*
KEY TO THE WORLD
I stand in front of the mirror,
trying to place everything
correctly: tip of tongue against
upper teeth, right hand checking
vibrations of the larynx.
“This is your key to the world,”
states my English for Today,
a book of secrets where Tom and Jane
carry on their cracked romance:
Tom, is this a girl?
No, this is a lamp.
I rehearse the sacred chant:
Thelma threw thistles
through the thick of her thumb.
Thistle while you work!
A tooth for a truth,
a thigh for an eye!
“They lisp,” the teacher
explains. “Maybe because
of cold wind.”
“Your r’s are too guttural,”
teacher warns. Guttural,
that’s me. What’s the meaning
of the, I ask. Where’s the tip
of your foreign tongue?
Between Thelma’s teeth.
Tom, is this a mouth?
No, this is a hoof.
Today the the; tomorrow
I open the world.
~ Oriana
So much struggle and failure! The textbooks were giving wrong advice. The tongue doesn’t go against the upper teeth; it goes between the teeth. I forget exactly when I made this dazzling discovery — was I close to forty?
I could also carry on about belatedly discovering the soft “r” — but what use now, these needless agonies of the past . . .
I was also told that people who lisp can't pronounce the word “lisp.”
*
THE MYSTERIES OF “THE”
~ ‘The’. It’s omnipresent; we can’t imagine English without it. But it’s not much to look at. It isn’t descriptive, evocative or inspiring. Technically, it’s meaningless. And yet this bland and innocuous-seeming word could be one of the most potent in the English language.
‘The’ tops the league tables of most frequently used words in English, accounting for 5% of every 100 words used. “‘The’ really is miles above everything else,” says Jonathan Culpeper, professor of linguistics at Lancaster University. But why is this? The answer is two-fold, according to the BBC Radio 4 program Word of Mouth. George Zipf, a 20th-Century US linguist and philologist, expounded the principle of least effort. He predicted that short and simple words would be the most frequent – and he was right.
The second reason is that ‘the’ lies at the heart of English grammar, having a function rather than a meaning. Words are split into two categories: expressions with a semantic meaning and functional words like ‘the’, ‘to’, ‘for’, with a job to do. ‘The’ can function in multiple ways. This is typical, explains Gary Thoms, assistant professor in linguistics at New York University: “a super high-usage word will often develop a real flexibility”, with different subtle uses that make it hard to define. Helping us understand what is being referred to, ‘the’ makes sense of nouns as a subject or an object. So even someone with a rudimentary grasp of English can tell the difference between ‘I ate an apple’ and ‘I ate the apple’.
But although ‘the’ has no meaning in itself, “it seems to be able to do things in subtle and miraculous ways,” says Michael Rosen, poet and author. Consider the difference between ‘he scored a goal’ and ‘he scored the goal’. The inclusion of ‘the’ immediately signals something important about that goal. Perhaps it was the only one of the match? Or maybe it was the clincher that won the league? Context very often determines sense.
There are many exceptions regarding the use of the definite article, for example in relation to proper nouns. We wouldn’t expect someone to say ‘the Jonathan’ but it’s not incorrect to say ‘you’re not the Jonathan I thought you were’. And a football commentator might deliberately create a generic vibe by saying, ‘you’ve got the Lampards in midfield’ to mean players like Lampard.
The use of ‘the’ could have increased as trade and manufacture grew in the run-up to the industrial revolution, when we needed to be referential about things and processes. ‘The’ helped distinguish clearly and could act as a quantifier, for example, ‘the slab of butter’.
This could lead to a belief that ‘the’ is a workhorse of English; functional but boring. Yet Rosen rejects that view. While primary school children are taught to use ‘wow’ words, choosing ‘exclaimed’ rather than ‘said’, he doesn’t think any word has more or less ‘wow’ factor than any other; it all depends on how it’s used. “Power in language comes from context... ‘the’ can be a wow word,” he says.
This simplest of words can be used for dramatic effect. At the start of Hamlet, a guard’s utterance of ‘Long live the King’ is soon followed by the apparition of the ghost: ‘Looks it not like the King?’ Who, the audience wonders, does ‘the’ refer to? The living King or a dead King? This kind of ambiguity is the kind of ‘hook’ that writers use to make us quizzical, a bit uneasy even. “‘The’ is doing a lot of work here,” says Rosen.
Deeper meaning
‘The’ can even have philosophical implications. The Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong said a denoting phrase like ‘the round square’ introduced that object; there was now such a thing. According to Meinong, the word itself created non-existent objects, arguing that there are objects that exist and ones that don’t – but they are all created by language. “‘The’ has a kind of magical property in philosophy,” says Barry C Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a paper in 1905 called On Denoting, all about the definite article. Russell put forward a theory of definite descriptions. He thought it intolerable that phrases like ‘the man in the Moon’ were used as though they actually existed. He wanted to revise the surface grammar of English, as it was misleading and “not a good guide to the logic of the language”, explains Smith. This topic has been argued about, in a philosophical context, ever since. “Despite the simplicity of the word,” observes Thoms, “it’s been evading definition in a very precise way for a long time.”
Lynne Murphy, professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, spoke at the Boring Conference in 2019, an event celebrating topics that are mundane, ordinary and overlooked, but are revealed to be fascinating. She pointed out how strange it is that our most commonly used word is one that many of the world’s languages don’t have. And how amazing English speakers are for getting to grips with the myriad ways in which it’s used.
Scandinavian languages such as Danish or Norwegian and some Semitic languages like Hebrew or Arabic use an affix (or a short addition to the end of a word) to determine whether the speaker is referring to a particular object or using a more general term. Latvian or Indonesian deploy a demonstrative – words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ – to do the job of ‘the’. There’s another group of languages that don’t use any of those resources, such as Urdu or Japanese.
Function words are very specific to each language.
So, someone who is a native Hindi or Russian speaker is going to have to think very differently when constructing a sentence in English. Murphy says that she has noticed, for instance, that sometimes her Chinese students hedge their bets and include ‘the’ where it is not required. Conversely, Smith describes Russian friends who are so unsure when to use ‘the’ that they sometimes leave a little pause: ‘I went into... bank. I picked up... pen.’ English speakers learning a language with no equivalent of ‘the’ also struggle and might overcompensate by using words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ instead.
Atlantic divide
Even within the language, there are subtle differences in how ‘the’ is used in British and American English, such as when talking about playing a musical instrument. An American might be more likely to say ‘I play guitar’ whereas a British person might opt for ‘I play the guitar’. But there are some instruments where both nationalities might happily omit ‘the’, such as ‘I play drums’. Equally the same person might interchangeably refer to their playing of any given instrument with or without the definite article – because both are correct and both make sense.
And yet, keeping with the musical vibe, there’s a subtle difference in meaning of ‘the’ in the phrases ‘I play the piano’ and ‘I clean the piano’. We instinctively understand the former to mean the piano playing is general and not restricted to one instrument, and yet in the latter we know that it is one specific piano that is being rendered spick and span.
Culpeper says ‘the’ occurs about a third less in spoken language. Though of course whether it is used more frequently in text or speech depends on the subject in question. A more personal, emotional topic might have fewer instances of ‘the’ than something more formal. ‘The’ appears most frequently in academic prose, offering a useful word when imparting information – whether it’s scientific papers, legal contracts or the news. Novels use ‘the’ least, partly because they have conversation embedded in them.
According to Culpeper, men say ‘the’ significantly more frequently. Deborah Tannen, an American linguist, has a hypothesis that men deal more in report and women more in rapport – this could explain why men use ‘the’ more often. Depending on context and background, in more traditional power structures, a woman may also have been socialized not to take the voice of authority so might use ‘the’ less frequently. Though any such gender-based generalizations also depend on the nature of the topic being studied.
Those in higher status positions also use ‘the’ more – it can be a signal of their prestige and (self) importance. And when we talk about ‘the prime minister’ or ‘the president’ it gives more power and authority to that role. It can also give a concept credibility or push an agenda. Talking about ‘the greenhouse effect’ or ‘the migration problem’ makes those ideas definite and presupposes their existence.
‘The’ can be a “very volatile” word, says Murphy. Someone who refers to ‘the Americans’ versus simply ‘Americans’ is more likely to be critical of that particular nationality in some capacity. When people referred to ‘the Jews’ in the build-up to the Holocaust, it became othering and objectifying. According to Murphy, “‘The’ makes the group seem like it’s a large, uniform mass, rather than a diverse group of individuals.” It’s why Trump was criticised for using the word in that context during a 2016 US presidential debate.
Origins
We don’t know exactly where ‘the’ comes from – it doesn’t have a precise ancestor in Old English grammar. The Anglo Saxons didn’t say ‘the’, but had their own versions. These haven’t completely died out, according to historical linguist Laura Wright. In parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumberland there is a remnant of Old English inflective forms of the definite article – t’ (as in “going t’ pub”).
The letter y in terms like ‘ye olde tea shop’ is from the old rune Thorn, part of a writing system used across northern Europe for centuries. It’s only relatively recently, with the introduction of the Roman alphabet, that ‘th’ has come into being.
‘The’ deserves to be celebrated. The three-letter word punches well above its weight in terms of impact and breadth of contextual meaning. It can be political, it can be dramatic – it can even bring non-existent concepts into being.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200109-is-this-the-most-powerful-word-in-the-english-language?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Polish doesn't have articles, and neither do other Slavic languages with exception of Bulgarian, which uses a short word ("to" or "ta") that sounds like "this" in other Slavic languages. It's goes after the noun as a suffix, with "ta" used with feminine nouns.
In English you say, I'm going to the bank; in Polish, using a literal translation: I go to bank. and there is perfect clarity in either language. In some cases, you use "this" or "that" to indicate specificity.
During the first English lesson in my life, my task was to grapple with the sentence "This is a girl." I didn't have a concept of an article, definite or indefinite, and it was quite challenging. Much later, in adulthood, I asked a Chinese-born co-worker how one says this sentence in Chinese. She replied with one word, which she translated for me: “girl.”
James Joyce: "the the." Joe:
I think that learning or speaking a different language forces a person to rethink the way we go through life — especially how we express ourselves.
Oriana:
What instantly came to my mind is that I had to stop trying to be super-polite, for instance preceding a request with “Would you be so kind and . . .” Americans tend to be direct, and are only confused by such baroque expressions. So I stopped being afraid of sounding rude, and learned to be plain and direct, relying on my soft tone of voice to convey politeness. And of course there’s the word “please” — but it’s just one syllable, not a whole phrase.
It took me about a year before I stopped perceiving Americans as rude and started taking pleasure in being more concise, not mired in Polish-style politeness.
*
A SOVIET PROPAGANDA MINISTER ATTACKS THE POETRY OF ANNA AKHMATOVA
“What has this poetry in common with the interests of our state and people? Nothing whatever. Akhmatova’s work is a matter of the distant past; it is foreign to Soviet life and cannot be tolerated in the pages of our journals.
Our literature is no private enterprise designed to please the fluctuating tastes of the literary market. We are certainly under no obligation to find a place in our literature for tastes and ways that have nothing in common with the moral qualities and attributes of Soviet people.
What instructive value can the works of Akhmatova have for our young people? They can do them nothing but harm. These works can sow nothing but gloom, low spirits, pessimism, a desire to escape the vital problems of social life and turn away from the broad highway of social life and activity into a narrow little world of personal experiences.
How can the upbringing of our young people be entrusted to her? Yet her poems were readily printed, sometimes in Zvezda and sometimes in Leningrad, and were published in volume form. This was a serious political error.”
~ Andrey Zhdanov, Head of the Central Committee's Propaganda Department. 1946
Mikhail Iossel:
Leningrad State University was named after Zhdanov. The Young Pioneers Palace in Leningrad, where I studied in a literary seminar in my early teens, was named after him. Dozens of other cultural establishments in Leningrad alone were named after him. Cities and towns were named after him. Sports teams. You name it.
*
WHO KILLED MOST: HITLER, STALIN, OR MAO?
~ In 2011, Timothy Snyder asked the provocative question: Who killed more, Hitler or Stalin? As useful as that exercise in moral rigor was, some think the question itself might have been slightly off. Instead, it should have included a third tyrant of the twentieth century, Chairman Mao. And not just that, but that Mao should have been the hands-down winner, with his ledger easily trumping the European dictators’.
While these questions can devolve into morbid pedantry, they raise moral questions that deserve a fresh look, especially as 2018 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of Mao’s most infamous experiment in social engineering, the Great Leap Forward. It was this campaign that caused the deaths of tens of millions and catapulted Mao Zedong into the big league of twentieth-century murders.
But Mao’s mistakes are more than a chance to reflect on the past. They are also now part of a central debate in Xi Jinping’s China, where the Communist Party is renewing a long-standing battle to protect its legitimacy by limiting discussions of Mao.
The immediate catalyst for the Great Leap Forward took place in late 1957 when Mao visited Moscow for the grand celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution (another interesting contrast to recent times, with discussion of its centenary stifled in Moscow and largely ignored in Beijing).
The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had already annoyed Mao by criticizing Stalin, whom Mao regarded as one of the great figures of Communist history. If even Stalin could be purged, Mao could be challenged, too. In addition, the Soviet Union had just launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, which Mao felt overshadowed his accomplishments. He returned to Beijing eager to assert China’s position as the world’s leading Communist nation. This, along with his general impatience, spurred a series of increasingly reckless decisions that led to the worst famine in history.
The first signs of Mao’s designs came on January 1, 1958, when the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily, published an article calling for “going all out” and “aiming higher”—code phrases for putting aside patient economic development in favor of radical policies aimed at rapid growth.
Mao drove home his plans in a series of meetings over the next months, including a crucial one—from January 11 to 20 in the southern Chinese city of Nanning—that changed the Communist Party’s political culture. Until that moment, Mao had been first among equals, but moderates had often been able to rein him in. Then, in several extraordinary outbursts, he accused any leader who opposed “rash advance” of being counter-revolutionary. As became the pattern of his reign, no one successfully stood up to him.
Having silenced party opposition, Mao pushed for the creation of communes—effectively nationalizing farmers’ property. People were to eat in canteens and share agricultural equipment, livestock, and production, with food allocated by the state. Local party leaders were ordered to obey fanciful ideas for increasing crop yields, such as planting crops closer together. The idea was to create China’s own Sputnik—harvests astronomically greater than any in human history.
This might have resulted in no more harm than local officials’ falsifying statistics to meet quotas, except that the state relied on these numbers to calculate taxes on farmers. To meet their taxes, farmers were forced to send any grain they had to the state as if they were producing these insanely high yields. Ominously, officials also confiscated seed grain to meet their targets. So, while storehouses bulged with grain, farmers had nothing to eat and nothing to plant the next spring.
Compounding this crisis were equally deluded plans to bolster steel production through the creation of “backyard furnaces”—small coal- or wood-fired kilns that were somehow supposed to create steel out of iron ore. Unable to produce real steel, local party officials ordered farmers to melt down their agricultural implements to satisfy Mao’s national targets. The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in.
When, in 1959, Mao was challenged about these events at a party conference, he purged his enemies. Enveloped by an atmosphere of terror, officials returned to China’s provinces to double down on Mao’s policies. Tens of millions died.
No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate. The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers.
On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work. Their most prominent spokesperson is Sun Jingxian, a mathematician at Shandong University and Jiangsu Normal University. He attributes changes in China’s population during this period as due to faulty statistics, changes in how households were registered, and a series of other obfuscatory factors. His conclusion: famine killed only 3.66 million people. This contradicts almost every other serious effort at accounting for the effects of Mao’s changes.
The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in 1987 used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his 1996 work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events. At the most basic level, the early works took the net decline in China’s population during this period and added to that the decline in the birth rate—a classic effect of famine. Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions.
Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid-20 millions and go up to 45 million.
Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in 2008, is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng, who estimates that 35 million died. Hong Kong University’s Frank Dikötter has a higher but equally plausible estimate of 45 million. Besides adjusting the numbers upward, Dikötter and others have made another important point: many deaths were violent. Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities.
Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government.
Can all this be blamed on Mao? Traditionally, Mao apologists blame any deaths that did occur on natural disasters. Even today, this era is known in China as the period of “three years of natural disasters” or the “three years of difficulty.”
We can discard natural causes; yes, there were some problems with drought and flooding, but China is a huge country regularly beset by droughts and floods. Chinese governments through the centuries have been adept at famine relief; a normal government, especially a modern bureaucratic state with a vast army and unified political party at its disposal, should have been able to handle the floods and droughts that farmers encountered at the end of the 1950s.
What of the explanation that Mao meant well but that his policies were misguided, or carried out too zealously by subordinates? But Mao knew early enough that his policies were resulting in famine. He could have changed course, but he stubbornly stuck to his guns in order to retain power. In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different.
But Mao’s policies were responsible for other deaths on top of those caused by the famine. The Cultural Revolution—the ten-year period (1966–1976) of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history. I called to ask for his estimates, and he said he would add another 1 to 2 million for other campaigns, such as land-reform and “anti-rightist” movements in the 1950s. The University of Freiburg’s Daniel Leese gave me similar figures. He estimates 32 million in the Great Leap Forward, 1.1 to 1.6 million for the Cultural Revolution, and another million for the other campaigns.
It is probably fair to say, then, that Mao was responsible for about 1.5 million deaths during the Cultural Revolution, another million for the other campaigns, and between 35 million and 45 million for the Great Leap Famine. Taking a middle number for the famine, 40 million, that’s about 42.5 million deaths.
How, finally, does Mao’s record compare to those of Hitler or Stalin? Snyder estimates that Hitler was responsible for between 11 million and 12 million noncombatant deaths, while Stalin was responsible for at least 6 million, and as many as 9 million if “foreseeable” deaths caused by deportation, starvation, and incarceration in concentration camps are included.
But the Hitler and Stalin numbers invite questions that Mao’s higher ones do not. Should we let Hitler, especially, off the hook for combatant deaths in World War II? It’s probably fair to say that without Hitler, there wouldn’t have been a European war.
If one includes the combatant deaths, and the deaths due to war-related famine and disease, the numbers shoot up astronomically. The Soviet Union suffered upward of 8 million combatant deaths and many more due to famine and disease—perhaps about 20 million.
Then again, wasn’t Stalin partly responsible for those deaths, because he purged his best generals and adopted reckless military policies? As for Hitler, should his deaths include the hundreds of thousands who died in the aerial bombardments of Germans cities? After all, it was his decision to strip German cities of anti-aircraft batteries to replace lost artillery following the debacle at Stalingrad.
And what of the millions of Germans in the East who died after being ethnically cleansed and driven by the Red Army from their homes? On whose ledger do they belong? These considerations add to Stalin’s totals, but they still more increase Hitler’s. Slowly, Hitler’s numbers approach Mao’s.
Yet all these numbers are little more than well-informed guesstimates. There are no records that will magically resolve the question of exactly how many died in the Mao era. We can only extrapolate based on flawed sources. If the percentage of deaths attributable to the famine is slightly changed, that’s the difference between 30 and 45 million deaths. So, in these sorts of discussions, the difference between one and two isn’t infinity but a rounding error.
Mao didn’t order people to their deaths in the same way that Hitler did, so it’s fair to say that Mao’s famine deaths were not genocide—in contrast, arguably, to Stalin’s Holodomor in the Ukraine, the terror-famine described by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum in Red Famine (2017). One can argue that by closing down discussion in 1959, Mao sealed the fate of tens of millions, but almost every legal system in the world recognizes the difference between murder in the first degree and manslaughter or negligence. Shouldn’t the same standards apply to dictators?
When Khrushchev took Stalin off his pedestal, the Soviet state still had Lenin as its idealized founding father. That allowed Khrushchev to purge the dictator without delegitimizing the Soviet state. By contrast, Mao himself and his successors have always realized that he was both China’s Lenin and its Stalin.
Thus, after Mao died, the Communist Party settled on a formula of declaring that Mao had made mistakes—about 30 percent of what he did was declared wrong and 70 percent was right. That’s essentially the formula used today. Mao’s mistakes were set down, and commissions sent out to explore the worst of his crimes, but his picture remains on Tiananmen Square.
Xi Jinping has held fast to this view of Mao in recent years. In Xi’s way of looking at China, the country had roughly thirty years of Maoism and thirty years of Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalization and rapid growth. Xi has warned that neither era can negate the other; they are inseparable.
How to deal with Mao? Many Chinese, especially those who lived through his rule, do so by publishing underground journals or documentary films. Perhaps typically for a modern consumer society, though, Mao and his memory have also been turned into kitschy products. The first commune—the “Sputnik” commune that launched the Great Leap Forward—is now a retreat for city folk who want to experience the joys of rural life. One in ten villagers there died of famine, and people were dragged off and flayed for trying to hide grain from government officials. Today, urbanites go there to decompress from the stresses of modern life.
Foreigners aren’t exempt from this sort of historical amnesia, either. One of Beijing’s most popular breweries is the “Great Leap” brewery, which features a Mao-era symbol of a fist clenching a beer stein, instead of the clods of grass and earth that farmers tried to eat during the famine. Perhaps because of the revolting idea of a brew pub being named after a famine, the company began in 2015 to explain on its website that the name came not from Maoist history but an obscure Song dynasty song. Only when you’re young and fat, goes the verse, does one dare risk a great leap. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/who-killed-more-hitler-stalin-or-mao?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
We do live in the recurrence of our own stories, and the kaleidoscope image is apt. I have a kaleidoscope that doesn't have any pieces of colored glass at all, just the prism mirrors. The angles of refraction and reflection are fixed, and when you look through it you see whatever is there in front of you, but in intricate and constantly moving fractal patterns. That seems to me a pretty accurate demonstration of how we live in our stories, the angles of refraction and reflection fixed by history, memory, and the body, patterning everything in ways particular to ourselves...our perceptions and thoughts have a coherence always particular and rooted in both the movement and details of our personal stories. That is how we will see and “read” the world, retelling those stories again, even as things change..they will yet be familiar, recognizable.
The personal, the interior life, and art not in service to the state are always suspect in totalitarian regimes, always far more comfortable with art in the role of propaganda. The individual and personal has to be useful to the social and collective, otherwise must be rooted out, criticized, and purged. I saw this in my own small experience with leftist politics in the 70's, where self criticism sessions could be a form of entertainment and revenge, as well as punishment and warning to toe the party line, and my own paintings were seen as self indulgent and dangerously lacking in social consciousness.
There were of course many different splinter groups, all more or less in opposition...ones who felt social justice could be achieved by non-violent means and others who felt only violent revolution could succeed. There were the self proclaimed Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, and those who espoused “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought.”
Of course all the while there was the eternal jockeying of various groups and local leaders for prominence and power on even the smallest scale. And everyone was still very busy with their own adventures in the ongoing sexual revolution.
Different degrees of involvement and seriousness...but most managed these ideological dalliances without seriously damaging their prospects for a future career — in academia, of course.
Also to be noted, Stalin was listed among the greats, and his portrait was decoupaged (this was the 70's!!!) along with those of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, to be raffled off at a fundraiser. You can't make this stuff up.
My memories aside, the question of who was the greatest mass murderer seems to miss the point, risking getting mired in the likes of "whose genocide was the worst?” I don't know what it serves to classify and rank evils, although understanding the dynamics could be helpful, in, for instance, understanding the sheer insanities (backyard smelting!!!) that drove the enormous losses of Mao's Great Leap Forward.
Oh dear, I'm getting caught up in these memories... at least the distance of time makes clear some of their hilarity, along with all the tragedy.
Joe:
My participation in leftist politics left me with the impression of the inexperience of the people. What was needed was an elder. Unfortunately, those who were middle-aged were trying to prove they were young, not provide a form of civil leadership. My experience paralleled Mary's. The bully and cruel types have migrated to the right. Not all but a significant number.
I never could get behind Lenin, Stalin, or Mao because they supported murder for power or enjoyment.
Putin and Trump in interesting, ahem, company . . . (mugs in a Moscow kiosk). Photo: Shaun Walker Oriana:
Thanks to both of you for sharing your personal experience in the leftist circles. I think the author of the article left out the matters you mention because he was mainly interested in changing the question, “Who killed more, Hitler or Stalin?” to including Mao as perhaps the greatest culprit of all.
As you probably know, Putin is an admirer of Stalin, and has done much to restore reverence for the monster. As for China, there seems to be a total denial of the atrocities committed in Mao’s name. I met a survivor of the Cultural Revolution who told me how her father, whom she adored, was beaten to death in front of her — and how, to save her own life, she shouted along with others, “Hit him harder!” Here she burst into tears, as did I.
I think it was Stalin who said, “One death is tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” One personal story can be more compelling than a long article.
And Andy Warhol showed how even a deified figure like Mao can be taken down to the level of crude pop-culture advertising. Indeed there isn't a clear difference between propaganda and advertising.
*
STALIN: EXTREME CRUELTY OR CHIEFLY BRAIN DISEASE?
~ “Alexander Myasnikov was one of the doctors called to Stalin's deathbed when the dictator fell ill in 1953, and, in diaries that have been kept secret up to now, he claims that Stalin suffered from a brain illness that could have impaired his decision-making.
"The major atherosclerosis in the brain, which we found at the autopsy, should raise the question of how much this illness — which had clearly been developing over a number of years — affected Stalin's health, his character and his actions," Dr Myasnikov wrote in his diaries, excerpts of which were published for the first time in the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. "Stalin may have lost his sense of good and bad, healthy and dangerous, permissible and impermissible, friend and enemy. Character traits can become exaggerated, so that a suspicious person becomes paranoid," the doctor wrote.
"I would suggest that the cruelty and suspicion of Stalin, his fear of enemies... was created to a large extent by atherosclerosis of the cerebral arteries. The country was being run, in effect, by a sick man.” ~
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brain-illness-could-have-affected-stalins-actions-secret-diaries-reveal-2271995.html
Oriana:
I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure to what extent it was “major atherosclerosis” causing brain dysfunction, and to what extent the man was evil through and through . . . just as now we are wondering if our Supreme Leader is a cunning con-man and non-stop liar, or if he genuinely can’t remember what he said the day before due to dementia, as has been suggested by various experts who say that his cognitive function has recently dramatically deteriorated and he is out of touch with reality.
A liar or a victim of dementia, out of touch with reality due to brain disease? What a question to be raising about a head of state. And yet, of course, there was Reagan, his mental decline carefully covered up by his wife and staff. In Russia, the senility of Brezhnev after his near-fatal stroke gave rise to “moron jokes” about him — yet those around the doddering head of state found it convenient not to change the status quo.
And at the extremes: was Hitler brain-damaged by exposure to mustard gas, and, later, use of stimulants and other psychoactive drugs? Stalin: were his brutality and paranoia heightened by degenerative brain disease? It seems we never learn, never require neurological exams.
*
~ Consider the poor souls whose work entails implementing the ubiquitous feature of automatic phone systems: when you call about a bill or service issue, you have to speak your name into a computer system; once you’ve articulated “speak to an agent” some 16 times to said computer system, waited 20 additional minutes, and finally reached a human being, you immediately have to provide the same information you already gave the system.
Meanwhile, says Graeber, practitioners in the fields that directly benefit mankind or offer personal fulfillment, such as teaching, caregiving, waiting, writing, performing carpentry, or making art, are (with the exception of some doctors) poorly paid and secretly resented by those forced to waste their time pursuing a paycheck.
Being occupied for long hours of the day fulfilling tasks that, at best, are useless and, at worst, hurt others—building the aforementioned phone systems, foisting software on budget-starved elementary schools, creating paperwork morasses for the homeless—is “a profound psychological violence” that causes anxiety and depression.
Basically, our collective soul is being crushed by a rise in what Graeber sees as make-work.
His essay was such a hit that polling agencies in Britain and the Netherlands tested his hypothesis. A third of respondents in both countries answered negatively to the question: “Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?” Armed with this affirmation, Graeber sent out a request on Twitter for descriptions of bulls--- jobs and received 250 thoughtful, detailed responses. These make up the anthropological basis for the book and are delightful in their comic darkness.
Here’s “Greg” describing his job as a designer of digital display advertising that, he came to believe—after reading that no one clicks on banner ads—were a scam: “High-paying clients generally want to reproduce their TV commercials within the banner ads and demand complex storyboards with multiple ‘scenes’ and mandatory elements. Automotive clients would come in and demand that we use Photoshop to switch the steering wheel position or fuel tank cap on an image the size of a thumbnail.”
“Eric” describes a job at a large design firm that was “pure liquid bulls---” with the title of Interface Administrator: “The firm was a partnership … [and the owners,] being unbelievably competitive fortysomething public-school boys, they often tried to outcompete one another to win bids, and on more than one occasion, two different [teams] had found themselves arriving at the same client’s office to pitch work and having to hastily combine their bids in the parking lot of some dismal business park.”
Eric was supposed to set up a “super collaborative” interface that would keep everyone on the same page and prevent this from happening. “I should have realized that it was one partner’s idea that no one else actually wanted. … Why else would they be paying a 21-year-old history graduate with no IT experience to do this? They’d bought the cheapest software they could find, from a bunch of absolute crooks, so it was buggy, prone to crashing, and looked like a Windows 3.1 screen saver. The entire workforce was paranoid that it was designed to monitor their productivity, record their keystrokes, or flag that they were torrenting porn on the company internet, and so they wanted nothing to do with it.”
There was little for Eric to do because he couldn’t fix the system and no one wanted to deal with it, anyway. He grew desperate and depressed and, despite the evident failure of the system, had to convince his bosses to let him resign. “I was basically tasked with selling and managing a badly-functioning, unwanted turd,” he wrote to Graeber.
This description might sum up the author’s view of the global economy and those tasked with (or conscripted into) maintaining it. One myth that these confessions debunk once and for all is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector in its employment practices. While derisive phrases such as “close enough for government work” have long been part of our vocabulary, these days corporate jobs, newfangled finance vehicles, and tech startups equally conjure associations of time-wasting in the form of bulls--- managementese, hollow strategizing, and annoying software. It’s easy to envision employees working to death to produce morally dubious profits for upper management, inventing or selling things no one really wants or needs, or listlessly spending hours seeking the empty solace provided by internet distractions and social media. Graeber, with this book, wants to and largely succeeds at solidifying our ambient low-level, collective sense that “economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines of producing nonsense.”
Graeber argues that the concept of selling off one’s time in increments is relatively new. Historically, he says, the idea “that one person’s time can belong to someone else is actually quite peculiar.” To the ancient Greeks, he claims, you were either a slave and your whole life was owned, or you sold a good (an eating utensil, food) that you created as you saw fit. He implicates the shift toward clock time in the Middle Ages as the culprit behind our collective acceptance of wage slavery. Whereas time was traditionally amorphous, determined by geographical distances or chemical transformations (as long as it takes for the bread to rise, the wheat to dry) clock towers and then pocket watches (disallowed in factories so bosses could cheat by meddling with the hour hands on clocks), turned time into discreet, barter-able chunks. Naturally, we’re built to work in bursts and then to celebrate and rest, just as Mother Nature ordained, not pace ourselves to produce at an even tempo for hours at a stretch, day after day, all week.
It hardly matters if Graeber’s history is accurate. His best-selling Dept: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, $22.99) garnered some controversy in this regard, with academics identifying myriad false claims—for instance, that Apple Inc. was started by former IBM engineers. The ideas alone are worth contemplating.
But Graeber loses traction when he tries to explain why “it’s as if someone out there made up pointless jobs for the sake of making us all work,” or when he attempts to get a handle on how automation and technology have done the opposite of creating a lovely four-hour workda y. His explanation hews to an argument that fits his politics: “Corporations are less and less about making, building, fixing, or maintaining things, and more and more about political processes of appropriating, distributing and allocating money and resources.”
By positioning themselves as job creators and maneuvering the political system to laud any and all jobs, rather than asking if they’re meaningful or help society or the employees, “they” can maintain power indefinitely. (This would be Graeber’s ruling elite, the 1 percent targeted by the Occupy Movement.) But it requires manufacturing a lot of pointless duties, complex bureaucracies, elaborate financial vehicles. Graeber sees this as recreating medieval feudalism, with software and middle management instead of dukes, archdukes, weapons, and castles.
When I read Graeber’s account of how a boss taught him and his fellow dishwashers to be less efficient at a restaurant job he held in his youth by yelling at them for washing the dishes as fast as possible and then loafing around, smoking, I sympathized with the boss. When you’re the one who owns or feels ownership over the endeavor, you think there’s always something more that needs doing. To you, it’s important. It’s hard to get other people to see what you see needs to get done; it’s human nature to want to have things done your own way. Sometimes Graeber reminds me of a 12-year-old who insists there’s no reason to clean up his or her room, while the parent knows that bugs, vermin, mental chaos, or depression could otherwise ensue.
He does nail it when he writes that “much of the reason for the expansion of the bulls--- sector more generally is a direct result of the desire to quantify the unquantifiable,” but he’s fallen into the same trap. The tension at the heart of this book, of course, is that the writing of it is a bit of a bulls--- job. Graeber might even be hiding a crushed soul of his own.
In his comfortable seat as a professor at an esteemed institution, musing amusedly about the mind-numbing hours most working people have to put in and put up with—even at jobs that have lively, meaningful moments—fits neatly in his category of “duct taping,” maybe also “flunky.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/you-re-not-just-imagining-it-your-job-is-absolute-bs?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE “POPULATION BOMB”?
~ Fortunately, and paradoxically, despite record high numbers of human beings on the planet, our population growth is actually slowing. Slate writes:
According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5 — where Europe is today — then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion.
According to the Denver Post, a report by the US Census bureau late last year showed US population growth of only 0.7% — less than at any time since the Great Depression. Reporter Stephen Mihm writes:
“Birthrates dropped dramatically over the course of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the U.S. This was particularly true for the middle classes, where declines in fertility were especially pronounced. Unlike farm families, middle-class families living in cities no longer needed as many children, and the demands of industrial society encouraged them to invest more resources — money, time, calories, education — in fewer offspring.”
These statistics are encouraging, because without a reduction in birth rates the ever increasing human population would have otherwise outstripped our ability to support it, which would ultimately lead to natural controls like war, disease, and starvation that would likely trigger a mass population crash after having been absent for so long.
Demographic Transition
The big question is how Malthus, Erlich, and many others could have been so wrong about overpopulation. What did they miss?
The answer is what’s called a demographic transition, in which a society moves from a high fertility & mortality rate to a low fertility & mortality rate.
In less advanced, agricultural societies, people had more children to offset the higher mortality rate — but as society became more advanced, fewer people die early in life, and fewer people are choosing to have children.
In other words, it appears that the very same advances in modern civilization that allowed world population to soar are now slowing its growth. Advances in education, women’s rights, birth control, and overall social wealth are reducing birth rates.
WHERE WILL IT END?
Where will human population peak before it begins to fall? The United Nations estimates a peak population in 2100 of 11.2 billion people, but others, such as the Norwegian climatologist Jørgen Randers, see the population peaking sooner at a much lower number — only 8 billion people with a peak in 2040.
After the peak, the overall population will begin to decline, and if that trend becomes the new norm, in a century perhaps all countries will be paying people to have children like city of Nagi-cho in Japan currently does.
While underpopulation is a welcome solution to the promised apocalypse of runaway overpopulation, it brings its own set of issues, including the overall aging of the population and a shrinking workforce & tax-base that can lead to economic stagnation.
Still, tax woes are far more welcome than running out of global resources & starving to death, and it’s far more palatable to pay people to have children than restrict them from having them.
https://medium.com/swlh/the-surprising-solution-to-overpopulation-ee12704f9edc
*HOW TO SEEM EFFORTLESSLY CHARMING
~ The factors that determine our success with other people, and the impressions we make upon them, can start even before we meet them. Research has proven the people we meet often make judgements about us based purely on the way we look. Alexander Todorov, a professor of psychology at Princeton, has shown that people can make judgements about someone’s likability, trustworthiness and competence after seeing their face for less than a tenth of a second.
Making a snap judgement on something so superficial might seem rash, but we do it all the time without even realizing. And it can have serious implications. For example, it might influence who you vote for. One study showed that facial appearance can be used to predict the outcome of elections to the US Senate. Similarly, facial characteristics associated with competence have also been successful in predicting the outcomes of elections involving Bulgarian, French, Mexican and Brazilian politicians.
The judgements we make about someone’s face can influence our financial decisions too. In one experiment, borrowers who were perceived as looking less trustworthy were less likely to get loans on a peer-to-peer lending site. Lenders were making these judgements based on appearance in spite of having information about the borrowers employment status and credit history at their fingertips.
Put on a Happy Face
Of course, while you may not be able to control the physical features of your face, it is possible to alter your expressions and smile. Todorov has used data-driven statistical models to build algorithms that can manipulate faces to look more or less trustworthy, allowing him to tease out the features that we trust the most.
According to his work, as a face becomes happier, it also becomes more trustworthy.
“People will perceive a smiling face as more trustworthy, warmer and sociable,” explains Todorov. “One of the major inputs to these impressions is emotional expression. If you look at our models and and manipulate the faces to become more trustworthy or extroverted, you see the emotional expression emerge—the face becomes happy.”
For those situations where our first impression has not been as good as we might have hoped, there is also hope – we can still win people over so they forget that initial snap judgement.
“The good news is that we can very quickly override our first impression made based on appearance,” says Todorov. “If you have the opportunity to meet someone, the moment you have good information about them, you will change the way you perceive them.” If you can impress someone, they will often forget about what they thought when they first saw us, even if it was negative.
The happier face seems more trustworty Channel Your Charm
Best of all, it’s possible to train yourself to be charming. Jack Schafer, a psychologist and retired FBI special agent who is a likability coach and author of The Like Switch, points to Johnny Carson as a quintessential example of someone who preferred being alone, but who learned how to be extremely sociable for the camera. The late host of The Tonight Show would go years without giving interviews and once told the LA Times that 98 percent of the time he went home after the show rather than choosing to socialize with the glitterati.
“Carson was an extreme introvert who trained himself to be an extrovert,” says Schafer. “As soon as the show was over he curled up and went home, but on TV he was famous for smiling and laughing and making jokes.”
Raising Eyebrows
So what can the rest of us do to be more charming? Schafer says charm starts with a simple flash of the eyebrows.
“Our brains are always surveying the environment for friend or foe signals,” he says. “The three major things we do when we approach somebody that signal we are not a threat are: an eyebrow flash — a quick up and down movement of the eyebrow that lasts about a sixthof a second — a slight head tilt, and a smile.”
So now you have made your entrance, experts agree that the next key to likability is to make your interaction about the other person. That means not talking about yourself.
“The golden rule of friendship is if you make people feel good about themselves, they’re going to like you,” says Schafer. Cabane agrees, but says it can only work if you show a geninue interest in what they are saying.
“Imagine the other person is a character in an indie flick,” she suggests. “Those characters become more fascinating the more you learn about them. You’ll find yourself observing and showing genuine interest in their mannerisms and personality.”
If that fails, she says interest can also be faked. “Focus on the different colors in their irises,” she says. “By maintaining that level of eye contact, it will give the impression of interest.”
Schafer suggests making empathic statements that might reflect some of what the other person is feeling.
“I once saw a student in an elevator who looked pleased with himself,” he explains. “I said ‘It looks like you’re having a good day.’ He went on to tell me about how he just aced a test he had spent weeks studying for. That entire exchange made him feel good about himself.”
If you know more about the person you’re speaking with, you can be even more effective.
“Instead of direct flattery, you want to allow people to flatter themselves,” he says. “Once I find out your age I can say something like, ‘you’re in your 30s and write for the BBC? Not many people can do that so young’. Now you’re giving yourself a psychological pat on the back.”
In a networking situation – something many people dread – you may have heard something about the person you’re speaking with, allowing you to bring up specific topics that are relevant to them. “You can say, ‘I heard that this great thing happened for you, I’d love to hear the story,’” suggests de Janasz.
Find Common Ground
De Janasz also suggests emphasizing common ground, even when your opinions diverge. Charming people are often skilled at finding common ground with the people they interact with, even when there’s not much to go on.
“When you disagree, try to really listen to the other person rather than setting up your response, which research shows smart people tend to do,” she says. “It might seem like you totally disagree but on closer examination you might agree on a few things, at least in principle.”
She adds that it’s always a good idea to keep up with current events, and industry news, since those are the things most people have in common. Schafer also advises looking for common ground contemporaneously (You’re from California? I’m from California), temporally (I’m hoping to visit California next year) or vicariously (My daughter works for a firm in Silicon Valley).
Watch Their Body
Another key to likability is to mirror the body language of the other person. When people are conversing and they begin to mirror one another, it is a signal that have a good rapport, says Schafer.
“So you can use that and mirror them so you can signal to them that you have good rapport,” he says. It is also a good way to test how the conversation is going – if you change your own position and the other person copies you, it is probably going well. Anyone working in sales might want to use that moment to start their pitch.
If you are looking to give your relationship with your new best friend some longevity, it might also be worth using something Schafer refers to as the Hansel and Gretel technique. A common mistake that many of us make is to overwhelm new people with too much information about ourselves, which can put them off. Instead, Schafer recommends revealing details about yourself little by little — like bread crumbs — so each new piece of information acts as “curiosity hooks” to keep their interest going.
“You gradually release information about yourself to keep the relationship alive,” he explains.
If all else fails, simply spending time near someone can make him or her like you, even in extreme circumstances. Schafer opens his book with an anecdote from the FBI about a foreign spy who was in American custody. Everyday Schafer sat in his cell quietly reading the newspaper until eventually fear gave way to curiosity and the spy wanted to start a conversation.
“So initially it was proximity and duration,” says Schafer. “And then I gradually introduced intensity, leaning toward him, increasing eye contact, et cetera.” It took months, but Schafer ultimately got what he wanted.
So next time you walk into a room filled with new faces, with a bit of effort it might be you that everybody wants to get to know.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-tricks-to-make-yourself-effortlessly-charming?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE
The argument “from evil” did not play any significant part in my journey from catholicism to atheism. I had trouble seeing god as good — just the story of the flood revolted me. (I did feel guilty, though, over not being able to love god.) My father, however, said that the mistake was seeing god as omnipotent. Many years later, I read Rabbi Kushner’s book and instantly felt at home in his thesis — god is not cruel, but has limited power. When bad things happen, we can try to connect with what we understand as divine.
To me that’s human and animal affection, and the beauty of nature.
And of course good books! My life changed when I learned to read. The world became much larger, and fascinating.
To me religion was not a source of solace, but of anguish. When I first heard Spong’s definition of religion as a “guilt-inducing control system,” I instantly connected. Solace has always come from three sources: affection (friendship and kindness), beauty (especially of nature), and good books.
*
In his “Letters on Cézanne,” written to his wife Clara in 1907, Rilke writes, “ I know a few things from [Cézanne’s] last years when he was old and shabby and children followed him every day on his way to his studio, throwing stones at him as if at a stray dog.” Rilke takes it for granted that children throw stones at stray dogs, and doesn’t seem surprised that they’d throw stones at the great painter when he was “old and shabby.” (In Arles, children weren’t kind to Van Gogh either.)
I remember that in one of Hardy’s novels an adult throws stones at a stray dog. It was customary, and probably no one thought it cruel. The hungry dog needed to be chased away.
Given the shootings and bombings, the never-ending no-win wars, it may seem frivolous of me to be saying Look! We no longer throw stones at a stray dog! Or at least it’s not customary!
I realize that there are still instances of cruelty to animals, the aged, and the homeless, but I don’t think anyone would mention it calmly, in passing. Even without Pinker’s statistics (“The Better Angels of Our Nature”), I’ve sensed a diminishment of cruelty and violence over the decades. What saddens me is how much it persists in the movies and on TV, how often the characters use both physical and verbal aggression. And yet, in spite of this, a certain softening, mellowing, nuance-ing seems to be happening. At least we no longer burn witches and heretics, go to public executions as a chief form of entertainment, and so on. I see progress.
*
RELIGIONS WERE CREATED DURING THE AGE OF IGNORANCE
I was suddenly struck by that phrase: the Age of Ignorance. It was also the Age of Dictatorship, of absolute rulers (emperors, kings, warlords — hence it was relatively easy to think that the universe, too, has a ruler) — but now it seems to me that ignorance was primary and more important.
We simply can't get into the mentality of the people who created the major religions (be it not in the form in which those are now practiced). Their world was populated by supernatural beings, chiefly demons. Disease was thought to be caused by demons.
Earthquakes, floods, and other “acts of god” were seen as punishment. “Sacred Scriptures” were written by men who had no idea where the sun went for the night. Not that we can blame them for not knowing that the sun didn’t “go” anywhere — rather, the earth rotates.
No, we cannot blame our ancestors for having been profoundly ignorant. They were slowly making all sorts of discoveries, making inventions that would eventually reduce ignorance (e.g. the printing press). The problem is that the various ancient texts arising the archaic mentality are still with us, still being taken literally by some — and the results can be lethal. Now, in the twenty-first century, when we are beginning to talk of self-driving cars and other wonders. 9/11 really opened our eyes: it was the revenge of the Age of Ignorance.
*
Titian: Assumption of the Virgin, 1518. Mary — in the body, since the ancient Hebrews didn't believe in disembodied souls — is being carried to god the father on a cloud. I especially like the little cherubs who seem to be pushing the cloud upward. Oddly, most of the angels here have really dark wings.*
And this is a close-up of Titian's god the father. It's presumably windy up there in the highest heaven, so the beard and hair billow in the breeze. Note that god's nose is large, thick, and not straight; unlike Jesus in so many paintings, Titian's Yahweh does not have idealized features.*
HIGH ALPHA DEFENSIN LEVELS IDENTIFIED AS THE SOURCE OF CLOTTING PROBLEMS IN COVID PATIENTS; SOLUTION: COLCHICINE
~ At least 30% of patients with coronavirus develop blood clots that block the flow of blood to their kidneys, heart and brain, as well as the lungs, according to international research.
Hadassah researchers discovered that the patients who form these fatal clots have an increased level of alpha defensin protein in their blood, explained Dr. Abd Alrauf Higavi, who directs a lab at Hadassah and has been studying blood clots for 30 years.
“Patients with mild symptoms have a low concentration of alpha defensin,” he said. “Patients with strong disease symptoms have high levels. The people who die have very high levels.”
The Hadassah team studied more than 700 blood samples from 80 patients who were admitted to the medical center during the first peak of the coronavirus outbreak in Israel. The results show that alpha defensin speeds up blood clot formation, which can cause pulmonary embolism, heart attacks and stroke. In addition, when blood clots form in the alveoli, whose function it is to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules to and from the bloodstream, this can lead to respiratory distress and eventually intubation.
Multiple studies have shown that around 80% of coronavirus patients who are intubated have died.
Higavi said his team are en route to a solution: administering the drug colchicine to coronavirus patients.
Colchicine is an approved drug used in the prevention and treatment of gout attacks, caused by too much uric acid in the blood.
Higavi said they have completed testing colchicine on mice and found that it successfully inhibited the release of alpha defensin. Now, they are waiting for the necessary approvals to test it on human coronavirus patients.
The researcher said that clinical trials would look at use of the drug both for severe cases and administering it to patients with mild or moderate symptoms to see if it will help decrease the chances of their developing a severe case of the disease.
“The drugs available today in the blood-thinning market do not fully address this clotting, since its mechanism differs from the mechanisms for which these drugs currently exist,” Higavi said. “Resources should be diverted to finding a suitable drug for coronavirus patients.”
https://m.jpost.com/health-science/hadassah-doctors-crack-the-cause-of-fatal-corona-blood-clots-631681/amp?fbclid=IwAR1TjNfq51y6J5caZrvB5zeTPBgb5n8TDtbV-HOmX5wPlcuhtRvp2dbNvQ8
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COLCHICINE, AN ANTI-GOUT REMEDY, MAY BE THE BEST “CLOT-BUSTER” FOR COVID
~ Israeli researchers have identified the mechanism that causes a deadly COVID-19 complication that affects 30% of patients: the formation of large and small blood clots that create lethal blockages in the patient’s lungs, kidneys, heart, and brain.
Researchers from the Hadassah-University Medical Center (Jerusalem, Israel) have discovered that alpha-defensin, a peptide (an amino-acid chain) speeds up the creation of blood clots and prevents their disintegration. This finding is crucial in understanding what is happening to COVID-19 patients because existing anticoagulant drugs do not impact alpha-defensin.
A study of blood samples from patients in Hadassah’s COVID-19 Outbreak department found a high concentration of alpha-defensin. The researchers also found that the sicker the patient was, the higher the concentration of the peptide. The researchers are now working on a new way to dissolve the blood clots. They are testing colchicine, an oral medication used for gout and Familial Mediterranean fever. The drug has succeeded in reducing alpha-defensin levels and blood clots in mice, and the researchers are now awaiting approval to begin human trials. They believe that if the drug reduces blood clots in COVID-19 patients, it will vastly reduce the number of patients needing respirators.
“These patients have numerous blood clots in their lungs, preventing normal blood flow,” said Prof. Abd Al-Roof Higazi, head of the Hadassah Medical Organization’s Department of Clinical Biochemistry and Division of Laboratories. “We can give the drug to those with mild symptoms to prevent the development of blood clots.” ~
https://www.hospimedica.com/covid-19/articles/294783178/covid-19-patients-develop-fatal-blood-clots-due-to-high-alpha-defensin-protein-levels-find-researchers.html
*
VITAMIN K2 FOR CAVITY PREVENTION
~ It is vitamin K2, working synergistically with calcium and other minerals, that is most responsible for preventing cavities and even reversing some pre-existing cavities.
It wasn’t until 1975 that Harvard researchers realized that vitamin K2 wasn’t just a different version of vitamin K1 with the same benefits. On the contrary, they discovered the protein osteocalcin, which is dependent upon Vitamin K2 for activation. Once activated, osteocalcin pulls calcium from the bloodstream into your bones and teeth to keep them strong and disease-free. Vitamin K1 doesn’t have the ability to activate that process.
With a new focus on vitamin K2 and its specific benefits, it would make sense for doctors and dentists to promote it as a vital nutrient and encourage people to get more of it in their diets. But that just wasn’t the case.
In 2007, 68 years after Price published the incredible benefits of Activator X, researchers finally realized that most people in modern society are deficient in Vitamin K2. The ramifications of this are huge, as scientists believe that vitamin K2 may have the potential to reverse the heart disease and diabetes epidemics.
And, of course, without vitamin K2, it is nearly impossible to achieve optimal oral and dental health.
Without vitamin K2, the body’s calcium may not end up in bones and teeth where it’s actually needed. Instead, it may travel to arteries where it calcifies and leads to heart disease.
Vitamins D3 and K2 work synergistically to carry and deposit calcium to your teeth and bones where it can be properly absorbed. And when one part of that system is out of whack, the whole process becomes disrupted—which can lead to poor dental health, even when you’re brushing and flossing regularly.
Kills Cavity-Causing Bacteria
One key factor in cavity formation is the disruption of the oral microbiome.
The mouth is full of trillions of bacteria at any time, and it’s the healthy bacteria that help to beat bad breath and stop cavities from forming. Unfortunately, it’s very common for bad bacteria to proliferate and crowd the good ones out. When this happens, harmful bacteria can lead to cavities, gum disease, and other issues.
To illustrate the impact of vitamin K2 on the oral microbiome, Price repeatedly conducted a simple experiment. He treated patients with a butter oil very rich in vitamin K2 and found that the cavity-promoting bacteria was decreased by up to 95 percent, sometimes going away altogether.
Builds New Dentin
Because osteocalcin is a K2-dependent protein, increasing vitamin K2 intake causes osteocalcin to work more efficiently. When osteocalcin is activated by K2, it causes the growth of fresh dentin (calcified tissue that underlies the enamel layer of teeth), and when new dentin grows, cavities are less likely to form. (Note that this process also requires vitamins A and D.)
Slows Tooth Degradation
Similarly to how it impacts bones, it is believed that vitamin K2 helps to slow the rate of tooth loss that occurs with age. In fact, when it comes to bone, K2 has been observed to actually increase bone mass.
Leads to Normal Facial Structure
One of the most striking findings that Weston A. Price documented during his travels was the difference in face and jaw structure of those exposed to Western diets as compared to those subsisting entirely on a traditional diet.
As Rheaume-Bleue explains, vitamin K2 is extremely important during fetal development. When mothers don’t consume enough of this vitamin, the nasal cartilage of the fetus is calcified too early and can lead to undergrowth of the bottom third of the face. This condition is considered extremely rare and is known as maxillonasal dysplasia or “Binder’s syndrome.”
While the most advanced stages of this condition are rare, you probably see less severe cases every day. Have you ever noticed a child with teeth that clearly don’t fit in their oral cavity, leading to misshapen or displaced teeth? That’s caused by vitamin K2 deficiency during fetal development.
The impact of the Western diet on facial development is one reason I believe modern dentistry has had to turn to so many external mechanisms like braces, bridges, and the removal of wisdom teeth.
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to learn more about K2: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/blog/2016/12/09/the-ultimate-vitamin-k2-resource
Oriana:
Of course the content of Vitamin K2 is not the only thing to consider. Pork sausage, for instance, is a good source of Vitamin K2, but it's undesirable for other reasons. It's possible that supplements are needed, especially as we get older. But practically no supplements have sufficient potency to reverse blood vessel calcification. There is one prominent exception, but I'm not going to use my blog to promote any specific product. Just search the Internet.
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ending on beauty:
O swallows, swallows, poems are not
the point. Finding again the world,
that is the point, where loveliness
adorns intelligible things
because the mind’s eye lit the sun.
~ Howard Nemerov, “The Blue Swallows”
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