"You were right about your prediction. About covid."
Small talk is rare at the grocery store. When it happens, it is not so easy to understand the other with the words coming through our ill-fitting masks.
"What prediction? What did I say"
I was genuinely curious. For one, that she had paid attention to what I had told her. And, I was right?
"When it began, you said this will take a year or more. And that is what's happening," she said.
Of course I am no epidemiologist. But, I did read and watch experts, including Bill Gates. They were pretty darn clear that it would take between a year and two before the world got a firm grip over this.
"Oh ... the science is clear. We can try to deny it as much as we want to ..." I replied.
The science-denying President, who believes that he is the foremost expert on any topic including the global epidemic, goes to rally after rally yelling in his grating tone that we've turned the corner.
The reality is a complete contrast to his world of alternative facts and truthful hyperbole!
Reading never fails to underscore how much I don't know any damn thing. I could spend all my hours reading, not wasting time playing bridge or doing any of my "wasteful" acts, and I will still not know any damn thing.
Karthika Nair's interpretation of the Mahabharata is a case in point. One of the voices that she channels is that of Ulupi, whose connection to the Kuru family is through Arjuna. A queen of the Nagas, Ulupi has a son, Aravan, through Arjuna during his exile years. Nair refers to Aravan (Iravan) being celebrated by a few Tamils in the Koothandavar cult.
Koothandavar? Cult?
The first result in a Google search for Koothandavar is Koovagam.
It is famous for its annual festival of transgender and transvestite individuals, which takes fifteen days in the Tamil month of Chitrai (April/May) ... The festival takes place at the Koothandavar Temple dedicated to Iruvan (Koothandavar).
Aravan aka Koothandavar, who was born from the union of Arjuna and Ulupi, is celebrated thousands of miles away in the southern tip of the subcontinent?
It turns out that Koovagam is located not far away from Neyveli, which is where I grew up!
A mere 25 miles away from Neyveli is this place where annual celebrations for Aravan are held, and I am finding out about it when I am 10,000 miles away?
Maybe I didn't know because it brings transgenders and transvestites to the temple, and the mainstream--definitely back then--did not care much about them and tried to only marginalize them?
Too many questions!
Wikipedia adds:
The participants marry the Lord Koothandavar, thus reenacting an ancient history of Lord Vishnu/Krishna who married him after taking a form of a woman called Mohini. The next day, they mourn the god Koothandavar's death through ritualistic dances and by breaking their bangles. An annual beauty pageant and several other competitions like singing contests are held.
The more I read, it turns out that there is much more to know about. So, read and learn I shall.
I scanned through. I was convinced that the reviewer had not exaggerated one bit. "The poems of Until the Lions are graphically typeset on the page so that they seem to be dancing, a celebration of visible sound."
Later in the night, I got to reading the book. Yes, it is unconventional and impressive. Even the simple explanation that Nair gives in the introduction for choosing the Mahabharata over the other Hindu epic, Ramayana: Unlike in the Ramayana, where the enemy is far away and some Other, here "that mortal enemy is one's own kin; the blood the heroes spill is all their own."
Think about the family disputes, among the rich and the poor alike. While there might not be any literal blood spilling, the emotions are not that different from those described in the epic. The Mahabharata is the one that I have always favored over the Ramayana, as I noted back in 2013:
I loved those epics. Phenomenal works of literature from centuries ago. What I read were mere re-telling; I can easily imagine that the works in the original will be quite a treat for those well-versed in Sanskrit. The Mahabharata, which I prefer a tad over the Ramayana, was Rajaji's version that I read and it was one gripping page turner when I read that as a kid.
Nair lists the key characters from the Mahabharata who are featured in her innovative interpretation. Those descriptions alone are enough compensation for the price of the book. Consider the following about Vyasa:
"in his spare time." What an editorial comment!
Over the decades of living in my adopted country, I have forgotten some of the characters. Nair reminds me about them. But, there was one in her listing that was new: Sauvali. Dhritarashra chose her as a "concubine during Gandhari's pregnancy." Yuyutsu was the son. He was the only son among the Kauravas who survives the war, and performs "the last rites for all his fallen kin."
Not having known anything about Sauvali, I chose to read the chapter about her first, ahead of everything else. Nair does not mince words--she writes about the rape of Sauvali.
There's so much to understand about the human condition, which is what great authors have been doing over the centuries of storytelling.
When I first read Harry Frankfurt's explanation of bullshit, I was simply floored. He had managed to convey in simple language what I had been struggling with inside but lacked the ability to articulate anything meaningful about it.
The book came out way back in the early years of W. Bush's second term. While Frankfurt never made any reference to the issues of the day--like the war in Iraq--the systematic bullshit from the administration worried me as much as I was concerned about their efforts to hide the truth. And it was this articulation of bullshit that Frankfurt provided that made all the difference to my understanding of the world around me. Like a fog lifting to reveal a blue sky and a bright sun, Frankfurt's explanation of why the bullshitter bullshits made it all clear:
For the bullshitter…is neither on the side of the true nor on the side
of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the
honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent
to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care
whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks
them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
I highly recommended the book to anybody who asked me for suggestions. I guest lectured about bullshit and critical thinking. I even required students in the university's Honors Program to read the book in their preparation for the thesis work. (One student dropped out of the program because of this requirement!)
Which is also why I was especially worried as candidate tRump started growing in strength during the Republican primaries in 2016. I wrote about it in February 2016.
What was beginning to reveal even then became an immense challenge after tRump gained the lead. “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” It is exhausting to keep refuting bullshit, and while we are at it, he produces even more.
I wrote in that post--a reminder that this was in February 2016:
Think about anything that Donald Trump says at any of his rallies. They are all bullshit. Now, think about all the work that has to go into refuting the errors. A huge magnitude of energy will be needed to refute his bullshit. You will be barely into the process when a new day dawns and Trump would have generated more bullshit.
63 million, including "friends" and commenters here, voted for this bullshit artist, a conman. One of the commenters who ridiculed tRump and his "followers" later voted for him in November 2016. To quote from Shakespeare, "So are they all, all honourable men."
The following is the unedited post from February 24, 2016: ***********************************************
Ah, yes, after this topic, which is about the certainty that we all face, perhaps bullshit is one of my favorite topics. After all, it takes a bullshitter to love bullshit ;)
People talk about the past golden age, like the golden age of cinema, or the golden age of cricket (no, not the bugs!). We now live in a golden age, and of an interesting kind:
We are currently in a golden age of bullshit. The internet is awash with unchecked claims.
Well, I read that on the internet. So, is that bullshit or the truth? Isn't everything in the internet true anyway ;)
So, of course, curious people want to know who are the people who are most likely to believe the bullshit. What is an individual’s propensity to believe in bullshit? Develop "a Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR)" then. What does the research show?
Summarizing the results, Pennycook, et al., write that “[people] more
receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability
(i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to …
conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and
paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and
alternativemedicine.”
If you believed that, you probably rank way high in the scale ;)
Seriously, that makes sense, right? So, what can be done to make sure people will be lower in the SBR scale?
Basically,
the goal here should be to get people to slow down and more carefully
examine the information being presented to them. To scan it, in other
words, forbullshit.
To be engaged and to examine the information is nothing but the rational, critical approach that science employs. The scientific method.
if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.
The unfortunate aspect is that the very scientific method of questioning anything leads the people with high BSR to believe that scientific research is all bogus. Science, on the other hand, sniffs out bullshit. But, sometimes the scientific method cannot be enough to tackle bullshit. Why?
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
You want a real example? Think about anything that Donald Trump says at any of his rallies. They are all bullshit. Now, think about all the work that has to go into refuting the errors. A huge magnitude of energy will be needed to refute his bullshit. You will be barely into the process when a new day dawns and Trump would have generated more bullshit.
Since then, the neighborhood has become even more heated.
In spring and summer, protests erupted in response to the horrific murder of George Floyd. So, some tRump supporting neighbors decided to publicly display the "blue-lives-matter" flag. A neighbor whose values coincide with mine was visibly upset. This is a man who has never shown any negative emotion in all these years that we have lived in the hood. "What they mean to say is all white lives matter," he complained to me. We commiserated as liberals do.
When masks became mandatory in public spaces like grocery stores, some neighbors started wearing masks that had their Dear Leader's name. With the red hat on top, of course.
The beauty of liberal democracy is that anybody who qualifies under the constitution can run for any elected office. It is up to the voters to determine their eligibility. Which is why tRump doesn't shock me as much as the fact that there are tens of millions of people who support him, despite all the horrible tweets of his, and despite all the horrible things he has said about a whole bunch of people not only in this country but even outside the US.
The following is an unedited copy of the post from October 26, 2016: ***********************************************************
Decision-making within the 35-home neighborhood where I live became a tad contentious. The rhetoric got heated. I followed Harry Truman's "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" and quit the governing board.
If a 35-home neighborhood can generate enough political heat for me to throw in that metaphorical towel, do you think I will be able to stand even one tweet from Adolf Trump?
What shocks me more than Drumpf as the major party candidate is this: There are tens of millions of people who support him, despite all the horrible tweets of his, and despite all the horrible things he has said about a whole bunch of people not only this country but even outside the US.
We cannot dismiss this as a freakish outlier. To me, this is all the more evidence that there is a wide gulf between the democracy that we idealize and the reality of it all. This gulf has existed all the time; it is not anything new. But, never before has it become this glaringly in our face, which means we can't really be in denial anymore.
[Maybe] the problem is that we were expecting too much out of it in the first place ... It's time to stop pretending that there's such a thing as a rational voter.
I agree. Maybe it is time we lowered the expectations. And lowered it a great deal. It is the unrealistic expectations that also then end up with the complications like the ballot measures that we regular people simply cannot even understand and, yet, are asked to vote on. The same unrealistic expectations of rational voters thinking through issues is also how the Brexit screw-up happened. It is the same story in any democracy, not only here in the US.
"Can ordinary people, busy with their lives and with no firsthand
experience of policy making or public administration, do what the theory
expects them to do?" Of course not. "Mostly," Achen and Bartels write,
"they identify with ethnic, racial, occupation, religious or other sorts
of groups, and often — whether through group ties or hereditary
loyalties — with a political party."
Exactly. Back in the old country, I was always shocked at how ethnic, religious, and other affiliations seemed to lead plenty--perhaps an overwhelming majority even--to vote. I tell ya, my adopted country is no different from my old country!
The author writes, "it’s finally time to make peace with a simple fact of political life: Informed, individualistic rationality is a chimera." I am ready. I made my own peace with it a long time ago, which is also why until a month ago, I never ruled out Hitler winning on November 8th. It is also why I was not that surprised that Bush won a second term.
The friend always asks me for some kind of a constructive takeaway. Here, it is simple: Stop imagining about the utopia and work with the reality. Do not deny the reality that you observe. And, more than anything else, do not ever think that more education means a better democracy. Nope!
For the good-government reform community, this suggests something
equally radical: giving up on the deeply held belief that American
democracy can be solved by giving citizens more opportunities to
participate by emailing Congress or voting, and an end to thinking all
would be better if more people would just "get informed on the issues. ... It also means coming to terms with the fact that we don’t think for
ourselves; we think together. And maybe that’s fine. Partisanship and
group loyalties are inevitable, and they can even be good things if they
can help us realize shared interests.
I have blogged too many times about happiness, as clicking here will reveal. I am practically obsessed with happiness--despite the General Malaise that I am! As I wrote here, I suppose I often return to this theme only because I think people do not think through this as they go through the process of college degrees and careers and incomes and travel and everything else.
All because of a simple logic that life without happiness can be unbearable, and I want to lead a happy life however short or long that might be.
It is the pursuit of happiness that led me to ditching a career in engineering. A career that might have delivered plenty of money but with a whole lot of unhappiness. I understood--intuitively--that no amount of money can buy happiness, and this was the message that I conveyed to any interested student who was at least half-awake and listening to me in the real world classrooms before the current age of the coronavirus.
In this happy life, I am less concerned about stuff and more interested in making memories. I remain convinced that memories is all that we take with us during that final journey. Stuff doesn't make one happy.
Nothing that I have written thus far will be new to any thinking person. After all, the old wisdom in cultures across the world have clearly conveyed over the centuries everything that one would need to know about happiness. Yet, all those and more need to be broadcast wider and louder now more than ever before because as rich as we are today, it is unhappiness that is on the rise! According to the General Social Survey, "across the income scale, average happiness is decreasing in the U.S."
What a tragedy!
What might be the reason? "We don’t get happier as our society gets richer, because we chase the wrong things."
Chasing the wrong things.
[We] allow our hunger for the fruits of prosperity to blind us to the timeless sources of true human happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work in which we earn our success and serve others. Regardless of how the world might change, those have always been, and will always be, the things that deliver the satisfaction we crave.
When we were kids, once in a while, usually on a Sunday, amma made vengaaya sambar (onion sambar) and a potato-curry. Would I love to have that combo for dinner tonight!
I didn't know then that potatoes, red chilies, and coriander (cilantro) were not really Indian. There was no reason to suspect they were not.
How wonderful to later find out that none of those is native to the old country. Two came from the world of the Aztecs and the Incas--from the other side of the planet! I was more shocked to learn that the coriander plant is native to the eastern Mediterranean.
The Subcontinent made them all its own.
But, there is one kitchen ingredient that I would never have imagined not being Indian. Never would I have even remotely wondered if it was really Indian.
Asafoetida.
Who would have thunk that! No sambar can ever taste great without a pinch of asafoetida, but this ingredient is not Indian!
Asafoetida, or hing as it's commonly known in India, is a perennial, flowering plant that largely grows in the wild. It thrives in dry soil in temperatures under 35C. So India's tropical plateaus and plains, humid coast and heavy monsoons rule out much of the country for hing farming.
So, where does India get its fix?
Instead, Indians rely on imports mostly from Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - worth more than $100m in 2019 - to get their fix.
They should rename that region as Asafoetidastan ;)
asafoetida in Latin means "fetid gum". The smell is so strong that raw hing, a greyish-white sticky resin collected from the roots, is dried and mixed with flour - wheat in India's north, rice in the south - to turn it into an edible spice. ... Although the Persians once called it "the food of the gods", hing is now barely found in cuisines outside of India. In other parts of the world it's either used for medicinal reasons or as an insecticide!
However, unlike the potato or the red chili, which came to India after the "Columbian exchange," asafoetida has a long history: "It also makes an appearance in the grand Hindu epic, Mahabharata, whose composition historians believe began around 300 BC."
Now, Indian scientists have "planted about 800 saplings of the plant in Lahaul and Spiti, a cold desert nestled in the Himalayan mountains." If those plants survive, and the resin is collected, then asafoetida will be made for the first time ever in the old country.
Step back and survey this landscape of food. Global is a simple and routine combination of vengaaya sambar and potato-curry. There is so much good that comes from being open to the world.
Suddenly, I yearned for some good classical music from the old country.
It happens, from time to time. It is no different from when the mind aches for BB King. Or Sarah Vaughn. Or SPB.
I pulled up this song in YouTube. A masterful interpretation of a Dikshitar composition, at a wonderfully slower than normal pace.
It is a composition that is dedicated to the presiding deity at Srirangam--one of the most sacred places for the faithful.
For the faithful.
I am not.
But, as I noted even a decade ago, all across the world, literature and the arts grew within religious frameworks. A confirmed atheist, Camille Paglia points out, and I am in complete agreement with her, that the works that resulted from this framework have been phenomenal, both in quantity and quality. Rangapura Vihara is a case in point.
Most of us atheists easily wander into the faith world of the arts, and find great comfort in it. We see no contradiction there. It is just we don't engage with the arts nor pursue them as a ticket to some glorious afterlife in heaven with god or the gods. We just don't worry about the afterlife. It is all about the here and the now.
But, of course, we too have to deal with the certainty that our lives will end at some time. As this philosopher, who is an atheist puts it, "because we can die at any time that threat is a constant one. We live under the shadow of death."
I am acutely aware of my mortality. But, that does not mean I plan for an afterlife either.
First, we must engage in forward-looking projects and engagements, because that’s inevitable for almost all human beings. A life without ongoing engagements is, for most people, an impoverished one. Second, we must try to live as best we can within the moments of those engagements. Instead of solely looking forward, we should enjoy the present of what we do in the knowledge that at any moment the future could disappear. It’s a kind of stereoscopic vision that seeks to orient toward the future while immersing in the present.
At any moment the future could disappear. Every single day becomes that much more enjoyable in this framework, and we try to live a life in gratitude for the awesomeness that we are here alive.
"Shift your focus outward ... focus on something outside yourself."
Despite the fact that a selfish and narcissistic approach has worked out well for tRump, exceptions to the rule are not what we are talking about. The more self-absorbed one is, the more it becomes possible to end up in a rut, with the negative feelings greatly amplified in that echo chamber. “A lot of life’s problems are caused by too much self-focus and
self-absorption, and we often focus too much on the negatives about
ourselves.”
Do whatever it takes, in your own ways, to understand that you’re part of the larger world around you. Maybe it is nature walks. Or, volunteering more hours at the food pantry. Or working with groups that want to get rid of tRumpism. Whatever floats your boat, as they say, in getting you out of the self-absorbed state.
Finally, some practices are about cultivating a sense of inspiration — which can take the form of gratitude, curiosity, or awe.
I suspect that gratitude has been my vitamin, though I had no idea that it serves as a vitamin. Gratitude is not the same as a momentary "thanks." It is not the same as good manners, though you should have good manners. We are not talking about the superficial thanks and the emoji when referring to gratitude.
If I had thought about it more, before I read the article, I would have said pretty much the same thing as this: “When you feel grateful, your mind turns its attention to what is
perhaps the greatest source of resilience for most humans: other
humans.”
You can thank your grandma for making delicious pie, but who do you thank for the circumstances of your life?
Gratitude is the truest approach to life. We did not create or fashion ourselves. We did not birth ourselves. Life is about giving, receiving, and repaying. We are receptive beings, dependent on the help of others, on their gifts and their kindness.
So, the bottom line to surviving the great pandemic winter ahead?
When the world between your two ears is
as bleak as the howling winter outside, shifting your attention outward
can be powerfully beneficial for your mental health. And hey, even in
the dead of winter, a 15-minute awe walk outdoors is probably something
you can do.
I am stumped at everything that Shulman offers. A guy who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, who immigrated to Israel, seems to know more about Tamil than all but a handful of the 80 million Tamil-speakers put together!
A polyglot Shulman is. In addition to English and Hebrew, "he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam."
Which is why Shulman comfortably writes that one of the most powerful interpretations of the Mahabharata was written in Malayalam: "By far the most powerful such interpretation that I have read, Wandering the Mahabharata, was written in the South Indian language Malayalam by a maverick scholar, Kuttikrishna Marar"
We are all better off thanks to scholars like Shulman who interpret history and old texts for the vast multitude of us who are barely literate in one language.
Shulman's essay is about a recent book on the Mahabharata. The first paragraph alone blows my mind on how fluent he is with various aspects of life in the Subcontinent, in addition to his mastery of the epic itself:
The Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic, is a fiery,
dangerous book. One is not supposed to keep a copy in the house, lest it
burn down. And it is dangerous, perhaps fatal, to read it from
beginning to end, in linear sequence. Similarly, translating it from
Sanskrit into another language, beginning at the beginning, is not
recommended. The classical Telugu version from South India has three
authors; two died during its composition.
More than a year ago, when I helped my parents move, and when my parents were donating and getting rid of many of their possessions, my father complained that nobody will want his copy of a scholar's interpretation of the Mahabharata--for the very reason that Shulman notes.
Shulman weaves his phenomenal understanding of the Subcontinent when reviewing Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata. After listing works that interpreted the epic in innovative and powerful ways--I have no clue about any of those!--he writes:
But surely the most lyrical of all such attempts to see the Mahabharata through the eyes of its characters is the remarkable dramatic poem Until the Lions by the Kerala-born, Paris-based poet, dance producer, and librettist Karthika Naïr.
She has given her book an appropriate subtitle: “Echoes from the
Mahabharata.” The thirty haunting, heartrending chapters, in a wide
range of forms and styles, resonate powerfully with one another;
together they offer a text clearly meant for live performance, in oral
recitation—or rather incantation—and in dance. ...
The poems of Until the Lions
are graphically typeset on the page so that they seem to be dancing, a
celebration of visible sound. Karthika plays with metrical
modes—canzone, rima dissoluta, the Panjabi Sufi acrostic form known as
Si Harfi, and the Tamil andadi, in which each new verse begins with the final syllables of the previous one.
Read the entire essay. If you are like me, after reading it, you too will immediately place an order for the book from your favored retailer.
I will end with this nugget from Shulman on the continued relevance of the Mahabharata:
[This] two-thousand-year-old book is, in a way, a template for Indian
civilization; it remains as vital and relevant today as it ever was, and
not only for South Asia. The apocalypse it describes is something all
too human, driven by greed, egotism, spite, and the usual phoney
fixation on the glories of dying in war.
Six years ago, I argued in my talk that academe that has been taken over by hyperspecialization, because of which we have failed to contribute to big and contemporary questions for which the public is eagerly looking for answers.
Hyperspecialization has its place, no doubt, even though it leads researchers to inventions and discoveries that are fraught with ethical concerns. But, that level of hyperspecialization is required in the natural sciences, and not in the social sciences and the humanities.
I could re-run that argument practically every time the "Nobel" Prize in economics is announced. But, who cares about what I think; let's hear from a real expert--Branko Milanovic.
I have blogged a lot quoting Milanovic. A consummate scholar, with a phenomenal level of expertise in income and wealth inequality. A decade ago, Milanovic crunched a whole lot of data and gave us this simple and clear bottom-line: "an astounding 60 percent of a person’s income is determined merely by where she was born (and an additional 20 percent is dictated by how rich her parents were)"
Isn't that a perfect example of big and contemporary issues that the public wants to understand? Especially here in America where we are told that you, too, can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and become a wealthy individual, we need such a reality check. You can certainly hang on to your bootstraps, but it will certainly help to be aware it is rigged game in which 80 percent is pre-determined.
Milanovic had a few thoughts after the economics "Nobel" was announced. He writes (well, tweeted):
when we ignore this biggest issue of all, we are --as indeed we seem to be-- in the world of Nobel in literature. At the time when Tolstoy, Joyce and Proust were publishing, the Nobel prize went to… Sully Prudhomme. Yes, Sully Prudhomme (check it out).
Sully Prudhomme? I have never even heard this name before. So, yes, I checked it out. Strange!
The point I want to make is this: Economics is a social science. Its aim is to make us understand the world and make people’s lives (materially) richer. The work that should be singled out is the work that does that—in a big way.
When I play bridge online, the name I use to identify myself is "Dump tRump."
I take my political preference even to that extent. The sociopath is so toxic to humanity that I need to broadcast that at every avenue I have (except the classroom and--in the pre-Covid era--in my office.)
Here in this blog, I have made it clear that any tRump supporters should not even bother leaving a comment, which some of the old regulars have implemented and I am happy about it. It is up to people and their conscience or god to explain how and why they support a sociopath.
The world of knowledge and inquiry has been in shock since that election victory, and the sociopath's continued insistence on denying facts, logic, and science has been a farcical tragedy. In this world, which is the vastness outside of Faux News, even those who used to be apolitical have taken it upon themselves to take a stand against tRump. After all, leaders and institutions will be thoroughly examined by future historians on what they did during the tRump nightmare.
Scientific journals that have never ever editorialized on presidential elections could no longer stand on the sidelines.
Sociologists say the scientific establishment seems to be making a
switch from a long-held condemnation of political interference in
science to actually condemning a politician. “In some ways, this is the
last stand,” says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of
Maryland, College Park. “They have to stand up, at this point, for
science because science and its role in society is threatened right
now.”
This is a moment unlike any other. Extraordinary times require extraordinary actions.
Of course, a tRump supporter like this person doesn't care for what the NEJM or Nature have to say, though they will loudly claim that as "real Americans" they are entitled to benefit from the scientific expertise.
But, me taking a stand here at this blog, or scientists writing editorials is not about influencing the electorate. We recognize the moral imperative and act. We need to dump tRump, and his enablers in Congress.
But then I am not a nutcase Republican anyway! Wait, in the tRump era, I suppose "nutcase Republican" is one too many words to mean the same thing--nutcase alone would suffice because a Republican who is not a nutcase is a rare find!
Why these nutcases make a political issue out of wearing masks is simply beyond me. Maybe I need to be a stable genius to figure that out!
Take a look at the photo below:
The caption at the source is simply this: "Clerks in New York City wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic."
For rule followers like me, what else can we do as the cooler and virus-friendly season sets in?
You can reduce the risk by using air filters where they’re available,
finding ways to bring in more outside air, and simply not spending time
in confined spaces with people who might be infectious—which is to say,
pretty much anyone outside your own household.
Done!
There is one more thing we need to do, which the public heath experts do not talk about: Defeat the science-denying tRump and his toadies, and elect leaders who will base public policies on science and evidence.
Darkness arrives earlier and earlier in the evening, and sunlight comes in later and later in the morning. The air has cooled.
The season has changed.
It is fall.
Many trees around me have lost all their leaves already. The maples are in fifty shades of gorgeous red; soon, those leaves too will fall, leaving the trees nude in the winter grey.
All the old things go.
The evergreens, though, last.
Against the cloudy and dark winter sky, the firs and the pines will stand tall. They keeping a watch on everything that happens all around. They listen to our talking, the river rushing, the rain falling, the wind whistling.
In 2002, my academic "job talk," when I came to interview at the university where I now work, was scheduled, on the fateful Ides of March, in the Calapooia Room.
Until then, I had never heard of Calapooia.
I didn't think much about "Calapooia" until I started interacting with the campus and its people in the fall of 2002.
Through those previous 15 years of my life in the US, my understanding of Oregon was the caricature that was mainstream: A land of tree-hugging hippies. The story began with that, and ended right there.
After moving to Oregon, for the first time, I was exposed to place for what it was, and I had a lot to learn. And I had to learn them fast, if I wanted to engage with students with ease and to be able to converse with them about what they knew and were curious about.
Calapooia?
Oregon, too, was Native American lands.
The Calapooia were one of the many who had lived here for, well, ever. It took a while for European settlers to come out west. But, they did. And when the settlers reached these lands, the story was no different. Remember Jill Lepore writing this:
Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.
When Native Americans did not die of disease that Europeans brought with them, wars with the European settlers did them in, or they were simply forced out of their lands.
Once, when we were driving around on a gorgeous summer day, we came across a sign for Fort Umpqua, which was a trading fort and the southernmost outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company. As one can imagine, the arrival of Europeans meant the end of life as they knew it for the indigenous people. Often, the literal end of life.
Beginning in February 1857, federaltroops forced native people to march from a temporary reservation atTable Rock in southern Oregon 263 miles north across rough terrain to the newly created Grand Ronde Reservation.
Thus began Oregon’s “Trail of Tears.” The
Rogue River and Chasta Tribes were the first to be removed from their
aboriginal lands. They were joined by members of other Tribes and bands
as the march passed other tribal homelands. The journey took 33 days and
many died along the way.
I live on the lands where the Calapooia once lived and prospered. Such an acknowledgment is "the start of action – a concrete step to bring
forgotten histories into present consciousness."
Land acknowledgment is a
recognition of a truth, a kind of verbal memorial that we erect in
honor of indigenous peoples. Like a memorial, land acknowledgment pays
respect to indigenous peoples by recognizing where they came from and
affirming who they are today. And like a memorial, land acknowledgment
is an education – enlisting speakers and audiences to learn about a
region’s indigenous history.
I hope that we will do a lot more acknowledgment, and a lot more direct action too, after the election in November.
"Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences. Our leaders have largely claimed immunity for their actions. But this election gives us the power to render judgment."#VoteGOPout#tRump#Election2020
How many of the 63 million who voted for tRump in 2016 care about what the NEJM and SciAm say, right?
Chances are that if they knew that these eggheads had dissed their Dear Leader, then they will double down on him.
The anti-science misinformation coming from this President and his toadies are literally killing us. "This “infodemic” has to stop," screams this SciAm commentary. "Even after Trump became ill with COVID, he continued to mislead the
public about the danger of the illness and the safety and efficacy of
the experimental treatments he received." What can one do then!
Like, an absolute lack of caring about human beings, or telling the truth, or anything like that. When he was up against Hillary Clinton, who tried very hard to play by the rules, and make that part of her shtick, it was just a horrible matchup.
Yet, 63 million voted for him, and a good chunk of those voters are ready to re-elect him!
Terrible three weeks ahead. And hoping that the attack on science and common sense will end the night of the election.
I have an urgency to tell people who have met me only during the bald phase of my life that I used to have lots of hair.
LOTS!
And it used to be black.
But then in this strange life during a pandemic, we are told to mind our own business and stay away from people. Strangers have been spared of my ranting!
Of course, it is all because of the male pattern baldness. It is not my fault; shit baldness happens!
Here is W.B. Yeats beginning a poem with "bald heads" as if I need any reminder!
BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
One of my many, many, many drawbacks is this: I waste my time even on stuff that I don't understand. Topics for which I am way underprepared. Yet, I continue with this habit.
There is a reason for this madness.
Actually two.
First, I am genuinely interested in a bunch of things. Of course, I know where my strengths and weaknesses are and I could simply focus on my strong areas alone. But, that ain't me. How could I not know about stuff about which I don't know anything? No, do not jump to conclude that it is some kind of a FOMO. Nope. FOMO doesn't belong in this context. FOMO is about fleeting, momentary excitement. I am referring to something more than the now.
Second, even though I am a college professor, I don't consider myself a "teacher." I am a life-long student who teaches. If the university fires me from my job next year, I will continue to be a student even though I will no longer be a professor. Being a student is absolutely a part of who I am.
So, I waste time reading about stuff that can often be way above my head.
CRISPR is one of those.
My earliest post--yes, there is more than one--on this was in March 2015. In that post, I expressed my concerns about CRISPR. I ended that post with this quote:
Rewriting human heredity has always been a theoretical possibility. Suddenly it’s a real one. But wasn’t the point always to understand and control our own biology—to become masters over the processes that created us?
Doudna says she is also thinking about these issues. “It cuts to the core of who we are as people, and it makes you ask if humans should be exercising that kind of power. There are moral and ethical issues, but one of the profound questions is just the appreciation that if germ line editing is conducted in humans, that is changing human evolution,” Doudna told me. One reason she feels the research should stop is to give scientists a chance to spend more time explaining what their next steps could be. “Most of the public,” she says, “does not appreciate what is coming.”
See the name Doudna in that quote?
In October 2015, I blogged about CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier. It was about how they were not awarded the Nobel, despite being considered the top bet.
They didn't get the October morning phone call until 2020!
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded on Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their 2012 work on Crispr-Cas9, a method to edit DNA. The announcement marks the first time the award has gone to two women.
“This
year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life,” Goran K. Hansson,
the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said as
he announced the names of the laureates.
Not merely understanding life, but rewriting the code of life.
As Jennifer Doudna said, most of the public does not appreciate what is coming.
For now, I am delighted that two women were the recipients of the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
But, I remain worried about the longer-term implications.
If only I didn't waste time reading stuff that I don't truly understand!
Dr Jonathan Reiner: "I think POTUS was infected with coronavirus for at least a week before he was admitted to the hospital...I think he's the superspreader. And I think the reason the WH will not have the CDC do a formal check...is they're concerned patient zero might be POTUS." pic.twitter.com/zQGc6Nqh5U
As he always claimed, he alone knows the truth--including about when he became infected with the virus.
At some time or another, we have all heard or read about one of the most famous superspreaders in history: Typhoid Mary. More than a hundred years ago, in 1907, "about 3,000 New Yorkers had been infected by Salmonella typhi, and probably Mary was the main reason for the outbreak."
Like the President, Mary too was not cooperative. But, she was not the President. Ultimately, she had no choice but to yield to the law. "At the end she was forced to give samples. Mary’s stool was positive for Salmonella typhi and thus she was transferred to North Brother Island to Riverside Hospital, where she was quarantined in a cottage."
If only we could quarantine the President until inauguration day in January 2021, and then load him in Marine 1 and send him to his true home--Moscow, Russia!
Covid-19 is a contagious virus, and like many other pathogens that humans have encountered over the centuries, it doesn't seem like it will go away easily or soon. This virus is smarter than ebola, which too hastily kills its host. It is also smarter than the Sars virus, which made patients with Sars get very sick.
The virus had a staggeringly high fatality rate –almost one in five patients died
– but this meant that it was relatively easy to identify those who were
infected, and quarantine them. There was no extra spread from people
without symptoms, and as a bonus, Sars took a relatively long time to
incubate before it became contagious, which gave contact-tracers extra
time to find anyone who might be infected before they could pass it on.
For a virus, Covid-19 hits a sweet spot: It stays without provoking symptoms in its host, while the host goes around shedding rapidly increasing viral loads. And then the host begins to show symptoms. By then, quite a few others are already infected. The virus lives on and prospers, much to our discomfort and death.
Is there any chance that Covid-19 will just go away, like a miracle that the President claimed would happen?
“With Covid-19, the reservoir is now us,” says Perlman. In fact, it’s
become so much of a human virus that scientists have begun to wonder if
it will spread the other way around – from humans to wildlife, in a kind of “reverse spillover”, if you will. This would make it even harder to stamp out.
It didn't take long from Patient Zero in the White House!
So, what is the way forward?
[Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist at the University of Chicago] "thinks now more than ever we should be focused on whittling down
the pool of human pathogens."
“I hope this is a period in which we can
reflect on, you know, what sort of illnesses we want to work toward
eradicating,” she says. “There are lots of pathogens out there – most
people don't appreciate just how many.”
Yes. We will start with removing this President from the White House, and then President Biden can spearhead the rest of the effort.
Back when we were kids, most people I knew did the bare minimum in life. They went to school or work. They came home. Relaxed. Ate. Went to sleep.
We slept a lot!
Some may have done a little bit of gardening. Or whatever. But, essentially leisure was leisure.
Nobody I knew then was even remotely maniacal about how they spent their downtime. I don't know how much life has changed in India. But, here in the US, leisure is no longer leisure. There is intense commitment, a maniacal intensity, to whatever people decide that they want to pursue.
My early exposure to this was back in California. Brewing beer at home was becoming a craze. I practically had to run away from a couple of acquaintances if I ever ran into them at any get together, because they could go on and on about the latest in their brewing.
Then there were the bake-bread-at-home people, especially after that machine appeared in the market in the early 1990s. Remember that?
Quilters, oh, don't get me started on them!
The age of Facebook and Instagram has made this worse.
People bike 40 miles and can't wait to post it. Leisure activities are meticulously documented and broadcast to the world.
I won't be surprised if soon people start boasting about the awesome sex they have, and broadcasting it as if they are porn stars in their bedrooms. Oh, wait, they already do!
Why do people get so maniacal, and competitive, about their leisure time "work"? When did this "play hard" concept take over lives? And why the condescending attitude towards those of us who don't play hard? I wish I could just freely admit that I don't do much. Why not just chill, and enjoy?
One might think that these people go to work in order to relax from such all the strenuous leisure activities. But, nope. Working hard and long hours is apparently the modern thing. I can understand the long, hard, and unpredictable hours in the healthcare world. But, most others? Even in the bullshit jobs?
Yes, yes, yes. I have written about all these. A lot. I hope against hope that the coronavirus is compelling people to ask themselves why they do what they do.
"Did you listen to the interview on NPR with an Indian-American poet?" she asked.
I used to listen to NPR. A lot. In the morning. In the evening. On Weekdays. On weekend.
It has been a long time since I tuned in.
I still pay my dues every month. Automatic recurring donation.
But, I rarely ever turn on the radio to listen to NPR.
All because of one man.
tRump.
I simply cannot bear to listen the orange, arrogant, bloviating pomposity that looks like a human but isn't.
I know I have missed out on a lot by shutting NPR off. But, I prefer my sanity. My peace of mind.
"He was born in Bangalore, and immigrated as a child."
It rang a bell somewhere. I tucked away the comment.
Today, I looked up the NPR schedule and tracked down the segment. I recognized the name: Vijay Seshadri.
The name is familiar because I have blogged about him. As I wrote there, even winning the Pulitzer is not as big an achievement as "an Indian-American stating to his parents about his wish to be a poet, when the "norm" is to enter the more traditionally high-income occupations."
Seshadri says in that NPR interview:
What we call poetry, I think, riddles and penetrates everybody's life,
whether they realize it or not. And it's as simple as creating a
narrative of the things you're doing in a day to something as complex as
reconciling yourself to things like grief and things like devastation. I
would appropriate all of that for the realm of poetry.
Yes, we could all use a little poetry.
The poem that Sehadri read at the end seemed odd. So, I looked it up. It turns out that he read only a part of the poem. Either that, or they edited the first part because of time issues.
I wanted to curl up in the comfortable cosmic melancholy of my past, in the sadness of my past being passed. I wanted to tour the museum of my antiquities and look at the sarcophagi there. I wanted to wallow like a water buffalo in the cool, sagacious mud of my past, so I wrote you and said I’d be in town and could we meet. But you think my past is your present. You wouldn’t relent, you wouldn’t agree to dinner or a cup of coffee or even a bag of peanuts on a bench in North Beach. You didn’t want to curl up or tour or wallow with me. You’re still mad, long after the days have turned into decades, about the ways I let you down. The four hundred thousand ways. Maybe I would be, too. But people have done worse to me. I don’t think I’m being grotesque when I tell you I’ve been flayed and slayed and force-fed anguish. I’ve been a human cataract plunging through a noose and going to pieces on the rocks. I’ve been a seagull tethered to Alcatraz. What can I say, what more can I say, how much more vulnerable can I be, to persuade you now that I’ve persuaded myself? Why can’t you just let it go? Well, at least I’m in San Francisco. San Francisco, where the homeless are most at home— crouching over their tucker bags under your pollarded trees— because your beauty is as free to them as to the domiciled in their dead-bolt domiciles, your beauty is as free to the innocent as to the guilty. The fog has burned off. In a cheap and windy room on Russian Hill a man on the run unwraps the bandages swaddling his new face, his reconstructed face, and looks in the mirror and sees the face of Humphrey Bogart. Only here could such a thing happen. It was really always you, San Francisco, time won’t ever darken my love for you, San Francisco.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2nd, 1869. On the occasion of his 151st birth anniversary, I am re-posting here a column from a few years ago.
****************************************
The United Nations marks Oct. 2 as the
“International Day of Nonviolence” for a very good reason — it is the
birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma
Gandhi.
Gandhi, who was born in 1869, led the
independence movement that, in 1947, resulted in the creation of two new
countries of India and Pakistan and, with that, the end of the British
Raj. The struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi passionately urged his
followers to observe non-violence even against the colonizer’s brutal
force, inspired many others, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Life is full of tragic ironies — Gandhi and
King, the champions of peace and nonviolence, fell to bullets aimed at
them. Unlike Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, King had not lived
long enough to live in the promised land of freedom.
Albert Einstein summed it up best for all
of us when he wrote about Gandhi that “generations to come, it may well
be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and
blood walked upon this Earth.” On Gandhi’s birthday, it certainly will
help us all to be reminded, as the U.N. puts it, of the human desire for
“a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence.”
In the contemporary United States, any talk
in the public space about peace and nonviolence is rare. Politicians of
all stripes want to prove how much tougher they are than the other, out
of a fear of being labeled a wimp. This has been especially the case
since the fateful events on Sept. 11, 2001. At the national level, the
“tough” ones smell blood when an opponent does not talk of war. At this
rate, even those running for the office of dogcatcher will have to prove
their toughness.
Of course, violence is more than merely
engaging in war. The political rhetoric during the past year seems to
have been anything but peaceful and nonviolent. A new day begins with
attacks on yet another person or group of people, based on whatever
cultural trait is deemed to be the “wrong” one for the moment. Even I,
as insignificant as one can be in the political landscape, have been a
target for those who are seemingly at ease with offensive words and
rhetoric.
While words, unlike sticks and stones, do
not break bones, the violence conveyed through words causes plenty of
harm. In the noise and confusion of the violent rhetoric that surrounds
us in the real and cyber worlds, we seem to have lost a fundamental
understanding of what it means to be human.
One of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it
all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who
are in misery.” Unfortunately, the rhetoric and practice these days is
far from that interpretation of humanity.
When it comes to the terrible humanitarian
crises, like the situation in Aleppo, Syria, it is depressing and
shocking to see how quickly we closed ourselves off from the “pain of
others” and how easily we refuse to “help those who are in misery.” We
have refused to budge even when the screens all around us flashed the
images of Aylan Kurdi — the toddler who was found dead, face down, on a
beach — or the five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, whose dust- and
blood-covered face looked dazed and confused.
Meanwhile, all around the world, the number
of people displaced from their homes continues to increase. The United
Nations estimates that by the end of 2015, the number of people who have
been forcibly displaced from their homes reached 65.3 million. The U.N.
High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, noted that “at sea, a
frightening number of refugees and migrants are dying each year; on
land, people fleeing war are finding their way blocked by closed
borders. Closing borders does not solve the problem.”
As I write, peace and nonviolence seem to
be evaporating even in Gandhi’s old lands of India and Pakistan. Tension
between the two countries is at such high levels that commentators
wonder, and worry, whether the neighbors are getting ready for yet
another war. As often is the case with these sibling countries, this
time, too, the fight is over Kashmir, but with plenty of nuclear bombs
on both sides of the border.
We shall certainly overcome, in the long
run. In the meanwhile, on the International Day of Nonviolence, like the
stereotypical beauty pageant contestant, I, too, wish for world peace.
