Eupan - Good for All - www.eupan.net

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by  Wendell Berry Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation  with pay. Want more of  everything ready-made. Be afraid to  know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any  more. Your mind will be punched in a card and  shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they  will call you. When they want you to  die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that  won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the  flag. Hope to live in that free republic  for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand . Praise ignorance, for what man has  not encountered he has not destroye...

From Wendell Berry's important speech, "It All Turns on Affection" [Millions of people] have entered into the trial of displacement and scattering that we try to dignify as "mobility."   Even so, land and people have suffered together, as invariably they must. Under the rule of industrial economics, the land, our country, has been pillaged for the enrichment, supposedly, of those humans who have claimed the right to own or exploit it without limit. Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished.   But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone. Toward eupan ~ ~ marty alan michelson, ph.d. 

SARS-CoV-2 requires a host in order to spread. Humans spread the virus. There is no cure. Hospitals only treat the human bodies response to the virus. We have no idea how the virus will impact bodies that carry the virus in 2 months, 2 years or 20 years. Perhaps, like Measle/Mumps, "once you have it, you won't get it again as your body has antibodies," and yet, we don't know this! Be smart in every possible way available to you. Avoid any non-necessary human interaction. [Clearly, you will live with those in your dorm/apartment/house.] The only way to be vigilant is to assume that the good, kind, well-meaning and loving humans that you know carry the virus and should be treated with respectful distance until humanity "figures this out" - if we figure it out! Humans carry the virus. Humans spread the virus. There is no cure. Toward eupan ~ ~ marty alan michelson, ph.d.

Every once in a while I am privileged to engage with a *former* student that I don't see often.  [Nearly every one of my closest friends is a former student, many I engage monthly, though many I only hear from 1x per year or so, especially since I am not on Facebook.] I am often optimistic for the future based on how my former students live and care and love. This past week, as the virus SARS-CoV-2 and sickness COVID-19 has reshaped lives, I happened to be with a former student. This particular student was a ministry student, and (s)he regularly teaches children in a local church, though (s)he works in the Public Sector, for the State Government.  It happens that I was in a State Government office this week where this former student is a Supervisor. It just so happened, too, that in the hours I was on-site, several new mandates came from the State with respect to social-distancing, customer care, and other issues of oversight.  I was able to "watch from a distance"...

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor Published 11:30 a.m. ET March 21, 2020 Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay. I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop  Ebola in West Africa  in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown. Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendati...

I've been alive quite a few years.  And yet, it seems no one ever took a few minutes to teach me how to *properly* wash my hands! To help you: And this, too, which demonstrates that the above method is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) method.  (If you've never read about Ignaz Sammelweiss, click this! ) Toward eupan ~ ~ marty alan michelson, ph.d.

I have no idea of Greta Thunberg has commented on COVID-19 now that we are in 2020. I've thought many times in the past days about her September 2019 speech whose focus was on Global Climate Change at the United Nations in New York where she said: "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth . How dare you!" (emphasis added) When she delivered her speech I noted her line about money and the "fairy tales of eternal economic growth."  I knew then that she was correct.   Nothing, no thing grows eternally and exponentially.  Living things die.   And, for most things in life there are "seasons" of change and cycles and patterns of expanding/contracting.  Even stone, granite, carbon, at the righ...

Two notes on "The Economy" and COVID-19: Note (1) I distinctly remember a particular section of Wendell Berry's novel, Jayber Crow that I read a few years back.  While everything by Berry causes readers to rethink community and social life in many ways, there was one section of the book that stuck with me - and that is when Berry narrates how his books American characters began to realize in the 20th century that "the Economy" is a "thing" and more than a thing, a kind of "person" a kind of "being" that has to be cared for and maintained.  As a single example, from page 275, The Economy no longer wanted the people of Port William to produce, for instance, eggs. It wanted them to eat eggs without producing them. Or, more properly speaking, it wanted them to buy eggs. It didn’t care whether the eggs were eaten or not, so long as they were bought. It didn’t care how fresh they were or how good they were, so long as they were ...

Quoted from Bill Bryson: For years, Britain operated a research facility called the Common Cold Unit, but it closed in 1989 without ever finding a cure. It did, however, conduct some interesting experiments. In one, a volunteer was fitted with a device that leaked a thin fluid at his nostrils at the same rate that a runny nose would.   The volunteer then socialized with other volunteers, as if at a cocktail party. Unknown to any of them, the fluid contained a dye visible only under ultraviolet light. When that was switched on after they had been mingling for a while, the participants were astounded to discover that the dye was everywhere—on the hands, head, and upper body of every participant and on glasses, doorknobs, sofa cushions, bowls of nuts, you name it.   The average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, and each of those touches transferred the pretend pathogen from nose to snack bowl to innocent third party to doorknob to innocent fourth party and so ...

Virus and disease are natural parts of the living order. It is sad to recognize that in the same decades that we have "mastered" vaccinations and thousands of people working in teams with Rotary or the Carter Foundation have eliminated  Polio  and  the Guinea Worm , that "we" have given rise to a new virus in COVID-19. While the science is not yet settled on *precisely* how and where the Cornavirus emerged, it seems clear it was from "wet" markets, where unclean animals were caged/sold in Wuhan, China. It seems to me, no "single" person is to blame and instead, "we" as humans are to blame.  And in a few weeks, the spread of a "single" virus - microscopic - has killed thousands, infected hundreds of thousands, and  . . . if my sense is correct, will "live with us" "forever" and will kill millions.  (I predict over 150 million will die in the next few years.  It will spread to "everywhere" hu...

I'm 48. My mom is 78. I'm "the baby" of the family, the last of four children. We were raised to take care of ourselves even as teenagers, making our own meals, getting jobs, and so forth.  When I moved out of my parents home to go to attend University when I was 18, for all intent and purposes, I've never been under my parents care since then. And yet, a person can never fully break free from the care of a loving parent. Today I shared with my mom that I was headed outside to spray and eradicate a developing wasps's nest on the eave of our house. My mom immediately stated:   "You be careful! You know! You're allergic to bee stings!" Ha! I laughed and told my mom! "Yes! Mom! I remember well and know I'm allergic to bee stings!"  [ I have had a prescription for an epinephrine pen in the past, as, the last time I was stung I ended up in the Emergency Room! ] What cracks me up about this - and which is a tender momen...

I didn't quite believe "the world had changed," as many claimed on 9/11/2001. In many ways, I still do not believe the world changed that day. In fact, if anything, 9/11 may have only reflected for us (Americans), back to us, and forward for us into our future, who we *already* were, not that we had changed. AND yet, I do believe *our responses* (as Americans) to the weaponization of airplanes on that day, striking at the "financial center" of America has demonstrated we shifted - though I believe it was a shift of magnitude in the same direction of who we already were.   We did not become different.   We only changed in the magnitude of our being more who we already were. It seems to me the Imperial Claims of American Dominance are now now more narrow, more violent, more acquisitive, more cash-strapped-cash-hungry, more belittling of races, religions, genders and cultures, and more war mongering than ever.   And, it does not ...

In the Christian Tradition - when the mother of Jesus is fully aware of her pregnancy, she sings a song.  Her song, recorded in the Bible in the  Gospel of Luke (Chapter 1),  celebrates more than just the arrival of Jesus.   Her song reflects the traditions of an older prayer in Scripture, from Hannah in 1 Samuel (Chapter 2) . Both songs celebrate more than the birth of a child. Each song celebrates the future hoped for reality of newness - and - reversals. Reversals where the poor and downtrodden are raised up. In a lovely 21st Century re-writing of the ideas found in these poems, Hillary Watson of Shalom Community Church in Ann Arbor, MI shared a wonderful poem found here. I'll share snippets of it here: Let me tell you the Good News:   There is Good News. That’s it:  goodness, somewhere, rushing toward us  in the place where future meets present tense.   Hope unwinds across the fragile world  and whispers its...

"Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation." "The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the  vast and growing  consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else." “We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff” said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at  WWF . “If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done.” Article: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since...