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The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with Nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
~ Shelley, “Mont Blanc”
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe
~ these lines always affected me deeply. Romanticism was many things, but chief among them was the awe of Nature (yes, with a capital N). The Romantics (including the visual artists) were the ones who practically discovered the mountains and loved them, unlike the Psalmist who wanted the earth to be completely level (“every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low”).
The Romantics were intoxicated with awe, almost always elicited by nature. They were creating a separate spirituality. There was a Spirit that "subtly interfused" nature, but it had nothing to do with the 'vengeful dude in the clouds'. As Wordsworth wrote, “Jehovah and his thrones, I pass them unalarmed,” Imagine, no fear of the archaic god, who was still quite alive and scary during this era when most believed that a lightning strike was divine punishment (lightning seemed to strike churches more so than other, lower buildings — but that too could be explained in terms of celestial wrath).
Ignoring the wrathful deity of orthodox believers, Coleridge came up with the wind harp analogy — each of us, along with all sentient beings, is a kind of wind harp, and the universal Wind/Spirit/Logos sweeps over the strings:
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
This interests me because Romanticism is regarded as a reaction against the Enlightenment’s enthronement of reason and the emergence of deism — there was a creator who set the universe in motion, and then turned away, never interfering in human affairs. It wa
s inconceivable that the deist god would violate the laws of nature. The existence of a creator was not questioned — only his interventionist nature, e.g. answering prayers.
The deist concept of “God the Utterly Indifferent” (as Kurt Vonnegut put it) struck the Romantics as too cold-hearted, but they did not try to go back to the bad oldtime religion. They turned to mysticism. Shelley described himself as a mystical atheist precisely to accommodate the feeling of awe as he gazed on Mont Blanc.
The American Transcendentalists claimed that the divine resided in nature but also within each human being. They rejected the more Judaic idea of god as the ultimate Other, an alien and incomprehensible presence outside time and space — with occasional incursions, frequent in the first and most mythological books of the Hebrew bible, then, in the later books, dwindling to absence and silence (In “The Disappearance of God,” Richard Friedman shows this gradual withdrawal in meticulous detail).
But the Romantics wanted an intimacy with the universal spirit that they assumed suffused nature. In a way, they were almost saying Yes to Einstein’s question: Is the Universe friendly?
Friendly or indifferent, if we can have such beauty on this earth, who needs any traditional god? Beauty itself can nurture us. And we don’t have to travel to the Alps or the Andes (though it would be wonderful). If you grow a beautiful garden, it will give back a hundred times. What am I saying, a garden. Grow one plant, and watch it do something new practically every day. Watch a cat or a dog. Watch a baby curl and uncurl her tiny hand.
This is how Shelley addresses the “spirit of Beauty” in his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”:
Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
Mary: WE ARE ALONE
The Romantics fallacy is that nature is "infused with spirit, " and indeed, is friendly. While the natural world can certainly inspire awe, and sustain us with its endless beauty, it is not benign, does not house a spiritual intention, a soul or "genius," that is continuous with our own, or aware of us in any way. Nature is not friendly, welcoming, or nurturing...it is not "personal," not an entity, neither kind nor cruel. Nature is sublimely indifferent to us, to our lives, our needs, our hopes and fears, our spiritual aspirations.
It is so human to see, to assume, animate being in living things, and even in objects...to personalize, to anthropomorphize, to see the world through the lens of our own subjectivity. Mountains as majestic, storms as malevolent, angels and devils everywhere, benevolent or threatening..aware of us and...interested. But nature is not any of those things, does not notice us, is not interested at all, but supremely indifferent.
Living through hurricane Ian was traumatic for all in its path. The terrible destructive power felt viscerally in the sound of the howling, hissing, roaring wind, the endless rain, the inexorable rising waters..pounding, crushing, swallowing, drowning, breaking all in its path. Even the words I use to describe these events imply an "actor," a "someone" who pounds, howls, screams, crushes, drowns, etc. Even naming the storm personifies it. And we always name the big storms.
As impossible as it is for us to accept, the action of such enormous events is in no way an expression of intent, is not part of a system of punishment and reward, curse or blessing. The effects on us, our projects, hopes, lives, our works and plans, are completely random and without any moral judgement, any actual decision. They are caused not by any mind or spirit but by physical things like temperature patterns, currents in wind and water, the laws of physics, not the workings of any spirit or mind. There is no god, no soul, in the natural world. To realize this is to finally realize the absence of God's last shadow, and know we are alone.
Oriana:
Nature, and particularly those aspects of it that possess grandeur and power, could be described as “sublime” in the Kantian sense — both beautiful and terrifying. And yes, of course I’m going to quote Rilke for the hundredth’s time: “For beauty’s but the beginning of Terror / and we adore it so because it serenely / disdains to destroy us.”
Of course eventually it does destroy us. Yet even knowing this, we still adore the beauty of nature, we still love life. Ironies and paradoxes only increase this love. That’s just the way things are, and we better accept the universe, for all its indifference.
I’m not thinking of natural disasters, though that’s the obvious example. I’m thinking of aging, definitely a “natural process.” We can hasten it or slow it down, and people do rate at different rates (seems to run in the family — nothing like having centenarian genes). Very few of us have centenarian genes, so we can try our best with food, supplements, stretching, weight lifting — and then we read an article about celebrity health nuts who died at rather young age. Take Adelle Davis, who died of cancer at the age of 70. She blamed it on the junk food she ate while in college, before she knew better. But cancer is primarily a disease of aging. There may be low-level carcinogens in junk food, but they are not known to cause cancer 40-50 years later.
There was also Roy Walford, who practiced calorie restriction by eating only every other day — but it didn’t protect him against dying from ALS (in fact it may have promoted it, as mouse studies indicate). Most ironic are perhaps the avid runners who died of a heart attack while running.
This is my indirect way of saying that nature gives us life, and then nature destroys us — a process we can merely submit to with the “politest helplessness,” as Wallace Stevens put it.
There are some “tender mercies” — e.g. during the natural dying process, brain function changes so that we may become peaceful. I’ve seen that in animals as well. I don’t have the slightest idea of how that process may have evolved. But I don’t think there was any kind of “design” to make things easier for us.
Not only is nature ultimately fatal to every living thing — it’s also obviously flawed, whether we consider various evolutionary bloopers or, on a grander scale, natural disasters (which used to be called “acts of God,” still a legal term). And let’s not forget about mass extinctions.
And yet we keep hoping. New Age followers claim that the universe is “psychoid” — that’s why what we ardently desire comes true (and if it doesn’t, perhaps it came true on “another plane”). Catastrophic drought in spite of millions praying for rain? It’s raining on the spiritual plane.
The paradox I like best is “in every blessing there is a curse; in every curse, a blessing.” So, though we may count no more than an ant in this beautiful and terrifying universe, let us count our blessings.
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An afterthought: After the Romantics’ worship of Spirit-interfused Nature came the Victorians, some of whom accepted the theory of evolution and thus “Nature red in tooth and claw.” Darwin stressed not aggression but adaptability and, in the case of social animals, the ability to cooperate. Human ascendence is based on our power to cooperate.
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SHELLEY, THE “EVERLASTING YOUTH”
~ During his brief time on earth Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) lived and wrote spiritually ablaze, as a Romantic poet was expected to do. Like his good friend Lord Byron, he comported himself just as he chose, scandalizing respectable people with his militant atheism, ardent republicanism, and faithful adherence to his professed belief in free love.
His poetic gift was protean. Renowned above all for his flights of lyric sublimity, he could be as ravishingly melancholy as John Keats and as tenderly exultant as William Wordsworth. This is the Shelley commonly studied today, the author of “To a Skylark,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and “When the Lamp Is Shattered.”
Yet his verse could be flagrantly unlovely in the service of his political hatreds, which were many and fierce. He raged like William Blake, with a similar caustic terseness, about the lack of justice and simple decency in society’s highest reaches and lowest depths. And like Blake he believed that the foulness of the highest was responsible for the foulness of the lowest. Priests, kings, and government ministers Shelley flayed, hanged, and quartered on general principle. Certain fellow poets he summarily executed for specific spiritual crimes against humanity. He was unable to forgive Wordsworth and Coleridge for their abandoning all democratic hope in the face of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the bloody rise and fall of Napoleon, and the Bourbon Restoration. This baleful, sardonic aspect to Shelley’s nature, however, never extinguished his confidence in human perfectibility.
His political sentiments—savage indignation on one end and millenarian hope on the other—eventually bent toward prudent, gradual reform; and toward the end of his life he became reasonable about politics. It was as an incendiary, however, that he was known during his lifetime. He was so notorious that persons protective of their honor thought it best not to know of him at all. As his invaluable biographer Richard Holmes laments in Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), “At the time of his death his reputation was almost literally unspeakable in England, an object to be torn apart between the conservative and radical reviews, but not on the whole to be mentioned in polite London society.”
Filial outrage
The rampaging disdain for conventional mores that got him ostracized started early, as it often does, and persisted well into his too-brief adulthood. His birth entitled him to the most desirable perquisites that polite society had to offer. The son of a Sussex baronet, he stood to inherit high rank along with vast wealth, and to be virtually guaranteed the seat in Parliament that his father occupied. The life he chose instead proved to be one of exile and obscurity.
At Oxford, when he was supposed to be deep in Euclid and Aristotle, Shelley was wolfing down what Holmes calls a rich diet of “skeptics and radicals: David Hume and Gibbon, Voltaire and Condorcet, Paine and Franklin, Rousseau, Godwin and even the political economist Adam Smith.” The political palaver of the day drew him inexorably in, and he became conversant with the issues bound to rile the mind of a born maverick.
The association with that venerable university would not last long. With his closest Oxford friend and comrade in political adventure, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, the 19-year-old Shelley published a 1,000-word pamphlet in which both men professed to disprove the existence of God and invited all comers to prove them wrong. Drawing upon Hume’s and John Locke’s epistemological arguments, The Necessity of Atheism contended that there was no cogent demonstration of divine reality, whether by evidence of the senses, reason, or the testimony of those claiming to have been “eye-witnesses of miracles”: “the mind cannot believe in the existence of a God,” Shelley and Hogg concluded, and Shelley was especially proud of the capstone to the polemic: “Q.E.D.” Full of himself, he sent copies to the bishops of the Church of England and the masters of the Oxford colleges.
Although published anonymously, the pamphlet’s authorship was an open secret, and retribution fell swift and sure upon the offenders. First, a Fellow of University College ordered the bookseller to burn all remaining copies. Then Shelley was hauled before a tribunal of the Master and Fellows. When the inquisitors asked if he was the author, he refused to answer. They expelled him not for atheism, then, but for, in their words, “contumacy in refusing to answer certain questions put to [him].”
Shelley complained to his father in a letter three days afterward of “the late violent tyrannical proceedings of Oxford.” Sir Timothy Shelley warned that if his son did not return home and submit to the supervision of godly preceptors, he would disown him. Shelley replied that he was willing to renounce his claim to the family property and would rest content with an annuity of £2,000. Eventually, he would receive a more generous bequest from his grandfather that permitted a life of greater comfort.
Outrage would become standard filial procedure. In London Shelley met the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, a schoolmate of his sisters, who was feeling the weight of fatherly oppression herself. Passionate talk that turned frequently to considerations of suicide led to something oddly like love. He resisted the pull toward a permanent respectable tie: the prospect of wedded bliss was sheer horror. To Hogg he wrote in May 1811, “Yet marriage is hateful, detestable—a kind of ineffable sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.” To Harriet he proselytized for atheism and free love, but she wasn’t having any: when in August Shelley suggested they run away together, she refused; and in the end it was hateful detestable marriage he proposed.
They eloped to Edinburgh, where Hogg joined them. Harriet’s sister Eliza soon joined the posse. Shelley saw this contented ménage as the potential core of a community of refined spirits who would dwell apart from the common herd and prepare the ground for social transfiguration. His father saw things differently, and Shelley had to howl loud and long to get the money Sir Timothy had agreed to give him.
Six weeks after the wedding Shelley’s belief in free love and communal sharing was put to the test when he was away for several days and the infatuated Hogg made a serious play for Harriet, which she refused in consternation. Shelley assured his friend there was nothing to forgive and extolled the wisdom of “the Godwinian plan,” the philosopher William Godwin’s promotion of what has come to be called “open marriage.” But Harriet was “prejudiced,” Shelley lamented, and not nearly as reasonable as her husband, and Hogg was left behind when the Shelleys moved on from York to the Lake District; the best of friends would not see each other for a year.
Poetry and political activism
In January 1812 the impressionable young man wrote to Godwin and initiated a friendship that would redirect the course of his life in a way unimaginable at the time. Yet he remained resolutely himself even as he solicited the great man’s sage counsel.
Poetry and political activism were already of a piece. Shelley made his first poetic splash that year with the ballad “The Devil’s Walk,” in which Beelzebub, dressed in his Sunday finery like the gentleman he is, goes to and fro upon the streets of London, calling upon his mortal subordinates in church and court. The poem was published as a broadside to be affixed to walls and displayed in working class meeting halls—a tactic the author learned from Tom Paine. When Shelley scalds “a brainless King” and his “[m]any Imps in attendance,” it is not with subtle wit:
In the end, however, “His sulphurous Majesty” returns to Hell, the Kings and Conquerors and Ruffians who have served him on earth are bereft, and Reason is free to exercise its beneficent power. The poem runs what will be Shelley’s characteristic emotional course through desolation to consolation. Rarely does he give up hope that all will be made well.
Evidently having learned little from experience, Shelley counted upon his readership’s being as amenable to his version of sweet Reason as he was. The oppressed and barely literate masses were the target audience of his “Address to the Irish People,” which he handed out to passersby in the Dublin streets in February, and his beatific vision of a world without rich or poor sought to arouse the multitude to virtuous exertions toward nothing less than perfection:
~ There would be no pomp and no parade, but that which the rich now keep to themselves, would then be distributed among the people. None would be in magnificence, but the superfluities then taken from the rich would be sufficient, when spread abroad, to make everyone comfortable. —No lover would then be false to his mistress, no mistress would desert her lover. No friend would play false, no rents, no debts, no taxes, no frauds of any kind would disturb the general happiness: good as they would be, wise as they would be, they would be daily getting better and wiser…. Vice and misery, pomp and poverty, power and obedience, would then be banished altogether. It is for such a state as this, Irishmen, that I exhort you to prepare. ~
Men longing to be made whole had first to renounce all thought of violent rebellion. For the vision of “universal emancipation” to be realized, only cool heads and muscular moral effort were required. “Mildness, sobriety, and reason are the effectual methods of forwarding the ends of liberty and happiness…. Before Government is done away with, we must reform ourselves. It is this work which I would earnestly recommend to you, O Irishmen, reform yourselves.”
Shelley could not understand why the Dublin poor showed no more enthusiasm for his preaching than had the eminences of Oxford.
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Shelley’s most implacable political hatreds and his most ardent political loves both bespeak a mental fever burning out of control. In the 1820 tract A Philosophical View of Reform, however, he cools himself down and confines himself to sound democratic feasibility. Against “the insolent and contaminating tyrannies” of Europe, he sets “the successful rebellion of America.
America holds forth the victorious example of an immensely populous, and as far as the external arts of life are concerned, a highly civilized community administered according to republican forms.” No king, no hereditary oligarchy, no established Church interfere with the flourishing of “a free, happy, and strong people.” American “political institutions” are the envy of those in the Old World who long for reform. In France, by contrast, the revolutionary rage of a people “rendered brutal, ignorant, servile, and bloody by long slavery” issued in a terrible vengeance, “in itself a mistake, a crime, a calamity.” There freedom and happiness found no lasting hold.
How to secure “a calm yet irresistible progress” toward freedom and equality in England is thus Shelley’s pressing concern. The current condition of the nation is woeful: “the majority of the people of England are destitute and miserable, ill-clothed, ill-fed, ill-educated.” They know this only too well, and their knowledge threatens an explosion that would not be unjustified. Yet only by gentle gradations, he argues, can republican virtue be inculcated in a brutalized multitude, and a just regime be firmly established. Demagogues who insist on universal suffrage straightaway put the nation in peril of civil war and make a new order built to last all but impossible.
It is very well to theorize of the perfect society, Shelley goes on, but “our present business is with the difficult and unbending realities of actual life.” However he might want the ideal—and Shelley never stops wanting it—he preaches moderate expectations in this long essay. Popular anger is politically beneficial only so long as it is kept in check and does not swell into internecine violence, which is the ultimate evil in Shelley’s view. To quell the people’s craving for revenge—for requiting suffering with suffering—is the core of his teaching. It is clear that he wants the best for his native country, and for once the best that he promotes is practicable. He is measured and mature here. Wisdom appears to be within reach.
Simple, impulsive mind
Wisdom came hard for Shelley. He lived out his controlling idea of absolute liberty to disastrous personal effect. And that expansive, exhilarating idea defined his poetry, again to his loss. Beauty of the high order he achieved is by no means a slight thing—it is magnificent—but nor is it everything: in a poet who is out to write philosophical poetry, want of intellectual weight is a serious deficiency. In his most ambitious poems Shelley is inclined to damn the past and present in their entirety and to fling every which way the hyper-egalitarian largesse of an impossibly golden future. In an 1856 essay Walter Bagehot penetrates this “simple impulsive mind” of Shelley’s, which is consumed with “[t]he love of liberty” to the point of dispensing with all known law.
It has hardly patience to estimate particular institutions: it wants to begin again—to make a tabula rasa of all which men have created or devised; for they seem to have been constructed on a false system, for an object it does not understand. On this tabula rasa Shelley’s abstract imagination proceeded to set up arbitrary monstrosities of ‘equality’ and ‘love,’ which never will be realized among the children of men.
What Bagehot describes is an intelligence essentially unformed, however sure of itself it may be. But then Shelley was never to see the far side of 30—he drowned in a sailing accident off the Italian coast at 29. Most of his political writings possess either youth’s dreamy hopefulness or its confident fury, or they blend these passions in wild intoxication. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), T.S. Eliot is largely right when he declares, “The ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of adolescence—and there is every reason why they should be.” Shelley’s chronically pubescent mind was in thrall to his tempestuous feelings: mature clarity of thought would require the struggle of a lifetime and be a rare accomplishment when he finally arrived at it. That accomplishment remained largely unknown in his lifetime. A Philosophical View of Reform did not appear in print until 1920.
“Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he averred in that piece, later deleting philosophers from such tribute in his more famous essay “A Defence of Poetry” (published posthumously in 1840). As a self-declared philosophical poet, he was a better poet than he was a philosopher. And he had to subdue certain of his most flamboyant poetic instincts to write sober philosophical prose, as he did in his most intelligent treatment of politics—which happens to be one of the most impressive political tracts by a poet of his stature. What could he have done had he been granted a longer life? What might he have become had he not been doomed to everlasting youth? ~
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/everlasting-youth/
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LATEST NEWS FROM THE FRONT
~ Vladimir Vladimirovich, Happy 70th Birthday from Ukraine! A bit belated present but still ain’t it looking bright and pretty early in the morning.
The Kerch (Crimean) Bridge was a costly enterprise. To finance it, the construction of the bridge across the Lena river in Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, a region in the Far East, was postponed indefinitely. Yakutia extracts and ships tons of diamonds, ores, coal and sends the proceeds to Moscow, while Crimea is almost entirely subsidized by Moscow.
350,000 residents of Yakutsk have no means to cross the mighty river with the mainland lying on the other side except on ice inn winter and ferries in summer.
In spring and fall, cars and trucks often sink trying to cross over thin ice.
Yakuts subsidized bridge to Crimea only to have become one of the largest donors to the war effort in Ukraine. After the announcement of mobilization, trains full of Yakuts have been sent to the warfront, for thousands of miles, across Asia to Eastern Europe.
Millions of vassals who suffer in silence across 1/8 of the world’s terrain day-dream about the despotic and violent Moscovy rule will end one day to set them free. ~ Misha Iossel
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RUSSIA’S “HOLY WAR” WITH THE WEST
~ "The truth is on our side and truth is strength!" Vladimir Putin boomed into a microphone on Red Square last week, after a grand ceremony at which he proclaimed four large chunks of Ukrainian territory to be part of Russia.
"Victory will be ours!”
But in the real world, things look very different.
Even as Russia's president signed his illegal annexation treaties in the Kremlin, Ukrainian forces were advancing inside the areas he had just seized.
Hundreds of thousands of men have been fleeing Russia rather than be drafted to fight in an expanding war.
And things are going so badly on the battlefield that Mr Putin and his loyalists are now reframing what they once claimed was the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine and the protection of Russian speakers as an existential fight against the entire "collective" West.
“[Putin] is in a blind zone. It seems he's not really seeing what's happening," the editor of Riddle Russia, Anton Barbashin, argues of Russia's president.
Like many, the political analyst believes that Putin was caught completely off-guard by strong Western support for Kyiv, as well as Ukraine's own fierce resistance to occupation.
As he turns 70, after more than 20 years in power, it seems Russia's leader has become a victim of his own system. His autocratic style is impeding his access to sound intelligence.
"We're at the stage where a significant part of Russian society still believes that 'Russia is a great power combating Nato in Ukraine' and sending tampons, socks and toothbrushes to the mobilized is a sign of patriotism," Anton Barbashin tweeted this week.
There is a giant push to blame Russia's setbacks on the "collective" West which is backing Ukraine.
State media hosts are now describing the land-grab in Ukraine as something far grander, apparently buoying the nation up for a bigger fight.
"It's our war with total Satanism", no less, Vladimir Solovyov told viewers this week.
"This is not about Ukraine. The West's aim is clear. Regime change and dismembering Russia, so that Russia no longer exists," he bellowed.
That is the "truth" that Vladimir Putin believes in and it is why this moment of objective weakness for Russia is also a moment of risk.
"This war is existential for Russia and so for Putin, victory has to be possible," Tatyana Stanovaya argues.
And "he has nuclear weapons", she says bluntly.
"I think he hopes that at some level of nuclear escalation, the West will step away from Ukraine.”
She's not the only one to note Mr Putin's more radical, near-messianic tone.
“THIS IS THE LAST STAND OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE”
"It feels like this is what he actually believes: that this is the last stand of the Russian Empire, an all-out war with the West," says Anton Barbashin.
"That we're at the finish line, whether Russia makes it or not.”
Of course, that's also the "truth" that Vladimir Putin now needs the West to believe, more than ever. ~ 
Russian men at the Kazakh border. As many Russians have fled over the border with Kazakhstan as have been drafted into the army in the past two weeks
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63160354
Oriana:
In Russian, the word for truth (pravda) is also a cognate with “right” — which could be interpreted as the “right path,” justice and other positive things.
The overheated rhetoric (“war with total Satanism”) tends to be a sign of desperation.
(A minor point: I suspect that Putin is somewhat older than 70. It would be like him, in his vanity, to lie about his age.)
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MISHA FIRER ON RUSSIAN PAST AND PRESENT
~ Russia is a religious movement. Russian leaders have been weaponizing Russians’ keen sense for injustice to partake in global wars against the West, with horrific results to the former.
Russian Empire collapsed after WW1.
WW2 broke Russia’s demographic back.
Russia lost Cold War (WW3) and collapsed.
Russia is losing WW4 and about to collapse.
Putin spoke in Kremlin at the ceremony of the b̶r̶e̶a̶k̶u̶p̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶R̶u̶s̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶F̶e̶d̶e̶r̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶ signing of the accession treaties of four Ukrainian regions.
People with real estate, money and families in the West have suddenly found themselves under Western sanctions. They’d trusted Putin that he’d be an ally of the West or at least pay them lip-service till his dying day.
Instead, Putin stabbed them in the back. They are helpless to stop the rapid descent into hell as the whole criminal system they are part and parcel of revolves around this one cunning conman who had usurped power. Has he gone mad, or that too is just an act? ~ Misha Firer, Quora
The Nord Stream 2 facility at Lubmin in Germany has been suspended, but gas remains the central issue in the West’s economic war with Russia.
Marcus Hartman:
[Re: Putin’s speech] Quite a broadside, but to quote Macbeth (in his monologue on life, without the first line): “a poor player, that struts and frets for an hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Tez Wiggle:
It's actually quite sad. We're seeing the death throes of country that could actually have brought good to the world, instead it's become insular and paranoid.
Christopher Thompson:
Putin really is trying his best to emulate 1930s Germany.
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THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE AWARDED TO MEMORIAL, A RUSSIAN GROUP (NOW CLOSED) INVESTIGATING SOVIET CRIMES
~ In December 2021, the closure of Memorial, one of the oldest civil rights groups in Russia, caused an outcry in the country and around the world. It had been prominent in uncovering the crimes of the Stalinist regime and remembering the victims of the Gulag. But the authorities accused the organization of trying to undermine the state order.
Almost a year later, and amidst a bruising state crackdown on all forms of opposition to its war in Ukraine, Memorial has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
For over 30 years, Memorial worked on uncovering the fates of the victims of Soviet political repressions. It also exposed human rights abuses in present-day Russia.
Its work never sat comfortably with the authorities. It was initially cautioned in 2006, and in 2014 it was added to the list of "foreign agents" -- a roster of organizations and individuals the government claims receive funding from abroad.
The label is a poignant reminder of the 1930s mass repressions in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Then, many victims were wrongfully accused of being foreign agents, traitors and enemies of the people.
It is ironic that Memorial, an organization finding out what happened to those accused of being foreign agents nearly a century ago, ended up with the same label.
A pretext for closing the group was its failure to mark some of its social media posts with a "foreign agent" disclaimer, which it is legally required to do.
Memorial was set up in 1987 — at the time of reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika — and initially led by Andrei Sakharov, a famous Soviet dissident scientist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Sakharov and those in his circle wanted to focus on uncovering the true scale of the repression which took place under Josef Stalin — Soviet leader between 1929 and 1953. During this period tens of millions of people are believed to have perished in the Gulag forced labor camps.
In 1990, a Memorial team traveled to the Solovky camp in the north of Russia — formerly one of the most notorious in the Gulag. They brought back a memorial stone to be placed in central Moscow.
The Solovetsky stone now sits in the Lubyanka square, opposite the imposing building of the Russian security service, the FSB, (formerly NKVD and later the KGB). It is meant to serve as a reminder of Russia's grim history.
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Yan Rachinskiy, the chairman of Memorial, says it's ironic that the organization is being liquidated in the year of Andrei Sakharov's centenary.
WHAT WAS THE GULAG?
A state network of prison camps in the Soviet Union, the name Gulag derives from a Russian acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei, or chief administration of camps.
Initially set up under the first Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, it grew under Josef Stalin before being abolished by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, in 1960.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago shone a light on life inside the Soviet prison system. It estimated that around 50 million people had gone through the labor camps between 1918 and 1956.
Underground copies of the book by the former political prisoner and Nobel prize winner were disseminated in the USSR from the late 1960s onwards.
Amnesty International's Marie Struthers described the decision to shut down Memorial as "a grave insult to victims of the Gulag".
"Memorial was created at the time of Perestroika when it seemed that the Soviet Union would never return, the arrests would never return," Zoya Svetova, a human rights activist and publicist, told BBC Russian. "But now there is a feeling that all these things might come back into our life."
History and nostalgia play a key part in Vladimir Putin's presidency. In December he lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of what he described as "historical Russia".
"What had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," he said.
Russia's role in World War Two has been recently included in the country's constitution and "spreading falsehoods about the activities of the USSR" in the war can be punished with fines or even imprisonment.
Yet, repressions of the Soviet era, while not openly condoned, have not been officially examined.
Memorial's supporters say that the organization has been uncovering parts of Russian history which current authorities don't want exposed as they don't fit into the patriotic narrative.
"Those who have studied the past of their families and have seen the Soviet archives, are likely to continue to be resistant to the myths of the 'lost Soviet paradise'," says lawyer Daniil Petrov.
He believes the work of Memorial has provided "an inoculation against propaganda".
Most independent Russian media and rights bodies are now forced to operate outside the country, and some of Memorial's activists have been jailed.
But the body continues to campaign vocally on social media, and the Nobel Prize committee hailed its efforts to document war crimes and other abuses of power.
But the victory may ring hollow for many in the organization, and previous winners of the prize have faced hostile reactions from their home governments since winning the prize. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59853010
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THE SUPER-RICH IN RUSSIA
~ Russia has been a paradise for one-percenters since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Holy Pipe that pumped oil and gas to the West is their only value in this world. The only thing they believe in.
The one-percenters despise and fear the human hordes that reside on the territory of the so-called Russian Federation. If there were no Western liberal values, they would gladly exterminate them with some deadly virus not to share a single petrodollar with them. But for now, moonshine, reckless driving, and suicide decapitate the population at a fast pace.
The elites pump those poor people’s brains with fairy tales about grandeur and teach them to love their Dear Leader, and to die for him, which is exactly what’s going on right now with the “partial” mobilization.
Having had professional army ground down, Putin chose to round up a million bodies, arm them with bayonets WW1 style and order to charge at NATO-trained, equipped with modern weapons professional army hoping that if cannon fodder outnumbers them 5 to 1, flesh will overcome iron like in WW2.
Men in Moscow started openly talking politics, while just a couple of months ago they spoke in harsh tones. There are discussions about getting guns. Rosgvardiya, internal military army, and riot police are heavily armed. Russian citizens can’t buy any guns like in the US. Only hunting rifles and shotguns. Moscovites have to wait for the cannon fodder to return from Ukraine to have access to assault rifles.
Very slowly the cogs of the armed resistance began to turn.
If Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine — in his opinion, an easy prize to enrich his cronies and himself from the new fiefdoms and punish freedom-loving Ukrainians — the original one percenters would have had their sons take over to complete the enforce the feudal state.
As such, capitalism in Russia is a sham, Potemkin village, while the real system is that of feudalism. And due to Putin’s overconfidence and time spent in a bunker, feudalism has clashed with 21st century capitalism. ~ Tomaš Vargazon, Quora
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Misha Iossel on the “partial mobilization”:
Russians, in their majority, weren't interested in the war — so the war got interested in them.
Now they no longer can ignore it. It is in their houses, pushing itself right into the heart of their families.
Catherine Comer:
Stealing away their husbands, sons and fathers to be bullet catchers for Putin's vanity.
PUTIN’S MISSION (Misha Firer)
The worst misfortune that can come:
~ Leonid Filatov
~ I believe that Providence has put Russia and specifically Vladimir Putin on earth to teach people a valuable lesson how not live one’s life, what leader not to have, and how not to manage one’s country.
While Russian mobilized conscripts are buying with their life savings bullet proof vests with 2000% markup due to shortages, the US has quietly transferred to Ukraine special anti-infantry ammunition for HIMARS.
Each missile upon explosion in the air releases thousands of shrapnels that penetrate through iron like knife through the butter.
An entrepreneur sells this bullet proof vest for 104,000 rubles online (worth 3 months of average salaries).
Wives take out loans to buy their husbands and sons some protection. Unfortunately, TV propaganda does not tell them what’s in store for them in Ukraine.
After weeks of guessing, the veil of secrecy has been lifted: 300,000 Russian conscripts will serve as guinea pigs to test this type of munition that will kill them by dozens at one go piercing through their absolutely useless overpriced bullet proof vests.
It is indeed on the behalf of the stakeholders of Lockheed Martin that those Russian men have kissed their wives and children goodbye, drank a bottle vodka and headed to the weapons’ test site in Ukraine.
*
Pop superstar Alla Pugacheva briefly touched down in Moscow only to leave a few weeks later following a polite conversation with Federal Security Service agents, posted a goodbye message in caps to her compatriots on Instagram:
YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN LACKEYS, AND NOW YOU BECAME SLAVES.
While Russians don’t have money to pay their utility bills that have gone up 9% this fall, Putin quietly raised the budget for the next year for personal security and presidential apparatus by 30%.
The richest man in the world has allocated additional 19 billion rubles, or 36,000 rubles per minute, to keep himself well-protected, although he’s already better guarded than anyone in Russia. In one minute, that paranoid coward spends on his security more money than an average Russia family spends in a month.
Putin does not forget his friends. After Steven Seagal did some publicity in the occupied Donbas visiting among other places a prison, in which Ukrainians who’d stood up against occupation were kept jailed, it was payback time.
A land plot in Ryublevka, a prestigious Moscow suburb, had been slated to build a rehabilitation center for children patients with cancer.
Steven Seagal’s construction company “won” the tender for that land plot to build the center for Eastern martial arts worth 1.5 billion rubles targeting children of the rich parents who live around. See, when one of those rich kids gets cancer, he undergoes rehabilitation and treatment in the West. It’s the poor who lost and the rich that won.
At the mobilization center in Ulyanovsk Oblast, a conscript died from vodka overdose. In Omsk, one conscript shouted Slava Ukraine and was stabbed to death by another conscript, both were drunk at the time. Conscripts live in tents and drink vodka non-stop. Another conscript was dismissed and died from cirrhosis of the liver.
While the dregs of the society, Putin’s core supporters, are getting their military training between the vodka binges, Russian draft dodgers have broken then record of the Fastest Brain Drain in the history of the Russian Federation.
In two weeks, half a million economically beneficial individuals have left Russia. Most of them for good. ~
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Rok Ružič:
Half a million in two weeks on top of the previous half a million, that's a million people, and those were not just any people, they were productive people, the educated, the ambitious, people who thought dying in muddy trenches is not the way they want to end their lives.
This is going to be a permanent blow to Russia, no matter how you look at it.
*
Mobilized officers in Orenburg wrote an angry letter personally to the Emperor, by hand. In the letter that started with “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich” they complained that they were forced to sleep on the floor in the barracks and the regiment commander responded to their protestations, “You have to understand, we’re collecting meat.”
“We are not meat!” the mobilized officers addressed the person who has condemned to death hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians and threatens the world with a nuclear war, while matter of factly vacationing in the taiga.
Gullibility of Russians is as infinite as the universe. Consider World War Two. Joe Stalin turned 27 million Russians into minced meat just to keep his regime in power.
Stalin has tricked the world with the False Binary. People were offered just option: since Hitler was evil, it necessitated that Stalin was good. No, they were both evil monsters who conquered countries in Europe and butchered millions of people on industrial scale in the name of a fascist ideology.
At the end of the war, he drank to the patience of the Russian people as he believed that people of any other nationality would have rebelled against him while Russians on whom he had committed genocide, worshipped him.
Putin did something outlandish: he cut out Lend Lease, fourteen republics’ and allies’ contribution to the Victory, and somehow owned up to it making Russians identify him and the Russian Federation as the victor in 1945.
Russians continue to identify Stalin as the greatest national leader of the 20th century. So it does not come as a surprise that military commanders suggest shooting military commissars who make mistakes in the summons. Chechen Warlord Kadyrov and Putin’s Chef Prigozhin suggested shooting generals for ceding territories.
Had another Stalin-like figure had come to power and whose commandeering had resulted in 27 million deaths, Russian Federation would have become extinct within one generation as all of its adult male population would have been exterminated.
There are perks though. Authorities in Sakhalin Island are providing each family that has mobilized soldiers with 5 kilograms of frozen pollock and flounder.
In Belgorod, the border region with Ukraine, residents put up posters on residential buildings walls featuring a nuclear bomb explosion and a warning, “Putin Don't Do it. NATO will respond. Belgorod residents want to live.”
Putin lives by the maxim after me the flood, prepared to evacuate the chairman of the State Duma, the government, the Prosecutor General, the leadership of the Security Council (without Medvedev), the leadership of the Presidential Administration, the leadership of the FSB, the FSO, the SVR with their families and the speaker of State Duma.
Putin plans to stuff his arch with parasites — professional politicians and heads of law enforcement and spy agencies in their 70s. No doctors. No engineers. No scientists. No women to procreate.
Once snuggly hidden in the bunker in the Urals, Putin will run his hands and order a nuclear strike on Ukraine to cosplay America for the last time.
After that order, Putin will be either killed with a bunker buster bomb in case the military command goes ahead. And if they don’t, well, then they will go Gazprom on Putin.
The gas that Putin has used to blackmail Europe to comply with his thuggish demands and to feed his avarice with a monarch lifestyle will be pumped into the bunker so that he could never blackmail anyone anymore. ~ Misha Firer
Sergei Broken:
Russia is invading Ukraine not because of Putin, gas, water, NATO ... Those plausible reasons are secondary at best.
Here’s the primary reason:
Russia in its current miserable incarnation cannot exist next door to Ukraine. In this sense, Ukraine represents a huge existential problem for Russia, and that problem is unresolvable.
In a way, the situation is similar to the two Germanys created after WW2. The “German Democratic Republic” was a puppet state that was impossible to keep under control with the Federal Republic of Germany and West Berlin thriving literally a few hundred yards away. Let it go – and the danger would spread further East. No wonder Russia had built the Berlin Wall in a delusional attempt to prolong the unnatural division of Germany into two states.
Of course, the Berlin Wall could not stop the information flow (same language, close relatives on both sides). Building a wall along the border with Ukraine is just as pointless.
But worst of all: NO WALL CAN STOP THE WIND OF FREEDOM.
Maybe not perfect, maybe not ideal, but Ukraine is already a normal democratic country, right next door, that has achieved a lot over the last thirty years, and will achieve much more. And what has Russia achieved since 1990?
Historically, Russia has a different driver: If my neighbor has a nice house – I will burn it down! Replacing Putin with anybody from the Russian ruling elite would not change anything: Seeing Ukraine prosper without its alleged “big brother” is something the Russian establishment can’t tolerate – or even survive.
Ukrainians may argue that the German parallel is inappropriate, as the two peoples are different and do not have a shared history. I totally understand them after all they have gone through over the last 200 days and 200 years of “good neighborliness.” Still, there are millions of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians living on the “wrong” side of the border, and there are quite a lot of similar words in the two languages. ~
Matthias Knoll:
The culminating point of Putin's attack seems to be already over. War might be over soon, maybe days, weeks, months are left. Not years I think. The collapse of the Russian military is already going on!
The Russians that joined Putin's mafia, and became rich by doing so, will have to pay a high price. They start to realize, that everything has its price. It was not so difficult to become a part of Putin's mafia, more difficult it might be to get out alive.
Alex Miroshnyhenko:
“It seems at times that Russia’s sole purpose is to show the whole world how not to live and what not to do. ~ Pyetr Yakovlevich Chadayev.
Shelama Leesen:
It’s a longer road further downhill for Russia after Putin is gone. Even if Putin died today, things would get worse. It’s not just Russian kids with cancer, it’s Russia itself.
Simon:
I can’t help but wonder if this war could have been avoided if Ukraine had have retained its nukes or if the USA and UK had honored their Ukraine protection agreement struck at the time of disarmament. Shameful really. History has shown that Ukraine was betrayed and Russia is continuing to play its long game for the conquest of Europe. Russia is not concerned that it could take multiple generations to achieve its ultimate goals but these will only be possible if we in the West let this creeping, cancerous spread to continue unabated. The Russians are well aware that you eat an elephant slowly, one bite at a time.
Oriana:
To me, the giant clue about Putin’s mission lies in his famous statement that the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Obviously, he’d like to restore that former glory— the fear that the Soviet Union inspired as a military power, and the propaganda image of the Soviet paradise that was omnipresent in the Soviet bloc (though the citizens of countries like Poland listened to Radio Free Europe, the BBC, or Deutsche Welle. Those broadcasts were mercilessly jammed, but enough got through so that the official propaganda had virtually no effect.
Another point that Putin (or some official close to him) made at the beginning of the invasion is that the idea behind it is to show the world that the US is not the boss. 
*
PUTIN AND THE FASCIST PHILOSOPHER IVAN ILYIN
~ Vladimir Putin was a cynical run-of-the-mill thief when he was selected by Boris Yeltsin and oligarchs for the presidency.
As Putin accumulated absolute power, his ballooned sense of self-importance called for framing mass scale thievery within some ideology to give gravitas to his persona. Putin wanted to believe that he was chosen by divine powers for greater things than simply robbing his compatriots blind.
Gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov who would fall from grace after the botched invasion of Ukraine acquainted Vladimir Putin with the books of Russian fascist political philosopher Ivan Ilyin.
Putin has been mentioning and quoting Ivan Ilyin in his speeches since 2005, the year when Kremlin leadership chose to follow the ideology of Russian fascism.
Ilyin is also quoted by Prime Minister Medvedev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a number of Russian governors, Patriarch Kirill, leaders of the ruling party United Russia, and many others. His books are mandatory reading for all newbie government officials.
Ilyin was a monarchist and squarely on the side of the White Movement (anti-communist forces) during the Civil War following October Revolution, and yet Putin somehow coalesced Ilyin’s philosophy with his efforts for reconstruct the Soviet Union.
Putin decreed moving Ilyin's remains from Switzerland to Russia. At the consecration an orchestra performed the national anthem of the Soviet Union. The exhumed Ilyin must have turned in his new grave.
Ilyin was a vocal supporter of the fascist ideology, and he didn’t give up his sympathies even after the end of World War Two.
Speaking about the true national idea, Ilyin wrote in 1934 repeating the style and meaning of the Italian fascist poet and politician Gabriele D’Annunzio:
“This idea should be state-historical, state-national, state-patriotic, state-religious… of cultivating a national spiritual character in the Russian people…Without this, there will be no Russia.”
Ilyin called for the suppression of any manifestations of the rational and the education of new people through the "new selection”.
Those who do not pass this "selection" will go to the "bottom rank in society", and “people who are incapable of autonomous self-control will be curbed and stigmatized.”
There are only three objects of love: "God, Motherland, and the National Leader.”
Russians have “their own, special” faith, surpassing the faith of both Catholics and Protestants, whose beliefs are false.
Motherland is a continuous challenge and burden that has fallen on the most long-suffering people in history. It is the burden of the earth, harsh climate and of hundreds of peoples in the leadership, to whom the Russians, according to Providence, should sacrifice their lives.
Russia’s historical mission is to defend from invading neighbors and to struggle.
No wars with Ottoman Empire, Sweden, Japan, China, France, Austro-Hungarian Empire, no conquest of mountainous Caucasus. Reluctant Russians have been forced by Providence to take empty land without any indigenous people living there for centuries.
Ilyin didn’t think much of Russians apart from being empty receptacles for faith and obedience. They should only love and believe but not participate in government in any way.
“The masses can have great merits in a battle, but the power of their judgment remains pitiful.”
Therefore, as fighters Russians should have no individual will of their own. "Russian people should not dare to oppose their army.”
Ilyin hated liberal democracy and self-governing. Russians must “selflessly love their national leader” and “send him their heart-willed ray of fidelity, strength and inspiration.” And if they don’t, well then enemies of the state will “try to weaken and undermine the Sovereign with their suspicions, ridicule and slander.”
Ivan Ilyin advocated the creation of a national dictatorship in Russia, which should be based on the exclusive role of the church, the army and paramilitary structures.
The leadership must be continuously engaged in the re-education of society — all for the sake of fulfilling the holy mission of “defending” the vast Eurasian space from the mass of enemies and for the sake of educating younger peoples in the correct way spirituality.
All those tenets Vladimir Putin has tried to fulfill in his thuggish ways through propaganda, expansion of the role of siloviki [strongmen] in the state, and building three churches per day.
Russians would be OK with all that because they carry "burden and torment." And those who have no "spiritual dignity" well then, there are “ensuing consequences for the "wrong" people.”
Windows, Novichok, and broomsticks up the rectum.
*
Ilyin did not hide his admiration with Nazi Germany.
“The Germans have managed to get out of the democratic impasse...a great social transformation... the upper stratum is being updated consistently and radically... On the basis of a new mindset... Those who are clearly unacceptable to the "new spirit" are removed... This spirit is …. the substance of the entire movement… it burns in the heart, tenses muscles, sounds in the words and sparkles in the eyes of every sincere National Socialist ... unjust slandering interferes with correct understanding, sins against the truth and harms all mankind.”
Time and again, Ilyin betrayed his disdain and fear of the criticism of his ideas and the National Leader. One either accepted fascism blindly or got relegated to the “wrong people.”
Ilyin was likewise fascinated with Italian fascism and saw ways of integrating it into Russia.
“Italian fascism, putting forward the ideas of “soldato” and “sacrifice” as the main civic ideas…what Russia has always stood for and built upon: the idea of the Monarch… Russian missionary work… Russian colonization … enslavement of estates…the idea of the Russian army and the white movement…fascism does not give us a new idea, but only new attempts to implement this Christian, Russian, national idea in its own way in relation to its own conditions.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Vladimir Putin has found his own way in relation to local conditions to implement European fascism to brainwash the populace and send them to colonize Europe under the of banner of the National Leader. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
James Thomas:
….and now Putin the admirer of the “philosophy” of Italian Fascism and Hitlerism attacks imaginary Nazis in Ukraine. You couldn't make it up…
Andy Wiskonsky:
How ironic.
Ilyin has areas of ideological similarity to Dmytro Dontsov. Dontsov was a writer who influenced the OUN — Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — in the interwar years. To be sure, fascism was ascendant in many parts of Europe between WW1 and WW2.
Maybe that is why Putin’s favorite dead dog to beat is the banderovtsy. It is sectarian violence.
Scott Garrett:
Putin is living a live version of a Mafia themed video game, and he's nearing the chapter where he gets gunned down by his closest confidants, who know his thoughts, as he expressed them, and made a choice. Perhaps it will play out. Putin has no time for a do-over. It's his last life. He is all in. Will he heed the call to reckoning, or flee and try to disappear? With some of his billions, no doubt.
Fabio d’Aleo:
I never understood why such a ridiculous ideology as Italian Fascism fascinated so many minds, I can't believe there are still people taking Julius Evola seriously. Or Ilyin.
Antton Goni:
Is there country without its fascist ideologue?
Fascism reduces and simplifies most of the people in order to promote a competitive elite whom people must identify with. It’s a sort of gaslighting. A simulation of having more.
And Russia is still a developing country with a magnificent capital mainly because it’s an enormous colonial empire that must gaslight too many people. It will be fascist until complete russification or total disintegration.
Dima Vorobiev:
As President Putin said to a group of schoolchildren, “You know where Russian border ends? Nowhere.” (A loaded reference to the fact that land borders form closed shapes.) The older part of our public immediately recalled a Soviet-era joke:
“Who does the USSR share borders with? — With whoever it fancies to.”
*
HOW PUTIN CHANGED RUSSIA
~ Putin planted a ticking bomb under the Russian Federation and it has been a matter of time for it to explode. Or, better comparison, Putin infected the country with a malignant tumor. The name of the cancer is siloviki.
Silovik is a person who works in police, army, prosecutor's office, FSB political police, Military Intelligence (GRU), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Federal Protective Service (FSO) and many other legal and shadowy state organizations that hold monopoly on using force against people.
Silovik comes from the word “sila” (force). They control the country through daily application of brutal force, threats in the use of the brutal force, and repressions.
Had they been surrounded by countries that lived in medieval age, this primitive system would be viable, however, to the east and to the west Russia has long borders with highly developed countries that rely on new technologies and take advantage of diversified economies to stay on top of the food chain.
The more siloviki repress their own people the further behind Russia falls in progress and development. They also cannot offer any unifying narrative to keep so many diverse peoples together — except through fear-mongering.
The only solution siloviki have to keep the country from breaking up will be to shut the borders and turn it into North Korea using Stalinist methods of mass-scale terror.
However, due to endemic corruption millions of working age citizens would escape through the porous borders and siloviki would have forty million retirees and extremely low fertility rates without any work force capable of getting stuff out of the ground and then processing it for sales overseas. This would be a logical result of 107 years of their reign of terror.
Luckily, siloviki have no ideology, and their organizations are no more than thieves’ unions with a license to steal from the populace. They have sadists who terrorize people who protest or businessmen who don’t pay up.
In post-Soviet Russia, a man who has a gun and a license to use it must apply them to make money. Siloviki form regional clans, while there’s room for rugged individualism.
Groups of FSB officers collect intel in Ukraine and torture captives to make them pay up. FSIN officers torture prisoners in penal colonies upon FSB or thieves-in-law commissions, record videos and use for blackmail.
A FSB agent accredited to keep an eye on a Tartar mullah gets his wages in the envelope from that very mullah.
A general provides protection to illegal financial schemes for private companies whose owners charge for non-existent services and then syphon money out of Russia.
Siloviki interests might clash, like a group of FSB officers who charged a businessman to provide protection from Kadyrov goons, but when Kadyrovtsi showed up at the meeting with mortars, FSB officers had to run.
While the whole world laughs at the poor state of the Russian Army, I want to point out that military generals are siloviki too who were handed guns and a license to use them, therefore they felt entitled to make money like any other upstanding silovik.
Generals used military budget money allocated for the preparations for the invasion, like war supplies, modernization of hardware, armed drones, etc to build dachas, mansions, purchase luxury vehicles and spend copious amount of cash on exhibitions of might: war exercises where just a fraction of real hardware was required, tank biathlon tournaments that the Minister of Defence Shoigu loved to attend, and huge army showrooms of empty spaces.
The shows of might were cheaper than the real things.
*
Russian propagandists blamed Ukraine and the West for planning to invade Russia, killing civilians, stealing grain, planning to blow up Zaporozhie Nuclear Station, breaking up Russia. For every evidence-based accusation, Russian leadership responded with “No, YOU did it!”
Federal Security Service, Kadyrov, Prigozhin, Army generals point fingers at each other blaming for the humiliations in the Russo-Ukrainian war -- each of them is a thief playing the game of music chair. When the music stops, one of them will be left out standing and take the blame and the rest of them will be absolved.
No one dares to say that the king has no clothes, to point his finger at Putin — the thief-in-chief who has masterminded and managed this system of legalized robbery.
The elite siloviki are Federal Security Service (former KGB). Putin is a graduate of the KGB school. In their minds, they are the last barrier that is stopping the West from breaking up Motherland into a number of fiefdoms.
This is a great instance of projection for it is FSB who are the forefront of causing metastases to form throughout the body of this former empire.
And just like cancer, they believe they are the good cells and when liberal critics apply verbal chemotherapy to them FSB brand them foreign agents, traitorous leaches. Siloviki do not understand that they are the cancer, not the meds they think they are.
Dave Owens:
“They also cannot offer any unifying narrative to keep so many diverse peoples together — except through fear-mongering.” That right there sums things up.
Richard Towers:
Russians are escaping to Mongolia. That just goes to show how bad it has got!!!
*
FOOT WRAPS AND OTHER NEWS
A singer entertains new Russian conscripts moments before being shipped to Kherson Oblast that not one of them would be able to find on the map. Approximately half of them will be killed within a month, and another quarter wounded. There are no medics, no blood transfusion, no bandages at the battlefront — many of them will just bleed to death.
Enlistment centers have sent out millions of summons including to Dmitry Klyukvin, a Moscow resident born blind.
“Do they want me to be a sniper? At least they could’ve sent a summons in Braille,” jokes Dmitry.
Summons are cold calls for participation in Squid Game. There is no obligation to come to the enlistment center, and the punishment is an administrative fine 3,000 rubles ($50).
It’s evolution in action, weeding out the dumbest and most docile who turn up at the enlistment centers anyways with HIMARS and howitzers impatiently waiting for blood harvest.
Trans-Baikal deputy Andrei Gurulev drew the shortest straw to break the news that 1.5 million sets of uniforms have “disappeared” from MoD.
Translation: not a single set of uniform has been sewn as the money has been used to build country houses for the generals. The Squid Game volunteers are welcome to buy army uniform at the local flea market.
Governor of Omsk Oblast Alexander Burkov said the region is bankrupt with 13 billion rubles in the red, so there’re no funds to pay the new conscripts. Conscripts are required to buy their own uniform, their own first aid kit, stick their wives’ tampons into the gun wounds, feed and train themselves.
Then they get hastily dispatched in COVID-infected overcrowded trains and dumped at the border to fight Banderas, Ukronazis, NATO, Americans. Well, you know, nazis come in all kinds of forms. Putin wouldn’t lie.
35-year old conscript Alexander Koltun from Bratsk called his mom from the recruitment camp in Novosibirsk, “it’s total chaos here; they did’t give us any uniforms, don’t feed us, everyone’s drunk stumbling about.”
Next day, Alexander died. This was tenth proven death of a mobilized conscript in Russia. In the meantime, 1,600 new conscripts have already died or missing in action in Ukraine.
President’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was caught off guard with a tricky question, “Where are Russia's self-declared international borders located?”
“You should ask people in Russia’s new territories,” Peskov answered.
Imagine Joe Biden at a press conference. “Mr. President, can you clarify where are the United States’ northern international borders at?”
“Don’t ask me. Ask people in Manitoba and Ontario of that fake country Canada that we’ve been trying to invade for seven months. They know better.”
FSB ordered propagandists to pile up pressure on army generals and blame them for failures in Ukraine. FSB’s talking head Strelkov-Girkin floods Internet with the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was a trap set by America. Translation: we provided excellent intel to the president, it’s the army generals who have screwed it up.
Russian conscripts use foot wraps like in World War Two.
To add insult to injury, Putin awarded Ramsan Kadyrov with the rank Colonel General (three stars). He received Lt. General just seven months ago. Ramsan Kadyrov fought only once, for the Chechens against Russian Army!
The Col. General rank is given to district, front and army commanders, deputy minister of defence, deputy head of the general staff. This is a calculated spit in the faces of the MoD top brass, to avoid their sworn enemy with the high rank in their armed forces.
Kadyrov has 30,000 bayonets of his private army that he deliberately has spared from fighting in Ukraine (they shot TikTok videos). The head of PMC Wagner Progozhin has been recruiting inmates from penal colonies and swore “to whack that f—- St. Petersburg governor” as he wants to have monopoly on the mobilized “meat.”
Their combined forces have over 100,000 bayonets of the private armies whose fighters swore to personally serve them. They might block what’s left of the 1st Taman Tank Division in Naro-Fominsk and try to grab power in Moscow and St. Peterburg after Putin’s dead. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Leonid Rachman:
They also use boots from WW2.
Kristen Sundelin:
Just the other day, it was revealed that 1,5 million uniforms have disappeared as they were shipped to the training centers in Russia. More likely, they were never produced, but oligarchs simply told Russia that they had delivered the uniforms, sent the invoice, and then bribed someone to confirm that the non-existing uniforms had been received and put in storage. And to save their arses, they now say that the uniforms disappeared en route from storage to training centers. It is not the only such example, and while the corruption has served some people in Russia (especially Putin and his cohorts), it has now come back to bite their arses.
Philip Harbin:
The reason that the US knows where all of the Russian Subs are and is constantly shadowing them, is because they make more noise than a german U-Boat. This is due to lack of maintenance.
Space Admiral:
How can Putin and his lackeys, especially the same handful of vampires who are always on Russian state TV, reconcile their assertion that Russia is an international heavyweight and military power with the fact that they can't even afford to pay or feed conscripts, and they can't even provide uniforms? Even the worst nations at least pretend to care about the conscripts they send into the meat grinder, but the Russian elites and government show nothing but contempt for these people before sending them off to die, then tell them to do their patriotic duty as some last second afterthought about morale.
I really hope they, and especially Putin, are taken alive so they can be dragged to The Hague, have their atrocities and war crimes broadcast to the world in all their unflinching, horrific detail, and are shown for the small, pathetic stains on the human race that they are.
I've been watching the Russian Media Monitor translated videos of state TV, and those Putin lackeys are STILL spinning their collective delusions while raging about how their conscripts are “cowardly" for not wanting to fight so Olga Skabayeva and her friends can have another three or four mansions each.
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HOW LONG CAN RUSSIA’S REGIME LAST?
~ Indefinitely.
When Putin announced his partial mobilization, the first response from Russian youngsters was to flee the country. Queues built up along the borders with Georgia, Kazakhstan and Finland, in just a few days more men fled Russia than served in Ukraine.
Russo-Georgian border
Russians don’t realize why they lost the Cold War: their 18th century political and economic structure simply isn’t able to cope with the modern world. It wasn’t able to follow in the early 20th century, so they lost the Great War and only managed to recover much of their lost territories because Germany was then defeated by the Entente. They would have lost World War 2, were it not for Western lend-lease and fronts over German skies, Atlantic and Africa, later Italy and France. They managed to expand their borders primarily by violating the agreements they made with Western allies.
Lessons Russia should have learned was they need deep reform, because they got lucky twice and saved themselves from evisceration. What they chose to believe instead was that their system somehow came through in the end. Until this belief changes, Russia is doomed to perpetual failure.
It’s how Venezuela ended up, with no war or anything. Poverty, rampant state-sponsored violence and the regime is firmly in the driving seat.
It’s not the first time this happened. Indeed, it’s the third (possibly fourth) time in just over 100 years Russia has gone through exactly that. ~ Tomaž Vargazon
Yair M:
Russia also harbors the potential for several ethnic uprisings and even secession of some entities from the Russian Federation.
Phil Gee:
The country cannot survive this brain (and youth) drain. Their population growth has been drastically, if artificially, culled to a point where not only the regime but the nation as we know it cannot survive. Without the young and educated youth and middle class, European Russia will soon be no different than its rural Asian lands. And soon there won't be the able-bodied and educated workforce to sustain the poorer and older population, let alone man the petroleum infrastructure it relies upon so much.
Tomaž Vargazon:
Unfortunately, this exact scenario played out twice in the 21st century already — first in Zimbabwe, then in Venezuela.
In both cases the regime survived largely unscathed. The countries are basket cases, but the survival of the regime was never in doubt.
There are lots of countries like that around the world — Venezuela and Syria are well known, but the same dynamic also plays out in Croatia, Turkey, Hungary, most of Latin America and more. It doesn’t go as far with these, but the effects are there nonetheless.
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~ Russia is not a developing country. It’s a fading country that's in deep and significant decline and has been for a long time. The term developing implies that it's getting better whereas Russia is getting worse. Russia has devolved into a third rate, third world totalitarian shithole with a rampant kleptocratic government led by a notorious war criminal. ~ Mike Webster
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TROUBLE IN UTOPIA: DON’T WORRY DARLING
~ The world of Don’t Worry Darling is picture-perfect at a glance: a company town called Victory, California, where a bunch of mid-century-modern homes have magically sprouted in the desert. Imagine someone opened a Mad Men theme park in Palm Springs, with the men outfitted in skinny ties and horn-rimmed glasses, and the women in glitzy dresses keeping everyone’s martinis fresh. It’s a specific kind of throwback fantasy, one in which husbands peck their wife on the cheek before heading to work, then return home expecting a roast in the oven. So it may not shock you to learn that all is not as it seems.
Olivia Wilde’s new film, her follow-up to the fizzy teen comedy Booksmart, owes a debt to many spooky dramas about the dark side of the suburbs—think The Stepford Wives, with even more of a sci-fi edge. But it’s a bizarrely paced movie doomed more by a thudding, repetitive narrative than by the behind-the-scenes drama that unfolded in the lead-up to its festival premiere. Viewers can tell from the get-go that something sinister is afoot in Victory, yet it takes the protagonist, Alice Chambers (played by Florence Pugh), nearly the entire runtime to start getting any answers. The experience might have been worthwhile if Don’t Worry Darling built to a grand reveal, but rather than offering satisfying answers, its final twist only provokes more baffled questions.
Wilde is not untalented behind the camera. Booksmart’s straightforward “one crazy night” story was powered by all kinds of clever visual tricks, and Don’t Worry Darling is very slick by design. The world of Victory is supposed to be an enchanting dream you’d never want to wake up from, and Wilde and her excellent cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, make it look like a David Hockney painting come to life, all crisp colors and stark blue skies. Every morning, all of the town’s men pile into their ’50s automobiles and drive off to their mysterious jobs working for a man named Frank (Chris Pine) on something called the “Victory Project.” The ladies—including a gossipy mom named Bunny (Wilde herself); Frank’s imperious wife, Shelley (Gemma Chan); and the distant-seeming Margaret (KiKi Layne)—mostly relax by the pool and take elaborate ballet classes (Wilde shoots those from the ceiling, making the women’s Busby Berkeley–esque dance moves look like the menacing behavior of a hive mind).
Alice first gleans that something is awry when Margaret starts to behave aberrantly; when her friend is whisked away, Alice starts having strange visions of a plane crashing in the distance, or of trying to crack eggs and finding nothing inside them. So much of Don’t Worry Darling’s runtime is concerned with surreal events like these, which are dismissed by everyone around Alice. One of the best actors of her generation, Pugh does her best to portray Alice’s crumbling mental state with integrity, but the script she’s working with is exhaustingly cyclical. Any concern she brings to Bunny, or to Frank, or to her devoted husband, Jack (Harry Styles), is quickly brushed aside, and a threatening doctor (Timothy Simons) is on hand to prescribe tranquilizers at the first hint of trouble.
Styles is perhaps the movie’s biggest issue beyond its underbaked screenplay; he’s an oddly flat presence despite his status as a global superstar. Styles blends in fine when he’s just one of the boys sipping whiskey and talking reverently about the genius of Frank’s Victory Project, but he can’t handle the big emotions required later in the film as Alice starts to unravel. Don’t Worry Darling has a lot of yelling and screaming about how things are Not Quite Right, and whereas Pugh can do that in her sleep, Styles comes off as uncomfortable throughout. That’s a serious obstacle for a movie that is essentially about how the ’50s-housewife vision is simply a male-power fantasy—a premise that would require Styles to be a more malevolent, commanding presence.
Don’t Worry Darling could have saved itself with a good ending. I shall not spoil the film’s conclusion, but it left me retroactively even more flabbergasted by the two hours of circular plotting I’d just witnessed. What’s “going on” in Victory is disclosed, in a manner of speaking, but I could fill a notebook with further questions I had about how the curious planned community functions. Wilde’s film aims to be a feminist parable about how this idealized vision of the past is actually a curdled vision of coupledom. Abstractly, that’s a robust concept; in execution, the movie’s absurdity overpowers its message.
~ The premise is, yes, familiar: Alice (Florence Pugh) seems to have the perfect mid-century American existence. She lives in a beautiful planned community called Victory with her foxy husband, Jack (Harry Styles). They have lots of great sex and really love each other. Every morning, Jack, along with every other member of this insular development, drives off in his perfectly polished car to do mysterious work in a dome-shaped compound that is off-limits to the wives. The wives, in beautiful cocktail dresses and aprons, wave in unison and go about their days. They shop, they lounge around the pool, they drink martinis and Manhattans, they take a curiously regimented ballet class led by Shelley (Gemma Chan), the wife of Victory’s founder, Frank (Chris Pine). Their only job is to keep the house clean and make sure a delicious meal and the promise of sex is waiting for their husbands when they get home.
Everyone’s happy, right?
Not quite. For one, Alice is plagued by flashes of something—memories? hallucinations?—that rattle her. Her next door neighbor, Margaret (Kiki Layne), is deeply depressed and tries to convince Alice that something is horribly amiss, even dangerous, in Victory. The other women gossip about Margaret, say she has become hysterical. (The specter of women being called hysterical is raised many times in the script—the kind of gaslighting that has powered many a thriller.)
The Frank character is guru of sorts, idolized by the husbands. (In one scene, he arrives at a party without a tie and all the husbands hastily begin to yank off their own ties.) He speaks in platitudes about the heroism and greatness of what they’re doing, without ever getting into specifics. He talks about how much the husbands need the wives—for their support, their love, and “most of all, their discretion.” Wilde has revealed that she modeled the character a bit off of men’s rights activist Jordan Peterson, and as the film goes on, that comparison becomes more apt.
Alice becomes increasingly paranoid. At one point, she cracks open one egg after the next, but they are all empty. At another point, she feels like the walls are closing in on her, literally. In one of the film’s best scenes, she deftly wraps her head in Saran wrap—a suicide attempt? Or something else? She tries to express her concerns to Jack, who cheerfully brushes her off, and later to her best friend Bunny (Wilde), who gets angry with her.
The performances are quite good. Florence Pugh is fast becoming one of my favorite actresses—she has a wonderfully expressive face and a frank sensuality. Chris Pine makes for a compelling villain—watchful, smart, and smugly self-satisfied. As for Harry Styles: I think he’s just fine. He doesn’t need to do much more than be a dreamboat—an idealized version of the devoted, hard-working husband who’s permanently hot for his wife—and he pulls that off convincingly.
Don’t Worry Darling is far from perfect. Alice has ongoing flashes of a Busby Berkeley-style choreography that never made sense to me. And the ending, while intriguing, feels a bit rushed.
If you think of Don’t Worry Darling as a stylish horror film rather than a searing exploration of our society’s gender politics, it works a lot better. That said, while the film isn’t adding anything new to the conversation about gender imbalance in our society, it’s a conversation we need to keep having. . . again. . . and again . . .and again.
https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/dont-worry-darling/
~ Olivia Wilde’s psychological thriller brings new meaning to the term “gated community”. Beautiful people live in beautiful homes. The husbands work office hours, the wives spend the day shopping or poolside, and occasionally the couples get together for a fancy soiree. It’s a 1950s utopia, with a few minor problems; planes fall out of the sky, men in red jumpsuits haul people away, and occasionally someone attempts suicide. Nothing local HOA president Frank (Chris Pine) can’t fix. Florence Pugh and Harry Styles play one of the couples in what can be described as the movie offspring of Rod Serling and Donna Reed.
There’s a heavy “Stepford Wives” vibe going on here, however, below the surface Olivia Wilde’s sophomore directorial feature is nothing like the 1975 satirical thriller which starred Katherine Ross, or its 2004 reboot with Nicole Kidman. The housewives in those films averaged mid-30s, here, the focus is on a younger generation. Wilde, who is 38, was originally going to play the lead role but switched places with Pugh (age 26) after deciding she wanted a younger couple as the film’s protagonists. On several levels, the story works much better with the focus on a newlywed stage duo. With youth comes inexperience and so the dynamic of being the film’s hero against a veteran antagonist is more dramatic.
Pugh and Styles play Alice and Jack Chambers. Life is good, sex is better. They live on a cul-de-sac in Victory, California, a small community that resembles Palm Springs, created by the local employer The Victory Project headed by Frank (Pine), a mysterious cult-like figure who is married to Shelly (Gemma Chan). I feel she is the real brains behind the operation. It would have been great to see Chan’s role expanded. For most of the film, Shelly is a chameleon, blending in with the scenery until she engages with Pugh during a dinner table scene that casts a new light on her character. It should have led to a great rivalry between Chan and Pugh, a missed opportunity.
Like the other wives, Alice packs her husband’s lunch every morning, walks him out to the car, and waves goodbye as he and the other men pull out of their driveways at the exact same time as if they’re competing in a new Olympic event, Synchronized Driving. Off they go, into the desert to put in an 8-hour day at The Victory Project, as the wives remain clueless about the work their husbands do. It’s top secret and classified, according to the men, and should anyone start asking too many questions, a bunch of goons in red jumpsuits show up to whisk you away.
Wilde plays Bunny, one of the first Victory residents, who serves as the wives’ preceptor. Her husband Bill (Nick Kroll) functions in a similar role to the men. Whenever someone seems to be straying from the path Frank has created, they play damage control. You’re never sure if they know what’s going on or if they are trying to stop anyone from ruining their comfortable utopian lifestyle.
And speaking of life, it’s perfect in Victory. The men work office jobs, drive fancy cars, drink, smoke, and have sex as much as they want — if Jack is representative of the collective, then they all know where to find the G-spot — and on the flip side, the women are sexually fulfilled, shop with unlimited credit, drink and gossip poolside, and practice ballet taught by Shelly. This leads to a couple of nightmarish sequences reminiscent of 2018’s “Suspiria” once Alice begins to break down.
Kiki Layne plays Margaret, who isn’t herself these days. In fact, she begins warning the other couples that something sinister is going on in Victory. You can imagine what happens next, but her foresight or paranoia causes a ripple effect that hits Alice the hardest. She notices peculiar things, like planes falling out of the sky, later everyone denies there was a plane crash. She begins having terrifying hallucinations, eggs are just empty shells with nothing inside, and the walls at home start closing in as if she’s trapped in a box. When Alice begins asking Jack questions about the Victory Project, the company’s physician Dr. Collins (Timothy Simmons) shows up with a handy bottle of pills to calm her down.
Playing it cool, maybe too cool, during all of this is the mysterious Frank, a motivational speaker who spends the day delivering pep talks to the wives via radio broadcast, throwing lavish parties on occasion to thank everyone for their “loyalty” and when he asks, “What are we doing?” the couples respond, “Changing the world.” But what are they doing at the Victory Project? Tremors are a common occurrence in Victory, yes, it’s California, but these are no earthquakes, they happen too often. Bunny plays off the tiny earthquakes by stating, “Boys and their toys, at least we know they’re getting work done.”
When Frank and Shelly show up for a dinner party at the Chambers’ home, Alice uses the occasion to directly engage Frank. When Jack tries to quiet her, Frank interrupts, “Jack, it’s okay, I’m curious to hear where she’s going with this” as if he’s looking forward to someone challenging him. The tension escalates and the seemingly perfect world begins to unravel at an alarming pace.
The cinematography by Matthew Libatique, Oscar-nominated for his work on “Black Swan” and Bradley Cooper’s “A Star is Born”, is gorgeous while Katie Byron’s production design is impeccable, both deserve to be recognized by the Academy during awards season.
Everyone and everything look beautiful in Wilde’s film which clocks in at just over two hours. Much of the running time is spent preparing the audience for the big reveal, too much time in fact. I would have preferred the moment about 30 minutes earlier leaving plenty of time for the fallout, but here, as in many films, the audience is left to speculate what happens next. Had there been a post-reveal sequence, the film would have worked better, as is, “Darling” gives off the impression that it’s missing the final reel.
Still, Wilde does an exceptional job with her second feature behind the camera. Pugh is terrific, with the rest of the cast delivering solid performances. I do feel that Styles was trying too hard, his character comes off as artificial and the dialogue is hokey.
There’s a bizarre dance sequence where Styles resembles a puppet dancing onstage who seems to be controlled by Frank, the sinister P.T. Barnum puppeteer. As a “Star Trek” fan it reminded me of the television episode where Kirk’s mind is being controlled by the Platonians who force him to dance with Lt. Uhura (R.I.P. Nichelle Nichols). Watching Pine who plays Kirk in the recent films, on the flip side of the telekinesis hoedown, felt like karma. Unfortunately, I was hoping for a “disengage” command as the whole scene felt out of place.
“Don’t Worry Darling” has many admirable traits including the score by John Powell. From sweeping orchestral overtures to whispers and sound effects that fluctuate between chants and vocals thrown into an oscillating fan, it’s haunting and tense. In the end, it’s an exceptional thriller that could have used a little less “Real Housewives” and more sci-fi horror. ~
https://fortworthreport.org/2022/09/24/dont-worry-darling-review-while-the-science-fiction-and-horror-elements-could-have-used-a-boost-wildes-thriller-succeeds-on-various-levels/
Oriana: WHY DO ALL UTOPIAS END UP AS DYSTOPIAS?
WARNING: SPOILERS! (my response is for those who have already seen the movie)
First, I did enjoy the movie. Even the few negative reviews admit that it’s beautifully crafted and eminently watchable. The fifties retro is designed in impeccable detail. We get the feel of mid-century Palm Springs, elegant and stylish under the cloudless sky. The only trees are indeed palm trees, which botanists tell us are “not real trees.”
And the gradual Big Reveal is that “nothing here is real.” It’s a computer simulation, a virtual reality. Living in this virtual Palm Springs (officially called Victory, or the Victory Community) are couples and families at least one of whom chose to escape from actual life with its never-ending problems and miseries. Visually it's eye candy; on a deeper level, the movie gradually transforms into a horror story.
I agree with those critics who criticize both the Big Reveal and the movie's rushed ending. My favorite comic quotation from the movie is one happy housewife's statement: "Where I express myself best is in appetizers." My favorite serious statement is Bunny's heart-rending exclamation to Alice (was Alice named for the curious Alice in Wonderland?): "Nothing here is real . . . I chose this. Because here I can live with my children, and not remember that in the real world they died in an accident."
I wonder if a mother's grief could be so easily assuaged by her children's resurrection in virtual reality, considering that Bunny is one of the few residents of Victory who knows the truth -- and who voluntarily chose to live there (Alice didn't -- it was her husband who did "I loved my work. You took my life from me!" she accuses him at one point in the rushed ending).
The depth of grief carried by the residents is just one of the questions that "Don't Worry Darling" leaves unanswered. Another one is why Alice, who in the real world is a surgeon, seems to live in a shabby apartment. There is no such thing, anywhere in the world, but in the US in particular, as a low-income surgeon living in a bad neighborhood.
Also, are there any women whose main escape fantasy is to return to the era of the fifties, where their only duties would be to keep the house clean and dinner ready? Also, if this is all virtual reality, why have the sound of those unexplained explosions? Is it weapons testing, hinted at by Bunny's remark: "Boys and their toys"? Also, doesn't Alice's husband, Jack, say at some point that a man's main task is to keep his wife happy? Maybe it's me, but I've never met a man who thought this way about his purpose in life.
And what about those men in red jumpsuits who try to prevent anyone from leaving Victory? Wasn't there a less harsh way of dealing with "dissidents"? It's virtual reality, after all. Why not turn the escape car into a pumpkin?
But then this is not meant to be a realistic movie, or a feminist movie, as a few critics would have it. It's a very watchable psychological thriller. Its presentation of an affluent Palm Springs-style community is a visual delight. And Florence Pugh as Alice is superb. "She doesn't just carry the movie; she bench-presses it," one critic observed. Both the visual delight and the excellent acting are enough to recommend this movie. But it delivers more than that -- enough to make it engaging and memorable, if perhaps not enough to raise it to the category of movies that become classics.
Yes, it's a flawed movie. Still, my parting words are, "Don't miss it."
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CONSERVATIVE VERSUS LIBERAL REALITY
~ Conservatives tend to see the world as a place where, like it or not, observable differences reflect real underlying value (high Hierarchical world belief) that is somehow meant to be (high Intentional world belief) where station and attention received are usually deserved (high Just world belief, low belief that the world is Worth Exploring). Therefore, most hierarchies that emerge are best left as they are (high Acceptable world belief). However, unfortunately, change is slowly eroding the world’s hierarchies (low Progressing world belief). Therefore, constraining change and accepting inequality (the textbook two-part definition of conservatism that researchers use) is just common sense.
LIBERAL REALITY
Liberals tend to see the world as a place where observable differences are superficial, rarely reflecting actual value (low Hierarchical world belief), cosmic purpose or intent (low Intentional world belief), deserved status (low Just world belief), or attention received (high Worth Exploring). Therefore, most hierarchies require reform (low Acceptable world belief). Fortunately, however, the world is getting better and change is taking us in the right direction (high Progressing world belief). Therefore, embracing change and rejecting inequality (the textbook definition of liberalism) is just common sense.
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Basically, what’s happening here is that the main worldview difference between liberals and conservatives has nothing to do with how dangerous we think the world is but with whether the world is a place where differences usually matter and should, in general, be respected.
These findings have substantial implications for psychologists figuring out where political views come from, political operatives crafting messages, and historians understanding how the conservative/liberal fault line has shaped history.
As America has become more tribal and plagued by media echo chambers and misinformation, it’s easy to forget that, for many, there remains some honest disagreement about the sort of world this is and what policies are needed. Our discoveries about the primal world beliefs that separate liberals and conservatives is good news because each side can now seem a little less crazy and a little less mean.
The beginning of cooperation is not agreeing about everything but seeing the world from the perspective of another. Our research has shown that humanity has spent decades (centuries really, going back to Hobbes) misunderstanding each other. Now, maybe perspective-taking efforts can bear more fruit around dinner tables and capitol buildings.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/primal-world-beliefs-unpacked/202210/we-thought-conservatives-saw-the-world-more-dangerous-we
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WHY MANY PEOPLE DON’T LIKE THEIR IMAGE IN PHOTOGRAPHS
~ There’s a difference between your image in the mirror and in photos. The image you see in the mirror is reversed compared to the image that others see face-to-face with you. Your friends are familiar with your non-reversed image, while you are familiar with your reversed image in a regular mirror.
One reason we don’t particularly like photographs of ourselves is that those pictures present a view of our faces less familiar to us. In fact, researchers have shown that individuals prefer photos showing their mirror images, while others prefer photographs of those same individuals showing their “true” images. This phenomenon is likely due to the mere exposure effect, which is the consistent finding that we’re more comfortable with and favorable toward things we see frequently.
Why does it matter? Research on the psychology of mirrors and reflection, detailed in my latest book, Mirror Meditation, finds that many people don’t like their image in the mirror—and like their non-reversed image even less!
Beyond being unsettling, one’s image in the mirror can be an impetus for improvement plans. Many people consider cosmetic surgery because they struggle with their appearance in the mirror. People often seek cosmetic surgery to correct facial asymmetries, such as one eye being bigger than the other or a slightly crooked nose. These asymmetries can be disturbing to a patient because they believe it affects the impression that others may have of them. But, other people are seeing their non-reversed image, not the image that the patient faces in the mirror.
This issue is further complicated because cosmetic surgeons use facial photos extensively to treat patients. As patients go through the consultations and procedures, they look at photos of themselves, which is their non-reversed image. If patients are not used to seeing their non-reversed mirror image, it may make it even harder for them to accept their facial appearance before and after their treatment.
One study found that participants scored significantly better on the FACE-Q Age Appraisal and Appearance-Related Psychosocial Distress scales when looking in a standard mirror than in a Non-Reversing Mirror (NRM). In addition, most reported that their faces seemed less symmetric and less balanced in the NRM. Overall, 83 percent reported seeing a qualitative difference in their appearance, with 30 percent responding that looking in the NRM had changed their facial aesthetic goals.
Thus, Non-Reversing Mirrors can bridge the familiarity of the patient’s reversed reflection and their less-familiar, non-reversed, true image. It may be a useful physician-patient communication tool when discussing goals and expectations for facial aesthetic procedures.
If you find looking at photos of yourself unsettling or are contemplating cosmetic facial surgery, getting familiar with your non-reversed image can be beneficial.
Use the mere exposure effect to your advantage. Repeated exposure to a stimulus facilitates liking, so you can leverage the mere exposure effect to increase your liking for your own photographs. Research also shows that exposures of shorter durations are more effective at increasing liking than longer duration exposures.
You can use a photograph as a background photo on your cell phone or rapidly scan through photographs of yourself, which may provide repeated short exposures and may increase your appreciation for those photographs.
Alternatively, get a True Mirror, a non-reversing mirror in a display box developed by John Walter. The True Mirror has led to many revelations in how people view themselves. Notably, you may have heard of the True Mirror from a popular TED Talk, “The Art of Being Yourself” by Caroline McHugh. Perhaps both images are true in knowing yourself and should be accepted and appreciated. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-clarity/202209/why-you-look-different-in-the-mirror-in-photos
Oriana:
The blankness of this mirror reminded me of the belief that the dead and other members of the spirit world have no reflection. Mirrors are amazing -- and loaded with symbolism.
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A FLORIDA COMMUNITY BUILT TO WEATHER HURRICANES
~ Like many others in southwest Florida, Mark Wilkerson seemingly gambled his life by choosing to shelter at home rather than evacuate when Hurricane Ian crashed ashore last week as a Category 4 storm.
But it wasn't just luck that saved Wilkerson and his wife, Rhonda, or prevented damage to their well-appointed one-story house. You might say that it was all by design.
In 2018, Wilkerson became one of the first 100 residents of Babcock Ranch — an innovative community north of Fort Myers where homes are built to withstand the worst that Mother Nature can throw at them without being flooded out or losing electricity, water or the internet.
The community is located 30 miles inland to avoid coastal storm surges. Power lines to homes are all run underground, where they are shielded from high winds. Giant retaining ponds surround the development to protect houses from flooding. As a backup, streets are designed to absorb floodwaters and spare the houses.
Wilkerson says he and his wife moved here from Illinois. "We'd almost been ready to build north of Tampa, on the Gulf," he says. "And then the last hurricane came through and reminded me that ... I want to be in a place where I don't have to evacuate.”
So when the storm hit, Wilkerson and his wife stayed put, as did most other residents here. Although the community didn't experience the hurricane at its most intense, Wilkerson says they felt 100-mph winds. At one point, the lights in his house flickered but "lo and behold, we never lost power.”
In fact, his house didn't even lose a shingle. That's the basic story of Babcock Ranch, post-Ian: Aside from a traffic light at the development's main entrance that's no longer there, a few street signs lying on the ground and some knocked-over palm trees, you'd hardly know that a hurricane came through.
Unfortunately, not so for many of the surrounding communities, where damaged structures and power outages have not been uncommon.
Wilkerson has worked in the solar industry since the 1980s, and one of the things that drew him to Babcock Ranch is its innovative use of solar energy: 870 acres of land owned by the development sport 650,000 photovoltaic panels, operated by Florida Power & Light.
The solar array powers the whole community — and then some. It can supply 30,000 homes. Babcock Ranch has only about 5,000 residents, though. The excess goes back into the grid and is used to power surrounding communities. At night and on cloudy days, a natural gas generator kicks in to fill the gap.
Babcock Ranch is the brainchild of Syd Kitson, a 64-year-old former professional football player who made his name in the 1980s with the Green Bay Packers. He went on to found a real estate development company, Kitson & Partners, and Babcock Ranch is one of firm's showcase projects.
Jennifer Languell is a sustainability engineer who helped design Babcock Ranch, and she lives here too. "We felt you could develop and improve land, not just develop in a traditional way where people think you are destroying the land.”
"We have a lot of open spaces. We have a lot of trails. We have a lot of parks," she says.
"The things that we do, you don't see. The strength of the buildings, or the infrastructure that deals with stormwater, or the utilities. You don't see that stuff," she says. "Which is good, because most people don't need or want to think about it.”
As confident as Languell is of the community's durability, even she was a little unnerved by the storm's sheer strength. "I can definitely tell you that I pulled up my construction drawings and I verified the wind speed," she says.
Their good fortune pays dividends for others in need
Admittedly, Babcock Ranch has a slightly insular feel to it. But partly because residents were spared the full wrath of the hurricane, they have been able to reach out and help those in need.
A community center here was designed to double as a reinforced storm shelter. Everyone staying there right now has come in from other hard-hit communities. Babcock Ranch residents have been fielding requests on social media and shuttling in supplies.
Judith Schrag, 70, who uses a walker, is sitting out front of the shelter smoking a cigarette. She arrived at the Babcock Ranch shelter a few days ago after her Port Charlotte apartment was flooded out.
The community has been "absolutely phenomenal in terms of donations," Schrag says. "They are what have helped to keep this place going.”
Hurricane Ian was a big test for this community, where houses start at around $250,000. Languell says the storm provided "proof of concept" for the community's design. The developers of Babcock Ranch welcome imitators, she adds. Communities elsewhere in the U.S. might benefit from what has been learned here.
But there's still more to learn, Languell says.
"We don't want to brag by any stretch of the imagination, because you do that, and the next thing you know, you get hit by a Category 5 and something doesn't work as well," she says. ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/05/1126900340/florida-community-designed-weather-hurricane-ian-babcock-ranch-solar
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HOW HURRICANES FORM
~ The typical hurricane season for Atlantic hurricanes is June 1 through November 30, and the peak season is from August to November. According to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), hurricanes form from tropical storms over the ocean.
A low-pressure area moves through humid, tropical air, increasing storm activity. As the storm moves west, it pulls warm air from the tropical waters and causes a low-pressure system. As the warm air is pulled into the atmosphere, it cools, forming a thunderstorm. As the water within the storm clouds condenses into rain, more heat is released, giving more strength to the storm. Once the winds from the storm hit 74 mph, it is classified as a hurricane.
Flooding after Hurricane Ian
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According to NOAA, hurricanes are ranked on a 1 to 5 category scale called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Category 1 is the weakest and Category 5 is the strongest.
Category 1
The hurricane's wind speeds can be anywhere from 74 to 95 mph. These strong winds can cause damage to roofs, snap tree branches and bring down power lines. The storms can also cause severe flooding. A famous Category 1 hurricane was Hurricane Danny, which hit Lake Charles, Louisiana. It caused severe flooding along the Gulf Coast, three casualties and over $100 million in damages.
Category 2
In a Category 2 hurricane, the wind speeds can span 96 to 110 mph. Much like a Category 1, these storms can damage roofs and siding, and uproot trees. They can also cause near-total power loss and flooding.
Hurricane Bonnie is a famous Category 2 that landed in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1998. There were three casualties and over $720 million in damages.
Category 3
Once the storm reaches 111 to 129 mph, experts consider it a Category 3 and a major hurricane. Extreme wind can damage homes, property and trees. It will most likely also cause power loss and remove clean water for several weeks after the storm.
One of the most famous Category 3 hurricanes is Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans, Louisiana, and parts of Mississippi in 2005. Though the storm had reached a Category 5, by the time Katrina made landfall, it was a Category 3. New Orleans' levees broke from the storm surge causing massive flooding and damage. It's estimated that over 1800 people died from the storm and it caused over $81 billion in damages.
Category 4
When wind speeds reach 130 to 156 mph, the hurricane is a Category 4 storm. Like the other categories, strong winds will cause significant damage to homes and structures, though it is more likely structures will lose exterior walls or collapse completely in a Category 4. It can also cause damage to power lines and trees, making it hard to get vehicles through the area. There will likely be no water or power and the storm surge could cause significant flooding.
According to NOAA, the area hit by a Category 4 hurricane will likely be uninhabitable for weeks.
Hurricane Harvey is a famous Category 4 that landed on Texas and Louisiana in 2017. There were 68 casualties and roughly $125 billion in damages.
Category 5
A Category 5 hurricane reaches wind speeds of 157 mph, or higher. These storms are devastating. They most likely will blow down homes and structures or severely damage them. The area could be without water or power due to damage to trees and power lines. According to NOAA, the area could be uninhabitable for weeks to months.
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There have only been four Category 5 hurricanes that have hit the continental U.S. and caused severe damage.
Labor Day Hurricane (1935)
The Labor Day Hurricane struck the Florida Keys with winds that reached nearly 200 mph. It caused severe crop and property damage, as well as massive flooding. According to NOAA, there were 408 casualties; many of them had been World War I veterans working in the keys.
Hurricane Camille (1969)
Hurricane Camille hit along the Mississippi coast. It's ranked the second strongest hurricane behind the Labor Day Hurricane that hit the Florida Keys. According to NOAA, the actual wind speed wasn't recorded because all the monitoring equipment was destroyed in the storm, though it's estimated that the winds peaked around 175 mph.
Hurricane Camille caused about $1.412 billion in damages; three deaths were also reported in Cuba. It caused severe structural damage and created flood waters nearly 10 feet deep. There were a total of 256 casualties between Mississippi and Virginia and West Virginia — where the storm had caused significant flooding.
Hurricane Andrew (1992)
Hurricane Andrew made landfall on Florida's southeast coast with 150 mph winds. As it moved over Florida, experts downgraded it to a Category 3. However, the storm was re-energized to a Category 4 as it entered the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into southeastern Louisiana with 175 mph winds.
Andrew not only caused severe damage to structures but to the environment as well — it wreaked havoc on the Florida Everglades and the coral reefs. There were 65 casualties and over $26.5 billion in damages.
Aftermath of Hurricane Andrew
Hurricane Michael (2018)
Hurricane Michael struck the Florida panhandle with 160 mph winds. There were 16 casualties and roughly $25 billion in damages. Some scientists warn that storms like Hurricane Michael may become more frequent with climate change.
It is worth noting that a Category 5 hurricane, San Felipe II hit Puerto Rico in 1928. Named after the first San Felipe hurricane to hit Puerto Rico, San Felipe II had wind speeds of 160 mph leading to 312 deaths and over $50 Million in damages. ~
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/this-is-what-makes-a-hurricane-so-dangerous-at-category-5-and-others?utm_source=acs&utm_medium=email&utm_email=ivy333%40cox.net&utm_campaign=News0_DSC_221006_000000_V1&eid=ivy333%40cox.net
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Hurricane Ian
~ As Ian headed north-northwestward, it continued to quickly intensify over the warm waters and emerged in the southern Gulf of Mexico as a Category 3 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph during the night of Sept 26 into the morning of Sept 27—the strongest September hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico since Hurricane Irma in 2017. Ian intensified faster than any other hurricane this Atlantic season. ~
METHANE: FAR WORSE THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT
~ Methane leaking from pipelines on the floor of the Baltic Sea is only the tip of the iceberg: Scientists have reported that methane emissions from the oil and gas industry are far worse than previously thought.
There's a reason why carbon dioxide has become the bogeyman of the climate crisis, considering just how much of it we've pumped into the atmosphere. We haven't stopped at CO2, however. Oh no, we've added methane into the toxic mix. While the gas, also known as CH4, has become almost synonymous with cattle flatulence, there's actually much more to it than that. And it's nothing like as funny as a fart. Or a burp, which are the bigger bodily offenders.
Scientists estimate that although methane only accounts for 3% of emissions since 1750, it is linked to as much as 23% of historic warming. In other words, the stuff is potent. Really potent. As in, a single ton of methane causes roughly the equivalent warming of at least 28 tons of CO2 over the course of a century. And in the last two decades alone, we've managed to increase our output by 10%.
Reducing the amount that seeps into the atmosphere could be a secret weapon in the climate fight. In fact it could, according to a UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) report , avoid 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming by the 2040s.
If only it were that simple. Methane is not only the natural gas that supplies power stations and heats homes, it's also the stuff that wafts from landfills, rice paddies, the intestines of ruminants, wetlands, and in some instances, supposedly “green” hydropower reservoirs.
All told, the world emits 570 million tons of CH4 a year. We humans are responsible for 60% of that, with the gold medal going to farming. Partly, but not only, as a result of gassy livestock, the agricultural sector causes the same amount of warming as 788 million cars, which is more than half of the world's 1.4 billion-strong fleet.
Silver goes to none other than the fossil fuel industry, with the waste sector snatching bronze.
Fossil fuel infrastructure is a major, and avoidable, source of methane. Damaged and poorly maintained gas pipes leak the gas through patchable holes and processes, leading to what are commonly called "fugitive emissions." If they were better maintained, the equivalent of 1.83 billion tons of CO2 could be saved. And what's more, the natural gas saved from patching up the leaks would more than pay for the upgrades.
oil refinery in Romania
Infrastructure improvements could reduce leaks, and tracing them is becoming easier thanks to satellite imaging that detects them, thereby making it harder for fossil fuel companies to hide or deny the flaws in their systems.
And by the same token, recovering burnable methane from waste could be financially incentivized. Landfill gas projects across the world are already capturing methane to burn. In the US, 70% of these LFGs produce gas for electricity generation. And at least we can use methane to burn.
But that's not ideal, since it produces carbon dioxide, which, as we've already established, is the bogeyman of the climate crisis.
Why is it always so complicated?
That's a good one, but hang on, there's more. Because although we can change dodgy pipes, we can't exactly replumb our farmyard friends, which makes shrinking our animal's methane footprint a tad trickier.
That said, we can go some way to mitigating the problem by changing what we feed them. Something called FutureFeed, for example, does exactly that: it's a livestock feed that contains 3% Australian seaweed which has been shown to reduce emissions by 80%. Just a little bit of dietary greens cuts back on cow burps. Not bad going.
An easier option would be to change what we eat. Less meat and dairy equals fewer animals, equals fewer gases being belched out into the atmosphere.
Cutting down on meat can't be the answer to everything…
Not everything, but it ticks a couple of boxes. But we don't need to go there now. Not when we could be talking permafrost.
As the Arctic heats up, areas of Earth that have been locked in frozen slumber for many millennia, are starting to thaw. And as that happens, they're not only revealing pristine condition — albeit dead — big cat species lost long ago to extinction, but thousands of years' worth of methane and CO2.
Some of this former icescape then transforms into new wetlands, which release methane into the atmosphere, helping temperatures to rise. Thawing permafrost could increase non-human methane emissions by 80%. And that, in turn increases the likelihood of droughts, fires, flooding and other extreme weather events everywhere around the world.
A gap between what's needed and what is actually being done
The latest IPCC report laid bare just how quickly we need to cut global greenhouse gas emissions before things get even worse.
While it might be impossible to do away with man-made methane emissions completely, cutting them even a little could generate time enough to develop green technologies, such as low-carbon planes and ships.
What's more, methane emitted at ground level forms ozone which can damage respiratory health. According to the UNEP, reducing CH4 output by45% could prevent 255,000 premature deaths per year.
Like many climate and environmental issues, policymakers are the ones with the power to affect meaningful, lasting change. But even as individuals we can make a contribution by (whether we like it or not), cutting back on burgers, palm oil and flying. Giving these industries our money sends them a seal of approval to continue with business as usual. But that, we have seen by now, is the one thing the planet cannot afford to let happen. ~
https://www.dw.com/en/greenhouse-gases-methane-carbon-dioxide-global-heating-cows-permafrost/a-59059353?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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ONLY MONTHS TO LIVE
~ EDITING THE FINAL DETAILS of one’s life is like editing a story for the final time. It’s the last shot an editor has at making corrections, the last rewrite before the roll of the presses. It’s more painful than I anticipated to throw away files and paperwork that seemed critical to my survival just two weeks ago, and today, are all trash. Like the manual for the TV that broke down four years ago, and notebooks for stories that will never be written, and from former girlfriends, letters whose value will plummet the day I die. Filling wastebasket after wastebasket is a regrettable reminder that I have squandered much of my life on trivia.
The final months would be a lot easier if I could be assured that, after death, we’d get a chance to see people who have died already. I’d like to shake hands with my best friend, my father, who died in 1972 and whom I’ve missed every day since. I owe him an apology. When I was 12, I stole 50 cents from his trousers, two quarters. The guilt was suffocating, though, and 10 days later I replaced his 50 cents, and I added an extra 25 for interest and atonement.
The only thing we argued about was politics. He was an ardent Republican. I am a boring liberal. When my son was born in 1994, the doctor held him by his ankles, upside down, as they do in movies, and announced that it was a boy. “I know that,” I said, nervously. “Is he a Democrat?”
Later that year, at Mount Auburn Hospital, as my mother neared death, I asked: “Where do you think we go after death?”
“I don’t know,” she said, voice aquiver, “but I think I am going on a long trip, and I think I am going to see your father.”
“If you see Dad, tell him we finally got rid of that S.O.B. Nixon.”
As usual, she leaped to his defense.
“Don’t talk about your father that way.”
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SOME PEOPLE GROW into adulthood confused about a career, but I was lucky. From age 14, I wanted to be a newspaperman. Although my father never graduated from high school and worked long hours for a meager salary as a machinist, and although my mother raised five children and mopped floors nights at Filene’s, and although our family lived at the edge financially and dressed in hand-me-downs, the one thing never in short supply at our house was the newspaper — four a day, the Boston Post, the Globe, the Boston American, and the Daily Record.
In my working-class Boston neighborhood, at age 14, I delivered the weekly newspaper, the Dorchester Argus, and the daily Hearst tabloid, the Record, paying 3.4 cents per copy and selling each for a nickel, a profit of 1.6 cents per paper, plus whatever tips I could finagle. On the porch in front of my father’s boarding house, I practiced folding the tabloid Record into thirds, without creasing it too much, so that when I tossed it high toward a front porch, with a spin, the newspaper would open flat, with the headline facing the customer as she opened the door to retrieve it.
I’ve had the privilege of having spent more than 60 years working for newspapers. There was not a day when it wasn’t a pleasure to go to work. Any doubts I had about newspapering as a career were dissolved on my paper route one Friday night in March 1953. I picked up my bundle of 45 copies of the Record that were tossed from a truck into the doorway of Berry’s hardware store and I was startled at the biggest, blackest headline I had ever seen: “STALIN DEAD.”
Newspaper bag over my shoulder, I began my one-hour route, crossing the railroad tracks in Port Norfolk, a neighborhood where the teenage gang took pride in calling themselves Port Rats. So eager were people for their evening newspaper and details of Stalin’s death that many were waiting for me on their front porch.
To me, every daily newspaper was a wonder — all those stories, local, national, global, all written on deadline, with photographs, analysis, columns, editorials, comics and crossword, not to mention all that news about the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins — if that isn’t a miracle, what is?
The Stalin story required coordination among correspondents in Moscow, telegraphers transmitting their stories, and among others in Boston, at the Record, foreign editors, photo editors, copy editors, compositors, pressmen, truck drivers and the least significant cog in the entire process, me, although I was the luckiest, because it was I who handed the newspaper to the grateful reader, and it was I who heard the words, “Thank you.”
DOES THE INTENSITY of a fatal illness clarify anything? Every day, I look at my wife’s beautiful face more admiringly, and in the garden, I do stare at the long row of blue hydrangeas with more appreciation than before. And the hundreds and hundreds of roses that bloomed this year were a greater joy than usual, not merely in their massive sprays of color, but also in their deep green foliage, the soft petals, the deep colors and the aromas that remind me of boyhood. As for the crises in Cuba and Haiti, however, and voting rights and the inexplicable stubbornness of Republicans who refuse to submit to an inoculation that might save their lives — on all those matters, no insights, no thunderbolts of discovery. I remain as ignorant as ever.
I am now so early into this new hell that I have no pain, although that is coming, surely, and no symptoms except moments of utter exhaustion and, in the past three months, a loss of 20 pounds. After decades of turning down desserts, candies, and pastries to control my weight, it now seems cruel to be pressured to eat more food for which I have less appetite.
As my life nears the finish line, the list of things I’ll miss grows.
I’ll miss my homes in Cambridge and Falmouth. I’ll never again see the sun rise over the marsh off Vineyard Sound, never again see that little, yellow goldfinch that perched atop a hemlock outside my window from time to time so that both of us could watch the tide rise to cover the wetland.
Never again will I stretch out on the sand with a drink and stare in amazement at a sky filled with diamond stars. How is it possible that there could be more than 100 thousand million stars in our Milky Way, let alone who can say how many millions upon millions more in other galaxies, and yet, among them all, there is no planet that supports life? Imagine how newspapers will report that discovery!
I wish the afterlife were arranged so that I could hear Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 again and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, especially the one in D for two violins and cello. In the afterlife right away, I’d test whoever’s in charge immediately by requesting “Till We Meet Again” with George Lewis, who played the clarinet with as much dexterity and imagination as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, yet never received the same fame because he was Black.
And then, I hope for a playlist that includes Nina Simone’s “The Laziest Gal in Town” and everything by Sarah Vaughan, especially “Easter Parade” with Billy Eckstine, and while we’re at it, let’s throw in Bessie Smith singing “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine.”
All of us who, like me, are blessed with a pause before death, spend some time reliving the better moments. I enjoy recalling that I played pool against two of the greatest, Willie Mosconi in Denver, and in Boston, Minnesota Fats, who was the inspiration for the Jackie Gleason role in The Hustler. I lost both games, never had a shot. Willie and Fats ran the table, and Fats did it from a wheelchair.
After I die, I’m not expecting the world, but this business about the afterlife is more complicated than what they describe in the Bible. The experts say more than 100 billion humans have died. If you’re looking for a buddy to have a beer, like jazzman Dave McKenna or writer Jerry Murphy or possibly Peter Falk who played Columbo, how are you going to find him in a mob of 100 billion people?
Speaking of music, if I bump into the great jazzman Earl “Fatha” Hines, who played with Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five back in the 1920s, you can bet your life I’m going to remind him that one night in the ’60s, between sets at Sandy’s jazz club in Beverly, I was the short guy who bought him that Heineken.
The same with Julia Child. One doesn’t “bump” into Julia, exactly, but if I see her at a local restaurant, if they have local restaurants, I’ll find a way to mention that I’m the guy who wrote in the Globe that we should run away together, that I would peel potatoes, cut onions, and do dishes if only I could put my feet under her table forever. I’ll recite for Julia the response she wrote to me in a letter: “How flattering to be invited to run away with a younger man. However, my husband has a black belt in karate and so, in the interest of your continued good health, if nothing else, I must decline.”
I KNOW THAT AFTER I DIE, I probably ought to forget all the treats of this life, like Lobster Savannah dinners on an expense account at an Elysium such as Locke-Ober, and with my luck, there’s probably some rule against chilled Hendrick’s martinis with a lemon twist. There will be no more nights of winnowing the hours away listening to Bob Winter’s piano at the Four Seasons. There’ll be no more lazy afternoons on Boston Harbor aboard my little sailboat, The Butterfly, and no more surprise telephone calls from buddies like Dave Manzo in Boston, Alan Pergament in Buffalo, and Jim Coppersmith in Marblehead, who never hang up without saying, “I love you, Jack.”
As death draws near, I feel the same uncomfortable transition I experienced when I was a teenager at Brantwood Camp in Peterborough, New Hampshire, packing up to go home after a grand summer. I’m not sure what awaits me when I get home, but this has certainly been an exciting experience. I had a loving family. I had a great job at the newspaper. I met fascinating people, and I saw myriad worldwide wonders. It’s been full of fun and laughter, too, a really good time.
I just wish I could stay a little longer. ~
Journalist Jack Thomas lived and wrote in Cambridge. He died of cancer at the age of 83.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/21/magazine/i-just-learned-i-only-have-months-live-this-is-what-i-want-say/
Oriana:
I don’t know if this is the most disappointing such story I’ve ever read — or the most perfect one, celebrating the high points of a good life and never mentioning a single regret.
Jack seems to take some kind of afterlife for granted, though certainly not the kind where most people end up in hell for eternity. He wishes he could be assured that he’ll meet the people he loved. He’s not totally sure that a good new existence awaits, but he does what he’s learned how to do: give us some specific of his satisfying life. And perhaps that’s the best we can do: to keep on celebrating life to the end, including the glory of rose bushes and hydrangeas.
He doesn’t engage in philosophizing, or advice giving. He wastes no time on pondering Stevensian “stale grandeur of annihilation.” It’s roses and hydrangeas for eternity. And the memory of lobster dinners, and his adoration of Julia Child. Should we pity him for not making the slightest effort to confront anything that went wrong, or recalling some dark night of the soul? But what good would it do, unless he gained some wisdom from it that he wished to impart to others? I suppose we should just envy him for having had the life he seems to have found rich and fulfilling. Yes, he was lucky.
Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.
Edward Hopper: Rooms by the Sea, 1951
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THE ORIGINS OF THE HEBREW GOD
~ What is now the Abrahamic God is a syncretism of two earlier gods: the Canaanite god El (Hebrew: Elohim) and Yahweh (YHWH).
El is known from the fifteenth century BCE, early in the Late Bronze Age.
Religion News Service reports “An ancient tablet discovered near the Palestinian city of Nablus may contain the earliest known mention of God’s name in proto-alphabetic Hebrew. Scott Stripling, director of the Archaeological Studies Institute at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, announced the discovery of the lead tablet Thursday (March 24). He said it could push back the written record of the name “Yahweh” a couple of centuries earlier, to at least 1200 B.C. and perhaps as early as 1400 B.C.”
I note that the divine name on the tablet is not YHWH, but YHW. This suggests it may be of Canaanite or Midianite origin. The Egyptians reported that YHW was the Midianite storm god.
Antony Ashkenaz reports in Express that “other experts believe the spot be a sacrificial altar from the Iron Age, several hundred years later.” If so, this tablet would not be the earliest mention of Yahweh.
Here is The Express article:
~ During excavations at the West Bank, researchers uncovered a tablet only slightly larger than a postage stamp, with an ancient text that called on God to curse a person who breaks their word. While the study has not been peer-reviewed yet, the researchers believe that the tablet is 3200 years old, making it the oldest known Hebrew text, and also the earliest one to contain the Hebrew name of God.
The 40 letters of the proto-Hebrew inscription on the tablet is centuries older than any Hebrew text discovered in ancient Israel.
The archaeologists note that the inscription is a warning to those who do not fulfill their obligations held by a covenant, which is a legally binding agreement.
The team of researchers translated the inscription to say:
“Cursed, cursed, cursed by the God YHW.
“You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die.
“Cursed by YHW— cursed cursed cursed.”
Project leader Scott Stripling, an archaeologist and the director of excavations for the US-based Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) noted: “These types of amulets are well known in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but Zertal’s excavated pottery dated to the Iron Age I and Late Bronze Age, so logically the tablet derived from one of these earlier periods.
“Even so, our discovery of a Late Bronze Age inscription stunned me.”
According to researcher Pieter Gert van der Veen, deciphering the concealed letters proved tedious, but “each day we recovered new letters and words written in a very ancient script.”
YHW from Mt Ebal in proto-alphabetic script.
The tablet was found inside sediment dug up during the archaeological excavations on Mount Ebal in the 1980s.
Mr Stripling believes that this sheet was unearthed during excavations of the ancient stone structure called "Joshua's Altar," high on a ridge of the mountain.
Some attribute the site to where the biblical figure Joshua, the successor to Moses as leader of the Israelites – sacrificed animals to God.
Meanwhile, other experts believe the spot be a sacrificial altar from the Iron Age, several hundred years later.
A chemical analysis of the tablet reveals that it was made from a lead mine in Greece that was active during this period. ~
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1591165/archaeology-mystery-ancient-curse-tablet-hebrew-name-god
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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARK OF COVENANT?
~ There is no direct evidence for the biblical Ark of the Covenant, but there is evidence that similar boxes were used elsewhere in the Ancient Near East, making the existence of the biblical one at least plausible. Historians actually believe there probably was a real Ark of the Covenant, even if its history is not as portrayed in the Bible. The last place the Bible locates the Ark is in Jerusalem, where it was taken by King David from Kiriath Jearim, some ten kilometers away. Haaretz says in an archaeological article, that the real Ark of the Covenant may actually have been taken from Kiriath Jearim, where it probably originated, to Jerusalem by King Josiah.
If there was a real Ark of the Covenant, it was left behind in Jerusalem and abandoned when the city was destroyed [by the Babylonians]. Thomas Römer speculates that the ark may have originally contained two statues representing Yahweh and Asherah. If so, the Exiles returning from Babylon would not have been interested in symbols of a forgotten partnership between Yahweh and his Asherah. ~ Dick Harfield, Quora
Oriana:
I’ve always felt confused by all the fuss initially made about the Ark — and then the Ark disappears without any explanation. If later on it came to be seen as idolatrous (whatever was inside it, let’s not forget that there were sculptures of two cherubs on top of it), then of course the Ark becomes an embarrassment to be hushed up.
The Ark was apparently inspired by the ancient Egyptian mobile shrines used during the harvest season. The Egyptian [i.e. “pagan”] origin may have been a further strike against even mentioning its existence.
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A WOMAN CELEBRATES BEING “RELIGION-FREE”
~ Saturday was a significant day. I didn't mention it then, but I treated myself to some celebration for being six years religion-free. Hallelujah.
Six years ago my then-husband and I studied our way out of the Bible. On Sept 22, 2012, I laid down the book and rejected its god. For me, it meant freedom beyond words (but I tried mighty hard to find them and even published a whole book that probably didn't do the journey justice, though folks seemed to enjoy it anyhow).
I didn't lose faith, didn't get angry with God and reject him -- my belief simply dissolved in the light of reason. I asked the questions, I found the answers, I closed the book and opened my eyes, slowly shedding a lifetime of indoctrination.
I had been a devout follower of Yehovah God and Jesus Christ my entire adult life. It shaped EVERYTHING and so EVERYTHING changed.
For six years now I have enjoyed the freedom and owned the responsibility of a life without a deity. I escaped a miserable marriage on the back of this, and as a single parent, I have learned to provide the stability my family needs, the stability that was under constant threat before, bound to a broken man (not a bad one, just very broken) by religious ideals. It's difficult; not gonna lie. But it's not as hard as trusting my life to the whims of an imaginary Father or bending my worldview to an ancient, misogynistic religion with the constant mantra of "my life is not my own.”
Fuck. That.
This is MY life. Fleeting, achingly beautiful, wretchedly painful, whatever I want to make of it. Mine. None of it has been a mistake, not the religion, not the marriage, not the children, not the time in prayer. I embrace it all. It's mine. I own it. I will own my past. I will own today. I will own tomorrow.
But I will never again tell a child or another person that they are sinful, born broken, destined to always fall short. YOU -- yeah you, reading this now -- YOU are an amazing human being, exactly the way you are. Don't be ashamed of you! You were not created for a purpose -- make one for yourself. Enjoy your time on this rock because it's probably all you've got. Do the dew, climb the mountain, swim the sea, kiss the girl, get the tattoo, eat the soup, read the book, hug the friend, feed the wayfaring stranger.
I don't know where I'm going with this. I just want to celebrate freedom this week as I think about how hard-won mine was.
~ Kaleesha, Facebook
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COFFEE LINKED TO LONGEVITY
~ Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day is linked with a longer lifespan and lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared with avoiding coffee, according to research published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. The findings applied to ground, instant and decaffeinated varieties.
"In this large, observational study, ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause" said study author Professor Peter Kistler of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia. "The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle.”
There is little information on the impact of different coffee preparations on heart health and survival. This study examined the associations between types of coffee and incident arrhythmias, cardiovascular disease and death using data from the UK Biobank, which recruited adults between 40 and 69 years of age. Cardiovascular disease was comprised of coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure and ischemic stroke.
The study included 449,563 participants free of arrhythmias or other cardiovascular disease at baseline. The median age was 58 years and 55.3% were women. Participants completed a questionnaire asking how many cups of coffee they drank each day and whether they usually drank instant, ground (such as cappuccino or filtered coffee), or decaffeinated coffee. They were then grouped into six daily intake categories, consisting of none, less than one, one, two to three, four to five, and more than five cups per day. The usual coffee type was instant in 198,062 (44.1%) participants, ground in 82,575 (18.4%), and decaffeinated in 68,416 (15.2%). There were 100,510 (22.4%) non-coffee drinkers who served as the comparison group.
Coffee drinkers were compared to non-drinkers for the incidence of arrhythmias, cardiovascular disease and death, after adjusting for age, sex, ethnicity, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, smoking status, and tea and alcohol consumption. Outcome information was obtained from medical records and death records. The median follow up was 12.5 years.
A total of 27,809 (6.2%) participants died during follow up. All types of coffee were linked with a reduction in death from any cause. The greatest risk reduction seen with two to three cups per day, which compared to no coffee drinking was associated with a 14%, 27% and 11% lower likelihood of death for decaffeinated, ground, and instant preparations, respectively.
Cardiovascular disease was diagnosed in 43,173 (9.6%) participants during follow up. All coffee subtypes were associated with a reduction in incident cardiovascular disease. Again, the lowest risk was observed with two to three cups a day, which compared to abstinence from coffee was associated with a 6%, 20%, and 9% reduced likelihood of cardiovascular disease for decaffeinated, ground, instant coffee, respectively.
An arrhythmia was diagnosed in 30,100 (6.7%) participants during follow up. Ground and instant coffee, but not decaffeinated, was associated with a reduction in arrhythmias including atrial fibrillation. Compared with non-drinkers, the lowest risks were observed with four to five cups a day for ground coffee and two to three cups a day for instant coffee, with 17% and 12% reduced risks, respectively.
Professor Kistler said: "Caffeine is the most well-known constituent in coffee, but the beverage contains more than 100 biologically active components. It is likely that the non-caffeinated compounds were responsible for the positive relationships observed between coffee drinking, cardiovascular disease and survival. Our findings indicate that drinking modest amounts of coffee of all types should not be discouraged but can be enjoyed as a heart-healthy behavior.” ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220926200838.htm
Oriana:
The benefits of coffee include reducing the risk of dementia and Parkinson’s, and the risk of colon, liver, head-and neck, prostate, and breast cancer.
If coffee doesn’t agree with you, similar benefits can be obtained with tea, both the black and green variety.
By the way, caffeine is an antioxidant found to be three times as potent as Vitamin C. But note that even decaf has some benefits, though I don’t think it’s only the compounds other than caffeine (still demonized by mainstream medical establishment) that have health benefits.
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THE RISING RATES OF NEAR-SIGHTEDNESS
~ In the United States, about 40% of adults are short-sighted, up from 25% in 1971. Rates have similarly soared in the UK. But their situation pales in comparison with that of teens and young adults in South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China, whose prevalence rates are between 84% and 97%. If current trends continue, half the world's population will be short-sighted by 2050. And the problem seems to be spreading at a faster rate than ever.
Myopia has risen dramatically among children in China to reach 76%-90% among older school children. "It has been an extremely steep rise," says Chia.
At first glance, the idea of a short-sighted world may not seem like a major problem. After all, when someone struggles to see things at a distance, we have a proven fix: glasses. But researchers warn that myopia is not a benign quirk. It is one of the leading causes of vision impairment and blindness, for example.
And in children, where it may take some time to spot the problem and correct it, it can hurt their ability to learn in school and enjoy daily life – and set them up for future eye health problems.
To make matters worse, while the typical age for a child to develop myopia is between eight and 12 years old, children are becoming myopic at a younger age. The earlier a child develops myopia, the more likely it is that they will have severe myopia in adulthood that can ultimately threaten their eyesight, by causing problems related to different parts of the eye such as glaucoma, retinal detachment, cataracts, and myopic maculopathy.
What explains this global eyesight crisis?
Genetics play only a small part. While a family history of myopia raises the risk of a child developing it, a purely genetic case of myopia is rare, says Neema Ghorbani-Mojarrad, a lecturer at the University of Bradford in the UK and a registered optometrist.
Instead, lifestyle factors are thought to be more significant, in particular, a lack of time outdoors, and focusing on close objects for an extended period through an activity like reading. These factors help explain why one otherwise thoroughly positive trend in children's lives has unintentionally worsened the spread of myopia: education.
Of course, education in itself – in the sense of discovering the world, and empowering oneself through knowledge and skills – does not cause poor eye health. In fact, education is associated with many positive, measureable health effects. But the way children obtain an education in the modern world, with the emphasis on long hours spent in classrooms, appears to be consistently hurting their eye health.
"Education has been shown to cause short-sightedness," says Ghorbani-Mojarrad, referring to education as measured by school years. "We don't know what it is about education – we suspect it is reading and spending more time indoors. Every year of education completed increases the expected amount of short-sightedness.”
The education paradox
Ghorbani-Mojarrad and his colleagues studied the effect of education, as measured by school years, on myopia, by investigating the impact of the UK's raising of the school leaving age from 15 to 16, in the 1970s. "There's literally a bump in the chart for the extra year of school. Now that the leaving age is 18 in the UK, I wonder whether we will find the same thing again," he says.
To understand this surprising link, it helps to parse how myopia develops in the first place. Most newborn babies begin life long-sighted. Within the first year of life, the eyes naturally develop and the long-sightedness reduces to the point of their vision becoming almost perfect. However, in some cases the eyes do not stop growing and short-sightedness develops. The eyeball is too elongated to be able to make out objects at a distance without the help of a corrective measure such as glasses.
"Everyone has a finite amount of retina, and if the eye continues to grow, it's like trying to scrape the same amount of butter on a larger piece of bread," says Ghorbani-Mojarrad. "The retina becomes really thin and is more prone to tearing.”
It appears that being indoors may worsen this problem, perhaps because of the way indoor lighting differs from natural light.
In Singapore, which has undertaken some of the longest-running research on childhood myopia, experts have reached a similar conclusion.
"My father's generation spent a lot of time outdoors fishing and things," says Chia. "But then urbanisation came to Singapore and there was a great push for academic excellence. Parents wanted their kids to get into the best school and go to university. It drove all the children indoors for more reading, because reading was supposed to be good for you.”
The paradox is, of course, that reading is good for children – measurably so. Literacy, and schooling more generally, is crucial for children's wellbeing, and missing out on them can cause lasting damage.
But pursuit of educational excellence to the exclusion of other aspects of life, such as spending time outside, can be detrimental to eye health, says Nathan Congdon, professor of global eye health at the Centre for Public Health at Queen’s University Belfast.
He points out that countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong and Singapore that have very high rates of myopia: "They've also got huge educational success. It is a complicated cultural phenomenon.”
In China, trials have been conducted in classrooms that mimic learning in the outdoors. Children and teachers in a 2017 study by Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, where Congdon also works, preferred the bright classrooms that resemble a glasshouse, as compared with a traditional classroom. However in summer and on sunny days, the light intensity was at the "practical upper limit for routine use". The bright classroom is also twice as expensive to build as a regular classroom, partly because cooling mechanisms are required.
This complex problem – myopia as a bad side effect of an otherwise positive trend – also shows up in another area: income levels.
Like education, a higher income is generally associated with greater wellbeing in children – but not when it comes to eye health. Instead, myopia is associated with higher socioeconomic status.
As Congdon explains: "The richer we get, the better we are at protecting our children from ever going outdoors, because they've got more things to do. They've got to play the piano and learn saxophone and watch TV, and so forth.”
In low- and middle-income countries, myopia rates still tend to be lower – Bangladesh and India for example report rates of about 20-30% in adults – but this is changing. In Africa, for example, myopia used to be comparatively uncommon, but over the past ten years the prevalence of childhood myopia has been rising fast. In addition, lower-income countries may lack the resources to diagnose and correct short-sightedness in children, with a massive impact on their lives and education. Some communities in Africa have reported having no access to spectacles at all, and very little access to eye care. Being unable to see properly means children can't follow what their teacher writes on the board, and may also find it hard to participate in other routine school activities.
As literacy rates improve in those countries – an otherwise welcome development – that problem could grow, unless there is a big effort to also provide eye tests and glasses, experts warn.
"We can expect myopia rates to continue to climb because countries like India are getting more kids into school," says Congdon. "And if kids are spending more time in school, they're spending more time reading and less time outdoors.”
School time in itself is, however, not necessarily the root of the problem, as the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns have shown. It is staying indoors that appears to be. During the lockdowns, schools shut down all over the world – but children's eye health became even worse. Typically, they stayed inside during the lockdowns, and spent hours staring at screens, either following classes or watching TV, as other forms of learning and entertainment disappeared.
Data from China already shows that the lockdowns did in fact deal a blow to young children's eye health. One study compared myopia rates among children, measured by annual screenings. Before the pandemic, in the years from 2015-19, the highest myopia rate measured among six-year-old children was 5.7%. In June 2020, after 5 months of home confinement, researchers measured children's eyesight in that age group and found that the rate that shot up to 21.5%, says David C. Musch, one of the study's co-authors and a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, and epidemiology, at the University of Michigan.
Researchers have referred to this effect as "quarantine myopia" – basically, lockdown-induced short-sightedness.
Due to pandemic lockdowns, myopia is also becoming a concern in countries that were not much troubled by it before. This can be particularly noticeable in countries where children generally roamed outdoors before the pandemic – but found themselves suddenly confined.
Protecting children’s eyesight
Since eye health if a global issue, many countries have made it a priority. China, for example, is pursuing a slew of different strategies, warning that widespread near-sightedness could cause labor shortages in a slew of industries.
"A majority of the interventions that exist to stop short-sightedness getting worse were developed or tested in China," says Ghorbani-Mojarrad.
The results have been mixed. Eye exercises, which were previously recommended as a low-cost health strategy, were found to be insufficient in preventing myopia in the long-term. China has limited children's video gaming to a set amount of time per week – but this was largely directed at concerns over the perceived negative influence of gaming, rather than screen time itself. As for the potential link between screen time and myopia, the evidence is not conclusive.
"There are many different types of screens and so many variables, so it is difficult to get accurate risk data," says Ghorbani-Mojarrad. "As a parent, it's probably worth being cautious about screens particularly because the evidence shows that it might be a factor. If your child really likes screentime, just sit them outside while they do it.”
Other solutions hinge on technological advances. Singapore's myopia strategy, for example, includes special contact lenses or glasses. Its researchers have found no evidence to suggest that treatments such as oral supplements, eye exercises, eye relax machines, acupressure or magnetic therapy, are effective. Simple eye drops, however, may help.
A new red-light therapy may also hold promise. "The machine emits a red light into a child's eye for a few minutes a day for five days a week. It has been shown to slow the amount of short-sightedness developing. But we do not fully understand why," Ghorbani-Mojarrad says.
But for now, some of the most powerful solutions – be it to manage or prevent myopia – are surprisingly simple. The most effective, evidence-based prevention strategy is also surprisingly low-tech, and applies to all countries regardless of their wealth or resources: more time outdoors.
Researchers are still investigating exactly why being outdoors, and being in natural light, helps prevent myopia – but for now, their perhaps most important conclusion is that it does. The challenge is to ensure that children make use of this natural boost.
In Singapore, outdoors time at preschools was doubled to one hour as part of the broader national myopia-fighting strategy. Exams for the youngest students have been scrapped, to reduce the time spent doing homework.
"We want to increase outdoor time for older students, but the curriculum is quite packed," says Chia. "We're a small island, so some schools don't have the room for the kids to go out and they're not close to a park or anything." While many uncertainties remain about myopia, she is encouraged by the progress made during decades of research: "Three years ago, we did not know how important sunlight is.”
Ultimately, a child's eyesight is part of their general wellbeing, she says: "We don't just want the focus to be on the eyes: it's about the whole body and good mental health. We want our kids to lead healthy lives.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220927-can-you-prevent-short-sightedness-in-kids?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Consider me strange, but I enjoy my near-sightedness. It means I don't need reading glasses. I can thread a needle -- even a fine needle -- without a struggle.
Ever since I became a bookworm, I heard the warning, "You're going to ruin your eyes." Did I ever consider parting with my beloved books? Of course not. There are pleasures vastly greater than perfect eyesight.
And besides, these days glasses have become a fashion accessory. If half the world is "doomed" to be near-sighted by 2050, this is the smallest degree of doom I can imagine.
Still, the finding about the importance of "time outdoors" is a good reminder to anyone. It's not only our eyes that benefit; our whole body benefits, including mental health.
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ending on beauty:
. . . paradise was when
Dante
regathered from height and depth
came out onto the soft, green level earth
into the natural light
~ A. R. Ammons
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