Another Blow at the Heart of Humanity

12/11/2016

Morning above Beşiktaş

Now they got the stadium at Beşiktaş.
Whoever they is.

It sat right below our window on the hill near Taksim Square, during our visit.

Turkey is one of the most fantastic (in the Orhan Pamuk sense) places in the world.
I’m glad we got there in 2012, just before all hell broke loose.

Of course, that goes for a lot of places these days. We have seen familiar streets, places we have recently walked, get blown up by nihilists of one persuasion or another. Boston. London. Paris. Nice. Istanbul. The world we knew. The world where people still try to live.

The sun comes up over Asia, lights up the Bosporus, shines on Beşiktaş Stadium and our hotel, diligently guarded.

The window from which this photo was taken had a little round arrow, pointing south and east, toward Mecca, so tourists could say their prayers.

Sitting at my laptop in the mornings, I prayed for people, for cities, for the collective impulse for life that made the streets throb with life, the pungent odors of coffee and kebabs, in all directions off Taksim Square.

Now somebody has blown up police officers, there to guard humanity, that is to say, us – to keep fans from rioting, from hurting the innocent. Now blown up.

We walked past that stadium every day, downhill, toward the tram that glided to a terrific art museum, to ferries to Uskadar – Asia! – to mosques and cafés and bazaars, the staples of life.

Even football is part of life, with its rivalries, its ballet and speed and power and fakery and thuggery.

Somebody got Beşiktaş. Struck life itself.

Just off Taksim Square. The bustle of life.

bruce

12/12/2016 02:23:11 pm

george,

i live about a 9-10 minute walk from where i grew up.

there was a large park about a five minute walk from my place. a few diamonds, a tennis court, a very large field bigger than a canadian fielddwarfs an american field and a play area for kids with slides, teeter totter etc....

it was always full from april to october with baseball and then football. pick up games. organized baseball too, but we played during the day in spring and summer. august we'd switch to mostly football.

for hockey, we trekked to hsylop's pond during weekends to play shinny. it was very very cold at times.we used to light a fire to warm ourselves during breaks. also, after we fell into freezing water when the ice was too thin.

now the fields are basically unused except for some organized baseball/fastball. hyslop's pond is empty.

then in my mid teens i discovered the pool hall. played a lot of snooker. we used to laugh at 9ball. small table, biggish pockets...how the hell could you miss!?

my 11 year grandson is glued in front of a computer or doing pokemon stuff.

on the other hand, there were a lot fewer options when i was a kid. i was born in 1950 and when i see movies or read contemporary articles it looks prehistoric times.

on the other, other hand....if i was 13 and was able to look at naked women--and not just being naked--on the internet i'm sure my all sports all the time priorities would've been greatly diminished.

feel the same way when people talk about how tough--using an american example--the founding fathers as well as the europeans who settled both canada and the usa were.

they were tough. no question about it.

however, it was because of the time they lived. if we'd been born in the 17th-18th centuries that's how we would've been. if washington or champlain were born today....well they'd be softies too.

bruce

George Vecsey

12/13/2016 04:47:15 pm

Bruce, I am assuming you were responding to my bicycle posting.
I lived on a busy street in Queens (half a mile from TrumpHaus, in a different neighborhood)....we rode our bikes to Cunningham Park...onto the old Vanderbilt Motor Parkway, through the woods, to Alley Pond Park. Dangerous? Traffic? Creeps? Maybe. But it's what we did.
Then again, we know of at least two little boys who were killed on bikes not far from two different houses of ours. So that is the possibility. Nothing is given...GV

bruce

12/13/2016 05:13:27 pm

george,

weird, i posted this when your bicycle piece was the latest you'd posted.

believe it or not, i never learned to ride a bike. only knew one other able bodied adult who was in the same boat.

bruce

George Vecsey

12/13/2016 07:55:32 pm

That is understandable because in Canuckistan the ice never melts, so cycling would be difficult. You had a rink in the back yard, however.
GV

Mendel

12/13/2016 03:37:18 pm

George, I've been considering how to respond to this but am coming up blank. May God help us all.

George Vecsey

12/13/2016 04:42:56 pm

Mendel: the news from other parts of the world is equally distressing.
The temptation is to personalize:
My rellies in London take some of the same transportation that the nihilists hit in 2005...we had just been there.
We know the block the geniuses hit in Boston.
But the blocks of Aleppo are, or should be, as precious.
When does it end?
G

bruce

12/13/2016 05:16:32 pm

george,

i stayed at the tavistock hotel in trafalgar square during my first visit to europe and again when mieko and i went to london/paris on our honeymoon.

bruce

bruce

12/13/2016 08:06:10 pm

george,

i can see that, unlike most of your countrymen/women, you've studied and been able to grasp the reality of life in the socalist/communist gulag that is your northern neighbour (note the correct spelling of neighbour, eh!)

bruce

govindnath link

12/22/2016 01:30:09 am

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QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Another Blow at the Heart of Humanity

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