It Hurts All the Same

 

It’s no surprise MAGA Mussolini has called the imminent danger of a coronavirus pandemic a hoax, nor is it a surprise his MAGA followers swallowed that lie and called for more. They always do. These developments have become so predictable that they no longer warrant the bother of linking to the news stories about them. All the rest of us can do, those of us who live in the fact-based world, that is, is resist the implementation of damaging policies by those who live in the fantasy world of MAGA hate-based politics.

 

J. Bond Francisco - The Sick Child - 1991.9 - Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Sick Child, an 1893 painting by the American artist J. Bond Francisco (1863-1931).

The great surprise is how well scientists and doctors have done in the past 100 years in restricting another pandemic like the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 and 1919, which killed 100 million people around the world. The Spanish Flu came on the heels of the close of World War I, and after it had finally flamed out it had claimed more lives than that most horrific “War to End All Wars”. That was the way the balance had worked throughout history, with battlefield deaths generally being outpaced by the communicable diseases unleashed in the gatherings of large armies and refugees. The later twentieth century holds the dubious distinction of tipping that balance toward human mayhem as the major cause of death in wars.

What is most remarkable about the efficiency of modern science in preventing the kind of communicable disease pandemics which have periodically scourged humanity is that scientists and doctors have done this despite the huge increase in population at the same time worldwide travel has skyrocketed in volume and speed. More people than ever before are moving faster and more frequently from one part of the world to the next, and all the while they are sharing untold numbers of germs both dangerous and mundane with local populations.

In the taking over of the New World by European colonists only two and more centuries ago, those sorts of introductions – though at a slower pace – led to genocidal destruction of the indigenous population through their exposure to an array of unfamiliar diseases. People more often lived in lighter concentrations then than they do now. Travel was certainly far slower, and most people then lived their entire lives in the familiar surroundings of one city or of a handful of farm villages.

The great danger now is the introduction of an unfamiliar permutation of a familiar virus or bacterium. And yet for 100 years the world’s scientific and medical professionals have forestalled the disaster that could easily overtake us if they weren’t vigilant. Calling their sincere efforts a hoax helps no one, and acting on such misinformation would amount to carelessly flipping a lit cigarette butt onto dry brush.
— Vita

 

Through a Glass Darkly

 

“11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
— The Apostle Paul in a letter to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 13:11-13, from the King James Version of the Bible.

DNA kits are very popular now, both for people ordering them for themselves and for those giving them as gifts. Sales of kits doubled in 2017 over all previous years, and have increased again in 2018 over 2017. Interest appears to derive mostly from curiosity about immediate ancestors, on which the kits do a good job of enlightening people, and secondarily about genetic health risks, on which the kits dealing with the subject deliver mixed results, needing confirmation from a medical professional.


One area of controversy with the results, at least for Americans, has come from links to African ancestry for European-Americans, and links to European ancestry for African-Americans. Most European-Americans, or white folks, get results that include some ancestry going back to Africa two hundred years or more, usually less than 10 percent of their total genetic makeup. Most African-Americans, or black folks, get results that include around 25 percent European ancestry.

Cesky Sternberk Castle CZ family tree 116
Portraits of six generations of the Sternberg family in Jiří Sternberg’s study, Český Šternberk Castle, Czech Republic. Photo by takato marui. Tracing ancestry is easier in the pure bred lines and close quarters of Old Europe than in the melange of ethnicities and transcontinental migrations of the New World.

Compared to the ethnic homogeneity of most Old World countries, Americans are mutts, and the melting pot was particularly active in the years of heavy immigration from Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Africans brought into the country as slaves until the Civil War eventually made up a larger proportion of the total population through that period than they have since, averaging close to 20 percent of the total for the first hundred years of the republic, and settling to a range of 11 to 13 percent of the total population afterward. It shouldn’t therefore surprise white people taking DNA tests to discover they have at least a small percentage of relatively recent African ancestry.

It is interesting, however, that DNA test results for black people yield an average of 25 percent European ancestry. It is not surprising there has been mixing of the races, despite laws against miscegenation going back centuries, but that black people have a much higher percentage of European ancestry than white people have a percentage of African ancestry, and yet black people are still and always considered black. This is Pudd’nhead Wilson territory, in which even a tiny percentage of African blood is tantamount to an entirely African genetic heritage. In America, once a person has been accepted into white society, it requires a considerable amount of African genetic input, along with other factors involving economics and relationships, for a person to fall from grace, as it were, from whiteness to blackness.


The evolution of man- a popular exposition of the principal points of human ontogeny and phylogene (1896) (14594954920)
In this 1896 illustration by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), “Man” is precariously at the top of a tree encompassing all life on earth.

The grade has always been uphill, on the other hand, for black people to be accepted into American society, always predominantly white, no matter how much they were genetically European. Initial branding of blackness meant staying black in the eyes of white society until extraordinary circumstances or subterfuge intervened. In all this, what the majority of people, black and white, seemed to have missed was that racial differences were minuscule, along the lines of one half of one percent of the genetics every human being shares. Race itself is an artificial concept, a social construct, rather than a real biological divider.

It’s all in the mind, and those who would reinforce race as a divider of the human species have to perform mental and ethical gymnastics to justify their beliefs since science won’t do it for them. The idea that DNA test results with some percentage of African ancestry are showing merely what goes back millions of years for all of humanity also does not hold up. Yes, everyone on earth does have common ancestors in Africa, but that is not what the makers of DNA home test kits design them to illustrate, since they typically only research genetic relations going back several centuries, that being within the time frame for which they have reliably detailed information on background in their databases.

The immigration scene of young Vito Corleone, played by Oreste Baldini, in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Godfather: Part II. Unlike Vito Corleone when he matured, the majority of immigrants, then as now, do not end up engaged in dangerous and unlawful activities, despite what rabble rousing politicians want everyone to believe.

There also appears to be an assumption among even open-minded white people that since Africa is the cradle of all humanity, then Africans themselves must be genetically closer to that cradle than the rest who emigrated to far continents. African ancestry noted in the DNA test results must, they reason, be hearkening back to long ago ancestors white people share with everyone on earth. No. The test results show genetic input from recent African ancestors. And those recent African ancestors have evolved along with everyone else on earth, including Europeans, triggered by similar environmental and social changes pushing them to adapt. The European discoverers should not be so quick to flatter themselves with ideas of inherent superiority that they lose sight of how other societies have adapted quite well under unique circumstances without prizing discovery and conquest above all else as the sine qua non of human existence.
— Ed.

 

 

Rock-a-Bye

 

Ahhh, wundaful west and wewaxation, as Elmer Fudd might have said, referring to wonderful rest and relaxation. As the weather warms, there can be few finer ways to gain satisfying rest and relaxation than lying in a hammock. Scientists have not studied a great deal the quality of sleep we get while in a hammock, but what little they have gleaned is that the rocking motion of a hammock along with the lack of pressure points on the sleeper’s body promotes deeper, more restful sleep than average.

 

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Ahhh, living the dream! A hammock on Kuata of the Yasawa Group of islands in the Western Division of Fiji. Photo by Isderion.

Hammocks are not sophisticated technology, though there are options available now with some technology such as lights built into them. A hammock in its basic form without a stand, the kind meant to be strung between two trees or posts, is sleep technology going back centuries and invented in the New World. A net of ropes, sometimes with a length of fabric woven in and sometimes using spreader bars at both ends for the ropes, is suspended from two supports like a sling for the sleeper or napper. It is the sling suspension that does away with pressure points. There is not a lot of hard scientific evidence to support the claim, but people with joint problems such as arthritis do often report the lack of pressure points helps them sleep more comfortably. Judge for yourself if and when you have the opportunity to doze off in a hammock.

How is it that after all the years of technological expertise and research spent on improving conventional beds, the simple hammock remains a more comfortable way to rest yet has never seen widespread adoption for every night sleeping except among sailors on old sailing ships or campers staying in the woods? The portability and light weight of hammocks has worked to their advantage for both sailors and campers, but for people in homes that hasn’t mattered as much as permanence and ease of entry and exit for old people and invalids. It is also pretty nigh impossible to engineer a hammock for comfortable long term use by two people at once. In the home, therefore, the hammock has been relegated to the same niche of peculiarity as the bean bag chair, more so really, since the great majority of folks consider hammocks suitable for outdoor lounging only.

What a shame then that the better quality sleep and more comfortable lounging afforded by hammocks is experienced by many only on summer days in their backyard or on vacations to warm resorts. Though a soothing experience, it’s not entirely idyllic. Going to sleep outdoors under the stars makes for a good snooze until the small hours, when it often gets chilly and dewy. For those lucky enough to have a deep, covered porch on their house, the six to eight foot deep kind that is styled more properly a veranda, and is rarely built even on expensive houses anymore since the general adoption of air conditioning, those lucky folks can sling hammocks outdoors under the eaves, which help to keep the dew from settling on them as they snooze happily away, perhaps pulling a light blanket closer around them to ward off the chill before dawn. A comfortable hammock, a book printed on paper, and a tall, cool drink make summer heat bearable, and all three can be a respite from the technological world we inhabit now.
— Techly

 

Charlie Don’t Surf

 

“Charlie, that’s beneath you,” Steve Bannon told interviewer Charlie Rose on the 60 Minutes television program this past Sunday, referring to Rose’s remark that we are a nation of immigrants except for the Native Americans. Bannon’s statement was bizarre and nonsensical, and seemed to come from his own peculiarly politicized vision of American history in which admitting that European immigrants largely stole the Western Hemisphere from Native Americans in a shameless display of cupidity and genocide is somehow nothing more than shameful leftist propaganda. So much for honestly facing the truth.

Charlie Brown parade balloon
Charlie Brown parade balloon at the 2016 Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. Photo by Midtownguy2012. Maybe Steve Bannon was referring to all the immigrants in the streets of New York City below the floating Charlie Brown balloon.

Even though Mr. Bannon is out of the White House now, his legacy lives on in the administration’s immigration policy, specifically the recent announcement about ending the Obama era DREAMer policy of granting a path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. Mr. Bannon does not appear to care for immigrants, legal or otherwise, no matter what sort of intellectual gloss he slops onto his elitism. He is an unsavory man who sees nothing wrong with declaring war on the brown-skinned peoples of the earth, as long as people other than him and his kind are doing the fighting. The short termed White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, in his own succinct way, characterized Bannon absolutely correctly. Mr. Bannon is someone who takes himself too seriously, and is accustomed to overawed admirers reinforcing his own high opinion of himself.

A clip from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and here featuring Robert Duvall as the gung ho Colonel Kilgore.

For all that, what do Mr. Bannon’s ideas amount to? Not much other than what can be found in the writings of Rudyard Kipling – the White Man’s Burden and all that – but without Kipling’s compassion. Steve Bannon is a man out of his time, which rightly should be about 150 years ago. Perhaps that was when America was great for him and his kind, or at least it was if he ignored the multitude of recent German and Irish immigrants, the millions of African slaves recently freed after the bloody Civil War, and all the Mexicans still at large in the new territories and states of the American southwest as a result of the giant land grab known as the Mexican-American War.

“Charlie Don’t Surf” from the outstanding 1980 triple album Sandanista! by the English band The Clash.


In that world, Mr. Bannon would no doubt have felt at home because his cognitive dissonance about American history would not have been noted by his contemporaries. He would instead have been part of the mainstream of Old Boy elites riding high on the backs of immigrant and poor persons’ labor, while snootily ignoring that fact and looking down on them, the source of his wealth, and of his leisure to engage in what amounts to little more than mental masturbation. Maybe that’s what he meant when he said “Charlie, that’s beneath you.”
― Ed.

The First Thanksgiving cph.3g04961
The First Thanksgiving, 1621, an early twentieth century painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863-1930). The painting portrays Native Americans as guests partaking of the bounty provided by The Pilgrims, while by all honest accounts of the period the Native Americans generously saved the newcomers from privation in their early years of struggling to survive in the unfamiliar surroundings of the New World. Steve Bannon would no doubt find comfort and confirmation in the relationship of the two groups as portrayed in this painting.

Too Much of a Good Thing

 

Sugar can be derived from numerous plants, including beets, corn, and the fruit of trees, but it has come into its own since the Middle Ages in Europe as the refined product of the sugarcane plant, a perennial grass. The plant originated in New Guinea, and from there traders introduced to Asia, where it eventually found its way to southern Europe by way of Arab merchants. As noted from its origin, the plant grows in tropical or sub tropical climates. Europeans quickly developed a taste for refined sugar, but since the plant would not grow well in Europe or northern Africa, they needed to find either another source or another place to grow, or forever be at the mercy of Arab merchants, who kept the price high.

When European explorers stumbled upon the New World in their search for a trade route to the Far East that bypassed Arab middlemen, they were interested in exploiting sugar resources as much as spices. The tropical and sub tropical bands of the New World – the Caribbean, much of eastern South America, Central America, and the far southeastern portion of North America – turned out to be well suited for raising sugarcane. The problem was finding a suitably cheap labor source for the backbreaking and dangerous labor involved in sugarcane cultivation as well as refinement. The Europeans, after exhausting the Native Americans as a labor source, turned to Africa as a source of slave labor.


There were other plantation crops that Europeans raised in the New World exploiting slave labor, such as tobacco (a plant native to the western hemisphere) and cotton, but sugar was the big money maker for them, the linchpin of Atlantic trade from the 1500s well into the 1800s. Sugar grown on plantations in the New World traveled, some in the form of rum, to northeastern ports of North America and then on to Europe, where it was traded for manufactured goods; some of the manufactured goods then were traded in Africa for slaves, who were loaded onto ships destined for plantations in the New World, their voyage across the Atlantic being known as the Middle Passage of this triangle of trade. Some didn’t survive the voyage, and of the ones who did, many suffered abominably under harsh conditions in the sugar growing regions and elsewhere.

No such thing as too much (4578918974)
Pancakes with syrup, or syrup with pancakes? Photo by jeffreyw.

Hundreds of years later, sugar is still exacting a toll from poor black people, as well as poor and working class people generally. The European quest for cheap sugar succeeded all too well. Now it’s found in far too many supermarket foods and beverages, where in the case of processed foods it masks the loss of wholesome flavors. Sugary beverages like soda and many fruit drinks are especially egregious sources of the endocrine disrupting carbohydrates present in refined sugar that can lead to obesity and type 2 diabetes. These processed foods are easy to prepare and are relatively cheap and, because of the sugar in them, to some people they taste good enough.

“Big Rock Candy Mountain”, first recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928, is about a hobo’s idea of paradise. McClintock claimed to have written the song in 1895, based on tales from his youth hoboing through the United States. McClintock’s 1928 recording was used by Ethan and Joel Coen at the beginning of their 2000 film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

People could cut back their consumption of processed foods, and certainly they could drop sugary sodas and fruit drinks out of their diet and not lose any essential nutrients. People can use will power and self control, even though there is evidence that sugar’s effects on their health are more insidious than industry mouthpieces would have everyone believe. People can do all those things. But they don’t. Why not?

What if crack cocaine were as cheap as sugar? How about cigarettes? Opioids? What levels of consumption would we encounter then among the general population, and among the poor and working classes specifically? All those substances stimulate pleasure centers in the human brain, just like a good hit of sugar does in a smaller way, and all are ultimately destructive in high enough doses. Is sugar as destructive as those other addictive substances? No, not in the short term, and it would be ridiculous to equate a cookie with a hit of cocaine. In the long run, however, over the course of ten, twenty, or thirty years, sugar consumption at modern American levels of a hundred pounds or more per person per year is proving destructive enough. Time to turn some of that exhausted soil in the tropics over from growing monocultures of sugarcane for export to growing fruits and vegetables the locals could consume for themselves. We could easily cut back from two or three lumps of sugar to just one.
― Izzy

 

Walls of Ivy

 

The middle of winter is time for garden maintenance projects the growing season doesn’t allow time for, such as keeping English Ivy (Hedera helix) at bay by pulling it off trees and structures, or yanking it out of the ground. The idea of eradicating it altogether is best left to fantasy. Besides, some gardeners, like the ones who brought the plant from the Old World to the New in the Eighteenth Century, harbor no ill will toward English Ivy and instead choose to encourage it’s growth. Those who look on it as a pest and choose to discourage it can be left wondering why anyone in their right mind would plant it next to a building and allow it to destructively sink its roots into crevices in mortar or siding.

 

Hadera helix 1
English Ivy in winter climbing a tree in Poland; photo by Agnieszka Kwiecień.

 

The misconception about ivy’s destructiveness is due to confusion about names, and presents a good argument for learning the scientific names of plants rather than relying on common names. English Ivy, the invasive pest which produces aerial rootlets that find their way into a building’s cracks as it climbs upward, is not to be confused with Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata), which uses suckers to adhere to a building and is therefore less harmful. Boston Ivy is also an introduction from the Old World to the New, though it has a native relative in the Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia). Boston Ivy, not English Ivy, is the vine that decorates old brick buildings around New England, and particularly on college campuses, where it lends its name to the Ivy League.
Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata)
Boston Ivy in autumn, South campus, State University of NY at Buffalo; photo by Y.G. Lulat.

 

It is no easy or safe task pulling English Ivy off a building where some ill-advised previous gardener had planted it or allowed it to grow under the impression that he or she was evoking some of the atmosphere of tweedy academia. Depending on the building construction and its soundness, chunks of mortar or shards of wood siding are apt to come loose with the ivy where its rootlets have dug in. It’s best to cut the vines at ground level and let them die back in place, drying and shrinking in the process, and then after several months have passed, pulling away the remaining dried bits once they have lost their hold on the structure.
Wrigley Field-Right Field Ivy and Bleachers
Wrigley Field, Chicago – Right Field Wall with Boston Ivy; photo by Flickr user wallyg.
Some gardeners think they can manage English Ivy clambering on a well maintained building. They may believe its evergreen and tough-as-nails attributes are worth the trade-off of constant vigilance over the safer alternative of planting the deciduous and better behaved Boston Ivy. More power to them if they think they can keep an eye on it! It is far more likely, however, that where you see English Ivy on a building it is there because someone didn’t know any better and, relying on common names, thought one ivy wasn’t much different than another and so let it go thinking it lent the place a touch of classy greenery. An excellent case can be made here for paying attention to scientific names for plants rather than dismissing them as the affectations of pedantic know-it-alls, and it’s a lesson those gardeners have learned all too well who have spent countless winter hours tugging out skeins of Hedera helix where it has tangled itself into absolutely everything.
― Izzy