The Astrology of the Pandemic

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The individual vs alternative facts

When philosophers say there’s no such thing as objective truth, they mean there’s no such thing as certainty. And as the cacophony of information from the media and technology becomes ever louder, how should we deal with this multiplicity? Must nuance be legislated, taught in schools, or left to the individual? Does knowledge stand a chance in a world of alternative facts?

In this new series of in-depth interviews, the IAI asks leading thinkers across philosophy, science, politics and the arts about the new ideas that they think are most significant, and about what the future has in store.

More from this series

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker on human nature, the enlightenment and beyond.
Philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on the role of intuition in Philosophy. 

The Speaker

Åsa Wikforss is a professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University. Wikforss is a member of Swedish Academy whose research focuses on the intersection of philosophy of mind, language and epistemology, ans in 2017 Wikfoss published Alternative facts. On knowledge and its enemies, a book that has had a great impact in Sweden.

Their radically opposed ideas of freedom broke up the philosophical friendship of the 20th century.

Aeon (getpocket.com)

• Sam Dresser

Albert Camus, 1952. Photo by Kurt Hutton / Stringer / Getty Images.

They were an odd pair. Albert Camus was French Algerian, a pied-noir born into poverty who effortlessly charmed with his Bogart-esque features. Jean-Paul Sartre, from the upper reaches of French society, was never mistaken for a handsome man. They met in Paris during the Occupation and grew closer after the Second World War. In those days, when the lights of the city were slowly turning back on, Camus was Sartre’s closest friend. ‘How we loved you then,’ Sartre later wrote.

They were gleaming icons of the era. Newspapers reported on their daily movements: Sartre holed up at Les Deux Magots, Camus the peripatetic of Paris. As the city began to rebuild, Sartre and Camus gave voice to the mood of the day. Europe had been immolated, but the ashes left by war created the space to imagine a new world. Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look like. ‘We were,’ remembered the fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, ‘to provide the postwar era with its ideology.’

It came in the form of existentialism. Sartre, Camus and their intellectual companions rejected religion, staged new and unnerving plays, challenged readers to live authentically, and wrote about the absurdity of the world – a world without purpose and without value. ‘[There are] only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch,’ Camus wrote. We must choose to live in this world and to project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it. This means that people are free and burdened by it, since with freedom there is a terrible, even debilitating, responsibility to live and act authentically.

If the idea of freedom bound Camus and Sartre philosophically, then the fight for justice united them politically. They were committed to confronting and curing injustice, and, in their eyes, no group of people was more unjustly treated than the workers, the proletariat. Camus and Sartre thought of them as shackled to their labour and shorn of their humanity. In order to free them, new political systems must be constructed.

In October 1951, Camus published The Rebel. In it, he gave voice to a roughly drawn ‘philosophy of revolt’. This wasn’t a philosophical system per se, but an amalgamation of philosophical and political ideas: every human is free, but freedom itself is relative; one must embrace limits, moderation, ‘calculated risk’; absolutes are anti-human. Most of all, Camus condemned revolutionary violence. Violence might be used in extreme circumstances (he supported the French war effort, after all) but the use of revolutionary violence to nudge history in the direction you desire is utopian, absolutist, and a betrayal of yourself.

‘Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate,’ Camus wrote, while ‘absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.’ The conflict between justice and freedom required constant re-balancing, political moderation, an acceptance and celebration of that which limits the most: our humanity. ‘To live and let live,’ he said, ‘in order to create what we are.’

Sartre read The Rebel with disgust. As far as he was concerned, it was possible to achieve perfect justice and freedom – that described the achievement of communism. Under capitalism, and in poverty, workers could not be free. Their options were unpalatable and inhumane: to work a pitiless and alienating job, or to die. But by removing the oppressors and broadly returning autonomy to the workers, communism allows each individual to live without material want, and therefore to choose how best they can realise themselves. This makes them free, and through this unbending equality, it is also just.

The problem is that, for Sartre and many others on the Left, communism required revolutionary violence to achieve because the existing order must be smashed. Not all leftists, of course, endorsed such violence. This division between hardline and moderate leftists – broadly, between communists and socialists – was nothing new. The 1930s and early ’40s, however, had seen the Left temporarily united against fascism. With the destruction of fascism, the rupture between hardline leftists willing to condone violence and moderates who condemned it returned. This split was made all the more dramatic by the practical disappearance of the Right and the ascendancy of the Soviet Union – which empowered hardliners throughout Europe, but raised disquieting questions for communists as the horrors of gulags, terror and show trials came to light. The question for every leftist of the postwar era was simple: which side are you on?

With the publication of The Rebel, Camus declared for a peaceful socialism that would not resort to revolutionary violence. He was appalled by the stories emerging from the USSR: it was not a country of hand-in-hand communists, living freely, but a country with no freedom at all. Sartre, meanwhile, would fight for communism, and he was prepared to endorse violence to do so.

The split between the two friends was a media sensation. Les Temps Modernes – the journal edited by Sartre, which published a critical review of The Rebel – sold out three times over. Le Monde and L’Observateur both breathlessly covered the falling out. It’s hard to imagine an intellectual feud capturing that degree of public attention today, but, in this disagreement, many readers saw the political crises of the times reflected back at them. It was a way of seeing politics played out in the world of ideas, and a measure of the worth of ideas. If you are thoroughly committed to an idea, are you compelled to kill for it? What price for justice? What price for freedom?

Sartre’s position was shot through with contradiction, with which he struggled for the remainder of his life. Sartre, the existentialist, who said that humans are condemned to be free, was also Sartre, the Marxist, who thought that history does not allow much space for true freedom in the existential sense. Though he never actually joined the French Communist Party, he would continue to defend communism throughout Europe until 1956, when the Soviet tanks in Budapest convinced him, finally, that the USSR did not hold the way forward. (Indeed, he was dismayed by the Soviets in Hungary because they were acting like Americans, he said.) Sartre would remain a powerful voice on the Left throughout his life, and chose the French president Charles de Gaulle as his favourite whipping boy. (After one particularly vicious attack, de Gaulle was asked to arrest Sartre. ‘One does not imprison Voltaire,’ he responded.) Sartre remained unpredictable, however, and was engaged in a long, bizarre dalliance with hardline Maoism when he died in 1980. Though Sartre moved away from the USSR, he never completely abandoned the idea that revolutionary violence might be warranted.

Philosophy Feud: Sartre vs Camus from Aeon Video on Vimeo.

The violence of communism sent Camus on a different trajectory. ‘Finally,’ he wrote in The Rebel, ‘I choose freedom. For even if justice is not realised, freedom maintains the power of protest against injustice and keeps communication open.’ From the other side of the Cold War, it is hard not to sympathise with Camus, and to wonder at the fervour with which Sartre remained a loyal communist. Camus’s embrace of sober political reality, of moral humility, of limits and fallible humanity, remains a message well-heeded today. Even the most venerable and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another. Absolutism, and the impossible idealism it inspires, is a dangerous path forward – and the reason Europe lay in ashes, as Camus and Sartre struggled to envision a fairer and freer world.

Sam Dresser is an editor at Aeon. He lives in New York.

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This post originally appeared on Aeon and was published January 26, 2017. This article is republished here with permission.

The iconic actor played Iceman, Doc Holliday, Batman, and Jim Morrison, but behind all the mythic roles was a man grasping for meaning wherever he could find it. Here he opens up about cancer, strength, and death.

BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS APR 21, 2020 (menshealth.com)

Val Kilmer in Los Angeles in early 2020.TOM STRATTON

SOME YEARS AGO, Val Kilmer began selling his original artwork on the Internet. Kilmer has been making art for a long time. He takes photographs and creates scrapbook-style media collages with atmospheric abstract paintings resembling blooms of underwater lava. His neon sculpture of a dyspeptic-looking Mahatma Gandhi hung for a while in the restaurant of a fancy hotel in South Beach, and he once cast a tumbleweed in 22-karat gold.

But the project he’s become most famous for is an ongoing series of quasi-self-portraits—Warholian pop-art images of Kilmer in character as Batman or Doc Holliday or Jim Morrison, rendered using stencils and brightly colored enamel paint on 12-inch-by-12-inch squares of reclaimed steel. Sometimes he’ll superimpose a stenciled word like love on the image, or a variation of a quote from one of his movies, such as chicks dig the car. His website didn’t have any Doc Holliday paintings at press time, but for a fan-friendly $150, you could still acquire a portrait of Kilmer as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky—Tom Cruise’s nemesis and beach-volleyball rival in Top Gun—in a range of colors, from neon green to red and blue to eerie red-on-black.

These are not the most technically complex or conceptually weighty paintings. They are not even technically complex or conceptually weighty by the standards of other paintings by Val Kilmer. But there’s an additional layer of meaning to them, because they’re portraits of Val Kilmer by Val Kilmer.

The pictures feel like a sincere effort on his part to use the tools at his disposal
to make sense of his own relationship to a postmodern character called “Val Kilmer,” who is less a person than a collection of symbolic echoes, and who casts a long shadow over the real Val Kilmer’s life despite existing solely in the media landscape and the public’s mind. There is nothing inherently interesting about a piece of steel with a stenciled image of Val Kilmer as Batman on it, but a piece of steel on which Val Kilmer himself has painted a stenciled image of Val Kilmer as Batman as part of a project involving the painting of dozens of Val Kilmer-as-Batman images becomes an act of introspection, a commentary, a reflection on reflections and the indelibility of iconicity.

One afternoon in early March, I discussed all of this with Val Kilmer over the phone. “Yes,” he said. “By repainting the exact same thing using a stencil, it was a way of contemplating the subject while being very strict with what I was inviting myself to do.”

I asked him if the paintings were a way for him to work through the feeling of being known without being known, to help process the weirdness that comes with everyone looking at you and seeing Iceman or the Lizard King. “It’s not so much me thinking about myself,” he said. “It’s more about the icon. The icon of the warrior. Or the gunslinger—that black-and-white justice that’s part of American history. That’s Doc Holliday. And then Jim Morrison is an iconic rock ’n’ roller, a poet.

“I also found there was a surprising number of fans who wanted original paintings,” he continued, as if to puncture the self-importance of talking about this work in this way. “I sold an embarrassing number of them.”

I think he laughed when he said this; I’m not positive. It was a strange conversation, because there was no way for it not to be. Kilmer, now 60, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015. In the opening pages of his new memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, (Simon & Schuster, April 21, 2020) he has lost his New Mexico home as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and finds himself convalescing at an ex-girlfriend’s place. This is a book of absurd juxtapositions; the home happens to be an Italian Renaissance–style palazzo in Malibu overlooking the ocean, because the ex-girlfriend happens to be Cher. He is there when his condition takes a fateful turn.

“Cher dipped out for afternoon errands,” he writes. “Night fell, and I fell asleep. Suddenly I awoke vomiting blood that covered the bed like a scene out of The Godfather. I prayed immediately, then called 911.” Eventually he endures two tracheotomies. “The cancer miraculously healed much faster than any of the doctors predicted,” he writes, but adds, “It has taken time, and taken a toll. . . . Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood, has become an hourly struggle.” He describes his new voice as sounding “like Marlon Brando after a couple of bottles of tequila. It isn’t a frog in my throat. More like a buffalo.”

Kilmer with a copy of I’m Your Huckleberry.@VALKILMEROFFICIALINSTAGRAM

Kilmer and I both live in Los Angeles. COVID-19 had not yet rendered in-person interactions verboten, so I suggested we could talk in person, but he wanted to speak over the phone, through an interpreter—his high school friend and business partner, Brad Koepenick. I would ask a question, I’d hear some indistinct buffalo growls on the other end of the line, and then Koepenick would repeat Kilmer’s response to me in his own voice. We spoke to each other this way for about an hour.

At first there were a few people speaking in the room, and I asked Koepenick if he could identify himself. “I’m Brad Koepenick,” he said. After that, I heard Kilmer speaking—rarrrggh rarrrggh rarrrggh—and then, speaking for Kilmer, Koepenick said, “I am Spartacus.” For all his responses, for clarity, when Koepenick is speaking Kilmer’s words, I’ve attributed them to Kilmer, and I’ve attributed Koepenick’s occasional comments to Koepenick.

To understand Val Kilmer, in all his incarnations, it’s important to recognize that he has been a Christian Scientist since the age of seven or eight. Founded in 1879 by the author Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science is a form of metaphysical Christianity whose adherents believe, among other things, that physical illness and infirmity result from mental misconception or “negative thinking.” All of Kilmer’s answers to questions regarding physical matters reflect these beliefs—as he writes in his memoir, his physical difficulties have led him deeper into spiritual practice: “When one sense weakens, another grows strong. I have more time to play in the metaphysical forests.”

Val Kilmer training in a Suzuki Method class at the Juilliard School, New York. At 17, he was the youngest drama student ever admitted in 1981.SIMON & SCHUSTER

It says something important about Val Kilmer’s mind, however, that the only historical figure who seems to loom as large in his personal pantheon as Mary Baker Eddy is Mark Twain. Twain was a contemporary of Eddy’s, and while he spoke approvingly of Christian Science’s core principles on occasion, he saw its founder as a charlatan.

In 2012, Kilmer began portraying Twain—whom he views as “the first media-literacy educator”—in a one-man stage show, Citizen Twain, and has spent years working on the script for a movie depicting a fictional meeting between Twain and Eddy, which he still hopes to direct. “Twain is the antagonist in the story,” Kilmer says. “Mary Baker Eddy is the protagonist. Mark Twain can’t help his pride and ego, his madness.”

Kilmer in character as Mark Twain.SIMON & SCHUSTER

I asked if this was what Kilmer related to about Twain as a character.

“His madness?” Kilmer asked, and then Koepenick, the interpreter, laughed.

Sure, I said. His pride, his ego, his madness. “Yeah,” Kilmer said. “We all have pride to work through.”

I WANTED TO TALK to Val Kilmer about pride. When he was young, he was beautiful, and moved through the world with the ease of someone beautiful, from school plays to Juilliard to the movies, such as 1984’s Top Secret!, which instantly made him a movie star for playing a rock star. One year later, with Real Genius, he was already a hyper-opinionated pain in the ass on set—he admits as much in his book—and a year after that came Top Gun, and with it great fortune.

Kilmer was a stage-trained actor with grand aspirations—he writes with chagrin about turning down the lead in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet due to the script’s sexual content and cops to badgering Stanley Kubrick for a meeting he never got. But by the mid-’90s, he’d become an A-list leading man who was reportedly receiving $6 million per picture, which was a different kind of grand.

His movie career hit its zenith in the first five years of the ’90s, when he played Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, Elvis’s ghost in True Romance, the gunfighter Doc Holliday in Tombstone, Robert De Niro’s demolitions-expert partner in Michael Mann’s bank-heist epic Heat, and Batman in Joel Schumacher’s goofy, garish Batman Forever. Those last two came out in 1995, and after that the going got weird. Whether Kilmer walked away or was released from his contractual obligation to play Batman again due to difficult behavior is unclear. His next projects were the film version of the 1960s TV series The Saint—in which he disappears behind a series of increasingly ludicrous wigs and glasses like somebody who really, really wants you to know he went to Juilliard—and a remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, which became one of the decade’s most infamously cursed productions.

In the pages of Huckleberry, Kilmer is equivocal about his reputation as a temperamental collaborator (“In an unflinching attempt to empower directors, actors, and other collaborators to honor the truth and essence of each project . . . I had been deemed difficult and alienated the head of every major studio”), but he talks straight about much of the work that followed (“I have here described myself as a man with lofty goals, and I have a solid two decades’ worth of work that I’d describe as less than lofty”).

There are true gems in Kilmer’s post-Moreau filmography, like the David Mamet human-trafficking thriller Spartan, Shane Black’s manically inventive Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and MacGruber, in which Kilmer plays a Bond-style villain named Dieter Von Cunth. His hazy-eyed performance as the doomed ’70s porn star John Holmes in 2003’s Wonderland is a riff on his Morrison but funnier and sadder, the Lizard King as lost soul. But for all intents and purposes, Batman was his farewell to franchise-hero parts. Having grown up watching Kilmer in blockbuster movies and then appreciating his work in smaller films, I never thought of him as a cautionary tale about hubris or ego, but Huckleberry points in that direction. His last thought on turning down Lynch is a poignant plea: “Maybe it’s not too late,” he writes. “Maybe one day we can finally work together. A character who lives up on Mulholland and doesn’t speak much? David, I am so sorry I never explained myself.”

One of Kilmer’s artworks, titled Iceman 68.VALKILMER.COM

We never got around to talking about Lynch, though, because we started talking about death, which led us to God, which left no time for much else. Shortly after a 17-year-old Kilmer left his home in L. A. for Juilliard, his younger brother, Wesley, suffered an epileptic seizure in the family’s Jacuzzi and died on the way to the hospital. I asked Kilmer about how he managed to avoid letting this loss define him.

“You have to not see it as a loss,” Kilmer told me. He writes in the book that he’s heard Wesley’s voice on occasion, admonishing him from beyond the grave: “No one wants to see or hear a handsome, successful, talented writer-actor-director who gets the most impossible-to-get girls in the world complain about a damn thing.”

“I’ve had experiences with lots of people that are departed,” Kilmer said on the phone. “For instance, my mother passed on recently, and a few days after, I was aware of her—you could call it her spirit. And she wanted me to be happy, because she was having a reunion with her son Wesley and the love of her life, Bill, her second husband. And they were just all so happy. It was a great release of a burden—because my mom, I felt, wasn’t so happy sometimes, here on earth.”

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Kilmer’s access to the unexplained and extrasensory is a major through line in his book. At 24, in New Mexico, he encounters a black-robed figure in a vision, whom he recognizes as the Angel of Death’s opposite, the Angel of Life, who pulls out Kilmer’s heart and gives him a bigger one. At a comic-book convention, across a table where he’s signing Batman stuff for Batman fans, Kilmer meets a Native American fan who asks him, “What is acting?”—a question that unlocks the meaning of a recurring dream Kilmer’s father had about dying in battle with another Native American man on the frontier. On a backpacking trip in Kenya with his then wife, Joanne Whalley, Kilmer steps outside his tent, and there’s a nine-foot-long monitor lizard sitting there.

I asked Kilmer if he’s thought much about why these messengers and symbols appeared to him, if he believes they were put in his path for a reason, and if all of us could interact with the metaphysical world in this way if we paid closer attention to its manifestations.

“Yes,” Kilmer said. “I do think it has to do with paying attention. And also asking for [those signs]. I’ve always had a very strong relationship with wild animals, especially animals like the kudu, which are very hard to spot, or the badger, or the black leopard, or the black panther.”

Kilmer said something else after this, and Koepenick, confused, repeated it back to Kilmer as a question: “Kanye forever?” Kilmer said the words again, clarifying, and Koepenick, to me, said, “Wakanda forever.”

“My translator’s higher than hell,” Kilmer said.

“I’ve got to lay off the ganja, you’re right,” Koepenick said.

Is it possible, I asked, to summon these things into your life? To seek these encounters with animals and other spiritual beings?

A mid-80s portrait of Kilmer that’s on the cover of I’m Your Huckleberry.SIMON & SCHUSTER

“I think so, yeah,” Kilmer said. “I mean, I’ve never been interested in hunting. But at the same time—this is a true story that sounds unreal, but I’ve been back to the same spot in South Africa, a hunters’ spot that you have to rent. It’s very expensive because all the animals there are very mature, so their horns are very big. And I’m not a hunter, but I rent the whole area so I can have as wild an experience as possible with very big game. And the most vindictive animal out there is the Cape buffalo. The Cape buffalo has a phenomenal memory, much better than the famed elephant.

“And I’ve been to the same spot three times. And the second time I went there, [a Cape buffalo] smelled me, even though I was the third in a line of humans, and he trotted over until he was right in front of me. And then he stared at me for half an hour, as if to say, ‘Your move—I’m ready.’ And then the third time I went, he did the exact same thing. Except it was more extreme because the wind was blowing harder. And he was very specifically putting his nose in the air, as if he was displaying—I’m smelling, I’m smelling. But this time it was almost like a playful kind of dance over to me. And I had the same guides [as before], and the guides were freaking out. They were babbling in their native tongue: He knows you, he knows you. He’s coming to say hello. They were freaking. And I was like, ‘I know.’

“But that happens a lot,” Kilmer said. “Like honey badgers, you know? Impossible to see in the daytime. I’ve seen them in both the daytime and the nighttime.”

YOU’VE PLAYED ALL these heroes over the course of your career, I said to Kilmer. There’s a tendency in our culture to frame illness in heroic terms, as a fight for life or an occasion for bravery, particularly when we’re talking about someone we think of as heroic in another context. We make shirts about kicking cancer’s ass and write headlines like “val kilmer battles cancer.” For someone who’s been through it, is the idea of a brave battle with cancer the wrong way to think about it?

Kilmer answered without really answering. He talked about mental attitude. “It’s half of the healing—making sure the mind is free, in the morning, of limitations.”

VAL KILMER’S ROLES OVER THE YEARS

Later, at the end of the call, Kilmer gave me his email address in case I had any follow-up questions. After a week or so, I wrote him an email in which I asked him a few fact-checking questions about the timing of his diagnosis and his recovery, and whether it was difficult to balance his Christian Scientist beliefs with traditional medicine. He didn’t answer, though this might be because I also asked him, very gently, if he had any regrets about being a jerk on movie sets.

That day on the phone, I let the conversation go where it wanted to, reluctant to steer it back to Moreau’s island. I asked Kilmer if it was hard to get to that place of being free and clear, if it was something he had to cultivate. Kilmer said no, that his spiritual practice had been part of his life since childhood. Then he asked, “Alex, do you believe in God?”

Kilmer with Bruce Springsteen after a performance of Springsteen on Broadway.SIMON & SCHUSTER

I stammered something about being a skeptic, because suddenly I felt guilty telling Christian Science Batman that God does not play a role in my life.

“The infinite,” Kilmer said. “Have you had a sense of the infinite?”

I confirmed to Val Kilmer that I have had a sense of the infinite and stammered again about psychedelics and the notion that something must exist outside the boundaries of our consciousness.

“And I think the physical science is catching up with that,” he said. I asked Kilmer if having cancer tested his faith, if there were moments when he wanted to give up hope. He quoted what turned out to be a line from the Gospel According to Mark, about faith in the face of doubt, about doubt as a specific crucible for faith: “Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.”

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What you can tell about Kilmer even throughout an odd and stilted back-and-forth is that he’s been through something and emerged from it that much more certain of the one thing he believes most strongly, which is that mental attitude can have transformative effects. As an inveterate doubter, I wanted Kilmer to express doubt or regret or otherwise admit to a sense of powerlessness, which I suppose is contraindicated in a worldview based on the all-importance of mental attitude. It was the paintings conversation all over again—I wanted him to talk about the gulf between our heroic notion of the movie star and the actual flawed human behind it, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it in those terms.

So I asked him what the most surprising thing was about his illness. He paused for a minute and then said, “Well, something that was reaffirmed to me—on such a level, it was almost shocking—was a sense of universal love, a kind of power and a different sense of love. It was coming into my consciousness and my body while I was at the hospital.”

At one point, Kilmer said, one of his doctors saw him and became animated, even overjoyed. This specific doctor, he said, turned out to have been present during a moment when Kilmer almost slipped away. “He lost me for a while, and he was just so happy I was back. He wanted me to be happier. I was grateful, but I was not surprised.”

Why not?

“Because I don’t believe in death,” Kilmer said.

I asked him how he managed to shake a belief that defines life itself in a fundamental way for so many people on this planet. He spoke again about his little brother’s death, how even though he’d spent years by that point reading and thinking and praying on the Christian Scientist concept of death as an illusion, “having to live it out becomes quite a different proposition.”

Christian Scientists believe any malady can be overcome through mental effort, death included. “And this is what Mrs. Eddy meant when she talked about reinstating primitive Christianity. That’s how she thought Jesus was teaching—teaching others to heal themselves. And that’s what made him a dangerous man. Because he taught people how to be independent, and that’s always a very, very radical thing to do in society.”

Kilmer with Tribeca Film Festival cofounder Craig Hatkoff (left) and Bradley Koepenick in 2019.

I don’t know enough about science, much less about faith, to argue with Kilmer. And yet, sitting there on the phone, I realized I envied his ability to believe, his confidence in the face of cosmic uncertainty. I envied the security he derives from what he thinks he knows.

It’s extremely human, when faced with adversity, to fall into wallowing and selfishness and sadness and not wanting to go on, I said to Kilmer. How do you avoid surrendering to those feelings?

“Sometimes you have to be aggressive about finding a way to be courageous,” he said, “and not believing what your physical picture may be demanding you accept as real. Like if someone came into the room, and they were sleepwalking, and they were screaming that their feathers were on fire, what would you do?”

Well, you’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker, I started to say, and then Kilmer interjected.

“You have to find a way to wake them up,” he said, “because they don’t have feathers, and so they’re not on fire.”

Alex Pappademas has written about pop culture for Esquire, GQ, Grantland, and others.

“THIS IS OLD SCHOOL BUT IT MIGHT WORK.”

BY VICTOR TANGERMANN / APRIL 24 2020 (futurism.com)

Researchers at Beijing pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech have developed an experimental COVID-19 vaccine that it says protected macaques from infection, Science Magazine reports.

The vaccine was based on a tried-and-true formulation that included an inactivated version of the virus SARS-CoV-2, as detailed in a preprint uploaded to the server bioRxiv on April 19.

“These data support the rapid clinical development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for humans,” reads the paper.

The team at Sinovac injected eight macaque monkeys with two different doses. Three weeks after injection, they introduced the coronavirus straight into the money’s lungs. There were reportedly no side effects.

None of the monkeys developed an infection beyond a small “viral blip.” A less fortunate control group of monkeys developed severe pneumonia after being infected by the virus.

“This is old school but it might work,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-authored a status report on COVID vaccine candidates, told Science Mag. “What I like most is that many vaccine producers, also in lower–middle-income countries, could make such a vaccine.”

Critics say, though, that the sample size in Sinovac’s trial was too small to produce generalizable results. Questions also remain about the viability of the vaccine candidate for use in humans — especially considering that monkeys don’t experience the same severe symptoms of COVID as humans.

In a separate Sinovac experiment, the researchers mixed a cocktail of antibodies from patients in China, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom with the virus.

According to the team, the antibodies “potently neutralized 10 representative SARS-CoV-2 strains, indicative of a possible broader neutralizing ability.”

And that’d be good news.

“This provides strong evidence that the virus is not mutating in a way that would make it resistant to a #COVID19 vaccine,” tweeted of Oregon Health & Science University immunologist Mark Slifka on Wednesday.

Sinovac Biotech is now planning trials on thousands of human subjects.

“What I want to know at work is, ‘Do you love me?’”

Dr. Lance Secretan, the world’s foremost authority on inspirational leadership, considers this to be the question at the heart of any workplace environment, though the question is rarely, if ever, asked out loud.

–HumanitysTeam.org

DAVID KORTEN APR 23, 2020 (yesmagazine.org)

ILLUSTRATION BY BORIS SV/GETTY IMAGES

The COVID-19 emergency has exposed our societies’ failure to address the needs of billions of people. Simultaneously, we are witnessing a fundamental truth about human nature: There are those among us eager to exploit the suffering of others for personal gain. We can be reassured, however, by how few of them there are. Their actions contrast starkly with the far greater numbers at all levels of society demonstrating their willingness, even eagerness, to cooperate, share, and sacrifice for the well-being of all.

The pandemic has also exposed extreme vulnerabilities in the global market economy, including its long and highly specialized linear supply chains, corporate monopolies shielded from market forces, privatized technologies, and ruthless competition without regard for its impact on people and the Earth.

This is an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how our beliefs, values, and institutions shape our relationships. We can create a world that works for everyone or face a future that no longer works for anyone.

Discussions now underway in many community, national, and global forums suggest a significant widening of what is known as the Overton Window: the range of public policies that the mainstream population is prepared to consider at a given time.

This is an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how our beliefs, values, and institutions shape our relationships.

While there is an almost universal desire to move rapidly beyond the COVID emergency, the spectrum of what we want post-pandemic is broadening. Many are articulating that they do not want to simply return to business as usual. In the United States, for example, we see the need for:

• A system of health care accessible to everyone regardless of income or documentation;

• Just compensation and job security for those who do our most essential but often least-rewarded work; and

• A guarantee that if your job evaporates, you won’t starve.

At a deeper level, this emergency is reminding us that we are living with another emergency—climate change. The combination of the two emergencies is helping us awaken to the profound implications of the simple truth that we are living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth. Our well-being depends on Earth’s well-being. Life is the goal, community is essential, and money is only a tool.

To avoid a climate catastrophe, we must use this opportunity to join in creating an economy that:

• Meets our basic needs while simultaneously healing and securing the health of the human community and Earth’s living systems; and

• Prepares us to respond rapidly and appropriately to the array of significant future emergencies likely to arise with alarming frequency.

From these insights, many additional imperatives follow, including the need to:

• Shift power from profit-maximizing corporations to self-organizing, self-reliant, life-serving communities;

• Achieve an equitable distribution of power and resources among and within these communities; and

• Limit the human use of resources to those applications (such as recycling and regenerative agriculture) that increase the well-being of people and nature while eliminating those (such as war and financial speculation) that consume massive resources to no beneficial end.

The expanding Overton Window may allow us to consider vast new possibilities. Here are two:

1. We may see growing recognition of the distinctive social benefits of shopping in locally owned stores, operated by neighbors who pay local taxes and are in business to make a decent, but modest, living serving their neighbors. This contrasts starkly with the experience of impersonal corporate chains such as Amazon.com and Walmart that are in business solely to maximize the extraction of money from our local communities while leaving as little as possible behind.

2. For those of us able to work at home and meet remotely via the web, the many benefits of doing so may make this form of working and meeting the new norm. We reduce the time devoted to long commutes in heavy traffic or sitting in crowded airports and planes. This change in our behavior carries the potential for a dramatic reduction in the need for cars and airplanes and the pollution that their production and operation create, while increasing opportunities to get to know our family and our neighbors. Better for the health of people, family, community, and Earth.

But would such changes mean lost jobs? Actually, a vast amount of work must be done. Among the needs that will become more important in a post-COVID world are:

• Converting to wind and solar energy.

• Growing nutritious food locally in ways that restore the health of the soil.

• Eliminating waste by recycling everything.

• Assuring everyone access to affordable high-speed internet.

• Caring for and educating our children.

• Preparing for the inevitable emergencies ahead.

• Providing care and housing for the homeless while helping those who can transition back to community life.

• Providing health care for everyone.

The COVID-19 crisis has imposed immense hardship on billions of people. But that hardship is dwarfed by what lies ahead if we continue on our current path. Now we must step up to prevent the collapse of the regenerative systems by which Earth creates and maintains the conditions we need to exist.

This current emergency provides the possibility for a new emergence—the birthing of a truly civil civilization dedicated to the well-being of all people and the living Earth. 

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DAVID KORTEN is co-founder of YES! Media, president of the Living Economies Forum, a member of the Club of Rome, and the author of influential books, including “When Corporations Rule the World” and “Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth.” His work builds on lessons from the 21 years he and his wife, Fran, lived and worked in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on a quest to end global poverty.

Larry Brilliant|TED2020: The Prequel

Examining the facts and figures of the coronavirus outbreak, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant evaluates the global response in a candid interview with head of TED Chris Anderson. Brilliant lays out a clear plan to end the pandemic — and shows why, to achieve it, we’ll have to work together across political and geographical divides. “This is not the zombie apocalypse; this is not a mass extinction event,” he says. “We need to be the best version of ourselves.” (Recorded April 22, 2020)

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Larry Brilliant · Epidemiologist, philanthropistTED Prize winner Larry Brilliant has spent his career solving the world’s biggest problems, from overseeing the last smallpox cases to saving millions from blindness.

Chris Anderson · Head of TEDAfter a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.

April 24, 2020 by Reuters

By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters)

In an extraordinary reversal, the U.S. Navy has recommended reinstating the fired captain of the coronavirus-hit aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, whose crew hailed him as their hero for risking his job to safeguard their lives, officials said on Friday.

The Navy’s leadership made the recommendation to reinstate Captain Brett Crozier to Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Friday, just three weeks after Crozier was relieved of command after the leak of a letter he wrote calling on the Navy for stronger measures to protect the crew, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Pentagon issued a statement acknowledging Esper received the results of the Navy’s preliminary inquiry into the Roosevelt incident. But it added that Esper wanted to review a written copy of the completed inquiry.

Suggesting no decision was imminent, the statement said Esper then “intends to thoroughly review the report and will meet again with Navy leadership to discuss next steps.” The Navy said in a statement “no final decisions have been made.”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, a Democrat, called for Crozier’s immediate reinstatement.

“During this time of crisis, Captain Crozier is exactly what our Sailors need: a leader who inspires confidence,” he said.

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Esper wanted to be sure that the final Navy report would stand up to public scrutiny before signing off and stressed that the Roosevelt outbreak inquiry went far beyond Crozier.

But Esper’s deliberations raised questions about whether political or other considerations might override the Navy’s recommendations in a case that has seen Democrats vocally critical of the Trump administration’s handling of the matter.

Sources say Crozier is one of the 856 sailors from the Roosevelt’s 4,800-member crew who have tested positive for the coronavirus, effectively taking one of the Navy’s most powerful ships out of operation.

Crozier was fired by the Navy’s top civilian, then-acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, against the recommendations of uniformed leaders, who suggested he wait for an investigation into the letter’s leak.

Modly’s decision backfired badly, as members of the crew hailed their captain as a hero in an emotional sendoff captured on video that went viral on social media.

Embarrassed, Modly then compounded his problems by flying out to the carrier to ridicule Crozier over the leak and question his character in a speech to the Roosevelt’s crew, which also leaked to the media. Modly then resigned.

News of the Navy’s recommendations could boost morale among sailors on the Roosevelt, who were caught between the Navy’s desire to keep the ship operational and its duty to shield them from unnecessary risk in peacetime.

“When you are in the military you sign away a lot of your choices and your (ability) to share your opinions about some things,” one sailor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

“It is nice to see that us standing together for this (shows) that our voices matter.”

The disclosure of the Navy’s recommendation, which was first reported by the New York Times, came just hours after the Pentagon announced that at least 18 sailors aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer – the Kidd – had tested positive for the new coronavirus.

It was another blow to the military as it faces fallout over its handling of the Roosevelt, raising additional questions about whether the revamped safeguards in place to protect U.S. troops are sufficient.

The crisis being triggered by the coronavirus is the biggest facing Navy leadership since two crashes in the Asia Pacific region in 2017 that killed 17 sailors.

Those incidents raised questions about Navy training and the pace of operations, prompting a congressional hearing and the removal of a number of officers.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Daniel Wallis)(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2019.

Is This an Initiation?

Is This an Initiation?

An Urgent Invitation to Beautiful Learning

by Martin Shaw

In pondering whether the coronavirus serves as a rite of initiation, Martin Shaw offers five reflections on the agency that rests within opportunity, the alchemy of experience, and the beautiful learning that is being called forth from this moment.

Here we are, millions of us. Little hermit huts bubbling, all over the planet.

It’s a unique moment in our lives. So I’m sharing five little thoughts here…. More at the Link!