Photo: Wim de Groot
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COULD HAVE
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
You were in luck — there was a forest.
You were in luck — there were no trees.
You were in luck — a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . .
So you're here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close call, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen
how your heart pounds inside me.
~ Wislawa Szymborska, tr. Stanislaw Barańczak
Like all the adults I knew when growing up, Szymborska was a survivor of WW2. I don’t know if she personally had experienced close escapes, but if not, she must have heard scores of such stories from friends and relatives. Just my parents’ stories were almost too much for me, but I wasn’t spared the wartime miracles of of relatives, friends, and sometimes strangers on the train. Add to this books and movies.
It seemed that practically everyone survived due to, more than anything, sheer luck. “I was in a hurry, so I took a different street than usual,” could be how a person explained having barely escaped a mass execution (later commemorated with a typical plaque: “On this spot, 100 people were shot [date]”) ran the laconic inscription. The victims were caught in the street at random. Luck. People who survived (and they were the only ones left to tell the tale) understood in horrifying detail the meaning of being (or not being) “at the right place at the right time.”
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
In the U.S., I got to listen to endless stories of avoiding or surviving “with minor cuts and bruises” horrific car accident. The details are different but the the mechanism is the same: sheer random luck.
Aside from believers and semi-believers (“My mother in heaven must have been praying for me”), some single out their intuition or positive thinking. If you live long enough, you’ll likely experience at least one such miracle. You’ll watch stories about them on TV, e.g. a person who missed their flight because of a flat tire, and the plane crashed with no survivors. Little or nothing is said of the unlucky ones.
I won’t go into the stories the medical drama — “if the paramedics arrived a minute later, the doctor said I’d be dead.” There are just too many of those. But the theme is ruthlessly, relentlessly the same: a moment earlier or later, or because you stayed behind. Or went ahead of the others. Or: you had a flat tire and missed the plane that went on crash. Or:
You were in luck — there was a forest.
You were in luck — there were no trees.
You were in luck — a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . .
And that what we live with — this randomness and fragility. Saved by luck. Or, one day, not saved.
Mary:
Luck is terrifying. That's what Szymborska illustrates in her poem: there's no reason behind it, no system to it, no way to know how it will go, no way to control, explain or predict it. People adopt magical thinking, holding on to lucky objects or charms, little rituals or avoidances, all desperate measures begging for luck...because there are no real ways to secure it, no protections from its random strikes.
The prime example is the fate of a soldier under heavy artillery barrage who doesn't get hit. There's no way to understand his survival so we talk of it as a miracle...an unaccountable, unearned, unforeseen, impossible, one in a million event. The randomness is emphasized, and the horror, by those lucky escapes that are extremely narrow, the difference between survival and extinction only a matter of seconds, of inches, of a hair's breadth. Those are our favorite stories, the ones that raise chills and make the heart pound, like Szymborska's, just thinking about the essential horror of random circumstance.
Oriana:
Yes, movies are full of those last-minute escapes and soldiers running unscathed through heavy fire and explosions on both sides of them. I prefer those stories that show that in a moment of danger we have the instinct to run or play dead or whatever . . . though I know I’m just trying to reassure myself that I too would swerve in just the right direction, know where to hide, trembling a foot away from my pursuer — or perform whatever miraculous action it would take.
It is magical thinking. Everyone is too young or too special to die or be harmed forever.
I especially hate it when people say they know they’ve been "spared for a reason," or that they prayed and sure enough, the wind changed direction and their house got spared — as if their neighbor didn’t pray just as intensely. Of course we hate being powerless over the randomness of events. That fear has a lot to do with the origin of all religions.
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“RUSSIA HAS LOST ITS MIND”
~ I cannot begin to describe what Russia, the country of my birth and the first half of my life, has become now. It is, at this point, a bona fide fascist state beset with endless seething historic resentment and hateful militaristic frenzy. It is a nation that has lost its mind and its bearings; and in order to remain in existence after its impending and inevitable defeat in the insane war it has unleashed against Ukraine, it will need to undergo a complete mental, psychological and political makeover. Absent that, it will disintegrate unto irrelevance and oblivion... deservedly so. ~ M. Iossel
Note that the father appears oblivious to the boys’ discomfort.
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Russia has only been called a “world power" because people remembered the USSR.
In reality, they became a regional power in 1991.
And now, they have been exposed as not even that. They're North Korea with oil, ISIS with nukes. A “power” equal to Portugal or Cambodia.
Capable of being a pain in the ass to neighbors, and that's it. They've lost all influence in the world except in Belarus, a couple of third rate dictatorships, and a handful of countries in Central Asia where they have been able to intimidate the locals. Until now. It's not going to last. ~ Mats Andersson, Quora
HOW WILL HISTORY REMEMBER PUTIN?
~ There doesn't really seem to be any ideological continuity between Putin and his predecessors except that he used the state spy network to establish an autocratic and kleptocratic state that exploits myths and nationalism to promote its own aims of plundering Russia and other countries.
Perhaps Putin sees himself as a Tsar more than Stalin. The one key word I took from his speech was "immortal" — and I guess Putin the man of propaganda can't undo nature. His tantrums are a reflection of the fact that he cannot live long and needs to find a way of making history remember him. He is just plainly — a thief. ~ Stephen Pain
Oriana:
Even worse, a war criminal. And a man who set Russia back by decades, returning his people to the misery of the Soviet years without accomplishing his dream of restoring Russia’s place as a superpower.
Misha Iossel remains an optimist:
~ And then — the fall of Putin's regime, a period of turmoil; and then, in fact, a tribunal like Nuremberg, which was supposed to be held back in the early 90s. The trial of Putinism, Russian fascism, United Russia party, KGB-FSB, all the heritage of Soviet times. ~
Oriana:
True, there has never been a de-Sovietization the way Germany underwent a de-Nazification. But whether we can count on it within out lifetime is not something I’d bet on . . . although history has certainly provided surprises. The fall of communism took the world by surprise, and created hope.
By the way, the great Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuscinki has written an amazing book, Imperium, about his travels in post-Soviet Russia, including Kolyma, the heart of the Gulag archipelago — the heart of darkness, though the dominant color is the whiteness of snow and fog.
Yes, it would be excellent if we could have the equivalent of Nuremberg Trials for the crimes of the Soviet and Russian Empire. But don’t count on it — not even a trial in absentia. Too many people — millions and millions — are still confused by the idealism that the Soviet Union managed to project through its ruthless lying.
The great moment of truth for Yeltsin was the time he was given a tour of an ordinary (he insisted on “ordinary”) American super-market. Given my own background, I can understand his astonishment: So much food! So much food!
Misha:
~ Quite frankly, on Victory in Europe Day, when we all celebrate the victory over fascism of so many decades ago, Vladimir Putin is bringing shame upon the memory of the millions of Russians who fought and died in the fight for freedom and the fight against fascism. ~ Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, in Kyiv on May 8, 2022
Gripping the edge of the table is likely an attempt to conceal Parkinson's-related tremor
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~ Putin misread the entire situation, on his own side and on Ukraine’s side. He did not know Western military technology was so superior to Russia’s, or that the West would shut off technology, computer chips, electronic components, and other items needed in the Russian aircraft, vehicle, and weapon manufacturing industries.
He missed the aspect of morale by a country mile.
Putin did not understand that a free people fighting on their own ground can defeat even the greatest of invading tyrannies and dictatorships.
His greatest error was thinking his one-man corrupt dictatorship was as good as nations with the rule of law, constitutions, and stability. He must not have thought his thefts would make a difference, but they obviously do. ~ John Dewar Gleissner, Quora
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TWO POSSIBLE OUTCOMES FOR RUSSIA
~ Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, sees two scenarios for ending the war with Russia – the disintegration of the Russian Federation and a change of its leadership.
The top spy spoke in an interview with NV [a Ukrainian news agency], Ukrinform reports.
The first is the disintegration of Russia into three or more parts. And the second option is the relative preservation of the territorial integrity of Russia with a change in the country's leadership.
According to Budanov, in the latter case, the new leader will have to state that Russia has nothing to do with the war and that it was designed by a “sick dictator.” Then Russia will withdraw from all the territories it has once occupied – from the islands of Japan to Königsberg, which belongs to Germany. [Oriana: I comment on this later]
"These are the two ways. Most of Russia's military-political leadership is aware of this. And that's why there are so many attempts at dialogue with the Western world, despite the official rhetoric they all apply. But the unofficial one is completely different: they are afraid of losing their wealth. And they understand how it will all end very quickly for them," Budanov said.
The head of the defense intelligence, the agency referred to as the GUR, expressed confidence that Ukraine will win the war, noting that "leaving Putin a way to retreat is one of the strategies, but it is almost unrealistic. He is a war criminal in the eyes of the whole world. This is his end, he has driven himself into a dead end.” ~
Oriana:
For many readers there is an exciting novelty to the idea of Russia’s oversize territory being divided into three or more parts. Indeed, why should Turkic or Mongolian people be ruled by the ethnic Russians?
And there is no denying that around eighty percent of Russia's population lives in the western part of the country, while the most precious resources are in the East, i.e. Asia.
Russia's population decline (the "downward demographic spiral") is also a factor to consider.
Of course one can immediately think of how difficult such a division would be to achieve peacefully, even with a cooperative new leadership in Moscow. As for Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, or in Polish Krölewiec, the idea of returning it to Germany (because it was once an important city in Prussia; Kant lived there) seems far-fetched. Nor am I proposing that it be given to Poland. Sooner maybe to Lithuania — but frankly I don’t claim to know what the best solution would be.
That Siberia will eventually become Chinese is quite imaginable. But other, smaller Asian regions? Not so much.
But it’s interesting to imagine a non-imperial Russia, divided into smaller territories. Or at least a "less imperial" Russia.
The only thing that is certain is change itself. Our great-grandchildren will live in a different world — if humanity doesn’t destroy itself by the end of this century, or sooner.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF RUSSIA COLLAPSES?
~ Russia collapsed at least two times during the last hundred years: after the Revolution ’17 and when we lost the Cold War in 1991. What happened afterwards, suggests a definitive answer:
If Russia collapses during our lifetime, it soon reassembles itself.
This is not because Russians are awesomely patriotic. It’s due to some hard factors of Russia’s existence.
Russia has almost always been a colonization project. The consequence is we have very few self-sustained territories. Most our provinces are on purpose made hopelessly dependent on massive transfers from Moscow thanks to a few oblasts endowed with either access to the sea, or valuable mineral resources.
The breakups after 1917 and 1991 went along ethnic territorial lines. In modern Russia, only the Muslims in North Caucasus can repeat the trick. Elsewhere, local ethnicities are either diluted to insignificance (e.g. Karelia, Crimea), or locked inside ethnically Russian territories (Volga Turks, Yakutia).
The centuries of colonization made Russia an extremely top-heavy nation. “Federation” in the name of our country is a joke. Everything goes through Moscow. If an evil wizard makes Moscow disappear into a thin air today, everyone else starts setting up New Moscow tomorrow—simply because no one knows how make things work any other way.
The climate and the distances make it almost impossible for people to encapsulate themselves in local communities, like in Somalia or Libya. You can have all the oil wells in West Siberia, but you got to get the juice to export terminals somehow. Likewise, to import life necessities to your people. You can’t do that past large territories where people habitually rob your caravans.
As long as a collapse doesn’t involve nation-wide door-to-door execution of the old elite—what happened during our Civil war—we have professional groups that would be the glue agent for reassembling the country. The primary motor would be of course the secret police FSB and the rest of security services associated with the Kremlin.
You must add to this a powerful external factor. Everyone who is someone in global politics, knows: Putin may be a nuisance, but Putinist Russia without Putin is a beast. No one wants it loose. A collapse would mean several well-armed factions in mortal combat. One of them sooner or later may decide that dangling an A-bomb, or selling nuclear components to a highest bidder is a good idea. And Russia is not a kind of a country where NATO and China, even together, can simply land a commando force to fix the problem. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
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ALTERNATIVE REALITY ON RUSSIAN TV
~ Never was there a better illustration of the alternative reality presented by Russian state media than at 17:00 GMT on Tuesday. As BBC World TV opened its bulletin with reports of a Russian attack on a TV tower in the capital Kyiv, Russian TV was announcing that Ukraine was responsible for strikes on its own cities.
So what are Russian TV viewers seeing of the war?
Good Morning, on state-controlled Channel One, one of Russia's most popular channels, is to the casual observer not unlike the breakfast broadcasting found in many other countries with its mix of news, culture and light entertainment.
On Tuesday the normal running order is interrupted at 05:30 Moscow time [02:30 GMT]. The presenters announce that TV schedules have been changed "due to well known events", and there will be more news and current affairs. The news bulletin suggests that reports about Ukrainian forces destroying Russian military hardware are false, designed to "mislead inexperienced viewers”.
"Footage continues to be circulated on the internet which cannot be described as anything but fake," the presenter explains as the viewer is shown photographs of what is described as "unsophisticated virtual manipulations”.
Later in the morning, at 08:00 Moscow time, we tune in for the morning bulletin from television channel NTV, which is owned by a subsidiary of Gazprom, a Kremlin-controlled firm. It concentrates almost exclusively on events in Donbas, the region in the east of Ukraine where on 24 February, Russia stated it was beginning its "special military operation" to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.
There is no mention of reports of the ominous miles-long military convoy snaking its way from Belarus in the north to Ukraine's capital Kyiv, which, in the UK, leads the BBC Radio 4 news bulletin half-an-hour later.
"We start with the latest news from Donbas. LNR [Luhansk People's Republic] fighters continue their offensive, having traveled 3km, while DNR [Donetsk People's Republic] units have traveled 16km," the NTV presenter says.
The presenter is referring to the Moscow-backed rebels who have been in control of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics since Russia's intervention in east Ukraine eight years ago.
On Rossiya 1 and Channel One - Russia's two most popular channels, both state-controlled - Ukrainian forces are accused of war crimes in the Donbas region. The threat to civilians in Ukraine comes not from Russian forces, but from "Ukrainian nationalists", says the Rossiya 1 presenter.
"They use civilians as a human shield, deliberately positioning strike systems in residential areas and stepping up the shelling of cities in Donbas.”
Channel One's presenter announces that Ukrainian troops "are preparing to shell residential houses" and bomb warehouses with ammonia, in "acts of provocation against civilians and Russian forces".
Events in Ukraine are not referred to as war. Instead, the offensive is described as a demilitarization operation targeting military infrastructure or a "special [military] operation to defend the people's republics”.
Across state-controlled TV, presenters and correspondents use emotive language and images to draw "historical parallels" between Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine and the Soviet Union's fight against Nazi Germany.
"The tactics of nationalists who use children to shield themselves have not changed since the Second World War," says the presenter of a morning show on Rossiya 1's sister channel, Rossiya 24.
"They behave like fascists, in the very sense of this word: neo-Nazis put their hardware not just next to residential houses but where children take shelter in basements," adds the correspondent in a video report captioned "Ukrainian fascism”.
While media in the West has been asking whether Putin's assault has struggled to make quick progress, Russian TV portrays the Russian operations as very successful. Regular updates give numbers of destroyed Ukrainian hardware and weaponry. More than 1,100 Ukrainian military infrastructure facilities have been disabled and hundreds of pieces of hardware have been destroyed, morning news reports say. There is no mention of any Russian casualties.
Russian morning news bulletins barely acknowledge its army's offensives in other parts of Ukraine. State TV correspondents are not reporting on the ground from places like Kyiv and Kharkiv, the two major cities that have seen shelling of people's homes. Instead, they are embedded with troops in Donbas.
But by the afternoon edition of the news, NTV finally mentions the news event that has dominated hours of coverage on the BBC by this stage — the shelling of the city of Kharkiv.
However, it debunks any reports that Russian forces are responsible, calling them “fake".
"Judging by the trajectory of the missile, the strike was delivered from the north-west where there are no Russian forces," the presenter says during the 16:00 Moscow time edition of the news. Four hours later, a bulletin by Rossiya 1 goes further, blaming Ukraine itself for the bombing.
"To strike Kharkiv and say that it was Russia. Ukraine is hitting its own and is lying to the West. But is it possible to deceive the people?" it asks.
During a 17:00 bulletin, the Rossiya 1 presenter outlines what she says is Russia's "main objective" in Ukraine: "The defense of Russia against the threat from the West, which is using the Ukrainian people in its stand-off with Moscow.”
To counter what is described as "fake news and rumors" about Ukraine which are circulating online", she announces that the Russian government is launching a new website where "only true information will be published”.
Increasing numbers of younger Russians tend to get their news from independent websites or social media, and the longer the war goes on, the more images and videos of dead soldiers and prisoners of war are surfacing. But the authorities are responding to this and turning the screws on independent reporting.
Roskomnadzor has ordered TikTok to remove military and political content in its suggestions to minors, complaining, "in most cases, these materials have a pronounced anti-Russian character". It also demanded that Google remove what it describes as false information about the Russian army's reported losses, and Reuters reports it has re-imposed a slowdown on Twitter's loading speeds over "fake reports" of Moscow's "special military operation", and restricted access to Facebook.
It has instructed media outlets to use information only from official Russian sources when reporting the invasion, demanding that they take down any reports referring to "a declaration of war" or "an invasion". It has threatened them with fines and blocking if they do not take action. The websites of the independent TV channel Dozhd and popular liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy have been blocked for alleged calls for extremism and violence, and "systematic spread of false information about the activities of the Russian military”. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60571737
Oriana:
Oddly enough, I couldn’t get the precise link to this, but it’s the May 9 Rachel Maddow report: Hackers Humiliate Putin; Prominent Media Vandalized On Russian Holiday. If you go to youtube.com you should be able to find it.
All the programs had the heading: “There is blood on your hands.” It wasn’t really “vandalizing.” It was hacking designed to reveal the truth.
It was done by two journalists who are now presumably safe somewhere outside Russia. "Dictators know they can't survive the truth,” as Rachel brilliantly summarized it.
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ANOTHER RUSSIAN OLIGARCH FOUND DEAD
~ A Russian oligarch has been found dead in the basement of a shaman's house, Russian state media has reported.
Alexander Subbotin, former CEO and former executive at the Kremlin-friendly energy company Lukoil, is the latest of a string of oligarchs and journalists who have died in mysterious circumstances since the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces. According to Russian-affiliated media Tass, Subbotin met his unfortunate end due to ingesting toad venom in an attempt to cure a hangover.
People who are no longer in the favor of Vladimir Putin do tend to have a habit of dying in mysterious circumstances, such as the string of clumsy journalists and doctors who met their end by falling out of windows.
Local news outlets reported that he had been seeking a hangover cure, which contained toad poison, according to Newsweek. Lukoil, by a remarkable coincidence, had recently called for a quick end to the invasion of Ukraine.
Sergey Protosenya, another oligarch, was found dead alongside his wife and daughter in April, in what police ruled a murder-suicide. The day before that, the former vice president of bank Gazprombank, Vladislav Avaev, was found dead in his apartment, along with his wife and daughter.
In this context, the claim that Subbotin sought a shaman and ingested toad venom in order to cure a hangover rather than taking an aspirin seems unlikely, but we guess stranger things have happened. Like all those journalists who accidentally fell out of third-floor windows. ~
https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/russian-oligarch-found-dead-at-shamans-home-russia-blames-toad-venom/?fbclid=IwAR2HHm2oZ92Z43CrA2fVAnpSw9goZttMtwlecfDM9mEa5_tQbP4r0ZxwwJo
Toad venom? Is ordinary poisoning not enough anymore?
True, it failed to get rid of Alexey Navalny, who had the nerve to recover. Perhaps someone took it as a sign that it was time to get more creative.
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“Whatever happens in Ukraine, Russia is a lesser country now than it was before this invasion.” ~ UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace
a colorized image of a Russian family, 1910
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SOME RUSSIAN SOLDIERS AND OFFICERS IN UKRAINE REFUSE TO FIGHT
~ After the victory parade Monday in Moscow, which many in the West estimated would be an opportunity for Russian President Vladimir Putin to announce achievements in the fighting or even officially declare a "war" on Ukraine, the Russian army is still struggling and continues to struggle in fighting the Ukrainian army.
Two and a half months after the start of the war, the Russian army is far from any real achievement, despite the occupation of several cities in southern Ukraine like Kherson and most of the port city of Mariupol. In addition to all the troubles of the Russian military in combat, various reports have recently surfaced of another problem that may bother Putin: refusals of command by officers and soldiers on the battlefield.
A senior Pentagon defense official reported yesterday that the United States had a series of reports and indications of a refusal of orders on the front lines of fighting in eastern Ukraine.
According to the report, the widespread phenomenon of refusals of the order forced more high-ranking generals to enter the battlefields — which raised the risk to their lives. As you may recall, last week they announced in Ukraine the assassination of another senior Russian general, the 12th in number since the beginning of the fighting. Washington denied last week that they had given the Ukrainians accurate information about the generals' positions on the battlefield — something that according to various leaks helped them in the series of assassinations.
This report joins other reports in the West, according to which Russia has so far recorded no real achievement in the fighting in eastern Ukraine. The same Pentagon official reported that the Russian military, for the time being, had managed to advance only "a few miles" in the area of the city of Izum in the northeast of the country. He added that the rising trend in the area is the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Izum region in a southeasterly direction, towards the town of Lyman. According to estimates, the move may be due to the difficulty of the Russian army to register achievements in the Izum and Kharkiv region, due to Ukrainian opposition there. Also yesterday it was reported that the Ukrainian army continues to repel and keep Russian forces away at a distance of tens of kilometers from Kharkiv.
Against the backdrop of numerous reports and estimates until yesterday that Putin might have used Victory Day to officially declare a "war" on Ukraine — a move that would have allowed him to recruit many more reserve and regular combat forces, there are no indications of large-scale mobilization of more Russians to war. At the same time, Washington recognizes that the Wagner group, the private mercenary group of businessman Yevgeny Priguzin close to Putin, has raised a demand for the transfer of more large forces to the war from other arenas in which they operate.
Preliminary estimates for extensive enlistment in the Russian military came in the wake of dramatic damage to Russian manpower at the end of two-and-a-half months of fighting. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, their force stood at about 120 battalion combat teams with a full staff, now it is estimated that they have a maximum of 97 battalion combat teams, numbering about a thousand fighters in each of them on average — much smaller in size than a fully qualified battalion.
Contrary to expectations, Putin did not address yesterday's parade at length the fighting in Ukraine. While many estimated that Putin was determined to present a victory picture in the parade and detail real achievements, he preferred to avoid it and continue to justify Russian motives for fighting — in what sounded mostly like an appeal to the Russian audience.
Yesterday, he reiterated the Kremlin's narrative since before the outbreak of the war, saying that the West had left Russia no choice and forced it to start a war against Ukraine because NATO forces threatened to invade Russia.
In recent days, there have been increasing allegations that Putin and the Russian military have failed in their early assessment of the outcome of the war and the response of Ukraine and Western countries. The British Ministry of Defense announced that Russia's underestimation of Ukraine and its army on the eve of the war led to a series of Russian failures on the battlefield, which is what effectively deprived Putin of the right to declare real achievements on Victory Day. "The Russian invasion plan was based on a great deal of information on a misjudgment regarding only limited resistance on the part of the Ukrainian army, which determined that Russia could carry out major conquests in a short time," a statement from London said. It was further alleged that the erroneous calculation in Moscow resulted in large losses and forced them to change the focus of the fighting.
Despite censorship, failures are also reported in Russia.
Further evidence of the failure of Russian combat efforts in Ukraine can be found in the reports of Alexander Sladkov, one of the greatest "Putinist" Russian war journalists. Sladkov, who reports from the fighting front in the Donbas region for Russia's first television channel, yesterday made an outrageous critique of the conduct of Russian fighting in Ukraine, calling it "shamefully hesitant." In a special report issued yesterday, he said that Russian forces "are unable to advance and repel Ukrainian forces.”
"We are not able to fend off the Ukrainians from the city, we are simply not succeeding," Sladkov reported. "Because, I do not know and do not want to criticize, but we face them in a one-to-one relationship," he continued."We are unable to close the bulge", he said about the inability of Russian forces to advances.
Putin's status is also undermined in the internal media arena, despite the harsh and restrictive legislation on the matter since the war began. CNN reports that 2 Russian journalists in the media known for their sympathetic attitude to the Kremlin published articles this morning criticizing the war and Putin's leadership. Journalists Igor Polyakov and Alexandra Miroshnikova wrote, among other things, that the authorities in Russia "lied to relatives of soldiers" in their reports regarding those killed in the sinking of the warship "Moscow". They also wrote that Putin had brought Russia to "the bloodiest war in the 21st century.”
"Putin and his immediate circle are expected to face a tribunal at the end of the war," the unusual article said. "Putin and his people will not be able to justify it after the war." Polyakov and Miroshnikova are two economic editors at the site Лента.Ру [Lenta, Ru], which is owned by the Russian bank Sberbank, on which only recently the US imposed a series of severe sanctions.
It is still too early to eulogize the Russian war effort, which many believe may be particularly long and protracted, but close to three months since it began, it can certainly be stated that it is conducted differently from the way Putin and his associates had hoped. If at first it seemed that the war was actually helping Putin to strengthen and fortify his position at home among the Russian public, recent developments and heavy failures on the battlefield show that Putin's strong position is not immune either. ~ Yohanan Ben Jacob, Quora
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“Same celebration, but in Poland.” ~ Irina Roskovsny
Red paint, signifying blood, was splashed on the Russian ambassador in Warsaw
Philip Matsikoudisa:
Who cares about the ridiculous waste of time of the ludicrous Russian Victory Parade being held by a belligerent murderous Dictator who is close to igniting WWIII due to his reckless and idiotic leadership? Putin is fabricating 99.9% of the Russian news being reported. Russia manufactures propaganda on an industrial scale that is designed to brainwash the Russian public who live in constant fear of their barbaric government where free speech doesn’t exist and thought control is their aim. The Russian government under Putin is the most repugnant and repulsive since Stalin, who is Putin’s idea of a great leader. The lives of human beings mean nothing to this monster.
from another source:
~ When the soldiers of an elite Russian army brigade were told in early April to prepare for a second deployment to Ukraine, fear broke out among the ranks.
The unit, stationed in Russia’s far east during peacetime, first entered Ukraine from Belarus when the war started at the end of February and saw bitter combat with Ukrainian forces.
“It soon became clear that not everyone was onboard with it. Many of us simply did not want to go back,” said Dmitri, a member of the unit who asked not to be identified with his real name. “I want to return to my family – and not in a casket.”
Along with eight others, Dmitri told his commanders that he refused to rejoin the invasion. “They were furious. But they eventually calmed down because there wasn’t much they could do,” he said.
He was soon transferred to Belgorod, a Russian city close to the border with Ukraine, where he has been stationed since. “I have served for five years in the army. My contract ends in June. I will serve my remaining time and then I am out of here,” he said. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. We aren’t officially in a state of war, so they could not force me to go.”
Dmitri’s refusal to fight highlights some of the military difficulties the Russian army has faced as a result of the Kremlin’s political decision not to formally declare war on Ukraine – preferring instead to describe the invasion, which will soon reach its fourth month, as a “special military operation”.
Under Russian military rules, troops who refuse to fight in Ukraine can face dismissal but cannot be prosecuted, said Mikhail Benyash, a lawyer who has been advising soldiers who choose that option.
Benyash said “hundreds and hundreds” of soldiers had been in touch with his team for advice on how they could avoid being sent to fight. Among them were 12 national guardsmen from Russia’s southern city of Krasnodar who were fired after refusing to go to Ukraine.
“Commanders try to threaten their soldiers with prison time if they dissent, but we tell the soldiers that they can simply say no,” Benyash said, adding that he was not aware of any criminal cases against soldiers who refused to fight. “There are no legal grounds to start a criminal case if a soldier refuses to fight while on Russian territory.”
Many soldiers have chosen to be fired or transferred rather than going into “the meat grinder”, he said.
A similar account to Dmitri’s was given to the BBC’s Russian service by Sergey Bokov, a 23-year-old soldier who at the end of April decided to leave the army after fighting in Ukraine. “Our commanders didn’t even argue with us because we were not the first ones to leave,” Bokov said.
Pointing to Russia’s military laws, Benyash said it would be more difficult for soldiers to refuse to fight if Russia were to declare a full-scale war. “During wartime, rules are totally different. Refusal then would mean much harsher penalties. They would be looking at time in prison.”
While the exact number of soldiers refusing to fight remains unclear, such stories illustrate what military experts and western governments say is one of Russia’s biggest obstacles in Ukraine: a severe shortage of infantry soldiers.
Moscow initially put about 80% of its main ground combat forces – 150,000 men – into the war in February, according to western officials. But significant damage has been done to that army, which has confronted logistical problems, poor morale and an underestimated Ukrainian resistance.
“Putin needs to make a decision regarding mobilization in the coming weeks,” said Rob Lee, a military analyst. “Russia lacks sufficient ground units with contract soldiers for a sustainable rotation. The troops are getting exhausted – they won’t be able to keep this up for a long period.”
Lee said one option for the Kremlin would be to authorize the deployment of conscript units to Ukraine, despite Putin’s earlier pledges that Russia would not use any conscripts in the war.
“Conscripts could fill some of the gaps, but they will be poorly trained. Many of the units that are supposed to train conscripts are fighting themselves,” Lee said.
But without conscript battalions, Russia could soon “struggle to hold the territory it currently controls in Ukraine, especially as Ukraine receives better equipment from Nato,” he said.
Russian authorities quietly stepped up their efforts to recruit new soldiers as it became clear that a quick victory in Ukraine was unattainable.
An investigation by the BBC’s Russian service showed that Russia’s defence ministry filled employment websites with vacancies, offering people with no combat experience opportunities to join the army on lucrative short-term contracts. Some large government-run companies have received letters urging them to sign up their staff for the army.
Russia has also turned to mercenaries to bolster its war efforts, deploying fighters from the shadowy Kremlin-linked Wagner group.
But analysts say voluntary recruits and mercenary groups are unlikely to lead to a substantial increase in the number of new soldiers, compared with the numbers that a partial or a full-scale mobilization would bring.
Despite speculation beforehand, Putin did not formally declare war on Ukraine during his Victory Day speech on 9 May.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, said the authorities may be worried that a general mobilization would antagonize large sections of the population that support the “special operation”.
Russians “might be in favor of the conflict, but they don’t actually want to fight,” he said, adding that a general mobilization would entail “colossal losses of untrained soldiers”.
And while the current status of the conflict gives Russian soldiers a legal path to refuse participation, some soldiers have complained that it has also led to them not being adequately cared for.
A junior sergeant said he was injured during one of the recent Ukrainian attacks on the Russian border territory where he was stationed. His superiors argued that he should not be given the monetary compensation of up to £2,500 that wounded Russians are entitled to by law because his injury took place on Russian soil – meaning it did not fall under the rules of Russia’s “special military operation”.
“It is unfair, I am fighting in this war just as the others in Ukraine, risking my life,” the soldier said. “If I don’t get the compensation that I am entitled to soon, I will go public and make a major issue of it.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/12/they-were-furious-the-russian-soldiers-refusing-to-fight-in-ukraine
Russian soldiers surrendering
*
Troy Welch:
There
won't be many body bags because the Russian Army is cremating most of
their KIA and then telling their families that they are MIA or that they
deserted so they don't have to pay money to the parents or wives. Most
of the soldiers who get buried will be those that the Ukrainians have
recovered and identified.
*
THE MAIN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SOVIET UNION AND TODAY’S RUSSIA
1. Choice
The USSR wasn’t a great place if you like an unlimited choice. Karl Marx famously said that freedom is a consciousness of necessity. Our rulers took this very seriously and decided on our behalf what was necessary for us (a few important things) and what was not (everything else).
The many tales of how Soviet citizens virtually fainted when seeing capitalist grocery shops for the first time give you a glimpse of how much choice we had in everyday life.
2. Mobility
The USSR was a place obsessed with keeping the perimeter tight against all threats. This was religiously applied both ways: most of people reportedly shot by Soviet border guards were those trying to get out of the country. This way, our rulers strived to keep a high level of control required by the totalitarian way of government— the one that not only requires you to obey, but also love them.
Luckily, President Putin, wise from his years in KGB, has chosen a more humane way of government. Anyone who doesn’t like his system is nowadays more than welcome to leave the country. In the grand scheme of Russian civilization, this is freedom.
I add to that the unprecedented wealth that has allowed most of us to buy cars and drive wherever we want down the city roads and highways with no potholes in them. And I bless the technology that allows me to easily explore the world wherever I step and buy airplane tickets that cost me less than parking my car in the airport while I’m away.
3. Dignity
Even as a member of a tiny privileged minority, in my capacity of a Soviet propaganda executive, back in the 1980s I traveled across Europe with the chip of a poor, fearful Soviet citizen on my shoulder. The 5,700 kroner of my untaxable monthly allowance was worth at least four or five times that amount earned by a Scandinavian native at the time. Adjusted for deductibles—taxes, free apartment and utilities, free car, free petrol, the untaxed groceries in the embassy shop etc—a very, very comfortable lump of money at the time.
And yet, the value of Western currency back home was so immense that spending every krone of it felt like paying with my own blood.
The moment I laid hands on my own 1,000 kroner for the first time, I realized how poor we all were in the USSR. The last bum in the street in Stockholm could immediately spend a fistful of his panhandled coins on things that even the top guys in the Politburo could only buy in the “Section 200″. This was a secret shop in the GUM department store where only selected top functionaries in the Party and government were allowed entrance. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Former Propaganda Executive at Soviet Union (1980–1991), Quora
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IS THE WAR IN UKRAINE NATO’S FAULT?
~ NATO acknowledged Russia’s security concerns regarding Ukraine becoming a member of NATO in 2008.
Ukraine and Georgia applied to join NATO in 2008. Their membership was declined because of German and French concerns of unnecessarily antagonizing Russia. The result of declining them membership in June of 2008 was the Russo-Georgian war six weeks later.
Let me type this out very slowly again. Ukraine and Georgia applied to join NATO, NATO declined because of ‘legitimate’ security concerns Russia allegedly had, and Russia invaded Georgia six weeks later. I typed this out over five minutes, read it just as slowly.
Does it seem like “addressing Russian security concerns” made them less likely to invade their neighbors? The obvious answer is no, it didn’t. It just opened a way for them to launch an unprovoked invasion of the smaller neighbor.
The war could have been prevented if Ukraine had been accepted into NATO in 2008, perhaps as a response to the invasion of Georgia. Russia must be contained and kept on a leash, that’s the only way you can prevent them from launching wars. I hope we finally learned this lesson in 2022. ~
Tomaž Vargason, Quora
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THE RED ARMY IN GERMANY
~ I have read a number of war accounts by Red Army soldiers. After they invaded Germany, they saw the German living standard, and that made them really furious. Soldiers from far reaches of Siberia marveled at the fact that each house was connected to the water main and they had water on taps. They had electricity, their houses were built of brick, they were plastered over and covered with roof tiles, the roads were paved or concrete, covered with asphalt.
These soldiers couldn't understand why these people, who lived in such comfortable splendor (from their perspective) could possibly want from them, poor peasants living in huts made of wooden planks without any internal walls, just a barrier fence between the family and the animals, who lived in the same hut as the family. I can understand their fury. In their mind it was spoiled rich people invading them to take the little they had. ~ Rok Ružič, Quora
*
HOW RUSSIAN CHILDREN FEEL ABOUT RUSSIA
~ Moscow State University conducted social research among Russian high school kids to build their political and psychological profile. Probably for nefarious purposes, but I digress. These are their findings.
Only 29.5% of students have a positive attitude to their country, and 25.5% have negative attitude. More than a third of high school students cannot even say how they feel about their country.
Almost half of the surveyed schoolchildren did not find any reason to be proud of Russia. 7.6% of the respondents directly stated that there is nothing to be proud of in Russia, and 34.1% of schoolchildren found it difficult to answer this question at all.
Despite militarization of patriotism, 6.2% of the school kids are proud of the people of Russia, its culture (6.2%), science (3.9%). Victory in the Great Patriotic War was recalled by only 2.3% although it has become the most important secular holiday in the country and billions of rubles have been spent on its promotion.
As for the symbol of the country's achievements, they chose something from the sphere of science and technology (16.5%), culture and art (12.8%) rather than from the military industry (3.7%).
In general, the victory in the Second World War gained only 0.7% of the votes as a symbol of the achievement of our country. Only 0.8% of respondents suggested that Vladimir Putin is a symbol of Russia.
Psychologists summed up the results of their survey as follows:
High school students have a lack of historical, political and legal knowledge or understanding of the significance of names, dates and facts they memorize through rote learning in the lessons of history and social studies.
They exhibit polarity in the emotional attitude to their country. High school students have a sharply negative attitude towards Russia as a state and a positive attitude towards Russia as a country.
And there you have it. Russians love their country, and they hate ruling classes with their militarization, patriotism, Putin, churches, propaganda, and dishonesty.
More than metaphorically speaking, young Russians feel like under foreign occupation.
The occupiers are the National Guard, special police units, officials, Kremlebots, the intelligence service operatives, Central Bank, the judges on government payroll, the oligarchs, the army, the police, the United Russia politicians. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Henry Kissinger meeting with Russia’s Head of Central Bank Nabibulina, the minister of Economy Kudrin, and the mastermind of privatization of state assets Chubais
*
~ Russia has forgotten something very important from WWII. During that war, they were kept alive by convoys of supplies streaming in from the West. Those supplies gave them what they needed to defeat Nazi Germany. Without them, they would not have survived. Now those supplies are going to Ukraine and Russia is the Nazis. Just as in WWII Ukraine will eventually win because they will have anything they need to do so. Russia likes to boast about its WWII victory but they seem to have forgotten how it achieved that. ~ Mark Belamy, Quora
*
Russia is GREAT. It’s a religion. You can’t argue rationally with religious people. ~ Misha Firer
St. Petersburg woman watching TV
Mary:
*
ROOSEVELT’S HOPE
”We have faith that future generations will know here, in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a time when men of good will found a way to unite... and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.” ~ FDR, 1943.
Oriana:
I wonder if he really believed those words. Perhaps he did. Hope springs eternal. 
FDR signing the GI Bill
*
BERTRAND RUSSELL’S MESSAGE TO THE FUTURE GENERATIONS
”I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral: The intellectual thing is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only "what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out?" Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think could have beneficial social effects, if it were believed. But look only and solely at: "What are the facts?" That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.
The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact, that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not to die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.” ~ Bertrand Russell, Message To Future Generations (1959)
Oriana:
I don't know which is more difficult: to exclude all wishful thinking from one's intellectual activity, or to achieve that great tolerance that would indeed keep the world safe from war.
*
WHY WE KEEP WAITING FOR “THE ONE” EVEN IF WE ARE IN A HAPPY MARRIAGE OR RELATIONSHIP
~ Have you ever found yourself listening to a sad song over and over? (You’re not alone: People play the sad songs on their playlists 800 times on average, versus 175 times for the happy songs.) Or felt strangely thrilled by a rainy day or night? Then you’ve experienced what Susan Cain calls the bittersweet state of mind.
And while you’ve probably never thought of sadness as a superpower, Cain begs to differ. We should listen — after all, she’s the one who showed us the gifts and benefits of introversion, via her 2012 book Quiet and her blockbuster 2012 TED Talk.
In her new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Cain invites us to embrace that feeling where joy and sorrow meet. Because when we learn to acknowledge our own heartache, she says, we’ll discover that it can be an unexpected path to creativity, connection and love.
Here, she explains why so many of us still dream of finding our soulmate — even when we’re happily partnered — and what this longing reveals about us and about being human.
*
An elegant Italian woman, worldly, sophisticated. Francesca. At the end of World War II, she meets and marries an American soldier, moves with him to his small Iowan farm town. Her husband is kind, devoted and limited. She loves her children.
One day her family leaves town for a week. She’s alone for the first time in her married life. Until a photographer knocks on the door, asking for directions, and they fall into a passionate, four-day affair. He begs her to run away but at the last minute, she says goodbye to him, and they long for each other for the rest of their lives.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it comes from The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 novel that sold more than 12 million copies, and a 1995 movie, starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, that grossed $182 million.
The story split people into two camps: one that loved it because the couple’s love was pure and endured over the decades and another that saw it as a cop-out — that real love is working through the challenges of an actual relationship.
Which was right? Should we learn to let go of the dream of fairy-tale love to fully embrace the imperfect loves we know? Or should we believe Aristophanes, as told in Plato’s Symposium: that once we were all conjoined souls, so ecstatic and powerful in our oneness that we aroused the fear of the Titans, who made Zeus break us apart?
In 2016, Swiss-born writer-philosopher Alain de Botton published an essay in The New York Times called “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.” It was the most widely read op-ed of the year, and it argued that we would be better off if we’d renounce the Romantic idea that, as De Botton put it, “a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.”
De Botton followed this with seminars offered by his organization, the School of Life, which operates across the world, from Sydney to Los Angeles, where I sit now at the Ebell Theater alongside 300 classmates. De Botton’s class is grounded in the idea that “one of the gravest errors we make around relationships is to imagine that they aren’t things we can get wiser or better at.”
Alain believes it’s the fantasy of the missing half that prevents us from appreciating the partners we do have. We’re forever comparing their flawed selves to “the amazing things we imagine about strangers, especially in libraries and trains.” In his class, he demonstrates this with an exercise called “The Anti-Romantic Daydream.” We’re shown four images of potential mates, two men and two women.
“Pick the person of the four who most appeals to you,” instructs Alain. “Imagine in detail five ways in which they might turn out to be very challenging after three years together.”
One audience member picks a photo of a woman in a red headscarf with a wistful expression. “She has exactly the same look my dog has when I leave him, so she may be quite needy.”
A woman chooses a photo of a slender young woman in a library. “She might be a book reader,” she offers. “But whatever she reads, you have to also. And you have to validate all her choices.”
Alain is brilliant: a droll and insightful author and speaker. But even as we apply his insights to our love lives, there remains the question of Francesca’s longing — of our longing.
So, what should we do about it?
When you feel these longings arising in your own love life, you’re going to think there’s something wrong. The most confusing aspect of romantic love is that most enduring relationships start with the conviction that your longing has now been satisfied. The work is done, the dream is realized. But that was the courtship phase.
Over the course of love, real life will intervene, in the daily negotiations of managing a partnership and possibly a household, and in the limitations of human psychology. You might find that he instinctively avoids intimacy, while you anxiously chase it. You might discover that you’re a neat freak and she’s a slob, or that you’re a bully and he’s a doormat, or that you run late and she’s punctual to a fault.
Most likely, your relationship will be an asymptote of the thing you long for — that is, bringing you close but never touching that dream you once glimpsed. As Sufi teacher Dr. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee says, “Those who search for intimacy with others are reacting to this longing. They think another human will fulfill them. But how many of us have actually ever been totally fulfilled by another person? … We want something more fulfilling, more intimate. We want God. But not everyone dares to go into this abyss of pain, this longing, that can take you there.”
If you’re an atheist or agnostic, such talk of “wanting God” probably makes you uncomfortable or impatient. And if you’re devout, it might seem obvious.
As for me, I believe that the bittersweet tradition extinguishes these distinctions between atheists and believers. The longing comes through Yahweh or Allah, Christ or Krishna, no more and no less than it comes through the books and the music; they are equally the divine, or none of them are the divine, and the distinction makes no difference; they are all it.
When you went to your favorite concert and heard your favorite musician singing the body electric, that was it; when you met your love and gazed at each other with shining eyes, that was it; when you kissed your five-year-old good night and she turned to you solemnly and said, “Thank you for loving me so much,” that was it: all of them facets of the same jewel.
And yes, at 11PM the concert will end, and you’ll have to find your car in a crowded parking lot; and your relationship won’t be perfect because no relationship is; and one day your daughter will fail 11th grade and announce that she hates you.
But this is to be expected. The Bridges of Madison County was a story about the moments when you glimpse your Eden. It was never just a story about a marriage and an affair; it was about the transience of these sightings, and why they mean more than anything else that might ever happen to you. ~
https://ideas.ted.com/heres-why-we-long-for-that-perfect-love-to-arrive-bittersweet-excerpt/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social&utm_content=2022-5-07&fbclid=IwAR2mIpdq8whz3vQjlcQYCEJR1DhxhV41wrdL9XR1l131IyPdg81yPj9rnhI
I suspect that a lot of what strikes us as Eden -- or at least a glimpse of Eden -- depends on the stage of life. At fifty we can't understand what was so great that we saw in the person who was the love of our life at twenty-two. At sixty we may wonder why sex was so important that we were willing to upend our life for it at thirty. Only change remains a constant.
Mary:
Somehow I never got the message about "the one" that would be my soul mate and miraculously complete me and fill all my needs. Even though I loved all those romantic 19th century novels, I never gave any time or attention to waiting for that special, transformative love. Maybe because my wishes for Eden were far more basic, more along the lines of a safe and private place than a romantic relationship, a safe haven rather than a savior. I never had that head over heels falling in love experience — love was always more gradual, something you built and discovered rather than something that overwhelmed. Maybe I'm one of the aromantic.
Oriana:
You are lucky not to have fallen for the myth. It took me a very long time to realize that, with all my peculiarities, I wasn’t meant for marriage at all, even though I was grateful for the security it provided, especially when I needed the time to write rather than work full time. And I’m grateful to have experienced marriage and how it evolves over time — otherwise I’d be always wondering what it was like to be married, idealizing it in fantasy, equating it with romance (and in so many ways it’s the opposite). Like the great majority of widows, I feel no urge to marry again — not even should I meet someone I might label a soulmate. My greatest need is for quiet and solitude and no potential new partner, no matter how exciting, could shatter that clarity.
*
THE RISE OF SINGLES IS RESHAPING AMERICA
~ Marriage rates are at a record low and the number of unpartnered adults is steadily on the rise.
Still, for any single person, it can be a pain going it alone in a society that historically favors the married. And comfortable in solitude or not, anyone can struggle with feelings of loneliness from time to time—feelings no doubt exacerbated during the pandemic.
SINGLE DOESN’T MEAN LONELY OR ALONE
Singles can face mistaken stereotypes and value judgments that they are less happy, or lonelier. For many, being single is simply a relationship preference or even an orientation.
The truth is that more Americans are living unmarried and without a romantic partner. In 2005, the census for the first time recorded a majority of women living outside of marriage Although, of course, some unmarried women have romantic partners.
By 2010, married couples became a minority in the United States. The percentage of unmarried adults is at an all-time high, with more young adults choosing to live unmarried and without a romantic partner.
Personal finances likely plays a role in such choices. Millennials are worse off than earlier generations. There is a proven connection between economic resources and marriage rates – what legal scholar Linda McClain calls “the other marriage equality problem.” Lower incomes correlate with lower rates of marriage.
But changing family patterns are not simply the result of financial instability. They reflect choices: Not everyone wants romantic partnership and many singles see solo life as more conducive to flourishing and autonomy.
Some women become single mothers by choice. As sociologist Arlie Hochschild has argued, marriage brings extra work for women, making it less attractive than single life for some.
For other people, being single is simply a relationship preference or even an orientation. For example, there are those, referred to as “asexuals” and “aromantics,” who lack interest in sexual and romantic relationships.
Data from a 1994 British survey of more than 18,000 people showed 1 percent of the respondents to be asexual. Because asexuality is still little-known, some asexuals might not identify as such. And so, it’s possible that the true numbers could be higher.
Asexuals are people who do not feel sexual attraction. Asexuality is not simply the behavior of abstaining from sex, but an orientation. Just as straight people feel sexual attraction to members of a different sex, and gays and lesbians feel attraction to members of the same sex, asexuals simply do not feel sexual attraction. Asexuals can have romantic feelings, wanting a life partner to share intimate moments with and even cuddle – but without sexual feelings.
But some asexuals are also aromantic, that is, not interested in romantic relationships. Like asexuality, aromanticism is an orientation. Aromantics may have sexual feelings or be asexual, but they do not have romantic feelings. Both asexuals and aromantics face a lack of understanding.
Angela Chen, a journalist writing a book about asexuality, reports that her asexual interview subjects suffered from a lack of information about asexuality. As they failed to develop sexual attractions during puberty - while their classmates did - they asked themselves, “Am I normal? Is something wrong with me?”
But while asexuality is sometimes misunderstood as a medical disorder, there are many differences between an asexual orientation and a medical disorder causing a low sex drive. When asexuals are treated as “abnormal” by doctors or therapists, it does them a disservice.
Since the early 2000s, asexuals have exchanged ideas and organized through online groups. One such group, The Asexual Visibility and Education Network, for example, promotes the understanding that lack of sexual attraction is normal for asexuals, and lack of romantic feelings is normal for aromantics.
Asexuals, like aromantics, challenge the expectation that everyone wants a romantic, sexual partnership. They don’t. Nor do they believe that they would be better off with one.
SINGLE NEED NOT MEAN LONELY
Far from the stereotype of the lonely single, lifelong singles are less lonely than other older people, according to psychologist Bella DePaulo, the author of “Singled Out.” Nor are singles alone.
Many singles have close friendships which are just as valuable as romantic partnerships. But assumptions that friendships are less significant than romantic partnerships hide their value.
Understanding the reasons people have for remaining single might help to handle family stresses. If you’re single, you could take unwanted questioning as a teachable moment. If you’re the friend or family member of someone who tells you they’re happily single – believe them. ~
https://theconversation.com/single-doesnt-mean-being-lonely-or-alone-108665?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
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BEING MARRIED HAS BECOME TIED TO SOCIAL CLASS
~If work is getting in the way of our relationships, it is not an equally distributed problem. The decline in marriage rates “is a class-based affair”, say the law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, the authors of the book Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family. The well-off are more likely to marry and have more stable families – and the advantages of this family structure are conferred on their offspring. For those in a more precarious financial situation, it can often be easier to stay single.
Economic stability provides “a better foundation for loyalty, one based on relationship satisfaction and happiness rather than economic dependency or need”, found the academics Pilar Gonalons-Pons and David Calnitsky when they studied the impact of an experiment with universal basic income in Canada. If we were not so worried about paying the bills, perhaps we would have the time and mental space for better relationships.
In an increasingly atomized world, being in a couple is how most people have access to care and love. The status of being partnerless, or, as the writer Caleb Luna has put it, being “singled” – an active process that means single people are denied affection or care because they are reserved for people in couples – can leave many people without life-sustaining care. As Luna writes, the culture of “self-love”, in which we are encouraged to love, support and sustain ourselves, leaves out those for whom this is not a choice.
Care is overwhelmingly still provided by partners in a romantic couple or other family members: in the UK, 6.5 million people – one in eight adults – provide care for a sick or disabled family member or partner. The charity Carers UK estimates that, during the pandemic in 2020, 13.6 million people were carers. What happens to those, however, without partners or family members to provide care? It becomes someone’s job – a job that can end up placing enormous stress on the personal life of whoever is doing it.
Care is often outsourced to paid workers – many of whom are immigrants – some of whom have left their own partners and children behind in order to go elsewhere for work, says Prof Laura Briggs, of the women, gender and sexuality studies department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The harsh crackdowns on migration to the US and the UK have left these workers in a uniquely vulnerable position. They would “work for almost any wage, no matter how low, to support family and household members back home, without the entanglements that come with dependents who are physically present, such as being late to work after a child’s doctor’s appointment, say, or the sick days that children or elders have so many of,” wrote Briggs in her 2017 book How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics. In other words, with their family far away, the worker is free to devote all their time – and their care – to their employer.
It is not just care work that is blending the boundaries between people’s work lives and personal lives. In many sectors, offices have been designed to look, feel and act like a home, to keep employees there for longer – with free food available 24/7, areas to rest and play with Lego, office pets, informal dress codes and even showers to create a feeling that work is a “family”.
When I met Karn Bianco while I was researching my book on how work is increasingly taking over our lives, he was a freelance computer game programmer who had tired of the long hours. “Your life became just work,” he said. “You would go in at 9am and would work through until 10 or 11 at night sometimes – you could get an evening meal there.” It was fine for a while, he said. “When I was an intern, I was single, I knew I was only in that desk for a year. I had no responsibilities, no dependents.”
But as Bianco, who is now 31 and living in Glasgow, got older and entered into a relationship, it became impossible to deal with. “I even tried to start coups of sorts,” he said, trying to convince his colleagues to walk out en masse at 5pm on the dot. But it did not take, so he was stuck trying to improve his own conditions, going home at 5pm on his own – something that was possible, he noted, only because he had worked his way up the ladder. Eventually, Bianco went freelance, then left the industry entirely.
Bianco is one of the founding members of the gaming industry branch of the IWGB, which is fighting the long hours in the sector. Traditionally, there was a crunch time, when, just before a product launch, programmers were expected to put in 100-hour weeks with no extra pay. Now, as games are connected to the internet and consumers expect constant updates, crunch time is pretty much all the time. “They try to instill that feeling of: ‘You have to do this for the family [company],’ rather than: ‘This is a transaction. You pay me and I work,’” said Austin Kelmore, 40, when I met him along with Bianco.
But what happens when the “family” is gone and the workers are left on their own? Layoffs are common in the games industry – so common that one observer created a website to track them. (In 2020, there were an estimated 2,090 job losses as part of mass redundancies in the gaming industry.) When Kelmore was laid off, his partner’s income was a lifesaver, but it made him think: ‘Do I want to do games any more?’ He is still in the industry and active in the union working against what he says is a systematic issue with work-life balance. “Without unions, we had no idea what our rights were,” Bianco says. “We were working illegal hours and didn’t even know it. Most of my time at home during some of those weeks was just sleeping.”
The pandemic, of course, has made many people face up to loneliness in a way they would not have done in the pre-lockdown world. One-third of women and one-fifth of men report feeling lonely or isolated in this period.
As the games workers learned, going home early by yourself – or leaving the industry – might be a temporary solution, but the real challenge is ending the culture of overwork. Perhaps it is time to revisit the original wants of International Workers’ Day, which called for the day to be split into eight-hour chunks: for work, for rest and time for “what we will”, whether that is romance, family, friends or otherwise. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/married-to-the-job-how-a-long-hours-working-culture-keeps-people-single-and-lonely?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
Oriana:
Somehow this article veered away from the topic of marriage and social class (educational level is the best predictor of getting married and staying married) to the "culture of overwork." But by now it's a well established finding: the lower down you go in socioeconomic status, the lower the frequency of marriage rather than cohabitation or single status. Another non-surprising finding is that children of legally married parents start life with an advantage. But it's hard to disentangle all the factors involved, considering that of course it's better to have affluent, well-educated parents -- but then it's the affluent, educated people who go on to get married and stay married.
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BEST MENTAL HEALTH ADVICE
“Focus on self-acceptance”
“Some of the best advice and tips that I have received are around self-acceptance. We often hear that we should love ourselves and focus on self-care but when you are really low that advice isn’t always helpful.
Rather than a gratitude journal, I keep a self-acceptance journal. My entries start with ‘I am the one who…’. It’s a way of acknowledging what I did each day without value judgements. It puts less pressure on me to perform wellness and it helps me accept myself as I am in each moment, even when those moments are painful.”
Nisha, 39
“You don’t need to do things 100% to do them”
“The best advice I’ve ever received is that you don’t need to do things 100% to do them. If you can’t shower, wipe yourself down with a washcloth. If you can’t make a meal, eat a granola bar. If you can’t get out of bed, try to sit up, etc. Incremental progress is still progress.”
Elizabeth, 30
Ask yourself, ‘Will this matter in a month’s time?’”
“I remember a therapist once telling me to ask myself ‘Will this matter in a month’s time?’ any time I’m stressing over something. It’s really stuck with me as someone extremely prone to overthinking and catastrophizing, and has saved me countless breakdowns over things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things!”
Liv, 23
“Hold your boundaries strong”
“The best advice I ever received is to hold your boundaries strong and tend them like flowerbeds. When you don’t have them, especially if you are an over giver, you are actually teaching people to take advantage of your time, expertise, kindness and even money.
Boundaries are there, not to inconvenience other people, but to honor yourself and your energy. When your energy is well managed, your mental wellness follows.”
Dani, 37
“Happiness only counts if it’s coming from the inside”
“A quote I always turn to is ‘happiness only counts if it’s coming from the inside’. People can pretend to be happy and you can seem happy to others, but there’s no point just looking happy if you’re not happy on the inside.”
Megan, 21
“It’s fine if things don’t happen exactly as you want them to – life is still going to happen for you”
“The best piece of advice my coach gave me is that it’s fine if things don’t happen exactly as I want them to. Life is still going to happen for me.
This quote really helps in that it empowers me and brings my sense of autonomy and decision making back to me rather than feeling that my life is out of my control. There’ll never be an instance in my life where I can control the outcome of anything other than how I feel, think, behave and how I show up. To that extent life happens for me not to me.”
Jennifer, 28
“Treat bad mental health days as a normal sick day”
“The most important piece of advice I took away from my time in therapy was to treat bad mental health days as I would a normal sick day.
It’s easy to feel frustrated or annoyed at yourself when you’re struggling with your mental health, but trying to see my anxiety as I would a sniffly nose or a bad cough helps to remind me that my anxiety isn’t my fault, and helps me to feel less guilty about taking extra care of myself on those days.”
Lauren, 24
“Having a tough conversation can be a loving act”
“The best advice I was ever given is that you can be loving and leave a relationship. My mental health was extremely affected by an abusive relationship, but once I had left I was feeling a lot of shame about being the one to end the relationship. Hearing that it can be a loving act – better in the long run for both of us – gave me a lot of peace.
I think it applies to all of the hard parts of any relationship (family/friends as well as romantic) – putting in boundaries, having tough conversations etc are loving acts for everyone involved.”
Anna, 34
Mary:
For me the central foundation of mental health is not just self acceptance, but self forgiveness. The basis of morality is kindness, including being kind to yourself. Something we seem to find very hard to do, as intolerance grows and there is so much anger and hatred acted out in terrible episodes of violence on an almost daily basis. Madness and evil erupting in the most ordinary places...like a grocery store where an 18 year old came filled with hate to deliberately murder as many innocents as he could. Because they were black, because they were alive. This is what can not and should not be forgiven, a poison that we must refuse.
Oriana:
It goes without saying that we mustn’t be forgiving toward the perpetrators of mass shootings — though we need to keep probing the reasons young people can become so warped and filled with hate, and how society can perhaps prevent that. And some would say that it all starts with harsh and/or neglectful child rearing and the self-hatred it creates. If nobody loves you, you must be worthless, but there are handy hate groups to join where you’ll finally feel accepted.
It’s taken me a lifetime to learn to be kind to myself and forgive myself for being only human and having made various mistakes — not to mention the times I got lost while driving or lost something or others — all those universal but endlessly annoying trivia until we learn the wisdom of “human, all too human.” And women start with low self-esteem to begin with, rejecting their bodies for sometimes totally imaginary flaws, and likewise accusing themselves of imaginary personality flaws.
What helped me forgive myself and accept myself was the realization that circumstances have a great power, and our choices, if any, are very limited. A lot of self-blame falls away thanks to understanding the obvious.
HOW THE US POPULATION KEEPS CHANGING
THE PERCENTAGE OF HISPANIC POPULATION KEEPS GROWING
~ Between 2010 and 2020, the Hispanic population grew more than any other racial or ethnic group, increasing from 50.7 million to 61.3 million. The growth of the Hispanic population accounted for the majority of population growth nationwide. Hispanics are now a larger portion of the population, growing from 16.4% to 18.6%.
In every state, the portion of the Hispanic population grew during the decade. Rhode Island had the sharpest increase, with its portion of the Hispanic population going from 12.5% to 16.7%. In Texas, which gained 2.2 million new Hispanic residents — more than any other state, the percentage of the Hispanic population grew from 37.7% to 39.8%.
The trends are also apparent at the local level. The Hispanic portion of the population increased by more than the national rate in almost half of the fastest growing counties in the country.
Osceola County, Florida, had the highest jump in its portion of the Hispanic population, increasing more than 10 percentage points from 45.7% to 56.0%.
Still, there are exceptions. Among the fastest-growing counties, the Hispanic population share dropped in five: Santa Clara County and Alameda County in California, Fulton County in Georgia, Travis County in Texas, and Denver County in Colorado.
ASIAN POPULATION IS GROWING ALSO
Between 2010 and 2020, the Asian population grew from 14.7 million to 19.4 million. The demographic’s share of the US population also increased by 1.1 percentage points from 4.8% to 5.9%.
The share of the Asian population increased in every state but Hawaii, where Asians are the largest racial or ethnic group. Washington had the largest increase in the share of the Asian population, increasing 2.4 percentage points from 7.2% to 9.6%.
At the local level, the Asian portion of the population grew by more than five percentage points in five of the fastest growing counties, three in California — Santa Clara, Alameda, Orange —Loudoun County in Virginia, and in King County, Washington.
AMERICA IS BECOMING OLDER
A higher percentage of Americans are 65 and older in 2020 compared with 2010, going from 13.1% to 16.9%. The total number of people 65 and older was about 38% larger than in 2010.
Alaska’s 65 and older population grew at the highest rate of any state, increasing by about 38%. Pennsylvania had the smallest increase for the group, growing by about 25%.
Every state’s population skewed older in 2020 than in 2010. In three New England states — Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire — the 65 and older population share increased by more than 5.6 percentage points, more than any other state.
The 65+ population more than doubled in 29 US counties, the largest of which is Collin County, Texas. In Sumter County, Florida, the age group’s population share increased from 43.8% in 2010 to 59.1% in 2020, the only 65 and older county in the US.
THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN HAS DECLINED
There are fewer children in the US from 2010 to 2020, with the total number of kids younger than 10 dropping by 1 million. This can be attributed to low birth rates in recent years.
The number of children in the age group dropped in all but 11 states as well as Washington, DC. Texas and Florida were the only states that gained more than 100,000 children. California and Illinois experienced the largest declines, both losing more than 200,000 in the 0 to 9 population. ~
https://usafacts.org/articles/our-changing-population-how-demographic-data-helps-tell-national-state-and-local-stories/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Paid&utm_campaign=General&utm_content=OCPArticle_Desktop_News&fbclid=IwAR0NeNuKb7SqLdnIhRaL5mg35ZvCCLDjaTRKmo6DZw4y1NcOIn0HREAeok4
The Nordic countries and the Netherlands, on the other hand, are experiencing a surprising baby boom. Perhaps it pays for a country to provide a social safety net for parents.
And Iceland too!
THE STAGE (THE UNIVERSE) IS TOO BIG FOR THE DRAMA
"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.” ~ Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist
Oriana:
On top of it, if we consider ancient Judaism, all these stars and planets and the tremendous diversity and complexity just so that god could communicate to one tiny nation in a tiny portion of the earth.
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HOW ONE WOMAN BECAME AN ATHEIST
~ I grew up in the Catholic Church. Mass every Sunday, etc.
I knew I was an atheist since I was little. I’m sure Sister Mary Margaret didn’t help when she told me that god hated questioning little girls with no faith. She then told me that if I didn’t find some faith quick, I was going straight to hell.
Even at the tender age of six, I thought punishing me with eternal damnation and hellfire for asking why there were no dinosaurs mentioned in Genesis was a bit over the top. That made me doubt everything I was being taught.
Some people wonder how atheists can have morals. I believe morals come from inside, not from fear of some afterlife.
As a nurse, I worked in the US Bible Belt for many years. From time to time I would have scared patients ask me to pray with them. I never told them no, I’m an atheist. I always prayed with them. If it gave them comfort, then that’s all I cared about.
I think atheism made me much more tolerant of other religions. I didn’t care when my patient’s Hindu family wanted to pray that she came back as a cow. I let a voodoo priestess rattle chicken bones over another patient.
My only rules were no fire in the ICU and no animal sacrifice. Yes, I had to enforce those a couple of times.
When the family of a dying Tibetan Buddhist patient asked me to dress her in seven layers of clothing as per their beliefs, I spent the better part of 2 hours struggling to get clothes on someone with more tubes and wires coming out of her than a ‘54 big block Hemi. Trust me, it wasn’t easy.
I had religious colleagues who would scoff at the practices of other religions. I even had one who was mocking a family’s beliefs behind their backs.
“Aren’t you a member of a snake handling church?” I asked him.
“Yes, what’s your point?”
“Uh, never mind.”
I even had one very religious woman come up and praise me for my cultural and religious sensitivity. She told me that I was a good Christian.
Ha, I wonder what she would have said if she knew the truth.
I have always looked at religion like pizza.
If you want to get a pizza and you like the abomination that is pineapple on pizza, then okay, we can get half with your topping and half with mine. We can both still enjoy the meal and each other’s company.
But if you start talking smack about my extra cheese and mushrooms, or worse yet, trying to legislate that everyone must eat Hawaiian pizza even if they don’t like it, then we have a problem.
Why can’t everyone just share the pizza in peace? ~
Jane Urresti. Quora
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Church, Belarus, 1917. Being an atheist never stopped me from enjoying churches (especially between services) as very special places, with magical dusk and quiet.
~“I’m an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for each other.”
~ Katharine Hepburn, Ladies Home Journal, Oct. 1991
Oriana:
That’s equivalent to the Dalai Lama’s “My religion is kindness.” If only people would toss sin and hell and salvation, and concentrate on doing good.
P.S. "Ladies Home Journal"!!! It folded only in 2014
Gwyn:
Almost shocking that Hepburn would say this, especially in a national magazine interview. One would think it would have been anathema to her career, in a time when so much was taboo, including homosexuality, bearing a child out of wedlock, or even saying the word "pregnant" on television. Remember Lucy and Ricky slept in twin beds on their tv show! But it should come as no surprise... Hepburn was courageous enough to be a highly self-determined person in a time when it did take guts to be that!
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CANCER AND PATTERNS OF DNA MUTATIONS
~ Researchers say that for the first time it is possible to detect patterns – called mutational signatures – in the DNA of cancers.
These provide clues including about whether a patient has had past exposure to environmental causes of cancer such as smoking or UV light, for example.
This is important as these signatures allow doctors to look at each patient’s tumor and match it to specific treatments and medications.
However, these patterns can be detected only through analysis of the vast amounts of data unearthed by whole genome sequencing – identifying the genetic makeup of a cell.
The principal author of the study, Serena Nik-Zainal, is a professor of genomic medicine and bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge and an honorary consultant in clinical genetics at Cambridge University hospitals.
She said: “It’s like looking at a very busy beach with thousands of footprints in the sand. To the untrained eye, the footprints appear to be random and meaningless.
“But if you are able to study them closely, you can learn a lot about what’s been going on, distinguish between animal and human prints, whether it’s an adult or child, what direction they’re traveling in, etc.
It’s the same thing with the mutational signatures.
The use of whole genome sequencing can identify which ‘footprints’ are relevant/important and reveal what’s happened through the development of the cancer.”
Researchers analyzed the complete genetic makeup or whole genome sequences (WGS) of more than 12,000 NHS cancer patients.
They were able to spot 58 new mutational signatures, suggesting that there are additional causes of cancer that are not yet fully understood.
Nik-Zainal said: “The reason it is important to identify mutational signatures is because they are like fingerprints at a crime scene – they help to pinpoint cancer culprits.
“Some mutational signatures have clinical or treatment implications – they can highlight abnormalities that may be targeted with specific drugs or may indicate a potential ‘achilles heel’ in individual cancers.”
Dr Andrea Degasperi, research associate at the University of Cambridge and first author, said: “Whole genome sequencing gives us a total picture of all the mutations that have contributed to each person’s cancer.
“With thousands of mutations per cancer, we have unprecedented power to look for commonalities and differences across NHS patients, and in doing so we uncovered 58 new mutational signatures and broadened our knowledge of cancer.”
The findings are being incorporated into the NHS as researchers and clinicians now have the use of a digital tool called FitMS that will help them identify the mutational signature and potentially inform cancer management more effectively.
Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said: “This study shows how powerful whole genome sequencing tests can be in giving clues into how the cancer may have developed, how it will behave and what treatment options would work best.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/22/like-fingerprints-at-a-scene-study-finds-new-clues-about-causes-of-cancer
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DESIGNER NEURONS OFFER NEW HOPE FOR TREATMENT OF PARKINSON'S DISEASE
~ Neurodegenerative diseases damage and destroy neurons, ravaging both mental and physical health. Parkinson's disease, which affects over 10 million people worldwide, is no exception. The most obvious symptoms of Parkinson's disease arise after the illness damages a specific class of neuron located in the midbrain. The effect is to rob the brain of dopamine — a key neurotransmitter produced by the affected neurons.
In new research, Jeffrey Kordower and his colleagues describe a process for converting non-neuronal cells into functioning neurons able to take up residence in the brain, send out their fibrous branches across neural tissue, form synapses, dispense dopamine and restore capacities undermined by Parkinson's destruction of dopaminergic cells.
The current proof-of-concept study reveals that one group of experimentally engineered cells performs optimally in terms of survival, growth, neural connectivity, and dopamine production, when implanted in the brains of rats. The study demonstrates that the result of such neural grafts is to effectively reverse motor symptoms due to Parkinson's disease.
Stem cell replacement therapy represents a radical new strategy for the treatment of Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases. The futuristic approach will soon be put to the test in the first of its kind clinical trial, in a specific population of Parkinson's disease sufferers, bearing a mutation in the gene parkin. The trial will be conducted at various locations, including the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, with Kordower as principal investigator.
You don't have to be a neuroscientist to identify a neuron. Such cells, with their branching arbor of axons and dendrites are instantly recognizable and look like no other cell type in the body. Through their electrical impulses, they exert meticulous control over everything from heart rate to speech. Neurons are also the repository of our hopes and anxieties, the source of our individual identity.
Degeneration and loss of dopaminergic neurons causes the physical symptoms of rigidity, tremor, and postural instability, which characterize Parkinson's disease. Additional effects of Parkinson's disease can include depression, anxiety, memory deficit, hallucinations and dementia.
Due to an aging population, humanity is facing a mounting crisis of Parkinson's disease cases, with numbers expected to swell to more than 14 million globally by 2040. Current therapies, which include use of the drug L-DOPA, are only able to address some of the motor symptoms of the disease and may produce serious, often intolerable side effects after 5-10 years of use.
There is no existing treatment capable of reversing Parkinson's disease or halting its pitiless advance. Far-sighted innovations to address this pending emergency are desperately needed.
A (pluri) potent weapon against Parkinson’s
Despite the intuitive appeal of simply replacing dead or damaged cells to treat neurodegenerative disease, the challenges for successfully implanting viable neurons to restore function are formidable. Many technical hurdles had to be overcome before researchers, including Kordower, could begin achieving positive results, using a class of cells known as stem cells.
The interest in stem cells as an attractive therapy for a range of diseases rapidly gained momentum after 2012, when John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize for their breakthrough in stem cell research. They showed that mature cells can be reprogrammed, making them "pluripotent" -- or capable of differentiating into any cell type in the body.
These pluripotent stem cells are functionally equivalent to fetal stem cells, which flourish during embryonic development, migrating to their place of residence and developing into heart, nerve, lung, and other cell types, in one of the most remarkable transformations in nature.
Neural alchemy
Adult stem cells come in two varieties. One type can be found in fully developed tissues like bone marrow, liver, and skin. These stem cells are few in number and generally develop into the type of cells belonging to the tissue they are derived from.
The second kind of adult stem cells (and the focus of this study) are known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The technique for producing the iPSCs used in the study occurs in two phases. In a way, the cells are induced to time travel, initially, in a backward and then a forward direction.
First, adult blood cells are treated with specific reprogramming factors that cause them to revert to embryonic stem cells. The second phase treats these embryonic stem cells with additional factors, causing them to differentiate into the desired target cells -- dopamine-producing neurons.
"The major finding in the in the present paper is that the timing in which you give the second set of factors is critical," Kordower says. "If you treat and culture them for 17 days, and then stop their divisions and differentiate them, that works best.”
Pitch perfect neurons
The study's experiments included iPSCs cultured for 24 and 37 days, but those cultured for 17 days prior to their differentiation into dopaminergic neurons were markedly superior, capable of surviving in greater numbers and sending out their branches over long distances. "That's important," Kordower says, "because they're going to have to grow long distances in the larger human brain and we now know that these cells are capable of doing that.”
Rats treated with the 17-day iPSCs showed remarkable recovery from the motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The study further demonstrates that this effect is dose dependent. When a small number of iPSCs were grafted into the animal brain, recovery was negligible, but a large complement of cells produced more profuse neural branching, and complete reversal of Parkinson's symptoms.
Further, the treatment could potentially be combined with existing therapies to treat Parkinson's disease. Once the brain has been seeded with dopamine-producing replacement cells, lower doses of drugs like L-DOPA could be used, mitigating side effects, and enhancing beneficial results.
The research sets the stage for the replacement of damaged or dead neurons with fresh cells for a broad range of devastating diseases.
"Patients with Huntington's disease or multiple system atrophy or even Alzheimer's disease could be treated in this way for specific aspects of the disease process," Kordower says. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220511123615.htm
ending on beauty:
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~ Li-Young Lee, from his first volume "Rose," BOA Editions, 1986
(Rose is still my favorite collection by Li-Young Lee: one of several instances of the book that made the poet famous remaining their strongest collection)
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