sense of what it may have been like to
listen to Tolstoy speak, as in Gorky's observation that "one must have
heard him speak in order to understand the extraordinary, indefinable beauty of
his speech; it was, in a sense, incorrect, abounding in repetitions of the same
word, saturated with village simplicity."
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Repetition is also a means of
defamiliarization, the technique by which objects and situations are "made
strange" and depicted with an unusual clarity, quite contrary to the way
we habitually see (and thus do not genuinely see) them. "The very fact of
repeating an item, repeating a word takes it out of line already and renders it
strange," observed Viktor Shklovsky, the great Russian formalist critic
who pioneered the concept of "estrangement" as an essential technique
of literature, and who acknowledged Tolstoy as one of the masters of the
device. War and Peace contains scene after scene in which the descriptions seem
first counterintuitive and then revelatory: Natasha's trip to the opera, where
the stage is shown as "painted pieces of cardboard on the sides
representing trees, and canvas stretched over the boards at the back";
Pierre, dazed and intrigued, wandering through the crucial battle of Borodino
in a white hat and green tailcoat, looking for the battle; Nikolai's fixation
on Dolokhov's "broad-boned, reddish hands, with hair showing from under
the cuffs," which appear to grow so large and monstrous that they
completely dominate his impressions. Senses are shifted or apparently
misattributed. War is rendered with images of peace, peace with images of war.
Laughter erupts in moments of solemnity. Bullets whiz by "merrily."
Prince Andrei waits outside the room where his son is being born and, hearing
the baby crying, thinks to himself, "Why did they bring a baby
there?" Again and again the world is seen, very suddenly, with the
startling and unclouded truthfulness of Tolstoy's alien but earthly eye.
Much of War and Peace is devoted to
clearing away received ideas--the legacy of Napoleon, the excuse of war for
moral atrocities, the elevating quality of Western ideals; and Tolstoy's style
is designed to reduce a complex of sentiments rife with preconceptions to a
powerful, moving, and finally rather raw feeling. This broaches another virtue
of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation: the decision to keep all the French in
Tolstoy's text. In Russian upper-class circles, especially in the early
nineteenth century, French was entrenched as the language of culture and
sophistication, following Catherine the Great's program of Westernization.
Pushkin wrote his first poems in French, and an aristocrat would have been
expected to be able to converse freely in the language. (Tolstoy's children
were instructed to speak French at the dinner table.)
In War and Peace, French--the language
in which, as Tolstoy observes, "our grandparents not only spoke but
thought"--seems alternately like the Trojan Horse and the perfect symbol
of liberalization and progress, a repository of both culture and illusion. The
emblematic depiction of the unnatural influence of French comes when Pierre
Bezukhov, feeling himself "occupying someone else's place," declares
his bewildered, engineered love for the duplicitous Helene Kuragin of St.
Petersburg. With the words "Je vous aime," he binds himself to a vast
network of social falsehoods, and then spends most of the novel trying to extricate
himself from them. The use of French also makes a significant socio-linguistic
point, by marking the gap between the classes: as Napoleon's army advances on
Moscow, the noble elite in Petersburg start to take private Russian lessons and
charge each other forfeits for every French word spoken, and it becomes
dangerous for the upper classes to greet each other in the street in Moscow, as
they might be mistaken by the crowd for French spies. The supreme embodiment of
French and all that it suggests is, of course, Napoleon himself, who is
characterized by "the absence of the best and highest human qualities--
love, poetry, tenderness, a searching philosophical doubt." Self-serving,
scornful of tradition, amoral, blinkered by ambition, Napoleon represents in
Tolstoy's novel a moral and spiritual challenge to the novel's heroes--and, in
a typical, ahistorical Tolstoyan put-down, the invading emperor speaks a
bizarre mix of French and Russian.
Tolstoy's temperament evidently
bristled at the existence of great men other than himself. He gradually
quarreled with much of the Russian artistic world, nearly fought a duel with
Turgenev over a minor disagreement, and flabbergasted Tchaikovsky by dismissing
Beethoven as a minor artist. Years after War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote an
article attempting even to annihilate the literary reputation of Shakespeare.
When he was advanced in years, Tolstoy was held by many Russians to be one of
Russia's "two czars," the first being the crowned sovereign Alexander
II. And he was too large even for the infinite: as Gorky wrote in his memoir of
Tolstoy, "With God he has very suspicious relations; they sometimes remind
me of the relation of 'two bears in one den.'"
War and Peace is in part a demolition
of the very idea of the "great man." History is so overwhelming,
according to Tolstoy, because momentous events are the result of many
factors--of so many factors that no single animating force behind them can ever
be identified. The leviathan of history has causes for scales, and no one can
count them all. The individual is inevitably swept up by a tide of causes
beyond his or her abilities to comprehend, let alone to influence. And no
single human being could possibly be the cause of something as vast as the
Napoleonic campaigns, including Napoleon himself. In one sense, the deepest
drama of War and Peace lies in the meeting between the self-contained universe
of a single individual and the senseless and immense tide of historical events.
This meeting, meaningless for history, leaves the individual shivering. As Mary
McCarthy observed, "It could be said that the real plot of War and Peace
is the struggle of the characters not to be immersed, engulfed, swallowed up by
the landscape of fact and 'history' in which they, like all human beings, have
been placed: freedom (the subjective) is in the fiction, and necessity is in
the fact."
The purest evocation of an individual
come face to face with history is in the battle of Schongraben, when Nikolai
Rostov sees the French army advancing and thinks: "Who are they? Why are
they running? Can it be they're running to me? Can it be? And why? To kill me?
Me, whom everybody loves so?" Tolstoy's development of the problem of
historical causation, in the later philosophical interludes produced during the
three-year period of revision, could even be seen as an attempt at the novel's
end to find answers for the questions that Nikolai asked at its beginning. But
he did not find these answers; and there is a chilling and momentous echo of
Rostov's baffled voice, many decades later, in Solzhenitsyn, who at the start
of The Gulag Archipelago describes a man's incomprehension about his arrest by
the secret police: "The darkened mind is incapable of embracing these
displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest
simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience can gasp out only: 'Me?
What for?'"
Yet the insignificance of the human,
cosmically considered, is not all of the novel's wisdom. Alongside the book's
illustrations of the blinkered perspectives of its people, War and Peace revels
in the depiction of individual experience, internally coherent and
inexhaustible, in the face of that same tide of history. The interior worlds of
love and its dreams, of hunger, disappointment, spiritual unity, and the fear
of death: Tolstoy reveals all of this, and the immediate impressions of his
characters, however self-contained, often expand in significance to fill
completely their perceptions. If there is a skeptical and abstract strain to Tolstoy's
picture of human life in the novel, there is also a personal and ecstatic one.
Each character stands at the center of his or her own universe, and much of the
lifelike quality of Tolstoy's narrative stems from its sensitivity to the force
of local sensations and desires. Amid the terrifying chaos of battle, a
military doctor comes out of a tent carrying in his bloody hand a cigar
"between the thumb and the little finger (so as not to stain it)."
And more, every personal universe
appears limitless. In the famous scene on the battlefield of Austerlitz, the
wounded Prince Andrei experiences his sweeping, almost mystical vision of the
"infinite sky" all around him, and then sees Napoleon, the
quintessential great man, and finds him inconsequential: "He knew that it
was Napoleon--his hero--but at that moment, Napoleon seemed to him such a
small, insignificant man compared with what was now happening between his soul
and this lofty, infinite sky with clouds racing across it." Napoleon
cannot conceive of a world of which he is not the center, but neither can
anyone else: Pierre, Nikolai, Natasha, and Princess Marya each experience
moments of transcendence, visions of the world in its totality, encompassed by
the individual soul and encompassing it. These moments are rarely shared
between the characters themselves, and Tolstoy shows us not only how his
characters glimpse the infinite, but also the relativity of their universal
glimpses: where one sees infinity, another sees just the sky.
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Dostoyevsky, Gorky, and many others
have referred to Tolstoy as a godlike author. If his message is in fact divine,
Tolstoy's War and Peace might be compared with God's final words to his prophet
Jonah, who desired to see the city of Nineveh destroyed for sinfulness, but
fell into a rage at the destruction of a gourd that gave him shade: "Thou
hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored, neither madest
it grow; which came up in the night, and perished in a night: and should not I
spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons
that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much
cattle." War and Peace can be read as a similar meditation on scale. If
one man can ascend to the heavens of experience, and love, and err, and repent,
and glimpse for a second the meaning of his own life, imagine the spiritual
attainments of entire families, cities, and nations! Again the philosophical
problems of complexity and causation seem to arise out of the local character
of the narrative--out of its local infinities--as though Tolstoy in his philosophical
chapters was coming at the same questions raised by the story in a different
way. Of what is life composed, and toward what should it be directed when set
against the world's immensity? Out of these perplexities arises not only
Tolstoy's philosophy, but also his fiction.
In his introduction, Pevear
paraphrases Isaac Babel as saying that "if the world could write, it would
write like Tolstoy." In fact, Babel actually said that "When you read
Tolstoy, it is the world writing, the variety of the world. " The life
that Tolstoy portrays is forever a teeming multiplicity, and his secret is to
imply even more life than that. Since the spiritual heights experienced by the
main characters are so vivid, and since these characters are decidedly not great
historical actors, the reader ends up believing that after the hussar mentioned
in only a single sentence has ridden out of view, behind the tree line, he may
go on to get rich, or to fall in love, or to see God--but no matter what, his
life will continue. The passing, anonymous hussar's life beyond his appearance
in this book could even be the subject of another book. It is one of the feats
of Tolstoy's art that it makes mortal lives seem so autonomous and so
unfathomed. And as in the Book of Jonah, the same is true for plants and
animals: when, during the hunting scene, a wolf emerges from the woods and
Tolstoy describes how he shudders "at the sight of human eyes, which he
had probably never seen before," the entire existence of the animal flashes
into view for a second. At times human life recedes into its cherished minor
place in the background, and Tolstoy lets us glimpse all of nature, its
animated whole.
The artistic recreation of life was
among the means by which Tolstoy sought to identify the meaning of his own
existence, creating in War and Peace a kind of laboratory for examining its
elements and the forces acting on it. Like Pierre Bezukhov, the writer was
always being consumed by a new passion, to which he intended to devote himself
fully: he would become a diplomat with a degree in Oriental languages; he would
marry a Cossack girl and live in an aoul like Olenin in The Cossacks; he would
race horses with the Bashkirs in Samara; he would write works rivaling Homer
and Shakespeare; he would be the patriarch of a great family; he would become a
holy sage and teach the world the meaning of the Gospels; he would become a
pilgrim and walk the earth in search of the Truth. In each of these
soul-scenarios, Tolstoy saw a vision of another life, a life in which his own
could be consummated and made sensible.
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After completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
experienced a religious crisis. Disillusioned with art and literature, he
devoted himself to his study of the Gospels, out of which grew his
once-notorious teachings of nonviolence and a churchless Christianity. At one
point he intended to become a cobbler, taking private lessons from one of his
tradesmen and making thick boots for his friends. (On receiving his pair,
Tolstoy's friend Sukhotin put them on his bookshelf after the twelfth volume of
Tolstoy's collected works, with a label that read "Volume XIII.") The
vexation of his later work lies in part in Tolstoy's decision to trade
complexity for simplicity and universal usefulness--in the feeling that he is
attempting not to address the truth as he sees it, that he is somehow
deliberately misplacing his powers. It is as though, regarding the question of
what he actually believed, Tolstoy, in Isaiah Berlin's phrase, "did his
best to falsify the answer," and to convince the world of the strength of
his faith just as it wavered more and more wildly. It worked: the popular image
of Tolstoy is the one that appears in the famous photograph in which he stands
next to Gorky at Yasnaya Polyana. Dressed in a heavy, rough peasant shirt tied
with a thick leather belt, he stares at the camera, weary and wise, even holy,
his streaming biblical beard so white that he seems to be dissolving into the
snow-covered Russian landscape.
When Tolstoy was in the Caucasus as a
young man, he heard the story of Hadji Murat, a famously brave and violent Avar
warrior from Dagestan who decamped to the Russians in opposition to the Muslim
cleric Shamil, and then betrayed the Russians, and died fighting against troops
of both sides. Very late in life, having disavowed his previously literary
works and become himself a destination for spiritual pilgrims, Tolstoy wrote
his own account of Hadji Murat's story. At first glance, the story seems to
take its cue from Homer, and Hadji Murat comes off as a latter-day Greek hero
dying honorably on the field of battle. But there is more to it. The story is
also a reflection on switching paths in search of the right one. In a strange
way Hadji Murat is a kindred spirit of Pierre Bezukhov, both of them drawn now
to one solution, now to another, examining by means of experience all the
possibilities, especially the antithetical ones, zigzagging in the hope of
discovering the correct choice.
When, in Tolstoy's story, a Russian
general speaking at a military banquet about Hadji Murat says, in English,
"All's well that ends well," the phrase has taken on a tragic irony
absent from its early use as the working title for War and Peace. Hadji Murat
dies a warrior's death, but he also fails in his attempt to rescue his family,
pinned by the two opposing sides that he has equally betrayed. The story could
be taken as an illustration of the impossibility of things "ending
well," or even ending at all in the sense of reaching completion. For
Tolstoy, what meaning there is lies in the attempt, not in the arrival. The
lives of Pierre Bezukhov and Hadji Murat are exemplary for the ceaselessness of
their flawed conversions and impassioned recalculations, all of them undertaken
at the edge of what may be an abyss.
In 1910 Tolstoy fled Yasnaya Polyana
in spiritual despair, and died of pneumonia in transit, at the train station of
a provincial town. In his last few days, he began dictating a letter to his
English biographer and translator Aylmer Maude, but finished only the first
half-sentence: "On my way to the place where I wished to be alone I
was" The tragic irony that sounds over Pierre and Hadji Murat finally
sounded over Tolstoy himself. Following the promptings of his soul toward an
answer for the question that filled his world, he left thousands of pages in
which we may recognize our own world, various, blossoming, and inconclusive.
rrrrrrrrrrrrrr
March 16, 2007 -- For adults who
suddenly collapse, CPR is more effective if rescuers focus on chest compression
over mouth-to-mouth ventilation.
CPR stands for cardiopulmonary
resuscitation. It's used on people whose hearts suddenly stop beating. Using
this emergency technique, you can keep a person alive until professional help
arrives.
Currently, CPR includes two
techniques. The first is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the so-called breath of
life. The other is chest compression: pushing down hard on a victim's chest,
more than once a second, pressing it down at least an inch and a half before
releasing.
A major reason why bystanders don't
give CPR to people who suddenly collapse is reluctance to put their mouths on
the mouth of a stricken person. That reason no longer exists.
Now, for adults who suddenly collapse,
there's powerful evidence that chest compression alone is far better than doing
nothing. In fact, the new evidence suggests that by interrupting lifesaving
chest compressions, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation may do more harm than good.
The striking evidence comes from Ken
Nagao, MD, of Surugadai Nihon University Hospital in Tokyo, and colleagues. The
researchers took a careful look at what happened to 4,068 adults who had an
out-of-hospital cardiac arrest witnessed by bystanders.
More than 70% of the time, the
bystanders did nothing when a person suddenly collapsed. Those victims were
less likely to survive, and more likely to have brain damage if they did
survive, than when bystanders tried to do something.
Bystanders bravely gave traditional
CPR to 18% of victims. And those patients did much better than those who got no
bystander aid.
But victims were 2.2 times less likely
to suffer brain damage if they were among the 11% of patients who got chest
compressions only -- without mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Death of Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation?
"This study just confirms what
has pretty much become common knowledge," CPR researcher Alfred Hallstrom,
PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, tells WebMD. "We did a
randomized trial of compressions vs. CPR, and the results indicated that the
compression-only technique was better. Subsequently, labs have done animal
studies suggesting the same thing."
"This does not surprise me one
bit," CPR researcher Joseph W. Heidenreich, MD, of Texas A&M Health
Science Center, tells WebMD. "This is what all of us who have done CPR
research have suspected for years. This is amazing data. Primarily, what people
who suffer cardiac arrest need are chest compressions."
But not everyone is willing to give up
on teaching people to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. One of them is Lance
Becker, MD, director of the center for resuscitation science at the University
of Pennsylvania and past chair of the basic life support subcommittee of the
American Heart Association (AHA).
"The real message from this study
is that doing something is better for saving people's lives than doing
nothing," Becker tells WebMD. "Good compressions are associated with
good things. It does not mean that ventilation is not an excellent thing as
well."
Becker says the AHA has always said
that if people feel uncomfortable doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, they
should simply focus on chest compression. And he says the new study validates
this approach.
Charles Sea, MD, an emergency-room
physician at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, teaches CPR to doctors. He
says that new CPR techniques emphasize chest compressions over mouth-to-mouth
ventilation.
"We are implementing new
standards for faster, stronger chest compressions -- 100 a minute, and only
about six to eight breaths a minute," Sea tells WebMD. "Compared to
the old CPR, just doing compressions would get better results. But I bet if
they did the new CPR with the fast compression and minimal ventilation, they
would get even higher survival rates than with compression alone."
But mouth-to-mouth resuscitation
steals precious time from chest compression, argues Gordon A. Ewy, MD. Ewy is
director of the Sarver Heart Center and professor and chief of cardiology at
the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson.
"If you witness an adult
collapse, it is most likely to be a cardiac arrest," Ewy says. "In
cardiac arrest, the blood is fully oxygenated. What you need to do is press
hard and fast on the chest to circulate the blood. This circulation you get
from pushing on the chest is barely enough to keep the brain alive. If you stop
for anything, like so-called 'rescue breathing,' which is an oxymoron, it is
not good."
Reasons Remain for Mouth-to-Mouth
The main reason why the AHA teaches
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is that some people go into cardiac arrest because
they have not been getting sufficient air. Such patients include drowning
victims, for example, and victims of drug overdose. These patients do not have
enough oxygen in their blood, and truly need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
But the vast majority of people who
collapse have been breathing normally before their hearts stopped. That means
that they have enough oxygen in their blood to survive until medical help
arrives -- if someone gives them continuous chest compressions, Heidenreich
says.
Heidenreich notes that chest
compression is not risk-free.
"With the type of force it takes
to move the blood through the veins, if you do good CPR you probably are going
to break someone's ribs," he says. "In this past week, I've done CPR
several times in elderly patients in the ER, and probably every time I have
cracked a rib. But if you talk to most people -- and I have surveyed many --
most are much more concerned about contracting a disease from giving
mouth-to-mouth than about breaking a rib to save a life."
Regardless of what kind of CPR you
give, the most important thing is to call for help right away. CPR is intended
only to keep a patient alive until emergency help gets there.
Louis J Sheehan
And the compression-only technique
applies only to adult patients. Children are far more likely to have stopped
breathing than to have suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. This means they far
more often need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation than adults do.
Louis
J Sheehan Esquire
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9.Eblog?
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Louis J Sheehan
Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/6/502/285
https://www.donotcall.gov/
Louis
J Sheehan Esquire
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Hugh Capet (c. 940 – 24 October 996)
was the first King of France of the eponymous Capetian dynasty from his
election to succeed the Carolingian Louis V in 987 until his death.
The son of Hugh the Great, Duke of
France, and Hedwige of Saxony, daughter of the German king Henry the Fowler,
Hugh was born about 940. His paternal family, the Robertians, were powerful
landowners in the Île-de-France. His grandfather had been King Robert I and his
grandmother Beatrice was a Carolingian, a daughter of Herbert I of Vermandois.
King Odo was his great uncle and King Rudolph Odo's son-in-law. Hugh was born
into a well-connected and powerful family with many ties to the reigning
nobility of Europe. But for all this, Hugh's father was never king. When
Rudolph died in 936, Hugh the Great organized the return of Louis d'Outremer,
son of Charles the Simple, from his exile at the court of Athelstan of England.
Hugh's motives are unknown, but it is presumed that he acted to forestall
Rudolph's brother and successor as Duke of Burgundy, Hugh the Black from taking
the French throne, or to prevent it from falling into the grasping hands of
Herbert II of Vermandois or William Longsword, Count of Rouen.
In 956, Hugh inherited his father's
estates and became one of the most powerful nobles in the much-reduced West
Frankish kingdom. However, as he was not yet an adult, his uncle Bruno,
Archbishop of Cologne, acted as regent. Young Hugh's neighbours made the most
of the opportunity. Theobald I of Blois, a former vassal of Hugh the Great,
took the counties of Chartres and Châteaudun. Further south, on the border of
the kingdom, Fulk II of Anjou, another former client of Hugh the Great, carved
out a principality at Hugh's expense and that of the Bretons.
The kingdom in which Hugh grew up, and
of which he would one day be king, bore no resemblance to modern France. Hugh's
predecessors did not call themselves rois de France ("Kings of
France"), and that title was not used until the time of his distant
descendant Philip the Fair (died 1314). Kings ruled as rex Francorum
("King of the Franks") and the lands over which they ruled comprised
only a very small part of the former Carolingian Empire. The eastern Frankish
lands, the Holy Roman Empire, were ruled by the Ottonian dynasty, represented
by Hugh's first cousin Otto II and then by Otto's son, Otto III. The lands
south of the river Loire had largely ceased to be part of the West Frankish
kingdom in the years after Charles the Simple was deposed in 922. The Duchy of
Normandy and the Duchy of Burgundy were largely independent, and Brittany
entirely so, although from 956 Burgundy was ruled by Hugh's brothers Odo and
Henry.
Election and extent of power
From 978 to 986, Hugh Capet allied
himself with the German emperors Otto II and Otto III and with Archbishop
Adalberon of Reims to dominate the Carolingian king, Lothair. By 986, he was
king in all but name. After Lothair and his son died in early 987, the
archbishop of Reims and Gerbert of Aurillac convened an assembly of nobles to
elect Hugh Capet as their king. In front of an electoral assembly at Senlis,
Adalberon gave a stirring oration and pleaded to the nobles:
Crown the Duke. He is most illustrious by his
exploits, his nobility, his forces. The throne is not acquired by hereditary
right; no one should be raised to it unless distinguished not only for nobility
of birth, but for the goodness of his soul.
He was elected and crowned rex
Francorum at Noyon in Picardy on 3 July 987, by the prelate of Reims, the first
of the house that would later bear his name to rule France. Immediately after
his coronation, Hugh began to push for the coronation of his son Robert. Hugh's
own claimed reason was that he was planning an expedition against the Moorish
armies harassing Borrel II of Barcelona, an invasion which never occurred, and
that the stability of the country necessitated two kings should he die while on
expedition. Ralph Glaber, however, attributes Hugh's request to his old age and
inability to contol the nobility.Modern scholarship has largely imputed to Hugh
the motive of establishing a dynasty against the pretension of electoral power
on the part of the aristocracy, but this is not the typical view of
contemporaries and even some modern scholars have been less sceptical of Hugh's
"plan" to campaign in Spain. Robert was eventually crowned on 30
December that same year. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us/
Hugh Capet possessed minor properties
near Chartres and Angers. Between Paris and Orléans he possessed towns and
estates amounting to approximately 400 square miles (1,000 km²). His authority ended there, and if
he dared travel outside his small area, he risked being captured and held for
ransom, though, as God's anointed, his life was largely safe. Indeed, there was
a plot in 993, masterminded by the Bishop of Laon and Odo I of Blois, to
deliver Hugh Capet into the custody of Otto III. The plot failed, but the fact
that no one was punished illustrates how tenuous his hold on power was. Beyond
his power base, in the rest of France, there were still as many codes of law as
there were fiefdoms. The "country" operated with 150 different forms
of currency and at least a dozen languages.[citation needed] Uniting all this
into one cohesive unit was a formidable task and a constant struggle between
those who wore the crown of France and its feudal lords. As such, Hugh Capet's
reign was marked by numerous power struggles with the vassals on the borders of
the Seine and the Loire.
While Hugh Capet's military power was
limited and he had to seek military aid from Richard I of Normandy, his
unanimous election as king gave him great moral authority and influence. Adémar
de Chabannes records, probably apocryphally, that during an argument with the
Count of Auvergne, Hugh demanded of him: "Who made you count?" The
count riposted: "Who made you king?"
Dispute with the papacy
Hugh made Arnulf Archbishop of Reims
in 988, even though Arnulf was the nephew of the his bitter rival, Charles of
Lorraine. Charles thereupon succeeded in capturing Reims and took the archbishop
prisoner. Hugh, however, considered Arnulf a turncoat and demanded his
deposition by Pope John XV. The turn of events outran the messages, when Hugh
captured both Charles and Arnulf and convoked a synod at Reims in June 991,
which obediently deposed Arnulf and chose as his successor Gerbert of Aurillac.
These proceedings were repudiated by Rome, although a second synod had ratified
the decrees issued at Reims. John XV summoned the French bishops to hold an
independent synod outside the King's realm, at Aachen, to reconsider the case.
When they refused, he called them to Rome, but they protested that the
unsettled conditions en route and in Rome made that impossible. The Pope then
sent a legate with instructions to call a council of French and German bishops
at Mousson, where only the German bishops appeared, the French being stopped on
the way by Hugh and Robert.
Through the exertions of the legate,
the deposition of Arnulf was finally pronounced illegal. After Hugh's death,
Arnulf was released from his imprisonment and soon restored to all his
dignities.
Hugh Capet died on 24 October 996 in
Paris and was interred in the Saint Denis Basilica. His son Robert continued to
reign.
Most historians regard the beginnings
of modern France with the coronation of Hugh Capet. This is because, as Count
of Paris, he made the city his power center. The monarch began a long process
of exerting control of the rest of the country from there.
He is regarded as the founder of the
Capetian dynasty. The direct Capetians, or the House of Capet, ruled France
from 987 to 1328; thereafter, the Kingdom was ruled by collateral branches of
the dynasty. All French Kings down to Louis Philippe, and royal pretenders
since then, have been members of the dynasty (the Bonapartes styled themselves
emperors rather than kings). As of 2007, the Capetian dynasty is still the head
of state in the kingdom of Spain (in the person of the Bourbon Juan Carlos) and
the duchy of Luxembourg, being the oldest continuously reigning dynasty in
Europe. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
Ancestors
Hugh Capet's ancestors in three
generations
Father: Hugh the Great
Paternal Grandfather: Robert I of
France
Paternal Great-grandfather: Robert the
Strong
Paternal Great-grandmother: Adelaide
Paternal Grandmother: Béatrice of
Vermandois
Paternal Great-grandfather: Herbert I,
Count of Vermandois
Paternal Great-grandmother: Bertha de
Morvois
Mother: Hedwige of Saxony
Maternal Grandfather: Henry I of
Germany
Maternal Great-grandfather: Otto I,
Duke of Saxony
Maternal Great-grandmother: Hedwiga of
Franconia
Maternal Grandmother: Matilda of
Ringelheim
Maternal Great-grandfather: Dietrich
of Westfalia
Maternal Great-grandmother: Reinhild
222222222
The matter that makes up everything we
can see or touch, either on Earth or beyond, is exceedingly rare, cosmically
speaking. Most of the material in the universe is something called dark matter,
mysterious stuff that doesn’t emit or reflect light and doesn’t interact with
what we think of as ordinary matter. It reveals its presence only by its gravitational
effects, guiding the evolution of the early universe and still affecting the
motion of galaxies. Earth-based experiments have attempted to detect dark
matter particles, but so far they have drawn a blank.
Astronomers, however, have had a better
year, continuing to find evidence of the crucial role dark matter plays in
shaping the visible cosmos. Thanks to about a thousand hours of observation by
the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have compiled a dark matter map of a
tiny slice of the sky, about two square degrees of the entire sky’s
40,000-square-degree span. The map, which was published in the journal Nature
last January, confirmed a central prediction of modern astrophysics: Galaxies
formed in, and remain bound to, enormous clouds of dark matter.
In the early universe, astronomers
believe, dark matter provided the gravitational scaffolding on which ordinary
matter coalesced and grew into galaxies. According to these dark matter
theories, as the visible galaxies formed, some of the matter surrounding them
should have clumped together into hundreds of small satellite galaxies, most of
which should survive today. But the observed number of satellite galaxies is
only a fraction of what the theory predicts. “We should see about a hundred to
a thousand, but up to 2005, there were only 12,” says Marla Geha, an
astrophysicist at Yale University. Astronomers call it the missing satellite
problem.
Astronomers had speculated that the
existence of small, dark matter–dominated satellite galaxies might solve the
problem, but there was no evidence that any such galaxies existed.
Last spring, Geha and Josh Simon, a
colleague at Caltech, used the 10-meter Keck II telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea
to study the mass of eight newly discovered satellite galaxies, detected over
the last two years by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ongoing effort to make a
detailed map of a million galaxies and quasars. Geha and Simon found that these
satellite galaxies were much fainter and smaller in mass than the other known satellites—and
99 percent of their mass was in the form of dark matter. Given that the
galaxies found by Geha and Simon have such high concentrations of dark matter,
it’s likely that many other satellite galaxies could be 100 percent dark
matter.
“We expect some to be undetectable,
with no stars or gas,” says Geha. “There are indirect ways of finding the dark
matter satellites, but it will take more work.”
Some astrophysicists believe that dark
matter particles may occasionally annihilate each other, producing bursts of
high-energy gamma rays. If the Milky Way has dark matter satellites, and if
they do emit gamma rays, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, scheduled
for launch in February, might detect them.
Dark matter may also be responsible
for creating the most awesome objects in the universe: the enormous black holes
believed to lurk in the center of nearly every large galaxy. Tom Theuns and
Liang Gao, astronomers at Durham University in England, used a computer model
last year to study how two types of dark matter, known as warm and cold, may
have influenced the formation of the very first stars in the universe—and the
first giant black holes.
In their simulations, Gao and Theuns
found that within clumps of cold dark matter, single massive stars formed, but
warm dark matter formed filaments about a quarter the width of the Milky Way,
attracting enough ordinary matter to create some 10 million stars—and some of
these very first stars could still be around. “You could potentially form
low-mass stars,” says Theuns. “And they live very much longer. They could live
for 13 billion years and could be in the Milky Way today. Maybe we’ve seen them
already. Who knows?”
But the most unexpected result of the
model was that the filaments could catastrophically collapse, warping
space-time to form a huge black hole.
The model suggested that collapsing dark matter
could warp space-time to form a huge black hole.
“Even if only 1 percent of the mass in
a filament takes part in the collapse, that’s already 100,000 times the mass of
the sun, a very good start to making one of these supermassive black holes,”
Theuns says. “We know that the formation of these supermassive black holes has
to be very rapid because we can see very bright quasars very soon after the Big
Bang, not much later than the epoch of the first star formation.” http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
Is there any chance that astronomers
could detect an echo of the primordial cataclysms that birthed these black
holes?
“You would think it’s such a violent
process that something would be left over from that,” Theuns says. “I don’t
have any predictions, but you would think there would be something.”
88888888888
Jellyfish are marine invertebrates
belonging to the class Scyphozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They can be found in
every ocean in the world and in some fresh waters. The use of the term
"jellyfish" is actually a misnomer since scyphozoans are not fish,
which are vertebrates. Although incorrect, the term is also commonly-applied to
some close relatives of true scyphozoans, such as the Hydrozoa and the Cubozoa.
The body of an adult jellyfish
consists of a bell shape producing jelly and enclosing its internal structure,
from which tentacles are suspended. Each tentacle is covered with cells called
cnidocytes, that can sting or kill other animals. Most jellyfish use these
cells to secure prey or for defense. Others, such as the Rhizostomae, do not
have tentacles at all.
Jellyfish lack basic sensory organs
and a brain, but their nervous systems and rhopalia allow them to perceive
stimuli, such as light and odor, and respond quickly. They feed on small fish
and zooplankton that become caught in their tentacles. Most jellyfish are
passive drifters and slow swimmers, as their shape is not hydrodynamic.
Instead, they move so as to create a current forcing the prey within reach of
their tentacles. They do this by rhythmically opening and closing their
bell-like body. Their digestive system is incomplete: the same orifice is used
to take in food and expel waste. The body of an adult is made up of 94–98%
water. The bell consists of a layer of epidermis, gastrodermis, and a thick,
intervening layer called mesoglea that produces most of the jelly.
Most jellyfish have tendrils or oral
arms coated with thousands of microscopic nematocysts. Generally, each
nematocyst has a "trigger" (cnidocil) paired with a capsule
containing a coiled stinging filament armed with exterior barbs. Upon contact,
the filament rapidly unwinds, launches into the target, and injects toxins. The
animal can then pull its prey into its mouth, if appropriate.
Although most jellyfish are not
perniciously dangerous to humans, a few are highly toxic, such as Cyanea capillata.
Contrary to popular belief, the menacingly infamous Portuguese Man o' War
(Physalia) is not a jellyfish but a colony of hydrozoans. Similarly, the box
jellies, notorious along the coast of Australia, are cubozoans, not true
scyphozoan jellyfish. Irrespective of the sting's toxicity, many people stung
by them find them very painful and some people may suffer anaphylaxis or other
severe allergic reactions, similar to allergies to bee stings.
A jellyfish detects the touch of other
animals using a nervous system called a "nerve net", located in its
epidermis. Touch stimuli are conducted by nerve rings, through the rhopalial
lappet, located around the animal's body, to the nerve cells. Jellyfish also
have ocelli: light-sensitive organs that do not form images but are used to
determine up from down, responding to sunlight shining on the water's surface.
Jellyfish do not have a specialized
digestive, osmoregulatory, central nervous, respiratory, or circulatory
systems. They digest using the gastrodermal lining of the gastrovascular
cavity, where nutrients are absorbed. They do not need a respiratory system
since their skin is thin enough that the body is oxygenated by diffusion. They
have limited control over movement and mostly free-float, but can use the hydrostatic
skeleton of the water pouch to accomplish vertical movement through pulsations
of the disc-like body.
The outer side of a jellyfish is lined
with a jelly-like material called ectoplasm (ecto meaning outer and plasma
meaning cytoplasm). The ectoplasm typically contains a smaller amount of
protein granules and other organic compounds than inner cytoplasm, also
referred to as endoplasm (endo meaning inner).
Many species of jellyfish are capable
of congregating into large swarms or "blooms", consisting of hundreds
of individuals. The formation of these blooms is a complex process that depends
on ocean currents, nutrients, temperature and ambient oxygen concentrations.
Jellyfish sometimes mass breed during blooms. During such times of rapid population
expansion, some people will raise ecological concerns about the potential
noxious effects of a jellyfish "outbreak".
According to Claudia Mills of the
University of Washington, the frequency of jellyfish blooms may be attributed
to man's impact on marine systems. She says that the breeding jellyfish may
merely be filling ecological niches formerly occupied by overfished creatures.
Jellyfish researcher Marsh Youngbluth further clarifies that "jellyfish
feed on the same kinds of prey as adult and young fishes, so if fish are
removed from the equation, jellyfish are likely to move in."
Increased nutrients in the water,
ascribed to agricultural runoff, have also been cited as an antecedent to the
proliferation of jellyfish. Monty Graham, of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in
Alabama, says that "ecosystems in which there are high levels of nutrients
... provide nourishment for the small organisms on which jellyfish feed. In
waters where there is eutrophication, low oxygen levels often result, favoring
jellyfish as they thrive in less oxygen-rich water than fish can tolerate. The
fact that jellyfish are increasing is a symptom of something happening in the
ecosystem."
By sampling sea life in a heavily
fished region off the coast of Namibia, researchers found that jellyfish have
overtaken fish in terms of biomass. The findings represent a careful,
quantitative analysis of what has been called a "jellyfish explosion"
following intense fishing in the area in the last few decades. The findings
were reported by Andrew Brierley of the University of St. Andrews and his
colleagues in the July 12, 2006 issue of the journal Current Biology. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
Areas which have been seriously
affected by jellyfish blooms include the northern Gulf of Mexico. In that case,
Graham states, "Moon jellies have formed a kind of gelatinous net that
stretches from end to end across the gulf."
Most jellyfish pass through two
distinct life history phases (body forms) during their life cycle. The first is
the polypoid stage, when the jellyfish takes the form of either a sessile stalk
which catches passing food, or a similar free-floating configuration. The
polyp's mouth and tentacles face upwards, reminiscent of the hydroid stage of
the somewhat closely related anthozoan polyps, also of the phylum Cnidaria.
In the second stage, the jellyfish is
known as a medusa. Medusae have a radially symmetric, umbrella-shaped body
called a bell. The medusa's tentacles are fringe-like protrusions from the
border of the bell. (Medusa is also the Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Russian and
Bulgarian word for jellyfish.)
Jellyfish are dioecious; that is, they
are either male or female. In most cases, to reproduce, a male releases his
sperm into the surrounding water. The sperm then swims into the mouth of the
female, allowing the fertilization of the ova. However, moon jellies use a
different process. The eggs become lodged in pits on the oral arms, which form
a temporary brood chamber to accommodate fertilization.
After fertilization and initial
growth, a larval form, called the planula, develops from the egg. The planula
is a small larva covered with cilia. It settles onto a firm surface and
develops into a polyp. The polyp is cup-shaped with tentacles surrounding a
single orifice, resembling a tiny sea anemone. After an interval of growth, the
polyp begins reproducing asexually by budding and is called a segmenting polyp,
or a scyphistome. New scyphistomae may be produced by budding or new, immature
jellies called ephyra may be formed. Many jellyfish species are capable of
producing new medusae by budding directly from the medusan stage.
Most jellyfish have a lifespan of two
and a half months; few live longer than six months but one species can live as
long as 30 years.
Since jellyfish are not fish, some
people consider the term "jellyfish" a misnomer, and instead use the
term "jellies" or "sea jellies". The word
"jellyfish" is also often used to denote either hydrozoans or the box
jellyfish, the cubozoans. The class name, Scyphozoa, comes from the Greek word
skyphos, denoting a kind of drinking cup and alluding to the cup shape of the
organism.
A group of jellyfish is often called a
"smack".
Jellyfish are an important source of
food to the Chinese community and in many Asian countries. Only jellyfish
belonging to the order Rhizostomeae are harvested for food. Rhizostomes are
favoured because they are typically larger and have more rigid bodies than
other scyphozoans. Traditional processing methods involve a multi-phase
procedure using a mixture of table salt and alum, and then desalting.
Processing makes the jellyfish drier and more acidic, producing a "crunchy
and crispy texture." Nutritionally, jellyfish prepared this way are
roughly 95% water and 4-5% protein, making it a relatively low calorie food.
In 1961, green fluorescent protein was
discovered in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria by scientists studying
bioluminescence. This protein has since become a quite useful tool in biology.
Jellyfish are also harvested for their collagen, which can be used for a
variety of scientific applications including the treatment of rheumatoid
arthritis. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
Jellyfish are commonly displayed in
aquaria in many countries; among them the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Long Beach
Aquarium of the Pacific, Vancouver Aquarium, Seattle Aquarium, Newport
Aquarium, National Aquarium in Baltimore, Georgia Aquarium and Maui Ocean
Center. Often the tank's background is blue and the animals are illuminated by
side light to produce a high contrast effect. In natural conditions, many
jellies are so transparent that they are almost impossible to see.
Holding jellyfish in captivity
presents other problems. For one, they are not adapted to closed spaces. They
depend on currents to transport them from place to place. To compensate for
this, professional exhibits feature precise water flows, typically in circular
tanks to prevent specimens from becoming trapped in corners. The Monterey Bay
Aquarium uses a modified version of the kreisel (German for "spinning
top") for this purpose.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
When stung by a jellyfish, first aid
may be in order. Though most stings are not deadly, some stings, such as those
of the box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri), may be fatal. Serious stings may
cause anaphylaxis and may result in death. Hence, people stung by jellyfish
must get out of the water to avoid drowning. In serious cases, advanced
professional care must be sought. This care may include administration of an
antivenin and other supportive care such as required to treat the symptoms of
anaphylactic shock. The most serious threat that humans face from jellyfish is
the sting of the Irukandji, which has the most potent and deadly venom of any
known species.
There are three goals of first aid for
uncomplicated jellyfish stings: prevent injury to rescuers, inactivate the
nematocysts, and remove any tentacles stuck on the patient. To prevent injury
to rescuers, barrier clothing should be worn. This protection may include
anything from panty hose to wet suits to full-body sting-proof suits.
Inactivating the nematocysts, or stinging cells, prevents further injection of
venom into the patient.
Vinegar (3 to 10% aqueous acetic acid)
should be applied for box jellyfish stings.Vinegar, however, is not recommended
for Portuguese Man o' War stings. In the case of stings on or around the eyes,
vinegar may be placed on a towel and dabbed around the eyes, but not in them.
Salt water may also be used in case vinegar is not readily available.Fresh
water should not be used if the sting occurred in salt water, as a change in pH
can cause the release of additional venom. Rubbing the wound, or using alcohol,
spirits, ammonia, or urine will encourage the release of venom and should be
avoided.
Once deactivated, the stinging cells
must be removed. This can be accomplished by picking off tentacles left on the
body.[9] First aid providers should be careful to use gloves or another readily
available barrier device to prevent personal injury, and to follow standard
universal precautions. After large pieces of the jellyfish are removed, shaving
cream may be applied to the area and a knife edge, safety razor, or credit card
may be used to take away any remaining nematocysts.
Beyond initial first aid,
antihistamines such as diphenhydramine (Benadryl) may be used to control skin
irritation (pruritus). To remove the venom in the skin, apply a paste of baking
soda and water and apply a cloth covering on the sting. If possible, reapply
paste every 15-20 minutes. Ice can be applied to stop the spread of venom until
either of these is available.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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