The Case For Universal Property

I have been against inheritance for over a decade (here, here). It's one of the major roots of all evils in the world. Peter Barnes makes a brilliant case on this topic in his new book Ours: The Case for Universal Property. 

I never knew Thomas Paine proposed a similar idea 1795!! We haven't learn much in the past 250 years! 

To be clear, I think that the property shouldn't be inherited by any of the relatives of the deceased person. That is quintessential to have a clean slate for every adult sans any privilege based on sheer random luck of being born in the "right" family. 

The excerpts from the book: 

Taken as a whole, property rights are akin to gravity: they curve econ­omic space-time.  Their tugs and repulsions are every­where, and noth­­­ing can avoid them.  And just as water flows inex­ora­bly toward the ocean, so money, goods and power flow inexorably toward pro­per­ty rights.  Gov­ern­­ments can no more staunch these flows than King Canute could halt the tides.   

That said, the most oft-forgotten fact about property rights is that they do not exist in nature; they are constructs of human minds and soci­e­ties.  The assets to which they apply may exist in nature, but the rights of humans to do things with them, or prevent others from doing them, do not.  Their design and allocation are entirely up to us.

In this book, I take our existing fabric of property rights as both a given and merely the latest iteration in an evolutionary process that has been and will continue to be altered by living humans.  Future iterations of the fabric will therefore be a product not only of the past, but also of our imagi­na­tion and political will in the future.  And, while eliminating exist­ing pro­perty rights is difficult, adding new ones is less so. 

Before we talk about universal property, we need to look at co-inherited wealth, for that is what universal property is based on.  

A full inventory of co-inherited wealth would fill pages.  Consider, for starters, air, water, topsoil, sunlight, fire, photo­syn­thesis, seeds, elec­­tri­city, minerals, fuels, cultivable plants, domesticable animals, law, sports, religion, calendars, recipes, mathema­tics, jazz, libraries and the internet.  Without these and many more, our lives would be incalculably poorer.  

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The idea of universal property isn’t new.  It was the invention of  Thomas Paine, the English-born essayist who inspired Ameri­ca’s revo­lution and much else.  Indeed, virtually all the ideas in this book can be traced back to a single essay he wrote in the winter of 1795/96.

Paine led an extraordinary life.  Unlike other American Founders, he wasn’t born to privilege.  The son of a Quaker corset-maker, he emi­grated to Philadelphia in 1774 and found himself in the thick of pre-revolu­tionary ferment.  Inspired, he wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense, which quickly sold half a million copies (in a nation of three million) and transformed the prevail­ing discontent with King George III into ardour for independence and a united democratic republic. 

[---]

It was during his years in France that Paine wrote his last great essay, Agrarian Justice.  In Rights of Man, Paine had criticized the English Poor Laws and argued for what today would be called a welfare state, in­clud­­ing universal education, pensions for the elderly and employment for the urban poor, all paid for by taxes.  In Agrarian Justice he went farther, arguing that poverty should be systemically eliminated with universal income from jointly inherited property.

There are two kinds of property, he wrote: “firstly, property that comes to us from the Creator of the universe — such as the Earth, air and water; and secondly, artificial or acquired property — the inven­tion of men.”  Because humans have different talents and luck, the latter kind of property must necessarily be distributed unequally, but the first kind belongs to everyone equally.  It is the “legitimate birth­right” of every man and woman. 

To Paine, this was more than an abstract idea; it was something that could be implemented within a laissez faire economy.  But how?  How could the Earth, air and water possibly be distributed equally to every­one?  Paine’s practical answer was that, though the assets them­selves can’t be distributed equally, income derived from them can be. 

There needs to be a clear demarkation between identifying a problem and proposing a solution. My hypothesis on why Thomas Paine failed was because his problem identification was brilliant (air, water, earth belongs to everyone) and he should have stopped there. Providing a solution (which was plain stupid) shifts the focus to proposed solution while the actual problem gets sidelined into abyss (for 250 years and still counting). 

I think, the same thing is happening with this book (for starters, the word "universal" is a polarizing). I don't agree with solution. 

Personally, I understand inheritance is a 800 pound gorilla that unleashes lifelong cancer. All things this blue planet provides should be equally shared by human animals and non-human animals; we are all guests on this planet for a short time. We should be grateful for this opportunity and enjoy it without destroying and claiming ownership. 

As of today, I only know what we currently have is a problem and I have no idea how to solve this. We should amplify this inheritance problem so much that future generations can hear and see this clearly as the biggest problem and maybe they can propose few novel solutions (which isn't socialist). 

Unpacking & Evaluating Myself - Sheldon Kopp's Laundry List

An Eschatological Laundry list: by Sheldon Kopp (thank you, Oliver Brukeman)

Evaluation criteria: 

• Things already learned from Max, then I will classify as "Still Learning" 
• Things I have already learned and acted on plus implemented in everyday life, then classification will be "Done (Thanks Max)". 
• For new things,  "New" 
• "NA" for not applicable to Max and I. 

So let's go one by one:

1. This is it ! - Done (Thanks Max)
2. There are no hidden meanings. - Done (Thanks Max). There is no magic so stop subjective bullshit. 
3. You can’t get from there to here, and besides there’s no place else to go. - Done (Thanks Max). You cannot escape yourself so stop planning trips to New Zealand. 
4. We are already dying, and we will be dead for a long time. - Done (Thanks Max), I live my life now without Max for eternity. 
5. Nothing lasts. - Done (Thanks Max), No kidding !!
6. There is no way of getting all you want. - Done (Thanks Max) plus my desires are none. 
7. You can’t have anything unless you let go of it. - Done (Thanks Max), so bloody true! 
8. You only get to keep what you give away. - New, deep insight here but overlaps with above point. 
9. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things. - Done (Thanks Max)
10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune. - Done (Thanks Max)
11. You have a responsibility to do your best nonetheless. - Done (Thanks Max), my reason to keep breathing after Max. 
12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning. - Done (Thanks Max). It's stupid to search for meaning (trust me, I have send over a decade searching for one). Keeping it simple - its a random universe, period. No need to bring meaning (and it's a boring topic with no end except causes immeasurable sufferings)
13. You don’t really control anything. - Not true. You need to keeping doing good irrespective of control. Marcus's wise words - Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
14. You can’t make anyone love you. - Done (Thanks Max)
15. No one is any stronger or any weaker than anyone else. - Done (Thanks Max). Another way of saying death is a great equalizer. 
16. Everyone is in his own way, vulnerable. - Done (Thanks Max), overlaps with above point. 
17. There are no great men. - Done (Thanks Max) and learned a lot from Montaigne. 
18. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way. - NA. Some people do need role models but nor heroes. My role model is Max. 
19. Everyone lies, cheats, pretends ( yes, you too, and most certainly I myself). - Done (Thanks Max). This goes back to point 13, you can minimize evil and suffering that you unleash. None is innocent, we all have blood on our hands - thank you Reinhold Niebuhr. 
20. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. - Well this is bullshit, sorry. People don't change so easily. When it comes to evil, our prison system breeds more evil and no work is done on the transformation front. 
21. All of you is worth something, if only you will own it. - NA, boring self centered preaching. Turning focus outside of yourself helps develop gratitude and serenity. 
22. Progress is an illusion. - Done (Thanks Max) and learned so much on this from John Gray. 
23. Evil can be displaced but never eradicated, as all solutions breed new problems. - Done (Thanks Max). Road to hell is paved with good intentions. 
24. Yet it us necessary to keep on struggling towards solution. - Done (Thanks Max). My inference on 19 and 13. He is contracting himself between 24 and 13. 
25. Childhood is a nightmare. - Bullshit. 
26. But it is s very hard to be an on-your-own, take-care- of -yourself-cause -there- is-no-one -else-to do-it-for-you-grown -up. - Done (Thanks Max)
27. Each of us is ultimately alone. - Done (Thanks Max). You were born alone and you are going to die alone, period. 
28. The most important things, each man must do for himself. - Done (Thanks Max)
29. Love is not enough, but it sure helps.  - Done (Thanks Max). I go one step over and usually say - Love is overrated. Changing mind is most valuable thing in the world. 
30. We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but thats all there is. - Done (Thanks Max)
31. How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it. - Done (Thanks Max)
32. We must live with the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge. - Done (Thanks Max) and learned so much from Buddha. 
33. All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. - Done (Thanks Max). Continuation of above point and hence, I love Bayes Theorem. 
34. Yet we are responsible for everything we do. - Done (Thanks Max)
35. No excuses will be accepted. - Done (Thanks Max)
36. You can run, but you can’t hide. - Done (Thanks Max)
37. It is most important to run out of scapegoats. - Done (Thanks Max). There is a shelf life on how much you can blame your parents (and others) - J.K.Rowling.   
38. We must learn the power of living with our helplessness. - Done (Thanks Max)
39. The only victory lies in surrender to oneself. - Bullshit. This in the realm of self-centeredness. Surrender to uncertainty and randomness (not oneself) but keep trying.  
40. All of the significant battles are waged within the self. - Done (Thanks Max)
41. You are free to do whatever you want. You need only face the consequences. - Done (Thanks Max)
42. What do you know…for sure…anyway ? - Done (Thanks Max), Socrates and then Montaigne. 
43. Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again. - NA

I have a lot of "Done's" and zero "Still Learning". It is not that I am not being humble but I think Max taught not to learn passively but act and implement in everyday life. 

There are zillion other things I am still learning but from Sheldon's list, it just happens to be zero. 

The Four ‘Metabolic’ Flora (Gut Microbiome)

Oscillospira

In twenty obese men, the Mediterranean diet increased oscillospira and improved insulin sensitivity—a marker of good metabolic health. Chopped almonds increased this helpful microbe in eighteen human volunteers during a randomised control trial. Exposure to furry house pets also increases oscillospira in infants.

Coriobacteriaceae

Coriobacteriaceae may mean the difference between being healthy and overweight, and being unhealthy and overweight. A human trial showed a higher amount of this gut bug in metabolically healthy, but overweight, people. Being metabolically healthy may make all the difference when attempting a fat-loss diet and fending off obesity related conditions. Coriobacteriaceae also has an important role in blood sugar balance and breaking down fat. Running a half marathon hugely increased the amount of this positive gut flora in human subjects immediately after the event. It’s fair to say that exercise is important. You don’t need to run twelve miles to improve your gut health.

Akkermansia Muciniphilia

Researchers consistently see this helpful bacterium in slim people and believe it to be protective of fat gain. Intermittent fasting and being in ketosis allow it to flourish by eating the gut lining mucus. This stimulates production, which keeps the bowel environment healthy. Supplementing akkermansia decreased the body weight of human subjects, improved liver function and lowered inflammation. The prebiotic fructooligosaccharides (FOS) found in garlic, onions, chicory, leeks and loads of other plants feeds this helpful gut bug, allowing it to proliferate. The polyphenols in Concord grapes and cranberries also gave a leg-up to this symbiotic microbe. Interestingly, Metformin, a drug taken to correct metabolic dysfunction—the mechanisms of which are not fully understood—increases akkermansia. Could this be one of the drug's hidden actions?

Christensenella Minuta

Scientists discovered this gut flora in 2012. It’s much higher in slim people than in the obese and the more you have, the more likely you are to be slim. It’s strongly correlated to healthy levels of triglycerides and HDL (the so-called good cholesterol). In other words, it’s cardioprotective. Researchers report people with metabolic syndrome—a cluster of conditions that increase your likelihood of cardiovascular and related diseases—are depleted in this gut flora. The healthy microbe proliferates by fermenting protein and fibre, which is a reason to consume enough of both. Legumes seem to provide a flawless food for fermentation as galactooligosaccharides, another prebiotic. Resveratrol from the skin of grapes also seems to give the microbes a boost. A French biotech company is busy trying to turn this gut flora into a drug for, you guessed it, metabolic dysfunction.

- More Here

Sniff Test - It's Stupid To Trust Only Dogs

To state the obvious I love all animals not only dogs but when it comes to life and death - there needs to be solid evidence; dogs sniffing can lead that evidence but sniffing along cannot be an evidence. 

I know, I know, it sounds so ridiculous but this is happening in real life. People (innocent until proven guilty) are going to prison with zero evidence but dog sniff test. Folks like Carren Corcoran corrupt the precious relationship between humans and dogs; there are millions ways to make money so please don't make money using this bond. You can read the stupidity here (she doesn't understand false positive): 

Dogs have been celebrated since antiquity for their ability to sniff a particular odor and lead humans to its source. But the domesticated canine’s transformation into crime-fighting companion emerged much more recently, as U.S. police launched K-9 training programs and a thriving cottage industry of private firms, which often aid law enforcement, emerged. Today, police use dogs to track fugitives and search for missing persons, obtain probable cause (that is, legal justification to get a search warrant), and find substances, particularly illegal drugs. In what are known as scent lineups, agencies use trained canines to match evidence collected at a crime scene to the scent of a suspect or body. Increasingly, testimony from dog handlers has also served as direct evidence of guilt—accepted in lieu of an actual corpse, drug stash, or other physical evidence of a crime.

Yet critics worry that the criminal legal system has embraced a technique profoundly lacking in scientific validation. Dog-sniff evidence has led to wrongful convictions, and studies show human biases skew animal behavior. Almost no published research indicates just what dogs detect or how they do it. Defendants and their lawyers can’t cross-examine a dog, which means the accused cannot scrutinize the evidence or readily confront their accusers, a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s not enough to say I have this amazing expert with an incredible nose who can distinguish between scents,” says Binyamin Blum, an evidence scholar at the University of California (UC) Hastings College of the Law, who contends such testimony short-circuits the safeguards in place to discriminate between junk science and real science. “You have to explain exactly what their method is.”

[---]

As with the 2004 cold case, the charges against Redwine hinged on Molly’s ability to detect the odor of dead bodies where no human remains could be found. “The best way I can describe it is someone pops popcorn in your house,” Corcoran explained to one Wisconsin jury. “You come in. You can smell the popcorn that’s been popped, but there is no popcorn left.” Suspects could hide a body but, as she saw it, no one could outrun a dog’s nose.

The notion has plausible roots. Behind a dog’s leathery, wet nose lies a cavernous labyrinth of scroll-shaped chambers called ethmoturbinates lined with some 200 million olfactory receptors, encoded by an estimated 2.5 times as many genes as in humans. In recent years, researchers studying canine cognition have shown pet dogs can sniff out minute quantities of odorants, such as the odor of their owner’s T-shirt after it has been worn.

In the best known study on what is sometimes called residual odor—one that Corcoran has cited in court—German researchers placed carpet squares underneath two recently deceased corpses and then presented those squares to three trained Malinois. The 2007 study showed the dogs accurately distinguished those squares from negative controls, though critics contend the findings were muddied by possible contamination and poor experimental design.

But what odors would be left 7 months or more after Dylan’s alleged murder? Although forensic anthropologists have identified hundreds of compounds associated with cadavers, little evidence suggests all dead bodies immediately start to give off a standard, identifiable odor signature. John McGann, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, who wrote an influential review paper in Science arguing that poor human olfaction is a myth, says, “Even in cases where you say, ‘OK, a dog can follow a scent trail through the woods and find a person.’ Yes, they can. But what are they smelling? We don’t know. Right? We just literally don’t really know what exactly they’re smelling.”

A Psychologically Rich Life - Beyond Happiness & Meaning

Abstract

Psychological science has typically conceptualized a good life in terms of either hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. We propose that psychological richness is another, neglected aspect of what people consider a good life. Unlike happy or meaningful lives, psychologically rich lives are best characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences. We present empirical evidence that happiness, meaning, and psychological richness are related but distinct and desirable aspects of a good life, with unique causes and correlates. In doing so, we show that a nontrivial number of people around the world report they would choose a psychologically rich life at the expense of a happy or meaningful life, and that approximately a third say that undoing their life's biggest regret would have made their lives psychologically richer. Furthermore, we propose that the predictors of a psychologically rich life are different from those of a happy life or a meaningful life, and report evidence suggesting that people leading psychologically rich lives tend to be more curious, think more holistically, and lean more politically liberal. Together, this work moves us beyond the dichotomy of hedonic versus eudaimonic well-being, and lays the foundation for the study of psychological richness as another dimension of a good life. 

- Full paper by Shigehiro Oishi & Erin C Westgate here

On Happy's Fight For Freedom

In 2014, the Supreme Court of India made waves in the animal rights world when it said that animals have protected rights under the nation’s constitution. As it banned a bull-fighting festival, the court said animals have the right to “live in a healthy and clean atmosphere” and “not to be beaten.” That same year, a court in Argentina reportedly ruled in a habeas corpus case that an orangutan named Sandra could be freed from a Buenos Aires zoo and moved to a sanctuary. Even though the ruling was later reversed, Sandra was still moved to a U.S. sanctuary.

Experts say Happy’s case is larger than any one pachyderm. If the NhRP is victorious, it says it would seek to end all elephant exhibits in zoos across the country, believing their efforts would save the complex creatures from stunted lives in captivity. But zoo leaders warn that such a move would have dire consequences for new generations of children and for the future of conservation, as climate change wipes more species off the planet.

[---]

In 2005, Happy showed researchers that she had one more characteristic that long seemed limited to humans and apes. She was the first Asian elephant to pass a mirror test, commonly used by scientists to gauge self-awareness through an animal’s ability to recognize itself. That’s one of the main reasons the NhRP launched a legal battle on her behalf in 2018. But it hasn’t been easy to persuade a court to grant an elephant human rights. When the case reached the Bronx County Supreme Court in 2020, the court said it was “extremely sympathetic to Happy’s plight” but that it was bound by legal precedent to find that Happy is not a person and not being illegally imprisoned. An appellate court later that year also denied habeas corpus relief to Happy. The NhRP appealed to the state’s highest court, which agreed to hear the case.

But the NhRP and elephant experts say contact through a fence isn’t enough to fulfill social needs, and that the elephants’ lives at the zoo don’t come close to the ones they’re capable of having. In the wild, elephants can roam 30 miles each day with their families, Poole says. They’re animated, constantly touching and interacting with the families they’re born into, and autonomous. At the zoo, Happy mostly just stands in place, according to Wise, who visits monthly when the monorail is open and who receives video updates from supporters. Experts say that’s stereotypical behavior for elephants in captivity.

“When you try and take an elephant and put it behind bars in an urban setting, it’s just a recipe for disaster,” Poole says. “As you can imagine if you were locked behind bars, there’s not much to do.”

- More on Time Magazine

So what you can do? Stop going to zoo and circus. Vote with your money.  Use comedy to morally shame the ones who go to zoo, circus and play pool using ivory balls. Don't get angry but use comedy to make a statement with your friends and family. Keep doing this "untiringly" until you kick the bucket and that would be a gratitude filled life. 

What If Dormant Microbes Trigger The Onset Of Alzheimer's?

It is more than 150 years since scientists proved that invisible germs could cause contagious illnesses such as cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis. The role of microbes in these diseases was soon widely accepted, but "Germ Theory" has continued to surprise ever since – with huge implications for many apparently unrelated areas of medicine.

It was only in the 1980s, after all, that two Australian scientists found that Helicobacter Pylori triggers stomach ulcers. Before that, doctors had blamed the condition on stress, cigarettes and booze. Contemporary scientists considered the idea to be "preposterous", yet it eventually earned the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2005.

The discovery that the human papillomavirus can cause cervical cancer proved to be similarly controversial, but vaccines against the infection are now saving thousands of lives. Scientists today estimate that around 12% of all human cancers are caused by viruses.

We may be witnessing a similar revolution in our understanding of Alzheimer's disease. Lifestyle and genetic factors certainly play a role in the development of the illness. But it looks increasingly possible that some common viruses and bacteria – the kinds that give us cold sores and gum disease – may, over the long term, trigger the death of neural tissue and a steady cognitive decline. If so, infections may be one of the leading causes of the dementia.

Like the germ theories of ulcers and cancers, this hypothesis was once considered a kind of heresy – yet a string of compelling findings has sparked renewed interest in microbes' contributions to dementia. "There's a huge amount of work being done now, compared to even five years ago," says Ruth Itzhaki, an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester in the UK, who has spent three decades investigating the role of infection in Alzheimer's.

[---]

Scientists studying Alzheimer's have also struggled to explain why some people develop the disease while others don't. Genetic studies show that the presence of a gene variant – APOE4 – can vastly increase someone's chances of building the amyloid plaques and developing the disease. But the gene variant does not seal someone's fate as many people carry APOE4 but don't suffer from serious neurodegeneration. Some environmental factors must be necessary to set off the genetic time bomb, prompting the build-up of the toxic plaques and protein tangles.

[---]

Could certain microbes act as a trigger? That's the central premise of the infection hypothesis.

Itzhaki has led the way with her examinations into the role of the herpes simplex virus (HSV1), which is most famous for causing cold sores on the skin around the mouth. Importantly, the virus is known to lie dormant for years, until times of stress or ill health, when it can become reactivated – leading to a new outbreak of the characteristic blisters.

While it had long been known that the virus could infect the brain – leading to a dangerous swelling called encephalitis that required immediate treatment – this was thought to be a very rare event. In the early 1990s, however, Itzhaki's examinations of post-mortem tissue revealed that a surprising number of people showed signs of HSV1 in their neural tissue, without having suffered from encephalitis.

Importantly, the virus didn't seem to be a risk for the people without the APOE4 gene variant, most of whom did not develop dementia. Nor did the presence of APOE4 make much difference to the risk of people without the infection. Instead, it was the combination of the two that proved to be important. Overall, Itzhaki estimates that the two risk factors make it 12 times more likely that someone will develop Alzheimer's, compared to people without the gene variant or the latent infection in their brain.

- More Here

Can Worms Hear?

“Can worms hear?” is an age-old question, one Darwin attempted to answer in the 1800s by having his son serenade earthworms with a bassoon and seeing if they wriggled away. Darwin’s answer: no. But new research suggests otherwise.

While other complex senses, such as vision, are widespread in the animal kingdom, so far, hearing has been found only in vertebrates and some arthropods. Almost all hearing animals rely on an organ that vibrates when sound waves hit it, firing neurons associated with processing sound. In humans and most other vertebrates, that’s our ear, comprising a delicate eardrum and inner ear.

But C. elegans, a tiny worm that’s ubiquitous in biology research, doesn’t have a specialized hearing organ. Instead, new experiments have revealed, its skin doubles as a sound-sensing membrane, effectively making the worm’s entire body an eardrum. This study, detailed recently in the journal Neuron, presents the first evidence ever found that a non-arthropod invertebrate can sense airborne sound.

The results come from more than a decade of targeted research led by Shawn Xu’s lab at the University of Michigan. Building on others' work that found the one-millimeter worms could smell, taste, and touch, the team uncovered evidence that the worms also had the senses of proprioception—the so-called sixth sense of body awareness—and light detection."(Read how superhuman hearing may someday be possible.)

“And since then, there’s only been one thing missing, and that is the auditory sensation,” says Xu, a sensory biologist. “We’ve been spending all these years searching for this one.”

The discovery, he says, presents a big leap in our understanding of both how organisms can hear and how hearing may have evolved. It also could expand the search for hearing in more organisms that lack obvious ears, such as mollusks and other worms (including Darwin’s earthworms) and shed light on animals whose hearing capabilities scientists are still deciphering, like some salamanders and “earless” frogs.

- More Here

This Day In 2019 - Max Back Home !

A lifetime of whatever little good deeds I did cumulated to this day, October 4th 2019. Max recovered and came home when it seemed impossible even the night before. I don't want speculate and do the usual subjective imaginations of what would have happened if Max didn't come home that day. 

As Taleb says there are no alternate histories. October 4th 2019 was and will be the happiest day of my life. 

My Max came back home as we both desired. My desires ended that day and I realized the importance of doing the right thing all the time irrespective what happens around you. 

For rest of my life, I have nothing but gratitude for what happened on that day. Because of that day,  Max was able to spend more weeks at home, Max was able to die peaceful next to me at home and I was able to continue living with gratitude. 

See you soon Max :-)  

"Re-Discovering" Ashoka In India

Ashoka is one my favorite human beings; but little did I know that he was forgotten in India (surprise! surprise!) until William Jone's resurrected him back in late 1700. 

Beautiful essay on Knowledge is power: The unintended outcomes of Orientalist William Jones’ study of Sanskrit texts

William Jones’s investigations of the past were hobbled by the imperative, commonly felt by European intellectuals of his era, to synchronise events with Biblical timelines. He did, however, make one crucial contribution to the study of Indian history by providing the first accurate dating for the reign of an Indian sovereign who had ruled before the common era. Greek chronicles mentioned that Seleucus Nicator, who succeeded to Alexander the Great’s eastern dominions, had sent his ambassador Megasthenes to the court of an emperor named Sandrocottus at Palibothra. Historians had speculated that Palibothra was the same as Pataliputra, the city known as Patna in modern times. However, that theory had a fatal flaw. Megasthenes described the capital of Sandrocottus as standing at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Erranaboas, but only the first of these flowed through Patna. Jones unearthed the fact that Patna used to be the site of the confluence of the Ganga and the Son, before the latter changed its course. He found, further, that another name for the Son was the Hiranyabahu, which matched the Erranaboas of Megasthenes’ account. Finally, he discovered a play which told of a usurper king called Chandragupta, who had a court at Pataliputra and had welcomed foreign ambassadors to it. Marshalling all this evidence, Jones could confidently state that Chandragupta was the same as Sandrocottus, whose reign had to have commenced between 325 BCE and 312 BCE.

Following Jones’s proof, the story of the dynasty Chandragupta founded, known as the Mauryas, was pieced together. The most important part of this history related to Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka Maurya. It was unravelled by James Prinsep, who came to Calcutta in 1819 as Assistant Assay-Master in the Mint and was later posted to Benares. Where the humanist Jones had delved into literary works, the scientifically-oriented Prinsep studied indecipherable inscriptions in two scripts, Brahmi and Kharoshti. Officials in far-flung areas of the burgeoning British empire in South Asia had come upon pillars and rocks bearing similar-looking messages in these scripts. After years of painstaking collation of data from edicts and coins, Prinsep succeeded in the late 1830s in decoding them.

It was revealed that the pillar and rock inscriptions had been commanded by a king referred to as Devanampiya Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods. They expounded the ethical principles on which his kingdom was run and were clearly Buddhist in inspiration. Prinsep was informed by a colleague posted in Ceylon that a great Indian king called Ashoka, also known as Piyadasi, had converted to Buddhism and sent a religious mission to Ceylon. The mystery of the inscriptions was thus resolved and Ashoka returned to his rightful place in Indian history alongside Chandragupta/Sandrocottus. The pillars on which Ashokan inscriptions were carved often had lion capitals atop them. A perfectly preserved specimen was excavated in Sarnath in 1904, and was adopted as one of India’s national symbols after independence. The chakra from Ashokan pillars was incorporated in the Indian flag. Thanks to the efforts of British Orientalists, two emperors who had been completely forgotten in India were established among the greatest rulers the subcontinent had seen. It was as if Dushanta’s lost memory had been returned to him.

Ed Young On NOT Learning From History Nor From Present

America’s frustrating inability to learn from the recent past shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of public health. Almost 20 years ago, the historians of medicine Elizabeth Fee and Theodore Brown lamented that the U.S. had “failed to sustain progress in any coherent manner” in its capacity to handle infectious diseases. With every new pathogen — cholera in the 1830s, HIV in the 1980s — Americans rediscover the weaknesses in the country’s health system, briefly attempt to address the problem, and then “let our interest lapse when the immediate crisis seems to be over,” Fee and Brown wrote. The result is a Sisyphean cycle of panic and neglect that is now spinning in its third century. Progress is always undone; promise, always unfulfilled. Fee died in 2018, two years before SARS-CoV-2 arose. But in documenting America’s past, she foresaw its pandemic present — and its likely future.

More Americans have been killed by the new coronavirus than the influenza pandemic of 1918, despite a century of intervening medical advancement. The U.S. was ranked first among nations in pandemic preparedness but has among the highest death rates in the industrialized world. It invests more in medical care than any comparable country, but its hospitals have been overwhelmed. It helped develop COVID-19 vaccines at near-miraculous and record-breaking speed, but its vaccination rates plateaued so quickly that it is now 38th in the world. COVID-19 revealed that the U.S., despite many superficial strengths, is alarmingly vulnerable to new diseases — and such diseases are inevitable. As the global population grows, as the climate changes, and as humans push into spaces occupied by wild animals, future pandemics become more likely. We are not guaranteed the luxury of facing just one a century, or even one at a time.

It might seem ridiculous to think about future pandemics now, as the U.S. is consumed by debates over booster shots, reopened schools, and vaccine mandates. Prepare for the next one? Let’s get through this one first! But America must do both together, precisely because of the cycle that Fee and Brown bemoaned. Today’s actions are already writing the opening chapters of the next pandemic’s history.

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 Every adult in the U.S. has been eligible for vaccines since mid-April; in that time, more Americans have died of COVID-19 per capita than people in Germany, Canada, Rwanda, Vietnam, or more than 130 other countries did in the pre-vaccine era.

“We’re so focused on these high-tech solutions because they appear to be what a high-income country would do,” Alexandra Phelan, an expert on international law and global health policy at Georgetown University, told me. And indeed, the Biden administration has gone all in on vaccines, trading them off against other countermeasures, such as masks and testing, and blaming “the unvaccinated” for America’s ongoing pandemic predicament. The promise of biomedical panaceas is deeply ingrained in the U.S. psyche, but COVID should have shown that medical magic bullets lose their power when deployed in a profoundly unequal society. There are other ways of thinking about preparedness. And there are reasons those ways were lost.

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When scientists realized that infectious diseases are caused by microscopic organisms, they gained convenient villains. Germ theory’s pioneers, such as Robert Koch, put forward “an extraordinarily powerful vision of the pathogen as an entity that could be vanquished,” Alex de Waal, of Tufts, told me. And that vision, created at a time when European powers were carving up other parts of the world, was cloaked in metaphors of imperialism, technocracy, and war. Microbes were enemies that could be conquered through the technological subjugation of nature. “The implication was that if we have just the right weapons, then just as an individual can recover from an illness and be the same again, so too can a society,” de Waal said. “We didn’t have to pay attention to the pesky details of the social world, or see ourselves as part of a continuum that includes the other life-forms or the natural environment.”

Germ theory allowed people to collapse everything about disease into battles between pathogens and patients. Social matters such as inequality, housing, education, race, culture, psychology, and politics became irrelevancies. Ignoring them was noble; it made medicine and science more apolitical and objective. Ignoring them was also easier; instead of staring into the abyss of society’s intractable ills, physicians could simply stare at a bug under a microscope and devise ways of killing it. Somehow, they even convinced themselves that improved health would “ultimately reduce poverty and other social inequities,” wrote Allan Brandt and Martha Gardner in 2000.

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Last year, “for a moment, we were able to see the invisible infrastructure of society,” Sarah Willen, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who studies Americans’ conceptions of health equity, told me. “But that seismic effect has passed.” Socially privileged people now also enjoy the privilege of immunity, while those with low incomes, food insecurity, eviction risk, and jobs in grocery stores and agricultural settings are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated. Once, they were deemed “essential”; now they’re treated as obstinate annoyances who stand between vaccinated America and a normal life.

The pull of the normal is strong, and our metaphors accentuate it. We describe the pandemic’s course in terms of “waves,” which crest and then collapse to baseline. We bill COVID-19 as a “crisis” — a word that evokes decisive moments and turning points, “and that, whether you want to or not, indexes itself against normality,” Reinhart told me. “The idea that something new can be born out of it is lost,” because people long to claw their way back to a precrisis state, forgetting that the crisis was itself born of those conditions.

- Ed Young

After close to two years of COVID if you haven't heard (leave alone read) Ed Young then please re-read the title of this post. 

The crazy thing is even Ed Young is only complaining about lack of "pandemic-preparedness" and none one is still doing something about "pandemic-prevention" which comes from reducing and eliminating suffering of non-human animals.