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Politics

Pipe Dreams

Looking into the endless gray this week, all I wanted was color. The rain hammered on my roof during the nights, with leaf-stuffed gutters overflowing, water gushing by my window. Of course! Drainpipes! The solution to filling my eyes with color and pattern and my brain with delightful memories of prior travels. Thus today’s barrage of photographs, since pipes held my interest for years on end, always with faint plans to use them eventually for abstract montages.

Of course you don’t get away today with just admiring rusting pipes. Too pressing the problem – in Portland and elsewhere – of health issues associated with lead in the water.

The nation, for the most part, knows about Flint, MI and the water troubles they experienced. The crisis there has become synonymous with environmental disaster. Turns out, Portland is worse.

Since the late 1990s, samples have shown Portland exceeding the federal safety threshold for lead 11 times. In 2017, after Portland had once again surpassed that threshold, OHA required the water bureau to build a corrosion control treatment facility, according to Salis’ letter. Water from the Bull Run watershed is naturally corrosive, which can cause lead from copper plumbing and fixtures to leech into people’s homes. By building a facility to make Portland’s water less corrosive, the bureau expects to reduce the amount of lead dissolving from old plumbing into stagnant water. The facility is slated to be completed by April. (Ref.)

Here is the water bureau’s January 2022 response after decades of complaints:

Some of the actions the Water Bureau is taking include:

  • Treating the drinking water to reduce lead and copper;
  • Offering free lead-in-water testing to all residential customers and childcare providers;
  • Increased education and outreach to customers through mailings to multifamily residences and all homes built between 1970 – 1985; 
  • Actively managing drinking water in the distribution system to maintain the effectiveness of corrosion control treatment; And
  • Proactively partnering with the Oregon Health Authority and Multnomah County Health Department.

I leave it to you to assess the quality of government/management in this city when you consider this problem was known for 30 years now.

In case you’re worried: The water bureau offers free lead-in-water testing to all residential customers and childcare providers. People can contact the LeadLine at leadline.org or 503-988-4000 to receive a free lead-in-water test.

And since we are in a practical mood today, here are 9 gutter fails that are slowly killing your house….only half joking, a beloved neighbor of ours had utterly expensive damage from rain water making its way into the walls and house foundation.

Children are, of course, the ones most at risk. They are often exposed to multiple sources of lead contamination: the water they drink, the dust they inhale from the paint used in older houses or contaminated soil in poorer neighborhoods often build adjacent to industrial sites. Parents who work in certain industries – automotive repair shops for example – can inadvertently bring lead particles home on their clothing. Kids are also surrounded by toys that expose them to lead:

“Lead softens the plastic and makes it more flexible so that it can go back to its original shape. It may also be used in plastic toys to stabilize molecules from heat. Lead dust can be formed when plastic is exposed to sunlight, air, and detergents that break down the chemical bond between the lead and plastics.” The CDC recommends to keep plastic toys away from young children who put their hands in their mouths after or during play.

Lead poisoning has serious consequences, developmental delay and learning difficulties included. Here is a link to the Mayo Clinic site that describes what to be on the look-out for symptoms.

And if all this is not enough justification to dig into my drainpipe archives, then maybe this is: Drainpipes are having a moment after homophobic Politician arrested at Gay Sex Party. (A right-wing Hungarian politician tried to avoid being arrested at a party in Belgium during lockdown by climbing out of the windows and down a drain pipe.) Everything that puts shade on the ruling Fidesz party is welcome….. (a rival lawmaker in Hungarian parliament, Zoltán Varga, reportedly brought a drainpipe to the floor of the legislature to use as a prop in a recent speech railing against the ruling Fidesz party’s hypocrisy.)

And here is a piece of music that captures sounds of rain and multiple rhythms when it runs, or dips or plops or gushes down the pipes…beautiful composition by John Luther Adams (2009.)

Let’s end with Ford Maddox Ford. (The entire wonderfully snarky poem can be read here.)

In the Little Old Market-Place

(To the memory of A. V.)

It rains, it rains,
From gutters and drains
And gargoyles and gables:
It drips from the tables
That tell us the tolls upon grains,
Oxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls
Set into the rain-soaked wall
Of the old Town Hall.

Here’s to the next 8 days that are supposed to be entirely dry!

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Geopolitical Primer

In January 2020 I wrote about my foreboding regarding a recently emerged virus no-one had ever heard of. Maybe my sense of unease had to do with the fact that the Chinese government put millions of people on strict lockdown – it HAD to be serious to justify such intense reaction, hadn’t it? Last weekend I had similar disquiet about what is unfolding in Kazakhstan; let’s hope I am wrong this time and there will be no comparable consequences. Doesn’t hurt, though, to try and understand the situation.

Kazakhstan is a huge country (the size of Europe, basically) bordering on both Russia (as former part of the Soviet Union) and China. Both, Russia and China have major interests in maintaining and/or expanding their grips on the country, for political and economic reasons. So does the West, for that matter (bitcoin bros who do a lot of mining there, included.) (I am summarizing today what I learned from several sources here, here and here, from the progressive to the conservative spectrum. The most easily read overview was found here.)

The country, after achieving independence from Russia, was governed for the longest time by an autocratic ruler, former President Nursultan Nazarbayev. In a surprise move to avoid democratic elections, he appointed a successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in 2019, who seems to be now in a power struggle with the old guard, trying to wrest influence from their hands. The country had opened up its vast resources (it contains 60% of all the mineral sources of the former Soviet Union) to Western investment right after 1990. The incoming riches were not spread evenly, though, with kleptocracy being a major problem. The population suffered from increasing debt and poverty after the 2008 financial crash. Repercussions of the MG17 flight disaster followed, since Western sanctions against Russia hit Kazakhstan equally hard as member of a customs union with Russia.

Then came Covid and killed not only huge numbers of people, but left many more in financial ruin. When gasoline prices were increased at the beginning of the year and inflationary pressure rose, anger erupted and large protests rose in Almaty and spread to other large cities, challenging the ruling party. As I write this, over 160 people have been killed, thousands wounded and close to 10 000 arrested. Government buildings have been destroyed, the airport shortly occupied, and the security forces were given orders to “shoot to kill without warning.” Just 3 days in, Tokayev’s government called on the “Collective Security Treaty Organization,” the Russian-led equivalent of NATO, to send troops to quell the unrest. It’s the first ever CSTO intervention, and it’s based on the accusation of a foreign attack on the sovereignty of Kazakhstan.

Russia immediately sent 3000 paratroopers (including some from Belarus and Armenia) who Putin says will stay “as long as needed,” but are now expected to be withdrawn within the week. Russia has multiple, important reasons for intervention. For one, Russia’s nuclear fuel cycle depends on Uranium from Kazakhstan, with their own companies mining it there and enriching it in Novouralsk, Russia. Also, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was the heart of the Soviet space program and is still used as its primary space-launch facility.

More importantly, about one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan is ethnic (orthodox-christian) Russians, deeply resented by the nationalist who are Muslim. If there was a civil war, ethnic cleansing would be a problem, including a stream of refugees across Russian borders, which Russia cannot easily absorb given its own problems.

Most importantly, though, Russia wants to quell any possibility of Western-oriented revolutions a la Ukraine, that could extend into its very own territory. Putin and the Kazak government claim that outside forces are stoking the fires, as they did in Ukraine. Western NGOs (many of them funded by Americans) are said to have encouraged protests against the incumbents, and armed “provocateurs” are claimed to incite the violence. Activists from other “color”revolution certainly have shared their tactics and strategies by their own public claims.

One question is, of course, how all of this will influence the NATO-Russia talks concerning Ukraine. Russia has before threatened to react to Western provocations and amassed troops at the Ukrainian border, demanding that Ukraine will never join NATO. Russia is also determined not to have “revolutionary fervor” spread within its own borders, clamping down on political change. These talks will surely be affected by this recent example of flexing a military muscle at the drop of a call. Russia’s military response has already been declared a win for Putin by media across the globe.

A more Moscow-friendly Regime in Kazakhstan might be a danger for other Central Asian strongmen and certainly be fought by China, because Kazakhstan is the route for some 10% of China’s annual natural gas consumption and some 29% of its imports. China is also worried about spillover effects” which could encourage citizens in Kazakhstan’s neighbors, or even Chinese citizens, to rise up against their government. If Kazakhstan moves closer to Russia as a result of the current situation this would pose a threat to China’s interests.

Other markets could be influenced as well, with inflationary pressures that drove these protests alighting in many more countries. In short, it’s a volatile situation that could have major repercussions in geopolitics. By all reports, an invasion of Ukraine, if intended, will have to happen sooner rather than later, with weather conditions permitting heavy artillery to proceed while grounds are still frozen and a (U.S.)world, distracted by the pandemic and weakened by polarization, that has fewer resources to respond.

The Kazak people have a history of both suffering and resilience. Stalin-imposed starvation cost 1.3 million lives; suppression of strikes and protests by unions against land reforms and rigged elections incited many more. The protests now are likely directed against the concentration of power and riches in the hands of a few, are asking for political reform and more independence as well as economic reprieve. They might, in the best of all worlds, lead to concessions. More likely, they will increase subsequent repression.

I tried to find female Kazak artists (I had seen an exhibition by a feminist collective some years ago in Berlin), but many websites are cut off (apparently the internet there has been affected by the protests.) Images today are therefore by photographer Nadav Kander, one of my favorites. He went to Kazakhstan in 2011 to photograph the landscape, ravaged by nuclear bomb- and long-range missile testing near the cities of Priozersk and Kurtchatov. The testing program included covert studies of the public’s exposure to radiation. The series took its name from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Good time to revisit this work.

” I will show you fear in a handful of Dust.” 

And here is some traditional Dombra music.
 

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Moving along

I skimmed two unusual books across the last weeks. Skimmed because I could not read 700 pages for one and who knows how many for the other before giving them as Hanukah presents to the kids. But I read enough (plus the reviews) to form an opinion that I can recommend them if you are willing to have your mind blown by one, and learn surprising facts in the other. Long slog today, so you are allowed to skim as well. But another wet weekend might give you enough time to read…

I am talking about The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (which I will definitely finish in full when my library loan comes through,) and Move by Parag Khanna.

The Dawn of Everything is a strange, mesmerizing window into the authors’ minds, who are willing to speculate about everything that has been accepted theory about 40.000 years of human history. The anthropology and archeology duo tackle the question if durable hierarchies in the form of nation states are inevitable. Nation states are usually assumed to be the outcome of a natural process due to the development of agriculture, accumulation of property that requires protection and increased population sizes amassed in cities, all leading to leadership hierarchies, domination exerted by state power and bureaucracies. The duo claims that nation states, and in particular undemocratically governed nation states are not at all inevitable, contrary to popular opinion. They point to alternative ways of humans organizing themselves and their lives across history from the very start.

The book is a tour de force of speculation, offering (elsewhere disputed) facts that help question the accepted wisdom of historians. The authors provide example after example of early human societies that avoided states, or subverted them, or decided to accept hierarchies during some times of the year and not during others. The authors certainly make the point that early societies were not in a natural state (innocents in the Enlightenment’s view, or brutes in Hobbes’) until agriculture inevitably changed the picture from an egalitarian to a hierarchical society. Instead they show that hunters and gatherers built their societies intentionally, with consensus. Some showed all signs of democratic approaches, others had inequality already built in. There were endless configurative possibilities and people made choices among them.

So why are we now stuck with nation states? Without providing an answer, the book challenges us to think through if there is STILL a possibility for alternatives, something the authors strongly believe. The classic reasons for statist views of history lie potentially with the fact that people can no longer easily move somewhere else if they dislike a given country, and the fact that bureaucracies have grown to impenetrable proportions. But Graeber and Wengrow show that many early cities thrived for centuries with no sign of hierarchy, contradicting scholars who assume that authoritarian rule appears naturally whenever large populations gather.

I found the book empowering not because it answers questions (it often doesn’t) or simply defies common assumptions (it always does.) It provides a model of a fresh approach when you question things differently. If you no longer think that there has to be an overarching pattern or law that inevitably governs the progression of human development then you can start to think through what alternatives could look like and how to bring them about. You can look at evidence for alternatives or interpret data in a new light. And once you acknowledge the possibility for human intervention, you can alter mind sets and explore ways how to change the status quo of domination of some over others.

The authors worked on this book for 10 years, planning more volumes to come. Graeber died suddenly of an infection at a young age shortly after completion. Here is a written portrait of this unusual, gifted man.

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So why would I read Move when the author is dissed like this from a New Republic review for a previous book:

“Khanna’s contempt for democracy and human rights aside, he is simply an intellectual impostor, emitting such lethal doses of banalities, inanities, and generalizations that his books ought to carry advisory notices. Take this precious piece of advice from his previous book—the modestly titled How to Run the World—which is quite representative of his work: “The world needs very few if any new global organizations. What it needs is far more fresh combinations of existing actors who coordinate better with one another.” How this A-list networking would stop climate change, cyber-crime, or trade in exotic animals is never specified. Khanna does not really care about the details of policy. He is a manufacturer of abstract, meaningless slogans. He is, indeed, the most talented bullshit artist of his generation. And this confers upon him a certain anthropological interest.“

Okaaaayyyyy. In German you would say this reviewer “had a louse crawling across his liver.” Same origin as the phrase “he’s an offended liverwurst” – since antiquity the liver was assumed to be the seat of emotions, and even as small a trigger as a louse could torpedo one’s mood. Never mind a bullshit artist. But I digress.

Let’s just say, I occasionally try and read widely and consciously from people I don’t necessarily agree with. And you know what? There were some interesting things to be learned from this book and it spoke to the issues of mobility and migration which played also such a role in the volume discussed above. Khanna makes an argument for opening up international borders, given the inevitable future mass migrations due to climate and political factors combined. He proclaims mobility across borders as a human right. He sees realignments likely to be regional (the millions of displaced Asian people will move into Kazakhstan, displaced Chinese will move into Russia, and Central Americans into Canada – all of which have tons of empty space that can be settled with the change in temperatures and according agricultural possibilities.)

The author argues that we need to move people to resources and technologies to people, something that will not happen if we cling to nativist notions of sovereignty. The question is how can you preserve geographic nation states that people feel culturally rooted in and move beyond sovereignty at the same time, into shared administration and stewardship of crucial geographies and resources?

He uses the examples of Canada and, surprisingly, Japan, as nations that have a futuristic outlook towards opening their borders to migrants. Khanna speculates that Europe will attract masses of Asian youth talent, while the nativist US stays behind. He also shows that migration needs to be done sustainably, so that newly opening eco systems are not trampled and then have to be deserted again and gives claimed catch-all phrases like “cosmopolitan utilitarianism” at face value, (the notion of holding all people equal and maximizing their happiness or welfare seems a bit of lip service in his rendering), we should debate how we can move towards open borders and mass wealth redistribution. Here is a summary article where the author explains his position.

In the context of pandemics and the emergence of newer, scarier variants, I believe one might indeed think through how more globally organized administrative powers would protect humanity as a whole. We can close borders all we want to, viruses and other invisible agents will always have a way to escape across them. If we do not coordinate research, prevention and treatment it is only a matter of time until things get worse, and no riches and fortified national castles will protect us. Decisions to give priority to pharmaceutical companies’ investments over radical, global distribution of available vaccines has been rather short sighted.

In any case, both books help move our thinking along, particularly when we don’t agree with some or much of what the authors offer. Just the right thing for late December when the holiday hectic calms down and you need an excuse not to leave the house or the couch on yet another rain soaked day or are forced into lockdown, and can tackle something more than the next mystery novel.

Photos today of birds last week on Sauvie Island, all of whom ignore borders.

Music today can be ambient listening, sustaining dreams of a better future, if reading becomes too cumbersome.

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Science Denial

It was infectious. The laughter of a tiny Russian grandmother, loud, unabashed, unceasing, first made me smile, then laugh as well. I was standing next to her and her family, all of us marveling at the antics of an Orangutan who was trying on various blankets to protect himself from the rain, finally settling on a tartan throw. I so miss laughter. I so miss regular interaction with strangers, if only via glances or smiles or a kind word. That whole social scenario when you take the bus, or stand in line, flirt with the waiter or encounter people in museums.

In any case, I had made it to the zoo, now requiring on-line tickets for a particular time-slot to be reserved in advance, and I happened to be standing at the primate enclosure outside when the family with young kids and grandma in tow arrived. I relished the laughter. I also admired how the dad was reading and sometimes translating for the kids the signs that describe scientific information about the animals, their habitat, their characteristics and so on.

Here is a question: why do people unfailingly accept scientific knowledge presented to us by some experts, zoologists for example, learn about it with pleasure and expose our kids to it? Yet invariably reject other scientific information that happens to be in domains equally unfamiliar as the mating rituals of the rhinoceros, but could save our lives if we only listened? Virologists’ insights, for example?

This question looms particularly large when scientists are thrown into the middle of political conflict, unable to avoid their unfortunate position because their knowledge is required to make administrative decisions. How do scientists not loose the public trust, how do they avoid becoming targets of aggression because their claims collide with vested interests or different world views? Issues in which these conflicts have become quite visible concern everything from the danger of tobacco consumption, the safety of nuclear power, the long term predictions for the climate crisis if fossil fuel use is not reduced, and, of course, the approach to handling the current pandemic.

For every you and I who think scientific input should shape policies, there are two others out there (if not more) who do not believe scientists, or assume they have nefarious motives, or believe in a different “scientific” truth. Public opposition to science-based governing can come in one of two versions. There are those who are motivated by disinformation or plain old conspiracy theories, disseminated by crack pots or those who have a political ax to grind (or both…) There are, however, also those who offer justified opposition on the basis of legitimate value judgments. The trick is to know the difference and react, as a scientist, accordingly. (I am summarizing today a longish article by a group of scientists that is in press Ref.)

The tobacco- and fossil fuel industries aside, we have individuals in, for example, the U.S. Senate who are torpedoing household resolutions to protest against scientifically recommended mask or vaccination mandates by the administration. Do they have vested interests, signaling to their constituencies who have been blasted by misinformation from partisan media sources that they are on their side, or signaling to their (former) leader that they still toe the line? Are they correct in claiming that scientific proscriptions created policies that limit individual liberties and impair economic activities in unprecedented ways, without proof that public health required it?

Isn’t it also true (spoiler, science agrees it is) that social restrictions like lock-downs have also negatively impacted mental health at scale and have disproportionately impacted women, single parents, young people, minority groups, refugees and migrants, and poor people who cannot afford to buy basic personal protective equipment? (Not that said senators would care.)

“Frustration with, and opposition to, social restrictions are therefore potentially legitimate grievances that deserve to be heard in democratic public discourse.”

The problem is how to distinguish between science denial due to politically motivated misinformation, and legitimate disagreement with governmental policies. One way is to spot how people diverge from a scientific consensus. Here are some pointers of what is usually present for those motivated by ideology:

Fake experts: Using doubtful/questionable/discredited/fake experts.

Logical fallacies: patterns of reasoning that are invalid due to their logical structure.

Impossible expectations: The act of demanding undeniable proof beyond what is scientifically feasible.

Cherry-picking: Regarding and disregarding pieces of evidence such as to advance one’s point.

Conspiracy theories: Explaining evidence by means of an evil conspirator, while consecutively expanding the theory to defend against challenging evidence.

A FLICC of the tongue, and you have your misinformation….

Contrast this with people whose lived experiences might make them averse to accepting scientific insight. If the history of your people was one where scientists harmed you or lied to you (see experimentation on POCs,) why should you trust science? If “denial” of the severity of Covid outcomes helps you not to lose your mind, but remain optimistic, shouldn’t scientists take that into account? Denying the effectiveness of social distancing might be an adaptive strategy if isolation would increase your sense of loneliness and depression. Denial can also be a protective mechanism against fear. If you HAVE to use public transportation and work surrounded by sick people, denial of Covid facts might be the only move you have not to break down in fright for what might happen to you.

In short, before we condemn any and all people who question science and scientists’ motives, let’s look a bit closer and figure out how to help those who are not conspiracy theorists to overcome their hesitation to accept scientific knowledge. If it could just be as easy as outlining the dietary habits of the Rocky Mountain goats….

Accosting scientists is, of course, not new under this sun.

Music reminds us. Some clips from the Galileo project concert.

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Vaccination Refusal

In this country, partisanship, age and level of education are predictors of who refuses to get a vaccine against Covid-19 in all its variants, or who is skeptical about the severity or the danger of the disease. Even though more people are now willing to get the shot, attitudes have hardened among those who don’t, encouraged by a never-ending stream of conspiracy theories or ideological battle cries by influencers on the far Right and conservative media. Refusal has also intensified for many during recent discussions of vaccination mandates, with multiple law suits filed against the Biden administration’s vaccination requirements. Deeply republican states have imposed policies that ban vaccine mandates or prohibit requiring proof of vaccination.

Vaccination levels are also low among those who have difficulties accessing vaccination opportunities in rural areas, who lack transporation or time off from work because every penny of income is essential and cannot be endangered. So there are structural variables of access and economics, independent of ideological considerations.

The third group of unvaccinated people are those among us who have no choice due to pre-existing conditions or compromised immune systems. If you consider that 15% of the world’s population lives with disabilities (some of which preclude vaccination) according to the World Health Organization, we are taking huge numbers of people whose only protection can come from those who surround them and behave accordingly. And that number does not even include those under active treatment for cancer or other life threatening diseases at any given point in time.

Those who refuse vaccination on ideological grounds often insist that they have a “natural right” of self determination and if that freedom includes the endangerment of others, so be it. Conspiracy theories about “chip implantation” or some such aside, there is an underlying agreement among vaccine skeptics that disease is a process of natural selection, where the strong will live and the weak will be culled. No need to listen to the (deeply mistrusted) science selling the advantages of vaccination. Solidarity with the young, the old, the sick is simply off the table in groups that believe in nothing but individualism and the “survival of the fittest.” In some cases religious considerations about G-d’s will or beckoning paradise add to the determination to carry vaccination refusal as a political flag. Above all, it is about “freedom” to reject the state’s interference with your own body (unless you are a woman, when decisions about bodily integrity are ripped out of your hands in case of pregnancy. Yesterday’s opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg in the NYT (linked above) was brilliant in showing the contradiction.)

In Europe we see additional variants on the theme. Within the far Right there is an explicit anti-Semitic streak that associates vaccinations with sinister Jewish plans for world domination, making an extra buck or at least a push away from the “natural.” Cartoons like the one below are from another era (published by 3rd Reich vaccination opponents in The Stürmer in 1933)), yet deeply embedded in contemporary neo-Nazi discourse.

I feel uneasy, since poison and Jews never add up to anything good.

There is also, however, a different group of German, Swiss and Austrian vaccine deniers who have previously not allied with the far Right. These are often educated middle-class citizens (more than half of them have finished their university education, and 67% consider themselves to be middle class, 23% of the surveyed said they had cast their ballots for the Greens in Germany’s 2017 federal election. Eighteen percent voted for the Left party and 15% for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and they are in their 40s and 50s.(Ref.)

There are many educators and medical professionals among them, who swear by homeopathy or are adherents of the Rudolf Steiner/ Waldorf School movement around anthroposophy. The German South-West is a stronghold of the anthroposophical movement.

Officially, educators and administrations of Waldorf Schools are not prohibiting inoculations; however if you look at the rates in which kids in these institutions are inoculated for dangerous childhood diseases like the measles or whooping cough, you find the numbers way below the national average.

What lies beneath their vaccination refusal, now extended to the current Covid pandemic? Historically (and particularly during the third Reich) people considered a strong immune system to be sufficient to ward off disease, and that system was created and sustained by a romanticized “natural living,” a diet free of poison, physical exertion in sunlight and fresh air. All things modern – large cities, poor immigrants, technology and mass culture were seen as the enemy of health, external agents poisoning the immune system and sickening the body.

Rudolf Steiner added to that a theory rooted in occultism. He preached that humans reincarnate in ever new bodies. (Note, I do not judge the belief held by billions on this planet that reincarnation is part of the life cycle. I do have problems with the specifics touted by Steiner attached to his philosophy.) Only high fever in a child’s body allowed reincarnated kids to take root in that new space, which until then was dominated by the mother’s “protein” which needed to be replaced by the child’s own “protein.” Only then could emerge a true representation of this new person’s identity. Furthermore, illness has special meaning in this never-ending cycle of re-incarnation. It educates us to the fact of what has gone wrong in a previous life and provides karmic balance for earlier misbehavior. (Steiner even named specific illnesses for specific misdeeds – I’m not going there.)

There was an additional racist element present in his theorizing as well. Bacteria and viruses were considered of demonic nature, specifically the astral demons and putrescence of earlier, “inferior peoples” – the Mongols, for example, who carried their foul nature to the Germanic nations in their mass migrations. (No, I am not making this up. (Ref. To find his own words, go here.)

The new version for the current epidemic, in its extreme form, states that vaccination prevents you from receiving the karmic insights brought by the messenger disease. You might protect your body, but your soul will not be able to grow. Should you die, the healing experience for your soul will put you on fast track in the next life, so nothing is lost. Healing is all well and good, but suffering has a place in the world that is irreplaceable for spiritual growth. (Note, this approach is a legally recognized field of study in Germany for medical doctors who want to specialize in this sub- discipline.)

And before you shake your head and wonder who would subscribe to this, demonstrations against vaccination have drawn up to 40.000 people in individual cities on a given weekend, mixing Querdenker (the equivalent of Qanon), neo-Nazis and Steiner adherents. A useful article from the Council for European Studies (in English) on the history of the movement can be found here. Generalized science aggressions has morphed into increasingly violent behavior – hospital personnel, schools, doctors who offer inoculation, and even bystanders have been attacked and in one case killed.

I find it remarkable how in times of crisis all the long-held prejudices, stereotypes and nationally rooted beliefs make an outspoken come-back. Anti-Semitism and stereotyping esotericism, buried deep after 1945, are raising their ugly head. Racism in this country is no longer subdued, but proudly presented in calls for a return to the good-ole-times, with racial hierarchies re-established and intact. Simply asking people to put their beliefs aside is not going to cut it. If the only way out from the danger of the pandemic and new viral mutations is world-wide vaccination, then countries have to come together and impose vaccination mandates, legal requirements that no-one can escape other than for medical reasons. It has been done before. (Since 1809 in the U.S., 1807 in Germany.) It can be done again.

There’s a Drop of Hope, though, from the Francis Crick Institute in London. Their vaccination center had 12 international artists in residence who wrote poetry about inoculation collected under above title. You can find the poems here and the intro explains the interactive poetry project. Sensible, moving and perceptive takes on vaccination.

1807 was also the year this Beethoven piece was written (or transcribed from his violin concerto op. 61.)

Brooding photographs were taken late yesterday. Should reincarnation occur against scientific odds, I’ll put in a request to be a tree. Preferably not at aspen, though, I’ve done enough trembling in this life time. Red chestnut would be nice. Oak will do, too.

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Historic Parallels

Imagine a flood of young men who are uprooted, lack perspective, unable to find employment, frustrated by promises of improvement that never materialized, psychologically fragile because they feel displaced by others who they deem less deserving, and burdened with shame for an uncontrollable situation. Provide them with weapons, and encourage them to band together for ideological causes that clearly identify an “other,” a defined enemy, a target in a deeply divided country. Provide them with markers that signal belonging (to an in-group) like hats, or insignia. What have you got?

No, wrong, country, wrong century, not the Proud Boys and their ilk.

I want to talk today about the German Freikorps, armed paramilitary groups that wreaked havoc in the the years after WW I, from 1918 to about 1923 during the Weimar Republic. About 3 million soldiers returned to Germany from Belgium and France after the armistice in November 1918, experienced by them as a shameful loss. The treaty of Versailles reduced the numbers of German soldiers in a standing army to 100.000 down from a total of 6 million before the war. Many of the former soldiers, in fact almost half a million, kept their weapons after formal decommissioning, and were soon organized into militias that were financed by the government interested in defending Eastern borders, in Poland and the Baltics, and crushing sectarian uprisings in Germany itself.

In a starkly polarized country where the left as well as strongly reactionary forces hoped for political change (and the right-wing myth that the left had betrayed the army stoked hatred,) the armed members of these right-wing militias started to kill members of the opposition, both everyday Germans and famous political players. Leftists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were among them because they had been publicly anti-war. The Bavarian Senat president Kurt Eisner was killed because he was a pacifist. Matthias Erzberger (from a centrist party) was murdered because he had signed the armistice of Compiègne as a government representative. Foreign minister Walther Rathenau was killed because he was Jewish. The militias supported (failed) coups, like the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch where reactionary forces under Kapp tried to destroy the government. Anti-semitism became a battle-cry, Jews being even more abhorred than communists who were active participants in the struggle for political representation.

Fearing a civil war, the government did not punish the Freikorps members who had supported the coups and let them retreat, and even paid their wages. Many of these now floating veterans organized themselves loosely afterwards and eventually drifted into a growing Bavarian party: the NSDAP. In total, and that in itself a frightening fact, in a few years about 354 radicalized right wing killers where systematically protected by the German legal system, getting away with murder without punishment, while 10 of the 22 leftist killers received the death penalty. (Ref.)

That’s a political assassination every four days or so in a country smaller than Montana across the span of four years. We are not living in these times.

“Born of war, defeat and compromise, the new German republic was reeling from the effects of wartime rationing, material deprivation and the millions killed or wounded. The horrors of the Somme, the Marne and Verdun did not end so much as trickle back into whole towns, villages and cities, which had to accommodate the countless returning invalids, with their missing limbs and gashed faces, their damaged psyches and shell-shocked nerves.….more than four million people died as a result of armed conflicts throughout Europe in the first five years after the war, a number greater than the combined wartime casualties of France, Britain and the United States. Vicious cycles of civil war, revolution and counterrevolution meant that, between 1918 and 1923, the European continent was “the most violent place on the planet.” (Ref.)

But there are parallels that we ignore at our own peril. We do see numerous electoral successes by right-wing and authoritarian candidates in the United States, Britain, Poland, Hungary, Italy, India and countries in South America. The resentment towards globalization and cultural pluralism, combined with racist and anti-semitic ideas attitudes, echo the invective aimed at the Weimar Republic by nationalists and conservatives during the 1920s. We also face a disturbing increase in right-wing political violence across the world. A long but brilliant description by Anne Applebaum of the current slide towards autocracies can be found here.

In our own country cries for violence to be permitted are on the rise. So are little veiled comments by politicians that foment chaos and violence – just look at the January 6th evidence. And we have no way yet to measure the psychological ramifications of a pandemic that has blanketed us with death and given further rise to political division around the (enforced) mechanisms to combat the scourge.

Without invoking an analogy, we can still learn from the mistakes that were made in the 1920s, (in)actions that promoted if not installed a dictatorial regime that claimed to provide a way out of the chaos and reinstate power hierarchies of yore, so desperately longed for by the shaken German people. We can look at the role of the legal system.

“One of the most crucial failures of the Weimar Republic was the failure of its courts to uphold and defend the constitution. Court judges and state prosecutors tended to side overwhelmingly with right-wing offenders; the Kapp Putsch of 1920, for instance, in which right-wing nationalists attempted to overthrow the government, resulted in just a single conviction.”

I don’t know if the train has left the station already. The appointment of ideologically biased judges, the vagaries of the American Jury system that is so open to manipulation, the fact that politicians get away with explicit calls for violence without major legal ramifications, are cause for worry. As congress-woman Ocasio-Cortez, after being the target of a video from a republican congressman depicting her being killed, said: “core recognition of human dignity, value and worth is a line that cannot be crossed.” If we forgo accountability, we open the floodgates.

This point is acknowledged even by some truly conservative thinkers. Aaron Sibarium, associate editor at the Washington Free Beacon, writes about the “Weimarization of the American Republic” here. I don’t agree with his both-sides are extremist approach, but he has interesting things to say about the fact of and mechanisms towards polarization that are implicated in rising threats of violence, the judiciary included.

Not mentioned, of course, is the very pragmatic, rational first step a country could take: curtail the absurd amount of lethal weapons that have deadly consequences in political violence. For all we know, our very own Supreme Court will march in the opposite direction come June. As I said: look at the legal system…the parallels there are frightening. Germany turned brown, the signature color of the Nazis. We know who contributed.

Photographs today are from the city of Weimar, from a trip I took there some years back.

The LA Philarmonic had a program last year called “The Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933″, selected by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Here are two of the pieces that were part of it (I only found them performed by other companies.) Kurt Weill’s Berliner Requiem and Hindemith’s strange one act-opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen.

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Stones on the Heart

Once you have crossed Portland’s Burnside Bridge you will encounter a building on the Eastside that has large sheets of paper hanging in its windows. They are printed with a poem by Oregon’s current poet laureate, Anis Mojgani. It is an appeal which addresses us with loving flattery, perceptive about potential burdens we might carry, and enthusiastic in its belief that there are remedies that can help you drop the stones of your heart, as he puts it.

The suggestions made me smile, made me frown, made me feel seen as one of the multitudes who experience themselves these days as “dark and angsty” as he says. (The word angsty, by the way, from the German word Angst (anxiety) was introduced as early as 1849 by English writer George Eliot. But it became popular in the 1940s when translations of Freud’s work promoted it in the context of neurotic fear, guilt and remorse.)

I was in a dark mood indeed, having been accused of neurotic fear, well, not in those words, but in a closely related term, namely being prone to conspiracy theories. Heated voices had been raised over an essay that I tried to summarize and that found nothing but scorn in the ear of my listener. The essay was published by Timothy Snyder, author of an interesting series of essays currently on the web, Thinking Aloud. He teaches history at Yale, and is a tenured fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His work concerns East European history, the Holocaust, the history of the Soviet Union, and the history of Ukraine, and he has been published in the NYT, the L.A.Times, the Guardian, Christian Science Monitor and many more. I dwell on the pedigree so we can agree this is not some random fantasist, dabbling in pseudo-Freudian analysis, or simply a moron (one of the less condescending terms emerging in our “debate.”) Not that learned people cannot be idiots, but I think there is something else going on here. Hear me out.

The essay is titled Killing Parents in Bad Faith. – How historians will remember the pandemic.The main argument offered is that reckless behavior of maskless younger people endangering their older relatives, or reckless refusal of politicians to implement measures that protect the elderly and anyone else against the ravages of the virus is not simply based on stupidity. Instead it is a return to the (falsely applied) maxim of the survival of the fittest with the added benefit that it triggers wealth transfer that is direly needed by a younger generation who has seen the promise of upward mobility ground into the dust by decades of Republican politics. The author goes so far to talk about elder cleansing and generational harvesting, which would be clearly revealed in retrospect by future historians.

An extreme position, not backed up by empirical evidence, yes, I understand the varied reactions ranging from crap to idiocy I have heard when I talked about it with people. So why do I, not the most irrational person on the planet, see reason to keep an eye on the argument with a possibility that it might be true? Why do people who fully acknowledge that Republicans have embraced Social Darwinism, have refused vaccinations on the basis of non-scientific, ideologically driven beliefs, have shown publicly a willingness to sacrifice older generations, can’t go as far as acknowledging that there might be a condoning acceptance of lethal consequences when younger folks expose their elders to the virus,(if intentional parricide is a step too far?)

I wonder if Snyder’s arguments are deeply influenced by his immersion into Holocaust research, and my openness to them affected by being German. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a whole section devoted to the way Nazism, German people, average citizens like you and I, betrayed people deemed unworthy of life in ways that insured economic benefit to the perpetrators. As early as 1933, laws were established to force the sterilization of all persons who lived with diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. These people were colloquially called useless eaters.

Daily cost of feeding a disabled person and a healthy family.

The program escalated but 6 years later with Operation T 4, which instated “mercy death” of non-Jewish German and Austrian citizens by gassing. By the end of the war an estimated 275.000 people living with disabilities had been murdered. These included people who were brought to the authorities by their families for no other reason than being “difficult” spouses or defiant daughters (blamed to have mental illness) or elders who did not want to dish out an early inheritance. The euthanasia program explicitly included incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people.

There has been a lot of psychological research looking at how the elderly are valued over younger lives, with decisions made by participants across the world that IF they have to sacrifice some life, it will be the elderly over the teens. Those sentiments are enhanced during times of crisis. Public discourse during the epidemic (social media content analyzed by scientists) showed an increasing amount of ageism with some proportion alluding to senicide (the killing of or abandoning to death of the elderly.) Real life scenarios certainly happened in several countries across the pandemic where a lack of ventilators forced doctors to do triage with a cut-off of age as low as 65 in some places where you were no longer eligible to have your life saved. Princeton Psychologist Susan Fiske who studies prejudice and ageism finds in her surveys that “younger people want to be sure that the elderly don’t hog a disproportionate amount of time and resources. Older people are expected to step aside.” The only American cultures that have consistently positive views of the elderly are African Americans and Native Americans.

Prejudice against old people is of course a far cry away from stepping up and actually killing the old by active measures. One can look at the moral deprivation of murder at one extreme of the scale. On the other end of the continuum would be the morally justified decisions by doctors to grant survival to those who benefit most of it, the young, when means to ensure survival are limited. Then there is the vast area in-between. There is morally unacceptable action – the decision to expose vulnerable populations to maskless visitors, say or state decrees forbidding mask mandates. Or equally debatable inaction of the authorities to demand protective devices or order vaccinations mandates for people who come in contact with vulnerable populations, or the personal decisions by police, firefighters or nurses not to get vaccinated.

To get back to Snyder’s Covid scenario, yes, it might be .0002 % or whatever tiny proportion of maskless visitors to retirement homes who have consciously nefarious motives. Bad apples, etc. pp. Once a political administration justifies the sacrificing of this or that constituency under the mantle of Social Darwinism, however, personal motives can find political backing, ruthlessness can be uncorked, as history has shown. And we are very few steps away from such an administration in the years to come. Looking at some State governments, we are there already.

Stones on my heart, indeed.

Music more representative of fall than spring, but there’s still hope that spring might be rushing back….

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Unimaginable

The light was strange. I walked the Sandy River delta for the first time since January, so grateful to be back and a bit worried if I had the strength for the full round in the 90 degree September heat. Thoughts of the fragility of existence, my companions for too long, were underscored by the wind that came down from the mountains, making the dry branches and grasses bending and trembling, the poplars noisy with their rattling silver leaves, upended by the gusts.

Claude Monet Haystacks 1885

The gusts were hints of colder times, easily ignored during this endless summer, perhaps perceived only because my thoughts were swirling around the essay I’ll urge you to read today, if you have time to read anything (I’ll keep my own remarks correspondingly short.) Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a neoconservative scholar, lays out what quite likely might be ahead for us as a country, and it is frightening to hear its measured analysis by a conservative, no less.

Ermenoville, Department Oise

Yes, politics. Yes, more bad news. Yes, I know the feeling of not wanting to hear one more scary thing in a world full of them.

Claude Monet Poplars at Giverny 1887

Do read it.

Camille Pissaro Poplars, Eragny 1895

You want to be prepared for what one might once thought unimaginable. Even though it is tempting to ignore that there is always a second act in the wings. One we might not like.

I might mention the German election results in passing…. major parties had a head-to head competition with a razor thin edge going, for now, to the Social Democrats – a centrist party who will need to form a coalition with any number of smaller parties to govern, an unwieldy moloch marked by political compromises. All signs point to continuation of the familiar paths rather than radical re-orientation in view of the needed actions for climate change. For me the most frightening number was the fact that among those voting for the first time a higher number picked a business friendly, conservative party (FDP) over the Green Party – so much for the “youth will save us.” And two large states in the Eastern parts of the country, Thuringia and Saxony, went all in for the right-wing extremist AfD. Berlin will have a mayor whose phD title was rescinded for plagiarism and who gave up her ministerial seat as minister for family in the wake of the scandal, now to oversee the government of the capital.

Claude Monet Wind effect (Poplar Series) 1891

I’ll sweeten the reading assignment with some classic paintings of poplars that were brought to mind by the beauty in front of my eyes – in black and white to emphasize the structure and pattern (and similarities) of these wispy trees.

Vincent van Gogh Poplars at St. Remy 1889

Maybe the river will have water again (photograph of the tree lined water is from 2 years ago around this time) – right now it is unimaginably low.

Claude Monet Poplars at the Epte 1891
Vincent van Gogh Poplars near Nuenen 1884

Soon the trees will shed their leaves, and the scent of decaying silver and gold will emanate from the layers and layers that soften your step. I’ll be out there again, soon.

Paul Gauguin Landscape with Poplars 1875

Today’s music acknowledges that somehow most of these paintings seem to have originated in France, even though Germany and the PNW is full of poplars as well. The selection of pieces by Ravel is quite representative of his best work.

Sue Darius Lombardy Poplars

And here is a poem from the late 1800s :

Binsey Poplars

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 
  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 
  All felled, felled, are all felled; 
    Of a fresh and following folded rank 
                Not spared, not one 
                That dandled a sandalled 
         Shadow that swam or sank 
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 

  O if we but knew what we do 
         When we delve or hew — 
     Hack and rack the growing green! 
          Since country is so tender 
     To touch, her being só slender, 
     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 
     But a prick will make no eye at all, 
     Where we, even where we mean 
                 To mend her we end her, 
            When we hew or delve: 
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 
  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 
     Strokes of havoc unselve 
           The sweet especial scene, 
     Rural scene, a rural scene, 
     Sweet especial rural scene. 

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Rebels Welcome

The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is supposed to be one of of taking stock of one’s actions. Contemplation of right and wrong, of divine judgement and human repentance, might guide an annual reset. Not a bad idea given that we could all improve on ourselves, even if I don’t buy into the belief that some higher agency will dish out consequences (the concept of hell is conspicuously absent in Judaism but there is a judging G-d.)

I have my own do’s and don’t’s list, in addition to the usual ones that define a moral person. One of the don’ts is to post poems that I fail to understand, necessitating spending the better part of a day to read up on possible meanings. One of the do’s is to break my own rule when what I learned really fits with the focus of the week, defining good or bad, as well as how what we know shapes our beliefs and subsequently actions.

The cryptic poem can be found at the beginning of William Blake‘s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, introduced as “The Argument.” (The full version of the short book, without the engravings, can be found here.)

What I knew: Blake was an exceptional artist with a visionary mind. He was a poet, a painter, an engraver, combining his skills to produce works that were multilayered, drawings interacting with the text. I was also aware that he was, in the context of the revolutionary movements of his time (we are talking the late 1700s,) a strong voice for change and breaking up patterns dictated by church and state.

What I learned about this particular poem: it was a parody directed at the religious cult around a philosopher guy named Swedenborg (never heard of him.) It used imagery directly derived from the Old Testament (who knew) and is populated by characters that are interpreted in 100 different ways by Blake scholars (and there are many – how would I choose?) It also tries – that’s where it gets interesting – to break up the dichotomy between angels and devils, the meek, rational, obedient good people, and the energetic, sinful, creative, rebellious bad ones. If you can figure out how that can be inferred from the lyrics you have a clear advantage over me. Something about the meek and the wild switching habitats? Crossing over?

The text goes on with prose, which makes it a little bit clearer:

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is heaven. Evil is hell.“

Blake insists that our existence depends on a combination of forces that move us forward (the marriage of the title.) It might be in the interest of those in power wanting to the retain the status quo, to designate us into “Team Good” and “Team Evil,” but for progress to happen we have to acknowledge that we are “Team Human,” as someone cleverly said. (My main source for what I learned was an issue of Image/Text (3.2) entirely devoted to scholars of the artist.)

Being human is not either/or, all good or all vile. We are complex enough to accommodate impulses from all directions, to heed some more than others, or do so in different contexts or different times. We might be the just (wo)man at times, or the sneaking, snaky villain at others, going from meek to enraged or in reverse. Change, both in the personal and the political realm, depends on it. Change, in the New Year, will depend on embracing all of what makes us human, and not waste energy to isolate bits and pieces at the expense of others. Intellect and sensuality, rationality and emotionality, acquiescence and rebelliousness can and must coexist.

Blake delivered this progressive message in a time of political upheaval both in the Americas and during the aftermath of the French Revolution, and I would never have known, if not for those who teach this stuff. Which brings me to a contemporary essay, also with a focus on the relative merits of acquiescence and rebellion, that outlines the danger of selective telling of history (in this case linked to the celebration of Labour Day.)

Adam Johnson, one of the most incisive young writers around, and Sarah Lazare deplore in The Column how even seemingly “progressive media outlets minimize radical elements of American history and recast liberal reforms as the primary movers of justice and political change.” It’s a short read and worth your time, providing food for thought why the establishment clings to meek(er) agents of change and prefers them to the call for more energetic rebellious action in Blake’s terms.

Let’s read up on our history!

Images today are selective Plates of Blake’s book, from an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, some years ago.

Here is some of Blake’s work set to music by Benjamin Britten.

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This Bunch or That?

It is the season for bunches, bands and batches, swaths and clusters of flowers in the meadows.

Yesterday’s photographic harvest was mostly common tansy, yarrow and goldenrod, all seemingly humming, which on closer inspection was, of course, the music of the bees.

The tightness of the clusters, the masses of plants all bunched together, reminded me of the polar opposite, isolation, and how that term (or state) has become such a focus for explanatory models of people willing to join groups or cults, when otherwise they’d never would have.

What do we know about that? Researchers have shown that people in places with high “social capital”—relationships and networks that connect us and enrich our lives – are more immune to being lured into cult-like groupings than those living in regions with low social capital.

And if you are lonely, belonging to the MAGA crowd has immediate rewards: you have an instant community, can travel with like-minded friends from rally to rally, feel connected through inside jokes and swag, just like following your favorite bands in days long gone. As one recent author, writing in the context of Trumpism preying on an emotional void, put it:

“There’s a reason vulnerable people are drawn to street gangs. There’s a reason Charles Manson preyed upon teenage runaways, and there’s a reason why so many poor Black women died in Jonestown. When you are down-and-out and lonely, you cling to the people who care enough to give you hope.”

Given the situation that we now face, I really want answers to the more immediate question, namely what it takes to get people out of cult-like existences. We cannot easily fix the causal societal ills of anomie and isolation and lack of community, although efforts in that direction have to be strengthened. Even if we did, there are reasons to fear that it would not necessarily make people leave Trumpland, and simply make a U-turn.

A convincing explanation for that sad fact, along with helpful suggestions, can be found here. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s essay focusses on witness testimony of people who lived under historical authoritarian strong-men. She observes:

“Just as cultivation and conversion leverage strong positive emotions (belonging, inclusion, safety, rapture), so does disengagement evoke strong negative emotions (shame, humiliation, abjection) that many wish to avoid.

Shame and fears of punishment, ridicule, and loss of status can motivate individuals who have been victims of con men to stay silent. They can also lead people who start to realize that they have been misled by authoritarian propaganda to double down on their convictions out of pride. 

Saving face can seem like a psychic necessity as it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the leader’s untruths and destruction, and individuals may feel betrayed as well as humiliated.”

We need to add to that list the fact that psychological losses loom larger for us than potential gains, something called loss aversion (part of the psychological literature since Kahneman and Tversky published their seminal work in 1979.) Even if I start doubting the wisdom of the Elders of Trumpland, I would still loose the community I’ve just found, the sense of belonging that I so yearned for, if I were to leave now. It seems also to be the case that cultures that favor individualism and masculinity, like our’s, tend to display a higher degree of loss aversion. (Ref.)

Ben-Ghiat concludes:

“This is why experts emphasize the importance of avoiding judgmental attitudes when dealing with people disengaging from cults. We should also resist the temptation to present individuals with evidence of the failure, corruption, or nonsensical nature of the cause they embrace. Such evidence will come from sources that are still tainted for them, and likely makes use of  language and reasoning they have been taught to distrust.“

That is, of course, more easily said than done. How can you not try to reason? Never mind assumptions about blood-slurping pedophile rings in the subterranean regions of the White House…. how can you not confront (dis)beliefs with visible, undoubtable facts of close to a million people dead in this country from a disease that could have been conquered with timely and appropriate measures? Do you really have to “empathize” with Covid-deniers, as the National Review suggested?

Some people furiously disagree, sociologist Brooke Harrington among them. Here is a drawn out thread on her argument. She summarizes:

“The “moral failure” of the COVID+ pandemic deniers & anti-vaxxers ranting from ICU beds is to prioritize saving face over saving other peoples’ lives. They could do the latter by telling the truth & exposing the con, saying “COVID is real, get vaccinated.” But they don’t.…. Since they’ve chosen moral failure, & now endanger us all with their face-saving maneuvers, the pragmatic question is: How do we keep them from killing the rest of us?“

As it turns out, she believes (on the basis of sociological science) that only people who are trusted, family and former fellow cult members or current leaders associated with it, are in a position to help change minds, minimize shame and need for face saving for cult members trying to turn around.

Which means, most of us get a pass, right?

Not much going to happen, either.

The flowers didn’t care. They just radiated warmth and color and purloined sound, making me happy, willing to forget about politics and psychology for an uplifting hour.

You should experience the same by listening to this music: Mahler’s 4th which describes heaven through a child’s eye.

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