Month: August 2022 Page 3 of 4

On August 13, 2022

Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

So Much Plastic Chemical Contamination in Rainwater It’s Unsafe to Drink

On August 12, 2022

Sigh.

Remember when you were a kid, and it was fun to tip your head back during a rainstorm and open your mouth to drink the drops? You shouldn’t do that anymore. That’s because you’ll be ingesting too many particles of Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), the hazardous chemicals that leach from the ultra-durable plastics we’ve created for about the past 120 years.

Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.

This stuff can be removed from drinking water in various ways, but that doesn’t remove it from the environment. This also implies that drinking water from most, perhaps all, freshwater sources, is no longer safe. As a child in British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada, I often drank water from snow- and glacier-driven streams and rivers, but no longer.

Health Effects:

The health effects of PFAS vary, but include reproductive, developmental, and immunological problems. Since PFAS don’t easily break down and can accumulate in the human body overtime, the more exposure a person has, the greater the chance of negative health effects. The EPA has cited evidence linking PFAS exposure to the following:

increased cholesterol levels

suppressed immune system

thyroid hormone disruption

liver and kidney damage

low infant birth weight

cancer

… PFAS can be removed from water through reverse osmosis, activated carbon filtration, and ion exchange.

Ah, joy.

This is separate from the issue of microplastics, which are now commonly found in blood and organs of humans and animals, and which some bacteria do feed on, though not enough to have a significant effect yet. (We can hope that evolution, natural or human-induced, will create more bacteria which eats plastic.)

Based on these type of studies, researchers have hypothesized that human exposure to microplastics could lead to oxidative stress, DNA damage, and inflammation — among other health problems. Particularly, when inflammation becomes chronic, this can pave the way to very serious health problems. However, it’s not only the plastic particles themselves that are potentially harmful: The microplastic surfaces in the environment are colonised by micro-organisms, some of which have been identified as human pathogens.

Human pathogens have a particularly strong bind to plastic waste, more so than to natural surfaces. Research published in 2016 identified the human pathogen Vibrio cholera, which causes cholera in humans, attached to microplastics sampled from the North and Baltic Seas.

Wonderful. I can’t find the original source, but I remember someone quipping:

“Born too late to explore the world, and too soon to roam the stars, but just in time to have microplastics in our blood.

Of course in many areas, rainwater is still too acidic to drink, so there’s that — though at least the horrible acid rain of my youth no longer plagues most of North America. We exported the industry which produces it to south-east China and various other manufacturing domiciles.

The fact of the matter is that human society is simply incapable of handling the power we’ve gained since the industrial revolution. Even when we know we’re doing massive harm, we don’t stop, or clean up, and we lie about it. In my youth, we moved from glass bottles for almost everything (including pop, as they were massively heavy) to plastic, and said “plastic can be recycled.” But most plastic isn’t recycled; only about eight percent ever has been and it’s not easy to recycle plastic because it has to be separated into different types first, since each type requires a different heat to be melted and reformed.

What’s happening, with climate, pathogens, plastic, and far more is classic “sorcerer’s apprentice” stuff: We have power we can’t control, and when we use it, we do harm.

This is why even if all the “best time ever to be alive” books and articles were right (a questionable assertion, but it is true for many people), they’re wrong in a larger sense — it’s like saying, “Man, I’m staying warm!” as you burn down your house. Once you’re finished burning your house, you’re screwed. Except what we’re burning down is the environment which keeps us healthy, fed, watered, and protected from temperatures too cold or hot to survive, as with the infamous point where it’s so hot the human body can’t cool itself.

People often point to a study published in 2010 that estimated that a wet-bulb temperature of 35 C – equal to 95 F at 100 percent humidity, or 115 F at 50 percent humidity – would be the upper limit of safety, beyond which the human body can no longer cool itself by evaporating sweat from the surface of the body to maintain a stable body core temperature…

…Our studies on young, healthy men and women show that this upper environmental limit is even lower than the theorized 35 C. It’s more like a wet-bulb temperature of 31 C (88 F). That would equal 31 C at 100 percent humidity, or 38 C (100 F) at 60 percent humidity.

This temperature has been hit over the last couple years in India.

It’s a brave new world, and our descendants, and, indeed, many people alive today are or will be cursing us — and with good reason.

The Basic Pattern to Most Meditation

On August 10, 2022

There are hundreds of types of meditation — maybe thousands. But most of them have a simple pattern.

1) Do something.

2) When you notice you aren’t doing that thing, go back to doing it.

Breath meditation:

Follow the sensations of your breath.
When you notice you aren’t paying attention to your breath, go back to paying attention to your breath.

All types of concentration meditation are similar. Here’s mantra meditation:

Say a mantra (a series of words) over and over again, either out loud or mentally.
When you notice you aren’t saying the mantra, or aren’t paying attention to it, go back to the mantra.

Discursive meditation (beloved by Western ritual mages, but not exclusively):

Pick something to think about.
When you notice you aren’t thinking about it, go back to the last thought you had that was on topic and continue.

Vipassana:

Sense a feeling in the body. Mentally say what it is: “itch, pressure, warmth, happy, love, fear, hatred.” Go on to the next sensation you notice.
Notice you are no longer doing the above, go back to it.

Loving-Kindness:

Find or generate a loving feeling.
Concentrate on that loving feeling.
If you notice you aren’t concentrating on it go back to it. If you notice it’s gone away, generate it again.

Do-nothing meditation (just sitting, Mahamudra, etc…):

Don’t try to control your attention.
Notice when you are are controlling or intend to control attention. Don’t.

Of course there are details, and techniques and subtleties, but if you just remember “do something, notice I’m not doing it, go back to it” and stick to it you can make a lot of progress. This also means that you shouldn’t switch meditation types mid-season — that would break the “go back to it” part.

Notice here that the important part is “notice when I’m not doing it.” This develops “meta-attention” which is the ability to know what you’re doing. It may seem like you know what you’re doing all the time, but a few minutes of attempting to concentrate on your breath or an object should convince you otherwise.

This also develops your ability follow your intention; it trains your mind to do what you want it to do. All we really have is our intentions, but, as we know from when we decide to do something and fail, it isn’t actually easy.

Now, of course, what you intend to do and do matters. Different types of meditation have different effects. But most types of meditation have a loop which is, at its heart, really this simple even if you intend to do multiple things, like sit in a specific way, or have the tip of your tongue touching the roof of your mouth and have your hands resting on your knees with forefinger and thumb touching while doing nothing else, or concentrating on your breath or whatever.

The basics really are this simple, though the permutations are vast.

The Law of Equal Treatment

On August 9, 2022

Last Friday, I wrote an article on the idea that if a society has a rule or duty, it must apply that to everyone in the applicable situation, no matter who they are, even if it’s someone you love. It was interesting to me that most of the commenters disagreed. Perhaps this is my fault, as I chose to use the famous example of a German general executing his own son for abandoning his sentry duty to fight and win a small skirmish, though I think this speaks partially to people not understanding how important sentry duty is — a group of soldiers ambushed in an encampment because sentries fail tends to get wiped out.

But whether the rule was reasonable or fair was NOT THE POINT. The point was that, if you have a rule, it must be enforced for everyone in the same situation. This can be a punishment, as in the example, or it could be a reward.

And that everyone isn’t just about people you love, it’s about you.

Ask yourself this: For what crimes, if you committed them, would you turn yourself over to the police? Those are the laws you actually support. You don’t support any other criminal laws, no matter what you say. This exercise may be a little hard, because most people support laws because they lack the imagination to conceive they would break them or be caught if they did, but give it a shot.

The law that everyone in the same situation should be treated the same is almost the most foundational law of a good society. Finland often ranked as having the world’s best education system. A researcher asked someone involved in designing and setting it up about how they did it, and they replied that hadn’t been the intention; they were trying to make sure that everyone was treated equally.

Again, though they didn’t say it, “in the same situation,” that clause is very important. If your kid is disabled in way X, they get treated the same as a rich or powerful person’s kid who is disabled in the same way. You can use power or money or connections to get better treatment, and not having money, power or connections doesn’t mean you will be treated badly.

There is a famous quote from Anatole France:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

These are bad laws, because they don’t acknowledge context. A better law about sleeping outside on another’s property might be that only those who have nowhere else to sleep can do this — with exceptions for camping and whatnot. Or, perhaps we would assume that if someone is sleeping outside they have a good reason, and when we see someone doing so in an odd place (a.k.a. not camping) we ask what the reason is, then get them some decent shelter if it’s because they have nowhere else. (As opposed to sending them to a homeless shelter, where theft and assault are common.)

If someone steals basic food, well, again, probably they need help because they’re hungry, and sending them to prison probably isn’t the best answer to the issue. In this case, the law might be that those who steal food and are found to not have the ability to otherwise feed themselves are sent to a social worker, not prison, and the state reimburses the business. Or perhaps a decent system of social support makes this sort of thing virtually not a problem. People who are old enough will remember that food banks were almost unheard of before the 80s recession because most countries had decent welfare system, and the chronic street people (of whom there were far fewer) were helped by soup kitchens run by a few large private organizations.

All of this is important. This is so basic that if it isn’t grasped, having a decent society is essentially impossible. Everyone must be treated the same in the same circumstances. Everyone. The poor and unconnected must be treated well when the rules say so, and the rich and powerful and connected must be treated badly when the rules say so. (Doing so is the best way to fix evil rules, by the way. Enforce them against the powerful.)

There’s a step beyond this, a prescriptive step. We’ll touch on that in a later article.

How to Deal with Anxiety and Trauma Using Meditation

On August 8, 2022

One of the common pitfalls of “mindfulness” meditation is that practitioners become very good at noticing sense objects in their body. (More simply: feelings.) Now, if those feelings are negative, that can lead to more anxiety and fear, and if you contact the emotions around a traumatic experience, you can be re-traumatized; the trauma can become worse.

Understand how the mind works. When something bad happens, the mind brings it up again and again as a warning; “This was bad, you should watch out for it.” The mind is trying to be helpful (our minds/brains are not that smart, but they are trying to help).

If, when a negative feeling comes up, you don’t react to it, or you react with warmth/love/security, it weakens. If, on the other hand, you are upset, and you add an additional negative load to it, your mind thinks, “Oh my, this is still a danger, I should bring it up more often and stronger.”

So the key to using meditation to help with trauma and anxiety is to not react, or to react with warmth, love, or indifference.

This means that mindfulness and Vipassana meditation styles should not be used alone. A concentrated mind (from shamatha: concentration on an object like the breath or meditation, or a loving mind, from Metta or something like puppy meditation will react more calmly or even with warmth.

When that happens, the underlying anxiety or trauma weakens. Repeated applications will reduce it a great deal.

This means that you should always do more concentration and loving kindness meditation than Vipassana or mindfulness — at least a 2/1 ratio, and do shamatha and loving-kindness before you do vipassana. I suggest concentration first (breath or mantra are easiest for most people), then do mindfulness or vipassana.

If you contact an emotion you can’t deal with, immediately switch over to concentration, then after a few minutes, go to loving-kindness.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 7, 2022

By Tony Wikrent

On August 7, 2022