Bee-eaters *
THE IMMOMRTALIST
In memory of Richard E. Lee, teacher and shaman
“I am in trouble with the school system
because I believe we are immortal,”
my old English professor tells me,
the one who taught immortality
and creative writing.
Metaphysics washes off in the shower,
but not love for the body’s baroque
nooks and notches, sneezes, belly growls —
the soul’s helpless love
for the body’s animal forgiveness.
Is that what he meant, this elf
in his graying nimbus?
I offered the wisdom of youth:
“Only our yearning is immortal,
wings of Eros like an upswept flame” —
He scribbled: “Be more vulgar.
I’m a sucker for frustrated lipstick.
P.S. I hope you get laid.”
*
He said, “Don’t let dying stop you
from doing what you love.”
He died on winter solstice,
squeezing through the shortening daylight
into another space-time
not taught by the school system.
“Life without poetry,” he said,
“that would be like sleeping
without dreaming.” Before the
diagnosis, he dreamed about
a train wreck. And knew.
And ordered coffee and croissants.
After he sent me that last poem,
I wanted to call him to say,
“Don’t die. Be more vulgar.”
But he was already
luminous, beyond distinction.
~ Oriana
Mary:
What a wonderful story in this poem! And what great advice..we spend too much time worrying about death, measuring our lives against their inevitable end when what is important is not to let death stop you from living fully, enjoying life, doing what you love, following your passion. And the perfect example here...when he knew death was near he “ordered coffee and croissants.” This is not bravery but wisdom, living until you die, and not a moment sooner.
*
WHY EVEN SOME MEN BECOME JANE AUSTEN FANS
~ I came to Jane Austen late. As a lifelong reader, I do not have a simple explanation for this omission, but when my family decided to read Pride and Prejudice as a family reading project soon after the pandemic forced us into isolation, I jumped at the chance to fill in the gap in my literacy.
Once I found my footing in her language, I was hooked. I put aside the other books I had been reading and devoted myself to Jane. I followed Pride and Prejudice with Emma and then Persuasion in quick succession. Each one was a true page-turner, great storytelling, with the added heft of sharp social commentary in language that is elegant, intricate, and comforting at the same time, a combination that seemed lacking in the other books I had been reading during the pandemic. And as the father of two daughters, I felt a special kind of admiration for Austen’s young heroines, who seem somehow of their age and modern at the same time.
Particularly Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who fits but does not fit, who reads, who observes with some humor the people around her and the world they inhabit. And who in one of everyone’s favorite scenes, stands up to the imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh, in a way even more modern heroines would be proud to emulate.
It may be that “men who read,” potential Janeites, are turned off by Austen’s sometimes brutal treatment of her male characters. I for one am mostly embarrassed, occasionally appalled, at the often vain, vapid, supercilious and small-minded men who populate Austen’s books, characters like Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion or Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice.
But Austen spares no one and there are many female characters who fit that description as well. And by necessity, there are a few good men, often matches for the heroines, since the books do end in traditional marriages. But the description of Sir Walter that opens Persuasion was almost enough for me to abandon the book entirely. Obsessed with rank, his place in society, and impossibly vain, “He [Sir Walter] considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.” And that is one of Austen’s milder descriptions of this ridiculous man. I overcame my discomfort to read on and am so happy I did.
Men who find Austen tend to do so later in life than women readers, according to Kiefer. That is certainly true for me. But the male reader’s resistance to Austen seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Professor Golden told me that until the mid-20th century, men were great readers of Austen. And Austen’s novels were even shipped to British soldiers on the front in both World Wars, in editions made specially to fit in the pockets of their uniforms.
The healing or soothing powers of Austen’s writing have long been recognized, according to Professor Golden. Not only were British soldiers on the front sent copies of Austen, soldiers suffering from shell shock (or what would now be known as PTSD) were given her novels to aid in the rehabilitation process. Rudyard Kipling, a great admirer of Austen’s work, even wrote a story about a group of soldiers reading Austen (The Janeites, published in 1924).
Her novels are more than good stories, even to the casual reader. Her caustic commentary on class and certain other of the social ills of her time transcends mere escapism and makes her books a worthy diversion in difficult days. Austen’s commentary on the role and plight of women, even women of privilege, is just as relevant today as it was two hundred years ago. Which I suppose is sad in and of itself. Her insights into human emotion, “free and direct discourse,” according to Professor Golden, take us directly into the minds of her characters and provide an immediacy that speaks to readers today, human nature and emotion not having changed so much from Austen’s time.
Austen’s language is often biting, but it is also a relief from the loud vulgarity that passes for some commentary today. Perhaps that sounds old-fashioned, but there is peace to be found there, in the pacing, the restraint, the poetry and elegance that is a product of another time entirely. And of course, of Austen’s genius. Austen depicts a highly regimented society, her characters bound by an intricate web of rules. I would not want to live in that time, but as a fiction it is a welcome counterpoint to the chaos that seems to surround us today.
There is a politesse or etiquette that is both suffocating and appealing, requiring her characters to remain in control of their behavior no matter how roiling their inner turmoil. Austen’s villains violate these accepted social norms in gross ways, while the heroines (and a few heroes) stray in small ways that loom large in the narrow world in which her characters live. And in a strange parallel to our circumscribed lives during the pandemic, Austen’s world like ours is limited, both geographically and by social order.
As it turns out, the rest of my family have not yet gotten back to Pride and Prejudice, although they delight in my conversion to Austen. And while some things seem to be looking up in our world since I finished reading Persuasion, recent events are sufficiently dire as to demand a worthy if occasional distraction from the deadly seriousness of events around us. Jane Austen is just the thing. I am off to read Northanger Abbey. ~
The Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice
“From the first moment I met you, your arrogance and conceit, your selfish disdain for the feelings of others, made me realize you were the last man in the world that I could ever be prevailed upon to marry” ~ Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice
After P&P, I went straight to S&S (Sense and Sensibility). Frankly, I enjoyed it more than P&P. It's probably my favorite Austen. I say "probably," since I read Austen in a different stage of my life, and I'm not sure if I'd enjoy the novel as much if I were to re-read it.
*
MUCH DEPENDS ON HOW YOU ANSWER THIS QUESTION
~ How the world sees you is largely determined by how you see the world. How the world treats you depends on how it sees you. So it follows that how you’re treated depends in no small part on how you see things. And that’s something you can control.
If you see fun and laughter in things where they’re less obvious, and pluck out the fun and funny from the rough and chaos, then you’re the fun person and the funny one. You’ll be treated more positively socially as a result. Broaden that out to life as a whole, and we get our outlook on life.
WHAT’S THE QUESTION?
It’s this: Why me? But it’s how we ask it that’s important.
When something bad happens, we can ask the question in two ways:
Why me? Why does this always happen to me? What have I done to deserve this pain? It’s so unfair? Why me, again?!
Why me? What is this here to teach me? What can I gain from this and learn from it? Why has this frustrating thing come to me specifically, to prepare me for? This teacher has come to me now. Why me?
If you’re the kind of person who feels like a victim, you’ll ask it in the first way. What will you get from that? Just self-pity and vultures.
If you ask it in the second way, you stand to gain a lot. To learn a lot and to grow from the uncertainty. You’ll be antifragile, in the words of author Nassim Taleb.
To be antifragile is to grow from stress and uncertainty instead of break like something fragile. A muscle is a great example – we work them harder than they’re used to, and they grow stronger under pressure. Our lives will react in a similar way if we ask the question in the second way. The pressure and uncertainty will make us grow.
We’ll be a more positive person, more effective and less prone to suffering from our problems. We can’t escape suffering in life, but we can often decide what to do with it, and even choose what suffering we even want. Asking why me? in this way is a way to leverage suffering and uncertainty to our advantage.
Victim or victor, as author John O’Leary puts it in his book On Fire.
LOOK TO WHAT WE HAVE, NOT WHAT WE LACK
If we look at what we have and ask the question, we reassure ourselves that we have the resources to deal with whatever it is, and can grow those resources.
If we look to what we lack, we’ll get stressed and pass up the opportunity to grow. The opportunity to be the victor, not the victim.
This has direct parallels to the ideas of gratitude and its benefits on mental health and happiness, now well-established by research.
You see it a lot in self-improvement as a whole. People see what they need to improve instead of how far they’ve come, which has the opposite of the desired effect. It’s the biggest own-goal in self-improvement.
THE WORLD WILL SEE HOW YOU SEE THE WORLD
Remember the fun and funny person who sees the world in that way, and so is seen as a fun and funny person? Now apply that to how someone answers that question. See yourself as a victim and that’s how you’ll be seen. The vultures will know who to feast on, and the victim mentality will be reinforced. You’ll be a victim to circumstances and then the vultures and conmen. A victim to your own worldview.
Ask the question in the other way, and you’ll see resources in yourself and positive opportunities in the world. You’ll project strength. That’s how the world will see you too. Even if the vultures succeed, you can walk away having learned from the experience, and ward them off next time. Even vultures can be teachers.
If you want to be seen as a positive and resourceful person, you have to first see the world in that way. Then people will treat you in such a way that they’d expect you to respond positively, you do, and life gets better. That’s the self-fulfilling prophecy at work, bringing you positivity because that’s what you and the world now expects.
WHY ME?
Just before the pandemic hit, I was on the brink of financing a movie I’d written, and was ready to make it on the other side of the world. I was excited to start travel writing too. Another script was looking promising for funding. Covid took it all away.
Why did this happen to me? Because life is unfair and I’m a victim? Because bad things always happen to me? No. Of course I’d have preferred for it to all work out, but it didn’t. My options?
To be frustrated throughout lockdown, furious at the world for ruining my dreams,
or
To be incredibly grateful that no one I know has died of Covid. To spend the time improving my writing, and learning to help people better. To start earning money outside the entertainment industry so I can travel and write regardless of whether the film funding returns. To save and be excited for the adventures to follow, with better skills and new friends around the world, found because everyone was driven online for social lives.
To be grateful. And happy.
EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON, BUT NOT A MAGICAL ONE
I don’t believe that everything happens for a god-given or mystical reason. It’s more useful and healthy to see things without the uncontrollable nature of the supernatural. Then you can apply your own reasons, and be in control of them. Everything happens for a reason, and that reason is whatever you choose. Choose the reason that’s most useful to for your narrative to achieve your goals or life changes.
Of course the pandemic has happened to everyone else too, but to me, it’s happening to me. That’s all I’ve got direct experience of. I can see it happening to everyone else, but I can’t experience it. It’s happening to everyone, and that includes me. What’s the reason it’s happened to me? That’s up to me to decide.
I can decide it’s because bad things always happen to me. Or I can decide that it’s because I’ve been gifted some time to reassess and learn new skills. Including to be grateful more. To be happier.
Why me? What’s the teacher? This: I want to make a living from writing, and I wasn’t good enough before. This year has turned that around. I’m a better writer now. Maybe. You be the judge of that.
Everything happens for a reason – and I choose that reason. Why me? I wasn’t good enough, and I was gifted an opportunity amongst the madness to sort that out before I flew 7000 miles to fail.
How does this affect how the world sees and treats me? You would see me quite differently if this piece had been about the pandemic ruining my plans and I’d written a five-minute pity-piece. You’d probably never come back to see anything else I write. Your worldview affects how the world sees you and treats you.
So next time things seem to go wrong, ask yourself Why me? Just make sure you’re asking it in the right way.
The world will see you doing it, and treat you better for it, too. ~ Alexander Combstrong
Mary:
The importance of how you answer the question "why me?" is convincing. I think of a family I know of who have experienced several tragedies, among them a son who committed suicide, and another who died young of esophageal cancer.
They could only answer that question in terms of its unfairness, its horrible injustice, and never in terms of "what can this teach me?" The result of this is that they saw themselves as completely powerless, without agency to change or control their lives. Seeing themselves as helpless eternal victims actually became an obstacle preventing change, cementing them in their passive and pitiful role.
Of course this stance communicates to the world, contributing to and reinforcing their victimhood. They are seen as the "losers" they believe they are, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one expects much from them, and they fulfill that expectation, full partners in their own defeat. And because they never asked what tragedy could teach them, they never saw what choices contributed to those tragedies---heavy smoking habits, a phenomenally poor diet, neglect of preventative health measures, etc. All of these things continued in full force, sure to contribute to future tragedies, which will again convince them only of their unjust victimization.
*
THE DISCOURAGING STATISTICS ON MARRIAGE
~ The book Happy Ever After: The Myth of the Perfect Life by Paul Dolan made a splash when it came out in 2019. It was reviewed in several major news outlets. The chapter that attracted most attention, perhaps, was the one on marriage. In it, Dolan suggested that marriage is bad for women's happiness.
Studies that compare subjective satisfaction among married and unmarried people tend to find that married people and those in committed relationships are happier than those who are single, and this seems true of both men and women, although the effects are not large. However, these types of comparisons are misleading since happier people are also more likely to get married. So we can expect higher levels of happiness among married people even if marriage does not increase anyone’s happiness.
A better approach would be to follow the same people over time and see how marriage impacts their happiness. Some studies that adopt this method find what has been dubbed the " honeymoon effect ": an increase in happiness in the leadup to a marriage and the period shortly after but a gradual waning of the effect later. A similar pattern has been observed in other circumstances. We adjust to major life events, both good and bad, and over time, tend to revert to our baseline level of happiness, an effect known as the “ hedonic treadmill.”
Another study that followed the same people over time found a long-lasting positive correlation between marriage (as well as stable-long term relationships without marriage) and happiness. However, the effect was much larger for people who saw their spouse as their best friend compared to those who didn’t.
When it comes to marital happiness, much depends on how close one is, emotionally, with one’s partner. The best marriages and long-term relationships – the unions of soulmates – seem to make people, men and women, happier. Mediocre marriages, or those full of turmoil, may do the opposite. Getting married, then, is a bit like playing the lottery.
What are the odds of winning? Statistically, they are not great: 40-50% of marriages, in the U.S. at least, end in divorce (more often initiated by women ), and that's not counting the couples who stay married but are estranged. So the chance any given marriage would last is about 1 in 2. The chance a marriage would not only last but be a happy one are smaller.
Why are happy marriages a rarity?
There is a long conversation to be had about this, but consider the following: attractiveness seems unequally distributed. A handful of people are attractive to many while a large number are desirable to few. Attractiveness may be particularly unequally distributed among men. According to one finding, while heterosexual male Tinder users "liked" the profiles of the majority of women, 78% of heterosexual female Tinder users "liked" the profiles of only 20% of men. This pattern is not encouraging. It appears that the majority of women are competing for a small proportion of men, at least on Tinder, which means that few people, men or women, are likely to find suitable dates on the site.
It could be that the asymmetry between men and women on Tinder is driven by different goals in using the app, e.g., it may be that women are more selective because they are looking for a long-term relationship while men are more often interested in casual dating and so set the bar lower. But whether attractiveness is highly unequally distributed among men only or both men and women, the stats do not bode well for the prospect of finding a desirable partner on anyone's part, at least on a dating app.
We must be cautious in interpreting the Tinder evidence, however. It should not be taken to mean that only a small percent of people can ever find a desirable partner. It is quite possible that users overlook the dating profiles of people they could come to deeply love and be loved by. But that points to yet another way in which luck plays a role here: We must not only happen to meet a potential soulmate but recognize that person when we encounter him or her.
And what are the signs?
Sometimes it happens, as it did for my spouse and me, and when it does, marriage is wonderful. My point is that whether it does or not is largely a matter of luck. We can do certain things to increase our chances of building a lasting, loving relationship. I have argued elsewhere that we don't help ourselves by never making a commitment or by focusing on minor flaws in the relationship. But there is only so much one can control.
THE GOOD AND NOT SO GOOD NEWS
While finding love is not easy, we can be perfectly happy single. In one UK study, 61% of single women and 49% of single men reported being happy with their relationship status, and the percentages can be higher if we combat the singlehood stigma. This brings me to my last point.
Some parents and friends put pressure on single people to get married. If we truly had single people's interests at heart, a better strategy would be to respect their choices and make it easier to be unpartnered. Among other things, this may reduce the number of failed marriages as fewer will marry for the wrong reasons.
It is, perhaps, surprising that singlehood continues to be stigmatized given that a third of U.S. adults are single . Some single people feel lonely on family holidays. It doesn't have to be this way. It is this way, because the streets become empty on such nights as Christmas Eve. Many single people are averse to the idea of being seen out alone just then. But if everyone who'd rather go out did so, the streets would be as busy as ever. When towns fall silent, we get the impression that everyone is home with their family. This isn’t true. Everyone is home, but millions are home alone.
*
MEET THE REAL BLUE-BLOODS
Oriana:
Horseshoe crabs also have blue copper-based blood.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/horseshoe-crab-blood-miracle-vaccine-ingredient.html
Mary:
Octopi are as close to alien life as we get.
*
HOW THE UNITED STATES ROSE TO BE THE LEADING ECONOMY
~ In the United States, the pursuit of profit was woven into the founding fabric, not as explicitly as the pursuit of happiness but there all the same. The Jeffersonian ideal was a nation of yeoman farmers guarding their freedoms and independence, but it was Alexander Hamilton’s financial system that ultimately defined the economy. Following the Revolutionary War and then the War of 1812, which sealed American independence, the United States began its ascent to become the world’s largest economy within little more than a century.
How that happened has been a source of constant debate. Perhaps it was a function of a vastly fruitful continent, the lack of regional competition, the protection afforded by two oceans, the influx of immigrants who brought their own dreams and ambitions and then inscribed those on a new nation, or none of those or all of them. But perhaps the key lies in one of Alexis de Tocqueville’s many piercing observations: “I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts.”
One of the prerequisites for rapid economic growth is capital. Land, property and labor are all vital, but none are liquid. For much of human history, wealth locked up in land and property was rarely turned into productive capital to fund businesses or ideas. That began to change in the 19th century, and the United States was ground zero for the shift. Money, especially in the form of paper promises, was a fuel. In the United States, making money and putting it in motion came easily, often too easily. Money flooded markets, and then receded. It unlocked potential, and then unleashed havoc. Unburdened by an entrenched aristocracy of land or church, and with the Jeffersonian ideal of yeoman farmers shunted aside in favor of a Hamiltonian economy, 19th-century America became a land of money.
Until the Civil War, it wasn’t federal money. There were coins minted by the federal government, but those floated in a sea of paper promises issued by different banks and merchant firms such as Brown Brothers. Coins mattered, but paper was everywhere. It was a bewildering mix, kaleidoscopic and constantly changing. There is always a tension between order and chaos, and it is hard to find the right balance between just enough chaos to nurture innovation and enough order to keep everything from unwinding. Hence the sharp and constant economic crises of the 19th century.
But that roiling, unsettling and harmful though it could be, was outweighed by the advantages. If you had a good idea in America, you had a better chance than anywhere in the world of finding money to fund it. Capital rarely flowed evenly; the 1870s and 1880s were flush with capital for the railroads but not so much for the working class or the farmers. Throughout the 19th century, there was paper money and credit, but there was also gold and silver, land and labor. The United States was fluid compared with the Old World, but it was easier to lose a fortune or never make one than to ascend the heights.
Brown Brothers acted as a conduit. From early in the 19th century, it became one of the primary channels through which money flowed. And flow it did, to merchants and their ships, to cotton plantations and to railroads and new farms and new towns and new businesses in the sprawling vastness of the continent. Brown Brothers facilitated that trade, first between Liverpool and Baltimore, and then once off-loaded by stevedores onto wagons, from Baltimore to the Ohio Valley. It funded, with offices in England and the Americas, successive generations of ocean-crossing vessels, some of which it owned outright, and for a brief moment, the house had a monopoly on the shipment of the Royal Mail from England to the United States.
The Browns spurred the birth of transatlantic steamships and underwrote the Collins Line, which might have surpassed Cunard had it not been for a tragic accident. They created the first railroad, the one we all know from games of Monopoly, the Baltimore & Ohio line, the B&O. They expanded to Philadelphia and to New York, and their reach grew. They were financial innovators and one of the largest cotton merchants in the world. So influential was Brown Brothers by the mid-19th century that when the thunderous celebrity preacher Henry Ward Beecher wanted to make a point from his pulpit in Brooklyn, he constructed an entire sermon lambasting his congregants for placing more faith in letters of credit issued by Brown Brothers than they did in God.
Brown Brothers was, in short, woven into the economic fabric of 19th-century America, its transportation network and its trade, with the cotton South and the agrarian West, with England and by extension with the rest of the world. It provided the credit that was more trusted than the notes issued by governments or the promises printed with abandon by the wildcat banks that dotted the American frontier. Paper issued by the House of Brown was essential to commerce, and without trusted paper, trade at the scale and scope required would have been impossible. The Browns determined exchange rates, and they provided travelers with letters to use abroad, which was a necessary prerequisite to a more interconnected world.
Wherever American commerce flowed, Brown Brothers was there to keep it flowing. It didn’t just make money for itself; it made money for America. And without money, there would be no rise of the United States as a global power.
Alexander Brown and his sons had helped create the first American railroad in the 1830s, but they largely eschewed the railroad boom in the decades after the 1860s. Fortunes were there to be made, but most of the railroads went bust, leaving their investors with worthless stocks. The innate caution of Brown Brothers prevented them from reaching the heights of J.P. Morgan, but it almost certainly protected them from being deluged by waves of bankruptcies and failures. Then the Great Depression hit.
The merger of Brown Brothers and Harriman blended two distinct cultures born of different paths to success. In the late 19th century, the lasting money was usually made by those who picked up the pieces after the initial railroad investors had lost everything, which was how E. H. Harriman built his empire. He was, in the 1890s, the nouveau riche, crass and aggressive, a rough and tough bundle of intensity. He courted attention where the partners of Brown Brothers avoided it. But while Edward Harriman and Alexander Brown could hardly have been more unalike, by the time Harriman’s fortune merged with the House of Brown in the 1930s, the world of his sons and of the next generations of Browns was more similar than not, nurtured by a small set of boarding schools and colleges that distilled the values of their fathers into a coherent, rigid web of money, duty and service that became the backbone of “the Establishment.”
The world this elite created after 1945 was not by design or intent. After the ravages of the Depression and a harrowing war, the United States found itself with immense relative power confronted by an adversary in the Soviet Union that was championing a system antithetical to its own. Whether the conflict of the Cold War was inevitable, Brown Brothers and the Establishment saw no other path. To meet the challenge, they distilled a formula to defend the world they knew and that they believed would serve everyone just as it had served them. The framework they erected unleashed the productive capital of the world, and established the foundation for the globalization of commerce and capital that so defined the rest of the twentieth century and the beginning of the 21st.
Having reached the apex of its influence in the years immediately following World War II, Brown Brothers, by the end of the 20th century, had faded in relevance. Its competitors, the firms of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and so many others, elected to go public in the 1980s, turning what had been skin-in-the-game partnerships into publicly traded entities relying on shareholder capital instead of their own. Those firms used that money. They accumulated almost unprecedented wealth, and they courted attention. That allowed them to outstrip Brown Brothers in size and scope, and, perhaps most critically, in greed and ambition. And then, in 2008, they almost destroyed the system they had made and that had made them.
Brown Brothers Harriman stayed out of that fray. Today the firm remains a large global financial institution with more than five thousand employees across the world. Its business has changed radically. It now acts as a custodian for trillions of dollars of global assets, a large amount of money that earns the firm relatively small but steady fees. Its culture revolves around service. In cleaving to the idea of a partnership, the company didn’t join the drunken capital party of the 1990s and 2000s and never rose so high that it could jeopardize the entire financial system. In that crucial sense, it stands as a reminder of what once was, and perhaps what all these banks should have remained.
Mention the firm today, and many wonder if it still exists, if they wonder at all; others shake their heads and sigh as if to say, “How sad.” It is not at all. Given how close the global financial system came to the abyss in 2008‒9, and given that it was caused by the detachment of personal gain from public risk, the quiet continuance of Brown Brothers Harriman is a lesson for what capitalism can be. It provided the fuel, and it also set boundaries.
For sure, its particular ethos of service could mask a multitude of sins. Without question, it was self-serving and self-enriching, but more often than not it also served the needs of society at large. That was not without its own excesses. The firm was crucial to the cotton trade, and cotton depended on the labor of enslaved men and women. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Brown Brothers plunged into financing businesses and banks in Central America, indifferent to the disruptions that ensued, and then worked closely with the U.S. government to overthrow a government that threatened its investments. That was the darker side of how money made the world.
We live in a time when we have all become acutely aware of the role of capital as the glue binding our economy and as tinder that can cause it to implode. Spread widely, it can be a ballast; spread too unevenly, it can open fissures. Money can create a nation; it can energize technology revolutions, from the steamships and the railroads to the internet and the smartphone.
But it can also unleash greed and deluge industries and countries, causing shocks that can shake society to its core. It can spread wealth but also concentrate it. It is indifferent to inequality. Nonetheless, the American formula, a capitalism distilled in the mid-20th century composed of rules and laws designed by Americans and cemented by the dollar, has been the formula for the world, from a China governed by the Communist Party whose economy is capitalist to the core, to a Nigeria whose government may be corrupt but whose society is market driven, from Scandinavian countries whose social contract flirts with socialism to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East that suppress expression but court investment.
Fiat money and the dollar are the bedrock of the global system, and Brown Brothers is part of the underwritten history of how that world came to be. Money is the power contained in the atom, which is why having people who believe their role is to serve the greater good and consider themselves stewards is a necessary prerequisite for a stable society. The Hippocratic oath does not guarantee that doctors will do good, but it tries to ensure that they knowingly do no harm. And in an age of pandemics and economic crises, Brown Brothers also demonstrates that being ever prepared for a storm is not just prudent; it is imperative.
The story of the Brown Brothers is the secret history of Wall Street. It is a story of sustainable capitalism. You might not like it if you object to capitalism, but you might want to emulate it to guard against capitalism’s inevitable excesses and imbalances. After the 1980s, their model of capitalism was superseded by more avaricious and ultimately more toxic variants, which is all the more reason to remember that other paths are possible.
The partners of Brown Brothers have never wanted to be the story, and that reticence has made the firm’s centrality easy to overlook. But it is an underground river that flows through the American past, and its saga is a window into the crucial nexus of money, power and influence that made America. It is at times a heroic tale, sometimes prosaic and beneath the veneer of gentility, occasionally brutal and rapacious. But such is the history of America, of global capitalism and of any rise to power. Celebrated or reviled, it is necessary history, and in the case of Brown Brothers, one that has never been adequately understood. This is their story, and ours.
https://lithub.com/on-the-small-family-firm-responsible-for-so-much-american-economic-power/?fbclid=IwAR0kGqbuOQNA5_ei78dTUUSJyz-5luq8zD1KPh6RSSspSWSFW1uaV3lG7js
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“WE’RE HEADED FOR A WORLD OF INSANELY CHEAP ENERGY”
~ “We’ve got to the point where solar is the cheapest source of energy in the world in most places. This means we’ve been trying to model a situation where the grid looks totally different today.”
This rapid radical reduction in the price of PV solar is a story about Chinese industrial might backed by American capital, fanned by European political sensibilities and made possible largely thanks to the pioneering work of an Australian research team.
The deep history begins with a succession of US presidents and the quest for energy independence. First was Richard Nixon, who in November 1973 announced Project Independence to wean the US off Middle Eastern oil. Then came Jimmy Carter, who declared the energy transition the “moral equivalent of war” in April 1977 and pumped billions of dollars into renewable energy research, which came to a screeching halt when Ronald Reagan came to power.
But by then, interest had been piqued in Australia.
THE FATHER OF PV SOLAR
The solar cell was invented when Russell Shoemaker Ohl, a researcher in Bell Labs, noticed in 1940 that a cracked silicon sample produced a current when exposed to light. However, little improvement had been made until the contribution of Martin Green, a young engineering professor working out of the University of New South Wales.
Born in Brisbane, Green had spent some time in Canada as a researcher before circling back home in 1974. A year later he had started a PV solar research group working out of a small university laboratory built with unwanted equipment scrounged from big American engineering firms.
His first experiments, alongside a single PhD student, involved looking for ways to increase the voltage on early solar cells.
“Pretty soon, we started beating all these groups in the US in terms of the voltage we could get,” Green says. “NASA had a project that had six contractors working on it. We beat them all.”
Not long after, Green and his team began to raise their ambitions. Having boosted the voltage, the next step was building better quality cells. Their early efforts broke the world efficiency record in 1983 – a habit the team would continue for 30 of the next 38 years.
In the very early years of the industry, the received wisdom had been that a 20% conversion rate marked the hard limit of what was possible from PV solar cells. Green, however, disagreed in a paper published in 1984.A year later, his team built the first cell that pushed past that limit, and in 1989 built the first full solar panel capable of running at 20% efficiency.
It was a moment that opened up what was possible from the industry, and the new upper limit was “set” at 25% – another barrier Green and his team would smash in 2008. In 2015, they built the world’s most efficient solar cell, achieving a 40.6% conversion rate using focused light reflected off a mirror.
RISE OF THE SUN KING
Out of this whirlwind of activity, the Chinese solar industry would be born largely thanks to an ambitious physicist named Zhengrong Shi.
Born in 1963 on Yangzhong Island, Shi had earned his master’s degree and come to Australia a year before the Tiananmen Square protests. He had spotted a flyer advertising a research fellowship and talked Green into bringing him on as a PhD student in 1989.
Shi would finish his PhD in just two and a half years – a record that still stands today. By the time he became Dr Shi, he had so impressed Green that he stayed on as a researcher.
With time, the university was increasingly looking to commercialize its world-leading solar cell technology and struck up a partnership with Pacific Power in 1995. The government utility sank $47m into a new company called Pacific Solar. A factory was set up in the Sydney suburb of Botany and Shi was made the deputy director of research and development where he quickly earned a reputation for resourcefulness and precision.
Shi stuck it out for a few years but in November 2000, he was made an offer. At a dinner held at his home, four officials from the Chinese province of Jiangsu suggested the 37-year-old researcher and Australian citizen return to China and build his own factory there. After some consideration, Shi agreed and ended up settling in the small city of Wuxi where he founded SunTech with $6m in startup funding from the municipal government.
Spying an opportunity for investment, a consortium that included Actis Capital and Goldman Sachs came knocking to pitch Shi on taking the company public. When the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005, it raised $420m and made Shi an instant billionaire. A year later he would be worth an estimated $3 billion and crowned the richest man in China, earning him the moniker “the Sun King”.
Having shown the way, the Chinese PV solar industry began a massive expansion. SunTech alone boosted its production capacity from 60 megawatts to 500MW, and then to 1 gigawatt in 2009. The company grew so fast, its supplies of glass, polysilicon and electronic systems needed to build its panels came under strain, forcing it to invest heavily in local supply chains.
“And then, you know the rest,” Shi says.
DIRT CHEAP POWER — AT A PRICE
As with the rest of China, the rate of technological development in the PV solar business makes for an industry that builds itself up one day, tears itself down the next, and then remakes itself again the day after. With razor-thin margins and cut-throat competition, everyone is always one step away from falling.
Around 2012 the world market was flooded with solar panels, sending the price plummeting through the floor, leaving SunTech vulnerable. Already under intense financial pressure, disaster struck when an internal investigation found a takeover bid it had launched had been guaranteed by €560m in fake German government bonds.
Upon discovering the bonds didn’t exist, Shi was removed as CEO of his company and a year later SunTech would file for bankruptcy protection when it couldn’t repay a $541m loan that fell due in March 2013.
Whatever befell SunTech later, the Macquarie University emeritus professor John Mathews says the company played a pivotal role in changing both China and the world forever.
In a quirk of history, what had begun as an American drive to wean itself off oil was eventually taken up by China, which made solar power dirt cheap in the process.
“The Chinese approach to renewables is all about energy security,” Mathews says. “At the scale from which they’re building new industries, they would need colossal imports of conventional fossil fuels, which would cripple them economically.
“They can get around that problem, which is a geopolitical obstacle, by manufacturing their own energy equipment.”
Today Green and Shi keep in touch. Both are working on new projects. Shi is overseeing a new company while 72-year-old Green is looking for new innovations to explore.
One such innovation is the stackable solar cell. Though still a niche technology very much in the early stages, the basic idea is to lay a material over a solar cell in order to boost its power output.
“We think a 40% module, rather than the 22% you can do nowadays with PERC, is what the industry will be doing once we perfect this stacking approach,” Green says. “We’re just trying to find a new cell that will have all the qualities of silicon that we can stack on top of silicon.
“The International Energy Agency now says solar is providing the cheapest energy the world has ever seen. But we’re headed towards a future of insanely cheap energy. It’s a fundamentally different world we’re moving into.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/25/insanely-cheap-energy-how-solar-power-continues-to-shock-the-world?utm_source=pdscl&CMP_TU=usmsp&utm_medium=sfbk&CMP_BUNIT=mem
Mark (Facebook): WE ARE NOT READY FOR IT
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“A WILD CARD IN CLIMATE CHANGE” — CRYOVOLCANISM AND A NEWFOUND GIANT CRATER IN SIBERIA
~ As they flew over the sweeping Siberian tundra, a Russian TV crew recently spotted an intriguing feature: a crater more than half a football field deep gouged from the frozen ground. Blocks of ice and dirt lay hundreds of feet away from the crater, flung from the deep scar on the surface.
This is just the latest in a series of such curious craters discovered in the Siberian Arctic, after the first was identified in 2014. Scientists believe they form from blasts of methane and carbon dioxide gas trapped within mounds of dirt and ice—a phenomenon that may be increasingly common as the climate warms. But much remains uncertain.
Recent studies of other craters point to one likely mechanism: cryovolcanism, in which eruptions take the form of frosty mud or slush rather than fiery molten rocks. Such phenomena are well known elsewhere in our solar system, such as on Saturn’s watery moon Enceladus. But cryovolcanism is thought to be uncommon on our planet. Studying these Siberian features could provide clues to what’s happening on those far-flung worlds.
The first Siberian crater was discovered in July 2014—and the public’s theories behind how it formed rapidly proliferated. Meteorite strike! Missile blast! Aliens!
In the years since, researchers have identified 15 more suspected craters from natural blasts. The newfound hole, number 17, may be the largest yet, says Evgeny Chuvilin, a permafrost expert at Russia’s Skoltech Center for Hydrocarbon Recovery. The Arctic craters are not easy to study—they fill with water in the months to years post blast, disguising them as one of the many lakes that dot the region.
Soon after this latest discovery, Chuvilin and his colleagues rushed to sample the icy crater, which is located in the Yamal Peninsula of northwest Siberia. Set against the gray, yellow, and green backdrop of the tundra, the crater stands out as “something of an outsider,” Chuvilin says. “When you are near a new crater, first of all, you are struck by its size.” Noises emanate as the slowly melting soils of its near-vertical walls crumble into the depths—“giving the impression of being alive,” he says.
The team is now “urgently processing” the samples for a scientific journal article, he explains via email.
Researchers hope to not only better understand the process behind the blasts but also predict where they may strike in the future. The explosions could pose a risk to locals, who have reported hearing booms or seeing flames near where new craters were found. In 2017, a crater was reported to have exploded near a camp of Nenets reindeer herders. The threat also potentially extends to the region’s abundant oil and gas infrastructure.
Analyses of other craters, including sampling their icy walls, have provided some clues to what’s going on. In 2018, Bychkov and his colleagues proposed the blasts were a form of cryovolcanism that centers around an explosive combination of gas, ice, water, and mud.
The craters form within permafrost, ground that typically remains frozen through the summer, which blankets nine million square miles of the Northern Hemisphere. They seem to start in deep pockets of unfrozen ground, known as taliks. One common place taliks form is under lakes, where the overlying water heats and insulates the land below. Yet the lakes are ever-shifting features as the surrounding permafrost freezes and thaws, so they frequently fill or can drain entirely. And if a lake drains, the ground starts to ice over.
“It can refreeze from the bottom, and the sides, and the top, so it’s freezing from all directions,” says Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Since ice takes up more space than water, the growth of ice squeezes the unfrozen slurry, concentrating and pressurizing the gas and water, eventually bulging at the surface in a wart-like hill, called a pingo.
Not all of the craters are related to lakes, Natali notes. Taliks can form in other situations, such as within a subterranean zone high in salt, which reduces the temperature at which water freezes. Some pingos are continually fed from below by rising groundwater.
Pingos are common throughout the Arctic, with more than 11,000 dotting the Northern Hemisphere. But crater-forming blasts, it seems, are much rarer. They’ve been observed only in Siberia’s Yamal and Gydan peninsulas. And those explosions require an excess of one particular ingredient: gas.
Natural gas abounds in western Siberia, and some of it likely percolates up along cracks and porous zones in the ground into the mushy talik. But there are other possible sources of gas. Microbes munch on organic matter and exude methane or carbon dioxide. Some of the gas may also come from the breakdown of what’s known as methane hydrates, a crystalline form.
“It may not be one thing,” Natali says. Different mounds might have slightly different gaseous contributors, but the gases all likely serve a similar purpose: pressurizing. Eventually, either because of mounting gaseous pressure or destabilization of the overlying ice cap, the system will let loose in a powerful blast that can spew the slurry across the surface and leave a steep-sided crater behind.
“It’s like champagne,” Bychkov says.
In the grand scheme of greenhouse gas emissions, the puffs of methane and carbon dioxide released from each explosion are likely insignificant. But the explosions may provide a “short-term glimpse of a longer-term phenomenon,” Walter Anthony says.
Climate change has already taken a toll on the Arctic, which is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet. An increasingly thick layer of the carbon-rich permafrost thaws each year—and in some places, the ground isn’t re-freezing, even in the winter months. Such thawing allows microbes to munch on the once frozen organic material and burp out carbon dioxide or methane. But it also poses deeper concerns. Permafrost acts as a lid on stores of geologic methane gas deep underground, slowing down their trek to the skies, Walter Anthony explains. As the permafrost melts, that lid may grow increasingly rife with holes that allow the methane to escape at the surface.
Walter Anthony studies this phenomenon in Arctic lakes, and notes that recent studies on crater formation may be further evidence of deep gas already burbling up to the surface. “As we turn permafrost from a block of cheddar cheese into a block of Swiss, we should see more of it,” she says. “It’s a wild card in the climate change story.” ~
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/colossal-crater-found-Siberia-what-made-it/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Compass_20210213&rid=E18AE510841C77329A0E2626CC03D351
From another source:
Since 2014, researchers have identified more of these craters across two regions, the Yamal and Gyda peninsulas. They're part of the Siberian tundra, a massive stretch of land in Russia characterized by a layer of permanently frozen soil just below the surface. And, as scientists have found, the holes, which are roughly 65 feet across when first formed, don’t show up quietly — they blast into existence. Like slow-motion lava, land in Siberia bubbles up until it breaks, leaving behind a depression called a gas emission crater.
Exactly why these massive holes form is still a mystery, though many scientists suspect that climate change is playing a role. “With increasing recognition that permafrost thaw is creating widespread and drastic ecosystem change, a lot of people are trying to understand it, document it, map it and monitor it,” says Scott Zolkos, an arctic researcher at Woodwell. In the process of that work, researchers might be finding even more of these craters in the landscape than people knew existed.
So far, researchers have gathered that the explosions come from gas, likely methane, building up in isolated pockets across the tundra. The pressure accumulates fast — the hills that precede each explosion swell in about three to five years — and when the strain is finally too much, the bubble explodes. Chunks of land, sometimes enough to fill four and a half Olympic swimming pools, blow out. Over time, the edge of the hole melts and expands the perimeter as the bottom fills with water, turning the gaping pit into an inconspicuous lake.
The land that gave way to each identified crater seems to have a few things in common. A thick glaze of ice lies on top of the frozen soil, and beneath it sits a watery deposit that remains liquid at 14 F thanks to its high concentration of salt. While it’s likely the icy surface traps in methane and causes it to build up explosive pressure, researchers still aren’t sure where the gas comes from in the first place.
Some suspect the methane comes from the salty liquid. Other researchers hypothesize that climate change is thawing the region's frozen soil and generating methane. When dead plants and animals trapped in its chill unfreeze, microbes break down the material and release methane as they go. It’s possible methane is coming from the ice within the soil too, as the gas can get trapped in the frozen water.
Additionally, climate change has morphed large portions of the Siberian tundra already. Between 1984 and 2017, 5 percent of the land in the Yamal and Gyda Peninsulas has seen shifts in vegetation, water and even land elevation because of the gradual permafrost melt, according to analysis of satellite data by Zolkos, Fiske and their colleagues. Besides potentially leading to land explosions, the melting permafrost is also collapsing and triggering landslides.
Of course, the effort would be easier if researchers had a full dataset of some of the features beneath the tundra — something private oil and gas companies have. “The Yamal Peninsula is one of the largest, if not the largest, natural gas fields on the planet,” Fiske says. “That would be very helpful, but that's proprietary information. The information is out there.”
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CHRISTIANITY MAY BECOME EXTINCT IN THESE NINE COUNTRIES
~ A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.
The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.
The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.
The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.
The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.
Their means of analyzing the data invokes what is known as nonlinear dynamics - a mathematical approach that has been used to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.
One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages.
At its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and the "utility" of speaking one instead of another.
"The idea is pretty simple," said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.
"It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.
"For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not."
Dr Wiener continued: "In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12811197
from another BBC article:
While 61% of the poll's respondents said they did belong to a religion, 65% of those surveyed answered "no" to the further question: "Are you religious?"
Two surveys were commissioned, one covering England and Wales, and the other for Scotland. The Scottish survey was commissioned by the Humanist Society of Scotland.
South of the border, 61% of respondents said they did have a religion.
But only 29% also said they were religious, while 65% said they were not.
Among respondents who identified themselves as Christian, fewer than half said they believed Jesus Christ was a real person who died, came back to life and was the son of God.
Another 27% said they did not believe that at all, while 25% were unsure.
In Scotland, 42% of respondents said they did not belong to a religion, yet in a further question "Are you religious?" 56% answered "no". ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-12799801
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“Conservative Christians have done so much more than the New Atheists to get people over to our side. First, they get people to realize how awful the Bible actually is, since all their beliefs stem from it. And once people are willing to admit the Bible isn’t the “Good Book” they always thought it was, it’s not very long until they reject its authority altogether.” ~ Herman Mehta
Oriana:
Though I was already an atheist when I took my “The Bible as Literature” class, it was only then that I realized the bible is filled with archaic cruelty — a morally obscene text. What was presented to me during religion lessons was a highly selective version. True, it wasn’t possible to skip major stories like Noah’s Flood or Abraham and Isaac, but you could present them with the emphasis on mercy, however slender or last-minute.
The arbitrary rejection of Cain's sacrifice that induced him to kill his brother Abel? My nun said that Cain brought inferior produce, wholesome-looking only on top — actually the bible gives no explanation of that unjust favoritism. The story of Job, even though it has a tacked-on happy ending? It was entirely omitted from my religion lessons, the bet between god and Satan unknown to me until college. The gang-raped concubine cut into twelve parts? Let’s be serious: you can’t expect a nun to pronounce the word “concubine.”
On the other hand, I never heard the bible referred to as the “Good Book” either. The authority was not the bible — it was the edicts of the Pope. In fact, reading the bible by yourself was highly discouraged — “because you might not understand.” Of course the real fear was that you'd understand only too well.
But in a majority Protestant country, what Mehta says is plausible. And I'm pretty sure he's right: fundamentalist Christians have done more to make people leave organized religion than the New Atheists.
Mary:
Not really a comment so much as perfect agreement! So incredibly true and accurate that the christian fundamentalists are excellent at driving people away from religion!! Reminded me of that saying "By their fruits you shall know them." Oh boy are those folks a bad advertisement for the faith they claim...greedy, proud, self-righteous, ungenerous — examples of the exact opposites of the supposed "christian virtues."
A DRUG THAT DESTROYS THE COVID VIRUS IS IN THE WORKS
A joint project of scientists from Australia and the US develop the first-ever antiviral treatment that targets the Novel Coronavirus. The new medication eliminates 99.9% of the virus and halts its spread in the body. Until now, no known COVID-19 treatment has been developed; generic antiviral medications like zanamivir and remdesivir are able to slow down the spread of the virus only partially.
The researchers believe that the novel treatment will be especially helpful for those patients who require urgent medical care, as well as those at risk of developing complications.
According to research published on May 13, 2021, in the journal Molecular Technology, a team of scientists from the Menzies Health Institute in Queensland, Australia, and the US City of Hope Institute has developed an antiviral treatment capable of eliminating 99.9 percent of the Novel Coronavirus. The therapy uses a gene-silencing RNA technology that destroys SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as other known coronaviruses, such as the SARS and the MERS viruses that caused outbreaks in 2002–2004 and 2012, respectively. The medication targets the genome of the virus directly and stops it from replicating. According to Professor Nigel McMillan, from Griffith University, the lead researcher of the study, "It causes the genome to be destroyed and the virus can't grow anymore — so we inject the nanoparticles and they go and find the virus and destroy it just like a heat-seeking missile." He also notes that “Normal human cells are completely unharmed by this treatment."
Who will benefit from this treatment? The researchers say that those who are suffering from COVID-19, especially patients in the intensive care unit (ICU), as well as those exposed to the virus can take advantage of the treatment. Since the medication stops the replication of the virus almost completely, this will allow the body to repair and recover more quickly. Professor McMillan states that early treatment, ”should be able to eliminate people dying from this disease,” which is really exciting.
According to their early estimations, those treated in the ICU would require 4-5 daily injections of the medication to make a full recovery, whereas those who were recently exposed to the virus would only need one injection to ensure that they’re free of the virus.
One last meaningful feature of the new medication is that it’s stable at 4°C (39°F) for 12 months, and at room temperature for over a month, which means that it’s easy to transport and treat infected patients in low-resource locations. At this point, the antiviral medication has passed animal trials, but it is yet to go through phase one, two, and three clinical trials in humans. For that reason, the researchers estimate that it will most likely only be available in 2023. ~
https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=40027
In-vitro studies conducted to date show that the clinical candidate PF-07321332 is a potent protease inhibitor with potent anti-viral activity against SARS-CoV-2. This is the first orally administered coronavirus-specific investigational protease inhibitor to be evaluated in clinical studies, and follows Pfizer’s intravenously administered investigational protease inhibitor, which is currently being evaluated in a Phase 1b multi-dose study in hospitalized clinical trial participants with COVID-19
And there is also this development:
~ Researchers at Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech) have filed a provisional patent for CROWNase—a new drug that has the potential to treat COVID-19 infections, including its new international variants, by cutting the spike glycoprotein so that it can no longer infect cells.
The new model coming out of Illinois Tech works by removing the protective coat of the virus, stopping the virus from infecting human cells and exposing the vulnerable part of the virus to the human immune system. Whereas current vaccines seek to boost the body’s preemptive immune response to the virus entering the system, CROWNase aims to serve as an effective treatment for patients who have already been exposed.
Spike glycoprotein gives the SARS-CoV-2 virus its crown-like exterior, enabling the virus to attach to the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and infect human cells. The spike glycoprotein is covered by a coat of human-derived molecules, which help the virus evade the immune system and infect the individual. CROWNase includes a human protein that removes this coat. It also includes the ACE 2 receptor, which helps it bind to viruses.
If funded, the researchers believe their treatment could enter preclinical trials shortly. ~
https://www.iit.edu/news/illinois-tech-researchers-developing-novel-covid-19-treatment-targets-human-spike-protein-stop?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=usnwr_2021&fbclid=IwAR33NNpQVcOHT7nEmLidwbGPagNyFM0p2RbK3l6esKXELPfIlcj5Orb1LJQ
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SOME MAY CHOOSE TO KEEP WEARING A MASK
I only wish I knew about the effectiveness of masks against respiratory diseases much sooner — colds and an especially horrible bronchitis did not have to happen. Instead, I stared clueless at the pictures of the Japanese wearing masks, and wondered why.
I assume you do know, don't you, that there was no flu this "flu season." Very few cases. Parents saying things like, "My child has never been this healthy.” Or, “I used to get sick every time I traveled by plane. Now, not even a sniffle.”
And some adults likewise admit that they've never been so healthy "since this whole thing started."
Despite the proverbs and bad jokes, we can and do learn, even at an older age.
(A shameless digression: I discovered a mask helps your face feel warm even when the wind is cold and vehement. Not that you’re much danger of Covid outside on a windy day. Still, a hidden benefit of masking.)
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ending on beauty:
Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
~ Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
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