women have to have strong immune systems that buck against the placenta, they evolved to produce more genes involved in the immune response. “I don’t think there’s any way out of thinking that placental pregnancy has to have influenced the evolutionary immune system,” Scofield told me.
Scientists could try to determine whether the number of pregnancies a woman has is predictive of her risk of autoimmune disease. If Wilson’s theory holds, women who have more pregnancies should have a lower risk. Or scientists could study the differences between mammals in the wild and zoo animals, which are sometimes on birth control, to determine whether they have differences in their autoimmune function.
Wilson says that the hope is to eventually learn what it is in the immune system that’s trying to respond to the placenta, and to target that thing with vaccines or treatments. More research could mean major improvements in the way women’s autoimmune diseases are treated.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/women-autoimmune-diseases-pregnancy/591901/
Oriana:
I was reminded of Dr. Steven Gundry’s observation about the Seventh-Day Adventists in Loma Linda: the women were stricter vegetarians, but they typically suffered from a variety of autoimmune diseases. Gundry’s theory is that the women are exposed to more toxic plant lectins that disrupts the intestinal wall and provoke the immune system into misguided action. But just because the men are more likely to cheat and eat occasional hamburger or piece of chicken doesn’t mean that the male Seventh-Day Adventists, too, aren’t exposed to massive amounts of plant food — in fact men consume more food overall — so the difference between men and women shouldn’t be so pronounced. It’s been common medical knowledge that women — across the general population — are more susceptible than men to autoimmune diseases.
Men appear to be protected by testosterone. Testosterone is known to reduce the number of B cells, a type of lymphocyte that releases pathogen-fighting antibodies. Women have a more aggressive immune system that gives them an advantage when it comes to fighting off infections, but can also go wrong and attack the body’s own tissue. Basically as we grow older our own immune system increasingly turns against us, but this is much more pronounced in women.
Autoimmune disease tends to follow infections. Amplified by sex hormones, women’s “hyperimmune response” may persist and inflict severe damage on the body’s own tissues. And more and more diseases tend to be identified as auto-immune. Yes, as we age, our immune system turns against us — particularly in the case of women. Estrogens (yes, plural: it's actually a family of hormones) activate the immune system, while androgens tend to suppress it. At a later age, it's probably mainly the low levels of immuno-suppressive androgens that dooms so many women to multiple chronic illnesses.
So why do women tend to live longer nevertheless? That’s a separate issue involving multiple factors. But anecdotal evidence shows that a rare 100-year-old man tends to be a lot more healthy than the more commonly found 100-year-old woman.
(To return to Dr. Gundry for a moment, and his belief, going back to Hippocrates, that all disease begins in the gut, I found this:
~ “Recently, scientists have started looking at a different kind of environmental factor – the microbiome – as a possible cause for sex discrepancy. The term “microbiome” describes the families of bacteria that live on all normal healthy people – in their mouths, on their skins, in their intestines and (in women) in their vaginas. Men and women differ in their microbiomes, and specific microbiome patterns are associated with specific illnesses. Details of how and why these associations occur are not yet known. Future studies may find that differences in male and female microbiomes are related to sex ratios of autoimmune illnesses.” ~
https://www.hss.edu/conditions_autoimmune-disease-sex.asp)
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ending on beauty:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
~ W.H. Auden, The More Loving One
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