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Are you afraid of Lyme disease? The tick-borne illness has become a major health concern in the Northeastern part of America and in Western Europe. As many as 365,000 people are infected every year, and the number is growing (as is the habitat of the ticks which spread the disease).
There was a perfectly safe and effective vaccine against Lyme disease which was available in the 1990s. It was marketed as “LYMErix” by the pharmaceutical company which is now known as Glaxosmithkline, but which was then called something else (has anyone noticed how the names of pharma companies themselves mutate and get weirder and weirder? it must be a side effect of the industry, but it perplexes me as to what the exact mechanism is). Three $50.00 shots were needed, but they protected against Lyme disease to a high degree of efficacy (by allowing the immune system to immediately target the proteins on the cell coating of the Borrelia bacteria).
Unfortunately, just as the nineties contained the seeds of today’s political stalemate, it was also a time when the misbegotten anti-vaxxer hoaxes, lies, and misinformation were starting to go mainstream. The sad fate of LYMErix was an early harbinger of the bad things to come. The vaccine was properly tested, vetted, and approved through the FDA’s lengthy and comprehensive approval process, yet some immune specialists at the FDA voiced a concern that Lymerix could cause autoimmune problems. Extensive research found that it did indeed cause such problems…in a small percentage of hamsters.
This news (which was breathlessly reported by the media) came at the same time as the Lancet’s infamous & discredited false articles about important vaccines. Some LYMErix users came forward with claims of agonizing super arthritis which they believed was caused by the vaccine (although the FDA’s tests and surveys found the same rate of such symptoms in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations).
Nevertheless the damage was done. The pharma company pulled the product from the shelves over the bad publicity and it is has not been available since 2002…despite extensive evidence that it was safe and effective (albeit expensive). By now the vaccine could be made generically for a fraction of the price…but phara executives are disinterested since they would have to fight an expensive PR campaign for low profits. In the mean time high profits and free publicity are available to pseudoscientific quacks who gets rich preying on the fears of poorly educated or credulous people who do not know what to believe.
To say nothing of goddamn lawyers…
Like the story of the world’s best and most life-saving antivenin, I find this story infuriating. The market is touted as godlike and infallible by (highly paid) economists, but here is yet another abject market failure (although I am happy to share out the blame to scientific illiteracy of anti-vaxxers and to scary and not-very-good journalism). I do not necessarily have a solution, but it seems to me that if drug companies are not addressing actual problems like antibiotic resistant superbugs, deadly snakebites, and Lyme disease while at the same time they are actively promoting and profiting from the opioid crisis, perhaps their cozy relationship with government funded research, government regulators, and with lucrative patents needs to be rethought. We are seeing more and more market failures in every business sector (because of regulatory capture, monopolization, and, lately, good-old fashioned graft), but the biomedical ones are particularly chilling. It’s time to smash some of these companies up, nationalize others in the name of public health, and to pour a great deal more money into public research which has public benefits. As things stand now, the government, universities, and philanthropists pay for research and pharmaceutical companies come along and benefit from it with duopoly/cartel practices.
There is an upside to all of this though. You can get a safe effective and harmless Lyme disease vaccine for your dog. A lot of the people I talk to desperately wish that the health services available for their pets were available to them for the same prices. Here is another example where our furry friends have cheaper and better care…because of market successes! Why is everything so complicated?
The Sole Seed and the Space Ark (Wayne Ferrebee, 2019) Wood and Mixed Media
A month or so ago, I wrote a heartfelt post about humankind’s relationship with other living things and why I feel that our ultimate destiny lies beyond the Earth. I am still thinking about how to say that message with all of the grace and power I can muster. Everyone paying attention to current trends fears for the future of living things. As humankind’s appetites grow exponentially we are bringing terrifying changes. Yet humankind’s knowledge and abilities are growing too. I hope you will read the post…or at least its Biblical-themed follow-up concerning the art of Noah’s ark. in the meantime, I made a sculpture shaped like a flatfish to try to explain my conception in the non-linear language of symbols (coincidentally, flatfish are my symbol for Earth life with its hunger and deep beautiful sadness and with a known tendency to desperately snap at baited hooks). There is the tree of life sprouting anew out of a battered ark and spreading seeds upon the cosmic wind (or are those pink stars?). Above the ark is a mysterious figure which may be a symbol of our “life instinct” and our need to disseminate ourselves (or it may be a shrugging cartoonish new human–who can say?). Interred in the crypt beneath the universe is the inverse reflection of the life instinct: our Thanatos death instinct (for we take it with us always, no matter where we go). It is pictured as a strange human/lamprey mummy-thing writhing its gray fluke in its cramped chamber.
The cosmic fluke has a perplexed expression. Perhaps it is less sure than I about the wisdom of venturing out into the unknown. Or maybe it is just hungry…like all living things.
My uncle and my mother have a long-standing (and enormously frustrating) argument which is useful to revisit because it reflects a circle which the rest of the nation is trapped in. My uncle always says “The government is corrupt and wishes to control the market in unfair ways! We need to diminish the role of government so that people are free to pursue business opportunities and live a life of super-awesome freedom!” My mother says, “business concerns subaltern the government in ways which individuals are ill-equipped to understand or to counter.” Then there is eristic back-and-forth about the market versus the state. Sometimes this is followed by interesting talk of K-Street lobbyists, environmental regulations, defense contracts, monopolies, and what have you. However, in the current political age it is more usually devolves completely (indeed, I am not even sure they are talking to each other in the era of Trump).
The argument frustrates me because I am not sure it should be an argument. My uncle is narrowly right: the government is indeed unresponsive to obvious and pressing societal needs…but only because it has been captured by special moneyed interests with deeeeeeeeeeeeeep pockets. The forces of monopoly and market capture are equipped with an infinite ocean of dark money, a bunch of anonymous Caimen Island LLCs (or is it supposed to be Cayman?), and armies of Ivy League lobbyists & attorneys. They can easily spend all day, every day writing complicated legislation and explaining it to their favorite legislators (who also take campaign money and aid from the same anonymous backers).
I suppose another way to say this is: I agree with my mother. The government has been subject to regulatory capture at just about every level. Small businesses or individuals look to it for succor against the depredations or excesses of big business. Yet when the regulations come out, they are revealed to favor large corporations or influential insiders. This is often accomplished with rules which sound outwardly appealing but are actually fiendishly designed to destroy small competitors or diminish the common good.
I can already feel some of the audience getting bored or frustrated with this abstruse language so let me provide a couple of examples. Back when I was a toymaker (circa 2007), the world’s largest toy companies were making unsafe toys in China. Mattel and Learning Curve were particularly at fault. These giants pressured their Chinese suppliers to make toys ever more cheaply and then turned a blind eye as to how this was accomplished (with lots of lead paint, as it turns out). When the big companies were caught selling lead toys, my business partner and I thought the scandal would help smaller companies like us.
How wrong we were! The large toy companies blamed the Chinese manufacturers (who were doing what they were told to do) and then came forward with their own proposed consumer protection legislation. Not only did the new rules mandate that each factory-run of toys would be extensively tested for lead and other hazardous materials, but the legislation also immediately phased out certain plasticizing chemicals. This “industry-supported” legislation became the backbone of the consumer product safety act of 2008 and it was ruinous to small companies. Fully testing a factory-run of toys cost about $15,000.00. For Mattel a factory run is millions of units and $15k was negligible. For small companies, a factory run was much smaller and $15k was most of the profit margin. Additionally, the legislation allowed no time to sell through existing toys made with the old plasticizing compound. The big companies knew the legislation was coming (having written it) and they used a different (although equally problematic) chemical. Small companies were prohibited from selling their products. Child safety advocates were delighted with the new rules. The big toy companies used a scandal they created through unsafe acts to drive small companies under and to claim the (undeserved) moral high ground.
My mother worked for the Department of Defense doing environmental clean-up and restoration and she saw different sorts of tactics. The DOD used to have vast tracts of land under its control. Often this was desirable land.
Real estate developers (or their dupes) would show up and say “The Defense Department is polluting such-and-such beautiful coastal rain forest! They need to clean it up at full taxpayer expense!” As soon as this was done (at enormous cost), the base would be decommissioned. The land would be turned over to cronies and crooked developers who would cut down the forest and sell the timber. Then they would build shoddy (yet expensive) subdivisions and a tacky resort. There would thereafter be no rainforest, polluted or otherwise.
Vieques Island Resort, Puerto Rico
These private sector tricks can be understood and explained, but it takes time, resources and clever people. Additionally the monopolists and insiders are running their own splashy PR campaigns which are perfectly tailored to appeal to voters and non-specialists who don’t necessarily have the time, bandwidth, or inclination to understand all of the complicated details of what is going on.
The current presidential administration is such a naked smash-and-grab by private interests that some of these tactics aren’t even necessary anymore. Yet regulatory capture is always out there–it is a form of corruption which we all need to guard against. I suppose what frustrates me about my uncle’s argument is that it rewards the real malefactors (the vested interests) by blaming the government. The government should represent all of us, but it is made into a sad puppet by clever oligarchs. They are the true malefactors!
Happy Birthday to Mary Anning (21 May 1799 – 9 March 1847). Mary’s life was a difficult one. Her father was a poor cabinet-maker in Lyme Regis (a coastal town in Dorset, England) who supplemented his income by selling strange petrified shells and stone bullets which he pried out of a nearby sea cliff. Mary’s parents had ten children, but only Mary and her brother survived past early childhood. Her name was a hand-me-down from an older sister who had burned to death at the age of four. When Mary was 15 months old, she and three neighbors were under a tree when it was struck by lightning and only Mary survived. Her father died while Mary and her brother were young and they kept the family afloat by selling curiosities pried from the sea cliffs. This was dangerous business: Mary’s beloved terrier Tray was crushed in a rockslide (he’s up there sleeping with the ammonites in the painting) and Mary narrowly avoided this fate herself on multiple occasions. Additionally, living so close to the sea carried further perils: the family nearly drowned from a flood during a great storm. Mary Anning died of breast cancer at the age of 47. Her final years were marked by agonizing pain from the condition which she self-treated with laudanum (which caused the community to gossip about her morals).
This is a pretty bleak biography (although in no way atypical for a working-class woman from early industrial Great Britain). So why are we writing about Mary 172 years after her death anyway? Mary Anning was a great pioneer of paleontology, geology, ichthyology, ecology, and invertebrate zoology. The luminaries of the English geology community relied on her indomitable fieldwork to frame their conclusions about the history of living things and to stock their museums with specimens. Mary was a religious dissenter and the daughter of a cabinet-maker in an age when geology was the near-exclusive preserve of well-to-do Anglican gentlefolk (the Geological Society of London did not even allow women to attend meetings as guests). Yet she kept informed of the scientific literature of her day and she dissected fish and invertebrates as to better understand the nature of her excavations and discoveries. Above all, Mary Anning actually discovered the fossils which others wrote about–so she had insights and knowledge which were occluded from armchair scholars. Charles Lyell (the father of geology) wrote to her asking her opinions about cliff erosion. Mary proposed a theory to William Buckland that some of the fossils she discovered were ingested by ichthyosaurs and the remains excreted (a concept which fascinated Buckland and became the central focus of his work). In a fair world she would have an alphabet of letters after her name and be immortalized as a statue on a plinth beside the statues of Darwin and Lyell. Even in our fallen world, she is revered as one of the founders of the natural history and life science disciplines (although many biographies about her concentrate on the sad exigencies of her life rather than on the extraordinary discoveries she made, a tradition which I have somewhat followed).
The cliffs which Mary relied on for specimens were part of a geological formation known as the Blue Lias. These layers of limestone and shale were a shallow seabed of the Tethys Ocean during the Jurassic period (about 210–195 million years ago). The curlicues and stone bullets were fossil ammonites and belemnites, but Mary had a knack for finding the much rarer remains of hitherto unknown creatures such as ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs and other ancient marine fauna.
In the early 19th century a debate was raging between learned churchmen who knew for certain that God’s perfect creation could never be diminished and gentlemen geologists who believed that there had once been animals which were gone from earth…”extinct” as they called this new concept. Mary’s fossils of bizarre giant sea crocodiles and lizard dolphins gave concrete evidence to the ur-paleontologists (who were indeed proven right). Her discoveries were seminal for the discovery of paleontology itself and paved the way to the understanding that the world’s ecosystems were once very different indeed from what they are like now. These pieces of knowledge helped towards an understanding of the true age of the Earth and ultimately made Darwin’s discoveries possible.
Here is another painting of Mary, by the greatest living fish-artist, Ray Troll. Troll shows Mary with fleshed-out versions of the creatures she discovered (note the ichthyosaur swallowing an ammonite). We owe an enormous debt to Mary Anning. Her contributions were under-appreciated in her day (when only the most learned gentleman scientists…and Mary… had inklings of the real nature of natural history and what her super sea-monsters connoted ), but those discoveries undergird our understanding the nature of the planet and of life itself.
It was a long and somewhat unsuccessful day…and there are only 13 minute left for writing a blog post, but I would be remiss if I didn’t offer something. So here is a completely adorable juvenile green filefish as captured by the matchless camera of Tara Murphy.
I was unable to find out much information about this particular fish…so this post might be of the adorable baby animal category, rather than the informative category. Filefish are weak swimmers and they often try to mimic coral or plants, a purpose which this endearing baby fish seems ideally suited.
One of life’s lesser disappointments is how boring everything here in America looks. I am not sure if this is a result of banal & puritanical tastes of home buyers or if the regulatory capture which is such an aspect of life here has allowed developers and zoning boards to prevent everything but prefab ranches and ugly co-ops. Probably it is a result of a combination of these things (along with a real desire by builders to keep people safe and an equal desire to make things that appeal to everyone). Anyway I am looking forward to a future of wilder and more eclectic buildings and we can already see inklings of such possibilities by looking abroad.
For example this is “Quetzalcoatl’s Nest” a complex of ten different apartments built by renowned Mexican architect Javier Senosiain in Naucalpan, Mexico. Senosiain is an advocate of organic architecture, which takes its inspiration from a combination of preexisting landscape features and natural forms. Quetzalcoatl’s Nest is built in a hilly landscape of natural caverns, serpentine ridges and old oak groves. looking at this landscape, Senosiain saw the shape of a colossal mythological serpent. He incorporated a large cave into the building as the snake’s head and then set out to build other textures of snake ribs and scales and serpentine patterns into the compound.
The fantastical lair includes water gardens, strange modern hideaways, and fantastic stained glass show spaces in a hard-to-describe architectural tour-de-force which spreads over 16,500 square feet. I have included a selection of pictures here, but you should really find a video somewhere so you can get a better sense of what is going on. Why couldn’t the Barclay’s Center people hire this guy so that their rattlesnake could look awesome instead of sinister and corporate.
It has been a while since we had a post celebrating all things Gothic. Last week’s post about the Yellow Emperor has reminded me of the unsettling relationship which we all have with mirrors (which are so lifelife and yet so empty and which always feature our own aging countenances staring at us with mute appeal). I wondered if I could find some beautiful ornamental Gothic mirrors to put up in a little gallery. Boy howdy! There were a lot to chose from. Here is a little sampling:
Of course these mirrors have the beauty of Gothic style, but they lack the disturbing simulacra of life which real mirrors furnish. You will have to imagine your own face in them. Or you could head over to your nearest foreboding manor to see if you can find one of these beauties underneath a big gray dusty sheet. Or I guess you just buy them: they are mostly for sale on the internet, which is maybe the most disturbing thing of all….
Because of last week’s post about the Thai coronation I got sucked into spooling through pictures of the astonishingly beautiful and crazy sights of Thailand. We really need to all visit that exquisitely beautiful land! What a place!
At any rate, as long-term Ferrebeekeeper readers will recall, I once made a (sadly unpublished) book on how to build toy vehicles out of household refuse. The industrious Buddhist monks of Thailand however did not stop at making toys. Thus, the temple which most caught my eye was Wat Pa Maha Chedio Kaew also named “Temple of Million Bottles.” As you can tell by the name, this temple (and all of its outbuildings like the crematorium and the restrooms) are built of empty bottles which have been carefully mortared together to form an exquisite . Actually though, the name is a bit of a misnomer–thus far the complex is constructed not of a million bottles but of around a million and a half bottles.
The project started back in 1984, when some monks decided to clean up the refuse around their temple. Perceiving the inner beauty of the discarded beer bottles, the monastics chose not to throw them away, but instead to clean them and use the brown and green glass vessels for constructing temple accessories. The project took on a life of its own as visitors brought ever more bottles–mostly Heineken bottles (green) and Chang Beer bottles (brown).
Anyone who has ever tried to piece together recalcitrant materials into desired order will start to fathom the scope of the monks’ accomplishment. Beyond the novelty of the material and the satisfying moral component of seeing something so complete made of something everyone throws away, the temple is simply beautiful though. Buildings in America are made of heavily regulated prefabricated materials expressly created for crafting buildings…and yet so many new buildings here are appallingly heart-wrenchingly ugly. Perhaps we could take some lessons from the monks not just in upcycling but also in imagination, patience, and craft.
Yet even if that isn’t going to happen, you can still contemplate the shadow side of Maha Chedio Kaew: in order for it to exist people drank one and a half million beers. That is a moral lesson which the Frauenkirche simply does not offer.
Here is an image of a wild horse made fifteen to twenty thousand years ago by a Cro-Magnon artist in the caves of Lascaux (which are now in France but were then in the hunting lands of these ancient hunter-gatherers). The horse, which looks for all the world like a Przewalski’s horse, is painted with the carbon black of charcoal and with a swoosh of yellow umber. This week accidentally became sponsored by the color yellow (maybe to celebrate the new Thai king–since yellow is the color of royalty in Thailand as in China). Yellow ochre (which is a clay that derives its hue from hydrated iron hydroxide) is one of the most ancient and straightforward pigments–yet it is beautiful and lasts forever. It is in my paintbox too, next to all sorts of strange synthetic pigments and esoteric heavy metals.
Anthropologists tell us that this horse served some unknown ritualistic purpose for the artists and their original audience (whose names…and whose very language are completely lost), but that strikes me as a bit simplistic. No doubt I would say the same thing about any mystery artwork from an unknown culture. What IS obvious is that the Cro-Magnon recognized how closely they lived to nature and they admired the the strength and grace of the animals they preyed on and lived next to. It goes without saying that they recognized how important their fellow creatures were, because they knew that without these animals they would die. They would literally starve to death and freeze.
I wonder sometimes if that vital piece of knowledge has gotten lost to the artists of today who are busy contextualizing the injustice of social paradigms or examining the insider/outsider dynamics of status hierarchy. We no longer need Equus ferus for food or clothing. We don’t even need their domesticated descendants for milk and transportation. But we are as inextricably a part of nature as ever. Even if we must exploit it to live we must protect it and save it or we will die. There is no outside of nature for us. We are nature’s progeny as surely as were the Cro-Magnon…or the wisents and aurochs which they lived off of. Great art lives in a timeless modernity. Look upon the round (pregnant?) yellow mare and think about what it really means. In 20,000 years nobody will know our names or who we were. Our language might be lost…and all of our works except for a few strange oddball things will be gone. But the people of then (if there are any) will surely know us by what we took. Will they admire us for what we understood and preserved or will they just curse us as vicious primitives who lost life’s most critical lesson that all living things are connected?
A sculpture of the Yellow Emperor in the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor in Shaanxi
The Han people claim to be descended from a mythological cultural hero known as the Yellow Thearch, the Yellow Emperor, or as “Huangdi.” Chinese history is long and complicated and so is the history of Huangdi! At times the Yellow Emperor was regarded as a real person–the first emperor of China. In other eras he was regarded as a matchless Daoist sorceror or as a great shaman or even as a god of the Earth itself. Modern scholars argue endlessly about how the myth came into being. The Communists tried to ban the cult during the cultural revolution, but quickly realized that it was a dreadful mistake. Different eras imagine him differently, but he is always there at the beginning. Imagine if Moses, Aeneas, George Washington, and Merlin the Magician lived five thousand years ago and were somehow one person–that would be the Yellow Emperor.
Inquiring of the Dao at the Cave of Paradise (Dai Jin, ca. mid 15th century AD) ink on silk
From time to time Ferrebeekeeper refers to the Chinese calendar (this is year 4716, the year of the Earth Pig). That calendar was putatively started by the Yellow Emperor (which sort of puts a date stamp on him, come to think of it). An incomplete list of the other accomplishments/inventions/innovations which have been attributed to Huangdi includes:
- invention of houses
- domestication of animals
- first cultivation of grains
- invention of carts/the wheel
- invention and successful use of the war chariot
- invention and popularization of clothing
- the invention of boats and watercraft
- discovery of astronomy
- invention of archery
- creation of numbers and mathematics
- the creation of the first diadem
- the invention of monarchy
- The invention of writing and the creation of the oracle bone script
- the invention of the guquin zither
Huangdi did not invent sericulture (the cultivation of silkworms): that was accomplished by his main wife, Leizu. Yet, as you can see above, he still has a fairly impressive CV. I haven’t even gotten into his military accomplishments or his physical prowess. Suffice to say they were very great–like the time he defeated the bronze-headed monster, Chi You, and his 81 horned and four-eyed brothers…or the time he defeated the nightmare sorcerers from the mirror dimension and imprisoned them forever in mirrors (although it is a bit disturbing to think that that figure in the bathroom every morning is a dark magician who is forced to dress like you and act like you and LOOK like you because of the Yellow Emperor’s magic).
Because Chinese history is so long and so vast it encompasses different cosmologies and pantheons. Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism have somewhat pushed out the ancient religions of the Han Dynasty (although figures like Nüwa linger on in the background). Huangdi sort of transcends change itself though and so he is in myths with great primordial Daoists like Guangchengzi and in stories with the now moribund goddess Xuannü, “the mystery lady” who was goddess of war, sex, magic, and longevity (we should maybe look into her backstory at some point). Also he was maybe a yellow dragon.
Although there are many stories about the Yellow Emperor’s life and accomplishments (and about his birth, which I will write about some other time), the stories about his death are somewhat exiguous. He met a quilin and a phoenix and moved on from this world. He has two tomb in Shaanxi (including the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor, which is pictured up there at the top of the post), in addition to other tombs in in Henan, Hebei, Gansu, and other places. Perhaps these stories are unsatisfying by design. Like King Arthur or Durin, the Yellow Emperor might not be entirely dead, but might be lying low somewhere, waiting for a moment of crisis which requires him.
Like a currency crisis?
To my point of view, there is no afterlife or magic, but the dead aren’t really gone–they live on in their descendants. This is a satisfying conclusion to me because it means that the Yellow Emperor IS the people of the Han. He is China the way Uncle Sam is the US (except 4500 years longer). He never really existed yet the Yellow Emperor is 1/6 of humankind…or at least their mascot.
ferrebeekeeper 