Infamy   January 6 and February 13, 2021 will for ever be a stain on American politics and particularly on Donald Trump and the Republican senators who facilitated his attack on the government.   Impact of Trump   On January 6, 2021, Trump was still the president. He lost the election but he never ceased saying the Democrats stole the election. Like a disgruntled tyrant about to be kicked off the White House, he spread his poisonous lies to the more than seventy million Americans who voted for him.   Trump supporters include all those who benefited from his ecocidal (nature killing) and anthropocidal (human killing) policies.   By this I mean his dismantling of some basic laws and regulations protecting public health and the environment.    The immediate effect of such an attack on human and environmental health would be more poisons in our food and drinking water and the air we breathe. Some people with conditions of bad health (cancer, heart, diabete...

 Sminthian Apollo about shooting arrows of plague against Greeks to avenge his priest insulted by Agamemnon. Silver didrachm. Apollo Sminthios from Sminthos, a city in the Hellespont. Wikipedia   The arrows of Apollo   The case of the plague in Greek history may still give us pose for reflection. The Greeks gave diseases precise names. They called plague  loimos  (pestilence).   They described disease, sorrow, and suffering as  nosos,  from which we have nosocomial (hospital) disease.   The plague made its first appearance among the Greeks as a weapon of divine wrath. Their commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, offended Chryses, the priest of Apollo and Apollo spread pestilence among them.    In the beginning of the first book of the  Iliad  of Homer, Agamemnon insulted the priest of Apollo by refusing to give back his daughter, whom he had captured in a raid. The priest knelt in front of Agamemnon and begged him to release his d...

  Adamantios Koraes, 1748-1833. Father of the Greek Revolution. Marble statue in front of the University of Athens. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.   The clerical dilemma   Adamantios Koraes, 1748-1833, did his intellectual and revolutionary work in Paris -- far from his hometown Smyrna and the Turks who  controlled Smyrna and Greece. From the relative safety of Paris, he was aware of the secret and deceptive role the ecclesiastics in Greek life. In public, he expressed his respect for Orthodox Christianity and support for the clergy. He zeroed in on the Turks and could not afford divisions among the oppressed Greeks. Yet, a few times, and without revealing his identity, Koraes lashed out at the traitorous policies of the senior ecclesiastics largely serving the Turks.   The first time was on the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. European governments, including that of the Ottoman Turks, went into alert about subversion from within and wit...