Anna Lee Walters

Dear Reader,

I have collected some information on the wife of our host Harry Walters. Here are two online biographies of Anna Lee Walters:

Voices from the Gaps: Artist Biography: Anna Lee Walters

Hanksville: Storytellers: Native American Authors Online: Anna Lee Walters

Here is a list of books she has written, cowritten, or edited:

with Peggy V. Beck and Nia Francisco. Sacred: Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life. Navajo Community College: 1977. ISBN: 0912586745 (paperback).

The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories. Firebrand Books: 1985. ISBN: paperback = 0932379109, hardcover = 0932379117.

The Spirit of Native America: Beauty and Mysticism in American Indian Art. Chronicle Books: 1989. ISBN: paperback = 0877015155, hardcover = 0877016518.

Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing. Firebrand Books: 1992. ISBN: paperback = 1563410214, hardcover = 1563410222.

with Carol Bowles (Illustrator). The Two-Legged Creature: An Otoe Story. Northland: 1993. ISBN: 0873585534 (hardcover).

ed. Neon Pow-Wow: New Native American Voices of the Southwest. Northland: 1993. ISBN: 0873585623 (paperback).

Ghost Singer: A Novel. University of New Mexico Press: 1994. ISBN: 0826315453 (paperback).

The Pawnee Nation (Native Peoples). Bridgestone Books: 2000. ISBN: 073680501X (Library Binding).

If you spot any errors or omissions in this list, please let me know.

Yours truly,
Rick

Home from Dinetah

Dear Reader,

I arrived home an hour and a half ago, though half my heart is still in Dinetah with the family of Harry and Anna Walters. Jerry and I had an unbelievable time we will never forget. Our thanks to the wise and warm Walters family for accepting us into their homeland, to master photographer Gary Tepfer for organizing this spectacular trip, and to our fellow travelers for their humor, experience, and camaraderie.

Yours truly,
Rick

Vacation

Dear Reader,

I will be off for the next two weeks hiking and photographing in the southwest with my friends Jerry and Gary. See you when I get back.

Yours truly,
Rick

Adulthood

Dear Reader,

At age 18 (or is it 21?) what magical transformation occurs that turns a child into an adult?

Nothing.

Watching quality reality shows like Frontier House, Black + White, Texas Ranch House, and so on, is an exercise in disappointment with the state of adulthood today. Or rather, disillusionment, for I am not aware of a coherent theory of what adulthood means in America other than making a living, paying taxes, and obeying the law. Even voting in America is optional, let alone fuller participation in democracy. We shove people into the responsibilities of adulthood whether they're ready or not as soon as they pass the magic age, and then punish them if they can't rise to the occasion.

This explains why so many "adults" are petulant, defensive, self-centered, appetite-driven, confused, incoherent, clannish, simple-minded, even unethical--in short, why so many "adults" are children. Many of the stories of popular culture hinge on the childishness of modern adults, and much of the chaos of current events and politics only makes sense when we look closely at the immature psychology of the people involved.

The most childish quality I see is competition over victim status. I mean, there are people like Dr. Martin Luther King or Malcolm X who no one would have blamed for giving up considering the adversity and outright unfairness they faced, yet they continued fighting for what was right even unto death, whereas I have met privileged, middle-class white men who feel oppressed and whine endlessly if you disagree with them about their pet theories about the world. The inability to distinguish great tests from irritating inconveniences (lack of perspective) and the complete immersion in their own private feeling life as though that were the extent of the world (egocentrism) help such people justify wallowing in victimhood even when they have the upper hand in life.

This lack of adults leads so many situations in modern life to devolve into resentful clans sniping and feuding over who has been the most unfairly treated by the other. I used to know a white employee at the VA hospital who felt victimized by the black employees there, not because of anything they did to him but because he imagined them shirking work and whining about how unfairly they were treated--precisely what he was doing when he came into my office to complain about them. I never told him what a racist he was because it was far more interesting just to watch him and try to understand the mind of the bigot, the adult child who has singled out categories of people to be his oppressors. Most adult children just blame life for being unfair, or specific people for picking on them, but bigots need a grander sense of drama so they imagine whole abstract categories of people oppressing them.

Two of the core lessons of adulthood are impossible for the victim to imagine, let alone act upon.

First, we contribute to many of the problems we experience in life, sometimes because we do not adequately prepare for adversity, sometimes because when bad things happen instead of rising to the occasion we wallow in our feelings of being victimized, the unfairness of it all, and sometimes because we are broken and recreate in our lives over and over bad situations from our childhood that we still haven't acknowledged and dealt with. I speak from experience, here.

Second, regardless of whether bad things that happen to us are our fault, as adults it is our responsibility to clean up the resulting mess. That is one of the defining qualities that distinguishes an adult from a child--an adult has learned that infantile responses do not make things better, however personally gratifying they may be, and they often make things worse.

By all means, sometimes things happen to us that are not our fault, and some people are definitely singled out for mistreatment for a variety of reasons. Anyone who believes racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry and persecution are things of the past is kidding himself. But where a child may let himself be defined by that unfairness, an adult has to be the parent, has to step up and start cleaning up the consequences.

I wish there were a handbook for adult behavior that children could read and strive for, but as it happens part of adulthood is learning to think for ourselves, to look past appearances, not to blindly trust authorities to tell us the truth or have our best interests at heart, so such a handbook would subvert what it purported to teach.

Still, our criteria of adulthood are so lax that even a clever psychopath qualifies as an adult, as long as he can survive for 18 or 21 years. Not one shred of decency or genuine human empathy is required to qualify as an adult in our culture. Can we be surprised at the quality of adults we have selected for?

Surely we can do better than this, but first we are going to have to think about what adulthood ought to mean and figure out how we could select for that. The Ken Lays and Jeffrey Daumers of the world clearly were not ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. We can proclaim that all men are created equal--and maybe they are--but they sure do not end up that way.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: This is not intended as a slight on children. I have met children who are fundamentally more adult than many "adults," and plenty of children are sweet and adorable and clever and good even if they are not yet ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. The problem is not childhood per se; it is the lack of standards for adulthood.

Noted Polyglots

Dear Reader,

According to a Wikipedia article on polyglots, if you learn six or more languages you are known as a hyperpolyglot. If you learn ten or more languages, you can be listed in their article on noted polyglots. It is a bit scary how few there are, and also a bit scary how many languages some people can or could speak. If I follow my own advice, I could be listed in this article in ten years.

Yours truly,
Rick

Polyglot

Dear Reader,

We should be or become multilingual. It is not optional for being a well-rounded human being. The limits of language impose limits on our thought, and different languages impose different limits and open up different areas of thought more easily. No language opens up the complete range of human thought, and probably not even all human languages taken together would do so, but learning more than one language at least lets us expand our mental horizons. There are other arguments to be made for multilingualism, such as the utility and improved harmony of being able to communicate with more of the world's people, but you have heard all that before.

So, if we should learn more than one language, which ones should we learn?

First, we should master our own native language or languages, in my case English, since I'm such a mutt that I don't have a short list of ancestral family languages to add. Only death should be the end of that learning process: we can never be fluent enough to justify quitting. Even as we should push at the boundaries of our thinking with philosophy, so should we push at the boundaries of our fluency.

Second, we should learn the languages of large numbers of our immediate neighbors, so we can be good neighbors. In most of the world this is more of a challenge than where I live, but even in the United States, we have Mexico and Canada as neighbors, and numerous immigrants from around the world in the U.S. Wikipedia has good information on languages used in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, but I will offer a summary. For good neighborliness, any North American should be at least bilingual, speaking English and Spanish, each of which has over a hundred million speakers locally. It would be better for North Americans to speak French as well, since almost ten million of our neighbors do. Millions of our immediate neighbors speak Chinese (2.85), American Sign Language (between .5 and 2), German (1.84), Nahuatl (1.5), Maya (1.5), Italian (1.48), Tagalog (1.37), and Vietnamese (1.13). Hundreds of thousands of our immediate neighbors speak Korean (975), Polish (878), Arabic (810), Russian (804), Hindi & Urdu (716), Japanese (514), Greek (490), Persian (404), Gujarati (297), Punjabi (over 271), Armenian (227), Navajo (178), Ukrainian (over 148), and Dutch (over 128). I will be refreshing my French this year, trying to tune it up enough to read a massive French series on Heraclitus. I want to refresh my Spanish after that, next year or the year after, depending on how long it takes me to improve my French enough. After that, in the years ahead for neighborliness I want to pick up American Sign Language and Japanese (because of Seattle's special relationship with Japan).

Third, we should learn our religious and philosophical languages, including Arabic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Hebrew, and the other languages of the world's great ethical systems. I will begin with Ancient Greek this year to support my cultural and philosophical studies. Arabic will be next, but not for a while.

Fourth, we should learn the languages of the First Peoples where we live, in part to show respect, in part to learn the languages of people who lived where we live far longer than we have and whose languages may well be more fully and subtly adapted to our homeland than our "native" tongues. As a Seattlite, I need to learn Salishan, but it will be a few years before I begin.

Fifth, we should learn the major languages of the world. The Linguasphere website has a great article on the languages most spoken around the world. Two languages have a billion speakers: English and Mandarin (aka Putonghua). Two pairs of related languages have a half billion speakers: Hindi + Urdu, and Spanish + Portuguese. Three more languages have over 200 million speakers: Russian, Bengali, and Arabic. Four more have 100 million or more speakers: Japanese, Malay + Indonesian, German, and French. From among these I am initially interested in adding Mandarin and Hindi + Urdu.

Sixth, there are always the languages we pick up because of our own personal interests. Because of my history studies to improve my Dungeons and Dragons games, I have sporadically studied Anglo-Saxon. Because of my love of The Lord of the Rings, I used to haltingly speak and write Tolkien's Sindarin and Quenya. Because of idealism, I spent some time learning Esperanto. Because of its long history as a scholarly lingua franca in the three millennia BC like Latin later became, I am very curious about Sumerian.

Of all of these, I am only fluent in English, I can reasonably understand and make myself understood in Spanish (which I used to be fluent in enough even to understand Portuguese), and I can hobble along in French. For German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, and Ancient Greek, I only have a few words and phrases and some practice with pronunciation. This is not nearly good enough. For at least the reasons outlined above, we all need to become polyglots, and it is not even that difficult. If we pick up a new language book and tapes every year or two and read and practice in our spare time over the course of the year, we can at least become fluent enough to understand and make ourselves be understood in the basics in a surprising number of languages.

It is a big world full of many interesting people. Let's make it easier to meet them by learning their languages, and by doing that work make ourselves more interesting to meet as well.

Yours truly,
Rick

Raymond and Bryanna Scott

Dear Reader,

Today's Seattle Times ran an article in its Northwest Life section about the amazing efforts of Raymond and Bryanna Scott of Renton, Washington, to transform his clan's estate and ancestral village in Sierra Leone. There have been four articles so far, and you should read them to remind yourself how much of a difference a few people can make:

Sunday, October 10, 2004: Native son works for a better Africa

Tuesday, November 30, 2004: Aid for Sierra Leone becomes more than a one-man mission

Sunday, May 29, 2005: Native son delivers aid, hope to ancestral village

Sunday, May 7, 2006: Helping Sierra Leoneans reap full benefits of a coveted resource

We can make a difference, but we have to be organized, and persistent, and patient, and focused, and gregarious, and we have to do something we believe in, and do it with people who believe in us.

Yours truly,
Rick

Visualizing Heaven

Dear Reader,

As a post-atheist, or whatever I am (I detect the need for some terminology), I am not inclined to trust to the afterlife to provide an experience of heaven for humanity; rather I feel we must work to create heaven on Earth. Or, as the camper's motto puts it, to leave the world better than we found it.

The problem is that the Modern world so relentlessly exterminates any conception of alternatives that we find our very imaginations invaded by the delusion of an endless present whose only positive development will be technology, e.g., the simplistic optimism of Star Trek or the noir optimism of Bladerunner. The more we take a hard look at the state of the world the more the relentless Modern myth is replaced by a relentlessly grim fear that our future will be dystopian--totalitarianism, corruption, plagues, ecological devastation, ignorance, religous wars, and technological incompetence--if not outright extinction. The unconscious sense that our future will be dystopian is part of why interest in reading science fiction is collapsing as readers turn to fantasy and other forms of escape.

Reading about the ancient Greeks, I notice one crucial ingredient in their success is a sense of what the future could be, based on generally agreed upon shared values and a shared ideal of what all people should strive to be, of arete. A central motivator for such a drive for excellence is contempt for the default human condition, a belief that we are obliged to strive to become better than we are if we are to be even crudely civilized. Without this vital ingredient the Greeks could never have advanced in so many different ways in such a short time.

Maybe we need to spend some time taking a long hard look at how things are and coming up with a clear idea of how we would prefer things to be. For example, maybe we want in a world in which there are some fisheries left. Maybe we want some forests so we don't have to live on a desert planet. Maybe we want people educated enough to tell when political candidates are lying about their positions. How about a world in which it's easier to find true friends? I would certainly prefer not to financially support torture. What if vote-tampering consistuted treason? How about making a world with so little pollution that mother's milk isn't laced with poisons?

Such an exercise could be fun or it could be daunting depending on how we approach it, but let's face it: each of us has to make this list. If we cannot even imagine what a good world would be like, then of course we will despair for our future. Give yourself a timeframe, say thirty days, to try to figure out what the most important issues are facing humanity, what things you most want to see improved. Do some research on the Internet and elsewhere to get your facts straight on each issue so you can propose something useful, if brief.

Let's put this another way. Aren't you sick of all those compromised political-party platforms drafted by committees, which you know the parties will never institute anyway even if they were good ideas? Wouldn't you like to see at least once in your life a platform that reflected your values and priorities? Well you can: write it yourself. That alone would take political discussion in this country a huge step forward by making possible concrete discussion of specific problems and possible solutions. Rather than political discussions consisting mainly of identifying sides and throwing stones, we could begin focusing on looking for ways to improve our personal political platforms. When we talk politics, we could be searching for who has come up with better ideas than we have on the things that matter to us, so afterward we can amend our lists with the improvements and note who we learned them from.

Imagine: productive political discussions, in which we compare our personal ideas about what a little bit of heaven on Earth would be like.

Yours truly,
Rick

The Language of Homer

Dear Reader,

Gilbert Murray's The Rise of the Greek Epic continues to impress.

A few samples of Homer:

They two in front of the high gate were standing like high-crested oaks on a mountain, which abide the wind and the rain through all days, firm in their long roots that reach deep into the earth.

. . .

So spake he, and the old man trembled and obeyed his word; and he went in silence by the shore of the many-sounding sea, and prayed alone to the Lord Apollo, whom fair-haired Leto bare.

. . .

And a herd he wrought thereon of straight-horned kine. The kine were wrought of gold and of tin, and lowing they wended forth from the byre to their pasture, by the side of a singing river, by a bed of slender reeds.

. . .

I look upon thee and know thee as thou art. I could never have moved thee, for the heart is iron within thy breast. Therefore beware lest I be to thee a wrath of god, on that day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo shall slay thee in thy valour at the Scaean Gates.

. . .

As riseth the screaming of cranes in front of the sunrise, cranes that have fled from winter and measureless rain, screaming they fly over the streams of ocean, bearing unto the dwarf-men battle and death.

. . .

As glorious as the language of the Iliad and Odyssey are, what makes these epics most astonishing is that they describe how the greatest heroes of the Greek heroic age essentially squandered everything they had over a domestic quarrel, and then screwed even that up over a temper tantrum. The Greeks exalted as very nearly their national bible a tale of how the best efforts of the best of men led to ruin, shame, and despair. They put their highest aspirations and deepest shames on display, and in their finest language painted a portrait of how their glorious ancestors destroyed their own civilization, collapsing the Aegean into a dark age that lasted for centuries.

The ancient Greeks taught their children from the Iliad! It is difficult for us as Moderns to fully believe there could ever have been a great people who put their own shame and weaknesses front and center, exalting them in their finest language. Of the many things they changed over time in this living traditional book of theirs, they never tried to obscure the domestic quarrel that launched the war, nor the petty squabble between Agamemnon and Achilles that forms the heart of the epic, and in tragedy after tragedy written about the consequences of that great war, the Greeks immortalized in art the terrible devastation awaiting each of the surviving victors. They did not write of these things for entertainment, or out of boredom, or to make money, or because they had run out of other things to say; they wrote of these things because for them art like every other facet of culture had to serve the purpose of anthropoculture--helping raise each new generation to be the best people they could--and that would only be possible if they learned from their mistakes.

I, too, wish to learn from my mistakes, and from our mistakes as a people.

Yours truly,
Rick

Getting to the Root

Dear Reader,

It is 2:21 a.m., and I cannot sleep, so I blog. I should have been in Eugene with Beverly, sleeping at Beth and Jerry's house in anticipation of a day of hiking and art, were I not ill.

My illness has six layers.

1) Infection. The colloidal silver turned that around within a couple days, and the infection is nearly gone now.

2) Inflammation. So now the color of the congestion is gone but the coughing continues. I must deal with this layer next.

3) Weakness. Battling this thing is always exhausting. After I beat it, I will still need to rest and recover my strength. It was brought on by weakening myself with a marathon twenty-four hour patching session that came on the heels of a month of nonstop work.

4) Poor physical condition. I get sick because I sacrifice my health maintenance, especially exercise, for work. This has to stop.

5) Stress. This is why I can't sleep. I have known for four months what I need to do to fix what's currently most broken in my life, to drive down the stress in my life, but because it is an emotionally difficult step for me to take I put it off and am now suffering the consequences.

6) Attachment. After four years of investing my heart and mind and time and money and energy and spirit and identity into something, it's hard to let it go, even if it is making me sick. I keep wanting to find the right argument to convince, to perform the right miracle to earn enough trust, but these are losing battles. As Jerry says, you cannot convince someone who does not want to be convinced, and you cannot teach values to adults, especially those who mistakenly believe they already have those values. It is far easier (though by no means easy) to find people who already share your values, and in that regard I have been very very lucky, yet still I have continued fighting a futile battle to be understood by and convince the others.

I may be an extraordinarily slow learner--and that is not false humility but the voice of bitter experience--but my great virtue is that sooner or later I do learn, and then I fold the lesson into my very soul and change everything about myself to take it into account. Here are a convergence of lessons pointing to the root of my problem. Wake up, says Heraclitus, from your sleepwalking dream and see things for what they really are. It's time, says the Christian, to exercise some long overdue wisdom and accept this thing I cannot change. A little less attachment, suggests the Buddha, for a lot more serenity.

Yes. I see. I will.

Yours truly,
Rick

Happiness and Eudaimonea

Dear Reader,

In Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles has the chorus sing "Count no mortal happy until he has reached the very end of his life free from misfortune and pain."

A Modern would read that in the most literal and judgmental way possible: obviously Sophocles is just a pessimist, so we can disregard what he says. Thus the banausic reflex--do not pursue the truth, only what seems useful to machine minds, and disregard the rest. The Greeks considered this play the masterpiece of one of their masters, this statement a pinnacle of insight into the human condition. As with Heraclitus, this statement rolls up layers of wisdom into a deceptively simple package.

It only seems pessimistic to those for whom it is most intended, those who foolishly believe happiness is the highest human achievement, to be captured by deserved good fortune. The Greeks believed happiness is fool's gold, the wrong thing to want, because happiness is transient and outside of our control. To attempt to will the cosmos to satisfy our personal desires is a fool's errand. To wish for happiness is to wish for luck, and the wheel of fortune turns. If we achieve our ends by luck, then we will eventually lose them the same way. Oedipus starts out on top of the world and ends up on the bottom, afflicted by the most terrible crimes and situations, because he has relied upon luck and overweening ego. His life is an object lesson for the rest of us, indeed, it is the object lesson we are most in need of but least likely to heed because it challenges the core of our beliefs.

To the ancient Greeks, the only thing worth having is not happiness but eudaimonea, which is its opposite. Eudaimonea is the condition having cultivated a good daimon, a well ordered inner cosmos that allows one to rise to the occasion at any time, not just when fortune smiles upon us, because the wheel of fortune turns, so sooner or later we will need the resources to be able to rise to the occasion when fortune frowns upon us. With eudaimonea we will often not be happy because that is not within anyone's control, but we may make the best of the hands life deals us. Unlike the pointless and self-atrophying quest for happiness, with the quest for eudaimonea the longer we are at it the better we will get, and thus our efforts are not wasted but grow into something more and more worth having. This is the true gold without which even the richest and most powerful man on Earth remains but a slave to fortune and his own demonic appetites and delusions, but with which even a pauper in a death camp is free. Eudaimonea is the only property you can truly own, that cannot be taken away from you, and therefore the most important thing to seek in life, and the only way to acquire eudaimonea is to work for it your entire life long.

That one line from Sophocles is pregnant with all of that and more, and this one play from ancient Greece is in many ways the signature of their entire civilization. Too bad we don't teach it that way.

Yours truly,
Rick

Comparing Silver Products

Dear Reader,

Here is the best report I have read yet comparing and contrasting the three forms of silver, including their advantages and disadvantages. Particularly, the discussion of why ionic silver is less effective in the body than in a lab--due to its tendency to react with chloride ions and precipitate out of the body as silver chloride--is something I would like to see the proponents of ionic silver solutions address, and was decisive in my decision to go with true colloidal silver instead for my experiment.

Yours truly,
Rick

Colloidal Silver

Dear Reader,

I'm very tired today, but making progress against the bronchitis.

Until this morning, each day I woke with more congestion than the day before and more infection as measured by the deepening color, and longer and more exhausting process of clearing my nose, throat, and lungs before the day could begin. Last night was the first time I got the sinus flooding procedure with the colloidal silver right, and this morning I woke with dramatically less congestion, color, and time to get clear. I had nothing in my lungs at all when I awoke, as opposed to the hour and a half of coughing it took yesterday to get clear. My sinuses were not clear yet when I awoke, so I'm not done, but it only took me a half hour to get clear, so this morning was quite a reversal in the right direction.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: Here is another informative website on colloidal silver; I particularly like their article about argyria. These writers do not share the disdain for ionic silver of the authors of the Purest Colloids website, but since both agree on the efficacy of the true colloidal form, I'm still satisfied with my choice of experiments. I am not recommending any of these colloidal-silver resources as factual, just better-than-average grist for your colloidal-silver mill.

Medical Independence

Dear Reader,

Today I began treating myself with colloidal silver, a universal antibiotic with no negative side effects (despite misinformation propagated by the FDA about a condition called argyria, which is caused by silver protein compounds or ionic silver but not by true colloidal silver), effective against most single-celled pathogens and to which they cannot develop immunity. In an era when the antibiotic industry is facing its end in resistant strains of pathogens created by the use and misuse of those very drugs, the once well known properties of silver ought to be front-page news, yet the medical industry remains strangely mute. Could the FDA's willful disregard for the truth about colloidal silver have more to do with its unpatentability? Here in a nutshell is the tug of war between profit and health.

The FDA would prefer to regulate all potentially healthful nutritionally based treatments, banning any it has not approved. It argues that we need this protection because we the patients are too stupid to care for ourselves. Patients are portrayed as superstitious children easily duped by snake-oil salesmen. We are to believe that patients need parents, and the drug companies and their favored government agencies are volunteering for the job. That this industry is so profitable that it is strangling the American economy is not supposed to matter to us. If we are afraid enough, maybe we will pay any price--even national bankruptcy--to be coddled like children.

The analogy I see is to the days when people were considered too stupid to have their own relationship with God, when the Bible had to be kept in Latin--not in the vernacular of the people--to ensure they could not read it for themselves, that they could only approach God through intermediaries. So, too, we are not to approach health except through the sacred intermediaries of an industry that not too long ago tortured the mentally ill, denied the existence of allergies, and treated a whole range of gynecological problems by extracting women's reproductive organs. Today, medical error is among the top five causes of death in America, a staggering, shameful number--comparable to the days of leeches, bleeding, and bonesaws--yet the industry's response is to attack alternative medicine because it might be harmful! I believe Jesus had some advice for those obsessed with the faults of others. That's a Hell of a beam in the medical industry's eye. Let it clean its own house before it worries about its neighbors.

If anyone is going to experiment on me in the quest to make me healthy, let it be me. At least I have the correct vested interest in the outcome--health rather than profit or ideological correctness.

I will let you know how my experiments with colloidal silver proceed, for better or worse.

Yours truly,
Rick

PS: If you are interested in exploring the possibilities of colloidal silver, spend your time researching it, because misinformation by opponents and supporters dominates the Internet. Try here and here to start, then contrast what the FDA, Quackbusters, and other supposedly neutral organizations have to say.

Labeling Redux

Dear Reader,

I spoke with Maria at Source Naturals and learned that the labeling change reflects not a change in ingredients but a change in law. The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 (Title II of Public Law 108-282) went into effect January 1st of this year and is being enforced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It increases the strictness of the rules governing labeling of the top eight ellergens in food and supplements, but unfortunately the wording is vague enough to be too strict.

The law is intended to ensure that even subtle amounts of allergens in products are listed, such as might result if an ingredient is not actually present in the product but was present in the factory where the product was produced, but the law as written requires exactly the same wording as if the product contained that ingredient. For example, Wellness Formula contains no dairy or soy, but some of the ingredients come from machinery that is also used at other times to process dairy or soy. Under the new law, Source Naturals is required to say their product does in fact contain those ingredients, even though it probably does not and if it does it contains at most trace amounts by accident. Prior to this law, there was a common wording used for such situations, namely "processed on machinery also used to process dairy and soy," which it would have been good to require Source Naturals to add, but instead the new law requires them to use this wording: "Contains milk/dairy and soy." The required wording is probably false, or at least false most of the time, but they are required by law to use it.

In such clumsy ways are the good intentions behind laws perverted in their execution.

The good news for me is that since the FDA-required label is false, since Wellness Formula contains at most trace amounts of dairy, I can continue to use it. Likewise, I can hold Source Naturals blameless for the confusing labeling and place responsibility where it belongs, with the drafters of this new law.

As you may know, the FDA's soul is split between protecting consumers and protecting the profits of the drug companies, and the agency has been responsible for some more or less corrupt activites, such as protecting the poisonous sweetener Aspartame by banning the marketing of the healthy natural alternative Stevia as a sweetener. FDA has lately been serving its drug company clients by trying to whip up an atmosphere of public fear of vitamins, supplements, and other alternative medicine products, thereby supporting lobbying efforts to "regulate" (i.e., restrict access to or put out of business any companies that sell) these alternatives to patentable drugs. Given this background, it is reasonable to wonder whether the FDA will enforce this law unevenly, using it as a club to put more pressure on the purveyors of alternative medicine. Certainly companies like Source Naturals have to be prepared for that and ensure that they adhere to the strictest interpretation possible of this ambiguous new law, if they want to avoid the product seizures and punitive fines FDA can levy.

To have at least part of the FDA so in the pocket of drug companies is Orwellian, since the organization is theoretically charged with protecting the public. Having worked for so many years for the federal government, I know no agency is monolithic, and the FDA will still have many career employees thoroughly dedicated to its original mission, employees who will be the first to acknowledge that some in the upper layers of their organization's management will be the usual rotating political appointees who are there to ensure the agency's primary mission does not interfere with the interests of the administration's political clients. The outcomes, good and bad, from any U.S. government agency tend to take their shape primarily from such tugs of war between these two populations of employees--those there to serve the mission and those there to serve their political masters. Where the former predominate, usually by accident or oversight, the occasional great government program can result, but usually the results more resemble this FDA law in their hamartia, missing the mark, in subtle but important ways.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: For more information on the new labeling law, an article in Natural Products Insider gives a brief overview.

Health and Information

Dear Reader,

I was going to write today to recommend a health supplement I use when sick, but upon studying the label I see it was recently reformulated to include dairy products, which means neither I nor anyone else allergic to dairy can use this product any longer.

The product in question is Wellness Formula from Source Naturals (http://www.sourcenaturals.com, a website down for maintenance at a time when it ought to be alerting existing customers about a change in formula). Source Naturals is conscious of allergies; the original formulation contained a notice that read:

Contains no yeast, dairy, egg, gluten, soy or wheat. Contains no artificial color, flavor or fragrance.

This earlier formulation qualifies as hypoallergenic, and the inclusion of gluten as well as wheat shows its creators understand allergies well enough to know why they should be listed separately--because there are other sources of gluten than wheat, and because there are other proteins in wheat to which a customer might be allergic.

The obvious question for me is why a company so clearly aware of the problem of allergies would reformulated a successful product to introduce an unnecessary and common allergen whose absence they had previously marketed as a selling point. I have left a voice message with the company asking them to call me and explain what happened. The only shift in the supplement facts in the new formula is an additional 5 mg of Vitamin C, which will not have come from any dairy product. I would guess that some other ingredient, perhaps the calcium, has proven easier to get from dairy than from its original source, or that some problem with the other source was discovered, but the new label neither explains the shift nor in any way draws the customer's attention to the shift. The front label has in no way changed and still reads "#1 Immune Formula!" which strongly suggests it is the same formula as it was, which is unintentionally false.

On the bottom of the second label, the allergy statement has been changed to read:

Contains no egg, gluten or wheat. Contains no preservatives, or artificial color, flavor or fragrance.

In the middle of the second column on the back label, this statement has been added:

Contains milk/dairy and soy.

I see no duplicity in this. The use of boldface was clearly an attempt to draw the reader's attention to the potential hazard of the product for those with these allergies. This change in wording is sufficient for new customers, but not for existing customers. New customers with allergies are used to carefully reading ingredient lists looking for their problem ingredients, so the combination of a boldface statement identifying the presence of dairy and soy along with a later statement identifying those allergens excluded from the product (a list which does not mention dairy or soy as excluded) will be enough to warn them off.

Existing customers though have already gone through this exercise and added Wellness Formula to their safe list. The back label is crawling with text--necessarily, to accommodate all the great ingredients along with a description of the product and explanation of its use--so even bold face will not be enough to make the new warning stand out from a wall of text that already included five other bold-faced phrases or statements. Existing customers with allergies need a far more obvious signal that they need to reevaluate this product or suffer potential health consequences. Letting my medical concerns override marketing considerations, they could have added the wording "Less Hypoallergenic Than Before" or "New Allergenic Version." Obviously no marketer would be that forthright, so for example at a minimum the word "Revised" could have been added in some prominent color under the banner "#1 Immune Formula."

The lack of any such clear highlighting aimed to capture the attention of and warn existing customers has resulted in my consuming a number of these new tablets in a misguided effort to help fight off bronchitis, misguided because my bronchitis is triggered by stress or allergies, of which my allergy to dairy is by far the worst. It is a safe bet I have made my condition worse rather than better by taking the new Wellness Formula tablets.

I do not mean to single out Source Naturals as being worse than most companies. On the contrary, they are better than most. For first-time customers their label is clear and attentive to the right details, and their formula is great. To anyone not allergic to dairy or soy I recommend these strong, pungent tablets. As their label suggests, taking three of these stinky tablets every three hours does indeed put the whammy on your illness. After discovering the disappointing change in formulation, I scrounged around my house and found a bottle (not that old--it doesn't expire for a while yet) containing the previous formula, which I am using instead. I will have to find someone not allergic to dairy or soy I can give the new tablets to, since I wouldn't want this valuable stuff to go to waste.

Apart from this disappointing change in ingredients, a lot of thought has gone into this formula, which its creators have loaded with immunity-boosting nutrients in a careful balance. It isn't perfect, but it's better than any other product I've found at such nuances as including copper any time you supplement with zinc, including zinc and bioflavonoids if you supplement with Vitamin C, and so on. It could stand to up the copper content to 2.3 mg to bring it to 10% of the zinc, and ideally the amount of bioflavonoids needs to match the amount of C to be fully effective, although that would be hard to do without creating truly huge monster pills. Overall, the shotgun approach of including a wide range of relevant herbal products such as garlic, echinacea, astragalus, goldenseal, pau d'arco, and so on, makes a reasonable addition to any strategy for battling ordinary illnesses, and one sniff of these tablets leaves no doubt about the potency of the herbs included.

So, the three lessons I would most draw out of this morning's discovery are these.

First, companies should pay far more attention to allergies than they do, should reformulate their products where possible to reduce the number of allergens present, and should never if at all possible introduce new allergens into an existing product.

Second, as we know from Heraclitus, change is inevitable and natural and important, so any labeling strategy should be oriented as much toward alerting existing customers of change as toward attracting new customers.

Third if I had not been planning to write a blog entry today recommending this product, I might never have noticed the dairy in the new formula; hence, blogging can be good for our health in unexpected ways.

Yours truly,
Rick

Aidos and Nemesis

Title: Aidos and Nemesis

Dear Reader,

I am reading Gilbert Murray's The Rise of the Greek Epic. I loved his Five Stages of Greek Religion, so Epic was the easy choice of the many fine books on Greek history, culture, and philosophy I have to choose from.

I am reading about Aidos and Nemesis. Many students of Greek mythology are familiar with Hesiod's description of the five ages of mankind--golden, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron--and remember this as a sequential loss of happiness and goodness. Murray quotes Hesiod as saying things are so bad in the Iron Age that even the last two of the Immortals on Earth will eventually abandon us to join the rest on Olympus. These two are Aidos and Nemesis, the last divine spirits of mankind in this bleak era.

Aidos refers to the capacity to be moved to pity or mercy by the helpless, that noble feeling that causes us to care for the orphan, the aged, the stranger, the dead, when we are not compelled to but only because we are moved by the divine emotion of Aidos to do so.

Nemesis refers to the righteous horror and anger of those who witness a crime such as cowardice, falseness, lack of reverence, or lack of aidos on behalf of another. Fear of the nemesis of witnesses, even imagined witnesses, can turn aside from criminal intent anyone not wholly lost to goodness.

Hesiod predicted there would come a time when the people of Iron would fall so far that they would lose even Aidos and Nemesis and be left with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, no touch of the divine left. Murray, writing in 1907, commented that "the time which the prophet feared never came." One of the more remarkable things for me in reading Murray's books is the reminder that we once imagined history was a great march of progress toward higher forms of civilization.

Now for certain lessons in goodness and hope we have to look more to the past than the future.

Yours truly,
Rick

Hide and Seek

Dear Reader,

Two and a half millennia ago in his masterpiece On Nature, Heraclitus wrote Physis kryptesthai philei; in English: Nature loves to hide.

Nature hides most things in Time's currents, almost hid these three Greek words from us, did hide most of his words, leaving only fragments. Heraclitus dedicated his book at the temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the World) in the ancient city of Ephesus and left a scroll of it there. That scroll and every other copy of his writing vanished long ago. Later, the writers Themistius, Philo, and Proclus quoted this terse sentence of his, or we would never know he had written it.

As I wrote in Verbal Medicine December 19th, 2004, Heraclitus's writing always compresses layers of meaning, entire books or essays worth of information, into the shortest of sentences, and we cannot fully grasp his intentions without using his other fragments and the ancient Greek worldview to put them into context and thereby help them to speak clearly to us across the millennia.

Understanding Heraclitus always begins by seeking the paradox, the seeming contradiction that points toward the truth. He implies that nature loves to hide from us. Here is the contradiction. Nature is all around us and within us, apparent to everyone, and everything is part of nature. How can something obvious and everywhere hide from us? This paradox encapsulates one of Heraclitus's two core messages from On Nature, something fundamental about human nature and the nature of the cosmos that everyone should learn and relearn from infancy throughout their lives, but that is instead not taught at all because modern culture considers it a heresy, forbidden knowledge.

In the fragments that follow to help unravel Heraclitus's meaning, I will use Philip Wheelwright's translations, except for one by Kenneth Smith and one of my own, a modified and I believe more accurate version of one of Wheelwright's. I am also rearranging the fragments——whose original sequence we do not know anyway——to help them in the unveiling.

Although this Logos* is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it——not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it——at least if they are judged in the light of such words and deeds as I am here setting forth. My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on around and within them as they are during sleep.

* Logos = the cosmic, interwoven logic of the forces of nature and the interwoven forces of the logic of nature.

Here in the opening words of his work he gives the expanded form of the paradox within "Nature loves to hide." The Logos is everywhere, and everyone experiences it, but they cannot understand it. We look right at the truths about the cosmos and do not see them. It is as though we are not awake at all, a race of sleepwalkers.

We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own. Although intimately connected with the Logos, men keep setting themselves against it. Most people do not take heed of the things they encounter, nor do they grasp them even when they have learned about them, although they suppose they do. Even he who is most in repute knows only what is reputed and holds fast to it. Fools, although they hear, are like the deaf; to them the adage applies that when present they are absent.

As sleepwalkers, instead of reacting coherently to the cosmos we respond to our private ideas/beliefs/delusions/dreams about it instead, each person behaving idiosyncratically in response to his own hallucinations, which we mistake for reality; our worldviews are crudely aligned with each other, but so badly that we are in a continual state of war and confusion with each other. Our private worldviews make sense to us, and when we experience the world we interpret it in terms of those private worldviews so that we believe we understand what we are seeing, but we do not. Our beliefs about how things truly are are merely self-consistent lies. When we interact with people, they are not really interacting with us but with their dreams of us, as though they are drugged out or hallucinating or sleepwalking. When a man looks at you, he cannot see you, only his waking dream of you.

Character is fate [tr. Kenneth Smith]. Human character has no real understanding; only the divine character has it [tr. Rick Marshall]. Man is not rational; only what encompasses him is intelligent. Much learning does not teach understanding. What is divine escapes men's notice because of their incredulity.

The problem is internal and intrinsic. The problem is human nature, in the essence of what it means to be human. We are inherently irrational. It is not in our natures to understand the cosmos. We are not gods of reason; we are crazed monkeys. The truth is an alien language to our minds. Given more information or education, we use it not to escape from our labyrinths of delusion but instead to construct more and more intricate and self-reinforcing systems of falsehood, internally consistent but profoundly false worldviews. Our confidence in our own beliefs leads us to discount the cosmos when it contradicts those beliefs. We look right at the evidence in the world that proves us wrong and scoff at it. The truth is out there, the Logos of which actuality is woven and by which it dances and transforms, and only it has the power to set us free of our delusions, but it can only do so if we turn away from popular opinion and authority and our most cherished beliefs and certainties. We must suspend disbelief and look at the cosmos with fresh eyes, disregarding the many rationalizations within us and our cultures that urge us not to question our beliefs.

The human mind craves strong, clear patterns, prefers them socially popular or personally rewarding——not uncomfortable uncertainties, not the nuances of the actual ever-shifting cosmos. The lies we tell ourselves are designed to appeal to us; the truth is not, so it is never as compelling. Never. The truth feels cold, alien, unreasonable, unlikely. We know the truth isn't true. Only our comfortable lies are true, and over our lives we build sophisticated, self-reinforcing, often internally consistent logics out of those lies, entire worldviews of flattering falsehoods. We hate change, so we protect our lies from attack--protect ourselves from the truth--with pride, with arrogance, with hostility or aversion toward anyone or anything that makes us uncomfortable, that dares to challenge the fragile houses of cards within our minds.

A gap, a chasm, an abyss separates our beliefs from the real world. Worst of the lies we believe with utter certainty is that the abyss does not exist, that we see the world as it is, at least in its essentials. This lie above all demands we reshape everything we experience to obscure the gap——ignoring, misinterpreting, misremembering, forgetting anything necessary to make reality seem consistent with our core beliefs, protecting our false certainties, reacting with anger if anyone dares to challenge them. Our lies are precious to us.

To break through our beliefs enough to challenge them, the gaps between our delusions and the truth must strike us too completely and suddenly for us to rationalize away, because we are master rationalizers. The chasm must lurch crazily open at our feet, shocking and frightening us. It can happen, rarely, for that tiny percentage of the population who can distinguish a challenge to our beliefs from an attack on us, who can turn the shock and anger of disillusionment against our old beliefs instead of against whoever questions them. When the light of reality sears our eyes momentarily, almost everyone almost everywhere almost always turns away from that painful disillusionment to seek a new delusion, a new certainty that differs in its disproven details but feels familiar emotionally, equally compelling, equally addictive.

Minds capable of real understanding would seem alien to us. This is why Heraclitus opposes the human and the divine, to emphasize the otherness and superiority of a mind capable of perceiving truth instead of the merely human capacity to perceive self-selected patterns and imagine them to be the truth. To perceive the truth, we must become better people, almost more than human, a transformation that burns away the merely human to become like the divine capable of true understanding, like Heracles burning away his humanity to become a god and join his father Zeus on Mount Olympus, an apotheosis by fire.

To extinguish hybris is more needful than to extinguish a fire. Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find [truth], for it is hard to discover and hard to attain. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs. The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

If we want to see the world, if we want the truth, we must approach the cosmos humbly, abandoning pride. To give up our arrogance is the most important thing we must do to approach the truth. What we expect, what we believe, what we already know to be true, all of these are false. To find the truth we must struggle against ourselves and search those ideas and beliefs we least want to consider. Nature does not truly hide; we hide from it. But neither does the Logos give itself to us easily. The important truths about actuality lie not in the surface patterns with which science is obsessed, but deeper than that, in the principles by which all things are related and shift. Nature exposes these deeper truths to us in principles that can be observed all around us, but we have to work against our reflexes to see them at all, and have to distinguish the obvious noise from the subtler principles that generate all things. Underneath the details of the cosmos is a music by which all things dance, and that is where the Logos may be learned.

Here is another implicit Heraclitean paradox: to become capable of true understanding, we must transform ourselves to become like the divine nature, like gods, yet we can only do so and remain so by extinguishing our hybris, through humility. The divine nature is both vastly superior in its understanding and simultaneously vastly humbler than human ego, which emphasizes how horrifically inflated the human ego is. Given that bizarre scale of human hybris, it does constitute a life-threatening emergency; it is a fire that endangers us all, and whose smoke blinds us to the truth.

Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men having barbarian souls.

This sentence elegantly refutes science, especially the premise that anyone following the right methodology can determine the truth; it refutes the very idea of educating people by pouring "objective" knowledge into their heads. Even if the truth were not hidden in an underlying harmony of the cosmos, even if it were directly perceivable in the surfaces of nature, in the appearances of things, still the mind must interpret those perceptions to create true knowledge. The mind is not a passive receptacle; it organizes any "information" to which it is exposed. Even directly perceived truth can be--will be, must be--converted by a barbarian soul into falsehood, because the barbarian soul wants to satisfy its appetites, stroke its ego, and reinforce what it already believes--so that is how it will twist everything it sees and hears. And, most crucially, every soul is a barbarian soul unless and until it is cultivated, something Modern education does not do. Those signs by which nature hints at deeper truths can only be perceived and correctly interpreted by those who make a lifelong project of cultivating their souls to raise themselves up out of their birthright of barbarism.

Heraclitus recognized that cultivating people competent to perceive the truth is profoundly difficult, that anthropoculture--the cultivation of good and wise people competent to govern themselves--should and must be the main purpose and priority of any culture if it is to achieve any lasting good in the world. To even know what is truly good is impossible unless the soul has been bent back against itself, cultivated into a capacity for recognizing the truth, a capacity with which we are not born, for which we must struggle lifelong to discover, attain, and retain. As all of Greek tragedy exists to attest, unless you know what is truly good and keep your hybris in check, all your actions are liable to lead to hamartia, missing the mark, which is the source of most evil in the world. Without this cultivation of the soul, the mind has no access to the truth and therefore no reliable capacity to judge good and evil; without the truth and right judgment, there can be no democracy, no free market, no justice, nor anything else worth having, only the swinish pursuit of appetites and the struggle for power. Science, by abdicating such isses, abdicates everything worth having and pursues only the means to better control the mechanisms of the universe, powers that are then made available to the highest bidder, usually those with the most barbarian souls.

To accurately perceive the world, we must be able to undo the distortions introduced into our perceptions by the barbarian tendencies of our souls. We must be able to twist our minds to look at themselves, and to know themselves so well that they can reverse their own involuntary defense mechanisms and thereby lay bare the truth of what we are seeing. Even then, to properly interpret what we are seeing we must understand the hidden harmony of the cosmos, which means we must have been adept at this back-bending trick of laying bare our perceptions for long enough to become acquainted with the true world, to slowly, painfully, step by step retrace a lifetime of missteps in service to a barbarian soul, idea by idea stripping off the layers of false interpretation from everything we think we know. Because our minds are not naturally socketed to permit us to bend them backward enough to do this, we must practice this almost like a kind of mental yoga to introduce a kind of flexibility into our thinking that does not come naturally to us. There are no shortcuts to this difficult discipline if we ever want to become realiable witnesses of ourselves and the world around us.

Gnothi seauton: Know thyself.

This is why the ancient Greeks, although having no commandments, did have divine advice that they carved into the entryway on the temple of Delphi within which resided the sacred Oracle; chief among these recommendations was this two-word, deeply profound seed of all wisdom, which a proper reading of Heraclitus reveals to be the implicit flipside of Physis kryptesthai philei, where I started this essay. Nature loves to hide because its truths are to be found in a hidden harmony hinted at by signs we ignore because we have barbarian souls. Those with barbarian souls--all of us--are sleepwalkers who look right at life and misinterpret it, interpreting it in terms of our private dreams. If we ever want to understand nature--that is, everything, for to the Greeks even the Gods are part of nature--we must wake up. To do that, we must first understand our own souls well enough to cultivate them well enough to become competent to recognize the truth when we see it. We don't need something new to think about; we need something new to think with.

We are the obstacle between ourselves and the truth. Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Until we know ourselves and our liabilities we cannot know anything else. Until we know ourselves, nature hides from us.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: The bronchitis continues.

Ugh!

Dear Reader,

This morning I woke with bronchitis, or at least my version. I am congested, weak, with a raw throat and phlegm. I must cancel my other activities and focus on recovering.

It is not surprising that illness should find me today. I felt it coming on yesterday and could not work. Last night I could not sleep until 2:30 a.m., often the final trigger. Above all, I knocked myself out by applying 480 patches in only six weeks to the codebase to bring it up to date. In doing so, I may have set a VistA patching record, but that push came at the cost of my self-care, and ultimately my health. I understand now that price was too high to pay.

Illness is a teacher; I need to become a better student.

Yours truly,
Rick

Making the Bed

Dear Reader,

This morning, as every spring, Beverly and I stripped off the winter bedding, the darker sheets and blanket, the thick comforter, and replaced it with the lighter, thinner summer bedding. Hardly something to cry about, but here I am.

The bottom part of the bedding is a bed skirt, whose plain white cotton sheet rests between the mattress and the boxspring, and whose colored skirts hang down over the boxspring and side boards of the bed's wood frame. The winter bed skirt on my side of the bed, toward the wall, had picked up some cat hair over the last six months, as it inevitably does, so it needed washing, more than you might think.

You see, I am mildly allergic to cat dander and dust mites. If we do not keep these allergens under control, I tend to develop bronchitis and depression. Therefore, we wash our sheets and blanket weekly. We have hardwood floors. We run a HEPA air filter in the bedroom twenty-four hours a day. We have housecleaners come in once a week. We scoop the cat box every day and change the litter and wash the box itself once a week, and we keep it in our bedroom on the other side of the air filter to make sure we don't forget. We keep the house clean enough that friends and relatives with stronger cat allergies than mine are able to stay at the house without any ill effects.

The exception to this rigorous cleanliness is that bed skirt, which is awkward to remove from between the boxspring and the heavy mattress, and even more awkward to slide back in between them and arrange so that it hangs down evenly. We don't wash it weekly with the rest of the bedding. We just try to keep it clean with the lint roller, and otherwise just change it every six months when we rotate bed clothes for the seasons. Today it was time to wash the bed skirt, even though it will never have that cat hair on it again.

Our kitty Morgana has never been responsible for the hair that tends to accumulate on my side of the bed skirt. Morgana is far more interested in getting up on the bed to sleep with us, especially on me since I tend to lie still during the night, than in walking beneath the bed. Besides, she is small and fastidious, cleaning herself repeatedly throughout the day, so she rarely has great quantities of loose cat fur to shed. There she is right now, a little furry shadow curled up asleep in front of the fireplace in the basement after taking her morning bath. The bed skirts are safe from Morgana.

It was our other kitty Shakti who loved to lurk beneath the bed in the mornings and evenings, who loved to brush herself on the bed skirts, weaving back and forth, out from under the bed, and then back under again, purring and purring. She loved to have me reach down from our high bed and pet her as she came out from under the bed skirts. I would have to lie flat with my arm reaching all the way down to her, and she loved it best if each stroke began at the tip of her nose, passed over her eyes and cheeks and ears, then down her neck, back, and gently to the end of her tail in one long stroke. She loved this game so much, she would not even wait for the stroke to finish before she was already turning back under the bed skirts to start again. When she was so happy, the rhythm of her tread would break, with her paws thumping on the floor in a heavy but rapid, off-beat staccato. Back under the bed, her thump-thump-thumping paws on the hardwood would pause for a few seconds before starting up again just before she emerged, purring in happy expectation. Eventually, I grew to understand that she paused because she loved that moment so much that she even savored the expectation of it. Our little ritual together was not a daily occurrence, because Shakti liked to play many different games, but over the course of a week we might play the bed skirts game several times. Shakti and I had our bonding time together, and the cat fur would gradually over the course of a month accumulate on the bed skirt until I took it off with a lint roller, and eventually washed it, as we are doing today.

The bed skirts are safe now from Shakti. She died about 1:00 a.m., Tuesday, February 21st of this year. A couple of weeks before she died, when she began to need more help, Beverly and I had set up a mattress and bedding from one of our guest beds on the floor of our bedroom, so I could sleep near her. For her last few nights she slept in bed with me, which is where she died. Exactly seventeen years and eight months before, she had been born in bed with me, on a mattress and bedding on the floor of my friend Ron's old apartment, along with her sisters and brothers.

Now Shakti's ashes are in a beautiful copper urn on the mantelpiece of the fireplace in the family room, the bed skirts are upstairs in the washing machine, and I'm down here in the basement writing my blog and crying a little.

Yours truly,
Rick

Progress, Hubris, and Humility

Dear Reader,

It was as a student of evolution that I first remember articulating the myth of progress. I thought it was true, as most people do, that history, or evolution, or something about the human condition was like a child growing up and getting better, a linear progression from worse to better.

We believe medicine is better today, that we live longer, that we are better educated, that we are more enlightened, less racist, less sexist, more free--in short, better in most ways than our ancestors. We believe mammals are more "advanced" than fish, which in turn are more "advanced" than worms, which are more "advanced" than bacteria. We believe creating a nuclear power plant is a greater accomplishment than knitting a really comfortable, warm sweater. We believe someday we will fly through space in great ships, and we believe that will be better than living on Earth. In one field of study or belief after another, we strive to organize the entire world into a hierarchy with ourselves and our dreams on top. This myth of progress serves us by appealing to something essential to human nature, one of its defining characteristics, a state we find ourselves in all the time, unconsciously.

This is a state of perpetual defensive hubris, of overweening pride. Why does everything have to proclaim our greatness? Why do we work so hard to stack the deck in our own favor? Why isn't it enough to strive to be good? Why do we insist everything demonstrate that we are the best, that others are worse? Why are we so insecure? Why aren't we willing to work to be great? Why do we look for these cheats of definition to demonstrate we are great without our having to work for it? Why are we so lazy?

Heraclitus wrote that it was more important to extinguish hubris than to extinguish a fire. That is, hubris is so terrible it constitutes a life-threatening emergency.

History shows he was not overstating the case. Faith in the superiority of the Aryan race over the Jewish (and heterosexuals over homosexuals, and Catholics over Jehovah's Witnesses, and fascists over communists, and so on against all the other target groups history unfairly erases from the Holocaust) was used to justify the mass exterminations by the Nazis. Faith in the superiority of human industry over nature was used to justify the Soviet destruction of their own ecology--and all industrialized countries fall prey to the same myth to varying extents. Faith in all kinds of superiority was used to justify European theft of land from the Native Americans. The history of our efforts to define ourselves as superior in order to justify the crimes we want to carry out goes on and on, our own mirror relentlessly reflecting back to us the source of our own problems. We must acknowledge the pervasiveness of this self-promoting self-deceit, and the universal tendency of the human species to fall prey to it; it appears to be one of our most essential defining characteristics, since we all fall prey to it.

In making this criticism of human nature, I am not arguing for nihilism--the belief that nothing matters. There is meaning in the cosmos; all things are not relative and all people are not equal. Hubris is not the belief that some things are better than others. Hubris is more pride than is warranted by the truth, pride out of balance with reality, unearned pride, pride for its own sake.

The proper level of pride is not its opposite, overweening shame; nor its negation, nihilism/relativism/scientism; but simple humility. We can take pride in our simple successes without inflating their significance to ourselves or others. Just because so many others can lift more weight than you does not mean you should not take pride when you can lift another five pounds than you could before. Humility is the harmony between your estimation of you and yours with the truth about you and yours.

Likewise, we must beware of hubris by association, the borrowed pride of "We're Number One!" It is every bit as irrationally arrogant to lie about some organization with which we associate in order to puff ourselves up by association with it. The hubristic human ego is cunning, and will happily disparage itself to hide under false humility as long as it can puff up someone or something else and then cuddle up close to it, basking in its borrowed false pride. Jingoistic flag-waving and fanatical boosterism are just hubris by proxy, as far from true patriotism as hubris is from humility.

We can strive for excellence without giving in to hubris. The solution to the quest to become the best at something is not to short-circuit the work by claiming victory at the outset, nor even at the end. The point of excellence is not some trophy or acclaim or finish line or record, but rather the effort to improve, and the gradual ongoing improvement, and the humility that comes from putting ourselves into proper context with the world, learning about what is truly better or worse in some way. In that quest to better ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, our countries, our species, our world, in that quest to leave things better than we find them, we must be ever vigilant against the myth of progress and other ploys of one of our true enemies in life--the hubris of our own grasping egos.

The more fully we resist our own hubris to embrace proper humility, the more we tune ourselves to the hidden harmony of the cosmos.

Yours truly,
Rick

Ancient Greek Philosophy

Dear Reader,

I am taking a class on Ancient Greek Philosophy from my friend in Texas, Kenneth Smith. It's really more of a tutorial, since I am the only student, but it is based on the course he used to teach. I bought a shelf of books, including the few textbooks but also many auxiliary references, and I paid a reasonably hefty tuition as I would to a university. What's different, though, is that with just the one student Kenneth can tailor it on the fly to my concerns and questions, and since said student is at once highly curious and indulgent Kenneth can use the course outline as a mere launching pad for embroidering the most convoluted but interesting and ultimately relevant streams of discussion. The simplest quotes take on whole new meanings when put into the context both of the culture of the time and its contrast to our time. This class fascinates and challenges me, as few classes have.

Yours truly,
Rick

Dictionaries

Dear Reader,

Yes, your dictionaries. You do not really believe anyone can master the English language, do you? Learning English is a lifelong effort, and among the indispensible tools for that permanent study are good dictionaries, of which there are many.

The most comprehensive English dictionary is The Oxford English Dictionary, aka the OED, a twenty-volume, 22,000-page reference on English. If you find that as intimidating a format as I do, I suggest The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, which photoreduces the entire OED down to just 2,416 pages; it includes a magnifying glass, but I find I can read the fine print without it. If you find even that daunting, I can recommend Oxford English Dictionary Online. I cannot recommend the CD-ROM version of the OED, since the software was written to emphasize the protection of their intellectual property over usability to the point of inconvenience and unreliability, according to most of the user reviews on Amazon.

The Chicago Manual of Style recommends you use two dictionaries: Webster's Third New International Dictionary (book and CD-ROM) and its more frequently updated abridgment, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (book only; a CD-ROM version is available separately). Webster's Third New International is far more complete than Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, but the Collegiate is updated more often, which is why Chicago recommends both.

You need not own these dictionaries, but you need some dictionaries, and you should explore them. Our words influence our ideas, or lack thereof.

Yours truly,
Rick

Style

Dear Reader,

For anyone interested in applying the Porter Principles, principle three is explained in detail (along with detailed guidelines for grammar, style, typesetting, and bookmaking) in The Chicago of Manual of Style, a copy of which you must have with you when you write, next to your dictionaries.

Yours truly,
Rick

Quotations

Dear Reader,

Consider two studies by Martin Porter about quotations.

The first, ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’ (or words to that effect): A study of a Web quotation, from January 2002, traces a popular quote attributed to Edmund Burke to show he probably never said or wrote it. Scrape this bumpersticker off your car or change its attribution to Anonymous.

The second, Four Principles of Quotation: Being a follow up to A study of a Web quotation, from March 2002, tracks the false Burke quote, and ends suggesting four principles for quotations. Let's call them the Porter Principles:

Principle 1 (for readers)
Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.

Principle 2 (for readers)
Whenever you see a quotation given with a full source assume that it is probably being misused, unless you find good evidence that the quoter has read it in the source.

Principle 3 (for quoters)
Whenever you make a quotation, give the exact source.

Principle 4 (for quoters)
Only quote from works that you have read.

Martin Porter's principles are excellent advice. Information out of context is noise. Our Misinformation Age is noisy, maybe even toxic. It is far too easy for writers to make things worse. Perhaps writers need an equivalent to the doctor's Hippocratic Oath: do not spread information out of context, either fragmented or in false contexts. Perhaps writers should consider a related mission: to make things better. Readers need to develop skepticism, need to realize that writers have taken no Hippocratic Oath, that everything they write is at best partly false. I am no exception. Readers and writers need the Porter Principles.

We should examine why any writer uses quotations, how they function within the text.

Most texts I read use quotations to appeal to authority, the writer trying to strengthen a weak argument by getting famous dead people to gang up on the reader. The writer should be capable of marshaling an adequate argument without calling on his influential buddies to help him out.

Other texts use quotations to hold the reader's interest, the writer struggling to stave off the reader's boredom. Gratuitous quotations are not needed to patch up a lively argument about a compelling subject.

I quote Mr. Porter because I have been sloppy with my own use of quotations, and I have fallen for this Edmund Burke pseudo-quote; perhaps you have as well. To amplify a subtlety of his two essays, we cannot know Mr. Burke never said or wrote this, only that we have no evidence he did, and that the sentiment expressed--that human affairs reduce to good and evil, and that the forces of evil will win unless the forces of good mobilize to stop them--does not sound like Mr. Burke. He criticized those who reduced human affairs to such a black-and-white apocalypse, according to Mr. Porter. We have attributed this quotation to Mr. Burke only because others have, on websites and bumper stickers that we have used as reliable sources of information.

The ancient Greeks carved Gnothi seauton on the temple before the Oracle at Delphi: Know thyself. Mr. Porter's two studies remind us of one of the most important things we should know about ourselves: too often, our inner sheep "think" for us. If we have the character strength to submit ourselves to the discipline of adhering to his principles, we will find it humbling to discover how much misinformation we believe. We have such poor mental hygiene that our minds are brimming over with lies and errors, which we routinely use to draw conclusions and make decisions. Misuse of quotations is one of the least serious symptoms of our filthy minds, but also an easy target for us to try to overcome, to begin to realize our beliefs are far from perfect. We know far, far less than we think we do, and most of what we do with our minds should not be called thinking at all.

Many of the fragments we have of Heraclitus's Peri physeos (On Nature), which I will explore frequently in these blog entries, wrestle with this dilemma in which humanity finds itself--our very survival as a species depends on our ability to think clearly about complex and dangerous subjects, but we are deeply irrational. Our irrationality leaves its fingerprints all over everything we do. Look! Detective Martin Porter has found the fingerprints of our irrationality on poor Edmund Burke. We cannot even quote a famous man correctly. We draft his corpse to argue on our behalf, put words in his cold, dead mouth.

If we show such contempt for an eloquent and honored statesman, how will we treat ordinary people like you and me? If we cannot be bothered with the truth when it is easy, like quoting a man correctly, why should anyone believe we will sacrifice for the truth when money, power, careers, or lives are at stake?

Cultivating a more honorable character, more honest, more noble, begins with the easy things, the little things, like learning to quote each other with care and respect. Without the regular practice of these minor tests, we will never shape up our characters enough for the trials troubled times will inflict upon us.

The details of life matter in ways we cannot imagine.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Postscript: My thanks to Martin Porter, Lee Frank, Frank Lynch, Paul Boller, John George, William Safire, and the others involved in removing our words from Edmund Burke's mouth. One down, a google to go.

Friends

Dear Amy and Danny,

We loved having you here.

Yours truly,
Rick

Names

Dear Reader,

Samuel Clemens wrote "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning" (George Bainton, The Art of Authorship, pp. 87-88 (1890), which I have not yet read).

Our dear Mr. Clemens was writing about word choice, but it applies equally well to names and titles.

In part it is a matter of personal respect. My name is Frederick Douglas Saling Marshall. My friends, family, and coworkers call me Rick, or by private nicknames. Everyone else can call me Mr. Marshall. If that seems stilted, it is because we have become a rude culture that mistakes lack of formality for genuine friendliness. Intimacy without invitation is at best false, at worst it is a cousin of sex without informed consent. When a solicitor calls asking to speak with Fred, or Freddie, I know I am dealing with an organization that wants my resources but cannot be bothered to even know from whom they want them; I am just meat to them, or money, or time--less than human. To show respect is the first step in any legitimate human communication.

In part, recognizing that most people come from other cultures and speak or write in other languages is a matter of cultural respect, essential to avoid ethnocentrism, jingoism, and false forms of patriotism such as fascism. English is but one of thousands of human languages. To pretend that the English translation of a book's title or text is that book is to promote the falsehood that all worthy things take place in our language, in our culture. We must be citizens of the world and understand the true diversity of human experience, if we are to be civilized adults.

In part, calling things by their true names is a matter of excellence. The master of any art discriminates between details that matter and those that do not, and does justice to the things that matter. If someone cannot be bothered to get a name right, what else can they not be bothered to get right? It is not only worrisome, it is often an accurate predictor of other sloppy habits.

In part it is a matter of clarity. We live in crowded times, in a crowded world, and failure to properly identify our subjects breeds confusion. This is especially true with human names.

Above all, though, proper naming is a matter of comprehension. The lightning-bug is not the lightning. Nor is lightening. Our readers are probably not psychic, and cannot know what we meant, only what we wrote. Even our own thoughts are altered by our choice of language, and if we use the wrong names we will unconsciously respond to our erroneous label rather than our intended meaning. The human mind is not an organ for detecting the truth but for building patterns and associations, and it will work with whatever material it is given, however false or misleading. The computer science expression GIGO applies: Garbage in, garbage out. Conversely, the work required to clarify what we are trying to say to get the names right can reveal new information that makes us rethink what we were about to say, can teach us crucial new information that prevents us from believing or spreading misinformation.

So, a few examples:

As a child, I did not see Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope; I saw Star Wars; a later reedit was given the former title. Lucas himself created both films, but the later reedit has new special effects superimposed throughout the film.

Dario Argento (DAH-rio ar-JEN-toe; see postpostscript) did not direct Deep Red nor even The Hatchet Murders; he directed Profundo rosso (pro-FUN-doe ROSS-oh). The Hatchet Murders is a retitling of Profundo rosso after distributors sliced out huge chunks of the film's dialog, story, and character development. Argento fans consider it an abomination.

Niccolò Machiavelli (nick-CO-lah mah-kyah-VELL-lee) did not write The Prince; he wrote Il Principe (ill prin-CHEE-pay). Machiavelli was Italian and wrote in Italian, which I cannot yet read. I have read an English translation of Il Principe called The Prince, but I have never read Il Principe itself. The difference is more important than most people realize, because translations are imprecise. A translation is the result of a different author rewriting the entire work using different words from a different language; meanings are always changed, no matter how careful the translator is. For example, prince in English can mean various things, such as a cute little boy who will grow up to be king, or a sexy and available young nobleman; in Machiavelli's time, principe, may have meant prince in the sense of leader, like boss or lord.

The computer system I work on, VistA, is not written in the MUMPS programming language, nor in Caché, nor in M; it is written in Standard MUMPS (except a few lines scattered among fifteen routines), also called Standard M, specifically the 1995 standard. VistA cannot run on older versions of Standard MUMPS (such as the 1990 standard), nor on versions that do not comply with the 1995 standard (such as M3 from Patterson, Gray & Associates).

The Western Red-cedar, Thuja plicata (THOO-ya plic-AY-ta), is not a cedar; it is a thuja, a member of the Cypress family, which makes it a cousin of cedars. The Alaska-cedar, Chamaecyparis nootkatensis (cam-ee-SIP-ah-riss noot-kah-TEN-sis), also called the Yellow-cedar, is also not a cedar, nor is it a thuja; it is a dwarf cypress, another cedar cousin. Nor is the Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii (soo-doe-TSOO-gah men-ZEE-see-eye), a fir; it is a false hemlock (an inappropriately negative but less misleading name), a member of the Pine family, making it a cousin of the firs, but only a very distant relative of cedars, thujas, and dwarf cypresses. These are three of the most important trees in my homeland. Names can be misleading.

I speak the American dialect of the English language, with western or standard pronunciation, a level of precision in the name of my language that often does not matter but sometimes does. For example, the color (not colour; I am not English or Canadian) of the sweatpants I am wearing is gray (not grey). Most people do not realize that spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary change in English depending on which dialect you are speaking. Even fewer realize there are formal styles in English, and the rules change further depending on which style you are using. I am trying to use Chicago style, detailed in The Chicago Manual of Style --though I am a novice and so make many mistakes--but newspaper writers use AP style, and there are others. If you do not know the name of your style, dialect, and language, you probably do not know the rules either, nor why they matter, nor when you may or should bend or break those rules to improve your communication.

Such examples help illustrate why sloppy knowledge of names is quite a good predictor of other sloppy knowledge.

This is not a call for anal retentiveness for its own sake. Sometimes we need precision, sometimes merely approximation, and sometimes a pronoun like it will do nicely, thank you very much. Sadly, though, even the minimal clarity required to spell short pronouns is beyond most Americans, who usually misspell its as it's. The rules for proper naming are nuanced, related not just to the thing in question and its origins but to the cultural identity of the writer or speaker, as well as to the context of the communication. If this seems complex, consider it a test of whether we have enough comprehension, clarity, excellence, and respect to engage in thought or communication with each other.

We can insist on the effort in a friendly and forgiving way. If we try and fail, we have at least pushed our limits, demonstrated our good intentions, and set a good example.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Postscript: I have not been able to discern the correct spelling of Machiavelli's first name: Nicolo, Nicolò, Nicoló, Niccolo, Niccolò, or Niccoló? For anyone who does not know what I mean, correct does not mean most popular or common spelling, nor the most obscure or learned looking, nor the spelling preferred by experts or authorities. This is a literate man's name, so the only question that matters is how did he spell it? I have guessed based on which websites are sloppy or still using restricted character sets that Niccolò is a plausible enough spelling for this blog entry, but I have no confidence that I am correct. If anyone knows--and I do not mean has a plausible or intellectual sounding guess--I would love to be educated. I would also love to know of a reliable reference for such questions. The Oxford English Dictionary Online does not seem to include biographical entries.

Postpostscript: I have decided to start adding pronunciation guides to foreign names and terms, since there are likely to be so many in my blog, and since most of us who learn terms from reading make up our own incorrect pronunciations rather than seek a reliable reference. My rough pronunciation guides will only be close for those who speak the standard American English dialect, but since so few people can read the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA), and many web browsers will not even display IPA characters, and since I am too lazy to lay out a string of pictures of IPA letters, I figure my Americanese approximations are probably better than nothing at this point. I welcome corrections to any mistakes I make in approximating pronunciation.

Postpostpostscript: I would like to draw your attention to Omniglot, an online guide to writing systems. For many writing systems they include an explanation of the language's origin and pronunciation. The pronunciation is expressed in IPA, but by checking the IPA letters against the page explaining your own language and dialect's pronunciation, you can decypher how you would pronounce the language in question. For example, you can look up Italian to get the IPA spelling of Niccolò Machiavelli, then if you do not know IPA you can look up British English, or standard American English to figure out how to pronounce the IPA spelling. A few other dialects of English are listed at the bottom of the British page, but the list is by no means exhaustive--for example, no Scottish or Irish English, no Georgian or Bostonian American, and so on. We live in an imperfect world.

Certainties

Dear Reader,

Like all American boys of a certain age, I grew up watching "Cowboys and Indians" movies on television, and played "Cowboys and Indians" for fun, when we were not playing "Cops and Robbers" or other imaginary combat games. We rooted for the cowboys, who were obviously the good guys in all those movies. Any fool could see that.

Eventually, Dad questioned my certainties. "You think bad Indians attack innocent settlers protected by brave cowboys. Look more closely. Cowboys and settlers were not Americans; they were Europeans; their ancestors came from Europe. Only Indians are Americans; their ancestors lived here for millennia. If invaders from another continent came to take away your land, wouldn't you be angry? Wouldn't you fight back? Who are the real bad guys here?"

As head-to-head conflicts between comfortable illusions and harsh reality often do, this pissed me off. Dad was lying or just wrong, obviously. I already believed something else, and so did all my friends at school. As Moderns are raised to do, I believed I had a right to my opinion, and I believed that meant I had a right not to have it contradicted. If Dad were right, then all these movies, all this television, all these stories I enjoyed were essentially lies, and everyone I knew who believed as I did believed in a lie. Believing lies would make us fools. For me not to be a fool, Dad had to be wrong, so he was.

Fortunately, I was raised to value the truth above almost anything, to follow the lead of the truth wherever it takes me, however uncomfortable, and any map of the world reveals the lies immediately. The Indians were the original inhabitants of America, and we stole it from them. There used to be many of them; now there are few, and many Indian cultures and languages are gone completely. "Decimation" means to kill one in ten, but we killed nine in ten, for which we have no precise word; the nearest words are slaughter, massacre, and genocide.

The truth about Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and so many other "battles" by which "the west was won" seared me as a child. The excitement of childhood death-games, the rage at implicitly being called a fool by my father, the shock and shame of disillusionment, the horror and grief for victims of one of the greatest holocausts humanity has ever experienced——I was ripe for electric emotional alchemy.

My delusion inverted. Europeans were the bad guys. Indians were the good guys. Americans were the bad guys. I was a bad guy. So I believed more or less for the next fifteen years.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Vacation

Dear Reader,

Last week, Beverly and I took our first vacation alone together in nine years. We spent five days at a bed and breakfast on an island in Puget Sound. We ignored our email and phones, went for walks together, soaked in the gorgeous views, played with our Dungeons and Dragons books, talked, rested, and generally had a wonderful time. Now I am much clearer on Harvey Manning's distinction between wreckreation and re-creation.

We will be doing this more often.

Sincerely yours,
Rick

Postscript: When I got back, I found that my dear friend Danny Barer had responded to my post about Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Since I love the work and he introduced me to it, I am delighted that he enjoyed what I wrote. Danny and I attended Walla Walla High School together, where he introduced me to manga, anime, many fine comics, science fiction and fantasy conventions, and so much more. I added his new blog, The Barer Cave, to my blog's links.