Juno's views of Jupiter, September 2017THE BEELZEBUB SONATA
Nothing is absurd enough
to express the mystery of existence.
~ Stanislaw Witkacy
writer, painter, photographer, 1885-1939
Broken cross in the sky
the ground smokes with mist
first red veins stand out on the ivy
He leaves Warsaw gives up
pasting newspaper strips on the windows
as the government instructed
so the panes wouldn’t fall out
In Brześć another bombing raid
She is with him his last companion
they walk for days
stubble ground
gossamer threads their mouths
they sleep in a barn
in a village called Jeziory/Lakes
Is man a thinking reed
September 17
the news of the Soviet invasion
Is Satan only an artistic device
The next morning he says
“Today”
“Aren’t you going to shave”
“As you wish”
He shaves but doesn’t
put away his razor and soap
They eat breakfast
“Let’s go for a walk”
Far-off a rooster crows
a rising note
pierces the horizon
“I must do it now
while there still is Poland”
They sit under an oak
dissolve eighteen
Luminal tablets in a mug of water
“You said you wouldn’t marry me
unless under chloroform —
see, it’s under Luminal”
She drinks
he cuts his veins
swallows a stimulant
for a faster flow
She lies down
heather dazed into snow
“Don’t fall asleep yet
don’t leave me alone”
The loneliness of his many selves
his glass negatives
drugs and alcohol
abstinence too is a drug
“After you are asleep
I’ll cut my throat”
A horse-drawn cart rolls by
“Don’t fall asleep yet
if only the sun would shine”
They are found the next day
wet with the morning fog
acorns from the oak
have fallen on them
she is still alive
After she fell asleep he put
his jacket under her head
his blood as he leaned soaked through
the strap of her slip
~ Oriana
Witkacy: Multiple Self-Portrait with Mirrors“Broken cross” is a reference to the swastika.
On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland. It was done in accordance with the secret deal worked out between Hitler and Stalin in the infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. This poem is particularly meaningful to me because my mother happened to be in the audience the one time I read it in public. When I read the lines: “I must do it now, while there still is Poland,” she burst out crying.
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Below: Nazi and Soviet victory parade Brest-Litovsk, September 22, 1939
Mary:
The opening poem and the article on "the Garbage Dump of History" present two very opposite responses to similar losses. The poem shows the despair and suicide, planned to be part of a lovers’ suicide pact, of a man who has lost his country to invasion — the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union in 1939. In the "Garbage Dump of History" article the speaker listens to Ronald Reagan dismissing the Soviet Union as a failure destined for that garbage dump. This dismissal shocks him, so contrary to the narrative he's heard all his life that the Soviet Union was in the vanguard, paving the way to a future beyond capitalism.
Reagan’s speech shocks him, but doesn't move him to despair. Instead he and his grandmother are amused. Then in the rising light of morning he turns to the natural beauty of the world, and finds it rich and sufficient. Life is not only endurable, it is wonderful, despite governments, ideologies, and the threats and judgements of political leaders. Grandma's words..."if Ronald Reagan says so…" deflate the importance of any such pronouncements, in the way wise grandmothers have always seen through the foolishness of children.
Why the difference?? These stories are not simple, not about patriotism. They are about what constitutes our sense of identity and what gives meaning to our lives. I cannot help but see the carefully orchestrated suicide in the poem as a romanticization of his own life and its meaning, a dramatic gesture of despair and rejection, more staged than spontaneous, a deliberately told story meant to assert his determination to be the author of that story despite all the forces of history. The fact that he intends to take his lover with him, to write the end of her story as well, is selfish and ignoble in my eyes. He controls the whole narrative, the day, the time, the method, and she only asks if he will shave beforehand. I am glad she survives him.
But why did he make sure he didn't? I can only think his losses seemed too great, too horrible to bear. Think of that broken cross in the sky, the betrayals of war and invasion, all resulting in the death, the disappearance, of the world he knew and loved...its culture, its history, its spirit. In their last hours the couple walk through the beautiful natural world, as though saying goodbye to it, but for them that beauty is not enough, merely another reminder of loss.
However, for the speaker in the Garbage Dump article that world is abundantly sustaining, the foundation of meaning. Changes in the larger structures of society matter, of course, and have shaped what we feel is our identity, but beneath it all, the foundation, is the physical world in all its wonder and beauty, our relation to it the rock on which all else stands, like grandmother in her eternal, worn but warm red sweater, chuckling at the notion of political ideologues and their confidence in their importance. She has lived long, seen wars and their horrors, promises given and never fulfilled, she has seen the mighty rise and fall. Still there is the lake and the morning light, the forest with its fog, its acorns and mushrooms, the simple and powerful rhythms of physical life, birth, pain, hunger, satisfaction, work, love, death. She will make soup no matter who is giving the speeches.
I hope you do not feel I have been cruel to the gentleman in "The Beelzebub Sonata"...he engineered a beautiful death, I can feel and understand his grief, and yet refuse his reaction.
It is a wonderfully nuanced poem. I think of his gesture of putting his jacket beneath her head...and can't help but wonder if he somehow knew and even intended, that she would survive.
Oriana:
That last gesture may strike us as automatic chivalry — but we can be more generous, and call it love. He arranges the jacket to be a pillow for her: an act of tenderness which manages to assert the importance of caring for one another as the foundation of human civilization.
As for the narrator in “Garbage Dump of History,” he is young — life ahead is a promise of good things, no matter the dark moments. His grandmother is still alive — and yes, she has seen much worse times. Now they have a summer house, no matter how modest, and can even afford to feed a dog. And — no bombs are falling from the sky. However modest and fragile their paradise, no bombs are falling.
In the poem, the writer and photographer, until the beginning of the war part of the Warsaw literary and artistic avant-garde, knows that his life is already behind him. Simply struggling to survive didn’t make sense to him. He wasn’t young and healthy and full of energy. The bombing raids in Warsaw and then again in Brześć must have been nerve-wrecking. The unfolding catastrophe was too much for him.
And it’s possible that he knew that the dose of Luminal his companion took was sublethal. He didn’t want to be alone while dying — that is a kind of selfishness, perhaps, but we can understand it as deeply human. At the same time, he didn’t have to take the drug at all, since he intended to cut his throat. If she’d taken the entire supply, she would have died — but since she took only half, she survived. Perhaps he planned it that way — we’ll never know. The act of putting his jacket under her head redeems him.
Witkacy: Self-Portrait, 1924
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HOW THE MEANINGS OF CERTAIN WORDS CHANGED OVER TIME
Bizarrely, the word girl was originally gender neutral and could be used in same way we would use child or kid. Its meaning didn’t begin to become more specific until the 15th century, after the word boy—which originally meant “a male servant or assistant”—was adopted into English (possibly from French) and effectively stole half of the meaning of girl, leaving us with the opposite pair we have today.
A husband was originally a home-owner or a head of a household—and not necessarily a married one. At its root are words meaning “home” or “dwelling” (an etymological ancestor of house) and dweller or freeholder (an ancestor of bond). Wife, meanwhile, meant “woman” originally, a general meaning that still survives in words like housewife and midwife.
The –plode of explode is derived from the same root as applaud—it originally meant “to jeer a performer off a stage.”
Nice derives from a Latin word, nescius, meaning “ignorant” or “not knowing”—and that was its original meaning when it was first adopted into English from French around the turn of the 14th century. Over the years that followed, nice was knocked around the language picking up an impressively wide range of meanings along the way—including “wanton,” “ostentatious,” “punctilious,” “prim,” “hard to please,” “cultured,” “cowardly,” “lazy,” “pampered,” “shy,” “insubstantial,” and “dainty”—before it finally settled on its current meaning in the early 1700s.
No one knows where the word punk comes from, but its earliest meaning in English was as another name for a prostitute—the meaning by which it appears in Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure. Over the centuries, the word seems to have accrued a whole host of fairly unsavory connotations, until it first began to be used of a petty criminal or a criminal’s assistant sometime around 1900, and ultimately any disreputable person, an outcast, or an inexperienced person in the 1920s and '30s.
Rival comes from the same etymological root as words like river and rivulet, and when it first appeared in English in the early 15th century was nothing more than another name for a shoreline or the riverbank. The modern sense of “competitor” or “opponent” is presumed to derive from fishermen competing over the best fishing waters—in fact, the Latin equivalent rivalis was historically used to describe someone who lived on the opposite bank of a river from you.
Gamut
Long before we started using do-re-mi, the first and lowest note of a musical scale was called ut. And the lowest of all the uts was gamma ut (named for the Greek letter gamma), which eventually simplified to gamut. As time went by, the term gamut came to refer collectively to all the notes of a musical scale, and then to the full range of a musical instrument, from where the modern sense of “the full extent” or “scope” of something eventually derived in the mid-1700s.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/25-words-that-don-t-mean-what-they-used-to?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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“Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.” ~ Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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“A play is fiction—and fiction is fact distilled into truth.” ~ Edward Albee
SO WHO’S GOING TO END UP IN THE “GARBAGE DUMP OF HISTORY”?
Mikhail Iossel on his short-wave radio moment
~ I pushed the dial knob once more, and right away heard the already intimately familiar voice of the American President Ronald Reagan. Oh, yes. Yes, baby. It was just instantly recognizable, with that rich, soft, mellifluous, velveteen quality to it. The Voice of America wavelength, then, this was. Reagan was giving some sort of an important speech, delivering some lengthy talk, speaking with his customary passion and conviction. It was too bad, just very unfortunate, that whatever he was saying was almost completely indecipherable to me. In some deeply perverse sense, it was a good thing, too, that I was in no immediate or long-term danger of being allowed to leave the Soviet Union and go to America, because my oral comprehension of the language of Reagan and Shakespeare was virtually non-existent.
But oh, I loved the sound of the American English! It was so beautiful! So... unlike Russian, which, ultimately, was like air to me: colorless, transparent, and received free of charge. Whether the air you breathed was clean or dirty, it still was just the only one you got to breathe, at any given moment, inescapably; and it was, indeed, totally free, because you didn't have to pay for it, it was yours from birth, an innate gift, unasked-for. It was impossible for me not to understand Russian, no matter how often I wished this had been the case.
Hard as I strained my unfocussed brain, with my ear pressed against the VEF-Spidola, I only could make out some disparate, a priori unmistakable words: Great Britain... war... the United States... President... Prime Minister... Germany... NATO... Russia... Washington... Berlin Wall... Moscow... Brezhnev... bloody century... friendship... Winston Churchill... Karl Marx... Afghanistan... Solidarity... freedom... freedom.
*Esh hip*? What the hell was that?
Then a female announcer's prim, starchy voice cut in, saying, in Russian, that now they were going to provide the Russian translation of President Ronald Reagan's speech to members of the British Parliament in the Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster in London, delivered earlier that day, June 8.
June 8? Ah, yes: in America, it was still the 8th of June. America was lagging behind us, time-wise, with no hope of ever catching up. In childhood, I had a book about America that was published in the early fifties, still under Stalin, called "America: The Land of Yesterday" -- or some such title. In it, America was portrayed as a terrible, backward place, hopelessly spinning its rusted wheels in the quicksand of history. Everything was "yesterday" about it -- that's what all of us Soviet children were taught all along. We were the human race's radiant future, and America -- its shameful, dark past. Capitalism-imperialism, which was one and the same thing, was the yesterday of history -- and as such, it was historically doomed. America was historically doomed in spades, totally. Dead as a doornail, in a near-future perspective. One had to feel sorry for it. Poor America. Poor hapless, unwitting Americans. Poor us, too. Poor everyone. Poor our pathetic, long-dead Soviet dream.
I sat there, on a bench overlooking the serene, listless, sleeping, ashen-gray lake in the diminishing dusk of a fleeting northern night, listening to American President Ronald Reagan's speech in Russian. In it, he was talking about a lot of rather predictable things: history, freedom, war and peace, and the struggle between two irreconcilable ideologies -- ours (bad, in his view) and theirs (good). He was talking about us and them -- the Soviet Union and America.
At one point, closer to the end, he caught me unawares, saying something unexpected: according to him, it was us, the mighty and eternal Soviet Union, that was historically doomed, and not the rotten world of capitalism-imperialism. It was, he said, Marxism-Leninism -- which, of course, was the very essence of "us-ness," the ultimate foundation, however ephemeral, upon which the Soviet Union stood, or was supposed to stand, with all of us inside it -- that was destined to end up on... the *svalka*, the garbage dump of history, rather than America.
Yes, so said Ronald Reagan. The garbage dump of history. That's what she -- the Voice of America's reader -- said he said. The garbage dump. I wondered what had been the exact American-English word or phrase he'd used. The garbage dump of history. *Svalka istorii*. Huh. But in any event, regardless, no matter his exact wording, the bottom line was that according to him, we were done for, finished; our time was up. It was just a matter of time, apparently. Of a short time, too, presumably, because Reagan was no spring chicken. Our goose was cooked. Yes, baby. Finished, defeated, no more... My heart was beating rapidly; it was galloping in my chest. I told myself to calm down, took a few deep breaths and held them in my chest for as long as I could.
OK, better. Very quiet was the diminishing night. The border with Finland and the rest of the larger, outer, non-Soviet world was but a dozen or so kilometers away. Right over there it was -- a stone's throw away, really -- within a healthy, brisk walking distance. But at the same time, it was as far away as the moon from where I was, hunched up on the old wooden bench on a narrow patch of lakeshore in K.
"Listen, Garrichna," I began... The dog, still slowly worrying the soup bone while seemingly beginning to fall asleep, too, paid me no attention. "On the garbage dump of history," I told him in a hissing whisper. "All of us, together. You too! Soviet dogs are not excluded! On the garbage dump of history, all of us together!”
Yes, all of us. It was quite a thought. All of us, with our lame-brained Marxism-Leninism, our stupid Soviet Union, or idiotic messianic notions of ourselves, our pathetically foolish delusions of grandeur. I wished Reagan would do it, too, and as soon as possible -- finish us off already. Just toss us over there, to that metaphoric (yet still vividly real) garbage dump of history. I was willing, ready and able to end up there, if it would be along with all the rest of our entire nation, the entire mighty and eternal Soviet Union. That would be fine by me. It would be. And then we would be no more.
I heard my name spoken quietly in back of me. Quickly I switched off the radio. Turning around, I saw Grandmother, wrapped in an oversized red sweater I remembered since I was practically an infant. She was standing a few steps away, at the edge of our small overgrown garden, over between the old gnarled ash tree and the tar paper-covered compost heap, where the straight path leading from the house opened out onto the lakeshore.
She knew, of course, that I'd been turned down for an emigré visa -- in other words, that I was a *refusenik*, someone permanently thrown out of the normal round of ordinary Soviet middle-class life (such as it might be): that was old news. This probably was a bitter pill to swallow for her -- a Party member (if one who made no secret originally of joining strictly out of the stark material necessity of raising her child, my father, alone) of four decades' standing.
She knew that as a corollary of being an open-ended *refusenik*, one with no discernible realistic perspectives ever to be permitted to leave the country, I would never have a good (whatever that meant), well-ordered Soviet life, like that of my parents', say: that I would never not be a self-declared would-be traitor to the Motherland, never would be able to buy a summer house or a car of my own... and so on.
"What were they saying on the radio?" she asked, shaking her head slightly to chase away the sad thoughts. "The enemy voices. I couldn't really make out, as I was walking down here, what they were saying.”
"My, Grandma, what keen ears you have," I said. "Well, in a nutshell, we're all going to the garbage dump of history.”
"Who is?" She gave me a concerned look.
"We, the Soviet people," I said. "The entire Soviet Union."
"What, all of us?" she said, laughing quietly.
"All of us together, holding hands, singing patriotic songs," I said.
"Sez who?" she asked, bemused.
"Sez Ronald Reagan," I said.
"Well," she said. "If Ronald Reagan himself says so…"
Again we were silent for a moment. And what was there to say?
Just like that, instantaneously, it started getting light all around us. The dark mirror of the lake's surface turned into pink-black marble right before our eyes. This was pure marvel, every single time. I felt happy and serene, filled with hope and wonder. Where had all my worries of a minute earlier gone? It was good to be alive. It was good being at the lakeshore, young and not knowing what life had in store for me and looking forward to getting into a boat and row out into the lake, into all that cool freshness, and spend the next few hours doing nothing but gazing at the gradually blueing lake, at the sunning-up forest of tall pines and firs, at the granite boulders hemming it in, at the red cork bobber of my makeshift fishing pole floating on the water, dipping up and down gently. It was good to be...
It was good to exist, even despite — and perhaps especially because of — having been consigned to the garbage dump of history. It was just good. I had no words to describe it. It was good.
~ Mikhail Iossel, abbreviated by Oriana. The setting is a country house near the Finnish border
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THE COFFIN CONFESSOR
~ Bill Edgar runs a business in which, for $10,000, he is engaged by people "knocking on death's door" to go to their funerals or gravesides and reveal the secrets they want their loved ones to know.
"They've got to have a voice and I lend my voice for them," Mr Edgar said.
Mr Edgar, a Gold Coast private investigator, said the idea for his graveside hustle came when he was working for a terminally ill man.
"We got on to the topic of dying and death and he said he'd like to do something," Mr Edgar said.
"I said, 'Well, I could always crash your funeral for you'," and a few weeks later the man called and took Mr Edgar up on his offer and a business was born.
In almost two years he has "crashed" 22 funerals and graveside events, spilling the tightly-held secrets of his clients who pay a flat fee of $10,000 for his service.
Dressed in tailored pants and vest, Mr Edgar said he was very respectful in the way he carried out his job.
"I actually blend in with the mourners," he said. "I sit with the family and friends. I sit in the middle with everybody."
In the case of his very first client Mr Edgar said he was instructed to interrupt the man's best friend when he was delivering the eulogy.
"I was to tell the best mate to sit down and shut up," he said.
"He knew that he'd [the best mate] been trying to have an affair with his wife.
"I also had to ask three mourners to stand up and to please leave the service and if they didn't I was to escort them out.
"My client didn't want them at his funeral and, like he said, it is his funeral and he wants to leave how he wanted to leave, not on somebody else's terms."
He said his most confronting job was telling mourners at a bikie's funeral that his client was gay and his lover was in the audience.
"They took offense to it but there was a number there that already knew," Mr Edgar said.
"I have been to a church service since where I actually had to ask the priest to sit down and be quiet because my client didn't want a religious service," he said.
"He was quite offended but at the same time he understood."
Mr Edgar protects himself legally by recording his client's confession and also provides them with a disclosure statement. ~
Oriana:
A fascinating article. What a peculiar job to have. Imagine telling the priest to sit down — the client didn't want a religious funeral. Or revealing that the client was gay.
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WHY THE SUDDEN COLLAPSE OF THE MAYAN EMPIRE?
During their 3,000-year dominance over Mesoamerica, the Mayans built elaborate architectural structures and developed a sophisticated, technologically progressive society. But immediately after reaching the peak of its powers over the entire Yucatan Peninsula, the Mayan Empire collapsed, falling apart in just 150 years. The reasons for its sudden demise remain a mystery, but in a 2018 Science study, scientists found clues buried deep in the mud of Lake Chichancanab.
Deforestation, overpopulation, and extreme drought have all been proposed as the reason for the empire’s collapse. The most probable of those, argue the University of Cambridge and University of Florida scientists in their study, is drought. The evidence they gathered in the muddy sediments underlying Lake Chichancanab, which was once a part of the empire, underscore the devastating power of a drought on a population.
The sediment cores that the scientists dug up from the depths of the lake are like a time machine, giving a glimpse of what past environments look like. In the study, the team specifically looked at precipitated gypsum, a soft mineral that incorporates oxygen and hydrogen isotopes of water molecules into its crystalline structure. Looking at it was like peering into fossil water, and in this case, it showed that the area surrounding the lake had gone through extremely arid periods. During periods of drought, larger amounts of water evaporate, and so a higher proportion of lighter isotopes in gypsum indicates a period of drought.
The team determined that between the years 800 and 1,000, annual rainfall in the Maya lowlands decreased by nearly 50 percent on average and up to 70 percent during peak drought conditions. This means the rainfall in this region essentially stopped about the same time that the empire’s city-states were abandoned.
Today, drought continues to aggrieve societies. The United States drought causes annual losses nearing $9 billion, and the environment is increasingly unable to bounce back. In 2017, a NASA study showed that land ecosystems are taking progressively longer to recover from droughts in the 20th century, stating that “incomplete drought recovery may become the new normal in some areas.” The impact of climate change, some scientists argue, may induce multi-decade “mega-droughts.”
However, modern-day droughts don’t necessarily spell out the collapse of our own society, says Andrew Plantinga, Ph.D., who was not involved in the study. Platinga, a professor of natural resource economics and policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says that today “we have many ways to mitigate water scarcity that would not have been available to ancient civilizations.” Modern societies can pump water from great depths, move it over great distances, and make water drinkable with technologies like desalinization. We can survive — but it’ll come with a cost.
“Although we have great potential for adaptation to water scarcity, adaptation comes at a cost, and we may well see these costs increase if droughts become more severe with climate change,” says Plantinga. “While humans will adapt to water scarcity for many generations to come, they may be living in a less hospitable and more resource-constrained world.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/ancient-mud-reveals-an-explanation-for-sudden-collapse-of-the-mayan-empire?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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HOW AFFECTIONS TRANSPORT US TO ANOTHER WORLD
“We have no claim to any of our possessions. We have no claim to exist; and, as we have to die in the end, so we must resign ourselves to die piecemeal, which really happens when we lose somebody or something that was closely intertwined with our existence. It is like a physical wound; we may survive, but maimed and broken in that direction; dead there. Not that we can, or ever do at heart, renounce our affections. Never that.”
So writes George Santayana, in a May 1933 letter of consolation to Iris Origo, daughter of his friend and former student, after her loss of her seven-year-old son. He goes on:
“All our affections, when clear and pure and not claims to possession, transport us to another world; and the loss of contact, here or there, with those eternal beings is merely like closing a book which we keep at hand for another occasion. We know that book by heart. Its verses give life to life. I don’t mean that these abstract considerations ought to console us. Why wish to be consoled? On the contrary, I wish to mourn perpetually the absence of what I love or might love. Isn’t that what religious people call the love of God?”
~ Mikhail Iossel, Facebook
Oriana:
I was especially struck by “affections transport us to another world.” I was surprised by how much just taking care of plants does that for me.
Garden at the asylum at Saint-Remy; Van Gogh, 1889
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THE COLLAPSE OF OIL
~ 2020 is shaping up to be an extraordinarily bad year for oil.
In the spring, pandemic lockdowns sent oil demand plummeting and markets into a tailspin. At one point, U.S. oil prices even turned negative for the first time in history.
But summer brought new optimism to the industry, with hopes rising for a controlled pandemic, a recovering economy and resurgent oil demand.
Those hopes are now fading. In a report Tuesday, the influential advisory body called the International Energy Agency revised its forecasts for global oil consumption downward, warning that the market outlook is "even more fragile" than expected and that "the path ahead is treacherous."
It's the latest in a flurry of diminished forecasts from major energy players. On Monday, oil cartel OPEC slashed its expectations of oil demand, just as Trafigura, a large oil trading company, warned that another large oil glut is building.
And energy giant BP, which has grabbed headlines with its new carbon-neutral commitments, raised the possibility that the world might never again use as much oil as it did before the pandemic.
A pair of recent OPEC reports reflect the rapid shift in mood.
Its August oil forecast assumed that by 2021, "COVID-19 will largely be contained globally with no major disruptions to the global economy." OPEC also predicted that economic activity would be rebounding steadily and oil demand would be recovering.
But on Monday, OPEC released a much grimmer forecast.
"[S]tructural changes to the global economy are forecast to persist," the oil cartel wrote. Travel and tourism "are not expected to achieve pre-COVID-19 levels of activity before the end of 2021."
The world still relies heavily on oil and natural gas. For 2020, OPEC predicts total oil demand will be slashed by nearly 10% — nowhere near the large-scale pivot away from fossil fuels that scientists say is necessary to fight climate change.
BP and Shell are among the European oil and gas giants that have pledged to reshape their businesses to focus more on zero-carbon energy sources. Total, the French energy company, recently acknowledged that the shift away from fossil fuels will cause some of its current oil investments to become "stranded assets," meaning they will not be as valuable as expected in a world that has reduced its reliance on oil.
Transitioning away from fossil fuels will not be quick, easy or simple, Kissane says. But it's possible the pandemic is pushing companies and oil-producing countries to think now about how to adapt to a world with reduced oil demand — one they once expected would arrive further into the future. ~
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/15/913052498/oil-demand-has-collapsed-and-it-wont-come-back-any-time-soon
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HOW THE INTERNET GOT STARTED
~ In the kingdom of apps and unicorns, Rossotti’s is a rarity. This beer garden in the heart of Silicon Valley has been standing on the same spot since 1852. During the course of its long existence, Rossotti’s has been a frontier saloon, a gold rush gambling den, and a Hells Angels hangout. These days it is called the Alpine Inn Beer Garden, and the clientele remains as motley as ever. On the patio out back, there are cyclists in spandex and bikers in leather. There is a wild-haired man who might be a professor or a lunatic or a CEO, scribbling into a notebook. In the parking lot is a Harley, a Maserati, and a horse. It doesn’t seem a likely spot for a major act of innovation.
But 40 years ago this August, a small team of scientists set up a computer terminal at one of its picnic tables and conducted an extraordinary experiment. Over plastic cups of beer, they proved that a strange idea called the internet could work. The internet is fundamentally simple. And that simplicity is the key to its success.
The people who invented the internet came from all over the world. They worked at places as varied as the French government-sponsored computer network Cyclades, England’s National Physical Laboratory, the University of Hawaii and Xerox. But the mothership was the US defense department’s lavishly funded research arm, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) – which later changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – and its many contractors. Without Arpa, the internet wouldn’t exist.
As a military venture, Arpa had a specifically military motivation for creating the internet: it offered a way to bring computing to the front lines. In 1969, Arpa had built a computer network called Arpanet, which linked mainframes at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the country. Arpanet grew fast, and included nearly 60 nodes by the mid-1970s.
But Arpanet had a problem: it wasn’t mobile. The computers on Arpanet were gigantic by today’s standards, and they communicated over fixed links. That might work for researchers, who could sit at a terminal in Cambridge or Menlo Park – but it did little for soldiers deployed deep in enemy territory. For Arpanet to be useful to forces in the field, it had to be accessible anywhere in the world.
Picture a jeep in the jungles of Zaire, or a B-52 miles above North Vietnam. Then imagine these as nodes in a wireless network linked to another network of powerful computers thousands of miles away. This is the dream of a networked military using computing power to defeat the Soviet Union and its allies. This is the dream that produced the internet.
Making this dream a reality required doing two things. The first was building a wireless network that could relay packets of data among the widely dispersed cogs of the US military machine by radio or satellite. The second was connecting those wireless networks to the wired network of Arpanet, so that multimillion-dollar mainframes could serve soldiers in combat. “Internetworking,” the scientists called it.
Internetworking is the problem the internet was invented to solve.
It presented enormous challenges. Getting computers to talk to one another – networking – had been hard enough. But getting networks to talk to one another – internetworking – posed a whole new set of difficulties, because the networks spoke alien and incompatible dialects. Trying to move data from one to another was like writing a letter in Mandarin to someone who only knows Hungarian and hoping to be understood. It didn’t work. In response, the architects of the internet developed a kind of digital Esperanto: a common language that enabled data to travel across any network.
In 1974, two Arpa researchers named Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf published an early blueprint. Drawing on conversations happening throughout the international networking community, they sketched a design for “a simple but very flexible protocol”: a universal set of rules for how computers should communicate. These rules had to strike a very delicate balance. On the one hand, they needed to be strict enough to ensure the reliable transmission of data. On the other, they needed to be loose enough to accommodate all of the different ways that data might be transmitted.
“It had to be future-proof,” Cerf tells me. You couldn’t write the protocol for one point in time, because it would soon become obsolete. The military would keep innovating. They would keep building new networks and new technologies. The protocol had to keep pace: it had to work across “an arbitrarily large number of distinct and potentially non-interoperable packet switched networks,” Cerf says – including ones that hadn’t been invented yet.
This feature would make the system not only future-proof, but potentially infinite. If the rules were robust enough, the “ensemble of networks” could grow indefinitely, assimilating any and all digital forms into its sprawling multithreaded mesh. Eventually, these rules became the lingua franca of the internet. But first, they needed to be implemented and tweaked and tested – over and over and over again.
There was nothing inevitable about the internet getting built. It seemed like a ludicrous idea to many, even among those who were building it. The scale, the ambition – the internet was a skyscraper and nobody had ever seen anything more than a few stories tall. Even with a firehose of cold war military cash behind it, the internet looked like a long shot. Then, in the summer of 1976, it started working.
If you had walked into Rossotti’s beer garden on 27 August 1976, you would have seen the following: seven men and one woman at a table, hovering around a computer terminal, the woman typing. A pair of cables ran from the terminal to the parking lot, disappearing into a big grey van. Inside the van were machines that transformed the words being typed on the terminal into packets of data. An antenna on the van’s roof then transmitted these packets as radio signals. These signals radiated through the air to a repeater on a nearby mountain top, where they were amplified and rebroadcast. With this extra boost, they could make it all the way to Menlo Park, where an antenna at an office building received them.
It was here that the real magic began. Inside the office building, the incoming packets passed seamlessly from one network to another: from the packet radio network to Arpanet. To make this jump, the packets had to undergo a subtle metamorphosis. They had to change their form without changing their content. Think about water: it can be vapor, liquid or ice, but its chemical composition remains the same.
This miraculous flexibility is a feature of the natural universe – which is lucky, because life depends on it. The flexibility that the internet depends on, by contrast, had to be engineered.
And on that day in August, it enabled packets that had only existed as radio signals in a wireless network to become electrical signals in the wired network of Arpanet. Remarkably, this transformation preserved the data perfectly. The packets remained completely intact.
So intact, in fact, that they could travel another 3,000 miles to a computer in Boston and be reassembled into exactly the same message that was typed into the terminal at Rossotti’s.
Powering this internetwork odyssey was the new protocol cooked up by Kahn and Cerf. Two networks had become one. The internet worked.
There was always more to accomplish: as soon as they’d stitched two networks together, they started working on three – which they achieved a little over a year later, in November 1977.
What made the internet a big deal is the feature Nielson’s team demonstrated that summer day at Rossotti’s: its flexibility. Forty years ago, the internet teleported thousands of words from the Bay Area to Boston over channels as dissimilar as radio waves and copper telephone lines. Today it bridges far greater distances, over an even wider variety of media. It ferries data among billions of devices, conveying our tweets and Tinder swipes across multiple networks in milliseconds.
This isn’t just a technical accomplishment – it’s a design decision. The most important thing to understand about the origins of the internet, Nielson says, is that it came out of the military. While Arpa had wide latitude, it still had to choose its projects with an eye toward developing technologies that might someday be useful for winning wars. The engineers who built the internet understood that, and tailored it accordingly.
That’s why they designed the internet to run anywhere: because the US military is everywhere. It maintains nearly 800 bases in more than 70 countries around the world. It has hundreds of ships, thousands of warplanes, and tens of thousands of armored vehicles. The reason the internet can work across any device, network, and medium – the reason a smartphone in Sao Paulo can stream a song from a server in Singapore – is because it needed to be as ubiquitous as the American security apparatus that financed its construction.
The internet would end up being useful to the US military, if not quite in the ways its architects intended. But it didn’t really take off until it became civilianized and commercialized – a phenomenon that the Arpa researchers of the 1970s could never have anticipated. “Quite honestly, if anyone would have said they could have imagined the internet of today in those days, they’re lying,” says Nielson. What surprised him most was how “willing people were to spend money to put themselves on the internet”. “Everybody wanted to be there,” he says. “That was absolutely startling to me: the clamor of wanting to be present in this new world.”
” The fact that we think of the internet as a world of its own, as a place we can be “in” or “on” – this too is the legacy of Don Nielson and his fellow scientists. By binding different networks together so seamlessly, they made the internet feel like a single space. Strictly speaking, this is an illusion. The internet is composed of many, many networks: when I go to Google’s website, my data must traverse 11 different routers before it arrives. But the internet is a master weaver: it conceals its stitches extremely well. We’re left with the sensation of a boundless, borderless digital universe – cyberspace, as we used to call it. Forty years ago, this universe first flickered into existence in the foothills outside of Palo Alto, and has been expanding ever since. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-the-internet-was-invented
Oriana:
This brings back the memory of one of Adrienne Rich’s poetry readings, in a huge museum auditorium, attended by several hundred people. Perhaps the most famous poet of her generation, she was greeted with a standing ovation. In the middle of her reading, she made a comment on “unimportant developments, such as the Internet.” The audience audibly gasp — and believe me, when four hundred or so people all gasp at the same time, the sound is unforgettable. When the reading was done, there was polite applause, but no standing ovation.
With one absurd statement, she made herself obsolete.
That’s not to detract from her middle-period poetry, which remains powerful and always relevant.
By the way, did the logo of DARPA remind you of something? Here it is:
“I FEAR, THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING RID OF GOD BECAUSE WE STILL BELIEVE IN GRAMMAR.” ~NIETZSCHE, “TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS”
~ “The grammar of dream interpretation, whether Freudian or Jungian, is a crust of dead theology. We deaden the outer surfaces of our creative response to dreams in order to protect ourselves from the creative power the dreams bring back to us.” ~ Greg Mogenson, “God Is a Trauma.”
Mogenson is referring to the brain’s power to create reality — a power too often squandered on brooding over the past or fantasizing about the future — the negative and positive inflation of vicarious living, rather than actively creating our life in the present. To quote Mogenson: “The ‘right’ interpretation is the most daring interpretation. Dream interpretation is the space project of an ever-opening consciousness. Interpretations are trajectories, arrows of longing, satellites in the surrendered heaven of man’s creating will.”
But more to the point, Nietzsche, way ahead of his era, understood the great power of language to shape our beliefs — and to deceive us. The sentence immediately before the quotation is “‘Reason’ in language: oh what a deceitful old woman!” It’s language that creates concepts and metaphors, as well as mythologies. It’s language that created the gods, and ultimately the all-powerful Supreme Being.
(To be sure, there were all kinds of cultural factors involved, such as the amount of control we feel we have over our lives; nevertheless, without language, with its power to reify imaginings simply by giving them a label — say, “demons” — no supernatural explanations would be possible.)
Nietzsche both lamented and celebrated the death of god as a tyrant of the soul, an obstacle to soul-making and metaphor-making. “Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead’, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations.”
To Nietzsche religion meant “not wanting to know the truth.” Freedom is the opposite of belief. “If there is today still no lack of those who do not know how indecent it is to ‘believe’ — or a sign of decadence, of a broken will to live — well, they will know it tomorrow.”
But our belief in grammar, though weaker now, still holds and will hold as long as we need to communicate (although I’ve graded hundreds of essays which showed no belief in grammar). And we may be talking here about the underlying "deep grammar." I think this is in line with “Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged. What you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.” ~ (http://www.science20.com/writer_on_the_edge/blog/scientists_discover_that_atheists_might_not_exist_and_thats_not_a_joke-139982)
By the way, I don't think Nietzsche wanted us to get rid of grammar. He was probably pointing out to the ingrained patterns that keep metaphysical assumptions in place. He even speaks about the "metaphysics of language." Noam Chomsky would probably speak here of Deep Grammar, part of our genetically determined brain function.
Language will always to some extent “use us” and deceive us by defining reality for us, but what's the alternative? We just have to keep refining language and using it as best we can.
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WHAT EXPLAINS WHY SOME PEOPLE ARE MORE RELIGIOUS THAN OTHERS?
~ For the past 15 years, I have taught an undergraduate course in the psychology of religion and spirituality. Most of my students haven’t had much exposure to significant religious and spiritual diversity, so I often bring in 10-15 community members during the term to share their stories, often during interfaith panel discussions. Through these presentations, it becomes quite obvious just how different people are in their approach to religion and spirituality, and it beckons us to consider why. One of the most common hypotheses made by panelists and students alike is this: non-religious people are more likely to process information analytically or logically while religious people are more likely to rely on intuition or emotion.
Evidence has been building for this “processing style” hypothesis. In a 2011 study, participants assigned to write about a time they followed their intuition were – maybe surprisingly – more likely to believe in God afterward than those assigned to write about a time they carefully reasoned through a situation. Along the same lines, a 2012 study found that participants assigned to view artwork depicting analytical thinking (Rodin’s “The Thinker”) were less likely to believe in God than those assigned to view artwork with similar surface characteristics (Discobolus of Myron).
Recent research that is getting a lot of press, however, paints a different picture. Scientists from the Universities of Coventry and Oxford tracked down pilgrims on the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain to ask them about the strength of their religious and spiritual convictions and how long they had been on pilgrimage. The researchers then presented these pilgrims with a probability task where they could choose either a logical or “gut feeling” response. Neither strength of conviction nor time on pilgrimage predicted logical or intuitive responses to the task. In a follow-up study, an area of the brain devoted to analytical thinking – sometimes thought to be more active in religious skeptics – was stimulated in research participants. This had no overall effect on belief in God.
In science, this is what’s called a “failure to replicate.” In other words, with different samples and methods, findings sometimes aren’t consistent.
Personally, when I see mixed findings like this, my assumption is that, even if there is an effect to be found, it’s probably on the small side. In other words, even if processing style may be somehow involved, it may not be the best explanation for why some people are more religious than others.
So, what are better explanations?
If I were to limit myself to three variables – based on all the research I know about in the psychology of religion – this is what they’d be.
First would be our genetic predispositions. Research supporting this shows that identical twins – even if raised apart – are considerably more similar in religious beliefs and activities than fraternal twins. In fact, the scientific consensus is that 30-50% of individuals’ differences in religiousness is due to genetic factors, making this the single most powerful explanation.
Not that religiousness per se is inherited, but some features of personality that may influence religiousness – such as openness, humility, or proneness to questioning and doubting – may be genetically predisposed in ways that influence us more than we might guess.
Second would be a need for control. In one study, for example, scientists assigned individuals to either write about a recent positive event in which they either possessed self-control or one in which they didn’t. Remarkably, individuals who were primed to think about their self-control were significantly less likely to believe in a controlling God afterward.
I have an Atheist friend of mine who jokes with me that, if he knew that he was imminently going to die, he’d offer up a prayer, just in case. Not that he would actually do this, but why would someone? When we lose control in our lives, we often turn to religion. When we have lots of personal control, we don’t.
Third would be the groups with which we identify. By this, I mean family, community, and the broader culture. Research based on nationally representative Gallup polls supports this point. For instance, when asked “is religion an important part of your daily life?,” over 99% of Egyptians say “yes.” Compare this with 66% of Americans and 16% of Swedes. So, as an American, though I tend to believe I have chosen my religious and spiritual beliefs and activities, the reality is that I’d probably believe and act quite differently if I had been raised in Egypt or Sweden.
More specifically, I imagine it is the religious beliefs of those we most admire that have the greatest impact on us. If we have come to believe that religious people are “cool” for some reason, we’ll probably start believing and acting more like them. If, instead, we have come to believe that atheists are “cool,” we’ll probably move in that direction.
Genetics, control, and groups. Like every other behavior psychologists have studied, religious behavior is influenced by an interaction between nature and nurture, in other words. Still, there’s a lot we don’t understand. One tentative answer generates five additional questions. Mystery remains and – I suspect – always will. ~
https://thequestforagoodlife.com/2017/12/15/the-psychology-of-religion/
Oriana: NOT SCIENCE BUT TECHNOLOGY
The feeling of being in control brings to mind Milosz's view that it's not science that has undermined religion; it's technology, including medical technology.
In my particular case, unbelief arose as I began to read about other religions and mythologies. Once I perceived that the Judeo-Christian tradition was only another mythology, that was it. The primitive features such as devils and angels, which were presented to us literally, as real beings, just invisible, sealed the case.
The earth and the sky filled with invisible beings . . . It struck me that it was an awful lot to take "on faith"; when I looked up at the sky, I saw only clouds (which I loved). I was also appalled by the idea that human reason was allegedly very weak and would always choose against god; the solution was to reject reason ("that whore, Reason," Martin Luther inveighed against it).
Also, just as the author of this article, at some point I noticed that religion depended a lot on geography: people born in India worshiped various Hindu deities, while people born in Arab countries were Muslim, and so on. Why should religion depend on the accident on birth? Billions of people doomed to hell just because they were born in the wrong country? It seemed incredibly unfair and cruel.
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THE BRADYKININ THEORY OF COVID
~ Earlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process — which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations — still took more than a week.
When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a “eureka moment.” The computer had revealed a new theory about how Covid-19 impacts the body: the bradykinin hypothesis. The hypothesis provides a model that explains many aspects of Covid-19, including some of its most bizarre symptoms. It also suggests 10-plus potential treatments, many of which are already FDA approved.
According to the team’s findings, a Covid-19 infection generally begins when the virus enters the body through ACE2 receptors in the nose, (The receptors, which the virus is known to target, are abundant there.) The virus then proceeds through the body, entering cells in other places where ACE2 is also present: the intestines, kidneys, and heart. This likely accounts for at least some of the disease’s cardiac and GI symptoms.
But once Covid-19 has established itself in the body, things start to get really interesting. According to Jacobson’s group, the data Summit analyzed shows that Covid-19 isn’t content to simply infect cells that already express lots of ACE2 receptors. Instead, it actively hijacks the body’s own systems, tricking it into upregulating ACE2 receptors in places where they’re usually expressed at low or medium levels, including the lungs.
In this sense, Covid-19 is like a burglar who slips in your unlocked second-floor window and starts to ransack your house. Once inside, though, they don’t just take your stuff — they also throw open all your doors and windows so their accomplices can rush in and help pillage more efficiently.
The renin–angiotensin system (RAS) controls many aspects of the circulatory system, including the body’s levels of a chemical called bradykinin, which normally helps to regulate blood pressure. According to the team’s analysis, when the virus tweaks the RAS, it causes the body’s mechanisms for regulating bradykinin to go haywire. Bradykinin receptors are resensitized, and the body also stops effectively breaking down bradykinin. (ACE normally degrades bradykinin, but when the virus downregulates it, it can’t do this as effectively.)
The end result, the researchers say, is to release a bradykinin storm — a massive, runaway buildup of bradykinin in the body. According to the bradykinin hypothesis, it’s this storm that is ultimately responsible for many of Covid-19’s deadly effects. Jacobson’s team says in their paper that “the pathology of Covid-19 is likely the result of Bradykinin Storms rather than cytokine storms,” which had been previously identified in Covid-19 patients, but that “the two may be intricately linked.” Other papers had previously identified bradykinin storms as a possible cause of Covid-19’s pathologies.
As bradykinin builds up in the body, it dramatically increases vascular permeability. In short, it makes your blood vessels leaky. This aligns with recent clinical data, which increasingly views Covid-19 primarily as a vascular disease, rather than a respiratory one. But Covid-19 still has a massive effect on the lungs. As blood vessels start to leak due to a bradykinin storm, the researchers say, the lungs can fill with fluid. Immune cells also leak out into the lungs, Jacobson’s team found, causing inflammation.
And Covid-19 has another especially insidious trick. Through another pathway, the team’s data shows, it increases production of hyaluronic acid (HLA) in the lungs. HLA is often used in soaps and lotions for its ability to absorb more than 1,000 times its weight in fluid. When it combines with fluid leaking into the lungs, the results are disastrous: It forms a hydrogel, which can fill the lungs in some patients. According to Jacobson, once this happens, “it’s like trying to breathe through Jell-O.”
This may explain why ventilators have proven less effective in treating advanced Covid-19 than doctors originally expected, based on experiences with other viruses. “It reaches a point where regardless of how much oxygen you pump in, it doesn’t matter, because the alveoli in the lungs are filled with this hydrogel,” Jacobson says. “The lungs become like a water balloon.” Patients can suffocate even while receiving full breathing support.
The bradykinin hypothesis also extends to many of Covid-19’s effects on the heart. About one in five hospitalized Covid-19 patients have damage to their hearts, even if they never had cardiac issues before. Some of this is likely due to the virus infecting the heart directly through its ACE2 receptors. But the RAS also controls aspects of cardiac contractions and blood pressure. According to the researchers, bradykinin storms could create arrhythmias and low blood pressure, which are often seen in Covid-19 patients.
The bradykinin hypothesis also accounts for Covid-19’s neurological effects, which are some of the most surprising and concerning elements of the disease. These symptoms (which include dizziness, seizures, delirium, and stroke) are present in as many as half of hospitalized Covid-19 patients. According to Jacobson and his team, MRI studies in France revealed that many Covid-19 patients have evidence of leaky blood vessels in their brains.
Bradykinin — especially at high doses — can also lead to a breakdown of the blood-brain barrier. Under normal circumstances, this barrier acts as a filter between your brain and the rest of your circulatory system. It lets in the nutrients and small molecules that the brain needs to function, while keeping out toxins and pathogens and keeping the brain’s internal environment tightly regulated.
If bradykinin storms cause the blood-brain barrier to break down, this could allow harmful cells and compounds into the brain, leading to inflammation, potential brain damage, and many of the neurological symptoms Covid-19 patients experience. Jacobson told me, “It is a reasonable hypothesis that many of the neurological symptoms in Covid-19 could be due to an excess of bradykinin. It has been reported that bradykinin would indeed be likely to increase the permeability of the blood-brain barrier. In addition, similar neurological symptoms have been observed in other diseases that result from an excess of bradykinin.”
Increased bradykinin levels could also account for other common Covid-19 symptoms. ACE inhibitors — a class of drugs used to treat high blood pressure — have a similar effect on the RAS system as Covid-19, increasing bradykinin levels. In fact, Jacobson and his team note in their paper that “the virus… acts pharmacologically as an ACE inhibitor” — almost directly mirroring the actions of these drugs.
By acting like a natural ACE inhibitor, Covid-19 may be causing the same effects that hypertensive patients sometimes get when they take blood pressure–lowering drugs. ACE inhibitors are known to cause a dry cough and fatigue, two textbook symptoms of Covid-19. And they can potentially increase blood potassium levels, which has also been observed in Covid-19 patients. The similarities between ACE inhibitor side effects and Covid-19 symptoms strengthen the bradykinin hypothesis, the researchers say.
ACE inhibitors are also known to cause a loss of taste and smell. Jacobson stresses, though, that this symptom is more likely due to the virus “affecting the cells surrounding olfactory nerve cells” than the direct effects of bradykinin.
Though still an emerging theory, the bradykinin hypothesis explains several other of Covid-19’s seemingly bizarre symptoms. Jacobson and his team speculate that leaky vasculature caused by bradykinin storms could be responsible for “Covid toes,” a condition involving swollen, bruised toes that some Covid-19 patients experience. Bradykinin can also mess with the thyroid gland, which could produce the thyroid symptoms recently observed in some patients.
The bradykinin hypothesis could also explain some of the broader demographic patterns of the disease’s spread. The researchers note that some aspects of the RAS system are sex-linked, with proteins for several receptors (such as one called TMSB4X) located on the X chromosome. This means that “women… would have twice the levels of this protein than men,” a result borne out by the researchers’ data. In their paper, Jacobson’s team concludes that this “could explain the lower incidence of Covid-19 induced mortality in women.” A genetic quirk of the RAS could be giving women extra protection against the disease.
As Jacobson and team point out, several drugs target aspects of the RAS and are already FDA approved to treat other conditions. They could arguably be applied to treating Covid-19 as well. Several, like danazol, stanozolol, and ecallantide, reduce bradykinin production and could potentially stop a deadly bradykinin storm. Others, like icatibant, reduce bradykinin signaling and could blunt its effects once it’s already in the body.
Interestingly, Jacobson’s team also suggests vitamin D as a potentially useful Covid-19 drug. The vitamin is involved in the RAS system and could prove helpful by reducing levels of another compound, known as REN. Again, this could stop potentially deadly bradykinin storms from forming. The researchers note that vitamin D has already been shown to help those with Covid-19. The vitamin is readily available over the counter, and around 20% of the population is deficient. If indeed the vitamin proves effective at reducing the severity of bradykinin storms, it could be an easy, relatively safe way to reduce the severity of the virus.
Other compounds could treat symptoms associated with bradykinin storms. Hymecromone, for example, could reduce hyaluronic acid levels, potentially stopping deadly hydrogels from forming in the lungs. And timbetasin could mimic the mechanism that the researchers believe protects women from more severe Covid-19 infections. All of these potential treatments are speculative, of course, and would need to be studied in a rigorous, controlled environment before their effectiveness could be determined and they could be used more broadly.
Covid-19 stands out for both the scale of its global impact and the apparent randomness of its many symptoms. Physicians have struggled to understand the disease and come up with a unified theory for how it works. Though as of yet unproven, the bradykinin hypothesis provides such a theory. And like all good hypotheses, it also provides specific, testable predictions — in this case, actual drugs that could provide relief to real patients.
This raises the question about the safety of ACE2 inhibitors. And here comes the surprise:
Wiki: “Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is an enzyme attached to the cell membranes of cells in the lungs, arteries, heart, kidney, and intestines. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 is a zinc containing metalloenzyme. ACE2 lowers blood pressure by catalyzing the hydrolysis of angiotensin II (a vasoconstrictor peptide) into angiotensin (1–7) (a vasodilator).
An April 2020 study of patients hospitalized in Hubei Province in China found a death rate of 3.7% for hospitalized patients who had hypertension and were on ACE inhibitors or ARBs versus 9.8% for hospitalized patients with hypertension not on such drugs, suggesting that the drugs are not harmful and may help against the coronavirus.”
Oriana:
Fortunately, some foods contain compounds that are natural ACE inhibitors. Such foods include broccoli, spinach, garlic, soybeans, rice protein, shiitake and oyster mushrooms, milk and gouda cheese, as well as other cheeses and fermented milk products in general (sorry, dairy haters: "Milk proteins still have a leading role as a source of ACE inhibitors," https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1541-4337.12051).
Among pharmaceuticals, ramipril was found to to associated with the lowest mortality, and lisinopril with the highest.
ending on a tribute:
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