Photo: Chris Vannoy
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If you set out on a journey may it be a long one
a replay of the world a journey to the essence
interview with the elements a question without an answer
a pact of surrender forced on you after fighting
a great reconciliation
~ Zbigniew Herbert, “The Journey”, tr. Oriana Ivy
Reading this (in Polish, which brings back memories) I thought,
So what if the history teacher, like history itself,
was an abusive tyrant?
So what if life wasn’t fair
again and again?
All that matters is the great reconciliation,
squeezing into a moment as into a sliver
of light like a tunnel through a million linden leaves,
proceeding from one minute to another
as if the only thing that is real
is the tiny rainbow
in a drop hanging from the tip of a leaf
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My other favorite passage from Herbert’s “Journey”
home has passed away
there’s a cloud over the world
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The tragedy of History is that, often, everybody is right, at the same time. ~ Friedrich Hegel
Oriana:
I would change that to read “everybody claims to be right.” Hitler claimed that Poland was a danger to Germany and that Poles were killing innocent Germans; Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine has been changing, but has been along the same lines. The aggressor asserts that he’s the victim. The police as used to that: the murderers typically claim they were victims forced to kill to restore justice.
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Misha shared THE DANGER OF A DECLINING POWER
"...power in the international realm is measured by a mixture of capabilities and intentions. And though Russia is not a rising giant, it is determined to challenge and divide America and Europe and tear up the rules-based international system. Putin’s Russia is the world’s great spoiler.
This phenomenon of a declining power becoming the greatest danger to global peace is not unprecedented. In 1914, the country that triggered World War I was Austria-Hungary, an empire in broad decline, and yet one determined to use its military to show the world it still mattered and to teach a harsh lesson to Serbia, which it regarded as a minor, vassal state. Sound familiar?
America’s dominant priority must be to ensure that Russia does not prevail in its aggression against Ukraine.” ~ Farid Zakaria
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“We have an article in our criminal code about insulting the authorities, although, as we see, no one insults the authorities, but we don’t have an article about insulting the people.” ~ Aleksandr Gorbunov, Russian dissident, aka “Stalingulag.”
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THE DISSIDENT BEHIND STALINGULAG (The article below goes back to May 2019)
~ Alexander Gorbunov, alias StalinGulag, has notched up 300,000 followers on the Telegram messaging app.
He has over a million more on Twitter, his witty and acerbic posts deploring the current state of affairs in Russia.
Now he has decided to speak out to prevent reprisals against his family, he has told BBC Russian.
Police visited his elderly mother's flat earlier this week.
Last month he posted about a family in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk whose HIV-positive adopted child had been barred from school, and a sick, elderly patient in Irkutsk who reportedly killed himself in hospital after waiting hours for a simple blood test.
"It is impossible to be silent when mad things happen [in Russia]," he told the BBC.
The man behind StalinGulag has a back story that was extraordinary long before he became the Kremlin's biggest social media critic.
Born in Makhachkala in the North Caucasus in 1992, he was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, an incurable muscle-wasting condition that has made him a wheelchair-user for most of his life.
Gorbunov started his first business aged just 13, selling dietary supplements online.
From these humble beginnings he moved on to become a successful financial trader, specializing in derivatives and crypto-currencies.
He now lives in Moscow with his wife, enjoying what he describes as a good life with regular outings to restaurants and the theater.
But he's keen to stress that someone with his disabilities needs to be able to make money in order to pay for all the support he requires to have a normal life.
For someone whose pithy tweets frequently contain expletives and slang, Gorbunov in real life comes across as articulate, educated and thoughtful.
He arrives at the BBC office smartly dressed in a black polo-neck and tweed jacket. He speaks softly and with the quiet confidence of someone who is used to being listened to.
It's clear that Gorbunov is a man who wants to make the most of however much time he has left.
He knows that medication will not stop the progression of his condition, and for that reason refuses to take drugs which could prolong his life.
"One year more to live, one year less - it doesn't matter for me," says Gorbunov. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a medical institution."
Gorbunov set up StalinGulag as an anonymous Twitter account in 2013.
At the time he was still living in Makhachkala, spending most of his time at home because, he says, it was not an easy town to get around for someone in a wheelchair.
"I just wanted to write," he says. "My computer and the internet meant I could follow what was going on in the rest of the world... I've always been interested in politics."
WHY THE NAME STALINGULAG?
He chose the name, in his words, "as a form of trolling" and to call out what he says are the false parallels between Stalin's era and Russia today.
"The people in power want us to think that they are scary and terrifying like the [Stalin-era] secret police," he says. "But it's not like that. At heart they are just commercial people who like luxury and money."
Telegram was set up in 2013 by Russian IT-entrepreneur Pavel Durov, founder of VKontakte — a Russian version of Facebook - and who now lives in self-imposed exile abroad.
Telegram allows users to set up groups of "channels" anonymously and send news and content directly to an unlimited number of followers.
Its channels have become hugely popular in countries such as Russia and Iran where freedom of speech is restricted. They are used by politicians, activists and social groups communicating news and information, and by businesses targeting new customers.
So far police have not been in touch with Gorbunov himself, and he remains philosophical.
"I'm not afraid for myself," he says. "They can't take any measures to restrict me, because I've been living with restrictions all my life."
"Nothing has changed," he adds. "I'm going to carry on writing the way I always have.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48132193
Misha Firer shared this photo of handicapped parking
Oriana:
I’ve checked to see if “Stalingulag” was still active. As of March 20022, it was. And as of June 10, Misha Firer writes of reading Stalingulag posts in the present tense. Note how he explains Gorbunov’s freedom: “Russian authorities hesitate to take Alexander to court and jail him as that would be bad optics given his health condition. Additionally, there’s not a single penal colony in Russia that can accommodate a person in wheelchair.”
You might ask, How about a quiet execution? Putin has been creative in that field.
Again, perhaps it’s the “bad optics” — Gorbunov is an internet celebrity, and his sudden silence would further inflame young Russians against the government. Putin’s Russia is certainly repressive and similar in many ways to the Soviet Union — but the times have changed, communications technology has changed, and current Russia simply cannot be the Soviet Union, no matter how ardently Putin desires it.
Gorbunov’s audience is the computer-literate younger generation. Putin’s support base comes from the older people who come home from work and watch TV; they are not likely to own an iPhone.
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Sahin Ahadli shared a joke:
Actually, it is an old Soviet joke from the sixties. The conclusion was that Adam and Eve were the Soviets because they were naked, had only one apple for two of them and thought they are in Paradise. Why I am correcting you, because Russians are not poor but the Soviets were.
Not very funny, I know, but it conveys the essence of the denial that seems to be many Russians’ chief way of coping: no matter how bad the living conditions, we are happy because it’s a great country, a super-power.
Oriana:
Funny, in the US it's likewise the squeezed lower middle class that seems to be Trumpland, getting high on the idea of the US being a super-power. Still, you don't hear interviews with someone who says, "I live in a trailer, but I'm happy because it's a great country."
Markku Herd:
When Mikhail Gorbachev met the Pope, he’s said to have asked:
— Why do people believe in your paradise, but not in ours?
His Holiness smiled:
— Because we don’t show them our paradise.
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I started seeing Putin as a murderer when general Lebied, who in my eyes was a honorable military man, was killed in a very suspicious helicopter crash in 2002, most probably on orders of Putin. He was very close to beating Putin during next presidential elections. ~ Norbert Szczęch, Quora
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UKRAINIAN LITERARY RESISTANCE TO RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM
~ Ukrainians frequently speak of the need to become Ukrainians: to consolidate their culture, language, and institutions after centuries of imperial domination. What Ukrainians see as a work in progress, however, Russia interprets as weakness; it views Ukraine as an accident of history. Indeed, before he ordered in the tanks, Vladimir Putin spent nearly an hour on television trying to convince Russians that Ukraine was nothing but an “anti-Russia” engineered by the West on “our historical land.”
Ukrainian national identity is not an accident, nor was it invented by the West. But for centuries, Ukrainians have struggled to fend off attempts to erase their culture. In the early 19th century, Russian publishers accepted Ukrainian literature only if it was ethnographic, comedic, or apolitical. (Serious literature had to be in Russian.) Successive laws in 1863 and 1876 led to the effective banning of all works in the Ukrainian language, as well as their near-complete prohibition in public settings. In the 1930s, Stalin executed a whole generation of writers who had been rebuilding Ukrainian literary culture in the decade prior, brutally cutting short the growth of the country’s vibrant avant-garde.
The story of Ukrainian literature is one of defiance in the face of imperial arrogance. Often, Ukrainian writers worked cautiously within the restrictions the Russian empire imposed in order to create some semblance of a literary culture. Sometimes they tried to express their Ukrainianness through works written in Russian. Others chose outright criticism of Russian imperialism—and suffered for it. Others still simply laughed at the hubris of those intent on making Ukraine look insignificant.
No one used humor to assert Ukrainian identity more than Nikolai Gogol (known as Mykola Hohol in Ukrainian), who despite his origins is known to the world as Russian. Likely taking inspiration from his father, who wrote folksy Ukrainian-language comedies for a provincial theater in central Ukraine, Gogol’s early works, published in the early 1830s, were raucous, colorful comedies about life in a Ukrainian village—but he wrote them in Russian, for readers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In one of his most famous stories, “Christmas Eve,” a group of Ukrainian Cossacks visits Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg. In a comic conversation littered with cultural and linguistic misunderstandings, there’s also a flash of politics: The Cossacks demand to know why Catherine destroyed their autonomy (a real event that happened in 1775). But before she can reply, the story leaps safely back into comic territory. Many Russian readers would have seen in this encounter nothing more than a joke at the expense of the simple Cossacks, overawed by the grandeur of the palace and the empress. For Ukrainians, it tapped into the folk tradition of the Cossack trickster who refuses to defer to authority.
This irreverence toward the empire was the foundation on which the Ukrainian literature of the mid-to-late 19th century was built. With writers such as Ukrainka and Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, this defiance was far more overt than with the outwardly loyal Gogol. Shevchenko was born a serf and knew that peasants’ lives were nothing like Gogol’s jolly idyll. “You laugh full deep,” he scolded his compatriot in a poem addressed to him, “while I must weep.” Shevchenko’s attacks on the empire and its repression of minority nations are fiery and uncompromising. In his poem “The Caucasus,” for instance, he writes, “From the Moldavian to the Finn / Silence is held in every tongue.” For this stance, Shevchenko was arrested, forced into military service, and banned from writing for 10 years.
Lesia Ukrainka defied imperial restrictions and stereotypes through work that criticized colonialism and embodied feminist ideas. Her dramas set in Spain, Troy, and Babylon brought European and world culture into a literature that had been forced into parochialism. Some Ukrainian intellectuals criticized her for ignoring Ukrainian subject matter. Yet she did write one play about Ukrainian history, The Noblewoman, a drama in verse set in the 17th century after the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskyi signed a famous and fateful alliance with Moscow in order to free Ukraine from Polish control. Oksana, a Cossack woman who agrees to marry a Ukrainian noble serving at the Moscow court, tries to assuage her fears about life in an “alien land”: “It’s not so much a foreign land, is it? / Religious rites are there the same, and I / Already understand somewhat their speech.”
She is mistaken. In Moscow, Oksana is not permitted to speak with men as their equal, is pressured to cover her face in public, and can’t leave the house on her own. Her foreignness makes her an object of curiosity and incomprehension. She is treated, as Hundorova noted in her lecture from besieged Kyiv, as an exotic object to be seen and not heard, much in the same way Ukrainian culture had been reduced to a colorful ornament in the imperial cultural imagination of Ukrainka’s own time. Oksana falls into a depression, but cannot return home, as Ukraine has been plunged into chaos and conflict: “Ukraine lies bleeding under Moscow’s boots / Is that what you call ‘peace’? A ruined waste?” The play’s message that alliance with Moscow was a tragedy for Ukraine directly contradicted official imperial historiography, and it was neither published nor performed until after the collapse of the empire. Tellingly, Soviet editions of Ukrainka's works also omit the play.
After Ukrainian independence, in 1991, Ukrainka became a major inspiration for a new generation of writers and thinkers, Hundorova among them. As global currents such as post-colonialism and feminism began to trickle into newly democractic Ukraine, local intellectuals immediately recognized Ukrainka in these “new” ideas. Oksana Zabuzhko, for example, one of Ukraine’s foremost novelists and a biographer of Ukrainka, explored these themes in her 1996 novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, independent Ukraine’s first real best seller, which recounts the tumultuous romance between a female poet and a male artist in the early days of independence.
For the protagonist, preserving national identity and resisting Russification are not just political, but also private, intimate matters that dictate her choice of partner and her desire to have a child:
And we’ll be able to defend him [their child], won’t we? God, how many of us are there anyway, this unhappy Ukrainian intelligentsia, forcefully and throughout history held back—just a handful, and at that scattered: a dying species, dying out clans, we should be multiplying like crazy and constantly.
During her lecture, as she spoke about Ukrainka’s ill-fated Oksana, Hundorova suddenly dropped her measured academic tone. Her voice became more urgent as she linked the fatal clash of cultures at the heart of The Noblewoman, whereby Oksana is consigned to voiceless objectification, to today’s war. Russia’s refusal, over the centuries, to perceive or hear Ukraine, to accept Ukraine’s existence on its own terms, lies at the foundation of Putin’s aggression. Those on the streets of Kyiv that day could feel the violent manifestation of that clash. As the works of writers from Ukrainka to Zabuzhko show, however, that violence only inspires Ukrainians to find ever more powerful, inventive, and irreverent ways of becoming Ukrainians.
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/03/ukrainian-books-resistance-russia-imperialism/626977/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=true-anthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1MHEDVWUEDUhVf0okaUlOfuN-pDUGBtVXLubyaOFe5Eg12h5kwGPggkEU
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RUSSIAN MILITARY MEDICINE
To every Russian person who talks with bravado about fighting Ukrainians, I suggest visiting National Medical Research Center for Surgery named after A.V. Vishnevsky in Moscow.
It was transformed into a military hospital, and hundreds of surgeries are performed there every day. I have first-hand confirmed report from a doctor from the hospital that there’s a dozen samovars (amputated both arms and legs).
Samovars are mostly young men — late teens, early twenties.
I want you, my patriotic Russians on Quora, to imagine yourself in the place of one of those young men who wakes up every morning not able to do a single thing by himself asking for what exactly reason did he lose all his limbs.
Perhaps you, my patriotic Russian on Quora, can come with me and explain what you write here to him in plain Russian?
As of early June 1 2022, Russian military have lost from 53,000 to 63,000 people wounded, most of them young men.
In February and March, the mortality rate was nearly 50%. At the beginning, there were no military field hospitals in the combat zone at all, there were no blood pouches, and wounded soldiers simply bled to death. In April-May mortality rate dropped to 25%.
Complicated wounds, including head wounds and lesions of the nervous system, are not treated in combat conditions. Severe limb injuries almost always end in amputation. There are no ambulances and medical instructors in the units at the battlefront.
The entire system of military medicine in Russia has been obliterated over the past 20 years. There were about 14,000 military hospitals in the USSR, and today there are about 60 left in the whole country. That number is open to debate as some of them exist on paper only.
Hospitals began to be prepared two months before the start of the war.
At that time, few doctors understood why this was necessary, but they did it anyways, not taking it seriously.
All hospitals in Russia were cleared off of Covid patients, and no new Covid cases, no matter how severe, were admitted, in preparation to receive the wounded.
The number of operating rooms was sharply increased by three to four times, while the medical staff was not increased.
In all military hospitals in Russia, non-core departments were closed: cardiology, gynecology, everything was concentrated only on the treatment of the wounded.
Specialists work in sanitary units in the rear, and not on the front line. But the wounded still need to be taken there, and this also causes problems due to the lack of special transport, so many wounded die at the battlefronts.
The paramedics are young soldiers who have just completed a simple first aid course. Many of them do not even know how to apply a bandage normally. They can’t save the seriously wounded.
Doctors work such long hours that there are already cases when surgeons die from stress and overwork. They live in the hospitals operating round the clock without days off.
The central command is trying to build something on the fly. To put things in some order.
They brought field hospitals, brought doctors, including civilians. There are still not enough of them.
Operations are often done crouching down when the field hospitals are under fire, and since Russian units have no communication with each other and do not know where the field hospitals located, often shell them with friendly fire.
Severely and moderately wounded are sent to Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Leningrad Region and other large hospitals. Naturally, corruption schemes form to be shipped with light wounds far from the battle front.
Self-inflicted wounds is a serious problem in the Russian army in Ukraine. A medical manual on self-inflicted wounds is handed to doctors and medical instructors. First thing is to determine whether the soldier wounded himself or it was from the enemy.
Specialist of military pathological and anatomical service collect the body parts of the dead that are taken to the laboratory for identification in Rostov-on-Don. It’s been there since the Chechen war.
But there are few people working there. And just a fraction of the dead are brought to the lab, most of the corpses are abandoned in the fields, forests and burnt tanks.
Nobody really knows how many dead and wounded Russian Army has. The figures of the loss are taboo and unknown, hence there are no published numbers.
If we had an official war, then all the missing people would eventually be recognized as dead. With the Special Military Operation every missing person cannot be considered dead, for this they need examinations, and much more.
Therefore, the seamen from the cruiser Moskva remain in an unknown status. Mothers have still not been told that their children have died. Some of them believe they’re still alive because they do not know that more than half of the crew died, since officially it was reported that nobody has. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
National Medical Center for Surgery, Moscow
Oriana:
I’ve heard estimates of Russian casualties (just the dead, not counting the wounded) as between 15,000 and 20,000 — and as high as 30,000. Counting the wounded (severely enough not to be able to return to combat), we may be looking at 50,000 or even 60,000. And the war is by no means over.
James Scott:
~ The biggest issue for Russia in general is that they can't actually find any logical, sensible reason as to why this war had to take place. There are zero security concerns for Russia itself, there were limited strategic reasons for wanting another Afghanistan to fight and there were few actual political points to be gained, outside of flexing some muscles which they could have done in a number of places to the south of them which would have achieved much more, with much less response.
Russia is going to be in a significantly worse position in 10 years time than it was 10 years ago. THAT’S the true test of whether military action was worthwhile.
Eric Wicklung:
~ The Soviets, by far, had a more powerful military.
The USSR wasn’t bothering to pretend to have democratic ideals. They were a totalitarian state, and proud of it. A massive chunk of their GDP went in to develop their military, and it showed.
In 1981, the Soviets boasted an Army of 4.8 million men, compared to the current 900,000. 50,000 Soviet tanks massively outmatched the current Russian 12,000+ tanks (most of which are in storage and rotting away).
The Soviet tanks were T-64s and T-72s, mostly brand new and in good condition. The current Russian T-72s are modernized, but when the Soviets were at their peak, their quantity advantage was so huge, it really did have a “quality of its own.”
The Soviets would have crushed the current Russian army within days. Both had their problems with corruption, but the current kleptocratic regime, robbing the military blind, has weakened their army to the point of being no more than a small regional power. ~ 
Soviet T-64 tank (is that a cemetery in the background?)
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EXHAUSTED RUSSIAN SOLDIERS COMPLAIN OF CONDITIONS
~ Russia’s assault on Ukraine’s east has brought it some battlefield success as its military has advanced slowly in fierce fighting in Donbas.
But those gains have come at a high price for the Russian invasion force, with evidence that high-level casualties are growing and that some units may be approaching exhaustion as the war moves past its 100-day mark.
As the conflict drags on, some fighters have gone public with appeals to Vladimir Putin for an investigation into battlefield conditions and whether their deployments to the front are even legal.
In two videos, fighters from Russian-controlled east Ukraine complained about poor conditions and long terms of duty at the front leading to exhaustion. “Our personnel have faced hunger and cold,” said fighters from the Russian-controlled 113th regiment from Donetsk in one video posted online. “For a significant period, we were without any material, medical or food support.”
The fighters added: “Given our continuous presence and the fact that amongst our personnel there are people with chronic medical issues, people with mental issues, many questions arise that are ignored by the higher-ups at headquarters.”
And in an interview, a Russian soldier who had fought near Kyiv, Kharkiv, and was now in eastern Ukraine, complained of exhaustion, saying he had even contacted a lawyer and complained that he had not seen his wife for months.
“I have been fighting in Ukraine since the start of the war, it has been over three months now,” Andrei, who serves with the 37th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade headquartered in Buryatia in Siberia, told the Guardian. “It is exhausting, my whole unit wants a break, but our leadership said they can’t replace us right now.”
His remarks are consistent with reports of Russian difficulties in rotating out its exhausted troops. Enlistment efforts have been hampered as Russia has not openly declared war against Ukraine. The Kremlin has continued to insist on calling it a “special military operation”.
“The Russian military is well suited to short, high-intensity campaigns defined by a heavy use of artillery,” wrote Michael Kofman and Rob Lee in a new analysis of Russia’s armed capabilities. “By contrast, it is poorly designed for a sustained occupation, or a grinding war of attrition, that would require a large share of Russia’s ground forces, which is exactly the conflict it has found itself in. The Russian military doesn’t have the numbers available to easily adjust or to rotate forces if a substantial amount of combat power gets tied down in a war.”
For the men on the ground, that has meant an exhausting tour of duty marked by bitter fighting against a battle-hardened enemy that is motivated to defend its homeland.
“The three months of fighting already feel longer than the four years I spent serving in the army during peacetime,” said Andrei. “I have already contacted a lawyer online who told me that by law the general can keep us here until our contract runs out so there isn’t much we can do.”
Those professional units may be some of Russia’s more fortunate, as others recruited from the Russian-controlled republics in Donetsk and Luhansk say they have been thrown into battle with little training at all. Videos have showed that some fighters have lacked basic kit such as protective vests and are armed with old rifles.
“Our mobilization was done unlawfully, without medical certification,” said another soldier who claimed to be serving in Donetsk’s 107th regiment, loyal to the Russian government. “Over 70% of those here were previously decommissioned because they physically can’t fight. Over 90% have never fought before and saw a Kalashnikov for the first time. We were thrown on to the frontlines.”
Russian state television has claimed that those soldiers should be ready to fight for their homeland, but locals have described empty streets and men in hiding to avoid a zealous recruiting campaign in Russian-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, casualties among Russian officers are mounting. A reporter for state-run Rossiya-1 said that Maj Gen Roman Kutuzov was killed while leading forces from the Russian-controlled east into battle. If confirmed, he would be at least the fourth Russian general to have been killed in combat since February, and Ukraine claims the number is higher.
“The general had led soldiers into attack, as if there are not enough colonels,” wrote Russian journalist Alexander Sladkov in a post on Telegram.
Western officials have said that Russia’s mid and junior ranking officers have also taken heavy casualties “because they are held to an uncompromising level of responsibility for their units’ performance”.
“Similarly, junior officers have had to lead the lowest level tactical actions, as the army lacks the cadre of highly trained and empowered noncommissioned officers who fulfil that role in western forces,” British intelligence claimed last week.
Russia has also used paid fighters to bolster its forces since the start of the war. It was estimated to have deployed between 10,000 and 20,000 mercenaries, including Wagner Group fighters, in its offensive in Donbas, a European official said in April.
Those units have also reported high-profile casualties.
Vladimir Andanov, a veteran Wagner soldier from Buryatia, was reported to have been killed in fighting in east Ukraine late last week. His death was confirmed by regional media and Russian military organizations.
He had previously fought in Syria and Donbas, where he had been accused of participation in extrajudicial killings.
Last month, two alleged Wagner Group fighters from Belarus were accused of murdering civilians near Kyiv, making them the first international mercenaries to face war crimes charges in Ukraine. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/07/exhausted-russian-fighters-complain-of-conditions-in-eastern-ukraine
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RIGHT WING POPULISM TO COME AFTER PUTIN WILL BLAME PUTIN
(Dima Vorobiev) ~ It’s in our tradition that every new ruler pins all national problems and ailings on the previous one. There's no reason to expect a change to that any time soon.
Right now, the most likely turn Russia may take after President Putin vacates the Kremlin, is right-wing populism. Our next right-wing populist ruler will certainly distance himself from Putin’s legacy. There are two ways to do it: directly, by bashing him personally—or indirectly, by denouncing his legacy but not him personally, like the Chinese did with Mao.
In both cases, the future ruler(s) will most probably focus on these things:
The loss of Ukraine: “We could have taken Kiev and Odessa in 2014 in a matter of weeks, and he just dillied and dallied.”
The demise of the Russian World: “They mistreated ethnic Russians everywhere from Central Asia to Chechnya and the Baltics, and he didn’t lift a finger”. The outsized role that Chechnya has played in our politics will be held against him, too.
Groveling before NATO: “They shot our planes, drowned our submarines, killed our ambassadors, slaughtered our volunteers, slapped us with endless sanctions. All he did was close our overseas bases, allow NATO’s boots on Russian soil and show cheap CGI weapon animations. He didn’t try to face them down even once."
Groveling before China: “He sold our Siberian oil and gas to them at a loss. And after what they did to us in Afghanistan, he gave away to them the sacred Damansky island.”
Squandering of the oil wealth: “Trillions that came from petroleum exports just dissipated. No infrastructure uplifts, no bullet trains, no breakthroughs in the space industry—only the nationwide deindustrialization, brain drain, and endless capital flight”.
International isolation: “Russia’s left friendless.”
Corruption: “Let’s return the loot to the nation.”
The creative imagination of Russians in finding derogatory monickers to our past rulers knows no limits. As for our current President, they will most probably focus on his obsession with appearances (“silicone-filled”?), his epic personal security arrangements (“timid”?) and the vast personal wealth of himself and his closest circle (“thief”?).
Yet, considering the degree of control President Putin has of the country, and the seemingly endless future of his rule, he still has ample opportunity to correct his posthumous fame.
In the photo below, President Putin during his visit to China. His persistent timidity in dealings with the Chinese, the murky petroleum deals around pipelines to China and the progressive dwindling of our relevance in the shadow of our eastern neighbor will certainly be held against him in the future.
Yuxuan Li:
Interesting. Many Chinese populists believe the other way around, that we are buying Siberian gas overpriced because our government is groveling in front of Putin….
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MISHA FIRER: RUSSIA TEN YEARS FROM NOW
~ One of my favorite quotes is from science fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
While everyone’s eyes are on Vladimir Putin, his war, and his corrupt regime, the future of Russia can be gleaned from the new general of technocrats that First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia Sergey Kirienko grooms.
One of the main contradictions of the modern political system in Russia controlled and run by incompetent thugs is the presence of real professionals in it. Putin’s criminal regime managed to hire top-notch specialists, especially in the economic sector of the government and public banking.
How do these professionals with Western mindset who perfectly understand who they work for and see through propaganda, address such contradiction?
To partially answer this question, I refer you to the works of the Soviet scientist, philosopher, and methodologist Georgy Shchedrovitsky. He came out of Khrutchev’s Thaw that followed Stalin’s reign of terror, when freedoms led to propagation of new ideas in science, philosophy, methodology, sociology.
Known for developing a management organization methodology within complex corporate structures, fame and success came to Shchedrovitsky after he staged business games at large enterprises of the Soviet Union.
These games were played with the aim to improve the quality of public administration by studying and organizing thinking, or mental activity of all participants in the process. Behind complex language, hides a very simple idea.
An employee, regardless of his position and status, is obliged to leave his personality at home, and at work become just a function.
A person is a person (home). A person is a function (work). Personal gets in the way of professional and vice versa. This concept stemmed from a theory about the predominance of the activity approach over the naturalistic one.
Such an approach, according to Shchedrovitsky, allowed to improve the quality of tasks and the speed of achieving goals.
The results of business games were recognized as successful, and the methods of organizing the state management according to Shchedrovitsky began to be studied in higher educational institutions that prepared party nomenklatura and civil servants.
And further along the vertical of power these ideas penetrated into the daily practice of public managers in many sectors of economy happening just at the time when most of Putin's ‘technocrats’ were professionally shaped, i.e. throughout the 1980s and until the collapse of the USSR.
When you come home you can vent your frustrations at the Soviet system, general secretary, the state of economy, war in Afghanistan, but on your work place, you cancel all those feelings and emotions and toe the political line.
Sergey Kirienko who studied Shchedrovitsky methods ensured that they have penetrated into all the echelons of power in Russia through crash courses and business games.
Kirienko had worked for democratic president Boris Yeltsin and now he’s an advisor to a dictator and a war criminal. I spoke with Kirienko’s employee and friend Artyom (father of my daughter’s girlfriend), and he explained (without reference to Shchedrovitsky) how it works.
Kirienko does not like dictatorship and hates that his country fights war in Ukraine — however these are just his personal feelings and emotions and he leaves them for conversations in private with his friends and family. In public, he supports Putin, not out of love and devotion to him, but because that is his professional duty.
Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov lies non-stop from TV screens, and often speaks utter nonsense, however, that is just his professional function.
From the interviews with oligarch Tinkoff, founder of eponymous bank, who spoke against the war for which he lost billions of his fortune and Alexei Venediktov, founder of liberal radio station Echo of Moscow that was shut down at the beginning of SMO, in person, Dmitry Peskov appears to be an intelligent, Westernized person, an erudite man with diverse interests, and they have always thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.
Yet the next day, Peskov goes back to work and sounds like a bumbling idiot for he’s performing a function leaving his erudite self at home for Tinkoff and Venediktov.
V. B. Khristenko, former deputy Prime Minister (position held by Putin), now Chairman of the Board ofEurasian Economic Commission said, “For me, the methodological theory of the G.P. Shchedrovitsky has long been a theoretical framework for developing managerial decisions on all levels of the administrative hierarchy that I managed to get through.”
The concept of “Technocrat”, now popular in Putin’s nomenklatura, has its roots in the works of Shchedrovitsky.
The School of Governors of Russia that churns out technocratic governors in accordance with Shchedrovitsky’s methods was fashioned after The Young Global Leaders, an initiative of World Economic Forum.
In a 2017 interview, Klaus Schwab, the founder of Young Global Leaders, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been recognized as a Young Global Leader, "I have to say, when I mention now names, like Mrs. Angela Merkel and even Vladimir Putin, and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum.”
Technocrats who dissociate from their sentiments and personality to be soulless robots at work is a global phenomenon, and the connection between the elites of Russia and the West will not be severed after the fog of war clears.
Great minds speak alike. A foolish theory makes a fool out of every great mind. ~ Quora
George Graham:
This was exactly the mentality of those who scheduled the trains that led to the gas chambers. It is the abjugation of moral choice.
Jamie Shutler:
I can see how allowing the suits to grumble at home over dinner as long as they parroted the
party line in the office was a massive liberalization at the time and took a lot of the fear out of living. However it looks like the new totalitarians saw the utility and ran with it. I don't know which method is more disturbing over the long term. How do you have an honest discussion with someone whose opinions are given to them as part of their job description?
Simon Durnien:
It’s akin to the Nazi officers who absolutely loved doing their professional function yet people still say they were forced. But they simply enjoyed the power. It’s the same as Putins cronies.
Simon Davies:
I can see why this system is popular in Russian halls of power — control is the perfect antidote for initiative and innovation.
Misha Firer:
I think that’s why European leaders loved Putin. He’s a gray functionary like them hung up on control. And I bet they hate Zelensky, a creative, bright individual who can’t be controlled.
Markus Brinkmanis:
But how can one respect him/herself by behaving like a total idiot or clown at work, i.e. in public and at least 1/2 of lifetime? Wtf is wrong with these people?
Misha Firer:
Everything. They are fucked up.
Matt Wilson:
Sergei Kirienko sounds rather like Sviyazhsky, from Anna Karenina, a local marshal of nobility. From Part 3, Chapter XXVI (translated by Pevear & Volokhonsky):
“Sviyazhsky was one of those people, always astonishing to Levin, whose reasoning, very consistent though never independent, goes by itself, and whose life, extremely well defined and firm in its orientation, goes by itself, quite independent of and almost contrary to their reasoning.
Sviyazhsky was an extremely liberal man. He despised the nobility and considered all nobleman secret adherents of serfdom, who did not express themselves only out of timorousness. He considered Russia a lost country, something like Turkey [i.e. the Ottoman Empire], and the government of Russia so bad that he never allowed himself any serious criticism of its actions, but at the same time he served the state and was an exemplary marshal of nobility, and when he traveled he always wore a peaked cap with a red band and a cockade.
He held that life was humanly possible only abroad, where he went to live at every opportunity, and along with that, in Russia he conducted a very complex and improved form of farming, followed everything with extreme interest and knew everything that was going on. He considered the Russian muzhik [peasant] as occupying a transitional step of development between ape and man, and yet at zemstvo [local council] elections he was most willing to shake hands with muzhiks and listen to their opinions. He believed in neither God nor devil, but was very concerned about questions of improving the life of the clergy and the shrinking number of parishes, taking particular trouble over keeping up the church in his village.”
Mary:
Oriana:
Another example is Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda. In the office, he was known as a cultured, soft-spoken boss respected and admired by his office staff. But whenever he gave an official speech, there seemed to be a Jekyll-Hyde sort of transformation. He was likened to a "malicious dwarf," spewing hate speech in a loud, shrill voice. All for patriotic reasons and to spread the message of Aryan supremacy (of which he wasn't a good example, at least in terms of his physique).
RUSSIA’S DEMOGRAPHIC DECLINE AND STALINISM
~ Russia is dying out. Many other developed countries do, too, but our demographic decline is largely caused by Stalinism.
The expedited collectivization of the late 1920s, early 1930s not only broke the back of our 100-million strong private peasantry. It triggered the mass exodus from the countryside and massive disruption of the traditional lifestyle. Birth rates dwindled much earlier than in other agricultural countries. Health care improved, but that wasn’t enough to compensate for the disappearance of the fountain of demographic abundance that was the old-time peasantry.
And then the cosmic blood-letting of WW2. Right now, we experience a new demographic trough as a result of WW2 losses. This catastrophic loss of human lives happened because of Stalin’s fateful decision to get a common border with Germany in 1939. Add to that his failed bet that Hitler wouldn’t be such an idiot to attack us in June 1941 so totally unprepared for a big, ugly, protracted war.
~ Misha Vorobiev, Quora
Oriana:
There are of course other factors as well, everywhere in the world. The cost of bearing and (especially) raising a child has gone up to the point that some couples simply can’t afford to have offspring.
Another factor is the delay in childbearing. Many women choose to establish themselves in a career first — then some of them discovered that they’ve waited too long — now they are no longer fertile.
The decrease in fertility is relevant for men as well. Sperm count declines with age, as does the viability of the sperm. The quality of ova decreases with age as well.
And, thanks to wider communication, some couples are coming to understand that child-rearing takes a lot of energy -- the kind of energy that it's natural to have when one is young, and that decreases with age.
Yet another factor is women’s lack of interest in undertaking this huge
and life-changing project. Many feel happy and fulfilled enough without
motherhood —
why should they take up an expensive burden? The pressure to have
children is primarily societal and cultural; the “maternal urge” seems a
myth.
This is not to say that a serious decline in fertility
rate is desirable. Past a certain point, with human population maybe
half of what it is now, children might become more precious than ever.
Child-rearing could be made easier and more joyful with adequate support
in terms of health care and free or low-cost preschools (or other
child-care arrangements).
*
POSSIBLE OUTCOME IN UKRAINE
~ Resolution in Ukraine will follow one of these two scripts. Either Ukraine will be utterly destroyed, their people dead or deported, or else Russia will collapse inward in a bloody civil war, which will render the central government unable to threaten Ukraine for a century. There is no other permanent solution.
The only other viable medium term solution is that Russia takes some portion of Ukraine, expels Ukrainians from there, settles Russians in newly conquered territory and the rest of Ukraine accepts that and lingers on as a rump state. This is doubtful to be achievable in this war, so any sort of compromise is expected to result in a new war ~8–20 years hence.
War will follow war, until one side is annihilated, or else an equally bad compromise is made. In the case of Ukraine a bad compromise would be Russia taking Crimea, but Ukraine retakes Donbass and southern Ukraine and expels all who declare themselves Russian from the region.
Most Ukrainians already left Crimea on their own accord, so you have a population exchange.
It is not a good solution by any means, but that would at least make a long-term peace dimly possible. The only other long-term solution is the utter destruction of one state or another I’m afraid. This is the overall plan of the Kremlin I might add. I just hope it’s theirs in the end. ~
Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
*
*
THE BREAKING POINT
“I'm interested in that thing that happens
where there's a breaking point
for some people and not for others.
You go through such hardship,
things that are almost impossibly difficult,
and there's no sign
that it's going to get any better,
and that's the point when people quit.
But some don’t.”
~ Robert Redford
Oriana:
This made me think of two people: President Zelensky and my mother. In that order. And the very existence of people who show this radical endurance changes the world.
*
*
WHY YOUR FAVORITE COLOR IS PROBABLY BLUE
~ In 1993, crayon-maker Crayola conducted an unscientific, but intriguing poll: it asked US children to name their favorite crayon color. Most chose a fairly standard blue, but three other blue shades also made the top 10 list.
Seven years later, the firm repeated its experiment. Again, classic blue ranked in the top spot while six other shades of blue appeared in the top 10, including the delightful sounding "blizzard blue". They were joined by a shade of purple, a green and a pink.
The dominance of blue in such lists doesn't surprise Lauren Labrecque, an associate professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies the effect of color in marketing. Like a Pantone-sponsored party trick, she'll often ask students in her classes to name their favorite color. After they respond, she clicks on her presentation. "I have a slide already made up saying '80% of you said blue'," Labrecque tells them. She is usually right. "Because once we get to be adults, we all like blue. It seems to be cross cultural, and there's no big difference – people just like blue." (Interestingly, Japan is one of the few countries where people rank white in their top three colors).
Our selection of a favorite color is something that tends to emerge in childhood: ask any child what theirs is and the majority – crayon in hand – will already be primed to answer. Infants have broad and fairly inconsistent preferences for colors, according to research. (They do show some preference for lighter shades, though.) But the more time children spend in the world, the more they start to develop stronger affinities to certain colors, based on those they have been exposed to and the associations they link them to. They are more likely to link bright colors like orange, yellow, purple or pink to positive rather than negative emotions.
One study of 330 children between 4-11 years old found they used their favorite colors when drawing a "nice" character and tended to use black when drawing a "nasty" character (although other studies have failed to find such links, so emotional associations and color are far from straightforward). Social pressures – such as the tendency for girls' clothes and toys to be pink – also have a strong effect on color choice as children get older.
It is commonly believed that as children enter their teenage years, their color choices take on a darker, more somber hue, but there isn't much academic research to support this. Adolescent girls in the UK, for example, have been found to be attracted to purples and reds, while boys favor greens and yellow-greens. One study of British teenage boys' choice of bedroom color found they tended to choose white, while they listed red and blue as favorite colors.
These color palettes seem to converge as people grow into adulthood. Intriguingly, while the majority of adults say they prefer blue colors, they'll likely also dislike the same color too: a dark yellowish brown is routinely identified as least popular.
But why do we have favorite colors? More importantly, what drives those preferences?
Put simply, we have favorite colors because we have favorite things.
At least that's the gist of ecological valence theory, an idea put forward by Karen Schloss, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, and her colleagues. Her experiments showed that colors – yes, even beige – are far from neutral. Rather, humans layer meaning onto them, mostly drawn from our subjective histories, and so create high personal reasons to find one shade repellent or appealing in the process.
"This accounts for why different people have different preferences for the same color, and why your preference for a given color can change over time," she says. As new associations accrete – whether through everyday exposure in the world around us or artificially by deliberate conditioning – this can cause what we love to change over time.
Schloss finessed this theory via several experiments, including one at the University of California-Berkeley. She and her collaborators showed volunteers squares of color on a screen while prompts asked them to rate how much they liked them. Then the researchers stepped away, as if to suggest a new experiment was starting.
They returned to show those same volunteers colored images again, except this time, instead of plain squares, they saw objects. Each image was dominated by one of four shades. Yellow and blue-heavy images were used as the control: these depicted neutral objects, like staplers or a screwdriver. Red and green photographs, however, were deliberately skewed. Half the participants saw red images that should have evoked positive memories, such as juicy strawberries or roses on Valentine's Day, while the green images they were shown were designed to disgust, such as slime or pond scum. The other half saw a set that reversed these associations: think red raw wounds versus green rolling hills or kiwi fruit.
Running the color preference test again, Schloss and her team saw a change in preference. Volunteers' choices had shifted towards whatever color had been positively emphasized while there was little decrease for the negative shade. The next day, she brought them back and ran the tests again, to see whether that preference endured overnight – it didn't. The shift induced by the experiment appear to have been over-ridden by the colors participants experienced out in the real world, according to Schloss.
"It tells us that our experiences with the world are constantly influencing the way we view and interpret it," Schloss says. "Think of color preferences as a summary of your experiences with that color: your regular daily experiences in the world influence that judgement.”
Schloss's work on color preferences may also inadvertently go some way to explain blue's position as such a widespread favorite. Blue's reign has continued uninterrupted since the earliest recorded color studies, which took place in the 1800s. And most of our experience with the color are likely to be positive, like idyllic oceans or clear skies ("having the blues" is an idiom restricted to English). In the same vein, her work also offers a clue for why that muddy brown color is so reviled, associated as it is with biological waste or rotting foods. For a brief period each year, though, this shade finds favor, largely thanks to changes that occur in the natural world.
In an experiment intended, at least in part, to unpack whether favorite colors were a static component of someone's identity, Schloss and her team asked volunteers in New England to track their color likes and dislikes weekly during the course of the four seasons of year. Their opinions seemed directly influenced by nature, with likes or dislikes rising and falling in sync with nature's palette. "As the colors of the environment were changing, their preferences were increasing," she says. The greatest uptick came in autumn, when warm colors – think dark red and orange – earned heightened plaudits, before tumbling at the same time as the leaves.
Asked to speculate as to why autumn saw such a surge, she suggests two explanations. First, the area where she conducted that research is famed for its autumnal displays – leaf-peeping is a tourism staple in New England – so volunteers might have been primed for that preference. More intriguingly, though, she also believes that there's an evolutionary aspect in play – the sharpness of contrast. "It's fascinating to speculate perhaps it's because it's kind of quick, this rapid, dramatic change to the environment – so fast, and then it's gone. Winter is a lot of white and brown, but we're not outside as much to see it.”
The environment we live in nudges our color preference in other ways too. Another study Schloss conducted looked at students at University of California-Berkeley and Stanford, showing that the varsity colors of a college influenced the hues they picked as favorites. The more a student said they endorsed and embraced the values and spirit of the school, the higher that preference rose.
It's easy to assume that the ecological valence theory would need time to take hold, for us to embed those social cues in the world we see. But experimental psychologist Domicele Jonauskaite says that's wrong. She studies the cognitive and affective connotations of color at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and has looked at how boys and girls view blue and pink – they articulate, and demonstrate, learned color preference at a young age.
Girls' love of pink forms on a bell curve, peaking at early school age – around five or six – before dropping off by the time they're teenagers. "But the boys avoid pink from an early age, at least five or so. They think 'I can like any color - just not pink'. It's really rebellious for a boy to like pink," she says. "And among adult men, it's hard to find someone who'll say, 'pink is my favorite'."
Some researchers in the past have proposed that this particular color preference, anchored in gender, is evolutionary: women were the gatherers in hunter-gathering societies, that theory goes, and would therefore need a preference for colors associated with berries. That’s utter rubbish, says Jonauskaite, who cites several recent papers looking at color preference in non-globalized cultures – villages in the Peruvian Amazon, for example, and a foraging group in the northern reaches of the Republic of Congo. None of their female children displayed a preference for pink. "In order to have this preference, or dislike, for boys, that aversion needs to have a coding of social identity," she says. In fact, pink was seen as a stereotypically male color prior to the 1920s and only became associated with girls midway through the 20th Century.
Even the youngest children can perceive, and rank, color, suggests Alice Skelton, who helps run the Sussex Color Group & Baby Lab, at the University of Sussex in the UK. Her particular area of interest is in babies and children, aiming better to understand how early preferences in color translate into aesthetic preferences later in life. "It's a big misconception that babies can't see color from birth – they can," she says, noting that the eye's development is uneven. The receptors which perceive greens and reds are more mature at birth than those which process blues and yellows, so intense reds, in particular register most easily in newborns.
The ecological valence idea – that we yoke meanings onto colors from the objects we encounter in the world – holds true even among the youngest. "Children will only pay attention to color when it has a function associated with it. They won't really pay attention to color unless they learn something from that," Skelton says.
Imagine there are two bottles. One is green, the other is pink. The green-colored bottle contains tasty liquid, the pink one is a sour mix. Children will note, and remember, those colors, because recognizing their difference provides a cognitive bonus. "It's like a ripe banana – color is a useful cue to some property of an object," says Skelton.
That ripe banana, of course, could be a yellowish-brown, the same shade that squeamish adults tend to shun in laboratory tests. Skelton offers solace to anyone whose color preference doesn't fit the domineering rule of blue. Those drawn to unpopular shades could be products of a particular period, cherishing positive memories from their childhood – think 1970s babies snuggling on bouclé brown sofas. But there's another intriguing possibility. Most humans are drawn to visual harmony, pleasure, and to easy sensations evoked by often-positive blue.
"It might be that while some are trying to achieve homeostasis, other people are sensation seekers, much like people are larks and night owls," she says. "Think about artists, whose main job is to look for stuff that challenges their visual system or aesthetic preference.”
They're the ones, doubtless, who didn't reach for the blue crayon. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220601-what-your-favourite-colour-says-about-you?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
HOW INEQUALITY BEGAN TO SOAR FOUR DECADES AGO
~ If you look at historical data on the U.S. economy, you often notice that something changed in the late 1970s or early ’80s. Incomes started growing more slowly for most workers, and inequality surged.
David Gelles — a Times reporter who has been interviewing C.E.O.s for years — argues that corporate America helped cause these trends. Specifically, David points to Jack Welch, the leader of General Electric who became the model for many other executives. I spoke to David about these ideas, which are central to his new book on Welch.
~ For decades after World War II, big American companies bent over backward to distribute their profits widely. In General Electric’s 1953 annual report, the company proudly talked about how much it was paying its workers, how its suppliers were benefiting and even how much it paid the government in taxes.
That changed with the ascendance of men like Jack Welch, who took over as chief executive of G.E. in 1981 and ran the company for the next two decades. Under Welch, G.E. unleashed a wave of mass layoffs and factory closures that other companies followed. The trend helped destabilize the American middle class. Profits began flowing not back to workers in the form of higher wages, but to big investors in the form of stock buybacks. And G.E. began doing everything it could to pay as little in taxes as possible.
This was one of those moments when an exceptional individual at a critical moment really goes on to shape the world.
Welch was ferociously ambitious and competitive, with a ruthlessness that corporate America just hadn’t seen. In G.E., he had control of a large conglomerate with a history of setting the standards by which other companies operated. And Welch arrived at the moment that there was a reassessment of the role of business underway. The shift in thinking was captured by the economist Milton Friedman, who wrote in The Times Magazine that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”
Welch transformed G.E. from an industrial company with a loyal employee base into a corporation that made much of its money from its finance division and had a much more transactional relationship with its workers. That served him well during his run as C.E.O., and G.E. did become the most valuable company in the world for a time.
But in the long run, that approach doomed G.E. to failure. The company underinvested in research and development, got hooked on buying other companies to fuel its growth, and its finance division was badly exposed when the financial crisis hit. Things began to unravel almost as soon as Welch retired, and G.E. announced last year it would break itself up.
Similar stories played out at dozens of other companies where Welch disciples tried to replicate his playbook, such as Home Depot and Albertsons. So while Welchism can increase profits in the short-term, the long-term consequences are almost always disastrous for workers, investors and the company itself.
What might be a better alternative?
An important first step is rebalancing the distribution of the wealth that our biggest companies create. For the past 40-plus years we’ve been living in this era of shareholder primacy that Friedman and Welch unleashed. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage remained low and is still just $7.25, and the gap between worker pay and productivity kept growing wider.
There are some tentative signs of change. The labor crisis and pressure from activists has led many companies to increase pay for frontline workers. Some companies, such as PayPal, are handing out stock to everyday employees.
But it’s going to take more than a few magnanimous C.E.O.s to fix these problems. And though I know it’s risky to place our faith in the government these days, there is a role for policy here: finding ways to get companies to pay a living wage, invest in their people and stop this race to the bottom with corporate taxes.
American companies can be competitive and profitable while also taking great care of their workers. They’ve been that way before, and I believe they can be that way again. ~
New York Times newsletter, 6-4-2022, quoting David Gelles, who wrote a book about Jack Welch, The Man Who Broke Capitalism.
**
~ It is a rare and powerful thing these days for someone to admit they were wrong. In our culture of competitive certitude, it is a risk too many of us are unwilling to take.
That’s just one of the reasons I admire the New York Times business reporter David Gelles’s powerful new book, “The Man Who Broke Capitalism,” about Jack Welch and the larger crisis he fomented.
The main target of the book’s criticism is clear from the subtitle: “How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America — and How to Undo His Legacy.” But as you’ll see in my conversation with David below, this is also a project rooted in his own realizations about his own past failures as a business reporter and, frankly, the failures of much (but not all) of the business press at large.
“When I think back to some of my early stories and my early jobs, like at Forbes magazine, I was essentially playing a boosterish role with the business world and trying to celebrate the success of businesses on their own terms,” David told me the other day, capturing how much of the business media has tended to write about business in an era of growing elite capture and savage, widening inequities.
But then covering stories like the Boeing 737 Max crashes awakened David to what he had missed in all those years of reporting. He realized that he, like so many in his guild, had given CEOs too much faith. That set him on the road to telling the story of how one CEO above all, the CEOs’ CEO, Jack Welch, broke American capitalism.
You won’t want to miss our conversation below about Welch, the larger crisis he shaped and reflected, and where business journalism should go from here.
David Gelles:
~ It wasn't where I started my journey when I was studying and then practicing business journalism more than 15 years ago. In retrospect, I clearly had a much more credulous approach to my job.
When I think back to some of my early stories and my early jobs, like at Forbes magazine, I was essentially playing a boosterish role with the business world and trying to celebrate the success of businesses on their own terms. As I looked deeper and wrote more stories over the years, and as those stories took me out of the boardrooms and into communities and the lives of real, everyday people, it became clear that the way this economy works simply does not distribute the riches of this land in an equitable way.
The coverage I did of the aftermath of the Boeing 737 Max crashes brought this home in a visceral way because I spent time with families who lost their loved ones in those crashes. As one woman said to me, this was corporate manslaughter.
I'll never forget those words because this was a company that had been celebrated for years and years. And at the end of the day, I understood what she was saying. At this point, Boeing was a company that had completely lost its ethical compass and had created planes that were flawed and led to the deaths of hundreds of people. That was a seminal moment for me. As much as I was still in the thralls of business and capitalism on its own terms, it was impossible to continue to be after covering that story.
I believe in capitalism, at least in some respects. I think free enterprise has its merits and has lifted tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of people out of poverty into better living conditions.
So I don't want to lose sight of that broader narrative. The way I would personally refine that question is to ask, Are those types of dramatic negative externalities necessary? Are they inevitable? I would say the answer is no, because we know that companies have choices. These are choices that people make about how they run their companies. Individuals, mostly men, made a series of choices that led us to those places. If we can restructure some of the incentive systems and reset the morals and values of the people running these companies, there might be fewer or less disastrous negative externalities that we have to reckon with.
Where do you place Jack Welch in the pantheon of American individuals who made life worse for a vast number of people and communities?
I think he's on the Mount Rushmore of men who screwed up this country. What he did at GE essentially became a standard operating procedure for every other company in this country and for many companies in other countries around the globe. It created this slow-motion revolution in what was deemed acceptable behavior by CEOs and corporations.
It spread this enduring legacy that we're still living with that has effectively normalized the practice of using mass layoffs to boost your earnings per share in a quarter. It created a world where it's acceptable to do everything in your power to pay the government the absolute minimum that you can in tax revenues while shoveling as much of your profits as you possibly can back to shareholders and executives in the form of buybacks and dividends. We're well past the place of being able to measure or calculate the damage brought by that type of behavior over more than 40 years now.
Can you describe the business world Jack Welch entered as a young man and tried to upend?
Many people have described it as the "golden age of capitalism." That may well be overstating it because there was still a lot of inequality and misallocation of opportunity and resources for marginalized communities of all shades and stripes in that period from roughly 1945 to the late '70s. But it's undoubtedly the case that businesses and CEOs operated with a fundamentally different orientation and understanding of their role in society in that era.
Specifically, the way companies distributed their profits and how they talked about their purpose is virtually a 180-degree change from what we see in big business today. In the 1953 GE annual report, the company proudly ticked off how much money it paid its workers. It was screaming from the rooftops how wonderful it was that it was the largest payroll ever in its history. It talked about how much money it was paying its suppliers and giving them really good rates so they could continue to make profitable goods and services and take good care of their employees.
GE even proudly talked about how much it paid the government in taxes, making the case that what was good for the company was good for the country and vice versa. I don't need to tell you that that is not the world we live in today, but it did exist.
Why did greed not dominate at that time? What was stopping people from trying to grab the most they could in the way that has now become normal?
Let's remember what had just happened. The country had just finished with World War II, and there was a sense of patriotism. There was a recognition that this country was really in it together, in a way that we haven't been for a long time now. Business, which was instrumental to the war effort, came out with its sense of civic patriotism intact. I think it persevered for quite some time. This was also the time of Keynes. There was an understanding that the government played a meaningful role in setting the guardrails of what was acceptable for business in shaping the economy.
It was a slow process, but by 1971, some on the economic right were beginning to challenge those ideas. It took ten years of them postulating about this stuff before Jack Welch ultimately came and did something about it. But, remember, Milton Friedman had written in The New York Times Magazine that a business's social responsibility is to increase its profits ten years before Jack took over GE. So the reaction to that golden age of capitalism was well underway, at least in the zeitgeist, even before Jack took over.
One thing that was very striking to me in the book was this moment under Jack Welch where labor went from being seen as an asset to being seen as a cost. What is the difference between an asset and a cost?
An asset is something you see as intrinsically valuable, something you're going to cherish and try to protect. Cost is something in the business world that you try to minimize for the most part. This was a crystallizing way for me to understand how Welch viewed his workforce. It was also very instructive when I thought about what labor in the United States looks like today.
In that golden age of capitalism, major corporations understood their employees were their most valuable asset. They treated them as such, giving them excellent pay and sterling benefits far beyond what most companies offer today. Then Welch arrived, and he came to the job with this explicit view that GE employed too many people. And what did he do about it? In his first couple of years on the job, he fired more than 100,000 people in a series of jarring mass layoffs that fundamentally destabilized the American working class and set a precedent for other CEOs to follow in his footsteps.
My colleagues at The New York Times like Brad Stone and Jodi Kantor have since revealed that when Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in the 1990s, he was channeling Jack Welch. He wanted a transactional relationship with his employees, not one where they felt they could count on their company to care for them. That represents a fundamental shift in how major corporations relate to so many Americans.
Welchism is the ideology that encompasses all of Jack Welch’s skewed priorities. I identify several tactics he used to propagate this, like downsizing, deal-making, and financialization. But Welchism is the full-throated belief in shareholder primacy, mixed with an aggressive, materialistic, and domineering style of management that sidelines opinions that run counter to that ideology and thrives on self-promotion and the celebration of the CEO as a national hero.
Financialization is a term that encompasses the economy's broad shift away from an economy of things and toward an economy of services, specifically financial services. Welch saw this coming in the 1980s and positioned GE to capitalize on it. Wall Street was the fastest growing industry in the country, as new technology-enabled banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, and trading outfits created more complex financial instruments to trade more volume at ever greater speeds.
What financialization enabled is almost more influential than the practice itself because it manipulated earnings. By squeezing profits out of the company with a black box financial entity like GE capital, Jack Welch was able to be at the vanguard of this enormous revolution of shoveling the profits earned by a corporation back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Remember, that was the money that used to be going to its employees, suppliers, and the government in taxes.
As all those parties got a smaller and smaller piece of the economic pie generated by these big companies, want to know who got an ever larger piece of pie? It was the institutional shareholders, namely the Wall Street firms and the executives themselves, through greater and greater stock-based compensation. Again, these were choices people made. It was a deliberate series of choices to prioritize financialization in their own self-interest.
For an average American reading this who didn't work at GE or a company like GE, can you tell them what Jack Welch did to them indirectly that they may not realize?
Before Jack came on the scene, it was not unreasonable for people to expect that if they got a job at a major American company and worked hard, they could expect to retire there. Jack Welch was the one who put an end to that world. He did it explicitly. He said he did not want anyone to think that they might have a job for life. Before Jack, it was unheard of that a corporation might shut down a factory simply to boost its share price or lay off 1,000 or even 10,000 people because its profitability for the quarter was in jeopardy. Jack Welch did that first, and many other companies followed and continued to do so.
In instance after instance, you can point to some of the most perverse labor practices today and look back 40 years to the moment when Jack was the first mainstream CEO of a big company to do each of these things.
In the end, do you think Jack Welch knew that he made the world worse?
I had the opportunity to interview Bernie Madoff in prison many years ago, and I asked him a version of that same question. Did he really understand the consequences and the deep waves of suffering he unleashed? He didn't. Madoff was unrepentant and, in the way of a true sociopath, he seemed incapable of actually acknowledging that he had caused other people to suffer.
Welch was unrepentant to the end as well. He passed away in 2020, but right up until the end, he was cheering on his proteges. He was talking up his friend, Donald Trump, in the White House. He was singing the praises of anyone who continued to propagate his legacy of downsizing, deal-making, financialization, and short-term profits for investors and executives at the expense of workers. He may have understood that the world had changed around him dramatically. Still, I don't get the sense that he ever accepted responsibility for the influence his practices had on the economy at large.
I should note that people did call Welch out for some of his misdeeds from the outset. He was known as "Neutron Jack" by the early '80s because Newsweek, “60 Minutes,” and others talked to the workers he fired and documented the fact that he closed their factories.
But as GE's stock price kept going up, it was impossible for the majority of the mainstream media not to be enthralled by the creation of so much paper money. It happened at a moment when many people saw their retirement accounts and their stock market portfolios go up and up.
I think there was a sense that, Well, there've been negative externalities — this economic term used to describe all the unfortunate consequences of businesses running roughshod over their communities. But, on balance, many in the business press felt we were living in a really prosperous age.
I do believe that it has taken time. I think the 2008 financial crisis was a seminal moment for recognizing that maybe things were deeply unequal in an enduring, systemic way. I also think Covid has brought that home all the more dramatically. As we saw, especially in the early phase of the pandemic, the people with the least means suffer the most. ~
Jack Welch book.png
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PLANKTON: THE ENABLERS OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH
~ Plankton are responsible for 50% of earth’s oxygen. They are an essential part of the food chain. And billions of billions of ancient plankton have given their bodies to form the crude oil that powers modern society.
In the astonishing world of plankton, bright pink, micron-sized dinoflagellates looking like spaceships glide slowly over the surface of the sea; beautiful, flute-like tintinnids exchange genes temporarily with each other; and slender chaetognatha, or arrow worms, bristle with hairs and become cannibals as they gobble up their relatives.
These and a million other mostly microscopic planktonic species of viruses, microbes, larvae and eukaryotes are the largely invisible origins of life, the very bottom of the food chain and the enablers of all existence. Together, these tiny, single-cell life forms that drift on the upper layer of the oceans produce half our oxygen, act as carbon sinks, influence our weather and serve as the base of the ocean food web.
Using different types of net [Tara Oceans Expeditions] collected and sequenced nearly a billion genetic barcodes and discovered, at depths of up to 1,000 meters, unknown worlds of viruses, bacteria, worms, gelatinous creatures and strange photosynthetic organisms. Many had never been seen before or even imagined and the Tara expeditions have transformed the study of our oceans.
“Some data suggest phytoplankton have significantly declined in the world’s oceans over the past century,” he says. “On the other hand, some warm water predators such as jellyfish are thriving.
Whether we are witnessing an actual global decline or massive changes in planktonic distribution will require more study. Certainly many species will be forced to adapt.
“We have modified the ecosystems by diminishing the big predators. No one knows if what man has done is reversible. We are closer to the start than to the end of what there is to know.”
http://www.theguardian.com/.../microscopic-magic-of-plankton
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TALKING WITH CHILDREN ABOUT DEATH
~ Should we talk to children about death, and if so when, and how? It’s hard enough discussing it with other adults. Death is unfamiliar to most of us, even though we see it acted on our TV screens, and reported in the news on a daily basis. Out of a desire to protect our children, we often shy away from discussing it openly.
But health professionals and teachers think this might be unwise. Dr Stuart Crisp, consultant pediatrician, writes, ‘Sooner or later, the child will be confronted with the subject. If a child has some understanding of the meaning of the word “death”, they will be better equipped to deal with the situation.’ In the UK, 92% of children will have lost someone close to them by the age of fifteen, and at any one time, approximately 70% of schools have a bereaved pupil under their care.
The charity Marie Curie Cancer Care has piloted an innovative scheme, ‘The Daffodil Project’, to address these issues. A group of Year Six pupils ‘buddy up’ with patients at the Marie Curie Hospice in Newcastle, and over the course of four weeks, are given the opportunity to explore the subjects of death and illness in a supportive and friendly environment. The aim is to ‘break down the taboos and encourage discussion around these often sensitive topics’, helping children ‘come to terms with death and dying’. While talking cannot solve all the problems, it is a comfort to children to know that they can ask questions and share their thoughts.
Seeing how parents in the past dealt with this challenging issue provides food for thought. In the seventeenth century, almost a third of children died before the age of fifteen, and the same proportion had lost a parent by this age. Far from shielding children from these foreboding facts, parents believed it was vital that they were aware of the reality of death. Primary sources such as diaries, letters, and eulogies, show that the young were encouraged to witness the deathbed scene, and ask questions about their own mortality. In the 1650s, four-year-old John Sudlow’s baby brother died: seeing the little body ‘without breath, and not being able to speak or stir, and then carried out of doors, and put into a pit-hole’ made this boy ‘greatly concerned’, and caused him to ask his parents ‘whether he must die too’. His parents answered frankly, that one day he must.
When children themselves fell seriously ill, their parents alerted them to the possibility of death. ‘My Dear, Are you so ill that you think you shall die?’, enquired the mother of thirteen-year-old Margaret Andrews three hours before her death in 1680. A child was never too young to hear about death. Four-year-old Mary Stubbs was asked ‘Whether she was willing to die and go to Heaven’ during her illness in the 1680s, to which her reply was ‘Go to Heaven’. This practice might seem cruel, but in the early modern period, it was considered quite the opposite: it was part of what was known as the ‘preparation for death’, a crucial component of patient care at this time. Essentially, family members sought to help their dying loved one reach a state of peaceful acceptance, and even, happiness, about death. They did this by encouraging the patient to take part in various religious activities, including prayer, repentance, and Bible-reading. It was hoped that through these acts, the dying would become convinced that they would go to heaven.
At the heart of the preparation process was talking. Children were invited to voice their worries and doubts, and receive explanations and reassurances. In 1644, eight-year-old Tabitha Alder from Kent told her parents she was ‘greatly afraid’ of dying because ‘she feared that she did not love God’. After a ‘dear friend’ of the family had spent a day talking and praying with her, she expressed ‘a great deal of joy, that now she…loves the Lord Jesus dearly’. Children also talked about the practical consequences of death, such as what would happen to their toys and possessions. When eleven-year-old Caleb Vernon from London was very sick in 1655, he overheard his little sister Nancy asking, ‘who shall have Calebs [pet] Bird when he is dead?’ Caleb told his father, ‘I shall not think of dying yet, but if I do, I will give it to my Sister Betty, who hath none, for Nancy hath one already’.
Children’s greatest fear was of being separated from their parents in death. In the 1670s, six-year-old Jason Whitrow took his mother ‘by the hand, and said, Mother, I shall dye, oh that you might dye with me, that we might both go to the Lord together’. Parents sought to allay these anxieties by reassuring their dying children that they would eventually enjoy a blissful reunion in heaven. A few hours before her death in 1679, Isaac Archer from East Anglia told his six-year-old daughter Frances, ‘she was going to heaven to her brothers and sisters, and that we should all meet againe’. Through these conversations, children sometimes came to feel happy about dying. When eleven-year-old Martha Hatfield lay ill in 1652, she ‘was enabled with great alacrity to express the joy of Heaven’, declaring that ‘I am now going to Heaven’, and seeming to be ‘exceedingly rapt up with joy’.
To a modern ear, these positive reactions to death seem scarcely credible. Parents may have exaggerated their child’s confidence in heaven as a way to allay their own grief. However, when we consider early modern attitudes to childhood, these responses begin to seem more plausible. Of all the ages, the young were thought to be the most capable of strong religious faith: they were especially beloved by Christ, and their innocence brought them closer to God. As such, it was considered appropriate to teach children about the joys of paradise from their youngest years.
The result was that this age-group often held very vivid imaginations of what heaven would be like. When ten-year-old Christian Karr was seriously ill in 1702, she told her family, ‘O I think I see Heaven, I think I see Heaven, That is a glorious sight…the Walls and the streets of that City are like burning Gold. And I think I see all the Saints, arrayed in Whyte there’. Children’s happiness about death can also be explained by the fact that many had already suffered the death of a parent, and longed to be reunited. In 1620, ten-year-old Cecilia D’Ewes contracted the smallpox; her mother had died a short time previously, and therefore, the girl appeared not to mind dying, but instead cried with relief, ‘I will go to my mother, I will see her; I shall shortly be with her’.
But it would be wrong to paint the early modern period as a golden age. The flip side to the belief in heaven was hell. Children were taught about hell in all its gruesome details. Robert Russel’s "A Little Book For Children", published in 1690, told its child reader, ‘[If ] thou wilt continue to be a naughty wicked Child . . . Then thou with all thy wicked Companions shall be tumbled into the Lake that burns with Fire and Brimstone; there thou shalt endure such unspeakable Pain . . . which cannot be conceived’. These books also contain vivid pictures of the damned in hell. Unsurprisingly, children often responded with great fear. When fifteen-year-old Joseph Taylor read ‘a little Book’ about hell, he was ‘put into sore Amazement and very great Terrour’. He sat ‘groaning in the dark’, crying ‘O! How shall I do to bear this heavy Sentence! How shall I bear the tormenting Flames of Hell for ever and ever’.
So, what can we take away from this brief foray into the early modern period? Parents in the past, like today, loved their children, and sought to comfort them through talking. But this was probably far less difficult for parents in the early modern period, because they appear to have been so much more certain about what happened after death. Before we can help our children, we need to help ourselves: we need to overcome our own reluctance to think about death. ~
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/never-too-young-to-talk-about-death
Mary:
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HUMANS HAVE COME CLOSE TO EXTINCTION TWICE
~ The first time was around 150,000 years ago during what’s catchily called the Marine Isotope Stage 6 period (named in part because of analyzing oxygen isotopes from deep-sea sediment samples). Basically, it was a specific type of ice age when not only did the polar caps and glaciers around the world expand, but deserts did too, due to the atmosphere effectively having moisture sucked out of it by the ice.
The atmosphere became very dry right across the world, but from our perspective, this affected significant parts of central, eastern and southeastern Africa where, at the time, all known humans lived. It’s estimated that the human population at this time could have dropped down to under 1,000 people.
The second near-extinction event was around 70,000 years ago following the eruption of a Sumatran volcano called Toba. Rather, it wasn’t just an eruption but it was a super-eruption, where so much ash and gasses are thrown into the atmosphere that their environmental effects threaten life.
It’s estimated that the Toba super-eruption ejected roughly 10,000 times more ash and gas than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption did and was big enough to significantly dim the sun globally for up to 6 years, resulting in worldwide cooling and a massive dying of vegetation from both cold and poor light. This again brought the human population down, perhaps to somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 people.
This was also the time that early humans began their migration out of Africa and around the world, it’s believed because once the ecosystem had stabilized following the eruption a ‘green corridor’ right the way up the east side of Africa and along the Nile Valley opened up, enabling our ancient ancestors to cross what had formerly been an impassable desert.
Toba Supervolcano, an artist’s rendition
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THE BOSOM OF ABRAHAM
In childhood and beyond, one phrase that confused me was "the bosom of Abraham." And even assuming some kind of capacious bosom, why would you want to be with the guy who was completely ready to kill his son after hearing a voice that told him to do that. Anyway, here is is an Eastern Orthodox Icon of heaven. Christ is surrounded by saints and angels. At the bottom is paradise, with the "bosom of Abraham" at the left and the "good thief" at the right (the good thief was promised an entry to paradise, but access to the bosom of Abraham was not mentioned).
Heaven Eastern Orthodox icon
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“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” ~ Luis Borges
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ACCESS TO HEAVEN ONLY THROUGH JESUS?
~ John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
According to the Bible, no one goes to Heaven except through Jesus.
Does this mean that everyone born before Jesus came to deliver his message goes to Hell? The unbaptized first born of the Egyptians are being tortured in Hell right now? Indigenous people all over the world who died without being “lucky” enough to be told of Jesus, Satan’s got them roasting on a spit?
I have a hard time understanding that.
What about all the other equally devout believers who have different beliefs? Hell-bound because they got the “wrong” book?
What does it mean that Jesus “died for our sins”? That is an entirely confusing statement. Did he die because we were sinful, or was his death a sacrifice to erase the sins of the past? If he erased the sins of the past, are we free of sin now?
If God wanted to absolve us of our sins (traditionally, Eve eating a fucking apple 6000 years ago), did he have to make a virgin pregnant and arrange for the child (who was also him) to be murdered in order to do that? Seems like a confusing and convoluted way of going about it.
Why didn’t He just show up and said “hey, remember back when I cursed the first man and woman and all of their descendants for eating a fruit that I said was off-limits? I’ve since realized that was a dick move, and you’re all forgiven.”
No, instead we had to have the Crucifixion, which became a vehicle for blaming the Jews for everything, setting the stage for the Holocaust. But confusingly, Jesus’ sacrifice was supposedly part of the Divine Plan, so why blame anyone at all?
We only have second-hand accounts of all of this, no original writings by the man himself, only accounts written by others after his death. And somehow, these ancient, posthumous, contradictory, fantastical pieces of hearsay are supposed to be credible?
I have a hard time understanding that.
Finally, all of this is found in a book that describes the Earth as having four corners, being about 6000 years old (if you add up the begatting), where every species of plant and animal was individually and specifically created by God, and also claims that every currently living species of land animals were once put on a boat. It leaves it to the reader’s imagination to work out how polar bears made their way to the Arctic and kangaroos hopped to Australia once the boat landed somewhere in Turkey.
This doesn’t seem in the least bit likely to me, and hurts the whole credibility of the Jesus is savior bit.
These are just some of the reasons why I have hard time understanding that Jesus Christ is the savior. But heck, send him around sometime and maybe he can explain it to me over a beer. ~
Scott Schafer, Quora
from comments:
Filipe Cross:
Paul: Jesus became God at his resurrection
Mark: No, at his baptism
Matthew & Luke: No, at his conception
John: No, at the beginning of creation
…making things up as they went along…
Stuart Beatty:
As a teenager, one of the things that led me to atheism was when, at a church camp, I asked if the natives in, say, New Guinea who had never heard of Jesus were all going to hell. They said "hell yeah!" I thought, is this a "god of love?" I think not!
Chuck Dean:
What’s that joke from Norway?
My god has a hammer. Your god was nailed to a cross.
Any questions?
L. Thomas Rouse:
I read an article once that talked about what happens to the people who never had the chance to hear the word, and it explained the belief that those people were like the little children; they were forgiven and automatically went to Heaven.
The article then went on to talk about John Allen Chau and his ill-fated visit to North Sentinel Island. Since he gave the Sentinelese the chance to hear the word and they refused, they are all now condemned to Hell.
So, the indigenous people who never hear about Jesus are fine until the missionaries show up. If they meet 100 people and ten convert, those ten go to Heaven, and the rest go to Hell.
Scott Schafter:
The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that there are only 144,000 openings in Heaven, based on one interpretation of the Book of Revelation. If you believe that, then I don’t see why you would want to convert anyone, as it would hurt your (and your loved ones’) chances of being selected.
So here’s a plot twist: perhaps those missionaries know exactly what they’re doing and are trying to better their odds. ;)
Christopher Murphy:
The bible teaches that no one ever goes to heaven. I am not a member of JW but I think that they do not believe in going to heaven. God's kingdom will be established here on earth at Christ's return and the god of this world will be imprisoned in the bottomless pit.
Scott Schafer:
If God exists and wanted to show his love for us, directly appearing to everyone and announcing His presence and desires for us would save a lot of trouble. It would be the easiest way to prevent holy wars between clashing religions, religious persecution, justification of slavery and genocide in the name of religion.
All sorts of bad behavior by people of all or no religions could have simply been trivially avoided by the Creator of the Universe.
Instead, I’m expected to believe that God sent a message to the entire world in the form of a human being who was executed in Judea thousands of years ago and who honestly would have been forgotten long ago except for his followers who wrote varying accounts after his death.
And who, I believe, literally expected that Jesus would return within their lifetimes:
“For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every man according to his deeds. Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.“ (Matthew 16: 27, 28)
Note that the Antichrist in Revelations was likely Emperor Nero.
Valdis Kletnieks:
The attempt to raise me Lutheran ended when I asked the minister “If only through Jesus can you get to Heaven, why did He create so many Muslims and Hindus?”.
The look on his face when he realized that to an 8 year old, the seminary-approved answer looks exactly like Making Shit Up On The Spot pretty much answered my question. :)
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METABOLISM: BURN BABY BURN
~ As the director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at the USDA Nutrition Center Tufts University, Massachusetts, Susan Roberts has spent much of the past two decades studying ways to fight the obesity epidemic that continues to plague much of the western world.
But time and again, Roberts and other obesity experts around the globe have found themselves faced with a recurring problem. While getting overweight individuals to commit to shedding pounds is often relatively straightforward in the short term, preventing them from regaining the lost weight is much more challenging.
According to the University of Michigan, about 90% of people who lose significant amounts of weight, whether through diets, structured programs or even drastic steps such as gastric surgery, ultimately regain just about all of it.
Why is this? Scientists believe that the answer lies in the workings of our metabolism, the complex set of chemical reactions in our cells, which convert the calories we eat into the energy our body requires for breathing, maintaining organ functions, and generally keeping us alive.
When someone begins a new diet, we know that metabolism initially drops – because we are suddenly consuming fewer calories, the body responds by burning them at a slower pace, perhaps an evolutionary response to prevent starvation – but what then happens over the following weeks, months, and years, is less clear.
“Does metabolism continue to go down, more than it should,” asks Roberts, “or does it initially go down, and then bounce back? This is an enormously controversial topic, and one that we’re looking to address.”
Over the next three to four years, we may get some answers. Roberts is co-leading a new study, funded by the National Institutes of Health in the US, which will follow 100 individuals over the course of many months as they first lose and then regain weight, measuring everything from energy expenditure to changes in the blood, brain and muscle physiology, to try to see what happens.
The implications for how we tackle obesity could be enormous. If metabolism drops and continues to stay low during weight loss, it could imply that dieting triggers innate biological changes that eventually compel us to eat more. If it rebounds to normal levels, this suggests that weight regain is due to the recurrence of past bad habits, with social and cultural factors tempting us to go back to overeating.
“If someone’s metabolism really drops during weight loss and doesn’t recover, it shows we have to put all of our money on preventing weight gain in the first place,” says Roberts. “Because once it’s happened, you’re doomed. If metabolism rebounds, it means that the lessons about eating less because you’ve now got a smaller body haven’t been learned effectively. So we might need to encourage people who have lost weight to see psychologists to work on habit formation. These are such different conclusions that we really need to get it right.”
This is just one of many ways in which our understanding of metabolism is evolving. In recent years, many of the traditional assumptions, which had long been accepted as truth – that exercise can ramp up metabolism, that metabolism follows a steady decline from your 20s onwards – have been challenged. For scientists at the forefront of this field, these answers could go on to change many aspects of public health.
THE AGE MYTH
If someone’s metabolism really drops during weight loss and doesn’t recover, it shows we have to put all of our money on preventing weight gain in the first place,” says Roberts. “Because once it’s happened, you’re doomed. If metabolism rebounds, it means that the lessons about eating less because you’ve now got a smaller body. So we might need to encourage people who have lost weight to see psychologists to work on habit formation. These are such different conclusions that we really need to get it right.”
This is just one of many ways in which our understanding of metabolism is evolving. In recent years, many of the traditional assumptions, which had long been accepted as truth – that exercise can ramp up metabolism, that metabolism follows a steady decline from your 20s onwards – have been challenged. For scientists at the forefront of this field, these answers could go on to change many aspects of public health.
It appears that between the ages of 20 and 60 our metabolism stays almost completely stable, even during major hormonal shifts such as pregnancy and menopause. Based on the new data, a woman of 50 will burn calories just as effectively as a woman of 20.
Instead, there are just two major life shifts in our metabolism, with the first occurring between one and 15 months old. The Science study showed that infants burn energy at such a rate to support their development that their metabolism at one year old is more than 50% higher than an adult’s. The second transition takes place at about the age of 60, when our metabolism begins to drop again, continuing to do so until we die.
“For much of your life, your body’s kind of chugging along on a trajectory for how busy your cells are going to be,” says Pontzer. “Your cells are following a roadmap, and it’s very hard to bump them off that roadmap.”
So what does this mean? Much of the aging process, and the commonly observed middle-aged weight gain, is not because of declining metabolism but genetics, hormone changes and lifestyle factors such as stress, sleep, smoking and, perhaps most crucially, diet. Pontzer argues that if the calories we burn stay largely the same throughout life, then the real source of obesity has to be the amount we’re eating, and particularly the heavy consumption of highly processed foods.
Over the years, one of the main marketing tools used to promote different exercise regimes and wellness supplements has been claims that they boost your metabolism. Pontzer says that this is mostly nonsense.
Studies that have compared indigenous tribes of hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania – who walk an average of 19,000 steps a day – with sedentary populations in Europe and the US have found that their total number of calories burned is largely the same. Other studies looking at whether metabolism changes if you put a mouse on an exercise regime, or comparing non-human primates living in a zoo or the rainforest, have found a similar pattern.
Some scientists believe that this is because the body is programmed to keep its average daily energy expenditure within a defined range. While there are day-to-day fluctuations, the body still burns the same number of calories overall, but it adjusts how they are used, depending on our lifestyle. To explain the theory, Pontzer gives the example of a keen amateur cyclist who takes part in 100km bike rides at weekends. Overall, that individual still won’t burn more calories on average than a sedentary person, but their average energy expenditure will be skewed towards providing fuel for the muscles. The sedentary person will burn a similar number of calories, but on background bodily functions which we do not notice, including less healthy outlets such as producing inflammation and stress.
“I think there is a deep evolutionary reason to this,” says Pontzer. “In the industrialized world, burning more energy than you eat would be great, but in the wild, that’s a bad strategy. The reason we’re gaining weight is not only because there’s more food available than we have evolved to expect, but because they’re modern, industrialized foods, designed to be overeaten. So you’ve got this perfect storm for making people obese.”
But these new findings on metabolism are not only changing our understanding of how to tackle obesity: they have ramifications across the world of medicine. Given that metabolism slows markedly beyond the age of 60, doctors now need to know whether older adults should receive slightly different medicinal doses, while the research will prompt questions about the connection between a slower metabolism and the onset of chronic disease in older adults.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
While the Science paper illustrated general population trends for metabolism across the age spectrum, we still know relatively little about individual differences, and what they might represent. Do babies with a particularly rapid metabolism develop quicker and in a better way? And do variations in the environment in which they grow up, such as social deprivation, mean that they have a slightly slower metabolism than their peers?
This is all speculation for now, but scientists know that metabolism can still vary significantly from one person to another, even after you account for factors such as size and body composition. We still don’t know exactly why this variation occurs, but there are thought to be a whole range of factors, from genetics to organ sizes, the immune system, and even the species of bacteria in their gut microbiome.
Even with the latest digital technologies, it is very difficult for people to track their own metabolic rate. Pontzer says this is because none of the current apps on the market can account for individual differences in resting metabolic rate.
However, one of the key questions is whether these variations can confer susceptibility to disease, especially illnesses linked to metabolic dysfunction such as cancer and type 2 diabetes. “There are so many metabolic health conditions,” says Eric Ravussin, director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “These are influenced by your diet and your weight. As you gain weight, you’re more likely to have hypertension, you’re more likely to have inflammation.”
A whole variety of startups around the world are now investigating ways of using our knowledge of metabolism to assist with developing personalized treatment programs. Because our gut microbes play such a crucial role in energy metabolism, by breaking down the food we eat, dysfunctional imbalances in the gut microbiome have been linked to the development of a number of metabolic illnesses.
Oslo-based Bio-Me is profiling the gut microbiomes of patients with type 2 diabetes, celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease and certain types of cancer, using DNA sequencing of fecal samples to identify the exact species of bacteria present in their intestines. It can then compare that information with existing microbiome data on that group of patients, available in population biobanks, and use this to predict dietary regimes or treatment interventions that could be particularly beneficial for those individuals.
Bio-Me CEO Morten Isaksen says that this can be used to predict whether common medications, such as the diabetes drug metformin, will work well for that particular patient. “It was discovered that metformin only works because the gut bacteria change the medicine into its active form,” says Isaksen. “So if you don’t have the right bacteria in the gut, the medicine won’t work. So knowing which bacteria are present is really important for identifying the right treatments.”
Because dysfunctional cell metabolism is central to cancer, determining how tumors form, as well as how fast they grow and spread, indications of metabolic dysfunction could be used for early diagnosis of certain cancers. The Stockholm-based biotech firm Elypta is trialing a system that detects small molecules, known as metabolites, which are produced by kidney cancer cells. In future, this could be used as part of a liquid biopsy for the disease.
“Once cancer cells begin to proliferate, what really changes is the metabolic requirements, compared with healthy cells,” says Francesco Gatto, co-founder of Elypta. “So we think we can use this layer of information from metabolism, to help identify multiple types of cancer early in a non-invasive manner.”
Pontzer is now planning to follow up the Science study by delving further into the extremes of metabolism, both in the young and the old. “We’re going to try to look at that variability both in very young children and the over-60s,” he says. “We want to try to understand whether in people whose metabolism is changing more or less, or faster or slower, does that predict anything about their health or how their bodies develop? Or maybe it’s not related at all. So we’re going to try to find out these things.”
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THE HIGHER THE BLOOD SUGAR, THE GREATER THE RISK OF DEMENTIA
~ There are many reasons to keep your blood sugar under control: protecting your arteries and nerves are two of them. Here’s another biggie: preventing dementia, the loss of memory and thinking skills that afflicts millions of older Americans.
A 2013 study showed that even in people without diabetes, above normal blood sugar is associated with an increased risk of developing dementia. This finding goes beyond previously seen links between diabetes and dementia. “It establishes for the first time, convincingly, that there is a link between dementia and elevated blood sugars in the non-diabetic range,” said study author Dr. David Nathan, a Harvard Medical School professor and the director of the Diabetes Center and Clinical Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Nathan teamed up with researchers across the country to look at blood sugar levels in more than 2,000 older adults—the average age was 76—taking part in the Adult Changes in Thought study. The vast majority of the study participants did not have diabetes. What the researchers found is that any incremental increase in blood sugar was associated with an increased risk of dementia—the higher the blood sugar, the higher the risk.
Why? There are only theories. “The speculation is that elevated blood sugar levels are causing more vascular disease, but it may be other metabolic issues. For example, people with elevated blood sugar often have insulin resistance which may be the link that affects our brain cells,” says Dr. Nathan.
The study does not prove that high blood sugar causes dementia, only that there is an association between the two. But it is worth keeping an eye on your blood sugar to try to avoid developing type 2 diabetes. This disease is at epidemic proportions. Almost 26 million Americans—one in 12—have diabetes. High blood sugar is hallmark of this disease. Normal blood sugar is under 100 milligrams per deciliter of blood mg/dL after an eight-hour fast. You have diabetes if your blood sugar is 126 mg/dL or higher after a fast. People with a blood sugar reading of above 100 but below 126 have what’s called prediabetes. Nearly 80 million Americans are in that camp.
Excess blood sugar is a problem because it can lead to a variety of health problems including heart, eye, kidney, and nerve disease.
TAMING BLOOD SUGAR
Short but frequent walking breaks—as brief as a minute and forty seconds every half hour—can lower blood sugar. So can taking a walk after a meal.
And it doesn’t always have to be official “exercise.” Try taking the stairs more often, parking farther away from the store, and getting up and moving if you’ve been sitting too long. “It’s common sense,” says Dr. Nathan. “The more active you are and the less sedentary, the more likely it is that your muscles can uptake glucose, and the insulin you make will be more effective.”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/above-normal-blood-sugar-linked-to-dementia-201308076596
Oriana:
Let me remind you that there is a stunningly effective supplement for lowering blood sugar: BERBERINE. It's just as effective as metformin, and apparently has the same mechanism of action. The advantage of berberine over metformin is that berberine also improves you cholesterol profile.
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TERMINAL LUCIDITY
~ It was the red jelly that did it. It was Christmas 1999 in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Ward Porterfield, 83, was in a nursing home. He had been diagnosed with dementia three years earlier; he was confused and disoriented and eventually he no longer recognized his daughter, Kay. “When I went in,” she says of her later visits, “he didn’t know me at all.” That Christmas, he refused to eat. “Finally I just told them: ‘Bring him jello, he likes jello. Red jello.’ And he looked at me, really deeply, and said: ‘So. I suppose the jello’s gonna be my last meal. You’re gonna try to starve me, eh?’ That was like: ‘What’s going on here?’”
Her surprise wasn’t just at his coherence, but that the tone of this reply was undeniably her father’s dry humor. Later that night, nurses told Kay, when children visited to sing carols, tears streamed down Ward’s face. Kay becomes emotional recounting it. “Don’t cry,” a nurse told him. Ward looked at her. “If you were in my position, you’d cry too,” he said. “These are the last Christmas carols I’ll ever hear.”
The next morning when she visited, Ward recognized his daughter instantly. And for the next two days they spoke. “It was as if his mind had been unplugged for so many years,” she remembers, “and then all of a sudden it got plugged back in again.” Then he lost consciousness. Two days later, he died.
Kay Porterfield believes this was a case of terminal lucidity, a phenomenon in which people whose brains have not functioned properly for significant periods of time – often many years, and mostly because of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia – suddenly regain cognition and interact with coherence. Responses might range from wordless but emotional exchanges to substantial memory recovery. The person then dies within a handful of days, if not hours.
It’s an experience the German biologist Michael Nahm brought to prominence in 2009, after learning about it from 18th- and 19th-century medical case reports. He published an article about it and coined the term “terminal lucidity”. Yet despite growing interest and some research (involving surveys and questionnaires) over the past decade, we’re no closer to knowing what causes it. Now, however, scientists hope a group of studies will change that.
“In 2015, I came across a newspaper article that described a situation like this, and I thought it was really interesting,” says Dr Basil Eldadah, who is leading this charge. “I sort of filed it away. Then around 2017 it got pulled out of the files in my mind and I thought: ‘Maybe there’s something that we can do about that.’”
Eldadah is supervisory medical officer at the Division of Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology at the US National Institute on Aging (NIA). In 2018 he and his team set up a workshop, inviting key figures to size up what had been learned so far. Eldadah and the NIA research staff had already given it a new name, “paradoxical lucidity”. “To call it terminal lucidity implies that this is a phenomenon that occurs shortly before death,” he says. “If you’re looking for it prospectively, you can’t quite say that.” Also, let’s face it, the terminology might be unhelpful.
“If you’re recruiting people into a research study,” he says, “you probably don’t want to tell them: ‘Hey, we’re going to be looking for this phenomenon that occurs right before you die.’”
The workshop resulted in a paper, published in the Alzheimer’s Association journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia, concluding that the study of such lucidity could “provide insight into both underlying neurobiology and future therapeutic possibilities”. From that, six studies were funded, which are getting under way. “Based on the preliminary data that we heard from our grantees,” says Eldadah, “I think it’s safe to say that this phenomenon exists, and it likely exists more often than we expect, or than we would have believed.”
Personally, I have no trouble believing it, having witnessed it myself. In the mid-1990s, with her eyesight rapidly going and her memory diminishing, my maternal grandmother, Kitty Lewis, moved into a care home, after suffering a series of mini-strokes and being diagnosed with vascular dementia. From there, her behavior began to change – this prim, proper, polite and warm woman, for decades a stalwart of whichever community she was in, had her personality twisted and transformed by dementia, and she became paranoid, aggressive, verbally abusive. Her short-term memory was shot, and the rest of it was patchy. She would just about know who we, her family, were, but for the last couple of years, angry, depressed and confused, she wouldn’t want to see people. We visited anyway, sitting with her while she wanted to die.
Then, in October 2004 she was admitted to hospital, having collapsed with a urinary tract infection. For a week she was barely conscious, but on the Sunday when my parents, cousin and I visited, she was sitting up in bed, smiling as we walked in. For the next two hours she laughed and joked, completely cognitive, coherent … lucid. A lifetime of memory had returned, and we took advantage of it as she regaled us with escapades from her past. My mum, who knew many of them, quietly verified them. Her funny, eloquent, vibrant mother had returned. “It all came back to her in one rush,” remembers my mum. “It was like a bolt of lightning. The clouds cleared.” After we left that afternoon, my grandma slipped back into a semi-conscious state, soon not knowing who my mother was, and died within days.
“It’s stories like these that inspire us to try to do something about this from a scientific perspective,” says Eldadah. His work is pushing ahead now. Dr Sam Parnia, a British critical care physician and pulmonologist who has been working in the US for 15 years, is associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York. He is leading a study for Eldadah. “If you talk to hospice nurses and palliative care doctors, they all know about this,” he says of terminal/paradoxical lucidity. “But no one’s ever studied it properly because no one ever thought anyone would take it seriously enough. So what I wanted to do is to help move this into the scientific realm.”
He plans to monitor 500 dementia patients at the end of their lives, working with hospices in New York City. With consent from patients’ next of kin, Parnia’s team will monitor them on electroencephalograms (EEGs). “The benefit of it is that it has 24/7 video recording of the individual, what they’re doing. And at the same time it’s measuring their brain electricity. We’re going to get a full picture of what the person says, how they act out.” The outcome could be groundbreaking. “If we could track what’s happening in the brain,” he says, “we might be able to find ways to stimulate the brain in those who are unfortunately in a state of complete dementia, and try to stimulate them into consciousness.”
These lucid episodes do not occur only in dementia patients. “I’ve seen it in cancer patients particularly,” says Dr Mayur Lakhani, a Loughborough GP and former chair of the National Council for Palliative Care. One person who hadn’t been coherent for some time was suddenly “able to have a very lucid conversation with me and their family, about what they wanted to do when they were younger”.
Tina McMillan, a massage therapist and former medical transcriptionist in Knoxville, Tennessee, saw the phenomenon with her father, who had multiple myeloma. Marshall James McMillan was raised in the mountains of West Virginia. His own father was an “abusive alcoholic” who made moonshine, and in 1937 when Marshall’s mother died of sepsis, the 14-year-old Marshall, eager to leave home and “fight some Nazis”, took a quart of moonshine to the army recruitment office and got the commanding officer drunk enough to sign him up. In 1944, aged 20, he stepped on a mine in Italy and lost his right leg. He earned a Purple Heart and Bronze Star.
“So he was not one to give up,” says McMillan of her family’s choice to not explain to Marshall that, when the multiple myeloma took over in 2008, he was in a hospice. “As a person’s organs begin to fail they get metabolic waste material in their bloodstream and their brain, and it mimics dementia,” she explains. “They lose the ability to really process. What I experienced with my dad was that we got to watch him very slowly fade away. He became confused. He knew who we were but he greatly withdrew from being interactive with us. He was in the room but not in the room. In his body but not in his body.”
It was a heartbreaking process. After an ambulance delivered Marshall to the hospice, the staff introduced themselves. “The chef said: ‘Mr McMillan, I’m the head of the kitchen and you can have anything you want.’ My dad said: ‘Could I have a milkshake?’ I was standing there with the administrator, and I whispered: ‘He’s diabetic, he can’t have that.’ And she squeezed my arm and said: ‘Honey, none of that matters now.’ So that was hard.” Soon after that, her father began “experiencing visits from people who were already dead. One day I walked in and he said: ‘You see that room across the hall? Your mother and your grandmother and your aunt Dot have been in there just cackling up a storm.’ And those are all dead people.”
But one Friday, Marshall “snapped out of it”. He was sitting up in bed. “We saw him talking to somebody and the color was back in his cheeks. There was all this excitement in the room – he was back to being himself. He was a very, very smart man, a very astute commentator on the human condition, and he was back to commentating,” laughs McMillan. One of the staff brought him his favorite drink, but he rejected it. “Now he was aware that he couldn’t have a milkshake. He said: ‘You can’t give me that.’” For the next few days he was back to his old self, but after that he once more withdrew from interaction, falling into “complete and utter separation”.
Such experiences have a profound effect on the person’s relatives. For my family, that afternoon with my grandmother was pure joy, almost – almost – balancing out years of sadness. And witnessing it shakes you up somewhat, because it doesn’t seem to make sense. “It opened me up to possibilities,” says Kay Porterfield of her father’s Christmas resurgence. “That I don’t know this is this way and that is that way. And it has made me feel more open to the possibility that our mind is not a physical thing and it is not located in our body. Maybe it’s just a tenant. Our mind is a tenant in our bodies.”
The opportunities, Eldadah says, are immense. “It gives us some pause with regard to our current theories and understanding about the nature of dementia. We’ve seen enough examples of this to be reassured that dementia can be reversed – albeit temporarily, very transiently – nevertheless, it does reverse. And so the question then is how.”
At the very least, learning more about such lucidity could help to prepare relatives and caregivers for it, to help them to emotionally handle it, and to let them know that it is not a sign – as some understandably think when it happens – that the patient is improving. “We have to be careful, because sometimes people think that their loved one is getting better,” says Lakhani. “That’s false hope. But it is an opportunity, a chance to connect.”
Of course for many people, it won’t happen at all – we don’t all have the luxury of such spirited resolutions. But for those who do, it’s invaluable. “He struggled,” Porterfield says of her father’s death. “It was not an easy passage. But I was just grateful for those three days.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-clouds-cleared-what-terminal-lucidity-teaches-us-about-life-death-and-dementia?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Joe:
I never knew that Terminal Lucidity existed. I experienced this with Patsy. In the last two years of her life, cancer metastasized to her brain for the second time. The first time, she experienced sense of balance issues. The second time, she began to experience memory issues. She was on her way to full dementia when she died.
During the last weeks of her life, her mother and I would sit up all night with her. Her mother, Leonor, would take the first shift from 9 pm to 3 am. I would take the early morning shift. About three days before her death, I was in the kitchen making coffee. Patsy was sleeping in the living room in her hospice bed. She sat up in bed and called my name.
I ran to her bedside. She said that I woke her, and we talked. She told me that she heard everything we discussed during the day. That morning we held hands and talked. I thought she had bottomed out and might recover. When she fell asleep, I continued my early morning routine. That was the last time she responded, physically or audibly, to either her mother or me.
In my grief group, the more aggressive members claimed it was my imagination. They said it bordered on superstition and compared it to people claiming to see the soul leave the body. A couple of women talked to me privately. They had a similar experience but didn’t explain it.
I concluded that my experience was one of the mysterious phenomena that caregivers experience. I accepted it as a gift from the universe. After reading your article, I was happy to hear that my experience was not an oddity. I’m glad they are researching Terminal Lucidity.
Oriana:
I experienced my mother’s terminal lucidity for just a moment, but I’ll treasure that moment forever. She had ceased to recognize me. But several minutes before she slipped into a coma,
she looked at me and suddenly recognized me. She called me by an endearment, a pet name that only she used to call me. My delight was mixed with sadness as I thought, “Nobody will ever call me that again.”
from Psychology Today:
~ There has been relatively little scientific research into the phenomenon of terminal lucidity. It has only been named since 2009, although according to Nahm, there are anecdotal reports of people experiencing end-of-life rallies in the medical literature dating back at least 250 years. Those who work with the dying, such as hospice nurses, are certainly familiar with it.
There are many questions surrounding the phenomenon: Why and how does it happen? What is the mechanism involved? Why do some experience it, while others do not? Terminal lucidity has been found in individuals with dementia, brain tumors, strokes, and mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. These are the people one would think would be least likely to have this experience, and yet they do.
Out of the 227 dementia patients tracked, approximately 10 percent exhibited terminal lucidity. From his literature review, Nahm has reported that approximately 84 percent of people who experience terminal lucidity will die within a week, with 42 percent dying the same day.
These findings suggest that normal cognition can occur in spite of a severely damaged brain. How is it possible for someone’s brain to be destroyed by a disease, and yet the person can become lucid and engaging close to death? Nahm gives the example of a 91-year-old woman who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for 15 years:
The woman had long been unresponsive and showed no signs of recognizing her daughter or anyone for the previous five years. One evening, she started a normal conversation with her daughter. She talked about her fear of death, difficulties she had with the church and family members, and then died a few hours later.
Exceptional experiences such as terminal lucidity, deathbed visions, and near-death experiences have raised questions about whether the mind is actually a product of the brain. Some philosophers and theologians have theorized that consciousness is outside of the brain. This idea has been suggested as an explanation for near-death experiences.
Hopefully, there will come a day when we can have the answers to these unusual experiences. Until then, if you are with your loved one at the end of their life, and you are lucky enough to be around them when they are having such an experience, consider it a final gift and savor those moments. The dying who have these experiences appear to have a more calm and peaceful death, while family members who are with them say that they will always cherish the special last moments with their loved one. ~
Mary:
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ending on beauty:
CHANCE
How many times we must have met
Here on the street as strangers do,
Children of chance we were, who passed
The door of heaven and never knew
~ Sara Teasdale
Gates of Kyiv; Kandinsky
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