Gérard Dubois: Exploded Tangerine, 2016*
radio silence
for the first year and a half
of my military service I was in training
for the two years after
I spent my shifts
sitting at a large radio console
listening,
trying to ferret out the secrets
of the Soviet air force
mostly
this meant
trying to dig out meaning
from tiny Russian voices buried
in rumpled beds of static
as part of my training
I learned that some of the voices on the radio
get trapped in the higher ionosphere
and bounce within that band
for years, old voices from years past
still circling the globe
but most of the voices
pass on through the atmosphere
and sail off into the void, traveling to the stars,
the human voice another bit of static
for alien ears
such a lesser static
we are
than what we hear, the sound of the
big bang continuing its expansion, waves
of such distant origin traveling
past and through us all the days of our lives,
such a joyous and holy sound,
but how I cursed it
as I sought human meaning
through its crunch and crackle, not understanding
at the time that I was listening to
the universe singing
its birth
song
~ Allen Itz
Oriana:
This poem reminded me of my last year in Poland, when I was an eager listener of the BBC on the short-wave radio. In order to "catch" the BBC (most Poles were trying to "catch" Radio Free Europe), I would traverse nearby frequencies, including Radio Moscow, very close to "Radio Station Freedom."
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WHY THE HIGH GAS PRICES? REFINERIES ARE LOSING CAPACITY
~ Bottom line: there are not enough refineries; therefore, gas prices may never decrease.
Companies have gotten the message that America wants to switch from petroleum to other sources of energy, so companies don't think that building new refineries makes much sense.
Also the pandemic lowered demand, refiners lost money, and didn't invest.
Finally, hurricane damage. ~
(Summary by Danusha Goska)
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/18/1106045608/oil-companies-are-profiting-from-the-scarcity-driven-by-refineries-losing-capaci?fbclid=IwAR2OmP7R4UklE-YT6oDHEvLf_zCSztZ7yU0pFqkt0PLRzLAgH8aS1gA0x30
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WHAT’S CAUSING INFLATION?
~ The last few months have been a painful crash course on inflation. We've been forced to become quick learners as the price of rent, gas and other essentials have soared in the first half of 2022.
Economists have a few general explanations for inflation:
Sometimes it happens when increased competition for a limited amount of homes, cars and a number of other essentials drives up their prices. This is demand-pull inflation.
Sometimes it happens when the price of a good or service (like uhhhhhh gas for example) increases dramatically because the cost of producing it is higher. This is cost-push inflation.
Sometimes there's just too much money in the economy.
But economists can't agree so far on what caused this particular bout of inflation, whether it was preventable and most importantly, who or what is to blame.
On today's show, we hear from an economist who says the federal government bears responsibility for our current inflation. And we'll also hear why Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was so slow to respond to the threat of inflation. ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/17/1105927579/the-debate-over-whats-causing-inflation
Jerome Powell*
RUSSIAN CYNICISM
~ I left Russia in 2011. I had a good job in Moscow and a very nice life. Yet, I was planning to have children and under no circumstances did I want my children to grow up there. At that time Russia was not a pariah state, it did not yet start troubles/war/genocide in Ukraine. It was mildly authoritarian and except for occupying 20% of Georgia (which NOBODY in the whole world paid any attention to) was almost a model world citizen. Well, in any case a dynamically growing important economy. But, as I said, I did not want my children to grow up there. On to “why”.
Russians of my age are overwhelmingly and terminally cynical. In all fairness, this is probably not something they’re to blame for. Generations of people who lived under the Soviet Rule used to having two different lives — public, where they professed to be good communist citizens and acted accordingly, and private — where they hated communism, laughed at it, feared it, and were by no means communist. This schizophrenic existence for 70(!) years under the communist rule must have left deep scars in the collective psyche of the people. That’s the first explanation that I have for why an upper class educated Muscovite would commonly profess things like “Post-truth” (i.e. truth doesn't matter, the whole world lives a big lie), acceptance of corruption (everybody is corrupted and corrupt, people in Western countries just hide it better than us — goes a common belief), belief that democracy/human rights are otiose [futile].
I think the communist regime is only partly to blame for it — as a nation Russians are amazingly lazy. Magnificently so. Being the richest country in the world in terms of natural resources, Russia is so very used to living off rent of its immense territory and many riches, that it influenced the nation, rendering it rather slothful as a whole (yes, there are always exceptions). So, instead of changing the country and their lives — difficult and time-consuming — during the last 15–20 years Russians simply preferred to be cynical about the world, making excuses and not tackling problems head on, when they still had a chance.
So, yes, the cynicism is something that is completely accepted socially in Russia and really disgusts me. ~ Georgy Djaparidze, Quora
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NAVALNY HAS BEEN “DISAPPEARED”
~ Putin, apparently, has "disappeared" Alexei Navalny.
Navalny's lawyers can't find him. His family has no idea where he might be.
Is he still alive? The question needs to be asked. Because — what would Putin have left to lose?
He already has been revealed as the war criminal of the worst kind, and the civilized world will never recognize him again as a legitimate political figure.
This is Stalinism all over again in Russia. Political assassination by another name.
So much tragedy as a result of that vile, worthless, deranged, cancer-ridden human insect's existence. ~ M. Iossel
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THE COST OF WAR
~ Destroyed cities, millions of refugees. And a paradoxical fact that defies comprehension: enormous sums of money are spent daily on this mass murder that could have been spent on solving social problems. This money could have been invested in the prosperity of both countries, but now Vladimir Putin has invested it in destruction.
In fact, what sums are we talking about? Kyiv, according to estimates of the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance, spends $10bn a month on the war. Of course, this money could also be put to better use, but it should be understood that the Ukrainian side was forced to spend it: it had no choice whether to go to war or not.
But for Russia, which initiated the war, such spending was a conscious choice. And that is why it is the expenditure of the Russian budget on the “special operation” that can be evaluated in terms of the best use of money.
So how much is Russia spending on the war? There is no official information about it, and experts’ estimates vary greatly. Therefore, in order to derive a possible amount of expenses, we will consider the range of expert data available in the public domain and reduce it to an arithmetic average. Of course, we must immediately stipulate that the figure obtained will not be exact: it will only be a weighted average. So:
According to American military expert Robert Farley (who is incidentally often quoted in Russian official publications), one day of war with Ukraine costs Russia no less than $500m. That's 35.5 billion rubles.
Surprisingly, the Russian state media quote even more than the cost of one day of the “special operation”. The publication Ukraina.ru (part of the holding company Russia Today) reports the figure of $20bn (1.4 trillion rubles), pointing out, however, that these are not official figures, but their own calculations.
Other sources also quote the figure of $20bn. It appears, for example, in the publication of the Turkish news agency Anadolu, which cites a study conducted by the Center for Economic Recovery and EasyBusiness, and Civitta.
Meanwhile, the data department of Novaya Gazeta, without naming the exact amount spent, estimated the daily expenses of the Russian budget on the war differently. The journalists used data about the cost of the “special operation” in Syria ($2.4m per day), and compared the forces involved in both wars. The Russian contingent in Syria was 1,600 men; in Ukraine it was at least 149,000 men.
A rough calculation (taking into account payments to military and civilian specialists, communications and IT services, maintenance of military equipment, medical expenses and food, but without taking into account the transport shoulder due to the lack of a complete list of military units involved in the Ukrainian “special operation”) shows that for one day of war Russia can spend about $223.5m – or 15.8bn rubles.
The arithmetic average of all these figures is $6.9bn. This is 483 billion rubles per day.
Once again, we should emphasize that the figures are approximate. It should be understood that even in conditions of sanctions, Russia continues to receive money from the export of hydrocarbons, partially covering the cost of the war. According to The Guardian, during the "special operation", Moscow even doubled its profits from the sale of oil, coal and gas to the EU compared to last year's figures, earning €44bn ($46.2bn or 3.2 trillion rubles) in two months.
However, the money spent on the war could have been put to better use.
In the end, even if this money were simply handed out to all 146,171,015 residents of Russia, there would be more than 212,000 rubles per person.
But instead — bombed out Odessa, Kharkov, Sumy, Chernigov, Kiev, Nikolaev, destroyed Mariupol…
ttps://genevasolutions.news/ukraine-stories/what-s-the-cost-of-war-for-russia-and-what-could-be-done-with-this-money?fbclid=IwAR18q2i-UV3iV_d2yfefTywHsCKqPp81e-O5Sv9c0ATvNQC9Tbkc7twJFuY
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ROGUE STATES (Misha)
North Korea, Belarus, Syria, Eritrea — and Russia.
The world's darkest rogue states.
After Russia loses this insane, unwinnable war, it will cease to exist in its unsustainable present form. Inevitably, it will fall apart.
There is not a cohesive idea, no common ideal to bind it together — this militarily weak state glorifying medieval violence, engorged on resentment and devoid of any other economic assets than the steadily devaluing raw materials.
Eventually — in the fullness of time — truth, sound institutions, the rule of law, democracy and freedom will prevail... hopefully. ~ M. Iossel
Oriana:
Misha is an eternal optimist. Note, however, this part: “this militarily weak state.” This is the first time in my life that I’ve come across such a blunt statement. What a reversal since the days of the Soviet Union! 
*
COULD THE SOVIET UNION HAVE SURVIVED?
~ Victory in war took the Soviet armies to the centre of Europe, where they stayed. The Soviet Union’s seductive ideology had already given it influence across the world. But after Stalin’s death in 1953 the ideology started looking threadbare, even at home.
In Eastern Europe, inside the Soviet Union itself, the subject peoples were increasingly restless for freedom. Soviet scientists were the equal of any in the world, but their country was too poor to afford both guns and butter and their skills were directed towards matching the American military machine, rather than improving the people’s welfare. It worked for a while.
But in 1983 the Soviet Chief of Staff admitted that ‘We will never be able to catch up with [the Americans] in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution’. ~
Lytiek Gethers, Quora
Ethnic minorities are the majority of Russia's forces.
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WHEN DID THE SOVIET UNION STOP BEING GREAT? (Dima Vorobiev)
Short answer:
The USSR stopped being “great” and started down the slope toward “ridiculous” and “hopeless” in the mid-1960s. Looking back, the process passed the point of no return after the invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and our defeat in the Moon race in 1969.
Longer answer:
The 1960s started well for us. Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and many more were to come. Our military build-up gave the Americans the fright of their life during the Caribbean crisis. The rulers promised us that by 1980 we would be reaching Communism, the most prosperous and just society of all.
Then the following happened:
The ruler who promised us Communism and made the Americans shake in their boots turned out be an incompetent, bumbling voluntaríst (Soviet speak for a pigheaded comrade who goes against the grain, but is not deemed criminal or enemy of the people) and was kicked out of the Kremlin.
The Jews in Israel not only became BFF with America, but humiliated our Arab friends in the Six-Day War. Our own Jews openly cheered for Israel, and ridiculed the Palestinians.
The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial opened the era of persecution of Soviets dissidents, among which ethnic Jewish intellectuals were over-represented. Together with the increasing push of our Jews for emigration to Israel, this irreparably tarnished the image of the USSR among Jewish progressives in the West, who ever since the 1917 revolution had been our most vocal supporters.
The government’s efforts to fill the shelves of our grocery stores with cheap abundant food failed. The USSR started importing big quantities of food from the West, and kept doing it until the end in 1991.
The discovery of oil and gas in Western Siberia diverted our economy in the extractive direction. Making industry more effective stopped being a priority. Under the torrent of petrodollars, productivity stagnated.
The violent suppression of Czechoslovak reforms in 1968 made plain for everyone the ossification of Real Socialism (actually existing Soviet socialism)
Maoism overtook the role of Stalinism as the shining star of the radical left in the West. The social unrest of the late 1960s in Europe and the US failed to boost our influence the way it happened in the 1930s.
China not only stopped being our friend and closest ally, but increasingly became “the most likely adversary”.
The 1970s still held out for us a few sweet years ahead. The spike in oil prices, the 1973–1975 recession in the West, and the general post-Vietnam, post-Watergate gloom in the US opened in the mid-1970s the last chance for us to win the Cold War. But consumerism already infected the USSR, and senility the Kremlin. From there, the death of the Communist project was only a matter of time. ~ Dima Vorobiev, former propaganda executive in the Soviet Union, 1980-1991)
Oriana:
Do I detect anti-Semitism in Dima's remarks? Blaming all that goes wrong on the Jews is a very ancient tradition. Also, the Soviet Union was not pro-Palestinian for any humanitarian reasons. Rather, it saw Israel as an outpost of the West, and close ally of the US.
But I do appreciate Dima's insight about the decline of the Soviet Union in the eyes of the world starting in the 1960s, with the invasion of Czechoslovakia and losing the Moon race.
Russian tank in Prague, 1968*
Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart, whoever wants it back has no brain.” ~ Vladimir Putin
Allan Glass:
I agree, but only with the second part of this statement.
I do not miss the old Soviet Union in any shape or form, in spite of living there for the first 27 years of my life. Luckily, after many years of trying, I was able to cross the border and get out. Never looked back.
Goodbye, homo sovieticus!
I guess I have no heart, as per Mr. Putin.
Renan Miranda:
When I was a teenager, I once asked a middle-aged Russian man about the USSR. His answer was the shortest and the deepest I could have heard: “We had a dream…”
Timur Sulaimanov:
That‘s what Putin believes in, much like a lot of other Russian people. After all if all you care in life is stable job, guaranteed income and guaranteed dignity of simple life, then Soviet life was exactly that for you. But if you want unrestrained freedom of expression, freedom of public discourse, freedom of thought, conscience, speech, society open to public scrutiny, public administration and government accountable to citizens, then Soviet Union was complete opposite, it was suffocating for you.
True, everything has changed. Identity changed. Relationships between people have changed. Society became stratified, there are social classes now that understand each other differently, compared with the way it used to be. New aristocracy has developed. Of course, Soviet Union has been plundered by current oligarchs and Putin’s circle, more importantly Soviet people have been robbed blind in open daylight, all of their ( our, i should say) life savings have been diluted 1:10,000 in the hyperinflation of 1991–93.
We still did not recover from that catastrophe that disintegration of Soviet Union was for everybody. It is safe to say that to this day half of the ~300mln population of all former Soviet republics still live on a 100USD/month incomes, endure daily hardships and face economic uncertainty, which we never had in USSR. But to think of the change of social and economic order back to socialism is impossible though, no one wants it anymore.
Socialism and communism is old and antiquated notion of social justice and equality that no one believes in anymore. It is like wanting to re-introduce monarchy, and the rule of christian church in the hope that powerful and kind monarch together with christian clergy will uphold peace and justice in the country, establish life based on christian values, and rein in all the rich classes corrupting the moral fabric of society.
No, it‘s naive to think that. The time of communism has passed, it failed exactly at what it was supposed to deliver — model of life superior to capitalism. It didn‘t work. Soviet Union could stand only thanks to its cheap source of income — oil and gas exports, much like Russia today, owing its existence to its minerals rather than labor and ingenuity of people.
Alexei Kochubei:
USSR was a totalitarian state, millions were killed, deported, executed. Their human rights were abused. Putin is praising USSR because his ancestors were executioners during Soviet time. He is affiliated with KGB — this structure gained so much profit because of repressions. In my opinion his comments about USSR are disgusting.
Konstantin Karyaev:
What’s important and often missed by foreigners is that Putin’s saying is addressed to Russians, or, generally speaking, ex-USSR citizens. The attitude to USSR in Western propaganda is well-known (“the evil empire”) so Putin is not that naive to expect “missing the USSR” from Western audience.
And for a regular Russian man the USSR days were the days of stability, extremely low crime, good education and acceptable medical service for everyone, social guarantees (like guaranteed more or less decent place to live) and decent degree of social justice. The future was always predictable and certain, and this brought a high degree of comfort to most of the population. No inflation and a guaranteed work place — hehe, now it could be again appealing even in the Western world ;)
That’s why even in the second half of the 1980s when the “Soviet” elites actually started the final stage of disbanding USSR and especially its socialist economic model, people laughed at the idea that USSR can be dissolved. It just sounded ridiculously improbable.
The “tough” and “hard to grasp” fact in Putin’s version is that by 80s there was little in USSR left of the principles and virtues it was declaring to pursue. And, most probably, there were no ways to “make the wrongs right”. So the idea to “returning back to 80s” actually means a return to decay and inevitable death — and obviously you have no brains if you want that.
It’s really hard to admit. But since you realize it, from analyzing your personal reminiscences or from reading a lot on the topic, it’s easy to see that Putin is right.
Leonardo Giuseppe Masia:
As far as I know, the sentence is a paraphrase of an aphorism of Georges Clemenceau.
The original phrase is: “who is not radicals (or “socialist”) at 20, has no heart. Who is radical at 40, has no brain”.
Clemenceau was quite a young politician in the year of Parisian Commune (he was the mayor of the Parisian suburb of Montmartre, if I remember), and even if he did not adhere to it, he was a friend of many of the “Communards”, and he struggled to protect them during the following repression and to encourage a policy of national reconciliation after that. Likely, the sentence comes from those years.
Garfield Farkle:
The second part is true. Russia is an economic basket case heading for third world status.
The first part is false — no one should miss that dreary, oppressive trailer park.
The one with no heart is Putin, who, by launching Putin’s War, has chosen to make things much worse for the Russian people.
Christian Olof:
In the end of Soviet-reign most people did not want it. Agriculture was improved, technology and democracy refined in most countries, and this diminished the need for the socialist system according to most Russians and therefore the Soviet system collapsed. The people who maintained it mostly did not want it anymore.
The Soviet Union had its rightful place but as most things history flushed away what is no longer needed and creates something new.
Was the Soviet union evil? My answer to that is no. To be evil requires evil intentions and The Soviet Union had good intentions. Sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions is also something people say and that is often true but to do wrong and be evil are two completely different things.
Did the Soviet Union do bad things sometimes? Without a doubt yes!
But that is not being evil.
In reality the concept of good and evil is more complex than in a Star Wars-movie.
Oriana:
Was Stalin evil? Yes, he was a monster. And he ran an evil regime, with gulags, deportations, mass executions -- and intense and constant propaganda that this was paradise. Things improved after his death, but the lack of human rights still meant that the Soviet Union was basically evil. The leadership did not care about improving people's well-being -- only about holding on to power. Today Putin is a glaring example of that.
Benny Marash:
As a teenager in the USSR in the 80s, I wanted the most 3 things: to see the movies that I heard about, to read the books that I choose, and to buy condoms. It was almost impossible. And I am not talking about “anti-Soviet" stuff, but stuff like Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey" and Kafka's “The Castle”! Even the Bible, yes, very simple, the most popular book in the normal world, I could get after intensive efforts in the age of 17. So, for me, USSR was evil. And, I believe, for every normal person, too.
Victor Volkov:
Soviet Union at its core had a noble goal — to build utopia for everyone in the world. A lot of works (art/literature), especially early on, were inspired by desire to have the greater future. Not missing those indeed would mean having no heart.
However, the idea was perverted, there were gulags, shortages of various products, and eventually system has failed. Being nostalgic about the Iron Curtain and cold war would definitely mean having no brain.
Alexey Godin:
Things I miss about the Soviet Union:
Real equality. There was some inequality in the late USSR, but it was a bag of laughs compared to nowadays.
Stability. You knew you will have work. You will have your own place to live (maybe in 10–15 years, but you will), pensions, paid vacations.
Infrastructure for children: free kindergartens, sport/science/… circles.
Generally the benefits of the socialist state.
The general atmosphere where people were judged by their intellect/good spirit instead of money.
The dream. People really harbored the idea that once there will be no state and no borders, no rich and no poor and everyone will get according to his needs and provide according to his talents.
I am not speaking of things we have still: free higher education and free healthcare.
What I don’t miss:
Ideological indoctrination where the preachers didn’t believe in the message they were preaching (the late USSR mostly)
Closed borders (all the time)
Product deficit and queues of the late USSR
The repressions of the early USSR.
Ivan Novoselov:
30 years has passed since collapse of the USSR. Today Russians miss the memory of Soviet Union, the idealized image of it in their memories, not the USSR itself.
In 1980s people didn’t like the way they lived and the government was very inefficient in managing economy and running the country in general. Life wasn’t perfect, but Soviet people still lived happily, had hopes, had all their life ahead of them.
Then came the 1990s, a dire time for all Russians. No laws, no economy, no state, no respect, no clear path in life. It was the record decade in Russia for the number of suicides. Some did manage to accommodate, some were barely surviving. A few got out rich, usually by speculating, robbing others or participating in criminal schemes.
Then came 2000s, a decade of economic restoration and rapid economy growth. Then came 2010s, a decade marked by international conflicts, sanctions and internal unrest. Life of people didn’t improve much in 2010s.
It’s 2021 now. Those people who remember USSR are at least 40+ like me. Those who managed to live in the USSR as adults are well over 50.
Those people who lived in USSR remember their childhood, which was really great (the USSR was an excellent place for children), remember their student years (the USSR was a great place for students), remember their youth.
People tend to forget small bad things if they are shadowed by big bad things that happen later. So today people don’t really remember things they disliked in the USSR because disasters of the 1990s were much more terrible.
Deficit of sausages is nothing compared to not being paid for your work for a year or more with over 2500% yearly inflation.
So, yes, Russians do miss the Soviet Union because they mostly remember good things about it and now they understand that things that were “bad” were nothing compared to how bad it really became without the USSR.
DO YOU MISS COMMUNISM AND THE USSR?
Small parts of it. I liked how many ethnicities could peacefully coexist in the USSR. I like how you didn’t have to be ashamed to be an atheist. I liked the social programs.
Unfortunately that’s where the sympathies end. Totalitarian society which did not allow its members to leave, plagued by shortages and economic issues, was not the best place to live. ~ Victor Smallfield, Quora
Anna Vinogradova:
The Soviet Union was born on the bones of the Russian Empire; an inept, sleepy monarchy which failed to reform itself on time and as a result was eaten alive by revolutionary types, who, predictably, made things even worse. A lot worse.
Russia was hell on Earth until Stalin died in 1953. The WWII, or The Great Patriotic War, was a genuine, non-communist, truly grassroots movement though, so that’s one of the few pages of Soviet history Russians, and other former Soviets, have every reason to be proud of. The Great Patriotic War was heroic and tragic, and changed the nation for the better. The rest was shameful and tragic, and killed the best people.
It all changed when Stalin died in 1953. The USSR indeed was an evil empire before; not so much after. It was stupid, senile, inefficient, but not evil. Not much more evil than the US in retrospect, although we, the Soviet dissidents, did not know that at the time.
We had excellent counterculture, and excellent life despite communism. Communism just did not affect our lives as much, not since the death of totalitarianism on a cold summer of 1953.
So we did not read the front pages of newspapers, and would read a paper from the back, just like in Israel. We learned not to see the stupid red posters everywhere, especially on holidays. Even though red is a Russian national color and is a synonym of the word “pretty”, so no big deal.
That’s not at all what our lives were about. We actually had lives, filled with friendships, families, children, education, careers, music, poetry, art, very sophisticated film and some of the world’s most beautiful nature. That was not a bad life at all.
Then the whole thing collapsed. Not what they said in the West: not losing the Cold War to the West, losing to its own internal revolutionary types who ate the USSR alive because the USSR failed to live to the demands of the time. Same old. I don’t miss the communism one bit, but the collapse was definitely a very bad thing. I wish Russia had not trusted those American advisors and went the Chinese route instead. Cost a million lives. Live and learn. ~
Alexander Lazarev:
I like to think that the fate of the USSR served as a warning for China to choose a better way of modernizing their country. 
Gorbachev signing the dissolution of the Soviet Union, December 26, 1991
Mary:
On missing the USSR, the quote from the older man:"We had a dream" is the essence of that idealism that can be so much missed by those who once experienced it so strongly. Young revolutionaries are fueled by idealism, the dream of equality and building a world with a more human face, one of peace and harmony and justice for all, where no one has more or less than anyone else. When what happens is the totalitarian horrors of the Stalin years, the dream is not forgotten, it is still remembered and mourned for, with a nostalgia that may seem inexplicable to the rest of the world.
What becomes increasingly difficult is living in a state where all the public messaging, the propaganda, mouths that idealistic program, and claims to have achieved it, while the lived experience of the people is in direct contradiction of those stated ideals. Out of that split comes the cynicism, the divided lives, one public, toeing the party line, the other private, aware of its falsehood. Also from that split comes the epidemic despair of alcoholism and suicide. The experience echoes those quotes about youth and maturity, where it may have been great to be a child or youth in the USSR, but maturity comes up against the realization of all the failures, limitations, dangers and inadequacies of life under a totalitarian state.
Oriana:
I remember a feature on a very successful Chinese business woman who lived in London for some years, and then — returned to China. Her explanation: “I missed the idealism.”
At the same time we must remember that if idealism becomes too extreme, detached from reality, from the awareness that everything is more complex than it seems, disaster follows.
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HISTORY’S WARPED SENSE OF HUMOR (Misha Iossel)
~ Could the little (both metaphorically and literally), crushingly ordinary Leningrad boy named Vova Putin, growing up like a sprig of nasty weed in the giant city's seedier Dostoyevskean part in the harsh post-war '50s and '60s — uncute, unlovely, unsmart, unfunny and totally no fun to be with, tiny and wiry of frame, ignored or at best scoffed at by girls, bitterly envious and resentful of most everyone, given to angry brooding and frequent inward bouts of uncontrollable rage... well, the usual stuff: your archetypal loser's loser beset with ludicrously impossible dreams of world domination — well, could he, that little boy, ever imagine that, at seventy (people don't live that long, as per the popular Russian interjection circa his youth), in the rapid decline of his improbably and unspeakably ugly and deadly life, he would become the most hated and reviled man on the whole damn planet and that hundreds of millions (to put it conservatively, too) of people all across the globe would ardently wish for his imminent death?
No, of course not. He would never in a million dog years have envisioned the dizzyingly implausible trajectory of his life to come... and who could blame him. Thanks for nothing, History, you creep. You have a grotesquely warped sense of humor.
As for the whole world ardently wishing for him to be dead — well, he likely would have dug that idea. Definitely. The whole world thinking of him? Seriously? Him, Vova Putin? Wow.
He always had ahard time distinguishing between loathing and love. Many (parenthetically speaking) suffer from that psychological affliction in Russia. ~
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PUTIN NEEDED AN IMMEDIATE SURPRISE VICTORY IN UKRAINE
~ I think the war was lost when Russia did not achieve the immediate victory Russia planned for.
Russia needed an immediate, surprise victory, like Crimea, so as to occupy and subdue the whole country before the world had much chance to react. Otherwise, Russia would be on the receiving end of the kind of crippling sanctions that are cratering the Russian economy.
The fact that Zelenskyy is still president illustrates the failure of Russia every day. Russia’s goal was to capture the crown jewel — Kyiv — assassinate Zelensky and impose a puppet government while conquering the whole country in a couple of days. Ukraine captured the dress uniforms senior Russian officers brought to wear at the victory celebration and the prerecorded victory announcement was broadcast on Russian media.
Russia’s military losses are already far greater than I think Putin or anyone else would have been willing to accept if known ahead of time. Many of her best military units have been rendered unfit for combat, due to high losses, 10 or so generals have been killed, dozens of colonels have been killed and many other senior officers in the military and intelligence services have been sacked. They can’t be replaced by merely throwing bodies at their vacated positions.
Russia has not only lost hundreds of tanks, but they can’t be replaced because Russia’s huge tank factories that build and repair armored vehicles are closed due to lack of imported parts. Russia is now deploying 50 year-old T-62s.
The pressure of those sanctions tightens like the coils of a boa constrictor daily. Inflation is at 17.6% and is expected to rise to the mid-20s. The Russian finance minister projected GDP to contract between 8.8 and 12.6% this year. The frozen $640 billion war chest and junk credit rating means Russia has no real tools to ameliorate the recession projected at lasting the next 2 years — if not longer.
~ Garfield Farkle, Quora
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HOW BAD WAS CRIME IN THE USSR?
~ Pretty bad. USSR had a pretty high murder rate in the 1980s. And the fact that people took off their windshield wipers when they left their car on the street should tell you something. Petty theft was everywhere, primarily driven by alcoholism (rampant in the 1970s and 1980s).
Russia is a lot better off these days. ~ Victor Smallfield, Quora
WHY DO RUSSIAN SOLDIERS ENGAGE IN SO MUCH LOOTING?
~ We have a saying in Finland: A cossack loots everything that is not bolted down.
Outside Moscow, St. Petersburg and couple of other cities, Russia is poor as a church mouse and uncivilized like jungle savages. The Russian intelligentsia and middle class is extremely thin, and the average Russians could be anywhere from the Third World. There has never really been any civilization beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia.
While China has grown in wealth enormously, Russia has sadly de-industrialized and regressed into a Third World country whose main industry is extraction of natural resources.
There have never been any human or legal rights in Russia, including the protection of ownership and property. Theft, larceny and robbery are so commonplace they are not really regarded as crimes at all.
What happens when poverty, savagery and disrespect of property of other people face a conquered country?
Exactly. The Russians loot everything lootable and nowadays even stuff which is indeed bolted down.
Russia has always been poor and technologically backwards. Some 40% of Russian houses outside the large cities have no indoors sanitation — that is why the Russian soldiers, when they enter a Ukrainian home, make a hole on the upstairs floor and defecate and urinate straight in the room downstairs. They simply do not know how to use a flushable toilet.
Russia has always been technologically backwards. The only thing Russians have ever themselves invented has been the samovar and they stole the tap from the Germans.
It also must be remembered the Russian military represents the worst and most untalented layers of the Russian society. Any boy with any wits will do anything not to get conscripted. Low IQ goes hand in hand with disdain of rules and laws, and the Russian soldiers are no exception. The contract soldiers usually are not ethnic Russians, but from backwards, underdeveloped and poor Asian oblasts — and their actions reflect that. ~ Susanna Viljanen, Quora
Oriana:
Of course serious crime in the Soviet Union, and now Russia, has had a different character than, say, ordinary theft or even homicide. The government was/is criminal. You could be thrown in jail or “liquidated” as an enemy of the state. I’m sure that anyone reading this knows about Stalinist terror. It boggles the mind to ponder that high officials could have so much blood on their hands.
One observant Western journalist remarked that the whole Politburo, standing together, looked like a police line-up.
Here is Misha: A ZONE OF LAWLESSNESS
I never felt safe there as an adult. I realized that this — even the sun-filled Nevsky Prospect in the summer afternoon — is a zone of complete lawlessness, where anything can happen to you and anyone. And even then, much later, returning as a foreign citizen, with all his literary projects, I felt this danger from the very first moment of crossing the Russian border until the very last. Held my breath at the entrance, exhaled at the exit.
And yet, in this sense of constant danger, there was a certain comfort. Because that was MY danger and lawlessness zone that I was born and raised in. And in this permanent absence of any sense of protection, there was also some perverted reliability: dozens and hundreds of millions of the same — Soviet, Russian, native speakers of my language — protected me from with a huge mass of its total helplessness in the face of absolute unpredictableness of each of our private and which had no meaning and weight or at least minimal importance to fate. We all walked together the same narrow paths through the endlessly dangerous, foggy swamp of our common lives.
But that was then. Then we were all equally helpless - that is, we had nowhere to go from that life, there was no way out of our infinite, cut off from the rest of the world. We did not choose that life. It never occurred to us that power could be elective. No one asked us if we like it or not — our life. All that was required of us to periodically (well, yes — constantly) loudly declare that we are completely happy with our lives and our power, and we are pleased with everyone.
And — we were for peace after all. For peace around the world. We were the stronghold of the world, in our advanced swamp, totalitarian quasi-socialism — curled up like a sheep, and just as developed.
Right now... I can't even imagine. Russia seems to be the same lawless, infinitely dangerous, forever ready for unpredictable wild cruelty, but — already different. Already — thrown out of complete madness and evil despair by a raging chain dog to the outside world. And doing so — with the approval of the majority of the Russian population, and on their taxes. Already — voluntarily putting on their necks, in power over themselves, representatives of the monstrous organization (Gestapo nervously smoking in the corner) that destroyed many millions of ordinary Russian people in the recent past century. Which kills and rapes civilians, women and children in a neighboring brother country just because it wanted a more decent human, a free life.
I can not imagine. This is a complete horror, an absolute collapse of the whole Russian history. ~ M. Iossel
Soviet-era communal kitchen
Oriana:
I grew up in Poland, not in Russia, but I can relate it to much of this commentary. There were certainly the good parts: housing was almost free (I am not sure if it was 100% free, since the subject simply never came up), public transportation was abundant and low cost; again, I’m not sure if child care was free or low-cost, but in any case women could work without worrying about adequate child care (many also had their mother living with them, the formidable Polish babcia). I was never afraid to be in the streets after dark; there were plenty of pedestrians and, here and there, a policeman walking his beat, which helped keep crime low. I saw the police as protectors (I mean it). I was never afraid to approach a policeman with a question (usually about directions, since I had a talent for getting lost).
University education was free, and there was no unemployment that I was aware of — though of course that didn’t guarantee that you’d like your job. There was maternity leave, paid vacations, free healthcare — but one could also choose to see a private doctor or dentist.
There were plenty of books and magazines, music (before the Beatles took over, French and Italian songs were popular), and Western movies, including of course American movies. Opera tickets were affordable (opera and live theater were subsidized).
One good thing that I realized only after I left was freedom from advertising. TV shows (some of them American) were not interrupted with commercials.
The huge drawback was shortages of consumer goods, the small size of most apartments, often inadequate heating in winter, difficulties traveling abroad (most people simply couldn’t afford it, and Soviet-block countries didn’t have interchangeable currency).
But the worst part was the constant exposure to political propaganda and the awareness that the government was illegitimate, taking orders from Moscow. No question, there was a sense that something was rotten in the political sphere, and that weighed heavily over the nation.
Soviet-era doll
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THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM AROSE FROM CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM
~ The idea of communism initially emerged from Christian monasticism. When I think about it, it makes total sense. Christian monasteries are in key ways the purest communist societies that have ever existed in Western civilization. But that was only possible at a small scale and with very committed individuals — often the cream of society at the time in terms of good, principled, nonviolent, deeply pious people.
Of course, there was a lot of hypocrisy and intolerance over the centuries as well, but the point is that this massive project, that makes actual 20th Century communism look tiny by comparison, fundamentally worked because these people were all aligned with proto-communist ideals. But if you tried holding all of society to that standard you would have economic and social chaos. Most people are not wired like that. ~ Luke Hatherton, Quora
Oriana:
Even before monasticism, some early Christian communes practiced a form of communism, i.e. all property was held in common.
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“All photographs are memento mori.
To take a photograph is to participate
in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality,
vulnerability, mutability.
Precisely by slicing out this moment
and freezing it, all photographs testify
to time’s relentless melt.”
~ Susan Sontag
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DEGROWTH: A LIFE OF FRUGAL ABUNDANCE
~ We used to live on a planet that was relatively empty of humans; today it is full to overflowing, with more people consuming more resources. We would need one and a half Earths to sustain the existing economy into the future. Every year this ecological overshoot continues, the foundations of our existence, and that of other species, are undermined.
At the same time, there are great multitudes around the world who are, by any humane standard, under-consuming, and the humanitarian challenge of eliminating global poverty is likely to increase the burden on ecosystems still further.
Meanwhile the population is set to hit 11 billion this century [other estimates set population peak earlier, around 9 billion, followed by a steady decrease]. Despite this, the richest nations still seek to grow their economies without apparent limit.
Like a snake eating its own tail, our growth-orientated civilization suffers from the delusion that there are no environmental limits to growth. But rethinking growth in an age of limits cannot be avoided. The only question is whether it will be by design or disaster.
The idea of the steady-state economy presents us with an alternative. This term is somewhat misleading, however, because it suggests that we simply need to maintain the size of the existing economy and stop seeking further growth.
But given the extent of ecological overshoot – and bearing in mind that the poorest nations still need some room to develop their economies and allow the poorest billions to attain a dignified level of existence – the transition will require the richest nations to downscale radically their resource and energy demands.
This realization has given rise to calls for economic “degrowth”. To be distinguished from recession, degrowth means a phase of planned and equitable economic contraction in the richest nations, eventually reaching a steady state that operates within Earth’s biophysical limits.
At this point, mainstream economists will accuse degrowth advocates of misunderstanding the potential of technology, markets, and efficiency gains to “decouple” economic growth from environmental impact. But there is no misunderstanding here. Everyone knows that we could produce and consume more efficiently than we do today. The problem is that efficiency without sufficiency is lost.
Despite decades of extraordinary technological advancement and huge efficiency improvements, the energy and resource demands of the global economy are still increasing. This is because within a growth-oriented economy, efficiency gains tend to be reinvested in more consumption and more growth, rather than in reducing impact.
This is the defining, critical flaw in growth economics: the false assumption that all economies across the globe can continue growing while radically reducing environmental impact to a sustainable level. The extent of decoupling required is simply too great. As we try unsuccessfully to “green” capitalism, we see the face of Gaia vanishing.
The very lifestyles that were once considered the definition of success are now proving to be our greatest failure. Attempting to universalize affluence would be catastrophic. There is absolutely no way that today’s 7.2 billion people could live the Western way of life, let alone the 11 billion expected in the future. Genuine progress now lies beyond growth. Tinkering around the edges of capitalism will not cut it.
We need an alternative.
ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE, FOREVER
When one first hears calls for degrowth, it is easy to think that this new economic vision must be about hardship and deprivation; that it means going back to the stone age, resigning ourselves to a stagnant culture, or being anti-progress. Not so.
Degrowth would liberate us from the burden of pursuing material excess. We simply don’t need so much stuff – certainly not if it comes at the cost of planetary health, social justice, and personal well-being. Consumerism is a gross failure of imagination, a debilitating addiction that degrades nature and doesn’t even satisfy the universal human craving for meaning.
Degrowth, by contrast, would involve embracing what has been termed the “simpler way” – producing and consuming less.
This would be a way of life based on modest material and energy needs but nevertheless rich in other dimensions – a life of frugal abundance. It is about creating an economy based on sufficiency, knowing how much is enough to live well, and discovering that enough is plenty.
The lifestyle implications of degrowth and sufficiency are far more radical than the “light green” forms of sustainable consumption that are widely discussed today. Turning off the lights, taking shorter showers, and recycling are all necessary parts of what sustainability will require of us, but these measures are far from enough.
But this does not mean we must live a life of painful sacrifice. Most of our basic needs can be met in quite simple and low-impact ways, while maintaining a high quality of life.
WHAT WOULD LIFE BE LIKE IN A DEGROWTH SOCIETY?
In a degrowth society we would aspire to localize our economies as far and as appropriately as possible. This would assist with reducing carbon-intensive global trade, while also building resilience in the face of an uncertain and turbulent future.
Through forms of direct or participatory democracy we would organize our economies to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, and then redirect our energies away from economic expansion. This would be a relatively low-energy mode of living that ran primarily on renewable energy systems.
Renewable energy cannot sustain an energy-intensive global society of high-end consumers. A degrowth society embraces the necessity of “energy descent”, turning our energy crises into an opportunity for civilizational renewal.
We would tend to reduce our working hours in the formal economy in exchange for more home-production and leisure. We would have less income, but more freedom. Thus, in our simplicity, we would be rich.
Wherever possible, we would grow our own organic food, water our gardens with water tanks, and turn our neighborhoods into edible landscapes as the Cubans have done in Havana. As my friend Adam Grubb so delightfully declares, we should “eat the suburbs”, while supplementing urban agriculture with food from local farmers’ markets.
We do not need to purchase so many new clothes. Let us mend or exchange the clothes we have, buy second-hand, or make our own. In a degrowth society, the fashion and marketing industries would quickly wither away. A new aesthetic of sufficiency would develop, where we creatively re-use and refashion the vast existing stock of clothing and materials, and explore less impactful ways of producing new clothes.
We would become radical recyclers and do-it-yourself experts. This would partly be driven by the fact that we would simply be living in an era of relative scarcity, with reduced discretionary income.
But human beings find creative projects fulfilling, and the challenge of building the new world within the shell of the old promises to be immensely meaningful, even if it will also entail times of trial. The apparent scarcity of goods can also be greatly reduced by scaling up the sharing economy, which would also enrich our communities.
One day, we might even live in cob houses that we build ourselves, but over the next few critical decades the fact is that most of us will be living within the poorly designed urban infrastructure that already exists. We are hardly going to knock it all down and start again. Instead, we must ‘retrofit the suburbs’, as leading permaculturalist David Holmgren argues. This would involve doing everything we can to make our homes more energy-efficient, more productive, and probably more densely inhabited.
This is not the eco-future that we are shown in glossy design magazines featuring million-dollar “green homes” that are prohibitively expensive.
One day, we might even live in cob houses that we build ourselves, but over the next few critical decades the fact is that most of us will be living within the poorly designed urban infrastructure that already exists. We are hardly going to knock it all down and start again. Instead, we must ‘retrofit the suburbs’, as leading permaculturalist David Holmgren argues. This would involve doing everything we can to make our homes more energy-efficient, more productive, and probably more densely inhabited.
This is not the eco-future that we are shown in glossy design magazines featuring million-dollar “green homes” that are prohibitively expensive.
Actions at the personal and household levels will never be enough, on their own, to achieve a steady-state economy. We need to create new, post-capitalist structures and systems that promote, rather than inhibit, the simpler way of life. These wider changes will never emerge, however, until we have a culture that demands them. So first and foremost, the revolution that is needed is a revolution in consciousness. ~
https://theconversation.com/life-in-a-degrowth-economy-and-why-you-might-actually-enjoy-it-32224
Oriana:
There is a "buy-nothing" movement, but it's marginal at best. Still, the idea of energy efficiency is wide-spread by now, along with the awareness that continuing current wastefulness will lead to catastrophe.
Even without the catastrophe angle, there is a rebellion against excess buying. It creates clutter. Books like the Marie Kondo's classic, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” showed us that there is a way to live beautifully: not by buying more things, but by getting rid of clothes we'll never wear again, books we'll never touch again, plates and bowls we never use. Instead of those ten cheap mugs, we could have bought one that "sparks joy." In my experience, it works. And it's interesting to ponder that a book like that would have never become a best-seller in the fifties, when it was considered a patriotic duty to buy, buy, buy.
Mary: LESS IS MORE
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CHILD LABOR IN ENGLAND, 1830s
~ Here is an excerpt from a book called “The Story of Old Halifax” describing the conditions where children worked in the 1830s, after the introduction of mechanized spinning mills but before the passage of laws protecting them. Before the Industrial Revolution, spinning had been done on manual spinning wheels and hand looms, often in homes. The spinning machines revolutionized cloth production. Children were also used to work in mines, which were often little more than muddy holes dug into the side of a hill.
“Boys and girls were sent into the mills when they were five or six years old; some were even younger. (…) We know that fathers took their children out of bed before five o'clock on a dark winter's morning, and carried them on their shoulders to the mill. Clocks were a luxury, and many children, afraid of being late, were at the mill gates long before the opening hour, and the little mites would fall asleep until wakened by the rattle of the machinery. They stayed at the mill until eight o'clock at night, and the engine did not stop for meal times. There was no halftime, no Saturday half-holiday, the machinery was not fenced, nor were there any factory inspectors. The overlookers beat the children unmercifully, hitting them to keep them awake, and the sleepy infants sometimes fell against the machinery and were maimed or killed.
“A spinner, in his evidence before the Commissioners in 1833, said ‘I find it difficult to keep my piecers awake the last hour of a winter's evening ; have seen them fall asleep, and go on performing their work with their hands while they were asleep, after the billey had stopped, when their work was over; I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of piecening when they were fast asleep, when there was no work to do, and they were doing nothing.’
“A tradition clings to Brookhouse Mill about a dark winter's morning when several factory children met their death. It was so dark and slippery that they must have fallen from the bridge into the stream, but all that was known was that their little bodies were found between the bridge and the stepping-stones.
“Large numbers of children were wanted for the new mills, and the mill-masters imported many of them from a distance. The Overseers of the Poor in the Midlands and the South of England were glad to get rid of their pauper children, who were often sent in batches to the mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire. (…) These poor mites, housed and fed by the mill owners, were worked under horrible and cruel conditions that may be described as slavery. The worst period was from 1804 until 1819, when the Government was moved to make enquiries about the pauper mill children, because they were, in a sense, wards of the state.
“About the year 1830, Richard Oastler was moved by the condition of the children, and determined to get an Act of Parliament passed, fixing ten hours as the longest time for children to work. (…)
“On January 1st, 1834, an Act came into force by which no child under nine could work in a mill, and children under eleven were not to work more than forty-eight hours a week. Christmas Day and Good Friday were to be holidays, and there were to be eight half-day holidays in the year, to be fixed by the millmaster.
“It was not until June, 1847, that the Ten Hours Bill became law, largely through the unselfish advocacy of John Fielden, M.P., of Todmorden, who though a large manufacturer, had worked for years to better the conditions of factory workers.”
I read a government report from 1842 containing accounts of many child laborers, mostly mine and mill workers. Often mining was a family enterprise: the father was the recorded laborer and he brought his children to work with him. While the father was digging, the kids would load up the trolley (called corves) and push or pull it back up the shaft to the mine entrance by pressing their heads against the back end. They were called hurriers or thrusters. Many children were bald on the top of their heads because of this. The trolleys were very heavy. If they slipped and fell, the child could be crushed. Children were routinely maimed. At the mouth of the shaft were the trappers, who opened and closed the door to the shaft all day.
The shafts were often no more than 2 feet tall, sometimes as little as 10 inches, so the children worked on their hands and knees. Sometimes the shafts were full of water, icy cold, so that their bodies were wet from day to night. The shafts were not reinforced or were badly reinforced so that collapses were common. “Mine damp explosions” were also very common and very deadly.
They would work from 5am to 7pm, with Sundays off. During the winter, the children might not ever see daylight. They would eat a slice of bread and butter at home for breakfast and take a slice with them to work for lunch. After work they would have bread and butter and sometime porridge at home and then fall into bed exhausted. They got meat several times a year. They might go for a swim on a Sunday in the summer; otherwise there were no baths. There were no schools, but by the 1830s, local do-gooders were trying to set up Sunday schools where the kids would learn to read the Bible, not because they believed in the value of education, but because they believed the children would live ungodly lives without religious instruction.
Little girls as well as boys were set to work in the mines, and the girls were not safe from assault and worse, without recourse. Many of the “getters” worked naked due to the heat deep inside the pits. The girls wore nothing but shifts. Nobody had shoes, even in winter. Children were routinely beaten as punishment for slacking off or making mistakes.
Since the father was the official worker who was paid by the weight of the coal, mine owners or supervisors really had no idea who was working in the mine. Nobody oversaw the work, nobody inspected the mines to see if they were safe or a death trap. No provision was made to help with any injuries.
This began to change in the 1830s, but change came slow. ~
Lisa Rose, Quora
Although there has been a general decrease in cruelty toward children and animals, at least in the developed world, I wonder if the future will look back on our times and still find us cruel in various ways. At least when children contributed to the family income, they were regarded as of some value. Now one comes across the opinion that a child is an "expensive nuisance."
Mary:
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ALTERNATIVES TO LITHIUM BATTERIES
~ In the age of electrification, we take rechargeable batteries for granted. From phones and laptops to hi-tech cameras - these batteries have one thing in common. They’re all made of lithium.
Lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion) have taken the world by storm in recent years. They are the most popular battery storage option today, controlling more than 90 per cent of the global grid market. And they store energy efficiently - for a long period of time.
But their most notable use nowadays is in electric vehicles.
Over the last decade, a surge in lithium-ion battery production has led to an 85 per cent decline in prices — making electric cars commercially viable for the first time in history.
Batteries pave the way towards a future without fossil fuel dependence, which is crucial if we want to slow down climate change.
But lithium is not the most environmentally friendly chemical element we could be using. In South America, huge lithium reserves are using up water by the gallon, causing devastating water-related conflicts among locals. A whopping 2.2 million liters of water is needed to produce one ton of lithium.
Lithium extraction also harms the soil and can cause air contamination.
Many do point out that Li-on batteries can be recycled, which is certainly a plus as it means they can be used again and again rather than mining having to occur each time.
But this is not yet a universally established practice and there has been meagre progress in battery recycling in recent years. So if we are to continue relying on lithium batteries, this must improve. As Mario Pagliaro puts it in a recent study, “the reuse and the recycling of LIBs is no longer an option but an inevitable need for both battery and battery EV manufacturers.”
In the meantime, many are searching for a replacement. Especially because there is no guarantee that we’ll be able to find enough raw material to keep up with demand.
What can we use instead of lithium?
SALT
Salt, or sodium, is a close chemical cousin to lithium. While a very similar element, it does not have the same environmental impact, meaning it could be a feasible option to replace it.
The solution could be sodium-ion batteries. Sodium-ion technology doesn’t consume any scarce resources - and its production doesn’t require rare lithium salts - simple table salt is sufficient.
However, sodium is three times heavier than lithium, which means sodium-ion batteries are also heavier. Sodium batteries may also be less powerful because they have a lower cell voltage.
SEAWATER
If salt batteries are a thing, then why not use seawater? A team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany has developed a prototype battery based on seawater.
According to lead scientist Stefano Passerini, they already have interest from investors in South Korea.
The world's oceans contain an estimated 180 billion tons of lithium. But it's diluted, so researchers are devising numerous filters to try and selectively extract the seawater from the lithium — to put it to good use.
IRON
Iron could perhaps be a strong lithium substitute. The chemical element is thought to have better ‘redox potential’, which is scientific lingo for “reduction potential” (it won’t lose its efficiency so quickly).
In September last year, an article entitled ‘Iron Battery Breakthrough Could Eat Lithium’s Lunch’ was published in Bloomberg. It focuses on a clean energy firm in Oregon, US, that is making a record purchase of batteries that depend on “iron-flow chemistry”.
These can apparently store renewable energy for longer and could “help overcome some of the reliability problems that have caused blackouts in California and record-high energy prices in Europe”.
The only limitation with iron-flow batteries is that they are much larger than lithium batteries. This means they wouldn’t be able to be used in smartphones or laptops or even electric vehicles, but could work well as a practical option for grid storage.
SILICON
Many scientists tout silicon as a crucial ingredient that could transform batteries. It wouldn’t replace lithium, but it would be added to lithium batteries - meaning they would be cheaper and more effective in the long-term.
Currently, lithium-ion batteries use graphite as a key component within them. Graphite consists of multiple layers of carbon stacked on top of one another. And in a traditional lithium-ion battery, lithium ions can slip through these vacant spaces between the layers, resulting in a loss.
Replacing graphite with silicon could lead to lighter and safer batteries.
“Silicon as the anode in a lithium-ion battery represents the 'holy grail' for researchers in this field,” according to specialist Professor Apparao M. Rao, who is director of the Clemson Nanomaterials Institute in South Carolina, US.
MAGNESIUM
Magnesium is currently being researched as a potentially powerful component in future batteries. It is an element that can carry a significant charge of +2, which is more than both lithium and sodium.
Batteries made from magnesium metal could have higher energy density, greater stability, and lower cost than today’s lithium ion cells, say scientists in one study.
Magnesium has another advantage too. Each magnesium atom releases two electrons during the battery discharge phase, compared to one electron for lithium. This gives it the potential to deliver nearly twice as much electrical energy.
HEMP
The plant and sustainable fiber used in clothing, building materials, food, and even car parts, could become a key constituent of cheaper, safer, less environmentally harmful electric vehicle batteries.
One proponent is Texas-based startup Hemp Research Corp, a company which has developed a battery alternative. Hemp is trying to gain investment to develop and commercialize its B4C-hemp — short for ‘Boron Carbide made from hemp’, in the form of lithium sulphur battery technology.
The company says commercial applications of hemp would overcome lithium-ion battery challenges in terms of cost, weight, scalability, performance, and recyclability.
A field of hemp.
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JESUS SAVES — FROM WHAT?
~ After reading and re-reading the New Testament, I’m now fully convinced that our view of salvation isn’t what the authors of the Gospels or the Epistles had in mind when they used this term.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, the phrase “He saved others but he cannot save himself” was spoken about Jesus as he was hanging on the cross. But those Pharisees couldn’t have meant “Jesus helped others get to heaven, but he cannot help himself get to heaven.” That would be ridiculous. Instead, the obvious meaning of “He saved others” is about a very different type of salvation; a very practical form that involves escaping death or suffering in this life [not the next one].
I’ve also noticed that there are numerous examples in the Gospels and the other New Testament documents where people often ask “What must we do to be saved?” and while I once assumed that this question must be about “how do I get to heaven after I die?”, I now realize that it was probably a question about how to escape a very practical danger that these people felt was coming soon.
For example, why is it that no one ever asks anyone this question in the Old Testament scriptures?
Why is it that everyone suddenly needs an answer to this question once Jesus arrives but they didn’t worry about it beforehand?
I asked this very question on my social media recently and the responses I received ranged from ludicrous to just plain sad. Most assumed that the question must have been about how to get to heaven after they died, but that begs my question: Why didn’t anyone seem to care about getting to heaven BEFORE Jesus arrived on the scene?
Answer: It’s not about getting to heaven. It’s about being saved from something in the here and now.
The question “What must I do to be saved?” often comes immediately after the preaching of the coming Day of the Lord which was prophesied by the prophet Joel and referenced by other Old Testament prophets. Jesus refers to this coming Day of the Lord in his Olivet Discourse. Peter also mentions it in Acts chapter 2. Paul refers to it in his writings as well.
Once people hear that this Day of the Lord is coming in their lifetimes, the most obvious question is: “What must I do to avoid getting killed in that?”
That’s what is meant by the question: It’s about avoiding the destruction prophesied by Joel and confirmed by Jesus and the Apostles. So, being “saved” in this context is not about getting to heaven. It’s about surviving an apocalyptic event.
The mistake made by later Christian theologians was to spiritualize this question and reinterpret these passages as if the whole point was to get to heaven and avoid hell in the afterlife. It’s also why terms like “The Kingdom of God” get reframed as “Heaven after we die” rather than what Jesus says it is: A new reality we can enjoy in this very moment.
Rethinking the way we view salvation is key to understanding Jesus and his mission and message.
Maybe that’s why he starts out his ministry by warning us to “Think Differently” [metanoia]? We need new eyes and fresh perspectives to unlearn all the religious garbage we’ve inherited from our parents and pastors.
If “What must I do to be saved?” isn’t about getting to heaven, then it’s also not a question about whether or not we’re already loved, or forgiven, or accepted by God. The scriptures declare over and over again that God was in Christ NOT counting our sins against us but reconciling the World to Himself. We are already loved. We are already forgiven. There’s nothing we need to do to unlock it or activate God’s acceptance. It’s ours right now.
What must I do to be saved? Nothing. You’re already saved, treasured, beloved and accepted by your Abba.
Rest in that.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/keithgiles/2021/03/jesus-saves-from-what/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&fbclid=IwAR2x3qSzhJ_jCmm1vlfbk8CeFVJ9dxm1Wrpsm8HVPEHHLPYCMa3x0gYA2CM
Oriana:
The last two paragraphs are the essence of Protenstantism. Catholics are forever struggling with their sinfulness. They always feel god is spying on them, writing down their sins -- including sinful thoughts.
On a different subject: why do we have many churches dedicated to St. Joseph and none to god-the-father? Why has the Son completely supplanted the Father? There are many reasons, of course, but mercy as opposed to vengefulness is probably the chief one.
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“THE BIBLE CLEARLY SAYS”
1. Do not allow a sorceress to live. [Here I strongly prefer the KJV: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.]
(Exodus 22:18)
What are you going to do about that Wiccan down the street? The Bible has given you your marching orders. (Please do not follow them.)
2. Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel.
(1 Peter 2:18)
There was a time when Christians used the Bible’s explicit teachings about slavery as a reason not to abolish the slave trade. What do you do when the Bible isn’t not only vague about slavery but places the onus on slaves to submit to cruel masters?
3. If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand.
Was this a problem that needed a solution? Either way, the Bible clearly gives a solution to this embarrassing problem.
4. No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.
(Deuteronomy 23:1)
Had an accident that impacted your privates? Stay the heck out of the church.
5. The men of her town shall stone her to death.
(Deuteronomy 22:20–21)
What do you do if your daughter loses her virginity before marriage? Be careful how you answer—because this is what the Bible clearly says:
If the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death.
She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.
6. Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.
(Leviticus 20:9)
Seems harsh, right? Too bad.
7. God encourages the murder of pagan children—and infants
(Hosea 13:4, 9, 16)
You shall acknowledge no God but me. . . . You are destroyed, Israel. . . . The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.
It’s kind of hard to maintain a pro-life stance in the face of this clear statement in the Bible. Maybe we should only worry about Christian fetuses? ~
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/jaysondbradley/2018/07/terrible-things-the-bible-clearly-says/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&fbclid=IwAR0eaGGajgLvR6Q4Esm5maFRAMmLKn25BUBB2C3ejjhzuh4taeeBiZmZTXo
Oriana:
The author of the article, a self-identified “progressive Christian,” concludes that these quotations need interpretation. It’s just that he wouldn’t like my interpretation, or that of anyone who discovered, thanks to taking a class on Bible as Literature, passages that were never discussed in church.
And how do you “interpret” the story that God sent a she-bear to tear apart the children that dared to make fun of the prophet Elisha’s baldness? I agree that those children behaved badly, but . . . did they deserve the death penalty?
I’ve found a complicated interpretation of this story as a warning against idolatry. Maybe. But what stands out is that a she-bear was sent by god to kill those naughty boys for whatever reason. I think my catechism nun, who never told us this story, was right when she said, in a different context, “The times were different then.” 
Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin, circa 1435
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SWEDEN IS 80% ATHEIST
Oriana:
Wow, I didn’t realize the percentage was this high. While this cheers me up, I realize that there are people to whom religion IS important (e.g. some recovering addicts). That doesn’t bother me, as long as there is separation of church and state, and the religious extremists don’t try to impose their views on the rest of the country.
In fact, some say that the worst thing about America is the existence of fundamentalist denominations, and the obstructionist influence they have on politics (opposing women’s rights, for instance).
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READING ON-SCREEN AND NEAR-SIGHTEDNESS
~ How close is the smartphone or laptop you’re reading this on from your eyes? Probably just a few inches. How long have you spent looking at a screen today? If you’re close to the average it’s likely to be over nine hours.
Research from ophthalmologists shows that our constant screen time is radically changing our eyes. Just like the rest of our bodies, the human eye is supposed to stop growing after our teens. Now it keeps growing.
When our eyes spend more time focusing on near objects, like phones, screens or even paperbacks, it makes our eyeballs elongate, which prevents the eye from bending light the way it should. This elongation increases nearsightedness, called myopia, which causes distant objects to appear blurred. Myopia affects half of young adults in the US, twice as many as 50 years ago and over 40% of the population.
For adults this might cause eye strains or speed up existing vision issues. But for kids, whose eyes are still developing, the situation is so dire that the American Academy of Optometry and American Academy of Ophthalmology both consider myopia an epidemic.
Working for prolonged periods, whether texting, reading or jotting emails is what optometrists call “near work”. The trouble with holding a screen close to your face isn’t about light shining into your eyes, it’s about the strain of the eye. For one, your eyes blink far less when they’re focused so closely. As you’re holding your phone in your hand, performing near work, your muscles stretch and your lenses shift since our eyes over-accommodate to constant close-distance tasks. That’s why they’re growing.
When you put on a pair of glasses, your eye muscles relax because they’re no longer straining. Ditto if you put down your phone – sans glasses – blink a couple times and stare off into the distance for 20 seconds.
Does this affect you? Probably. How much extra time on screen have you had in the past 18 months? How much work have you been doing from home? Pre-pandemic, our phones were already constant companions. When many of us began working from home and e-learning last year, researchers predicted this dramatic online increase would cause never-before-seen eye dysfunction. They were right.
In the spring of 2020, Chinese researchers tested over 120,000 Covid-quarantined students aged six to eight and found myopia and other vision issues linked to home confinement increased up to three times compared with the previous five years – that’s with as little as 2.5 more hours of e-learning (not counting video games, social media, etc). Results for US students could be much higher since many American kids spend most of their days online. “Virtual learning has definitely increased myopia,” says Dr Luxme Hariharan, of the Nicklaus children’s hospital in Miami, Florida, who points anecdotally to a huge shift in cases in the last year. “Prolonged near work [like looking at screens up close] makes our eyes overcompensate.”
“We can clinically measure the millimeter lengthening of the eyeball,” explains Dr Eric Chow, a Miami, Florida optometrist. “Studies have shown that the longer the axial length, the higher the risk of eye diseases like glaucoma, retinal detachment and cataracts.”
Straining vision introduces a host of eye-related health problems. And it’s more than just kids needing prescriptions. “People say ‘oh, it’s just glasses,’” says Dr Aaron Miller, a pediatric ophthalmologist at Houston Eye Associates. “The nearsighted have much higher chances of retina tears and glaucoma, bigger issues secondary to nearsightedness. It’s the long game we worry about.”
He adds: “The shape of the eye is round like a basketball,” he explains. “When an eye becomes nearsighted, myopic, the eye is longer, like a grape or olive. The retina – the coating – can get stretched and thinned. As we age, sometimes there can be breaks in the retina. Like cracks in wallpaper. When that occurs, these cracks cause fluid to enter in behind the wallpaper, that’s what we call retinal detachment which causes a lot of people to go blind.”
This isn’t just a western problem. There is a genetic component here, but it’s clear that behavior accelerates the change. Poor eyes can lead to decreased work efficiency and huge loss of productivity – think money–for multinationals. That’s why nations like China are so worried about this that they have already changed their education system, limiting how long students study – even extra tutoring – to curb the near-work that heightens myopia. The US should do the same, says Miller.
Labeling myopia a second public health crisis is no hyperbole. 10-year-old Aleena Joyce’s screen time tripled in the last 18 months, with many school days – and two-thirds of Aleena’s waking hours – held almost entirely on her iPad. The Illinois fourth-grader had already been diagnosed with myopia – nearsightedness – in kindergarten, and her eyes had worsened each year.
“Sometimes we would have to go in prior to her annual eye exam because she noticed more difficulty with reading the board at school,” says Yusra Cheema, Aleena’s mother.
Aleena was one of a handful of students who said that their vision had markedly worsened in connection with increased screen time. The parents of Alan Kim, the child actor and nine-year-old Minari star, said their son’s prescription doubled in the last year in part due to the near work of on-set studies held on his iPad.
Each child now uses new FDA-approved contact lenses that effectively reshape the eye to slow down myopia. But most parents and their kids have no idea this issue even exists.
These problems affect adults too. Constant connection can heighten high or degenerative myopia, severe nearsightedness that progressively worsens and can lead to cataracts, glaucoma and retinal detachment – since the eyeball stretches and the retina thins – but thankfully, it’s rare. Risk grows with age, and can speed up gradual loss of the eye’s ability to focus, called presbyopia.
Detection can help. Home approaches like GoCheckKids, an FDA-registered vision screening app allows any parent to take a photo of their child’s eyes to analyze how light refracts and measure their risks for near or farsightedness and other eye diseases.
Specialized contact lenses are another major tool, says Dr Michele Andrews, a vice-president of CooperVision, the company behind the FDA-approved MiSight contacts. “It’s a contact geared for children aged eight to 12 whose eyes are growing,” she explains, “Which slow down the progression of myopia and change the shape of the eyeball.”
In late 2021 at the American Academy of Optometry meeting in Boston, an annual eye research conference, Andrews presented the results of a seven-year study that showed abnormal axial length growth slowed by an average of 50% among eight-to-17-year-olds who wore her company’s corrective contacts. Perhaps most striking is for those who suffered from myopia, wore the lenses, then stopped wearing them, “we learned there is no rebound effect,” she says. “Myopia did not come back” after kids stopped wearing her company’s contacts. That’s because these lenses “change the way the light bends inside the eye and pulls the image in front of the retina”, she says, which slows axial growth because the clear image is now in front of the retina. If there’s no reason to grow then the problem resolves itself early.
As myopia is typically most pronounced – and dangerous – as the eyes grow, this solution is geared for kids. But adults have hope too. “Spend more time outdoors,” recommends Chow, at least two hours daily. “Studies have shown that increased sunlight decreases myopia progression.”
Most important is taking breaks which help eyes rest, blink and lubricate. Then there’s the 20-20-20 model. “Every 20 minutes, look at a distance 20 feet away, for 20 seconds,” Hariharan advises. “Being on the computer for hours on end isn’t good for your health. Don’t break to play video games or pick up another screen. Go outside!” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-staring-at-screens-is-making-your-eyeballs-elongate-and-how-to-stop-it?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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WHY WE DECLINE AFTER AGE 70
~ A blood-based discovery as to why humans tend to become frailer after 70 is opening doors to new therapies to manage the decline and disease associated with growing old. Researchers from the Sanger Institute in Cambridge discovered that our blood undergoes a drastic change in older age, which increases our risk of developing diseases and hampers our immune function.
Blood cells and hematopoietic cells – which are young blood cells with the potential to become red or white blood cells or platelets – were taken from 10 humans aged zero to 80+ and analyzed in the study published in Nature. Using these, the researchers were able to sequence the genomes of the 10 people and look for differences in their blood.
It revealed that these stem cells took on an average of 17 mutations per year after birth, as well as losing around 30 base pairs a year from their telomeres. Telomere shortening like this can be influenced by a person’s lifestyle and is associated with aging and the onset of age-related disease.
The genome sequencing also revealed that for adults aged 65 and under, blood is made up of a diverse community of stem cells (in the region of 20,000 to 200,000) who churn out red, white, and platelet cells. However, for people aged 65 and over, there were fewer than 100 different types of stem cell doing the same job.
This lacking diversity is the result of mutated stem cells self-proliferating, something that can happen throughout life but by the age of 70 they have effectively taken over. This means that a person’s blood is being crafted by a small population of faulty stem cells, so not only is it of poorer quality but it also puts older people at higher risk of sickness and slow recovery as well as blood cancers and disorders.
However, it’s not all bad news as establishing a firmer understanding of why this drop off in health occurs at 70 could one day enable us to formulate effective therapies to counter the effect of these selfish, mutant stem cells. Furthermore, it could lead to better support for people undergoing chemotherapy, which appears to have an effect on the body that mirrors aging.
“We predict that these factors also bring forward the decline in blood stem cell diversity associated with aging,” said joint senior author Dr Elisa Laurenti from the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute to The Guardian.
“It is possible that there are factors that might slow this process down, too. We now have the exciting task of figuring out how these newly discovered mutations affect blood function in the elderly, so we can learn how to minimize disease risk and promote healthy aging.” ~
https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/discovery-of-why-we-decline-after-70-paves-way-for-new-therapies-to-tackle-aging/?fbclid=IwAR3YMAZJi388I8Ctzbft3htcIfrbaLt2rmpgoJCJGBk7N9YdDYn26Llp4ps&utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spot_im_redirect_source=pitc
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ending on beauty:
Tell my friends that I've died.
Tell them that I'm out here in the sky, my eyes wide open.
My face covered up by this endless blue shroud.
That I've gone off, empty, to the stars.
~ Federico Garcia Lorca
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