The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 54, May 23 2021 (V2 #1)
“What potent blood hath modest May” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We need answers on the 1/6 insurrection—but many of my [Republican] colleagues are indicating they will vote against an independent investigation. When people start moving heaven and earth to block an investigation, I have to wonder if there is something to hide.” —Senator Angus King (I), Maine
Once you give up the principle of equality before the law, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have granted your approval to the idea of rulers and servants. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in one of the lesser groups. —Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American
“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it… where will it stop?”—Abraham Lincoln
Most of the past year, TWT has focused on pandemic, science, climate change, politics and economics, poetry, and music. And birds, beavers, wolves too.
This weekend, I am recovering from my fourth hernia surgery, this latest done robotically by an outstanding Yale surgeon, Dr. Andrew Duffy. I have been thinking about how advances in surgery, medical imaging and information technology have changed medical practice, wondering what my orthopedic surgeon grandfather (who lived through the great influenza epidemic of 1918-19) would have thought of 21st century medicine. Is there a conceptual framework that makes sense of technological “progress” together with capitalism, habitat and species destruction, and authoritarian attacks on democracy?
And thanks to my friend, George Gibson who edited this book for Grove Atlantic, I’ve been reading Ross King’s The Bookseller of Florence; it’s a great story that has made me think a lot about technology, knowledge, and survival of democracies.
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan at 80 – a little Minnesota town celebrates its famous son: Hibbing, the birthplace of the musician, is paying tribute with a year of special events, Edward Helmore, The Guardian, 5/23/21
Bob Dylan’s debut 1962 single began: “I got mixed-up confusion; man, it’s a-killin’ me”. It hasn’t yet – he turns 80 on Monday, and the pre-eminent custodian of American roots music, with its storytelling and protest traditions, is set to be celebrated by a public avalanche of events, programmes and tributes.
The occasion will be marked in his birthplace of Hibbing, Minnesota – where, inspired by the sounds of country and blues music drifting up from the south on AM radio, he wrote in his high-school yearbook that his ambition was to join Little Richard. St Louis county, in which Hibbing sits, has issued a proclamation declaring a “Year of Dylan Celebration”.
Minnesota’s Star Tribune is listing 80 things about the local boy; Folk Radio UK is running a livestream called “Dignity”, with tributes from an international line-up of musicians.
The Memphis Blues Again (in Yiddish)
At the height of the folk/rock revolution
In the late 1960s
With a tip of the hat to
Keeping the language of
Our grandparents alive
My sister and I asked my
Grandmother Celia to
Translate a Bob Dylan song
We chose
Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the
Memphis Blues Again)
Grandma sat down and
Carefully translated the words
As we gave them to her
Rendering them this way:
Oy, mama
Iz dos takeh der sof?
Zein farkrikhn in Mobile
Mit di Bloy Memphis
Nokhamol
This Yiddish version of the refrain
Sounds particularly good
If you sing it in a
Nasal yet
Impassioned
Righteous
Howling
Mytho-poetic
Dylanesque way
Fifty years later
I remember the Yiddish words
Suggested by my grandmother
Almost as well as
I remember the Dylan original
Even now there are days when
I wake up and feel I have the
Bloy Memphis once again
Sure the English word “stuck” packs an
Onomatopoetic punch but
There’s no doubt “farkrikhn” is even better
Just another reference point for the
Universality of Dylan’s poetry and my campaign:
Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize
—Dan Burstein, April 2016
About this pome:
I wrote this shortly before Bob Dylan was actually awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, making the final lines prescient at the time, but now obviously out of date.
Lyrics to Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)
"Bibi and Hamas each exploited or nurtured their own mobs to prevent an unprecedented national unity government from emerging in Israel — a cabinet that for the first time would have included Israeli Jews and Israeli Arab Muslims together. Like Trump, both Bibi and Hamas have kept power by inspiring and riding waves of hostility to 'the other.' They turn to this tactic anytime they are in political trouble. Indeed, they each have been the other's most valuable partner in that tactic ever since Netanyahu was first elected prime minister in 1996 — on the back of a wave of Hamas suicide bombings." Thomas Friedman: For Trump, Hamas and Bibi, It Is Always Jan. 6.
Birds
The 'impossibly beautiful' courtship dance of black-necked stilts, explained: Social Sharing: Naturalist Brian Keating says now is the time to watch migration season on Alberta's lakes, Hannah Cost, CBC News, 5/17/21
"They dance side-by-side, the male dances around the female splashing the water with his bill," Keating said.
"She leans down, he jumps on top ... and then it's done, and they walk away with bills entwined."
Country diary: under the gaze of a magnificent bird of prey: Stamford, Lincolnshire: Swooping over the garden, the red kite lets you know it has you in its sights,Simon Ingram, The Guardian, 5/21/21
For some reason our garden has found its place on the morning scrutiny round of this magnificent thing. You can see why it got its name: the kite part, I mean. I’ve seen it more than any other bird of prey, so its movements are familiar. That shallow “M” of the wings, splay-tail like a mermaid’s, and that strange flight, too slow, wobbling on a spindly axis. It could briefly be a buzzard, then it drops a little, as if sliding down a wire, and you realise it’s bigger than it seems. I’ve seen it sometimes as low as the trees. Sometimes high, in a pair. Once I spotted its shadow first, patrolling the grass.
From Avocet to Zebra Finch: big data study finds more than 50 billion birds in the world: Talk about getting your ducks in a row, University of New South Wales, Eurekalert, 5/17/21
There are roughly 50 billion individual birds in the world, a new big data study by UNSW Sydney suggests - about six birds for every human on the planet.
The study - which bases its findings on citizen science observations and detailed algorithms - estimates how many birds belong to 9700 different bird species, including flightless birds like emus and penguins
Securing a swift return: how a simple brick can help migratory birds: Many swifts flying back to Britain will find their summer nests lost to building renovations. But bird bricks are offering them an alternative home, Sarah Gibson, The Guardian, 5/18/21
Champions of the swift have sprung to the rescue around the country, installing nest boxes on houses, schools, libraries and hospitals, and inside church belfries. But replacing nest holes that have been blocked over a period of decades requires a strategic approach.
This is where nest bricks come in. These are hollow, rectangular boxes made of a breathable material called woodcrete or stonecrete – a mixture of concrete and wood or stone. Integrating them into walls does not compromise insulation and the only part visible from the exterior of the house is the small entry hole.
Science and environment
Corals swap in heat-resistant algae to better cope with global warming, Karina Shah, New Scientist, 5/17/21
Some corals can swap out the algae that live inside their tissues for different strains that are more heat tolerant – and these coral species have a better chance of surviving global climate change in the coming decades.
When sea temperatures are too high, corals expel the microscopic algae living in their tissues. This is what occurs during coral bleaching. Losing algae in this way is harmful for the corals because the algae normally provide oxygen for them and remove their waste products. However, marine biologists have previously discovered that when some corals are exposed to warmer temperatures, they can swap the algae inside their tissues for strains that have a higher thermal tolerance.
How the Covid pandemic ends: Scientists look to the past to see the future, Helen Branswell, StatNews, 5/19/21
How did those pandemics end? The viruses didn’t go away; a descendent of the Spanish flu virus, the modern H1N1, circulates to this day, as does H3N2. Humans didn’t develop herd immunity to them, either. That’s a phenomenon by which a pathogen stops spreading because so many people are protected against it, because they’ve already been infected or vaccinated.
Instead, the viruses that caused these pandemics underwent a transition. Or more to the point, we did. Our immune systems learned enough about them to fend off the deadliest manifestations of infection, at least most of the time. Humans and viruses reached an immunological détente. Instead of causing tsunamis of devastating illness, over time the viruses came to trigger small surges of milder illness. Pandemic flu became seasonal flu.
The viruses became endemic.
Stanford researchers make ‘bombshell’ discovery of an entirely new kind of biomolecule:A newfound biomolecule, consisting of RNA modified by sugars, could be present in all forms of life and might contribute to autoimmune disease, Adam Hadhazy, Stanford News, 5/17/21
The novel biomolecule, dubbed glycoRNA, is a small ribbon of ribonucleic acid (RNA) with sugar molecules, called glycans, dangling from it. Up until now, the only kinds of similarly sugar-decorated biomolecules known to science were fats (lipids) and proteins. These glycolipids and glycoproteins appear ubiquitously in and on animal, plant and microbial cells, contributing to a wide range of processes essential for life.
Deadly Fungi Are the Newest Emerging Microbe Threat All Over the World: These pathogens already kill 1.6 million people every year, and we have few defenses against them, Maryn McKenna, Scientific American, 6/1/21
Fungi are surging beyond the climate zones they long lived in, adapting to environments that would once have been inimical, learning new behaviors that let them leap between species in novel ways. While executing those maneuvers, they are becoming more successful pathogens, threatening human health in ways—and numbers—they could not achieve before.
Enbridge’s Line 3 Is Putting Wild Rice at Risk—and Indigenous Water Protectors Are Taking a Stand: In northern Minnesota, Anishinaabe people are fighting an oil pipeline that threatens their sustenance and spiritual connection to the land, Lynn Sue Mizner, Civil Eats, 5/18/21
The plan involves drilling under 22 river crossings in Minnesota’s pristine northern lake region, and Anishinaabeg and other “water protector” activists have been protesting the construction for years. But in the last six months, their response has been ramping up to include a number of camps, hunger strikes, blockades, and direct appeals to President Biden. In March, Jane Fonda flew in to show her support for the protesters, and dozens of water protectors have been arrested.
In April, Canada’s National Observer reported that Enbridge had been accused of paying police in Minnesota to harass activists by deploying drones, disrupting prayer ceremonies, and detaining them in cages. And while it hasn’t yet received the level of media coverage that the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock did, the resistance to Line 3 isn’t likely to die down any time soon. In fact, Rising Tide—a network of environmental activists working on five continents—is planning a week of action in response to Line 3 in early June.
Study reveals structure of key receptors involved in memory and learning, Oregon Health & Science University, Science Daily, 5/12/21
Scientists have for the first time revealed the structure surrounding important receptors in the brain's hippocampus, the seat of memory and learning. The new study focuses on the organization and function of glutamate receptors, a type of neurotransmitter receptor involved in sensing signals between nerve cells in the hippocampus region of the brain. The study reveals the molecular structure of three major complexes of glutamate receptors in the hippocampus.
Politics
The future of war is bizarre and terrifying: Drones, eternal cyberwar, info ops, and the specter of biological warfare, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 5/23/21
New technologies — networking, Li-ion batteries, A.I., various biotech techniques, and so on — have led to bursts of innovation in a variety of fields. I’m a techno-optimist because I think these bursts will soon lead to accelerating productivity growth. But there’s one area where I’m worried about the impact of all these new toys: War. Military technology is a hugely important area of innovation, and yet it generally results in things getting blown up and society going to hell for a while.
CAPITOL OFFICERS BLAST REPUBLICANS FOR FIGHTING A 1/6 INVESTIGATION, SUGGEST LAWMAKERS WOULD BE DEAD IF NOT FOR THEM: “It is a privileged assumption for Members to have the point of view that ‘it wasn’t that bad.’ That privilege exists because the brave men and women of the USCP protected you, the Members.” Bess Levin, Vanity Fair Hive, 5/19/21
In a scathing letter released by Rep. Jamie Raskin’s office, members of the Capitol Police, writing anonymously for fear of retribution, blast Republicans for refusing to support a bipartisan investigation into the riot, in particular calling out House and Senate minority leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, who themselves have lied about the attack and let Trump get off consequence-free. Saying it is “unconscionable to even think anyone could suggest we need to move forward” and just “get over” what happened, express “profound disappointment” in both chambers’ minority leaders for insisting there is no need for a January 6 commission.
Your Electric Vehicle Can’t Get There from Here—At Least, Not Without a Charge: Why we need to build a national network of charging stations, Bill McKibben, New Yorker, 5/14/21
If we’re going to deal with the climate crisis, electric vehicles are a crucial part of the task. We badly need electric trains, buses, bikes, and scooters, too, but, because America was laid out in the postwar years with private automobiles in mind, E.V.s are going to play a large role in the transition. Transportation accounts for almost a third of U.S. carbon emissions, and cars and trucks make up the bulk of that. E.V.s, over their lifetime, produce less than half the emissions that gas cars do, and those levels can be driven steadily lower as the electric grid becomes more renewable. Cars, in other words, are some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the carbon orchard. But just because they’re low-hanging doesn’t mean that they will drop of their own accord. Apart from the early adopters, people will not buy E.V.s as long as the charging situation remains a mess.
Police records show threats to kill lawmakers in wake of Capitol attack: Leaked files show how police stepped up surveillance efforts after January insurrections for signs of violence from far-right groups, Jason Wilson, The Guardian, 5/23/21
Washington’s Metropolitan police department recorded threats to lawmakers and public facilities in the wake of the 6 January attack on the Capitol, according to documents made public in a ransomware hack on their systems this month….
The revelation of the seriousness of the threats comes amid Republican opposition to forming a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January attack, which saw the Capitol roamed by looting mobs hunting for politicians and involved the deaths of five people.
CEASE FIRE
(for Gaza and Israel)
After the fire the darkness descends
and then the coldness multiplies and divides us still.
We grope in the dark reaching to touch something human,
to touch another, to know another, to touch not fear or
the darkness near. To cease fire is not forgetting but to remember
the burning, the smoke and hatred inhaled, the choking
and struggling to breathe and believe in the fragrance of peace,
the sweetness that must never cease. Oh- how blind this fire
in our eyes, the anger that never dies, its embers stabs and stabs
again, this earth too often shadows hell and we continue to be
neither lover or friend.
—E. Ethelbert Miller
RATATATAT: QUICK HITS
Angelina Jolie embraces bees—and female beekeepers as environmental guardians: The film star and humanitarian talks about training women to care for bees in UNESCO biosphere reserves...and about the bee that got under her dress, Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, National Geographic, 5/20/21
Rivers Are Key to Restoring the World’s Biodiversity: Biodiversity is plummeting, but restoring rivers could quickly reverse this disastrous trend,Alessandra Korap Munduruku, Darryl Knudsen, Irikefe V. Dafe, Independent Media Institute, 5/20/21
House Democrats’ 2020 election autopsy: Bad polling hurt and GOP attacks worked,Paul Kane, Washington Post, 5/18/21
Iowa farmer brings class-action claim over herbicide banned by other nations, Clark Kauffman, Iowa Capital Dispatch, 5/17/21
Employees are feeling burned over broken work-from-home promises and corporate culture ‘BS’ as employers try to bring them back to the office, Kimberly Merriman, David Greenway, Tamara Montag-Smit, The Conversation, 5/19/21
Bladeless wind turbine generates electricity by vibrating with air movements:It's a promising technology still in its infancy, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 5/19/21
Antarctica is headed for a climate tipping point by 2060, with catastrophic melting if carbon emissions aren’t cut quickly, Julie Brigham-Grette, Andrea Dutton, The Conversation, 5/17/21
Greenland ice sheet on brink of major tipping point, says study: Scientists say ice equivalent to 1-2 metres of sea level rise is probably already doomed to melt, Damian Carrington, The Guardian, 5/17/21
DiCaprio, conservationists launch $43M effort to restore Galápagos Islands, Rhett A. Butler, MongaBay, 5/17/21
Pesticides are becoming increasingly toxic for the world's most important insects: The toxicity of 381 pesticides in the U.S. more than doubled for pollinators and aquatic invertebrates over the past two decades, Quinn McVeigh, Environmental Health News, 5/18/21
Santa Fe women built homemade air purifiers to help protect people from wildfire smoke: Members of the Three Sisters Collective, a group of Indigenous activist women, mobilized to help the local community during last summer's wildfires, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 5/12/21
The Great Plains prairie needs fire to survive. These ranchers are bringing it back: Regular fires are essential for protecting what remains of the grasslands from a stealthy invader: trees, Brianna Randall, National Geographic, 5/13/21
Sharks use Earth’s magnetic field as ‘GPS’ guidance system, study says. Florida scientists use juvenile bonnetheads for research. Authors say findings applicable to other ocean-going sharks, Richard Luscombe, The Guardian, 5/14/21
Threats, videos and a recall: A California militia fuels civic revolt in a red county, Anita Chabria, Hailey Branson-Potts, LA Times, 5/19/21
Trump’s revenge: tilting of supreme court to the right poised to bear fruit, David Smith, The Guardian, 5/23/21
Covid Forced America to Make More Stuff. What Happens Now? A software entrepreneur pivoted to making masks at the start of the pandemic. The experience opened his eyes: “I thought, ‘Wow, the US really is behind.’” Tom Simonite, Wired, 5/17/21
“YOU GUYS HAVE LIT A FIRE”: INSIDE GEORGE CLOONEY’S MASSIVE ONE-MAN PUSH TO TURN THE TIDE ON GUN CONTROL: After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, Clooney started making calls, including to Barack Obama and his pals at the Sunday shows. His behind-the-scenes efforts helped lay the groundwork for the March for Our Lives, a multimillion-dollar, star-studded event that was anything but spontaneous, Edward-Isaac Dovere, Vanity Fair, 5/19/21
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them. – from Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I a Woman” made at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, May 29, 1851.
I'm sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
—John Lennon, "Gimme Some Truth"
Another old friend has passed away. Paul von Drasek died in his sleep last Sunday, May 16. Paul was friend and colleague to many in the literary world, worked in book selling and publishing for four decades. He was a treasure of a human being, one whom I and many others will miss terribly. Condolences and warm regards to his family, especially to Lisa.
See what you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world
See what you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world
The breath from your own lips
The touch of fingertips
A sweet and tender kiss
The sound of a midnight train
Wearing someone's ring
Someone calling your name
—Emmylou Harris, Sweet Old World
Just a reminder to TWT readers – the book-centric podcast site we launched a few months ago - LiveWriters.com – has an excellent bi-weekly newsletter. Please take a look and subscribe if you like it.
I hope you are all enjoying the sudden advent of Spring & All (thank you WCW). Get outside, visit with family, enjoy this sweet old world, painful as it sometimes is.