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The Red Queen’s Race
I also finished a first action on my oldest Regular New application. This coming week, I hope to do a first action on another Regular New case. There’s just one week left in the third quarter.
The Great Depression changed the US in more ways than people realize today. Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president as the economy sank further and further. His New Deal programs were designed for the three "R"s: relief, recovery, and reform. There were many programs the government rolled out between 1933 and 1938, and those that didn't yield results were dropped, while the most effective survive today. The programs that worked gave us affordable mortgages, electricity in rural areas, the minimum wage and the 44-hour work week (since changed to 40), protections for bank accounts, national park amenities, old age pensions, protection for our natural resources, rules for Wall Street trading, and a lot more. All this required massive government spending, but it got us through the decade. After World War II boosted the American economy into the black, some Depression era programs were considered so important that they were made permanent. Read about those New Deal programs and how they changed America at Mental Floss.
(Image source: Library of Congress)
A significant part of the problem is that we only start saying "all pain is in the brain" (or "the tissue isn't the issue" or whatever) to people with complex or chronic pain.
And there's a good reason for that! It's the same reason that I need to have a much more detailed idea of the fine detail of what an atom is and how it behaves than the vast majority of the population, for whom the Bohr model is perfectly adequate!
... and we need to explain that, we need to explain why we don't tell people with simple acute pain that All Pain Is In The Brain -- it's not because it's any less true for them, it's just that for most people most of the time they don't need to worry about that level of detail. But if you don't explain that, it sure do sound a lot like "your pain isn't real (unlike those people over there)".
Lies-to-children. That. That thing. That's a thing I need to explain.
Every afternoon this week, I reach a point in the afternoon where I stumble away from my work computer and end up in the kitchen, and there on the countertop I see a handful (or more!) of strawberries, which V has harvested and washed.
And I try to only eat half (which was easier today because they ended up telling me they'd already eaten half of what they'd picked, and they'd finished off the blueberries in the fridge along with it; basically that was their lunch), and it's just the thing I need to get through the rest of the day.
Strawberry season is the best season. And I'm so grateful that don't even have to pick them myself!
You know of Ed Gein, even if you were never sure how to pronounce his name. He was a serial killer who inspired numerous cinematic killers such as Buffalo Bill, Norman Bates, Leatherface, and a bunch of other movie characters, including himself. In 1957, investigators searched Gein's home and found bodies and body parts of numerous people in various stages of dismemberment. Gein was trying to make a suit out of human skin that he could wear and become his mother. He had exhumed most of them from graveyards, but confessed to two murders. Gein was convicted of one murder and is suspected to be behind many other cases of missing persons around Plainfield, Wisconsin. He spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.
You can read about Gein's crimes in many places, but you also have to wonder, what could have led to Gein's twisted view of the world and of the people he treated so carelessly? Weird History focuses on his early life with his parents, and uncovers a story that can best be described as "how not to raise children." It's no excuse for his actions, but it is another horror story connected with Gein.
When Europeans colonized the Americas, they found corn, an easily-grown and inexpensive grain. Eventually, many of the poorest people in Europe were eating little besides corn, made into polenta in Italy, and began to suffer from a disease called pellagra. For hundreds of years, no one knew what caused pellagra, but some suspected it was caused by a fungus or insects associated with corn. Only in the 1920s did they realize it was a nutritional deficiency, and in the '30s it was found to be a lack of niacin (vitamin B3). The poor folks who consumed mostly polenta suffered from skin rashes and diarrhea, and if it went untreated, they developed dementia, called pellagrous insanity.
During those hundreds of years, Italian sufferers could end up at San Servolo or San Clemente, two islands off of Venice with hospitals for the mentally ill. Treatment of these inmates varied according to their social status and the medical philosophy of those in charge of the hospitals. It took way too long for authorities to figure out why an improved diet would "cure" individuals, only for them to return later after eating little besides polenta in their home towns. Read about the mental hospitals of San Servolo and San Clemente at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Kasa Fue)