FOURTH OF JULY, ATLANTIC CITY BOARDWALK
It was the money night.
Eighty-eight-cent stores competed
with the ninety-nine-cent stores.
The fake Gypsy fortune-tellers
tugged back sweaty
made-in-China Gypsy scarves.
On the pier you could put on
a padded suit and pretend
to be a Sumo wrestler.
You could shoot at plastic ducks
and win a plush
purple dinosaur.
On each corner someone was
performing: a raggae band,
dreadlocks bleached to rust,
a kazoo player, a one-man orchestra
pounding on a washboard
with a foot-strung drum.
Then the fireworks, twice:
the family show at nine,
and the midnight extravaganza.
rockets from an off-shore boat
burst into cartwheels, rings and hearts —
even a wobbly peace sign.
The full moon rose from the ocean,
orange-pink like a salmon.
After the fireworks
fizzed their last gasp,
we turned toward the casinos:
Caesar’s Palace lined with giant
statues saluting Caesar, and the gilded,
candy-striped Taj Mahal.
High over the sprawling edifice,
in floodlights shifting across the dark,
spiraled an eddy of seagulls.
More than a hundred seagulls, luminous,
soaring three hundred feet up!
At first I thought they too
were only part of the show —
perhaps trained doves,
or a laser fantasy of flight.
But the birds were too high,
and they didn’t
advertise anything.
A passer-by explained,
“They are attracted by the lights.”
We couldn’t stop watching them:
in the gaudy dusk,
the white birds,
incomprehensible as artists,
high above greed.
Over the garish casino,
seagulls spiraled in shifting beams,
their bodies weightless,
as if made of light.
~ Oriana
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CHEKHOV: “NO CONVICTIONS”
~ The would-be famous impressionist painter Konstantin Korovin describes a scene in a Moscow hotel room in 1883. The characters are Korovin, Chekhov (studying for his final exam to become a doctor; he is 23) and other students. The dialogue sounds entirely contemporary and could have been transcribed this morning on any number of college campuses:
“The students were different from Anton Pavlovich. They loved to argue, and they were in some peculiar way opposed to just about everything.
“If you have no convictions,’ said one student turning to Chekhov, “you can’t be a writer.” “No one can say, `I have no convictions,’” said another. “I can’t understand how anyone could not have convictions.”
“I have no convictions,” replied Chekhov.
“You claim to be a man without convictions, but how can you write a work of literature without any ideology? Don’t you have an ideology?”
“I have no ideology and no convictions,” answered Chekhov.
These students had an odd way of arguing. They were apparently displeased with Anton Pavlovich. It was clear that they could not fit him into the didactic turn of their outlook or into their moralizing ideology. They wanted to guide, to instruct, to lead, and to influence. They knew everything. They understood everything. And Anton Pavlovich was plainly bored by it all.
“Who needs your stories? Where do they lead? They don’t oppose anything. They contain no ideas. The Russian Bulletin, say, would have no use for you. Your stories are entertaining and nothing else.”
“Nothing else,” answered Anton Pavlovich. ~ Konstantin Korovin, My Encounters with Chekhov (my thanks to M. Iossel)
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“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.” ~ Nabokov, 1948
https://lithub.com/every-great-writer-is-a-great-deceiver-vladimir-nabokovs-best-writing-advice/?fbclid=IwAR3zSt_4VE_Gh_83jrrlBmER7o43n5ZdU-B-rM5BA3iii0N7Vkcb9u20WEM
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A RADICAL IDEA: GOVERNMENT BASED ON THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED
Rather than “anti-biblical,” I'd say, more broadly, “anti-theocratic”: government is to be based on the consent of the governed rather than divine right of kings or divine election of any sort.
Is the “consent of the governed” to be based on simple majority, rather than the votes of the electoral college? I wonder if this argument will be resolved within our lifetime.
*
Oriana:
Once I read an interesting article in Newsweek (I think) by an American journalist who argued that independence was a mistake, and the US would have been better off if it had stayed a colony like Canada.
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THE GOLDEN RULE OF RELATIONSHIPS
~ Make your relationship the top priority in your life. That’s the golden rule.
When you do so, you take chances. You put the other person first. As long as both of you make it a top priority, you’ll find it easier to compromise and look for win-win outcomes. You do kind things for each other without being asked.
All of the loving behaviors that enhance your relationship flow from making that special person your first concern.
During the early stages of a relationship, we’re insecure about our status, uncertain of where we stand. We make our relationships the top priority to achieve that certainty in status.
Time passes. We get comfortable and secure. Our relationship goes from being the top priority to one of many priorities.
Your personal ambitions and desires re-emerge. There’s nothing wrong with that. We need our space, but sometimes we forget the tenuous circumstances that forged our relationship and the risks and sacrifices we made to make them safe and secure. We get lazy and take things for granted.
If that’s where you find yourself, put your other priorities aside, and remember the golden rule.
Our bond strengthens when we follow this rule and weakens when we stray from it. All other acts of love follow when you do this first.
https://psiloveyou.xyz/the-golden-rule-of-relationships-nobody-talks-about-8641f932cfc
Oriana:
I don’t think that the love relationship needs to be the top priority every single moment of one's life. There may be times when you need to focus primarily on something else. But when the relationship is in danger — for instance, if you are having a big disagreement about politics — that’s the time to decide which has the priority in your life: your long-term relationship, or your views on politics. If you choose the priority (I am tempted to say: the “sacredness”) of the relationship, then the joy of loving and being loved will indeed follow.
I don’t suggest that adopting the partner’s political stance is the only solution. No, you must be free to think for yourself. But you may decide not to talk about politics. As long as you perceive your partner as a good person, and concede that practically every issue is complex and no “absolute truth” is attainable, both of you can work out a mode of being together that deepens the affection rather than undermines it.
Seeing that each of you is partly right and partly wrong lays the foundation for tolerance and respect. And respect is an absolute necessity, a rock that can withstand the shifting currents of feeling, including those low moments when you wish you could just flush your partner down the toilet. Those moments will pass quickly when the underlying respect is there, and when both of you treasure the relationship.
If you truly value your relationship, then, beyond even respect, there is what I call “the pact of non-abandonment.” Barring extreme circumstances, you are there for the other, “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
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“Everything that can be undermined should be undermined. That’s the only way to discover that which cannot be undermined.” ~ Tadeusz Kotarbiński
He might be right. That’s pretty much Nietzsche’s “philosophizing with a hammer.” That’s what I’ve done looking for something in Christianity (theory rather than practice) that cannot be undermined. Non-vengefulness and “heaven is within you” stayed. (I abbreviate the saying, getting rid of “kingdom” — an anachronism, since all those texts were written in the era of kings and other tyrants.)
The golden rule, heaven is within you, non-revenge, and trying not to have expectations: “there is nothing I want from X,” the last one either from Buddhism or just a certain philosophy of life (“You are suffering because you want something from her”).
The principle of LESS: do less, focus on one thing at a time and do it slowly. And last but not least: life is too short to be unhappy — this is my last chance for unbridled hedonism (my kind of unbridled hedonism, that is — intellectual orgies). And yet one more principle, my most recent discovery (never mind how many said it before — I had to discover it through living): what matters is not achieving a goal, but having a beautiful journey.
That seems to summarize my beliefs. Such a short, simple list. Simple, but not simplistic. Each principle learned through suffering and error. And the learning is continual. For instance, I’ve noticed that older people seem to fall into two groups: the adorable and the insufferable. The mystery of charisma. And if not charisma, then just sweetness. Being affectionate — what a world it would be if people were more affectionate!
*
*
CLAIR PATTERSON: THE UNSUNG SCIENTIST WHO SAVED US FROM LEAD POISONING AND CALCULATED THE AGE OF THE EARTH
~ A definitive age for our planet was not established until 1953.
Some of the earliest estimates of the earth’s age were derived from the Bible. Religious scholars centuries ago did some simple math, synthesizing a number of passages of Biblical scripture and calculated that the time to their present-day from the story of Genesis was around 6,000 years. That must have seemed like a really long time to people back then.
But in 1907, scientists developed the technique of radiometric dating, allowing scientists to compare the amount of uranium in rock with the amount of lead, the radioactive decay byproduct of uranium. If there was more lead in a rock, then there was less uranium, and thus the rock was determined to be older. Using this technique in 1913, British geologist Arthur Holmes put the Earth’s age at about 1.6 billion years, and in 1947, he pushed the age to about 3.4 billion years. Not bad. That was the (mostly) accepted figure when geochemist Clair Patterson arrived at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena from the University of Chicago in 1952. (Radiometric dating remains today the predominant way geologists measure the age of rocks.)
Canyon Diablo meteoriteBy employing a much more precise methodology, and using samples from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, Patterson was able to place the creation of the solar system, and its planetary bodies such as the earth, at around 4.6 billion years. (It is assumed that the meteorite formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system, including Earth). Subsequent studies have confirmed this number and it remains the accepted age of our planet.
Patterson’s discovery and the techniques he developed to extract and measure lead isotopes led one Caltech colleague to call his efforts “one of the most remarkable achievements in the whole field of geochemistry.”
But Patterson was not done.
In the course of his work on lead isotopes, Patterson began to realize that lead was far more prevalent in the environment that people imagined. In the experiments he was doing at Caltech, lead was everywhere.
“There was lead there that didn’t belong there,” Patterson recalled in a CalTech oral history. “More than there was supposed to be. Where did it come from?”
Patterson was flummoxed by the large amounts of environmental lead he was seeing in his experiments. It seemed to be everywhere: in the water, air and in people’s hair, skin and blood. Figuring out why this was the case took him the rest of his career.
He found it so hard to get reliable measurements for his earth’s age experiments that he built one of the first scientific “clean rooms”, now an indispensable part of many scientific disciplines, and a precursor to the ultra-clean semiconductor fabrication plants (so-called “fabs”) where microprocessor chips are made. In fact, at that time, Patterson’s lab was the cleanest laboratory in the world.
To better understand this puzzle, Patterson turned to the oceans, and what he found astonished him. He knew that if he compared the lead levels in shallow and deep water, he could determine how oceanic lead had changed over time. In his experiments, he discovered that in the ocean’s oldest columns of water, down deep, there was little lead, but towards the surface, where younger water circulates, lead values spiked by 20 times.
He decided to look in places far from industrial centers, ice caves in Greenland and Antarctica, where he would be able to see clearly how much lead was in the environment many years ago. He was able to show a dramatic increase in environmental lead beginning with the start of lead smelting in Greek and Roman times. Historians long ago documented the vast amounts of lead that were mined in Rome. Lead pipes connected Roman homes, filled up bathtubs and fountains and carried water from town to town. Many Romans knew of lead’s dangers, but little was done. Rome, we all know, collapsed. Jean David C. Boulakia, writing in the American Journal of Archaeology, said: “The uses of lead were so extensive that lead poisoning, plumbism, has sometimes been given as one of the causes of the degeneracy of Roman citizens. Perhaps, after contributing to the rise of the Empire, lead helped to precipitate its fall.”
In his Greenland work, Patterson’s data showed a “200- or 300-fold increase” in lead from the 1700s to the present day; and, most astonishing, the largest concentrations occurred only in the last three decades. Were we, like the Romans, perhaps on the brink of an environmental calamity that could hasten the end of our civilization? Not if Patterson could help it.
In a Eureka moment, Patterson realized that the time frame of atmospheric lead’s rise he was seeing in his samples seemed to correlate perfectly with the advent of the automobile, and, more specifically, with the advent of leaded gasoline.
Leaded gas became a thing in the 1920s. Previously, car engines were plagued by a loud knocking sound made when pockets of air and fuel prematurely exploded inside an internal combustion engine. The effect also dramatically reduced the engine’s efficiency. Automobile companies, seeking to get rid of the noise, discovered that by adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline, they could stop the knocking sound, and so-called Ethyl gasoline was born. “Fill her up with Ethyl,” people used to say when pulling up to the pump.
Despite what the Romans may have known about lead, it was still an immensely popular material. It was widely used in plumbing well into the 20th century as well as in paints and various industrial products. But there was little action taken to remove lead from our daily lives. The lead in a pipe or wall paint is one thing (hey, don’t eat it!), but pervasive lead in our air and water is something different.
After World War I, every household wanted a car and the auto sales began to explode. Cars were perhaps the most practical invention of the early 20th century. They changed everything: roads, cities, work-life and travel. And no one wanted their cars to make that infernal racket. So the lead additive industry boomed, too. By the 1960s, leaded gasoline accounted for 90% of all fuel sold worldwide.
But there signs even then that something was wrong with lead.
A New York Times story going back to 1924 documented how one man was killed and another driven insane by inhaling gases released in the production of the tetraethyl lead at the Bayway plant of the Standard Oil Company at Elizabeth, N.J. Many more cases of lead poisoning were documented in ensuing years, with studies showing that it not only leads to physical illness but also to serious mental problems and lower IQs. No one, however, was drawing the connection between all the lead being pumped into the air by automobiles and the potential health impacts. Patterson saw the connection.
When Patterson published his findings in 1963, he was met with both applause and derision. The billion-dollar oil and gas industry fought his ideas vigorously, trying to impugn his methods and his character. They even tried to pay him off to study something else. But it soon became apparent that Patterson was right. Patterson and other health officials realized that if nothing was done, the result could be a global health crisis that could end up causing millions of human deaths — perhaps the decline of civilization itself.
Patterson was called before Congress to testify on his findings, and while his arguments made little traction, they caught the attention of the nascent environmental movement in America, which had largely come into being as a result of Rachel Carson’s explosive 1962 book Silent Spring, which documented the decline in bird and other wildlife as a result of the spraying of DDT for mosquito control. People were now alert to poisons in the environment, and they’d come to realize that some of the industrial giants that were the foundation of our economy were also having serious impacts on the planet’s health.
Patterson was unrelenting in making his case, but he still faced serious opposition from the Ethyl companies and from Detroit. The government took half-hearted measures to address the problem. The EPA suggested reducing lead in gasoline step by step, to 60 to 65 percent by 1977. This enraged industry, but also Patterson, who felt that wasn’t nearly enough.
Industry sued and the case to the courts. Meanwhile, Patterson continued his research, collecting samples around Yosemite, which showed definitely that the large rise in atmospheric lead was new and it was coming from the cities (in this case, nearby San Francisco and Los Angeles). He analyzed human remains from Egyptian mummies and Peruvian graves and found they contained far less lead than modern bones, nearly 600 times less.
Years would pass with more hearings, more experiments, and the question of whether the EPA should regulate leaded gas more heavily went to U.S. Court of Appeals. The EPA won, 5-4. “Man’s ability to alter his environment,” the court ruled, “has developed far more rapidly than his ability to foresee with certainty the effects of his alterations.”
The Clean Air Act of 1970 initiated the development of national air-quality standards, including emission controls on cars.
In 1976, the EPA’s new rules went into effect and the results were almost immediate: environmental lead plummeted. The numbers continued to plummet as lead was further banned as a gasoline additive and from other products like canned seafood (lead was used as a sealant). Amazingly, there was still tremendous denial within American industry.
Although the use of leaded gas declined dramatically beginning with the Clear Air Act, it wasn’t until 1986, when the EPA called for a near ban of leaded gasoline that we seemed to finally be close to ridding ourselves of the scourge of atmospheric lead. With the amendment of the Clean Air Act four years later, it became unlawful for leaded gasoline to be sold at all at service stations beginning [at midnight] December 31, 1995. Patterson died just three weeks earlier at the age of 73.
Clair Patterson is a name that few people know today, yet his work not only changed our understanding of the earth itself, but also likely saved millions of lives. He is one of the most unsung of the great 20th-century scientists, and his name deserves to be better known.
https://californiascienceweekly.com/2019/11/08/the-little-known-california-scientist-who-may-have-saved-millions-of-lives/
from another source:
~ “ODD GAS KILLS ONE, MAKES FOUR INSANE,” screamed The New York Times. The headlines kept coming as, one by one, the four other men died. Within a week, area hospitals held 36 more patients with similar symptoms.
All 41 patients shared one thing in common: They worked at an experimental refinery in Bayway, New Jersey, that produced tetraethyl lead, a gasoline additive that boosted the power of automobile engines. Their workplace, operated by Standard Oil of New Jersey, had a reputation for altering people’s minds. Factory laborers joked about working in a “loony gas building.” When men were assigned to the tetraethyl lead floor, they'd tease each other with mock-solemn farewells and "undertaker jokes."
They didn’t know that workers at another tetraethyl lead plant in Dayton, Ohio, had also gone mad. The Ohioans reported feeling insects wriggle over their skin. One said he saw “wallpaper converted into swarms of moving flies.” At least two people died there as well, and more than 60 others fell ill, but the newspapers never caught wind of it.
An official for Standard Oil maintained the gas’s innocence: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard,” he said.
One expert, however, saw past the speculation and spin. Brigadier General Amos O. Fries, the Chief of the Army Chemical Warfare Service, knew all about tetraethyl lead. The military had shortlisted it for gas warfare, he told the Times. The killer was obvious—it was the lead.
Lead makes humans sick because the body confuses it with calcium. The most abundant mineral in the human body, calcium helps oversee blood pressure, blood vessel function, muscle contractions, and cell growth. As the milk cartons boast, it keeps bones strong. In the brain, calcium ions bounce between neurons to help keep the synapses firing. But when the body absorbs lead, the toxic metal swoops in, replaces calcium, and starts doing these jobs terribly—if at all.
The tragedy began at the factories in Bayway, New Jersey. It would take Clair Patterson’s whole life to stop it. ~
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it
Oriana:
I encourage you to read the whole article. Despite its length, it reads like a thriller.
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THOMAS MIDGLEY, THE MAN WHO POISONED THE WORLD WITH LEAD AND GAVE US THE HOLE IN THE OZONE
~ His first big invention was to make an additive ( made of tetra-ethyl lead) for gasoline that almost completely eliminated knocking in automobile engines. The Ethyl corporation was formed to make millions of dollars off of this product, and they did for many years, until they ran into a small problem: LEAD is a dangerous neurotoxin. Ethyl Corp. workers suffered all kinds of ill health effects, up to, and including death.
He next came up with a way to get rid of the dangerous chemicals used in early air conditioning systems. To do this, he invented a product called dichlorodifluoromethane. It’s hard to pronounce, so everyone just called it CFC. Thomas Midgley invented CFC’s! He had no idea of course that they would not only work well as a refrigerant, but were also incredibly effective at destroying Ozone.
Midgley never believed (apparently) his products were unsafe, and he’s a classic example of the quote from the THE JUNGLE by Upton Sinclair that “It’s nearly impossible to convince a man of anything when his paycheck depends on it being otherwise”.
There is a sad end to Midgley, and his story. He contracted Polio in later years, and designed a nifty contraption to get him in and out of bed, but it had the same hidden dangers of the rest of his inventions.
He got caught in it, and was found strangled. ~
https://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2014/04/21/more-about-the-guy-who-almost-poisoned-the-planet-as-seen-on-cosmos-sunday-night/
Oriana:
After reading that it took until 1996 for the ban on unleaded gas to go into effect, I asked myself, “What else might be there out in the environment, slowly poisoning us the way the fumes of leaded gasoline used to?” Within minutes, I heard a voice in a my mind replaying a famous scene in The Graduate: “I have only one word to say to you: plastics.”
More than anything, it’s probably the microplastics that we breathe in and ingest. But that’s a separate subject. Perhaps in the next blog.
By the way, Midgley himself suffered from lead poisoning early on, and felt so guilty over the workers’ deaths that he wanted leaded gas removed — but the oil industry executives talked him out of it. The idea was that the “health of the economy” was more important than human health (i.e. profit as the supreme value).
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let’s detox with a chuckle:
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ANYTHING BUT AN ANGEL ~ ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
If after our death they want to transform us into a tiny withered flame that walks along the paths of wind -- we have to rebel. What good is eternal leisure on the bosom of the air, in the shape of a yellow halo, amid the murmur of two-dimensional choirs?
One should enter rock, wood, water, the cracks of a gate. Better to be the creaking of a floor rather than a shrill and transparent perfection.
~ Zbigniew Herbert (tr. John and Bogdana Carpenter)
Oriana:
Herbert was a master of the prose poem. Prose poems are not my favorite genre, with the exception of Herbert’s. As with Kafka, it’s not his stylistic mastery that makes Herbert stand out, though he certainly knows how to compress. It’s his interesting mentality, his different way of looking at things, his love of the “loyalty of objects” and reverence for the ordinary. “Better to be the creaking of a floor rather than a shrill and transparent perfection.”
He was able to practice Denise Levertov’s dictum: Accuracy is the gate to mystery.
But he also wrote something that Oprah picked up, and various self-help blogs:
I know it’s hard to be reconciled
not everything is as it should be
but please turn around and step into the future
leave memories behind and enter the land of hope
Grettis Skogafoss, Iceland (even the name is wonderful)It took me forever to leave sad memories behind, and the endless analyzing of what went wrong in my life, trying to discover the first catastrophe from which the rest followed. I had to create “no-think zones.” I could think neither of the past nor of the future (my view of the future was that it had been stolen from me). Now I’m healed enough, strong enough, that I don’t have to police my thinking in such a strict way.
For me stepping into the future meant stepping into the present with the strange certainty that I could cope with anything that happens as long as I had my mind -- full of creaking floors rather than perfection. And I recognize that floor, the boards washed to a kind of blondness, a muted interior sunlight — I recognize the beautifully plaited straw mat at the door, and the wildflowers in a jar on the window sill.
Wu Guanzhong: Singing of Swallows, 1990
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WHAT IF WE NEVER DIED?
“With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts . . . and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own . . . Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.” ~ Alan Lightman, “Einstein’s Dreams”
Oriana:
There is something to it. It has often been observed that a woman never fully “comes into her own” until her mother dies, and the same holds for fathers and sons. The submissive attitude toward parents that we learn in childhood, and later the burden of caring for ailing, often disabled elderly parents, are obstacles to feeling fully in charge of one’s life. To some extent we are trapped by having parents (and parents are also trapped by having children) — not that I have a solution to this eternal generational problem.
William:
Ever wonder what heaven would be like if it were true that people go there and see grandpa and grandma? Would they have the old bodies they died with; look like the kids remember them? Or would everyone be young, maybe late teens, early twenties so as to be at the peak of romantic attractiveness? Wouldn't that be confusing? If you kept the body you died in that would be a good reason to try to die young.
Oriana:
Not only that, but presumably there'd be no clothes — grandma not huddled and shivering in a sweater, but a nude Venus!
I guess everyone assumes perfect young bodies, free of all pain and disease — and perfected personalities too, nothing but sweetness. So there'd be no flaws and quirks, no "personality" in the earthly sense — everyone a Buddha, eternally the same and boring.
William:
Didn’t Wilde say he preferred Hell because that's where all his friends would be?
Oriana:
Milosz imagined himself in a special compartment of hell reserved for writers, artists, and all those who put their vocation ahead of service to their family, and basically pursued their passion instead of “living for others.”
So yes, all the interesting people would be in hell. Certainly all the great achievers — paradoxically, an achievement which then benefits many, sometimes all of humanity, takes a concentrated, often obsessive effort that precludes “living for others.”
An oak in England, estimated to be 500-600 years old
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A DIFFERENT ANGLE: PARADISE IS FOR MARTYRS
“Although it may, dispiritingly, seem otherwise, the supply of homicidal madmen intent on entering heaven by means of taking the lives of as many people as possible is not inexhaustible and will start ebbing once the forces of civilization manage eventually to drive an iron stake through the dark heart of that rancid madness.” ~ Mikhail Iossel
Oriana:
The phrase “the dark heart of that rancid madness” reminded me of Conrad’s “heart of darkness.” The fantasy of attaining paradise (earthly or heavenly) through mass killings or other atrocities has been a stain on the history of humanity.
**
Garibaldi was born on the Fourth of July!
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COVID-RELATED PSYCHOTIC SYMPTOMS; HOW COVID DAMAGES THE BRAIN
~ Perhaps the first better-known correlation between the onset of psychotic symptoms in response to viral illness was documented during the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. Individuals infected with influenza at that time were noted to have a variety of psychiatric sequelae, including hysteria, melancholy, and insanity. Similar findings were noted in later influenza pandemics, so much so that they were termed, "psychoses of influenza" (Kępińska et al., 2020). These accounts were the first to acknowledge viral illnesses as impacting more than just the respiratory system.
As with past influenza pandemics, there is some evidence to suggest that the COVID-19 virus has capability to penetrate the central nervous system, leading to inflammation of the brainstem. The medulla in particular is apt to be compromised in severe cases of respiratory failure. A strong correlation between neural inflammation and psychotic illness has been well-documented since the eighteenth century, making it likely that the onset of psychosis in a small subset of COVID-19 patients could be traced back to this etiological process.
Additionally, there is a wide subset of literature describing the hypercoagulability in COVID-19 cases ( Connors & Levy, 2020; Panigada et al., 2020; Spiezia et al., 2020).
Essentially, these studies describe the abnormality of blood coagulation in COVID-19 patients, which increases the risk for blood clots in the circulatory system. Interestingly, the same global hypercoagulability is noted in individuals with schizophrenia (Chow et al., 2015).
Similarly, Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) is a common complication in cases of COVID-19. ARDS has been associated with cerebral atrophy which occurs by way of hypoxic injury to neural (and other) tissue. Essentially, there is a reduction of oxygenated blood reaching essential organs. The deleterious effects of hypoxia has been associated with residual hyperglycemia, delirium, and hypotension- all of which can produce psychotic symptoms and lasting cognitive changes. There is some evidence to suggest mild-to-moderate global cerebral atrophy is occurring in severe COVID-19 cases. In particular, CT scans illustrate atrophy of the ventricles, a classic neurological finding in patients with psychotic illness (Li & Hashikawa, 2020).
While some individuals will display psychotic symptoms in association with a COVID-19 diagnosis, a number of individuals without the virus can display these symptoms as well. A recent case series documented four individuals who presented with acute psychosis in response to the psychosocial stressors associated with COVID-19 (Valdes-Florido et al., 2020). Moreover, an observational study suggests a 25% increase in acute psychoses for individuals living in areas with a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases (Hu et al., 2020). This data is in addition to a growing number of case studies that document similar findings.
The incidence of psychosis in viral illness gives credence to the mind-body connection. Physical health and mental health are so intertwined that you cannot attend wholly to one without consideration of the other- suggesting, perhaps, a false distinction between physical illness and psychological illness. The future of healthcare, and society at large, would likely benefit from the eradication of this distinction, as doing so would foster the betterment of medical outcomes, improve access to care, and reduce stigma. Future studies examining the relationship between viral illness and neuropsychiatric changes are warranted. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/adventures-in-cognition/202006/can-covid-19-induce-psychosis
Oriana:
I was especially interested in the mention of hypercoagulability in both covid-19 and schizophrenia. A deficiency of vitamin K may be implicated — and if so, it can be easily corrected. (Vitamin K doesn’t cause clotting; it REGULATES clotting.)
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COVID AND BRAIN DAMAGE
~ Some scientists suspect that Covid-19 causes respiratory failure and death not through damage to the lungs, but the brain – and other symptoms include headaches, strokes and seizures.
For Julie Helms, it started with a handful of patients admitted to her intensive care unit at Strasbourg University Hospital in northeast France in early March 2020. Within days, every single patient in the ICU had Covid-19 – and it was not just their breathing difficulties that alarmed her.
“They were extremely agitated, and many had neurological problems – mainly confusion and delirium,” she says. “We are used to having some patients in the ICU who are agitated and require sedation, but this was completely abnormal. It has been very scary, especially because many of the people we treated were very young – many in their 30s and 40s, even an 18-year-old.”
Helms and her colleagues published a small study in the New England Journal of Medicine documenting the neurological symptoms in their Covid-19 patients, ranging from cognitive difficulties to confusion. All are signs of “encephalopathy” (the general term for damage to the brain) – a trend that researchers in Wuhan had noticed in coronavirus patients there in February.
Now, more than 300 studies from around the world have found a prevalence of neurological abnormalities in Covid-19 patients, including mild symptoms like headaches, loss of smell (anosmia) and tingling sensations (arcoparasthesia), up to more severe outcomes such as aphasia (inability to speak), strokes and seizures. This is in addition to recent findings that the virus, which has been largely considered to be a respiratory disease, can also wreak havoc on the kidneys, liver, heart, and just about every organ system in the body.
“We don’t know yet if the encephalopathy is more severe with Covid-19 than with other viruses, but I can tell you we’ve been seeing quite a lot of it,” says neurologist Elissa Fory of the Henry Ford Foundation in Detroit, Michigan. “As the number of cases increases, you will start to see not only the common manifestations but also the uncommon manifestations – and we’re seeing them all at once, which is not something any of us have encountered in our lifetimes.”
Estimates of exact prevalence vary, but it seems that roughly 50% of patients diagnosed with Sars-CoV-2 – the virus responsible for causing the illness Covid-19 – have experienced neurological problems.
“In fact, there is a significant percentage of Covid-19 patients whose only symptom is confusion” – they don't have a cough or fatigue, says Robert Stevens, associate professor of anaesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
“We are facing a secondary pandemic of neurological disease.”
“Happy hypoxia” is another mystery. Our blood normally features “oxygen saturation” levels of around 98%. Anything below 85% should lead to a loss of consciousness, coma or even death. But a large number of Covid-19 patients have been found to have oxygen saturation levels below 70%, even below 60%, yet remained fully conscious and cognitively functional.
Then there’s the fact that an enormous percentage of people who carry the virus have no symptoms. Estimates vary, but one mass-testing report from Iceland found that fully 50% of the population who carried the virus expressed no symptoms whatsoever.
Perhaps most unnerving: while about 80% of people who develop Covid-19 shake off the virus easily, a small percentage quickly worsen and within days die from respiratory weakness and multi-system organ failure. Many of these patients are elderly or have particular underlying health conditions, but not all.
Dr. Robert Stevens: “I’ve had patients in the ICU recover in two to three days. I’ve got others who have been in hospital now for months.”
There are other quirks that Stevens has noticed but cannot explain. “Covid-19 patients seem to have a lack of sensitivity to the drugs we normally use – we’ve had to use five to 10 times the amount of drugs for sedation that we would normally use,” he says.
Virologists will spend years trying to understand the biomechanics of this invader. And though researchers have scrutinized the virus and its victims for six months, publishing scientific studies at a rate never before seen with any disease, we still have more questions than answers. The newest to be added is: can the virus infect the brain?
“If you had asked me a month ago if there was any published evidence that Sars-CoV-2 could cross the blood-brain barrier, I would have said no – but there are now many reports showing that it absolutely can,” says Stevens.
In fact, some scientists now suspect that the virus causes respiratory failure and death not through damage to the lungs but through damage to the brainstem, the command center that ensures we continue to breathe even when unconscious.
David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, says he himself treated many patients in the 1970s and 1980s who had suffered from severe clinical depression ever since the 1957 influenza pandemic in the UK.
“Their depression was enduring and it was solid – it was if their emotional circuits had all been switched off,” he says, warning that we could see the very same thing happen again, but on a much larger scale. “People who are discharged from the ICU with Covid-19 need to be monitored systematically long-term for any evidence of neurological damage – and then given interventionist treatments if necessary.”
In France, Helms knows better than almost anyone how intense the neurological impacts can be. We needed to delay her interview with the BBC after one of her Covid-19 patients – who was discharged from the hospital two months ago, but is still suffering from viral fatigue and severe depression – required urgent consultation for suicidal risk. And that patient is not unique – she has seen many people in similar states of distress.
“She is confused, she cannot walk, and she just wants to die, it’s really awful,” says Helms. “She’s only 60, but she has said to me ‘Covid has killed me’ – meaning it has killed her brain. She just doesn’t want anything more in life.
“This has been especially difficult because we don’t know how to prevent this damage in the first place. We just don’t have any treatments that will prevent any damage to the brain.”
Patients experiencing lung failure can be put on a respirator, and kidneys can be rescued with a dialysis machine – and, with some luck, both organs will bounce back. But there is no dialysis machine for the brain. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-effects-of-covid-19-infection?fbclid=IwAR0uMNlB-66wWJq9WOsLeVXSf4y-iQTQmkqOi9i69wR2xg28nEieYn5BZpo
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SURGE IN NEW US COVID CASES
~ The daily number of new coronavirus cases confirmed in the United States smashed past 50,000 for the first time Wednesday. Citing numbers from Johns Hopkins University, CNN reports that 50,203 new coronavirus cases were reported in under 24 hours. That’s more cases than the U.S. confirmed during the first two months of the pandemic. The previous daily high came on June 26, when 45,255 cases were reported across the nation. Health officials are becoming increasingly concerned that the situation could get even worse as we head into the holiday weekend. Dean Sidelinger, the Oregon state health officer, told CNN: “We know people are tired of being cooped up at home... but cases surged after Memorial Day... We don't want the same thing to happen over the Independence Day holiday.” At least five states—Arizona, California, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas—reported record-high totals of new cases Wednesday. ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-reports-staggering-50000-new-coronavirus-cases-in-one-day?via=newsletter&source=CSAMedition
Oriana:
Florida alone reported 10,109 new cases on July 2.
According to Woldometer, the current US death toll is 132,313. We seem to be marching on toward the predicted 150,000 — or beyond.
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WHY BATS DON’T SUFFER FROM THE VIRUSES THEY CARRY
~ Rabies, Ebola*, Marburg, SARS, MERS, Hendra, Nipah: Bats are a definitive or probable source of many of the most lethal zoonotic viruses to enter human populations. Why? There are many reasons. Bats are an ancient and diverse lineage: Nearly one in four mammal species is a bat; as a group, they have been co-evolving with a vast array of viruses for around 50 million years.
Many bat species are social: They roost in large numbers, huddle together for warmth, groom one another and suckle their young, providing numerous opportunities to circulate pathogens among themselves. Bats are highly mobile, sometimes traveling dozens of miles between roosting sites or migrating hundreds of miles seasonally, taking their viruses with them.
Bats also have a unique immune system, most likely as an adaptation to a talent no other mammal can claim. In order to fly, bats must significantly increase their metabolic rate, which creates dangerous molecular byproducts, such as reactive ions that damage cells and DNA. During flight, bits of fractured DNA escape the nuclei of bat cells and drift about, resembling the presence of viral invaders. In most animals, all that havoc and misplaced DNA would provoke a robust immune response and chronic inflammation, needlessly harming healthy tissue. As a result of these pressures, bats have evolved several countermeasures, including tempered inflammatory reactions. In turn, these adaptations have made them more resilient to actual viruses and less likely to initiate the kind of overzealous immune response that often kills other infected animals.
Bats do not typically mingle with other animals or initiate potential spillovers; despite their gothic literary associations, only three bat species feed exclusively on blood. Outbreaks of bat viruses usually begin when a human takes a bat somewhere it would never go on its own or intrudes on its home.
Nipah is a prime example. From the summer of 1997 to the summer of 1998, human-set fires in Southeast Asia incinerated at least five million hectares of drought-stricken forest and generated a massive drifting layer of haze, which caused widespread health problems and obscured sunlight, hindering photosynthesis throughout the region. With much of their native habitat logged or in ashes, and wild fruit trees less productive than usual, bats began feeding in orchards that bordered on forest. When Chua and his colleagues examined the farms in the area where the first cases occurred, they discovered mango, durian and jambu air trees adjacent to or overhanging pig enclosures. As bats foraged among the farms’ trees, saliva-soaked pieces of fruit would have fallen into the pigsties, providing the pigs with irresistible morsels and repeated doses of the virus. Farmers in close contact with infected pigs subsequently contracted the virus. If this scenario sounds at all familiar, it’s probably because it inspired the closing scenes of the 2011 film “Contagion.” ~
(*Some researchers think the 2013 to 2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa — the most severe in history, infecting more than 28,000 people and killing more than 11,000 — may have started with a 2-year-old boy playing in a hollow tree inhabited by bats.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/magazine/animal-disease-covid.html?referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR1E8AD-rNlRIG6lZK1FwLTg7ruw5d4myYQJ2eEiSZ5jayRrJaDNeVyR4vE
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ending on beauty:
We can’t plan a party for the apocalypse because
friends of the apocalypse know
the apocalypse always shows up
uninvited and with a bag of half-eaten chips.
This is why some of us wake up
in the middle of the night looking for a saint —
and maybe your saint is in the moon,
or maybe your phone, or maybe
it’s the moment you want out the door
to look up at the stars
just to prove to the heavens you’re still alive.
~ Kelli Russell Agodon
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