Obsidian Wings

Cemeteries

by JanieM

A couple of summers ago, after years of procrastination, I got a lawyer to help me rewrite my will. We also drafted a power of attorney for money matters and a health care advance directive.

One of the reasons I had been procrastinating was that I wanted to write a novella-length response to every item in the health care advance directive. The lawyer helped me narrow my options, and though I still have second thoughts about some of them, I have so far managed not to re-open that can of worms.

Another reason I procrastinated was that I couldn’t decide where – or even if – I want to be buried when I die. That question remains unaddressed.

When I was younger, I thought I’d ask for a simple burial, no embalming, no lead casket, just let my physical self return to the earth where it (partly) came from. In more recent years, with adult children who have scattered and no clear sense of a home place, I haven’t been so sure. If burial, then yes, it should be simple. But if not burial, maybe cremation? Or maybe one of these newfangled alternatives?

I still can’t decide.

I am fascinated by cemeteries. When I visit my home town in Ohio, where some of my family still live, I always make a trek to the cemeteries. Some of my people are Italian immigrants or their descendants; they’re in the Catholic cemetery in town. Others – the “old American” ones – are scattered around the rural areas of the county. One is a Revolutionary War veteran. Others “removed” to Ohio from Connecticut when northeastern Ohio was “unbroken wilderness,” as one of my family’s genealogy books says. They all have stories: early deaths, at least one suicide, blended families, long grudges, neighbors who stepped in when tragedy struck. Many are veterans; one died in Korea in 1952.

Adam Silverman touched on these matters in a recent Balloon Juice post about bomb threats at Jewish community centers and vandalism at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis. The whole post is worth a look, but this paragraph in particular spoke to my dilemma:

I cannot emphasize enough just how bad this is. Not the property damage, in and of itself that’s bad, but because ground that has been the site of violence cannot be sanctified/re-sanctified. Provided that this is just cosmetic damage to the headstones – defacing, being knocked over, etc – there should be no problem. But if the graves themselves have been desecrated, then it will require reburials and the spaces will never be able to be reused as Judaism prohibits reusing a grave. This means that if someone has to be reburied in another plot, then the final resting place and marker/memorial will either be away from the remainder of their relations graves or everyone will have to be relocated. [jm: my emphasis, and one typo correction.] This is not only traumatic for the living, but becomes prohibitively expensive to deal with.

The part about valuing burial among one’s relations echoes strongly for me, and yet I don’t really belong out there in Ohio. I left when I was eighteen to indulge my extreme math nerdiness (this part was deliberate) and to discover that I was gay (this part was a surprise).
I never went back. On the other hand, though I am utterly at home in the landscape of my adopted home state of Maine, I don’t have any family ties here.

It’s a dilemma that I may end up passing on to my kids. But in the meantime, I’m curious:

What are the death customs in the culture/religion you identify with, or that you simply prefer for whatever reason? Do you have plans, or will you leave your heirs to decide? Do you like cemeteries or avoid them? Have you ever scattered anyone’s ashes? (I haven’t, but I’ve helped bury my uncle’s.)

How would you feel about being buried far from “home” – whatever home means to you? I’m thinking of the World War I dead in France and Belgium, or the ANZAC soldiers buried at Gallipoli, or the uncounted wanderers who have had to leave their original homes for whatever reason.

What do you-all think?

*****

The grave of one of my thirty-two four-greats-grandfathers, who is buried in Ohio and would be my ticket into the DAR if I wanted one:

From the ObWi hivemind

by liberal japonicus

Just to let you know, we've asked a few people to join the front page, with the key being they provide some new points of view. I'm closing the comments to this post as it is just an announcement, but if you have ideas or recommendations for others, drop a line to the kitty.

TRAPPIST No Longer Automatically Says "Monk" to Me -- Weekend Open Thread

by wj

We're overdue for another thread, so here it is. (I was hoping Doctor Science could do something with this particular bit of news. But I guess you'll have to make do with me.)

Wednesday, at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) meetings, scientists had some highs to go with their feelings of concern: NASA has announced that TRAPPIST, the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, has found a wonder. In addition to the visuals in the NASA announcement, there is this artist's illustration.

It's a star with seven (7!) earth-sized planets, three of which may be in the zone to possible have liquid water -- apparently the central star is a very dim dwarf. And, since it's only 40 light years away, it's close enough that we may get more than just the bare minimum of information about them. Not just sizes, but actual information on atmospheres and what they are made up of. Perhaps even how planets which are tidally locked to a star can manage to keep an atmosphere circulating and temperatures tolerable.

It never ceases to amaze me how much more we know today about the universe around us than we did when I was growing up. (Admittedly, I'm of an age where I can remember going out into the yard to watch the first ever artificial satellite pass over.) And more information pours in every day. How anyone can fail to have a sense of wonder at it all eludes me -- science is just so damn interesting.

There's More Happening in the World than Trump -- Weekend Open Thread

by wj

Among the interesting stories this past week, Kim Jong-nam, the (older) half brother of North Korea's leader Kin Jong Un, was assassinated in Malaysia. Several North Koreans are in custody.

But the interesting bit is the response from China, where he has been resident for some years. China is said to feel insulted as a result. Not to mention frustrated by North Korea's latest missile test. And it now appears that they are going to do something about it.

China is North Korea's biggest trading partner by far. And the biggest export North Korea has is coal. So it matters that China has suspended all coal imports from North Korea. Immediately and for the rest of 2017. That's going to hurt Kim John Un where it hurts: in the ability to buy the luxury imports that he loves.

No doubt there are other things happening in the world outside as well. Have at!

The United States has no national security

by Doctor Science

This is not a drill, and I am not speaking rhetorically. I think the evidence shows that, at the White House level, the United States has *no* functioning national security, as the national security and intelligence communities understand it.

Most of the talk, as in the previous post, about the growing conflict between Trump and NS/IC is about Trump and his associates' ties to Russia, and the extent to which they may be acting as Russian assets.

This is obviously a very serious charge that has to be investigated, post-haste. But a lot of us have been screaming our fool heads off about this for *months* without NS/IC going this far, so why now? What took them this long?

I wonder if the reason this has broken out now was the apparent use of the Mar-a-Lago terrace as a Situation Room. At Mar-a-Lago Trump and his staff showed themselves incapable of acting as part of a national security system. The whole intelligence community, the national security apparatus, and the military now saw, publicly, that classified or sensitive material given to the Trump White House will not be treated as such. It's not as specific as "this particular person is compromised by Russia", it's a general failure to acknowledge that national security issues have special significance.

I'm cutting here because this post is long and has embedded tweets and other slow-down factors.

This view from a Former CIAer is Disturbing

by Ugh

Vox has an interview with "a 23-year veteran of the CIA and a former deputy officer on the National Intelligence Council."  I picked this up in my twitter feed, that person describing it as "chilling."  But I think they meant chilling from an "isn't Trump a horrible threat?" perspective, although perhaps not.  But my take away is that the intelligence community - or at least this person who spent more than two decades working in it - is full of themselves (and "it") and feels entitled to undermine the President of the United States if they view him as sufficiently not to their liking.

More below.

unexpected but welcome

by russell

Leaving the flaming hulk of the Trump administration aside for a moment, I thought this piece from Reuters to be of interest.  Unexpected, but welcome.

tl;dr - big pharma is not all that interested in a massive rollback of FDA regulation.  

The primary reason seems to be that drugs that actually make it through the regulatory hoops have demonstrated value and safety, and thus can command a premium price.  But patient safety also pops up on the radar, which is... a good thing.  Nobody wants people to be harmed by pharmaceuticals released to market with insufficient vetting - glad to hear it!

In any case, worth a read IMO.

Hacking Trump's Brain

by Doctor Science

A few days ago media guru Dan Pfeiffer tweeted:

Trump might be the most predictable human on earth https://t.co/GmmtMlM4j6

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) February 6, 2017

So-called President* Trump is also easily influenced (especially by the last person he spoke to), and is, of course, probably the most influential person in the world.

Everyone wants to hack Trump's brain. Everyone always wants to influence influential public figures -- let me tell you about Louis XIV! -- but with Trump the process has gone to a much higher level than we've seen with any other public figure, maybe ever, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, since his Inauguration Trump has had a lonely yet public life. Neither his wife nor his children are living with him, and he seems to spend a lot of his time in the evenings and early mornings watching TV while phoning and/or tweeting.

Because he often tweets in response to what he sees on TV, we know what he watches. For instance, Pfeiffer's tweet above was in response to this tweetfrom NBC News editor Brad Jaffy:

This MJoe segment on Bannon (6:09 a.m.) may have been what set off Trump's “I call my own shots” tweet (7:07 a.m.) https://t.co/DxPddbuWMm

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 6, 2017

Since Trump tweets in response to things he sees on "Morning Joe, [t]he ad rates for "Morning Joe" have more than doubled post-election, according to one veteran media buyer," Politico reported. "One prominent D.C. consultant said some of his clients, including a big bank and major pharmaceutical company, were negotiating this week to buy ads on "O'Reilly" and "Morning Joe" because they knew they had a good chance of reaching the president."

We talk a lot about "this is not normal" these days, but this is beyond not-normal, we're into the realm of the surreal.

Today the President of the United States isn't just the Commander-in-Chief, he's the Demographic-in-Chief, with people and firms competing for his attention by advertising on his favorite shows, hoping for mentions on his twitter.

That people will try to influence the President is perfectly natural and to be expected, but one of the functions of his staff (and family) is normally to be both buffer and filter: to screen out extraneous demands, but to let in worthwhile information and influences so the President can make good decisions.

"Surrealist Landscape" by 1337samurai on deviantart. Created in 2009, I think the elephant in the crown is a particularly prophetic touch.

By watching so much TV, Trump has essentially made FoxNews, MSNBC, and CNN part of his staff, letting them determine what gets through his filters. And not just their programming, their ads! -- or at least, that's what the people buying those ads think.

In a wacky, 2017 way, this *is* a more transparent approach to money in Washington. The public can see who buys time on "Morning Joe" or "The O'Reilly Show" and what they're saying, and can thus see who's trying to influence Trump in what direction. And in fact I think some media or communications student should start a spreadsheet right now, it might turn out to be really useful.

I can't find it now, but I recall that during the transition I saw a story saying that Kellyanne Conway was on TV so much not just to promote Trump's policys, but to influence them: that Trump, seeing her on TV, would be influenced by her views and presentation. That he would believe her and be swayed by her, because he saw her on TV. Even though he sent her there. At the time I thought it was kind of ridiculous, and even if true was sure to be an artifact of the transition, but now I see it as part of a pattern.

As I was finishing up the edits on this post, Alexandrea Erin alerted me to a Politico article saying the same thing:

...but no one is more cognizant of the fact that their job is performing for one man or more comfortable with it than is Conway. pic.twitter.com/2UCBCuGvvv

— Alexandra Erin (@alexandraerin) February 12, 2017

Those of who are opposed to Trump are also trying to hack his brain, though mostly by different methods because we have different goals.

Nice, well-intentioned people have tried to persuade those of us in #TheResistance that all our protesting isn't going to be effective the way we're doing it. But one unspoken yet serious goal of the protests, especially the ones that follow Trump himself wherever he goes, is ... well. To help Mike Pence.

I loathe Mike Pence, I think he'd be a terrible President. But he'd be a terrible President in a standard Republican mold, or a slightly exaggerated version thereof. I think of this as the "Marty metric", after one of our resident conservative commenters who pointed it out as a way to decide what to freak out about in the opposite party. It's very probable that tens of thousands of Americans would needlessly die on Pence's watch, but that would be true of any Republican who succeeded in gutting the ACA or the Clean Air & Water Acts.

Trump is NOT a standard Republican. He has already done significant damage to the fabric of international relations, and the longer he's around the more he threatens major peacekeeping institutions like NATO. I truly believe *millions* of lives are at risk, if Russia invades the Baltics or the Ukraine, or if Pakistan and India start lobbing nukes at each other (may heaven forfend!).

The decision to go for either impeachment or the 25th Amendment is essentially political, and must be made by Republicans. One of the reasons we protest Trump and mock him at every turn is to make him feel unhappy and stressed, so that he's more likely to say or do something in public that Pence and his colleagues can use as ammunition.

Yeah, what I mean is pushing Trump to having a physical or mental breakdown.

"Propane Jane" is a psychiatrist in Texas. When she looks at Donald Trump,

I find myself confronted with public behavioral disturbances that more closely resemble the DSM than they do politics as usual. I've written extensively about the political aspects of Trump's many disqualifying attributes, from his peddling in the privileged politics of personal insult, to his disingenuous minority outreach, and his exploitation of the poorly informed; but now it's time that we discuss his mental health.

I'm not here to formally diagnose him from afar, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't beginning to feel somewhat derelict watching an emergency unfold without meaningful, life-saving intervention taking place. I make my living treating acute and sub-acute mental and behavioral health emergencies, which means people don't end up on my radar unless they've comported themselves in ways that are generally determined to be unstable and unsafe. In some cases it's florid psychosis, dementia, or mania, and in others it's severe depression and suicidality, or unbridled poly substance abuse or personality disorder. No matter the etiology, my duty is to determine if the mental status changes in question represent a lack of stability and/or portend a heightened risk to individual or public safety.

When I hear and see Donald Trump, I hear and see an emergency.

In a later tweetstorm:

As a psychiatrist, my SPECIFIC concerns w/Trump are 1) clinically significant character pathology 2) readily apparent cognitive impairment.

His antisocial narcissism is a lost cause and should've disqualified him from jump but antisocial narcissists have the right to vote too.

Beyond that he won't be the first antisocial narcissist to be POTUS. The kicker here is that he's also elderly AND cognitively impaired.

I repeat, the overarching issue here is Trump is unmistakably disinhibited, incoherent, and erratic. No matter the etiology, he's UNFIT.

Following Propane Jane (a must if you're on Twitter, truthbombs dropped daily), I've seen many people point out similarities between Trump's behavior and that of their relatives with Alzheimer's. (Also ADD, which is pretty likely but not really a problem on the same level.)

As we can all tell by looking, "President of the United States" is an extremely stressful job that tends to age a person hard. The only President of my conscious lifetime who didn't seem to be ground down by the Presidency was Ronald Reagan, and in retrospect I wonder if this was an early symptom of his Alzheimer's.

Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis boycotted Trump's Inauguration, and then attended the Women's March in Atlanta. The following Monday, reporter Devon Maloney tweeted:

John Lewis just walked through Terminal 2 at DCA followed by what can only be called a rolling tidal wave of standing ovations.

— Devon Maloney (@dynamofire) January 23, 2017

CNN collected various videos.

I am certain that this is what Trump expected the Presidency to be like: "a rolling tidal wave of standing ovations". Instead, as a recent Politico article reports: "his mood has careened between surprise and anger as he's faced the predictable realities of governing". And this is coming from his "allies".

So, we've got an unprepared and mentally unstable person, doing one of the most significant and stressful jobs in the world. I think a *lot* of us are doing our best to subject Trump to psychological stress, not out of sadism or payback (or at least not only that). We want him to feel more stress so he'll behave even more erratically, so his mental health will deteriorate faster and more publically, so Pence and Congress will make their move sooner.

I admit, it's a horrible thing to want, especially when I think of it as someone who has long-standing mental illness. But nuclear war (or even conventional war!) is a much worse thing, and while Trump's mental deterioration probably can't be prevented--as Propane Jane says, he's a man too hated to be helped--we have time to drag the world back from the nightmare brink. Millions of lives could be at stake.

Autocrat II, by Liza Brenner.

* If he can call a judge who was unanimous approved by the US Senate "so-called", I can sure call someone who got 3 million fewer popular votes a so-called president.

He May be a Dumpster Fire, but he's OUR Dumpster Fire (Open Thread)

by Ugh

The Magical Mystery Reality Show of Doom, Tacos and Discontinued Clothing Lines continues here in the United States of Fnckin' A.  While Week 3 showed a slight down-tick in pictures of CBP-handcuffed pre-Kers and other similar defenses of the national security, we still managed to have our fair share of entertainment, in a "oh-god-we're-all-gonna'-die-pass-the-vodka-and-Valium" kind of way.  Even Super Bowl was entertaining, although I guess in the same way for most of the country.

Republican President Donald Trump is still President, as of this writing, so it seems the show has been renewed for a fourth week.  Upcoming week's highlights:  Alec Baldwin hosts SNL, Sean Spicer Canning Watch goes into full gear, Michael Flynn Indictment Watch started, Steve "Mnu" Mnuchin to be confirmed as SecTreas, plus: this week's horrible surprise!  Ratings are high.

Open thread.

bannon

by russell

I've been curious about Steve Bannon, Trump's advisor.  Trump is pretty much a well-known quantity - what you see is what you get, who and what he is, is basically there to see.  I don't think there's any significant hidden depths behind the surface - what's on the surface is who he is.  Bannon is a different case, he doesn't put himself out there very much.  He holds his cards pretty closely.

I found this transcription of an interview he gave to some conservative Catholic folks at the Vatican back in 2014.  The link here goes to BuzzFeed, the same content is available in many places, including YouTube.  There are a number of points Bannon makes here that I agree with - the loss of any sense of social responsibility in capitalism as it is practiced, the neglect of working people's interests.

What I found disturbing was his embrace of the whole "war of civilizations" reading of militant Islamic fundamentalism.  That is, he apparently views things like Al Qaeda and ISIS in terms of an epic and existential conflict between Islam and "The West", where "the west" is conflated with Christendom.  And, that the US, in spite of our tradition of and Constitutional requirement for religious tolerance, is part of that.  I find this disturbing because the logical and inevitable outcome of that is some kind of military fight to the death between "The West" and "Islam".  Which seems, to me, both unnecessary and wrong-headed.  And, a lot of people will die.

What I found ironic is his use of the term "the church militant".  He makes the same error here that militant Islamists do with the term "jihad" - mistaking what is intended to be an analogy from physical struggle to a moral, ethical, and spiritual one, for a call to actual physical combat.  

Anyway, I continue to find Bannon a dangerous guy.  What I take away from everything I've been able to find about him is that he wants, urgently, to go to war, with people we don't necessarily need to go to war with.  And he's more than happy to break whatever institutions stand in his way, to make that happen.