Ryan Mohl: Crossing Philadelphia, 2019*
LENIN TO HIS MISTRESS, INESSA ARMAND
(the village of Poronin, Tatra Mountains)
Dear Comrade, Dearest Love, I cannot wait
to give you the voluptuous green
of Tatra valleys, the Black Ponds
deep and pure as your eyes. Women like you
are the Revolution’s greatest treasure.
to think you have a husband
and five children, yet never
speak about them, or of anything
as petit-bourgeois as divorce.
The night I escaped from Russia,
corpse-like moonlight glazed the frozen channel.
Halfway to the ship bound for Sweden,
the ice began to crack. I was ready to die —
life hadn’t denied me anything except
love between equals. Then you, Inessa,
in bruised winter dark —
the Lafargues slumped in their chairs,
self-injected with cyanide
(Marx’s daughter! she could still be of use);
Russian exiles carted off to insane asylums,
babbling about balalaikas;
my wife dozing with her glasses on —
“So I can see where I’m sleeping.”
Imagine, Emma Goldman writes,
“If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.”
Anarchists are such children.
Yet they too can be used:
what the Italians call utili idioti.
Then that madwoman Rosa Luxemburg
with her “freedom for the one
who thinks differently.”
I’m tired of repeating and repeating,
Liberty is a form of bourgeois dictatorship.
The people have no need of liberty.
I am sorry, dearest — I should rather say
I remember, in Zurich,
when you stood by the fireplace,
your red hair a shroud of flame —
I thought of the fox I saw
one time in a Siberian forest:
so beautiful I couldn’t kill it.
I know you will forgive me.
Yours, Vladimir Ilich.
~ Oriana
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MY FIVE MAJOR LIFE-CHANGING INSIGHTS
CHOOSING NOT BE DEPRESSED
I credit my breakthrough depression-ending insight to reading the statement “You can practice falling apart, or you can practice being strong.” It was like the proverbial being struck by lightning. I was changed forever. The neural portal to depression not only slammed shut, but disappeared, seared off by the electricity of the insight.
Later I was able to see that “readiness is all” — I also had minor insights along the way. For instance, I was also haunted Jack Gilbert’s “It’s too late for discontent,” which I eventually translated as “It’s too late in life for depression” — I called this “being cornered by mortality.”
So there were several insights that helped me to develop a desire to be rid of depression rather than indulge the perverse desire to go ever deeper into it. Still, the lighting was the “or” — meaning the idea of having a choice: “You can practice falling apart, or you can practice being strong.”
LEAVING THE CHURCH
The first time I had such instant change due to an insight was dropping religion when I was fourteen, after heavy Catholic indoctrination. A thought rose in my mind: “It’s just another mythology.” It seemed instant, but of course the moment of insight was preceding by preliminary steps and stages, including reading a certain crucial page in a book on comparative religion on the similarities between various gods across mythologies, e.g. the dying and resurrecting gods. Once I saw the Judeo-Christian tradition as one of many mythologies, there was no going back.
CHOOSING MY OWN BEST INTEREST
The third such moment happened when a former partner wrote just one sentence in reply to a desperate letter from me: “Do only that which is in your best interest.” And just like that I was no longer willing to risk a disastrous marriage, or in any way subjugate my primary needs to a man’s needs. It was my feminist moment, and it’s a bit funny that I owe it to a man. But that’s exactly what a typical man would do without any need for coaching — do only that which is in his best interest.
CHOOSING NOT TO WANT ANYTHING FROM WRONG PEOPLE
The fourth life-changing insight came from a woman friend to whom I complained how a certain person was mistreating me, not replying to me emails, breaking promises. My friend smiled and said, “You suffer because you want something from her.” I instantly knew that was profound wisdom. In my thoughts I repeated “There is nothing I want from X. There is nothing I want from X.” (X here stands for her name, which need not be revealed). Later, whenever I happened to be reminded of that person, I deliberately thought, “There is nothing I want from X.”
An interesting thing happened. Eventually a got a long, effusive, self-centered email from X, making no mention of the promise she’d made earlier. I replied with a brief and aloof email that made no request — I actually stopped needing anything from X. Her next email to me was friendly and respectful — but I was no longer interested in cultivating this friendship, so again I replied in a brief and aloof way. And that was the end of it, and good riddance, since the woman was an alcoholic.
Ever since, I practiced saying to myself “There is nothing I want from X” [insert the relevant name] whenever trouble arose. It worked. I also remembered that my mother said that a school friend taught her a similar method: when someone or something doesn’t work out, repeat to yourself “that’s not for me, that’s not for me.”
CHOOSING A RATIONAL WAY TO USE MONEY, i.e. spend it on things of value
The fifth insight, like the depression-ending insight, arose from what I call “the power of OR.” (I mean the tiny word “OR.”) This one I owed to a banker who was trying to induce me to invest a certain relatively modest sum of money over which I just gained sole autonomy. “What do you want to do with your money?” he asked. “Do you want to have it make more money?” He paused, and then asked what to me was a revolutionary question: “Or do you want to spend it?” And after a lifetime of being taught exclusively to save, save, save, and never having questioned the “virtue” of thrift, I surprised myself by saying without hesitation, “I want to spend it.” Of course the point was to spend it intelligently to improve the quality of my life — or to donate to a cause truly important to me.
Though this new willingness to spend seemed to come out of the blue, I realized that I’d been thinking about the stages of life. A parallel insight emerged: “I don’t want to die rich.”
These five insights have changed my life for the better. I hope that perhaps one or two of them may prove useful to a particular reader. Why this relatively modest expectation? Because one needs to be ready. Much needs to fall into place, sometimes slowly, before the lightning of instant change can strike.
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Which of these five guiding principles do I use most frequently? Now that chronic depression is history, I'd say it's "there is nothing I want from X."
Mary: WE HAVE A CHOICE; THE POWER OF “OR”
Of your five insights the one I remember operating so distinctly in my own life is the power of "or." I remember one day walking to my bus stop after class, at a time when I was very depressed. Just as I was crossing a bridge I pictured a hand held out flat, and then turned over, as the word "or" was said. The idea was you can think and feel this way, or not. There is a choice. Like looking up instead of down, you have the agency in your own state of being; you can actively live, rather than passively allow yourself to be swept into a morass of pain and grief.
For me religion lost its power over a few things...first, the suffering of children, in the same vein as Ivan's speech in Karamazov. And my conclusion was: there is no excuse for this suffering or the god who allows it. This was further buttressed by my sense that a god who could not forgive was less than a good man could be, and the idea of a creator who is less than the best of creation can’t be…or if he does exist, certainly needn't be worshiped.
I also had great difficulty with the idea of prayers. If your prayers for relief of suffering go unanswered, what does that mean?? That you are unworthy? That you are chosen to suffer? That you somehow are a failure and deserve to suffer? The god people address their prayers to is not worthy of them.
On your release from pain over the cruelty of a friend . . . I recently have been going through something similar from a long time friend, suddenly very cold and critical of me, and withdrawn from me. I was really anguished over this, and kept trying to reconnect and breach that gap — only to be met with coldness. Finally I thought not “what do I want from her?" but that I didn't need her, didn't need to continue trying and being rebuffed and being sad, that it was she diminishing herself by her withdrawal, and not something I somehow deserved because I had failed in some dreadful way. I could feel some regret about the loss, but was able to simply let it go.
So I would say I shared the experience of saving insights in ways similar to you, at different times of life. Amazing how long journeys can share similar paths.
Oriana:
I see definite similarities. We both suddenly saw there was a choice; we both got healed from the underlying assumption that we “deserve” to suffer (an especially harmful Catholic concept). And we both discovered that we don't need toxic people in our lives, or, to use different wording, we don't need anything from them.
Nor do we need to worship a toxic god. Again, it’s a choice to refuse to suffer. The choice is automatic once there is full understanding, i.e. insight. You can't go back to "before the insight."
Louise Hay was both a New Age air-head and a very wise woman. It’s a matter of selecting what makes sense to you. Her idea of the healing power of loving yourself makes wonderful sense. Women have reported bursting out crying when trying to say “I deserve to live,” much less “I love myself.” But let me not go on a rant about “patriarchy.” Men too suffer and may see themselves as failures. Through the mouth of the sage monk Zosima, Dostoyevsky says to the mean-spirited Karamazov father, “Above all, don’t be so ashamed of yourself. Much evil comes from that.”
And much good comes from loving yourself rather than putting yourself down. Then you start making good choices.
Charles:
It worked.
Going to college right out of high school was pivotal to getting me out of a blue collar life style.
My father was a pivotal influence on that account. He really wanted me to attend a good university.
Entering the Army right after college changed my life as well, in ways I could have never predicted.
By far, the most important decision I made was to head east and pursue a doctorate at a university in the Midwest.
In the era, it was one of the top 3 or 4 quantitative psych programs in the country.
I should have realized that I was going to do OK when a business college hired – I had no business coursework in my background.
It seemed like a risky move at this time, but 30 years later I retired out of that college. Financially it was gift from the Gods.
Early in 1979 I had six academic articles under review – none accepted at the time when I had a performance review with a senior faculty. He made the point to me that none had been published and that my presence in the college was questionable.
I was not pleased with his assessment – he had read none of the manuscripts.
Within that year all six had been accepted and scheduled for publications.
I am stunned to see that my research is still being accessed and cited. The total citations to my academic work is approaching 10,000.
I had a similar episode at my army base.
After two weeks, a Captain had decided I was incompetent.
I went on to work for a Colonel for four years.
Oriana:
Thank you, Barry, for citing these examples of courage and perseverance. They helped me see the times when I too took a risk and struck out for the unknown, and the times I too persevered despite discouragement.
I’ve come to believe in the wisdom of the saying that we regret most not the things we did but what we didn’t do. I have all kinds of regrets precisely along those lines, but that’s my “no-think zone.” It’s too late for discontent, for regrets, for anything other than appreciating the astonishment of being alive. “I have been continual practice,” to steal from Hamlet, after his “let be” insight.
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In the late 60s, I left the seminary and was drafted. During my service, I explored the teaching of Buddha, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. There was a recurring altruistic theme in their teachings. It fitted nicely with the parables of Christ. After the Army, I worked as a wildland firefighter on the Cleveland National Forest.
By the time I fought forest fires, I was no longer affiliated with any religion, but I enjoyed contemplating the lessons to be found in my teachers’ writings. Even if it meant ignoring their own safety, these teachers seemed to practice a high degree of regard for the wellbeing of others. Their altruistic behavior led them to a state of calm and contentment.
During my first season, I began long-distance running. It was during a run that I experienced my best insight. Ronald Reagan was making his bid for the presidency. It occurred to me that he promoted a selfish, violent, and mean-spirited agenda. It seemed his presidency might lead to the rotting of the country’s soul.
During my run, I thought about life under greedy leaders. I wondered how to live through the next decades, and I decided that I needed to become more like the men I admired. During another run, I saw that altruism led to periods of happiness.
Those happy moments nourished the inner self. Altruism demands the ability to empathize, and not to impulsively react but to thoughtfully act. Solomon believed that to act with compassion and empathy was to act wisely, and Gandhi believed that to act nonviolently took restraint and empathy.
The insight that running gave me was a sense of what it takes to survive a fascist regime. Unselfishness allows one to survive not as a victim but as a person. In today’s environment, darkness gathers like evening fog, and, perhaps more than ever, the moral stance good people need to embrace is one that embodies self-restraint, empathy, and compassion.
Oriana:
Joe, I'm thrilled by your response. This is a wonderful insight. I immediately thought of the various accounts of life in concentration camps, and how a handful of people didn’t allow themselves to be dehumanized but tried, in spite of circumstances, to help others — be it only words of compassion to lifting a metal cup of water to the lips of the dying. And prisoners watching this behavior were uplifted too, just by being witnesses.
“A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” ~ John Burrough
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YEATS AND THE NOBEL PRIZE
~ Yeats was not one to ignore the business side of things. Bertie Smyllie, the Irish Times journalist who was the first to inform Yeats of his Nobel, has left the following account of that exchange:
It was fairly late in the evening, getting on to eleven o’clock I suppose, and I rang him up at his house, hoping that he didn’t know the news. I said, “Mr. Yeats, I’ve got very good news for you, a very great honor has been conferred upon you,” and I was rather enthusiastic and gushing at the time, and I said, “this is a great honor not only for you but for the country,” and I could tell that he was getting slightly impatient to know what it was all about, so I said, “you’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize, a very great honor to you and a very great honor to Ireland” . . . and to my amazement the only question he asked was, “how much?, Smyllie, how much is it?”
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/6/the-poet-as-memoirist
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LENINTHINK
~ Lenin did more than anyone else to shape the last hundred years. He invented a form of government we have come to call totalitarian, which rejected in principle the idea of any private sphere outside of state control. To establish this power, he invented the one-party state, a term that would previously have seemed self-contradictory since a party was, by definition, a part. An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state.
Stephen Pinker has recently argued that the world has been getting less bloodthirsty. The Mongols, after all, destroyed entire cities. But the Mongols murdered other people; what is new, and uniquely horrible about the Soviets and their successors, is that they directed their fury at their own people. The Russian empire lost more people in World War I than any other country, but still more died under Lenin. His war against the peasants, for instance, took more lives than combat between Reds and Whites.
Numbers do not tell the whole story. Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to fear arrest, but Lenin pioneered and Stalin greatly expanded a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary: that is true terror. By the time of the Great Terror of 1936–38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe. The Party itself was an especially dangerous place to be, and the NKVD was constantly arresting its own members—a practice that was also true of its predecessor, the Cheka, which Lenin founded almost immediately after the Bolshevik coup.
NKVD interrogators who suspected they were to be arrested often committed suicide since they had no illusions about what arrest entailed. They had practiced exquisite forms of torture and humiliation on prisoners—and on prisoners’ colleagues, friends, and families. “Member of a family of a traitor to the fatherland” was itself a criminal category, and whole camps were set up for wives of “enemies of the people.” Never before had such practices defined a state.
For good reason, many have traced these practices to Lenin’s doctrines. In his view, Marx’s greatest contribution was not the idea of the class struggle but “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.” He argued that a revolutionary Party must be composed entirely of professional revolutionaries, drawn mainly from the intelligentsia and subject to absolute discipline, with a readiness to do literally anything the leadership demanded.
These and other disastrous Leninist ideas derived from a specific Leninist way of thinking, and that is what this essay focuses on. I know this way of thinking in my bones. I am myself a pink diaper baby and I remember being taught this way of thinking, taken for granted by all right-thinking people. Memoirs of many ex-Communists, from David Horowitz to Richard Wright, confirm that, more than doctrines, it was the Leninist style of thought that defined the difference between an insider and an outsider. And that way of thought is very much with us.
Introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.—Lenin’s instructions to authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod, August 1918.
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Lenin regarded all interactions as zero-sum. To use the phrase he made famous, the fundamental question is always “Who Whom?”—who dominates whom, who does what to whom, ultimately who annihilates whom. To the extent that we gain, you lose. Contrast this view with the one taught in basic microeconomics: whenever there is a non-forced transaction, both sides benefit, or they would not make the exchange. For the seller, the money is worth more than the goods he sells, and for the buyer the goods are worth more than the money. Lenin’s hatred of the market, and his attempts to abolish it entirely during War Communism, derived from the opposite idea, that all buying and selling is necessarily exploitative. When Lenin speaks of “profiteering” or “speculation” (capital crimes), he is referring to every transaction, however small. Peasant “bagmen” selling produce were shot.
Lenin and Trotsky, celebration of the Second Anniversary of the Revolution, November 7, 1919. Trotsky was later erased from the photo.
Basic books on negotiation teach that you can often do better than split the difference, since people have different concerns. Both sides can come out ahead—but not for the Soviets, whose negotiating stance John F. Kennedy once paraphrased as: what’s mine is mine; and what’s yours is negotiable. For us, the word “politics” means a process of give and take, but for Lenin it’s we take, and you give. From this it follows that one must take maximum advantage of one’s position. If the enemy is weak enough to be destroyed, and one stops simply at one’s initial demands, one is objectively helping the enemy, which makes one a traitor. Of course, one might simply be insane. Long before Brezhnev began incarcerating dissidents in madhouses, Lenin was so appalled that his foreign minister, Boris Chicherin, recommended an unnecessary concession to American loan negotiators, that he pronounced him mad—not metaphorically—and demanded he be forcibly committed. “We will be fools if we do not immediately and forcibly send him to a sanatorium.”
Such thinking automatically favors extreme solutions. If there is one sort of person Lenin truly hated more than any other, it is—to use some of his more printable adjectives—the squishy, squeamish, spineless, dull-witted liberal reformer. In philosophical issues, too, there can never be a middle ground. If you are not a materialist in precisely Lenin’s interpretation, you are an idealist, and idealism is simply disguised religion supporting the bourgeoisie. The following statement from his most famous book, What Is to Be Done?, is typical: “The only choice is: either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn away from it in the slightest degree, means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.” There is either rule by the bourgeoisie or dictatorship of the proletariat: “Every solution that offers a middle path is a deception . . . or an expression of the dull-wittedness of the petty-bourgeois democrats.”
Contrary to the wishes even of other Bolsheviks, Lenin categorically rejected the idea of a broad socialist coalition government. He was immensely relieved when the short-lived coalition with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries collapsed. Immediately after seizing power he declared the left-liberal Kadets “outside the law,” leading to the lynching of two of their ex-ministers in a Petersburg Hospital. He would soon arrest Mensheviks and the most numerous group of radicals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, famed for countless assassinations of tsarist officials. We think of show trials as Stalinist, but Lenin staged a show trial of Socialist Revolutionary leaders in 1922.
By the same token, Lenin always insisted on the most violent solutions. Those who do not understand him mistake his ideas for those of radicals like the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that violence was permitted when necessary. That squishy formulation suggests that other solutions would be preferable. But for Lenin maximal violence was the default position. He was constantly rebuking subordinates for not using enough force, for restraining mobs from lynchings, and for hesitating to shoot randomly chosen hostages.
One could almost say that force had a mystical attraction for Lenin. He had workers drafted into a labor army where any shirking or lateness was punished by sentence to a concentration camp. Yes, Bolsheviks used the term concentration camp from the start, and did so with pride. Until economic collapse forced Lenin to adopt the New Economic Policy, he demanded that grain not be purchased from peasants but requisitioned at gunpoint. Naturally, peasants—Lenin called recalcitrant peasants “kulaks”—rebelled all over Russia. In response to one such “kulak” uprising Lenin issued the following order:
The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people.
Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”
Lenin constantly recommended that people be shot “without pity” or “exterminated mercilessly” (Leszek KoĹ‚akowski wondered wryly what it would mean to exterminate people mercifully). “Exterminate” is a term used for vermin, and, long before the Nazis described Jews as Ungeziefer (vermin), Lenin routinely called for “the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrels, fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.”
Lenin worked by a principle of anti-empathy, and this approach was to define Soviet ethics. I know of no other society, except those modeled on the one Lenin created, where schoolchildren were taught that mercy, kindness, and pity are vices. After all, these feelings might lead one to hesitate shooting a class enemy or denouncing one’s parents. The word “conscience” went out of use, replaced by “consciousness” (in the sense of Marxist-Leninist ideological consciousness). During Stalin’s great purges a culture of denunciation reigned, but it was Lenin who taught “A good communist is also a good Chekist.”
When D. I. Kursky, People’s Commissariat of Justice, was formulating the first Soviet legal code, Lenin demanded that terror and arbitrary use of power be written into the code itself! “The law should not abolish terror,” he insisted. “It should be substantiated and legalized in principle, without evasion or embellishment.”
Lenin and Stalin
Leninspeak
Lenin’s language, no less than his ethics, served as a model, taught in Soviet schools and recommended in books with titles like Lenin’s Language and On Lenin’s Polemical Art. In Lenin’s view, a true revolutionary did not establish the correctness of his beliefs by appealing to evidence or logic, as if there were some standards of truthfulness above social classes. Rather, one engaged in “blackening an opponent’s mug so well it takes him ages to get it clean again.” Nikolay Valentinov, a Bolshevik who knew Lenin well before becoming disillusioned, reports him saying: “There is only one answer to revisionism: smash its face in!”
When Mensheviks objected to Lenin’s personal attacks, he replied frankly that his purpose was not to convince but to destroy his opponent. In work after work, Lenin does not offer arguments refuting other Social Democrats but brands them as “renegades” from Marxism. Marxists who disagreed with his naĂŻve epistemology were “philosophic scum.” Object to his brutality and your arguments are “moralizing vomit.” You can see traces of this approach in the advice of Saul Alinsky—who cites Lenin—to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it.”
Compulsive underlining, name calling, and personal invective hardly exhaust the ways in which Lenin’s prose assaults the reader. He does not just advance a claim, he insists that it is absolutely certain and, for good measure, says the same thing again in other words. It is absolutely certain, beyond any possible doubt, perfectly clear to anyone not dull-witted. Any alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie can only be short-lived, he explains: “This is beyond doubt. Hence the absolute necessity of a separate . . . strictly class party of Social Democrats. . . . All this is beyond the slightest possible doubt.” Nothing is true unless it is absolutely, indubitably so; if a position is wrong, it is entirely and irredeemably so; if something must be done, it must be done “immediately, without delay”; Party representatives are to make “no concessions whatsoever.”
Under Lenin’s direction the Party demanded “the dissolution of all groups without exception formed on the basis of one platform or another.” It was not enough just to shoot kulaks summarily, they had “to be shot on the spot without trial,” a phrase that in one brief decree he managed to use in each of its six numbered commands before concluding: “This order is to be carried out strictly, mercilessly.” You’d think that was clear enough already.
No concessions, compromises, exceptions, or acts of leniency; everything must be totally uniform, absolutely the same, unqualifiedly unqualified. At one point he claims that the views of Marx and Engels are “completely identical,” as if they might have been incompletely identical.
Critics objected that Lenin argued by mere assertion. He disproved a position simply by showing it contradicted what he believed. In his attack on the epistemology of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, for instance, every argument contrary to dialectical materialism is rejected for that reason alone. Valentinov, who saw Lenin frequently when he was crafting this treatise, reports that Lenin at most glanced through their works for a few hours. It was easy enough to attribute to them views they did not hold, associate them with disreputable people they had never heard of, or ascribe political purposes they had never imagined. These were Lenin’s usual techniques, and he made no bones about it.
Valentinov was appalled that both Lenin and Plekhanov, the first Russian Marxist, insisted that there was no need to understand opposing views before denouncing them, since the very fact that they were opposing views proved them wrong—and what was wrong served the enemy and so was criminal. He quotes Lenin:
Marxism is a monolithic conception of the world, it does not tolerate dilution and vulgarization by means of various insertions and additions. Plekhanov once said to me about a critic of Marxism . . . : “First, let’s stick the convict’s badge on him, and then after that we’ll examine his case.” And I think we must stick the “convict’s badge” on anyone and everyone who tries to undermine Marxism, even if we don’t go on to examine his case. That’s how every sound revolutionary should react. When you see a stinking heap on the road you don’t have to poke around in it to see what it is. Your nose tells you it’s shit, and you give it a wide berth.
“Lenin’s words took my breath away,” Valentinov recalls.
Lenin speaking, Trotsky and Kamenev at the side. They were later erased from the photo.Opponents objected that Lenin lied without compunction, and it is easy to find quotations in which he says—as he did to the Bolshevik leader Karl Radek—“Who told you a historian has to establish the truth?” Yes, we are contradicting what we said before, he told Radek, and when it is useful to reverse positions again, we will. Orwell caught this aspect of Leninism: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Western scholars who missed this aspect of Leninism made significant errors. For example, they estimated the size of the Soviet economy by assuming that official figures were distorted and made appropriate adjustments. But as Robert Conquest pointed out, “they were not distorted, they were invented.” The Soviets did not find out the truth and then exaggerate; they often did not know the truth themselves. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith hears that fifty million pairs of boots were produced that year and reflects that, for all he knows, no boots at all were produced. Orwell, who never studied the Soviet economy, grasped a point that escaped experts because he understood Leninthink.
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My mother left the American Communist Party in 1939 in response to the Hitler–Stalin pact, but her friends who remained were able, like Pyatakov, to turn on a dime. One morning The Daily Worker followed Pravda and described Nazis as true friends of the working class; the next, nothing too strong could be said against them. Crucially, and as Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was never an admission that any change had taken place.
In his history of Marxism, Kołakowski explains some puzzling aspects of Bolshevik practice in these terms. Everyone understands why Bolsheviks shot liberals, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Trotskyites. But what, he asks, was the point of turning the same fury on the Party itself, especially on its most loyal, Stalinists, who accepted Leninist-Stalinist ideology without question? Kołakowski observes that it is precisely the loyalty to the ideology that was the problem.
Anyone who believed in the ideology might question the leader’s conformity to it. He might recognize that the Marxist-Leninist Party was acting against Marxism-Leninism as the Party itself defined it; or he might compare Stalin’s statements today with Stalin’s statements yesterday. “The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology,” KoĹ‚akowski observes. And so anyone who truly believed the ideology was suspect. “The [great] purge, therefore, was designed to destroy such ideological links as still existed within the party, to convince its members that they had no ideology or loyalty except to the latest orders from on high . . . . Loyalty to Marxist ideology as such is still—[in 1978]—a crime and a source of deviations of all kinds.” The true Leninist did not even believe in Leninism. ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink
Oriana:
One can object that this is a very one-sided portrait of Lenin. It leaves out his charismatic appeal, or the fact that once, during hunting, he said the fox was so beautiful that he couldn’t kill it. It never mentions that Lenin loved music and seemed to genuinely love his musical mistress Inessa Armand; he was well-read; he greatly admired the United States for its technological and economic success; he also adored cats.
But in this instance the author isn’t trying to create a balanced presentation of Lenin’s personality. It’s a ruthless dissection of the extremism of Lenin’s thinking, and his ruthless commitment to violence and the principle that the end justifies the means. The extremism that still crops up whenever ideology or religion is involved is perhaps the chief danger we have to cope with, whether from the Left or the Right.
By the way, it's instructive to remember that we owe Lenin's seizure of power and the creation of the Soviet Union largely to the insanity of World War I, during which Germany transported Lenin and his closest coworkers in a sealed train carriage "like a dangerous bacillus" from Switzerland to Russia.
~ It is perfectly clear, almost a century on, just as it was to Churchill in the 1920s, that Lenin was bad news. The 20th century could have turned out a lot better if he had simply never been given a train ride, and been left to fulminate in the Swiss Alps. ~ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/bolsheviks-on-board
Mary:
Lenin's Marxism, with its centralized state, purges of dissidents and splinter groups with opposing interpretations, its requirement of absolute obedience, its inquisitors and exiles, is very like a religion. I'm sure this has been noted many times before, but for me it explains the intolerance for any deviations, and the execution of dissidents, real or perceived, without mercy. There are the holy texts, by Marx, Lenin, Engels, including apocrypha, epistles and sermons. There is the hunting down and eradication of apostates and sinners, with inquisitions, confessions and executions. All of course done to ensure attainment of a future perfect state.
And all of course part of a powerful engine of propaganda...the consolidation of power requires that everyone knows how terrible and swift punishment is for any foolish enough to even whisper opposition.
Making severe punishments random, arbitrary and baseless keeps everyone properly terrified. And all of this has to be pretty visible, not glossed over or hidden..there has to be public spectacle, just like the public burnings of the Catholic inquisition.
Violence is part of the doctrine. It must be advocated and demonstrated again and again. It seems the tendency to extremism exists in almost any doctrine, though more readily in those that are evangelistic...that feel they have the Truth and must ensure it spreads and conquers all. Marxism- Leninism is evangelistic. Every evil can be used, may have to be used, to achieve the final Good.
Such elitism inherent in this!! While touting the proletariat they wanted the intelligentsia at the helm; workers and peasants were seen not as partners but as the "utili idioti." The condescension in this raises my hackles, so like a parent forcing you to something 'for your own good.'
It is very telling that Lenin was not interested in liberty, saw it not as a virtue or a goal, but a distraction.
Oriana:
Freedom wasn't merely a distraction for Lenin. He famously asked, "Freedom for whom? To do what?" Rosa Louxemburg wonderfully answered, "Freedom always for the one who thinks differently." But for Lenin, the one who thought differently was to be "liquidated" as a class enemy.
Lenin is also on record with his opposition to free press: "A pen is lot more dangerous than a gun."
And of course, as many others have also pointed out, there are similarities here to terrorist-type religions that burned heretics at the stake, and committed other atrocities. The early Catholic church basically exterminated the opposition, e.g. the Gnostics. Corruption eventually brought it down, spurring the Reformation. We saw that repeat itself in the dissolution of the Soviet Union (not, alas, that this was the end of despotism in Russia; but there is still hope).
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Lilith:
I have been reading your latest blog, especially the one on Lenin's language. Reminds me too much of the former guy here in the US.
Oriana:
Yes. Fortunately in the U.S. elections can change the head of state. That's why Republicans are working so hard to make voting more difficult.
Another thing that worked against "the former guy" is that he's not that bright, and might even be in early stages of dementia. Lenin was very smart. He read a lot. He had no wisdom, but he was shrewd, and could be immensely persuasive.
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“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ~ Primo Levi
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“History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.” ~ Clarence Darrow
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EDITH HAMILTON’S MYTHOLOGY: THE OVERWHELMING POWER OF BEAUTY
When I was ten, [a family friend] handed me a paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942) and said, “All educated people know mythology.” I took the book and ran upstairs, where I immediately wrote my name and the date in ballpoint pen on the inside cover, as if the ink was an incantatory potion that would launch me to the ranks of the educated.
Somehow, the absent figure is the most affecting, a myth unto himself. In the weeks, months, and years after the slender book became mine, I read and reread the stories of love and adventure that Hamilton rendered so wryly: Cupid and Psyche, Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion and Galatea. The stories had no Disney endings. They concluded with limited lover visitation or a harassed gal being turned into a linden tree.
I also drank in the Steele Savage illustrations (a 1970 reviewer in The Classical Outlook: “The illustrations are strikingly beautiful, although they bear a closer relationship to Fantasia than to anything Greek”). Was it weird to wish I could turn into a forever-bubbling spring (like Arethusa) or a shining-leaved tree (like Daphne)? I liked how overpowering emotions guided every mythological action and reaction: cockeyed desires strung together risk and longing, manipulation and capture. Part of the thrill was not knowing what role I wanted for myself in the story.
“He decided that he could never rest satisfied unless he proved to himself beyond all doubt that she loved him alone and would not yield to any other lover.” That’s Hamilton writing about Cephalus, but the line fits at least seven other characters. I wanted to be the one who stirred that desire, that impulse to possess. Or did I want to be the one who felt it?
The key plot point in these stories seemed to be pursuit. But it was pursuit inside a cloud unknowing, a shroud of darkness. A god chased you; someone accidentally stabbed you; you couldn’t help returning to a spot where a first tryst occurred; you were visited for nighttime pleasure by someone you couldn’t see. All of this stalking and constraint and strength of feeling made me feel a little woozy as I read in my bunk bed. I couldn’t name what that wooziness was. I could only see myself wanting to recreate its conditions, over and over.
Much later, I’d focus my educated self on getting down and geeky on all of this. I’d learn about the role of women in Greek and Roman antiquity; how ancient Greeks and Romans perceived rape and how Athenian law adjudicated rape accusations; why Greeks liked to talk about love coming through arrows; how to conceive of consent in classical Athens; and how to teach rape scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the era of trigger warnings.
I would join a field—the study of religion—in which explaining the local mindset of seemingly awful things is standard practice. For example, one of the field’s leading lights once explained (and later, upon reflection, modified) that the Greek goddess Persephone’s “proper name” is “only bestowed when she has been initiated, become an adult, and lost her maiden status.” What the original claim underlines is that the myth of Persephone should not be understood through modern ideas of rape. What we think about sexual violence today is unhelpful to understand the properly “cosmic event” recorded in the myth of Persephone.
Hamilton, too, comments that being so initiated gains its subject “geographical fame,” suggesting that Europa cut a deal for a spot in the atlas. “Nothing humanly beautiful is really terrifying,” she writes, setting a stage for readers like me to think that when Zeus transformed himself into a bull and “lay down before her feet and seemed to show her his broad back,” we should see the overwhelming power of beauty—not the overpowering power of power.
Hamilton isn’t worried about power because she doesn’t see Greek mythology as an articulation of a religious system that ordered real people’s lives: “Greek mythology is largely made up of stories about gods and goddesses, but it must not be read as a kind of Greek Bible,” she writes. “According to the most modern idea, a real myth has nothing to do with religion.” These were stories, not manuals for right living. “For the most part the immortal gods were of little use to human beings and often they were quite the reverse of useful.”
The professional person I have become is tempted to get lost in the debate about whether Hamilton has the distinction between myth and religion right. Perhaps this distinction is a practice of myth making. Stories can and do serve as manuals; religion, like myth, is not absolutely sequestered from scholarship.
Still, I can’t stop thinking about how I got here. Thinking about all the men who handed me myths hoping to make me their educated equal, about the person I was, gobbling up every scrap they gave me. I remember how it felt so good, so sexy, when I could identify the figures in that Rubens painting or when I knew the W. B. Yeats allusion to Leda without looking it up.
Hamilton made the route to being clever very easy. It’s hard to tell how much pleasure she extracted in her own life from this work. She was the kind of person who, according to her closest student, friend, biographer, and life partner, Doris Fielding Reid, “liked men better than women.”
By her own description, she was a schoolmarm who taught generations of students at Bryn Mawr School, developing its rigorous classical curriculum and fundraising for disadvantaged daughters to gain access to elite education. Yet her legacy includes focusing on how to close your eyes and slide onto Mount Olympus via the back of a bull.
It was only long after I was handed Mythology that I would wonder if being understood as properly educated required the eminently useful myth that rape could be a cosmic event. It was still much later when I wondered: maybe it was an initiatory rite I needed to undergo in order to get my name into the atlas?
“The fact that the lover was a god and could not be resisted was, as many stories show, not accepted as an excuse,” Hamilton explained in her version of CreĂĽsa and Ion. “A girl ran every risk of being killed if she confessed.”
These are stories, we are told. I like to think she told them to us not to bring us to woozy oblivion. I like to think she hoped we might use our educated power to draw new maps.
Mary:
My introduction to mythology was not through Hamilton, but Nathaniel Hawthorne. My mother gave me a copy of The Wonder Book, already quite worn, I later wondered if it was hers from childhood, when I was very young, maybe 7 or 8. I fell in love with the stories and they became part of the world of my imagination, filling me with dreams of gods who gave tricky gifts, people transformed into trees, or fighting monsters, or flying on the backs of winged horses. These stories became old familiars, and an introduction to the magic of reading.
It was one of my mother's wisest gifts.
Oriana:
There wasn’t any single book from which I learned the main myths — though I did come across Hamilton’s famous compendium not long after arriving in this country, and it filled in whatever gaps I still had in my knowledge — not to mention that it was the joy reading these stories in English. My first encounter with Greek myths was essentially conversational — my parents might mention Athena, Diana, Hercules, Helen, Orpheus, Odysseus. It simply was a part of educated discourse. Though I was never explicitly told that you had to know mythology to be an educated person, that was self-evident to me. And I came upon more stories in various books and articles: Jason and Medea, Antigone — we actually studied the play in high school, and also Oedipus Rex. We read excerpts from the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the royal garden in Warsaw there was a copy of Bernini’s famous sculpture of Daphne changing into laurel, which in my teens I regarded as the most beautiful sculpture ever.
I fell in love with Ancient Greece when we studied Ancient History in school, and I think it was then that I was presented with a more systematic introduction. But in the main, it seems that I came to know mythology gradually and effortlessly, from many sources. By fourteen I knew enough so that I broke through to my insight that the Judeo-Christian religion was “just another mythology.” I loved the classical stories, and initially would have never guessed that they would play such an important part in my life — leading me to my first act of courage and risk-taking: leaving the church.
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Why was Zeus so given to amorous pursuits? Perhaps Victor Frankl hints here at an answer (though Frankl meant humans and not imaginary gods)
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ANTARCTICA’S MELTING SHOULD TERRIFY US
~ Antarctica’s frozen vastness holds 80 percent of the globe’s fresh water. The faster climate change melts that water into the oceans, the nearer we edge to catastrophe.
For millions of years, Antarctica’s glaciers have flowed into the sea, calving icebergs at a slow and sustainable rate. In the past few decades, that rate has rapidly increased as temperatures in the region have shot up to alarming levels. During a heat wave in February 2020, they reached a record 69 degrees on Seymour Island, at the tip of Graham Land. The less isolated Arctic is a harbinger of how climate change might soon affect the southernmost continent. In 2007, the Northwest Passage, which Amundsen took three years to muscle through aboard the tiny Gjøa, became navigable for the first time. It is expected that the North Pole will be clear of summer sea ice by 2050.
Antarctica’s ice contains at least 80 percent of the fresh water on earth. If all of it were to melt, sea levels everywhere would rise by up to two hundred feet, drastically redrawing the world map. This may not happen in the near future—the Antarctic ice cap is more than a mile thick in places—but any sustained amount of warming will lead to sea-level rise that will obliterate coastal communities and cause incalculable suffering. The continent is a coiled spring loaded with tremendous destructive power.
If Poe and Verne were writing today, this is the nightmare scenario that would capture their imaginations. They would be drawn not to the ends of the earth, but to the end of the earth. Just as the Belgica’s men answered the call of fiction to elucidate the mysteries of the Antarctic, it is now up to scientists and explorers to blaze the path ahead. May they have the audacity of Adrien de Gerlache, the fortitude of Roald Amundsen, and the gumption of Frederick Cook. Like the Belgica, we have sailed heedlessly into a trap of our own making, but if that expedition proved anything, it’s that we need never resign ourselves to doom. ~ Excerpted from Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/antarctica-is-running-out-of-ice-and-you-should-be-terrified?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
MICHIO KAKU ON NEWTON, ALIENS AND MORE
You believe that within a century we will make contact with an alien civilization. Are you worried about what they may entail?
Soon we’ll have the Webb telescope up in orbit and we’ll have thousands of planets to look at, and that’s why I think the chances are quite high that we may make contact with an alien civilization. There are some colleagues of mine that believe we should reach out to them. I think that’s a terrible idea. We all know what happened to Montezuma when he met CortĂ©s in Mexico so many hundreds of years ago. Now, personally, I think that aliens out there would be friendly but we can’t gamble on it. So I think we will make contact but we should do it very carefully.
There are many brilliant scientists whose contributions you discuss in the book [The God Equation] Which one, for you, stands out above the rest?
Newton is at number one, because, almost out of nothing, out of an era of witchcraft and sorcery, he comes up with the mathematics of the universe, he comes up with a theory of almost everything. That’s incredible. Einstein piggybacked on Newton, using the calculus of Newton to work out the dynamics of curved spacetime and general relativity. They are like supernovas, blindingly brilliant and illuminating the entire landscape and changing human destiny. Newton’s laws of motion set into motion the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. A person like that comes along once every several centuries.
You describe yourself as an agnostic. Has your research led you closer or further away from the idea of a designer God?
Stephen Hawking said that he didn’t believe in God because the big bang happened instantly and there was no time for God to create a universe, therefore God couldn’t exist. I have a different point of view. My parents were Buddhists and in Buddhism there is Nirvana, timelessness, no beginning and no end. But my parents put me in a Presbyterian church, so I went to Sunday school every week and learned about Genesis and how the universe was created in seven days.
Now with the multiverse idea we can meld these two diametrically opposed paradigms together. According to string theory, big bangs are happening all the time. Even as we speak, Genesis is taking place somewhere in the cosmos. And what is the universe expanding into? Nirvana. Eleven-dimensional hyperspace is Nirvana. So you can have Buddhism and Judeo-Christian philosophy in one theory.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/03/string-theory-michio-kaku-aliens-god-equation-large-hadron-collider?utm_source=pdscl&CMP_TU=usmsp&utm_medium=sfbk&CMP_BUNIT=mem&
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TEA IF BY SEA, CHA IF BY LAND
~ With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term—tĂ© in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi.
Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used. The words that sound like “cha” spread across land, along the Silk Road. The “tea”-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.
The term cha (茶) is “Sinitic,” meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming “chay” (چای) in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago. This form spread beyond Persia, becoming chay in Urdu, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian, among others. It even made its way to sub-Saharan Africa, where it became chai in Swahili. The Japanese and Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into Persian.
But that doesn’t account for “tea.” The Chinese character for tea, 茶, is pronounced differently by different varieties of Chinese, though it is written the same in them all. In today’s Mandarin, it is chá. But in the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, the character is pronounced te. The key word here is “coastal.”
The te form used in coastal-Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained in the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company’s expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French thĂ©, the German Tee, and the English tea.
Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.
A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak.
The map demonstrates two different eras of globalization in action: the millenia-old overland spread of goods and ideas westward from ancient China, and the 400-year-old influence of Asian culture on the seafaring Europeans of the age of exploration. Also, you just learned a new word in nearly every language on the planet. ~
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THE UN-CAR
~ Here are two important characteristics of the airline industry: Just two manufacturers produce 99% of the world’s airplanes for airlines, and everyday passengers have a hard time telling those aircraft apart—and mostly don’t care anyway. Weirdly enough, though, these characteristics are important to the future of cars. Why? Because the present of Boeing and Airbus could be the future of the automotive industry.
There are already indications that automotive is following aviation’s path toward a future in which there are fewer brands and models. The exteriors of many autonomous vehicle prototypes are similarly shaped mobile boxes; see examples from Muji, Olli, Transdev, and, yes, Teague.
The interiors of autonomous vehicle concepts are also very uniform—evident in examples from the likes of Audi, Mercedes, and Volvo, with lie-flat seats and tables for working and meeting among the common characteristics. This uniformity inside and out points toward a future of mobility that is based on utility, which is very different than our history of using cars as transportation as well as expensive expressions of our personalities. There is, after all, no logical reason to own a Lamborghini.
It’s easy to see where this is headed. In a world where ride-hailing companies are now incentivizing people to give up their cars and rethink transportation as a service rather than a piece of hardware, we will only need a couple manufacturers to make fleets of urban taxibots. The century of automotive brand building that produced the 911, Golf, Land Cruiser, Mini, Mustang, Wrangler, and thousands more will give way to a new era of boxy autonomous pods. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-next-big-thing-in-transportation-the-un-car?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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HOW SOON WILL ALL CARS BE ELECTRIC?
~ We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in motoring since Henry Ford's first production line started turning back in 1913.
And it is likely to happen much more quickly than you imagine.
Many industry observers believe we have already passed the tipping point where sales of electric vehicles (EVs) will very rapidly overwhelm petrol and diesel cars.
It is certainly what the world's big car makers think.
Jaguar plans to sell only electric cars from 2025, Volvo from 2030 and last week the British sportscar company Lotus said it would follow suit, selling only electric models from 2028.
And it isn't just premium brands.
General Motors says it will make only electric vehicles by 2035, Ford says all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030 and VW says 70% of its sales will be electric by 2030.
This isn't a fad, this isn't greenwashing.
Yes, the fact many governments around the world are setting targets to ban the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles gives impetus to the process.
But what makes the end of the internal combustion engine inevitable is a technological revolution. And technological revolutions tend to happen very quickly. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57253947?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The first cars were in fact electric. Here is one such vehicle in England, 1896
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NO PSYCHIC COULD GUESS A DEAD MAN’S MESSAGE (reprise)
~ “The idea was that after Eikemo died, psychics from around the world would be given the chance to either remote-view the note via paranormal means, or would somehow get inside the deceased’s head to learn what he had scribbled.
With Eikemo gone, some 2,000 people from around the world participated in the challenge, e-mailing the TV makers with what they thought they’d been able to glean. Many had obviously googled the man and gambled that he’d left a note of consolation to his children (wrong). Others wrote that the secret note said carpe diem or other thoughts and clichĂ©s that might pop into a dying person’s head (also wrong).
When the actual Eikemo note was removed from the safe and opened, it turned out that he had written a wonky World War II reference: “Two ME 110 Messerschmitt planes fly over Gandsfjord on April 9, bank west, and fire on Sola Airport.”
Did any of the 2,000 self-described psychics come at all close? Was there at least one person who guessed something about fighter planes, or war, or Gandsfjord, or an airport, or April?
Nope.
Shortly before his death, Eikemo told a TV interviewer that “The illusion that there’s life after death is used to take advantage of the survivors, the loved ones. I would like to show that that’s wrong.”
And he did.
Maybe the episode will put a dent in the number of Norwegians — almost 33 percent of them — who believe there is life is after death.” ~
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2016/10/14/not-a-single-psychic-in-the-world-came-close-to-guessing-a-dead-mans-secret-message/?utm_
Oriana:
Only 33% of Norwegians believe in the afterlife?
~ A 2010 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll found that 65% of Americans believed that people go to heaven, hell or purgatory after death, 7% believed they go to another dimension, 6% believed they are reborn on earth, and 2% believed they become ghosts. ~
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/paradise-polled-americans-and-afterlife
Norwegian or American, people who believe in the afterlife are not going to be dissuaded by a rational proof to the contrary. Religious faith is based not on reason, but on emotional need.
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AN IMMUNOSUPPRESSIVE DRUG COULD DELAY ALZHEIMER’S AND PARKINSON’S
~ Rapamycin, a drug used to prevent rejection in transplants, could delay the onset of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121015112844.htm
Oriana:
This is no surprise, since dementia is basically an autoimmune disease, the way rheumatoid arthritis is. “Dementia occurs when the body's immune system attacks the cells of the brain, indicating that dementia may be similar to autoimmune rheumatic diseases.” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5755737/) Thus, transplant patients treated with immunosuppressive drugs have a significantly lower risk of dementia. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4923720/)
Rapamycin is also well-known for its longevity benefits. Is there any supplement that mimics the action of rapamycin, the way berberine mimics the action of Metformin? Yes. It’s curcumin, notorious for its poor absorbability. But this problem could be compensated for by increasing the dose. Taking only one capsule a day is simply a waste of money — but 3-6 capsules might have an effect, without any dangerous side effects.
Also, the right brand of curcumin is everything in this case. After wasting a lot of money on brands that delivered no benefits, I happened upon Omax, which wasn't just capsules filled with beige powder. Their curcumin is suspended in MCT oil. It has helped me feel less knee pain. If I didn't take it, the pain was worse. I realize that this is not scientific proof, but it was good enough for me.
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A GLUCOSE MIMIC FOUND EFFECTIVE AGAINST COVID
Oriana:
The drug is 2-deoxy-D-glucose. It acts as a decoy, a glucose mimic that can’t actually be utilized, causing cell death (presumably the virus picks it up in greater quantity, by analogy with cancer)
It’s an investigational anti-cancer and anti-viral drug.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57139919
COVID is apparently a “sugar feeder.” I found confirmation that covid virus thrives in a high-glucose environment. It’s so important to keep blood sugar down. I have just one word to say to you: BERBERINE.
"Recent epidemiological data demonstrate that rate of COVID-19 induced morbidity as well as mortality is markedly higher in people with obesity and T2 Diabetes. Consistently, multiple clinical studies including a retrospective examination of a large cohort of COVID-19 patients have shown that poorly controlled blood glucose levels are associated with highest COVID-19 mortality rates.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-021-00532-4
Oriana:
The rest is pretty technical, but yes, it’s a very simple drug that seems to have a potential to disable the virus by depriving it of glucose. Dosage is probably very important. I’d also give patients metformin (berberine is the closest any supplement comes to metformin).
“Use of the diabetes drug metformin — before a diagnosis of COVID-19 — is associated with a threefold decrease in mortality in COVID-19 patients with Type 2 diabetes, according to a racially diverse study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Diabetes is a significant comorbidity for COVID-19.”
The use of insulin had no effect on Covid mortality, while the use of metformin produced a significant benefit.
https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/11795-metformin-use-reduces-risk-of-death-for-patients-with-covid-19-and-diabetes
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IMMUNE SYSTEM DISCOVERY “MAY TREAT ALL CANCERS”
~ A newly-discovered part of our immune system could be harnessed to treat all cancers, say scientists.
The Cardiff University team discovered a method of killing prostate, breast, lung and other cancers in lab tests.
The findings, published in Nature Immunology, have not been tested in patients, but the researchers say they have "enormous potential".
Our immune system is our body's natural defense against infection, but it also attacks cancerous cells.
The scientists were looking for "unconventional" and previously undiscovered ways the immune system naturally attacks tumors.
What they found was a T-cell inside people's blood. This is an immune cell that can scan the body to assess whether there is a threat that needs to be eliminated.
The difference is this one could attack a wide range of cancers.
T-cells have "receptors" on their surface that allow them to "see" at a chemical level.
The Cardiff team discovered a T-cell and its receptor that could find and kill a wide range of cancerous cells in the lab including lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells.
Crucially, it left normal tissues untouched.
Exactly how it does this is still being explored.
This particular T-cell receptor interacts with a molecule called MR1, which is on the surface of every cell in the human body.
It is thought MR1 is flagging the distorted metabolism going on inside a cancerous cell to the immune system.
"We are the first to describe a T-cell that finds MR1 in cancer cells — that hasn't been done before, this is the first of its kind," research fellow Garry Dolton told the BBC.
T-cell cancer therapies already exist and the development of cancer immunotherapy has been one of the most exciting advances in the field.
The most famous example is CAR-T — a living drug made by genetically engineering a patient's T-cells to seek out and destroy cancer.
CAR-T can have dramatic results that transform some patients from being terminally ill to being in complete remission.
However, the approach is highly specific and works in only a limited number of cancers where there is a clear target to train the T-cells to spot.
And it has struggled to have any success in "solid cancers" — those that form tumors rather than blood cancers such as leukemia.
The researchers say their T-cell receptor could lead to a "universal" cancer treatment.
HOW IT WOULD WORK
The idea is that a blood sample would be taken from a cancer patient.
Their T-cells would be extracted and then genetically modified so they were reprogrammed to make the cancer-finding receptor.
The upgraded cells would be grown in vast quantities in the laboratory and then put back into the patient. It is the same process used to make CAR-T therapies.
However, the research has been tested only in animals and on cells in the laboratory, and more safety checks would be needed before human trials could start.
Lucia Mori and Gennaro De Libero, from University of Basel in Switzerland, said the research had "great potential" but was at too early a stage to say it would work in all cancers.
Daniel Davis, a professor of immunology at the University of Manchester, said: "At the moment, this is very basic research and not close to actual medicines for patients.
"There is no question that it's a very exciting discovery, both for advancing our basic knowledge about the immune system and for the possibility of future new medicines.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51182451
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ending on beauty:
This evening, far from here,
a friend is entering his death,
he knows it, he walks
under bare trees alone,
perhaps for the last time. So much love,
so much struggle, spent and worn thin.
But when he looks up, suddenly the sky
is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.
~ Jean Joubert, Brilliant Sky
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