Indian Pipe a.k.a. ghost plant, Monotropa unifloraWeaker and weaker, the sunlight falls
In the afternoon. The proud and the strong
Have departed.
Those that are left are the unaccomplished,
The finally human,
Natives of a dwindled sphere.
Their indigence is an indigence
That is an indigence of the light,
A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.
Little by little, the poverty
Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.
Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.
~ Wallace Stevens
The title could be translated as “the game of life’s wisdom.”
I love the love stanza:
Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.
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“I don’t believe in God. I believe in Wallace Stevens.” ~ AS Byatt
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“One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.” ~ Lev Tolstoy, A Confession
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FIRST SNOW IN A REFUGEE CAMP IN GERMANY
~ I still remember the first time I saw snow.
I was almost three years old, living in a refugee camp in Germany.
The snow fell thick and fast on a convoy of camouflaged army trucks moving through the camp.
I stepped outside of the barracks without shoes on. I didn't know the snow would be cold and wet, but that didn't matter, the cold and the wet.
I stood in the white swirl and put both hands out to catch the flakes.
~ John Guzlowski
Marina Antropow:
The first time my younger brother, a toddler, saw snow fallen thickly in the street, he exclaimed, 'Ooh! Soap!’
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Soldier rescuing a kitten in Korea
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HOW THE WORLD WILL END
~ When I was in my teens, I loved science-fiction novels about the end of the world.
I read hundreds of apocalyptic novels like I Am Legend and the Earth Abides and Day of the Triffids and On the Beach and Alas, Babylon! And I also watched apocalyptic B movies just about every Saturday at the Vision Theater on Division Street. I saw the world blown up by atom bombs, taken over by zombies, attacked by aliens from outer space, smashed into little bitty pieces by other planets, and eaten up giant ants and nasty plants!
I think part of my interest in these stories came from the fact that I came from a world that experienced something like an apocalypse. Most of my mom’s family was brutally killed in the war, and my dad’s family was gone too, and like my mom used to say, “Our family’s deaths weren’t the only ones.”
World War II was a mini apocalypse. It saw about 25 million soldiers die, and about 55 million civilians killed. Anyway you look at that, that is a lot of deaths. And the world we left behind in Europe was pretty much rubble. Warsaw was leveled. Berlin was gone. Magdeburg where my dad worked as a slave laborer was one rock on top of another on top of another. When you look at photos of European cities from that time, you shake your head, convinced that there was no way to rebuild.
But it wasn’t just my parents’ memories of the war that fed my interest in the apocalypse.
There was also always the possibility of my own apocalypse. I remember as a kid in 3rd grade listening to my teacher at the parish school near Humboldt Park preparing us for the Nuclear War she figured would be starting soon. She taught us where to hide in the school and what prayers to say before the bombs killed us.
70 years later, I’ve stopped reading novels about the end of the world, but it’s still a part of my life. Now, I read about it in newspapers and magazines and hear about it on the news.
And one of the things I’ve learned from this change is that the end of the world is less entertaining on the news than it is in science fiction novels and comic books and movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and When Worlds Collide.
I hear about the possibility of Putin starting a nuclear war and the way climate change is burning the West Coast and flooding the East Coast and the possibility of another pandemic worse that the last pandemic, and I shake my head and worry about how the young people in my family may face a future that’s worse than the past my parents and Poland faced in WWII.
But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst of it is the legion of people who deny the possibility of catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse and pandemics.
These deniers figure the world will always be the world they grew up in because the scientists pushing these apocalyptic possibilities are only doing it for the money. ~
John Guzlowski, Dziennik Zwiazkowy
Oriana:
John's account crystalized for me the fact that I come from the same background: in Poland, all the adults around me were survivors of WW2, meaning they have experienced apocalypse. And they did talk about it, oblivious to the fact that a child was listening and might later have nightmares.
Of course my nightmares must have been minor compared to the ones that sometimes woke my grandmother in the middle of night, moaning, terrified. She was an Auschwitz survivor.
Mary:
Mary:
Our generation, the first post WWII generation, all had experiences similar to John's. Our parents lived through the apocalypse of WWII, the defining experience of their lives, climaxing with the nuclear explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They knew the unthinkable could happen, had happened...death on a scale that dwarfed anything that had come before. They knew the world could end, they had witnessed the preview, stopped only by the sustained massive effort and sacrifice of millions.
The worst was experienced in Europe, the huge genocidal project to annihilate the Jews, along with the Rom and other named "undesirables," the cities reduced to rubble, the long stretch of wartime years...fear, deprivation, oppression and resistance, civilization replaced with a landscape from hell. In the US the experience was not as immediate, war not fought here on our territory, but the war was still the formative experience for that generation. In many real ways, no soldier ever comes home from the war, he brings the war home inside him. My father's character was indelibly stamped with his war experience for the rest of his life. Like John's parents and your grandmother, he had terrible nightmares, and in the last years of his life, when he was sick, in delirium, he was back in the trenches, still fighting.
We, the post war generation, grew up with the presence of the nuclear threat...always a possibility we were not allowed to forget. In school we had bomb drills, crouching under desks we knew would be no protection. There was talk of bomb shelters, of preparing food and water, there were the weekly civil defense air raid sirens. And we always knew full well none of that could save us from a nuclear annihilation. I don't remember when all that stopped...but it seems to have been replaced by fears of mass school shootings, students now drilling for lockdown and evacuation...also no proof against destruction.
So modern, so typical, these nightmares of the world ending, of hellish fates no prayers can protect us from, no plans, no careful measures can deflect.
With all this practice at facing Armageddon, it is hard to believe the determined blindness of climate change deniers, refusing to see the changes already happening, insisting things will go on "as always" when they are already obviously worse.
Oriana:
So familiar to me, all you are saying. The survivors — and that meant all the adults around me — certainly carried the war within them, and were scarred by it to various degrees. Scarred, but also “educated” about life and death in an indelible way.
On top of this, I also lived in an Orwellian situation of Poland’s having become a colony of Russia, with a puppet government carrying out Moscow’s order. Of course this meant heavy propaganda; the enemy was called “brother.”
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STALIN’S TOAST TO THE WRITERS
~ During his meeting with writers in preparation for the first Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, Stalin said: “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul” ~ John McQuinn, Quora
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~ “We Can Repeat” refer to the Soviet victory in Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany that became a grass roots slogan of the victorious Russian nationalism that pined to find Nazis and kill them again. In the end Russian patriots found none and channeled Nazism themselves, slapped Z swastikas on their cars and tanks and trudged into Ukraine for a replay of Great Patriotic War in reverse.
Thus, chronologically, attack on Kyiv became Battle for Moscow, siege of Mariyupol is Stalingrad Battle and Leningrad Siege rolled into one, and the upcoming battle of Donbas is the decisive Battle of Kursk.
Putin spearheaded Russia back to the era of Stalin minus economic achievements, industrialization, war victories. He took all the bad and left all the good. ~ Misha Firer
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RUSSIAN-STYLE MOBILIZATION
Saturday, 15 October 2022, 02:04
I was texting back and forth with a Russian friend today who lives in St. Petersburg. They had just arrived home from work via the subway. They immediately wanted to share witnessing the military draft Russian style while waiting for a connection at the Pushkinskaya metro station.
The platform was crowded with people waiting for trains when suddenly Russian police rushed in from all sides to start collaring and cuffing men with zip ties. Once subdued a black cloth hood was placed over their head and they were led away to the street above to be shoved into police vans.
My friend remarked it resembled some sort of wild west roundup. Women were screaming and children crying as panicked men scattered in all directions trying to escape the metro station back to the streets above with police hot on their heels. By my friend’s estimation at least 50 to 100 men were caught and carted away. Then the police left and people went back to waiting silently for their trains as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.
As a teenager I loved reading science fiction and dystopian novels. But if what my friend tells me happened in St. Petersburg today is true, it far surpasses anything Orwell, Huxley or Bradbury could have ever imaged or written. It crosses into the surreal. ~ Izzy Luggs, Quora
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One way to try to escape mobilization is to buy a uniform and pretend you already are a soldier. Note that the man is Asian, which makes it more probable that he’d be a soldier.
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What puts a Russian citizen at extra risk of being mobilized is not being an ethnic Russian.
Below: Chechen recruits.
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FIGHTING AMONG THE NEW RECRUITS
A group fight between mobilized and contract soldiers who tried to take away their personal belongings in Alabino, Moscow region.
~ According to Putin, from 21 September to 18 October, 222,000 people were mobilized.
However, an insider in the MoD indicates that the actual number is almost three times greater — 618,000. More than half were sent directly to combat zone and border areas. The rest are stuck at collection points and training facilities.
Russian Armed Forces harvested predominantly obedient and calm peasants from the villages and the dregs of society — drunks and gopniks [bums] — from depressing small towns and distant suburbs of big cities. They did not try to hide out of stupidity or lethargy. They had not shown interest in the Special Military Operation until military commissars came to collect them.
Against the backdrop of docility, hooliganism and alcohol intoxication they begin to drill. Fist fights on the way to the training facilities are the norm and then they continue to solve conflicts physically in the barracks.
The new conscripts drink from fear and then become aggressive. Conflicts instantly flare up over minor issues like a seat on a bus, a sideways glance, words taken out of context.
Conscripts break each other’s faces and go to bed. They polish off the bottle or after they pass out, booze is quietly taken away from them. There are no officers with experience to manage this crowd.
They are still civilians, they behave as they are used to at home, after the beaten up wife leaves for her mother and takes the children with her.
46 people died from alcohol poisoning in three military districts during two weeks of mobilization. Additionally, there were some who choked on their vomit or died from heart attack and stroke due to excessive drinking. Three conscripts in the Central Military District died after injuries. One fell out of a window. Another broke his head against the curb. The third one had his head banged against the iron fence until his brains oozed out.
Nobody keeps statistics of the victims and those who died in fights. The Ministry of Defense is not interested in drawing attention to such incidents and the murdered are written off as killed by diseases, the crippled sent to hospitals for treatment, and if they’re not severely wounded will be sent to the war front.
Into this drunken crowd of aggressive gopniks, frightened middle-aged men are thrown in. Drunks get sobered up by drill and earthworks. The saving grace is that Russians are used to submissiveness in civilian life, and officers when mastering commanding voice and threats of prison make them obey the orders.
When former convicts misbehave, combat veterans beat them up to teach a lesson. Recruits are a multi-ethnic lot: Ingushes, Yakuts, Buryats, Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashs, Kazakhs.
White caucasian gopniks and neo-Nazis from small towns unite and form gangs and call themselves masters.
Members of ethnic minorities don’t like to be pushed around and are often physically and mentally stronger. Gopniks get beaten and hazed. Then ethnic Russians begin to serve representatives of ethnic minorities: wash their linen and cook them food.
A mobilized officer told a story about conscripts from Yakutia arriving later than the others, and soldiers from central Russia tried to restore order on the rights of whiteness.
Yakuts and Kazakhs are both Turkic tribes and they bonded together and beat the crap out of ethnic Russians.
On October 15, at a training ground in the Belgorod region Lieutenant Colonel Lapin called Allah a coward (Lapin means hare in French, so linguistically Lt. Colonel is a coward).
Shortly after his speech two citizens of Tajikistan went on a shooting rampage with machine guns killing anywhere from 22 to 32 colleagues and wounding a dozen before being taken down by a sniper.
From September 21 to October 18, there were more than three dozen cases of wounds with cold weapons including fatalities.
The Russian Armed Forces did not have enough experienced officers before the war. Eight months later, there’s an acute shortage of command personnel able and willing to train and educate this wild mass of men.
After September 21, retired officers began to come to the units. They do not know how to work with soldiers and do not want to. As a result, physically stronger or angrier soldiers take on the function of officers creating a criminal order in the units.
The Russian Armed Forces were not prepared for war, nor were they ready for mobilization. There is nothing to feed the conscripts with, nothing to put on them, no medical care. Conscripts steal food, money, cigarettes, things from each other.
This situation remains typical for units in the combat zone, where officers are often not eager to communicate and command people, preferring to keep far away from the front line, and shifting control to junior command staff.
Conscripts arriving at the frontlines do more harm than good. They do not know how to use weapons. They reveal positions. Or blow up stupidly on a mine. Or disappear. Soldiers have to be pulled out of the unit to look for them.
Other commanders use replenishments to solve combat suicide missions. Whoever survives, earns the right to have his life valued by the unit.
Sometimes conflicts from training grounds are carried on to the war front. The dead are written off as combat losses. If a conscript can kill one of his own then he can kill Ukrainian soldiers.
Wild, stupid, aggressive herd pushed to the edge is capable of anything. People finding themselves in such inhuman conditions, will defend themselves and they have weapons for that.
Europeans owe a debt of gratitude to the Ukrainian soldiers: if not for their valor those brutes — and Russia has tens of millions of them — they would’ve reached the Atlantic Ocean, destroying everything in their path backed by Putin’s nuclear threats. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Sahin Ahadli:
Toxic masculinity at peak. No other word.
Paul Johansen:
It seems the country is self-destructing under its own weight of sheer stupidity, lack of discipline, education and financial neglect. Perhaps Putin, knowing these people are mainly useless rabble, wants them to kill each other off and then send the survivors, being strongest of the thugs, off to war. Without proper training, by firing wildly they might actually hit something. In reality they will just be Canon fodder for the experienced Ukrainian forces. Any numerical advantage won't worry the Ukrainians at all, they will just mow them down. You have to feel sorry for them. Like lambs to the slaughter.
Larry Kimm:
There are a couple of positive things that have come out of this barbaric war. Russian military is not something to be feared as prior to the war.
Russian society is now looking to be far more fragile. The days of doing whatever Putin wants are over. He is now trying to get his population, as a whole, back on his side. Fat chance.
Putin has lost any leverage or at least any sizable leverage with the world in general.
Russias's military equipment sales are taking a huge hit. The inability to produce reliable systems has countries canceling orders.
Jim Brown:
I will add one more potential positive and please don’t get me wrong either. We are being forced to deal with Russian nuclear threat. And, I guess, nuclear threats in general. So far Ukraine and The West has decided that it’s better to take the chance and confront Russia rather than suffer brutal, suffocating subjugation for eternity. I support that.
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In Putin’s Russia, homosexuals fight with homosexuality. Putin ordered Heinstein and Volodin, both gay, draft and rubber-stamp in the State Duma the new anti-gay law. (~ Misha Firer)*
~ Elon Musk’s weakness is fear of death.
He works 16 hours a day on his projects. He tweets. He plans to send manned flight to Mars. He makes children. With all these hectic activities, the last thing he needs is to die in a nuclear attack over Crimea.
Musk does not understand that he accepted the rules of the bully and does what the bully wants him to do.
A 20th century KGB colonel bullies a 21st century visionary using a threat of nukes, which he might or might not use, that might or might not be operational.
To remind you that for over fifteen years Putin had successfully bullied the West with the nukes.
A vast majority of Soviet citizens had suffered from low self-esteem due to being slaves of the state; their self-worth was sacrificed to the enforcement of grandeur of the communist empire.
Putin identified key weaknesses in the “Wild 90s” — mass poverty and a sense of national humiliation (deliberately overlooking positives: new business opportunities and burgeoning democracy) that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union and preceded his presidency.
Putin gave Russians a lot of free money and television propaganda provided them with faulty reasons to feel proud about themselves and Russia.
Crimea was a blind spot that Putin stumbled upon by accident, which would eventually become his downfall.
Russians do not understand nor value laws-based order.
Nationalism had been drummed up and annexation of the peninsula resulted in mass hysteria that had no rational explanation and should have been left at that.
Putin mistook a brief period of excitement for the collective wish of Russians to rebuild the Soviet Union.
Russians did not want it and didn’t react positively to war in Donbas that could have led to another annexation.
Had there been democracy in Russia, the major catastrophe would have been avoided and the next president would have focused on diversifying and reforming economy.
With moribund economy and Western sanctions ensuring that it would remain in such state, all Putin wanted now was to destroy Ukraine.
Leading up to Maidan, Ukraine’s weakness was corruption and Putin abused it to make Ukraine a client state.
After the citizens of Ukraine chose to pivot to the West, an enemy was born.
With the exception of a few brave Russians who had paid with their lives or freedom, Ukrainians are the only people who stood up to Putin and refused to be bullied by him.
That’s why Putin is going to make every effort in his power to either crush their will or kill each and every one of them.
The end result might be the dismantling of Russia and a long period of internal turmoil.
However, Putin lives by the maxim, “after me the flood.”
The yes men and yes women that surround Putin are a projection of his own hurt ego and inferiority complex and have no backbone to oppose him.
The West should not back down and go all the way until all of Ukraine is free including Crimea regardless of the constant threat of a nuclear attack from Putin. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Crimea, Swallow's Nest Castle
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~ During the Soviet winter offensive in WW2 it was usual practice for the advancing Soviets to strip their dead of their winter jackets, but hey had to act fast as within minutes the jackets froze solid to the dead and became like steel. ~ Gary Wilkes
Soviet soldier feeding a Ural owl. Note his cotton wool-stuffed winter jacket (fufayka-vatnik)
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~ Putin wasted 20 years of Russian history, the lives of countless Russians dead of needless war, poor health and sanitary infrastructure, polluted air, water and food, HIV, tuberculosis, liver cirrhosis, domestic violence for little development of a robust Russian economy oriented around serving the Russian people. ~ Andy Wiskonsky
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WHAT’S THE MOST EMBARRASSING MISTAKE MADE BY GORBACHEV?
~ The anti-alcohol campaign.
From the point of power game, it was for him the single stupidest thing to do.
Stomping out the drinking habit of my compatriots was originally envisioned by Andropov who felt a kind of fascination about the grim asceticism of Stalinism. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, it was considered bad Communist karma to be seen partaking the stuff. So Gorbachev felt compelled to make it happen the way his patron wanted it to be.
Bad, bad decision!
It robbed the state budget of an easy, universally accepted source of income. We probably wouldn’t have gone bankrupt if Gorbachev hadn’t done that.
It created a huge, progressively increasing wave of bad will in the lower classes. Unlike the food shortages, the displays of inequality, and the unending waste of wealth and human capital that could be blamed Gorbachev’s predecessors, the shortages of alcohol were obviously his work, fair and square.
The sheer counterproductivity of the anti-alcohol campaign demonstrated to the broad masses the incompetence of the Communist elite. This prompted millions of lower-level bureaucrats and party functionaries to seriously consider if a total dismantling of the Soviet project and privatization of the Socialist property would make much more sense for them and their families.
The Communist project in the USSR by the time of Perestroika was doomed as much as in China. But a more sensible maneuvering on the part of Gorbachev could have transitioned us to the one-party system of State-oligarchical Capitalism like the Chinese did, at a much lower cost.
Below, a photo of a loyalist anti-alcohol rally during the happy days of early Perestroika. The banner saying “Alcohol and Socialism are not compatible!” turned out to be chillingly prescient. In a head-to-head mortal combat between the two, Socialism had no chances. It took just a few years for alcohol to come up a winner on all counts. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Lee Jacobson:
An interesting fact: the level of alcoholism prior to Prohibition was much higher than that after the Prohibition, and to this day the percentage of alcoholics in the US has never returned to pre-Prohibition levels.
David Hirst:
Interesting to note that, in experiments, if you give people drinks that you tell them are alcoholic, but actually aren’t, disinhibition still sets in. To an asshole, the drink might provide a kind of permission to act assholeishly.
Dima Vorobiev:
The lower classes saw it as a breach of the old convention: “you can lock us inside this damn country, but you can’t rob us from the last escape hatch”.
Rui Azevedo:
You’re painting the situation as if the anti-alcohol campaign was just an arbitrary decision by Gorbachev, but that is not really true. When he arrived in power the alcoholism situation in Russia had been getting progressively worse to the point that it was affecting the production capacity of the country. According to some sources between 1960 and 1979 alone, alcohol sales nearly quadrupled (with disposable household income spent on alcohol reaching 15–20%).
Just prior to the anti-alcohol campaign, annual consumption of pure alcohol in the Soviet Union exceeded 14 liters per capita (compared to 8 liters in the United States) (Nemtsov 2000). This figure is roughly equivalent to adult males consuming half a liter of vodka every two days (Ryan 1995).12 Given lower levels of drinking in Soviet states with more Muslims (in the Caucasus and Central Asia, for example), the counterbalancing rate for Russia alone was presumably much higher.
An appreciable percentage of employees at factories arrived at their jobs in a condition that made them useless, and managers would just let them sleep it off at some corner during the workday. And this would happen every day…
Gorbachev's predecessors had not faced an alcohol problem of this dimension. How could he not try to do something?
Alexey Zubkov:
The cutbacks produced a boom in domestic distillation (illegal) wiping out sugar from the grocery shelves, at least in places where sugar was not a rationed item already.
Edward Lokshin:
It should be noted, however, that the anti-alcohol campaign was cleverly used by Gorbachev as an excuse to cleanse the Party and the government from the Brezhnev era appointees and promote people loyal to Gorbachev.
Kevin Brown:
Interesting that Putin did nearly the same with smoking and didn’t suffer any political damage for it. When I moved to Russia, you could smoke on trains, playgrounds, apartment balconies, stair cases (podvals), restaurants — even buses if you did it near the doors (though not legally). He hasn’t gone full-Chicago yet and banned it in private apartments, but it’s close.
Rastislav Galia:
From recollections of my parents, the ethanol was the fuel of the communist era social engine. First of all, drinking parties (& possibly hunting) were the essential social interactions among the members of the local level nomenclatura.
Besides that, public drunkenness was very much tolerated and wide-spread. Being drunk on the workplace seldom led to serious repercussions. I myself remember the masses of drunkards in the streets in the evening hours.
My understanding is that it was a way of coping with grim and gray way of life the “real socialism” inherently induces.
From this point of view, severing the alcohol supply to real socialist society equated to dismantling the whole system -- without the “fuel” the social engine stopped.
Ted Waldron:
Restricting or rationing vodka didn’t cause the downfall of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev trying to make the Soviet Union a multi-party democracy did more harm, given it weakened the Communist Party, and dues dried up, while Communist Party members quit in droves.
Richard Kosinski:
So the drunks got us Putin and the drunken military. Gorbachev failed but was not that stupid.
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~ Russians have disappointed Putin. They have failed to rise up to his genius. Not long ago all the world leaders were dancing to Putin’s tune, and if not for the rabble’s drunkenness, docility, and, ultimately, betrayal, Putin would have overcome Ukraine’s resistance and conquered all of Europe and dictated America his own vision of how the world should be run: like a drug cartel. ~ Misha Firer
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Let’s put a human face on the “partial mobilization.” This is Timur Izmailov, 33, killed in Ukraine shortly after being sent to the front.
His last name makes me think of Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.” Like most Russian conscripts, he was not an ethnic Russian.
In one source I read that the average life expectancy of new recruits sent to the front lines is eleven days.
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WHY COMMUNISM IS SO APPEALING TO RUSSIA
~ It’s a solace to great many of us [Russians] to look back and think that once upon a time we made a difference.
Under Soviet rule, Russia was no longer just a far, cold, vast Kuiper Belt of human habitation.
For several decades we became the centerpiece of world politics. Where an absolute majority for centuries toiled in subsistence farming, we suddenly got universal education and health care for everyone during a lifetime of one generation.
We won a world war and sent the first man into outer space.
We became the high fortress of globalist progressives.
We pointed the way for other nations into the future.
And then we wasted it. All for a promise of carefree, settled consumerism. Now as Russia seems to slip into a slow but irreversible decline, that’s how our story goes.
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Below, a piece of ancient Soviet propaganda by artist Leoníd Sayánskiy, “Soon the whole world will be ours”. A manual worker and peasant, armed with a shovel and hammer, plot the course for conquering other planets in the Solar system.
Under Soviet rule, it was a given that painting the whole Earth proletarian red was a done deal.
We don’t indulge in this kind of daydreaming anymore. Our patriots are no more obsessed with discovering new horizons. They get their kick out of sticking it up to the Americans and the liberal bunch. Even the few of them who still believe that the whole world can be “ours”, struggle to answer “What for?”
It feels like we’re getting old as a nation.
Nowadays, for us this Communist past is like great love. We never get a second chance to live through it again. But we can reminisce, fantasize—and boast to whoever cares to listen to our story. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Paul Denlinger:
In the USSR days, the Soviet Union was looking to Europe and the US for the kind of approval it never got. After the fall of the USSR, Russia looked to Europe and the US for acceptance as an equal, which it never got.
Fortunately for Russia, Putin is discovering that the Chinese and other Asians are not a very ideological lot, don’t impose sanctions, and just want to do business without talking about “values”.
Dima Vorobiev:
PRC evokes a lot of fascination in our elites. However, I don’t know a single Russian who wants a life like a Chinese for himself or his family. “Everyone” looks west for lifestyle inspirations and Instagram pictures.
Georgette Wolf:
Here’s my favorite hypothesis: The Roman Empire, Russian Empire and Chinese Empire each adopted a new religion as a political excuse to keep their giant polities together. For both the Romans and Russians, it worked for awhile — and then the empires started to die again. I think as the Chinese realize that there is no good reason to incorporate other ethnic peoples against their will, this last iteration of the Chinese Empire will begin to fade too. It seems all of these states melt into cynicism.
Dan Tailleur:
If it was mostly Russians who contributed to these accomplishments during that era (just as the Soviet Olympic hockey team was mostly Russians) — do you think that Russia could have made these great achievements on their own — without being part of the USSR?
Dima Vorobiev:
We were in majority, after all. But Jews punched well above their weight, too.
Daragh Malone:
I had always heard that many older folks harbored feelings of nostalgia towards 'the good old days’ but how popular is communism among young people in Russia?
Dima Vorobiev:
Not much. They’re a rather apolitical bunch.
Correntin Larzun:
Marxism-Leninism has an appealing millenarian aspect to it: if we work hard enough to free the proletariat of the world, humanity as a whole will ascend and reach beyond what it even thinks it can achieve now. Sadly once that magic is dispelled once, one cannot really hope to recreate it again.
Mary McGarvey:
Russia will rise again: they can look to Finland for an example of success.
Duke Ganote: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-dictatorship-majority-of-eastern-germans-feel-life-better-under-communism-a-634122.html
Dima Vorobiev:
Life is better now. Much better indeed if you happen to live in Moscow.
William Lebotschy:
Some of us have different views on civilization. Did the Soviet Union produce the great composers and writers of Tzarist Russia? Technology is not civilization, especially at the expense of culture.
Paul Wartena:
On the contrary, communist rule made Russia all time low in its history. Millions were killed by the Marxist-Leninists, the so called “communists”. Also tens of millions were starving. Russia became behind in most aspects, except in arms industry. They even were not able to make a car without the help of a capitalist country (Italy). Though they have the biggest land area of all countries, they could not even feed their own population by their own agriculture.
Dima Vorobiev:
Still, for a few decades we were the other superpower, how about that?
Steven Duch:
No Dima, you just had nukes and a huge army. America was a superpower since at least since the 60’s, Americans lived in big houses and drove big cars and went on international vacations. The Soviet people on the other hand lived in small communal apartments and generally could not afford cars while international vacations where out of the question altogether. Would you like to go back to Russia being such a “superpower” again?
Soviet Russia simply sacrificed the economic well-being of its citizens for the sake of keeping its humongous army, just like North Korea does even today.
Oriana:
"SOON THE WHOLE WORLD WILL BE OURS." Talk about a nightmare!
Mary:
The dream of a socialist utopia, like all dreams of utopia, dies hard. The nostalgia is for those early days, when it seemed there could be real change, that real communism could be achieved. Those early posters were jubilant and proud...now the propaganda takes a darker turn. I can feel pity for these people who have so little hope, who medicate their suffering with alcohol and brutality, for whom suicide is too often the "best" choice. All those young men being scooped up and sent into war unprepared, without uniforms, food, or weapons...nothing but human sacrifices to a megalomaniac's crazed ambition. Seeing this convinces me Putin may well play his nuclear card, glad to see the world he could not have destroyed. After me, the deluge.
~ The war in Ukraine marks the end of the USSR.
Below are Russian soldiers in Ukraine using the Soviet flag. They need it to improve low morale. ~ Catalin Olteanu
Read Dostoyevski — Russian spirituality is based entirely upon the expectation of having your humanity crushed. If he was a Russian, Dickens would have written “Terrible Expectations.” ~ Joey Tranchina
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MISHA IOSSEL ON PUTIN’S REVENGE RAIDS AGAINST CIVILIANS
~ In the penultimate stages of World War II, Nazi Germany, already hopelessly losing the war, resorted to sending cruise and ballistic missiles to kill civilians in London.
How did that work out for Nazi Germany, Putin? ~
Irene Newhouse:
The problem is, everyone thinks THEY are SO different, the same thing will turn out OK for them. Like Hitler figured he could conquer Russia even after Napoleon failed disastrously. It was horrible, but in the end, Hitler didn't do much better, did he?
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WARPLANE CRASHES INTO A RESIDENTIAL BUILDING IN YEYSK, ON THE AZOV SEA
~ A Russian warplane crashed Monday (October 17, 2022) into a residential area in a Russian city on the Sea of Azov after suffering engine failure, leaving at least 13 people dead, three of whom died when they jumped from upper floors of a nine-story apartment building to escape a massive blaze.
A Su-34 bomber came down in the port city of Yeysk after one of its engines caught fire during takeoff for a training mission, the Russian Defense Ministry said. It said both crew members bailed out safely, but the plane crashed into a residential area, causing a fire as tons of fuel exploded on impact.
After hours of combing through the charred debris of the building, authorities said 13 residents, including three children, were found dead. Another 19 were hospitalized with injuries.
Yeysk, a city of 90,000, is home to a big Russian air base.
Surveillance cam videos posted on Russian messaging app channels showed a plane exploding in a giant fireball. Other videos showed an apartment building engulfed by flames and loud bangs from the apparent detonation of the warplane's weapons.
The Su-34 is a supersonic twin-engine bomber equipped with sophisticated sensors and weapons that has been a key strike component of the Russian air force. The aircraft has seen wide use during the war in Syria and the fighting in Ukraine.
Monday's accident marked the 10th reported non-combat crash of a Russian warplane since Moscow sent its troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. Military experts have noted that as the number of Russian military flights increased sharply during the fighting, so did the crashes. ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1129614707/russia-warplane-crashes-near-apartment-kills-at-least-13
Note, in the middle right, the parachute of the catapulted crewman.
The military jet that crashed was an advanced Su-34 type. Another such crash into a residential building was recently reported in Siberia. Boys and their deadly toys . . .
KARL MARX WOULD NOT DO WELL IN RUSSIA
~ In the USSR, Karl Marx would be considered “an individual without particular employment”. This was a fuzzy term for bums, underground entrepreneurs, armchair philosophers, hookers, poets, street hustlers, and suchlike.
Unsubstantiated class allegiance
Karl Marx was reading and writing like mad his entire life. He was very productive, measured both in page count he left after him, and the lasting legacy of his ideas. But this is not a proletarian way of life. The added value he created was all his. Also, remember that he was a revolutionary. As a trouble-maker, he would have soon caught the eye of the Soviet police and charged with “parasitism” and “anti-social” lifestyle.
Karl Marx had no documented connection to the class of proletarians. He came from a bourgeois family. In Stalin’s era this would have been an instant career-stopper. The people’s court would also be certain to notice that had never been permanently employed by any publication where sent his contributions.
Neither could he prove he belonged to “working intelligentsia” (or was a “worker of mental labor”, rabótnik úmstvennogo trudá). To be one, he needed a formal membership in one of the government-approved associations of free professions.
On the wrong side of the law
Here’s the beaten path to an indictment under the Soviet Criminal Code, Particular Chapters, part 209, namely “ill-intentioned non-compliance to the decision of prescribed employment and desisting a parasitic way of life”.
An uchastkóvyie i.e. local police officer) would first visit him and Jenny at home and give him a written preduprezhdénye (“reprimand”). This would be followed by a Soviet court decision obliging him to find gainful employment.
Then, in order to placate the authorities, Karl Marx would need an attorney-confirmed copy of his trudováya knízhka from his publishing house. It was a kind of ID documenting the history and current status of people’s employment. A trudovói dogovor (“work contract”) would hold, too. For example, a written confirmation from a state-approve publishing house that he works on a scientific book that explains why the working classes must abolish Capitalism and introduce Communism.
Failing to do any of this, Karl Marx would be hauled to a court and most probably exiled to some provincial town, or village. This was intended for him to practice, at least on paper, some kind of socially acceptable, most likely manual, work.
Real-life case
This was exactly what happened to our Nobel prize winner, the great poet Joseph Brodsky. He was exiled by a court decision from Leningrad (St. Petersburg). He had to spend three years in a village in northern Russia as a laborer at the local state farm. Brodsky was also subjected a psychiatric examination to decide if he was sane in his parasitic way of living.
A creative spirit that he was, Brodsky later called these years “the happiest time” of his life. The arrest, however, caused a heart condition that grew worse with time, and seemed to provoke his death in 1996.
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Below, a Stalinist poster: “The Capitalist mode of production is detrimental to certain types of creative production, as for example arts and poetry.~ Karl Marx”.
The founder of Scientific Communism was a defiant contrarian. He would probably find even stronger words about the Soviet State’s idea of creative production. ~ Dima Vorobiev
Gerard van Wilgen:
Yes, it is ironic that someone who can be considered one of the spiritual fathers of the Soviet Union, would have been considered a parasite and a troublemaker by that same Soviet Union if he had lived there.
Similarly, I think that if Jesus Christ were alive today, a lot of Christian churches would find him totally unacceptable as a member.
Paul King:
As an anti-authority free thinker, Jesus Christ would have made a terrible Catholic. :)
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MARX’S ALLEGED ANTISEMITISM
~ Marx is known for his dislike of Judaism and his disparaging remarks about Jews. He had a difficult relationship with his own Jewish origins and it was, sadly, common for assimilated and baptized Jews to despise their origins and feel embarrassed by them. Antisemitism was pervasive in German society and being of Jewish origin was treated like a “moral stain”.
Marx internalized much of the trauma of being a “New Christian” as a child and, long after he had rejected religion and embraced atheism, the brainwashing of his Lutheran childhood and the constantly repeated message that he came from a “cursed people” obsessed with money and following a crude materialistic religion that he needed to constantly distance himself from stayed with him.
Marx experienced Jewishness as a trauma — an accusation by others that he wasn’t quite “a real German”. This shaped his views of Jews and Judaism throughout his life.
In any case, Marx’ desire to see Judaism consigned to history and for the Jews to simply disappear through assimilation was a very common one among Jews of that era and was even embraced by Theodor Herzl until the Dreyfus trial changed his mind. I think it is too easy to decontextualise works like “On the Jewish Question” and forget how deeply rooted German Jew-hatred really was and how deeply it affected Jews who wanted to assimilated and be accepted as Germans. I know it from my own family. ~ Shain M, Quora
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“I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other.“ ~ Peter Ustinov
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IS THIS RUSSIA’S LAST WAR?
Russias demographic situation is so bad that this maybe its last war. As for China, its demographics are even worse — in a few decades its population may be half or less. ~ John Geddes, Quora
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UKRAINE MAY RETAKE CRIMEA WITHIN A YEAR
~ As Ukrainian precision-guided rockets continue to bombard Russian supply lines to the southern city of Kherson, while Ukrainian ground forces make gains in the northern Kharkiv region, there is growing optimism that the Russia-Ukraine war will ultimately end in an outright military victory for Kyiv.
It remains less clear how far away that end might be, and at what cost it will be achieved.
"The Ukrainians saved their country," Ret. General Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, told Newsweek on the sidelines of the Tbilisi International Conference of the McCain Institute this week.
"They've set the conditions where they can restore full sovereignty, to include Crimea, I think, within the next year," he added.
Such a prediction would have been all but unimaginable a mere six months ago, when Russian forces were still physically present within striking distance of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Those Russian forces began to withdraw in late March, however, and since mid-summer, Russian advances in the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region have also stalled.
"Here we are, half a year after the start of the full scale Russian invasion, and the supposed second-best army in the world is now the second-best army in Ukraine," Hodges said. "After all this time, Russia still controls less than 20% of Ukraine's territory, and their ability to conduct further offensive operations has been all but exhausted."
Hodges says that it's past time for Ukraine's Western partners to provide the Kyiv government with the material and moral support it will need in order to achieve a full military victory.
Hodges would also like to see the U.S. government change the way it publicizes its material support for Ukraine.
"When the administration says, 'we've delivered two million of these, ten thousand of those, X billion dollars worth of whatever,' those numbers absolutely do not matter," he explained. "Big numbers don't matter."
"The only number that matters is percentage of requirement," he said. "What I would really like to hear instead is, 'we've delivered 80% of what is needed for Ukraine to defeat Russia and regain their territory, and we're working on the other 20%.'"
"That's the kind of data point that actually tells you something," he added.
Ukrainian officials continue to make clear that Ukraine's chances of victory depend largely on the timely provision of Western military and financial support.
"Next year will be the decisive year of this war," Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Honcharenko told Newsweek. "With the help of the free world, Ukraine has an opportunity to win.”
It does not mean that a Ukrainian victory is imminent. "Even the Ukrainians admit that Russia has an advantage in firepower: tanks, artillery, rockets, airplanes," Topornin added. "That makes it almost impossible to drive Russian troops out of the territory that they already occupy. The war is likely to take on a more protracted character, with continuing battles in the east and periodic strikes to prevent regular life from resuming in the areas of Ukraine behind the front lines.”
Honcharenko laid out a few areas in which Western support is still lacking.
"We need more weapons, including aircraft," he said. "Ukraine is gradually exhausting its inventory of Soviet-era aircraft, and if we do not receive replacements from the West, we could be left without an air force."
"We need better air defense systems, as well as rockets with a longer range than the HIMARS rockets we are currently receiving," he added. "We also need financial support. The Ukrainian economy has been hit hard, and we can only meet our budgetary obligations with the help of assistance from the free world.” ~
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-will-retake-crimea-within-year-former-us-europe-general-says-1741204
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RUSSIA AND AFRICA
Russia is winning hearts and minds in Burkina Faso, Africa. “The Wagner Group mercenaries kill men savagely and gang rape women unlike those girlie Frenchies!” chanted protesters, paid to participate from France’s natgas bank transfers to Gasprombank, waving Russian flags Sputnik television crew had handed to them.
~ Soviet government considered African continent a crucial region to form socialist alliances after countries proclaimed independence from European imperialists.
Billions of dollars were allocated to a score of independent nations in Africa, money that dictators spent on luxuries in Paris and London, forgiven by magnanimous tsar Putin who promptly gave a new generation of African despots more petrodollars to spend in Europe.
Rusky brutalsky kill himself because he can’t pay small debt for he cannot offer natural resources — he’s given up on his right to own what’s under his feet — and with no value to Motherland, he is much advised to get drunk and freeze to death in the street.
Soviet government provided free scholarships to African students to study in the Soviet Union.
In 1960, a university named after the leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, assassinated for nationalizing strategic raw materials and handing them to the Soviet comrades, was opened in Moscow.
Single Russian women had to thank a nameless Belgian hitman for sending Lumumba to kingdom come for it expedited their exodus to every corner of the world to improve local genetic pools through giving birth to millions of mixed race children.
In December 1963, residents of the central districts of Moscow witnessed an extraordinary spectacle: the main square of the Soviet Union was filled with several hundred young black guys in coats and ushanka hats.
Moscovites were less surprised with the sight of black men as the fact that they were protesting — for this was the first protest action in Moscow since the late 1920s!
Black men unlike their Soviet comrades were no slaves, and when they felt to be victims of injustice, they let their voices be heard.
On December 13, 1963, the body of a young African guy was found in a deserted area of Hovrino, then a sparsely developed area of Northern Moscow.
The police identified the deceased: Assare Addo, a medical student from Ghana.
The cause of death was a fatal neck wound. Circumstances of his death looked suspicious, as he studied at another town. Students from African countries were enraged, as they believed he was a victim of racism.
There were rumors that a wedding was planned between Assare-Ado and a Russian girl, which allegedly was supposed to happen the day after his death. African students claimed that he was murdered by the girl’s family, who in no other way could oppose the marriage.
Black people took to the streets of Moscow. After gathering at the gates of the Ghanaian embassy, a crowd of about five hundred people headed to Red Square, armed with posters and banners with provocative slogans.
The police attempted to detain the protesters, but they did not have enough manpower as they did not understand what was going on.
It ended up with the Africans getting to Red Square where they held a press conference with foreign correspondents who suspiciously showed up in the right place at the right time.
Soviet authorities believed that the protest was organized by Western intelligence services, and they started negotiations to avoid international scandal.
The Minister of Education of the Soviet Union, Vyacheslav Yelyutin, spoke with the leaders of the protesters and expressed condolences and honored the memory of the deceased student with a minute of silence, which somewhat calmed down African students.
Afterwards, authorities cracked down on the leaders of protests. The university press branded them provocateurs and got them expelled and sent home.
Authorities announced that Assare-Ado got drunk, fell asleep in the cold and froze to death.
The protest in academic circles was discredited, and the authorities increased ideological and propaganda indoctrination of all the foreign students, and African students in particular.
For everyone is treated equally in the Motherland, as long as he bows down to the supreme authority of the Tsar and his boyars. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Roy Miller:
A woman I know served as a medical missionary in Russia. Her work moved from helping Russians in the villages to working with illegal African immigrants in Moscow. Those people can get no medical attention at any facility without lots of cash.
She’s now serving in an African nation where she was invited by the family of a Muslim man that she got medical attention for, and help in getting to return home.
Racism in America? Russia is FAR worse than the US has been in the last forty years.
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KHRUSHCHEV: AN APPRAISAL
Khrushchev seemed to be the last Soviet ruler who believed in the primacy of Communism over Capitalism. He involved the country in several large-scale experiments for the betterment of the system. Most of them were costly duds, but showed the measure of his conviction.
He also didn’t share Stalin’s belief that brutality is a necessary part of the Communist project. He freed many people from the forced labor in concentration camps, and then disbanded the Gulag.
After the devastations of WWII, Khrushchev decided that the survivors and their children deserved a respite. He started a large-scale residential building, something Stalin deemed unnecessary. He also shifted some of state funds from the military-industrial complex to the needs of common people, so that they could eat better, live better and wear better clothes.
He made attempts to open up the USSR to the outer world. The Festival of youth in Moscow in 1957 was for many Soviets the first contact with foreigners. We exchanged national exhibitions with the US, where Moscovites received the shock of their life witnessing the contrast in living standards between the two countries.
He could have become the ruler who made a breakthrough in the cooperation between the East and the West. But the Carribean crisis of 1962 and the U2 shootdown in 1960 postponed the Détente until the era of Nixon and Brezhnev. However, the groundwork for the first sovereign loans to our country since the time of Czars (the lend-lease was a conditional wartime arrangement) was laid during the Khrushchev’s rule.
Hardcore Stalinists and Maoists point at Krushchev as the main culprit for deviation of the USSR from the true path of world revolution. He put revolutionary wars on hold, and they were not resumed before the onset of hybrid wars at the start of Brezhnev’s era (creation of PLO and infiltration into Italian and German militant leftist cells). From the POV of Communism, Krushchev bears a grave responsibility for its defeat in the USSR. But from the POV of a small insignificant commoner like me and millions of other Soviets, he was the best ruler in the Kremlin during the Soviet era.
The art below praises the huge expansion of grain farming to new territories in Kazakhstan and South Urals that previously were lying idle. The sharp rise in living standards, the baby boom, the 1961 breakthrough in orbital exploration, the windfall of Cuban pro-Soviet conversion and the promise of Communism by 1980 created in the USSR a huge wave of optimism in the first half of 1960s. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Brian Katron:
One of Krushchev's relatives said Krushchev used to cry a lot at home after he lost his position.
Alisher Orynbek:
Besides boosting living standards, Khrushchev saw tremendous development of Soviet space and nuclear tech. But inadvertently he derailed Soviet communism by setting exact date — “20 years from now”. It had interesting consequences. When it became clear that communism will not be built by 1980, and it did become clear by mid-1970s, commies wanted an ideological substitute. They found one in celebrating victory in Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 — Victory Day. It was not much celebrated before. All of the sudden it became grandiose holiday. Another way of masking lack of progress toward “communism” was Moscow Olympics of 1980, a huge event.
Andrei Gribanov:
Actually he is remembered as corn aphid. He is blamed for giving Crimea to Ukraine as a gift on celebration of “300 years together”.
And do not forget that he was one of the most bloodthirsty persons in Central Committee. Even Stalin had to write him “Stop, idiot” when he asked to increase a number of people to be executed.
Dima Vorobiev:
They were all a homicidal bunch.
Khrushchev and Prime Minister Bulganin, 1956
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DOES PROPAGANDA STILL WORK?
~ Propaganda is about aligning other people’s worldviews with your agenda.
As such, propaganda is as effective (or as ineffective, no one really knows for certain) as it has been since the invention of human speech.
The reason why so many people question propaganda nowadays is the creeping erosion of the cornerstones of Enlightenment.
Fewer and fewer people trust knowledge. Knowledge is usurped by scientists, and scientists are a selfish, arrogant bunch. More and more embrace instead conviction. Conviction takes control from scientists and gives it back to common people.
People are tired of facts. If facts don’t care about people’s feelings, why should people care about facts? We need alternative facts, the ones that care about people.
People are sick and tired of knowledge. All too often knowledge makes us feel miserable. As we say in Russia, “the less you know, the better you sleep”. More and more of us go instead for meaning. And as religious people can confirm, meaning makes us free from the yoke of cold, impersonal knowledge.
The propaganda landscape around us is populated by pulsing beacons of belonging. The breakneck technological progress and crumbling of traditional social networks make us confused about who we are and where we belong. The beacons of propaganda help us find our spiritual brothers and sisters.
Before the Internet, you thought you were alone. Now, you know you’re not.
This is the era of new tribalism. Tribalism not only loves propaganda. It is proud of it.
Below, an art piece by Ildár Khánov, from 1967, “Lenin explaining simple things”.
Now comes the flood of its second coming. This New Tribalism is kaleidoscopic in its variety and sophistication. Anti-vaxxing, LGTB+, Brexit, green activism, anti-globalism, anything your heart desires.
And Marxists showed the way to all of these: propaganda is not something to be ashamed of. Propaganda needs to be celebrated. Because it brings people together. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Sergey Berezovikov:
Propaganda has replaced ideology.
Jesse Witwer:
You can say many things about propaganda, but saying that it doesn’t work is not one of them. The dichotomy of narratives coming from a cacophony of sources refuse to be reconciled and are in fact polar opposite views of the world. With Communism and Capitalism, at least you had two competing paradigms over economic allocation of resources in a society that would simply be solved through experimentation. Now we have irreconcilable differences. Is a trace gas in our atmosphere turning earth into Venus or not? Is a virus that can escape a level 4 containment facility going to be stopped by your mini-mouse cloth mask that you have used dozens of times without washing or not? Do the vaccines stop transmission or not? Does having sex with your spouse with a mask on stop transmission of a virus or not?
These questions can and were answered over and over again and yet the propaganda can keep people aligned with whatever paradigm they have chosen and virtually nothing can dislodge them.
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WHAT IF RUSSIA WINS THIS WAR — A PYRRHIC VICTORY
~ Russia has suffered massive losses of military resources and personnel. The resources will be difficult to replace, due to requiring components that are currently embargoed—but the people are irreplaceable.
Russia already had a “top-heavy” age distribution among its populace—too many old people, not enough young people. That’s a slow death sentence for an economy if it isn’t reversed.
And then Tsar Khuylo [an extremely derogatory nickname for Putin] sent thousands of Russian young men to die for his imperialist fantasies, and is attempting to round up hundreds of thousands more.
Quite frankly, if Russia wins the war, they’ll be in rough shape for at least a generation.
If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined. ~ Pyrrhus of Epirus
If they get spanked and sent home crying, they’ll have a ruined economy, a critical shortage of young men, an eviscerated military, and essentially no international allies or respect.
Oh, and to the extent that “keeping Ukraine out of NATO” was ever anything more than a convenient excuse, it’s worth noting that Vlad the Imp-ulsive will have sparked what is likely to be the biggest expansion of NATO in decades.
Russia absolutely can lose. The real question is whether there is even the remote possibility anymore that Russia could win. ~
Andrew Alexander:
Rebuilding their military is going to take years, if not a decade. Russia will have essentially no ability to bully or project strength to anyone, even if their reputation hadn’t been ruined, which it absolutely has.
Iain MacClatchie:
The problem with this situation is that Russian people really want Russia to be a big deal internationally. They want that bully power. And their conventional military has shown it can’t deliver.
The unfortunately consequence is that they will be tempted to look to their nuclear weapons for bully power.
Amanda Ramsey:
They’re losing even more young men than they mobilize, since so many are fleeing the country.
Roland Bartetzko:
This is a war of attrition and at the moment, Russia loses nine soldiers for every killed Ukrainian soldier, a number which is far too high. If they were able to lower the ratio to 5:1 or reduce it even more, they would probably be ready to accept an extremely high absolute casualty count (in the hundreds of thousands).
The Russian military regards their soldiers as expendable, and therefore, the KIA (killed in action) numbers that are acceptable for them are far higher than what any Western democracy would ever tolerate.
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Below, peasants from a famine-struck area at the Volga River in 1921 show their gratitude to the manager of an American rescue mission for bringing them food. In the minds of a grand majority of Russians, such scenes of national humiliation are a direct consequence of Western-style democracy.
(As a side note, look at the headgear of the American. No one else in the crowd has a hat like his. The nánsenovki, or “fur hats with three flaps”, that came to be seen as classic Russian hats, were brought to fashion in the USSR by the personnel of Western relief missions in the early 1920s).
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DETENTE DURING THE COLD WAR
~ Détente is the name of a short-lived, half-hearted intermission in the Cold War in the early 1970s.
It saw a sharp increase in contacts between the USSR and Western countries on all levels, softening of repressions against dissidents in the Soviet Union, several agreements about limiting the arms race. It culminated in the Helsinki accords in 1975. For the first time since the start of the Cold War, East and West agreed that they had much more in common than the simple wish of not to start a nuclear war of annihilation.
Why the shift?
Reason 1: China
After the Cultural revolution broke out in PRC, the bilateral relations between the two Communist giants went from bad to worse. In 1969, the Sino-Soviet border conflict
broke out, hitherto a unique case of two “Socialist” countries about to start a full-scale war with each other.
The American government saw a window of opportunity. After a couple of years of shrewd footwork of Henry Kissinger and other sherpas of US diplomacy, in 1972 as a result of Nixon’s visit to China, Mao broke ranks in the epic struggle of revolutionary proletarians against international Imperialist forces. From then on, the Soviet rulers had to count on a real possibility that if a “hot war” happened, the USSR had to prepare for a battle not only with NATO in the west, but also China is the east.
This was scary as hell.
Reason 2: Czechoslovakia
After the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 with Soviet tanks, the image of the USSR as an imperfect but powerful force of peace and progress got a huge dent among Western liberals and leftists. The most radically-minded groups (soulmates of our present-day SJWs and Antifas) who long kept with us through thick and thin, increasingly turned Maoist.
We needed to win back those “people of good will” and “friends of peace and progress”. A global charm offensive became the top of the order.
Reason 3: Economic troubles
By the mid-1960s, the Soviet economy had exhausted the potential of Stalinist growth. The second wave of industrialization on the back of at least 5,500 industrial and power plants taken from Northern China and Europe in reparations after WW2 was over. The countryside could no longer provide millions of additional industrial workers to man new work stations. The technology was subpar for keeping up the growth through the gains in productivity.
The country seemed to have lost direction. As an answer, in 1964 a palace coup sent Khrushchev into retirement. A set of half-baked economic reforms was initiated. But no one knew what exactly needed to be done—and as we know now, the most powerful movers and shakers didn’t really want to change the system.
Luckily, in a couple of years, they were going to find insane amounts of petroleum in West Siberia. These fields would usher in the era of our petro-ruble exuberance for the following 15 years. But before the oil prices went stratospheric in 1973, it was hard to see whether new oil and gas exports could really cover our bills. Therefore, the Kremlin needed Plan B, in the case the arms race started bleeding us dry.
Short spell
However, oil and gas turned out to be the new blood of the Communist project. The proceeds from petroleum exports allowed us not only to speed up the arms race, but also spend more on the populace, as well as pump insane amounts of money into our agents of influence in Western Europe and around the world.
Africa sailed up as the new hot spot ripe for the next wave of anti-Imperialist revolutions. In Europe, Germany turned more and more Soviet-friendly. The far right lost Greece, Spain and Portugal. The rest of the continent was swept by waves of anti-American, anti-Nato, pro-disarmament activism. Watergate and the lost war in Vietnam shattered the American political class.
The winds of change turned our way in the mid-1970s. Predictably, the Soviet leaders no longer needed Détente. Without our contribution, the Helsinki accords became increasingly marginal. A historic window of opportunity opened between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s for a victorious break of Soviet Communism in the Cold War —but was never used.
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Below, a poster celebrating the Soviet Union as the global champion of world peace and progress. In 1972, the conciliatory spirit of Détente dictated the visual canon of open arms, visible hand palms and affable faces. The poem in the picture says: “To the honest people the word “peace” is valuable / This short word carries the meaning of life / We’re open to broad cooperation / With all who supports a stable peace”. The branch of laurel is ornamented with the ribbon that says “cooperation”. “МИР” means both “peace” and “world” in Russian. The coat of arms of the USSR on the man’s industrial overalls mean that he represents the Soviet State. The motif contains no military references.
Below, an example of post-Detente peace propaganda. Gone are the affable faces and open palms. The fists raised in defiance hark back to the pre-WW2 Rot Front shows of class struggle. The text says “The fire of war won’t happen, the Earth won’t go up in flames!”. The poster celebrated one of high-profile international gatherings of Soviet agents of influence, the 12th World Festival of Youth and Students.
The erected fists remind more of a barrage of ABM defense against incoming ICMBs than a rally of peace-loving humans. The message is, “we have more than one way to struggle for peace and progress”, known from the earliest days of Communist propaganda.
Michael Beraka:
Pretty incredible it took the Prague Spring to cast a new light, as opposed to say the Ribbentrop Pact, the Winter War, the Secret Speech, etc, but I guess the second generation of Western apologists was a whole different animal, not in fact religiously committed but rather spoiled middle class children too self-absorbed to be embarrassed to be interested only in appearances.
Henrik Unné:
The western countries should never have attempted détente with the Soviet Union. By permitting the Soviet Union’s parasitism on the West, the West prolonged the Soviet dictatorship needlessly.
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Ukrainian soldiers being fed a hot meal by the locals*
WHY PALM TREES SURVIVE HURRICANES
~ "This is our royal palm and if you'd come up to this you'd think you're knocking on a column of solid cement," horticulture specialist Karen Maxwell says, knocking on the trunk. "What makes these trees outstanding in a hurricane is this tree can bend almost 40 to 50 degrees and not break. Because it has no branches. It is not rigid.”
The palm tree is a monocot, closer to the grass family than broadleaf trees. It grows from the top. The inside is not hard and there are no tree rings. It's a collection of thousands of vascular straws that carry nutrients and water from the ground to the crown.
Palm trees come in more than 2,500 species, mostly occurring in the vast warm regions between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. They love a good tempest.
"All of them are adapted for wind, many of them are adapted for flooding, and many are also adapted for salt," Maxwell says. In short, millennia of natural selection have perfectly adapted the palm tree for an event like Hurricane Ian. "They have the tools to survive," Maxwell says, grinning appreciatively.
After a hurricane, the ground is often littered with brown palm fronds. While it's a chore for the city, it's a good thing for the trees. The wind has pruned the dead fronds. The live, green fronds are tough and aerodynamic and seldom break off. If they do, they grow back.
The English statesman and scientific philosopher Francis Bacon made an observation that well suits the brilliant adaptability of the palm tree: "We cannot command nature except by obeying her.” ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/16/1127746570/palm-trees-hurricane-ian-fort-myers-southwest-florida
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WE ARE LIFE’S PLAN B
~ The chances are that practically every life form you’ve ever seen is multicellular. Every person, dog, reptile, fish, insect, spider, worm, slug, tree, blade of grass, every bird and every lump of mold, each contains countless cells. It’s tempting to think that this is the grand culmination of a long and gradual evolutionary march since life’s inception.
Just five years ago, we found out that that’s not true.
You may have heard of the Ediacaran biota. This consisted of ecosystems of early multi-celled organisms — beyond that, their identity isn’t known. They’ve been variously classified as animals, algae, fungi — even as none of the above, as some unknown kingdom of life. The Ediacaran biota existed about 600 million years ago.
Ediacaran biota
With “creatures” (if they can even be called that) so primitive and unrecognizable, surely this was life’s first leap to multicellularity, a pioneering step in its history? No.
A staggering 2.1 billion years ago, there was an entirely different guild of multi-celled organisms, four times more ancient than the Ediacaran biota, and these guys definitely don’t belong anywhere on our evolutionary timeline. They are the Francevillian biota, discovered in 2014.
The organisms in the Francevillian biota are far, far too bizarre for us to classify, but they each had many cells and grew up to 17 centimeters in length. They all died out due to a global drop in oxygen levels, but if they didn’t, I can guarantee you that Earth would literally look like an alien planet.
Also, having had four times as much time to evolve, think of how staggeringly complex and advanced they’d be by now. It’s only because the Francevillian organisms died out that multicellular organisms resembling anything like the ones we have today exist — including humans.
One’s brain starts to hurt even more when you realize that there could be another league of complex organisms even older than these guys just waiting to be discovered. It took us 200 years of paleontology to find out about the Francevillian biota, after all, and I have a feeling that there’s a lot more to be discovered. ~ Gary Meaney, zoologist, Quora
Scientific American:
“Proterozoic means "before animals". These creatures, whatever they were, were probably not animals, not plants, and not anything we know today. What they were is tantalizingly unknowable, but also good food for a lively imagination. For us, their distant kin, they can be whatever we might dream them to be.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/two-billion-year-old-fossils-reveal-strange-and-puzzling-forms/
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THE IMPACT OF URBANIZATION AND ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
~ In 1800, only two percent of the human population lived in cities. A century later, that portion grew to 15 percent. Then, sometime in 2007, a person was born in a city somewhere on the globe who tipped the proportion of Homo sapiens that lives in cities over the 50 percent mark. Despite the fact that cities cover only two to three percent of terrestrial surface area, more than half of humanity is now urban-dwelling. There is no going back.
For a species that spent close to 200,000 years living in grasslands and scrubby forests, hunting and foraging, and using skins, wood, and grasses for shelter, we are increasingly occupying an evolutionarily unfamiliar niche, where the sensory and physical dimensions of a life lived in daily contact with the natural world have been replaced by a whole set of alternate experiences: Cement and traffic, 90-degree corners, bars, sirens, glass, and streetlights increasingly dominate our senses. As far as our genes are concerned, we live in an alien world. Phobias about snakes slithering out of toilet bowls, coyotes snatching children out of strollers, and diseases infiltrating city water supplies reveal the location of our biological roots. The shadow of the wild continues to haunt the psyche of even the most entrenched urbanite.
Alongside us, fast-breeding and opportunistic species are changing their behaviors and their genomes so that they will fit better in the urban world. City-dwelling swallows are evolving shorter wings that allow them to avoid the traffic better, and sparrows and starlings have raised the pitch of their calls to compensate for the background urban noise. Moths are gaining different color patterns so that they have more suitable camouflage in their new concrete habitat. Evolutionary forces are turning city-bound mice into separate subspecies in different city parks, unable to exchange genes with cousins who live a few blocks away.
A second and related agent of evolutionary change is the progressive banishment of darkness from the world at the hands of electric light. Paul Bogard has written poignantly of his deep regret at the “end of night.” He points out that the spread of electricity across many parts of the globe has condemned real darkness to the planet’s history. This lack of night comes with sizable biological consequences. Excessive illumination is disrupting the natural rhythms created by millions of years of the earth’s steady axial rotation.
The first photos of the earth from space taken by lunar-bound astronauts revealed a spectacular blue marble poised in front of a star-speckled expanse. The individuals lucky enough to see the planet from this vantage point were all transformed. American astronaut Edgar Mitchell memorably described his impression of it as “a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery.” The planet’s finitude, its swirling beauty, and its apparent fragility gave our species its first clear sense of our lack of astral significance. Norman Cousins later remarked that “what was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that man set foot on the Moon but that they set eye on the Earth.”
More recent photographs of the earth taken at night have revealed a pearl that is increasingly crossed by spider webs of yellow light projected from cities and the transportation corridors between them. The world is now comprehensively illuminated. Thanks to the ubiquity of electric light, less and less of the planet falls genuinely into darkness any more. Power shunted through incandescent filaments, the gases of fluorescent lights, and a billion light-emitting diodes means that darkness is being pushed off the landscape by this electric interloper. Synthetic light races through the air for miles beyond its intended destination, leading to a diffusion rate that far exceeds that attainable by the bulldozers and diggers that make its spread possible.
Prior to Thomas Edison’s design of the first commercially viable light bulb, nighttime illumination came only from flames fueled by imperfect sources, such as wood, whale oil, paraffin, and natural gas. The light from these sources danced unpredictably and was always mottled by the smoke of imperfect combustion. The spread of the light was limited by available fuel, environmental conditions, and a basic lack of penetration. Many still feel attached to the light provided by a cavorting flame, seeking it out from wood and wax when wishing to disappear into memories or create venues for intimacy.
When the limited light cast by these flames was overtaken by that of incandescent bulbs, the nighttime started to change its color from a deep inky black to various shades of orange, yellow, and white. The carefree spreading of megawatts of unused light into the night sky has led to a pale dome of illumination above every population center. This glow refuses to leave the city’s vault even when most of its residents are asleep. Bogard quotes an Iroquois writer who told him “we have the night so the Earth can rest.” As electrification has spread across the world, the amount of rest available to the earth has diminished. This loss to the planet also appears increasingly to be a loss of our own.
Human bodies have natural circadian rhythms. These rhythms are adjustments to the waxing and waning of light during the earth’s daily rotations. Evolution lodged such patterns deeply inside of us. The circadian rhythm has an influence on hormone production, body temperature regulation, blood pressure, and other key functions. Plants, animals, cyanobacteria, and fungi all have similar rhythms that are their own evolutionary adaptations to the rising and setting of the sun.
Leaves turn to face the sun and drop in the fall, petals open and close daily, animals rest, and bacteria fix nitrogen at rates that are direct responses to periodic and predictable changes in light. When patterns of light and darkness change, organisms must rapidly adapt or pay the price.
Consider that more than a fifth of all mammal species are bats. In addition to these well-known lovers of a dark world, 60 percent of invertebrates and 30 percent of vertebrates are nocturnal.
This means that a large number of the living forms that share the planet with us have evolved so that darkness is an essential factor in their well-being. Of those species that are not fully nocturnal, a large number are crepuscular, a word that has exactly the right sound to describe the creeping and partially hidden character of activity that takes place at twilight.
The swapping out of darkness for light across much of the planet affects all of these species. Sea turtles emerging from the surf and no longer able to navigate by the moon due to beachfront floodlights are perhaps the best-known victims of artificial illumination. But in addition to the turtles, countless other species are shifting their behavioral patterns to accommodate a planet that is increasingly lit up.
Peregrine falcons, for example, are adapting to the new frontier of urban living by figuring out how to hunt pigeons, ducks, and bats in the city at night. The nocturnal hunt no longer involves the 200-mile-per-hour “stoop” from above that has made peregrines famous as the fastest birds on earth. Illumination provided by the glowing city means that the nighttime ambushes involve a new type of stalk. Peregrines fly upward toward the illuminated bellies of their unsuspecting prey, rotating at the last second to pierce the hapless victim’s feathered breast with their deadly talons. Like Homo sapiens adapting to the city, peregrines are figuring out ways to live, feed, and rest in a world that no longer resembles the one their genes prepared them to find.
Meanwhile, in developed countries, up to 20 percent of the workforce is employed in service industries that require employees to be awake for large portions of the night. Night-shift workers such as janitors, health care attendants, and those who labor in 24-hour manufacturing facilities are some of the people who bear this burden. Those who work the graveyard shift seldom replace the number of hours of sleep they missed at night with the same number of hours of sleep during the day.
In a striking indication that the end of night has consequences, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded in 2007 that “shift-work that involves circadian disruption is probably carcinogenic to humans.” It is thought that this may have something to do with disruption to the production of the hormone melatonin, but at the moment, this is little more than a guess. It should come as no surprise that the human body has a deep biological connection to the earth’s diurnal rhythm.
One of a growing number of local and national organizations concerned about the loss of darkness in America is the National Park Service. This agency has created a “night sky team” to raise awareness of the importance of darkness as a new type of resource, pointing out with impeccable logic and federally approved rhythm that “half the park happens after dark.” In 2006, the Park Service committed itself to preserve the natural lightscapes of parks, which it described in ethical language as “resources and values that exist in the absence of human-caused light.” Artificial light is now deemed an “intrusion” into the park ecosystem, suggesting that the distinction between what is artificial and what is natural is not yet completely moot.
Astronomers too are obviously miffed. Light pollution from cities is making optimal conditions for star gazing harder and harder to find. This is not only the concern of a few professionals with big budgets. Astronomy may be one of the most widely enjoyed arts on the face of the planet, ranging in its practitioners from Ph.D. scientists with multi-million-dollar telescopes to five-year-old children trying not to topple to the ground while craning their necks upward to wonder at the night sky. Seeing the moon and the stars above is one of the most orienting of human experiences, yet it was recently determined that more than a third of the world’s population can no longer see the Milky Way due to the presence of light pollution.
There may be no reason to lament the urban path we have taken given its many positive contributions to our humanity. But there is no doubt it is a path causing an unstoppable shift in who we, as well as the species that like to live alongside us, essentially are. After all, “If we never see the Milky Way,” asks Bogard (quoting science writer and poet William Fox), “how will we know our place in the universe?”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-evolutionary-power-of-cities-and-light?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THE AFTERLIFE IS IN OUR HEADS
~ One Sunday evening in September, nearly 30 years ago, Xavier Melo, then 23, was driving home from his job as a private math tutor in Barcelona, Spain. It was one of his two weekend jobs, and his car was stacked with study notes and practice tests for an upcoming business school entrance exam. Melo retraced the familiar route home at a leisurely pace, to savor a gentle breeze and the satisfaction of a weekend’s work complete. As he pulled into an intersection, a Volkswagen Golf violently crashed into his car, destroying it. Melo himself suffered head trauma, lost consciousness, and fell into a coma. He woke up in his hospital bed, screaming, again and again, “I have been with God!”
Melo’s memory of the immediate aftermath of the crash is vivid and mysterious; it follows the familiar arc of the near-death experience. He recalls that he flew out of his body and hovered above it, that he observed a nurse in the ambulance who held his hand and called out, “We’re losing him, we’re losing him,” as he watched his papers swirl and scatter in the street. Then he began to rise, the ambulance receding from him in the distance, until he came to a tunnel, where scenes of his life as a child began to play out. He felt an overwhelming sense of belonging, of kinship with the trees, the wind, and the water, and saw an indescribable light that drew him in, a light he began to believe was a being. “It was like the magnetism of love, something that attracts the deepest part of you,” he told me. “I have never been more alive, I have never felt more lucid in my life.” Regaining awareness and sense of his physical body, Melo said, was traumatic.
As Melo relived his story for me over Zoom, from his home in Barcelona, he repeatedly became so overwhelmed with emotion that he had to stop to regain his composure. The experience, he said, transformed him, but not until 25 years after his accident. In 2017, after years in the insurance industry, and upon graduating from a business school program in management, he formed a foundation, Icloby, to promote socially responsible business practices. This fall, the foundation will also embark on a study of near-death experiences in cardiac arrest patients, including children, among Spanish speaking people across Spain, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The research project aims to replicate an earlier study of 344 cardiac arrest survivors published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2001 and led by Pim Van Lommel, a cardiologist, author, and researcher in near-death studies from the Netherlands. “For us, it’s important to demonstrate that death is only for the material body,” said Luján Comas, vice-president of the Icloby foundation, who joined us on the Zoom call.
The idea that near-death experiences, also known as NDEs, offer proof of an afterlife for the soul has been remarkably persistent, despite an accumulation of scientific evidence to the contrary. Such claims have existed in the historical record since at least Plato’s time; the earliest known account of near-death experiences appeared in the fifth century B.C. But they weren’t widely popularized until the 1970s, when American physician and philosopher Raymond Moody published his best-seller Life After Life, based on his collection of 150 coma survivor’s reports.
Many studies and books that bear witness to life after life have sprung up since Moody’s book, none more notorious than Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, a New York Times bestseller in 2012, by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander. Increasingly, these supernatural claims have taken on a scientific veneer. Van Lommel, the cardiologist from the Netherlands, has made it clear in his many popular writings, public talks, and interviews that he believes NDEs serve as proof that consciousness exists independently of the brain, that it is “non-local.” And Sam Parnia, who researches resuscitation science and NDEs at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and was the lead researcher on a 2022 paper that proposes a framework for future study of NDEs, recently told me, “The [big] question that we’re trying to explore is, ‘What happens to consciousness when you die, does it die or continue?’ And the evidence so far is that it doesn’t die when you and I cross over into death.”
But neuroscientists who study consciousness and have weighed the decades of research into NDEs told me these claims that consciousness survives death are not supported by the research. Though they are highly personal and often transformative for those who experience them, NDEs are nonetheless explained by physiological processes, they said, which have been pieced together over the past 50 years.
In the decades since Moody published Life After Life, advances in critical care medicine and resuscitation science have made it easier to revive patients whose hearts have stopped, which has made it easier to systematically identify and study people who have had an NDE. Some estimates now suggest that between 4 to 15 percent of the global population and 10 to 23 percent of cardiac arrest patients have had an NDE. We now have a better grasp of how they happen, what purpose they may serve and why they are so transformative for those who experience them. At the most basic level, neuroscientists say, when a person’s brain changes in profound ways — as happens when that person goes into cardiac arrest, for example — their perceptions and emotions change in profound ways, too.
“Having an out-of-body experience is not proof that the soul or the mind can leave the body and go floating about,” said Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex who studies consciousness and is the author of a recent book on the subject, Being You. Those who tout near-death experiences as something more than biological, Seth added, “are confusing the content of the experience with a claim about the nature of the universe. There’s a much more interesting explanation, which is that the location that we feel ourselves to be is something that is generated by the brain and can be changed when the brain is in a particular state.”
IN 2019, a group of critical care specialists, anesthesiologists, and psychiatrists, as well as a neurologist from New York Medical College and a neurophysiologist specializing in sleep and epilepsy from Kings College in London, got together in New York to discuss the future of NDE studies. Sam Parnia, the resuscitation researcher from New York University Grossman School of Medicine, was among them. The result of that meeting was the 2022 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Among other things, the authors proposed a new name for the NDE: “recalled experiences of death,” or REDs, to limit the field to the study of just those experiences that occur when someone is in critical condition, or a near-death state, such as cardiac arrest, when the brain no longer receives blood and oxygen.
Parnia told me the new name was meant to reflect the authors’ belief that near-death experiences actually happen after someone is dead. “What we’re saying is science is showing you that death is not the end that we thought,” Parnia said. “It’s almost like a new, uncharted, unexplored territory.”
The group also identified 51 core features, or themes, of REDs. These include “separating from the body,” “realization of having died,” “a higher purpose: I wish I had known,” and “loss of fear of death.” These experiences, the paper states, are characterized by “a paradoxical lucidity and a heightened sense of consciousness, awareness, and well-structured thought processes, typically without external or visible signs of consciousness.” In a supplement to the paper, the authors allow the possibility that consciousness “is a separate entity that, while undiscovered by science today, is not produced by conventional brain cell activities.”
NDEs have been reported under many circumstances, a list of which appeared in Van Lommel’s 2001 paper: cardiac arrest in myocardial infarction, shock in postpartum loss of blood or in perioperative complications, septic or anaphylactic shock, electrocution, coma from traumatic brain damage, intracerebral hemorrhage or cerebral infarction, attempted suicide, near-drowning or asphyxia, and apnea. According to Van Lommel, they are also reported by patients with serious but not immediately life-threatening diseases, and in those with major depression. Experiences that bear many similarities to NDEs can even happen in the terminal phases of illness or after situations in which death seemed inevitable, such as mountaineering accidents.
But NDEs can also occur in circumstances that do not bear any direct relation to imminent death or even fear of death, such as meditation or intense grief, according to numerous studies, said Renaud Evrard, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Lorraine in France, who works with patients grappling with exceptional and paranormal experiences, including NDEs. In a response paper published a few months later in the same journal, the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Evrard accused Parnia and his co-authors of ignoring the actual data on NDEs. “They focus too much on the interpretation of testimonies and not enough on the evidence,” said Evrard. Bruce Greyson, professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia and the creator of the Greyson scale used to identify and rate NDEs, agreed, even though he is listed as an author on the 2022 paper. The evidence suggests NDEs experienced by patients whose hearts have stopped are no different from those experienced by people who simply fear death—for example, if someone is falling off of a mountain, Greyson said.
Prior belief in god or an afterlife does not, perhaps surprisingly, seem to influence one’s propensity to have an NDE, according to the research, but there is a strong association between the “depth” of the NDE a person experiences—as measured by the Greyson NDE Scale—and the likelihood that they will experience a religious or spiritual transformation afterward, including reduced fear of death, greater empathy, and decreased interest in material possessions.
NDEs are generally understood to begin with a feeling of detachment from the physical body—known as an out-of-body experience, or OBE—followed by deep feelings of peacefulness, entering a gateway or tunnel, seeing a bright light and finally feeling a “return” to the body. It is the OBE that is perhaps the most defining element of the NDE: Some 80 percent of people who report experiencing an NDE have one, according to the research of Steven Laureys, a clinical professor of neurology who leads the Coma Science Group at the University of Liège in Belgium. His lab searches for behavioral and neural correlates of consciousness in patients with severe brain damage and studies non-ordinary states of consciousness.
But a wealth of neuroscience research describes how OBE-like experiences—a loss of the sense of self and disturbed body perception or ownership—can be triggered by brain damage, epilepsy, and migraine, as well as by stimulation of the part of the brain where the right temporal and parietal lobes meet. This region is known as the right temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), and it is understood to play an important role in multisensory integration, our sense of embodiment, feelings of agency and self-other distinction. Stimulation of this junction can disrupt the brain’s ability to coherently process the positioning of the body and the sense of body ownership, which can lead to the sensation of seeing oneself from above.
OBEs often also involve awareness of specific details of the scene that feature the body in a comatose state–doctors discussing one’s chances of survival, for example, or attempting CPR. In the past, accounts from people who have recovered from being unconscious or in a minimally conscious state, and have recalled sensory details of their environments, might have seemed miraculous. But recent studies of people who are in coma, or under anesthesia, and seem unresponsive, have shown these individuals can perceive things in their environment and respond physically to commands. For example, while higher-level semantic processes can be impaired in people with low levels of sedation or minimally impaired consciousness, a person’s ability to process speech more generally has been found to be resilient even during deep sedation.
Cardiac arrest may be similar. How much activity is present in the brain under these conditions is not clear. Positron emission tomography scans suggest that there is about a 60 percent reduction in global activity compared to baseline following cardiac arrest, said Laureys, but it’s not zero. But if a brain has flatlined, showing no activity on an EEG monitor, it would most likely be incapable of forming a memory or having any other conscious experience, said Seth, who has been studying the neuroscience of consciousness for decades. He and many others believe that most NDEs are “false” or imagined memories—that the brain constructs a memory after the fact to fill in for an inexplicable series of mental events.
“You don’t want to undermine the person’s lived experience,” Seth said. “If they experience flying through a tunnel of light, into a beautiful white open space, then that’s what they experience. But memories, things that minds do, like remember things and talk about them, depend on brain activity. No brain activity, no mental process. If somebody with no brain activity were able to experience something and remember it later, then pretty much everything we know about the brain, about science, about physics is wrong.”
While no single overarching explanation for the NDE has yet been established, neuroscientists have discovered a series of neurophysiological mechanisms that could, together, account for many aspects of the phenomenon. One hypothesis is that NDEs are produced by the release in the brain of a natural hallucinogen with neuroprotective properties. London researcher Karl Jansen, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, is a leading expert on the hallucinogen ketamine, which is used to treat depression and, during surgery, as an analgesic to induce loss of consciousness and reduce pain. Jansen proposed in the 1990s that a ketamine-like substance may play a role in the emergence of NDEs among patients with life-threatening injuries or disorders of the brain or spinal cord given the parallels between NDEs and ketamine trips, and the potentially protective properties of ketamine-like substances.
The “dissociative anesthetic ketamine can reproduce all aspects of the near-death experience,” Jansen wrote. That includes a sense of ineffability, timelessness, that what is experienced is “real,” that one is actually dead, a perception of separation from the body, vivid hallucination, rapid movement through a tunnel, and emerging “into the light.”
Although many psychedelic experiences bear some similarities to NDEs, recreational ketamine trips top the list. In a massive 2019 study comparing psychedelic experiences to NDEs, Laureys’ group used natural language processing tools to assess the semantic similarity between 15,000 accounts linked to the use of 165 different psychoactive substances and 625 NDE narratives. They found that accounts of ketamine trips most closely resembled those of NDEs.
Ketamine is also an N-methyl D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, and so could counter neurotoxic processes that are set into motion by NMDA receptors when blood flow and oxygen to the brain are cut off, “with a short lived, dissociative hallucinogenic state occurring as a side effect.” At least one naturally occurring substance that could play this role, called an endopsychosin, has been identified. In fact, critical conditions like hypoxia—oxygen deficiency—or temporal lobe epilepsy, have been shown to trigger NDEs or NDE-like experiences. And many studies and clinical trials have established that ketamine has neuroprotective and neuroregenerative effects in humans, even after stroke, brain injury, and epileptic seizures.
There is likewise some experimental evidence that near-death experiences that occur at the time of a trauma might help to ward off post-traumatic stress disorder. Bruce Greyson, of the Greyson NDE Scale, led a study published in 2001 that showed that people who have NDEs report more intrusive memories of their close brushes with death but make fewer efforts to avoid reminders of the event, which is considered the more pathological dimension of PTSD.
“One feature that distinguishes NDEs from other forms of [traumatic] dissociation is the , Greyson wrote in the 2001 paper. “If so, we might speculate about the possible survival value of having NDEs when close to death.”15 (Of course, some NDEs have been documented to feature negative and even nightmarish features, though some question whether these are “true” NDEs.)
Independently, serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in mood, cognition, reward, learning, and memory, might play a role in certain features of the NDE. In a small placebo-controlled experiment with 13 individuals, Laureys’ group assessed the experiences induced by injection with a drug called DMT that stimulates serotonin production, which triggered feelings such as entering an unearthly environment, heightened senses, feelings of peace and harmony or unity with the universe. All participants scored above the cut-off score of seven on the most widely used reference scale for NDEs, the Greyson scale. Hypoxia itself has also been considered as a possible contributor. Hypoxia is sometimes experienced by fighter pilots during acceleration maneuvers, which have been documented to provoke tunnel visions, bright lights, OBEs, pleasant sensations, and visions of beloved ones.
To attempt to confirm this in a controlled study, one group induced temporary loss of consciousness via loss of blood pressure in 42 volunteer participants and found that 16 percent reported OBEs, 35 percent reported feelings of peace and pleasantness, 17 percent had a vision of a light, 47 percent felt they entered another world, 20 percent encountered preternatural beings, and 8 percent experienced a tunnel. Likewise, abnormally elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, known as hypercarbia, can induce recollections of past memories, life reviews, visions of a light, OBEs, or mystical experiences, according to research conducted in 1950 and again in 2010. Yet another study showed higher prevalence of NDEs in people with REM sleep intrusions.
Other work suggests that some kind of last-gasp survival mechanism may be at work when near-death experiences occur, in which the brain marshals all of its remaining resources to try to keep itself alive. Recent EEG studies in humans and rodents seem to show highly coherent electrical activity in the brain just before death. This was first found in a small human case series in 2009 by researchers who identified transient electrical spikes in half of their sample of critically ill patients immediately before cardiac arrest. They speculated that critical hypoxia—loss of blood flow to the brain—unleashes a cascade of pathological neuronal activity. These findings were replicated on a larger sample of 35 patients in 2017.
Similar episodes of so-called paradoxical lucidity have been identified in patients with Alzheimer’s disease just before they die, despite irreversible degeneration in the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus and corresponding memory loss. Researchers who have studied brains in the throes of electrical surges just before death have posited that they represent “a last gasp attempt by the brain to survive a lethal loss of blood flow,” which could serve as an “evolutionary survival event.” Why some people experience these surges and others don’t, and how they are set into motion, is unknown.
Scientists haven’t assembled all the pieces to explain why brains in desperate throes generate feelings of peace and joy, ineffability, and the sense of being in the presence of something transcendent. “It’s always difficult for science to answer the big why questions,” Laureys said. Comas, of the Icloby Foundation, told me that by educating the public about near-death experiences, she and Melo hoped to “to eradicate the fear of death.” After all, she said, “The fear of death is the mother and father of all fears.” Who could argue with that? Scientific evidence says near-death experiences are directly linked to the workings of our brains. But evolution is a sly master. Perhaps our biology in its final hour is easing us gently into that good night. ~
https://nautil.us/the-afterlife-is-in-our-heads-240441/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
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FRUCTOSE AND OBESITY
~ All the fructose you eat is cleared on its first pass through the liver. The liver scarfs up all the fructose and immediately converts it to fat [i.e. triglycerides], while glucose stays in the bloodstream for some period of time. That’s why we call starches hyperglycemic molecules; they keep glucose levels in your bloodstream high for a long time. That is good for the brain — the brain loves to eat glucose. It’s good for the muscle.
But fructose doesn’t actually supply any energy to your brain at all. It doesn’t supply any energy to your muscle. It only gets stored as fat. That’s really quite remarkable, if you think about it. You eat sucrose — one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose — that glucose is being used by your muscle and your brain — your brain loves getting that glucose — but the fructose is all just getting stored as fat.
But does it also mean that you get hungrier — you want more sugar if you’re using fructose rather than glucose?
Exactly. You would have to eat exactly twice as much sucrose as starch to get the same amount of energy supplied to your muscle and brain. The brain realizes that, it keeps relaying a feedback so that the more sugar you eat, the more it wants you to eat. Hence the addiction to sweetness. That’s the dangerous thing about this molecule.
You might ask — why did we evolve such a complicated system? Why does the liver feed fructose straight into fat? I think it’s quite clear why this happens. We have a symbiotic relationship with plants. Plants want to spread their seeds around, so they surround them with fructose.
High-fructose material surrounding the seeds gets us and other animals to eat them and this craving of fructose makes us eat them a lot and we end up carrying their seeds around and spreading them. But at the same time, it gives us an advantage because those fruits ripen just at the end of the growing season, which generally means, in almost all environments, that you’re not going to have much to eat over the next few months. So the best way to survive is to convert everything you eat at that time into fat. That is the long-term storage mechanism that allows you to survive until the next growing season. That’s why fructose was spectacular for us 10,000 years ago, getting us through these famines that we faced every year. But today we don’t have famines and so we just get fat.
And here’s an additional comment. The way we’ve attempted to avoid this problem is by using artificial sweeteners. The problem with those is that a disconnect ultimately develops between the amount of sweetness the brain tastes and how much glucose ends up coming to the brain.
So the brain figures you have to eat more and more and more sweetness in order to get any calories out of it. The consequence of people eating lots of sweeteners, no matter what they are — whether they’re natural or unnatural — is that it increases the addiction for the sweetness. As a consequence, at the end of the day, your brain says, 'OK, at some point I need some glucose here'. And then you eat an entire cake, because nobody can hold out in the end. The only way really to prevent this problem — to break the addiction — is to go completely cold turkey and let go off all sweeteners — artificial as well as fructose. Eventually the brain resets itself and you don’t crave it as much. ~
http://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7007-12-8
Oriana:
I'll never forget a biochemist friend remarking, "Fructose does really ugly things to blood vessels." That was at least three decades before the public got alerted to the dangers of fructose. Biochemists tend to be the first to know.
And, if we are to believe Dr. Gundry, if you stop eating fruit completely (as well as any other sources of fructose), you will end up losing weight. Not a huge amount, but still. (Gundry does allow greenish bananas, a good source of resistant starch, which nourishes our gut bacteria.)
Pure glucose (aka “dextrose”) can be bought as powder (inexpensive if bought in quantity). Used as a sweetener it’s less harmful by far than sugar. I’ve tried it, and was surprised by how well it kept hunger at bay (also lifting the mood). Not good for your teeth, so be sure to rinse well after consuming a glucose-sweetened drink.
Or switch to xylitol, a sweetener that’s actually good for your teeth.
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WHAT HIBERNATING BEARS COULD TEACH US ABOUT DIABETES
~ By feeding honey water to hibernating bears, researchers at Washington State University have discovered genetic clues to how these bruins can control their insulin. Their results—published in iScience—might lead to better diabetes treatments for people.
Insulin is a hormone found in most mammals that regulates the body’s blood sugar levels, for instance by telling the liver, muscle, and fat cells to absorb blood sugar, a source of energy. But if a lot of blood sugar enters the bloodstream, over time the cells stop responding, and become resistant to insulin. This is a leading cause of Type 2 diabetes, a disease that can lead to heart attacks, strokes, and blindness. About 1 in 10 Americans, or about 37 million people, have Type 2 diabetes. However, unlike humans, bears can mysteriously control their insulin resistance—turning it on and off like a switch.
To find out how, researchers drew blood serum from six captive grizzly bears—aged between five and 13 years—at the WSU Bear Center, a research facility in Pullman, Washington. They also collected bear fat tissue that they used to grow cell cultures in the lab. “It gives us a way to test things that we couldn't do in a fully grown bear,” says study co-author Blair Perry, a postdoctoral researcher at the university.
This experiment helped the team narrow down the bears' secret to controlling their insulin: Eight key proteins that seem to have a unique role in bear biology, working either independently or together to regulate insulin during hibernation.
Because humans share most of our genes with bears, understanding the role of these eight proteins could teach scientists more about human insulin resistance, Perry says.
Grizzly bears—found in parts of the western U.S., Canada, and Alaska—experience three stages in a year: Active, hyperphagia, and hibernation. In the spring and summer, the massive mammals spend their time foraging, mating, and caring for young. Then in the fall, the animals transition into hyperphagia, when “pretty much all their energy is devoted to eating as much as possible,” Perry says.
During this time, bears consume up to 20,000 daily calories and gain up to eight pounds each day to prepare for the upcoming winter.
When the bears begin hibernating in early winter, they rely on their fat deposits to sustain them through the cold months. Hibernation is “more than just a deep sleep,” Perry says. “Lots of physiological changes allow bears to survive these long winters without food.” Their metabolic rate, heart rate, and body temperature decrease, and they become insulin resistant.
Hibernating bears experience periods of wakefulness, during which they move around but don’t eat. When the study bears awoke, the team fed them honey water—a favorite treat—for two weeks, then collected their blood. The team already had blood samples taken from the same bears during the spring and summer.
Next, in the lab, the researchers combined various blood serums with cell cultures of various types—for instance, they mixed a cell culture from fat tissue taken from hibernating bears with blood serum taken from active bears. This allowed the team to see what genetic changes would occur within the cells.
Of all the combinations studied, the serum taken from the honey-fed hibernating bears helped the most in narrowing down those eight key proteins involved in regulating insulin sensitivity and resistance.
For Mike Sawaya, a bear biologist at Sinopah Wildlife Research Associates who was not involved in the study, the big take home of this “fascinating study” is how many implications bear hibernation can have for human health.
“Identifying those eight proteins is an important step,” he says, as is identifying “exactly what is being turned on and off” when bears change their insulin resistance, he says.
One step closer to diabetes prevention?
While insulin resistance and its consequences are well understood, there is much to learn about its genetics. Studying how a bear goes in and out of insulin resistance each year gives scientists a “unique opportunity” to better understand this, adds Perry.
For instance, figuring out how to manipulate those eight proteins in people could potentially “reverse a human out of insulin resistance,” Perry says. Such medications or interventions are very far off, "but we're getting closer,” he says.
Sawaya agrees that this is “definitely one more piece of the puzzle” and hopes that unravelling the mysteries of bear physiology could lead to diabetes prevention.
In future studies,
the team hopes to investigate exactly how these specific proteins turn off insulin resistance in bears. ~
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/hibernating-bears-could-hold-a-clue-to-treating-diabetes?rid=E18AE510841C77329A0E2626CC03D351&cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Daily_NL_Tuesday_Environment_20221011
ending on beauty:
I will die in Paris on a rainy day,
On a day I already remember.
I will die in Paris – I am not in a hurry –
Perhaps on a Thursday in autumn, like today.
~ Cesar Vallejo, White Stone On a Black Stone
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