#brigham sinclair | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hellsitesonlybookclub · 10 months ago

Text

It can't happen here, Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 1-2

THE handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.

Here in Vermont the affair was not so picturesque as it might have been on the Western prairies. Oh, it had its points: there was a skit in which Medary Cole (grist mill & feed store) and Louis Rotenstern (custom tailoring—pressing & cleaning) announced that they were those historic Vermonters, Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, and with their jokes about imaginary plural wives they got in ever so many funny digs at the ladies present. But the occasion was essentially serious. All of America was serious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929. It was just long enough after the Great War of 1914-18 for the young people who had been born in 1917 to be ready to go to college... or to another war, almost any old war that might be handy.

The features of this night among the Rotarians were nothing funny, at least not obviously funny, for they were the patriotic addresses of Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A. (ret.), who dealt angrily with the topic "Peace through Defense—Millions for Arms but Not One Cent for Tribute," and of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch— she who was no more renowned for her gallant anti-suffrage campaigning way back in 1919 than she was for having, during the Great War, kept the American soldiers entirely out of French cafés by the clever trick of sending them ten thousand sets of dominoes.

Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhat unappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the American Home by barring from the motion-picture industry all persons, actors or directors or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been divorced; (b) been born in any foreign country—except Great Britain, since Mrs. Gimmitch thought very highly of Queen Mary, or (c) declined to take an oath to revere the Flag, the Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly American institutions.

The Annual Ladies' Dinner was a most respectable gathering—the flower of Fort Beulah. Most of the ladies and more than half of the gentlemen wore evening clothes, and it was rumored that before the feast the inner circle had had cocktails, privily served in Room 289 of the hotel. The tables, arranged on three sides of a hollow square, were bright with candles, cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurines of Mickey Mouse, brass Rotary wheels, and small silk American flags stuck in gilded hard-boiled eggs. On the wall was a banner lettered "Service Before Self," and the menu—the celery, cream of tomato soup, broiled haddock, chicken croquettes, peas, and tutti-frutti ice-cream—was up to the highest standards of the Hotel Wessex.

They were all listening, agape. General Edgeways was completing his manly yet mystical rhapsody on nationalism:

"... for these U-nited States, a-lone among the great powers, have no desire for foreign conquest. Our highest ambition is to be darned well let alone! Our only gen-uine relationship to Europe is in our arduous task of having to try and educate the crass and ignorant masses that Europe has wished onto us up to something like a semblance of American culture and good manners. But, as I explained to you, we must be prepared to defend our shores against all the alien gangs of international racketeers that call themselves 'governments,' and that with such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our towering forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair and far-flung fields.

"For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on arming itself more and more, not for conquest—not for jealousy— not for war—but for peace! Pray God it may never be necessary, but if foreign nations don't sharply heed our warning, there will, as when the proverbial dragon's teeth were sowed, spring up an armed and fearless warrior upon every square foot of these United States, so arduously cultivated and defended by our pioneer fathers, whose sword-girded images we must be... or we shall perish!"

The applause was cyclonic. "Professor" Emil Staubmeyer, the superintendent of schools, popped up to scream, "Three cheers for the General—hip, hip, hooray!"

All the audience made their faces to shine upon the General and Mr. Staubmeyer—all save a couple of crank pacifist women, and one Doremus Jessup, editor of the Fort Beulah Daily Informer, locally considered "a pretty smart fella but kind of a cynic," who whispered to his friend the Reverend Mr. Falck, "Our pioneer fathers did rather of a skimpy job in arduously cultivating some of the square feet in Arizona!"

Seething with the notion, she got herself clear into the office of the Quartermaster General, but that stuffy machine-minded official refused her (or, really, refused the poor lads, so lonely there in the mud), muttering in a cowardly way some foolishness about lack of transport for canaries. It is said that her eyes flashed real fire, and that she faced the Jack-in-office like Joan of Arc with eyeglasses while she "gave him a piece of her mind that he never forgot!"

The culminating glory of the dinner was the address of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, known throughout the country as "the Unkies' Girl," because during the Great War she had advocated calling our boys in the A.E.F. "the Unkies." She hadn't merely given them dominoes; indeed her first notion had been far more imaginative. She wanted to send to every soldier at the Front a canary in a cage. Think what it would have meant to them in the way of companionship and inducing memories of home and mother! A dear little canary! And who knows—maybe you could train 'em to hunt cooties!

In those good days women really had a chance. They were encouraged to send their menfolks, or anybody else's menfolks, off to war. Mrs. Gimmitch addressed every soldier she met—and she saw to it that she met any of them who ventured within two blocks of her—as "My own dear boy." It is fabled that she thus saluted a colonel of marines who had come up from the ranks and who answered, "We own dear boys are certainly getting a lot of mothers these days. Personally, I'd rather have a few more mistresses." And the fable continues that she did not stop her remarks on the occasion, except to cough, for one hour and seventeen minutes, by the Colonel's wrist watch.

But her social services were not all confined to prehistoric eras. It was as recently as 1935 that she had taken up purifying the films, and before that she had first advocated and then fought Prohibition. She had also (since the vote had been forced on her) been a Republican Committee-woman in 1932, and sent to President Hoover daily a lengthy telegram of advice.

And, though herself unfortunately childless, she was esteemed as a lecturer and writer about Child Culture, and she was the author of a volume of nursery lyrics, including the immortal couplet:

But always, 1917 or 1936, she was a raging member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

All of the Roundies are resting in rows,

With roundy-roundies around their toes.

The D.A.R. (reflected the cynic, Doremus Jessup, that evening) is a somewhat confusing organization—as confusing as Theosophy, Relativity, or the Hindu Vanishing Boy Trick, all three of which it resembles. It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors struggled.

The D.A.R. (reflected Doremus) has become as sacrosanct, as beyond criticism, as even the Catholic Church or the Salvation Army. And there is this to be said: it has provided hearty and innocent laughter for the judicious, since it has contrived to be just as ridiculous as the unhappily defunct Kuklux Klan, without any need of wearing, like the K.K.K., high dunces' caps and public nightshirts.

So, whether Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch was called in to inspire military morale, or to persuade Lithuanian choral societies to begin their program with "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," always she was a D.A.R., and you could tell it as you listened to her with the Fort Beulah Rotarians on this happy May evening.

She was short, plump, and pert of nose. Her luxuriant gray hair (she was sixty now, just the age of the sarcastic editor, Doremus Jessup) could be seen below her youthful, floppy Leghorn hat; she wore a silk print dress with an enormous string of crystal beads, and pinned above her ripe bosom was an orchid among lilies of the valley. She was full of friendliness toward all the men present: she wriggled at them, she cuddled at them, as in a voice full of flute sounds and chocolate sauce she poured out her oration on "How You Boys Can Help Us Girls."

Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the United States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved them all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes. In fact, Woman must resume her place in the Home and: "As that great author and scientist, Mr. Arthur Brisbane, has pointed out, what every woman ought to do is to have six children."

At this second there was a shocking, an appalling interruption.

One Lorinda Pike, widow of a notorious Unitarian preacher, was the manager of a country super-boarding-house that called itself "The Beulah Valley Tavern." She was a deceptively Madonna-like, youngish woman, with calm eyes, smooth chestnut hair parted in the middle, and a soft voice often colored with laughter. But on a public platform her voice became brassy, her eyes filled with embarrassing fury. She was the village scold, the village crank. She was constantly poking into things that were none of her business, and at town meetings she criticized every substantial interest in the whole county: the electric company's rates, the salaries of the schoolteachers, the Ministerial Association's high-minded censorship of books for the public library. Now, at this moment when everything should have been all Service and Sunshine, Mrs. Lorinda Pike cracked the spell by jeering:

"Three cheers for Brisbane! But what if a poor gal can't hook a man? Have her six kids out of wedlock?"

Then the good old war horse, Gimmitch, veteran of a hundred campaigns against subversive Reds, trained to ridicule out of existence the cant of Socialist hecklers and turn the laugh against them, swung into gallant action:

"My dear good woman, if a gal, as you call it, has any real charm and womanliness, she won't have to 'hook' a man—she'll find 'em lined up ten deep on her doorstep!" (Laughter and applause.)

The lady hoodlum had merely stirred Mrs. Gimmitch into noble passion. She did not cuddle at them now. She tore into it:

"I tell you, my friends, the trouble with this whole country is that so many are SELFISH! Here's a hundred and twenty million people, with ninety-five per cent of 'em only thinking of SELF, instead of turning to and helping the responsible business men to bring back prosperity! All these corrupt and self-seeking labor unions! Money grubbers! Thinking only of how much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate employer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear!

"What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great dream, but maybe sometimes it's only a pipe dream! I'm not so sure—now this will shock you, but I want you to listen to one woman who will tell you the unadulterated hard truth instead of a lot of sentimental taffy, and I'm not sure but that we need to be in a real war again, in order to learn Discipline! We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. That's good enough in its way, but isn't it, after all, just a nice toy for grownups? No, what we all of us must have, if this great land is going to go on maintaining its high position among the Congress of Nations, is Discipline—Will Power—Character!"

She turned prettily then toward General Edgeways and laughed:

"You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General—just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns—'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps—just maybe—when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!"

Dramatically she sat down, and the sound of clapping filled the room like a cloud of downy feathers. The crowd bellowed, "Come on, General! Stand up!" and "She's called your bluff—what you got?" or just a tolerant, "Attaboy, Gen!"

The General was short and globular, and his red face was smooth as a baby's bottom and adorned with white-gold-framed spectacles. But he had the military snort and a virile chuckle.

"Well, sir!" he guffawed, on his feet, shaking a chummy forefinger at Mrs. Gimmitch, "since you folks are bound and determined to drag the secrets out of a poor soldier, I better confess that while I do abhor war, yet there are worse things. Ah, my friends, far worse! A state of so-called peace, in which labor organizations are riddled, as by plague germs, with insane notions out of anarchistic Red Russia! A state in which college professors, newspapermen, and notorious authors are secretly promulgating these same seditious attacks on the grand old Constitution! A state in which, as a result of being fed with these mental drugs, the People are flabby, cowardly, grasping, and lacking in the fierce pride of the warrior! No, such a state is far worse than war at its most monstrous!

"I guess maybe some of the things I said in my former speech were kind of a little bit obvious and what we used to call 'old hat' when my brigade was quartered in England. About the United States only wanting peace, and freedom from all foreign entanglements. No! What I'd really like us to do would be to come out and tell the whole world: 'Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse!'

"I don't altogether admire everything Germany and Italy have done, but you've got to hand it to 'em, they've been honest enough and realistic enough to say to the other nations, 'Just tend to your own business, will you? We've got strength and will, and for whomever has those divine qualities it's not only a right, it's a DUTY, to use 'em!' Nobody in God's world ever loved a weakling— including that weakling himself!

"And I've got good news for you! This gospel of clean and aggressive strength is spreading everywhere in this country among the finest type of youth. Why today, in 1936, there's less than 7 per cent of collegiate institutions that do not have military-training units under discipline as rigorous as the Nazis, and where once it was forced upon them by the authorities, now it is the strong young men and women who themselves demand the RIGHT to be trained in warlike virtues and skill—for, mark you, the girls, with their instruction in nursing and the manufacture of gas masks and the like, are becoming every whit as zealous as their brothers. And all the really THINKING type of professors are right with 'em!

"Why, here, as recently as three years ago, a sickeningly big percentage of students were blatant pacifists, wanting to knife their own native land in the dark. But now, when the shameless fools and the advocates of Communism try to hold pacifist meetings— why, my friends, in the past five months, since January first, no less than seventy-six such exhibitionistic orgies have been raided by their fellow students, and no less than fifty-nine disloyal Red students have received their just deserts by being beaten up so severely that never again will they raise in this free country the bloodstained banner of anarchism! That, my friends, is news!"

"Look here, Mr. Edgeways, if you think you can get away with this sadistic nonsense without—"

As the General sat down, amid ecstasies of applause, the village trouble maker, Mrs. Lorinda Pike, leaped up and again interrupted the love feast:

She got no farther. Francis Tasbrough, the quarry owner, the most substantial industrialist in Fort Beulah, stood grandly up, quieted Lorinda with an outstretched arm, and rumbled in his Jerusalem-the-Golden basso, "A moment please, my dear lady! All of us here locally have got used to your political principles. But as chairman, it is my unfortunate duty to remind you that General Edgeways and Mrs. Gimmitch have been invited by the club to address us, whereas you, if you will excuse my saying so, are not even related to any Rotarian but merely here as the guest of the Reverend Falck, than whom there is no one whom we more honor. So, if you will be so good—Ah, I thank you, madame!"

Lorinda Pike had slumped into her chair with her fuse still burning. Mr. Francis Tasbrough (it rhymed with "low") did not slump; he sat like the Archbishop of Canterbury on the archiepiscopal throne.

And Doremus Jessup popped up to soothe them all, being an intimate of Lorinda, and having, since milkiest boyhood, chummed with and detested Francis Tasbrough.

This Doremus Jessup, publisher of the Daily Informer, for all that he was a competent business man and a writer of editorials not without wit and good New England earthiness, was yet considered the prime eccentric of Fort Beulah. He was on the school board, the library board, and he introduced people like Oswald Garrison Villard, Norman Thomas, and Admiral Byrd when they came to town lecturing.

Jessup was a littlish man, skinny, smiling, well tanned, with a small gray mustache, a small and well-trimmed gray beard—in a community where to sport a beard was to confess one's self a farmer, a Civil War veteran, or a Seventh Day Adventist. Doremus's detractors said that he maintained the beard just to be "highbrow" and "different," to try to appear "artistic." Possibly they were right. Anyway, he skipped up now and murmured:

"Well, all the birdies in their nest agree. My friend, Mrs. Pike, ought to know that freedom of speech becomes mere license when it goes so far as to criticize the Army, differ with the D.A.R., and advocate the rights of the Mob. So, Lorinda, I think you ought to apologize to the General, to whom we should be grateful for explaining to us what the ruling classes of the country really want. Come on now, my friend—jump up and make your excuses."

He was looking down on Lorinda with sternness, yet Medary Cole, president of Rotary, wondered if Doremus wasn't "kidding" them. He had been known to. Yes—no—he must be wrong, for Mrs. Lorinda Pike was (without rising) caroling, "Oh yes! I do apologize, General! Thank you for your revelatory speech!"

The General raised his plump hand (with a Masonic ring as well as a West Point ring on the sausage-shaped fingers); he bowed like Galahad or a head-waiter; he shouted with parade-ground maleness: "Not at all, not at all, madame! We old campaigners never mind a healthy scrap. Glad when anybody's enough interested in our fool ideas to go and get sore at us, huh, huh, huh!"

And everybody laughed and sweetness reigned. The program wound up with Louis Rotenstern's singing of a group of patriotic ditties: "Marching through Georgia" and "Tenting on the Old Campground" and "Dixie" and "Old Black Joe" and "I'm Only a Poor Cowboy and I Know I Done Wrong."

Louis Rotenstern was by all of Fort Beulah classed as a "good fellow," a caste just below that of "real, old-fashioned gentleman." Doremus Jessup liked to go fishing with him, and partridge-hunting; and he considered that no Fifth Avenue tailor could do anything tastier in the way of a seersucker outfit. But Louis was a jingo. He explained, and rather often, that it was not he nor his father who had been born in the ghetto in Prussian Poland, but his grandfather (whose name, Doremus suspected, had been something less stylish and Nordic than Rotenstern). Louis's pocket heroes were Calvin Coolidge, Leonard Wood, Dwight L. Moody, and Admiral Dewey (and Dewey was a born Vermonter, rejoiced Louis, who himself had been born in Flatbush, Long Island).

He was not only 100 per cent American; he exacted 40 per cent of chauvinistic interest on top of the principal. He was on every occasion heard to say, "We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the country, and what I mean, the Kikes just as much as the Wops and Hunkies and Chinks." Louis was altogether convinced that if the ignorant politicians would keep their dirty hands off banking and the stock exchange and hours of labor for salesmen in department stores, then everyone in the country would profit, as beneficiaries of increased business, and all of them (including the retail clerks) be rich as Aga Khan.

So Louis put into his melodies not only his burning voice of a Bydgoszcz cantor but all his nationalistic fervor, so that every one joined in the choruses, particularly Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, with her celebrated train-caller's contralto.

The dinner broke up in cataract-like sounds of happy adieux, and Doremus Jessup muttered to his goodwife Emma, a solid, kindly, worried soul, who liked knitting, solitaire, and the novels of Kathleen Norris: "Was I terrible, butting in that way?"

"Oh, no, Dormouse, you did just right. I am fond of Lorinda Pike, but why does she have to show off and parade all her silly Socialist ideas?"

"You old Tory!" said Doremus. "Don't you want to invite the Siamese elephant, the Gimmitch, to drop in and have a drink?"

"I do not!" said Emma Jessup.

And in the end, as the Rotarians shuffled and dealt themselves and their innumerable motorcars, it was Frank Tasbrough who invited the choicer males, including Doremus, home for an after-party.

CHAPTER II

AS he took his wife home and drove up Pleasant Hill to Tasbrough's, Doremus Jessup meditated upon the epidemic patriotism of General Edgeways. But he broke it off to let himself be absorbed in the hills, as it had been his habit for the fifty-three years, out of his sixty years of life, that he had spent in Fort Beulah, Vermont.

Legally a city, Fort Beulah was a comfortable village of old red brick, old granite workshops, and houses of white clapboards or gray shingles, with a few smug little modern bungalows, yellow or seal brown. There was but little manufacturing: a small woolen mill, a sash-and-door factory, a pump works. The granite which was its chief produce came from quarries four miles away; in Fort Beulah itself were only the offices... all the money... the meager shacks of most of the quarry workers. It was a town of perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousand bodies—the proportion of soul-possession may be too high.

There was but one (comparative) skyscraper in town: the six-story Tasbrough Building, with the offices of the Tasbrough & Scarlett Granite Quarries; the offices of Doremus's son-in-law, Fowler Greenhill, M.D., and his partner, old Dr. Olmsted, of Lawyer Mungo Kitterick, of Harry Kindermann, agent for maple syrup and dairying supplies, and of thirty or forty other village samurai.

It was a downy town, a drowsy town, a town of security and tradition, which still believed in Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and to which May Day was not an occasion for labor parades but for distributing small baskets of flowers.

It was a May night—late in May of 1936—with a three-quarter moon. Doremus's house was a mile from the business-center of Fort Beulah, on Pleasant Hill, which was a spur thrust like a reaching hand out from the dark rearing mass of Mount Terror. Upland meadows, moon-glistening, he could see, among the wildernesses of spruce and maple and poplar on the ridges far above him; and below, as his car climbed, was Ethan Creek flowing through the meadows. Deep woods— rearing mountain bulwarks—the air like spring-water—serene clapboarded houses that remembered the War of 1812 and the boyhoods of those errant Vermonters, Stephen A. Douglas, the "Little Giant," and Hiram Powers and Thaddeus Stevens and Brigham Young and President Chester Alan Arthur.

"No—Powers and Arthur—they were weak sisters," pondered Doremus. "But Douglas and Thad Stevens and Brigham, the old stallion—I wonder if we're breeding up any paladins like those stout, grouchy old devils?—if we're producing 'em anywhere in New England?— anywhere in America?—anywhere in the world? They had guts. Independence. Did what they wanted to and thought what they liked, and everybody could go to hell. The youngsters today—Oh, the aviators have plenty of nerve. The physicists, these twenty-five-year-old Ph. D.'s that violate the inviolable atom, they're pioneers. But most of the wishy-washy young people today—Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere—not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs! Like this smug pup Malcolm Tasbrough, hanging around Sissy! Aah!

"Wouldn't it be hell if that stuffed shirt, Edgeways, and that political Mae West, Gimmitch, were right, and we need all these military monkeyshines and maybe a fool war (to conquer some sticky-hot country we don't want on a bet!) to put some starch and git into these marionettes we call our children? Aah!

"But rats—These hills! Castle walls. And this air. They can keep their Cotswolds and Harz Mountains and Rockies! D. Jessup— topographical patriot. And I am a—"

"Dormouse, would you mind driving on the right-hand side of the road—on curves, anyway?" said his wife peaceably.

An upland hollow and mist beneath the moon—a veil of mist over apple blossoms and the heavy bloom of an ancient lilac bush beside the ruin of a farmhouse burned these sixty years and more.

He was a tall man, Tasbrough, with a yellow mustache and a monotonously emphatic voice. He was fifty-four, six years younger than Doremus Jessup, and when he had been four, Doremus had protected him from the results of his singularly unpopular habit of hitting the other small boys over the head with things—all kinds of things—sticks and toy wagons and lunch boxes and dry cow flops.

Mr. Francis Tasbrough was the president, general manager, and chief owner of the Tasbrough & Scarlett Granite Quarries, at West Beulah, four miles from "the Fort." He was rich, persuasive, and he had constant labor troubles. He lived in a new Georgian brick house on Pleasant Hill, a little beyond Doremus Jessup's, and in that house he maintained a private barroom luxurious as that of a motor company's advertising manager at Grosse Point. It was no more the traditional New England than was the Catholic part of Boston; and Frank himself boasted that, though his family had for six generations lived in New England, he was no tight Yankee but in his Efficiency, his Salesmanship, the complete Pan-American Business Executive.

Assembled in his private barroom tonight, after the Rotarian Dinner, were Frank himself, Doremus Jessup, Medary Cole, the miller, Superintendent of Schools Emil Staubmeyer, R. C. Crowley— Roscoe Conkling Crowley, the weightiest banker in Fort Beulah—and, rather surprisingly, Tasbrough's pastor, the Episcopal minister, the Rev. Mr. Falck, his old hands as delicate as porcelain, his wilderness of hair silk-soft and white, his unfleshly face betokening the Good Life. Mr. Falck came from a solid Knickerbocker family, and he had studied in Edinburgh and Oxford along with the General Theological Seminary of New York; and in all of the Beulah Valley there was, aside from Doremus, no one who more contentedly hid away in the shelter of the hills.

The barroom had been professionally interior-decorated by a young New York gentleman with the habit of standing with the back of his right hand against his hip. It had a stainless-steel bar, framed illustrations from La Vie Parisienne, silvered metal tables, and chromium-plated aluminum chairs with scarlet leather cushions.

All of them except Tasbrough, Medary Cole (a social climber to whom the favors of Frank Tasbrough were as honey and fresh ripened figs), and "Professor" Emil Staubmeyer were uncomfortable in this parrot-cage elegance, but none of them, including Mr. Falck, seemed to dislike Frank's soda and excellent Scotch or the sardine sandwiches.

"And I wonder if Thad Stevens would of liked this, either?" considered Doremus. "He'd of snarled. Old cornered catamount. But probably not at the whisky!"

"And the Jew Communists and Jew financiers plotting together to control the country. I can understand how, as a younger fellow, you could pump up a little sympathy for the unions and even for the Jews—though, as you know, I'll never get over being sore at you for taking the side of the strikers when those thugs were trying to ruin my whole business—burn down my polishing and cutting shops— why, you were even friendly with that alien murderer Karl Pascal, who started the whole strike—maybe I didn't enjoy firing him when it was all over!

"Doremus," demanded Tasbrough, "why don't you take a tumble to yourself? All these years you've had a lot of fun criticizing— always being agin the government—kidding everybody—posing as such a Liberal that you'll stand for all these subversive elements. Time for you to quit playing tag with crazy ideas and come in and join the family. These are serious times—maybe twenty-eight million on relief, and beginning to get ugly—thinking they've got a vested right now to be supported.

"But anyway, these labor racketeers are getting together now, with Communist leaders, and determined to run the country—to tell men like me how to run our business!—and just like General Edgeways said, they'll refuse to serve their country if we should happen to get dragged into some war. Yessir, a mighty serious hour, and it's time for you to cut the cackle and join the really responsible citizens."

Said Doremus, "Hm. Yes, I agree it's a serious time. With all the discontent there is in the country to wash him into office, Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we're the huskiest nation going. And then I, the Liberal, and you, the Plutocrat, the bogus Tory, will be led out and shot at 3 A.M. Serious? Huh!"

"Rats! You're exaggerating!" said R. C. Crowley.

Doremus went on: "If Bishop Prang, our Savonarola in a Cadillac 16, swings his radio audience and his League of Forgotten Men to Buzz Windrip, Buzz will win. People will think they're electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there's been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America—the fix of the Southern share-croppers, the working conditions of the miners and garment-makers, and our keeping Mooney in prison so many years. But wait till Windrip shows us how to say it with machine guns! Democracy—here and in Britain and France, it hasn't been so universal a sniveling slavery as Naziism in Germany, such an imagination-hating, pharisaic materialism as Russia—even if it has produced industrialists like you, Frank, and bankers like you, R. C., and given you altogether too much power and money. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy's given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had. That may be menaced now by Windrip—all the Windrips. All right! Maybe we'll have to fight paternal dictatorship with a little sound patricide—fight machine guns with machine guns. Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!"

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen."

"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

"Well, what if they are?" protested R.C. Crowley. "It might not be so bad. I don't like all these irresponsible attacks on us bankers all the time. Of course, Senator Windrip has to pretend publicly to bawl the banks out, but once he gets into power he'll give the banks their proper influence in the administration and take our expert financial advice. Yes. Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!"

"Yes!" said Emil Staubmeyer. "Didn't Hitler save Germany from the Red Plague of Marxism? I got cousins there. I know!"

"Hm," said Doremus, as often Doremus did say it. "Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics. I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis!"

"Think that's nice language to use in the presence of the Reverend Falck?" raged Tasbrough.

Mr. Falck piped up, "I think it's quite nice language, and an interesting suggestion, Brother Jessup!"

"Besides," said Tasbrough, "this chewing the rag is all nonsense, anyway. As Crowley says, might be a good thing to have a strong man in the saddle, but—it just can't happen here in America."

And it seemed to Doremus that the softly moving lips of the Reverend Mr. Falck were framing, "The hell it can't!"

#hellsitesonlybookclub #bookblr #It Can't Happen Here #sinclair lewis

1 note · View note

swifteforeverandalways · 4 years ago

Text

Partners in Crime Chapter Seven

Notes: Brigham Sinclair and Detective Lovato are both from CSI: NY (I have been on a huge CSI NY binge as of late). Syndel Okaia is an OC and Detective Morse....well....y’all gotta guess that one ;)

Tag Squad: @riottstheory @thirst-n-bullshit

A few days later, the two Austins, Raul, and Jake were called to a meeting with Stephanie and Hunter. Raul and Jake, both armed to the teeth, escorted the two Austins to the McMahon Family Corporation Headquarters. The four stepped into the office to see that there were more than just Stephanie and Hunter in there. With them was an African American man dressed in a suit.

“Who is he?” Jake asked, placing a hand on his concealed gun.

“Jake, Raul, this is Brigham Sinclair, he’s the NYPD Chief of Detectives,” Hunter said.

“Not that I’m really here willingly,” Sinclair muttered. Stephanie shot him a look.

“Why is he here?” Austin T asked. Stephanie sighed.

“Sinclair owes our family for helping him out a number of years ago when some...allegations about him harassing a clerk of his. He hired a woman named Ann Steele to ‘fix’ it and she did, by asking us to make her quiet. We did,” She explained.

“Did you guys kill the clerk or whatever?” Austin F asked.

“No, we just threatened her,” Hunter said calmly. Austin F blinked at Sinclair cleared his throat.

“What am I doing here anyways?” He asked.

“The people who have been killed with the symbol of an A and a W, they’ve been killed by the Elite. We are going to…..deal with some of their members, and we need you to have your detectives look the other way,” Hunter said. Sinclair looked unhappy but nodded.

“Fine, whatever. Can I go now?” He asked.

“You may,” Stephanie said. Sinclair got up, leaving. Once he was out of the room, Jake and Raul turned to their bosses.

“What if he doesn’t have his detectives look away?” Jake asked.

“We have a second plan,” Hunter said.

“Who is this second plan?” Austin T asked skeptically. There was a knock at the door and Stephanie smiled.

“Come in,” she called. The door opened and an older woman, maybe mid or late 40s, walked in. She had white hair, though there was a stripe of dark grey right down the middle. The woman held herself with an air of regality, and was dressed in a royal purple pant suit.

“Who the hell are you?” Austin F asked, narrowing her eyes in suspicion.

“This is Syndel Okaia, she works for the New York District Attorney’s office and is a friend of our family,” Stephanie said.

“Why is she here?” Austin T asked, looking unsure. Syndel looked at her, the expression on the Asian woman kindly.

“My family and I will keep the police off of your backs,” she said, “I’m a prosecutor. My husband, Kenshi, is the captain of the Brooklyn Special Victims Unit. Our daughter, Jade, is a detective with him while our son, Takeda, is currently in law school. In addition, our daughter-in-law is part of the NYPD’s Crime Scene Unit, so she is hands on with the crime scenes and evidence. The four of us will keep suspicion from all of you.”

“Why? Why would you do this for us?” Austin T asked, frowning.

“Because Stephanie and Hunter are friends of my family. They trust you, or at least have faith in you, so my family will help you,” Syndel said, “While my family and I may share names with Mortal Kombat characters, we are not like them.”

“Did Syndel just make a Mortal Kombat joke?” Stephanie said with a laugh. Syndel gave her a glare, though her expression was amused.

“You know how my family and I feel about the….retcon from MK11.”

“Yes,” Stephanie smiled, “We all know.” Syndel chuckled and looked back at the two Austins.

“Any more questions?” She asked. The two shook their heads and Syndel nodded.

“I will see you later,” she looked at Stephanie and Hunter, who both nodded. The white haired prosecutor headed out. Once the door was shut once more, Stephanie and Hunter looked at the two Austins.

“Now,” Hunter said, “How have you two been settling?”

“Pretty good,” Austin F said.

“Jake and Raul said you two kind of keep to yourselves?” Stephanie said gently.

“It’s not that we don’t trust you, it’s just that we only truly trust each other,” Austin T said.

“Why is that?” Stephanie asked softly.

“I guess…I guess it’s because of our past,” Austin F said with a sigh.

“What about your past?” Hunter asked. Austin T and Austin F exchanged a look before the two sighed.

“So I was raised originally by my grandparents as my mom was into drugs and stuff, never even knew my dad. But my grandparents were on the older end. When I was six, there was an accident and my grandpa was injured badly. Because of that, I was put into foster care,” Austin F said.

“Mine is similar,” Austin T said, “I never knew my parents, though. Apparently they were both into drugs and shit, I had been a ward of the state since I was a baby. I met the other Austin when I was four.”

“We were in the same foster home, even if it wasn’t a great one. We became close, really close. Siblings, pretty much. When I ran away when I was sixteen, he followed,” Austin F said. Stephanie and Hunter nodded.

“I…that’s a hell of a story,” Hunter said. Austin T nodded while Austin F just looked down at her shoes.

“Do you have anything else for them?” Raul asked, a protective look crossing over his face. Stephanie and Hunter exchanged a look before nodding.

“No, we are good for now,” Hunter said. Jake and Raul nodded before ushering the two Austins out.

Austin T reached over and squeezed Austin F’s hand, smiling at his sister. Austin F smiled back instinctively. Despite everything, the two were always going to be there for each other.

When the four arrived back at their apartment, they found two people waiting outside the door. One was a tall, blonde woman while the other was a shorter woman with dark hair and darker skin.

“Hello, may we help you?” Jake stepped up in front of the others.

“I’m Detective Morse, this is Detective Lovato, we’re with the NYPD,” the blonde woman said, “We would like to talk to Austin Flynn and Austin Theory about the murder of Robert Stone.” The two Austins stiffened at that, knowing that it was their black market seller who was murdered by the Elite.

#partners in crime #austin dos veces #my writing

2 notes · View notes

rjzimmerman · 5 years ago

Link

youtube

Description from this article from Yale Climate Connections:

The change is visible from space. In the Earth’s high latitudes, new lakes and ponds are appearing in once-dry areas. These so-called “thermokarst” lakes form when underground ice collapses as permafrost warms. In the freshly formed lakes, the greenhouse gas methane is bubbling to the surface and escaping to the atmosphere, where it will make human-caused climate change even worse.

“I’m very concerned about the state of permafrost ecosystems,” says Ben Abbott, an assistant professor of ecosystem ecology at Brigham Young University. He and other scientists interviewed in this month’s “This is Not Cool” video, by independent videographer Peter Sinclair, warn that thawing permafrost will have cascading impacts on ecosystems and local infrastructure, which is buckling as it shifts on formerly sturdy ground.

The scientists interviewed for this video say that gradual melting on land can stimulate the growth of new plants, which trap some carbon in the soil. That could ameliorate some of the impact of the permafrost thaw.

But Katey Walter Anthony, an aquatic ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, says that models suggest that even moderate future warming will be enough to induce the widespread formation of thermokarst lakes – and more bubbling of methane from deep below the surface. “It’s really hard to avoid this methane release,” she says.

#permafrost #permafrost melting #climate change

1 note · View note

gravityresearch · 5 years ago

Link

Each Cyclops had a single eye because, legend has it, the mythical giants traded the other one with the god Hades in return for the ability to see into the future. But Hades tricked them: the only vision the Cyclopes were shown was the day they would die. They carried this knowledge through their lives as a burden—the unending torture of being forewarned and yet having no ability to do anything about it.

Since ancient times, aging has been viewed as simply inevitable, unstoppable, nature’s way. “Natural causes” have long been blamed for deaths among the old, even if they died of a recognized pathological condition. The medical writer Galen argued back in the second century AD that aging is a natural process.

His view, the acceptance that one can die simply of old age, has dominated ever since. We think of aging as the accumulation of all the other conditions that get more common as we get older—cancer, dementia, physical frailty. All that tells us, though, is that we’re going to sicken and die; it doesn’t give us a way to change it. We don’t have much more control over our destiny than a Cyclops.

But a growing number of scientists are questioning our basic conception of aging. What if you could challenge your death—or even prevent it altogether? What if the panoply of diseases that strike us in old age are symptoms, not causes? What would change if we classified aging itself as the disease?

David Sinclair, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, is one of those on the front line of this movement. Medicine, he argues, should view aging not as a natural consequence of growing older, but as a condition in and of itself. Old age, in his view, is simply a pathology—and, like all pathologies, can be successfully treated. If we labeled aging differently, it would give us a far greater ability to tackle it in itself, rather than just treating the diseases that accompany it.

“Many of the most serious diseases today are a function of aging. Thus, identifying the molecular mechanisms and treatments of aging should be an urgent priority,” he says. “Unless we address aging at its root cause, we’re not going to continue our linear, upward progress toward longer and longer life spans.”

It is a subtle shift, but one with big implications. How disease is classified and viewed by public health groups such as the World Health Organization (WHO) helps set priorities for governments and those who control funds. Regulators, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have strict rules that guide what conditions a drug can be licensed to act on, and so what conditions it can be prescribed and sold for. Today aging isn’t on the list. Sinclair says it should be, because otherwise the massive investment needed to find ways to fend it off won’t appear.

“Work to develop medicines that could potentially prevent and treat most major diseases is going far slower than it should be because we don’t recognize aging as a medical problem,” he says. “If aging were a treatable condition, then the money would flow into research, innovation, and drug development. Right now, what pharmaceutical or biotech company could go after aging as a condition if it doesn’t exist?” It should, he says, be the “biggest market of all.”

That’s precisely what worries some people, who think a gold rush into “anti-aging” drugs will set the wrong priorities for society.

It “turns a scientific discussion into a commercial or a political discussion,” says Eline Slagboom, a molecular epidemiologist who works on aging at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. Viewing age as just a treatable disease shifts the emphasis away from healthy living, she says. Instead, she argues, policymakers and medical professionals need to do more to prevent chronic diseases of old age by encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles while they are still young or middle-aged. Otherwise, the message is “that we can’t do anything with anybody [as they age] until they reach a threshold at the point where they get sick or age rapidly, and then we give them medication.”

Another common objection to the aging-as-a-disease hypothesis is that labeling old people as diseased will add to the stigma they already face. “Ageism is the biggest ism we have today in the world,” says Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “The aging community is attacked. People are fired from work because they are old. Old people cannot get jobs. To go to those people with so many problems and now tell them, ‘You’re sick, you have a disease’? This is a no-win situation for the people we are trying to help.”

Not everyone agrees it has to be a stigma. “I am clearly in favor of calling aging a disease,” says Sven Bulterijs, cofounder of the Healthy Life Extension Society, a nonprofit organization in Brussels that considers aging a “universal human tragedy” with a root cause that can be found and tackled to make people live longer. “We don’t say for cancer patients that it’s insulting to call it a disease.”

Notwithstanding Sinclair’s comment about “linear, upward progress,” just how long humans could live remains bitterly contested. The underlying, fundamental question: Do we have to die at all? If we found a way to both treat and beat aging as a disease, would we live for centuries—millennia, even? Or is there an ultimate limit?

Nature suggests that endless life might not be inconceivable. Most famously, perhaps, the bristlecone pine trees of North America are considered biologically immortal. They can die—chopped down by an ax or zapped by a lightning bolt—but left undisturbed, they typically won’t simply fall over because they get old. Some are reckoned to be 5,000 years young; age, quite literally, does not wither them. Their secret remains a mystery. Other species appear to show signs of biological immortality as well, including some sea creatures.

Such observations have led many to contend that life span can be dramatically extended with the right interventions. But in 2016, a high-profile study published in Nature argued that human life has a hard limit of about 115 years. This estimate is based on global demographic data showing that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after 100, and that the record for human longevity hasn’t increased since the 1990s. Other researchers have disputed the way the analysis was done.

Barzilai says efforts to tackle aging are needed regardless. “We can argue about if it’s 115 or 122 or 110 years,” he says. “Now we die before the age of 80, so we have 35 years that we are not realizing now. So let’s start realizing those years before we’re talking about immortality or somewhere in between.”

Whether or not they believe in either the disease hypothesis or maximum life spans, most experts agree that something has to change in the way we deal with aging. “If we don’t do something about the dramatic increase in older people, and find ways to keep them healthy and functional, then we have a major quality-of-life issue and a major economic issue on our hands,” says Brian Kennedy, the director of Singapore’s Centre for Healthy Ageing and a professor of biochemistry and physiology at the National University of Singapore. “We have to go out and find ways to slow aging down.”

The aging population is the “climate change of health care,” Kennedy says. It’s an appropriate metaphor. As with global warming, many of the solutions rest on changing people’s behavior—for example, modifications to diet and lifestyle. But, also as with global warming, much of the world seems instead to be pinning its hopes on a technological fix. Maybe the future will involve not just geoengineering but also gero-engineering.

One thing that may underlie the growing calls to reclassify aging as a disease is a shift in social attitudes. Morten Hillgaard Bülow, a historian of medicine at the University of Copenhagen, says things started to change in the 1980s, when the idea of “successful aging” took hold. Starting with studies organized and funded by the MacArthur Foundation in the United States, aging experts began to argue against Galen’s centuries-old stoic acceptance of decline, and said scientists should find ways to intervene. The US government, aware of the health implications of an aging population, agreed. At the same time, advances in molecular biology led to new attention from researchers. All that sent money flowing into research on what aging is and what causes it.

In the Netherlands, Slagboom is trying to develop tests to identify who is aging at a normal rate, and who has a body older than its years. She sees anti-aging medicine as a last resort but says understanding someone’s biological age can help determine how to treat age-related conditions. Take, for instance, a 70-year-old man with mildly elevated blood pressure. If he has the circulatory system of an 80-year-old, then the elevated pressure could help blood reach his brain. But if he has the body of a 60-year-old, he probably needs treatment.

Biomarkers that can identify biological age are a popular tool in aging research, says Vadim Gladyshev of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He characterizes aging as the accumulation of deleterious changes across the body, ranging from shifts in the populations of bacteria that live in our gut to differences in the degree of chemical scarring on our DNA, known as methylation. These are biological measures that can be tracked, so they can also be used to monitor the effectiveness of anti-aging drugs. “Once we can measure and quantify the progression through aging, then that gives us a tool to assess longevity interventions,” he says.

Two decades on, the results of that research are becoming apparent. Studies in mice, worms, and other model organisms have revealed what’s going on in aging cells and come up with various ways to extend life—sometimes to extraordinary lengths.

Most researchers have more modest goals, with a focus on improving what they call “health span”—how long people remain independent and functional. And they say they’re making progress, with a handful of possible pills in the pipeline.

One promising treatment is metformin. It’s a common diabetes drug that has been around for many years, but animal studies suggest it could also protect against frailty, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. Giving it to healthy people might help delay aging, but without official guidance doctors are reluctant to prescribe it that way.

One group of researchers, including Einstein College’s Barzilai, is trying to change that. Barzilai is leading a human trial called TAME (Targeting Aging with Metformin) that plans to give the drug to people aged 65 to 80 to see if it delays problems such as cancer, dementia, stroke, and heart attacks. Although the trial has struggled to raise funding—partly because metformin is a generic drug, which reduces potential profits for drug companies—Barzilai says he and his colleagues are now ready to recruit patients and start later this year.

Metformin is one of a broader class of drugs called mTOR inhibitors. These interfere with a cell protein involved in division and growth. By turning the protein’s activity down, scientists think they can mimic the known benefits of calorie restriction diets. These diets can make animals live longer; it’s thought that the body may respond to the lack of food by taking protective measures. Preliminary human tests suggest the drugs can boost older people’s immune systems and stop them from catching infectious bugs.

Other researchers are looking at why organs start to pack up as their cells age, a process called senescence. Among the leading candidates for targeting and removing these decrepit cells from otherwise healthy tissues is a class of compounds called senolytics. These encourage the aged cells to selectively self-destruct so the immune system can clean them out. Studies have found that older mice on these drugs age more slowly. In humans, senescent cells are blamed for diseases ranging from atherosclerosis and cataracts to Parkinson’s and osteoarthritis. Small human trials of senolytics are under way, although they aren’t officially aimed at aging itself, but on the recognized illnesses of osteoarthritis and a lung disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Research on these drugs has highlighted a key question about aging: Is there a common mechanism by which different tissues change and decline? If so, could we find drugs to target that mechanism instead of playing what Harvard’s David Sinclair calls “whack-a-mole” medicine, treating individual diseases as they emerge? He believes there is, and that he has found a stunning new way to rewind the aging clock.

In unpublished work described in his coming book Lifespan, he says the key to his lab’s work in this area is epigenetics. This fast-moving field focuses on how changes to the way genes are expressed, rather than mutations to the DNA itself, can produce physiological changes such as disease. Some of the body’s own epigenetic mechanisms work to protect its cells, repairing damage to DNA, for instance; but they become less effective with age. Sinclair claims to have used gene therapy to effectively recharge these mechanisms in mice, and he says he can “make damaged optic-nerve cells young again” to restore sight to elderly blind animals.

We have been here before. Many scientists thought they had found a fountain of youth in animal studies, only to have the results dry up when they turned their attention to people. But Sinclair is convinced he is on to something. He says he’ll soon publish the results in a scientific journal for other researchers to examine.

Because aging isn’t officially a disease, most research on these drugs exists in a gray area: they don’t—or can’t—officially tackle aging. For example, Barzilai’s metformin project, the closest the world has right now to a clinical trial for a drug that targets aging, aims to prevent diseases associated with aging rather than aging itself, as do the trials on senolytics. “And one of the side effects is you might live longer,” he says.

Barzilai won’t go so far as to say aging should be reclassified as a disease, but he does say that if it were, discoveries might happen faster. Studies like TAME have to give people a drug, then wait years and years to see if it prevents some of them from developing an age-related disease. And because that effect is likely to be relatively small, it takes huge numbers of people to prove anything. If aging were instead considered a disease, trials could focus on something quicker and cheaper to prove—such as whether the drug slows the progression from one stage of aging to another.

The Healthy Life Extension Society is part of a group that last year asked the WHO to include aging in the latest revision of its official International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11. The WHO declined, but it did list “aging-related” as an extension code that can be applied to a disease, to indicate that age increases the risk of getting it.

To try to put research into treatments that target aging on a more scientific footing, a different group of scientists is preparing to revisit the issue with the WHO. Coordinated by Stuart Calimport, a former advisor to the SENS Research Foundation in California, which promotes research on aging, the detailed proposal—a copy of which has been seen by MIT Technology Review—suggests that each tissue, organ, and gland in the body should be scored—say, from 1 to 5—on how susceptible it is to aging. This so-called staging process has already helped develop cancer treatments. In theory, it could allow drugs to be licensed if they are shown to stop or delay the aging of cells in a region of the body.

Reclassifying aging as a disease could have another big benefit. David Gems, a professor of the biology of aging at University College London, says it would provide a way to crack down on quack anti-aging products. “That would essentially protect older people from the swirling swamp of exploitation of the anti-aging business. They’re able to make all sorts of claims because it’s not legally a disease,” Gems says.

In February, for instance, the FDA was forced to warn consumers that injections of blood from younger people—a procedure that costs thousands of dollars and has become increasingly popular around the world—had no proven clinical benefit. But it couldn’t ban the injections outright. By calling them an anti-aging treatment, companies escape the strict oversight applied to drugs that claim to target a specific disease.

Like the Cyclops, Singapore has been given a glimpse of what is to come—and officials there do not like what they see. The island nation is on the front line of the gray surge. By 2030, if current trends continue, there will be just two people working there for every retired person (by comparison, the US will have three people in the workforce for every resident over 65). So the country is trying to change the script, to find a happier and healthier ending.

With the help of volunteer subjects, Kennedy of Singapore’s Centre for Healthy Ageing is preparing the first wide-ranging human tests of aging treatments. Kennedy says he’s aiming to trial 10 to 15 possible interventions—he won’t say which, for now—in small groups of people in their 50s: “I’m thinking maybe three or four drugs and a few supplements, and then compare those to lifestyle modifications.”

The Singapore government has prioritized strategies to deal with the aging population and Kennedy wants to create a “test bed” for such human experiments. “We have made great progress in animals,” he adds, “but we need to begin to do these tests in people.”

0 notes

enzaime-blog · 7 years ago

Text

A Sun-Splashed Wedding, Then Hospice, For Dana-Farber Patient

New Story has been published on https://enzaime.com/sun-splashed-wedding-hospice-dana-farber-patient/

A Sun-Splashed Wedding, Then Hospice, For Dana-Farber Patient

Each day, Anthony Lewis Jr. showed up at the convenience store under the guise of purchasing a lottery ticket. He bought the tickets, but his real interest was in the woman behind the counter – an old high school classmate he was working up the nerve to ask out. The warm-hearted cashier finally let Lewis off the hook by asking him out, and since their first date six years ago he and Jennifer have seldom been apart. They often talked about getting married, but were always too busy at work or too short on funds. Further complicating matters was Lewis’ stage IV metastatic cholangiocarcinoma cancer (also known as bile duct cancer), for which he received ongoing treatment at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center at Milford Regional Medical Center. Then, this October, everything changed. The couple, both 44, learned that Lewis’ cancer was reaching a terminal stage, and he would need to make plans for hospice care. In a separate meeting with Jennifer Grant, Dana-Farber social worker Mellissa Rearick, MSW, LICSW, asked if there was anything that her boyfriend had always wanted to do. “Get married,” she said. “We were waiting for him to get better, and now it can never happen.” Rearick then said, “We can do this. We can get you and Anthony married.” Things moved quickly from there. Rearick told Lewis about the conversation, and he called Grant in the morning from his hospital bed to propose. She said yes, and the couple who once couldn’t make time for a wedding set a date for the very next day. The couple, which originally met in high school, reconnected around 2010 and had put off getting married when Anthony was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic cholangiocarcinoma cancer (also known as bile duct cancer) two years into their relationship. The couple, which originally met in high school, reconnected around 2010 and had put off getting married when Anthony was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic cholangiocarcinoma cancer (also known as bile duct cancer) two years into their relationship. Rearick teamed up with Cheryl Mitchell, MSW, LCSW, Lewis’ inpatient social worker during his frequent stays at Milford Regional Medical Center, to handle the details. A bakery prepared a gluten-free wedding cake overnight that met Lewis’ dietary restrictions. A local jeweler donated rings. Notarized letters from Lewis’ oncologist Natalie Sinclair, MD, and Milford Regional’s chaplain, minister Thomas Landry, enabled Grant to pick up their marriage license without the usual three-day wait. Invitations went out by phone and email to caregivers and a small group of family members. “When Mellissa asked me what I wanted to wear, I was torn,” says now-Jennifer Lewis. “Places were willing to donate a veil and dress, and it would have been wonderful to look super-special for my soulmate. But Anthony was feeling very sick, and I knew pajamas were best for him. I wanted to be equally comfortable.” On Oct. 18, under a sunny sky in the tranquil garden of Milford Regional Medical Center, Jennifer and Anthony said “I do.” The bride wore jeans and a casual shirt. “What was important was the union, and the ceremony,” says Anthony Lewis. “She looked like herself – beautiful.” Did Jennifer miss not having a traditional veil and dress? “Not at all,” she says. “Father Landry said the connection that Anthony and I have is what marriage should always be about. It was hard for us to stop sneaking in kisses during the ceremony, because it was one of the happiest moments we could ever think of.” Now the couple that used to meet for lunch in the middle of each work day is spending all their time together as husband and wife. Anthony is home from the hospital, and receives daily visits from a hospice nurse arranged through Dana-Farber Milford. Rearick and Sinclair text and call regularly; Jennifer’s adult son, Cameron, comes by for help and hugs. When it was clear that his disease was terminal, in Fall 2017, social workers Mellissa Rearick, MSW, LICSW, of Dana-Farber Milford and Cheryl Mitchell, MSW, LCSW, of Milford Regional Medical Center (where Anthony often stayed as an inpatient) headed up arrangements for the couple’s wedding on Oct. 18 – one day after Anthony proposed. The rings and gluten-free cake were donated and the Milford Regional chaplain performed the ceremony. Anthony’s oncologist, Natalie Sinclair, MD, and other caregivers were also in attendance. When it was clear that his disease was terminal, in Fall 2017, social workers Mellissa Rearick, MSW, LICSW, of Dana-Farber Milford and Cheryl Mitchell, MSW, LCSW, of Milford Regional Medical Center (where Anthony often stayed as an inpatient) headed up arrangements for the couple’s wedding on Oct. 18 – one day after Anthony proposed. The rings and gluten-free cake were donated and the Milford Regional chaplain performed the ceremony. Anthony’s oncologist, Natalie Sinclair, MD, and other caregivers were also in attendance. “Days are spent loving each other unconditionally, cherishing every moment together, and cuddling with our sweet hound mix, Chief Brody,” says Jennifer Lewis. “We are so lucky that we found each other, and are thankful for every minute and second we have — and for what everybody did to make our wedding happen. “Our message is this: Don’t take your loved ones for granted, and don’t let a day go by without telling them how you feel.” No wonder Anthony jokes that Jennifer is “still out of my league.” He got that winning lottery ticket after all.

#ceremony #Chief Brody #gluten-free #Landry #LCSW #Mellissa Rearick #MSW #Bile Duct Cancer

0 notes

healthyeve-blog1 · 7 years ago

Text

Aging Solution : The Miracle Solution Of Aging Finally Discovered - HealthyEve

New Post has been published on http://www.healthyeve.com/aging-solution/

Aging Solution : The Miracle Solution Of Aging Finally Discovered - HealthyEve

.healthyeve_beforepost width: 300px; height: 250px; @media(min-width: 600px) .healthyeve_beforepost width: 620px; height: 300px; (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

(function($) $(document).ready(function() ); )(jQuery); (function ($) var bsaProContainer = $('.bsaProContainer-1'); var number_show_ads = "0"; var number_hide_ads = "0"; if ( number_show_ads > 0 ) setTimeout(function () bsaProContainer.fadeIn(); , number_show_ads * 1000); if ( number_hide_ads > 0 ) setTimeout(function () bsaProContainer.fadeOut(); , number_hide_ads * 1000); )(jQuery);

HealthyEve.com

Aging Solution: The Miracle Solution Of Aging Finally Discovered – HealthyEve

Sunday, April 2, 2017

Aging Solution: A medication could prevent the onset of certain diseases related to aging and improve heart health.

Scientists have achieved a discovery that can lead to a revolutionary drug that resists aging.

It can miraculously help repair the damaged DNA, and even protect NASA astronauts to send them to Mars by protecting them from solar radiation.

a team of researchers developed the drug after discovering a key signal in DNA repair and cell aging.

HealthyEve.com

Aging Solution: Dr. Sinclair and her research team

“This is the closest we have to the anti-aging drugs to a safe and effective aging that mnot be more than 3 to 5 years before they are available in the market if trials starting within 6 months are going well,

.healthyeve_afterpost width: 300px; height: 250px; @media(min-width: 600px) .healthyeve_afterpost width: 620px; height: 300px; (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

(function($) $(document).ready(function() ); )(jQuery); (function ($) var bsaProContainer = $('.bsaProContainer-3'); var number_show_ads = "0"; var number_hide_ads = "0"; if ( number_show_ads > 0 ) setTimeout(function () bsaProContainer.fadeIn(); , number_show_ads * 1000); if ( number_hide_ads > 0 ) setTimeout(function () bsaProContainer.fadeOut(); , number_hide_ads * 1000); )(jQuery);

” Sinclair says. Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Aging Solution: Accelerating symptoms of aging

The work drew attention from NASA, which is studying the challenge of keeping the spacewalkers safe during a 4-year mission to Mars.

.healthyeve_betweenpost width: 336px; height: 280px; @media(min-width: 600px) .healthyeve_betweenpost width: 620px; height: 300px; (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

(function($) $(document).ready(function() ); )(jQuery); (function ($) var bsaProContainer = $('.bsaProContainer-2'); var number_show_ads = "0"; var number_hide_ads = "0"; if ( number_show_ads > 0 ) setTimeout(function () bsaProContainer.fadeIn(); , number_show_ads * 1000); if ( number_hide_ads > 0 ) setTimeout(function () bsaProContainer.fadeOut(); , number_hide_ads * 1000); )(jQuery);

Even in short missions, the experience of astronauts led to the acceleration of aging #

because of the effect of cosmic radiation, suffering from muscle weakness, memory loss, and other symptoms when they return.

Mice, dogs and soon young humans longer? Scientist Matt Kaeberlein, a Washington University biologist specializing in research on aging, believes in it, as he explains in an article in the New York.

Aging Solution: New Approaches

HealthyEve.com

The fountain of youth would bear the name of rapamycin.

The first tests on dogs confirm the observations observed for the first time in mice in 2009: this medicine usually used to prevent graft rejections in humans slows down aging by decreasing the activity of a protein that Is responsible.

“If you extrapolate the results in humans, we’re probably talking about a 20-year gain with the hope that these years will be relatively healthy,”

enthuses Kaeberlein. Until now, the first tests on the 1,500 dogs participating in the study do not have side effects but on the contrary an improvement in cardiac capacities.

Aging Solution: Eternal youth

These analyses mark a new stage in the youth race launched by molecular biologists in the 1990s.

Hitherto, the experiment in flies, parasites, and mice, the arrival of rapamycin on dogs has changed our relationship with the drug According to Kaeberlein.

“If the owners of the dogs find that there is a way to greatly delay the aging of their pet, this may have an influence on what is done with the drug.

While most of the deadly diseases in developed countries – heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer – all have the common risk factor of aging, eternal youth becomes a real issue.

Researchers on this topic are still calling for more grants, while Google with Calico and the start-up Unity are already working on the issue.

HealthyEve.com

Aging Solution: Would old age be a reversible shipwreck?

Only, the older you get, the more NAD’s network feels. Result: the mitochondria can no longer convey their fuel to target organelles.

And this is where the work – on the mouse – American researchers are dreaming.

Because by administering NAD for a week to a rodent at the end of life, they found a completely unbelievable.

Aging Solution: The Ultimate Effect

“Dorian Gray” effect: the mitochondria regained a new youth, strengthening the muscles of the animal and improving their resistance to the ” inflammation.

Thus, by restoring the vacillating intracellular communication network of an elderly animal,

David Sinclair and his team may well have put their finger on an essential mechanism for longevity.

“This is the first time that the mouse has a link between aging and good communication between the cell nucleus and its mitochondria,” says David Sinclair.

Could the NAD constitute an effective filter of youth for the human being?

Would old age be a reversible shipwreck? These are the questions that immediately come to mind in the face of such dramatic results. Even the greatest caution required.

“The NAD ,indeed a totally exciting molecule that has occupied me for several years,

” enthuses Pierre Rustin, but we must not draw hasty conclusions: aging is a very Different from one animal to another.What is successful in mice is not necessarily transposable to humans. ”

HealthyEve.com

Aging Solution: Next step? Old people…

That does not prevent David Sinclair from taking the plunge. The next step in his work will be to restore the failing mitochondrial function in … the elderly.

With the hope that NAD-based treatment will, at least initially, help combat countless age-related diseases such as stroke.

It could also counteract conditions such as cancer, inflammatory diseases, or type 2 diabetes, for which mitochondria play an essential role.

In short, if you did not know the existence of these organelles

before, it would be better you accustomed to them because you have not finished hearing about it.

HealthyEve.com

Published On

Sunday,April 2,2017-11:18:27 AM[London]

URL: http://www.healthyeve.com/aging-solution/

You Could Find More About This Article Via Useful Links:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160711120533.htm

http://realmedicalhelp.com/antiaging/cv1.htm

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/beauty/face-body/scientists-discover-vitamin-that-may-reverse-the-antiageing-process/news-story/eb64818052866fdc74e8254931e0192f

http://www.healthyeve.com/heart-disease-best-foods-prevent-cardiovascular-disease/

http://www.healthyeve.com/latest-anti-aging-research-news/

http://www.healthyeve.com/3d-prinitng-top-achievements-3d-health-printing/

http://www.healthyeve.com/news-world-medicine-top-5-innovations-new-treatment-aids-disease/

http://www.healthyeve.com/diabetes-facts-diabetes-complications/

http://www.healthyeve.com/alzheimers-disease/

http://www.healthyeve.com/stroke-real-danger-behind-serious-disease/

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

.healthyeve_afterpost width: 300px; height: 250px; @media(min-width: 600px) .healthyeve_afterpost width: 620px; height: 300px; (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

#aging #Alzheimer's #anti-aging drugs #diabetes #diseases #DNA #Eternal youth #health #healthy #healthyeve #healthyeve.com #heart disease #innovations #NAD #rapamycin #Scientific Discovery #stroke

0 notes