Saturday, September 25, 2021

ATHEISM AMONG THE MUSLIM; ANTIETAM: BLOODIEST BATTLE OF THE CIVIL WAR, FIRST PHOTOGRAPHS; DANTE’S PURGATORY; AKHMATOVA’S ON DANTE’S EXILE; WHY HUMANS HAVE SHED THEIR FUR;DO FIVE COFFEES A DAY KEEP THE DOCTOR AWAY?

Tibetan art; alas, my source listed no further information

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DANTE
      del mio bel San Giovanni ~ Inferno XIX:17

Even after his death, he did not return
To his ancient Florence.
To he who leaving never looked back,
I sing this song.

Torches, night, a last embrace,
Beyond the threshold the wild howl of fate.
From hell he sent his curses to her,
In paradise could not forget her —

But he never walked in a hair-shirt
Barefoot, with a lighted candle,
Through that city — beloved,
Perfidious, base, and longed for…

~ Anna Akhmatova

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“In 1301, the White Guelfs sent Dante to Rome on a mission to secure the Pope’s support for their cause. But while he was away from Florence the Black Guelfs seized power. They banished Dante in absentia and confiscated his property; he would burn at the stake should he ever return. He never did, even in 1315, when the city offered to commute his sentence if he repented publicly. Exile was preferable to abasement for a man of his temperament, which was reported to be vain and contentious. After leaving Purgatory’s terrace of pride, he worries that he’ll be remanded there after death.”  ~ from The New Yorker, September 2021, Reading Dante’s Purgatory while the World Hangs in Balance

Oriana:

Akhmatova’s great love for St. Petersburg made it vivid for Akhmatova what it must have been like for Dante to be exiled from Florence.

And she knew from experience that “wild howl of fate.”

photo: Sasa Gyoker

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READING DANTE’S PURGATORY

~ Last spring I began reading three new translations of Purgatory, being published to coincide with the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, at fifty-six, in September of 1321. “Di che potenza vieni?” -- “From what power do you come?” Purgatory, like the other two canticles of what Dante called his “sacred” epic, Inferno and Paradise, takes place during Easter week in 1300. In Canto I, the pilgrim and his cicerone, Virgil, emerge from Hell and arrive at the mountain “of that second kingdom where the human spirit purges itself to become worthy of Heaven.” Dante’s body, still clad in its flesh, inspires marvel among the shades because it casts a shadow. They mob him with questions: From where has he come?

Dante was a good companion for the pandemic, a dark wood from which the escape route remains uncertain. The plagues he describes are still with us: of sectarian violence, and of the greed for power that corrupts a regime. His medieval theology isn’t much consolation to a modern nonbeliever, yet his art and its truths feel more necessary than ever: that greater love for others is an antidote to the world’s barbarities, that evil may be understood as a sin against love, and that a soul can’t hope to dispel its anguish without first plumbing it.

An underworld where spirits migrate after death has always been part of humankind’s imagination. Nearly every culture, including the most ancient, has a name for it: Diyu, Naraka, Sheol, Tartarus, Hades. But there is no Purgatory in the Bible, or in Protestantism, or in Eastern Orthodoxy. In current Catholic dogma, it is a state of being rather than an actual realm between Hell and Heaven: an inner fire in the conscience of sinners that refines their impurities.

The concept of Purgatory was relatively new when Dante was born; it came into currency in the twelfth century, perhaps among French theologians. This invention of a liminal space where sinners who had repented but still had work to do on their souls was a great consolation to the faithful. It was also a boon for the Church. By the late Middle Ages, you could shorten your detention by years, centuries, or even millennia by paying a hefty sum to a “pardoner,” like Chaucer’s pilgrim. A popular ditty captured the cynicism this practice inspired: “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings / The soul from Purgatory springs.”

Before Dante, though, the notion of Purgatory was an empty lot waiting for a visionary developer. His blueprint is an invention of exquisite specificity. A ziggurat-like mountain ringed with seven terraces, one for each of the cardinal sins, rises from the sea in the Southern Hemisphere, opposite the globe from Jerusalem, with the Earthly Paradise at its summit. According to Dante, this mountain was formed by the impact of Satan’s fall to Earth. His descent brought grief to the children of Eve—those “seductions of sin and evil” that every godparent must renounce. But it also created a stairway to Heaven.

Dante’s conception of Purgatory is remarkably like a wilderness boot camp. Its terrain is forbidding—more like an alp than like a Tuscan hillside. Each of the rugged terraces is a setting for group therapy, where supernatural counselors dispense tough love. Their charges are sinners, yet not incorrigibles: they all embraced Jesus as their savior. But, before dying, they harmed others and themselves, so their spirits need reëducation. They will graduate to the Earthly Paradise, and eventually to Heaven, after however much time it takes them to transcend their mortal failings by owning them.

For many students of Dante, Purgatory is the Divine Comedy’s central canticle poetically, philosophically, and psychologically. It is, as one of its best translators, the poet W. S. Merwin, noted, the only one that “happens on the earth, as our lives do. . . . Here the times of day recur with all the sensations and associations that the hours bring with them, the hours of the world we are living as we read.” And here, too, he reflects, there is “hope, as it is experienced nowhere else in the poem, for there is none in Hell, and Paradise is fulfillment itself.”

Dante fought in the cavalry at Campaldino, and war must have given him a foretaste of Hell. But then he went back to civilian life, becoming a nova in Florence’s literary firmament. He made princely friends who admired his poetry. Among them was another of Italy’s greatest poets, Guido Cavalcanti, although Dante wouldn’t spare his father from damnation for heresy.

By 1295, Dante had finished “Vita Nuova,” a stylized autobiography. Its author is a self-absorbed youth with the leisure to moon after an aloof woman.

Several ladies elicit Dante’s gallantry in the “Vita,” but only one, Beatrice, inspires his adoration. Her probable model was Beatrice di Folco Portinari. Her father and husband were rich Florentine bankers; she died in her early twenties. Dante claims that he was first smitten with Beatrice as a nine-year-old; she was a few months younger and dressed fetchingly in crimson. At that moment, he “began to tremble so violently that even the least pulses of my body were strangely affected.” He next catches sight of her at eighteen, now “dressed in pure white,” and when she greets him he feels he is experiencing “the very summit of bliss.” That night, he dreams of her asleep, “naked except for a crimson cloth,” in the arms of a “lordly man.” The man wakes her, holding a blazing heart—Dante’s—and compels her to eat it, which she does “unsurely.”

The “other woman” of the “Vita” was not the girl to whom Dante had been betrothed when he was not quite twelve, and whom he had married as a young man. His lawful wife was Gemma Donati. Her family was nobler and richer than the Alighieris, and they led the Black Guelfs. He mentions several of his wife’s relatives in the Comedy. (One, the virtuous Piccarda, whose odious brother tore her from a convent and forced her to marry, greets him in Paradise; another, Forese, a friend of his youth, is a glutton in Purgatory.) But he never acknowledged Gemma’s existence in any of his works. One would like to think that Dante ghosted her out of discretion—she was beholden to his persecutors. Perhaps, though, the rueful shade of Ulysses hits upon the real reason in Inferno:

Neither tenderness for my son,

Nor duty to my old father,

Nor the debt of love I owed Penelope,


To make her happy, could compete

With my ardor to know the world,

And all things human, base and noble.

If Gemma was Dante’s Penelope, Beatrice was his Athena—the divine protectress of his odyssey. And the final chapter of the “Vita” announces a future joint enterprise. The guilty swain vows to atone for his betrayal by writing of Beatrice “what has never been said of another woman.”

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Dante spent the last nineteen years of his working life as an itinerant diplomat and secretary for the lords of northern Italy. The poem that he called, simply, the “Comedy” (a Venetian edition of 1555 added the adjective “Divine,” and it stuck) is the work of an embittered asylum seeker. Its profoundest lesson may be that love’s wellspring is forgiveness. Yet Dante never forgave Florence. Even in Paradise, he can’t resist a swipe at his fellow-citizens. They are “little brats who swat away their nurse’s breast though they’re dying of hunger.”

As the narrator of the Comedy and its central persona, Dante wrestles with his fellow-feeling for sinners condemned to torments that he has invented. Nowhere is the tension between his orthodoxy and his nascent humanism more acute than in Canto XV of Inferno, when a shade with features scorched by the flames clutches at the poet’s hem. “Brunetto, master, you are here?” Dante cries out, palpably shocked.

Brunetto Latini, a Florentine poet and statesman, had been Dante’s mentor after his parents’ deaths. He has been condemned to the Seventh Circle for practicing the vice of sodomy, about which, apparently, he was unrepentant. But the tenderness both men express, and their mourning for what they have lost in each other—a father and a son—is in its way a heretical rebuke to the implacable order that forbids their reunion in Heaven. “If all that I ask were fulfilled,” Dante says, “you wouldn’t be an outcast from human nature.”

Virgil, who died two decades before Christ’s coming, is also excluded from Heaven, yet he bears that sorrow stoically. He tells Dante that it’s a presumption to question divine justice, even when it seems unfair, and to confuse “piety” with “pity” (the same word in Italian, pietà). Salvation, Dante will discover, requires the surrender of precisely that attribute to which he is most attached as an artist, a lover, and a man: his ego.

As Dante and Virgil make their arduous circuit of Purgatory’s terraces, they ask directions from the shades, who share their stories and explain their penances. Like birds of prey being tamed by a falconer, the envious have their eyes sewn shut. The gluttons are mortified by starvation amid tormenting aromas. The lustful must pass through a wall of flames. The proud stagger beneath a sack of boulders, and the slothful atone with manic activity. But Dante is an embed, rather than a mere tourist. A sword-wielding angel scarifies his brow with seven letters—“P”s, for peccato, or sin. Once he understands a sin humbly and viscerally, he ascends to the next terrace, and a “P” is erased. Fear and exhaustion sometimes tempt him with dejection, but, Virgil tells him,

This mountain’s nature

Is to seem steepest from below;

The climb is less painful the higher you go.

Finally, in the Earthly Paradise situated at Purgatory’s summit, Dante reunites with Beatrice. She has descended from her place in Heaven, near the Virgin Mary’s, not to welcome but to confront him:
 
. . . In your desires for me,

Which led you to love the good

Beyond which one can’t aspire,


What ruts or chains in the road

Forced you to ditch any hope

Of advancement?


And what bribes or lures
In others’ eyes enticed you

To dally so idly there?

“Answer me!” she commands, as Dante cowers mutely. He compares himself to a naughty little boy being scolded.

No one has told Beatrice that, according to St. Paul, women are forbidden to teach men. She chastises Dante with a pontifical authority that few members of her sex would have then dared to vaunt. In her perfect beauty and wisdom, she explains, she embodies God’s love, so Dante’s fickleness toward her is ingratitude to the Creator. His repentance ultimately wins her absolution and consummates their love story.

But, for all her endearing feistiness, Beatrice is uniquely implausible among Dante’s major characters. She’s an abstract mouthpiece for her creator’s philosophy who lacks her own vital substance. (The Virgin Mary, by comparison, is a relatable woman who has labored and suffered.) In that respect, the poet’s otherwise incomparable powers of imagination slight Beatrice and us.

Even as a figment, however, Dante’s Beatrice has an enduring prestige as the object of a man’s ardent longing. Did her halo of romance tantalize the poet’s daughter? Dante and Gemma had at least three children. Two of their sons were among the Comedy’s first commentators. The boys’ younger sister, Antonia, became a nun in Ravenna, where Dante died and is buried in a splendid tomb. She is said to have taken the name Suor Beatrice. The poignancy of that detail haunts me. Antonia was a baby when her father was exiled, so she grew up without knowing him—yearning, it would seem, to be worthy of the love that he had vowed so publicly to an ideal woman.

Many readers don’t get farther with Dante than Inferno, for obvious reasons: depravity is a more compelling subject than virtue, as you discover when you reach Paradise. Inferno’s denizens are our familiars—we meet their avatars every day. It’s a place, as Merwin put it, where “the self and its despair [are] forever inseparable,” a predicament we think of as modern, perhaps because it suggests the claustrophobia of narcissism.

Translators have also preferred Inferno: its tableaux of carnage are so thrillingly obscene. In a famous passage, Dante meets Muhammad in the “bedlam” of the Eighth Circle, where the sowers of discord get their comeuppance. (Muhammad’s “sin” was to have lured his followers away from the true church. Dante was a fierce critic of the papacy but a militant defender of Catholic theology.)

I never saw a barrel burst apart,

Having sprung a hoop or slipped a stave,

Like that man split down to where we fart,

His guts between his legs, his body splayed,

Its organs hanging out, among them that foul sac

Which turns to shit all that we eat.

As I beheld this gore he looked at me

And even wider tore his breast apart

“See how I spread myself,” said he.

Evil is never banal in Dante’s depiction. Nor are the traitors, counterfeiters, rabble-rousers, thieves, hypocrites, corrupt pols, charlatans, flatterers, pimps, blasphemers, usurers, sodomites, suicides, plunderers, murderers, heretics, spendthrifts, melancholics, gluttons, sex addicts, or, at the threshold of Hell, those apathetic souls whose sin was ingratitude for the life force they were born with. Each one is indelibly individual. Yet, if Dante can show a bodhisattva’s compassion for the sufferings he has devised, he is also susceptible to that most human of guilty pleasures: Schadenfreude. At every opportunity on his journey to beatitude, he settles a score.

The Comedy is a morality tale designed, in part, to scare its readers straight, not to free them from their hangups. But in Purgatory Dante describes a process—slow and arduous, like analysis—of unriddling the mysteries of self-sabotage. As Beatrice puts it to him:

From dread and shame I want you

To evolve, so you no longer speak

As in a dream.

In his commentary on the poem, Black likens the terraces where the penitents “go round and round” to the “circling thoughts of those who can’t let go of the past.” That describes most of history. There seems to be no escape from our worst natures; it would take a miracle no deity has ever wrought.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” James Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” But Dante (here in Black’s thoughtful rendering) invites us to believe that we can banish our demons, alone and together, if we resist unconsciousness:

As a man dismayed who turns to face the facts
changes his fear to trust in his own strength
when to his eyes the truth has been uncovered

So I changed; and when my leader saw me freed
from those anxieties, up by the rampart
he moved, and I behind him, toward the height. ~

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/reading-dantes-purgatory-while-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance?
 
Oriana:

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God,” said Jorge Luis Borges. But Dante’s sanctified Beatrice is infallible. After submitting to the severe tongue-lashing with which she greeted him, Dante follows her like a puppy. But that’s already in Paradiso, which most find the most boring part of the Commedia. A poem needs conflict, a tension of the opposites; the singing of praises can go on only for so long before losing our interest.

My theological problem with the concept of Purgatory is this: why can’t all the sinners be given a chance to be purified? Why the pointless, sadistic torment in the Inferno?  If the answer is that hell is for the unrepentant sinners, why not give them a chance to repent by administering precisely that moral education that governs Purgatory? Why not give them a hope for something better than hell? (So basically my greatest theological problem is hell, rather than purgatory -- though our life on earth could be said to be purgatory enough.)
 
(On a different note: this is a marvelous article. I especially like the statement, "If Gemma was his Penelope, then Beatrice was his Athena, the divine protectress of his odyssey." I have never before thought of Dante in Odyssean terms -- rather as a moralizer with a rather sadistic imagination. But there was indeed that "explorer of worlds" aspect of Dante, even if his great journey took place entirely in his imagination.)

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“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” ~ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
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Heather Cox Richardson: THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM, THE BLOODIEST BATTLE OF THE CIVIL WAR

~ The armies clashed as the sun rose about 5:30 on the clear fall morning of September 17, 159 years ago (1862). For twelve hours the men slashed at each other. Amid the smoke and fire, soldiers fell. Twelve hours later, more than 2000 U.S. soldiers lay dead and more than 10,000 of their comrades were wounded or missing. Fifteen hundred Confederates had fallen in the battle, and another 9000 or so were wounded or captured. The United States had lost 25% of its fighting force; the Confederates, 31%. The First Texas Infantry lost 82% of its men.

That slaughter was brought home to northern families in a novel way after the battle. Photographer Alexander Gardner, working for the great photographer Matthew Brady, brought his camera to Antietam two days after the guns fell silent. Until Gardner’s field experiment, photography had been limited almost entirely to studios. People sent formal photos home and recorded family images for posterity, as if photographs were portraits.

Taking his camera outside, Gardner recorded seventy images of Antietam for people back home. His stark images showed bridges and famous generals, but they also showed rows of bodies, twisted and bloating in the sun as they awaited burial. By any standards these war photos were horrific, but to a people who had never seen anything like it before, they were earth-shattering.

White southern men had marched off to war in 1861 expecting that they would fight and win a heroic battle or two and that their easy victories over the northerners they dismissed as emasculated shopkeepers would enable them to create a new nation based in white supremacy. In the 1850s, pro-slavery lawmakers had taken over the United States government, but white southerners were a minority and they knew it. When the election of 1860 put into power lawmakers and a president who rejected their worldview, they decided to destroy the nation.

Eager to gain power in the rebellion, pro-secession politicians raced to extremes, assuring their constituencies that they were defending the true nature of a strong new country and that those defending the old version of the United States would never fight effectively.

On March 21, 1861, the future vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, laid out the world he thought white southerners should fight for. He explained that the Founders were wrong to base the government on the principle that humans were inherently equal, and that northerners were behind the times with their adherence to the outdated idea that “the negro is equal, and…entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man.” Confederate leaders had corrected the Founders’ error. They had rested the Confederacy on the “great truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

White southern leaders talked easily about a coming war, assuring prospective soldiers that defeating the United States Army would be a matter of a fight or, perhaps, two. South Carolina Senator James Chesnut Jr. assured his neighbors that there would be so few casualties he would be happy to drink all the blood shed in a fight between the South and the North. And so, poorer white southerners marched to war.

The July 1861 Battle of Bull Run put the conceit of an easy victory to rest. Although the Confederates ultimately routed the U.S. soldiers, the southern men were shocked at what they experienced. “Never have I conceived of such a continuous, rushing hailstorm of shot, shell, and musketry as fell around and among us for hours together,” one wrote home. “We who escaped are constantly wondering how we could possibly have come out of the action alive.”

Northerners, too, had initially thought the war against the blustering southerners would be quick and easy, so quick and easy that some congressmen brought picnics to Bull Run to watch the fighting, only to get caught in the rout as soldiers ditched their rucksacks and guns and ran back toward the capital. Those at home, though, could continue to imagine the war as a heroic contest.

They could elevate the carnage, that is, until Matthew Brady exhibited Gardner’s images of Antietam at his studio in New York City. People who saw the placard announcing “The Dead of Antietam” and climbed the stairs up to Brady’s rooms to see the images found that their ideas about war were changed forever.


“The dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams,” one reporter mused. “We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type.” But Gardner’s photographs erased the distance between the battlefield and the home front. They brought home the fact that every name on a casualty list “represents a bleeding, mangled corpse.” “If [Gardner] has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it,” the shocked reporter commented.
The horrific images of Antietam showed to those on the home front the real cost of war they had entered with bluster and flippant assurances that it would be bloodless and easy. Southern politicians had promised that white rebels fighting to create a nation whose legal system enshrined white supremacy would easily overcome a mongrel army defending the principle of human equality

The dead at Antietam’s Bloody Lane and Dunker Church proved they were wrong. The Battle of Antietam was enough of a Union victory to allow President Abraham Lincoln to issue the preliminary emancipation proclamation, warning southern states that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State,” where people still fought against the United States, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the…government of the United States…will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons....”

Lincoln’s proclamation meant that anti-slavery England would not formally enter the war on the side of the Confederates, dashing their hopes of foreign intervention, and in November 1863, Lincoln redefined the war as one not simply to restore the Union, but to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
To that principle, northerners and Black southerners rallied, despite the grinding horror of the battlefields, and in 1865, they defeated the Confederates.

But they did not defeat the idea the Confederates fought, killed, and died for: a nation in which the law distinguishes among people according to the color of their skin. Today, once again, politicians are telling their followers that such a hierarchy is the best way forward for America, and today, once again, those same politicians are urging supporters to violence against a government that defends the equality before the law for which the men at Antietam—and at Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, and at four years worth of battlefields across the country—gave their lives. ~

~ The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, is the bloodiest day in American history. More than 22,700 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the battle, which was fought in the fields and woods outside the small, western Maryland town of Sharpsburg. It is also the first battle where American war dead were photographed. What for some had remained a distant, abstract war, was suddenly—and viscerally—brought to life. The reactions to the photographs reflected the intensity of their content. ~

Oriana:

Vietnam was the first televised war in American history, and some claim that was the reason for the fiasco: "The war was lost in the media." And Antietam was the first post-battle landscape to be photographed. And that was a serious blow to the glorification of war.

Interesting that the Confederate soldiers expected the Union soldiers to be "emasculated." Back then, war was glorified as a test of manhood rather than seen more in the category of toxic masculinity.

The way that Confederate soldiers regarded themselves not only as superior due to being white, but also superior to the white men of the North reminds me how the Nazi ideology singled out Germans as being superior to other white people, some of whom were classified as Untermensch (subhuman).


Mary: THE POWER OF IMAGES

The photographs of Antietam brought home the visceral horrors of war in a way that could not be denied or idealized. No one, in fact, can think war a noble or glorious enterprise unless they've never been in one. I think of Tolstoy's Pierre for instance,  learning war the hard way, and losing his illusions. Battlefields are messy, ugly and confusing. When there are great numbers of dead and wounded the scene becomes infernal. Sorting the wounded and treating them, cleanup and burial of the dead can be logistic nightmares.

And remember, the number of bodies in the field after this battle was huge, outstripping the capacity of doctors, medics, transporters , burial details. The bodies photographed had already been laying there decaying, for 2 days. The battlefield would have been littered not only with human corpses, but those of horses. And the outnumbered and overburdened doctors had only two major tools to work with, morphine and amputation.

The sight of these things in the photographs could not fail to have strong effects on the civilian population, where both sides began with the idea this wold be a brief conflict with small damages. And though a photograph cannot supply this, imagine the smell. Glamor, nobility, all fail, become absurdities in the light of the untouched material reality, the charnel house horror, of these actual battlegrounds preserved for the first time in image rather than imagination.

Film reportage, as with Vietnam, brings war even more vividly into civilians' awareness. We watched it from the living room or the supper table — we watched executions and naked burning children running for their lives. It becomes harder and harder to countenance the more palpable and immediate it is. There is a visceral revulsion hard to avoid or be argued out of.

On the other hand, the kind of remote warfare now employed with drone strikes makes it all much less compelling, less real. We don't see the bodies as often or at all...maybe just as flag draped coffins. Here the media coverage seems less immediate and compelling.

Oriana:

I’ve heard again and again that the Vietnam war was “lost on TV”; the military decided they can’t afford another such media defeat, and began to restrict what could be filmed or photographed. “National security” is a very broad concept that can be used to deny access to journalists, and especially photo-journalists.

And now, as you note, we have remote warfare by drone — again taking us away from the horror. But we’ve seen the war photographs — the American Civil War, the bloodiest civil war in human history; World War 1, World War 2, Vietnam. We can never unsee those horrific images. There is still a glorification of the military, but not really of war per se. And there have been honest poems, novels, short stories. Only a lunatic fringe still think war is primarily an exciting macho adventure — paunchy middle-aged men who love to dress in camouflage and play war in the woods.

But the public at large is less and less willing— especially when a conflict can’t really be solved militarily. Democracy is not something you can impose by force. And the truth that “war is hell” is out, and can’t be pushed back into oblivion. Mutilated war veterans in wheel chairs mingle among us in parks, in stores,  in museums. It’s awful to think that their sacrifice has been in vain.

Alas, it seems we are doomed to wait until toxic religions and ideologies collapse before we can speak of true peace.
 
John Guzlowski:
 
Photos of the Dead at Antietam
 
They are simple as arithmetic. One minus one
is nothing. You see this in their blind, dumb eyes,
the twist of their bodies lying in the mud,
the truth of their silence. There is nothing
 
to tell one man from another. They are dead.
They have nothing to grieve or remember.
The mouth cracked open tells you nothing
about his first love, or that night in the church
 
that meant so much, or the happy time he stood
before the Christmas tree knowing how much
his mother would love the light blue pitcher
he gave her, no matter how simple it was.
 
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WHY HUMANS (AND NEANDERTHALS) HAVE SHED THEIR FUR

~ Evolutionary theorists have put forth numerous hypotheses for why humans became the naked mole rats of the primate world. Did we adapt to semi-aquatic environments? Does bare skin help us sweat to keep cool while hunting during the heat of the day? Did losing our fur allow us to read each other's emotional responses such as fuming or blushing? Scientists aren't exactly sure, but biologists are beginning to understand the physical mechanism that makes humans the naked apes. In particular, a recent study in the journal Cell Reports has begun to depilate the mystery at the molecular and genetic level.

Sarah Millar, co-senior author of the new study and a dermatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, explains that scientists are largely at a loss to explain why different hair patterns appear across human bodies. “We have really long hair on our scalps and short hair in other regions, and we’re hairless on our palms and the underside of our wrists and the soles of our feet,” she says. “No one understands really at all how these differences arise.”

In many mammals, an area known as the plantar skin, which is akin to the underside of the wrist in humans, is hairless, along with the footpads. But in a few species, including polar bears and rabbits, the plantar area is covered in fur. A researcher studying the plantar region of rabbits noticed that an inhibitor protein, called Dickkopf 2 or Dkk2, was not present in high levels, giving the team the fist clue that Dkk2 may be fundamental to hair growth. When the team looked at the hairless plantar region of mice, they found that there were high levels of Dkk2, suggesting the protein might keep bits of skin hairless by blocking a signaling pathway called WNT, which is known to control hair growth.

To investigate, the team compared normally developing mice with a group that had a mutation which prevents Dkk2 from being produced. They found that the mutant mice had hair growing on their plantar skin, providing more evidence that the inhibitor plays a role in determining what’s furry and what’s not.

But Millar suspects that the Dkk2 protein is not the end of the story. The hair that developed on the plantar skin of the mice with the mutation was shorter, finer and less evenly spaced than the rest of the animals’ hair. “Dkk2 is enough to prevent hair from growing, but not to get rid of all control mechanisms. There’s a lot more to look at.”

Even without the full picture, the finding could be important in future research into conditions like baldness, since the WNT pathway is likely still present in chrome domes—it’s just being blocked by Dkk2 or similar inhibitors in humans. Millar says understanding the way the inhibitor system works could also help in research of other skin conditions like psoriasis and vitiligo, which causes a blotchy loss of coloration on the skin.

With a greater understanding of how skin is rendered hairless, the big question remaining is why humans became almost entirely hairless apes. Millar says there are some obvious reasons—for instance, having hair on our palms and wrists would make knapping stone tools or operating machinery rather difficult, and so human ancestors who lost this hair may have had an advantage. The reason the rest of our body lost its fur, however, has been up for debate for decades.

One popular idea that has gone in and out of favor since it was proposed is called the aquatic ape theory. The hypothesis suggests that human ancestors lived on the savannahs of Africa, gathering and hunting prey. But during the dry season, they would move to oases and lakesides and wade into shallow waters to collect aquatic tubers, shellfish or other food sources. The hypothesis suggests that, since hair is not a very good insulator in water, our species lost our fur and developed a layer of fat. The hypothesis even suggests that we might have developed bipedalism due to its advantages when wading into shallow water. But this idea, which has been around for decades, hasn’t received much support from the fossil record and isn’t taken seriously by most researchers.

A more widely accepted theory is that, when human ancestors moved from the cool shady forests into the savannah, they developed a new method of thermoregulation. Losing all that fur made it possible for hominins to hunt during the day in the hot grasslands without overheating. An increase in sweat glands, many more than other primates, also kept early humans on the cool side. The development of fire and clothing meant that humans could keep cool during the day and cozy up at night.

But these are not the only possibilities, and perhaps the loss of hair is due to a combination of factors. Evolutionary scientist Mark Pagel at the University of Reading has also proposed that going fur-less reduced the impact of lice and other parasites. Humans kept some patches of hair, like the stuff on our heads which protects from the sun and the stuff on our pubic regions which retains secreted pheromones. But the more hairless we got, Pagel says, the more attractive it became, and a stretch of hairless hide turned into a potent advertisement of a healthy, parasite-free mate.

One of the most intriguing theories is that the loss of hair on the face and some of the hair around the genitals may have helped with emotional communication. Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist and director of human cognition at the research company 2AI, studies vision and color theory, and he says the reason for our hairless bodies may be in our eyes. While many animals have two types of cones, or the receptors in the eye that detect color, humans have three. Other animals that have three cones or more, like birds and reptiles, can see in a wide range of wavelengths in the visible light spectrum. But our third cone is unusual—it gives us a little extra power to detect hues right in the middle of the spectrum, allowing humans to pick out a vast range of shades that seem unnecessary for hunting or tracking.

Changizi proposes that the third cone allows us to communicate nonverbally by observing color changes in the face. “Having those two cones detecting wavelengths side by side is what you want if you want to be sensitive to oxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin to understand health or emotional changes,” he says. For instance, a baby whose skin looks a little green or blue can indicate illness, a pink blush might indicate sexual attraction, and a face flushing with red could indicate anger, even in people with darker skin tones. But the only way to see all of these emotional states is if humans lose their fur, especially on their faces.

In a 2006 paper in Biology Letters, Changizi found that primates with bare faces and sometimes bare rumps also tended to have three cones like humans, while fuzzy-faced monkeys lived their lives with just two cones. According to the paper, hairless faces and color vision seem to run together.

Millar says that it’s unlikely that her work will help us directly figure out whether humans are swimming apes, sweaty monkeys or blushing primates. But combining the new study’s molecular evidence of how hair grows with physical traits observed in humans will get us closer to the truth—or at least closer to a fuller, shinier head of hair.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-did-humans-evolve-lose-fur-180970980/

*
REPRODUCTIVE PROBLEMS IN BOTH MEN AND WOMEN ARE RISING

~ The whole spectrum of reproductive problems in males are increasing by about 1 percent per year in Western countries. This “1 percent effect” includes the rates of declining sperm counts, decreasing testosterone levels and increasing rates of testicular cancer, as well as a rise in the prevalence of erectile dysfunction. On the female side of the equation, miscarriage rates are also increasing by about 1 percent per year in the U.S., and so is the rate of gestational surrogacy. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate worldwide has dropped by nearly 1 percent per year from 1960 to 2018.

When people hear of this, there’s often a natural instinct to shrug it off, believing that 1 percent per year isn’t really a big deal. But it is a huge deal! It adds up to more than 10 percent per decade and more than 50 percent over 50 years. When you consider that sperm counts declined by 50 percent in just 40 years, as Shanna's meta-analysis published in a 2017 issue of the journal Human Reproduction Update showed, it’s difficult to deny or discount how alarming this is.

So, we continue to wonder: Where is the outrage on this issue? The annual 1 percent decline in reproductive health is faster than the rate of global warming (thankfully!)—and yet people are up in arms about global warming (and rightly so) but not about these reproductive health effects. To put the 1 percent effect in perspective, consider this: scientific data show a 1.1 percent per year increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder between 2000 and 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People have been rightly unnerved about this.

Why aren’t people equally troubled by reproductive damage to males and females? Maybe it’s because many don’t realize that these worrisome changes are happening, or that they’re marching along at the same rate. But everyone should. After all, these reproductive changes can hardly be a coincidence. They’re just too synchronous for that to be possible.

The truth is, these reproductive health effects are interconnected, and they are largely driven by a common cause: the presence of hormone-altering chemicals (a.k.a., endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs) in our world. These hormone-hijacking chemicals, which include phthalates, bisphenol A, and flame retardants, among others, have become ubiquitous in modern life. They’re in water bottles and food packaging, electronic devices, personal-care products, cleaning supplies and many other items we use regularly. And they began being produced in increasing numbers after 1950, when sperm counts and fertility began their decline.

Exposure to these chemicals is especially problematic during pregnancy because what happens during pregnancy doesn’t stay in pregnancy. Rather, an expectant mother’s exposure to toxic chemicals in the air she breathes, the water she drinks, the foods she eats and the products she slathers on her skin can enter her body (and hence the fetus) and influence her baby’s reproductive development. This is particularly true early in pregnancy—in what’s called the reproductive programming window—and it’s especially true for male babies.

For example, if a woman is exposed to chemicals that block the action of androgens during the first trimester of pregnancy, this can affect the reproductive development of the male fetus in numerous ways. It can result in a shortening of the anogenital distance (AGD), the span from the anus to the base of the penis, which is significant because research has shown that a shorter AGD correlates with a smaller penis and, in the adult, a lower sperm count. In addition, prenatal disruption of the male hormonal system can result in reduced testosterone levels and increase the risk that a baby boy will have undescended testicles (cryptorchidism) or a particular type of malformed penis (hypospadias) at birth. And if a boy is born with these genital defects, he will have an increased risk of low sperm count and testicular cancer as an adult.

This cluster of related reproductive problems—for both men and women—is presenting huge challenges to the world’s population. There’s the obvious challenge related to fertility issues and the declining birth rate. But endocrine disruption is also a culprit in rising rates of autoimmune disorders as well as the growing epidemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of conditions that increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes). Some of these reproductive effects are even associated with an increased risk of premature death.

To put it mildly, these issues are more important than the “1 percent” people usually pay attention to, which means: We need to shift our collective focus. It’s time for us to make it a priority to demand that endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the everyday products are replaced with chemicals that don’t affect our hormones and don’t persist in the environment. It’s also time to establish better testing methods and regulatory actions so that only safe chemicals can enter the market and our bodies. In other words, we need to stop using each other and our unborn children as lab rats for EDC exposures. The health and the future of the human race really do depend on it. ~

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reproductive-problems-in-both-men-and-women-are-rising-at-an-alarming-rate/

 Oriana:
 
One's first response to the news of rising reproductive disorders may be, "Who cares? The world is overpopulated as is. In fact it's rather wonderful that infertility is rising." But that's a shallow response. Reproductive problems are in indication of something deeply wrong -- in this case, the presence of hormone mimics in the environment. As with lead in gasoline and the gases damaging to the ozone layer, we should know by now that serious harm can result from putting toxic chemicals into the environment. 
 
Mary: 
 
Of course reproductive problems are increasing...how could we, with our bodies so subtly regulated and developed by hormones, have ever thought it was OK to use hormone mimics in such a careless way?? How could it have taken so long to wake to these dangers?? The effects on sexual features of amphibians was one of the first widely recognized dangers, but that was already late in the game. I'm not sure now any of these harmful effects can be effectively reversed, or completely reversed, without at least leaving some residual harm.
 

Oriana:
 
How long did it take us to stop putting lead into gasoline? I'm afraid that the battle against toxic plastics and food additives is going to be much, much harder . . .
 
*
 
Looking at this mandala, I couldn't help thinking that if god looked like that, rather than the anatomically correct versions by Michelangelo, I might be willing to go along. Christianity has nothing to offer me -- the ideal of kindness can exist without it. But I am drawn to elements of Buddhism and Taoism: serenity and non-striving. If she's trying too hard, a writer needs to be able to catch herself at it and let go, take a walk, clean the house. Good writing will flow effortlessly from the unconscious when the time is ripe.
 
*
*
ATHEISM SPREADING AMONG MUSLIM

~ Ex-Muslims are publicly flaunting their rejection of Islam as never before: a steamy tell-all memoir tops the country’s best-seller lists. One video (with 1.5 million views) shows a copy of the Koran ripped into pieces; another video shows a woman in a bikini cooking and eating bacon; another, blasphemous cartoons of Muhammad.

Beyond such provocations, ex-Muslims work to change the image of Islam. Wafa Sultan went on Al Jazeera television to excoriate Islam in an exalted Arabic and over thirty million viewers watched the video. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a powerful autobiography about growing up female in Somalia and went on to author high-profile books criticizing Islam. Ibn Warraq wrote or edited a small library of influential books on his former religion, including Why I am Not a Muslim (1995) and Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (2003).

Behind these individuals stand Western-based organizations of ex-Muslims that encourage Muslims to renounce their faith, provide support to those who have already taken this step, and lobby against Islam with the knowledge of insiders and the passion of renegades.

Together, these phenomena point to an unprecedented shift: The historically illegal and unspeakable actions among Muslims of open disbelief in God and rejection of Muhammad’s mission has spread to the point that it shakes the Islamic faith.


To non-Muslims, this shift tends to be nearly invisible and therefore is dismissed as marginal. When it comes to Arabs, Ahmed Benchemsi notes, Westerners see religiosity as “an unquestionable given, almost an ethnic mandate embedded in their DNA.” The Islamist surge may have peaked nearly a decade ago but the eminent historian Philip Jenkins confidently states that, “By no rational standard can Saudi Arabia, say, be said to be moving in secular directions.”

To help rectify this misunderstanding, the following analysis documents the phenomenon of Muslims becoming atheists. The word “atheist,” along with the organization Ex-Muslims of North America, in this case, refers to Muslims “who adopt no positive belief of a deity,” including “agnostics, pantheists, freethinkers, and humanists.” Atheist emphatically does not, however, include Muslims who convert to Christianity or to any other religion.

Two main factors make it difficult to estimate the number of ex-Muslim atheists.

First, some of them prefer to stay within the bounds of Islam to retain a voice in the religion’s evolution and especially to participate in the fight against Islamism, something they lose on leaving the faith. There is a phenomenon whereby Muslims “make a tactical decision not to break with religion completely, presenting themselves as secularists, ‘progressive’ Muslims or Muslim ‘reformers.’ They feel more can be achieved by challenging oppressive religious practices than by questioning the existence of God, since they are unlikely to be listened to if they are known to be atheists.

The path of reform, however, is fraught with dangers. The eminent Egyptian authority on Islam, Nasr Abu Zayd, insisted he remained a Muslim while his opponents, perhaps motivated by financial considerations, deemed him an apostate. His foes succeeded in both annulling his marriage and forcing him to flee from Egypt. Worse, the Sudanese government executed the great Islamic thinker Mahmoud Mohammed Taha as an apostate.

Second, overtly declaring oneself an atheist invites punishments that range from ostracizing to beating, to firing, to jailing, to murder. Families see atheists as blots on their honor. Employers see them as untrustworthy. Communities see them as traitors. Governments see them as national security threats. The idea of an individual atheist as a threat seems absurd, but authorities realize that what starts with individual decisions grows into small groups, gathers force, and can culminate in the seizure of power. In the most extreme reaction, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia promulgated anti-terrorist regulations on March 7, 2014, that prohibit “Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.” In other words, free thinking equates to terrorism.

Indeed, many Muslim-majority countries formally punish apostasy with execution, including Mauritania, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Brunei. Formal executions tend to be rare but the threat hangs over apostates. Sometimes, death does follow: Mubarak Bala, was arrested in Nigeria and disappeared for his blasphemous statements. In a case that attracted global attention, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini called on freelancers to murder Salman Rushdie in 1989 for writing The Satanic Verses, a magical-realist novel containing disrespectful scenes about Muhammad. Vigilante violence also occurs; in Pakistan, preachers called on mobs to burn down the houses of apostates.

This external pressure at least partially succeeds, notes Iman Willoughby, a Saudi refugee living in Canada: “the Middle East would be significantly more secular if it was not for heavy-handed religious government enforcement or the power mosques are given to monitor communities.” Fearful of trouble, more than a few ex-Muslims hide their views and maintain the trappings of believers, making them effectively uncountable.

Nonetheless, Willoughby observes, “Atheism is spreading like wildfire” in the Middle East. Hasan Suroor, author of Who Killed Liberal Islam? notes that there’s a tale “we don’t usually hear about how Islam is facing a wave of desertion by young Muslims suffering from a crisis of faith . . . abandoned by moderate Muslims, mostly young men and women, ill at ease with growing extremism in their communities. . . . Even deeply conservative countries with strict anti-apostasy regimes like Pakistan, Iran and Sudan have been hit by desertions.” That tale, however, is now more public: “I know at least six atheists who confirmed that [they are atheists] to me,” noted Fahad AlFahad, a marketing consultant and human rights activist in Saudi Arabia, in 2014. “Six or seven years ago, I wouldn’t even have heard one person say that. Not even a best friend would confess that to me,” but the mood has changed and now they feel freer to divulge this dangerous secret.

Whitaker concludes that Arab non-believers “are not a new phenomenon but their numbers seem to be growing.” Professor Amna Nusayr of al-Azhar University states that four million Egyptians have left Islam. Todd Nettleton finds that, by some estimates, “70 percent of Iran’s people have rejected Islam.”

Turning to survey research, a WIN/Gallup survey in 2012 found that “convinced atheists” make up 2 percent of the population in Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan; 4 percent in the West Bank and Gaza; and 5 percent in Saudi Arabia. Revealingly, the same poll found “not religious” persons are more numerous: 8 percent in Pakistan, 16 percent in Uzbekistan, 19 percent in Saudi Arabia, 29 percent in the West Bank and Gaza, 33 percent in Lebanon, and 73 percent in Turkey. Conversely, a GAMAAN poll found that just one-third, or 32.2 percent, of born Shi’ite Muslims in Iran actually identify as such, plus 5 percent as Sunnis and 3.2 percent as Sufis.

The trend is upwards: a Konda survey in Turkey found that atheists tripled from 1 to 3 percent between 2008 and 2018, while non-believers doubled from 1 to 2 percent. Arab Barometer polls show a substantial increase in the number of Arabic-speakers who say they are “not religious,” from 8 percent in 2012-14 to 13 percent in 2018-19, a 61 percent increase in five years. This trend is even stronger among people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, among whom the percentage went from 11 to 18 percent. Looking country by country, the largest increases occurred in Tunisia and Libya, with middle-sized ones in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and Sudan, and almost no change in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Iraq. Yemen stands out as the one country to count fewer non-religious persons. It is particularly striking to note that about as many Tunisian youth (47 percent) as Americans (46 percent) call themselves “not religious.”

Atheism among Muslim-born populations has historically been of minor importance. It appeared especially negligible during the surge of Islamism over the past half-century. As recently as twenty years ago, atheism among Muslims was nearly undetectable. But no longer. Atheism has turned into a significant force with the potential to affect not just the lives of individuals but also societies and even governments.

It enjoys such potency because contemporary Islam, with its repression of heterodox ideas and punishment of anyone who leaves the faith, is singularly vulnerable to challenge. Just as an authoritarian regime is more brittle than a democratic one, Islam, as practiced today, lacks the suppleness to deal with internal critics and rebels. The result is an Islamic future more precarious than its past. ~

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/atheism-among-muslims-%E2%80%9Cspreading-wildfire%E2%80%9D-193924?fbclid=IwAR3sMTsVlEVPdEf_P_sg-yvjWnyK-ss7WyGy_lG0s4FT9PnFihFX8t8NUPY
 
Oriana:
 
To me the most encouraging statement in the article is "The Islamist surge may have peaked nearly a decade ago." In the long run, it's impossible to try to remain in the Dark Ages and keep on resisting modernity. Any thinking person may have the experience of waking up and thinking "this is all made-up nonsense." And that thought cannot be unthought. All religions are based on fear and wishful thinking, as smarter humans eventually notice. Above all, as one former minister told me, you have to maintain a high level of threat. But these days, with many other voices out there, it's harder to enforce.
*

DO FIVE COFFEES A DAY KEEP THE DOCTOR AWAY?

~ According to new research, drinking coffee is associated with lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes and neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s. Drinking coffee, researchers claim, may even lower the risk of suicide.

The study, published in the science journal Circulation, was led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and others. Lead researcher Ming Ding and colleagues analyzed the health data of three large groups consisting of over 208,000 participants, male and female, aged between 25 and 75. The study groups were based on American nurses, dentists, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals, and those who already had cardiovascular disease or cancer were not included. 

Their coffee intake was analyzed every four years, by asking the men and women how many cups (caffeinated and decaffeinated) they consume on average a day, ranging from less than one cup to more than five cups.

In the whole population, coffee consumption (between three and five cups per day) was associated with lower risk of cardiovascular deaths and type two diabetes, but was associated with increased risk of lung cancer. 

However, looking at those who have never smoked, coffee consumption was no longer associated with an increased risk of lung cancer. Non-smokers who drink more than five cups a day were found to have a reduced risk of CVD and type two diabetes compared to non-coffee drinkers, and a lower risk of neurological disease such as Parkinson’s, and even suicide.

Co-author Frank Hu said: “Regular consumption of coffee was found to be inversely associated with risk of mortality due to CVD. This study indicates that coffee can be incorporated into a healthy lifestyle.”

Strengths of the study include its large sample size, long follow-up (30 years), and efforts to adjust for other issues, such as smoking, which could affect the results. However, with all participants varying greatly in terms of health and lifestyle, other factors might have influenced the results.  

The study does not prove that coffee is the reason that coffee-drinkers were less likely to die. Another weakness was that size of coffee portions was only based on each participant’s estimation. 

Apart from whether it was decaf, what type of coffee was drunk (eg freshly ground or instant) was not looked at, and nor was the milk or sugar added. Finally, it is important to note that the reduction in risk of death from drinking coffee, at less than 10 per cent relative risk, is small. ~

https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/behind-the-headlines/five-coffees-a-day

Oriana:

Coffee is a great source of antioxidants (caffeine is a stronger antioxidant than Vitamin C) and other beneficial compounds. The findings about the benefits of coffee have been part of the discovery that “forbidden” foods such as eggs and butter are in fact good for you.

As everyone knows, coffee is energizing. Enhanced glucose metabolism resulting in lower blood sugar may be the key to its benefits (think of metformin and berberine). 
 
Aging is, to a great extent, an energy-deficit syndrome. Coffee helps ameliorate that energy deficit. 

Coffee also increases dopamine levels, with all its attendant benefits for good mood, obesity prevention, and possibly even cancer prevention. And — listen to this! — regular coffee consumption lowers the risk lowers the risk of Alzheimer’s by 65% and the risk of Parkinson’s by 60% (note: to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, it needs to be caffeinated coffee). It also dramatically decreases the risk of any liver problems, including liver cancer.

Speaking of cancer, coffee also reduces the risk of breast, colon, and rectal cancer— as well as oral and throat cancer.  This may be due to its anti-inflammatory effect and its overall health benefits.

Coffee increases peristalsis, serving as a mild laxative.

While caffeine, like other stimulants or exercise, increases blood pressure, that rise its temporary. In fact, regular drinking of moderate amount of coffee is associated with lower risk of stroke.

By improving mood, coffee lowers suicide risk. I dare venture a guess that no one has ever committed suicide after drinking a good cup of coffee.

Of course common sense and listening to your body are needed to for the best results. Nobody suggests consuming a lot of coffee at once sitting.  

If it hadn’t been with us for so long, coffee would probably be regarded as a miracle drug. 
 
*
ending on  beauty:

He was at Naples writing letters home
And, between letters, reading paragraphs
On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned
For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there
While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,
Cast corners in the glass. He could describe
The terror of the sound because the sound
Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain
Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,
Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.
The volcano trembled in another ether,
As the body trembles at the end of life.

It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.
There were roses in the cool café. His book
Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.
Except for us, Vesuvius might consume
In solid fire the utmost earth and know
No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up
To die). This is a part of the sublime
From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,
The total past felt nothing when destroyed.

~ Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal, the first section
 

 




















Saturday, September 18, 2021

"ANYTHING WE CAN DO, WE CAN AFFORD"; THE LOST LEONARDO (MOVIE); FOODS THAT REDUCE BLOOD PRESSURE; HOW THE DISCOVERY OF MICROSCOPIC LIFE SHOOK UP THEOLOGY; THE BRAIN CLEANS ITSELF DURING REM SLEEP; THE PUZZLE OF OBESITY

Picasso: Marie-Therese in a mirror, 1932

*
Now it’s September and the web is woven.
The web is woven and you have to wear it.
 
~ Wallace Stevens, The Dwarf

And maybe it’s already October, in terms of the seasons of life — we simply don’t know how much time is left — relatively healthy time, that is, when the brain can still produce something interesting, or at least when we can be useful rather than burdensome to others.

But when I look at the most creative years in my life, there’s no evading the diminishment. Perhaps because limited mobility prevented me from following a friend’s advice: travel and have affairs, my creative output in poetry has shriveled to one new poem a year, and even that is not guaranteed. Yes, I have become a dwarf. Meanwhile three people dear to my heart, and who happen to be near my age, continue to produce their best work ever.

My late older friend, Una, also wrote some of her most touching poems in her seventies and eighties. She predicted that I’d pay a price for choosing not to be depressed: “Depression strokes the feathers of the Muse.”

For me success was never about money, but I did have a naive expectation of a kind of sunset beauty of those sunset years, writing my best poems yet. Back at my peak (so long ago it’s scary) I really was so ignorant of how a typical creative life unfolds. (Not for the people I mentioned, whose later-life creativity astonishes me.)

Here is something I recklessly wrote back when poems arose as naturally as thoughts (the title is Latin for where are you going?):

QUO VADIS

I ask the red desert rocks:

Great mothers, which way?

The mothers do not reply,

their faces always serene,

their breasts a stone lullaby. 

Where to? I keep asking

the slow harp of trees,

hillside grasses hurrying to bear seed,
smoky plumage turning pale gold.
And I know what the earth will reply.

I look at the stained glass of autumn,
watch the blaze of deepening sunset.
Late beauty burns
purest flame. Then the diamond
kindling of the stars.

~ Oriana

I omitted the first stanza, which struck me as too explicit (and besides, less is more)

Where to? I keep asking. Where are you
taking me, my life?
But life
doesn’t reply. Only the waving
of the infinite ocean. Only the falling
of innumerable leaves.

There is still an occasional surprise poem, now once a year perhaps. But at least I can do this one thing still — I can still do minor revision, maybe touch up a line or omit it. I think I’ve learned what poetry is, and recognize it, just as I’ve learned to spot the dull, explanatory lines.

And speaking of minor revision, last night I discovered this early Penelope poem — the least accomplished of my several Penelope poems.

THE JOURNEY OF PENELOPE

I roam through my endless house.
I open doors and walk in,

a little scared and hushed,
as if entering pristine

chambers of the heart.
These are not guilty labyrinths

but unfinished solitudes.
I want to find

not the way out,
but the way deeper in.

*

Odysseus only thought
he arrived:

by then Ithaca
was another country.

**

Maybe the second section is its own poem — but for me the creative process washed it ashore, so to speak. Somehow the statement needs to come from the stay-at-home Penelope, the non-dominant character who, if she ever aspired to glory, kept it to herself, and instead concentrated on her weaving and fending off the many suitors.  

Mary:

The opening poem, "Quo Vadis," asks that question against a kind of scrim of different lifetimes. The rocks feel no urgency, their time is measured in milllennia. Trees are a "slow harp" while grasses rush to set seed in one season. Our time is longer than grass', shorter than trees', and under the pressure of death we may often experience that deepening sunset blaze, when “Late beauty burns/ purest flame.” Beyond that sunset there is the timeless diamond light of the stars, as close as we can imagine eternity.

Certainly wondrous when it happens, that late sunset blaze is not universal, sometimes creativity flags with age, instead of blossoming. Why? Probably many things determine this, including physical health and economic situation. My creative production increased most after my working days were over, but simply having more time isn't enough to explain much of anything.

Penelope going through the rooms of her house is interesting, as the structure of a house can express the times of a life or the states of a mind.As she moves through her rooms she reflects on her life, both the long years of waiting, and the states of mind changing through those years —memory, consciousness, moods. All the changes of a lifetime. Changes her returning husband could know nothing about.


Oriana:

Thank you for this lovely analysis. Yes, after twenty years apart, Penelope and Odysseus have become largely strangers. But another way to see them is as two aspects of the same personality. But let me restrain myself — as Nietzsche warned, anything you look at closely enough becomes an infinity.
 

Today's Ithaca

*
MIDDLEMARCH, GEORGE ELIOT’S “GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — WHEN GRAND ASPIRATION DWINDLES INTO LESSER ACCOMPLISHMENT

~ It would be hard for even the most devoted aficionado of George Eliot to argue that the opening sentence of Middlemarch should be numbered among the greats in terms of memorability, effectiveness, or enticement. The novel opens with a Prelude—not so much an introduction to the novel’s characters or context as an announcement of its themes. It begins with a rhetorical question: “Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand in hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?” Modern-day readers, invited at the outset of what is a dauntingly long book to reflect upon their familiarity with the life of a 16th-century Spanish saint, might be forgiven for meekly responding, “Er, me?”

George Eliot—who was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, and who adopted her masculine pen name in 1857 when she published her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life—was herself very familiar with the life of Saint Theresa, a Spanish noblewoman of passionate religious conviction who first joined a religious order when she was twenty years old, and who, over the subsequent almost half-century, became an influential theologian, mystic, and religious reformer. The opening sentence of Middlemarch refers to an incident in which the young Theresa and a sibling, seized with precocious religious conviction, set off from Ávila with the intention of being gloriously executed for their faith by non-Christians, only to be thwarted by family members who stopped them in their outing.

It is described in Saint Theresa’s autobiography, which Eliot would doubtless have read multiple times and in different languages: in 1867, three years before Middlemarch was published, she sought out a Spanish-language copy while on a trip through Spain, and seems to have been mildly irked when, in a bookshop, an effort was made to sell her a photograph instead. Eliot might have expected that her contemporary readers would be at least somewhat familiar with the Life of the saint—which is, modern-day readers may be surprised to discover if they look at it, approachable and even winningly ironical in its depiction of its narrator’s early religious ardor. “As soon as I saw it was impossible to go to any place where people would put me to death for the sake of God, my brother and I set about becoming hermits,” Saint Theresa writes of the abortive effort at martyrdom cited by Eliot. “We contrived, as well as we could, to build hermitages, by piling up small stones one on the other, which fell down immediately; and so it came to pass that we found no means of accomplishing our wish.”

Eliot’s opening sentence is ironical, too, though a reader who is new to her voice may not immediately discern the irony amidst the more off-putting elements of Eliot’s prose, such as the alarming capitalization of “Time” and the invoking of an obscure-ish saint. Middlemarch has acquired such a forbidding reputation of literary gravitas that a reader embarking upon it for the fist time may not be primed to expect humor, but it is there from the start, if in subtle form. The novel’s opening sentence suggests that the author is taking no less an object for her novelistic consideration than “the history of man” and the “experiments of Time”—even though, as the reader has been informed by the novel’s subtitle, these large themes are to be explored within the narrow framework of “A Study of Provincial Life.” Like Saint Theresa herself, the novel has epic ambition.

But, also like the young Theresa, Middlemarch—both the novel and the fictional town for which it is named—is limited by the constraints of ordinary life. The novel’s first sentence may not be pithy; it may even be clunky. But with it, Eliot establishes what is to be her theme, developed with complexity throughout the novel: What happens when grand aspiration dwindles into lesser accomplishment?

Grand aspirations are everywhere in Middlemarch, not least nurtured within the breast of Dorothea Brooke, the nineteen-year-old heroine to whom the reader is introduced as soon as the generalities of the Prelude give way to the specifics of the narrative. (“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress,” the fist chapter of Book One of Middlemarch begins—a much more inviting way to start a story.) Dorothea, we can safely assume, has read the autobiography of Saint Theresa.

When we are first introduced to her, it is through the eyes of more conventional Middlemarch dwellers, whose regard for the as-yet-unmarried Dorothea’s high birth and good manners is qualified by the disquieting sense that she also has some unfortunate habits, such as kneeling down on a brick floor to pray by the side of a sick laborer or having “strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books!” Even Dorothea’s most fond allies, her family, are skeptical of her predilection for self-denial. “She likes giving up,” remarks Dorothea’s more down-to-earth sister, Celia, with comic generalization. And the ironical voice of the novel’s narrator has fun with Dorothea’s high-minded religiosity, noting, apropos of Dorothea’s fondness for horseback riding, that “she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.”

Dorothea’s inclination is not to withdraw to a cloister for a life of private devotion, however. Today we might recognize her motivations to be not so much religious as social and ethical: She wants to do good in the world, which in her case is provincial England around 1830. Dorothea wishes to reform the lives of the tenant farmers on her uncle’s property not by improving their souls for the hereafter, but by building them new and better cottages for the here and now. Early in the novel Dorothea marries a clergyman, Edward Casaubon, but her attraction to him is not due to any exemplary faith on his part, but rather because she believes—mistakenly, it turns out—that he has a great mind, and that by participating in a minor way in his intellectual project, she might contribute to the greater good of the world.

About halfway through Middlemarch—after considerable marital disappointment, among other developments—Dorothea gives an account of the form of religious belief that she has come to hold, which is personal rather than canonical: “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

To depict Dorothea’s youthful piety, George Eliot drew on her own. Eliot grew up in far humbler circumstances than did her heroine: as the daughter of a land agent on a country estate in Warwickshire, she might have anticipated a career as a farmer’s wife, not as the editor, critic, novelist, and poet that she became. Enormously gifted intellectually, she attended school until the age of sixteen, and thereafter continued her studies with tutors while also keeping house for her widowed father.

In her teens, she turned her capacious mind to questions of theology, and, like her heroine in Middlemarch, went through a period of devout observance and even ostentatious denial. She disapproved of singing, other than of hymns, and renounced the reading of fiction as a frivolous distraction. “I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life,” she wrote to a friend in 1839, when she was the age of Dorothea at the outset of Middlemarch. “Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?”

By the time Eliot became the author of Middlemarch, thirty years on from writing that letter, she had long been what we would now call agnostic, having undergone a crisis of faith in her twenties and come to the conclusion that the tenets of the church could not stand up to intellectual scrutiny. But Eliot maintained her own adherence to the credo expressed by Dorothea in Middlemarch: that individual acts of goodwill, however small, contributed to the widening of the skirts of light, and the narrowing of the struggle with darkness. Eliot characterized herself as a “meliorist,” a word that she believed was of her own coinage, deriving from the Latin word melior, which means “better.”

Meliorism might best be understood as a belief that the world is gradually improving, or can gradually be improved, through individual, incremental actions in the direction of good. Eliot had come to believe, contrary to her youthful skepticism about the utility of fiction, that the depiction of “things that never existed”—the writing of novels—might itself be a way of making the world better. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures,” she once explained.

By this measure, even the mere activity of reading a novel can be a way of bettering the world, if in doing so the reader expands their capacity for sympathizing with the choices and predicaments of characters whose circumstances may be profoundly different from their own, but whose moral and ethical dilemmas are completely recognizable. The social world of Dorothea Brooke, a daughter of the English landed gentry in the early 19th century, may be unfamiliar to a modern-day reader of Middlemarch; in many ways the conventions of her life, and the expectations that attend her, are as peculiar and obsolete as the practice of riding sidesaddle, the activity that Dorothea so looked forward to renouncing.

On the other hand, the larger world of the town of Middlemarch—which, Eliot shows her readers, is experiencing political upheaval in the form of the Reform Act that extended the franchise beyond the upper classes, and which is bracing itself for the possible spread to its precincts of the global cholera pandemic that occurred in the 1820s and 1830s—has more in common with our own time than we might at first imagine.

Meanwhile, Eliot’s rendering of her characters’ consciousnesses as they come to terms with the disjunction between aspiration and accomplishment needs no explanatory footnote. “For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective,” Eliot writes of Dorothea near the outset of the novel. “What could she do, what ought she to do?” This is a state of mind that a young reader of today will likely recognize, just as Saint Theresa would have done five hundred years ago.

If readers can be forgiven for grumbling at the first sentence of Middlemarch, the novel’s last sentence is rightfully regarded as one of the greatest ever written. No spoilers—it won’t be quoted here. A first-time reader will have to arrive at it in their own time—after weeks or even months spent in the company of George Eliot and the struggling, erring human creatures who inhabit the fictional town of Middlemarch. Suffice it to say that that the sentence returns to the theme established at the novel’s beginning—the question of what counts as accomplishment for that large majority of individuals who may not have the capacity or the context to achieve the spiritual grandeur attained by the remarkable female saint with whom the book opens. What might the rest of us aspire to? Now read on, reach the ultimate sentence, and see the light widen.

https://lithub.com/the-gulf-between-aspiration-and-accomplishment-rebecca-mead-on-saint-theresa-and-middlemarch/?fbclid=IwAR1qG7_L7Gin39_vGzVwo7xT93G-vNR3VSdA7CD8HDzo9CcwNj7PMgCeyyI


Oriana:

I did read Middlemarch, and remembered that the last sentence had an outstanding insight — something about the merits of kind, unremembered deeds. I looked it up, and here it is: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

*
Two unhappy marriages in one novel? Of course the true and tragic shattering of great expectations happens not so much to Dorothea, who after all is liberated by Casaubon’s death and chooses true love over wealth —the book’s “happy ending.” The book’s tragedy unfolds for  the ambitious Dr. Lydgate. Somewhere in the middle of the novel, every reader realizes that Lydgate should have married Dorothea, whose wealth would then support his progressive public health projects. Alas, he’s already unhappily married to a shallow and vain coquette and doomed to be an average physician catering to rich patients — a failure in his own eyes. 

Eliot is a realist and shatters the romantic convention that true soulmates go on to live happily ever after. Rather, most people end up mismatched. Somehow Eliot got away with this ruthlessness, while Dickens capitulated to public pressure and changed the original unhappy ending of Great Expectations to the romantic one (still apparently preferred even by today’s readers).

But then it’s been said that Middlemarch is the only novel for grown-ups in the English literature.  

As for Saint Teresa, she has inspired countless young Catholic girls to want to become nuns. Most of them change their mind, but St. Thérèse of Lisieux persisted in her ambition to become a saint and did enter Carmel. Soon enough she realized that she would never be a great mystic like Teresa of Avila. Having experienced those diminished expectations she then discovered her own “Little Way” — doing small kind deeds. For instance, she was friendly toward a gruff elderly nun, disliked by all others. I have a feeling that, if circumstances allowed it, George Eliot would be keenly interested in that once-ambitious young nun who ultimately chose a “hidden life” filled with small kind deeds rather than hope for visions and miracles.

Now Thérèse is revered as “The Little Flower.” She supposedly said, “I’ll spend my heaven doing good on earth.” If more people chose, in this life, to do good on earth, we’d come closer to experiencing heaven. After all, according to the new Catholic dogma, heaven is not a place but a loving state of mind. And if it is a place after all, then one where everyone is kind. 


Dorothea and Casaubon: a woman who marries a much older man pretty much dooms herself to be unhappy.

*
’THE LOST LEONARDO” — AN ART MARKET THRILLER

~ “After drugs and prostitution, the art market is the most unregulated market in the world,” quips one of the assortment of engaging talking heads gathered by Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed for his latest documentary, The Lost Leonardo. That would be da Vinci, not DiCaprio (although the latter does make a cameo), and what resurfaced, after 500 years, was “Salvator Mundi,” a painting attributed to the most famous Renaissance master. Allegedly. Possibly maybe, as the song goes. It really depends on who you ask, and while complicated issues of authenticity make up a significant portion of Koefoed’s film, it’s his pursuit of the money through that opaque and unregulated market that reveals the more fascinating, if predictable, themes of greed, power, and deception.

So, a couple of art players buy this painting in New Orleans in 2005 for around $1,200. They’re convinced it’s a lost Leonardo and bring in Dianne Modestini, art restorer extraordinaire, to fix it up – which, after five years of work, she does. In that process, she has restored 85% of this painting depicting Jesus Christ clothed in the fashion of the (Renaissance) times. Now, in order to fetch a nice price at market, this thing has to be authenticated, so enter the experts. There’s a little known fact about art scholars and academics you may not be aware of: They tend to have a propensity for incredibly inflated egos. I know, who would have thought, right? Anyway, none of the scholars want to outright say that “Salvator Mundi” is legit, because what if they’re wrong? And none of the scholars want to say that “Salvator Mundi” is a fraud, because what if they’re wrong? (Art scholarship can be quite a nerve-racking vocation.) So they all agree that it might be an authentic Leonardo.

Well, that’s not conclusive enough to fetch a nice price at market, so enter the museum curator. London’s National Gallery steps in and says, “Hey, not only will we confirm it’s authentic, we’ll put it on display and make loads of cash and increase its cultural capital!” Bingo! Sold in 2013 to a Russian oligarch for $127.5 million (well, actually $83 million, but that’s a whole other story). The Russian billionaire stores his trophy, er, painting in one of those cool, secret billionaire tax evasion warehouses called “freeports.”

So when the Russian oligarch decides, as Russian oligarchs are apt to do, to liquidate his mobile assets, er, art collection in 2017, Christie’s auction house steps in and says, “Hey, not only will we sell this fabulous and completely legitimate Leonardo painting, we’re going to send it on a tour of world museums to make it even more famous (and also make us a lot of money)!” Which they do, launching a full-on blitzkrieg of publicity, which is where the other Leonardo pops up, seen in an ad campaign that equates seeing the painting with basically ascending to godhead. At this point, never mind any questions of authenticity, or that less than 20% of the painting is the work of Leonardo himself (probably), because, as we all are reminded of daily, all you have to do to prove an absolute truth is to keep repeating it. But who needs truth anyway when this commodity, er, painting breaks a world record and is sold for $450 million? To whom, you ask? Why, it’s everyone’s favorite authoritarian, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia himself, Mohammed bin Salman, and you know when MBS shows up in a doc (see: The Dissident), shit’s about to get real.

“Salvator Mundi” is now stored on a yacht somewhere, tucked away like the Ark of the Covenant, which is pretty perfect, metaphorically speaking. That whole art-versus-commerce bit was so 20th century anyway, and Koefoed’s film takes undeniable glee in pointing this out, over and over again. And while some of the re-creations of clandestine meetings and shots of faceless men transporting the painting can be a bit cloak-and-dagger cheesy, that’s the only stumble in a film that tells a strange tale populated by a cast of eccentric and dangerous characters. It’s another peek, along with 2018’s The Price of Everything and 2017’s Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World, into the high-finance world of paintings as investments. As the song goes, “Eyes down, round and round/ Let’s all sit and watch the moneygoround.”

https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2021-09-03/the-lost-leonardo/


Salvator Mundi before restoration; I'm tempted to say that this is my favorite version

from another source:

~ Ten years ago, London’s National Gallery exhibited a heavily restored Salvator Mundi, allegedly painted by Leonardo da Vinci, the attribution of which is fiercely contested. Tracing the painting from discovery to its eventual record-breaking private sale, documentarian Andreas Koefoed’s latest is about how art can become a vector for vanity, status and raw power.

For anyone hoping for this film to offer any kind of definitive answer to the question of the Salvator Mundi’s origins, The Lost Leonardo is likely to disappoint. This is not an investigative documentary and Koefoed sensibly works around the question that has caught up his subjects in obsession. Indeed, The Lost Leonardo is not really about a painting at all; the meaning of the painting – whether it is by the Renaissance master or not – is of secondary concern to the film and apparently entirely superfluous to both its skeptics and the figures that profess absolute faith in its provenance. The art critic Jerry Saltz – the film’s most forthright skeptical voice as well its most amusingly obnoxious – says that a genuine da Vinci or not, Salvator Mundi is not even a good painting.

No, The Lost Leonardo is about obsession, ego, power and greed. For almost all of the film’s characters, Salvator Mundi represents nothing more than opportunity. For some it is increased status in the art world, for others it is the vain satisfaction in being the one who has discovered a lost treasure; for all of them it is about converting that opportunity into capital, whether it be cultural, financial or even political.

A few figures do emerge with some semblance of sincerity. Dianne Modestini, who believes that the work is a true da Vinci, restored the heavily damaged the painting and is one of only two figures who appears to have an actual appreciation of the painting. A question marks hangs over how much, if anything, she expected to profit from its restoration and eventual sale, but she is consistent in her regret that it did not end up in a public gallery. Elsewhere, art scholar Martin Kemp is assured that the painting is authentic, while apparently standing to gain little from the declaration other than perhaps the waning status of having an opinion of the thing.

The film first shows its hand after the painting is acquired by a Russian oligarch through a deal with shady businessman Yves Bouvier. This is where the mask that the acquisition of valuable art is about anything other than power finally drops. Converting liquid cash into physical objects, billionaires’ vast fortunes can be hidden safely from tax authorities in Bouvier’s vast freeport. They can then be reconverted into cash or other forms of capital when needed, such as the painting’s eventual sale for $450m in 2017, allegedly to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The painting’s authenticity would be question if only it still mattered. There are conflicting accounts over the reason that the Louvre Museum, which sought to loan the painting, didn’t display it during their famous da Vinci exhibition, though the one that prevails here is that MBS insisted that it be displayed next to the Mona Lisa, while the Louvre refused. It is a truly fascinating and cynical display of political power by proxy, but at this stage no one is surely under any illusions that it was ever about the art. ~

https://cine-vue.com/2021/09/film-review-the-lost-leonardo.html

Oriana:

I remember first looking at Salvator Mundi (“Savior of the World”) and finding it rather ugly. The eyes were all wrong, especially when compared to the beautiful eyes of Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist.

 

And no matter how badly damaged The Last Supper is, that is Leonardo’s Jesus: infinitely gentle and sad, resigned to what must be, with the tumult on both sides of him. Who will betray him? Perhaps only that painter who gives us a stiff, un-beautiful Jesus.

But the Guardian comes up with an interesting theory of why this painting does not look like a Leonardo: “If this painting looks fake, that’s because it is a religious masterpiece painted by an atheist. It is a genuine Leonardo but not a genuine expression of his thoughts and feelings. That insincerity saps it of soul even as it spooks you with the illusion of Christ’s presence.” https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/16/all-leonardo-da-vinci-painting-rated-salvator-mundi

If so, how come Leonardo did paint beautiful St. John, the soulful, sorrowing Jesus of the Last Supper, beautiful Mary and St. Anne, and exquisite angels?

But there is a more telling detail, even if terrubly mundane detail. We know that Leonardo was a perfectionist. If he painted on wood, he chose the best-quality panels. The panel of Salvator Mundi is the cheap kind, with a knot in it. A knot is harder than the rest of the plank and would eventually cause problems.

There are other red flags as well, but the authenticity of the work is not what this superb documentary is about. As the reviews point out, it’s about the greed and shady practices of the art market. It’s also about the obscenely rich collectors who end up depriving the public of access to various masterpieces by keeping them in a kind of heavily armored safe storage in Geneva, called “freeport.”

The buyer of Salvator Mundi wished to stay anonymous, but his covered was blown by the CIA. It turned out to be Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia — the one who ordered ( or, in the new softened media language, “approved””) the barbarously torturous murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The vile and indeed obscenely rich Saudi potentate was apparently willing to pay up to one billion dollars for the painting. For me the most painful scenes of the documentary were those showing French President Macron positively fawning on the Saudi Prince. So much for the West’s willingness to stand up for human rights.

So it's absolutely true that this movie is not really about art, and it's not about Leonardo. It's about corruption at the top. It's about Big Money. And right now no one knows where the painting is. It may be in the Swiss freeport, or on bin Salman’s yacht. If he looks at it, then in the eyes of Islam he’s committing a sin: depiction of the prophets (Jesus is regarded as a prophet) is a major sin, an instance of religious corruption. But most likely he’s not looking at it. To him it’s not art, but an extraordinary financial asset, “a male Mona Lisa.”

If you have a chance, by all means go see “The Lost Leonardo.” It’s superbly well done. You will leave the theater sadder but wiser. 

Mary:

Although I have not seen the movie, the Lost Leonardo sounds like it has much to say about the connection between art, power and wealth in our world. It sounds very much like the value of any individual work is not related to its status as an aesthetic object, or barely so, and that the value is something determined by a power game of smoke and mirrors, in order to leverage its financial worth. Rarity and authenticity become selling points, and as the game is played out that worth is inflated over and over again.

So art becomes currency for the very very obscenely rich, who may shift it over agan and again in the marketplace, maximizing their profits...then, often, it is owned and stored in someone’s private collection, removed from any public venue.

This kind of manipulation, in my mind, can actually call into question the intrinsic value of whatever work comes into that rarefied and exclusive marketplace. As the price increases beyond all reason, the artificial and forced nature of that process makes its worth less believable, seem more and more contrived and inauthentic.

As to the painting I don't like it. It doesn't have that exquisite beauty of Leonardo's faces, their subtlety of expression..it seems stiff and unalive. Also, Leonardo was very interested in optics, and the transparent globe this figure is holding does not show the kind of distortions Leonardo would have known present in a curved surface. Here the folds in the clothing and palm of the hand look as they would if viewed through a flat piece of glass. I also find the " cheap panel" detail very telling.

*

"ANYTHING WE CAN ACTUALLY DO, WE CAN AFFORD"

~ “The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that ‘anything we can actually do, we can afford,’” writes Adam Tooze. “Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.”  

It’s obviously not a novel observation to point out that the global economic response to the pandemic was astounding in size. But I want to start today with just some numbers to put this in context. So the O.E.C.D., which is a consortium of a lot of richer nations, estimates that its members issued a total of 18 trillion in debt in 2020 alone. That is the largest surge in debt ever recorded in peacetime.

A whopping 11 trillion of that was just between the months of January and May. Nearly 70 percent of that debt — 70 percent — was in the U.S. alone. The $2.2-trillion CARES Act — that was passed by a Republican Senate. It was signed into law by a Republican president. And it was more than double the size of the 2009 stimulus. In a matter of weeks, the Federal Reserve bought 5 percent of the entire $20-trillion bond market. At the peak of its action, the Fed was buying bonds at the rate of a million dollars per second. These are wild numbers.

But the most revealing part of that response wasn’t what happened. It was what didn’t happen. Bond vigilantes didn’t send markets into a tailspin. Interest rates didn’t skyrocket. Inflation — well, we’re going to talk about inflation a lot in this. But there was certainly no evidence of a hyperinflationary spiral. Private investment didn’t plummet. The terrified view of future uncertainty hasn’t stopped everyone from hiring or making new capital investments.

Instead, the Treasury market stabilized. The financial markets not only recovered, they surged. The decades of doomsday predictions of what would happen if the government should spend huge amounts of money without paying for it — they didn’t materialize, not in the moment anyway.

Adam Tooze is a brilliant economic historian at Columbia University. He’s the author of the book “Crashed,” which, for my money, is the single best history of the financial crisis, and now of “Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy.” He’s also co-host of the new podcast “Ones and Tooze.” Yeah, that is Tooze spelled T-O-O-Z-E like his name. So who said economic historians don’t have a sense of humor?

EZRA KLEIN: So you’ve written that one of the central takeaways of the last year and a half is that, quote, “John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared, during World War II, that anything we can actually do, we can afford.” Tell me about that idea.

ADAM TOOZE: So it’s double-edged. I think that’s the key. And the penny took a while to drop, for me. But 2020, I think, illustrates both sides of this. So on the one side, there is the emancipatory promise, this open-handed “we can afford anything,” by which I think Keynes means, money is a technical issue.

In the end, it’s a question of mobilizing finance, stringing together the financial engineering, doing some of the central-banking arithmetic we might need to do. But in the end, what limits what we can do is not whether we can afford something, but whether we can actually do it.
And this is why 2020 is — it’s a slightly academic way of putting it, but it’s a kind of beautiful illustration of the force of this point, because we could pay for all sorts of things. But could we organize ourselves to collectively socially distance? Well, in the end, in some places, yes, and in many places, no.

Could we roll out a vaccine? Well, we didn’t know ahead of time. Early in 2020, I remember sitting in meetings with science colleagues at Columbia and them saying, we’ve never done this before. We’ve never had a coronavirus vaccine. And we ended up with a whole suite of them. And that depended on the extraordinary skill of the scientists manipulating nature to produce that result. But then again, can we actually organize to roll that out to the entire world’s population? Certainly not at the pace that we’d want to.

So the book is really a kind of meditation on that, on the one hand, enabling discovery: that really finding the money isn’t the problem, and not just in the rich countries. But if the Fed settings are right, and you’ve got competent management, in fact, in much of the world economy right now, that isn’t the problem. The problem is the nitty-gritty. The problem is what economists call the — if you like — more the supply side, the real economy. That turns out to be where the problems are that we need to overcome.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to drill on this idea for a minute because it is simultaneously deceptively simple and not how we have been taught to think. So what you’re saying here, what Keynes was saying here, is that money can be invented in whatever quantity we want, really. The Federal Reserve can just create more of it. But things cannot be invented in whatever quantity we want.

So if you have 100 jet planes that you can make, and you only have, quote unquote, “money” for 80 of them, the government can create the money for 100. But if you want 120 jet planes, and you can only make 100, then you can’t. And so is the idea here that we’ve often gotten which side the scarcity is on wrong?

ADAM TOOZE: I think that’s a really good way of putting it. And part of the tension, part of the stress caused by discovering that, really, budgetary arithmetic is just really budgetary arithmetic, is that without it, we face the really harsh political questions of, could we agree to do this? And if we’re not doing it, it’s because you, the other people, our antagonists, don’t want to do it. You’ve got something else you’d rather do. Or it’s the humbling realization that, will it as much as we will, we just can’t do it. We just don’t have the technical wherewithal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-adam-tooze.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=OpEd%20Columnists


Adam Tooze

Oriana:

I'm very struck by the phrase “Money is a technicality” and by this passage: “You can tell by how much money we spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars without an inflationary problem, without a crowding-out problem. We just spent it. We didn’t pay for it. It’s trillions and trillions of dollars.”

I can’t pretend to comprehend the world of trillions and trillions of dollars. It might as well be astrophysics. But if what Tooze says is correct, then the great problems of our times are not financial, but moral. The trillions and trillions spent on no-win wars versus the penny-pinching when it comes to providing housing for the homeless, for instance.

When we truly want something enormously expensive, it gets done — to give a more positive example, think of the Moon landing. And the most recent example, providing hundreds of millions of doses of Covid vaccine, free to the recipient. But there must be a will. That’s the level  at which things can break down in a polarized country — the level of politics, of radical differences in values.

I remember discussing, some years ago, universal access to health care. “That will never happen here,” one man argued. “Americans are too selfish.” A burly blue-collar worker, I don’t think he meant it as any kind of leftist criticism. It was rather his honest diagnosis. But at this point I am struck by the fact that he didn’t say, “It would cost too much.” 

Mary:


Just a thought on money...this crazy game of inflating the price of a work of art actually undermines the idea of value. The increases are like the inflation of a balloon, growing and growing, but only filled with air. Money is a technicality, yes. And also an imaginary construction...if we need more we can just make more. Smoke and mirrors, number games, creative bookkeeping

Oriana:

What depresses me no end is that we don't have a consensus on priorities. Of course this country can afford both free tuition at state universities and universal health care, but there is still the bizarre fear of "socialism" and a paralyzing lack consensus and political will. So again the money is spent instead on nuclear weapons that will never be used, and the like absurdities.


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THE DISCOVERY OF MICROSCOPIC LIFE SHOOK UP THEOLOGY (AND MORE)

~ When the Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked at a drop of pond water through his home-made microscope in the 1670s, he didn’t just see tiny ‘animals’ swimming in there. He saw a new world: too small for the eye to register yet teeming with invisible life. The implications were theological as much as they were scientific.

Invisibility comes in many forms, but smallness is the most concrete. Light ignores very tiny things rather as ocean waves ignore sand grains. During the 17th century, when the microscope was invented, the discovery of such objects posed a profound problem: if we humans were God’s ultimate purpose, why would he create anything that we couldn’t see?

The microworld was puzzling, but also wondrous and frightening. There was nothing especially new about the idea of invisible worlds and creatures — belief in immaterial spirits, angels and demons was still widespread. But their purpose was well understood: they were engaged in the Manichean struggle for our souls. If that left one uneasy in a universe where there was more than meets the eye, at least the moral agenda was clear.

But Leeuwenhoek’s ‘animalcules’ and their ilk indulged their opaque, wriggly ways everywhere one looked: in moisture, air, body fluids. In human semen — Leeuwenhoek studied his own, transferred with jarring haste from the marital bed — there were tadpole-like creatures writhing like eels. In 1687 the German mathematician Johann Sturm suggested that disease was caused by breathing in such invisible animals in air. In 1646 the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher proposed that the plague might be caused by the microscopic ‘seeds’ of virulent worms that enter the body through the nose and mouth — just a step away, it seemed, from a germ theory of contagion. Alas, the impossibility of seeing bacteria and viruses with the microscopes of the time obstructed that leap until Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch made it in the late 19th century.

Pestilence was everywhere, unseen and impossible to fend off — just like medieval demons. The narrator in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) claims he has heard that if a person with the plague breathes on glass, ‘there might living Creatures be seen by a Microscope of strange, monstrous and frightful Shapes, such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents and Devils, horrible to behold’. He admits some doubt as to whether this is true, but the message is clear: the invisible microworld is labelled ‘Here be dragons.’

Little has changed. Electron microscopes now reveal miniature viral monsters that look like science-fiction aliens, with arachnoid legs and crystal heads from which they inject genetic venom into cells. MRSA bacteria lurk unseen on hospital door handles and bed sheets. We sprinkle anti-bacterial fluids like holy water to fend off these invisible fiends.

*

The idea that matter might be composed of particles and processes too small to see has a long history — from the atoms of Democritus to the whirling vortices of Descartes and the corpuscles of Newton. Yet this fine-grained structure only came to seem like an ‘invisible world’ once the microscope had enabled us, first, to appreciate the intricacy with which it was wrought, and second, to identify life among the grains. When Galileo used one of the first microscopes to study insects, he was astonished and repelled, writing to his friend Federico Cesi in 1624: I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration, among which the flea is quite horrible, the mosquito and the moth very beautiful… In short, the greatness of nature, and the subtle and unspeakable care with which she works is a source of unending contemplation.

The 17th-century philosopher Robert Hooke echoed this wonder at nature’s invisible intricacy. It was his book, Micrographia (1665), that put microscopy on the map. Crucially, Hooke’s volume was not merely descriptive: it included large, gorgeous engravings of what he saw through the lens, skillfully prepared by his own hand. The power of these illustrations was impossible to resist. Here were fantastical gardens discovered in mold, snowflakes like fronds of living ice and, most shockingly, insects such as fleas got up in articulated armor like lobsters, and a fly that gazes into the lens with 14,000 little eyes, arranged in perfect order on two hemispheres.

This was surely a demonstration of the infinite scope of God’s creative power. In comparison, the finest contrivances of man — a needle’s tip, a razor’s edge, a printed full stop — looked crude and clumsy under the microscope. Yet what excited Hooke and his contemporaries most of all was the thought that microscopes might uncover, not just the invisible structures of nature, but its hidden mechanisms as well. In previous ages, natural philosophers had attributed the causes of processes to invisible, occult forces and emanations — vague and insensible agencies. The new mechanistic philosophers of the 17th century argued that nature worked like a machine, filled with levers, hooks, mills, pins and other familiar devices too small to be seen. As Hooke put it: ‘Those effects of Bodies, which have been commonly attributed to Qualities, and those confess’d to be occult, are perform’d by the small Machines of Nature.’

He never quite found them — what the microscope revealed was more often unintelligible in these terms. But there was no shortage of other marvels.


*

Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries, reported in 1676 and verified by Hooke a year later, brought home the full force of a teeming, invisible microworld. The anxieties about scale and perspective that run through Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) make it clear how unsettling this was; recall Gulliver’s disgust at the gigantic bodies of the Brobdingnagians when seen close up: ‘Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than pack-threads.’

In the 19th century, refinements to the design of the microscope allowed scientists to peer into the invisible world with unprecedented resolution. Yet there remained questions about what might be happening down there. In 1896 the pioneering British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley proclaimed that The universe, as it is within [man’s] experience, may be unlike the universe as it is within other living experience, and no more like the universe outside his experience, which he cannot think, than the universe of a mite is like his universe.

Maudsley’s protestation of ignorance was an attack on the complacent assumption held by some of his contemporaries that the invisible realms were peopled with beings like us. But this lack of knowledge could equally license the most exotic speculations. The beginnings of molecular science had suggested that life might have a minimal possible size. When the ‘indivisible’ atom began to display a finer-grained structure of subatomic particles, and light waves proved to have many unexpectedly fine oscillations in the form of X-rays, no one could rule out the possibility of an entire hierarchy of material existences on ever smaller scales.

The physicist George Johnstone Stoney declared in 1891 that the physical universe is really an infinite series of worlds within worlds. The scientist Edmund Fournier d’Albe developed these ideas in Two New Worlds (1907), where he envisaged an ‘infra-world’ at a scale below that which microscopes could register, peopled, like Leeuwenhoek’s drop of water, with creatures that ‘eat, and fight, and love, and die, and whose span of life, to judge from their intense activity, is probably filled with as many events as our own’. The human body, he estimated, could play host to around 10 to the 40th power of these ‘infra-men’, experiencing joys and woes ‘without the slightest net effect on our own consciousness’.

As is often the case with scientific advance, the new and unfamiliar was popularly interpreted by reference to the old and prosaic. Littleness has been a consistent theme in the folklore of demons and faeries. Mischievous imps and fairies that interfere in domestic matters were a commonplace of folk tradition, and if these beings were not necessarily invisibly small, their diminutive stature enabled them to pass unseen. One might be tempted to imagine that, by the late 19th century, such beliefs persisted only in rural backwaters, but that would be to underestimate the grip of the invisible world on the imagination. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the ‘demon’ of James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the most profound physicist of the 19th century.

Maxwell’s idea was a response to the gloomy prediction of a ‘cosmic heat death’ of the universe. In 1851 William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) pointed out that the second law of thermodynamics, which can be expressed as the condition that heat energy always flows from hot to cold, must eventually create a universe of uniform temperature, a universe from which no useful work can be extracted and in which nothing really happens.

A devout Christian, Maxwell could not accept that God would let this happen.
He believed that the second law was statistical rather than fundamental: temperature gradients dissipated because it was far more likely that faster, ‘hotter’ molecules would mingle with slower ones, rather than by chance congregating into a ‘hot’ patch. But what if there were, as Maxwell put it in 1867, a ‘finite being’ small enough to ‘see’ each molecule and keep track of it, one who could open and shut a trapdoor in a wall that divided a gas-filled vessel? Such a being could let through fast-moving molecules in one direction so as to congregate the heat in one compartment, separating hot from cold and creating a temperature gradient that could be tapped to do work.

Maxwell didn’t intend his creature to be called a demon; that label was applied by Thomson, and Maxwell was not pleased. ‘Call him no more a demon but a valve,’ he grumbled — albeit a ‘valve’ with intelligence and autonomy. Or, as he put it elsewhere: ‘a doorkeeper, very intelligent and exceedingly quick’.

Several of his contemporaries took these ‘demons’ quite literally. Thomson himself took pains to stress that the demon was plausible, calling it ‘a being with no preternatural qualities, [which] differs from real animals only in extreme smallness and agility’. Maxwell’s friend, the Scottish physicist Peter Guthrie Tait, evidently believed they might exist, and he enlisted them for an extraordinary cause. In 1875, he and a fellow Scot named Balfour Stewart, an expert on the theory of heat, published a tract in which they attempted to show that ‘the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist’. There must be, they wrote, ‘an invisible order of things which will remain and possess energy when the present system has passed away’. Tait and Stewart were aware of the apparent conflict between the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the second law of thermodynamics, which seemed to enforce an eventual universe of insensate stasis.

Maxwell gave them a way out. ‘Clerk-Maxwell’s demons,’ they wrote, ‘could be made to restore energy even in the present universe without spending work’ — and as a result, ‘immortality is possible’.

Alas, modern studies have shown that Maxwell’s demon cannot evade the second law after all, since it would dissipate heat as part of the process of gathering information about molecular speeds. The conceit is now generally regarded as an amusing thought experiment: it is forgotten that, in Maxwell’s day, the notion of invisibly small demons going about their micro-business seemed plausible, even quite likely.

*

It should not be forgotten that the demonization of invisible beings goes on in our own time, though now it is adapted to the fantasies of our age. And so viruses are ‘alien invaders’; we go to ‘war’ on ‘superbugs’ with super-powers, repelling them with ‘magic bullets’ as if they were werewolves. Children are taught that invisible ‘germs’ are the omnipresent enemy. Microbes are invoked, as imps and demons once were, to instill safe behavior. It is a case, as the microbiologist Abraham Louis Baron declared in 1957, of ‘man against germs’. ‘We share the world with an incredible vast host of invisible things,’ he announced, but that wasn’t an expression of wonder so much as a warning. As the physician Robert Hessler wrote in his 1912 study of the hazards of dust: ‘It is the invisible we have to guard against.’

This fear of the malevolent designs of imperceptibly small entities became particularly evident in the early reception of nanotechnology. Among scientists, nanotechnology was a loosely defined collection of attempts to visualize and manipulate matter on scales ranging from ångströms (the size of atoms) to hundreds of nanometers (the size of small bacteria). In public discourse, however, it became dominated by a single, hypothetical entity: the nanobot. This, it was said, would be an autonomous device that could patrol the bloodstream for pathogenic invaders, or else construct materials and molecules, atom by atom. It was, in other words, a human avatar on an invisible scale.

But what if nanobots ran amok, as robots (in fiction) are almost predestined to do? A rogue robot might be a menace, but it is a comprehensible one, a kind of superhuman being. A rogue nanobot, capable of replicating like bacteria and of pulling matter into its component particles, would be an unthinkable threat. Hidden from sight, it could reduce anything in seconds to a formless mass of atoms, which would then be reconstituted into replica nanobots: an amorphous ‘grey goo’. Michael Crichton exploited the terror of this imagery, crudely but effectively, in his novel Prey (2002).

If the grey goo idea is frightful, it is also familiar. Invisible powers have long been held capable of animating clay, creating the fearsome Golem, or of disintegrating and deliquescing matter and flesh (think now of the Ebola virus). What’s more, the nanobot connects with long-standing images of the exploration of new worlds, most notably the submarine Nautilus in which Captain Nemo explores the hidden deep sea in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870). Once again, it seems we must remake the invisible microworld in our own image before we can explore its promise and peril. This became most explicit in the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, and its parodic 1987 remake, Innerspace, in which humans are shrunk to a scale that allows them to navigate through the human body.

The extreme miniaturization that has its ultimate expression in nanotechnology has not yet given birth to an invisible nemesis. Indeed, it shows no sign of doing so. Instead, in conjunction with invisible rays such as Marconi’s ‘wireless’ emanations, it has created an age of technological invisibility, a world in which things happen with no mechanism in sight, even without our volition, via an omnipresent field of information. Items in stores speak to barriers and computers; miniaturized sensors control our cars and refine our household environment; libraries leap into our pockets. Dust, a metaphor for worthless matter while it was the smallest thing that could (just) be seen with the naked eye, has become ‘smart dust’, a nanotechnological promise of particles laced with invisible circuitry, programmed to self-assemble as we will them: to make a Golem, perhaps, rebranded now as a ‘reconfigurable robot’.

It has become a cliche that these advances would have seemed like magic in earlier times. Something that is acknowledged less frequently is how traditional reactions to invisibility might help us comprehend the cultural changes that have ensued. The boundaries between rationality and insanity can no longer be policed in behavioral terms. Is the person who is gesticulating and talking out loud in the street communing with demons of the mind, or with a friend? Is the person fretting over the invisible threats of nearby radio masts succumbing to some modern version of the mal aria theory of contagion, or do they have a point? We entrust our digital secrets to the intangible Cloud, assuming that this nebulous entity can be summoned to regurgitate them at will. With invisibly small technology harnessed to the invisible ether, we have animated the world. ~

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/small-things?utm_source=pocket-newtab


mayfly nymph

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HOW THE BRAIN CLEANS ITSELF DURING REM SLEEP

~ Scientists have long wondered why almost all animals sleep, despite the disadvantages to survival of being unconscious. Now, researchers led by a team from the University of Tsukuba have found new evidence of brain refreshing that takes place during a specific phase of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when you tend to dream a lot.

Previous studies have measured differences in blood flow in the brain between REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and wakefulness using various methods, with conflicting results. In their latest work, the Tsukuba-led team used a technique to directly visualize the movement of red blood cells in the brain capillaries (where nutrients and waste products are exchanged between brain cells and blood) of mice during awake and asleep states.

"We used a dye to make the brain blood vessels visible under fluorescent light, using a technique known as two-photon microscopy," says senior author of the study Professor Yu Hayashi. "In this way, we could directly observe the red blood cells in capillaries of the neocortex in non-anesthetized mice.”

The researchers also measured electrical activity in the brain to identify REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and wakefulness, and looked for differences in blood flow between these phases.
"We were surprised by the results," explains Professor Hayashi. "There was a massive flow of red blood cells through the brain capillaries during REM sleep, but no difference between non-REM sleep and the awake state, showing that REM sleep is a unique state.

The research team then disrupted the mice's sleep, resulting in "rebound" REM sleep — a stronger form of REM sleep to compensate for the earlier disruption. Blood flow in the brain was further increased during rebound REM sleep, suggesting an association between blood flow and REM sleep strength. However, when the researchers repeated the same experiments in mice without adenosine A2a receptors (the receptors whose blockade makes you feel more awake after drinking coffee), there was less of an increase in blood flow during REM sleep, even during rebound REM sleep.

"These results suggest that adenosine A2a receptors may be responsible for at least some of the changes in blood flow in the brain during REM sleep," says Professor Hayashi.

Given that reduced blood flow in the brain and decreased REM sleep are correlated with the development of Alzheimer's disease, which involves the buildup of waste products in the brain, it may be interesting to address whether increased blood flow in the brain capillaries during REM sleep is important for waste removal from the brain. This study lays preliminary groundwork for future investigations into the role of adenosine A2a receptors in this process, which could ultimately lead to the development of new treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. ~

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210825113638.htm

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CHINA’S NEW THREE-CHILDREN POLICY

~ When first announced, China’s new procreation policy of increasing the allowable number of children from two to three boggled my mind. Now I’m for it. Probably not for the reasons you might think.

Like many westerners, I squirmed when One Child went into effect in the 1980s. I thought that was pretty heavy-handed. When Two Babies was announced in 2015, I was nonplussed. This week, China’s announcement of Three Kids got my attention.

By fiddling with how many kids its citizens could have, China pragmatically acknowledged the fact that some people would never have any at all. In the beginning, I suspect those folks were even held in high esteem for their forbearance.

Coincident with restricting family size came booming growth of China’s cities and its economy. The relative value assigned to male children over females resulted in a dearth of marriageable potential mothers. Immigration and increasing allowable progeny addressed the need for fertile females, now and for generations to come.

The proverbial cat was now out of the bag, however. Today Chinese women have more access to the workplace and weigh the merits of career over motherhood. These days, an old descriptor from the 1980s, “Double Income, No Kids,” has taken root in China.

Living childfree has caught the attention of Chinese males, too. Vasectomies are in high demand as young singles and couples weigh their procreative options.

Joining them, both in China and in every other nation on earth, are those who unwittingly go through life without having children of their own. Their reasons are many, including infertility, lack of a viable partner, economic resources, disability, and illness.

There’s a worldwide, largely invisible subculture of adults who will never have kids, more of us than ever before. While in years past we may have talked furtively and sometimes tentatively among ourselves, today there’s swelling recognition of and appreciation for childfree and childless living. We’re finding voice and validation while living in the midst of a world high on family.

Books about childlessness were few as little as a decade ago. Today top-quality work is being picked up by big publishing houses and small presses alike, as well as self-published by authors around the globe. Goodreads lists over 200 current titles for books about the childless and childfree.

Brainchild of voracious reader Lisa Kissane, the NoMo Book Club includes detailed reviews that are designated with color-coded trigger warnings for those childless not by choice.

The Childfree by Choice website lists over 30 movies that are childfree. A growing number of documentaries cover the topic, including To Kid or Not to Kid and The Guardian’s Childfree series.

There’s even a dating site dedicated for our kind to find childfree partners. CFdating was founded in 2018 by a childfree Atlanta couple. In less than three years, membership has taken off, with steady growth all over the world, including China. Users range in age from 18 to 57, most in the 40+ category.

When you sign up, CFdating asks why you chose to be childfree. Overpopulation is one of the most frequently cited reasons, with concerns that contributing another child isn’t in the planet’s best interest.

When China proclaims its need for more children, the ensuing media coverage and pushback gives impetus to counterpoints raised by those who occupy our adulthood without having kids —lives some of us chose, others unintentionally childless. May we all create lives of meaning, connection, and joy and revel in the different routes each of us ultimately follow. ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unapparent/202106/how-chinas-three-kid-policy-impacts-those-who-have-none


Mother is the name of God in the lips and hearts of little children. ~ W.M.Thackeray


Picasso: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1896

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SPOUSAL HOMICIDE GENDER RATIO IS DIFFERENT IN THE U.S.

~ Results revealed that for every 100 men who killed their wives in the United States during 1976-85, about 75 women killed their husbands. Women committed a substantially larger proportion of spousal homicides in the United States than elsewhere. In fact the spousal sex ratio of killing (SROK) is more than twice that in the other Western countries. However, this contrast cannot be attributed to greater gun use in the United States nor to a general behavioral and psychological convergence of males and females in the United States. Instead, significant predictors of the SROK include registered versus de facto marriage, co-residency versus separation, ethnicity, and age disparity. However, the impacts of these variables are not sufficient to explain the difference in the victim sex ratios in the United States and other countries. ~

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/who-kills-whom-spouse-killings-exceptional-sex-ratio-spousal

*

*

THE PUZZLE OF OBESITY

~ The energy-in-energy-out conception of weight regulation, we argue, is fatally, tragically flawed: Obesity is not an energy balance disorder, but a hormonal or constitutional disorder, a dysregulation of fat storage and metabolism, a disorder of fuel-partitioning. Because these hormonal responses are dominated by the insulin signaling system, which in turn responds primarily (although not entirely) to the carbohydrate content of the diet, this thinking is now known as the carbohydrate-insulin model.

Its implications are simple and profound: People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.


fat cells

A century ago, the general thinking on obesity still allowed for two equally commonsensical ways to conceive of the pathology of the disorder. “The medical profession in general believes that there are two kinds of obese persons,” is how Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan described this schism in 1930 in the first of two papers in which he claimed to have settled the issue, “those who have become fat because they overeat or under-exercise; and those composing a second group whose adiposity is not closely related to diet, but is caused by an endocrine or constitutional disorder.”

This endocrine (hormonal) or constitutional concept may have been best phrased not by a scientist or physician but by playwright George Bernard Shaw in his 1910 work “Misalliance.” “It’s constitutional,” says the character John Tarleton. “No matter how little you eat, you put on flesh if you’re made that way.”

By this thinking, promoted in the decades between the World Wars by prominent German and Austrian physician-researchers, some people are born predisposed to accumulate excess fat just as some are predestined to grow tall. However hungry or physically inactive they might be is an effect of the manifestation of this predisposition, not a cause.

That the environment plays a critical role is a given. The undeniable evidence is the enormous increase in the prevalence of obesity worldwide. In the U.S., 12% of Americans lived with obesity 60 years ago; more than 40% do today. Something has changed in the environment — in diets or lifestyles — to trigger such a dramatic rise in the prevalence of obesity. But is it nature or nurture that the environment triggers, behavior or physiology, minds or bodies?

Ask a simple question, like “Why is it that some of us fatten easily and some of us don’t — just as some breeds of livestock fatten easily and others don’t?” and obesity researchers can’t answer it because, curiously enough, that’s not what they study.

Positive energy balance — more calories consumed than expended — is a description of what happens when people gain weight. As the energy stored in their bodies increases, so does their body mass. The increase in body mass is the positive energy balance. This reality says nothing about why it happens. After all, children are in positive energy balance when they’re growing — as Gustav von Bergmann, the leading German authority on internal medicine in the pre-World War II decades argued then — but that’s not why they’re growing. Women during pregnancy are in positive energy balance, as is the child in their womb, but that’s no explanation for why their body mass is increasing.

Among the most troubling [problems of the energy balance theory] is that it inescapably transforms a physiological disorder — the accumulation of excess body fat — into a behavioral disorder, a character flaw. This makes fat-shaming a seemingly unavoidable consequence.

Here it helps to quantify exactly what energy imbalance implies. To maintain a healthy weight, by this thinking, requires that people match their intake to their expenditure perfectly.

Overshooting on average by just 10 calories a day — the calories in a single potato chip — translates into gaining a pound of fat yearly, 10 pounds of excess fat per decade. In just 30 years, that tiny imbalance will transform anyone from lean to obese. Those 10 calories a day of positive energy balance are less than half of 1% of the calories a typical American consumes daily. That’s the overeating that has to be explained.

It’s easy to imagine why already obese individuals might not be able to exert the concerted effort necessary to become lean. But why didn’t they prevent themselves from becoming obese initially? If obesity is caused by a positive energy balance, avoiding or preventing it should be effortless.

Because the energy-balance logic demands an answer, Newburgh offered up the implication in his articles and, by doing so, catalyzed the transformation of the scientific perception of obesity from a chronic, disabling physiological disorder into a character or psychological defect.
 
Children get fat, Newburgh wrote, not because of a constitutional predisposition but because they’d “been deliberately trained to overeat by their parents”; and most adults get fat because they suffer from “various human weaknesses such as over-indulgence and ignorance.” If they didn’t, wouldn’t they have eaten less and not become obese?

This problem is solved by simply defining obesity as what it clearly is: a disorder of excessive fat accumulation. This perspective was argued in the 1920s and 1930s first by the German internist Gustav von Bergmann and then by University of Vienna endocrinologist Julius Bauer, the “noted Vienna authority on internal diseases,” as the New York Times then described him.

This conception focused on what Bauer called the “exaggerated tendency of some tissues to store fat.” Men and women fatten differently, he pointed out; and both in very specific areas. Sex hormones clearly influence fat accumulation independent of energy balance. Whatever mechanisms are at work locally, Bauer argued, should be the prime suspects systemically in causing obesity.

“Like a malignant tumor or like the fetus, the uterus or the breasts of a pregnant woman,” Bauer wrote in 1929, the fat tissue in a person predisposed to obesity “seizes on foodstuffs, even in the case of undernutrition. It maintains its stock, and may increase it independent of the requirements of the organism. A sort of anarchy exists; the adipose tissue lives for itself and does not fit into the precisely regulated management of the whole organism.”

While researchers have since created many animal models of obesity — genetically, surgically, or manipulated by diet — one observation is remarkably consistent. Although researchers have rarely thought to control for energy intake in their experiments, when they did, testing whether their animals get fatter than lean controls even when eating as little or less food, they almost invariably report that they do.

“These mice will make fat out of their food under the most unlikely circumstances, even when half-starved [my italics],” as Jean Mayer wrote about obese mice he studied in the 1950s. This fundamental observation directly challenges the notion that obesity is caused by poorly regulated eating behavior. It supports the hypothesis that poorly regulated eating behavior is a consequence of an animal’s constitutional drive to accumulate excess fat. These observations, too, have been ignored.

The most conspicuous example of the disconnect between the energy-balance model and the actual evidence from animal models comes from the most famous mutant mice — named the ob/ob mice — ever discovered. The first appeared in a litter at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine in 1949. It was ob/ob mutants that led Jeffrey Friedman and his Rockefeller University colleagues to discover the hormone leptin and identify defects in the leptin gene as responsible for the animal’s obesity.

Leptin’s discovery in 1994 was hailed as the holy grail of obesity research: the “putative signal” secreted by fat tissue to inform the hypothalamus that fat is accumulating, and so eating and expenditure must be adjusted to compensate. Tens of thousands of articles have since been published relevant to leptin’s role in obesity.

But even the ob/ob mutants make fat out of their food when, quite literally, half-starved.

Friedman’s research was based on Douglas Coleman’s research at the Jackson Laboratory and Coleman, who shared a Lasker Foundation Award in 2010 with Friedman, dedicated two papers to this observation: “Even when maintained on 50 percent of normal food intake,” Coleman reported in 1985, “mutants still become obese.”

*

By the mid-1960s, researchers studying fat storage and metabolism had established unambiguously that the hormone insulin dominated the regulation of fat storage. While insulin works conspicuously to control blood sugar — defects in insulin production and responsiveness are primary causes of diabetes — it does so partly by stimulating the uptake of fat into fat cells, inhibiting its release and inhibiting its use as energy in non-adipose tissue. No tissue in the body is as sensitive to insulin’s action as fat tissue — “exquisitely sensitive,” as these researchers often described it.

With the invention of a technique to measure circulating levels of insulin — the radioimmunoassay, developed by Solomon Berson and Rosalyn Yalow in 1960 (for which Yalow, after Berson’s death, won a Nobel Prize in 1977) — researchers learned that animals with hypothalamic lesions and ob/ob mice are both hyperinsulinemic, as are people with obesity and with type 2 diabetes, offering a parsimonious explanation for the mechanism of their excessive fat accumulation.

The hormonal/constitutional hypothesis also encountered dogmatic resistance in response to its single most direct practical implication: Diets that can successfully resolve obesity are not those that induce us to eat less, per energy-balance thinking, but those that reduce circulating levels of insulin, accomplished most effectively by replacing dietary carbohydrates — sugars, starchy vegetables and grains, and the like — with fat.

Physicians and diet book authors have been promoting carbohydrate-restricted, high-fat diets — ketogenic diets, now commonly known as keto — for going on 200 years, most famously Robert Atkins, a New York cardiologist. By arguing, as Atkins and others did, that fat could be lost without limiting calories by fixing the hormonal dysregulation of fat storage — restricting what one eats, not how much — these books were treated as de facto quackery. By advocating that we eat fat-rich foods, they were considered dangerous.

While researchers continue to study fat metabolism and its role in obesity, they typically assume that whatever they’re observing plays a subordinate role to that of energy imbalance. This, again, is a danger of dogmatic thinking. In Stockholm, for instance, Karolinska Institute researchers have reported that fat is stored longer in the fat cells of people who are obese than it is in those who are lean. Mobilization of fat from fat cells in these people is inhibited, precisely as would be predicted by Bauer and von Bergmann’s thinking that the fat tissue in those predisposed to obesity is dysregulated.

In 2019, the Karolinska researchers reported that the older we get, the more fat “turnover” in fat cells slows, a phenomenon that they estimate could account for a 200-pound person adding 30 pounds of excess fat in a decade without eating any more than he or she ever did. Still, they could not or would not shake the energy-balance context, suggesting that because overeating was the “main driver for obesity,” it might be the “failure to reduce calorie intake in aging” to compensate for this de-accelerating fat turnover that leads to weight gain.

The researchers most willing to question the energy balance logic are those who still practice as physicians and regularly treat patients with obesity. These physicians, an ever-growing but still small minority, find that when they induce their patients to restrict carbohydrates but not calories, their patients can achieve and maintain a healthy weight with relative ease and get healthier in the process. When this approach has been used for people with type 2 diabetes, as the San Francisco-based start-up Virta Health has been doing, the results have been unprecedented. ~

https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/13/how-a-fatally-tragically-flawed-paradigm-has-derailed-the-science-of-obesity/

Oriana:

Any discussion of obesity that omits the critical role of the microbiome is inadequate. And beneficial bacteria require their favorite food, soluble fiber. Vegetables provide it. Unlimited broccoli, anyone?

Atkins did the world a terrific favor by publicizing the need to lower insulin, the fat-forming hormone. While carb restriction remains primary, too much protein is harmful as well, since the body can convert protein into glucose. The only type of food that can’t be converted into glucose is fat.

(By the way, Atkins acknowledged that he had predecessors. The low-carb diet was known already in the 19th century. But the early carb restricters, including Atkins, didn’t seem to realize that protein intake also needed to be controlled.)

“Weight gain and obesity are driven by hormones—in everyone—and only by understanding the effects of the hormones insulin and insulin resistance can we achieve lasting weight loss.” ~ Jason Fung M.D. This is correct in the main, but more hormones than insulin are involved, sex hormones and growth hormone for example. Still, insulin is #1.

In addition, it seems that constant snacking and even frequent eating contributes to obesity. Tea (without snacks) is an excellent appetite suppressor that can make less frequent eating quite easy.

Also, something has dramatically changed in the environment, since now we see obesity even in wild animals. Main suspicion falls on hormone mimics.

And we need to remember that the obese are often children of obese parents. Diabetes during pregnancy also increases a child's risk of obesity.

All in all, I have to admit that the author has a point. My neighbor across the street had two huskies. They ate the same amount of the same kind of dog food. Only one of them became obese. Genetics? Most likely, but which genes acting through which mechanisms? It sounds so lame to end on “more research is needed,” but it’s the truth. 

But one conclusion one can already draw is that obesity should be treated basically like diabetes: use Metformin to lower the blood sugar, and sensitize the patient to insulin; and a carb-restricted diet that's nutritional too (as opposed to soda and chips).


Obese marmoset

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FOODS THAT LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE

High blood pressure affects 1 in 3 adults in the United States.

Having high blood pressure increases a person’s risk of heart disease, stroke, and kidney disease.

A diet high in certain food can help lower blood pressure.

BERRIES

Blueberries and strawberries contain antioxidant compounds called anthocyanins, a type of flavonoid.

Researchers conducted a large study with more than 34,000 people with hypertension.
They found that those with the highest intake of anthocyanins — mainly from blueberries and strawberries — had an 8 percent reduction in the risk of high blood pressure, compared to those with a low anthocyanin intake.

According to the American Heart Association, potassium reduces the effects of sodium and alleviates tension in the walls of the blood vessels.

BANANAS

One medium-size banana contains around 420 mg of potassium.

According to the American Heart Association, potassium reduces the effects of sodium and alleviates tension in the walls of the blood vessels.

Adults should aim to consume 4,700 milligrams (mg) of potassium daily. Other potassium-rich foods include:

avocado
cantaloupe and honeydew melon
halibut
mushrooms
sweet potatoes
tomatoes
tuna
beans

People with kidney disease should speak to their doctors about potassium, as too much can be harmful.

BEETS

Beet’s high levels of inorganic nitrate caused the reduction in blood pressure.

Drinking beet juice can reduce blood pressure in the short and long terms.

In 2015, researchers reported that drinking red beet juice led to lower blood pressure in people with hypertension who drank 250 milliliters, about 1 cup, of the juice every day for 4 weeks. The researchers noticed some positive effects within 24 hours.

DARK CHOCOLATE

This sweet treat may lower blood pressure. A review of 15 trials suggests that cocoa-rich chocolate reduces blood pressure in people with hypertension or prehypertension.

Choose high-quality chocolate that contains a minimum of 70 percent cocoa, and consume a single square, or a piece measuring about 1 ounce, each day.

WATERMELON

Watermelon contains an amino acid called citrulline, which may help to manage high blood pressure.

Citrulline helps the body to produce nitric oxide, a gas that relaxes blood vessels and encourages flexibility in arteries. These effects aid the flow of blood, which can lower high blood pressure.

Researchers have also found that animals given a diet rich in watermelon had better heart health. In one study, mice who drank a solution containing watermelon juice had 50 percent less plaque in their arteries than the control group.

The mice who drank the solution also had 50 percent less low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, which many describe as bad cholesterol, and they showed 30 percent less weight gain than the control animals.

LEAFY GREEN VEGETABLES

Leafy green vegetables are rich in nitrates, which help to manage blood pressure. Some research suggests that eating 1–2 servings of nitrate-rich vegetables every day can reduce hypertension for up to 24 hours.

Examples of leafy greens include:
cabbage
collard greens
fennel
kale
lettuce
mustard greens
spinach
Swiss chard

GARLIC

Garlic is a natural antibiotic and antifungal food. Its main active ingredient, allicin, is often responsible for associated health benefits.

Some studies suggest that garlic increases the body’s production of nitric oxide, which helps the smooth muscles to relax and the blood vessels to dilate. These changes can reduce hypertension.

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Lentils, unsweetened yogurt, pomegranate juice, cinnamon, nuts such as almonds and pistachios have also shown a beneficial effect on blood pressure. ~

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322284#outlook

 

Oriana:

One excellent thing I've just learned is to add chopped walnuts to various dishes. Walnuts add taste and nutrition to practically everything. 

And never underestimate lettuce and cabbage.

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ending on beauty:

A light on the candle tearing against the wick

To join a hovering excellence, to escape

From fire and be part only of that which
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible. . .

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,

With every visible thing enlarged and yet

No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,

The immensest theater, and pillared porch,

The book and candle in your ambered room,

Total grandeur of a total edifice,

Chosen by an inquisitor of structures

For himself.

~ Wallace Stevens, To an Old Philosopher in Rome (excerpts)