CHECKOUT
So this is death, I think and wonder why
I can still see through my eyes. An angel
approaches me with a feedback form asking
how I’d rate my life (very good, good,
average, bad, very bad) and I intend to tick
‘average’ followed by a rant then I recall
your face like a cartoon treasure chest
glowing with gold light, tick ‘very good’
and in the comments box below I write
‘nice job.’ The angel asks if I enjoyed
my stay and I say, ‘O yes, I’d definitely
come back,’ and he gives me a soft look
meaning ‘that won’t be possible but thanks
all the same,’ clicks his pen and vanishes.
~ Caroline Bird
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CAMUS AND HOPE (THE PLAGUE)
~ Despite his lasting popularity in America, Camus is often misunderstood. Tellingly, in the midst of the Tea Party rebellion a decade ago, Newt Gingrich quoted The Plague while on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The former speaker of the House tried to co-opt Camus into his denunciation of “Obamacare” as the mark of a tyrannical, secular, leftist government. Camus was, in fact, a European social democrat who backed universal health care and was deeply skeptical of organized religion. Such disinformation—a prelude to the rise of Trumpism—was precisely among the pitfalls of ideologies that revolted Camus.
The Plague evoked the shadow of authoritarianism that would resurge in our age. According to biographer Olivier Todd, Camus began writing the story in the midst of World War II when he was involved in the French resistance. Published two years after the war ended, it came to represent the advent of the Third Reich. A nonbeliever, Camus equally used his allegory to call into doubt religious or spiritual explanations for tragic life events. The words of a resilient old man in the final pages of the novel exemplified this outlook: “What does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”
The world that Camus paints in The Plague may appear bleak. In reality, the novel is a testament to hope, resistance, and humanity. Camus explained that his allegory could be read in three ways: “It is at the same time a tale about an epidemic, a symbol of Nazi occupation (and incidentally the prefiguration of any totalitarian regime, no matter where), and, thirdly, the concrete illustration of a metaphysical problem, that of evil.” Camus raises a recurrent question in the book: How may one become a saint in a godless world? The answer may be through compassionate self-sacrifice.
“There always comes a time in history,” reads the translation by Robin Buss, “when the person who dares to say that two and two make four is punished by death.” For the protagonists of the novel, however, death would not come at the hands of an authoritarian regime but in their battle against a virus. As the narrator explains, many were saying that nothing was any use and that we should go down on our knees.
Tarrou, Rieux and their friends could answer this or that, but the conclusion was always what they knew it would be: one must fight, in one way or another, and not go down on one’s knees. The whole question was to prevent the largest possible number of people from dying and suffering a definitive separation. There was only one way to do this, which was to fight the plague.
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Born in 1913, Camus grew up in colonial French Algeria before spending most of his adult life in mainland France. Throughout his career, he tended to oscillate between the roles of journalist, novelist, playwright, essayist, and philosopher. After briefly joining the Communist Party in his twenties, he became staunchly anticommunist. This led to his falling out with far-left figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who lacked his profound reservations about revolutionary violence. Camus was not an absolute pacifist—his pragmatism led him to accept that armed resistance against oppressive regimes could be necessary—but he was suspicious of ideologies convinced that it is righteous to kill in the name of some greater good.
Camus was simultaneously unyielding in his moral commitments—Sartre stressed his “stubborn humanism”—and wary of the tendency to dehumanize those who disagree with us or even people who are indeed despicable. These are among the reasons why Camus was a fierce opponent of the death penalty. He did not wish to reduce people to their worse thought or act.
As many have rediscovered this year, Camus’s humanistic ideals and sensibilities are omnipresent in The Plague.
The novel unfolds in Oran, an Algerian city under French rule. A group of volunteers, including Dr. Bernard Rieux, Jean Tarrou, and Father Paneloux, a Catholic priest, choose to provide health care to plague victims at the risk of contracting the virus. The volunteers’ solidarity symbolizes the French resistance during World War Two, which enlisted people of diverse stripes—liberals and conservatives, socialists and capitalists, believers and nonbelievers, and more.
Why do plagues or pandemics occur? Why such human suffering? Throughout the novel Camus calls into question religious or supernatural explanations. Consider how Father Paneloux identifies the plague as a trial of faith, claiming in a sermon that “God was doing His creatures the favor of putting them in such a misfortune.” Camus subsequently depicts an innocent child dying in agony from the disease in the vicinity of a helpless, distressed Paneloux.
But Camus did not see the world in black and white. He does not demonize Paneloux, one of the few who courageously joins the solidary group of volunteers who care for plague victims at tremendous personal risk. Dr. Rieux, a nonbeliever and the group’s leader, welcomes Paneloux: “We are working together for something that unites us at a higher level than prayer or blasphemy, and that’s all that counts.” Paneloux later falls prey to the disease.
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Caring for the vulnerable is a central theme of The Plague. To Camus this mission unequivocally was a key dimension of social democracy. It remains a crucial issue in an age when the United States is the only Western democracy without a universal health care system.
Rambert, the journalist trapped in Oran, ultimately decides to stay and join the volunteers who care for plague victims, instead of escaping to his lover. Rieux tries to dissuade him, arguing there is “no shame in choosing happiness.” But “there may be a shame in being happy all by oneself,” Rambert replies. Choice is an omnipresent theme in Camus’s works, as he rejects fatalism and emphasizes human agency.
The volunteers are akin to the French resistance, yet they also incarnate an ideal of democracy based on compassion and humanism. Tarrou, who founded the group, finally dies of exposure to the disease. His coming of age had occurred when he grasped that his father, a prosecutor, sought the death penalty—a punishment symbolizing inhumanity in Camus’s eyes. “I was already suffering from the plague long before I knew this town and epidemic,” he recounts. As I have commented on elsewhere, the United States is the only Western democracy that has refused to abolish the death penalty, and it now has the highest incarceration rate worldwide. Alongside health care, criminal justice was a benchmark of democracy and humanity in Camus’s worldview.
The end of The Plague reaffirms this perspective as the virus slowly disappears. This infuriates Cottard, the character who comes closest to resembling a villain because he only thinks of himself. A smuggler, Cottard profits financially from the disease and its human misery. Realizing that he will no longer be able to do so, Cottard erupts. He takes a revolver, locks himself in his home, and attempts a mass shooting by rabidly firing outside his window. The police eventually break into the building and arrest him. Camus then has a policeman beat up Cottard. Rieux, the narrator and arguably a stand-in for Camus, feels uneasy. The narration suggests disapproval, that doing violence even to the guilty dehumanizes all of us. As Rieux walks away from the crime scene to go see a patient, Camus writes: “Rieux was thinking about Cottard, and the dull sound of fists thudding into his face stayed with him.” The specter of police brutality is still with us.
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The Plague rewards our attention today not only because we live in an age of polarization, authoritarianism, illiberalism, and pandemic. In his time Camus also spoke with passion about the threats that ideology, disinformation, and cynicism posed for liberal democracy, as in Neither Victims nor Executioners (1946): “The long dialogue among men has just come to an end. Naturally, a man who will not listen is a man to be feared.”
Throughout his life, Camus wished to transcend the opposition between utopianism and cynicism. When he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, this was his call to the world:
‘Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death.’
Camus sought to reconcile idealism and pragmatism, hope and realism, humanity and inhumanity. We need to read and reread Camus. ~
http://bostonreview.net/arts-society/mugambi-jouet-reading-camus-time-plague-and-polarization?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=f735198cb4-MC_roundup_12_5_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-f735198cb4-40729829&mc_cid=f735198cb4&mc_eid=97e2edfae1
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~ I regard hatred as bestial and crude, and prefer that my actions and thoughts be the product, as far as possible, of reason. Much less do I accept hatred directed collectively at an ethnic group, for example at all the Germans.
If I accepted it, I would feel that I was following the precepts of Nazism, which was founded precisely on national and racial hatred.
I must admit that if I had in front of me one of our persecutors of those days, certain known faces, certain old lies, I would be tempted to hate, and with violence too; but exactly because I am not a fascist or a Nazi, I refuse to give way to this temptation. ~ Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz
Oriana: JEWISH SPACE LASER
Still, we can’t afford to forget. A poetry-workshop classmate once exclaimed, “It’s time that the Jews would somehow metabolize the Holocaust out of their system!” No, an attempt to exterminate an entire people can’t be “metabolized” (and then presumably flushed down the toilet). (And I wonder if she'd have the nerve to tell Afro-Americans to "metabolize" slavery.)
Alas, the Nazi mentality, including anti-Semitism, is still virulently alive. It’s it’s always about the power of the lie: the Big Lie (about Germany’s being stabbed in the back by the Jews) or the myriad lesser lies, however ludicrous they may be:
~ “Noah was a conspiracy theorist himself when he built the ark. So who are we to say that it’s true or not?” ~ a supporter of GOP Georgia Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said that wildfires were caused by a secret Jewish laser space laser. MTG ran unopposed because her opponent quit the race due to death threats.
Mikhail Iossel:
One of the main purposes served by the vile clownish lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene — or, say, Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russia — is to make their political masters, the much bigger and crazier and more dangerous actors, Trump and Putin, respectively, seem marginally "normal" by comparison.
Oriana:
As Hannah Arendt said, the first task of fascism is to erase the difference between truth and lie: to normalize extreme lies as the supposed hidden truth that's now being revealed to true believers.
Also: a Jewish space laser starting forest fires in California? Can you imagine how that goes over in Israel? In the world in general?
Mikhail:
Yes it is amazing how lunatic the ideas of the Trump faction are, how much you are tempted to laugh at their belief in such outlandish and inventive lies as Jewish Space Lasers and Satanic cannibal pedophiles operating out of pizza shops. But it is also clear what a mistake it would be to disregard them. They are passionately invested in these lies, they are armed, and they feel not just the election, but Everything, is being taken away from them. They cannot see change in how we see history, justice, and society as anything but destructive.
To them removing the statues of Confederate generals is not an adjustment acknowledging they were not heroes but traitors, and that the confederate flag is the symbol of a treasonous state, but is "canceling culture "...denying history rather than clarifying it. Efforts to amend injustice and create a more just society they see as taking away something from them, diminishing them, and giving what was rightfully theirs to the undeserving and unworthy. While they deny institutional racism and white privilege, they see any challenge to them as oppression. They are "insulted" by Black Lives Matter, assuming that means only black lives matter, and cannot see the movement as a reaction to a society and history where black lives don't and have never mattered, while there was never any question about white lives, which have always mattered.
I think one of the things going on here is a kind of scarcity mentality: that there is only so much "stuff", material or opportunity, to go around, and if one group receives there has to be another that gets nothing, or nothing much. There is also a kind of failure of imagination — if old things can't be maintained as they were, the losses are huge and permanent, they can't be easily replaced. If coal and oil go, we are doomed to massive unemployment, there is little sense that the passing of these industries is both inevitable and well underway, and they are already being replaced by rapidly growing new industries — solar, wind, vehicles that won't rely on fossil fuels.
They see only destruction and loss. They are both terrified and furious, ripe for demagoguery, for the Big Lie that will weaponize their fear and rage, then use them to consolidate power in a totalitarian state. Reason, facts and argument will not persuade or dissuade them, and they have already become the Republican party, with both the flamboyant, unrepentant crazies filling high office, and the majority unwilling or afraid to step out of line, no matter how terrible or outrageous things become.
Things are very much in flux, and it's impossible to predict or be sure of our hopes for a good outcome, for the survival of a democratic state.
Interesting that the Bernie memes have been so prolific, so amusing, so much enjoyed. He sits there calm and wise, with those large mittens some Nana must have knitted...benevolent, reassuring, a visual icon of relief and sanity after the insurgent qAnon leaders in their fur hats and horns.
Oriana:
Add to this the toxic masculinity, bare chest being one of the emblems. Real men don’t need clothes — they need war paint!
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DICTATORSHIPS AND THE WAR ON FACTS
"The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You simply feed him “alternative facts.” The prisoner needs to think he is in paradise!
Compared to the War on Facts, all other “wars” are secondary. Orwell understood this perfectly. All dictators understand this. Lies are their primary tool.
**
Oriana:
But things are always more complex than they appear at first glance. Here is the story of one police officer who tried to defend the Capitol building.
“KILL HIM WITH HIS OWN GUN!”
(warning: graphic description of violence, though there is a “happy ending,” given the circumstances)
~ Blinded by smoke and choking on gas and bear spray, stripped of his radio and badge, D.C. police officer Michael Fanone and his battered colleagues fought to push back rioters trying to force their way into an entrance to the U.S. Capitol.
The officers had been at it for hours, unaware that others in the mob had already breached the building through different entrances. For them, the West Terrace doors — which open into a tunnel-like hallway allowing access to an area under the Rotunda — represented the last stand before the Capitol fell.
“Dig in!” Fanone yelled, his voice cracking, as he and others were being struck with their own clubs and shields, ripped from their hands by rioters. “We got to get these doors shut.”
An officer since 9/11, the 40-year-old Fanone, who has four daughters, had been working a crime-suppression detail in another part of the District on Jan. 6. He and his partner sped to the Capitol when dispatchers broadcast an urgent citywide emergency call.
“They were overthrowing the Capitol, the seat of democracy, and I f---ing went,” Fanone said.
Someone in the crowd grabbed Fanone’s helmet, pulled him to the ground and dragged him on his stomach down a set of steps. At around the same time, police said, the crowd pulled a second officer down the stairs. Police said that chaotic and violent scene was captured in a video that would later spread widely on the Internet.
Rioters swarmed, battering the officers with metal pipes peeled from scaffolding and a pole with an American flag attached, police said. Both were struck with stun guns. Fanone suffered a mild heart attack and drifted in and out of consciousness.
All the while, the mob was chanting “U.S.A.” over and over and over again.
“We got one! We got one!” Fanone said he heard rioters shout. “Kill him with his own gun!” ~
Oriana:
This is where the account on the Facebook page of Danusha Goska ends, and I have to rely on my memory of having read it on Newsworthy. Fanone still had the control of his gun, and could have tried shooting in self-defense. But he realized that he’d be quickly overpowered. Instead, he decided to appeal to what sense of humanity might be left in his would-be killers. He shouted: “I have kids!”
Then, according to his account when interviewed by CNN, “A group within the rioters circled Fanone and protected him until help arrived, saving his life.
"Thank you, but f*** you for being there," Fanone said of the rioters who protected him in that moment.”
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/14/politics/police-officers-capitol-riot-hodges-fanone/index.html
Can the same people be both monstrously evil and yet in the end show decency? In terms of this story, the question is rhetorical.
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“In my work with the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, I was searching for the nature of evil. Now I think I have come close to defining it. A LACK OF EMPATHY. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think is the absence of empathy.” ~ Captain G.M. Gilbert, the army psychologist assigned to observing the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials.
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THE “HIDDEN FIGURE” WHO REVOLUTIONIZED NAVAL SHIP DESIGN
~ Raye Montague was born on January 21, 1935 in Arkansas, and the gifted girl, who excelled at math and science, set her sights on her future career early: when her grandfather took the 7-year-old Montague to see a captured German submarine during WWII, she was fascinated by how it worked. "I looked through the periscope and saw all these dials and mechanisms. And I said to the guy, 'What do you have to know to do this?'" she recalled later. "He said, 'Oh, you’d have to be an engineer, but you don’t have to worry about that.'"
For a while, it seemed that he was right: when she graduated high school, she wasn't permitted to study engineering at the University of Arkansas because the engineering program didn't admit black students. Instead, she completed a degree in business and moved to Washington D.C. in 1956 to become a typist for the Navy. She continued to pursue her dream of becoming an engineer by taking night classes in computer programming and engineering.
Montague's job with the Navy seated her next to the department's UNIVAC I computer, where she learned how it worked by watching the male Ivy League graduates running the computer. At first, as she later recounted, Montague wasn't allowed to use the computer "because 'we' weren't supposed to touch that computer right? And because I was from Arkansas." One day when the engineers were all out sick, however, she proved that she was up for the challenge by running the machine by herself. Her boss grudgingly agreed to give her a promotion to work on engineering projects — if she worked the night shift. But there was no public transportation at night, and Montague couldn't drive. So she bought a 1949 Pontiac, taught herself how to drive, and worked nights until she got the promotion. Soon, she was appointed a computer systems analyst, and she continued to excel, despite many obstacles along the way.
The real test of Montague's mettle came in 1971 when she was given the daunting task of figuring out how to design a Naval ship using a computer — her boss didn't mention that his department had been unsuccessfully trying to accomplish this task for years. She ended up having to tear down the Navy's computer and rebuild it but, after months of work, she figured out how to create computer-generated ship designs.
After she proved it was possible, the admiralty asked her to create a rough draft for an actual ship. It normally took two years to produce a design of a ship on paper; they gave her a month and she finished the design in 18 hours and 56 minutes. In honor of her breakthrough in the ship design process, Montague was awarded the Navy’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1972.
Montague continued to climb the Navy's civilian ladder, becoming the program director for the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Integrated Design, Manufacturing, and Maintenance Program, the division head for the Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) Program, and deputy program manager of the Navy's Information Systems Improvement Program. She eventually earned the civilian equivalent rank of captain.
When Montague retired in 1990, her contributions were largely forgotten, but with the success of Hidden Figures, her name emerged as another example of an African American woman in technology whose work was critical to her country's success. She has since been recognized by the Navy and inducted into the Arkansas Women's Hall of Fame. She used her fame to tell people her story and urge them to persevere in their dreams: "Don’t let people control you, you control the situation," Montague said in an interview in 2018. "Change obstacles into challenges. You might have to step back and go a different direction, but you can achieve."
”The past is present first of all in the language we speak." ~ Hannah Arendt, 1969
Oriana:
Yes, and the future enters through language also: new words can announce subtle or radical shifts in consciousness.
THE TUNGUSKA EXPLOSION MYSTERY
~ In the early morning of June 30, 1908, a massive explosion flattened entire forests in a remote region of Eastern Siberia along the Tunguska River. Curiously, the explosion left no crater, creating a mystery that has puzzled scientists ever since — what could have caused such a huge blast without leaving any remnants of itself?
Now Daniil Khrennikov at the Siberian Federal University in Russia and colleagues have published a new model of the incident that may finally resolve the mystery. Khrennikov and colleagues say the explosion was caused by an asteroid that grazed the Earth, entering the atmosphere at a shallow angle and then passing out again into space.
“We argue that the Tunguska event was caused by an iron asteroid body, which passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and continued to the near-solar orbit,” they say. If they are correct, the theory suggests Earth escaped an even larger disaster by a hair’s breadth.
First some background. Scientists have long speculated on the cause of the Tunguska impact. Perhaps the most widely discussed idea is that the explosion was the result of an icy body, such as a comet, entering the atmosphere. The ice then rapidly heated up and evaporated explosively in mid-air but without ever hitting the ground.
Such an explosion could have been powerful enough to flatten trees without leaving a crater. And it would have left little evidence other than vapor in the atmosphere.
But this theory does not fit some of the other evidence. There were just a handful of eyewitness reports of the event. These describe how “the sky split in two,” a huge explosion and widespread fire. But together, they provide evidence that the impactor traveled some 435 miles (700 km) through the atmosphere before the explosion that morning.
So Khrennikov and colleagues simulated the effect of meteorites made of rock, metal or ice, moving through the atmosphere at a speed of 12 miles per second (20 kilometers per second). (Meteorites enter the atmosphere with a minimum speed of 11 kilometers per second.)
Friction with the atmosphere immediately heats these objects. But while iron vaporizes at around 5,432 degrees Fahrenheit (3000 degrees Centigrade), water vaporizes at only 212 degrees F (100 degrees C). So icy meteorites do not last long.
Indeed, Khrennikov and colleagues calculate that an icy body large enough to cause such a large explosion would have traveled no more than 186 miles (300 kilometers) through the atmosphere before vaporizing completely. That suggests the Tunguska meteorite could not have been made of ice.
Instead, Khrennikov and colleagues say a different scenario fits the facts. They say the explosion must have been caused by an iron meteorite about the size of a football stadium. This must have passed through the upper atmosphere, heated rapidly, and then passed out into the Solar System again. The shock wave from this trajectory was what flattened trees.
The shock wave would have caused an explosion of about the right magnitude, and any vaporized iron would have condensed into dust that would be indistinguishable on the ground. Crucially, this scenario would not have left any visible asteroid remnants.
It could also explain reports of dust in the upper atmosphere over Europe after the impact.
If Khrennikov and colleagues are correct, then Earth had a lucky near-miss that morning. A direct impact with a 656 foot-wide (200 meter-wide) asteroid would have devastated Siberia, leaving a crater 2 miles (3 kilometers) wide. It would also have had catastrophic effects on the biosphere, perhaps ending modern civilization.
In the event, the Tunguska impact is thought to have killed perhaps three people because the region is so remote. It could clearly have been much worse. ~
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/10/tunguska-explosion-in-1908-caused-by-asteroid-grazing-earth?utm_source=asyfb&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=asyfb&fbclid=IwAR14QgXmKiokWY3helSSe1aqBpuSpsFct5gtFv7829l82wiAK0AfZFsWdJI
~ Leonid Kulik led a scientific expedition to the Tunguska blast site in 1927. He hired local Evenki hunters to guide his team to the center of the blast area, where they expected to find an impact crater. To their surprise, there was no crater to be found at ground zero. Instead they found a zone, roughly 8 kilometers (5.0 mi) across, where the trees were scorched and devoid of branches, but still standing upright. Trees more distant from the center had been partly scorched and knocked down in a direction away from the center, creating a large radial pattern of downed trees.
Glancing impact hypothesis
In 2020 a group of Russian scientists used a range of computer models to calculate the passage of asteroids with diameters of 200, 100, and 50 meters at oblique angles across Earth's atmosphere. They used a range of assumptions about the object's composition as if it was made of iron, rock or ice. The model which most closely matched the observed event was an iron asteroid up to 200 meters in diameter, traveling at 11.2 km per second which glanced off the Earth's atmosphere and returned into solar orbit.
The explosion's effect on the trees near the hypocenter of the explosion was similar to the effects of the conventional Operation Blowdown. These effects are caused by the blast wave produced by large air-burst explosions. The trees directly below the explosion are stripped as the blast wave moves vertically downward, but remain standing upright, while trees farther away are knocked over because the blast wave is traveling closer to horizontal when it reaches them.
During the 1990s, Italian researchers extracted resin from the core of the trees in the area of impact to examine trapped particles that were present during the 1908 event. They found high levels of material commonly found in rocky asteroids and rarely found in comets.
A smaller air burst occurred over a populated area on 15 February 2013, at Chelyabinsk in the Ural district of Russia. The exploding meteoroid was determined to have been an asteroid that measured about 17–20 meters (56–66 ft) across, with an estimated initial mass of 11,000 tons and which exploded with an energy release of approximately 500 kilotons. The air burst inflicted over 1,200 injuries, mainly from broken glass falling from windows shattered by its shock wave. ~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
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DIFFERENT GOSPELS, DIFFERENT MEANING
~ “The author of Mark (who, by the way, was not really an apostle or named Mark) was most likely writing to a community that lived through the time of the Jewish revolt (and subsequent massacre). They also knew that, during his lifetime, Jesus was understood by his followers (even his disciples) to be the Jewish messiah—not one equal to God himself, but a figure like King David who would overthrow the Roman rule and usher in the Kingdom of God. But, they wondered, how could he be the messiah given that he was crucified? Mark gives them an answer: because no one at the time understood what it meant to be the messiah. Before Jesus was to usher in the Kingdom, God intended for him to suffer and die “as a ransom for many.” Only later would he return to establish the Kingdom.
Why didn’t people realize this at the time? Mark reinterprets (misremembers) Jesus’ life to make sense of this. Mark says that Jesus intentionally kept his mission a secret; and he did tell his disciples, but they were just too dumb to understand. That’s why Jesus death was such a surprise to everyone. Mark seems to be letting his readers in on this secret for the very first time. He is reinterpreting what it means to be the messiah, and misremembering Jesus life to fit into that interpretation.
According to Mark, God’s plan also included a subsequent era in which followers of Jesus would suffer just like he did (which Mark’s community was currently experiencing). But not to worry, says Mark. Jesus will be returning soon, in judgment, to fulfill is ultimate goal as messiah and finally establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. That’s the promise God had made, through Jesus, to the Christian community…according to Mark.
The gospel of John, on the other hand, is written (again, not by John) in a completely different era—an era when the early Christian expectation of the Jesus’ “imminent return” was nearly a century old and thus beginning to look a bit silly. As a result, John remembers Jesus’ life in a completely different way. Although John still thinks part of Jesus’ mission is to suffer and die, Jesus’ ultimate goal is not to overthrow Roman rule and establish an Earthly Kingdom of God. That’s not the promise John’s Jesus makes. He instead promised his followers eternal life after death. Think John 3:16.
To make this offer, Jesus must be one with God himself. And so in John, Jesus doesn’t keep his mission or his true nature a secret, like he does in Mark. In John, the main purpose of his ministry is to declare who he is (one with God himself), prove it by performing miracles, and then do what is necessary to grant this eternal life to his followers by suffering and dying. The resurrection is the final proof that he was telling the truth.
Ehrman draws an analogy between how Mark and John remembered Jesus and how people in the American North and South remember the civil war. For the former, it was a war brought on by southern rebellion, motivated by their desire to keep slavery legal. For the latter, it was the war of northern aggression, motivated by their desire to keep southern states from governing themselves. Same war, different memory.
For Mark, Jesus was someone who would deliver his community from their suffering and bring judgement on the political authorities who were suppressing them. For John, Jesus was someone who promised and provided the means to eternal life. Same guy, different memory.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/logical-take/201604/book-review-bart-ehrman-s-jesus-the-gospels
St. John the Evangelist by Domenico Zampieri (Domenichino)
Oriana:
Ehrman sees the “historical Jesus” (he opposes mythicism) as one of many apocalyptic preachers common around that time. Not that he thinks we can reliably extract a historical Jesus from the gospels (including those gospels that didn't make it to the canon), but he thinks there is a certain “gist” in those stories that adds up to an apocalyptic preacher.
The gospel of John, however, strikes out in a new direction, more relevant to the times and less Judaic. The promise of the Second Coming is now displaced in favor of eternal afterlife. Of course what really happened is that instead of the Coming of the Kingdom we got the Coming of the Church . . .
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DEBUNKING EXERCISE MYTHS: “JUST MOVE”
~ Daniel Lieberman is a professor in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. He says that the notion of "getting exercise" — movement just for movement's sake — is a relatively new phenomenon in human history.
"Until recently, when energy was limited and people were physically active, doing physical activity that wasn't necessarily rewarding, just didn't happen," Lieberman says. "When I go to these [remote African tribal] villages, I'm the only person who gets up in the morning and goes for a run. And often they laugh at me. They think I'm just absolutely bizarre. ... Why would anybody do something like that?"
Lieberman has spent a lot of time with indigenous hunter-gatherers in Africa and Latin America, cataloging how much time they spend walking, running, lifting, carrying and sitting. He writes about his findings, as well as the importance of exercise and the myths surrounding it in his new book, Exercised.
"If you actually look at what our ancestors do, they walk about 5 miles a day, which turns out to be, for most people, about 10,000 steps," Lieberman says.
Lieberman notes that many people are moving less than they did before the pandemic. He says if 10,000 steps feels out of reach, it's OK to shoot for less — just so long as you're focused on movement. Even fidgeting can keep your muscles engaged.
"The more we study physical activity, the more we realize that it doesn't really matter what you do," Lieberman says. "You don't have to do incredible strength training ... to get some benefits of physical activity. There's all different kinds of physical activity, and it's all good in different ways.”
On the demonizing of sitting as "the new smoking"
When I walk into a village in a remote part of the world where people don't have chairs or a hunter-gatherer camp, people are always sitting. ... Some friends and colleagues of mine actually put some accelerometers on some hunter-gatherers and found that they sit on average about 10 hours a day, which is pretty much the same amount of time Americans like me spend sitting.
So it turns out that I think we've kind of demonized sitting a little falsely. It's not unnatural or strange or weird to sit a lot, but it is problematic if, of course, that's all you do. As I started to explore the literature more, I was fascinated because most of the data that associates sitting a lot with poor health outcomes turns out to be leisure-time sitting. So if you look at how much time people spend sitting at work, it's not really that associated with heart disease or cancers or diabetes. But if you look at how much people sit when they're not at work, well, then the numbers get a little bit scary.
On the importance of “interrupted sitting”
Just getting up every once in a while, every 10 minutes or so — just to go to the bathroom or pet your dog or make yourself a cup of tea — even though you're not spending a lot of energy, you're turning on your muscles. And your muscles, of course, are the largest organ in your body — and just turning them on turns down inflammation. It uses up fats in your bloodstream and sugars in your bloodstream, and it produces molecules that turn down inflammation.
So the evidence is that interrupted sitting is really the best way to sit. In hunter-gatherer camps, people are getting up every few minutes, to take care of the fire or take care of a kid or something like that. And that kind of interrupted sitting, as well as not sitting in a chair that's kind of nestling your body and preventing you from using any muscles, all that kind of keeps your muscles going and turns out to be a much healthier way to sit.
On how chairs with backs have contributed to our back pain
We all think that it's normal for a chair to have a seat back. But until recently, only really rich people — the pope or the king — had a chair with a seat back. Until recently, all human beings pretty much either sat on the ground or, if they did have chairs, they were stools or benches or things like that. ...
The reason it matters for our health is that a seat back essentially makes sitting even more passive than just sitting on a bench or a stool because you lean against the seat back and you're using even fewer muscles, even less effort to stabilize your upper body. And the result is that we end up having very weak backs. So there are a lot of muscles that we use in our backs to hold up our upper body, and those muscles, if we don't use them, just like every other muscle in your body, they atrophy. And weak muscles then make us more prone to back pain.
In fact, studies show that the best predictor of whether or not somebody gets lower-back pain — and most of us do get lower-back pain — is whether or not we have weak and, importantly, fatigable backs. I think sitting a lot on chairs with backrests contributes to that.
On the idea that running is bad for your knees
There's this kind of general idea out there that running is like driving your car too much — [that] it's wear and tear, and that running is highly stressful and it just wears away your cartilage, just like driving your car for a long period of time wears out your springs, for example. And that turns out not to be true.
Study after study has shown that in terms of "wear" — by which we really mean arthritis, degeneration of the cartilage in your joints — that people who run more are not more likely to get arthritis in their knees. In fact, they're actually slightly less likely to get arthritis, because using your cartilage, using your joints, using your muscles, strength, all the good benefits from physical activity actually turn out to be slightly protective.
That said, it's also true that the most common site of injury for runners is their knees. But a lot of those injuries, I think, are preventable by learning to run properly. We don't treat running as a skill in our culture. We just give people shoes and tell them to head out the door, and some people run really well and some people don't run that well — or their bodies aren't really well-adapted to running, and then they get into trouble. But in terms of wear and tear, I think we can dispel that myth completely.
On becoming frail with age
I think one of the most important points about physical activity is that as we age, it becomes not less but more important to be physically active. Muscle atrophy is the perfect example.
We have this notion that as you get older, you retire, you go to Florida, you kick your feet up on the beach or whatever. ... We have plenty of evidence that older individuals in America are less physically active and they do fewer activities that involve strength. And one of the really sort of serious negative consequences of that is that our muscles dwindle, they atrophy.
There's a technical term for that, which I think is illuminating — it's called "sarcopenia." Sarco means "flesh" in Greek and penia means "loss" — so "flesh loss." But basically it's frailty. And as we get older and become more frail, a vicious circle sets in because because we walk more slowly, it's harder to get out of a chair and that makes us even less likely to be physically active, which keeps that cycle going. So that's the bad news.
But the good news is that it doesn't take a huge amount of physical activity to kind of reverse that, turn it around. Think about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was celebrated for her vim and vigor, which meant that a lot of that came from the fact that she kept working out and as she got older, she went to the gym several times a week. Now, she didn't do crazy, "pump iron" stuff. She wasn't trying to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But she did a few rounds of weight training every week and that helped keep her marvelously active and vigorous up until her late 80s. And the mechanisms that get turned on when we do a little bit of strength training don't diminish with age. So if you're in your 80s or 90s and you do a little bit of strength training, you'll still get enormous benefits.
On the stress around getting eight hours of sleep a night
I used to say this to my students, that Thomas Edison robbed us of sleep. We invented electricity, and now we have iPhones and televisions and all these things that keep us up at night and that we didn't used to do. But it turns out that people who live in places where there is no electricity and there no iPhones and there's no TV — turns out they don't sleep any more than the average American. I think the number is 6.7 to 7.1 hours on average at night. And they often don't nap either, by the way, which is something we're also told. If you look at the data, there's no evidence that people [on average] sleep less today than they used to.
And furthermore, to my astonishment, when you look at big epidemiological data sets where you graph how much you sleep on the horizontal axis and your health outcomes on the Y axis, it's a U-shaped curve. And the bottom of that curve is about seven hours. Of course, there's a lot of variation. Some people need more, some people need less.
So I think sleep is another one of those examples of how we make people exercise. We make them stressed about what they should be doing, and there's a lot of "virtue signaling" going on. If you tell somebody they're not getting enough sleep and they actually are getting enough sleep, you just make them stressed ... that elevates cortisol. Cortisol is the hormone that's about arousal. Cortisol prevents you from sleeping. [So by worrying about getting enough sleep] we get into this kind of vicious circle.
So, while it's true that people who don't get enough sleep, that can be a problem, getting three, four, maybe five hours of sleep a night can be detrimental and it's an issue ... if you're getting six, seven hours of sleep and you feel fine, I think we should all relax and stop being so uncompassionate to each other. ~ Daniel Lieberman, professor in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard.
Make no mistake about it: this book was written by a jogger. It's still of great value for those of us who feel great relief when we read about "interrupted sitting." Simply engaging our muscles in the course of daily life absolves us from the guilt of "sitting is the new smoking."
My favorite paragraph:
"The more we study physical activity, the more we realize that it doesn't really matter what you do,"
Lieberman says. "You don't have to do incredible strength training ...
to get some benefits of physical activity. There's all different kinds
of physical activity, and it's all good in different ways.”
*
BERBERINE, A SUPPLEMENT THAT RIVALS METFORMIN
~ One of the main actions of berberine is to activate an enzyme inside cells called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). [adenosine monophosphate protein kinase]
This enzyme is sometimes referred to as a “metabolic master switch.”
It is found in the cells of various organs, including the brain, muscle, kidney, heart and liver. This enzyme plays a major role in regulating metabolism.
Berberine also affects various other molecules inside cells, and may even affect which genes are turned on or off.
BERBERINE CAUSES A MAJOR REDUCTION IN BLOOD SUGAR LEVELS.
Over time, high blood sugar levels can damage the body’s tissues and organs, leading to various health problems and a shortened lifespan.
Berberine seems to work via multiple different mechanisms:
Decreases insulin resistance, making the blood sugar lowering hormone insulin more effective.
Increases glycolysis, helping the body break down sugars inside cells.
Decrease sugar production in the liver.
Slows the breakdown of carbohydrates in the gut.
Increases the number of beneficial bacteria in the gut.
Berberine also appears to inhibit the growth of fat cells at the molecular level.
It lowers LDL cholesterol and raises HDL cholesterol.
It has also been shown to lower apolipoprotein B by 13-15%, which is a very important risk factor.
According to some studies, berberine works by inhibiting an enzyme called PCSK9. This leads to more LDL being removed from the bloodstream.
OTHER HEALTH BENEFITS
Depression: Rat studies show that it may help fight depression.
Cancer: Test tube and animal studies have shown that it can reduce the growth and spread of various different types of cancer.
Antioxidant and anti-inflammatory: It has been shown to have potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects in some studies.
Infections: It has been shown to fight harmful microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites.
Fatty liver: It can reduce fat build-up in the liver, which should help protect against non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
Heart failure: One study showed that it drastically improved symptoms and reduced risk of death in heart failure patients.
Many of these benefits need more research before firm recommendations can be made, but the current evidence is very promising. ~
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/berberine-powerful-supplement#TOC_TITLE_HDR_9
Oriana:
There are currently two known anti-aging drugs: metformin and rapamycin. Metformin is widely used to treat diabetes. Diabetic patients who use metformin tend to live longer than non-diabetics. Animal studies have confirmed that metformin extends life span as effectively as calorie restriction.
Rapamycin is rarely prescribed, It regulates the immune system, which becomes a hazard to us past a certain age, becoming overactive in the wrong way and causing auto-immune diseases. A lot of common disease of aging have a large autoimmune component. But to qualify for rapamycin, it’s best to be a kidney transplant patient.
And, alas, I don’t know of any supplement that can act as an equivalent of rapamycin, though a diet low in animal protein helps, as do the vegetables in the cabbage family (blessed be broccoli and bok choy, and possibly curcumin and D3).
Given the enormous cost of the diseases of aging, it would make perfect sense to prescribe both metformin and rapamycin to all seniors, but such an enlightened action seems too radical in terms of the current medical mentality — and of course it would cut into the profits of Big Pharma.
Fortunately there is a supplement equivalent of metformin. I became convinced of berberine’s benefits when my lab results (especially blood sugar and cholesterol) astonished my primary physician. My fasting blood sugar, which used to hang around 100 or slightly above, was suddenly down to 70. Lower (but still normal) blood sugar means less damage to body tissues through glycation, and a lower risk of obesity.
(Hope for hypertension: one study also showed that taking berberine together with the drug amlodipine [a calcium-channel blocker like magnesium but without magnesium’s laxative action) lowers blood pressure more effectively than amlodipine alone. This helps prevent the prescribing of a whole cocktail of anti-hypertensive drugs, all with side effects).
Addendum:
Progesterone suppresses the mTOR pathway and promotes generation of induced regulatory T cells with increased stability
*
ending on beauty
The forest, letting me walk among its naked
limbs, had me on my knees again in silence
shouting — yes, yes my holy friend,
let your splendor devour me.
~ Hafiz
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