Akrotiri on the island of Santorini is believed by many scholars to fit best the legend of Atlantis. Here is one of the bronze-age Minoan frescoes excavated in the ruins of Akrotiri.*
ATLANTIS
We’re wreathed in robes of seaweed,
air bladders’ amber beads,
the hood of water
over the face of things.
Fish weave in rainbow veils.
Kelp sways like soundless bells.
we cannot tell one day
from a thousand years.
Here are our amulets, good-luck
crystals, diadems and crowns.
Here tilts the headless
statue of our god,
Lord of Mercy in whose name
we killed. Mudworm burrows
in palaces of our rare marble.
Our purses fill up with silt.
We remember pine forests,
resin scent of the wind.
We remember having held
someone’s hand.
This glitter on the waves
like bent echoes,
those are our last words:
Hold hands. Hold hands.
~ Oriana
Max Ernst: The Eye of Silence
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SAPPHO
Here is Fragment 24D:
]
]
]
]
]
] in a thin voice ]
The four words of Carson's poem are a haunting translation of a single word in Greek: leptophon.
In Sappho, the spaces name nothing — but the emptiness still speaks. Here, it says, is where you must imagine a fullness. The right verb. A noun that works.
Sometimes nothing comes. Then you must go slack and let your mouth form the O of emptiness, of zero, of no-idea-at-all. That way the poem will still be at work. Inside you. Nudging you toward life’s true question — how well do you handle risk?
Can you imagine your thoughts mending Sappho’s? In your hand there’s a residue. In your hand, there’s a disfigured beauty in which an urgency remains.
~ Deborah Bogen (Voice Populi, 10/29/20
Pompeian fresco of a woman generally believed to be Sappho. This may not be an accurate likeness, as it was painted about a century after her death. Sappho was described in her lifetime as being”small, dark and ugly" and "violet haired, pure, honey smiling.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/02/classics
Oriana:
I love "leptophon" — a slender sound. I still remember a statistics professor explaining that a leptokurtic distribution: "It leaps up into the air." A moment of poetry in a statistics class.
As for the Pompeian portrait of Sappho: Whether or not this is a portrait of Sappho, it's a woman whose face and hand still speak to us after millennia.
Mary:
Yes, so pensive, beautiful and wise. I want to hear what she has to say.
Oriana:
This piece of wisdom is haunting me right now: “That which is your greatest joy will also be your greatest sorrow.” That has turned out to be true both in terms of my love relationships and in terms of vocation, i.e. the work I love doing — it can be, and has been, a source of great agony. 
Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson (If Not, Winter)
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“Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it. It belongs to those who need it.” ~ Margaret Atwood
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If poetry is news that stays news, politics can be as ephemeral as the fly that sat on Pence’s hair. Recently streaks of hair dye on Rudy Giuliani’s face caused a similar salvo of social media attention. So while it lasts . . . here’s the most literary comment I’ve come across.
~ There’s Rudy Giuliani dripping hair dye in 2020 and then there’s Thomas Mann’s 1912 classic, Death in Venice (and this 1971 film version) of Gustav von Aschenbach sitting in the rain, watching and longing for the young Polish boy Tadzio, while all his attempts to appear youthful (including his hair dye) drip down his face. ~ Leonard Kress
Oriana:
Yes, and there was even an epidemic in the novel and movie, an outbreak of cholera.
Dirk Bogarde played Gustave von Aschenbach in Death in Venice. What a sumptuous movie!
and Rudy Giulani's latest PR misadventure
Charles said that this particular photo (above) reminded him of Dali — except that Dali's self-caricatures were intentional.
Let's just stay with Death in Venice — though for Giuliani, it was Death at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping Parking Lot.
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GREECE: REFUGEES IN MYTH AND HISTORY
“I sing of arms and the man who of old from the coasts of Troy came, a refugee of fate, to Italy and the shore of Lavinium.” –Virgil
~ The most famous of the ancient refugees who took to the sea from the shores of Asia Minor was Aeneas.
We cannot say with any certainty from where he—along with his father, his son and dozens of survivors of the sack of Troy—set sail. Visiting the famous city, besieged by the Achaeans for ten years before it fell thanks to Odysseus’ wooden horse, we struggle to see the sea on the horizon. Although its power had grown through trade—its position almost guarding the Dardanelles—Troy was never a maritime city. The land surrounding the defensive walls—which Heinrich Schliemann announced he had identified in 1872—has certainly changed over the centuries.
The Scamander—the river in which Achilles massacred the Trojans after taking up arms again to avenge Patroclus—is now just a trickle known to the Turks as the Karamenderes, a name with no legendary significance. Today, the plain where the warriors’ bodies were buried is an expanse of fields that stretch anonymously towards the wine-dark sea; there is no invitation to visit, no signs, and the little roads that run across the landscape form a labyrinthine grid.
. . . Even then Lesbos was an island with a rich history. It was said that the head of Orpheus had washed up on its shores after he was killed by women driven to fury by his rejection of their advances. Orpheus, the legendary poet who almost succeeded in bringing his wife Eurydice back to life and who, after seeing her disappear for eternity into the dark of Hades, decided to devote himself exclusively to music. Perhaps it was the singing head of Orpheus that endowed Lesbos with the lyrical magic that achieved glory in the immortal poetry of Alcaeus and Sappho; and perhaps it was the lake-like calm of the sea that inspired the Trojans to venture out and abandon their homeland.
Aeneas did not set sail for Lesbos, however, as people do today in large, unbelievably overcrowded rubber dinghies, united in their certainty that the Greek shore is but a stone’s throw away. Aeneas eventually arrived in Rome; for modern migrants just reaching Europe would be enough. Crossing the imaginary border drawn in the sea just off the Turkish coast is the decisive step.
The majority of the thousands of asylum seekers who have arrived on Lesbos in the past few years have left Turkey from these same beaches. Between Antandros and Assos, evading the ever-tightening surveillance of the border forces, those who do not drown first land somewhere near Skala Sikamineas, a little village nestling in a magnificent fishing harbor. From the taverna, which is open year-round, even on the coldest days, and named after a local poet, it seems impossible to imagine shipwrecks in this flat expanse barely eleven kilometers across.
“You can drown a few meters from the shore,” an old fisherman bent over his nets tells me. “All it takes is panic, some vicious rocks and little waves that can seem insurmountable when you’re in the water. The sea is harsh everywhere, but on land things can sometimes be worse. Why risk so much if you’re going to have to stop here?”
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It was September 13th, 1922 when the final Catastrophe took place in Smyrna (modern Izmir). Katastrophi. This is still how people remember the end of the Greco-Turkish war, which also signaled the end of an entire civilization. The coasts of Asia Minor had been home to Greek peoples since the Iron Age, the days of Aeneas, and even before Aeneas. Then, in 1919, almost a century after Greek independence from the Turks, who had dominated Hellenic territory since 1453, the Greeks tried to take back what they had never stopped regarding as theirs.
The Megali Idea, the Great Idea, proposed a restoration of the territorial integrity of the Byzantine Empire and reconquering the Polis—as it is still called by Greeks—the city of Constantine, better known to us as Istanbul. The capital would have been moved from Athens to Constantinople, and many Turkish lands would have returned to Greek control. The great powers that Greece had sided with during the First World War did not offer the promised support, however. The words of Great Britain and France turned out to be empty, and Kemal Atatürk revealed himself to be an extremely astute strategist.
In 1922 the Turkish counter-offensive vanquished the Greek contingents, which had almost reached Ankara, and the end of the Great Idea was sealed by the great fire of Smyrna, the elegant and cultured Greek city that is now the Turkish city of Izmir. One of the young reporters who described the atrocities of those tragic days would become perhaps the most influential American writer of the 20th century: Ernest Hemingway.
The end of Greek civilization on the shores of Asia Minor led to a monstrous migration. As well as those who fled the flames of Smyrna or Turkish persecution, thousands of families were involved in a dramatic exchange of populations in an attempt at pacification that remains unstable even today. The Greeks in Greece and the Turks in Turkey. But how can you define the culture of peoples who have been intermingled for so long?
Religion was the key: Christians over here and Muslims over there. More than 1.5 million people abandoned everything and took to the sea, carrying with them what they could. Some stopped on the islands off the Turkish coast—Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Kos—but most migrated to Piraeus, the port of Athens, or maybe to the port of Thessaloniki. It was a disturbing exodus, a movement of people with profound consequences for 20th-century Greece. And yet those displaced people who suffered terrible conditions and died of hunger and exhaustion in their thousands (around 70 thousand) were never denied the opportunity to leave, to seek elsewhere the future that had been taken away from them in Asia Minor.
Never before on the islands off the coast of Asia Minor—in other words, in the original heart of the very idea of Europe—had a plan been hatched to stop the flow of migrants. Never. And perhaps this is why recently, outside the shacks and the tent cities, outside the improvised encampments and the cabins thrown up by NGOs, I so often saw Greek women and men hard at work lending a hand without show, without self-aggrandizement, without fuss.
[Here we see] a human propensity that is absolutely unique in these days of growing obsession with national sovereignty, racism and the collapse of solidarity, something related to the word for foreigner, xenos—but, rather than the familiar term xenophobia, its exact opposite, philoxenia, friendship towards strangers.
This, too, is an ancient story. In Greece there are no stories that have completely lost their connection with the dimension from which they originated, because myths, stories and events have entered and shaped the DNA of the people. Perhaps we should go back to Odysseus, that other migrant, who was forced to roam the Mediterranean for ten years before he could reach home. There was a decisive moment during his adventures. The Homeric poets describe it entirely without grandiloquence, perhaps with the same literary and human intentions that inspired Hemingway almost three millennia later.
It was the morning that Odysseus found himself shipwrecked on the island of the Phaeacians. After sleeping in the bushes, dirty and naked, the hero emerges on to a beach where some girls are playing with a ball. It is a wonderful, unexpected scene. Princess Nausicaa stays while her companions run away screaming. She talks to the stranger with composure and explains what he should do to be welcomed by her parents.
Sure enough, following the girl’s instructions Odysseus finds himself at Alcinous’ table shortly afterwards without ever being asked his name, what he is doing, what he wants and where he is going. These were the key rules of the institution that the ancients simply knew as xenia. Because while xenos meant foreigner, above all it meant guest. And xenia was, very simply, the duty of hospitality to be shown to foreigners when they arrived with no bad intentions.
You will see for yourself if you arrive as an ordinary traveler, unannounced, in a village in Greece or the regions of southern Italy known to the Romans as Magna Graecia because of their populations of Greek settlers. You are unlikely to want for company or not to meet someone who offers you a glass of water and invites you to pull up a chair outside their house, to rest in the shade in the summer or in the sunshine in winter, before you continue on your way.
https://lithub.com/in-life-as-in-mythology-greece-is-a-place-of-frustrated-migrations/?fbclid=IwAR2mwUhGtR6Jh5U-0rtL-XO-gMDF2w5npi73hEVArRgRS7HDJoNOEE2TLpc
Lilith:
Thanks for sharing the article about refugees and the Greek Islands. I've been to the Greek islands twice, and their hospitality toward strangers is in the air. You can breathe it everywhere.
Mary: PHILOXENIA MISSING IN THE WORLD TODAY
“Philoxenia,” that friendship toward strangers, may be the most critical element missing in the world today, where groups defining themselves by nation, sex, religion, politics, see themselves as threatened by all outside their group. The “Other” — the one outside my tribe, is always evil, to be feared and opposed, destroyed and eliminated.
This is partly based on an idea of scarcity, that there's not enough to go around, and anything going to someone else is being taken away from me. This kind of thinking leads to the rhetoric of "swarms" of invading immigrants coming to "steal" our health and human services, erase our language, take our country, and commit all kinds of vicious crimes against us. This characterization of the Other as an overwhelming horde of vermin, a visceral nightmare of a threat, is very familiar. You need only think of the Nazi propaganda against the Jews, or the demonization of black people in America, or of recent hate speech targeting Muslims or Asians.
I also have little hope of a rational conversation across the divide. What we are seeing is so much like a religion, with all the extreme and crazy ardor of a cult, that reason has no ability to reach its congregation. The very basis of Right Wing Evangelism, White Supremacist groups, and Trump's followers is irrational — fundamentally and passionately irrational, full of fear, conspiracy theories, and the nostalgia for a mythical golden past where all Others were kept firmly in place, and nothing challenged their own group's complete hegemony.
Unfortunately true believers are often ready to die rather than change their minds. Just as they refused to see Trump's endless lies, or to give that habit of lying any importance, I can imagine them seeing him as persecuted now, rather than as an obstructionist trying to subvert the constitution and the law. I can imagine them seeing Giuliani's hair dye running down his face not as symbolic of deception and fakery, but as a sort of “stigmata” — sweated out of him by a cruel and persecuting press. Such delusions and rewriting of the facts are the very essence of fervent religiosity.
True believers will always see unbelievers as opponents, a threat to their own existence — never as simply human, never as neighbors. I am reminded of those who talk about a "war on Christmas" if "Merry Christmas” is replaced by "Happy Holidays.” Diversity and inclusion are not positive values for believers. For them there must be one faith, one "winner" in what must always be a conflict, because there can be no cooperation with "evil."
Oriana: REMEMBER THE PREDICTIONS OF A CIVIL WAR?
I remember how years ago there used to be huge discussions of religion, not just on Facebook but also in sophisticated articles in the New York Times and elsewhere. Then politics took all, subsuming the religious fervor. Democrats and Republicans hate each other almost as Catholics and Protestants hated each other. And remember how recently we talked about the possibility of post-election civil war? That's because we've been waging a "cold" civil war for a few decades now. Friends and family members who voice the opinions we don't share get unfriended and disowned. I'm not sure how this can be resolved.
As you say, there is no reaching Trumpland with reason. We live in different places, work different jobs, eat different food (isn't Starbucks a communist cell? and what about all those Thai restaurants and taco trucks?), get our news from different networks. This is no longer the America I came to: the nation that ate meatloaf and jello, and watched Walter Cronkite — with total trust, I should add, since the phrase "fake news" had not yet been created. 
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IN DENIAL UNTIL THE LAST BREATH
Mikhail Iossel shared: ~ A South Dakota ER nurse Jodi Doering says on CNN this morning [November 16] that her Covid-19 patients often “don’t want to believe that Covid is real.”
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’ And when they should be... Facetiming their families, they’re filled with anger and hatred.”
...
In 1937-39, many of the Old Bolsheviks being executed in the basement of the Lubyanka building in Moscow on Stalin's direct orders, would shout in the last split-seconds of their lives: "Long live Comrade Stalin!” ~
Oriana:
Also, don't forget the "I love Big Brother" ending of 1984. The term brain-washing isn't in use as much as in the past, but it's all the more relevant now, with talk radio dedicated to conspiracy theories, for instance.
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Cuckoo d'état? One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest — that was a masterpiece of a movie. Unforgettable.
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THE RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE HAS A LONG HISTORY
~ The chasm of misunderstanding and animosity between rural and urban voters is one of the oldest divisions in American political life.
From the beginning of the United States republic, farmers and other country dwellers have viewed cities with political suspicion. Cities were filled with immigrants, the poor, and other people who didn’t fit the Jeffersonian yeoman ideal. Here’s Henry J. Cookingham, delegate to an 1894 New York state Constitutional Convention, disparaging urban voters and municipal corruption: “I say without fear of contradiction that the average citizen in the rural district is superior in intelligence, superior in morality, superior in self-government, to the average citizen in the great cities.”
As urban areas exploded in size and power, urban voters increasingly returned such disdain. Rural residents were rubes or hicks. Urban agglomerations were the economic future, country roads the past. In 1921 the acerbic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken envisioned new Republican President Warren Harding giving rural speeches to “small town yokels ... low political serfs.”
Today, almost 100 years later, the place-based insults are shriller than ever. The divide is getting wider. Polarized US politics – and politicians who exploit that polarization for their own gain – are pulling urban and rural voters farther and farther apart.
Take Wisconsin. Are the state’s rural voters more “real”? This December a Republican-controlled state legislature voted to strip powers from an incoming Democratic governor. One reason the move was legitimate, they said, was because Democratic voters are concentrated in Madison and Milwaukee. Republican votes came from all over the state. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” said Robin Vos, the GOP speaker of the Wisconsin state house.
Not that those same rural voters necessarily feel more real. Many feel downgraded, ignored, and despised by the urban elites. They remember what candidate Barack Obama said of voters in struggling small towns at a 2008 fundraiser (in a city of course, San Francisco). “They get bitter,” said Mr. Obama. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
Perhaps the problem is that too many social and cultural aspects of personal identity are becoming aligned with politics and geography. Rural voters are predominantly white Christian Republicans. Urban voters tend to be minorities, or more-educated whites, and on the whole younger and Democratic.
When the voters in a particular area are alike in so many ways, their attachment to their fellows becomes stronger than ever. The other side becomes just that, “other,” not fellow voters at all. That gap grows.
“The divides are not just about politics but who we are as people,” writes University of Wisconsin political scientist Katherine J. Cramer in the introduction to “The Politics of Resentment,” her book about rural consciousness and the Wisconsin rural-urban political divide.
FROM AN AGRARIAN TO AN URBAN NATION
In the beginning, of course, rural areas were dominant, in the sense that they were where most people lived.
Founding father Thomas Jefferson famously thought this the principle on which democracy should be based. To Jefferson, a small farmer and his family represented virtue and wisdom (he said much less about the slave labor that worked much of the Southern countryside). Cities were evil, dirty, and perhaps monarchist.
“The strong allurements of great cities to those who have any turn for dissipation, threaten to make them here, as in Europe, the sinks of voluntary misery,” wrote Jefferson to David Williams in 1803.
When Jefferson penned that letter about 94 percent of the US population was rural-based, leaving 6 percent in cities. This dominance of numbers was backed by a political system that gave disproportionate influence to large, thinly populated areas of land. Under the Constitution, every state is guaranteed two senators and one representative, no matter its population. Thus Wyoming, with 580,000 people, is as powerful in the Senate as California, with 40 million residents.
But cities grew as fast as corn. Jefferson was right about “strong allurements.” The urban population marched up with the nation’s industrial might, with the tipping point reached in 1920. That’s when a census first showed a majority of Americans living in urban areas.
Unsurprisingly, this set up a conflict. Rural voters did not want to give up their political power, says historian Doug Smith, author of “On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought ‘One Person, One Vote’ to the United States.”
The cities were full of immigrants, people who spoke different languages and practiced different religions. They were Italian, German, and Irish. Were they really entitled to the franchise?
“There was definitely a sense that the cities had attracted the mobs, lower classes, the people were somehow different, not real Americans at that particular time,” says Dr. Smith, whose book contains the pointed Cookingham quote [about the superiority of the rural voter] that starts this story.
BEFORE “ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE”
So rural powerbrokers turned to malapportionment. The Constitution said congressional districts should be divided by the census, but gave no specifics. States governed state legislative districts. State legislatures controlled by rural interests simply drew lines that gave rural areas more representation.
The disparity worsened and grew entrenched from the 1920s through the middle of the century, when virtually every state in the nation was malapportioned to some degree. In some states 20 percent of the population could elect a majority of the state legislature. Business often lined up with rural interests, seeing them as more stable and conservative. Spending projects that benefited cities – school funds, infrastructure, overtime and minimum wage rules – were often bottled up.
In an egregious example cited by Smith, in California at one point one state senator represented the 6 million residents of Los Angeles County. And one state senator represented 14,000 residents of three counties on the east side of the Sierra Mountains, effectively giving those residents 450 times the political power of their urban counterparts in state Senate voting.
After World War II this situation became legally and politically less tenable. Cities continued to grow, and frustrated urban leaders fought back in the courts.
Civil rights were intertwined with the anti-malapportionment movement in many ways, and the Supreme Court began to consider and move on both these huge issues in the early 1960s. Finally, in June 1964, the Court ruled that state districts needed to be drawn on the basis of one person, one vote. It was a momentous decision.
“We are really talking about a system of minority rule. With malapportionment that was happening,” says Smith.
But there is more than one way to manipulate electoral systems. A cousin of malapportionment, the venerable practice of gerrymandering, survives.
Gerrymandering, the manipulation of political boundaries in favor of one party or class, is practiced by Democrats and Republicans for their own purposes. Essentially it’s used to protect entrenched power. Increasingly for the GOP that means power in rural areas.
In Wisconsin, for instance, unified control under a Republican legislature and outgoing GOP Gov. Scott Walker produced a state map so favorable to Republican candidates that the GOP won 63 of 99 assembly seats – though Democrats won 54 percent of Assembly votes cast.
Rural Republicans also benefit from the simple fact of geographic clustering. Democratic votes are increasingly concentrated in big cities. Former President Obama famously got all votes cast in 59 Philadelphia precincts in 2012.
That “wastes” lots of votes, since a candidate only needs a majority to win. Republicans are scattered less densely across rural and suburban areas. This doesn’t matter much in statewide votes, such as for governor. But it does matter in legislative races. It’s a sort of natural gerrymander.
Rolled together, these reasons help explain the enduring power of the Republican coalition of rural and suburban whites. For 20 years, Democrats have been looking at demographic projections of fast-growing minorities and younger voters tipping red states blue. Yet that never quite seems to happen, as Democrat Beto O’Rourke found in losing his Senate race in Texas to the GOP’s Ted Cruz in November.
“What Democrats have failed to take into account fully is just how much geography is privileged over population in our political system,” says Steven Conn, a professor of history at Miami University of Ohio and author of “Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century.”
DIVIDE WIDENED IN 2016
As a candidate Donald Trump appeared to make little effort to win city voters. Instead, he painted a bleak picture of burnt-out cities dominated by poverty and crime. In response, urban counties from Austin to Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles produced record-low numbers for a Republican candidate in 2016. Trump’s childhood county of Queens gave him 22 percent. Washington, D.C., one of the most Democratic cities in the country, gave him 4 percent.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s decline among rural whites in the Midwest might well have been the deciding factor in her Electoral College loss, as Trump turned Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania red. Overall, the least-dense counties in America voted at a significantly lower rate for Mrs. Clinton than they did for Obama in 2012.
The rural-urban trend continued in the 2018 midterms. Some Democratic candidates faced huge rural vote deficits. In 2012, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri won rural Saline County by 22 points. In 2018, she lost it by 21.
Democrats rolled up a 40-seat gain in the House, not by winning back rural whites, but largely by winning big in suburbs with large percentages of educated voters. Add the 2016 and 2018 results together and they begin to suggest that the real divide in US politics is between geographic areas based on population density, not on states sorted between red and blue.
A FIGHT OVER WHO THE “REAL” VOTERS ARE
What is the foundation for the estrangement between rural and urban America? Perhaps it is the belief on both sides that the other does not care about them.
This is a feeling well-documented among rural voters, at least. In her book, Professor Cramer in Wisconsin recounted her years of fieldwork traveling outside urban areas to get the political pulse of her state. Rural voters felt disrespected by Madison politicians and city elites, she concluded. They felt like outsiders, their world grounded in a rural consciousness others did not understand.
Though they themselves often stood to benefit from government services, they vehemently opposed big government. They felt like they were standing still while others – minorities, outsiders – cut in front of them to get undeserved help.
And both sides of this divide feel resented.
Among urban residents, 65 percent said other communities don’t understand their problems, in a Pew Research poll this year. Sixty-three percent said others see them in a negative light. Those numbers were similar to those posted by rural residents – with 70 percent and 57 percent answering the same way, respectively, on those questions.
By way of contrast, people living in the suburbs scored substantially more positively on both these measures.
Much of today’s polarization is rooted in social identity, argues University of Maryland political scientist Lilliana Mason in her book “Uncivil Agreement.”
This overlay results in a powerful political group attachment, according to Professor Mason. Politics becomes more than a means to govern ourselves and handle disputes about proper actions. It becomes tribal: “us” versus “them.”
In that context the divide between Republican rural America and urban Democratic America is indeed a fight over who the “real” voters are.
Duan Zhen Zhong (b. 1944): City
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A REAL RIFT, BUT ALSO BLURRY LINES
But Nathan Connolly, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and co-host of the “BackStory” history podcast, has a different take on the divide’s foundations. He says it is important to remember that this spatial divide is real in some important ways, but it is also a narrative we tell ourselves to try to understand any number of other divides and problems, from racial prejudice and slavery to economic injustice. He calls it a “hard box” we put people in to explain election cycles, culture wars, and so forth.
For one thing, there has always been extensive migration between urban and rural areas, from the Great Migration of southern African-Americans to northern factory jobs, to retirees returning to their roots.
For another, there are Democrats in every rural space and Republicans in every city. Only the mix is different. Some of the nation’s most famous radicals came from the farm. Some of the strongest voices for “fly-over country” and the heartland on conservative media have lived in Manhattan all their lives.
There are transsexual police officers in San Francisco who grew up in Nebraska and rural homesteaders in Maine who went to Harvard. Who, Dr. Connolly asks, is more connected to the world than a soybean farmer following the global markets for his crop from his tractor?
“There are broad examples of the diversity of America around the country,” he says.
Provo, Utah, is by any measure a small place with conservative values. But the language training available there is on par with any in New York City, says Connolly. That is because it is predominantly Mormon, and young Mormons serve as missionaries, and thus benefit from immersion training in Mandarin or Portuguese.
“I think our sense of this bifurcated country, it doesn’t really hold up once you start to bear down and ask basic questions,” Connolly says. ~
Photo by Kestrel Trael
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THE RURAL/URBAN DIVIDE GROWS WIDER OVER COVID
~ President-elect Joe Biden will be taking over a country that is even more sharply divided on urban-rural lines. One of the biggest reasons why the divide got bigger in 2020 may be the coronavirus pandemic.
Rural Republicans mostly spurned the COVID-19 business shutdowns. Many Democrats called them essential to protect public health. While some in America blasted the president's chaotic pandemic response and his spreading of racist conspiracy theories, Trump racked up wins in some rural counties by even bigger margins than in 2016.
"There's this sense that decisions about the pandemic are being made in cities and kind of imposed on rural spaces," said Kathy Cramer, an expert on the rural-urban divide at the University of Wisconsin. "That doesn't sit well with a lot of folks and may have driven them further from the Democratic Party."
Wisconsin was a flashpoint for divisions over coronavirus policy. Even as many rural counties saw alarming spikes in cases and hospitalizations leading up to the election, Cramer says Trump was able to capitalize on rural resentment. There tends to be mistrust in government authority in rural America, and a proud tradition of individualism when it comes to mask mandates and social distancing laws. Trump also sent billions in subsidies to farmers.
So can a President Biden make inroads into Trump's red America in 2021? The new administration's agenda will face big obstacles especially in the Senate, which gives disproportionate power to rural states. The Democratic rural dean of that chamber, Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, is trying to stay optimistic.
"If he gets a good person in as the secretary of [agriculture], and he's willing to listen first, and, as I say, react to what you're hearing, I think we'll be in fine shape," Tester says.
Tester, a farmer, says Republicans have been winning in the heartland lately on what he calls hot button issues. But he faults both parties for mostly shunning rural America and its complex problems that aren't solvable over one election cycle.
Analysts say the rural-urban divide is sharpest in the middle of the country, which has been hit especially hard economically and where many small towns are losing population. Democrats like Tester see an opening in the West though, where in 2021 the party will control all the Senate seats in New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado for the first time since 1941.
"I think rural America is literally up for grabs," Tester says.
The 2020 election also exposed vulnerabilities for Republicans in states like Colorado. Like in a lot of the country, the GOP lost even worse than it did in 2016 in Colorado's cities and suburbs and also its rural counties with ski resorts and tourist-dependent economies.
"There was a lot of frustration going into this election," says Rose Pugliese, a Republican commissioner in the longtime conservative stronghold of Mesa County, Colo.
Pugliese says her region picked up some big wins during the Trump era, especially with oil and gas development on public land, including a large natural gas pipeline project connecting western Colorado to the Oregon coast.
Pugliese is skeptical about what a Biden administration will mean for rural economies. But she's eager to listen.
"I mean, really when we talk about what's important to all parties, and all political persuasions, they want to make sure they have economic opportunities," Pugliese says. "So it'll be interesting to see how he talks about rural America and our economic opportunities."
For now, Pugliese says rural counties like hers are mostly worried about the potential for more lockdowns due to coronavirus. She says she hopes the new administration will continue to leave those decisions to states and local jurisdictions. ~
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/934631994/bidens-win-shows-rural-urban-divide-has-grown-since-2016
photo: Kestrel Trael*
WHY TRUMP SUPPORTERS DON’T CARE IF HE LIES
“The masses' escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true…
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” ~ Hannah Arendt
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Joe: Trump Supporters (Suspenders?)
I wonder about the people who make up the 47.6% or so of the American Electorate. They voted for Trump in 2020. Many commentators dismiss them as unbalanced cooks. After Trump’s election, major news networks such as CNN, the New York Times sent reporters into rural America to give us an in-depth understanding of these voters. Others filmed documentaries.
These different projects portrayed the Trump supporters as the average person next door, and indeed they are. They work, go to church, raise their kids as responsible adults. The majorities of these journalistic endeavors demonstrated one thing: if you didn’t challenge the Trump voters’ world-view, they appeared as logical and compassionate human beings.
Not challenging their irrational views validates their beliefs. Yet, to exist as a country, we need to interact with them with a modicum of logic. Although some exceptions exist, there is a terrible gap between the Trump supporters and the rest of Americans. Their views ensure inhuman isolation for Trump’s followers.
Oddly, this lack of connection validates their values and increases the animosity they have for the rest of America, with whom they have little interaction. For our country to overcome this unreasonable situation requires more than creating a polite society. First, we need to understand the mystery of their beliefs to find a communication link with them.
We must move toward them because their irrationality prevents them from moving towards us. In general, racism, conspiracy theories, anti-science attitudes, and conservative-Christian beliefs characterize the four largest categories of Trump voters. Members from both parties comprise these groups, but a difference exists between the Republican and Democratic adherents.
The quest for power and wealth drives the conservative leaders transformation to the right. For the everyday member, their disillusionment with life is a by-product of the anxiety, neurosis, confusion, and opportunism of the corporate economy. They cope by reveling in the religious acrobatics of their TV shows along with the high-sounding words of their leaders.
After a while, these emotionally volatile presentations become less effective as a drug than opioids or other medication they use to calm their frustration. The exasperation leads them to believe they are alone. Their loneliness makes them feel like an outsider, and it produces a voracious appetite for someone who will acknowledge their need to use violence against the in-crowd.
The biggest group is the racists: the KKK, white supremacists, and white nationalists. Of course, some people are racists but do not identify with the above organizations. Still, these racism- driven people feel a need to prove their loyalty to Trump. They arrive in full military regalia to intimidate or cause property damage when protests against their president take place.
The conspiracists believe in the theories of Joe McCarthy and Bishop Sheen. They state the Jews control the world by controlling the communist party and Hollywood. They believe in the John Burch Society theories, such as Virginia Woolf conspired to control the world through communist manipulation, and that Democrats give African Americans preferential treatment.
This theory was voiced in the code language many times by Ronald Reagan as he worked out his socialist conspiracy theories that eventually became the mainstay of Republican propaganda. The speculations about a socialist, Communist, Jewish conspiracy exists in many of the QAnon Conspiracy theories. It is important to note that QAnon is a remake of the John Birch Society.
The anti-science group is composed of people who believe that evolution is bad science. They think that Liberals place saltpeter in the drinking water along with fluoride. Saltpeter is a home remedy to subdue the male hormone. It’s a way for liberals to control the birth rate. They also believe that the vaccines (polio, chickenpox, measles, and flu-shots) cause childhood diseases.
They believe that pasteurization doesn’t work, while home remedies succeeded for centuries; otherwise, people would be extinct. These beliefs dovetail with the American Conservative Christians. Some label the American conservative Christians as Christian fascists.
When we label these groups as Christians, we need to remember their tenets are harmful. They believe in one language and one faith. Protestant Christianity is the faith, and its language is English. Therefore, no other religion, protestant or not, can be allowed. Currently, they favor the Prosperity Gospel as preached by Joel Osteen and Franklin Graham.
This gospel is a mixture of the racist and anti-Semitic beliefs held by the Southern Churches like the Southern Baptist. Also, there are Catholic priests and bishops who follow the teachings of Bishop Sheen, a TV evangelist of the 1950s. When you look at these groups, you see that some of the tenets bleed over; thus, these groups are symbiotic with each other.
By not disagreeing with each other, these different groups validate their different beliefs. Donald Trump succeeds because he is a card-carrying member of each group. He speaks the code language of each group. When commentators say that the president is illogical, that is a misconception. He is making perfect sense to 73 million people because he speaks in their code.
Bob Dole lost votes because he refused to speak the language that Ronald Reagan used. He did this because he was educated and didn’t think that speaking in the language of the working man endeared him to the electorate. Thus, many members of these groups stayed home during his election.
John McCain lost because he told a bigoted woman that Barack Obama was an American and told her she was wrong. Some of the racists and conspiracists stayed home. Mitt Romney lost because he was a Mormon. The Mormons are not considered Christians by the southern protestant Christians. Many of the Conservative Christians voters stayed home.
Donald Trump attacked Cruz for his Mexican heritage. Then he assaulted Jeb Bush’s wife for the same reason. Finally, Trump condemned the Mexicans and the blacks for their culture and race. He said the Democrats were conspiring to make the whites the highest unemployed group. He said he would give further tax breaks to the mega Churches, which preached the prosperity gospel.
All the commentators said Trump talked too crazy to be elected. Yet they wonder why all these minority radicals come out to vote for him. The reason is that Trump wins is that he is a true believer of every tenet in the four categories. The question is not how to have them abandon Trump, but how to bring 50% of the country into a conversation of ideas not sound bites.
Oriana:
Thanks, Joe, for pointing out things I didn’t know — e.g. that QAnon is a remake of the John Birch Society. And I feel particularly grateful for your reminding us about Joe McCain’s decency in defending Obama against bigotry. I happened to watch that exchange with the bigoted woman on TV, and I totally admired McCain at that moment. He refused to be a racist, even if it might cost him the election.
Thanks for making me look up Bishop Sheen! Whatever his faults may be, I found a quote of his that applies to narcissism and racism: “Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.” (This could be applied to any religion that claims to be the only true religion.)
I am rather pessimistic about the prospects of a rational conversation with white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and other overlapping groups. Their core values are essentially different, possibly stemming from a basic attitude to the world that sees threats rather than a fascinating diversity. One hypothesis is that fear of "the other" is the result of harsh, authoritarian parenting versus nurturing parenting that encourages openness. I'm sure there are other factors as well, such as having actually interacted with people of different cultures — more likely to happen if you live in a city rather than a small rural town. As one of my friends said about her anti-Semitic grandparents in the Midwest: I don’t think they ever met a single Jewish person in their entire lives.
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Cima da Conegliano: Satyrs, 1510. Oddly, the same Cima created perhaps the nicest God the Father
The peculiar assumption underlying all these representations of God the Father is that god should be made to look like an older man, gray-haired, sometimes balding. But god doesn't age, does he? Eternal youth would be more like it.
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TECHNOLOGY AND SECULARIZATION
Milosz made this interesting observation long before the Internet. It made me realize that hardly anyone else has paid attention to technology as a factor in the decline of religion. Typically it’s science that is postulated to have had the greatest influence. But the average person is not truly informed about science, be it astrophysics or natural selection. It’s not something they deal with in their everyday lives. What has hugely affected those lives is technology.
For one thing, compared with the past, we live in comfort, even luxury. We can communicate with China or Australia as if distance hardly existed. Covid is a tragedy, but we don’t respond to it with processions of flagellants and the burning of heretics. We have discovered that wearing a mask is highly protective, and vaccines and new anti-viral drugs are being developed.
We are simply not as helpless as before. Though far from omnipotent, and definitely mortal, we are not praying every day to be saved from the countless perils that used to be commonplace in the past. True, we have our own huge problems, some of them created by the very technology that has made us relatively safe and comfortable. But the sense of helplessness is not what it used to be, and the longing for a parent in the sky is also diminished. Technology has made it easier to enjoy life — and that means less interest in the afterlife, whose very existence has come into serious question.
Milosz never apologized for writing a lot about religion. He said that the disappearance of heaven and hell, just that alone, merited a writer’s attention. And I think he was right about technology. Even just being able to drive changes one's consciousness; it empowers. No wonder the Saudis don't want to allow women to drive.
The church's central message about humans being helpless and weak-minded just doesn't fly so well anymore, and the main reason for it has been technology. Nothing is all good or all bad: technology also has its problems. Nevertheless, it empowers us and makes us less afraid. It cannot be said often enough: human reason, inventiveness, and imagination are to be honored, not demeaned.
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“The debate between religion and science was over when churches started putting lightning rods on their steeples.” [Oriana: a lighting rod is an example of technology.]
“Had the ecclesiastics of the Church of San Nazaro in Brecia given in to repeated urgings to install a lightning rod, they might have averted a terrible catastrophe. The Republic of Venice had stored in the vaults of this church 90,000 kg (close to 200,000 lbs) of gunpowder. In 1769, 17 years after Franklin's discovery, no rod having been placed on the church, it was struck by lightning and the gunpowder exploded. One-sixth of the city was destroyed and over 3,000 lives were lost because the priests refused to install the 'heretical rod.’”
When I read about lightning, I am frequently reminded of my moment of apostasy (apostasy! a glorious word that rhymes with ecstasy; funny, this is the first time I'm using it word in reference to myself). In my mind I said, “If god exists, let him strike me with lightning.” And I stood in place and waited. My heart was pounding and I literally shook with fear while waiting to be struck with lightning. I stood rooted to the ground for about five minutes, waiting. In case god existed, I wanted to be fair and give him enough time. The first minute I could barely breathe. Then I shook less and less, and at last I was able to walk. It was a beautiful spring day, white clouds, a riot of lilacs.
I shared this story with the poet Adam Zagajewski, who replied, “Sometimes there is a delay.” The experience was worth it just for that comment.
Lightning strikes the dome of St. Peter’s. *
“My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.” ~ Oliver Sacks
Autumn in the Mountain; Koukeii Kojima*
EARLY HUMANS DOMESTICATED THEMSELVES, GENETIC EVIDENCE SUGGESTS
~ When humans started to tame dogs, cats, sheep, and cattle, they may have continued a tradition that started with a completely different animal: us. A new study—citing genetic evidence from a disorder that in some ways mirrors elements of domestication—suggests modern humans domesticated themselves after they split from their extinct relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans, approximately 600,000 years ago.
“The study is incredibly impressive,” says Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new work. It’s “a really beautiful test,” he adds, of the long-standing idea that humans look so different from our primate ancestors precisely because we have become domesticated.
Domestication encompasses a whole suite of genetic changes that arise as a species is bred to be friendlier and less aggressive. In dogs and domesticated foxes, for example, many changes are physical: smaller teeth and skulls, floppy ears, and shorter, curlier tails. Those physical changes have all been linked to the fact that domesticated animals have less of a certain type of stem cell, called neural crest stem cells.
Modern humans are also less aggressive and more cooperative than many of our ancestors. And we, too, exhibit a significant physical change: Though our brains are big, our skulls are smaller, and our brow ridges are less pronounced. So, did we domesticate ourselves?
Giuseppe Testa, a molecular biologist at University of Milan in Italy, and colleagues knew that one gene, BAZ1B, plays an important role in orchestrating the movements of neural crest cells. Most people have two copies of this gene. Curiously, one copy of BAZ1B, along with a handful of others, is missing in people with Williams-Beuren syndrome, a disorder linked to cognitive impairments, smaller skulls, elfinlike facial features, and extreme friendliness.
To learn whether BAZ1B plays a role in those facial features, Testa and colleagues cultured 11 neural crest stem cell lines: four from people with Williams-Beuren syndrome, three from people with a different but related disorder in which they have duplicates instead of deletions of the disorder’s key genes, and four from people without either disorder. Next, they used a variety of techniques to tweak BAZ1B’s activity up or down in each of the stem cell lines.
That tweaking, they learned, affected hundreds of other genes known to be involved in facial and cranial development. Overall, they found that a tamped-down BAZ1B gene led to the distinct facial features of people with Williams-Beuren syndrome, establishing the gene as an important driver of facial appearance.
When the researchers looked at those hundreds of BAZ1B-sensitive genes in modern humans, two Neanderthals, and one Denisovan, they found that in the modern humans, those genes had accumulated loads of regulatory mutations of their own. This suggests natural selection was shaping them. And because many of these same genes have also been under selection in other domesticated animals, modern humans, too, underwent a recent process of domestication, the team reports today in Science Advances.
Wrangham cautions that many different genes likely play a role in domestication, so we shouldn’t read too much evolutionary importance into BAZ1B. “What they’ve zeroed in on is one gene that is incredibly important … but it’s clear there are going to be multiple other candidate genes.”
William Tecumseh Fitch III, an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna, says he is skeptical of “precise parallels” between human self-domestication and animal domestication. “These are processes with both similarities and differences,” he says. “I also don’t think mutations in one or a few genes will ever make a good model for the many, many genes involved in domestication.”
As for why humans might have become domesticated in the first place, hypotheses abound. Wrangham favors the idea that as early people formed cooperative societies, evolutionary pressures favored mates whose features were less “alpha,” or aggressive. “There was active selection, for the very first time, against the bullies and the genes that favored their aggression,” he adds. But so far, “Humans are the only species that have managed this.” ~
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/early-humans-domesticated-themselves-new-genetic-evidence-suggests?utm_campaign=ScienceNow&utm_source=Contractor&utm_medium=Facebook
Women are still hoping to domesticate men . . .
Seriously, there is something to be said for the domestication theory and sexual selection, but this particular study is not especially impressive. Perhaps the problem of cooperation versus aggression is simply too complex, and beyond biology. I'm especially interested in Steven Pinker's theories on the decrease in crime and cruelty over the centuries, as documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Enlightenment can't be explained through genetic mutations.
There’s also Sylvia Plath’s unforgettable line, “Every woman adores a fascist.” But that’s not true of women who’ve gained more experience with men, including those capable of tenderness and small attentions. So the husband-type men would ultimately out-reproduce the bullies.
On the biological/genetic level, one could probably argue for partial domestication.
And there’s no denying that civilization is the fruit of cooperation, so the more advanced societies would favor those already inclined to friendliness and teamwork.
Mary: PERHAPS HUMANS AND DOGS DOMESTICATED EACH OTHER
Did we domesticate ourselves? There seems to be merit in the idea that some genetic changes happened, selecting for cooperation rather than aggression, something certainly useful when the group is larger than an individual or family unit. At best, even now, we're only half tamed…there's still a lot of aggression in the mix, from bar fights and wife beating to genocides and wars.
The most interesting things I’ve read about domestication suggests we did not domesticate dogs — rather, dogs and humans domesticated each other, involving a process that satisfied needs in both partners. They also suggest it was most likely dogs began the process, some hanging around human camps and middens in search of scraps.
Oriana: REMOVE THE BULLIES, GET INSTANT CULTURAL CHANGE
Again, I'm reminded of Sapolsky’s discussion of the change from aggression to cooperation that happened when a troop of baboons lost their bullies, who died after eating tainted meat. Without the bullies, the health of the group improved; the matriarchs and the juveniles created an atmosphere of friendliness, cooperation and affection. If a stray young male happened to join the bully-free group, he too tended to accept the new rules. It was an amazing demonstration of what the removal of bullies can accomplish almost instantly, with no genetic change.
And the bullies can be empowered very quickly too — think of Nazi Germany, which even came up with a breeding program designed to produce racially pure future soldiers and colonizers. The nature/nurture questions always turn out to be extremely complex, and goes beyond biology.
Restoration inside the Hagia Sophia; John Guzlowski
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A SNIPPET OF NEANDERTHAL DNA LINKED TO MORE SEVERE COVID
~ Covid-19 patients with a snippet of Neanderthal DNA that crossed into the human genome some 60,000 years ago run a higher risk of severe complications from the disease, researchers have reported.
People infected with the new coronavirus, for example, who carry the genetic coding bequeathed by our early human cousins are three times more likely to need mechanical ventilation, according to a study published in Nature.
There are many reasons why some people with COVID-19 wind up in intensive care and others have only light symptoms or none at all.
Advanced age, being a man, and pre-existing medical problems can all increase the odds of a serious outcome.
But genetic factors can also play a role, as the new findings make clear.
"It is striking that the genetic heritage from Neanderthals has such tragic consequences during the current pandemic," said co-author Svante Paabo, director of the department of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Recent research by the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative revealed that a genetic variant in a particular region of chromosome three — one of 23 chromosomes in the human genome — is associated with more severe forms of the disease.
That same region was known to harbor genetic code of Neanderthal origins, so Paabo and co-author Hugo Zeberg, also from Max Planck, decided to look for a link with COVID-19 .
UNEVENLY DISTRIBUTED
They found that a Neanderthal individual from southern Europe carried an almost identical genetic segment, which spans some 50,000 so-called base pairs, the primary building blocks of DNA.
Tellingly, two Neanderthals found in southern Siberia, along with a specimen from another early human species that also wandered Eurasia, the Denisovans, did not carry the telltale snippet.
Modern humans and Neanderthals could have inherited the gene fragment from a common ancestor some half-million years ago, but it is far more likely to have entered the homo sapiens gene pool through more recent interbreeding, the researchers concluded.
The potentially dangerous string of Neanderthal DNA is not evenly distributed today across the globe, the study showed.
Some 16 percent of Europeans carry it, and about half the population across South Asia, with the highest proportion —- 63 percent — found in Bangladesh.
This could help explain why individuals of Bangladeshi descent living in Britain are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as the general population, the authors speculate.
In East Asia and Africa, the gene variant is virtually absent.
About two percent of DNA in non-Africans across the globe originates with Neanderthals, earlier studies have shown.
Denisovan remnants are also widespread but more sporadic, comprising less than one percent of the DNA among Asians and Native Americans, and about five percent of aboriginal Australians and the people of Papua New Guinea.
https://www.firstpost.com/health/people-with-neanderthal-dna-run-a-higher-risk-of-severe-complications-from-covid-19-8872401.html
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BREAKFAST AND HEART DISEASE
~ The survey portion of the analysis involves responses from 6,550 participants who were surveyed between 1988 and 1994 as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Overall, only 5.1 percent of those people didn’t eat breakfast on a daily basis, and 59 percent of people ate breakfast every day (the remaining 35.9 percent ate breakfast intermittently). To illuminate the long-term effects of skipping breakfast, Wei Bao checked death records through December 31, 2011, and found that 2,318 of that original cohort had died.
In that cohort, Bao found strong links between skipping breakfast and death. Specifically, breakfast skippers were 19 percent more likely to have died from any cause and 87 percent more likely to have died from heart disease — even after Bao adjusted for other risky activities like smoking, or factors like body mass index that might also affect death risk.
First, there’s the idea that skipping breakfast actually induces some kind of change in the body. For instance, Bao and his co-authors propose that the prolonged period of fasting may lead to elevated blood pressure, which, on its own, is a risk factor for heart disease. They also propose that skipping breakfast exacerbates levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the “bad” type of cholesterol associated with buildup in the arteries. To highlight this hypothesis, they cite a 2017 paper, also in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, showing that people who skipped breakfast had more than double the risk of having plaque buildup in their arteries even compared to people who ate high-calorie breakfasts.
On the other hand, skipping breakfast may just be a stand-in for other harmful lifestyle choices that can impact heart health. Speaking to CNN, Krista Varady, Ph.D., an associate professor of kinesiology and nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago who wasn’t involved in the new study, implied that Bao’s team’s research also presents evidence to that effect.
“However, the major issue is that the subjects who regularly skipped breakfast also had the most unhealthy lifestyle habits,” Varady said. “Specifically, these people were former smokers, heavy drinkers, physically inactive, and also had poor diet quality and low family income.”
In the paper, the authors acknowledge that skipping breakfast might just be a “behavioral marker” of other risk factors, as Varady suggests, but they argue that their statistical adjustments helped offset those factors. Ibáñez also notes the power of their evidence but adds that health factors are so multidimensional that it is impossible to adjust for everything.
For now, it’s still unclear which way this research will go. But what we already know is that skipping breakfast does seem to come at a price. ~
https://www.inverse.com/article/55187-skipping-breakfast-costs
Oriana:
Correlation does not prove causation. I suspect that “other harmful life choices” play a role here. On the other hand, not having much appetite in the early morning may be an individual trait similar to eye color. Low-carb diets also lead to less appetite.
ending on beauty:
Even love must pass through loneliness,
the husbandman become again
the Long Hunter, and set out
not to the familiar wood of home
but to the forest of the night.
~ Wendell Berry, Setting Out
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