Reliquary of the Holy Umbilical Cord, Cluny, 1407. The counterclaim, however, is this: A section of the Holy Umbilical Cord believed to remain from the birth of Christ, is currently in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome.*
HOMELAND
Here and everywhere is my homeland.
~ Czeslaw Milosz
Twenty years later I’m told I am foreign.
How naïve to have thought
I’d grow out of it. As if I could erase
that Columbus Day:
in the morning I had a homeland;
in the evening I had two suitcases.
Twenty years later under desert sky,
I remember the stencil
of drizzle in Warsaw.
On the sill of our old kitchen,
pigeons ruffle like small gray clouds.
My uncle and my father
raise a toast with żubróvka,
the buffalo vodka, the bottle lit
with a blade of buffalo grass.
I ought to remember
in more vivid color,
but I was carelessly young.
I tried so hard: changed my name,
ate only with my right hand —
eager to throw away extra vowels
and hands. Twenty years later
men still want me to touch them
in French, slide toward them
on slow Slavic looks:
“You know how to treat a man —
you’re from the Old World.”
I must be very old —
parks and ponds with weeping
willows, centuries of rain.
Yet my true homeland is not
lilac gardens, nor childhood’s
palaces of clouds. Among statues
in a museum, no one says,
as I used to, “Excuse me,
I’m foreign.” No one is foreign.
~ Oriana
October, my month of fate. Columbus Day: a strange personal coincidence since it’s the anniversary of my arrival in America. By now I know it’s pointless (and dangerous to my mental health) to wonder if I’d made a gigantic mistake, the greatest mistake of my life from which all the rest followed like the unfolding of a Greek tragedy. It’s my number one no-think zone.
Of course I’ve also gained in various ways. I think I have a larger mentality for having grappled with the enormous difficulties of being an immigrant — of having experienced poverty, for instance. But that’s perhaps a rationalization, since I can’t predict how my intellectual development would have proceeded if I’d stayed.
Once, years ago, I had an unexpected thought: if I had gone to the University of Warsaw, I would have had a ball. The thought went through me like an ecstatic revelation. Yes, that would have been real youth, real springtime, in the magical city I loved. But just minutes later I realized that I had no basis for thinking that. Maybe, for whatever reasons, I would have been miserable and yearned to leave the country.
In any case, I don't blame myself: the opportunity to see America — "to see the world," as I thought about it — arose, and I took it without giving a single thought to possible negatives.
THE ONLY CERTAINTY: The price I paid in suffering is huge. There is only one word I have to say to a prospective young immigrant: don’t. Don't even think about it. If life in your homeland is dangerous and/or truly difficult to endure, that may be the only good reason to leave. But if your life is rich and interesting (as mine was in Warsaw), don’t even think about it. Drop on your knees and deeply thank whatever gods you believe in that you that you have a homeland.
I always loved the clouds over Warsaw.
*
RUSSIAN POETS AND WRITERS BATTLE FOR RUSSIA’S SOUL
~ The last time people were writing in Russian so urgently was in the late nineteen-eighties, when Soviet citizens were confronted with the terror of the Stalinist past. ~
~ Russia says that it has expanded. On September 30th, President Vladimir Putin signed a document that ostensibly accepted four Ukrainian regions as members of the Russian Federation. The residents of those regions, Putin said in a speech, “have become our citizens forever.” He made this assertion as the Ukrainian Army was liberating the territory to which Russia was laying claim. He was not just trying to snatch propaganda victory from the jaws of evident military defeat; he was laying the groundwork for fighting for those lands ever more aggressively. A week and a half earlier, he had ordered the military to draft hundreds of thousands of new soldiers, and had threatened to use nuclear weapons.
A Russia that includes parts, or all, of Ukraine and untold other lands is the Russian World, a vague and expansive idea pioneered by the self-styled philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, some of whose ideas have been adopted by the Kremlin. In August, his thirty-two-year-old daughter, Darya, also an imperialist pundit, was killed by a car bomb that may have been intended for him. the Times reported that U.S. intelligence believes a part of the Ukrainian government may have been behind the attack. If true, this suggests that the government puts strong, probably unfounded, faith in the power of the concept of the Russian World.
Putin, in his speech, described both the Russian World and the larger world as he sees it. According to Putin, the West destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991, but Russia came back, defiant and strong. Now the West wants to destroy Russia. “They see our thought and our philosophy as a direct threat,” he said. “That is why they target our philosophers for murder.”
The ultimate goal of the West—specifically, the United States and Great Britain—is to subjugate people around the world and force them to give up traditional values, to have “ ‘parent No. 1,’ ‘parent No. 2,’ and ‘parent No. 3’ instead of mother and father (they have completely lost it!),” and to teach schoolchildren that “there are some other genders besides men and women and offer them sex-change operations.” Putin has said, repeatedly, that only Russia can save the world from this menace. This is the story of a world in which his war in Ukraine—and the draft, and even, perhaps, a nuclear strike—makes sense.
But when the world shaped by the feedback loop of propaganda collides with the world of facts on the ground, things begin to crack. On October 5th, two videos circulated widely on Russian-language social media, including in normally pro-war quarters. The videos show a crowd of men in uniform. They say that there are five hundred of them and that they were recently drafted. They complain of “animal-like” conditions, of having to buy their own food and bulletproof vests, and of a lack of organization. “We are not registered as part of any detachment,” one man says. “We have weapons, but these are not officially issued to us.” Meanwhile, some Russian television propagandists have been acknowledging Ukrainian victories, and urging Russians to prepare for a long wait before their country can attack again.
It’s too early to make assumptions about where these tiny cracks may lead. It is not too early, however, to think about what a future, militarily defeated Russia might look like. This is what Alexey Navalny, the opposition politician who has been in prison since January, 2021, has been doing. The Washington Post recently published an op-ed, smuggled out by Navalny’s legal team, in which he writes that Russia deserves to lose the war and that, once it does, it must be reconstituted as a parliamentary, rather than a Presidential, republic. This, he argues, will insure that no one person can usurp power in Russia as Putin has.
Navalny’s op-ed serves to illustrate Putin’s wisdom, of sorts—the wisdom of keeping his most important political opponent behind bars. Navalny seems to have missed a cultural turning point. In the seven and a half months since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their country. Many of them are journalists, writers, poets, or artists, and they, along with some who are still in Russia, have been producing essays, poems, Facebook posts, and podcasts trying to grapple with the condition of being citizens of a country waging a genocidal colonial war. Some of their Ukrainian counterparts have scoffed at their soul-searching.
Ukrainians, indeed, have bigger and more immediate problems. But they also have certainty — they know who they are in the world, while for Russians nothing is as it once seemed to be.
One of the earliest examples of this outpouring was a poem, by the children’s-book author Alexey Oleynikov, about the incongruity of trying to flee Russia with a pet hedgehog in tow. One stanza reads, “We will not wash the shame off until our old age, until we die / There have been worse times, but there has never been a more ridiculous time.” Posted on Facebook, the poem went viral in March. May’s viral poem, by the actress and poet Zhenya Berkovich, tells of a young Russian man visited by the ghost of his grandfather, who fought in the Second World War; the ghost asks his grandson to forget him, lest the memory of his valor be used to justify the current war.
This month’s viral poem, by Eli Bar-Yahalom, an Israeli Russian, is a dialogue between God and a Muscovite who hopes to return home someday. “There is no resurrecting Bucha, no raising up Irpin,” God says, referring to suburbs of Kyiv where Russians appear to have committed war crimes. There are also at least two Russian-language podcasts devoted to the issues of individual and collective responsibility for the war. And Linor Goralik, an acclaimed Russian writer born in Ukraine and living in Israel, has founded an online journal called roar (Russian Oppositional Arts Review), which has published three packed issues.
The last time people were writing in Russian so urgently was in the late nineteen-eighties. Soviet citizens back then had been confronted with their past — the Stalinist terror. That moment gave Russia, among other things, Memorial, the human-rights organization that, along with Ukrainian and Belarusian activists, won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Now Russian citizens are being confronted with their present. The writers in exile have physically fled their country (as has much of Memorial’s leadership) and are trying to write their way to a new Russia. Their imagination extends far beyond the Russian constitution to a world that’s radically different, and better than not only Putin’s revanchist Russian World but the world we currently inhabit. ~ Masha Gessen
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/17/the-war-in-ukraine-launches-a-new-battle-for-the-russian-soul?utm_source=twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&utm_medium=social&s=04&fbclid=IwAR2tux3aTXBaD4A5ZjBSVF60kQHUBT_jA9A4KQCXQ5cJ2JlfjoJlz44tm1o
*
KERCH BRIDGE AFTERMATH
Kerch Bridge the day after. The fire was so intense the tracks softened and buckled under the weight of the train.
The damage above can be patched up in relatively short order, but the damage from fire and explosion likely means there will be serious weight and speed limits on the rail track from now on. Again, this will not help Russian logistics, and they were already shambolic before the attack.
It’s one more piece in the mosaic of Russian defeat and historic humiliation at the hands of Ukraine. ~ Tomaz Vargazon, Quora
AltDermative:
Since security will be tighter, that means an additional slowdown. It also means security has to be reduced somewhere else.
*
PUTIN’S OVERREACH (MISHA FIRER)
Putin and his supporters are not just fighting Ukraine and the NATO block, but also Turkey, China, India who gave him an ultimatum that if he does not end the war in two months they would join Western sanctions. At this point, Russian economy will grind to a halt.
Except for a handful of bloodthirsty dictators, Putin has managed to pit the whole world against himself. He’s fighting the humankind with middle-aged drunks and tanks manufactured same year when Yuri Gagarin flew into space.
Putin is this century’s number one loser.
He even pissed off his ultra-fascist supporters releasing 215 Azov fighters on the same day he crossed the invisible line and ordered to mobilize one million cannon fodder from his core base who were all for cheering war sitting on a couch.
Putin has basically thrown everyone under the bus.
How can one man manage to mess things up so badly?
Putin the Imbecile, Putin the Buffoon and everyone who’s ever supported him did that out of avarice or to inflate their own self-worth.
Russian political commentator Sergey Parkhomenko summed the public sentiment in his VK post:
“So it happened. The veil was taken off people’s eyes.
I’m reading the neighbors’ chat of my apartment complex in Moscow. We didn’t discuss anything more serious than manicurists, dog lost, and payment for the broken gates lock. And now what do I see — arguments about mobilization, and if men want to die for something they don’t need, to kill people who had done nothing bad to them.
The Pharaoh shot himself in the temple with this mobilization.
Propagandists’ hard labor of many years collapsed in a matter of one day.
People feel now that this is their war, and they imagine themselves at this war.
The question is how long this sensation will last and how it will develop.”
At some places people swear at each other. At another place, a highway was cordoned off.
Tears of mothers, wives, children by the buses with new recruits. At another video, a nation taking off from the airports. Loudly. Comprehensively. Evacuation at the borders — traffic jams for tens of kilometers.
Now war has come into every family.
Very few are aware that they have been sent to fight for one goal only — to extend for another month or two the 23-year stay in power of comrade Putin.
The trend is clear. You can’t sell an elephant with such mood. And it’s just the first day of mobilization. Nobody will fight.
With this army they won’t capture Kharkiv but rather Kremlin.”
He spoke emotively addressing his compatriots.
“Guys, where are you going? It’s time to get off your knees, Russia. Stand up already, Russia! Enough! Enough! From 1999. For twenty two years. For how much longer? Are you not tired of being slaves? I think that you’re tired. Any upstanding man would get tired of being a slave for so long. Do you have millions of dollars in the offshores? Some have yachts, mansions, factories overseas. And others have no toilet at home. Not a toilet where you squat, but a toilet to sit like a normal, civilized person. You get it?”
Indefatigable Russian soldiers dug a hole in the ground and threw over some planks to shit like back home.
“Give me this little. And when you gave this little, they always want more. Guys, believe me. It’s better to be in jail and be alive than to go where you don’t know where and to die for what you don’t know.” ~
*
Anthony Higham:
Today Russia is like the alcoholic who has hit rock bottom and just realized it.
David Roetzel:
A large mobilization has large problems — are these recruits going to bring their own winter clothes and enough food for the cold and wet? To redo a quote Quantity has Needs of its own. Winter is coming.
Pavel Aseev:
Some of them brought their own equipment and medicine only to discover that it would be taken by commissars. Instead they got something cheaper and of much worse quality. PMC Wagner calls draftees to join them instead of official army to avoid such cases.
Janos:
Putin has been absolute ruler of a great power, and this does weird stuff even to the most level head. I don’t think Putin of even 10 years ago would have made this gross a miscalculation. Some say beware of whoever comes after Putin, as they might be even worse, but whoever that might be, they wouldn’t have lost touch with the world as much as a longstanding, lonely ruler had. By definition they must have a clearer view of how the world works now. Besides, anybody seizing power in Russia must have the backing of several others, and I doubt several high-ranking Russians would be crazy enough to support someone even more looney than Putin.
Talking big now, without an ounce of responsibility, fearing the fanaticism of others is one thing — being in power is something quite another.
And one more thing: I recall Putin casually saying he himself doesn’t use a computer. As he is an old man, I believe it translates to he cannot, meaning he wouldn’t understand things like Twitter, nor how these things would be useful. He wouldn’t ask his aides “And what do they say on Twitter?” -- he doesn’t even understand the concept. This is important, as these are the things he cannot control and his people cannot write for him. Anybody who comes after him would have a pretty good idea what people of Russia and the world think, and why it’d be a good idea to consider the public opinion. That there is such a thing as public opinion and strange as it sounds, it matters.
James Roche:
A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Instead of ending the war right here and now and withdrawing from the Ukraine, which would be a defeat, Putin is on collision course with the total destruction of his military forces a la Hitler at Stalingrad who also would not withdraw and instead had his entire 6th Army destroyed.
*
Like
Stalin, Putin perfectly understood the implications of the
colonial roots of Russian civilization on our politics. For the mass of
commoners, any major change—especially if it comes from above and has a
“foreign” feel about it—has been bad news. You need to assure people
than you’ll protect them from change, wherever it comes from, no matter
what. ~ Dima Vorobiev
*
HAS PUTIN SHIFTED TACTICS IN UKRAINE?
Mobilized soldiers in Tatarstan recorded a video with complaints that authorities force their relatives to buy helmets, bullet proof vests and uniforms for them.~ Putin has gone to great lengths to keep everyone down and equally enslaved to his personalized power. After a total defeat of the liberals, he is going after fanatics of special military operation Z.
They have criticized president’s lackadaisical war efforts and called for the reprisals against commanders for failed operations at the front and "steps of goodwill."
Suddenly, far right war correspondents and bloggers realized that patriotic frenzy will not save them from repressions.
Legendary Strelkov-Girkin (a famous sniper) is on the hit list, and he has not logged into his channel since October 10.
If they don’t go and get ever stopped again, they will be forcefully taken to conscription centers and then sent to training facilities after they purchase all the military equipment and gear they require using their own money.
In Ufa, a city in west-central Russia, capital of the Bashkir Republic, a plane full of passengers about to fly to Turkey was kept on the runway for 2 hours, after which it was announced that the flight was canceled because the co-pilot was mobilized.
In Moscow, police and employees of enlistment offices ambush men at the exits of metro stations and give them mobilization notices.
Men are afraid to walk the streets now. Sales of tickets to concerts has cratered. Municipality organizes free concerts of famous musicians to empty concert halls.
At noon, the Mitinsky market in Moscow was cordoned off by the police. The police targeted young people who are on the lists of military enlistment offices as draft dodgers.
After checking, about forty men were taken away from the radio market, put into two buses and sent to the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, after which they were taken to mobilization points.
The truth is mobilization has no “waves”. It’s a non-stop meat grinder and authorities will do their best to conscript millions like in WW1 and WW2 in order to conquer Ukraine, which is what Putin wants more than anything else, and the sacred wish of the tsar shall be obeyed.
How will tsar’s sacred wish reflect on demographics?
Putin is effectively committing genocide against the Russian people with their full consent.
According to demographers, the combination of mobilization and emigration will deprive the Russian Federation of 3-6% of men in the best case scenario.
It will sink Russia to the bottom of the demographic hole by 2030.
It it predicted that in 2024 there will be the lowest number of births in Russia since the end of the 18th century. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Kathy Stacey:
Wow! I follow Girkin on Telegram. It certainly seems he has met his end via some “accident.” Last post on his channel was at 12:28 pm Moscow time on Monday. Will it ever end?
James Packer:
China isn't doing much better. By 2050, 1 in 3 Chinese will be over 60. By 2075, it will be nearly half the population. By then, the population will also have cratered to 750 million. This year or the the next, China will reach peak population. There ever after, their population will contract. The birthrate in China has decreased year after year, and statisticians project this trend will accelerate. In 50 years, there will be empty, crumbling cities in China. There will not be a large enough tax base to pay for the swelling population of pensioners.
Mike Leadsome:
The round up tactics are reminiscent of those used by Germany, 1939–45.
Oriana:
Putin now says that he’ll end the mobilization in two weeks. But can we believe anything that Putin says? He seems determined not to be defeated at any price, and that price could be horrendous for the entire world.
*
QUALITY BEATS QUANTITY: LEADERSHIP AND MORALE STILL MOST IMPORTANT
~ For all the technology that has been used in the war, the main lesson is one of leadership and morale. Having seen the Western trained, but utterly corrupt, new Iraqi army turn and run from Islamic State, and the Western trained, but utterly corrupt, Afghan National Army roll over to the Taliban, few people would have been surprised if the Armed Forces of Ukraine had done exactly the same thing.
However, instead of stuffing his pockets with bank notes and fleeing in an American helicopter, President Zelensky stood and fought. So did all his generals, his soldiers and most of the population. At every stage of the conflict, we have had press briefing from upbeat Ukrainian generals, seen pictures of smiling Ukrainian troops and defiant Ukrainian civilians preparing defenses, telling Russian troops to go home or, in the most iconic pictures of the war, stealing their abandoned military vehicles.
Meanwhile on the Russian side it has been a tale of utter woe. Bewildered POWs, desperate phone calls home, doom filled intercepted radio messages and completely inept propaganda.
Usually in war the side that attacks first has the advantage of surprise. Here Russia seems to have surprised itself. The conscripts went from being on a ‘training exercise’, to being ‘liberators’ to being abused by locals and then blown up. It’s not often you can feel sorry for an invading army, but I do here.
So those are my first two takeaways so far. There will be more when the dust has settled. Perhaps then we can decide if it was material or morale that won this war for Ukraine, but either way we can say quality has beaten quantity. ~ Martin Porter, Quora
*
RUSSIA CAN NO LONGER BE CONSIDERED A SUPERPOWER (MISHA IOSSEL)
~ One of the collateral consequences of this disastrous war in Ukraine has been the growing international realization that not only Russia can any longer be considered a superpower — it is not even a first-tier world power with a strong military and much of a forward-bound metaphysical reason for its continued existence, at this point.
Putin, of course, awash in hubris, had been hoping to accomplish exactly the opposite outcome with his colossally misconceived Ukrainian gambit. But there you have it — the irony of fate, by the title of the most popular late Brezhnev-era movie in the Soviet Union. Man supposes, God disposes.
Putin has been exposed as a failed war leader. His grip on power is now greatly weakened. He is in a precarious political — and indeed, existential — situation, and he is desperately trying to demonstrate his "toughness," his being "up to the task," to his increasingly shrill hardline critics, by bombing Ukraine's civilian population. This will not postpone his already predetermined, unenviable fate for long. He has seen the writing on the wall. ~
Oriana:
I'm not so sure that Putin has seen the writing on the wall. Dictators have a way of getting out of touch with reality, with no one daring to tell truth to power. But we will see, we will certainly see . . . and already we wonder if Putin's successor might be even worse.
*
LEFT-WING AND RIGHT-WING PRO-PUTINISTS
~ Left-wing pro-Putinists are noisy on Twitter, but in the end, they cannot do much for him. The people who *could* have power to rescue Putin from this debacle of his own-making are the pro-Trump candidates hoping to win seats in Congress next month and then stop aid to Ukraine.
Left-wing pro-Putinists see Putin as useful because he might weaken or destroy US and Western influence in the world. For them, his corruption and appeals to racial and sexual bigotry are regrettable defects to be concealed or denied.
Right-wing pro-Putinists see Putin as exciting because he offers a model of how they would like to govern their own countries. For them, Putin's corruption and appeals to racial and sexual bigotry are thrilling examples to emulate. ~ David Frum, Senior Editor, The Atlantic
*
Civilization die by suicide not by murder. ~ Arnold Toynbee.
Oriana:
It seems we are watching the Russian Empire commit suicide. And hopefully whatever comes after will be more civilized. I know, I know, and I'm not holding my breath . . . 
Putin and Lukashenko
*
HOW THE MOBILIZATION IS COMING ALONG
~ The second wave of mobilization has just got vicious. Men are ambushed at work, in the metro, in restaurants, during smoke breaks and handed conscription notices.
Millions of men are missing from the apartments where they are registered and skip work further dragging down the economy. To mobilize one percent of the reservists, ten percent will go into hiding.
Putin decided to destroy Russia to revenge Ukraine’s defiance. Let everything and everyone burn!
The reaction of women is most peculiar — they bury themselves in work and chores pretending that nothing is going on and get extremely annoyed when they are reminded there’s a war in Ukraine.
“Authorities in Europe are trying to shift responsibility to Russia for their own mistakes, that Europeans must stock up on firewoods like in the medieval times,” complained Vladimir Putin.
In Altai Republic in Russia 39% of households heat their homes with firewood. In Buryatia - 43%, Zabaikalsky Krai 50%, Tuva 88%.
The face of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Maria Zakharova, still can’t accept the fact that values are more important to Europeans than personal comforts — unlike the regime that she’s been serving that has zero values but many vices. Speaking of Zelensky’s insistence on the new package of sanctions against Russia, she tweeted:
“In EU, people don’t take showers, don’t wash clothes, don’t fill in the car tank with gas and don’t take their clothes off at home, and the clown needs another package of sanctions. He used the old one.” ~
*
EURASIANISM: A SPECIAL KIND OF RUSSIAN FASCISM
Imperial March in Moscow organized by philosopher Alexander Dugin’s supporters. Symbol of Eurasism — arrows pointing into eight directions; each direction is Russia.
The son of a military intelligence officer, philosopher Alexander Dugin spent time in a mental institution as a young man. Little did he know that he would be instrumental in turning all of Russia into a mental institution.
Dugin did it by selling compatriots on a simple, fascistic maxim: “All the good people are Russian.” Russians can do no evil, while whoever is not Russian can’t be that good.
Fascism was a hard sell to people in Russia that had lost 37 million citizens to it between 1941 and 1945. Dugin hid fascism in his seminal work “Fourth Political Theory” under the name Eurasianism.
A Eurasian is a follower of political and theological thought of the post-Bolshevik Revolution emigration, which saw the future of Russia after the fall of communism in a pivot to the east, the rejection of democracy and market economy.
Dugin called for foundation of The Moscow Kingdom as the heir of the Tatar-Mongolian horde, rather than Kievan Rus, from Shanghai to Lisbon, as a primitive, pre-industrial, feudal state where men would be obliged to grow beards (“beardlessness along with pederasty were introduced by Peter the Great” and “shaving is a mental castration”) while women will be dancing miles-long circle dances day and night when not churning out good Russian babies untainted by Atlantism.
Everything West-related, which he calls “Atlantism,” is anathema to Dugin (he drives a Toyota Land Cruiser Prada and owns an iPhone).
Dugin especially hates surfers:
“The worst ghettos will be created for the surfers — it is the most brazen, the most anti-Eurasian phenomenon. There is nothing more disgusting than cruising with a white-tooth smile on that hideous board.”
And skateboarders:
“A man turns a baseball cap the wrong way round and puts on wide-leg pants and walks. Hums rap while picking his nose, relaxing. Understood. What does it mean? He’s haunted by the spirit of Atlantism. He serves Leviathan. It’s not total immersion yet but an object of close observation. When there’ll be a lot of us, we won’t let such person walk freely down the street. We’ll round him up and place in a special ghetto for the sick. There they can draw down pants, grimace like on MTV and jump on those heinous boards on wheels.”
In "Fundamentals of Geopolitics" Dugin called the independence of Ukraine “an existential danger to Russia.” He proposed the idea of establishing political control of Russia over the south-east of Ukraine and Crimea.
Dugin didn’t formulate anything original, he just provided paranoid and insane urgency to other thinkers’ thoughts that resonated with Putin’s KGB-screwed mind.
It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, who called the independence of Ukraine and Belarus in 1990, a year before the breakup of the Soviet Union, “a tragedy that must be avoided.” Solzhenitsyn considered the Ukrainian literary language artificially created in Austria-Hungary and “stuffed with German and Polish words.”
Hence it was the Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn who gave gravitas to the claim that Ukraine is an artificial country and Ukrainian is an artificial language.
Dugin was the first in Russia who went on record to label America Satan, and call up “to kill, kill, kill Ukrainians.”
In 2010, Dugin’s extremism didn’t find fertile soil and he lost his professor job in Moscow State University, access to presidential administration, and stopped getting invitations to speak on federal TV stations.
Businessman Konstantin Malofeyev has peddled the concept that Vladimir Putin is a monarch, Russian citizens are his subjects, and together with the help of Orthodox Christianity, they’re rebuilding Russian Empire.
In 2016-2017, businessman Konstantin Malofeyev founded Tsargrad TV, Russian answer to Fox News, with an Orthodox Christian twist. Alexander Dugin helped Malofeyev to reach out to far-right movements in Europe and the United States.
From his academic career, Dugin retained connections in the academic and ideological circles with countries like China, Iran and Turkey that have pronounced anti-Western sentiments.
Dugin has finally become mainstream in 2022. Russian propagandists and talk show hosts call Western international community that support Ukraine “satanists,” and in his speeches Putin delivers ideas and messages of far-right organization in the US, Iran and China that Dugin has translated as the editor-in-chief of Tsargrad.
Russian fascism has come to fruition with the invasion of Ukraine.
There is Big Satan — the US, and Small Satan — Ukraine that has been possessed with Atlantism.
Patriotic Russians kill satanists and process through filtration camps citizens of artificial country Ukraine to make them good Russians, kidnap Ukrainian children to bring them up in good Russian families.
Newly found fame brought tragedy into Alexander Dugin’s family. His daughter, who popularized Russian fascism, died in a car blast. And his son might want to join the mobilization to put into practice his father’s theories. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Paul Barends:
Wait a minute, wasn’t Israel the little Satan already? They should call Ukraine the medium size Satan.
Terry Stewart:
Both German fascism and Soviet communism had personality cults around their “Great Leaders” (Hitler and Stalin), both had illusions about the special destinies of their countries, and while theoretically, Soviet communism didn’t believe in the superiority of the Russian people and was against antisemitism and racism in general, in practice those ideas seemed to have been tolerated, and occasionally positively endorsed as far as antisemitism goes. In addition, both countries had similar ideas about the repression of dissent, employing security services with license to kill civilians deemed acting against the state.
Joseph Milosch: MANY PEOPLE ARE COMFORTABLE WITH FASCISM
Many people feel comfortable with fascism. It circles underneath the pro-democratic society like a shark. Yet, its weakness is that it depends on a cult leader. There are generally 7 to 12 characteristics used to define a cult leader. But the most important characteristic is never mentioned. That characteristic is that the cult leader rationalizes murder and lack of repentance, and the cult believes remorse and unlawful death as sanctified.
Perhaps that is because it also defines what the major religions provide their followers. Cults and religions generally have an Us versus Them mentality where anybody who is outside of the community is seen as inferior to the group. They promote this mentality under the deceptive guise of evangelism. Their actions are sanctified and there is no need for redemption. Guilt is used as a key tool for enforcing compliance.
None of the characteristics of cult leaders explain why most followers will die when the cult leader tells them. The most famous cult leaders in the last fifty years have led their followers down the road to death.
· David Koresh of the Branch Davidians, an off shoot of the Seventh Day Adventists, in a confrontation with the US Government had 75 of his 100 loyal followers executed by his loyalist followers before they committed suicide in Waco, Texas.
· Reverend Jim Joness, a Methodist Minister, took his followers to Jonestown, Guyana, and in an international conflict over executing a US Congressman convinced over 900 of his followers to commit suicide by drinking arsenic-laced Kool aid.
· Although Trump’s demise mat not have occurred, DT convinced his followers not to get vaccinated over a dispute with science. He was backed by most conservative Christians. Over a million people died in the US. In most of the deaths, the people refused to become vaccinated. Reports on the Covid pandemic estimate that 60% to 90% of the total deaths were the unvaccinated followers of Trump.
History classifies these dictators as cult leaders.
· Mussolini the Prime Minister in Italy. Over 3,000,000 Italians died during WWII
· Hitler the chancellor of Germany Over 9,000,000 Germans died during WWII (Not counting the Holocaust because the victims were not cult followers.)
· Stalin the General Secretary of the Soviet Union. (In the millions, though the exact number is unknown.)
· Mao the General Secretary of the Republic of China. (In the millions, though the exact number is unknown.)
Today, two dictators are considered Cult leaders
· Xi Jinping, the President of the Peoples Republic of China.
· Putin, the President of Russia.
In the end when the Cult leader fails, his last act is to oversees the murder of the commune, the destruction of his legacy, and his ego turned to dust.
Oriana:
I remember that when Xi was officially made “president for life,” Trump announced it on TV, then stated on, “Isn’t that nice?” — signaling to his base that he could use such a nice change to the constitution.
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IS RUSSIA RUNNING OUT OF AMMO?
~ Russia is running out of artillery shells and Grad rockets and digging deeper and deeper into old stocks that go back to WWII.
Analysis of shell craters from overhead photography indicates that about 70% of Russian artillery shells are duds. Some are exploding or cooking off when fired, there are lots of short-falls (which generally hit friendly troops) and the ones that fly successfully are experiencing fuse failures that result in them exploding on contact with the ground instead of overhead. This is a major reason why so few entrenched Ukrainians troops are being killed.
From a tactical standpoint, the Russians dispersed its artillery in ones and twos to avoid being hunted down by drones and artillery. This left them unable to mass artillery fire to repel the Ukrainians. And it made for quick abandonment by the troops.
Even worse than ammo is artillery tube life. Russian artillery is rated for about 1,125 full-charge shots. Most Russian artillery pieces are now well over 5,000 shots without tubes being replaced. This results in exploding artillery and a complete loss of accuracy. The Ukrainians are reporting that captured artillery is mostly worn out and unusable until the tubes are replaced. (They captured an ammo train with a lot of replacement barrels, however.)
Grad rockets are in a similar situation. Like artillery shells, the solid propellant does not age well and forms cracks and cavities that cause short-falls and defective fuses make for about 70% duds. You see many pictures of Grad rockets that failed to explode.
Russia can still make artillery shells and Grad rockets, but would have to shift production to a full wartime footing to keep up with their losses. That is why they are buying artillery shells and Grad shells from North Korea (though these are likely to be just as old and even more defective.) ~ R.W. Carmichael, Quora
I know I've posted a similar image before, but I can't resist the symbolism of this rusty Russian rifle.
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MISHA FIRER ON RUSSIA’S ECONOMY AND FUTURE
~ Putinism, the system of governance where political and business elites are allowed to make themselves filthy rich at everybody else’s expense till they forget they’re supposed to serve the interests of people, is economically and morally bankrupt.
Indeed, Putin hasn’t invented the rules of the game. It was Boris Yeltsin who gave away the key industries to oligarchs and concentrated all the power in his own hands. Putin perfected it while everybody partied from a deluge of petrodollars, until the system of total corruption has inevitably rotted away.
We have reached the point where it becomes awfully clear that it has all been one giant mistake.
You don’t give away industries to random guys.
You don’t hand a president executive, judicial and legislative powers.
You don’t allow corruption to be the single factor for officials’ motivation.
And even more importantly, self-enrichment for the top ten percent and propaganda and terror for the rest is a dead-end ideology.
What comes after?
I’m afraid there’s only way to go — back to communism. Won’t be too hard psychologically speaking. All the communist symbols are still on full display. Lenins are still standing in every square and red stars adorn Stalin’s Art Deco high-rises.
It won’t be statist as in the Soviet Union, more akin to China. There will re-nationalization of extraction and other key industries. Small and medium sized business will be encouraged with free money and less red tape in exchange for the complete loyalty to the state. There will be five year plans. A firewall for the Internet. China will be the new bestie.
On the positive side, American and European left will lose all the steam to re-construct glorious Soviet Union in a given country, because Russia will be doing all the dirty work for them. ~ Quora
Alexander Ramsbottom:
China isn’t really a communist country anymore. It is an authoritarian state that has adopted capitalism to modernize their country and improve the lives of their people. If anything, the CCP has more in common with Imperial Chinese Dynasties such as the Han, Tang and Ming that it does with the CPSU.
Dave Panja:
China has been influenced by Confucianism for more than a thousand years.
It is an authoritarian meritocracy society. Most of the time the country is run by bureaucracy based on performance (imperial civil service exam started in 650 CE), not by hereditary or political connection.
China is a scholar bureaucrats society.
They purged the landlord aristocrats long time ago.
I could be wrong. May be the problem with Russia throughout the history is : the aristocracies with religious elites dominated political and economic power, and currently the new aristocracies in Russia are the oligarchs behind Putin.
Misha Firer:
The structure won’t change though — aristocracy will still be at the top. The difference is they’ll share or go to gulag Soviet style.
Guy Body:
What Putin has done reminds me a lot of feudalism — industries and regions (eg Chechnya) handed over to oligarchs and thugs in return for their loyalty.
Steven:
Russia has millions of acres of unpopulated land which is warming up nicely thanks to climate change. If she had any sense she would be encouraging immigration to boost her economy and bring in skills and talent from abroad.
Misha Firer:
Yes, I wrote many times than in 100 year, Russia will have a population one billion climate refugees, a mixture of Indians, Africans and Middle Easterners.
Mark Helfenstein:
Looks like Brazil. Always astonishes me how these two countries being so different are so similar.
Jim Matlock:
All this thievery. What happened to superior “proletarian morality” and the New Soviet Man? After all, the Communist Party ran the country with an iron fist for at least three generations. Stalin purged millions of saboteurs, wreckers and “cosmopolitans” (whatever they were).
Alex Miroshnychenko:
Except that Russia will never be able to replicate the Chinese model. It does not have the cultural cohesion, nor the socio-historic background or a prevailing Confucian philosophy which facilitated the rise of the PRC.
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HIV IN RUSSIA
~ More than 1 million people in Russia are infected with HIV.
For a developed country, Russia has a surprisingly high number of people living with HIV and AIDS. Recently, the number of people living with HIV in the country reached 1.2 million. Shockingly, the numbers are out of control. Every year, the rate of infected people in Russia is rising by 10-15%. That means more than 250 people are getting infected every day.
The number comes from the country's heavy use of injectable drugs, the study found. About 1.8 million people (2.3% of the population) use injectable drugs. Most of the other infections come from sexual partners. About 49 percent of new infections come from opposite-sex partners. Clearly, sex workers and partners of people who inject drugs are at higher risk of contracting the virus.
Estimates suggest that about 500,000 Russians are infected with HIV and do not even know it. The most common reason they gave for not testing themselves was lack of access to testing. The government had acknowledged the HIV crisis in the country and was taking measures to strengthen sex education and the use of resources in order to curb the epidemic. ~ Freeman, Quora
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HOW PEOPLE WITH LITTLE POWER TAKE REVENGE IN PETTY WAYS
~ People who have little to no power in society sometimes seek out ways to have power over people, even if just for a moment. That includes things like:
Crossing in front of them very slowly, so the person in the car has to wait.
Listening to very loud music in a public place, so everyone else has to hear it too.
Swearing and/or being very loud when talking in public places.
Providing bad customer service when they suspect the customer is of a higher social class.
Being rude to professionals that are trying to help them (teachers, doctors, etc…)
Taking an adversarial attitude towards any authority figure (their boss, teacher, police, etc…)
Complaining unnecessarily about a product or service they bought.
All of these things come across as being obnoxious, but, for some poor people (not all of them), it’s the only way they get any attention or feel like they have any power in society at all, even if it’s just the power to annoy.
A similar thing happened with the disabled teenagers I used to work with. One kid would purposely drive his wheelchair into people, because it was often the only way he could get those people to acknowledge his presence. ~ Matthew Bates, Quora
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HANNAH ARENDT: LONELINESS CAN LEAD SOME PEOPLE TO EMBRACE TOTALITARIANISM
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …
~ from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt
‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’. After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere. Her colleagues lacked a sense of humor, and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life. She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each.
As a word, ‘loneliness’ is relatively new to the English language. One of the first uses was in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, which was written around 1600. Polonius beseeches Ophelia: ‘Read on this book, that show of such an exercise may color your loneliness.’ (He is counseling her to read from a prayer book, so no one will be suspicious of her being alone – here the connotation is of not being with others rather than any feeling of wishing that she was.)
Throughout the 16th century, loneliness was often evoked in sermons to frighten churchgoers from sin – people were asked to imagine themselves in lonely places such as hell or the grave. But well into the 17th century, the word was still rarely used. In 1674, the English naturalist John Ray included ‘loneliness’ in a list of infrequently used words, and defined it as a term to describe places and people ‘far from neighbors’. A century later, the word hadn’t changed much. In Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), he described the adjective ‘lonely’ solely in terms of the state of being alone (the ‘lonely fox’), or a deserted place (‘lonely rocks’) – much as Shakespeare used the term in the example from Hamlet above.
Until the 19th century, loneliness referred to an action – crossing a threshold, or journeying to a place outside a city – and had less to do with feeling. Descriptions of loneliness and abandonment were used to rouse the terror of nonexistence within men, to get them to imagine absolute isolation, cut off from the world and God’s love. And in a certain way, this makes sense. The first negative word spoken by God about his creation in the Bible comes in Genesis after he made Adam: ‘And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man is alone; I shall make him a helpmate opposite him.”’
In the 19th century, amid modernity, loneliness lost its connection with religion and began to be associated with secular feelings of alienation. The use of the term began to increase sharply after 1800 with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, and continued to climb until the 1990s until it leveled off, rising again during the first decades of the 21st century. Loneliness took up character and cause in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ (1853), the realist paintings of Edward Hopper, and T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922). It was engrained in the social and political landscape, romanticized, poeticized, lamented.
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When Arendt added ‘Ideology and Terror’ to Origins of Totalitarianism in 1958, the tenor of the work changed. The elements of totalitarianism were numerous, but in loneliness she found the essence of totalitarian government, and the common ground of terror.
Why loneliness is not obvious.
Arendt’s answer was: because loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection. She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness.
Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realize our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.
In order to illustrate why loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism and the common ground of terror, Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness, and loneliness from solitude.
Isolation, she argued, is sometimes necessary for creative activity. Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation. One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude but, once alone, one is always able to turn back:
Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship – without being isolated.
Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible.
Totalitarian movements use ideology to isolate individuals. Isolate means ‘to cause a person to be or remain alone or apart from others’. Arendt spends the first part of ‘Ideology and Terror’ breaking down the ‘recipes of ideologies’ into their basic ingredients to show how this is done:
ideologies do not explain what is, they explain what becomes;
ideologies rely on logical procedures in thinking that are divorced from reality;
ideological thinking insists upon a ‘truer reality’ that is concealed behind the world of perceptible things.
The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.
But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them skeptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment:
Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Organized loneliness, bred from ideology, leads to tyrannical thought, and destroys a person’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction – to make judgments. In loneliness, one is unable to carry on a conversation with oneself, because one’s ability to think is compromised.
Ideological thinking turns us away from the world of lived experience, starves the imagination, denies plurality, and destroys the space between men that allows them to relate to one another in meaningful ways. And once ideological thinking has taken root, experience and reality no longer bear upon thinking. Instead, experience conforms to ideology in thinking. Which is why when Arendt talks about loneliness, she is not just talking about the affective experience of loneliness: she is talking about a way of thinking. Loneliness arises when thought is divorced from reality, when the common world has been replaced by the tyranny of coercive logical demands.
We think from experience, and when we no longer have new experiences in the world to think from, we lose the standards of thought that guide us in thinking about the world. And when one submits to the self-compulsion of ideological thinking, one surrenders one’s inner freedom to think. It is this submission to the force of logical deduction that ‘prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others’ for tyranny. Free movement in thinking is replaced by the propulsive, singular current of ideological thought.
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Life is messy. Amid the chaos and uncertainty of human existence, we need a sense of place and meaning. We need roots. And ideologies, like the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, appeal to us. But those who succumb to the siren song of ideological thinking must turn away from the world of lived experience. In doing so, they can’t confront themselves in thinking because, if they do, they risk undermining the ideological beliefs that have given them a sense of purpose and place. Put very simply: people who subscribe to ideology have thoughts, but they are incapable of thinking for themselves. And it is this inability to think, to keep one’s self company, to make meaning from one’s experiences in the world, that makes them lonely.
Arendt’s argument about loneliness and totalitarianism is not an easy one to swallow, because it implies a kind of ordinariness about totalitarian tendencies that appeal to loneliness: if you are not satisfied with reality, if you forsake the good and always demand something better, if you are unwilling to come face-to-face with the world as it is, then you will be susceptible to ideological thought. You will be susceptible to organized loneliness.
Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness is felt most sharply in the company of others. Just as much as we rely upon the public world of appearances for recognition, we need the private realm of solitude to be alone with ourselves and think. And this is what Arendt was stripped of when she lost the space to be alone with herself. ‘What makes loneliness so unbearable,’ she said ‘is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude …’
In solitude, one is able to keep oneself company, to engage in a conversation with oneself. In solitude, one doesn’t lose contact with the world, because the world of experience is ever-present in our thinking. To quote Arendt, quoting Cicero: ‘Never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.’ This is what ideological thinking and tyrannical thinking destroy – our ability to think with and for ourselves. This is the root of organized loneliness. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness
Oriana:
Verlassenheit does not mean "loneliness." It means being abandoned. The closest I can come to reconciling verlassenheit with loneliness is standing all alone in front of a difficult task, without help and emotional support.
But in terms of the common meaning of loneliness, I agree that loneliness is felt most acutely when one is with people who are not kindred minds -- with whom there is no real connection.
Mary: MOST PEOPLE DON’T CRAVE TRUTH, THEY CRAVE HOPE
Arendt's opinion on loneliness and ideologies, totalitarian ideologies such as threaten us now, illuminates much, I think, in the situation we face in the US. The MAGA crowd, Trump's base, the insurrectionists, had their most bitter resentments, their most racist fears and prejudices, their deepest feelings of, yes, abandonment and rejection, pandered to and amplified. This is what energizes them, the overwhelming promise of winning at last, of "getting over" on the elites and the educated liberals who only disregard them as 'deplorables' who inhabit all that empty "flyover country" that doesn't really matter.
So, ratify their resentment, amplify their hate, but to really make it work you have to separate them from any other version of reality than the one you stand for and command. Any sense of an objective reality, of evidence-based truths, of rational and critical thought, has to be undermined and destroyed. In this way the ideologue becomes the great leader, possessor of the only actionable truth. You owe him all, and will never question the absolute correctness of his actions and orders. Here is Hitler, Stalin, Jim Jones, even smaller actors like Manson.
This kind of system works like a cult, and is satisfying to its members because it replaces their essential loneliness with the opposite of abandonment. They are welcomed and enfolded in this great mass of people that all share the same script, this is home for them now. They will protect it with their lives.
For this to work the way it does first all things outside the desired ideological narrative have to be undermined. We saw this in action with the promotion of thousands of lies, conspiracy theories, and assertions of "alternate facts." Was there really a violent armed mob of insurrectionists attacking the Capitol and democratic process of election on Jan. 6th, or were they concerned citizens, unarmed and acting only from the best of motives?? Was Ashli Babbit a treasonous criminal or a martyr and victim??
At this point you cannot depend on logic, rationality, or demonstrable evidence. There is no argument that will convince, because all has been inverted, lies are truth and truth is lies..the lies themselves become wilder and wilder, more elaborate and surreal...liberal cannibal pedophiles meeting in a pizza shop basement. The fact that there was no basement means nothing because the believers are no longer anchored in a consensual reality shared with anyone outside their cult.
And as you say, most people don't crave truth, they crave hope. Don't want analytics, hard decisions and responsibilities, but miracles that comfort and enthrall...the image of a god magically emblazoned on a cloth, prayers guaranteed to "work," a savior who hates the same folk we do, sweet revenge on all who cut us out from things we so richly and righteously deserve.
Sometimes all this throws me into a state of agitation close to terror, and I have to try and convince myself all will not be swept under by the totalitarian nightmare still there, seething, threatening to move and overwhelm all that stands against it.
I’m afraid I may be just repeating myself . . . like a prayer or protest, a kind of novena against Armageddon . . . but then we know, don't we, just how useless those prayers and novenas are.
Oriana:
“Most people don’t crave truth; they crave hope” has been among my best insights ever. It gets at the core of religion or any ideology. At the same time, statements such as “there is no afterlife,” or, to use one of my own, “If god allowed Auschwitz, god will allow anything” undercut wishful thinking. For many people, that’s just too painful, so they’ll suppress anything that goes against their hopes for happy endings and eternal bliss. But that disquieting little voice of reason keeps on whispering, creating tension. Hence the need for a group of fellow believers. And that’s perhaps the main reason why atheists may encounter hostility — the very existence of atheists is a threat to faith without any convincing evidence.
Mary:
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STALIN’S ARCHITECT AND THE HOUSE ON THE EMBANKMENT
“Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death.” ~ George Orwell
~ For Boris Iofan, the most prominent of Stalin’s architects, the patronage of a murderous dictator came at serious personal risk — as much to his critical reputation as to his life. Rather than not build at all, he was prepared to build what the dictator demanded of him. As a result, Iofan is now remembered not for his considerable talent, but for the way that his buildings came to define Stalinist architecture as it was practiced from Warsaw to Beijing.
Ever since the summer of 2008, when I visited his former apartment on the top floor of Moscow’s famous House on the Embankment, I have been unable to get Boris Iofan out of my mind. The House — which is in fact a large complex with more than 500 apartments and its own cinema, theater and department store — was one of his most significant projects.
Iofan’s apartment had hardly been touched since his death 30 years earlier. From its windows I could see the golden domes of the new Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a replica of the historic church destroyed by Stalin to make room for the Palace of the Soviets. Iofan had watched the demolition of the original cathedral from this same window. In these rooms, surrounded by friends and colleagues — many of whom would soon be murdered by Stalin — he had celebrated his victory in the competition to design the palace, which he intended to be the world’s tallest building.
Later, he watched a perfect circle of giant cranes rise on its construction site like a hollow crown, in a futile struggle to drag his reluctant building up from the mud. When the German army threatened Moscow in 1941, the crown imploded and the site went quiet; it remained so for a decade after the war. All Iofan’s hopes for the project were finally drowned when Nikita Khrushchev had the palace foundation pit flooded to create a huge open-air swimming pool. Iofan did not live to see the reappearance of the cathedral.
Except perhaps for Minoru Yamasaki and his World Trade Center in Manhattan, no architect of the 20th century has designed a structure that has become more politically charged with meaning, or that has come to play such an important part in a country’s history and culture. But while the Twin Towers were immolated, Iofan’s House on the Embankment survived, even as so many of its residents fell victim to Stalin’s violence.
Boris Iofan in his study in Moscow in the early 1950sThe apartment had the smell of years of neglect. A plastic shower curtain had been slung over boxes of Iofan’s papers, but it did little to protect them from the dust generated by workmen attempting to modernize the kitchen. Under his desk was a plaster maquette of the Lenin statue he had designed to stand atop the Palace of the Soviets. On a table was another of a worker, right arm raised over his head in a conscious paraphrase of the Statue of Liberty: this had formed the basis for a huge stainless steel figure that topped the Soviet pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, an incongruous tribute to the proletarian revolution in Queens.
I found sheaves of black-edged official envelopes in a box. Among them was a telegram marked “SECRET” from Vyacheslav Molotov, dispatching Iofan to Stalingrad in a military transport plane immediately after the surrender of the German forces to advise on the reconstruction of a city that had been all but destroyed. Nearby were stacks of photograph albums; in one, an image of Iofan and his aristocratic half-Italian wife Olga, daughter of a Russian princess, taking tea with Frank Lloyd Wright at a conference in Moscow. In this picture Iofan appears a sympathetic, sensitive-featured man in his mid-40s, hair combed back from a high forehead. His wife, with a cigarette in her hand and a briefcase under her arm, looks animated, an equal partner in the conversation with the notoriously egotistical Wright.
After this visit, I began trying to learn as much as I could about what had gone on in Iofan’s mind as he saw his work turned into a monstrous tribute to Stalin — as much as it is ever possible to know about the internal lives of others. I tried to piece together all the disparate elements, the surviving objects and records, in a way that made sense. Mostly I was driven by a desire to understand the part that architecture had played in the state apparatus of one of history’s most murderous regimes. But I was also drawn in by Iofan himself and the remarkable life that this stylishly dressed, distinguished figure — who looked disarmingly like my own father — had lived. I had spent six years studying architecture myself; what would I have done in Iofan’s place?
In the course of Iofan’s 45 years in this apartment, his bookshelves had filled up with volumes devoted to his own work as well as to that of the Renaissance masters he admired. His drawings of interiors for the Palace of the Soviets had been peeled away from his drawing board, to be framed and hung on the walls: no longer working documents, but fading memorials to what might have been. The chaotic mess of books, papers, fraternal greetings, medals, and ancient electrical appliances felt like the residue of an entire system — which is exactly what it was.
Outside, on that June day, Moscow was booming. A cascade of oil money was floating an armada of Prada stores where the more discreet customers left their bodyguards, dressed in camouflage uniforms, waiting on the pavement while they shopped. There were sushi restaurants with cellars full of Petrus, streets lined with Hummers with blacked-out windows. But the House on the Embankment smelled of sour decay. It was no longer the heart of the city.
As if in mockery of the red stars Stalin had impaled on the Kremlin spires across the river, the building was topped by a huge, revolving three-pointed Mercedes star — a relic of the wild excesses of the immediate post-communist period. That emblem has gone now, its removal ordered by Moscow’s mayor in 2011.
Things were very different in 1937, when Thomas Sgovio, a young and idealistic Italian American communist from upstate New York living in Moscow, visited Iofan in his apartment: number 426 on the sought-after top floor, facing the river. In those days many people in Moscow lived in miserably overcrowded conditions, sometimes went hungry, and were dressed mostly in worn-out clothing and shoes patched together with scraps of sacking. Inside the House on the Embankment was a cocoon of what would have seemed to them like unimaginable luxury.
Sgovio was hoping for Iofan’s help in securing a place at one of Moscow’s art schools. They had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance who knew Iofan from his own time as a student in Rome. Sgovio was baffled by the process of finding his way to the Iofans’ apartment in such an enormous building with so many entrances. He had to produce a special permit, leave his passport at the guard post and follow an official escort to the lift. From there, an attendant took him up to the 11th floor. A maid let him into the apartment and he was welcomed by Olga, a stately-looking woman who spoke in perfect English and offered him tea. Then Iofan himself appeared, the streaks of white in his dark hair adding a distinguished touch to his appearance.
Sgovio had been horrified by his experiences of everyday life in Moscow. When he ate in a workers’ canteen, the scraps of food he left on his plate were grabbed from him by hungry neighbors. It was not what he had expected from the world’s first socialist country. The Iofans’ home felt like an entirely different world, and he was charmed by their kindness. He also remembered noticing that Iofan’s clothes “were foreign-made — grey tweed slacks, black sleeveless sweater, white shirt, brown Oxfords with thick sponge soles — which gave him a youthful appearance.”
After tea, Iofan invited Sgovio into the studio and settled down to examine his portfolio of drawings. He looked at them carefully and commented politely, handing them to Olga for her to see the work for herself. Standing in the center of the room, which had skylights and a view of the river, was a model of the Palace of the Soviets. Was this the actual model chosen by Stalin, Sgovio asked? Iofan laughed. “No, that one is even larger. This is my personal working model.”
They talked about New York, a city Iofan had recently visited. He told Sgovio that he did not think much of modern American architecture: “It represents an ugly expression of capitalism. The skyscrapers are tall, rectangular boxes, made of shiny steel and stone, made to hide the ghettos of the poor beneath them. This is the architecture of the rich, eh? There is no spaciousness, no room to breathe.”
As Iofan showed him the model of the palace, Sgovio recalls him saying: “You see what I mean about spaciousness. The Palace of the Soviets will be the tallest building in the world. The radius of the base is more than its height. Can you imagine the capitalists building something like this in New York? The land on which it would stand costs millions, perhaps billions. It would take centuries for them to capitalize on the cost of the land alone. Here the land belongs to the people, and the Palace of the Soviets will belong to the people.”
Sgovio never did go to art school; he was arrested by the secret police at the gates of the American Embassy shortly after his meeting with Iofan. Convicted of being “a socially dangerous element,” he was sentenced to 16 years of forced labor. He survived a series of prison camps by using his artistic skills to draw tattoos for the criminals who were incarcerated alongside him. Many years later, back in America, he wrote an account of his disillusionment with communism — Iofan never had the chance to read it, but it might have prompted him to see some parallels with his own life story. Both men had joined the Communist Party out of conviction; both had chosen to move with their families to the Soviet Union; and both had used their talents as a means of staying alive.
Boris Mikhailovich Iofan died in 1976, the same year that “The House on the Embankment,” a bestselling novella by the Moscow writer Yuri Trifonov, was published. Iofan was 84 – a long life by any standards, but particularly impressive for the Soviet Union – and being cared for at Barvikha, a sanatorium he had built for the Communist Party elite nearly 50 years earlier.
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“The House on the Embankment” is a lightly fictionalized account of the experiences of people living in Iofan’s austere complex of apartment blocks, located just across the river from the Kremlin. At the time he designed it, in the late 1920s — when the revolution was still a recent memory and an inspiration to many communists — it was known as Government House, and it would be home to most of the Soviet elite during the 1930s. Trifonov’s novella made such an impact that its title immediately became the building’s popular name, and today the House on the Embankment remains one of Moscow’s most prominent landmarks.
The House on the Embankment, across the Moskva River from the Kremlin, was the most substantial achievement of Iofan’s career. It was a city within the city, built to house the Soviet elite, including the architect himself. During Stalin’s purges 300 of its residents were executed.
Iofan, his wife, two stepchildren and his younger sister Anna were among the first to take up residence in the House, moving in at the start of 1931. With the exception of two years when he
was evacuated during the Great Patriotic War, he would live there for the rest of his life, sharing it with his stepdaughter after the deaths of his wife and his brother Dmitry in 1961.
Yuri Trifonov also lived in the House on the Embankment during the 1930s. He was present on the night that his father, who had been a hero of the Bolshevik revolution, was marched away to his death. Shortly afterwards, his mother was sent to a labor camp. Trifonov was just 12 years old at the time; she did not return until he was 20. Like many other victims of Stalin, the Trifonovs’ truncated lives are commemorated today in the line of wall plaques mounted near the entrances to the House. As many as 800 of their fellow residents — one-third of the people living there in 1932 — were eventually arrested by Stalin’s secret policemen, and more than 300 of them were shot.
“The House on the Embankment” captures the paranoiac mixture of privilege and fear felt by all those, including the Iofans, who lived in this “huge grey apartment house with its 1,000 windows giving it the look of a whole town.” Trifonov depicts a building patrolled by white-gloved militiamen, with all-seeing lift operators employed by the Ministry of the Interior guarding access to its apartments, on corridors that smelled of cooking. He portrays the anxiety of lives spent in the unspoken knowledge of secret listening rooms where policemen labored day and night, transcribing conversations relayed by microphones embedded in walls and listening in on telephone calls. Even as late as the 1970s, these things could not be discussed openly.
“The House on the Embankment” first appeared in an issue of the literary monthly Druzhba narodov (Peoples’ Friendship), and later as a book. Many critics were amazed that it had been published at all, especially in a magazine
with a reputation for taking, at least in Soviet terms, a culturally conservative position. There were some savage r
eviews by various orthodox defenders of the regime who would have preferred to see it sink without trace, but in spite of their efforts it was a huge success. Its acknowledgment of the psychological damage caused by decades of dishonest public rhetoric was like a gulp of life-saving oxygen in the stifling airlessness of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union.
It is impossible to know whether Boris Iofan read Trifonov’s book before he died. But he might well have encountered Trifonov as a child decades earlier, playing around the fountain in one of the building’s three courtyards. Contemporary accounts suggest that Iofan was an approachable and genial figure, ready to entertain the children of the building in his home. He and Olga had the luxury of an apartment spacious enough to accommodate Boris’s personal studio (his official studio was beside the Kremlin walls) and a live-in housekeeper. Before the war he kept his Buick convertible, purchased during a trip to the U.S. in 1934, in the garage beneath the building.
Elina Kisis, daughter of the party official I. R. Kisis, later recalled visiting Iofan as a 10-year-old.
“During the day Boris Mikhailovich liked to work in his studio and I would often go and visit him there. He grew fond of me and used to show me beautiful pictures, books, and postcards, give me apples and pat me on the head. There for the first time I saw many things that we and others did not have. There were some dark, shiny figures and figurines (probably bronze, but also a few white marble ones) on tall stands. There were lots of paintings and other mysterious things. In the middle of the studio, on tripods, were some huge drawing boards with pictures of a tall building that looked like a Kremlin tower, with a man on top. ‘That’s Lenin,’ he said.”
In Trifonov’s book there is a character whose home has space to host 50 guests for a party and “corridors that feel like museum galleries.” Elsewhere, he describes priceless 19th-century Russian seascapes lining the walls of one apartment and plaster busts of great but politically suspect philosophers, “probably acquired in Berlin,” on the library shelves of another. He mentions the progressive-looking lampshades and the modernist government-issued furniture (designed by Iofan) in one of the more modest three-room apartments. Many other residents had the means to buy and install their own custom-made furniture, imported in at least one case from England.
Iofan would have clearly understood the dilemma that faced anyone for whom meeting the demands of Stalin and his enablers was the price of remaining in these apartments — even of staying alive. As a child, Trifonov’s protagonist, Vadim Aleksandrovich Glebov, in a fit of schoolboy hooligan envy persuades two of his friends to assault the son of a high-ranking NKVD officer living in the House on the Embankment. Later, Glebov reveals their names to the official, believing that he has no choice if he is to secure the officer’s help in arranging the release of a relative of his who has been arrested. His friends are never seen again — but Glebov’s relative stays in the gulag. As a graduate student after the war, Glebov is encouraged by the party cell at his university to inform on a professor suspected of so-called “cosmopolitanism.” The professor is not only a resident of the House on the Embankment, but is about to become Glebov’s father-in-law. What can Glebov do but comply, if he is to secure academic tenure after completing his doctorate? With no apparent difficulty he betrays his fiancée and her father, his teacher, for the sake of a safer and more comfortable life.
Iofan was himself accused of cosmopolitanism in 1949, and it cost him the chance to build Moscow State University; but 10 years earlier, he had an even more difficult challenge to deal with. He had to close his eyes while Stalin set his torturers to work on Aleksei Rykov, former premier of the Soviet Union and one of Iofan’s closest friends. It was Rykov, in fact, who had given Iofan the task of building the House on the Embankment, and the two had been neighbors there before his arrest.
It was not enough for Iofan simply to keep silent. The price he had to pay for designing the Palace of the Soviets — the most important building of his career, on which he began working even before the House on the Embankment was finished — was to keep up a continual stream of praise for the genius of Stalin. Even after Rykov’s judicial murder, Iofan declared: “Never before has an artist been able to devote himself in this way to an art that is placed at the service of the workers, at the service of a new and remarkable culture, the culture of a communist society – as now, in the era of the great Stalin.”
In his well-cut tweed suits and knitted ties, with his sensitive, watchful eyes, Iofan appeared to be the model of a liberal modern architect. However, he seems to have willingly declared his devotion to “the leader of peoples, the inspirer of all our victories, Comrade Stalin, who helped us to arrive at the final form of the Palace of Soviets. We live in the great era of joyous creative labor.” Iofan wrote his own speeches, so it seems reasonable to conclude that he was prepared to say whatever he needed to in order to stay alive. To this day, his surviving family members believe that despite everything, he always respected Stalin.
Iofan was not vindictive in the way of some of his contemporaries, such as Karo Alabyan, architect of the Red Army Theatre in Moscow with its notorious floor plan in the form of a five-pointed Soviet star. Alabyan’s campaign against those he claimed were Trotskyite architects and Gestapo agents led directly to the death of Mikhail Okhitovich, a visionary urban theorist who was arrested and executed as a result of his denunciation. Alabyan was equally eager to destroy the career of the prodigiously gifted Ivan Leonidov; and there almost certainly were other victims.
But although Iofan did not betray his friend Rykov — and indeed seems to have made an effort to help Rykov’s daughter when she was subsequently imprisoned in a labor camp — he remained loyal to the regime that had killed him. He said just enough in public to do his duty, to help impose Stalin’s will on his architectural colleagues and ensure his own reputation for reliable loyalty. In 1929, when the strikingly original winning design in a competition to build the Lenin Library was abruptly abandoned in favor of a piece of socialist realist architecture, it was Iofan the party deployed to endorse the decision at a public debate. He was prepared to put his talent at the service of the “leadership of the militant vanguard of the Soviet people’s struggle.”
Another of Iofan’s close friends was the charismatic theater director and actor Solomon Mikhoels, a kind of Soviet counterpart to Laurence Olivier. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the two men were founder members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee; Mikhoels became the committee chairman, touring the world to raise money and support for the USSR. After the war, when Mikhoels had outlived his usefulness, Stalin had him secretly murdered as a first step towards dismantling the committee. Before the majority of the committee’s members were arrested, Iofan was proposed by the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) as a more reliable replacement to take over the leadership. And in the course of his career he also worked closely with the three most fearsome leaders of the Soviet secret police: first Feliks Dzerzhinsky, then Genrikh Yagoda and finally Lavrenty Beria.
While none of the characters in “The House on the Embankment” is based directly on Iofan, the book vividly describes the milieu in which he and his family lived. It depicts the building in its pomp during the 1930s, when its residents enjoyed luxuries hard to find in Moscow. Iofan designed a hair salon for their exclusive use; a department store, stocked with imported items unobtainable elsewhere in Russia; a laundry; a billiard hall. There were home film shows, and there was a remarkable abundance of food. Even in the midst of the catastrophic man-made famine in Ukraine, which touched the whole country, the comfortable matrons of the House on
the Embankment could complain of a day-old cake as “stale.”
In 1941, Iofan led a team of architects and artists whose task was to camouflage sites such as the Kremlin, Red Square and the Bolshoi Theatre in order to screen them from German bombing raids. But, as Trifonov writes, “there was no way to disguise the river; its shining surface reflected the stars, its bends marked out the districts of the city.” Trifonov wrote about “cold, clear, starlit nights” when “anti-aircraft guns flashed incessantly all around and deafened us with their noise. I shall never forget that smell of powder smoke above the roofs of Moscow, the clatter of shell splinters falling on sheet iron and the sad smell of burning coming from somewhere beyond Serpukhovskaya Street.”
The House on the Embankment “was surrounded by near misses.” Iofan and his family experienced for themselves the chaos of being evacuated, as portrayed in Trifonov’s book: “The evacuation trains left at dawn, but they had to go to the rail station hours beforehand because the business of getting on the train was so chaotic.” Iofan was one of the few who not only survived Stalin’s purges, but subsequently returned to Moscow — although, as Trifonov describes it, the House on the Embankment was never quite the same after the war.
Through a mixture of luck, judgment and calculation, Iofan stayed alive while many of his friends and colleagues did not. Trifonov too was able to negotiate his own accommodation with the regime, although he was one of only seven out of more than 7,000 Writers’ Union members to protest at the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Georgi Markov, secretary of the union, rebuked him: “No matter how great a talent a writer may possess, it can be expressed with full clarity only in an atmosphere of struggle for implementing the great social transformation that is waged by the Soviet people led by its militant vanguard, the Communist Party.”
Yet Trifonov managed to get his book published uncensored in the Soviet Union — far from a given in the repressive Brezhnev era. He used his good fortune to present a nuanced but unflinching exploration of the choices that are open to individuals faced with dangerous moral dilemmas. His courage and the quality of his writing would have made him a strong contender for the 1981 Nobel Prize. “The House on the Embankment” is impressive both as a work of literature and as a reflection of its author’s integrity.
Iofan’s story is partly about his remarkable ability to survive the worst of times when many of his contemporaries did not, but it also illustrates the price of working for the monstrous Stalin.
Iofan’s career is a precise reflection of all the compromises that architects must make with power. We should be thankful that for the past half-century, most creative individuals have not had to face such a brutally sharp choice. But with a disturbing increase in the number of leaders we can only describe as authoritarian — trying on the second-hand trappings of totalitarianism for size — now is the time to explore how previous generations such as Iofan’s addressed, or failed to address, these life-or-death decisions. ~
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/stalins-architect-the-remarkable-life-of-boris-iofan/
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LINCOLN’S STATUTE IN MANCHESTER, UK
~ Abraham Lincoln was moved to write a letter of thanks to the cotton workers of this city: a letter reproduced in part on the plinth of that statue. He did so to recognize the courage they showed in refusing to handle slave-picked cotton during the American Civil War, even at the cost of their own livelihoods, despite bullying tactics by their employers and even the advice of the Manchester Guardian. Here’s what he wrote:
It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the working-men of Europe have been subjected to severe trials, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. ~
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HOW TO FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU WANT IN LIFE
~ Berrak Sarikaya always knew she wanted to be a lawyer. In high school, she threw herself into mock trial and debate. The oldest child of Turkish immigrant parents, Sarikaya understood the gravity of getting into a good college and the necessity of scholarships to fund that schooling. “One of the biggest reasons that we came to the US was for me and my brother to get a good education and have better opportunities,” Sarikaya, 37, says. “So there was definitely that pressure of if I don’t go to college, then all of it will have been a waste.”
When it came time for higher education, Sarikaya’s hard work paid off. She enrolled in her dream school, George Washington University, and lived at home. Her freshman year was enjoyable, she says, but grueling, with full days of classes, studying, homework, and working at a grocery store and a bank. By her sophomore year, however, the sheen had worn off. Her classes weren’t challenging, and she wasn’t feeling fulfilled by the coursework. What’s more, tuition jumped, and her parents took out loans to supplement her scholarship.
By this point, Sarikaya was working at law offices and she felt this experience provided her with more real-world training than sitting in a classroom. Though college was the thing her family and society “expected” of her, an achievement many young Americans also feel pressured to attain, Sarikaya dropped out of college.
Among life’s many chapters and milestones, Americans have come to see some events — like college, marriage, homeownership, child-rearing, and career success — as achievements they must fulfill in order to maintain the status quo. Because so many follow these “traditional” paths, both in real life and in Western popular culture, we learn from a young age to model and emulate these behaviors. Family and cultural traditions can dictate what is expected of us throughout life, particularly among women, which can elicit anxiety when those benchmarks aren’t reached. When people are rewarded and celebrated for graduating from college or getting married, we internalize these events as being desirable. Thus, people can feel pressured to fit an assumed mold or fear being alienated when bucking convention.
“What researchers have found is that people conform their behaviors to those around us, mostly to gain acceptance,” says Daryl Van Tongeren, an associate professor of psychology at Hope College. “So a lot of times, we go along doing what other people do because we want to fit in, we want to be accepted, we want to be liked.”
When culture provides limited road maps for the future, these life events can seem nonnegotiable. External pressure from family, friends, and media further muddies the waters, potentially creating an emotional conundrum when it comes to determining what you really want for the future. Through time and reflection, you can use your values and motivations as guides for a fully authentic life.
LIVING ON AUTOPILOT
Many people don’t stop to consider what they truly want out of life, Van Tongeren says. They consume media and observe loved ones moving through the world checking familiar boxes, “and we usually try to dutifully follow those scripts,” he says. When life is full of “shoulds” — you should go to college, get married, buy a nice house, have kids, become the boss, etc. — there is very little room for improvisation. Because so many of these milestones are tied to wealth, those without the means to afford tuition or a mortgage can feel they lack an accurate model for how to approach life.
However, it isn’t until you stray from the path — either on purpose or accidentally — that you consider whether the road well traveled is the right one for you. When Sarikaya realized college wasn’t all she’d hoped, she took more chances in her career, moving from taking roles in law-adjacent positions to working in communications and government affairs, and finally to striking out on her own path as an independent content marketing strategy consultant. (She maintains her dream of going to law school.) “At times, there are these inflection points where we can evaluate our behavior relative to what society is telling us,” Van Tongeren says. “In those moments, we try to gain clarity as to whether or not we’re living a life of authenticity.”
To home in on the events and activities that make your life meaningful, you have to get to the root of your motivations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people feel more competent, more connected to others, and more independent when they are intrinsically motivated — that is, internally or self-motivated. When parents, friends, or other outside forces pressure you to, say, pursue a career in medicine when you really want to work in fashion — known as extrinsic motivation — you might feel stressed, afraid of missing out on what your peers are doing, unfulfilled, or concerned you’ll upset a parent if you stray from the path, says Jeremy Nicholson, a social and personality psychologist.
The things you’re intrinsically motivated to do are the ones that will feel the most authentic. However, if you grew up with certain expectations, obligations, and social examples, knowing what fulfills you can be difficult. Nicholson recommends paying attention to your feelings when confronted with significant milestones. Are you running away from something or running toward it? Are you afraid of being seen as a failure if you don’t aspire to be a supervisor at work?
People should think about how competent, connected, and autonomous they’d feel when faced with certain responsibilities, like parenting. “For example, if they believed they would make a good spouse or parent, enjoyed being around a particular partner or kids, and felt free to make the choice, then the decision would likely be self-determined,” Nicholson says. “In contrast, if they felt entirely unprepared for the role, didn’t really see themselves connecting with a spouse or kids, and were being pressured into making the decision by other people, then they might not personally value reaching the milestone at that time.”
Another question to ask yourself is why you might want a big house, to send your kids to a certain school, or to climb the corporate ladder, says licensed marriage and family therapist Mercedes Coffman. “Is it because you want the validation from others? Are you in med school because your mom and dad told you that that’s a career that would make them proud?” she says. “That is just going off of validation of others. That’s not an authentic goal of yours.” That external fulfillment never lasts long, Coffman adds, and you’re likely to feel disappointed and to search for the next “thing” from which yocan earn approval. Alternatively, if you’ve always wanted a house with a big yard so you can rescue dogs and host your large family for get-togethers because of your genuine appreciation for animals and loved ones, your motivations are internally driven.
Remember, your self-worth isn’t measured by validation and acceptance from others, says therapist Natasha Sharma, the CEO of NKS Therapy. “It’s not about asking the question, ‘What do you want out of life?’ which sets you up for external measurements again, and some kind of ‘measured entity’ or ‘output,’” Sharma says. “Instead, ask yourself: ‘What do I enjoy about life?’”
CONSIDER YOUR VALUES
Simple enough at face value, “What do I enjoy about life?” is a deceptively difficult question. Since no one enters this world as a fully realized human, this takes some trial and error. Coffman says to consider what naturally excites you and to feed those desires. “If you lived on an island and there was nobody around to people-please or to impress, what is it that you would want in your life?” she says. “What is it that you would be doing? What are your natural passions and skills? What excites you naturally?”
Think about the things you value most in life and weigh your decisions against these values. For instance, if you’re considering accepting a higher-paying new job that perhaps looks good on paper but would involve moving away from your community, reflect on how much you value your autonomy, relationships, and finances. “If people really value autonomy, and they really value relationships, but maybe they value financial freedom a little bit less so, can they pick a job that will give them autonomy and allow them to pursue deep relationships, even if it means they take less money?” Van Tongeren says.
Or, if you and your partner are wondering if you should get married, each of you should reflect on what shaped your views of marriage. Did your parents constantly fight and you fear your marriage might be similarly mired in conflict? Do you want to get married because all your friends are doing so and you feel left out? Having answers to these questions can help you move forward authentically.
This work is difficult and, frankly, terrifying. Few people would willingly embark on a thought exercise that puts their entire life into question. However, consider the alternative: coasting along in a career or relationship you don’t quite feel passionate about because you never considered other possibilities. At any age, setting aside time and intentionality to decipher what motivates you and whether you’ve been living authentically can be enlightening. This isn’t to say a life full of “traditional” markers of success and happiness isn’t worthwhile, but some contemplation can determine if these milestones are desirable for you. ~
https://www.vox.com/even-better/23353720/figure-out-what-you-want-out-of-life-marriage-kids-homeowner-college?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THINK OF BAD TIMES LIKE BAD WEATHER — THEY TOO SHALL PASS (and more sage advice)
~ Arden Fleming, 15, calls her grandmother Agneta Vulliet her “biggest role model.” Vulliet, the daughter of French immigrants, grew up in New York City, and she says she first learned about independence when she went to boarding school. Vulliet left school before graduation to get married, and ended up getting her high school degree at night school — while raising two kids. She studied art in college, where a professor was impressed with her determination and recommended her for a scholarship. Toward the end of their interview, Fleming asked her grandmother for advice.
“What I want you to know and keep in mind is that your 20s are very turbulent and that it does get better,” Vulliet says. “You want so much for yourself, you have such expectations, you have so many wishes to succeed, and there’s a lot of anxiety that goes with how all that will take shape. I never want you to get carried away with how hard it seems.” She adds, “Growing up is a lot like the weather. Every time you hit the big storms that seem like they’re going to snow you under, it will change and get better — and the sun will come out.”
DRAW INSPIRATION FROM PEOPLE YOU MEET
Bill Janz traveled the world as a journalist, and wrote a column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about ordinary people who’d shown remarkable courage. In a 2015 interview with his 14-year-old grandson, Jasper Kashou, the now-retired Janz shared memorable stories from his days as a reporter — of almost falling off an elephant into tall grass where a tiger was hiding while in India, and of crawling on his belly to avoid sniper fire in Croatia during the Bosnian War.
But when Kashou asked him about the person who’d impacted him the most, Janz spoke of someone closer to home. “A boy named Eddy helped me see a little bit about what life is all about,” says Janz. Eddy was a 10-year-old he’d written about whose leg was amputated due to cancer. “No matter what happened to him, he never gave up,” he recalls. “I called Eddy once at home, and the phone rang and rang and rang. Finally, he picked up the phone. I said, ‘Eddy. I was just about to hang up. Where were you?’ And he said, ‘Bill, I was in another room. My crutches weren’t near, so I crawled to the phone.’” Janz often finds himself thinking about that conversation. “He was only a young man, but he was teaching an old man to never give up,” Janz said. “I sometimes tend to give up and go do something else, and [he helps me] remember not to do that.”
LOVE YOUR WORK — FOR THE SALARY AND THE PEOPLE
Bennie Stewart, 80, got his first job at age 7 — he’d run errands for his neighbors and get paid in chicken eggs. In a 2015 interview with grandaughter Vanyce Grant, 17, he talked through his many jobs. Stewart chopped cotton for $3 a day in 115 degree heat; bused dishes; cleaned buildings as a janitor; sold insurance; and eventually found his passion as a social worker and, later, as a pastor.
Grant asked his grandfather about what led him to these different occupations. “I love talking to people,” Stewart says. “I’ve been told I have the gift of gab, so I can talk and I can grasp things real fast. I always took pride in being able to listen to instructions and pick them up quick.” What lessons did he learn from his work experience? “It taught me that I can have something of my own and provide for my family and get some of the things in life that I couldn’t,” he says.
These themes echo those in an interview that Torri Noakes, 16, recorded with her grandmother Evelyn Trouser, 59. Trouser worked in auto factories, first on the line and then as a welder. “My advice to everybody in my family: learn to take care of yourself. Don’t depend on anyone to provide you with anything,” Trouser says. She refuted any notion that her jobs were dreary. “I used to love going to work,” she said. “It’s the people you’re with that makes a job fun or not. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the people you’re with that make things different.”
FIND MENTORS WHO CAN GUIDE YOU AND CHALLENGE YOU
Allen Ebert, 73, reminisced about his working days in an interview with grandson Isaiah Ebert, 15. Ebert first worked as a welder in an auto factory when he was young and said the experience helped him once he entered medical school. “If you understand how something works, when it breaks you know what to look for and how to fix it,” he said. “Even the body is mechanical.”
When Ebert spoke about his experiences as a doctor, he impressed one thing upon his grandson: look for mentors. “The stuff you’re doing right now in school, you’re learning from people who know something you don’t know. Continue that throughout your life,” he says.
To find mentors, you should look beyond your bosses and teachers. “Just develop relationships with people whom you can observe, even from a distance, and see how they accomplish things,” Ebert says. “The way I look at it: in life, we probably make 95 percent good decisions and about 5 percent messed-up decisions. A large part of our lives as adults is fixing the mess of those few wrong decisions, and you can minimize them by just having people in your life who will challenge you and make you think twice, who will say, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound right to me.’”
MAKE THE MOST OF LESS
According to StoryCorps, many people use the Great Thanksgiving Listen as a time to ask about family recipes. Along with step-by-step instructions, they receive a slice of family history, as well as life advice.
Some of the stories highlight one of the secrets to a life well-lived: learning to make the most of what you have. Kiefer Inson, 28, talked to his grandmother Patricia Smith, 80, about her classic tuna noodle casserole made with canned tuna. “When I was 18, I was married and had a child and did not have an outside job, so I’d go to the library, bring home cookbooks, and try the recipes,” Smith says. “Back then, we were on a very limited budget. A pound of fish cost 69 cents, so I learned to cook a lot of things with that.”
Jaxton Bloemhard, 16, interviewed his mother, Bethany Bloemhard, 38, about Ukrainian pierogi. She told him how her own grandmother would make hundreds at a time. “She’d tell stories about how they kept the Ukranian people alive,” says Bethany Bloemhard. “The Ukrainians grew potatoes like nobody’s business, and as long as you had flour, water and some oil, you could make the dough.”
Other stories point to the need to keep trying until you succeed. June Maggard, 87, spoke to her granddaughter Emily Sprouse, 33, about the recipe book that she’s kept for 30 years. “People say they can’t make bread or biscuits, or anything really, but you just have to learn the feel,” Maggard says. “That comes by doing.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/5-pieces-of-essential-life-advice-from-seniors?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Sure, you can learn just about anything if you are willing to give it time. But how you use your time is a very important question. If cooking is your passion, then “follow your bliss.” Otherwise you might want to learn how to prepare simple one-pan dishes. I try to eat healthy, but if I find something frozen that meets my standards, yes, by all means. Averse to canned beans? You can get the same health benefits from frozen green peas. You can always add leafy greens, mushrooms (of all kinds; I love the algae-like Asian wood-ears), sliced onions and olive oil.
“Finding a mentor” turned out to be “mission impossible” for me. Then I realized that a mentor need not be a living person. It can be a composite of your favorite literary authors and even fictional characters. But even the connection with literature didn’t turn out to be all that important. I learned a lot reading biographies. If I had to distill it to a one-liner, I’d say that my reading showed me how to be a dedicated person — someone who has a vocation, and prioritizes it. In fact Jung said that extraordinary people are that way because of their strong sense of vocation.
“What is it that tips the scales in favor of the extraordinary?
It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and its well-worn paths.
Vocation acts like a law from God from which there is no escape.
Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man; he is called. . . . He voluntarily sacrifices himself to his vocation.”
Yes, I know — it’s annoying to read those exclusively male nouns and pronouns, and, if you are a woman, you have to “translate” the text so as to feel included. But Jung was an important mentor to me for confirming the priority of vocation.
And yes, I know, Jung went on to fuse vocation and individuation, and even identified individuation as vocation. But I prefer to stay with the common meaning of vocation as the kind of work to which you feel called, and usually show a gift for. It’s only partly what you are born with; talent takes years to develop.
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ALGAE FARMS COULD FEED BILLIONS
~ Growing nutritious, protein-dense microalgae in onshore, seawater-fed aquaculture systems — particularly along the coasts of the Global South — could help increase food production by more than 50% and feed a projected 10 billion people by 2050.
New research describes how growing algae onshore could close a projected gap in society's future nutritional demands while also improving environmental sustainability.
"We have an opportunity to grow food that is highly nutritious, fast-growing, and we can do it in environments where we're not competing for other uses," said Charles Greene, professor emeritus of earth and atmospheric sciences and the paper's senior author. "And because we're growing it in relatively enclosed and controlled facilities, we don't have the same kind of environmental impacts.”
Even as the Earth's population grows in the coming decades, climate change, limited arable land, lack of freshwater and environmental degradation will all constrain the amount of food that can be grown, according to the paper.
"We just can't meet our goals with the way we currently produce food and our dependence on terrestrial agriculture," Greene said.
With wild fish stocks already heavily exploited, and with constraints on marine finfish, shellfish, and seaweed aquaculture in the coastal ocean, Greene and colleagues argue for growing algae in onshore aquaculture facilities. GIS-based models predict yields based on annual sunlight, topography, and other environmental and logistical factors. The model results reveal that the best locations for onshore algae farming facilities lie along the coasts of the Global South, including desert environments.
“Algae can actually become the breadbasket for the Global South," Greene said. "In that narrow strip of land, we can produce more than all the protein that the world will need.”
Along with high protein content, the researchers noted that algae provide nutrients lacking in vegetarian diets, such as essential amino acids and minerals found in meat and omega-3 fatty acids often sourced in fish and seafood.
Algae, which grow 10 times faster than traditional crops, can be produced in a manner that is more efficient than agriculture in its use of nutrients. For example, when farmers add nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers to grow terrestrial crops, about half runs off fields and pollutes waterways. With algae grown in enclosed facilities, excess nutrients can be captured and reused.
Similarly, carbon dioxide must be added to aquaculture ponds to grow algae. Researchers and companies have been experimenting with adding algae to construction materials and cement, where the carbon gets sequestered and removed from the atmosphere. "If we use algae in these long-lived structural materials, then we have the potential to be carbon negative, and part of the solution to climate change," Greene said.
The study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, among others. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221006162844.htm
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THE ASTEROID THAT WIPED OUT THE DINOSAURS SET OFF A GLOBAL TSUNAMI
~ The miles-wide asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago wiped out nearly all the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the planet's plant and animal species.
It also triggered a monstrous tsunami with mile-high waves that scoured the ocean floor thousands of miles from the impact site on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, according to a new University of Michigan-led study.
The study, scheduled for online publication Oct. 4 in the journal AGU Advances, presents the first global simulation of the Chicxulub impact tsunami to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. In addition, U-M researchers reviewed the geological record at more than 100 sites worldwide and found evidence that supports their models' predictions about the tsunami's path and power.
"This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments," said lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master's thesis under U-M physical oceanographer and study co-author Brian Arbic and U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore.
The study authors calculated that the initial energy in the impact tsunami was up to 30,000 times larger than the energy in the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami, which killed more than 230,000 people and is one of the largest tsunamis in the modern record.
The team's simulations show that the impact tsunami radiated mainly to the east and northeast into the North Atlantic Ocean, and to the southwest through the Central American Seaway (which used to separate North America and South America) into the South Pacific Ocean.
In those basins and in some adjacent areas, underwater current speeds likely exceeded 20 centimeters per second (0.4 mph), a velocity that is strong enough to erode fine-grained sediments on the seafloor.
In contrast, the South Atlantic, the North Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the region that is today the Mediterranean were largely shielded from the strongest effects of the tsunami, according to the team's simulation. In those places, the modeled current speeds were likely less than the 20 cm/sec threshold.
The heavily disturbed and incomplete New Zealand sediments, called olistostromal deposits, were originally thought to be the result of local tectonic activity. But given the age of the deposits and their location directly in the modeled pathway of the Chicxulub impact tsunami, the U-M-led research team suspects a different origin.
"We feel these deposits are recording the effects of the impact tsunami, and this is perhaps the most telling confirmation of the global significance of this event," Range said.
“We found corroboration in the geological record for the predicted areas of maximal impact in the open ocean," said Arbic, professor of earth and environmental sciences who oversaw the project. "The geological evidence definitely strengthens the paper.”
Of special significance, according to the authors, are outcrops of the K-Pg boundary on the eastern shores of New Zealand's north and south islands, which are more than 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) from the Yucatan impact site.
Based on the findings of previous studies, the researchers modeled an asteroid that was 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) in diameter, moving at 12 kilometers per second (27,000 mph). It struck granitic crust overlain by thick sediments and shallow ocean waters, blasting a roughly 100-kilometer-wide (62-mile-wide) crater and ejecting dense clouds of soot and dust into the atmosphere.
Two and a half minutes after the asteroid struck, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward from the impact site, briefly forming a 4.5-kilometer-high (2.8-mile-high) wave that subsided as the ejecta fell back to Earth.
Ten minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, and 220 kilometers (137 miles) from the point of impact, a 1.5-kilometer-high (0.93-mile-high) tsunami wave -- ring-shaped and outward-propagating — began sweeping across the ocean in all directions, according to the U-M simulation.
According to the team's simulation:
One hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic.
Four hours after impact, the waves had passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific.
Twenty-four hours after impact, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the east and most of the Atlantic from the west and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides.
By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world's coastlines.
The models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America's Pacific coast.
As the tsunami neared those shorelines and encountered shallow bottom waters, wave heights would have increased dramatically through a process called shoaling. Current speeds would have exceeded the 20 centimeters per second threshold for most coastal areas worldwide.
"Depending on the geometries of the coast and the advancing waves, most coastal regions would be inundated and eroded to some extent," according to the study authors. "Any historically documented tsunamis pale in comparison with such global impact.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221004105010.htm
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THE COURAGE OF THOMAS PAINE
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize.” ~ Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1792)
Yes, Enlightenment, sure. But to say anything so directly opposed to what you were indoctrinated with . . . . to think for yourself . . . to suggest that it would be more fitting to call the bible the word of Satan . . .
(By the way, a car used to park near my house with this on its bumper sticker: “Accept Jesus or burn in hell forever!” Is that the REAL message of Christianity, the so-called religion of love, just as Islam is the so-called religion of peace?)
Tom Paine also said, “My mind is my own church.” This would be daring even today, when again we are assured by many that we are no good and weak-minded.
I'm blown away by the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Franklin, all of them, so astonishingly daring. And then: where did it all go? Why weren't the later presidents of that quality?
THE SHROUD OF TURIN — REAL OR FAKE?
~ The Shroud of Turin has already been proven fake. Joe Nickell says, in Science Versus Shroud Science, published in Science and Religion (Edited by Paul Kurtz), that the Shroud of Turin first appeared about 1355 at a little church in north-central France. He says:
According to a later bishop’s report, written in 1389 by Pierre D'Arcis to the Avignon pope, Clement VII, the shroud was being used as part of a faith-healing scam. Bishop D'Arcis’ predecessor had even obtained a confession by the artist who had painted the shroud.
Nickell also says “the physique of the image on the Shroud is unnaturally elongated, in a manner similar to figures in Gothic art.”
Which brings us to the latest investigation of a Shroud that ought to have been dismissed by the Church long ago. Reuters reports that:
~ Of course, it has also been carbon-dated. In spite of later protests by true believers, three separate laboratories arrived at a date close to the fourteenth-century time that the Shroud first appeared in history. ~
For what it is worth, the Shroud contradicts a clear description in John’s Gospel. The Shroud is a cloth that would have been placed lengthwise over the whole body, including the otherwise uncovered head. John said that a cloth was wound around Jesus’ body and that a separate napkin was placed on his head, as was standard practice among Jews in the first century.
The proof of inauthenticity is there, supported by evidence. It just has to be accepted by Shroud-believers. ~ Dick Harfield, Quora
Oriana:
The last explanation seems to me the strongest. A shroud is a long piece of cloth that is wound around the corpse (like swaddling an infant).
from Wiki: ~ After the resurrection, the Gospel of John states: "Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen." The Gospel of Luke states: "Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves.
In 1998, shroud researcher Joe Nickell
wrote that no examples of herringbone weave are known from the time of
Jesus. The few samples of burial cloths that are known from the era are
made using plain weave.
In 2000, fragments of a burial shroud from the 1st century were
discovered in a tomb near Jerusalem, believed to have belonged to a
Jewish high priest or member of the aristocracy. The shroud was composed
of a simple two-way weave, unlike the complex herringbone twill
of the Turin Shroud. Based on this discovery, the researchers concluded
that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem. ~
David Lascelles:
Fake relics were big business… there were enough supposedly genuine nails from the true cross to crucify a whole regiment of Messiahs…
Thomas Bostick:
Interesting historical background. The Shroud of Turin was only one of twelve “authentic” burial shrouds of Christ at different Cathedrals at the time. It replaced the previous authentic burial shroud of Christ at Turin which was lost in a fire, about 50 years previously.
Oriana:
Most people do not crave truth; they crave hope, and the message of Christianity is hope, including the hope of eternal bliss in the afterlife. Also, I have to admit that the face on the Shroud of Turin looks soulful -- I can see that it could induce a mood of reverence.
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WHY MORE EDUCATED PEOPLE ARE LESS LIKELY TO BELIEVE IN GOD
~ The authors of this study (The relation between intelligence and religiosity: a meta-analysis and some proposed explanations - PubMed) suggest three possible explanations: First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.
Personally, I think that it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the more people learn about the batshit crazy beliefs and practices of other religions, the more they begin to wonder about the batshit crazy beliefs and practices of their own religion. Plus endless scandals, the mass-rape of children and preachers with private planes would make anyone wonder about the moral authority of the church. ~ Quora
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BERBERINE IMPROVES PROSTATE PROBLEMS, PREVENTS PROSTATE CANCER
The prostate is one of those troublesome organs that continue growing throughout a man’s life. This excess growth — benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH, brings no end of misery to older men because of problems with urine flow. Frequent awakenings due to urinary urgency (the bladder empties only partly) decrease the quality of sleep.
While there are surgical solutions, the older a man gets, the more risks are associated with the trauma of surgery. Surgery should basically be the last resort. But men found that widely promoted supplements such as saw palmetto or bee pollen don’t produce significant benefits. A 2018 rat study, however, found that berberine, a supplement used chiefly to lower blood sugar and improve the cholesterol profile, can also improve symptoms of BPH.
“Berberine considerably reduced BPH-stimulated oxidative stress and inflammation through preventing the rise in lipid peroxidation and nitrite concentration, and decreased the accumulations of pro-inflammatory cytokines (e.g. interleukin 1β and tumor necrosis factor α) and declining the depletion rate of GSH and the function of catalase and superoxide dismutase. Histopathological investigations reported that administration of BBR could suppress testosterone-stimulated BPH.”
https://bmccomplementmedtherapies.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12906-021-03472-2
Berberine is something of wonder supplement, one of a handful that actually produce striking results. It appears to work better than metformin. I shudder to think that Big Pharma may try to ban berberine, a safe over-the-counter treatment that outperforms a commonly used anti-diabetes drug.
Here is the article again: “Berberine (BBR, an isoquinoline alkaloid) is a biologically active component of traditional Chinese plants available in many plants such as Ranunculaceae, Coptis sp. Rutaceae, Berberis sp. The main feature of BBR is its high safety. Recent studies have indicated that berberine has multiple pharmacological properties, such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, anticancer, antibacterial, antihyperlipidaemic, antidepressant, anti-anxiety, anti-psychosis, anti-amnesia. Furthermore, BBR is effective in preventing testicular damage, cardiotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, and Alzheimer 's disease.”
However, in this study berberine alone did not decrease prostate weight. That happened in the group that combined berberine and finasteride (a drug commonly used for BPH). “BPH animals that received berberine revealed a significant reduction in epithelial layer thickness and mild glandular hyperplasia, suggesting that berberine is an effective treatment for BPH.”
“In summary, berberine treatment reduced concentrations of oxidative and inflammatory factors and enhanced the concentration of anti-oxidant variables in the prostate, which indicates that berberine can prevent BPH. Hence, it may be an appropriate herbal intervention.”
Another rat study showed that berberine “can be used as a therapeutic agent for BPH by controlling hyperplasia of prostate through suppression of ERK mechanism.” (ERK means extracellular signal kinase, an enzyme involved in cell proliferation — believe me, I’m trying to simplify the heavy biochemistry in these articles). The results are basically stated in the title of the article: “Berberine Improves Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia via Suppression of 5 Alpha Reductase and Extracellular Signal-Regulated Kinase in Vivo and in Vitro.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6054997/
Berberine’s benefits for the prostate may also stem from its ability to lower blood sugar:
~ People with increased blood sugar concentration tend to have a higher risk for prostate enlargement. Those with high blood glucose had three times the risk of developing enlargement of the prostate.
Diabetics are twice as likely to develop prostate inflammation compared to healthy men. That’s because the insulin receptor can affect prostate gland growth.
Not only can berberine lower blood sugar, but it can also lessen the odds of prostate problems. ~
https://www.bensnaturalhealth.com/blog/berberine-benefits/
Oriana:
Normally I don’t promote specific brands, but in this case it strikes me that NOW berberine, which is suspended in MCT oil, may be the best. If taking it three times a day is cumbersome, try one capsule during the day, and two capsules at bedtime. But, as always, people need to experiment to find the dosage that best works for them.
Women should also takes berberine due to its many health benefits, presumably leading to a longer and healthier life. Frankly, I felt sad when I first discovered that metformin made diabetics live longer than non-diabetics who didn’t take metformin. My sadness was due to the fact that I knew my primary would never prescribe metformin for me unless tests proved full-blown diabetes.
Some two decades later I learned that berberine is even better than metformin, since it has a wider range of benefits. For men, those benefits include an improvement in the symptoms of prostate problems. For women, berberine helps prevent breast cancer when combined with bioavailable curcumin (in my experience, only the OMAX brand works).
(My thanks to C. Sherman for alerting me to berberine’s benefits for the prostate)
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THE SURPRISING BENEFITS OF BEER
~ Beer lowers the risk of kidney stones
Last year, a study suggested that the risk of developing kidney stones decreases with increasing beer consumption.
Finnish researchers, led by Dr. Tero Hirvonen of the National Public Health Institute of Helsinki, used their detailed study of 27,000 middle-aged men to conclude that "each bottle of beer consumed per day was estimated to reduce risk by 40 per cent".
The study authors noted that both the water and alcohol found in beer are shown to increase urine flow and dilute urine, thereby reducing the risk of stones forming. Alcohol may also "increase the excretion of calcium," the prime constituent of kidney stones, said Hirvonen.
Beer protects you from heart attacks
A research team at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania found that dark ales and stouts can reduce the incidence of heart attacks.
Atherosclerosis — when artery walls become furred-up with cholesterol and other fatty substances — is known to cause heart problems, but Dr Joe Vinson, a professor of chemistry and lead author on a 2000 study, revealed that beer can cut the risk of this disease by as much as half.
However, the researchers were keen to add that moderation was key.
Beer reduces the risk of strokes
Studies by both Harvard Medical School and the American Stroke Association have shown that people who drink moderate amounts of beer can cut their risk of strokes by up to a 50%, compared to non-drinkers.
Ischemic strokes are the most common type of stroke. They occur when a blood clot blocks the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain. However, when you drink beer, your arteries become flexible and blood flow improves significantly.
As a result, no blood clots form, and your risk of having a stroke drops exponentially.
Beer strengthens your bones
Beer is known to contain high levels of silicon, an element that promotes bone growth.
But you have to get the balance right. Academics at Tufts University in Massachusetts found that whilst one or two glasses of beer a day could significantly reduce your risk of fracturing bones, more than that would actually raise the risk of breakages.
So be careful when you visit the pub: if you drink too much, your bones will be weakened and those drunken nightime tumbles could result in nasty fractures. Drink the right amount, however, and you'll walk home with your bones and dignity in tact.
Beer decreases the chances of diabetes
In 2011, Harvard researchers found that middle-aged men who drink one or two glasses of beer each day appear to reduce their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by up to 25%.
Dr Michel Joosten, a visiting professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, studied 38,000 middle-aged men, and concluded that the alcohol content in beer increases insulin sensitivity, which helps prevent diabetes. Additionally, beer is a good source of soluble fiber — a dietary material that helps to control blood sugar and plays an important role in the diet of people suffering from diabetes.
So, whether you've got diabetes or not, a glass of beer is just what the doctor ordered.
Beer reduces the chances of Alzheimer's
Studies dating back to 1977 have suggested that beer drinkers can be up to 23% less likely to develop cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia.
However, despite the statistics speaking for themselves – one study surveyed over 365,000 people – it is unknown why moderate drinking can have a beneficial effect. One theory suggests that the well-known cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, such as raising good cholesterol, also can improve blood flow in the brain and thus brain metabolism.
The silicon content of beer could also be responsible. Silicon is thought to protect the brain from the harmful effects of aluminum in the body – one of the possible causes of Alzheimer’s.
Beer reduces insomnia
Beer is a natural nightcap. Ales, stouts and lagers have been found to stimulate the production of dopamine.
According to research undertaken at the Indiana University School of Medicine, simply tasting beer increases the amount of dopamine in the brain — and thus make drinkers feel calmer and more relaxed. However, the academics clarified that these effects are achieved after only a taste, and so a paltry 15 milliliter serving is all you need — the equivalent of one tablespoon of beer.
Beer can stop cataracts
Too much and your vision will get blurry, but but consume just the right amount and your eyes might benefit.
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario found that the antioxidants found in beer, particularly ales and stouts, protected against mitochondrial damage.
Cataracts are formed when the mitochondria — parts of a cell responsible for converting glucose into the energy - of the eye's outer lens are damaged. Antioxidants protect the mitochondria against this damage, and therefore the study authors recommend one drink a day to keep the eye doctor away.
Beer might cure cancer
In January, at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, researchers presented findings that suggested a key ingredient in beer could be used in the fight against cancer and inflammatory diseases.
Acids called humulones and lupulones, found in hops, possess the ability to halt bacterial growth and disease, and scientists hope to find a way to extract these compounds or synthesize them in a lab in order to develop active agents for cancer-treating pharmaceuticals.
Beer helps you lose weight (??)
It may seem a strange one, considering we've named the 'beer belly' after the weighty effects of alcohol, but researchers at the State University of Oregon seem to think that beer can help you shed some pounds.
The scientists published a study earlier this year showing that a compound called xanthohumol, commonly found in hops, can lower an individual's chances of developing metabolic syndrome – a condition that indicates obesity, elevated blood pressure, increased blood sugar, and bad high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels.
Sadly, the researchers concluded that humans would have to drink over 3,500 pints of beer a day to feel the benefits of the 'miracle' compound – by which point they'd need a miracle just to be alive.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/the-surprising-health-benefits-of-drinking-beer/
Oriana:
So no, beer doesn’t help you lose weight. Heavy beer drinkers tend to be obese (unless they are far-gone alcoholics who are “on a liquid diet”).
Still, beer does have significant benefits, and it would help if the larger public knew this. Of course I also wish that people knew about the incredible life-extending benefits of berberine (lower blood sugar does everything for you), the dental health properties of cheese, or cancer-fighting properties of black tea — to mention just a few things that might spare much suffering and premature death. As an old MD told me, most people die of ignorance.
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Ending on beauty:
About the drizzling night,
in the drizzling, night,
right in the beating heart,
the incomparable mine
. . . so highlighted that it pops up
behind the scenes of heaven
the one who dreams will come out —
the grey streets of Ulysses
~ Vladimir Gandelsman, St. Petersburg
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