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Asteroidea and Brittle Starfish Fossils on matrix (Ordovician, 488 - 433 million years) from Morocco. Isn't this a marvelous, dancing image?
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LETTER FROM KAFKA
Dear Fräulein K, I can’t believe you ask,
Does God love us? You must joke.
We are the suicidal thoughts of God.
I always have a headache ready,
can easily arrange insomnia.
Today a neighbor coughed twice;
I know tomorrow
he’ll cough even more.
Do I complain too much?
My motto: If we cannot use arms,
let us embrace with complaints.
If only I could be not the nobody I am,
but the nobody I am paid to be!
On a balcony in my mind I leaned
to peony petals rimmed with rain,
when my superior, that good
sober man, asked if we carried
insurance for convicts —
I almost slapped him with both hands.
You see what an impossible
person I am. What strength it takes
to read this letter.
How you must hate me.
But I am unworthy of hate.
My father meanwhile grows and grows,
one colossal leg already in America —
he’s sprawling across the continents.
We have nothing in common, but then
what do I have in common with myself?
I must move away from home:
the sight of my parents’ nightshirts
makes me sick to the stomach.
I think of marriage
even more often than of death.
If only I could spend my life
in a cellar with nothing but paper
and pen, a ribbon of light
seeping in at the edge of the door —
But I won’t torment you by mail;
I’ll save it up until we meet.
If writing is prayer, who am I praying to?
Not to the one who hangs
around our neck our daily stone.
Perhaps we shouldn’t meet.
I resent having to talk
when I could be writing you a letter.
You ask, But what is art?
Dear Fräulein: there is no art.
There is only the delight of failure.
Regretfully Yours, K
~ Oriana
Statue of Kafka in Prague; Jaroslav Rona, 2003
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THE PLEASURES AND PUNISHMENTS OF READING FRANZ KAFKA
~ Reading the work of Franz Kafka is a pleasure, whose punishment is this: writing about it, too.
In Kafka, no honor comes without suffering, and no suffering goes unhonored.
Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.
Once, a student approached Rabbi Shalom of Belz and asked, “What is required in order to live a decent life? How do I know what charity is? What lovingkindness is? How can I tell if I’ve ever been in the presence of God’s mercy?” And so on. The Rabbi stood and was silent and let the student talk until the student was all talked out. And even then the Rabbi kept standing in silence, which was—abracadabra—the answer.
Having to explain the meaning of something that to you is utterly plain and obvious is like having to explain the meaning of someone. Providing such an explanation is impossible and so, a variety of torture. One of the lighter varieties, to be sure, but torture nonetheless. It is a job not for a fan, or even for a critic, but for a self-hating crazy person.
Kafka’s work should be standard reading for a time that cannot define its standards: a time that treats all identities as spectrums but all judgment as binary (“like” or “dislike”); a time that insists on appropriate behavior but forbids appropriation (people should read more books from other cultures, but must never write a book set in a culture not their own); a time that has replaced literacy with numeracy, but then laments that its only common culture is political (“Remember 2017?” “Whose 2017?”).
Kafka: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”
*
None of Kafka’s novels were finished, or published, during Kafka’s lifetime. Only nine of the fictions included in He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka were published during his lifetime. It’s not clear how many of them were finished. Are finished.
The aspect of essay writing that I loathe the most: giving a biographical account of the author. It’s ridiculous to give an account that I’ve inevitably sourced, at least in part, from the very same online omniscience that’s equally available to the reader. I’ve resolved, then, not to consult the internet for this—not to consult anyone, or anything. If the world burned now, and all of the internet with it, and then all the libraries, and then all the books, this is what I would know and must be judged by: Kafka was born in Prague, the third city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1880-something, and, due to complications from tuberculosis, basically starved to death in a sanatorium located in a town that starts with a K, in post-Empire, independent Austria, in 1920-something.
He was trained in law at Charles University and practiced as a lawyer in the insurance industry. He was engaged to be married three times, twice to the same woman, whose name was Felice Bauer. He left instructions for all of his work to be burned after his death, which his friend Max Brod disobeyed. In 1918, which year I remember because it’s the last year of the World War I, Kafka wrote in the notebook that he otherwise used for his Hebrew lessons, “Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.” I think I recall a few other Kafka quotations, but this is the one I repeat to myself aloud like a prayer, dragging home after my expensive, every-Wednesday-at-4-P.M. appointment describing my childhood to a stranger: “Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.”
*
Kafka’s characters have no choice but to suffer Kafka. We readers, however, have chosen to submit to his machinery of our own free will, and we have done so in every generation since Kafka’s own, in the process producing thousands of essays and academic papers, more than a hundred biographies, more than a dozen films and TV shows, not to mention the Kafka-branding industry, which includes a computer font that reproduces the author’s handwriting (and features, alongside the author’s signature capital-K, a whimsically anachronistic € sign), T-shirts, hats, keychains, and smartphone covers emblazoned with his face, und so weiter.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, our Kafka cathexis can be read as a product of the subject’s rejection of us—a reaction to the fact that every time a new merchandiser of scholarly Kafkaiana claims to have finally gotten a grasp on a certain aspect of the author’s life—on his identity as a Germanophone Czech, or Jew, or Zionist, or anti-Zionist, or Marxist, or feminist, or Americophile, or vegetarian, or hypochondriac, or lawyer, or brother, or son—Kafka, whoever Kafka was or is, floats away even further. It’s my conviction that we keep abasing ourselves in this unrequited pursuit because Kafka was the last truly great writer that any of us have had, and by us, I mean Germanophone Czechs, Jews, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Marxists, feminists, Americophiles, vegetarians, hypochondriacs, lawyers, brothers, and sons.
Here is a quintessential Kafka sentence, on the building of the Great Wall of China, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir:
In fact it is said that there are gaps which have never been filled in at all—according to some they are far larger than the completed sections—though this assertion is merely one of the many legends to which the building of the wall gave rise, and which cannot be verified, at least by any single man with his own eyes and judgment, on account of the extent of the structure.
And here is the same sentence translated by Stanley Corngold:
Indeed, it said that there are gaps that have not been filled in at all; according to some people these are much larger than the completed sections, although this assertion may be only one of the many legends that have grown up around the Wall and which, given the length of the Wall, is not something one person can verify, at least with his own eyes, and by his own standards.
Try it this way:
Indeed, it is said that gaps there are, that filled in have never been at all, an assertion, however, that probably only to the many legends belongs, that around the Wall have arisen, and that, at least by any single person with their own eyes and standards, on account of the extent of the Wall, cannot be verified.
The manipulation of this nested “inversion” for purposes of variation, rhythmic drive, cliché lampooning, and subversive humor is a significant feature not merely of Kafka’s style, but of Kafka’s mind, and is at least as important for English-language readers to countenance as the author’s religiosity, eschatology, libido, and insomnia.
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Kafka’s most profound ambiguity, though, inheres in his use of the subjunctive—his moments of “as if” and “as though” (in German, als): “If I merely walk in the direction of the entrance, even though I may be separated from it by several passages and rooms, I find myself sensing an atmosphere of great danger, actually as if my hair were growing thin and in a moment might fly off and leave me bare and shivering, exposed to the howls of my enemies” (“The Burrow”). Here, and elsewhere, Kafka harnesses the humblest grammar to metamorphic power, until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator, but the absence of the universe’s only reliable narrator, who is God.
In his fiction, Kafka leaves certain elements undescribed (characters’ faces), and underdescribed (settings), in order to allow the reader to impose descriptions of their own that personalize the universality. He furthers this permissiveness by rarely writing surface metaphors, preferring instead to inculcate structural metaphors (or allegories, or parables) by defining his subjects negatively: “Our little town does not lie on the frontier, nowhere near; it is so far from the frontier, in fact, that perhaps no one from our town has ever been there” (“The Refusal”). In general, Kafka prefers not to associate things or people inside his fiction with things or people outside it. Self-reference is his primary mode: His fiction is full of formulations like “as I used to do,” and “as I had often thought,” which, by comparison and contrast, establish precedent.
Once, in Jerusalem, I was sitting at a café reading Kafka (in English). At some point the café had become a bar—meaning that the coffee and tea drinking had given way to alcohol—and when I took a break from the pages and looked around, I realized that a lot of people were drunk. One man came over to my table, turned an empty chair around, sat down straddling its back, grabbed the book out of my hands, and examined it. “What’s it about?” he asked. He was in his early twenties, twitchy, aggressive, entirely serious. “It’s about impossible situations,” I said in Hebrew, and the moment that the phrase was out of my mouth, I regretted the fact that, especially given my foreign accent, it sounded like I was quoting some journalistic euphemism for the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
The guy leaned in close and said, with boozy breath, “Impossible situations like what?” Realizing that I’d have to defuse this impossible situation, I told him that one of Kafka’s books was about a man who is accused of a crime, but no one will tell him what that crime is, and so he is unable to defend himself. I told him that another of the books was about a man who incompetently surveys land (I didn’t know the Hebrew for “land surveyor,” so I said something like “mapmaker”) who comes to a strange town in the course of his duties and must receive permission to practice his trade there, and even just to stay there, from the authorities who rule the town from its castle, but the castle authorities refuse to grant him a labor or even a residency permit and defer any decision about his legal status indefinitely.
Meanwhile, the face of the man in front of me had turned siren red and the vessels in his neck swelled and throbbed. Not knowing what I had said to enrage him, or what else I could do that might calm him, I just continued with my explanation, by saying that this book—the one that he was still holding, and gripping so tightly that I thought he’d tear it in half—was called Amerika, and that it was about America, and, because it was the author’s first novel, it wasn’t quite typical of—
The man jumped out of the chair and banged the book on the table, yelling (in my loose translation), “So the people in the books are fucking idiots? Is it supposed to be funny that they’re so stupid? When I had to get a new passport on short notice, because my old one expired and I had to go to London for business, at the passport office they told me no, it’s not possible. And I could have just left it at that and given up, but I didn’t. It was too much money to lose. So I just phoned my cousin, whose wife’s brother works for the Ministry of Interior, and I got my new passport within a week. That’s how you have to be. I mean, you have a job to do, you do it. Don’t let anything get in your way.”
He flung the book to the floor, and now all the café-bar’s patrons were paying attention to what was happening, but also moving away, giving him some room to have his tantrum. “And if someone accused me of some crime that I didn’t do,” he continued, “I’d get this friend of mine from the army who’s a lawyer to sue them for all their money and take their apartment and car. And if they kept on accusing me after that, I’d beat the shit out of them. I’d find out where their offices were and wait outside until they came out and I’d jump them from behind and go like this and like that”—he was air-punching and air-kicking some imaginary nemesis, putting phantom opponents in headlocks and choking them out.
I ran away down the block and turned around only at the corner: the man was being restrained by waiters. Amerika was lost—it is the only book by Kafka that I have never finished. But to this day, the man’s words, and his air-fighting, remain with me, and I’m still not sure how to take them—as anything other than an indication of the differences between the Mitteleuropean will to ambiguity and the near-universal impatience of the present.
Kafka is buried in the New Jewish cemetery in the crumbling suburbs of Prague. The original gravestone was stolen (some say by a literary-minded Nazi, others say by the Czechoslovak Communist government). Then the replacement gravestone was stolen (some say by a Czechoslovak anti-Communist underground youth movement, others say by a private collector from the West). Today the stone under which the author reposes is a replacement’s replacement—an ugly hexagonal monolith. The last time I visited the cemetery, for the funeral of a man, a Holocaust survivor whose memoir I ghostwrote, workers were installing CCTV cameras. ~
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/09/02/the-pleasures-and-punishments-of-reading-franz-kafka/
Kafka mural in Prague
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The stupidity of people comes from
having an answer for everything.
The wisdom of the novel comes from
having a question for everything.
~ Milan Kundera
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A RETIRED RUSSIAN COLONEL AND MILITARY ANALYST SPEAKS OUT ON RUSSIAN TV
~ Russia's mainstream media outlets offer a view of the Ukraine war that is unlike anything seen from outside of the country. For a start, they don't even call it a war. But our Russia editor reflects on a rare exchange broadcast on state TV.
The program was 60 Minutes, the flagship twice-daily talk show on Russian state TV: studio discussion that promotes the Kremlin line on absolutely everything, including on President Putin's so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine.
The Kremlin still maintains that the Russian offensive is going according to plan.
But on Monday night, studio guest Mikhail Khodarenok, a military analyst and retired colonel, painted a very different picture.
He warned that "the situation [for Russia] will clearly get worse" as Ukraine receives additional military assistance from the West and that "the Ukrainian army can arm a million people".
The program was 60 Minutes, the flagship twice-daily talk show on Russian state TV: studio discussion that promotes the Kremlin line on absolutely everything, including on President Putin's so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine.
The Kremlin still maintains that the Russian offensive is going according to plan.
But on Monday night, studio guest Mikhail Khodarenok, a military analyst and retired colonel, painted a very different picture.
He warned that "the situation [for Russia] will clearly get worse" as Ukraine receives additional military assistance from the West and that "the Ukrainian army can arm a million people”.
Referring to Ukrainian soldiers, he noted: "The desire to defend their motherland very much exists. Ultimate victory on the battlefield is determined by the high morale of troops who are spilling blood for the ideas they are ready to fight for.
"The biggest problem with [Russia's] military and political situation," he continued, "is that we are in total political isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don't want to admit it. We need to resolve this situation.
"The situation cannot be considered normal when against us, there is a coalition of 42 countries and when our resources, military-political and military-technical, are limited.”
BBC’s Steve Rosenberg posted on Twitter: “Extraordinary exchange on Russian state TV’s top talk show about Ukraine. Military analyst and retired colonel Mikhail Khodarenok tells anchor Olga Skabayeva “The situation for us will clearly get worse . . . We are in total geopolitical isolation . . . the situation is not normal.”
The other guests in the studio were silent. Even the host, Olga Skabeyeva, normally fierce and vocal in her defense of the Kremlin, appeared oddly subdued.
In many ways, it's a case of "I told you so" from Mr Khodarenok. Writing in Russia's Independent Military Review back in February, before Moscow attacked Ukraine, the defense analyst had criticized "enthusiastic hawks and hasty cuckoos" for claiming that Russia would easily win a war against Ukraine.
His conclusion back then: "An armed conflict with Ukraine is not in Russia's national interests.”
Criticism in print is one thing. But on TV - to an audience of millions — that is another level completely. The Kremlin has gone out of its way to control the informational landscape here: shutting down independent Russian news sources and ensuring that television — the principal tool in Russia for shaping public opinion — is on message.
It is rare to hear such realistic analysis of events on Russian TV.
Rare. But not unique. In recent weeks, critical views have appeared on television here. In March, on another popular TV talk show, a Russian filmmaker told the presenter: "The war in Ukraine paints a frightening picture, it has a very oppressive influence on our society.”
So what happened on 60 Minutes? Was this a spontaneous, unprompted and unexpected wake-up call on Ukraine that slipped through the net?
Or was it a pre-planned burst of reality in order to prepare the Russian public for negative news on the progress of the "special military operation”?
It's difficult to say. But as they say on the telly, stay tuned to Russian TV for further signals. ~ (Steve Rosenberg, BBC’s Russia Editor)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61484222
(a more phonetic transliteration of the colonel’s name is “Khodaryonok)
Oriana:
I wouldn’t say that the hostess “appeared oddly subdued.” Perhaps slightly more so during the first part of the colonel’s presentation. Then she started interrupting him, her voice charged with hostility.
For me one special moment was the colonel’s invocation of “the classics of Marxism-Leninism, and they were not fools (duraki) about this” on the soldiers’ morale as the most important factor in warfare.
In reply to the hostess’s attempt to define an army’s “professionalism” as “the readiness to die,” the colonel replied that he defines military professionalism as “combat readiness.”
“Virtually the entire world is against us,” Khodarenok said. When the hostess attacked him by pointing out China and India, he replied that the support of China and India was not unconditional. He seemed unfazed by the aggressive propaganda coming out the hostess. He even said that “waving missiles at Finland is comical.”
Considering Kremlin’s tight control over the media, perhaps it’s a new policy to allow a few critical voices, maybe just for show, or maybe to prepare the Russian public for a more toned-down picture of the war. To quote the BBC article:
~ Was this a spontaneous, unprompted and unexpected wake-up call on Ukraine that slipped through the net?
Or was it a pre-planned burst of reality in order to prepare the Russian public for negative news on the progress of the "special military operation”? ~
Unsurprisingly, Skabeyeva finished by saying that “our great country will achieve a great victory.” But against the colonel’s “Marxist-Leninist” prediction that the victory goes to the side with the greater morale, her prediction of Russian victory sounded hollow, like a religious promise of heaven, devoid of evidence.
In another article, Steve Rosenberg quotes this conversation:
~ Outside the shopping centre, I get chatting to Nadezhda, a doctor.
"Prices are so high, it's impossible to survive now on my salary," Nadezhda tells me.
"But the hardest thing of all is living in a society that doesn't want to know the truth about events in Ukraine. People are too busy worrying about their mortgage payments, paying off their debts. They're not interested in what's going on around them. But I think that what's happening in Ukraine is terrible. I'm ashamed to be Russian.”
Rosenberg sums up: ~ This is "Special Military Operation Russia" — a parallel universe, Orwellian, where invasion is liberation, where aggression is self-defense and where critics are traitors.
It feels like the Russia I have known for the last 30 years has gone. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61188783
Mikhail Khadarenok
Oriana:
An update, May 20, 22
Alas, the retired colonel appeared on TV again, and tried to tone down his previous statements.
Well, at least he wasn’t hauled off to prison. But he must have gotten “worked on” by some FSB agents.
Regardless, he is alive. That’s progress. And the shock of truth in his first appearance won’t be so easily dispelled.
**
"The motherland is not the president's ass that one must lather and kiss all the time. The motherland is a beggar, an old woman that sells potatoes at the railway station. That is what motherland is," Yuri Shevchuk [a popular rock singer] said at the concert.
His words were cheered by the crowd.
Last month, authorities in the Siberian city of Tyumen canceled a DDT concert in the city after Shevchuk refused to perform on a stage decorated with a huge "Z" — a sign of support of Russia's war against Ukraine. ~
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ddt-shevchuk-criticism-ukraine-war/31858449.html?fbclid=IwAR0l4ohD6ZckqmRhvHaDQ13rZ3WnIfbZ6jP-crqxGGOY5-wdEQO9Yl0K0TE
Oriana:
Note: the police did come up to him after the concert, talked to him, drew up the charges, BUT DID NOT ARREST HIM.
His message went viral on the social media.
Again, there is speculation that this may be a preparation of the public for a change in the official policy course on Ukraine.
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AUDIENCE CHANTS "F*CK WAR!" AT A CONCERT IN SAINT PETERSBURG
And of course it would be difficult to try and arrest and whole audience chanting "Hooy voynye!"
Note that these are young people who are daring to protest. Young, urban, more educated. They are a minority; nonetheless, they are the future.
As for the rural young men, they don't really want to fight in Ukraine either. And since no declaration of war has been issued, they have the legal right not to enter Ukraine.
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PAUL KRUGMAN ON CERTAIN PUNDITS
The indications of a potential coup in Russia seem to be present, but there's no telling if that would be an improvement, a catastrophe of chaos, or even an intensifying of the situation, with a replacement worse than Putin. Even with the iron fist of a tyrant’s control and a massive propaganda machine it is impossible to contain and maintain belief past a certain point. That point is when irrefutable evidence accumulates that the official story doesn't account for what is actually right before your eyes. Such as sons not returning from a (not) war, and merely reported "missing." In the thousands. As the numbers increase the lies become less and less credible.
Also, the narrative fails when it reaches the realm of the ridiculous. When there's such obvious refusal to even work hard at believable lies. the whole thing looks like a clown-run circus...the unfortunate numbers of people falling out of windows, committing “murder-suicide”, the generals being picked off by snipers one by one, tanks without fuel, guns without ammunition, soldiers without food, cardboard armor, egg cartons on tanks, soldiers who don’t know digging trenches at Chernobyl is a bad idea...it's like a comedy of errors that is also a theater of horrors...and all the actors forced on that stage inevitably come to see that they are no more than "meat" thrown into the grinder, expendable bodies caught in a huge deliberate web of lies.
Not at all surprising that they go AWOL, sabotage their already shabby equipment, turn on their superiors...and commit war crimes whose brutality must at least be in some ways shaped by their own frustration, anger, hunger, fear — and their sense of betrayal. Not excusable, but not surprising.
The failure of a state can be measured in the suffering of its people. The huge incidence of alcoholism, high numbers of suicides, and a population fleeing the country in droves — even the drop in the birthrate — although that is now almost universal — speaks of deep misery, beyond mere discontent. It seems to me these indicate a system that cannot continue without some dramatic, catastrophic change. What comes next is not really predictable.
Oriana:
No. First the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union took the world by surprise — in Putin’s perception, “the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century.” And now this war that’s an insane attempt to restore the territory and the alleged glory of the Soviet era. True, Russia has never been through a “de-Sovietization,” the way Germany went through de-nazification. The hope is that with a shrinking population and its best minds fled abroad, Russia eventually won’t have the sheer numbers and know-how to sustain a military capable of invading neighboring countries.
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SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT PUTIN’S FRAGILE EGO?
~ This is a remarkable investigation of mass executions perpetrated by Russian invaders just on one small suburb of Kyiv. More and more of such hair-rising cases of Russian army's monstrous medieval barbarity: thousands upon thousands of instances of murder, rape, plunder in Ukraine are coming to light, being thoroughly documented and presented to the stunned world and to The international Court of Justice in The Hague.
But we still must not humiliate Putin? His ego is too fragile? He is too easily woundable? Some of Old Europe's leaders still are hoping to do business with him, when this is over — to shake his puffy blood-stained hand, to benefit from his financial largesse?
Not going to happen. ~ Misha Iossel
Bucha execution
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MARK HERTLING: “LET’S REMIND OURSELVES WHAT RIGHT LOOKS LIKE”
*General Eisenhower was given a very brief (two page) order for the Normandy invasion. His task:
"You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other united nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.”
Brief and succinct strategic guidance to the leader of the greatest generation.
1. Undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany.
2. Destroy her armed forces.
No appeasement, no "let Hitler have part of Poland," no face-saving for a dangerous megalomaniac.
History didn't tell us there was "waning public support" for a righteous effort to help other nations regain their sovereignty.
The rest of the world and our nation were not being bombarded with "both-side" cable news opinions.
Values shaped our policy, and policy drove strategy.
All this to say I disagree with @nytimes editorial board who suggests today that US citizens may “wane in their support for Ukraine.”
Ukraine met an illegal and criminal invasion with strong will. After 1000's of deaths, rapes, and destruction of homes, their will is stronger than ever.
We ought take a long, hard look at ourselves — in this area, and in others — and remind ourselves what right looks like.
"Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, & never be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won." (West Point Cadet Prayer)*
Oriana:
We’ve gotten so used to moral compromise in politics that someone like Zelensky, who chooses to stay in his besieged country and fight for what is right comes as a shock. Regardless of how this war will end, we will never forget the courage and moral integrity of Zelensky and the whole Ukrainian nation.
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UKRAINE’S CHIEF OF INTELLIGENCE PREDICTS FURTHER COURSE OF THE WAR
~ Ukraine's head of military intelligence says the war with Russia is going so well, that it will reach a turning point by mid-August and be over by the end of the year.
It is the most precise and optimistic prediction by a senior Ukrainian official so far.
In an exclusive interview with Sky News, Major General Kyrylo Budanov also said a coup to remove Vladimir Putin is already under way in Russia and the Russian leader is seriously ill with cancer.
The general's office is dark and stuffed with the paraphernalia of war and espionage, sandbags stacked on its windows, machine guns piled on the floor, and a spare rifle magazine on his desk used as a paperweight.
He is remarkably young to lead his country's military intelligence agency at just 36 years and speaks with the dry precision of his trade.
He showed little emotion, smiling only once as he said in English: "I'm optimistic."
General Budanov correctly predicted when the Russian invasion would happen when others in his government were publicly skeptical and now says he is confident about predicting its conclusion.
"The breaking point will be in the second part of August.
"Most of the active combat actions will have finished by the end of this year.
"As a result, we will renew Ukrainian power in all our territories that we have lost including Donbas and the Crimea.”
Russia's tactics have not changed despite its shift to the east he says, and Russia is suffering huge losses though he would not be drawn on Ukrainian casualties.
Russia is just a 'horde of people with weapons’
He said he was not surprised by Russia's setbacks in the war.
"We know everything about our enemy. We know about their plans almost as they're being made.
"Europe sees Russia as a big threat. They are afraid of its aggression.
"We have been fighting Russia for eight years and we can say that this highly publicized Russian power is a myth.
"It is not as powerful as this. It is a horde of people with weapons.”
Russian forces have been pushed back almost to the border around Kharkiv, he says, and a recent attack on forces further south trying to cross the Siverskyy Donets caused considerable damage.
Its aftermath has been caught in dramatic aerial pictures.
"I can confirm that they suffered heavy losses in manpower and armor and I can say that when the artillery strikes happened many of the crews abandoned their equipment," General Budanov said.
'Impossible to stop a coup’
General Budanov also told Sky News defeat in Ukraine would lead to the removal of Russia's leader and the country's disintegration.
"It will eventually lead to the change of leadership of the Russian Federation. This process has already been launched and they are moving into that way.”
Does that mean a coup is under way?
"Yes," he responded.
"They are moving in this way and it is impossible to stop it.”
He claimed Mr Putin is in a "very bad psychological and physical condition and he is very sick".
He dismissed suggestions he was spreading propaganda as part of the information war and was certain of his claims.
"It's my job, it's my work, if not me who will know this?”
Ukrainian officials have cast doubts about Mr Putin's mental and physical well-being before and declared their certainty about eventually winning, but until this interview, none have been so specific and laid out a timeline for victory, a sign of their increasing confidence on the battlefield. ~
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-military-intelligence-chief-optimistic-of-russian-defeat-saying-war-will-be-over-by-end-of-year-12612320
Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine's chief of military intelligence: "It is my job to know."
Jay Failing:
I hope this is true, but my senses tell me this is over confident. Russians are a tough people, and battlefield losses traditionally do not bother them as much as losses do to Western Nations. The golden rule: “Never underestimate the enemy.” Period. Ain’t over till its over. Power to Ukraine, fighting with the heart of a lion.
Stuart Clark:
Demographics have changed in Russia since the Great War.
They have a declining population.
Very high divorce rates and children are usually only one per mother (who is divorced).
The men die in Russia at 60 due to a life time of alcohol abuse… the wives live on average 16 years longer.
So the Mother is joined by the Babushka to bring up the kid.
Can you imagine how it's going to go down when thousands of them realize their only child is missing in action.
It will reverberate.
I also think it's very sad.
Deaths of young folk on either side.
(Quora)
*
Oriana:
I’ve read that in Russia the male life expectancy is 63 years.
Some of these deaths are due to suicide: “The suicide rates among men in Russia (26.1 per 100,000) were over three times higher than among women (6.9 per 100,000) in 2016. Committing suicide appears to be a male phenomenon over the past 20 years in post-Soviet Russia.”
“Not only are men likelier to die of suicide than women between the ages of 10 and 60 years, but the suicide rate among men also grows with every decade of life, reaching a peak at 50. Russian men become increasingly inclined to commit suicide before their 60th birthday, usually via firearms or strangulation.” [I think what is meant by “strangulation” is hanging oneself.]
https://www.cureus.com/articles/88128-suicidality-among-men-in-russia-a-review-of-recent-epidemiological-data
Oriana, continued:
Still, we should not disparage Russia as “just a horde with weapons” (though the Russian soldiers, and not just recently, have gained a reputation as barbarians). Nor is Russia just a “gas station with nukes.” It’s still a very important country, a tragic country with oversize ambitions and severe problems, but an important part of the European heritage. If we’ve managed to accept a post-Hitler Germany, we can at least imagine the kind of peaceful, cooperative Russia that would be accepted and respected. It would indeed take an encounter with the truth — a de-Sovietization that might be be vastly more difficult than de-nazification of post-war Germany. The current Stalin-worshiping older generation may have to die off first.
One of the many problems is that smart young Russians tend to leave the country — the notorious “brain drain” — and one can’t really blame these people for wanting freedom of expression and freedom from corruption.
Still, the very fact that there are rumors of a coup may point to instability. And if Putin falls, so will Lukashenko in Belarus. If he steps beyond the borders of Russia, he'll be dragged before the Hague Tribunal. There is nowhere for him to go, nothing to do except die.
*
“A POTEMKIN-VILLAGE MILITARY”
“Russia has a Potemkin Village military. Her defense budget is only about $62 billion a year.
Russia comes out with pretty planes for air shows, but most of them are hangar queens, unable to fly either because they are cannibalized for parts or Russia just can’t afford to fly them very often.” ~ Garfield Farkle, Quora
“Putin has painted himself into a corner he can’t escape. He has not portrayed himself at home as a liberator of a portion of Ukraine, but as The Last Hope Of Civilization, The Savior Standing In The Breach Stopping Barbaric Nazi Hordes From Ruling The World.
So he can’t get out and he can’t stay.
The huge problem here is the megalomaniacal mindset of Putin. It will perpetuate destruction of Russia and Ukraine without end as long as he is in power.
The only solution I see for Russia is for patriotic Russians to carry out a palace coup that dethrones Putin.
I believe that is what will happen. I do not believe Putin will be in power in May 2023.
I think there are already powerful people in the Kremlin who want to dethrone Putin, but they have to tread carefully. Putin’s center of gravity is his grip on the security and intelligence services. That grip has to be broken for a coup to be successful.
It’s not going to catch him napping, either. Putin is conspiracy-minded and is isolated with rings of security around him that very few can penetrate. He has already fired generals and large numbers of intelligence officers, not just for what he perceived as incompetence, but as a blunt message to those plotting against him.” ~ Garfield Farkle, Quora
“From 2013 to 2021, cultivated land in Crimea dropped from 130,000 hectares to 14,000 hectares.
The theft of Crimea in 2014 was indeed Pyrrhic. Keeping it has cost Russia tons of money. Let’s not pretend that did not happen.
At this point, I doubt Ukraine will agree to stop thrashing the Russian army unless Russia gives back Crimea.” ~ Garfield Farkle
Z sign in Saint Petersburg. It does indeed have that swastika-like look.
*
RUSSIA’S IMPORT SUBSTITUTION PROGRAM
~ In the Third Decade of Absolute Power, Russia’s geriatric rulers began to painstakingly re-create the stifling environment and paranoid culture of their youth when girls loved them for who they were and not for their money and privileges.
One of their oft-repeated ‘blast from the past’ is ‘import substitution.’ Russians are advised to stop buying foreign goods and produce everything locally like in the good old days of the Soviet Union.
Russia doesn’t manufacture much except for synthetic hats for bathhouse, crooked chess boards, Hollywood movie knockoffs, Sputnik covid vaccine that apparently doesn’t work, and tv propaganda, which we pay with our taxes to export.
One could say that the only real achievement of Putin’s regime is stocking shelves of every store in Russia with foreign merchandise, but the honor goes to Boris Yeltsin, second most hated supreme leader in recent history, by reliably grateful Russian citizens.
When Yetsin came to power, the only place to drink coffee in Moscow was Sheremetyevo airport. By the end of his second term, Russians had choices. Dozens of types of meats, cheese, fruit, sweets, milk, yogurts, coffee, and finally, soft toilet paper.
Every type and model of electronic gadget on the planet, all the clothes available in the West were also for sale in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Foreign cars. New businesses that never existed before have opened - from tourism to pharmaceuticals.
All this was done of course not by Boris Yeltsin per se, but by the collective will and hard work of the Russian people. And yet those same people claim that the 90s was the worst period in the national history since Tatar-Mongol yoke, and if not for Putin, everything would have fallen apart.
However, the prize for the most hated leader goes to Mikhail Gorbachev. You know, the guy who allowed Russians to emigrate and travel overseas, speak and trade freely, and quit bankrolling thirteen republics.
Not only Russian people badmouth their leaders, which would be fine if they did it while they were in power, not after they stepped down, because it’s a sign of cowardice, but they also suffer from the worst case of inferiority complex.
No matter what they achieve, they still believe they’re failures and losers. There seems to be no one to pat them on the shoulder, give a hug, and say they’ve done great. Russians are possibly the loneliest nation in this world.
I want to pause here and speak to the imagined audience of the owners of the super-yachts and luxury real estate where every piece of decor, furniture and contents of the closet has been made anywhere but here.
Almost every single thing in the USSR was made in the USSR. The progress of the last thirty years in this country has been to move away as further as possible from that point in time. And now, Russians are being asked, nay, forced to make the full circle and return.
If you want to imagine hell on Earth, this would be it. A nation where all the creative genius went into making weapons of mass destruction to kill as many foreigners as possible.
The same Soviet engineers, as a hobby and afterthought, designed merchandise for mass production without testing or competition, or getting any feedback from their customers.
Soviet government honestly believed that citizens were fine with having third rate stuff, scarce in number, as long as they could passively participate in enslavement of the world for the sole purpose of turning them into atheistic, nihilistic fanatics hell bent on fulfilling Karl Marx’s prophecies.
If there’s a definition of madness, this would be it. As an empire, the Soviet Union had gone way beyond bizarre. It must have existed to play the role of the dark shadow of the West and be its sparring partner.
It comes as no surprise that geriatric Kremlin is so enchanted with Taliban, recently calling them “adequate people” and “people with nice faces.” In their youth, the entire Politburo were Russia’s answer to Taliban.
The only possibility Russia adopts import substitution if China moves sweatshops and factories to Russia to take advantage of African salaries and workers living in 22-story apartment complexes so squashed together that a perpetual shadow is cast into the muddy courtyard.
Russians wallow in their misery perceiving it to be their fate and the shortcut to redemption and resurrection.
And what if they’re right?
~ Misha Firer, Quora
Oriana:
It may be not be all that difficult to come up with a substitute for a “happy meal” at McDonald’s. Producing a high-end microchip, however, is a different matter. Producing new tanks and other weaponry, when parts are missing — especially when you need to produce such items quickly and in large quantity. 
*
PUTIN NO LONGER MACHO; BUT A “LAME DUCK”; THE NEED FOR DE-PUTINIZATION AND DE-IDIOTIZATION
~ Former Russian deputy of the State Duma and retired FSB colonel Gennady Gudkov believes that it is necessary to "de-putinize" Russia.
Putin's end may come along with a military defeat in Ukraine - he said in an online broadcast of the Ukraine 24 channel.
Putin is no longer macho, but a lame duck, he explained.
In his opinion, the replacement of the Kremlin leader is the role of the Russian elite that will lead to this. The former MP added that in addition to "de-putinization" in the Russian Federation, "de-idiotization" would also need to be carried out because, Putin managed to run a machine to deceive people, "turning them into complete idiots who support the most disgusting deeds in the world."
"Putin cannot be left in power. How? Military defeats. Putin is Akella, who missed. That's when the elites will think about how to remove him and will remove him, and then it will be the end of Putinism”.
[Akella: a defunct Russian software company.]
~ Anna W, Quora
Misha:
As Russia is becoming increasingly isolated in the world, Putin's mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov spent this morning pontificating at an event in Moscow called "The New Horizons.”
The words behind him read "Russia's role in the world.”
Russia's role in the world is strictly and starkly a negative one, and it is shrinking by the day. ~ 
Irina commented: “Through the Looking Glass” — a reference to Alice in Wonderland, an unreal world. While Steve Rosenberg invoked Orwell, Irina invoked Lewis Carol. Both have a point, though Orwell is much darker: when invasion is called “liberation,” we are in Orwell’s world.
From an article in the Atlantic, quoted by Misha:
*“Mom, they’re bombing us!” a young woman in Kyiv shouts into the phone.
“You’re wrong, baby girl,” the mother replies from St. Petersburg. “TV said no civilians were harmed.”*
https://flipboard.com/@TheAtlantic/cold-ashamed-relieved-on-leaving-russia/a-pCmAsuDDQRmdI1vtyaSqvg%3Aa%3A3199527-b0969d102d%2Ftheatlantic.com
*
RUSSIANS TURN AGAINST ONE ANOTHER OVER UKRAINE
~ Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.”
After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views.
“Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them.
“No longer,” one of the girls shot back.
A few days later, the police came to her school in the port town of Korsakov. In court, she heard a recording of that conversation, apparently made by one of the students. The judge handed down a $400 fine for “publicly discrediting” Russia’s Armed Forces. The school fired her, she said, for “amoral behavior.”
“It’s as though they’ve all plunged into some kind of madness,” Ms. Dubrova said in a phone interview, reflecting on the pro-war mood around her.
With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.
The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.
There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.
In the western region of Kaliningrad, the authorities sent residents text messages urging them to provide phone numbers and email addresses of “provocateurs” in connection with the “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian newspapers reported; they can do so conveniently through a specialized account in the Telegram messaging app. A nationalist political party launched a website urging Russians to report “pests” in the elite.
“I am absolutely sure that a cleansing will begin,” Dmitri Kuznetsov, the member of Parliament behind the website, said in an interview, predicting that the process would accelerate after the “active phase” of the war ended. He then clarified: “We don’t want anyone to be shot, and we don’t even want people to go to prison.”
But it is the history of mass execution and political imprisonment in the Soviet era, and the denunciation of fellow citizens encouraged by the state, that now looms over Russia’s deepening climate of repression. Mr. Putin set the tone in a speech on March 16, declaring that Russian society needed a “self-purification” in which people would “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.”
In the Soviet logic, those who choose not to report their fellow citizens could be viewed as being suspect themselves.
“In these conditions, fear is settling into people again,” said Nikita Petrov, a leading scholar of the Soviet secret police. “And that fear dictates that you report.”
In March, Mr. Putin signed a law that punishes public statements contradicting the government line on what the Kremlin terms its “special military operation” in Ukraine with as much as 15 years in prison. It was a harsh but necessary measure, the Kremlin said, given the West’s “information war” against Russia.
Prosecutors have already used the law against more than 400 people, according to the OVD-Info rights group, including a man who held up a piece of paper with eight asterisks on it. “No to war” in Russian has eight letters.
“This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Gayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens.
“Repressions are not just done by the hands of the state authorities,” she said. “They are also done by the hands of regular citizens.”
In most cases, the punishments related to war criticism have been limited to fines; for the more than 15,000 antiwar protesters arrested since the invasion began on Feb. 24, fines are the most common penalty, though some were sentenced to as many as 30 days in jail, Ms. Gayeva said. But some people are being threatened with longer prison terms.
In the western city of Penza, another English teacher, Irina Gen, arrived in class one day and found a giant “Z” scrawled on the chalkboard. The Russian government has been promoting the letter as a symbol of support for the war, after it was seen painted as an identifying marker on Russian military vehicles in Ukraine.
Ms. Gen told her students it looked like half a swastika.
Later, an eighth grader asked her why Russia was being banned from sports competitions in Europe.
“I think that’s the right thing to do,” Ms. Gen responded. “Until Russia starts behaving in a civilized manner, this will continue forever.”
“But we don’t know all the details,” a girl said, referring to the war.
“That’s right, you don’t know anything at all,” Ms. Gen said.
A recording of that exchange appeared on a popular account on Telegram that often posts inside information about criminal cases. The Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., called her in and warned her that her words blaming Russia for the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, last month were “100 percent a criminal case.”
She is now being investigated for causing “grave consequences” under last month’s censorship law, punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison.
Ms. Gen, 45, said she found little support among her students or from her school, and quit her job this month. When she talked in class about her opposition to the war, she said she felt “hatred” toward her radiating from some of her students.
“My point of view did not resonate in the hearts and minds of basically anyone,” she said in an interview.
But others who have been the targets of denunciation by fellow citizens drew more hopeful lessons from the experience. On Sakhalin Island, after local news outlets reported on Ms. Dubrova’s case, one of her former students raised $150 in a day for her, before Ms. Dubrova told her to stop and said she would pay the fine herself. On Friday, Ms. Dubrova handed the money over to a local dog shelter.
In Moscow, Mr. Grachev, the computer repair store owner, said he found it remarkable that not one of his hundreds of customers threatened to turn him in for the “no to war” text that he prominently displayed on a screen behind the counter for several weeks after the invasion. After all, he noted, he was forced to double the price of some services because of Western sanctions, surely angering some of his customers. Instead, many thanked him.
The man who apparently turned in Mr. Grachev was a passer-by he refers to as a “grandpa” who, he said, twice warned his employees in late March that they were violating the law. Mr. Grachev, 35, said he believed the man was convinced he was doing his civic duty by reporting the store to the police, and most likely did not have access to information beyond state propaganda.
Mr. Grachev was fined 100,000 rubles, more than $1,200. A Moscow politician wrote about the case on social media, including Mr. Grachev’s bank details for anyone who wanted to help. Enough money to cover the fine arrived within two hours, Mr. Grachev said.
He received 250,000 rubles in total, he said, from about 250 separate donations, and he plans to donate the surplus to OVD-Info, which provided him with legal aid.
“In practice, we see that not everything is so bad,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Grachev is now pondering how to replace his “no to war” sign. He is considering: “There was a sign here for which a 100,000 ruble fine was imposed.” ~
~ Anton Troianavski, Quora
*
~ A military satellite with inscribed letter Z burned in the atmosphere 20 days after the launch. Blessings and holy water sprinkling from FSB vetted ROC priests didn’t help, either. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
*
RUSSIAN SOLDIERS IN UKRAINE GOING AWOL
~ Russian soldiers are apparently so sick of Vladimir Putin’s “stupid” war in Ukraine that they are now openly plotting with their own commanders to go AWOL.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate released a recording on Thursday that is said to show precisely that happening, with a soldier heard in a purportedly intercepted phone call detailing the plan.
The soldier, identified by Ukrainian intelligence as one of many men “mobilized” by authorities in occupied Donetsk, complains that he and others in his battalion are so under-equipped that even the Chechen forces fighting alongside them mock them as “meat.”
“Everyone who is here … I’m telling you … everyone is planning to take off on the 26th,” the purported soldier says.
“Isn’t that stupid?” says the other man, apparently a relative back home.
“Isn’t it stupid that we’re here?” the unnamed soldier shoots back.
He goes on to explain that the troops have decided to abscond “on the basis of the fact that they put us on the front with absolutely nothing.”
“I want to tell you even more,” he says, adding that a “battalion commander is leaving with us and even a staff colonel.”
“They don’t provide us with any [equipment],” he says, adding that the rifles given to snipers are “from 1945.”
Other units “look at them and go, ‘holy shit, what would you need those for?’ They laugh at us. You know what they call us? Blessed. We ask, ‘Why blessed?’ They say because we are walking around with no equipment, no helmets, without anything. … The Chechens call us meat.”
“It’s not desertion, because we shouldn’t be on this territory. … We crossed the border as 200s,” he says, using a Russian military term for those killed in battle. “We’re not actually here. So if they say I’m a deserter, fuck off, I’m not here. Prove otherwise.”
Other Russian soldiers are said to have taken equally drastic measures to get themselves out of the war. Ukrainian intelligence has released several recordings in recent days that purportedly show Russian soldiers resorting to injuring themselves in an effort to get pulled from the war.
On Thursday, Ukraine’s Security Service released another recording said to reveal that trend. In the purportedly intercepted call between two Russian soldiers, one of the men tells his friend that fighting is getting more and more intense by the day, and despite daily fatalities, the military leadership is not providing backup.
“Take someone else’s weapon, a Ukrainian one, and shoot yourself in the legs,” his friend advises. ~
https://www.yahoo.com/news/commander-leaving-us-putin-troops-142125501.html\
*
RUSSIA BEYOND PUTIN: COULD IT BREAK UP INTO SEPARATE REGIONS?
~ In 2011 Moscow’s urban middle class took to the streets to demand modernization. Mr Putin responded by picking out alleged national traitors, annexing Crimea and starting a war against Ukraine. The idea that Russia’s latest foreign-policy adventures might end in the same way as previous ones—with the collapse of the state and disintegration of the country—is not as far-fetched as it might seem.
The Soviet Union came apart because it overstretched itself and ran out of money and ideas. Local elites saw no benefit in remaining part of a bankrupt country. It fragmented along the administrative borders of the 15 republics that made up the giant country.
Yet there was no reason why the process had to stop there. Indeed, many of Russia’s regions—including Siberia, Ural, Karelia and Tatarstan—declared their “sovereignty” at the time. To prevent further disintegration Russia’s then president, Boris Yeltsin, came up with the idea of a federation, promising each region as much “sovereignty as it could swallow”. Yeltsin made this promise in Kazan, the ancient capital of Tatarstan, which acquired many attributes of a separate state: a president, a constitution, a flag and, most important, its own budget. In exchange, Tatarstan promised to stay part of Russia.
Putin has reversed federalism, and turned Russia into a centralized state.
Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov, a former warlord installed by Mr Putin, is a grotesque illustration of this. In the most recent presidential election, Chechnya provided 99.7% of its votes for Putin with a turnout of 99.6%. In return, Mr Kadyrov receives subsidies and freedom to subject his people to his own “informal” taxes and Islamic rules. Moscow pays a dictatorial and corrupt Chechnya a vast due in return for Mr Kadyrov pretending to be part of Russia and pledging loyalty to Mr Putin.
If Putin goes and the money runs out, Chechnya could be the first to break off. This would have a dramatic effect on the rest of the north Caucasus region. Neighboring Dagestan, a far bigger and more complex republic than Chechnya, could fragment. A conflict in the Caucasus combined with the weakness of the central government in Russia could make other regions want to detach themselves from Moscow’s problems.
Tatarstan, home to 2m Muslim ethnic Tatars and 1.5m ethnic Russians, could declare itself the separate khanate it was in the 15th century. It has a strong identity, a diverse economy, which includes its own oil firm, and a well-educated ruling class. It would form a special relationship with Crimea, which Crimean Tartars (at last able to claim their historic land) would declare an independent state.
The Ural region could form a republic—as it tried to do in 1993—around Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, or else it could form a union with Siberia. Siberia itself could revive its own identity, from a base in the cities of Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, and lay claim to its oil-and-gas riches, which it would sell to China. Unlike Russia, China might not have much interest in territorial expansion into the sparsely populated Far East and Siberia, but it could (and already does) colonize these regions economically. Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, two of the largest cities in the Far East, are more economically integrated with China and South Korea than they are with the European part of Russia.
The specter of disintegration is already haunting Russia. Politicians and pundits are scared to discuss it publicly. Shortly after annexing Crimea and stirring separatism in eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin introduced a law which makes “incitement of any action undermining Russia’s own territorial integrity” a criminal offense. Yet the greatest threat to Russia’s territorial integrity is posed by the Kremlin itself and its policies in Ukraine.
By breaking the post-Soviet borders, Putin opened a Pandora’s box. If Crimea “historically” belongs to Russia as he has claimed, what about Kaliningrad, the former Königsberg, an exclave which Germany lost to Russia after the second world war? Should not eastern Karelia, which Finland ceded to the Soviet Union after the winter war in 1940, be Finnish and the Kuril Islands return to Japan?
Even more perilously for Russia’s future, Putin brought into motion forces that thrive on war and nationalism. These are not the forces of imperial expansion—Russia lacks the dynamism, resources and vision that empire-building requires. They are forces of chaos and disorganization.
The specter of disintegration is already haunting Russia. Politicians and pundits are scared to discuss it publicly. Shortly after annexing Crimea and stirring separatism in eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin introduced a law which makes “incitement of any action undermining Russia’s own territorial integrity” a criminal offense. Yet the greatest threat to Russia’s territorial integrity is posed by the Kremlin itself and its policies in Ukraine. [this article was written before the current war]
In short, Russia under Putin is much more fragile than it looks. Vyacheslav Volodin, his deputy chief of staff, recently equated Mr Putin with Russia: “No Putin, no Russia,” he said. It is hard to think of a worse indictment. ~
https://worldif.economist.com/article/12114/peril-beyond-putin
Oriana:
I've read that Finland does not really desire to regain Karelia. Russia has polluted and otherwise messed up and impoverished the region. Remember the problems that Germany had re-integrating East Germany? Apparently in terms of Karelia, it's much worse. Rebuilding Karelia to Western standards would be very expensive.
The article also expresses concern that the disintegration of Russia would threatened the security of nuclear weapons. In my abbreviation of the article, I omitted that part (I was also experiencing technical problems trying to copy it) -- but it seems obvious. A complicating factor here is the probable poor condition of those weapons, expensive as they are to maintain.
*
RUSSIA’S FUTURE IN RELATION TO EUROPE AND ASIA
~ If Russia wants to survive as a nation, a rapprochement with the West is its only choice. The alternative is becoming China’s bitch, which is what is happening under Putin and seems to be his goal all along.
The ridiculous idea that Russia — a white, European, and Christian country — is the natural enemy of other white, European, and Christian countries is a product of communist Cold War propaganda. In post-Soviet years, this idea mixed with an equally ridiculous idea going back to the Russian Empire that Russia is a civilization of its own, therefore eternally opposed to the West. This idea though was considered fringe even in the time of the czars, and virtually everyone saw the Russian Empire as a European power.
Putin is a fine example of this Cold War mentality jinxed with neoorthodox irredentism, but the good thing is that putinism is already past its peak and what we see in Ukraine is no more than its agony: a desperate attempt of a senile old man from the bygone era to feel relevant in the modern world.
Putin has been in power for 22 years. The probability that he rules for another 22 years is close to zero: his generation is dying out, and with it will be weeded out the left-wing neobolshevist authoritarianism known as putinism.
It may take 5, 10, or 20 years, but mark my words, Russia will become pro-Western in our lifetime.
Do you seriously think this cantankerous old galoot and his ideas have any future? ~
Yaroslav Mar, Quora
Bogdan Groza:
I love your optimism. But then again, Russia, as it is today, follows the great percepts of Kublai Khan: strong ruler, obedient masses. It's been the same old story through the Czars and Comunists, and now… whatever cleptocrats call themselves.
The first thing the Russian people must do is acknowledge (just like the Germans did after WW2) that they were a bully in the European park. And bridges and atonement will come. In time.
The idea of former “Great Empire” is well known and accepted by the Brits, the French, the Spanish, etc. But they did come to terms with the fact they no longer hold that much sway.
Russia needs to understand this as well. And given their de facto mindset, only a strong leader accepting this would be able to steer the country towards this way. And this is the Russian paradox.
Yaroslav:
As for the perennial question of whether Russia is European or Asian, the answer is easy: Russia is a European country with Asian colonies and the last last remaining European colonial power.
Richard Hurley:
Russia was historically seen as exotic by the West –- being the easternmost fringe of Europe and a bit suspect on that basis. The Tsarist régime was often cited as the exemplar of “Asian” tyranny. Abraham Lincoln said as much in so many words (but was more than happy to accept the support of the Tsar during the American Civil War). But the German princess who became Catherine the Great could not have been more thoroughly grounded in the mainstream of Western political and cultural thought. Her absolutism was a response to the excesses of the French Revolution and was not in any way different from, say, the reaction of the Austrian monarchy.
The idea of Russia as fundamentally different from the rest of Europe may play well in certain domestic political settings, but the reality is that the country has been thoroughly woven into European culture and politics for hundreds of years. Let us hope that this dark folly in Ukraine is the last gasp of Russian exceptionalism.
*
THE DREAM OF “GREAT RUSSIA”
~ Many Russians believe in this axiom: We are poor and our lives are full of hardships, but we live in a great country.
The greatness is majored in superlatives: the greatest people, the greatest language, the greatest poet Pushkin, the greatest president Putin, all which is drummed into the head of every schoolboy and schoolgirl.
Indoctrination begins at the kindergarten level and continues well into adulthood blaring from TV screens.
Russia is indeed like a religious cult, and it’s pointless to show Russians evidence of committed atrocities, appeal to logic, expect repentance.
It’s akin to telling a devout Christian that Christ didn’t exist, or that he wasn’t resurrected, or that the Bible is a collection of short stories written by humans.
From this logic stems a credo: it’s better to wreck Ukraine and own the ruins and convert survivors to the faith of their forefathers rather than allow them to be snatched away and brainwashed by the Western enemy.
And: we’d rather tear up all the ties with the West and live more poorly and pile up more misery on ourselves than relinquish the dream of Great Russia.
That’s why a tricolor flag doesn’t cut it anymore. The greatness needs a more grandiose flag, that of the Soviet Union.
The Westernized business elites have the mercenary mindset. They scoff at the perceived greatness of Russia as a propaganda tool that targets uneducated peasant grade citizenry who dwell in magical reality, and follow the money trail. They’re fleeing the sinking ship called Russian Federation.
In just two days, on May 16 and 17, Senior Vice President Shemetov, Senior Vice President Chupina, Senior Vice President Alymova, Deputy Chairman of the Board Buriko, and Deputy Chairman of the Board Maltsev left Sberbank.
Nothing wrong with being religious, however we live in a material world, and Russia cannot carry on without Western technologies and products.
Russian army is digging trenches along the frontline. The political signal might be negotiating a peace deal to lift sanctions in exchange for ceasing hostilities, and claiming the new annexed lands as temporary victory for the TV consumers.
Then back to rearmament and another war with Ukraine until the final victory. ~
Misha Firer, Quora
*
WHY HAS PUTIN NOT VISITED HIS TROOPS IN UKRAINE?
~ He is scared shitless about being in the open: any Russian may have his name on a bullet.
~ Ricky Tack, Quora
*
OLD EUROPE AND NEW EUROPE
The geopolitical cravenness of the "Old" Europe — Germany, France, Italy; the strength and determination of the "New" one -- Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, supported by the US.
The Old Europe had better forget its wistful dreams about returning to the pre-February 24 status quo, with Russia again being their main supplier of gas and oil, corrupt money and tacit political support. That will never happen again, and the Old Europe won't be allowed by Ukraine to play these cowardly retrograde political games with its future and its territory.
Russia might feel "humiliated"? Aw, poor Putin. He is so emotionally delicate, so easily upset...
Russia needs to be defeated, demilitarized, denazified, detoxified.
After weeks spent fretting over what would happen if Russia crushed Ukraine, Western European leaders are now worried about what might happen if Ukraine actually wins. Ukraine’s recent success in pushing Russian troops out of some occupied territory has prompted leaders from France to Germany to Italy to conclude that a once-unthinkable Ukrainian victory is now a distinct possibility.
Even as European leaders sympathize publicly with Ukraine’s struggle and in some cases have gone to great lengths to support the country, they also fear that what French President Emmanuel Macron last week called a “humiliation” of Russia could create a whole new set of problems, Western officials say.
One big concern is that a Ukrainian win could destabilize Russia, making it even more unpredictable and putting a normalization of energy links further out of reach. That’s why some western European capitals quietly favor a “face-saving” resolution to the conflict, even if it costs Ukraine some territory. ~ Mikhail Iossel
Oriana:
Just imagine if someone suggested to Macron that France cede some of its territory . . .
Alas, to the Old Europe, countries like Ukraine don’t really count. Russia is bigger and richer in resources, and its culture is better known, at least to the educated. Without a doubt, it’s an important country. But disregarding Ukraine means disregarding basic decency — human lives count, whether in France or a tiny country like Estonia. If we adopt the attitude that some lives don’t count, then the spirit of Hitler lives on.
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THE LAW OF REVERSE EFFORT
The Law of Reversed Effort was first coined by the author Aldous Huxley, who wrote:
“The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold.”
It’s the idea that the more we try to do something, the worse we become at it. Suppose, for instance, that you are learning how to ride a bike for the first time. You are told to hold the handlebars a certain way, to push off with this foot, to pedal at that speed, to sit in a specific position, to hold your balance here, and so on. There is a small book’s worth of micro-instructions when learning to ride a bike. When we ride a bike, we know all these things, but we do not try to do them. They just happen. In Huxley’s words, it’s “combining relaxation with activity.”
But, there’s a spiritual or holistic way of viewing the “law of reversed effort” as well. It’s something that has a much longer history than Aldous Huxley — it’s the Daoist idea of “Wu Wei.”
WU WEI
The word “surrender” comes laden with negative connotation. Surrender is cowardly or weak. Heroes are ones who never back down, and no great story begins with the good guys just giving up. And yet, there is a lot of arrogance in this.
To surrender to a greater power — or a nobler, righteous one — is not an act of cowardice. It is an act of profound wisdom. There is nothing praiseworthy about swimming in a storm or punching a bear in the face. There is wisdom in knowing our limits, in embracing humility, and even in being pushed around.
This is the meaning of Wu Wei. It is not some lazy torpor, or an excuse for a duvet day and Netflix binge. In fact, it is often the very opposite. Wu Wei is to appreciate, recognize, and accept the pull of forces far greater than us. It is to walk the path that opens up and push the door that gives. Call it gut-feeling, intuition, fate, divine calling, or whatever, but Wu Wei is to stop doing what you think is right, and to let yourself be pulled by some other power.
Wu Wei is the reed bending in the wind. It’s the stick riding the current. It’s surrender and humility. It is, in short, the law of reversed effort — to recognize that some things need patience and space.
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
That’s nice, you might think, but how does that actually translate to real life? The problem with a lot of philosophy of this kind is that it rather leaves us no better off than before. How can Huxley’s law of reversed effort be seen not as an ideology but as a practical guide? The fact is that “not doing” is fundamental to the nature of many tasks. Here are just a few examples.
Writing: For an author, there is nothing so terrifying as the blank page. If you have been told you have to write something, especially on a deadline, the mind often can go into meltdown grasping for something — anything — to write. It’s much better to let ideas come and write them in a notebook so they don’t get lost.
Technical skills: When you are learning a new sport or skill, you have to learn the technique. You go through the motions, ticking off steps in your head, and eventually end up succeeding. But there comes a point when overthinking is detrimental. It’s probably why your favorite team are rubbish at penalty shoot-outs.
Stress and anxiety: We all get stressed about things. All jobs involve bottlenecks and crunch points. Life has good days and bad days. But when we obsessively run things over in our heads, we actually make anxiety worse. There is a reason why “mindfulness” is such a breakaway phenomenon, and why Headspace is a $250-million business. Stepping away, taking a breath, and doing nothing are good for you.
Conversations: When it comes to how we talk to people, less really is more. A bad conversation involves you talking too much and your “listening” consisting of simply waiting to talk again. Yet research shows that active listening gives more “conversational satisfaction” and leaves the partner feeling more understood.
YOU CAN’T FORCE IT
There are many moments in life when trying harder makes things worse. When you have a mosquito bite, a broken bone, or a nosebleed, you leave it be. Picking, prodding, and probing only exacerbate the problem. So, too, with a lot of life’s major moments.
Perhaps it is time to step away from what you are doing and enjoy Wu Wei or inaction. After all, if I tell you not to think of pink elephants, there’s only one way to do it.
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/law-reversed-effort/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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HOW ROMANCE HAS WRECKED TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE
~ Few consider the actual roots of our marital traditions, when matrimony was little more than a business deal among unequals. Even today, legal marriage isn’t measured by the affection between two people, but by the ability of a couple to share Social Security and tax benefits. In reality, it’s the idea of marrying for love that’s untraditional.
For most of recorded human history, marriage was an arrangement designed to maximize financial stability. Elizabeth Abbott, the author of “A History of Marriage” explains that in ancient times, marriage was intended to unite various parts of a community, cementing beneficial economic relationships. “Because it was a financial arrangement, it was conceived of and operated as such. It was a contract between families. For example, let’s say I’m a printer and you make paper, we might want a marriage between our children because that will improve our businesses.” Even the honeymoon, often called the “bridal tour,” was a communal affair, with parents, siblings, and other close relatives traveling together to reinforce their new familial relationships.
By the Middle Ages, gender inequality was not only enshrined in social customs, but also common law. In most European countries, married women were forced to give up control over any personal wealth and property rights to their husbands. Eventually, the system became known as “coverture” (taken from “couverture,” which literally means “coverage” in French), whereby married couples became a single legal entity in which the husband had all power. The American practice of wives adopting their husbands’ surnames originated in England as a way to enforce patrilineal heritage, signifying that a woman belonged to her husband, thereby suspending any individual rights when she took her marital vows.
Under such laws, children were generally viewed as assets, in part because they were expected to work for the family business. “People saw their kids as pawns, literally,” says Abbott. “They might love them, but even if they did, their children had a function to further the family’s economic interests, which was thought to be good for the whole family.”
Abbott outlines a typical example of an arranged marriage in 15th century England, where the father of the intended bride had several daughters and didn’t choose which one would be betrothed until the morning of the wedding. Since husbands had all legal power, when a marriage ended in annulment, divorce, or separation, women almost never received custody of their children.
The idea of marriage as an economic necessity was also reinforced by social restrictions on personal independence. “Under the guild system in Europe during the Middle Ages, even if you’d passed all the apprenticeship and journeyman stages, you couldn’t become a master of your trade if you weren’t married,” says Abbott. “It was an essential part of adulthood. Marriage was the core of societies, and married people were always given more rights and seen as more responsible.” In no uncertain terms, being married conferred the rights of full citizenship, at least for men.
Despite their second-class status, women were still expected to bring their own assets to a marriage through their dowry, which could include money, land, and physical property. But above all else, a woman’s financial value was linked to her sexual purity. Before decent birth control or paternity tests, a bride’s virginity became the essential method for protecting the male bloodline. Women were undoubtedly related to the children they birthed, but fathers could guarantee lineage only if they were the sole male sex partner. Female promiscuity became taboo because of its potential to affect inheritance, instituting a double standard we’re still grappling with today.
While female chastity was revered, male infidelity was entirely acceptable, though it was most common among men wealthy enough to support various wives, mistresses, or male “companions.” Stephanie Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” says that even while the spread of Christianity worked to eliminate polygamy, there was little social reinforcement. “For centuries, monogamy was more theoretical than real, especially for men. Men were expected to have affairs. We have letters and diaries from the late 18th century of men bragging to their male in-laws about their sexual adventures in ways they could never do today.”
Despite the church’s staunch position on monogamy, in the late Middle Ages, a legal marriage was quite easy to obtain. However, as more couples attempted to elope or marry without consent, the old guard upped its game. To combat the spread of “clandestine” marriages, or those unapproved by parents, state officials began wresting the legal process of marriage from the church. “Aristocrats and patricians put pressure on the state to ensure that the family could control whom their children married,” says Abbott, ensuring that their wealth wouldn’t be mishandled.
France enacted its first marital edict in 1557, raising the age of majority to 25 for women and 30 for men, and requiring both parents’ consent for marriage before this age. Those who disobeyed could now be legally disinherited. It took another two centuries for Great Britain to raise the bar by passing the Marriage Act of 1753, which made certain marital procedures mandatory, including public “banns” or notices of impending nuptials, proof of age, and the explicit consent of family members.
But during the 18th century, increased globalization and the first Industrial Revolution were changing the world in ways even that the most affluent parents couldn’t control. “With the development of wage labor, young people started making more decisions independently from their parents,” says Coontz. “If I were a young woman, I could then go out and earn my own dowry, instead of waiting for my parents to bestow it on me after I married someone they approved of. Or, if I was a young man, I didn’t have to wait to inherit the farm; I could move somewhere else if I wanted to. This was greatly accelerated by the rise of the Enlightenment with its greater sense of personal freedom and, of course, the French and American revolutions of the 18th century, with the idea that people are entitled to the ‘pursuit of happiness.’”
As this philosophical support for individual choice spread, more young people wanted some say regarding their future spouses. “Demands for consent from the people actually getting married were thought to be quite radical,” says Abbott. Even more radical was the idea that marriage might be entered into for emotional, rather than financial, reasons.
Though the murky concept known as “love” has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. “Love was considered a reason not to get married,” says Abbott. “It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.”
In fact, for thousands of years, love was mostly seen as a hindrance to marriage, something that would inevitably cause problems. “Most societies have had romantic love, this combination of sexual passion, infatuation, and the romanticization of the partner,” says Coontz. “But very often, those things were seen as inappropriate when attached to marriage. The southern French aristocracy believed that true romantic love was only possible in an adulterous relationship, because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event. True love could only exist without it.”
By the 19th century, the friction between love and money had come to a head. As the Western world advanced towards a more modern, industrialized society built on wage labor, emotional bonds became more private, focused more on immediate family and friends than communal celebrations. Simultaneously, mass media helped make sentimental inclinations a larger part of popular culture, with the flourishing of holidays like Valentine’s Day and nostalgic hobbies like scrapbooking.
Culturally speaking, love was in the air, and the union of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840 only served to seal the deal. Though Victoria and Albert’s marriage was sanctioned by their royal families, it was also hailed as a true “love match,” cementing the new ideal of romantic partnership. Their nuptials also coincided with the proliferation of early print media, making the event visible to readers all across Europe and North America.
“With Victoria’s wedding, you had endless reporting and tons of illustrations,” Abbott says. “Between two and four weeks after Victoria was married, magazines reproduced every last aspect of her wedding. Queen Victoria chose orange blossoms for her wreath, and an elaborate, white dress with this ridiculously long train in the back, and every detail was sent across the ocean and read voraciously by women in ladies’ magazines. Her wedding became the model because everyone knew about it.” To this day, many stereotypical elements of American weddings are still drawn from Victoria’s, particularly the tradition of wearing a white dress.
However, outside of the insular world of nobility, women still had to view romance through a logical lens. “Women tried very hard to love the right person, to test their love, in the sense that many of them were quite rational about it,” says Coontz. “You have women writing in their diaries, ‘Well, my heart inclines to so and so, but I’m not sure that he’s worthy of my love,’ really trying to force themselves to love the right person.
“Men had less trouble with that because men were more powerful. A man could actually afford to fall in love, and once he was married, he wasn’t at the mercy of her whims the way a woman was at the mercy of a man’s. It’s contrary to all of our preconceptions about women’s more emotional nature, but a man could afford to give into his emotions more than a woman could. She paid a price when she did.”
Meanwhile, the surge in steel production during the 1860s, and the subsequent spread of railways, was permanently altering the landscape of the Western world. Twenty years later, this transformation was intensified with the birth of electric light. As America became increasingly industrialized and urban areas exploded in growth, men and women had more opportunities to live and work on their own, and to interact outside the protected familial environment.
While the search for a love match gave women a modicum of control during the courtship stage of a relationship, married women were still subject to their husbands’ legal authority. “In many loving marriages, husbands’ treatment of their wives improved, but on the other hand, it also made women more dependent on love and on ‘earning’ or sustaining that love,” says Coontz.
Just how did a wife earn her husband’s love? She became the perfect homemaker. Abbott refers to the period’s housewife-mania as the “cult of the domestic,” centering on a stereotype that desexualized women and made child-rearing their primary goal. In her role as a domestic angel, the perfect wife was completely pure in body and mind, submitting to her husband’s erotic advances, but never desiring or initiating sex herself. “This was the new take on women, the new hype,” says Abbott.
Politicians, scientists, and intellectuals began declaring women the “purer” gender, supposedly innately uninterested in sex. “People were very nervous about the potentially destabilizing impact of the love match and the increase in youthful independence, and I think that romantic sentimentalism helped to defuse the worry and paper over the contradictions and danger points,” explains Coontz. “There was a fear that love would, in fact, lead not only to divorce but to out-of-wedlock sex and childbirth. And the response was this idea of female purity. Real love wasn’t about sex primarily—sex was something that only bad girls like.” Many modern cliches about married women’s roles evolved from the Victorian homemaking trend and the new reliance on romance to find a suitable mate.
While the search for a love match gave women a modicum of control during the courtship stage of a relationship, married women were still subject to their husbands’ legal authority. “In many loving marriages, husbands’ treatment of their wives improved, but on the other hand, it also made women more dependent on love and on ‘earning’ or sustaining that love,” says Coontz.
In the late 19th century, a new genre of marriage manuals and homemaking magazines proliferated, with extensive instructions to help wives maintain a happy union (Good Housekeeping debuted in 1885). These publications covered every aspect of a wife’s duties, from the Biblical view of women’s roles to cleaning tips to suggestions for dealing with an abusive husband. And often, the confusion between issues of love and money played out on their pages.
In Marion Harland’s 1889 book entitled “House and Home: A Complete Housewife’s Guide,” she writes: “A loveless marriage is legalized crime. Marriage entered upon without just appreciation of mutual relations and obligations is folly so grave as to approximate sin.” Though Harland asserts the supreme importance of love, at the time, this feeling implied respect and appreciation, rather than emotional infatuation. Harland also emphasized that the most problematic issue among married couples was the division of finances and firmly recommended splitting the husband’s income equitably. She recognized that romance could actually undermine the perception of women as contributors to a family’s financial well-being. “… consider that you two constitute a business firm, and pay over her share of equitable profits. The act is a just partition, not a gift.”
When Harland’s book was published, the change from smaller household production and barter systems to factory labor and wage-earning jobs had thoroughly divided the economic roles of husbands and wives. This split became embodied in the ideology of “separate spheres,” which created biological justifications for men to dominate the public realm and women the private world of domesticity. As the home became dissociated from the family income, women’s roles were no longer viewed as integral for economic survival. “It wasn’t called ‘working,’ but many women had paying boarders, raised chickens and sold their eggs, and made pies or jams and sold them,” says Abbott.
As Coontz explains, in “Marriage, A History,” these myriad tasks were no longer viewed as crucial economic activities. “In the older definition of housekeeping, women’s labor was recognized as a vital contribution to the family’s economic survival. Wives were regularly referred to as ‘helps-meet’ and ‘yoke mates.’ But as housekeeping became ‘homemaking,’ it came to be seen as an act of love rather than a contribution to survival.”
Gradually, as women achieved more freedom to find educational and professional opportunities outside the home, love became a more viable option for them, too. “Women became less likely to tolerate horrible relationships than in the past, where even abused spouses were supposed to grin and bear it,” says Abbott. Political movements of the 19th century, like abolition and women’s suffrage, brought the seeds of gender equality to the intellectual forefront, and the subservient status of women began to shift.
After thousands of years, the traditional goals of marriage were changing, from making ends meet to finding fulfillment—a much more elusive target. “The personal satisfaction that marriage brought to the spouses became very important,” Abbott continues. “Spouses expected their mates to be their primary source of emotional support. The marital home became the locus of romantic love, passion, emotional sustenance, and sexual satisfaction. Egalitarianism was still far off, but women increasingly demanded and slowly won more rights.” By the time that women won the right to vote, love had become inseparable from the concept of marriage, effectively stealing the spotlight from its patriarchal economic motives.
Since then, we’ve been steadily socialized to ignore this unpleasant history, even while retaining the system’s financial incentives. Much as we want to believe that marriage is a heartfelt validation of loving commitment, the legal definition of marriage still centers on income, inheritance, and other monetary rights. Nowhere is its economic value more clear than the debate over gay marriage, in which both sides often justify their position by touting the long list of federal benefits provided by a legal marriage license.
“I don’t think we’re headed toward the death of marriage,” says Coontz, “especially in the United States, where marriage remains the highest expression of commitment most people can imagine. But I do think that we’re moving toward more acceptance of a multiplicity of marital and non-marital models.”
Which raises an even more provocative question: With marriage rates on the decline, single-parenting on the rise, and the nuclear family becoming a minority, why do we still give married couples benefits denied to unmarried people? Perhaps greater awareness of the institution’s oppressive history will lead to policies that value all citizens equally, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, or relationship status.
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-romance-wrecked-traditional-marriage/?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
Mary:
I think there is much truth in that the rise of industrialization in the last few hundred years affected both the shift in our ideas about love and marriage and the change in woman's position. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution changed how we worked and how we lived in families. In the old world family and work were integrated, all together in one place, and the work of women an important contribution to the family's wealth. A lot of production went on in the household...clothing for instance went from raw material, say sheep’s wool, made into thread, thread made into cloth, cloth cut and sewn into clothing...all at home. Ale and wine were were also produced at home, and butter and cheese. All family members would be involved in these processes. Then machines replaced homespun, mills replaced spinning wheels.
Less and less was produced at home. Work became something done separately, in factories, producing not for one's own use but for the market, controlled by the owner and for his profit. I think this robbed women of the worth of their work...she made not a product, but a wage, and not a good one.
Replacing the actual worth of women's work was the 19th century romanticizing of her influence as "angel of the house." This was not productive work, but largely inessential, or decorative. These angels were ladies of the upper class, not wage earning factory girls, working farmwives, or even, like women of hunter/gathering people, providers of the majority of everyday food. The ornamental angels of the 19th century were echoed in the 50's, when the war was over and women were put back into their kitchens so the returning men could have jobs.
Unfortunately, with modern appliances and daily essentials all part of the marketplace, there wasn't much for her to do. So things got silly and elaborate rather than plain and practical. She was admonished by ads and "women's magazines" to follow extensive cleaning, preparing, decorating and serving rituals. She had to learn how to set the scene like a decorator, cook like a fine chef, maintain her good looks, devote herself completely to fulfilling the needs of husband and children. A lot of this pretty flimsy and unsatisfying stuff, providing more convenience than necessity. So unsatisfying it had to be rejected, and was.
At the same time the mythology of romantic love persisted, unreplaced and still pretty much alive to this day, even though ideas of marriage and family are growing and becoming more diverse. We still want to find, still believe in "The One." We still fret and mourn not finding or keeping the One that could fulfill us, answer all our needs, make us complete.
Oriana:
It also used to be called, “Waiting for the Prince,” after the theme of various fairy tales. Never too early to start indoctrinating little girls! “Some day my Prince will come!”
It’s not strictly cultural — it’s biological too. In both sexes, there are neural pathways dedicated to falling in love, even past the capacity to reproduce (but then perhaps we weren’t meant to live long to be post-reproductive). So yes, one can fall in love even past sixty (A man nearing ninety told me, “With men, it never ends.”) The agony and ecstasy. Now it may have something to do with the union of the minds, but it evolved as nature’s trap for getting women pregnant.
I forget at what point it struck me that if the Prince did come, I wouldn’t really know what to do with him. I enjoy living alone, and desire only so much company, male or female. Soon it becomes a burden, and I want to be alone again. Not only is my writing more important than the Prince — so is eating when I feel hungry, going to bed when sleepy and so on — having my own schedule, being my own boss.
But I realize how lucky I am — I have my work, my writing. For many women, it’s their children, and later their grandchildren. The important thing is to escape being a slave of romantic love. There really are more important things in life than romance — but one has to be sufficiently brutalized by the myth of The One before one wakes up to that.
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A PRECOCIOUS ATHEIST
~ My parents tried to get me into church and from a very young age I questioned everything about it. For instance, at the age of three, I got in trouble for telling my Sunday school teacher that people couldn’t live inside whales because they’d drown. When told that god saved Jonas’ life I asked “How do you know?” Eventually, after many complaints from my Sunday school teachers, my parents were asked not to bring me back. So my mother took me to her Sunday school lessons… I sat at the back of the room coloring in my secular coloring books. During regular services, I was under threat of spankings if I didn’t keep quiet. Nevertheless, after one very long sermon during which the pastor insisted that god wasn’t dead, I answered quite loudly just before he said “Amen” to close his diatribe, “God IS dead. That’s why he’s in heaven!”
After that, my parents took me to a sitter on Sundays. ~ M. Conner, Quora
Oriana:
I envy this man for having been such an unintimidated little child. And so logical! After being told that dead people go to heaven, it followed that if God is in heaven, he must be dead.
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HOW SLEEP PROCESSES EMOTIONS
~ Researchers at the Department of Neurology of the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern identified how the brain triages emotions during dream sleep to consolidate the storage of positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative ones. The work expands the importance of sleep in mental health and opens new ways of therapeutic strategies.
Rapid eye movement (REM or paradoxical) sleep is a unique and mysterious sleep state during which most of the dreams occur together with intense emotional contents. How and why these emotions are reactivated is unclear. The prefrontal cortex integrates many of these emotions during wakefulness but appears paradoxically quiescent during REM sleep. "Our goal was to understand the underlying mechanism and the functions of such a surprising phenomenon," says Prof. Antoine Adamantidis from the Department of Biomedical Research (DBMR) at the University of Bern and the Department of Neurology at the Inselspital, University Hospital of Bern.
Processing emotions, particularly distinguishing between danger and safety, is critical for the survival of animals. In humans, excessively negative emotions, such as fear reactions and states of anxiety, lead to pathological states like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). In Europe, roughly 15% of the population is affected by persistent anxiety and severe mental illness. The research group headed by Antoine Adamantidis is now providing insights into how the brain helps to reinforce positive emotions and weaken strongly negative or traumatic emotions during REM sleep. This study was published in the journal Science.
A dual mechanism
The researchers first conditioned mice to recognize auditory stimuli associated with safety and others associated with danger (aversive stimuli). The activity of neurons in the brain of mice was then recorded during sleep-wake cycles. In this way, the researchers were able to map different areas of a cell and determine how emotional memories are transformed during REM sleep.
Neurons are composed of a cell body (soma) that integrates information coming from the dendrites (inputs) and send signals to other neurons via their axons (outputs). The results obtained showed that cell somas are kept silent while their dendrites are activated. "This means a decoupling of the two cellular compartments: soma deep asleep and dendrites wide awake," explains Adamantidis. This decoupling is important because the strong activity of the dendrites allows the encoding of both danger and safety emotions, while the inhibitions of the soma completely block the output of the circuit during REM sleep. In other words, the brain favors the discrimination of safety versus danger in the dendrites, but block the over-reaction to emotion, in particular danger.
A survival advantage
According to the researchers, the coexistence of both mechanisms is beneficial to the stability and survival of the organisms: "This bi-directional mechanism is essential to optimize the discrimination between dangerous and safe signals," says Mattia Aime from the DBMR, first author of the study. If this discrimination is missing in humans and excessive fear reactions are generated, this can lead to anxiety disorders. The findings are particularly relevant to pathological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorders, in which trauma is over-consolidated in the prefrontal cortex, day after day during sleep.
Breakthrough for sleep medicine
These findings pave the way to a better understanding of the processing of emotions during sleep in humans and open new perspectives for therapeutic targets to treat maladaptive processing of traumatic memories, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) and their early sleep-dependent consolidation. Additional acute or chronic mental health issues that may implicate this somatodendritic decoupling during sleep include acute and chronic stress, anxiety, depression, panic, or even anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Sleep research and sleep medicine have long been a research focus of the University of Bern and the Inselspital, Bern University Hospital. "We hope that our findings will not only be of interest to the patients, but also to the broad public," says Adamantidis.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220513113237.htm
Oriana:
This strikes me as a poorly written article. Fortunately, it reminded me of a better one, which described the function of dreams in "taming" emotion. When a "solution" to an serious emotional problem cannot be found, the result is a nightmare. Otherwise, dreams are a form of therapy meant to purge negative emotions and magnify positive ones. The brain is an amazing therapist.
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FAMILY SIZE MAY INFLUENCE COGNITIVE FUNCTION LATER IN LIFE
~ A new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and the Robert Butler Columbia Aging Center and Université Paris-Dauphine -- PSL, found that having three or more versus two children has a negative effect on late-life cognition. The results further indicated that this effect was strongest in Northern Europe, where higher fertility decreases financial resources but does not improve social resources in this region. This is the first to study the causal effect of high fertility on late-life cognition.
Until now fertility has not received much attention as a potential predictor of late-life cognition compared with other factors, such as education or occupation. The findings are published in the journal Demography.
"Understanding the factors that contribute to optimal late-life cognition is essential for ensuring successful aging at the individual and societal levels — particularly in Europe, where family sizes have shrunk and populations are aging rapidly," said Vegard Skirbekk, PhD, professor of population and Family health at Columbia Mailman School.
The researchers analyzed data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to examine the extent to which having three or more children versus two children causally affects late-life cognition. SHARE surveys representative samples of the older populations in 20 European countries and Israel including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Participants were aged 65 or older who had at least two biological children.
Based on advanced econometric methods able disentangle causality from simple associations, the evidence suggests that that having three or more versus two children is related to worse late-life cognition. They also found that this effect is similar for both men and women.
Fertility may affect late-life cognition via several pathways. First, having an additional child often incurs considerable financial costs, reduces family income and increases the likelihood of falling below the poverty line, thus decreasing the standard of living for all family members and possibly causing financial worries and uncertainties, which could contribute to cognitive deterioration.
Second, having an additional child is causally related to women's lower labor market participation, fewer hours worked, and lower earnings. In turn, labor force participation — compared with retirement — positively affects cognitive functioning among men and women.
Third, having children decreases the risk of social isolation among older individuals which is a key risk factor for cognitive impairment and dementia, and often raises the level of social interaction and support, which can be protective against cognitive decline at older ages.
Finally, having children can be stressful, affect health risk behaviors and adversely affect adult cognitive development. Parents with more children can experience more stress, have less time to relax and invest in cognitively stimulating leisure activities. This can imply sleep deprivation for the parent.
"The negative effect of having three or more children on cognitive functioning is not negligible, it is equivalent to 6.2 years of aging," noted Bonsang. It suggests that the decrease in the proportion of Europeans having three or more children may have positive implications for the cognitive health of the older population.
"Given the magnitude of the effect, future studies on late-life cognition should also examine fertility as a prognosticator alongside more commonly researched predictors, such as education, occupational experiences, physical exercise, and mental and physical health," observed Skirbekk. "In addition, future studies should address the potential effects of childlessness or having one child on late-life cognition. We also need more information on the types of interactions, supports, and conflicts that occur between parents and children, which may influence cognitive outcomes.” ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220512134147.htm
Oriana:
There is inconsistency among studies. Some show that multiple pregnancies in fact decrease the risk of Alzheimer’s. The exposure to higher estrogen levels, which are very powerful antioxidants, could be a factor here. Motherhood, while stressful, also produces positive emotions, which are highly beneficial for health and longevity.
ending on beauty:
ELEGY FOR A WALNUT TREE
Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world
~ W. S. Merwin
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