It's been a while since I last saw an opossum in my neighborhood. The years of drought drastically reduced the wildlife.
*
LENIN TO HIS MISTRESS, INESSA ARMAND
The night I escaped from Russia,
corpse-like moonlight glazed the frozen channel.
Halfway to the ship bound for Sweden,
the ice began to crack. I was ready to die —
life hadn’t denied me anything except
love between equals. Then you, Inessa,
in bruised winter dark —
the Lafargues slumped in their chairs,
self-injected with cyanide
(Marx’s daughter! she could still be of use);
Russian exiles carted off to insane asylums,
babbling about balalaikas;
my wife dozing with her glasses on —
“So I can see where I’m sleeping.”
Imagine, Emma Goldman writes,
“If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.”
Anarchists are such children.
Yet they too can be used:
what the Italians call utili idioti.
Then that madwoman Rosa Luxemburg
with her “freedom for the one
who thinks differently.”
I’m tired of repeating and repeating,
Liberty is a form of bourgeois dictatorship.
The people have no need of liberty.
I’m sorry, dearest — I should rather say
I remember, in Zurich,
when you stood by the fireplace,
your red hair a shroud of flame —
I thought of the fox I saw
one time in a Siberian forest:
so beautiful I couldn’t kill it.
I know you will forgive me.
Yours, Vladimir Ilyich
~ Oriana
Inessa Armand
~ One of the few instances when Lenin publicly demonstrated a weakness came on October 12, 1920, the day when Inessa Armand, his long-lasting comrade, personal friend, and lover, was laid to rest.
“As we were following the coffin, Lenin was barely recognizable,” recalled revolutionary activist Alexandra Kollantai. “He was walking with his eyes shut tight, and was hardly standing on his feet.”
Armand died suddenly of cholera, which came as a hard blow to Lenin.
“I fear lest Inessa's death should do Volodya [Vladimir Lenin] in," his wife Krupskaya wrote. “He has been crying, and his gaze is miles away.”
https://www.rbth.com/arts/history/2017/06/03/revolutionary-love-lenins-amorous-triangle-with-his-wife-and-mistress_773225\
Inessa’s funeral in Moscow
*
“GENIUS IS OF SMALL USE TO A WOMAN WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO DO HER HAIR”: EDITH WHARTON IS HOT AGAIN
~ If ever there were a good time to read the American writer Edith Wharton, who published over forty books across four decades, it’s now. Those who think they don’t know Wharton might be surprised to learn they do. A reverence for Wharton’s fiction informs HBO’s Sex and the City, whose pilot features Carrie Bradshaw’s “welcome to the age of un-innocence.” The CW’s Gossip Girl opens, like Wharton’s The House of Mirth, with a bachelor spying an out-of-reach love interest at Grand Central Station while Season 2 reminds us that “Before Gossip Girl, there was Edith Wharton.”
But why Wharton? Why now? Perhaps it’s because for all its new technologies, conveniences, and modes of travel and communication, our own “Gilded Age” is a lot like hers. For the post-war and post-flu-epidemic climate that engendered her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence is not far removed from our post-COVID-19 reality. In both historical moments, citizens of the world have witnessed a retreat into conservatism and a rise of white supremacy.
Fringe groups like the “Proud Boys” and “QAnon” and deniers of everything from the coronavirus to climate change are invited to the table in the name of free speech and here Wharton’s distrust of false narratives resonates particularly well. Post-9/11 calls for patriotism and the alignment of the American flag with one political party harken back to Wharton’s poignant questioning, in a 1919 letter, of the compulsion to profess national allegiance:
“How much longer are we going to think it is necessary to be “American” before (and in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?”
Her cosmopolitan critique of nationalist fervor remains instructive to us today.
*
Since the dramatic revival of interest in the writer in the 1990s, Edith Wharton studies has evolved from a largely US-based project grounded in feminist literary criticism to an increasingly global, multi-disciplinary enterprise. Wharton had been known, for the greater part of the twentieth century, much in the way her obituaries characterized her: novelist who chronicled Gilded Age New York, author of the sobering New England tale Ethan Frome (1911), and, following the publication of The Age of Innocence (1920), first woman awarded the Pulitzer for fiction.
Wharton is now embraced by specialists not only in literary, cultural, and gender studies but also architecture, art history, museum studies, fashion studies, history, sociology, and anthropology. She is studied in classrooms more frequently than ever, is the subject of a peer-reviewed journal with a broad international reach, and is regularly represented in book clubs, on “Jeopardy!,” and in frequently trending hashtags across social media. She is also the only woman to appear twice on the Modern Library’s list of “100 Best Novels” of the 20th century.
For its second virtual book club meeting, which took up Wharton’s 1913 masterpiece The Custom of the Country, The Times drew over four thousand participants. Currently in development is Sofia Coppola’s much-anticipated Apple TV adaptation of The Custom of the Country, a novel informed by Wharton’s command of the clash between the old guard and the new.
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton, whose family members were among Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred,” was groomed for a career as a leisure-class wife but ultimately transformed herself into a consummate master of the rightly celebrated fiction as well as poetry, drama, memoir, and non-fiction prose on travel, literary criticism, gardening, architecture, and design.
The very picture of cosmopolitanism, Wharton, comfortable with five languages, read voraciously and produced at an astonishing pace; as Hermione Lee has noted, “between 1897 and 1937 Wharton published at least one book almost every year of her life. (She has, altogether, forty-eight titles to her name.)” She lived and/or traveled in Italy, England, Spain, France, Germany, Morocco, and her native country before settling in France; although she questioned America’s conduct during the Great War she never renounced citizenship.
Wharton also was an unlikely war hero honored by the French and Belgian governments for her tireless philanthropic work in support of refugees. Indeed, the November 28, 1915 New York Sun wrote of Wharton that “no woman, probably no man not engaged in military service, has seen so much of the war.” A lifelong lover of dogs, she helped establish the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Edith Wharton’s oeuvre continually suggests that, like Walt Whitman, whom she featured in the 1924 novella “The Spark,” she is “large” and “contain[s] multitudes,” her contributions to the study of American culture extending far beyond the leisure class satires. Wharton is also, like her beloved poet, marked by contradiction.
As Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray have recently noted, “To study Wharton is to engage with an almost overwhelming volume of material,” some of it admittedly contradictory, “produced by a woman of enormous energies, interests, and areas of expertise.”
Edith Wharton was one of the most popular, critically acclaimed, and handsomely paid writers of her time. She rose to prominence for a series of well received short stories in the 1890s, collected at the century’s end as The Greater Inclination. Indeed, in the stories, which she affectionately called her “smaller realisms,” Wharton was “doing New York” long before her friend and fellow realist Henry James famously implored her to do so. She distinguished herself as an authority on interior décor and architecture with The Decoration of Houses (1897), which, written with the architect and interior designer Ogden Codman, Jr., was recently called “the most important decorating book ever written” and the “pioneering guide” to which “all modern design books owe their existence.” Her triumphant novel of social commentary The House of Mirth (1905) and subsequent fictions made her famous.
A kind of literary counterpart to the painter John Singer Sargent, Wharton was found to be particularly adept at capturing the New York aristocracy, which she critiques in “Souls Belated” (1899) as marked by “the same fenced-in view of life, the same keep-off-the-grass morality, the same little cautious virtues and the same little frightened vices.” But Wharton is also now duly recognized as a writer who fixed her gaze on the less privileged and mastered genres beyond fiction.
Wharton was a best-selling author from The House of Mirth through the release of her memoir, A Backward Glance (1934). On receiving an honorary doctorate at Yale University in 1923, which made her the first woman so honored, Wharton was celebrated by critic William Lyon Phelps, who exercised profound influence on literary tastes, as an “American novelist of international fame” who had secured “a universally recognized place in the front rank of the world’s living novelists.”
Nevertheless, a number of factors contributed to the waning of Wharton’s star in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in what Helen Killoran has called “the lull” of the years 1938 to 1975: a resistance to realism as a mode of representation, a distrust of Victorian themes, the charges of unnecessary cruelty and pessimism, a sexist and ageist preference for art that might “make it new,” and the short-sighted notion, articulated by Edmund Wilson and re-inscribed by Alfred Kazin and Louis Auchincloss, that Wharton’s fiction after The Age of Innocence was not worth reading.
Additionally, the establishment in the 1920s of a canon of American letters that excluded women, people of color, and members of the working class did little to secure Wharton’s status. As Pamela Knights has noted, “This image of Wharton as aloof and out-of-touch intensified in the 1930s, with the rise of new forms of social realism, in the exigencies of the Depression.” The younger, modernist literary establishment found her dated. The Wharton who had lamented her status as the literary equivalent of violet, old lace, tufted furniture, and chandeliers is the same who posited, in a 1925 letter to her friend Daisy Chanler, “as my work reaches its close, I feel so sure that it is either nothing, or far more than they know…. And I wonder, a little desolately, which?” As we approach the one-hundred-year mark of that disclosure, Wharton’s staying power—particularly for our current Gilded Age—confirms that her corpus yields far more than anyone could have known.
Readers new to the study of Edith Wharton will, it is hoped, recognize the inadequacies of earlier readings of her work. It is no longer a legitimate practice, if ever it was, to read Wharton as an imitation of her fellow cosmopolitan and friend Henry James—a comparison that made her cringe. Nor is it valid to write her off as a stuffy grand dame, the likes of which we find in prickly accounts by Vernon Parrington (1921) and Percy Lubbock (1947). Charges of Wharton as an icy elitist are complicated by the range of demographics treated in her fiction and by her enormous charitable initiatives, public and private.
A reckoning with the full oeuvre also undermines any reading of Wharton as anti-feminist. Although she would not have called herself “feminist”—a term in conflict with her patrician upbringing—and she regrettably poked fun at organized feminism, scholars have recognized in her work a fierce indictment of the limitations imposed upon women’s lives. Laura Rattray has shown that the under-studied published and unpublished non-fiction reveals Wharton’s “unfettered, unapologetic feminism.”
Wharton’s politics are perhaps her greatest site of contention. Dale M. Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (1994) turned our attention to Wharton’s post-war writings to reveal an author acutely invested in the cultural debates of her moment, including reproductive rights, authoritarian politics, and mass culture. Jennie A. Kassanoff’s Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (2004) argues that confronting Wharton’s political conservatism helps us better understand the anxieties that continue to vex American culture, namely white hegemony, changing demographics, and systemic narratives that rationalize exclusion.
Edith Wharton’s stature as a central figure in American letters is no longer open to question and her uncanny anticipation of our culture makes her more resonant than any other writer I teach. Indeed, she seems to have foreseen the excesses, obsessions, and spectacles of our current moment. The scandals documented in Wharton’s narratives serve as harbingers of the sensations that flash across our hand-held screens. The grooming of girls for the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein touches on the same nerve as the sexual exploitation of minors in Wharton’s Summer (1917) and The Children (1928). The quid pro quo run-in between Wharton’s Lily Bart and Gus Trenor looks uncomfortably forward to Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo.
The rise to power of Donald Trump would not in the least surprise Edith Wharton.
Wharton’s tenacious Undine Spragg of The Custom of the Country—as horrifying to progressive era readers as she is admired by Generation Z—can be conceived of as the original social media influencer conscious of her brand. For Undine and her creator know that “the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous” and that the turn-of-the-century “world where conspicuousness passed for distinction” foreshadows our own. Wharton would describe Undine with a disclaimer we might use for a “Real Housewife”: “If only everyone did as she wished, she would never be unreasonable.”
Undine is compelled to fashion herself as a trophy wife and the sexual double standard dictating that “genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair” would apply to Wharton herself who, on the 150th anniversary of her birth, would be assessed by a male novelist in terms of how she compares to Grace Kelly or Jackie Kennedy. The writer who would declare, in her wildly popular interior design manual The Decoration of Houses, privacy “one of the first requisites of civilized life” would be appalled by what is broadcast across social media.
Wharton also would’ve anticipated the racism directed at Meghan Markle and understood why the Oprah an interview would do little to thaw relations with her in-laws. Children forcibly separated from families due to morally dubious immigration policies echo the plight of war refugees for whose welfare Edith Wharton labored, while the distrust of the cultural other echoes the writer’s own complicated nationalist allegiances.
Ten years ago, Lev Raphael declared in the Huffington Post that “Edith Wharton is hot.” She is now positively on fire. Given the extent to which Wharton foresaw our “showy and promiscuous” present, now is an ideal time to curl up with The Custom of the Country, two new paperback editions of which have appeared in the past six months. What better way to prepare for Sofia Coppola’s mini-series? Undine Spragg has been ready for her close-up for years and I like Florence Pugh for the part. ~
https://lithub.com/the-future-belonged-to-the-showy-and-the-promiscuous-how-edith-wharton-foresaw-the-21st-century/?fbclid=IwAR1f9qYQNrJ0SiLNAvRExlAetICkK49nD5Bh0TK_OkzPY8mt_AV-hh7y1oc
Mary:
The revival of interest in the work of Edith Wharton demonstrates how fashions in literature change, reflecting the needs and tastes of the times. The "canon" of greats changes like a literary stock market board, influencing not only what is popular and read, but the careers of literary scholars and critics, including what is taught in schools, what students are exposed to, even what books are represented in film.
Fluctuations in an author's popularity can reflect what stories are relevant, felt true and necessary for a particular time and place. Wharton's return to attention has more to do with our present historical moment than to anything within the text itself...the question is not "is this a good story, well told?" but "does this story say something important about our own lives now? " It must always be noted that the audience sees any work from its own perspective, set of values and experience...our re-interpretations actually re-shape how we see old stories in terms of emphasis, focus, and message. A twenty first century reader will not see Anna Karenina orJane Eyre's stories in the same way contemporary readers did.
The accessibility and popularity of some stories more than others is not really as frivolous as "fashion," but says something essential about the audience and its current society. We seek out and choose stories we need the most when we most need them.
J.S. Burton:
She knew the super rich and how they behaved when completely unfettered and in control of an oligarchy engineered to serve their needs. We need to tax them more, just like they were taxed just after the era she wrote about.
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SOME LESS-KNOWN FACTS ABOUT LENIN
An interesting fact is that during his life Vladimir Lenin wrote about 30,000 documents. At the same time, he managed to speak at hundreds of rallies and lead a huge state.
All his life Lenin was an avid chess player.
Ilyich had a party nickname, which was used by his comrades and himself: “Old Man.”
According to the recollections of many contemporaries, Lenin was a very cheerful person who loved a good joke.
At school, Lenin was an excellent student, and at graduation he received a gold medal.
Lenin playing chess. The woman looking on is his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.
*
“PUTIN IS A CIA AGENT”
When I asked my friend Nikolai the other day who drinks vodka with his neighbor, a retired general and veteran of Chechnya war, what he thinks of Putin, he spoke from his heart, “Putin is a CIA agent. His job is to destroy Russia from within.”
“Is that what your general friend told you?”
“Not just him. We all know that.”
~ Misha Firer, Quora
*
THE REAL PROBLEM WITH COMMUNISM (Dima Vorobiev)
~ Communism picked the wrong enemy: Capitalism. The nature of Capitalism is too formidable and undefeatable for any strand of radical Socialism.
The reason is in Capitalism’s eternal fluidity and fungibility. It’s a shapeshifter. It can hide in plain sight, take any form it wants, and is immune against all spells.
Name the Beast
Marxism is all about the “abolition of private property”. Private property is the culprit because it always ultimately leads to Capitalism. Which is why the first thing to do, according to the Communist Manifesto, for proletarians is to take the means of production, the capital, from the bourgeois classes.
I repeat because it’s the hard core of Marxism. Private property, even when it doesn’t involve exploitation of others’ labor—like some Joe Doe using his private car to make a few bucks as an Uber driver—is an embryo of Capitalism. There’s no future for it in Communism. Means of productions, i.e. anything that is a source of wealth, are only allowed for cooperatives and state enterprises.
The proof
“Communist” China and “Communist” Vietnam brilliantly proved this Marxist dogma. After the decades under the red flag of proletarian power, both countries are now a millionaire’s and billionaire’s paradise. These are the safe zones for steady accumulation of capital. No place for rabble-rousing trade unions and pesky leftists. Property rights for the wealthy and well-connected are under rock-solid government protection.
The Soviet Union showcased this relapse back from Real Socialism to Capitalism. The USSR was picked apart by card-carrying members of the Communist Party who wanted to own private property. They had the power, the skills, and the motivation to make it happen. And in 1991, it happened officially.
Private property, even the tiniest one, starts the rot. Always. No exception. Watch out, comrades!
Shape-shifter
Marxism found its economic legs in the English political economy of the 18th century. Adam Smith defined capital as “that part of men's stock which he expects to afford him revenue”. “Stock” is a reference to tangible property or trade-able output.
Marx grabbed this nugget and ran away with it.
What he failed to understand was a simple wisdom that every Russian beyond the school age can share with you. POWER is an intangible “stock” that anyone can turn into an endless fountainhead of personal wealth. This is even better than “Smith’s stock”! Power is invisible, intangible, portable, fungible. It’s like honor or love: other people can kill you, but can’t take true power away from you.
President Putin and his trusted circle of men are shining examples to it.
The Future is Capitalist
In terms of Marxism, Stalin and Mao indeed waged a triumphant war against private property on the means of production. But from the height of the 21st century, we all know the terrible truth. The moment they took power, Capitalism instantly resurrected in the heads of the Communist bosses. Their political power became their private capital. And boy, they were experts in winning and keeping power.
This realization is very bad news for Communists. The post-industrial economy is creating a new kind of Capital on a daily basis: the intellectual one. The ability to generate ideas, the knowledge and experience needed to turn them into business, the networks are all unevenly distributed among people. They are going to churn out fountainheads of individual wealth, unfair advantage, and economic inequality at every turn.
The Stock inside you
The economy of knowledge is Capitalist. You can confiscate land, bank accounts and plant equipment. But you can’t confiscate the source of personal wealth inside people’s heads.
And you won’t believe what kind of capital people are going to make of their bodies when the age of bionics arrives. Imagine how seemingly regular people will be able to see all, remember everything and compute entire spreadsheets in their heads within seconds.
Whatever you try, you can only realistically do a re-distribution of wealth. This is what despised Social Democrats and liberals have been doing for more than a century now.
But the abolition of private property? Forget it. Not gonna happen.
Below, two Soviet successors of Stalin, Khrushchev and Bulganin in Great Britain in 1956.
Here, they laid the foundation for “Londongrad”, the Western heaven for Soviet, and later Russian, foreign wealth. Their coats are puffed up by bulky flack jackets. This is a vivid image of Communist luminaries who made power their new exclusive private property and the source of individual wealth.
Khrushchev and Bulganin
Oriana:
What still haunts me is the story of a visiting Russian official, a woman, who, as part of her sight-seeing, was taken to a supermarket. Upon seeing the abundance of food, the Russian woman burst into tears.
Mary:
The abolition of private property may be humanly impossible. This is clearly demonstrable in terms of "ideas," what we now term "intellectual property," and seek to defend and protect from threat of appropriation by others. It's the reason for copyrights, punishment for plagiarism, and the existence of patents. Your ideas are so private they seem part of your identity...theft of ideas is a violation of the self. Also I keep seeing that child with a toy, fiercely declaring "Mine!"
The other most obvious problem with public ownership of the means of production is how are decisions made, and by whom? If by individuals, that opens the path to self enriching oligarchs, if by a group...well, we've all seen the results of decisions made by committee. Big 4 or 5 year Plans by fiat have proved to be ludicrous and dangerous, with sometimes catastrophic results. It seems the very effort to remove private property sets the stage for a new inequality, a class of "millionaires and billionaires" generated by the new system...powerful members of the state, bureaucrats, those who operate like Mafia bosses, running their own lucrative operations, with force, threat, and corruption.
Oriana:
In most cases, private enterprise seems the most efficient because it's flexible. Imagine if a store manager couldn't quickly lower the price on ripe avocados because that decision would require layers of bureaucracy. When it comes to consumer goods in particular, private companies, incentivized by profit, make sense.
But should we have for-profit prisons or hospitals? Private medical insurance doesn't seem to work as well as Medicare -- but, and that's a big but, the people in charge of public enterprise need to be competent. They need to be chosen on the basis of competence, not political loyalties.
Overall, a mixed system seems best. Most often it's called "regulated capitalism," with a robust social safety net also operating. I think Social Security and Medicare are great. State-owned restaurants, on the other hand, are ridiculous on the face of it (but that was the situation in the Eastern bloc). In the end, it appears that only capitalism creates wealth for the greatest number, but the social safety net is absolutely necessary. So, a mixed system is best. And competent, non-corrupt managers, regardless or whether the enterprise is private or public.
Perfection will never be reached, but, as Dima says, capitalism is flexible. And it's attentive to customer needs. Think of Kleenex and paper towels; I can no longer imagine life without those small conveniences. And such things didn't exist in Poland, much less Russia. Soft toilet tissue? You were happy to have ANY toilet papers -- shortages were legendary. Ridiculous, yes, but ultimately it does matter, and people seem happier when "pampered" with such "decadent" luxuries.
Joe:
I attended one of the last readings by Czeslaw Milosz. During his question-and-answer session, a person asked him about Capitalism and Communism. He answered that those terms no longer provided a valuable understanding of world economies and politics. For him, a thoughtful discussion about economics and government provided a better path than forcing policies to fit into a capitalist or communist system. Of course, he spoke more eloquently than I write, but since then, his words have influenced my thinking about the differences between Capitalism and Communism. In the article, the author, Dima Vorobiev, said all human ideas are in one’s mind and are intellectual property.
That is an obvious truth, but the idea that the capitalist system inspires innovation is more myth than truth. Invention requires education and experience, and a political/economic system does not develop a person’s mind. Mental development requires a public school system, providing a solid understanding of math and science as well as sociology, history, and English or what is called “language arts”. When asked what subjects prepared students for a scientific career, Albert Einstein replied that a young person needs to read novels. It allows them to develop their imagination and leads to ideas outside the confines of traditional education. Einstein wanted students to learn traditional concepts and develop the ability to imagine a landscape beyond their borders.
Otherwise, scientists practice imitation, not innovation. Most innovations come from outside the economic or political systems. The reason is that under the state or corporate structure, success depends on gaining favor with those in power. By definition, innovation changes traditional practices and methods. Thus, it endangers an innovator’s career. That is the reason the capitalistic or communistic structure inhibits innovation. There are many examples. A good and recent one is the COVID vaccine. Russian and Chinese educational systems are solid, yet their scientists developed a vaccine with only 60% efficacy. Although their vaccine is effective, it is less effective than the West’s.
They employed traditional methods and used dead viruses to develop their vaccines because the potency discrepancy between individual viruses makes a high range of quality difficult to replicate. Using an integrated network, the world’s scientists developed a vaccine based on a protein found in the outer envelope of the virus. The synthetically replicated proteins are uniform and results in a higher-quality vaccine. This statement is an oversimplification of the procedure, but western vaccines achieve an efficacy of over 90%. Although they worked for American pharmacies, most of the contributing scientists came from Europe and Asia, especially Japan and India.
My point is that a structured school system produces a foundation for innovation. Under Communism, the state would own all the innovative ideas and techniques. They are lucky to work in the West, where corporations own an individual’s creativity. It is not an economic or political system that generates groundbreaking ideas. It is education. Thus, innovation comes from a concrete context that opens the door to a vision beyond traditional reason.
Oriana:
Thanks Joe! Milosz was ahead of his time in noting that it’s obsolete to try to fit everything into capitalist/communist categories.
Not only obsolete, but a real obstacle to clear thinking.
I do write about the Soviet Union a lot because I’m fascinated that a huge social experiment has actually been performed — at a great human cost. And part of that cost was simplification and distortion.
At its worst, the result is tragic, e.g. the Soviet government executed its best economist, Kondratiev, because his discovery of the long cycles in capitalism didn’t fit the Marxist framework.
Or think of the Nazi’s rejection of Einstein’s contributions because Einstein was Jewish. Fortunately this turned out to be merely ridiculous rather than tragic.
It seems that all ideologies are harmful if pushed to an extreme.
I agree about the crucial importance of education. Capitalism is not automatically the best system for fostering innovation because entrenched financial interests might actually be an incentive to squash it or at least ignore it. That’s why it takes government funding of some projects that are promising but not immediately profitable. Most important, we need basic research to satisfy our human drive to find out how things work, regardless of potential applications. And scientists need to freedom to exchange information without being hampered by corporate secrecy contracts.
And we should always remember that Jonas Salk did not patent his polio vaccine because he wanted it to be available everywhere in the world, without the barrier of high cost. There can be no price on a child’s freedom from paralysis.
But if someone invents a new plumbing tool, sure, by all means he has the right to be rewarded with patent royalties. Financial incentives work, and have their place. But ultimately human creativity is governed by more complex factors, interwoven into the very fabric of the myriad interactions between an individual and society.
Joe:
I saw Milosz read twice. Both times, the audience was more interested in the Warsaw ghetto than his poetry. they also seemed to want him to say America was better, but he quietly deflected those questions. I believe that he was disappointed because the audience seemed more aware of his personal history than his writing.
Oriana:
My guess is that it was not an audience of poets, but rather more of the “general educated public,” and Polish people who would not come to a reading by a non-Polish poet. But even with an audience of local poets, I often got the impression that there is more interest in how you look, dress (you are supposed to “look like a poet,” aren’t you?), your background and family, and in my case, the tiresome (to me) story of how I came to America, and why. If, instead, someone makes a remark about a poem, I am ecstatic.
Still, we must face it: we may think of our poems as easy to understand, perfectly accessible, and coming from a familiar context — but to others our poems are strange fragments of a larger and unknown whole, a life they don’t understand, but maybe are trying to imagine, filling in poetry’s many silences.
Perhaps the strangest question I ever got after a reading was, “Is it true that in Europe the streets are full of people?” After a moment’s shock, I was actually grateful that someone was interested in Europe. Milosz was used to dealing with huge themes, but others would rather know about his personal life. Let’s face it: we are voyeurs more so than philosophers.
*
DID NIXON FORESEE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION?
~ It was not so much the sense of an impending collapse of communism that motivated Nixon's peacemaking efforts vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.
Nixon was raised a Quaker and deeply admired his mother who was a quite observant one. He possibly developed an interest in peacemaking possibly because he was concerned that his choice of a political career was a disappointment to her — or it could have been that his earlier career as an anti-communist red-baiter proved embarrassing for him as one who harbored intellectual pretensions and who wanted to be remembered as a substantive leader and thinker. Whatever the case, he publicly stated that his mother’s Quaker spirituality inspired him to seek peace.
Moreover, Nixon was likely not as focused on the incipient decline of the Soviet Union as Reagan was a decade later. In fact, while most people in the know, such as Sovietologists who advised Nixon and other Western leaders, were fully aware of the contradictions and inconsistencies of the Soviet system, many speculated that a serious reckoning was likely years, possibly even decades into the future.
During the Nixon presidency, the Soviets even appeared to be on the march throughout the developing world, while American and Western influence seemed to be waning. Nixon was no different than his predecessors in understanding that whatever one thought of the Soviet system, an ideological struggle of two systems, each armed with nuclear arsenals, was ensuing throughout the world and a miscalculation in any part of the world raised the real prospect of escalation up to and including nuclear conflict.
Interestingly, in his memoirs of his years as Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger admitted to being flummoxed on several occasions when the Soviets seemed reluctant to capitalize on American vulnerabilities. He speculated among his staff about its possible relationship to systemic failure, though none of this was confirmed until the late 80′s. ~ Jim Langcuster, Quora
Ted Waldron:
The cracks became too big to cover up in the mid to late 1970s, when the Soviet Union was falling behind the West in technology. Happy announcements about pig iron production, or how successful was the harvest for this year, could not downplay the fact that the Soviet Union was having problems with both adapting to new technology, plus the Soviet Union was buying a huge amount of foodstuff from abroad — countries like the US, Argentina, Australia for grain shipments.
The West were getting a better picture of Eastern Europe, because these countries were begging for loans from the West, because the Soviet Union was trying to wean these countries off Soviet subsides, or asking them to pay for the subsidies with hard currency.
By the time of Brezhnev’s death in 1982, the West knew there were serious inherent problems with the Soviet Union. By the time of Chernenko’s death in 1985, those problems seemed kind of impossible to fix…
I don’t think the Soviet Union would had survived if Alexei Kosygin’s proposed economic reforms in 1965 with limited market base economic methods were implemented, which would give the Soviet Union a better economic performance (or worse as the change could cause problems). There were too many nationality issues, with the Baltic Republics and Central Asia Republics wanting independence. There way too many entrenched bureaucrats whose political power relied on a central planning. The Military was just too entrenched and too powerful to accept change that could jeopardize their 20–25% of the GDP for their use.
Could the Soviet Union could had survived? Maybe, but as we see in Putin’s Russia, there is way too much graft and corruption in the political system..
If Brezhnev and Kosygin pushed for reform after they took over in a coup in 1964, (they also had to neutralize Alexander Shelepin, the man behind the coup), it could cause short term chaos, but longer term survival for the Soviet System (economic reform plus political reform). However the Mikhail Suslovs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, plus fear that any reform could upset Soviet power abroad, meant the Kremlin kept its inefficient ways.
If anything prolonged and delayed the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the discovery of oil and gas in Western Siberia in the 1960s. This helped keep things going until the implosion of the Soviet Union started in 1988–1989. ~
Nixon and Brezhnev on the presidential yacht Sequoia
Steve Bloxham:
In the Russian civil war after WW1 there was a Siberian breakaway movement to (believe it or not) to become America's 49th state. Hell… Siberia east of Lake Baikal and the Russian Far East would be cool to have as our 51st state. It's where Yul Brenner grew up. His dad owned a copper mine east of Vladivostok.
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HITLER SURROUNDED HIMSELF WITH MEDIOCRE PEOPLE (Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich)
~ “A man whose “magic” Speer often refers to did not seem at all magical. In Speer’s telling, Hitler is duplicitous and vacuous, so intimidated by accomplished people that he surrounds himself with shallow hangers-on; he is humorless and only laughs at the expense of others; he tiresomely repeats himself and is delusional, even before the war, with what Speer describes as “fantastic misreadings” of reality. Yet Speer was devoted to him. Awed by him, loyal to him.
Speer belittles the architectural work he did for Hitler, mocking the designs as “pretentious,” but what remains astonishingly true is that he believed in Hitler’s architectural jingoism. Hitler tells Speer that Berlin, compared with Paris and Vienna, is “nothing but an unregulated accumulation of buildings,” and here Speer’s nationalist insecurity aligns with his architectural ambition. He, too, wanted to assuage Germany’s wounded pride, to wipe off the humiliation of losing the First World War by erecting edifices. He toiled to make a reality of Hitler’s imperial megalomania—buildings that would last a thousand years, structures that reflected a Germany to which the rest of the world would bow—so much so that his disapproving architect father, on seeing his models, told him, “You’ve all gone completely crazy.”
As a child, I could not have seen this book as the silver-tongued project of exculpation that it is. Nor would I have recognized how much Speer’s class privilege makes this possible. Speer’s class sneer is always present, always subtle, in his references—to Hitler’s petit-bourgeois background, to the unrefined tastes of Hitler’s other henchmen. He detests Bormann, whom he calls “a peasant” with “no culture,” a feeling rooted more in class than in morality. He objects not so much to what Bormann does as to the crude nature with which he does it, as though Bormann’s murderousness would not be so offensive had he exhibited some finesse. The burning of the Berlin synagogues and the “smashed panes of shop windows” offend his “sense of middle-class order.” He asks the slave laborers in his armaments factory if they are satisfied with their treatment. Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.
In my graduate class at Yale, a classmate once said, while studying the war in Sierra Leone, “African violence is different.” In that word, “different,” was a repressed shudder. He meant that hacking people to death with machetes lacked something that might have made it more bearable. A cold-blooded elegance, an efficiency, a remove. I will always remember that student because he illuminated for me the Western idea that turpitude, when committed by a certain kind of person and in a certain kind of way, is worthy of being engaged with.
Speer, with the cultured, reasonable, modest manner that is the easy inheritance of the privileged classes, represented a kind of Teutonic ideal. It made possible his memoir, a well-written act of image-making. It made possible his designation as the “good Nazi,” somehow better than the others, a man whose ruthlessly steady hand kept the German war machine churning, who denied that he knew of millions of Jews being murdered, who burst into tears on seeing a photo of Hitler after his death.
Did I sense the insecurity that pervades this memoir, and, by extension, the Third Reich itself? A collection of men-children with infantile fantasies. Dreams of victory parades. Great halls built to impress. Bigger as better. The ringing echo, in Hitler’s refrain of “We are not inferior,” of a man desperate to believe himself.
It is interesting now, as Europe tries to find a sense of self, to read of Speer’s fleeting dream of an economically united Europe, with Germany as its leader. Or of Hitler’s belief that Islam was more compatible with Germans than Christianity. Or Speer’s suggestion that democracy is inherently not German and the Weimar Republic an aberration of Germanness because “tight public order was in our blood.”
Right-wing populism is rising again around the world, and it is hard not to look for lessons here. Hitler rose to power because he exploited in Germans that sense of what Speer called “personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy,” which “was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims.” He turned history into a reservoir of resentments.
And he spoke simply. Speaking simply, in this case, meant discarding complexity and disregarding truth." ~
The New Yorker, January 3, 2018
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It's uncanny to watch history repeat itself. Not that it exactly repeats itself -- but it rhymes, as Mark Twain observed. The Russians use "filtration camps" rather than concentration camps, and have adopted the letter Z (as in Zelensky? how ironic) instead of the swastika. But in essence . . . no, we didn't think it could happen again.
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FATHERS ARE HAPPIER PARENTS THAN MOTHERS
~ A study of 18,000 people shows that fathers experience more well-being from parenthood than mothers.
Past studies have considered whether people with children have greater well-being than people without children. They do. But few have considered the relative happiness of fathers and mothers.
UCR psychologists and their colleagues analyzed three separate studies totaling more than 18,000 people to determine whether fathers or mothers experience greater happiness from their parenting roles.
Across the three studies, researchers looked at measures of well-being that included happiness, well-being, depressive symptoms, psychological satisfaction, and stress.
The first two studies compared well-being of parents with that of people who don’t have children.
Across all outcomes measured in the first studies, fatherhood was more frequently linked with greater well-being than motherhood. Relative to peers without children, fathers reported greater satisfaction with their lives and feelings of connectedness to others, and they reported greater positive emotions and fewer daily hassles than mothers. They also reported fewer depressive symptoms than men without children; whereas mothers reported more depressive symptoms than women who don’t have children.
The third study considered parenthood and well-being while engaged in childcare or interacting with children, compared to other daily activities.
Gender significantly impacted the association between childcare and happiness. Men were happier while caring for their children, while women were less happy.
In terms of daily interactions generally, both men and women were happier interacting with their children relative to other daily interactions. But men reported greater happiness from the interactions than women. One possible explanation for this finding is that, relative to mothers, fathers were more likely to indicate that they were playing with their children while they were caring for them or interacting with them.
“Fathers may fare better than mothers in part due to how they spend their time with their children,” said study author Katherine Nelson-Coffey, who worked in UCR psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky’s lab as a graduate student and is now an assistant professor of psychology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Lyubomirsky said the study carries a suggestion: perhaps all parents will benefit from finding more opportunity for play with their children. ~
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2019/01/30/fathers-are-happier-parents-mothers-new-study-shows
from Psychology Today: WHY FATHERS ARE HAPPIER THAN MOTHERS
~ "Children are a social benefit to everyone, but they are a public good for which mothers are paying a disproportionately high price,” observed a researcher at the University of New South Wales' Social Policy Research Centre more than a decade ago.
With fathers assuming more active roles at home, you have to wonder why in 2020, views remain measurably different about parents' roles, happiness, and well-being. Clinical psychologist Darcy Lockman, author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, writes in a New York Times op-ed, “What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With,” that “By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing ‘a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.’”
To which Ashley McQuire, writing for the Institute of Family Studies, finds “the liberal feminist obsession with chores to be dated and tired.” She argues, “Those women want to be the primary caregivers for their children and are happy when they can prioritize what they do at home. It’s a cold, hard fact that for some reason, feminists like Lockman just cannot accept.”
When the Pew Research Center looked at the numbers recently, the split for housework is 18 hours per week for mothers, 10 hours for fathers. Additionally, Pew found that more mothers, 53 percent, feel they spend enough time with their children. Only 36 percent of fathers take that position. In short, most dads would like more time with their children.
Fathers spend about eight hours a week on childcare (an uptick from men’s two-and-a-half hours 50 years ago) compared with mothers’ 14 hours, according to the Pew.
Happy Mothers, Happier Dads
How mothers and fathers spend the time they have with their children affects mothers’ and fathers’ well-being. A new study, “Happy Moms, Happier Dads: Gendered Caregiving and Parents’ Affect,” underscores previous research indicating that dads are happier and tells us why. The study’s researchers, Cadhla McDonnell, Nancy Luke, and Susan E. Short, analyzed specific childcare activities to determine where and when the activity took place, which parent was present, how much care was involved and how mothers’ and fathers’ moods were affected.
Their study, published in Journal of Family Issues, looked at who did what in terms of meeting a child’s basic needs; who was involved with playtime or sports; or homework help; and who made children’s arrangements, doctor appointments, or did most of the transporting. They focused on the context of care rather than the amount of time spent to determine a parent’s level of stress and happiness. The authors state, “Parenting is emotionally demanding and highly gendered. We observe a gender imbalance in the emotional rewards of childcare: Fathers report more happiness, less stress, and less tiredness than mothers.”
Mothers who work say that “despite these challenges, many working parents—including about 8 in 10 full-time working mothers—their current employment situation is what's best for them at this point in their life regardless of the stress and feelings that working “makes it harder for them to be a good parent.”
The stress factor
Difficulties aside for both parents, for fathers in the “Happy Moms, Happier Dads” study, the emotional rewards were greater; they were happier and less stressed because they engaged in more recreational activities and fewer of the stressful aspects of parenting.
Reporting on findings from an Austrian study for Psychology Today, Michael Ungar takes the position that because fathers are doing more childcare, they are becoming more stressed than mothers especially in families with young children.
Leah Ruppanner, who teaches sociology at the University of Melbourne, found otherwise. She and her colleagues reviewed data collected from about 20,000 Australian families over 16 years. In addition to finding that having a second child affects the mental health of parents, she concluded that “Prior to childbirth, mothers and fathers report similar levels of time pressure. Once the first child is born, time pressure increases for both parents. Yet this effect is substantially larger for mothers than fathers. Second children double parents’ time pressure, further widening the gap between mothers and fathers.” Time pressures and the stress they create “did not diminish as children aged.” Ruppanner’s findings seem to hold even when children reach adolescence.
As children age
The study, “Mothers' and Fathers' Well-Being in Parenting Across the Arch of Child Development: Well-Being in Parenting by Child Age,” assessed how 18,000-plus parents felt in different activities with children at different ages using the American Time Use Survey Well‐Being Module. Ann Meier, lead researcher, found that both parents are least happy with teens, but mothers “report more stress and less meaning [than fathers] with adolescents.” The study underscores that the teen years are hard on parents’ happiness and well-being. Nonetheless, the researchers summarized that “mothers shoulder stress that fathers do not, even after accounting for differences in the context of their parenting activities.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/singletons/201911/is-why-dads-are-happier-moms
Oriana:
It seems that fathers, though more active as parents now compared to some decades ago, tend to play with the children more, while mothers do a greater share of the more stressful, mundane chores of child rearing. As someone said, it would be great if both parents spent more time simply playing with their children.
Mary:
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A MAN CALLED OTTO: A GRUMPY OLD MAN TURNS INTO A SWEETHEART
Rolf Lassgard as the title character in the Swedish film "A Man Called Ove" which was released in 2015. It was based upon the novel by Fredrik Backman which was published in 2012. Tom Hanks stars in the American film "A Man Called Otto"released in 2023 and based upon the same novel.
Oriana: Let's first take a look at a rather negative review.
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~ In reality, cantankerous curmudgeons don't routinely possess hearts of gold. Genuine intentions don't always gleam behind petty folks with grudges spouting insults, either. Movies like A Man Called Otto keep claiming otherwise, though, because cinema is an empathy machine — and placing viewers in the shoes of characters different to them, whether in background, behavior, situation or temperament, remains key among its functions. Tom Hanks, the silver screen's beloved everyman of more than four decades, knows this. Veteran filmmaker Marc Forster does as well. After getting villainous in Elvis and sweet with Christopher Robin, respectively, the actor and director join forces for a feature advocating for understanding, kindness and acceptance. Behind that cranky nitpicker, local annoyance or rude aggressor might just lurk a story worth appreciating and a person worth knowing, it sentimentally posits.
This Americanization of A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman's Swedish 2012 novel that first hit the screen in its native language in 2015, did indeed come about exactly as expected. Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson saw the Oscar-nominated OG movie, contacted its producer Fredrik Wikström Nicastro (Borg vs McEnroe), then went about making a US-set, Hanks-starring iteration. Wilson is now also one of A Man Called Otto's producers. Truman Hanks, Tom's youngest son with Wilson, co-stars as the young Otto (nabbing just his second on-screen credit after popping up in his dad's News of the World). This flick's smooth path to cinemas and the easy family ties behind it speak volumes about the film that results; despite focusing on a man repeatedly trying to take his own life, attempts at which are constantly interrupted by his rule-breaking neighbors, openly and breezily warming hearts and pleasing crowds is this remake's aim.
Misanthropic and embittered beyond even the Internet's most pointless keyboard warriors, Otto hasn't met a scenario he can't sour with his resentment and sometimes downright cruelty. Cue arguing with hardware store workers about being charged for too much rope, yelling about dogs urinating on his lawn, denigrating walkers for their exercise attire, snapping at his forced retirement party, gruffly spouting property bylaws in his gated townhouse community and getting short with a stray cat. Hence the struggle to make his exit, too, because there's always someone or something to scold. Soon, that spans the pregnant Marisol (Mariana Treviño, Narcos: Mexico) and her husband Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, The Lincoln Lawyer), who move in across the road with their kids Abbie (Alessandra Perez, To Leslie) and Luna (Christiana Montoya, The Guilty).
Otto starts shouting at Marisol and her family about poor parking skills, but she isn't just willing to grin and bear his persnicketiness or bad temper. Since A Man Called Otto is a star vehicle for Hanks, its namesake is instantly destined to become likable well before the end credits roll. That transition is true to the Swedish source material, but it feels unearned here. Specifically, it plays like casting doing too much heavy lifting, because an adored, usually affable, reluctant-to-be-disagreeable actor is going to turn out that way, as he frequently does, in this kind of uncomplicated affair. It's also a missed opportunity to make a statement about unpleasant people who are jerks for the sake of it, but that isn't the tale that Backman wrote, Swedish filmmaker Hannes Holm (Ted — Show Me Love) initially adapted and screenwriter David Magee (Lady Chatterley's Lover) reuses.
Accordingly, Otto joins the ranks of surly and churlish on-screen men made that way by trauma (a dead wife in this case, played in flashbacks by Tokyo Vice's Rachel Keller, plus the isolation and loneliness he's been plagued with since her recent passing). Also, he's someone that everyone else can see goodness shining within even when he's at his worst. In other words, he's a scowling bag of cliches, which the movie endeavors to give depth via Hanks and Treviño. A Man Called Otto's best touch isn't pretending to get its high-profile lead playing against type, an approach that persuades no one. As a result, it isn't Hanks' committed but largely implausible efforts, either. Rather, it's ensuring that the charismatic Marisol is so convincing in her optimism, reluctance to let her crotchety neighbor bring her down and willingness to help anyone she can — selling why she, and anyone, would, could and should invest time and patience in Otto.
When a feature needs a good-natured supporting character to make its audience care about its hostile protagonist, that isn't a great sign. With A Man Called Otto, this can't have been the desired outcome — just a matter of expecting Hanks to do what Hanks does, his charm kicking in regardless of what's around him. Worse movies have made that bet before, even if the actor's resume is filled with far more highs than lows.
Forster’s picture almost goes all in, Treviño's canny portrayal aside, given how by-the-numbers it proves in most of its choices (including workmanlike cinematography by Christopher Robin's Matthias Koenigswieser and an emotion-signposting score by Operation Mincemeat's Thomas Newman). There's being easygoing and then there's just ticking the straightforward, unchallenging and plainest-to-see boxes, with the director behind everything from Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction to The Kite Runner, Quantum of Solace and World War Z clearly going for the former and achieving the latter.
If the entirety of A Man Called Otto was as textured and luminous as Treviño's performance, viewers would've been gifted a better and less cloying film. That would've meant beefing up or ditching other plot points that happily skew broad and thin, and play like padding, such as rallying against exploitative corporations, turning Otto into a social-media star, using his fastidiousness to save the day, navigating multiple health conditions and serving up supposedly out-of-character nice deeds. And, it would've required giving gravity to Otto's recurrent suicide attempts, rather than being content with unamusing awkwardness.
Also, it'd mean actually being funny, darkly, lightly, Curb Your Enthusiasm-style or otherwise. That said, the heartstring-pulling still works whenever Marisol is involved. A version of this tale from the scene-stealing Latin American character's perspective, unpacking issues of gender and race that this flick doesn't touch? That would've been refreshing, and might've also truly been lovable. ~
from another source:
~If I had my druthers, Americans would embrace the notion of film as the Universal Language, and there would be no market for local remakes of truly wonderful movies that just happen to be in some tongue other than English.
Alas, that universe does not exist, and so we get perfectly adequate films like A Man Called Otto, Tom Hanks’ remake of 2015’s A Man Called Ove, a Swedish movie that was so magical, so pitch-perfect in its balance of dark foreboding and bubbly whimsy, that a U.S version was as inevitable as it was unnecessary.
Hanks stars as Otto, a recently widowed man who has also been pushed into retirement. Now he spends his days resentfully patrolling his Pittsburgh neighborhood, notepad in hand, enforcing HOA parking, dog-walking, and lawn maintenance regulations with the ruthlessness of a deranged high school principal.
Otto suspends his rounds only long enough to visit the grave of his wife, who clearly remains the only person he can talk to.
In real life, every single neighbor would hate Otto’s guts — or at least give him wide berth — but in this only-in-the-movies community, virtually every gently-quirky resident greets Otto with jaunty waves and persistent attempts at small talk.
Both versions of Otto — which are, in turn, based on a Swedish novel — draw their charm from the story’s conviction that the thing sad people need most is a cloud of positivity on which they can float to a realm of happiness. It’s a nice idea, even if it is demonstrably untrue, and Hanks has built up enough audience goodwill to pull off the unlikely transformation from grumpy old man to slightly less-grumpy father figure.
Otto touches on the same weighty themes as Ove — isolation, suicide, and mortality among them — but from the start, director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, World War Z) pulls back the drapes to brighten what in the original version was a decidedly murky room. Despite Hanks’s permanent scowl — as indelible at those overcast Pittsburgh skies — Otto trades in optimism; a sense that Otto’s redemption is not only possible, but inevitable.
It’s a decidedly American attitude, worthy of Frank Capra. And it works here, sort of.
Still, there’s something to be said for rough edges. And those, unfortunately, have been lost in translation. ~
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2023/01/review-a-man-called-otto-and-the-son-movies-for-the-rest-of-us-with-bill-newcott/
Oriana:
There is no way to dislike Tom Hanks. He is a sweetheart even as he tries hard to be a proverbial grumpy old man. I agree with the critics who suggest that the main character needs to be less lovable and more, indeed, grumpy, but . . . we go to the movies mainly to experience pleasure — I’d even say enchantment. And one of the pleasures that movies can offer is watching Tom Hanks trying to be unpleasant, and failing in an unavoidable way — probably simply because the audience is already familiar with him, and prepared to adore him.
The movie also offers a pleasant — some say radiant — performance by Mariana Traviño as Marisol, Otto’s new neighbor who finds that Otto reminds her of her late father. “My father also used to smile like that,” she tells Otto. “I’m not smiling,” he barks back. “Exactly,” she replies. The two are perfect together. It's no surprise that they become family, with Otto listing Marisol as "next of kin" -- which she doesn't deny.
Even Otto’s new cat is perfect for the movie — beautiful and absolutely regal, a pampered deity. How would such a cat become homeless? There is no answer, but then we don’t really need an answer, just the creature’s happy purr upon establishing Otto’s bed as his territory.
Nor do we really ponder the fact that, as one critic points out, no engineer would fail at hanging himself. He’d first use a stud-finder to locate a beam before pounding a hook into the ceiling. Otto skips this vital step, the masonry can’t sustain Otto’s weight, and he simply falls to the floor — much to our relief and even delight. It was only after reading a review that I thought about the stud-finder — and the average viewer doesn’t know and doesn’t care. The suicide attempt turns into comedy, and that’s all that matters.
The only thing I didn’t like were the flashbacks to Otto’s marriage — those were just too saccharine for me. True, after a spouse’s death one tends to dwell on the pleasant memories, but I wanted Otto’s grumpy self, not his younger version — even if capably acted by the Tom’s own son, Truman (I find the son’s name to be the best part).
Would I recommend this movie? By all means. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is a reliable feel-good movie that is a perfect way to greet 2023. 
Is it possible not to love Tom Hanks or his kitty?
Mary:
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HOW TO QUICKLY LIFT YOUR MOOD
To these tips, I'd add a walk somewhere where there are trees. Clouds also do it for me. And, oddly enough, the fake smile.
Four Mood-Changing Moves
~ "There really is something to the mind-body-spirit connection and when all three are in alignment you’re going to feel better. This is the point, then, where spirituality and personal development become physical.
When we move with awareness and give attention to how we stand, sit, move during our days, we can change how we feel.
Here are four ways to do it.
Smile: Plenty of research, including one study from 1989 and another published in the journal Psychological Science last year proves that a smile – even a faky, contrived one – can actually induce happiness and reduce stress. So, even if you have to talk yourself into it, give yourself a grin or simply repeat the long “e” sound, as psychologist Robert Zajonc had participants do in that early study, to stretch out a smile, and you’ll feel better.
Give yourself a hug. Kristen Neff, renowned for her research into self-compassion suggests a hug as a way of coping with the stress of making a mistake. When we wrap our arms around, our arms or shoulders, our bodies release oxytocin which is causes us to feel more nurturing and less reactive.
Tilt your chin up. Look at the sky. Just look up. Lifting your chin up and letting your shoulders sit back improves mood and confidence in potentially difficult situations, according to Paula Niedenthal, a psychology professor, who has studied the link between posture and emotion. No surprise then, that people who keep their chins down and shoulders slumped generally don’t feel as positive.
Dance. Seriously. Just do it. Rock out by yourself in the living room, before the kids get home, or gently sway with your husband long after they are in bed. Scores of studies show that various dance forms decrease stress, improve focus and concentration, and yep, you guessed it, boost your mood.
So, next time you’re feeling blue, stressed, anxious, angry, or inadequate, shift your body, go for a walk, concoct a face-stretching smile, or change your posture and your mood may just follow will follow along." ~
(I lost the link, alas; but there’s a lot on the Internet about lifting your mood. However, the perversity of depression consists in not taking any action that threatens to do away with the depression; you need to get bored or preferably even disgusted with depression to do anything that would lift your mood rather than sink deeper down, all the way to either stupor or vehement sobbing.)
Oriana:
This fits in with the somatic approach of William James. He'd say, You don't cry because you're sad; you're sad because you cry. In other words, pay attention to the BEHAVIOR rather than the supposed emotion. If you change your behavior, your emotional state will change too.
It was only when I perceived my depression as a set of behaviors that I knew how to end it: because a behavior can be changed. I changed my behavior (productive work instead of rumination), and my mood followed. I wasn't entirely sure it would work, but it did.
I realize that it could also be argued that my insight that depression was a behavior did most of the work; once you have an insight, you can't really go against it. But it doesn't have to be either-or. Insight and a competing behavior can work together.
What took longest was regaining access to positive memories. But that's a different chapter. The article here is concerned only with occasional low mood. But note that the prescription for lifting the mood is behavioral -- even if it's just something that seems very minor (but isn't), e.g. stand or sit up straight. You fight bad mood with behavior.
Why fight bad moods? Because life is too short to be unhappy. Because, once you've survived childhood and adolescence, it's simply too late. So -- sit up straight. Feeling better? Of course.
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POST-RELIGIOUS AMERICA: CHURCHES ARE CLOSING AND BEING SOLD
~ As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country — a figure that experts believe may have accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The situation means some hard decisions for pastors, who have to decide when a dwindling congregation is no longer sustainable. But it has also created a boom market for those wanting to buy churches, with former houses of worship now finding new life.
About 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, the last year data is available, with about 3,000 new churches opening, according to Lifeway Research. It was the first time the number of churches in the US hadn’t grown since the evangelical firm started studying the topic. With the pandemic speeding up a broader trend of Americans turning away from Christianity, researchers say the closures will only have accelerated.
“The closures, even for a temporary period of time, impacted a lot of churches. People breaking that habit of attending church means a lot of churches had to work hard to get people back to attending again,” said Scott McConnell, executive director at Lifeway Research.
“In the last three years, all signs are pointing to a continued pace of closures probably similar to 2019 or possibly higher, as there’s been a really rapid rise in American individuals who say they’re not religious.”
Protestant pastors reported that typical church attendance is only 85% of pre-pandemic levels, McConnell said, while research by the Survey Center on American Life and the University of Chicago found that in spring 2022 67% of Americans reported attending church at least once a year, compared with 75% before the pandemic.
But while Covid-19 may have accelerated the decline, there is a broader, long-running trend of people moving away from religion. In 2017 Lifeway surveyed young adults aged between 18 and 22 who had attended church regularly, for at least a year during high school. The firm found that seven out of 10 had stopped attending church regularly.
Some of the reasons were “logistical”, McConnell said, as people moved away for college or started jobs which made it difficult to attend church.
“But some of the other answers are not so much logistics. One of the top answers was church members seem to be judgmental or hypocritical,” McConnell said.
“And so the younger generation just doesn’t feel like they’re being accepted in a church environment or some of their choices aren’t being accepted by those at church.”
About a quarter of the young adults who dropped out of church said they disagreed with their church’s stance on political and social issues, McConnell said.
A study by Pew Research found that the number of Americans who identified as Christian was 64% in 2020, with 30% of the US population being classed as “religiously unaffiliated”. About 6% of Americans identified with Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.
“Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of US adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’,” Pew wrote.
“This accelerating trend is reshaping the US religious landscape.”
In 1972 92% of Americans said they were Christian, Pew reported, but by 2070 that number will drop to below 50% – and the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans – or ‘nones’ will probably outnumber those adhering to Christianity.
Stephen Bullivant, author of Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America and professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University, said in the Christian world it had been a generational change.
While grandparents might have been regular churchgoers, their children would say they believe in God, but not go to church regularly. By the time millennials came round, they had little experience or relationship with churchgoing or religion.
In the Catholic church, in particular, the sexual abuse scandal may have driven away people who had only a tenuous connection to the faith.
“The other thing is the pandemic,” Bullivant said.
“A lot of people who were weakly attached, to suddenly have months of not going, they’re then thinking: ‘Well we don’t really need to go,’ or ‘We’ve found something else to do,’ or thinking: ‘It was hard enough dragging the kids along then, we really ought to start going again … next week.’”
Bullivant said most other countries saw a move away from religion earlier than the US, but the US had particular circumstances that slowed things down.
“Canada, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the nones rise much earlier, the wake of the 1960s the baby boom generation, this kind of big, growing separation of kind of traditional Christian morality,” Bullivant said.
“What happens in America that I think dampens down the rise of the nones is the cold war. Because in America, unlike in Britain, there’s a very explicit kind of ‘Christian America’ versus godless communism framing, and to be non-religious is to be un-American.
“I think that dampens it down until you get the millennial generation for whom the cold war is just a vague memory from their early childhood.”
When people leave, congregations dwindle. And when that gets to a critical point, churches close. That has led to a flood of churches available for sale, and a range of opportunities for the once holy buildings.
Brian Dolehide, managing director of AD Advisors, a real estate company that specializes in church sales, said the last 10 years had seen a spike in sales. Frequently churches become housing or care homes, while some of the churches are bought by other churches wanting to expand.
But selling a church isn’t like selling a house or a business. Frequently the sellers want a buyer who plans to use the church for a good cause: Dolehide said he had recently sold a church in El Paso which is now used as housing for recent immigrants, and a convent in Pittsburgh which will be used as affordable housing.
“The faith-based transaction is so different in so many ways from the for-profit transaction. We’re not looking to profit from our transactions, we’re looking for the best use that reflects the last 50 years or 100 years use if possible.”
The closures aren’t spread evenly through the country.
In Texas, John Muzyka of Church Realty, a company that specializes in church sales, said there were fewer churches for sale than at any point in the last 15 years. He believes that is partly down to Texas’s response to the pandemic, where the governor allowed churches to open in May 2020, even when the number of new Covid cases was extremely high.
“I would say if a church stayed closed for more than a year, it was really hard to get those people to come back. When you were closed for three months, you were able to get over it,” Muzyka said.
That aside, closures are often due to a failure of churches to adapt.
“A church will go through a life cycle. At some point, maybe the congregation ages out, maybe they stop reaching young families.”
“If the church ages and doesn’t reach young people, or the demographics change and they don’t figure out how to reach the new demographic, that church ends up closing.
“Yes, there’s financial pressures that will close a church, but oftentimes, it’s more that they didn’t figure out how to change when the community changed, or they didn’t have enough young people to continue the congregation for the next generation.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/22/us-churches-closing-religion-covid-christianity?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THE WORLD’S OLDEST LIVING PERSON: LUCK AND GOOD GENES
~ María Branyas Morera, born in 1907, has lived through two world wars, the Spanish civil war, the 1918 flu pandemic and Covid.
Now the California-born woman is the world’s oldest living person.
Branyas, 115, became the eldest known person alive after the death of 118-year-old Lucille Randon, the Guinness world records website confirmed last week. Randon died at her nursing home in the French town of Toulon on 17 January.
Branyas captured global headlines after she survived a bout of Covid in May 2020, when the pandemic made Spain one of the hardest-hit countries before the availability of vaccines. She was believed to be the oldest Covid survivor at one point, before Randon survived contracting the virus herself.
“Order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity and staying away from toxic people” is what Branyas credits with her longevity, according to the Guinness site.
“I think longevity is also about being lucky,” Branyas said, Guinness officials added. “Luck and good genetics.”
Branyas was born in San Francisco on 4 March 1907, a year after her parents moved from Spain to the US. Over the next eight years, the family moved to Texas and New Orleans, where her father founded the Spanish-language magazine Mercurio, before they returned to Spain and settled in Catalonia.
Ever since, Branyas has endured defining moments on scales large and small.
Her father died from pulmonary tuberculosis on the ocean journey from the US to Spain. The route was circuitous because the first world war made passage treacherous, so the ship had to go via Cuba and the Azores, Branyas once recalled.
In 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic began sweeping the world. Then, when Branyas was 29, the Spanish civil war broke out, leaving her with what she has previously summarized as “very bad memories”. The second world war followed soon after.
Branyas started a family with her husband, a Catalan doctor named Joan Moret, which has given her three children, 11 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
On the couple’s wedding day, after hours of waiting for him, they learned that their priest had unexpectedly died. There was no telephone at the church to call for another chaplain, so the family had to get in a car and search for another one.
“Life is not eternal for anyone,” she tweeted on New Year’s Day. “At my age, a new year is a gift, a humble celebration, a beautiful journey, a moment of happiness.
“Let’s enjoy life together.”
Branyas’s nursing home, Residència Santa María del Tura, issued a statement saying they would recognize her becoming the world’s oldest living person in a private event.
“She is in good health and continues to be surprised and grateful for the attention that this … has generated,” the home said. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/26/worlds-oldest-person-115-maria-branyas-morera-california
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CAN IMMIGRATION COMPENSATE FOR LOW BIRTH RATES?
~ As populations age, labor for low wage jobs in particular is in high demand, Pritchett said. The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics predicts many of the fastest growing job types don't require a college degree. The Bureau predicts that in the next decade, there will be close to one million new jobs in home health and personal care alone.
"And yet over that same period, we're going to have three million less workers [aged] 20 to 40," Pritchett said.
But while rich countries get older, the developing world is getting younger. Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa was well above the replacement rate at an average of 4.7 births per woman in 2020. The challenge in these countries is creating enough jobs to sustain a growing workforce.
To economists, the simplest way to solve both problems is through migration.
"A real bellwether for the future is South Korea," said Michael Clemens, a professor of economics at George Mason University.
At 0.79 births per woman, South Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world. To augment the number of young, energetic workers relative to the number of old people, the country relies on migrant workers to fill labor shortages, Clemens said.
It's a win-win, according to Pritchett: Immigration solves labor shortages in the developed world, and emigration solves job shortages in the developing world.
As easy as the solution could be from an economic perspective, the politics of it all are much more complicated. In a future where much of the world's working age population will be from countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, anti-immigrant sentiment could be a sticking point, Clemens said.
"The opportunities for lawful migration of Africans are extremely constrained [in the U.S.]. And the main route into the U.S. right now for Africans is the diversity visa," Clemens said. "That visa is vastly oversubscribed for every visa that's given ... Again and again, politicians have proposed eliminating that entirely.”
Increasing the amount of temporary work migration would address the economic problem while avoiding the political sticking points, Pritchett argued, adding that his solution is to create an industry that "recruits, prepares, places, protects" migrant workers.
Tara Watson, an economist and the director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, argues that a solution like Pritchett's would pose challenges and not necessarily solve the problem in the long term.
"It's not easy to make temporary migration work in a way that's not exploitative," Watson said. Part of the problem, she said, is most temporary work options are "tied to a specific employer, and that gives that employer a lot of discretion over your work environment and really limits the worker's ability to advocate for themselves.”
And to Watson, temporary labor mobility is only a temporary solution.
"I am a proponent of moving more towards a permanent visa space," Watson said. According to Gallup, almost one billion people around the world would migrate permanently if they could. "It's the permanent immigrants who generate the long run population growth for us," Watson said.
To Pritchett, the current landscape of migration is comparable to the U.S. prohibition of alcohol.
"We wanted to ban all alcoholic beverages and it just wasn't enforceable. And so the path to more control of alcohol was through less control of alcohol, through legalizing these flows. I feel the path to better migration is through more migration," Pritchett said.
"Some part of this labor mobility is going to be a path to citizenship. That's terrific," he said. "But some of this is going to have to be temporary. And the sooner we wrap our heads around that, the sooner we get to out of prohibition mode.” ~
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/27/1151734308/immigration-economy-birth-rate-population
Oriana:
Nothing here changes my opinion that women would be willing to have more children if more help were provided with child-rearing. The availability of quality child-care, especially if connected with the work place, seems crucial.
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IS EVEN A SMALL AMOUNT OF ALCOHOL HARMFUL?
~ While it’s easy to say "too much alcohol is bad for you" (and then point out the litany of harms caused by alcohol, such as liver disease and motor vehicle accidents), it’s harder to answer these simple but important questions:
Just how much is too much?
Is there a health benefit to some drinking compared with none?
These are more than just interesting questions for researchers to study. The answers could guide recommendations of doctors, public health officials, and policy makers throughout the world — and they could save millions of lives.
But so far, the answers vary depending on the study. And perhaps that should not be too surprising since study methods differ widely. For example, the definition of "one drink" in the US is 14 grams of alcohol, as found in a 12-ounce bottle of beer, 5-ounce glass of wine, or 1.5-ounce shot glass of distilled spirits. In other countries, and in many research studies, a different definition is used.
In June of 2018, a study published in the journal PLOS Medicine found that among older adults, light drinking (in the range of one to four drinks per week) was associated with a slightly lower risk of death compared with zero consumption.
In August of 2018, two larger studies examined the impact of alcohol. The first one, published in The Lancet, included only people who drank at least some alcohol. It concluded that common recommendations regarding "moderate" drinking (one drink a day or less for women, and two drinks per day or less for men) might be too much.
The second study, also published in The Lancet, was even bigger. It examined data from hundreds of studies and other sources (including sales of alcohol, home-brewed alcoholic beverage consumption, and even estimates of tourist consumption) in 195 locations. And it analyzed the overall health impact related to alcohol consumption, including death and disability due to automobile accidents, infectious diseases, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. It concluded that the best option for overall health was no drinking at all. Of note, the definition of "a drink" in this study was 10 grams of alcohol — that’s 30% less than a standard drink in the US, but 25% more than a standard drink in the UK.
Here are more details about what they found:
Alcohol use was the seventh leading cause of death and disability worldwide in 2016; about 2% of female deaths and 7% of male deaths (2.8 million deaths in total) were considered alcohol-related.
For those ages 15 to 49, alcohol was the leading risk factor for death and disability worldwide. Tuberculosis, road injuries, and self-harm were the top causes (the risk of each of these conditions is higher if you drink enough).
For older adults, cancers related to alcohol use were the top causes of death.
In general, health risks rose with rising amounts of alcohol use. However, some protective effect related to light drinking (less than one drink/day) was observed for heart disease and diabetes in some groups. For example, the risk of heart attack and related cardiovascular disease was 14% lower for men drinking 0.8 drinks/day, and 18% lower for women drinking 0.9 drinks/day compared with none.
From this, the study’s authors concluded that while light drinking might have a modest protective effect for certain conditions among certain people, ”Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none.”
As I look at the study data, I interpret it differently. True, the data does not confirm a protective effect of light drinking. But the health risks were low, and quite similar at levels between zero to one drink per day. That suggests that zero consumption may not necessarily be best, or any better than several drinks per week. In addition, this study (and others like it) is based on a large number of people, which is helpful to detect trends but can overlook important individual factors. In other words, some people may be harmed or helped more by alcohol consumption than others.
It’s worth acknowledging that regardless of how you interpret this study or whether researchers encourage "zero alcohol" as the best health option, the findings are quite unlikely to lead to zero alcohol consumption. After all, many people are more than willing to accept some health risks associated with drinking because they like to drink! Alcohol can encourage social interaction (which is why it’s often called a "social lubricant"), it is part of many religious traditions, and it’s a source of regular enjoyment for millions of people. And the fact is, most people "get away" with moderate drinking without suffering any major health consequences. As one expert said when interviewed about this study: "There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving.”
My take on these new studies is this: if you don’t like to drink alcohol, this latest research gives you no "medicinal" reason to start. But, if you drink lightly (and responsibly) and you have no health problems related to it, this study and other recent research is reassuring.
Clearly there are good reasons to discourage excessive alcohol consumption, driving drunk, and other avoidable alcohol-related trouble. But is "zero consumption" really where we should be aiming? I’m not so sure. I think it’s much more complicated than that. ~
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/alcohol-and-your-health-is-none-better-than-a-little-2018091914796
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AN ALZHEIMER’S DRUG STIMULATES TEETH TO REPAIR CAVITIES
~ A few years ago, researchers suggested that low doses of a small molecule glycogen synthase kinase (GSK-3) antagonist — in the form of anti-Alzheimer’s drug Tideglusib — applied to a decayed area could stimulate the coronal pulp in a tooth to repair itself. Now scientists at King’s College in London have expanded upon that research and found further evidence that Tideglusib may indeed provide a pathway toward self-healing teeth. The new research is published as a paper in the Journal of Dental Research.
Drilling may still be necessary, unfortunately, to clean decay from the affected area before treatment.
The are three elements to the structure of a tooth:
The outer enamel — The hard outer mineralized layer that protects the tooth structure.
The dentin — Hard, calcified tissue protecting the structure’s soft inner region.
The soft dental pulp — The inside of the tooth. It contains the tooth’s nerve, blood vessels, and connective tissue.
When you get a cavity, the outer enamel has a hole in it. With that outer protection breached, infecting bacteria nestle in, causing decay that burrows ever-deeper into the tooth, causing damage to its inner layers. To repair it using traditional methods, a dentist cleans bacteria from out the inside of cavity before filling it with a cement composite that replaces the lost natural dentin.
BUILDING NEW DENTIN
“In the last few years we showed that we can stimulate natural tooth repair by activating resident tooth stem cells. This approach is simple and cost effective. The latest results show further evidence of clinical viability and brings us another step closer to natural tooth repair.” — lead author Paul Sharpe
Sharpe and his colleagues were interested in understanding how large a damaged area could be repaired with Tideglusib, and where, and they hoped to analyze the composition of repaired dentin in comparison to naturally occurring dentin and/or bone.
The researchers confirmed that Tideglusib can cause the generation of sufficient replacement dentin to be of use. The paper asserts that the drug can “fully repair an area of dentin damage up to 10 times larger.” More than enough to be of value.
Second, Sharpe and his team learned that Tideglusib works only on a particular kind of tooth material: the coronal pulp, that region of pulp extending to the crown of the tooth. They also learned that the drug must be applied only to the affected area to be effective, finding that untreated areas of pulp, notably the root pulp, are not adversely affected by treatment, a good thing.
Finally, analyzing repaired dentin using Raman microspectroscopy, the researchers determined that the generated dentin is chemically quite similar to natural dentin, being comprised of a similar ratios of carbonate and phosphate and mineral-to-matrix as natural dentin.
THE NEXT REGENERATION
One limiting factor in the use of Tideglusib, therefore, is that the coronal pulp must be exposed in a cavity in order to be treated. Nonetheless, the research stands as confirmation not only of this specific drug’s talent for triggering dentin regeneration, but of something even bigger and more intriguing: That teeth have the ability to repair themselves.
There’s a great deal of investigation these days into the possibilities of humans regenerating body parts much as other animals such as salamanders and axolotls do. How far all of this research will get remains an open question for now, but undoubtedly remains one of the most exciting areas of current medical research. ~
https://bigthink.com/health/tooth-regeneration/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2UbcGKZFkG57VanUzmqwT0hvxCqBnttZ7Es_XE1q_didOf9g1kbLmR6wY#Echobox=1674237519-1
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WEIGHT-LOSS SURGERY REDUCES THE RISK OF PREMATURE DEATH
~ Weight loss surgery reduces the risk of premature death, especially from such obesity-related conditions as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, according to a new 40-year study of nearly 22,000 people who had bariatric surgery in Utah.
Compared with those of similar weight, people who underwent one of four types of weight loss surgery were 16% less likely to die from any cause, the study found. The drop in deaths from diseases triggered by obesity, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, was even more dramatic.
“Deaths from cardiovascular disease decreased by 29%, while deaths from various cancers decreased by 43%, which is pretty impressive,” said lead author Ted Adams, an adjunct associate professor in nutrition and integrative physiology at the University of Utah’s School of Medicine.
“There was also a huge percentage drop — a 72% decline — in deaths related to diabetes in people who had surgery compared to those who did not,” he said. One significant downside: The study also found younger people who had the surgery were at higher risk for suicide.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Obesity, reinforces similar findings from earlier research, including a 10-year study in Sweden that found significant reductions in premature deaths, said Dr. Eduardo Grunvald, a professor of medicine and medical director of the weight management program at the University of California San Diego Health.
The Swedish study also found a significant number of people were in remission from diabetes at both two years and 10 years after surgery.
Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy. The area in light pink shows the removed part of the stomach.
“The key for patients is to know that changing your diet becomes more natural, more easy to do after you have bariatric surgery or take the new weight loss medications,” said Grunvald, who was not involved in the Utah study.
“While we don’t yet fully understand why, these interventions actually change the chemistry in your brain, making it much easier to change your diet afterwards.”
“We don’t torture people who have heart disease: ‘Oh, it’s because you ate all that fast food.’ We don’t torture people with diabetes: ‘Oh, it’s because you ate all that cake.’ We tell them they have a disease, and we treat it. Obesity is a disease, too, yet we torture people with obesity by telling them it’s their fault.”
Most of the people who choose bariatric surgery — around 80% — are women, Adams said. One of the strengths of the new study, he said, was the inclusion of men who had undergone the procedure.
“For all-causes of death, the mortality was reduced by 14% for females and by 21% for males,” Adams said. In addition, deaths from related causes, such as heart attack, cancer and diabetes, was 24% lower for females and 22% lower for males who underwent surgery compared with those who did not, he said.
“The gastric sleeve is a procedure where essentially about two-thirds of the stomach is removed laparoscopically,” he said. “It takes less time to perform, and food still passes through the much-smaller stomach. It’s become a very popular option.”
“First, we as a society must consider obesity as a disease, as a biological problem, not as a moral failing,” Grunvald said. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/28/health/bariatric-surgery-success-wellness/index.html
Before considering the gastric sleeve surgery, the patient would do well to try a drug such as semiglutide, or a semiglutide-imitating diet (protein and calcium are the key) -- or other, less drastic approaches. Any surgery is traumatic for the body and includes the danger of complications. It should be considered only as a last resort.
Medicare will pay for bariatric surgery, but the application process is complicated and may take months.
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ending on beauty:
If you come with me
I could show you nothing
I could show you my emptiness
love like snow falling
love like that
~ Sutton Breiding
