One man’s unspoken inner edge of darkness
sitting far away in his own fear,
like someone looking through
the wrong end of a child’s telescope,
like someone sitting at the end
of an absurdly lengthened table:
holds his intimate circle in fear of death
and torture, threatens their families,
poisons their lives along with his enemies,
sews everyone into the straight jacket
of immobile fear, then carefully tailors
a uniform of death for every single one
of his bullied young men to wear.
May we see then, in this allegory,
as we too, in this time, sit so far away,
the simple way an individual life
no matter how imprisoned,
transformed by generosity, saves
so many lives in the future.
~ David Whyte, There Is No Table Long Enough”
Putin and Macron: This will probably become one of the top iconic images of the early twenty-first century.
*
DOSTOYEVSKY: WHEN I FALL INTO THE ABYSS
When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book III, Chapter 3
This sounds so totally like Dostoyevsky, with his psychological daring to move between extremes. I don’t doubt that for Dostoyevsky, prose was what poetry is for many poets: you have to be willing to let go of control. Writing comes from the unconscious, often surprising the author. A sequel to Brothers Karamazov was to be “Alyosha’s story”: while Dostoyevsky’s intention was to make Alyosha saintly, if Dostoyevsky had lived longer and started writing the sequel, soon enough Alyosha would experience a fall, a real one, “head down and heels up” into the abyss — because innocence must be lost for the sake of maturity.
But emotional intensity is the one predictable element. That's what makes Dostoyevsky (and the rest of the great Russian literature) so irresistible: skipping the small talk and getting to the great questions.
I don’t know if Dostoyevsky — or maybe we should say, Dostoyevsky's creative-cognitive unconscious — would go as far as to make Alyosha become a tsar-assassinating revolutionary, but a would-be saint who ends up visiting prostitutes sounds pretty likely, and a prostitute’s love saves him in the end — wait, I’m sliding into Crime and Punishment. Whether writing poetry or prose, you can’t avoid your central themes, and even tightly outlined prose can go off into unplanned wilderness. But that’s of course the wonderful (and sometimes shattering) experience of writing, no matter what the genre: the discovery, the surprise.
Below: a page from Dostoyevsky's notebook at the time he was beginning to work on his last novel.
Mary:
I think that is what appealed to me so strongly in Dostoyevsky, that emotional intensity, that avoiding the small talk to get to the heart of things, the big essential questions. For me there was an immediate shock of recognition: this is the real stuff, no simple entertainment but a daring plunge into that "abyss" that lies beneath the most ordinary days, that most would rather skate over even on the thinnest ice. The emotional intensity matched what I was used to in my life, explosive angers, violence conflated with the habits of the ordinary, the eruption of raw passion any where, without warning, like the sudden whims and punishments of the Old Testament god. The god Dostoyevsky called to account for all the suffering of the innocent. I felt that calling to account like my own refusal of that same god, as inexcusably evil, and at best, irrelevant.
Of course Dostoyevsky also wants the possibility of redemption, again, through suffering, like Raskolniov's acceptance of salvation through penance, replacing pride with humility and expiation, or Alyosha 's gentle, seeking patience. None of which is half as strong and convincing as Ivan's fierce accusation.
*
Dostoyevsky was concerned with the problem of evil, especially about the suffering of innocent children. At the same time, in his later years he became an ardent nationalist. I wonder how he’d react to this photo of a Ukrainian child:
*
WHY IS RUSSIA WILLING TO RISK ANOTHER WORLD WAR?
~ Being as fair as I can, I don’t think Russia remotely anticipated that things would be this difficult, or that they would get this much blowback.
Russia has been invading foreign countries and bullying them — well, forever — but for present purposes, under Putin since the year 2001 or so. They have gone in, exerted control and carved chunks out of half a dozen countries with almost no opposition to their forces, and very little dissent from the West.
They seem to have simply assumed that attacking Ukraine in 2022 would simply be more of the same. They had no reason to think this would be any different from Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Kyrgyzstan, Chechnya or any another place that they have used force of arms to push their geopolitical agenda. ~ Colin Riegels, Quora
*
“Russia should take care of the rights of Russian speakers in Russia. Where there is no freedom of speech, poverty thrives and where human life is worthless.They say, to see Paris and die. For Russians, it is to steal a toilet and die.” President Zelensky, April 22, 2022
*
UKRAINE AS THE ATTEMPT TO REVERSE THE OUTCOME OF THE COLD WAR
~ The Ukrainian war is Russia’s attempt to reverse the outcome of the Cold War. Our defeat at the hand of America three decades ago turned out to become the defining moment for the entire political class of Russia. Hence the overwhelming political support for the war.
Germany tried a re-run of WW1 in the late 1930s. This was a high-stake game, to say the least. I see some worrying parallels. We kind of try to look into the future from a vantage point much like Berlin ‘38. What lies ahead for us, the epic triumph of the Greater Reich? Or The Nuremberg trial and the Marshall Plan? ~ Dima Vorobiev, former Propaganda Executive in Russia (Quora)
~ So many Russian untrained farm boy conscripts dead. Putin has sent a mobile crematorium into Ukraine, so that the thousands of Russian conscripts, now dead, who had not even gone through basic training, do not have to be sent home in body bags, They are gone, and just become more of Putin’s “disappeared ones”. This war is not Russia against Ukraine, but the actions of a megalomaniac elderly ex-KGB man, with Messianic tendencies. Those Russian boys had no idea that they would be up against a well trained and well armed enemy, with a huge, armed militia of civilians. ~ Ricky Tack (Quora)
Russia has lost hundreds of tanks and 2,000 armored vehicles. Much credit goes to the modern anti-tank weapons. Some tanks have not been damaged, but simply abandoned.
Oriana:
Yes, it is a shame that poorly trained farm boys are being sent to fight in Ukraine -- but our main sympathy should be mainly with the victims of those farm-boy conscripts, i.e. the Ukrainians.
~ One of Russian conscripts, a POW Alexander Morozov, said: “We were taken prisoner near the city of Sumy. I thought that we would be beaten, humiliated, given no food or water in captivity. It turned out the opposite: we were given food, water, we had a place to sleep, we were given warm clothes," he said.
Morozov said they were given rations in the fields that were expired for years, and "that was disgusting"; the equipment was breaking down all the time.
"Ukrainians are a strong people, they fight like beasts. Their aircraft shatters our columns utterly. Our side suffers great losses: technicians, sergeants, officers, soldiers. And we want to stop that. We want to tell the whole world the truth about what is happening here. People are dying here, children and elderly are dying here just for nothing, because of some Putin who is lying, who told the whole world that there were no conscripts here. But here we are – five conscripts who just want to return home. And I want to apologize to the whole of Ukraine for coming here. I do not want violence in this country. I am very ashamed," Morozov said.
Andrey Savin (born in 2002, lives in Perm Krai, the town of Solikamsk, called up for military service on June 22, 2021) also said that his tank regiment was allegedly sent to the exercises. Then soldiers were deprived of their phones and informed that they would "go to Ukraine to carry out a combat mission to capture the city of Kyiv and to free the civilian population of Ukraine from the so-called Bandera followers and neo-Nazis," and that they would receive a monetary reward after the operation.
"We did not have the opportunity to escape from there, we were put in tanks… And on the morning of February 24, we were already in the territory of Ukraine… In a few days, we ran out of food. Our equipment was breaking on the way. There were only 6 tanks left from 30 and 2 armored personnel carriers," he said.
Another prisoner of war, Andrey Pozdeyev (born in 2003, born and residing in Irkutsk region, called up for military service on June 23, 2021) said that on February 23 they were told that they would conduct a training march through Russia.
"We were told: 'Don't be afraid, no one will take you to Ukraine', as rumors were going, someone guessed that equipment was being prepared, many were talking about the war… On the night of February 23-24, we left. There was a morning line-up, and we were told: ‘For those who did not understand, you are in the territory of Ukraine.’ And all the statements by Vladimir Putin that there are no conscripts in his military operation are lies," the prisoner of war stressed. (Quora)
*
A RUSSIAN TYCOON CONDEMNS THE “CRAZY WAR” AND “UKRAINE MASSACRE”
~ A Russian tycoon has lambasted the country's "massacre" in Ukraine and called for an end to the "crazy war”.
Oleg Tinkov wrote in a profanity-littered Instagram post that he did not see "any beneficiary" of the conflict.
Mr Tinkov is one of Russia's most well-known entrepreneurs and founded the global online bank Tinkoff Bank and owned the cycling team Tinkoff-Saxo.
Mr Tinkov, who is not currently in Russia, owns about 35% of Cyprus-based TCS Group Holding, whose stable of companies under the Tinkoff brand span sectors from banking and insurance to mobile services.
He is also one of the most high profile Russians to publicly condemn President Vladimir Putin's actions.
Two of the country's most prominent oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska have made separate calls for peace, but have stopped short of direct criticism.
In his Instagram post, Mr Tinkov said 90% of Russians were against the war in Ukraine and added "morons in any country are 10%”.
"I don't see a SINGLE beneficiary of this insane war! Innocent people and soldiers are dying," Mr Tinkov added.
"Waking up with a hangover, the generals realized that they have a shit army.
"And how will the army be good, if everything else in the country is shitty and mired in nepotism, sycophancy and servility?”
Before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Mr Tinkov's wealth had been estimated at more than $4.4bn (£3.4bn).
But he has since lost his billionaire status as shares in his bank have plummeted, Forbes reported last month.
Switching to English in his post, Mr Tinkov wrote: "Dear 'collective West' please give Mr Putin a clear exit to save his face and stop this massacre. Please be more rational and humanitarian.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61163546
Misha:
The
city council of Mariupol, Ukraine, speaks of tens of thousands of
civilians killed in the brutal Russian attack on the city. Evidence of
freshly dug mass graves is a clear indication of Russian attempts to
hide a war crime of biblical proportions.
*
WE LIVE IN A NEW HISTORICAL ERA NOW: HELSINKI VERSUS YALTA
~ It is a rare thing to live through a moment of huge historical consequence and understand in real time that is what it is.In November 1989, I stood on a snow-flecked Wenceslas Square in Prague, the capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, and watched a new world being born.
The peoples of Communist Eastern Europe had risen in defiance of their dictatorships. The Berlin Wall had been torn down. A divided Europe was being made whole again.
In Prague, the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel addressed a crowd of 400,000 from a second-floor balcony. It was an exhilarating moment, dizzying in its pace. That evening, the Communist regime collapsed and within weeks Havel was president of a new democratic state. I sensed, even at the time, that I had watched the world pivot - that it was one of those rare moments when you know the world is remaking itself before your eyes.
How many such moments had there been in the history of Europe since the French Revolution? Probably, I thought then, about five. This, 1989, was the sixth.
But that world - born in those dramatic popular revolutions - came to an end when Putin ordered Russian forces into Ukraine.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called this moment a zeitenwende - a turning point - while UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said it was a "paradigm shift". The age of complacency, she said, was over.
PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
1789: French Revolution. Monarchy overthrown, republic founded
1815: Congress of Vienna redraws map of Europe, restores balance of power and ushers in decades of peace after the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars
1848: A wave of liberal and democratic revolutions across Europe
1919: Treaty of Versailles. New independent sovereign nation states replace old multi-national empires
1945: Yalta - great powers agree to partition Europe into Western and Soviet "spheres of influence". Iron Curtain falls across the continent
1989: Democratic revolutions in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe tear down the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union collapses two years later. Vladimir Putin calls this the "greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century”
Quentin Sommerville, one of the BBC's most experienced war reporters walked through the wreckage in Kharkiv recently and said of the Russian bombardment: "If these tactics are unfamiliar to you, then you haven't been paying attention.”
He should know: he spent enough time under Russian rockets in Syria to be paying very close attention. But the governments of the democratic world - how much attention have they been paying to the nature of the Putin regime?
The evidence has been building for years.
Two decades have passed since he sent troops into Georgia claiming he was supporting breakaway regions.
Later, he sent spies into British cities armed with nerve agents to murder exiled Russians.
In 2014, he invaded Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea.
Despite all this, Germany, and much of the EU, were locking themselves into an unhealthy dependence on Russian gas. A year after the annexation of Crimea, they approved the building of a new pipeline, Nord Stream 2, to boost supplies.
The "complacency" Liz Truss refers to also indicts her own country. London has been a safe haven for Russian money since John Major was prime minister. Russian oligarchs have parked billions here, laundered their money, bought up the most prestigious private homes in the capital, socialized with politicians and donated to their campaign funds. Few questions were asked about where their vast wealth, acquired so suddenly, had come from.
So, no. The Western democracies have not been "paying attention" to the nature of the menace that has been incubating on their eastern frontier.
But Putin, too, has seemed complacent.
First, he believed the West was in chronic decline, weakened by internal division and ideological rancor. The election of Donald Trump and Brexit he saw as proof of this. The rise of right-wing authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary was further evidence of the disintegration of liberal values and institutions. The US's humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan was proof of a waning power withdrawing from the world stage.
Second, he misread what was happening on his borders. Putin refused to believe that a series of democratic uprisings in former Soviet Republics - Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004-5) and Kyrgyzstan (2005) — could possibly be authentic expressions of the popular will. Because each was aimed at removing corrupt and unpopular pro-Moscow governments, it seemed self-evident to the Kremlin that these were the work of foreign intelligence agencies, the Americans and the British in particular — Western imperialism's forward march into territory that was rightfully and historically Russia’s.
Third, he has failed to understand his own armed forces. It is clear now that he expected this "special military operation" to be over in a few days.
Russia's military incompetence has astonished many Western security experts. It brings echoes for me of a smaller, more containable, but nonetheless devastating war, in former Yugoslavia.
In 1992, Serb nationalists launched a war to strangle the newly independent state of Bosnia at birth. They argued that Bosnian identity was bogus, that Bosnian statehood had no historical legitimacy, that it was really part of Serbia. It is exactly Putin's view of Ukraine.
Like Russia today, Serb forces enjoyed overwhelming firepower superiority. But they often stalled wherever local non-Serbs put up resistance. They seemed unable to seize towns or cities - unwilling to fight street-by-street on foot. The Bosnian defenders were initially very poorly equipped - I remember boys in tennis shoes in the trenches of Sarajevo with one AK-47 between three of them. But they defended their capital for nearly four years. There is a similar resolve in the young men volunteering to defend Kyiv.
So instead of taking the cities and towns, the Serbs laid siege to them — surrounding them, bombarding them, cutting off water, gas and electricity. It is already happening in Mariupol. Besiege a city and cut off its water supply, and within 24 hours, every toilet is a public health hazard. Citizens have to go out into the streets to find water standpipes and fill up receptacles just to flush their loos. Cut off the electricity and you freeze in your own home. Soon the food runs out. Is that what the Russians intend for Mariupol, for Kharkiv, for Kyiv? To starve them into submission?
But nearly four years of this cruelty gave Bosnian nationhood a founding narrative of resistance, suffering and heroic struggle. Ukraine's identity, too, will be strengthened further by the way Ukrainians have fought. Ukraine's Russian speakers have not felt "liberated" by the invasion. The evidence is that they, too, believe in Ukraine as a sovereign state. Putin's war, aimed at reunifying what he sees as two parts of the Russian nation, is already having the opposite effect — strengthening the will of most Ukrainians to seek a destiny free from Russian domination.
In 1994, while the war in the Balkans was still raging, the rest of Eastern Europe was looking to the future — each nation eager to take what it saw as its natural place in a Europe of independent sovereign states at peace with each other. But it was still far from certain that any of them would be allowed to join Nato.
Under President Bill Clinton, the US pressed ahead with Nato expansion. The Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who saw himself as a loyal ally of Clinton's, was said to be furious when he found out — at a press conference — that Nato was planning to admit new members without consulting Moscow.
And the tearing down of the Iron Curtain had raised a new question in geopolitics - how far east does the Western world extend? I was commissioned by the BBC to take a road trip through Poland, Belarus and Ukraine to address the question, "Where is the eastern edge of the Western world now?”
I went to the hunting lodge in Belarus where, in late 1991, the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, had met his counterparts from Ukraine and Belarus. Here, they agreed to recognize each other's Soviet Republics as independent nation-states. They then rang the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and informed him that the country of which he was head of state — the Soviet Union — no longer existed.
It was a moment fraught with both danger and opportunity. For Belarus and Ukraine, it was the chance to liberate themselves from Moscow rule — domination by Russian imperialism in both its Tsarist and Soviet forms.
For Yeltsin, it represented the chance to liberate Russia too - from its historic role as an imperial power. The UK and France had both ceased to be imperial powers after World War Two - as Austria had done after WW1. In Turkey, Kemal Ataturk had built a modern European secular republic — a Turkish nation-state — after the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire had been defeated and dismembered in 1918.
Could Boris Yeltsin do the same thing — build a modern Russian nation-state, at peace with its sovereign neighbors, on the ruins of the Soviet Empire? In the early 1990s, he began his Westernizing experiment, to try to turn an imperial power into a democratic state.
But the rush — encouraged by the Western democracies eager for investment opportunities — to turn a sclerotic, state-owned command economy into a free-market system was disastrous. It created gangster capitalism. A tiny elite became fabulously rich by plundering the assets of the major industries — especially oil and gas.
The wheels finally came off the experiment in 1998. The economy collapsed, the rouble lost two-thirds of its value in a month and inflation hit 80%.
I stood with a middle-aged couple in a queue at a Moscow bank. They wanted to take their money out in dollars or pounds - anything other than roubles. The queue was long and slow-moving and, every few minutes, a bank employee changed the displayed exchange rate, as the rouble plunged further. People could see their life savings dropping in value by the minute. The couple got close to the head of the queue when suddenly the shutters came down — there was no cash left.
I went to a former coal-mining region near the Ukraine border, where the mines were barely functioning. I met a graduate mining engineer who had lost his job — a man in his 30s with a young family. He took me to his dacha outside the city, which had about an acre of land. "About 80% of what my family eat in the year," he said. "I grow on this patch of land. The rest, like coffee and sugar, I barter for. I haven't used or even seen cash in about 18 months." Nothing spoke more powerfully about Yeltsin's failure to transform Russia than the sight of this highly educated man digging for his own dinner.
"Stalin turned a nation of peasants into an industrial superpower in a generation. Yeltsin is doing the same thing in reverse," he told me.
Ordinary Russians felt robbed. The great westernizing experiment had been a con trick that had enriched a criminalized elite and impoverished everyone else. Many of the reports we filed from Russia at that time boiled down to a single question: "What are the political consequences of the profound disenchantment that Russians now feel?”
The answer was that Russia, eventually, would revert to type - a retreat from democracy and a return to authoritarian rule. A retreat from nation-statehood and return to a more assertive imperial attitude to its "near abroad" - the countries that had previously been part of the Soviet Union.
The former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said that Russia could be a democracy or an empire, but it could not be both. The Russian emblem, the double-headed eagle, looks both east and west. History has pulled Russia in opposing directions - democratic nation statehood in one direction, domineering imperial power in the other.
Go to St Petersburg and you will see another aspect of this dual character. It is the country's beautiful bay window on the Gulf of Finland. It is an 18th Century city, facing west. It is the European Enlightenment in architectural form. Under the Tsars it was the imperial capital.
St. Petersburg: Palace Square
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow and power retreated behind the high, crenellated walls of the Kremlin. It is the architecture of defensiveness, of suspicion, even fear. When Russian leaders look west from here, they see flat open countryside rolling away to the south and west for hundreds of miles. There are no natural frontiers.
When I was the BBC's Moscow correspondent in the late 1990s, there was a driver who could remember, as a boy, seeing German troops on the outskirts of Moscow in the 1940s. Every time he took us to Sheremetyevo Airport, we would pass a monument designed to look like metal anti-tank defenses — so-called Czech hedgehogs — and he would say: "This is how close they came, the Germans.”
Napoleon's army had gone further the previous century. That experience — that chronic sense of an insecure western frontier — informs the way Russian leaders have thought about their "near abroad”.
In another conversation about the "near abroad", a friend recited a rhyming couplet to me. In Russian it rhymes nicely, but in English it goes: "A chicken's not really a bird; and Poland's not really abroad." Russia's sense of what it is entitled to in the lands to its west penetrates popular consciousness, too.
I will borrow an anecdote from another friend in Moscow at the time. The same driver picked her up from the airport and asked her where she had been. "I've been for a weekend in Prague," she said. "Oh Prague," came the reply. "That's good. That's ours.”
But it wasn't. The Berlin Wall had come down nine years earlier and the nations of Eastern Europe had ceased being “ours".
Except Ukraine. Putin regards it not as a neighboring country, but as the frontier land of Russia itself - and he wants it brought back into the Russian fold.
What would it take to do that? How can a nation that has put up so unified a resistance be subdued? Almost certainly he has overreached himself. Several factors must now be alarming him.
The first is the state of his own armed forces.
The second is the resilience of the Ukrainian defense. Did Putin really expect the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine to welcome his troops as liberators? Did he really believe that the uprising of 2014 - which replaced the pro-Moscow government with one oriented to the West - was all a Western plot? If he did, then it reveals how little the Kremlin understands about its "near abroad”.
But his biggest miscalculation has been to underestimate the resolve of the West. And this is what makes 2022 one of those pivotal years — the zeitenwende, in the words of Chancellor Scholz.
Almost overnight, Germany has transformed its attitude to its role in the world. Traditionally reluctant - for sound historical reasons - to throw its weight around, it had preferred the exercise of soft power to hard. Not now. It has announced a doubling of defence spending, and is sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. Gone, too, is the Ostpolitik — the decades-old German policy of seeking peace through engagement, especially trade.
Germany, along with the rest of the democratic world, will now move to end its dependence on Russian gas. The Nord Stream 2 project is suspended - though not yet scrapped. We are seeing a root-and-branch redrawing of the map of global energy distribution, aimed at cutting Russia out of it.
Russia is highly integrated into the global economy. But now it has been expelled from the system the world uses to exchange payment for goods and services. Its industries, including oil and gas, depend on imported goods and components. Soon production will grind to a halt. Employers will have to lay off their workers. Unemployment will rise.
No-one expected the West to sanction the Russian Central Bank. Already, the rouble has collapsed and interest rates have doubled. No other major economy has ever been subjected to a package of sanctions this punitive. It amounts to the expulsion of Russia from the global economy. More workers will be laid off. Major industries will find it hard to carry on.
Unemployment will rise further. Soaring inflation will erode life savings.
We will all be affected. Potentially, this is the rolling back of the globalized economy that emerged after the end of the Cold War.
The US and the EU have, in effect, divided the world up. Those states and companies that continue to trade with Russia will find themselves punished - also frozen out of trade with the rich world.
It amounts to a new economic iron curtain separating Russia from the West.
Much will depend on how China negotiates this new landscape. China and Russia are bonded by their shared antipathy to American power, and their conviction that the greatest threat is from a resurgent, more unified democratic world.
China does not want Putin weakened, or the West strengthened. Yet that is exactly what the effect the war in Ukraine has had.
Some China watchers believe Beijing will try to challenge the dominance of the dollar as a reserve currency by carving out a distinct yuan zone as an alternative space in the global economy that can be protected from any future attempt by the US to sanction China. Putin's war, therefore, could redraw the international financial map.
But above all, this is a war that pits the world's democracies against the world's authoritarian regimes.
It is also a war between two conflicting conceptions of the rules by which international relations should function.
The Oxford scholar Timothy Garton Ash says these two world views can be expressed in short form by two words — Helsinki versus Yalta.
At Yalta in 1945, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill carved post-war Europe into "spheres of influence" — most of Eastern Europe to Russia, the West to the trans-Atlantic alliance that would set about rebuilding Europe's democracies.
"Helsinki", by contrast, describes a Europe of independent sovereign states, each of which is free to choose its own alliances. This grew out of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and gradually evolved into the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Ukraine's defenders are fighting for Helsinki. Putin has sent his troops in to impose a modern version of Yalta — which would kill off Ukraine's independence and leave it under Russian domination.
Garton Ash argues that the West has been too half-hearted in defending the values of Helsinki - that it has formally acknowledged Ukraine's right to join Nato at some unspecified date in the future without ever intending to make it happen.
But Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has signaled a readiness to compromise on Helsinki principles, by agreeing to abandon Ukraine's ambition to become a Nato member. With all the risks that entails, it may yet be the price Ukraine pays for the survival of its statehood.
*
My generation grew up with the existential terror of the threat of nuclear annihilation. The conflict has brought that fear back to public consciousness. Putin has threatened to use Russia's nuclear arsenal.
That makes this the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Then, the Soviet Union shipped nuclear missiles to its ally Cuba. The US assembled a fleet to blockade (or "quarantine") Cuba and was considering an attack on the island by air and/or sea.
What the Americans did not know is that the Soviets didn't only have long-range strategic missiles. They also had smaller, tactical nuclear missiles — so-called battlefield nuclear weapons. And that Soviet military doctrine delegated first-use decision making to commanders on the ground.
Had the threatened invasion gone ahead, it would have triggered a nuclear exchange.
The then American Defense Secretary Robert McNamara only found out about this when the Soviet archives opened in 1991. Only then, did he understand how close the world had come to catastrophe.
In a remarkable film called Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, he explained how the world had avoided destroying itself. Was it skilled diplomacy? Wise leadership? No.
"Luck," he said. "We lucked out.”
That experience, now fading from memory, should focus minds.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60767454
The Yalta Conference, 4-11 February 1945
Mary: THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES
Putin's war is, I think, doomed to failure. Even beyond the gross incompetence, shoddy equipment, failures in planning and strategy, the whole is an attempt to reverse time, to return to a mythologized past that never existed. Putin sees the fall of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. He wants to reverse that, bring back the cold war, and win it, re-establish a world order polarized by two great powers, recapture all the fragments of the former Soviet empire, consolidate himself in the kind of absolute power a Mongol Tsar might have.
But the whole is a fantasy based on situations that only existed for a limited time in history, the boundaries of nations in flux and rearranged with every new war, the Soviet Union itself a historical creation...not some eternal and natural sacred order. This is all a terrible handicap, a continuation of the kingdom of lies that is Russia's default operating system. The corruption is so all pervasive, so systemically embedded, that lying is actually its basic and only idiom.
When that system comes up against the kind of opposition raised in Ukraine it collapses under the weight of reality. It turns out that Russia's supposed military might was only a shadow, a mirage whose substance was siphoned off to the "dons" of the Mafia state. However, and this is a very serious consideration, as far as we know Russia's nuclear armaments are real. Putin is waving them about as a threat, but a threat I think it is quite likely he will make good on, precisely because it's all he's got.
With his dreams shredded into a tissue of lies, his frustration with his henchmen and advisors, his humiliation before the whole world, deploying nuclear arms may be his only way to salvage himself, and it will not matter what he takes down with him, just as the mass killings, the slaughter of civilians, the murder of children, doesn’t matter. He has already said this...without Russia, the powerful Russia he intends to create, nothing matters.
I think that is a statement of intent we should not dismiss.
Oriana:
Russian artillery and ordinary missiles, however, are not a mirage. Every day we see another apartment building gutted, and eventually the city is level. It's hard not to ask if Russia, even if it can't win, intends to turn the entire country to rubble. This was a tactic used to install a Russian puppet in Chechnya, annex parts of Georgia and to defeat the insurgency in Aleppo.
Of course nuclear expansion would be a tremendous escalation, but even without it, in terms of Ukraine alone, the damage from artillery shelling is horrific.
Still, the price for Russia has been substantial:
As Brent Cooper comments in Quora:
~ The Russian military used to be feared. It used to be respected. No longer. The Emperor has no clothes. Putin has exposed the Russian military as weak and incompetent. Certainly not the world power everyone thought.
Let’s talk about respect. Soldiers are saying Putin ordered the war crimes. The bombing of maternity hospitals. Shelling of Children’s shelters. Execution of the elderly and women and children. Shot in the head with their hands tied behind their backs. Gang raping women and small girls. Whatever respect Russia may have gained since the fall of the Soviet Union has been squandered and lost by Putin. ~
Oriana:
Yes, we were all taken in by "pokazukha" -- "for show" -- the Potyomkin Village-type of military parades and press releases bragging about brave new weapons.
Now it seems that truly up-to-date weapons are on the NATO-Ukraine side, and inflicting significant damage on the invader. Nevertheless, old-fashioned WW2-type artillery is still capable of doing much harm.
The time between now and May 9 may prove critical. Both sides know it, and may try harder. Putin will have tough time declaring victory; it will be interesting to be just how far he can push his deluded propaganda.
This is not yet, but eventually food shortage may become an important factor. True, China remains a food supplier -- but of course for a price. China is not known for sending humanitarian aid. And if it's not paid in currency or precious raw materials, it may demand territorial concessions, having eyed Siberia for a very long time. So years from now, Russia may end up with a smaller territory -- the exact opposite of Putin's wild dreams.
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DO RUSSIANS REALLY MISS THE SOVIET UNION?
~ 30 years has passed since collapse of the USSR. Today Russians miss the memory of Soviet Union, the idealized image of it in their memories, not the USSR itself.
In 1980s people didn’t like the way they lived and the government was very inefficient in managing economy and running the country in general. Life wasn’t perfect, but Soviet people still lived happily, had hopes, had all their life ahead of them.
Then came the 1990s, a dire time for all Russians. No laws, no economy, no state, no respect, no clear path in life. It was the record decade in Russia by the number of suicides. Some did manage to accommodate, some were barely surviving, a few got out rich or wealthy, usually by speculating, robbing others or participating in criminal schemes.
Then came 2000s, a decade of economic restoration and rapid economy growth. Then came 2010s, a decade marked by international conflicts, sanctions and internal unrest. Life didn’t improve much in 2010s.
It’s 2021 now. Those people who remember USSR are at least 40+ like me. Those who managed to live in the USSR as adults are well over 50.
Those people who lived in USSR remember their childhood, which was really great (the USSR was an excellent place for children), remember their student years (the USSR was a great place for students), remember their youth.
People tend to forget small bad things if they are shadowed by big bad things that happen later. So today people don’t really remember things they disliked in the USSR because disasters of the 1990s were much more terrible.
Deficit of sausages is nothing compared to not being paid for your work for a year or more with over 2500% yearly inflation.
So, yes, Russians do miss the Soviet Union because they mostly remember good things about it and now they understand that things that were “bad” were nothing compared to how bad it really became without the USSR. ~ Ivan Novoselov, Quora
Oriana:
I assume “how bad it really became without the USSR” means during the nineteen nineties. It was a perfect opportunity for the West to offer all sorts of aid, but this strategic generosity was lacking. Poland, on the other hand, was treated generously, and has been thriving. Few, if any, miss the bad old days.
Another brief post on this nostalgia, or the lack thereof.
~ The only good thing I remember about the childhood was safety and ease for the parents to dump us anywhere they wanted — free after school extra curricular activities, summer camps etc. Kindergarten was free, too and we were well fed in it. Nobody cared about us being unattended but I believe this was a common sentiment in any country. However, since we were children, our perception of life was completely different from adults’ especially if we had both parents there, which for the most part all of us did.
When I ask my Mom who was an adult in USSR, she would not want to go back there. She remembers the propaganda, the lies, the controlled media, lack of choices and freedoms, the rationing and the privileged life of those in Moscow while the rest of the country lived on scraps and spent hours in lines to get the basics for the households. The Soviet toiletries sucked, perfumes were cheap, clothes were bland and travel was limited (except again, for the privileged in Moscow). ~ Anna Windsor, Quora
Oriana:
The mother's memory is right. Children were spared standing for hours in lines for food and other necessities. Their parents shielded them from daily drudgery and tried to feed them as best they could.
*
GOOD VERSUS EVIL
Russia is losing its war against Ukraine, which means that the humanity's good is in the process of defeating the global evil, that Ukraine is going to become a fully-functioning and independent democracy, and that NATO, the EU, and the democratic West are getting strengthened.
There are people — quite a few of them — who are against this outcome. They dislike western democracy, loathe the US, and still feel sorry the good old USSR no longer is around. And so they urge Ukraine to surrender before Russia is defeated, so as deny the US and the EU any measure of success.
One can commiserate with them: their whole system of beliefs is falling apart right now. They wanted to perceive western world as decadent and weak, but it has proven strong and decisive; they wanted to believe Putin's Russia was fearsome and powerful, but it has revealed itself as cruel, stupid, barbaric and ineffectual. ~ M. Iossel
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TOLSTOY ON WAR
“All these impudent, false speeches about…adoration of the monarch, about the readiness to sacrifice life (I should say someone else's, not one's own), all these promises of defending foreign land with the chest, all these meaningless blessings of each other with various banners and ugly icons, all these prayers, all these preparations of bandages, all these processions, the demands of the anthem, the cries of "hurray"… all this stupefaction and bestiality… all this is only a sign of the consciousness of the criminality of the terrible deed that is being done…”
*
CIVILIZATION AND BARBARIANS
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THE FATE OF THE DISABLED WW2 VETERANS IN RUSSIA
Approximately half a million Soviet soldiers and officers had lost their limbs on the battlefields of the Great Patriotic War (WW2) in 1941–1945. They returned to civil life where they found themselves useless to anyone and unable to get a job. They loitered and begged on the streets, theaters and markets trying to make the ends meet.
Joseph Stalin ordered this flawed audience to be taken out of sight in order to stop despoiling Soviet city views. From Leningrad and other big cities, crippled veterans were kidnapped, thrown into trucks and driven to the shore of Lake Ladoga, near the border with Finland, and from there by boat to the island of Valaam.
The House of Invalids of War and Labor was founded in the buildings of the former monastery, in 1948. Limbless veterans lived in harsh conditions of isolation like the worst criminals, because they were crippled and not killed in a battle with the enemy.
Those who had lost all their limbs were cynically nicknamed “samovars” (because without legs and arms a person looks like Russian samovar). Samovars in particular had hard time. They were continuously swaddled like babies, pissing and defecating under themselves.
In the summer, they were taken outside and placed on the grass next to the river or lake, so their piss and excrement dripped into the waterways. Some would roll down and try to kill themselves by drowning. Nurses took pity of them, had them form Samovar Choirs to give them meaning in life.
For the first few years, there was no electricity or heating in the buildings, or an infirmary for that matter. Thousands died from cold and untreated diseases.
During that period, other similar establishments popped up across the Soviet Union, all located in remote, cold places and hidden from human habituation, most often in abandoned monasteries : Kirillo-Belozersky, Alexander-Svirsky, Goritsky. They housed between 100,000 and 200,000 crippled veterans.
Mothers, wives, sisters looked for the crippled relatives kidnapped by the state. Many women in the post-war period wrote inquiries to homes for the disabled, or even came over, but were rarely in luck.
Some cripples deliberately refused to show up before their relatives, even hid their real names: they did not want to show their loved ones their ugliness and helplessness.
As a result, these people found themselves erased from the collective historical memory. Few individual enthusiasts without any support from the state try to find out the truth about those who whiled away the remnants of their lives in special boarding schools for war veterans. One of them is Moscow historian-genealogist Vitaly Semyonov.
As a result, these people found themselves erased from the collective historical memory. Few individual enthusiasts without any support from the state try to find out the truth about those who whiled away the remnants of their lives in special boarding schools for war veterans. One of them is Moscow historian-genealogist Vitaly Semyonov. (Quora)
**
*
WHY IS RUSSIA SO CORRUPT?
Fivefold answer:
1. Orthodox religion, which assumes humans are basically good and all sins can be forgiven. This leads into a high tolerance on abuse, crime, amorality and corruption on the powerholders and into servility, masochism and suffering on the powerless. Hospodipomilui!
2. Autocratic Patrimonialism, which effectively gathers all power (violence, societal, influential and economical) in the hands of one person, who is above the written law.
3. The legacy of the Mongol khanate and rulership and their state apparatus. The Grand Princes of Moscow were the most eager ar5e-kissing vassals of the Khan, and they subjugated all of the other princedoms (the last to be crushed was Novgorod 1476). Moscow is essentially the creation of the Mongols.
4. Thorough militarization and militarism. Russians absolutely adore war, military and physical violence. Russia is not a country with an own army, it is an army with its own country.
5. Extractive economy. The Russian economy is based on primary production - agriculture, mining, pumping oil and natural gas, and making energy. This is because industrialization requires the development of capitalism and rule of law. To make a productive industry which produces added value instead of just extracting the existing, you need a stable and uncorrupt society, but you can practice extractive economy in just any kind of a $hithole - and seize the assets at will if you are strong enough. This is the reason why Russia has deindustrialized seriously, it imports all its technology, and all attempts to establish Russian “Silicon valley” have drained in the sand.
All these five strands together intertwine into a rope which has effectively hanged all social and societal evolution and reforms in Russia. Corruption is just as an age-old phenomenon in Russia as the authoritarianism itself, and all militarchies are corrupt.
Corruption is so deeply implanted in the Russian society that any attempts to curb or remove it will lead into smuta, anarchy. Corruption is essentially the glue which keeps the society glued together, monolithic. It is the custom of the country and everyone approve it.
Russia is basically a Venezuela with nukes. All the Russian achievements in science, technology, aerospace etc are merely pokazuha — “window decoration”. How things appear is much more important than how they actually are — already the USSR prioritized space race over producing toilet paper. The toilet paper appeared in the Soviet supermarkets only in 1974.
When Ivan IV [Ivan the Terrible] crushed the boyars, what followed was oppritsina, an age of state terror. The violence machinery of the state terrorized all subjects into servility, and the nobles — instead of being the watchdogs of the ruler as in West — became his loyal poodles. Ivan then granted favors to them as reward of loyalty. Or, as the Russians say, “a fish rots from its head first”.
The corruption has been an age-old way on guaranteeing the loyalty of the upper class to the despot. Simply because it works. Corruption is bad only if you cannot partake on it yourself. Corruption is the grease which lubricates the gears of the Russian societal apparatus.
The oligarchs are nothing new. It is essentially the same system as with Czars. Also the Czar’s regime was thoroughly corrupt. And in any hierarchy, people within the hierarchy are more concerned on their own position and status in that hierarchy than the overall shape and condition of the apparatus.
Laws are nothing but a bad joke in Russia. Laws are harsh but obeying them is optional — another Russian proverb. In the West, the laws are the rules upon which the society works. In Russia, laws are the means of the ruler on how to punish disobedient subjects. The ruler is not bound to any law, and the ruler can abuse any chapters of the law on imposing arbitrary punishments on a subject which has proved a nuisance. This is yet another form of corruption.
All in all, Russia is incurably corrupt and its institutions are thoroughly rotten. But the Russians themselves are so used to it that it doesn’t matter them. A vot — life is hard, but it could be worse. ~ Susanna Viljannen, Quora
*
from Misha Firer
~ Lacking brains to run a complex system of the state, Putin corrupted everyone and each of its links, for a compromised person cannot complain, criticize, and has no choice but to be loyal.
Teachers were corrupted by being forced to falsify elections.
Businessmen were corrupted by being forced to pay bribes and kickbacks to secret police.
Secret police was corrupted by being forced to choose taking bribes and kickbacks, or losing their jobs.
Riot police was corrupted by having to beat retirees and students who took part in peaceful demonstrations.
The army was corrupted by taking part in a special military operation that had nothing to do with state security, but personal ambitions of a small clique.
The TV personalities were corrupted by being forced to lie non-stop, brazenly from the screen.
At each turn, almost every citizen in Russia was forced to choose bad over good, immorality over morality, wrong over right.
At the end, the citizens, if you can call them that, have become incapable of telling good from evil.
That’s why they so happily support killing other Russian speakers in Ukraine, including women and children, or demonstrate absolute lack of empathy and much indifference to the fate of their friends, family, and relatives who live there, and don’t believe a word they say.
Three commentators on the state TV discuss nonchalantly the destruction of the whole of city of New York with the new Satan missile. They didn’t “choose” to annihilate a military base, or a Navy ship. Oh no, they’ve decided to wipe out eight million people and literally laugh about it.
The state Leviathan from the mouths of its minister of foreign affairs and the president’s spokesperson announce without batting an eye that they won’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons. That means that they won’t care if the result of their action would kill people in Russia, including, possibly, the members of their families.
The fact that they rejected a call for ceasefire and humanitarian corridors during Easter, one of the most important Orthodox Christian holiday, points without any doubt to the fact that the senior leadership don’t subscribe to any religion, therefore there’re no expectations of heaven, or retribution, or repentance.
It’s all pure survival instinct with them, and a beastly desire to inflict maximum damage on your opponent.
A form of government that doesn’t care about killing millions of its people, neighbors, and other nationals over ambitions of one man is called Satanocracy.
Russian speaking Ukrainian bloggers, experts, mayors, president advisors post YouTube videos every day discussing war in Ukraine. Unlike Russian propagandists and regular people, they’re not full of hatred and animosity, although it is them who are being attacked, and they stream discussions with Russians who haven’t lost their minds in a free and democratic manner.
Not everyone has been overwhelmed with evil and succumbed to immorality in Russia.
Millions here go about their lives as normal. However, let’s not split hairs, we’re facing a distilled form of absolute evil that won’t stop unless it’s stopped and will take the whole world with them if it’s expedient to the dark visions of their Führer. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Oriana:
Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Authoritarianism, speaks about how the constant exposure to lies leads to a passive citizenry devoid of the sense of truth versus lie and good versus evil.
*
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying -- lying to others and to yourself. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Oriana:
I witnessed this in Poland. I went back after communism fell, after twenty-eight years in the US. One of the things I noticed was that people seemed to treat others with greater respect -- courtesy even. I couldn't help but connect it with the removal of the daily lying by the former illegitimate government (its very illegitimacy was the foundational lie).
Remove the lying, and a lot of things, big and small, improve automatically.
*
~ Putin laments the demise of both the czarist and Soviet empires, but he is surprisingly blind to the reasons for their failure.
He has transformed Russia back into an inefficient and corrupt autocracy like what the czars depended on, destroying any beginnings of a Russian civil society. Never mind that that was what caused the October Revolution.
And like Brezhnev he spends his last kopeyka on the military and its adventures abroad. Never mind that that is exactly what brought down the Soviet Union.
In
a way I am surprised that someone can be so blind to the mistakes of
the past. On the other hand I am not. Power corrupts. Absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Power is also the most addictive substance known to
humankind. Its addicts always crave more. This has ever been the scourge
of our species. Putin is a classical example of these facts of
political life. It is why democracy, with all its warts and
shortcomings, is a necessity for human survival. It is the only system
that safeguards us from this scourge. ~ Jaap Folmer, Quora
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Ivan the Terrible. Centuries later, he was dubbed “the first Stalin."
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WHEN DID THE GERMAN WW2 COMMANDERS KNOW THE WAR WAS LOST?
~ During the Nuremberg trial prosecutions, Head of the OKW (the German military high command) Wilhelm Keitel was asked by the Soviet prosecutor Nikitchenko when exactly he knew the war was lost. The disgraced General replied in one word: “Moscow”.
Specifically, he was referring to the Battle of Moscow in September 1941 to around April 1942. The Germans had planned a Blitzkrieg in Russia like they had done in France a year earlier. They would strike Russia with overwhelming speed and ferocity, surround and outmaneuver its armies with superior use of tanks and then capture the capital before they even knew what had hit them. Its one of those classic “we’ll be home by Christmas” situations that don’t usually end very well.
The OKW were confident that if Moscow could be captured, Soviet morale would collapse just as the French had, and from there on out it would be a hop, skip and a jump to the Urals, and to victory.
With Soviet resistance not collapsing like a house of cards as was hoped (and the size of the USSR meaning a quick war was impossible) meant that once the exhausted and overextended Germans reached Moscow, the Soviets had had time to rally a reasonable defense of the city. By this point as well, winter had set in. The whole fiasco of the winter has been told and retold so many times that I won’t go into it. Zhukov was able to throw the Germans a safe distance from the capital and from here on out, as Keitel rightly described, there was no winning. A long war would always be impossible for Germany.
Keitel met a grisly end. He had been indicted for War Crimes, Planning and Initiating a War of Aggression, Crimes against peace and Crimes Against Humanity. He was found guilty on all 4 charges and sentenced to death. “Death -- by hanging!” he cried after being given the verdict. “That, at least, I thought I would be spared”. His Prussian military pride was more upset over being executed as a civilian than over being executed. When the day finally did come, a malfunction meant that he would be strangled by the noose for some 20 minutes before dying in total agony. ~ Tristan Harvu, quora
David Murray:
In November 1941, German production supremo [Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition] Fritz Todt told Hitler the war could not be won militarily and he would have to seek a political settlement.
Hitler responded, “I can scarcely see a way of coming politically to an end.” Hitler often said the war, once launched, was not about this or that issue, but about whether Germany was to be or not to be. That was the case for him personally, as it is for Putin today, and he projected his own situation outward onto the German nation.
Oriana:
It's interesting to read about Todt. He had the courage to tell Hitler that the German economy didn't have the resources to defeat Russia. The meeting took place in Hitler's secret headquarters in Pomerania. Todt's plane then crashed on take-off. Possibly it was a genuine accident . . .
D. Bean:
All the top military and economic people knew that Germany could not win a long war, even before Sept 1939. They committed everything to Barbarossa when they had no idea how badly outnumbered and outgunned they really were…
Tom Lane:
Some believe after the Battle of Britain was over, with 2,300 of Germany’s best extensively trained pilots deaths. Those pilots and airmen were desperately needed in Russia.
Oriana:
I think Stalingrad remains the most clear point at which defeat started. It was the first time the German army had to surrender and began its long retreat.
Let’s remember that 80% of casualties happened at the Eastern Front. This was the main theater of WW2. Russia knows, the countries of Eastern Europe know it, but Americans are hardly aware of such a thing as the Eastern Front, much less that it was the place where most of the fighting happened.
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THE SECRET OF SURVIVAL
~ Angel, a Jew, owner of the most famous bakery in Germany, often said: "Do you know why I'm alive today? I was still a teenager when Nazis in Germany killed Jews mercilessly. Nazis took us to Auschwitz by train. Last night in the ward was deadly cold. We were left for many days in cars without food, without beds, which means without the possibility to warm up somehow. It was snowing everywhere. The cold wind froze our cheeks every second. There were hundreds of us on those cold, horrible nights. No food, no water, no hiding. The blood is frozen in the veins.
Next to me was an elderly Jew who was very loved in my city. He was all shaking and looking terrible. I wrapped him with my hands to warm him up. Hugged him tight to give him some warmth. Rub his hands, legs, face, neck. I begged him to stay alive. I cheered him up. This is how I kept this man warm all night. I myself was tired and frozen. Fingers crossed, but I kept massaging this man's body to warm him up.
So many hours have passed. Finally, the morning has come, the sun has started to shine. I looked around myself to see other people. To my horror, all I could see was frozen corpses. All I could hear was the silence of death. Frosty night killed everyone. They died of cold. Only two people survived: the old man and me. The old man survived because I didn't let him freeze, and I survived because I made him warm.
Allow me to tell you the secret of survival in this world. When you warm the heart of others, then you will warm yourself. When you support, strengthen and encourage others, then you receive support, strengthening and encouragement in your life”. – Unknown
An old Jew by Rembrandt, 1654
*
DID PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM EVER EXIST?
~ Karl Marx died on 14 March 1883. At the funeral three days later, Friedrich Engels wasted little time on their 40-year friendship, focusing instead on Marx’s legacy. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature,’ Engels said, ‘so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’ His friend had died ‘beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers – from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America … His name will endure through the ages, and so will his work!’
Engels made sure of this. In the following years, he devoted himself to organizing and publishing Marx’s ideas. From a mélange of fragments and revisions, he produced the second and third volumes of Das Kapital, in 1885 and 1894 respectively. He meant to publish a fourth but died before he got to it. (It was later published as Theories of Surplus Value.) Still, the most peculiar project born from Marx’s notes was released a year after his death. Engels titled it The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I’ll call it The Origin, for short.
The Origin is like Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster Sapiens (2014) but written by a 19th-century socialist: a sweeping take on the dawn of property, patriarchy, monogamy and materialism. Like many of its contemporaries, it arranged societies on an evolutionary ladder from savagery to barbarism to civilization. Although wrong in most ways, The Origin was described by a recent historian as ‘among the more important and politically applicable texts in the Marxist canon’, shaping everything from feminist ideology to the divorce policies of Maoist China.
Of the text’s legacies, the most popular is primitive communism. The idea goes like this. Once upon a time, private property was unknown. Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The organic community splintered under the weight of competition. The story predates Marx and Engels. The patron saint of capitalism, Adam Smith, proposed something similar, as did the 19th-century American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Even ancient Buddhist texts described a pre-state society free of property. But The Origin is the idea’s most important codification. It argued for primitive communism, circulated it widely, and welded it to Marxist principles.
Today, many writers and academics still treat primitive communism as a historical fact. To take an influential example, the economists Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi have argued for 20 years that property rights coevolved with farming. For them, the question is less whether private property predated farming, but rather why it appeared at that time. In 2017, an article in The Atlantic covering their work asserted plainly: ‘For most of human history, there was no such thing as private property.’ A leading anthropology textbook captures the supposed consensus when it states: ‘The concept of private property is far from universal and tends to occur only in complex societies with social inequality.’
Historical narratives matter. In his bestseller Humankind (2019), Rutger Bregman took the fact that ‘our ancestors had scarcely any notion of private property’ as evidence of fundamental human goodness. In Civilized to Death (2019), Christopher Ryan wrote that pre-agricultural societies were defined by ‘obligatory sharing of minimal property, open access to the necessities of life, and a sense of gratitude toward an environment that provided what was needed.’ As a result, he concluded: ‘The future I imagine (on a good day) looks a lot like the world inhabited by our ancestors…’
Primitive communism is appealing. It endorses an Edenic image of humanity, one in which modernity has corrupted our natural goodness. But this is precisely why we should question it. If a century and a half of research on humanity has taught us anything, it is to be skeptical of the seductive. From race science to the noble savage, the history of anthropology is cluttered with the corpses of convenient stories, of narratives that misrepresent human diversity to advance ideological aims. Is primitive communism any different?
According to the Aché, former hunter-gatherers living in Paraguay, they first met Kim Hill when he was a child. They adopted him, raised him, and taught him their language. Hill, however, remembers their first encounter differently. It was Christmas of 1977. He was 24 years old. He had persuaded the Peace Corps to fly him out to a Catholic mission with newly contacted hunter-gatherers. A priest welcomed Hill, but ‘he had a lot of duties across the border in Brazil,’ Hill told me. ‘So he drove me into the mission, dropped me off, and said “Here’s the keys to my house.”’ Then the priest left for two weeks. Thus began ‘the most exciting, fun adventure I could imagine’.
The Aché that Hill first met had recently been contacted and settled at the mission. They didn’t know how to farm, so they regularly packed up and headed to the forest, sometimes for weeks at a time. The priest warned Hill not to join them. ‘He said: “You don’t have enough skills – it’s really rough – they’re going to walk really far – you won’t be able to eat the food” – blah blah blah.’ So, ‘of course, the first thing I did was ignore his advice completely.’
The first trip was tough. The Aché didn’t have clothes, so Hill went barefoot and wore nothing but gym shorts. The forest shredded his feet. Vines and spiny plants lacerated his legs. He later wrote in his diary: ‘I have seen my blood every single day for the past month.’ At night, the Aché slept on the ground. Struggling to keep warm, children crawled on Hill, making it hard to catch more than 10 minutes of sleep. He enjoyed hunted meat, but he was less prepared for the hundreds of fat palm larvae sitting between him and starvation.
It was on that first trip that Hill saw the Aché share their meat. A man returning from a hunt dropped an animal in the middle of camp. Another person, the butcher, prepared piles for each family. A third person distributed. ‘At the time, it seemed kind of logical to me,’ Hill said. The scene reminded him of a family barbecue where everyone gets a plate.
Yet the more he lived among the Aché, the more astonishing food-sharing seemed. Men were forbidden from eating meat they’d acquired. Their wives and children received no more than anyone else. When he later built detailed genealogies, he discovered that, contrary to his expectations, bandmates were often unrelated. Most importantly, food-sharing didn’t just happen on special days. It was a daily occurrence, a psychological and economic centerpiece of Aché society.
What he started to see, in other words, was ‘almost pure economic communalism – and I really didn’t think that was possible.’
*
Hill’s first trip to Paraguay got him hooked on anthropology. After the Peace Corps, he returned to the United States and wrote a PhD thesis on Aché foraging. Now, four decades later, he is professor of anthropology at Arizona State University and renowned for his work on hunter-gatherers and remote peoples. According to his CV, he has spent 190 months – nearly 16 years – conducting fieldwork.
Not all of that has been with the Aché. In 1985, he started working with another group, the Hiwi of Venezuela. He didn’t expect dramatic differences from the Aché. The Hiwi, too, were hunter-gatherers. The Hiwi, too, lived in lowland South America. Yet Hiwi society felt like a new world. The Aché lived in mobile bands of 20 to 30 people. The Hiwi lived in villages of more than 100 people for most of the year. The Aché neither did drugs nor danced. The Hiwi snorted hallucinogens and had tribal dances near-daily. The Aché spent most of each day strenuously getting food. The Hiwi foraged for barely a couple hours, preferring to relax in hammocks. The Aché divorced constantly. The Hiwi, virtually never.
Then, there was food-sharing. In the primitive communism of the Aché, hunters had little control over distributions: they couldn’t favor their families, and food flowed according to need. None of these applied to the Hiwi. When meat came into a Hiwi village, the hunter’s family kept a larger batch for themselves, distributing shares to a measly three of 36 other families. In other words, as Hill and his colleagues wrote in 2000 in the journal Human Ecology, ‘most Hiwi families receive nothing when a food resource is brought into the village.’
Hiwi sharing tells us something important about primitive communism: hunter-gatherers are diverse. Most have been less communistic than the Aché. When we survey forager societies, for instance, we find that hunters in many communities enjoyed special rights. They kept trophies. They consumed organs and marrow before sharing. They received the tastiest parts and exclusive rights to a killed animal’s offspring.
The most important privilege hunters enjoyed was selecting who gets meat. Selective sharing is powerful. It extends a bond between giver and recipient that the giver can pull on when they are in need. Refusing to share, meanwhile, is a rejection of friendship, an expression of ill will. When the anthropologist Richard Lee lived among the Kalahari !Kung, he noticed that a hunter named N!eisi once ignored his sister’s husband while passing out warthog meat. When asked why, N!eisi replied harshly: ‘This one I want to eat with my friends.’ N!eisi’s brother-in-law took the hint and, three days later, left camp with his wives and children. By exercising control over distributions, hunters convert meat into relationships.
To own something, we say, means excluding others from enjoying its benefits. I own an apple when I can eat it and you cannot. You own a toothbrush when you can use it and I cannot. Hunters’ special privileges shifted property rights along a continuum from fully public to fully private. The more benefits they could monopolize – from trophies to organs to social capital – the more they could be said to own their meat.
Compared with the Aché, many mobile, band-living foragers lay closer to the private end of the property continuum. Agta hunters in the Philippines set aside meat to trade with farmers. Meat brought in by a solitary Efe hunter in Central Africa was ‘entirely his to allocate’. And among the Sirionó, an Amazonian people who speak a language closely related to the Aché, people could do little about food-hoarding ‘except to go out and look for their own’. Aché sharing might embody primitive communism. Yet, Hill admits, ‘the Aché are probably the extreme case.’
Hunters’ privileges are inconvenient for narratives about primitive communism. More damning, however, is a starker, simpler fact. All hunter-gatherers had private property, even the Aché.
Individual Aché owned bows, arrows, axes and cooking implements. Women owned the fruit they collected. Even meat became private property as it was handed out. Hill explained: ‘If I set my armadillo leg on [a fern leaf] and went out for a minute to take a pee in the forest and came back and somebody took it? Yeah, that was stealing.’
Some proponents of primitive communism concede that foragers owned small trinkets but insist they didn’t own wild resources. But this too is mistaken. Shoshone families owned eagle nests. Bearlake Athabaskans owned beaver dens and fishing sites. Especially common is the ownership of trees. When an Andaman Islander man stumbled upon a tree suitable for making canoes, he told his group mates about it. From then, it was his and his alone. Similar rules existed among the Deg Hit’an of Alaska, the Northern Paiute of the Great Basin, and the Enlhet of the arid Paraguayan plains. In fact, by one economist ’s estimate, more than 70 per cent of hunter-gatherer societies recognized private ownership over land or trees.
The respect for property rights is clearest when someone violates them. To appreciate this, consider the Mbuti, one of the short-statured (‘pygmy’) hunter-gatherers of Central Africa.
Much of what we know about Mbuti society comes from Colin Turnbull, a British-American anthropologist who stayed with them in the late 1950s. Turnbull was kind, strong and courageous. From 1959 until his death, he lived in an openly gay, interracial relationship, eventually resigning from the American Museum of Natural History under charges of discrimination against him and his partner. He spent his later years campaigning for death row inmates and, upon his death, donated his entire estate and savings to the United Negro College Fund. ‘Throughout his life,’ wrote a biographer, ‘Turnbull was motivated by a deep-seated wish to find goodness, beauty and power in the oppressed or ridiculed and, by making those qualities known to the world, reveal the evils of Western civilization.’
For some, these motivations clouded Turnbull’s descriptions of the Mbuti. He has been criticized for painting an ‘idealized picture’ of the Mbuti as ‘simple and childlike creatures’ living ‘a romantic and harmonious life in the bountiful rain forest.’ Yet, even if he did idealize, his writings still undermine claims of primitive communism. He described a society in which theft was prohibited, and where even the most desperate members suffered for violating property rights.
Take, for instance, Pepei, a Mbuti man who in 1958 was 19 years old and still unmarried. Unlike most bachelors, who slept next to the fire, Pepei lived in a hut with his younger brother. But instead of collecting building materials, he swiped them. He snuck around at night, plucking a leaf from this hut and a sapling from that. He also filched food. He was an orphan after all, and a bachelor, so he had few people to help him prepare meals. When food mysteriously disappeared, Pepei always claimed to have seen a dog snatch it.
‘Nobody really minded Pepei’s stealing,’ wrote Turnbull, ‘because he was a born comic and a great storyteller. But he had gone too far in stealing from old Sau.’
Old Sau was a skinny, feisty widow. She lived a couple of huts down from Pepei, and one night caught him skulking around in her hut. As he lifted the lid of a pot, she smacked him with a pestle, grabbed his arm, twisted it behind his back, and shoved him into the open.
Justice was brutal. Men ran out and held Pepei, while youths broke off thorny branches and thrashed him. Eventually Pepei broke away and ran into the forest crying. After 24 hours, he returned to camp and went straight to his hut unseen. ‘His hut was between mine and Sau’s,’ wrote Turnbull, ‘and I heard him come in, and I heard him crying softly because even his brother wouldn’t speak to him.’
Other foragers punished stealing, too. The Ute of Colorado whipped thieves. The Ainu of Japan sliced their earlobes off. For the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego, accusing someone of robbery was a ‘deadly insult’. Lorna Marshall, who spent years living with the Kalahari !Kung, reported that a man was once killed for taking honey. Through violence towards offenders, foragers reified private property.
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Is primitive communism another seductive but incorrect anthropological myth? On the one hand, no hunter-gatherer society lacked private property. And although they all shared food, most balanced sharing with special rights. On the other hand, living in a society like the Aché’s was a masterclass in reallocation. It’s hard to imagine farmers engaging in need-based redistribution on that scale.
Whatever we call it, the sharing economy that Hill observed with the Aché does not reflect some lost Edenic goodness. Rather, it sprang from a simpler source: interdependence. Aché families relied on each other for survival. We share with you today so that you can share with us next week, or when we get sick, or when we are pregnant. Hill once saw a man fall from a tree and break his hip. ‘He couldn’t walk for three months, and in those three months, he produced zero food,’ Hill said. ‘And you would think that he would have starved to death and his family would have starved to death. But, of course, nothing happened like that, because everybody provisioned him the whole time.’
This is partly about reciprocity. But it’s also about something deeper. When people are locked in networks of interdependence, they become invested in each other’s welfare. If I rely on three other families to keep me alive and get me food when I cannot, then not only do I want to maintain bonds with them – I also want them to be healthy and strong and capable.
Interdependence might seem enviable. Yet it begets a cruelty often overlooked in talk about primitive communism. When a person goes from a lifeline to a long-term burden, reasons to keep them alive can vanish. In their book Aché Life History (1996), Hill and the anthropologist Ana Magdalena Hurtado listed many Aché people who were killed, abandoned or buried alive: widows, sick people, a blind woman, an infant born too soon, a boy with a paralyzed hand, a child who was ‘funny looking’, a girl with bad haemorrhoids. Such opportunism suffuses all social interactions. But it is acute for foragers living at the edge of subsistence, for whom cooperation is essential and wasted efforts can be fatal.
Consider, for example, how the Aché treated orphans. ‘We really hate orphans,’ said an Aché person in 1978. Another Aché person was recorded after seeing jaguar tracks:
Don’t cry now. Are you crying because you want your mother to die? Do you want to be buried with your dead mother? Do you want to be thrown in the grave with your mother and stepped on until your excrement comes out? Your mother is going to die if you keep crying. When you are an orphan nobody will ever take care of you again.
The Aché had among the highest infanticide and child homicide rates ever reported. Of children born in the forest, 14 per cent of boys and 23 per cent of girls were killed before the age of 10, nearly all of them orphans. An infant who lost their mother during the first year of life was always killed.
(Since acculturation, many Aché have regretted killing children and infants. In Aché Life History, Hill and Hurtado reported an interview with a man who strangled a 13-year-old girl nearly 20 years earlier. He ‘asked for our forgiveness’, they wrote, ‘and acknowledged that he never should have carried out the task and simply “wasn’t thinking”.’)
Hunter-gatherers shared because they had to. They put food into their bandmates’ stomachs because their survival depended on it. But once that need dissipated, even friends could become disposable.
The popularity of the idea of primitive communism, especially in the face of contradictory evidence, tells us something important about why narratives succeed. Primitive communism may misrepresent forager societies. But it is simple, and it accords with widespread beliefs about the arc of human history. If we assume that societies went from small to big, or from egalitarian to despotic, then it makes sense that they transitioned from property-less harmony to selfish competition, too. Even if the facts of primitive communism are off, the story feels right.
More important than its simplicity and narrative resonance, however, is primitive communism’s political expediency. For anyone hoping to critique existing institutions, primitive communism conveniently casts modern society as a perversion of a more prosocial human nature. Yet this storytelling is counterproductive. By drawing a contrast between an angelic past and our greedy present, primitive communism blinds us to the true determinants of trust, freedom and equity. If we want to build better societies, the way forward is neither to live as hunter-gatherers nor to bang the drum of a make-believe state of nature. Rather, it is to work with humans as they are, warts and all. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-primitive-communism-is-as-seductive-as-it-is-wrong?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&&utm_campaign=launchnlbanner
Oriana:
The most successful examples of sharing of resources seem to be religious communes, including some monastic orders. Non-religious communes usually don't last long.
Early Christians who shared all they possessed did so in the spirit of agape, or communal love.
Thomas More presented a shared ownership of property in his famous Utopia.
Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1527
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HOW TO INCREASE SELF-CONTROL
~ I know it's not the most pleasant activity, but think for a second about your worst habits, dumbest decisions, and most nagging regrets (go on, experts insist it's good for you).
It's amazing how often we fail to live up to our potential not because of fear or stupidity but because of lack of self-control. It's tempting to think this comes down to some inborn shortage of willpower -- that you are simply too lazy or unfocused for the kinds of success you dream of -- but according to Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, impulse control isn't a fixed talent. It's an ability you can train.
In a recent interview with the Knowledge Project's Shane Parrish, Huberman explained exactly how to hone your impulse control so you can craft the life you actually want -- rather than end up living the one you mindlessly wandered into.
GO VERSUS NO-GO
The interview kicks off with a brief anatomy lesson. Within a part of the brain called the basal ganglia we all have two important circuits, Huberman explains. One is the "go-function," which, as the name implies, works to propel us into action. Whether you want to pick up a glass of water or train for a triathlon, you'll need your go-function to start.
But the go-function is only half the story. We also have a mirror image "no-go function" that is responsible for inhibiting impulses. This is the part of our brain that needs to fire if we're going to stick with that difficult project or resist that delicious cookie. Whenever your kindergarten teacher told you to quit squirming and sit still in class, she was training your no-go function.
The trouble is that, as we get older, we often get fewer and fewer opportunities to exercise this no-go circuit. "We move toward the things that are important to us. We're emailing. We're always doing go, go, go, go. Even if you're scrolling Instagram or something, it's a go-type function. We rarely rehearse our no-go functions," Huberman observes. Unsurprisingly, the less we exercise this function, the weaker it tends to grow.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR NO-GO FUNCTION
But just because the comfort and opportunity of our modern tech-enabled lives doesn't give us many chances to practice controlling our impulses, it doesn't mean we can't consciously set up a program to strengthen our no-go circuits and learn to inhibit our impulses.
To do that, you could force yourself into Herculean feats of self-control like Tony Robbins's morning ice plunges or Digg founder Kevin Rose's love of walking around in the snow in flip-flops. But if that sounds borderline insane to you (me, too), fear not. Huberman offers a much less radical, science-backed program to improve your impulse control.
Huberman explains that he personally aims to have between 20 or so no-go moments each day. These are times when he consciously inhibits his impulse to do something to train his ability to recognize and put the brakes on his moment-by-moment desires. He offers several examples.
Don't grab your phone. Something as trivial as having the urge to scroll through social media but refusing to pick up your phone can begin to train your "no-go circuit.”
90-minute work blocks. Huberman declares himself a big fan of fixed 90-minute work blocks in which he forces himself to keep his butt in the chair at least attempting to be productive for a whole hour and a half. Stopping yourself from making that cup of coffee or scrolling for kitten pictures when you get bored helps keep your no-go circuits strong.
Snack control. Simply delaying a bit of food you're craving for a few minutes can be a way to exercise your no-go function, though Huberman cautions this isn't a good option for those with any kind of eating disorder.
Stick to the plan. Huberman explains that, like many of us, he often feels the urge to improvise halfway through his planned gym routine. Forcing yourself to complete the three sets of push-ups you planned on exercises your no-go circuits as well as your arms.
Meditation. "You think, 'Uh, I don't want to do it, but I'm going to force myself to sit still even though I want to get up.' That's a no-go," Huberman says of any kind of mindfulness practice.
With all its shiny baubles and beeping notifications, our world is exquisitely designed to get our go function firing. Small moment of self-control like those above act like a whetting stone, sharpening our no-go circuits through tiny repetitive acts. And it's only when you can control your impulses that you can craft the life you truly want. ~
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/stanford-impulse-control-no-go-function.html?fbclid=IwAR18LhTIw1noWqbPu-p-GHlXdC6it2FNsNJbPj04-LjKIrcyGXGU36J8FFQ
from another source:
Your ability to self-regulate as an adult has roots in your development during childhood. Learning how to self-regulate is an important skill that children learn both for emotional maturity and later social connections.
In an ideal situation, a toddler who throws tantrums grows into a child who learns how to tolerate uncomfortable feelings without throwing a fit and later into an adult who is able to control impulses to act based on uncomfortable feelings.
In essence, maturity reflects the ability to face emotional, social, and cognitive threats in the environment with patience and thoughtfulness. If this description reminds you of mindfulness, that's no accident—mindfulness does indeed relate to the ability to self-regulate.
Self-regulation involves taking a pause between a feeling and an action—taking the time to think things through, make a plan, wait patiently. Children often struggle with these behaviors, and adults may as well.
It's easy to see how a lack of self-regulation will cause problems in life. A child who yells or hits other children out of frustration will not be popular among peers and may face reprimands at school.
An adult with poor self-regulation skills may lack self-confidence and self-esteem and have trouble handling stress and frustration. Often, this might be expressed in terms of anger or anxiety, and in more severe cases, this individual may be diagnosed with a mental disorder.
Self-regulation is also important in that it allows you to act in accordance with your deeply held values or social conscience and to express yourself appropriately. If you value academic achievement, it will allow you to study instead of slack off before a test. If you value helping others, it will allow you to help a coworker with a project, even if you are on a tight deadline yourself.
In its most basic form, self-regulation allows us to be more resilient and bounce back from failure while also staying calm under pressure. Researchers have found that self-regulation skills are tied to a range of positive health outcomes. This includes better resilience to stress, increased happiness, and better overall well-being.
Self-regulation can play an important role in relationships, well-being, and overall success in life. People who can manage their emotions and control their behavior are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and achieve their goals.
COMMON SELF-REGULATION PROBLEMS
How do problems with self-regulation develop? It could start early; as an infant being neglected. A child who does not feel safe and secure, or who is unsure whether their needs will be met, may have trouble soothing and self-regulating.
Later, a child, teen, or adult may struggle with self-regulation, either because this ability was not developed during childhood, or because of a lack of strategies for managing difficult feelings. When left unchecked, over time this could lead to more serious issues such as mental health disorders and risky behaviors such as substance abuse.
STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVED SELF-REGULATION
mindfulness
According to Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), mindfulness is "the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally."
By engaging in skills such as focused breathing and gratitude, mindfulness enables us to put some space between ourselves and our reactions, leading to better focus and feelings of calmness and relaxation.
In a 2019 review of 27 research studies, mindfulness was shown to improve attention, which in turn helped to regulate negative emotions and executive functioning (higher-order thinking).
cognitive reappraisal
Cognitive reappraisal or cognitive reframing is another strategy that can be used to improve self-regulation abilities. This strategy involves changing your thought patterns. Specifically, cognitive reappraisal involves reinterpreting a situation in order to change your emotional response to it.
For example, imagine a friend did not return your calls or texts for several days. Rather than thinking that this reflected something about yourself, such as "my friend hates me," you might instead think, "my friend must be really busy." Research has shown that using cognitive reappraisal in everyday life is related to experiencing more positive and fewer negative emotions.
In a 2016 study examining the link between self-regulation strategies (i.e., mindfulness, cognitive reappraisal, and emotion suppression) and emotional well-being, researchers found cognitive reappraisal to be associated with daily positive emotions, including feelings of enthusiasm, happiness, satisfaction, and excitement.
Some other useful strategies for self-regulation include acceptance and problem-solving. In contrast, unhelpful strategies that people sometimes use include avoidance, distraction, suppression, and worrying.
As an adult, the first step to practice self-regulation is to recognize that everyone has a choice in how to react to situations. While you may feel like life has dealt you a bad hand, it's not the hand you are dealt, but how you react to it that matters most. How exactly do you learn this skill of self-regulation?
Recognize that in every situation you have three options: approach, avoidance, and attack. While it may feel as though your choice of behavior is out of your control, it's not. Your feelings may sway you more toward one path, but you are more than those feelings.
Start to restore balance by focusing on your deeply held values, rather than those transient emotions. See beyond that discomfort at the moment to the larger picture. Then, act in a way that aligns with self-regulation. ~
https://www.verywellmind.com/how-you-can-practice-self-regulation-4163536
Oriana:
The mantra that changed my life has been “you can practice falling apart, or you can practice being strong.”
Achieving clarity about your values and goals can make the job of self-regulation almost automatic. You simply can’t act against this clarity. It makes the decision for you. 
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A FABLE FOR OUR TIMES: HOW WE TREAT NEW RISKS VERSUS OLD ONES
~ Guido Calabresi, a federal judge and Yale law professor, invented a little fable that he has been telling law students for more than three decades.
He tells the students to imagine a god coming forth to offer society a wondrous invention that would improve everyday life in almost every way. It would allow people to spend more time with friends and family, see new places and do jobs they otherwise could not do. But it would also come with a high cost. In exchange for bestowing this invention on society, the god would choose 1,000 young men and women and strike them dead.
Calabresi then asks: Would you take the deal? Almost invariably, the students say no. The professor then delivers the fable’s lesson: “What’s the difference between this and the automobile?”
In truth, automobiles kill many more than 1,000 young Americans each year; the total U.S. death toll hovers at about 40,000 annually. We accept this toll, almost unthinkingly, because vehicle crashes have always been part of our lives. We can’t fathom a world without them.
It’s a classic example of human irrationality about risk. We often underestimate large, chronic dangers, like car crashes or chemical pollution, and fixate on tiny but salient risks, like plane crashes or shark attacks.
One way for a risk to become salient is for it to be new. That’s a core idea behind Calabresi’s fable. He asks students to consider whether they would accept the cost of vehicle travel if it did not already exist. That they say no underscores the very different ways we treat new risks and enduring ones.
I have been thinking about the fable recently because of Covid-19. Covid certainly presents a salient risk: It’s a global pandemic that has upended daily life for more than a year. It has changed how we live, where we work, even what we wear on our faces. Covid feels ubiquitous.
Fortunately, it is also curable. The vaccines have nearly eliminated death, hospitalization and other serious Covid illness among people who have received shots. The vaccines have also radically reduced the chances that people contract even a mild version of Covid or can pass it on to others.
Yet many vaccinated people continue to obsess over the risks from Covid — because they are so new and salient. ~ (Source: New York Times)
101 freeway in Los Angeles
Oriana:
The most flagrant example of getting away with murder is cigarettes. It's old stuff, so smoking-caused diseases are taken for granted. Still, we know that the answer is not to make cigarettes (or cars) illegal.
The anti-smoking campaign has been amazingly successful, and smoking went down from 40% of the population to 12.5%. More effort might make that percentage even lower, resulting in less lung cancer, COPD, smoking-related heart disease and stroke, diabetes, immune problems, and shorter overall life expectancy.
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JESUS AS A “SCAPE-LAMB”
My birthday usually falls close to Easter, and once in a while even on Easter Sunday. There was a time when life was hard, even desperate, and I was thrilled by the word “resurrection.” I did of course know since childhood about Easter’s connection with fertility (OK, my mother pointed it out to me): spring, lambs, bunnies, eggs. Later I read about how pagan holidays got co-opted by the church since there was no stopping people from celebrating the change of seasons. And even later, after a more complete emancipation of my thinking from Catholicism (it takes years; even now my guess is that remnants of Catholicism hang like cobwebs in some some unswept neural networks; it takes decades to shake off “You’ll burn in hell” sort of religious bullying) did I begin to question the horror story behind the holiday.
The execution of Yehoshua (the probable name of Jesus in Aramaic) as an insurgent against Rome (the apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world implied an imminent end of the Roman Empire) may have happened at any time of the year, but the anonymous writers of the Greek gospels found it convenient to make it at the time of Passover, so that Jesus could be the paschal lamb. (Note that I am not questioning the historicity of Jesus, only the fabrications that grew around this apocalyptic preacher.) But creating the “lamb that takes away the sins of the world” required a deeper change in the Jewish foundations.
Taking away the sins of the people was not the task of the sacrificial lamb, but of the scape-goat. During the holiday of Yom Kippur, the sins of Israel were ritually laid on a goat, and the animal was then driven out “into the wilderness.” (I dearly hope that at least some of those goats survived, hardy as they are.) The lamb, on the other hand, was a symbol of perfect innocence. The sacrificial Yom Kippur lamb also had to be physically without a blemish. This physically and morally perfect animal was then slaughtered as a sacrifice to Yahweh in order to appease and please the deity — animal sacrifice was a pretty universal custom of the era: that was how you worshipped any god. What counted was observance and not the specifics of belief.
Since Jesus was killed rather than driven out like a scapegoat, the goat that took with it the sins of the people had to be removed from the picture. In fact the goat was later equated with Satan — the horns, the horniness, the separation of the sheep from the goats (the species are so related they can interbreed). But the lamb, a sweet innocent, remained. Now it was the lamb who was loaded with the sins of the world (and not just Israel), including the Original Sin of Adam and Eve — St. Augustine came up with that concept, the original sin being transmitted through semen. So the spring holiday of Passover and the autumn holiday of Yom Kippur got conflated, Jesus becoming a kind of “scape-lamb.”
The bad guys were the Roman executioners, but that was an inconvenient fact. Since the gospels were religious propaganda rather than historical chronicles, the Roman involvement was minimized and the blame for having killed Jesus was laid on the Jews. This blood guilt also passed from generation to generation, so the belief in collective Jewish guilt continued until only quite recently, when the Vatican issued an infallible statement that the Jews were not to be blamed.
(Let’s not get tangled here in the strange logic of blaming anyone for the death on which the salvation of the whole world allegedly depended, so presumably you’d have to thank the executioners and single out Judas as the most important among the disciples.)
At least the anti-Semitic aspect of the horror story is now resolved, but not the core issue of the “bloody ransom.” The critical passage is found in Hebrews 9:22: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” (Gary Wills, in “Why Priests?” discusses Hebrews as falsely attributed to Paul, its inclusion in the canon questionable.) Thus, Yahweh laid the sins of humanity, going back to Adam, on Jesus — and since the Father and the Son are one, he laid those sins on himself (I rather like that part) — and then staged the crucifixion as an expiatory blood-shedding sacrifice. In the Middle Ages, theologians held that the “bloody ransom” was paid to Satan, but again, let’s not get tangled up in the logic of economic exchange here.
What we must face with unflinching clarity is the barbarous nature of the whole concept of blood sacrifice as the foundation of Christianity. The Catholic mass is a symbolic re-enactment of that sacrifice, being derived from the ritual of animal sacrifice at the Jerusalem Temple. Once the temple was destroyed by the Romans, leaving only the Western wall which became the famous Wailing Wall, Judaism dropped animal sacrifice and developed a sacrifice-free liturgy (of course even ancient Judaism did not have the concept of a crucified Messiah; the Messiah was supposed to be a victorious king who would restore Israel and raise it to glory, Jerusalem being the center of the earth to which all kings would come to pay homage).
I realize that the apologists would say that the crucifixion was only a necessary step to the resurrection, and the whole point is not the crucifixion but the resurrection. But the symbol of Christianity is not the resurrected Christ. Nor is it the fish of the early Christians. We don’t have representations of the crucifixion until the late 6th century c.e. The early Christians were apparently more interested in the images of paradise. Only the Middle Ages began the fascination with the bloody details (the huge spikes, the bloodied body), the Stations of the Cross, and the ever-present crucifix as a magic weapon against evil spirits.
Isn’t it high time to re-examine the whole theology of the bloody ransom? To face the barbarity of it, its archaic character? It’s so completely out of touch with the modern world, and so, let’s face it, revolting — all this “being rinsed in the blood of the lamb” and the whole obsession with blood. Isn’t a live lamb more joy than a slaughtered one?
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THE ANIMALS’ AFTERLIFE
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TIME-RESTRICTED EATING FOR WEIGHT LOSS AND LONGER LIFE
~ Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. This excess weight contributes to a variety of health problems. Despite enormous effort over decades, the problem has proved extremely difficult to solve. Biologist Satchin Panda thinks we’re missing a key variable: Instead of focusing so much on what we eat, he says, we should pay more attention to when we eat.
A researcher at the Salk Institute in San Diego, Panda argues that eating within a certain time window each day can help people lose weight and may help prevent illnesses including diabetes, heart disease and cancer. In animal studies, he and others have shown that limiting food intake to a period of eight to 12 hours can boost cognitive and physical performance, and may even lengthen life span. Known as time-restricted feeding, or TRF, the approach is simple: Eat more or less what you want, but don’t consume anything before or after the allotted time.
Panda argues that humans’ circadian rhythm is not designed for a world with 24-7 access to food. “If you’re eating all the time, it messes up that pattern,” he says. For many if not most Americans, that pattern is deeply out of whack, and many of us eat from early morning until late at night.
It is not clear whether TRF works in humans the way it seems to work in lab mice. For one, mice and humans have very different circadian rhythms. Mice are nocturnal and sleep more than once a day. They also live for only two or three years. “It may be that for a mouse, a 16-hour fast is the equivalent of a two- or three-day fast for a human,” says Courtney Peterson, a nutrition scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who is doing research on TRF in humans.
Panda first got interested in TRF 15 years ago, while studying the genetics of circadian rhythm. His research on mice revealed that over the course of a day, hundreds of liver genes turn on and off cyclically. The liver plays a central role in metabolizing calories, and it turned out that most of these cyclic genes were involved in eating and digestion. This led him to ask whether mice — and humans, too — were programmed to eat according to a certain circadian schedule. In 2008, he began examining how mice responded to different feeding schedules; to his surprise, TRF had powerful health benefits.
The researchers compared two groups of mice, both of which consumed the same number of calories. One group was limited to an eight-hour window, while the other could eat at any time. After four months, the eight-hour mice weighed 28 percent less than the anytime eaters. “When we saw the results, they were so unexpected,” he says. “Even I didn’t believe it.”
He had his students independently repeat the experiment three times; all of the results were similar. Using the same model — two groups eating an equal number of calories, but on different feeding schedules — he found that TRF mice had normal blood sugar levels, while the unlimited-schedule animals developed Type 2 diabetes. Since then, he has shown that TRF can reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer. In addition, mice restricted to an eight- or nine-hour eating window could run for twice as long as those that ate on a normal schedule.
Some evidence from research involving humans indicates that TRF has benefits even when people don’t eat any less. In a study that is soon to be published, Peterson examined eight men with pre-diabetes, a condition in which people are close to being diabetic but not quite there. Researchers prepared all food in the study, and the participants ate it under supervision. The men tried two schedules: eating all their meals between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., and between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Compared with the 12-hour schedule, the six-hour window significantly lowered blood pressure and improved insulin sensitivity, the ability to process glucose.
“We were really excited about the results,” Peterson says. “It was a small study, but it was done extremely carefully.” In a similar study, also not yet published, she looked at 11 overweight people who followed the same two regimens. Although those in the six-hour window did not increase the overall number of calories they burned, they did increase the amount of fat they burned and reduced levels of a key hunger hormone called ghrelin; these metabolic changes might make it easier to lose weight and body fat.
“I think that within 10 years we will have some really clear guidelines for meal timing,” Peterson says. “But we are in the early stages of this research. There is a lot more work we need to do.”
In 2015, Panda looked at the eating patterns of 156 adults; more than half spread food consumption over 15 hours or longer, while only 10 percent consistently ate within a 12-hour window. He followed up with eight of these people, who were overweight and typically ate for 14 hours or more a day. When the subjects were limited to a 10-hour window for four months, with no other restrictions — they could eat whatever they wanted — they lost weight, slept better and had more energy.
Panda is now starting a study that will eventually include thousands of adults worldwide. Using a custom smartphone app that allows people to take photos of what they eat and immediately send them to researchers, he will be able to more accurately track which foods people eat. Using this data, he will examine whether TRF can improve weight, blood sugar, blood pressure, joint pain, sleep, anxiety and inflammation.
Panda says that mice and humans — and probably most organisms — are not built to simultaneously ingest food and metabolize it. “Everything cannot happen at once,” Panda says. “The body can’t take in calories and break down calories at the same time.” He and other circadian scientists say that many if not most animals have evolved to consume food according to the 24-hour solar cycle. For humans, this rhythm involves eating during the day and sleeping after sunset. With the advent of electric lights, refrigerators, microwaves and 7-Elevens, millions if not billions of us have jettisoned this pattern. But the circadian rhythm of our metabolism still expects us to stop eating at sundown. This mismatch between modern society and programmed biology can lead to myriad health problems, Panda and others say.
It is not clear exactly how TRF works, but it seems to trigger several molecular changes. It increases the activity of mitochondria, which provide energy to cells throughout the body; it boosts levels of ketone bodies, molecules produced by the liver during fasting, which are a powerful source of energy and are especially useful to muscle and brain cells; it also raises production of brown fat, the “good” fat that helps the body burn more energy. Together, these mechanisms allow the body to generate more energy and metabolize calories more efficiently than unscheduled eating.
TRF is just one of several approaches that involve fasting. Scientists are also looking at intermittent fasting, which typically involves eating every other day, or eating for five days and then fasting for two.
Valter Longo, a gerontologist at the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, has focused on an approach in which people eat very little for five days at a time, several times a year. Other researchers are examining calorie restriction, which requires reducing calorie intake below normal levels, for months, years or longer, in hopes of triggering a variety of beneficial physiological responses. Studies of animals and humans have found that these regimens can have benefits, including weight loss, lower rates of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and, in some animal studies, significantly longer life span.
All of these strategies have some similarities to TRF, Panda says, with one major difference: They are much more difficult to follow. Whereas TRF involves relatively minor adjustments in how most people already eat, intermittent fasting and calorie restriction often require hunger and discipline for long periods.
This, he says, is why TRF has potential as a public health strategy. In a society where Big Gulps and Big Macs are ubiquitous, unhealthy eating and obesity are very hard to avoid. TRF, Panda contends, offers a simple, relatively manageable alternative. “Just by changing when we eat, we can have an effect on obesity and these related problems,” Panda says. “This can really move the needle.”
Panda himself has adopted TRF and says he’s seen benefits: lower blood sugar, weight loss, better sleep and more energy. He now uses a modified version, in which he eats breakfast at 7 a.m., skips lunch and has dinner with his family at around 7 p.m. In essence, he has two long fasts a day, between meals and overnight. Others around him have adopted the classic TRF regimen, including his 15-year-old daughter, his mother and several graduate students in his lab. He says his mother had pre-diabetes before starting the diet; since then, her blood sugar has dropped significantly, to a healthy level.
So far, TRF has not caught on widely. Peterson, the UAB scientist, is one of the early adopters. Five to seven days a week, she limits her consumption to a six- or seven-hour window, usually eating between 8 a.m. and 2 or 3 p.m. She says she has more energy, feels a bit calmer and doesn’t feel particularly hungry in the afternoon or evening.
“You have to adapt to it,” she says. “When I first started trying this, I found 10 hours was hard. Now, six hours seems easy.” ~
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/timing-your-meals-may-help-with-weight-loss-thats-what-it-seems-to-do-in-mice/2018/03/23/14672fc0-f718-11e7-a9e3-ab18ce41436a_story.html
from another source
~ Intermittent fasting, where you restrict your food intake to an eight-hour window, is becoming a huge area of research.
Giving our bodies at least 12 hours a day without food allows our digestive system to rest, says Emily Manoogian, clinical researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, and author of a 2019 paper entitled "When to eat".
Rozalyn Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine and Public Health, has studied the benefits of calorie restriction, which is associated with lower levels of inflammation in the body.
"Having a fasting period every day could reap some of these benefits," she says. "It gets into the idea that fasting puts the body in a different state, where it's more ready to repair and surveil for damage, and clear misfolded proteins." Misfolded proteins are faulty versions of ordinary proteins, which are molecules that perform a huge range of important jobs in the body. Misfolded proteins have been associated with a number of diseases.
Intermittent fasting is more in line with how our bodies have evolved, Anderson argues. She says it gives the body a break so it's able to store food and get energy to where it needs to be, and trigger the mechanism to release energy from our body stores.
Fasting could also improve our glycemic response, which is when our blood glucose rises after eating, says Antonio Paoli, professor of exercise and sport sciences at the University of Padova in Italy. Having a smaller blood glucose increase allows you to store less fat in the body, he says.
It's better for all cells to have lower levels of sugar in them because of a process called glycation, Paoli adds. This is where glucose links to proteins and forms compounds called "advanced glycation end products", which can cause inflammation in the body and increase the risk of developing diabetes and heart disease.
But if intermittent fasting is a healthy way to eat – how many meals does this leave room for?
Some experts argue it's best to have one meal a day, including David Levitsky, professor at Cornell University's College of Human Ecology in New York, who does this himself.
"There's a lot of data showing that, if I show you food or pictures of food, you're likely to eat, and the more frequently food is in front of you, the more you're going to eat that day," he says.
This is because, before we had fridges and supermarkets, we ate when food was available. Throughout history, we consumed one meal a day, including the Ancient Romans who ate one meal around midday, says food historian Seren Charrington-Hollins.
Wouldn't one meal a day leave us feeling hungry? Not necessarily, Levitsky argues, because hunger is often a psychological sensation.
"When the clock says 12pm, we may get feelings to eat, or you might be conditioned to eat breakfast in the morning, but this is nonsense. Data shows that if you don't eat breakfast, you're going to eat fewer calories overall that day.
"Our physiology is built for feasting and fasting," he says. However, Levitsky doesn't recommend this approach for people with diabetes.
But Manoogan doesn't recommend sticking to one meal a day, since this can increase the level of glucose in our blood when we're not eating – known as fasting glucose. High levels of fasting glucose over a long period of time is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.
Keeping blood glucose levels down requires eating more regularly than once a day, Manoogan says, as this prevents the body thinking it's starving and releasing more glucose when you do eventually eat in response.
Instead, she says, two to three meals a day is best – with most of your calories consumed earlier in the day. This is because eating late at night is associated with cardio-metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.
But eating too early in the morning should be avoided, too, she says, as this wouldn't give you sufficient time to fast. Also, eating too soon after waking up works against our circadian rhythm – known as our body clock – which researchers say dictates how the body processes food differently throughout the day.
Our bodies release melatonin overnight to help us sleep – but melatonin also pauses the creation of insulin, which stores glucose in the body. Because melatonin is released while you're sleeping, the body uses it to make sure we don't take in too much glucose while we're sleeping and not eating, Manoogan says.
"If you take in calories when your melatonin is high, you get really high glucose levels. Consuming a lot of calories at night poses a significant challenge to the body because if insulin is supressed, your body can't store glucose properly.”
And, as we know, high levels of glucose over long periods of time can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
This doesn't mean we should skip breakfast altogether, but some evidence suggests we should wait an hour or two after waking up before we crack open the eggs. It's also worth remembering that breakfast as we know and love it today is a relatively new concept.
"The Ancient Greeks were the first to introduce the concept of breakfast, they'd eat bread soaked in wine, then they had a frugal lunch, then a hearty evening meal," says Charrington-Hollins.
Initially, breakfast was exclusive to aristocratic classes, says Charrington-Hollins. It first caught on in the 17th Century, when it became the luxury of those who could afford the food and the time for a leisurely meal in the morning.
"The concept today of breakfast being the norm [came about] during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century and its introduction of working hours," says Charrington-Hollins. Such a routine lends itself to three meals a day. "The first meal would be something quite simple for the working classes – it might be street food from a vendor or bread.”
But after war, when availability of food diminished, the idea of eating a full breakfast wasn't possible and a lot of people skipped it. "The idea of three meals a day went out the window," says Charrington-Hollins. "In the 1950s breakfast becomes how we recognize it today: cereal and toast. Prior to that we were happy to eat a piece of bread with jam.”
Manoogan says it's best to not specify the best times to eat, as this can be difficult for people with responsibilities and irregular time commitments, such as those working night shifts.
"Telling people to stop eating by 7 pm isn't helpful because people have different schedules. If you try to give your body regular fast nights, try to not eat too late or early and try to not have huge final meals, this can usually help. People can at least adopt parts of this," she says.
"You could see a dramatic change just from a small delay in your first meal and advancing your last meal. Making this regular without changing anything else could have a big impact."
But whatever changes you make, researchers agree that consistency is crucial.
"The body works in patterns," says Anderson. "We respond to the anticipation of being fed. One thing intermittent fasting does is it imposes a pattern, and our biological systems do well with a pattern." She says the body picks up on cues to anticipate our eating behaviors so it can best deal with the food when we eat it.
When it comes to how many meals we deem normal, Charrington-Hollins is seeing change on the horizon.
"Over the centuries, we've become conditioned to three meals a day, but this is being challenged now and people's attitude to food is changing. We have more sedate lifestyles, we're not doing the level of work we were doing in the 19th Century, so we need fewer calories.
"I think, long-term, we'll be reducing back to a light meal then a main meal, depending on what happens work-wise. Our working hours will be the driving force.
"When we came off rations, we embraced three meals a day because there was suddenly an abundance of food.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220412-should-we-be-eating-three-meals-a-day?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Velasquez: Peasants' Lunch
Oriana:
Even with time-restricted eating, we should still make sure that our meals do not cause a glucose and insulin spike; this means that meal has sufficient protein (but not excess protein, which is converted to glucose), leafy greens and other non-starchy vegetables, and good fats (e.g. an avocado, which is also an excellent source of fiber).
I'd love to try longer fasting, but, alas, I can fast only so long (until noon or so) before I begin to feel woozy and weak. It’s not really hunger pangs that have stopped me from the more extreme fasting regimens — it’s that weak feeling (probably hypoglycemia). I listen to my body, and that signal was definitely received.
I like the idea of not eating two hours before bedtime and two hours after waking. That's pretty easy, and might give you the courage to try more hours of fasting. But it's important to listen to your body. I don't really mean hunger pangs -- those pass. But that woozy feeling -- I simply can't afford it. Life is too short to let yourself feel so woozy that you can no longer be productive.
Any restricted time diet can be helped by pouring olive oil (or a mix of olive oil and MTC oil) over the food. Fat slows down digestion, so it’s an appetite suppressant. Tea, both black and green, also makes an excellent appetite suppressant. And yes, you can put a bit of MTC oil into that tea. Or pop a teaspoon of delicious coconut oil into your mouth.
But the best way to forget about food is to work on something interesting. Reading fascinating articles also works. The idea may seem Buddhist: you lose yourself in your activity. You sink into it completely, like Dostoyevsky into the abyss.
Rilke: “To work is to live without dying.”
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REGENERATING HUMAN SKIN BY 30 YEARS
~ Research from the Babraham Institute has developed a method to 'time jump' human skin cells by 30 years, turning back the aging clock for cells without losing their specialized function. Work by researchers in the Institute's Epigenetics research program has been able to partly restore the function of older cells, as well as rejuvenating the molecular measures of biological age. The research is published in the journal eLife and whilst at an early stage of exploration, it could revolutionize regenerative medicine.
As we age, our cells' ability to function declines and the genome accumulates marks of aging. Regenerative biology aims to repair or replace cells including old ones. One of the most important tools in regenerative biology is our ability to create 'induced' stem cells. The process is a result of several steps, each erasing some of the marks that make cells specialised. In theory, these stem cells have the potential to become any cell type, but scientists aren't yet able to reliably recreate the conditions to re-differentiate stem cells into all cell types.
Turning back time
The new method, based on the Nobel Prize winning technique scientists use to make stem cells, overcomes the problem of entirely erasing cell identity by halting reprogramming part of the way through the process. This allowed researchers to find the precise balance between reprogramming cells, making them biologically younger, while still being able to regain their specialized cell function.
In 2007, Shinya Yamanaka was the first scientist to turn normal cells, which have a specific function, into stem cells which have the special ability to develop into any cell type. The full process of stem cell reprogramming takes around 50 days using four key molecules called the Yamanaka factors. The new method, called 'maturation phase transient reprogramming', exposes cells to Yamanaka factors for just 13 days.
At this point, age-related changes are removed and the cells have temporarily lost their identity. The partly reprogrammed cells were given time to grow under normal conditions, to observe whether their specific skin cell function returned. Genome analysis showed that cells had regained markers characteristic of skin cells (fibroblasts), and this was confirmed by observing collagen production in the reprogrammed cells.
Age isn't just a number
To show that the cells had been rejuvenated, the researchers looked for changes in the hallmarks of aging. As explained by Dr Diljeet Gill, a postdoc in Wolf Reik's lab at the Institute who conducted the work as a PhD student: "Our understanding of aging on a molecular level has progressed over the last decade, giving rise to techniques that allow researchers to measure age-related biological changes in human cells. We were able to apply this to our experiment to determine the extent of reprogramming our new method achieved."
Researchers looked at multiple measures of cellular age. The first is the epigenetic clock, where chemical tags present throughout the genome indicate age. The second is the transcriptome, all the gene readouts produced by the cell. By these two measures, the reprogrammed cells matched the profile of cells that were 30 years younger compared to reference data sets.
The potential applications of this technique are dependent on the cells not only appearing younger, but functioning like young cells too. Fibroblasts produce collagen, a molecule found in bones, skin tendons and ligaments, helping provide structure to tissues and heal wounds.
The rejuvenated fibroblasts produced more collagen proteins compared to control cells that did not undergo the reprogramming process. Fibroblasts also move into areas that need repairing. Researchers tested the partially rejuvenated cells by creating an artificial cut in a layer of cells in a dish. They found that their treated fibroblasts moved into the gap faster than older cells. This is a promising sign that one day this research could eventually be used to create cells that are better at healing wounds.
In the future, this research may also open up other therapeutic possibilities; the researchers observed that their method also had an effect on other genes linked to age-related diseases and symptoms. The APBA2 gene, associated with Alzheimer's disease, and the MAF gene with a role in the development of cataracts, both showed changes towards youthful levels of transcription.
The mechanism behind the successful transient reprogramming is not yet fully understood, and is the next piece of the puzzle to explore. The researchers speculate that key areas of the genome involved in shaping cell identity might escape the reprogramming process.
Diljeet concluded: "Our results represent a big step forward in our understanding of cell reprogramming. We have proved that cells can be rejuvenated without losing their function and that rejuvenation looks to restore some function to old cells. The fact that we also saw a reverse of aging indicators in genes associated with diseases is particularly promising for the future of this work."
Professor Wolf Reik, a group leader in the Epigenetics research program who has recently moved to lead the Altos Labs Cambridge Institute, said: "This work has very exciting implications. Eventually, we may be able to identify genes that rejuvenate without reprogramming, and specifically target those to reduce the effects of aging. This approach holds promise for valuable discoveries that could open up an amazing therapeutic horizon.” ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220408083901.htm
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ending on beauty:
OF MERE BEING
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
~ Wallace Stevens
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