“Well, if God doesn't exist, who’s laughing at us?” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov*
WHEELING MOTEL
The vast waters flow past its back-yard.
You can purchase a six-pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee
a block down. It’s twenty-five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.
There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.
The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.
Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.
~ Franz Wright
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Oriana:
I was immediately reminded of the magical poem by James Wright, Franz’s mostly absent father, usually regarded as the greater poet of the two (though Franz’s popularity has been steadily rising)
I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.
I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?
For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.
And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.
~ James Wright, In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned
Talk about an extraordinary poem, with an unforgettable ending — those last two stanzas, though the entire poem is astonishing.
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I included the poem by James Wright for the sheer pleasure of it, and also to provide a reference for Franz’s poem. Simply by invoking Wheeling, Franz is invoking his father, twenty-five years after his death. “The wind will die down when I say so” probably means the creative powers of the poet, who creates an imaginary reality with words. And then the moon will rise,
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.
The grief is still there, but it’s gentle now, without the angry resentment. It’s no longer, as in an earlier poe, an accusation of abandonment:
“Since you left me at eight I have always been lonely”
But it’s the third stanza that’s my favorite:
There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.
Maybe because it’s I love rivers, and have always been disappointed that they don’t reflect the trees and the sky. I guess water has to be still to be reflective, but a river moves on — blind to all but its own story.
Mary:
The poem about the women going into the river each night is indeed magical. Here the river is not the Styx, but a means to regeneration, the healing river of a baptism, of redemption and transformation. The women enter in a joyous procession, "swinging their purses," and emerge drying their wings, like butterflies just released from their cocoons.
Bridgeport OH; The bridge was demolished in 2011*
TRYING TO IMAGINE POST-PANDEMIC FUTURE
~ From an economic perspective, there are four possible futures: a descent into barbarism, a robust state capitalism, a radical state socialism, and a transformation into a big society built on mutual aid. Versions of all of these futures are perfectly possible, if not equally desirable.
Coronavirus, like climate change, is partly a problem of our economic structure. Although both appear to be “environmental” or “natural” problems, they are socially driven.
Yes, climate change is caused by certain gases absorbing heat. But that’s a very shallow explanation. To really understand climate change, we need to understand the social reasons that keep us emitting greenhouse gases. Likewise with COVID-19. Yes, the direct cause is the virus. But managing its effects requires us to understand human behavior and its wider economic context.
Tackling both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential economic activity. For climate change this is because if you produce less stuff, you use less energy, and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The epidemiology of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. But the core logic is similarly simple. People mix together and spread infections.
This happens in households, and in workplaces, and on the journeys people make. Reducing this mixing is likely to reduce person-to-person transmission and lead to fewer cases overall.
Reducing contact between people probably also helps with other control strategies. One common control strategy for infectious disease outbreaks is contact tracing and isolation, where an infected person’s contacts are identified, then isolated to prevent further disease spread. This is most effective when you trace a high percentage of contacts. The fewer contacts a person has, the fewer you have to trace to get to that higher percentage.
We can see from Wuhan that social distancing and lockdown measures like this are effective. Political economy is useful in helping us understand why they weren’t introduced earlier in European countries and the US.
Lockdown is placing pressure on the global economy. We face a serious recession. This pressure has led some world leaders to call for an easing of lockdown measures.
Even as 19 countries sat in a state of lockdown, the US president, Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called for roll backs in mitigation measures. Trump called for the American economy to get back to normal in three weeks (he has now accepted that social distancing will need to be maintained for much longer). Bolsonaro said: “Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept … We must, yes, get back to normal.”
In the UK meanwhile, four days before calling for a three-week lockdown, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was only marginally less optimistic, saying that the UK could turn the tide within 12 weeks. Yet even if Johnson is correct, it remains the case that we are living with an economic system that will threaten collapse at the next sign of pandemic.
The economics of collapse are fairly straightforward. Businesses exist to make a profit. If they can’t produce, they can’t sell things. This means they won’t make profits, which means they are less able to employ you. Businesses can and do (over short time periods) hold on to workers that they don’t need immediately: they want to be able to meet demand when the economy picks back up again. But, if things start to look really bad, then they won’t. So, more people lose their jobs or fear losing their jobs. So they buy less. And the whole cycle starts again, and we spiral into an economic depression.
As the economist James Meadway wrote, the correct COVID-19 response isn’t a wartime economy – with massive upscaling of production. Rather, we need an “anti-wartime” economy and a massive scaling back of production. And if we want to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood.
So what we need is a different economic mindset. We tend to think of the economy as the way we buy and sell things, mainly consumer goods. But this is not what an economy is or needs to be. At its core, the economy is the way we take our resources and turn them into the things we need to live. Looked at this way, we can start to see more opportunities for living differently that allow us to produce less stuff without increasing misery.
I and other ecological economists have long been concerned with the question of how you produce less in a socially just way, because the challenge of producing less is also central to tackling climate change. All else equal, the more we produce the more greenhouse gases we emit. So how do you reduce the amount of stuff you make while keeping people employed?
Proposals include reducing the length of the working week, or, as some of my recent work has looked at, you could allow people to work more slowly and with less pressure. Neither of these is directly applicable to COVID-19, where the aim is reducing contact rather than output, but the core of the proposals is the same. You have to reduce people’s dependence on a wage to be able to live.
The key to understanding responses to COVID-19 is the question of what the economy is for. Currently, the primary aim of the global economy is to facilitate exchanges of money. This is what economists call “exchange value.”
The dominant idea of the current system we live in is that exchange value is the same thing as use value. Basically, people will spend money on the things that they want or need, and this act of spending money tells us something about how much they value its “use”. This is why markets are seen as the best way to run society. They allow you to adapt, and are flexible enough to match up productive capacity with use value.
What COVID-19 is throwing into sharp relief is just how false our beliefs about markets are. Around the world, governments fear that critical systems will be disrupted or overloaded: supply chains, social care, but principally healthcare. There are lots of contributing factors to this. But let’s take two.
First, it is quite hard to make money from many of the most essential societal services. This is in part because a major driver of profits is labor productivity growth: doing more with fewer people. People are a big cost factor in many businesses, especially those that rely on personal interactions, like healthcare. Consequently, productivity growth in the healthcare sector tends to be lower than the rest of the economy, so its costs go up faster than average.
Second, jobs in many critical services aren’t those that tend to be highest valued in society.
Many of the best paid jobs only exist to facilitate exchanges; to make money. They serve no wider purpose to society: they are what the anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”. Yet because they make lots of money we have lots of consultants, a huge advertising industry and a massive financial sector. Meanwhile, we have a crisis in health and social care, where people are often forced out of useful jobs they enjoy, because these jobs don’t pay them enough to live.
The fact that so many people work pointless jobs is partly why we are so ill prepared to respond to COVID-19. The pandemic is highlighting that many jobs are not essential, yet we lack sufficient key workers to respond when things go bad.
The other side of this coin is that the most radical (and effective) responses that we are seeing to the COVID-19 outbreak challenge the dominance of markets and exchange value. Around the world governments are taking actions that three months ago looked impossible. In Spain, private hospitals have been nationalized. In the UK, the prospect of nationalizing various modes of transport has become very real. And France has stated its readiness to nationalize large businesses.
Likewise, we are seeing the breakdown of labor markets. Countries like Denmark and the UK are providing people with an income in order to stop them from going to work. This is an essential part of a successful lockdown. These measures are far from perfect. Nonetheless, it is a shift from the principle that people have to work in order to earn their income, and a move towards the idea that people deserve to be able to live even if they cannot work.
This reverses the dominant trends of the last 40 years. Over this time, markets and exchange values have been seen as the best way of running an economy. Consequently, public systems have come under increasing pressures to marketize, to be run as though they were businesses who have to make money. Likewise, workers have become more and more exposed to the market – zero-hours contracts and the gig economy have removed the layer of protection from market fluctuations that long term, stable, employment used to offer.
The upside of this is the possibility that we build a more humane system that leaves us more resilient in the face of future pandemics and other impending crises like climate change.
Social change can come from many places and with many influences. A key task for us all is demanding that emerging social forms come from an ethic that values care, life, and democracy. The central political task in this time of crisis is living and (virtually) organizing around those values. ~
https://theconversation.com/what-will-the-world-be-like-after-coronavirus-four-possible-futures
Mary: THERE WILL BE NO “RETURN TO NORMAL”
As to what will come after the coronavirus, the one thing we can be sure of is that it won't be a 'return to normal.’ That normal folks are yearning for is gone forever, impossible to recover. What will replace it is unclear, and may require a revolution in our thinking and attitudes as uncomfortable as social distancing. It will feel both profound and unnatural.
These changes, in fact, would be so essential I doubt whether they are possible. The idea of work as a value in itself — that it is the way to earn the necessities of life, that those who don’t work are morally reprehensible, useless, and worthless — is deeply engrained in our social and ethical consciousness. Taking what is Free, or assuming that the basics necessary for life should be a given, not something to be earned through work, makes you lazy, useless, a parasite, a shirker, an unsavory and disgusting creature that burdens upstanding citizens and society itself. Basically the old idea that the poor are poor because they are sinners, defectives, lazy freeloaders who deserve their poverty, the only thing they have “earned.”
All you have to do is look at the language — all the negatives, the slurs, used to describe those who do not work. It's always assumed this is their own choice, and that they are scheming to "work the system" and defraud honest citizens of their well earned profits. The assumed congruence between virtue, work, and wealth runs both deep and wide, blatantly obvious in the religious and political right, but occurring everywhere, an inheritance of history and economics.
Seeing society as a marketplace geared to generate profit has certainly proven its false and destructive power in precisely the sector most essential and most besieged in the current pandemic, that is, healthcare. The accelerating trend over the past few decades has been to operate healthcare like any other productivity and profit industry. The CEO's are businessmen, who know little about healthcare and a lot about profit. In a few decades this has transformed healthcare in hugely negative ways. Doctors are largely now "employees" rather than owners of their practices. As employees they are required to be more productive — that is, acquire more and more patients and see more of them by giving each one less time — thus generating more profit for the corporation. Nurses are required to work with less staff, and the result is certainly less care...skimping on fundamentals. A prime example is the bed bath, something now so rare as to have become almost mythical, but was formerly not only the first thing nurses were taught, but the first and most basic way to observe and understand the patient's condition.
Treating health care as part of a market economy centered on generating profit distorts and misses the point. Health care needs to generate health, not money. All the many bullshit jobs coming out of this, advertising, physical expansion (hospital systems multiplying their sites often close to each other, so as to compete with each other for patients), closing of unprofitable sites (usually in poorer neighborhoods, leaving some without both hospitals and grocery stores) do nothing to improve health and welfare — but that is not their aim. They want to improve their profits.
Most of us have watched these developments with dismay. Perhaps the great opportunity that this pandemic produces may be to see clearly enough what our assumptions and behaviors about worth, value and use are costing us, and how much they contribute to our chaotic and ineffective response to this grave threat. When this is over the new normal may look nothing at all like the old normal. There is the chance of chaos and barbarism, but also the chance to come out like those women in the poem, drying our new wings, neither in hell nor in Wheeling, but in a new world.
Oriana:
Good health requires good “social health” — decent housing, adequate nutrition, absence of stress over money for basic needs, time for fulfilling activities. I agree that thanks to the pandemic we see more clearly the need to prioritize human needs rather than profits. I especially like your statement that “health care needs to generate health, not money.” And yes, the changes that are required — putting people ahead of money — are so profound that at present they seem impossible. But change will happen — somehow. With covid deaths in the US now close to fifty thousand, and the awareness that more pandemics are on the horizon, we can’t afford to do nothing.
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CHANGE JUST ONE THING IN YOUR LIFE
~ Zen Buddhism is predicated on principles of simplicity. Leo Babauta, founder of Zen Habits and author of several courses and e-books on habit-changing, explains it with characteristic minimalism in this blogpost.
In order to make any change in one’s life—whether it’s to get out of debt, become fit enough to run a marathon, or get on better with your family—he says, start with a single change. It should be small; not a goal, but a tiny first step. It could be to run for ten minutes; to spend two minutes drawing; to prepare a healthy work lunch for one day a week. It could be to stay in hard conversations for a moment after you want to leave, and spend that moment trying to listen.
Babauta advises that to turn changes into habits, it’s important to make the change tiny, and let it embed: he suggests making one change every four to six weeks. Having experimented on himself, he also advises addressing one thing at a time, rather than trying to solve work, love, health, or family problems simultaneously. He’s boiled down all his teachings into what he calls one “algorithm: a series of steps that you can apply to make any change, no matter what your situation”:
1. Start very small.
2. Do only one change at a time.
3. Be present and enjoy the activity (don’t focus on results).
4. Be grateful for every step you take.
The beauty of the method is that its smallness removes the problems that result from many self-help recommendations and resolutions: too often they leave people quickly overwhelmed by the task in hand, or swamped by a sense of failure. The change should be so small it’s not hard to do. What takes rigor, for people drenched in stimuli and commitments, is identifying something that is truly small enough. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-zen-rule-for-becoming-happier-change-one-thing?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
"Think small" has been my motto for many years now. Less! Less!
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WE BECOME KINDER AS WE GROW OLDER
The old are kind.
The young are hot.
Love may be blind.
Desire is not.
~ Leonard Cohen
The first two lines strike me as wisdom. I sometimes mention the “cruelty of youth.” Empathy deepens with age, experience, and the growing knowledge that we all suffer and will die; we get to see that it's more meaningful to hold hands than to have sex.
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PEOPLE REALLY DO GET KINDER AS THEY GET OLDER, RESEARCH SUGGESTS
The words 'grandma' and 'grandpa' normally bring to mind kind and caring older people, who lovingly bestow gifts and affection on their grandchildren and others.
And now research confirms this image of generous elderly people to be one of truth.
A study by the National University of Singapore, published in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, wanted to investigate what made people tend to become more generous with age. To test this, they examined how much money participants were willing to donate to strangers.
Two groups of 39 volunteers took part in the study, one group with an average age of 70 and another with an average age of 23. The influence of social relationships on the amount of money they were willing to give was analyzed.
In comparison to young adults, psychologists found that older people are more likely to donate to complete strangers, signifying that generosity provides a greater emotional gratification for the elderly.
The findings suggest that this move towards altruism as we get older is down to chemical changes in the brain, with a possible increase in the 'love hormone', oxytocin.
Dr Yu Rongjun, who led the study, told the Mail Online: "Our findings shed light on the age-related changes among the elderly, and provide an understanding of why they are more inclined to lend a helping hand to strangers.
"Greater generosity was observed among senior citizens possibly because as people become older, their values shift away from purely personal interests to more enduring sources of meaning found in their communities.
“Providing older adults with more opportunities to help others is not only beneficial to our society, but it might also be a boon to the well-being of older adults themselves.” ~
https://www.countryliving.com/uk/wellbeing/news/a1935/older-people-kinder-more-generous/
Picasso: The Old Guitarist, 1904*
EPIDEMICS AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY
~ There is a school of thought that, historically, pandemics have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities.
The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm.
What about in reality? Historian Peter Turchin has described a strong statistical association between global connectedness, social crises and pandemics throughout history. An example is the second century CE, when the Roman and Chinese empires were at the peak of their wealth and power; the poor in both places were very poor, and the ancient silk routes were enjoying a heyday. Starting in 165CE, the Antonine plagues struck Rome; within a decade plague was devastating China too, and both empires then went into decline.
The plague of Justinian in the 6th century and the Black Death in the 14th century emerged in similar circumstances, and Turchin sees the same forces at work again today: globalization, leading to the emergence of new human pathogens, combined with widening inequality. “And now it looks like our Age of Discord got its own pandemic,” he wrote in a blog last week.
Pandemics don’t always trigger social unrest, but they can do, by throwing into relief the very inequalities that caused them. That’s because they hit the poor hardest – those in low-paid or unstable employment, who live in crowded accommodation, have underlying health issues, and for whom healthcare is less affordable or less accessible. This was true in the past and remains so today. During the 2009 flu pandemic the death rate was three times higher in the poorest fifth of England’s population than in the richest. Covid-19 is showing no signs of departing from the pattern, which, because of the way the socioeconomic dice fall, also has a racial dimension.
But there is something brand new about this pandemic, which has never been seen before in the history of humanity – and that is our unprecedented global experiment in lockdown.
These lockdown measures are designed to slow the spread of the disease, relieve the burden on health systems and ultimately save lives – and it looks as if they may be doing that. But they may also be exacerbating social inequalities themselves.
We won’t have a full picture of their impact until the pandemic is over, but there have been anecdotal reports that point to this, and some more systematic analyses are emerging. Preliminary findings from a survey of 1,200 Norwegians, published last week, indicate that people with lower levels of education and income are more likely to be temporarily laid off. They can apply for a government furlough scheme, similar to the one in the UK, but they are also more likely to see their income fall and to worry that their unemployment might become permanent.
Whether these measures are justified by the threat Covid-19 poses to human life is impossible to say, but those who imposed them knew there would be a high price to pay. Last year Mamelund sat on a committee that advised the World Health Organization on non-pharmaceutical interventions in case of a pandemic. The committee’s job was to assess the costs and benefits of measures for slowing disease spread – everything from hand-washing to border closure – based on the available evidence. They came up with a list of recommendations that excluded lockdown, even in the worst-case scenario. “We never suggested lockdown because we knew it would be so harmful socially and economically for all countries,” he says. “And I never thought the rest of the world would follow China’s lead.”
In India there have been reports of deaths among unemployed migrant workers returning home in search of food; many countries, including the US, have seen workers taking industrial action, and anger has been expressed in rural communities over wealthy city-dwellers retreating to their second homes for the duration.
Governments should keep an eye on these developments, in weighing up when and how to lift the lockdown, because even if it’s difficult to argue today that the cure is worse than the disease, the cure might provoke an entirely different malaise – and history teaches us that no society is immune to that.
That’s the symptomatic treatment. In the long term, of course, they – and we – should address the dreadful inequality in our societies, which this pandemic is picking apart with a lethal scalpel. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/12/inequality-pandemic-lockdown?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR0dg8Co6xHE0UMzJ_tT13ZfqiVlqqVGZAPHgaI7XL8TlJYPv4XtOPaRSqsepidemic london
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Majority black counties have three times the rate of infections and nearly six times the rate of deaths as majority white counties.
UNDERLYING CONDITIONS
Data has long shown that black Americans have higher rates of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and lung disease. Medical professionals have said that coronavirus exacerbates the challenges that come with these illnesses.
“Health disparities have always existed for the African American community, but here again with the crisis now — it’s shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday.
A 2014 National Institutes of Health study found that hospitals in predominantly black neighborhoods are more likely to close down than those in predominantly white neighborhoods, often making it difficult for black Americans to access health care near where they live.
“We don’t have access to care and if we do it’s likely that care is of worse quality because they are often termed minority-serving,” Blackstock said. “And they may not have a specialist or the resources needed to care for covid-19 patients.
ESSENTIAL WORKERS
Black people are more likely to work in jobs that put workers in close contact with others who might be in poor health and that make engaging in social distancing more difficult.
According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled by the Center for American Progress, black people are overrepresented compared to the overall population in the food service industry, hotel industry and taxi drivers and chauffeurs.
HOUSING DISPARITIES
A 2017 Princeton University study found that black children are more likely to suffer from asthma because they live in older buildings that harbor fecal matter and rodent infestations, and which are in segregated neighborhoods that are near busy highways that put harmful matter into the air.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released information stating that people with asthma may be at a greater risk of dying from coronavirus.
People of color are more likely to live in densely packed areas and in multi-generational housing situations, which create higher risk for spread of highly contagious disease like covid-19.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/10/4-reasons-coronavirus-is-hitting-black-communities-so-hard/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
TEMPERATE RAIN FOREST IN ANTARCTICA NINETY MILLION YEARS AGO
~ Scientists have discovered remnants of a swampy temperate rainforest that thrived in Antarctica about 90 million years ago. They were surprised to find fossil remnants of this forest in a sediment core sample retrieved in February 2017 from the ocean floor in the Amundsen Sea off the coast of West Antarctica. This sample contained ancient forest soil with an abundance of fossilized plant pollen and spores. CT scans revealed a dense network of fossilized plant roots. What’s astonishing about this discovery is its location. Ninety million years ago, this West Antarctic forest was just 560 miles (900 km) from the then-South Pole. Yet its climate was surprisingly mild.
The scientists think these mild conditions – an annual mean temperature of about 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius) – were possible because there was no significant ice sheet across Antarctica. It appears that carbon dioxide concentrations were much higher than previously thought. Their findings were published in the April 1, 2020, issue of the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
How could a temperate rainforest exist at about 82 degrees latitude south, 560 miles (900 kilometers) from the South Pole’s location 90 million years ago, where the forest would have been in darkness each year during four months of polar night?
Over the past 140 million years, the warmest climate on Earth occurred between 115 to 80 million years ago. Scientists have known, from previous studies, that tropical sea surface temperatures could have been as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) and the sea level was 186 feet (170 meters) higher than it is today. This new sediment core was the first opportunity to better understand the southern polar region’s climate during the mid-Cretaceous.
Analyses provided a preliminary glimpse of the temperate climate where this 90 million year old swampy rainforest once thrived; there was moderately abundant rainfall (comparable to Wales, according to the scientists, which would be around 41 inches [104 centimeters]). The annual mean air temperature was 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius). In summer, the temperature, on average, was 66 degrees Fahrenheit (19 degrees Celsius), and water temperature in the rivers and swamps reached 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius).
According to climate models run by the scientists, these conditions could have existed if there was dense vegetation across Antarctica with little or no ice sheet present and carbon dioxide levels were higher than previously thought.
These findings illustrate the powerful effect that carbon dioxide has on the planet and the importance of polar ice sheets in cooling the planet. Torsten Bickert, a geoscientist at the University of Bremen, said:
We now know that there could easily be four straight months without sunlight in the Cretaceous. But because the carbon dioxide concentration was so high, the climate around the South Pole was nevertheless temperate, without ice masses.
But a crucial question remains; how did the Earth subsequently cool down, bringing back the ice sheets? According to Lohmann, their climate simulations haven’t been able to answer that question; understanding how this cooling occurred is going to be an important area of investigation for climatologists. ~
https://earthsky.org/earth/a-temperate-rainforest-in-antarctica-during-the-age-of-dinosaurs?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=03e2cfba3d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-03e2cfba3d-394935141
An artist’s conception of the ancient rain forest in Antarctica *
BUT PERHAPS A TINY FERN CAN HELP COOL THE EARTH
~ Rothfels says that one of the most “extraordinary features” of this fern is its ability to have a symbiotic relationship with cyanobacteria, which in turn gives it the ability to “fix” nitrogen. Nitrogen fixation is the process by which plants use the chemical element as a fertilizer: Most plants typically can’t do this alone, but the blue-green cyanobacteria that live in the Azolla leaves allow for this process to happen. In turn, Azolla can sustain rapid growth in favorable conditions.
That’s important for multiple reasons, the first being that the fern shows “great promise as a biofuel,” says Rothfel. While it’s been used as a fertilizer for rice paddies in Asia for the past 1,000 years, he and his team are now curious to know whether it could be used as a sustainable fertilizer elsewhere. Its ability to help agricultural crops is compounded by its resistance to pests: Farmers have noticed for decades that bugs generally don’t like ferns, and now the sequencing of the Azolla genome reveals it carries certain genetic mutations that allow it to repel insects.
All of this has earned Azolla the nickname “green manure,” and co-author and Cornell University assistant professor Fay-Wei Li, Ph.D. says it is “perhaps the most economically important fern that has ever lived!”
But Li and Rothfel both note that the fern’s incredible ability to grow and thrive could help humans save themselves from climate change. In fact, it’s actually helped out the planet before.
“There was a massive Azolla bloom in the Arctic 50 million years ago so large that geologists believe it drove down a significant amount of C02 (carbon dioxide) and helped cool the Earth,” says Li.
That means that Azolla, one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet, has the potential to be a significant carbon sink today. A massive rise in modern-day atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are directly linked to the warming of the planet and overall climate change.
Millions of years ago, this fern “sequestered so much carbon that it switched the globe out of ‘hothouse’ conditions into the relatively cooler conditions that we experience now,” says Rothfel. If we grow a huge amount of this tiny plant, we might be able to make that happen again. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/azolla-the-tiny-fern-could-have-a-huge-impact-on-climate-change?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Azolla fern*
AND METHANE-CONSUMING SOIL BACTERIA
~ European researchers report that they’ve isolated and grown a species of soil bacteria that lives on methane, the potent greenhouse gas that is second in importance only to the almighty carbon dioxide.
That bacterium is Methylocapsa gorgona, which lives in soil all over the Earth. Because it can live on methane present in extremely low concentrations, the feisty microbe can pull the gas out of the atmosphere and consume it, even when it’s not near a major source.
“We were lucky to get this atmospheric methane oxidizer in pure culture in the laboratory,” Mette Marianne Svenning, Ph.D., a professor of arctic and marine biology at The Arctic University of Norway and the corresponding author on the new paper, tells Inverse.
Svenning’s group is the first to successfully isolate the bacterium responsible for methane storage in soil. “Several research groups have hunted for these since it has been known that soil can take up methane from the atmosphere,” she says.
"It just seems to be really, really, really efficient."
This deeper understanding of M. gorgona helps explain why soil is such an efficient methane sink. It also helps explain why soil isn’t soaking up more methane.
“Anthropogenic activity — agriculture, tillage, all kinds of things seem to destroy it — so certainly understanding the exact organisms that perform the process could be worthwhile in understanding how not to destroy them,” says Dunfield.
Therefore, preserving the methanotroph in soils could help slow the rate at which methane accumulates in Earth’s atmosphere and warms the planet.
As far as innovative approaches to scrubbing methane from the atmosphere, the researchers behind the paper are hesitant to say that their research unlocks creative new solutions to climate change — at least not yet.
Nevertheless, M. gorgona’s ability to consume methane from the atmosphere suggests that it could be supercharged to suck more out, slowing the rate of global warming.
https://www.inverse.com/article/54695-this-bacterium-could-help-curb-climate-change
Methylopsa gorgons*
Procession of Our Lady of Piety in Algarve*
TROUBADOURS AND SECULAR CULTURE
Come to think of it, the secular culture started already with the troubadours. Even Dante was strongly affected by it and set up Beatrice as his female savior — now that is quite a heresy!
There have of course been religious poets, often tending to heresy, I think (Milosz certainly admitted to gnosticism), but overall the arts were at least as corrosive as science. Not enough credit is given to the arts. Or to women for having been beautiful and tender enough to inspire love, the human love that was humanizing our world.
Raphael: Lady with a Unicorn, 1505. Certain images become like old friends: more treasured over time. In this case, familiarity breeds affection.*
HEIGHTENED UNCERTAINTY
David Lloyd Blackwood: The Parting, 1984
Oriana:
It’s so liberating for me to hear someone say that “we are not meant to be competent at life.” Life is simply too complicated, and we can control only so much — certainly not the main factors. A huge amount depends simply on luck.
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HOW ELIJAH INFLUENCED THE HISTORY OF MODERN RESEARCH ON CONFORMITY
~ If you've ever been to a Passover Seder dinner, then you probably know about Elijah. The hosts of the Seder will typically add an extra setting for Elijah who is, essentially, the Passover Ghost. (Note: There is, to my understanding, no evidence that he actually exists.) Importantly, Elijah usually even gets a healthy glass of wine with his food.
Part of the whole Elijah thing, as is common in many holiday traditions, is about the children. As with, for instance, Santa Claus (sorry kids), the parents sort of try to convince the kids that Elijah is real. More for fun than anything else as far as I can tell.
What many people don't know is that the whole Elijah tradition actually shaped some of the most important research to ever be conducted in the behavioral sciences.
Asch's Seminal Research on Conformity
One of the pioneering names in social psychology is that of Solomon Asch. Raised in the Jewish tradition, Asch became well-known for, among other things, his work on the topic of conformity. In the early 1950s (see Asch, 1951; 1956), Asch conducted some simple social experiments that shed a great deal of light on the human tendency to conform or to, essentially, go along with the crowd.
The catch is this: On a subset of turns (with the actual participant always going near the end, and all of the other "participants" actually being actors who were in cahoots with the experimenter), the actors all gave an obviously incorrect answer. The big questions: Would the naive participant report (again, publicly and aloud) what he knew to be the correct answer? Or would he essentially cave to the group pressure and conform, thereby giving the obviously incorrect answer?
This research was actually conceived in a post-Holocaust context and was designed, as you may see, to shed light on the question of how people are so capable of following along with others, even if they know that the others are in the wrong.
The results were pretty shocking. In Asch's research, most participants gave the obviously incorrect answer on at least one occasion. And more than one-third of participants always conformed fully when the obviously incorrect answer was on the table.
Solomon Asch's Visit with Elijah
Years later, Asch described the inspiration for this research (see Stout, 1996). When he was a 7-year-old boy, he was introduced to Elijah at a Seder with his family. The grownups at the table made a point to say that Elljah had definitely visited the Seder as evidenced by the wine glass. The narrative that they were putting out there was this: Oh look, there is obviously less wine in that glass now than there was at the beginning of the night. You see it also, right? Yes! Yes! Yes!
Poor little Solomon didn't know what to do. He sort of felt like he had to agree with everyone else so as to not seem rude. But he never quite really believed that the wine had reduced (which makes sense, since, again, Elijah is not real).
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Like any and all research, Solomon Asch's renowned conformity research has an origin story. The whole Elijah prank that the grownups pull on the kids during the Passover Seder came to strongly influence Asch's entire body of work as a pioneering force in the social and behavioral sciences.
The lesson is this: You just never know what factors are going to influence someone's future. We now understand the nature of human social influence much better than we ever did. Partly thanks to Elijah, the Passover Ghost.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202004/the-passover-seder-and-the-history-psychology
I love the idea of Elijah as the Passover Ghost!
Otherwise, Elijah has never especially impressed me. And Moses is much more relevant to Passover.
Elijah, c 1200, St .Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai*
WHY COVID-19 IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN THE ORDINARY FLU
~ COVID-19 starts out in the lungs like the common cold coronaviruses, but then causes havoc with the immune system that can lead to long-term lung damage or death.
SARS-CoV-2 is genetically very similar to other human respiratory coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. However, the subtle genetic differences translate to significant differences in how readily a coronavirus infects people and how it makes them sick.
SARS-CoV-2 has all the same genetic equipment as the original SARS-CoV, which caused a global outbreak in 2003, but with around 6,000 mutations sprinkled around in the usual places where coronaviruses change. Think whole milk versus skim milk.
Compared to other human coronaviruses like MERS-CoV, which emerged in the Middle East in 2012, the new virus has customized versions of the same general equipment for invading cells and copying itself. However, SARS-CoV-2 has a totally different set of genes called accessories, which give this new virus a little advantage in specific situations. For example, MERS has a particular protein that shuts down a cell’s ability to sound the alarm about a viral intruder. SARS-CoV-2 has an unrelated gene with an as-yet unknown function in that position in its genome. Think cow milk versus almond milk.
How the virus infects
Every coronavirus infection starts with a virus particle, a spherical shell that protects a single long string of genetic material and inserts it into a human cell. The genetic material instructs the cell to make around 30 different parts of the virus, allowing the virus to reproduce. The cells that SARS-CoV-2 prefers to infect have a protein called ACE2 on the outside that is important for regulating blood pressure.
The infection begins when the long spike proteins that protrude from the virus particle latch on to the cell’s ACE2 protein. From that point, the spike transforms, unfolding and refolding itself using coiled spring-like parts that start out buried at the core of the spike. The reconfigured spike hooks into the cell and crashes the virus particle and cell together. This forms a channel where the string of viral genetic material can snake its way into the unsuspecting cell.
SARS-CoV-2 spreads from person to person by close contact. The Shincheonji Church outbreak in South Korea in February provides a good demonstration of how and how quickly SARS-CoV-2 spreads. It seems one or two people with the virus sat face to face very close to uninfected people for several minutes at a time in a crowded room. Within two weeks, several thousand people in the country were infected, and more than half of the infections at that point were attributable to the church. The outbreak got to a fast start because public health authorities were unaware of the potential outbreak and were not testing widely at that stage. Since then, authorities have worked hard and the number of new cases in South Korea has been falling steadily.
How the virus makes people sick
SARS-CoV-2 grows in type II lung cells, which secrete a soap-like substance that helps air slip deep into the lungs, and in cells lining the throat. As with SARS, most of the damage in COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, is caused by the immune system carrying out a scorched earth defense to stop the virus from spreading. Millions of cells from the immune system invade the infected lung tissue and cause massive amounts of damage in the process of cleaning out the virus and any infected cells.
Each COVID-19 lesion ranges from the size of a grape to the size of a grapefruit. The challenge for health care workers treating patients is to support the body and keep the blood oxygenated while the lung is repairing itself.
SARS-CoV-2 has a sliding scale of severity. Patients under age 10 seem to clear the virus easily, most people under 40 seem to bounce back quickly, but older people suffer from increasingly severe COVID-19. The ACE2 protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses as a door to enter cells is also important for regulating blood pressure, and it does not do its job when the virus gets there first. This is one reason COVID-19 is more severe in people with high blood pressure.
SARS-CoV-2 is more severe than seasonal influenza in part because it has many more ways to stop cells from calling out to the immune system for help. For example, one way that cells try to respond to infection is by making interferon, the alarm signaling protein. SARS-CoV-2 blocks this by a combination of camouflage, snipping off protein markers from the cell that serve as distress beacons and finally shredding any anti-viral instructions that the cell makes before they can be used. As a result, COVID-19 can fester for a month, causing a little damage each day, while most people get over a case of the flu in less than a week.
At present, the transmission rate of SARS-CoV-2 is a little higher than that of the pandemic 2009 H1N1 influenza virus, but SARS-CoV-2 is at least 10 times as deadly. From the data that is available now, COVID-19 seems a lot like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), though it’s less likely than SARS to be severe.
What isn’t known
There are still many mysteries about this virus and coronaviruses in general – the nuances of how they cause disease, the way they interact with proteins inside the cell, the structure of the proteins that form new viruses and how some of the basic virus-copying machinery works.
Another unknown is how COVID-19 will respond to changes in the seasons. The flu tends to follow cold weather, both in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Some other human coronaviruses spread at a low level year-round, but then seem to peak in the spring. But nobody really knows for sure why these viruses vary with the seasons.
What is amazing so far in this outbreak is all the good science that has come out so quickly. The research community learned about structures of the virus spike protein and the ACE2 protein with part of the spike protein attached just a little over a month after the genetic sequence became available. I spent my first 20 or so years working on coronaviruses without the benefit of either. This bodes well for better understanding, preventing and treating COVID-19.
https://earthsky.org/human-world/what-covid19-coronavirus-does-to-body-that-makes-it-deadly?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=03e2cfba3d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-03e2cfba3d-394935141
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ending on beauty:
No oil to read by...
I am off to bed
but ah!..
My moonlit pillow
~ Basho
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