photo: D. Goska *
DANCING FOR MENGELE
If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
~ a Yiddish proverb
In a dream he heard a voice:
Socrates, make music —
and Socrates the unmusical, the mortal,
wrote poems while awaiting execution.
He denied he wanted to publish; he was only
obeying his dream. Do we believe
him, we who also write in orderly
stanzas as we await our execution,
deny we crave to publish and be
immortal; we’re only obeying our dream.
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And when the angels come for us,
when time is ended, the trumpet’s blast,
they’ll say there’s Hitler in all of us —
Yet we make music beyond the noise,
song will survive, watch my poise:
reciting palm trees under my breath,
the platinum sheen of the Pacific
before the syntax shifts to gold —
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If God is Hitler we need to know,
the Tree of Knowledge obliges us,
don’t tell me poets lie too much,
do not tell God he has the right
to remain silent. Love, can I borrow
your clarinet, that gurgling joy I dedicate
to the survivor who sings and laughs,
dances to live, for all of us.
*
But modern music favors dissonance.
Imagine the percussive sound:
tossed on a pile of corpses,
arm against thigh, pelvis against
*
Why would God bother
with the Last Judgment:
bone joining bone, putting on flesh,
just to be judged? Redeemer,
where? She is among us,
the one-time ballerina
behind the electric wire —
listen, she laughs, having survived
dancing for Doctor Mengele.
Her name is Edith, it means “blessed” —
like dancing naked in a glass house,
safe from the stones that people throw,
thinking it’s God’s house. They shout
Heil Hitler and who could blame them,
they want to break his windows —
and those stones turning
into bones, and those
bones dancing,
and those bones
turning into stars.
~ Oriana
**
in honor of Edith Eger, survivor of Auschwitz, whom I had the honor of meeting
Edith (born 1927) and her twin sister were 16 when they were taken to Auschwitz. She was too young to be a professional ballerina, but she already had years of training — and someone told Mengele that she'd been a ballerina in Hungary. So he wanted to see her perform. Close to liberation (in a different camp, in Germany), she ended up being tossed on a pile of corpses. Fortunately one of the soldiers who entered the camp noticed a slight movement. She eventually became a therapist and a peace activist. Dancing is still a powerful metaphor for her.
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
~ Rushdie was forced into hiding after the publication of his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. It took nearly a decade for Rushdie to become more vocal and visible — though he continued to write stories. Today, Rushdie is widely known for being a vocal defender of artistic expression.
On Friday August 12 2022, he was scheduled to speak on that matter at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York when a 24-year-old man went on stage and stabbed the author in his neck and chest, New York State Police said. Rushdie remains hospitalized. His attacker, Hadi Matar, was charged with attempted murder and assault.
Rushdie, 75, was born in India and later grew up in England. He has written 14 novels, many of which have been translated in over 40 languages and received numerous accolades. In 2008, Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
I was relieved to learn that Rushdie is now off the ventilator and recovering.
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WHY SOME FOUND RUSHDIE’S WORK OFFENSIVE
The controversy began after Rushdie published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988.
The story centers on two Indian Muslims living in England. It reimagines parts of the Prophet Muhammad's life and in one section suggests that the founder of Islam may have flirted with polytheism.
Whether that interpretation is backed up by Islamic texts has been disputed by historians, but in a 2012 interview with NPR's Morning Edition, the author said that was beside the point.
"My purpose was not to write only about Islam," said Rushdie, who was born to a Muslim family.
"In my view, the story — as it exists in the novel — reflects rather well on the new idea of the religion being born because it shows that it actually may have flirted with compromise, but then rejected it; and when in triumph, it was pretty merciful.”
The Satanic Verses received immediate and violent backlash from Muslims who found the book's depictions of Islam insulting.
Within months of its publication, the novel was banned in a number of countries including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Sudan. His native country of India banned the book's import.
The controversy also ignited violent protests and attacks on bookstores around the world. Multiple people connected to the novel were also under threat — including Hitoshi Igarashi, a Japanese scholar who translated the book, who was killed in 1991.
In 1989, Iran's leader called for Rushdie's assassination and a bounty was offered of several million dollars. Iran stepped back from the religious order, also known as a fatwa, in 1998, saying it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie." However, the order has not been officially withdrawn.
Rushdie wrote a memoir about his time in hiding that was published in 2012. He lived under the pseudonym Joseph Anton.
"One of the strangest aspects of it is that nobody thought that this was going to last very long," he told NPR in 2012. "They said, 'Just lie low for a few days and let the diplomats and politicians do their work, and this will be resolved.' Instead, in the end, it took almost 12 years."
In a statement, the literary freedom group PEN America said Rushdie was targeted for decades but "never flinched nor faltered.”
"We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil," CEO Suzanne Nossel wrote. "We hope and believe fervently that his essential voice cannot and will not be silenced.” ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/13/1117389122/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses-controversy
Oriana:
Another of countless examples of religion inspiring people to do evil, including killing in the name of the God of Mercy.
Mary:
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"A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” ~ Salman Rushdie
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Tribute to Anna Politkovskaya, human rights activists, journalist, writer who was killed in Moscow on 7 October 2006. She was murdered in the elevator of her block of flats, an assassination that attracted international attention. In June 2014 five men were sentenced to prison for the murder, but it is still unclear who ordered or paid for the contract killing.
Politkovskaya's frightening exposé of Russia as a criminal state
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WHY GAS IS CHEAPER IN THE US THAN IN OTHER COUNTRIES
~ With average US gasoline prices reaching a peak of $5.19 in June and currently hovering at $4, Americans have canceled vacations, reconfigured commutes, and plastered gas stations with stickers blaming Joe Biden.
In a recent survey run by The Hustle, 75% of respondents said they thought gas was overpriced in the US.
But there is a surprising truth amid the inflation: Compared to other large nations, gasoline in the US is actually extremely cheap.
Countries game the consumer cost of gasoline through taxes and subsidies, leading to wildly different prices around the globe. In the US, prices are far lower than most large economies because of comparably light taxes at the federal and state level.
“It’s been a priority of the public for decades now to have inexpensive fuel and gasoline,” said Garrett Golding, senior business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
As hard as it is to think about during an expensive summer, the US faces a gasoline tax dilemma: The relatively cheap gas Americans rely on comes with heavy, hard-to-solve costs for the public.
All about the taxes
Back in late July, while gas was ~$4.61 at the pump in the US, things were far worse in the UK. Abroad, the Brits were paying nearly double that, at ~$8.50 per gallon.
Crude oil (the stuff that comes out of the ground) was more or less the same price wholesale in each country, as it’s traded on the global market. While the US is a leading producer of crude, it still imports much of its stock from other countries.
The discrepancy didn’t come from the price of the gasoline itself, but mostly from the taxes paid on the gas. In the US, gas taxes have always been shockingly low.
us gas prices.jpg
The federal gas tax (an excise tax levied during the production process) was first charged in 1932 at 1 cent per gallon and is now 18.4 cents per gallon — an increase which tracks close to inflation.
But the federal gas tax hasn’t gone up since 1993. And as time has passed, the burden of the tax has weakened substantially.
Of course, states and many localities throw in additional taxes. Some states, like California and Illinois, issue taxes upwards of 60 cents. But according to August data from the US Energy Information Administration, the average state tax is 32 cents.
That puts the average American tax at ~50 cents per gallon — well behind most other large economies.
The United Kingdom charges 52.9 pence per liter, or ~$2.45 a gallon, then adds another 20% tax to the total cost at the pump.
The EU requires a tax of at least 0.36 euros per liter in member countries, or ~$1.41 per gallon. Most members charge more, with France at ~$2.67 per gallon and the Netherlands at ~$3.18 per gallon.
Canada levies a national tax of ~38 Canadian cents per gallon or ~30 cents. Provinces can tack on their own taxes, which leads to Canadians spending ~90 cents to ~$1.50 a gallon on taxes.
When you take earnings into account, American gas is even cheaper, on a relative scale.
The cost for 100 gallons of gasoline, based on the average price in late July, takes up a smaller share of the country’s per capita GDP than any other nation in the world, including Iran, where people paid 20 cents a gallon last month.
Iran subsidizes the cost of its state-owned oil, selling a vast supply to its own population at a discount.
It’s a strategy “to keep political peace,” according to Boston University economics professor Jay Zagorsky, and not entirely different from the US strategy of light taxation.
“Iran is actually taking a loss by selling that gasoline,” Zagorsky said. “The United States government is not taking a loss. They’re just taking a smaller cut than, as an economist, I believe they could be.”
WHY THE GAS IS LOW
On a recent afternoon, Angela Miller was trying to think of another way to get to work besides driving. The closest bus stop to her home in Conway, a suburb outside Little Rock, Arkansas, is 1.5 miles away.
“I’d have to walk that far just to get on a bus, assuming that one crosses the river [into Little Rock],” Miller said.
Similar issues exist in most rural, suburban, and urban areas in the US.
Contrast that with older European and Asian cities that continued to invest in transit during the highway era. Or with Canada, which despite following a similar growth trajectory as the US, has a more extensive transit system.
In the US, without legitimate transportation alternatives, higher gasoline taxes would be punitive and hard to avoid.
But there’s also a chicken-and-egg situation at hand.
The US needs a low gas tax because there are very few alternative transportation options in sprawling metros — and the US has very few alternative transportation options in sprawling metros because it has a low gas tax.
“We became accustomed to cheap gasoline at the same time all this development was kicking off,” Golding said. “And they’ve been symbiotic institutions: cheap gasoline and more development and more space.”
Although it’s hard to tell whether cheap gas is primarily the result or the cause of Americans’ reliance on cars, it’s clear that many problems have arisen.
The Highway Trust Fund, which finances the majority of federal spending on highway infrastructure and public transit with gasoline tax money, has foundered, requiring an infusion of $140B from general revenue sources since 2008 to stay afloat.
Bad roads and ineffective public transit can lead to greater damage to cars and increased living costs. According to the Citizens Budget Commission, car-centric cities with cheaper housing, like Dallas and Houston, end up costing the same as New York City because of their pricier transportation costs.
Some trade-offs from America’s low gasoline tax go beyond personal costs. Studies on raising the federal gasoline tax say the US could achieve societal benefits such as cleaner air, reduced congestion, and fewer traffic deaths.
“Governments don’t pay for anything,” said Ted Kury, director of energy studies at the University of Florida. “The people pay, and if they’re not paying through taxes, then they’re paying through convenience, comfort, and safety.”
To cover the societal costs of driving, economists have thrown out several estimates for what America should charge as a federal tax, from ~$1 to ~$1.50 per gallon.
German economist Stefan Tscharaktschiew looked at Germany’s gasoline tax of ~$2.50 per gallon (one of the world’s highest) and found it should be ~48% higher to account for the burdens of driving.
Obviously, none of those suggestions have turned into reality. But most Americans are willing to pay more for their gasoline — if they believe they’ll get something in return.
THE COMPLICATIONS OF RAISING THE GAS TAX
Every year since 2010, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, director of San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute’s National Transportation Finance Center, has asked Americans the same question: Would you support raising the federal gas tax by 10 cents to benefit transportation?
People have been surprisingly receptive to the idea.
Agrawal’s polls indicate the share of respondents who support a tax hike rose from 23% in 2010 to 48% in 2021, an increase she partially attributes to awareness of the country’s dilapidated infrastructure. In this year’s poll, taken mostly in February when inflation picked up, the share fell to 38%.
When the poll indicates the tax revenue would go to improving roads and reducing traffic and accidents, more than 70% of respondents have said they would favor raising the tax.
Yet raising the gasoline tax has been a dead end in politics.
In 2006, then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan argued for a raise in the federal tax as a “way to get consumption down,” to no avail.
Independent presidential candidate Ross Perot had a plan to incrementally raise the tax by 50 cents.
Last year, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said America may raise the gasoline tax. He walked back the suggestion a few days later.
gas hike.png
Aside from the political pressure, there are many questions about equity and the efficacy of a gasoline tax hike:
In 2020, the average American spent about ~2.5% of their total income on gasoline, a number that increased to nearly 4% this year.
Lower-income Americans spend ~14% of their incomes on gas and typically live in areas that have the worst options for alternative transportation and fewer opportunities to work remotely.
Plus, there’s a distinctly 21st-century reason complicating the picture. Americans with higher disposable incomes could escape an increase in the gasoline tax by purchasing an electric vehicle.
“So if we do raise the gasoline tax, what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to make it more regressive,” said Zagorsky, the Boston University professor. “Because richer people are opting out of the system.”
Suggestions to counteract some of those negative effects have been bandied about for years, including:
A mileage fee (which has solid support in Agrawal’s polls)
A fluctuating gasoline tax that would rise and fall inversely to oil prices, steadying gasoline prices for people who plan budgets around fuel costs.
A windfall tax on oil companies’ record profits (similar to the UK)
But nothing has stuck in the United States, and gas still feels expensive.
https://thehustle.co/why-gas-is-actually-cheap-in-america/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
The whole problem arises from the US having a low-density population. Most of the population lives in suburbs consisting of one-family houses. This makes having a car practically a necessity. Ironically, New York is the most iconic city in America, and the least typical.
I couldn't understand what my mother was saying after returning from her first stay in the US (as part of a scientific exchange): "America is not urban. It's a village." My idea of a village was the Polish farmhouses with sunflowers and hollyhocks in tiny front yards -- and sweetpeas. My only image of the US was Manhattan -- that made sense to me, and that's where access to mass transit is easy.
The last thing I expected was that I'd spend my whole adult life in suburbia.
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PUTIN NOW COMPARES HIMSELF TO ALEXANDER NEVSKY
~ Administration of the President of the Russian Federation has prepared two new Methodichkas/Playbooks, a set of guidelines and instructions, for the regime’s mass media to follow.
Elaborations of the Playbook are encouraged to create an illusion of plurality of opinions, however the main diktat is stated clearly and is holy law.
New Kremlin Playbook’s Diktat
Vladimir Putin is not Peter the Great. He’s now Alexander Nevsky.
The Special Military Operation is the Battle on Ice fought in the 13th century against Teutonic Order, and its official motto is a quote attributed to Mr. Nevsky, “Power is in the Truth!”
The goal of Special Military Operation is a sacred battle against “Godless men” aka Ukronazis. Propagandists are encouraged to call them “satanists and followers of anti-human cults.”
“Collective West” has started the war “to use Ukraine as a jumping board to attack Russia.” Kremlin has called “Collective West” has existed under various guises: Teutonic Order, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, Napoleon Empire, Third Reich, NATO.
The West wants to destroy Russia to capture its natural resources, which they have run out of centuries ago, and carve in up.
On February 24 2022, Vladimir Putin prevented the repeat of June 22 1941 when Nazi troops invaded Russia.
Special Military Operation is like Baptism of Rus in the 10th century bringing forth “foundations of the state” and “foundations of the development of Russia for centuries to come.” According to Kremlin, this is happening due to “consolidation of the society around the army and ‘strategic course of the president.’”
Alexander Nevsky
Putin is leading Russia to a major national catastrophe, and it comes as no surprise that he chose to compare himself with Alexander Nevsky.
Moscovy satrap Alexander Nevsky kneels in front of his Tatar-Mongol masters.
The spiritual father of Moscovy Alexander Nevsky was one of the worst traitors in the Russian history.
He allied with Mongol-Tatars and helped them twice in 1252 and 1262 to suppress the population of Russia and defeat the Russian cities that rebelled against them.
His warriors flogged Russians with whips, gouged out their eyes, cut off their noses.
He betrayed his brother Andrei, who led the uprising of 1252 against Tatar-Mongols, and imprisoned his son Vasily, who disagreed with his policy.
Moreover, Alexander Nevsky became the adopted son of Batu, the Great Khan, having performed all the prescribed rites. Hence, he was not Orthodox Christian but pagan.
Moscovy, thanks to an alliance with the Tatar-Mongols, received a label for reigning, used the power of the Mongols to conquer neighboring principalities, collected tributes from them on behalf of them, enriched itself and thereby strengthened its influence.
Alexander Nevsky liquidated democratic parliament veche, and established an authoritarian model of power that exists in Russia to this day.
Kievan Rus inherited Christianity from Byzantium, while Moscovy has closer cultural ties to Mongol steppes.
Kyiv brought Christianity to Eastern Europe, while Moscow brought dictatorship, communism, and Putinism. ~ Misha Firer
Oriana:
Alexander Nevsky was canonized as an Orthodox saint in 1547. People crave legends, heroes. Never mind some ugly truths.
And there is of course a way to spin the story — Alexander, a patriot and clever tactician, basically played politics in his alliance with the Mongols. It was just a special political operation. And he did defeat Swedes and Germans, aka “the West,” and that’s the essence of his legend.
veche = popular assembly that was a characteristic institution in Russia from the 10th to the 15th century. The veche probably originated as a deliberative body among early Slavic tribes.
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RUSSIAN ARMY RELIES ON ETHNIC MINORITIES
~ To understand this, you have to understand that Russia has socioeconomic-ethnic stratification that would make Jim Crow smile fondly.
The core of the Putin regime is the Moscow-St. Petersburg demographic base. They see themselves as “real” Russians. As smart, worldly, and successful. The elites, the middle class aspiring to be elites, and the lower classes benefiting from living in one of the few prosperous areas of the nation. They are, to their minds, the personification of that which is good in Russia, and the pillars of Russian culture and pride.
And for the most part, they really don't give a shit if people who live in other parts of Russia die. Those Russians might be useful talking points, but they aren't real people. Not in the sense you would care. You are more likely to find one of these urbanites complaining on social media about reduced stock in their favorite clothing store, or perhaps a canceled vacation, rather than something as irrelevant as dead soldiers or an international reputation for barbarity.
Then we come to “ethnic Rus” — read, predominantly white European Russians who don’t live in the major metros. While these are “real Russians”, they are also largely considered rubes, fools, inferiors. Backwards country bumpkins subject to poor decisions and ridiculous brutalsky posturing. In the mind of a Muscovite, one of them dying or being wounded is a fine academic debate about what has been inflicted on Russia, but if they were to meet a crippled rube in person — well, he's a bit of a distasteful idiot, a gangster who took a lot of money to go fight in a voluntary war and now is spewing nonsense as if he really believes the state TV. What a fool, and a mercenary, and clearly expendable human trash — why does this crippled shithead who is probably human trash from a town without sewers, who signed up for a dumb idea because he was blinded by easy money rather than proper middle class success, had the gall to darken your street and pretend he deserves anything? Someone move him along and get him out of sight. As casualties they matter…but…not that much.
Then we have the central and east Asians. Bluntly, no one gives a shit if they die. They're somewhere far away, you'll never see them, and you quietly think they're kind of subhuman scum who have been benefiting from integration with the glories of Russia to make up for their own sad failings. Lazy, shirtless, criminally violent, not really Russian. A thousand dead? Ten thousand? No one cares. The only reason they aren't completely expendable is the vague understanding that eventually enough losses might result in the eastern oblasts deciding they don't want to listen to the government — but that's an issue for policy makers, not you as you go to the re-named McDonald’s.
And then we have LPR/DPR militias. To care about them dying you would have to know they died. The noble Russian-speaking good guy, oppressed by evil western Kiev, sure that fictional member is a great reason for an SMO. But your daily life won't change one iota if every adult male in the People's Republics dies. You'd barely hear about it, much less have any personal stake in the matter.
These guys really get the Darwin award of the century— when they decided to defect in 2014 they basically hung a sign on their necks that said “please use me as cannon fodder. Not one person in Russia will care in any way whatsoever if every man woman and child of us dies. We have signed up to have our lives pissed away by Putin to make sure Muscovites don't need to die for this war”. No one, no one at all, gives an actual shit in any way what happens to them.
Does that sound like a good portion of Russian society sees the other portion as human meat with little value, laughable idiots whose life or death is barely worth noticing? If it did, great, because that is pretty much the truth of it. ~ Timothy Hodge, Quora
Paul Irving:
The Birobidzhan Jewish region never held more than a few percent of the Jewish population of the USSR, & IIRC it's never had a Jewish majority.
Most of the former Jewish population has left, & Jews are a small minority now.
It's in the Far East.
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Andrey Markov:
There are many more homeless kids in Russia than in America.
The abortion rate in Russia is one of the highest in the world.
Domestic violence in Russia is much higher than in America.
Life expectancy in Russia is comparable to a poor third-world country.
No need to mention alcoholism, drug abuse, and AIDS — Russia holds the undisputed Number One in those categories. [Oriana: There are signs of progress in the fight against alcoholism. The fact that Putin is a teetotaler seems to help. Yeltsin was an alcoholic and everyone knew it.]
Just one more thing to add:
The vast majority of the young men in Moscow and St. Petersburg never served in the Russian army. Although military service was compulsory for every man aged 18–30 until recently, only the boys from the poorest regions actually served, and also the boys from the territories that have predominantly with non-Russian ethnic population. The well-educated, middle and upper-class pals from Moscow and St. Petersburg never ever learned what it means to be a soldier in the Russian army. Hence their total lack of empathy for those who serve and fight today in Ukraine.
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Lucien Kim, Twitter:
Talked to someone in Moscow who vehemently opposes the war. "Everyone is pretending that nothing is happening and keeping busy with work," she said. "It's like your house is on fire but you're still cleaning it."
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WHAT RUSSIANS THINK OF THE WEST (Dima Vorobiev)
~ Irrespective of era, all elements of Russian thinking about Europe are brilliantly encapsulated in Alexander Blok’s poem Scythians.
The piece came to be a national treasure, particularly warmly embraced by our nativists and Erasianists. More lyrical parts of it are effusively quoted during the decades of rapprochement, the brutal ones in times of confrontation like now. If you are not particularly fond of a wooly imagery of foreign poetics, here are the main points:
We love the West. We have a superior intuitive understanding of European ways. We can tell them a lot of things about themselves they have no idea about.
The West most often either ignores us or despises us. That hurts. When we are hurting, we may be very, very dangerous.
There are a lot of threats to the West from east. We long have been shielding Europe from these threats. Maybe, it’s about time for us to just step aside and watch what happens.
We are very strong and very passionate, much more than the confused, effeminate, bumbling Westerners. Our horses and female slaves can confirm.
This is the last warning. Love or destruction, whatever the anemic Europeans choose.
If you check out any of President Putin’s, or his closest advisors’ general comments about the West, you’ll find at least one of these elements in a less poetic, but very definitive form. ~
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ASPECTS OF THE WESTERN CULTURE DISLIKED BY RUSSIANS (Dima Vorobiev)
~ Individualism and civil liberties.
The Russian civilization is essentially all about the state. Almost all you know about us, revolves in the orbit of our state, is shaped by its actions, or in opposition to it. The exceptions like Chekhov, Nabokov, Stravinski, Rothko, Chagall—and the tennis babes!—started to appear first in the XX century, many of them in emigration.
That means patriotism (i.e. government-approved nationalism), self-sacrifice, following the orders, and the rest of statist narrative is very important to us. The Western concept of individual moral choice is detrimental to the Russian civilization. Organized resistance of individuals against immoral actions of state agents is not accepted in our culture. Citizens’ self-organization to protects themselves from the state is frowned upon, and often suppressed, as a subversion.
Largely, we have three lines of defense against the rot of individualism and civil liberties:
Western values are a blatant disguise for promoting self-serving national interests of European and American nations. The US foreign policy gives us plenty of arguments for that.
Against the proponents of liberal democracy who are themselves critical of the egotistical agenda of NATO nations, we use the duplicity argument. We say that their values are worthless, because they themselves act contrary to them as they go. We use the running debate in the Western media about their home affairs as a bottomless proof of their hypocrisy.
A large part of our society views the Western tolerance, gay marriages, and juvenile justice as an irrevocable proof of their moral decay. ~
Though Russia used to have the aspiration to be the "third Rome" (in terms of empire), I don't think that concept has ever been accepted by the West. There has long been some uncertainty as to classifying Russia as European. Putin rejects the idea, proposing that Russia is a "Eurasian" culture. For a while, Putin played with the idea of comparing himself with Peter the Great. But Peter wanted to westernize Russia, so Putin eventually rejected that Tzar as a model.
Gazi Cher:
The Russians love Western culture but denigrate the West publicly because of their inferiority complex. Look at the Oligarchs of Russia. Almost all live in the West and send their children to Western schools.
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GORBACHEV DID NOT INVENT “PERESTROIKA” (RESTRUCTURING)
It’s a myth that the policy of Perestróyka, blamed for the bankruptcy of the USSR, was the brainchild of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
KGB started it.
In fact it was envisioned and commissioned by the powerful KGB boss Yuri Andropov, after he was appointed the General Secretary in 1982. President Putin, who considers Andropov his hero, just looped back in his policy to Andropov’s vision on a new, post-Soviet foundation.
During his short stay as top ruler, Andropov initiated an internal discussion in the Central Committee of the Communist party about “improvements in the Soviet economy”. Thanks to his patronage, a group of ambitious junior technocrats were promoted as advisors to the political leadership, headed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov (later, Gorbachev’s “prime minister”).
Young guns
Nikolai Ryzhkov became the project manager for a group of young economists from Leningrad (St. Peterburg) who drafted the reform program of Perestróyka. This group consisted of Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais, Sergei Ignatyev and other men who became the ruling elite during the Yeltsin’s and Putin’s era. After Andropov’s death, an official think tank was formed for them, under the formal supervision of the “Committee of the Politburo for improvement of management”.
Despite resistance from Stalinist old-timers, the general idea of reforms was supported not only by KGB, but several other top bureaucrats. This can explain the puzzling fact that in 1984 they sent Gorbachev, and not one of the other higher-ranking Communist officials, to meet Margaret Thatcher in London. Later, in 1985, they voted for him as the new General Secretary, despite his relatively young age and an apparent absence of any spectacular achievements in his earlier functions.
Chinese path
In the hindsight, we can clearly see in Perestroika a parallel to the Chinese roll-back of the Communist project, initiated just a few years earlier. The Perestroika would introduce a kind of “Socialist” market economy, where “workers’ units” would exchange goods and services according to laws of demand and supply. Like in China, this would ultimately lead to a de-facto appropriation of state property by corporations of Party and State functionaries, under the protection of a formally “Communist” one-party state.
Below, Yuri Andropov (left) takes a walk with Mikhail Gorbachev (center). Andropov seems to be the first Soviet top ruler who decided that Nomenklatura would be more effective managers of our economy, if they were its owners, rather than merely hired hands.
Andropov and Gorbachov
Gregory Stroud:
Dima, a good post, though I haven’t seen evidence that Perestroika (certainly not in its early days) was intended to privatize the economy… certainly not the larger portions of the energy and manufacturing sectors.
As for whether Perestroika collapsed the economy, it appears fairly clear now that the Russian economy was already in crisis by the end of the 1970s. Of course, there is no contradicting the fact that Perestroika failed to prevent the complete collapse of the economy.
Dima Vorobiev:
It was unthinkable at all to talk about “privatization”. Old-timers would have burnt alive anyone for saying that out loud. This is why “worker’s collectives” and “local initiative” were launched as the way to go.
Only now we know what exactly was happening beneath the surface, and why Russia ended up as a playground of former party functionaries and KGB veterans in the role of new millionaires and billionaires.
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THE “COFFIN MONEY”
~ Visibly distraught Russian journalist Timur Olevsky told a very strange story on Skype to a Ukrainian news channel. It was related to him by the sister of a contract soldier fighting in the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine.
She submitted a complaint, or rather a plea for help, to the prosecutor’s office. Her parents falsified DNA verification procedure and buried a body of an unknown soldier pretending it was their son’s in order to receive a government monetary compensation, the so-called “coffin money.”
After a while it transpired that their son is alive and that Ukrainian Army had captured him.
When parents learned of their son’s captivity they didn’t want to hear anything about it. They did absolutely nothing to get him back, didn’t apply to the Defense Ministry, because they would have to return the coffin money and they don’t want to do it. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.jpg
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THE RUSSIAN ARMY (Misha Firer)
~ Nikita, a new recruit for SMO from a small settlement in Nizhni Novgorod believes that he’ll be luckier than 80K dead and maimed before him. Indeed, hope springs eternal.
Pro-Russia trolls are selling to Westerners including on Quora that their media is lying to them. Russian army is in fact advancing and capturing new territories.
Conquest of territories does not equate victory, although Russia’s territorial gains in the past three months were insignificant.
Napoleon and Hitler conquered lots of territories. And then lost them all.
The question, therefore, is how’s Russian government going to keep those territories when the war costs half a billion dollars and a hundred corpses a day, and the main customers stopped buying their gas and oil like they used to in order not to subsidize their “denazification campaign”?
Moscow Times revealed that the Central Bank clandestinely turned on the printing press to bankroll those huge salaries to amateur soldiers of fortune — more like cannon fodder, which will lead to another cycle of inflation.
Russian government has evaluated that cannon fodder should be paid 3–4 times more than doctors, engineers, scientists, chemists, architects.
At my company, an academic of prestigious Russian Academy of Science, an expert in obstetrics, earns the same what one of those drunks sent to war does.
An engineer from Izhevsk auto-making plant wrote a letter to Putin complaining that he’s tired of painting fences because he was trained as an engineer. He wrote a letter to the very person who caused his plant to shut down!
60% of parts in Lada Vesta that used to be manufactured in his auto plant are made in the West and not available anymore due to sanctions. Government continues to pay factory and plant employees to paint fences and sweep floors.
For how much longer and isn’t the whole point of industries to manufacture stuff, rather than provide a pretext to pay the unemployed?
Putin can’t provide safety to residents and tourists in Crimea, which he annexed eight years ago. After attacks on three Air Force bases in Crimea within days, summer vacationers began to flee for the mainland.
The Simferopol airport is closed, and unless you’re a soldier eager to confront HIMARS in Kherson, Kerch Bridge is the only way out.
But it too was shut down for outbound traffic in order to spirit out FSB (former KGB) officers and generals with their families, a priority over plebs.
A long line of cars leaving Crimea. Never has been a better time to visit Crimea — empty beaches, low prices. Just stay away from military installations.
FSBshniks wouldn’t take a train due to risk of railway tracks being sabotaged. Can’t fly. Can’t take train. Can Putin revenge the attack on his Holy Land?
To up the stakes Putin would have to use chemical and biological weapons but that too would up Western stakes.
He’s already run out of options — he bombed Ukraine with every type of bomb, missile and rocket that the armed forces have at their disposal. Flattened whole settlements and towns.
Trillions of rubles have been allocated to rebuild Donbas and Mariyupol while a third of clinics in Russia don’t have indoor plumbing and central heating, and everywhere Soviet infrastructure is crumbling and falling apart.
The more Russian army bombs Ukraine, the more budget money that’s already being squeezed dry due to sanctions will have to be pulled out of Russia to rebuild what they have destroyed in Ukraine.
For more than a decade, propaganda was telling us that Russian soldiers are “polite men,” well-equipped, kind-hearted liberators.
The war in Ukraine revealed that the Russians army is a bunch of lowlifes, thieves and marauders. Look at those recuperating soldiers at a hospital.
3 Russians
They proudly display watches they stole from Ukrainians. These are the true faces of liberators.
We also learned about “traditional family values” Putin has been bragging about that supposedly makes us so superior to decadent and morally corrupt West.
One captured soldier’s mother got upset when she heard her son’s voice — expected to receive six million ruble compensation, which she now won’t because he’s alive and well.
Another soldier’s mother complained to the Ukrainian journalist that she has to pay the loan she took out to buy an iPhone 13.
“But your son is in captivity!” Isn’t his life more important than a gadget?
Well, she has a disabled father and to take care of him costs money.
Babushka I saw the other day selling matryoshkas outside of a Russian Railways clinic.
“Artisanal crafts! Give me money! I need money!” she called out to passers by. I wanted to ask where she got the merch, but then reckoned I’d better not.
In Russia, matryoshkas sell you. ~
James Packer:
Kherson is going to be Putin's Stalingrad. He's too proud and stupid to pull his forces back to the Eastern bank of the Dnieper. Soon, if not even now, he will no longer have the option of withdrawing them, and 15–20k Russian troops will be pinned down and trapped on the Western side of the River.
10K Russian prisoners being marched West by the Ukrainians will be absolutely humiliating for Putin. It will be all the more funny because he has and continues to make exactly the same mistakes Hitler did, but has refused to learn from them.
Thomas Collinson:
Regarding Putin’s sanctioning of war crimes, I would argue that his personally awarding medals to soldiers known to be involved in war crimes specifically for their actions in towns where they committed war crimes is fairly telling.
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MEET A WAR CRIMINAL
~ Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev is known as the Butcher of Mariupol. This title is rightly justified. If you look up the definition of scumbag in the dictionary, you would find his picture. Why is he such a scumbag? He is weak and likes to exploit anyone he can.
It was Mizintsev who gave the order to bomb a maternity hospital in the city that killed a heavily pregnant woman and her unborn child; to bomb a theatre sheltering hundreds of children who were likely buried alive in the rubble; and to indiscriminately shell neighbourhoods in attacks that have left corpses rotting in the streets.
He also has been heard berating a junior officer for not cutting off the ears of a private who had been caught not wearing his uniform properly, according to a chilling intercepted phone call.
General Mikhail Mizintsev appeared to call for the private to have his 'face messed up' and called for others to beat him with a bottle after he wore the wrong uniform.
'Look at that scum standing there, frowning with his bovine eyes, showing me his unhappy face, his stinking mug,' Mizintsev can he heard saying in the audio shared by Olexander Scherba, Ukraine's ex-Austrian ambassador.
'Why is he still serving? And why should I have to waste my time with your scum? If you're the head of a unit, then step up to the plate.
'Why is his face not mutilated yet? Why hasn't anyone cut off his ears? Why isn't this moron limping yet,' Mizintsev can be heard saying.
'At night, when he walks out, unknown assailants jump him. Just jump him over and over, beating him in the face with a bottle and then pouring another litre into it.'
This is not the first time he has given such commands. In his role as defense chief, Mizintsev was also devised Russia's military strategy in Syria - including the bloody siege of Aleppo, which has frightening parallels with the horror being inflicted in Mariupol.
Many
feel he should be charged with war crimes. Olexander Scherba, Ukraine’s
ex-Austrian ambassador, this week branded Mizintsev the 'Butcher of
Mariupol' while Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of Ukraine's Centre for
Civil Liberties, called on him to face war crime charges. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Colonel General Mikhail MizintsevOriana:
Sounds like a demented psychopath. And yes, of course he's a war criminal, his cruelty extending to his own troops. A weak man who's running scared. A small man who's trying to compensate. No, we can't call him an animal because animals are not capable of such "bestiality."
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WHY RUSSIAN ECONOMY SUFFERED AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
~ Two factors mainly decided the great contraction of our economy due to the collapse of Communist rule.
We lost our dependencies—the 14 ethnic “union republics” around Russia. They stood for about 2/5 of the combined Soviet GDP.
Collapse of the military-industrial complex. The Soviet project was essentially a military machine with a mobilization-type economy attached to it. When the USSR went bankrupt, tens of thousands enterprises lost their sole, or main, customer: the Soviet Army.
The size of Russian military-related production was extremely hard to pin down. Two main reasons for it were (1) the token nature of Soviet ruble and (2) the mobilization setup of our economy where most of civil production capacities and infrastructure had an inbuilt military-use component.
When the State strangled the military spending, this had a cascading effect.
A large part of existing production capacities went idle. The drop in the GDP in the early 1990s suggests that the real share of the defense and military-related programs in Soviet economic output was somewhere between 30–50%.
In the absence of the government’s readjustment programs, stalled industrial activity led to millions of people going unpaid for months and years in a row. This led to a collapse in the consumer sector that according to the official data constituted about 60% of the Soviet GDP.
The management and personnel went about stealing inventory. A lot of stuff was sold for pennies and the proceeds were funneled out of the country. St. Petersburg under the leadership of Putin’s liberal boss Sobchak was one of the main hubs for shipping out our national wealth. This was an epic nationwide disinvestment, not captured by the official stats.
Many engineers and other key personnel left the country, taking with them the expertise. This was a huge loss of human capital, hard to quantify, which further depressed the economic output.
With the runaway inflation and millions of people going unpaid, much of the economy switched to barter and therefore disappeared from the radar of the official stats.
People who lost their jobs or went unpaid in their “official” jobs went into the “grey” and “black” sectors of economy. The “Second Economy” exploded, eating away off the stats of the official economy. (A part of the GDP growth under Putin in the early 2000s was simply “black” and “grey” economic activity turning “white”.)
The Soviet poster below says: “Heavy industry is the foundation of our Motherland’s might!” Heavy industry was the Communist term for enterprises that assured our self-reliance in arms production and military infrastructure. It all was too rigid to be swiftly re-oriented to civil production, and before it had time to do so, most was stolen by former Party and Communist functionaries, chopped up and sold piecemeal.
Soviet steelworker
Matthias Heinze:
Soviet accounting was comically inaccurate, vastly over-reporting the size of the economy. There is a misplaced nostalgia in Russia of a “glorious Soviet Union that won WWII.” None of it is true. The Soviet Union was depleting the wealth of the country. It borrowed from the future. Rather than destroying, capitalism rescued the country.
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RUSSIAN JEWS ARE LEAVING RUSSIA
~ Russia is facing the mass migration abroad of large numbers of its Jewish population, with at least one in eight leaving the country since its war with Ukraine began.
The Jewish Agency helps Jews around the world move to Israel. It says an astonishing 20,500 of Russia's estimated total of 165,000 Jews have gone since March.
Thousands more have moved to other countries.
Undoubtedly the specter of historical Jewish persecution has loomed large in the minds of many of those who are a part of this sudden mass migration and those still trying to get out of Russia.
In Moscow, there had been a huge effort to develop the Jewish community since the fall of Communism. Among those at the forefront was Pinchas Goldschmidt, the city's chief rabbi since 1993.
But just two weeks into the war this year, Rabbi Goldschmidt and his family left Russia, first to Hungary and then to Israel.
He then stepped down from his position and spoke out against the war.
"I felt that I had to do something to show my total disassociation and disagreement with this invasion of Ukraine, but I would have endangered myself if I had done that staying in Moscow."
Some Russian Jews criticized him for leaving and speaking out, worried it would mean more scrutiny of the community, but Rabbi Goldschmidt said most were supportive.
"I received some messages saying 'How can you leave us alone?' but I would say the great majority were extremely supportive. It was not a minor conflict to decide whether to go, for me and my wife the community was our lives," he says.
Rabbi Goldschmidt says that it was through staying and speaking out that the community could have been left endangered.
But since then, huge numbers have followed his lead.
Many have taken up the opportunity of going to Israel, where the Law of Return gives anyone who can prove they have at least one Jewish grandparent the right to citizenship.
"I have been thinking quite a bit about why there is such a rush to go because we are not seeing a huge surge of anti-Semitism," says Anna Shternshis, Professor of Yiddish studies at the University of Toronto and specialist in Jewish history in Russia.
"But then putting my historian hat on, I see that every time something happens in Russia, some upheaval, some change, Jews are always in danger.”
She describes how Russian historical events led to violence against Jews, such as the revolution, the economic crisis of the late 19th Century and World War Two.
"Not everyone acts on it, but every Jew in Russia today is thinking about this."
Professor Shternshis was born and raised in Russia herself. She says she feels especially dismayed at the way in which Jews feel, once again in world history, that however much they have committed to building a life somewhere it can suddenly be taken away.
One man we spoke to who is trying to leave felt he was in precisely that position. He wanted to be known by a false name, Alexander, because of fears of the consequences of speaking out given that he is still in Moscow.
"After 24 February, my family realized we were absolutely against this war but we did not know how we could protest. One of my children is the age of military service, so that is another reason we want to go," he says.
The distress in his voice at having to contemplate leaving his home and country is all too clear, and he talks of his fears of not being able to find work abroad and not having huge amounts of savings.
But as Professor Shternshis suggested, Alexander's anxiety about his family's future in Russia goes beyond just opposing the war.
"The authorities in Russia are unpredictable and they have a bad tendency; Jews become one of their propaganda targets; we are traditionally a good way to find internal enemies. My great-grandparents and grandparents suffered from those times," he says.
Alexander says he only knows two other Jewish families and that the community has not been a big part of his life.
But he fears that however integrated he is, this will not matter if the mood against Jews changes.
He has applied for Israeli citizenship and is due to be interviewed in the coming weeks.
One of the things that has alarmed Alexander is the Kremlin's stated intention to shut down the Russian arm of the Jewish Agency.
"All of a sudden we see that on the news, and we wonder what is next? We feel very unsafe and we think could we lose our jobs, or go to jail. Things have become very scary.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62564122
Oriana:
The Jewish “brain drain” is a loss for Russia and a gain for Israel and the West. More than 150,000 Jews emigrated from Russia during the Soviet era. Now we are witnessing another wave.
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TURKIC INFLUENCES ON THE RUSSIAN CULTURE
~ Turkic influences on the Russian culture is one of the largest secrets we successfully hide from the rest of the world.
In the pre-Imperial era, we were tributaries of the Golden Horde and their descendants. We call them Mongols, even though there are very few Mongol artifacts in our woodlands, Mongol DNAs in our genes and Mongol texts in our archives. As far back as we can see to the east and south, it’s almost always Turks.
The problem of Turks is, on our side of the Black Sea they never got the same conqueror glory as the Mongols. This matters a lot in Russia.
In addition, subjugating ourselves to strangers of our own free will, as St Alexander Nevsky did to the Golden Horde, is not cool at all. Every time I mention this on Quora, there’s always someone who angrily tells me off: “Russia was conquered by Mongols! There was the Mongol yoke! Everyone knows that!”.
In Russia, it’s much cooler to rub the shoulders with the Chingizides than with Turks.
Back to the Turks. We’ve been living with them as our closest neighbors from the time of early Cumanian kingdoms. Due to their dominance on the river routes along the Volga down to the Caspian Sea, before the Varangians [Vikings] came, we had been tributaries to the Khazars. Our early rulers even called themselves Kagans, which was Turkic for “king”. We went on being intertwined with them in many ways like no one else—until the House of Romanovs decided it’s time to make a clean break and become Europeans.
[The Khazars (/ˈxɑːzɑːrz/) were a semi-nomadic Turkic people that in the late 7th-century AD established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, and Kazakhstan.]
Now, the top 10 Turkic things in Russia
Food. Cumanian nomads taught us to cook dough in boiling water long before Jews came to town with their bagels and pretzels which we transformed into búbliki, baránki and súshki. The Turks also had ample access to meat—which is why many of the favorite meat recipes in Russia came from Turks, shashlík being the absolute favorite.
A wealth of everyday words about everything from déngi (“money”) and tamózhnya (“customs office”) to cherdák (“attic”), shtaný (“pants”) and durák (“dimwit”). Add to that the myriads of toponyms in the Cumanian prairies: Astrakhan, Saratov, Ural, Samara, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Tiumen.
Family names: Yeltsin, Sharapova, Yusupov, Sheremetyev, Suvorov, Karamzin, Bulgakov, Zhdanov, Turgenev, Radishchev, Chadayev, Berdyaev, Tukhachevsky.
Cossacks. These originated as Slav-speaking Orthodoxes who subscribed to Turkic lifestyles and never looked back. They considered themselves a nation apart from the rest of Russians and Ukrainians until Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin wiped them off the planet altogether.
Siberia. The name itself is Turkic, the territory was originally a playground of Turkic tribes, and the Russian colonization happened thanks to a massive contribution from friendly Turks. The supreme hero of our early Siberian colonization was a Tatar called Yarmúk/Ermák.
The Cumanian steppes. These insanely productive farming areas were the powerhouse of Russia’s demographic and economic growth starting from the 15th century, especially when the Imperial conquests made them safe for settlement in the 18th century.
Amanát, or “friendly” hostage-taking. A “safekeeping” of the native’s kids was the main tool of political control the Empire of Joche had over the political class in the early Muscovy. Later, it became a backbone of the pelt-driven colonization of Siberia, the Far East and Alaska by our Cossacks and trappers (promýshlenniki).
Intermarriages, the turbo engine of colonial absorption of the lands east of the Urals. Because of immense distances, it made little sense to Cossacks, trappers and other single male settlers to bring brides from the Russian heartland. They married local girls and made many babies with them. Several generations down the road, few pockets of ethnically insulated areas remained that considered themselves “non-Russian”.
Russian aristocracy. Because of the colonial nature of Russian civilization, it was customary to use outside minorities for recruitment in the state administration. Before Peter I undertook his Westernization project, Christianized Tatars had been the preferred external recruitment pool by our rulers. Before the revolution, knyaz (“duke”) was widespread as a derogatory word for Volga Tatars.
The Magnificent Port was a source of inspiration for the imperial state-building, before the French and Dutch dazzled the Romanovs with their splendor.
(Below, one of the first detailed drawings of the Kremlin in Moscow, the 17th century. Before Italians brought to Russia the tradition of European masonry in the 15th century, ours was the domain of timber construction—while Turks in the prairies used stone slabs and bricks. Which was probably why the type of fortresses we see in Moscow, Astrakhan, Novgorod got the Turkic designation of Kreml (“Kremlin”). The original Russian fortifications from the Varangian era were either simple walls of timber, or a combination of earthwork and wooden constructions. These were called ostróg, detínets and górod (hence, Gardarika)
~ The genetic and historical evidence suggests that the early Turkic peoples were of largely East Asian origin but became increasingly diverse, with later medieval Turkic groups exhibiting both East Asian and occasionally also West Eurasian physical appearances and genetic origins. Many vastly differing ethnic groups have throughout history become part of the Turkic peoples through language shift, acculturation, conquest, intermixing, adoption and religious conversion.
Nevertheless, certain Turkic peoples share, to varying degrees, non-linguistic characteristics like cultural traits, ancestry from a common gene pool, and historical experiences.
Some of the most notable modern Turkic-speaking ethnic groups include the Turkish people, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Uyghurs, Turkmens, Volga Tatars, Kyrgyz people and Yakuts.
The Cumans (or Kumans, also known as Polotzvians) are a Western Turkic group.
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RUSSIAN AND SANSCRIT
~ My ancestors hail from the Vologda region in the Russian North. When I visited my grandparents in summer, it usually took me a week to get used to their dialect of the Russian language.
Little did I know that a person from India who knows Sanskrit would need about that much time to understand the dialect without a translator.
A professor from India, who arrived in Vologda, almost immediately turned down his translator’s services. “I can understand Vologda dielect,” he said, “because they speak corrupted Sanskrit.”
It turns out, the entire area of Vologda is linked to Sanskrit and Indian culture.
The region is located at the confluence of the river Dvina (“divine, sacred” in Sanskrit) and its tributary Sukhona (“easy to cross” in Sanskrit). Other rivers with Sanskrit names in the region: Vel (border, riverbank); Valgu (nice lovely); Indu (a drop); Lal (play, overflow); Padma (flower of a water lily, lotus).
Vologda lace knitting is world famous. Little did I know that my female ancestors knitted Indian patterns.
Vologda ethnographer Svetlana Zharnikova accompanied an Indian folk band on a trip down the Sukhona river.
The head of the ensemble, Ms. Mihra, was shocked by the ornaments in Vologda national costumes. “These,” she would exclaim enthusiastically, “are native to Rajasthan, and this one is from Aris, and these ornaments are what we have in Bengal.”
It turned out that even the technology of embroidery of ornaments is called the same in the Vologda region and in India. Our craftswomen call embossed smooth surface "chekan", and Indians call it “chikan".
However, not just the Vologda dialect, but the Russian language sounds very similar to Sanskrit.
In the 1960s, the Indian specialist in Sanskrit Durga Prasad Shastri visited Russia. After two weeks, he told his translator Mr. Gusev, “Stop translating! I understand what you are saying. You are speaking here some altered form of Sanskrit!”
Having returned to India, he published an article on the similarities of the Russian and Sanskrit languages. Here is a quote from the article:
“If I were asked which two languages of the world are most similar to each other, I would answer without any hesitation: Russian and Sanskrit. And not because some words are similar. Common words can be found in Latin, German, Sanskrit, Persian and Russian. What surprising is that the word structure, style, syntax and even grammar rules are too similar in the two languages to be a coincidence.
“When I was in Moscow, they gave me the keys to a room 234 at the hotel and said “dwesti tridsat chetire ”. In bewilderment, I could not understand whether I was in Moscow or in Benares two thousand years ago. In Sanskrit, 234 is “dwishata tridasha chatwari.”
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the researcher of the origins of the Indians, published his book "The Arctic Home in the Vedas" in 1903.
According to Tilak, sacred books, the Vedas, written more than three thousand years ago, “tell about life of the distant ancestors near the Arctic Ocean. They describe endless summer days and winter nights, the North Star and the northern lights.” ~ Misha Firer, Quora
~ Sanskrt
(“san” - dream, revelation, “skr(i)t” - something hidden; revealing
something hidden through a vision) basically means revealing something
divine that we cannot normally know.
The Aryans or “the followers of Orion” how the Greeks called them. Orion was the gigantic hunter from myths and is of “Balkan Slavic” origin: “Oријаш” (Orijaš) is one of the Slavic words for “giant”.
In the Balkans (actually a Turkish medieval name) we can find the oldest cities and towns in Europe, possibly in the world, and, more importantly - the oldest writing system ever known. This is important as the ancient Greeks describe Aryans as the inventors of writing - and we actually found it scattered across modern day Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, N. Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania and Italy, mostly around the Danube and Morava rivers.
They migrated in two directions from the Balkans. One, northern, went all the way to Siberia and then south to China and India, the other, eastern, across the seas and Middle East which also landed in India. These weren’t short term voyages and military expeditions, they went on and off for decades and centuries. ~ Bodin Kravljanac, Quora
Oriana:
All this is a subject of controversy. There is no scholarly consensus as to the origin of Slavic tribes. To be sure, Slavic languages are Indo-European, but so are most European languages except for the Finno-Ugric group, and of course the mysterious Basque language.
Mary:
Oriana:
Part of the answer may be that sometimes, after a long migration, a particular ethnic group becomes isolated and becomes "frozen in time." This is to some extent seen in the variant of the English language spoken in the American South. The immigrant population preserved the pronunciation of 18th century English.
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WILHELM KUBE: NAZIFIED CHRISTIANITY
~ Wilhelm Kube (13 November 1887 – 22 September 1943) was a Nazi official and German politician. He was an important figure in the German Christian movement during the early years of Nazi rule. During the war he became a senior official in the occupying government of the Soviet Union, achieving the rank of Generalkommissar for Generalbezirk Weißruthenien. He was assassinated in Minsk in 1943 after participation in the Holocaust, triggering brutal reprisals against the citizens of Minsk.
An extreme antisemite and participant in numerous war crimes against Jewish people, he is known to have said about Jews: "What plague and syphilis are to humanity, are Jews to the white race.” However, Kube behaved towards German Jews in a relatively mild way during his charge in Minsk, by trying—unsuccessfully—to protect German Jews, whom he felt as culturally closer, from extermination. As for Minsk, he planned to level the city and replace it with a German settlement, called Asgard.
Kube was born in Glogau (today's Głogów), Prussian Silesia, and studied history, economics and theology. In 1911 he received a Moses Mendelssohn Scholarship from the University of Berlin. Kube was active in the Völkisch movement as a student, and joined the Nazi Party in late 1927. From 1928 he was also leader of the tiny Nazi party faction (6 seats) in the Prussian Landtag (Prussian state legislature). Under his leadership it grew to be the largest party in the Landtag by 1932. On 1 February 1928, he was appointed Gauleiter of Ostmark with his seat at Frankfurt an der Oder. In 1934, he was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer. On 9 September 1935, Kube was made a member of the Academy for German Law.
NAZIFICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
Kube remained an active Christian as well as a zealous Nazi, and in 1932 he organized the list of candidates of the Faith Movement of the German Christians for the ordinary election of presbyters and synodals within the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union on 13 November that year. The German Christians then gained about a third of all seats in presbyteries and synods. Kube was elected as one of the presbyters of the congregation of Gethsemane Church in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. The presbyters elected him from their midst as synodal into the competent deanery synod (German: Kreissynode; Berlin then comprised 11 deaneries altogether), and these synodals again elected him a member of deanery synodal board (German: Kreissynodalvorstand).
When in 1933 the Nazis came to power he remained active in the German Christian movement which sought to "Nazify" the 28 Protestant church bodies in Germany. For 23 July 1933 Hitler ordered an unconstitutional, premature re-election of all presbyters and synodals, with the German Christians now gaining 70–80% of the seats, so Kube could then further advance as head of the Berlin synod of the old-Prussian Church. Following the German conquest of Poland in 1939 his Nazi party domain was extended to include Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia and Reichsgau Wartheland.
ACCUSATIONS AND REMOVAL FROM OFFICE
In late 1935 the Supreme Party Court under Chairman Walter Buch, the father-in-law of Martin Bormann, began an investigation into Kube due to allegations of adultery and corruption in running his Gau, including nepotism, favoritism and a dictatorial management style. In December he was issued a letter of reprimand. Swearing revenge, Kube sent an anonymous letter claiming that Buch was married to a half-Jew. This, of course, would have far-reaching implications not only for Buch but for Bormann, whose wife consequently also was accused of not being a pure Aryan. Kube was leveling serious charges at two Party Reichsleiters. In the course of a Gestapo investigation, it came to light that the letter had been written by Kube. Buch and Bormann saw to it that Kube was removed from all his posts on 7 August 1936. Only on Hitler's orders was he allowed to retain the title of Gauleiter, albeit without a Gau. Furthermore, owing to a dispute with Reinhard Heydrich over a search conducted of Kube's mistress' apartment, Kube offered his resignation from the SS on 11 March 1936; he was officially discharged on 1 April.
REICHSKOMMISSAR OF WEISSRUTHENIEN (BELARUS)
On 17 July 1941, in the wake of the German occupation of the western parts of the Soviet Union, he was appointed Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien (now known as Belarus), with his headquarters in Minsk. In this role Kube oversaw the extermination of the large Jewish population of this area. He was nevertheless outraged by the Slutsk Affair in October 1941, when SS Einsatzgruppen (death squads) massacred Jews without the authority of the local Nazi civil administration and Security SS authorities. Local non-Jewish Belarusians were also killed, creating great resentment among the population. Kube wrote in protest to his supervisor and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler:
The town was a picture of horror during the action. With indescribable brutality on the part of both the German police officers and particularly the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people, but also among them Belarusians, were taken out of their dwellings and herded together. Everywhere in the town shots were to be heard and in different streets the corpses of shot Jews accumulated. The Belarusians were in greatest distress to free themselves from the encirclement.
The letter concluded:
I am submitting this report in duplicate so that one copy may be forwarded to the Reich Minister. Peace and order cannot be maintained in Belarus with methods of that sort. To bury seriously wounded people alive who worked their way out of their graves again is such a base and filthy act that the incidents as such should be reported to the Führer and Reichsmarschall.
Despite these misgivings, Kube participated in an atrocity on 2 March 1942 in the Minsk ghetto. During a search by German and Belarusian police, a group of children were seized and thrown into pits of deep sand to die.
At that moment, several SS officers, among them Wilhelm Kube, arrived, whereupon Kube, immaculate in his uniform, threw handfuls of sweets to the shrieking children. All the children perished in the sand.
Kube's contradictory attitude towards Jews is shown in his behavior towards German Jews deported to Minsk. He was particularly incensed by the presence among the deportees of men decorated during World War I. These Jews who he regarded as belonging "to our cultural milieu" prompted Kube to file a complaint with Reinhard Heydrich, in which he stated that "during the evacuation of Jews from the Reich, the guidelines on who was to be evacuated had not been properly observed" and he attached a list of names.
During the 2 March 1942 massacre, Generalkommissar Kube withheld German Jews from a mass shooting which was conducted in Minsk under the supervision of Sturmbannführer Eduard Strauch, at which 3,412 Jews were killed, an unprecedented act that provoked a formal complaint from the SS according to which "Generalkommissar Kube appears to have promised to the German Jews, who before my time were delivered to the ghetto five thousand strong, that life and health would remain theirs”.
Heydrich flew to Minsk to deliver Kube a reprimand, after which he felt compelled to comply with extermination actions. On 31 July he wrote to his friend, the Reichskommissar for the Ostland, Hinrich Lohse, in Riga:
~ Following lengthy talks with the SS-Brigadeführer Zenner and the extraordinarily diligent head of the SD, SS-Obersturmbannführer Strauch, in the last two weeks in White Russia we have liquidated roughly 55,000 Jews....In the city of Minsk about 10,000 Jews were liquidated on 28 and 29 July. Of these, 6,500 were Russian Jews, predominantly women, children, and the aged; the rest were Jews unfit for labor, mainly from Vienna, Brünn, Bremen, and Berlin. The latter had been sent to Minsk last year in accordance with the Führer's orders....In Minsk proper there are 2,600 Jews from Germany left. ~
ASSASSINATION
At 1:20 am on 22 September 1943, Kube was assassinated in his Minsk apartment by a time device hidden in his mattress. The bomb was placed by Soviet partisan Yelena Mazanik (1914–1996), a Belarusian woman who was hired in Kube's household as a maid and was convinced to assassinate him later. According to alternate version, the explosives were set up by Lev Liberman from the Minsk ghetto, who was also employed in the household, but this later proved to be false. In total 12 groups received an order from Moscow to assassinate Kube.
The bomb went off forty minutes early, purportedly due to higher air temperature than that during bomb testing. In retaliation, the SS killed more than 1,000 men who were citizens of Minsk. Owing to Kube's antagonistic attitude to some SS anti-Jewish actions, Himmler felt that the dead man had been well on the way to booking himself a place in a concentration camp anyway, and reportedly described the assassination as a “blessing”.
Mazanik escaped the reprisals and continued to fight with the partisans. On 29 October 1943 she was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, along with other members of the assassination group Nadezhda Troyan and Maria Osipova. After the war she went on to become deputy director of the Fundamental Library of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. ~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Kube?fbclid=IwAR1TEjZNZqEXLZc6p8DuBzid5w3zOC5MZ3_zVwXkSwZx-7MkpZWT9zqHwjE
Wilhelm Kube, who tried to Nazify German Protestant churches; later the Butcher of Minsk
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THE POLISH-BOLSHEVIK WAR AND THE “MIRACLE ON THE VISTULA”
~ 102 years ago, on August 16 in 1920, Polish forces begin a counter-attack against Soviet armies sent by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky along the Vistula River north of Warsaw. Despite being on the verge of defeat, the Polish army fought for 12 days and managed to stop the early spread of Communism into Europe in an event known as the “Miracle on the Vistula”.
Assuming control of Russia after the destabilization of World War One, the Communist Revolution sought to expand as far as it could throughout Europe. The Russian provinces that resisted in the start of the revolution were eventually brought under control. Then Lenin moved his armies east into Ukraine and the Baltic nations. Polish troops would be fighting against the Soviets in Ukraine, only to be pushed back. Having a superior army, the Soviets felt capturing the Polish capital Warsaw would be a great boost in moral and strategic value to the Communist cause.
Soviet forces entered Poland in January 1920 and continued to build up over the year until they broke through Polish lines in June. With the entire Polish army in disarray and retreat, Polish leader Józef Piłsudski reorganized and rallied his forces at the capital to prepare a plan for one final stand. On August 3rd, the Communists installed a ‘Polish Revolutionary Committee” that issued a ‘Manifesto to the Polish Working People of Town and Country,’ proclaiming a revolutionary socialist government. The plan backfired and drove the Polish workers and civilians to their capital to resist the coming Communist revolution.
With the Soviets getting closer to Warsaw, the Polish leaders had to haggle with the allies to get military aid to defend their capital. A small contingent of French, British, and Americans would be present in the upcoming battle. Józef Piłsudski’s final plan was a large counter offensive to save Warsaw. But the Soviets eager to capture Warsaw as soon as possible, began to approach northern Warsaw along the Vistula River on August 12th with little concern of the threat of their Polish foes who were growing stronger every day with reinforcements.
Over the next 3 days the Soviets managed to get 15 miles outside of Warsaw, and the Poles fought desperately in some instances with hand-to-hand combat to delay them until their forces could be remobilized to reinforce and counterattack. A regiment of Polish cavalry heroically went behind enemy lines and destroyed Soviet radio stations and wreaked havoc on their supply lines. This action severely crippled the Soviet armies who were unable to work cohesively on an exposed flank of the Polish forces.
On August 15th the Polish forces were ready to begin their desperate counterattack and some units started to go on the offensive. The next day on August 16th the tides would begin to turn as allied airplane squadrons arrived on scene. One of them, known as Kościuszko's Squadron, was named after the Polish hero Tadeusz Kościuszko who helped Americans gained their independence in 1776. The Americans involved in this squadron were volunteers independent of the U.S. State Department or the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. Taking advantage of the new airpower, Józef Piłsudski launched his much anticipated blitzkrieg type counterattack on the Soviets.
http://www.historynet.com/miracle-on-the-vistula.htm
Oriana:
My two maternal uncles fought in the "Bolshevik war." WW1 and the Bolshevik War were later totally eclipsed by the mass slaughter and destruction of WW2.
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THE POWERFUL ROLE OF MAGICAL BELIEFS IN OUR EVERYDAY THINKING
~ Adults often deny believing in magic, but on closer inspection, much of our behavior is more magical than we think. Eugene Subbotsky, who for over 40 years has studied the development of magical thinking, has suggested that in adults, magical beliefs are simply suppressed and can be reactivated given the appropriate conditions. His research also suggests that when denial of a magical belief is costly, adults are happy to give up their belief in the power of physical causality and view the world in terms of magical explanations.
Subbotsky’s findings show that magical thinking is deeply ingrained in our day-to-day thoughts and behaviors, and that magical and scientific beliefs can happily coexist inside our minds. But why does such thinking exist in the first place?
In children, magical beliefs provide fuel for imaginary role-playing and fantasizing that helps them master difficult problems and maintain a feeling of independence and power. Similar concepts also play a role in our adult lives. Magical beliefs can help us deal with complex situations that we would otherwise simply fail to comprehend, and they can make the inanimate world more understandable. For example, human-computer interactions rely on a deep-rooted magical belief that is typically known as the user illusion. Every time you empty your computer’s trash folder, you happily accept the magical belief that the files within have been deleted. Accepting this user illusion is far more manageable than having to deal with the complexity of computer programming.
Another aspect is the illusory sense of control that magic provides, with magical beliefs offering a helping hand in situations beyond our rational control. Control is an important coping strategy, and a lack of control can lead to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski argued that magical beliefs and superstitious behaviors allow people to reduce the tension created by uncertainty and help fill the void of the unknown.
Malinowski noticed, for example, that the behavior of fishermen in the Trobriand Islands changed depending on where they fished. In the inner lagoon, fishing was straightforward, with little ritual. When fishermen set sail for the open sea, however, there were much higher levels of superstitious behavior, often involving elaborate rituals. The water in the inner lagoon was always calm and the fishing consistent, with little risk and, consequently, a high level of perceived control. Fishing in the open sea, on the other hand, was more dangerous, with prospects that were much less certain, resulting in a lower sense of control.
More recent studies have provided further support for this connection. During the 1990–1991 Gulf War, researchers observed more magical thinking and superstitious behavior in people who lived in areas under direct threat of a missile attack, compared to those in low-risk areas. In their study of superstitious rituals employed during high-stress examinations, Jeffrey Rudski and Ashleigh Edwards observe that the frequency of students’ exam-related magical rituals increases as the stakes increase. Intriguingly, students report that they frequently use these rituals while denying any causal effectiveness. Superstitious behavior therefore seems to give us the illusion of control, which can reduce anxiety during stressful situations and consequently improve performance. As with homeopathic medicine — which can have the same healing power as a placebo, suggesting that its effects are all in our mind — many of these rituals might actually work, albeit through unintended or indirect mechanisms.
Few doubt that magical beliefs can provide an illusory sense of control, but why do normal people also develop and maintain magical beliefs in ordinary, nonstressful contexts? The social psychologist Jane Risen suggests that magical beliefs result from some of the shortcuts and heuristics that our minds use to reason about the world. According to Risen, there is nothing intrinsically special about magical beliefs; they simply reflect some of the biases and quirks found in our everyday cognition. Let’s examine this theory in a bit more detail.
In recent years, psychologists have proposed that we use two fundamentally different mental processes to solve cognitive tasks. In his influential book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman proposes that our reasoning and decision making rely on two separate mental processes. One of them, System 1, operates quickly and requires little cognitive effort. Rather than analyzing a problem in all its detail, it uses simple heuristics to come up with quick, intuitive answers. In many situations, this is an effective and reliable strategy. But as with any shortcut, it can lead to errors.
An example of this is the availability heuristic, a cognitive shortcut that helps us evaluate the importance or prevalence of an event based on the ease with which we can remember the appropriate information. Information that comes to mind more easily is weighted more heavily. This is why, for example, most people vastly overestimate the likelihood of dying from a shark attack. Such attacks are extremely rare; you are far more likely to be killed by a cow. Yet unlike cow attacks, shark-related deaths are widely reported in the press and so pop into your mind more easily, thereby influencing your beliefs.
Although System 1 is fast, it is not necessarily accurate, whereas accuracy is much better with System 2, the other mental process. But System 2 operates in a controlled, step-by-step manner, making it rather slow and effortful. According to Kahneman, most of our day-to-day decisions are made through System 1, with System 2 intervening to override these intuitive assessments when they go wrong. Unfortunately, however, System 2 is often too effortful, so that many of these wrong answers go unnoticed, especially when they seem like they’re correct.
Let me illustrate this using a famous problem-solving task. Try to solve the following problem: The combined cost of a bat and a ball is $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Before reading on, take a few moments to solve the problem. (No, really. Give it a try.) The answer that immediately springs to most people’s minds is $0.10. But this is incorrect. If the ball cost $0.10 and the bat cost $1.00 more, the total would be $1.20, not $1.10. The correct answer is actually $0.05. Even though solving this problem does not require sophisticated mathematics, more than half of the participants at elite universities and more than 80 percent of participants at less selective universities answered it incorrectly.
If you came up with $0.10 as the answer, you relied on System 1 and did not invest enough cognitive energy to check your answer. Had you done so, you would certainly have spotted the error because the problem is not particularly challenging. The fact that most people fail to check their answer suggests that System 2 is often lazy and inattentive. There is huge pressure on the brain to save its cognitive resources. System 1 requires less effort and is much more likely to be used, even though it occasionally makes mistakes. People who come up with $0.10 as the answer have replaced “the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball” with a simpler statement: “The bat costs $1.00.” According to Kahneman, most of our cognitive reasoning is carried out by System 1, but once System 2 spots a mistake, it corrects it and enables us to come up with the correct answer.
Jane Risen recently suggested that, in many situations, System 2 notices the mistake but still does not correct it, acquiescing to the erroneous conclusion. The idea that you would continue to believe something that you know to be wrong sounds rather odd, but of course, this is exactly what we observe during magical thought processes. For example, when participants refuse to drink a beverage labeled “cyanide” — fully aware that the label is false and the drink does not contain cyanide — they know that they are acting irrationally, just as they know that cutting up a picture of a loved one causes no real harm. It is clear from participants’ verbal reports that people realize that their feelings toward these objects are unfounded but that they feel them anyway. For example, I know that there is nothing special about my particular wedding ring, but I feel strongly about it nonetheless.
Risen argues that superstitions and other powerful intuitions can be so compelling that we simply cannot shake them off, despite knowing that they are wrong. According to her, System 2 is not simply lazy and inattentive, it is also “a bit of a pushover”; it will not override the result of System 1 if the feelings associated with that result are too strong. Many magical beliefs occur because we rely on System 1’s simple heuristics and employ them in situations where these rules do not apply. Even though System 2 knows they are wrong, it fails to correct the erroneous logic and thus acquiesces to magical beliefs.
The idea that you would believe something that you know to be impossible seems rather counterintuitive. However, this is only one of many strange and counterintuitive properties of our mind. It is important to note that Risen’s new model of cognition does not apply exclusively to magical thinking and can explain a wide range of rather irrational behaviors.
For example, in 2015, British gamblers lost a staggering £12.6 billion. In 2016, American gamblers lost even more: $116.9 billion. People’s probability judgments clearly have some rather irrational characteristics. Many of these judgments are based on System 1 responses, which people often know are wrong. Imagine that you can win a prize by selecting a red marble from a bowl that contains both red and white ones, and you can choose whether you’d like to pick from a small bowl or a large one. The small bowl has 10 marbles, one of which is red (a 10 percent chance of winning). The large bowl has one hundred marbles with fewer than ten that are red (a less than 10 percent chance of winning). You know the odds, which are clearly marked on each bowl. So which bowl would you choose? Rather surprisingly, over 80 percent of people chose the large bowl, even though they knew that the odds of winning would be lower. We are evidently compelled to choose this bowl because it contains the larger number of winners.
This is one of numerous situations in which System 1 makes a decision based on a heuristic (i.e., choose the situation with largest number of winners), while System 2, which knows the odds, fails to override this intuitive yet suboptimal decision. Likewise, sports gamblers are reluctant to bet against the favorite, even if the potential winnings of the underdog are higher. Again, System 2’s failure to override such decisions contributes to the astronomical profits made by casinos and bookmakers and influences consumer behavior and stock markets around the world.
We’ve explored here our beliefs in “real” magic and the important role these play in much of our day-to-day behavior. The current research on magical thinking challenges many traditional views of cognition — in particular, the view that childhood magical beliefs are replaced by rational and scientific reasoning in adulthood. Instead, it has become apparent that rational and magical thoughts cohabit deep inside our minds. Most previous models of cognition have struggled to accommodate the coexistence of magical and scientific thought processes; hence the need to revise our models of cognition.
Understanding our magical beliefs also helps us understand the experience of performance magic, because witnessing a magic performance results in a coexistence of contradictory beliefs. The magician Teller — the silent one in the Penn & Teller duo — describes magic tricks in terms of experiencing things as real and unreal at the same time, while Jason Leddington suggests that the experience of magic results in a conflict between our beliefs about the world and the automatic belief that the trick itself elicits. These ideas share many similarities with the theories of magical thinking discussed here.
In light of this new research, the idea of simultaneously holding contradictory beliefs or experiences seems entirely plausible. It is tempting to think of magic as simply a form of fringe entertainment that deals with unique experiences rarely encountered during day-to-day life. However, magical beliefs play an important role in our everyday cognitive processes.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-powerful-role-of-magical-beliefs-in-our-everyday-thinking/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I don't have any typical good luck charms. But I've noticed that when faced with a challenging situation, I tend to choose to choose my "courage" blouse. I remember what I wore on some important occasion, and those items seem to have a special meaning.
Certain objects regarded as "magical" have a natural beauty -- for instance, gold jewelry or crystal pyramids. I think beauty (e.g. perfect proportions) has emotional power, which can also be thought of as "magical."
Mary:
The idea of "luck" is a magical, not a logical concept, and there are lots of rituals trying to obtain or preserve one's luck, and to protect from the curse of bad luck. Some are religious, like prayers, novenas, holy medals, scapulars, holy water, relics..some are cultural, like gestures to ward off the "evil eye" or charms to wear or carry for the same purpose. I think of gamblers, like the Bingo ladies, who have their special seats, their charms and tokens lined up in front of them (troll dolls are a favorite) — all a kind of voodoo petitioning luck to make them win. Gamblers always think they're going to make a big win someday, a magical thought that keeps them "in the game" far past the stage of entertainment...even to the point of losing all they have.
Oriana:
Gambling is also the perfect illustration of the "power of intermittent reinforcement." Paradoxical as that sounds, if the reward comes only at rare intervals, the gambling habit becomes extremely strong. In the case of lab animals, if lever pressing delivers food only at rare and unpredictable intervals, the animal will literally starve to death while pressing and pressing.
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DID MOSES SEE GOD FACE TO FACE?
~ Different authors had different concepts of God. For the anonymous author now known as the Yahwist, God was anthropomorphic and did visit and talk to humans face to face, but the Elohist portrayed God as transcendent and unseeable. The Priestly Source said that no one could see God and live, which is a strange mixture of the two earlier portrayals since it meant that you could see God as long as you were prepared to die. It was the Yahwist who portrayed God as walking in the Garden in the cool of the day and speaking face to face with Adam.
Exodus chapter 33 appears to be a conglomeration of two somewhat contradictory accounts from two different sources. Exodus 33:11 says “And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend,” but in Exodus 33:20 God says to Moses “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” ~ Dick Harfield, Quora
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HOW THE BRAIN DEALS WITH SPEAKING DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
~ Research into how multilingual people juggle more than one language in their minds is complex and sometimes counterintuitive. It turns out that when a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the same time, even if only one gets used. These languages can interfere with each other, for example intruding into speech just when you don't expect them. And interference can manifest itself not just in vocabulary slip-ups, but even on the level of grammar or accent.
"From research we know that as a bilingual or multilingual, whenever you're speaking, both languages or all the languages that you know are activated," says Mathieu Declerck, a senior research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. "For example, when you want to say 'dog' as a French-English bilingual, not just 'dog' is activated, but also its translation equivalent, so 'chien' is also activated.”
As such, the speaker needs to have some sort of language control process. If you think about it, the ability of bilingual and multilingual speakers to separate the languages they have learned is remarkable. How they do this is commonly explained through the concept of inhibition – a suppression of the non-relevant languages. When a bilingual volunteer is asked to name a color shown on a screen in one language and then their next color in their other language, it is possible to measure spikes in electrical activity in parts of the brain that deal with language and attentional awareness.
When this control system fails, however, intrusions and lapses can occur. For example, insufficient inhibition of a language can cause it to "pop up" and intrude when you're meant to be speaking in a different one.
Declerck himself is no stranger to accidentally mixing up languages. The Belgian native's impressive language repertoire includes Dutch, English, German and French. When he used to work in Germany, a regular train journey home to Belgium could encompass multiple different language zones – and a substantial workout for his language-switching skills.
"The first part was in German and I'd step on a Belgian train where the second part was in French," he says. "And then when you pass Brussels, they change the language to Dutch, which is my native language. So in that span of like three hours, every time the conductor came over, I had to switch languages.
"I always responded in the wrong language, somehow. It was just impossible to keep up with it."
In fact, language-switching scenarios – albeit in a laboratory rather than on a train – are often used by researchers to learn more about how multilingual people control their languages. And errors can be a great way to gain insight into how we use and control the languages we know.
Tamar Gollan, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, has been studying language control in bilinguals for years. Her research has often led to counterintuitive findings.
"I think maybe one of the most unique things that we've seen in bilinguals when they're mixing languages is that sometimes, it seems like they inhibit the dominant language so much that they actually are slower to speak in certain contexts," she says.
In other words, a multilingual person’s dominant language can sometimes take a bigger hit in certain scenarios. For example, in that color naming task described earlier, it can take longer for a participant to recall a word in their first language when switching from their second, compared to the other way around.
In one of her experiments, Gollan analysed the language-switching abilities of Spanish-English bilinguals by having them read aloud paragraphs that were just in English, just in Spanish, and paragraphs that haphazardly mixed both English and Spanish.
The findings were startling. Even though they had the texts right there in front of them, participants would still make "intrusion errors" when reading aloud, for example, accidentally saying the Spanish word "pero" instead of the English word "but". These types of errors almost exclusively happened when they were reading aloud the mixed-language paragraphs, which necessitated switching between languages.
Even more surprising was that a large proportion of these intrusion errors weren't words that participants had "skipped over" at all. Through the use of eye-tracking technology, Gollan and her team found that these mistakes were made even when participants were looking directly at the target word.
And even though the majority of participants were dominant English speakers, they made more of these intrusion errors for words in English rather than their weaker Spanish – something that Gollan explains is almost like a reversal of language dominance.
"I think the best analogy is, imagine that there's some condition in which you suddenly become better at writing in your non-dominant hand," she says. "We've been calling this reversed dominance, we've been making a really big deal out of it because the more I think about it, the more I realize how unique this is, and how crazy it is.”
This can even happen when we are learning a second language – when adults are immersed in the new language, they can find it harder to access the words from their native language.
Reversed dominance effects can be particularly evident when bilinguals switch between languages in a single conversation, says Gollan. She explains that when mixing languages, multilinguals are navigating a sort of balancing act, inhibiting the stronger language to even things out – and sometimes, they go too far in the wrong direction.
"Bilinguals try to make both languages about equally accessible, by inhibiting the dominant language to make mixing back and forth easier," she says. "But they sometimes 'overshoot' that inhibition, and it ends up coming out slower than the non-dominant language.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220719-how-speaking-other-languages-changes-your-brain?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=BBC%20Future%20%7C%20FB_US_CA%20%7C%20Languages%20%7C%20Article&utm_content=BBC%20-%20US_Languages
Oriana:
There are countless times when I tried to recall a word, and it would come to me in Spanish, French, Polish -- anything but English (currently my dominant language). But it's a minor annoyance compared with the joy of knowing another language, even if not well. I love the music of Italian, for instance, though I can hardly claim to know Italian, except for a handful of favorite words.
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MEN WHO OULIVE WOMEN
~ A study has called into question the long-held belief that women outlive men, especially men who are married or have a university degree.
The analysis spanning two centuries across all continents concluded that although men have a lower life expectancy than the opposite sex, they have a “substantial chance of outliving females”.
Between 25% and 50% of men have outlived women, according to the academics in Denmark, who highlighted that large differences in life expectancy sometimes mask substantial overlaps in lifespan between the sexes, and that summarizing the average length of life can be a “simplistic measure”.
The study, published in the BMJ Open journal, examined data on the lifespan of men and women across 199 countries for almost 200 years. It concluded that men have a high probability of outliving women, especially those who are married or have a degree.
“Males who are married or have a university degree tend to outlive females who are unmarried or do not have a high school diploma,” the authors said.
The analysis also found that in developed countries, the probability of men outliving women fell until the 1970s, after which it gradually increased in all populations. The rise and fall in the differences in life expectancy were mainly attributed to smoking and other behavioral differences. The research said: “A blind interpretation of life expectancy differences can sometimes lead to a distorted perception of the actual inequalities [in lifespan].”
It added: “Although male life expectancy is generally lower than female life expectancy, and male death rates are usually higher at all ages, males have a substantial chance of outliving females.
“These findings challenge the general impression that men do not live as long as women and reveal a more nuanced inequality in lifespans between females and males.”
The academics suggested that a better measure could be to examine the lifespan of both genders in different countries. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/03/women-may-not-live-longer-than-men-after-all-study
from another source:
~ Between 2015 and 2019, the probability of males outliving females was 40% across the entire US population.
But this statistic varied, depending on marital status and educational attainment: the probability of men outliving women was 39% for those who were married and 37% for those who weren’t. And it was 43% for those with a university degree and 39% for those without a high school diploma.
“Not all females outlive males, even if a majority do. But the minority that do not is not small. For example, a sex difference in life expectancy at birth of 10 years can be associated with a probability of males outliving females as high as 40%, indicating that 40% of males have a longer lifespan than that of a randomly paired female,” they explain.
The data nevertheless show that the death rate has fallen faster for women, overall, than for men under the age of 50, especially in the first half of the 20th century, largely as a result of improvements in infant and child deaths.
And men have not only maintained their survival disadvantage at younger ages, but at older ages too. They are more prone to accidents and homicides in their 20s and 30s, and they tend to smoke and drink more, leading to higher cancer prevalence and death in their 60s.
A more nuanced approach to sex differences in survival is needed, say the researchers. “Efforts in reducing lifespan inequalities must thus target diverse factors, causes and ages,” they conclude. ~
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmjopen/2022/08/03/men-have-high-probability-of-outliving-women-especially-the-married-and-degree-educated/
But there may be a wrinkle . . .
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WOMEN ARE HAPPIER WITHOUT CHILDREN OR A SPOUSE
~ We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.
Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.
“We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.”
Men benefited from marriage because they “calmed down”, he said. “You take fewer risks, you earn more money at work, and you live a little longer. She, on the other hand, has to put up with that, and dies sooner than if she never married. The healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children,” he said.
Dolan’s latest book, Happy Ever After, cites evidence from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which compared levels of pleasure and misery in unmarried, married, divorced, separated and widowed individuals.
Other studies have measured some financial and health benefits in being married for both men and women on average, which Dolan said could be attributed to higher incomes and emotional support, allowing married people to take risks and seek medical help.
However, Dolan said men showed more health benefits from tying the knot, as they took fewer risks. Women’s health was mostly unaffected by marriage, with middle-aged married women even being at higher risk of physical and mental conditions than their single counterparts.
Despite the benefits of a single, childless lifestyle for women, Dolan said that the existing narrative that marriage and children were signs of success meant that the stigma could lead some single women to feel unhappy.
“You see a single woman of 40, who has never had children – ‘Bless, that’s a shame, isn’t it? Maybe one day you’ll meet the right guy and that’ll change.’ No, maybe she’ll meet the wrong guy and that’ll change. Maybe she’ll meet a guy who makes her less happy and healthy, and die sooner.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
Oriana:
Children and spouses can of course be a source of joy, but for a woman they are also a source of stress. The cultural expectation is still that a woman takes care of both the husband's and children's needs. Children's needs in particular can be insatiable, and yes, they often continue in some form even when the children are grown.
If a woman has a strong need to have a life of her own, she should think very carefully about getting married and especially about having children.
Waiting for widowhood can take a very long time -- I witnessed that in the case of one poet-friend of mine. Her fear was that her husband, who came from a long-lived family, would outlive her. Fortunately it didn't happen, and she got to enjoy several years of freedom. But those were partly spoiled by ill health.
It may not be the actual marriage that is more burdensome for women; it's living together. Couples who live apart can maintain long-term loving relationships with much less conflict.
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A WAY TO UNDERSTAND RELIGION
~ The simplest way to understand religion is to take it apart. Social scientists do this by talking about the three Bs: belief, belonging and behavior. Beliefs are the things that people affirm as true or real. We – those of us in mutual understanding – usually consider beliefs religious when they affirm the reality of God or the supernatural, though sometimes we call beliefs religious when they are based on faith, which is to say, not based on testable evidence.
Belonging is about membership or identity. Religious belonging is membership of a Church or other group we consider religious, or claiming a religious identity, such as Christian or Hindu.
Behaviors are things people do. We call behaviors religious when they are directed toward a deity, like prayer; when they perform rituals, like baptism; or when they’re done collectively by people we consider religious, as with festivals. Sometimes, we consider practices like yoga, meditation or energy healing religious, and sometimes we don’t. To resolve our uncertainty, Americans have filed lawsuits, and courts have decided them.
Nonreligion, ironically, shows us why it’s so important to take religion apart if we’re going to understand it. To talk coherently about the nonreligious, we need to know what they aren’t.
According to the latest surveys, around a third of Americans have no religious affiliation. They do not belong religiously. But those same surveys show us that many of the religiously unaffiliated believe or behave religiously. They believe in God or a higher power, for example, or they pray daily or weekly. If someone believes in God and prays daily but doesn’t claim to be part of a religion, then are they nonreligious? There are a lot of people like this; they’re normal. What do we call them?
Atheists are even weirder. Surely, they’re not religious — right? But then, some are. Members of the Ethical Culture movement, often called Ethical Humanists, meet on Sundays to hear sermon-like speeches called Platforms. They have Sunday Schools where their children learn nonreligious ethics. Many, but not all, Ethical Humanists in the US consider themselves religious, and US courts and the IRS recognize their communities as religious. They belong and maybe behave religiously, but they do not believe religiously since they don’t believe in God or the supernatural.
Are Ethical Humanists religious or nonreligious? It’s hard to say. But if we don’t take religion apart – if we don’t disaggregate it into belief, behavior and belonging – we can’t even understand why it’s hard to say. We can’t tell the difference between the religiously unaffiliated and atheists. We can talk vaguely about the nonreligious or religious decline, but we have no idea what’s actually going on with religion.
The more radical way to understand religion is to break it, which shows us that religion is always analogous to Christianity. This is a strange assertion, I know, but it makes more sense when we give religion a history. Writing and reading now, in English, we drag forth a particular history of language and concepts and, along with it, a material history. Merchants and missionaries traveled around the world redefining other cultures in the image of European Christianity. When encountering people unlike themselves, they called the parts of life that they thought resembled Christianity those peoples’ religions. They analogized. In some cases, they imposed an understanding of religion through violence, which had dire consequences for those whose religion was stamped out as superstition. The British did this in India, and Americans did this in the Philippines.
So I write now in one of the many languages of empire, which arrive to us by way of wars and other conflicts, fought, lost, and won. Religion arrives to us as one way of separating out some parts of life from others, and it’s not a way of separating that all people have always used.
Originating in ancient Rome, religion as a concept has undergone many changes, but it has not changed completely. It carries the sediment of its accretions. It’s a complex mineral.
We can break this mineral religion in at least two ways. The first is what I just did. I drilled into its history, cracked it open, and fractured its sediment. This lets us see it for what it is, with all its layers of meaning bound together, and now, apart.
The other way to break religion is to use it in ways that should work but don’t. The limits of religion’s use lay bare its particular history and belie its universality. Jewishness, for example, breaks religion right away. I’m an ethnographer by training – an anthropologist – so I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people about religion. A few years ago, I was conducting an interview outside of Detroit with a man who identifies as formerly Jewish. He told me how hard it is to be not-Jewish, which at first, surprised me. His ex-wife, his family and a lot of his friends still consider him Jewish, he told me, because his mother’s Jewish. ‘You can’t un-Jew yourself,’ they’ve told him. This is because Jewish is a religious identity, but also an ethnic and cultural one. The man I talked with cannot stop being Jewish like a Christian can become an ex-Christian; even if he doesn’t believe or behave religiously, he can’t stop belonging.
In its analogical misfit, Jewishness lays bare Christianity as the source of our thinking about religion. Being Jewish is sort of like being Christian and sort of not, but we accept it as a religion because the analogy is good enough. Ethical Humanists in the US show us the same. Their analogy to Christianity is good in some ways and bad in others. They are sort of religious because they are only sort of like Christians. They belong and behave, but they do not believe. Jamming religion’s square peg into a round hole, it cracks apart.
The most ironic way to understand religion is to throw it away. There is a secular liberal story that you’ll likely know. It opposes religion to science and associates it closely with faith. Religion is at times irrational, indeed by definition. There is a long history to this way of thinking, which is grounded in the European Enlightenment. Religion is belief without evidence. It is the source of subjective meaning and values, but not of objectivity. It is deeply personal and private. Its truths are ineffable – inexpressible – beyond communication from one person to another. Religion is what science is not. It is the opposite of modern; it was what modernized countries with modernized economies are losing more and more of every day.
This is a very belief-centered understanding of religion that has no way to make sense of Buddhism as an atheistic religion or of Ethical Humanists as actually religious. But it’s also a common, even banal understanding. The conclusion to this way of understanding is simple enough. Religion is the garbage heap of the Enlightenment. I promise, the dumpster diving is good.
These three ways of understanding religion are certainly not definitions. They are approaches to an object that looks different from different angles. They are ways of understanding something that has a history. Speaking or writing about religion, we drag forth that history even as we intervene within it. How each of us talks about religion reflects our personal histories and what we’ve come to know through reading and conversation, which is to say, through one another. A definition asks us to allow what’s come before to flow through us, as we agree on what it means. A freer way of understanding is to grasp what we’ve been asked to know and hold it for a moment at a distance. This is a better way to understand religion. ~
“Religious faith is the faith in the power of faith, a convenient false belief.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
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MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR TO ALZHEIMER’S DISCOVERED
~ Research led by Drs. Yuhai Zhao and Walter J Lukiw at the LSU Health New Orleans Neuroscience Center and the Departments of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Neurology and Ophthalmology, reports for the first time a pathway that begins in the gut and ends with a potent pro-inflammatory toxin in brain cells contributing to the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). They also report a simple way to prevent it. Results are published in Frontiers in Neurology.
The researchers found evidence that a molecule containing a very potent microbial-generated neurotoxin (lipopolysaccharide or LPS) derived from the Gram-negative bacteria Bacteroides fragilis in the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract generates a neurotoxin known as BF-LPS.
"LPSs in general are probably the most potent microbial-derived pro-inflammatory neurotoxic glycolipids known," says Dr. Lukiw. "Many laboratories, including our own, have detected different forms of LPS within neurons of the Alzheimer's disease-affected human brain.”
In this study, the researchers detail the pathway of BF-LPS from the gut to the brain and its mechanisms of action once there. BF-LPS leaks out of the GI tract, crosses the blood brain barrier via the circulatory system, and accesses brain compartments. Then it increases inflammation in brain cells and inhibits neuron-specific neurofilament light (NF-L,) a protein that supports cell integrity. A deficit of this protein leads to progressive neuronal cell atrophy, and ultimately cell death, as is observed in AD-affected neurons. They also report that adequate intake of dietary fiber can head off the process.
The novel features of this newly described pathological pathway are threefold. The AD-stimulating pathway begins inside of us -- in our GI-tract microbiome -- and therefore is very "locally sourced" and active throughout our lives. The highly potent neurotoxin BF-LPS is a natural by-product of GI-tract-based microbial metabolism. Bacteroides fragilis abundance in the microbiome, which is the source of the neurotoxin BF-LPS, can be regulated by dietary fiber intake.
"Put another way, dietary-based approaches to balance the microorganisms in the microbiome may be an attractive means to modify the abundance, speciation, and complexity of enterotoxigenic forms of AD-relevant microbes and their potential for the pathological discharge of highly neurotoxic microbial-derived secretions that include BF-LPS and other forms of LPS," Lukiw explains.
The researchers conclude that an improved understanding of the interaction between the GI tract-Central Nervous System axis and the GI-tract microbiome and Alzheimer's disease has considerable potential to lead to new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies in the clinical management of Alzheimer's disease and other lethal, progressive, and age-related neurodegenerative disorders.
It has been estimated that Americans eat 10-15 grams of fiber a day on average. The USDA recommends that women up to age 50 consume 25 grams a day and men 38 grams. Over age 50, women and men should consume 21 and 30 grams daily, respectively.
According to the National Institutes of Health, Alzheimer's disease is the most common diagnosis for patients with dementia and the sixth leading cause of death for Americans. Experts estimate that as many as 5.8 million Americans 65 and older have Alzheimer's disease, and the prevalence in the United States is projected to increase to 13.8million by 2050. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220809141235.htm
Oriana:
Such a simple answer: eat more fiber to keep your microbiome healthy, and you won’t be suffering from “leaky gut.” And that way you lower your risk of various chronic diseases, including dementia. Salad, anyone?
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INCREASED HEART DISEASE RISK FROM EATING RED MEAT MAY STEM FROM GUT MICROBE RESPONSE TO DIGESTION
SUMMARY: A new study found that chemicals produced in the digestive tract by gut microbes after eating red meat (such as beef, pork, bison, venison) explained a significant portion of the higher risk of cardiovascular disease associated with higher red meat consumption. High blood sugar and inflammation may also contribute to higher cardiovascular risk associated with red meat consumption. However, blood pressure and cholesterol were not associated with the higher CVD risk associated with red meat consumption. General consumption of fish, poultry and eggs was not associated with increased cardiovascular risk.
Chemicals produced in the digestive tract by gut microbes after eating red meat may help explain part of the higher risk of cardiovascular disease associated with red meat consumption, according to new research published today in the American Heart Association's peer-reviewed journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology (ATVB).
In the United States and around the world, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death. While the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke, increases with age, other risk factors are influenced by lifestyle. Lifestyle and behaviors that are known to improve cardiovascular health include eating healthy foods, especially fruits and vegetables; regular physical activity; obtaining sufficient sleep; maintaining a healthy body weight; stopping smoking; and controlling high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high blood sugar.
"Most of the focus on red meat intake and health has been around dietary saturated fat and blood cholesterol levels," said co-lead author of the study Meng Wang, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. "Based on our findings, novel interventions may be helpful to target the interactions between red meat and the gut microbiome to help us find ways to reduce cardiovascular risk.”
Previous research has found that certain metabolites -- chemical byproducts of food digestion -- are associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease . One of these metabolites is TMAO, or trimethylamine N-oxide, which is produced by gut bacteria to digest red meat that contains high amounts of the chemical L-carnitine.
High blood levels of TMAO in humans may be associated with higher risks of CVD, chronic kidney disease and Type 2 diabetes. However, whether TMAO and related metabolites derived from L-carnitine may help explain the effects of red meat intake on cardiovascular risk, and to what extent they may contribute to cardiovascular risk associated with meat consumption, are still unknown.
To understand these questions, the researchers conducting this study measured levels of the metabolites in blood samples. They also examined whether blood sugar, inflammation, blood pressure and blood cholesterol may account for the elevated cardiovascular risk associated with red meat consumption.
Study participants included nearly 4,000 of the 5,888 adults initially recruited from 1989 to 1990 for the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS). The participants selected for the current study were free of clinical cardiovascular disease at time of enrollment in the CHS, an observational study of risk factors for cardiovascular disease in adults aged 65 or older. The CHS follows 5,888 participants recruited from four communities: Sacramento, California; Hagerstown, Maryland; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The average age of participants at enrollment was 73, nearly two-thirds of participants were female and 88% of participants self-identified as white. The median follow-up time for participants was 12.5 years, and up to 26 years in some cases. At follow-up appointment, participants' medical history, lifestyle, health conditions and sociodemographic characteristics -- such as household income, education and age -- were assessed.
Several blood biomarkers were measured at the start of the study and again in 1996-1997. The fasting blood samples stored frozen at -80 degrees Celsius were tested for levels of several gut-microbiome linked to red meat consumption including TMAO, gamma-butyrobetaine and crotonobetaine.
Additionally, all study participants answered two validated food-frequency questionnaires about their usual dietary habits, including intake of red meat, processed meat, fish, poultry and eggs, at the start of the study and again from 1995 to 1996. For the first questionnaire, participants indicated how often, on average in the previous 12 months, they had eaten given amounts of various foods, ranging from "never" to "almost every day or at least five times per week," based on medium portion sizes, which varied based on the food source. The second questionnaire used a ten-category frequency of average intake over the past 12 months, ranging from "never or less than once per month" to "six+ servings per day," with defined standard portion sizes.
For the current analyses, the researchers compared the risk of cardiovascular disease among participants who ate different amounts of animal source foods (i.e., red meat, processed meat, fish, chicken and eggs). They found that eating more meat, especially red meat and processed meat, was linked to a higher risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease -- a 22% higher risk for about every 1.1 serving per day.
According to the authors, the increase in TMAO and related metabolites found in the blood explained roughly one-tenth of this elevated risk. They also noted that blood sugar and general inflammation pathways may help explain the links between red meat intake and cardiovascular disease. Blood sugar and inflammation also appear to be more important in linking red meat intake and cardiovascular disease than pathways related to blood cholesterol or blood pressure. Intake of fish, poultry and eggs were not significantly linked to higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
"Research efforts are needed to better understand the potential health effects of L-carnitine and other substances in red meat such as heme iron, which has been associated with Type 2 diabetes, rather than just focusing on saturated fat," Wang said.
The study had several limitations that may have affected its results. The study was observational, meaning it could not control for all risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and may not prove cause and effect between meat consumption and cardiovascular disease or its mediation by gut microbe-generated chemicals. Additionally, food consumption was self-reported, so errors in reporting were possible. And, as most of the study participants were older, white men and women in the United States, the findings may not apply to populations that are younger or more racially diverse. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220801102939.htm
Oriana:
After discovering that pesco-vegetarians live longest, I've decided to stick to fish and seafood, and of course all types of vegetables (including sweet and red potatoes in moderation). Since fish and seafood are so fast and easy to prepare, I'm just too spoiled to undertake the chore of preparing meat dishes (e.g. removing excess fat -- yuck!)
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HOW TO LOWER YOUR URIC ACID LEVELS
~ The leadoff hitter is quercetin. While quercetin has been available for decades as a supplement, it is only more recently that research has revealed just how powerful and broad-reaching quercetin is in terms of its health benefits. Quercetin is a plant-derived flavonoid found in abundance in grapes, berries, cherries, onions, kale, apples, red wine, and black tea. As an antioxidant, quercetin rivals vitamins C and E. Its antioxidant activity coupled with its strong anti-inflammatory activity explains why quercetin is so extensively studied in animal models of various diseases in which oxidative stress and inflammation play important roles. These include Alzheimer’s disease, complications of diabetes, and various forms of arthritis. But perhaps the newest and most exciting property of quercetin, only recently discovered, is its ability to lower uric acid levels as demonstrated in human studies.
Uric acid, the end product of the metabolism of fructose sugar as well as nucleotides derived from food and cellular DNA and RNA, has until only recently been considered to be simply a waste product. And uric acid elevation was only thought to be a health risk when related to gout or kidney stones. But with the pioneering work of Dr. Richard Johnson at the University of Colorado, we now recognize that uric acid elevation is implicated as playing an important role in pervasive issues such as elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance, obesity, fatty liver disease, and diabetes. This new paradigm certainly elevates the value of quercetin beyond its historical virtues.
Like quercetin, luteolin
is a flavonoid, a plant-derived compound with powerful antioxidant and
anti-inflammatory activity. It is found in abundance in green pepper, celery, and broccoli. The anti-inflammatory effects of luteolin have been extensively studied in laboratory animals as well as in human cells in the laboratory setting.
More recently, a human, interventional trial demonstrated remarkable lowering of markers of inflammation (Il-6 and TNF-alpha) in subjects treated with this natural plant compound. Even more exciting is the emerging research evaluating luteolin’s effectiveness in lowering uric acid. In this regard, luteolin is even more powerful that quercetin. In fact, luteolin’s ability to lower uric acid, at least in the laboratory, may be comparable to a drug commonly used to treat gout.
Oriana:
The richest food source of luteolin is radicchio, followed by green peppers.
Both quercetin and luteolin are senolytics — they enhance the process of autophagy: the removal of harmful senile or dead cells. (MCT oil also enhances autophagy.)
~ Continuing on the theme of targeting uric acid, one of the most widely appreciated interventions, at least in the supplement world, is tart cherry. An abundance of peer-reviewed, scientific literature has confirmed that in humans, tart cherry has significant activity in terms of lowering uric acid. Traditionally, this research has focused on the translation of these findings to patients with gout, as one might expect. But now that we’ve gained a much broader understanding of the implications of elevated uric acid, including tart cherry makes even more sense. In a recent study reported in the journal Nutrition in Health and Disease, researchers evaluated the effectiveness of tart cherry juice versus placebo on uric acid levels in a group of overweight or obese adults over a four-week period. The results were impressive, demonstrating an average reduction of uric acid by 19% in those taking the tart cherry juice. In addition, these participants, in comparison to those receiving the placebo, showed a reduction in an important blood marker of inflammation, C-reactive protein.
When you ask people to name an antioxidant, vitamin C likely would be the most common response. And with good reason. The scientific validation of vitamin C’s antioxidant function is certainly vast. But historically, vitamin C came on to the scene when it was identified in the 1930s as the chemical that prevented the development of scurvy. Scurvy, as manifested by loss of teeth, bleeding, poor wound healing, and bone pain, is a disease of the connective tissue caused by the body’s reduced ability to utilize carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. In addition, as a consequence of vitamin C deficiency and therefore decreased antioxidant function, the tissue damage seen in scurvy is accentuated by the action of free radicals. Because vitamin C plays a central role in creating collagen, one of the body’s major building block proteins, vitamin C deficiency can have far ranging effects within our bodies.
Vitamin C works in tandem with the polyphenols quercetin and luteolin to provide antioxidant protection against the damaging effects of free radicals. But what’s really exciting about the synergy of these supplements, along with tart cherry, is that they all contribute to lowering uric acid. So, this isn’t your grandfather’s vitamin C. We now look upon this powerful, newly discovered attribute of vitamin C with excitement as it reveals that vitamin C throws a much wider net in terms of its potential health benefits. In what be the most comprehensive evaluation of the role of vitamin C in lowering uric acid, researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine published a report entitled “Effect of Oral Vitamin C Supplementation on Serum Uric Acid: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.” In their publication, the authors called attention to the importance of lowering uric acid when it is elevated, stating:
Hyperuricemia (elevated uric acid) has been associated with a wide range of diseases, including hypertension, obesity, renal disease, metabolic syndrome, obstructive sleep apnea, stroke, vascular dementia, and preeclampsia.
The report reviewed the results of 13 randomized controlled trials that were aimed at determining the effectiveness supplemental vitamin C in human subjects. The average length of the studies was 30 days and the average dose of vitamin C was 500 mg. The combined results of the various trials showed a substantial effectiveness of vitamin C in lowering uric acid.
Consumption of green tea has gained popularity, especially among the health conscious. And unlike the specific chemicals described above, green tea is a food, and as such, contains a vast array of biologically active components, many of which offer up real health benefits. It is rich in polyphenols, providing antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity. Another important antioxidant found in green tea is epigallocatechin 3-gallate (EGCG), which also serves to aid mitochondrial function, facilitating cellular energy production. And EGCG aids in the process of autophagy, an important mechanism whereby cells rid themselves of defective components, a central event in maintaining cellular function.
Vitamin D is deservedly in the spotlight these days because of its importance in immune regulation and especially in limiting inflammation. Vitamin D deficiency is highly prevalent around the world while chronic, degenerative inflammatory conditions like coronary heart disease, obesity, and diabetes are now the number one cause of death on our planet. To be fair, this is a correlation. But it shouldn’t detract from considering the fundamental role of vitamin D in health, not just as a modulator of inflammation but as an antioxidant, a central player in bone health, a regulator of gene expression related to cancer development, and an important influence on insulin sensitivity.
Finally, let’s consider zinc, present within every cell and the second most abundant mineral in the body after iron. Zinc plays a central role in both the development as well as the function of immune cells and as such, joins the team to help control inflammation. More than 300 important enzymes in the body concerned with things like metabolism and nerve activity depend on zinc for proper functionality. Like vitamin C, we need zinc for proper wound healing. And to be sure, zinc really shines when we consider its potent role as an antioxidant.
We can all appreciate the solo musician. But the synergy of the orchestra’s performance elevates the value of each individual’s contribution. ~
https://www.drperlmutter.com/an-integrated-plan-for-lowering-uric-acid/
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WHY SPINACH IS A SUPERFOOD
SPINACH IS NUTRIENT-RICH AND PROTECTS THE BONES
~ “Spinach is a quick way to top up on the nutrients that women often lack,” says Dr Ruxton. “The benefits of the nutrients in spinach mostly relate to bone health (calcium, magnesium and vitamin K), skin and eye health (vitamin A, vitamin C and carotenoids), reproductive health (folate) and energy levels (iron).
“However, it’s worth noting that only 10% of the iron in spinach gets absorbed so you’d be better off taking a multi-nutrient supplement if you’re concerned about low iron levels. Around a third of women have low iron stores in their bodies.”
SPINACH SUPPORTS HEART HEALTH
Spinach is naturally rich in compounds called nitrates which can promote heart health. In fact, some studies have suggested that nitrate-rich foods, such as spinach, may also help heart attack survival.
SPINACH CAN PROTECT YOUR EYES
Spinach also contains high levels of zeaxanthin and lutein (powerful antioxidants) which are linked to improving eye health.
Several studies indicate that zeaxanthin and lutein work to prevent macular degeneration and cataracts, which are major causes of blindness.
MAY STRENGTHEN MUSCLE FUNCTION
According to research, eating just one cup of leafy green vegetables every day could boost muscle function.
The 2021 study, published in the Journal of Nutrition from Edith Cowan University, Australia, found that people who consumed a nitrate-rich diet, predominantly from vegetables, had significantly better muscle function of their lower limb.
However, some nutritionists remain unconvinced.
IS SPINACH BETTER THAN KALE?
By weight, typical kale does contain more calcium and vitamin B6 than typical spinach, but kale contains less iron, magnesium or potassium than spinach.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/benefits-of-spinach-3-reasons-why-you-should-be-eating-more-of-this-superfood?utm_source=pocket-newtab
ending on beauty:
FOR GOD’S SAKE
He was passing tipsy down the footpath
and caught the air of my son in the loft
practicing exalted Weber on his clarinet.
He hailed me from trimming the black current
for a passing word on beautiful music,
and spoke that he, himself, was a guitarist
in his youth but had given up that spirit
for the daily drudgery of other pursuits.
Then with a wry smile looking me up
and down, said, “ I hope he keeps it up
for God’s sake, for my sake, for his, for yours.
~ Kerry Keys
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