LIFEPATH RESEARCH IN EUROPE

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00118/full

These are notes from an article in the website called “Frontiers,” and is about the impact of one’s lifecourse in health and well-being.  This is English and contrasted the difference between “high” classes and “lower”, but in terms of countries in Europe so there is no black/white or north/south dynamic.  The “lower” classes socioeconomically were in Eastern Europe.

The point was to discover what could help certain measures improve both the kind and timing of interventions.  

 ______________________________________

Studies on multiple biomarkers and omics provided credible mechanisms for our conceptual life-course model, including epigenetics, inflammatory markers, allostatic load, and metabolomics

. . . . . . . . .

Nevertheless, changes in self-rated health appeared to be short-lived and were not sustained a few years after the programme ended. On the contrary, improvements in psychological well-being seem to take time and were observed only 42 months after the end of the study. Overall, the findings from this report offer a mixed picture of the potential of CCTs to reduce health inequalities. On the one hand, the findings suggest that conditional cash transfers may improve the psychological well-being of low-income adults, but they also suggest that effects on physical and overall health assessments of adults and children are weak or inconsistent in the short- to medium-term.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Our analyses showed that although compulsory schooling laws increased the length of schooling and in some cases educational attainment, they may also have led to unexpected increases in depressive symptoms, and some negative effects on biological markers of diseases. These results raise questions about simple causal interpretations of the relationship between education and health. Overall, our findings suggest that changes in schooling may not always lead to expected improvements in population health, and they emphasize the need to monitor how specific social policies influence health and aging trajectories of individuals and families. However, these studies were conducted in a French cohort and the results may reflect the specific context and a specific time period.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

The impact of socioeconomic condition on premature aging is mediated by known behavioral and clinical factors and intermediate molecular pathways that Lifepath studies have revealed, including epigenetic clocks (age acceleration), inflammation, allostatic load, and metabolic pathways—highlighting the biological imprint (embodiment) of social variables and strengthening causal attribution.

Research on the impact of recessions suggests that the economic strain imposed by short-term fluctuations in resources is harmful over the long-term. Social protection systems should be designed to reduce the volatility of household incomes by offering short-term income protection, and, potentially, investment in labor and human capital to ensure long-term income maintenance.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

The term “socioeconomic status” is often used in health research, but it contains a basic confusion between concepts of class, status, income, and wealth. In epidemiology (though not in social sciences) education is also used as a measure of position in the social structure. To make things worse, these different measures may be used as if they were interchangeable. A few studies such as that of Geyer et al. have tested the validity of this assumption. They found that in fact education, income, and an occupational measure of social class were only moderately correlated, and had different strengths of relationship with different health outcomes.

. . . . . . . . . . 

Sociology has traditionally drawn clear distinctions between class and status. But since these dimensions of inequality are often correlated, as they are with income and wealth, it can appear that for descriptive purposes it does not matter which one is used. However, if we understand the conceptual basis of the different measures we will greatly accelerate our efforts of explanation. Once these conceptual issues are clarified, it becomes clear that distinct dimensions of inequality implicate etiological pathways composed of different mixtures of material, psychosocial, cultural, and behavioral factors.

. . . . . . . . . . .

The MacArthur Study of Successful Aging was the first to propose an AL score. Parameters included systolic and diastolic blood pressure (indexes of cardiovascular activity); waist-hip ratio (an index of more long-term levels of metabolism and adipose tissue deposition, thought to be influenced by increased glucocorticoid activity); serum high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and total cholesterol levels (indexes of long-term atherosclerotic risk); blood plasma levels of total glycosylated hemoglobin (an integrated measure of glucose metabolism during a period of several days); serum dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEA-S) (a functional HPA axis antagonist); 12-h urinary cortisol excretion (an integrated measure of 12-h HPA axis activity); 12-h urinary norepinephrine and epinephrine excretion levels (integrated indexes of 12-h sympathetic nervous system activity). Some variants of the original items can be found in the literature, but the markers most commonly used are associated with cardiovascular and metabolic diseases (blood pressure, heart rate, blood glucose, insulin, blood lipids, body mass index, or waist circumference), HPA axis (cortisol, DHEA-S), sympathetic nervous system (epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine), and inflammation (C-reactive protein, IL-6).

These scores of AL have been shown to be a better predictor of mortality and functional limitations than the metabolic syndrome or any of the individual components used to measure AL when analyzed separately

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Epigenetics, specifically DNA methylation modifications, has been proposed as a biomarker of biological aging and as one of the plausible mechanisms through which social exposures become biologically embodied, affecting physiological systems and cellular pathways leading to disease susceptibility. The “epigenetic clock” is one of the main mechanisms contributing to age-related methylation changes. It refers to specific sites on the genome where methylation levels constantly change as the body ages and can therefore be used to predict chronological age with high accuracy. This type of clock can identify deviations between the epigenetic clock and chronological age that may be driven by social exposures. It means that the biological aging of one social group can be compared to another, a useful tool when examining the socially driven differences in healthy aging

. . . . . . . . . . 

This highlighted the need for refining and adapting the socio-economic-related exposures to the system and context they relate to. A good example of that approach involves social differences in the risk of infection by Epstein Barr virus (EBV) in children (N > 12,000) from the Millennium Cohort Study. Authors showed that children from disadvantaged social background were more likely to be infected by EBV, by the age of 3 compared to advantaged children, due to the material conditions to which they were exposed to. In these analyses, social exposures were refined and included environmental factors, and household environment (e.g., temperature in baby's room). The outcome of interest, the EBV infection, is usually benign, but the time of infection can be socially patterned. It was therefore used as a proxy for potential socially-driven differential immune maturation and function which can, later-in-life, affect health.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Associations detected in cord blood in relation to maternal education were not detected in relation to other SEP factors. Similar analyses did not detect any differentially methylated CpG sites in relation to maternal education in blood samples from 7 years old, and found 20 differentially methylated sites in blood samples from 15 years old. Of these no formal overlap was identified across ages but changes in methylation in the SULF1 gene appeared as a possible common target

THINKING ABOUT VIRUSES

Many years ago after reading about a scientist who was interested in the many and complex variations on the gene codes we call “viruses” who have escaped the machinery of cells by invading pre-existing entities, and who had dedicated himself to acquiring samples from jungle hunters, I proposed a sort of vending machine at the beginning of each trail.  The idea was that the person emerging by that trail would pause enough to stick his (or her) finger into a hole that would take a blood sample.  Then the machine would spit out some kind of valuable token for exchange or wanted as an object, a bullet or a food.  Even a condom.

Everyone thought this was a ridiculous idea because no one worried about viruses that much.  The reason was that they didn’t realize how much they permeate our lives and how fluid they are.

I’m trying to understand viruses, but no sooner do I figure out one thing than they discover some new aspect.  For instance, I had learned about the four nucleic acids, than it turns out that RNA (single strand nucleic acids) has a different fourth nucleic acid than DNA (double strand nucleic acids).

“Nucleic acids are the biopolymers, or small biomolecules, essential to all known forms of life. The term nucleic acid is the overall name for DNA and RNA. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomers made of three components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. If the sugar is a compound ribose, the polymer is RNA (ribonucleic acid); if the sugar is derived from ribose as deoxyribose, the polymer is DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).Nucleic acids are the most important of all biomolecules. “  (Britannic instead of Wikipedia)

https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Microbiology/Book%3A_Microbiology_(Kaiser)/Unit_4%3A_Eukaryotic_Microorganisms_and_Viruses/10%3A_Viruses/10.02%3A_Size_and_Shapes_of_Viruses

Pictures in the website linked above.  I’ve always thought of viruses as little flecks hardly big enough to have “structure” but I could not have been more wrong.  They are zoomorphic, inventive, invasive attempts at life that went wrong, or maybe primitive life that couldn’t quite get it together.  Or maybe they’re jokes or caught in transit, merely becoming instead of being.  The scientists have a sense of humor about it.  The very largest ones are called “Mimiviruses” or “Pandoraviruses.”  I imagine Mimi and Pandora were not amused.

The point is that they are not necessarily jungle hunters in the traditional sense.  Today’s mega-city IS a jungle and both Mimi and Pandora live there.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/06/25/pandemic-proofing-the-planet?utm_campaign=coronavirus-special-edition&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2020-06-27&utm_content=article-link-1

Comments from this website follow.

“Ebola, sars, Zika and Rift Valley fever. But it also included “Disease X”.  This illness, caused by a pathogen never before seen in humans, would, the panel said, emerge from animals somewhere in a part of the world where people had encroached on wildlife habitats. It would be more deadly than seasonal influenza but would spread just as easily between people. By hitching rides on travel and trade networks, it would journey beyond its continent of origin within weeks of its emergence. It would cause the world’s next big pandemic, and leave economic and social devastation in its wake.”

. . . . . . . . .  

“The first layer is a worldwide effort to find and track the hundreds of thousands of as-yet-unseen pathogens that might threaten human health. The second is the monitoring of blood samples and other indicators from people living in places where new diseases are most likely to emerge. The third is a concerted programme that employs all the data thus collected to get a head-start in the development of drugs and vaccines that might be used to meet an emerging disease halfway.”

. . . . . . . 

“In 2004, however, a highly pathogenic strain emerged and began to spread across South-East Asia, killing tens of millions of birds. By the middle of 2005 this version of the virus had infected wild geese, which took it into Europe, India and Africa. That year, 98 people were infected, and 43 of them died—a death rate severe enough for David Nabarro, then co-ordinator of the un’s response to influenza, to issue a warning that an unchecked h5n1 outbreak could kill up to 150m people. In 1968 a less pathogenic strain of flu, which had originated in the same area, killed 1m people when it spread around the world. In 1957 a still-earlier relative killed 1.1m. h5n1 was considerably more lethal than either.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“PREDICT ran for just over a decade. Scientists working with local teams in 30 countries collected around 170,000 samples from people and wild animals, mainly non-human primates, bats and rodents. In the process they discovered 1,200 new viruses belonging to families known to have the potential to infect people and cause epidemics. Among these were more than 160 potentially zoonotic coronaviruses.”

 . . . . . . . 

“Among other things, having a registry of such risks might make it possible to identify hotspots where an unhealthy number of the conditions for zoonoses coexist. The predict programme’s risk registry includes virological, ecological and sociological factors. Viruses which store their genes as rna, for example, are categorised as more risky than dna viruses, because of their increased ability to mutate. Viruses already found in more than one host are also flagged up. They clearly have an adaptive knack. And being adapted to a species reasonably close to Homo sapiens matters too. A virus able to reproduce in the cells of one species will, other things being equal, have a better chance of adapting to life in a related species than an unrelated one. siv did not have to change all that much to become hiv. Reptile viruses, by contrast, are less of a threat.”

. . . . . . .

“Besides being the original reservoirs of sars-cov and sars-cov-2, bats also harbour another coronavirus, mers-cov, which causes Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, an illness first detected in 2012. They are also the source of the virus which causes Ebola and of the hendra and nipah viruses which, over the past three decades, have led to small outbreaks of deadly respiratory and brain infections in Australia and South-East Asia.”

THE SIXTIES ON THE REZ (A reblog)

[PDF] THE HERO'S JOURNEY IN JAMES WELCH'S SACRED GEOGRAPHY by JHC Vest - 2005 - Using an auto-criticism reflecting the author's ... James Welch's Fools Crow has figured greatly in that odyssey

www2.brandonu.ca/Library/cjns/25.1/cjnsv25no1_pg337-353.pdf 

Jay came through Browning (I suppose he was actually in Missoula with side trips) at a liminal time -- meaning “on a threshold,” because that piece across the bottom of the door is called the limen. The same word, sometimes spelled “limin” means the threshold of perception, the least amount of sensation that can be detected. Psychologically and theologically, it is meant to be the point of entrance, transition, crossing, often into holiness or at least potential. It was a liminal time for the whole planet as the cultures shifted towards openness and experiment; for me because I was newly divorced; and for Jay because he was just reaching that point in a young man’s life when he’s trying to figure out his identity.

Normally there’s a lot of thrashing around, experimenting, emotion, and risking at such a time and that was certainly the case with Jay. I don’t think I ever exchanged two words with him, but there were conversations about him -- sometimes approving and other times not. He was one of the MANY who came thinking that if they could sort of meld with the Blackfeet, they would become powerful and knowing. The trouble was that they usually picked out advisors who were pretty full of it, to be frank. Tricksters. I won’t name them. Of course, I have a certain point of view which is that of a white female older woman. Sceptical. A little over-experienced. Okay, cynical. After all, I’d known some of these people since they were twelve and my husband and father-in-law were older than most of them, as old as the enrolled grandfather elders and here since 1903. 

Liminal time in the theatre is when the curtain goes up. In church it is the call to worship. At a concert it is the first chord after the tuning up. At that time this country's crossing of the limin into some new way of being was almost to the point of critical mass, the tipping point. Something happened and the whole political scene backed off. I think just became terrified, maybe like now.

Jay was pursuing his degree, now in hand. Both of us have gone through many new spaces since then, stepped over many a limin. My hope is -- and I think there is some evidence -- that the world is again crossing a threshold, but the point is that in a liminal time/space anything can happen. The car is out of gear. There is space to be Dionysian, even with an Apollonian president. But immense destruction can be one result.

The paper about “The Hero’s Journey in James Welch’s “Fools Crow” is competent and engaging, useful in particular for people who don’t have much background in Blackfeet matters. I see that now Jay is claiming his own enrollment in the Mohacan Indian Nation but I don’t know much about that group.

The paper called “The Oldman River and the Sacred: A Meditation Upon Aputosi Pii’kani Tradition and Environmental Ethics” is the one that had me wielding two colors of highlighter and scribbling in the margins. There is really good stuff in this paper, mixing realistic sociology with story and theory. Of course, I like it because it’s theory I can understand.

SOCIOLOGY: “. . .the Pii’kani community was divided in response to the dam, which created a position easily exploited by the outside interests. Since Native Modernists, motivated by poverty, tend to be willing to accept change provided it brings the promise of monetary benefit, they were largely unopposed to the environmental degradation. It was, however , the Pii’kani traditionalists who had the most to lose. In the traditionalists’ identification with place, specifically the Oldman River, these Natives were impacted with a major disruption of their religious ethos and cultural identity.” 

STORY: “According to Campbell, mythology concerns the mystical dimension, for without this you have ideology. Myth also concerns ‘the pedagogy of the individual, giving him a guiding track to guide him along.’”

THEORY: “Elements of this [spiritual] integration include include: first, purification of body, soul, and spirit; second, spiritual expansion in realizing a relationship to all that is; and third, identity or realization of unity in a state of oneness with the totality.” (The reference is to Joseph Epes Brown, “ The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian,” 1982 p. 113. Vest studied with Brown.)

These ideas have not been exhausted and the development of ecological and scientific awareness of a changing planet makes them sharply useful. I’m a little surprised that Jay doesn’t pick up on some of the more recent thought. Many of the people he quotes have been gone for some years, which doesn’t make them less true and useful, but the torch has not been extinguished -- just handed on. Today the challenge is the Alberta Tar Sands and international high-tension power lines. The corporations are far more dangerous and powerful than anything in the Seventies.

Jay seems not to have heard about the “RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY” . . . strongly challenging the idea of “culture,” which is so obsessed with accuracy that it tries to freeze everything at one point in time when, in fact, the shared lives of people on the land is always dynamic and changes as it goes.” (Quote from the recent history seminar at Piegan Institute.) Nor has he heard about Jack Gladstone’s generous troubador synthesis of song, philosophy, tradition and land.

There is a website where students critique their professors and Jay took some hard comments, mostly having to do with rigidity. I realize that today’s college students tend to be a self-important and contemptuous lot, but it sounds as though now HE’s the Culture Police, quoting a stack of white men’s books and telling about things that happened to him a half-century ago. Why does this happen so often? It seems as though he ought to be here celebrating and growing with the rest of us.

Maybe we should organize a convocation of all those white and low-quantum guys who came through here in the Sixties and Seventies, looking for liminality. Some found it and were transformed. We should find out what it did for them. And see what they can do for us.

Friday, August 27, 2010

SOME GOOD COUNSEL (a reblog)

In the years between 1492 and 1776, populations grew and crossed over in many ways, most commonly in liasons between European men and indigenous women.  Few mechanisms for recording them existed yet, except as the Catholic church kept records and devout individuals listed their family in their Bibles.  Thomas Conselor (1784-1853) died as the Old Northwest of southern Michigan was filling up, dividing into thrifty farms along the streams.  

Because genealogists have ferreted out the records of wills, censuses, land assignments and sales, for nine generations -- begat by begat -- we know that Elisha Counselor (which might be spelled Counsellers or Councilors or a dozen other variations) had moved his branch of the family to Michigan.  Mitsawokett is a tribal website that has accumulated and organized as much information as they could about that community and have named the individuals in each generation until the present.  Eventually, a descendant of Thomas Counselor married a descendent of Cyrus McCormick in Michigan, but as marriages and children continued, some in the present have lost both patristic names.  Perhaps some genes persisted.  If the causes of schizophrenia are genomic, this is not a happy possibility since several McCormicks suffered it, but they had no descendants.

The Michigan Conselors are descended from Elisha, who could be a son of Benjamin, one of the first to be born in America.  Genealogists are like bird-watchers, obsessed with detail, exerting many efforts, keeping lists and theories,  always provisional, and not really affecting anything.  By the ninth generation the Conselors had met the industrial revolution.  The hard-working farmers were expanding their incomes and know-how by working in the Detroit and Lansing automobile factories capitalizing on Post-WWII hunger for cars, meeting the remnants of the war effort.  One of the ninth generation cleared a field to make a runway and bought a small airplane.  Inevitably, when he had the resources, he moved to California, rather than the New Northwest of Oregon and Washington.   In the nine generations the line of progenitors had reached from one coast to the other.  They had a provenance proving descent, a pedigree. 

The story goes that the first, or at least a very early Conselor was a French pirate. Besides being part of the Lenape complex of indigenous people, at least part of the family was more properly Metis.  Others say that the first Conselor was Spanish.  Mitsewokett was under "Indian control" when that first single man -- however one spells the name and whether or not he was a pirate -- first settled In America.  He married an "Indian".  The next generation all married "Indians."  What lures the researchers on through successions is the usual assortment of scandals, murders, small fortunes, and occasional flares of genius and madness, not counting a small number of religious leaders.  But that small tendril of the family line didn't release their hold on a small Michigan farm along the pleasant stream until very recently, abiding through the generations.

My Twitter feed includes many tribal people from the North and West in Canada.  At this moment at least a few of them are very intense about blood quantum and their status with the Canadian government as well as the Provinces, which have much more control than States.  International corporations, of course, dominate nations.  In spite of the RCMP's story, things get lawless when distances are immense, and powerful international corporations will do almost anything to prevent interference with their hunger for resources.   Values that are present in the laws are deeply based on British assumptions.  For centuries the whole Western half of Canada, though called "Rupert's Land," was essentially the fiefdom of the Hudson's Bay Company which had a mercantile goal.

The identities of the indigenous people on the entire continent were heavily influenced by concepts convenient to slavery, which carried over to the native people as though there were some definitive and universal law about the nature of genetics separating everyone into races.  The idea of culture as also being a trajectory that controls both identity and law was  near-religious in the sense of being a matter of faith in something untrue, rejecting challenge.

Species are separated (until recently) as a matter of definition, meaning inability to cross-breed.  All humans as races can easily (sometimes a little too easily) mix with other races, so humans are all the same species. This is evident but denied by the cultures.  It is also the key to evolutionary "fitness" changing as the environment varied from pleasant to challenging, often unexpectedly.  Only some can cope.

The identities of individuals are created by the pushing of the genome against the resistance and forming of the environment.  Often hard times are the origin of hard people, or at least those resourceful enough to find new ways to live.  It's not a matter of magic, neither things nor stories and songs.  But we rejoice in these familiar things.  Wanting to keep them alive is a near sacred trust.  Even pirates have their uses.

http://nativeamericansofdelawarestate.com/ReferenceWorksOfInterest.htm

I'M SUSPENDED FROM TWITTER

I'm suspended from Twitter because they think I'm not me.  All attempts to prove otherwise are blocked by their cultural refusal to accept a phone number that isn't from a cell phone.  This IS a problem when the world has developed a sub-culture of techies who control communication on their own narrow terms, narrow because they never step outside their own head-space and many live in the same city.

The exceptions were Academia.edu and Researchgate.com, websites meant for educated people that record serious papers by thoughtful writers.  I successfully changed an update of my email name there.

My present email address is mscriver@3rivers.net.

OH, SAY, CAN YOU SEE?

This song left me weeping, not because I’m patriotic or because I’m nostalgic for old drinking songs, but because it is so skillful, spontaneous, and surprising The story is on the vid, but the first time I saw this the male singer was totally unexpected.  In fact, when I found a close up on You Tube, it was not nearly so intense in effect.  It’s the idea of a stranger, an “other”, who appears from no where and a world apart, walking gracefully, wearing a fringe jacket, boots and jeans, and then singing counterpoint as though the two had practiced for a week — at that point something beautifully done becomes a story full of suspense. . . and then he turns and walks away quietly, with a wave.  The intensely focused white girl smiles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2V0rG_4Ax4  

Several times I’ve tried to write up a similar (sort of) incident in Portland.  In fact, I attended several classes at PSU in those years and sometimes dream about the buildings.  But this incident didn’t happen at PSU.  I was headed to a foreign film at the 33rd Ave theatre on Alberta where as a child I saw many movies, including “King Kong.”  I’ve forgotten what movie this was.  

In those days, the 70’s, movie houses were trying to survive by divving up the huge auditoriums into smaller units.  My movie was showing on what had been the stage, because not many viewers were expected.  I went in the proper door, but there were no clues about aisles and seats because there weren’t any.  The seating was on old furniture, mostly bulging and semi-collapsed.  I stood in total darkness waiting for my eyes to adjust or for a bright scene in the movie.  You know how those moody foreign noir films are — there were no sunlight scenes.

Then a hand reached out of the dark and pulled me down alongside him.  When I could finally see, it was a black man about my age, a cheerful well-spoken man who knew about this movie and its maker.  We sat there together, in sync, watching and quietly commenting now and then.  At the end we didn’t leave together and I never saw him again.  I don’t remember his face, only the feel of his strong dry hand on my arm.

These are encounters in the context of “high culture.”

 (French film. Opera.)   Both singers are highly skilled people in those fields and though not all viewers may know exactly what technicalities are involved, we all directly enjoy the result, the same as they seem to.  At first it seems spontaneous, but when we read the note that the woman

The bios of the two, Madisen Hallberg and Emanuel Henreid are printed on the screen in the version above.  It soon turned out that this shared moment electrified a lot of people.  The result of the two voices under the trees is soaring and seemingly effortless.  We’re told that Emanuel, who is a professionally very busy person, had been “passing” and asked to join Madisen.  But as a cynical suspicion, maybe there more to it than that, speaking with the mind of a theatre producer.  One has to consider the audience at all times.

A)  A dangerous chasm has developed between Black and white.

B)  Any time a man and woman sing together, the music is sexualized, but this is not sexual music.  Still, it’s arousing and so some people that’s the same thing.  So it would be misleading for the pair to go off together  For coffee?  More?  Likewise, if they had arrived together, arm-in-arm, it would suggest they were in relationship.

C)  But in the note it is said that Emmanuel did ask whether singing along would be okay and Madisen did agree to that.  Notice that she’s named for a founding father, though the spelling is different?  Well, he was named for an angel, right?  But they didn’t put the names up front.  People object to both categories.

D)  In real life the two singers may well have known each other.  Maybe Emmanuel had given lessons.  Maybe they were in the same production.  Maybe they just hung out with the same bunch of singers.  Professional people in sophisticated arts so not have to even consider color, unless they’re producing “Otello,” the Verdi opera, and don’t want to paint a white singer.  Come that, it would be lovely to hear these two sing.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpcQcLZRetQ  Duet starts at 2.40.  There might be better duets for them.  I’m no expert.  Verdi’s just previous opera had been “Aida” but I don’t think he cast black singers.

This must have had to pass some kind of organizer of the graduation and this may have been an excellent pre-determined way to escape objections.  On the other hand I don’t have any difficulty believing that it really was just spontaneous and these two could fit their voices together expertly without any rehearsal.

As for my friend at the foreign film, he was a little old to be a college student, I think, though we didn’t exchange particulars.  In a way we were speaking filmeze and on that level all that matters is on the screen.  The point of many humanities is not about the people but about the subject at hand.  Many racists have no subject at hand except prejudice.  They’re obsessed with it and worry that a person of a different color might use the same brand of toothpaste which would reflect badly on them.

These incidents suggest that at the high end (thoughtful, educated) of any scale whether color, ethnic, professional, sexual, or by happenstance there can be a collaboration of considerable beauty.  I’m not excluding a continuum of jazz or any other folk skill.  Not would I insist that only a black man could use jazz and only Italians could sing opera.  It’s often glorious and absorbing no matter who does what.

But it's a bit ironic that our national anthem should be the subject here, eh?  Since the country is feeling so much slip away.

NOTES FOR THE PLANET OF CODES

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/06/25/pandemic-proofing-the-planet?utm_campaign=coronavirus-special-edition&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2020-06-27&utm_content=article-link-1

This article notes “Ebola, sars, Zika and Rift Valley fever. But it also included “Disease X”.  This illness, caused by a pathogen never before seen in humans, would, the panel said, emerge from animals somewhere in a part of the world where people had encroached on wildlife habitats. It would be more deadly than seasonal influenza but would spread just as easily between people. By hitching rides on travel and trade networks, it would journey beyond its continent of origin within weeks of its emergence. It would cause the world’s next big pandemic, and leave economic and social devastation in its wake.”

. . . . . . . . .  

“The first layer is a worldwide effort to find and track the hundreds of thousands of as-yet-unseen pathogens that might threaten human health. The second is the monitoring of blood samples and other indicators from people living in places where new diseases are most likely to emerge. The third is a concerted programme that employs all the data thus collected to get a head-start in the development of drugs and vaccines that might be used to meet an emerging disease halfway.”

. . . . . . . 

“In 2004, however, a highly pathogenic strain emerged and began to spread across South-East Asia, killing tens of millions of birds. By the middle of 2005 this version of the virus had infected wild geese, which took it into Europe, India and Africa. That year, 98 people were infected, and 43 of them died—a death rate severe enough for David Nabarro, then co-ordinator of the un’s response to influenza, to issue a warning that an unchecked h5n1 outbreak could kill up to 150m people. In 1968 a less pathogenic strain of flu, which had originated in the same area, killed 1m people when it spread around the world. In 1957 a still-earlier relative killed 1.1m. h5n1 was considerably more lethal than either.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“PREDICT ran for just over a decade. Scientists working with local teams in 30 countries collected around 170,000 samples from people and wild animals, mainly non-human primates, bats and rodents. In the process they discovered 1,200 new viruses belonging to families known to have the potential to infect people and cause epidemics. Among these were more than 160 potentially zoonotic coronaviruses.”

 . . . . . . . 

“Among other things, having a registry of such risks might make it possible to identify hotspots where an unhealthy number of the conditions for zoonoses coexist. The predict programme’s risk registry includes virological, ecological and sociological factors. Viruses which store their genes as rna, for example, are categorised as more risky than dna viruses, because of their increased ability to mutate. Viruses already found in more than one host are also flagged up. They clearly have an adaptive knack. And being adapted to a species reasonably close to Homo sapiens matters too. A virus able to reproduce in the cells of one species will, other things being equal, have a better chance of adapting to life in a related species than an unrelated one. siv did not have to change all that much to become hiv. Reptile viruses, by contrast, are less of a threat.”

. . . . . . .

“Besides being the original reservoirs of sars-cov and sars-cov-2, bats also harbour another coronavirus, mers-cov, which causes Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, an illness first detected in 2012. They are also the source of the virus which causes Ebola and of the hendra and nipah viruses which, over the past three decades, have led to small outbreaks of deadly respiratory and brain infections in Australia and South-East Asia.”

Never kiss an even-toed ungulate!!  

Whether to kiss an odd-toed ungulate depends on how odd they are.

THE SAVING REMNANT

A holocaust is supposed to be a sacrifice that will save the sacrificer by bribing the gods, but no one gives any thought to the feelings of those sacrificed, which are often human “animals” (out-groups) or their children.  We were supposed to have given that up when we went to agriculture and just sacrificed something vegetable, maybe a corn dolly or a burning man.  But the gods are willing to sacrifice whole crops. Whole species.

Holocausts do not improve people either as individuals or groups, “improve” meaning happy, cheerful, generous, patient and all those other things.  When the Blackfeet were sacrificed so ranchers could have grass and the railroad could have right of way, the US side Piegan group were reduced to 500 people, half children.  The loss was of story, social structure, standards, knowledge, memory.  It all had to be rebuilt or borrowed from someone.  Luckily the Canadian divisions hung on to a lot of it.  But there was loss to the point of numbness.

The first reaction was simply being stunned.  Then it was secrecy.  Maybe some ceremonies, the old familiar ones or even the rituals of invaders, since those things seemed to work. Maybe some small comforts, little possibles kits to hang on one’s belt the way the movies use diamonds as holders of value.   I don’t say this because I’m an expert on “Indians,” I say it because it’s human and we’re all doing it now in this pandemic.  Somehow while we weren’t looking, someone killed all the “buffalo”.  And now they are putting bounties on the heads of our warriors.  Maybe we’d better start providing gifts, or did we do that already?

One strategy is to shrink the size of one’s community, the people one will defend or share with.  At one extreme is the person who has made no real attachments so only has himself to guard.  He had better have resources or at least good luck.  At least it’s an advantage if the holocaust is caused by something contagious like a virus that can be defeated by distancing.  But if the holocaust — the one only barely on the horizon — is climate change, there is nothing to be done without working with others.

The most familiar and mammalian basic group is family but if threatened one way or another, the adults abandon the pups.  This is where we all can learn from the tribal people where family is the whole tribe, but sometimes it shrank to the “clan” or “band” — the people who traveled together.  The internal plague has been those who intercept money for themselves or their immediate family.

Still, the impulse to help each other persists so in the midst of terrible times there have been formed affinity groups, like the refuge Carl Cree Medicine created from an empty building, a trusty big coffee pot and a collection of furniture, specifically for street people who sat in a loud of cigarette smoke, but out of the killing weather.  Not quite out of the contempt of others.  Then there are the growing number of coalitions that feed people living on the street who until recently had houses.

A little fancier was the group of teachers and administrators in Browning who formed a “learning group” and talked a state college into providing a curriculum that they taught to each other until they had earned higher degrees. 

But the secret to the rez and most Western small towns is the power of the family involved.  With a family defined as everyone with blood or marriage connections, all members have help and insurance, even if it’s only sitting at the kitchen table brain-storming the scene over coffee.  But some families harbor criminals or are violent even among themselves. 

The even darker national side of this is that somehow thirty Republican senators have formed something more like a coven than a family, but capable of creating power and controlling a whole country, bluffing as much as punishing. The coin of their realm is money and that may turn out to be their downfall, because money is only bookkeeping and often just gambling.  It’s not so easily hidden now and lies are revealed by videos.  Most of those senators can’t even bring up a spread sheet on a computer.  Reporters and smart phones are everywhere.  Somehow the secret handwritten ledgers in safes are eventually found.

The strongest glue in scary and edgy times is always gambling and that’s an industry in itself, though it used to be one of the big “Christian” sins, like going into debt which has also underwritten our contemporary holocausts and threatened families by foreclosure.  The ultimate gamble is elections so the money-grifters try to buy them, too, but it’s getting harder.  If Putin is paying a coyote bounty for every American soldier, he must be paying bigger for all the defenestration in his own country.  Not in terms of money, but in terms of sacrificing the best people in his country, the scientists who would have made Russia far more of an empty prairie than the middle of America.  Putin is always gambling that no one will find out, but we do.  He is in debt.

It’s a strange human self-destruction that it imposes holocausts on itself.  The quiet and coherent Judaism of the Middle East was oppressed so viciously by Rome — which crucified hundreds along the roads to warn dissenters (carefully crucifying women facing the cross so no one would be embarrassed by their vulnerable bodies) until Jesus was able to oppose them in “house churches”, family by family, sharing in the potlucks that became communion.

Rome was eventually destroyed, as much by internal strife, barbarians, climate change, famine, insects, and disease holocausts as by proudly valuing themselves above everyone else. After a couple of millennia of admiring Rome and living off its remnants, until WWII brought everything to a climax, we thought we had finally given a new country — Israel — to a people often treated unjustly.  Now we see that they have repeated the same oppression on everyone around them, besides allying with the worst Roman-style senators among us.  People who once sacrificed as holocaust have become accustomed to just putting the skin, bones, ears and tails of the lambs on the altar and taking the rest home so the family can enjoy lamb chops. It doesn’t work.   

Just as I was building up to a mighty climax of blame and outrage, I got a phone call.  It was a person I went to grade school with — Class of 1953 at Vernon Elementary in Portland.  Some of them still meet for lunch once a month. She was living in a “bubble” away from the rebellion, murder, fires and other mayhem in Portland, but she knew what was happening worldwide. We persist, we eighty-years-old people. Little unseen filaments who vote.  It’s a human world wide web.

___________________________

I'd better add the Biblical story that my title comes from. God had become so disgusted by the behavior of people that he intended to destroy them all.  But an intercessor argued, "Would you really want to destroy X who is a good and innocent person?"  Well, no, God admitted.  The intercessor named others. In the end God didn't obliterate the town.  

A WEB OF HOLOCAUSTS

A category that is not a category exists only in my mind.  Maybe half-a-dozen educated white people who have been visiting the Blackfeet since maybe the Sixties are known to me.  That is: myself, Adolf Hungry Wolf, Alice Kehoe, Ken Lowensgaard, Sid Gustafson, and a few more.  Some are dead now.  One moved to Europe.  We don’t necessarily know each other.  I’m not counting the white merchants and ranchers whose children are now enrolled. We’re in touch mostly online.  Some have written books.  

When Mike Swims Under died, Adolf knew many of the ceremonial songs.  Ken Lowensgaard and Sid Gustafson were here as youngsters.  Alice Kehoe is an anthro professor who has usually spent her summers here and has written books.  We are people who know this rez in quite a different way than most people, whether they could be considered Blackfeet or even tribal or not.  We do not agree about what we see or what we would recommend.

When viral holocaust hit the Blackfeet on the US side of the high prairie east of the Rockies, it came in waves. Maybe the first was smallpox which could survive on fabrics.  “Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by one of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980. The risk of death following contracting the disease was about 30%, with higher rates among babies.”  It may have survived as a weapon.  WHO may not survive Trump.

Of course there were always natural disasters in every millennia, but “settlement” made the former nomads more vulnerable, and there are places on this rez that are blind to electronics like radio or telephone.  No warning possible. The Big Flood was as much a financial and emotional blow as a pandemic, though it didn’t kill high numbers.  The tourist trade was shut down that summer, much like now.

Race is meaningless in terms of skin color or manner of dress.  What counts is culture, which is a way of being, central practices, rooted in ecoculture.  So it was not the atrocities — like murdering a whole band/family of people by mistake and by stealth in spite of an individual peace agreement — that did so much to impose a holocaust as it was the continuing killing of buffalo on which the culture was based.  Restoring buffalo today is interesting, but the culture that went with it did not and can not come back.

Residential schools are blamed for killing the culture, but the continuing web of truant officers, school bus systems that became a minor culture along the routes, and the German military organization of “grades”, “steps”, categorizing, national texts, and teacher training have continued to force people to conform.  Now a few ways of escaping have reappeared with home schooling, charter schools,  religious schools, are pushing back — because “white” people are rebelling as well. The national WASP culture is seriously eroded and confused, a world class holocaust that affects the notion of globalization as covid-19 travels around the world.  At the same time people like Adolf in his log cabin he built himself, he is talking to people around the planet with his computer running on electricity generated by a roll-up photovoltaic panel.  I publish this blog that is read by a thousand people daily on every major continent. I used to run a blog gadget from clustrmaps that showed a dot every time they made contact, but I don’t use it now because the governments and international criminals were using it to find their enemies.

The holocaust of right now is the killing of secrecy, the murder of the ability of slide in and out of the mostly white control by simply disappearing.  After all, non-whites all look alike to them now that the cultural cues like blankets or braids or language have either been weakened or lost.  But anyway the categories have been reinvented, romanticized, so that now it is thought to be admirable to be a “savage” who is making Rousseau (and a lot of other French philosophers) very happy.  So pleasant to stiff those stiff English, whose elite force their own children into residential schools where perversion based on force is alive and well.  Only a princess can resist them — to a point.

At 80 I am old enough to have known survivors of the “Baker” or Bear River Massacre on January 23, 1870, and to have watched while the memory was brought back to life.  Also, “white” kids I taught and who went on to higher education and successful careers have become surprising members of the tribe.  The Blackfeet are now intermarried with Cree, Flatheads, Mexican tribes, Filipinos, Germans, and even a few Blacks, though most of them arrived as children with mothers who had survived the relocation holocaust of being moved to city ghettos.  They also came with a lot of resistance ideas.

The Pan-Indian movement formed from joining forces politically but also out of the residential higher education schools where marriage-age youngsters fell in love with partners from other tribes, but because the government never expected such a thing, they cannot claim Indian Identity since the pesky records of provenance, (begats), misrepresented as “blood quantum” as though birth had something to do with A,B, or O proteins used to find compatible transfusions or maybe something to do with the intricacies of molecular genetics.  

Alas, analysis of genomes which the tribes suspiciously resist as just another plot, reveal that A) there is more difference among the members of the tribe than between tribes so that only hustlers and Oprah think you can tell which tribe is which, and B) the basic 98% of code for American indigenous people comes from Asia, mostly the SE islands whose boatmanship could cross the Pacific.  Maybe not on purpose.

The individuals at the beginning of this post came mostly in the Sixties and Seventies when much of this thought had not formed yet, but they’ve been open to sciences of all kinds and keen to learn ideas that might become a new culture.  But there will not be one new culture.  It will be a range of adaptations to circumstances that persist long enough for people to feel like a group.  These individuals will have been gone a long time, but their writing might persist. There were never enough of them to form a tribe.

"GODLESS" -- A review, I suppose

“Godless” (2014) is a vid series in the Cormac McCarthy style, meaning many atrocities.  It’s hard to know whether it’s a counter-Western or a logical extension to rather an extreme.  It could have gone farther, but violence can be so excessive that it’s unintelligible. 

I kept thinking I’d seen parts of this series before, which was easy because there were so many parts in what didn’t always create continuity, but human brains can make logic out of almost anything, which is one of the drawbacks of depending on logic.  This 7 part series used just about every trope, meme, metaphor, conceit, snippet, clip and wet dream that could be found.  Luckily, American culture is packed with them.  We export them to spaghetti Westerns and then reimport them while insisting they are American.

This one tries to avoid offense to everyone by including an entire Black (buffalo soldier) town.  Some nasty guys with horned buff heads appear in what have might either a dream or a memory.  Miscegenation was narrowly avoided by killing the lovable young white deputy gunslinger.  “Indians” were represented by a boy, a mysterious man who is supposed to be dead, and Tantoo Cardinal who makes the whole series worth watching.  I’m esp. fond of her “wise and mysterious old woman” role which she repeats in various films, vastly improving them.  Actually, she seems to be getting younger.

Of course the whole thing ends in a shoot-out, a bravua marathon that kills almost everyone and ends with the town burning.  Not to worry — it’s one of those movie set towns with only fronts which are re-labeled from one film to another.  I like them.  Maybe one will be finished inside so tourists can stay there and drink a lot of cold tea while pretending it’s rotgut.  

It’s clear that the actors thoroughly enjoy making these stories, though it takes a special level of foolhardiness to ride a horse off a roof into a blazing fire.  I don’t think that was “green screen” cgi.  The insurance company must have been cringing.

I strongly suspect that this series was once a conventional length movie with much more narrative logic but it was so popular that all the out takes, maybe from two movies, were added back in as dreams or flashbacks.  The success is not about the art of doing it — though I’d be fascinated by a sequence analysis of all the women forted up with Winchesters in the saloon/hotel and the thirty-plus miscellaneous bad guys who rode into town in a well-organized and spaced line.  I mean, is there somewhere a storyboard that has a card for each quick vignette?  The dialogue is above average.  Too bad the

“Why it's a keeper: It's hard to find a series that is partly a feminist Western and also a commentary on fathers and sons. Apart from the magnificent cinematography, the show's dialogue is almost poetic. Godless is truly a unique find on Netflix, and is totally worth watching.”

“Production for “Godless” began in September 2016 and was housed at Santa Fe Studios, though most of the film was shot on location throughout northern New Mexico. It is executive produced by Casey Silver and Steven Soderbergh. “Godless” features the largest Western film set ever built in New Mexico.Nov 26, 2017”

https://www.indiewire.com/2017/11/godless-cast-jeff-daniels-jack-o-connell-scoot-mcnairy-burning-questions-netflix-1201902373/

If you want to think about all this some more, the link above will answer a lot of questions.  Michelle Dockery helped get the movie financed, I’m sure, and her bonus was sinking that “Downton Abbey” image once and for all.

The severed arm thing did involve “green screen” or at least “green sleeve.”  (No song.) It turns out that there was a ground-level fake roof for the horse to come off of, but still. . .  Some of these guys were truly excellent horseback riders.  They didn’t say anything about digging the well and, in fact, the actors themselves are only interviewed in this post off camera and then quoted by the article.  

I always get more interested in these writer/producers once I’ve seen their film.  Looks like Scott Frank may have a second “season” in the works.  He wins prizes and easily translates the Western context over to Sci-fi as in “Logan” which is about the aging of “Wolverine,” quite a good movie.  Frank is not confined to one genre but uses bits of "tech noir, whodunit, thriller and science fiction genres, as well as a traditional chase film.”   No one accuses him of violating the American indigenous genre, though it exists and walks with Tantoo Cardinal.  I guess “tech noir” is close enuf to “gothic” to get by.

Since watching this series, Netflix has taken me out of the Euro “police procedural” silo and now I’ve got tons of Westerns too macabre to watch.  At least I’ve escaped Disney.

And “Godless” is a misnomer.  The 19th version of God is all over the movie.

I was sorry that the lesbian was portrayed as mannish and "sturdy", but her character was a fav of mine (I'm straight.) and the actress, Merrit Wever is excellent.  All the other women were very skinny.

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1234091545?pf_rd_m=A2FGELUUNOQJNL&pf_rd_p=fc0404f6-81c7-4ece-ac1b-3ab658a784cd&pf_rd_r=WQQ0T7CE4R3MM7K2T05T&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_t=15011&pf_rd_i=nm0923266&ref_=nm_vd_nsp_ce_i_1&listId=ls025720609

So there's one of the secrets of a good Western -- a little someone for everyone.  Good thing it's long.