The Sea Turtle Society

 

Of course, sloths are very dear to the Phantom's heart.

But this post is about sea turtles, not sloths.

Having said that, the David Attenborough clip of the lovelorn sloth hearing the siren song from a female sloth only to arrive and find her already claimed, has cleaved to the Phantom's soul.

But this is a digression.

This post is about sea turtles.

(However, if you haven't seen the sloth thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7HGSvczDA4 )

Meanwhile, back to sea turtles. 

How can you not think of the sea turtle without responding to this unlikely, wondrous species? 

Their chances of survival are worse than those of the  Frenchmen racing across No Man's Land into the maw of the German machine guns at the Battle of the Somme.

In the beginning, the mother turtle finds some beach she has been returning to for years, and she waddles up from the shoreline, digs a little hole in the sand, just deep enough to receive the eggs, and then she scampers back  to the sea. She doesn't hang around like some father penguin, or a mother bear protecting her cubs; she gets out of there as soon as she can. There is peril, exposed on the beach. And, unlike the penguin, the mother sea turtle has no father turtle to help with the eggs. She is out of there. 

(Really makes the Emperor Penguin fathers look even better in the animal kingdom, when you see the sea turtles. Talk about an absent father.)

Some time later, the hatchlings crawl out of their foxholes and launch themselves toward the ocean. In this charge, they are on their own.  Their desperate lunge toward their destination does bring to mind "All Quiet on the Western Front."

The hatchlings set out for the ocean, that is, if they can find the ocean.

How they know where the ocean is, is not clear. There was one story about hatchlings charging not toward the sea, but toward a shoreline Bar & Grill, because it had lights, and the hatchlings, attracted by the lights, or possibly mistaking it for the moon, flopped along desperately toward the bright lights and juke box sounds, only to be crushed on the road by passing Jeeps and SUV's, splattered like so many dropped nachos.

But even when there is no distracting bar, getting from nest to sea is a true gauntlet--flopping along at highest turtle speed, they are picked off by hordes of seagulls, for whom baby sea turtles are a favorite hors d'oeuvres,  and somewhere in the neighborhood of 2/3 of them never even make it to the ocean. 

And when they do manage to reach the raging surf, some drown! Who would have thought a sea turtle, who lives in the sea, could drown?  It's a sea turtle, for crying out loud!  But they do. Drown. David Attenborough can be trusted on this, we can be sure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE0qp3Yje6Q&t=3s

How many survive whatever predators may be lurking in the ocean is anybody's guest. 

But, eventually, some do survive, against the odds, despite the seagulls and tiger sharks, killer whales, plastic bags which strangle them when swallowed, fishing nets and fishing hooks, some actually manage to  live and some manage to breed and reproduce. 

How exactly turtles copulate the Phantom can only imagine, looking at the anatomy, but apparently, it happens.  Is there a Kama Sutra for sea turtles? 

But, despite all the mayhem and murderous depredation, some manage to live. 

It's inspirational, really. 

But it does make one wonder about a benign and loving God. 

The Phantom's older son, watching the Planet Earth episode on the spider wasp, which plants its egg inside an unsuspecting spider, which is then consumed, gradually, from the inside by the developing wasp, which emerges eventually, leaving only the husk of the poor wasp behind--the son, seeing this story through to the end announced, "This proves there is no God."

To which, the Phantom objected: No, this proves there is no benevolent, kindly, father protector God with a white beard and mighty halo which lights up the Sistine Chapel.  

For some of God's creatures life is indeed nasty, brutish and short. 

Remarks at the Deliberative Session 2/7/2023

First, it must be said:  I know nobody here tonight who wishes anything but the best for the Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Church or its Sacred Heart School. 

Those of us in opposition to this warrant article come not to oppose the Church, but to embrace the Constitution and the principles which emanate from it, including separation of Church and State, which, it must be remembered is why we do not tax church property. 

I know the Church has congregants here tonight who support this warrant article and they are honorable folks and good citizens.

3 TIMES OVER

But the good folk of Hampton have paid for the 53 Hampton children who attend SHS, three times over, every year. They have paid first by providing enough seats and enough teachers to accommodate these children at the 3 public schools.  We do not save money we have already spent.

 And the taxpayers will pay a second time for these students, by paying for the state vouchers for private school students, 

and the taxpayers pay a third time with this warrant article.

You might even consider a 4th way: by exempting the church from taxation, we subsidize the property of the Sacred Heart School.

The New Hampshire Constitution  says, and I quote, "But no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination. "

I have in my hand the itemized reports of invoices paid by Ms. Curtis: She tells me she has never refused to pay to cover an invoice from Sacred Heart School in all the years she has written these checks. Among the items were glitter crayons and paper crowns,  computers and molding clay.  But knowing what the items were does not tell you how they were used. If you knew the paper crowns were used in religious pageants,  by kids acting as the three wise kings, the clay used to mold a baby Jesus and the computers used to stream services from St. Patrick's cathedral, would you then still pay the invoices? 

The answer, or course will be: But they never used these items this way. And I will ask: How do you know?

Last year we voted down an amendment to fund all religious or private schools as we do Sacred Heart  because that might mean funding a school for the Church of Satan. So we a favor only some churches in Hampton.

In Hampton, we have voted to fund the Sacred Heart School as a special case, as if it were the Church of Hampton.    By my calculation if only 53 of 239 students come from Hampton, then  3/4 of the students  attending Sacred Heart are not even from Hampton.          So we are not simply offering to all Hampton children a benefit, we are offering a benefit to students beyond Hampton,  who want to go to a religious school, which makes this is a special tithe paid by the town to Miraculous Medal.

In Congress Representative Marjorie Taylor Green has said that separation of church and state is a "myth." She says we should be a Christian nation. Representative Lauren Boebert says she is "tired of separation of church and state," and the church should govern the government. 

But I do not agree. 

I still believe in the separation of  church and state, and I suspect  some Miraculous Medal congregrants support this principle, when it means they are exempt from property taxes, but when it gets in the way of taxpayer support for the church, then never mind, we don't much like it then.

Hearing the Banshees of Inisherin

Discerning what "Banshees of Inisherin" is all about is the central mystery of this wonderful film and the answer remains unsolved until the very end.

Padraic, the protagonist, but not the central character, goes to collect his best and longest friend, Colm, who for the first time simply ignores Padraic's rapping at the window and Padraic, confused, and disturbed trudges off to the pub, where he had thought he would be drinking dark beer with his friend and he commiserates with the barkeep, who asks the obvious question, "Are ye row-ing?" That is are you having another fight, which, apparently is not unheard of between the two friends.

No, that is not what is brewing, as Colm finally arrives at the pub and announces that he no longer likes Padraic, and no longer wishes to be friends with him, without explanation. Of course, Padraic asks what has caused this rift and Colm replies he has simply concluded Padraic is a waste of time: Padraic's conversation is filled with the trivia of daily life, down to what he finds in the scat of his donkey, which, after lo these many years, Colm now finds agonizingly banal and "dull." His friend has become a bore, or, more exactly always has been, and Colm realizes he has only limited time left on earth and he doesn't want to waste it on the mundane and the boring. 

He might be a bored housewife on the way out the door after 20 years of an unfulfilling marriage.

Colm wants to create music, like Mozart's, which will last through the ages, after him. Colm is looking for the transcendent and the immortal and Padriac celebrates the joy of every day life and compatible friendship, of being "nice."

All this is happening while the alternative to brotherly love and tolerance is echoing in the distance, across the water, as the Irish Civil War is burning itself out, and its explosions punctuate the calm of Inisherin erratically. 

The town policeman tells Colm he is looking forward to a free lunch he'll earn by attending an execution but he can't recall who is being executed or why--all the policeman cares about is the lunch. He is the ultimate in "not nice."

Padraic's sister, Siobhan, confronts Colm with the very obvious, "But Padraic has always been dull," so why reject him now for what he is and has always been?

Colm has no answer for this other than to say that dull is not enough. Fifty years from now, nobody will remember Padraic for being nice; nor will anyone remember Siobhan fifty years from now. But people will remember Mozart hundreds of years from now, a 17th century musician, Colm says, remembered, not for being nice, but for being great.

Siobhan notes that Colm has not even placed Mozart in the proper century, suggesting that Colm has no real grasp of what real greatness is.

August Macke

It is this moment which challenges Padraic's very essence. Why should being "nice" not be enough, not be celebrated?  He invests that word with so much more than "nice:" Nice envelops the quality of kindness but it also extends to ordinary things, which make life rich. Nice is the every day joy of living, the stuff which people who have been told they have only a short time to live, so relish. The joy of every day things. Obama once observed that as President, he missed this stuff the most--just going down the block and getting coffee, just washing dishes. 

(To which, famously, Obama's  wife interjected: "And when have you ever washed the dishes?" in a scene which could have fit seamlessly into Banshees.)

Padraic unleashes a volley which stuns everyone: It's not important his sister will not be remembered by others in 50 years; what is important is that he thinks Siobhan is nice right now, which, of course, totally endears him to Siobhan, and which makes her decision to leave her brother even more difficult. Padraic continues that Colm can have his friend, the policeman, Peadar, for whom a free lunch is more important than any sort of justice. And, for good measure, Padraic throws in the true stunner: Peadar is well know to be sexually abusing his son, both sexually and physically.

In fact, the character of Peadar the policeman is pivotal in revealing a decent side of Colm: It is after the policeman blindsides Padraic, striking him to the ground, that Colm gathers up his former friend and sets him on his cart back home, and later Colm lays out the nasty cop with a blow after Peadar threatens Padraic. 

But Colm is not the man we can actually sympathize with, even though it is his struggle which drives most of the movie. He could have explained himself more kindly to Padraic, and his insistence on cutting off his own fingers places Padraic in an agonizing position. 

In the end, Padraic is driven to a classic Greek tragedy place--he has got to say, like Antigone, "No"; he has got to stop being nice and start asserting himself, which he does with fire and which, in the end, he embraces. 

Colm has insisted he stop being so nice, and in fact the very first time Padraic stops being nice, however briefly, is the first time Colm finds him interesting.

In the end, it is Colm who suffers the greatest abuse, but it is a suffering he has invited and in some way deserves. Padraic has had to change; his suffering has made him less nice and more interesting. His path down that road to nastiness is step by step, first lying to an innocent musician which he rationalizes as a lie which will be discovered and will be harmless in the end. But, step by step, he moves away from a man who prattles on about his donkey's scat to a man who burns down the edifice of a lost friendship.

Getting Lady Chatterley Right, At Long Last

 

Adapting any novel for a feature length film is always a kayak run down class V rapids, but when your novel is D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," the cauldron is especially daunting.

Any print to film challenge has multiple hurdles to leap:

1/ Every reader has already seen the character's faces, bodies and habitus in his or her own mind's eye, so the casting is always treacherous, finding just the right look, voice, carriage for each character. 

I don't know who did the casting for Netflix's Lady Chatterley, but whoever it was got each character just right, with the possible exception of Clifford, who I had pictured as a young Michael Redgrave type, or possibly a young Christopher Plummer, with fine features, high cheekbones and thin lips. 

But that is a quibble. 

Lady Constance Chatterley herself, Emma Corrin, has the sculpted features, the asthenic qualities which give her instant vulnerability and upper class credibility. Jack O'Connell is just right for Mellors, not movie star hunky, but plenty good looking enough to be believable as a temptation for Lady Chatterley, and her first look at him bathing naked in an outdoor shower beside his hut is lovely, as just a glimmer of a smile flits across her face and you know he will set her fantasizing.

2/ Each important character and incident has to be managed and choices made to keep the length down to about two hours. The screenwriter here, David Magee, simply has made all the right choices. 

In the case of characters, all the important folks made the cut, and the decision to economize on the Irish playwright, Michaelis, is a sound one. His role is just a cameo in this version, but that's all he really needs.  In the book Constance has a brief, unsatisfactory coital experience with him, but he only really serves to show how unsatisfactory simple sex is for Lady Chatterley.  He is simply too uncouth for her, and he complains about her climaxing before he has a chance to do so, as if that is her fault.

But all the other scenes, the important scenes, are there, from her initial sighting of Mellors, to her holding the hatchlings, "New Life!" to her mad, naked  dance in the rain, to the wheel chair scenes between Clifford, Mellors and Constance. All the important stuff makes the cut.

3/ The actual themes are every bit as clear and artfully presented in the film as in the book:  Laure de Clermont Tonnerre has kept the pace exactly correct, made the right choices presenting the sex, which has to be volcanic and raw to make Constance's choices understandable. Even the brief scenes of Lady Chatterley masturbating have a clear point--she is missing sex, which you knew from earlier scenes she had once enjoyed. 

Clifford's belief that his class was meant to rule and the lower classes to serve; Clifford's idea that Constance should produce an heir by taking on the "right sort" of lover; Clifford's ruthlessness about keeping the coal miners repressed with low wages and his lack of sympathy for the common folk whose economic fate he controls and most shockingly, the deep seeded ideas about not mixing classes.  

The Neflix Lady Chatterley highlights Constance's rebellion against the gilded cage in which she finds herself trapped. When she raises objection to Clifford's plans to keep wages low, she is told she is thinking like a woman, and when Clifford tells her she should feel free to acquire a lover because he cannot get an erection, that might seem open minded and even generous on his part, but he conditions this liberty with the comment, straight from Lawrence's original text, that he trusts her to choose the right sort of fellow, not the sort he might object to--so even in his emancipation proclamation, he still insists on control.

All this prepares you for the gradual alienation Constance develops toward her husband, and it allows us to understand what Mellors means when he says the upper class men he sees at Wragby, the estate, are "dead" men. Constance knows he has chosen exactly the right word for what she has been seeing in the drawing rooms, the dining table and the village, where she can feel the "drizzle of resentment" from the coal miners and villagers, as Lawrence put it. You see that drizzle on screen here.

Hilda, Constance's sister, who is her champion and her rock, is, still, apart from all her stellar qualities, shocked and repulsed by her choice of lover: For Constance to choose a servant rather than someone of her own upper class is tantamount to the plantation mistress at Tara taking on a Negro lover. 

No important detail is omitted: Even the story that both Constance and Hilda had taken on lovers as adolescents, when they were at school in Germany, surfaces and this  becomes important as it serves to demonstrate that this class of English is not so constrained as to think sex belongs only within the confines of  marriage, but they do believe that there are "proper" partners.

And, of course, Hilda fears Constance is simply enraptured by the sex with Mellors, given her husband's inability to satisfy her, which to her is simply not the point of a man. For Constance, the point of the man is the rapture, not to mention his capacity for tenderness and the other qualities she finds more important than his social status. She says they should escape England and flee to Australia, where they can be "left alone."  This is D.H. Lawrence peeking through the visuals. 

I've read "Lady Chatterley" at least four times through the years. The first time, I was simply too young and too unsophisticated to see the class issues--all I was interested in was the sex.  Later, I saw the story as primarily about the notion of fidelity and betrayal. Later still, the class prejudices leapt out, and I wondered how I could have been so dense as to miss all that.   And finally, the last time, I saw it as an ode to life and the imperative to pursue every day as a gift, because, as mortality begins to loom large, you look back and think how silly societal strictures really are.

Scanning through some of the reviews of this Netflix version online I've been surprised and disappointed about how thoroughly most reviewers have missed the essential quality of this Netflex version. There have been other attempts at "Lady Chatterley" -- all of them forgettable. 

But this one is a gem. The director, the actors, the casting director, the screen writer and likely a lot of folks I don't even know about like the cinematographer have all succeeded where all others have failed before them. 

If there was ever a film which demonstrates how it is actually possible to transform a print book into a living film, this Netflix effort has achieved that.

This version is a triumph and it is the only film version I can say would be worth watching even if you've never read the book, before you read the book, because it is that good.

Half a Percent: How Much of a Problem is Transgender?

 

Googling the question: "How many transgenders live in America?" you get various answers, but the most generous estimate is somewhere around half of one percent of the population identifies as transgender or gender fluid at any given time.

There are, of course, no real numbers, no good numbers. 

As someone who has devoted his career to thinking about some very rare conditions, along with the common ones, The Phantom is moved to ask: Why are we so concerned about the transgender folk who live among us, our fellow citizens?

Thinking about my own high school, that means in a school of 2,000 students, we are talking about, roughly, 8 students. 

Assuming we are talking about half of these folks who are male transitioning to female, you're down to 4 students. 

Now Ron Desantis and Ted Cruz and Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene will howl about the danger of having these students undressing in the girls' locker room, sharing bathrooms with "normal" girls or trying to swim as females on the girls' swimming team, but really, how likely is this really ever going to be a problem? 

This is not to say there haven't been problems: When a swimmer who lived the first 18 years of life as a male, developing male muscles, joints and bones under the influence of testosterone began to swim as a woman on the Penn swimming team, that swimmer crushed the competition and the existing women's records for the sport.

Penn Swimmer

So one person can cause a disturbance.

Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

And then you get to the problem of a person who did not need to ask a doctor's help to become a gender bending individual. Caster Semenya, the South African women's track star, who has set all sorts of records has posed a problem, not because she is transgender, but because she is like genetically male, while not being biologically entirely male, and, in fact she does not have a penis. But she may have testes, or had testes in her inguinal canals once. From what you can see on the internet she has partial testosterone insensitivity syndrome.

Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

She is a rarity.

It should also be noted, she did not seek to have her gender altered by any doctor, if she has this syndrome. She simply "is" this way.

Gdansk, Poland 

So why are the Republican culture warriors like DeSantis and Cruz so obsessed with these rare cases?

Paul McHugh, MD

The answer may be because these are cases which make people who are "woke" or otherwise open minded look foolish or bizarre or simply ridiculous, as they try to cleave to a position of extreme tolerance in a case which tests the understanding of the average citizen, who is unversed in what exactly transgender is, and how that may be different from "intersex" or from homosexuality or pseudohermaphrodism, each of which is separate and different from each other. 

So the far right has found the perfect scapegoats, small in number, poorly understood, people who most people have no first hand experience with.

Society of Assassins

 

Rife throughout internet sites like Twitter are posts suggesting that Vladimir Putin's days are numbered and few, as an assassin's bullet is, as only internet seers can know, already loaded and aimed at his head.

It is a curious thing, this Twitter syndrome of Wishful Assertion Syndrome: some people seem to be comforted by simply saying something will happen with great assurance, and when it does not, never mind. It was pretty to think it.

But it has made The Phantom wonder about the role of assassination in the control of events. The Phantom became fully sentient during that time of assassinations: JFK in 1963, Martin Luther King in 1968 followed by Robert Kennedy, that same year. 

It was always the liberals, the progressives, the men who looked like they might just want to change things, who got shot. People asked, "Why is it always the liberals, never the fascist thugs?"

Of course, in one sense, the answer was obvious: The guys who wanted to keep on lynching Negroes were the guys with the guns. They were, at core, murderous thugs whose idea of how to get what they wanted was violence. Blood is their argument.

And the men who live by violence take great pains to be sure they do not die by violence because they are living in the mindset of violence. You didn't see Joseph Stalin riding around in an open car like Kennedy in Dallas.

On the other hand, Hitler did just that, and never got shot. 

And people did try to assassinate Hitler. The numbers vary, but at least 42 attempts on his life made the Google list and there were likely others. The most famous was the July, 1944 plot at Wolf's Lair in Prussia where an briefcase with a bomb was placed at Hitler's foot, exploded killing 4 and wounding 20, but Hitler suffered nothing more than a perforated eardrum and his trousers were shredded.

If ever there seemed to be divine intervention...this would seem to demand an explanation from Christopher Hitchens. How could a man standing right next to a powerful bomb survive so unscathed? Of course, at the time, this miracle seemed to confirm the belief of true Nazis everywhere that in Hitler's case that widely used motto "Got Mitt Uns" which Wehrmacht soldiers carried engraved on belt buckles, was clearly true. 

God, or the physics of explosives, saved Hitler.

Of course, if Hitler had been killed, and the German army sued for peace in 1944, then the truth about the concentration camps might never have been known. The Nazis might have continued to rule Germany after an armistice but as it played out, Hitler would not allow for anything but utter  annihilation and the complete destruction of the Third Reich and nobody could argue about a stab in the back causing Germany's defeat. 

No such explanation seems to apply to Vladimir Putin. He simply is the only man who seems to matter in this war on Ukraine, and there do not seem to be any hidden concentration camps in Russia, only a society where there is no real dissent allowed and a population as duped as the Germans were.

And it's not that violent, murderous men never get assassinated: Reinhard Heydrich, as murderous a Nazi as ever emerged did get killed, but again he was so arrogant, he rode around in an open car. George Wallace, the ardent segregationist was shot, but not killed, and he remains the sole exception to the rule that right wing zealots do not meet with violence. 

Stalin was never touched. 

Hitler was never assassinated--he simply lost the war and knew his head would be on the block. He had seen what happened to Mussolini, who was strung up in a public square when his army lost.

It's pretty clear the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have no plans to assassinate Trump or DeSantis or Rand Paul or Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or the gun toting Lauren Boebert.

Violent parties do violent things.  During the Weimar Republic, as democracy was stirring in its cradle after the First World War in Germany, somewhere around 400 assassinations of liberal or left wing politicians ripped through the government. Less than 10 right wingers died by assassination.

So, if history is any guide, the Democratic Party and democracy in general will not gain advantage by any assassin's bullet. 

The Good News from TWiV

I started listening to This Week in Virology (TWiV) in March, 2020 and the cast of characters have become my long distance friends, as they came at the problem from their various perspectives as virologists, immunologist and lab folks. 

Back then, Rich Condit, who was on the faculty of a Florida university after knocking around academia for years, said we all ought to understand that anything this learned panel said should be taken the spirit of "current knowledge" will likely be wrong 6 months, a year later, because this is a new virus, at least to science, (although it may have knocked around in some form in bats for years).  But as they speculated about how the pandemic would end, one possibility was it would mutate into new, more benign variants and, like other coronaviruses, it would devolve into a virus we all get, but after the runny noses, the sore throats and headaches and aches, we get past what feels like "the common cold."

They cautioned, at the time, that would be the rosiest scenario and the disease could follow  a course more like influenza, which kill millions worldwide for years.

Now TWiV has interviewed Jake Scott, MD, from Stanford who says that in his infectious disease practice he has seen only 2 cases of serious COVID this year.  While he laughed about Joe Biden's "The pandemic is over," he conveyed much the same feeling, as he walked through the numbers and the stories of hospitalized patients and how things have changed.

Basically, people over 60 have to worry, but young, vaccinated people--and there is some reason to believe even UNvaccinated people--may do just fine with the new Omicron variants.

I had listened less often to TWiV over the past few months, as they drifted away from talking about COVID and I find their clinical guy, Daniel Griffin, insufferable. Griffin was so good early on, but the more exposure he got the more excrutiating it became listening to his self promotion and supercilious riffs on why he is the only physician in America who practices evidence based medicine. 

But Dr. Scott now says we have come to the Promised Land, or, not really the promised land because TWiV did not promise anything, but, more accurately, we have maybe arrived at the ardently desired land, where the COVID variant which has become dominant is not killing many people and making people miserable with "a cold" for a week, but otherwise not burdening hospitals with admission and ICU illnesses.

He said some new things--like the idea that instead of under-using Paxlovid, he thinks we may be over using it. It might be okay, even for an 80 year old with a positive test, otherwise healthy beyond old age, to just "ride it out."

Makes me feel better about what I saw in New York City, where young people crowding into bars and people eating at restaurants and going out wore no masks and looked blissfully indifferent to the risk of COVID.

Of course, the winter season awaits us, and SARS COV-2 is a winter virus, but the news looks hopeful.

And the gorilla chest pounders among the political Right will claim they were right all along and we should have never closed schools or worn masks or insisted soldiers be vaccinated. But, of course, it's all about timing. Those things likely saved lives then although they may not be necessary now.

And, what the Right is now trying to co-opt or ignore is the fact that actual scientists, who used the scientific method, which depends on evaluating evidence rather than just proclaiming stuff, these scientists with their wondrous vaccines saved more lives than all those Right Wing Rand Paul, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Roger Stone will, in aggregate, ever save.