Frogs on heliconia plant
*
LULLABY
sleep, little beansprout
don't be scared
the night is simply the true sky
bared
sleep, little dillseed
don't be afraid
the moon is the sunlight
ricocheted
sleep, little button
don't make a fuss
we make up the gods
so they can make us
sleep, little nubbin
don't you stir
this sky smiled down
on Atlantis and Ur
~ Albert Goldbarth
*
FIRST LINES OF CLASSIC NOVELS IF NO ONE HAD CHILDCARE
Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, but when she tried to get her kid to put on pants he said that pants were scary and then screamed for 35 minutes so I guess, fine! No flowers!
Invisible Man
I am an invisible man. No, you can’t see me. You can’t. We’re playing a game, and it’s called I’m invisible and you can’t see me for two minutes and you have to play with your toys by yourself. I’m setting a timer.
Moby-Dick
Call me Ishmael. Actually, no. Only FaceTime, and only if you’re prepared to entertain a toddler for five minutes while I go pee.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. They were supposed to go to the grocery store first, but when they got there Colonel Aureliano Buendía whined the whole time about ice so finally his father relented, even though he knew he was reinforcing a bad behavior but you know what? He was really, really tired.
Gravity’s Rainbow
A screaming comes across the sky, despite the fact that it’s only 5:15 and the light on the “Time to Wake Up!” alarm clock that the internet swore would work hasn’t turned green yet.
Swann’s Way
For a long time, I went to bed early. But now night is the only time I can get any work done so I guess I’ll sleep in… four years?
The Stranger
Mother died today. Metaphorically. In reality, the sweet release from responsibility was denied to her.
The Unnamable
Where now? Who now? When now? Why now? Why now? WHYYYYYYYYY NOOOOOOOOOOOOOW? WHYYYYYYYYYY NOOOOOOOOOOOOW? NOOOOOOOOOOOO NOT NOOOOOOOOOOOOW!
The Great Gatsby
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like taking all the dirt out of the houseplant DO NOT TAKE ALL THE DIRT OUT OF THE HOUSEPLANT. This is your second warning. The houseplant is a living thing. You don’t want to make the houseplant sad, do you? Please put it back. Put. It. Back. PUT THE DIRT BACK IN THE HOUSEPLANT.
Rebecca
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Manderley is the name of our daycare, which has been closed for a Covid exposure for eight days. I miss it so much.
https://lithub.com/first-lines-of-classic-novels-if-no-one-had-childcare/
Oriana:
This is funny but also sad. Parenting has become too exhausting for many, leading to more stress than joy. That's one reason why affordable childcare should be in the top five priorities.
*
“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” ~ Carl Sagan
*
WHY THE OLD ELITE SPEND SO MUCH TIME AT WORK
~ Everything in America is getting older these days. In practically every field of human endeavor, the average age of achievement and power is rising.
Politics is getting older. Joe Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Remarkably, he is still younger than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And they aren’t exceptions to the general rule: The Senate is the oldest in history.
Businesses are getting older. The average age of new CEOs at Fortune 500 companies is very likely at its record high, having gradually increased throughout the 21st century. And it’s not just the boss; the whole workplace is getting older too. Between the 1980s and early 2000s, Americans under 45 accounted for the clear majority of workers. But that's no longer the case, since the large Baby Boomer generation has remained in the labor force longer than previous cohorts.
Science is getting older—not just in this country, but around the world. Discovery used to be a young person’s game. James Watson was 24 when he co-discovered the structure of DNA, and Albert Einstein was 26 when he published his famous papers on the photoelectric effect and special relativity. But in the past few decades, the typical age of scientific achievement has soared. Nobel Prize laureates are getting older in almost every discipline, especially in physics and chemistry. The average age of an investigator at the National Institutes of Health rose from 39 in 1980 to 51 in 2008, and the average age of principal investigators receiving their first major NIH grant increased from about 36 in 1990 to about 45 in 2016. In fact, all of academia is getting older: The average age of college presidents in the U.S. has increased steadily in the past 20 years. From 1995 to 2010, the share of tenured faculty over the age of 60 roughly doubled.
In pop culture, the old isn’t going out of style like it used to. The writer Ted Gioia observed that Americans have for several years shifted their music-listening to older songs. In film, the average age of movie stars has steadily increased since 1999, according to an analysis by The Ringer. So far this year, the seven highest-grossing American films are sequels and reboots. Sports such as tennis and football are dominated by superstars (Nadal, Djokovic, Brady, Rodgers) who are unusually old for the game. Incredibly successful young artists and athletes obviously do exist—but older songs, older stars, and existing franchises are dominating the cultural landscape in a historically unusual way.
So, what’s going on?
AS RICH AMERICANS LIVE LONGER AND HEALTHIER LIVES, AMERICAN POWER IS AGING
The average American lives longer than they did in 2000, despite life expectancy flatlining in the past decade. Rich Americans have it even better: The wealthiest Americans live at least 10 years longer than the poorest Americans, and that gap is growing.
Since the rising ages of prominent politicians, CEOs, and Nobel Prize winners are what’s at issue, a focus on the elite seems appropriate. For most of this century, the richest quartile of men have been adding about 0.2 years to their life expectancy each year. If we extrapolate that annual increase to the entire century, it would suggest that rich men have added roughly four years to their lifespans since 2000. The average age of U.S. senators did, in fact, rise from 59.8 in 2001 to 64.3 in 2021—a roughly four-year increase.
But many positions and institutions are getting older much faster than that. For college presidents, seventy seems to be the new fifty.
The average age of new CEOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies increased nine years since 2005—from 46 to 55. The average age of leading actors in films increased about 12 years since 2001—from about 38 to about 50 for male stars.
Maybe we should consider not just life spans, but health spans. In sports, for instance, a superior understanding of diet, exercise, and medicine has allowed stars to extend their careers. The tennis stars Novak Djokovic, 35, and Rafael Nadal, 36, are old for their sport, but they’ve somehow won 15 of the last 17 Grand Slam men’s tournaments. Three of the last five NFL Most Valuable Player Awards went to quarterbacks over the age of 36—Tom Brady in 2017 and Aaron Rodgers in 2020 and 2021. In basketball, LeBron James recently became, at 37, the oldest NBA player to average 30 points per game in a season. The winningest pitcher in Major League Baseball is Justin Verlander, who is 39.
So the longevity factor is twofold. Not only are Americans overall living longer, but richer Americans are living even longer, and rich Americans with access to dietitians, personal exercise, and high-class medical care are extending their primes within the context of longer lives. As a result, we should expect older workers to vigorously contribute to their fields much longer than they used to.
2. As work becomes less physical and more central to modern identity, the old elite are spending more time at work.
Another way to frame the central question here: Why are the Boomer elite working so hard, so late into their lives?
One explanation for the rapid aging of our political leaders, academic faculty, and chief-executive class is that the Boomer generation is choosing to stay in the workforce longer than previous generations did. This has created what the writer Paul Millerd calls a “Boomer blockade” at the top of many organizations, keeping Gen-X and Millennial workers from promotions. As older workers remain in advanced positions in politics and business, younger workers who would have ascended the ranks in previous decades are getting stuck in the purgatory of upper-middle management.
If one wanted to frame things more generously, one could say that declining ageism has allowed older Americans to stay in jobs that they really like and don’t want to leave. These folks could retire, but they love their work and draw an enormous amount of pride from their careers.
But 70- and 80-somethings loving their work so much that they never retire is awfully close to something I’ve called workism—the idea that work has, for many elites, become a kind of personal religion in an era of otherwise declining religiosity.
Workism isn’t all bad; it’s nice that the economy has evolved from brawn to brainy labor that gives people a sense of daily enrichment and higher purpose. But workism isn’t all good, either: The corner office was not designed to function as a temple, and a work-centric identity can lead to a kind of spiritual emptiness. What’s more, though this subject is complicated and sensitive, a lot of very elderly people in positions of great power are clinging to their jobs long after their cognitive and verbal abilities have waned.
3. The “burden of knowledge”: Science is getting older, because we’re all getting smarter.
Longer lives and increasing workism could explain why our political and business leaders are quickly getting older. But they don’t explain the biggest mysteries I’ve highlighted in the field of science—such as why the average age of Nobel Prize laureates has increased or why young star researchers are rarer than they once were.
The best explanation for both of these trends is the “burden of knowledge” theory. We are learning more about the world every year, but the more we learn about any subject, the harder it is to master all the facts out there and push the frontier of knowledge outward.
This theory is pretty obvious when you think about it for a few seconds. Let’s imagine, for example, that you want to revolutionize the field of genetics. Three hundred years ago, before any such domain existed, you could have made a splash just by shouting, “I’ve got a strong feeling that genes are a thing!” Two hundred years ago, you could have done it by watching some peas grow in your backyard and using your powers of observation to form a theory of inheritance. But now that we know that genes are a thing and have figured out dominant and recessive genes and have mapped the genome, the most groundbreaking research in the field is really, really complicated. To understand the genetic underpinnings of a complex disease such as schizophrenia, hundreds of people around the planet have to synthesize data on the infinitely complex interplay of genes and environment.
The burden of knowledge affects the average age of scientists in several ways. First, attaining mastery at a young age of an existing domain becomes harder. Since scientists have to learn so much in fields such as physics or chemistry, they take longer to become established, and the average age for achieving breakthrough work (or fancy prizes) goes up and up. Second, the knowledge burden necessitates large teams of researchers to make new breakthroughs, and these teams tend to be led by older principal investigators. Third, scientific-funding institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, may be awarding a disproportionate amount of funding to older researchers precisely because they’re biased against younger researchers who they assume haven’t overcome the knowledge burdens of their field. Or perhaps, as academia and funding institutions get older, they develop an implicit ageism against younger researchers, who they assume are too naive to do paradigm-shifting work in established domains.
The burden of knowledge theory represents a double-edged sword of progress. It is precisely because we know so much about the world that it is getting harder to learn more about the world. And one side effect of this phenomenon is that science is rapidly aging.
4. “Data dulling” has made institutions risk-averse (and consumers obsessed with familiarity).
Pop culture in 2022 has been a warm bath of nostalgia. The song of the summer is quite possibly Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” which was originally released 37 years ago. Its success was launched by the show of the summer, the ’80s pastiche Stranger Things. The year’s biggest blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick, is a sequel-homage to the 1986 original.
Okay, well, that’s just one summer, you might be inclined to say. But it’s not. So many recent albums have fallen short of expectations that The Wall Street Journal has called it a “new music curse.” Every year in the last decade, at least half of the top-10 films in America have been sequels, adaptations, and reboots. (Even the exceptions are their own sort of franchise: The two biggest opening-weekend box offices for original films since 2019 were for movies directed by Jordan Peele.)
Is this about median longevity, or workism, or the burden of knowledge in physics and genomics? Uh, no. These are cultural stories, and they deserve a cultural explanation. The best I’ve got is this: As the entertainment industry has become more statistically intelligent, entertainment products have gotten more familiar and repetitive.
In music, I’ve previously called this the Shazam effect. As the music industry got better at anticipating audience tastes, it realized that a huge portion of the population likes to hear the same thing over and over again. That’s one reason why hit radio stations have become more repetitive and why the most popular music spends more time on the Billboard charts.
For the past few decades, the same statistical revolution that reshaped sports—a.k.a. moneyball—has come for entertainment. You could call it data dulling: In entertainment, greater algorithmic intelligence tends to ruin investment in originality. When cultural domains become more statistically sophisticated, old and proven intellectual property takes money and attention from new and unproven acts.
What does data dulling look like in art? It looks like music companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying the catalogs of old hitmakers when, in previous generations, that money would have gone toward developing new artists. It looks like movie studios spending significantly more on the production budgets of sequels than on originals. It looks like risk-averse producers investing more in familiar content, which amplifies consumers’ natural preference for familiarity—thus creating a feedback loop that clusters new cultural products around preexisting hits. It looks a lot like what we’ve got.
***
America’s multidisciplinary gerontocracy is complex. It comes from a mix of obviously good things (we’re living longer, healthier lives), dubiously good things (an obsession with the music and tastes of the 1980s), and straightforwardly bad things (a stunning dearth of young political power and an apparent funding bias against young scientists).
Solving this problem is similarly complex. I would be very uncomfortable with laws that ban ambitious 74-year-olds from working. I’m not very interested in forcing Bruce Springsteen fans to stop listening to him. But I’m enthusiastic about new research organizations that specialize in funding young scientists.
Another matter worth investigating is that other countries don’t share the gerontocracy problem across disciplines. In the U.K., for example, the public is getting older, but its leaders aren’t. I think we should be more open to asking hard questions, such as “If the Democratic Party is the preference of America’s young people, why are so few young people represented in its leadership?” and “How do we balance a respect for the elderly with a scientific approach to evaluating the cognitive state of our oldest political and corporate leaders?” In the end, this is about nothing less than how an aging country learns to grow up wisely. ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/08/older-aging-politicians-athletes-culture/671027/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
I don’t think the aging of different parts of our society has a single overall explanation. In science I think it is exactly as described: there is so much to learn it takes a long time to master before you can move to innovation, and all research must be comprehensive, thorough and exact before you can finalize a theory, present a discovery, release a product. A single scientist in a lab is not enough, it takes a team to run and record experiments and results, and all must be repeatable before conclusions can be announced as verified.
Research must also compete for funding, and against the competition of others pursuing the same problem. Findings are jealously guarded, as are reputations--not only are prizes at stake, but all the rewards of the marketplace. Sometimes the intensity of competition can tempt the less scrupulous to be less than careful in stating results. Financial pressures determine what gets funded and researched...note the case of very rare diseases, where research is not funded because there would be little profit in a cure. In our system profit and funding are always big issues. I think we have young talent, witness teens working on electric engines that won't depend on rare metal components, or coming up with simple systems for water purification...but without sponsorship and funding these ideas won’t be fully realized.
I also have noted the "franchise/sequel" domination in entertainment, and wondered why so much of it concentrated on cartoons and comic book heroes., as if the whole audience was preadolescent. Again I think this is determined by the idea that what sold once will sell again. If you had a blockbuster success just keep doing more and more of that..same old, same old. Stick with what the audience is familiar and comfortable with.
Nostalgia is part of the mix as well, and these years have many longing for old times, childhoods, really, that may have seemed simpler and safer, even if in reality they were not.
And of course, and I think most important of all is that people are living longer and healthier, that 60 can be the new 30, and people can want to continue actively working much longer than what used to be retirement age. This is a problem in academia and in business for the younger folk. If positions don't open up, for advancement or for tenure, they have no where to go.
Oriana:
It is a problem. But when a job is rewarding, retiring is a very depressing proposition. Some people don't really visibly slow down until they are eighty and beyond. Even then it's difficult to persuade some of them to step down -- especially if they are the boss.
Cultivation of interests other than those related to one's job is perhaps part of the answer.
But I can see how the old persist in politics -- after all, the electorate is getting older too, and the retired are eager to vote, while young voters don't seem to care as much -- and there simply aren't that many young people in politics. They'd rather interact with their iPhones.
*
THE CENTRAL FLAW IN COMMUNISM
~ Communism is Christianity
Before the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, there had been 72% devout Christians in the Russian Empire. Their traditions and customs had stretched back hundreds of years.
In just a decade or two there were no Christians left. Instead, there were millions of devout communists. Moreover, their ideology was rapidly spreading across the globe.
What made it so successful so quickly?
The Bolsheviks did a very simple, yet clever thing. They made Soviet communism a carbon copy of Orthodox Christianity.
Lenin = Christ
Lenin saved the proletariat and peasants from the exploiters. He is the Messiah of the new faith. Like Christ created Christians, so did Lenin created Soviets that live in opposition to the pagans (capitalists).
One of the most popular slogans in the Soviet Union was: “Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin will live.”
Like Christ, Lenin is immortal.
He was wounded and killed, suffering for the proletariat.
In spirit, Lenin is leading the Soviets to “the Bright Future” (the Heaven).
The First Coming = The October Revolution
Lenin’s Coming was the Red Revolution. It was the dawn of the new era.
Stalin is his disciple (interestingly, he studied in the seminary). He will make sure that his teachings will be carried out to the letter.
The Bible = Lenin’s books (also, books by Marx)
Lenin wrote books that would be studied by the Soviets, because they contain the holy truth.
Karl Marx = John the Baptist
Marx predicted the coming of the Messiah. In his writing (preaching) he pathed the way for Lenin to become a communist leader that will lead the world to the Bright Future.
Lenin + Marx + Engels = Holy Trinity
Soviets = Christians
The Soviets had to carry out sacred covenants of Lenin through applying his teachings and doing what the leaders of the party (priests) told them to do. The leaders of the party also were the only ones who knew how to interpret the covenants correctly.
Hammer and sickle = Cross
Cross is a symbol of suffering. Through suffering you can reach the Heaven. Unlike machinery, hammer and sickle are crude tools that require application of physical strength, thus physical suffering. Through suffering and hard work, the Soviets would build and thus reach the “Bright Future,” promised to them by their Messiah.
Houses of Culture = Churches
These were place of gatherings for the Soviets. Like churches, they were beautifully decorated and had expansive halls. There were musical performances, like liturgies in the churches.
Images of Lenin = Icons
As with Christ, images of Lenin were replicated throughout the communist domain: busts, statues, portraits. They had to constantly remind every communist he’s the only Messiah, there’s no other Messiah. His outstretched arm shows the way to the righteous. He will lead the righteous to the Bright Future of Communism (Kingdom Come).
They did an Ancient Egyptian burial - mummified body in a mausoleum with the stands to face the Red Square to receive parades to glorify Communism. Why? Because Jesus’s body disappeared after his physical death. Lenin’s body was surrounded by too many people to pull a David Copperfield on him, so they went all pagan. Still organized religion, isn’t it.
Proselytizing
The Soviets tried to convert to their faith millions of people around the world. Like Christians, they fought wars over it.
Leaders of the Party = High Priests
They ruled over the Soviets. They interpreted the holy books.
The Soviet elites substituted Christianity with Communism through cunning usage of its tenants, symbolism and elements of faith. Built on the existing faith, it could spread rapidly, as all its elements were instinctively recognized by millions of people.
*
Russian Orthodox procession
In 1980s, Communism’s biggest strength became its biggest flaw.
While the West embraced consumerism as its new secular religion, the Soviet Union was still going through the motions of an irrelevant ideology.
Transcendence was out. The Bright Future had no buyers. It was all about right here, right now.
The new big thing was the stuff. China was working three shifts, pulling millions out of the villages into new cities to provide the world with stuff, and the world began to consume.
The Soviet Union had become a “dinosaur on the dump of history”.
The West beat Communism. ~ Misha Firer
Jeffrey B. Popper:
The very existence of affluent and consumerist Western societies posed an existential threat to the Soviet bloc for its whole existence. You could saturate it in propaganda all you wanted, but that still couldn’t prevent people from seeing with their own eyes that people lived better on the other side. The open border in Berlin in the ’50s showed starkly what would happen if people had a choice: and that was early on in the Cold War. At a certain point, the people of Eastern Europe just got sick of living a lie.
Jason Sarasti:
Socialism is just Christianity with “the people” or “the community” replacing god.
Actually Matthew 19:21 says yes clearly that Jesus said that his followers needed to sell all their possessions and give away all their money to follow him.
Both communism and Christianity promise the same thing: an egalitarian utopia (which is really a dystopia) controlled by an insatiable tyrant. Marxism is based on Christian ethics, even if it isn’t explicitly Christian itself.
Khurshid Shah:
Christianity that says all people who just happen to disbelieve in Jesus are to be eternally condemned to hell. I am no fan of communism, but Lenin or Marx seems to be a more caring deity as they preached about an idealistic society where all people are equal, everybody gets food etc.
Klodi Caci:
Communism was against the human nature. Humans are primarily egoistic beings vested by social behaviors. Communism wanted them to be altruistic beings, which was not in their nature. So the communist people in power circumvented the communist ideal of altruism by keeping it in slogans and practicing in real life a more egoistic style of communism, the dictatorship, which is the most egoistic form of power exercise.
Oriana:
Both communism and Christianity demand absolute altruism — “love thy neighbor” — in theory, that is. Because the ideal is impossible to reach, is breeds all kinds of corruption. Ultimately any attempt to build a Utopia turns into lies and corruption. Yes, there are rare exceptions — a dedicated physician working for free in Africa, a priest who risked his life to save Jews from the Nazis. But most people simply are not saints. They are not altruists. They enjoy good food and body comforts.
On the other hand, both communism and Christianity represent an ideal, and the young crave an ideal, a cause for which to live. Consumerism alone does not satisfy the need for believe in an ideal.
The old saying was, “Communism has capital deficiencies, but capitalism has moral deficiencies.”
Mary: THE STATE AS A RELIGION
"Communism is Christianity" . . . oh, yes, and not only because it echoes some early Christian ideas of communalism. The structure is very much like a religion. The holy books, the foundation in Das Kapital, (the Bible) and the works of Lenin, and later, Mao. The slogans like prayers or litanies, the "confessions" in public Self Criticism sessions, the naming of apostates — enemies and dissenters, the Inquisition and purges and punishments, the excommunication to prison or Gulag.
We have parades and spectacles like church processions with saints and their icons, the ever-present images of the Great Leaders, and the preserved bodies like incorruptible saints...Lenin on his catafalque. All of these forms and formulas feel very comfortable to someone from an Orthodox or Roman Catholic background. The State becomes the embodiment of your new faith, and you the faithful acolyte.
Oriana:
Here Christ/Lenin is the champion of the proletariat and social equality. The betrayal of that ideal was almost instantaneous in the Soviet Union -- the party elites became the ruling class, never mind the proletariat.
Joseph Milosch: TRUMP AS MESSIAH
The greed of the rich throws the United States into confusion. Their alliance with the Republican party and the White Supremacist is as dangerous to the USA as communism was to the freedom of the Russians and their neighboring countries. After reading this article, it seemed to me that the Republican Party is copying the Communist strategy for domination as their own. Below are a few examples of what I mean.
~ Communism is Christianity
~ White Supremacy is Christianity
In the 1950s, William Buckley Jr. wrote God and Man at Yale. In this work, he expressed his opposition to federal civil rights legislation and support for continued racial segregation in the South. He thought the Federal government should have close relationships with the Christian churches. Those relationships opened the door for the eventual alliance between the Moral Majority and the Republican Party and led to the coronation of Donald Trump as the anointed one by mega-churches led by Joel Osteen.
Today, few Evangelical preachers call out their fellow Christians for following Donald Trump more closely than they follow the teachings of Christ.
Lenin = Christ
Trump = Christ
Lenin saved the proletariat and peasants from the exploiters. He is the Messiah of the new faith. Like Christ created Christians, so did Lenin create Soviets that lived in opposition to the pagans (capitalists).
According to Fox News and some evangelical leaders, Donald Trump is the messiah because he will save the White Race from minority domination.
One of the most popular slogans in the Soviet Union was: “Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin will live.”
Like Christ, Lenin is immortal.
He was wounded and killed, suffering for the proletariat.
One of the current slogans in the United States is Donald Trump won in 2021. He will win in 2023 and will be our future president.
The left abused Donald Trump, but he will rise to be our leader again.
Bright Future = Kingdom Come
In spirit, Lenin is leading the Soviets to “the Bright Future” (the Heaven).
Out of office, D. Trump is leading America to a ‘White Future.’ (Heaven on Earth).
The First Coming = The October Revolution
The First Coming = January 6th.
Lenin’s Coming was the Red Revolution. It was the dawn of a new era.
Stalin is his disciple (interestingly, he studied in the seminary). He will make sure that his teachings will be carried out to the letter.
To most Americans, January 6th was a terrible desecration of America. To the White Supremacists, it was the start of restoring White dominance. Furthermore, Conservative religions did not see them as the utmost danger to society, and in this political dispute, they sided with Trump and his allies, the White Supremacists.
I could continue with this exercise, but my point is that in reviewing the horrors of Soviet-styled communism, we should not ignore those same techniques when the Republican party and their White Supremacists allies use them.
Oriana:
Here Christ is no protector of the poor. He is the savior of the right wing Christians who have long forgotten his teachings in favor of the Prosperity Gospel. Blessed are the rich.
*
TROTSKY’S PROPHECY: WATCH OUT FOR BOURGEOIS ROT
The Soviet state was going to metamorphose, said Trotsky. Bureaucrats would fall in love with power and comfort, and succumb to the spells of a bourgeois lifestyle.
Deep down inside, Stalin knew Trotsky was right. Hence, he did everything in the spirit of Trotsky: the build-up of the military machine, the bloody purges of the elites, the collectivization, the revolutionary expansion—and killed the man, to get rid of a witness.
With Stalin’s death, this spirit expired. (Or moved to China, some insist.)
Socialist consumerism
Without Stalin, we saw the most rapid rise in living standards of the mass of Soviet population. The use of fertilizers and herbicides in the agriculture made the food situation more stable.
Khrushchev initiated a large program of residential construction, and more and more families started to move to their own apartments. These were often tiny: a kitchen of 7 square meters or less, minuscule bathroom, and one, or two smallish bedroom. But these were otdelníye (“separate”), a very important distinction at the time, apartments. These were not shared with several other families, as had been standard during Stalin’s time.
The 2nd superpower
The last remains of old exploitative classes were gone. The USSR was now a nuclear power. The British and French colonial rule was crumbling. The Soviet space program seemed to be a decade ahead of the American. The Soviet economy rose by at annual rate of 5-7%, at least, for many years in row, with no sign of easing.
The country was teeming with baby-boomers. We passed the US in life expectancy. A few top men lost their chairs every now and then, but there were no new purges, not even indictments.
A new, unusual sense of safety and contentment started to take hold on all levels of state administration.
Tired of the heat
This is when Brezhnev came to power. Around him, and at least one level down, there were men who had made good careers in the era of Stalin. Just like him, they were mostly non-ideological bureaucrats and technocrats. Almost all had a memory of hunger and poverty: Soviet rule was a harsh mother. Another shared memory was the promise a swift fall and death at the hand of Stalin’s executioners in case of failure, or an awkward move.
These men had gone through hell. Now, they wanted their reward—for themselves and their families.
As the prophet said
This is how the Communist cause in the USSR was doomed. The sense of contentment and self-indulgence went on to cascade downward. Gulag was closed. Even if a thousand people were still executed in our prisons every year, no one of them died for being a slacker, or a negligent moron, or an enemy of people.
If you were loyal, did your work (kind of did, at least) and didn’t steal too much, you were safe. Such a blessed time.
Toward the end of Stalin’s rule, the Communists indeed delivered quite a lot of what they promised. Many people died in the process, but the survivors started to take care of their kids much better than their parents did. Look how more contented kids have become. “Hail the heroic mother!” This is 1944, and WWII is still going on:
[Note the blond hair and light skin of these children. Arguably this is a racist poster that tries to say: this is what real Russians look like. In fact brown and dark brown hair dominates.]
[Don't tell me that these are all her children. Soviet women rarely had more than two children. For professional women, having just one was enough. That's why Russia's coming demographic collapse.]
However, already under Stalin, you can trace an unforgivable bourgeois cuteness creeping in, a shameless Hallmark knockoff. The schoolgirl below is wearing a Young Poioneer’s red necktie, but the entire look of both kids is as from a Capitalist advertisement piece.
The new generation of Soviet citizens started to feel a certain entitlement. True Stalinists saw the rot and warned the nation.
But the nation wasn’t listening. Quite a lot of these young citizens just in a few decades would dismember the country to become oligarchs, minigarchs, and the armed protectors of new Capitalist Russia. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Oriana:
Thus, in a way, Trotsky predicted the downfall of communism. He didn't give the date, but he knew it would be generational, with the children of devout Bolsheviks already less devout, and their children even less so -- while the understandable interest in living a comfortable life kept on growing.
Of course Trotsky thought that the Soviet Union was doing Communism all wrong ("Revolution Betrayed), and only he, Trotsky, knew the true meaning of the ideal. But by all accounts he had a brilliant mind, and somehow foresaw that the revolutionary fervor of the first generation couldn't be sustained in the future -- the lure of prosperous life was going to be too powerful.
Now, if he'd only stayed true to his first insight (he started out as a Menshevik, not a Bolshevik): the "dictatorship of the proletariat" could mean only the dictatorship OVER the proletariat.
*
PUTIN IN HIS OWN TRAP ~ MISHA IOSSEL
~ Putin, that rabid rat of his childhood nightmares, has painted himself into a corner. For political reasons, he cannot ever leave Crimea or Donbas. He cannot declare General Mobilization: Russian people don't want to have anything personally to do with his pointless war. 80,000 killed and wounded in Ukraine. Russian Army is starting to crumble. His end will not be pretty. ~
~ “Officially, Russia's Defense Ministry has released only partial tallies of war losses, the last on March 25, when it announced 1,351 dead and 3,825 wounded.”
"I think it's safe to suggest that the Russians have probably taken 70,000 to 80,000 casualties in less than six months," Kahl told reporters. "Now, that is a combination of killed in action and wounded in action, and that number might be a little lower, a little higher. But I think that's kind of in the ballpark, which is pretty remarkable considering that the Russians have achieved none of Vladimir Putin’s objectives at the beginning of the war.”
After Russia's retreat from the Kyiv region, many units had been decimated, according to U.S. military officials and outside experts. According to some estimates, some Russian units lost up to one-third of their personnel.
Michael Kofman, a longtime expert on the Russian military at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analysis, has roughly estimated that for every Russian soldier killed, there were likely about 3.5 wounded.
Factors that experts have blamed for Russia's high casualty rate include poor morale and poor discipline, particularly among the lower ranks and noncommissioned officers.
Astashov, who works in a medical unit with the 64th Brigade [the brigade was honored by Putin for the atrocities it committed in Bucha], told RFE/RL that at least 100 soldiers — so-called "refuseniks" — may have refused to fight in Ukraine, particularly after the initial battlefield defeats suffered by Russian forces.
"In fact, there was no rotation at all," he said. "There were at least 100 ‘refuseniks,' not after the first defeats, but after many [lies] on the part of commanders. The boys are tired of the intensity of fighting and movement, of the duration of the deployment, and the backdrop of uncertainty.” ~
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-army-casualty-rate-64th-brigade-bucha-deaths/31982194.html
Dead Russian soldiers on top an armored vehicle
~ More on the war from Misha:
Russia has already lost this unforgivable war.
"The staggeringly high rate of Russian casualties in Ukraine means that President Vladimir V. Putin may not be able to achieve one of his key war objectives: seizing the entire eastern region of the country this year, officials in the Biden administration and military experts say.
With 500 Russian troops killed or wounded every day, according to the latest estimate by American intelligence and military officials, Russia’s war effort has decelerated to a grinding slog, the officials said."
*
The face of the war that nobody wanted or needed — except for Putin’s ego.
His bandages look soiled. Putins delusions of grandeur doomed this young man to a life of misery.
*
THE RUSSIAN BILLIONAIRE WHO DARES TO CRITICIZE PUTIN
~ Boris Mints is one of a few rich Russian businesspeople to speak out against Russia's invasion of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin.
The majority of high-profile people in the country have remained silent over the war, avoiding criticism of the Kremlin.
There is one simple explanation, according to Mints: "They are all afraid.”
The Kremlin has a reputation for cracking down on outspoken critics of President Putin with the content on Russian news channels controlled. Unauthorized protests have also been banned in the country since 2014.
Mints said "any person" who openly criticizes Putin "has grounds to worry about personal safety”.
However, in an interview conducted over email, he told the BBC: "I have no intention to live in a bomb shelter, as Mr Putin does.”
The 64-year-old, who built his wealth through investment company O1 Group, which he founded in 2003 and then sold in 2018, said that in Russia the "usual way" to punish a business owner for their "intolerance" towards the regime was to "open a fabricated criminal case against their business”.
"Such criminal cases will affect not only the business owners themselves, but also their family and employees," he said.
"Any business leader independent from [Putin] is seen as a threat as he or she may be capable of financing opposition or cultivating protest -- as such, those people are seen as Putin's enemies and, therefore, as enemies of the state," he added.
It is a situation Mints has first-hand experience of, having first spoken out publicly against President Putin's policies in 2014 after Crimea was annexed from Ukraine.
Mints felt he needed to leave Russia in 2015 for the UK "in the context of growing crackdown on political opposition", with Boris Nemtsov being shot dead that year.
Mr Nemtsov was a fierce adversary of President Putin. His murder in 2015 is the highest-profile political killing since Mr Putin came to power. The authorities deny any involvement.
Two years later, Mr Mints' former investment company O1 Group "found itself in an open conflict against Central Bank of Russia", he said, with legal proceedings starting across several different jurisdictions.
"When things like this start to happen, it is a clear signal that one should leave the country immediately," he said.
He remains the subject of current legal action by the Kremlin.
It is because of such action that Mr Mints suggests the "bravest step available" for wealthy Russians who dislike Mr Putin is to "go silently into exile", citing the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once Russia's wealthiest man, but was jailed for almost a decade on charges of fraud and tax evasion which, he says, were politically motivated.
Two of the country's most prominent oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska, stopped short of direct criticism of Mr Putin when they made separate calls for peace in Ukraine.
Mr Fridman, a billionaire banker, said any personal remarks could be a risk not just to himself but also to staff and colleagues.
However, Mr Mints has been joined by Russian tycoon Oleg Tinkov, founder of Tinkoff Bank and former owner of cycling team Tinkoff-Saxo, in lambasting the invasion.
Mr Mints called President Putin's actions "vile", saying the invasion was "the most tragic event in recent history, not only of Ukraine and Russia, but globally”.
He also compared it to Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939.
"This war is a result of madness and hunger for power of a single person, Vladimir Putin, supported by his inner circle," said Mr Mints, who was chairman of one of the largest pension asset managers in Russia until 2018.
Mr Mints was first introduced to Mr Putin in the early 1990s but only properly spoke with him on 2 January 2000, two days after Mr Putin was appointed acting president of Russia.
Mr Mints, who worked under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, was keen to discuss his plans to reform local government to grow Russia's democracy into the 21st Century.
"Mr Putin listened to my suggestions without commenting or arguing. The following day, Putin sacked me," he said.
He knew then that Putin's vision for his country was "miles away" from the previous administration’s.
Leaving politics, Mr Mints started a stock brokerage for individual clients three years later.
Mr Mints has not been sanctioned by the UK government, unlike other Russian businessmen who have been identified as having close links to the Kremlin.
However, his name did appear on a so-called "Putin list" released by the US in 2018. Out of 210 names, 114 of them were listed as being in the government or linked to it, or key businessmen.
The other 96, which included Mr Mints, were listed as oligarchs apparently determined more by the fact they were worth more than $1bn (£710m) at the time, rather than their close ties to the Kremlin.
The father-of-four made Forbes' world billionaires list in 2017 with a total wealth of $1.3bn, before he dropped off in 2018.
But he dismissed suggestions that he was an oligarch.
"Not every Russian entrepreneur is pro-Putin, and likewise neither is every wealthy Russian person an 'oligarch'," he said. "In Russia, the term means a business leader who is very connected to Putin and most of whose wealth, or the profits of their businesses, depend on co-operation with the Russian state.
"Russia is not only an oilfield with an aluminum mine in the center," he added. "It is a country of 140 million people. People there as everywhere else have their needs and these needs are not at all different from those here in the West.”
Now living in the UK, Mints, a keen art collector, feels comfortable without the need for extra security to keep himself and his family safe in Britain, and has no current ambition to move back to Russia. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62037169
STALIN AND SOVIET SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
~ Stalin’s purges of course meant setbacks in several areas, as entire research institutes stood half-empty after the arrests.
However, sometimes it worked in unexpected ways, as Beria introduced a system of secret research facilities and laboratories where sentenced scientists and engineers were collected to work on highly classified military projects. It’s hard to say if these programs would have had a success if the project personnel pursued their “civil” interests and careers as free researchers.
The most eminent example is the Soviet missile program. The “father of Soviet space program” Sergei Korolev started his career as a missile constructor while serving a term during WWII. He was originally sentenced to death, and only a lucky turn spared him for his later fame. The sharáshka episode made him noticed and put him in contact with many brilliant minds focussed on the same very defined engineering task—that ultimately led to the sensational Soviet breakthrough in space. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
*sharashka = A secret research and development laboratory in the Soviet gulag.
from Wiki: ~ Arrested on a false official charge as a "member of an anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary organization" (which would later be reduced to "saboteur of military technology"), he was imprisoned in 1938 for almost six years, including a few months in a Kolyma labor camp. Following his release he became a recognized rocket designer and a key figure in the development of the Soviet Intercontinental ballistic missile program. He later directed the Soviet space program and was made a Member of Soviet Academy of Sciences, overseeing the early successes of the Sputnik and Vostok projects including the first human Earth orbit mission by Yuri Gagarin on 12 April 1961. Korolev's unexpected death in 1966 interrupted implementation of his plans for a Soviet crewed Moon landing before the United States 1969 mission.
His mentor was Andrei Tupolev, the famous aircraft designer.
Korolev rarely talked about his experience in the Gulag. He lived under constant fear of being executed for the military secrets he possessed, and was deeply affected by his time in the camp, becoming reserved and cautious.
Korolev's passion for his work was a characteristic that made him a great leader. He was committed to training younger engineers to move into his space and missile projects, even while consumed with his own work. Korolev knew that students would be the future of space exploration, which is why he made such an effort to communicate with them. ~
Part of the reason for Korolev’s untimely death in 1959 was in injury sustained in the Gulag: ~ Suddenly, during the operation, Korolev started to bleed. Doctors tried to provide intubation to allow him to breathe freely, but his jaws, injured during his time in a Gulag, had not healed properly and impeded the installation of the breathing tube. Korolev died without regaining consciousness. ~
Subramanian Nagarajan:
Why did the Great Purge ever happen? It was meant to kill the best minds of the time, but why? I also observed the same thing happening in the movie “First they killed my father” which is about rebels taking over the country of Cambodia. The rebels ordered doctors and teachers to be executed, but can’t understand why!
Dima Vorobiev:
Won’t say about Cambodia (not my field), but for Stalin, it was a necessary rotation of the elites. He needed to get rid of the revolutionaries, in order to impose his vision of imperial order on the country. In their place, he would appoint new talents, who shared his vision, or just executed his orders without questions.
Bulat Ziganshin:
In USSR vision, there were only two classes — workers and peasants. White collar workers were called “interlayer” between those classes. It’s the result of marxist theory that set hard-working people against privileged people, including both entrepreneurs and intellectuals. And the theory was established this way because in 19th century, there was significant gap between level of life for workers and for intellectuals. In particular, intellectuals had enough money to have their own servants.
So, Marx concluded that intellectuals and entrepreneurs exploit workers and peasants and this vision was mindlessly copied in all socialist ideologies. Cambodia only executed this idea to its ultimate end, killing all those “exploiters”.
Anthrakas Exi:
What about class society and servants in the USSR…a hidden class society were working people lived in squalor while the “equal ones”, generals, bureaucrats, prima ballerinas and their relatives lived in comfortable/big apartments with servants and delivery of food from state shops, food not available for the ordinary people?
Magnus Johansson:
Cambodia was Stalinism as tragic farce, really.
The country was totally underdeveloped but they still tried to follow the Marxist script to the letter. Add huge doses of xenophobia and paranoia, and the result was, well, [the killing fields].
*
A RECORD-HOLDING KILLER UNDER STALIN
~ The KGB hitman Blokhin was the person who personally shot the most people in history. He personally shot over 8000 Soviet prisoners for Stalin. He was sent to prisons around Russia to empty them so they could be refilled with new victims. So, he was much worse than anyone else you can name.
At one point he was put on a kill list (charged with some random crime to fill a list) but Stalin himself crossed off his name, and replaced it with the name of the list-maker's own son. ~ Ian Vance, Quora
*
CRIMEA AIRPORT EXPLOSIONS
~ Ukrainian military intelligence released intercepted conversations among Russian troops in the Donetsk region immediately after the explosions at the Crimea airfield. The intercepted calls reveal troops unnerved by the massive explosions while not buying the official Kremlin explanation.
"Nothing special. An airport in Crimea has exploded, allegedly due to somebody’s ‘negligence’.
The ammunition exploded at the fuel depot. In the goddamn Crimea. Fucking hell."
"What fuel depots are you talking about? Those Ukropy (a derogatory word for Ukrainians) fucking attacked it with missiles."
"Well! The Khokhols (another derogatory word for Ukrainians) say so, that they fucking destroyed the airport. And Russian TV says: No fucking shit, it was ‘negligence’. They don’t admit fucking shit. The Ukropy say one thing, the Russians say another."
"The Russians are saying this so as not to embarrass themselves."
"Right. The skies were heavily defended. But the lauded air defense systems failed again."
"The Ukrainian Forces may attack the Crimean Bridge."
“Then what?”
“Then we are left in hell.”
*
DAILY LIFE IN RUSSIA
~ I’m a Russian born, living in US for about 8 years now. I just came back from a month long trip there.
What can I say? The western media got me brain washed too. What did I see during my visit?
The social/ government workers who used to be rather rude and ignorant are now polite, because all phone calls are recorded and you can call and complain about any service provided to you.
The roads. There is a saying that fools and roads are the two Russian troubles. I can tell that the roads are slowly getting better. At least the ones I’ve seen are a major improvement from 5 years ago, when I visited Russia last time.
The healthcare. Free or cheap. And child healthcare is so much ahead of what is provided in USA. In USA deadly illnesses are treated better, but typical physician assistance or therapy are simply not there. I was able to get a diagnosis and amazing treatment for my child. In US they were not even able to figure out what is wrong.
Food. Great food, ability to find small places with unique cuisine n every corner. Anything from traditional Russian, Georgian, Uzbek to French, Italian, German. The quality of service has improved dramatically as well.
Not even to mention that in cities like Moscow and St Petersburg almost any service is available 24/7.
There is a room to grow. The cities outside the two mentioned above need to grow. Education and manufacturing need improvement. So do bribery and alcohol abuse. But the country is changing for better. ~ Katya Huster, Quora
Stanislava Suplatovich:
I wouldn't say we live a bad life (here “we” means really “I”). It means that I have enough daily bread in a broad sense of the word. I also have a choice between public and private health service which I didn't use to. Yes, private medical care is expensive but as compared to that of the USA, it's a lot cheaper. Speaking about housing, it's pretty much the same as in most countries nowadays: you either pay a rent or a mortgage. The interest is much higher than in the US or in Canada, though (7–12%). As for education, there is a mixed system of public and private schools, public schooling prevailing. As for universities, about 30% of enrollment is payable while the rest 70% is free of charge. The condition and equipment of many institutions of higher learning leaves much to be desired. As is the quality of the roads and transportation system. Sanitation is our weak point as well.
In a nutshell, Russia is not a superpower, but it's quite а livable country if I can apply the word here.
El Al:
Next time please try to go out of MKAD (Moscow Ring Motorroad). In Russia people says that Moscow is another country.
So please, check out Ryazan or Saratov or Samara — huge cities with survival-level life. Russian people says that they don't live, they just exist.
Adrian McGovern:
You have no idea what poor means from an American perspective until you visit the villages outside Moscow, not to mention the Urals and the far East.
Katya Hunter:
Though none of the poor Russians can imagine paying $8–15K a year on healthcare needs. Just basic healthcare needs.
Stephen Wilde:
Any improvements were down to the commercial relationship with the West, not Putin’s skillset. There is no hatred towards Russia. We all want them to join the international community as a reliable and cooperative neighbor but that would lead to demands for democracy which Putin cannot allow.
TheGermanDuck:
Russian history is filled with being humbled and beaten back by nations smaller than them, massive Empires of their own crashing, awful leadership, slow to transition from a serf society to Industrial and horrible military defeats. Mostly caused by themselves or western powers (including non westerners Japan, the Mongols and Ottomans) so normally they love to cling to their most prideful history being the USSR. This is because they saw USSR as the slayer of Nazism and finally stepping up to match the Western powers. They see Ukraine as an old enemy they once proudly destroyed — partially due to some Ukrainians actually siding against the USSR due to horrible treatment and incompetence in the region and it not being so friendly to Russia for past and present events.
Vernon McKenzie:
Brainwashed by dangerous (paranoid) conspiracy theory: Correct.
Suffering from inferiority complex: Correct.
This is how autocrats work. Invent a mortal enemy to hate, and then pretend they alone can save you from said enemy.
We see Trump and the worst “culture wars” imitation conservatives attempting PRECISELY the same playbook in the USA. It’s just that these useful idiots for Putin are pretending the mortal enemies are within the USA.
*
POST-SOVIET RUSSIA WAS DIFFERENT FOR DIFFERENT GENERATIONS
The 1990s marked a clear generational rift.
Youngsters
For those born in the 1970s and later, life in Russia of the 1990s was a much more exciting time than for us Soviet teenagers in the 1970s. The freedom and the full set of perfect reasons to flip a birdie at the old-timers and sovóks (“Soviet losers”) who tried to teach the youngsters life, far outweighed the meager, dreary, cynical chaos of our post-Cold War existence.
My generation
For those like me then in the 20–40 age bracket, this was a golden time of unlimited opportunities. Unencumbered by the past, but already knowing a thing or two about life, and having a network of good friends, we were offered an enormous chance to bite a good morsel off the fat corpse of the Soviet Union. Many died, many more lost in the game, millions entered later the legions of radical nationalists, neo-Stalinists and Putin’s fans in the 2000s, but almost everyone can now tell a lot of cool stories about that time—a stark contrast to the lethargic, grey, cynical 1970s.
Lost souls
Few of those over 40 managed to find a place under the sun in post-Soviet Russia. It’s the same story of displacement that North Korean defectors tell after a few years in the West. They find themselves surrounded by apparent consumerist exuberance, people with perfect teeth and smooth skin who take showers at least once a day—but grow more abandoned, confused and endlessly unhappy in this bright new world of personal freedom. The awful mortality stats and appalling tales of human misery and loneliness from the 1990s are their story.
Single mothers
The 1990s carried on the gloomy Soviet tradition of men checking out of society and life by suicidal alcohol abuse, reckless driving, and playing with death in a million other ways (ever heard about “crazy Russians”?). This left a huge overhang of women that needed to take care of their kids and grandkids without the father being around even rarely. In the USSR, there was a solid social safety net prepared to catch the kids and widows of millions of fallen revolutionary warriors. In post-Soviet Russia, it ceased to function. In the provinces, utmost poverty and despair were widespread on a scale not seen since WW2.
Pensioners
An even sadder case were the pensioners. Under Soviet rule pensions were mostly just enough for a subsistence lifestyle. But the dole, the free health care and the apartment rented cheaply from the government would give not exactly a fulfilling old age, but a sheen of predictability. In the 1990s, imagine yourself alone, in a leaky, cold apartment that the municipality doesn’t care to maintain, a pension that is several months in arrears and the inflation that makes your original pension figure a laughing stock. Old men and women with successful careers in their past Soviet lives begged in the streets, ate from garbage cans, fell sick of undernourishment, died of the common cold—and no one cared.
Vsevolod Maslakov: Remembrance Day
Being old still sucks even in today’s Moscow. The place is too self-absorbed and haughty for the frail and weak. And yet, Putin’s State resumed at least a part of its duties as a caretaker of old people. This is why those over 50 are the most dependable part of Putin’s electorate. They recall the bleak 1990s when they were young, and they are scared stiff that the same can happen to them now as old.
*
Below, an iconic dissident painting from the last years of Soviet rule, “The Line”. Standing in lines everywhere, for almost everything, was the ever-present feature of our life, and kept growing to an absurd level starting from the late 1970s.
However, at least for old people and single mothers in the 1990s, the scene in the painting was a nostalgic memory of normalcy. The line is orderly, everyone has a firm, realistic purpose in mind, the setting has a distinct, familiar frame of reference, life strategies are proven and settled. Also, make note of how well-clothed is everyone in this line. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Oriana:
The line doesn't look orderly to me. But perhaps I've used the wrong illustration, drawn to more drama.
I remember the omni-presence of lines in Soviet-era Poland. The saying was that if you see a line in the street, you should immediately join it -- and only later ask what the line is for.
*
LATVIA DESIGNATES RUSSIA A TERRORIST STATE
~ Latvia has sent Putin into a rage. The Latvian parliament voted overwhelming to designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. A large crowd gathered outside the parliament building broke into cheers as the vote concluded. Putin went ballistic with the usual threats of imminent invasion and nuclear annihilation. Latvia yawned. They've heard it all many times before. ~ Quora
*
VENGEANCE (MOVIE); A STRANGE, HAUNTING MOVIE THAT SHATTERS SOME TEXAS STEREOTYPES
~ "Vengeance" sounds like the title of an action thriller. There have been films with that name before. But although vengeance is discussed in "Vengeance"—the first feature from writer/director/star B.J. Novak, co-star and co-writer of the American version of "The Office"—it has a lot more on its mind. Too much, probably.
The story begins in earnest when New Yorker writer and aspiring public intellectual Ben Manalowitz (Novak) gets a call at his Manhattan apartment late one night from Ty Shaw (Boyd Holbrook), who lives in one of the flattest backwaters in West Texas, a small town five hours' drive from Abilene, which is two hours and forty minutes from Dallas. Ty is calling to tell Ben that his sister, Ben’s girlfriend—who is oddly also named Abilene, Abby for short—has died.
Ben doesn't have a girlfriend named Abby. He's a player who hooks up with many women. But a quick check of his phone confirms that he did indeed have sex with an aspiring singer named Abby (Lio Tipton) a few times and then forgot about her. Somehow he ends up letting himself be talked into traveling to Abby's hometown, attending her funeral, and commiserating with her grieving family, which also includes her younger sisters Paris (Isabella Amara) and Kansas City (Dove Cameron), her kid brother El Stupido (Elli Abrams Beckel), and her mother Sharon (J. Smith-Cameron). Then Ty tells Ben that Abby was murdered, probably by a Mexican drug dealer named Sancholo (Zach Villa), and asks if he'll help the family seek, well, you know.
Ben is a narcissist who seems to view every relationship and experience as a way of raising his status as a writer and quasi-celebrity, so it seems unbelievable at first that he'd travel to Texas to attend the funeral of a woman he didn't really know. But the notion begins to seem more plausible once he starts talking to the family and slotting them into his prefabricated East Coast media-industrial-complex notions of "red state" and "blue state" people, and spinning his theories about temporal dislocation. Modern technology, he says, allows every person to exist in every moment except the present if they so choose. The desire for vengeance, we are told, is exclusively a backward-looking urge.
Intrigued by the possibility of writing the equivalent of a great American novel in the form of a podcast (he even name-checks Truman Capote's In Cold Blood) Ben decides to stick around to gather material for an audio series, which will be created under the supervision of his friend Eloise, a New York-based podcast editor for a National Public Radio-like organization. (As Eloise, Issa Rae works wonders with a thinly written role.)
If Ben’s creative vision sounds like the kind of navel-gazing blather that you'd hear on a true crime podcast in which an actual person's murder becomes a springboard for brunchy rumination on law and truth and the nature of yadda yadda by a group of Ivy League college graduates based in Brooklyn, well, Ben is aware that he's sliding towards that cliché—and so is Eloise, who early on makes a joke to the effect that Ben is the only white man in America without a podcast. And yet, true to media form, they embrace the templates, tropes, and clichés anyway.
Unfortunately, so does the movie. Like "The Daily Show" and its many imitators—and like Jon Stewart's recent film "Irresistible"—this is a movie that chastises its protagonist and the "red state" people he engages with for failing to look beyond the clichés they're fed by their own self-enclosed media loops, while at the same time dining out on them. On one side of the great divide is a nation of "coastal elites" (driven by Harvard-educated Jewish people like Ben) who name-drop cultural tidbits that they learned in college and never revisited; sneer at monogamy, and think everything between the coasts that's not a Top Ten city is a barbaric wasteland. The inhabitants of said wasteland are people whose favorite restaurant is Whataburger and have several guns in the house for every person (including the kids) and use them to settle their differences rather than calling 911.
Intriguingly, though, even as "Vengeance" checks box after box on the op-ed chart of American shorthand, it also presents a number of characters with idiosyncrasies and layers that we've never seen in a movie before. Ben himself is quite a piece of work, and it's to Novak's credit that we eventually dig past Ben's buzzwords and NPR-ready voice and see the character's self-loathing (and, it would appear, the filmmaker's) at realizing that he's a prisoner of the same limited thinking he decries. (Ben often plays more like the protagonist of a French comedy than an American one—or like the characters played by Canadian satirist Ken Finkleman in "The Newsroom" and "More Tears.")
There's little discussion of racial grievance as a motivation for politics in the film, and nobody mentions Trump, Greg Abbott, or the transformation of Texas into an authoritarian nation-state. The movie takes the audience into a minefield but tactfully declines to point out most of the mines. But these threats lurk under the surface, and they do occasionally explode—particularly when the drug epidemic that's decimating white middle-America comes to the forefront of the story.
The supporting cast boasts a number of characters who seem one-note during their introductions but quickly assert their spiky individualism. Smith-Cameron seems underutilized at first, but becomes the emotional anchor of Ben's story, and her final scene is powerful. There are several terrific scenes involving Abby's onetime record producer Quinten Sellers, kind of a Phil Spector of West Texas who lives and works in a combination home, studio, and cult compound, and regales his talent and hangers-on with monologues about time, space, individuality, art, drugs, and hedonism that Marlon Brando or Dennis Hopper might have delivered in a 1970s American art film. Sellers is played by Ashton Kutcher in what might be a career-best performance. With his polite but eerie intensity, ten-gallon white cowboy hat, and lanky frame, it's as if Sam Shepard had come back to play Col. Walter Kurtz.
Novak is a thoughtful writer with a lot of things to say about the United States of America in the year 2022. The problem is that he seems determined to say all of them in one feature film. The result is a jumbled, fitfully amusing, occasionally fascinating effort, but one that shows promise even when it's stumbling over its ambition and falling prey to some of the same stereotypes about "red" and "blue" (or reactionary and progressive) America that it keeps intimating that Americans need to get beyond. The first 15 minutes are borderline awful, but the movie gets better and more surprising as it goes, and the final act is impressive in its determination not to give the audience what it wants. Novak is famous enough that he could've cobbled together an onanistic two hours of nothing and still gotten into South by Southwest with it, but he decided to try to make a real movie. ~
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/vengeance-movie-review-2022
~ It’s a plot as old as plots: a city slicker comes to the countryside with preconceived notions about the rural folk and then finds that they’re smarter and better than his city friends (or, alternatively, that they’re just as venal as the people he left behind). Sitcom actor B.J. Novak portrays this city slicker in his directing debut Vengeance, a movie that transports him to West Texas, and if this satire isn’t entirely successful, there’s more than enough to suggest he has talent as a filmmaker.
Novak stars as Ben Manalowicz, who has secured his place as a staff writer for The New Yorker and now thinks of branching out into podcasting. His boss (Issa Rae) pointedly asks him what yet another middle-aged white guy could possibly have to say. His answer comes in the form of a distraught phone call from Ty Shaw (Boyd Holbrook), whose sister Abilene (Lio Tipton) has died in her small town a five-hour drive from the Texas city she was named after. Ben and Abby slept together a few times while she was in the Big Apple pursuing dreams of music stardom, and she made it seem to her family that the two of them were much closer than they were. When Ben is guilted into traveling to Texas to attend her funeral, Ty seriously tells him that she didn’t die of an opioid overdose like the authorities say but was murdered by a conspiracy of Mexican drug cartels, pedophiles, and the deep state. A podcast is born, initially with the insensitive title Dead White Girl.
Speaking of insensitive, Ben plays along with the fiction that he and Abby were practically engaged, because he means to make fun of the paranoid rednecks or at least hold them up to ridicule while he investigates what makes them tick. His disillusionment plays out in humor that is admirably specific to the region: When Ben asks whether the city of Abilene is near Dallas, he receives the curt reply, “Dallas ain’t Texas.” Later on, at his literal first rodeo, he gives a big cheer for the University of Texas and quickly finds out he’s deep in Tech country. A local music producer (Ashton Kutcher, going for understatement for once) gestures at the blasted desert landscape and tells Ben, “People here have creative energies and nowhere to plug them in. It goes into conspiracy theories, drugs, and violence.” (The movie was actually filmed in the Albuquerque area, since you’re wondering.)
Yet the script doesn’t set out to absolve the Texans, either. For all the Christian paraphernalia in their house, the Shaws call Abby’s youngest brother El Stupido (Eli Bickel), and Ben is the only one who addresses the boy by his given name of Mason. The boy, in turn, gives him a vital piece of information that cracks the mystery. The family conceals an important piece of information from Ben, and the New Yorker finally explodes at them in that most Texas of locations, a Whataburger parking lot. To Ty’s defense that they followed their hearts, Ben says, “You follow your heart, the world is flat, and vaccines contain microchips.”
If only that line hadn’t come in the midst of a much longer speech. Novak the director lets Novak the writer go on for too long. The climactic confrontation with the villain of the piece really needed pruning, even if I’m chilled by nihilism of the bad guy’s thesis that America is the way it is because we’re all going to die someday and our social-media hot takes will be the only proof that we were ever here. Vengeance has more than a few amusing moments and was significantly better than I expected, but it still feels like the work of a beginner who has more to learn.
https://www.fwweekly.com/2022/08/03/conspiracy-theory/
Oriana:
Yes, the movie is perhaps too talky and tries to deliver too many messages at once — but it is still a very interesting and thought-provoking movie. It shatters stereotypes. As the small-time music producer says, it’s not that people who live in places like West Texas are not intelligent or not creative — it’s just that they don’t have a venue.
The same man also delivers an amazing soliloquy on how important sound is, and how we want to leave a legacy of our voice — and even points out that the universe began with a sound, i.e. the Big Bang (though it wasn’t the bang of an explosion but rather a kind of cosmic humming: https://science.howstuffworks.com/what-did-big-bang-sound-like.htm)
Ben’s city-slicker condescension turns into a genuine connection and caring as he grows attached to the small-town family he’s staying with. It takes a while before the movie gets to the opioid epidemic that increasingly becomes its heart. But it needs to do that because we need to understand how Ben, a cynical New Yorker, gradually gets to see the Texans as real people — people who don’t need to be told what a writer is, or that universities provide education ("I know what a writer is, you condescending asshole," he gets publically corrected.)
Ben is also taken aback by the discovery that Abby (“the dead white girl” that is to feature in Ben’s planned podcast) indeed loved him, while to him she was only one of many hook-ups, to be forgotten as he keeps exploring new “options." The movie starts with Ben and friend talking about how it's not a "fear of commitment," but just "not wanting to close one's options." He seems a stranger to the realm of real human connections, of needing to respect people even if they wear cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats, and live in what we so casually call “the middle of nowhere.”
And Ben is made complicit in Abby’s death when her mother tells him, “People take drugs for a reason. And one reason may be that they love someone who sees them as meaningless.”
Ben discovers that Abby was indeed murdered, though in an indirect way — and, in the movie's final surprise, he does take revenge on the killer. But to reveal the details would spoil the thriller part of the plot. I admire this movie too much to be willing to spoil the surprise ending.
Nevertheless, the problem is that this ending is not believable. A writer delivers justice with words, not with a gun.
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An aside on naxolone, a drug that is a potent antidote that can save an opioid user from death by overdose if administered promptly enough. Alas, it’s prescription only, making it much less accessible than it needs to be. Here is a plea for making it over-the-counter:
"In the immediate term, large reductions in opioid-related mortality could be achieved by expanding the distribution of naloxone. Naloxone is a life-saving intervention that can reverse the toxic effects of an opioid overdose, but to be effective it must be immediately available in such an event. Several countries, including Australia, Canada, Italy, Ukraine, and the UK, have introduced naloxone as over-the-counter medication. In 2020, take-home naloxone programs were implemented in ten EU countries, Norway, and the UK. In this issue of The Lancet Public Health, a modelling study by Tracy Green and colleagues finds that nearly every state in the USA has under-developed naloxone distribution. Naloxone needs are highest in states were fentanyl—a potent synthetic opioid that is particularly dangerous when misused—dominates the local opioid epidemic. Green and colleagues estimate that naloxone distribution is most effective when done via pharmacies and community organizations. However, the success of community-based programs depends on the support provided to people who use drugs and adopt the role of emergency first responder.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(22)00043-3/fulltext
“Nearly every state in the USA has under-developed naloxone distribution” — what more needs to be said? People die needlessly because the perfect antidote is behind the paywall of medical establishment.
Another opioid antagonist, naltrexone, can be effective in fighting both drug addiction and alcoholism. In small doses, it acts as effective analgesic:
“Low-dose naltrexone (LDN) has been demonstrated to reduce symptom severity in conditions such as fibromyalgia, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and complex regional pain syndrome. We review the evidence that LDN may operate as a novel anti-inflammatory agent in the central nervous system, via action on microglial cells. These effects may be unique to low dosages of naltrexone and appear to be entirely independent from naltrexone’s better-known activity on opioid receptors. As a daily oral therapy, LDN is inexpensive and well-tolerated.
Both naloxone and naltrexone have been demonstrated to exert neuroprotective and analgesic effects.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962576/
“Inexpensive” is the death knell. As I was told by an insider: “It’s not enough that a cure exists. Someone also has to get very rich off it.”
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“The more a body tries to explode all the foolish myths that have grown up about Texas by telling the truth, the more a body will wind up adding to the mythology.” ~ Molly Ivins
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FINLAND’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE PENAL SYSTEM
~ Criminals can be divided roughly in four categories: mad, sad, lad and bad.
Those who befall in the category “mad” have psychiatric problems or problems with impulse control and anger control. An example would be a man who kills his wife’s lover in a bout of jealousy and rage.
Those who are “sad” have gotten the proverbial Seven High in the Great Poker of Life. They usually have low IQ, ADHD or some other concentration problem, mental issues, drug and/or alcohol addiction and come from families which you really do not want even your worst enemy to have.
Those who are “lad” are young males with more testosterone and rebellious mindset in their heads than common sense. They overlap heavily with the “mad” and “sad” categories.
Finally, those who are “bad” are the most dangerous. They usually are either psychopaths or really hardened cases, and many of them have connections to the organized crime. They are the ones who are least likely to straighten up and who really need to locked up. Fortunately, they are few and usually the authorities know them well.
The good old Pareto’s law applies also to crime. 80% of all crime is committed by 20% of criminals, and 50% of all crimes are committed by the hardened core (the “bad” category). Concentrating the real punitive measurements on these — and aiding the “mad”, “sad” and “lad” categories to wisen up and rehabilitate — has been found to be the best use of resources. 80% of prisoners commit crimes from sheer stupidity, not real malice.
The open prisons are meant to those convicts who have demonstrated desire to return back to the society and integrate in the civilian life. Many of them have had serious life control problems, and the open prisons are more like “schools for civilian life” rather than penitentiaries. The biggest thing is the loss of freedom — it is the thing which hurts most — but the intention is to prevent recidivism. ~ Susanna Viljanen, Quora
prison cell in Finland
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WHY OUR FINGERS WRINKLE IN WATER
~ The water-induced wrinkling of skin on our fingertips and toes has occupied the thoughts and work of scientists for decades. Most have puzzled over what causes this puckering in the first place, but more recently the question of why, and what purpose it may serve, has attracted the attention of researchers. Perhaps more intriguing still, however, is what our shriveled fingers can reveal about our own health.
It takes around 3.5 minutes in warm water – 40C (104F) is considered the optimal temperature – for your fingertips to begin wrinkling, while in cooler temperatures of about 20C (68F) it can take up to 10 minutes. Most studies have found it takes around 30 minutes of soaking time to reach maximum wrinklage, however.
Fingertip wrinkling was commonly thought to be a passive response where the upper layers of the skin swelled as water flooded into the cells via a process known as osmosis – where water molecules move across a membrane to equalize the concentration of the solutions on either side. But as long ago as 1935, scientists have suspected there is more to the process than this.
Doctors studying patients with injuries that had severed the median nerve – one of the main nerves that run down the arm to the hand – found that their fingers did not wrinkle. Among its many roles, the median nerve helps to control so-called sympathetic activities such as sweating and the constriction of blood vessels. Their discovery suggested that the water-induced wrinkling of fingertips was in fact controlled by the nervous system.
Later studies by doctors in the 1970s provided further evidence of this, and they proposed using the immersion of the hands in water as a simple bedside test to assess nerve damage that might affect the regulation of unconscious processes such as blood flow.
Then in 2003, neurologists Einar Wilder-Smith and Adeline Chow, who were working at the National University Hospital in Singapore at the time, took measurements of blood circulation in the hands of volunteers as they soaked them in water. They found that as the skin on the volunteers' fingertips began to wrinkle, there was a significant drop in blood flow in the fingers.
When they applied a local anesthetic cream that caused the blood vessels in the fingers of healthy volunteers to temporarily constrict, they found it produced similar levels of wrinkling as water immersion.
"It makes sense when you look at your fingers when they go wrinkly," says Nick Davis, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, who has studied fingertip wrinkling. "The finger pads go pale and that is because the blood supply is being constricted away from the surface.”
Wilder-Smith and his colleagues proposed that when our hands are immersed in water, the sweat ducts in our fingers open up to allow water in, which leads to an imbalance in the salts in our skin. This change in the salt balance triggers the firing of nerve fibers in the fingers, leading to the blood vessels around the sweat ducts to constrict. This in turn causes a loss of volume in the fleshy area of the fingertip, which pulls the overlying skin downwards so that it distorts into wrinkles. The pattern of the wrinkles depends on the way the outermost layer of skin – the epidermis – is anchored to the layers beneath it.
There have also been suggestions that the outer layers of skin may also swell a little to enhance the wrinkling. By osmosis alone, however, our skin would need to swell by 20% to achieve the wrinkles we see in our fingers, which would leave them hideously enlarged. But when the upper layers of skin swell slightly and the lower levels shrink at the same time, the wrinkling becomes pronounced far sooner, says Pablo Saez Viñas, a biomechanical engineer at the Technical University of Catalonia, who has used computer modeling to examine the mechanism.
"You need both to have normal levels of wrinkles," he says. "If you don't have that neurological response, which happens in some individuals, wrinkles are inhibited."
But if wrinkling is controlled by our nerves, it means our bodies are actively reacting to being in water. "That means it is happening for a reason," says Davis. "And that means it could be giving us an advantage.”
It was a question from one of his children during a bath about why their fingers had gone wrinkly that recently led Davis to dig into what this advantage could be. With the help of 500 volunteers who visited the Science Museum in London during 2020, Davis measured how much force they needed to use to grip a plastic object. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those with dry, unwrinkled hands needed to use less force than people whose hands were wet – so their grip on the object was better. But when they submerged their hands in a water bath for a few minutes to turn their hands wrinkly, the grip force fell between the two even though their hands were still wet.
"The results were amazingly clear," says Davis. "The wrinkling increased the amount of friction between the fingers and the object. What is particularly interesting is that our fingers are sensitive to this change in the surface friction and we use this information to apply less force to grip an object securely.”
The object that Davis' volunteers were gripping weighed less than a couple of coins, so the amount of grip required was small. But when performing more arduous tasks in a wet environment, this difference in friction could become more important.
"If you don't have to squeeze as hard to grip something, the muscles in your hands get less tired and so you can do it for longer," he says.
His findings match those by other researchers who have found that the wrinkling of our fingertips makes it easier for us to handle wet objects. In 2013, a team of neuroscientists at Newcastle University in the UK asked volunteers to transfer glass marbles of varying sizes and fishing weights from one container to another. In one case the objects were dry, and in the other they were at the bottom of a container filled with water. It took 17% longer for the participants to transfer the submerged objects with unwrinkled fingers than when they were dry. But when their fingers were wrinkled, they could transfer the submerged marbles and weights 12% quicker than when their fingers were wet and unwrinkled. Interestingly, there was no difference in transferring the dry objects with wrinkled or unwrinkled fingers.
Some scientists have suggested that the wrinkles on our fingertips and toes may act like rain treads on tires or the soles of shoes. The channels produced by the wrinkles help to squeeze water away from the point of contact between the fingers and an object.
This suggests that humans may have evolved fingertip and toe wrinkling at some point in our past to help us grip wet objects and surfaces.
"Since it seems to give better grip under water, I would assume that it has to do with either locomotion in very wet conditions or potentially with manipulating objects under water," says Tom Smulders, an evolutionary neuroscientist at Newcastle University who led the 2013 study. It could have given our ancestors a key advantage when it came to walking over wet rocks or gripping branches, for example. Alternatively, it could have helped us when catching or foraging for food such as shellfish.
"The latter would imply it is unique to humans, whereas if it's the former, we would expect it to happen in other primates as well," says Smulders. Finger wrinkling has yet to be observed in our closest relatives in the primate world such as chimpanzees, but the fingers of Japanese macaque monkeys, which are known to bath for long periods in hot water, have been seen to also wrinkle after they have been submerged in water. But the lack of evidence in other primates does not mean it doesn't happen, it may simply be because no-one has looked closely enough yet, says Smulders. "We don't know the answer to this question yet.”
There are some other interesting clues about when this adaptation may have appeared in our species. Fingertip wrinkling is less pronounced in saltwater and takes longer than it does in freshwater. This is probably because the salt gradient between the skin and surrounding environment is lower in saltwater, so the salt imbalance that triggers the nerve fibers is less dramatic. So, it could be an adaptation that helped our ancestors live in freshwater environments rather than along coastlines.
But there are no firm answers, and some believe it could just be a coincidental physiological response with no adaptive function.
Strangely there are other baffling mysteries – women take longer to develop wrinkles than men do, for example. And why exactly does our skin return to its normal state – normally after 10-20 minutes – if there is no clear disadvantage to our grip on dry objects of having wrinkly fingertips? Surely if having wrinkly fingers can improve our grip in the wet, but not harm it when dry, why would our fingertips not be permanently wrinkly?
One reason for that could be the change in sensation the wrinkling also causes. Our fingertips are packed with nerves, and the pruning of our skin changes the way we feel things we touch (although one study has shown it does not affect our ability to discriminate between objects based on touch).
"Some people have a real aversion to it because picking something up with wrinkly fingers feels weird," says Davis. "It could be because the balance of skin receptors have changed position, but there could be a psychological dimension too. It would be fun to investigate why. There could be other things we can do less well with wrinkly fingers.”
But the wrinkling of our fingers and toes in water can reveal key information about our health in surprising ways too. Wrinkles take longer to form in people with skin conditions like psoriasis and vitiligo, for example. Patients with cystic fibrosis experience excessive wrinkling of their palms as well as their fingers, and this has even been noticed in people who are genetic carriers of the disease. Patients suffering from type 2 diabetes also sometimes show markedly decreased levels of skin wrinkling when their hands are placed in water. Similarly reduced wrinkling has been seen in people who have suffered heart failure, perhaps due to some disruption in the control of their cardiovascular system.
Unsymmetrical wrinkling of the fingers – where one hand wrinkles less than the other despite the same immersion time – has even been suggested as an early sign of Parkinson's disease as it indicates the sympathetic nervous system is not functioning correctly on one side of the body.
So, while the question of why our fingers and toes began wrinkling in water in the first place remains open, our pruney digits are proving useful to doctors in other surprising ways. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220620-why-humans-evolved-to-have-fingers-that-wrinkle-in-the-bath
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MARK TWAIN ON PEACE OF MIND
"Peace of mind is a most valuable thing. The Bible has robbed the majority of the world of it during many centuries; it is but fair that in return it should give some to an individual here & there. But you must not make the mistake of supposing that absolute peace of mind is obtainable only through some form religious belief: no, on the contrary I have found that as perfect a peace is to be found in absolute unbelief." - Letter to Charles W. Stoddard, 6/1/1885
Oriana:
It has worked for me. I didn’t have absolute unbelief until I read The Belief Instinct, by Jesse Bering, which elucidated the cognitive errors on which religious thinking was based. Only that really gave me the certainty that the monstrous punitive deity, the “God of Punishment,” didn’t exist. “The monster really doesn’t exist!” I remember thinking, then experiencing euphoria at the thought.
What a pity that Bering’s excellent, research-based book is not more widely known. 
MISHA FIRER ON ANDREI RUBLOV AND ANDRONIKOV MONASTERY
~ In Andrei Tarkovsky’s biopic “Andrei Rublev,” Greek artist Theophanes asks his student and protege icon painter Andrei Rublov, “Tell me honestly, are Russian people ignorant or not?”
“Yes, ignorant,” says Rublov after a pause. “But who’s to blame for that?”
“Their stupidity is to blame!” fires away Theophanes, and grumbles that people are fickle, mean and can’t be trusted.
Andrei Rublov thinks to himself that it can’t be right. That no one has slandered Jesus except for Jews, who learned to read and write “in order to gain power… they’re great deceivers, literate and cunning.”
Juxtaposing bad, literate Jews with good, illiterate Russians, Andrei Rublov concludes his monologue, “Russians are human beings. Don’t forget it. Of one blood and one land. Never despairing, but enduring it silently. And Russian muzhik is only praying to God to give him enough strength to endure.”
I was moved to tears by this passionate speech of a great Russian icon master and immediately went to check out Andronikov Monastery of the Savior, in which Rublev had painted walls and ceiling with his spiritual art that reflected the deep love and understanding of Russian people.
I entered the compound on a hill by the Yauza River, and saw two old-looking churches. The monastery!
I asked a babushka from a squad of Icon Museum guards. “Is this Andronikov Monastery? I wanna see Rublev art!”
“Bolsheviks destroyed Andronikov Monastery,” she responded listlessly.
“What? Nothing left?”
“Just that wall over there.”
A cat sitting by the wall of what’s left of Andronikov Monastery after illiterate Russian muzhiks flattened it. Well, Andrei Rublov, perhaps literacy is not such a bad thing?
A very old church and a placard saying that Andrei Rublev painted the interiors. I ran inside.
A corner shop [was] selling Russian Orthodox Church merchandise — icons, Bibles, candles.
“Where’s Rublev art? Anything left?”
“No. Would you like some candles?”
After denouncing Jesus, bolsheviks the great deceivers, literate and cunning made an addition to the pantheon of God-men.
Oriana:
Fortunately, Rublov’s art has been preserved elsewhere. There is a certain tenderness to it, an endearing sweetness. The deity suggested by Rublev's Trinity does not seem like "the god of punishment."
.jpg)
Andrei Rublov, Troitsa (the Trinity) (Note that the Holy Ghosts is not presented as a dove, a later tradition)
Markus Hartman:
The Bolsheviks were the Taliban of the 1920-s. Decadent and religious art was replaced by social realism, as ugly as brutalism.
Rublov, Annunciation
Oriana:
I agree that the Bolsheviks were the Taliban. They destroyed thousand of beautiful old churches and monasteries.
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THE IMPRINT OF CALVINISM ON AMERICA’S ATTITUDE TOWARD THE RICH AND THE POOR
~ American attitudes and ethical concepts tend to arise from Calvinism — which is perhaps the coldest and most callous of all Christian denominations. While the majority of Americans are not Calvinists, Calvinism and Calvinism-related denominations have had the societal hegemony and set the basic values upon which the American society has been built.
One of the main tenets of Calvinism is the just world assumption: this world is a just place and everyone has exactly the share of the world which he or she has deserved. Another is the concept of prosperity theology -- that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God for them, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one's material wealth, and material and especially financial success is seen as a sign of divine favor (and conversely, poverty as disfavor). Third is the concept of predestination — that God has decided the final depository of each human being even before his or her birth, and whether he or she will end up in Hell or be let in Heaven depends solely on the divine whim.
These three strands of Calvinist concepts twist together into a rope which is strong enough to hang the weakest and most vulnerable of the society. Poverty and homelessness are seen as God’s righteous punishment on the said individuals, and the society should not interfere with divine will. This mindset is present in all Calvinist societies — including the Netherlands and Switzerland, but not as blatant as in the United States.
The European social security systems have been created after three large wars -- the German-French war 1870–1871, the WWI 1914–1918 and the WWII 1939–1945. After each war Europe was in smithereens, vast amounts of property and real estate had been annihilated and literally millions of people had been rendered homeless by having their homes destroyed. The Europeans realized that if anything else, homelessness was a result of blind chance, and in suitable circumstances, anyone can become homeless. The Europeans also noticed that nobody makes it alone and that societal co-operation and sharing what you have is the way out of poverty. No “pulling yourself on your bootstraps” or other claptrap -- Baron von Münchausen intended it as a tall tale anyway.
Homelessness is generally seen in Europe as a societal problem, and when the problem is societal, the solution also is societal.
USA had no similar problems. USA has been saved from wars after 1865, and the American housing and infrastructure survived unscathed the both World Wars. The jobs were plentiful, and anyone could get a job by just walking in. This reinforced the American concepts of exceptionalism, divine blessing and “city on the hill” attitudes — whose ugly flip side is that the problems an individual might face are his or her own making.
A lot of water has flown in Mississippi since 1945, and the situation has changed drastically in the last fifty or so years. Jobs are hard to find and hard to keep. But people’s attitudes change slower than the economic realities — many Americans, especially the cohorts who entered in the work life before 1990 — still imagine USA lives in the reality where it was after the WWII.
Americans see the homelessness generally as a personal problem, and are thus reluctant to do anything about it — this is also the reason why there appears to be more people homeless in the USA than in Europe. ~ Susanna Viljanen, Quora
Nishant:
I can't help but observe the similarity to Hinduism, especially the doctrine of Karma and transmigration of soul.
While useful as an individual level, at a group level it seems to imply that the unfortunate deserve their misfortunes due to their actions in past lives. (Even though it shouldn't matter behaviorally, as the Doctrine of Dharma [duty] supersedes everything.)
Marcus Skubic:
The tenets of Calvinism are also the reason why satanism is often a talking point among fringe right. If you believe that everyone in the God’s Earth is in the place they deserve to be and then see people who are a complete antithesis to their vision of perfect God’s Earth, you believe they had to make a pact with God’s (near) equal to gain such power/wealth/influence as otherwise, they should have never be able to obtain it otherwise.
A bit less religious outline of this thinking is well documented in the book Strangers in Their Own Land by A. Hochschild. And while on one hand, it does wake some sympathy about the rural right, it also kills a lot of it when you realize just how entitled Calvinism made those people.
Oriana:
I knew someone on Facebook who argued that “poverty is the result of multi-generational sin.” He was also very religious, and eventually concluded that if I’m not religious that shows that god didn’t choose me for faith and salvation. Eventually I blocked him.
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“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” ~ Salman Rushdie
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HOW MUCH EXERCISE IS ENOUGH?
~ We know we’re supposed to exercise, and we know we’re supposed to do it often. But how often? What’s the most effective exercise routine to extend your longevity? According to researchers, the good news is that exercise routines can vary day to day and still be equally effective.
“It’s recommended that you exercise for at least 150 minutes a week,” says Keith Diaz, assistant professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. “You can exercise 30 minutes a day for five days, you can do longer workouts on the weekends or anything in between. All that matters is that you get it in.”
In findings published last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Diaz’s team found that for those who sat for less than seven hours per day, 150 minutes of exercise per week reduced their risk of early death by 80 percent. It did not, however, reduce the risk for those who sat for more than 10 hours per day.
Diaz also cautions that while you can do it all at once and reap the health benefits, it might put you at an increased risk for injury.
“If you go out and do it all at once you might hurt yourself, especially if you’re not used to it,” he says.
When it comes to longevity, there is no better tool than exercise because it changes us down to the cellular level, says Diaz. For example, exercise keeps healthy the cells along your blood vessels that help them expand and constrict, expanded. This lowers your blood pressure and overall risk of cardiovascular disease.
What’s more, exercise helps the body to lower blood sugar, improve cholesterol and even stave off certain types of cancer. And maybe even more importantly, it improves your mood. A large 2018 study of 1.2 million individuals published in Lancet Psychiatry found that regular exercise “significantly and meaningfully” improved self-reported mental health in study participants.
“If you could bottle the benefits of exercise up in a pill, everyone would want it,” says Diaz.
However, a small amount of research has shown that excessive exercise, for example, those who run ultra-marathons and triathlons, can damage the heart. One study published in the journal Current Sports Medicine Reports found that “very high doses of exercise may be associated with an increased risk of atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease and malignant ventricular arrhythmias.”
But Diaz says that the research is scarce. With so few people who exercise in excess, researchers have had trouble gathering them for a study. “We still don’t have enough data to find any upper limit for exercise,” he says.
WHAT’S THE BEST KIND OF EXERCISE FOR LONGEVITY?
While all types of exercise are helpful, if you could only choose one type, Diaz contends it should be cardio. Cardio exercise — including brisk walking, running, cycling and swimming — raises your heart rate and respiration into the moderate or more vigorous zone and keeps your heart muscle in good shape.
“If you’re pressed for time, cardio is most important,” he says.
But that doesn’t mean that other forms of exercise don’t extend longevity. Weight bearing exercise, done a few times per week, keeps your body functional into old age. Research published in the journal Preventative Medicine Reports found that weight bearing exercises, like lifting weights and more vigorous forms of yoga, help to improve skeletal and bone health with age.
“It’s not just about living a long life, you want to be mobile for as long as possible too,” says Diaz.
Stretching classes like yoga and Pilates help to keep the muscles healthy so you can exercise late into old age without getting injured. “The beauty of exercise is that it’s beneficial no matter when you start. Even if you don’t start exercising until you’re 60, it’s still proven to improve your health,” says Diaz.
And when it comes to the best type of exercise for longevity, Diaz is hesitant to choose just one. “The best type of exercise is one that you’ll do regularly and that means you need to love it.”
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/is-30-minutes-of-exercise-a-day-enough?utm_source=acs&utm_medium=email&utm_email=ivy333%40cox.net&utm_campaign=News0_DSC_220807_000000_Health&eid=ivy333%40cox.net
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DOES VEGAN DIET PROTECT AGAINST HEART DISEASE?
~ Around half a million British people are now vegan, according to the Vegan Society. In the US, there’s been a 300% increase in the number of American vegans in the past 15 years.
There are many reasons why people may adopt a vegan diet, such as animal welfare, sustainability or to lose weight. Another reason that’s often touted is that vegan diets are good for your heart, and can not only prevent heart disease, but even reverse it.
But as our latest review found, this isn’t necessarily true. In fact, we found that there is currently little evidence to suggest a vegan diet protects the heart, or can reverse heart disease.
This isn’t to say that vegan diets don’t have benefits. Large amounts of whole grains, alongside fruit and veg, means that vegans fiber than omnivores (people who eat meat products, alongside fruit and vegetables). And research shows people who eat a high fiber diet are less likely to develop heart disease.
Eating lots of fruit and veg also means consuming plenty of phytonutrients, which are natural chemicals found in plants. Some research suggests these have inflammatory and antioxidant properties, which may help prevent damage to cells in the body. Since vegans eat more fruit and veg on average, they should benefit more.
And a vegan diet is linked to a host of other health advantages that should benefit heart health, including a lower weight, lower blood pressure and lower levels of bad cholesterol.
But unless it’s carefully constructed, a vegan diet can easily lack vital nutrients. For example, vegan diets may contain lower amounts of certain omega-3 fatty acids, which are easily found in seafood. This may mean vegans aren’t getting the heart benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, such as lower blood pressure and reduced risk of heart attacks.
Some minerals and vitamins are also harder to come by for vegans without supplementation. Levels of selenium, iodine and vitamin B12 are lower in vegans compared to non-vegans, which can be detrimental to their heart health. Low levels of these minerals and vitamins can also lead to thyroid problems, muscle disorders and anemia.
HEART HEALTH
Our team wanted to know whether vegan diets really do lower the risk of developing heart attacks or strokes. To do this, we needed to look through all the current evidence that has investigated this. This would allow us to develop a conclusion based on all the current data out there.
Although veganism is growing in popularity, vegans still make up a small fraction of any population. As such, few studies out there have looked at the effects of a vegan diet of any length on heart health. We could only find three – although in total they were large studies, with data on more than 73,000 people combined, and more than 7,000 vegans.
None of the studies found vegans were protected against heart disease, heart attacks or stroke compared to omnivores. Unfortunately, there was even a suggestion that vegans may be more likely to have an ischaemic stroke, which are caused by a blood clot in the brain. But it’s uncertain whether the vegan diet itself really did increase risk of this type of stroke, or if this was just coincidence.
Our study also looked at whether a vegan diet could benefit people who already had heart disease. One study showed that veganism could be beneficial and may potentially stop or reverse heart disease. The researchers found that people who started a vegan diet and stuck with it for more than three years were six times less likely to have another serious heart problem or stroke than those who started but didn’t continue with a vegan diet. That’s only one out of 177 vegans, compared to 13 out of 21 non-vegans, who became ill again. But as this was a relatively small sample we’d ideally want a much bigger study to double check this.
The other two studies didn’t show any benefit or reversal of heart disease in people who started a vegan diet. However, the participants of these studies only followed a vegan diet for two or six months – making it difficult to truly see a long-term impact. But one of the benefits of following the vegan diet for six months was that participants ended up with lower cholesterol and lost more weight than those on an omnivore diet.
Overall, our review has found that there isn’t evidence to back up the claims that veganism is good for your heart. But that is partly because there are few studies -- and only 361 people in the studies we looked at became vegans after developing heart disease. Participants in two of the studies were only vegan for less than six months, which may not be long enough to see a large effect on heart disease.
But veganism may have other health benefits. Vegans have been found to have a healthier weight and lower blood glucose levels than those who consume meat and dairy. They are also less likely to develop cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes. But its effect on heart disease, the leading cause of death worldwide, really needs to be better understood. ~
https://theconversation.com/are-vegan-diets-good-for-your-heart-158021
Oriana:
But remember the higher risk of bone fractures and stroke. As the next article shows, it's best to combine a vegetarian diet with eating fish (the so-called pesco-vegetarian diet).
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PESCO-VEGETARIANS LIVE LONGEST
~ In a study conducted over almost six years with 73,308 people, vegetarians had a 12% lower risk of dying than meat eaters. Another interesting find in the study conducted by Loma Linda University is that pesco-vegetarians (a vegetarian that does eat fish and seafood), vegans (someone who abstains from all animal products, including dairy and eggs), lacto-ovo-vegetarians (does not eat any meat, but eats dairy and eggs), and even semi-vegetarians all had varying but lower mortality rates than non-vegetarians, with pesco-vegetarians having the lowest risk of death at 19% lower than average non-vegetarians.
One factor that might help explain the lengthened life is that vegans tended to weigh about 30 pounds less than their meat-eating counterparts. And it’s not just weight and lifespan that seem to benefit from the vegetarian or vegan diet. Studies also show that there are 19% fewer deaths as a result of heart disease in the vegetarian population and this factor is much more noted for men. Along with this and a lower body mass index, vegetarians are also less likely to die from diabetes and cancer too. It all adds up when the type of foods vegetarians tend to load up on are considered – foods low in cholesterol and saturated fat, high in fiber, complex carbohydrates, and other vitamins and nutrients that they need to consume in order to get a well-rounded diet.
Simply cutting out meat will not automatically add 5 or 10 years to one’s life.
https://www.pacificprime.com/blog/myth-debunked-do-vegetarians-live-longer.html
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THE SUPERFOODS THAT KEEP THE DOCTOR AWAY
FISH
Heart attacks and strokes are the two most common causes of premature death in the world.
Fish is considered one of the most heart-healthy foods a person can eat.
According to a study published on the British Medical Journal website, eating at least two servings of oily fish a week is moderately but significantly associated with a reduced risk of stroke.
An international team of researchers, led by Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury at Cambridge University and Professor Oscar H. Franco at Erasmus MC Rotterdam, analyzed the results of 38 studies to help clarify the association between fish consumption and risk of stroke or mini-stroke (transient ischaemic attack or TIA). Collectively, these conditions are known as cerebrovascular disease.
The 38 studies involved nearly 800,000 individuals in 15 countries and included patients with established cardiovascular disease (secondary prevention studies) as well as lower risk people without the disease (primary prevention studies).
After adjusting for several risk factors, participants eating two to four servings a week had a moderate but significant six per cent lower risk of cerebrovascular disease compared with those eating one or fewer servings of fish a week, while participants eating five or more servings a week had a 12 per cent lower risk.
In another study in more than 40,000 men in the United States, those who regularly ate one or more servings of fish per week had a 15 per cent lower risk of heart disease.
Researchers believe that fatty types of fish are even more beneficial for heart health due to their high omega-3 fatty acid content.
CRUCIFEROUS VEGETABLES
These are vegetable powerhouses with the unique ability to modify human hormones, activate the body’s natural detoxification system and inhibit the growth of cancerous cells. Cruciferous vegetables should be chewed thoroughly or eaten shredded, chopped, juiced or blended in order to release their potent anti-cancer properties. The cruciferous phytochemical sulforaphane has been found to protect blood vessel walls from inflammatory signaling that can lead to heart disease. Cruciferous vegetables are the most nutrient-dense of all the foods. Eat a variety in both raw and cooked form daily — try some broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale or cabbage.
SALAD GREENS
Raw, leafy green vegetables – some are cruciferous – contain less than 100 calories per pound, making them an ideal food for weight control. In scientific studies, women who ate a large salad at the beginning of a meal ate fewer calories from the rest of the meal, and larger salads reduced calories more than smaller ones. In addition to keeping weight down, greater intake of salads, leafy greens or raw vegetables is associated with reduced risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes and several cancers. Leafy greens are also rich in the essential B-vitamin folate plus lutein and zeaxanthin, carotenoids that protect the eyes from light damage. Try kale, collard greens, mustard greens, spinach or lettuce. To maximize the health benefits of leafy greens, you must maximize your absorption of their fat-soluble phytochemicals, carotenoids in particular, and that requires fats – which is why your salad (or dressing) should always contain nuts and/or seeds.
NUTS
A high-nutrient source of healthful fats, plant protein, fiber, antioxidants, phytosterols and minerals, nuts are a low-glycemic food that also help reduce the glycemic load of an entire meal, making them an important component for an anti-diabetes diet. Despite their caloric density, nut consumption is associated with lower body weight, potentially due to appetite suppression from heart-healthy components. Eating nuts regularly also reduces cholesterol and is linked to a 35 percent reduction in the risk of heart disease. Top your next salad with chopped walnuts or sliced almonds or blend some raw cashews into a creamy salad dressing. [Oriana: Dr. Gundry warns that cashews are not a nut but a legume, and should be avoided due to lectins. On the other hand, I've seen cashews classified as seeds. Regardless, you may want to soak them a bit before consuming; soaking lowers the lectin content.]
BERRIES
These antioxidant-rich fruits are very heart-healthy. Studies in which participants ate blueberries or strawberries daily for several weeks reported improvements in blood pressure, signs of oxidative stress, total and LDL cholesterol. Berries also have anti-cancer properties and are an excellent food for the brain. There is evidence that berry consumption could help prevent cognitive decline with aging. Stick with the tried and traditional strawberry or blueberry, or try something new like goji berries.
POMEGRANATE
The pomegranate is a unique fruit, containing tiny, crisp, juicy arils with a tasty mix of sweet and tart flavors. The signature phytochemical of pomegranate, punicalagin, is the most abundant and is responsible for more than half the antioxidant activity of pomegranate juice. Pomegranate phytochemicals have a variety of anti-cancer, cardio-protective and brain-healthy actions. Most notably, a study of patients with severe carotid artery blockages who drank one ounce of pomegranate juice daily for one year found a 30 percent reduction in atherosclerotic plaque; in the control group, atherosclerotic plaque increased by nine percent. In another study of older adults, those who drank pomegranate juice daily for 28 days performed better on a memory task compared to those who drank a placebo beverage.
BEANS
Daily consumption of beans and other legumes helps stabilize blood sugar, reduce your appetite and protect against colon cancer. The most nutrient-dense starch source, beans act as an anti-diabetes and weight-loss food because they are digested slowly, which blunts the rise in blood glucose after a meal and helps prevent food cravings by promoting satiety. They also contain lots of soluble fiber which helps lower cholesterol, and resistant starch which is converted by intestinal bacteria into short-chain fatty acids that help prevent colon cancer. Eating beans, peas or lentils twice a week has been found to decrease colon cancer risk by 50 percent. Legume consumption also provides significant protection against other cancers too. Red beans, black beans, chickpeas, lentils, split peas – they are all good, so sample them all and decide on your own favorites.
MUSHROOMS
Consuming mushrooms regularly is associated with a decreased risk of breast cancer. Because they contain aromatase inhibitors, compounds that inhibit the production of estrogen, white and portobello mushrooms are especially protective against breast cancer. Mushrooms have quite an array of beneficial properties. Studies on different types of mushrooms have found anti-inflammatory effects, enhanced immune cell activity, prevention of DNA damage, slowed cancer cell growth and angiogenesis inhibition. Mushrooms should always be cooked; raw mushrooms contain a potentially carcinogenic substance called agaritine that is significantly reduced by cooking. Regularly include common white mushrooms in your diet and try some of the more exotic varieties like shiitake, oyster, maitake or reishi.
ONIONS AND GARLIC
The allium family of vegetables, of which onions are a member, benefit the cardiovascular and immune systems and have anti-diabetic and anti-cancer effects. Increased consumption of allium vegetables is associated with a lower risk of gastric and prostate cancers. These vegetables are known for their organosulfur compounds which help prevent the development of cancers by detoxifying carcinogens, halting cancer cell growth and blocking angiogenesis. These compounds are released when they are chopped, crushed or chewed. Onions also contain high concentrations of health-promoting flavonoid antioxidants, which have anti-inflammatory effects that may contribute to cancer prevention. In addition to garlic and yellow onions, try leeks, chives, shallots and scallions.
TOMATOES
An abundance of health-promoting nutrients can be found in tomatoes – lycopene, vitamins C and E, beta-carotene and flavanol antioxidants, to name but a few. Lycopene in particular protects against prostate cancer, UV skin damage and cardiovascular disease. About 85 percent of the lycopene in American diets is derived from tomatoes. Lycopene is more absorbable when tomatoes are cooked – one cup of tomato sauce has 10 times the lycopene as one cup of raw, chopped tomatoes. Also keep in mind that carotenoids, like lycopene, are best absorbed when accompanied by healthy fats, so enjoy your tomatoes in a salad with nuts or a nut-based dressing for extra nutritional punch. Tip: buy diced and crushed tomatoes in glass jars, not cans, to avoid the endocrine disruptor BPA in can liners.
https://www.denverhealthmedicalplan.org/blog/10-best-foods-longevity
Oriana:
I would definitely include olive oil in this list of superfoods.
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ending on beauty:
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