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What does God fear? The disobedience of the planets? The blasphemy of whales? The dreams of worms struggling in the mud?
Does God fear himself? Does God have any human emotions? Sympathy? Love? Hate? Sorrow?
Are there emotions only God experiences? Can we know what they are? Is he as alien to us as we are to the lizard or the rhino?
Does God ever wonder about what he does? Second guess himself? Wonder about his motives?
Does he change his mind? Is he angry about something today? Okay with it tomorrow?
Does he surprise himself with the crazy questions he asks about himself?
Does God laugh?
Would he like to?
~ John Guzlowski
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Oriana:
He called it the "last freedom." I think most of what we think, say, and do is pretty much on automatic, but now and then there is indeed a new situation and that "space for choice" of which Frankl speaks.
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A LEADING ANTHROPOLOGIST SUGGESTS THAT PROTOHUMANS BECAME DOMESTICATED BY KILLING OFF VIOLENT MALES
Why are we so much less violent today than our closest relatives, the chimpanzees?
When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With typical graduate-student arrogance, I pronounced it “too many ideas chasing too little data.”
Half a century and thousands of fossil finds later, we have a far more complete—and also more puzzling—view of the human past. The ever-growing fossil record fills in one missing link in the quest for evidence of protohumans, only to expose another. Meanwhile, no single line emerges to connect these antecedents to Homo sapiens, whose origins date back about 300,000 years. Instead, parallel and divergent lines reveal a variety of now-extinct hominids that display traits once considered distinctive to our lineage. For example, traces of little “Hobbits” found in Indonesia in 2003 show that they walked upright and made tools; less than four feet tall, with brains about a third the size of ours, they may have persisted until modern humans arrived in the area some 50,000 years ago.
As data pile up, so do surprises. Microscopic methods indicate that certain marks on 2.5-million-year-old bones were probably made by sharp stone tools; scientists had previously assumed that such tools came later. The dental tartar caked on the teeth of Neanderthals suggests that the brawny, thick-boned people (almost-humans on one of the parallel lines) probably ate cooked barley along with their meat; these famously carnivorous folks were really omnivores, like us. DNA from tiny fragments of bone—for instance, the tip of a pinkie many thousands of years old—has brought to light a whole new humanlike species that once interbred with us, as Neanderthals did. Charles Darwin drew evolution as a bush, not a tree, for a reason.
The study of human evolution is by now about much more than bones and stones. In 1965 a remarkable book—Irven DeVore’s collection Primate Behavior (which led me to study with DeVore)—made what then seemed a radical claim: We will never understand our origins without intensive study of the wild world of our nonhuman relatives. A handful of scientists, including Jane Goodall, set up tents in distant jungles and savannas. Following monkeys, apes, and other creatures in their habitats, these scientists turned their notes and observations into voluminous, quantitative data. DeVore and others devoted themselves just as rigorously to the remaining human hunter-gatherers, found on every habitable continent except Europe—our biological twins, living under conditions resembling the ones we evolved in.
The multifaceted effort was new and ambitious, but the idea was old. DeVore had hanging in his office an 1838 quote from Darwin’s notebook: “Origin of man now proved … He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” It’s an aphorism that calls to mind one of my favorite characterizations of anthropology—philosophizing with data—and serves as a perfect introduction to the latest work of Richard Wrangham, who has come up with some of the boldest and best new ideas about human evolution.
In his third book, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, he presents fascinating facts of human evolution and genetics as he enters the debate staked out centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among other philosophers), and still very much alive today: how to understand the conjunction of fierce aggression and cooperative behavior in humans. Why are we so much less violent in our communities than our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are within theirs?
At the same time, how is it that human violence directed toward perceived enemy groups has been so destructive?
Wrangham, who teaches biological anthropology at Harvard, was mentored by both Goodall and DeVore. He was in a sense working toward this latest venture in his two previous books, which explore the opposing poles of behavior. Renowned for his meticulous fieldwork, especially with chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, Wrangham showed just how common chimp brutality is. Goodall had acknowledged with frank regret that her beloved chimpanzees could be quite violent. One mother and daughter killed the infants of other females in their group. Males often coerced and beat females, and would sometimes gang up and attack a chimp from another group. At Kibale, large groups of chimps range together, and aggression escalates accordingly.
Wrangham observed as these bigger parties of males got excited and went out on “patrol” in what looked like an organized way: They walked along their territorial border, attacking lone chimps from neighboring communities when they came across them en route. In his 1996 book, Demonic Males, co-authored with Dale Peterson, Wrangham recapped this and other evidence to draw a dire portrait of humanity (the male version) as inherently violent by evolutionary legacy, Here was vivid support for a Hobbesian view of human nature, rooted in genetics.
Wrangham’s 2009 book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, pursued a very different hypothesis. Based on archaeological evidence, he made the case that our ancestors mastered fire much earlier than most of us had believed—perhaps closer to 2 million rather than 800,000 years ago—which changed everything for them. In particular, cooking made possible a much more diverse diet, by allowing the consumption of fruits, leaves, and other plant foods with toxic potential when eaten raw. It made meat, too, safer and easier to digest. As a major bonus, fire extended the day into the night. Given how important we know conversations and stories told around the fire are to human hunter-gatherers, it’s easy to see how this process could have accelerated the evolution of language—an essential ingredient for less physically aggressive interactions.
In his new book, Wrangham grapples fully for the first time with the paradox of the title. Over the decades during which he has focused mostly on the dark side of human nature, evidence has steadily accumulated that humans, from early on in their development, are the most cooperative species in the primate world. Put apes and humans in situations that demand collaboration between two individuals to achieve a goal, as a variety of experimenters have done, and even young children perform better than apes.
Meanwhile, classic work on chimps has been complemented by new studies of bonobos, our other close relative. No more removed from us genetically than chimps are, they are a radical contrast to them, often called the “make love, not war” species. Some of our nonhuman kin, such fieldwork has revealed, can live and evolve almost without violence.
Wrangham draws on this trove of material as he pursues yet another ambitious hypothesis: “Reduced reactive aggression must feature alongside intelligence, cooperation, and social learning as a key contributor to the emergence and success of our species.” (By reactive aggression, he means attacking when another individual gets too close, as opposed to tolerating contact long enough to allow for a possible friendly interaction.) He also applies his evolutionary logic to studies of a wider array of animals. He dwells in particular on some marvelous experiments that explore the taming of wild foxes, minks, and other species by human-directed artificial selection over many generations.
Such breeding efforts, Wrangham notes, have produced “the domestication syndrome”: a change in a suite of traits, not just the low reactive aggression that breeders have deliberately singled out. For instance, in a fox study begun in Russia in the early 1950s, the pups in each litter least likely to bite when approached by humans were bred forward. Yet a variety of other features appeared in tandem with docility, among them a smaller face with a shortened snout and more frequent (less seasonally circumscribed) fertile periods, as in some other similarly domesticated species.
Enter the bonobos, to whom Wrangham turns as he considers how diminished aggression may have been selected for in the evolution of humans. Once thought to be a type of chimpanzee, bonobos are now known to be a different species. The standard view holds that they separated from chimps 1 to 2 million years ago, and were isolated south of a bend in the Congo River. Female bonobos form strong coalitions—partly based on sex with each other—that keep a lid on male violence. The “trust hormone” oxytocin is released during female sex: You could say that the partners are high, in both senses of the word, on trust. Because females run things, males don’t attack them, and even male-on-male violence is extremely limited. Bonobos also display the other traits common to the domestication syndrome, which suggests—as in the case of the foxes—a broad genetic dynamic at work.
Wrangham accepts the consensus that the difference between bonobos and chimps is fundamental, genetic, and evolutionary. His distinctive explanation of the divergence reflects his training in ecology: He has learned that over many generations, ecological realities create species-specific behavior. In the case of bonobos, he suggests, a lush habitat in which they were protected from competition with either chimps or gorillas gave them the luxury of decreasing their own reactive aggression. Other examples of nonhuman self-domestication in the wild exist—for instance, the Zanzibar red colobus monkey diverged from the mainland African red colobus in similar ways during its island isolation—but bonobos are the closest and most relevant to us.
In fact, Wrangham’s notion of human evolution powered by self-domestication has an ancient lineage: The basic idea was first proposed by a disciple of Aristotle’s named Theophrastus and has been debated several times since the 18th century. This latest version, too, is bound to provoke controversy, but that’s what bold theorizing is supposed to do. And Wrangham is nothing if not bold as he puts the paradox in his title to use. In his telling, the dark side of protohuman nature was enlisted in the evolution of communal harmony.
Central to his argument is the idea that cooperative killing of incurably violent individuals played a central role in our self-domestication. Much as the Russian scientists eliminated the fierce fox pups from the breeding pool, our ancestors killed men who were guilty of repeated acts of violence. Certainly all-male raiding parties have operated in some groups of humans, seeking out and killing victims in neighboring villages (which recalls the patrolling chimps that Wrangham reported on earlier in his career). The twist in his current theory is that such ambushes are turned inward, to protect the group from one of its own: they serve as a form of capital punishment. Wrangham cites a a number of examples of anthropologists witnessing a group of men collaborating to kill a violent man in their midst.
The idea is intriguing, and it is indeed true that human hunter-gatherers, whose societies exist without governments, sometimes collectively eliminate bad actors. But such actions are rare, as the Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee emphasized in his extensive studies of the !Kung, which include the report of an unusual case: After a certain man killed at least two people, several other men ambushed and killed him.
My own two years with the !Kung point to a more robust possible selection process for winnowing out aggression: female choice. Women in most hunter-gatherer groups, as I learned in the course of my experience in the field, are closer to equality with men than are women in many other societies. Evolutionary logic suggests that young women and their parents, in choosing less violent mates through the generations, could provide steady selection pressure toward lower reactive aggression—steadier pressure than infrequent dramas of capital punishment could. (Female bonobo coalitions would seem primed to serve a similar taming function.)
Although he downplays such a comparatively domestic story of self-domestication, Wrangham has nonetheless highlighted a puzzle at the core of human evolution, and delivered a reminder of the double-edged nature of our virtues and vices. “Human nature is a chimera,” he concludes, evoking both the hybrid monster of mythic lore and the biological phenomenon of genetically hybrid organisms.
In a closing meditation on a 2017 visit to Poland, he writes, “I walked around Auschwitz. I could feel the chimera at its best and worst.” Violence and virtue, he recognizes, are not opposites but powerful, not always reliable allies. “So much cooperation,” he notes of the smoothly operating human machinery of mass murder—“it can be for good or bad.” To protect us from danger, which now arises mainly from our own inclinations and actions, clear-eyed wisdom like that is surely what we need. ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-humans-tamed-themselves/580447/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=true-anthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1I2TyQcAT1sBiyOqZwcC2xXCJTPKpXFh8JqDWzR2cX4z1Tko_86HMEkD8
Joseph Williams:
Seems logical. Pretty much what happens in prison, gangs and schoolyards. If someone is being self-servingly violent, without nurturing alliances, they will be conspired against. It’s only a reign of terror when their heinous acts wield fear over both those who oppose them and those who are serving/enabling them.
Ryland Zenas:
The only change now, we pay overly aggressive people to beat the crap out of each other in rings, and make the rich, richer. Or we send them off to war, in which those at the top get even richer too. But wait, there’s more, three words — For Profit Prisons. Now, not all of those cases do we find the overly aggressive in, most of it is profiteering, but we’re trying to kill one another off still.
Allister Sands:
Or overly violent males didn't survive long enough to reproduce. Too much violence without thinking first.
Luke Osborne:
Iceland is currently the least violent country.
Even bankers are sentenced to prison in Iceland. lol.
Beau Martin:
It seems the same effect still takes place, even if we simply lock them away.
Oriana:
Statistics show that the most violent men are young: late teens through early twenties. Later hormonal changes seem to calm down the impulse toward violence.
Society has also evolved various mechanisms for re-directing the aggression of young males. The main "substitute aggression" seems to be sports.
Mary: OUR CULTURE STILL ADMIRES VIOLENCE
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WHY DID THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSE?
The Soviet Union went bankrupt.
By 1991, it could no longer maintain the normal functioning of its civil economy (read: feeding and sheltering people) and run its enormous military-industrial complex at the same time. The Kremlin had to choose, for the first time since WWII.
Lenin and Stalin would have chosen the military. Population would have started to revolt, and they would have quieted it all down by an epic blood-letting and strangulation. The North Korean Kims did that in the 1990s, and it worked.
Gorbachev and Co didn’t feel like murdering people. They pulled the plug on the military. Gorbachev got a Nobel prize for that from humanity, and an undying hate from the entire Russian nation (with the exception of some scum like myself) for all posterity.
The military-industrial complex (a good half of the economy, or more) ground to a halt, entire cities in provinces shut down, troops went hungry, and it rippled throughout the whole country to Moscow.
Then the BIG thing happened, the one you know from history books.
The USSR was a Communist empire that consisted of several ethnic republics. When money stopped coming from Moscow, and the fearsome Soviet machine of suppression and control ran dry for fuel, the ethnic elites didn’t see any reason to subjugate themselves to Moscow.
The fifteen republics went every each way. The USSR project was finished. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
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PUTIN AND THE WORST TRADITIONS OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
"Putin draws on the worst traditions of Russia’s history—its tyranny; imperial pretensions; repression of freedom at home and as far as its armies can reach; poverty for many and massive wealth for a few, supported by corruption as a feature of the state—not only to show that power and cruelty are the immutable aspects of the Russian state but also to show that liberal progress over time, our preferred framework for viewing history, is illusion or cant.” ~ Daniel Fried, writing in the June issue of Journal of Democracy
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LIFE IN THE SOVIET UNION
~ Material life was miserable throughout the whole Soviet history. Out of 70 years of brief Soviet history, some 35 years represent a horrible poverty, starvation and pain.
1917–1922: Rapid de-industrialization, driven by the policy of 'military communism'. The policy included expropriations of property, prohibition of private entrepreneurship. By 1922, Russia traveled back in time to 1880s with most railroads closed, electricity and any meaningful production shut down. In agriculture, the military communism and civil war had frozen all the production. The result was an epic hunger in Volga region and South Urals, with 90 million people affected and 5 million dead.
Russian children dead of hunger, Volga Region, 19211929–32: After a short economic recovery of 1923–28, mostly driven by New Economic Policy (in short, a return of the market economy to the agriculture sector of economy), the communists decided to engage in Industrialization and Collectivization. Industrialization was needed desperately as by 1928 Russia had been so thoroughly de-industrialized that it more resembled medieval Moscovia than the Russian Empire.
So, the communists chose to industrialize the country by robbing farmers and converting them back into serfs. In effect, they were made slaves of city population. Collectivization brought sharp decline in agriculture production, destruction of equipment, houses, cattle. Hunger followed. Number of victims is still debated, but it seems that it was anywhere between 3 and 10 million people (1929–32).
1941–47: WWII and post-war famines. Food was rationed during this period by cards. Number of hunger victims is impossible to count, anyway it pales in comparison with the war butchery machine victims.
1947–52: rebuilding the industries. Again agriculture resources were pulled to finance the re-industrialization and military upgrades. Population remained on subsistence levels everywhere (both in cities and in countryside).
In 1962, the working class in Novocherkassk protested against price inflation and effective decrease in salaries. Soviet Army shot 26 workers on the spot, then another 7 were sentenced to death.
Protest march in Novocherkassk, June 1, 1962
1965–91: 'Deficit' economy spiraling out of control. I wouldn't like to expand here on arguments why 'deficit' is an integral part of any central-planned economies (there's no shortage in scientific argument about that). What is important to say is that deficit problem in USSR had three serious boosts:
In 1967, when Liberman/Kosygin economic reforms were rolled back.
In 1974, when peasants were given the right to leave their collective farms and move to cities. In the following 2–5 years, the rural economy came to almost complete stop: villages deserted, agriculture imports sky-rocketed and city dwellers were mandated to participate in 'the battle for crops'.
In 1983, when after short relief brought by the surge in crude oils prices, oil price returned to normal, stripping USSR of hard currency which by that time was already vital (grain was purchased from this to feed the whole country).
In reality, unrolling deficit meant that from 1970s, most of 'luxury' food items went off the shelves to the black market (meat, sausages, fresh fish, caviar, etc); from mid-1980s, deficit expanded to almost every food item (except for bread and milk products) and closer to 1989 even the bread and milk products were off the shelves.
Central government tried to keep the distribution channels in order at least in big cities: these fell victim much later than the rest of the country. But as they fell, it seemed like the problem came out of nowhere: just a couple of years ago (1984) Moscow and St Petersburg knew nothing of deficit and then… Boom! All was gone.
To this day some Moscovites believe that the deficit problem was brought by Gorbachev’s Perestroika and blame CIA for destroying the rock-solid Soviet economy.
Soviet Union: line to buy bread
New Serfdom (1929–74)
Tell about social equality to the peasants (kolkhoz workers) who from 1929 to 1974 couldn't leave their collective farms under the risk of criminal prosecution and did not get any salary (until 1966). As a payment for their serfdom, they were given a small part of agricultural products that they themselves produced.
Soviet peasants did not have passports. This might seem a trivial thing today, but in USSR it meant these people could neither move, nor go to study, nor travel, nor search for other job outside their farm other than with permission from their master (collective farm director).
It was serfdom, fair and square. And there were 58 million of them by the time this serfdom was abolished in 1974.
NEW MASTERS
Tell about social equality to the Communist party elite, who isolated themselves from the rest of the country with luxurious accommodation, exclusive shops, clinics, Crimean recreational facilities, spacious dachas, free transport and security, cash in envelopes on top of their official salaries, etc.
Somehow they, being communists, didn't have problem with social inequality even in the hardest periods of war and hunger.
Moreover, through shameless propaganda they implanted the myth of their asceticism in the heads of Soviet people. Even today, whenever Stalin personality is discussed, 8 out of 10 Russians would tell you this outrageous nonsense that he owned only a pair of boots and a military uniform. They would forget to mention that he personally owned everything and everyone in USSR, making life and death decisions at his will.
An example of Stalin’s asceticism, Vorontsovsky Palace in Tbilisi where Stalin’s mother lived from 1920-ies to the time of her death in 1937
Below, notorious ‘Dom na Naberezhnoy', the house where the early Soviet nobility isolated themselves from regular folks. Prime location, furnished apartments, all-inclusive services (private cinema, restaurants, laundry, tailor, etc, all closed to general public). Residents did not pay for either food or transportation. The first place on Earth were communism truly existed.
Slavery
Early Soviet economy ran on slave labor. Slaves were the engine of Stalin's industrialization, they continued to be a significant economic force up until late 1950s.
Mostly criminals were used as slaves. What's important to understand, you would be a ‘criminal’ in early USSR for such things as your origin (clergy, nobles, business owners' descendants were considered criminals). Peasants who protested their lands expropriations were criminals too.
In late USSR, you could be considered criminal for reselling your property with profit, for buying or selling currency, for not being able to find job, etc.
By some estimates, Soviet slave camps used as much as 3 million people at the peak (1935–40). As the regime cooled down, the number of slaves fell to 700–800,000 people.
Slave labor on the construction of the White Sea Canal, 1930s.
Myth: There was no unemployment in the Soviet Union
This is like saying that headless bodies don't have headaches.
There’s no unemployment in any slave camp by definition. You were legally forced to work, it was NOT your choice. If you didn’t, you got a slave labor sentence and worked anyway (Soviet Russia Criminal Code, article 209).
One might say: people have to work under any other system to survive. So what’s the difference? The difference is that the State never asked YOU whom you want to be. Your choice was artificially narrowed by what the state needed in the place where you were registered. If you didn’t chose something, it meant you broke the law and would go for slavery in labor camps (or ‘public works’ as this was put mildly by the communists).
If you are born in countryside, you don’t get any passport and you effectively found yourself an ‘employer’ for life.
All other Soviet people were tied to the places of their birth by registration system. You could not just decide to move and move. You had to be allowed to move.
The beautiful story is the one of a poet Joseph Brodsky (Nobel Prize winner) who was sentenced to labor camps for not being able to find permanent paid job as a poet. The judge ruled that there’s no such profession as a poet and sent him for 5 years of slave labor.
There were tens of thousands of such people who didn't become Nobel prize winners and whose stories you could never hear.
Brodsky in a labor campMyth: USSR was the land of optimism and happiness
If there was any persistent mood applicable to all citizens, it was neither optimism nor happiness. It was the dynamic mixture of Fear and Cynicism.
The fear to be prosecuted for wrongly understood joke, for telling something to somebody that the State would consider a treason, for showing your religious beliefs, for siding with wrong party in whatever strange dogmatic discussion is going on…
Even in the 1980s, I remember my parents shushed us every time anything remotely related to politics was discussed with the words ‘Do you want us all to rot in jail’?
The Cynicism over time has become widespread as a form of protest against the system: elites didn't believe in what they say, took the rest of the country as ignorant idiots, and the rest of the country demonstrated compliance with absolute secret resistance and mocking.
Myth: apartments were given for free
First of all, those apartments have never been given to be owned. They remained the property of the state and technically you could have been kicked out any time.
Most of those apartments were actually privatized AFTER the USSR broke down, it was the act of Yeltsin administration. People had to pay for this (not much, but, again, it was Russia who gave the apartments, not USSR).
Ask the emigrants from USSR what happened to ‘their’ apartments. The answer is that they had to return them for nothing, moreover, they had to pay for basic repairs so that those apartments would be ‘accepted’.
Second, in large cities people had to wait for their free apartments for 5–10 years. The queue was long and complicated by a range of documents you constantly had to bring to prove your right to remain in this queue. Where did they live all this time while awaiting for 50 sq.m. paradise?
Barracks, work hostels, ‘communal apartments’ (where 2+ families live in one apartment).
In Leningrad, by 1989 some 450′000 people lived in communal apartments, another 300′000–400′000 people lived in work hostels (population was 4.5 mln). The rest were lucky to have 2–3 rooms apartment in the block similar to the one in the picture.
Personally, as someone who spent a lot of childhood time in Soviet hospitals, I find that claim so outrageously false that I don’t even know where to begin.
First, if it was so great, why even now, 30 years after the break up of the USSR any Russian person with money prefers to go for health services to Germany, Israel, and wherever else, but not to local hospital?
Second, do you even remember how your hospitals looked like? I do not mean 3–5 best hospitals that Soviet elite built for themselves. I mean an average district poliklinika with its lines, poorly educated doctors, lack of free medicine, constant bribes for everything, beds in the corridors, anesthesia queues?
Third, if you don’t like the general discussion, let’s take dentists as something specific. Do you remember people with golden/metal teeth? Toothless mouths? Do you know that almighty Soviet doctors did not even manage to fix Mr Brezhnev’s mouth: his speech impediment was mostly the result of constant toothache?
Myth: Unlike in capitalism where people compete with each other and hate each other, in socialism people love and help each other
The very nature of socialist distribution system makes you hate each other as you effectively compete with other ‘comrades’ for perks and distributions from the State.
Non-Moscow residents universally hated Moscovites, because Moscow was kept in better order in terms of food, housing and public facilities. Moscovites were never shy in showing arrogance to the rest of the country.
Picture (below): thousands of people would take trains from suburbs and villages to Moscow and back on weekends to shop. The train earned the nickname ‘sausage train’, because people traveled to buy meat products, absent outside of Moscow.
b. It was hard to love your brothers who stand in queue with you for whatever deficit item is on sale in retail shops:
c. It was even harder to love your neighbor in communal apartment: the regulation was that if a resident in such apartment lives alone and dies, other neighbors effectively could take over his/her room. It went down to poisoning, writing anonymous forged accusation of neighbors in political crimes to KGB, in extreme cases. Constant quarreling was modus operandi.
d. ‘Free apartments’ were provided by the state enterprises as much as the local authorities. So you can imagine how the relationships between the colleagues in the state enterprises developed as they all competed for limited number of flats to be distributed. Bribes, nepotism, false accusation, forged disciplinary measures were all in play against fellow colleagues.
e. Colleagues working for state owned enterprises fought with each other not only for the apartments. On top of what you can find in companies in capitalist societies (salaries, promotions, nice business trips, etc), they would fight for places for their kids in kindergartens and summer camps, for spots in recreational facilities funded by the state companies, for possibility to shop in closed shops maintained for company managers, for closed medical facilities access and many other in-kind benefits/perks that the socialist distribution system provided.
f. Everybody in USSR universally hated retail shop workers: in constant deficit conditions for most of consumer goods, the workers in retail shops and logistic centers had a closer access to retail goods and could effectively resell them on black market. The state wasn’t short in blaming the Soviet retail workers for the deficit too. From time to time the communists entertained the public by throwing some managers of ‘soviet trade’ system under the bus.
In 1978, Deputy Fish Minister Vladimir Rytov was sentenced to death for ‘organizing a criminal trade’, i.e. reselling fish products on black market
g. Residents of national republics within USSR hated the whole russification campaign unleashed on them heavily from Moscow: Russian as a language in most cases replaced the local languages. Without speaking Russian you couldn't effectively make any sort of meaningful career anywhere.
The list of these hate-generators is truly endless, and all of them were created by the system. You could not blame people for behaving as they did.
But you certainly could not describe the relationship between citizens in USSR as brotherhood and love. It was the opposite of love and brotherhood. Much farther away than what you can observe today in evil capitalist Russia.
Myth: Unlike in capitalist societies, in socialism people worked better because they knew that they worked for themselves, for the society and not for evil bunch of capitalists who steal from workers their profits
When the communist government expropriated property from small and medium business owners, they faced immediately the problem of ‘alienation of workers from means of production’ as described by Karl Marx. Working for the government is never the same as working for yourself. And they faced all the consequences in full.
a. Neo-Luddism (intentional breaking of machines and equipment, stealing of state property)
Even Stalin recognized it talking to Churchill in 1943: ‘when we gave tractors to the peasants, they were all spoiled in a few months’. The Communists had to respond in their usual way, i.e. violence and propaganda. The criminal code was amended to include death sentence for this.
That did not stop people. They were actively stealing from work whatever could be stolen, going to unimaginable levels of creativity in the process.
b. Absenteeism
Once people figured there’s no correlation between your work and your remuneration, naturally they tried to find workplaces with less work to do or closer to goods distribution systems. Or as these were called ‘Теплое Место’ (literally — a warm place).
Food storage cargo worker could have more power in the system than industrial plant engineer and, usually, lived far better material life. In every city, the meat shop director was a dream job for everyone.
The other type of job would be some meaningless office work where the actual job would take 2–3 hours a day and the rest could be used for whatever private life you had. People were actively searching for such places.
c. Rampant alcoholism
Will Jackson, Quora
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“So much barbed wire under the stucco.” ~ George Szirtes, Idioms of Central Europe
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BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THE TELEVISION SHOW “DALLAS” BROUGHT ABOUT THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION
~ Though the show didn’t debut on Russian television until 1996, Larry Hagman, who played J.R. Ewing in Dallas, said that back in the ‘80s, he had a friend who was a Russian film director who used to trade caviar for videotapes — which he’d then smuggle back into the USSR. “He took over the whole entire ‘Dallas’, whatever it was up until that time, a couple of hundred shows”, Hagman said. “And they would bootleg the stuff….People would tell me they’d seen it in Russia (and say), ‘Why don’t we have that over here? Why don’t we have those cars and that glitz and all that stuff? You mean people actually live that way?’ Because they thought it was all propaganda from the Americans. They actually saw Dallas and the way we live and they wanted that”.
The point is this: once the communist countries found out their governments had been lying to them all along about the West (capitalism), and America in particular (For instance, in the USSR, state run radio constantly said that a huge number of Americans lived on the streets, and that half of all Americans went hungry.), it led to dissent and the demise of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, the day Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as Soviet President. And to other communist countries, such as Romania, it led to a revolution and the trial and execution of President Nicolae Ceausescu in just one day, on December 25, 1989.
Soviets were getting to know what life was like in the West before the fall of the Soviet Union and that was the tipping point for its demise. Secretary of the Communist Party and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies in 1985 opened up the USSR for the first time in history. The “wall” had been torn down. Now Soviets could see for themselves what the world was really like, from the American television show “Dallas” and its portrayal of a luxurious American lifestyle to popular Western rock bands now allowed to perform for the youth in Russia. And on Saturday, August 12, 1989 at The Moscow Music Peace Festival, Western rock bands including Bon Jovi, Mötley Crue, Scorpions, Skid Row, and Cinderella were enthusiastically received by loving fans in Moscow.
And on September 28, 1991, shortly after the 1991 Soviet coup d’etat attempt of August 19–21 and four months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, half a million Soviet fans jammed an airfield in Moscow to see the Monsters of Rock concert featuring AC/DC, Pantera, and Metallica at the Soviet Union’s biggest Western rock concert, touted as a gift to Russian youth for their resistance to the previous month’s failed coup attempt by communist hard-liners against Gorbachev which led to the ascension of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the end of the Communist Party.
And even our cuisine was a big hit in the Soviet Union. The newly opened, January 31, 1990, McDonald’s was the largest in the world at the time, and became a sensation among the Soviet populace.
In Romania, its reaction was more rapid since it only involved one state. The television show Dallas was the highest rated show around the world, from France to the Soviet Union to Ceausescu’s Romania. Ceausescu showed Dallas to his people in order to show the corruption in the West, but it backfired, because people were instead saying “we don’t have all this stuff”, and led to revolution and his and his wife’s quick arrest, trial, and execution by firing squad. (The “Hotel Dallas” is a life-size replica of the J. R. Ewing bunkhouse from the show that was built by a newly rich capitalist in Romania in the 1990s. In 2016, the Romanian film Hotel Dallas, with the help of Bobby Ewing, i.e., Patrick Duffy himself, captured this moment in time.)
~ Anonymous, Quora
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Russian (Soviet-era) men socializing. Dental problems were an icon of those times.
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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOVIET AND RUSSIAN CULTURE (Dima Vorobyev)
~ There’s a huge overlap between modern Russian and Soviet culture. When patriotic Russians rally around our tricolor, they do that in Soviet uniforms, they sing Soviet songs and they eat food from Soviet recipe books.
But there are differences.
The Top Ten Differences between Russia’s and Soviet Cultures:
Soviet progressivism against Russia’s conservatism.
For all the curiosity about imported fashion, food, technology, and suchlike, we have a deep-seated suspicion that somewhere beneath all these influences there is a hidden threat. They bring with them irreversible changes to our lives that sooner or later turn us into regular Europeans. Or even worse, Americans!
2. Soviet atheism against Russia’s Orthodox beliefs.
My parents were atheists. For them, Orthodoxy was an odd, worn-out relic of the retrograde past. It was widely shared by almost the entire educated urban Russians at the time. Nowadays, most around me are manifestly Orthodox. Even those who can’t tell Catholic canon from Orthodox wear сrosses on their neck and keep tiny religious icons in their car—just in case.
3. Ideological uniformity of the USSR against Russia’s ideological fragmentation.
The USSR was a totalitarian state. In the privacy of your head, you could believe in anything. But in public, we all were expected to be exemplary Soviets, both in deeds and thoughts. As a popular movie quote had it: “When around people, what idiot would think honest thoughts?” Now, as long as we agree with our rulers, we’re free to think and do anything.
4. Soviet internationalism against Russian nationalism in our global outlook
In the USSR, we were expected to help all the “friends of peace and progress”, i.e. anyone who was eager to cooperate with us, no matter if it were concerned Communists in Prague in 1968, Chilean leftists in the 1970s, or Yemenite militants in the early 1980s. Now, we run advanced cost-benefit assessments and ROI reports on the tiniest of our foreign adventures and find much pride in wreaking havoc on American elections on a budget smaller than an oligarch’s single spa treatment.
When it comes to Russia, overseas, we have quite a few friends but no “brothers”. As our patriots like to quote one of the Tsars, “Russia has no but two allies: its army and navy”. President Putin wallows in his newly-won “global solitude”, and we along with him.
5. An unyielding Kulturträger policy across the board in the USSR against the dumbed-down, mobbed-up commercial culture in post-Soviet Russia.
As radical progressives, the Communists believed that knowledge makes everyone’s life better, and invested a lot in the 18th-century style enlightenment. Capitalist Russia sees no point in pushing high culture down your throat if you just want to chill and check out the latest of lolcats on YouTube.
6. An egalitarian framework of daily life in the USSR against the cult of conspicuous consumption in Russia.
For all the privileges of the top Nomenklatura members, the gap between the lifestyle of the occupants of the Kremlin and simple commoners was minimal by today’s standards. In today’s Russia, you won’t be taken seriously if you don’t flash your wealth in the face of everyone.
Our President sporting a collection of wristwatches and fashion items worth more than his combined official salary over two decades raises no one’s eyebrows. How else? No one in Russia would listen to a dørk in H&M rags driving a Lada banger and wearing a Pobeda piece on his wrist.
7. The breakthrough ambition of Soviet culture against a knock-off spirit of the last three decades of oligarchical Capitalism.
Marxist progressivism required blazing new trails in everything. Stealing needed layers upon layers of creative varnish, as it happened with the Soviet version of the Winnie-Pooh story or the Wizzard of Oz saga. (Both of which are even better in the Soviet release than in the original to me.)
Modern Russian culture is unashamedly copycat. It imitates either earlier Soviet classics or commercially successful foreign formats. There are still a few truly innovative talents. But they are in the far margins of the mainstream art scene. They live on the crumbs provided by our State, or a handful of savvy connoisseurs, or supported by charitable foreigners.
8. The insularity of Soviet censorship and sealed-off borders against the openness of the Internet-dominated world of Russia today.
To get out of the USSR without high approval from the government was an impossibility. The defection was a feat of a lifetime for few courageous souls. Nowadays, it’s the opposite. If your displeasure with our President’s rule gets over a certain threshold, someone will surely notice you and make sure you leave Russia. Or else.
9. Classical Soviet normativity against disruptive, all-encompassing iconoclasm of today’s Russia.
Even though the Marxist project meant a radical break with the past, the USSR considered itself an heir to the best in the world’s culture. From their portraits in our classrooms, Goethe, Shakespeare, Bach, and Petrarca watched with approval at us absorbing old knowledge in order to build a new, better, more just and prosperous society.
Today, street smarts and unbridled chutzpa beat hard studying and bookish knowledge any day. No one among our oligarchs got to their station in life by hard work and obeying the rules—but by busting them. Our President and foreign minister continually speak like mobsters to explain the deep logic of our policy. Parents and their small kids easily switch to the profane language of Russian mat' for discussing things they find important. Scientists are ridiculed, quality printed media are extinct, TV shows are endless shouting matches between “experts” with no expert knowledge.
10. Multi-ethnicity of Soviet culture against mono-ethnic tilt in today’s Russia.
As a junior propagandist, I was moonlighting in my spare time by ghostwriting for luminaries from ethnic minorities who contributed texts to the theoretical flagship of our Party, the magazine “Communist”. The pay was fabulous. Many of the authors struggled not only with Russian but also with putting their thoughts on paper. But the State invested massively in making ethnic minorities heard at the time.
Not anymore. Russia nowadays stays multi-ethnic but takes pride in being Russian. No one is interested much anymore in specific Sami, or Avar, or Yakut views on life, the universe, and everything. We ethnic Russians long were the most suppressed group in our own country, with serfdom and things, weren’t we? Now it’s time to claim back our place under the Sun, isn’t it?
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Below, a visual rendition of the continuity of Russian and Soviet cultures. A monument to enduring brotherhood, drawn by Vladimir Borodan, is accompanied by the text: “Cain and Abel, Brothers Forever”.
A century ago, the Communists scorched the aristocratic culture of Imperial Russia in the name of a new global Marxist civilization. Some three decades ago, field commanders of the Soviet project dismantled the USSR to start the lives of mega-rich, super-powerful, obscenely greedy anti-Communist oligarchs.
Yet, both claimed the stumps of the previous culture they obliterated as their own.
In the words of modern-day propaganda, “we don’t really know what happened between Cain and Abel”. “Let’s put to side past grievances and work together on real problems in today’s world”.
Cain and Abel, brothers forever. Artist: Vladimir Borodan
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FROM THE ANNALS OF PROPAGANDA
The Soviets have just entered in Romania, people are in the streets praising Stalin, bearing huge photos of him, shouting the name of the great liberator of the Russian people and the magnificent leader, great father of the people, etc. etc.
An old country woman doesn’t understand what this is all about and asks somebody:
Who is that man?
Reply:
Why do you ask who that man is? This is great Stalin who freed us from the Germans!
The old woman says:
Oh! Then let him free us from the Russians, too!
A Romanian monastery
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IS PUTIN A PRODUCT OF RUSSIAN MENTALITY?
~ Yes. He is the product of what I call the “core Russian” mindset.
This mindset is not very well known to foreigners, who mainly interact with the westernized educated minority. Some borderline people may have features of both, i.e. in some respect, they behave like the core Russians, in other — more civilized.
This mindset is typical for the low-educated common people, who live outside the capital cities and do not aspire to rise above their primitive lives (see why below). But not always. A common farmer may have their own judgement and even think critically, while a professor of philosophy may not only share these destructive beliefs, but even form a pseudo-scientific foundation for them, and ingrain these ideas into the minds of his students.
This mindset is also called: chauvinistic, imperialistic, traditionalist, soviet. I prefer not to use the term ‘conservative’, because it has nothing in common with the Western conservatives.
Completely different values and morality.
This set of belief is frequently mockingly marked Homo sovieticus. There is a story behind it: USSR had claimed to develop a new, better species of a human being, devoid of greed and selfishness. The label reflects that they indeed grew a new species, but with completely different traits. Whether it was the intention, is another matter.
A core Russian is not necessarily stupid. Such a mindset can be combined with a cunning brain, searching for opportunities to steal, or attack. Core Russians become great career criminals.
So, what defines the core Russian mindset:
Moral relativism. There is no good and no evil. There is ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. What is good for ‘Us’, is good. “Us” is usually ‘Russia’, but can be narrowed further down.
Collectivism. A single life means nothing. An individual must conform or is an enemy. Hence, core Russians always say ‘we’, even if there is no crowd to back them.
Logical relativity. Kind of a logical Schrödinger’s cat: the same statement is both true and false (or multiple mutually exclusive statements are all true), it depends on the circumstances, who is speaking and to whom it is addressed, and what is the motive.
A consequence of the previous one: there is no truth, as it cannot be objectively established. There are only points of view.
An obvious consequence: lack of critical thinking. It is a key core Russian trait, sometimes mentioned separately. Obviously, if one accepts contradictions, making logic unworkable, one cannot debunk false statements.
Another consequence: sociology does not work. When a core Russian is asked a question by someone they think as important, they always try to guess the “correct” answer that will satisfy the one who is asking. To get true answers, the interviewer must choose questions carefully, like at a criminal investigation. However, it should not deceive you: they sincerely approve of the war in Ukraine, as it fits their values.
Willful ignorance. A core Russian does not want to hear any opinions or facts that contradict their established beliefs. Education is viewed as a hindrance. A core Russian saying sounds like: “Oi, ain’t you the cleverest one?”. Don’t get misguided, this particular phrase is a direct insult.
Magical thinking. A lot of core Russians personalize natural or society phenomena. They believe that everything is caused by a will of some very powerful person or entity. It is not necessarily a religious belief in God, but some mystical power, rituals, superstitions that a person automatically follows without any explanation or even internal rationalization.
This is sometimes reflected in irrational behavior. Such as a man repeatedly fails to achieve something, but instead of analyzing the mistakes and reconsidering the strategy, he repeats exactly the same steps, hoping to be lucky next time. This is the likely explanation of the #Chornobaivka phenomenon (when Russian troops occupied the same airbase 17 times in a row, only to be destroyed by Ukrainian artillery fire, without any change of tactics).
Such people are susceptible to superstitions and conspiracy theories.
Zero-sum game assumption. Core Russians do not believe in a mutual benefit. If someone offers them a deal which looks profitable for both sides, they still look for a catch, and try to cheat, so that their partner loses. Even if the partner’s loss eventually backfires on them. If such a person is caught cheating and is brought to court, he sincerely replies: Because I wanted to win, not to lose!
Example: Russia does not want Ukraine to become free and prosperous, because by doing so, they believe that they will lose competition and be out of trade. And this opinion is shared by the majority of their population.
Fatalism. Everything is pre-determined. A person cannot change their fate. We are little people and nothing depends on us. This is sometimes labelled as “acquired helplessness syndrome”.
Might is right. Core Russians only respect strength. Raw strength. This is why there is so much casual manslaughter, caused by a drunken brawl gone badly, including father-son debates. Any formal agreement (such as ‘law’), is only respected if there is some enforcement directly behind it, and punishment for violation is severe.
Crime does not exist. (derived from moral relativism). Everybody steals. If they are successful, they are lucky. If not, too bad for them. But stealing from me is a crime, and I will kill for that!
Killing is bad, they say, but a core Russian will kill, either when they gather as a mob, or when they are given permission.
Militarism. A core Russian man usually becomes very sentimental when he is remembering his military service. Although the details are frequently obscured and covered by phrases like “you don’t know, you were not there”. In reality, the service is typically some drills and idle talks. But it develops subordination and kills whatever remains of critical thinking — an order must be always fulfilled, even if it is impossible, stupid or in breach with the law. Core Russians despise anyone who has not served in the army, although their own service has little to do with proper army training.
Core Russians adore military style, they always dress up in camouflage trousers and coat, even if they do not plan a hunting expedition. They like to show off replicas of Soviet or Russian tanks, warships, planes, etc.
The army is usually the only social elevator a core Russian can catch. The other one is organized crime.
Cult of crime. Although not shared by all core Russians, nevertheless, it is favored by a significant subset of them. Not all of them have connections with the criminal world, but they still copy their manners, wear gangsta style clothes, etc. The criminal subculture is very trendy in Russian pop media, and many pop stars deliberately romanticize the ‘bad guys’. Prison life, crying over the misspent youth, ‘mama, please forgive your wayward son’, bravado and contempt towards the non-criminal people — these are the motives of ‘blatnyak’, aka ‘chanson de russe’ - the pop subgenre that romanticizes and glorifies thug life. “Blatnyak” motives are very prominent in the mainstream Russian pop culture.
Russian police are also severely influenced by this subculture, in a way you can’t tell a thug from a cop by jargon.
The core Russian youth prefer the Russian gangsta rap, emerged in late 2000s, who openly glorify murder with sadistic tendencies.
Cult of WWII. Militarism is further enhanced by the WWII cargo cult (rus. pobedob’esie, победобесие - a term used by non-core Russians, meaning “unholy victory”), slowly developed since Soviet times to a new quasi-religion. Because they are taught that Russia single-handedly defeated the greatest evil in the world - Hitler. WWII is labelled “Great Patriotic War” (GPW): 1941–45. This was done to hide the facts that USSR collaborated with Nazi Germany before 1941, and occupied other countries in the same fashion.
The history of WWII/GPW is interpreted in the same Us/Them paradigm: everything USSR did was right, if you disagree -- you are the enemy and side with Hitler.
This is why they label Ukrainian resistance fighters, both of WWII and now, as Nazis.
Contempt for the weak/lack of empathy. Since early childhood, most Russian boys bully one another, until some sort of social hierarchy establishes. Then they usually concentrate their bullying on one or two smaller ones who cannot fight back and quickly become an outcast.
If you ask a bully why do you behave like this, they say “Because I can”. Meaning that they do not get a punch back in their face.
The core Russian youths are labelled gopniki (see above) -- they share this attitude and attack anyone they can, to rob or just for the fun of it.
This explains the attack on Crimea in 2014. They did it, simply because they were ready, and knew that Ukraine was unprepared to fight back, just after the Revolution of Dignity.
Love of grandeur. A core Russian likes to show off, when they believe their neighbors won’t harm them for doing so, and/or their wealth comes ‘from above’, i.e. granted by the Tsar or his subordinates. They build palaces, buy huge yachts, extremely large and useless limousines, etc. They decorate everything with gold and precious stones. They hoard huge amounts of cash in their vaults (also because they do not believe in investment). This is also due to the fact that they know that their wealth may come and go any moment.
They also like to hire servants, even if they do not really need them, just to be able to show their higher standing over them. Domination is everything.
A Russian can be either rich or poor. Rich is considered ‘lucky’, or ‘granted by the Tsar’. Poor is the norm, how people are supposed to live. Anyone who tries to rise up from the poverty is frowned upon.
Once a Russian is rich, he starts resenting his former poor friends, calling them names and separating from them.
Resentment of achievement and merit. If an active person manages to achieve certain wealth or status, he is resented, if not openly hated, by the majority of core Russians. You can hear the usual leftist-style retorts, such as: ‘no wealth can be obtained in an honest way’, ‘he has cheated all of us’, ‘he must share his wealth with the common decent folk’, ‘he is a Jewish, that is why he is so rich’, etc. Having an opportunity not to be caught, these people will try to harm the successful one, even if it means to kill him.
This is also why they resent the West.
But this does not apply to the Tsar or his boyars (see above).
Paternalism. A core Russian depends on a strong father figure, represented by the national leader (Tsar), to feed them, to provide them with everything. The state is not just an arbitrator who sets the rules and enforces them, but the ultimate master. A core Russian is born to serve his master. When a leader is not a tyrant, he is despised by his subject as ‘weak’.
Atomization. As a consequence of paternalism, Russian society is very atomized. People do not establish horizontal connections easily. Having some work to do, they always rely on someone to tell them what to do, instead of doing it themselves.
Lack of initiative/responsibility. Following the logical chain above, we see that a person who tries to take responsibility beyond their immediate family is frowned upon. If they ask someone “could you please do that”, they may respond with an angry “you are not my boss to tell me”. If an initiative is successful, people say ‘we did it’, or even ‘it is done’ forgetting the one who suggested it, or even did most of the work. But if it fails, the initiator is the one who failed, even if others directly sabotaged it.
Xenophobia/supremacy cult. Core Russians believe they are a supreme race, who inherited the empire from the Romans (the “Third Rome” concept). All other nations are considered inferior, and are called vile names. This applies both to non-Russian ethnic groups who live in Russia (who, in turn, despise everyone except themselves), and foreign nations. Also, smaller nations are despised more than the bigger ones.
As a consequence of this and resentment to merit, the provincial core Russians usually hate residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg. They believe their wealth is gained at their expense, because someone above distributes it unfairly (i.e. unevenly). The hate goes both ways: once a provincial core Russian settles in a big city, he start hating provincials — he believes they are after his job and home.
‘Historical rights’ concept. One of justifications of their expansionism is that Russia owned something in the past. No matter how exactly did they part ways with that land or property, they want it back simply because they previously owned it.
Compare it to a guy who sold you a house, then gets drunk and tries to kick you out, because he used to own it in the past. Even if he sold it many years ago.
Male chauvinism. A woman has no say, she’d better watch the children — that defines it all. In this text, I sometimes intentionally use ‘he’ because women usually keep to themselves, letting their men speak. But they, too, are part of this mindset, and bring up children in it.
Not giving a damn. This is a typical reply of a core Russian, when someone tries to persuade them to think of the consequences of their poor decisions, or else. Eg: Putin is leaving your country without a future — I do not give a damn about it.
Just think how many of these traits can you observe with Putin and his lot…
Another short definition of this mindset: a nation of serial killers. A serial killer has his/her own motivation, based on inner beliefs, so killing is justified (e.g. Jack the Ripper believed that prostitutes are sinful, and he was cleansing the world of their sin for God’s sake). But their attitude towards accidental killing shifts towards ‘collateral damage’ attitude, described above. The more they kill, the more they are self-justified. ~ Timofey Vorobyov
Andon K:
Brilliant! One big upvote from me, with my both hands. I really enjoyed the reading.
I would like to add something to this point:
A lot of core Russians personalize natural or society phenomena. They believe that everything is caused by a will of some very powerful person or entity.
That is reason why core Russians can not even imagine that a group of free people, anywhere on the planet, can spontaneously react to something wrong done to them by protesting and demanding changes in their country. That is, no protest, uprising, revolution, rebellion and other similar events and process against any dictator never ever are spontaneous and never ever represent the authentic will of the people.
Oh, no, nothing is spontaneous! Core people (in Russia and elsewhere) know that except themselves (of course), all other citizens are brainless puppets, with no proper will, and as such they can only do whatever the puppet master wants them to do. So, things such as “people’s will” just don’t exist, the people’s will is what the puppet master says it is!
Core people know that protests and similar events happen always, without any exception, as the result of the conspiracy of some foreign evil will or power, whose agents infiltrate the country and recruit (and pay) domestic traitors to do the dirty job.
Oriana:
The description would fit quite a few uneducated Americans, with some exceptions concerning details. One of them is the American hostility toward the government — though now we know that the uneducated crowd could rally behind a “strong leader” and perhaps not mind it if he becomes a dictator.
"There is no truth" -- Hannah Arendt would see much of this as confirming her description of totalitarianism. The constant lying makes the citizens dubious that any kind of truth exists. One woman said she left Russia because she didn't want to raise her children amid so much cynicism.
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“CHINA WILL DECIDE THE OUTCOME OF THE WAR” (John Feffer)
~ The war has oversized implications. What at first glance seems like a spatial conflict is also a temporal one. Ukraine has the great misfortune to straddle the fault line between a twentieth century of failed industrial strategies and a possible twenty-first century reorganization of society along clean-energy lines.
In the worst-case scenario, Ukraine could simply be absorbed into the world’s largest petro-state. Or the two sides could find themselves in a punishing stalemate that cuts off the world’s hungriest from vast stores of grain and continues to distract the international community from pushing forward with an urgently needed reduction of carbon emissions. Only a decisive defeat of Putinism — with its toxic mix of despotism, corruption, right-wing nationalism, and devil-may-care extractivism — would offer the world some sliver of hope when it comes to restoring some measure of planetary balance.
Ukraine is fighting for its territory and, ultimately, its survival. The West has come to its aid in defense of international law. But the stakes in this conflict are far more consequential than that.
What Putin Wants
Once upon a time, Vladimir Putin was a conventional Russian politician. Like many of his predecessors, he enjoyed a complicated ménage à trois with democracy (the boring spouse) and despotism (his true love). He toggled between confrontation and cooperation with the West. Not a nationalist, he presided over a multiethnic federation; not a populist, he didn’t care much about playing to the masses; not an imperialist, he deployed brutal but limited force to keep Russia from spinning apart.
He also understood the limits of Russian power. In the 1990s, his country had suffered a precipitous decline in its economic fortune, so he worked hard to rebuild state power on what lay beneath his feet. Russia, after all, is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, its second-largest oil producer, and its third-largest coal exporter. Even his efforts to prevent regions from slipping away from the Russian sphere of influence were initially constrained. In 2008, for instance, he didn’t try to take over neighboring Georgia, just force a stalemate that brought two breakaway regions into the Russian sphere of influence.
Meanwhile, Putin pursued strategies aimed at weakening his perceived adversaries. He ratcheted up cyberattacks in the Baltics, expanded maritime provocations in the Black Sea,
advanced aggressive territorial claims in the Arctic, and supported right-wing nationalists like France’s Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini to undermine the unity of the European Union. In 2016, he even attempted to further polarize American politics via dirty tricks in support of Donald Trump.
Always sensitive to challenges to his own power, Putin watched with increasing concern as “color revolutions” spread through parts of the former Soviet Union — from Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2005) to Belarus (2006) and Moldova (2009). Around the time of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, he began shifting domestically to a nationalism that prioritized the interests of ethnic Russians, while cracking down ferociously on dissent and ramping up attacks on critics abroad. An intensifying sense of paranoia led him to rely on an ever-smaller circle of advisors, ever less likely to contradict him or offer him bad news.
In the early 2020s, facing disappointment abroad, Putin effectively gave up on preserving even a semblance of good relations with the United States or the European Union. Except for Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the European far right had proven a complete disappointment, while his fair-weather friend Donald Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election. Worse yet, European countries seemed determined to meet their Paris climate accord commitments, which sooner or later would mean radically reducing their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.
In contrast to China’s eagerness to stay on good terms with the United States and Europe, Putin’s Russia began turning its back on centuries of “westernizing” impulses to embrace its Slavic history and traditions. Like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and India’s Narendra Modi, Putin decided that the only ideology that ultimately mattered was nationalism, in his case a particularly virulent, anti-liberal form of it.
All of this means that Putin will pursue his aims in Ukraine regardless of the long-term impact on relations with the West. He’s clearly convinced that political polarization, economic sclerosis, and a wavering security commitment to that embattled country will eventually force Western powers to accommodate a more assertive Russia.
He might not be wrong.
Whither the West?
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the West has never seemed more unified. Even previously neutral Finland and Sweden have lined up to join NATO, while the United States and much of Europe have largely agreed when it comes to sanctions against Russia.
Still, all is not well in the West. In the United States, where Trumpism continues to metastasize within the Republican Party, 64% of Americans are convinced that democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing,” according to a January NPR/Ipsos poll. Meanwhile, in a surprising Alliance of Democracies Foundation poll last year, 44% of respondents in 53 countries rated the United States, a self-proclaimed beacon of liberty, as a greater threat to democracy than either China (38%) or Russia (28%).
In Europe, the far right continues to challenge the democratic foundations of the continent. Uber-Christian Viktor Orbán recently won his fourth term as Hungary’s prime minister; the super-conservative Law and Justice Party is firmly at the helm in Poland; the anti-immigrant, Euroskeptical Swiss People’s Party remains the most significant force in that country’s parliament; and the top three far-right political parties in Italy together attract nearly 50% in public opinion polls.
Meanwhile, the global economy, still on neo-liberal autopilot, has jumped out of the pandemic frying pan into the fires of stagflation. With stock markets heading into bear territory and a global recession looming, the World Bank recently cut its 4.1% growth forecast for 2022 to 2.9%. The Biden administration’s perceived failure to address inflation may deliver Congress to Republican extremists this November and social democratic leaders throughout Europe may pay a similar political price for record-high Eurozone inflation.
Admittedly, the continued military dominance of the United States and its NATO allies would seem to refute all rumors of the decline of the West. In reality, though, the West’s military record hasn’t been much better than Russia’s performance in Ukraine. In August 2021, the United States ignominiously withdrew its forces from its 20-year war in Afghanistan as the Taliban surged back to power. This year, France pulled its troops from Mali after a decade-long failure to defeat al-Qaeda and Islamic State militants. Western-backed forces failed to dislodge Bashar al-Assad in Syria or prevent a horrific civil war from enveloping Libya. All the trillions of dollars devoted to achieving “full-spectrum dominance” couldn’t produce enduring success in Iraq or Somalia, wipe out terrorist factions throughout Africa, or effect regime change in North Korea or Cuba.
Despite its overwhelming military and economic power, the West no longer seems to be on the same upward trajectory as after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back in the 1990s, Eastern Europe and even parts of the former Soviet Union signed up to join NATO and the European Union. Russia under Boris Yeltsin inked a partnership agreement with NATO, while both Japan and South Korea were interested in pursuing a proposed global version of that security alliance.
Today, however, the West seems increasingly irrelevant outside its own borders. China, love it or hate it, has rebuilt its Sinocentric sphere in Asia, while becoming the most important economic player in the Global South. It’s even established alternative global financial institutions that, one day, might replace the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Turkey has turned its back on the European Union (and vice versa) and Latin America is heading in a more independent direction. Consider it a sign of the times that, when the call went out to sanction Russia, most of the non-Western world ignored it.
But hostilities have flared in Ukraine just as the world was supposed to be accelerating its transition to a clean-energy future. In another three years, carbon emissions must hit their peak and, in the next eight years, countries must cut their carbon emissions by half if there’s any hope of meeting the goals of the Paris climate accord by 2050. Even before the current war, the most comprehensive estimate put the rise in global temperature at a potentially disastrous 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century (nearly twice the 1.5 degree goal of that agreement).
The war in Ukraine is propelling the world full tilt in the opposite direction. China and India are, in fact, increasing their use of coal, the worst possible fossil fuel in terms of carbon emissions. Europe is desperate to replace Russian oil and natural gas and countries like Greece are now considering increasing their own production of dirty energy. In a similar fashion, the United States is once again boosting oil and gas production, releasing supplies from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and hoping to persuade oil-producing nations to pump yet more of their product into global markets.
With its invasion, in other words, Russia has helped to derail the world’s already faltering effort at decarbonization. Although last fall Putin committed his country to a net-zero carbon policy by 2060, phasing out fossil fuels now would be economic suicide given that he’s done so little to diversify the economy. And despite international sanctions, Russia has been making a killing with fossil-fuel sales, raking in a record $97 billion in the first 100 days of battle.
All of this could suggest, of course, that Vladimir Putin represents the last gasp of the failed petropolitics of the twentieth century. But don’t count him out yet. He might also be the harbinger of a future in which technologically sophisticated politicians continue to pursue their narrow political and regional aims, making it ever less possible for the world to survive climate change.
Ukraine is where Putin is making his stand. As for Putinism itself — how long it lasts, how persuasive it proves to be for other countries — much depends on China.
After Putin’s invasion, Beijing could have given full-throated support to its ally, promised to buy all the fossil fuels Western sanctions left stranded, provided military equipment to buoy the faltering Russian offensive, and severed its own ties with Europe and the United States. Beijing could have broken with international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF in favor of the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, its own multinational organizations. In this way, Ukraine could have turned into a genuine proxy war between East and West.
Instead, China has been playing both sides. Unhappy with Putin’s unpredictable moves, including the invasion, which have disrupted China’s economic expansion, it’s also been disturbed by the sanctions against Russia that similarly cramp its style. Beijing isn’t yet strong enough to challenge the hegemony of the dollar and it also remains dependent on Russian fossil fuels. Now the planet’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has been building a tremendous amount of renewable energy infrastructure. Its wind sector generated nearly 30% more power in 2021 than the year before and its solar sector increased by nearly 15%. Still, because of a growing appetite for energy, its overall dependence on coal and natural gas has hardly been reduced.
Reliant as it is on Russian energy imports, China won’t yet pull the plug on Putinism, but Washington could help push Beijing in that direction. It was once a dream of the Obama administration to partner with the world’s second-largest economy on clean energy projects. Instead of focusing as it has on myriad ways to contain China, the Biden administration could offer it a green version of an older proposal to create a Sino-American economic duopoly, this time focused on making the global economy sustainable in the process. The two countries could join Europe in advancing a Global Green Deal.
In recent months, President Biden has been willing to entertain the previously unthinkable by mending fences with Venezuela and Saudi Arabia in order to flood global markets with yet more oil and so reduce soaring prices at the pump. Talk about twentieth-century mindsets. Instead, it’s time for Washington to consider an eco-détente with Beijing that would, among other things, drive a stake through the heart of Putinism, safeguard Ukraine’s sovereignty, and stop the planet from burning to a crisp.
Otherwise, we know how this unhappy meal will end — as a Last Supper for humanity. ~ John Feffer
Source: Vox Populi, June 27, 2022
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IF RUSSIA LOSES THIS WAR, WILL PUTIN BE EMBARRASSED?
~ Definitely not, no matter how this war turns out.
The thing is, embarrassment is foreign to Russia’s culture in general, and to our political class in particular.
We individual Russians can of course feel embarrassment like anyone else. But we don’t scale it up. On a collective level, we convert it into guilt and shame (check out anything of Dostoyevsky) or bare-teethed defiance (e.g. Russia’s Foreign Office commenting on current issues).
If we lose this war, which is far from given, this will most likely result in Putin’s fall. Some angry populists will grab power, and a nationwide search will start for the wicked who stabbed Russia in the back and botched this important endeavor.
No embarrassment, thank you very much!
Below, Russia’s approach to embarrassing episodes of our history, by Alexey Merinov.
A girl and boy from the patriotic organization “Young Pioneers” stand guards of honor besides dying Jesus Christ. Young Pioneers were a multi-million strong Communist version of boy scouts. It’s now resurrected by President Putin in his effort to bring back some of the unity and greatness we remember about Soviet rule.
The Jews let others hijack the narrative of the Crucifixion. Later, enemies made it a vehicle for hostile propaganda, persecution and genocide. How silly of them!
If Jesus were Russian, we’d make Him our national hero right after the Ascension.
That’s how the Jews should have handled it. A different story would be known to the world, strongly enforced by the government. “Crucifixion. God’s greatest project since the Deluge, and why He trusted the Jews to execute it so flawlessly”. ~ Dima Vorobyev, Quora
Crucifixion, Alexey Merinov
Mario Gea:
Darkest time line is letting Putin win, meaning he’ll go all the way to Portugal. As one Russian politician said, “ From Lisbon to Vladivostok, everything will be Russia “.
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THE COST OF IMMORTALITY
With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts . . . and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own . . . Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. ~ Alan Lightman, “Einstein’s Dreams”
Mary: IMMORTALITY INDUCES AN INTELLECTUAL VERTIGO
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A HUMAN BEING IS AN AESTHETIC CREATURE
“In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species’ development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.” ~ Joseph Brodsky
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"We understand better how little we understand inflation.” ~ Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board
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MARRIAGE 101: THERE ARE NO SOULMATES
~ Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.
Yet nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that. The goal of their course is to help students have more fulfilling love relationships during their lives. In Marriage 101 popular books such as Mating in Captivity and For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage are interspersed with meaty academic studies. Students attend one lecture a week and then meet in smaller breakout groups to discuss the weekly topics, which range from infidelity to addiction, childrearing to sexuality in long-term relationships.
At first glance this class may seem a tad too frivolous for a major research university. But the instructors say it’s not an easy A and its reputation as a meaningful, relevant, and enlightening course has grown steadily over the 14 years it’s been offered. In fact, teachers are forced to turn away eager prospective students every year. In 2014, the enrollment was capped at 100. The class is kept to a manageable size so that students can grapple at a deeply personal level with the material during their discussion sessions.
The Marriage 101 professors believe college is the perfect time for students to learn about relationships. “Developmentally, this is what the college years are all about: Students are thinking about who they are as people, how they love, who they love, and who they want as a partner,” says Alexandra Solomon, a professor and family therapist who will be teaching the course along with a team of four other faculty, all affiliated with Northwestern University’s Family Institute, and 11 teaching assistants. “We’re all really passionate about talking about what makes a healthy relationship.” The professors see the course—which requires journaling exercises, interviews with married couples, and several term papers—as a kind of inoculation against potential life trauma.
Historians tell us that marriage education in America began as a way to keep women’s sexuality in check. “Marriage education has been for hundreds of years aimed at women. It was considered their responsibility to keep the marriage going,” Stephanie Coontz, co-chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families and author of Marriage: A History, tells me. During the 1920s and 1930s, Coontz explains in her book, fears about sexual liberation and the future of marriage led eugenics proponents like Paul Popenoe to become enthusiastic about marriage counseling. “If we were going to promote a sound population, we would not have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married,” Popenoe wrote.
College-level marriage courses became even more popular during the post-World War II period, when marriage rates were at an all-time high and women were encouraged to embrace a new role as happy homemakers. Marriage education during that time, Coontz explains, was similarly driven by a strong emphasis on stereotypical gender, race, and class ideas about how a marriage should ideally be conducted. “The received wisdom of the day was that the only way to have a happy marriage was for the woman to give up any aspirations that might threaten the man’s sense of superiority, to make his interests hers, and to never ask for help around the house.”
In one case, cited in Rebecca Davis’s book More Perfect Unions, a young wife became convinced, after a series of sessions at Ohio State University’s marriage clinic, that her husband’s straying was a result of her failing to do her duty by taking care of her looks and keeping a proper home. And New York University’s College of Engineering presented “Good Wife Awards” to women who put their spouses first, providing the domestic support that allowed their husbands to concentrate on their studies.
There was another resurgence of interest in marriage education a decade ago when the George W. Bush administration undertook an initiative, with bipartisan Congressional support, to promote marriage. The Healthy Marriage Initiative was met with mixed reception; criticism was leveled at the lack of evidence that the proposed marriage-promotion strategies even worked, as well as the possibility that low-income women would feel pressured to remain in abusive or dysfunctional marriages. “We did not know if the existing scientific literature on predicting successful marriages would apply to poor families because it was mostly conducted on middle-class families,” Matthew Johnson, Director of the Marriage and Family Studies Laboratory at Binghamton University, told Forbes in an interview. “Some in the scientific community were trying to point out that we did not know whether investing [large amounts of money] in marriage education for poor couples would work, but our voices were drowned out by those who felt that it was worth the gamble.”
Nowadays, when colleges and universities offer courses on the topic of marriage, rather than explicitly offering practical marriage advice, they often survey the institution of marriage from a historical point of view or look at larger sociological trends.
Today’s marriage education classes are most often aimed at high-school students, usually as part of a home economics or health class, where teens are taught how family structure affects child well-being, learn basic relationship and communication skills, or are required to carry around a sack filled with flour for a week so they can learn what is entailed in being responsible for a baby 24 hours a day. Other courses are taught at specifically religious colleges, or are meant for engaged couples, like Pre-Cana, a marriage prep course required of all couples desiring to marry in a Catholic church.
Northwestern’s Marriage 101 is unique among liberal arts universities in offering a course that is comprehensively and directly focused on the experiential, on self-exploration: on walking students through the actual practice of learning to love well.
While popular culture often depicts love as a matter of luck and meeting the right person, after which everything effortlessly falls into place, learning how to love another person well, Solomon explains, is anything but intuitive. Among the larger lessons students learn in this class are:
Self-understanding is the first step to having a good relationship
“The foundation of our course is based on correcting a misconception: that to make a marriage work, you have to find the right person. The fact is, you have to be the right person,” Solomon declares. “Our message is countercultural: Our focus is on whether you are the right person. Given that we’re dealing with 19-, 20-, 21-year olds, we think the best thing to do at this stage in the game, rather than look for the right partner, is do the work they need to understand who they are, where they are, where they came from, so they can then invite in a compatible suitable partner.”
To that end, students keep a journal, interview friends about their own weaknesses, and discuss what triggers their own reactions and behaviors in order to understand their own issues, hot buttons, and values. “Being blind to these causes people to experience problems as due to someone else—not to themselves,” Solomon explains. “We all have triggers, blind spots, growing edges, vulnerabilities. The best thing we can do is be aware of them, take responsibility for them, and learn how to work with them effectively.”
You can’t avoid marital conflict, but you can learn how to handle it better
The instructors teach that self-discovery is impossible without knowing where you came from. “Understanding your past and the family you grew up in helps you to understand who you are now and what you value,” Solomon says. To help students recognize what has shaped their views on love, she and her colleagues have students extensively interview their own parents about their own relationship.
Many find this to be the most demanding and yet the most rewarding assignment of the course. Maddy Bloch, who took the course two years ago along with her boyfriend at the time, learned a lot when she interviewed her own parents about their own marriage, despite the fact that they are divorced. “I learned that in an intimate relationship each person holds a tremendous amount of power that you can easily turn on someone,” she says. “This is why relationships require a lot of mutual trust and vulnerability.”
Once you have a sound, objective sense of why you behave the way you do, you are better equipped to deal with conflicts—inevitable in any long-term relationship—with the appropriate tincture of self-awareness so that you avoid behaving in ways that make your partner defensive. The class instructors teach their students that blaming, oversimplifying, and seeing themselves as victims are all common traits of unhappy couples and failed marriages. They aim to teach students that rather than viewing conflicts from a zero-sum position, where one wins and one loses, they would benefit from a paradigm shift that allows them to see a couple as “two people standing shoulder to shoulder looking together at the problem.”
Thus, one of many concrete conflict-resolution skills that they teach is to frame statements as “X, Y, Z” statements, rather than finger pointing: When you did X, in situation Y, I felt Z. In other words, calmly telling my husband that when he left his clothes on the bathroom floor in the morning because he was late for a meeting, I felt resentful because I felt he didn’t notice that I was busy too, would lead to a better outcome than if I were to reactively lash out and accuse him of being a messy and careless slob. “‘You’ statements,” Solomon explains, “invite the other partner’s defensiveness, inviting them to put their walls up.” So too do words (tempting though they may sound in the moment) such as “always” or “never.”
A good marriage takes skill
There’s no doubt that the largest takeaway from the course is that fostering good relationships takes skills. “We’re a very romantic culture,” Solomon says, “and it seems a little unromantic to talk about skill building and communication skills. But it’s important.” One of our more beloved cultural myths about marriage is that it should be easy. The reality is that most of us don’t have adequate communication skills going into marriage. That’s why Marriage 101 students are required to interview another couple in addition to their own parents: a mentor couple (typically a local couple who has been married anywhere from several years to several decades).
The professors hand out a list of more than 80 suggested questions and tell their students to think of the interview as a sort of lab experiment, a chance to observe the theoretical concepts they’ve been learning in a real-life context. During a 90-minute interview, a pair of students asks each couple questions such as what most attracted them to the other at the start of their relationship, which moments stand out as the best ones of their marriage, how they’ve weathered severe stresses, whether they ever thought about divorce, and what their sex life has been like over time. They watch the couple interact and engage in good couple skills: bringing a spouse a glass of water, for instance, as an unspoken gesture of caretaking. The interview is itself also a chance to observe a couple doing something that research shows is good for marriage: reminisce together as they look back on their relationship.
You and your partner need a similar worldview
Yet, despite how often we hear about the importance of good communication, even the best communication skills won’t help a couple that sees the world completely differently. One of the texts used in the course, Will Our Love Last? by Sam R. Hamburg, argues that people can be incredibly proficient communicators, yet never see eye to eye because they simply can’t understand how their partner can hold a position they see as untenable. “For people to be happy in their marriage they must be able to understand not just what their partner is saying, but the experience behind the words,” writes Hamburg. If partners are unable to do that, “they cannot understand what it’s like to be their partner—to understand their partner empathically—and the best communication in the world won’t help.”
The instructors teach students that once they learn to identify what is important to them, what values they hold, what they like to do on a daily basis, and what their sexual preferences are—in other words, once they know who they are—they will then be in a much stronger position to be able to recognize when they are with a partner who is compatible and shares their worldview.
Ben Eisenberg, who majored in learning and organizational change at Northwestern, took the course last year as a senior, right after the breakup of a long-term relationship. He found it enlightening as he looked back at his past and towards his future. “Pairing up with a partner is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in life, more important than some of the other things you’ll learn in college,” he mused. Among other things, he learned to recognize that the more aligned you are on certain crucial dimensions—such as day-to-day compatibility, or whether you are on the same wavelength about larger issues—the better off you’ll be as a couple. He learned that all the communication skills in the world won’t help if you haven’t learned how to recognize and invite in a compatible partner. “How similarly you spend your day, your money, how you view the world, greatly affects that day-to-day happiness with your partner, more than whether you have initial attraction.”
The greatest lesson Eisenberg learned from Marriage 101? “I learned that the modern idea about love at first sight is a myth. Love is a lot of work, but it’s worth it if you put the work in.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-first-lesson-of-marriage-101-there-are-no-soul-mates?utm_source=pocket-newtab
LET'S DETOX WITH SOME HUMOR
My flight was being served by an obviously gay flight attendant, who seemed to put everyone in a good mood as he served us food and drinks.
As the plane prepared to descend, he came swishing down the aisle and told us that "Captain Marvey has asked me to announce that he'll be landing the big scary plane shortly, so lovely people, if you could just put your trays up, that would be super."
On his trip back up the aisle, he noticed a well-dressed rather Arabic-looking woman hadn't moved a muscle. "Perhaps you didn't hear me over those big brute engines but I asked you to raise your trazy-poo, so the main man can pitty-pat us on the ground."
She calmly turned her head and said, "In my country, I am called a Princess and I take orders from no one."
To which, without missing a beat the flight attendant replied, "Well, sweet-cheeks, in my country I'm called a Queen, so I outrank you. Tray-up, Bitch."
THE UNCERTAIN FATE OF THE MONSOONS
~ In the months of March, April and May in 2020, at the peak of the Covid lockdowns across Asia, Indian scientists began to notice a startling change in the atmosphere above parts of the country. Not long after, these changes reverberated through the massive weather systems that dominate much of Asia – the monsoons.
The changes to the monsoons were an unexpected side effect of the lockdowns that restricted human activity. With no vehicles plying the streets and with industrial activity slowing considerably, the reduced emissions led to a significant decrease in atmospheric aerosols. These are tiny solid and liquid droplets suspended in the atmosphere, and they include microscopic particulate matter (PM 10 and PM 2.5) harmful to human health. Aerosols include sulphur dioxide, from burning coal, and black carbon or soot. The latter is a byproduct of agricultural burning, which in India is often from wood fires commonly used in cooking.
We have long known the ill effects of aerosols. Our airways suck up them up like a vacuum cleaner would dust – they coat our lungs and the toxins enter our bloodstream. But 2020 was the first time researchers were able to study the effects of a sharp decline in aerosols in our atmosphere, and at a broader level, map the impacts on the Indian and East Asian summer monsoons.
"During the lockdown period, when anthropogenic (human) activity was negligible, we saw as much as a 30% reduction in aerosols in the atmosphere over India," says Suvarna Fadnavis, who has studied monsoon patterns at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology for the past 25 years. The effects were seen widely and chronicled in news reports: especially of how residents of Saharanpur in the Central Indian city of Uttar Pradesh could catch a breathtaking glimpse of the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years.
Crucially for the monsoons, these aerosols usually form a layer in the atmosphere which reflects solar radiation. The thinner aerosol layer over North India during lockdown meant that the land was now heating up rapidly, says Fadnavis.
In general, monsoons work on a temperature gradient – the difference in temperature between a warming land (with lower atmospheric pressure) and a relatively cooler ocean (with higher pressure). Winds blow from high pressure to low pressure areas, driving moisture-laden winds from ocean to land. When the land warms up faster – as it did without its usual aerosol shade – the monsoon rains are stronger, and that's what researchers observed when the aerosol layer thinned.
"We observed that it increased annual monsoon rainfall by as much as 5-15%, around 3mm a day," says Fadnavis.
To put this in context, the increase in monsoon rainfall was the equivalent of an hour's moderate shower of rain per day. In drought-prone India, highly dependent on seasonal monsoon rainfall for its agriculture, economy, food security and overall health, this is significant, she says.
But the impact wasn't just observed in India. The climate of Asia as a whole is largely dictated by its monsoons. Large swathes of East Asia saw an abrupt reduction in aerosols and its effects were felt over China, Korea and Japan.
"Our research shows that the sudden reduction in aerosol concentration significantly increased the total monsoon rainfall over East Asia as well," Chao He, associate professor at the Institute for Environmental and Climate Research, Jinan University in Guangzhou, China, tells BBC Future in an email. This was proven by observational and modeling studies in the summers of 2020 and 2021. "Previous studies confirmed that the emission reduction during Covid-19 was not strong enough to hamper global warming," he adds. "We agree that Covid-19 has no substantial global-scale climate effect, but its impact on regional climate may have been ignored – and East Asia is a hot spot.”
As India and China have developed rapidly over the past few decades, there have been more and more aerosol emissions to contend with, says Andrew Turner, a UK-based scientist studying monsoons and a lead author of the sixth assessment report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in August 2021. And the increase in aerosols has reduced the quantity of rainfall in the region over the years.
Observational data from 1901-2011 collected by Indian researchers show that south-west monsoon rainfalls have declined over the years. Some researchers believe that the decline has been aided by other factors as well – and one of these is rapidly warming waters over oceans.
"Our research shows that the Indian Ocean is the fastest warming ocean in the world," says Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist in the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune who is studying marine heat waves and the changing patterns of monsoons across the Indian Ocean. "We've noted a rise in (surface) temperature of 1.4C from the 1950s onwards, especially in the western region including the Arabian Sea. This is higher than the global average of 0.7C for ocean warming over the same period," he says.
These rising ocean temperatures, he says, weaken the monsoon winds and the temperature gradient too – the difference in temperatures over land and sea which actually drives the monsoons. "This is causing a decline in monsoonal rains," says Koll.
While this may compound the pressures on the monsoons, researchers such as Turner believe that aerosols are the key factor in driving their decline so far. And in the long run, a warming world may in fact have the opposite effect on the monsoons.
Historical studies of monsoon intensity millions of years ago have shown that when CO2 levels are higher, the monsoons are stronger. Higher CO2 levels mean that land warms more rapidly, creating a larger temperature difference between land and sea. In addition, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water – creating a greater potential for rainfall.
Global carbon dioxide emissions began a sharp, steep rise from the 1950s. The 10 warmest years on global record have been noted since 2005. With rising CO2, Turner says that the monsoon rains will reach a tipping point, when the monsoons will return to their previous strength and then possibly surpass it.
In the long run, CO2 will play the dominant role in the fate of the monsoons. "The big difference between carbon dioxide and aerosols is that carbon dioxide is well mixed in the atmosphere," says Turner. "We call it a well-mixed greenhouse gas, whereas the aerosol emissions tend to exist very close to their region of origin.”
Another difference is that aerosols tend to have a much shorter lifespan than long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, says Wen Zhou, a professor at Fudan University, Shanghai, and a co-author of the study on Covid's effect on the East Asian summer monsoon. The aerosol effect on the climate can change rapidly, just as it did when the Covid lockdowns began and ended, she says.
What happens to the monsoons when both carbon dioxide emissions and aerosol emissions increase in the future? We could reach a tipping point, says Turner.
"At some point the effects of carbon dioxide will become dominant over the monsoon, if they have not done so already," says Turner. "Our findings from the IPCC report suggest that aerosol emissions have been the dominant factor driving the weakened Indian monsoon since the 1950s. And we know that in our future climate experiments with higher CO2 emissions (for instance, in the year 2100), we will have stronger monsoons.”
When that tipping point will come, Turner says, is so far impossible to say.
When it does arrive, the outcome is likely to contribute to the rise of more extreme weather events like cyclones and floods.
"One of the many issues that has come out of the sixth IPCC report is that the more you increase the levels of global warming, the worse the impact gets," says Turner. "For every degree of global warming, heat waves when they happen get hotter, heavy rains get heavier and thus as a result, mountainous regions will see landslides, and it can lead to inundation of agricultural regions and crop damage.”
In the future, this may leave the Asian region more vulnerable to extreme weather events. While the aerosol effect over the monsoons is easily reversible, (at least in theory, if governments take steps to control industrial emissions and clean up air pollution), the warming effects of long-lived atmospheric CO2 are harder to mitigate. Preparing for these extreme events now, says Zhou, is all the more critical. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220517-the-uncertain-fate-of-asias-monsoons?utm_source=bbc-news&utm_medium=must-see
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FAITH AS THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD
In “Lapidarium IV,” Kapuscinski relates trying to write an article on the Last Judgment, interviewing friends, historians, theologians. Each person had a different vision of it.
One (a historian, I imagine) was a literalist. “The Last Judgment? That’s impossible!” Kapuscinski asked why. “Because it would require that all the [resurrected] dead and all the living to appear — billions and billions of people over the last 200,000 years. There isn’t room enough.” Not in the designated Kidron Valley, running through the Old City of Jerusalem.
And he imagined how they’d have to stand in line, some of the living dying on their feet while waiting. And since those to be judged are now living, resurrected bodies, surely they need food. How to feed those billions?
Who goes first? The earliest-born? The Jews and certain other nations? Men and women separate, like lines for restrooms?
So perhaps a mobile Last Judgment, special vehicles coming to people from different epochs and locations?
There was no Judgment, with some verdict or explanation — just this instant separation. And the best part was always the skeletons stepping out of the graves, putting on flesh.
The belief was absolutely literal. I blink, startled, when I think that I didn’t differ from other children my age in taking all this literally, “as shown in the picture.” The paintings substituted for the impossible reality. If the church had not falsified the Second Commandment, I don’t see how the children, so prone to asking questions, would be indoctrinated as deeply as they were.
And no wonder the mainstream Protestant churches, devoid of such art, produce both tepid believers and non-passionate atheists.
All those paintings with god in the garment of clouds . . . how naive they seem now. And, when I was a child, I remember the constant frustration of looking up at the clouds, trying to get a glimpse of his eyes and beard — at least his huge beard, gray, curdled, mingling with the clouds — but no such luck. There would be no sign, no announcement (perhaps in Latin?), no revelation. It was a perfect Theater of the Absurd: we were to believe in the Great Absence.
I almost can’t believe that once I did believe. I can’t get back into my own childhood mentality. I believed in the Last Judgment and was in terror of it? That’s where child abuse comes in, but even that sounds absurd now: the church made her dread the Last Judgment. A nine-year-old girl cowering in fear that she will be plunged naked — in flesh, the better to suffer with! — into the fires of hell.
And above all, how are the living and the dead to be judged? All by the same standard? What if something was not a sin according to their culture?
As a child, I never tried to work out the details for myself. The paintings were enough. The proceedings seemed efficient enough, like selection in concentration camps — the angels directing people to the left and to the right, the Elect in halos being handed white robes, the damned falling down naked into the pit.
Why would God bother
with the Last Judgment:
bone joining bone, putting on flesh,
just to be judged? Redeemer,
where?
(from my poem "Music Says That Freedom Exists")
Kidron Valley, where the Last Judgment is supposed to be conducted
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PSEUDIGRAPHA: FAKE LETTERS NOT AUTHORED BY PAUL OR PETER, BUT INCLUDED IN THE BIBLE
~ The New Testament is filled with epistles that were not written by Paul or Peter. These are called “Pseudepigrapha” because, like other fake scriptures circulated in the late second and third centuries, they were not authored by the Apostle whose name appears on it.
The textbook definition of Pseudepigrapha is:
“Spurious or pseudonymous writings ascribed to various biblical patriarchs and prophets but composed within approximately 200 years of the birth of Jesus Christ.”
In other words, the New Testament you’re holding contains “scriptures” that are about as reliable as The Gospel of Thomas, The Epistle of Barnabus, or The Book of Enoch [which the New Testament book of Jude quotes, by the way].
So, which books of the New Testament are Pseudepigrapha and how did they get in there?
Great questions! Let’s take the first one:
Several letters bearing Paul’s name are disputed among scholars, namely:
Ephesians
Colossians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Timothy
Titus
Scholars are sharply divided on whether or not Colossians and 2 Thessalonians are genuine, but when it comes to Ephesians and the so-called “Pastoral Epistles” [that would be 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus] most critical scholars have no trouble labeling them as pseudepigraphical works.
No one knows who wrote either 1 Peter or 2 Peter, but the one thing almost every New Testament scholar agrees on is this: It probably wasn’t the Apostle Peter.
Ok, so on to the second question: “How did these fake letters from Peter and Paul end up in our Bibles?”
Well, that’s easy: Because the Christians who decided which books were in or out of the Canon – around 400 AD – didn’t make their decisions using textual criticism. Usually, the decision was made by consensus, or based on opinions.
In fact, in some cases, they just prayed and waited for God to move the scrolls that were not authentic on to the floor. [Nope. I’m not making that up].
Still other decisions about the Canon, like the Council of Trent [1546] were nearly too close to call, with 24 yea, 15 nay and 16 abstaining. So, it could’ve gone another way, I suppose.
Maybe a better question is: “Why do some Bible scholars today doubt these letters of Paul and Peter?”
This could take a long time. So, if you’re really interested in the gory details, I’d recommend Googling “Disputed Letters of Paul” or “Peter” and start heading down the rabbit hole.
For the rest of you, here’s the short answer:
Summary of reasons to doubt Pauline authorship of Ephesians:
The language and style are different. Ephesians contains 40 new words, e.g. 1:3 “heavenly places”; “family, or fatherhood” (3:15). 1:19 has four different words for “power”
Metaphors, or illustrations in Paul are turned into actual objective realities in Ephesians (and sometimes in Colossians also). E.g. faith, gospel, word of God, reconciliation, salvation, human resurrection and glorification, the Church as the Body of Christ, Minister, Saints of God.
Ephesians shows that the Church is becoming an advanced and powerful universal institution (rather like the Church today). In Paul’s time there was no universal Church in that sense, but only informal gatherings of individual believing communities.
Ephesians contains no mention of charismatic gifts.
Ephesians shows Jesus acting on his own account and by his own authority without making explicit that he is acting on God’s behalf and with God’s blessing; in Paul’s other letters, this is more explicit.
Summary of reasons to doubt Pauline authorship of Colossians:
The basis for the early objection was that the letter aimed at refuting Gnosticism, a heresy which had not reached its ascendancy until the early 2nd century.
Another argument centers on differences in style and vocabulary with significant stylistic differences between Colossians and Paul’s other works, such as unusual genitive constructions.
The extensive theological development in the epistle compared to other epistles has also led to skepticism concerning Pauline authorship.
The question of inspiration and authority is, in itself, a serious problem for most Christians. We tend to place more authority on the Bible rather than on Christ, even though Christ [in the Bible] tells us that “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me [Christ].” (See Matt. 28:18)
What we have to do is to learn how to abide in Christ and to know the voice of the Good Shepherd so clearly that we know inspired truth when we hear it, regardless of where it comes from.
Even the most famous verse in the Pseudepigraphal book of 2 Timothy says that “all the God-breathed writings [graphis] are profitable for teaching, instruction, rebuke and training in righteousness.” [2 Tim. 3:16]
The trick is to learn which writings are God-breathed and which are not. ~
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/keithgiles/2019/03/sorry-christians-our-bible-contains-fake-letters-from-paul-and-peter/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&fbclid=IwAR3dInc-eVWMs3Vao_hNyRZ0pkbdxIIrBolEnzK4OqgFhJ98BzIp-WtmLzw
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Keith Giles is the author of Jesus Unbound: Liberating the Word of God from the Bible
“god-breathed” — presumably “inspired by god.” Inspiration and breath are etymologically linked.
Oriana:
I’ve posted this (skipping quite a bit) to show just how convoluted biblical scholarship is. Thank goodness I don’t care.
Robert Ahrens is more explicit:
"Oh, but let's not pollute the bible by taking out the fake stuff!”
Geez, this guy does fine until he checks the "god inspired" box. These things were, we know, written by different people at different times for different audiences, and they all had different agendas. Most of these fakes introduced contradictions into the canon, and that is plenty of reason to remove them.
Of course, to me, as an atheist, keeping them in is just another reason for me to laugh and walk away.
Oriana:
True, but there are exceptions: otherwise we would have neither atheists nor adult converts to this or that religion.
And sometimes the decision to leave the faith of one's ancestors is the most courageous and decisive moment in a person's life.
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CALM BRAIN AND LONGEVITY
~ A thousand seemingly insignificant things change as an organism ages. Beyond the obvious signs like graying hair and memory problems are myriad shifts both subtler and more consequential: metabolic processes run less smoothly; neurons respond less swiftly; the replication of DNA grows faultier.
But while bodies may seem to just gradually wear out, many researchers believe instead that aging is controlled at the cellular and biochemical level. They find evidence for this in the throng of biological mechanisms that are linked to aging but also conserved across species as distantly related as roundworms and humans. Whole subfields of research have grown up around biologists’ attempts to understand the relationships among the core genes involved in aging, which seem to connect highly disparate biological functions, like metabolism and perception. If scientists can pinpoint which of the changes in these processes induce aging, rather than result from it, it may be possible to intervene and extend the human life span.
So far, research has suggested that severely limiting calorie intake can have a beneficial effect, as can manipulating certain genes in laboratory animals. But recently in Nature, Bruce Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues reported on a previously overlooked controller of life span: the activity level of neurons in the brain. In a series of experiments on roundworms, mice and human brain tissue, they found that a protein called REST, which controls the expression of many genes related to neural firing, also controls life span. They also showed that boosting the levels of the equivalent of REST in worms lengthens their lives by making their neurons fire more quietly and with more control. How exactly overexcitation of neurons might shorten life span remains to be seen, but the effect is real and its discovery suggests new avenues for understanding the aging process.
GENETIC MECHANISMS OF AGING
In the early days of the molecular study of aging, many people were skeptical that it was even worth looking into. Cynthia Kenyon, a pioneering researcher in this area at the University of California, San Francisco, has described attitudes in the late 1980s: “The aging field at the time was considered a backwater by many molecular biologists, and the students were not interested, or were even repelled by the idea. Many of my faculty colleagues felt the same way. One told me that I would fall off the edge of the Earth if I studied aging.”
That was because many scientists thought that aging (more specifically, growing old) must be a fairly boring, passive process at the molecular level — nothing more than the natural result of things wearing out. Evolutionary biologists argued that aging could not be regulated by any complex or evolved mechanism because it occurs after the age of reproduction, when natural selection no longer has a chance to act. However, Kenyon and a handful of colleagues thought that if the processes involved in aging were connected to processes that acted earlier in an organism’s lifetime, the real story might be more interesting than people realized.
Through careful, often poorly funded work on Caenorhabditis elegans, the laboratory roundworm, they laid the groundwork for what is now a bustling field.
A key early finding was that the inactivation of a gene called daf-2 was fundamental to extending the life span of the worms. “daf-2 mutants were the most amazing things I had ever seen. They were active and healthy and they lived more than twice as long as normal,” Kenyon wrote in a reflection on these experiments. “It seemed magical but also a little creepy: they should have been dead, but there they were, moving around.”
This gene and a second one called daf-16 are both involved in producing these effects in worms. And as scientists came to understand the genes’ activities, it became increasingly clear that aging is not separate from the processes that control an organism’s development before the age of sexual maturity; it makes use of the same biochemical machinery. These genes are important in early life, helping the worms to resist stressful conditions during their youth. As the worms age, modulation of daf-2 and daf-16 then influences their health and longevity.
These startling results helped draw attention to the field, and over the next two decades many other discoveries illuminated a mysterious network of signal transduction pathways — where one protein binds another protein, which activates another, which switches off another and so on — that, if disturbed, can fundamentally alter life span. By 1997, researchers had discovered that in worms daf-2 is part of a family of receptors that send signals triggered by insulin, the hormone that controls blood sugar, and the structurally similar hormone IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor 1; daf-16 was farther down that same chain. Tracing the equivalent pathway in mammals, scientists found that it led to a protein called FoxO, which binds to the DNA in the nucleus, turning a shadowy army of genes off and on.
That it all comes down to the regulation of genes is perhaps not surprising, but it suggests that the processes that control aging and life span are vastly complex, acting on many systems at once in ways that may be hard to pick apart. But sometimes, it’s possible to shine a little light on what’s happening, as in the Yankner group’s new paper.
Get Plenty of REST
Figuring out which genes are turned on and off in aging brains has long been one of Yankner’s interests. About 15 years ago, in a paper published in Nature, he and his colleagues looked at gene expression data from donated human brains to see how it changes over a lifetime. Some years later, they realized that many of the changes they’d seen were caused by a protein called REST. REST, which turns genes off, was mainly known for its role in the development of the fetal brain: It represses neuronal genes until the young brain is ready for them to be expressed.
But that’s not the only time it’s active. “We discovered in 2014 that [the REST gene] is actually reactivated in the aging brain,” Yankner said.
To understand how the REST protein does its job, imagine that the network of neurons in the brain is engaged in something like the party game Telephone. Each neuron is covered with proteins and molecular channels that enable it to fire and pass messages. When one neuron fires, it releases a flood of neurotransmitters that excite or inhibit the firing of the next neuron down the line. REST inhibits the production of some of the proteins and channels involved in this process, reining in the excitation.
In their study, published in October 2019, Yankner and his colleagues report that the brains of long-lived humans have unusually low levels of proteins involved in excitation, at least in comparison with the brains of people who died much younger. This finding suggests that the exceptionally old people probably had less neural firing. To investigate this association in more detail, Yankner’s team turned to C. elegans. They compared neural activity in the splendidly long-lived daf-2 mutants with that of normal worms and saw that firing levels in the daf-2 animals were indeed very different.
“They were almost silent. They had very low neural activity compared to normal worms,” Yankner said, noting that neural activity usually increases with age in worms. “This was very interesting, and sort of parallels the gene expression pattern we saw in the extremely old humans.”
When the researchers gave normal roundworms drugs that suppressed excitation, it extended their life spans. Genetic manipulation that suppressed inhibition — the process that keeps neurons from firing — did the reverse. Several other experiments using different methods confirmed their results. The firing itself was somehow controlling life span — and in this case, less firing meant more longevity.
Because REST was plentiful in the brains of long-lived people, the researchers wondered if lab animals without REST would have more neural firing and shorter lives. Sure enough, they found that the brains of elderly mice in which the Rest gene had been knocked out were a mess of overexcited neurons, with a tendency toward bursts of activity resembling seizures. Worms with boosted levels of their version of REST (proteins named SPR-3 and SPR-4) had more controlled neural activity and lived longer. But daf-2 mutant worms deprived of REST were stripped of their longevity.
“It suggests that there is a conserved mechanism from worms to [humans],” Yankner said. “You have this master transcription factor that keeps the brain at what we call a homeostatic or equilibrium level — it doesn’t let it get too excitable — and that prolongs life span. When that gets out of whack, it’s deleterious physiologically.”
What’s more, Yankner and his colleagues found that in worms the life extension effect depended on a very familiar bit of DNA: daf-16. This meant that REST’s trail had led the researchers back to that highly important aging pathway, as well as the insulin/IGF-1 system. “That really puts the REST transcription factor somehow squarely into this insulin signaling cascade,” said Thomas Flatt, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg who studies aging and the immune system. REST appears to be yet another way of feeding the basic molecular activities of the body into the metabolic pathway.
A Biological Balancing Act
Neural activity has been implicated in life span before, notes Joy Alcedo, a molecular geneticist at Wayne State University who studies the connections between sensory neurons, aging and developmental processes. Previous studies have found that manipulating the activity of even single neurons in C. elegans can extend or shorten life span. It’s not yet clear why, but one possibility is that the way the worms respond biochemically to their environment may somehow trip a switch in their hormonal signaling that affects how long they live.
The new study, however, suggests something broader: that overactivity in general is unhealthy. Neuronal overactivity may not feel like anything in particular from the viewpoint of the worm, mouse or human, unless it gets bad enough to provoke seizures. But perhaps over time it may damage neurons.
The new work also ties into the idea that aging may fundamentally involve a loss of biological stability, Flatt said. “A lot of things in aging and life span somehow have to do with homeostasis. Things are being maintained in a proper balance, if you will.” There’s a growing consensus in aging research that what we perceive as the body slowing down may in fact be a failure to preserve various equilibria. Flatt has found that aging flies show higher levels of immune-related molecules, and that this rise contributes to their deaths. Keeping the levels in check, closer to what they might have been when the flies were younger, extends their lives.
The results may help explain the observation that some drugs used for epilepsy extend life span in lab animals, said Nektarios Tavernarakis, a molecular biologist at the University of Crete who wrote a commentary that accompanied Yankner’s recent paper. If overexcitation shortens life span, then medicines that systematically reduce excitation could have the opposite effect. “This new study provides a mechanism,” he said.
Higher levels of neural excitation are linked to shorter life spans in people and other animals, according to recent studies. Credit: Wenyi Geng for Quanta Magazine.
Why exactly do overexcited neurons lead to death? That’s still a mystery. The answer probably lies somewhere downstream of the DAF-16 protein and FoxO, in the genes they turn on and off. They may be increasing the organism’s ability to deal with stress, reworking its energy production to be more efficient, shifting its metabolism into another gear, or performing any number of other changes that together add up a sturdier and longer-lived organism. “It is intriguing that something as transient as the activity state of a neural circuit could have such a major physiological influence on something as protean as life span,” Yankner said. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/longevity-linked-to-proteins-that-calm-overexcited-neurons?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Medication to reduce over-excitation? One excellent de-exciter is MAGNESIUM. It's not easy to get enough magnesium from the diet (nuts, beans, pumpkin seeds and dark green leafy vegetables are good food sources, as is dark chocolate). Considering the great importance of magnesium, I recommend supplementing with magnesium citrate.
One fantasy that I know will remain only a fantasy is that I'll write a book on the few supplements that actually seem to work for most people. First place goes to berberine, since low-normal blood sugar is super-important. Second, to Omax curcumin, and third to magnesium citrate.
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A CUCUMBER DIET
Here are the directions:
You need to get a couple of cucumbers, and have a knife for peeling. Some people may not need to peel, but cellulose and pesticides -- they can be irritating. So I prefer peeled cucumber.
Cut a portion of a cucumber, peel, cut into convenient pieces, and consume before each meal — and/or between meals, but for weight loss, before each meal is especially effective.
This will provide you with alkaline water, so good for health, and will reduce appetite, inflammation, and other baddies. You will feel refreshed and energized.
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ending on beauty:
Man is an arrow shot toward the ideal. ~ Johann Gottlieb Fichte
So it was perhaps Fichte, a Kantian idealist, who in part inspired Nietzsche’s Overman.
I love the great despisers,
for they are great worshippers,
arrows of longing for the other shore.
~ Nietzsche
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