Morning in Montreal; M. Iossel; I love the snowy veins/vines of ivy*
CHARON’S COSMOLOGY
With only his dim lantern
To tell him where he is
And every time a mountain
Of fresh corpses to load up
Take them to the other side
Where there are plenty more
I’d say by now he must be confused
As to which side is which
I’d say it doesn’t matter
No one complains he’s got
Their pockets to go through
In one a crust of bread in another a sausage
Once in a while a mirror
Or a book which he throws
Overboard into the dark river
Swift and cold and deep
~ Charles Simic
Simic’s earliest memories were of wartime in what was to become Yugoslavia. In almost all of Simic’s poems, there are some reference to world history, which he regarded as obscene due to constant wars.
And every time a mountain
Of fresh corpses to load up
Take them to the other side
Where there are plenty more
I’d say by now he must be confused
As to which side is which
A mountain of corpses — we’ve all seen those gruesome historical photos of concentration camps.
“Pig, do not admire so much
your reflection in the butcher’s knife”
— I quote from memory, and no longer remember the title of the poem. But it’s very much Simic’s mode — you might call it ruthless — conditioned by the world where we see constant warfare and other moral obscenities.
Charon by MichelangeloThe secret ambition of all lyric poetry is to stop time. ~ Charles Simic
Oriana:
Yes, to attain to the “timeless,” universal truths. As Ezra Pound said it, “Poetry is the news that stays news.”
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HOW JANE AUSTEN ALMOST WALKED AWAY FROM WRITING
~ The story begins with an almost-twenty Jane, at home in Hampshire. It’s the winter of 1795, and Austen’s first full-length novel is safely drafted. Enter Tom Lefroy, visiting a neighboring rectory, and delighting Jane, celebrating her birthday on 16 December. Despite evidence that the two young people are strongly attracted to each other, despite a letter suggesting that Jane has great hopes of Tom, there is no engagement, let alone marriage. Money is the problem. It usually is, in Austen’s world.
For some, including one of her best biographers Claire Tomalin, this was a crucial turning point in Austen’s life: “it was not Tom Lefroy, or anyone like him, who became her adventure, but the manuscript upstairs. Not marriage, but art.” But, for Tomalin, this is not without regret. Austen would have exchanged her future as a novelist for being married to Tom Lefroy “living in an unknown Ireland, with a large family of children to bring up.”
Regret (whether turning to bitterness or creativity or both) is one enduring way of seeing Jane Austen’s life, as she sublimates her natural desire for a husband and family and puts her energies into her writing. Some takes on this would be laughable if the ideas underpinning them were not so enduring. Apparently, the ironic ending to Northanger Abbey was written by a woman “on the brink of destruction, in her early twenties, as a result of loneliness, of sexual longing.” The novel shows her “asking the old question: Where is the man for me?”—John Halperin writes in 1984. Others flip the coin, viewing Austen as having a narrow escape from the literary and legal oblivion of marriage.
Add to the mix the one proposal of marriage we know Austen received, from Harris Bigg-Wither in early December 1802. Jane accepted, slept on it, then withdrew her acceptance. More often than not, commentators express some limited sadness that Jane chose to remain single and miss out on the joys of married life, alleviated by relief that by refusing Bigg-Wither, the world gained her novels. Given the actual timing of the proposal/refusal, the episode does not seem to have so much significance: it would be a further eight years before one of Austen’s novels would reach the world.
Somewhere between these two is the possibility that if Austen had married, or if her financial situation had improved in some way, her writing might have remained for ever within a semi-private setting, as appropriate to a lady with private income, whether married or no; another Montagu, if less exalted socially. Even that compromise scenario is tested by a letter written by Jane’s clergyman father, George, on 1 November 1797, offering the publishers Cadell & Davies “a manuscript novel, comprised in three vols about the size of Miss Burney’s Evelina.” Mr. Austen asks about the “expense of publishing it at the author’s risk” but also floats the idea that Cadell & Davies might advance something “for the property of it, if, on a perusal, it is approved of?”
Mr. Austen was probably offering the first version of Pride and Prejudice, originally entitled First Impressions, which Jane had written over the course of the previous year. The publishers “declined by Return of Post,” failing to answer Mr. Austen’s query about the cost of what we might call self-publication, ignoring his hints about an advance, and refusing even to read the manuscript.
The novel’s existence at the end of 1797 and George Austen’s attempt to sell it argues that the Tom Lefroy episode did not stop Jane Austen from writing. Nor did it stop her family supporting her ambitions to be a print author. Quite the opposite it seems.
But did the rejection of her Burney-esque novel in 1797 do so? Again, it seems not. Austen continued to carry her writing desk with her wherever life took her. While traveling through Dartford in 1798 she almost lost it, and her savings of seven pounds, when it was accidentally placed in a horse-drawn chaise heading for Dover. When, three years on, George Austen decided to leave the Hampshire village of Steventon and move to Bath, Austen’s life became one of constant moving, with many seeing her as unsettled by the experience.
Yet still she wrote. More than that, in 1803, she successfully sold a novel, Susan, to a publisher, receiving the copyright payment—ten whole pounds—her father had been angling for in 1797. (As with the earlier unsuccessful attempt to sell First Impressions, the business was conducted by Jane’s male relatives or their representatives.) It was a hollow triumph because Crosby, the publisher, took no steps to publish Susan. No matter: Austen began a new novel at the start of 1804. She had just turned twenty-eight in December.
By her next birthday, she had abandoned the work. Jane Austen hung on to the opening chapters to her death but never wrote them out as a fair copy. This was the moment the music could have died. What do the chapters (published long after Austen’s death as The Watsons) tell us, and why did she put them aside?
If you read them, you might be surprised by their bleakness. The world in which Emma Watson, Austen’s watchful, dependent heroine, moves is not terrible, no one is hungry, suicidal or homeless. But it is packed full of bitchy, disappointed and snobbish women living utterly boring lives.
The sheer bitterness of the opening chapters makes it very hard to see how Austen could have engineered the necessary “romantic” ending of couples united in wedded bliss. Men are presented as so utterly useless, the institution of marriage so utterly bankrupt, that to present either as the goal or reward for a young woman would seem absurd. Austen doesn’t even bother to offer more than the haziest glimpse of a male love interest. Instead, all her writerly energies are invested in showing the constriction of Emma Watson’s life and (looking on the bright side) the consolation of the companionship of a sister, Elizabeth.
It is almost too easy to map these fictional sisters onto Jane and Cassandra Austen. In a letter written some years later, Austen evokes the claustrophobia of everyday life, the banal social encounters, the dutiful visits, the departure of servants, the arrival of illness. It is escaped in two ways, both mentioned only in passing and with irony. One is the success of “S & S:” Sense and Sensibility has reached Ireland. The other is Cassandra: she and Jane are rather gloriously “the formidables.”
In 1804, Austen allows her impoverished heroine a superb (formidable?) one-liner, adding it in one of her “patches” or edits. Emma Watson is speaking to the arrogant, detached and wealthy Lord Osborne who has no idea what it is to have little money: “Female Economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.” Lord Osborne’s response is as significant as Emma Watson’s statement. Emma’s “manner had been neither Sententious nor sarcastic, but there was a something in its mild seriousness, as well as in the words themselves which made his Lordship think.”
Is this exchange just one of the many moments when Austen uses her modest and submissive heroines to challenge patriarchal values? I am not so sure. For all the satire of the marriage market, for all the suggestions—more than suggestions—that women (of a certain class) are trapped by the legal, economic and social structures of their time, Austen nevertheless offers no critique of those structures. Her solution, at least in 1804, is for good women to educate men. Emma Watson’s “mild seriousness” shorn of sententiousness and sarcasm does make Lord Osborne think.
This may be strategic. Perhaps, to reach male readers, Austen has to dial down her judgements on society. Or perhaps driven or conditioned by her political conservatism and her Anglican faith, she is suggesting Emma’s kind of approach as the appropriate use of feminine power. The questions remain: can Emma Watson as a character, can she, Jane Austen, as a novelist, morally educate their men? Austen’s sense that the answer might be “no” may lie behind her decision to leave Emma Watson’s story unfinished.
I believe but of course cannot prove that Austen knows that what she has written is plain and simple too bleak, her delineation of female dependency too stark. This is a Cinderella story without the prospect of a ball, let alone a prince. Austen knows or believes at this stage in her life that to get published, she needed that romantic plot. The Watsons may well be not the tragic victim of patriarchal oppression but rather Austen’s dirty little secret, the kind of dispiriting satire that she may have wanted to write, but which was incompatible with a more powerful desire: to be a print author.
Her next step, when she made a fair copy of one of her most substantial teenage works, the epistolary novella Lady Susan, was possibly a fresh attempt at publication, although just as likely to have been motivated by a desire to entertain her family circle. But then, just as her father’s unexpected death in January 1805 left Jane, her sister and her mother completely dependent on the goodwill of their male relatives and more in need than ever of both money and entertainment, Austen was unable to press on. She finally gave up on novel writing.
For the next four years, letters were Austen’s only writerly output. Then another turn in the path. One of Austen’s brothers, Edward Knight (adopted as a boy by wealthy, childless relatives and duly taking their name) gave Jane, Cassandra and their mother, together with a family friend, Martha Lloyd, a substantial cottage close to one of his manor houses to live in. The years of wandering were over. Jane Austen, at thirty-four, had a home: Chawton.
The house is now become something of a pilgrimage site, so connected has it become with Austen’s emergence as an author. At Chawton Cottage, she is pictured beyond the quest for a husband, perhaps breathing a sigh of relief at not having to engage in the exhausting and dangerous business of having children. At Chawton, so the story goes, the years of silence ended.
But even before the move, Austen the novelist was stirring. She wrote to the publishers who had bought Susan (using the pseudonym of Mrs. Ashton Dennis, it has been suggested only for the pleasure of being able to use the initials MAD), saying that she wanted the manuscript back: “Six years have since passed, & this work of which I avow myself the Authoress, has never to the best of my knowledge appeared in print.” They wrote back to say: pay us what we paid you. Austen dropped Susan for the moment, and picked up an epistolary novel, Elinor and Marianne, that she had first written some ten years earlier. She revised her prose (no more letters) and revised her approach to publishers.
Back in 1797, George Austen had asked Cadell & Davies how much it would cost him to get his (or rather his daughter’s) manuscript published and received no reply. In 1810, Jane Austen asked the same question of the publishers Thomas Egerton and got an answer: £50. That money, to be paid by the author, would cover the book’s production and distribution. Any profits would come to the author, minus a commission taken by the publisher, but so too would any losses. Sense and Sensibility was on its way.
It has been calculated that the actual risk for Austen was no more than £30. She had an annual dress allowance of £21—eighteen months without new clothes would have done it. A further calculation shows that Austen would have broken even once 419 copies were bought, even allowing for Egerton’s commission. The somewhat heartbreaking conclusion is that, if Austen had known earlier that even at worst her losses were likely to be manageable, she might have published sooner, perhaps when she inherited £50 in 1807. But so it goes.
In 1810, probably with the support of brother Henry, whether he provided the cash or acted as guarantor, Austen made the deal with Egerton. Through the following spring and summer, Sense and Sensibility was always on her mind, as she wrote to Cassandra: “I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child.”
It’s a reassuringly motherly image for a writer’s work, and fits nicely with, what at first sight appears to be Austen’s uncontroversial and properly feminine ambition to be a novelist. The novel offered a new literary space for women. It was forged from genres which were already characterized as feminine, female, womanly: prose romances, letters, letter-books, epistolary narratives, confessional tales written in the first person. One might think this would be a cause for celebration but, sadly and predictably, female success led not to applause but to the novel becoming devalued as a literary form.
Commentators lined up to dismiss it as a feminine genre, what George Eliot (using her male nom de plume) would later call Silly Novels by Lady Novelists. Eliot wrote her attack-essay in the hostile climate of the 1850s, attempting to create a space for “serious” fiction by women, but the easing of women out of the new literary arena, or the corralling of the female novelist into a space marked “trash,” began in Austen’s lifetime. Even the bestselling Fanny Burney, phenomenally successful, almost untouchable in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, was in trouble in the first decades of the nineteenth. The subject matter of her ambitious political novel, The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties was deemed inappropriate for a woman, Burney herself too old—lacking “vivacity” and “bloom.”
The novel, as the go-to genre for female authors, was therefore both obvious choice and poisoned chalice for twenty-year-old Jane in 1795. Only her determination ensured that on 30 October 1811, Austen’s “child” came cautiously, discreetly (its mother was not named: Sense and Sensibility was “By a Lady”) into the world. ~
Winchester Cathedral where Jane Austen was buried. She was only 41 when she died.
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“I SEE PRESIDENT PUTIN AS THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD”: AMERICANS WHO PRAY FOR PUTIN
~ Last weekend a far-right group called America First held a political rally in Orlando. At one point, organizer Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist also involved in the 2017 Charlottesville rally, invited attendees to cheer for Russia. Soon the audience was chanting “Putin! Putin!”
Without context this may seem puzzling. Why would a group of ultra-nationalist Americans celebrate the invasion of a U.S. ally by someone both the left and right have largely understood to be an enemy of freedom?
In fact, though, the U.S. right wing has long cultivated ties with Russia. Some of these are self-evident quid-pro-quo affairs: The “sweeping and systematic” campaigns of election interference authorized by Putin in support of a Trump victory in 2016 and 2020; Trump’s attempt to leverage Congressionally allocated aid to Ukraine for political dirt on the Biden family; the confessed Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast in a bid to develop informal channels of influence on the Republican Party.
More broadly, however, U.S. conservative evangelicals have developed strong symbolic and institutional ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In recent years, these have dovetailed with white racist fantasies of Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles, symbolized by the bare-chested kleptocrat on horseback, Vladimir Putin.
In the following vignettes, I explore how these connections came to exist, and what they reveal about the transnational currents of U.S. conservatism and white nationalism.
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In the summer of 2018, the white supremacist League of the South debuted a bold new initiative on its website: in Russian, the neo-Confederates invited “the Russian people” to understand themselves as “natural allies” of white U.S. southerners in the fight “against the destructive influence of globalism.”
“As descendants of white Europeans, we come from the same genetic pool. As heirs of the European cultural tradition, we share the same values, traditions, and way of life. And as Christians, we worship the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and our common Faith binds us as brothers and sisters. We Southerners believe in a society built on real organic factors such as Blood, Culture, and Religion.”
If we are looking for historic roots of this imagined commonality between U.S. white nationalists and Russians, a good place to start is the 1975 address of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn to the New York chapter of the AFL-CIO labor union.
The Nobel laureate’s vituperations seems like a bizarre digression in a speech primarily devoted to denouncing the West’s weak, short-sighted capitulation to the ruse of Soviet détente. But in fact it was a window onto a fast-coalescing relationship between Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Christian nationalism and the new post-Civil Rights politics of whiteness of his American hosts.
The U.S.S.R’s defectors and escapees had helped shape U.S. definitions of freedom since the onset of the Cold War, but Solzhenitsyn was unique. Born the year after the October Revolution into a propertied and educated family whose land was collectivized, Solzhenitsyn later wrote that he began to lose faith in the Soviet system after witnessing Red Army war crimes while serving as an artillery officer during World War II. Letters critical of Stalin landed him in the infamous Lubyanka prison in 1945. In a politically tinged decision, the Nobel committee awarded him its prize for literature in 1970, and Soviet authorities handed the West a cause célèbre when they denounced the writer as a dupe of Western reactionaries. In 1972 he announced his faith in an open letter addressed to the Moscow Patriarch. Two years later, after the first volume of his massive, quasi-historical The Gulag Archipelago (1974) was published in the West, he was deported.
The first in the U.S. evangelical right to recognize Solzhenitsyn’s political utility was North Carolina’s white supremacist senator Jesse Helms. Helms was at the time involved in supporting Rhodesia’s ruling white minority as a bulwark against communism. Intrigued by a 1973 report from the World Anti-Communist League, Helms pursued the dissident writer, inviting him to North Carolina and proposing that Congress grant him honorary U.S. citizenship. When Solzhenitsyn finally traveled to the United States in 1975, Helms dispatched his own translator as interpreter and escort.
The Nobel laureate’s first stop was the senator’s suburban Virginia home, where the two compared notes on their respective Christian faiths and the paramount necessity of religious freedom to all other human freedoms. Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to speak to the AFL-CIO during the same trip came from its conservative leader, George Meany. Meany’s enthusiasm for the dissident writer derived from the labor leader’s Catholic sexual conservatism, his support for the Vietnam War, and his decades dedicated to purging left tendencies in the U.S. labor movement.
Solzhenitsyn’s visit was a success, and his message was passed among evangelical champions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Evangelical periodicals lauded his denunciations of U.S. moral degeneracy alongside Soviet criminality. He was soon swept up into the pantheon of Christian intellectuals claimed by evangelical activists dedicated to the suffering church in Russia.
Also haunting Washington that summer was Chuck Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon who’d recently been released from prison after serving time for trying to obstruct the Watergate investigation. Now freed, he was feverishly assembling his prison conversion narrative, Born Again (1976). Colson had been a key architect of the new Republican electoral coalition forecast by strategist Patrick Buchanan in 1973—the white, Christian, conservative Silent Majority that combined the former “Dixiecrat” wing of racist Southern Democrats with the second- and third-generation children of white working-class immigrants. In the Nixon White House, Colson had been responsible for wooing Catholic and Eastern Orthodox “white ethnic” union members away from their New Deal allegiance to the Democratic Party—including, specifically, by building a relationship with AFL-CIO President George Meany.
For Colson and his colleagues on the right, Solzhenitsyn was not only a celebrity “Slav”–one of the major European immigrant ethnic groups they courted as an alibi for “white”—just as “crime” and “welfare” were being inscribed on Black and Hispanic Americans. More specifically, he represented a way to control the narrative about who got to be called a political prisoner. At stake was the legitimacy of the “law and order” politics that had won white ethnics to the Silent Majority. The War on Poverty was transformed into a “war on crime” by shifting resources and responsibility for social programs to law enforcement. Social protest was managed through massively expanded incarceration.
But behind bars, members of the Black Power, New Left, and Puerto Rican independence movements embraced an identity as political prisoners and called their prisons “the fascist concentration camps of modern America.” Prison uprisings exploded, peaking at forty-eight in 1972. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was bombarded with appeals for U.S. carceral systems to be subjected to international law. Andrew Young, the first African American ambassador to the UN, acknowledged that there were “hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people I would call political prisoners” in the United States. The most internationally recognizable was Angela Davis.
In speeches, editorials, and his book Loving God: The Cost of Being Christian (1983), Colson undertook a kind of counterintelligence campaign, promoting Solzhenitsyn as the paradigmatic political prisoner, a white man who had been persecuted for his anti-communist politics and his Christian faith. Over the next four decades, Colson’s Prison Fellowship ministry helped reframe the national conversation around criminal justice: arguing that rehabilitation could only come from the inner drama of religious conversion, Prison Fellowship justified the removal of secular, publicly funded services like GED classes, job training, and drug treatment from U.S. prisons.
In the contest over the meanings of captivity, Solzhenitsyn served the Christian right’s efforts to replace Attica with the gulag. American evangelicals leveraged his moral status to amplify the message: the people really suffering, in the United States and globally, were white Christians being crushed by the hands of godless government.
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For more than twenty years, the chief sponsoring foundation behind paleoconservatism was the Rockford Institute, under the presidency of historian Allan Carlson. In 1995 Carlson was invited to Moscow by Anatoly Antonov, professor of family sociology and demography at the prestigious Moscow State University, to discuss their shared concern: declining rates of marriage and fertility. Many post-Soviet nations saw their life expectancy and birthrates plummet in the 1990s as neoliberal “shock therapy” destroyed social safety nets in the name of liberating market competition, and Antonov’s was already a public voice of concern over small families. Carlson’s writings had intrigued him with the argument that an “androgynous ideal” was replacing the fertile, male-headed “traditional family” and concrete policy recommendations for privileging larger families.
Antonov introduced Carlson to like-minded Russian academics, politicians, and priests, and their shared vision became the World Conference of Families. On the U.S. side of the relationship, Carlson cultivated longstanding allies such as the Utah-based Sutherland Institute, led at the time by Paul T. Mero, whose work included penning a report called How Congress Supports and Funds Organized Homosexuality for the office of California congressman Bob Dornan.
However, it was the Russian branch of the organization that assumed international leadership, complete with a private laser show in the Kremlin for its 2014 Moscow meeting. Its stature was bolstered by a novel “family values” wing of the Russian Orthodox Church advising Putin-era family policy and by patronage from representatives of Russia’s flamboyant business class. The meeting took place while the European Union was sanctioning the meeting’s host, private equity financier Konstantin Malofeyev, for funding illegal military units in support of ethnic Russian separatists in Crimean areas of Ukraine.
Some of these individuals and organizations have won official status at the United Nations, allowing them to influence policy. But the public connections are only part of the story: a 2014 hack of emails revealed that WCF’s Russian funders also secretly promote a pro-Russian geopolitics through far-right anti-immigrant parties such as Italy’s Liga, France’s Front National, and Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs. From their standpoint, the logic is self-evident: an “anti-civilization” aimed at the “physical extinction of people” is underway through the “sodomization of the world,” and only Russia can save the day. It is no surprise that Putin cited the need to defend the traditional family as a reason for invading Ukraine.
For English-speaking audiences, WCF documentaries on “Demographic Winter” paint a dire picture of falling white birthrates, brought about by the sexual revolution, easier access to divorce, and the end of the traditional family. “The most common boy’s name in Amsterdam is Muhammad,” WCF’s media director tells the viewer—all you need to know, that is, about the apocalyptic consequences of white women’s selfish refusal to reproduce. “Certain kinds of human beings,” one of the talking heads explains, “are on their way to extinction,” unless we can orchestrate a “return to traditional values: patriarchy, properly understood.” The paleocons voiced their explicit fears of non-white immigrant “invasions”; their new institutional platforms transmute white nativism into pro-natalism.
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In the YouTube video, an SUV full of bearded men in cassocks explain that they are on a road trip to South Carolina to explore the surprising growth of the Russian Orthodox Church in the land of “barbecue, country music, moonshine, fireworks, rednecks, and much more.” Their first stop is the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. First the museum curator dismisses the myth that the prominently displayed Confederate battle flag has any “modern political meaning.”
He then addresses the question of Orthodoxy’s attractiveness for southerners: “I think there’s a very manly appeal. . . . It’s not just that you guys have cool beards like I do. It’s simply there’s challenge to the faith. . . . There’s discipline and high standards and something to aspire to. . . . Tradition.” To be sure, the video puts an optimistic face on the statistically tiny trend of white Southern conversion to Orthodoxy; converts are still probably not quite half of the congregants making up the various Eastern Orthodox churches in the United States, and Orthodoxy can claim less than one percent of Americans, versus evangelicals’ 25 percent. But the phenomenon has important symbolic value for the larger network of both conservative white evangelicals and neo-Confederate “traditionalists.”
In the spring of 1987, American Orthodoxy experienced one of the largest mass conversion events in its history. Two thousand American evangelicals were incorporated, parish by parish, into the Antiochan Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. Men who had spent years in the central institutions of conservative evangelicalism and Pentecostalism—the Campus Crusade for Christ, Dallas Theological Seminary, Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), Oral Roberts University, Wheaton College—led their flocks into full communion with world Orthodoxy, and were themselves transformed into its priests and bishops.
The mass defection—the culmination of more than a decade’s seeking by a loose network of self-proclaimed “Evangelical Orthodox” churches—helped raise awareness of Orthodoxy as an alternative for conservative Christians who were growing disillusioned by what they interpreted as liberalizing trends in their churches. Just as the New Christian Right was at the zenith of its political and cultural power, some of its most committed adherents abandoned its churches for the exotic alternative that few had ever encountered in the flesh. This sudden influx of converts altered the landscape of the Orthodox Church, and laid the ground for the racist right’s appropriations in the twenty-first century.
This dramatic Reagan-era mass evangelical defection to Orthodoxy paved the way for a small but significant hemorrhage. Several Christian celebrity converts have kept the issue alive in conservative Christian circles. The typical conversion narrative starts with an extremely self-aware religious “seeker.” This believer appreciates the fervent search for communion with Christ and clear rules for right living, but finds evangelicalism flaccid where it should be militant, insipid where it should be imposing, relaxed where it should be rigorous.
Particularly disturbing are the seeming compromises with gender liberalization: church feels like another place where men’s authority and basic nature are unwelcome. Often in their telling, the converts are driven to Orthodoxy by a dramatic apostasy by mainline Christianity or the culture more generally: Episcopalians allow gay priests, Methodists allow women as pastors, abortion remains legal [now that varies among states], the Supreme Court makes gay marriage the law of the land.
In these conversion scenarios, the tradition that Orthodoxy offers is one that is forthrightly patriarchal and masculine. “There is something in Orthodoxy that offers ‘a deep masculine romance,’” explains a convert priest. “’Most romance in our age is pink, but this is a romance of swords and gallantry.’”
Southern traditionalists see the former slave states as a particularly promising mission ground alongside the original Pacific Coast efflorescence of evangelical defection. “Like the planter class of the South,” writes one former Catholic convert to Orthodoxy for the neo-Confederate Abbeville Institute, “the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church recognizes how irrevocable institutional change can be, and has therefore been wary to allow it.” Among such ill-considered sudden changes he includes the “radical and immediate emancipation” of enslaved Southerners which the rational, principled planters opposed.
Similarly convinced by the paleoconservative tradition was white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, who founded the hate group Traditionalist Workers Party and converted to Orthodoxy, citing the Eastern church’s subdivision into Greek, Russian, and other geographically rooted patriarchates as evidence that “[r]egional and racial identity is a fundamental principle of Christianity.” He applauded Putin’s aggressive promotion of Orthodox traditional values and racial nationalism in the fight against “anti-Christian degeneracy” and the erosion of white power. “Russia is our biggest inspiration,” Heimbach asserted. “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.”
Heimbach was a principal organizer of the deadly 2017 Charlotteville rally, at which he appeared as a spokesman to the press. A number of other right-wing Orthodox communicants helped on social media to organize the event, as well. Despite credible reports of this activity by anti-racist Orthodox believers to their regional clergy and bishops, none of the American Orthodox jurisdictions took steps to distance the Church or denounce the white supremacist and anti-Semitic recruitment. After all, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America—the body that speaks officially for the fourteen Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States—had responded with alacrity and clarity to denounce gay marriage and lament the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Why did Charlottesville not merit an equally speedy and unequivocal national statement?
The Orthodox bishops finally released a statement on Charlottesville itself, but the larger problem would not go away. “Some of our priests openly display Confederate symbols on their Facebook timelines,” charged an open letter on the scholarly Canadian site Orthodoxy in Dialogue in early 2018, adding that at least one Orthodox seminarian was actively posting white supremacist materials under an alias. More than 150 priests and laypeople signed a letter forcefully requesting “a clear, unambiguous public condemnation of white supremacy, racism, and xenophobia” from the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America—to no avail. Matt Parrott of the Traditionalist Worker’s Party blasted back, asserting that “AltChristianity’s Church Militant is steadily and quietly working its way through the seminaries and sinecures just like the leftist radicals and homosexuals did in the 20th century.”
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But meanwhile other devotees continue to build the mystical connection between aggrieved white Southern nostalgia, Putin’s authoritarian Russia, and Orthodox leadership of the global family values movement. At southernorthodox.org, the faithful quote Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and the neo-Confederate intellectuals of the Abbeville Institute. In the pages of Patrick Buchanan’s paleocon magazine The American Conservative, celebrity convert Rod Dreher advocates for an Orthodox seminary in Texas. And as new research by anthropologist Sarah Riccardi-Swartz shows, converts in Appalachia add another wing to the edifice of authoritarian white Christian nationalism.
At the much broader level of institutionalized ambitions to “dominion,” the Russian partnership has proved invigorating to the American right’s overlapping agendas of white supremacy, masculine authority, and anti-democratic Christian authority. If Putin’s cooperation with the Moscow Patriarchate is a model for emulation, American theocrats are telling us what they seek here at home. We would be foolish not to take them at their word. ~
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-u-s-christians-who-pray-for-putin/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=a1199e695f-reading_list_12_17_22_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-a1199e695f-40729829&mc_cid=a1199e695f&mc_eid=97e2edfae1
Mary: THE PERCEIVED THREAT OF “REPLACEMENT”
I was at first puzzled by the idea of the right wing cozying up to the Russian Orthodoxy and seeing Putin as the "leader of the free world" — some Orwellian doublespeak there!!— until the phrase "aggrieved white Southern nostalgia" made things clear. This is not nostalgia for some past time of rosy innocence; this is nostalgia for slavery itself, blatant and unashamed. These folks found the sudden change of the emancipation of slaves an "ill-considered" one. For them the Evangelicals are too liberal, allowing women pastors and gay marriage. The language they use is revelatory...they want the values of "Blood, Culture and Religion," the romance of traditional patriarchy, something satirized by Twain in Huckleberry Finn.
The narrative these white supremacists spin is one where "traditional white ethnic culture," the patriarchy, and "family values" are threatened by the "liberal left." This threat is seen as a "sodomization," as an effort to outnumber and "replace" white people, white "culture" and its traditional "values." The threats are many: "selfish" white women refusing to give birth to enough white babies to keep a majority, waves of black and brown immigrants, especially those with religions other than Christianity, the acceptance of gay people and their right to marry and parent. Each of these cultural developments is seen as an active strategy to outnumber and replace straight white christian men. Women, gays, people of color are not seen as wanting to be free and equal but dominant and supreme. The hate feeds on fears: gays don't want their rights, they want to grow their numbers by "grooming" and recruiting your children. Women don't want rights over their own bodies, they want to selfishly refuse those bodies' service to the support of white supremacy, letting the brown and black people win by "replacement."
The white supremacists like to see themselves as engaged in a war on Christianity, as oppressed political prisoners of satan loving liberals. It's too easy to dismiss all this as outrageously hysterical, just crazy stuff. The thinking of Nazis was crazy hysterical stuff, and look how far it got, how many it murdered, how much the current crazies want to wave those swastika flags beside the confederate ones. It would be best not to underestimate the damage they can do, have already done, how much they have already eroded the ground on which democracy stands.
Considering the international links and alliances here is extremely important. I knew Solzhenitsyn was not a favorite of the left at all, but was not aware of this larger picture. We are now seeing the rise of nationalistic authoritarianism world wide, and should have perhaps not been so surprised to find some US citizens rooting for Putin.
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WHAT SHOULD HAVE SOVIET UNION DONE TO WIN THE COLD WAR? (Dima Vorobiev)
~ Nothing. The Cold War was unwinnable for us. Only a hot war held a chance for us.
History proved right Chairman Mao and Leo Trotsky. In the longer run, Communism doesn’t stand a chance in peaceful competition with Capitalism.
In the realities of the XX century, Communism could only be achieved in a series of revolutionary wars rippling over to new territories. They would serve to (1) replenish resources for the build-up of the military-industrial muscle of the proletarian revolution, and (2) prevent the “bourgeois transformation” of the ruling elites. We know now that it was this transformation that eventually buried the Communist project in China (1978) and the USSR (1991).
The whole direction the Cold War took—proxy wars, economic competition and an arms race without an actual head-on war—was a dead end for us.
Communism, if bogged down within national borders, is doomed to lose. We suffered from a persistent technological lag in the means of production and inferior productivity.
The death of Stalin was fatal to the Soviet project. Our WW2 hero [Marshall] Zhukov still wouldn’t mind using nuclear warheads for blasting through NATO’s defenses in Germany. However, among the men in the Kremlin the belligerent Bolshevik spirit seemed to have gone.
The upper poster below from 1954 illustrates the cheeky Stalinist belligerence of Stalinism in the early years of the Cold War: “We invite nations to talk peacefully, but can hit back at every provocation”:
Contrast this with the creeping bourgeois spirit in the posters of the last decade of Soviet rule: “The Earth is for plows, not missiles”, “Weapons is a brake on the progress”, “Peoples of the entire world, let’s forge the swords into plows”, “Your work place is the at the forefront in the struggle for peace”. The Bolshevik spirit of collective self-sacrifice for a higher purpose is gone forever.
Chris Otter:
In all fairness, I understand that the Soviet Union invested so much in “peace” and “anti-nuclear" rhetoric in its propaganda, in order to create an anti-militaristic atmosphere in the West. The idea was not to promote peace, but rather to create popular pressure for demilitarization in the West -- where public opinion affected politics much more than in the Soviet Union. This strategy would partially cripple the Western will to invest in more weapons, or even to fight (as we saw in Vietnam). I am not sure the Soviet Union ever had any serious plans of curtailing its own military.
Max Monclair:
Trotsky predicted that the Stalinist bureaucracy would eventually organize a counterrevolution that would dismantle the Soviet state and return to an even worse form of capitalism. Of course, he was thinking it would happen in years, not decades.
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This is Moscow:
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New Russian conscripts
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U.S. Marines
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“Much depends on the health and vigor of our own society. [The Soviet ideology] is a malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in the face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit.” ~ George Kennan, in his famous “Long Telegram” (8,000 words), 1946. Kennan predicted that if the Soviet Union cannot expand, it will collapse.
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WHY POLAND WASN’T ANNEXED BY THE SOVIET UNION LIKE THE BALTIC STATES
~ Joseph Stalin was pragmatic — incorporating Poland into the Soviet Union would cause a major revolt. Contrary to the common beliefs about the Soviets being undefeatable, with an endless amount of people to fight for it — well, the Soviets suffered heavy losses in World War 2, and they weren’t some kind of a juggernaut capable of conquering the world. The anti-communist partisans were already fighting in other places as well, if we’ll add to this the Polish People’s Army, the Civic Militia, and the Poles who fought alongside Western Allies, that would be dangerous to Stalin. On the other hand, installing his puppet — Bolesław Bierut — as the head of Poland, creating some sort of illusion that Poland is free, and in the end, having a buffer state between the USSR and the West, for Stalin was good enough. ~ Gniewko Swiędziwór, Quora
Oriana:
This reminds me of a very old Polish political joke, going back to the times of Bierut. Unfortunately this is also the type of humor that depends on word play, and is lost in translation. The joke was very succinct, and was actually in Russian, though comprehensible to every speaker of Polish: “Bierut, a nye dayut” — “they take, but do not give.” Poles saw the Soviet Union as a colonial power that was looting Poland’s natural resources, especially coal.
(Funny, it's only now that I thought of the irony of arguably the best-known Polish political joke being in Russian.)
Rachid Masimov:
Stalin and the Soviets had bad experience with the Polish nationalism in 1920. They were intent on liberating the Polish proletariat from the capitalist and right-wing fascist oppression, while the Poles naturally viewed the Bolshevik expansion as another Russian Imperial attempt of subjugating the new-born nation, under the new ideological cover-up. They greatly misunderstood each other.
Oriana:
Maybe the supposed misunderstanding was actually a correct understanding on the part of the Poles? Poland did not relish the idea of being erased from the map under any pretext, be it liberation from capitalism or alleged fascism. In fact after WW2 the great majority of Poles felt betrayed by the West as having been sold to the Soviet Union as part of the Yalta agreement. And millions of parents taught their children accordingly, in order to counteract the official propaganda: that Russia under any other name was Poland’s greatest enemy, and not its “big brother.” (Yes, this was an Orwellian situation: the enemy was called brother. Growing up, I heard the phrase "Big Brother" long before I knew about Orwell.)
There was also the question of spreading yourself too thin. If Poland were to be annexed, then likewise Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and so on. But Russia’s ability to suppress uprisings and guerrilla warfare was limited after all. It’s easier to have puppet states near the border, or even not so near — think of East Germany. And Russia certainly wasn’t going to attempt to annex East Germany and then share a border with West Germany. Better to put layers of distance between yourself and a dangerous enemy.
Stalin was ambitious and paranoid, but he wasn’t stupid. Of course there were Soviet troops stationed in Poland, but their presence was kept as inconspicuous as possible. Being an empire is expensive, and, if you spread yourself too thin, unsustainable. It’s a mistake made by would-be conquerors of the world over and over. Stalin knew about the Roman Empire. He knew about Napoleon. He wasn’t stupid — he didn’t want to repeat other conquerors’ mistakes.
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IF PUTIN LOSES THE WAR WITH UKRAINE
~ The idea that Putin’s regime might collapse is almost impossible for the Russians to visualize. Putin and his system are so deeply embedded in their experience of Russia that even the most clear-eyed Russians I have spoken with believe that even if the Russians lose (I can’t speak to whether they think a win is still possible), Putin would hang on to power in some weakened state.
They may be right. But increasingly, such assumptions look as shaky as the assumptions made by West German officials more than three decades ago. We — and they — should not be surprised by a Ukrainian victory, and if that happens, we should not be surprised to see some startling changes within the Kremlin itself.
Back in April, when the war was still young, I wrote that having watched Putin closely for 20 years, “this is the first time that I doubt his ability to survive politically.” I stand by those words now, particularly given what we have seen since: Russia’s catastrophic defeats on the battlefield, Putin’s narrowing of diplomatic exit ramps with his sham annexation of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, an emerging opposition in Russia, new reservations expressed by Putin’s foreign allies, the desperation shown by his highly unpopular “partial mobilization,” and the stampede for the exits that the mobilization has inspired.
There is no question: Ukrainians have the battlefield momentum right now. Their forces are advancing on two fronts, either taking or threatening territory that Putin announced would be Russian territory “forever.” The U.S. and NATO weapons flow continues. Reports of chaos and even anger within the Russian army come almost daily.
I believe some version of defeat is increasingly likely for Russia. I base that on all that we now see, and on my own and others’ experiences with war.
Then there is the more elusive metric: the will to fight. My own understanding of this comes from direct engagement in one war (Vietnam) and indirect involvement in two others (Afghanistan and Iraq). Ultimately, any war becomes very personal and its success rests heavily on whether individual soldiers are ready to risk their lives to defeat an opponent. An army arrives at that readiness through some combination of strong identification with a cause, a government that commands respect, and a conviction that one must destroy the adversary to save oneself and one’s comrades. By now, it is clear that on all these fronts, the Ukrainians hold the overwhelming advantage.
So a Ukrainian victory over the vaunted Russian army is increasingly possible.
How to define a victory for Ukraine? Or, from the other side, what would defeat look like for Russia? To some degree, only Putin himself can answer that — given that he has shifted his war aims and narrative multiple times since the first troops rolled in. But I think he would see it as a defeat if his forces were driven back to the small areas of Donetsk and Luhansk where Russian proxies held sway as Putin’s invasion kicked off on Feb. 24.
That said, the way things are going, “defeat” could look worse from the Russian perspective; Ukraine may push further and expel Russian forces from those territories Putin held prior to the war. It is harder perhaps to imagine a Ukrainian recapture of Crimea, which Putin seized in 2014, but even this is no longer out of the question.
It would be hard for Putin to spin any of these outcomes into “mission accomplished”; some of his most stalwart pro-war propagandists have begun questioning Russia’s performance and demanded that more territory be taken, no matter the costs to Russian soldiers. For many vocal and influential Russians, any of the defeat scenarios would be seen as an unacceptable humiliation.
Several analysts have argued that Russia still has a vast military that it has yet to commit, and which dwarfs the Ukrainian capability. But where is it? Is Putin saving this card for a larger battle with NATO — even though he calls the battle with Kviv “existential”? And if he really holds that military strength, why must he mobilize 300,000 untrained and unwilling Russians to continue the fight in Ukraine?
It is no longer unthinkable that Putin will lose power in the event of a catastrophic outcome in Ukraine — the collapse of the Russian military or its expulsion from the country. Exactly how this would unfold is not clear, which helps explain why even those sophisticated Russians I spoke with find the scenarios so hard to fathom.
Under Putin’s own last round of constitutional changes, in the event that a sitting president leaves office, the prime minister (currently an obscure former taxation official hand-picked by Putin), would become president for 90 days or until a new election can be held. Of course, the problem with this orderly scenario is that no one sees Putin allowing it to happen.
But if Russia suffers defeat in Ukraine, the Russian elite and all those ultranationalists who dominate the media would have to contemplate a world in which Russia and many of its leaders remain under Western sanctions, with a weak and globally isolated leader at the helm, and Russia carrying little weight on the world stage. Would they accept that? Their capacity for sycophancy has been almost boundless, but it is already fraying; calls for a more competent and brutal campaign have filled the airwaves lately, and public criticism of the mobilization has been heard all over the vast reaches of the Russian Federation.
Some Russians — struggling to imagine the aftermath of a Russian loss — sketch yet another scenario, one that might be described as a slow fading away for the Russian leader. A weakened Putin would cling to power, many more Russians would leave the country, and Russia would for a time simply exist as a dispirited and weak country.
This is what Putin’s monumental miscalculation has wrought for a country that, whatever its shortcomings, has no shortage of proud traditions and gifted citizens, and which during his early years in power had attained a place of significant influence and respect in the world.
Russia has arrived at a critical, even existential, crossroads at least three times since World War I — during its 1917 revolution, facing the German onslaught on its territory that began in 1941, and then in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These were huge and very different challenges, and Russia is in some ways still working its way through the consequences of all those upheavals.
With his Ukraine invasion, and the folly of his many moves since, Putin appears to be driving the country toward another crossroads. The outcome looks every bit as uncertain and potentially destabilizing as those earlier cataclysmic events. ~ John McLaughlin, former acting director of the CIA.
https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/10/10/putin-might-lose-the-war-what-would-that-look-like-for-russia-ukraine-and-the-world/?utm_source=Quora&utm_medium=Paid&utm_campaign=Quora-Paid-Putin-Loses
UKRAINE GETS ENOUGH WEAPONS NOT TO LOSE, BUT NOT ENOUGH TO WIN
Scholz and Putin
Mike Chang:
The Russian federation after the war regardless of the outcome will never be the same. They are behind in technology and GDP. They never recovered from the massive loss of men in WW2 that hit the same age group in the Ukrainian invasion. That means the depleted age group just got more depleted. That results in a cycle with huge gaps in the economy. Russia and Ukraine are both never going to be the same again as they also lost people in the same age group. Throw in the mass Exodus and the economic ripples turn into waves.
Bruce Dobson:
Story I heard many years ago. Visiting Japanese steel executives were touring Russian steel mill. Russians were bragging about upgrades. When asked how far behind they were, the Japanese answered “forever”.
Michael Woodman:
Let’s not forget the oil and gas sales to Europe that Russia has lost forever.
Neoprene:
Russia loses more men every year from alcohol abuse than in this war. Even the US is losing more through drugs than Russia loses soldiers.
Roland Barteczko:
Even if the West keeps up its support, will it be enough? Ukraine needs a much higher number of tanks, artillery pieces, and air defense systems than the West is ready to deliver. As one NATO general has put it: “they get enough to not lose but not enough to win”. The West must drastically increase its support for Ukraine and do it fast. Honestly, I don’t see that happen, at least not yet.
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JANUARY 20, 2023 UPDATE: WAGNER GROUP SUSTAINS MASSIVE LOSSES; ACCUSES RUSSIANS OF BEING TRAITORS
~ The Russian losses continue to mount, even among the mercenaries. The mounting losses are starting to cause racks within the Russian military.
It has been reported that in the battles for Bakhmut and Soledar alone, the Wagner Group lost about 40,000 soldiers, accounting for about two-thirds of its personnel. To capture a town of less than 10,000, Prigozhin lost two-thirds of his soldiers.
"The two hottest spots remain: Bakhmut and Soledar. This is logical, let me remind you why: Putin tried to give the order to reach the administrative borders of Donetsk region by the end of 2022. It did not work. In fact, they are suffering very unprecedented losses there and attempted to switch to Soledar, where Prigozhin tried to play himself as an independent commander. He failed: Wagner Group suffered simply incredible losses there. At the moment, about 40,000 personnel are estimated to be killed and wounded, accounting for about two-thirds of this structure," military expert Petro Chernyk reported.
Chernyk added that the mobilization and recruitment of prison inmates continues in Russia. Therefore, one should not underestimate the gross number of people that the enemy wants to use in the war with Ukraine.
Prigozhin has criticized the MoD’s new guidelines for Russian troops in Ukraine that restrict the use of certain personal electronic devices in combat zones and set stricter guidelines for men’s grooming standards on January 18.
Prigozhin defended Russian line soldiers, who disregarded grooming norms, noting that many Muslim and Orthodox Christian combatants sported beards, and asserted that soldiers’ use of cellphones and tablets is essential for modern warfare.
“War is the moment for the courageous and active, not the clean-shaven who turned in their phones to the warehouse,” Prigozhin is quoted as saying.
Russian MoD officials are out of touch according to Prigozhin, should “grow along with the evolution of modern warfare, learn how to successfully kill the enemy and conquer areas,” rather than “comb everyone under your silly rules, principles, and whims.”
“One of Prigozhin’s most audacious attacks on the Kremlin to date involved a direct criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presidential administration and an implication that certain employees there are traitors who want Russia to lose the conflict in Ukraine,” according to an ISW report.
Prigozhin indicated that certain members of the Putin’s presidential administration opposed the ban on YouTube since it would jeopardize their efforts to improve relations with the United States after Russia loses the war in Ukraine.
According to Prigozhin, such officials believe that if Russia pleads for Western pardon after losing the war, the United States will “forget (Russia) its crimes” of backing “pro-Russian interests” and “supporting Putin.”
Prigozhin referred to the government’s employees as “traitors of the country” who claimed to uphold lofty pro-Russian ideals but still resided, traveled, and “supported the West in every imaginable manner.”
So gaps are starting to develop in the Russia military system. Distrust is fomenting. People are turning in each other. Are we nearing the end of the involvement of the Wagner Group? ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Johari Salim:
Bakhmut and Soledar is Russian pyrrhic victory at its best. The fall of both won’t have any strategic impact on the war itself.
Ironically two Chechen groups are also now fighting each other in this battle. The Kadyrovites (Current commander: Adam Delimkhanov) of Ramzan Kadyrov is with the Russian (led by Putin’s confidant, Yevgeny Prigozhin) and Sheikh Mansur Brigade (Current commander: Muslim Cheberloyevsky) on the Ukrainian side.
Sheikh Mansur Brigade’s motto is “Freedom or Death” whilst Kadyrovites’s motto is “Akhmad is best”.
Akhmad (full name:Akhmad-Khadzhi Abdulkhamidovich Kadyrov) was Ramzan’s father who betrayed the Chechen and sided with Putin at the outbreak of Chechen 2nd War with Russia in the autumn of 1999. He was killed by a bomb blast during Russia Victory Day Memorial Parade at Grozny, Chechnya on 9 May 2004.
Rob Connolly:
The battle for Bakhmut has been ongoing since August, so they’ve had a long time to rack up a big body count. I have seen a figure of 15,000 WG casualties for capturing Soledar. Given that their chosen tactic is the old Soviet ‘Human Wave’ against artillery and dug-in machine guns, their losses are going to have been enormous. 40K is probably exaggerated — 25-30K more realistic?
Brian Jaggard:
Prigozhin might fall out of a window soon if he continues to criticize the Kremlin & the Russian military. Probably his close ties to Putin are what’s keeping him alive at this point.
He’s likely willing to keep trying to take Bakhmut in order to show his value but is already blaming the Russian military (plus giving the Ukrainians some credit) for his failure to date. If he doesn’t take Bakhmut, it could spell the end of Prigozhin.
Steven M:
Involvement of the Wagner Group will end when Russia no longer needs cannon fodder. Sending prisoners to die instead of trained Russian regulars has been the plan all along. Don’t be fooled by Russian theater acting to the contrary. Prigozhin’s job has always been to provide cannon fodder while saving millions of rubles that used to be spent housing, feeding, clothing and medical care for prisoners and mental patients.
Max Williams:
This disunity will be the ultimate defeat of Russia I believe. While most well-organized countries’ militaries are a single entity with a single chain of command, Russia’s are more like a wide group of militias, most of whom think the others are assholes.
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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE RUSSIAN SOLDIERS WHO DUG IN AROUND CHERNOBYL
~ For the Russian troops who dug in in the Red Forest, about 200 died in hospital in Belarus from acute radiation poisoning and the remaining 20,000 or so troops had varying degrees of radiation poisoning and many are still being treated in Belarus. This was to be the centerpiece of Russian claims about Ukraine using a “dirty bomb.” Unfortunately, Belarussian authorities cremated the bodies before the Russian politicians could get a hold of them. The ones who survived will have to live with a seriously increased risk of cancers for the rest of their lives.
The Red Forest was the most contaminated part of Chernobyl, named because the pine trees turned red when exposed top massive radiation. There were locals shouting at the Russians through bullhorns to not dig there and to wet the roads before driving vehicles on them. The Russian troops shot at the Ukrainians who tried to warn them.
Then about three days into the occupation of Chernobyl, projectile vomiting and diarrhea began. And 20,000 Russian troops fled into Belarus in complete disorder. They left behind supplies and vehicles and even goods looted from Ukrainian border villages. Even the Ukrainians will not venture into the area.
I have seen one Russian milblogger who claimed that seeing the Russian troops fleeing into Belarus in such disorder is a reason why the Belarussian military does not want to be involved in the Second Russo-Ukrainian War. ~ R. W. Carmichael, Quora
RUSSIA DURING ITS HORRIBLE NINETIES
~ Well, let me put my answer into three words. Poverty. Crime. Humiliation.
Poverty
In 1990s I lived in St.Petersburg with my parents who were ordinary engineers at state enterprises. They didn’t lose their jobs per se, but the government just stopped paying people. My father went to garage to fix cars, my mother took a string of low paid jobs like cashier in a grocery shop or similar. I was a liability cause I just enrolled in university and couldn’t study and work at the same time.
Many St. Petersburgers were going frequently to Finland for so called ‘shopping tours’. They bought alcohol and cigarettes that were cheap in Russia, but taxed heavily in Finland. They got on a bus, which delivered them to Finland. They would stop on a next gas station after the Finnish border and were selling vodka and cigarettes to Finns risking getting caught by police. The money they got they usually spent in some shops with very cheap prices or in second hand clothes shops.
Crime
Those who didn’t have brains and moral, but had strong arms became mobsters. They were engaged in all sorts of illegal activities from racket to robberies. Gangs wars and group killings became a norm. I remember stories when a hitman entered the five star hotel in the main street of the city and used a Kalashnikov to kill a couple of guys just in front of terrified foreign tourists.
Another incident happened not far from my house involved usage of explosives. A car with a prominent criminal got stuck in a usual traffic jam. A guy approached the car waiting for the green traffic light, calmly placed a bomb on the roof of the car and quickly ran to the safe distance just in time before the bomb tore the SUV apart. My mother was working as a cashier in a grocery store and were lucky to stay alive when armed robbers attacked the shop.
Humiliation
Once a powerful country, which first put man in space and defeated Nazis in a great war, resorted to receive humanitarian aid from the same country it defeated 50 year ago. Unable to put up any resistance we saw how NATO was getting closer to our borders. I got my first passport for traveling abroad somewhere in mid 90s and it was still the passport bearing Soviet Union symbols. The country didn’t have the money to print passports with the national coat of arms. ~ Pavel Novikov, Quora
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COULD THE SOVIET UNION HAVE WON AGAINST NAZIS WITHOUT WESTERN HELP?
63% of Russians believed that the Soviet Union would have won World War II without allies, according to a Levada poll from five years back.
But Khrushchev himself wrote in his memoirs:
“I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's view on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were discussing ‘freely’ among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one-on-one we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure and we would have lost the war.”
Oriana:
If Russia were to undergo a process of de-Sovietization that would parallel the post-war German de-Nazification, one of the things the citizenry would have to learn is that no, the Soviet Union did not single-handedly win WW2.
Joe: THE NAVAL AND AIR SUPERIORITY OF THE ALLIES
There are three reasons Russia needed its western allies to defeat the Nazis. The first is the Naval Superiority of the British and American Navies. Although the German Navy was well equipped, it was small and failed to stop or severely hinder the shipping of supplies to Britain or Russia. The lack of naval support allowed the manufacturing of the United States to have a leading role in WWII.
American companies, such as Ford Motor Company, produced an endless supply of military equipment and parts for Russia and England. The military supplies included jeeps, planes, tanks, and weapons. The Russian war with Ukraine exemplifies the need for a secure and reliable supply chain of new equipment and parts. The Russian Army is unable to support its troops with parts and weapons.
This situation slows down its ability to organize an attack or counterattack. The lack of new equipment is partly due to sanctions and the Russian lack of manufacturing infrastructure. Russia slows Ukraine’s counterattacks by the diversion provided by their air superiority, but the lack of adequate supplies hinders their ground forces. Thus, the third reason is that German manufacturing lacked the necessary speed to produce new planes and supplies that the battle conditions required.
The Battle for Britain cost the Nazis air power. To compensate for their manufacturing problems, Germany withdrew planes from their Egyptian theater. The result was that the German attack stalled outside Cairo. The German air force withdrew some planes from its Eastern Front. The result was a stalled offensive for the Ural Oil fields and Moscow. Among the many reasons contributing to the Russian victory, military experts considered air superiority to be a primary reason for the allied victory in WWII.
Britain’s air defense forced the Luftwaffe to end its bombing campaign of England and allowed the western allies to bomb Germany without encountering substantial resistance. The mistakes made by Hitler were many, and the courage of all those who resisted Nazi occupation was enormous. Yet, it took several countries working as a team to win the war.
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SNOW REMOVAL AND REVOLUTION (Dima Vorobiev)
~ In February 1917, in St. Petersburg, an uprising happened that led to the abdication of Czar Nicholas II, the take-down of the Russian Empire, and the rest of the distressing stuff you know about the XX century. What sparked the event was closed bakeries in the city that didn’t have flour to make bread. The flour wasn’t there not because of a lack of grain—a lot of it was stocked in the train stations and depots around the country—but because heavy snowfalls made it impossible to deliver it from Central Russia to St. Petersburg.
The long disgruntled lines in front of the bakeries were the starting point of the ripples, then waves, and then a tsunami that swept the empire off its feet.
The man who made sure that these ripples would ultimately grow into a revolutionary tsunami was an unassuming but very determined Bolshevik. His name was Skryabin. He went on to become a luminary in the pantheon of Soviet leaders, known to the rest of the world as Vyacheslav Molotov.
He was one of the most trusted men in Stalin’s circle. He never forgot what brought down the mighty Romanov’s empire: snow. Neither did the rest of the men in the Kremlin. Which made it very clear to anyone responsible for snow removal in Moscow and other large Soviet cities: the day when a black government sedan won’t be able to leave the Kremlin because of snowfall, would be the last day of their career—and most probably their life.
In the Soviet Union, no one ever tried penny-pinching on snow removal.
In the photo below is Prospect Marksa [Karl Marx Prospect] outside the Hotel National in Moscow:
Paul Designer:
The interesting thing about Molotov was that after Mao split with Khruschev in the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, Molotov agreed with Mao, and said “China is our only hope!”
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WHY THE BRITISH WORKING CLASS DOESN’T WANT TO ABOLISH THE CLASS SYSTEM
~ The working class people in general are extremely conservative. They are just content with the classes, the monarchy, the private schools, the elitism -- it is the toff stuff. For them, toffs are just different kind of people and they have their own elitist follies.
What the working class people desire is not social but material good — access to ownership of homes, setting up their own small businesses, a car, a summer cottage, you name it. Something which is tangible to for you and your family. And if your kid is bright, perhaps sending him to one of those toff [upper class] schools and toff universities.
The working class is perfectly content with monarchy. It represents a continuum and something which is above the ordinary people but also above the middle class and the toffs.
It is the rotten eggs of the upper class who want those things — abolition of monarchy, abolition of aristocracy, private schools, and all other elements of social hierarchy and elitism. The reason is that they realize they can never attain those things on their own merit, and neither likely to inherit those things. So what drives them forward is resentment — if they cannot have them, so cannot anyone else either.
This is exactly the same why the American working class is perfectly content with the American plutocracy and the existing plutocrats, Ivy League, big businesses, corporate American and the other stuff — they want it that way. ~ Susan Viljanen, Quora
Alexander Whitaker:
The American proletariat aspires to BE Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, not overthrow them.
Eugene Sho:
PLUS they assume that anyone successful and rich must be “good" and hard working and deserving, while anyone poor or unsuccessful must be lazy, unmotivated, “bad" and therefore worth of only scorn and derision.
Same with good looking people vs not attractive. Pretty MUST mean they are good.
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PARENTING IN POPULAR CULTURE
~ When comedian Louis C.K. premiered his television show “Louie” in 2010, he presented a drastically different view of domestic comedy. He inserted into his show all the boring, tedious, and frustrating details of modern parenting. That level of honesty was an outlier not only on television but across all forms of popular media at the time. Most novels and memoirs focusing on parenthood omitted these parts of the job as well, under the assumption they’d come across as mind-numbingly tiresome on the page as in real life. “Louie” suffused its hyperrealistic portrayal of parenting with comedy, which perhaps softened the blow, but the other contemporary artist doing the closest thing to Louis C.K.’s work at the time, Karl Ove Knausgaard, would never be mistaken as a comic writer.
The specter of parenting hovers over the entirety of Knausgaard’s six-volume work, “My Struggle,” with about equal space devoted to the author’s relationship with his father and the author’s relationship with his wife and children (three at the time of “My Struggle;” a fourth was born after its publication). And like Louis C.K., Knausgaard feels no inclination toward eliding over the mundanities of raising children. In fact, his extended dives into the daily routines of parenting, with dozens of pages covering a walk to school or a trip to the grocery store to pick up last-minute dinner items, seem intended to challenge his readers to keep up with him in his quest to survive the blows of fatherhood.
Knausgaard’s parenting stories are riveting. They are tedious at times, but they are riveting in their tediousness. James Wood, writing for the New Yorker on the first two volumes of “My Struggle,” summed up this phenomenon:
Even when I was bored I was interested (which is pretty much like life itself). The prose is often offensively prosaic; the scenes (such as they are) often painfully banal. Knausgaard wants his struggle to be your struggle, too; he immerses the reader in all the clumsy, extraordinary varieties of experience, from changing diapers to playing in a crappy rock band.… Many writers strive to give you the effect, the illusion, of reality. Knausgaard seems to want to give his readers the reality of reality.
By willfully acknowledging how uninteresting parenting can be, Knausgaard, like Louis C.K., has broken away from the expectations of a father, or a mother for that matter. In her own book about motherhood, “Little Labors,” Rivka Galchen anoints Knausgaard and Louis C.K. as the most distinguished “mother writers” of the day. This praise is rooted in their shared ability to address the drag that parenting can be, the way children can suck up your time, your energy, and your overall identity.
The problem with Galchen’s praise of Knausgaard and Louis C.K. as mother writers is the same problem plaguing so many fathers: They exist in a world with different expectations for fathers than for mothers. An essay about “Parent Corner,” a segment of a popular football podcast in which the hosts complain about the antics of their children, uses the term “fandom parenting” to describe the tales they recount each week. One host expresses his dismay at his son stealing candy from a Halloween party while the other grouses about an elementary school scheduling a winter recital head-to-head against an important Thursday night football game. These men talk about a child’s obsession with slime in the same analytical way they’ve just discussed a quarterback’s tendency to throw interceptions at the end of the first half. They observe and have vested interests in the outcome, but they don’t participate. The Knausgaard on the page and the Louie on the screen do, of course, participate, but the stakes don’t seem that high for these fathers, either. If Louie packs the wrong lunch, his daughter just trades it at school for something better. If Knausgaard is late to pick up his children from the daycare, the teacher might give him a scolding, but it’s playful, almost flirtatious.
The fathers in these popular entertainments are living in the chaotic world of parenthood (a noun, a state of being) but are not drowning in the tsunami of parenting (a verb, an effort). There’s a section in Book 6 of “My Struggle” in which Knausgaard discusses a family vacation that ends with a disastrous flight home. After delineating the turmoil of dragging three sleepy kids through an airport, baggage claim, taxi line, and the drive back to their apartment, he takes a moment after all the children are finally tucked into their beds. “The last thing I did was to put Heidi’s dinosaur egg in a bowl of water,” he writes. “So that it would have cracked and a little dinosaur would have emerged by the time she woke the following morning.” It’s a beautiful image that also divulges the confidence he feels as a father. He can handle the chaos, or at least he can handle the role expected of him in this chaos.
Molly, the protagonist in Helen Phillips’s “The Need,” is not feeling this brand of confidence. Left alone with her two small children while her musician husband is playing a gig in South America, Molly senses an intruder in her house in the book’s opening pages. Molly holds her infant son in one arm and cradles her soon-to-be-four-year-old daughter in the other. When Viv, the daughter, starts to speak, Molly cups her hand over the girl’s mouth.
She remembered, for the first time in a long time, an old fear of hers from when Viv was newborn: that she would go into the baby’s room in the morning after letting her cry herself back to sleep in the night only to find an empty crib with a scribble of blood on the sheet, identical to the scribble of blood where a mouse thrashed its way out of the trap on the concrete floor of the basement of her childhood home.
This fear is meant to signal the guilt and anxiety Molly feels about her mothering. If that’s not clear enough to the reader, we eventually learn the identity of the house’s intruder is Molly herself. If not exactly Molly, then an alternate version of her, named Moll, who has arrived to both help (she dons a fish costume to entertain all of Viv’s friends at her birthday party) and torment (she makes passionate love to Molly’s husband when he returns home unexpectedly from his business trip) the reeling mother.
As Molly ponders her children in one of the book’s early scenes, Phillips gives us a glimpse into the mother’s psyche: “Moment by moment, maddened by them and melted by them, maddened/melted, maddened/melted, maddened/melted.” This push-pull between enjoying and suffering through parenthood is embodied by Moll, who may or may not be real (Xenia and I had a fairly extended argument about this point, and I worry that my insistence that Moll is real says more about my gender than my reading acumen). Prior to her invasion of Molly’s home, Moll has lived a parallel version of Molly’s life, with a mirror husband and two children.
But Moll has recently lost them to an explosion, a bomb set off at her workplace, which is essentially the same workplace as Molly’s. Moll can unconditionally cherish the time she spends with Molly’s family because of her loss, and only because of this loss. Before their deaths, she, like Molly, cycled through the ups and downs of motherhood, alternating between the melting and the maddening. It is no coincidence that the children die at the mother’s workplace, this arena of guilt for moms who sense they should be more present for their children but know they need their own space and identity. It’s hard to picture Ward Cleaver or Heathcliff Huxtable or even Karl Ove Knausgaard facing down such demons.
“The Need” is emblematic of recent books and films in which the chaos of parenting is sinister and monstrous for women, threatening to destroy their sanity and the family structure they’ve fought to build. Success — even survival — is not guaranteed for the mothers in these texts the way fathers like Louie or Bill Simmons, the host of the football podcast, always come out relatively unscathed at the end of their parenting tales. Before the narrator in Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” sees her marriage wrecked by her husband’s affair with a much younger coworker, she watches her life crumble apart under the weight of mothering a colicky daughter she refers to as the “devil baby.” The screaming of this devil baby, who can only be calmed by trips to the local Rite Aid pharmacy, rings like “a car alarm … perpetually going off in my head.” When a well-meaning older woman on the subway uses the phrase “sleeping like a baby,” the narrator confesses, “I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.”
A monstrous rage lurks in all of these popular culture depictions of mothering that would feel alien in books, shows, movies, or podcasts focused on fathers. How much of this is cultural, and how much of this is biological? And do those distinctions even matter in the 21st-century sport of competitive parenting? In an article published in the early days of the pandemic, Sara Petersen, lamenting the “impossible state” of modern motherhood, writes, “In reality, mothering is not respected as ‘real work.’ It figures in our collective imagination not as labor, but as something warm and fuzzy and supposedly ‘natural.’ Maternal love and self-sacrifice are put on a pedestal by white patriarchy, but maternal work, the lifeblood of literally everything, is still invisible.”
After reading “Orange World,” the author and artist Miranda July tweeted, “For me this was a non-fiction exposé about normal, everyday life. When it was done I did the thing where u weep & have big thoughts about whole scope of your life & all the plainly obvious things you’ve been ignoring. They’re just right there.” The same sort of praise thrown at Karl Ove Knausgaard and Louis C.K. for their stories about parent-teacher meetings and after-school playdates was cast, by women to a woman, for a story about a young mother losing her mind and body to a breastfeeding devil.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-popular-culture-is-telling-us-about-parenting/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Kerry:
Found the parenting part interesting, could be because I have been fathering for 17 years. I also working for our family's cash income the entire time. Living at home, mostly working from home. Loved every minute of it, no matter how tired I often was, and I mean exhausted. Never felt an ounce of resentment nor looking toward supposedly greener pastures. Life is often a trade-off — I knew I was leaving behind much of my bohemian life style, and also the recognition that comes thru hosting artists at home, having a good time.
The visceral joy of walking the kids to school (holding their hands, singing now and then, playing silly chase games) was a true high, though I am not a morning person AT ALL. I would return home and sleep again, smiling not resentful. And in the afternoon, I would fetch them by bus or on foot. I also did nearly all the food shopping on foot — hard, heavy 1/2 mile in snow or any weather — and totally drained. This was not a pleasure, but a necessity, and well, one of the things that comes with raising kids.
As for kids crying, I would tramp into their room and hold and rock them and sing... a real High for them and me.... the body contact and rhythm and feeling I had soothed their distress.
I also do not think a workplace provides any more space for “identity” than being at home with family.... the give and take of parenting.
Oriana:
Surveys show that fathers enjoy parenthood more than mothers do. But it's always heart-warming to hear about dedicated fathers and the pleasure they take in parenting.
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2019/01/30/fathers-are-happier-parents-mothers-new-study-shows
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REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS DON’T UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER
~ Americans often lament the rise of “extreme partisanship,” but this is a poor description of political reality: Far from increasing, Americans’ attachment to their political parties has considerably weakened over the past years. Liberals no longer strongly identify with the Democratic Party and conservatives no longer strongly identify with the Republican Party.
What is corroding American politics is, specifically, negative partisanship: Although most liberals feel conflicted about the Democratic Party, they really hate the Republican Party. And even though most conservatives feel conflicted about the Republican Party, they really hate the Democratic Party.
America’s political divisions are driven by hatred of an out-group rather than love of the in-group. The question is: Why?
A new study, called “The Perception Gap,” helps provide an answer. More in Common, an advocacy organization devoted to countering extremism that previously published a viral report on America’s “hidden tribes,” set out to understand how political partisans see each other. Researchers asked Democrats to guess how Republicans would answer a range of political questions—and vice versa. (The survey was conducted among a sample of 2,100 U.S. adults the week immediately following the 2018 midterm elections.) What they found is fascinating: Americans’ mental image of the “other side” is a caricature.
According to the Democratic caricature, most Republicans stridently oppose immigration, hold deeply prejudiced views about religious minorities, and are blind to the existence of racism or sexism. Asked to guess what share of Republicans believe that immigration can strengthen America so long as it is “properly controlled,” for example, Democrats estimated about half; actually, nearly nine in 10 agreed with this sentiment.
Democrats also estimated that four in 10 Republicans believe that “many Muslims are good Americans,” and that only half recognize that “racism still exists in America.” In reality, those figures were two-thirds and four in five.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans are also prone to caricature Democrats. For example, Republicans approximated that only about half of Democrats are “proud to be American” despite the country’s problems. Actually, more than four in five Democrats said they are. Similarly, Republicans guessed that fewer than four in 10 Democrats reject the idea of open borders. Actually, seven in 10 said they do.
If the reasons for mutual hatred are rooted as much in mutual misunderstanding as in genuine differences of values, that suggests Americans’ divisions should in principle be easy to remedy. It’s all just a matter of education.
Unfortunately, the “Perception Gap” study suggests that neither the media nor the universities are likely to remedy Americans’ inability to hear one another: It found that the best educated and most politically interested Americans are more likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less tuned-in peers.
Americans who rarely or never follow the news are surprisingly good at estimating the views of people with whom they disagree. On average, they misjudge the preferences of political adversaries by less than 10 percent. Those who follow the news most of the time, by contrast, are terrible at understanding their adversaries. On average, they believe that the share of their political adversaries who endorse extreme views is about 30 percent higher than it is in reality.
Perhaps because institutions of higher learning tend to be dominated by liberals, Republicans who have gone to college are not more likely to caricature their ideological adversaries than those who dropped out of high school. But among Democrats, education seems to make the problem much worse. Democrats who have a high-school degree suffer from a greater perception gap than those who don’t. Democrats who went to college harbor greater misunderstandings than those who didn’t. And those with a postgrad degree have a way more skewed view of Republicans than anybody else.
It is deeply worrying that Americans now have so little understanding of their political adversaries. It is downright disturbing that the very institutions that ought to help us become better informed may actually be deepening our mutual incomprehension. ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republicans-and-democrats-dont-understand-each-other/592324/
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THE MYSTERY OF THE LONGEVITY OF LONG-FLYING BIRDS
~ Hummingbirds live life in the fastest of fast lanes, and with few exceptions, animals that live fast, die young. But ruby-throated hummingbirds can live more than nine years in the wild, even as they perform their death-defying 600-mile flights across the Caribbean twice per year. Nor are they the longest-lived hummingbird. The similar-size broad-tailed hummingbird (Selasphorus platycercus), with similar energy demands, can live up to at least 12 years in the wild. The much bigger mouse lives only a few months in the wild and only about three years as a well-cared-for pet. Therein lies a secret that once fully understood may help develop ways for people to remain healthy longer.
Hummingbirds are an extreme example, but virtually all of bird biology can be understood in terms of adaptations to the exceptional energy demands of powered flight. Those energy demands all suggest that birds should be short-lived, but they are the opposite. Their body temperature is higher than ours, their resting metabolism is up to twice as high as a mammal of the same size, and during flight, their metabolism cranks up even further. Even gliding flight such as performed by gulls, vultures, and albatrosses may look almost effortless to us but doubles or triples the birds’ resting metabolic rate. Fuel for their exceptional energy demands is supplied by blood sugar levels that would signal uncontrolled diabetes in a human. Uncontrolled diabetes resembles accelerated aging more than virtually any other disease.
High energy, high heat, and high blood sugar should accelerate a number of the major processes that contribute to aging, one of which is free radical production. Recall that free radicals are molecules that can damage all classes of biological molecules, including DNA. To maintain cellular health, free radicals need to be destroyed rapidly by our antioxidant defenses, and the damage they inevitably cause needs to be repaired rapidly. Birds must have exceptionally effective antioxidant defenses and exceptionally rapid repair mechanisms. In fact, some of the few studies that have been done trying to understand bird longevity found that their cells produce fewer free radicals at the same rate of energy production as similar-size mammals. However, we don’t understand how they do it. They also can withstand more free-radical damage before their cells die. We don’t understand how they do that, either.
The other aging process that according to what we understand about aging should be accelerated in birds is browning of proteins. Proteins power the chemical reactions that define life. In their role powering chemical reactions, proteins need to be folded in complex and precise ways, like origami. Any slight deviation from perfect folding compromises their function. Imperfectly folded proteins not only lose function, but they become sticky, causing them to clump together with other misfolded proteins. The plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s disease are particularly well-known clumps of misfolded proteins, but there are many others.
Proteins misfold spontaneously in the chaotic, bumper-car environment of our cells all the time and are broken down and their parts recycled regularly. However, one particular type of protein misfolding bedevils slowly recycled proteins and is most relevant to birds and to diabetics. This is the browning reaction, which is caused by heat and sugars. Sugars will attach themselves spontaneously to proteins, disrupting their precise folding. The higher the heat, the more concentrated the sugar, and the faster this browning reaction happens. It happens very rapidly at the temperatures we use in cooking. Meat and toast brown when heated because of this reaction. The same thing happens in our bodies, only much more slowly. For instance, our tendons and ligaments are composed of collagen, a protein that stiffens with age due to browning. Aging athletes have browning to thank for their increased risk of injury.
Because of birds’ higher body temperature and elevated blood sugar concentration, their tendons, ligaments, and other tissues should brown at a much higher rate than mammals. But they don’t.
How birds prevent free-radical and browning damage is something from which human health could benefit. Do they have unique antioxidants that prevent free-radical damage? Do they have unique ways of degrading damaged proteins? They must also have mechanisms that preserve cellular functions in the face of life’s challenges. There has been a little research on bird aging processes but never a large, sustained effort like we might have if they were being studied for cancer prevention. Medical research remains largely mired in the study of short-lived laboratory species such as fruit flies and mice, from which we may learn little to improve or extend human health. A Manhattan Project to understand birds’ exceptionally slow aging and their ability to maintain strength and endurance throughout life would be a fine use of research dollars. ~
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-bird-longevity-might-teach-us-about-human-health/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
The longest-lived mammal is the bow-headed whale. It can live longer than 200 years.
But the longevity of long-flying birds remains a true mystery. It has something to do with adaptations to flight. Bats, though they are mammals, live several times as long as a mouse of the same size.
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AN ANTIDOTE TO SITTING
~ Mounting evidence suggests that prolonged sitting — a staple of modern-day life — is hazardous to your health, even if you exercise regularly. Based on these findings, doctors advise all adults to sit less and move more.
But how often do we need to get up from our chairs? And for how long?
Few studies have compared multiple options to come up with the answer most office workers want: What is the least amount of activity needed to counteract the health impact of a workday filled with sitting?
Now a study by Columbia University exercise physiologists has an answer: just five minutes of walking every half hour during periods of prolonged sitting can offset some of the most harmful effects.
The study, led by Keith Diaz, PhD, associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, was published online in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.
Unlike other studies that test one or two activity options, Diaz's study tested five different exercise "snacks": one minute of walking after every 30 minutes of sitting, one minute after 60 minutes; five minutes every 30; five minutes every 60; and no walking.
"If we hadn't compared multiple options and varied the frequency and duration of the exercise, we would have only been able to provide people with our best guesses of the optimal routine," Diaz says.
Each of the 11 adults who participated in the study came to Diaz's laboratory, where participants sat in an ergonomic chair for eight hours, rising only for their prescribed exercise snack of treadmill walking or a bathroom break. Researchers kept an eye on each participant to ensure they did not over- or under-exercise and periodically measured the participants' blood pressure and blood sugar (key indicators of cardiovascular health). Participants were allowed to work on a laptop, read, and use their phones during the sessions and were provided standardized meals.
The optimal amount of movement, the researchers found, was five minutes of walking every 30 minutes. This was the only amount that significantly lowered both blood sugar and blood pressure.
In addition, this walking regimen had a dramatic effect on how the participants responded to large meals, reducing blood sugar spikes by 58% compared with sitting all day.
Taking a walking break every 30 minutes for one minute also provided modest benefits for blood sugar levels throughout the day, while walking every 60 minutes (either for one minute or five minutes) provided no benefit.
All amounts of walking significantly reduced blood pressure by 4 to 5 mmHg compared with sitting all day. "This is a sizable decrease, comparable to the reduction you would expect from exercising daily for six months," says Diaz.
The researchers also periodically measured participants' levels of mood, fatigue, and cognitive performance during the testing. All walking regimens, except walking one minute every hour, led to significant decreases in fatigue and significant improvements in mood. None of the walking regimens influenced cognition.
"The effects on mood and fatigue are important," Diaz says. "People tend to repeat behaviors that make them feel good and that are enjoyable.”
The Columbia researchers are currently testing 25 different doses of walking on health outcomes and testing a wider variety of people: Participants in the current study were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, and most did not have diabetes or high blood pressure.
"What we know now is that for optimal health, you need to move regularly at work, in addition to a daily exercise routine," says Diaz. "While that may sound impractical, our findings show that even small amounts of walking spread through the work day can significantly lower your risk of heart disease and other chronic illnesses.” ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230112134726.htm
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SENESCENT “ZOMBIE” CELLS COULD BE THE CLUE TO ALZHEIMER’S
~ “The biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease is age,” said Marcia Gordon, the study’s primary investigator and a professor of translational science and molecular medicine. “I’m trying to understand what it is about the old brain that makes it more susceptible to Alzheimer’s.”
The answer, she believes, lies in senescent cells – those that are old, still alive, but no longer capable of dividing.
“Some people call them zombie cells,” Gordon said. “These cells stop performing their normal functions and begin to send out signals that likely trigger adverse changes in the brain, including the clumping of the beta-amyloid protein and tangles of another called tau.”
Of the estimated 5.7 million Americans who have Alzheimer’s, 5.5 million are over the age of 65, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Ten percent of people over the age of 65 have Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. By age 85, the rate rises to 40 percent.
“We think that if we slow down the biological aging of brain cells, we will slow the rate of disease progression,” Gordon said.
Under the five-year grant, she will look at ways to delay this biological aging and deplete the number of senescent cells. Possible treatments include restricting calories, which previous research has shown is associated with longevity. Rapamycin, a drug commonly prescribed for immunosuppression in organ transplant patients, also has shown some promise of extending lifespan.
The goal of the study is not to find the fountain of youth, Gordon said, or even to cure Alzheimer’s. Few diseases that have been largely eradicated, including smallpox, were not cured, but have been prevented, she noted.
“It would be wonderful if we found a cure,” Gordon said. “But it’s much easier to prevent a disease than to treat it once you get it.” ~
https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2019/zombie-cells-could-be-key-to-alzheimers-susceptibility
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DISSOLUTION FORETOLD: A NEUROSURGEON FACES THE INEVITABLE
~ It seemed a bit of a joke at the time—that I should have my own brain scanned. I should have known better. I had always advised patients and friends to avoid having brain scans unless they had significant problems. You might not like what you see, I told them.
Perhaps I thought that seeing my own brain would confirm the fascination with neuroscience that had led me to become a neurosurgeon in the first place, and that it would fill me with a feeling of the sublime. But it was vanity. I had blithely assumed that the scan would show that I was one of the small number of older people whose brains show little sign of aging. I can now see that although I had retired, I was still thinking like a doctor—that diseases only happened to patients, and not to doctors, that I was still quite clever and had a good memory with perfect balance and coordination. I ran many miles every week and lifted weights and did manly press-ups. But when I eventually looked at my brain scan, all this effort looked like King Canute trying to stop the rising tide of the sea.
It took only a few minutes to download the files. As I looked at the images on my computer’s monitor, one by one, just as I used to look at my patients’ scans, slice by slice, working up from the brain stem to the cerebral hemispheres, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of complete helplessness and despair. I thought of folk stories about people who had premonitions of attending their own funeral. I was looking at aging in action, in black and white MRI pixels, death and dissolution foretold, and already partly achieved.
My seventy-year-old brain was shrunken and withered, a worn and sad version of what it once must have been. There were also ominous white spots in the white matter, signs of ischemic damage, small-vessel disease, known in the trade as white-matter hyperintensities—there are various names for them. They looked like some evil pox. Not to put too fine a point to it, my brain is starting to rot. I am starting to rot. It is the writing on the wall, a deadline.
I have always felt fear as well as awe when looking at the stars at night, although the poor eyesight that comes with age now makes them increasingly difficult to see. Their cold and perfect light, their incomprehensible number and remoteness, the near eternity of their lives are in such contrast to the brevity of mine. Looking at my brain scan brought the same feeling. The urge to avert my eyes was very great. I forced myself to work through the scan’s images, one by one, and have never looked at them again. It is just too frightening.
*
There is an extensive medical literature about the white-matter changes on my brain scan, the white matter being the billions of axons—electrical wires—that connect the grey matter, the actual nerve cells. If we reach eighty years old, most of us will have these changes. Their presence is associated with an increased risk of stroke although it is unclear whether they predict dementia or not. If we make it to eighty, we have a one in six risk of developing dementia, and the risk gets greater if we live longer.
It is true that a so-called “healthy lifestyle” reduces the risk of dementia to a certain extent (some researchers suggest 30 percent), but however carefully we live, we cannot escape the effects of aging. We can only delay them if we are lucky. Long life is not necessarily a good thing. Perhaps we should not seek it too desperately.
I have reached that age where you start to dislike seeing yourself in photographs—I look so much older than I feel myself to be, even though getting out of bed in the morning is getting more difficult each year and I become tired more quickly than in the past. My patients were no different—they would protest that they felt so young if I pointed out to them the signs of aging on their scans. We accept that wrinkled skin comes with age but find it hard to accept that our inner selves, our brains, are subject to similar changes. These changes are called degenerative in the radiological reports, although all this alarming adjective means is just age-related.
For most of us, as we age, our brains shrink steadily, and if we live long enough, they end up resembling shriveled walnuts, floating in a sea of cerebro-spinal fluid, confined within our skull. And yet we usually still feel that we are our true selves, albeit diminished, slow and forgetful. The problem is that our true self, our brain, has changed, and as we have changed with our brains, we have no way of knowing that we have changed. It is the old philosophical problem—when I wake in the morning, how can I be certain I am the same person today that I was yesterday? And as for ten years ago?
I always downplayed the extent of these age-related changes seen on brain scans when talking to my patients, just as I never spelled it out that with some operations you must remove part of the brain. We are all so suggestible that doctors must choose their words very carefully. It is so easy for doctors to forget how patients cling to every word, every nuance, of what we say to them. You can unwittingly precipitate all manner of psychosomatic symptoms and anxieties. I usually told cheerful white lies.
“Your brain looks very good for your age,” I would say, to the patients’ delight, irrespective of what the scans showed, provided that they showed only age-related changes and nothing more sinister. The patients would leave the clinic room smiling happily and feeling much better. The eminent American cardiologist Bernard Lown has written of how important it can be to lie to patients—or at least to be much more optimistic than the facts perhaps justify. He tells stories of patients of his who were close to death from heart failure but who rallied and survived when he was overly positive.
Hope is one of the most precious drugs doctors have at their disposal. To tell somebody they have a 5 percent hope of surviving is almost as good as telling them they have a 95 percent chance, and a good doctor will emphasize the life-affirming 5 percent without denying or hiding the corresponding 95 per cent probability of death. It is Pandora’s Box—however many horrors and ailments come out of the box, there is always hope.
Only at the very end does hope finally flicker out. Hope is not a question of statistical probability or utility. Hope is a state of mind, and states of mind are physical states in our brains, and our brains are intimately connected to our bodies (and especially to our hearts). Indeed, the idea of a disembodied brain, promoted by the more extreme protagonists for artificial intelligence, might well be meaningless. This is not to say that being kind and hopeful will cure cancer or enable us to live for ever. The human mind is always trying to reduce all events to single causes, but most diseases are the product of many different influences, and the presence or absence of hope is only one among many.
*
I have a fine copy of an engraving by the sixteenth-century German artist Albrecht Dürer on the wall of my study, which I inherited from my mother. It shows St Jerome at his desk in his study, a beautiful medieval room with a coffered ceiling and a large window with deep reveals and small panes of crown glass, through which diagonal sunlight falls. There is a lion—the creature associated with the saint—sleeping on the floor in front of him. The story goes that he removed a thorn from its paw, and it became a sort of pet. Next to the lion is a dog, symbolizing loyalty.
St Jerome was one of the early fathers of the Christian Church. He is said to have had an enthusiastic following of wealthy widows in fifth-century Rome. One of their daughters came under his influence and his advocacy of leading an ascetic life. He was blamed for her death from what some say in retrospect sounds like anorexia nervosa. I suspect I would dislike St Jerome if I met him, and consider him to be a fanatic.
And yet I love the Dürer etching, with its aura of wisdom and learning, and I once made a table modeled on the desk in the picture. There is a skull on a shelf beside St Jerome’s desk, an icon often found in images of medieval philosophers. Memento mori, a reminder of the death to come. My brain scan is no different. However hard I looked it at—and I looked very hard—it told me nothing that I did not know already: my brain is aging, my memory is not as good as it was, I move and think more slowly, I will die.
I should have known that I might not like what my brain scan showed, just as I should have known that the symptoms of prostatism that were increasingly bothering me were just as likely to be caused by cancer as by the benign prostatic enlargement that happens in most men as they age. But I continued to think that illness happened to patients and not to doctors, even though I was now retired.
Twenty months after I had my brain scanned, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. I had had typical symptoms for years, steadily getting worse, but it took me a long time before I could bring myself to ask for help. I thought I was being stoical when in reality I was being a coward. I simply couldn’t believe the diagnosis at first, so deeply ingrained was my denial.
For many years I had kept a human skull on a shelf in my study, in rather self-conscious imitation of the Dürer. I had found it discarded in a box, in a pile of rubbish, when the hospital I had worked in for many years was closed and relocated. An unknown predecessor must have been practicing on it—there was a series of burr holes in the skull’s vault, with saw cuts between them, that had clearly been made with an old-fashioned surgical hand saw that fell out of use a long time ago.
It was otherwise in unusually pristine condition, with intact stylomastoid processes, the little needles of bone behind the ear to which the stylomastoid muscles are attached. They often break off quickly with any handling of the skull. Once I had been diagnosed with advanced cancer, I no longer found the sight of the skull amusing. I gave it to one of my colleagues at the hospital where I used to work, so that he could use it for teaching. ~
https://lithub.com/dissolution-foretold-neurosurgeon-henry-marsh-on-the-reality-of-his-own-diagnosis/?fbclid=IwAR0uDiSIqajJ3o_xhRGbCupKHQQDCoiNyC4X9Nbt6z02gPxhaCI3pnt9v4g
Oriana:
Dr. Marsh is 72. His prostate cancer is now in remission. (Prostate cancer has a relatively low mortality rate compared with breast cancer.) I find his article to be an example of excellent writing on a difficult subject. I hope his remaining years are filled with joy and productivity.
Mary:
In Dr Marsh's report of his brain scan experience he says "as we age, our brains shrink steadily." I read "steadily"as "stealthily," and in that misreading lies the crux of the problem. Inside we feel the self as the same one we were at seventeen, even as we know the body carries the toll of all its years, cannot move with the grace and speed of youth, suffers the indignities of stiff and aching joints, decreased hearing, declining eyesight, diminished strength. We either shy away from mirrors or stare in dismay at what has become of us, our spotted, wrinkled, drooping, sagging flesh seems like a trick played by a vicious prankster, not true or kind or trustworthy.
Oriana:
If research to understand and reverse (or at least slow down) aging received the kind of priority that the race to the Moon did, millions if not billions of people would be spared the (currently) inevitable suffering of progressive aging. I don't think we'd become immortal, but it would be very different to die at 120, say, of respiratory failure, than to die a torturous death of cancer or lose even the sense of self to dementia.
Unfortunately, our priorities are a mess, and research on aging receives only a fraction of funding it should get. Even so, we seem to be ahead of where we were decades ago, when the semi-official explanation was that the government doesn't want people to live too long because of the cost of Social Security.
Now we realize that if people stay healthy, they could work longer (or perhaps part-time at second or third careers), and the burden of medical cost of aging-related diseases would be much lower.
*
ending on beauty:
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
~ W. B. Yeats, first stanza of “Byzantium”
Maiden's Tower, Istanbul
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