The Strangler Tree at The Moorings, Islamorada

Were you a harmless, nameless tree, just standing there,

Motionless and proud, your boughs spread wide,

The product of a hundred fruitful summers,

Surviving the convulsions of Caribbean hurricanes,

Cold fronts and brisk north winds,

You might neither notice nor much care about

The arrival, perching quietly, of yet another bird.

Thousands stop from year to year,

Resting on their pilgrimage

To Antigua or St. Kitts and back.

You welcome them.  They chatter. It passes time.

 

But be alert! One single bird could be your nemesis,

Sitting, resting, eating lunch – –

A juicy fig from some distantly related tree.

The bird pecks. It flies.  You give it no more thought.

But resting in a crevice between your trunk and bough

It might have left behind a single seed,

Worried fiercely from the dark, ripe fig,

Falling ignored and overlooked.

Beware! This solitary seed in good conditions sprouts

And little tendrils grow, vertical and true,

Descend beside your trunk and seek the soil below.

 

Well, no problem.  All are welcome here.

These are the tropics, just hang out, relaxed.

Trees have a long perspective and are cool.

This is not the first parasite you’ve met – –

Vegetable, animal, lichen, fungus.

All in all they bring some mutual benefits

In the relentless struggle for survival.

Lulled into a sense of false security,

You’re pre-occupied with problems common to your kin – –

Nutrients, moisture, humidity, all aspects of dendrology,

Not to mention the weather and condition of your bark.

You fail to see the lurking danger till it’s right upon you.

 

Suddenly you do become aware!

The roots of your tenant tree have dropped and rooted in the soil,

Thickened and become a tough and healthy wood,

Like pinions or cross-braces screwed into the earth.

Where the aerial roots cross, they fuse and merge,

Creating a hard, thick lattice of stout roots.

It cribs, confines you like a prison.

On windy days you barely move or sway.

You struggle like a ship against a hawser,

Trying to break the bonds that hold you from the sky.

Yes, this crafty Strangler Fig is now in competition

For the nutrients, light, and water you have taken for granted.

 

You panic, struggle, but to no effect.

You stand there, bound, a prisoner in chains,

Making small, if any gains.

Your visitor’s no vampire, sucking at your blood,

But battens on you, using up your vigor and your strength,

In fruitless struggle, using little effort of its own.

You cease protesting, give in, weaken, rot away.

Where once you stood, a proud and flourishing tree,

There is in time a poor and rotting hulk,

Gently decaying in the Florida half-light,

Attracting the attention of beetles, grubs and other mites,

The vultures and hyenas of the vegetable world.

 

In your place, your very own spot,

Now stands a sinister, shapeless mass of crisscross roots,

Huge and spreading, center-less, without a form,

Impenetrable, jungle-like and dense.

The irony is that this triumphant Strangler Fig,

By its very nature a thousand rather shallow roots,

Is itself vulnerable, in dire and imminent danger.

Whereas you, its host, withstood the weather for a century,

A serious hurricane might well uproot it, blow it down.

Its roots are insubstantial faced with wind and rain;

They loosen in the meager soil, become unstable and give way.

Thus all will be to no avail; the Strangler strangled where it lies,

Bloated and overgrown, a victim of its own success.

Would it had stayed modest, or remained that single seed,

Worried fiercely from a dark, ripe fig,

Falling ignored and overlooked, not so reckless and ambitious.

Too late! It cannot be revived or disentangled now.

Maybe there is some crude justice in the natural world.

 Robert Hanrott,  March 2007                         

 (The Strangler Fig is also called the Banyan tree.  In India it is also called the kalpavriksha, or the wish-fulfilling tree, representing eternal life, because of its host of ever-expanding branches.)

This really was an attempted coup

The commander of the D.C. National Guard has said the Pentagon restricted his authority ahead of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, requiring higher level sign-off to respond that cost time as the events that day spiraled out of control.

Local commanders typically have the power to take military action on their own to save lives or prevent significant property damage in an urgent situation when there isn’t enough time to obtain approval from headquarters.

But Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, said the Pentagon essentially took that power and other authorities away from him ahead of the pro-Trump incursion into the capitol on January 6th.   That meant he couldn’t immediately roll out troops when he received a panicked phone call from the Capitol Police chief warning that rioters were about to enter the U.S. Capitol.

My comment:  What does this have to do with Epicurus?  Epicurus wanted us to have peace of mind, a feeling of security and safety. He despised politics (and maybe you can see why!) There was quite enough warfare and fighting in his day and it disrupted the quiet tenor of life.   Here we have a bogus claim of victory by a clear loser and what looks like a plan to overturn a democratic election by violence, whether you like the outcome or not.   I never thought I would see such a thing in the United States, of all countries. The frightening thing is that the instigator will clearly not be brought to book and will be encouraged to try again.   What price peace of mind?

 

 

 

The lion’s roar

male-lion-roaring-FDJ2EA.jpg

Every lion has its own individual roar.

A lion’s roar is an impressive sound: it can be as loud as 114 decibels (equivalent to a chainsaw), and the creatures can recognise the roars of other individuals, even when they are several miles apart. Now a team of scientists has used sophisticated recording devices to pinpoint the variations that make this possible. In a study in Zimbabwe, five male lions were fitted with acoustic accelerometers, to record the full spectrum of the sounds they generated. Researchers from Oxford University analysed these recordings, then trained a pattern-recognition algorithm to “learn” the signature of each lion. In tests involving a series of roars, it was able to identify which lion had produced them with 91.5% accuracy; it achieved similar results from recordings taken later, in the bush.

The hope is that conservationists will be able to use the algorithm to identify and track lions in the wild. “The ability to remotely evaluate the number of individual lions in a population from their roars could revolutionise the way in which lion populations are assessed,” said Andrew J. Loveridge, of the Oxford team.  (The Week 31 Oct  2020).

Phew!  So it’s safer to visit Africa!  I’ve been waiting.

Legalizing assisted dying (but cannabis remains illegal)

New Zealanders recently voted to legalize euthanasia for the October general election ballot paper. The results are binding and the Act will come into effect 22 months from the final results on 6 November 2021. The vote makes New Zealand the seventh country in the world to legalize assisted dying.

On the other hand, New Zealanders simultaneously refused to legalize cannabis. (The Guardian Weekly, Nov 12, 2020)

My comment: To force someone in terrible pain or giving up on life, to soldier on in misery is totally counter to kindness and compassion – and Epicureanism. My own mother was in this situation, kept alive with drugs, unable to recognize my sister or me, and with no wish to live. The head nurse told us she could keep my mother technically alive, but her prospects were wretched; she would be a shell of her former self. My sister and I looked at each other and I asked the nurse to let her go. “Thank you”, said my sister, a committed, active Christian. “I agree”.

As for cannabis, the logic behind keeping it illegal evades me. Keeping it illegal elevates the prices, and encourages its theft or over-use. It is handy for helping you sleep and can help subdue pain. It should be regulated (as in the District of Columbia, where you have to have a license and a good reason for using it, supported by a qualified doctor. No problem.).

The cataclysm caused by the war on terror

When you read about desperate refugees crossing the English Channel in dinghies, do you ever ask yourself why these people left home in the first place? Few give it much thought. To most, migrants seem just a fact of life.

But the reality is they’re “the thin edge of the wedge of a vast exodus” created by military intervention by the US and its allies. How vast? An analysis by Brown University has put the number displaced since 9/11 by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, northwest Pakistan and the Philippines at an astonishing 37 million. At least eight million of these have fled abroad; the rest have been internally displaced. That surpasses the disruption caused by the First World War (ten million), India-Pakistan Partition (14 million), and the Vietnam War (13 million); in recent history only the Second World War has seen a greater displacement.

For as long as the conflicts spawned by the war on terror continue, so too will “these waves of migration – and the anti-immigrant backlash that has done so much to poison European politics”. (Patrick Cockburn, The Independent)

My comment:   37 million people displaced!  And we are still throwing huge sums of money at the military to keep the “peace” in half those countries, while the US infrastructure creaks and groans, people are coming out of school semi-literate, huge numbers are unemployed, families have insufficient food, and we have made a hash (so far) of handling the coronavirus (add your own grumbles).  Question: are our leaders fit for purpose?  Let’s hope the new government picks up on all this.

The disgraceful execution of Lisa Montgomery

Lisa Montgomery was executed in Indiana last Wednesday morning, becoming the first woman to die under the federal death penalty in nearly seven decades.

Her sentence was carried out after the Supreme Court lifted one stay and declined to grant another last-minute request for a delay from her attorneys. The court’s three liberals, Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, all said they would have granted the request for a stay.

Montgomery’s attorney, Kelley Henry, who had argued she is too mentally ill to understand her death sentence, criticized the Trump administration for pushing forward with her execution.

“Our Constitution forbids the execution of a person who is unable to rationally understand her execution,” Henry said in a statement. “The current administration knows this. And they killed her anyway. Violating the Constitution, federal law, its own regulations, and longstanding norms along the way.”

Montgomery’s lawyers had raced to federal appeals courts in the District of Columbia, Chicago and St. Louis in attempts to delay the execution because a pause of even a few days could have a significant effect on Montgomery’s fate.

The administration resumed federal executions last year for the first time since 2003 It has since carried out 10 federal executions, the most in a single year in the U.S. in decades.   President Joe Biden, on the other hand, opposes capital punishment  and has pledged to push to eliminate the federal death penalty. 

The executions of two other death-row inmates scheduled for later this week were temporarily delayed, after a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday said they should first be allowed to recover from covid-19 contracted in prison.

Montgomery, 52, was convicted in 2007 of a grotesque crime: strangling a Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant, and cutting the baby from her abdomen. The infant survived and was raised by her father.  This horrible crime was preceded by years of abuse and mental illness. Doctors who have examined Montgomery say she has bipolar disorder and brain damage; she has said that God speaks to her through connect-the-dot puzzles, according to court affidavits. Her mother abused her and her stepfather repeatedly raped her, her lawyers say.

But in papers filed with the Supreme Court, Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey B. Wall said Montgomery understands her crime and coming punishment, and that courts should not delay a death penalty that has been pending for years.

The Supreme Court set aside a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that would have delayed a hearing in Montgomery’s case until after the inauguration.  (Ann E. Marinow & Robert Barnes, Washington Post)

My comment: The Guardian in England ran a full article about Montgomery two weeks ago.  The above does not explain the full graphic horror of this woman’s life, from about five years old onwards.  My wife and I read it and were speechless.  Just about everyone she encountered her abused her, it seems.  She was mentally a total mess.

It might possibly be a blessing for Montgomery to finally be at peace.  Her life in a horror show was at an end.  All the same, executing a deranged woman such as this was a cruel and vicious thing to do, unsurprising given who encouraged/ordered it, but two wrongs don’t make a right.  The death penalty is uncivilized, un-Epicurean and a disgrace.  Montgomery should have been helped by a shrink in a mental hospital. Her life should not depend on the views of the President in any case.

 

Inauguration poem

Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first-ever youth poet laureate read the following poem during the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20th.  One cannot replicate Amanda’s excellent presentation, unfortunately. But the words are wonderful.  An amazing talent:

When day comes we ask ourselves,
Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry, a sea we must wade.
We’ve braved the belly of the beast,
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
And the norms and notions of what just is
Isn’t always justice
And yet the dawn is ours. before we knew it
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl, descended from slaves
and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one.
And yes we are far from polished, far from pristine
But that doesn’t mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
We must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious,
Not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time
Then victory won’t lie in the blade,
But in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade
The hill we climb if only we dare
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy
And this effort very nearly succeeded
But while democracy can be periodically delayed
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth
in this faith we trust
For while we have our eyes on the future
history has its eyes on us
This is the era of just redemption
We feared at its inception
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs
of such a terrifying hour
but within it we found the power
to author a new chapter
To offer hope and laughter to ourselves
So while once we asked,
How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be
A country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold, fierce and free
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and changes our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with.
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one
We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west,
we will rise from the windswept northeast
where our forefathers first realized revolution
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states,
we will rise from the sunbaked south,
We will rebuild, reconcile and recover
and every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

The attempted coup and the District of Columbia


The Capitol riot highlighted the need for DC statehood in tragic, terrifying relief. The 700,000 residents of DC watched as racist armed insurrectionists took over city streets, hotels, restaurants, Airbnbs, and peaceful neighborhoods before and after the Capitol attack, powerless to do anything about it.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was hamstrung in her attempt to send in critical backup to the Capitol as the attack was unfolding; because DC isn’t a state, she was barred from the normal power to send in National Guard troops afforded to every other state leader. Instead, Bowser had to rely on approval from the White House, which presented a deadly catch-22 that resulted in hours of havoc (and the Pentagon didn’t want to intervene, supposedly because of the “optics” – another creepy story too long for this post).  

DC residents pay taxes but have no say in the federal government that’s disrupted all of city life, and it’s a matter of justice – not politics – that we amend that by making DC a state.    (Hannah Giorgis, Patriotic Millionaires).

My comment:  it becomes increasingly clear that social media, lousy education, insecure employment, and the indecent gap between rich and poor (add other factors as you wish) have bred gangs of (mostly) ignorant young men who are susceptible to lies and wild distortions spread by Nazis and Fascists, a type resurrected after eighty odd years, complete with imaginary plots and hate speech, set on disrupting the ordered lives of the rest of us.  We can expect more of this, and we must not repeat the mistakes of the 1930s.   No appeasement!

Oh, and DC should be a state – it has a higher population than some Western states as it is.

Covid shots

Getting a Covid vaccination where I live reminds me of feeding chickens.

I arrive at the chicken run with a full bowl of corn.  “Mornin’ all, I call”, to be totally ignored – until they see the tell-tale bowl.  I  dip my hand into the corn, take a full handful of chicken-feed and throw it into the air.

An unseemly scramble ensues, with every chicken racing to get to their dinner  before the others.   There is no politeness in the fowl world, just every chicken for herself, the law of the jungle.

Had I time and inclination I would train the chickens to line up in alphabetical order, or age, or gender.  But I’m just a farmer’s boy, and can’t tell the chickens apart in any case.  So I can piously think that every chicken is being served in the best possible way.  But in reality the more shy ones get thinner every day.

 

Racism and religion

Studies have shown that attending church frequently does not make white christians less racist. In fact, the data suggests that the opposite is true. The connection between holding more racist views and white christian identity is actually stronger among white evangelicals who attend church frequently than it is among those who attend less frequently.

My comment:  This is about American evangelicals.  My impression is that, outside the US, evangelicals hold to similar teachings but do not subscribe to the racism that leads American evangelicals to vote for candidates that are racists or closet racists, resentful of immigrants and Black people.

For Epicureans everyone, black, yellow,  and brown should be treated with courtesy, as equals, with the same rights as everyone else.  We only have one, fragile , planet. We used to have a fine example of democratic government.   We need to calm down, stop the hate masquerading as christianity  and get our democracy operating again.

What happened to all the tree-planting plans?

In January, the World Economic Forum, backed by US president Donald Trump, announced the One Trillion  Trees to plant or protect a trillion trees by 2030, bolstering the estimated 3 trillion that already exist. The scheme joins existing reforestation efforts such as the “Trillion Trees” project launched by conservation groups in 2017.

“One Trillion Trees” (sic) didn’t respond to requests for comment on progress, but a US version of its website says that 855 million trees have been pledged by US-based authorities and other bodies. It is unclear how many of those have been planted.

Separately, the National Forest Foundation, a US non-profit organisation, said it had planted 5 million of 7.8 million seedlings it hoped to put in the ground this year, hampered slightly by the pandemic.

In the UK, Guy Shrubsole at Friends of the Earth says there has been little sign that mass tree-planting pledged during the 2019 general election campaign has turned into action. Figures show that between March 2019 and March 2020, 134.6 square kilometres of new woodland were planted, down 1 per cent on the previous year. Most was in Scotland, with only 23.3 sq km in England, implying a government target for England of 300 sq km by 2025 will be missed without a major ramp-up.

(Adam Vaughan, New Scientist    Dec 18, 2020)

My comment:  You cannot expect a conservative government to prioritise something like tree-planting.  Many right-wing politicians don’t even believe in global climate change and think it a scam.  More immediately, they are used to thinking it terms of profits and return on capital.  What financial benefit has tree planting wealth when it will take a generation before the trees are big enough to cut down and  sell?

Am I being unfair?  Well……yes…………to some enlightened and thoughtful people.

Why don’t birds freeze at high altitudes?

Birds fly at tens of thousands of metres high. Ice forms on the wings of planes at this altitude, so why don’t the birds freeze?

Birds can sometimes reach astonishingly high altitudes. The record is a massive 11,278 metres by a Rüppell’s vulture that collided with an aircraft. The resulting “snarge” – that is to say, the bird’s remains – left on the plane provided robust evidence.

Birds almost certainly don’t experience icing while flying at altitude for three reasons.

First, birds normally maintain their body temperature at about 40 to 41°C, higher than that of mammals. Flying is such hard work that it probably uses about twice as much oxygen per unit of time as running does, so birds are plenty warm as they fly about, even at very high altitudes.

Second, birds’ feathers are a fascinating evolutionary adaptation to not only flight, but also life outdoors. As well as being beautiful and providing lift and trim in flight, feathers keep birds warm and waterproof. They do this via complex microstructures that trap air and repel water. Birds also spend a lot of time preening their feathers to coat them in a layer of “preen oil”.

The content of preen oil varies between bird species, but mainly contains monoester waxes and triglycerides, which are oily and repel water. Next time you spot a bird in the rain, marvel at how raindrops sit on top of its feathers as beads, rather than making the bird wet. That is preen oil at work. Indeed, one of the solutions used to prevent accidents in aircraft flying through icing conditions is to use hydrophobic surfaces.  ( Lucy Hawkes, University of Exeter, Devon, UK)

My comment: just thought you might be interested.  In fact, there are all sorts of obscure questions you have probably never thought of asking.  I will try to make it my business to find occasional obscure and useless facts from time to time and bring them to your notice.  It’s a way of momentarily focusing on anything except  the dismal news.

,

 

The Ten Commitments

The following is my personal list of qualities needed for anyone, woman or man to be judged a good and civilized human being.  (There is no significance to the order in which they are listed):

Consideration for others

Empathy for the sick and old

Generosity with time and money, according to means

Critical thinking

Ethical behavior at all times

Belief in and support for social justice

Politeness to everyone

Altruism

Humility

Being a good listener

Care for the environment

 

 

Birth control

“Have you noticed that all the people in favor of birth control are already born?” – Benny Hill 

Very clever, but my serious point of views is as follows: we should only bring into the world human beings that are wanted, cherished, loved ….and in due course educated.

A woman should always be allowed to choose whether to have a baby or not.  There is quite enough misery on this planet without forcing any mother to have a child.  You only have to look around you in the United States at the hard and exhausting lives of mothers with young children – the need for an income, the struggle with money for food, the sleepless nights.  You have to really want a child and be prepared for an exhausting period in your life.  If you are not committed to motherhood you may not be doing a favor to yourself or the baby.  We don’t know the extent to which  exhaustion, impatience, resentment and mood conveys silently to a young baby.

About the current crisis: a parallel story

Isn’t it amazing that one man can so easily rile up millions of people, who seem to sincerely believe the national election was stolen from him, no proof needed.

I am reminded of my youth at a boarding school. By “tradition”, young boys lacking confidence and struggling with being away from home, were stuffed into a cramped wooden tea box, legs and feet hanging out over the edge of the box.  Wooden rulers were then used to attack the boys feet and legs , which were covered in glue.  The box was then pushed around, tipped over and pushed under a table.  By this time the child ( usually 12 or thirteen), was hysterical and terrified.

This style of bullying was immortalized in a recent a movie about Alan Turing, the mathematical genius, who was at that same school (The reality was worse than devised by the film- makers).   In any event, the one of the bullied boys subsequently threw himself in front of a train; the other was made mentally ill and was permanently hospitalized.  I am proud that, when I had the opportunity I had this gross, un-Epicurean behavior towards young boys stopped.  Period.

Make no mistake –  what  has happened over recent months in the US is the same thing, on a massive scale, writ large – the bully-in- chief cow-towed to by his followers, and those standing for law and order treated to physical or verbal violence.  These spineless yes-men know the “ leader” is morally wrong, but they do what they are told as self- preservation, glad to have someone to “lead” them, while abrogating any idea of protecting the weak and distraught or the reputation of the nation ( school).  The bully is  only stopped  if confronted by superior force.

In my day, as a senior boy soon to be off to the army,  I asked the headmaster, for the sake of the school,  to back instant expulsion for perpetrators.  These weak people understand a serious threat.  The bullying apparently stopped – dead.

Do not enable self-reverential  bullies!