Donald Trump: Joking His Way to a Dictatorship

 Fintan O’Toole is one of the most incisive and entertaining observers of the US pollical scene.  In a recent article for the New York Review of Books, Laugh Riot, he turns his sights on Donald Trump and his use of large rallies to fire up his believers.

Large rallies were a standard tool of the twentieth century fascists.  O’Toole points out that a nasty form of humor was common at these events.

“Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, xenophobic, antidisabled, and antiqueer jokes have always been used to dehumanize those who are being victimized…as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes can also be a way of shutting down pity itself by identifying those who are being laughed at as the ones not worthy of it…”

O’Toole quotes Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who analyzed the relationship between Nazi rallies and degrading humor. 

“The rally, they suggested, was an arena in which a release that was otherwise forbidden was officially permitted:

The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.”

Trump plays the same game at his rallies, but the implementation in the current century is different: bombastic rage is replaced by ugly humor in the form of “jokes.” 

“This is not the 1930s or the 1940s, and we should not expect this toxic laughter to be organized quite as it was then. Trump functions in a culture supersaturated with knowingness and irony. In twentieth-century European fascism, the relationship between words and actions was clear: the end point of mockery was annihilation. Now, the joke is ‘only a joke.’ Populist politics exploits the doubleness of comedy—the way that ‘only a joke’ can so easily become ‘no joke’—to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious.”

“It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)”

This approach of saying outrageous things implying that they are being said in jest is an effective but terrifying practice.

“Violent words and violent actions are all covered by the same disclaimer—one that Trump’s apologists use to blur the relationship between his words and his followers’ actions in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the Trumpian twilight zone where democracy is dying but not yet dead, the connection between words (‘fight like hell’) and deeds (the armed invasion of the Capitol) must be both strong and weak, sufficiently ‘no joke’ to be understood by the faithful yet sufficiently ‘only a joke’ to be deniable to the infidels. The comic mode is what creates the plausible deniability that in turn allows what used to be mainstream Republicans (and some Democrats) to remain in denial about what Trumpism really means.”

Just as the twentieth century fascists used violent words to obtain violent actions, Trump has demonstrated the same power over his followers.

“This is the thing about Trump’s form of organized laughter, in which the idea of humor obscures the distinction between outlandish words and real-life actions. Sooner or later, the first becomes the second. The in-joke becomes the killer line.”

 

Plastics and Human Health: A Poison Like No Other

 In Death by Plastic: Yet Another Threat to Humanity, a book by Matt Simon, A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies, was discussed.  His findings were a revelation and a warning.  We are terribly wrong if we consider plastics merely as the annoying water bottles that float onto our beaches or are tossed by the side of our roads.  Plastics are structures that, in all their applications, contain thousands of chemicals, many of which are considered dangerous.  They are not rigid structures that last forever.  They continually break down into smaller structures, emitting some of their chemicals at each fracture.  The quickest way to ingest plastics and their chemicals into your body is to take a drink from one of those plastic bottles.  If the particles are small enough, they can pass from the digestive system into the blood stream and onward to our organs, bringing their chemicals with them.  Perhaps we are putting our infants at greatest risk by feeding them milk or formula in plastic bottles with plastic nipples to suck on.

Plastic particulates are everywhere, from the highest mountain top to the deepest ocean beds.  Every time we wash our plastic clothes, we generate trillions of nanofibers that enter our water systems.  Every time we drive our cars we generate massive amounts of plastic particulates from the tires.  When it rains, some of these particulates that are not circling the globe in the atmosphere also wash into our waterways.  So many particulates have been added that our waterways are now a significant source of airborne plastic pollution.  That pleasant ocean breeze that we enjoy is bringing plastics into our respiratory system.  If plastic particles are small enough, they and their chemicals can enter our blood stream through our lungs. 

Most people who hear these facts get extremely worried, but then ask, “if this is such a dangerous situation, where are all the sick people?”  The answer that could be given is that the problem has only recently been realized and it takes time for the evidence to appear.  We can perform experiments on animals which demonstrate the threats that arise, but with humans we must wait until, for some, it is too late.  A recent journal article presents some evidence of why we must be concerned.  The findings are summarized in Microplastics may be new risk factor for cardiovascular disease, researchers say.  Here is the main conclusion.

“…an international team of physicians and researchers showed that surgical patients who had a build-up of micro and nanoplastics in their arterial plaque had a 2.1 times greater risk of nonfatal heart attack, nonfatal stroke or death from any cause in the three years post surgery than those who did not.”

Here are the details. 

“The 257 patients who completed the study all had asymptomatic extracranial high-grade internal carotid artery stenosis — in other words, their carotid arteries were blocked with plaque. The patients underwent carotid endarterectomies, a procedure in which the artery is opened and the plaque is cleaned out. Patients who’d had previous heart failure, valvular defects, cancer or other causes of hypertension were disqualified.”

“The researchers then examined the plaque and found polyethylene micro- and nano- particles in 150 of the patients. Thirty patients had polyvinyl chloride particles in their plaque. Images from electron microscopy showed visible, jagged-edged ‘foreign bodies’ along with the biological plaque in these patients.”

“Polythylene, or PET, is the plastic used to make soda and water bottles. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, is the plastic used in water pipes, packaging, medical devices, toothbrushes, children’s toys and window frames, to name a few.’

“The two patient populations were roughly the same in terms of age, sex, weight, smoking status, geographical location, blood pressure and heart rate.”

“The one glaring difference, the authors noted, was the two groups’ susceptibility to heart disease in the months following the surgery — an indication that the presence of microplastics may have played a role. Indeed, indicators of inflammation were higher in the plastic-exposed group. Nonfatal heart attack, nonfatal stroke, or death from any cause occurred in eight of the 107 patients who did not have microplastics in their plaque and 30 of the 150 patients with microplastics.”

This study cannot explain the causes of the results, both plastic particles and plastic chemicals were present.  Either, or both, could be at work here.  But the first shoe has fallen.  There will be more to come.

 

Solar Storms: Yet Another Thing to Worry About

 For those of us who have the time to spend thinking about what is going on in the world, contemplating the future can be terribly depressing.  Earth’s climate seems to be using its increasing energy to make life miserable: melting ice, dryer droughts, hotter heatwaves, wetter floods, and fiercer winds.  Surviving the COVID pandemic merely reminds us how much worse the next one might be.  Our civilization is ever more rapidly polluting the planet with dangerous chemicals.  We may some day eliminate the burning of fossil fuels, but it will be lot harder to stop using them to make chemicals like those in plastics that are growing in concentration everywhere, including within our own bodies.  The geopolitical trends are scary.  We appear to be experiencing a redo of the 1930s when fascism arose and tried to control the world.  Fascism is on the rise again, but this time it appears much stronger.  The United States which led us to victory previously now struggles with the rise of fascism in its own country. 

Apparently, there are additional horrible things possible.  Kathryn Schulze tells us in a New Yorker article, What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet, that wind, snow and rain are not the only components of storms that put us at risk.  Now we must worry about solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

Our sun is an ongoing thermonuclear explosion.  It rotates in space and possesses a magnetic field.  Since it is a plasma without a rigid structure, its dynamics can produce unstable concentrations of energy that can initiate the ejection of radiation and plasma charged particles into space, and occasionally toward the Earth.  The world first took notice of such an event in 1859.  It became known as the Carrington Event.

“The first such storm to cause us trouble took place in 1859. In late August, the aurora borealis, which is normally visible only in polar latitudes, made a series of unusual appearances: in Havana, Panama, Rome, New York City. Then, in early September, the aurora returned with such brilliance that gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up at night and began making breakfast, and disoriented birds greeted the nonexistent morning.”

“This lovely if perplexing phenomenon had an unwelcome corollary: around the globe, telegraph systems went haywire. Many stopped working entirely, while others sent and received ‘fantastical and unreadable messages,’ as the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin put it. At some telegraph stations, operators found that they could disconnect their batteries and send messages via the ambient current, as if the Earth itself had become an instant-messaging system.”

“Owing to a lucky coincidence, all these anomalies were soon linked to their likely cause. At around noon on September 1st, the British astronomer Richard Carrington was outside sketching a group of sunspots when he saw a burst of light on the surface of the sun: the first known observation of a solar flare. When accounts of the low-latitude auroras started rolling in, along with reports that magnetometers—devices that measure fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field—had surged so high they maxed out their recording capabilities, scientists began to suspect that the strange things happening on Earth were related to the strange thing Carrington had seen on the sun.”

These events occurred at a time when our civilization was not critically susceptible to electromagnetic events imposed on the Earth by the sun.  Subsequent events did occur over time, but none were as large as the Carrington Event.  However, as civilization became more complex, it was recognized that the potential for massive damage was increasing.  Eventually, scientists would put their knowledge in a form that would warn the world what could happen.

“…space weather remained a mostly marginal subject until 2008, when the National Academy of Sciences convened a group of experts to assess the nation’s capacity to endure its terrestrial effects. Later that year, the N.A.S. published a report on the findings, ‘Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts’.”

“The title was dry; the contents were not. The report noted that the Earth hadn’t experienced a Carrington-size storm during the space age, or, for that matter, during the age of widespread electrification, and that much of the country’s critical infrastructure seemed unlikely to withstand one. Extensive damage to satellites would compromise everything from communications to national security, while extensive damage to the power grid would compromise everything: health care, transportation, agriculture, emergency response, water and sanitation, the financial industry, the continuity of government.”

“The report estimated that recovery from a Carrington-class storm could take up to a decade and cost many trillions of dollars.”

That report got peoples’ attention.  Studies were initiated and directives were issued requiring the entities most at risk to prepare to weather a significant solar storm.  Any such preparations are complicated by the interactions of our electromagnetic systems, but progress is undoubtedly being made.  Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with the frequent climate-change predictions dealing with the complex Earth system.  Such modeling predicts what is going to happen, but it was far off in predicting how fast change would come.  One might be suspicious that anyone can predict all the effects of a major solar storm.  One might also be suspicious that anywhere near the money and effort required to protect our technology will be allocated.

Just one more thing to worry about.

 

IVF Could Become a Required Procedure for Human Reproduction

The recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that embryos should be considered human beings caused an uproar across the nation and a rush to protect in vitro fertilization (IVF) as a technique to assist in fertilization.  It is an expensive and time-consuming process, so practitioners usually produce a number of embryos and select the most promising ones for implantation.  This leaves leftover embryos.  If they are considered “persons,” what do you do with them?  This will get resolved in such a way as to allow IVF to continue to be available to those who need it.  It is too beneficial a procedure to be inhibited.  It is also a procedure that could become increasingly required in supporting fertility rates across the world.

In Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Intersex is Rising, Sperm Counts Are Falling, we discussed results of the ever-increasing level of poisons we are producing in our environments.  In particular, the concern was with endocrine-disrupting compounds and their effects on the intersex incidence and the global decrease in male sperm count.  Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are those that are sufficiently similar to human hormones that they can fool the body’s hormone receptors into responding at an inappropriate time or trigger a response altogether inappropriate.  Encountering such chemicals is particularly risky if the occurrence is in the fetal stage where growth and development depend on hormonal surges at the correct time and with the correct intensity.  Body function depends critically on proper hormonal function, making encounters with these disrupting chemicals dangerous.

Endocrine disruptors cannot be avoided.  They have become an integral part of our lifestyle, being produced by plastics, pharmaceuticals, herbicides, pesticides, and numerous other products used in our households.  As the production of EDCs has inexorably increased (and continues to increase), sperm count in males across the globe has been falling, along with the quality of the sperm being produced.  Consider these findings from the BBC article How pollution is causing a male fertility crisis.

“In 2022, Levine and his collaborators published a review of global trends in sperm count. It showed that sperm counts fell on average by 1.2% per year between 1973 to 2018, from 104 to 49 million/ml. From the year 2000, this rate of decline accelerated to more than 2.6% per year.”

“Seemingly small changes can have a powerful effect on these highly specialised cells, and especially, their ability to fertilise an egg. The crucial aspects for fertility are their ability to move efficiently (motility), their shape and size (morphology), and how many there are in a given quantity of semen (known as sperm count). They are the aspects that are examined when a man goes for a fertility check.”

“Sperm count, explains Levine, is closely linked to fertility chances. While a higher sperm count does not necessarily mean a higher probability of conception, below the 40 million/ml threshold the probability of conception drops off rapidly.”

At the current rate of decline we are only a few years from this 40 million/ml threshold, and we will accelerate down past it. 

Protect the IVF process and strive to make it cheaper and more efficient.  There may come a time when it will be needed if we wish to propagate the human population.

  

Free Will: Yes, It Does Exist

Most people believe they have free will in the sense that when confronted with an issue that demands resolution, they will consider the possible responses and all possible pluses and minuses of each and will select the action that is consistent with their experiences, goals, and sense of right and wrong.  However, there are many who will claim that the individual is only responding to all the neuronal exchanges going on in the physical brain which is making the decision for the person.  A smaller minority will take this notion that our brains make our decisions for us to the logical extreme and claim that our lack of free will results in a lack of responsibility for our actions.  If we have no free will and are unable to not do what we have just done, how can we be held accountable for committing a crime?

Physical scientists tend to be comfortable with their understanding of physical laws and believe that the human body and its brain are a mechanical system that moves from one point in time to the next in a defined, deterministic fashion, and there is no way to stop it.  Bio-scientists, as they learn more about biofunction, tend to be less rigid in their thinking.  Kevin J. Mitchell is associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.  He believes that evolution created animals that needed free will and natural selection provided them with it.  He makes his case in his book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.

“It is fashionable these days to claim that ‘free will is an illusion!’: either it does not exist at all, or it is really not what we think it is.  I am not willing to give up on it so easily.  In this book I argue that we really are agents.  We make decisions, we choose, we act—we are causal forces in the universe.  These are the fundamental truths of our existence and absolutely the most basic phenomenology of our lives…It is to accept instead that there is a deep mystery to be solved and to realize that we may need to question the philosophic bedrock of our scientific approach if we are to reconcile the clear existence of choice with the apparent determinism of the physical universe.”

“All living things have some degree of agency.  That is their defining characteristic, what sets them apart from the mostly lifeless, passive universe.  Living beings are autonomous entities, imbued with purpose and able to act on their own terms, not yoked to every cause in their environment but causes in their own right.”

Mitchell’s task is to convince his readers that brains of humans and many other animals are designed to accept inputs from many lower order neural functions about memories, past experiences, current intentions, and such, yet are capable of reaching a decision that need not be directly based on any of those inputs.  In other words, the brain cannot ignore those inputs, but it can be creative.

He builds his case by taking us through the development of agency in animals from single cell bacteria to complex human-like species, illustrating how natural selection recognizes mutations that are beneficial and allows them to propagate.  An amoeba that can take in nutrients and excrete waste is at risk of losing a food source if it is just floating around randomly in water, but if it develops an ability to detect interesting chemicals in its surroundings and the ability to move it has a much better chance of survival.  Natural Selection provided these things.

Higher-order animals such as mammals that have developed mobility, vision, hearing, smell, and other capabilities need neural functions to manage inputs from the various senses and provide appropriate information for planning actions.  If they are to perform effectively, they must break from the simple sensation-response patterns of simple animals and create a hierarchical structure in which the machinery of consciousness can, if necessary, take control of any impulsive responses that might be suggested and provide an analysis of potential options before choosing a course of action.  Natural selection provided the necessary neural functions as animals’ environments became more complex, requiring ever more complex means of reasoning to prosper 

“Through the cumulative effects of natural selection across millennia and of learning over the course of individual lifetimes, living things accrete causal power.  Although they are made of physical components, they are not merely physical systems, where the things that happen within them are driven by low-level causes.  They are organized for a purpose, and that organization constrains the physical components to enable true functionality and goal-directed action.  Their physical structures are configured so that they run on meaning, on patterns of activity that represent things—percepts, concepts, beliefs, needs, goals, plans, causal relations, regularities of the world, memories, scenes, narrative sequences, and possibilities.”

“First, organisms do not passively wait for external stimuli to respond to.  Their brains, when awake, are constantly cycling through possible actions, and this stream of behavior accommodates to new information and the changing environment.  Second, this is not a one-way relationship from environment to organism: it is a recursive loop of mutual interaction.  The activity of the organism changes the environment and the organism’s relation to it.  The apparently linear chain of causation is really a loop or a series of loops—you can think of it as a spiral stretched through time.  If we ignore these reciprocal effects, we are left studying only half the overall system.  Third, the processes of decision making and action selection are just that—processes: they have duration through time.  They are not instantaneous transitions from one physical state of the system to the next.  This point is crucial when we consider some philosophical challenges to the idea that choices can be made at all.”

“Finally, the description of the processes involved in action selection risks giving the impression of a mechanism churning away or of a computer running a linear algorithm…However, the idea of an algorithm—a series of steps being completed methodically and sequentially—is not an accurate conception of what is happening.  The various subsystems involved are in constant dialogue with each other, each attempting to satisfy its own constraints in the context of the dynamically changing information it receives from all the interconnected areas.  Ultimately through these dynamic, distributed, and recursive interactions, the whole system settles into a new state—one that drives the release of one of the set of possible actions under consideration and the inhibition of all the others.”

“In a holistic sense, the organism’s neural circuits are not deciding—the organism is deciding.  It’s not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs.  It’s an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons.  Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures.  The process relies on physical mechanisms but it is not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms.  What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it.  Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it’s the self that decides.  If we break them apart, even conceptually, we lose sight of the thing we are trying to explain.”

“Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physical brains, somehow directing the flow of electrical activity.  The activity distributed across all those neural circuits produces or entails our mental experience…The meaning of those patterns for the organism has causal power based on how the system is physically configured.  We can thus build a holistic physical conception of agency without either reducing it or mystifying it.”

We feel we have free will because we know that we are going through the same sort of process that Mitchell describes above when we are trying to reach a decision.  The self we have become requires nothing beyond our physical structure to reach such decisions.  It is imperative to realize that the agency our brains provide allows us to make decisions that will be incorporated in the experience base of the self that will emerge from this decision process.  We thus have the power to modify the self we were into a new self (better or worse?).

Mitchell goes at length to eliminate the common attempts to claim our actions are predetermined and not under our control.  But the most compelling counter to them is his in-depth description of what happens in the brain as we struggle to understand something or to make a decision.  Some background on the properties of neurons is required.

“Cells come in all shapes and sizes, but whether they are globular or are packed together like little bricks, most are content to keep their bits local.  Neurons, by contrast, send long, thin cellular projections out from the cell body, which branch to form wondrous tree-like structures that enable them to connect with many other neurons or with sensory or muscle cells.  Importantly, they can bypass many cells along the way, specifically connecting over long distances—up to a meter in the human body!”

“There are two types of these extensions: dendrites, which are specialized for receiving signals, and the axon, which is specialized for sending signals.  The neuron is thus polarized: it has an ‘input’ end and an ‘output’ end, with the cell body, where the nucleus is, sitting in the middle.”

“The real power of neurons comes from the way they are connected.  They rarely have input from only one cell that they send to just one other cell: frankly, that would be pointless.  Instead, their branching dendrites collect signals from many cells, allowing the neuron to perform all kinds of integrative operations to extract relevant meaning from that incoming information…Similarly, they can send output to many cells, allowing them to convey information in a coordinated fashion across a network of connected cells.”

The simple act of trying to recall a memory can be quick or slow, and it can be clear or indistinct, or maybe it cannot be found at all.  A murky memory can be disappointing or deceptive, but in some instances, it can provide a new interpretation of the event being recalled.  The author provides this perspective on neurons.

“They are made of wet, jiggly, incomprehensively tiny components that jitter about constantly, diffusing around at random, bumping into each other, engaging in transient molecular interactions, shifting their conformations, and continually being chemically modified, transformed, broken down, and remanufactured.  How can you make a reliable information processor out of this kind of messy wetware?”

Trust natural selection to turn an apparent weakness into a survival enhancement feature.

“This generates what engineers call noise in neural populations: random fluctuations in the very parameters that are used to transmit signals.  This noise presents nature with a problem: it is difficult to build structures capable of complex cognitive operations out of individually unreliable components.  But organisms also capitalize on this underlying variability.  Crucially, it breaks what Epicurus called ‘the treaties of fate,’ under which the behavior of the organism would simply reflect the inevitable transitions from one physical state to the next.  Instead, the brain has evolved to take advantage of the noisiness of its components to allow the organism to make some decisions itself.”

“The noisiness of neural components is a crucial factor in enabling an organism to flexibly adapt to its changing environment—both on the fly and over time.  Moreover, organisms have developed numerous mechanisms to directly harness the underlying randomness in neural activity.  It can be drawn on to resolve an impasse in decision making, to increase exploratory behavior, or allow novel ideas to be considered when planning the next action.  These phenomena illustrate the reality of noisy processes in the nervous system and highlight a surprising but very important fact: organisms can sometime choose to do something random.”

So much for the assumption that all our actions are predetermined.

“In humans we recognize this capacity as creativity…When we are frustrated in achieving our current goals or when none of the conceived options presents an adequate solution to the current problem, we can broaden our search beyond the obvious to consider new ideas.  These do not spring from nowhere but often arise as cognitive permutations: by combining knowledge in new ways, by drawing abstract analogies with previously encountered problems in different domains, or by recognizing and questioning current assumptions that may be limiting the options that occur to us.  In this way, humans become truly creative agents, using the freedom conferred by the underlying neural indeterminacy to generate genuinely original thoughts and ideas, which we can then scrutinize to find the ones that actually solve the problem.  Creative thoughts can thus be seen as acts of free will, facilitated by chance but filtered by choice.  As dual Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling said, ‘If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas.  Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away’.”

Freed from the notion of neural determinacy, we can celebrate the fact that when we work hard to understand difficult concepts and occasionally succeed, or we come up with a new concept and we are heralded for it or solve a difficult problem we can enjoy it as truly our accomplishment.  For our brain works exactly as we thought it did.  We just didn’t know all the details.

Mitchell closes with this final comment.

“Thinking may have evolved for controlling action.  But the expansion of our neural resources and the recursive architecture of our cognitive systems gave us the ability to think about our thoughts.  We internalized cognition to such an extent that it became its own world: what cognitive scientists Uta and Chris Frith have called a world of ideas.  Our minds were set free.  We are capable of open-ended, truly creative thought; of imagination; of entertaining fanciful notions and hypothetical futures; of creating art and music and science; and abstract reasoning that has revealed the deepest laws and principles of the universe.”

 

Fungi: Yet Another Growing Threat to Humanity

 We are constantly reminded that our bodies exist in a swarm of microbes, some of which are critical parts of our bodies resulting from evolving in this swarm.  Pathogens occasionally enter our environment and cause problems.  Mostly they have been viruses and bacteria.  Emily Monosson, in her book Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic, reminds us that there is another class of microbe, fungi, that is also part of the surrounding swarm.  She describes new forms of fungi that may be developing and spreading due to global warming.

Monosson tells us that there are an estimated six million or more different species of fungi, much more than the number of plant and animal species.  Their main function seems to be the breaking down of dead or once-living matter into its components for future use.

“Most fungi live if not in collaboration, then in peace with other living things.  But some do not.  Some feed on the living rather than the dead and dying.  Most fungi give life; fungal pathogens take it.”

“Some disease-causing fungi can survive in the environment for days or months or years even without a host.  Unlike many other pathogenic microbes, fungal spores can be remarkably persistent, and each single spore carries the instructions for a next generation of mold, mildew, smut, or myriad other fungi.”

“Collectively, infectious fungi and fungus-like pathogens are the most devastating disease agents known on the planet.  The incidence of novel fungal diseases across species, including humans, has risen over the past century.”

Like other of the Earth’s microbes, fungi evolve over time as they look for new hosts to invade.  Infectious diseases will find a host and generally devastate the population, but not necessarily eliminate it.  A few specimens will possess genetic makeups that allow them to survive the onslaught and rebuild a population that can survive the endemic pathogen.  What is dangerous is when hosts are unknowingly transported across the globe where the pathogen finds plenty of new hosts to infect, leading to a pandemic.

“The pandemics and epidemics I write about in these pages all began with a fungus that was moved from its home environment to a completely new setting where it happened upon a suitable host.  There are a lot of fungi in the world.  Although most are harmless, a few can cause utter devastation when provided with a novel and susceptible host.  Our job going forward will be to prevent the potentially harmful fungi from meeting the susceptible host—including us.”

Much of what Monosson discusses relates to plant life.  Trees and other foliage are in constant danger of infection.  Agricultural crops have always had to contend with unruly fungi.  Recent fungal infections have appeared among bats and amphibians, decimating their populations and spreading across the globe. 

Could something similar happen to humans?  The author’s book title suggests an answer in the affirmative.  Has something changed to make fungal infections more likely?  Perhaps so.  Consider that our mammalian body with its high temperature microbiome has provided an inhospitable environment for fungi.

“For much of our existence our microbiome has helped to keep potentially invasive microbes—particularly those already in residence—in check.  Most of those microbes are bacteria that in both number and diversity have the fungi beat.  There is a good reason for this: our body temperature.  Many bacteria thrive at 37ºC (98.6ºF), the normal human internal temperature, but for many fungi our bodies are like Death Valley.  Most fungi prefer temperatures between 12ºC (53.6ºF) to 30ºC (86ºF).  We mammals simply run too hot.  Like a healthy microbiome, our warmth protects us from fungal invasion.  But now some scientists worry that our so-called temperature barrier is beginning to fail us.”

What has changed recently is that the climate has become warmer in most locations, providing more opportunities for fungi to develop a tolerance for higher temperatures.  And regions where high-temperature fungal infections already exist can spread into new regions with fresh potential hosts.

“In 2010 [Arturo] Casedevall and Monica Garcia-Solache coauthored an opinion piece for a scientific journal.  They hypothesized that warmer temperatures would alter and likely increase the geographic range of disease-causing fungi and likely select for new fungi pathogens with higher tolerances for a warm body.  In 2019, less than a decade later, Casadevell and colleagues suggested that the emergence of C. Auris may be the first example of a climate-enabled novel human fungal pathogen.”

C. Auris is short for Candida auris, a form of yeast that was first observed as an infection in relatively cool ears in 2006.  By 2009 it was observed to have entered the blood stream of three people, killing two of them.  In 2015, a fungal outbreak in Pakistan led to the CDC identifying C. Auris as the culprit.

“A year later C. Auris began popping up in other locales around the globe, including a handful of cases, diagnosed retrospectively, in the United States, which is when the CDC issued its first warning about the emergent disease.  Once the warning went out, other cases were identified.  Hundreds of cases in the United States and thousands of cases globally have since been reported.”

“In April 2019 the New York Times published a story about a patient who had been hospitalized at Mount Sinai in Brooklyn, New York, with C Auris.  He died three months later.  By then the yeast had colonized the entire room.  Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president told the Times that ‘everything was positive—the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump.  The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive’.”

The mortality rate for infected patients varies between 30 and 60 percent.  Various strains of C. Auris exist, with resistance to most or all antifungal drugs.

C. Auris is an example of a suddenly appearing new pathogen; more are likely to follow.  Others already exist and appear to be growing in infection rate.  Valley Fever is a fungal disease endemic to warm and dry climates of the southwestern US and Mexico.  It is expected to spread throughout the western states in the coming decades.  During the covid pandemic, India saw a huge growth of cases of the fungal disease mucormycosis.  Thousands of cases emerged with a mortality rate of 85 percent.

New fungal strains are decimating bat and amphibian populations.  Thus far, humans have been spared a pandemic, but the fungi are gathering strength, and one might be inevitable.

 

 

Health and Justice: Individuals Versus Society

 Linda Greenhouse produced an intriguing article for the New York Review of Books: An Unhealthy Definition of Rights.  In it she discusses a book by Wendy E. Parmet: Constitutional Contagion: Covid, the Courts, and Public Health.  Greenhouse presented a startling Supreme Court Ruling that seems to conclude that the Constitution owes we citizens nothing in terms of protection from “private actors.”  The particular case was DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989).

“In this case, the father of a four-year-old boy was known by government social service workers to be abusing his son, yet the county failed to remove the boy from his custody. A final beating left the boy severely brain-damaged. The question was whether the government’s failure to act on its knowledge violated the child’s constitutional right to due process. Rejecting the claim, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the majority:

Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors. The Clause is phrased as a limitation on the State’s power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security.”

This Constitutional failure has long been recognized but had not been seen as an impediment to government taking actions to protect its citizens.  That has begun to change as the Court has swung to more extreme conservative legal theories.

“…the fact remains that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution are for the most part negative rights against government interference rather than positive rights to government-provided goods or services. This feature of American constitutionalism has been widely observed and continually contested. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for ‘a second Bill of Rights,’ one that would include guarantees to the right to ‘a useful and remunerative job,’ ‘a decent home,’ ‘adequate medical care,’ ‘a good education,’ and ‘the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.’ Cass R. Sunstein, in The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever (2004), wrote that the address ‘has a strong claim to being the greatest speech of the twentieth century’.” 

The interpretation by Rehnquist and his colleagues became dominant during the legal arguments over Covid pandemic actions and overturned a long history of government regulation arguing that there were limits on personal liberties if those actions endangered others.  Consider the history of vaccine mandates.

“Vaccine requirements are nothing new; George Washington required soldiers in the Continental Army to be vaccinated against smallpox. Nor is resistance to them a historical anomaly. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court decision that established the legal framework for dealing with vaccine resistance, dates to 1905 and stems from an individual’s refusal to accept a required smallpox vaccine.”

“By a vote of 7–2, the justices upheld Jacobson’s conviction with a ringing endorsement of vaccine mandates in service of the public good. ‘There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in the majority opinion.

Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.

In Harlan’s words, this ‘liberty regulated by law’ was the ‘fundamental principle of the social compact’.”

When the pandemic struck the Supreme Court’s legal bias was toward a quite different interpretation of individual rights, particularly when religion was the issue.  Alerting the public to this change and its consequences was the purpose of Parmet’s book.

“She places on display an American exceptionalism of a particularly disquieting form: a legal mindset that has come to value individual freedom over communal welfare and so has ‘lost sight of contagion’s most compelling lesson: Our own health depends on the health of others’.”

Consider one noteworthy case that was argued during the pandemic.

“In January 2022 a federal district judge barred the navy from penalizing a group of SEALs who claimed religious reasons for refusing the Covid vaccine. Parmet notes this astonishing case, but without giving the details that demonstrate how far away from the ‘rich liberty’ of the Jacobson case the legal system was moving not even two years into the pandemic. The district court decision’s list of the SEALs’ rationales for refusing to be vaccinated included the ‘belief that modifying one’s body is an affront to the Creator’ and ‘direct, divine instruction not to receive the vaccine.’ The navy argued that the requested waivers would render the SEALs nondeployable, to the detriment of military readiness and the national defense. Judge Reed O’Connor was unmoved. ‘The Plaintiffs’ loss of religious liberties outweighs any forthcoming harm to the Navy,’ he concluded.”

The case became moot when the Navy ultimately withdrew the order, but the precedent set was alarming to say the least.  While the focus of the article is on health issues, the elevation of individual liberty (or license) above the needs of society is troubling in an even greater arena.

A group of soldiers decided to disobey an order because they didn’t agree with it and the court told them they had done the right thing.  What might the future consequences be if soldiers’ religious or political beliefs convince them they need not obey an order. 

Humans live in groups because they learned, over the course of evolution, that groups provided individuals with a higher level of protection than they could provide themselves.  Individuals support the group because they know the group will be there to support them.  Thus, the notion that an individual’s liberties can be more important than the good of the community is rather nonhuman, and unlikely to have been an intention of our group leaders (our Founding fathers).  Further, the notion that religious freedoms seem to be weakening the bond between individuals and other members of society is particularly troubling.  Religions are inherently discriminatory, dividing a group into subsets of believers and nonbelievers.  These subsets can coexist provided one does not attempt to impose its beliefs on others.  Unfortunately, such a tendency seems inevitable when religious groups seek political power in order to dominate the community.  This always damages the group, leading to social and physical conflicts.  Human history is replete with examples of societies descending into dark times from corruption of leadership by the religious, or of wars being waged between different religious groups.

The grasping for power by religious groups in our country is a major source of the polarization that has unsettled our nation and rendered our federal government inoperative.  The current Supreme Court justices seem determined to support the polarization of our political system by propagating their own religious biases.  This cannot end well.

 

Israel and Germany: The Tangled Desires for Ethnic Cleansing

 The history of Germany and Jews has continued since the end of the original Nazi era, leading to a surprising accommodation between Israel and Germany as they now collaborate to accomplish ethnic cleansing of Muslim peoples in their territories.  Pankaj Mishra provides an overview of this political activity in an article for the London Review of Books: Memory Failure.  Mishra writes as a reviewer of the book Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany by  Esra Özyürek.  After the war, each country had a need for the other.  For Germany, an embrace and support of Israel would help diminish the stain from its antisemitic history and accelerate its acceptance as a member of the international community.  Israel would need economic, military, and political help as it set out to solidify its position and demonize Arabic enemies.  As both countries now move further towards the right, they benefit from arguments that Muslim peoples are the worst propagators of antisemitism.  Ideally, for both nations, it would be advantageous to convince the world that Muslims are worse than Hitler’s Nazis.

Konrad Adenauer, in 1960, is identified as the initiator of this symbiotic relationship.

“Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.”

“As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Adenauer himself explained after his retirement that giving money and weapons to Israel was essential to restoring Germany’s ‘international standing’, adding that ‘the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated’.”

The deal was sealed during the Eichmann trial when the Israelis chose to protect rather than out the Nazi background of one of Adenauer’s closest advisors, Hans Globke.  The arrangement included:

“…moral absolution of an insufficiently de-Nazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons.”

“It also suited both countries to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser (‘Hitler on the Nile’), as the true embodiments of Nazism. The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of at least one observer: Hannah Arendt wrote that Globke ‘had more right than the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis’. She noted, too, that Ben-Gurion, while exonerating Germans as ‘decent’, made no ‘mention of decent Arabs.”

The mutual demonization of Arabs/Muslims continues to this day with the events of October 7^th pushing both countries to extremes.

“In Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, have been cranking up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims.”

“…despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, ‘white Christian-background Germans’ see themselves ‘as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation’, according to Özyürek. The ‘general German social problem of antisemitism’ is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as ‘the most unrepentant antisemites’ in need of ‘additional education and disciplining’.”

“Both Judaeophobia and Islamophobia have increased in Germany in the wake of the Hamas attack, Israel’s scorched-earth assault on Gaza and the German government’s crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with ‘Arab roots’ to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would be tolerated in Germany only if they rejected antisemitism. Aiwanger, a politician with a weakness for Nazi salutes, has joined the chorus blaming antisemitism in Germany on ‘unchecked immigration’. To denounce Germany’s Muslim minority as ‘the major carriers of antisemitism’, as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly ‘90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans’.”

Netanyahu has long been busy setting the stage for the ethnic cleansing he desires.

“Netanyahu, too, has learned from Germany’s postwar efforts at whitewashing. In 2015 he claimed that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded Hitler to murder rather than simply expel the Jews. Three years later, after initially criticising a move by the Law and Justice Party in Poland to criminalise references to Polish collaboration, he endorsed the law making such references punishable by a fine. He has since legitimised Shoah revisionism in Lithuania and Hungary, commending both countries for their valiant struggle against antisemitism. (Efraim Zuroff, a historian who has helped bring many former Nazis to trial, compared this to ‘praising the Ku Klux Klan for improving racial relations in the South’.) More recently, Netanyahu accompanied Elon Musk to one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, just days after Musk tweeted in support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Since 7 October, he has seemed to be reading from the Eichmann trial script. He regularly announces that he is fighting the ‘new Nazis’ in Gaza in order to save ‘Western civilisation’, while others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists keep up a supporting chorus. The people of Gaza are ‘subhuman’, ‘animals’, ‘Nazis’.

Mishra, given the texts he was reviewing, focuses more on the dangerous direction in which Germany is moving by joining with Israel in promoting islamophobia.

“In mid-December, with twenty thousand Palestinians massacred and epidemics threatening the millions displaced, Die Welt was still claiming that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.’ German leaders continue to block joint European calls for a ceasefire. Weizman may seem to exaggerate when he says that ‘German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.’ But the only European society that tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson. German politicians and opinion-makers are not only failing to meet their national responsibility to Israel by extending unconditional solidarity to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben Gvir. As völkisch-authoritarian racism surges at home, the German authorities risk failing in their responsibility to the rest of the world: never again to become complicit in murderous ethnonationalism.”

Observing that Israel is collaborating with the nation that sought to annihilate Jews as an unwanted minority so that Jews can eliminate another unwanted minority, leaves one stunned and horrified.