Golden calcite crystals inside a fossilized clam shell, Florida
*
LISTENING TO GABRIELA READ IN SPANISH
La noche es infinita, she begins.
What is born in her mouth
slides out slippery like moonlight —
her name, a Hebrew archangel
translated into a woman word by
word creating herself. I pour infinity
into my native tongue,
let it create another world:
The night is not finished.
The night is not finished, it waits
behind the unfinished trees,
it makes the dogs bark and coyotes
laugh. What do they hear that we
cannot hear? Infinidad, she says because
we’re infinite but we are not
finished. The Universe is mostly
dark laced with dark,
pierced by the cry of the beginning.
There’s space like a lover
that opens only once. Gabriela
waits, a lily in her hand.
What will you say to her?
Can you utter such a total Yes?
Do not ask if the angel
is real. Who wants a heaven
that is always day? We need
la noche, our native land,
black leche of the soul,
white of stars.
~ Oriana
Mary:
*
COLERIDGE, THE WORDSWORTHS, AND THE YEAR OF MARVELS
~ ADAM NICOLSON’S 2020 book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels chronicles the tumultuous year (1797–98) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent as neighbors and collaborators, friends and rivals on the Somerset Quantocks. During this time, they composed aloud, wandering lonely as clouds as they broke through copsewood branches and enjambments, pacing down and then up a narrow gravel walk. There Coleridge found “Alph, the sacred river,” which “ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea,” while Wordsworth beheld “these steep and lofty cliffs, / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion,” and discovered how lovely it was “to walk / Along the public way when, for the night / Deserted in its silence, it assumes / A character of deeper quietness / Than pathless solitudes.”
An observant farmer found the ritual rural jaunts of these two flâneurs a “queer thing.” He was troubled by the fact that Wordsworth’s “brain was that fu’ of sic stuff, that he was forced to be always at it whether or no, wet or fair, mumbling to hissel’ along t’roads.” Others did more than scratch their heads, nettled; although “nobody ever heard [them] say one word about politics,” vigilant men reported the poets to the police. As Nicolson notes, though, “with their ‘dark guesses’ (Coleridge’s own expression),” the people of Stowey were mistaken in suspecting them to be French Jacobins but “had somehow grasped the otherness latent” in the perambulating verse-peddlers. The Stowey spies accused these foreigners of reconnaissance activity: sneaking about the country on “their nocturnal or diurnal expeditions”; armed with “a Portfolio in which they enter their observations,” they “may possibly be under Agents.” Soon enough, the two poets came under official surveillance: England’s Home Department hired a faux caretaker to tend the Romantics’ riotous garden. Charged to listen for seditious celebrations, the creeping gardener followed them with a poet’s radical attentiveness. He came up with weed roots and little else, and the King’s Men turned their spying eyes elsewhere.
Although in prior years Wordsworth was so taken with revolution that he moved to France (and fathered a child there, an abdicated paternity Nicolson does not gloss over), and both Samuel Taylor and his wife Sara Coleridge had plans to found a utopia in America (“a Social Colony, in which there was to be a community of property and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed”), the friends were quickly disillusioned, not least by the French Republic’s “bloody land-grab” in Switzerland. As Coleridge would put it, they’d snapped the “squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition.” Still, Nicolson makes the case that, insofar as poetry can pursue political ends by other means, “Wordsworth and Coleridge were moving faster and further than the most famous radical in England,” John Thelwall. For though their activist friend experienced “failed encounters between the champion of the poor and the poor themselves,” the Somerset poets “were wanting to understand them as people,” not “as a political problem.”
Wordsworth’s revolution was not merely — as he put it in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) — to guillotine the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,” their “arbitrary and capricious habits of expression.” Rather, in deciding to “choose incidents and situations from common life” in a style of language “really used by men,” he perhaps did more to increase human dignity than the would-be democratic legislators of the world, whose principles were spinning spools of blood.
Nicolson spent a year ambling and climbing the sublime counterpoint of sea and stone, solitude and communion that is distinctive of the Quantocks, trying to catch those moments and moods Coleridge had captured in Biographia Literaria (1817), wherein “‘the truth of nature’ and ‘the modifying colors of imagination’ coalesce.” He trudged through the percolating dusk where the great Romantics had pressed their senses against the rugged terrain, giving “birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors.” His impassioned immersion in their milieu gives us a sense that we, too, are living through the marvels he maps.
The picture he draws distills “the deep psychic structure of the year”: Coleridge and Wordsworth “repeatedly drawing from these landforms […] through the combes and the oakwoods,” the “sunlit widths of the wide-ranging tops,” back down “into a bath of shade.” Dorothy Wordsworth appears here too, “following at their heels, always slightly behind.” Her diary entries contain astute accounts of the “melting” that occurred between mortals and nature, immortal souls and the wide, wide cosmos. But mainly she is helpmate to her brother: “There is no suggestion of equality between them. She is the servant, he the walking hero; she quietly attends, he struggles with his greatness.” And yet, made vulnerable by his sister’s devotion, Wordsworth, “[i]n certain lights […] looks as gaunt as a new-dropped lamb.”
At times, Nicolson’s own poetic extractions from landscapes can grow tiresome. This is not to say that he fails to deliver on one of the book’s subterranean theses: we do now frequently see the self and the world through eyeglasses lent us by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Nicolson’s careful observations of nature convince us that, witnessed rightly, “[n]othing looks ugly or tawdry.” But at other times, though riffing off the great poets, he cannot rival them: we are sunk in a marsh of sensations that don’t sufficiently amount to anything.
Nicolson puts his infectious, immersive familiarity to best use in fascinating interweavings of poetry and people, as when we see Coleridge shuffle off to a barn, afflicted by dysentery, ingesting the prescribed opium that would hasten “Kubla Khan” — and his coming addiction. Or fireside next to his sleeping son Hartley, fascinated as “[t]he Frost performs its secret ministry.” Nicolson also traces Wordsworth’s pained passage through days and months of miserable muteness; strangely, these dull drafts, dead on the page, come alive under the author’s judicious care. He reminds us that this unpublished agony is “the price of poetry, a price that is rarely allowed to surface […] the cost of beauty, the fee exacted by the need for resolution.”
Both men were “subject to frightening and sometimes disabling aches and spasms […] never more than when revising,” trying to fulfill the greatness of their mutually imposed expectations. Through many a conversation, each grew convinced that a deep oneness summoned unity out of multiplicity and apparent divergences. If in fundamental agreement, they inhabited the same truth in opposite ways. Coleridge “felt that he was dispersed into everything that was,” whereas Wordsworth “detected within himself a presence and power so vast that it could outreach and outlast anything in the material universe.” While Wordsworth found that “[n]othing in the daily world could ever match the sense of grandeur sinking into his mind,” Coleridge “had the supreme gift of giving, an all-embracing ability to meld his own consciousness with everything and everyone around him” — even as his relations took a more tormented shape as “a desire for togetherness, an inability to be together.” Disappointingly, Nicolson ignores, as presumably irrelevant, Coleridge’s hugely important affinities with Christian Platonism.
At his worst, Wordsworth turned terribly inward — chin down, crippled by introspection. At his best, he took a turn above Tintern Abbey. “[I]n a trance of otherness,” he discovered “something far more deeply interfused”: the sublimities of “‘this green earth’ […] effectively bury his heart, mind and self” beneath a cataract of thanksgiving. Excessive self-consciousness is replaced by a consciousness of the self’s elaborate contours, which the poet bespeaks as more magnificent than the romantic ruins of a medieval church. Recovering in memory the sacred stream Coleridge searched for in laudanum fantasy, he at last lauds his sister Dorothy: “[T]hou my dearest Friend.” Effusive, he again beckons “[m]y dear, dear Friend,” for it is only “in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart.”
Rumors of division drew faint battle lines. Significantly, their scheme to join forces on an epic about Cain in exile stalled, though this temporary paralysis ended with Coleridge’s lone composition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) — a sibling to the biblical story of brothers, wherein “the rage and despair of the broken, excluded and tortured man will forever want to hold his happy brother in his grasp and wreak a kind of vengeance on him.” Lack of mutual appreciation afflicted their friendship, even as the poets continued to commune and collaborate. Financial constraints and failure in the theater brought them around the same table, plotting out the prospect of the shared collection; surely the planned Lyrical Ballads could fetch some cash.
Years later, Coleridge would revise these tensions into a neatly planned dialectic: “[I]t was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural,” yet courting a common human interest by “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” Wordsworth, by contrast, would attend to the ordinary and “every day” in a manner that would remove “the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude,” redirecting readers towards the “inexhaustible treasure” and “wonders of the world before us,” lost because “we have eyes, yet see not.”
But, as Nicolson makes plain, this division of labor was not so readily contrived, for “the attention to the real and the claims of the imagined drove a cleft between them.” Put simply, “Coleridge’s supernaturalism was driving Wordsworth towards the poetry of this world.” Coleridge was impatient with worldliness. He knew too many who, through “rational” education, had become “marked by a microscopic acuteness,” so that “when they looked at great things, all became a blank & they saw nothing.” Still, the poets saw eye to eye enough to try and sell their Lyrical Ballads, an effort that met repeated rejections before it swelled into the watershed it has since become.
Nicolson at last departs from the Quantock shores, abandoning these strange men who cross-pollinated profundity just before their friendship petered out awkwardly. We bid them farewell aboard the same ship, surrounded by suffering passengers. Wordsworth is at home in “the privacy” of his “boarded coffi[n]” bunk below deck, while Coleridge, with the habitual gaze of a matured artist and the delirium of a budding addict, leans overboard toward the sea, seeing “in the phosphorescent surge of the zooplankton around him a vision of Asiatic cavalrymen-cum-galaxies,” alert to the surf where self and cosmos kiss.
Alternately smitten and sober-minded, this beautiful book, filled with bright wood carvings, is not a dry, cerebral genealogy but a living lineage. Without romanticizing the fraught and fragile fellowship, it celebrates the making of poetry in community — stirring all comers into co-creation. ~
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-communion-of-pathless-solitudes-on-adam-nicolsons-the-making-of-poetry-coleridge-the-wordsworths-and-their-year-of-marvels/?fbclid=IwAR1Ewj63lSaZp2oH89uP2jLvvcTYPCHPdzC05VAm82hHE_a_wrABcnMFTC0
*
GENERAL KUTUZOV — A MILITARY GENIUS OR A LUCKY FOOL?
~ In his fascinating new biography of Kutuzov, the historian Alexander Mikaberidze, an expert on the Napoleonic Wars, explains that Kutuzov’s victory over Napoleon restored Russia’s pride, indeed “its very sense of national purpose and identity. The triumph over Napoleonic France raised Russia’s prestige to unprecedented heights. . . . More than a national hero, [Kutuzov] became a legend.”
That legend was decisively shaped by Tolstoy’s historical novel about the Napoleonic Wars, War and Peace, in which Kutuzov frequently appears. When Dostoevsky wanted to introduce a wise character to enunciate his thoughts, he picked a monk, but Tolstoy chose a master military strategist, whose approach was as unconventional as it was philosophically profound. In doing so, Tolstoy sought to discredit the many commentators who regarded Kutuzov as a lucky fool.
According to Robert Wilson, a British commissioner attached to the Russian army during the Napoleonic Wars, “Kutuzov affords a memorable instance of incapacity in a chief, of an absence of any quality that ought to distinguish a commander.” An Austrian general referred to “l’imbécile Kutuzov,” and John Quincy Adams, the American envoy to St. Petersburg, observed that it was “beyond all human calculation” that Napoleon had been defeated by such an old man whom many “held in contempt.”
Tsar Alexander I disliked Kutuzov and reluctantly made him commander-in-chief only because he needed a Russian general—almost all the others were foreigners or ethnically non-Russian—at a time of national peril. Although the tsar honored the vanquisher of Napoleon, he did so with distaste because, he commented privately, “the field marshal has done nothing he ought to have done. All his successes have been forced upon him.” But the public regarded Kutuzov as a national savior, and so, Alexander explained, he had to go along: “I have no choice. I must submit to a controlling necessity.”
Why did so many contemporaries disdain Kutuzov? In Tolstoy’s view, it was because they adhered to views of war, and indeed of life itself, that were as mistaken as they were attractive. Just as many Enlightenment thinkers aspired to construct a hard science of society modeled on Newton’s astronomical laws, so did most generals believe in a “science of warfare” allowing them to “foresee all contingencies.” So does the novel’s fictional hero, Prince Andrei, who eventually learns what Kutuzov has known all along, that there can never be such a science, of war or anything else concerned with human beings. Contingency and surprise can never be eliminated. “What science can there be,” Prince Andrei at last asks himself, “in a matter in which, as in every practical matter, nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment, and no one can tell when that moment will come?” In every practical matter: Tolstoy means his skepticism to apply to any conceivable social science, a view that placed him at odds with most thinkers of his day and many since.
If there really were a science capable of predicting all events and eliminating the surprises of a “particular moment,” then the best thing one could do before a battle would be to get the plans right. As Tolstoy describes the council of war the night before the Battle of Austerlitz, the generals debate how to do so in detail. Their “science” assures them that they are certain to prevail, whereas Austerlitz, as Kutuzov alone foresees, will turn out to be Napoleon’s greatest victory. As often happens with putative social sciences, this disconfirmation does not shake the generals’ confidence in their science one bit.
Although Kutuzov is the commander-in-chief at Austerlitz, he has no choice but to fight this battle because the tsar believes the science-minded generals. In a justly famous scene, Kutuzov dozes through the council of war. At last he wakes and calls a halt to the deliberations: “Gentlemen, the disposition for tomorrow—or rather for today, for it is past midnight—cannot be altered now. . . . You have heard it, and we will all do our duty. And before a battle, there is nothing more important than . . . a good night’s sleep.”
War and Peace is a novel about decision-making, and Kutuzov’s point is that wise decisions must take into account how certain one can be. Newton’s laws allow one to make perfectly reliable predictions of where planets will be at a given moment, but in battle, experience tells Kutuzov, maximal uncertainty prevails. In situations of such uncertainty, where no advance plans could possibly predict countless contingencies. What matters most is how one responds in the instant to unforeseeable dangers and opportunities. Alertness, not meticulous planning, is at a premium, and for that one needs a good night’s sleep.
*
As Tolstoy shows, Kutuzov’s countless critics faulted him for his decidedly unheroic view of war. Instead of seeking glorious engagements and decisive battles, he avoided conflict with Napoleon. As the French emperor advanced further and further into Russia, Kutuzov retreated and thus avoided the decisive battle Napoleon sought. Politics eventually forced Kutuzov to fight the bloody battle of Borodino, a Pyrrhic victory for Napoleon since his army was badly weakened thousands of miles from home. Having promised to continue the fight the next day, Kutuzov instead withdrew, allowing the French to occupy Moscow.
When Napoleon occupied other European capitals, rulers came to terms with him, but the Russians refused to negotiate. Unable to provoke Kutuzov to another battle, and facing winter in alien territory in a city that immediately burned to the ground, Napoleon retreated, with Kutuzov harassing him but again avoiding any decisive encounter.
Napoleon, who called Kutuzov “the old fox of the North,” appreciated the brilliance of this strategy, and Kutuzov himself spoke not of conquering but of outthinking Napoleon. “Napoleon might defeat me in battle,” Mikaberidze quotes him, “but he would never outsmart me!” Others were repulsed by this decidedly unheroic view. This is not how Achilles or Aeneas fought. As he learns the impossibility of any military “science,” Prince Andrei, who enters the army believing in dramatic heroism and epic glory, gradually learns Kutuzov’s very different outlook.
Late in his life, Tolstoy became fascinated with the founding text of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, which he translated into Russian (from a French translation). As some critics have noted, what Tolstoy discovered in this book of wisdom was the philosophy of life he had attributed to Kutuzov. Dramatic action and the heroism of “great men” usually fail because they run counter to the tendency that Taoism calls “the Way” and which Tolstoy attributed to the collective impact of countless minute decisions of ordinary people. The right actions seem almost like non-actions (as the Tao Te Ching calls them) because, instead of trying to force the world to bend to one’s imperious will, one acts within the range of possibilities that the general tendency offers. You know you have a good governor, the Tao Te Ching explains, not when people say “our governor is good,” but when they ask: “do we have a governor?” “Therefore it is because the sage never attempts to be great,” it tells us, “that he succeeds in becoming great.” Kutuzov appeared passive, but he was actually making the most of circumstances, like a Taoist sage on horseback.
Mikaberidze offers to “lift [Kutuzov] out of Tolstoy’s novel,” but he fails to do so because he does not begin to understand War and Peace. “Tolstoy offers a great-man view of history,” he contends, whereas if there is anything this masterpiece is famous for, it is the rejection of such a view. Mikaberidze apparently makes this mistake because he reads Tolstoy’s book without suspecting that it is first and foremost a novel of ideas. Tolstoy’s Kutuzov is a philosopher whose views are also voiced by other characters and by Tolstoy himself in the novel’s many embedded essays.
Kutuzov’s legend has continued to grow. In the year 2000, Russians responding to a poll deemed him the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. Stalin found it especially convenient to celebrate Napoleon’s vanquisher. Having purged the majority of his generals and admirals and having dismissed all warnings that the Soviet Union’s ally Hitler was about to invade, Stalin left his country utterly vulnerable to the Nazi onslaught. Rather than admit to his mistake, he claimed, after the fact, that in surrendering large parts of the country he was actually following Kutuzov’s strategy of cunning retreat. No criticism of Kutuzov was allowed, and even extravagant praise might be deemed insufficient. One historian was reproached because “Comrade Stalin has showed us that Kutuzov was two heads above [General] Barclay de Tolly, while your paper shows that he was only one head above.”
Kutuzov himself understood his own limitations. “Here I am, wandering in the fleeting smoke that is glory,” he wrote to his beloved wife Catherine in the year of his death. He knew what his Soviet historians were not allowed to say, that luck, as well as skill, had contributed to his success. Providence, Kutuzov declared, was “a capricious woman” who had tired of Napoleon’s “ingratitude” and so briefly favored him. “Here is an old man, who adores and worships females, and is always ready to please women,” Kutuzov imagined her thinking. “And so, to take a break from all the horrors of war, I have decided to join him, if only for a little while.” ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/12/a-taoist-sage-on-horseback
Mary:
Reading War and Peace I remember being impatient with Tolstoy's "embedded essays," because I felt the narrative demonstrated and convinced without them. Pierre's education as he follows the war becomes the discovery that history is not driven by "Great Men" but by the “collective impact of countless minute decisions made by ordinary people.” This is an anti-heroic, anti-Romantic, view of history — a very modern view. It is not difficult for me to see Tolstoy's depiction of war in the same fictional mode as its much later cousin Catch22. Yossarian and Pierre are both students, observers...and philosophers, trying to make sense of realities that don't confirm traditional rules, but upend them.
General Mikhail Kutozov
*
WHAT IS WORSE: THE RUSSIAN WINTER OR THE RUSSIAN MUD?
~ In terms of moving around town they create problems in equal measures.
Central Moscow is the only locality in the Russian Federation where snow is being cleared regularly in winter.
St. Petersburg, the most northernmost city with over a million residents, has snow apocalypse every winter that lasts for weeks on end and authorities find creative excuses to explain why they are helpless to clear the snow that is piled up knee-high on sidewalks.
This year St. Petersburg governor Beglov said that all the budget funds for clearing the snow went to the construction of the Potemkin village in Mariupol, razed to the ground during the liberation from the Nazis.
Mud Season aka rasputitsa that catches everyone off-guard like a natural disaster every spring and fall is another beast altogether.
The Russians have come up with a phenomenal way to deal with mud on the street. They take off their shoes when they enter the house and marvel at the savagery of foreigners who wear shoes at home because they don't have mud on the streets.
This makes Russians infinitely proud and imbues with a sense of superiority to uncivilized Westerners who walk around their houses in the same shoes that they do outside.
That said, housewives can’t stop washing floors for any renegade sign of mud and often do it several times a week and on the weekend, preferring it to going out.
Dirty floor to a Russia woman is like Nazis to a Russian man, it triggers dark instincts, an open invitation to engage in combat duties.
Why Rasputitsa is so bad in Russia?
There’s no storm sewer system. Drainage grids are often located above the lowlands, or they get clogged with debris and trash. Most of the puddles are from defects in the asphalt.
Russians don’t believe in readymade lawn grass. Best case scenario municipal workers bring truckloads of black soil and dump directly to the old soil and then plant seeds and wait for the lawn to bloom. After a rain the black soil is washed away to the sidewalks and roads.
Things don’t get better after grass sprouts on the lawn. Lawns are not taken care of and they turn into muddy puddles.
Russian love tall curbs. As a result there’s a formation of puddles on the sidewalks because the water has nowhere to go.
Gravel and wood chips are rarely used and then only in Moscow and other big cities. Flower beds level with sidewalks are drenched in melted water. Sidewalks are submerged. Huge puddles everywhere.
Paths are laid poorly in park zones. And wherever they’re done right, Russians still prefer to tread across the ground forming new paths and spreading mud to the sidewalks. Moscow consumes half of the country’s budget for parks so elsewhere parks and playgrounds look like this:
Most of the roads in Russia remain unpaved. Mud everywhere. A car gets dirty the very next day after a through wash. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
I remember driving on these unpaved dirt roads around the pools of water. It’s a quest! Every now and then the car is stuck and it takes a truck to pull it out.
Winter roads in Russia are covered with ice 75% of the time. The other 25% they are covered with water mixed with ice, knee high or higher.
Oriana:
Russia's severe climate and bad roads discourage invasion. Their fear of being invaded seems ludicrous — who'd want to?
*
THE WEAKNESS OF A DESPOT — STEVEN KOTKIN’S TIMELY (AND TIMELESS) WISDOM ABOUT RUSSIA
~ What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.
I would even go further. I would say that NATO expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today. Where would we be now if Poland or the Baltic states were not in NATO? They would be in the same limbo, in the same world that Ukraine is in. In fact, Poland’s membership in NATO stiffened NATO’s spine.
Unlike some of the other NATO countries, Poland has contested Russia many times over. In fact, you can argue that Russia broke its teeth twice on Poland: first in the nineteenth century, leading up to the twentieth century, and again at the end of the Soviet Union, with Solidarity.
When you talk about the internal dynamics of Russia, it brings to mind a piece that you wrote for Foreign Affairs, six years ago, which began, “For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of fifty square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.” You go on to describe three “fleeting moments” of Russian ascendancy: first during the reign of Peter the Great, then Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon, and then, of course, Stalin’s victory over Hitler. And then you say that, “these high-water marks aside, however, Russia has almost always been a relatively weak great power.” I wonder if you could expand on that and talk about how the internal dynamics of Russia have led to the present moment under Putin.
We had this debate about Iraq. Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam, or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq? In other words, there’s the personality, which can’t be denied, but there are also structural factors that shape the personality. One of the arguments I made in my Stalin book was that being the dictator, being in charge of Russian power in the world in those circumstances and in that time period, made Stalin who he was and not the other way around.
Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place—a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a “special place” in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful.
Russia is a great power, but not the great power, except for those few moments in history that you just enumerated. In trying to match the West or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion. They use a very heavy state-centric approach to try to beat the country forward and upwards in order, militarily and economically, to either match or compete with the West. And that works for a time, but very superficially. Russia has a spurt of economic growth, and it builds up its military, and then, of course, it hits a wall. It then has a long period of stagnation where the problem gets worse. The very attempt to solve the problem worsens the problem, and the gulf with the West widens. The West has the technology, the economic growth, and the stronger military.
The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with a personal ruler. Instead of getting the strong state that they want, to manage the gulf with the West and push and force Russia up to the highest level, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism. They’ve been in this bind for a while because they cannot relinquish that sense of exceptionalism, that aspiration to be the greatest power, but they cannot match that in reality. Eurasia is just much weaker than the Anglo-American model of power. Iran, Russia, and China, with very similar models, are all trying to catch the West, trying to manage the West and this differential in power.
What is Putinism? It’s not the same as Stalinism. It’s certainly not the same as Xi Jinping’s China or the regime in Iran. What are its special characteristics, and why would those special characteristics lead it to want to invade Ukraine, which seems a singularly stupid, let alone brutal, act?
Yes, well, war usually is a miscalculation. It’s based upon assumptions that don’t pan out, things that you believe to be true or want to be true. Of course, this isn’t the same regime as Stalin’s or the tsar’s, either. There’s been tremendous change: urbanization, higher levels of education. The world outside has been transformed. And that’s the shock. The shock is that so much has changed, and yet we’re still seeing this pattern that they can’t escape from.
You have an autocrat in power—or even now a despot—making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others? Perhaps. We don’t know what the inside looks like. Does he pay attention? We don’t know. Do they bring him information that he doesn’t want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. Does he believe his own propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? That also seems likely. These are surmises. Very few people talk to Putin, either Russians on the inside or foreigners.
And so we think, but we don’t know, that he is not getting the full gamut of information. He’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.
Putin believed, it seems, that Ukraine is not a real country, and that the Ukrainian people are not a real people, that they are one people with the Russians. He believed that the Ukrainian government was a pushover. He believed what he was told or wanted to believe about his own military, that it had been modernized to the point where it could organize not a military invasion but a lightning coup, to take Kyiv in a few days and either install a puppet government or force the current government and President to sign some paperwork.
But think about the Prague Spring, in August, 1968. Leonid Brezhnev sent in the tanks of the Warsaw Pact to halt “socialism with a human face,” the communist reform movement of Alexander Dubček. Brezhnev kept telling Dubček, Stop it. Don’t do that. You’re ruining communism. And, if you don’t stop, we will come in. Brezhnev comes in, and they take Dubček and the other leaders of Czechoslovakia back to Moscow. They don’t have a puppet regime to install. In the Kremlin, Brezhnev is asking Dubček, after having sent the tanks in and capturing him, what should they do now? It looks ridiculous, and it was ridiculous. But, of course, it was based upon miscalculations and misunderstandings. And so they sent Dubček back to Czechoslovakia, and he stayed in power [until April, 1969], after the tanks had come in to crush the Prague Spring.
One other example is what happened in Afghanistan, in 1979. The Soviet Union did not invade Afghanistan. It did a coup in Afghanistan, sending special forces into the capital of Kabul. It murdered the Afghan leadership and installed a puppet, Babrak Karmal, who had been hiding in exile in Czechoslovakia. It was a total success because Soviet special forces were really good. But, of course, they decided they might need some security in Afghanistan for the new regime. So they sent in all sorts of Army regiments to provide security and ended up with an insurgency and with a ten-year war that they lost.
With Ukraine, we have the assumption that it could be a successful version of Afghanistan, and it wasn’t. It turned out that the Ukrainian people are brave; they are willing to resist and die for their country. Evidently, Putin didn’t believe that. But it turned out that “the television President,” Zelensky, who had a twenty-five-per-cent approval rating before the war—which was fully deserved, because he couldn’t govern—now it turns out that he has a ninety-one-per-cent approval rating. It turned out that he’s got cojones. He’s unbelievably brave. Moreover, having a TV-production company run a country is not a good idea in peacetime, but in wartime, when information war is one of your goals, it’s a fabulous thing to have in place.
The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, and its President, Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the miscalculation.
How do you define “the West”?
The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and NATO, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.
If you assumed that the West was just going to fold, because it was in decline and ran from Afghanistan; if you assumed that the Ukrainian people were not for real, were not a nation; if you assumed that Zelensky was just a TV actor, a comedian, a Russian-speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraine—if you assumed all of that, then maybe you thought you could take Kyiv in two days or four days. But those assumptions were wrong.
Let’s discuss the nature of the Russian regime. Putin came in twenty-three years ago, and there were figures called the oligarchs from the Yeltsin years, eight or nine of them. Putin read them the riot act, saying, You can keep your riches, but stay out of politics. Those who kept their nose in politics, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were punished, sent to prison. Others left the country with as much of their fortune as possible. But we still talk about oligarchs. What is the nature of the regime and the people who are loyal to it? Who is important?
It’s a military-police dictatorship. Those are the people who are in power. In addition, it has a brilliant coterie of people who run macroeconomics. The central bank, the finance ministry, are all run on the highest professional level. That’s why Russia has this macroeconomic fortress, these foreign-currency reserves, the “rainy day” fund. It has reasonable inflation, a very balanced budget, very low state debt—twenty per cent of G.D.P., the lowest of any major economy. It had the best macroeconomic management.
So you have a military-police dictatorship in charge, with a macroeconomic team running your fiscal, military state. Those people are jockeying over who gets the upper hand. For macroeconomic stability, for economic growth, you need decent relations with the West. But, for the military security part of the regime, which is the dominant part, the West is your enemy, the West is trying to undermine you, it’s trying to overthrow your regime in some type of so-called color revolution. What happened is that the balance between those groups shifted more in favor of the military security people—let’s call it the thuggish part of the regime. And, of course, that’s where Putin himself comes from.
The oligarchs were never in power under Putin. He clipped their wings. They worked for him. If they didn’t work for him, they could lose their money. He rearranged the deck chairs. He gave out the money. He allowed expropriation by his own oligarchs, people who grew up with him, who did judo with him, who summered with him. The people who were in the K.G.B. with him in Leningrad back in the day, or in post-Soviet St. Petersburg—those people became oligarchs and expropriated the property to live the high life. Some of the early Yeltsin-era people were either expropriated, fled, or were forced out. Putin built a regime in which private property, once again, was dependent on the ruler. Everybody knew this. If they didn’t know, they learned the lesson the hard way.
Sadly, this encouraged people all up and down the regime to start stealing other people’s businesses and property. It became a kind of free-for-all. If it was good enough for Putin and his cronies, it’s good enough for me as the governor of Podunk province. The regime became more and more corrupt, less and less sophisticated, less and less trustworthy, less and less popular. It hollowed out. That’s what happens with dictatorships.
But such people and such a regime, it seems to me, would care above all about wealth, about the high life, about power. Why would they care about Ukraine?
It’s not clear that they do. We’re talking, at most, about six people, and certainly one person as the decision-maker. This is the thing about authoritarian regimes: they’re terrible at everything. They can’t feed their people. They can’t provide security for their people. They can’t educate their people. But they only have to be good at one thing to survive. If they can deny political alternatives, if they can force all opposition into exile or prison, they can survive, no matter how incompetent or corrupt or terrible they are.
And yet, as corrupt as China is, they’ve lifted tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty. Education levels are rising. The Chinese leaders credit themselves with enormous achievements.
Who did that? Did the Chinese regime do that? Or Chinese society? Let’s be careful not to allow the Chinese Communists to expropriate, as it were, the hard labor, the entrepreneurialism, the dynamism of millions and millions of people in that society. You know, in the Russian case, Navalny was arrested—
This is Alexey Navalny, Putin’s most vivid political rival, who was poisoned by the F.S.B. and is now in prison.
Yes. He was imprisoned in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine. In retrospect, it could well be that this was a preparation for the invasion, the way that Ahmad Shah Massoud, for example, was blown up in Northern Afghanistan [by Al Qaeda] right before the Twin Towers came down.
You have the denial of alternatives, the suppression of any opposition, arrest, exile, and then you can prosper as an élite, not with economic growth but just with theft. And, in Russia, wealth comes right up out of the ground! The problem for authoritarian regimes is not economic growth. The problem is how to pay the patronage for their élites, how to keep the élites loyal, especially the security services and the upper levels of the officer corps. If money just gushes out of the ground in the form of hydrocarbons or diamonds or other minerals, the oppressors can emancipate themselves from the oppressed. The oppressors can say, we don’t need you. We don’t need your taxes. We don’t need you to vote. We don’t rely on you for anything, because we have oil and gas, palladium and titanium. They can have zero economic growth and still live very high on the hog.
There’s never a social contract in an authoritarian regime, whereby the people say, O.K., we’ll take economic growth and a higher standard of living, and we’ll give up our freedom to you. There is no contract. The regime doesn’t provide the economic growth, and it doesn’t say, Oh, you know, we’re in violation of our promise. We promised economic growth in exchange for freedom, so we’re going to resign now because we didn’t fulfill the contract.
What accounts for the “popularity” of an authoritarian regime like Putin’s?
They have stories to tell. And, as you know, stories are always more powerful than secret police. Yes, they have secret police and regular police, too, and, yes, they’re serious people and they’re terrible in what they’re doing to those who are protesting the war, putting them in solitary confinement. This is a serious regime, not to be taken lightly. But they have stories. Stories about Russian greatness, about the revival of Russian greatness, about enemies at home and enemies abroad who are trying to hold Russia down. And they might be Jews or George Soros or the I.M.F. and NATO. They might be all sorts of enemies that you just pull right off the shelf, like a book.
We think of censorship as suppression of information, but censorship is also the active promotion of certain kinds of stories that will resonate with the people. The aspiration to be a great power, the aspiration to carry out a special mission in the world, the fear and suspicion that outsiders are trying to get them or bring them down: those are stories that work in Russia. They’re not for everybody. You know many Russians who don’t buy into that and know better. But the Putin version is powerful, and they promote it every chance they get.
The West has decided, for obvious reasons, not to go to war with Russia, not to have a no-fly zone. Economic sanctions have proved more comprehensive and more powerful than maybe people had anticipated some weeks ago. But it seems that the people who these are aimed at most directly will be able to absorb them.
Sanctions are a weapon that you use when you don’t want to fight a hot war because you’re facing a nuclear power. It’s one thing to bomb countries in the Middle East that don’t have nuclear weapons; it’s another thing to contemplate bombing Russia or China in the nuclear age. It’s understandable that economic sanctions, including really powerful ones, are the tools that we reach for.
We are also, however, arming the Ukrainians to the teeth. And there’s a great deal of stuff happening in the cyber realm that we don’t know anything about because the people who are talking don’t know, and the people who know are not talking. And there is quite a lot of armed conflict, thanks to the courage of the Ukrainians and the response and logistics of NATO, with Washington, of course, leading them.
We don’t know yet how the sanctions are going to work. The sanctions often inflict the greatest pain on the civilian population. Regimes can sometimes survive sanctions because they can just steal more internally. If you expropriate somebody’s bank account in London or Frankfurt or New York, well, there’s a source where that came from originally, and they can go back inside Russia and tap that source again, unfortunately. Putin doesn’t have money abroad that we can just sanction or expropriate. Putin’s money is the entire Russian economy. He doesn’t need to have a separate bank account, and he certainly wouldn’t keep it vulnerable in some Western country.
The biggest and most important sanctions are always about technology transfer. It’s a matter of starving them of high tech. If, over time, through the Commerce Department, you deny them American-made software, equipment, and products, which affects just about every important technology in the world, and you have a target and an enforceable mechanism for doing that, you can hurt this regime and create a technology desert.
In the meantime, though, we saw what Russian forces did to Grozny in 1999-2000; we saw what they did to Aleppo. For Russia, if precision doesn’t work, they will decimate cities. That is what we’re seeing now in Kharkiv and in other parts of Ukraine. And it’s only just begun, potentially.
Moreover, the largest and most important consideration is that Russia cannot successfully occupy Ukraine. They do not have the scale of forces. They do not have the number of administrators they’d need or the coöperation of the population. They don’t even have a Quisling yet.
Think about all those Ukrainians who would continue to resist. The Nazis came into Kyiv, in 1940. They grabbed all the luxury hotels, but days later those hotels started to blow up. They were booby-trapped. If you’re an administrator or a military officer in occupied Ukraine and you order a cup of tea, are you going to drink that cup of tea? Do you want to turn the ignition on in your car? Are you going to turn the light switch on in your office? All it takes is a handful of assassinations to unsettle the whole occupation.
Let’s take the story back to Moscow. We know the story of how Tsar Paul I was assassinated by people around him. Khrushchev was overthrown and replaced, eventually, by Brezhnev. Under Putin, is there any possibility of a palace coup?
There is always a possibility of a palace coup. There are a couple of issues here. One is that [the West is] working overtime to entice a defection. We want a high-level security official or a military officer to get on a plane and fly to Helsinki or Brussels or Warsaw and hold a press conference and say, “I’m General So-and-So and I worked in the Putin regime and I oppose this war and I oppose this regime. And here’s what the inside of that regime looks like.”
At the same time, Putin is working overtime to prevent any such defection while our intelligence services are working overtime to entice just such a defection—not of cultural figures, not former politicians but current security and military officials inside the regime. This happened under Stalin, when General Genrikh Lyushkov of the secret police defected to the Japanese, in 1938, with Stalin’s military and security plans and a sense of the regime. He denounced him at a press conference in Tokyo.
So now we’re watching Moscow. What are the dynamics there with the regime? You have to remember that these regimes practice something called “negative selection.” You’re going to promote people to be editors, and you’re going to hire writers, because they’re talented; you’re not afraid if they’re geniuses. But, in an authoritarian regime, that’s not what they do. They hire people who are a little bit, as they say in Russian, tupoi, not very bright. They hire them precisely because they won’t be too competent, too clever, to organize a coup against them. Putin surrounds himself with people who are maybe not the sharpest tools in the drawer on purpose.
That does two things. It enables him to feel more secure, through all his paranoia, that they’re not clever enough to take him down. But it also diminishes the power of the Russian state because you have a construction foreman who’s the defense minister [Sergei Shoigu], and he was feeding Putin all sorts of nonsense about what they were going to do in Ukraine. Negative selection does protect the leader, but it also undermines his regime.
But, again, we have no idea what’s going on inside. We hear chatter. There’s a lot of amazing intelligence that we’re collecting, which is scaring the Chinese, making them worry: Do we have that level of penetration of their élites as well? But the chatter is by people who don’t have a lot of face time with Putin, talking about how he might be crazy. Always, when you miscalculate, when your assumptions are bad, people think you’re crazy. Putin pretends to be crazy in order to scare us and to gain leverage.
Do you think that’s the case with this nuclear threat?
I think there’s no doubt that this is what he’s trying to do. The problem is, we can’t assume it’s a bluff. We can’t assume it’s a pose of being crazy, because he has the capability; he can push the button.
Sun Tzu, the Chinese theorist of war, wrote that you must always build your opponent a “golden bridge” so that he can find a way to retreat. Can the United States and NATO help build a way for Russia to end this horrific and murderous invasion before it grows even worse?
You hit the nail on the head. That’s a brilliant quote. We have some options here. One option is he shatters Ukraine: if I can’t have it, nobody can have it, and he does to Ukraine what he did to Grozny or Syria. That would be an unbelievable, tragic outcome. That’s the pathway we’re on now.
Even if the Ukrainians succeed in their insurgency, in their resistance, there will be countless deaths and destruction. We need a way to avoid that kind of outcome. That would mean catalyzing a process to engage Putin in discussion with, say, the President of Finland, whom he respects and knows well, or the Israeli Prime Minister, who has been in contact with him; less probably, with the Chinese leadership, with Xi Jinping. Someone to engage him in some type of process where he doesn’t have maximalist demands and it stalls for time, for things to happen on the ground, that rearrange the picture of what he can do.
It’s not as if we’re not trying. The Finns know Russia better than any country in the world. Israel is another good option, potentially, depending on how skillful Naftali Bennett proves to be. And then China, the long shot, where they’re paying a heavy price and their élites below Xi Jinping understand that. There’s now quite a lot of worry inside the Chinese élites, but Xi Jinping is in charge and has a personal relationship with Putin. Xi has thrown in his lot with Putin. But how long that goes on depends upon whether the Europeans begin to punish the Chinese. The Europeans are their biggest trading partner.
The Chinese are watching this very closely. They’re watching (a) our intelligence penetration, (b) the mistakes of a despotism, and (c) the costs that you have to pay as the U.S. and European private companies cancel Russia up and down. Xi Jinping, who is heading for an unprecedented third term in the fall, needed this like a hole in the head. But now he owns it.
Finally, there’s another card that we’ve been trying to play: the Ukrainian resistance on the ground and our resupply of the Ukrainians in terms of arms and the sanctions. All of that could help change the calculus. Somehow, we have to keep at it with all the tools that we have—pressure but also diplomacy.
Finally, you’ve given credit to the Biden Administration for reading out its intelligence about the coming invasion, for sanctions, and for a kind of mature response to what’s happening. What have they gotten wrong?
They’ve done much better than we anticipated based upon what we saw in Afghanistan and the botched run-up on the deal to sell nuclear submarines to the Australians. They’ve learned from their mistakes. That’s the thing about the United States. We have corrective mechanisms. We can learn from our mistakes. We have a political system that punishes mistakes. We have strong institutions. We have a powerful society, a powerful and free media. Administrations that perform badly can learn and get better, which is not the case in Russia or in China. It’s an advantage that we can’t forget.
The problem now is not that the Biden Administration made mistakes; it’s that it’s hard to figure out how to de-escalate, how to get out of the spiral of mutual maximalism. We keep raising the stakes with more and more sanctions and cancellations. There is pressure on our side to “do something” because the Ukrainians are dying every day while we are sitting on the sidelines, militarily, in some ways. (Although, as I said, we’re supplying them with arms, and we’re doing a lot in cyber.) The pressure is on to be maximalist on our side, but, the more you corner them, the more there’s nothing to lose for Putin, the more he can raise the stakes, unfortunately. He has many tools that he hasn’t used that can hurt us. We need a de-escalation from the maximalist spiral, and we need a little bit of luck and good fortune, perhaps in Moscow, perhaps in Helsinki or Jerusalem, perhaps in Beijing, but certainly in Kyiv. ~
Mary:
On Putin's popularity because he has “stories to tell” — this should not be puzzling, because we see the same thing with Trump. Both have a narrative that makes their followers feel justified in their prejudices, both offer enemies to hate, who are diabolically evil and decadent, both reference former "Days of Glory" they promise a way to return to: America/Russia will be made Great Again. These narratives are so satisfying to their followers that the actual wretchedness of their lives under these very leaders is simply ignored, or the blame is shifted to one of '"the enemies."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Be a hero! Soviet WW2 poster.
MODERN RUSSIANS’ VIEW OF STALIN’S COLLECTIVIZATION
~ Our new generations view the Soviet collectivization with one part pity, three parts indifference.
Stalin’s collectivization consisted of robbing peasants of their right to work the nationalized land in the USSR. From being independent economic players, they were forced into collective farms.
Those who resisted were purged. Many young peasants left and became industrial workers and soldiers. Those who stayed labored the land much like the pre-1861 serfs.
Our general indifference to the plight of peasants has some specific Russian roots.
RESIDUAL ARISTOCRATIC WORLDVIEW
Russia as you know it is a Westernized colonization project of North-Eastern Eurasia by the House of Romanov. Later, it was overtaken by the Communists. The glorious Russian culture all sprung from the Russian imperial court, while everything else on our territory was destroyed, allowed to die, or be forgotten. Small pockets of Turkic, Cossack and other cultural relics survived. But they were preserved in spite of much adversity thanks to individual enthusiasts in the capitals and among the ethnic minorities.
According to that colonial mindset, the endless mass of Slav, Turkic and Finno-Ugric commoners constituted a passive, retrograde element, merely an object of exploitation. Something to be overcome, rather than empowered. This is why both the House of Rurikids and House of Romanov preferred to recruit their administrative talents among foreigners. Slav natives were there for being serfs.
We modern Russians like to associate ourselves with the resplendent legacy of our aristocrats. We don’t feel much affinity with illiterate toiling masses—all these peasants, herdsmen, fishermen and hunters swallowed by the Collectivization.
LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR
The Civil War of 1918–1934 was a tripartite conflict among the Communists, the White counterrevolutionaries, and private peasants. The peasants were close to toppling the Communist rule several times, not so much because of better organization or military power, but by denying food to the Bolshevik-controlled cities. Recurring hunger was a feature for many urban centers in 1918–1920.
The Bolsheviks took a terrible revenge on the peasantry. They manufactured two famines in the countryside in 1921–22 and 1932–33. On the second attempt they had enough manpower and weapons to sweep the villages for all the grain they could find, including the seeds for next year.
This was accompanied by a formidable push of totalitarian propaganda. Over many years, it pounded the populace with the image of private peasantry as a dark wilderness of vegetation-like subsistence, devoid of self-reflection, spirituality, and development. Our great proletarian novelist Maxim Gorky painted them like the worst of scum. Artists and writers in the government’s pay translated this message to the farthest corners of the Soviet Society.
ELITIST TWIST
The combination of the imperial aristocratism and the modernizing push of Soviet totalitarianism created a strong strain of elitism among our public.
It persists even now, in the face of the strong influence of Western egalitarianism. Advertisement texts are peppered with words like elítnyi (“top-notch”, “exclusive”), eksklúzivnyi (“exclusive”). You can’t be considered someone of power in Moscow if your car doesn’t have the number plates with EKX letters (shortcut for “I drive as I want”), or if you are not allowed to shove aside the traffic with blue lights and an ear-splitting horn signal. Fashionable author Pelévin created a catchy meme for Russian Orthodoxy: “A substantial God for substantial gentlemen”.
Below, a piece of concept art by Sergéy Kólesov titled “Zombie cruising”.
This is a good illustration to Stalin’s approach to industrialization when he robbed peasants and made them powerless serfs in the service of the Soviet state. Even now, few among our elites dare to insist that we could have industrialized the country without slaughtering the private peasantry. The deeply ingrained contempt for peasants still seems to be alive and kicking among many urban Russians. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Stefan Henzel:
Too bad there was never a proletarian revolution in Russia.
Sergey Bobyk:
It was Khrushchov who turned peasants into state serfs post 1953. For example in Stalin’s time minimum amount of days per year peasant was obliged to work in kolhoz was set up as just 60. Khrushov turned it into 260 and ban all private livestock down to last chicken and taxed even fruit trees.
Steven Duch:
Under Stalin there was no pay for kolhoz members, just agriculture products that they get to keep for themselves. Members of kolhoz were not even permitted to leave the kolhoz without permission, they were practically slaves or serfs. Cut off from the world, with minimal access to healthcare, the kholhozniks were the Soviet poor living on scraps. Besides Gulags kolhoz/sovhoz system was the real shame of the Soviet Union, unknown to the outside world as foreigners were not permitted to leave the big cities. Even today the difference between big Russian cities and the countryside is astonishing.
Mary:
On the wages of history, I think feudalism and a foreign aristocracy is for Russia the kind of unredeemed “original sin” that the institution of slavery is for the US. It is interesting that both states were fueled by the labor of agricultural workers, serfs or slaves, who were regarded as property and as creatures more bestial than human. In Russia this oppression is maintained and carried into the present — witness Stalin's eradication of the free peasantry, locking them in place in collective farms, like prisoners who never profit from their own appropriated labor.
It is ironic how Putin values the Russian language as an identifier for Russian citizens, wanting to outlaw the languages of the many ethnicities corralled by the Soviet State, when the historical Russian aristocracy insisted on the refinement and cosmopolitan sheen of French.
*
PUTIN ON WHO CAN BE TRUSTED
~ Standing in front of members of the Russians press today [Saturday December 10, 22], Putin was asked by a reporter who Russians should believe regarding frontline conditions being experienced by Russian troops — the troops themselves calling home to friends and relatives or the Russian Department of Defense …
To which Putin replied with a pixyish grin while pointing to himself, “You can’t trust anyone. Only I can be trusted.”
You can’t make this stuff up …
~ Izzy Luggs, Quora
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THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT IN HISTORY: GENGHIS KHAN
To me, one of the greatest butterfly effects in history is in 1171, when some Tatars decide to poison a local clan chief.
How can this be a big deal, stuff like this happens all the time in the Steppes of Siberia. Well, it drove his family to live in poverty, and his Son was left with a desire for revenge. That son, who was named Temujin, and his ambition to control the Mongolian plains gave him the name of Genghis Khan, leader of all Mongols.
His warriors take over China, Persia, Korea, Central Asia, Iraq, and Russia, killing roughly 10% of the entire human population on Earth in the course of the conquest.
But the Butterfly effect doesn’t end there.
First:
The Turks displaced by the Mongols find settlements in Anatolia. The climate of the region is very similar to Central Asia, but far more valuable due to the Black and Mediterranean Sea coasts.
Out of this region, a kingdom ruled by the House of Osman takes over Anatolia and what’s left of The Byzantine Empire in 1453, becoming the Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman empire
Second: With the Ottomans blocking off the Red Sea ports from Europe, the Kingdom of Portugal invests in long distance trade, being the first nation to sail around Africa and into the Indian Ocean. This cuts the prices of valuable spices by 90% and encourages other European countries to do the same.
Portugal’s newly united neighbor, Spain decides to sail across the Atlantic to get to India, but they “discover” two new continents instead.
Third: Back in Asia, the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty is overthrown by the Ming.
But with the fear of any future Mongol invasions, they take a far more isolationist policy to invest in building the Great Wall of China.
This isolationism eventually backfires on China centuries later, leading to its Century of Humiliation.
Fourth: In Eastern Europe, a duchy called Muscovy that built itself on trade with the Mongols, rises up and unifies the region.
Summary: The death of a local Mongolian tribesman motivated his son to establish a large empire, whose legacy displaced the Turks into forming the Ottomans, the weakening of China, the creation of Russia, and the discovery of the Americas, and Europe’s power in the following centuries.
Mary:
The Butterfly effect as described from Genghis Kahn onward is a perfect example of how history moves through a multitude of acts/decisions. Even if you argue that Genghis was one of those phenomenal history-making Great Men, what you see is the poisoning of a local tribesman has a ripple effect, empires rising and jostling each other, reaching for new possibilities, each affecting all the rest, like a chain of dominoes, leading eventually to the rise and establishment of European colonial empires, which in turn led to the end of that system and the rise of modern states, the long death of colonialism propelling us through the last two centuries into the current dynamic of global powers. Every step seems both inevitable and surprising, not at all predictable.
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THE FATE OF DISABLED SOVIET WAR VETERANS
~ In 1949, before the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Great Stalin, veterans, invalids of the Second World War, were shot dead in the USSR. Some were shot, some taken to the distant islands in the North and remote corners of Siberia for further disposal. Valaam is a concentration camp for invalids of the Second World War was located on the island of Valaam (Lake Ladoga), where in 1950-1984 the maimed disabled veterans were taken to.
Over one night, the authorities conducted a round up, gathered homeless disabled people, centrally transported them to the station, loaded them into wagons of the ZK type and sent them by echelons to the Solovki.
No guilt or judgment admitted: the maimed must not embarrass citizens with their unpleasant appearance of their front-line stumps and spoil the idyllic picture of the overall socialist prosperity of Soviet cities. The homeless veterans, tens of thousands in number after the war, first of all aroused anger and disgust among those who spent the war at the headquarters. Rumors had it that Zhukov personally organized this action. The disabled were taken out from all major cities of the USSR, especially from the capital cities of the Soviet republics.
The whole country was "cleaned up" over one night. It was a special operation of the unprecedented scale. Yes, the disabled tried to resist, threw themselves onto the rails, but they were picked up and taken anyway. Even the so-called "samovars" (100 000 men) were "taken out" — people without arms and legs. At the Solovki, they were sometimes taken out for a breath of fresh air and hung on the ropes of trees. Sometimes they were totally forgotten and froze to death.
These were usually 20-year-old guys, crippled by the war and written off by the Motherland as used up human material no longer benefiting the Motherland. Many of them were crippled during the storming of Berlin in March-April 1945, when Marshal Zhukov, in order to save tanks, sent infantry soldiers to attack minefields — thus stepping on mines and blowing themselves up — the soldiers cleared minefields with their bodies, creating a corridor for troops, thereby bringing the Great Victory closer.
Comrade Zhukov proudly boasted of this to Eisenhower, which was recorded in the personal diary of an American military leader, who simply fell into a stupor from such revelations of his Soviet colleague.
Disabled people who lived with families however were not touched. The "cleansing of the disabled" was repeated several times with the disabled also sent to boarding schools resembling prisons, under the full control of the cruel NKVD forces. Since then, there have been no disabled people in the veterans' parades and very few in the streets. They were simply removed as an unpleasant painful memory. Thus, the Soviet people could continue to enjoy the Soviet prosperous reality without the need to witness the unpleasant horrifying spectacle of thousands of the begging and drunken invalids with their stumps. Even their names have gone into oblivion.
Much later, the lucky survivors began to receive benefits from the state. Yet those poor legless and armless boys were simply buried alive on the Solovki Islands, and today hardly anyone can recall their names and their extreme suffering. This was the final solution of the disability issue in the USSR. ~ Oleg Vischmidt, Quora
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NO CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR CRIMES
~ The State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted in the first reading a bill that removes criminal responsibility for crimes committed in the occupied territories of Ukraine in the event that they were committed for the sake of "protecting the interests of Russia." After all, there is no need to explain that, if desired, lawyers of sledgehammer law can define any war crime "as protecting the interests of Russia”?
Don't forget something else. Namely, the directive “On military jurisdiction in the Barbarossa region and special powers of the troops” issued on May 13, 1941, according to which German soldiers and officers were relieved of responsibility for future crimes in the occupied territory of the USSR. ~ Sozon, Quora
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Green ribbon is a symbol of resistance in Russia. The green ribbon in this photo bears the message “You are not alone.”
COULD THE SOVIET UNION BE RESURRECTED?
~ Whether Putin actually had such a plan will continue to be debated for decades, or possibly centuries. See the never-ending debates about Roman strategy (including if they even had one); what was inside Hitler’s mind; the Cold War; or whatever.
What is certain, however, is that the Ukraine War has revealed Russia as a tottering colossus plagued by everything from unimaginable levels of corruption to crap demographics.
It remains to be seen whether this is the end of Putin or if he can survive and even mount a small comeback (don’t count it out), but if there ever was a neo-Soviet dream this is definitely the end of it.
Historians might well bundle it all and say that the USSR finally ended in 2022, similarly how they like to play with other eras (e.g. the “long 19th century” from 1789 to 1914). But that’s really semantics. The point is that it’s over. ~
Russian tank flying the Soviet flag during the first days of the invasion of Ukraine
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SOVIET REACTION TO THE LUNAR LANDING (Dima Vorobiev)
~ In the USSR, it worked like in spectators sports. If we win, it’s the biggest thing since the Crucifixion. If we lose, who cares?
Tight upper lip
For sure, we were unhappy about the US winning the Moon race. But we saw it coming for a few years. No major blame game happened inside the Soviet system after the fact. Lack of resources to the Soviet Lunar program was an implicit reason for why we didn’t make it.
“If you don’t succeed, make sure no one knows you even tried”. Yet, deep down inside, quite a few people on the top had the feeling that the soul had left the body of the Soviet project.
So what?
For want of anything better, we downplayed the thing.
There was no direct TV footage of the Moon landing. (Generally, live feed in the USSR was practiced only for carefully staged high-level events, like party congresses and parades.)
As the moon landing was happening, our TV showed a light-hearted musical “They Met in Moscow,” made on Stalin’s watch.
I learned about it in the evening news on the radio. It took less air time than a report from some collective farm in the south that started harvesting grain a whole week ahead of time.
Our rulers made no public comment about Apollo 11. The media reported about it, but made sure we all understood it was no big deal. Newspaper coverage of the event was sparse. The government sent congratulations to the Americans, and that was it. We didn’t talk about it much afterwards.
Mixed emotions
The educated elite discussed the moon landing under the radar. The populace at large didn’t like the news. The Americans winning meant they had an upper hand. When enemies are winning, rulers in Russia often get restless and start acting out on us, the commoners.
One of the Soviet authors of children books, Kornéy Chukóvsky, wrote in his diaries on July 25, 1969:
I’m all absorbed in the [news of the] flight of Americans to the moon… The maid of [Chukovsky’s daughter] Lida, Marusya, said: “Shame they didn’t die on the way." The school children are being told that the Americans sent people to the moon because of their callousness and inhumanity. As it goes, we send [to the Moon] apparatuses, mechanisms—and the mean-spirited Americans send living people… “Only under soulless Capitalism they can send living people to the moon.”
Below, the painting of Vyachesláv Khováyev, Lenin on the Moon. It shows a Mount Rushmore-themed rock carving of the founder of Soviet rule, with tiny figures of Soviet cosmonauts around it. The painting was made in 1960, and reflects the idea of what the Earth looked like from the space at the time. After the Americans landed on the Moon, and we failed to put working probes on Mars, the entire focus of our propaganda switched on something much closer to home: our new tremendous, shiny, reliable orbit stations.
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THE FASTEST WAY TO A GOOD LIFE IS TO SLOW DOWN
“Don’t live your life as if you’re afraid of being late to your own funeral.” ~ Geir Berthelsen, Founder The World Institute of Slowness
Here at The World Institute of Slowness we have put together our Top 11 favorite tips for a slower, more productive and happier life:
1 Don’t hurry. If you must then hurry slowly! Festina Lente
Rushing things always makes you less productive and prone to making mistakes.
2 Do nothing. Daydream
Daydreaming is your brain at it’s most productive! Allow period of time in your day for doing absolutely nothing. Let your mind slow down and wander wherever it wants.
3 Work-life balance
Countless studies show that the harder and longer you work, the less productive you become. Set yourself clear boundaries as to when work time finishes, and when your free time starts. Stick to these boundaries, stop yourself from peeking at your emails in the evening or weekends.
4 Don’t multitask.
Multitasking is a bad way to do nearly everything. Do one thing at a time and do it well. Be realistic about how long tasks take and allow yourself enough time to do each task well. Slow down, take your time and focus 100% on one task at a time.
5 Sleep
Good quality sleep is vital in slowing down your brain and letting it reset itself. Make sure you try to get a good 8 hours each night and let yourself nap when you need to, (except for when you’re driving!).
6 Diary
Don’t cram your calendar full of meetings or events. Allow enough time before an event to prepare and enough time afterwards to reflect. Don’t rush from meeting to meeting.
There’s nothing wrong with an empty diary. Enjoy the freedom it gives you. Remember you are your calendar. Your life is defined by how you spend your time.
7 Disconnect
Take control of your mobile. Turn it off, put it away, so you’re not tempted to have a sneaky peak. Take off your watch. Don’t be a slave to other people’s messages. Don’t look at work emails on holiday or weekends. That is YOUR time.
8 Don’t get distracted
Our modern world is full of distractions. You have to be disciplined to not allow yourself to be distracted by the general noise of life, your mobile phone, emails, but also by other people demanding your time.
9 Be early
Always plan to be 10 minutes early to every meeting (work or personal). You will be amazed at how much calmer you are. Enjoy the free time this gives you and use it to slow down time.
10 Slow time
Slow down your own personal time clock. Go for a slow walk, sit in a park, turn off your TV and mobile, just sit and think.
11 Give the gift of time
The best gift you can give to someone is your time. Give undistracted, quality time to your family, friends or colleagues.
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WHY MUSLIM COUNTRIES CAN’T BECOME A SUPERPOWER, EVEN IF UNITED
~ I've become convinced that Muslim countries will absolutely never ever develop to the level and strength of Western countries until Islam disappears, and disappears completely and totally.
Not even moderate Islam can exist.
Plain and simple, there is no way you can develop a country when you have a toxic, retarded belief system that you always have to show respect for and that even moderate Muslim leaders can't officially contradict.
How are we going to accomplish something as simple as teaching in biology class that humans did not suddenly appear on the earth, with no prior history, and in their current form? That they actually evolved over 2 million years from small–brained humanoids who had fur, tails, ape-like prognathism in their jaws and no speech, and ate wild grass and had their infants stolen by birds of prey?
That would mean teaching that Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark aren't real. Calling the Quran, the word of Allah, mythology.
A quote from my biology teacher — “Do I believe in jinn (genies)? Scientifically I don't, religiously I do.”
Most Muslims seem to think that modernization is about acquiring Western science and technology. But it's not.
Egypt is a country that is crawling with doctors, pharmacists, scientists, engineers, computer nerds.
But it's also a country where a man can have up to 4 wives and divorce any of them by saying “I divorce you" three times. Where women go to prison for 2 years and lose their parental rights if they commit adultery, and divorced women lose custody of their children if they remarry (because Muhammad said they should). Where most young girls face intense pressure to wear the hijab. Where virginity and sexual honor are essential and honor killings rampant. Where women who aren't virgins buy fake hymens with fake blood for their wedding night. Where Christian men can’t marry Muslim women without converting, and even the rumor of a Christian boy “dishonoring" a Muslim girl sparks a deadly riot. Where national ID cards state “Muslim,” “Christian,” or “Jewish” — the three “celestial religions" (الأديان السماوية) — and no other religions are recognized. The Baha'is fought for years just to have a blank space under Religion on their IDs.
It's a country whose greatest novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in the neck and paralyzed for life for alleged blasphemy. His attackers were executed but the Al–Azhar clerics who goaded them — and praised them afterward — were untouchable, and continued their despicable and deadly teachings. It's a country where a dead man's brother inherits twice as much from him as his daughter. Where people line up at kiosks in the subway to get the ruling of an Islamic scholar on any problem they may have in life. Where anti-religious speech is a crime, and the government has declared atheism a form of dangerous extremism like jihad.
All of this in a nominally secular country whose constitution proclaims all citizens equal and promises freedom of religion.
What kind of modern nation is this? It's a Frankenstein republic. A country that tried to undertake the modernization process — it's been trying since the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the 1800s — but can only seem to get it slightly right, and plateaued at being a society uselessly stuck between the mediaeval and the modern, the theocratic and scientific worlds. Frankenstein’s creature was intended by his creator to be a handsome giant, physically, intellectually and morally superior to natural men. But the experiment failed due to the scientist's flawed design, and Egypt is very similar — an experiment in modernization that failed due to a very incomplete understanding of the process, or an unwillingness to undertake it in full.
Egypt is still a hellhole. If it were flush with cash, it would be a rich hellhole like Saudi Arabia.
Superior technology is just a fringe benefit, not the foundation, of modernization.
Modernization first requires a modern culture, public values, and governing ideology. And Islam couldn't possibly be farther away from these things.
There is no way to become modern just by adopting the trinkets and lingo of developed countries. It goes much deeper than that. An ape can imitate anything a human does, while preserving his animal brain. He’ll never be on the same level as a human. We can't ape this. Which is how we've been trying to go about it all this time.
There is no way to adopt and popularize modern values when we also believe that the total opposite of modern values is the eternal word of Allah. This doublethink does not work.
Nor can we be a secular country with a religious public. If Egypt abolished all Islam in its laws and made its constitution and penal code an identical copy of Germany's, it would still be a hellhole because most Egyptians are religious Muslims. The deep-seated beliefs of a people will always trump what exists on paper.
In the 1950s, the Communist Party of China destroyed traditional Confucianism in its entirety. It could have tried to work within the limits of Confucianism or paid lip service to it. But it decided Confucianism was so archaic and horribly backward — such a social ill — that it just wasn't worth the bother, and it would be easier to start from scratch.
Decades before the birth of the CPC, the Qing Dynasty's Self-Strengthening Movement had tried to modernize by aping the science and technology of the West while leaving traditional Chinese culture untouched. Feng Kuei–Fen wrote, “We should use the instruments of the [Western] barbarians but not adopt the barbarians' ways.” The Self-Strengthening Movement failed. It turned out you can't modernize without adopting the barbarians' ways.
Muslims who remember the glory of the Caliphate and Islamic Golden Age and believe Islam can take them there again, should learn that Confucianism also once made China a civilization much stronger, wealthier and more advanced than Europe. The Tang Dynasty was like the Galactic Empire compared to medieval Europe. A ton of crucial technology only arrived in Europe many centuries after it had appeared in China.
But gradually this ideology fell out of pace with the times, and imperial China made the fatal mistake of continuing to uphold Confucianism and rejecting and blocking out foreign ideas. By 1776, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations was able to deduce that China was horribly backward, although he never went there. He noted that Western travelers' descriptions of China in his day were remarkably similar to Marco Polo's account from the late 1200s. And Smith was right, of course — by 1450 the Ming Dynasty had closed China off to the outside world so it could be a Confucian utopia forever, and the decline began from there.
This was exactly like believing that the Quran is the eternally, universally perfect orders of God, that Muhammad was history's sole perfect human whose behavioral and legal prescriptions are second only to God's word, and that Shariah law is the utopian law of God which all Muslims should seek to apply one day when they are ready, and whose principles Muslim–country legal systems cannot violate. These are beliefs held by almost all Muslims no matter how progressive they think they are. And indeed, when I read Edward Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), I was stricken and pretty depressed by how his meticulous description of Muslim Egyptian society has changed little in 200 years.
Islam isn't worth the trouble of keeping in any amount. It’s a disability and excruciating burden. It gives us no advantages over Western society in return. Muslim countries overall are doing even worse than they were a century ago, because of the rise of religious sentiment. Even Turkey. We've gone backward because of what we feel makes us strong.
The only way Muslim countries can modernize, close the gap with Western countries and correct the Great Divergence — is if at least 3 future generations in a row grow up as atheists, making belief in Islam extinct among the living population. Then we can recover some Islam, the way China today is doing with Confucianism — as a relic. For museums, celebrations, symbolic rituals and history class. Maybe we can even revive some of what we judge to be useful, since we won't also have to revive the rest of the belief system, because it will be dead.
Atheists are not people who believe in nothing and have nothing to live for. They are ordinary people who try to live fully in the world of reality and seek the only guide to reality, which is Reason. Muslims imagine that without religion, God and the promise of a joyful afterlife as a reward for rigid conduct and faith in the unseen, life would be meaningless and anarchy and nihilism the only logical result. But the truth is that in godless countries civilization advances, and in religious countries civilization rots. This is even true in the United States, the most religious country in the Western world. Christianity and especially its political influence make the US a more backward country, not a better one.
To adults who were born and raised without religion, it is natural to accept a purely physical existence with no need for the supernatural in order to find motivation, save on occasion some vague spiritual curiosity and speculation which have no rules and do not dictate living. (Indeed, it's common and daily for Westerners to discuss purportedly supernatural subjects in a casual manner, because very few atheists are fanatics.)
On the other hand, only adults who were raised deeply on religion as children cannot imagine a life without it. Their brains have been chemically altered to experience profound satisfaction from immersion in religion, and to feel great fear, depression and hopelessness without religion. Religion is basically a stimulant (and somewhat hallucinogenic) drug for the brain — prescribed without necessity for the non-existent, perceived disease of needing a religion. It is direly addictive, inflicts awful withdrawal symptoms when absent, and comes with many crippling side effects. By giving children a staunchly religious upbringing, we are in fact giving them a disability.
I myself have only recovered from this disability very recently. For 20 years after I stopped believing in Islam at age 14, I still needed some belief in the metaphysical to see any point to living. But I never found any evidence of otherworldly things, and all the evidence I found only pointed to our world looking exactly as it would if no heavenly father were present in it. It was only months ago that I started to feel comfortable with a completely physical existence lacking any god, divine truth, supernatural occurrences, or afterlife. Now I'm 34.
Mind you I did say modern values, not Western values. On a Venn diagram, there would still be a huge overlap between Western values and modern values. But this is mostly because of Western values from the past, from the 1700s up to the 1950s or so. I certainly would not call Western popular culture today superior or worthy of emulation. I saw a post by a 16–year–old Turkish girl calling herself a “straight ally" of transgender people. That's cultural pollution and nonsense. I don't want radical feminism or an LGBT revolution in Egypt. In fact I call the absurd, blindly accepted, cult–like, and uncriticizable lunacy into which mainstream Western social thought has descended, “white” Islam. But obviously, we are still worse. We are 300 years behind the West, so catching up on the 1700s—1950s stuff would be damn good.
The Muslim world is exactly like a morbidly obese, bedridden man who continues to pig out on delicious junk food because since childhood it’s been what makes him feel so good and has always been there for him. To continue indulging in this belief, he prolongs and worsens his disease and pushes himself closer to death. What would transform his body and save his life is to switch to a sparse diet of bland chicken, fish, fruits and vegetables. But that is anathema to him. He convinces himself he can make some effort to eat healthy while keeping the junk food. That doesn't work. So his probability of long-term failure is over 95 percent.
This is not the mindset of a traitor. It's the mindset of a patriot. If you want to be as strong as your oppressors and ex-colonizers, you have to start by killing all of that which makes you weak, ignorant, backward, and resistant to change, within yourself.
I want to see a Middle East and North Africa that is sovereign, independent, powerful, advanced, assertive, wealthy — and socially just and livable for its people, including its women and many precious minorities. I want us to join the world's vanguard of progress again, as we did in ancient times when the Sumerians and Babylonians worked out the first calculus mathematics that Europeans thought they invented for the first time in the 1400s.
The disappearance of Islam — complete and total — is not by itself a sufficient condition for this transformation from our current status to happen, but it is one of the necessary conditions. Islam must disappear. And that is a nice way of saying that I believe Islam must be destroyed. We must destroy it ourselves. Because it's not a good enough reason to hold us back. It isn't good enough at all. ~ Ismail Bashmori, Quora
Oriana:
To some extent, these are the problems with any religion when it is taken seriously. It's a bunch of archaic nonsense, standing in the way of progress, especially in terms of human rights. Islam has become more toxic than most other religions because of the lack of separation between church and state — make that "mosque and state."
From a historical perspective, any new major religion seems to be a vital force at first. There was a "golden age" of Islam. Then the conservative forces come into control, turn astronomical observatories into temples, and that's the beginning of the long decline and cultural stagnation.
Mary:
Islam is indeed an obstacle to developing a modern, civilized society. When the state and religion are one there can be no progress. This is largely due to religion's reification of history. Religion sees history as already complete, the end already determined...change is only to be proscribed and avoided. Study is not study of the real world, but of the holy book, and success at study is memorization. All is already known and decided, there can be no deviance or exploration.
Any country where blasphemy is not a sin to be confessed but a crime to be punished (and with execution!!) cannot progress beyond what is already written. I won't even go into the primitivism and backwardness of "honor" as a social value and force. As ready as the writer of this article is to eradicate Islam, he preserves some of its "moral law," condemning any question of gender beyond the heterosexual norm as a Western "lunacy."
All the Abrahamic religions have problems with human sexuality, heavily regarded as part of women's particular sinfulness.
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ST. THOMAS OF AQUINAS AND HIS FAMOUS REPARTEE
~ St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1278) gave a burn so profound, it’s been remembered for 785 years.
He was a genius and a brilliant theologian.
But he was quiet, gentle, full of wonder, and the size of a fullback.
People mistook his innocence for idiocy when he was a young monk.
They called him The Dumb Ox.
One day, his fellow monks ran up to him and said:
“Thomas, come see! The pigs are flying in the sky!”
Thomas jumped up and bounded to the window.
The other monks shrieked with laughter.
He was silent for a minute, then quietly said:
I would rather believe pigs can fly, than that my brothers would lie to me. ~
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GLOBAL DECLINE IN SPERM COUNT
~ Sperm counts worldwide plunged by sixty-two percent in under fifty years between 1973 and 2018, and this could lead to a reproductive crisis.
The research was done by an Israeli and American team joined by researchers from Denmark, Brazil, and Spain, who studied sperm count trends in areas that had not been previously reviewed.
Professor Hagai Levine of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who led the research, told The Times of Israel, “We should be amazed and worried by the finding.”
Associated with low sperm count, the sixty-two percent drop refers to the number of sperm present in an average ejaculation, as published in the journal Human Reproduction Update on Tuesday.
Men who checked their sperm count because of fertility problems were not included in the new study, according to Professor Levine and his colleagues.
The researchers crunched numbers from hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and adjusted overall statistics in an attempt to eliminate potentially distorting data.
A peer-reviewed study noted that during the same period, the concentration of sperm in men dropped by more than fifty-one percent on average from 101.2 million to 49 million sperm per milliliter of semen.
That number, below which men are technically deemed to have a low sperm concentration, still remains above the World Health Organization’s cutoff of fifteen million per milliliter, as reported by The Times of Israel.
However, according to both Professor Levine and Professor Shanna Swan at New York’s Icahn School of Medicine, the drop is, nevertheless, alarming and predictive of future trends.
The epidemiologist said, “We have a serious problem on our hands that, if not mitigated, could threaten mankind’s survival.”
He added, “We urgently call for global action to promote healthier environments for all species and reduce exposures and behaviors that threaten our reproductive health.”
The analysis doesn’t mention possible reasons for sperm declines, but other studies have tied falling sperm counts to obesity, sedentary lifestyles, smoking, and exposure to certain chemicals and pesticides among other factors.
According to Euronews, the same team had already reported an alarming decline in sperm counts across the Western world in 2017.
That report claimed there was a fifty percent general decrease in sperm counts in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and New Zealand between 1973 and 2011.
Furthermore, meta-analysis looked at 223 studies from across fifty-three countries based on sperm samples from more than fifty-seven thousand men.
The sperm count concentration among men in the meta-analysis had dropped by more than fifty-one percent from 101.2 million to 49 million sperm per milliliter of semen between 1973 and 2018 in men not known to be infertile.
Low sperm counts associated with major health risks
Researchers noted that this is dismaying in general for both male fertility and for men’s health since low sperm counts usually come with increased risk of chronic disease, testicular cancer, and a decreased lifespan.
He added, “The trend of decline is very clear. This is a remarkable finding and I feel responsible [for] deliver[ing] it to the world. The decline is both very real and appears to be accelerating.”
He said, “What is more, we’re looking at averages, and if men are today averaging 50 million sperm per milliliter, there are large numbers of men who today have under 40 million sperm per milliliter—in other words, fertility that is actually suboptimal.”
Professor Shanna Swan of New York’s Icahn School of Medicine reported that dropping sperm counts are part of a wider decline in men’s health.
She said, “The troubling declines in men’s sperm concentration and total sperm counts at over [one percent] each year as reported in our paper are consistent with adverse trends in other men’s health outcomes.”
“These include testicular cancer, hormonal disruption and genital birth defects, as well as declines in female reproductive health,” Swan concluded, adding that “this clearly cannot continue unchecked.”
Sperm counts expected to drop more within a decade
Far wider in geographical reach, the new study includes seven more years of statistics and covers fifty-three countries.
He added that that number is expected to be the global average within a decade at the rate of the current decline.
The epidemiologist reported that research suggests fertility starts dropping when sperm concentration goes under forty million per milliliter. ~
https://greekreporter.com/2022/11/20/sperm-counts-drop-worldwide/
“IT’S NOT THE COW, IT’S HOW”
~ After refusing to eat meat for 33 years, Nicolette Hahn Niman bit tentatively into a beefburger in 2019. She had become a vegetarian because she was concerned about animal welfare and the environmental cost of meat. Unlike most vegetarians, she had experience of the dire conditions on factory farms during her career as an environmental lawyer campaigning against pollution caused by industrial meat production in the US. Then she married a farmer.
Hahn Niman’s journey from vegetarian activist to cattle rancher to writing a book called Defending Beef may be driven by love, but it is also informed by a lawyerly desire to stick up for small farmers besieged by the growing ethical and environmental clamor against meat. The burger turned out to be an unexpectedly delicious brief pleasure, but it was the 18 years working on the ranch alongside the man who grilled it – and raised the cow – her husband, Bill Niman, that inspired her.
Hahn Niman was raised in semi-rural Michigan and was working in New York as an environmental lawyer for Robert F Kennedy Jr when she fell in love with a farmer. Kennedy Jr’s charity, Waterkeeper Alliance, was seeking to stop livestock farmers from polluting water bodies with slurry, and Hahn Niman began working with farmers who were doing the right thing, including her future husband. When the couple met for coffee in Central Park, “I just realized, wow, this is a really handsome man, in addition to his work that I admire,” she says, on a video call from her farm kitchen. When she moved from New York to the Pacific coast to be with Niman on the rough, arid terrain of his 1,000-acre ranch, she planned to continue as a lawyer.
“I began doing small tasks around the ranch and I discovered I loved it,” she says. “I said to Bill: ‘I’d like to work on the ranch.’ And he was shocked. I was still vegetarian at the time, and he was like: ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t think you’d want to be a rancher.’
“I wanted to be capable of doing whatever needed to be done here at the ranch. I didn’t want to be a helpless female.”
For seven years, she worked full-time on the farm, where they refuse to use chemicals on the land or animals, before raising their two sons. She says she and Bill are constantly learning. “The most important thing I learned was that in the two years I’d been working on agricultural issues as an environmental lawyer, I just scratched the surface in terms of understanding the real daily issues of agriculture.”
Many environmentally aware people believe that if they are still eating beef they probably shouldn’t be. Fueled by the popular Netflix film, Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, there has been a backlash against the meat. Rainforests are razed for cattle grazing, and the industrial farming of cows causes soil erosion and water and air pollution. Meanwhile, people who gorge on burgers, butter and ice-cream seem beset by chronic diet-related diseases and ballooning obesity rates. Worst of all, livestock farming is driving the climate crisis, causing around 14% of annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Hahn Niman’s time rebutting the claims made in Cowspiracy includes debating with one of the film’s directors in San Francisco. “It was really shocking because I’ve never sat next to someone who knew less about agriculture in my life,” she says. “Yet here is someone telling everyone how we need to eat and what we need to farm. I feel like I need to bring facts and reason in and say, ‘OK, you’ve heard this inflammatory statement. Where’s the truth? How do we get to solutions? We want to eat healthily and ethically – what choices should we make?’”
Hahn Niman’s argument is summarized by a slogan T-shirt she likes to wear: “It’s not the cow, it’s the how.” A cow is not an innate eco-devil, but how they are farmed is often fiendishly damaging. She does not defend grazing on obliterated rainforests, but joins other influential farmer-writers such as Gabe Brown, Charles Massy, Simon Fairlie, and the controversial, iconoclastic ecologist-grazier Allan Savory, in proposing a better kind of cattle farming. If cows are freed from barns and feedlots – the cramped dirt pens in the US where they are fed grain – and allowed to roam and eat diverse natural grasses and shrubs as their wild ancestors did, they can restore soils, enhance natural diversity and help capture carbon. Cows, she believes, can engineer healthier ecosystems, and healthy grass-fed animals provide meat with measurable health benefits over factory-farmed stuff.
This sounds reasonable, but the carbon cost of cattle is what troubles most environmentalists today. In her book Defending Beef, Hahn Niman explains how naturalistic cattle grazing adds manure and organic matter to the soil and encourages plants that help draw down carbon. Unlike crops, which are traditionally cultivated by ploughing the soil and releasing carbon, there is a wealth of evidence showing that carefully grazed grasslands sequester carbon.
But evidence also shows that grasslands’ rates of carbon sequestration tail off after 20 years. A scientific study in 2017 concluded that, at best, careful cattle grazing could offset 20-60% of its annual emissions. The same study calculated that, globally, 1g of protein per person per day comes from grass-fed animals, whereas 32g of protein per person per day comes from all animal sources including fish, with 49g from plant sources. Ruminants already collectively take up about a quarter of the planet’s useable surface; it would not be possible to move to grass-fed meat and keep eating it at current levels without devastating environmental consequences, turning forests into vast prairies.
These kinds of big global studies frustrate Hahn Niman because, she argues, they fail to account for the complexity and diversity of land. “In that report, they say, ‘This is crazy, you have this huge amount of land used for grazing and it’s only producing this tiny percentage of nutrition.’ But if you ignore what those lands could actually be used for in agriculture, then that statistic means nothing.” For instance, her own ranch has rough, dry ground and Mediterranean-style weather; they cannot grow crops there. So the Nimans are converting arid grassland into sustenance where no other human food could be produced.
Many environmentalists argue in response that if diets were to become much less meaty, all such grazing land could be rewilded, sequestering even more carbon, while cropland is farmed more intensively to feed the world. This, responds Hahn Niman, fails to acknowledge the soil erosion and carbon emissions caused by intensive, plough-based farming. As the innovative Australian farmer Charles Massy puts it, says Hahn Niman, “Natural landscapes have a way of functioning. And in modern agriculture and modern human life we tend to ignore what that functionality looks like – where there should be watercourses, grasslands, forests.” We need to “create agricultural systems that work with the natural land function, rather than just ploughing it and doing whatever we want,” she argues. Where grasslands occur naturally and have been grazed by wild herbivores for millennia, farming with nature is grazing cattle.
The current consensus is that livestock cause 14% of global emissions; Hahn Niman calculates that cattle make up 8%, but she writes of cattle farmers who claim to sequester so much carbon in their grasslands that their cows are carbon neutral. What is her best estimate of how much those emissions would fall if we only raised grass-fed beef? “As a lawyer, I understand the desire to create statistics that we can use as evidence, but coming up with a global figure is probably nonsense,” she says. Modeling of the emissions of natural grazing systems doesn’t account for how they positively benefit hydrology or water retention in the soil. “I’ve learned from living here for 18 years that even one part of our ranch is incredibly different from another. What you should do on the land is radically specific to that place. I am convinced that grazing, when done well, is probably beneficial everywhere. But to legitimately quantify how much [carbon] benefit you’re going to get globally – I actually don’t think that can be done.”
If the world switched to eating only grass-fed beef, people would have to eat much less and pay much more. Hahn Niman points out that naturalistic grazing does not mean meat would be only for the rich because many poor people graze livestock this way already. “We need to have food bear its full cost,” she says. “Cheap food is not the answer – we need to make good food available for everyone.”
The true cost of cheap food includes all “these downstream effects”: water and air pollution, soil erosion, animal cruelty – and the poor human health they cause.
Proselytizing the health benefits of grass-fed beef comes easily to Hahn Niman. She makes a good case for America’s obesity problem being caused not by grass-fed burgers, but by ultra-processed foods. Two-thirds of calories eaten by US children come from ultra-processed foods. These include the new generation of lab-made meats. She points out that a “confinement pork” producer (you can guess how the pigs are reared) she once fought as an environmental lawyer recently started a vegan food range. We need “real” food, not factory food, she argues.
Her own return to meat-eating was driven by health concerns as she turned 50, including a diagnosis of osteopenia, the precursor to osteoporosis. She cites research showing how livestock will deliberately graze plants to address specific health issues (another reason to allow animals to graze naturally) and believes that humans have the same kind of innate “nutritional wisdom,” as Fred Provenza argues in his book, Nourishment.
Hahn Niman accepts that moving to a healthier, low-carbon food system, when global capitalism is still pushing production in the opposite direction, is a challenge that can seem as overwhelming as the climate crisis. She believes it requires government legislation as well as consumers choosing to eat locally produced food. And eating locally requires more food production close to people’s homes and a demographic shift to the countryside: fewer than 20% of Americans live in rural areas; less than 1% work in farming.
Post-Covid, there are signs of a move from city to country in many nations. Hahn Niman hopes such shifts will deliver a healthier outdoor life for many children. She observes the benefits of farm life for her sons, who are 12 and eight. “We forage for mushrooms and blackberries, we have our own orchard, so there’s a lot going on that involves their bodies and food – physical activity with meaning, not just going into the playground, which is fun too.”
Hahn Niman may have remained a vegetarian for many years after she became a cattle rancher, but after returning to meat she now eats it daily. “When I started eating meat again, I was reconnecting with my whole upbringing, my culture and the foods that I’ve grown up with,” she says. “I’ve felt physically and emotionally good. It’s been surprising how much joy that has brought me.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/it-s-not-the-cow-it-s-the-how-why-a-long-time-vegetarian-became-beef-s-biggest-champion?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Many things happen to our bodies during the dark. Levels of the hormone leptin, which helps control hunger, go up. High levels of leptin mean we do not feel hungry while low levels make us hungry.
Why does leptin go up in the dark? Since we evolved without artificial light at night, one theory holds that leptin goes up at night because it would be good to not be hungry during the night, rather than needing to forage in the dark and possibly get into trouble.
This fasting that should happen every night, and why we call the first meal in the morning “breakfast.” Experiments in human beings have shown that sleep disruption and turning on lights lowers leptin levels which makes people hungry in the middle of the night.
In the last decade or two it has become clear that the genes which control the endogenous circadian rhythm (the “clock genes”) also control a large part of our entire genome including genes for metabolism (how we process the food we eat), DNA damage response (how we are protected from toxic chemicals and radiation), and cell cycle regulation and hormone production (how our cells and tissues grow).
Light at night disrupts these processes. The changes that result from exposure to electric light at night have biological connections to disease and conditions that are common in the modern world today including obesity, diabetes, cancer and depression.
BLUE LIGHT, RED LIGHT, NO LIGHT
Not all light is the same – some kinds of light make you more alert and more awake, and others have less of an effect.
Light from the Sun is strong in blue, short wavelength light, although it includes all other colors as well. That’s important in the morning when we need to be alert and awake. But when it comes in the evening or during the night, it fools the body into thinking it’s daytime. We now know that this bright blue light has the strongest effect on lowering melatonin during the night.
Your tablet, phone, computer or compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) all emit this kind of blue light. So using these devices in the evening can prevent that primordial physiological transition to night from occurring. This makes it harder to sleep and might also increase the longer term risk of ill-health.
Other kinds of light, like dimmer long wavelength yellow and red light, have very little effect on this transition. This is the kind of light from a campfire or a candle; even the old fashioned incandescent light bulb is dimmer and redder than the new CFL.
Only in the last 20 years have we acquired a basic biological understanding of how the eye’s retina tells the circadian system it is daytime. Now we know that blue, short wave-length light is captured by the newly discovered photopigment melanopsin in the retina, and that when blue light stops, we start our physiological transition to nighttime mode.
ELECTRICITY CHANGED THE WAY WE SLEEP
Before electricity, people experienced bright, full-spectrum days of sunlight and dark nights. We slept in a different way than we do now. The dark lasted about twelve hours and during this time people slept for eight or nine hours in two separate bouts, and were awake, but in the dark, for another three or four hours.
Everything changed when electric lighting was invented in the latter part of the 19th century. Since then there has been an ever increasing assault on dark. Outdoor environments are relentlessly lit, and more and more people use computer tablets and smart phones at all hours, bathing their faces in bright blue light at times of day when they should be transitioning to nighttime physiology.
When people get away from the city and its artificial light to go camping, they often notice a marked improvement in their sleep. A recent study has verified this effect.
Today, most of us get too little light during the day and too much at night for our circadian rhythm to function at its best. It is the rare person who sleeps in a completely dark bedroom, and many people get very little sunlight because they work inside all day long.
What can you do for your circadian health? Get bright, blue light in the morning (preferably from the Sun), and use dim, longer wavelength light (more yellow and red like incandescent) in the evening. And sleep in the dark.
This will certainly improve sleep, and may reduce risk of later disease. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-dark-night-is-good-for-your-health?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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AUTISM AS AN AUTO-IMMUNE DISEASE
~ In recent years, scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the causes of autism, now estimated to afflict 1 in 88 children. But remarkably little of this understanding has percolated into popular awareness, which often remains fixated on vaccines.
So here’s the short of it: At least a subset of autism — perhaps one-third, and very likely more — looks like a type of inflammatory disease. And it begins in the womb.
It starts with what scientists call immune dysregulation. Ideally, your immune system should operate like an enlightened action hero, meting out inflammation precisely, accurately and with deadly force when necessary, but then quickly returning to a Zen-like calm. Doing so requires an optimal balance of pro- and anti-inflammatory muscle.
In autistic individuals, the immune system fails at this balancing act. Inflammatory signals dominate. Anti-inflammatory ones are inadequate. A state of chronic activation prevails. And the more skewed toward inflammation, the more acute the autistic symptoms.
Nowhere are the consequences of this dysregulation more evident than in the autistic brain. Spidery cells that help maintain neurons — called astroglia and microglia — are enlarged from chronic activation. Pro-inflammatory signaling molecules abound. Genes involved in inflammation are switched on.
These findings are important for many reasons, but perhaps the most noteworthy is that they provide evidence of an abnormal, continuing biological process. That means that there is finally a therapeutic target for a disorder defined by behavioral criteria like social impairments, difficulty communicating and repetitive behaviors.
But how to address it, and where to begin? That question has led scientists to the womb. A population-wide study from Denmark spanning two decades of births indicates that infection during pregnancy increases the risk of autism in the child. Hospitalization for a viral infection, like the flu, during the first trimester of pregnancy triples the odds. Bacterial infection, including of the urinary tract, during the second trimester increases chances by 40 percent.
The lesson here isn’t necessarily that viruses and bacteria directly damage the fetus. Rather, the mother’s attempt to repel invaders — her inflammatory response — seems at fault. Research by Paul Patterson, an expert in neuroimmunity at Caltech, demonstrates this important principle. Inflaming pregnant mice artificially — without a living infective agent — prompts behavioral problems in the young. In this model, autism results from collateral damage. It’s an unintended consequence of self-defense during pregnancy.
Yet to blame infections for the autism epidemic is folly. First, in the broadest sense, the epidemiology doesn’t jibe. Leo Kanner first described infantile autism in 1943. Diagnoses have increased tenfold, although a careful assessment suggests that the true increase in incidences is less than half that. But in that same period, viral and bacterial infections have generally declined. By many measures, we’re more infection-free than ever before in human history.
Better clues to the causes of the autism phenomenon come from parallel “epidemics.” The prevalence of inflammatory diseases in general has increased significantly in the past 60 years. As a group, they include asthma, now estimated to affect 1 in 10 children — at least double the prevalence of 1980 — and autoimmune disorders, which afflict 1 in 20.
Both are linked to autism, especially in the mother. One large Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent. Genetic studies tell a similar tale. Gene variants associated with autoimmune disease — genes of the immune system — also increase the risk of autism, especially when they occur in the mother.
In some cases, scientists even see a misguided immune response in action. Mothers of autistic children often have unique antibodies that bind to fetal brain proteins. A few years back, scientists at the MIND Institute, a research center for neurodevelopmental disorders at the University of California, Davis, injected these antibodies into pregnant macaques. (Control animals got antibodies from mothers of typical children.) Animals whose mothers received “autistic” antibodies displayed repetitive behavior. They had trouble socializing with others in the troop. In this model, autism results from an attack on the developing fetus.
But there are still other paths to the disorder. A mother’s diagnosis of asthma or allergies during the second trimester of pregnancy increases her child’s risk of autism.
So does metabolic syndrome, a disorder associated with insulin resistance, obesity and, crucially, low-grade inflammation. The theme here is maternal immune dysregulation. Earlier this year, scientists presented direct evidence of this prenatal imbalance. Amniotic fluid collected from Danish newborns who later developed autism looked mildly inflamed.
Debate swirls around the reality of the autism phenomenon, and rightly so. Diagnostic criteria have changed repeatedly, and awareness has increased. How much — if any — of the “autism epidemic” is real, how much artifact?
YET when you consider that, as a whole, diseases of immune dysregulation have increased in the past 60 years — and that these disorders are linked to autism — the question seems a little moot. The better question is: Why are we so prone to inflammatory disorders? What has happened to the modern immune system?
There’s a good evolutionary answer to that query, it turns out. Scientists have repeatedly observed that people living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently as we do.
Generally speaking, autism also follows this pattern. It seems to be less prevalent in the developing world. Usually, epidemiologists fault lack of diagnosis for the apparent absence. A dearth of expertise in the disorder, the argument goes, gives a false impression of scarcity. Yet at least one Western doctor who specializes in autism has explicitly noted that, in a Cambodian population rife with parasites and acute infections, autism was nearly nonexistent.
For autoimmune and allergic diseases linked to autism, meanwhile, the evidence is compelling. In environments that resemble the world of yore, the immune system is much less prone to diseases of dysregulation.
Generally, the scientists working on autism and inflammation aren’t aware of this — or if they are, they don’t let on. But Kevin Becker, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, has pointed out that asthma and autism follow similar epidemiological patterns. They’re both more common in urban areas than rural; firstborns seem to be at greater risk; they disproportionately afflict young boys.
In the context of allergic disease, the hygiene hypothesis — that we suffer from microbial deprivation — has long been invoked to explain these patterns. Dr. Becker argues that it should apply to autism as well. (Why the male bias? Male fetuses, it turns out, are more sensitive to Mom’s inflammation than females.)
More recently, William Parker at Duke University has chimed in. He’s not, by training, an autism expert. But his work focuses on the immune system and its role in biology and disease, so he’s particularly qualified to point out the following: the immune system we consider normal is actually an evolutionary aberration.
Some years back, he began comparing wild sewer rats with clean lab rats. They were, in his words, “completely different organisms.” Wild rats tightly controlled inflammation. Not so the lab rats. Why? The wild rodents were rife with parasites. Parasites are famous for limiting inflammation.
Humans also evolved with plenty of parasites. Dr. Parker and many others think that we’re biologically dependent on the immune suppression provided by these hangers-on and that their removal has left us prone to inflammation. “We were willing to put up with hay fever, even some autoimmune disease,” he told me recently. “But autism? That’s it! You’ve got to stop this insanity.”
What does stopping the insanity entail? Fix the maternal dysregulation, and you’ve most likely prevented autism. That’s the lesson from rodent experiments. In one, Swiss scientists created a lineage of mice with a genetically reinforced anti-inflammatory signal. Then the scientists inflamed the pregnant mice. The babies emerged fine — no behavioral problems. The take-away: Control inflammation during pregnancy, and it won’t interfere with fetal brain development.
For people, a drug that’s safe for use during pregnancy may help. A probiotic, many of which have anti-inflammatory properties, may also be of benefit. Not coincidentally, asthma researchers are arriving at similar conclusions; prevention of the lung disease will begin with the pregnant woman. Dr. Parker has more radical ideas: pre-emptive restoration of “domesticated” parasites in everybody — worms developed solely for the purpose of correcting the wayward, postmodern immune system.
Practically speaking, this seems beyond improbable. And yet, a trial is under way at the Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine testing a medicalized parasite called Trichuris suis in autistic adults.
First used medically to treat inflammatory bowel disease, the whipworm, which is native to pigs, has anecdotally shown benefit in autistic children.
And really, if you spend enough time wading through the science, Dr. Parker’s idea — an ecosystem restoration project, essentially — not only fails to seem outrageous, but also seems inevitable.
Since time immemorial, a very specific community of organisms — microbes, parasites, some viruses — has aggregated to form the human superorganism. Mounds of evidence suggest that our immune system anticipates these inputs and that, when they go missing, the organism comes unhinged.
Future doctors will need to correct the postmodern tendency toward immune dysregulation. Evolution has provided us with a road map: the original accretion pattern of the superorganism. Preventive medicine will need, by strange necessity, to emulate the patterns from deep in our past. ~
Moises Velasquez-Manoff is the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.”
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SCIENTISTS REVERSE MUSCLE AGING
~ Hallmarks of aging in muscle cells have been reversed by the overexpression of a specific protein called NANOG. The finding by scientists from University at Buffalo shows how NANOG can reverse cellular aging in muscle cells without having to reprogram the cells to a more stem cell-like state, which has been an approach in the past in the search to reverse cellular aging.
“Our work focuses on understanding the mechanisms of NANOG’s actions in hopes of discovering druggable targets in signaling or metabolic networks that mimic the anti-aging effects of NANOG,” says the study’s corresponding author Professor Stelios T. Andreadis in a statement.
Cellular senescence occurs during aging, with cells reaching a point where they are unable to divide and repair. This results in the genetic material in the cells becoming unstable and causes an array of molecular and metabolic dysfunction that leads to disease. As a consequence, our body's ability to regenerate decreases over time – but this study has shown that it might not be all that bad.
By overexpressing a protein called NANOG in senescent human myoblasts (the embryonic precursor for muscle cells) in the lab, scientists could reverse the age-related deterioration of the cells and increase their DNA repair mechanisms. Furthermore, in experiments involving animals, they showed that NANOG overexpressed in prematurely-aging mice increased the number of muscle stem cells present, showing that NANOG might have rejuvenating properties that could help reverse the aging process.
"Ultimately, the work could help lead to new treatments or therapies that help reverse cellular senescence, and aid the many people suffering from age-related disorders,” adds Stelios T. Andreadis.
In the pursuit to halt and reverse the aging process, various strides have been made in the last. Just last month, a study showed that a supplement could reverse the hallmarks of old age and promote healthier aging. [The supplement in question was a combo of NAC (N-Acetyl-Cysteine) and glycine.]
The latest discovery was published in the journal Science.
https://www.iflscience.com/scientists-reverse-the-aging-of-skeletal-muscle-in-longevity-breakthrough-65380
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BENEFITS OF GOAT MILK
~ Goat milk has various effects on human health considering the total solid, fat, protein, lactose, mineral, and vitamin contents.
Lipids of goat milk provide better digestibility with small fat globule size and high short- and medium-chain fatty acids content.
Goat milk has higher amounts of conjugated linoleic acids playing important roles in immune stimulation, growth promotion, and disease prevention.
The most important effect of goat milk proteins is their healing effect on cow milk allergy, the most common food allergy, which causes many deaths in infants. In addition, the β-casein/αs1-casein ratio (70%/30%) of goat milk proteins is similar to human milk, which results in more digestibility compared to the cow milk in relation to higher sensitivity of β-casein to the protease enzymes.
Lactose is the main carbohydrate of all species of milk, and its content in goat milk is lower than the others. In contrast, goat milk rich in oligosaccharides is important in its protective function of intestinal flora against pathogens and in brain and nervous system development.
In addition to higher amounts of some minerals, more importantly the bioavailability of minerals in goat milk is higher than of minerals in cow milk.
The higher Vitamin A content may be the most important difference among the other vitamins in goat milk compared to cow milk. Considering the millions of child deaths every year caused by Vitamin A deficiency, goat milk is a very important source.
Besides many beneficial effects of goat milk, the advantages of breeding goats, such as the lower cost of animals, the need for less feed and water, and often not requiring the specialized housing that larger livestock need, are reasons to promote the improvement of goat milk production worldwide.
Goat milk is a valuable food source of animal protein, phosphorus, and calcium, especially in countries with low consumption of meat. ~
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128097625000358
Oriana:
And on top of this, the delicious creamy taste. And there is also the great-tasting goat cheese.
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ending on beauty:
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
~ William Wordsworth
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