RUSSIA FIFTY YEARS FROM NOW; HOW RUSSIA HELPED START WW2; WHY PEOPLE FALL FOR THE BIG LIE; THE WISDOM OF SAYING NO; FORGOTTEN COMMUNES IN THE MIDWEST; POST-OPERATIVE COGNITIVE DYSFUNCTION

*
MY MOTHER ASKS ME NOT TO WRITE ABOUT WWII

“Why write about this old stuff?”
Not for this she gave me life.
Not for this she sent me
to the country of the future.

“Hitler is dead,” she says.
She remembers that night —
The chill, uncertain May
has just begun. She’s not in

ruined Warsaw, but in her leafy
home town, sleeping,
when church bells wake her up,
ringing loud and wild.

Lights go on in the windows,
people rush into streets,
women in coats over nightgowns
moon-shadowed, glancing,

whispering. Someone shouts:
“Hey, these are wedding
bells!” A few men run
back in to listen to the radio —

the Red Army entered
Hitler’s bunker, found
two bodies partly burned:
Hitler and Eva Braun.

The bells sway the stunned air.
Neighbors and strangers
embrace, kiss on both cheeks,
laugh and weep. Hitler is

dead, is dead, is dead,
the bells ring all over town,
and the difficult future begins —
wedding bells in the dark.

~ Oriana

April 30 is the anniversary of Hitler’s suicide. In his Last Will and Testament, dictated the night before his suicide, he said, “The German people have not proved worthy of me.”

*
WHY DO SO MANY FALL FOR THE “BIG LIE”

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. ~ Joseph Goebbels

~ Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels coined the term "Big Lie." According to the supposed quote, Goebbels said that if you tell "a lie big enough" and regularly repeat it, "people will eventually come to believe it." That said, Adolf Hitler actually did use the phrase "big lie" — but not to describe his own propaganda strategy. In a darkly ironic case of psychological projection, he came up with the expression to defame the Jewish community.

"In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility," Hitler wrote in "Mein Kampf," his 1925 autobiographical manifesto. He observed that most people are only comfortable telling small lies, and imagined others would be as uncomfortable as themselves perpetuating big ones. "It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously," Hitler explained. "Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

Indeed, like many abusers before him, Hitler rationalized his own depraved behavior by falsely accusing his victims of doing the same thing. The story of World War II is, in many ways, a tale of a Big Lie run amok. Germany felt humiliated after its loss in World War I, and the nationalistic pride which had fueled that conflict still burned in the hearts of millions.

Georg Grosz: The Agitator

This tactic, of a leader hypnotizing vast swathes of the public through the perpetuation of a grandiose falsehood, is a phenomenon that extends well beyond World War II and Adolf Hitler. Recently, the term has been recycled to refer to the falsity that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" in some indeterminate way, a lie that is repeated ad infinitum by Trump and a slew of his supporters at all levels.

The term "Big Lie" is believed to have been first popularized in the Anglophone world by Walter Langer, a psychoanalyst who prepared a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler for the U.S. government in 1943. In that report, Langer wrote: 

“[Hitler's] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

Beyond Langer, psychologists and sociologists throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century have been intrigued by the success of the Big Lie strategy — meaning a story pushed by a political leader that is clearly bald-faced, yet so grandiose as to make it hard to believe that someone would fabricate it. Indeed, it is an intriguing question as to why this works politically, and why so many millions are so quick to believe Big Lies — be it about voting fraud or Jewish conspiracies. The counterintuitive nature of the Big Lie tactic is perhaps what is most peculiar: wouldn't a small lie be easier to pass off than a large one?

Not necessarily, psychologists say.

"Repetition is important, because the Big Lie works through indoctrination," Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor of psychology who is noted as an expert on narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic abuse, told Salon by email. "The Big Lie then becomes its own evidence base — if it is repeated enough, people believe it, and the very repetition almost tautologically becomes the support for the Lie.”

Durvasula added that this is amplified by the numerous media platforms which exist in the modern era, as they trick people into thinking a certain falsehood has been reinforced even if all of their media platforms have the same political leanings.

"Hear something enough it becomes truth," Durvasula explained. "People assume there is an evidence base when the lie is big (it's like a blind spot).”

Indeed, Hitler rose to power through a Big Lie that soothed Germans' wounded egos and targeted already-popular scapegoats: Jews and socialists, who according to the Nazi narrative had betrayed Germany through backroom dealings after the empire had won on the battlefield. All of the "evidence" that Hitler marshaled to support this claim was false (fact-checkers who pointed this out were described as Jews promoting a "big lie"), and for that reason only die-hard Nazis believed the Big Lie — at first. After Hitler gained power, however, he was able to effectively spread both that fabrication and other lies, convincing more and more people that a conspiracy of Jews and leftists were enemies of Europe's supposedly superior races. Dissent was squashed, fascism prevailed and even so-called moderates began to think that there must be at least some truth in the accusations. After all, they were being repeated everywhere.

This omnipresence, apparently, is a big part of what makes it so easy for people to be fooled by a Big Lie.

Logician Miriam Bowers-Abbott, an associate professor at Mount Carmel College of Nursing, stressed the importance of repetition in spreading a Big Lie.

"What's especially helpful is repetition in a variety of contexts," Bowers-Abbott wrote to Salon. "That is, not just the same words over and over — but integration of an idea in lots of ways. It builds its own little web of support.”

As a hypothetical example, Bowers-Abbott suggested a scenario where she would want to falsely convince Salon that green grapes are a superfood.

"I need to do more than state, 'Green grapes are a superfood' repetitively, I need to work it into conversations," Bowers-Abbott explained. "'Oh, I see grapes are on sale this week, so much nutrition at such a low price!'; 'My dietician has a great superfood recipe that features kale and grapes!'; 'Yes! Green grapes are green! That's the color of superfoods!’"

Dr. Matt Blanchard, a clinical psychologist at New York University, told Salon by email that this kind of immersion does not have to be merely rhetorical. If the purveyors of a Big Lie are shrewd, they can even incorporate it into a target's physical environment.

"You might think I'm kidding, but.... Nothing sells the Big Lie like novelty t-shirts, hats and banners," Blanchard told Salon. "These items are normally associated with sports teams, not life-and-death political issues. But [former President Donald] Trump and his circle have deftly used these items to generate the kind of unbridled loyalty Americans associate with pro football." Blanchard noted that the mob which attempted a coup on January 6th was "at points indistinguishable from a rowdy tailgate party. The banners and hats crucially add an air of silliness to everything. If I can buy a novelty hat about it, can it really be so serious? Or a flag featuring Trump as Rambo? The use of these sports fan items allows them to both be attacking the Capitol building and at the same time, just having good clean fun.”

He added, "It's a genius mindf**k. This goofy paraphernalia has confused our response to the riot ever since.”

Bandy Lee, an American psychiatrist who edited the book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," noted that people embrace outrageous assertions for emotional reasons, and that propagandists play into that as they repeat their narrative.

"Usually, they are trying to find comfort and to avoid pain," Lee wrote to Salon. "This happens in states of lesser health, where one is less inclined to venture into new domains or to seek creative solutions. There is comfort in repetition, and so a people or a nation under duress will gravitate more toward what is repeated to them than what is realistic. Adolf Hitler understood this very well, which is why the American psychologist Walter Langer coined the phrase to describe his method.”

Durvasula also speculated that Big Lies benefit from humanity's hierarchical nature, given that "primate groups do tend to organize into tribes with alphas and leaders and hierarchies, and that's us as people." She added that many people are not sufficiently informed about the narcissistic behaviors that are warning signs "that there are people in our midst that lack empathy, have no care for the common good, are grandiose, arrogant, and willing to exploit and manipulate people for solely their own egocentric needs." Instead "a sort of halo effect imbues leaders with presumed expertise and power — when that is not at all the case (most if not all megalomaniacal leaders, despots, tyrants, oligarchs share narcissism/psychopathy as a trait).”

The popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram further exacerbates these trends because they add new elements of social pressure. An individual who has embraced a Big Lie repeatedly in those public settings will feel a level of personal investment that makes dislodging that much more challenging.

"It was easier to dislodge untruths before social media," Bowers-Abbott told Salon. "In social media, people tend to take public positions. When that position turns out to be wrong, it's embarrassing. And backing down is typically seen as weakness. So they double-down on untrue claims to save face and personal credibility.”

She added, "We are way too emotionally attached to being right. It would be better for our culture as a whole to value uncertainty and intellectual humility and curiosity. Those values help us ask questions without the expectation of permanent answers.”

Durvasula expressed a similar point, arguing that the best antidote to Big Lies is for people to learn more about critical thinking skills.

One expert compared disabusing someone of the falsehoods in a Big Lie to treating regular delusions. One rule: Don't put them on the defensive.

"Confronting them, or presenting facts or evidence, never works," he told Salon. "You have to fix the underlying emotional vulnerability that led people to believing it in the first place. For populations, it is usually the pain of not having a place in the world, which socioeconomic inequality exacerbates. Deprivation of health care, education, an ability to make a living, and other avenues for dignity can make a population psychologically vulnerable to those who look to exploit them.” ~

https://www.salon.com/2022/02/03/the-psychological-reason-that-so-many-fall-for-the-big-lie/?fbclid=IwAR1CBrtt4JYBfqgTG_Yuc7TOdl1BSbk-b5lSrmNP4C5ssn8qgaf7-2ZYpjIhttps://www.salon.com/2022/02/03/the-psychological-reason-that-so-many-fall-for-the-big-lie/?fbclid=IwAR1CBrtt4JYBfqgTG_Yuc7TOdl1BSbk-b5lSrmNP4C5ssn8qgaf7-2ZYpjI

Joseph Goebbels

 Oriana:

Religions have proved beyond compare when it comes to perpetuating their founding Big Lie. Nothing like a lie invoking the Highest (even if the Highest Being is fictitious).

Putin has shown himself to be a grand master: Ukraine is a fictitious country! 

Cecilia:

Zelensky appealed to the Russian people, saying, “Living in the Russian Federation is like virtual reality, like a video game. Come back to the world. It’s more beautiful and more truthful.”

*

*
JUST ONE TYPICAL WAR TRAGEDY IN UKRAINE

~ Yuriy Glodan had only left his flat and family to go to the shops when he heard the news of the explosion.

At the entrance to his block of flats he screamed at police to let him inside the burning building. When he reached his flat, he found the bodies of his wife and her mother, killed by a Russian missile that had ripped into the upper floors of the block.

The body of his three-month-old baby Kira was discovered later; he saw it for the first time when he returned to the flat on Sunday.

The deaths - three generations of a single family - have sparked outrage and revulsion in Ukraine, a country already hardened by two months of war.

Commenting on the strikes, President Volodymyr Zelensky was visibly upset when speaking about baby Kira's killing.

"How did she threaten Russia? It seems that killing children is just a new national idea of the Russian Federation," Mr Zelensky said in his nightly address to Ukrainians. He described those who had planned and carried out the attach as "bastards".

Five others were also killed in the missile strike.

Yuriy was in the wrecked building on Sunday to find what he could salvage from the apartment. Photo albums, his wife's sugar sachet collection, handwritten notes. He found his baby's stroller in pieces.

“We were so happy when she was born," he says. "I was in the maternity hospital when she gave birth. It's very hard for me to realize now that my daughter and wife are no longer here. All my world was destroyed yesterday by a Russian missile.”

He wants the world to know about what happened to his family.

"What is happening is a grief for my family, for our city, for Ukraine, it's a grief for the whole civilization. I hope our story helps to stop this war.” ~

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61210699

Oriana:
 
Yuriy lucked out by having been away, shopping, while the missile hit. Maybe if Valerie happened to be visiting a neighbor across the street, she and the baby would still be alive — it’s all random luck. It reminds me of many wartime stories I heard in Poland, of amazing wartime luck. And it’s survivors who tell those tales of frightful randomness, sometimes using the word “miracle,” but on the whole knowing there was nothing special about them, nothing that meant they “deserved” to survive — except in the sense that all of the residents deserved to survive and not be subjected to missile attacks.

*
~ Zelensky: "The world has not seen such barbarism in 80 years. It will be in history books. Little kids will stand up and tell their teachers where ruscism -- рашизм -- [neologism mixing Russia + fascism] began, and who won in the war against this terrible thing.”

“What did Nazis achieve when they occupied Europe? Everyone hated them. And the second and third generations, who are not even to blame, feel their guilt. The Russians will achieve the same.”

Ruscism -- Russian fascism. “Sc” is to be pronounced like “sh.”

Russia, unequivocally, is a fascist state now. ~ M. Iossel

*
IS PUTIN PURGING HIS INNER CIRCLE?

The four alleged suicides have all been labelled as "suspicious" by Russian sources

— including a former FSB colonel on the Telegram messaging channel.

Writing on Mozhem Obyasnit — which means We Can Explain — Gennady Gudkov claimed there were similarities in the passing of top managers and their families from senior gas companies.

He claimed: "Don't let the 'rats' escape, they might talk.

“If we already understand that the regime is engaged in the elimination of its opponents and enemies, then why will they not deal with those who are considered traitors who have fled the system.

"Many cases of [suspicious deaths] are like settling scores.”

https://www.the-sun.com/news/5188029/clues-putin-allies-murdered-purge/


Oriana:

The Russian "sudden death syndrome” — this time it’s not journalists, but oligarchs: “Curious number of oligarchs have died since the invasion of Ukraine.”

And they killed the families too. Reminds me of Macbeth. But they made it worse, since they pretended it was the father who killed the family, and then committed suicide by hanging.

*
MISHA ONCE MORE ON GOOD AND EVIL:

~ Pope Francis reached out to Putin three times asking to allow the ship with a Vatican flag to evacuate civilians trapped in Mariupol's Azovstal steel mill, but all three times his requests were rejected, according to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero.

This couldn't have been any other way, The Pope and Putin are located on the opposite poles of humanity. The former represents the essential goodness of human nature, while the latter — to put it somewhat grandly but simply — is the devil's emissary on Earth. ~

*
HOW CLOSE ARE WE TO NUCLEAR WAR?

~ During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, one Soviet submarine just off the US coast lost contact with Moscow. Standing orders were that under those circumstances, they should assume that the reason was a nuclear strike on Moscow, and launch their nukes on the US East Coast. Three officers had to agree to fire; one of them refused. He was onboard by pure chance.

In 1983, during the NATO Able Archer exercise which the Soviet Politburo feared was a cover for a full scale invasion, Russian early warning systems detected a US nuclear missile being launched. Standing orders were immediate and total retaliation*. The officer in charge, however, refused to believe the Americans would just send one single missile, and didn’t do a thing except to register it in his daily report as a suspected malfunction (which it indeed was; the system had erroneously mistaken a normal cloud reflection for a missile launch).

In both cases, we were minutes or seconds away from annihilation.

Today, Russia’s nuclear forces are on an alert level which means that they can launch missiles at several hours’ notice. The US has so far not put their forces on corresponding alert. During the Cold War, both sides had their forces ready to launch every single nuke inside 15 minutes, 24/7/365.

~ PUTIN FANCIES HIMSELF THE SAVIOR OF RUSSIA, RESTORING THE GREATNESS OF THE USSR. His saber rattling is shocking everyone and leaving the world paralyzed while he ravages Ukraine. So far, his nuclear blackmail is working very well and keeping the West’s military might at bay. If he fires nukes, he and his legacy will be destroyed. He can surely imagine what would happen if his words turned into action with regards to nukes … he would be hunted down and pulled from a hole in the ground like Saddam Hussein.

Putin is deathly afraid of NATO, hence the nuclear saber rattling when Finland and Sweden mentioned their intentions to consider joining. Why? Putin fears the U.S. response that would be involved with any disputes with NATO. Putin does not want his Army to fight with the U.S. military - the consequences for the Russian Army would be quick and decisively bad for him. While he thinks the U.S. can be deterred from fighting for human rights, genocide, and many of the other things that American leaders preach against, he is pretty sure that the U.S. would be shamed into honoring its NATO treaty obligations if he attacks a NATO country. So, he has to fight or blackmail these countries BEFORE they enter the alliance.

One thing he knows quite well is this: use of nukes would be a red line for the American people, regardless of President. That’s why he is not using nukes, now or ever… He will, however, continue to use nuclear blackmail until someone stops him. ~ Michael Chandler, Quora

Oriana:

I hate to think of it, but is someone keeping  watch over the US nuclear arsenal, making sure it’s still effective? I’m not in favor of detonating anything in the air; strictly deep underground (if need be).

I’d hate to think that North Korea, say, has gotten ahead.

Some reassuring news:
“The US has not seen any indication Russia has made any moves to prepare nuclear weapons for use during the war, but two sources familiar with recent intelligence assessments previously told CNN that US officials are more concerned about the threat of Russia using them than at any time since the Cold War.” ~

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/26/politics/mark-milley-interview-cnntv/index.html

*
IS RUSSIA’S NUCLEAR ARSENAL IN DISREPAIR?

~ There was a “whistleblower” message that appeared from somewhere deep inside some Russian security organization which said a few key things about this.

Steve Baker's answer to What do the Russian security agencies (FSB) think about the war in Ukraine?

Bullet points 30, 31 and 32 say:

…I do not believe that VV Putin will press the red button to destroy the whole world.

First, there is more than one person making a decision, at least someone will jump off. And there are a lot of people there — there is no "one-man red button”.

Secondly, there are some doubts that everything is functioning successfully there. Experience shows that the greater the transparency and control, the easier it is to identify shortcomings. And where it is not clear who controls and how, but always bravura reports — everything is always wrong there. I'm not sure if the red button system works as advertised. In addition, the plutonium charge must be changed every 10 years.

The authenticity of this document has been debated ad nauseam — but the general consensus is that it’s genuine. The language (in the original Russian) is convincing — and there are a few things he seems to know about their security organization that some random person on the Internet wouldn’t have known.

CONCLUSION:

It is definitely plausible that their nuclear capability is severely compromised — and would either fail to do much damage — or might not actually be launched at all (unless the US launched first of course).

However, I wouldn’t want to bet on that. ~ Steve Baker, Quora

*
LIFE IN RUSSIA GOT WORSE SINCE THE ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA (2014)

~ Moscow has spent 1.5 trillion taxpayer rubles on subsidies to Crimea.

Standard of living in Russia has declined by 11%.

Foreign exchange value of the ruble more than halved.

Economic growth has been at a near standstill while the global economy advanced by 19%.

The retirement age was raised by 5 years for men and 8 years for women.

The levels of social discord and government repressions have significantly increased.

3 million people have emigrated from Russia, and as you can imagine, not the stupidest ones. [This is the infamous "brain drain."]

International sanctions have denied access to advanced technologies, halting a number of
ongoing commercial and military projects.

318 billion dollars of capital outflow left the Russian economy — official stats of the central ban bank.

Putin changed the constitution to remain in power indefinitely.

Russia failed to grasp the indispensable value of trust, cooperation and participation in the global economy necessary to remain competitive, and took the imperialist turn toward a dead end. ~ 

Roxolan Tonix, Quora

*
WILL PUTIN BE GONE AS RESULT OF THE UKRAINE WAR?

~ Yes. But the question is who will get to him first. The odds on it being a billionaire oligarch just got better.

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning earlier this month after a meeting in Kyiv.

Abramovich, who accepted a Ukrainian request to help negotiate an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and at least two senior members of the Ukrainian team, were affected, Monday’s report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The sources blamed the suspected attack on “hard-liners in Moscow who they said wanted to sabotage talks to end the war,” the WSJ quoted. A person familiar with the matter confirmed the incident to the Reuters news agency but said Abramovich had not allowed it to stop him working.

So the oligarchs are trying to end the war. Certain hard liners want it to continue. As the war boys down and sanctions impose a tighter grip on the Russian economy, look for internal tensions to get hotter.

I have predicted before. Putin gone by June 1. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora [Oriana: Alas, Putin seems able to lie his way out of any defeat-like situation, and is deeply entrenched as a dictator.]

John Marcel:

Putin has surrounded himself with psychopaths, and psychopaths do what psychopaths do and that includes betrayal. Be patient the final solution is conning.

Oriana:

If Putin is replaced by another psychopath (Remember: Russian Lives Don’t Matter), then the war could drag on. But maybe not, since only Putin seems to be wrapped up in the delusion than Russia needs to annex Ukrainian territory (and Estonian territory, Polish, Finnish, and so on).

Only Putin? Do I know that for sure? No. I realize this might be wishful thinking. But Putin's thinking has become delusional and grandiose. The steroids and who knows what other drugs he's on are probably making the delusional thinking worse.

*
ONLY THE RUSSIANS CAN DEPOSE PUTIN

~  Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in his interview with a Ukrainian TV station in 2014 shortly before being assassinated on the bridge across from the Kremlin, predicted that Putin will get bloodier with age and never forgive Ukraine their independence and desire to live like Europeans as it’s a direct threat to his dictatorial rule.

When asked what could stop him, Boris said that it won’t be sanctions, or actions of the West, or Ukrainians.

According to Nemtsov, Putin can be stopped only by the people of Russia and nobody and nothing else.

He said that he didn't know how exactly Putin would end up, as every dictator meets his end badly but differently, but he was sure that after Russians get unglued from the TV propaganda and pluck up courage they will find a way to depose him.

A special military operation watcher would observe that there are multiple actors on stage — heroic Ukrainian people, modern Ukrainian army, state department, Western governments with their sanctions and military aid, Western people’s support of Ukraine, wile and evil Russian army flattening whole cities and towns unable to advance, Putin and his inner circle and their statements of the nuclear war, and TV propaganda from both sides — but there’s one main actor that is completely absent.

The Russian people.

Yes, there were peace demonstrations that ended up in arrests. There are a few opposition bloggers, most of them relocated abroad. There’s neo-Nazi promotion of war with swastikas and draconian laws imposed by the state and supported by the docile and blood-thirsty.

However, for the most part, Russian people have remained completely absent, withdrawn as if it’s none of their business. I will call the Russian people who are yet to make an entrance the X Factor.

The X factor that hasn’t been played out yet.

Oleksiy Arestovich, Zelensky’s advisor, spoke recently in jest that Putin must be a CIA agent tasked with dissolving the Russian Federation for his actions throughout the years confirm this theory.

The Russian people might want to consider that if they want to save their country from dissolution by a clique of traitors who might possibly start a nuclear war on top of that, they would have to act.

Look at the facts.

In twenty two years of his rule, Putin has obediently excavated and sold natural resources to the West and took the money for the members of the inner circle and officials that formed his mafia state which they spent in the West, thus completing the circle where the people of Russia were absent.

He ensured that Russia didn’t develop economically remaining in the third world status. Now that the Western companies have left, it is revealed that Russia cannot produce its own print paper, nails, dental fillings, cars, trucks, planes and much, much more. It is fair to call it Banana Republic, whose bananas are oil, gas, fertilizer.

Putin degraded the army and Navy by appointing outsiders who along with generals stole all that they could and didn’t show anything for the stolen half a trillion dollars except for cgi cartoons of rocket launches and coming soon! new! promises of new tanks and fighter jets that have never materialized.

In another couple of months, the Soviet grade army will be completely wiped out in Ukraine exposing thousands of miles of its long borders for attacks.

The populace has been brainwashed with false narratives and lies on state TV for years teaching them passivity and reinforcing in them perception that they live in a great country that goes from victory to victory, mostly in the past.

A Russian patriot can argue that Putin specifically invaded Ukraine to get rid of the army, to destroy the economy beyond recovery, annihilate financial system, to sell it to the highest bidder.

Of course the true reason for this sorry state of affairs is the neo-Soviet system that Putin built that lacks any competition thus leading to stasis and degradation. However that would be too hard to explain to the Russian people who have been taught to loathe and despise democracy.
Therefore, in order to achieve a Sacred Victory, the Russian people will have to ride up, join the fight and save their country from dissolution.

The X factor that will overturn the fragile balance of the war. Perhaps, however, they are like Putin sick and tired of Russia and couldn't care less if it goes down like the Moskva cruiser. ~ Misha Firer (Quora)

Angie Johnson:

Russians have been trained to be cowed and submissive for centuries, and that’s what they’re doing. If you don’t like it, you find a way to leave, if you’re willing. If you don’t like it, and you rise up, you are likely to be assassinated, poisoned, disappeared, imprisoned on trumped-up charges. That’s the real problem, is fear, but it’s not clear to the populace that if just enough of them also hit the streets, the system they’re under will be entirely overrun.

Oriana:

This reminds me of the situation in Poland just before Solidarity took power. At first the Martial Law seemed to  work. But Solidarity continued its work in uniting the population until the inevitable happened.

But of course that was Poland, where the support for what was seen as an illegitimate, Moscow-controlled government was minimal. Unfortunately the older segment of the Russian population seems to be genuinely supportive of Putin. So I wonder if there’ll ever be enough people in the streets. And I wonder if the police, if given the order to shoot into the crowd, would comply. In Poland the answer would be no. In Russia, we can’t be sure. And if we can’t be sure, that means that even a big crowd would have to have tremendous courage.

*
RUSSIA FIFTY YEARS FROM NOW

~ Based on statistics, some accurate and some manipulated from Kremlin to look “not so bad" but are terrifying nevertheless: it will cease to exist as a country.

Russia suffers from some of the most disturbing phenomenons and if measures aren't taken in time to prevent its full disintegration 50 years from now will be too late to do anything. For example extracting the resources of the whole federation to invest in 2–3 major cities and in politicians/oligarchs bank accounts is a serious problem that risks disintegrating the federation.

On the other hand the statistics on alcohol abuse which is hard liquor mostly not beer, suicides, lowest life expectancy in Europe coupled with monumental societal degeneracy with phenomenons like sexually related diseases especially HIV epidemic, abortions, use of drugs are indicators of a fast dying nation. Add to this the migrants from Caucasus and other ex-Soviet Republics in the western part of Russia mostly and you have a recipe for an unmitigated nation disaster in the future. The birth rate of ethnic Russians is very low to compensate for the dying generation even by Kremlin statistics which aren't real of course — the situation is much worse.

Oil money won't be there forever like it won't be in other countries for that matter. Instead of diversifying the economy by primarily industrializing it with oil money, Putin and his oligarchs are stealing and wasting that money in the most unbelievable way. Inheriting good specialists from Soviet Union and oil money, industrialization could be achieved at satisfactory levels. However Putin proved he's a total incompetent far below the level of even Arab leaders who invested the oil money in stock markets.

For the average Russian life not only sucks — it’s a nightmare. He lives in appalling conditions and has decided to “protest" against this injustice by intoxicating himself with alcohol and drugs. By not having children he's saving a future generation that won't come to this world from the misery and injustice he's enduring himself. Despite being bombarded by propaganda from the regime and somehow having this laughable belief that Putin is the greatest leader in the world, deep in his consciousness the Russian peasant knows that living in Russia sucks. ~ Besmir Besmir, Quora

Alex:

Yep, this is 100% on point. Sometimes it feels like we’re all in a big stupid play pretending that everything is fine, while internally screaming with deep dissatisfaction.

Oriana: SHRINKING POPULATION COMBINED WITH BRAIN DRAIN

It’s terribly risky to make predictions even for five years from now, much less fifty. Things change too fast. But we can be reasonably sure that the shrinking population, especially when combined with brain drain, will create all kinds of problems, e.g. not enough skilled workers — or simply workers, period. The silver lining is that the smaller population won’t need as much food, clothing, or energy. At least the planet will benefit.

*
RUSSIA’S MILITARY WEAKNESSES AS REVEALED BY THE WAR

The war has revealed us the following weaknesses:

No single special force has gone so swiftly from ‘elites’ into ‘laughingstock’ as the VDV [paratroopers]. They were simply squandered in badly planned and poorly executed airdrops in contested airspace.

Russian enlisted men have bad morale, bad military skills and bad discipline. Its internal culture is more that of a prison than that of an army. The all-prevailing dedovshchina has pretty much destroyed any esprit de corps and loyalty to one’s buddies -- if there ever was any. 

Conscripts are good in defending homeland, but useless when invading someone else’s. 

The reform of the Russian military has gone down in the drain. It has suffered the same fate as all Modernization programs in the Czarist Russia and in the USSR. It has failed -- the Russian military in 2022 is essentially the same as the Soviet military in 1989.

The Russian commanders resemble mafia bosses more than soldiers. They are corrupt, lacking in initiative, lacking in coordination and cooperation, incompetent and incapable of delegation. They lack in imagination and cannot improvise.

In the Russian military, competence is a no-no thing, but loyalty and bootlicking appreciated. The reason is that competent officers are a threat to their higher-ups and to the Russian kleptocracy.

Russians are bad on fighting any competent soldiers, but excellent on terrorizing civilians. It is as if their whole military was one grand Handschar [Croatian] division.

The average IQ of the Russian conscript is in the mid-to-upper 80s. The reason is that anyone who is able to will attempt to dodge the draft, and the military gets only the unluckiest. The incompetence and lack of tactical skills of the Russian troops reflect this.

Russian anti-aircraft troops are just as much nincompoops as they were in 2014, when they were unable to distinguish between a jet airliner from a turboprop light transport.

Russian air force has failed to gain aerial supremacy. Their aviators are poorly trained, have few flying hours and are in bad physical shape.

Russian logistics can be best described as “shambolic”.

Russian operational planning is lousy. They committed all the errors they did in the Winter War 1939–1940, and came up with a dozen more. Now whose bright idea was to invade Ukraine at the eve of the rasputitsa [the thaw, or mud season]?

Russian military has no professional NCOs. The result is that there is very little trust between the officers and enlisted men, and the discipline among the enlisted men is brutal but poor. The enlisted men are basically cannon fodder.

Russians believe strictly that terrorizing helpless civilians is a key to victory. It was that way in Chechnya and Syria, but has backfired terribly in Ukraine. The reason is that when there is a trust between a nation and its leaders, any terror bombardment will only increase the resolve to fight and create hate, not fear.

Russian cyber warfare capability is poor. They can harass and bully, but they have no cyber warfare defenses of their own.

Likewise, the Russian signaling and telecommunication ability is lousy. After destroying the 3G and 4G network in Ukraine, they have needed to resort to ordinary mobile phones - or, God forbid -  walkie-talkies. Their encryption protocols are poor. As result, their messages can be decrypted and read in almost real time, and the Ukrainian military has an excellent view on what is happening and where. Using carrier pigeons would be a better idea on behalf of the information security.

Russian tanks are made either from cardboard or from explodium. They can be easily destroyed by infantry anti-tank weapons. The autoloader carousel which compels storing the ammunition in the crew compartment is a bad idea — the Russian tanks are basically WWI British battlecruisers on caterpillar tracks.

The problem is that Russia is neither a democracy nor a military dictatorship. Putin is no military dictator. He has risen from the ranks of the Secret Service and he basically is a spook gone mafia boss. Actually he experiences military as his enemy and rival. And to curb the military and prevent a military coup, you need to keep military weak.

Putin has kept the military weak by identifying competent officers and eliminating them before they rise as a threat, by squandering the money on useless white elephant projects such as Sukhoi PAK-FA, Skhval torpedo and Armata tank, and by good old-fashioned corruption. It permeates the whole Russian society, and it is a well known, tried and true way to upkeep the Russian society. It is better for Putin if the funds assigned to the military go into generals’ superyachts in the Mediterranean and in apartments in London rather than on new vehicles or rations for the soldiers.

Let us now see what will happen if the Ukrainian military gathers momentum and goes on counteroffensive. I will predict the Russian military will be much stronger when on defensive.

~ Susanna Viljanen, Quora

*
Mary: PUTIN CAN BE HUMILIATED, BUT HE CANNOT BE SHAMED

One new thought on the Russian military arises to explain its surprising incompetence, so unexpected in comparison with its reputation. The poor performance, shoddy equipment, dismal strategy are not all due to the undeniably widespread and endemic corruption, the perpetual theft and diversion of funds at every level, but also are part of Putin's deliberate intention. He cannot afford a strong military, with strong and competent generals, because that would bring a serious threat to his own power. He fears the possibility of a military coup unseating him, so he acts to ensure this won't happen, removing generals too competent and able through the well known Russian Sudden Death syndrome, folks getting poisoned or falling out of windows so often it seems like a peculiarly Russian bad habit. He runs the state like a mafia boss and cannot allow possible rivals the resources and power to act against him.

And the nuclear threat..the tactics of a criminal bully who has already clearly demonstrated he operates without the restraints of empathy...massive death tolls mean nothing to him, not those of the people he moves against and not those of his own people. It is important to realize he can be embarrassed, and thereby become more dangerous, but he cannot be shamed.

Oriana:

Yes, that’s the consensus among Russia’s analysts: Putin does not want a strong, competent military because he’s afraid of a military coup. After all, Russia is not a military dictatorship. It’s a gangster state, with the equivalent of a mafia boss at the top. The idea is not to develop Russia, but to loot its resources.

And I totally agree that he is a war criminal, accusing others of being Nazis (he seems fixated on that) while he is the most blatant Nazi in the world, not in the rank of Hitler, but with the same mentality: who cares how many suffer and die? The point is to annex new territory at any price. Dead Russian soldiers an embarrassment? Mobile crematoria can solve that problem (but apparently there aren’t enough of those for disposing of thousands of bodies). He seems devoid of any empathy, a mark of a psychopath.

*
CASUALTY ESTIMATES

Right now here are the best estimates.
Russia: 8,000-15,000 killed and 20,000+ injured.
Ukraine: 3,000–6,000 killed and 10,000+ injured
Anywhere from 8,000–25,000 civilians killed

Where do we get these numbers?
NATO
The EU
Independent media outlets
Photographic evidence and battle reports
International observers

These numbers are NOT based on what Russia or Ukraine is claiming. (Quora)

(The highest estimate of the Russian dead is 30,000. At present we can doubt it’s this high, but if the war continues, it will get there)

*

WHY SUCH LARGE RUSSIAN MILITARY CASUALTIES?

~ Because their military tactics are long outdated. I had a long discussion with a former U.S. infantry officer today. His views echoed what others have said and what I believe. The Russians do not care about human life. They are barbarians who will suffer for generations. They should also be kicked out of the U.N. and isolated indefinitely. ~ Richard Wendt, Quora  

*
Russia, where I worked 98-2000, has a cultural victimhood/persecution complex and an almost masochistic addiction to deprivation, honed over 500 years of subjugation. ~ Stephen Grimmer

*
THE SOVIET UNION AND WW2

~ While Westerners tend to see the war through the lens of events such as D-Day or the Battle of Britain, it was a conflict largely won by the Soviet Union. An incredible eight out of 10 German war casualties occurred on the Eastern Front. As German chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2015 “the Red Army played the decisive role in liberating Germany.”

For this, the Soviet Union paid dearly: An estimated ten million military dead, more than every other Allied nation combined. On average, every 24 days the Soviet Union saw enough men killed to equal the entire wartime losses of the United Kingdom (383,700). If you were a Soviet male born in 1923, there was a 70 per cent chance you never lived to see Victory in Europe Day.

Victory over fascism remains the USSR’s signature achievement — and the triumph is often used to justify the worst repressions of the Soviet state. In the words of the Marxist British historian Eric Hobsbawm, “the victory over Hitler’s Germany was essentially won, and could only have been won, by the Red Army.”

What these boosters ignore is how the world’s first communist state was also instrumental to ensuring that a devastating global conflict broke out in the first place. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were obviously the principal architects of the Second World War, but below find the lesser-known story of how the march to global war was encouraged, abetted and supplied by the USSR.

A NAZI-SOVIET CONSPIRACY DIRECTLY SPARKED WORLD WAR 2

The first shots of the Second World War were a direct result of a Soviet diplomat meeting a Nazi diplomat, shaking his hand, and telling Hitler’s Germany to do whatever they wanted with Western Europe.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – so named for the foreign ministers of each dictatorship – had an immediate effect on European peace. Within eight days of its signing, German bombs began to rain down on Warsaw.

Officially called the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet government would long assert that the pact was nothing more than a benign neutrality agreement; a necessary alliance in the face of perfidious French and English unwillingness to join with Moscow in an anti-fascist bloc. In truth, Molotov-Ribbentrop was two dictatorships dividing up the world map to their own ends.

In the late 1980s, the Soviet policy of Glasnost (openness) would finally reveal that Molotov-Ribbentrop had included secret protocols carving up Poland as well as giving the Soviet Union free reign to annex the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. As Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev revealed in a 1989 column in Pravda, Stalin and Hitler were indeed guilty of “collusion” in 1939.

With his eastern flank secured, the pact unleashed Hitler to steamroll first Poland, then Norway, and then finally France, Belgium and everything in between. Similarly, the Soviet Union also exploited the new peace agreement to unleash hell on their neighbors: After seizing Eastern Poland and the Baltic States, the Red Army attacked Japanese forces in Mongolia and staged an all-out unprovoked invasion of Finland.

It’s telling that when Anglo-French commanders drew up plans for one of the first strategic bombing operations of the war, their target wasn’t German factories or even German military installations: It was oil refineries in the Soviet Union.

Operation Pike was a plan to attack Soviet oil production facilities in what is now modern-day Azerbaijan. The idea wasn’t just to kneecap the ongoing Soviet assault on its Baltic and Finnish neighbors, but to deny petroleum to the Nazis.

After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was inked, Nazi and Soviet diplomats then turned to drafting a comprehensive trade agreement between the two countries: Nazi Germany would ship manufactured goods east, while the Soviet Union sent raw materials west. The result was what historians have called a “not inconsiderable” Soviet lifeline to the German war machine: Wood, phosphates, mineral ores, cotton and 1.3 million tons of grains and cereals.

While the First World War had been won in part thanks to a crippling blockade imposed on Imperial Germany, as the Allies geared up for war in 1939 they faced a Germany fed, fueled and clothed by Soviet suppliers. Nazi Germany even had a direct link to the Pacific Ocean via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The Soviets had nurtured clandestine trade relationships with Germany long before Hitler came to power. After the First World War, Germany was severely limited in its military production by the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. To get around it, German leaders simply struck a deal with Moscow to rearm using secret military bases and even armaments factories built on Soviet soil. By the time the Nazis took control in 1933, they inherited a German Military Industrial Complex that had been supercharged by Soviet collusion.

Soviet imports may not have been overly critical to supplying the Wehrmacht in 1940. The Soviet Union was never able to supply more than 4.5 million barrels of oil to the Third Reich (for context, the Canadian oil sands produce three million barrels per day). But it’s difficult to overstate the lingering German trauma of the shortages that had accompanied the end of the First World War; by fitting Germany to a Soviet lifeline, Hitler was able to overcome one of his country’s principle fears of entering new war. “By the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union had become the most important supplier of raw materials to the German Reich,” wrote the German historian Heinrich Schwendemann in 1995.

Ultimately, the consequences of trade with Hitler would be felt most sharply by the Soviets themselves, who saw their eventual Nazi invaders disproportionately supplied by Soviet goods. “Over and over on the eastern front, the same ironic scene was played out. German soldiers fed by Ukrainian grain, transported by Caucasus oil, and outfitted with boots made from rubber shipped via the Trans–Siberian railroad fired their Donetz–manganese–hardened steel weapons at their former allies,” wrote Edward E. Ericson in a 1999 history of Soviet-Nazi trade.

Trade ties between the two dictatorships would continue right up to the bitter end. In the spring of 1941, as millions of German troops began marching east for their genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union, many reported passing trains of Soviet grain going the other direction.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Vladimir Lenin looked out at a Europe strewn with destruction and saw reason for joy. The catastrophe would topple empires, destabilize treasured institutions and sow misery in the masses: All prime ingredients for Marxist revolution. As Lenin wrote to fellow Marxists in 1915, their job was to “turn the imperialist war into civil war.”

And he was sort of correct: Without the utterly destabilizing effects of the First World War on Imperial Russia, Lenin would probably have lived out his life as an embittered Swiss pamphleteer rather than becoming the all-powerful dictator of the world’s largest empire.
For similar reasons, Joseph Stalin was also encouraged by the prospect of the planet once again descending into apocalyptic conflict. As the historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his 2010 book Bloodlands, Stalin’s goal in 1939 was “destroy the enemies by their own hands and remain strong to the end of the war.”

The Soviet dictator assumed that a second world war would look very similar to the first: Germany, England and France all mired in years of devastating trench warfare. At war’s end, it didn’t matter who won; the “capitalist” powers would be so ruined by conflict that, just like 1917 Russia, they would be ripe for communist takeover.

“Our goal is that Germany should carry out the war as long as possible so that England and France grow weary and become exhausted to such a degree that they are no longer in a position to put down a Sovietized Germany,” Stalin reportedly said in a secret 1939 speech to the Soviet Politburo.

It’s a controversial theory – most notably because Hitler himself justified Operation Barbarossa as a “preemptive” war against a Soviet threat to the West. It’s dubious that Stalin ever planned his own unprompted invasion of Germany, but over the years a trickle of Soviet defectors and Comintern bureaucrats have reported firsthand accounts of the Moscow inner circle seeing renewed world war as tool to fire the flames of revolution.

“A Russian diplomat in London later remarked indiscreetly that, while most of the world weighed Allied and German casualties against each other, Stalin added the two together to compile an assessment of his own balance of advantage,” wrote the historian Max Hastings in Inferno.

The plan backfired when the war instead turned to one of lightning German victories. The Soviet Union officially congratulated Hitler on his 1940 defeat of France. Behind the scenes, however, Stalin was livid. After the Fall of France, future Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev wrote in his memoirs that “Stalin was in a great agitation, very nervous. He cursed the French, cursed the English, (asking) ‘How come they allowed Hitler to thrash them?’”

But while Stalin may not have foreseen the extent of the Nazi terrors that would strike his own country, his basic strategic calculus was ultimately correct: A war-battered planet did indeed become ripe for communist takeover.

The world of 1945 saw Soviet tendrils extended everywhere from Korea to the heart of Germany itself, and transformed Russia from an underdog European power into one of two contenders for global hegemony. ~

https://nationalpost.com/news/the-ussr-won-the-second-world-war-for-us-too-bad-they-also-helped-start-it


Oriana:

Thanks to my parents wanting to make sure that I knew true history rather than propaganda, I knew about Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and what followed. I knew about Katyń (which the Russians tried to blame on the Nazis).

As for later in the war, Stalin’s motto might as well have ben “Russian Lives Don’t Matter.”

*
A COMEDY BREAK: FAMOUS INSULTS

These insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.

1. "He had delusions of adequacy ” ~ Walter Kerr

2. "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” ~ Winston Churchill

3. "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. ~  Clarence Darrow

4. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” ~ William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

5. "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"~ Ernest Hemingway

6. "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it.” ~ Moses Hadas

7. "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” ~ Mark Twain

8. "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” ~ Oscar Wilde

9. "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” ~ George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

10. "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one.” ~ Winston Churchill, in response

11. "I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here” ~ Stephen Bishop

12. "He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” ~ John Bright

13. "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.” ~ Irvin S. Cobb

14. "He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” ~ Samuel Johnson

15. "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. - Paul Keating

16. "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” - Forrest Tucker

17. "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” ~ Mark Twain

18. "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” ~ Mae West

19. "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” ~ Oscar Wilde

20. "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.” ~ Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

21. "He has Van Gogh's ear for music.” ~ Billy Wilder

22. "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I'm afraid this wasn't it.” ~ Groucho Marx

23. The exchange between Winston Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison." He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it.”

24. "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."  Abraham Lincoln’

25. "There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." ~ Jack E. Leonard

26. "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." ~ Thomas Brackett Reed

27. "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them." ~ James Reston (about Richard Nixon) —Robert L Truesdell

*
CIGARETTE BUTTS ARE A MAJOR POLLUTANT

Every year, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are dumped in the environment every year, polluting our planet and contributing to the killing of marine life.

And they’re not made of harmless paper or cotton – they’re made of a microplastic, cellulose acetate, that never completely decomposes.

*
WHEN TO SAY NO

In our early careers, we’re taught to say yes to everything; but soon, as we gain more experience, we face the opposite problem—a stream of opportunities, with uncertainty about what to say no to.

That’s okay, though. Saying no is a skill, and it’s one that opens up new doors. Each time you say no, you take the first step to saying yes to something else.

SAY NO TO EXISTING COMMITMENTS

Quitting sucks. The famous saying goes, “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” It’s a great adage to hit home the value of perseverance and grit. However, at any point, each winner has—and needed to—quit. Every person who has done anything worth doing has made an important, and deliberate, decision to quit something, in order to make the space for it.

Seth Godin wrote a short book entitled The Dip about the topic of quitting, but it’s more than that. It’s a book about saying no, in order to focus, so that you are free to say yes to something else—whether you know it or not. As he writes, expanding on the topic, “The way you become the best in the world is by quitting the stuff where you can’t be the best. That leaves you the resources to invest in getting through the Dip.”

In this case, our resources are mainly our attention, our morale, and our motivation—valuable assets that we can’t outsource to anyone else. This level of focus is crucial even at the corporate scale. Former Apple designer Jony Ive put it eloquently: “What focus is, saying no to something that with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea. And you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it. Because you are focusing on something else.”

Because quitting is so frowned upon, we’ve publicly disguised what quitting looks like: this CEO is becoming a chairman, that creative director is becoming an adviser. Read between the lines. Someone is scaling back their commitment and preparing to quit. Know that you may need to do the same at some point, and prepare yourself.

SAY NO TO OTHER DEFINITION OF SUCCESS   

Saying no is the key to keep yourself from being spread too thin. Rather than splitting your attention to pursue a number of ideas adequately, commit to just doing just one thing really, really well. In a Hot Ones interview, Pusha T says:
“I am the Martin Scorsese of street raps. That’s how I want to be seen. Even just creatively, Scorsese gives you The Departed, Goodfellas, and a host of other joints. You never say, ‘Hey, I want him to make a love story.’ That’s how I want you to look at me rap-wise.”

You can also choose to serve a specific group of people, and to say no to the rest. You don’t have to be the best to everybody. You just have to be the best to somebody that you know—or have decided to get to know—better than most other people. In order to do that, you have to define what you’re not going to do, and who you’re not serving or making things for.

When that happens, your brain naturally focuses, learns how to make better work, and opportunities start coming your way. You also draw in people who appreciate artistic integrity and count on you for your expertise. You feel energized, like you’re capable of setting an unrealistic goal, and you’re gaining momentum.

Eventually, as you put in the work, you start a self-fulfilling dynamic that is contagious. People believe in you because you believe in yourself, and you believe in yourself because you know what you’ve committed to doing and your vision isn’t blurred by mainstream symbols of success.

Don’t try to be the best for everyone. Aim instead to be the best for someone, and define who you won’t.

SAY NO TO QUICK, EASY OPPORTUNITIES

These days, there’s no shortage of shiny opportunities. Emerging markets include web3, mushrooms, and NFTs—among many others.

Rather than choosing to chase each of these—and incurring unnecessary financial risk which could hurt your focus—you can stay committed to making the thing you’re best at. You can say no to copying other people. Picking the low hanging fruit isn’t always worth putting down what you’re doing; plus it’s the fruit that everybody is chasing, which means it’s not scarce.

Let the other people chase the quick wins and glittering lures. Focus on your craft and your life’s task instead. If you don’t know what it is, focus on finding it.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90744453/3-things-to-say-no-to-if-you-want-to-succeed?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Oriana:

Warren Buffett said that the most essential skill in his life has been his ability to say NO. He considers it the most important skill in achieving success.

Don’t keep the doors to other opportunities open. Slam them shut and stick to the one path that you believe is right for you.

Creative people quickly discover that one thing that divides artists from wanna-be artists is the ability to say no. Say No to most socializing and other irrelevant activities, no matter how “fun” they promise to be. Instead, focus on what is important to you. The results will amaze you (and your distracted friends).

If I were to extract the gist of this article it would be, EACH TIME YOU SAY NO, YOU SAY YES TO SOMETHING ELSE.

(I have to admit that the fantasy of having a mushroom farm  — morels, say, and/or other valuable varieties — has been with me almost ever since I left Poland and lost its fragrant forest mushrooms. But some things are best as fantasies.)


*
THE FORGOTTEN COMMUNES IN THE MIDWEST

~ Orson S. Murray founded Fruit Hills in 1845, near present-day Loveland, inspired by his personally-held principles of atheism, socialist feminism, and economic cooperation. Murray hailed from the radical abolitionist movement, writing in The Struggle of the Hour that slavery “makes men into brutes, driving and being driven, crushing and being crushed.” He railed against church, state, and property as “a trio of monsters” in his newspaper, The Regenerator, and cofounded a group called the Society for Universal Inquiry and Reform. Fruit Hills was one of several efforts by Universal Reformers to translate theory into a practical utopia on the rural American frontier.

Murray once wrote that “Bibles and Constitutions are only the necessities of ignorance—things to be changed—to be outgrown and displaced by better things.” Change seems to have gotten the best of Fruit Hills, however; the commune collapsed within seven years. “All the necessaries of life could be raised in abundance,” wrote one contemporary observer, “but the laborers were mostly unused to agriculture and in many instances lacked industry.” From the vantage of the Meinecke lobby, no definition of success seemed generous enough to encompass the project’s fate.

This story is fairly typical. Inland America is pocked with the unmarked graves of communitarian utopias—primitive socialist and communist experiments—that tried to rebuild the world on what was assumed to be virgin soil. Ephrata, Pennsylvania; Germantown, Tennessee; Utopia, Ohio; Brentwood, New York; Iowa’s Amana Colonies: these and many other towns were originally settled by communalists with lofty visions of abolishing private property, quashing material inequity, and transcending divisive individualism.

New Harmony, Indiana was settled twice: first by the Harmony Society, a dissident religious group, and then by utopian socialist Robert Owen, a philanthropic industrialist whose work inspired dozens of communes across Britain and the United States. The Harmonites believed that the Second Coming of Christ would occur within their lifetime; the Owenites believed in abolishing the ills of capital without displacing the ruling class. Despite their apparently opposed precepts, they inhabited the same buildings, drew overlapping conclusions, and clung to similar myths.

Self-styled refugees of moral rot, the original Harmonites sought southern Indiana for its isolation. Some seven hundred of them relocated there from Pennsylvania in 1814, aiming to live according to a particular interpretation of piety. Property was held in common, labor was performed according to ability, and its yield was distributed equally. In an effort to restore “the harmony of male and female elements in humanity,” sex and marriage were discouraged, if not banned outright.

Despite their industrious work ethic, the Harmonites remained economically tethered to the wider world and often struggled with life at its edge. Their settlement suffered harsh bouts of malaria, conducting trade meant traversing a long, marshy river, and frontier neighbors did not always abide their unusual lifestyle. The group ultimately returned to Pennsylvania after a decade, leaving over 130 communal structures in their wake. What they built from scratch, Robert Owen bought with money.

“If we cannot reconcile all opinions, let us endeavor to unite all hearts.” An engraving in New Harmony attributes this line to Owen, but in fact he borrowed it from Nicholas Vansittart, the son of a British colonial administrator and joint secretary of the queen’s treasury. Owen was not quite so highborn, but his hopes hinged on the sympathies of Vansittart’s class. Having witnessed the exploitative horrors of early industrialization, he prophesied that reform would flow from the reason and good will of those in power, “that truly just spirit which knows no exclusion.” Owen believed that industrial capitalism could only survive in the long run through the parallel evolution of a “New Moral World” built around economic collectivization, scientific rationalism, and popular education. His communes were early efforts to realize such a world.

Owen’s most famous model society was in New Lanark, Scotland, but New Harmony was his most ambitious. He purchased the land with philanthropist William Maclure in 1825 and populated it with a cohort of artists, educators, and scientists. Owen’s followers took up the Harmonites’ housing and tilled the same communal fields, adopting a constitution that emphasized common property, freedom of action, and preservation of health. Childcare was reframed as a collective responsibility, not only because parents were seen as selfish, but because they were believed to carry the old world’s traumas in their patterns of thought. “Children aged two to five were taken away from home and placed in a controlled environment,” said Terri Axton, a modern-day New Harmony resident. “They were taught to get along with others and be polite.”

In Women in Utopia, Dr. Carol A. Kolmerten notes that female New Harmony residents were among the first to observe that Owen’s lofty proposals did not always translate to pleasant living conditions or common sense, writing that “married women who had come to New Harmony with their husbands . . . spent much of their free time plotting their own private rebellions.” In elevating impersonal “rationality” and utilitarian materialism above domestic labor, aesthetic considerations, and personal comforts, Owen’s utopian socialism not only diminished traditional spheres of women’s autonomy but arguably minimized the very qualities that ultimately give meaning to life.

New Harmony was formally dissolved in 1827, just two years after its optimistic launch. “Many here were unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality,” observed Robert Owen in a farewell address. The project’s failure is variously pinned on its leader’s off-putting zeal, the untenability of economic collectivization, and the fact that its settlers were softies without the constitution for subsistence farming. But there is also the fact that Owen himself hardly spent any time there, preferring to stay back and promote the project on the East Coast and in Britain. He may have initially conceived New Harmony’s second coming, but was he really an authority on its failure or success?

New Harmony’s communal structure formally dissolved in 1827, but its residents did not simply disappear. Educator William Maclure traveled to New Harmony in 1826, for example, but it wasn’t until 1838 that he established the town’s “Working Men’s Institute,” a hybrid library and museum for “mutual instruction” that aspired to educate and empower the working class. The model proliferated across Indiana and neighboring Illinois, spawning 144 such institutes that were, for the most part, eventually absorbed into their respective state library systems. Josiah Warren, sometimes regarded as the first American anarchist, was another early resident of Owenite New Harmony. But it wasn’t until the 1840s that he opened the town’s “time store,” an experimental retailer that exchanged goods for “labor notes” representing agreements to perform work. “People would not buy at home, but came twenty, twenty-five, and even one hundred miles, to the time store,” he observed at the time.

New Harmony did not dramatically transcend the capitalism, but it remained a site of leftist experimentation for some time, and the ideas at its core played a role in establishing significant public works. One of Owen’s sons, Robert Dale Owen—who oversaw much of the day-to-day operations at New Harmony—was later elected to represent Indiana in congress. In this capacity he introduced legislation that founded the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, enshrining the Working Men’s Institute’s public education philosophy on a national scale.

Reconnecting New Harmony’s history with these long-term effects somewhat vindicates the project’s utopian designs, suggesting that a broad and radical vision may have been necessary to create such enduring institutions. Still, even if New Harmony’s collapse was more gradual than Owen asserted, it was nonetheless slowly reabsorbed into mainstream society. The project’s fatal shortcoming was not its imagined ends, but its means: Owens’s excessive faith in morality over muscle. It is one thing to speculate what might be done with power, but quite another to win it.

THOSE CRAZY SWEDES

Three-hundred miles northwest of New Harmony, Bishop Hill, Illinois is plastered with the Swedish flag. The general store stocks imported Swedish candies; the diner serves pancakes with lingonberries. The town has become a minor regional tourist destination for its association with mid-to-late nineteenth century Swedish migration to the American Midwest—of which I am also a product. While the king of Sweden personally attended Bishop Hill’s 150th anniversary in 1996, the monarchy was less supportive of its founders.

Bishop Hill was settled as a pietist commune in 1846 under the leadership of self-styled prophet Erik Jansson. Like the Harmonites, Jansson railed against the Lutheran church and preached a communistic flavor of Christian perfectionism. In contrast with Lutheranism’s self-flagellating embrace of imperfection, Jansson preached that eternal salvation, health, and earthly rewards would come only to those of pure faith. Cultish by today’s standards, the Janssonists were fairly typical of pietist sects at the time, stripping away secondary texts and aiming to live strictly by the Bible’s dictates. After coming into conflict with the Swedish government, Jansson and some twelve hundred followers crossed the Atlantic to create a “New Jerusalem” on the American frontier.

Their grandiose optimism, however, quickly met western Illinois. Hundreds of Jansson’s followers perished or defected during the long trek; only about four hundred made it all the way, and a hundred more died during the first winter. The settlement nearly collapsed when Jansson was murdered in 1850, but it managed to re-stabilize under new leadership. Power was transferred to a group of trustees who ran Bishop Hill as a centralized commune, overseeing its growth into a regional hub for crafts, agriculture, and commerce. Land was held in common, residents lived in collective housing, and agricultural profits were shared equally. Having overcome the perilous early years, the commune prospered until its trustees elected to dissolve Bishop Hill’s collective ownership structure in 1861. At that time, almost everything in Bishop Hill was measured, counted, and divided—even women and children received shares, which was then a radical notion.

“I would definitely call them a cult,” said an attendant at the Bishop Hill Heritage Association’s archive, which inhabits a former commune building. “They had bad leadership, or maybe too much leadership.” The fate of Bishop Hill’s socialistic experiment is typically evoked as a warning about the sinister authoritarianism lurking behind collectivization. But in an essay on “those crazy Swedes” of Bishop Hill, librarian Troy Swanson argues that the commune fell victim to the success, rather than failure, of its socialized economy. “After the devastating crisis of 1849 and 1850,” he writes, “Bishop Hill appeared to be the utopia these Swedish immigrants had envisioned.” Swanson cites the colony’s changing population as a key factor in triggering its downfall. Newcomers were less committed to the project, and some wanted to enrich themselves from the arrangement. The trouble, it seems, was not with the true believers.

During my visit, I stayed in a local bed and breakfast run by Brian “Fox” Ellis, who hosts visitors in a building that was once the commune’s hospital. “Fifteen years is a pretty good run for a commune,” he said. “No commune survives the murder of their charismatic leader, but they had their best years after [Jansson] was shot.”

Fox estimated that 20 percent of Bishop Hill’s modern-day residents are descended from the original Janssonist settlers. I met one of them, Marty Ray, who grew up and still lives in a home that was once the colony’s meat storage building. “Anything metal in the basement rusts,” she said, “because the wood is so saturated with salt from when they cured the meat.”

Ray spoke of her childhood in joyous terms of open arms and unlocked doors. “[The town] still has that utopian vibe,” said Fox. “When we first moved here, people just showed up with paintbrushes and said, ‘put us to work.’”

Misguided though it may have been, Eric Jansson’s religious utopianism answered genuinely repressive circumstances, and his disciples showed promise in adapting beyond their leader’s cult of personality. But while Bishop Hill’s modest success demonstrates the fortitude of small-scale collectivization, running away was never a realistic fix; the Old World was always destined to catch up. In the end, the industrial system easily reabsorbed Bishop Hill, along with countless other microcosmic American “socialisms.” The town has remained small enough to cohere a warm and trusting community, but neither faith nor familiarity can reform power at scale.

*
Ripon, Wisconsin is an unassuming city of around eight thousand with a cutesy downtown drag. It’s an appealing setting for the town’s crown attraction, the “Little White Schoolhouse” where the modern Republican Party was formed in the summer of 1854. The streets ooze nostalgic Americana, but memory is selective.

Present-day Ripon was first settled in 1844 as Ceresco, or the Wisconsin Phalanx, according to the communitarian philosophy of Charles Fourier. Fourier’s socialism, like Owen’s, was fixated on education reform, but Fourier argued for reorganizing society around human desires, not the other way around. Where Owen saw human nature as essentially plastic, something to mold toward higher ends, Fourier believed it was fundamentally benevolent, worthy of discovery and liberation. His views were embraced by radicals with a clearer sense of class antagonism, informing the revolutionary Paris Commune among other movements.

Fourier advocated for anchoring humanity to self-sustaining agrarian units of 1,620 people living in self-contained “phalanstères,” a French portmanteau of phalanx and monastery. He saw a degree of social inequality as unavoidable but insisted that the best remedy would be to keep societies small enough to recognize and counterbalance injustice on an ad hoc basis. The phalanstère was envisioned as a vehicle for empathy to overtake coercion as civilization’s driving force, unifying perspectives and blurring lines between work and play.

These ideas were immensely popular in the United States and, significantly, earned support from socialist congressman and newspaper magnate Horace Greeley, who commanded a national audience as founding editor of the New-York Tribune. Greeley encouraged young idealists to migrate west, where the expanding frontier provided opportunities for experimental forms of social organization. A few dozen Fourierist phalanxes formed in the United States in the 1840s, and Ceresco was among the most successful.

The Wisconsin Phalanx peaked with about two hundred members, who lived in a cooperative longhouse and farmed some two thousand acres. Meals were prepared in common—mostly by women, who were paid lower wages than men—assets were held collectively, and while the community was not explicitly religious, it tolerated religion so long as community members were willing to lay it aside for a united social effort. By most accounts, the phalanx remained prosperous up until the end: Ceresco disbanded in 1850, and its members were absorbed into the new town of Ripon three years later. An 1885 Chicago Times autopsy concluded that the split owed more to some members’ “love of wealth and speculation”: self-interested opportunism rather than functional breakdowns or ideological spats. As with Bishop Hill, the commune’s end was as much a product of its success as its flawed precepts. “Human nature was the rock on which this fine ship split,” wrote observer Everett Chamberlain, “as did all other argosies bearing the banner of Owen or Fourier.”

At the same time, as with Owenite New Harmony, the Wisconsin Phalanx’s members did not simply abandon their ideals with the commune’s dissolution. Alvan Bovay, an abolitionist lawyer, member of the 1840s “Anti-rent” movement, and friend of Horace Greeley, only arrived Ceresco in 1850, just as it was beginning to come apart. Bovay had previously served as secretary of the National Reform Association (NRA), an organization that Friedrich Engels singled out in The Principles of Communism as a natural ally for would-be communist
revolutionaries in America. Disappointed to find Ceresco coming undone, Bovay nonetheless stayed in Ripon to oversee an addition to the town that included a little white schoolhouse on former phalanx land.

The Wisconsin Phalanx attracted a politically engaged migrant population, many of whom were alarmed at the looming Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which threatened to reverse the Missouri Compromise and open the door to slavery’s westward expansion. Bovay and a group of former phalanx members held a meeting in the schoolhouse shortly before the law’s passage, resolving to form a new party focused on resisting the expansion of slavery. They called it the Republican Party, leveraging connections to Horace Greeley to propagate the organization across the country.

Today, the one-room schoolhouse where this meeting took place is a small museum of GOP history. It features a minor display about the phalanx but treats the commune as a local oddity rather than a feature of the party’s formation. In fact, many people involved in the party’s genesis (“Radical Republicans” in the GOP’s early years) quickly departed from the national line, splitting to form the short-lived Liberal Republican Party in 1872. In what feels like obfuscation, the schoolhouse had been physically uprooted from its original location and moved to a new site near Ripon’s cutesy present-day downtown.

A mile away, the phalanx site is almost completely buried under a residential neighborhood. The only commune building still bearing a recognizable form is the second, smaller cooperative longhouse, which was partitioned into private apartments and stands in a state of relative disrepair. The lack of interest in preserving Ripon’s communitarian heritage is a shame, as it has far more to do with what actually transpired there than the GOP’s long trajectory does. Rummaging around the ruins of Ceresco, I pictured myself as a bizarro Dinesh D’Souza, unearthing the Republican Party’s secret utopian socialist history. Modern Republicans still evoke “the party of Lincoln” but, in Lincoln’s day, the party shared a clear intellectual linage with the Paris Commune.

If the Wisconsin Phalanx “failed,” it was not for a lack of lasting impact. After all, its vision was central to uniting the people and ideas that converged into one of America’s two enduring political parties. But that party was almost immediately lost to institutional inertia, and in the long run, unmoored to the point of unrecognizability. It is not enough to simply walk away from preexisting hierarchies, but it can also be fatal to meet power on its own terms.

*
America’s forgotten utopias carry a delicate thread of radicalism through an otherwise genocidal history of U.S. expansion, even if they falsely imagined the western frontier as a blank slate, free from the trappings of history. Their stories contradict much of the frontier’s official mythology, but it is also important to remember why they were forgotten.

The socialisms of Robert Owens; Charles Fourier; and Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon were most famously called “utopian” by Friedrich Engels to distinguish their ideas from those of his and Marx’s. “One thing is common to all three,” Engels wrote in 1880. “Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced.”

Engels credited the utopian socialists to an extent—their work had a clear influence on early Marxist thought—but argued that their idealism failed to engage the underlying dynamics of history. Owen introduced “transition measures to the complete communistic organization of society,” he wrote, but no means of delivering them. The utopians’ experiments were voluntary associations in direct competition with the old mode of production, which they were vastly incapable of out-producing. In the long run, their efforts were reabsorbed, ultimately breaking ground for the expansion of a ruthless new empire.

Back in the Loveland Meinecke lobby, I looked out at suburban Cincinnati and considered Fruit Hills founder Orson S. Murray’s two universal imperatives: inquiry and reform. He clearly failed to achieve a sustained collective harmony by fleeing to an imagined autonomous zone at the imperial fringe—history shows that radical transformation often demands messy, direct confrontation—but it was strangely comforting to remember that, even there, people had once dared to boldly inquire. Perhaps the best way to honor the memory of America’s forgotten utopians is to absorb their laudable ideals alongside the ultimate shortcomings of their methods. If nothing else, ignorant, enthusiastic idealism furnishes a foundation to iterate upon. ~

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-other-american-frontier-malmgren?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The statue of Robert Owen in Manchester

*
A HIPPIE COMMUNE LIVES ON

~ More than 30 years ago, a few hundred hippies left California to start a commune in Tennessee. They're still there, and they're not the only ones.

If you thought the communes all quietly faded away, you're not alone. But the communes didn't go up in clouds of pot smoke, according to people in the still-thriving movement.

"Contrary to the public perception of the commune movement being a failure, it was a raging success," said Lois Arkin, one of the founders of the Los Angeles Eco-Village. "When the communities stopped being preoccupied with sex and drugs, the media stopped being preoccupied with them.”

For most of the people who began communities like The Farm in Tennessee, it wasn't about the sex and drugs: It was about changing the world, and it still is.

The word "commune" may be out of date, but according to people who still live in them, the ideals behind those "get back to the earth" efforts are not, and they say they're making a difference in many different ways.

There are thousands of contemporary communes — now commonly called "intentional communities" — across the country, from rural Tennessee, Missouri and Oregon to downtown Los Angeles and New York City. They're organized on various different principles, whether concern about the environment, shared political views, religious beliefs or some other set of ideals.

"Intentional community" is a rather clinical and perhaps off-putting term for a simple idea — groups of people who have common views deciding to live together to improve the quality of life for themselves, and in many cases, to try to help those around them.

The definition is rather broad, said Laird Schaub, executive secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, an umbrella organization of some 3,000 such communities worldwide, and a longtime resident of Sandhill Farm in Rutledge, Mo.

By the FIC's definition, an intentional community is a group of people who "share property on the basis of explicit common values," which can be ecological, religious, social, political or psychological. Many of the member communities are eco-villages, focused on environmental issues, while other are followers of the co-housing movement that began in Denmark.

The only firm requirements for membership in the FIC are that groups be "upfront and honest about their views," don't advocate violence and don't hold people against their will.

"As a movement, it's not very focused," Schaub said. "It's more about people who are not satisfied with life the way most of society lives it.”

Nearly all of the communities listed on the FIC's Web site welcome visitors — even for weekend stays or longer — and many are open to new members.

People join or form intentional communities for a lot of different reasons, members say. Some come because they feel isolated in society, some because they are concerned about their children's safety or the influences on them, and others because they want to lead a more environmentally friendly or simpler lifestyle.

Though the original communes like The Farm in Tennessee were often portrayed as experiments in free love and uncontrolled drug use by kids who didn't want to deal with reality, that stereotype was not always accurate, which is proven by the fact that many of those communities are still around, decades later, members say.

Instead, the founders of The Farm always had it in mind to be an example for others, and that ideal is shared by many of the thousands of newer eco-villages and intentional communities across the country and around the world.

"The founding principle was creating something that people could emulate," said Douglas Stevenson, who was one of those hundreds who left California more than three decades ago to start The Farm.

The idea was to create a community based on nonviolence and sustainability, and to provide an example of how it can be done, he said. Some 30 years later, he said, that's still what The Farm and other similar communities are doing.

"You want to get far enough away so you can do your own thing without being influenced by society at large, but you don't want to isolate yourself," Stevenson said.

At its peak, The Farm's 1,700 acres were home to some 1,500 people. Stevenson said the population is much smaller now, but it spans the generations, with about a quarter under 30, many of whom are children of the original members.

"Most of the people who live here have lived here at least 20 years," he said. "The majority of the population has been through it all.”

For some, The Farm has been almost their whole life.

Julia Skinner, 20, was born and raised there, and she says she plans to stay.

"I grew up here, so I'm pretty much a country girl," she said. "I like how relaxed everybody is. I like it because of the community aspect of it.”

While the population may have declined from its peak, in more important ways The Farm has grown from its agrarian beginnings, Stevenson said. Now it is home to more than 20 businesses, including a publishing company, food stores, doctors and construction companies that specialize in environmentally friendly technologies.

More than a half-dozen nonprofit groups also operate out of The Farm, including The Farm Midwives, a retirement village and Peace Roots Alliance, which is working to register new voters.

Another misconception about the communes, according to Stevenson and others, is that the groups of young people who founded them weren't accepted by their neighbors when they moved into rural communities to get back to the earth.

"Once they kind of got over the initial shock of us living there, some of them became our staunchest allies," Stevenson said. "We always had a strong work ethic, so they admired that. It was also a time when a lot of young people were leaving the area, so to see a group of young people coming to the area wanting to learn farming, that made them happy.”

Some of the children Skinner met in elementary and middle school reacted with "a little bit of prejudice" that she came from The Farm, but she said that has changed.

"Now when I go back and see kids from the same school now they say, 'You're from The Farm? That's so cool,' " she said.

*
Caroline Estes of Alpha Farm near Mapleton, Ore., recalls a reaction similar to the one Stevenson said he and the others at The Farm received, when she and the other founders of the community moved there from Philadelphia more than 30 years ago.

"We were told we could do most anything we wanted to as long as we worked hard and paid our taxes. That's kind of an Oregon thing. That's what we did," she said.

Alpha Farm was founded by a group of people who believed that the country was on a path that "wasn't sustainable," Estes said. The inspiration for the social structure of the community came from the Quakers, with their values of nonviolence and the need for consensus in decision-making and a simple way of life.

Like The Farm, Alpha Farm has also reached out into the community around it, opening a bookstore and cafe in Mapleton, the closest town to the farm.

"We're very active in the community," Estes said. "One of the reasons we have a store is to have an open face to the community.”

Among the accomplishments of the farm members' activism, she said, were stopping the spraying of pesticides along roadsides in the county, closing parts of the surrounding forest to logging for eight years to protect the spotted owl, and starting a food co-op that offered lower-priced fresh produce.

For many of the communities today, the goal is to be more than a role model. Instead, they want to take an active role in the community around them.

*
The desire to create a community outside of mainstream American life doesn't send everybody running for the woods, though. For some, the problems in American cities are all the more reason to stay there.

In Los Angeles, for example, a group of people was planning an eco-village in 1992 when the riots — sparked by the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King — broke out in the neighborhood. That forced them to rethink their focus.
"We had already been planning to build a sexy new solar-powered, state-of-the-art eco-neighborhood when the fires came," said the Los Angeles Eco-Village's Arkin. "We took a deep breath and said, 'What should our priorities be?' Our goal was to transform a really unhealthy neighborhood into a healthy community.”

So along with trying to minimize their impact on the environment in terms of energy use, waste and pollutants, they tried to maximize their impact on their neighbors, by sharing the produce from their gardens and trying to encourage the people who lived around them to get to know one another and take back the neighborhood from drug dealers, prostitutes and gang members.

They tried to reach out beyond the neighborhood by periodically opening their bicycle repair shop for classes to teach people how to fix their own bikes, as part of their effort to get people to be less dependent on cars.

"We have a very strong public interest purpose, and that is to reinvent the way we live in our cities," Arkin said. ~

https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=96711&page=1


*
SHOULD YOU UNPLUG YOUR DEVICES WHEN THEY ARE NOT IN USE?

~ All things plugged in will bleed some energy. Called "standby" electricity loss because it's so often associated with electronics in standby or idle mode, it's also known as "phantom" or "vampire" electricity (for obvious reasons). Even turned off, many appliances keep drawing power. Same goes for all those chargers — whether or not a device is charging! That means the charger continues to use power even if your cell phone/portable vacuum/toothbrush/wireless drill isn't attached, let alone charging. Power supplies don't just convert energy; they consume it. Anything with a transformer — those black boxes on power cords — draws power as long as it's plugged in. And because of poor design, these boxes waste up to three-fourths of the electricity that passes through them.

The Natural Resources Defense Council says the cost of plugged-in but not used devices is about $165 per household, or $19 billion across the U.S. That amounts to about 44 million tons of carbon dioxide, or 4.6% of the country’s total residential electricity generation.
Unplug 10 of those black box transformers and you save, depending on how much you pay for electricity, $20 a year. But add up the energy used when we are not using our TVs, stereos, cable boxes (all turned "off" but really in standby mode), computers, modems, routers, printers (these networks tend to be left on all the time), rechargeable devices (cellphones, computers, MP3s, cameras, wireless tools and vacuums, toys, cordless phones) and their transformers, and you get the equivalent of a year's output of 17 power plants. The oft-cited research by Alan Meier of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds that vampire energy accounts for about 5% of all residential electricity use.

The Department of Energy sets the loss at 5% to 8% of a single family home's annual usage, which is an entire month's energy bill. That's a national average; take a walk through your home and count the number of devices you have plugged in (don't forget the washing machine) and you may find that you're spending 25% of your energy bill to feed vampires.

Use power strips: Instead of unplugging things one at a time, make the job easier with power strips. You can then switch off or unplug the strip to turn all the devices off at once — really, truly, actually off. There are all kinds of "smart" power strips on the market that make the task ever easier: strips with motion sensors (leave the house/office and it'll shut off all devices automatically); strips that have a few "always on" sockets, with the rest turned off as you please; and power strips that allow a master device to control the power use of its paraphernalia (turn on/off your computer or TV or stereo, and the peripherals are turned on/off too). In the meantime, I'm going to put my surge protectors on timers because, well, I don’t always remember to switch them off. OK, that's almost never remember, and at least this way they'll be off when I'm most likely to be sleeping.

Your screen will be fine; save energy instead: Screen savers don't save energy. If you won't be using your computer and don't want to shut it down (but why?), turn off your monitor. I've read that we spend as much as $100 a year running screen savers. Along the same lines, you can reduce the energy consumption of your TVs and computers by dimming the screen: Reduce the brightness by half, and you can cut energy use by 30%.

Standby is better than on: Whether you consider vampires a threat or not, it's when things are turned on that they're consuming the most power, so turn them off even if you don't unplug!

https://www.treehugger.com/should-i-unplug-my-appliances-and-if-so-will-i-save-money-4864312

*
A UK CITIZEN WHO LIVED IN BOTH COUNTRIES COMPARES US AND UK

~ To an observer, many Americans seem to need to be constantly reassured they live in the best (and “freeist”) country in the world. “Land of the free, home of the brave”. To suggest to some that perhaps they do not, would undermine the very foundations of their belief system. It is repeated ad nauseum. In any other country it would be called indoctrination. It starts in the school system. Waving and saluting flags, sing the anthem at every opportunity (clutching hearts to add emotion), and “God Bless America” is repeated so often its almost a plea. No speech can end without this addition. Even the President and all his cabinet feel the need to always wear a little flag to prove how patriotic they are. It’s a bit stalinist! Hollywood turns out countless versions of the same theme. To a non-American it gets a bit tiring. It also often gets hijacked by an unpleasant fringe of society. The chant “USA USA” is often an example.The British, and almost all other democratic countries, don't need to bother with all that. They just know how lucky they are and don't require constant reassurance. They don't feel a need to prove how patriotic they are, or call on God for affirmation. I think this reflects a country with a much longer history and maturity.

America is a much more religious country than the UK. I was shocked at how many people attend church (or other religious institution) every week. Of course there is nothing at all wrong with that, but the mixing of religion and politics and the number of people who blindly follow the various doctrines is shocking to a Brit. I was taken aback at how often God was introduced into the conversation on some of my travels (even on a Marine base!). 

In such an advanced country it is amazing to an outsider how often faith trumps logic in so many people’s thinking. Try being a politician and not claiming to be a “believer” (better still - born again) in the USA — good luck! Even Trump had to pretend (he had to admit Jesus was more important than him - that must have hurt!). Christian and other religious fundamentalism is common and dangerous when mixed with politics - which it commonly is in the US. Texas is the latest example. Fake preachers and down right crooks getting rich on religion thrive, as do conspiracy theorists. QAnon being one of the most dangerous. They seem so obviously fake and ridiculous to us Brits but they get away with it in the US and have a frightening following right up to senior representative level.

The healthcare sucks in America if you are poor or have the wrong insurance, are unemployed, or are sick too long. Incidentally, and I stress, it is really great if none of these apply to you. I was fortunate and enjoyed the best of it and was impressed. Paying medical bills is one of the most common causes of bankruptcy. Being financially ruined just for being sick? That is sick! Doctors checking you have the means to pay before they will treat you? That is just plain wrong. The fact that huge numbers of Americans think this is better than “socialized medicine” (without any knowledge of it, or any objection to equally socialized US institutions like the FBI, National Park Service or Coast Guard as just random examples) points to an “I’m all right Jack” society. The British system is not perfect but it cares about everyone if they're sick, not whether they can pay. There is also a world class private system if that rocks your boat). It is hugely reassuring knowing it’s there for you, no questions asked. It shows a more compassionate country.

The rich are richer in the US and there are more of them, but the poor are way poorer and swathes of America resemble a third world country. It shocks us foreigners when we see it. We really do not expect it. You just don't get that in the UK. Yes there are poor, and yes there are depressed areas, but not close to some of the urban and rural poor found in large areas of the US. It is are not especially generous, but the safety net for the really needy is kinder in the UK.

The right to ramble. There are stunning National and State Parks in the USA but outside of these it is often difficult to just go for a country hike or walk without hitting a “Do Not Tresspass” sign, often reinforced with a threatening gun logo. In the UK our laws and the literally tens of thousands of miles of footpaths and bridleways means that access to the land is far less restricted and, within reason, we can walk or hike virtually anywhere as long as we do no harm or damage. 

The unbelievable levels of gun ownership in the US and general crime statistics cannot be ignored. More people are murdered annually in just one US city each year than the entire UK.

Not because the British are any less prone to crime or violence, we are no better as individuals. Its mainly down to the ready availability of guns. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”. A common refrain. Yes but give people ready access to guns and people get killed. Availability in the UK? Very difficult. People shot? Virtually zero (as at April 2022 not one death by gun in London since October 2021). 

Military grade assaults weapons? Crazy. A daily US average of 54 gun deaths. Each one a life wasted. That’s deaths. Woundings run at about 3 times that figure. Why? I’ve seen people walking around the stores in some states proudly showing their hand guns, as if they are John Wayne. Come on! Guns and ammunition on sale openly as if it was an everyday item? Insane. This is an aspect of American life I simply could not get used to. It’s shocking. Private gun ownership somehow equates to freedom? That is not freedom. That’s fear.

I didn’t feel one bit free in the thought that the guy in the car next to mine probably had a gun in the glove compartment. A large section of US society thinks the simple answer is to have a bigger gun in your own glove compartment. Sick. Armed guards everywhere from banks to schools, driven by fear. There is something morally and ethically wrong with a country when even the massacre of 6 and 7 year old school children ultimately fails to move politicians enough to do something meaningful. I know weapons. I have used them. I have seen what modern weapons do to a person and it’s not like the movies. It lives with you for the rest of your life. This is a country that has never really matured.

We think our government institutions are bad in the UK. Many are good in comparison with their US counterparts. Try dealing with the IRS or Immigration and you'll know what I mean. The IRS harassed me to complete a US tax return for years after I returned to the UK despite the fact that I had only ever been an employee, had paid my US taxes in full, left the country, become a UK tax payer again and planned no return. In the end it required a letter from my UK lawyer to get them off my back. Dealing with the IRS is so stressful for US citizens that huge numbers prefer to pay someone to do it for them.

Police. In the UK the police are, on average, far better trained, far fitter and don't shoot you! I was staggered to have a gun pointed at me for a minor traffic violation! That would never, ever, happen in the UK. Indeed, if it ever did, the cop concerned would be immediately suspended pending a full investigation of the justification and if there was none, it’s a firing offense (pun intended). Many US police are poorly trained paramilitaries and shoot a hell of a lot of their own citizens every year. If a UK cop is trusted with a weapon, he or she has been seriously vetted and trained. UK police and policing wins every day.

Food and diet. Obesity. Americans love their food but on a world scale it is actually pretty bad. Quantity wins over quality and sugar and other additives are added to food at levels now banned in Europe. Even an unacceptable proportion of police are fat in America. Perhaps that's why they shoot - they can't run. The number of seriously overweight citizens shocks Europeans. To be fair our food was pretty bad decades ago but we have improved up to world standard. The US, if anything, has sadly got worse. Unless of course you want to live on steak. burger and pancakes and die young, then its destination of choice! Of course there are plenty of places that still serve good or even great food, but by comparison to Europe you have to go really looking for it, and sadly most don't bother.

Extremist politics and division. It saddens me that the US has become a divided nation and it’s getting worse. You either agree with me or you are stupid or bad has increasingly taken over from reasoned debate and compromise. The politicization of the Supreme Court in a democratic country shocks us. Judges chosen for their political views? Presidents pardoning convicted criminals because they are politically well connected? In advanced countries, law is surely separate and above politics? The prevalence of weapons and irresponsible leadership make this a serious worry. The storming of the Capitol could have turned into a massacre and is evidence of how bad things have become.

I will simply mention work/life balance. Europe/UK wins.

Finally I want to stress I have highlighted some decisive points based on my experience. My experience may be different from others. I am answering the specific question. The US is still a great country, I fully accept that there are many areas of the country where some of these observations may not apply, its a big country! I can only use my personal experience. I loved my time there, met some great people, learned a lot and saw much to admire. 

I have served with Americans, there was a lot of mutual respect, they were good men and women and I was happy when they had my back. More than a few felt that they were doing God’s business which mystified, and slightly worried, my British military comrades but it did not affect their professionalism. I could certainly create a list of negative points for most countries I’ve spent time in, including the UK. But, at a key point in my life, I had to make the choice and I knew, without doubt, where I wanted to spend the rest of my life and raise my kids. ~ Chris, Quora

*
WHAT’S THE POINT OF PRIMARY CARE?

“I still don’t really understand what’s going on with the health system, and I’ve been here nearly five years,” says Alistair, a sports journalist who lives and works in New York City. An American citizen by parentage, but brought up in England, he says he’s only now coming to grips with the risky business of insurance. “In Britain you don’t need to understand it — you just go to a doctor and they treat you and then you go home. But here there’s co-pays, deductibles and all these words. It’s just not nice to have that extra stress when you’re ill.”

For someone who had never once had to pay for treatment, nor so much as glance at a medical bill or insurance form until he was in his 30s, Alistair’s experiences in American doctors’ offices have so far made him wary of physicians’ motives. “You’re always suspicious about over-treatment here,” he sighs. When he saw a dermatologist about a worrying mole, for example, it was recommended he undergo a procedure to have it surgically removed. But it wasn’t until afterwards that his friend, a qualified doctor from Australia (which currently holds the dubious title of the worldwide home of melanoma), told him: “That’s bullshit, in Australia they’d have scraped it off. They’ve completely over-treated you there so they could charge you.”

Mike, a content editor in San Francisco — who tells me he’s currently on the hook for $250 from a routine visit to his doctor, which was subsequently contested by his insurers in a way that’s proving far too baffling to challenge — can compare care in the other direction, having lived in the U.K. for two years as a student. Overall, he says he prefers the security and simplicity of Britain’s state-funded, single-payer National Health Service. But he nevertheless sees “occasional perks in the U.S. system, which would mainly be the availability of specialists. I like that it’s pretty easy to shift from a primary care person to a specialist in any situation.” (In the U.K., this isn’t always a straightforward process: Without first getting a referral from a primary care doctor, universally known as a “G.P.” (for general practitioner), it’s usually impossible to see a specialist of any sort.)

And he kind of likes the fact that in the U.S., over-treating and over-referring for minor ailments seems widespread among primary care practices. “In the U.S., they probably err on the side of more tests because there’s a financial incentive for it,” he says. “But I’m okay with that, because I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. So I’d rather get tests for everything, to be 100 percent sure.” Back in the U.K., by contrast, he’d worry that under-treatment was the norm. Often the advice would be, “Take two Nurofen [Advil] and don’t worry about it,” he recalls, “when my dad, who’s a doctor in the U.S. — who obviously doesn’t have a financial incentive — would say, ‘You need to get this checked out.’”

When you next show up at your doctor’s office, then, there are hidden hazards to fall foul of beyond any unexpected charges, whichever side of the Atlantic you’re on. As Mike puts it, “It seems like there are incentives that aren’t necessarily in the patients’ interests in both directions: To save costs in the U.K., and an incentive to spend more in the U.S.”

Mary: FEAR IS THE DRIVING FORCE

One of the most telling ideas on the discussion of U.S. culture is that it is not mature, that many facets seem like things found in small children or adolescents. The whole resistance to directions and orders (re "mandates") of any kind...I can hear the toddler's whine, "you're not the boss of me," and "you can't make me." Followed by often violent tantrums. The whole mythology of the Wild West, the gunslinger heroes, the lone individual "pioneer " carving out his place in the wilderness (an inconveniently already inhabited wilderness), the fierce insistence that freedom means freedom to do, say, be, whatever I want no matter who else might be around...all more part of an adolescent's vision and behavior than an adult's.

I think the lack of, one might even say refusal of critical thought, is part of the same pathology. Ignorance is relished and educated thought rejected as elitist. There is a severe provincialism and deliberate proud myopia about the world outside the U.S...a jealously guarded ignorance of history, geography and the basic facts of the Constitution and the foundation of the country...the country they so erroneously insist is a Christian Nation.

And we may not survive this adolescent crisis as a democracy. That is what's at stake here, and the signs aren't good.

The comparison of life in the U.S. with life in the U.K hits home with noting how much fear there is driving behaviors here, fear and violence, fear of violence, the permeation of deadly weapons and deadly force literally at every level and in every space of our lives. Nowhere is safe. Not school, or church or synagogue, not street, or home, gym or spa, restaurant or theater. In Ukraine the threat is bomb, missile, tank and gun, the machinery of war. Here it is the random gunman, who might look like anyone, who might be your neighbor, or a stranger, an army of one, unknown, sudden, an unexpected executioner who comes without warning, a catastrophe blind as a tornado. Fear. I might even say Terror. Uniquely American.

*
*
WALLACE STEVENS ON THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE CLASSICAL GODS

~ “To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as though they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing . . . What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever uttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed . . .

Thinking about the end of the gods creates singular attitudes in theming of the thinker. One attitude is that the gods of classical mythology were merely esthetic projections. They were not objects of belief. They were expressions of delight . . . It is one of the normal activities of humanity, in the solitude of reality and in the unworthy treatment of solitude, to create companions, who, if not superficially explicative, are, at least, assumed to be full of the secret of things . . . However all that may be, the celestial atmosphere of these deities, their ultimate remote celestial residences, are not matters of chance. Their fundamental glory is the fundamental glory of men and women, who being in need of it create it, elevate it, without too much searching of its identity. The people, not the priests, made the gods.” (~ quoted by Leon Surette in The Modern Dilemma)

 

Apollo as the Sun

*

WHAT MAKES A CHURCH TOXIC?

~ When I discuss my recent memoir, Where the Light Fell, often I use the phrase toxic church to describe the extreme form of Southern fundamentalism I grew up under. I joke that I’ve been “in recovery,” a process of detoxing, ever since.

“Tell me,” asked one podcast interviewer, “What makes a church toxic?” Three characteristics immediately came to mind.

FEAR

Memories of church from my youth summon up feelings of fear and shame. It was hard to hear the gospel as good news when most sermons centered on sin and hell. Over the decades, churches have played on many fears: a Catholic president (JFK), Armageddon, communism, the Great Tribulation, Y2K, AIDS, secular humanism, homosexuals, socialism, the New World Order, COVID-19. Some of these fears have proved legitimate, but others border on conspiracy theories.

“Perfect love drives out fear,” says 1 John 4:18. A healthy church does not use scare tactics to manipulate emotions. Nor does it deny that we will face frightening situations. Rather, it directs fearful people toward a trustworthy God. The Psalms and the Prophets demonstrate the pattern clearly: again and again, a people facing catastrophe are reminded of a God who is not anxious. “Be still and know that I am God,” Psalm 46 advises, even when nations are in uproar and mountains are quaking.

Yes, we should battle injustice and respond to tragedy, but from a position of calm compassion. The world is still reeling from a pandemic that has affected nearly everyone on the planet. I have talked to pastors who describe congregations torn apart by anger and fear over vaccines and masks. Is this the best we can do in representing the One whom the apostle Paul describes as “the God of all comfort, the Father of compassion”?

EXCLUSION   

My boyhood church in Atlanta stationed deacons at the door to turn away as “troublemakers” any people of color who tried to attend. Thank God, our society has moved beyond that kind of overt, legalized racism—and yet bias persists in other forms.

The apostle Paul, once a Pharisee who would not deign to touch a woman, slave, or Gentile, laid down this firm principle after his conversion: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In one fell sweep, he dismantled the walls separating race, class, and gender. Nonetheless, the church has never stopped struggling with these very issues.

“If you want to grow in love, the way to do it is not likely going to be by attending more Bible studies or prayer meetings; it will happen by getting close to people who are not like you,” writes the Canadian pastor Lee Beach. Grace gets tested when we find ourselves confronted with people who are different from us. Do we welcome them? I think of the people attracted to—and received by—Jesus: “heretics” (Samaritan women), foreigners (a Roman officer), outcasts (prostitutes, tax collectors, the disabled, those with leprosy).

I know of no churches who would actively exclude someone of a different race or social class, but I know many churches that just “happen” to comprise people of the same class, race, and political persuasion. What kind of welcome would a homeless person or immigrant receive in such a congregation? Perhaps in reaction to my racist upbringing, now when I walk into a new church, the more its members resemble each other, and resemble me, the more uncomfortable I feel.

RIGIDITY

Church rigidity can take many forms. In extreme cases, an authoritarian pastor can create a near-cultic atmosphere. A series of popular podcasts produced by Christianity Today traces the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, which Mark Driscoll led to explosive growth, only to see it implode under his abusive style. A psychologist friend of mine who has studied pastors estimates that 80 percent of them have strong narcissistic tendencies. Why not? We elevate them, literally, on platforms, and assign them the lofty task of telling us what to believe and how to behave.

All too often, narcissistic leaders focus on minor points of doctrine and miss the main message, of God’s boundless love for estranged human beings. John’s gospel describes Jesus as “full of grace and truth.” Rigid churches tilt heavily toward the “truth” side of that balance scale, often piling on rules of behavior that the Bible never mentions.

Once again, the apostle Paul shows a more flexible style. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” he declared to the Galatians, vehemently opposing those who insisted that Jesus-followers undergo the Jewish practice of circumcision. Yet he voluntarily took a strict ritual vow (Acts 18, 21) in order to identify with Jewish believers. Similarly, depending on the spiritual maturity of the church he was addressing, he modified his counsel on such issues as pagan holidays and eating meat that had been offered to idols.

Paul summarized his approach: “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.” He knew which theological and ethical issues to emphasize and which ones to minimize. He viewed rigidity over minor disagreements as a serious threat to church unity. The existence of some 54,000 denominations in the world indicates that not everyone has followed Paul’s style.

A HEALTHY CHURCH

In the last full night with his disciples, Jesus set out a formula for healthy church leadership (John 13-17). First, he got up from the meal and washed their feet, much to their discomfort. He demonstrated that good leaders don’t cling to privilege narcissistically. Quite the opposite: they serve the very ones they lead.

Next, Jesus gave a paramount command that overcomes exclusion: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Finally, he prayed for unity—not only for the disciples but for everyone in history who would follow him. Nothing would bear a more powerful witness to his message. In his prayer, Jesus said, “Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

Service, love, unity—Jesus named these as primary marks of his followers. Have you ever asked a stranger, “When I say the word Christian or evangelical, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?” I have, and not once, not once, have I heard anyone answer with one of those three words.

A few times I have visited a megachurch in a tiered auditorium. As I look at the spotlighted stage below, I feel as if I’m at an NBA game, with 10,000 spectators cheering ten professionals on the court. It strikes me, that’s the opposite of a biblical view of church. Worshipers gather together not as spectators to be entertained, but as active participants. 

The real audience sits outside, waiting to see if we truly represent Jesus through our acts of service, love, and unity.

Toxins work their way into the church seemingly without effort. A healthy church will require the vigilance of all its members. ~ Philip Yancey

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/evangelicalpulpit/2021/10/what-makes-a-church-toxic/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&fbclid=IwAR0qAzLAot-GaXLMOMw24JHQawsN7OUcGQD0_SlFv_tQZZE-6hl9R9iytlQ

Oriana:

For me it was the fear the hell, and being indoctrinated with the image of being of weak-minded, sin-prone being who deserves hell fire for eternity except for the redemptive human sacrifice of Jesus to a wrathful god. Suffering was a good thing — “God sends suffering to those he loves.” Suffering here on earth would shorten the suffering in Purgatory; there were also indulgences, given you some time off from the purgatory in you did something specific, like praying the novena for the required nine days (this is more difficult than it sounds).

For me, the fear of hell was by far the worst part of being a Catholic.

*



For me this is personal because I was raised in part by my maternal grandmother who was an Auschwitz survivor. I was forced to conclude that if god allowed Auschwitz, god would allow anything.

*

*
POSTOPERATIVE COGNITIVE DYSFUNTION; SURGERIES AFFECT THE BRAIN

~ In 2004, Mario Cibelli was preparing a 75-year-old patient for a big cardiac operation when the patient’s daughter asked for a quick word. “She explained to me how worried she was about the surgery,” says Cibelli, a consultant in anesthesia and intensive care at the University Hospitals Birmingham. “I said: ‘Look, everybody’s worried about heart surgery, it comes with risks, but normally people benefit from it.’ And then she told me that her father had undergone a cardiac procedure two years before and he had changed dramatically.”

Cibelli listened as the woman described how her father, a former physics professor, had shown signs of significant cognitive decline after the initial operation. Once a keen chess player, he was now unable to play the game and struggled to even do basic crosswords.

At the moment, estimates suggest that the overall incidence of POCD in older patients can be as high as 50-80% at discharge, 20-50% at six weeks and 10-30% at six months post-surgery. Given that the NHS carries out about 5.1m operations every year, a disproportionate number of which are in the over-65s, Cibelli says that there are a considerable number of patients being left with lasting impairment.

In recent years, POCD has caught the attention of Alzheimer’s researchers, intrigued to see whether it can accelerate decline towards dementia in some cases. Jenny Barnett, chief executive of Monument Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based biotech startup developing new therapies in neurology, says that people who already have underlying impairments in memory and attention skills are particularly vulnerable to POCD and it needs to be considered as a risk factor before significant surgeries.

“Many of us have had the experience of granny breaking her hip, goes into hospital and then by the time she comes out, she isn’t the same cognitively and isn’t able to live independently any more,” says Barnett. “I think that’s something that resonates with a lot of people.”

But exactly what causes POCD remains something of a mystery. Some point the finger at anesthetics – certain animal studies have found that inhalation anesthetics, the most commonly used form of general anesthesia, can cause degradation of the cholinergic system in the brain, which is involved in learning and memory – but it has proven hard to study this in humans.

Instead, many scientists are pinpointing the possibility that these symptoms arise through the body’s reaction to surgery itself. Big operations unleash a firestorm of inflammation in response to the acute tissue damage that can cross the blood-brain barrier. Because the brain contains the largest density of inflammatory receptors in the body, it is especially vulnerable to the effects of inflammation, which can damage sensitive regions. Some brain-imaging scans have found that the hippocampus – a complex and vulnerable structure that plays a key role in memory – has a reduced volume in patients with POCD.

All this emerging evidence could lead to changes in medical practice. Research is already taking place into ways of identifying at-risk patients before operations, with the idea of potentially using a regional rather than a general anesthetic.

*

But it is not only older, frailer patients who are most at risk of POCD. The same can be said for the very young, in a markedly different way.

As a pediatric anesthetist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, David Warner had been attempting to understand the possible causes of a wide range of behavioral issues in children. He began to wonder whether surgery and anesthesia could affect the fragile brains of young children.

“I go into hospital in the morning and I take care of kids during surgery, and they wake up and they go home at night, and they seem to be fine,” he says. “So for a long time, we just assumed that anesthesia was very transient, so when it wears off, it’s gone. That’s probably not true.”

The reason why Warner became concerned about anesthetics is because in studies of monkeys, anesthesia exposure in infancy has led to altered behaviors such as heightened emotional reactivity to threats, and impaired learning and memory formation. However it is difficult to translate these changes to humans, in whom child development is far more complex than in our closest relatives.

In 2018, Warner decided to put his theories to the test. He carried out a study on 1,000 children in Minnesota and compared three groups: children who had not been exposed to anesthesia before the age of three; children who had a single exposure; and children who had multiple exposures.

“Basically, we found that kids who had multiple exposures to anesthesia had these problems with their fine motor skills and increased reports of behavioral problems,” he says.

Other investigations have also found an association between multiple exposures to anesthetics before the age of three and cognitive, memory, listening comprehension, and language deficits. Further studies have found correlations between multiple exposures to anesthetics and children later being given a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

But so far it has been hard for scientists to prove a direct causative relationship between anesthetics and damage to the developing brain. In 2019, a study in the Lancet pointed out that there could be alternative explanations. Children who require multiple operations at a young age could already be predisposed to neurodevelopmental problems because of the injuries or illnesses they are suffering from: the doses of anesthetics may be merely incidental.

Right now, we do not know, but later this year, Warner will be carrying out brain-imaging scans on the same children to see whether structural changes in the brain related to anesthesia can be linked with the onset of behavioral issues.

“We have some preliminary evidence that there’s something different in a particular part of the brain in the kids who had multiple anesthetic exposures,” he says. “That’s just our initial look at this, but I suspect that there’s going to be something there.”

*
At the other end of the age spectrum, increasing amounts of attention are being devoted towards ways of either preparing older patients for surgeries to make them more cognitively resilient, or treating POCD in the aftermath.

In the early 1990s, the Danish surgeon Henrik Kehlet created a program known as ERAS (enhanced recovery after surgery) to study ways of maximizing postoperative recovery. Some of the latest research suggests that a “prehabilitation” program consisting of simple muscle exercises, nutritional supplements and education to stimulate the mind over a period of six to eight weeks before big operations can have a protective effect.

Monument Therapeutics has reformulated a generic anti-inflammatory drug so that it can access the brain and potentially dampen down some of the brain inflammation that may be occurring post-surgery. It is preparing to launch a trial, initially in healthy volunteers, and if that proves successful, it will look to target POCD patients in the coming years.

But scientists are also searching for ways of pinpointing the patients most at-risk of developing POCD so that they can be specifically targeted with some of these interventions. Studies in cardiac patients have found that people with low levels of antibodies against bacterial endotoxins are particularly at risk of POCD, suggesting that infection could also play a role in these symptoms. Monument Therapeutics has also identified a biomarker that it claims can predict POCD with 90% accuracy.

“In future, we want to be able to measure people’s cognitive function before they go in for surgery, to get a measure of how vulnerable or resilient their brain is, and if they’re vulnerable, have a way to treat that,” says Barnett.

Time will tell whether these approaches can help reduce the incidence of postoperative cognitive problems in the very young and the very old. But one thing is now clear, even when surgery is over, the risks are far from over.

“We’ve got to stop thinking that when the anesthetic wears off, everything’s fine,” says Warner. “Whether it’s the anesthesia, the trauma of surgery, or the other effects of acute illness, people’s brains have a hard time around operations.” ~

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/24/the-hidden-long-term-risks-of-surgery-it-give-peoples-brains-a-hard-time?utm_source=pocket-newtab

*
IMMUNOSUPPRESSANTS SEEM TO LOWER THE RISK OF PARKINSON’S

~ The researchers found that people with ulcerative colitis and some other autoimmune disorders were at lower risk of developing Parkinson’s than the general population.

Because the immune system disorders linked with a reduced risk are associated with a variety of causes and symptoms, it was difficult for the authors to detect a pattern that might indicate a common mechanism of action between the conditions and Parkinson’s risk.

Eventually, the researchers found a common denominator: immunosuppressant drugs were used to treat many of these conditions.

To investigate further, the team analyzed Medicare prescription data from 48,295 Parkinson’s patients and 52,324 people who had not been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

They found that people prescribed immunosuppressants were less likely to develop Parkinson’s than people who took no immunosuppressants.

The results showed that people who took corticosteroids were 20 percent less likely to develop Parkinson’s, and people taking another type of immunosuppressant, called inosine monophosphate dehydrogenase (IMDH), were approximately one-third less likely to develop Parkinson’s.

To test the link between immunosuppressants and reduced risk of Parkinson’s, the researchers ran an analysis of specific autoimmune conditions individually, but the results remained the same. This indicates that the reduced risk was linked with the immunosuppressant therapies rather than the autoimmune disorders.

“One group of drugs, in particular, looks really promising, and warrants further investigation to determine whether it can slow disease progression,” says senior author Brad Racette.

“What we really need is a drug for people who are newly diagnosed, to prevent the disease from worsening,” Racette says. “It’s a reasonable assumption that if a drug reduces the risk of getting Parkinson’s, it also will slow disease progression, and we’re exploring that now.”

Because of the relatively high number of side effects linked with corticosteroids, Racette’s team is conducting a proof-of-concept study to establish whether IMDH inhibitors could fulfill this role.

“It’s too early to be thinking about clinical trials to see whether it modifies the disease,” says Racette, “but the potential is intriguing.” ~

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322010

Oriana:

There is a safe immunosuppressant which gets simply disregarded: PROGESTERONE. It’s the safest hormone there is. It is allowed for use in pregnant women (in fact progesterone is critical for the continuation of pregnancy). It has been found effective against Covid, probably due to its anti-inflammatory properties. 

I mean of course the bio-identical hormone, not a chemical perversion like Provera. Bio-identical progesterone is easily manufactured and relatively inexpensive. It’s a natural substance and cannot be patented.  And that’s the end of Big Pharma’s interest. 

Testosterone is also an excellent immunosuppressant, but the problem of possible abuse has made it taboo. Progesterone can be used by both men and women, but it takes a very progressive MD to get a prescription. I recommend the cream version: progesterone has a very good dermal absorption (no, I don’t mean the patch, but cream or gel). 

(As a side-note, dermal progesterone is a miracle drug for acne and/or dandruff.)

*
BEING OVERWEIGHT INCREASES RISK OF ENDOMETRIAL CANCER

~ Being overweight substantially increases the risk of developing womb cancer, research suggests.

If a 5ft 5in (1.65m) woman is two stone (12.7kg, or 28 lbs) above a healthy weight, her risk is nearly doubled, for example.

The Cancer Research UK (CRUK)-funded research involved 120,000 women in the UK, US and five other countries.

The charity says keeping a healthy weight can cut the risk of 13 different cancers. Genes and hormones may be other risk factors.

FASTING INSULIN AND TESTOSTERONE

One theory is fat cells can send out signals telling other cells to divide more often, which can lead to cancer.

The growth of some breast cancers is linked to the female hormone estrogen, which fat cells also produce, for example.

The CRUK study, led by a team at the University of Bristol and published in BMC Medicine, is one of the largest into the link between fat and womb cancer.

It looked at the effect of lifelong weight gain and uncovered two hormones, fasting insulin and testosterone, linked with obesity and womb cancer.

The researchers hope scientists could in future use drugs to regulate levels of those hormones in people at risk of developing the cancer.

Lead investigator Dr Emma Hazelwood said: "This study is an interesting first step into how genetic analyses could be used to uncover exactly how obesity causes cancer and what can be done to tackle it.”

CRUK health information head Dr Julie Sharp said: "Studies like this bolster the fact that being overweight or obese is the second biggest cause of cancer in the UK and can help us start to pinpoint why.

"This will play a pivotal role in uncovering how to prevent and treat cancer in the future".

One in 36 UK women develops womb cancer and one in four people diagnosed is pre-menopausal.

The most common symptom is abnormal vaginal bleeding.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61148579

Oriana:

This is concerning, considering that 66% of American women are overweight or obese. Abdominal obesity is of special concern (the apple, not the pear-type distribution of fat).

High levels of insulin and testosterone are also associated with breast cancer. Those are found mainly in androgenic women, the kind who gain fat the way men do, forming the infamous potbelly. Potbellies are not infrequent in postmenopausal women since they no longer have sufficient female hormones to protect them. 

As for hormonal protection against endometrial cancer, we are back to progesterone, which stops the growth of endometrial tissue.


ending on beauty:

ADAM’S  COMPLAINT

Some people,
no matter what you give them,
still want the moon.

The bread,
the salt,
white meat and dark,
still hungry.

The marriage bed
and the cradle,
still empty arms.

You give them land,
their own earth under their feet,
still they take to the roads.

And water: dig them the deepest well,
still it’s not deep enough
to drink the moon from.

~ Denise Levertov