The Osiria rose. I may havie posted it before. I think favorite images are like favorite poems: they need to be visited again and again.
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TRISTAN
As if they knew. . . that the mask is real, that everything is real,
and the dream awaits.
~ Richard*, 1949-1986
The long journeys of your small hands,
Richard wrote, and Richard is dead.
We weren’t lovers, but one New Year’s Eve,
we lay side by side on his bed
and held hands — he a hopeless alcoholic,
I hopelessly in love with someone else.
Everything dreams, Richard wrote,
watching birds turn the color of twilight.
He sat in his rickety armchair
at his only window. The heater
leaked gas; to stay alive he kept
his window like a quarter moon
open to the sea, the dark, the rain.
The empty light bulb socket
grew gray braids of dust.
The aroma of souls — lavender and sweat —
do not want to die yet,
Richard wrote, and Richard is dead.
I echo beneath the voices,
innocent as the future,
Richard wrote, becoming the past,
growing as archaic as the grass.
Dew thinks only of diamonds,
Richard wrote, becoming spray.
The cliffs drip wet sea moss.
A seagull like a white cross
pauses in mid-air
over a wounded man
in an oarless boat, sending up
a melody from his harp —
making music, like all of us,
to keep from being afraid.
~ Oriana
Mary:
It is a beautiful and intruiging poem. Richard is interesting for his gnomic/poetic proclamations, his game playing with death -- living in a room with a leaky gas heater and betting the open window will let enough air in to save him.. That you linger in this room with him and listen to his words is your own game with art and death...but you survive and he doesn't. It has the romantic desperation feel of adolescence — one person survives, one succumbs to the romance of poetic death (a la Chatterton). Never aging. Always the beautiful dead youth. You choose to continue and grow up.
Oriana:
Yes, I was on the way to becoming myself. Richard* (name changed to protect privacy) was an “advanced alcoholic” who actually died of lethal alcohol levels in his blood. He was found dead four days later in a local park — "under his favorite tree,” his mother said. Someone stole his wallet, so the police had trouble identifying the body.
I later met his mother. She didn't seem shattered by Richard’s fate. She said she realized early on that “his kingdom was not of this world.”
"He died under his favorite tree," she said at least twice, as if that could erase the ultimate ugliness of his dying -- literally drinking himself to death.
But he did write some lovely lines -- lines more so than whole effective poems. Poetry, too was his alcohol. He loved the Spanish poets in the anthology Roots and Wings. That was his holy book.
When he needed money, he got good union wages as a furniture mover. He lived in squalor, so he worked maybe a week per month. He grew his own marijuana in a pot -- his only houseplant, to which he referred as "this bird." If not for his accidentally self-inflicted death a la Dylan Thomas, it would be a colorful "La Bohéme" type of story.
I don’t think he wanted to end it all — not as long as he had his Spanish poets. He just wanted to escape the pain, and he got his wish on a permanent basis.
At least I knew better than to become his girlfriend. I slightly knew the woman who did: they had a big quarrel before he went to the park and drank himself to death. Once she learned he died after they had the falling out, she took a bunch of pills, but then chickened out and called the Suicide Hot Line. They pumped out her stomach and she was OK. The last I heard of her, she'd joined some Christian group and said things like, "What's the point writing anything; everything worth knowing was already written down in the Bible."
She was from London and spoke with a Cockney accent, which here in California was treated as part of her glamor.
My apologies to those who think this story is just too much: Richard and Lisa, and on the side her lesbian girlfriend, who died of MS not long after, also showing signs of dementia -- or maybe it was a touch of schizophrenia -- in any case losing touch with reality, and who could blame her).
So you could say I was abnormally normal given all this going on, and here I am still shamelessly alive. So much for some of my "Tales of Ordinary Madness." Then I assumed the disguise of a suburban housewife. It was in that disguise that I became a poet.
“La Boheme,” sings Charles Aznavour. “La Boheme, meaning: we were young.”
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I am sitting on my bed. A storm is coming., appropriately. A storm is always appropiate. ~ Franza Kafka, from a diary entry c. December 1919.
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ARE REPUBLICANS LOSING THE CULTURE WARS?
~ Republicans are confronting a decisive moment in the battle over public education: proving they can still win a culture war.
School board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a conservative vanguard whose members popularized restrictions on classroom library books, are losing elections in Florida and some swing states. Republican leaders who rallied against critical race theory and LGBTQ+ issues recently faced recalls in red pockets of California.
And in the presidential race, Democrats are playing offense. The party convention in Chicago featured liberals attacking conservative candidates as “weird” and denouncing so-called book bans.
Former President Donald Trump is expected to lean into school politics at a Moms for Liberty summit, making the case that culture war issues still resonate with core supporters.
Republicans show no signs of changing their strategy. But the party faces new challenges from a Democratic agenda — embodied by vice presidential nominee Tim Walz — that is redirecting the divisive education issues promoted by conservatives during the pandemic into a vehicle for highlighting free school lunches and affordable child care.
“We’re in the middle of a cultural revolution in America, and one of the biggest battlegrounds is the schools,” Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said in an interview. “We didn’t start this fire, but we’re going to put it out.”
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said there is “a lot of mutual consensus” between the Republican nominee’s beliefs on education “and what Moms for Liberty stands for.”
But several Democratic National Committee speakers found ways to leverage social issues, including Walz, a former teacher who used them to pivot to a law he signed as Minnesota governor providing free school meals to all students.
“We made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day,” Walz said Wednesday at the DNC. “So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.”
Gov. Tim Walz is currently the most popular member of either presidential ticket, according to polling conducted last week by the Democratic research firm Blueprint. It
concluded about half of voters and independents said the free school
lunch law caused them to view the governor more favorably.
Moms for Liberty has declared the Democratic presidential ticket “would give way to the rise of the most anti-parent, extremist government America has ever known.” Some conservatives have started referring to Walz as “Tampon Tim” for a law he passed as governor that provides students with free menstrual products in school restrooms. They assert the law requires those products in boys’ bathrooms, but it does not include such a mandate.
Education ranks high on the list of Americans’ concerns, according to recent polling that suggests many prioritize less politicized issues such as school funding.
“If I were advising a candidate for office, I would focus on the issues that have broad support across political ideologies,” said James Lane, a former senior adviser to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona who is now CEO of PDK International, the professional association for educators that conducted the poll. “At least in our polling, independents have some very clear priorities for the next president.”
Trump will swap out a campaign-style speech in favor of a “fireside chat” with Moms for Liberty in Washington. Supporters hope he’ll elaborate on a party platform that includes commitments to close the Education Department and defund schools that are “pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
The visit is part of a symbiotic relationship between the candidate and the organization. The Trump interview promises to help shore up support for Moms For Liberty, which brought a roster of Republican presidential candidates to its convening last year in Philadelphia. For Trump, the group offers the nominee an opportunity to make a direct case to a segment of women voters.
Labeled as an anti-government extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization is a central player in a legal campaign that has blocked the Biden administration from enforcing its Title IX anti-discrimination regulations throughout roughly half the country.
“We’d just like to hear some more plans,” Justice, the Moms for Liberty co-founder, said of the Republican presidential nominee. “He talks about abolishing the Department of Education. I think it’s a little more complicated than just waving a magic wand and making it go away.”
Two conservative-leaning candidates just lost their races in Florida’s Indian River County — a Republican-dominated area where Justice once won a school board seat — including an incumbent who was appointed by DeSantis in April.
“Floridians across the state are tired of the divisiveness, they are tired of the culture wars,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried told reporters. “Ron DeSantis lost badly.”
DeSantis pointed to the overall record of conservative school board candidates since 2022 and called it proof that Floridians support an education platform that rails against “woke” ideology in schools. He also said Republicans devoted fewer resources to school board races this cycle “because we’ve got so much stuff going on,” referencing fundraising for Trump and statewide abortion and marijuana ballot measures the GOP is fighting.
Republican-backed candidates made inroads in conservative pockets of California in 2022, but their progress has since eroded. In just the last year, six conservatives have been recalled, eliminating four GOP-endorsed school board majorities.
Tab Berg, a Republican strategist who has run school board campaigns in California, argues Trump’s focus on social issues in education is still a viable strategy — but the former president needs to simplify his messaging.
“My advice to the Trump campaign has been consistent over time, and I’ve said it to a couple people I know over there: Make the speeches shorter. Keep the points simpler,” Berg said.
Moms for Liberty founders insist the losses don’t mean much.
“You’re going to win some races, and you’re going to lose some races,” Justice said. “The fight doesn’t stop here.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/24/republicans-culture-war-races-00176166?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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TRUMP: “I DO THE WEAVE”
For those baffled by Donald Trump’s forays into meandering discourses about electrocution, bacons sales or cannibal killers at his recent political rallies, the former US president had an explanation.
Trump assured supporters in Pennsylvania on Saturday that what might look like incoherent ramblings as he frequently departed from his scripted speech were instead indicators of his brilliance that impressed other great minds.
“I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’” he told a bemused audience.
“But the fake news, you know what they say, ‘He rambled.’ It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back on to the subject, and you go through this and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.”
But, increasingly, many others are not persuaded, including some of his own supporters.
Trump has a long history of deviating from written speeches as the words on the autocue fire up disparate thoughts and digressions he then pursues and embellishes. But Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, said that Trump’s’s manner of public speaking is now the subject of scrutiny and disquiet over his mental acuity – in some of the same ways that Joe Biden faced and that ultimately cost him his re-election bid.
“The reason he’s now offering these convoluted explanations of his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he’s hyper-aware that people have noted that he’s making even less sense than he used to,” he said. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate.”
Recent examples of Trump’s claim to be weaving together complex explanations include repeated references to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, while talking about immigration. Trump frequently, and falsely, claims that foreign governments are emptying their prisons and “insane asylums” to send the former residents across the US border to commit crimes. Trump then makes the leap to talk about the sociopath he calls the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” who, at one rally, he bewilderingly described as “a wonderful man”.
Last week in Wisconsin, Trump was asked what he would do “to make life more affordable and bring down inflation”. He turned the question into another opportunity to rail against green energy as he theorized that Biden’s expansion of wind power had driven up the cost of electricity and increased inflation. This in turn, said Trump, put the cost of bacon beyond the reach of many ordinary Americans.
“You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon any more. We are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know, this was caused by their horrible energy – wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem,” he said.
There’s no evidence that these things are linked other than in Trump’s head. Besides, demand for bacon hasn’t fallen significantly. Trump has previously claimed that wind farms are driving whales “batty”.
To O’Brien it is classic Trump because he uses digressions, piled high with false claims, as a means to avoid proper scrutiny.
“He’s a serial liar and a serial fabulist. So much of that comes out that by the time you start to fact-check a statement or a tale, eight others have already landed. I don’t think it’s strategic, I just think it’s Trump being Trump. It protects him from greater accountability because it wears people down trying to keep up with him,” he said.
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor specializing in political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, said that Trump regards his meanderings as a strength to the point of publicly belittling his advisers who tell him not to do it.
“He sees himself as someone who is unscripted and not teleprompted, and a freewheeling conversationalist. He wants to be able to feed off the crowd. Another part of it is that his brain is not well-disciplined and it might also just be that he’s unable to maintain a thought and carry it through to his logical conclusion,” she said.
However, Mercieca said that Trump was aware that his digressions are increasingly drawing questions about his mental fitness to be president again – the charge he once made against Biden. That, she said, has put him on the defensive.
“Donald Trump, while not a good businessman, is very good at marketing and branding, and so he’s very good at putting a marketing spin on anything that might be perceived as a negative. He’s had a lot of criticism lately for rambling, for being low energy during his rallies, for failing to read the teleprompter properly, mispronouncing words and so his response is to spin it. He says, ‘I have experts, these friends of mine, unnamed others, who are very impressed with my ability to weave,’” she said.
Trump’s speeches also appear all the more disorderly because they are no longer in contrast to Biden’s faltering campaign but compared with a far more coherent Democratic presidential candidate in Kamala Harris. O’Brien said that what might once have been an asset for Trump has become increasingly self-defeating.
“It’s certainly doing more harm than good right now because he no longer has the foil of Joe Biden to bounce off of. Biden had become so visibly diminished and the media was more ready to take Biden to task on it on a regular basis. That allowed Trump to skate by. Now that he has a different, younger, more acute and vibrant political opponent, I think it does for him because he now often looks ridiculous or unhinged, unfocused or very, very old,” he said.
Trump has a particular obsession with electric vehicles, a theme he returns to even when it is not the subject of his speech or discussion. At a rally in June he recounted a conversation with a boat manufacturer in which he speculated that an electric-powered boat would sink under the weight of the battery. Then he introduced a shark into the equation.
“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?” he told the crowd.
Trump said he asked the boat manufacturer whether it would be better to be in the water next to the boat and risk electrocution from the battery or to swim toward the shark.
“I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer,” he told the crowd. “He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’”
Trump saw this as an indication of the cleverness of his thinking and then told the audience that he’d rather be electrocuted than fall victim to the shark before returning to his original point – that he doesn’t like electric vehicles.
“So we’re going to end that, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks,” he said.
When Trump was widely mocked for his musings on the shark, it only prompted him to double down by explaining what he meant at another rally.
“You heard my story in the boat with the shark, right? I got killed on that. They thought I was rambling. I’m not rambling,” he said.
“I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for many years, I think the longest tenure ever. Very smart, had three different degrees and, you know, so I have an aptitude for things. You know, there is such a thing as an aptitude.”
Then Trump retold the shark and battery story.
To some, the former president does little more than unleash a torrent of disconnected thoughts. Others see a logic to his performance in which a coherent pattern of thought can be discerned by joining up the points he is making between digressions.
O’Brien, who has described Trump as using his rallies as a therapy session to work out his emotional and psychological issues on stage, said that it would be a mistake to try to make too much sense from his speeches.
“To try to discern a method in his madness is a fool’s errand. He is someone who is so narcissistic and privileged that he’s willing to stand up in front of large crowds and essentially free-associate about whatever crosses his mind. It frustrates his political advisers. It frustrates the Republican party,” he said.
“But it appeals to his base, which is somewhere between 25% and 30% of Republican voters, as performance art. Not as him offering a menu of public policy choices or real world solutions to their fundamental problems. It’s simply because they feel they’re invited into this world through these nonsensical, nonlinear bits of performance art.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/07/election-trump-speeches
"Well, I would do that, and we're sitting down. You know, I was somebody — we had, Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about that, because look, child care is child care, couldn't you know, there's something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to. But they'll get used to it very quickly. And it's not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including child care, that it's going to take care. We're going to have, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country. Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I'm talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just — that I just told you about. We're going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it's, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers will be taking in. We're going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let's help other people. But we're going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It's about make America great again. We have to do it because right now, we're a failing nation. So we'll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank You."
To my disbelief, the Washington Post did an actual analysis of this "answer."
At the outset, he clearly didn’t know what he was going to say. He had suddenly been thrust into a dark, smoke-filled room and had to find the exit.
He started a few times.
“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down,” he began, likely preparing to claim (as he so often does) that a specific policy was being prepared and would be produced within a few weeks (as he so rarely does).
But then he appears to have remembered that this was something he had actually talked about with people (or seen people talking about it on TV). Like his daughter and, perhaps, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who introduced legislation on child care earlier this year.
“You know,” he transitioned, “I was, uh, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so, uh, impactful on that issue.”
It wasn’t going well. And when Trump is scrambling for an exit, his instinct is to find one from which he can hear the muffled sounds of applause emanating.
“It’s a very important issue,” he told the questioner. He was starting over, looking to build a rapport. He continued down that path, fumbling through the dark.
“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care,” he said. “It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.”
You can see him figuring out what he’s going to say even as he is patting the questioner on the head
“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly,” he continued. “And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”
This is the patter kicking in. He’s going to tax the foreign manufacturers at levels they’ve never seen before! He’s going to fix our problems with One Simple Trick.
But then, it seems, he realized that he was drifting away from the actual question, which asked for a specific policy. So he wound back to that.
“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time,” he said. “Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — ”
This is a reference to his earlier promise to put Elon Musk in charge of a commission that would find the places where the government was wasting at least a third of the money it spent. This is … an overestimate of how much spending is wasted. But Trump was looping back to more comfortable, better-worn terrain closer to the overall thrust of his speech.
“Because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with child care,” he continued, “but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.” He riffed on this a little more.
That was the answer, though: that this unrealistic promise of eliminating the deficit by increasing tariffs (and, by extension, costs for Americans) and uprooting trillions of dollars in wasteful or fraudulent spending would leave the country’s coffers so flush that he would pay for child care. Which is certainly what his party would want to prioritize over tax cuts, right?
Anyway, Trump finally found the door, closing out his answer the way he likes to conclude his rallies.
“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first,” he said. “This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again.”
The audience applauded.
“We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation,” Trump concluded, with almost palpable relief. “So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”
And that was that. Sale made — if only in the room and only for a moment.
House Democrat Sean Casten: "Towering stupidity. The people listening know it. The people around him know it. Word salad, not even pretending to have a single coherent idea. Vote for smart people."
Another X user commented: "This is not The Weave. This is a physical assault on the English language.
It's
frightful that speaking in word salad doesn't make people realize that
this is a sign of brain damage (Alzheimer's and schizophrenia have much
in common). As I said before: It's madness for millions, on display for all. There is even a change in Trump's face: a kind of borderline fear in his eyes. In many cases of dementia, fear is the dominant emotion. So yes, now I see dementia in his face.
There is also an element of Molly Bloom here: the "stream of consciousness." English professors don't call it "doing the weave"; they call it the stream of consciousness narration.
My thanks to Violeta for the image, which is indeed worth more than thousands of Donald's words.
Mary:
I think it is hilarious that the Right accuses Democrats of being "extreme" when that is actually the hallmark of their positions. Just listening to Trump at the debate you could see the explosion of his claims. Immigrants are not just bringing crime...they are bringing crime from the Whole World into the US..like a huge drain where crime is flowing downhill from everywhere else, so as to lower crime in the whole world as it all comes in with the illegals pouring into the US. All the criminals, all the insane, in the millions and billions, invading to wreak havoc, spread disease, vote illegally and EAT OUR PETS. Abortion not only kills UNborn babies but NEWborn babies. Democrats will abduct your kids from school and perform gender transform surgery on them-- And perform gender transform surgery on millions of illegal aliens. As Harris said THIS is extremism. Spouted unabashed and batshit crazy, without apology or any sense of just how nonsensical and impossible it is.
What a crazy " weave". Hard to believe anyone can hear this stuff and keep a straight face...much less swallow it all, hook line and sinker.
Oriana:
His dementia is showing more and more. I guess there is no legal precedent for removing a candidate due to dementia. Late-night comedians may be glad, but let's face it, this is pathetic.
We thought it was funny when Reagan kept saying, "I don't remember" and "I don't recall" during some kind of investigation — only in retrospect, when his Alzheimer's diagnosis became public knowledge, did we realize that he was simply telling the truth.
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HOW ANCIENT INDIA SHAPED THE WEST
In AD628, an Indian sage living on a mountain in Rajasthan made one of the world’s most important mathematical discoveries. The great mathematician Brahmagupta (598–670) explored Indian philosophical ideas about nothingness and the void, and came up with the treatise that more or less invented – and certainly defined – the concept of zero.
Brahmagupta was born near the Rajasthan hill station of Mount Abu. When he was 30 years old, he wrote a 25-chapter treatise on mathematics that was immediately recognized as a work of extraordinary subtlety and genius.
He was the first mathematician to treat the circular zero symbol – originally just a dot – as a number just like the others, rather than merely as an absence, and this meant developing rules for doing arithmetic using this additional symbol along with the other nine.
These basic rules of mathematics for the first time allowed any number up to infinity to be expressed with just 10 distinct symbols: the nine Indian number symbols devised by earlier generations of Indian mathematicians, plus zero.These rules are still taught in classrooms around the world today.
Brahmagupta also wrote down in Sanskrit verse a set of arithmetic rules for handling positive and negative numbers, another of his innovations. In other writings, he seems to have been the first to describe gravity as an attractive force a full millennium before Isaac Newton.
But Brahmagupta was not alone, and he viewed himself as standing on the shoulders of an earlier Indian genius, Aryabhata (476–550). The latter’s work contains a very close approximation of the value of pi – 3.1416 – and deals in detail with spherical trigonometry. The ease of making calculations using his system had direct implications for astronomy and allowed him to calculate the movements of the planet, eclipses, the size of the Earth and, astonishingly, the exact length of the solar year to an accuracy of seven decimal places.
He also correctly proposed a spherical Earth that rotated on its own axis. “By the grace of Brahma,” he wrote, “I dived deep in the ocean of theories, true and false, and rescued the precious sunken jewel of true knowledge by the means of the boat of my own intellect.”
The ideas of these two men, bringing together the mathematical learning of ancient India, traveled first to the Arab world, then far to the west, giving us not only crucial mathematical concepts such as zero, but the very form of the numbers we use today.
In Britain, our education still gives us the impression that most of the great scientific advances of antiquity were the product of the brilliance of ancient Greece. We learn about Pythagoras and Archimedes at primary school, but mathematicians of equal stature of Indian background are still completely unfamiliar to most of us, and neither Brahmagupta nor Aryabhata are names that will ring any bells at all in this country beyond a tiny group of academics.
It was they who perfected the numeral system in use around the world, arguably the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language; yet in the west, we attribute our numerals to the Arabs from whom we borrowed them, not the Indians who actually invented them.
In Britain, we are still quite astonishingly ignorant about India’s often forgotten position as an economic fulcrum, and civilizational engine at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds.
Although we in the west are almost entirely unaware of it, Indian learning, religious insights and ideas are among the crucial foundations of our world. Like ancient Greece, ancient India came up with a set of profound answers to the big questions about what the world is, how it operates, why we are here and how we should live our lives.
What Greece was first to Rome, then to the rest of the Mediterranean and European world, so at this period India was to south-east and central Asia and even to China, radiating out and diffusing its philosophies, political ideas and architectural forms over an entire region, not by conquest but instead by sheer cultural allure and sophistication.
For a millennium and a half, from about 250BC to 1200, India was a confident exporter of its own diverse civilization, creating around it an empire of ideas that developed into a tangible “Indosphere”, where its cultural influence was predominant.
During this period, the rest of Asia was the willing and even eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power – in religion, art, music, dance, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, language and literature.
Out of India came not just pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, doctors and sculptors, but also the holy men, monks and missionaries of several distinct strands of Indic religious thought and devotion, Hindu and Buddhist.
These different religious worlds sometimes mingled and melded, sometimes competed; occasionally, they clashed. But between them they came to dominate south, central, south-east and eastern Asia. More than half the world’s population today lives in areas where Indian ideas of religion and culture are, or once were, dominant, and where Indian gods ruled the imaginations of men and women.
This entire spectrum of early Indian influence has always been there, hiding in plain sight: in the Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan; in the place names of Burma and Thailand; in the murals and sculptures of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Laos and Cambodia; and in the Hindu temples of Bali.
Yet somehow the Golden Road of monsoon-blown maritime trade routes linking all this into a single cultural unit – a vast Indosphere stretching all the way from the Red Sea to the Pacific – has never been recognized as the link connecting all these different places and ideas to each other; and never been given a name.
If India’s transformative effect on the religions and civilizations around it was so central to world history, why is the extraordinary diffusion of its influence not better and more widely known?
This is surely a lingering legacy of colonialism and more specifically Victorian Indology, which undermined, misrepresented and devalued Indian history, culture, science and knowledge from the period when Thomas Babington Macaulay confidently proclaimed that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.
If India were acknowledged to already have been a powerful, cosmopolitan and profoundly sophisticated civilization, then what justification would there be for Victorian Britain’s civilizing mission?
How would you set out to bring civilization to a part of the world that you recognized has been supremely civilized for thousands of years and which indeed was spreading its influence all over Asia long before the coming of Christianity? The irony was that it was Indian ideas that in many ways allowed the west to move eastward and subjugate India.
The numerals invented in India were adopted by the Arabs by the 8th century, thanks to a dynasty of viziers of Baghdad, the Barmakids, who were Sanskrit-literate converts from Buddhism, some of whose members had studied Indian mathematics in Kashmir.
It was the Barmakids who sent missions to India in search of Indian scientific texts, resulting in a mission from Sindh that brought a compilation of the works of Brahmagupta and Aryabhata to Baghdad in 773.
A generation later, all the Sanskrit mathematical texts stored in the House of Wisdom library in Baghdad were brilliantly summarized by the Persian polymath Khwarizmi, whose name is the origin of our word “algorithm” and whose book popularly known as Kitab al-Jabr is the basis of our word “algebra”.
It became the basis for mathematics across the Arab world. But it is the original name of the book that points to its inspiration: The Compendious Book on Calculating by Completion and Balancing, According to Hindu Calculation.
From Baghdad, these ideas spread across the Islamic world. Five hundred years later, in 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, known by his nickname Fibonacci, returned from Algeria to Italy with his father, where he found his compatriots still shackled by the Latin numeral system.
Fibonacci had grown up in a Pisan trading post in Béjaïa, where he had learned fluent Arabic as well as Arab mathematics. On his return, at the age of 32, he wrote the Liber Abaci, the Book of Calculation. As he explained in the introduction, it was in Algeria that “I was introduced to a wonderful kind of teaching that used the nine figures of the Indias.
“With the sign 0, which the Arabs call zephyr (al-sifr), any number whatsoever can be written. Getting to know this pleased me far beyond all else … Therefore I made an effort to compose this book so that in future the Latin race may not be found lacking in mathematical knowledge.”
It was Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci that first popularized in Europe the use of what were later thought of as “Arabic numerals”, so seeding the growth of banking and accounting, initially in Italy, under dynasties such as the Medici and then in the rest of Europe.
These innovations helped propel the commercial and banking revolution that financed the Renaissance and in time, as these ideas spread, the rise of Europe, ultimately making it look east towards the riches of India, the source of all these ideas.
For it was arguably European commercial prowess and initiative just as much as military might that gave Europe the edge over India.
From the mid-18th century, it was a European corporation, the East India Company – run from the City of London by merchants and accountants, with their ledgers and careful accounting – that ran amok and seized and subjugated a fragmented and divided India in what was probably the supreme act of corporate violence in history.
Today, three-quarters of a century after independence, many believe that India’s moment has come again. Its economy has quadrupled in size in a single generation. Its reputation as a center for mathematics and scientific skills remains intact, as Indian software engineers increasingly staff the new Houses of Wisdom in Silicon Valley.
The only questions are whether it is India, China or the US that will dominate the world by the end of this century, and what sort of India that will be.
For a thousand years, India’s ideas spread along the Golden Road and transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere, a cultural zone that spread over political borders by the sheer power of its ideas.
Within this area, Indian culture and civilization transformed everything they touched.
This poses a question, unthinkable back in 1947 at independence from Britain: could they do so again?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/hidden-story-ancient-india-west-maths-astronomy-historians
(my thanks to Violeta Kelertas for providing this article)
Mary:
Fascinating article on the origins of mathematical science in India and
it's role in the foundation of Western science...unrecognized and
forgotten. I seem to recall hearing about a legend that Christ spent his
young adulthood in India before he returned to his birthplace and began
his career as an itenerant preacher. So much of the past has been
forgotten or rewritten to exclude the stories that are outside the
tradition of the rise and development of civilization as a completely
Western story.
*
WHY IS RUSSIA SO UNSTABLE AND CRIMINAL?
Such ridiculously high payouts can mean only one thing — they’re all out of volunteers for meat assaults.
Next comes the draft. Once they send you summons they’ll automatically terminate your traveling document, driving license and block all your bank cards so you can’t withdraw cash.
Where you gonna hide without money and documents? In Moscow there are surveillance cameras everywhere and face recognition tech in the subway.
If I were to try and hide how long would it take them to find me? A day?
More like several hours. So why bother hiding.
War veterans in new uniforms are chatting with two hobos near Kremlin. Hobos, I observed, are especially keen on becoming friends with Putin’s mercenaries. They have cash in their pockets and can tell stories from the frontlines. Bread and spectacle. Common people steer clear of such “heroes.”
A fire engine is a new fixture beside The Four Seasons Hotel in Moscow. In case of a drone attack on Kremlin, it will extinguish fire. If the firefighters locate the closest hydrant half a mile away.
It’s September. Foreign and local tourists are gone. It’s time for school children trips to see the heart of the Motherland. They wear orange ties of the communist red pioneer organization that Putin resurrected after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We’re supposed to think that we’re still living in the Soviet Union.
Strictly in Anglo lingo. Russian is for proles, vets and their hobo buddies.
They gutted historical buildings that were in the way and annexed a church that will be in the courtyard of the building no longer accessible by non-residents.
NEIGHBORHOOD THAT CHALLENGES TIME.
Mark my word, the next development project will annex Kremlin.
Once upon a time most expensive (and bustling) street in Europe there’s business as usual just with few customers. The black ice mats thrown over the cobbled road are in case you come to shop wearing ice skates.
Putin’s favorite brand Kiton. His three kids from the gymnast woman study with native English speaking tutors.
Sourced on free market, there’s just one condition Putin insists on: they have to be from South Africa. It is a BRIC country and therefore the tutor won’t be a spy.
If you’re a teacher from South Africa you got a lucrative job waiting for you in Moscow. There’s a high demand from the high profile families for you due to new political realities. You can thank me later for the tip.
At my local supermarket a simple set for office plankton to have a party with girlfriends on a shoestring. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Ray Ryan:
I hate the fall and I dread the winter like approaching death. Shut inside most of the time, forced to bundle up to survive the elements. And that’s living in Pennsylvania.
I cannot imagine the feeling and the mental stress of living in gray Moscow in autumn on the cusp of another Siberian winter hell, all while surviving under a mad dictatorship scouring the streets for meat to send to a senseless war of aggression. I guess the climate seems almost irrelevant compared to the madness. Bless the sane people of Russia.
Chuck Weisenberg:
“Mark my word, the next development project will annex Kremlin.” Oh no, I think the Kremlin will be the best tourist destination of all! Sort of like the White House or Windsor Castle. Think of the history: “and this room is where Khrushchev decided to put nukes in Cuba.”
Oriana:
It’s frequently claimed that Misha doesn’t answer the question stated as the title of the post. I think he answers questions in a sly and indirect way. Here he is saying that luxury is on show in Moscow, Russia’s Potemkin’s Village, while “the masses,” as Marxists would call them, live a gray, shabby existence, with men, already in short supply, threatened with military service.
Also, for whatever it's worth, China is rapidly colonizing the far-east Russian areas. Russia doesn't have what it would have to defend that border.
*
THE GAZA NEUROSURGEON WHO FACED A HEART-WRENCHING DECISION
Husam Abukhedeir, a Palestinian neurosurgeon, left his native Gaza for the United Arab Emirates last November because he felt that conditions caused by the war had stripped him of his power as a physician — and endangered his family. Nearly 9 months have passed, and Abukhedeir does not see an end in sight to the suffering.
In February, NPR published the story of Husam Abukhedeir, the Palestinian chief neurosurgeon at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. When war broke out after the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, he spent nearly two months tending to severely injured Palestinians, rationing care – in effect choosing who lives and who is left to die amid a shortage of medical supplies and fuel.
His wife and five young children, including a then 6-month-old baby, moved into a single room at the hospital with him after they felt their home became unsafe due to Israeli airstrikes.
When Israeli forces encircled Al-Shifa, Abukhedeir believed that his family was in danger and recognized that he was unable to serve his patients due to the lack of medical resources. So, he made the difficult decision to leave his homeland with his young family – taking advantage of their foreign passports to depart.
NPR caught up with Abukhedeir to check on how he’s been doing since he left the enclave for Egypt, and then the United Arab Emirates.
Last time NPR spoke to Abukhedeir, it had been just a month since he left Gaza. The physical exhaustion and the emotional wounds of the death and injuries he had to deal with as the chief neurosurgeon of the enclave’s largest medical complex were still fresh. But he still had passion –– and hope –– in his voice.
But now, he says, he’s “alive but he’s not living.”
Nearly 9 months have passed and Abukhedeir does not see an end in sight to the suffering. This has dampened his spirit, he says. He still believes that he will one day be back to rebuild and serve his community. But, as he puts it, it will take “nothing short of a miracle”. And he doesn’t know how many of his family members in Gaza will still be alive.
“All we have left is to pray to God that this suffering stops,” he said.
And when the phone rings, he fears it will be bad news about his elderly parents or one of his siblings who are still alive in Gaza.
“I want to check on my family but when they’re the ones who call me, I worry that they will tell me someone has died,” he says.
Since Abukhedeir left Gaza, he sometimes feels remorse and guilt that he left his family and patients behind.
“But I thank God when I remember that exiting Gaza was God’s plan for me,” he says. “It saved me from this genocide and meant that I’m still able to help my family and patients even though I’m abroad through remote medical consultations and financial support.” (The Israeli government has strongly denied accusations that it has violated the convention against genocide.)
Even though he previously held a medical license to practice in the UAE, it took four months of waiting and paperwork for Abukhedeir to get permission to practice at a private medical center in the city of Al-Ain.
“Life here is very expensive. There are many expenses for schools. Housing is costly,” he says. “We had to burn through all of our savings.”
Their new life holds promise: as in Gaza, the main language is Arabic, there are nice places for his kids to go to and some restaurants that serve familiar Middle Eastern food. But he does not have the appetite for any of it.
“My wife and I go out only to create a nice environment for our kids,” he says.
Abukhedeir has already lost many things he held dear in Gaza: his house, his clinic and dozens of friends, colleagues and family. The closest death was his sister, Dalia, who, he says, perished from untreated burns that covered three-quarters of her body in October after an Israeli airstrike. Abukhedeir’s 22-year-old nephew, Dalia’s son, was also severely burnt but is still living with the wounds. Abukhedeir has been trying to get him out of Gaza to seek urgent medical treatment to no avail.
He lost his right ear, can’t properly use his legs because he needs physiotherapy and can’t move his hands due to contractures, a complication where burn scars mature, tighten and thicken, preventing movement of the affected area, Abukhedeir says. The situation weighs heavily on him.
“He was one of the most diligent young men in the family. He was a third year computer science student in college. He loved his work and was full of passion and energy,” Abukhedeir says. “All of that is gone. He can’t use his hands to work on computers. And it pains me that I can’t do anything about it.”
Abukhedeir’s elderly parents are also still in the North of Gaza and he hasn’t been able to get them out. They have been living on canned foods for months, with no fresh produce available, he says.
“They haven’t seen meat or chicken or fresh fruits or vegetables for so long,” he says.
Starting from ground zero
Before the war, Abukhedeir and his family lived a comfortable life in Gaza. He was at the top of his career ladder as a neurosurgeon with a bustling clinical practice and around 14 neurosurgery trainees to mentor at Al-Shifa Hospital and the European Hospital in southern Gaza.
At his new job in the UAE, he has had to start from ground zero. He needs to establish a name for himself and build a referral system for patients to come.
He’s putting in the work for his family’s sake. But it’s not easy.
He says that a sense of anguish is consuming both him and his wife.
He won’t let his children watch the news lest the harrowing images affect them, but when they’re not around, he and his wife tune in. “It’s unbearable. But we really can’t turn away from it,” he says.
The children are resilient but they are still healing. They seem shaken everytime they remember what they endured in Gaza, Abukhedeir says. He adds that they thank God they’re safe but feel sad and worried about the family still there.
The kids have just started to get acclimated to their new school, make friends and live a semblance of a normal life.
“Even though my wife and I are shells of humans at this point, we smile and want our children to live a life like any child deserves,” he says.
In terms of mid- or long-term plans, Abukhedeir said he is taking it one day at a time.
“I feel like I’m paralyzed,” he says. “I just can’t think or make any plans until the war ends.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/09/06/g-s1-20847/gaza-neurosurgeon-war-israel-middle-east
*
TOO UNATTRACTIVE TO MERIT ASSAULT
Donald Trump appears to be arguing that one reason he is innocent of sexual assault allegations is because his accusers are not attractive to him. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said of one. Later, Trump said, “I would not want to be involved with her.”
Trump has repeatedly suggested writer E. Jean Carroll was too unattractive for him to have had any interest in her. Meanwhile, in a deposition played at the trial, Trump looked at a photograph and confused his accuser for his ex-wife Marla Maples.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/09/06/2024-election-campaign-updates-harris-trump/#author-box'
*
DESPITE TRUMP’S CLAIMS, HOMICIDE IS DOWN. FEDS CREDIT REAL-TIME INTELLIGENCE
Crime is falling rapidly in many U.S. cities for the second year in a row, a decline attributed in part to the end of the pandemic’s empty streets and shuttered stores.
Law enforcement officials also credit a renewed focus on gun crimes — analyzing evidence faster, hitting suspects with federal charges where possible, and quickening the pace of arrests to prevent tit-for-tat violence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/09/06/2024-election-campaign-updates-harris-trump/#author-box
*
IN JD VANCE’S VIEW, REAL AMERICANS HAVE KIDS AND EDUCATE THEM IN BUNKERS
One of the defining characteristics of Sen. JD Vance’s (R-Ohio) politics, at least since his rebirth as a far-right voice and an acolyte of Donald Trump’s, is that Americans should have more kids — and that Americans without kids are not full participants in the American experiment.
Since Vance was tapped as Trump’s running mate, examples of his disparagements of childless Americans have trickled out, a byproduct of his affinity for granting interviews to ideologically aligned podcast hosts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/09/06/2024-election-campaign-updates-harris-trump/#author-box
"More sociopathic." According to CNN, Vance said on a conservative podcast in November 2020 that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.”
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/09/04/why-does-jd-vance-focus-on-people-without-children-a-deeper-look/75067025007/
*
J.D. Vance has called falling birthrates in the U.S. a "civilizational crisis.”
But he voted against a bill that would have protected IVF treatments.
He also called universal childcare programs “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent.”
Vance is against IVF
Liz Wisniewski:
No, Vance’s daughter would be flown to another country for the procedure. Hypocrisy is his middle name.
Oriana:
Vance is a convert to Catholicism. In Catholicism, a woman should be, best of all, a virgin. She also gains some respect (but not as much as a virgin) if she bears lots of children (never mind that it takes having lots of sex). But a single woman who loves nature (cats don’t count), who seriously pursues her creative talent, of is simply a good person — such a woman is of no use to the church and thus, presumably, to society.
This has been a strange obsession of the church: how to coerce women to breed dozens of children, or else remain sterile virgins for life.
*
”They will call you “crazy” because you are, because you were born with the gift of seeing things differently and that scares them.
They're going to call you “intense” because you are, because you were born with the value well placed to allow yourself to feel it all fully and that intimidates them.
They're going to call you “selfish” because that's right, because you found out that you're the most important thing in your life and that doesn't suit them.
You're going to be called in many ways, with many judgments, for a long time, but stay firm on yourself and what you want, and I promise you one day they're going to call you to say, “thank you for existing.” ~ Frida Kahlo-%20Sun%20and%20Life%201947.jpg)
*
THE RIGHT’S OBSESSION WITH CHILDLESS WOMEN
A woman without biological children is running for high political office, and so naturally that quality will at some point be used against her. Kamala Harris has, in the short period since she emerged as the Democratic candidate for US president, been scrutinized over her lack of children. The conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain posted on X that Harris “shouldn’t be president” – apparently, she doesn’t have “skin in the game”. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, called Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives”.
It’s a particularly virulent tendency in the US, with a rightwing movement that is fixated on women’s reproduction. But who can forget (and if you have, I am happy to remind you of a low point that still sticks in my craw) Andrea Leadsom, during the 2016 Conservative party leadership election, saying that Theresa May might have nieces and nephews, but “I have children who are going to have children … who will be a part of what happens next”.
“Genuinely,” she added, as if the message were not clear enough, “I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”
It’s an argument about political capability that dresses up a visceral revulsion at the idea that a woman who does not have a child should be vested with any sort of credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that “so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me”. He appears so fixated on this that it is almost comical: a man whose obsession with childless women verges on a complex.
But his “disorientation and disturbance” is a political tendency that persists and endures. It constantly asks the question of women who don’t have children, in subtle and explicit ways, especially the higher they rise in the professional sphere: “What’s up with that? What’s the deal?” The public sphere becomes a space for answering that question. Women perform a sort of group plea to be left the hell alone, in their painstaking examinations of how they arrived at the decision not to have kids, or why they in fact celebrate not having kids, or deliberations on ambivalence about having kids.
Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering. But one reason this traditionalism persists in ostensibly modern and progressive places is that women withdrawing from mothering in capitalist societies – with their poorly resourced public amenities and parental support – forces questions about our inequitable, unacknowledged economic arrangements. A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay home and provide unremunerated care. She is less likely to be held in the domestic zone and extend her caregiving to elderly relatives or the children of others. She cannot be a resource that undergirds a male partner’s career, frailties, time limitations and social demands.
A mother is an option, a floating worker, the joker in the pack. Not mothering creates a hole for that “free” service, which societies increasingly arranged around nuclear families and poorly subsidized rights depend on. The lack of parental leave, childcare and elderly care would become profoundly visible – “disorienting and disturbing” – if that service were removed.
“Motherhood,” writes the author Helen Charman in her new book Mother State, “is a political state. Nurture, care, the creation of human life – all immediate associations with mothering – have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources … than we like to admit. For raising children is the foundational work of society, and, from gestation onward, it is unequally shared.”
Motherhood, in other words, becomes an economic input, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room. Data on declining birthrates draws comment from Elon Musk (“extremely concerning!!”) . Not having children is reduced to entirely personal motivations – selfishness, beguilement with the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility – rather than external conditions: of the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible working arrangements and the risk of financial oblivion that motherhood frequently brings, therefore creating bondage to partners. To put it mildly, these are material considerations to be taken into account upon entering a state from which there is no return. Assuming motherhood happens without such context, Charman tells me, is a “useful fantasy”.
It is a binary public discourse, obscuring the often thin veil between biological and social actualization. Women who don’t have children do not exist in a state of blissful detachment from their bodies and their relationship with maternity: a number have had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and periods. A number have entered liminal stages of motherhood that don’t conform to the single definition from which they are excluded.
A number extend mothering to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepchildren (who don’t count, just as May’s nieces and nephews didn’t). A number have become mothers, just not in a way that initiates them into a blissful club. They experience regret, depression and navigate unsettlement that does not conform to the image of uncomplicated validation of your purpose in life.
But the privilege of those truths cannot be bestowed on creatures whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unfair contract. Women with children are handed social acceptance for their vital investment in “the future”, in exchange for unrewarded, unsupported labor that props up and stabilizes the economic and social status quo. All while still suffering sneeriness about the value of their work in comparison with the serious graft of the men who win the bread.
On top of that, women have to navigate all that motherhood – or not – entails, all the deeply personal, bewildering, isolating and unacknowledged realities of both, while being subject to relentless suffocating, infantilizing and violating public theories and notions that trespass on their private spaces. With that comes a sense of self-doubt and shame in making the wrong decision, or not being as content with those decisions as they are expected to be. It is a constant, prodding vivisection. That, more than anything clinical observers feel, is the truly disorienting and disturbing experience.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/02/jd-vance-childless-women-kamala-harris
Do parents like other people’s children?
Fred Flubster:
More education reduces birth rates for women, but does a culture really want its brightest women to have fewest children, given that intelligence is to a great degree heritable?
M909:
I've spent part of my professional life and probably more of my leisure time, coaching sports to children. It's fun. But I don't have any of my own. And preferred being able to hand back the children to someone else, after the coaching session.
UKBristolDave:
I love being an Uncle but, due to a variety of huge character flaws, I'd be a terrible parent hence I chose not to have any. I wouldn't want to inflict me on children.
GeneralLex:
If you insist on calling yourself child-free, you just don’t like children. Let’s stop fooling ourselves.
Evelynsme:
I'm child free AND I hate children. Some of my friends are child free AND like children. Some people I know are parents AND dislike most children.
The two things are not intertwined.
mintaka:
Good point. Parents are generally no more likely than the child-free to like or tolerate other people's children.
NBfinery615:
my favorite [term for children] is 'sexcrement'
unfortunately I didn't make that one up I heard a comedian say it
Wild1:
1 in 5 women don't have children.
Dearlings:
More babies means more growth. Every government on the planet seems to be obsessed with trying to figure out how to make women have more children because 'the economy' is all that matters. Most countries have tried using carrots to get those eggs fertilized — the US is going the stick route. Neither is likely to work without a major societal shift as well. The Republicans are salivating at the prospect of using a massive huge stick to whack the womenfolk back into place. Most other countries aren't prepared to offer a big enough carrot to change things... it's probably only a matter of time before they try the stick too.
Awk_099:
I see a lot of people cheering about having a smaller population, but nobody is volunteering to go first
FredFlubster:
The Black Death was tremendously good — for the survivors. It led in the UK to the end of feudalism/serfdom, and our forebears were no longer required by law to stay on the lord's estate and work for him.
Instead you could get on your Shanks's pony and seek work where you could find it.
And you also acquired a surname — generally ending -son if you were a serf.
Moogie Musings:
Why is childlessness a serious issue? Through a climate lens overpopulation and resource use both need to be tackled and through a societal lens then childless males and females are a boon providing additional labor and childcare to help parents — many human and animal groups do this. It’s only through the capitalism lens that childlessness becomes an issue as less people means fewer sales of products. Time to rethink what really matters to humanity and get off the capitalist treadmill. And let’s not forget that men can be childless too.
VelmaDinkley:
I never wanted children, never ever. Money had nothing to do with it. Women like me may be a minority, but not an insubstantial one.
Don't pretend we aren't real.
KittyLove:
It wasn't a choice for me or many others. Infertility and social childlessness have a major part to play. I didn't meet a man who wanted to have kids with me until I was in my late 30s and then it turned out I wasn't able to. Many of my friends of a similar age (late 40s) have simply never met a partner who is willing to have children with them. Of my college flatmates (6 including me), only one has had children. The rest of us are childless due to circumstance or infertility (me). None of us chose it.
*
THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF A JFK MISTRESS
On a brisk autumn day in October 1964, Washington D.C. socialite and painter Mary Pinchot Meyer was out for an afternoon stroll on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown, a route she often took, when she was shot and killed in broad daylight. A 25-year-old African American man named Ray Crump was arrested, having been found near the crime scene. The lack of evidence, though, eventually lead to his acquittal.
To this day, the murder remains unsolved, but the case is still the subject of fascination to many, inspiring memoirs, novels, a TV series, including the podcast "Murder on the Towpath" by Emmy-winning veteran journalist Soledad O’Brien.
Who Was Mary Pinchot Meyer?
Why the endless fascination? For one, Meyer was a very well-connected socialite with a social pedigree. Her father was a wealthy lawyer, her mother a journalist, and an uncle had served as a two-time governor of Pennsylvania. She was educated at Manhattan's prestigious Brearley School, and then went on to Vassar, and had married a high-ranking CIA official named Cord Meyer, whom she divorced in 1958.
She counted Jackie Kennedy as a friend; the Kennedys had moved in next door to the Meyers in 1954 and the two women took walks together, often on the same path where Meyer was later murdered. Ben Bradlee, who would go on to lead the The Washington Post and become a folk hero after Watergate, was her brother-in-law (he was married to her sister Antoinette).
She was also John F. Kennedy's mistress. The two had known each other since high school, when they met at a school dance at Choate, and struck up a secret romantic relationship after her divorce. She would visit JFK at the White House when Jackie went out of town. In October 1963, a month before he was assassinated, the president wrote a letter to Meyer imploring her to visit him in Boston or on the Cape. "Why don't you just say yes," it read. The letter, which was never sent and remained with JFK's personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, went up for auction in 2016 and sold for nearly $89,000.
What Happened to Her?
Meyer lived in Georgetown with her two sons, where she had moved after her divorce and became an artist; she spent most of her time painting in her studio. On October 12, 1964, at around noon, she left for her daily walk on the towpath along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. There she was shot twice.
In just 45 minutes, the police apprehended a suspect, Crump, who was found nearby, his clothes soaked. He said he had been fishing, dropped his pole, and fell into the canal while trying to retrieve it. Legendary civil rights attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree became Crump's defense lawyer and he was acquitted of all charges in July 1965. The murder was never solved.
Meyer's Relationships with JFK and the CIA Have Fueled Several Conspiracy Theories
Meyer's illustrious social connections—plus the shock that something like this had happened in tony Georgetown—made this crime particularly salacious. And her affair with Kennedy and her connections to the CIA, an organization she openly criticized, inevitably fed the conspiracy-theory machine. Was the CIA behind both Meyer's and JFK's deaths, with their alleged killers the scapegoats? Did the CIA order the hit because she knew too much?
Several things fueled the speculation: The execution-style manner of her killing, a close-range shot to the head and one to the chest. Then, the fact that her death occurred a few weeks after the release of the Warren Commission (which concluded that JFK's assassination was the work of a lone gunman) further fanned the flames, since she allegedly challenged its conclusions.
Finally, there was the fact that the CIA was wiretapping her phone and its counterintelligence chief was found trying to break into her studio to find her diary after the murder, likely to prevent details of her affair with JFK from becoming public.
But Meyer Isn't the Only Fascinating Woman at the Center of This Story
In "Murder on the Towpath," O'Brien delves deeper into the unsolved mystery of Meyer's death by shifting focus away from all the conspiracy theories and to the women at the heart of this story. Meyer is one, of course, and the other is Dovey Johnson Roundtree, the trailblazing civil rights attorney who successfully defended Meyer's accused killer and got him acquitted.
Dovey Johnson Roundtree"It's very easy to go to conspiracy theories. Sometimes they're wacky, sometimes they're interesting," says O'Brien, who spent nine months investigating the case, interviewing friends, relatives, historians, and biographers, and consulting memoirs, especially Ben Bradlee's, for the eight-episode series.
"But what was really compelling was this idea of these two women who were both trying to figure out how to live their lives in 1964. I thought the 1960s was an interesting era to think about for women and how they were often thwarted, whether they were rich and white or poor and black.”
Roundtree, who died in 2018 at the age of 104, grew up in the Jim Crow South and worked her way up to become a civil rights champion who broke several racial and gender barriers throughout her life. She was one of the first women to be commissioned an Army officer, she secured the ban on racial segregation on interstate buses, and, in 1964, she took on Crump's defense for just $1—and secured his acquittal.
That Roundtree, an African American woman, was able to get a poor, black man acquitted of murdering a very rich, white woman was a historic achievement, especially in 1960s America, a period of immense civil unrest.
It's how the trajectories of Meyer's and Roundtree's lives aligned, even though the two women never met, that interested O'Brien. She wanted to make these women—not the men around them—the focus, something that hasn't been done for the past 50 years. "Technically they're at the center of the story: one is murdered and the other is a person who argues a case she's expected to lose. Yet historically they've been moved off the center," she says. "It's a metaphor for how women were treated in the 1960s.”
There's a telling moment that O'Brien recounts in the first episode: a police officer examining Meyer's dead body at the crime scene proceeds to make a comment about how pretty she is. "It felt like an important element because it speaks to the people of this story constantly being rendered powerless," she notes.
As for those conspiracy theories, O'Brien does address them. "For me as a reporter the key is to have transparency," she says. "You can't ignore them because they exist.”
But "Murder on the Towpath" goes far deeper into the layers. It's a true crime story about two compelling, strong, and independent women, plus history, mystery, and a lot of twists and turns. Says O'Brien: "There's so much more to this case than just conspiracy theories and a love affair with JFK."
Mary Pinchot at far right
~ No one knows if JFK did experiment with LSD
with Meyer, but rumors persist, championed by followers of Leary and
“proven” by dramatic changes in Kennedy’s international policies in
1963. In June, Kennedy appeared to make an about-face on his pessimism
that peace could ever be achieved with the Soviet Union and gave one of
the most remarkable speeches of his career, on world unity, at American
University. “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s
future. And we are all mortal,” Kennedy declared. “… Is not peace, in
the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights: the right to live
out our lives without fear of devastation… ?” Kennedy’s speech so
impressed Krushchev that the Soviet leader had it rebroadcast throughout
his country. This led to renewed negotiations with Soviet leadership
and the nuclear test ban treaty. It also severely disappointed war hawks
in Washington. ~
https://crimereads.com/the-last-painting-of-mary-pinchot-meyer/
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MEANWHILE IN MOSCOW
In Moscow, I spotted an advertising of a new Russian apparel company that has taken advantage of departed Western brands to make dramatic expansion.
This woman to me does not look like she cares about traditional family values.
Where is her husband and five children, three of whom she gave birth to while still in high school in order to skip university and go straight to tank factory to help Motherland fight Nazis?
This advertisement makes me blush in shame. I give it zero red stars. Not even zero because Z is symbol of special military operation,
At least we have world’s most traditional and conservative outhouses! ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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PUTIN’S THREE DREAMS
Putin’s dream was to be in history books — as a great conqueror of lands, like Peter the Great or Catherine II of Russia. But he will be in the history books like Hitler of Germany, who began the largest war of the century.
[Oriana: a sign briefly appeared in Red Square, placed so that Putin could read it: "You are not Peter the First. You are Adolph the Second."]
Stalin was one of Putin’s icons — it’s with Putin’s guidance that the Russian Federation began again worshiping the murderous tyrant, who remained barely mentioned in Soviet history textbooks after 1956.
Now the younger generation, born during Putin’s time in power (Putin became Russia’s prime minister 25 years ago — in August 1999) is wearing T-shirts with Stalin’s portraits and celebrates Soviet symbols.
The Soviet Union was composed of 15 republics — now all of them are independent countries.
The Russian Federation used to be the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the USSR.
RSFSR itself was composed of many national autonomous republics (Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Buryatia, Tuva, and dozens of others)— territories populated by nations conquered by various Russian tsars and princes during hundreds of years of Muscovy’s territorial grabs.
Muscovy 1471
By now, Putin has 3 dreams:
Restore the Russian Empire: a more ambitious dream than was restoring the USSR — Russian Empire also included Finland and Poland.
Destroy the rules-based order — and also punish the West, which didn’t allow Putin to just roll over Ukraine. Putin is a vindictive sadist who can’t stand being shown his place.
Secure a positive mention in history books — rather than how he is seen now, as a sadistic murderer who is responsible for deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Putin is still hopes it’s all possible for him.That he can somehow erase the collective consciousness and memory and get not what he deserves, but what he dreams about — that there is a way to make the world forget and start worshiping him — like he managed to make Russians forget the Stalin’s past and make him a hero worthy bronze statues in every town.
It is up to us, the regular people of the world, to keep our politicians to account, to ensure that Putin gets what he deserves — a place in history books among the likes of Hitler and Gaddafi.
And a 3-year court hearing for his many crimes against humanity.
Preferably, this hearing should take place in the Ukrainian Mariupol.
refinery fire best
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YOU ARE A DIFFERENT PERSON AT 77 THAN YOU WERE AT 14
Look at a photo of yourself as a teenager and, mistaken fashion choices aside, it’s likely you see traces of the same person with the same personality quirks as you are today. But whether or not you truly are the same person over a lifetime—and what that notion of personhood even means—is the subject of ongoing philosophical and psychology debate.
The longest personality study of all time, published in Psychology and Aging and recently highlighted by the British Psychological Society, suggests that over the course of a lifetime, just as your physical appearance changes and your cells are constantly replaced, your personality is also transformed beyond recognition.
The study begins with data from a 1950 survey of 1,208 14-year-olds in Scotland. Teachers were asked to use six questionnaires to rate the teenagers on six personality traits: self-confidence, perseverance, stability of moods, conscientiousness, originality, and desire to learn. Together, the results from these questionnaires were amalgamated into a rating for one trait, which was defined as “dependability.” More than six decades later, researchers tracked down 635 of the participants, and 174 agreed to repeat testing.
This time, aged 77 years old, the participants rated themselves on the six personality traits, and also nominated a close friend or relative to do the same. Overall, there was not much overlap from the questionnaires taken 63 years earlier. “Correlations suggested no significant stability of any of the 6 characteristics or their underlying factor, dependability, over the 63-year interval,” wrote the researchers. “We hypothesized that we would find evidence of personality stability over an even longer period of 63 years, but our correlations did not support this hypothesis,” they later added.
The findings were a surprise to researchers because previous personality studies, over shorter periods of time, seemed to show consistency. Studies over several decades, focusing on participants from childhood to middle age, or from middle age to older age, showed stable personality traits. But the most recent study, covering the longest period, suggests that personality stability is disrupted over time. “The longer the interval between two assessments of personality, the weaker the relationship between the two tends to be,” the researchers write. “Our results suggest that, when the interval is increased to as much as 63 years, there is hardly any relationship at all.”
Perhaps those who had impulsive character flaws as a teenager would be grateful that certain personality traits might even out later in life. But it’s disconcerting to think that your entire personality is transformed.
“Personality refers to an individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms—hidden or not—behind those patterns,” note the authors, quoting psychology professor David Funder’s definition.
If your patterns of thought, emotions, and behavior so drastically alter over the decades, can you truly be considered the same person in old age as you were as a teenager? This question ties in with broader theories about the nature of the self. For example, there is growing neuroscience research that supports the ancient Buddhist belief that our notion of a stable “self” is nothing more than an illusion.
Perhaps this won’t surprise you if you’ve had the experience of running into a very old friend from school, and found a completely different person from the child you remembered. This research suggests that, as the decades go by, your own younger self could be similarly
unrecognizable.
https://qz.com/914002/youre-a-completely-different-person-at-14-and-77-the-longest-running-personality-study-ever-has-found
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ANNE GILCHRIST ON HAPPINESS
“So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance,” Jane Hirshfield wrote in her stunning poem “The Weighing.” In how we chip from the monolithic weight of the world those osmian grains of happiness lies the promise of an answer to the abiding question: How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?
That is what Anne Gilchrist (February 25, 1828–November 29, 1885) — a woman Walt Whitman cherished as “a sort of human miracle,” whose “vision went on and on” and who “belonged to the times yet to come” — returns to again and again, each time quarrying new strata of insight, in the forgotten treasure The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman (free ebook | public library). Radiating from the pages of her beautiful and heartbreaking love letters to Whitman is an uncommonly original and penetrating mind in dialogue perhaps even more richly with itself than with its half-attentive correspondent. (Whitman responded to a fraction of the letters; he could not, for the obvious reason, meet her romantic ardor — but he relished and responded to her exceptional mind.)
By the time Gilchrist encountered Whitman’s soul-salving poetry, which she helped popularize in England with her coruscating review, she had been widowed for more than a decade, raising her four children as a single mother and making a living by her pen in an era when very few women were published authors — notably, her biography of William Blake, on which she had collaborated with her husband until his death, then finished by herself to establish the forgotten Blake, who had died an obscure outsider artist almost entirely unknown as a poet, as a creative icon for generations.
On the second day of summer in 1869, in consonance with her contemporary and compatriot Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s insistence on happiness as a moral obligation, Gilchrist writes in a letter to William Michael Rossetti — Christina Rossetti’s brother and Whitman’s British publisher, who had boldly brought Leaves of Grass to England when it was scorned in America and who would eventually introduce Gilchrist and Whitman:
I used to think it was great to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal, careless, disdainful of it. But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness; to pluck it out of “each moment and whatever happens”; to find that one can ride as gay and buoyant on the angry, menacing, tumultuous waves of life as on those that glide and glitter under a clear sky; that it is not defeat and wretchedness which come out of the storm of adversity, but strength and calmness.
Our greatest obstacle to happiness, Gilchrist intimates, are our illusions of finitude and fragmentation — a failure of imagination that becomes a self-imposed prison of smallness, from which we are liberated only when we learn to see the interconnected wholeness of the universe:
One of the hardest things to make a child understand is, that down underneath your feet, if you go far enough, you come to blue sky and stars again; that there really is no “down” for the world, but only in every direction an “up.”
And that this is an all-embracing truth, including within its scope every created thing, and, with deepest significance, every part, faculty, attribute, healthful impulse, mind, and body of a man (each and all facing towards and related to the Infinite on every side), is what we grown children find it hardest to realize, too.
Fifteen years before William James devised his revolutionary theory of how our bodies affect our feelings and more than a century before our modern science shed light on how the mind and the body converge in the healing of trauma, Gilchrist makes a beautifully articulated, elegantly reasoned case for nondualistic wellbeing:
I feel deeply persuaded that a perfectly fearless, candid, ennobling treatment of the life of the body (so inextricably intertwined with, so potent in its influence on the life of the soul) will prove of inestimable value to all earnest and aspiring natures, impatient of the folly of the long-prevalent belief that it is because of the greatness of the spirit that it has learned to despise the body, and to ignore its influences; knowing well that it is, on the contrary, just because the spirit is not great enough, not healthy and vigorous enough, to transfuse itself into the life of the body, elevating that and making it holy by its own triumphant intensity; knowing, too, how the body avenges this by dragging the soul down to the level assigned itself. Whereas the spirit must lovingly embrace the body, as the roots of a tree embrace the ground, drawing thence rich nourishment, warmth, impulse. Or, rather, the body is itself the root of the soul — that whereby it grows and feeds. The great tide of healthful life that carries all before it must surge through the whole man, not beat to and fro in one corner of his brain.
Like Whitman, who both reverenced science and probed its limitations, Gilchrist bolstered her erudition and her philosophical ideas with an intense interest in astronomy, chemistry, and biology, keeping up with the latest discoveries of the time. Drawing on her respect for science, and echoing computing pioneer Alan Turing’s brokenhearted belief that “the body provides something for the spirit to look after and use,” she adds:
Science knows that matter is not, as we fancied, certain stolid atoms which the forces of nature vibrate through and push and pull about; but that the forces and the atoms are one mysterious, imperishable identity, neither conceivable without the other. She knows, as well as the poet, that destructibility is not one of nature’s words; that it is only the relationship of things — tangibility, visibility — that are transitory. She knows that body and soul are one, and proclaims it undauntedly, regardless, and rightly regardless, of inferences.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/anne-gilchrist-on-inner-wholeness-our-greatest-obstacle-to-happiness-and-the-body-as-the-seedbed-of?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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PLOTTING THE DEMISE OF ALZHEIMER’S
Catch it early.
Those are watchwords in the battle against a host of illnesses, from heart disease to cancer to Type 2 diabetes. Early detection gives physicians a chance to minimize damage, to insert a stent and keep blood flowing to the heart, to remove a tumor before one becomes many, to urge crucial lifestyle changes: lose weight, eat better, exercise.
But can the strategy work for Alzheimer’s disease? Scientists are starting to think it might.
The Harvard Aging Brain Study, a National Institute on Aging-backed project now in its seventh year, has shown that amyloid beta, the protein thought to cause Alzheimer’s [Oriana: it's important to note that there are other hypotheses, which regard amyloid beta as a symptom and not a cause], accumulates in the brain a decade or more before symptoms occur.
That finding has given new hope to researchers struggling to move beyond a rash of high-profile Alzheimer’s failures in clinical drug trials. In February, just three months after Eli Lilly & Co. announced a trial failure, drug maker Merck & Co. halted a study. Several additional drugs are still in trials, but researchers are reconsidering their approach and wondering whether the problem is in trying to reverse, rather than prevent, dementia.
“I think we’ve failed in 11 phase 3 trials, which is not a good track record,” said Reisa Sperling, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and co-director of the Harvard Aging Brain Study at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). “From a clinical point of view, it’s a dismal failure.”
Now, the “catch it early” idea is being put to the test in a new study called A4, or Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease, led by Sperling and the University of Southern California’s Paul Aisen. Researchers will try an anti-amyloid drug on people who show no signs of cognitive decline, but who do have abnormally high levels of amyloid beta in their brains.
“I think this is a tremendously important trial,” said Aisen. “It’s the first trial in a population we refer to as ‘preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.’ We believe this is identifying an early stage of the disease, not just ‘at risk’ [patients]…. If we wait for people to have symptoms, there’s already substantial neuro-degeneration.”
Alzheimer’s is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States, killing about 94,000 people annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
An estimated 5 million Americans are living with the disease, a figure expected to climb to 13.5 million by 2050, according to a report by the Alzheimer’s Association. Costs of care are projected to rise from $226 billion in 2015 to $1.1 trillion by 2050, with Medicare and Medicaid paying 70 percent. Developing a treatment to delay Alzheimer’s onset by just five years could save an estimated $935 billion over the following 10 years, the report says.
In recent decades, researchers have worked out what many believe is the step-by-step process through which Alzheimer’s does its work. Amyloid beta, a naturally occurring protein whose normal function in the brain remains unclear, builds to unhealthy levels. The amyloid beta forms plaques, which in turn lead to tangles of a protein called tau inside nerve cells, killing them. This triggers inflammation, a natural infection-fighting response, which in this case makes things worse.
A4 is screening 5,000 cognitively normal candidates, age 65 to 85, with the goal of enrolling about 1,150 who have elevated amyloid beta levels. The trial will test Eli Lilly’s solanezumab, an anti-amyloid antibody that was proved safe, though judged ineffective, in patients with mild dementia due to Alzheimer’s. The antibody targets soluble forms of the protein, not the plaques themselves.
Though solanezumab has been tried in Alzheimer’s patients without success, the data from that trial held indications of positive trends, said Sperling.
The A4 study — being conducted at 67 sites in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Australia — has already enrolled 875 people and is funded by the National Institutes of Health, Eli Lilly, and several philanthropic organizations. Much of the launch work — signing up participants and managing data — is being conducted by the Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.
The A4 study rests on a foundation laid by the Harvard Aging Brain Study, which began in 2009 and is headed by Sperling and Keith Johnson, a professor of radiology at HMS and MGH. The study, which has funding to run through 2019, images the brains of 60- to 90-year-olds to follow changes over time.
By early 2013, it was clear that patients who started out with higher amyloid levels — even those who were cognitively normal — had a much faster rate of decline in cognitive ability, four to five times that of patients with normal levels of the protein, Sperling said.
Those findings pointed to a far earlier beginning of the disease than scientists had grasped and led to the “catch it early” approach of A4. Sperling worries, however, that even the A4 design might be intervening too late, and that, though subjects are cognitively normal, their high amyloid levels mark a cascade ending in dementia a drug won’t halt.
And that isn’t her only worry. Though the amyloid-tau-inflammation scenario has gained wide support, skeptics remain. In fact, there are enough exceptions in the Harvard Aging Brain Study to give Sperling pause: cases of people with high levels of amyloid beta who don’t experience cognitive decline and others with lower levels who nonetheless progress rapidly.
“I think there’s still a lot of questions,” she said. “We can still only account for 50 percent — on a good day — of the variance of what happens to people cognitively. I do worry, what if we’re completely on the wrong track? What if it’s all circumstantial? What if there’s some giant X-factor we’ve missed?”
Dorene Rentz, an associate professor of neurology at HMS and the Brigham and co-director, with Sperling, of the hospital’s Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment, is also working on the A4 study. For Rentz open questions in Alzheimer’s include the relative roles of amyloid beta and tau. Though removing amyloid beta has been a major thrust of drug development, it could be that tau, which forms the tangles within neurons, has to be removed to see a clinical effect. And no tau-removing compounds have been developed.
“But the argument in the community is we have to start somewhere,” Rentz said. “All we’ve done is fail.”
The inflammation associated with the disease — part of the process of clearing amyloid and tau proteins from the brain, but itself destructive to tissue — amounts to another unanswered question, Sperling said. It’s possible that inflammation has to be reduced or avoided entirely to avoid cognitive damage. Another possibility is that Alzheimer’s is part of an underlying problem, an inability to handle waste proteins and, as Sperling put it, “empty the body’s protein garbage can.” Potentially pointing to a broader problem is the fact that other neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson’s, are also related to abnormal protein accumulation.
“I am very hopeful about the field in general,” Aisen said. “There’s a number of promising therapies. I believe we’re going to be successful and I believe dramatically successful. This is an enormous world health problem and a major problem in this country’s health.”
Should A4 fail, Sperling has a plan for trying to catch the disease earlier still. While A4 is targeting cognitively normal patients with high amyloid levels, she’s designing A3, which would test interventions on people age 60 — or even 50 — who are cognitively normal and whose amyloid levels have yet to rise.
“A3 is trying to get closer to primary prevention, pushing the envelope,” Sperling said.
For Sperling and Rentz, Alzheimer’s is not just a clinical problem, but also a personal one. Rentz’s husband has the disease and is currently participating in a drug trial, and Sperling’s career sprang from her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s, which became apparent when she was applying to medical school. Her father, who was a chemistry professor at Lehigh University, was diagnosed with the disease six years ago and died last year.
“I naively thought I could do something before it affected other members of my family,” Sperling said. “I hope my kids don’t have to take care of me that way and, hopefully, my grandchildren won’t even know what Alzheimer’s is.”
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/harvard-researchers-plot-early-attack-against-alzheimers/
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SPEEDING UP BRAIN METABOLISM
BRAIN LIGHTS
Aging and Alzheimer's leave the brain starved of energy. Now scientists think they've found a way to aid the brain's metabolism — in mice.
~ The brain needs a lot of energy — far more than any other organ in the body — to work properly. And aging and Alzheimer’s disease both seem to leave the brain underpowered.
But an experimental cancer drug appeared to re-energize the brains of mice that had a form of Alzheimer’s — and even restore their ability to learn and remember.
The finding, published in the journal Science, suggests that it may eventually be possible to reverse some symptoms of Alzheimer’s in people, using drugs that boost brain metabolism.
The results also offer an approach to treatment that’s unlike anything on the market today. Current drugs for treating Alzheimer’s, such as lecanemab and donanemab, target the sticky amyloid plaques that build up in a patient’s brain. These drugs can remove plaques and slow the disease process, but do not improve memory or thinking.
The result should help “change how we think about targeting this disease,” says Shannon Macauley, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky who was not involved in the study.
A surprise, then a discovery
The new research was prompted by a lab experiment that didn’t go as planned.
A team at Stanford was studying an enzyme called IDO1 that plays a key role in keeping a cell’s metabolism running properly. They suspected that in Alzheimer’s disease, IDO1 was malfunctioning in a way that limited the brain’s ability to turn nutrients into energy.
So the team used genetics to eliminate the enzyme entirely from mice that develop a form of Alzheimer’s. They figured that without any IDO1, brain metabolism would decline.
“We expected to see everything [get] much, much, much worse”, says Dr. Katrin Andreasson, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Stanford. “But no, it was the complete opposite.”
Without the enzyme, the mouse brains were actually better at turning glucose into energy and didn’t exhibit the memory loss usually associated with Alzheimer’s.
“It was such a profound rescue that we sort of went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out what was going on,” Andreasson says.
Eventually, the team found an explanation.
Getting rid of the enzyme had altered the behavior of cells called astrocytes.
Usually, astrocytes help provide energy to neurons, the cells that allow for learning and memory. But when the toxic plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s begin to appear in the brain, levels of IDO1 rise and astrocytes stop doing this job.
“They’re kind of put to sleep,” Andreasson says. So “you’ve got to wake them up to get them to help the neurons.”
And that’s what happened when scientists used genetics to remove IDO1.
Their hypothesis was that high levels of IDO1 were limiting the astrocytes’ ability to produce lactate, a chemical that helps brain cells, including neurons, transform food into energy.
To confirm the hypothesis, the team, led by Dr. Paras Minhas, did a series of experiments. One involved placing a mouse in the center of a shiny white disk under a bright light.
“It really wants to get out of there,” Andreasson says. “But it has to learn where the escape hole is” by following visual cues.
Healthy mice learned how to read those cues after a few days of training, and would escape almost instantly.
“But in the Alzheimer mice, the time to find the escape hole really skyrocketed,” Andreasson says.
That changed when the team gave these mice an experimental cancer drug that could block the enzyme much the way genetic engineering had.
The treated mice learned to escape the bright light as quickly as healthy animals. And a look at their brains showed that their astrocytes had woken up and were helping neurons produce the energy needed for memory and thinking.
In the hippocampus, a brain area that’s critical for memory and navigation, tests showed that the drug had restored normal glucose metabolism even though the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s were still present.
The team also tested human astrocytes and neurons derived from Alzheimer’s patients. And once again, the drug restored normal function.
Beyond plaques and tangles
The experiments add to the evidence that Alzheimer’s involves a lot more than just the appearance of plaques and tangles.
“We can have these metabolic changes in our brain,” Macaulay says, “but they’re reversible.”
Neurons have long been the focus of Alzheimer’s research. But the new results also show how other kinds of cells in the brain can play an important role in the disease.
The brain is a bit like a beehive, where a neuron is the queen, Macaulay says. But she’s kept alive by worker bees, like astrocytes, which are asked to do more as Alzheimer’s changes the brain.
“Those worker bees are getting unbelievably taxed from all the things they are being asked to do,” Macaulay says. “When that happens, then the whole system doesn’t work well.”
Metabolic treatments that restore astrocytes and other helper cells in the brain could someday augment existing Alzheimer’s drugs that remove amyloid plaques, Macauley says.
And the metabolic approach may be able to improve memory and thinking — something amyloid drugs don’t do.
“Maybe this can make your astrocytes and your neurons work a little bit better, so that you function a little bit better,” Macaulay says.
But first, she says, the promising results will have to be replicated in people.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/09/02/g-s1-20328/metabolic-brain-boost-revives-memory-alzheimers-mice
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ALZHEIMER’S DRUG MAY SAVE LIVES THROUGH SUSPENDED ANIMATION
Could buy patients more time to survive critical injuries and diseases, even when disaster strikes far from a hospital
Donepezil, an FDA-approved drug to treat Alzheimer’s, has the potential to be repurposed for use in emergency situations to prevent irreversible organ injury, according to researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Using donepezil (DPN), researchers report that they were able to put tadpoles of Xenopus laevis frogs into a hibernation-like torpor.
“Cooling a patient’s body down to slow its metabolic processes has long been used in medical settings to reduce injuries and long-term problems from severe conditions, but it can only currently be done in a well-resourced hospital,” said co-author Michael Super, director of immuno-materials at the Wyss Institute. “Achieving a similar state of ‘biostasis’ with an easily administered drug like DNP could potentially save millions of lives every year.”
This research, published Thursday in ACS Nano, was supported as part of the DARPA Biostasis Program, which funds projects that aim to extend the time for lifesaving medical treatment, often referred to as “the Golden Hour,” following traumatic injury or acute infection. The Wyss Institute has been a participant in the Biostasis Program since 2018, and has achieved several important milestones over the last few years.
Using a combination of predictive machine learning algorithms and animal models, the Wyss’ Biostasis team previously identified and tested existing drug compounds that had the potential to put living tissues into a state of suspended animation. Their first successful candidate, SNC80, significantly reduced oxygen consumption (a proxy for metabolism) in both a beating pig heart and in human organ chips, but is known to cause seizures when injected systemically.
In the new study, they once again turned to their algorithm to identify other compounds whose structures are similar to SNC80. Their top candidate was DNP, which has been approved since 1996 to treat Alzheimer’s.
“Interestingly, clinical overdoses of DNP in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease have been associated with drowsiness and a reduced heart rate — symptoms that are torpor-like. However, this is the first study, to our knowledge, that focuses on leveraging those effects as the main clinical response, and not as side effects,” said the study’s first author, María Plaza Oliver, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute when the work was conducted.
The team used X. laevis tadpoles to evaluate DNP’s effects on a whole living organism, and found that it successfully induced a torpor-like state that could be reversed when the drug was removed. The drug, however, did seem to cause some toxicity, and accumulated in all of the animals’ tissues. To solve that problem, the researchers encapsulated DNP inside lipid nanocarriers, and found that this both reduced toxicity and caused the drug to accumulate in the animals’ brain tissues. This is a promising result, as the central nervous system is known to mediate hibernation and torpor in other animals as well.
Although DNP has been shown to protect neurons from metabolic stress in models of Alzheimer’s disease, the team cautions that more work is needed to understand exactly how it causes torpor, as well as scale up production of the encapsulated DNP for use in larger animals and, potentially, humans.
“Donepezil has been used worldwide by patients for decades, so its properties and manufacturing methods are well-established. Lipid nanocarriers similar to the ones we used are also now approved for clinical use in other applications. This study demonstrates that an encapsulated version of the drug could potentially be used in the future to buy patients critical time to survive devastating injuries and diseases, and it could be easily formulated and produced at scale on a much shorter time scale than a new drug,” said senior author Donald Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/08/alzheimers-drug-may-save-lives-through-suspended-animation/
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GENETIC LINK BETWEEN CORONARY HEART DISEASE AND ALZHEIMER’S CONFIRMED
Researchers at Edith Cowan University's (ECU's) Centre for Precision Health have uncovered a significant genetic connection between Alzheimer's disease (AD) and several coronary artery disease (CAD) related disorders and lipid classes, offering opportunities to improve health outcomes across two of the more common causes of death in Australia.
The new research has found that several heart disease-related factors like angina, arteriosclerosis, ischemic heart disease, myocardial infarction, and coronary artery disease as well as lipids like cholesterol, triglycerides and both high- and low-density lipoproteins (HDL and LDL) could share similar biological origins with AD.
This means that some of the same genes played a role in or are associated across these conditions.
"There is considerable evidence from observational and other studies to support a connection between these conditions, however the intricate biological mechanisms of AD are poorly understood, and its relationship with lipids and CAD traits remains unresolved." lead researcher and Centre for Precision Health PhD candidate Ms Artika Kirby said.
"Our study employed a genetic approach to investigate the intricate relationships of these comorbid conditions, providing new insights into their shared biological underpinnings of these conditions. I am optimistic that our findings open new avenues of research that have the potential to enhance the lives of millions, worldwide.”
"The Centre for Precision Health's use of advanced statistical genetics approaches is significantly contributing to our understanding of the relationships across many of today's major health conditions -- this study emphazises the strength of this approach," Professor Simon Laws, Director of the Centre for Precision Health and co-supervisor of the study, remarked.
Dementia, of which AD is the major cause, and coronary artery or heart disease, are the two leading underlying causes of death in Australians. Researchers say there may be more to link these conditions than just their association with poor health outcomes.
Evidence increasingly links CAD with cognitive impairment and the risk of dementia with research suggesting that individuals with CAD experience an accelerated cognitive decline following diagnosis and CAD patients have a 26% higher relative risk of dementia. However, the nature of the relationship and the underpinning mechanisms for CAD's association with AD and cognitive impairment remains unclear.
The connection between CAD and AD may partly reflect shared risk factors such as dyslipidaemia and inflammation. Lipid disorders and CAD considerably impact human health and are recognized as a substantial risk factor for AD, just as a relationship between CAD and AD has been reported.
There is also the potential for shared genetic predispositions across all of these factors.
"By applying genetic approaches to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between AD and Coronary Heart disease -- the two leading causes of death in Australia -- we have uncovered novel insights into the underlying mechanisms linking these conditions," NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and project co-supervisor Dr. Emmanuel Adewuyi added.
"These insights could translate into improvements in patient care and outcomes for these two leading health issues -- not only in Australia but around the world."
Investigating Genetic Overlap Between Alzheimer's Disease, Lipids and Coronary Artery Disease has been published in the International Journal of Molecular Science.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240815124206.htm
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ALPHA CAROTENE: THE SECRET TO LONGEVITY?
The most colorful fruits and vegetables may lengthen our life expectancy. Why? They are high in color due to alpha-carotene, an anti-oxidant in the carotenoid family whose concentration in foods may be intimately linked to risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Alpha-carotene: more powerful than beta-carotene
The carotenoids, including beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, and lycopene, are vitamin A precursors. These pigments produce yellow, orange, red, and dark green in fruits and vegetables. They act as antioxidants, fighting against the damage caused by oxidation, which plays a role in the development of cardiovascular diseases and cancers. However, while alpha-carotene is chemically similar to beta-carotene, several studies seem to demonstrate that alpha-carotene is much more effective in decreasing mortality for certain forms of cancer (lung, prostate, liver, etc.) and reducing the risk of cardiovascular mortality. Research on the subject tends to show that the higher the alpha-carotene blood concentration, the more the risk of all-cause death diminishes.
In which vegetables is it found?
Scientists continue to study those results, trying to understand why and at what dose this protection occurs. However, researchers underline the importance of increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, especially that of orange and yellow vegetables, which are particularly rich in this pigment. So add color to your plate by eating carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin and winter squash, other squash, mandarin oranges, cantaloupe, and apricots. And don’t forget the red and green vegetables that contain alpha-carotene, too, including beets, broccoli, green beans, peas, green turnips, cabbage, and green salad.
https://www.fondation-louisbonduelle.org/en/2016/10/13/alpha-carotene-or-the-secret-to-longevity/
Ending on beauty:
EARLY FALL
pulled rotting from the vine,
the first grey, rainfilled sky —
sunless as February,
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