PEPCID, LLAMA ANTIBODIES TESTED AGAINST COVID; DO WE LIE WHEN WE SAY “I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU”? MANN IN EXILE; SONGS PROMISED US A DIFFERENT WORLD; BASIC INCOME EXPERIMENT IN FINLAND

 
 Face masks on the statues of bench  sitters in Planty, Krakow

*
AUTOTOMY

In danger, the sea cucumber divides itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world,
with the other self it flees.

It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.

An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly becomes two foreign shores.

Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.

If there are scales, the pans don't move.
If there is justice, this is it.

To die as much as necessary, without excess.
To grow back as much as needed from whatever’s left.

We know how to divide ourselves, how true, we too.
But only into a body and an interrupted whisper.
Into body and poetry.

The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
light, quickly dying out.

Here the heavy heart, there, non omnis moriar —
just three little words like three feathers in flight.

The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.

~ Wisława Szymborska

sea cucumber
 
Oriana:

My favorite stanza:


We know how to divide ourselves, how true, we too.
But only into a body and an interrupted whisper.
Into body and poetry.

This statement by Iris Murdoch seems related:

“As we live our precarious lives on the brink 
of the void, constantly coming closer 
to a state of nonbeing, 
we are all too often aware of our fragility.”

The knowledge of our fragility results in the creation of defense mechanisms. For some it's religion, with its promise of life after death. For others, it may be an intense dedication to their work. For still others, especially women, family indeed comes first.  

One way or another, there is the division: the poorly repressed knowledge of mortality ("light quickly dying out"), and our ability to carry on with activities meaningful to us, never mind the abyss.


*

“WEIMAR ON THE PACIFIC”: THOMAS MANN IN CALIFORNIA EXILE
 
~ Thomas Mann, the uncrowned emperor of Germany in exile, lived in a spacious, white-walled aerie in Pacific Palisades, which the émigré architect J. R. Davidson had designed to his specifications. He saw “Bambi” at the Fox Theatre in Westwood; he ate Chinese food; he listened to Jack Benny on the radio; he furtively admired handsome men in uniform; he puzzled over the phenomenon of the “Baryton-Boy Frankie Sinatra,” to quote his diaries. 

Like almost all the émigrés, he never attempted to write fiction about America. He was completing his own historical epic, the tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers,” which is vastly more entertaining than its enormous length might suggest. The Biblical Joseph is reinvented as a wily, seductive youth who escapes spectacularly from predicaments of his own making, and eventually emerges, in the service of the Pharaoh, as a masterly bureaucrat of social reform. It’s as if Tadzio from “Death in Venice” grew up to become Henry Wallace.

Essays like “The Coming Victory of Democracy” and “War and Democracy” remain dismayingly relevant in the era of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump. In 1938, Mann stated, “Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem.” At such moments, he said, the division between the political and the nonpolitical disappears. Politics is “no longer a game, played according to certain, generally acknowledged rules. . . . It’s a matter of ultimate values.” Mann also challenged the xenophobia of America’s strict immigration laws: “It is not human, not democratic, and it means to show a moral Achilles’ heel to the fascist enemies of mankind if one clings with bureaucratic coldness to these laws.”

On the subject of German war guilt, Mann incited a controversy that persisted for decades. He was acutely aware that mass murder was taking place in Nazi-occupied lands.  As early as January, 1942, in a radio address to Germans throughout Europe, Mann disclosed that four hundred Dutch Jews had been killed by poison gas—a “true Siegfried weapon,” he added, in a sardonic reference to the fearless hero of Germanic legend. In a 1945 speech titled “The Camps,” he said, “Every German—everyone who speaks German, writes German, has lived as a German—is affected by this shameful exposure. It is not a small clique of criminals who are involved.”

The overwhelming fact of the Holocaust led Mann to call for a searching self-examination on the part of German people all over the world. In “Germany and the Germans,” a remarkable speech delivered at the Library of Congress in 1945, he argued that the demonic energies of Hitler’s regime had roots reaching back to Martin Luther. 

Mann did not exclude himself from the web of shame: “It is all within me. I have been through it all.” In the end, he said, “there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning.” The entire story is a “paradigm of the tragedy of human life.” That message of universal responsibility—which, Mann made clear, is not the same as universal guilt—aroused fierce opposition in postwar Germany, where searching self-examination was not in fashion. Allied forces, for their part, were happy to skate over the de-Nazification process, so that Western Europe could focus on fighting a new enemy, the Soviets.

Mann’s words also caused a flap among the émigrés. Brecht and Döblin both criticized their colleague for condemning ordinary Germans alongside Nazi élites. Brecht went so far as to write a poem titled “When the Nobel Prize Winner Thomas Mann Granted the Americans and English the Right to Chastise the German People for Ten Long Years for the Crimes of the Hitler Regime.” In fact, Mann disapproved of punitive measures, but his nuances were overlooked. As Hans Rudolf Vaget has shown, in his comprehensive 2011 study, “Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner,” the fallout from “Germany and the Germans” clouded Mann’s reputation for a generation. Only after several decades did the wisdom of his approach become clear, as Germany established a model for how a nation can work through its past—a process that is ongoing.

Marta Feuchtwanger once said of the novelist, “He felt in a way responsible as a German. . . . He defended the First World War and also the emperor. Later on, it seems that he recognized his error; maybe that was the reason that he was so terribly upset about the whole thing, more than anybody else.” There is, she commented, “no greater hate than a lost love.”

Thomas Mann, who had become an American citizen in 1944, felt the dread of déjà vu. The likes of McCarthy, Hoover, and Nixon had crossed his line of sight before. In 1947, after the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten, he recorded a broadcast in which he warned of incipient Fascist tendencies: “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisition, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’: that is how it started in Germany.” Two years later, he found his face featured in a Life magazine spread titled “Dupes and Fellow Travelers.” In his diary, he commented that it looked like a Steckbrief: a “Wanted” poster.

To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.

 
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/the-haunted-california-idyll-of-german-writers-in-exile

from Wikipedia:

“The outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, prompted Mann to offer anti-Nazi speeches (in German) to the German people via the BBC. In October 1940 he began monthly broadcasts, recorded in the U.S. and flown to London, where the BBC broadcast them to Germany on the longwave band. In these eight-minute addresses, Mann condemned Hitler and his "paladins" as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture. In one noted speech he said, "The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture.”

When Mann was living in California, in Pacific Palisades, for a while there was talk of turning The Magic Mountain into a movie, with Greta Garbo as Clavdia Chauchat (Oriana: a perfect choice, I feel — what a loss that she didn’t get a chance to play that particular seductress.)

Mary:

I understand why Mann met such a firestorm of resistance for his words on Germany. His views challenged people's sense of identity, unfortunately still congruent with nationality and nationalism, and also with identity as it is inextricably connected with language.The language a person speaks has always been a way of locating the geographic presence of a people — from tribe to community to nation. Language is perhaps also the most essential part of one's sense of identity...the first language the "real" name of all things. People separated from their own language can mourn like orphans or exiles, separated from home. Language is as much our home — the words mother spoke — as the cradle of her arms.

What is difficult, but I feel irrefutable, is that both culture and history are embedded in language — even the parts of history and culture we'd rather deny or forget . Without even considering the idea of guilt, which is what makes these issues so emotionally volatile, what happens to language when it is used to describe, define and support a particular kind of social action? It cannot be unaffected. The words used to make possible, to normalize, the workings of the German nazi enterprise are forever changed by that use...the shape and memory of that mechanical, regularized, methodical evil is now part of that language.

I think this is true for any language, any culture. The history of slavery in the US has also become part of the fabric of our language, no matter how some may want to deny or minimize its evils and importance in our world as it is today. All the assumptions and apologies for that brutal, so called "peculiar institution" survive in today's deniers, apologists and defenders of the "honor" and "gracious living" dependent on the foundation of slavery. You can't resolve or "absolve" the present of this history by simply saying, it's all in the past, or, there were good people as well as bad....condemnation is not really the point. First, the past is never really past, and there are good and bad people present no matter what the time and place. Those statements mean nothing.

What we have to do is understand our history. Understand the how and why of it, and understand what still remains of it at work today. Getting all worked up about personal or family guilt or justification is kind of a natural reaction, because all of these are issues involve moral judgements, but it isn’t helpful, and actually prevents understanding. If we understand how a system only works with the agreement/complicity of its members, we are much farther toward avoiding repeat catastrophes. Casting blame, like finding scapegoats, may be easy but it’s also an infantile reaction that doesn't solve or redeem anything. As Mann said, there is universal responsibility, which is not the same as universal guilt.
Oriana:

I’ve had German friends and acquaintances, and have had at least a glimpse of how confused things get — how much prejudice gets transmitted through generation to generation (e.g. Germans are superior, indeed something of a “master race,” even if that expression is no longer used) — while the individual may be vociferous in condemning the Nazis. We can’t easily separate ourselves from the wider culture.

I once mentioned that the University of Krakow, founded in the Middle Ages. “But that was a German university, I suppose,” one of my German friends responded. The idea of a Polish university, Polish intellectuals, professors, scholars, scientists, jurists, writers, artists of all kinds — was nearly impossible for her to accept, in spite of abundant evidence — and that was actually during the time now regarded as the Golden Age of Polish poetry, Polish cinema and experimental theater. For her, the only real culture was of course the German culture. That tribalism is pretty universal, and perhaps unavoidable. But it can lead to harmful consequences.

But I also witnessed, in another friend, her anxiety about taking a certain class because the professor was Jewish. Now, imagine this: my friend did enroll, and the professor said, in front of the whole class, “I'm sorry, Evelyn, but I just don’t like Germans.” And I’ll never forget the look on poor Evi’s face when I mentioned, in context, that my grandparents were Auschwitz survivors. “It’s not your fault. You had nothing to do with it. I don’t believe in collective guilt,” I immediately tried to reassure her as she stood there, white-faced and trembling. I agree that we must understand but not blame. Yet there is a kind of collective guilt — just as there is a collective pride — that operates on the emotional level, probably hard-wired through evolution. We are extremely social animals, parts of a whole.

I could give other examples, but I think that point is clear: blaming or desperately trying to clear ourselves from blame are not useful responses. Let’s study history, psychology and sociology, child development, religion (especially cults), literature, propaganda — anything applicable — in order to understand how it happens that ordinary people, otherwise decent people, can become silent or active accomplices in massive atrocities. No nation is exempt — this is a human problem, and it must be studied as universal.

Mann wisely tried to switch from “guilt” to “responsibility.” Our responsibility is not to go into denial, but aim for a deeper understanding.

I am not an admirer of Mother Teresa, but she did say one thing that resonates with me: “It was when I discovered I had Hitler within me that I decided to become a saint.”
The grave of Thomas Mann in Switzerland
*
FIFTY YEARS AGO, POPULAR SONGS PROMISED A DIFFERENT WORLD

“Midnight, and I listen as frogs seek mates in the dark. I wonder if they know there's a virus loose in the world bringing nothing but misery on the broken backs of hippie promises fifty years dead and gone. I don’t think anyone ever expected flying cars. I think all they wanted was to raise a son who wouldn’t die in a foreign war. Raise a daughter to walk paths of power and change the world. We were all supposed to finally look past the color of our skin, the slant of our eyes into a future where everyone wore flowers in their hair, safe as houses, everyone singing around the campfire. Smoke a little weed, strum the guitar. The kids are gonna be all right. 

What a world. Is there any such thing as a promise come true that doesn’t have a curse hidden in it?

I’ve been listening to songs sung before I was born, songs from when I was barely walking, songs new when I was wearing a homemade dress sitting in the church pew listening to the preacher tell me God loved the little children. Amazing Grace. Jesus Loves Me This I Know. Somewhere around the time Mariner 10 neared Mercury and the Supreme Court ruled against Nixon, God decided he wanted nothing to do with me. It was mutual. Like Ali, I had my own Rumble and God went down. But I still thought the world was a good place – probably because I had no idea what that last helicopter out of Vietnam meant or that all the years after were tainted by all the things that came before. 

2020. An ironically numbered year for when a plague stalks the land, killing more than the number who died in Vietnam, revealing all the cracks still in the foundation of our shared house built on lies and centuries of spilled blood. Old wounds torn open, the covering flesh thinner than we ever believed. The poor are still with us, the homeless, the orphan and lame, the refugee, the helpless. I hear the unknowing frogs seeking to spawn in the dark and I worry the heaviness in my chest is the virus multiplying like our national sins. 

There’s no hope in me tonight. All I have is rage and it, too, sits heavily in my chest waiting to claw its way out. All those songs of an end to war, an end to hunger, an end to hate, the rise of everyone being equal feel like musical hydroxychloroquine. We’ve sung ourselves to sleep and the virus has lifted the veil from our eyes. 73,000 dead [we just passed 80,000]. The frogs don’t care.” ~ Kestrel Trael, Facebook, May 8, 2020

Oriana:

I think Kestrel summarizes it beautifully: no, we didn't want flying cars; we wanted a world without wars, without preventable disease, without hunger, hate crimes, and so on . . . and knew nothing about a climate catastrophe, pandemics, or the refugee crisis.

The death toll as of early afternoon, May 9, 2020 is 79,823  in the US alone (close to 300,000 worldwide). Tomorrow it will be past 80,000: the shockingly quick march toward 100,000 American dead. And probably beyond . . . And this is just the first wave. How many of those deaths have been preventable?

Yes, the songs promised a different world, one full of flowers and flower children and not Neo-Nazis. And yet some progress has been made in human rights, less poverty, lower rates of violent crime. But because we realize that great disparity between the ideal and reality, we grieve rather than “look on the bright side.” 

Sandy:

The number of deaths is probably too low, as noted by the concurrent spike in unexplained excess deaths, but the death rate is too high, because our government was too dismissive of the danger and didn't immediately go for widespread testing. On the other hand, the open-it-all-up folks will have us looking at a bunch more funerals real soon now, but isn't that what Memorial Day is all about?

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

Mary:

Oh those songs of 50 years ago, those hopes!! The promise all you need is love and peace, that we were poised on the doorstep of a new and better world, that we would overcome all obstacles to freedom and justice. That love could be free, free of dangers and the judgements of religion and society. What happened??  Altamont, Kent State, Nixon, Manson, the defeat in Viet Nam. And AIDS. Bodies piling up like some kind of retribution, all those promises and hopes seeming naive as children's dreams. And now a new plague, one that illustrates all those cracks in our foundation, that house built on lies and blood. What survives may be something we can't imagine, and I find it hard to think it will have to be better..there is just as much the possibility of a world much worse than this.
Oriana:

That’s a timely warning: it could be worse. The idealism of those songs helped us through a time of despair. Fortunately there was free expression at that point — the Communist witch-hunts of the fifties were over. After disastrous, unwinnable wars, there was a yearning for “peace and love” (I have a friend who still signs off Peace and Love — and I admit I like it). Idealism by itself can’t accomplish much, but it’s the first step: having a vision and the hope that goes with it.

*
ALBERT CAMUS ON HOW TO DEAL WITH THE ABSURDITY OF LIFE
 
~ [In 1942]. twenty-eight-year-old Camus had stunned the world with his revolutionary philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins with one of the most powerful opening sentences in all of literature and explores the paradox of the absurd in life. “I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” he writes — something that prompted his interviewer to ask whether a philosophy predicated on absurdity might incline people to despair. 

Camus — who years earlier had asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life” — answers: “Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.”

Speaking at the close of the meaningless brutality of World War II, six years before he formulated his ideas on solidarity and what it really means to be a rebel, Camus considers the only act of courage and rebellion worth undertaking: 

In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them. 

I have often wondered whether Camus had read W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” written in 1940, which includes this searing stanza so kindred to Camus’s sentiment: 

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/albert-camus-on-the-three-antidotes-to-the-absurdity-of-life?utm_source=pocket-newtab
 
*
“I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU” — TRUE OR FALSE? 

“One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Oriana:

I think Nietzsche is right on this. One can promise actions — I will always be kind to you; I will help you in a time of need — but one can't promise feeling passionate love for the person years from now. Yet we see that lovers pretty universality say, "I will always love you." When we are in love, we can't imagine that love ending — and that's just part of being human, of making a total commitment in the heat of the moment and actually meaning it, in that moment. We want to hear "I love you" and not "I love you, but we'll see about a year from now.”

Ten years from now? Let's not get ridiculous.  On the other hand . . .  we just don't know.


Things get more complicated with promising fidelity. Having or not having a relationship with a third person falls within the realm of action. But it’s possible that Nietzsche meant emotional rather than physical fidelity. Marriage vows include “forsaking all others,” but it’s quite common for a married person to fall in love with an attractive colleague at work, for instance. It’s a dilemma to which humanity has not found a satisfying universal answer. Perhaps a universal answer cannot exist — we must proceed case by case. No matter what action is chosen, some amount of suffering is unavoidable. And by suffering, I mean sheer hell.

At the same time, we know that long-lasting love is possible. Like friendship, it must be cultivated. Compliments, sweet little surprise gifts, showing concern about the partner's feelings — volumes have been written on the subject of “true love.” It’s a set of behaviors rather than feelings. Feelings are fed with actions.

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UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME — THE LATEST ON THE EXPERIMENT IN FINLAND
 
The world’s most robust study of universal basic income has concluded that it boosts recipients’ mental and financial well-being, as well as modestly improving employment.
Finland ran a two-year universal basic income study in 2017 and 2018, during which the government gave 2000 unemployed people aged between 25 and 58 monthly payments with no strings attached.

The payments of €560 per month weren’t means tested and were unconditional, so they weren’t reduced if an individual got a job or later had a pay rise. The study was nationwide and selected recipients weren’t able to opt out, because the test was written into legislation. 

The study compared the employment and well-being of basic income recipients against a control group of 173,000 people who were on unemployment benefits.

Between November 2017 and October 2018, people on basic income worked an average of 78 days, which was six days more than those on unemployment benefits.

There was a greater increase in employment for people in families with children, as well as those whose first language wasn’t Finnish or Swedish – but the researchers aren’t yet sure why.

When surveyed, people who received universal basic income instead of regular unemployment benefits reported better financial well-being, mental health and cognitive functioning, as well as higher levels of confidence in the future.

When asked whether basic income could help people dealing with situations such as the economic fallout of the covid-19 pandemic, Ylikännö said that it could help alleviate stress at an uncertain time.

“I think it would bring people security in very insecure situations when they don’t know whether they’re going to have an income,” she said.

The findings suggest that basic income doesn’t seem to provide a disincentive for people to work.

However, the effect of basic income was complicated by legislation known as the “activation model”, which the Finnish government introduced at the beginning of 2018. It made the conditions for accessing unemployment benefits stricter.

The timing made it difficult to separate the effects of the basic income experiment from the policy change, said Ylikännö. “We can only say that the employment effect that we observed was as a joint result of the experiment and activation model,” she said.

Preliminary findings, released in February last year, had previously found no difference between the two groups for the number of days worked in 2017.

“Money matters, but alone it’s not sufficient to significantly promote either labor supply or demand,” said Ylikännö.


https://www.newscientist.com/article/2242937-universal-basic-income-seems-to-improve-employment-and-well-being/#ixzz6Lt3qDBfk

*

WALLACE STEVENS ON THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE CLASSICAL GODS

~ “To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as though they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing . . . 

What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementos behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. 

They were not forgotten because they had been part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever uttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed . . . 

Thinking about the end of the gods creates singular attitudes in the thinker. One attitude is that the gods of classical mythology were merely esthetic projections. They were not objects of belief.  They were expressions of delight . . . It is one of the normal activities of humanity, in the solitude of reality and in the unworthy treatment of solitude, to create companions, who, if not superficially explicative, are, at least, assumed to be full of the secret of things . . . 

However all that may be, the celestial atmosphere of these deities, their ultimate remote celestial residences, are not matters of chance. Their fundamental glory is the fundamental glory of men and women, who being in need of it create it, elevate it, without too much searching of its identity. The people, not the priests, made the gods.” (~ quoted by Leon Surette in The Modern Dilemma)

*
Classical mythology has proved to be an endless source of inspiration for the arts. True, the worship of these gods disappeared, and their temples are in ruins. But I still encounter hundreds of poems on Penelope and Persephone, on Icarus and Odysseus and so on. Those myths have tapped into enduring truths about the human nature and the complexity of human relationships.

Talk about revisionist myth: Medusa holding the head of Perseus. Sculpture by Luciano Garbati.


*
“IF IT’S FAITH, THEN IT COULD BE WRONG”

I heard this statement from a friend, and realized that I never before heard it formulated so simply and succinctly. 

Here is what led up to it. He’d done business with a fundamentalist church and was invited to attend a service. He found it boring and predictable. The word “Jesus” was repeated at least a hundred times, in formulations such as “What is your greatest problem? What is the answer to it? Jesus.” Other high-frequency words were “faith” and “heaven.” (Seems that even churches are learning you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.)

The preacher said, “If you have faith, then you have a 100% guarantee that you will go to heaven.” That’s the moment when my friend thought, “But if it’s faith, then it could be wrong.” 

Again, I'm reminded of the priest who was re-reading the seven proofs of god’s existence, and suddenly realized they were all invalid. And the pilot who was reciting the Apostles’ Creed when it occurred to him that he didn’t believe a word of it. 

As a side note, it’s also telling that the fundamentalist congregants were asked to think about their problems, their suffering. Religion is not for happy people, who are presumably busy being happy. 

But, in spite of the theory that your spirit must be broken before you are ready to kneel and really pray, people can also be too busy suffering to turn to religion, especially if they are not in the habit of praying and going to church.

This is a complex issue. I went through a period of great unhappiness in my youth, crowned with a life-threatening illness. I’d been an atheist since my teens. Even so, you’d think it might have occurred to me to pray as a last resort, but it didn’t. I was too busy suffering. And I know stories similar to mine. Suffering doesn’t “naturally” lead one to religion.

If anything saved my life, it was poetry. Creative work. “Work works.” God stayed absent and silent as always, but poetry spoke, and I heard.

*
Yet what a difference it would make if churches ceased to present faith as knowledge! But we know that no nun would ever say, “Jesus allegedly rose from the dead, but this could be wrong.” Nor would she (I'm choosing the nun here, since they did most of the indoctrinating) say, “The church invented the Purgatory in the eleventh century, but such place might not exist” (as the Protestants later concluded). I'm pondering this in relation to the theist comments that in essence say, “There is no proof, but that’s OK — because if we had proof, then there’d be no need for faith.” 

That’s not how I was taught. We had to memorize the seven proofs of the existence of god, though oddly enough we were not examined on those the way we were strictly examined on the seven deadly sins. The sins seemed to carry more weight. 

Even so, everything was presented not as faith, but as knowledge. Now and then, when the absurdity was shining through, there was an appeal to Mystery, the human mind being too feeble to comprehend. And we took it on faith that we were feeble-minded, besides being weak-willed (that’s why we were sinners already as young children, and in so many categories). 

But it’s the faith that is feeble, and thus has to be defended by whatever means are available in any given historical era. Being burned at the stake was definitely a deterrent to raising questions. Now it’s not as easy, at least in the West, so we do see mass apostasy. But next door, globally speaking, there is still death penalty for “apostasy.” Such extreme measures would not be necessary if faith could not be wrong. It’s the weakness or non-existence of evidence that creates the endless repetition of “I believe in Jesus!”, reciting the Creed, saying the same prayers over and over and over. It’s protesting too much. It’s trying to brainwash yourself.

Note the  children imitating the pose of The Thinker
 
*
WHY PEOPLE KEEP PRAYING: THE POWER OF INTERMITTENT REINFORCEMENT 

Have you ever wondered why people continue to pray in the face of random outcome? It’s the power of intermittent reinforcement. 

If you reward an animal every time it presses a lever, the animal will press the lever until sated with whatever goodie it is that the experimenter provides. But if you reward the animal only now and then, at unpredictable intervals, the animal will press the lever like crazy. It will work much more intensely. This principle was discovered by the gambling industry. No wonder you can see people work the slot machines hour after hour, even though they are losing. 

Another feature of intermittent reinforcement is that the behavior is very hard to extinguish.
Thus, if prayers appear to be answered only some of the time, the principle of intermittent reinforcement predicts that the believer will pray all the more intensely. 

In addition, there is also SELECTIVE RECALL. The times prayers were answered would be remembered, while the many times they weren’t would slide into oblivion — just as the gambler working the slots remembers the excitement (enhanced by flashing lights and jingling noise) of a jackpot rather than the drab and steady hours of winning nothing or very little. 

But as someone (I think it was Jason) pointed out, when it comes to prayer, a lot depends on the initial cognitive framing. Suppose you have a problem at work, and start praying for a solution. If you start out with the assumption, “I am talking to god,” then any thought arising afterwards has the potential to be seen as god’s answer. Of course it needs to be the kind of thought that strikes the person as an insight or an effective solution. That’s the “jackpot” here. It too doesn’t have to come immediately. In fact “sleeping on it” often works.
 
But what if you pray for a child’s survival, and the child dies? Here we can’t rely on selective recall — the child’s death can’t be forgotten. So there is a crisis, and a minority of believers lose their faith. But most, with the help of supportive friends and/or a minister, can figure out some story about god’s master plan and the “better place,” and “your little angel is now waiting for you in heaven,” so on. 

These are all simple tricks compared with the almost diabolically clever reply: “God doesn’t answer all our prayers so as to increase our faith.” 

Yes, you’ve read that correctly: god doesn’t answer prayers in order to INCREASE FAITH. We are back to the principle of intermittent reinforcement: you will work harder if your request is granted only now and then. You will believe all the more ardently if faith is understood to be the critical factor in bringing about healing or some other important “manifestation.” 

Also, those praying for a miracle have forgotten the injunction about not testing the Lord (Jesus remembered it during the temptations in the desert). You have to believe that god can work miracles, but you can’t “test” him. So there: the kind of faith that can’t be shaken by lack of evidence. In fact, it could even be argued that the less the evidence, the better. The silent god, absent or hidden (Deus absconditus), can redouble religious ardor. This particular “mystery of faith” is not all that mysterious. It's the power of intermittent reward.

Mary:

I find the whole use of prayer as though it were a real solution intensely irritating. It's  so much magical thinking — that the correct words (there are specific prayers for all sorts of things) will WORK like a magical spell to being about whatever the petitioner wants. Or you simply aim an intense and nonstop barrage of prayers and bully god into responding. If these prayers don't  work...well maybe you just weren't worthy, or the one you prayed for wasn't. Or you didn't say the right prayers or pray hard enough . So prayer may be a way of manipulating god, and if it doesn't work it's due to your fault, not God's lack of power. It all seems so crass and ridiculous...and yet people are constantly offering their prayers as if they were actually giving something real, something they should be thanked for.

Oriana:

And don’t forget specific “patron saints” for each kind of trouble! And if that archaic mentality is still with us, we can barely imagine how much worse it was in the past centuries, with less developed technology (our “real magic”) and less advanced medicine. On the other hand, it’s “only human” to pray for the outcome we ardently desire, yet can’t control. Part of it, as I explain, is the power of intermittent reinforcement — now and then, a prayer seems to have been answered, and we’ll remember that “miracle” rather than the hundreds of times we prayed to no avail.

Also note that not so long ago we had a wave of “positive visualization.” It was an attempt to manipulate the whole universe to bring us something we desired, e.g. a “soulmate” — never mind that the whole concept of a soulmate, if understood in mystical terms, is a terrible hindrance to having a good relationship with a real, flawed human being.

As you point out, it’s all magical thinking, and it’s time for humanity to grow up and try to see the real cause-and-effect relationships. Then we can perhaps work more effectively toward achieving our goals — as long as we remember that total control is impossible. Scientists will do their best to produce vaccines and treatments — and there is certainly more hope in that than in praying a novena against the coronavirus.
*
WHY IS CORONA VIRUS DEADLY FOR SOME, AND HARMLESS FOR OTHERS?

THE new coronavirus has already infected millions of people, but we are still learning about who is most vulnerable to its attacks. It quickly became clear that older people and those with certain underlying health conditions such as diabetes and cancer were at higher risk. But there have now also been many reports of the disease killing young, otherwise healthy individuals. And even among the high-risk groups, the threat that covid-19 poses varies dramatically.

What’s more, information from several countries now indicates that people from some ethnic minorities are more likely to die. So are men and people who are obese.

Meanwhile, because covid-19 attacks the lungs, we predicted that people with asthma would be among the most vulnerable. But so far, they don’t seem to be in greater danger.
 
Around the world, efforts to quickly identify risk factors have already helped shape public health advice and direct resources. But to understand why these factors make such a difference, we will need to look more closely – not just at the virus, but also ourselves.

“The disease is actually just our response to the pathogen,” says Priya Duggal, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. To work out who gets sick and why, we need to understand what happens once the virus is inside us, and the role our genes play in our body’s response. As well as helping us to better protect the most vulnerable, doing so could guide the development of treatments that ultimately let us live with covid-19.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632811-300-why-is-coronavirus-deadly-for-some-but-harmless-in-others/#ixzz6Lt6EH1Cj

from another source:

AGE:

About 8 out of 10 deaths associated with COVID-19 in the U.S. have occurred in adults ages 65 and older, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The trend may be due, in part, to the fact that many elderly people have chronic medical conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes, that can exacerbate the symptoms of COVID-19, according to the CDC. The ability of the immune system to fight off pathogens also declines with age, leaving elderly people vulnerable to severe viral infections

DIABETES:

In a review of 13 relevant studies, scientists found that people with diabetes were nearly 3.7 times more likely to have a critical case of COVID-19 or to die from the disease compared with COVID-19 patients without any underlying health conditions (including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease or respiratory disease), they reported online April 23 in the Journal of Infection.

Even so, scientists don't know whether diabetes is directly increasing severity or whether other health conditions that seem to tag along with diabetes, including cardiovascular and kidney conditions, are to blame.

That fits with what researchers have seen with other infections and diabetes. For instance, flu and pneumonia are more common and more serious in older individuals with type 2 diabetes, scientists reported online April 9 in the journal Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice. In a literature search of relevant studies looking at the link between COVID-19 and diabetes, the authors of that paper found a few possible mechanisms to explain why a person with diabetes might fare worse when infected with COVID-19. These mechanisms include: "Chronic inflammation, increased coagulation activity, immune response impairment and potential direct pancreatic damage by SARS-CoV-2."

HEART DISEASE AND HYPERTENSION

People with conditions that affect the cardiovascular system, such as heart disease and hypertension, generally suffer worse complications from COVID-19 than those with no preexisting conditions, according to the American Heart Association. That said, historically healthy people can also suffer heart damage from the viral infection.

A study of COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, found that more than 1 in 5 patients developed heart damage — some of the sampled patients had existing heart conditions, and some did not.

In seeing these patterns emerge, scientists developed several theories as to why COVID-19 might hurt both damaged hearts and healthy ones, according to a Live Science report.
In one scenario, by attacking the lungs directly, the virus might deplete the body's supply of oxygen to the point that the heart must work harder to pump oxygenated blood through the body. The virus might also attack the heart directly, as cardiac tissue contains angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) — a molecule that the virus plugs into to infect cells. In some individuals, COVID-19 can also kickstart an overblown immune response known as a cytokine storm, wherein the body becomes severely inflamed and the heart could suffer damage as a result.

SMOKING

People who smoke cigarettes may be prone to severe COVID-19 infections, meaning they face a heightened risk of developing pneumonia, suffering organ damage and requiring breathing support. A study of more than 1,000 patients in China, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, illustrates this trend: 12.3% of current smokers included in the study were admitted to an ICU, were placed on a ventilator or died, as compared with 4.7% of nonsmokers. 

Cigarette smoke might render the body vulnerable to the coronavirus in several ways, according to a recent Live Science report. At baseline, smokers may be vulnerable to catching viral infections because smoke exposure dampens the immune system over time, damages tissues of the respiratory tract and triggers chronic inflammation. Smoking is also associated with a multitude of medical conditions, such as emphysema and atherosclerosis, which could exacerbate the symptoms of COVID-19.

A recent study suggests that smoke exposure increases the number of ACE2 receptors in the lungs — the receptor that SARS-CoV-2 plugs into to infect cells. 

Many of the receptors appear on so-called goblet and club cells, which secrete a mucus-like fluid to protect respiratory tissues from pathogens, debris and toxins. It's well-established that these cells grow in number the longer a person smokes, but scientists don't know whether the subsequent boost in ACE2 receptors directly translates to worse COVID-19 symptoms. What's more, it's unknown whether high ACE2 levels are relatively unique to smokers, or common among people with chronic lung conditions.

OBESITY

Several early studies have suggested a link between obesity and more severe COVID-19 disease in people. One study, which analyzed a group of COVID-19 patients who were younger than the age of 60 in New York City, found that those who were obese were twice as likely as non-obese individuals to be hospitalized and were 1.8 times as likely to be admitted into critical care.

A preliminary study from Shenzhen, China, found that obese COVID-19 patients were more than twice as likely to develop severe pneumonia as compared with patients who were normal weight, according to the report published as a preprint online in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Those who were overweight, but not obese, had an 86% higher risk of developing severe pneumonia than did people of normal weight, the authors reported. Another study, accepted into the journal Obesity and peer-reviewed, found that nearly half of 124 COVID-19 patients admitted to an intensive care unit in Lille, France, were obese.

Obesity is generally thought of as a risk factor for severe infection. For example, those who are obese had longer and more severe disease during the swine flu epidemic. Obese patients might also have reduced lung capacity or increased inflammation in the body. A greater number of inflammatory molecules circulating in the body might cause harmful immune responses and lead to severe disease.

BLOOD TYPE

Blood type seems to be a predictor of how susceptible a person is to contracting SARS-CoV-2, though scientists haven't found a link between blood type per se and severity of disease.

Jiao Zhao, of The Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, and colleagues looked at blood types of 2,173 patients with COVID-19 in three hospitals in Wuhan, China, as well as blood types of more than 23,000 non-COVID-19 individuals in Wuhan and Shenzhen. They found that individuals with blood types in the A group (A-positive, A-negative and AB-positive, AB-negative) were at a higher risk of contracting the disease compared with non-A-group types. People with O blood types (O-negative and O-positive) had a lower risk of getting the infection compared with non-O blood types.

Why blood type might increase or decrease a person's risk of getting SARS-CoV-2 is not known. A person's blood type indicates what kind of certain antigens cover the surfaces of their blood cells; These antigens produce certain antibodies to help fight off a pathogen. Past research has suggested that at least in the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), anti-A antibodies helped to inhibit the virus; that could be the same mechanism with SARS-CoV-2, helping blood group O individuals to keep out the virus, according to Zhao's team.

[in summary: type A means highest risk and type O the lowest, with type B being in the middle]

https://www.livescience.com/why-covid-19-coronavirus-deadly-for-some-people.html

Oriana:

I'm surprised that this article didn't list being male as one of the risk factors. It’s anything but minor.

“In the US twice as many men have been dying from the virus as women. Similarly, 69% of all coronavirus deaths across Western Europe have been male. Similar patterns have been seen in China and elsewhere.

One theory is that women’s immune response to the virus is stronger, says Philip Goulder, professor of immunology at the University of Oxford. “The immune response throughout life to vaccines and infections is typically more aggressive and more effective in females compared to males,” he says.

This is partly down to the fact that women have two X chromosomes, whereas men have only one – which is important when it comes a coronavirus. “In particular, the protein by which viruses such as coronavirus are sensed is encoded on the X chromosome,” says Goulder. “As a result, this protein is expressed at twice the dose on many immune cells in females compared to males, and the immune response to coronavirus is therefore amplified in females.”

Another possibility is that the difference is down to gender-based lifestyle choices. “There are important behavioral differences between the sexes, for example in smoking, which affect the level of pre-existing disease such as heart disease, chronic lung disease and cancer,” says Goulder. “These have a huge impact on the outcome from infections such as coronavirus.

“The sex differential in smoking is especially marked in some countries such as China, where 50% of men smoke, compared to 5% in women.”

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200409-why-covid-19-is-different-for-men-and-women

*
A HEARTBURN DRUG IS BEING TESTED AGAINST COVID

~ The fast-growing list of possible treatments for the novel coronavirus includes an unlikely candidate: famotidine, the active compound in the over-the-counter heartburn drug Pepcid. 

On  April 7, the first COVID-19 patients at Northwell Health in the New York City area began to receive famotidine intravenously, at nine times the heartburn dose. Unlike other drugs the 23-hospital system is testing, including Regeneron’s sarilumab and Gilead Sciences’s remdesivir, Northwell kept the famotidine study under wraps to secure a research stockpile before other hospitals, or even the federal government, started to buy it. “If we talked about this to the wrong people or too soon, the drug supply would be gone,” says Kevin Tracey, a former neurosurgeon in charge of the hospital system’s research.

187 COVID-19 patients in critical status, including many on ventilators, have been enrolled in the trial, which aims for a total of 1174 people. Reports from China and molecular modeling results suggest the drug, which seems to bind to a key enzyme in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), could make a difference. But the hype surrounding hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine—the unproven antimalarial drugs touted by President Donald Trump and some physicians and scientists—has made Tracey wary of sparking premature enthusiasm. He is tight-lipped about famotidine’s prospects, at least until interim results from the first 391 patients are in. “If it does work, we’ll know in a few weeks,” he says.

In reviewing 6212 COVID-19 [Chinese] patient records, the doctors noticed that many survivors had been suffering from chronic heartburn and were on famotidine rather than more-expensive omeprazole (Prilosec), the medicine of choice both in the United States and among wealthier Chinese. Hospitalized COVID-19 patients on famotidine appeared to be dying at a rate of about 14% compared with 27% for those not on the drug, although the analysis was crude and the result was not statistically significant.

With both the tantalizing Chinese data and the modeling pointing toward famotidine, a low-cost, generally safe drug, Callahan contacted Tracey about running a double-blind randomized study. COVID-19 patients with decreased kidney function would be excluded because high doses of famotidine can cause heart problems in them.

Anecdotal evidence has encouraged the Northwell researchers. After speaking to Tracey, David Tuveson, director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center, recommended famotidine to his 44-year-old sister, an engineer with New York City hospitals. She had tested positive for COVID-19 and developed a fever. Her lips became dark blue from hypoxia. She took her first megadose of oral famotidine on 28 March. The next morning, her fever broke and her oxygen saturation returned to a normal range. Five sick co-workers, including three with confirmed COVID-19, also showed dramatic improvements after taking over-the-counter versions of the drug, according a spreadsheet of case histories Tuveson shared with Science. Many COVID-19 patients recover with simple symptom-relieving medications, but Tuveson credits the heartburn drug. “I would say that was a penicillin effect,” he says.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/new-york-clinical-trial-quietly-tests-heartburn-remedy-against-coronavirus

HOW TO CHECK YOUR OXYGEN LEVELS IF YOU DON’T HAVE AN OXIMETER
 
~ In the absence of a pulse oximeter, one rough measure of respiratory function is a self-test called the Roth score. It requires the patient to take a breath and try counting to 30. If a patient can’t make it to the number 10 (or seven seconds) without another breath, it’s likely their oxygen level has dropped below 95. If they can’t count to the number 7 (or five seconds), their oxygen score may be below 90 percent. The test is not perfect, nor has it been studied in Covid-19. A University of Oxford team said the Roth score should not be used because it hasn’t been validated and could give false reassurance.

Another physical but subtle sign of falling oxygen: Patients may start taking short, fast breaths to compensate, although they may not notice they are doing it. Patients with low oxygen levels might also have a blue tinge to their lips or skin. That’s why a video conference with your doctor can be helpful if you’re not sure about whether you need to go to the hospital. ~

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/well/live/coronavirus-days-5-through-10.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 
LLAMA ANTIBODIES SHOW PROMISE AGAINST COVID
 
Antibodies from Winter, a 4-year-old llama with great eyelashes, have neutralized coronavirus and other infections in lab experiments.Antibodies from Winter, a 4-year-old llama with great eyelashes, have neutralized coronavirus and other infections in lab experiments.

Winter was the lucky llama chosen by researchers in Belgium, where she lives, to participate in a series of virus studies involving both SARS and MERS. Finding that her antibodies staved off those infections, the scientists posited that those same antibodies could also neutralize the new virus that causes Covid-19. They were right, and published their results Tuesday in the journal Cell.

Scientists have long turned to llamas for antibody research. In the last decade, for example, scientists have used llamas’ antibodies in H.I.V. and influenza research, finding promising therapies for both viruses.

Humans produce only one kind of antibody, made of two types of protein chains — heavy and light — that together form a Y shape. Heavy-chain proteins span the entire Y, while light-chain proteins touch only the Y’s arms. Llamas, on the other hand, produce two types of antibodies. One of those antibodies is similar in size and constitution to human antibodies. But the other is much smaller; it’s only about 25 percent the size of human antibodies. The llama’s antibody still forms a Y, but its arms are much shorter because it doesn’t have any light-chain proteins.

This more diminutive antibody can access tinier pockets and crevices on spike proteins — the proteins that allow viruses like the novel coronavirus to break into host cells and infect us — that human antibodies cannot. That can make it more effective in neutralizing viruses.

Llamas’ antibodies are also easily manipulated, said Dr. Xavier Saelens, a molecular virologist at Ghent University in Belgium and an author of the new study. They can be linked or fused with other antibodies, including human antibodies, and remain stable despite those manipulations.

This antibody is a genetic characteristic llamas share with all camelids, the family of mammals that also includes alpacas, guanacos and dromedaries.Dr. Saelens said that llamas are domesticated, easy to handle and less stubborn than many of their camelid cousins, although, “if they don’t like you, they’ll spit.”

[Researchers] injected Winter with spike proteins from the virus that caused the 2002-03 SARS epidemic as well as MERS, then tested a sample of her blood. And while they couldn’t isolate a single llama antibody that worked against both viruses, they found two potent antibodies that each fought separately against MERS and SARS.

The researchers were writing up their findings when the new coronavirus began to make headlines in January. They immediately realized that the smaller llama antibodies “that could neutralize SARS would very likely also recognize the Covid-19 virus,” Dr. Saelens said.
It did, the researchers found, effectively inhibiting the coronavirus in cell cultures.

The researchers are hopeful the antibody can eventually be used as a prophylactic treatment, by injecting someone who is not yet infected to protect them from the virus, such as a health care worker. While the treatment’s protection would be immediate, its effects wouldn’t be permanent, lasting only a month or two without additional injections.

This proactive approach is at least several months away, but the researchers are moving toward clinical trials. Additional studies may also be needed to verify the safety of injecting a llama’s antibodies into human patients.

“There is still a lot of work to do to try to bring this into the clinic,” Dr. Saelens said. “If it works, llama Winter deserves a statue.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/science/llama-coronavirus-antibodies.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR26ZBE4jlQr69SSWb9xlKWgTy4MxjeSjSY3PUI3Oxre1_dUnGH5qMgKAXY

ending on beauty:

DIVORCE

Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
Rushed through the dark house.
Stopped, remembering. Stood looking
out at the bright moonlight on concrete.

~ Jack Gilbert