*
EXILE: FOR ILYA KAMINSKY
The city of your childhood rises between steppe and sea, wheat and light,
white with the dust of cockleshells, stargazers, and bones of pipefish,
city of limestone soft enough to cut with a hatchet, where the sea
unfurls and acacias brought by Greeks on their ships
turn white in summer. So yes, you remember, this is the city you lost,
city of smugglers and violinists, chess players and monkeys,
an opera house, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir
where two things were esteemed: literature and ships, poetry and the sea.
If you return now, it will not be as a being visible to others, and when
you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if
someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.
If you return, your father will be alive to prepare for you
his mint-cucumber soup or give you the little sweet called bird’s milk,
and after hours of looking with him for his sandals lost near the sea,
you visit again together the amusement park where
your ancestors are buried and then go home to the apartment house
built by German prisoners of war, to whom your father gave bread,
which you remember surprised you. You take the tram to a stop
where it is no longer possible to get off, and he walks
with you until he vanishes, still holding in his own your invisible hand.
~ Carolyn Forché
https://lithub.com/exile-for-ilya-kaminsky/?fbclid=IwAR2l57j9fIPHpXRV4s817rAND9RKin2BWFwXghxt-aKmAJikDZf1xDoWVVg
Nevytsky Castle ruins in Zakarpattia, Ukraine (my thanks to Kerry for the link)
*
THE SOLITUDE OF POWER: “AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH” BY GARCIA MARQUEZ
~ García Márquez spent ten years researching dictatorships from Pinilla to Trujillo and from Franco to Perón – and then tried to forget everything he had heard and read to invent this story of a self-styled "General of the Universe". The novel opens with the discovery of the tyrant dead on the floor of the presidential palace, "older than all old men and all old animals on land or sea", before exploring moral decay and political paralysis in what the author called a "poem on the solitude of power”. ~ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/18/gabriel-garcia-marquez-must-reads\
~ The nameless dictator — known only as the Patriarch or the General to his subjects in an equally nameless Caribbean country — is one of the great grotesques of modern literature. The novel itself stands out as a scathing critique both of the ravages of power and the ruthlessness of capitalism. Complex, confusing, and magnificent, its labyrinthian sentences mimic the paranoid labyrinth that is the dictator's diseased mind; Gabo called it "a poem on the solitude of power.”
The dictator starts life as an unschooled soldier, but one with an "extraordinary instinct for power." The British, who recognize a colonial puppet when they see one, help put him on the throne, and the Americans keep him there. Altogether monstrous, with enormous elephantine feet, smooth girlish hands, and an enlarged testicle that he softly caresses, the only person he loves apart from himself is his mother. Otherwise, he rapes his concubines, pursues a beauty queen whom he never wins, changes the clocks and the seasons, orders 2000 children to be deported in boxcars and then blown up with dynamite, and serves up an enemy on a silver platter "stuffed with pine nuts and aromatic herbs.”
In short, his 200-year reign is a prolonged and sanguinary opera buffa marked by slaughter, torture, and ultimately bankruptcy. It is the latter which leads to the sale of the sea: The American ambassador comes calling to collect the ballooning debt, and bluntly tells him "either the marines land or we take the sea, there's no other way, your excellency.”
How can anyone buy a sea, much less transport it to Arizona? The dictator thinks it impossible, but he hasn't bargained on America's dazzling technological wizardry. The gringo engineers show up "with gigantic suction dredges" and get to work, resulting in one of the most hauntingly beautiful passages in the novel:
.. so they took away the Caribbean in April, Ambassador Ewing's nautical engineers carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons …
Good coward that he is, the anguished General hopes the people will rise up to drive the Americans away, but the people know better. They have protested before and been mowed down by the General's guns, so they stay put at home. Plus, after enduring two centuries of the dictator's depredations, the sale of the sea is just one more in a long list of insanities.
The gringos take not just the salty water but "the flora and fauna belonging to said waters, its system of winds, the inconstancy of its millibars, everything." They leave behind "only the desert plain of harsh lunar dust" and — in a nice comic touch — the lighthouse, which flashes away uselessly like a "fantastic starlike firefly," driving the dictator mad. Equally comic is the wind machine that one ambassador presents him with to make up for the lack of sea breeze — a realistic detail characteristic of García Márquez's writing. As the dictator walks through his gloomy mansion, he is cooled by "the cross currents of the tardy trade winds and the false mistrals from the wind machine that Ambassador Eberhart had given him so that he would not think so much about that bad business with the sea.”
García Marquez wrote the novel in Barcelona during the last throes of General Franco's rule, but Franco wasn't really the role model. For that, he foraged closer home, and was spoiled for choice. His monster is a glorious mythical composite of all the monsters who have ruled different parts of Latin America. Like his nonfictional predecessors, he has total control of the media, and lives in a world of news that is as obsequious as it is fake. He crowns himself "general of the universe," and ultimately believes that he is — not the Chosen One — but God himself, and names his son Emmanuel.
Convinced that "he alone was the nation," his rotting body becomes an embodiment of the body politic. When it begins to exude a salty fluid and sprout crustaceans and polyps, he is convinced that the sea is returning. "Seas are like cats ... they always come home," he tells an American named Johnson, who is unfazed by his optimism.
When the dictator finally dies, the wind machine lies abandoned in the corner. The only breeze that wafts out of the palace is the one fanned by the flapping of vultures that feed on his corpse. It is a warm, foul scent, but for a country awaking from the "lethargy of centuries" it is the scent of freedom.
The sale of the sea — and all its teeming flora and fauna — will endure as a brilliant satire not just of a ruler drunk on power but, equally, of American capitalism run amok. Both maladies, it would seem, are alive and well. ~
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/24/753852881/buying-greenland-thats-nothing-to-gabriel-garc-a-m-rquez
~ Paranoia competes with power at every turn. The patriarch regularly consults a fortune-teller, but his paranoia is never explored as a psychological matter. In fact, he is never given an interior life, as he would have to be given in a realistic novel, so there is no need to look for psychological explanations. The patriarch is not an individual but rather an archetype, a myth, a freestanding hyperbole. We are told that his “baggy linen suit” looks “as if there were nobody inside.” Exactly. There is no person or personality, only air.
Beyond the roasted general and other horrors, the novel’s hallucinatory atmosphere rises from sentences that continue for pages with little or no punctuation (the opposite of Twitter, I suppose, but to similar effect), added to which there are various narrators from the oppressed community who enter and exit without introduction, a kind of Greek chorus in local garb. Chapters without paragraphs, sentences without periods reinforce our sense of the patriarch’s power as uncontainable, inexorable, inevitable. So, too, this streaming style seems to mirror the community’s powerlessness as the unbounded account flows on and on, and yet nothing changes.
Unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude, which ends abruptly and apocalyptically when the fictional town of Macondo is swept away by a “biblical hurricane,” The Autumn of the Patriarch ends on the upswing. Until the last scene, the townspeople have been passive bystanders who intermittently recount travesties in which the patriarch lumbers and lurches, satisfies his appetites and strews chaos as he goes.
But nothing is forever, it seems. The community outlasts the patriarch because this time his demise is not feigned but real. The proportion of hope in this novel, which amounts to one final page, is slight compared to what the townspeople have suffered over 267 pages, but this one page is enough. Reflecting on the “comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine,” the townspeople declare “the uncountable time of eternity has come to an end.” As in Greek tragedy, this chorus surveys the damage, cautions survivors, and carries on.
The Latin American “dictator novel” has become sadly relevant today. As our writers survey the damage and contemplate the future, they may wish to turn to their literary precursors from Latin America for guidance. ~
from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-autumn-of-our-patriarch/
GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE:
Zelensky: "So far, we know of at least 300 of those murdered in Bucha. In Borodyanka [town east of Kyiv] the number of victims could be even higher. The same situation in many of
the towns and villages we've liberated — this is worse than what the Nazis did here 80 years ago.”
From Quora:
Susanna Viljanen: “Russians did it. Who else? Aliens from the outer space, huh?
This is a perfect example of the bespredel, from Russian “беспредел” — “boundlessness”, “no-limit-ness”), a situation when someone in power — be it military, political, financial, or criminal — does whatever he wants while enjoying complete impunity and getting away with a murder (often literally).
Such atrocities are a tell-tale sign of a military whose discipline and morale have collapsed completely. The Russian soldiers are unpaid, bullied, tortured, have no decent military training, are under brutal discipline and are badly equipped and fed. They have been pounded by the Ukrainians, unable to fight effectively back, suffered terrible losses and routed. How do you avenge your defeat and your losses — especially if you have courageously liberated a liquor store and embalmed yourself into a pharaoh?
You take it out on the unarmed and defenseless civilians, of course! It doesn’t really matter of whom you extract your eye for an eye revenge, as long as you get it!
If you have ever met a drunken Russian, you know you cannot reason with him. He may beat you up just for fun and/or rape you or kill you — and when he sobers up, he sadly regrets what he has done. Terror and violence are deeply ingrained in the Russian military soul — it is another Mongol legacy.
This is no different on what happened in Berlin 1945. The only difference is that there is no Georgi Zhukov this time to restore the law and order and to execute the rapists and murderers.”
Oriana:
Not sure if we need to invoke "Mongol legacy" — we don't try to explain the Nazi brutalities by invoking something remote in German history, e.g. the Teutonic Knights or the disaster of the Thirty-Year War. It's rather than under some circumstances, people feel free to do their worst.
But “worse than what the Nazis did here 80 years ago” says it all.
And yes, alas, the Russians have become the new Nazis. Those who don't support Putin feel deeply distressed by this "new Nazis" status of their nation.
I feel helpless when it comes to the problem of getting Putin to face the tribunal at the Hague.
Mikhail Iossel:
*
THE RUSSIAN MILITARY AND A CULTURE OF BRUTALITY
~ Lviv, Ukraine (CNN): The grotesque pictures emerging from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha are some of the strongest evidence yet of apparent war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine: Dead civilians on the street, some with hands bound and shot execution-style, others apparently mowed down at random.
For anyone who has followed Russian President Vladimir Putin's way of war, it's a depressingly familiar pattern. Russia's military has a culture of brutality and scorn for the laws of armed conflict that has been extensively documented in the past.
"The history of Russia's military interventions -- be it in Ukraine or Syria, or its military campaign at home in Chechnya -- is tainted with blatant disregard for international humanitarian law," said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International's Secretary General.
"The Russian military repeatedly flouted the laws of war by failing to protect civilians and even attacking them directly. Russian forces have launched indiscriminate attacks, used banned weapons and sometimes apparently deliberately targeted civilians and civilian objects -- a war crime.”
That statement, made less than a month before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has proven sadly prophetic. In the opening weeks of the war, the international community reacted with horror as Ukrainian cities came under relentless Russian bombardment. Protected civilian infrastructure was hit, much as Russian aircraft once targeted Syrian schools and hospitals.
But the scenes unfolding in places like Bucha suggest an intimate kind of violence, something reminiscent of Russia's war in Chechnya.
During the second Chechen war -- which coincided with Putin's rise to power -- allegations also surfaced of widespread human-rights abuse by Russian troops. In 2000, to cite just one well-known incident, investigators with Human Rights Watch documented the summary execution of at least 60 civilians in two suburbs of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.
Locals unearthed mass graves in Chechnya; international officials made fact-finding trips to the region and made concerned statements about the reports of abuse and extrajudicial killings. Those statements did not stop Russia's military from grinding ahead with its ruthless pacification campaign.
Similar evidence of summary executions abounds in towns such as Bucha. A CNN team visited the basement of one building and saw the bodies of five men before they were removed by a Ukrainian team. An adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko, told CNN that the five men had been tortured and executed by Russian soldiers.
CNN cannot independently verify Gerashchenko's claims. But equally troubling is the alleged treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian forces. The Ukrainian parliament's human rights ombudsman, Liudmyla Denisova, said Monday that Russia's treatment of prisoners of war violates the Geneva Conventions, laying out a theoretical case for potential war crimes prosecutions.
In a Facebook post on Monday, Denisova said that released Ukrainian soldiers have "told of the inhumane treatment of them by the Russian side: they were kept in a field, in a pit, in a garage. Periodically, one was taken out: beaten with rifle butts, shots fired next to their ear, intimidated.”
CNN cannot independently verify Denisova's claims.
Igor Zhdanov, a correspondent for the Russian state propaganda outlet RT, posted videos on March 22 depicting Ukrainian prisoners of war being processed for "filtration" -- Zhdanov's choice of word -- after they were captured. The videos show masked Russians searching their captives for tattoos or insignia, which would supposedly show affiliation with nationalists or "neo-Nazi" groups that the Russians have cast as their main enemy in Ukraine.
Zhdanov said in his post that Ukrainian POWs were being treated humanely. But his choice of words was ominous. During the war in Chechnya, Russian forces notoriously used so-called "filtration camps" used to separate civilians from rebel fighters. Legendary Russian investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya gathered testimony from Chechen civilians detained in filtration centers, where detainees said they were held in pits and subjected to electric shock, beatings and ruthless interrogation.
Russian forces have also targeted local Ukrainian mayors for detention -- and in at least one case, Ukrainian officials say, an extrajudicial killing.
"At the moment, 11 local mayors from Kyiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Donetsk regions are in Russian captivity," Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a message posted on social media Sunday. She said the Ukrainian government learnt Saturday that Olga Sukhenko, the mayor of Motyzhyn, a village in the Kyiv region, was killed in the custody of Russian forces.
Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of the southern city of Melitopol -- who was detained by Russian forces but subsequently freed as part of a prisoner exchange -- said Russian forces occupying his city were appropriating local businesses, saying that the "situation is difficult, because Russian soldiers have declared themselves as authorities but of course, they don't care about people and their problems, they only care about taking the money from the businessmen, [and seizing] their businesses.”
Long before the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military had a reputation for a culture of cruelty. Russia has a hybrid manpower system of contract soldiers and conscripts. Although the Russian government claims to have made strides in professionalizing its forces, the country's military still has a brutal hazing system known as dedovshchina, a notorious tradition that encourages senior conscripts to beat, brutalize or even rape younger conscripts.
Putin recently announced a decree on spring conscription, fixing a target for 134,500 individuals to be called up into the Russian armed forces. The Russian President originally claimed that Russian conscripts would not take part in what Russia has euphemistically dubbed the "special military operation" in Ukraine. But the Russian Ministry of Defense subsequently acknowledged that draftees were fighting in Ukraine, and Ukrainian forces claim to have taken a considerable number of Russian conscripts prisoner.
Ukrainian investigators are already launching criminal probes of alleged crimes by Russian forces as more areas are freed from Russian control -- particularly around Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv.
It will be days, or perhaps weeks, before we get a fuller picture of what happened in Bucha. But if the past is any guide, there is little hope that Russian perpetrators would be brought to justice. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/04/europe/russia-military-culture-brutality-intl/index.html
*
~ Most
of Russia’s army are conscripts. And the treatment of the conscripts by
the contracted soldiers (kontraktniki) borders on torture and has
resulted in several deaths that we know about. Kontraktniki steal
paychecks, new uniform items, food, and more from the conscripts, in
addition to beatings and other forms of extreme, let’s call it “hazing.”
That unit morale is a problem is a given just based on the presence of
conscripts, who have historically not made the most motivated soldiers,
and compounded by the abuse of the kontraktniki. I knew there would be
large scale issues, especially in the infantry. That’s why the first
wave of assaulters were the highly-motivated VDV and Chechen army units.
Turns out, though, despite the propaganda, they’re not bulletproof. ~Sophia-Helene Mees de Tricht, Quora
MOST RUSSIANS SUPPORT PUTIN AND BELIEVE HIS PROPAGANDA
~ Russians defending Putin and their “special military operation which is totally not a war” brings back memories for me.
After 9/11 happened, my Russian former classmates and neighbors, people I had known all my life, told me 9/11 was faked. Or an inside job. But definitely not an act of an outside terrorist group.
When I mentioned that I worked a block away from the World Trade Center and was actually IN the train station under the buildings when the first plane hit, they casually dismissed my statement as lying. “Too many people and their brother were all there on 9/11”, they said contemptuously, as if the event didn’t happen at the peak of the rush hour in one of the densest urban environments on the planet.
When I pushed back, they accused me of being “emotional”. (Seriously, accusing someone of being “emotional” — and therefore wrong — is one of the most contemptibly dishonest argument tactics in existence.) They, unlike me, were using Logic. Logic said, what possible reason would Osama Bin Laden have to do this? The only ones who benefitted from 9/11 were Americans. Therefore the Pentagon orchestrated it. Or faked it. Filmed it in a movie studio. To make Al Qaeda look bad. It’s only logical. “Just like the Soviets faked all the Nazi atrocities to make innocent Nazi Germany look bad?” I asked. “HOW DARE YOU,” was the “logical”, and not at all emotional, response.
As a result, I stopped speaking to all my childhood friends. In later years, I repeatedly ignored the attempts of this or that person to re-establish contact. It took me many, MANY years to become interested again in what is going on in Russia and what Russian people say.
Now this. Again with this. “Ukrainians did it to themselves, or faked it, to make Russia look bad.” Same exact f-ing format. Over the past several weeks, I’ve gradually stopped reading most Russian Quorans’ postings. I’ve blocked some of them. Because truth is, I am DONE. Done with these people. Done with the lies. Done with that perpetual trashcan fire of a country. Done with the “enigmatic Russian soul”, and the bottomless bowl of sneering, condescending, self-serving deception that is its true nature. I am glad I left that hideous country, and I am glad I left it at a young age. Also, thank you, Supreme Soviet, for canceling my citizenship out of spite when I was all of 12. At least I can proudly say I am not a Russian citizen. ~ Kate Stoneman, Quora
more from Kate:
~ Hate needs no rationale and no internal consistency. Russians at the time celebrated 9/11 and simultaneously argued that it was faked/staged/inside job. After long and exasperating discussions about this, I came to the conclusion that their belief in the supposed fabrication of 9/11 was never sincere. Arguments to that effect were always motivated purely by sadism.
The same thing is happening right now with Russians and fans of Putin denying that Russia is committing atrocities against Ukrainian civilians even while the Russian government is explicitly announcing its genocidal intentions towards Ukraine. It’s hard to believe people would do this, but then, it’s hard to believe people would do what those Russian soldiers are doing in Ukraine.
Putin’s apologists online are, essentially, partaking in these war crimes; and their mindset isn’t different from what that of the Russian soldiers on the ground. They — Russian trolls and various pro-Putin volunteers — see the footage and the pictures that are horrifying to us, and they experience delight and satisfaction. And then they increase their enjoyment of it by claiming that these atrocities are not real, or if they are real, then Ukrainians did them, or if they are real and the Russians did them. It is still the fault of Ukraine/NATO/US/Poland/bicyclists for forcing Russia’s hand. The point is not good-faith discussion. The point is to intensify the suffering of victims, survivors, witnesses and Western “normies.” ~
David Li:
It’s the same in China.
Rick Lappi:
A Russian and a Finn were drinking vodka after sauna. The Russian got emotional, started to cry and said: “Finland and Russia, friends forever!” Finn: “No, no, no! We are brothers!” Russian downed a glass of vodka and asked, “Why are we brothers? Why not friends?” The Finn started to cry too and answered in tears: “Because you cannot choose your brothers.”
*
OBAMA ON PUTIN IN HIS BOOK “A PROMISED LAND”
"Putin is like a ward boss, except with nukes and a UN Security Council veto.”
“Putin did, in fact, remind me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall [a New York City political organization] - tough, street-smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences, and who viewed patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as legitimate tools of the trade.”
“While we were exchanging some pleasantries, I noticed in him a certain casualness, an indifference in his voice, indicating that he was used to being surrounded by subordinates and solicitors. He was a man accustomed to power.”
Obama's grim facial expression seems to signal that he knows he's looking at a complete thug.
*
THE RUSSIAN ARMY
~ There’s no analyst in the world that can factor in all the stealing. I mean:
Russian tank pouches
Those pouches are elements of reactive armor system “Relikt”. They are supposed to hold explosive material. If a specialized enemy AT round strikes the pouch, the explosives go bang and reflect the energy of that round outwards. Except on this Russian tank, someone stole the explosives and replaced them with egg cartons. Probably they are a little bit less effective.
The problem is that the Russian military is a very thick coat of bullshit and lies covering up a rotten, corrupt institution. On the ground, conscripts are raped and subjected to levels of violence you would find in the worst US prisons. Generals have limousines and yachts on salaries which would not support a hundredth of that lifestyle. The only way this holds together is if everyone denies reality and lies, lies lies about everything.
And then western military experts try to interpret that cacophony of lies. How is a military analyst supposed to estimate the level of corruption and its impact on the deterioration of specific capabilities of the Russian army? How many tanks have egg cartons for armor, is it one, 1% or 70%? We saw soldiers cut radios out of their BTRs to sell them for scrap (precious color metals). What is the cumulative effect on the comms ability?
It’s all very difficult, so the strength of Russian forces seems to be estimated without taking corruption into account, and then when it turns out corruption crippled the army, the experts can only go “woah, we did not expect that”.
And on top of the corruption there is propaganda about new weapons, like the Su57 “stealth” fighter that does not have stealthy surfaces, nor engine, nor sensors it was supposed to have, and crashes due to simple mechanical faults. Or the T14 Armata tank, which was sent to Syria for field testing and after that, its production line was quietly switched off. ~ Zbigniew Lobocki
https://truthaboutrussia.quora.com/
Bob Kizer:
The performance of the Red Army is no surprise. The Russians have lived off their un-earned WW2 reputation for 75 years. As noted by Stalin “quantity has a quality all its own” and that sums up the strength of the Red Army.
Zbigniew:
The Russian offensive seems to have stalled amidst reports of incredible supply, morale and organizational problems.
If you remember the Afghan army pretty much ran and disintegrated on contact with the Taliban some months ago. This now seems to be happening to at least part of the Russian army. There is an overwhelming number of anecdotes about Russian tanks driving into deep mud on purpose (so their crews can ditch them, walk back and stay away from the fighting) or driving around in circles to burn all their gas on purpose (similar effect).
Mats Andersson: PUTIN HAS NO WAY OUT
Until the war crimes in Bucha came to light, I would have expected an “exit” along the lines of Putin having to accept whatever he could get away with calling a “victory”.
Today, I really fail to see any way out of this for Russia. Their regime is exactly as reviled as the Nazis were in 1945. I hope that there can be some sort of solution where a new Russian government hands any surviving war criminals over to the Hague. I wouldn’t actually bet on it.
Realistically, then, Russia is the new North Korea. Shut off from the rest of the world, descending into hardship with starvation a regular occurrence, decline of living conditions to something resembling the 1950s, ever-increasing brutality from the dictator.
One thing is certain, though: things will never get back to what they were. The world has changed just as irrevocably as it did when the Nazis built their death camps. From that moment, it was total genocide or total destruction of the Nazi state. It’s a one way street, a point of no return.
In the same way, Russia of today will never be allowed back among the nations of the world. Under a radically different leadership, maybe, in due time. It took Germany 40 years.
Albina Graniute:
The same common mistake again — Western people don’t understand what Russia always was, but has become much more so in the past 20 years. The whole system is based on lies. Lies and a fake sense of superiority. The culture itself is permeated with this, not just the leadership. You know, Russia über alles. If the regime changes, it would still take at least 50, but more likely a 100 years of painstaking work to change the culture so this doesn’t happen again.
Mark Bergman: RUSSIA COULD BECOME A SATELLITE OF CHINA
When a country with a GDP more than 10x in size and population becomes your only customer, you are actually captive to that country. It’s highly possibly that Russia will become a satellite of China. There is historic irony in this.
*
RUSSIA IS NOT A MILITARY DICTATORSHIP. IT’S A GANGSTER STATE
~ Many commenters in the West have attributed the massive underperformance of the Russian Army to severe corruption among Putin’s underlings. They point to the budget set aside to modernize the army being siphoned off, to a culture of utter disregard for institutional integrity at all levels. They ascribe the screwups to the Russian military budget being frittered away on things like luxury yachts and mansions in Kensington. This is a valid observation and the straight-corruption factor plays a big role in the Russian military performance, but I think it is an incomplete explanation. These users may not grasp just how bizarre the Russian state is from a Western perspective, just how perverse and counterintuitive the corruption there actually is, and how it’s tied to the very heart of way the regime functions.
I believe the full story is much stranger than these commenters realize.
The reality is that Russia’s military weakness is no accident, but largely by design. The rot isn’t just in spite of Putin’s efforts, but because of them.
To understand why, let’s look closer at the regime’s structure, and at the specific nature of the fascism that has slowly been creeping into all corners of Russian society for these last 20 years.
On the face of it, Putinism might appear like a textbook militant fascist ideology. From the outside, it looks like Russia is a society that was steadily transformed into a gigantic armed camp by the warmongering propaganda of a military dictator.
We can see all the trappings of it:
But this is just window-dressing. Russia is not a military dictatorship.
Putin’s power base was never the military. As everyone knows, he is a State Security man, beginning his career in the KGB and consolidating his rule around elements of the secret police. He has always viewed the military as a threat, and taken steps to ensure it remains neutered and low on the totem pole in his fiefdom.
Any sign that some military element or circle is gaining any sort of power base leads to a purge. Any evidence of competence, initiative or coordination from his military men is inevitably met with a bullet or poison or a sudden fall off a high balcony.
In Putin’s Russia, you get sudden epidemics of Russian generals committing suicide at the end of wars, so that generals and armies grown competent in actual combat don’t end up causing too much trouble.
There are also a lot of suicides at the beginning of wars, when Putin opportunistically dislodges any cliques that may have formed in peacetime.
The Russian military is very low in domestic status and prestige. The highest-ranking men in the Russian military are characterless yes-men with no actual experience, while the lowest are regularly sold into gay prostitution by their superiors. Stranger still, organized crime outfits regularly force Russian military units, including nuclear units, to hand over protection money, equipment and weaponry. It’s really very hard to overemphasize just how much the modern military in Russia are actually prey.
Don’t let the medals fool you, Sergei Shoygu has no military experience. Let’s pray he recovers soon from the ‘heart problems’ he developed recently.
Once again: Putin’s Russia is not a military dictatorship. Nor is it really a police state, at least not in the conventional sense. It is actually a gangster state.
That’s not just an allegory, a description of the revealed behavior, attitudes and actions of Putin, it is literally true. The Mafia are a major branch of Putin’s regime.
Putin’s direct links to organized crime are an open secret, and very well-consolidated. Mafia factions form a significant component of the power base he has built for himself in the 1990s and 2000s, and this influence extends through to all state institutions within Russia. The rot goes a lot further than mere corruption. It’s deep in the foundations on which the very regime is built.
Naturally, it spreads far beyond Russia’s borders as well.
Not only are the mafia used to keep the military subordinate and unthreatening to the regime, but they have also thoroughly infiltrated it. It’s hard to say just how much of the institutional backbone of the army is compromised this way, but their recent performance in the field suggest the rot is bone-deep and dire.
So let’s discard the idea that Russia’s fascism is based around militarism, that it is innately militaristic like fascism was in Hitler’s regime. The military chauvinism is really confined to the surface level.
Scratch away that veneer, and you find yourself facing a fascism that wraps itself in the flag of Imperial Russia but that has a gangster’s heart. It’s deeply insinuated itself into the apparatus of the Security State, all the way from the bottom to the top. From there it seeped into the culture as a whole and can be seen in the behavior and values of this war’s cheerleaders.
The brand of fascism that Putin built up in Russia is gangster fascism, and Putin’s military is less a true armed force than an organ of bluff and terror built to enhance the atmosphere of fear that permeates any gangland or mob stronghold. It was never meant to be capable in serious fighting because that would threaten the regime, but it is very good at terrorizing civilians and committing war crimes.
When such a force comes up against a real military, composed of a genuine professional soldiery, it crumples.
It was all, always just a bluff. Everything about it was always about trying to get opponents to back down and surrender before the first shot was fired. This is undoubtedly what Putin believed would happen when his forces entered Ukraine. That’s why he made the gamble that he did; he didn’t think he was getting into an actual fight. When the Ukrainians stood their ground, his army’s mystique was punctured utterly.
That is a disaster for him. In a month, he’s lost as many troops as the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan in a decade. All while Russia’s demographic stagnation truly sets in and he is forced to rely on low-quality recruits from largely ethnic minority backgrounds often from the Caucasus or Central Asia. He is caught in a quagmire he didn’t anticipate.
Once you understand this reality about Russia, that it runs on gangster fascism, a lot more starts to make sense. Everything about the way it behaves, from the constant intimidation of its citizens to the assassinations of dissidents and underlings alike, to the hybrid warfare strategy it pursues against the Democratic World, sort of falls into place. These tactics resemble those of a mafia organization trying to wrest control from more-powerful lawful authorities because that’s literally what they are.
In a way this is less a war than a gigantic irruption of the criminal underworld into wider law based society. It’s an attempt to pull not just Ukraine but ultimately all of Eastern Europe into a huge new protection racket. Proximately, Putinism seeks to overturn rule of law across the whole continent, and ultimately the entire world.
But the Ukrainians stopped Putin in his tracks. They burst the bubble of bluff and terror, and showed us all what lay beneath.
For this we owe them a debt of eternal gratitude. Don’t forget this lesson they taught us in the coming days, because Russian threats are sure to become more dire and apocalyptic as time goes on and they scrabble to restore some of that mystique. Putin now seeks to claw back for himself the very bedrock of fear on which his entire geopolitical strategy rests. But he himself evaporated that bedrock of fear through his own actions. Don’t give it back to him.
Putin’s military has been exposed as a paper tiger, but it still needs to be stopped. If it isn’t stopped in Ukraine today, it will have to be stopped in Lithuania tomorrow. Or in Poland the day after that. This kind of fascism doesn’t just go away. It’s been unleashed now. It must be utterly defeated. ~ Alan Gould, Quora
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“PUTIN IS A BANDIT”
Ten years ago, in an interview with Radio Liberty, the late Vyacheslav Ivanov spoke about Putin:
— I read in his face a mixture of cowardice, small mind, shamelessness and some suppressed complexes that make him a very dangerous personality. I'm afraid that he imagined himself as the embodiment of the national spirit or something he has.
— Many of you will not agree, they will say that you underestimate the intelligence and grip of the VVP: he got angry with the oligarchs, someone forced to emigrate, someone like Khodorkovsky, jailed — others learned a lesson. He forced businesses to pay taxes — his predecessors, none of them could do it, he taught that without his decision, nothing happens in the country — no big deal to buy-sale, no enrichment, no investment…
— He is a bandit. A bandit can do a lot. Stalin was a thug. Well, perhaps, in this sense, he will compare with Stalin, because Stalin was also a foolish and incompetent person. But a bandit.
And those with whom he played the political game, even Buhari, who seemed to be friends with him, still perceived him as a human. And he was not a human, he had no human emotions. I think Putin has human feelings only for a dog. I don't think anyone around him has any feelings. You see, a person without human feelings is terrible. What is Khodorkovsky's mistake? Khodorkovsky thought that because they ate kebabs that Abramovich fried, they become if not friends, then people in some human relationship. And there can be no human relationship with him.
— Why are you so sure of it?
— I talked to him a little — right after the arrest of Khodorkovsky. I told him that Khodorkovsky, in my opinion, deserves good words, because he understands that science needs to be funded. Putin was president then and handed me a medal. That is, those were the days when he didn't take off his mask yet. But when I pronounced Khodorkovsky's name, he turned green. The reaction was biological. There was no mask in front of me, but there was a terrible, bloody man. I saw it with my own eyes. Therefore, everything that happened afterwards, I was no longer surprised by anything.
— And if there is protest, will the pressure from below increase?
— The assumption that he can be pressured, after all, is based on his human reactions. I assure you there is no way to pressure him. It's dangerous to scare him. It's not dangerous to do anything for real. But just to scare is dangerous... Putin is a Pakhan [mafia boss] in a huge bandit shake. In the gangster gang, I think there were able people at first. The same Abramovich, since he made so much money. But they underestimated Putin: this is a grand mistake of a whole group of people. Then Putin lost most of the capable people. Their power is getting less and less — the regime is falling apart. The Soviet regime also fell apart…
— I understand correctly that, in your point of view, the evolutionary regime change — even through half-term, but gradual reforms — cannot be?
— No. You absolutely can't hope for this, it's a mistake…
— Aren't you demonizing Putin too much? It's already very dark, everything is working out.
— I don't expect anything good from him, but I do expect the bad — being very scared, maybe he’ll start shooting, putting people in prison... In this sense, the situation, alas, is very dangerous. ~ (from the Facebook page of M. Iossel; this is a translation, and sometimes it sounds awkward, but the description of Putin as a mafia boss and a bandit comes through.)
This morning (April 8, 2022), Russia, furious in humiliating military defeat, bombed a civilian train station in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, filled with refugee families. They used multiple missiles. At least 39 are dead, mostly women and children.
Here is one of those missiles. On its side, it has been stenciled, "FOR THE CHILDREN." Meaning -- here's your retribution, Ukraine, for all the Ukrainian children that you... wait, what?
They are both completely brainless and brainwashed to a totally subhuman degree, those Putin's orcs.
Olga:
It means “here is your retribution, Ukraine, for all the Russian children who are growing up in a world where Ukraine and Ukrainians exist.” We are the existential threat to Russia — in their inflamed imagination. I cannot find any plausible explanation to this, but it’s reality.
*
Finland will be officially applying for NATO membership. Full credit goes to that brilliant master strategist, Vladimir Putin, who will have managed to extend Russia's border with NATO by 150% while at the same time massively increasing the presence of NATO troops in Russia's immediate vicinity.
This war has been an unmitigated disaster for Russia’s reputation. Putin and his generals may want to read Benjamin Franklin's timeless 1773 essay: “Rules By Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One.”
Except that Russia has never been a great empire. It has, rather, for centuries been the hellacious prison of the peoples. ~ M. Iossel
*
*
PUTIN IS A THIEF
*
STUCK IN THE MUD
The German advance on Moscow was delayed for nearly 2 months by the mud season. It is now the start of the mud season in Ukraine.
This is from before the war even got started: Russian tanks being dug out of the mud by excavators, something you can’t do in a combat zone.
*
A NOTE ON CHERNOBYL
~ Digging trenches in the radioactive soil by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor took place because officers and soldiers have never heard of Chernobyl disaster.
Russians are taught at school and TV that the Soviet Union was perfect and its leaders didn’t make any mistakes. And the HBO TV series “Chernobyl “ was banned in Russia for anti-Russian propaganda.
Ironically, Russian authorities had earlier reported that they must occupy Chernobyl Nuclear Station because it is apparently too sophisticated for Ukrainians to run. ~ (Quora)
Chernobyl, the metal dome around the damaged reactor.
*
INSIDE CHERNOBYL: “WE STOLE RUSSIAN FUEL TO PREVENT A CATASTROPHE”
~ When the power to the station was cut off for three days, Valeriy said he scrambled to find fuel to keep the generator running, even resorting to stealing some from the Russians.
"If we had lost power, it could have been catastrophic," Oleksandr explained. "Radioactive material could have been released. The scale of it, you can well imagine. I wasn't scared for my life. I was scared about what would happen if I wasn't there monitoring the plant. I was scared it would be a tragedy for humanity.”
Just outside the sarcophagus which protects the damaged nuclear reactor, Russian soldiers piled up sandbags behind which they could hide if attacked. Valeriy scoffed at this, saying the Ukrainian military wouldn't dream of firing at a nuclear reactor.
Down in the basement of the main building, are dormitory style rooms which have been completely ransacked. The floor is littered with rugs, mattresses, clothes, shoes and other personal belongings of the Ukrainian national guard who were held there. Officials at Chernobyl say Russian soldiers looted what they could when they left, and they also took the captive members of the national guard with them.
"We were able to keep the site safe. But it's upsetting that they took 169 of our military," said Valeriy.
It's not confirmed where the men are being held, but Chernobyl's staff believe they are in Russia. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61048256
Oriana:
Based on other sources, the Russians troops weren’t around Chernobyl long enough to develop radiation sickness. Still, digging in radioactive soil shows a disregard for human life that is characteristic of brutal dictatorships.
Putin and his advisors *
YOUNG RUSSIAN EXILES IN ISTANBUL: “NOWHERE ARE RUSSIANS TREATED AS BADLY AS IN RUSSIA”
~ At a hostel down a cobblestoned street not far from Istanbul’s fabled mosques and cathedrals, a young Russian restaurant worker named Misha was smoking cigarettes on the balcony.
Misha quit his job on the day Russia invaded Ukraine, swiftly packed his bags and left Moscow without a clue when he will be back. Only 24, for the last few weeks he has shared a $10-a-night bunk room with three other guys. He estimates his money will last about a month.
“I decided without a second thought — That’s it,” he told me. “I thought, ‘I am 24 years old, I have arms, legs, I am not dumb, well, I probably won’t perish.’”
Misha isn’t a jet-setter; in fact, this is his first trip outside of Russia. When I asked him what surprised him most about life outside Russia, he said: “I don’t feel scared when I pass by police officers, even if they are holding guns. I just feel safe.”
Misha told me that he had lost faith in his homeland. Only a toddler when Vladimir Putin became president, his entire life has been lived in the Russia that Putin built during his 22 years in power. Last year, Misha went to rallies in support of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who has been jailed after leading a pro-democracy movement that brought to light massive corruption by Putin and his circle. In recent months, the Russian government has intensified its crackdown on opposition and independent media.
“Even before this war started, I went to Navalny rallies and various other opposition events and saw that the effect from this was zero! No matter how hard we try, the government keeps screwing the bolts tighter and tighter,” Misha said.
In response to the war in Ukraine, at least some of the young Russians who grew up in Putin’s Russia are fleeing. With opposition to the war in Russia effectively criminalized, some are actual refugees, fleeing Putin’s crackdown on opponents and media. Some are intellectual exiles who no longer want to live in a country that invades a neighbor or supports a despot.
Tens of thousands have landed in Istanbul, because Russian flights can reach Turkey without crossing into European airspace and Russians don’t need Turkish visas to visit.
As a result, you can now hear Russian on the streets and on lines that form in front of ATMs — with Russian credit cards disabled, Russian refugees are living on any cash they can withdraw from ATMs. Inside coffee shops, you can overhear Russians exchanging tips on cheap places to stay, how to open a bank account or the best places to exchange currency.
Under Turkish law, they can only stay for 90 days. What will happen to them next is a topic in the cafes, bars and hostel lobbies where they also gather to discuss the political developments in their homeland. Most still have friends and families who are left in Russia.
Putin’s generation grew up in the post-Soviet era of exhilarating upheaval. They ate at McDonald’s, read Harry Potter and danced to Rihanna. Unlike their parents, they don’t know what it is like to live behind an Iron Curtain and they don’t wish to find out.
And Putin doesn’t want them, either, dubbing self-exiled Russians a “fifth column” that is working to undermine their homeland. In a televised address, Putin condemned Russians with a Western mentality as “national traitors” who cannot live without “oysters and gender freedom.”
I’m part of this generation, too. I’m a freelance journalist and landed in Istanbul when it became clear that my reporting could put me at risk if I stayed in Russia.
I didn’t expect I’d have so much company.
Nastya Mez, 26, and Igor Timofeenko, 28, are both from the southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don just an hour away from the border with Ukraine; their families speak with a southern accent that can sound like a mixture of a Ukrainian and Russian pronunciation. For the last few years, they have lived in Saint Petersburg, the second-largest city in Russia.
“My father stopped speaking to me after we moved to Turkey. He thinks I am part of the fifth column,” Igor tells me. He notes that his surname ends in “enko” which is a common Ukrainian ending. “He has been brainwashed with TV and thinks that Ukrainians are Nazis, despite our last name being Timofeenko.” Igor laughs bitterly.
I hear similar stories from other young Russians I meet. When Misha told his father that he ran from Russia to Turkey, he was met with radio silence. His father hasn’t spoken to him since.
“He has not been interested in anything all his life. He sits in a room all day and watches TV,” Misha says, including one of Putin’s most influential propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov.
“I tell him: ‘Dad, let me watch Solovyov for an hour with you, and you, in turn, watch Navalny’s YouTube investigation with me for 10-15 minutes.’ And he says that this is evil, that the Internet is evil,” Misha tells me.
When his mother asks him to fix something on her phone, Misha subscribes her to Navalny’s Telegram channel and the one operated by his organization.
For both Igor and Misha, economic concerns also played a role in their decision to flee. They fear what will happen to Russia as its economy is battered by unprecedented sanctions and on the verge of the first major default since 1998.
“We grew up in the well-fed 2000s. We still remember the time when everybody was getting rich, when the average [monthly] salary in cities with a population of a million-plus was around $1,000. Now it’s hard to even imagine this,” Igor said.
Now in Russia, prices are spiking, the ruble has lost value and stores are running out of basic necessities like sugar and feminine hygiene products.
“Sadly, Western sanctions are also affecting those who oppose Putin and don’t want to stay in Russia and pay taxes to support the regime,” Nastya said.
When I ask them if they have encountered any instances of Russophobia while abroad Nastya has a sharp reply: “Nowhere are Russians treated as badly as in Russia.”
As Putin seems to have feared, Russia’s young exiles are continuing their anti-war protesting from abroad. On the third week of the war, Russians gathered outside one of Istanbul’s nightclubs for the first in a series of charity concerts by Russian cult rapper Oxxxymiron called “RussianS Against War.’’ All revenues from the concert were promised to go to a Polish independent NGO helping Ukrainian refugees.
Oxxxymiron, also known as Miron Fyodorov, has enchanted Russian-speaking popular culture with his clever lyrics that sometimes sound like political manifestos. His Jewish family fled Soviet Russia in the 1980s, and he spent half his childhood in the West. After graduating from Oxford, he returned to Russia as an adult and his rap battles gathered million of views on YouTube.
Most in the crowd are under 30, stylish, urban, middle-class Russians. Some even brought anti-war posters. During the performance, the newly-minted emigres chanted: “No to War,” “Glory to Ukraine” and “Putin Huylo” — an anti-Putin obscenity.
This is exactly the demographic that Putin resents. The feelings are mutual.
“I cannot wait until all of this is over, the dictator is dead and I can return to my country,” Alexander Salin, 25, an IT programmer from Saint Petersburg carrying a Ukrainian flag tells me inside the concert venue.
His girlfriend stands quietly next to him and looks visibly distressed by Salin expressing his political opinions to a journalist. Salin says he is also a Navalny supporter and he donated to the Kremlin critic’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, which has been branded an extremist organization in Russia.
“I hope that people like me will be useful in Europe or elsewhere and that there will be no Russophobia,” Salin tells me.
At the concert, I also met people from Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. It felt as if the young people of the post-Soviet countries came together to transcend the boundaries of Russian nationalism in a demonstration of the kind of brotherhood of nations that once were espoused by the Soviet Union.
Oxxxymiron had cancelled a series of concerts in Russia to protest the war and the Istanbul concert was the first of a series he planned to hold in other countries to raise money for the victims. He addressed his audience from the stage with a bright neon “Russians Against War” slogan lit up behind him: “Those people who are for this war, are actually against this war,” he said. “They are sure that a ‘special military operation’ is underway, that it’s only military facilities that are being bombed.” He reminded the audience that Russians aren’t being told the truth.
“Unfortunately, our parents, friends of our parents, very often live in this illusion. You need to talk to them because they are most likely not bloodthirsty people, but most likely they are watching too much TV.”
The crowd cheered. ~
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/07/russians-putin-fleeing-00023482?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
WHY MORE WOMEN ARE CHOOSING TO STAY SINGLE
~ [In the Middle Ages] spinsterhood was accompanied by unusual legal and economic freedoms. The feudal law of couverture invested men with absolute power over their wives, and the “feme sole”, or unmarried woman, was the only category of female legally entitled to own and sell possessions, sign contracts, represent herself in court, or retain wages. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that people began to despise the spinster and that was largely thanks to the poets, playwrights and other trendsetters of the time, who turned her into one of the most pitiable creatures in literature and, by extension, society.
They trolled never-married women with hideous caricatures of stupidity, meanness and monstrosity (none quite tops the vitriol-filled Satyr Upon Old Maids, an anonymously written 1713 pamphlet decrying these “nasty, rank, rammy, filthy sluts”). And as the policy of Empire forged ahead, women who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, procreate were written off as useless, or selfish, or both. When an 1851 census revealed that one byproduct of the Napoleonic Wars and colonization was a generation of “surplus” women counting in their millions, some suggested taxing their finances, while others called for them to be forcefully emigrated.
And yet it was ultimately the Victorians who, with their indefatigable sense of purpose and powers of association, rescued the spinster, championing in her the rebel spirit that fanned feats of political and social reform. Out of impoverished necessity, never-married women pioneered the way to the first female professions, from governess to nursing, and expanding to typing, journalism, academia and law. They became philanthropists and agitators, educators and explorers; some rejected sexual norms while others became quiet allies of the homosexual community.
What I love about these women is their spirit of urgency – they weren’t waiting for anything. Of all the anxious experiences of spinsterhood, one of the most debilitating is the sense of a life on hold, incomplete. As Roseneil argues in her book, membership of grown-up society is marked by coupling. “There’s something symbolic about transitioning into a permanent relationship that says you are an adult.”
For those of us who haven’t, and may never, make that step, we can be left with the strong impression – not just from society, but from within ourselves – that we’re immature or underdeveloped. Consider another wave of “superfluous women”, between the world wars, whose marriage prospects were shattered by the loss of an entire generation of young men. Popular history recast them as dilettantes and flappers: the spinster’s contribution to national life once again belittled and mocked.
When Professor Paul Dolan, a behavioral scientist at London School of Economics, published research claiming that single women without children were happier than married ones, he was taken aback by the response. “I had lots of emails from single women saying thank you,” says Dolan, “because now people might start believing them when they say they’re actually doing all right. But more interesting was the reactions from people who didn’t want to believe it.
“I’d underestimated how strongly people felt: there was something really insulting about choosing not to get married and have kids. It’s all right to try and fail – but you’d better try. So with these competing narratives, you would be challenged internally as a single woman, where your experiences are different to what they’re expected to be.”
Whether a spinster is happy with her state depends, of course, not just on her personality, her circumstances, and her mood at the moment you ask her, but an ambivalent definition of contentment. We struggle to remember that, says Dolan, because our human psychology doesn’t deal well with nuance. “Almost everything you experience is a bit good and a bit bad. But with marriage and singleness it’s not voiced the same way. You’ve ticked off this box and got married so you must be happy. The divorce rates show that’s categorically untrue.”
It is time, surely, to change the rules, and the conversation. As the population of never-married women expands, we should be honest about what it meant, and means, to be one. We should celebrate our identity and the life experience that has given it to us. We should reclaim our history and stop being defined by others. Why not start by taking back that dread word, spinster? ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-are-increasing-numbers-of-women-choosing-to-be-single
Oriana:
There are definitely some significant advantages to being married, both for women and men, though experts tend to agree that men get a better deal out of being married (or out of any close relationship). It's still a culture in which a man expects his wife to be virtually his servant. His needs and his career always come first.
Divorced and widowed men generally seek to re-marry. But when it comes to women, statistics show that fewer and fewer choose to remarry. They may have a committed relationship, but without living together. When asked why, they respond with some variation on "The freedom is awesome!"
And . . . it is.
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THE BIOLOGICAL BIG BANG: THE CAMBRIAN LIFE EXPLOSION
~ Though it may seem like multicellular life dominates Earth, it is a relative newcomer to a planet that single-celled organisms have called home for more than three billion years. Modern humans, whose existence spans a paltry 300,000 years, have long been curious as to how life evolved from these simple organisms, and why.
Studies trying to demystify the origin of modern life pivot around a geological and evolutionary fulcrum — the Cambrian explosion, a burst of evolution that took place around 530 million years ago. Named for the geological period in which it occurred, the Cambrian explosion filled the world’s oceans with complex, hard-bodied animals that populated diverse, thriving ecosystems.
The pace of evolution was staggering, occurring at a rate five times that of modern evolution. The complex life that emerged formed the blueprint for the “body plans” of most modern animals and plants.
The Cambrian explosion has a common nickname: the Biological Big Bang. Like its astronomical namesake, the term focuses as much on what happened before as what happened during the period of expansive evolution. It implies a still period of nothingness, followed by a sudden explosion of life.
DARWIN’S DILEMMA
In 1859, when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, “nothing” could accurately describe the Precambrian fossil record.
That dismal record did not sit well with Darwin’s theory. Evolution, Darwin posited, occurs slowly and gradually; the Cambrian explosion must have been preceded by a period teeming with life. The contrast of the Cambrian period’s rich fossil record with the barren Precambrian began to be known as “Darwin’s dilemma” for its theory-shattering potential.
Darwin recognized the conundrum, which he addressed in an oft-cited section of his masterpiece: “[As to] why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods before the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer. The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”
It was not just the fossil record that spelled trouble for Darwin, but also the rapid pace of evolution after the Cambrian explosion. If he was right, how could life have evolved from simple, single-celled organisms to complex plants and animals in the blink of a geological eye?
In the decades after On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, Darwin’s dilemma was one of biology’s greatest and most tantalizing mysteries. Today, the dilemma is considered resolved, with evidence coming from a concentrated effort of interdisciplinary scientists who often butted heads in their quest for biology’s holy grail. Yet while new evidence answered some questions, it also spurred scientists to ask new ones. Such is often the case when studying the Earth’s past.
FILLING IN THE PRE-CAMBRIAN FOSSIL RECORD
There is no question that Darwin was right about evolution and natural selection. He was also right about why, in 1859, it looked as if the Precambrian was lifeless — we just had not found the fossils yet.
In uncovering the origin and evolution of life, we rely on fossils to give us glimpses into the past. Not everything, though, fossilizes easily. The soft-shelled, cartilage-based life forms thought to precede the hard-bodied animals of the Cambrian tend to disintegrate easily.
Researchers were not deterred. A persistent and international effort has sought out fossilized evidence of Precambrian life in the years since Origin was published. Paleobiologist James William Schopf offers a history of this hunt in his seminal 2000 paper “Solution to Darwin’s dilemma: Discovery of the missing Precambrian record of life.”
Here, Schopf describes how the earliest purported Precambrian fossils turned out to be serpentine limestone that only appeared to contain fossils. Thus, these incorrect findings from the late 1800s “poisoned the well,” according to Schopf, with “object lessons handed down from professor to student, generation to generation, to become part of accepted academic lore.”
It wasn’t until the 1960s that Precambrian paleontologists could untether themselves from their inauspicious start. The discovery of filamentous microfossils in Australia and petrified cellular microbes nearly 3,500 million years old (the oldest fossils ever known, more than three-quarters the age of Earth) showed that the Precambrian period was “surprisingly richer and easier to unearth than anyone had dared to imagine.”
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EVOLUTION’S RAPID PACE AFTER THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION
Though the work of Schopf and other paleobiologists continues to fill in the Precambrian fossil record, questions remain about the pace of the Cambrian explosion. What triggered life to evolve so fast?
The question has intrigued scientists of many disciplines for decades. Interdisciplinary collaboration has wrought a wealth of evidence from diverse perspectives — geochemical, paleoenvironmental, geological, anatomical, and taxonomic — that describes how biological organisms evolved in concert with changing environmental conditions.
This accumulated body of evidence substantiates a long-held belief: Large geological events changed ecological and environmental conditions and set the stage for rapid evolution. For example, most scientists agree that the availability of oxygen had something to do with the Cambrian explosion. Perhaps a rapid increase of available oxygen during the Cambrian period set the stage for rapid evolution.
We know that oxygen availability is related to a geological process called the Great Unconformity — a protracted period of widespread continental erosion and degradation leading to a hiatus in fossilization and sedimentation. In 2021, new research suggested that the Great Unconformity was a worldwide phenomenon caused by the formation and breakup of the ancient supercontinent Rodinia. This tectonic event would have released an extraordinary amount of oxygen into the ancient oceans and the Earth’s atmosphere. Further, the associated rising sea levels could have carved new ecological niches in shallow water and provided the calcium and phosphorus needed to build skeletons and hard shells.
PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER
We know that the Precambrian did have life. However, the Cambrian explosion was a staggering, unparalleled period of evolution — a pace Darwin’s theory of evolution does not explain well on its own.
Geologists have helped fill in this gap, providing evidence that large tectonic shifts turned an oxygen-limited world into an incubator of life. Released from the constraints of oxygen limitation, life diversified quickly. New genes would be subject to Darwin’s natural selection, either becoming more prevalent or fading out of existence.
Studying the past always carries a degree of uncertainty. As Schopf described in his history of the hunt for Precambrian fossils, overzealous scientists tainted the field when they claimed they had found Precambrian life, only for other researchers to quickly dismiss the material as inorganic. In 2014, a study demonstrated that scientists had long overestimated how much oxygen was present before the Cambrian period.
We still do not know what caused the Great Unconformity and related tectonic shifts, though most researchers believe large-scale glaciation must have been involved. Not all scientists even accept the idea that the Cambrian explosion was an unusually rapid evolutionary event. Instead, they argue, the spike in the fossil record may simply reflect the fact that hard-bodied organisms fossilize more easily than their soft-bodied predecessors.
Remaining questions highlight the constant challenge of studying the past. The discovery of a new fossil or geologic clue may upend decades of theories. Any claim is only as strong as our ability to interpret limited biological and environmental records.
The chase is as seductive as the reward. Discovering and piecing together clues about the Earth’s past answers a yearning for discovery that we, as humans, can never seem to satisfy.
https://bigthink.com/the-past/cambrian-explosion-fossils/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1M1NeYa30mAy7n7BTCcaaECBa74uQz5bQ-kaqAfiDXddonlhDT4a1EYY4#Echobox=1649171559-1https://bigthink.com/the-past/cambrian-explosion-fossils/?
Marine Wildlife, mosaic, first century BCE, Pompeii
*
SPECIES NOT ONLY DIVERGE; THEY CAN ALSO MERGE
“Species: a group of organisms that interbreed to produce fertile offspring.”
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Its central hypothesis held that, because populations contain variety, some members were born with characteristics, or adaptations, that made them more fit – better able to produce offspring. Others were less fit and they, along with their adaptations, were winnowed away as they added fewer and fewer offspring to future generations. This variation coupled with the winnowing was the fuel that drove changes in populations, eventually leading to populations that could no longer interbreed with each other and produce fertile offspring. Thus, new species evolved.
I told my students that once a species diverged from its ancestor – when it became unable to interbreed and form fertile offspring – those branches [of the “tree of life”] were separate, forever isolated. But, even as I spoke the words, I knew something wasn’t exactly right.
I was studying phytoplankton at the time. Single-celled creatures such as phytoplankton reproduce by cell division, which makes the question of what’s an offspring tricky. When you clone yourself, which one is the ancestor?
Graduate students down the hall in a microbiology lab regularly used viruses to transfer genes from one species to another. And gene shuffling wasn’t just happening by manipulation. I’d heard seminars about how different species of bacteria naturally perform a kind of sexual reproduction called conjugation, transferring genes from one to another. How did that kind of gene-hopping fit into the concept of a branching tree?
Three years ago, I started writing a book about the future of corals and discovered the research of the Australian scientist John E N Veron. Veron, nicknamed ‘Charlie’ after Darwin by a gradeschool teacher who noted his predilection for nature, is an icon of the field of coral taxonomy, the science of identifying and describing species. Reading his definitive work Corals of the World (2000), co-authored with Mary Stafford-Smith, my questions about evolutionary-tree inadequacies came flooding back.
The Great Barrier Reef is the most massive biologically built structure on our planet. Composed of around 3,000 smaller reefs, it covers an area greater than Italy. Cataloguing its species was no less monumental. It took nearly a decade of diving, visiting museums across Europe, and studying the work of others for Veron to inventory the more than 400 coral species of the Great Barrier Reef.
Then Veron visited the other side of Australia. There, on Ningaloo Reef, the corals he saw seemed more or less identifiable at first. But, as he looked at them longer, he wasn’t so sure.
‘Eight years on the Great Barrier Reef, and I knew all the species at a glance,’ Veron told me when we talked by Zoom. ‘When I was on the Great Barrier Reef, X and Y are two distinct species. But when I went to western Australia, I found a species that combined the characters of X and Y.’
It would be like seeing a fluffy-tailed creature with black-and-white stripes down its back eating acorns in your backyard. Are you looking at a squirrel or a skunk? Should you step away in alarm or simply wait for it to scamper away?
‘I thought, “Good grief, I made a mistake”,’ Veron told me. ‘So I went back to the Great Barrier Reef. And there was no mistake.’
But when Veron went to the Philippines and Japan, the confusion returned. The further Veron traveled from Australia, the more his confidence in identifying coral species wavered. What was going on?
One morning in 1993, while waiting for his kettle to boil, a solution to all his bothersome questions arrived. ‘The whole concept of reticulate evolution literally came into my head almost instantaneously. It really did; the whole lot from beginning to end … we call them eureka moments.’
The hypothesis of reticulate evolution is that species are not as isolated from each other as the analogy of branching trees propose. Instead, species both diverge and merge together. The tree of life doesn’t look like a tree so much as the reticulated pattern of a python’s skin.
Veron used a mind experiment to develop his idea. Imagine that all the ocean currents stopped flowing. Fertilized coral eggs become larvae a quarter the size of a grain of rice. In the absence of currents, those larvae can’t swim very far, so they settle near their parents. When it comes time to spawn, coral eggs are fertilized by those close relatives living nearby. Over time, gene mutations accumulate in the local population through natural selection. These conditions create many isolated populations, or species.
Now imagine that the currents are vigorous. Coral larvae are swept far from their parents. When it comes time to spawn, they hybridize with distant relatives. The gene pool is mixed. Isolated populations are rare. Species blur together.
Veron argues that today’s corals are a product of Darwin’s classical natural selection when currents are slack, and of hybridization when they are strong. Species separate and merge, and more so over long expanses of time and space. That’s why it was so hard for Veron to nail down what a ‘species’ is across an area as big as the Pacific Ocean.
Since Veron’s eureka moment, genetic tools have become more widespread and sophisticated. Does data support the hypothesis that species don’t just separate, they also merge? The answer is a resounding yes.
‘It’s not just rare freaks or accidents, it’s happening all the time. And in quite divergent species too,’ said Nielsen. Roving genes have been found in every branch of the tree of life where geneticists have looked. Today, the technical terms for the process of genes moving between populations are introgression or admixture.
Introgression occurs in plants such as maize and tomatoes. In mosquitoes, the entire genome except for the X chromosome can be swapped with other species. In a tropical genus of butterfly called Heliconius, gene jumping has been found to cause critical changes in the patterns of their colourful wings. Introgression has been documented in finches, in frogs, in rabbits, in wolves and coyotes, in swine, in yaks and cows, in brown bears and polar bears. And in us.
Nielsen and his colleagues found that Tibetans (and a few Han Chinese) carry a very beneficial gene called EPAS1. The protein EPAS1 gives a boost to haemoglobin, the molecule that ferries oxygen in our blood. EPAS1 makes high-altitude living easier. In 2014, the researchers discovered that the EPAS1 gene was also in the DNA of an extinct group of humans called Denisovans, known from bone fragments in Siberia and Tibet.
The prevailing hypothesis is this: ancient humans left Africa moving northward along temperate plains. When they encountered the Himalayas and their cold, high altitudes, it literally took their breath away. Those oxygen-poor conditions should have kept humans near the base of the mountains. But the ancient humans also encountered Denisovans and interbred with them, receiving the EPAS1 gene. Only those humans with the EPAS1 gene moved up the mountains, and their offspring also carried the EPAS1 gene, giving the ancestors of today’s Tibetans a critical advantage at higher altitudes.
‘I think that process of splitting up and merging back together again, and getting a bit of DNA from here to there, that’s happening all the time, in all of the tree of life,’ Nielsen said. ‘And it’s really changing how we’re thinking about it, that it really is a network of life, not a tree of life.’
One driver could be shifting habitats. As the planet warms, populations drift to higher altitudes or northern latitudes, and they encounter new species with which to hybridize. For example, polar bears and brown bears are running into each other more frequently. In 2006, hunters in Canada shot a white bear with brown rings around its eyes and extra-long claws. Genetic analysis showed that it was a hybrid, with a polar bear mother and a brown bear father. Ultimately, ‘bolar’ bears (or ‘pown’ bears?) could become the norm.
When it comes to coral, the climate crisis is especially critical. Corals are solar-powered animals, fueled by a symbiosis with algae that live tattoo-like in their tissues. The algae supply as much as 90 per cent of the sugar that they make through Sun-driven photosynthesis to the coral.
But when ocean temperatures rise by a couple of degrees for a few weeks, the algae abandon the coral, leaving them bone white, or bleached, and devoid of their energy source.
Ocean temperatures have already increased more than 1ºC. Layer marine heatwaves on top of that, and temperatures frequently reach bleaching thresholds. Mass bleaching was largely unknown before the 1980s. Now, nearly every reef on our planet has experienced it. Predictions are that 99 per cent of all stony coral will die by the end of the century, if the climate crisis is not mitigated.
Scientists have already started to see some shifts. Off the island of Hawai‘i, the coral bleaching threshold has increased by more than 2ºC. Anecdotally, Matz told me that corals at his field site in Australia now tolerate several degrees higher temperatures than a decade ago. Similar observations have been published from Southeast Asia. Although no gene for ‘thermotolerance’ has been discovered – and experiments suggest no single gene exists – such observations could mean that natural selection is already acting on coral.
If some corals do come up with genetic solutions to warmer seas, could their genes spread to other species the way that EPAS1 helped some humans use more oxygen at higher altitudes?
What we do know is that the tree of life is much more complicated and twisty than we believed it to be just a generation ago. I would say that only by recognizing its inherent fuzziness can we begin to understand evolution more clearly. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/why-evolution-is-not-a-tree-of-life-but-a-fuzzy-network?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&&utm_campaign=launchnlbanner
IN 1704, ISAAC NEWTON PREDICTED THE WORLD WILL END IN 2060
~ We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of climate change, and from religionists declaring the apocalypse due to a surfeit of sin. It’s almost impossible to imagine these two groups of people agreeing on anything other than the ominous portent of their respective messages. But in the early days of the scientific revolution—the days of Shakespeare contemporary Francis Bacon, and later 17th century Descartes—it was not at all unusual to find both kinds of reasoning, or unreasoning, in the same person, along with beliefs in magic, divination, astrology, etc.
Yet even in this maelstrom of heterodox thought and practices, Sir Isaac Newton stood out as a particularly odd co-existence of esoteric biblical prophecy, occult beliefs, and a rigid, formal mathematics that not only adhered to the inductive scientific method, but also expanded its potential by applying general axioms to specific cases.
Yet many of Newton’s general principles would seem totally inimical to the naturalism of most physicists today. As he was formulating the principles of gravity and three laws of motion, for example, Newton also sought the legendary Philosopher’s Stone and attempted to turn metal to gold. Moreover, the devoutly religious Newton wrote theological treatises interpreting Biblical prophecies and predicting the end of the world. The date he arrived at? 2060.
Newton seems, writes science blog Another Pale Blue Dot, “as confident of his predictions in this realm as he was in the rational world of science.” In a 1704 letter exhibited at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Newton describes his “recconing”:
So then the time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calendar of the primitive year. And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived [sic] kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.
Newton further demonstrates his confidence in the next sentence, writing that his intent, “though not to assert” an answer, should in any event “put a stop the rash conjectures of fancifull men who are frequently predicting the time of the end.” Indeed. So how did he arrive at this number? Newton applied a rigorous method, that is to be sure.
If you have the patience for exhaustive description of how he worked out his prediction using the Book of Daniel, you may read one here by historian of science Stephen Snobelen, who also points out how widespread the interest in Newton’s odd beliefs has become, reaching across every continent, though scholars have known about this side of the Enlightenment giant for a long time.
For a sense of the exacting, yet completely bizarre flavor of Newton’s prophetic calculations, see another Newton letter at the of the post, transcribed below:
Prop. 1. The 2300 prophetick days did not commence before the rise of the little horn of the He Goat.
2 Those day [sic] did not commence a[f]ter the destruction of Jerusalem & ye Temple by the Romans A.[D.] 70.
3 The time times & half a time did not commence before the year 800 in wch the Popes supremacy commenced
4 They did not commence after the re[ig]ne of Gregory the 7th. 1084
5 The 1290 days did not commence b[e]fore the year 842.
6 They did not commence after the reigne of Pope Greg. 7th. 1084
7 The diffence [sic] between the 1290 & 1335 days are a parts of the seven weeks.
Therefore the 2300 years do not end before ye year 2132 nor after 2370.
The time times & half time do n[o]t end before 2060 nor after [2344]
The 1290 days do not begin [this should read: end] before 2090 [Newton might mean: 2132] nor after 1374 [sic; Newton probably means 2374]
The editorial insertions are Professor Snobelen’s, who thinks the letter dates “from after 1705,” and that “the shaky handwriting suggests a date of composition late in Newton’s life.” Whatever the exact date, we see him much less certain here; Newton pushes around some other dates—2344, 2090 (or 2132), 2374. All of them seem arbitrary, but “given the nice roundness of the number,” writes Motherboard, “and the fact that it appears in more than one letter,” 2060 has become his most memorable dating for the apocalypse.
It’s important to note that Newton didn’t believe the world would “end” in the sense of cease to exist or burn up in holy flames. His end times philosophy resembles that of a surprising number of current day evangelicals: Christ would return and reign for a millennium, the Jewish diaspora would return to Israel and would, he wrote, set up “a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom.” We hear such statements often from televangelists, school boards, governors, and presidential candidates.
As many people have argued, despite Newton’s conception of his scientific work as a bulwark against other theologies, it ultimately became a foundation for Deism and Naturalism, and has allowed scientists to make accurate predictions for hundreds of years. 20th century physics may have shown us a much more radically unstable universe than Newton ever imagined, but his theories are, as Isaac Asimov would put it, “not so much wrong as incomplete,” and still essential to our understanding of certain fundamental phenomena. But as fascinating and curious as Newton’s other interests may be, there’s no more reason to credit his prophetic calculations than those of the Millerites, Harold Camping, or any other apocalyptic doomsday sect.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/in-1704-isaac-newton-predicted-that-the-world-will-end-in-2060.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/in-1704-isaac-newton-predicted-that-the-world-will-end-in-2060.html&utm_content&utm_campaign=Open%20Culture%20Daily%20Mail%20(T-TH)
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THE FIRST TIME I STOOD UP TO A PRIEST was just after I turned 14, a month or so after I'd left the church. The beauty of it unfolded when I suddenly realized I didn't have to stand there and listen to him practically yell at me in the street. It was a major, crowded street (Grójecka, in the Ochota district of Warsaw). The priest was having a combined rage and anxiety attack. He was red in the face and shaking. “Have you stopped going to church?” he asked sharply. Then, with unmistakable fear in his voice, “Have you stopped believing in god?”
His fear startled me. I didn’t answer. My silence was the answer. And this seemingly tiny fact — that a young girl had decided god didn’t exist — seemed to unnerve him to the core, to threaten his whole worldview. It was the first time in my life that I felt I was threatening to someone — a middle-aged man at that! Yet I was only a teenager, a “girl from a good home” who’d never be impolite to an adult. No need to fear that I’d say, "F**k god" or “give the priest a fig” with the fingers of my right hand. No.
I merely stood in the middle of the sidewalk, small next to this massive man, a sparrow against a crow — “little sparrows,” as our literature teacher called me now and then — a mere girl but suddenly with a mind that had obviously done something other than regurgitate catechism. He, red in the face and screaming; me, cool and silent, just staring at him.
After five minutes or so of listening to his frantic scolding, I realized that my parish priest had no power to punish me. He continued to speak in a loud voice, getting even redder in his face, gasping. Without a word, I turned my back on him and resumed walking to wherever I was going (home, I think).
But at that point it was no longer real courage. I wish I'd had courage back when hell was terribly real for me, and oh, how I hated going to confession! Maybe I would have stayed longer in a liberal Protestant church . . . or perhaps not as long because who knows at what point reading the bible would make me question the more revolting stories . . . Aside from Noah’s Flood, I had no idea to what extent the deity of the Old Testament was a god of hate. (Not that Jesus is purely the god of love — remember that he is to be the judge at the Last Judgment, tossing the majority of humanity into eternal flames.)
It was fascinating, though, to see a priest throw a tantrum in public, pedestrians in a quick staccato walking by us with with barely a glance at the spectacle — the usual human wave of faces lost in their own preoccupations. I threatened his worldview, while he did not threaten my new clarity. He, a suddenly scared priest of a dead god; I, suddenly filled with courage, my life ahead of me, the future, the new world. (This is a repost, but I can't help loving the memory of that encounter.)
My parish church in Warsaw, St. Yakub's
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BART EHRMAN ON THE ORIGIN OF HEAVEN AND HELL
~ What happens when we die? A recent Pew Research poll showed that 72% of Americans believe in a literal heaven, 58% in a literal hell. Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. But eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught.
So where did the ideas come from?
In clear and compelling terms, Bart Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He discusses ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which a living person observes the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. Some of these accounts take the form of near death experiences, the oldest on record, with intriguing similarities to those reported today.
One of Ehrman’s startling conclusions is that there never was a single Greek, Jewish, or Christian understanding of the afterlife, but numerous competing views. Moreover, these views did not come from nowhere; they were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. Only later, in the early Christian centuries, did they develop into the notions of eternal bliss or damnation widely accepted today.
As a historian, Ehrman obviously cannot provide a definitive answer to the question of what happens after death. In Heaven and Hell, he does the next best thing: by helping us reflect on where our ideas of the afterlife come from, he assures us that even if there may be something to hope for when we die, there is certainly nothing to fear. ~ (Amazon review)
~ What does Bart tell us about the afterlife? Descriptions of an afterlife change, somewhat as living species change over time through natural selection. The ideas in circulation now, derived ostensibly from someone’s reading of the Bible, are actually a strange brew of notions from many times and cultures. In fact, the whole superstructure is more attributable to Plato and Descartes than any “author” of the Bible. Our current ideas were canonized because they served the needs of the canonical authorities at the time, just as the books of the Bible were originally written because they served the needs of their many authors at an earlier time. The ambitious reader can find out what that process looked like by reading Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
Even a casual reader of the Old Testament will notice that no one is going to Heaven or Hell, as they are described in modern Christian theology. From the book:
“Alan Segal, the late scholar of Judaism, unequivocally stated: 'There are not any notions of heaven and hell that we can identify in the Hebrew Bible, no obvious judgment and punishment for sinners nor beatific reward for the virtuous.’” ~ from a customer review
~ In the course of explaining the development of the ideas of the afterlife, Ehrman discusses the problems of resurrection. In what form will a body be resurrected – in the form of the person in his prime, or in the same state of his death? Will a man born blind be resurrected blind and live in eternity in blindness? Will dead babies be reborn only to live eternally as babies? What about Hell? How hot is it? Ehrman has many questions for that idea too as he traces the history of the creation of Hell. For example, for those who do not believe in a bodily resurrection, how does one’s immaterial soul burn? If one believes in a bodily resurrection, how does a body keep burning in perpetuity without turning to ashes? ~ from a customer review
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Not all descriptions of hell include extreme heat. Dante imagine a Lake of Ice in the center of hell.
THE LAKE OF ICE
Below is one of Gustave Doré's illustrations to Dante's Commedia, showing the Ninth Circle of Hell, where the souls of the damned show like straws frozen in the ice. Satan, the "Emperor of Pain," here looks like a giant Batman.
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ANTI-AGING BENEFITS OF SELENIUM
According to a review from 2018, selenium can fight aging and prevent age-related health issues, such as tumors, cardiovascular disease, and neuropsychiatric disorders. Some researchers also believe that selenium can reduce chronic inflammation, which is closely related to aging.
According to some research, selenoproteins are primarily responsible for many of the health benefits of selenium.
For example, one 2021 review found that selenoproteins play a key role in controlling and removing misfolded proteinsTrusted Source, which accumulate as we age. Specialists note that the accumulation of misfolded proteins is a common characteristic of aging and age-related diseases, including type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Experts also believe that selenium protects the skin against ultraviolet (UV) oxidative stress by stimulating the selenium-dependent antioxidant enzymes glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and thioredoxin reductase (TDR). TDR is located in the plasma membrane of epidermal keratinocytes. This may potentially combat aging skin caused by UV exposure.
Moreover, a newer study from 2020 found that increased dietary intakes of selenium are associated with longer telomeres. This study found that every 20 microgram increase in dietary selenium was associated with a 0.42% longer telomere length in participants over the age of 45.
Telomeres are “protective caps” located on the ends of our chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age. Some experts consider telomere length as an informative biomarker of aging.
ResearchersTrusted Source also believe that higher levels of selenium are associated with longevity. The all-cause mortality of older adults with low selenium levels is significantly higher than that of the elderly with a high level of selenium.
For example, centenarians often appear to have higher systemic levels of selenium and iron while having lower levels of copper than other older people.
However, it is important to note that results remain conflicting and more research on the topic is needed. Some studies — such as the one referred to above — suggest that low levels of selenium may actually promote longevity.
Selenium may also play an important role in the protection against certain age-related diseases.
One meta-analysis study found that people with lower selenium levels are at a higher risk of coronary heart disease. In contrast, a review of trials that used only selenium supplementation for the primary prevention of heart disease found no statistically significant effects of selenium on both fatal and nonfatal cardiovascular events.
Although some research appears promising, there is not enough evidence to support the routine use of selenium supplements, especially in those who are obtaining enough from food to prevent heart disease at this time.
Because serum selenium levels decline with age, marginal or deficient selenium concentrations may be associated with age-related declines in brain function. Experts believe this might be due to selenium’s antioxidant properties.
Still, more research is needed to determine if selenium supplementation can help treat or prevent age-related cognitive decline in older adults.
FOOD SOURCES OF SELENIUM
Most adults need 55 mcg of selenium per day. Pregnant women, however, should consume 60 mcg. During lactation, selenium needs to further increase to 70 mcg.
Since the human body does not generate its own selenium, it is essential to get optimal amounts from the diet, in order for it to benefit overall health.
Thankfully, selenium is found in a wide variety of foods that can be easily incorporated into a person’s diet.
Because selenium is found in soil, its levels in food will be based on how much selenium was in the soil where the food was grown.
Brazil nuts, seafood, and organ meats are among the highest dietary sources of selenium.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/does-selenium-really-slow-aging#The-bottom-
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FUTURE OPTIONS FOR mRNA VACCINES
~ mRNA vaccines tell our cells how to make a mimic of a viral protein, in this case the spike protein that the coronavirus uses to break into cells (SN Online: 12/16/21). The vaccine-generated protein then teaches the immune system what the real threat looks like should it later encounter that threat.
For decades, efforts to develop mRNA-based vaccines to fight infectious diseases like rabies have been on a slow and meandering road (SN Online: 6/29/21). But the urgency of the pandemic breathed new life into these attempts. The promise of mRNA technology now takes us well past this pandemic’s horizon. “We’re right at the beginning of a really exciting time,” says Anna Blakney, a bioengineer who studies RNA technology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
The dreams are big: Fighting all sorts of infections. Attacking cancer cells. Restoring specific proteins to treat genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.
INFLUENZA
Our current flu vaccines aren’t so hot. In a given year, flu shots are between 40 percent and 60 percent effective at preventing the disease. mRNA might do better. Pfizer has begun enrolling about 600 people ages 65 to 85 to find out how mRNA vaccines stack up against traditional flu shots. Moderna has already dosed participants in its own trial of such a flu vaccine, slated to include 180 adults in the United States.
HIV
HIV is a slippery foe, able to evade the immune system by quickly mutating and disguising itself in a coat of human proteins and sugars (SN: 7/3/21 & 7/17/21, p. 14). But mRNA vaccines may be able to train the body’s immune system to detect HIV in its many permutations. That’s the premise of a new clinical trial in the works, sponsored by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and including scientists from Moderna.
ZIKA VIRUS
There are no vaccines available to protect people against Zika virus, which can cause severe disabilities in children born to infected mothers (SN Online: 8/7/18). Scientists from Moderna are currently recruiting 800 adults for a clinical trial testing an mRNA vaccine for its safety and ability to prevent Zika infection.
CMV (cytomegalovirus)
There are no vaccines available to protect people against Zika virus, which can cause severe disabilities in children born to infected mothers (SN Online: 8/7/18). Scientists from Moderna are currently recruiting 800 adults for a clinical trial testing an mRNA vaccine for its safety and ability to prevent Zika infection.
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HEALTH BENEFITS OF EATING SOUP
When prepared with the right ingredients, soup can be a truly healthy dish with multiple nutritional benefits.
For example, soups made with bone-, vegetable-, or meat-based broths provide vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, such as collagen.
They also deliver great flavor while keeping added fats and calories to a minimum.
Studies show that daily calorie intake tends to be lower for people who eat soup.
Fiber is known to increase feelings of fullness by delaying gastric emptying — the speed at which your stomach empties after eating — and increasing stomach volume by absorbing water and swelling once it enters the stomach.
Delaying gastric emptying and increasing gastric volume leads to your stomach being fuller for longer, which translates to reduced hunger.
Increasing your protein intake (if your soup contains seafood, chicken, or other protein) may help you regulate your appetite, boost your metabolism, and even reduce body fat.
Lastly, eating soup can help you stay hydrated. Water is essential for your health, and your total water intake may come from drinking water, water in beverages, or water in food — as is the case for soup, fruits, and vegetables.
Additionally, eating soup is an easy and tasty way to increase your vegetable intake.
High vegetable intakes are associated with a reduced risk of weight gain, which is a risk factor for chronic diseases, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.
Furthermore, vegetables provide numerous health benefits due to their high content of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and plant compounds.
Moreover, soups can be made with almost anything you have available in your kitchen.
BONE BROTH-BASED SOUPS
Bone broth has regained popularity due to its highly nutritious nature.
It’s made by simmering bones, which produces a broth filled with the bones’ nutrients, including calcium, magnesium, and collagen — the most abundant protein in your body.
By being rich in collagen, bone broth may improve joint, bone, and skin health. ~
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-soup-healthy
ending on beauty:
But such is love —
~ Nelly Sachs, Line Like
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