*
GREETING THE FIRST SECRETARY
Again workers and schoolchildren
three-deep along the boulevards.
This time it was not
a cosmonaut,
not the Abyssinian emperor,
it was Brezhnev
who stood,
Caesar-in-chariot,
monolithic three-quarters profile,
in a long open
black car,
next to the nervous host —
himself a first secretary,
but how slight!
And Brezhnev an impassive mound.
His feral eyebrows
underlined his hat.
He stood heavy,
rotund,
flesh caped by a black coat.
Now and then, his pale
pudgy hand
flopped slowly up and down
like a disturbed mollusk;
he did not bother to smile.
We stomped our feet
in the chill;
at his passage, when signaled,
feebly clapping.
For news and documentaries,
they used a soundtrack
with its own hurrah
applause and shouts
of long live.
His huge dark back
took over the screen.
~ Oriana
His complete indifference and lack of engagement with the crowd told us everything about what Poland meant to him. A ruler doesn’t waste his energy smiling at the colonials.
*
LEONID BREZHNEV: A BRIEF ASSESSMENT
~ It’s the opening ceremony of the Moscow Olympics in 1980. Brezhnev rises to the stand to deliver his opening speech. He removes the written text from his pocket, unfolds it, clears his throat and starts: “Oh…… oh……. oh…….”
Quickly, one of his aides runs over to him and whispers: “Leonid Ilyich, skip that part, these are the Olympic rings!”
Brezhnev is viewed, at least in my circles in the former soviet republic of Estonia, as an elderly man, who, as years went by, became more and more senile. He wasn’t seen as someone particularly well equipped for the job he held, and he was the subject of numerous jokes making fun of the way he read his speeches without giving them a thought, and his various other idiosyncrasies.
The USSR was already lagging behind, and Brezhnev is often seen as somebody who took it to a complete standstill. His ill-fated venture into Afghanistan cost the lives of many young men across the USSR. Yet his shortcomings eventually paved the way to the collapse of the Soviet Union, so I guess it wasn’t all bad.
Anyway, I’m not sure “cool” would be the right word. But he did provide some comic relief to the Soviet everyday life, and he did have killer eyebrows. ~ Arno Taramäe, Quora
A chain smoker and heavy drinker, Brezhnev allegedly also suffered strokes which reduced his mental competence. The Soviet government kept rolling him out for official occasions.
*
GOOD NEWS FROM UKRAINE
Lucian K. Truscott IV writes:
"Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning (9-10-22) that Ukraine took the city of Kupyansk overnight, cutting off supply lines to the south. The New York Times just reported that Ukraine’s offensive pushed all the way south to Izyum and took that key Russian stronghold, too. The Times called the Ukraine offensive 'a dramatic new phase in the more than six-month war. The loss of Izyum — a strategically important railway hub that Russian forces seized in March after a bloody weeks’ long battle — could mark a turning point in the war, dwarfed only by Russia’s humiliating defeat around the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in the spring.’
Russian forces were seen raising a white flag over the Izyum railroad station, according to the Times. Russia had held the city since March. The Institute for the Study of war estimated yesterday that Ukraine has driven Russian military forces from 2500 square kilometers of land in the area south and east of Kharkiv. Ukraine’s push into Kupyansk last night and Izyum today adds significantly to the territory Ukraine has regained in just 24 hours.
Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the Times that the Ukrainian offensive 'looks like a very effective combined arms operation with tanks, mechanized infantry, Special Operations forces, air defenses, artillery and other systems.’
The Russian Ministry of Defense, which was claiming yesterday it was pouring reinforcements into its front lines in the east, announced that Russia had pulled its forces from Izyum as part of a 'preplanned move, intended to strengthen its efforts in the east where its army has been bogged down for weeks,' according to the Times.
*
~ A Reuters journalist inside a vast area recaptured by the advancing Ukrainian forces in recent days saw burned out vehicles bearing the “Z” symbol of Moscow’s invasion, and boxes of ammunition lying in heaps at positions abandoned by fleeing Russian soldiers. ~
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-surprise-counteroffensive-kharkiv-russia-land-east-rcna46805
Oriana:
It's great to read updates like this: “Russian Front in Kherson west of Dnipro set to collapse. Negotiations underway to surrender to Ukrainian forces with all equipment intact. @MriyaReport @WarintheFuture @AVindman @SpencerGuard.”
Misha Iossel:
Watching the Russian military collapsing and running scared in real time, after seven months of unspeakable barbaric cruelty perpetrated by it in Ukraine, must be a cathartic moment for the entire Ukrainian nation.
WHY THE COLD WAR WAS IMPORTANT TO BOTH SIDES
~ First, as as part of the outcome of the Second World War, Germany and Austria were temporarily divided among the victors. Austria was settled relatively amicably, while Germany, a major nation located in the heart of Europe, became the focus of numerous disagreement among the Allies.
This was rendered even more problematic by the three-power agreement that afforded the Western Allies occupation sectors in the vanquished Reich capital of Berlin. Located more than 100 miles into the Soviet zone of occupation, this western enclave was strategically unviable, but the West had no choice but to maintain a presence there, as a pullout would have amounted to a resounding symbolic victory for the Soviets.
Second, because of the inherent American conventional military disadvantage, American policy makers found it cost effective to develop a nuclear arsenal fully capable of destroying the Soviet Union in the event of an attempted invasion of Allied-occupied western Germany and other parts of western Europe.
The United States would maintain a residual force on the continent essentially to serve as a tripwire. If the Soviet Red Army crossed the Elbe River into western Germany to engage with American troops, this, theoretically, at least, would supply the pretense for what the Eisenhower administration characterized as massive [nuclear] retaliation.
As American policy makers anticipated, this effectively resolved the threat of conventional warfare between the United States and her allies and tbe Soviet Union its Eastern European client states.
Third, this new set of conditions ironically fostered a rivalry between this two camps into a wholly new struggle: an ideological one in which the two sides would compete for favor among the developing nations of the world, most of which were emerging from former colonial status.
Remarkably, this turned out to be one area of struggle in which the Soviets enjoyed a significant advantage. Many of the leaders of newly independent former colonial countries, not being privy to real conditions in the Soviet Union, assumed that central planning, which actually was proving a disastrous choice in the Soviet Union, would supply a fast track to rapid industrialization, material prosperity, and even as a means of strengthening these emerging states’ nascent national identities.
Remarkably, this forced the far more affluent United States, particularly under the Kennedy administration, to frame every national undertaking as something with major implications in the Cold War struggle, notably, the space program, which likely would have been far less ambitious — and expensive — but for the struggle with the Soviets.
Indeed, he United States spent almost $26 billion on the Apollo space missions between 1960 and 1973 - approximately $257 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars. This amounts up to $28 billion ($280 billion in 2020 dollars) adding the Project Gemini missions and the robotic lunar program, both of which were undertaken to advance the Apollo moon missions. ~ Jim Langcuster, Quora
first man to walk in space, Alexi Leonov
*
DID THE SOVIET UNION KNOW IT WAS GOING TO COLLAPSE?
~ There were dissenting voices in the upper levels of the Communist Bloc long before there was any foreseeable end to this cold clash. Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslavian, can be read even today with profit, when he talked about the futility of communistic strategy in creating a "perfect society" or any sort of earthbound utopia. A different group were the promoters of Perestroika (literally "rebuilding") who relied on Glasnost' (“tolerance, openness") to get the word out about how things could be improved.
But the inertia of the Russian state is not something you can overestimate. By the time the post-Stalin generation came of age and was ready to reform (rebuild) the USSR, there was already too much dead weight dragging down the whole ship of state to jettison any part of it and save the rest of it. The military wasn't about to give up any part of its budget and forego another war like they'd taken up against Afghanistan. Anyone with any sort of connections for consumer goods wasn't about to give up his/her ability to "call in favors" and receive preferential treatment on the next shipment of canned tomatoes, casual shoes, windshield wipers, or whatever other consumer goods they could claim through their position. Artists (in the very large, general sense) weren't about to give up their perks — they'd worked hard to rise to the top of their profession and a foreign tour was almost the only way they could get their hands on estrogen or condoms, supplemental vitamins, foreign art publications, or most anything else they could only buy overseas. Parents weren't about to give up their perks once their children were safely placed in "yasli" (child care for the very young), leaving them free to continue their career and make more connections for more perks.
Abortion became the de facto birth control for large parts of the USSR outside of the Baltics. Heavy machinery had no choice but to keep running all winter in some parts of Siberia, because turning off the engine was the same as condemning the engine blocks to freezing solid and cracking without proper shelter (cement floors, snow bearing roofs) for those machines. And the Glasnost' apostles only stoked to fires for independence when they started publishing facts about military corruption and ecological devastation that both threatened the possibility for a healthy lifestyle in many parts of the country. The Caspian Sea no longer produces beluga caviar in any significant amounts; Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk are basically lost to human inhabitants for at least the next 50 or 75 half-lives.
It was no secret that things were bad — Solzhenitsyn and six other dissidents started writing From Under the Rubble at least a decade before Gorbachev, with the goal of getting the country to pick itself up by its bootstraps — yet collapse was hardly a foregone conclusion at that time. But by the time Yeltsin was leading the charge against the communists 16 years later, there was little doubt about the gravity of the domestic situation. ~ Steve Wright, Quora
Statue of Solzhenitsyn, Moscow
*
THE FAILED STRATEGIES OF THE SOVIET UNION
~ The USSR was a lot weaker than the USA.
It was much poorer. The Soviet communist economy could not keep up with the free-market economies of the West.
It was an autocracy, unrepresentative of the people. Ultimately, the people overthrew the government and replaced it. The US democracy was far stronger and representative of the people’s needs and wishes.
It lagged the US in technology. When Reagan instituted the Strategic Defense initiative with its high-tech space based defense systems, the USSR could not match it or afford it.
It could not keep the conquered nations in Eastern Europe in control. They resented being a part of the Soviet Union or even to be associated with it.
The Afghan misadventure revealed some serious weaknesses in Soviet military power projection outside the Soviet footprint.
The 1991 Gulf War exposed the inferiority of Soviet military weaponry versus American weaponry. ~ Jay Snead, Quora
Afghan College Girls, 1970s
*
WHAT IT FELT LIKE RIGHT AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION (Misha Firer)
~ Teachers never explained to us what had happened. Why were we red pioneers no more?
Then, they canceled weekly book readings about Vladimir Lenin in our new children’s city library. It had huge windows allowing sunlight to stream into a spacious area with a smart floor carpet and comfortable chairs. We sat in a circle and listened to the librarian read us stories about Vladimir Lenin’s childhood. When we were ten, the stories were about Lenin when he was ten. We were supposed to proceed all the way till he finished school. No, we wouldn't. No more beautiful stories.
Same year, we lost the only Jewish student in my class. Leonid Eberman. He came for the last time to say goodbye, beaming a happy smile. “Lenny is moving with his family to America,” our class teacher announced. Oh, not Leonid, please. He was the only student in my class who knew how to handle bullies so skillfully they never beat him up or verbally abused him, and he was the dorkiest kid in the class. I was still studying his techniques, and now he would be half a world away.
It was a very disorienting time for me because they shattered my sense of continuity, but it taught me an important lesson that my compatriots can’t follow through with pretty much anything for a long stretch of time. I don’t plan five years ahead like I used to anymore. ~
Dima Vorobiev:
Ever since 1978, the Chinese paradigm was on hand: re-introduce Capitalism, paint it red, and plaster plenty of hammers and sickles on it! But in Russia, no one at the top was willing to stomach that until the very end.
[The point of no return] was the coup d’état in August 1991, and its defeat marked the end of the Soviet project.
Below, armored vehicles of the coup makers in downtown Moscow on August 19, 1991. This is Kalinin Avenue (now New Arbat). The Kremlin is about a mile straight ahead.
An avalanche of old skeletons poured out of the closets of Soviet history. A lot of taboos and conventions needed for integrity of the Communist ideology were irrevocably broken.
More and more people started to question the entire reason of the Soviet project. On the other side, ethnic nationalists got the elbow room to capitalize on popular discontent. Nationalism sailed up everywhere as an alternative to Communist misery— including Russia.
The anti-Communist revolution that followed after the foiled August coup was a triumph of the young guns. Under the leadership of the Nomenklatura rebel Yeltsin, hundreds of thousands of former Soviet servants, including a retired KGB operative Vladimir Putin, were now collectively in a position to fully dismantle the USSR and make the Socialist property their private possession. During the 1990s, this process was completed. Thanks to Putin’s rule in the 2000s, the privatization of the USSR was made irreversible.
*
IS PUTIN GAY?
The CIA has believed Putin to be a closeted homosexual since February 2012, when the Russian dictator began an ongoing affair with a peasant child from Tbilisi who was orphaned by political assassination.
That young man — Dmimti Bulova — is now 24 years old and manages a private equity fund based in Moscow with a lucrative portfolio of investments in Russian natural gas and mining companies. The CIA believes that, before this most recent contract, Bulova held more than $200 million in personal assets.
Bulova has a nearly non-existent public profile and his non-descript Moscow office is nestled less than a half-mile from the Kremlin. It lacks signage and is not mentioned in public telephone or address directories.
For the past ten years, Bulova has been living at various homes owned by Putin, including in a sprawling apartment in Moscow, a vacation home near Sochi, and a chalet in the Alps, where they conduct many of their affairs.
Until weeks ago, Bulova was in Germany aboard Putin’s yacht but has since returned to Moscow. Neither Bulova nor Putin acknowledges their homosexual behavior to those individuals with whom they are close, and they’ve gone to extensive lengths to conceal their relationship.
Some CIA analysts believe that Putin has been grooming Bulova to succeed him as the leader of Russia. ~
A few months ago I read an account on Quora on how Putin has gay affairs with his young and handsome body guards. His first gay relationship was allegedly with his Judo instructor. I dismissed all this as insufficiently substantiated. But now it seems to me quite likely that Putin is a closeted gay.
His gayness doesn’t bother me as such. What bothers me is his hypocrisy in promoting “traditional family values” while keeping an eye out for handsome young men as his potential (ahem) body guards.
Update, 9-15-22
Misha Firer:
From 30% to 50% of highest ranking officials in the government are homosexual men, and “gay lobby” is believed to be the most powerful in Russia. In some state corporations, the percentage of gays among top management is similar.
In the early 2000s, for the public to learn that the politician is gay was termination of the credit of confidence in him and the end of his career, thus making homosexuality a low-hanging fruit kompromat. A no brainer.
Times have somewhat changed, and nowadays Russians are more tolerant of gays, but obviously by now, FSB collected plenty of new kompromat on those individuals.
In 2008, two candidates vying for the president’s chair were not some random picks: both Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Ivanov were gay making it safe to assume that they would not overstay their welcome after four years. In the end, Medvedev was chosen because he was shorter than Ivanov.
Yuri Kovalchuk, Putin’s confidante and billionaire is gay. So are Sergey Kirienko, First Deputy Chief of Staff; Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of State Duma; Herman Gref, CEO and Chairman of Sberbank; Vladislav Surkov, main ideologist of Kremlin; Vladimir Medinsky, former minister of culture and chairman of the General Council; TV propagandist Dmitry Kiselev who vouched to destroy the UK with nukes; Sergey Axenov, Crimea Governor; Denis Pushilin, head of Donetsk People’s Republic, and many more. ~ Quora
Misha Firer:
When foreigners derisively call Putin weakling they don’t take into consideration that he is bisexual and has many gay friends in important positions of power.
This
gender fluidity is what has made Putin so popular among the populace
thus busting the myth that Russians allegedly love a strongman as their
leader. (Here of course Misha is speaking with "sarc on")
PUTIN AND HIS JUDO INSTRUCTOR
~ The Central Intelligence Agency is in possession of more than five-and-a-half hours of video footage of Russian President Vladamir Putin engaging in a range of sexual activities with his late mentor and judo instructor, the billionaire Anatoly Rakhlin and others.
That footage was recorded during the summer months of 2004 at a hideaway near Sochi, where the two men often engaged in a closeted homosexual relationship that began when Putin began his judo instruction at age 13, and it continued to Rakhlin’s death in 2013 at age 75.
Putin mourned Rakhlin’s death publicly and observers openly commented on what they called the judocracy, a clique of Putin’s closest friends and judo partners who became quite wealthy during his tenure as Russian President, and whose dealings with the Russian Federation are most hidden.
“Being a judo sparring partner of Vladimir Putin’s is clearly a good career move,” columnists opined at the time, noting the appointment of Viktor Zolotov to become deputy head of the MVD Interior Troops. Zolotov is also known by the CIA to be a closeted homosexual in a longtime relationship with Putin and Rakhlin.
Zolotov is Putin’s primary sexual participant in the video footage that was shared with The Buffalo Chronicle, though several men can be seen engaging in sex.
Zolotov heads the presidential security service.
Arkady Rotenberg, who learned judo alongside Putin as a teenager, and who is now a billionaire, is seen repeatedly in the video footage. Rotenberg was awarded $7.4 billion in government contracts for the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. It’s unclear if Rotenberg’s brother, Boris, is also seen in the video footage. The CIA insists that Boris does in fact appear on the video, though his face is turned from the camera.
Igor Sidorkevich, president of the St. Petersburg Judo Federation, is also clearly identifiable in the video engaging with Putin and others.
“Putin’s Russia is the power of an autocrat’s court, where factions crystallize not just around charismatic individuals, common ideas, or shared self-interest, but even around a sport — which in this case a proxy activity to conceal closeted gay sex,” one CIA analyst explains.
“Rich, powerful, well-connected: the new Russian judocracy.
Putin publicly credited Rakhlin as being his first judo coach, his mentor, and his second father.
Rakhlin died in 2013 at the age of 75 due to complications of HIV/AIDS, but his illness was not widely reported at the time.
In a condolence message on the presidential website, Putin said that he was deeply saddened by Rakhlin’s death and that it represented “a big, irreplaceable loss for all of us.”
Rakhlin was a “real teacher and attentive mentor both in sports and in life,” Putin said.
During his funeral, Putin laid flowers at Rakhlin’s grave in St. Petersburg and spent hours standing next to his former coach’s coffin with his head bowed alongside Rakhlin’s widow, and comforted by his former sparring partners.
“We’re now thinking about how to immortalize his memory. Maybe there’ll be a monument or something else,” said State Duma Deputy Vasily Shestakov, who as a young man sparred with Putin under Rakhlin’s tutelage.
Rakhlin trained Putin for 15 years, beginning when the future KGB colonel and Russian leader was 13. Their bond was so tight that Rakhlin was called by the Kremlin for a private lunch with the president the day after his inauguration in 2000.
At the time of his death, Rakhlin ran a youth sports academy in St. Petersburg. Putin presented Rakhlin with a “medal of honor” for his achievements in Russian judo on the coach’s 75th birthday, just months before his death.
Again, I don’t claim to have any solid proof — it just seems likely. Alas, my only source are these two articles in the Buffalo Chronicle, and Misha Firer’s article in Quora about Putin’s handsome body guards. I have no idea where Misha got his information. But if the CIA knows, then Mossad also knows, and Misha has an Israeli connection.
Mary:
*
MOST HUMAN EMBRYOS DIE SHORTLY AFTER CONCEPTION
~ Most human embryos die before anyone, including doctors, even know they exist. This embryo loss typically occurs in the first two months after fertilization, before the clump of cells has developed into a fetus with immature forms of the body's major organs. Total abortion bans that define personhood at conception mean that full legal rights exist for a 5-day-old blastocyst, a hollow ball of cells roughly 0.008 inches (0.2 millimeters) across with a high likelihood of disintegrating within a few days.
As an evolutionary biologist whose career has focused on how embryos develop in a wide variety of species over the course of evolution, I was struck by the extraordinarily high likelihood that most human embryos die due to random genetic errors. Around 60% of embryos disintegrate before people may even be aware that they are pregnant. Another 10% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, after the person knows they're pregnant. These losses make clear that the vast majority of human embryos don't survive to birth.
The emerging scientific consensus is that high rate of early embryo loss is a common and normal occurrence in people. Research on the causes and evolutionary reasons for early embryo loss provides insight into this fundamental feature of human biology and its implications for reproductive health decisions.
INTRINSIC EMBRYO LOSS IS COMMON IN MAMMALS
Intrinsic embryo loss, or embryo death due to internal factors like genetics, is common in many mammals, such as cows and sheep. This persistent "reproductive wastage" has frustrated breeders attempting to increase livestock production but who are unable to eliminate high embryonic mortality.
In contrast, most embryo loss in animals that lay eggs like fish and frogs is due to external factors, such as predators, disease or other environmental threats. These lost embryos are effectively "recycled" in the ecosystem as food. These egg-laying animals have little to no intrinsic embryo loss.
In people, the most common outcome of reproduction by far is embryo loss due to random genetic errors. An estimated 70% to 75% of human conceptions fail to survive to birth. That number includes both embryos that are reabsorbed into the parent's body before anyone knows an egg has been fertilized and miscarriages that happen later in the pregnancy.
AN EVOLUTIONARY DRIVE FOR EMBRYO LOSS
In humans, an evolutionary force called meiotic drive plays a role in early embryo loss. Meiotic drive is a type of competition within the genome of unfertilized eggs, where variations of different genes can manipulate the cell division process to favor their own transmission to the offspring over other variations.
Statistical models attempting to explain why most human embryos fail to develop usually start by observing that a massive number of random genetic errors occur in the mother's eggs even before fertilization.
When sperm fertilize eggs, the resulting embryo's DNA is packaged into 46 chromosomes – 23 from each parent. This genetic information guides the embryo through the development process as its cells divide and grow. When random mistakes occur during chromosome replication, fertilized eggs can inherit cells with these errors and result in a condition called aneuploidy, which essentially means "the wrong number of chromosomes." With the instructions for development now disorganized due to mixed-up chromosomes, embryos with aneuploidy are usually doomed.
Because human and other mammal embryos are highly protected from environmental threats – unlike animals that lay eggs outside their bodies – researchers have theorized that these early losses have little effect on the reproductive success of the parent. This may allow humans and other mammals to tolerate meiotic drive over evolutionary time.
Counterintuitively, there may even be benefits to the high rates of genetic errors that result in embryo loss. Early loss of aneuploid embryos can direct maternal resources to healthier single newborns rather than twins or multiples. Also, in the deeper evolutionary history of a species, having a huge pool of genetic variants could occasionally provide a beneficial new adaptation that could aid in human survival in changing environments.
SPONTANEOUS ABORTION IS NATURAL
Biological data on human embryos brings new questions to consider for abortion policies.
Although required in some states, early embryo loss is typically not documented in the medical record. This is because it occurs before the person knows they are pregnant and often coincides with the next menstrual period. Until relatively recently, researchers were unaware of the extremely high rate of early embryo loss in people, and "conception" was an imagined moment estimated from last menstruation.
How does naturally built-in, massive early embryo loss affect legal protections for human embryos?
Errors that occur during chromosomal replication are essentially random, which means development can be disrupted in different ways in different embryos. However, while both early embryos and late fetuses can become inviable due to genetic errors, early and late abortions are regulated very differently. Some states still require doctors to wait until the health of the pregnant person is endangered before allowing induced abortion of nonviable fetuses.
In the wake of anti-abortion laws, doctors have refused to treat patients with miscarriages because it uses the same procedures as abortions.
Since so many pregnancies end naturally in their very earliest days, early embryo loss is exceedingly common, though most people won't know they've experienced it. I believe that new laws ignoring this natural occurrence lead to a slippery slope that can put lives and livelihoods at risk.
Between 1973 and 2005, over 400 women were arrested for miscarriage in the U.S. With the current shift toward restrictive abortion policies, the continued criminalization of pregnancies that don't result in birth, despite how common they are, is a growing concern.
I believe that acknowledging massive early embryo loss as a normal part of human life is one step forward in helping society make rational decisions about reproductive health policy. ~
https://www.salon.com/2022/09/05/most-human-embryos-naturally-after-conception_partner/
*
WHY DO EMBRYOS OF VARIOUS SPECIES LOOK SO SIMILAR?
~ Human embryos resemble those of many other species because all animals carry very ancient genes. These genes date back to the origin of cells, which are expressed during a middle phase of embryonic development, according to two separate papers published in this week's Nature.
The findings help to explain why our embryos have a tail when they are a few weeks old and why human embryos retain other characteristics, such as fur-like hair and fish embryo similarities, seen in the developmental stages of other species.
"On average, the similarities will be even stronger for more closely related species," Diethard Tautz told Discovery News.
"However, it is indeed true that even fish and human embryos go through a phase that looks very comparable, while they are rather different before and after this," added Tautz, who co-authored one of the papers and serves as managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology.
He and colleague Tomislav Domazet-Loso tackled the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" puzzle. This expression means that a more advanced organism, like humans, will resemble less advanced species during it's development stages.
The researchers studied the genes of zebrafish. The scientists classified the genes according to their evolutionary origin in the history of life and measured their contributions at different time points in the zebrafish life cycle.
The researchers found that the oldest genes evolutionarily were expressed during a middle phase, also known as the "phylotypic period," of the zebrafish's embryonic development.
"(Our) paper shows in addition the interesting effect that old animals return also to old gene expression patterns, suggesting that they increasingly switch off the genes that have helped them to go through adulthood," Tautz said.
For the second study, Casey Bergman, a lecturer in computational and evolutionary biology at the University of Manchester, Pavel Tomancak and their colleagues approached the embryo similarities' puzzle from another perspective: They measured differences in gene expression between various species of the fruit fly Drosophila.
Again the scientists observed that development among the various species was comparable during the middle phylotypic phase.
"Genes that are active during the middle embryonic period are involved in organizing the overall body plan of the organism, such as the body axes and major tissues and organs," Bergman explained to Discovery News.
He continued that the earlier and later developmental stages instead "use genes involved in utilizing materials in the egg provided by the mother and more species specific aspects of animal form involved in environmental adaptations."
Evolutionist Charles Darwin noticed such patterns in other species, but the two new studies show what is happening at the genetic level. They all support what is known as the "hourglass model" of embryogenesis.
It's dubbed that because the middle point marks the often-shared phylotypic period when the individual's basic body plan is laid down, while the beginning and end points are more genetically divergent and unique to the particular species.
"The similarity of animals at the center of the hourglass is shared by species in the same group of organisms, that is, among all vertebrates (including mammals, fish and birds) or among all insects, but not between insects and vertebrates," explained Bergman.
Human embryos at a certain stage therefore have a tail and folded neck structures that, in fish, later turn into gills. In humans, the folded structures become our jaws. Bergman said human embryos also possess a laryngeal nerve that travels from the brain underneath the aorta and then back to the larynx.
"The unnecessarily long path of this nerve is shared by all vertebrates and only makes sense when considering the origin of vertebrates is from a fish-like ancestor," he said.
"We are just very highly evolved fish!" Bergman concluded.
*
WHAT LUCK IN WAR REVEALS ABOUT LUCK IN LIFE
~ There was a saying I heard in Iraq: ‘Big sky, small mortar.’ It provided reassurance that the probability of being hit by one of the many rockets fired at our base was low. Perhaps because of this, the first time I saw a rocket flying overhead I was struck by how small the black en dash looked against the bright Mesopotamian sky. I took cover behind a concrete blast wall, and it passed harmlessly overhead. Other soldiers not far away from where I was based weren’t so lucky. Some were killed by rockets falling out of the night sky while they slept. The difference between us was luck.
In his novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), Erich Maria Remarque claimed: ‘Every soldier owes the fact that he is still alive to a thousand lucky chances and nothing else. And every soldier believes in and trusts to chance.’ Despite the level of mastery of drills and skills, there was a recognition by many I served with that Remarque was right. In war, human experience is taken to extremes. Survival is determined by multiple variables outside your control. Once you have been in a situation where your survival appears to be down to random luck, you are inevitably changed. The question that this raised for me was how much of my civilian life was down to my choices, and how much was like my experience of war zones. Is it only in such extreme situations that luck takes over, or is it there but less frequently noticed in all our lives?
George Orwell described sport as ‘war minus the shooting’. Cricket has more variables that can influence the result than most sports. It starts with the toss of a coin. The nature of the pitch and the weather can make it better to bowl at some stages than others. The opposition can get you out 10 different ways. The former England batsman David Gower agrees that luck was a big factor in who won key matches he played in. He quoted the former Australian captain Richie Benaud: ‘Captaincy is 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill. But don’t try it without that 10 per cent.’
But it is not just in war and sport that luck plays such a great part. In our interconnected global economy, every business operates in a high-variable environment. This is not new. Timothy Dexter, perhaps the luckiest businessperson to have lived, married a rich widow sometime at the end of the 1760s or early 1770s. He used her money to buy large amounts of depreciated Continental currency, from which he made a significant profit at the end of the American Revolutionary War. He used this to start exporting. Rivals advised him to send bed warmers to the tropics. His ship’s captain sold them as ladles to the molasses industry and made a profit. He then shipped coal to Newcastle, England (where there were multiple coal mines), which arrived during a miners’ strike, enabling his cargo to be sold at a premium. Dexter decorated his mansion with statues of famous men, including George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and himself (his was inscribed: ‘I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western World’).
Dexter was an eccentric, whose decisions were aided by events outside his control, but was his success dissimilar to that of a lauded CEO running a company when the wider economy is booming? The bonds trader and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb used a simulation of hundreds of traders tossing a coin, trying to land heads, to demonstrate survivor bias. Each round, those landing tails are removed until there is just one left. Is that winner the best at tossing coins, or simply the luckiest? There is another common error called fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency of humans to overestimate the role of individuals in success and to underplay the role of circumstances. CEOs in a booming economy are seen as better leaders than those in bust cycles.
Yet in 2020 the entrepreneur Elon Musk Tweeted: ‘Working 16 hours a day, 7 day’s a week, 52 week’s in year and people still calling me lucky.’ For Musk, success is down to hard work, not luck. If you work hard enough, luck stops being a factor. But there are no guarantees. As the Australian politician Andrew Leigh noted: ‘While there are plenty of people who’ve gotten to the top by dint of hard work, many of those who’ve worked their guts out don’t succeed. Effort may be a necessary condition for success, but it isn’t a sufficient one.’
Does it matter if we don’t generally recognize the role of luck in success? The economist Robert H Frank suggests that it may be disadvantageous to think too hard about luck’s role. Practice means trying and failing before mastering skills. It’s difficult to summon up effort to do that. If you’re focused on luck, you may make excuses to avoid that effort, instead hoping you’ll get lucky when the time comes. If denying luck’s importance makes it easier to tackle difficult tasks, it may be adaptive. Some sports stars use the power of superstitions to manage the pressure that the cricketer Bell mentions. Their rituals give them a belief that fate will favor them. When Gower made a good score wearing a new piece of kit, it became lucky for him. He’d use it until he made a bad score, when he would discard it, scapegoating it for his bad luck. I witnessed similar superstitions in the army.
However, whether we appreciate the role of luck in our lives or not can have a profound impact on how we see and treat others. The philosopher Thomas Nagel claims that things for which we are morally judged are determined, in more ways than we think, by what’s beyond our control. What we are and do, what we become or have done, all these things are dependent on what he called ‘moral luck’.
Nagel identifies four ways in which moral judgment is subject to luck. The first is the kind of person you are: intelligent, disciplined, tall (a disproportionate number of CEOs are above average height). The second is your circumstances, the situations you face. The third is luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances. The fourth is luck in the way one’s actions turn out. Nagel takes a drunk driver who is caught and charged with drunk driving. He is seen morally differently from the drunk driver in a parallel world who has a child step out in front of his car, leaving no time for even a sober driver to swerve. Our moral judgment is more severe towards the latter. Nagel asked: ‘How is it possible to be more or less culpable depending on whether a child gets into the path of one’s car … ?’
According to Nagel, across these elements of moral luck, the idea of us having genuine agency, and therefore being able to be legitimately morally judged, seems to shrink. Yet, we don’t view ourselves simply as results of external circumstances and genetic fate. We have an idea of the boundary between what’s us and what’s not us, what we do and what happens to us, who we are and what fate throws in our path. This remains true even when we accept Nagel’s arguments that we are not ultimately responsible for our own existence, or nature, or the circumstances that give our acts the consequences they have. As there’s a close connection between our feelings about ourselves and our feelings about others, this allows us to feel justified in judging others, even when we accept how little responsibility they have.
The psychologists Dena M Gromet, Kimberly A Hartson and David K Sherman discovered that whether you accept Nagel’s ideas is correlated with your political beliefs. They demonstrated that conservatives believe that luck plays much less of a role in success than liberals do. Conservatives believe that successful people deserve their success, and that to suggest they have been lucky challenges this ‘deservingness’.
Their study showed that external attributions for success that don’t emphasize chance, such as help from a network, don’t produce the same results. Conservatives are more amenable to luck when random chance is de-emphasized, as it doesn’t contradict people being deserving of outcomes. Like Musk, conservatives don’t accept that successful individuals have not earned their spoils, and assume that those who are less successful haven’t worked as hard. Individuals with socially conservative attitudes are more likely to believe in some form of the Protestant work ethic, and in a just world, than liberals do.
The psychologist Paul Piff suggests that, when we believe that our luck is deserved, it changes how we treat others. He randomly assigned subjects in a laboratory as ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’ in a rigged game of Monopoly. The lucky players began behaving as though they were superior to their opponents. When asked why they won, they attributed it to their ability rather than (their rigged) luck.
Self-help literature has traditionally re-enforced such biases. In his classic of the genre Think and Grow Rich (1937), Napoleon Hill argued that those who suffer poverty ‘are the creators of their own “misfortune”’. Believe you will be successful, and you will be. The former US president Donald Trump is influenced by his father’s obsession with the self-help author Norman Vincent Peale. Peale proclaimed that you need only self-confidence to prosper. Trump claims to be a self-made man, conveniently ignoring the part played by his luck in being born into great wealth in one of the world’s richest countries. These sorts of beliefs impact human relations, policies and our sense of self-worth.
The West is in the grip of a conflated culture war, in which ‘privilege’ has become a burdened word. This idea of privilege combines Nagel’s first two types of luck: being born who you are, and the circumstances you face. Most will agree we are all born with different characteristics and are born into different circumstances – some into royalty, some into poverty. However, disagreements center around what makes one lucky or not.
No matter our political persuasion, we recognize our bad luck more than other’s bad luck, other’s good luck more than we do our own. I started my career as a soldier with the illusion that I was in control of my fate; after seeing the misfortune of those who fell victim to events outside their control, I finished my career with the recognition of how lucky I had been, and how much chance affects outcomes.
Perhaps this is not such a bad way to view life: you should see yourself as in control of your future successes, but lucky to have achieved your past successes and, at the end of your life, accept that you got better than you deserved.
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-luck-in-war-reveals-about-the-role-of-chance-in-life?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=a33ea82ac2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_09_05_07_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76a303a90a-a33ea82ac2-72772636
Mary: RANDOM LUCK IS TERRIFYING
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AMERICA IS GETTING OLDER
~ The national population over the age of 65 more than doubled between 1980 and 2020. Two-thirds of that growth has occurred since 2000. The 65 and older group grew by more than 20.5 million people, a 59% increase, during that time.
The largest contributor to the number of elderly people is the aging of the large baby boom generation.
The first members of the baby boom generation, or the group of people born between 1946 and 1964, turned 65 in 2011.
In 2000, there were 62 million people between the ages of 45 and 64. That group of mostly baby boomers was 77% larger than the 65 and older population at the time. As the group aged, the elderly share of the population increased.
In addition to the aging of baby boomers, older people in the US are living longer. The death rate for people ages 65 or older declined 24% between 2000 and 2019 before increasing 15% in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Migration is the last factor that contributes to the number of elderly people in the US.
Net migration is a measure of the net effect of people moving to and from a region. One way to estimate it is by taking the number of people in a group for a given year and comparing the deaths and population size at a later point in time.
In 2000, there were 97 million Americans in the 45 and older group. From 2000 to 2020, 43 million people in that group died.
So, if no one in the age group moved in or out of the country from 2000 to 2020, there would be about 55 million Americans 65 and older. But as of 2020, the group was larger than that. The increase of 790,000 people can be attributed to net migration.
STATES WITH THE LARGEST ELDERLY POPULATION
As of 2020, the share of total population ages 65 and older is largest in Maine, Florida, West Virginia, and Vermont. Over 20% of the population in these states is elderly.
Out of those four states, Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia had large populations of baby boomers in 2000, explaining most of the reason for their higher share of older population by 2020.
But Florida, the state with the second-largest elderly population percentage, can attribute its numbers to net migration. From 2000 to 2020, net migration accounted for an increase of 1 million people to the now 65 and older group. The only states with higher rates of net migration were Nevada and Arizona.
Utah, Washington, DC, Alaska, and Texas have the lowest elderly shares of their populations, all under 13%.
While the elderly are a small part of Alaska and Utah’s populations, the growth rate of the group was among the highest in the country in both states.
Between 2000 and 2020, Alaska more than doubled its relatively small elderly population, the largest increase of any state.
Utah’s elderly population increased by 95%, the fifth-largest increase over the same time period.
While total births increased from 4.1 million in 2000 to 4.3 million in 2007, the birth rate stayed consistent. The birth rate is measured as the yearly number of births per 1,000 people.
The number of births per year decreased to the point where nearly 1 million fewer babies were born in 2020 than in 2007. During that time, the birth rate decreased from 14.33 births per 1,000 people to 10.97.
Utah was the only state with more than 30% of its population in the 0-19 age group as of 2020. About 28% of Texas was under the age of 20 that year, making it the state with the second highest percentage of young people in its population. Idaho, Nebraska, and South Dakota round out the top five. Half of the top 10 states by young population percentage were in the Midwest.
The number of young people decreased from 2000 to 2020 in nearly half of the states. ~
https://usafacts.org/articles/america-is-getting-older-which-states-have-the-largest-elderly-populations/
Oriana:
The statistic I have found most convincing is the number of births per woman. In the US, it’s 1.7 (2019 data). This is also the number for China, though we don’t know if to trust this figure.
Russia’s birth rate is officially 1.5 — but Misha Firer argues that most likely it’s lower than that, and a typical ethnic Russian woman has only one child (the birth rate is higher for some minorities, especially in the Asian republics of the Russian Federation).
Russia also has the highest abortion rate in the world. Sadly, effective modern birth control is not widely available, creating a high demand for abortion.
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It is time to acknowledge that we (the West) are also at war with Russia and that if we want to win we have to win in Ukraine. Any faltering will embolden Putin further. He must lose hope and be seen to lose badly. Adventurism in the 21st century should not be rewarded. ~ Karim Hyatt
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HEAT AND HUMIDITY ARE ALREADY REACHING THE LIMITS OF HUMAN TOLERANCE
~ Over the hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on the planet, modern humans have managed to adapt to a huge range of climates—from the arid heat of the Sahara Desert to the icy chill of the Arctic. But we have our limits. If temperatures and humidity rise high enough, even a robustly healthy person sitting still in the shade with access to water will succumb to the heat.
As heat waves grow hotter and more frequent, research has suggested some places will begin to see events that reach that limit of human tolerance in the coming decades. But now a new study shows they already have. The findings, published on Friday in Science Advances, underscore the need to rapidly curtail emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and develop policies that will help vulnerable populations stay cool.
High temperatures prompt the human body to produce sweat, which cools the skin as it evaporates. But when sky-high humidity is also involved, evaporation slows down and eventually stops. That point comes when the so-called the wet-bulb temperature—a measure that combines air temperature and humidity—reaches 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).
Previous analyses using climate models suggested that parts of the Persian Gulf region, the Indian subcontinent and eastern China would regularly see heat waves breaching this limit by later in the century. But they looked at broad areas over several hours, which can mask more localized, shorter-term spikes in extreme conditions. To see what other researchers might be missing, “we decided to zoom in a little bit closer,” says Colin Raymond, who conducted the new study when he was a Ph.D. student at Columbia University.
Raymond and his co-authors examined temperature data from more than 7,000 weather stations around the world going back to 1979. They found that extreme humid heat occurs twice as often now as it did four decades ago and that the severity of this heat is increasing. Many places have hit wet-bulb temperatures of 31 degrees C and higher. And several have recorded readings above the crucial 35-degree-C mark. Identifying that trend is “important because it builds on [weather] station data, which is the most direct evidence that we usually have,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology climate scientist Elfatih Eltahir.
These humid heat extremes have already emerged in the same places that earlier modeling studies had identified as future hotspots. Most are coastal areas that are both near warm bodies of water, which can supply abundant moisture, and subject to soaring overland temperatures. Others, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, are regions where monsoon winds usher in moisture-laden air.
Given the paucity of weather stations in some of the involved places, such as parts of Pakistan, “there’s probably even higher [wet-bulb] values out there,” says Raymond, who now works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The highest extremes were typically only reached for an hour or two, so they do not yet necessarily hit the limit of human tolerance. But such events will start to last longer and cover larger areas in a warmer future. Also, even much lower wet-bulb temperatures can be deadly, particularly to the elderly or those with underlying health conditions. The historic heat waves that killed thousands of people across much of Europe in 2003 and in Russia in 2010 never had a wet-bulb temperature above 28 degrees C. “These are very, very nasty conditions,” Eltahir says.
The new paper also found that parts of the world will regularly see wet-bulb temperatures higher than the 35-degree-C limit if global average temperatures rise just 2.5 degrees C above those of the preindustrial climate. The world has already warmed about 1 degree C above that level. “These kinds of events can become a regular occurrence with not much more warming than we’ve experienced,” says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was not involved with the study.
That projection underscores the need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming as much as possible, which would restrict how often such events might happen in the future. It also raises several questions, including what policies governments will need to develop to safeguard vulnerable groups, such as establishing cooling centers for elderly residents or sending out warnings before heat waves. And industries whose workers toil outdoors—such as agriculture and construction—may need to shift their schedules to cooler times of day. Even in the abundantly air-conditioned U.S., heat currently kills more people than cold, floods or hurricanes. ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-and-humidity-are-already-reaching-the-limits-of-human-tolerance/
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RUSSIA IS BURNING OFF LARGE AMOUNTS OF NATURAL GAS
~As Europe's energy costs skyrocket, Russia is burning off large amounts of natural gas, according to analysis shared with BBC News.
Experts say the gas would previously have been exported to Germany.
They say the plant near the border with Finland, is burning an estimated $10m (£8.4m) worth of gas every day.
Scientists are concerned about the large volumes of carbon dioxide and soot it is creating, which could exacerbate the melting of Arctic ice.
The analysis by Rystad Energy indicates that around 4.34 million cubic meters of gas are being burned by the flare every day.
It is coming from a new liquified natural gas (LNG) plant at Portovaya, north-west of St Petersburg. The first signs that something was awry came from Finnish citizens over the nearby border who spotted a large flame on the horizon earlier this summer.
Supplies through the pipeline has been curtailed since mid-July, with the Russians blaming technical issues for the restriction. Germany says it was purely a political move following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
But since June, researchers have noted a significant increase in heat emanating from the facility -- thought to be from gas flaring, the burning of natural gas.
While burning off gas is common at processing plants — normally done for technical or safety reasons -- the scale of this burn has confounded experts.
"I've never seen an LNG plant flare so much," said Dr Jessica McCarty, an expert on satellite data from Miami University in Ohio.
"Starting around June, we saw this huge peak, and it just didn't go away. It's stayed very anomalously high.”
Mark Davis is the CEO of Capterio, a company that's involved in finding solutions to gas flaring.
He says the flaring is not accidental and is more likely a deliberate decision made for operational reasons.
"Operators often are very hesitant to actually shut down facilities for fear that they may be technically difficult or costly to start up again, and it's probably the case here," he told BBC News.
Others believe that there could be technical challenges in dealing with the large volumes of gas that were being supplied to the Nordstream pipeline.
Russian energy company Gazprom may have intended to use that gas to make LNG at the new plant, but may have had problems handling it and the safest option is to flare it off.
It could also be the result of Europe's trade embargo with Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
"This kind of long-term flaring may mean that they are missing some equipment," said Esa Vakkilainen, an energy engineering professor from Finland's LUT University.
"So, because of the trade embargo with Russia, they are not able to make the high-quality valves needed in oil and gas processing. So maybe there are some valves broken and they can't get them replaced.”
The financial and environmental costs mount each day the flare continues to burn, say scientists.
"While the exact reasons for the flaring are unknown, the volumes, emissions and location of the flare are a visible reminder of Russia's dominance in Europe's energy markets," said Sindre Knutsson from Rystad Energy.
"There could not be a clearer signal -- Russia can bring energy prices down tomorrow. This is gas that would otherwise have been exported via Nordstream 1 or alternatives.”
Energy prices around the world rose sharply as Covid lockdowns were lifted and economies returned to normal. Many places of work, industry and leisure were all suddenly in need of more energy at the same time, putting unprecedented pressures on suppliers.
Prices increased again in February this year, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. European governments looked for ways to import less energy from Russia, which had previously supplied 40% of the gas used in the EU.
Prices for alternative sources of gas went up as a result, and some EU nations — like Germany and Spain — are now bringing in energy-saving measures.
The environmental impacts of the burning are worrying scientists.
According to researchers, flaring is far better than simply venting the methane which is the key ingredient in the gas, and is a very powerful climate warming agent.
Russia has a track record of burning off gas — according to the World Bank, it's the number one country when it comes to the volume of flaring.
But as well a releasing around 9,000 tons of CO2 equivalent every day from this flare, the burning causes other significant issues.
Black carbon is the name given to the sooty particles that are produced through the incomplete burning of fuels like natural gas.
"Of particular concern with flaring at Arctic latitudes is the transport of emitted black carbon northward where it deposits on snow and ice and significantly accelerates melting," said Prof Matthew Johnson, from Carleton University in Canada.
"Some highly cited estimates already put flaring as the dominant source of black carbon deposition in the Arctic and any increases in flaring in this region are especially unwelcome.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62652133
Oriana:
Several articles pointed out that once you cap a gas pipe, you may never be able to get it going again. Flaring billions of dollars’ worth of natural gas is a desperate solution.
Russia missed out on much of the Renaissance and skipped the Enlightenment completely. It is a backward country that has only ever known totalitarian rule. Here is the problem with Russia in a nutshell: Stalin, the second largest mass murderer in history, is greatly admired. When Stalin is your hero you have done something wrong. ~ Tim Brennan
WOMEN SHARE THEIR BEST MENTAL HEALTH ADVICE
We asked women to share the best piece of advice they’ve ever received about mental health and well-being.
“Focus on self-acceptance”
“Some of the best advice and tips that I have received are around self-acceptance. We often hear that we should love ourselves and focus on self-care but when you are really low that advice isn’t always helpful.
“Rather than a gratitude journal, I keep a self-acceptance journal. My entries start with ‘I am the one who…’. It’s a way of acknowledging what I did each day without value judgements. It puts less pressure on me to perform wellness and it helps me accept myself as I am in each moment, even when those moments are painful.”
~ Nisha, 39
“You don’t need to do things 100% to do them”
“The best advice I’ve ever received is that you don’t need to do things 100% to do them. If you can’t shower, wipe yourself down with a washcloth. If you can’t make a meal, eat a granola bar. If you can’t get out of bed, try to sit up, etc. Incremental progress is still progress.”
~ Elizabeth, 30
“Ask yourself, ‘Will this matter in a month’s time?’”
“I remember a therapist once telling me to ask myself ‘Will this matter in a month’s time?’ any time I’m stressing over something. It’s really stuck with me as someone extremely prone to overthinking and catastrophizing, and has saved me countless breakdowns over things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things!”
~ Liv, 27
“Hold your boundaries strong”
“The best advice I ever received is to hold your boundaries strong and tend them like flowerbeds. When you don’t have them, especially if you are an over giver, you are actually teaching people to take advantage of your time, expertise, kindness and even money.
“Boundaries are there, not to inconvenience other people, but to honor yourself and your energy. When your energy is well managed, your mental wellness follows.”
~ Dani, 37
“Happiness only counts if it’s coming from the inside”
A quote I always turn to is ‘happiness only counts if it’s coming from the inside’. People can pretend to be happy and you can seem happy to others, but there’s no point just looking happy if you’re not happy on the inside.”
~ Megan, 21
“It’s fine if things don’t happen exactly as you want them to – life is still going to happen for you”
The best piece of advice my coach gave me is that it’s fine if things don’t happen exactly as I want them to. Life is still going to happen for me.
“This quote really helps in that it empowers me and brings my sense of autonomy and decision making back to me rather than feeling that my life is out of my control. There’ll never be an instance in my life where I can control the outcome of anything other than how I feel, think, behave and how I show up. To that extent life happens for me not to me.”
~ Jennifer, 28
“Be open and honest with yourself”
“The best mental health advice I ever received was to be open and honest with yourself and to journal your thoughts and brain dump onto paper. That’s where my journaling journey came from.”
~ Gemma, 39
“Treat bad mental health days as a normal sick day”
“The most important piece of advice I took away from my time in therapy was to treat bad mental health days as I would a normal sick day.
“It’s easy to feel frustrated or annoyed at yourself when you’re struggling with your mental health, but trying to see my anxiety as I would a sniffly nose or a bad cough helps to remind me that my anxiety isn’t my fault, and helps me to feel less guilty about taking extra care of myself on those days.”
~ Lauren, 24
“Having a tough conversation can be a loving act”
“The best advice I was ever given is that you can be loving and leave a relationship. My mental health was extremely affected by an abusive relationship, but once I had left I was feeling a lot of shame about being the one to end the relationship. Hearing that it can be a loving act – better in the long run for both of us – gave me a lot of peace.
“I think it applies to all of the hard parts of any relationship (family/friends as well as romantic) – putting in boundaries, having tough conversations etc are loving acts for everyone involved.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/world-mental-health-day-9-women-on-the-best-piece-of-mental-health-advice-they-ve-ever-received?utm_source=pocket-newtab
THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING: THE MYSTERY OF WHAT WE WISH FOR
~ Drolly played by Tilda Swinton, the story’s central character, Alethea Binnie, is an academic who leads a life dominated by her intellect. This tends to mean that nothing surprises her. So when an enormous genie bursts out of a small antique bottle that she’s bought in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, she greets his offer of three wishes with academic skepticism. A specialist in the history of legend and fairytale, she’s familiar with this proposition and it rarely turns out well. She has everything she wants, she tells him firmly. Yet he persists.
They’re in her Istanbul hotel room and at this stage, the djinn (Idris Elba) has reduced himself to a more manageable size. He is wearing a white terry toweling bathrobe identical to her own and if it weren’t for his large, pointed ears, they might be a vacationing couple discussing Istanbul’s sightseeing possibilities.
Instead, he’s pleading for his freedom. If she doesn’t accept his offer, he’ll be forced back into the bottle for more years of incarceration. As a result, he must persuade her that he can fulfill her wishes and, more importantly, that he can advise her to make the kind of wishes likely to bring about a happy ending.
Like Scheherazade before him, he pins his hopes on his abilities as a storyteller. By way of an audition, he begins to relate three tales which explain how he wound up in the bottle.
This puts Miller on slippery ground. Any film fan who grew up on old-fashioned sword-and-sandal movies will be aware of their potential for producing cheesy cliches. But it soon becomes clear that Miller knows exactly how to avoid them. The first of the stories is set in the palace of the Queen of Sheba and the burnished beauty of John Seale’s cinematography, together with the Dutch composer Tom Holkenborg’s music, takes it right out of Hollywood to give it all the romance to be found in an early Arabian Nights illustration.
The next, which takes the djinn to the Turkish court of Suleiman the Magnificent, is less romantic but just as dazzling and it’s done with a satirical edge, while the third is different altogether. Set in the 1850s in the gloomy mansion of a wealthy Turkish merchant, it has a muted palette and a more naturalistic look, in keeping with the seriousness of the story. This time, the djinn has fallen deeply in love, a risk in itself.
As the stories unfold, they begin to have their desired effect. Alethea is warming to the djinn. Her no-nonsense north of England accent is softening and the djinn, who could claim to have seen everything, is sounding more and more worldly. Elba and Swinton are so delightfully in tune with each other that these scenes take on the witty tones of a sophisticated romcom as Alethea’s sensual side, which has been long dormant, shows signs of coming to life again.
Most of the film was shot in Australia, which is hard to believe since it’s such an exuberantly exotic piece of film-making. It’s also unclassifiable. Its $US60 million budget and the fantastic nature of its visual effects earned it a wide commercial release in the US during a bad week for cinema going, and its opening box office figures were predictably low. It’s no blockbuster. It wasn’t designed that way. But it’s audacious, funny and consistently inventive with a lot of charm. ~
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/movies/idris-elba-and-tilda-swinton-charm-in-three-thousand-years-of-longing-20220830-p5bdwu.html
Note: Alethea means “truth” in Greek, the opposite of forgetting (Lethe was the river of forgetting)
Oriana: CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
The movie, while no masterpiece, is quite watchable and modestly enjoyable. The only tale I connected with was that of Zefir, a woman of genius whose wish is for knowledge. She’s meant to be a female Leonardo da Vinci (minus Leonardo's art; only his curiosity and inventiveness). As a woman, she is doomed to a totally private, subordinate existence, unable to contribute to humanity.
The Djinn is apparently a crypto-intellectual, and he falls in love with Zefir. But in the end her frustration prevails, and she makes a wish never to have met the Djinn — which forces him back into the bottle.
Alethea finally knows what she wants: she wants the Djinn to love her just as he loved Zephyr. And since the Djinn is forced to grant wishes, we get a faint, hardly erotic glimpse of that romance. But the Djinn is unhappy -- living in modern London is actually killing him -- and Alethea learns that love requires freedom.
The movie's funniest scene involves a fat heir to the throne being kept in a room filled with fat naked women. The scene is splendidly politically incorrect.
If there is a serious message in this movie, it’s perhaps about the near-impossibility of making those proverbial three wishes (immortality is out — the Djinn doesn’t have the power to grant that desire). One desire might be easy. Anyone with a disabling health condition would naturally want perfect health. An infertile couple might wish for a child. An artist might wish for the inspiration to create masterpieces. Many people might stipulate wealth and love — but that’s where we begin to run into problems. If we’ve lived long enough, we already know that there is a price for everything. As Saint Teresa of Avila wisely observed, more tears have been shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones.
In the movie, Alethea, who is an academic specializing in “narratology,” fully realizes that the fairy tales in which you are to be granted your wishes are all cautionary tales. A disaster looms on the horizon. That’s why Alethea at first refuses to make a single wish — and ultimately undoes the wish she eventually makes. There is, after all, the law of unforeseen consequences. St. Teresa warned us. The Buddha warned us. Whatever desires we may have we need to hold lightly, ready to let go of them as our life changes.
And of course we are reminded of this timeless piece of advice: "Careful what you wish for."
In the end it’s a relief to know that no “genie” is going to step out of any bottle, jar, or vase. "Humanity no longer needs djinns or angels" may be the most memorable line in the movie. Vases are for flowers.
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And then there is this interesting take on the movie:
~ The subtle twist in Three Thousand Years of Longing is that the Djinn may not be real.
The third act of the film lightly confirms that the Djinn's stories
were made up by Alethea for a book, with several of her inspirations
appearing in her basement. She turns off lights by pulling the red
string that was tied around the Djinn's first bottle, and she has a
bottle collection that is very similar to Zefir's own collection. The
coincidences between the Djinn's tales and Alithea's life were simply
too much, and it being a story Alithea fabricated makes much more sense.
While the stories are fake, the Djinn and his history was made up by
Alithea to tell a parable about the importance of love and the danger of
locking oneself away, which is the true meaning of Three Thousand Years of Longing. ~
https://screenrant.com/three-thousand-years-of-longing-true-meaning-explained/
ANTI-NATALISM: THE CASE AGAINST BEING BORN
~ David Benatar may be the world’s most pessimistic philosopher. An “anti-natalist,” he believes that life is so bad, so painful, that human beings should stop having children for reasons of compassion. “While good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place,” he writes, in a 2006 book called “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.” In Benatar’s view, reproducing is intrinsically cruel and irresponsible—not just because a horrible fate can befall anyone, but because life itself is “permeated by badness.” In part for this reason, he thinks that the world would be a better place if sentient life disappeared altogether.
For a work of academic philosophy, “Better Never to Have Been” has found an unusually wide audience. It has 3.9 stars on GoodReads, where one reviewer calls it “required reading for folks who believe that procreation is justified.” A few years ago, Nic Pizzolatto, the screenwriter behind “True Detective,” read the book and made Rust Cohle, Matthew McConaughey’s character, a nihilistic anti-natalist. (“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution,” Cohle says.) When Pizzolatto mentioned the book to the press, Benatar, who sees his own views as more thoughtful and humane than Cohle’s, emerged from an otherwise reclusive life to clarify them in interviews. Now he has published “The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions,” a refinement, expansion, and contextualization of his anti-natalist thinking. The book begins with an epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”—“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”—and promises to provide “grim” answers to questions such as “Do our lives have meaning?,” and “Would it be better if we could live forever?”
Benatar was born in South Africa in 1966. He is the head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town, where he also directs the university’s Bioethics Center, which was founded by his father, Solomon Benatar, a global-health expert. (Benatar dedicated “Better Never to Have Been” “to my parents, even though they brought me into existence.”) Beyond these bare facts, little information about him is available online. There are no pictures of Benatar on the Internet; YouTube videos of his lectures consist only of PowerPoint slides. One video, titled “What Does David Benatar Look Like?,” zooms in on a grainy photograph taken from the back of a lecture hall until an arrow labelled “David Benatar” appears, indicating the abstract, pixellated head of a man in a baseball cap.
After finishing “The Human Predicament,” I wrote to Benatar to ask if we could meet. He readily agreed, then, after reading a few of my other pieces, followed up with a note. “I see that you aim to portray the person you interview, in addition to his or her work,” he wrote:
One pertinent fact about me is that I am a very private person who would be mortified to be written about in the kind of detail I’ve seen in the other interviews. I would thus decline to answer questions I would find too personal. (I would be similarly uncomfortable with a photograph of me being used.) I understand entirely if you would rather not proceed with the interview under these circumstances. If, however, you would be happy to conduct an interview that recognized this aspect of me, I would be delighted.
Undoubtedly, Benatar is a private person by nature. But his anonymity also serves a purpose: it prevents readers from psychologizing him and attributing his views to depression, trauma, or some other aspect of his personality. He wants his arguments to be confronted in themselves. “Sometimes people ask, ‘Do you have children?’ ” he told me later. (He speaks calmly and evenly, in a South African accent.) “And I say, ‘I don’t see why that’s relevant. If I do, I’m a hypocrite—but my arguments could still be right.’ ” When he told me that he’s had anti-natalist views since he was “very young,” I asked how young. “A child,” he said, after a pause. He smiled uncomfortably. This was exactly the kind of personal question he preferred not to answer.
*
Benatar and I met at the World Trade Center, where The New Yorker has its offices. He is small and trim, with an elfin face, and he was neatly dressed in trousers and a lavender sweater; I recognized him by his baseball cap. On the building’s sixty-fourth floor, we settled into a pair of plush chairs arranged near windows with panoramic views of Manhattan: the Hudson on the left, the East River on the right, the skyscrapers of midtown in the distance.
Social scientists often ask people about their levels of happiness. A typical survey asks respondents to rate their lives on a scale of one (“the worst possible life for you”) to ten (“the best possible life for you”); according to the 2017 World Happiness Report, Americans surveyed between 2014 and 2016 rated their lives, on average, 6.99—less happy than the lives of Canadians (7.32) and happier than those of citizens of Sudan (4.14). Another survey reads, “Taking all things together, would you say you are (i) Very happy, (ii) Rather happy, (iii) Not very happy or (iv) Not at all happy?” In recent years, in countries such as India, Russia, and Zimbabwe, responses to this question have been trending upward. In 1998, ninety-three per cent of Americans claimed to be very or rather happy. By 2014, after the Great Recession, the number had fallen, but only slightly, to ninety-one per cent.
People, in short, say that life is good. Benatar believes that they are mistaken. “The quality of human life is, contrary to what many people think, actually quite appalling,” he writes, in “The Human Predicament.” He provides an escalating list of woes, designed to prove that even the lives of happy people are worse than they think. We’re almost always hungry or thirsty, he writes; when we’re not, we must go to the bathroom. We often experience “thermal discomfort”—we are too hot or too cold—or are tired and unable to nap. We suffer from itches, allergies, and colds, menstrual pains or hot flashes. Life is a procession of “frustrations and irritations”—waiting in traffic, standing in line, filling out forms. Forced to work, we often find our jobs exhausting; even “those who enjoy their work may have professional aspirations that remain unfulfilled. Many lonely people remain single, while those who marry fight and divorce.
“People want to be, look, and feel younger, and yet they age relentlessly.”
They have high hopes for their children and these are often thwarted when, for example, the children prove to be a disappointment in some way or other. When those close to us suffer, we suffer at the sight of it. When they die, we are bereft.
The knee-jerk response to observations like these is, “If life is so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” Benatar devotes a forty-three-page chapter to proving that death only exacerbates our problems. “Life is bad, but so is death,” he concludes. “Of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together, they constitute an existential vise—the wretched grip that enforces our predicament.”
It’s better, he argues, not to enter into the predicament in the first place. People sometimes ask themselves whether life is worth living. Benatar thinks that it’s better to ask sub-questions: Is life worth continuing? (Yes, because death is bad.) Is life worth starting? (No.)
Benatar is far from the only anti-natalist. Books such as Sarah Perry’s “Every Cradle Is a Grave” and Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” have also found audiences. There are many “misanthropic anti-natalists”: the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, for example, has thousands of members who believe that, for environmental reasons, human beings should cease to exist. For misanthropic anti-natalists, the problem isn’t life—it’s us. Benatar, by contrast, is a “compassionate anti-natalist.” His thinking parallels that of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence; Metzinger espouses digital anti-natalism, arguing that it would be wrong to create artificially conscious computer programs because doing so would increase the amount of suffering in the world. The same argument could apply to human beings.
Like a boxer who has practiced his counters, Benatar has anticipated a range of objections. Many people suggest that the best experiences in life—love, beauty, discovery, and so on—make up for the bad ones. To this, Benatar replies that pain is worse than pleasure is good. Pain lasts longer: “There’s such a thing as chronic pain, but there’s no such thing as chronic pleasure,” he said. It’s also more powerful: would you trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure? Moreover, there’s an abstract sense in which missing out on good experiences isn’t as bad as having bad ones. “For an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good,” Benatar explained. “But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.” This asymmetry “completely stacks the deck against existence,” he continued, because it suggests that “all the unpleasantness and all the misery and all the suffering could be over, without any real cost.”
Some people argue that talk of pain and pleasure misses the point: even if life isn’t good, it’s meaningful. Benatar replies that, in fact, human life is cosmically meaningless: we exist in an indifferent universe, perhaps even a “multiverse,” and are subject to blind and purposeless natural forces. In the absence of cosmic meaning, only “terrestrial” meaning remains—and, he writes, there’s “something circular about arguing that the purpose of humanity’s existence is that individual humans should help one another.” Benatar also rejects the argument that struggle and suffering, in themselves, can lend meaning to existence. “I don’t believe that suffering gives meaning,” Benatar said. “I think that people try to find meaning in suffering because the suffering is otherwise so gratuitous and unbearable.” It’s true, he said, that “Nelson Mandela generated meaning through the way he responded to suffering—but that’s not to defend the conditions in which he lived.”
I asked Benatar why the proper response to his arguments wasn’t to strive to make the world a better place. The possible creation of a better world in the future, he told me, hardly justifies the suffering of people in the present; at any rate, a dramatically improved world is impossible. “It’ll never happen. The lessons never seem to get learnt. They never seem to get learnt. Maybe the odd individual will learn them, but you still see this madness around you,” he said. “You can say, ‘For goodness’ sake! Can’t you see how you’re making the same mistakes humans have made before? Can’t we do this differently?’ But it doesn’t happen.” Ultimately, he said, “unpleasantness and suffering are too deeply written into the structure of sentient life to be eliminated.” His voice grew more urgent; his eyes teared up. “We’re asked to accept what is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.” In an ordinary conversation, I would’ve murmured something reassuring. In this case, I didn’t know what to say.
*
Benatar had selected a vegan restaurant for lunch, and we set out to walk there, along the Hudson. At the end of Vesey Street, we passed the Irish Hunger Memorial—a quarter acre of soil transplanted from Ireland, in 2001, to commemorate the millions who had died during the country’s Great Famine. At Benatar’s suggestion, we spent a few minutes exploring and reading the historical quotes displayed in the entryway. The famine lasted seven years; recalling it, one man wrote, “It dwells in my memory as one long night of sorrow.”
It was a warm day. In Battery Park, mothers picnicked with their small children on the grass. A group of co-workers played table tennis. Down by the water, couples strolled hand in hand. There were runners on the path—shirtless men with muscular chests, women in stylish workout gear.
“Do you ever feel a dissonance between your beliefs and your environment?” I asked.
“I’m not opposed to people having fun, or in denial that life contains good things,” Benatar said, laughing. I glanced over to see that he had removed his sweater and was now in shirtsleeves. His cap appeared not to have moved. We reached the spot where, eight weeks later, a twenty-nine-year-old man in a van would kill eight people and injure eleven others.
*
Like everyone else, Benatar finds his views disturbing; he has, therefore, ambivalent feelings about sharing them.
Life, he says, is already unpleasant enough. He reassures himself that, because his books are philosophical and academic, they will be read only by those who seek them out. He hears from readers who are grateful to find their own secret thoughts expressed. One man with several children read “Better Never to Have Been,” then told Benatar that he believed having them had been a terrible mistake; people suffering from terrible mental and physical afflictions write to say they wish that they had never existed. He also hears from people who share his views and are disabled by them. “I’m just filled with sadness for people like that,” he said, in a soft voice. “They have an accurate view of reality, and they’re paying the price for it.” I asked Benatar whether he ever found his own thoughts overwhelming. He smiled uncomfortably—another personal question—and said, “Writing helps.”
He doesn’t imagine that anti-natalism could ever be widely adopted: “It runs counter to too many biological drives.” Still, for him, it’s a source of hope. “The madness of the world as a whole—what can you or I do about that?” he said, while we walked. “But every couple, or every person, can decide not to have a child. That’s an immense amount of suffering that’s avoided, which is all to the good.” When friends have children, he must watch his words. “I’m torn,” he said. Having a child is “pretty horrible, given the predicament in which it will find itself”; on the other hand, “optimism makes life more bearable.” Some years ago, when a fellow-philosopher told him that she was pregnant, his response was muted. Come on, she insisted—you have to be happy for me. Benatar consulted his conscience, then said, “I am happy—for you.”
At lunch, we sat next to a little girl and her mother. The girl was around eight years old, wearing a dress and holding a book. “Do you want to take these home?” her mother asked, pointing to some French fries.
“Yes!” the girl said.
My conversation with Benatar continued, but I found it hard to talk about anti-natalism while sitting next to the mother and daughter. We spent much of our lunch amiably discussing our work habits. On the street, we shook hands. “I’m just going to walk around a bit,” Benatar said. He planned to wander the West Village before heading to the airport. I walked south and, near the World Trade Center, descended into the Oculus, the vast, sepulchral mall and train station that has replaced the one destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. With its towering, spine-like roof and white-marble ribs, it is part skeleton, part cathedral. Standing on the escalator, I watched as a woman with one arm in her jacket struggled to insert the other. An overweight businessman, his ears plugged with earbuds, brushed past me, jostling me with his briefcase. As he reached the bottom, he held the woman’s coat, and she slipped into it. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-case-for-not-being-born?utm_campaign=falcon&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1qZhW4Qh5z21zyvd1xdzGm3hUZXdLWmJwdnbRdroYbxnd__FoSoTbRdhA
Joseph Milosch:
The article about antinatalism reminded me of Buddha’s First Noble Truth: Life is suffering. David Benatar is very eloquent, and his comments also reminded me of Jimmy Hoffa’s debate with William Buckley Jr. Hoffa kept saying, you’re intelligent, and I can’t argue with your ideas, but in prison, they are impractical. Buckley spent an hour trying to prove that African- Americans shouldn’t be allowed to wear Afros because they could hide drugs or weapons in their hair. Hoffa did a pantomime of guards patting down a prisoner by pushing their hair tightly against their heads. Hoffa said, If the guards do their job, no one can smuggle contraband into prison, but the guards are corrupt. In the end, Hoffa proved that Buckley’s ideas were not practical and did not work in the prisons.
Benatar is correct in saying that to cause pain is morally wrong, but his conclusion seems unworkable in the real world. One reason is that for the world to achieve a zero-birth rate, it must stop sexual activity on moral grounds. That is a Christian idea. Christianity and all other major religions believe that procreating out of wedlock is ethically wrong. According to the Church, it is morally wrong because outside marriage, there is no responsibility to provide for the offspring. According to most religions, marriage carries a responsibility for the children. Benatar states that in or out of wedlock, couples should not reproduce since causing pain is morally wrong. He believes humans have a moral responsibility not to cause pain. According to most religions, people should abstain from sex before marriage, which has never worked.
In the Catholic tradition, the Church promotes the Rhythm Method, which works about as well as abstaining from sex. The only way not to procreate is to use birth control. In developed countries, more than 60% of women have birth control made available to them. In undeveloped countries, 25 to 30% of women have birth control. The American press usually states that every woman can obtain birth control. Yet, 15 to 30% of the women have access to it in the states where birth control is widely available. Benatar’s arguments seem more in line with an upper-class, college-educated person at a cocktail party than a philosopher. From his standpoint and for people similarly situated in his social class, birth control is available without restrictions. His solution to end suffering by exterminating life is not only irrational but unjust. For this reason, we could say that they are not moral conceptions but simply a means of Christian suppression by another name.
Mary: "EVEN PAIN IS NOT ALL PAIN"
*
THE ABSENCE OF GOD: “We are finally utterly on our own” ~ Nietzsche
~ “God disappears in the Bible. Both religious and non-religious leaders find this impressive and intriguing. Speaking for myself, I find it astonishing. The Bible begins with a world in which God is actively and visibly involved, but it does not end that way. Gradually through the course of the Hebrew Bible, the deity appears less and less to humans, speaks less and less. Miracles, angels, and all other signs of divine presence become rarer and finally cease. In the last portion of the Hebrew Bible, God is not present in the well-known ways apparent in the earlier books. Among God’s last words to Moses, the deity says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be” (Deut 31:17, 18; Deut 32:20). By the end of the story, God does just that. The consequences and development of this phenomenon in the New Testament and in the post-biblical Judaism are extraordinary as well.
As the people settle in their promised land, the remaining signs of divine presence and communication begin to diminish gradually. In the book of Joshua, the column of cloud and fire is no longer present, the glory of Yahweh no longer appears, and the text notes tat the manna ceases on the day after the people first eat naturally grown food in the land. The disappearance of the signs of divine presence is gradual.
In the book of Judges, the judge Gideon says, “If Yahweh is with us, then . . . where are all His miracles that our fathers told us about? (Judg 6:13) Gideon in fact gets his miracle, but miracles are fewer and farther between after this. . . . The diminishing apparent presence of God continues and even accelerates from this point. [Elijah on Mount Carmel] is the end of public miracles in the Hebrew Bible.
~ Richard Elliott Friedman, The Disappearance of God
“Why does the God who is known through miracles and direct interaction at the beginning of the Bible gradually become hidden, leaving humans on their own by the Bible's end? How is it possible that the Bible, written over so many centuries by so many authors, depicts this diminishing visible presence of God - and the growing up of humankind -- so consistently? Why has this not been common knowledge?”
(Oriana): This is an excellent question. Why has there been hardly any comment on the diminishment of god’s presence not only in modern times, but in fact already in biblical times? Is it only now that we are bold enough to see what has always been in plain sight? Also, we won't be burned at the stake for noticing the obvious.
The first part of Friedman’s book, “The Disappearance of God,” is by far the best. Of course he isn’t the only biblical scholar to have noticed the initial high involvement and then the gradual disappearance of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, but he writes in an accessible manner reminiscent of Jack Miles, who notes the same phenomenon in his prize-winning “God: A Biography.”
Still, the speculation on the causes of this disappearance is rather disappointing: yes, we can trace the narrative of how humans take more and more responsibility for themselves and are moving toward a “loyalty to the species” as the basis of morality, but the mechanism remains unclear. I think only Julian Jaynes was bold enough to offer an answer, which makes perfect sense to some (e.g. the lack of “mentalistic” vocabulary in the first five books of the Hebrew bible).
And then there is the disquieting statement by Yahweh himself: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” What kind of deity would behave in this way? One who satisfies his own curiosity with no regard for human suffering?
*
WHO CREATED GOD?
~ Who created God? It isn’t a bad question to ask, though it isn’t often queried about. While it is a valid question, it is a scary one. You know what they say…curiosity killed the cat! There is this sense that if we keep to ourselves and don’t go too dangerously far down the rabbit hole we will be ok. Perhaps the question is perceived as an irreverent one. Maybe we are afraid what it might mean that our minds have even reached a point where we suppose there might be an answer to this question. It is all a bit complicated, isn’t?
Earlier this year Hebrew and ancient religion scholar Francesca Stavrakopoulou published “God: An Anatomy.” While I have three seminary degrees I am no expert on the Hebrew Scriptures or history. When I teach or preach out of the Hebrew Testament I tread very carefully, as it was and is Jewish Scripture before it was my own and claimed by Christianity as the Old Testament. So when I saw this book was being published as such a large volume by a well respected scholar and thinker I was really looking forward to getting my hands on it. I must say, it did not disappoint. \When I handle and study Biblical texts, I don’t usually concern myself too much with empirical realities outside of it. Of course, I am interested in the world in which these texts were birthed and certainly reflect, but when it comes to interpretation the text usually can tell us all we need to know.
We have the god of the Bible and we interpret this god as such…within the bounds of its home, i.e. the biblical text and its narratives. That is the only way it makes sense, and we can then interpret and derive meaning.
However, if you are interested in the birth of the “God of the Bible,” Yahweh’s evolution and ancient near Eastern historical realities, and the ultimate question, “who created God?” we certainly have to go elsewhere. The Bible is not a history book; it is a deeply meaningful and spectacular religious narrative of a people and their own telling of their history with their god. And this is a beautiful thing.
I remember sitting in an Old Testament class on Wisdom Literature. This professor was seen as particularly liberal compared to some of the more conservative Evangelical professors. I remember sitting in his class one week and he started talking about Ba’al worship, the ancient Canaanite god of thunder and storm and son of El the great god and head of the Pantheon.
Most of you might have heard the name Ba’al or Ba-El before. It comes up over 90 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. Particularly, we can see that there are actual Psalms that talk specifically about the god of thunder and lightning, which would have been a direct reference to Ba’al. We also know from ancient Ugaritic texts and tablets that there are striking similarities in rhetoric. It stands to reason that the writer of the Psalms and Proverbs would have been familiar with the worship of their Canaanite ancestors and could have likely re-authored it in worship and in service to Yahweh. This is how my professor talked about it. And he wasn’t wrong.
I was so delightfully disturbed. To be frank, I was elated! This awakened and aroused within me so much desire to know more. Because, at the time I thought to myself, now I can engage in conversations with those who tried to debunk the authority of the Bible! And I encountered so many at that time in my life. The arguments were always the same…
“Did you know texts from Mark were taken from Homer’s odyssey?”
“Or what about that this: worship of Yahweh was actually for El and Ba’al and other gods?”
And now I could say (and did!) “Yes, I do. And here’s how that happened and here’s why it happened. The writers decided to give worship where true worship was due. And as a way to subvert other gods this is what they did.”
It was empowering and I loved it. I wasn’t threatened by anyone’s atheist argument. Even now, I find these arguments boring and tired and still a complete non-starter.
In any case, my professor didn’t take this all the way. He stopped a bit short of what most would have seen as heresy and that is the fact that this worship was actually for Ba’al. Not his fault. I think the administration would have ate him for breakfast if he had done so. There are lots of historical arguments and evidence that: 1. The Yahweh cult morphed from narratives and myths about El, 2. That Yahweh was actually Ba’al, 3. That there was still an active pantheon and worship of this pantheon at the time Yahweh worship started to emerge.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a safe enough space for him to say a lot of that.
But Francesca Stavrakopoulou does…and more.
One thing we must always remember, that I feel like I say often, is that we always make god in our own images. Which makes sense. Why wouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t we worship a god that relates, knows how we tick, and understands us?
In ancient times deities behaved like humans. This was a bit problematic when it came to the moral nature that gods would often take on, but this is how the gods related to humans and humans related to gods.
Back in the day, in what was known as the Levant (which is modern day Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine/Israel and Jordan), there was an extremely active Pantheon. El was the head, having 70 sons, one of which was Ba’al…and…one of which was (may have been) Yahweh. Yahweh, the son of El, the son of God. Historical documents (what we have) can corroborate this.
Historical documents are frustratingly silent when it comes to Yahweh worship emergence. We see Yahweh break onto the scene around late 2nd and early 1st millennium BCE.
It isn’t difficult to figure out that Israel, as a tiny nation that was forming, wanted to rise to the top. Yahweh eventually came to be known as a god of storm and war. Not as big and as bad (or as well known) as Ba’al ,but he did just the same. They wanted this sort of god to be their personal patron and give them a bit of street cred. Yahweh was actually a minor deity, but still a ferocious storm deity.
Stavrakopoulou says that he was “at the margins of the inhabited world” and this was within the “dangerous, mountainous wilderness.” Although Yahweh wasn’t alone as a “desert dwelling deity.”
He was part of the Shaddai gods, the gods that lived in the wilderness. Which also makes sense for Israel’s story. We also know that these desert deities were in subject to El, as we have record of El as El-Shaddai. This is El, head of the ancient Levantine Pantheon. The El, that according to Stavrakopoulou, is the one who is recognized by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It was the El of Isra-el or Yisra-el, the El of El Shaddai.
How Yahweh usurped El is “frustratingly unclear.” But, again, looking at the socio-political situation of the emergence of Israel and Judah, it is easy to see why they may have claimed personal patronage of Yahweh to enhance and legitimate their royal powers and kingdoms.
By the 9th century Yahweh is “firmly established as the head of the local pantheons of two kingdoms.” As we arrive to the writings of the prophets in exile we can see the case they are making. It isn’t Yahweh’s fault. He hasn’t abandoned us. We are still worshiping the other gods and we need to stop and worship Yahweh exclusively. Then he will help us.
And thus, we have the new image of the “god of the Bible”.
Myths snowball. Because gods reflect cultures, situations, needs and those they serve. And that changes with every new generation.
What does the birth of god have to do with the birth of Jesus? And does Jesus even matter if this is god’s origin story? The god of the bible anyway.
We are Christians because Jesus continues the beautiful trajectory of the story.
Jesus is a completely new interpretation of god -- a brand new son of god. One that would subvert not only the Roman Imperial cult, but the Yahweh cult, as well.
Our “god of the Bible” is the son of God (El), made in the image and needs of his people. Our Jesus-Son-of-god is the redesign. A brand-new launch!
The savior of the world and perhaps the savior of the image of god.
Maybe this was his attempt.
Maybe it might be our attempt, as well. ~
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/mariafrancescafrench/2022/07/who-created-god/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&fbclid=IwAR1YRmP8xfsmAcTVHKf7xWfKH3MTRjB6OxO2rGxmR326yxw3uh-HzABhZkI
Michael Theeke:
“Men rarely if ever dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.” - Robert Heinlein
Chris Spencer:
People who wanted control over other people created an invisible boogey man.
Mc McLear (Amazon):
“The Christian construct of God as a transcendent, invisible and incorporeal being is a distorted refraction, not a reflection, of the biblical image of God. The real God of the Bible was an ancient Levantine deity whose footsteps shook the earth, whose voice thundered through the skies and whose beauty and radiance dazzled his worshipers. This was a deity who crafted god-shaped humans from clay, and breathed life into their nostrils. But this was also a god who wept and talked and slept and sulked. A god who felt and fought and loved and lost. A god who sometimes failed and sometimes triumphed. This was a god more like the best of us and the worst of us. A god made in our own image.” (Epilogue, Chapter 21, “An Autopsy”, page 422/423)
“This emerging theological emphasis on the hiddenness of God would eventually give rise to the abstract, incorporeal deity of Judaism and Christianity – a deity no longer shrouded by fire and clouds, but only wondrous, inscrutable mystery. But Judaism and Christianity are post-biblical religions and their disembodied deity is a later reimagining of a god who was far from enigmatic. For the God of the Bible was a deity who not only had a body, but a personal name, a backstory, a family and a host of companions in the heavens.” (Chapter 1 “Dissecting the Divine”, page 18)
“‘One thing I asked of Yahweh, that I will seek ever after: to live in the house of Yahweh all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of Yahweh . . . Your face, Yahweh, I do seek!’ (Psalm 27.4. 8) . . . ‘Praise Yahweh, for he is lovely looking!’ another psalmist cries. ‘Praise Yah, for Yahweh is good-looking!’ yet another exclaims. (Psalms 135.3; 147.1)
In these songs of worship, God’s aesthetic qualities are more usually veiled in translation by the mistaken assumption that no one believed God had a body to be seen. His magnetic good looks are recast instead as immaterial moral virtues, so that, in most Bibles today, God is described not as ‘good looking’, but ‘good’; he is not ‘lovely looking’, but ‘gracious’.” (Part V Head, Chapter 17 “Headstrong Beauty”, page 333)
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HOW AIR POLLUTION CAUSES CANCER
~ Researchers say they have cracked how air pollution leads to cancer, in a discovery that completely transforms our understanding of how tumors arise.
The team at the Francis Crick Institute in London showed that rather than causing damage, air pollution was waking up old damaged cells.
One of the world's leading experts, Prof Charles Swanton, said the breakthrough marked a "new era”.
And it may now be possible to develop drugs that stop cancers forming.
The findings could explain how hundreds of cancer-causing substances act on the body.
The classical view of cancer starts with a healthy cell. It acquires more and more mutations in its genetic code, or DNA, until it reaches a tipping point. Then it becomes a cancer and grows uncontrollably.
But there are problems with this idea: cancerous mutations are found in seemingly healthy tissue, and many substances known to cause cancer — including air pollution — don't seem to damage people's DNA.
The researchers have produced evidence of a different idea. The damage is already there in our cell's DNA, picked up as we grow and age, but something needs to pull the trigger that actually makes it cancerous.
The discovery came from exploring why non-smokers get lung cancer. The overwhelming majority of lung cancers are caused by smoking but still, one in 10 cases in the UK is down to air pollution.
The Crick scientists focused on a form of pollution called particulate matter 2.5 (known as PM2.5), which is far smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
Through a series of detailed human and animal experiments they showed:
Places with higher levels of air pollution had more lung cancers not caused by smoking
Breathing in PM2.5 leads to the release of a chemical alarm — interleukin-1-beta — in the lungs
This causes inflammation and activates cells in the lungs to help repair any damage
But around one in every 600,000 cells in the lungs of a 50-year-old already contains potentially cancerous mutations
These are acquired as we age but appear completely healthy until they are activated by the chemical alarm and become cancerous
Crucially, the researchers were able to stop cancers forming in mice exposed to air pollution by using a drug that blocks the alarm signal.
The results are a double breakthrough, both for understanding the impact of air pollution and the fundamentals of how we get cancer.
Dr Emilia Lim, one of the Crick researchers, said people who had never smoked but developed lung cancer often had no idea why.
"To give them some clues about how this might work is really, really important," she said.
"It's super-important — 99% of people in the world live in places where air pollution exceeds the WHO guidelines so it really impacts all of us.”
RETHINKING CANCER
But the results also showed mutations alone are not always enough to cause cancer. It may need an extra element.
Prof Swanton said this was the most exciting finding his lab had come across, as it "actually rethinks our understanding of how tumors are initiated". He said it would lead to a "new era" of molecular cancer prevention.
The idea of taking a cancer-blocking pill if you live in a heavily polluted area is not completely fanciful.
Doctors have already trialed an interleukin-1-beta blocking drug in cardiovascular disease and found, by complete accident, they cut the risk of lung cancer.
Speaking to the BBC from the conference, Prof Swanton said: "Pollution is a lovely example, but there are going to be 200 other examples of this over the next 10 years.”
And he said we needed to rethink how even smoking causes cancer -- is it just the known DNA damage caused by the chemicals in tobacco or is the smoke causing inflammation, too?
Curiously, the idea that mutated DNA is not enough and cancers need another trigger to grow was first proposed by scientist Isaac Berenblum in 1947.
"Philosophically, it's fascinating. These incredible biologists have done this work 75 years ago and it's largely been ignored," said Dr Lim.
Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, stressed that "smoking remains the biggest cause of lung cancer”.
But she added: "Science, which takes years of painstaking work, is changing our thinking around how cancer develops. We now have a much better understanding of the driving forces behind lung cancer.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62797777
Oriana:
Interesting how in this article no one suggests that we need to reduce air pollution. Aside from causing lung cancer, air pollution has been implicated in asthma, emphysema, COPD, and chronic bronchitis. Particulate air pollution has also been linked to heart disease and stroke.
The involvement of an inflammatory cytokine, interleukin-1-beta, is also fascinating. Normally this cytokine would be useful in fighting infection. But obviously it's a two-edged sword, involved in harmful inflammation and autoimmune disease. Our own immune system becomes our executioner.
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STUDY SHOWS THAT REVERSAL OF ALZHEIMER’S IS POSSIBLE
~ In some excellent news about a horrible and gripping disease, Science Alert reports 10 patients with early Alzheimer’s disease responded to a clinical trial of a new treatment and showed the disease can be reversed. According to the researchers, this is the first study to objectively show that memory loss in patients can be reversed, and improvement sustained. The treatment caused the trial patients not only gain back cognitive skills, but also allowed them to return to work and become productive again. Some regained their ability to speak different languages, the reports says, and experience increased brain matter after just a few months.
The treatment, called metabolic enhancement for neurodegeneration, or MEND, is based on 36 different factors, including changes in diet, exercise, and sleeping habits, plus the integration of certain drugs, vitamins, and brain stimulation therapy to their regular routine.
A team from UCLA and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California reports that many of the patients showed real, life-altering, unprecedented, improved results.
The Journal Aging published this official results:
Alzheimer's disease is one of the most significant healthcare problems nationally and globally. Recently, the first description of the reversal of cognitive decline in patients with early Alzheimer's disease or its precursors, MCI (mild cognitive impairment) and SCI (subjective cognitive impairment), was published. The therapeutic approach used was programmatic and personalized rather than monotherapeutic and invariant, and was dubbed metabolic enhancement for neurodegeneration (MEND).
Patients who had had to discontinue work were able to return to work, and those struggling at work were able to improve their performance. The patients, their spouses, and their co-workers all reported clear improvements. Here we report the results from quantitative MRI and neuropsychological testing in ten patients with cognitive decline, nine ApoE4+ (five homozygous and four heterozygous) and one ApoE4-, who were treated with the MEND protocol for 5-24 months. The magnitude of the improvement is unprecedented, providing additional objective evidence that this programmatic approach to cognitive decline is highly effective. These results have far-reaching implications for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, MCI, and SCI; for personalized programs that may enhance pharmaceutical efficacy; and for personal identification of ApoE genotype.
This means there could be some benefit in getting tested for this genetic risk, because patients might finally be able to do something to stall the progression of the disease. Around 65 percent of Alzheimer's cases in the US involve APOE4.
Bredesen says "We're entering a new era” and the old advice to not get tested is no longer recommended as now there is a bonafide chance that early detection can lead to prevention and reversal. Ten studies of the patients can read about in their open access paper. One 69-year-old man began showing signs of progressive memory loss was to close his business. After 10 months of treatment returned to work and expanded his business. Here are two other examples.
One woman was barely able to do grocery shopping on her own before the treatment, but showed "marked improvement" that has now been sustained for 3.5 years.
Another patient regained her ability to speak two different languages after nine months of taking the treatment. "She remains asymptomatic after one year on the program," the team reports.
The results are remarkable. It’s noted that in order to retain the results, the treatment must be maintained. The trial had been conducted for four years and there are no findings on how long the treatment will last, but they did find that one patient who opted to go off the treatment reported a rapid decline after three months. A comprehensive analysis as to why the treatment works has yet to be published. At this point the study has only been tried on 10 patients. A larger study is expected that will allow a better understanding and more results, but this is the best news that has ever been released about Alzheimer’s. ~
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/21/1540972/-The-first-study-to-ever-show-Alzheimers-can-be-reversed-has-just-been-published?detail=facebook
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~ MEND incorporates multiple components including dietary adjustments (eliminating processed foods and simple carbs and eating more fruits, vegetables and fish), stress reduction, hormone balance, sleep optimization, plus the integration of varied cognitive activities and certain vitamins and supplements to the patient’s regular routine.
The results from the MEND study and other research on aging show that concentrating on lifestyle changes when used in combination with medications may improve brain health and possibly prevent or even reverse cognitive decline.
“Many aspects of MEND can benefit all adults whether they are experiencing a decline in cognition or simply wish to improve brain health, prevent onset of memory loss and neurodegeneration or simply sustain good health,” said Neurology Solutions Medical Director Dr. Robert Izor, M.S.
In addition to assessing the need for FDA-approved medications, injections and other advanced therapies, the center advises its patients to incorporate an anti-inflammatory diet, increase protein consumption, consider adding certain vitamins and supplements to their routine, and engage in exercise and cognitive activities. The center also assesses patients for sleep issues and hormone deficiencies and promotes physical therapy, meditation and other stress-reducing activities.
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TRANSCRANIAL ELECTRICAL STIMULATION MAY IMPROVE MEMORY
~ Neuroscientists at Boston University published a new approach to improve memory in elderly people. “This is an entirely different approach,” Robert Reinhart, who led the study, said in a press conference announcing the findings. The method uses specific frequencies of weak electrical current applied to the scalp at appropriate spots to target brain circuits responsible for short-term or long-term memory.
Twenty minutes of this stimulation on four consecutive days boosted both short-term and long-term memory ability in research participants aged 65 to 88, and the benefit lasted for at least one month after the experimental treatment. The method provides “an entirely new realm of potential new treatment options [for Alzheimer’s disease and other memory disorders]," Reinhart said.
Loss of memory is a hallmark of cognitive decline in aging, and it is a common complaint. Difficulty remembering people, places, and facts can become a severe disability with life-changing consequences.
Present methods of treating memory impairments in aging rely on drugs like Aricept to boost the strength of synaptic transmission. Synapses are the points of contact between neurons where chemical signals are relayed through neural circuits. Memories are believed to be formed by networks of neural connections that encode our experiences, so strengthening those connections should strengthen memory.
Unfortunately, cognitive enhancing drugs do not always work, and they can cause serious side effects. The method employed by Reinhart's team, of using electrical brain stimulation, exploits a new perspective on how the brain forms and recalls memories.
The new understanding comes from taking a “helicopter view” of how memories are stored and recalled; that is, how the brain operates as a complex network. A memory requires bringing together information that is perceived and stored in many different parts of the brain to form a coherent scene or concept. For example, recalling the word “Trump” evokes a rich complex of images, sights, sounds, emotions, and context to form a vivid memory quite different from that evoked by recalling the word “Obama.”
Sights, sounds, emotions, and so forth, are processed and stored in different places in the brain, and all of the puzzle pieces that form our complete concept of these words must be brought together to form and recall a specific memory. Scientists have long wondered how this happens, and recently a new possibility has emerged: brainwaves.
While it's well-known that neurons communicate by exchanging electrical impulses with each other, the buzz of neural activity in brain circuits is typically clustered and transmitted at specific rhythms. When populations of neurons fire electrical impulses, their combined discharges create an electrical field in the tissue surrounding them, and because neuronal firing is rhythmic, the surrounding fields of electricity oscillate at different frequencies. These rhythmic electric fields permeate through brain tissue as brainwaves, which even penetrate the skull, enabling scientists and doctors to detect them with electrodes placed on the scalp (EEG recording). The frequency of neural oscillations ranges from less than one cycle/second in delta brainwaves to 40-100 cycles/second in gamma waves.
But brainwaves are more than the electrical buzz of neurons at work; brainwaves provoke neurons to fire or inhibit them from firing at the peaks and troughs of the electrical waves. For this reason, brainwaves of different frequencies will coordinate populations of neurons to fire cooperatively at the same frequency, much like how different sections of an orchestra are precisely coordinated rhythmically in time. This is how all the diverse aspects of a memory could be brought together, by the electrical oscillations causing populations of neurons to follow in the specific frequency of a brainwave.
Neuroscientists have observed that theta waves (brain oscillations at about 5 cycles/second) strengthen synapses in parts of the brain that are critical for memory, and gamma waves (40-100 cycles/second) oscillate in the prefrontal cortex, where diverse types of information are brought together. Rather than giving a person a drug to improve memory, a better approach might be to use mild rhythmic electrical stimulation to boost the appropriate waves of neural oscillations that couple together all the necessary information for storing and recalling a memory.
A simple and harmless method to alter the power and frequency of neural oscillations in targeted brain regions is to stick an electrode on the scalp, and deliver a weak electrical current at the same frequency as the brainwave of interest. The electrical current is so mild it is barely perceptible as a slight tingle on the scalp. The weak voltage drops dramatically as the electrical current crosses the skull and penetrates brain tissue. By the time the current reaches the neurons, it is too weak to make them fire electrical impulses. However, when delivered rhythmically, in sync with the brain’s neural oscillation, the effect builds, like the combined force mounting rhythmically as people push in synchrony to free a car stuck in mud.
In this study, 150 elderly participants, including many who experienced their memories weakening with age but not suffering from Alzheimer’s or mild cognitive impairment, were fitted with caps studded with electrodes to deliver currents at specific frequencies targeted to brain regions involved in memory. Stimulation was applied as they underwent a memory test. A list of 20 words was read to them and the subjects were then asked to recall as many words from the list as they could remember. This was done five times during 20-minute sessions, while the prefrontal cortex (behind the forehead) and parietal cortex (near the temples) were stimulated at either the gamma or theta wave frequency. The process was repeated each day for four days, and the results showed that memory recall improved incrementally each day the appropriate electrical stimulus frequency was delivered to the appropriate brain region.
Theta wave stimulation of the parietal cortex improved short-term memory, which we use to hold information in our minds temporarily. Gamma wave stimulation of the prefrontal cortex improved long-term memory, which can persist for days or years.
The researchers found that when they switched the stimulus to deliver theta wave stimulation to the prefrontal cortex and gamma wave stimulation to the parietal cortex, there was no improvement in memory. This control experiment supports the conclusion that augmenting the appropriate frequency of neural oscillations in appropriate brain regions boosts memory, rather than the tingling scalp heightening attention, which is also known to improve memory.
The data showed that people who had the poorest baseline memory performance showed the greatest improvement in memory. This inspires the researchers to consider “personalized” memory enhancement by measuring brainwaves by EEG or using functional brain imaging to identify specific weaknesses in neural oscillations in a person’s brain before designing the appropriate stimulus for that individual.
Remarkably, the study found that the improvements in memory lasted at least one month after the treatment. This means that the memory boost from the current while information was being remembered and recalled resulted in persistent changes in those neural networks that strengthen memory ability.
In addition to using electrical stimulation, there are many other well-known ways to change brainwaves. For example, lights flashing at gamma frequencies have recently been shown to stimulate the brain’s immune cells (microglia) to engulf the toxic beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease.
In studies on mice, this treatment reverses the cognitive decline caused by the disorder. This approach is now undergoing experimental studies on human patients. In an email interview, Reinhart agreed that rhythmic light or sound stimulation might well be used to enhance memory, as could neurofeedback, which can also change brainwave power and frequency in specific brain regions.
As Reinhart wrote, “Electrical stimulation connects with the language of the brain. The brain speaks to itself and communicates with itself through electrical impulses.” By tapping into that electrical dialog and modifying it, brain performance and dysfunction can be modified directly in a drug-free manner. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-brain/202208/using-electricity-researchers-find-surprising-memory-results
Mary:
Both studies on Alzheimers are exciting , largely because the methods do not involve drugs with their inevitable baggage of secondary effects and complications. Both approaches are holistic and non-invasive, with very little risk of harm. I was particularly interested by the stimulation with mild electrical waves. Sounds very Zen.
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ending on beauty:
A spruce fell over in a storm
leaving the roots upended
and a dark, cave-like hole beneath.
Eerie, maybe the den of an animal now.
It seems I was born there, sucked milk,
long ago. Is my mother there.
I can’t tell, don’t want to know.
~ Kerry Shawn Keys
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