Georgia O’Keefe: Red Canna, 1928O’KEEFE: RED CANNA
Tunnels of flesh,
dew of devouring
throats — love, magnified
to show how deep
reach the velvet
and rapacious flames.
Could Eros blaze
from the ash of years,
even when she worked
in a lace factory —
petals crucified
with a ghost-fine thread —
Love unfinished yet,
blindness shut the world,
threadwork thick with age —
set of sun and moon,
of the ochre glow
on the rocks, on the red plateau —
Sangre de Cristo bone-lace light
infinite as the first
morning of the world.
Blessed are they
who can choose
what destroys them.
~ Oriana
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Charles Bukowski presents the idea in the last stanza in a more earthy way:
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FOSSILIZED WORDS PRESERVED IN IDIOMATIC PHRASES
Here are 12 words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms.
WEND
You rarely see a wend without a way. You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. Wend was just another word for go in Old English. The past tense of wend was went and the past tense of go was gaed. People used both until the 15th century, when go became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where went hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.
DESERTS
The desert from the phrase "just deserts" is not the dry and sandy kind, nor the sweet post-dinner kind. It comes from an Old French word for deserve, and it was used in English from the 13th century to mean "that which is deserved." When you get your just deserts, you get your due. In some cases, that may mean you also get dessert, a word that comes from a later French borrowing.
EKE
If we see eke at all these days, it's when we "eke out" a living, but it comes from an old verb meaning to add, supplement, or grow. It's the same word that gave us eke-name for "additional name," which later, through misanalysis of "an eke-name" became nickname.
SLEIGHT
"Sleight of hand" is one tricky phrase. Sleight is often miswritten as slight and for good reason. Not only does the expression convey an image of light, nimble fingers, which fits well with the smallness implied by slight, but an alternate expression for the concept is legerdemain, from the French léger de main," literally, "light of hand." Sleight comes from a different source, a Middle English word meaning "cunning" or "trickery." It's a wily little word that lives up to its name.
DINT
Dint comes from the oldest of Old English, where it originally referred to a blow struck with a sword or other weapon. It came to stand for the whole idea of subduing by force, and is now fossilized in our expression "by dint of X" where X can stand for your charisma, hard work, smarts, or anything you can use to accomplish something else.
ROUGHSHOD
Nowadays we see this word in the expression "to run/ride roughshod" over somebody or something, meaning to tyrannize or treat harshly. It came about as a way to describe the 17th century version of snow tires. A "rough-shod" horse had its shoes attached with protruding nail heads in order to get a better grip on slippery roads. It was great for keeping the horse on its feet, but not so great for anyone the horse might step on.
FRO
The fro in "to and fro" is a fossilized remnant of a Northern English or Scottish way of pronouncing from. It was also part of other expressions that didn't stick around, like "fro and till," "to do fro" (to remove), and "of or fro" (for or against).
HUE
The hue of "hue and cry," the expression for the noisy clamor of a crowd, is not the same hue as the term we use for color. The color one comes from the Old English word híew, for "appearance." This hue comes from the Old French hu or heu, which was basically an onomatopoeia, like hoot.
KITH
The kith part of "kith and kin" came from an Old English word referring to knowledge or acquaintance. It also stood for native land or country, the place you were most familiar with. The expression "kith and kin" originally meant your country and your family, but later came to have the wider sense of friends and family.
LURCH
When you leave someone "in the lurch," you leave them in a jam, in a difficult position. But while getting left in the lurch may leave you staggering around and feeling off-balance, the lurch in this expression has a different origin than the staggery one. The balance-related lurch comes from nautical vocabulary, while the lurch you get left in comes from an old French backgammon-style game called lourche. Lurch became a general term for the situation of beating your opponent by a huge score. By extension, it came to stand for the state of getting the better of someone or cheating them.
UMBRAGE
Umbrage comes from the Old French ombrage (shade, shadow), and it was once used to talk about actual shade from the sun. It took on various figurative meanings having to do with doubt and suspicion or the giving and taking of offense. To give umbrage was to offend someone, to "throw shade." However, these days when we see the term umbrage at all, it is more likely to be because someone is taking, rather than giving it.
SHRIFT
We might not know what a shrift is anymore, but we know we don't want to get a short one. Shrift was a word for a confession, something it seems we might want to keep short, or a penance imposed by a priest, something we would definitely want to keep short. But the phrase "short shrift" came from the practice of allowing a little time for the condemned to make a confession before being executed. So in that context, shorter was not better.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/12-old-words-that-survived-by-getting-fossilized-in-idioms?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
My early life and English lessons are practically synonyms. And English presented wild mysteries. One of them was the past tense of “go” — “went.” Why not “goed”? I knew better than to ask my unflappable instructor, who also taught me to sing about sweet Molly Malone, a figure as exotic to me as an Eskimo might be. (And what about "warm the cockles of your heart"?)
But now I finally have a few answers, and revel in knowing why “went” is the past tense of “go,” and the origins of “short shrift” or “kith and kin.”
Mary:
Fossilized words in common expressions are as fascinating and as full of historical detail as the bony kind archeologists unearth. A delight to anyone as in love with words as we poets are. “Roughshod” was completely new to me — I knew nothing about how horses used to be equipped for icy roads. Now that is a fossil of forgotten time, just like the chains my father used to put on his tires to increase traction in ice and snow. I remember the sound of those chains sounding almost like bells or chimes as the car moved over the snowy roads, and it's surely 50 or 60 years since they were commonly used.
Oriana:
Inland in California, in places that do get snow, you can still see signs: “Chains required.” But I guess the four-wheel drive proved an excellent substitute. Anyway, the origin of “roughshod” was a complete surprise to me.
Still, I was stunned by the origin of "short shrift." I hope to remember it as another instance of Christianity trying to do some good, but going only so far . . . never demanding a radical overturn of evil, as that would offend those in power.
Scribe, 15th century
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FIVE APOCALYPSES HUMANITY HAS SURVIVED
Here are five of the most catastrophic events that have threatened our survival.
THE TOBA ERUPTION
Volcanologists agree supervolcanoes pose a serious threat to the planet, and some assert that they’ve brought humanity to the brink of extinction before. Approximately 74,000 years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano in modern-day Indonesia erupted, sending tons of dust into the air and blanketing Indonesia, India and the Indian Ocean in debris six inches deep. Believed to be the biggest eruption in human history, the blast achieved an 8 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index and sent shockwaves around the world. Ash spread throughout the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, dropping worldwide temperatures by 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, disrupting plant and animal life and causing starvation among ancient human populations. Some studies suggest only 3,000 to 10,000 individuals survived these abrupt climate changes, though recent research could complicate this theory. Whatever the truth may be, humanity withstood the blast.
THE ICE AGE
Alongside active super-volcanoes and their ash, ice ages are known to plunge the planet into a prolonged cold so severe that it threatens species survival. Induced by variations in solar output and our planet’s orbit, these prolonged periods feature surges of frigid temperatures and glacial growth that persist for thousands, if not millions, of years. While we are currently facing a warm, interglacial period of an ice age, humans have not always been so fortunate. Earth suffered the full-force of a deep freeze as recently as 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. At that time, ice sheets stretched across North America and Eurasia, glaciers consumed mountains throughout the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and worldwide temperatures plunged approximately 10 degrees. With such massive swaths of the planet covered in ice, the world became harsh and inhospitable. Indeed, many large species, including mastodons and saber-toothed cats, vanished as the temperatures vacillated from cold to colder, yet Homo sapiens adapted to these climate conditions against all odds.
THE BUBONIC PLAGUE
In the thousands of years following the freeze of the Ice Age, humanity’s increasing interconnectivity allowed diseases to develop into pandemics. The bubonic plague, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria, is believed to be the deadliest of these communicable cataclysms. It initially appeared in A.D. 541 and “came close to wiping out the whole of mankind,” as ancient author Procopius wrote in his text The Secret History. The disease rampaged through Eurasia and Africa and massacred as many as 50 million people in a single year. In 1347, the plague appeared once again to wreak havoc on humanity. Symptoms included malaise, delirium, diarrhea, blisters, bloody cough and chills, all in addition to the black bulges, or buboes, which appeared along victims’ thighs and armpits — a sure sign that death was near. “Against these maladies,” wrote Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron texts in the 1300s, “all the advice of physicians and all the power of medicine were profitless and unavailing.” This so-called Black Death claimed as many as 200 million lives in Eurasia and Africa, though advancements in antibiotics today mean that the modern world is well protected against another such disaster.
SMALLPOX AND OTHER OLD-WORLD DISEASES
About a century after the Black Death, globalization triggered another wave of devastating infections. Europeans arrived in the Americas starting in 1492, introducing several serious diseases to isolated societies that had no prior exposure or immunity to them. The illnesses included smallpox, measles, cholera and typhus, and the impacts were immediate, with an estimated 80 to 95 percent of Indigenous populations dying from them within 100 to 150 years. “There came over them so much illness, death and misery,” Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas observed in an account in 1561, “from which infinite numbers of fathers and mothers and children sadly died.” Some studies suggest that so many individuals died of these so-called Old-World diseases, and so abruptly, that the planet’s atmospheric CO2 and overall temperature decreased, aggravating a period of cold climate called the Little Ice Age. That more subtle ice age likely impacted North America and Northern Eurasia as early as 1300 and as late as 1850. Still, humanity survived.
THE TAMBORA ERUPTION
Around the time that the Little Ice Age began to dissipate, a second supervolcanic blast thrust the world into volcanic winter. In April 1815, Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia burst, spurting smoke, volcanic ash, aerosols and pumice into the atmosphere and throughout the surrounding terrain. The event killed 10,000 islanders instantly. Once again, the consequences rippled worldwide. As smoke and ash spread throughout the atmosphere, they blocked sunlight, which dipped global temperatures by 5 degrees. For a full year after the eruption, North America and Eurasia experienced inconsistent climate conditions, incredible cold, frost and flooding so severe that 1816 became known as a “year without a summer.” As many as 100,000 to 200,000 people died worldwide due to starvation and sickness. The Tambora supervolcano remains active to this day, but thankfully its subsequent activity pales in comparison to this blast.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/five-apocalypses-humanity-has-survived?utm_source=acs&utm_medium=email&utm_email=ivy333%40cox.net&tm_campaign=News0_DSC_211007_000000
Mount Tambora, caldera
Mary:
I think we fail to realize how very common extinction is. It happens all the time, and though our activities have certainly spurred it on, caused many extinctions like the passenger pigeon's, simply through greed and thoughtlessness, it is a natural occurrence. Species can adapt amazingly fast, much faster than we thought, but there are limits. If the change is too drastic, it could, and has, overwhelmed a species' ability to change enough to survive. These apocalypses you list actually did at one point cause a " bottleneck" where only a small population survived, numbered in the thousands. If that population was much smaller humanity might not have survived, the gene pool might have been too small to allow for flexibility in adaptation.
So at least once that we know of humanity hung on by a thread, and even with all our inventiveness, there may come future challenges we can't meet or adapt to, and we'll be gone, like the dinosaurs, who flourished much longer than we have before they disappeared. The list of calamities is long, but any one will do, climate change, for instance, or a new infection, that might burn through us the way old Europe's illnesses reduced Indigenous populations by 90%. In Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, he imagines a cultured population on Mars, completely destroyed by a disease contracted on first contact, something like measles, that left all the cities peopled only by bones and ghosts. That could be us, maybe confronted by some new infection that moves from its usual animal vector to us, like ebola or covid. We may not have time enough to learn how to survive it, or it may be so ferocious we will dwindle to a remnant too small to have a future.
Oriana:
I can imagine remnants of human population on remote islands or some isolated, unpopular regions surviving various catastrophes — but would these survivors be capable to resurrecting our complex civilization? Though we are wired for hope and optimism, who’s rugged enough to withstand the famine they might be caused by a supervolcano? I realize the article is meant to fill us with optimism — somehow humanity has indeed survived some incredible apocalypses — but it’s difficult for me to imagine a life worth living under certain circumstances.
Yet the horror of concentration camps showed us that yes, some can survive what seemed unsurvivable. The survivors of concentration camps were generally (though not in every case) young — in their teens or twenties. Or they were religious fanatics, like Jehovah's Witnesses, which shows that delusional beliefs can have survival value.
Still, there was a culture to return to, rather than having to try to eat rats and insects for as long as you live. But, as they say, humans are incredibly adaptable, and most have a stubborn will to live. And maybe our greatest, underestimated resource is the capacity for love and tenderness — and of course we have language, which promotes cooperation and the sharing of what knowledge may be preserved.
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HOW TO GET SOMEONE TO OPEN UP TO YOU
~ We turned to a journalist who’s known for getting people to reveal sensitive insider information. Out of respect for past sources and an interest in cultivating future ones, he asked to remain anonymous, but he gave out some great advice.
“Ask them something personal about themselves,” he said, advising that it’s better to get to know someone and let them talk about themselves before you push for anything more intense. Say you’re on a date with someone and you want to know why their last relationship ended. That’s not a question you want to lead with. You’d ask more general questions first, wouldn’t you?
No one is going to get super deep with someone they don’t yet feel comfortable with. They need to share the small stuff first—and you need to share your small stuff, too. Ask questions about their life, interests, and goals, then tell them about yours. Opening up is personal and uniquely human. If you act like a gossip-loving robot, you won’t get anywhere.
That being said, the journalist also noted it’s important not to interrupt someone once they start spilling. Don’t counter everything they say with your own similar stories or interject constantly with questions or comments. Whatever your end goal, this conversation is about giving them (and the information they’re holding onto that you want to know) center stage.
BE EMPATHETIC AND RESPONSIVE
“Always express empathy,” the journalist said. Remember the basics of that interpersonal communications class you took in college: Communicating is about not only receiving messages, but giving feedback.
If you’re talking in person, make eye contact. If you’re talking over the phone, make sure you signal that you’re listening, even with a few “mm-hmm”s. Revealing sensitive information is already uncomfortable, but revealing it to someone who isn’t giving any kind of response in the moment is downright eerie.
Imagine you and a friend had a fight as a result of a miscommunication. You want them to open up to you about how they really feel about what happened. If they’re baring their soul to you but you’re not nodding, responding, or indicating you understand where they’re coming from, they’re going to be mighty put off. They might think you’re still mad, that you don’t like their explanation, or that you straight-up don’t care—even if none of those things are true. You have to give to get, in life and in communication.
Even if your job requires getting people to open up about difficult topics—say you work in human resources or the billing department of a hospital—you don’t need to stay totally buttoned-up and professional while prying. If someone is telling you why they couldn’t pay their bills on time and the story is sad, say you understand. “Always express empathy” is simply good advice.
BE PATIENT
“Allow them to take their time, especially if it’s a sensitive subject,” advised the journalist. If you rush someone or question them too indelicately, you’ll give the impression you don’t care about the weight of the information or the consequences they might face for opening up to you. If someone is telling you about a past trauma or a current struggle, it could be really hard for them to let you in on those secrets. Respect that. If they don’t seem like they want to continue, drop it—at least for the time being. You have a better chance of getting more information later if you don’t freak them out with impatience and impersonality early on.
“Give them their space and some time,” said our reporter. “Allow them to tell their story.”
If the information you’re after is a deeply-held secret, it could be difficult to reveal, especially if it’s based in some kind of trauma. Don’t give this person even more trauma just because you’re nosy.
Ultimately, be a person: kind, gentle, and trustworthy. It can take some time to prove that you can be trusted, so don’t expect dates, new friends, coworkers, or even people you’ve known a long time to open up until they’ve established that you are decent and dependable.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-get-someone-to-tell-you-their-secrets-according-1847783774
A reader’s comment:
Conversation abhors silence. If you’re interviewing someone, and they answer your question, don’t respond immediately. Silence is uncomfortable. If you’re silent for even 10 seconds, the person you’re interviewing will often speak up and add something else. Often, the something else will be something worthwhile for the journalist to hear.
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SELF-DRIVING CARS AND THE TROLLEY DILEMMA
~ Last year saw a jump in the number of car fatalities, even as the pandemic kept many Americans off the roads. The number of deaths per 100 million miles driven grew 24 percent from a year earlier. It was the biggest single-year rise on record — and 2021 is on track to be just as bad. At the same time, the promise of autonomous cars has never been closer. Waymo and Tesla are continually improving their autonomous capabilities, drawing the tantalizing prospect of markedly less human suffering ever nearer. But getting to that future is complicated.
The decision to switch to autonomous vehicles presents a very modern take on an old ethical dilemma: the famed trolley problem.
This thought experiment involves a trolley car driver on a collision course with a group of pedestrians. The driver can do nothing and kill several people on the track ahead or take action, switching tracks so that just one person dies. These days, doing nothing means that about 1.3 million people will die each year globally in regular car accidents, the leading cause of death in people under 30. Switching tracks would involve more rapidly developing and adopting autonomous vehicles that could eventually prevent thousands of deaths per day. The problem is that the technology has a long way to go before it can drive people safely on its own in everyday conditions. In the meantime, it could lead to deaths at the hands of robots, if not humans.
Waymo and Tesla are at the forefront of the driverless car push and thus have a front seat to this dilemma. Both have similar goals — to safely transport people in autonomous vehicles — but they are operating with wildly different strategies.
Waymo, which shares a parent company with Google, is slowly and methodically rolling out its autonomous vehicles in the form of a robo-taxi service. The company boasts it has logged well over 20 million miles of autonomous driving without a single death. But currently, regular people can only ride in one of several hundred Waymo vehicles in sunny Phoenix.
Last week, the company got permission to launch its taxi service (with a human monitor behind the wheel) in a second city — San Francisco — where hills, weather, and traffic complicate the task. The company eventually plans to launch in other cities and license its automated driver technology to car manufacturers. But Waymo doesn’t know when that will happen because, as its co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told Kara Swisher at the September 2021 Code Conference, the company is “in the process of learning.”
“It’s, I would say, the engineering challenge of our generation. That’s what’s taking it so long,” Mawakana said. “Safety takes time.”
In the meantime, people will continue to die in car accidents, with 94 percent of fatal car crashes caused by human error.
Tesla, on the other hand, has rolled out autonomous features much more quickly. In September, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that drivers with a record of safe driving and who paid for the feature could request permission to beta test its “Full Self-Driving” technology. It includes more advanced driver assistance features than Autopilot, Tesla’s existing semi-autonomous feature, which helps drivers steer, brake, and accelerate within a lane. The company claims that the hardware — but not the software, which is still being tested — in new Teslas is capable of “full self-driving in almost all circumstances” and is “designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.” According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there are currently no fully automated or self-driving cars for sale, and such technology is years away.
The head of the National Transportation Safety Board has said that Tesla should fix existing safety deficiencies before rolling out the new tech. Meanwhile, other Tesla critics say that names like “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” cause people to place more faith in the technology than they should, erroneously taking their hands off the wheel or not paying attention.
This dissonance has resulted in tragedy. In August, the NHTSA opened a formal investigation into Autopilot after crashes involving Teslas and emergency vehicles (12 so far). The agency has also opened special investigations into accidents suspected to have happened while advanced driver assistance systems were engaged and which have resulted in 12 deaths.
Musk maintains that, despite the deaths, these cars are 10 times safer than regular cars.
“Even if you, for argument’s sake, reduce fatalities by 90 percent with autonomy, the 10 percent that do die with autonomy are still gonna sue you,” Musk told Swisher at Code. “The 90 percent that are living don’t even know that that’s the reason they’re alive.”
There’s some truth to that. By taking humans out of the equation, autonomous cars have the potential to save lives and alleviate incalculable social and economic losses. As NHTSA put it, “Fully automated vehicles that can see more and act faster than human drivers could greatly reduce errors, the resulting crashes, and their toll.”
The key is getting to that future quickly without jeopardizing it by causing the very harm you’re attempting to stop.
TWO ROADS TRAVELED
If the goal is to get autonomous driving assistance to the masses, Tesla is closer. If the goal is to have cars that safely drive themselves, Waymo is winning.
“Tesla is doing high-altitude flights or near-space flights, and Waymo is landing on the moon,” Mike Ramsey, vice president at research firm Gartner, told Recode. “One is trying to achieve something that’s far harder to do than the other. But that’s not to say that the high-altitude flights can’t keep getting higher and higher.”
In other words, while Tesla probably won’t be delivering a fully autonomous vehicle anytime soon — despite its misleading naming — it could incrementally get better and better assistance features that would eventually lead to true self-driving capabilities.
Tesla vehicles are considered to be at level 2 on the engineering society SAE International’s automation scale. That means Tesla’s system requires constant driver supervision, even if the assistance features are handling some of the steering and braking. Waymo vehicles are level 4, meaning the car can drive itself under limited geographic conditions and doesn’t need driver supervision. However, the technology that powers them is not ready for mass-market use outside of its test areas.
Waymo’s hardware is much more robust than Tesla’s. It uses several redundant sensor systems, including lidar, radar, and cameras, to create a real-time picture of where it’s operating. The company also maps areas ahead of time by having human drivers manually drive the vehicles through them. Meanwhile, Tesla vehicles rely exclusively on cameras and ultrasonic sensors.
“The more sensors you have, it adds to the complexity of the system, but it also makes it way safer,” Ramsey said.
Cameras aren’t as accurate at gauging distance as lidar or radar, and their ability to map an area can be impaired by everyday hazards like snow, dust, or darkness. However, cameras are a lot cheaper, and that matters when it comes to getting this technology into consumers’ hands.
You can purchase a souped-up Model 3 Tesla for around $75,000. However, experts don’t think Tesla vehicles could be fully autonomous with their current hardware, and will likely need to incorporate other technology like lidar to get there. We don’t know the exact price of Waymo vehicles — which are Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar I-Paces outfitted with Waymo’s sensors and autonomous driver tech — but the company’s former CEO previously said it “cost no more than a moderately equipped Mercedes S-Class,” which has a price tag of about $180,000. Waymo says its costs have come down significantly with the latest generation.
But by selling its vehicles to the general public, Tesla is able to collect lots of real-world driving data that will be useful in helping solve autonomous driving challenges. Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an autonomous vehicle pioneer, calls Tesla’s data collection an “incredible advantage” but warns that data is “part of the answer, but it’s not the entire answer.” Still, he thinks Waymo ought to collect more of it from regular drivers in regular conditions.
Tesla’s relatively wide reach also means rolling out a truly autonomous vehicle, when they eventually make one, will be a lot easier.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Experts estimate that we could have level 3 or 4 cars for sale within the next 10 years. But in the meantime, it’s important not to overlook the benefits that the pursuit of autonomous cars has already wrought. Cars will soon be able to reliably take over in some instances, say, on the highway — where the lanes are clearly marked and the rules are pretty clear — but humans might take over on city streets.
Already a number of advanced driver assistance features are showing up on regular vehicles. Automatic emergency braking, technology that automatically slows or stops the car before it hits an object, has been shown to reduce injuries and fatalities and will be standard on most vehicles sold in the US next year. Consumers can expect more of these features to spill over from the quest for autonomous vehicles in the next few years.
“We should all stop thinking in terms of something magical will happen and all of a sudden cars will become self-driving,” Rajkumar said. Rather, the shift will happen feature by feature, after many tests and improvements. “That last change will be so incremental you won’t be able to realize it happened over the last five to 10 years.”
In the meantime, perhaps the path forward for self-driving cars isn’t a binary choice at all. We’ll likely see a spectrum of improvements from many car companies as they incorporate more and more driver assistance features. And although in the near term the tech might not be the self-driving future we were promised, it will be better than nothing. ~
https://www.vox.com/recode/22700022/self-driving-autonomous-cars-trolley-problem-waymo-google-tesla
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NOT THE TV VERSION OF LIFE IN PRISON; ABUSE COMES FROM THE SYSTEM
~ I am White. I was also young—23 years old when I was arrested—and my thin frame had me worried. I had never been to an actual prison, but I had spent hours in TV and film facilities like Fox River (“Prison Break”), Oz (“Oz”) and Shawshank (“The Shawshank Redemption”). I learned from those fictional spaces that there was a good chance I would be sexually assaulted shortly after I arrived. There would be chants of “Fresh Fish” and candy bars on my pillow. I would probably have to kick someone’s ass the first day. And all that was nothing compared to the dread I felt about the shower. Long before I was headed there, I was convinced that prison was a paradise for monsters and a hellhole for people like me.
That knowledge, false as it was, drove me. The deck of cards came out the day I realized I was going to prison. Whenever I was locked in my jail cell or had a few minutes to kill, I would flip and dip, trying to harden up. Between sets of 340 pushups, I pounded out situps, jumping jacks and knee curls. I also ate big meals and high-calorie snacks to pack on as many pounds as possible. But the hardest part for me was perfecting the dead-eyed stare I practiced in the mirror, hoping a cold exterior would be enough to keep me out of trouble.
The day arrived when a dozen of us were escorted to the front of the jail, then chained together and loaded into a van. Our next stop was the largest walled prison in the world, a dungeon in Jackson, Michigan. And from the second we arrived I realized something was off. Sure, the abuse I expected was there, but it seldom came from other inmates.
As soon as we arrived, I was stripped naked, told to shower, then photographed and given a number: 470236. The next step was processing, where I received clothing, bedding and a few basic hygiene supplies from inmates who appeared on the verge of dying from boredom. Then it was on to housing. The girth of the structure bore down on me as our group, now numbering hundreds, entered the prison wall, a brick edifice so massive that inmates are housed inside it. The single-man cells were barren and rusty. The prison was built a decade before Alcatraz began housing federal inmates, and it looked the part.
There is this scene in “Orange is the New Black,” just after Piper gets to prison, where she is offered a yogurt and refuses to take it without first asking, “What do I have to do for it?” That message was thick in the air as I locked-in for the first night. Who was going to try me? What would I have to do to prove myself? Would they come for me tonight? Day one in the penitentiary is a panic attack in slow motion.
The darkness had just started to descend when a raspy voice from next door whispered, “Hey man, you good?”
I was not good, not even close. But I knew better than to let my guard down. It was time to perform the cold-blooded inmate I had been practicing. “Yeah, this shit ain’t shit,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking.
And then it got weird. But not like I expected. My neighbor said, “You need a smoke?” In 2004 you could still buy tobacco, but smoking was not permitted inside the housing unit. He was smoking anyway, and he reminded me, “We are already in prison. What are they gonna do?”
His cigarette smoke floated around the edge of my cell, barely visible but enticing. I had not had a cigarette in months. Of course I wanted to smoke, but I couldn’t accept any gifts, not without first asking my version of Piper’s question: “What do you want for it?”
The laughter was soft and nostalgic, like he remembered this conversation from some other time. He said, “Nothing kid. You sound like you could use ‘em,” and then reached around the wall and held two hand rolled cigarettes out for me to grab. That was how I met Johnny. He was in for parole violation, waiting to be transferred to a level-three prison where he could participate in an educational program. And he was telling the truth; he expected nothing in return, except for the occasional late-night conversation through the wall about the shit they served for dinner or the frigid temperature of the cell block. He was just a normal guy.
Johnny was not an oddity. The thousands of men who were caged with me were mostly good guys stuck in a bad situation. But many of us had clearly seen the same prison films and TV shows, because we expected the violence that seldom showed up. We were convinced that the penitentiary was a dangerous place full of terrible monsters, but it turns out that the abuse most of us experienced came directly from the system.
No inmate ever forced me to get naked so they could photograph my body, or to bend over and spread my ass so they could look inside me with a flashlight. No inmates ever agreed to feed me, then left me hungry night after night. No inmates ever put their hands on me or took my possessions. No inmates ever uprooted me from one prison and moved me to another without notice. These power moves were monopolized by the system, not the people caught up in it.
Are there fights in prison? Sure. And right now most of us can probably understand why that happens better than we could a year ago. When you are locked in a room with someone for months or even years due to a pandemic, things can get awkward, annoying or even explosive. The system is designed to make sure we pressure cook until we blow unless we are extraordinarily prepared to keep our cool.
Whenever I think about flipping those playing cards, doing my pushups and expending that energy in the service of self-preservation, I ask myself what would have happened if I had spent just as much energy studying conflict resolution, meditation, yoga, spirituality and other methods of anxiety relief. What if I had rejected the Hollywood image of prison and instead expected what I found: human beings locked in a cage designed to make us snap? I would have been better prepared had I developed the tools I would need every day to keep my cool, instead of just those I wrongly believed I needed to survive. ~
Benjamin Boyce was released from prison in 2005. He now teaches Communication classes at the University of Colorado-Denver, and he hosts “The Dr. Junkie Show,” a podcast devoted to harm reduction and ending the war on drugs.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/01/28/i-did-340-pushups-a-day-to-prepare-for-the-tv-version-of-prison-then-i-got-there?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
I am astounded to hear prisons are not what I thought, not what we see in the movies, not hellholes where prisoners abuse each other, and survive by violence within the violent and abusive system of the prison itself.
But if we think about how our prison system is a "for profit industry," the prisoner's statement makes much more sense. The prison industry needs prisoners to fill its cells, so that demand is filled by increasing the supply of criminals. You do that by criminalizing things like addiction, victimless crimes, and setting up three strikes sentencing laws. Of course there are real criminals…murderers and such, but it would be terrible, and ridiculous, to believe that our astoundingly huge prison population is made up of truly bad and evil men. Monsters.
It reminds me of TV dramas like Criminal Minds, which takes serial killers as its subject. A new serial killer every week. Of course serial killers exist, but they are much rarer than this drama would lead you to think. There is not a serial killer around every corner — that paints a distorted, and troubling, picture of reality.
Oriana:
I’ve done some teaching in prisons, and what really breaks your heart is the awareness that everyone in your class was an abused child, and I mean serious physical and sexual abuse. It makes you think of what kind of therapy might work, aside from educational programs, proven to reduce recidivism. And it turns out that cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has shown positive results. Don’t brutalize them — humanize them, I say. It won’t be 100% successful, but we should actively seek effective rehabilitation.
One thing that stays in my mind is how most of the inmates would line up after class, wanting to shake hands. A handshake is a sign of respect. That’s where therapy must start. 
Folsom Prison in Repressa, California
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MATTHEW ARNOLD AND “SWEETNESS AND LIGHT”
“It wasn’t just the working class that [Matthew] Arnold saw as in need of culture. “Sweetness and light” was also lacking among the aristocracy, whom Arnold nicknamed Barbarians, and the middle class, whom he called Philistines. Every class suffered from the tendency toward “anarchy,” since they all believed in “an Englishman’s right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes.” ~ David Yezzi, “Culture as Counterculture”
Oriana:
I love it that Matthew Arnold called aristocrats Barbarians.
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HOW FRIENDS AND LOVERS SYNCHRONIZE
~ Researchers have long known that people choose friends who are much like themselves in a wide array of characteristics: of a similar age, race, religion, socioeconomic status, educational level, political leaning, pulchritude rating, even handgrip strength. The impulse toward homophily, toward bonding with others who are the least other possible, is found among traditional hunter-gatherer groups and advanced capitalist societies alike.
New research suggests the roots of friendship extend even deeper than previously suspected. Scientists have found that the brains of close friends respond in remarkably similar ways as they view a series of short videos: the same ebbs and swells of attention and distraction, the same peaking of reward processing here, boredom alerts there.
The neural response patterns evoked by the videos — on subjects as diverse as the dangers of college football, the behavior of water in outer space, and Liam Neeson trying his hand at improv comedy — proved so congruent among friends, compared to patterns seen among people who were not friends, that the researchers could predict the strength of two people’s social bond based on their brain scans alone.
“I was struck by the exceptional magnitude of similarity among friends,” said Carolyn Parkinson, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The results “were more persuasive than I would have thought.” Dr. Parkinson and her colleagues, Thalia Wheatley and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Dartmouth College, reported their results in Nature Communications.
“I think it’s an incredibly ingenious paper,” said Nicholas Christakis, author of “Connected: The Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our World” and a biosociologist at Yale University. “It suggests that friends resemble each other not just superficially, but in the very structures of their brains.”
“Our results suggest that friends might be similar in how they pay attention to and process the world around them,” Dr. Parkinson said. “That shared processing could make people click more easily and have the sort of seamless social interaction that can feel so rewarding.”
Kevin N. Ochsner, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University who studies social networks, said the new report is “cool,” “provocative” and “raises more questions than it answers.” It could well be picking up traces of “an ineffable shared reality” between friends.
Dr. Ochsner offered his own story as evidence of the primacy of chemistry over mere biography. “My wife-to-be and I were both neuroscientists in the field, we were on dating websites, but we were never matched up,” he said.
“Then we happened to meet as colleagues and in two minutes we knew we had the kind of chemistry that breeds a relationship.”
Dr. Parkinson — who is 31, wears large horn-rimmed glasses and has the wholesome look of a young Sally Field — described herself as introverted but said, “I’ve been fortunate with my friends.”
The new study is part of a surge of scientific interest in the nature, structure and evolution of friendship. Behind the enthusiasm is a virtual Kilimanjaro of demographic evidence that friendlessness can be poisonous, exacting a physical and emotional toll comparable to that of more familiar risk factors like obesity, high blood pressure, unemployment, lack of exercise, smoking cigarettes.
Dr. Christakis and his co-workers recently demonstrated that people with strong social ties had comparatively low concentrations of fibrinogen, a protein associated with the kind of chronic inflammation thought to be the source of many diseases. Why sociability might help block inflammation remains unclear.
Researchers have also been intrigued by evidence of friendship among nonhuman animals, and not just in obvious candidates like primates, dolphins and elephants.
Gerald G. Carter of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and his colleagues reported last year that female vampire bats cultivate close relationships with unrelated females and will share blood meals with those friends in harsh times — a lifesaving act for animals that can’t survive much more than a day without food.
Through years of tracking the behaviors of a large flock of great tits, Josh A. Firth of Oxford University and his co-workers found that individual birds showed clear preferences for some flock members over others. When a bird’s good friend died or disappeared, the bereft tit began making overtures to other birds to replace the lost comrade.
Yet when it comes to the depth and complexity of bonds, humans have no peers. Dr. Parkinson and her co-workers previously had shown that people are keenly and automatically aware of how all the players in their social sphere fit together, and the scientists wanted to know why some players in a given network are close friends and others mere nodding acquaintances.
Inspired by the research of Uri Hasson of Princeton, they decided to explore subjects’ neural reactions to everyday, naturalistic stimuli — which these days means watching videos.
The researchers started with a defined social network: an entire class of 279 graduate students at an unnamed university widely known among neuroscientists to have been the Dartmouth School of Business.
The students, who all knew one another and in many cases lived in dorms together, were asked to fill out questionnaires. Which of their fellow students did they socialize with — share meals and go to a movie with, invite into their homes? From that survey the researchers mapped out a social network of varying degrees of connectivity: friends, friends of friends, third-degree friends, friends of Kevin Bacon.
The students were then asked to participate in a brain scanning study and 42 agreed. As an fMRI device tracked blood flow in their brains, the students watched a series of video clips of varying lengths, an experience that Dr. Parkinson likened to channel surfing with somebody else in control of the remote.
Analyzing the scans of the students, Dr. Parkinson and her colleagues found strong concordance between blood flow patterns — a measure of neural activity — and the degree of friendship among the various participants, even after controlling for other factors that might explain similarities in neural responses, like ethnicity, religion or family income.
The researchers identified particularly revealing regions of pattern concordance among friends, notably in the nucleus accumbens, in the lower forebrain, which is key to reward processing, and in the superior parietal lobule, located toward the top and the back of the brain — roughly at the position of a man bun — where the brain decides how to allocate attention to the external environment.
Using the results, the researchers were able to train a computer algorithm to predict, at a rate well above chance, the social distance between two people based on the relative similarity of their neural response patterns.
Dr. Parkinson emphasized that the study was a “first pass, a proof of concept,” and that she and her colleagues still don’t know what the neural response patterns mean: what attitudes, opinions, impulses or mental thumb-twiddling the scans may be detecting.
They plan next to try the experiment in reverse: to scan incoming students who don’t yet know one another and see whether those with the most congruent neural patterns end up becoming good friends.
Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of a meditative book, “On Friendship,” appreciated the design of the study and its use of video clips to ferret out the signature of friendship.
“The aesthetic choices we make, the things we like, the taste we have in art, plays, TV, furniture — when you put them together they are absolutely essential components of our character, an indication of who we are,” he said. We live “immersed in art.”
Not high art, not a night-at-the-opera art, but everyday art — buildings, billboards, clothing, the dishes at a restaurant, the percussive rhythms of subways on train tracks.
So if you happened to catch “The Cute Show: Sloths!,” about a self-proclaimed “sloth sanctuary” in Costa Rica, and if your first thought wasn’t ooh, how adorable those little smiley sloths are, but rather, sloths are not pets to be cuddled and don’t bathe the algae off their fur — haven’t you heard of mutualism? — give me a call.
We’ll be biosnob soul mates for life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/science/friendship-brain-health.html
PEOPLE WITH BLUE EYES HAVE A SINGLE COMMON ANCESTOR
~ “A team at the University of Copenhagen has presented remarkable new research that shows that people with blue eyes have a single common ancestor. Researchers have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today. “Originally, we all had brown eyes,” said Professor Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch,” which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes.”
The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin. The “switch,” which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris — effectively “diluting” brown eyes to blue. The switch’s effect on OCA2 is very specific therefore. If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or turned off, human beings would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin color — a condition known as albinism.” ~
http://sciencevibe.com/2016/08/13/all-blue-eyes-come-from-a-single-ancestor/
Oriana:
An interesting fact: “Originally, we all had brown eyes.” Only an estimated 8% of the world’s population have blue eyes. Eye color depends on the amount of melanin in the iris; those with blue eyes have the least melanin, meaning they have less protection against UV radiation.
Interestingly, all newborns start out with blue or gray eyes. Then the production of melanin increases in response to light exposure, turning almost all irises brown (about 5% of the population have hazel eyes, which are a combination of various hues).
As for the supposedly blond and blue-eyed Aryan ancestors that the Nazis so valued, here is a member of the tribe in India that is supposed to be the descendants of the original Aryans — not quite, I think, what Hitler imagined. Note the dark-brown eyes.
DEEP EARTHQUAKES AND GIANT DIAMONDS
~ Earthquakes shouldn’t occur more than 300 kilometers below Earth’s surface, according to most geophysical models. Yet they commonly do—a phenomenon that has mystified seismologists for decades. Now, researchers suggest water carried by tectonic plates shoved beneath continents could be triggering these deep temblors. The find may also explain another marvel: why a huge number of fist-size diamonds form at this depth.
Earthquakes typically occur when the two sides of a fault, or the opposite sides of a tectonic plate boundary, scrape past each other. But far beneath our planet’s surface, the pressures are too high for such slippage, and rocks are typically so hot they ooze and flow rather than break. That has led geophysicists to come up with alternate explanations for deep seismic activity, which can be very strong but largely too far away for us to feel.
Steven Shirey, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, had a hunch: diamonds. The precious gems can accumulate layers as they grow, gathering imperfections—such as flecks of surrounding rocks—as they get bigger. Those so-called inclusions can also contain pockets of mineral-rich water.
To see whether the idea could work, Shirey and his team took a closer look at how water might make its way down deep. The answer, they believe, is that it rides down within tectonic slabs as they get shoved beneath continents. There are three sources of water, they postulate. One was the water was locked in the minerals that formed as molten rock hardened at mid-ocean ridges.
Another was the wet sediments that accumulated on those slabs as they moved across the ocean floor. And the third was ocean water that infiltrated the slabs as they bent and fractured.
Then, the scientists used computer simulations—and the results of previous lab studies by their team and others—to study how minerals in those slabs would behave as they moved deeper and deeper. In general, as depth within Earth increases, so do temperature and pressure. Although slabs can start out relatively cool at Earth’s surface, they warm up as they sink. And because they’re many kilometers thick, it often takes millions of years for the slabs to heat throughout.
Regardless of depth, Shirey and his team found that once rocks in the slabs reached temperatures above 580°C, they were less able to hold water. As that water flooded out of the slab, it weakened the surrounding rocks and triggered quakes, Shirey and his colleagues report in AGU Advances. This water, typically chock-full of dissolved minerals, would also be available to fuel diamond formation.
giant diamond with inclusions“The temperature tells the story,” says Douglas Wiens, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the new study. If the tectonic slab starts out hot, as it would if the rocks are relatively young, he says, the plate will dehydrate at depths between 100 and 250 kilometers and thus won’t carry water far enough down to generate deep quakes. But if rocks in the sinking slab are old and relatively cool, water will stay locked inside the sinking slab for a longer time, persisting there until it is released at depths of 300 to 500 kilometers or more.
Further work in both the lab and the field will be needed to fully understand the relationships between water released from sinking slabs and deep earthquakes, Wiens says. In the meantime, he says, it’s clear that diamonds that form at those depths, imperfections and all, will be critical to teasing out the details of the story.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/06/giant-diamonds-may-hold-key-superdeep-earthquakes?utm_campaign=SciMag&utm_source=Social&utm_medium=Facebook
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HARVARD’S HUMANIST CHAPLAIN AND ATHEISM IN AMERICA
~ At the end of August 2021, Harvard University’s organization of chaplains unanimously elected Greg Epstein as president. Epstein – the atheist, humanist author of “Good Without God” – will be responsible for coordinating the school’s more than 40 chaplains, who represent a broad range of religious backgrounds.
His election captured media attention, prompting articles in several outlets such as NPR, The New Yorker, the Daily Mail and the Jewish Exponent. Some portrayed the idea of an atheist chaplain as one more battle in the culture wars.
But the trends that Epstein’s position reflects are not new. Non-religious Americans, sometimes referred to as “nones,” have grown from 7% of the population in 1970 to more than 25% today. Fully 35% of millennials say they are not affiliated with any particular religion.
They are part of a diverse group that’s changing ideas about what it means to be nonreligious.
As sociologists of religion, we have studied these transitions and their implications. A recent study with colleagues at the University of Minnesota shows that, while Americans are becoming more comfortable with alternative forms of spirituality, they are less comfortable with those they see as entirely secular.
We argue that Epstein’s election represents a shift that shows the increasing visibility and acceptance of nonreligious Americans. At the same time, the commotion around his position shows many Americans’ lingering moral unease about atheism.
Epstein seems to understand this cultural dilemma and emphasizes his commitments to social justice and humanism, a philosophy that rejects supernatural beliefs and seeks to promote the greater good. In doing so, he is becoming a spokesman for something new in the American context: an atheism that explicitly emphasizes its morality.
JOINING RANKS
Atheism has long generated contention in the United States, going back to colonial times. But the late 19th century’s “Golden Age” of free thought brought the first widespread public expressions of skepticism toward religion. Lawyer and public orator Robert Ingersoll drew religious leaders’ ire as he lectured on agnosticism in sold-out halls across the country.
In the 1920s, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” over the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools highlighted struggles over religious authority in America’s laws and institutions. Meanwhile, Black skeptics of religion, often overlooked by scholars, influenced artists like Zora Neal Hurston and, later, James Baldwin. Many Americans know of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who successfully challenged mandated Christian prayer and Bible readings in public schools in the 1960s and founded the organization that became American Atheists.
Black atheists, not always feeling welcome in white-led organizations, have formed their own, often centered on social justice.
NO GOD, NO TRUST?
Despite this increasing organization and visibility, a large percentage of Americans do not trust atheists to be good neighbors and citizens. A national survey in 2014 found that 42% of Americans said atheists did not share their “vision of American society,” and 44% would not want their child marrying an atheist. Those percentages were virtually unchanged in a 2019 follow-up.
These attitudes affect young people like those to whom Epstein ministers. A third of atheists under age 25 report experiencing discrimination at school, and over 40% say they sometimes hide their nonreligious identity for fear of stigma.
As a chaplain, Epstein’s job is to provide spiritual guidance and moral council to students, with a special focus on those who do not identify with a religious tradition. He himself identifies as an atheist, but also as a humanist.
In U.S. society, humanism is increasingly accepted as a positive, and moral, belief system, which some react to more favorably than to atheism, which is perceived as a rejection of religion. And a handful of America’s college campuses now have humanist chaplains.
But atheism remains more controversial in the United States, and an atheist chaplain is a harder sell. Efforts to include atheist chaplains in the military, for example, have not succeeded.
SHIFT IN TONE
Epstein, a vocal advocate for humanism, appears to be pushing back against Americans’ persistent moral concerns about atheism identified in the research from the University of Minnesota.
His book openly challenges those views by arguing that atheism is a morally anchoring identity for people around the world. He talks at length about how humanism can motivate concern for racial justice and has called for political leaders on the left to embrace the nonreligious as an important, values-motivated constituency.
It’s too soon to say whether Epstein’s strategy of linking atheism to humanism, justice and morality will be successful in changing attitudes toward atheists. It is, however, likely to keep him in the public eye, a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion. ~
https://theconversation.com/what-harvards-humanist-chaplain-shows-about-atheism-in-america-168237?fbclid=IwAR2JuaEIbqMVdgwql7mManJsDU56KvTtNYdIllhNmD38okzUTSSUh8NIl2M
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Jeremy Sherman:
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BENEFITS OF NATURAL (PRODUCED BY THE BODY) BUTYRATE
FUELS YOUR GUT CELLS
Butyrate is the main energy source for colonocytes, the cells which make up your gut lining.
Unlike most other cells in your body which use sugar (glucose) as their main energy source, the cells of the lining of your gut (colonocytes) mainly use butyrate. Without butyrate, these cells would not be able to carry out their functions correctly.
Members of the Firmicutes genus, a classification of bacteria, are well known for producing butyrate. More specifically, microbes like Roseburia spp., Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, and Eubacterium rectale turn prebiotics like dietary fiber into butyrate.
This three-way relationship is mutual. Butyrate fuels colonocytes, and in return these cells help provide an oxygen-free environment in which beneficial gut microbes thrive. This keeps inflammation in check, gut cells healthy, and gut bacteria happy.
HAS ANTIOXIDANT POWERS
Butyrate defends your cells from harmful substances to keep your gut healthy and disease-free.
Let’s talk about free radicals, which are basically waste products from chemical reactions in the body. Antioxidants, on the other hand, are your body’s defense against them. Large numbers of free radicals cause damage and overwhelm the body’s repair systems. We call this oxidative stress.
The colon or large intestine is a storage container for the waste you produce. Higher butyrate levels have been shown to increase levels of glutathione, an antioxidant produced in the body’s cells which neutralizes free radicals in the gut. This is good because free radicals are linked to inflammation and many diseases.
So, increased butyrate production could improve the barrier function of the colonocytes due to its secondary antioxidant functions. This reduces the risk of diseases like bowel cancer, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
PREVENTS GUT INFLAMMATION
Butyrate performs anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer functions for your gut.
Your gut lining maintains a low level of inflammation just in case there are any changes at the mucosal surface that’s in contact with the microbiome. The low level of inflammation is tightly controlled, but if it is disrupted, it can lead to oxidative damage and over a prolonged period, even cancer.
Butyrate stops some of the pro-inflammatory substances in your body from working. The anti-inflammatory effect of butyrate reduces oxidative stress and controls the damage caused by free radicals.
So, your diet can have a massive effect on both butyrate production as well as gut inflammation. A diet high in fiber is particularly beneficial for butyrate production because it feeds your butyrate-producing bacteria. More butyrate means less inflammation.
Your gut lining maintains a low level of inflammation just in case there are any changes at the mucosal surface that’s in contact with the microbiome. The low level of inflammation is tightly controlled, but if it is disrupted, it can lead to oxidative damage and over a prolonged period, even cancer.
Butyrate stops some of the pro-inflammatory substances in your body from working. The anti-inflammatory effect of butyrate reduces oxidative stress and controls the damage caused by free radicals.
PROTECTS AGAINST CANCER
Butyrate keeps your gut environment stable and is part of the protective effect associated with dietary fiber against certain cancers.
Bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer, is a major health burden in the western world and our diet is largely to blame. A diet low in dietary fiber affects the bacteria in your gut. Your colonocytes need butyrate for energy, and if they have no energy, they can’t work.
If the cells lining your gut are unable to work, cells associated with tumor progression can thrive. These give off inflammatory signals and lead to tumor development. So, low dietary fiber means reduced butyrate production, a risk factor for bowel cancer.
Butyrate is also a histone deacetylase inhibitor. Histone deacetylase is an enzyme produced in most cancers. Because butyrate is an inhibitor, it causes cells to commit suicide, a process known as apoptosis. So, it can stop cancer cells developing altogether.
REPAIRS YOUR LEAKY GUT
Your gut lining needs butyrate to stay healthy and function properly. It’s as simple as that.
The gut lining is an intestinal barrier. It selectively allows things like vitamins and minerals to leave the gut, enter the bloodstream, and travel to where they’re needed. Equally, it stops toxins, pathogens, and food compounds from entering the bloodstream and making you ill.
The process is called intestinal permeability by doctors and scientists. When the barrier is healthy, small holes called tight junctions relax, allowing water and nutrients to pass through.
Innocuous habits, like frequent snacking, stop these tight junctions from closing between meals, so bacteria and unwanted substances things can enter your bloodstream. This is leaky gut.
The butyrate produced by your gut microbes from the dietary fiber provides the fuel needed by the cells in your gut lining. By doing so, it preserves the integrity of your gut lining, preventing leaky gut from occurring.
HELPS PROTECT AGAINST OBESITY AND DIABETES
Butyrate could improve obesity and type II diabetes by increasing the production of certain gut hormones which improve blood sugar balance.
Insulin is released from the pancreas when your blood sugar levels rise. On the flipside, this organ releases glucagon when insulin levels (and blood sugar levels) in the bloodstream are too low, so the liver can send glucose into the bloodstream.
Together, these hormones work to keep your blood sugar levels stable. When blood sugar is too high, insulin tells the body’s muscle and fat cells to take in this excess glucose, which is why these hormones are important for obesity and diabetes.
Research shows butyrate enhances the secretion of gut hormones like glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) and peptide YY (PYY). GLP-1 increases insulin production and reduces glucagon production in the pancreas. PYY increases the uptake of glucose in both your muscles and fatty tissue.
Increased production of short-chain fatty acids, including butyrate in the colon, increases the release of these gut hormones, indicating potential benefits for managing blood sugar levels and preventing weight gain.
PROTECTS YOUR BRAIN
As well as its roles in the gut, butyrate has significant potential to support brain health.
Butyrate, produced by the bacteria in your colon, has a range of biological functions. These functions are also associated with neuroprotective effects (that benefit your brain and nervous system).
Butyrate targets many of the pathways associated with the progression of diseases like Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, stroke, and autism. Therefore, butyrate can influence brain health, and diet could be a simple way to improve disease outcomes.
Boosting your butyrate production through your diet is easy and low risk. One day it may even be a potential treatment option for brain diseases. More importantly, increasing your butyrate production right now can benefit your health in many ways.
YOU CAN BOOST YOUR BUTYRATE PRODUCTION BY CONSUMING MORE FIBER
A high fiber diet can boost butyrate production because it encourages the butyrate-producing bacteria in your colon to thrive.
Members of the Firmicutes phylum are renowned for their ability to produce butyrate. If you want to nourish this class of bacteria and, indeed your microbiome in general, then foods containing prebiotics are popular with your gut bacteria.
Prebiotics are foods which directly nourish your microbiome and include vegetables, fruit, pulses [beans, green peas, lentils], almonds, and whole grains. They contain dietary fiber that is fermented by your gut bacteria into organic compounds like butyrate.
Onions, apples, berries, and mushrooms are also prebiotic foods.
https://atlasbiomed.com/blog/9-reasons-why-your-gut-needs-butyrate/
Oriana: RIGHT FIBER AND FATS
Since the benefits sound wonderful, should we supplement with sodium or potassium butyrate? There is too little research on the benefits of this, with a potential for disturbing the electrolyte balance. This is a case where I’d trust our good bugs to produce just the right amount — if properly nourished with fiber.
But wait! Fiber isn’t the only nourishment needed to nourish a healthy microbiome. We also need to consume the right fats. Avocado provides both fiber and valuable monounsaturated fat. Then there is the ancient Mediterranean mainstay, extra virgin olive oil. But don’t forget a small quantity of grass-fed butter — it provides short-chain fatty acids, including butyric acid (whose very name derives from “butter” — yes, it’s the butter acid!).
I personally am all for using coconut oil (great on vegetables and mushrooms) and small amount of MCT oil (a large amount can cause abdominal cramps). Walnuts? Yes, and most nuts and nut butters — almond butter is a favorite of mine.
Don't especially like walnuts? Try chopping them into small bits and then adding those bits to anything you can mix ingredients into, e.g. stir-fries. The flavor boost alone is worth it. And your good bacteria will love it, and hopefully produce more butyrate.
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COVID EXPOSED THE RAVAGES OF DIABETES
~ COVID-19, which has killed more than 700,000 people in the United States, has had an especially devastating impact on the millions of Americans with diabetes. Health professionals and scientists noticed early on that many severely ill coronavirus patients also had the chronic disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cites research showing that 40% or more of the people who died with COVID-19 also had diabetes.
After years of improvement, the outlook for diabetes patients began to worsen by several measures about 10 years ago.
Late in the last century and early in this one, medical breakthroughs steadily chipped away at rates of diabetes-related deaths and complications in the United States. But the trend reversed as rising obesity and its consequences — like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease — more than offset improved therapies.
From 2009 to 2015, CDC data show that among diabetes patients, rates of hospitalization for hyperglycemic crises soared by 73%, and deaths by 55%. From 2010 to 2015, a jump in the rate of lower-limb amputations – always a risk for diabetes patients – erased more than one-third of a 20-year decline. The sharpest increases in these numbers were among adults 44 and younger. A Reuters analysis of more recent state-level data found that the trend has persisted. By 2019, U.S. deaths attributed primarily to diabetes reached their highest rate in eight years.
So when the pandemic struck, Americans with diabetes were in poorer health than they had been in years, increasing their vulnerability just as the virus overwhelmed the U.S. healthcare system.
Diabetes-related deaths in the United States rose faster in 2020 than for any other disease among leading causes of death.
The reasons for the worsening outlook for diabetes patients are rooted in the American lifestyle and medical system.
More Americans are developing diabetes earlier, even in childhood, because of long-term societal shifts toward sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy diets, according to researchers and doctors. Younger patients often have a harder time managing their disease, develop complications faster, and tend to have less consistent access to medical care, doctors say. Some patients ration their medications and limit doctor visits to avoid the hefty out-of-pocket costs of increasingly common high-deductible insurance plans, backed for years by employers, insurers and policymakers. The focus in U.S. healthcare on treating crises over preventing them doesn’t help, downplaying the importance of lifestyle changes that could lessen the severity of the disease.
“Over and over again, the problem is worse in young adults, and there isn’t improvement in older adults,” said Ed Gregg, a former CDC researcher who is now a professor at Imperial College in London. “The magnitude of the increase has set us back 15 to 20 years.”
The failure to effectively treat diabetes carries enormous consequences for patients, their families and society at large. Roughly 34 million people, or about 1 in 10 Americans, have diabetes. Treating them costs more than $230 billion a year – more than the U.S. Navy’s annual budget – much of that borne by taxpayers through government-sponsored Medicare insurance for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.
About 1.6 million people have type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease of unknown cause that requires lifelong insulin injections when the pancreas stops producing the hormone. Without insulin, cells are unable to absorb glucose, their primary source of energy, and the sugar builds up in the blood.
But the vast majority of patients, accounting for most of the increase in new cases in recent years, have type 2 diabetes, a chronic condition linked to genetics, weight gain and inactivity. These patients’ bodies don’t make enough insulin or don’t use it well. Diet and exercise can help manage the disease, but many also need medication that helps them use the insulin their bodies produce. Many eventually require insulin injections.
For all diabetes patients, life revolves around checking their numbers. That means testing their current blood glucose levels several times a day. And it means visiting a lab every few months to test their hemoglobin A1c, a measure of their glucose levels over the preceding three months. The higher the number, the worse it can be for a patient.
Uncontrolled diabetes wreaks havoc on the body. Acute hyperglycemia can lead to coma or even death. Over time, the disease degrades blood vessels and damages major organs, leaving patients prone to heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, amputations and blindness.
While the coronavirus battered diabetes patients around the world, the longer-term reversal of fortunes is a particularly American problem. The U.S. mortality rate for diabetes was 42% higher than the average among 10 other industrialized countries in 2017, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the British medical journal Lancet, researchers in 2018 gave the United States a score of 62 out of 100 on the quality of diabetes care. Most Western European countries scored in the 90s. The United States trailed Libya, Iran and Vietnam.
“Other countries have more of a safety net to get people through hard times,” said Steven Woolf, a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine who studies death rates from diabetes and other causes. “People here are more vulnerable to the economic shocks of job losses, the last recession and now the pandemic.”
In younger people, type 2 diabetes is often more severe than in cases that develop later in life, said Dr Deborah Wexler, clinical director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. The potential for damage starts earlier, and younger patients tend to have a harder time managing a complicated medication regimen, a healthy diet and regular exercise amid other competing priorities in life, Wexler said. “This is a harder problem for the patient and clinician to manage,” she said.
At the same time, many younger patients, more so than their older counterparts, are missing out on newer, more-effective drugs for lowering blood glucose in type 2 patients.
Diabetes has become a cash cow for the drug industry. Annual sales of insulin and other diabetes drugs surpassed $75 billion in 2020, according to the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. That’s up from $24 billion in 2011 and second in total revenue only to drugs for inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis.
Nearly 20% of patients between the ages 20 to 44 with raised A1c levels took no glucose-lowering drugs, compared to 10% of those 45 and older, said Dr Elizabeth Selvin, who co-authored the study. The gap was even more pronounced between insured and uninsured patients of all ages.
The newer drugs can reduce the risk of heart disease and promote weight loss, but “they are very expensive and many of the patients that really need them … are not covered,” said Dr Nestoras Mathioudakis, co-medical director of the Baltimore Metropolitan Diabetes Regional Partnership at Johns Hopkins.
In the private insurance market, more than 40% of young and middle-age adults have high-deductible health plans, requiring them to pay hundreds of dollars for routine care and medications before coverage kicks in. To avoid those costs, some diabetes patients forgo filling prescriptions or visiting a doctor regularly. In a 2017 study, Dr J. Frank Wharam of Duke University and other researchers found that lower-income workers and their family members with diabetes had 22% more emergency-room visits for preventable complications after switching to a high-deductible plan. ~
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-diabetes-covid/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I have a neighbor who has diabetes — which was detected early, and the only medication she takes is metformin, a drug of choice for anyone with elevated blood sugar but no advanced symptoms. And thanks to metformin, an anti-aging drug, she can expect to live longer than the average non-diabetic.
One of my college friends, a diabetic, reversed her blood glucose levels to the normal range by going on a low-carb diet. Her doctors were actually alarmed, since this was new to them — a patient who no longer needed insulin, or only minimal amounts. My friend said she got awfully tired of stabbing her finger every day to test her blood sugar.
Atkins really did show the way. It’s just that he didn’t know that excess protein also get converted into glucose. So carbs are not the only no-no food for diabetics. The servings of protein also need to be moderate.
"Diabetes is a foot and fork disease," one acquaintance joked. "Eat less, walk more," a centenarian in my family advised. Still, it is very sad to contemplate that a disease that is both preventable and even reversible is rising in a population. This simply doesn’t have to happen.
ending on beauty:
~ The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddam coming and going?” he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
“Forever,” he said.
~ Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (inspired in part by GGM’s father’s ardent pursuit of GGM’s mother)
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