HITLER WAS NOT AN EVIL GENIUS, BUT A LAZY, INCOMPETENT BUFFOON; CAMUS THE ANTI-TOTALITARIAN; THE CAPGRAS IMPOSTOR SYNDROME; CAN EXTREMISM BE PREVENTED?

Milky Way over White Sands National Monument, New Mexico

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MOTHER’S DAY POEM

I remember my mother, her old house,
the miracle of her love, her fingers
on my cheek brushing away the night,
the world coming home for breakfast,
her eyes asking if I’d been on the road
for long and was the traffic heavy.

Nothing speaks of love like her kindness,
not the birds swirling in the mountains
nor starlight in the trees. Nothing speaks
of hope like her silent prayers for me
in the morning before school or the bread
and soup she placed before me at night.

Some people seek comfort in a priest,
the way he washes his hands in holy water,
raises his chin to drink wine. But it’s mothers
who divide the loaves and fishes, collect
the crumbs, sweep the floors, and find lost coins.
One day they’ll call us home for the last supper.

~ John Guzlowski

I'm especially struck but “collect the crumbs.” Somehow that’s so emblematic of “woman’s work.” 

And since John’s poem relies on religious allusions, it reminds me of “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” notable for the detail of the falling sandal. And that reminds me of . . .

“What’s the symbolism of the falling sandal?” Charles asked. “I don’t think there is any mystical symbolism here,” I replied. “It’s just a charming realistic detail.” Charles wasn’t buying that. “Mary is the one who’ll pick up the sandal and tie it back on, again and again” he said. “That’s why Mary is called Our Lady of Perpetual Help. A mother is a perpetual help machine.”

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But because motherhood also has a metaphorical meaning, let me include another poem to honor those other kinds of motherhood.

INVISIBLE WORK

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.

~ Alison Luterman, The Largest Possible Life

There are many excellent lines here. I especially love the second stanza:

 There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.


*
Mary: "the invisible work that stitches up the world"

In honor of mothers always and everywhere, we should remember they create and maintain the world with their labor, that "invisible work" of generation in the womb followed by all the endless, repetitive, necessary and unrecognized work women do. Not only here and now, but everywhere and forever. In our earliest hunter gatherer societies it was not the hunter that provided the bulk of the food, but the women with their children carried on their hips and their sharpened digging sticks...later, they would be the farmers, providing the essentials, but still uncelebrated. The hunters were the heroes, then as now, but the mothers have always done all those basic, invisible things that life depends on.

Oriana:

Well, the Great Mother Goddess was once worshiped . . . And I watched the nascent movement to bring her back. Also Isis, a female savior to Osiris and an overall nurturing goddess. One can also make the claim that Mary is basically a goddess of Mercy. But our era is basically too scientific for any religious movement to thrive in a sustained fashion . . .  The closest we’ve come is Yoda and the Force in Star Wars. Imagine if Yoda were female — which would be quite Taoist (the Force has been compared to the Tao), with its acknowledgement that Yin is more powerful than Yang.

Oriana:

By the way, Invisible Work is an example of how an ending can open up into more and more. It illustrates what Stanley Kunitz said about his preferred endings:

 

I realize that this is a bit hard to read, to let me repeat the most important part: 

Just as the truly great piece of architecture moves beyond itself into its environment, into the landscape and the sky, so the kind of poetic closure that interests me bleeds out of its ending into the whole universe of feeling and thought. I like an ending that's both a door and a window. ~ Stanley Kunitz

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CAMUS, THE ANTI-TOTALITARIAN

~ “Today, it is not unusual to see Albert Camus celebrated as the debonair existentialist—the handsome hero of the French Resistance, a great novelist, and a fine philosopher. But this reputation was only recently acquired. For much of his life, and in the years since his untimely death in 1960 aged just 46, Camus was deeply unfashionable among France’s leading intellectuals. In many quarters, he remains so.
 
Camus did not take up arms in the struggle against the Nazi occupation, but during the war he was the editor of the underground newspaper of the Resistance, Combat. This job involved great personal risk and he would almost certainly have been imprisoned and shot, either by the Nazis or their French collaborators, had his role been uncovered. When the war ended, Camus gazed at the devastation of Europe and reflected. Over the subsequent years, his writing would change significantly as humanism and anti-totalitarianism became increasingly central to his thinking. His 1947 allegorical novel The Plague depicts not a solitary, alienated man, but a group of people struggling together against a plague in a small Algerian city. Here, human beings are willing to confront the absurdity of the universe, but they remain compassionate nonetheless, and strive to be kind and to care for each other. Then, in 1951, Camus published The Man in Revolt (later published in translation as The Rebel). Horrified by the crimes of Stalin and by the apologetics for his regime published by some of the Western Left’s most influential intellectuals, Camus sought to understand the justification of mass murder. It is a rich book, and not easily summarized, but two of Camus’s arguments proved particularly antagonizing to his peers.

First, Camus argued that commitment to a single, distant purpose endangers us all. The struggle for a perfect society in the future leads to as ruthless consequentialism that allows us to sacrifice countless people in the present. This fear is what led him to describe Marx as “the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbeliever’s plot at Highgate Cemetery.” The faith of the Marxist in the promise of utopia, he observed, is every bit as powerful and irrational as that of the religious fanatic.

Second, Camus defended the proposition, explicitly denied by Marxists and Existentialists, that there exists a universal “human nature”—traits shared by all people, from which we can infer what is better or worse for all people and common ground upon which to form social bonds. Sartre, on the other hand, argued that we are the product of our choices and nothing more. Simone de Beauvoir summarized the Marxist view as her peers understood it: “There is no authentic human essence to be realized, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organized wholeness to be achieved. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time.”

From his universalist humanism and skepticism about utopian ideologies, Camus developed an ethics in Man in Revolt that rejected revolution. Instead, Camus argued that moral progress arises from a rejection of injustice by people united in their recognition of that injustice. This kind of “revolt” is more restrained than the revolutionary impulse and shows mesure—it recognizes and respects human nature, attempts to improve things now, and accepts no limits on free speech and expression. When revolt is combined with the misguided belief that history has some unifying purpose and that human beings can be reshaped in the manner of wet clay, it declines into revolution. Revolution is unrestrained, it is démesure, and it leads inevitably to violence and cruelty.

Sartre and Beauvoir edited the leading French intellectual journal of their day, Les Temps Moderne, and they invited the activist and philosopher Francis Jeanson to review The Man in Revolt. The result was scathing. Jeanson’s article was mostly a series of ad hominem attacks which made no attempt to interpret Camus’s text charitably. Camus’s sins were clear: he had attacked Marxism, he had attacked revolution, and he had attacked the idea that human beings were infinitely malleable. For this, he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary.

Sartre then published an open letter addressed to Camus, that began, “Our friendship was not easy, but I will miss it.” Most of Sartre’s letter ignores the arguments in The Man in Revolt, and concentrates instead on itemizing Camus’s alleged personal failings, including the accusation that he was bourgeois. Camus did not respond to this criticism, because he did not see it as important. After all, it was the Marxists, not him, who believed that class determines what one may say. But it was a petty and laughable accusation even so: Sartre grew up in privilege, and he let other people manage his domestic matters all his life. Camus grew up in Algeria in poverty, where as a child he lived in a two-room apartment with his brother, uncle, grandmother, and deaf widowed mother who worked as a cleaning woman to support all of them.

Beauvoir’s attack on Camus was perhaps the most vicious of all. Her 1954 Goncourt Prize-winning novel The Mandarins is a fictionalized account of her life in post-war Paris, populated by characters closely based upon the intellectuals in her political and literary circles. A long section describing her alter-ego’s travels with an American lover is simply lifted by Beauvoir from her diary of her travels with the novelist Nelson Algren. But the novel contains one very important deviation from real life: the character based on Camus has an affair with a young and insipid Nazi sympathizer. To prevent this lover from being prosecuted for her treasonous beliefs and activities, he lies under oath in a court of law in order to have her released from prison.

That Beauvoir’s shameful treatment of her former friend elicited no outrage is evidence of how unfashionable Camus has become. I have been unable to find a single critical mention of his mistreatment in the academic literature about Beauvoir’s novel.

The criticisms of Camus grew more heated as the insurgent war in Algeria intensified. Camus’s position on the war seemed impossibly naïve to Sartre and his followers. Camus hoped that some kind of peaceful solution would be possible, and that both the descendants of colonists and the various indigenous people of Algeria could continue to live together. The situation in Algeria soon grew too violent and divisive for Camus’s hopes for a peace to remain realistic. However, history would prove Sartre’s revolutionary romanticism to be even more reckless.

But arguments for a revolution, it turned out, were considerably more titillating to the intelligentsia than Camus’s earnest pleas for moderation, peace, and solidarity. As a thinker, he now seemed to be out of step with the age. Many years later, Susan Sontag would describe Camus as a “literary husband,” boring but dependable, unlike “literary lovers,” who are exciting even if selfish and brutal. But, exciting as Sartre and Fanon may have been, history proved them wrong: killing Frenchmen and colons did not transform the Algerian people, nor did it unite them into a peaceful nation. Once the French withdrew, the violence just continued, only now it was turned inward.

The vitriolic attacks on Camus reached their crescendo after an angry Algerian student denounced him at a public talk, and Camus was misquoted—perhaps intentionally—by Le Monde as saying, “I will choose my mother over justice.” Sartre and Beauvoir and the intellectuals of their circle gloated that this confirmed Camus as a sentimental reactionary.  But what Camus actually said was something like, “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” Camus recognized that indifference to individual human suffering is essential to all forms of political extremism, and his statement was nothing more scandalous than a rejection of the idea that terrorism is justice.

If Camus is correct, moral progress depends upon revolt, and just revolt begins with the recognition, and the assertion, of our shared human nature. As Camus put it, a just act of revolt “grounds its first value on the whole human race.” And so the rebel cries out, “I revolt—therefore we exist.”  This is a cry not only against inequality, but also against division.

https://quillette.com/2019/03/26/albert-camus-unfashionable-anti-totalitarian/?fbclid=IwAR0lWjKpO10Ef7fTVKWX1nnkjySXqDfDSuJq3QUnggZle6PjSowA4ZNTaUo
Camus, Paris, 1957; Loomis Dean

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“Without tenderness, a man is uninteresting.” ~ Marlene Dietrich

Eventually I came to see that intellectual brilliance wasn’t the most important quality I wanted in a partner. There had to be kindness. A special subcategory of kindness was a capacity for tenderness, an unconditional emotional support so you don’t feel abandoned and alone when dealing with a crisis.
 
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“It’s not hubris to notice that humans are not just another species. Having language sets us far apart from the rest, far above them in foresightful ingenuity and delusional destructiveness.” ~ Jeremy Sherman

 
CAN EXTREMISM BE PREVENTED?
 
~ “It may seem surprising, but Exit does not begin the rehabilitation process by targeting the ideology. In his book Healing from Hate, Michael Kimmel studies, amongst others, two Exit organizations – Exit Sweden and Exit Germany. He argues that contrary to his initial presumptions ideology is not an important factor for many of the young people who join extremist far-right organizations. He struggled to get participants to be able to even explain the ideology of the organizations they were part of, with participants instead talking about the importance of being “part of something, part of a group”.

Kimmel acknowledges that there are critics of this approach, with many arguing that focusing on non-ideological reasons for people to get engaged lets people off the hook for past or even current extremist views and behavior. But if our goal is to get people out of violent organizations, he argues, we must be practical in our approach, engaging with a member’s own experiences in order to further motivation to get them out. 

Robert Örell, who works for Exit Sweden, says that this affiliation with the group grew from teenage delinquency and, as his self-esteem plummeted, he started getting into fights and conflicts with people around him. As he got into his later teen years, he joined a violent right-wing organization. “I grew up in central Stockholm, which was quite middle class, fairly wealthy Swedes,” Örell explains. “We got into conflicts with suburban gangs which came in on Friday, and on Saturday evenings we’d go the youth club to fight.”

Far-right organizations, Örell says, successfully exploited the feelings of isolation he was having as a teenager. He describes this as the "The Extremist Mindset", which includes three separate elements.

First, there is the promotion of black-and-white thinking. Örell argues that groups work to define an opposition between “us” and “them”, or “good” versus “bad”. In this case the “us” is white people and “them”, any people of color, immigrants or Jewish people. This is linked with the second element, a feeling of superiority. Örell says that extremist groups frame themselves as being superior to other individuals or groups, primarily as a way for members to regain their self-esteem, as well as their sense of power, belonging and community. Finally, extremist groups engage in a process of dehumanization. They give their opposing groups animalistic characteristics (like labeling immigrants as a “swarm of rats”). This reinforces the “us” vs “them” mentality, and also legitimizes violent actions.

Örell argues that the main outcome of the extremist mindset is to create a strong sense of belonging: “In these groups you have a very strong sense of purpose and cause. I think this goes for a range of groups, whether it's white power groups or violent Islamic extremist groups, or gangs. What I see for a lot of people, essentially, is having been part of a group where you have this very strong commitment, you feel you have the brothers who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for you, you have a cause that's so important you are prepared to risk your life for it. These mechanisms are quite unusual and build together a very strong sense of 'us'.”

So what caused him to leave? He says he began to see hypocrisy in the group’s standards – which included a culture of drinking, partying and steroid use despite allegedly celebrating discipline. His feelings of distance increased when he joined the military, which helped to offer the discipline and sense of purpose without the toxic ideology. And the physical distance – of being away from his old acquaintances for longer periods of time – helped him to make the break.

“The military gave me a sense of competence and self-esteem that I missed earlier, which I see clearly decreased the need of feeling superior, of de-humanizing others and the power and control that the involvement in the movement gave me,” he says today. “By cognitively and emotionally opening up I started to be less intolerant and had different experiences with the people I previously hated.”

Örell’s story matches academic research on why people leave far right organizations. In his book Racist and Right-Wing Violence in Scandinavia, Tore Bjørgo argues that there are a range of "push" and "pull" factors that can lead to people exiting extremist organizations. Push factors often include a loss of faith in the organization’s ideology, disillusionment with the organization’s strategy, leadership, membership or action or simply burnout, while pull factors can include intimate relationships, employment, or imprisonment. 

Consider the story of "Sarah" (not her real name), a former member of a far-right organization in the United States. Sarah explained to Horgan and his colleagues that her parents were extremely religious, yet at the same time had a very undisciplined lifestyle, with both being alcoholics. She had a turbulent relationship with her father, leading, at least in part, for her to be involved in a range of anti-social behaviors from a young age. As a teenager, she began to develop a sexual interest in other girls, leading to further distance from her family. Confusion, anger and prejudice was building up inside her. In high school Sarah encountered a group of skinheads, which she joined as a way to channel these feelings. Once she joined, she began to become more committed.

Sarah’s process of exiting was both physical and psychological. It started when she was imprisoned over a robbery, creating physical distance from her former friends. She then became psychologically disengaged when she became friends with Hispanic and African American women in jail, a process that led her to question her previous beliefs. Örell, referring to his own experiences, describes this as an “unexpected act of kindness”. These are acts of kindness from people who people previously saw as the enemy, acts which in turn can help people find motivation to rethink their beliefs and actions.

Whatever the initial trigger to leave, both physical and psychological distance is needed, the researchers argue, to remove the person not just from the ideology – but from all those other motivations for joining the group in the first place.

A similar trajectory can also be seen in members of other extremist groups, such as radical Islamists. In his book Jihad and Death, for example, Oliver Roy argues that modern jihadists, particularly those who have engaged in terror attacks in Europe, are initially less motivated by the ideology of radical Islam than by a sense of nihilism: a malaise formed from social isolation, fantasy and rebellion.
While motivations for joining are different between jihadists and far-right extremists, Roy further highlights that ideology is often not the driving cause of extremism, but that it is often due instead to deep social causes such as social alienation and isolation.

It is for all these reasons that organizations such as Exit prefer to examine the underlying motivations; it’s simply a more effective way to help people to leave than directly confronting the ideology, which can backfire. As Orell puts it: “We see that confronting, going into debate or arguments [about ideology] very seldom leads to change, rather the opposite – it strengthens the need to justify, explain and stand up for the ideas which leads to the opposite of what we want.”

Instead, they encourage clients to “think about and understand how they got involved in the movement, how this affected and influenced their way of thinking and reasoning, and how the movement helped them interpret everything they experienced through an ideological lens which by time became the only lens they used”. Secondly, they work with clients to build new experiences, primarily in the social sphere. “This helps us to create new perceptions of how to relate to the world, to different sources of information, to other people and to ourselves lived through experiences and interpretations of events. This way we create more nuances and less distance which makes the need for violent extremist ideas decrease and less attractive.”

As we grapple with the reality of extremist and violent right wing organizations, one thing we can learn is the necessity of actually trying to understand the motivations for joining. That is not to undermine the abhorrence of their beliefs, but to recognize the complex underlying factors behind their behaviors appears to be the best way to prevent more people following the same path.” ~

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190501-how-do-you-prevent-extremism?ocid=fbfut&fbclid=IwAR2YVRDCykegHKDHIHOf61fXvlfjKeXxdCX5EWsvkosh8ieUH8jEObQJDSU
 The back cover blurb for Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, 1935

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HITLER: NOT AN EVIL GENIUS, BUT A LAZY, INCOMPETENT BUFFOON
 
“There’s an aspect to Hitler’s rule that kind of gets missed in our standard view of him. Even if popular culture has long enjoyed turning him into an object of mockery, we still tend to believe that the Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient, and that the great dictator spent most of his time…well, dictating things.

So it’s worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show.

In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people.

Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren’t actually wrong in their assessment of his competency—they just failed to realize that this wasn’t enough to stand in the way of his ambition. As it would turn out, Hitler was really bad at running a government. As his own press chief Otto Dietrich later wrote in his memoir The Hitler I Knew, "In the twelve years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilized state."

His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His "unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair," as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.

There’s a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff. Dietrich himself came down on the side of it being a cunning tactic to sow division and chaos—and it’s undeniable that he was very effective at that. But when you look at Hitler’s personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a workshy narcissist in charge of a country.

Hitler was incredibly lazy. According to his aide Fritz Wiedemann, even when he was in Berlin he wouldn’t get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn’t do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him, the press cuttings being dutifully delivered to him by Dietrich.

He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as "the greatest actor in Europe," and wrote to a friend, "I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history." In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table, and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat "prodigious amounts of cake" and "put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea.”

He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked). But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him.

Little of this was especially secret or unknown at the time. It’s why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren’t wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it’s possible to get.

Hitler’s personal failings didn’t stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don’t actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things.

We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It’s understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn’t an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can’t immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine.

But history suggests that’s a mistake, and it’s one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them.

https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-government-clown-show-opinion-1408136?utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=NewsweekFacebookSF&utm_medium=Social&fbclid=IwAR3GkEPQ8RM32uDxISJtKWWbUnTQ0nOw05G3drfBD4Y0uCtsTpaXlQdy6IE


“I have the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations.” ~ Hitler quoted by Auden

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HOW TO LIFT YOUR MOOD INSTANTLY



~ "Smile. It’s cheesy, but apparently it’s true: The act of smiling really can turn a frown upside down.

Jump around. Get happy-making endorphins pumping fast with some jumping jacks, jump rope, or random flailing around (hey, no judgment here).

Sniff certain scents. Inhaling the scent of orange (or essential orange oil) or lavender can reduce anxiety and improve mood.

Chew gum. The repetitive action of gnawing on gum can promote relaxation and reduce anxiety and stress.

Ogle (or buy) some flowers. Studies find flowers provide an instant—and lasting—mood boost. Bonus: they can also make us more productive.

Visualize your best self. Let’s be honest: None of us are exactly the person we want to be all the time. But imagining our “ideal” selves—calm, confident, movin’ like Jagger—can make us feel better, even when we’ve got miles to go before we get there.

Expose yourself to green. Color psychologists say green symbolizes happiness—and can create the feeling of it, too. Throw on a green sweater, pick up a green pen, deck yourself out like the most dedicated of Leprechauns, and it’s possible your mood will be over the rainbow.

https://greatist.com/happiness/34-ways-bust-bad-mood-ten-minutes



Oriana:

I can't jump, but a spurt of gardening exposes me to green and to flowers too, and provides some exercise as well (unblievable how much watering plants demand to thrive).

Also, I suggest increasing the amount of seafood in the diet, or taking fish oil supplements that provide a high dose of DHA (see the health article near the end of this blog)

Perhaps the most surprising suggestion here is chewing gum. Just make sure the gum contains xylitol rather than sugar (sucrose). Xylitol gum will actually improve your dental health. There is also a licorice-derived digestive-aid tablet you can let dissolve in your mouth — DGL (pure licorice can raise blood pressure). My personal experience confirms that the mood-lifting effect of chewing gum or sucking on a DGL tablet. If you like dark chocolate, you can also try letting a small rectangle of chocolate dissolve in your mouth. 

And let’s not forget that a classic study showed that something as simple as slowly repeating the word “One” had a significant soothing effect.

The point is this: Don’t let yourself stew in bad mood. It’s not worth the rise in blood pressure and other stress-related damage. There are so many ways to lift your mood almost instantly. The young often lack the motivation to do so; but as you grow older, you begin to understand that you no longer have infinite time . . .
 
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 THE CAPGRAS IMPOSTER SYNDROME AND OUR DIGITAL “REALITY”
 
~ “We start with the case of a woman who experienced unbearable tragedy. In 1899, this Parisian bride, Madame M., had her first child. Shockingly, the child was abducted and substituted with a different infant, who soon died. She then had twin girls. One grew into healthy adulthood, while the other, again, was abducted, once more replaced with a different, dying infant. She then had twin boys. One was abducted, while the other was fatally poisoned.

Madame M. searched for her abducted babies; apparently, she was not the only victim of this nightmarish trauma, as she often heard the cries of large groups of abducted children rising from the cellars of Paris.

As if all this pain was not enough, Madame M.’s sole surviving child was abducted and replaced with an imposter of identical appearance. And soon the same fate befell Madame M.’s husband. The poor woman spent days searching for her abducted loved ones, attempting to free groups of other abducted children from hiding places, and starting the paperwork to divorce the man who had replaced her husband.

In 1918, Madame M. summoned the police to aid her in rescuing a group of children locked in her basement. Soon she was speaking with a psychiatrist. She told him she was the direct descendant of Louis XVIII, the queen of the Indies, and of the Duke of Salandra. She had a fortune of somewhere between 200 million and 125 billion francs, and had been substituted as a toddler in a conspiracy to deny her this money. She was constantly under surveillance, and most, if not all, of the people she encountered were substituted doubles, or even doubles of the doubles.

The psychiatrist, Joseph Capgras, listened patiently. It’s delusional psychosis—disordered thought, grandiosity, paranoia—he thought. Pretty standard fare. But then again, no one had ever described the particular delusion of a loved one being replaced by an identical double. What could that be about?

“Capgras delusions,” as psychiatrists eventually called the belief that loved ones have been replaced by identical imposters, are not just archival oddities. Our modern understanding of the disorder tells us much about how the brain has separate modules for analyzing the cognitive aspects of recognition, and for feeling the emotional aspects of familiarity. It shows us that while cognition and emotion can be neurobiologically dissociated, behavior makes a lot more sense when they’re left alone to intertwine.

Over this century, it has come to be recognized that every thought, emotion, or behavior is the direct end product of the material brain. The ways in which Capgras delusions are the product of such materialism tells us much about the differences between the thoughts that give rise to recognition and the feelings that give rise to familiarity. As we’ll see, these functional fault lines in the social brain, when coupled with advances in the online world, have given rise to the contemporary Facebook generation. They have made Capgras syndrome a window on our culture and minds today, where nothing is quite recognizable but everything seems familiar.

Capgras himself, in his earliest writings, briefly speculated that the delusions could reflect some sort of brain disease, before jumping on the psychodynamic bandwagon [i.e. since we feel ambivalent about our loved ones, we may splitting them into the good loved one and the bad one; in extreme cases, the bad loved one then becomes an impostor]. An obscure paper in 1930 tentatively suggested brain damage rather than psychodynamics, and was roundly ignored. It wasn’t until a spate of studies in the 1970s that two facts came to be appreciated.

First, if you examine the brains of people with Capgras delusions, you’ll often find clear evidence of brain disease. As more sensitive techniques came on board, such as functional brain imaging, it became clear that a substantial percentage of Capgras sufferers had organic brain diseases, usually centered around damage or atrophy of the frontal cortex. 
 
A good example is seen in a 2013 study of a woman who had suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage in her right frontal cortex. After years of rehabilitation, she had mostly recovered function, having some residual spatial orientation problems. And while she readily recognized most people in her life, including her daughter and grandchild, she insisted that her husband had been replaced by an imposter. Yes, yes, she’d admit, he looks just like my husband, and he has been very helpful during my recovery, but he is most certainly not my husband; my husband is elsewhere. She readily identified pictures of her husband, but this man before her was not him. She also believed that her home had been replaced with an exact duplicate.

Capgras delusions had become the province of acute neurological insults. Discrete damage to the brain can produce someone who can identify the features of a loved one, yet who insists that the living, breathing person in front of them is an imposter. Which turns out to tell us a lot about one of the great false dichotomies about the brain.

Starting at least with Descartes, there has been the dualist distinction between “mind” and “brain,” or in a spinoff that has particularly engaged neuroscientists recently, between “cognition” and “emotion.” In the standard view, the latter two are functionally and neurobiologically separable, and are in some sort of perpetual, epic struggle over the control of your behavior. Moreover, this dichotomizing has typically given rise to the view that one of the two, in some sense a mixture of ethics and aesthetics, should dominate the other. 
 
A dichotomy between cognition and emotion, we now know, is false, clearly explored in neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s 1994 book, Descartes’ Error. The two endlessly interact, both functionally and neurobiologically. And most importantly, they’d better, because what we view as normal function requires extensive integration of the two. 
 
Identification is at the intersection of factual recognition and a sense of familiarity. In this framework, Capgras delusions arise when there is selective damage to the extended face processing network, impairing the sense of familiarity. Factual recognition is intact; you know that this person looks just like your loved one. But they just don’t feel familiar.

The terrible and complementary dislocations of Capgras delusions and prosopagnosia [inability to recognize faces] show what happens when you pry apart the conjoined balance of cognition and emotion. The separate modules of our brains underlie dissociable functions, but we rarely fare well when those functions are dissociated. The dissociation of cognition and emotion, of recognition and familiarity, is what makes Capgras delusions a metaphor for the state of our minds today.

For 99 percent of hominid history, social communication consisted of face-to-face interactions with someone you’ve hunted and foraged with most of your life. But then the recognition and familiarity components got pried apart by modern technology. By “modern technology,” I mean a newfangled invention that came along a few millennia ago—you could communicate with someone by putting scratches of ink on a piece of paper, and then sending that paper a great distance where they’d decode it. Wait, you know someone by their microexpressions, their pheromones, their totality—not by implicitly assessing word frequency in their letter or the scrawl of their signature. This was a first technological blow to the usual primate sense of familiarity. And the challenges have accelerated exponentially from there. Is this text message from my loved one, does it feel familiar? Well, it depends. What emoticon did they use?

Thus, not only has modern life increasingly dissociated recognition and familiarity, but it has impoverished the latter in the process. This is worsened by our frantic skill at multitasking, especially social multitasking. A recent Pew study reported that 89 percent of cell phone owners used their phones during their most recent social gathering. We reduce our social connections to mere threads so that we can maintain as many of them as possible. This leaves us with signposts of familiarity that are frail remnants of the real thing.

This can lead to a problem; namely that we become increasingly vulnerable to imposters. By any logic, this should induce all of us to have Capgras delusions, to find it plausible that everyone we encounter is an imposter.

But something very different has occurred instead. This withering of primate familiarity in the face of technology prompts us to mistake an acquaintance for a friend, just because the two of you have a Snapchat streak for the last umpteen days, or because you both like all the same Facebook pages. It allows us to become intimate with people whose familiarity then proves false. After all, we can now fall in love with people online whose hair we have never smelled.

Through history, Capgras syndrome has been a cultural mirror of a dissociative mind, where thoughts of recognition and feelings of intimacy have been sundered. It is still that mirror. Today we think that what is false and artificial in the world around us is substantive and meaningful. It’s not that loved ones and friends are mistaken for simulations, but that simulations are mistaken for them.” ~ Robert Sapolski

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/to-understand-facebook-study-capgras-syndrome?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Joseph Capgras 

Mary:

The current sort of inversion of the Capgras syndrome, where friends and family are not seen as imposters, but imposters seen as friends, and where the suspicion arises that all may be  imposters, is unsettling and, I think, actually dangerous. It's  like the "fake news" assertion...constant rejection of just about anything that doesn't fit the agenda of one party or another leads inevitably to mistrust of all reported news as biased, invented, false. Nothing can be depended on. Everything is an attempt to conceal the truth with a pack of distracting lies. Such shifting sands soon become quicksand, leaving nothing to trust as solid ground.

In a dissociative state nothing seems familiar, and soon the unfamiliar becomes sinister — just as the imposter wearing your husband's face surely has some evil intent, and your infant replaced by a changeling elicits only horror. As we don't see and touch our many Facebook friends, these relationships are already less “real” — less grounded in the world, and this in some ways invites inauthenticity. 

I was astounded to hear of “sock puppets” — invented personas used to pursue purposes less than the acceptable...masks to hide behind, and perhaps say things cruel, false, contemptible or manipulative. Who has this kind of time, and why would you want to do this?? And yet it's apparently frequent and widespread enough that you might see a little sign appear when you post a comment that says "posting as yourself."

I think these are negative developments, and not unimportant. They point to a kind of dissociative disorder, or at least dissociative symptoms in our social interactions. And people seem to prefer these interactions to the usual face to face ones. So you get the group at the dinner table, all focused on their phones and their private digital lives rather than on the physical presence of those around them. A picture of profound alienation.

Like anything, our digital lives also have the potential for making real and living connections between people. It will be, in the end, what we make it.
Oriana:

Definitely. Thanks for the enlightening comment about the dissociative state: “In a dissociative state nothing seems familiar, and soon the unfamiliar becomes sinister — just as the imposter wearing your husband's face surely has some evil intent, and your infant replaced by a changeling elicits only horror.”

And yet, crazily, when it comes to digital media, some people who otherwise seem normal fall for impostors with astonishing ease. I suspect it’s because in this case the impostors know how to create the illusion of adoring their victim — and this may be easier online than when you see the person (note especially their body language) and hear their voice (which will often reveal the tension of pretending better than the face — we learn early how to control our facial expressions).

Of course real-life impostors have always been with us. Just saw Red Joan, an example of how a young woman’s great need for love and friendship make her an easy target for manipulation. But she is smart, gets to experience being truly loved, and above all gains clarity about her strong moral values — and eventually she becomes very much her own person. But not everyone has these resources. 


Judi Dench as "Red Joan"
*

FAVORITISM TOWARD THE  REPENTANT SINNER

“I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” [Luke 15:7] This is the ending of the parable of the one stray sheep — the shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep in search of one that got lost, finds it, carries it back on his shoulders, then calls his neighbors and friends to rejoice with him. We can imagine the sheep being petted and given little treats.

Of course in the parable the sheep left alone while the “good shepherd” looks for the one lost sheep do not fall prey to wolves. Nor do they feel abandoned and unvalued — or so we assume. But it’s different with humans, who’d like to feel appreciated for a lifetime of sticking to rules, especially if those rules are oppressive. But no — the great rejoicing is reserved for the strays and the prodigals. This is obviously propaganda aiming to convert those who valued having a good time (e.g. the young St. Augustine, who didn’t care for chastity in his youth), and may think it’s too late now, not realizing if they change their ways, even in the last moment, they are the special treasure, and not those who strove to be “good” all their lives.

While we understand the joy of the shepherd, and that of the father of the prodigal son, only now I realize why those parables used to upset me.  We all like to be appreciated and justly rewarded — and dislike favoritism. We all like to feel loved and important, rather than be taken for granted and ignored.

And not just people. If you have two dogs, start favoring one with treats and affection — and see what happens. Of course you wouldn’t do that, because you have empathy and a sense of justice — and so do all social animals.

*
THOSE FABULOUS OMEGA-3 FATS: WHY WE NEED DHA
 
~ “There are two types of omega-3s that play major roles in good health: docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosatetraenoic acid (EPA). And studies show DHA omega-3s are the most important for your heart, brain, and eyes.

Yet, the average American gets only about 120 mg of DHA per day. In other countries, like Japan, the average DHA intake is 600 mg per day—which researchers theorize helps to contribute to the good heart health experienced by many people in Japan.
Why Your Body Need DHA Omega-3s

Studies show that DHA omega-3s are vital to every cell and system in your body.

    Blood Pressure Support: DHA fats have a more profound effect on normal blood pressure levels than EPA fats.

    Arterial Health: In a study of postmenopausal women, those with the highest levels of DHA had better coronary artery health.

    Circulation: In research, DHA did a better job than EPA in improving vasodilation and endothelial function.

    Mental Processing: In a nine-year study, DHA was correlated with better brain function and cognitive health.

    Eye Support: Your eyes need DHA, too. It makes up 30% to 40% of the fatty acids found in the photoreceptors in your eyes, so DHA is critical to your eye health. Plus, research shows omega-3 fatty acids help with natural tear production, keeping your eyes moist and hydrated.

As essential as omega-3s are for your health, your body can’t manufacture them. So, you need to get them through foods or supplements that are high in DHA omega-3s. This is important because while your body can easily convert DHA to EPA, it has great difficulty converting EPA to DHA.

Fatty fishes can be good sources of DHA omega-3s, including wild caught salmon, herring, small Atlantic halibut, and mackerel. A great source of omega-3s is calamari (squid). It’s naturally high in DHA and is sustainably sourced from squid in deep ocean waters. Plus, the squid are harvested small and only live up to 450 days, so they are clean.

https://www.drsinatra.com/fish-krill-or-calamari-oilwhich-has-the-most-dha-omega-3-benefits?

Carribbean reef squid

Oriana:

Even if your diet is heavy on seafood, it's still not easy to obtain optimal amount of DHA. NOW has the best price on DHA (DHA 500). 
 
*
ending on beauty:

I always wake up before I get caught
always before I hit the ground
as I wake up on the ground
I don’t know what the work will look like
but I’m sounding more like my Hungarian grandmother
who refused to speak English
I’m not worried at this stage
when you reveal where inside you
you carry your light
handshake or vague humor
(multiple endings with deep image)

~ Craig Czury
Adam Hunter Caldwell: The Funeral

HOW TO BECOME RESILIENT; POETRY AND SIMPLICITY; PASCAL AND KAFKA ON BEING ALONE IN A ROOM; THE MYTH OF THE KINDLY GENERAL LEE; PROPIONATE AND OBESITY

A butterfly egg; Martin Oeggerli
 
*
THE TRUE SUBJECT

            The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.
                               ~ Faiz Ahmed Faiz
  
The death of the fantasy man I loved,
the one I called by your name
and held in my arms every night,

caused me more pain than later
the throbbing bullet of your real
suicide. Then I learned about

poetry’s true subject: the tremble
in your voice when you said,
I want to do something great —

the heft of a thousand-page
anthology of regrets we read in the dark,
and yes, it ruined our eyes;

eating oatmeal, the only
food you had, as we listened
to the aria of the Queen of Night;

your turning to the wall
when I tried to wake you up;
the sudden lightning

like an angry god 
dancing around the room —
though it never seemed to rain

when I was at your house —
my dreams withering without
the veil of that sound.

~ Oriana
Francis Picabia, A Man and a Woman
 
My fantasy lover had my actual lover’s name and face, but gradually the contrast became so stark that the fantasy could not be sustained. I realize that the poem does not really indicate that . . . of course it wasn’t eating oatmeal that I minded, and certainly not listening to Mozart together. But in the poem, I wanted beauty, so I memorialized a few beautiful moments. 

And the lightning in its crazed dance around the room — it might be taken as the writing on the wall, a prophecy of a violent end. But only a reader who reads the entire sequence might make this connection. 

Perhaps Jack Gilbert’s short poem can illuminate the unsaid:

GOING THERE

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

~ Jack Gilbert

Note that Gilbert too is being evasive.

In terms of honesty, my poems fails utterly. But are poems about honesty? Someone said: “The task of the poet is not to debunk; the task of the poet is to bunk.” But in real poetry, this “bunking” is not about a cheap consolation and a quick affirmation, something like, “But isn’t life glorious in spite of all the suffering?”

Gilbert states it in a much more modest way:

Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

I took up the question of the disparity between life and poetry in discussing my poem “Tristan” — also about a young man who died in a self-destructive way, arguably a suicide. It could be argued that the real story is more interesting than what is revealed by the poem — take his mother, for instance, so detached from reality it would be a comedy if it weren’t a tragedy. But the poem is about trying to discover the deeper, more universal meaning of the events. The power and purpose of poetry are much bigger than “what really happened.” 

Mary:

Speaking of memory, the stories we tell ourselves, and "what really happened," it seems such a layered, shifting, subjective thing. Difficult enough when we are discussing history, itself so laden with differing perspectives, retold through the lenses of cultural, political and ideological bias, so very different for the winners and losers, the rich and the poor, slaves and masters, women and men. Even family history is hard to pin down, each one remembers experience in the terms of their own fears, hopes and desires, each story a personal mythology. But just as in art, the story, the myth, may be closer to the truth, the emotional, psychological, human truth, embodying values and meaning, than even the most accurate catalogue of events.

Oriana:

That’s a very important last point: myths and “inaccurate stories” may be closer to the psychological truth. Thank you for reminding of that. Any poem — anything we say, for that matter — is at best a partial truth. In my case, the desire to create beauty is one of the distorting factors — but then, as Nietzsche said, “we have art so we don’t die of truth.”
 
 
Charles:

The black and white photo of the children of photographer holding hands is one of the most famous and  valuable of photographer Eugene Smith.

*

“Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.” ~ Miranda July

Two barred owls in Florida

*

POETRY AND SIMPLICITY

From Anton Chekhov’s letter to Maxim Gorki: “. . . cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can . . . It is comprehensible when I write ‘The man sat on the grass,’ because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write, ‘The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that has already been trampled down by pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.’ The brain can’t grasp all of that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.”

This passage, quoted in What Light Can Do, Robert Hass’s new collection of essays, is a pearl of great price. In every writing class, over and over you are told not to use too many adjectives and adverbs. What you are not told is the rationale: art needs simplicity. “When you lose simplicity, you lose art,” Joseph Campbell said (The Campbell Companion), probably quoting someone else. Chekhov explains why: the brain can grasp only so much, while “art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.”

On closer look, however, it’s not the number of details per se that clogs the cluttered second version of the man sitting on the grass. It’s the fact that these details are crammed into one sentence. What we have here is not just the too-muchness of things, but disrupted flow clogged with commas. Velocity is lost, flow is lost. And a good piece of writing needs to flow by itself. The syntax needs to be simple, particularly in poetry, which otherwise risks being “hard on the brain.” Simple words and simple syntax, further split into simple units with the magic tool of line breaks — now there is a chance that poetry can happen.

(A shameless digression on line breaks. I remember a workshop with Jeffrey Levine, during which he mused: “There are terrible things happening in the world: warfare, famine, genocide. And here we are, talking about line breaks . . . isn’t that wonderful?”)

Line breaks are immensely important; I protest the current popularity of prose poems. The brain can grasp only so much at a time, and line breaks help. Recently a friend sent me a poem that delighted me with its elegant, sophisticated simplicity, far from simplistic:

ORIGAMI

 Yesterday I laundered a mouse —
wash, rinse, spin cycled.
She came out a little damp,

lying on her side as if asleep,
tiny whiskers, claws folded,
thin tail, exquisite ears, so complete

as if sculpted from Japanese Kami paper.
If there were children in the house
there would have been a funeral —

match box coffin, bouquet of weeds,
Boy Scout version of taps.
But they are gone and I am old —

I scooped her into the trash.

~ Una Hynum

***

Aside from the brilliance of noting that a laundered mouse came out looking like origami, what don’t we have in this poem? There is childhood and old age, life and death, domestic practicality versus sentiment, the mouse as art and the mouse as reality. We have the past overlaid on the present like a revenant ghost, a lifetime of mothering — one infinity after another. And yet it sounds so simple: “Yesterday I laundered a mouse  . . .  She came out a little damp.”

 ***

Just a week ago I was treated to another feast of infinity in simplicity, and more life and death.

THE SCATTERING

the ashes are from a woman
named Mo
my lover’s lost wife

whom I only meet
as I pour her
into my pottery urn

whom I only feel
when I scoop in my hand to hold
small hunks of her bone

her white sparkling dust
clings to me
as I scatter her

into the lake
where the dog
laps her up

what’s left of her
we rub on our pant legs
while we circle around each other

in silence, wondering
how could we be so bold?
to reach in

to grab a messy handful
that spills
like all the sand and gravel

we’d picked up as children
sifting all sorts of remnants
of life, not knowing

until this dust of a wife
I breathe into me
until her death resounds

in the song that I sing
which is heard before
it comes out of my mouth

until I begin to sparkle
like one’s body
cast into the air

we sit in silence
with the lake and the forest
saying, “Mo. Mo.”

~ Lisa Ezzard

***

Again we have the past and present, nature and culture, ruthlessness and tenderness. Infinities blossom forth one after another, and we can grasp those unending complexities precisely because of the simplicity of the poem. The words here are simple and ordinary, especially the one-syllable active verbs that move the narrative forward: meet, pour, feel, scoop, clings, rub, circle. Like “Origami,” this poem too is not “hard on the brain.” That’s why it touches us. Both poems practically bypass the intellect, going deeper.

I think it’s safe to say that the greatest poetry uses the simplest words, the simplest syntax, a child-like parallel construction. To be or not to be? And if not that, then: Can I make it more simple? It is one of the most important questions a poet needs to ask during revision. Paradoxically, depth resides in simplicity. So yes, please cross out most of those adjectives and adverbs. And let the silence around the words speak for itself.

~ Oriana

(this essay was published in Atticus Review, October 11, 2012)
 

PASCAL AND KAFKA ON BEING INA ROOM ALONE
 
“All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” ~ Blaise Pascal
 
It surprised me to see that Pascal said that. For introverts — and Pascal certainly was one — that’s the easiest thing in the world.

By the way, this reminds me of Kafka’s

You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Be quiet, still, and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.
It has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

To me the image of the world rolling in ecstasy at my feet is one of Kafka’s greatest gifts.


*
HOW PEOPLE LEARN RESILIENCE OR NON-RESILIENCE

“[Martin Seligman], who pioneered much of the field of positive psychology, found that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression.

The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus (“I can change this”) tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.

Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened.

Resilience is, ultimately, a set of skills that can be learned.” ~

(The source is the New Yorker, February 11, 2016 — now unfortunately behind a pay wall.)

from another source:

~ “According to the research of leading psychologist, Susan Kobasa, there are three elements that are essential to resilience:

Challenge – Resilient people view a difficulty as a challenge, not as a paralyzing event. They look at their failures and mistakes as lessons to be learned from, and as opportunities for growth. They don't view them as a negative reflection on their abilities or self-worth.

Commitment – Resilient people are committed to their lives and their goals, and they have a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning. Commitment isn't just restricted to their work – they commit to their relationships, their friendships, the causes they care about, and their religious or spiritual beliefs.
   
Personal Control – Resilient people spend their time and energy focusing on situations and events that they have control over. Because they put their efforts where they can have the most impact, they feel empowered and confident. Those who spend time worrying about uncontrollable events can often feel lost, helpless, and powerless to take action.

Another leading psychologist, Martin Seligman, says the way that we explain setbacks to ourselves is also important. (He talks in terms of optimism and pessimism rather than resilience, however, the effect is essentially the same.) This "explanatory style" is made up of three main elements:

Permanence – People who are optimistic (and therefore have more resilience) see the effects of bad events as temporary rather than permanent. For instance, they might say "My boss didn't like the work I did on that project" rather than "My boss never likes my work.”
 
Pervasiveness – Resilient people don't let setbacks or bad events affect other unrelated areas of their lives. For instance, they would say "I'm not very good at this" rather than "I'm no good at anything.”

Personalization – People who have resilience don't blame themselves when bad events occur. Instead, they see other people, or the circumstances, as the cause. For instance, they might say "I didn't get the support I needed to finish that project successfully," rather than "I messed that project up because I can't do my job.”

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/resilience.htm

Oriana:

It comes down to this: resilience is a set of cognitive skills. You have to learn how to talk to yourself in a way that makes you resilient rather than makes you feel defeat. For instance, if you try to enter a website and get the message that your user id and password don’t match, don’t let yourself think, “I am hopeless with computers.” From there it’s only a step to “I am a total failure in life” which opens the portals to depression. No, you want constructive action.

Wait, you say, “just one step”? For people who are prone to depression and well-practiced at inducing it (be it unintentionally), it can indeed be just one step. So doing cognitive therapy on yourself is a must if you tend to always blame yourself, see whatever happens in absolutes (“I always” . . . “I never”), or whose national anthem is “You just can’t win.” I’ve been at all those places, and more — for decades. Sometimes it stuns me to think that thought habits ingrained for so long can be replaced by productive thought habits. But they can.

It also helps to have a supportive partner — one who doesn’t criticize you if you make a mistake, but stands by you and helps you get out of the mess. 

Charles:

I relate to the article on resilience. The only thing I would add is that you need to love the challenge. 

Oriana:

For me the biggest obstacle used to be self-blame. It was always my fault. Louise Hay was a great teacher of learning to stop self-blame.  

*

Mary:

When you say resilience is the result of a set of cognitive skills you are absolutely correct. Cognitive errors can become a deadly habit, so ingrained they seem natural and correct. The habitual errors become like a straitjacket, making positive change increasingly difficult. First you have to recognize the error (I am a failure, I can’t do anything right) and then correct it (mistakes are challenges to learn and improve; I can learn and improve.) The problem with habitual errors is that they are of such long standing, such habits, they feel comfortable, familiar . . . painful, but it's a familiar pain, easier than change.
Oriana:

A therapist friend of mine said, “You’ve done cognitive therapy on yourself.” It was like falling asleep: slowly, slowly — and then all of a sudden you are asleep. In hindsight I can trace a long preparation for the insight (It’s too late in life to be depressed) that ended my depression in an instant. It was a mental lightning — it may sound surreal, but I could feel something happening in my brain as it was rewiring itself, with a different neural pathway forming and “burning out” the depressive thinking.

It wasn’t just that the door to depression got shut — it simply disappeared. I was suddenly homeless. So I had to find my home elsewhere — in my work.

I didn’t become happy in an instant — I’d lost the capacity for happiness, and it took a while to gradually regain positive memories and positive emotions. But I never lost my writing skills and the capacity to be productive. I’ve exchanged brooding and crying for productivity. I could still work, I could still contribute.

Work saved me. I realized that I mustn’t ask about the meaning, the purpose — just work. My motto became “work works.” And I’ve discovered I wasn’t alone. Many others have discovered that work — any work, even cleaning the house, if you really throw yourself into it — is the best remedy against the life-wasting low moods. And I’ve witnessed how work can ameliorate even schizophrenia. Yes, you’ve read it correctly: even schizophrenia, as long as it’s not the acute phase. Work empowers the “sane” neural pathways.

*

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

*

THE BRAIN OF HIGHLY SENSITIVE PEOPLE FUNCTIONS DIFFERENTLY
 
~ “1. Your brain responds to dopamine differently.
 
Dopamine is the brain's reward chemical. It's what makes you "want" to do certain things, and then feel a sense of victory or happiness when you do them. But many of the genes involved in high sensitivity affect how your body uses dopamine, in ways we don't fully understand. It's likely that HSPs are less driven by external rewards, which is part of what allows them to hold back and be thoughtful and observant while they process information. That would also help prevent HSPs from being drawn to the same highly stimulating situations that end up overwhelming them.

If you're an HSP, and you just don't find yourself all that interested in a super loud party, you have your dopamine system to thank — it's helping you avoid overstimulation and burnout.

2. Your mirror neurons are more active than those of others.
 
Mirror neurons help you understand what another person is doing, or what they're experiencing, based on their actions. They do that by comparing the other person's behavior with times when you yourself have behaved that way — effectively "mirroring" the other person to figure out what's going on for them.

That's an important job for a lot of reasons, but one of the things it does in humans is allow us to feel empathy and compassion for others. When we recognize the pain (or joy) that someone is going through and relate to it, it's because of this system. More mirror neuron activity means a more empathetic person — like an HSP.

HSPs don't necessarily have "more" mirror neurons than others. It’s that their mirror neuron systems are more active. In 2014, functional brain imaging research found that HSPs had consistently higher levels of activity in key parts of the brain related to social and emotional processing. This higher level of activity kicked in even in tests involving strangers, showcasing HSPs' ability to extend compassion to people they don't personally know. (The effect was still highest with loved ones, however).
 
As a highly sensitive person, these mirror neurons are both your superpower and, at times, more than a little inconvenient — like when you can't watch the same TV show as everyone else, because it's too violent. But it's also what makes you warm, caring, and incredibly insightful about what other people are going through.
 
3. You really do experience emotions more vividly than others.
 
Hidden away in the front of the brain is a fascinating area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). This area is hooked in to several systems involving your emotions, your values, and processing sensory data. When we say that highly sensitive people "process things more deeply than others," there's a good chance it happens right here.

While not all of the jobs the vmPFC does are well understood, it's definitely associated with emotional regulation — and it enhances the things we experience with a certain emotional "vividness." Everyone experiences life more vividly during emotional moments, not just HSPs. But high sensitivity is linked to a gene that increases this vividness, essentially "turning up the dial." That gene allows emotional enhancement to have a much greater effect on the vmPFC as it processes experiences.

What does this mean for HSPs? Unlike mirror neurons, this emotional vividness isn't necessarily social in nature. It's all about how vividly you feel emotions inside yourself in response to what's happening around you. So, if you seem to feel things more strongly than other people do, it's probably not just in your head. HSPs are finely tuned to pick up even subtle emotional cues and react to them.

4. Other people are the brightest thing on your radar.
 
For some less sensitive people, it's easy to tune out other people. But for an HSP, almost everything about the brain is wired around noticing and interpreting others.

This is clear from the many, many other parts of the brain that get extra-active for HSPs in a social context. For example, the brain imaging study mentioned above didn't just show greater activity in areas associated with empathy. It also showed increased activity in the cingulate area and the insula — two areas that, together, form the "seat of consciousness" and moment-to-moment awareness. For HSPs, these areas become far more active in response to images of other people, especially those exhibiting a relevant social or emotional cue.

In other words, highly sensitive people actually become more alert, almost "more conscious," in a social context. If you're an HSP, other people are the brightest thing on your radar.

The Gift of the Highly Sensitive Brain

There's a lot that can be said about the gifts of the highly sensitive brain. It processes information on a deeper level, sees more connections, and cares and relates to others in a profound way. If you're a highly sensitive person, it's not an exaggeration to say that your brain is among the most powerful social machines in the known universe.

But perhaps your most important gift as an HSP is the one designed to protect you: Your brain is fine-tuned to notice and interpret the behavior of everyone around you. If someone is bad news, you know it. If someone is not going to treat you right, you see it coming. And if a situation isn't right for you, you know that, too.

That's vital, because a highly sensitive person needs a healthy environment and supportive loved ones in order to thrive — perhaps even more so than others.

If you're a highly sensitive person, trust your intuition about people. Your brain is on your side, and it's rooting for you.” ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/highly-sensitive-refuge/201901/4-brain-differences-highly-sensitive-people?utm_source=FacebookPost&utm_medium=FBPost&utm_campaign=FBPost&fbclid=IwAR1lI_7X9Mf3VoFMJh_1v5cADbLMLFBcPvMIHnurEfMezj_e0dr9KG0OFzY

Creation of animals, Master Bertram, 1383, Grabow altarpiece. Does anyone else get the impression that the creator is Jesus rather than Yahweh?

*

THE MYTH OF THE KINDLY GENERAL LEE
 
~ “The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

Lee was a slaveowner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:

    I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.

The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.

Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to "lay it on well." Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

Every state that seceded mentioned slavery as the cause in their declarations of secession. Lee’s beloved Virginia was no different, accusing the federal government of “perverting” its powers “not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.” Lee’s decision to fight for the South can only be described as a choice to fight for the continued existence of human bondage in America—even though for the Union, it was not at first a war for emancipation.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with whites. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

After the war, Lee did counsel defeated southerners against rising up against the North. Lee might have become a rebel once more, and urged the South to resume fighting—as many of his former comrades wanted him to. But even in this task Grant, in 1866, regarded his former rival as falling short, saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free, he fought for the preservation of slavery, his army kidnapped free blacks at gunpoint and made them unfree—but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of the great Christian love the South held for blacks. Here we truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that "between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."

Lee argued against the enfranchisement of blacks, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality on the South. Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

Lee is not remembered as an educator, but his life as president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee) is tainted as well. According to Pryor, students at Washington formed their own chapter of the KKK, and were known by the local Freedmen’s Bureau to attempt to abduct and rape black schoolgirls from the nearby black schools.

There were at least two attempted lynchings by Washington students during Lee’s tenure, and Pryor writes that “the number of accusations against Washington College boys indicates that he either punished the racial harassment more laxly than other misdemeanors, or turned a blind eye to it,” adding that he “did not exercise the near imperial control he had at the school, as he did for more trivial matters, such as when the boys threatened to take unofficial Christmas holidays.” In short, Lee was as indifferent to crimes of violence toward blacks carried out by his students as he was when they were carried out by his soldiers.

Lee died in 1870, as Democrats and ex-Confederates were commencing a wave of terrorist violence that would ultimately reimpose their domination over the Southern states. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866; there is no evidence Lee ever spoke up against it. On the contrary, he darkly intimated in his interview with the Herald that the South might be moved to violence again if peace did not proceed on its terms. That was prescient.

To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917,  but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.

The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.

The question is why anyone else would.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/?fbclid=IwAR0ay5wZl_9MnIoql0D6Zjz7KlfHhcUxSYCTDbhM24WbzXOrhIAtOXajc_o

Lee surrenders at Appomattox, 1865

from another source:

~ “Robert E. Lee was not an abolitionist. It is a gross injustice and an insult to the memory and sacrifices of those who fought against the cruelty and immorality of forced servitude–or who suffered under it–to claim Lee was anti-slavery. He once remarked that the status quo of slavery  was “the best that can exist between the white and black races while intermingled as at present in this country,” and that he “would depreciate any sudden disturbance of that relation unless it be necessary to avert a greater calamity to both.”

In short, slave ownership was the best relationship whites could currently have with blacks, and unless it was a means to avert an even worse situation, it should continue. Let’s not overlook the irony that a four year war that resulted in the death of 620,000 soldiers was apparently not a great enough calamity to warrant a “disturbance” of the “relation” of slave and master.

[Lee believed that] God will one day see fit, when this inferior race has finally been oppressed enough and Christianized enough to become equal to their slave-owners, to emancipate the slaves. This is not for men to do. In fact, he claims that abolitionists therefore have “no right” to push for the end of slavery and even goes so far as to say that it is an “evil” endeavor to do so.

This is not the language of an anti-slavery mentality. This is a man who can find no moral justification for it other than the tired “it is as God wills it.”
He then gives this little jab to northern abolitionists: “Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom have always proved the most intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?”

Yes, you read that right. Lee found it anathema to the idea of freedom to push for the freedom of slaves, because to him, the freedom to OWN slaves was clearly the more pressing matter.

Yes, Lee eventually freed his slaves, but only because he was ordered to by the courts because those were the terms in the will of his father-in-law. He didn’t want to at all.
What he did do is lead an army against his own country because he was loyal to a state that seceded so that they could continue to own people like cattle.

Upon his death, a wave of admiration for Lee sprang up which sickened Frederick Douglass, who wrote, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries” of General Robert E. Lee. Those flatteries blossomed over the next century and a half so that today, Lee enjoys a reputation not as a “hard taskmaster” slave-owner who believed human beings he owned as property were divinely placed in servitude to prepare them for equality, but as a misunderstood gentleman who did not exemplify the underlying mentality that perpetuated the repugnant institutions he fought to defend.
The removal of his statue is not the erasure of history, nor is it the politicizing of it. It is a rejection of a myth and a refusal to celebrate a man whose morals deserve no celebration.” ~ Matt Ferrara

https://automateddissolve.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/taking-down-the-myth-on-the-removal-of-the-robert-e-lee-memorial/?fbclid=IwAR0kEorKlrHazttEeobMHBpt4vzi9RUsQQ83sRNK3xnA_Kz3uchCHJHmJyk

Lee statue being removed, New Orleans

Mary:

With the mythologizing of General Lee,  the story of the man and his actions was reshaped to fit the purposes of the "Lost Cause" mythology, where the hideous and evil institution of slavery is justified and obscured by a picture of genteel and gracious life in a romantic, and completely false, antebellum South. The stinking odor of suffering, the brutal debasement of humanity, is denied by the façade of chivalry, brave soldiers, white mansions, ladies in elaborate gowns. And it still stinks.

The refusal to abide these mythologies any longer is evidence that as an apology and perpetrator of inequality and injustice these stories no longer convince, no longer have the power to silence other stories, the stories of those not in power, who are moving to reclaim a history and power of their own.
Oriana:

Beautifully put. The myths justifying slavery no longer have the power to silence the stories of the slaves themselves. Let us also remember books such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Huckleberry Finn.” They did have a moral power. Now it’s chiefly the movies, I think — The Green Book is the most recent example — that humanize the victims and make racism look not only morally abhorrent but also simply absurd.

I think Oscar Wilde had a point when he said that it’s useless to tell people that war is immoral. You need to tell them that war is vulgar. I have a feeling that we need to start saying “Racism is vulgar.”

And if that word doesn’t quite have the clout it used to have, and in Europe, still has, then we need to cast after another word that signifies the opposite of the kind of white-mansion elegance and refinement that the South aspired to. (Here I'm reminded that Hitler had “beautiful manners with women” — he always kissed their hands and gave them flowers. Perhaps the more atrocities you commit, the more you need to kiss women’s hands.)  “Vulgar” may be too weak to express the moral ugliness, the stench of the underlying human debasement and suffering — but I keep returning to it. 


*

WHY PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WORKS OUTSIDE THE US

~ “Unlike their American counterparts, European planners designed new suburbs in ways that made transit use still viable. Many new towns were built around train and metro stations.

Early U.S. suburbs like Levittown, New York, on the other hand, were built along highways and had virtually no transit service at all. They’re almost all still built on the model developed in the 1940s: single-family homes on isolated streets, with stores surrounded by parking lots a decent drive away.

In contrast, places like Vällingby, a Swedish suburb outside Stockholm built in the 1950s, were sited around a new Metro station. Building rail infrastructure through built-up areas is extremely expensive, but building it through farmland, before new neighborhoods are built, is comparatively cheap.

This is the model that cities like Copenhagen, Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam have used. Instead of building highways first, which tends to make neighborhoods auto-centric and de-prioritizes transit, European cities tended to put transit first when they built new neighborhoods.

Existing Rail Lines
 
Many, though not all, major cities in the U.S. have a number of rail lines radiating out of their centers. Most of them are only used by freight or a few commuter train trips a day. It’s a huge, untapped resource. There’s no reason why those railway lines can’t be turned into what are effectively subway lines—high-capacity routes that allow people to get across the city quickly—without the immense cost of tunneling. In Europe, what we usually call “commuter rail” operates frequently, all day, and cost the same fare as other local transit. That’s the difference between regional rail and commuter rail. A transit system with service that is only useful to 9-to-5 commuters to downtown will never be a useful one for most people.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Paris built its RER network, which included new tunnels to connect its disconnected Paris terminals. The system now moves more people per year than all American commuter railways combined. Many German cities built similar systems, and London is now following them with Crossrail.

Look at any American commuter rail system, and imagine that instead of high fares and a few trips a day designed to take people to jobs downtown, it had trains every few minutes, all day, and the same fare as other local transit. Los Angeles’ Metrolink, Chicago’s Metra, and Boston’s MBTA commuter rail all have extensive networks that blanket their metropolitan areas, but their trains are too infrequent and too expensive to be used as a real local transit service. Why do we only run decent service on expensive subways that were built from scratch?

Feeder Buses

A good feeder bus system can save huge capital costs, because it can bring people to the existing rail line, thus eliminating the need to bring a rail line through existing development to the riders. Converting existing rail lines to run real transit service can be shockingly cheap: Ottawa converted a lightly-used freight route to a five-stop rail transit line with trains every 15 minutes for only $16 million. By comparison, one station on New York’s Second Avenue Subway cost $740 million; the 2.2-mile-long D.C. Streetcar cost $200 million. Even on lines with heavy freight traffic, adding extra tracks for passenger service costs a fraction of the cost of subway tunnels.

For another example, take Munich, a German city with a population roughly comparable to that of Denver or St. Louis. It has 95 kilometers of subway—only about half the length of Washington’s Metro system. But on top of that, it has 434 kilometers of S-Bahn, which is like American commuter rail, except that it uses the same fare as the local bus and metro service and its trains come every 20 minutes, all day. Through the downtown core, all the S-Bahn routes combine into one underground line that acts as a kind of super-subway, with trains every two minutes.

It would never have been affordable for Munich to build that many miles of rail if it had to be in tunnels, like a subway. But most of these lines were already built a century before and had previously been used just for freight, long-distance, and conventional commuter trains. So it was comparatively cheap to adapt them to also provide local transit service. With that many kilometers of rail transit, the idea of centering most development around rail stations is actually realistic.
*

For people who can’t drive or choose not to, the dependence on cars in the U.S. is a huge mobility barrier. It also means that many drivers suffer long commutes on congested roads. Cars and trucks are the largest source of carbon emissions in the U.S., worsening air quality and driving climate change. America’s dependence on them also contributes to the extremely high cost of housing in urban neighborhoods that are served by transit. Because so few places fit that description, people who prefer not to drive everywhere pay an enormous premium.

Take Nashville, for example. There, a well-organized anti-transit lobby defeated a referendum to significantly improve transit service. In most of the city, if you’re not in a car it’s all but impossible to get around after 10 p.m., even if you live on some of the major routes. Other parts of the city lack Sunday service, and many bus trips that should take only 30 minutes end up tripling that travel time because of the long waits for connections. This isn’t the kind of transit that would encourage anybody to leave their car at home.

Sustaining higher gas prices aren’t going to single-handedly save transit systems, as advocates sometimes wishfully hope. European countries shows that, while pricier fuel may drive some people to transit, it doesn’t make a meaningful difference if service isn't improved first.

In some ways, the story of American transit is not so unique. Europeans and Canadians also like to drive. Their countries have also built big expressway networks. The difference is more basic, yet profound: When transit service isn’t good, few will choose to use it.

Fortunately, improving American transit doesn’t necessarily demand multi-decade, hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure projects: It can be done by better advantage of existing space and existing vehicles, and then deploying them in ways that encourage people to actually use them.” ~

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america-suffocated-transit-other-countries-embraced-it/572167/

Oriana:

I think there is one more barrier to effective public transport in the US. Americans are used to going to stores and buying a tremendous amount of stuff all at once — stuff (groceries, home-improvement supplies) that it takes a car — sometimes a van — to transport back home.

I'm not sure what the solution to that would be — delivery services by the store? A limited use of cars specifically for shopping, with commuting to work using mostly public transit? One thing is certain: one innovation leads to another, and solutions would emerge. 
Amsterdam commuters at a bus stop

Charles: 

In Los Angeles are real estate prices soared near every projected metro station and now small cities are emerging around the stations.

Oriana:

Fantastic!! People are always saying that public transportation can't work in America. But give it an earnest try, and sure enough . . .
 

*
ONLY 23% PERCENT OF AMERICANS SEE GOD AS BENEVOLENT
 
~ “Those who believe in an authoritarian God represent 32 percent of America. They believe God is very angry and willing to punish anyone who is unfaithful or who acts in an ungodly way. They may even believe that God causes earthquakes and human disasters as a wake-up call about the sinful behavior of people.

Another 16 percent of Americans believe that God is critical but will neither punish nor comfort his flock. This God has an unfavorable view of society. He does not intervene with the world, but he will cast judgment on people in the afterlife.

The second largest group, comprising 24 percent of the American population, sees God as distant and uninvolved. He does not hold opinions about the world or about personal behavior; thus we are left to our own free will to decide what is right and wrong. This God is less of a person and more like a cosmic force that set the laws of nature into motion.
Those who perceive God as distant have higher levels of income and education than any other group. Approximately a third of all Catholics, Protestants, and Jews believe in a distant God, yet this group is more open-minded when it comes to gay rights, abortion, and premarital sex. Within this group, many people question the existence of God.

In contrast to 72 percent of Americans who believe in an authoritarian, critical, or distant God, only 23 percent see God as gentle, forgiving, and less likely to respond with wrath. Like those who believe in an authoritarian God, believers in a benevolent God think he is very active in their lives. He listens, responds to prayers, and cares deeply about the suffering of others, but he sometimes causes suffering and pain.

Only a quarter of Catholics, mainstream Protestants and evangelics embrace a loving God, whereas less than 14 percent of black Protestants and Jews see God as a benevolent force.
 
Envisioning an authoritarian or critical entity — be it another person or God — will activate the limbic areas of the brain that generate fear and anger. However, when you perceive God as a benevolent force, a different part of the brain is stimulated … . . the anterior cingulate. The God of the limbic system is a frightening God, but the God of the anterior cingulate is loving.

Our Survey of Spiritual Experiences illuminated a fifth personality of God that we think the Baylor study missed. When we asked our survey participants to described their spiritual experiences, many talked about God as an emotional presence, using words like peace, energy, tranquility, or bliss. God was not a separate entity, but rather a force that permeated everything. God didn’t create the universe, God WAS the universe, a radiance that extended throughout time and space. God was light, God was freedom, and for many people God was consciousness itself.

Based upon national surveys conducted by the Barna Group, 11 percent of Americans believe that God is “a state of higher consciousness that a person may reach.” Eight percent define God as “the total realization of personal, human potential,” and 3 percent believe that each person is God.

Something happened in the brains of our ancestors that gave us the power to tame the authoritarian God. No one knows exactly when or how it happened, but the neural structures that evolved enhanced our ability to cooperate with others. They gave us the ability to construct language and to consciously think in logical and reasonable ways. Our research shows that they are the same structures stimulated when we meditate and pray, which is what allows us to consciously envision a loving and compassionate God.

We can’t get rid of our old limbic God, which means that anger and fear will always be a part of our neural and spiritual personality. However, we can train the newer structures of our brain to suppress our biological tendency to react with anger and fear.

Along with the Unitarians, Unity Churches, and Quakers, the Church of Religious Science developed philosophies of greater open-mindedness by proclaiming the inner divinity of the human being and extending kindness to every person regardless of their religious orientation. In these churches, God, consciousness, morality, and science are melded into a universal HUMAN spirit that is simultaneously mystical and materialistically pragmatic. In many ways these modern churches reflect the same deist philosophy that had captured the imagination of the eighteenth-century leaders of the Enlightenment. God had fallen out of heaven and taken up residence in the mind.

Source: the section “THE FOUR GODS OF AMERICA,” in “How God Changes Your Brain” by Andrew Newberg and Mark R. Waldman, 2009. The authors quote the results of a survey  conducted by Baylor University.

*
A FOOD ADDITIVE THAT COULD BE MAKING YOU FAT

~ “The recent study finds one food additive may be (at least partly) responsible for many health issues.

The food additive is calcium propionate, used to keep foods fresh and prevent mold. Some foods containing propionate include:

    bread and baked goods
    dairy products, including flavored milk, cheeses, and puddings
    processed meats such as canned fish and sausage casings

Other foods with propionate added to them include beer, sports drinks, diet foods, commercially prepared potato salad, nut butters, and vinegar.

Researchers initially tested propionate in mice and found it quickly activated the sympathetic nervous system, the part responsible for automatic functions such as heart rate.
This caused a surge in hormones that increased blood sugar levels in the test animals, a characteristic symptom of diabetes. When the mice were chronically exposed to the same amount of propionate typically consumed by humans, they gained weight and became insulin resistant (prediabetes).

To discover how these findings applied to humans, the researchers designed a double-blind, placebo controlled study with 14 participants.

Half of the participants took one gram of propionate in their food. The other half ingested a placebo.

Those who ate food with propionate experienced the same surge in hormones as the mice. According to the researchers, this indicates that propionate may be an endocrine disruptor that increases the risk of both diabetes and obesity in humans.

However, some medical professionals are hesitant to accept the study results, at least for now.” ~

Oriana:

Obviously the sample size in the human study was very small. And it could be argued that mold is more dangerous than a small dose of calcium propionate. Still, this is another (perhaps minor) reason to avoid processed foods. 


 
Ending on beauty:

BELL

Sound, no longer defined
by our hearing. As though the tone
that encircles us
were space itself expanding.

~ Rilke, Uncollected Poems