Health before wealth

Ever since I came across the phrase sanitas per escam, well, that is a motto that I have used a lot.  Even my food photographs on Facebook, before I took it all down, were in an album under that title.

My food photographs.  As in I made them. I took those photographs too.  And, yes, there was a separate album for foods made by M.

We continue to cook most of our meals.  And we continue to plate and serve in a manner that is pleasing to the eye as well.  We have simply stopped taking photographs.  We cook, we eat, and we enjoy.  Just like humans always did for the longest time.

Cooking and cleaning takes up time, of course.  No wonder I don't have time for Game of Thrones or whatever else that people are talking about.  Heck, I don't even get enough time in the day for me to play bridge online!

Well, yes, such tasty and healthy meals all the time means that I might live past 75, and die only at 99.6 years of age; but, that is a different problem for another day.

But, is spending time on Game of Thrones, or Facebook, or whatever else more important and valuable than cooking ones own meals?  Do people ask themselves this question?

The author of this op-ed argues something similar, by particularly aiming at what he refers to as The Prepared Food Industrial Complex.  Like the ones that young people rave about. Sometimes even the older ones.  But, ...

The $17 billion- a-year food delivery market is very flexible and well-intentioned like that. All these companies want to do is give me my life back by keeping me out of the kitchen — more time for YouTube, more time for CrossFit — and they’ve created myriad ways to do so.

I don't ever understand why time spent for cooking is a waste, and why time spent at the office or at a ballpark or in front of a digital screen is more valuable!

In fact, much of the P.F.I.C. pushes the idea that any time and any effort put into cooking is a waste. The goal, one meal kit company declares, is “saving time to make time — for everything else you want to do.” (Just so long as what you want to do isn’t “cook from scratch.”) Another meal kit service praises mail-order smoothies as a life-changing idea because there’s “no time to research, prep, buy, measure and blend before work.”

An acquaintance once joked that in most homes the kitchen is the most expensive real estate that is never used.  If only that was indeed a joke and not the reality!  Perhaps uber-clean stove-tops and ovens are no longer the result of prideful home-cleaning but merely a reflection of non-usage.

People who cook at home are conclusively healthier, consuming less sodium and fewer overall calories than people who mostly eat out. Cooking at home is better for the planet: it avoids the single-use plastics and paper goods that delivered food usually comes with, and with just a bit of creativity with leftovers, home cooking can be entirely free of food waste. Cooking is being studied as a promising tool for improving mental health, and even as a method for eliminating unhealthy behaviors such as smoking. And no matter what restaurant you order in from, there’s always a home-cooked meal that can be made for less money.

People seem to want to deny all these facts when they talk about the convenience of eating out all the time.  Crazy!

I am with the author when he writes:

Do I cook at home every day of the year? No. I love the burger at my favorite bistro too much to do that.

Yep. Same here.  Our burger bistros are different, however ;)

Sanitas per escam!

When nobody reads the Mueller Report, ... who cares about Azodicarbonamide!

Alexandra Petri, who writes an awesomely funny column at WaPo, has one right after the Mueller presser.  She writes as if she is Mueller talking:

My fellow Americans, it is not Mueller Time. It will never be Mueller Time. I wish you would remove my likeness from your T-shirts and steins. I, Robert Mueller, will not be fired. I quit.
First off, it is obvious that none of you has actually read the report, or you would all sound like Justin Amash. Pete Buttigieg read “Ulysses,” but you will notice how quiet he is on the subject of my report findings.
I guess I should not be surprised that people hate to read so much that they will let folks just go around willy-nilly obstructing justice. Donald Trump’s rise is general proof that people hate to read. I kind of thought that maybe one or two people would want to see if the Wikipedia plot summary matched the book, but no.

And all that is just the beginning!  Hilarious. Laugh is all we can do in these stressful times.

If we don't read books, newspapers, and all that big items, what are the odds that we will read the list of ingredients in the food stuff that we buy?  Like in the bread.  Until today, I had no idea that there is something called Azodicarbonamide.  I have often joked with students that if they see an ingredient that they cannot even spell, they should not even think about buying it leave alone eating it!

In The Guardian's series on toxic items in our lives is where I came across Azodicarbonamide, and more.  It is more about caveat emptor.  (Read that too, in case you missed it or need a refresher.)  This latest is about food. About bread:

Azodicarbonamide has been banned for consumption by the European Union for over a decade.
But despite petitions from several advocacy groups – some dating back decades – the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still considers these to be Gras or “generally recognized as safe” to eat, though plenty of experts disagree.

Insane!

For years now, I have been buying bread that is locally baked, often at prices that are way higher than the national or regional brands.  Apparently that might be a good strategy.  But, maybe I should check their label too?

But, don't we have the federal government to take care of all these?

“The system for ensuring that ingredients added to food are safe is broken,” said Lisa Lefferts, senior scientist at the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest. Lefferts, who specializes in food additives, said that once a substance was in the food supply, the FDA rarely took further action, even when there was evidence that it isn’t safe.

Seriously? WTF are the taxes for then?

“In EWG’s view, it is important for companies to start removing chemicals associated with health risks, so that shoppers don’t have to have a chemistry degree in order to decipher food labels,” said Naidenko.

I agree.

If you like such information from The Guardian, you want to contribute a couple of dollars to fund them?

Nowhere to hide :(

I try my best to avoid all things tRump.  But, it is impossible.  He and his actions stick around like how the toilet paper strip clung on to Dear Leader's shoes!

Like this headline: "Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science."  How can one avoid such news reports?  Every single day is another bucket-load of bad news!

What's he now up to with climate science? Haven't tRump and his toadies done enough damage already?

But then I forget that enough is never enough for these sociopaths for whom cruelty is the point!

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.
And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

How so?

Like so:

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.
Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

And, of course, there will be a new climate review panel:

That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

You want to know what a comparable stable genius this tRump appointee is?

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies.

Yep, demonizing CO2 makes you, dear reader, a Nazi!  Poor little defenseless CO2!

Meanwhile, a response from a scientist in the country that continues to apologize for Hitler and the crimes that were committed:

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to my department colleagues:

Back--way back--President Carter and California's Gov. Brown tried to rally the people. Brown was ridiculed as Gov. Moonbeam. Carter's solar panels were taken down by the Republican who succeeded him.
In dedicating those solar panels, Carter noted that it was the beginning of a moment, a road not taken kind of moment. He looked at a goal of 20% renewables by the year 2000! Who knows if ever the GOP will abandon its carbon in its various forms as a vote-winning strategy. I am not counting on it.
Meanwhile, the market--which the current GOP has abandoned in favor of protectionism--is betting on anything but carbon as an energy source in the future. At some point, the GOP base will find out the truth. But we will be all be burnt toast by then ;)

Doesn't tRump care about leaving the world a better place for his own grandkids, or is he so much a narcissist that he simply couldn't care?

I suppose those 63 million voters don't care because they are ecstatic that they are merely accelerating their travel to meet with their creator!

Caveat Emptor

I had some quick learning to do when I transitioned from electrical engineering to graduate studies in topics about which I was fascinated but were all brand new.  Every day I was encountering new phrases that might have been elementary to some but were the metaphorical Greek and Latin to me.  And sometimes they were literally in the Latin.

This was also in the prehistoric days before Google. Before the internet as we understand it today.  Which meant that any time I ran into new phrases, it was darn difficult to figure out what the hell it meant. Sometimes, despite my ultra-self-consciousness and introvertedness, I managed to get myself to faculty's offices and ask them to clarify.

One of the phrases that initially stumped me was caveat emptor.  I chanced upon a faculty searching for a book in the library.  Lowdon Wingo.  I had never come across such a name ever.  He was ancient even back then.  (He will one supercentenarian if he were alive now)  I gathered up all my courage and asked him what caveat emptor meant.

Buyer beware!

That, by itself, gave me a lot to think about the market system.

If the buyer is not carefully looking through the product details, then?  So long, sucker!  Uncle Sam doesn't really care about the human buyer, but is always far more keen on the most important person ever--the corporation!

Economic life in the US has not changed all that much over these years.

Across a span of cosmetics, including makeup, toothpaste and shampoo, to items ranging from household cleaners to fruit juice to cheese, hundreds of potentially harmful ingredients banned in the EU are legally allowed in the US. ...
“Generally, the EU has got it right. In the US we have a strong favouritism towards companies and manufacturers, to the extent that public health and the environment is being harmed. The pendulum has swung in an extreme way and it’s really going to take a general awakening by the public.”

Caveat emptor!

Want an example? "In cosmetics alone, the EU has banned or restricted more than 1,300 chemicals while the US has outlawed or curbed just 11."

Why is it so here in the US?

The clout of powerful industry interests, combined with a regulatory system that demands a high level of proof of harm before any action is taken, has led to the American public being routinely exposed to chemicals that have been rubbed out of the lives of people in countries such as the UK, Germany and France.

I don't  understand such a behavior.  Don't American industry leaders and lobbyists have children and grandchildren that they worry about?  Why would they not want to make sure their little ones will have an awesome future?  Why would they want to condemn those innocent kids to caveat emptor?

I know; that was a rhetorical question.  That was answered well in Thank you for smoking, remember?

Oh well ... so, is there any hope?

“I’m hoping for dramatic changes in our politics but there’s little chance of that,” said Bergstein. “The federal government is barely functioning, so consumers have to realize they have the power to become more vocal and demand change. The awareness is still not there, though.”

Caveat voter!

Finding meaning in meaninglessness

tRump is a RINO.  No, not that one.  But, this: He is religious in name only.

The "Two Corinthians" man is far from being a true Christian, as much as he is far from being a patriot when he makes out with the American flag.  Not for a moment does any sane person ever imagine tRump getting high on religion, like some of the uber-religious do.  In a marvelous autobiographical essay, the author writes: "I have confused religion with drugs, drugs with music, music with religion. I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all."  Maybe if tRump had tasted alcohol, his life--and ours--would have been different.  But then we also had a disastrous Republican President who had not only binged on alcohol but had even done cocaine, but found god after all that!

Anyway, the demagogue knows that bringing Jesus into political rhetoric is important in this country that was founded by fanatics who fled England: "the impulse to purify the group through separation from mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not be more fundamental to the nation’s history.”

And here I am, an atheist, who has never been anywhere near even pot, and I have no idea how the more potent drugs are.  Alcohol is rarer in my life than animal protein is.  I don't need religion or drugs to be ecstatic about life!

God and religion are not going to die anytime soon.  At a dinner a month ago at a meeting, an older man engaged me in a conversation about yoga and more.  The more included woo-woo talk. And then he made the mistake of asking me for my opinions.  I told him, in a matter of fact tone, that all our angst seems to be because we humans can't seem to figure out how to deal with two definitive aspects: We are here because our parents had sex, and we are going to die.  I suppose now he knows better to avoid me the next time he sees me ;)

With time, I have come to understand that life is what it is.  And life ends. Dogs die. Trees die. We humans also die.  Perhaps we are the only living beings who are fully aware that death awaits us, and I am thankful for that:  "we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life."

In my transition from a believer, I thought I had to beat up on religion, on faith.  I wanted to argue that there is no god.  But, I care not anymore.  Have not cared about those for a long while.  My atheism does not depend on beating up on god or religion.  Like the review essay notes, such a framework also "releases atheism from its ancient curse: its sticky intimacy with theism."

Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

We are meaning-haunted creatures.  What a lovely phrasing!

Some day in the future, I hope, we will have a political system in which politicians do not have to fake their ways with religion and god.

We still haven’t seen that system, and it’s hard to imagine it, but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised land. And that land is in this life, not in another one.

Take me to your leader!

More than a month ago, in my talk at the annual meeting of my peers, I suggested that even as we promote the educational framework within which we situate diversity and empathy, we need to recognize that identities help people deal with the fundamental existential angst.  We need to acknowledge that, and respect it, without any condescending attitude.

I have been saying this for years.  I gained this understanding thanks to the number of students I have interacted with over the years who are very different from me.

Which is why in this post almost exactly three years ago, as Brexit was unfolding, and as candidate tRump promised a Brexit-plus here in the US, I wrote:

It is a "deeper emotional issue" about whatever it is that provides value to people.  In the brief time that we get to live on this beautiful planet, we handle our existential crisis in so many different ways.  We try to answer the question of "who am I?" through many affiliations and ideas,  When people search for meaning, there are different institutions that provide them with comfort.  ...
The political identity also plays an important role. While I personally and intellectually recognize that the political identity is a freakish accident--being born in a country--it is very much like the accident of being born in a family that practices a particular religion, speaks a particular language, eats particular foods, listens to particular music, ... All these accidents together help with understanding our own place in the cosmos.We err when we conclude that those institutions that give us various identities are irrelevant.  It is a huge mistake to force people into behaving as one.

Andrew Sullivan apparently made a similar point more recently:

For Sullivan, cohesion comes from transcendental symbols and stories—i.e. religion, nationhood. Liberalism’s public square has “an empty center” that must be filled. “The fact that liberals do not have a language to speak about nationhood or borders or countries … has led to the far-right gaining power,” Sullivan said

Exactly!

Even prior to that, back in September 2014, I wrote in the context of the Scotland referendum to break free:

We are so much wrapped up with the idea of globalization that we forget we are humans and we like, we love, identities.  Identities especially when there is a long and rich history of the peoples.  Economics--being materially well off--does matter to us, yes.  But, we seem to overlook that we do not live on bread alone.  There is a lot more than mere material satisfaction that makes us human.  Identity--religious, ethnic, linguistic, ... and often these are also intertwined.

The challenge is to let people hold on to whatever identity makes sense to them, even as we develop a greater understanding.  And this is no different a bottom-line from what I have been ranting about forever:

The challenge, as I see it, is to figure out how to understand each other and engage in constructive cross-cultural relationships even while holding on to the identities and without making those identities as a metric for hierarchical comparisons.  The solution is not to erase the identities but to understand that we can create a much better future even as we tightly embrace whatever identity that we want to hold on to.

I reinforced this in the discussions:

I am ok with whatever identity that people want to have. But, what I am not ok with is using that identity in order to promote their supremacy and to systematically keep the "other" out. What I imagine is, I would argue, far more challenging than is to have an EU or an India. In India or EU, the diversity is accommodated under a big tent, but--and especially in India--the bigness of the tent allows for people of similar identities to stick to their own kind.
It is not the size of the geography that should matter--think about the tiny countries in the western part of Africa, for instance. The challenge is whether people are informed, educated, and human enough to think beyond their respective boundaries and identities.  

All these require leadership of a certain kind.  But, instead of sorting these issues out, we are tragically rushing into discussing "electability."  Oh well, we will certainly get the leaders that we deserve!

Let it go ... NOT!

“Holding onto a grudge really is an ineffective strategy for dealing with a life situation that you haven’t been able to master. That’s the reality of it,” said Dr. Frederic Luskin, founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project.
“Whenever you can’t grieve and assimilate what has happened, you hold it in a certain way,” he said. “If it’s bitterness, you hold it with anger. If it’s hopeless, you hold it with despair. But both of those are psycho-physiological responses to an inability to cope, and they both do mental and physical damage.”

Ah, well ... hold that thought ... not so fast.

I practice a no-forget-no-forgive approach to life.  Like in many other posts, I explained here, about my take on assholes who create the grudge in the first place:

There is a huge difference, however, between wallowing and viewing the world as a worthless place, versus wallowing while enjoying the world and the vastness of this universe. 

I enjoy the world.  The river. The goslings. The green. The warmth. A few people ;)

I smile--though people cannot ever seem to sense that I am smiling!  I joke. I enjoy jokes. The sillier, the better.  Like, have you heard this one before?

Q: What do you call a cow that is lying on the grass?
A: Ground beef!

Or, how about this:

Why do you have to "put your two cents in"... but it’s only a "penny for your thoughts"? Where's that extra penny going?

Have you heard me laugh aloud?

I do not give a shit about those who did me wrong.  Once when a colleague offered an apology at a meeting, and the chair turned to me, I merely said "can we move on to the next item in the agenda?"  Burn!

The key here is to enjoy life.  When assholes reveal their assholeness, it means that they are not going to help me enjoy life, but it is their nature to suck my life away.  I then take a detour around them, and continue to enjoy the vastness in the universe that is for me to marvel and enjoy.

Which is exactly what we have planned for this long weekend.

Le Deuxième Sexe en Amérique

I grew up in an India that had a woman as a Prime Minister.  I grew up with an elder sister. In my classes, girls were smart, and attractive.

Even though I was fully aware of the restrictions on women of all ages, while men of all ages had a lot more freedom, I never thought twice about the ability of women to be engineers, doctors, or political leaders.

Here in the adopted land, I am shocked day in and day out on how much women are not taken seriously, especially in politics. 

Heck, even in college administration.  In the history of my university, which has gone through many transformations from its founding in 1856, guess how many female presidents we have had?  Let me make the math simple: How many female presidents of my university over the past 163 years?

One.

Yep. Only one. From 1995 to 2002.

But, hey, the consolation is that our story is more the rule than an exception. At least we had one female president.  The flagship university in the state hasn't had even that many. I don't think they have even had a female provost!

I have threaded together a few tweets about how the Democratic Party has a number of qualified female candidates in the contest and yet it is the (white) men who are being considered as electable. Even in 2019, women are considered not electable. 

In a potential toss up between the pussy-grabber and a qualified woman, the pussy-grabber winning because his opponent is a woman says a lot of awful things about my adopted home!

Seriously, the pussy-grabber?

Meanwhile, in the old country, a man who ditched his wife in order to freely go about his divine mandate of Hindu-fying India and restoring traditions is all set to win another election.

Something is rotten.

The naked truth

I have always been impressed with people who seem free and liberated enough that they color their hair in purple and blue and whatever else; or wear outrageously colorful clothing; or couldn't care about how they look when they are clothed or not.  Nudity in the public terrifies me, and I bet am not alone.

I am, therefore, all the more impressed that an academic at Cambridge, with graduate degrees from Oxford, sometimes presents self in the nude in order to convey the point.  In the nude in the public.  Or, in the nude in videos that the entire world can watch whenever.  And, oh, this a female academic.

I won't embed any unclothed image of Victoria Bateman's in this blog, even though it is not at all difficult to track them down.  Bateman herself provides plenty even at her Twitter stream.

Why the public nudity sometimes?  For one, she is pissed off that women are "invisible" to economists and economic historians.  And, she is one hell of a strong feminist.

I think “my body, my choice” should be at the heart of feminism. It shouldn’t just apply to birth-control rights.

Bateman's forceful and well thought out arguments remind me of Camille Paglia.  But, I don't want to digress.

Bateman has come out with her latest book, which is about how women made the West rich.

The Industrial Revolution was a new technological wave. Women were crucial for sowing the seeds of that wave. They created the incentives for technological change, the savings, the skills base, and the entrepreneurship. But when that feeds through to the economy, women don’t get paid back in return.
And so we see quite a sizable decline in women’s participation in the labor force throughout the Industrial Revolution. By the late 19th century, we have the roots of the idea of the male breadwinner model. That then becomes the middle-class ideal, and we then get the cult of domesticity.

Which leads us situations like this today:

There was an International Labour Organization (ILO) report out last year that showed that globally 75% of unpaid care is provided by women. They estimated it’s the equivalent of 2 billion women working full time, for nothing. The ILO says the way in which unpaid care is seen as women’s responsibility is one of the big impediments to women entering the workplace and being able to achieve equality within the workplace.

Now, don't for a second be tempted into thinking that Bateman comes from a privileged background and, hence, the OxBridge and feminism and nudity and all that.  Nope.  Bateman's parents didn't complete high school.

[Her dad,] inspired by Thatcherite entrepreneurialism, went into business for himself, again in ductwork, and her mom helped out with the administrative side while working other odd jobs and raising Bateman and her two younger sisters. Customers often couldn’t pay Bateman’s father, and the business soon went under. When Bateman was 11 and home sick, she’d go with her mom to clients’ homes begging for them to pay what they owed, sometimes blocking their driveways to help persuade them. At home, however, the family was on the flip side of that ugly equation, several men armed with bats demanding that her parents pay what they owed.
When Bateman was 14, her parents split, and her mom raised the girls as a single mother.

A tough life.  A blue-collar background just like Paglia's.

A woman who has accomplished a lot. "Bateman is embraced and appreciated by colleagues and students alike for her approachability, her down-to-earth sensibility, and her sense of humor."

Her dad, now in his 70s, still works in duct fitting, traveling about in his van. Her mom was in a bad car accident 10 years ago and is on disability. One of her sisters went to night school and has pulled together a career for herself, but the other still struggles mightily.

But, even this uber-confident feminist academic sometimes feels the bad moments ... what does she do? "I play the Ella Fitzgerald song “They all laughed.”

Whether we are clothed or in the nude, men or women, academics or duct workers, we all find comfort in Ella Fitzgerald ... and Louis Armstrong.  

Toilet Talk

With some regularity, I blog about shit. 

I am surprised that more people don't talk about shit.  I don't mean about one's daily bowel movements and whether or not one needs more fiber in the diet.  Nope. I am interested in aspects of shit like in this post or this one, for  instance.  Remember the piss-pot?  (Yep, there is more for any interested reader.)

So, yes, it is time to blog about shit again.

Imagine Rome about 2,000 years ago.  How did people take care of their shit?  For that matter, where did they pee?

These are genuinely interesting questions, if only one turned their attention away from the latest video of cats playing the piano!

Anyway, back to the Romans 2,000 years ago.  Where did all their pee go?

As best we can tell from historic and archaeological data, ancient Romans peed in small pots in their homes, offices, and shops. When those small pots became full, they dumped them into large jars out in the street. Just like with your garbage, a crew came by once a week to collect those hefty pots of pee and bring them to the laundromat.

They took them to the laundromat?

Why? Because ancient Romans washed their togas and tunics in pee!

WTF! Holy shit!

So, why did the Romans wash their clothes in pee?

Human urine is full of ammonia and other chemicals that are great natural detergents. If you worked in a Roman laundromat, your job was to stomp on clothes all day long—barefoot and ankle deep in colossal vats of human pee.

I decided I needed more details.  The internet delivers:

If you’ve investigated the ingredients in your household cleaners, you may have noticed a prevalent ingredient: ammonia. As a base, ammonia is a useful cleanser because dirt and grease–which are slightly acidic–get neutralized by the ammonia. Even though early Europeans knew about soap, many launderers preferred to use urine for its ammonia to get tough stains out of cloth. In fact, in ancient Rome, vessels for collecting urine were commonplace on streets–passers-by would relieve themselves into them and when the vats were full their contents were taken to a fullonica (a laundry), diluted with water and poured over dirty clothes. A worker would stand in the tub of urine and stomp on the clothes, similar to modern washing machine’s agitator.

And you thought your job sucked! ;)

This photograph tells us a lot about how Romans shat (or is shitted?) back in the day:

Oh my!

Don't you want to know how they cleaned up after shitting?  Read that essay and find out for yourself!

Why don't they teach such stuff in history classes?  Maybe in a few years, I should offer a freshman seminar titled "Piss, Shit, and Fart--But Never Simultaneously" ;)

Our lives are so different from washing clothes in pee and shitting in the public with people all around.

So the next time you’re enjoying a morning constitutional, think about the fact that defecation and urination are more than biological functions; they are cultural activities that involve artifacts and technologies that change through time.

Indeed. Thankfully!

"She" sells ... by the sea shore!

Take a look at the image below:

Source

A woman in a two-piece swimsuit, staring at the ocean with a drink in her hand.  Right?

Now, imagine a man in his swim trunks staring at the ocean with a drink in his hand.

Unless the image of the woman is needed because it is a part of a story in which women are the focus, the story can be told with an image of a man, yes?

If the story is not really about women, or a woman, then why the graphic of a woman in a two-piece swimsuit with a drink on her hand?

It is the old saw of objectification of women. Sex sells!

BTW, the writer is a guy.  All the more then why a graphic of a guy in his swim trunks is more appropriate, I would think.

The story for which that graphic is a lead-in has the byline "one of the best ways to reduce stress while traveling is to just plan less and let spontaneity take over."  Tell me again why you need for this a graphic of a woman in a two-piece swim suit with a drink in her hand!

And, this is in the NY Times!

Oh well ...

As for the content?  I largely agree with the point that he makes: "I strongly recommend considering planning less, even if that’s leaving just a few days open."

Surely there are other graphics that will work to get this point across, don't you think?

Murderous Masturbating Men!

A few days ago, I tweeted this:

#SNL has an awesome #Election2020 bumper sticker for #Republicans who are opposed to #abortion:
"Life begins at erection"
🤣🤣🤣
And, oh my, Cecily Strong as Susan Collins is phenomenal!https://t.co/wcmGyelQGi#tRump #ShootsOn5thAvenueAllTheTime

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) May 12, 2019

It kept nagging me that I have seen "life begins at erection" before.  But, simply could not track that down.

Today, I did.

I found that at my own blog! 

A post that is almost seven years old included this cartoon:

We men have it easy.  A few minutes of pleasure, and we move on. 

Now, should one of the sperms crack through the egg, then it is the women who has to deal with a fetus inside her for 280 days.  And then give birth.  And then feed and clean and ...

Yet, as The Guardian put it:

Source

CNN compares Alabama's move with the rest of the world, and I find this that shocked me:

Countries with more liberal laws include Finland, India and Japan, where provisions for abortion are made not only in cases of rape or risk to the woman's health, but also on socioeconomic grounds.

India? Do mOdi and his toadies know about this?

Commentators are educating us about what happened in Romania, when the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu completely banned abortion and contraception.

Prior to 1966, Romania had one of the most liberal abortion policies in the world. But, desperate for population growth, Ceaușescu issued Decree 770, essentially nationalizing Romanian women’s wombs. Both abortion and contraception were criminalized for all women age 45 and under who had not borne at least four children (later increased to five). The only exceptions were for rape and incest, high-risk pregnancies, and cases in which the fetus could contract a hereditary disease from either parent. The law was strictly enforced. The Romanian secret police, the Securitate, registered suspected pregnancies and kept tabs on women until the birth of the child. It was the kind of natalist authoritarianism that US "pro-life" advocates have long dreamed of.

The sharia comes to Alabama. And to Georgia, to Missouri, to ... Orgasmic times for a good chunk of the 63 million!

Process this!

My father, who is almost 90 years old, helps out with the food prep by cutting vegetables.  A couple of months ago, when I was in India, one of those mornings when he was engaged in this work, for which he uses a dangerously rickety knife, well, that knife sliced a little bit of his skin.  After he cleaned it up, I put a finger cot on it, and he resumed the knife work.

A few minutes later, he wondered where that finger cot went.  We then located it among the wastes, thankfully.  I reminded my father about the health risks--to himself and to others.  For a good measure, I added, "paatti always said that you never know what went into the cooking in the hotels.  The chef may not have even washed his hands."

When we process and cook our own meals, then we know exactly what we are doing.  Chances are that this is the best way to practice sanitas per escam.  It is not only about the hygiene, but also about the amount of salt, sugar, fat, and whatever else is added.

One would think that this is common knowledge. Common sense.  But, we humans are not always about being sensible.  We then want science to tell us what is correct!

Over the past 70 years, ultra-processed foods have come to dominate the U.S. diet. These are foods made from cheap industrial ingredients and engineered to be super-tasty and generally high in fat, sugar and salt.
The rise of ultra-processed foods has coincided with growing rates of obesity, leading many to suspect that they've played a big role in our growing waistlines. But is it something about the highly processed nature of these foods itself that drives people to overeat? A new study suggests the answer is yes.

Next research question for scientists: Is the Pope catholic?

And ultra-processed foods include more than just the obvious suspects, like chips, candy, packaged desserts and ready-to-eat meals. The category also includes foods that some consumers might find surprising, including Honey Nut Cheerios and other breakfast cereals, packaged white bread, jarred sauces, yogurt with added fruit, and frozen sausages and other reconstituted meat products. Popkin says ultra-processed foods usually contain a long list of ingredients, many of them made in labs.

Seriously, a gazillion-dollar scientific study is needed to tell us this?

The convenience of inexpensive ultra-processed foods comes at a high hidden cost.  If only people will put their kitchens to use by cooking their own meals--without slicing their fingers!

A vacation to have ...

A lovely essay this is; I hope it is not paywalled.

The essay, which is about countries racing to "use" the moon as a pit-stop for their space ventures into the vast beyonds, concludes with a poem for children that Neil Armstrong wrote nearly a decade after his trip to the moon.

Here's Amstrong's "My Vacation":

Nine Summers ago, I went for a visit.
To see if the moon was green cheese.
When we arrived, people on earth asked: “Is it?”
We answered: “No cheese, no bees, no trees.”

There were rocks and hills and a remarkable view
Of the beautiful earth that you know.
It’s a nice place to visit, and I’m certain that you
Will enjoy it when you get to go. 

Wouldn't it be awesome to go there?

Work builds character

Perhaps you are nodding your head in agreement with the title of this post: Work builds character.

Are you sure?

Let's suppose the work is with the mafia.  Does that work build character?  How about as a butcher?  A teacher? A soldier? A ...? You get my point.

Perhaps you then argue that "work builds character" is applicable to young people. To kids. To Teenagers.

If we are what we repeatedly do, well, "to see if work really builds character, then, we need to ask: What do we repeatedly do at work?"

In the first chapter of his 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith marvels at the division of labor in a pin factory. He writes that someone who had to perform every step of the pin-making process himself would struggle to make a few pins a day. Put him on a team of ten, though, and assign him only to sharpen the point of every pin that comes down the line, and he can contribute to the manufacture of thousands.⁸But who do you become if you sharpen pinpoints all day long? Do you advance in virtue? Do you attain moral excellence? 

You can now see where this discussion is headed.  Imagine the work that the "cleaners" do every single day as Facebook content moderators.  What character does that build?

So what should we do? Repair the whole rickety heap of our work ideology? Redesign work so that it delivers the dignity, character, and purpose it’s supposed to? Pass laws that limit employers’ control over workers’ bodies and public behavior? Push for transparency regarding the actions workers perform, and establish norms that they specialize less narrowly and have rotating duties? Set humane limits on service work and eliminate the pointless tasks most professionals do during the workday? It wouldn’t hurt to try. These are all worthy short-term goals that would help work in America live up to its promise. But making these changes would likely either reduce productivity or increase costs, leading companies to accelerate the rollout of machine labor in every aspect of their business. The changes would be self-defeating. Eventually, there would hardly be any jobs at all.

What exactly are we working for?

I am not sure if we ask ourselves that question even once.  We seem to have been brainwashed into believing that we have to work, and work is the answer to the question of our existence.  So much so that if we come across a person who cares not about work, but who does not depend on others either, we have only negative things to say about them.

Of course, I am channeling my life here, as I always do in my blog.  I know damn well that I could "work" a lot more than I do.  Instead of playing bridge, I could spend time writing essays. Or even books.  But why?  What for?  The typical response is about fame and fortune.  But, what is the big deal about all that fame and fortune that I might have given up, and am continuing to give up?  What does this say about my "character"?

A few weeks ago, a big-time economist, with plenty of fame and fortune, and with a lot more left in him, died. He committed suicide. I have no idea about what troubled him that severely for him to end his life.  What a tragedy!  Imagine if he had sacrificed a chunk of his fame and fortune, and had worked "only" as a high school teacher, and enjoyed his life.

We are born. We live. We die. Within this there is work. "We just need meaning, wherever we might find it."  I am confident that work does not offer any meaning to our existence.  It does not build any damn character either!

Killing me softly ...

Killing animals for our purposes is what this post is about.  Take off now if you are convinced about this issue either way, or if denial is the way you deal with it.

If you are continuing to read this post, it then means that you are like many of us, who have made an uneasy peace with how we treat animals.

This post is in response to two essays that I read: One is about the way we treat animals for our food, and the other is about lab animals that we use in our search for medical and scientific understanding.

In both, we seem to operate with the same bottom-line:

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

Many years ago, when I attempted to minimize my problems by comparing to some bigger ones that many others deal with, my daughter jumped to correct me: "You cannot compare pain. Your pain is your pain."

By the same logic, the cow's pain is the cow's pain, and we cannot compare that to our suffering.  The anxiety and panic that a lab rat experiences is not to be compared with what we humans experience.

Yet, we routinely eat juicy beef burgers and subject lab rats to "humane" experiments!

With the rise of Christianity, which preached that God made animals for humans’ use, attitudes toward animals grew bleak. French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote that responses to painful stimuli in animals are merely reflexes, and that animals are not capable of any internal experience because they don’t have souls. To this vacuous view, Voltaire delivered a devastating response about a century later. “Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously,” Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, in 1764. They “nail it on a table, and dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins,” only to “discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself … Has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel?” Modern science has validated the great thinker’s rhetorical question, providing an overwhelming multitude of evidence that animals, from mice to macaques, robins to ravens, do feel pain and can suffer, physically and emotionally.

Of course, we have come a long way since the bad old years.

That people care about lab animal well-being is heartening, and the fact that the animals have any protections at all is not trivial. It wasn’t always so. Like much of human history, the history of animal experimentation is one of gruesome cruelty. In the pursuit of knowledge, entertainment, or profit, humans have inflicted unimaginable suffering upon billions of animals over centuries.

We have evolved that much.  But, we have a long way to go.

While modern technology has greatly reduced painful experiences of many lab animals, does that allow scientists to use them as we please? “I don’t believe that there’s a philosophical a priori answer to say whether we can do this or not,” Born said. “It’s a value judgment on the part of society. And it’s a discussion that society needs to have with itself.”

While those are about the animals in science labs, what about the animals we raise and kill so that we can eat them?  If you prick them do they not bleed?

Why is the "problem of meat-eating seems to be so intractable?"

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

And, 

[Farm animals] share many of the same mental and emotional characteristics that we recognise in ourselves and acknowledge in the animals closest to us – dogs and cats. To continue our self-indulgence, we resist the evidence and reinforce the status of farmed animals as objects, as commodities, as food. Their inner lives have become ‘the forbidden territory’ we dare not enter lest we deprive our palate and shatter our sense of ourselves.

If we stopped to think about all these, it will " shatter our sense of ourselves."

I am not a socialist, but ...

Some of my colleagues think that I am against their left-leaning (in some cases way out left) politics just because I am not in their dues-paying organization.  If only they read even a couple of posts here at this blog!  Or, better yet, if only they had discussed intellectual ideas with me instead of sending me to exile!

The old commie-teenager in me has never really died, as much as the young man with a whole lot of hair has not disappeared from my idea of who I am.  I continue to rail against terrible money-grabbing practices as I have always done.

What increasingly pisses me off is this: The digital economy roars on for those who have money.  For the rest, it is a crawl at best.

Seven years ago, almost to the very date, I ranted against Facebook's IPO.  I quoted from a Forbes column:

Microsoft when public in 1986, its market value was $780 million. Microsoft’s market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years. Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors. When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me. Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return. Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all.

Money-making in the contemporary digital economy is less and less democratic.

The latest in this is Uber.  (Full disclosure: I have never had an Uber account, but have been in Uber's services a couple of times.)

A successful I.P.O. for Uber will validate and perpetuate the mega-venture capital model, and all the distortions that it entails.

The author--incidentally, an Indian-American--lays out a case, that is less about Uber itself and more about the big venture capital funders:

The largest of Uber’s major shareholders is SB Cayman 2 Ltd., which holds more than 16 percent of Uber shares. That investment represents the SoftBank Vision Fund, a $100 billion mega-venture capital fund that has fundamentally changed the venture financing world. The fund, whose biggest investors are the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the founder of Japan’s leading internet company, has been writing enormous checks — ranging from $500 million to $5 billion — to start-ups including WeWork, Lemonade, Wirecard and DoorDash. SoftBank’s presence has inflated deal sizes in the venture capital world, where rounds of financing are typically well below $100 million.

These big money funds are taking us all for an uber-ride!

And, of course, Uber is out to screw its employees, er, drivers.  How?  Remember that bottom-line from the Forbes column seven years ago? "The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all."  Here too it is the same:

Uber is unprofitable. In fact, they have not really clearly articulated how they're going to become profitable. They have indicated that they intend to clamp down on worker bonuses and incentives, which they acknowledge will upset drivers. At the same time, it's hard to grow, have more drivers, and replace those who turn over and quit, if you're not competitive. And so now we're in a situation of low unemployment. Wages are rising in other industries, but they're not in ride-share driving. So I think they're caught; they're in a price war with Lyft and others. It's hard to see how they're going to be able to accomplish growth, recruiting enough drivers, and become profitable.
So what this IPO is doing is it's giving the Uber investors the potential to cash out. So they may not have to worry about whether Uber ever becomes profitable if they can convince enough people to just buy the stock.

You want an example ?

Mr. McMullen, 33, is part of an exclusive club: the semiretired tech millennial who left California after getting rich. Like many in this group, he is a newly minted multimillionaire who became wealthy by working for high-profile San Francisco start-ups like Uber and Lyft, which are now about to go or have just gone public. Once their wealth was assured, these tech workers quit the companies and fled California, which has the nation’s highest state income tax, at more than 13 percent, to reside in lower-tax states like Texas and Florida, where there is no personal state income tax.

Screw the drivers!

Uber wants to shift the risk, it wants to shift the cost, onto the driver. The end result is that drivers are denied access to worker compensation in an industry that is very dangerous. They have no unemployment insurance, and they obviously get no health or pension benefits. And they're not subject to the wage and hour laws, or laws overseeing race and gender discrimination. So the algorithms that Uber develops are the bosses.

But then, what do I know; after all, according to many of my colleagues, I am nothing but bourgeois trash!

The mystery that writing is!

Of course, I had no idea about writing until the first term of graduate school.  I am, therefore, sympathetic towards students, in particular, who are yet to figure out how to write, especially in their own voice.  It takes time to learn to write, and then to learn to write in one's own style.

One of the many things that I had to learn right in that first term of that first year was about numbers.  Sometimes they were written out as words. Sometimes as numerals.  Nobody gave me an explanation; I observed the patterns in the publications and then decided on a practice.

Not until today did I learn something deeper about the numerals versus words when it comes to conveying numbers in the written form: "Numerals jump off the page; numbers written as words lie on the page and don’t interrupt the flow." That makes complete sense now that I think about it.  More so now in the world of electronic screen reading where we skim through paragraphs, the numbers do call our attention and essentially interrupt the flow.

But, this is also a stylistic issue; it is intended "for readers who have the leisure to savor what they read."  Ah, yes.

Over the years, I have also come to understand that writing involves a lot of re-writing.  Over and over and over again.  I routinely tell students this, but nobody seems to pay attention.  But then even academic (published) writing often comes across as if the author did not care to re-write.

If we’re speaking of a larger, more overarching mistake that writers make, it’s not taking the time to read their work aloud as they’re refining and editing it. If they did, they might easily find all sorts of errors and infelicities that they could themselves solve

Infelicities. 

I would never have worked that word into that sentence, in conveying that idea, because my vocabulary is limited.  Not that I don't know what infelicities means.  Knowing what a word means is one thing, but to know how and when to use it is different.

Two decades ago, back in California, I had writing instructors assist me in conveying to my classes the importance of writing.  One of them reminded students to be cautious when using the thesaurus in order to use big and fancy words that students often think make their papers more sophisticated.  One of the many examples that she gave was this: Consider the sentence, "their successful marriage was built on a solid foundation of love and understanding."  Basement is a synonym for foundation.  Imagine a marriage built on a basement of love!

It has been almost 32 (or thirty-two) years since that first writing experience in graduate school.  I am continuing to learn to write.

Hello! My name is ... Suriname?

After five weeks of misspelling my name, and me often pointing out the incorrect name, the student seems to have finally figured out how to spell my name.  But, at least this is a student who made that mistake.  A senior citizen takes the proverbial cake with how she butchered my name as "Shram."  I suppose I should be happy that she didn't make an "Ashram" out of my name!

My grandmother said that in the traditions, they gave children god's names so that it then gave them yet another opportunity to think about the divine.  And she, like many elders, didn't care much for the modern names that don't have any godly interpretations.

Sometimes, acquaintances shorten my name to "Sri." If these are people whom I might rarely encounter, then I don't waste my time and energy to correct them.  In my mind, I take it as they are addressing me with the honorific "sri" from the old country.  To others that I might interact with more, I politely tell them that I go by my first name in its complete form--Sriram.

But, never in a million years would I have ever imagined that people might have been duped into thinking that after three months of travel they would meet the god Sri Ram.  And that is exactly how some were misled, writes the author of the book that I have been commissioned to review.

Think about the Subcontinent in the 1860s and 1870s.  The bastards had a tight squeeze on India and were extracting every possible penny that they took with them to London.  Meanwhile, some of their colonies far away needed labor because the damn good-hearted managed to screw up the African slave trade.  So, they created an indentured labor scheme that would then take people from the Subcontinent to halfway around the world to the Caribbean.

The problem was the local culture and the fear of the unknown.  But, the colonial masterminds knew well how to tap into the culture.  "These recruiters knew the inner workings of indenture and skillfully used their experience to inveigle intending indentured Indians."  Bastards, I tell ya!

What strategies did they use?  "For instance, recruiters told the intending Indians that they were going to Sri-Ram instead of Suriname.  To Indians, Ram indicates a religious place that sounds like the Ramayana ... "

The bastards knew their enemy really well; so well that they knew exactly how to string them along.  Sociopaths are experts at this, remember?  "Someone with sociopathic tendencies can ‘read’ other people well and understand their emotions. But a sociopathic person reads others in order to manipulate or take advantage of that person."

Thus, Suriname became Sri-Ram!  And more twists to the names of places so that gullible Indians would fall for it.  And they did.  They boarded ships to Mirich Desh (Mauritius), Chinidad (Trinidad), and others.  For the long voyage: "The sea voyage from India to the Caribbean is about eleven thousand miles."  Took them about a 100 days, to Sri-Ram. Sad!

Playing god?

The anti-vaccination minority seems to be getting louder and more powerful with every passing day.  These are some strange times when it is people in rich countries who are opposed to vaccines, when it used to be the case even a decade ago that people in poor countries were the ones who needed to be convinced about vaccination!

Vaccinations have helped us defeat diseases, and even wipe out the nasty pathogens.  The small pox virus now lives only in highly secure test-tubes.  It is difficult to imagine that it was once one of the most feared monster diseases ever.  Even now my father has tales about the small pox wave that killed and maimed and disfigured children.

Defeating one disease after another, and coming up with ways in which we have effectively postponed death--which is what the remarkably high life expectancy means--is a tad like we are playing god, and very unnatural:

We play god when we vaccinate. We play god when we give women pain relief during labor. ... Our whole life is entirely unnatural. The correction of infertility is interfering in nature. Contraception is interfering in the most fundamental aspect of nature.

Where does "natural" end and the artificial begin?  We wrinkle as we age, for which there is now Botox and cosmetic surgery.  We grow bald: Hair transplant surgery has made Joe Biden look young again. Or, in tRump's case, he has become an orange monster!

An Oxford philosopher, Julian Savulescu, argues that we should go full speed into playing god:

The fact that we’ve done it or nature has done it is irrelevant to individuals and is largely irrelevant to society. What difference would it make if a couple of identical twins come not through a natural splitting of an embryo, but because some IVF doctor had divided the embryo at the third day after conception? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.

Is it morally irrelevant?

Consider blood transfusions.  Unnatural. We humans do it routinely these days.  Left to nature, we would die from blood loss. But, we play god by taking blood from people and infusing it into others who need that vital juice.  So unnatural and playing god this is that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that blood transfusions are disrespectful of life itself.

Is morality irrelevant when we play god?

"People will vote with their feet once those technologies offer significant benefits," says Savulescu.

People will choose the unnatural alternatives. We have plenty of problems coming our way, like this:

The interesting question is how long we should live. At the moment we’ve pretty much maxed out what we can do with treating cardiovascular disease or cancer. But if we could attack aging, which is the real disease that causes adult onset cancer and cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes, people could live healthily for 200 years or longer. Then we’ll face the deep question, how long should we live? How many people should there be? How we will pay for people living to 150? How will younger people carve out a place in society? Will life become boring? These are really deep and difficult questions. Is this something that people should be able to choose, or should we place termination criteria on how long people can live? It may be that our death starts to become not just our choice, but society’s choice. Is it better to have a society with 500 million people living to 80, or 250 million people living to 160? Those are difficult questions that we may well have to decide. This idea that we’ll just leave it to the market to resolve is not going to wash.

So, what is his greatest worry?

I think we are the biggest threat to ourselves. The elephant in the room is the human being. For the first time in human history we really are the masters of our destiny. We’ve got enormous potential to have unprecedentedly good lives.

Or unprecedentedly godawful lives.  The choice is ours. The moment is now.

Sunrise ... (to) ... Sunset

Ramadan began Sunday evening here in the US.

Chances are that tRump has not tweeted--presidentially--about Ramadan.  After all, he is no Justin Trudeau, who said that in English and in French too!

But, the great dictator's office did put out a formal release:

I wonder if his white-supremacist, Islamophobic supporters will approve of their Dear Leader's office issuing such statements!

Muslims are required to from abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and sexual relations from dawn to sunset.  Though, Neil deGrasse Tyson adds more to the timing of it all:

The Qur’an says plainly that daytime fasting during Ramadan ends at “Dark” not at sunset. “Dark” is a good match for the end of twilight. This time of year: up to 15 mins later in equatorial latitudes. 30 mins at middle latitudes. And 45 mins at higher latitudes. I’m just saying. pic.twitter.com/XAseweAIhM

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) May 6, 2019

I, of course, do not observe this or any religion's practices.  I don't fast either.  When "in moderation" is my mantra, when there is no binge involved--not even in reading or watching videos--to deny myself anything does not appeal to me.  Especially when it comes to food.

However, oddly enough, I seem to mark the passage of time by even noting the major religious observances.  It is almost as if I am an atheist without a cause ;)

Ramadan Mubarak!

Ramadan Mubarak!

Fasting. Prayer. Charity. Forgiveness. Renewal. That’s what Ramadan means to me. Here are a few things you may not know about it: https://t.co/hdZipWD0hQ

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) May 5, 2019

In search of happiness, fulfillment and meaning

A month short of two years ago, I blogged about the difference between a religion and a cult, in which I referred to the old joke:

Question: What's the difference between a religion and a cult?
Answer: 200 years

As I quoted there,

Cults don’t come out of nowhere; they fill a vacuum, for individuals and, as we’ve seen, for society at large. Even Christianity itself proliferated most widely as a result of a similar vacuum: the relative decline of state religious observance, and political hegemony, in the Roman Empire.

Yep, when it began, Christianity was a cult.

A middle-aged writer, who grew up in a cult when she was a kid, writes in The New Yorker about her experiences that point out how complicated it is to understand cults, and why people are drawn to them.  She writes there:

But, to be fair, the notion that U.F.O.s are going to take you to live on Venus is not obviously crazier than the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, not to mention the unscientific beliefs put forth by other mainstream religions. Sheer popularity and longevity can do a lot to render odd convictions reassuringly familiar.

A longevity of 200 years can easily mainstream a cult into a religion.

She writes, "There will always be people in search of what cults have to offer—structure, solidarity, a kind of hope."

Such a search leads people to all kinds of cults and leaders.  Like Rajneesh.

Or, like this latest one, which sounds way bizarre:

It was called “collateral” — nude photos and other embarrassing material that female members of an upstate New York self-improvement group turned over to their “masters” to ensure obedience, silence and sexual fealty to the organization’s spiritual leader, Keith Raniere.
Now some former members of the group, NXIVM, are poised to break their vow of silence for the first time by testifying against Raniere, who has been compared to a cult leader.

These included educated, professional, women.  "The women are instead described as “independent, smart, curious adults” in search of “happiness, fulfillment and meaning.”

I suspect that we will witness the rise of cults along with a diminishing status of mainstream religions.  People know well about religions for them to submit to religious leaders en masse as we humans once did.  However, as technological challenges, in particular, make us angst-filled beings who are compelled to worry about our existence, cults will step up to provide "structure, solidarity, a kind of hope."

I suppose we have a choice: Understand our mortality and deal with it in our daily lives, or follow the orders from a cult or a religious leader, who claims to know the truth but does not.  A long time ago, I decided to understand my creation and death on my own terms, however difficult the task is.  To quote the Nobelist Steven Weinberg, again:

Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God

Need a Plan B. Problem is that it does not exist!

The sun is shining, and spring is in full bloom.

Yet, as Max Boot writes, "I am in despair as I have never been before about the future of our experiment in self-rule."

tRump has proved over and over again that nobody will do anything even if he shoots somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue.

And now he apparently has god also on his side!

“People say, ‘How do you get through that whole stuff? How do you get through those witch hunts and everything else?’” Trump said, turning to Vice President Pence. “And you know what we do, Mike? We just do it, right? And we think about God.”

Holy shit!

And, he continued:

“One of the things that Mike and I were discussing just a little while ago—people are so proud to be using that beautiful word, God, and they’re using the word God again, and they’re not hiding from it,” he said. “They’re not being told to take it down, and they’re not saying we can’t honor God. In God we trust. So important.”

Thus spake the pussy-grabbing sleazeball!

It does not shock me anymore that the religious right is solidly behind this horrible human being.  While politics always has made strange bedfellows, never have we witnessed such a combination.  The righteous followers of Jesus in bed with "the racist, pxxxy-grabbing, child-caging, transphobic, Muslim-hating, “sh*t hole” mocking Nazi apologist," as Charles Blow describes tRump.

We continue to dig way down and far away from the high bar that Abraham Lincoln set.  Lincoln  was asked if God was on his side, during the Civil War.  To which Lincoln replied: “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”

If god is always right, and he has selected tRump as his envoy, as the evangelicals claim in their support for him, does it mean that god approves racism; pussy-grabbing; child-caging; homo- and trans-phobia; Islamophobia; mocking the poor in shitholes; promoting white supremacy; ...?

Maybe god will reelect him in 2020 in order to teach us non-believers a lesson that we will never forget!

The (mis)rule of law

Perhaps it is the teenage rebel who continues to live within me, or perhaps because I am always pissed off about something or the other.  Yet, despite the anger within, I am a wuss who obeys the law.  I simply do not have the backbone to openly question the law and its enforcers.

I do have the greatest admiration for the courage and determination that people demonstrate when they question the law, fully knowing that they could be imprisoned for months or even years, should the law find them guilty.

Imagine if MLK and others had respected the rule of law and not protested against the existing system that treated a population as less than equal.

A geography colleague--in the larger community--is one of those courageous and determined people who are willing to risk it all in order to do the morally correct thing.  He--Scott Warren--writes in his recent update:

By now most of you know the story. In January 2018 I received misdemeanor charges for doing humanitarian work in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Days later, I was arrested and then indicted by federal grand jury in a three-count felony harboring charge for giving "food, water, clean clothes and beds" to two undocumented individuals in my hometown of Ajo, Arizona (http://kjzz.org/content/10966/arizona-aid-worker-arrested-accused-harboring-undocumented-immigrants). The judge released me on my own recognizance, but the two undocumented individuals were held in detention for weeks, deposed as material witnesses in the government's case against me, then deported to the countries from which they had fled for their safety.
Trials for both the misdemeanor and felony are coming up, May 6 and May 28, respectively.

Warren is fighting the US government.  One can easily imagine what a challenge this is.  If he fails in this fight?  Warren can be locked away for years!!! :(

Despite that, Warren fights on.  He writes:

My future is most directly at stake in these cases. But I am well situated to weather a felony charge. In the future, there may be others who will not be so well resourced. Regardless, the government may continue to expand its interpretation of the harboring and smuggling laws to target not only humanitarian aid workers on the border, but possibly family members, friends, churches, lawyers, doctors, charities, and all those in the interior of the country who support undocumented people. Even if that support is in the form of the most basic of human needs for "food, water, clean clothes, and beds." 
I encourage you to use this moment in ways that you can, to shine a light not just on the border, but on the people and places in your own communities most affected by these issues.

Warren joins a long line of people who have courageously stood up against the forces, who defend their actions by using a legal argument: Necessity defense/doctrine.

This legal argument has deep roots: History is full of situations in which breaking the law was morally justified, and a critical means of changing unjust laws. The abolition movement, the women's suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s all included protests, sit-ins, and other acts of non-violent civil disobedience. Each of these movements saw activists jailed and prosecuted for challenging laws that were changed as a result. While controversial at the time, these struggles are now understood as heroic efforts that led to major milestones in human rights.
What many people don't realize is that, in such situations, breaking the law can be legally, as well as morally, permissible, and our legal system recognizes that breaking the law is sometimes justified.

Our collective progress is thanks to the courageous few who act according to their conscience, and then lead us also towards a better society.

History proves that strict adherence to immoral laws can be foolhardy and destructive. Laws are not perfect. They evolve over time to reflect society's changing values. Our ability to act rationally and prioritize morality in the face of these contradictions is what moves us toward a more just world.

In the case of Scott Warren, and others who are battling the immoral acts of the US government, there are a few ways that you too can help.  Warren provides that information also in his email:

For those who want to support with a financial contribution, please consider a donation to Armadillos Busqueda y Rescate (Armadillos Search and Rescue). This volunteer, civilian organization searches for migrants lost in the Arizona desert and regularly recovers the bodies and bones of those who have died. Many volunteers are immigrants themselves and I consider them all friends. Donate at https://www.gofundme.com/armadillos-busqueda-y-rescate1, offer a message of support, and help them surpass their fundraising goal.
Feel free to distribute this email message widely, post to social media, and share within your own social circles.