Photo: D. Goska*
THOUGHTS
There’s something dangerous
In being with good talkers.
The fly’s stories of his ancestors
Don’t mean much to the frog.
I can’t be the noisy person I am
If you don’t stop talking.
Some people talk so brilliantly
That we get small and vanish.
The shadows near that Dutch woman
Tell you that Rembrandt was a good listener.
~ Robert Bly, Morning Poems
Rembrandt: Bathsheba
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ENGLISH ROMANTICISM AND GERMANOPHILIA
~ In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German expedition’. The realization of the scheme, he explained to a friend, was of the highest importance to ‘my intellectual utility; and of course to my moral happiness’. He wanted to master the German language and meet the thinkers and writers who lived in Jena, a small university town, southwest of Berlin. On Thomas Poole’s advice, his motto had been: ‘Speak nothing but German. Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German.’
After a few days in Hamburg, Coleridge realized he didn’t have enough money to travel the 300 miles south to Jena and Weimar, and instead he spent almost five months in nearby Ratzeburg, then studied for several months in Göttingen. He soon spoke German. Though he deemed his pronunciation ‘hideous’, his knowledge of the language was so good that he would later translate Friedrich Schiller’s drama Wallenstein (1800) and Goethe’s Faust (1808).
Those 10 months in Germany marked a turning point in Coleridge’s life. He had left England as a poet but returned with the mind of a philosopher – and a trunk full of philosophical books. ‘No man was ever yet a great poet,’ Coleridge later wrote, ‘without being at the same time a profound philosopher.’ Though Coleridge never made it to Jena, the ideas that came out of this small town were vitally important for his thinking – from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of the self to Friedrich Schelling’s ideas on the unity of mind and nature. ‘There is no doubt,’ one of his friends later said, ‘that Coleridge’s mind is much more German than English.’
Few in the English-speaking world will have heard of this little German town, but what happened in Jena in the last decade of the 18th century has shaped us. The Jena group’s emphasis on individual experience, their description of nature as a living organism, their insistence that art was the unifying bond between mind and the external world, and their concept of the unity of humankind and nature became popular themes in the works of artists, writers, poets and musicians across Europe and the United States. They were the first to proclaim these ideas, which rippled out into the wider world, influencing not only the English Romantics but also American writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Many learned German to understand the works of the young Romantics in Jena in the original; others studied translations or read books about them. They were all fascinated by what Emerson called ‘this strange genial poetic comprehensive philosophy’.
In the decades that followed, the Jena Set’s works were read in Italy, Russia, France, Spain, Denmark and Poland. Everybody was suffering from ‘Germanomania’, as Adam Mickiewicz, one of Poland’s leading poets, said. ‘If we cannot be original,’ Maurycy Mochnacki, one of the founders of Polish Romanticism, wrote, ‘we better imitate the great Romantic poetry of the Germans and decisively reject French models.’
This was not a fashionable craze, but a profound shift in thinking, away from Isaac Newton’s mechanistic model of nature. Despite what many people might think today, the young Romantics didn’t turn against the sciences or reason, but lamented what Coleridge described as the absence of ‘connective powers of the understanding’. The focus on rational thought and empiricism in the Enlightenment, the friends in Jena believed, had robbed nature of awe and wonder. Since the late 17th century, scientists had tried to erase anything subjective, irrational and emotional from their disciplines and methods. Everything had to be measurable, repeatable and classifiable.
Many of those who were inspired by the ideas coming out of Jena felt that they lived in a world ruled by division and fragmentation – they bemoaned the loss of unity. The problem, they believed, lay with Cartesian philosophers who had divided the world into mind and matter, or the Linnaeun thinking that had turned the understanding of nature into a narrow practice of collecting and classification. Coleridge called these philosophers the ‘Little-ists’. This ‘philosophy of mechanism’, he wrote to Wordsworth, ‘strikes Death’. Thinkers, poets and writers in the US and across Europe were enthralled by the ideas that developed in Jena, which fought the increasing materialism and mechanical clanking of the world.
So, what was going on in Jena? And why was Coleridge so keen to visit this small town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar that had become a ‘Kingdom of Philosophy’? Jena looked unassuming and, with around 4,500 inhabitants, it was decidedly small. It was compact and square within its crumbling medieval town walls, and it took less than 10 minutes on foot to cross. At its center was an open market square, and its cobbled streets were lined with houses of different heights and styles. There was a university, a library with 50,000 books, book binders, printers, a botanical garden and plenty of shops. Students rushed through the streets to their lectures or discussed the latest philosophical ideas in the town’s many taverns. Tucked into a wide valley and surrounded by gentle hills and fields, Jena was lovingly called ‘little Switzerland’ by the Swiss students.
On a lucky day at the end of the 18th century, you might have seen more famous writers, poets and philosophers in Jena’s streets than in a larger city in an entire century. There was the tall, gaunt-looking Schiller (who could only write with a drawer full of rotten apples in his desk), the stubborn philosopher Fichte, who put the self at the center of his work, and the young scientist Alexander von Humboldt – the first to predict harmful human-induced climate change. The brilliant Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm, both of them writers and critics with pens as sharp as the French guillotines, lived in Jena, as did the young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who redefined the relationship between the individual and nature, and G W F Hegel, who would become one of the most influential philosophers in the Western world.
Also in Jena was the formidable and free-spirited Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. She carried the names of her father and three husbands, but she was fiercely independent and had no intention of living according to social conventions. The young poet Novalis, who had studied in Jena, regularly visited his friends there from his family estate in nearby Weißenfels. In the winter months, you might have glimpsed Germany’s most celebrated poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as he skated on the river – his bulging belly buttoned together with a flowery waistcoat. Older and more famous, Goethe became something like a benevolent godfather to the younger generation. He was inspired, even rejuvenated, by their new and radical ideas, and they, in turn, worshipped him.
These great thinkers attracted students from across Germany and Europe to Jena. Starstruck to see so many famous poets and philosophers sitting in one row at the concerts in the Zur Rose tavern, they couldn’t believe their eyes when seemingly all of Germany’s greatest minds squeezed into one room at a party.
Each of these great intellects lived a life worth telling, but the fact that they all came together at the same time in the same place is even more extraordinary. That’s why I’ve called them the ‘Jena Set’ in my book Magnificent Rebels (2022).
In an age when most of Europe was still held in the iron fist of absolutism, the Jena Set were united by an obsession with the free self. ‘A person,’ Fichte shouted from the lectern during his first lecture in Jena in 1794, ‘should be self-determined, never letting himself be defined by anything external.’ Fichte’s philosophy promised freedom at a time when German rulers presided over the smallest details of their subjects’ lives with an authoritarian delight – refusing marriage proposals, arbitrarily raising taxes, or selling their subjects as mercenaries to other nations. They were the law, police and judge rolled into one.
For centuries, philosophers and thinkers had argued that the world was controlled by a divine hand – but now, Fichte said, there were no absolute or God-given truths, certainly not safeguarded to princes and kings. The only certainty, the fiery philosopher explained, was that the world was experienced by the self. The self (or the Ich, in German), ‘originally and unconditionally posits its own being’ – it basically brings itself into existence. And through this powerful initial act, it also conjures up Fichte’s so-called non-Ich (the external world). According to Fichte, the reality of the external world was simply transferred from the Ich to the non-Ich. This didn’t mean that the Ich creates the external world, but that it creates our knowledge of the world. By making the self the first principle of everything, Fichte recentered the way we understand the world. Not only was the self the ‘source of all reality’, but it was imbued with the most exciting of all powers: free will and self-determination.
Fichte’s Ich-philosophy was lit by the fire of the French Revolution. When the French revolutionaries denounced aristocratic privilege and declared all men equal, they promised a new social order, grounded in freedom. ‘My system is, from beginning to end, an analysis of the concept of freedom,’ Fichte declared: ‘Just as the French nation is tearing man free from his external chains, so my system tears him free from the chains of things-in-themselves, the chains of external influences.’
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
These ideas were so radical and influential that these few years in Jena became the most important decade for the shaping of the modern mind and our relationship to nature. The story of the Jena Set is one of radical ideas – ideas about the birth of the modern self and the importance of Romanticism – but it also plays out like a soap opera as the young men and women broke conventions and used their own lives as a laboratory for their revolutionary philosophy. They placed a free and emboldened self not only at the nexus of their work but also at the center of their lives. Their lives became a stage on which to experience the Ich-philosophy.
There were passionate love affairs, scandals, and fights with the authorities. Caroline Schlegel, for example, widowed at 24, hung out with German revolutionaries and was imprisoned by the Prussians for being a sympathizer of the French Revolution. In prison, she discovered that she was pregnant after a one-night stand with a young French soldier. After her imprisonment, she was treated like an outcast, but the young writer August Wilhelm Schlegel came to her rescue: he married her, gave her a new name and, with that, a new beginning. The Schlegels had an open marriage, which Caroline explained was ‘an alliance that between ourselves we never regarded as anything but utterly free’. Both of them had lovers. When Caroline fell in love with Friedrich Schelling, 12 years younger than she, Schlegel didn’t mind. In fact, he joked: she ‘isn’t done yet … her next lover is still wearing a little sailor suit!’
The Schlegels were not the only ones who had come to such an unusual arrangement. The Humboldts also had an open marriage and Caroline von Humboldt’s lover moved in with the couple; Goethe lived with his mistress; meanwhile, Friedrich Schlegel outraged the literary establishment and polite society by taking readers into his bedroom to watch him and Dorothea Veit make love. Schlegel had intended to shock, and succeeded. ‘I want there to be a real revolution in my writing,’ he told Caroline.
The group met almost daily. ‘Our little academy,’ as Goethe called it in the spring of 1797, was very busy. They composed poems, translated great literary works, conducted scientific experiments, wrote plays, and discussed philosophical ideas. They went to lectures, concerts and dinner parties. They were interested in everything – art, science and literature. They were thrilled by this communal way of working. As the poet Novalis explained: ‘I produce best in dialogue.’ They called this way of working ‘symphilosophising’, a new term they had invented. They added the prefix ‘sym-’ to words such as philosophy, poetry and physics – it essentially meant ‘together’. ‘Symphilosophy is our connection’s true name,’ Friedrich Schlegel said, because they believed that two minds could belong together.
They often met in Caroline’s sunlit parlor on the ground floor of the Schlegel house near the market square. Caroline had no interest in playing the domestic wife. She simply served some gherkins, potatoes, herrings and a tasteless soup. No one complained. The flavor, one visitor said, was not provided by the ingredients of the meal but by the intellectual menu that Caroline prepared.
Caroline Michaelis-Schlegel-Schelling
Caroline Schlegel steered discussions, demanded opinions and her sharp analytical mind shaped the friends’ thinking. She awakened Friedrich Schlegel’s interest in ancient Greek poetry, for example, editing his essays, suggesting books and teaching him about strong female figures in ancient mythologies. ‘I felt the superiority of her mind over mine,’ he admitted, adding ‘she made me a better person.’ Caroline’s opinions about poetry, Friedrich Schlegel told his brother August Wilhelm, were illuminating, and her passionate support for the French Revolution was infectious.
Caroline also wrote many reviews under her husband’s name, and August Wilhelm Schlegel counted on her literary contributions. Together, they produced the first major German verse translation of Shakespeare, translating 16 plays in six years. It was a close collaboration, with August Wilhelm translating and Caroline scanning the verses in a kind of chant. Their Shakespeare is, to this day, the standard edition in Germany, but her name is still missing from the cover.
August Wilhelm Schlegel’s published lectures on Shakespeare also resurrected the playwright in England. In the 18th century, Shakespeare had become unpopular with critics who described his language as disordered, ungrammatical and vulgar. Voltaire, for example, had declared Hamlet ‘the work of a drunken savage’. For the Jena Set, though, William Shakespeare was the epitome of the ‘natural genius’, the quintessential romantic writer. In contrast to the polished refinement of the French dramatists Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille, who had followed rigid rules, Shakespeare’s plays were emotional and his language unruly and organic – ‘the spirit of romantic poetry dramatically pronounced’. English poets and writers, such as Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle, all read and admired August Wilhelm’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809-11). Wordsworth, said Coleridge, had declared that ‘a German critic first taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare.’
At the end of 1797, Friedrich Schlegel convinced his brother August Wilhelm, his sister-in-law Caroline Schlegel and his friend Novalis that they should publish their own literary magazine. It would be of ‘sublime impertinence’, he announced, and they would fight the literary establishment. They called it the Athenaeum, a title that stood for learning, democracy and freedom. Caroline was its editor. Printed on cheap paper without any illustrations, the Athenaeum might have appeared unassuming, but its content was the Jena Set’s manifesto to the world. It was in the pages of the Athenaeum that they first used the term ‘romantic’ in its new literary meaning, launching Romanticism as an international movement. They provided its name and purpose but also its intellectual framework – it was ‘our first symphony’, as August Wilhelm said.
Today, the term ‘Romanticism’ evokes images of lonely figures in moonlit forests or on craggy cliffs – as expressed in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings – as well as artists, poets and musicians who emphasized emotion and longed to be at one with nature. Some say the Romantics opposed reason; others simply think of candlelit dinners and passionate declarations of love. For the Jena Set, though, Romanticism was something much more complex and radical. Romantic poetry, they said, was unruly and dynamic – a ‘living organism’. They wanted to romanticize the entire world. They strived to unite humankind and nature, art and science. If two elements could create a new chemical compound, so Romantic poetry could bring together different disciplines and subjects, and weld them into something new. ‘By giving the commonplace a higher meaning,’ Novalis said, ‘by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticize.’ And for that, the friends insisted, one needs imagination.
They elevated imagination as the highest faculty of the mind. They didn’t turn against reason, but believed it insufficient to understand the world. For centuries, philosophers had mistrusted imagination, believing it obscured the truth. The British writer Samuel Johnson had called it ‘a licentious and vagrant faculty’, but the Jena Set believed that imagination was essential for the process of gaining knowledge. Novalis announced that ‘the sciences must all be poeticized’, and scientist Alexander von Humboldt believed that we had to use our imagination to make sense of the natural world. ‘What speaks to the soul,’ he said, ‘escapes our measurements’.
At the center of Romanticism were aesthetics, beauty and the importance of art – terms which, for the Jena group, carried a deeply political and moral meaning. They had all initially embraced the French Revolution but, as hundreds of heads rolled off the guillotines during Maximilien Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, many Germans became horrified. By 1795, Friedrich Schiller was arguing that the Enlightenment’s enshrinement of reason over feeling had led to the bloodshed of the French Revolution. Rational observation and empiricism might have encouraged knowledge, but they had neglected the refinement of moral behavior. All the knowledge in the world could not foster a person’s sense of right and wrong: it might give them the ability to understand natural laws or make medical advances such as smallpox inoculations, even inspire them to wish for universal rights such as liberty and equality, but the horrific excesses of the French Revolution were bloodied proof that this was not enough.
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Societies in Europe were driven by profit, productivity and consumption. ‘Utility is the great idol of our time,’ Schiller bemoaned, ‘to which all powers pay homage.’ The arts had been pushed aside. In his ‘Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man’ (1795), Schiller claimed that only beauty would lead us towards ethical principles and make us morally mature, for beauty protected us against brutality and greed. Maybe the French had simply not been ready for freedom and equality, he suggested, because in order to be truly free, one had to be morally mature. He didn’t mean a morality such as fidelity to a spouse or an individual’s sexuality – because, in that department, the Jena Set definitely had some fun. What Schiller meant was the morality of a society that was ready to govern itself. The French Revolution and the ensuing atrocities had shown how urgent was the need for a philosophy of beauty. ‘Art is a daughter of freedom,’ Schiller said, and ‘it is through beauty that we reach freedom.’
The younger generation admired Schiller’s ideas. They believed, Friedrich Schelling said, in a ‘revolution brought about by philosophy’ – which is exactly what Schelling set out to do. At just 20, he had already published his first philosophical book, followed each year by another one. By 23, he was so famous that he became the youngest professor at the University of Jena in 1798, enthralling students with his revolutionary ideas. There was a ‘secret bond connecting our mind with nature,’ he said. Rather than dividing the world into mind and matter as philosophers had done for centuries, Schelling told his students that everything was entangled into one living organism.
His students were so enraptured that their letters home described an almost religious epiphany. Schelling’s new world was filled with a ‘new, warm, glowing life,’ wrote one: it was alive. Instead of a mechanistic world where humans were little more than cogs in a machine, Schelling conjured a world of oneness. The self was identical with nature, he insisted, and being in nature – be it in a forest or meadow, or scrambling up a mountain – was therefore always also a journey into oneself. ‘Since we find nature in the self,’ one of Schelling’s students concluded, ‘we must also find the self in nature.’ Schelling’s philosophy of oneness became the heartbeat of Romanticism, influencing the English Romantics and the American Transcendentalists both. It flared out of Jena into the wider world.
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Schelling’s impact on Coleridge’s thinking is graphically illustrated by the changes the English poet made to ‘The Eolian Harp’, a poem he had originally written in 1795. After studying Schelling’s works intensely, Coleridge republished the poem in 1817 with these new lines to the second verse:
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought …
After Coleridge learned German, he continued to read the works of the Jena Set. Though he studied Fichte’s Ich-philosophy, Coleridge was a ‘Schellingianer’, said one of his friends (who had studied under Schelling in Jena), someone who ‘metaphysicized à la Schelling’. So obsessed was Coleridge that he translated big chunks of Schelling’s work, then passed them off as his own. He was particularly fascinated by Schelling’s idea of the unity between mind and nature. Page after page, paragraph by paragraph, Coleridge inserted Schelling’s sentences into his literary autobiography Biographia Literaria, describing how he had moved from the materialistic view of British empiricists to German idealistic philosophy. A child of the Enlightenment, Coleridge had initially agreed with the empiricists that the mind was like a blank sheet of paper that filled up over a lifetime with knowledge that came from sensory experience alone. But, after studying the works of the Jena Set, he became a proponent of Idealism – a school of thought that believed that ‘ideas’ or the mind, not material things, constitute our reality.
When his Biographia Literaria was published in 1817, Coleridge’s friend Thomas De Quincey accused him of ‘bare-faced plagiarism’, insisting ‘the entire essay, from the first word to the last, is a verbatim translation from Schelling.’ But Coleridge did the same thing with August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, from which he imported long passages for his own Shakespeare lectures in London.
Having failed to travel to Jena in 1798, Coleridge, together with Wordsworth, finally met August Wilhelm Schlegel 30 years later in 1828. Showing off his German skills, Coleridge told August Wilhelm that never had any translation of any kind of work in any language been as great as his of Shakespeare. To which August Wilhelm pleaded: ‘Mein lieber Herr, would you speak English? I understand it; but your German I cannot follow.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, too, studied August Wilhelm Schlegel’s work. In March 1818, as he and his wife Mary Shelley were traveling through France to meet Lord Byron in Switzerland, he read aloud Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature for six long days.
Coleridge was not the only one to learn German in order to study the works of the Jena Set. The American Transcendentalists, who gathered in the small Massachusetts town of Concord in the 1830s and ’40s, were equally keen to master the language. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s elder brother had impelled him to ‘learn German as fast as you can.’ Reading lists included Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Fichte, Schelling and, later, Novalis and Humboldt. And those who couldn’t read German studied the works through English editions such as Madame de Staël’s bestselling book Germany (1810), Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Thomas Carlyle’s widely read essays, reviews and translations in Foreign Review and other journals.
Emerson’s library was filled with books by Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Humboldt, Fichte, Schelling and the Schlegel brothers. His famous essay Nature (1836), which became the Transcendentalists’ manifesto, was deeply influenced by Schelling’s philosophy of oneness. Each leaf, crystal or animal was part of the whole, Emerson explained, ‘[e]ach particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.’ We are nature, Emerson wrote, because ‘the mind is a part of the nature of things.’
Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau was equally immersed in the ideas coming out of Jena, and in particular Alexander von Humboldt’s work. He filled his journal with observations about the natural world – from the chirping of crickets and the effortless movements of fish to the first delicate blooms of the year. Thoreau’s daily entries record his visceral sense of his synchrony with nature and the changing seasons – or what he called the ‘mysterious relation between myself & these things’. At one with nature, he felt the unity the Jena Set had described. ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself?’ he asked in Walden (1854). For Thoreau, the study of nature ultimately became a study of his own self. After his years at Walden Pond, for example, he described a lake as ‘earth’s eye’ and, by looking into it, the ‘beholder measures the depth of his own nature’.
There were many other Jena acolytes: Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville. Poe’s last major work, for example, the 130-page prose poem Eureka (1848) was dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt, and a direct response to Humboldt’s international bestseller Cosmos (1845). It was Poe’s attempt to survey the Universe – including all things ‘spiritual and material’ – echoing Humboldt’s approach of including the external and the internal world. Like Coleridge, Poe also lifted several pages from August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, and published them verbatim under his own name. Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855) is another example of the Jena Set’s international appeal. Whitman thought of it as a poetic distillation of the ‘great System of Idealistic Philosophy in Germany’. In one poem, he introduced himself as ‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos’ – perhaps a nod to Humboldt’s Cosmos, which the poet reportedly kept on his desk as he composed Leaves of Grass.
Romantic poetry, August Wilhelm Schlegel had argued in Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature was ‘the expression of the secret attraction to a chaos … which is perpetually striving after new and wonderful births.’ It was a sentiment that appealed to American Transcendentalists and British Romantics alike, just as much as Schelling’s unity of mind and matter, and Humboldt’s concept of nature as a living organism.
Jena’s intellectual reign was brief and vital, and its influence was lasting. The Jena Set put the self at the center of their thinking, redefined our relationship with nature, and heralded Romanticism as an international movement. These ideas have seeped deeply into our culture and behavior: the self, for better or worse, has remained center stage ever since, and their concept of nature as a living organism is the foundation of our understanding of the natural world today. We still think with the minds of these visionary thinkers, see with their imaginations, and feel with their emotions.
https://aeon.co/essays/english-romanticism-was-born-from-a-serious-germanomania?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=d48f193f8f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_12_21_12_49&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-d48f193f8f-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
William Thomas Sherman:
The fundamental problem with romanticism and transcendentalism as philosophy is its almost complete ignoring of the issue and existence of evil (and I mean hard core, truly diabolical evil), and, whether intentionally or no, their simply leading to a moral relativism that either ignores evil or else is incapable of dealing with evil realistically. If the world is ALL ONE (as some of them averred Spinoza-like), then are we to assume evil has a rightful place in it? And if so, does that mean we, like Goethe’s Faust, simply make a deal with it?
William Taylor:
As I see this central role of the Self, my first thought is, did this movement lead to the blind, selfish instinct of mere egotism? Some of the article seems to say it did. Not much progress there, in my mind. Or was it individualism, which is at the root of much of our social tragedy today, as expressed in a narcissistic fool like Donald Trump? All the ecstasy and enthusiasm expressed in this article falls to nothing if it erases social connections and a sense of the common good. The author says all this eventually spawned Emmanuel Kant. Now there is progress. We end up trapped in our minds, unable to establish any real contact with the outer world, the world of phenomena. Difficult to develop any real oneness with nature within that context.
Franca Collozo:
The Sturm und Drang (storm and impetus) was one of the most important German cultural movements and dates from 1765 to 1785. The name derives from the drama Wirrwarr (chaos), published in 1776 by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. [Oriana: I lean to translating Sturm und Drang as Storm and Drive]
Sturm und Drang contributed, together with Neoclassicism, to the birth of German Romanticism, and, together with Neoclassicism and Romanticism, represents a cultural movement often referred to as the ‘Age of Goethe’ (1749-1832), a term coined, in 1830, from the German Heinrich Heine.
In this way, the very famous cult of genius developed more and more and one of the first figures identified with this ideal was William Shakespeare. The opposite, therefore, of the cold and academic imposition of norms and rules.
The Sturm und Drang was also a political movement, since the bourgeoisie, in opposition to the nobility, chose nationalism against the cosmopolitanism of the nobility, thus preferring the culture of the people over that of the literary tradition.
All this profoundly characterized European culture, spreading from Germany to France and Italy, spreading like wildfire in all European countries, with a greater or lesser impact also on the various social structures. Surely, the patriotic and nationalist uprisings, in particular the Italian Risorgimento, took their cue from the same impetus that distinguishes the hero, a brilliant figure or patriot with a noble soul and a vocation for sacrifice. “Historia docet”.
Mary: THE ROMANTIC HERO WAS ESSENTIALLY AN OUTLAW
The Romantics' rejection of a clockwork world, operating on fact and reason, was indeed more than a change in style and fashion. Remember the execution of the British king under Cromwell was then reversed and the monarchy restored...there was little taste for the disorderly horrors of revolutionary change. A century later the American and French revolutions rode on a wave of cultural changes there was no turning back from. The influence of revolutionary thought and action cannot be ignored, it permeated international culture, society and the arts. Nature was no longer an object to be tamed and exploited, but the source of inspiration, the means to spiritual evolution, the vital connection between the individual and the living universe. The wild, majestic, mysterious, untamed, disordered and sublime world of nature was part of the human soul as well as its origin and home.
This is both the magical generative and liberating force of Romanticism and its essential fault. Romanticism does have a problem with evil from its very inception. Think of the Romantic ideal as seen in how they elevated and admired Milton's Satan, think of Heathcliff in Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The Romantic hero, in all his wild splendor, is a source of pain, destruction and chaos. He approaches the kind of terror nature can inspire, irresistible beauty, indiscriminate power to destroy. It's dangerous to fall completely under his spell, dangerous to ignore his disruptive power, his rejection of the fetters of established law. The Romantic hero is essentially an Outlaw, and we're still in love with him.
This was all evident even at the inception of Romanticism...so many were breathless admirers of the French revolution, the upset of an oppressive order, the promise of freedom, glorious and triumphant. Then the guillotine blade kept falling, more and more enemies were found, denounced, and executed. The Revolution was followed by the Terror, just as later revolutions would also be followed by reigns of terror.
Part of the problem is the difficult issue of balance, of creating an order that is not soulless and dead as clockwork, not oppressive and stifling to the individual, yet disallows extremes of action and thought that can threaten to devolve into chaos, rivers of blood, orgies of slaughter, genocides, mass starvation, and the elimination of dissent. Freedom becomes its opposite, still nominally in the service of a glorious, freer, better world. Think ideologues, tyrants, totalitarians, Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mao — the end results of Heathcliff and Satan. Fatal glories.
Oriana: ADOLESCENTS ASPIRING TO BE SOLITARY HEROES
Romanticism as a precursor of fascism, with its cult of the Great Man, an Übermensch beyond good and evil — certainly the dark side of Romanticism can’t be denied. But mostly we think of the marvelous works of literature, art, and music. Yes, there is something adolescent in the cult of feeling, passion, wilderness. The creators of Romantic art were . . . so young. Still untouched by the diminishing perspectives of growing older. Still full of hope, still imagining themselves destined to be solitary heroes. The compromises required when working as part of a team were distasteful to them. They failed to see how even a “solitary” work of art is in fact a product not of a single inspired mind, but of a complex collective culture.
But adolescents often stylize themself as misunderstood loners. It’s part of the cult of feeling — you have to have enough solitude to process your emotions. As you said, the question of balance is difficult and crucial at the same time. Anything taken to an extreme usually ends up as evil, out of touch with the lives of others. The adolescent contempt for those prosy others must be overcome. Fortunately we can enjoy romanticism in the arts without needing to emulate the dubious romantic hero.
The idea that we are here to be useful, to be of service to others, and to build a common good seems strangely absent . . . That too can be taken to harmful extremes — think of Tolstoy in his last years. I suspect the enemy is simply extremism, no matter where we start. “Metron ariston,” the ancient Greeks counseled — moderation is best.
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PREDICTIONS FOR 2023 MADE IN 1923
~ Forget flying cars. When scientists and sociologists in 1923 offered predictions for what life might look like in a hundred years, their visions were more along the lines of curly-haired men, four-hour workdays, 300-year-old people and "watch-size radio telephones."
That's according to Paul Fairie, a researcher and instructor at the University of Calgary who compiled newspaper clippings of various experts' 2023 forecasts in a now-viral Twitter thread.
They include projections about population growth and life expectancy, trends in personal hygiene, advances in industries from travel to healthcare and even some meta-musings on the future of journalism itself.
"In reading a forecast of 2023 when many varieties of aircraft are flying thru the heavens, we do not begin the day by reading the world's news, but by listening to it for the newspaper has gone out of business more than half a century before," wrote one newspaper (which was neither identified nor entirely off-base).
Paul Fairie thinks it's revealing that many of these century-old predictions were about things people worried about at the time and that remain a source of concern for some today.
For instance, predictions about men curling their hair appear to stem from "a general worry about anything that challenges gender norms," while talk of a four-hour workday is seemingly part of a larger conversation about the promise of automation.
Some predictions proved way more prescient than others (consider it a sliding scale between smartwatches and telepathy). Fairie says his big takeaway is "just to be modest about the certainty of predictions a century out.”
"If there's one thing I've learned from putting this together," he writes, "it's that I have absolutely no idea what a century from now will be like.”
Here's a selection of the — understandably rose-tinted — 2023 predictions he found, and how they panned out.
ADVANCES IN HEALTH AND BEAUTY
Several seers described a world full of healthier and more beautiful people (though only one explicitly linked those two ideas).
One writer predicted the eradication of cancer, as well as tuberculosis, infantile paralysis (also known as polio), locomotor ataxia and leprosy.
Another went with the headline "Fewer Doctors and Present Diseases Unknown; All People Beautiful.”
"Beauty contests will be unnecessary as there will be so many beautiful people that it will be almost impossible to select winners," they continued. "The same will apply to baby contests."
Some focused on the personal grooming and style trends that made up the standard of beauty itself.
One anthropologist, reportedly versed in masculine and feminine trends, declared "curls for men by 2023." A similar prediction appeared in the Savannah News, which also forecast that women will "probably" be shaving their heads.
"Also the maidens may pronounce it the height of style in personal primping to blacken their teeth," it added. "Won't we be pretty?”
LIVING LONGER AND WORKING SMARTER
Some newspapers predicted that the average person would live longer in 2023, though the exact amount varies based on whom you ask.
One said the average lifespan could reach 100 years, though certain individuals could make it to 150 or even 200. Another cited a scientist who put the average at 300 years.
For context, the expected lifespan of someone born in the U.S. decreased last year to 76.4 years — the shortest it's been in nearly two decades.
In another optimistic outlook, mathematician and electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz predicted that people would spend even less time working ("No More Hard Work By 2023!" that headline blared).
Steinmetz believed "the time is coming when there will be no long drudgery and that people will toil not more than four hours a day, owing to the work of electricity," the paper declared, adding that in his vision "every city will be a 'spotless town.'
Several publications posited that technological and industrial advances would make more parts of North America more habitable, estimating the U.S. population at 300 million and Canada at 100 million in 2023.
Yes and no: The latest estimates from Worldometer put the U.S. population at 335 million and Canada at more than 38 million.
GIZMOS, GADGETS, AND OTHER INNOVATIONS
Naturally, there were also advances to dream about in science, technology, transportation, communications and other fields.
First, the products: One writer proposed that people will be wearing "kidney cosies," which they compared to teapot cozies for one's internal organs. Another posited that utensils and dwellings will be made largely of "pulps and cements."
Next, the flying: Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss predicted that by 2023 "gasoline as a motive power will have been replaced by radio, and that the skies will be filled with myriad craft sailing over well-defined routes," which the Minneapolis Journal deemed "an attractive prophecy.”
Elsewhere, the opening of a new "Polar airline" was cheered for making it possible to fly from Chicago to Hamburg — via the North Pole — in just 18 hours (as opposed to the roughly 13 hours most direct flights take nowadays).
There was also considerable excitement about the prospect of wireless and paperless communications.
One writer envisioned a world in which Pittsburgh and London take orders "on talking films" from merchants in Peking, and "1,000-mile-an-hour freighters" deliver goods before sunset.
"Watch-size radio telephones will keep everybody in communication with the ends of the earth," they added, hitting the nail on the head.
Archibald Low — the British scientist and author who invented an early version of TV and the first drone, among other things — wrote that "the war of 2023 will naturally be a wireless war," thanks to "wireless telephony, sight, heat, power and writing.”
He went a step further, according to one newspaper account:
"Professor Low concludes that it is quite possible that when civilization has advanced another century, mental telepathy will exist in embryo, and will form a very useful method of communication.”
Low, an esteemed "futurologist" of his era, made many other — and more accurate — predictions about the 21st century.
They include the rise of smartphones and dictation, contemporary department stores, the internet and, arguably, British TV phenomenon Strictly Come Dancing.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/02/1146569895/2023-predictions-from-1923?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary: THE FUTURE WILL BE DIFFERENT THAN WE CAN IMAGINE
While some predictions may come close to the mark, most do not, and what is most sure is that the future world will be very different than we can imagine. They may have come close with wristwatch radio/telephones, and shorter travel times through aviation, but quantum shifts have been much more difficult to foresee. You may very well have been able to see the development of more sophisticated calculating machines, but even in the early days of real computers it was impossible to see that computers, then taking up whole rooms, requiring special temperatures and the learning of special languages, would shrink to pocket size, and smaller, while their capacity would become immeasurably greater, and just about everyone would have one of their own, small, powerful, portable and connected to that other unimaginable development — the World Wide Web.
Technology transforms the world and how we live in profound and far reaching ways. This was always true. Electric light transformed how we live, work and sleep, changing patterns and habits that had been the same for most of our history. Industrialization transformed our relation to time — life’s rhythms dictated by shift work, time clocks, school room schedules.
Railways, and then automobiles, transformed landscapes and our experiences of distance, travel, and cities. Cars not only made the great interstate system possible, they made it necessary. Calamaties like storms, pandemics, new diseases, and our attempts to survive them, all shape the future in unexpected ways. Think of the social changes following the Black Death...revolutionary changes that made medieval social hierarchies, habits and thinking no longer possible. Similarly, our current pandemic is still in the process of changing how we work and how we live in cities. Big office buildings are standing empty as more and more work is done remotely, meetings done virtually, work done and delivered digitally.
These may lead to changes in many parts of daily living, from school to fashion, entertainment to medicine...change is the constant we can be sure of, and the pace of change is likely to increase. Old systems and old solutions become obsolete faster and faster. The possibilities are endless, and I envy those who will see them, the wonders we can barely imagine.
Oriana:
We need to bear in mind that technological and social changes are not 100% positive. You and I have both experienced medical personnel standing with their back to the patient, engrossed in filling out an overly detailed, mostly irrelevant computer chart. And there is much talk of robots taking the place of humans, with a strange absence of concern for what happens to the human need for connection in this brave new dehumanized world.
Somehow I don’t think the pendulum will swing back to more human interaction. But at some point there will be a reaction against anything pushed to an extreme. Yes, I too am inconsolable when I think of the fascinating changes I won’t live enough to see. But who knows? Something awful like a horrible war or a pandemic worse than covid may be already in the making. And no, nobody expected a lowly virus to disrupt our lives and change the nature of work. Nobody thought there could be a major war in Europe. Perhaps the most profound changes are always beyond what we can imagine.
The only thing I know for sure is that, for all our current problems, I am so glad not to have been born in the past — even fifty years earlier, much less one hundred or more. Some aspects of our era will no doubt be seen as barbarous — our homeless, our toxic medical treatments, the income inequality — but we can see progress nevertheless. Still a long way to go toward a truly civilized world.
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WHAT THE RUSSIAN SOLDIERS ARE DYING FOR IN UKRAINE (Misha Firer)
~ That’s how many Russian soldiers, not counting PMC Wagner inmates and volunteers, died in Ukraine War in 2022.
What did they die for? It depends when they died.
In February, they died for de-nazification and de-militarization of Ukraine.
In March, they died “to stop the planned aggression in Crimea and Donbas.” Thousands perished defending Donbas hundreds of miles away in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv.
In April, they died for de-Satanization of Ukraine.
In June-August, they died for “unacceptable security conditions.”
In September, they died because of “coup and NATO expansion to the east.”
In November, they died because “West is trying to drive Russia into a corner.”
In December, they died in an all-out war with NATO.
Cherepovetz, Vogoda oblast. Population: 315,000
That’s how many Russian people were wounded in Ukraine war. Thousands lost their limbs and will remain apartment-ridden for the rest of their lives.
That’s how many people have left Russia in 2022 in two waves: right after the beginning of war, and after partial mobilization was announced. Among them — famous artists, doctors, IT specialists, civil pilots, and other high in demand professionals.
As the war drags on with no end in sight, most of them started building new lives abroad and won’t return.
Armed Forces mobilize the generation of the 1990s - early 2000s, which is the smallest segment of the demographics.
A little more than 2% of the young people of this generation have been mobilized and they will be targeted again in the second and third waves.
In addition, 2–3% of them have already left Russia, and more will leave. This will reduce the number of births by a few percent already starting next year.
Low fertility rates due to economic instability, dwindling population of the child-bearing age, and non-stop conveyor belt of war create a perfect storm for 2023.
At the end of his tenure, Vladimir Putin shot Russia in the head. It will take mighty efforts of millions of people to undo all the damage he has done and will do this year in pursuit of personal glory. ~ 
*
MISHA: “A 19TH CENTURY LAND GRAB”
~ Russia started its catastrophic war against its neighbor and once-brotherly nation under the stated goal of Ukraine's "denazification" — that is, wholesale regime change in Kyiv, the country's total subjugation to Russia and its effectively ceasing to exist as an independent state entity. Now, ten months later, that deliberately amorphous and pointedly meaningless justification of the unjustifiable has been replaced by the Kremlin propaganda's near-open admission of Russia's real — admittedly, a lot less toxically grandiose — ambition vis a vis Ukraine: to steal and try to hold on to more Ukrainian territory; yes, the crudely banal, brazenly imperialistic, 19th-century land grab.
How pathetic. More land? Why does Russian need more land? To befoul and make uninhabitable a few additional hundred thousand square miles of neighborly territory? Russia doesn't know what to do with the enormous excess of its own current territory as it is. This enormous, nightmarish surfeit of largely empty land, scarcely populated by impoverished, deeply unhappy people, has been the bane of Russia existence in the world throughout its history.
Yes, but it also happens to be the sole remaining source of Russian people's nationalistic pride: indeed, we know we are poor, miserable, backward, perennially angry and have no unifying purpose on Earth — but... But! We are by far the largest country in the world! Isn't that something? We have the greatest amount of landmass... which, in truth, we have no idea what to do with. And we want more land!
Yes! The more unmanageable, empty land we have, the better we feel about ourselves! Let people in some small European countries, Switzerland or Denmark or some such, enjoy their countless creature comforts and high incomes and wonderful living standards — those are not for us. We don't want to be a happy, wealthy small country. We don't need to have a good life — we wouldn't know how to go about having it. No. Just let us stand, fuming with diffuse resentment and looking about us in confusion, in the middle of our senseless eleven time zones. That's our lot in history. ~ 
Oriana:
It's super-human resilience that Ukrainians are managing among the rubble. Seems that Putin, seeing he can't conquer Ukraine, decided to turn it into rubble — to cause the maximum destruction he possibly can. Pure evil — after WW2, this just wasn't imaginable, we thought.
We underestimated how much history repeats itself after all. First Putin's small land grabs, ignored by the West. Then a shameless big grab. If victorious, it will be followed by another and another. Russia’s great dream is to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific (“from Lisbon to Vladivostok”). Barring that, at least restoring the Soviet Union, which would mean annexing the Baltics and other former republics, with puppets governments installed in Poland, Czechia, etc. It would be called “the Russian World.”
Russia is not a normal European country that left old imperialist ambition behind the way Sweden, for instance, did centuries ago. Or the way that the British Empire shrank to become the UK -- not even “Great Britain” any more. Funny, we never saw such developments as a collapse and resentment-breeding defeat. We saw them as a peaceful, orderly transition. But we don’t expect this from Russia. We expect violence and chaos, with the rich and powerful falling out of windows.
*
ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE SOVIET UNION
~ In the grander European scheme of things of the 20th century, the Soviet Union wasn’t particularly anti-Semitic. I’d rather say we were close to the middle of normal distribution.
The reason the USSR gained the notoriety as a flagship of anti-Semitism in Europe was our confrontation with Israel after their triumph in the Six-Day War in 1967. This gave rise to a wall of “anti-Zionist” propaganda, now enthusiastically recycled by many detractors of Israel in the West and the Middle East.
Soviet “anti-Semitism” is perfectly encapsulated in an apocryphal story about the witty British orchestra conductor Thomas Beecham. He had a conversation with a Communist minder of a Soviet cultural delegation visiting Great Britain in the late 1950s.
Soviet bureaucrat: “This talk about anti-Semitism in the USSR is absurd. Look at us, our orchestra has 30 Jews. How many have you got in yours?
Thomas Beecham: “No idea. Never occurred to me to count them.”
*
Jews were a late arrival to our part of the world. They came in a package with the part of Poland that we annexed at the end of the 18th century. From there anti-Semitism metastasized to the rest of Imperial Russia. In the early 20th century, the Black Hundreds
fused grassroot anti-Semitism with nationalistic imperial ideology, beating the Nazis to it by more than a decade.
A Black Hundred procession, 1907
But soon the Communist revolution happened.
An ambitious minority, the Jews played a central role in the victory of the Communists and the rebuilding of the country. This not least because they were almost 100% literate in the midst of a peasant country where most of the old educated classes were murdered, imprisoned or exiled.
Using their foreign contacts, they became prominent in building the OGPU/NKVD/KGB international spy network, the revolutionary cells of Comintern, and proliferating our agents of influence inside the movements for peace and disarmament. They also were very important in our education, science and research, and mass culture.
Great turnaround
In WW2, we played a unique role in saving Jews from annihilation at the hand of the Nazis. And yet, a few years after the victory the love story between Soviet rule and Jews took an abrupt end.
The state of Israel was formed. Despite our help and all the accumulated goodwill, they turned out to be staunchly Zionist. Stalin watched the loyalty of our own Jews to shift toward Israel — and considered this a treason. Preparations were made for a nationwide ethnic cleansing of Jews, just like what happened to ethnic Germans, Poles, Greeks, Chechens and other minorities before the war. Only Stalin’s death prevented it from happening.
Glass walls and ceilings
Yet, this opened the valve through which the grassroot anti-Semitism started to permeate the Soviet system from underneath. The “uncertain” loyalty of Jews led to an undeclared quota system and glass ceilings that barred them from many attractive careers. They kept inventing things, building weaponry and winning chess titles for Soviet rule — but among my 40+ strong class of International Journalism in the Moscow State University there was only one of them, and even he was only half Jewish.
Then I started my career in propaganda—and never did I meet a single Jew among the myriad of KGB and GRU spies either inside or outside of the perimeter. Pretty amazing, if you think about it, against the long list of Jewish operatives in the service of the Soviet Union before the war.
Foreign agents
By the time I entered the business of propaganda, the emigration of Jews had already picked enough steam to cause serious problems for the USSR internationally. The Refuseniks brought upon us a series of economic sanctions (Jackson–Vanik amendment). In the eyes of the mass of commoners this made even loyal Jews “foreign agents”. People were upset by the fact that the Jews were “privileged”: they were allowed to legally emigrate, while it was totally impossible for the rest of us.
Enter Russian ethnic nationalism, long suppressed by the Communists. By the 1980s, the Czarist-era narrative of “Jews hurting Russian people” resurfaced across all classes of society. Glasnost not only uncovered dirty secrets of Soviet rule. Anti-Semitic reading became kosher. Unlike the previous decades, by the late 1980s you as an upwardly-mobile Communist functionary no longer risked to taint your personnel file by publicly voicing anti-Semitic grievances.
No wonder hundreds of thousands of Jews headed for the exit once the perimeter became porous around 1988–89. The exodus also took in its wake many people from other ethnicities. Looking back, it’s easy to see how this drained the country of the future middle class, the backbone of a robust democracy and powerful civil society comparable to what Israel has built.
The current narrative of Russian nationalists about “Ukrainian Nazis and their Jewish masters” is a rehashed Soviet propaganda construct. ~
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MORE ON THE SOVIET NOSTALGIA
~ Putin’s plan to rebuild USSR through invasion of Ukraine was a consensus of the silent majority, and handing Ukraine and Moldova on a silver platter in 2022 to his constituents would have skyrocketed Putin’s ratings.
That’s what Levada-Center, a Russian non-governmental research organization dubbed “foreign agent” indirectly concluded shortly before the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine: 75% of Russians believed that the Soviet era was the best time in the history of the country, only 18% of respondents did not agree with this judgment.
The number of Russians who rate Russia as a great power was 64% vs 82% who rated the Soviet Union as a great power.
Putin could do no wrong with annexation of former Soviet republics — more annexations, more greatness in the hearts of the Russian people, more historical glory to him.
While 64% graded Russia as a great country, only 15% of respondents are satisfied with modern Russian healthcare.
They sincerely believe that hospitals without plumbing and unavailability of meds do not bear on the greatness of their country.
National greatness, therefore, is not measured in concrete terms like state of the art hospitals and longevity due to advanced meds but it is rather a wholly religious construct.
As of August 2020, Russians voted Military as the most trusted institution of power, well ahead of the President, at second place, the FSB (former KGB) and other political police entities at third. Russian Orthodox Church is at the fourth place (statehood is Russians religion, not Christianity).
Should one be surprised then that Putin stopped paying any attention to Russia’s economy ten years ago relegating that responsibility to prime minister while focusing almost entirely on making Russia great again through military conquest of territories of a sovereign state as the armed forces was the most trusted institution according to the vast majority of Russians?
The largest demonstration in the late Soviet period was not against USSR, the so-called “prison of peoples,” but for not letting the bankrupt Soviet Union fall apart.
Russians demanded to be kept in the prison indefinitely -- although they subsidized almost every republic and couldn’t even travel abroad without an exit visa -- they didn’t want to be let out!
It's a huge mistake to think otherwise! Mikhail Gorbachev is the most vilified leader in Russian history for a reason.
In 2012, before Putin transformed Russia into a totalitarian country, Levada asked respondents how they place freedom from the list of 12 common values. Freedom was voted exactly in the middle of this list, in sixth place.
In the first place were order and security followed by the rule of law. Third, human dignity, social justice, the desire to achieve more and personal responsibility.
This corresponds to my answer to my friend’s question how Putin managed to destroy freedom of speech in Russia: Russians didn’t value freedom of speech in the first place.
A thief always steals what’s the easiest to steal. Freedom was an easy steal as Russians didn’t care much for it.
Russians that I’ve spoken with do not understand why Ukrainians are dying for freedom.
To them, order and stability, even when ruled by a criminal gang are considerably more important, and they’d rather die for Putin, a guarantor of stability, than for freedom. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Kenneth Coville:
“National greatness, therefore, is not measured in concrete terms like state of the art hospitals and longevity due to advanced meds but it is rather a wholly religious construct.”
It's the same for the “Make America Great Again” crowd. When you ask what Makes America Great it is never having a lower cost universal health care system, or having a living wage for all workers, or having adequate affordable housing for all, etc. It’s always about punishing persons different than themselves and maintaining a special status for their self defined group of adherents as in
“Jews will not replace us!”
and ironically to this thread
“I’d rather be Russian than Democratic”
etc.
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PUTIN AT A CHRISTMAS SERVICE
~ Look at that bloodthirsty human insect. Scared for his useless, ugly life to the point of coming for the Christmas service in his house church all alone and just standing there in complete isolation, hoping God doesn't exist. ~ Misha Iossel
Place: the Kremlin Cathedral of Annunciation.
Anca Garcia (Facebook):
What
I dislike the most about him is his obvious hypocrisy. I saw a video of
this. As always, he is never still, looking around with the attitude of
a bored apparatchik who is there on official business, twitching and
turning with a face that says he is thinking of
something official and stringent. I just don't understand how they buy
it. He is obviously so fake in his religious sentiment, yet for some
reason nobody tells him how bad his attitude looks. You don't have to
watch the video. He is always that way. He is always awkward in
everything he does. What a despicable creature!
*
HOW ORDINARY RUSSIANS VIEW AMERICA
~ Ordinary Russians’ views and opinions on America are shaped by our wall-to-wall patriotic propaganda.
In their mind, the US very much reminds of how American Conservatives view their Libs. It’s a bunch of rich, arrogant d*cks who look for any opportunity to grab things at someone else’s expense. Despite their inflated sense of entitlement, they turn into whiny snowflakes the moment they face anyone tough—for example, Russia.
Through the lens of ordinary Russians, right now President Putin is busy cutting these guys down to size in Ukraine. Across the world, the silent majority holds their breath in the hope the Americans will be defeated in the end.
The way to greatness, the key to redemption for an average Russian is the mighty State (Derzháva). Without it, everything withers and crumbles in the end. Americans, in their unrelieved ignorance, are too dumЬ to see it.
[According to the Russian view,] American anti-Statism is part of the same global evil that inspired the Ukrainian Maidan revolution. ~ Dima Vorobiev
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WHY COMMUNISM WAS DOOMED TO FAIL
~ First, the premise. “To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities” sounds nice on paper and works well in fiction such as Star Trek’s utopian United Federation of Planets. In reality, us human beings are selfish bastards. Sure, some are more selfish than others, but self-preservation is a fundamental trait. The utopian “socialist man” exists only in the imagination.
There’s a reason why humans invented money and trade. Societies that pursue utopian ideals inevitably resort to coercion. If you do not measure up to their impossible standards, you are an enemy of the people or the community. You are, essentially, a criminal who needs to be controlled. Sure, some regimes might choose more benign means of control than others, say, fines and administrative action instead of incarcerating you to do forced labor in a re-education camp, but the end result is the same: the ideals of the regime are upheld through coercion and the regime necessarily becomes a police state, complete with a massive security force and a network of informants to weed out its perceived enemies.
Second, the planning. Oh, the basic idea is great. Markets react to the immediate. The economy is optimized “locally” (in a mathematical sense), short term, responding to the needs of the moment. It’s like trying to climb a hilly terrain at night, simply seeking the steepest slope: you find the highest spot in the vicinity, but it’s almost certainly not the tallest mountain peak of the land. Planning is like having a map of the whole countryside: you no longer rely on short-term, blind market forces but pursue long-term economic goals with full foresight of the consequences. Surely it is superior! Except… first, planners are not that smart. They may not understand all aspects of the economy. Most importantly, they often cannot foresee changes that are beyond their control. A natural disaster. An epidemic. A new discovery.
Say, you are an engineer at the #3 Car Factory of Capital City and come up with a new way to build automobiles. Cheaper, requiring less labor. But wait… what happens to the labor force? What happens to the raw materials you no longer need? The plans must be rewritten. Not just for the #3 Car Factory but entire sectors of the economy. You pull one string and the whole fabric unravels. No, comrade, we cannot allow you to implement your innovation. Maybe in the next Five-Year Plan. Surely you can’t expect us to redo years of planning work on a whim?
And there you have it. The result was the stagnation of the Brezhnev era. Life in most East Bloc countries was not horrible. Shortages were not rampant. Basic necessities, even some luxuries were available. There was some progress: more automobiles, new technologies slowly trickling in. But… life was… gray. We were condemned to live behind an Iron Curtain whose main function was not to protect us from evil Western imperialists but to prevent us from fleeing. And everything was second-rate. Our cars used the technologies of yesteryear. The infrastructure was old and ill-maintained. Things… just generally sucked. And the gap between East and West appeared to widen with each passing year.
Gorbachev, I suspect, understood this. Which explains his attempts at reform. But these attempts only hastened the collapse of the regime. I suspect that by the time he became the leader of the USSR, the regime was already irreversibly doomed. It was simply a question of whether it goes with a bang or a whimper, keeping in mind that a bang would have brought down much of the world along with it. Thanks to Gorbachev, we got a whimper, and it happened sooner than expected. I say we were lucky to have him, even if this wasn’t his intent when he embarked on his reform agenda. ~ Viktor T. Toth, Quora
*
It may be that in the future, 30 years from now or more, historians will write that although the USSR formally dissolved in 1991, it didn’t die as an idea until 2022. ~ Tomaž Vargazon
*
WHY THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSED (Dima Vorobiev)
~ With the USSR, it’s like the Roman Empire: you can fill an entire library with books and articles explaining why it declined and crumbled, and not one of them would alone give a definitive answer. But one answer may give you an intuitive understanding of what all the other books in the library “The Rise and Fall of the USSR” contain:
The Soviet project lost its momentum.
A revolutionary undertaking like Communism must keep moving forward at any price. It’s exactly like riding a bike: once you stop, it’s only a matter of time before you fall.
Both Stalin and Trotsky were acutely aware of this, even though both attacked the issue from different angles. Mao Zedong knew this, as did Che Guevara. The real Communism, the way Lenin and Stalin implemented it, was based on a Raubwirtschaft [looting, kleptocracy] concept: you grab a resource, you use it to build economic strength and armed muscle, and then use it to move on the next resource.
During the Revolution ’17 and Civil war, the Bolsheviks grabbed the military, communication, transport, financial and mineral resources of the Russian empire.
They built their strength on that and moved in 1928–1933 on private peasants and the Church.
Having confiscated almost all private wealth in the country, the Bolsheviks used it to buy from the West and put into use the industrial and military backbone of the USSR that after WW2 brought into the realm of Communism almost all of East Asia and half of Europe.
Reparations after WW2 also brought to us vast financial resources and at least 5,500 new industrial objects confiscated in Manchuria, Germany and some other countries. We used it to assure our nuclear capability and achieve some spectacular breakthroughs in the space race and a major upgrade of many other industrial capacities.
And then it all slowly ground to a halt. Discovery of vast petroleum reserves in West Siberia helped us chug along for another two decades, but no more. We stopped, and everything came crashing down in 1991.
In retrospective, the poster below from 1983 was a premonition of the coming defeat. A young worker warns the US for their Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars): “Wouldn’t advise you to test our strength, Mister Reagan!” Despite the defiant text, the bellicose red and a wedge-like composition, a lot of things in this motif are alarmingly off, seen from the height of traditional Communist propaganda canon:
There’s no weapons in the picture. Behind the man there are only the letters U.S.S.R. in Russian—formed like a Polish hussar’s wings, and probably as useless in a real fight.
The man’s clothes and hair suggest he’s a civilian. His posture in the one of a Hyde Park speaker, not a martial arts expert. His face is concerned, not threatening or scary. Does he even know how to disassemble and clean an AK-47?
The Pravda newspaper he holds in his fist—is this how he’s going to fight Reagan’s space ships?
The paper at the time consisted of three broadsheets (i.e. six pages), which means rolled tight into a paper stick it was laughingly flimsy against the New York Times rolled the same way.
No apparent heresy here, of course. It weaved into the overarching narrative of weakening the West through the Peace Movement and our agents of influence attached to it. However, all in all, the fact that such a poster was greenlighted by the Central Committee for internal use, somewhere on a propaganda meta-level definitely signaled: “The end is nigh, comrades!” ~
Translation:
“Wouldn’t advise you to test our strength, Mr. Reagan.”
“Raubwirtschaft” = plunder economy, sometimes also translated as “robber economy” or “kleptocracy.” The president is the thief-in-chief.
*
BEFORE YOU HAVE ANOTHER COOKIE, WATCH “THE WHALE”
~ The main character in "The Whale" is killing himself in the slowest, most painful way he can think of.
It's more a filmed play than a movie and no one would call it perfect for the holidays but "The Whale" is an unusual character portrait. Charlie is an online teacher who is confined to the apartment where the entire movie takes place. Weighing 600 pounds and with blood pressure double the recommended level, Charlie joylessly wolfs down a bucket of chicken, as if it's his job rather than dinner. But the ray of hope in Darren Aronofsky's adaptation of Samuel Hunter's play is when Charlie says, "I need to know I have done one thing right with my life.”
A series of people try to help Charlie. There's a nurse, played by Hong Chau, who gradually reveals other connections to her patient. There's his estranged daughter, who drops in to tell him to drop dead. There's the pizza delivery man, who speaks to Charlie through his door. And there's an evangelist who insists, "God brought me here for a reason.”
All of those characters have secrets, which is one way "The Whale" feels more theatrical than cinematic, along with the conveniently timed entrances and exits into the set — er, Charlie's apartment. Just about everything in "The Whale" feels like a metaphor, something that works better in the theater, but it poses a bunch of interesting questions that can be interpreted in wildly different ways.
For instance, is the nurse helping Charlie or, since she accedes to his wish to avoid hospitals and often brings food, is she enabling him? When the vituperative daughter betrays the evangelist, is it to help him or hurt him? Is the main character's problem mental illness or something more pervasive? Is a "Moby Dick" essay that Charlie loves (it gives the film its title) the key to the whole thing because of its insistence that everything can be interpreted at least two ways?
One thing there's no question about is Brendan Fraser's committed, award-worthy performance as sad, desperate Charlie. The extensive prosthetics he wears could be a distraction but they're not. Fraser's choices are so subtly intelligent that we barely notice what amounts to his costume, so attuned are we to the way his Charlie teeters on the brink of life and death. He's an angry, fearful character and, somehow, he seems to be trying to take control of the only thing within his grasp.
Anyway, that's how I see "The Whale," which plays out like a horror movie in which the villain is already inside the victim when we meet him. ~
https://www.startribune.com/review-brendan-fraser-is-an-oscar-frontrunner-in-the-whale/600237986/
MISERY PORN (from The Daily Beast)
~ Adapted from Samuel D. Hunter’s highly divisive play, the film stars Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a homebound 600-lb. professor attempting to reconcile with his estranged, cruel daughter (Sadie Sink) as he anticipates his death. Over the course of the film, we learn Charlie’s full heartbreaking situation: an affair with a male student that ended his marriage, the religious self-hatred that drove his lover to suicide, and Charlie’s feelings of guilt over his death. We are meant to see him more humanely than we did when we met him. But The Whale wants to put the audience and Charlie through the wringer.
Aronofsky is no stranger to depicting the human body horrifically, whether through the ravages of addiction in Requiem for a Dream or turning Natalie Portman into a bloody, horny swan. In terms of depicting a character’s willingness to commit self-harming acts at risk of their possible demise, The Wrestler might be Aronofsky’s empathic magnum opus.
Comparing that film (which shares copious parallels to The Whale, from father-daughter estrangement to the intended second coming of its star) to Aronofsky’s latest only further highlights the latter’s deficiency in this regard. The Wrestler’s Randy the Ram was a tragic figure who was given complicated dimension that makes us understand, and even love, him; Charlie in The Whale is granted complexity of pain, but not personhood.
The film would rather make Charlie a divine saint, willingly accepting his daughter’s constant epithets and speaking like a motivational cat poster (his hushed “people are amazing!” features prominently in the trailer) than a complete person. This makes the character as written feel hollow, no matter how charismatic the actor who plays him. Fraser is tasked with pulling our heartstrings throughout in a ceaseless torrent of tears, but he’s not given the luxury of an arc to play. The film might think it is distinguishing Charlie by his unconditional love, but Hunter’s script defines Charlie purely through his suffering.
The Whale also thinks its pleading for compassion, while stylistically enacting the opposite. Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique shoot the film in the square Academy ratio (where the images you see are a claustrophobic box, rather than a wide rectangle to absorb more of the environment) so that Charlie’s body fills the frame. The film leers at his naked body while showering. Aronofsky plays a night of Charlie’s self-punishing binge eating like the stuff of a monster movie, complete with howls and lightning crashes.
The title itself is a troll, dodging a slur with the film’s flimsy allusions to both Moby Dick and the biblical Jonah. Meanwhile, Rob Simonsen’s boomingly mournful score projects all of the pitying emotions at us that the film demands we feel. Rather than creating authentic empathy from the audience, the film is more interested in making a spectacle of Charlie’s suffering and his body.
Why would the film do all this if it thinks it is operating from a place of compassion, or that it earns it from judgmental viewers? Is it because it is laying a trap for the kind of fat-hating judgment for Charlie it flatly assumes the audience possesses? If so, it illustrates why the film is so fundamentally compromised: It is utterly certain that no one in the theater could have compassion for Charlie before the film begins, let alone that someone like Charlie might be in the audience. All the film’s posturings towards empathy come out looking phony. ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/from-the-whale-to-the-son-the-year-movies-became-misery-porn?ref=author
In "The Whale," Brendan Fraser plays a 600-pound shut-in whose life has entered what in all likelihood is its final phase. He barely gets up from the couch anymore, he doesn't answer the door and his binge-eating sessions are a quick jolt of pleasure wrapped in immense, deep-rooted sadness.
For Fraser, the goofy, kind-eyed star of films such as "Encino Man" and "The Mummy" franchise, the role is an immersive character study, much deeper than those that made him one of Hollywood's top stars two decades ago, and he's magnificent in the part. The movie around him, however, is chaotic and boorish, and lacking in the very measured, humane characteristics that Fraser brings to the table and which make his performance so moving.
The director here is Darren Aronofsky, the hyper-talented architect of emotional ruin whose films are never a walk in the park. Elements of his past works "The Wrestler" and "mother!," and even "Noah," are present in this adaptation of the 2012 play by Samuel D. Hunter.
Aronofsky is by no means soft on Fraser's character, Charlie, an online college professor (he keeps his camera off so his students can't see him) who upon introduction is seen furiously masturbating on his couch inside his cramped Idaho apartment. He's interrupted by a knock on the door from Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a Christian missionary, who feels compelled to save Charlie. Their interaction goes on a bit too long to not feel contrived.
Thomas isn't the only one who drops in on Charlie. There's also Liz (Hong Chau), his nurse, who helps Charlie but is also his conduit to the meatball sandwiches he gorges himself on. And then there's Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie's estranged teenage daughter, who has big Mean Girl energy and lets her dad have all of it.
Occasionally these characters collide, and there seems to always be someone either knocking on the door or running past the window of Charlie's second-floor apartment. It's part of the feeling of suffocation that Aronofsky creates inside the space, which he films in a 4:3 aspect ratio, to make the viewer feel as boxed in as Charlie's character.
Through these characters we learn more about Charlie: he was once married to Mary (Samantha Morton), Ellie's mother, but he cheated on her with a male student whom he left her for, and when he later committed suicide, Charlie's morbid obesity began to take hold. Now that he's at the end — he's suffering from congestive heart disease and his blood pressure if off the charts — he wants to help Ellie, and even though she's full of ill intent, he believes in her, as misbegotten as his trust in her may be.
"The Whale" is an often frustrating watch — teenage angst aside, Sink's character is simply grating — although Aronofsky is far too skilled a filmmaker for the experience to be a wash. And Fraser's performance, especially the soul he imbues in his ocean blue eyes, elevates the proceedings beyond the exploitative display of grotesquerie it flirts with becoming.
In his online classes and in his relationships, Charlie strives to find an invariable truth, a nugget of unfettered honesty to hold onto. It's something Aronofsky strives for as well, and what he latches onto in "The Whale" is messy and compromised, but finds its honesty in the emotional core of its lead performance. See it for Fraser, try and drown out the rest. ~
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/12/20/the-whale-a-triumph-for-star-brendan-fraser-if-nothing-else/69741916007/
Oriana:
“There’s going to be a grease fire in hell the day he dies,” Ellie writes about her morbidly obese father. Her mother considers this one more proof that Ellie is evil. But Charlie the Whale thinks she is “amazing” — and in danger of forgetting how awesome she is. He saves the money from his meager income — money that could be used on treatment for himself — to give it to Ellie, the daughter he abandoned when he fell in love with a male student.
Ellie’s mother is an alcoholic, and it’s hard not to predict that Ellie’s adult life is going to be profoundly damaged by having had the parents she does: an alcoholic mother and a father who literally eats himself to death. Ellie is slender and attractive, but she seems to have a mean streak that prevents us from sympathizing with her, even if her anger at her father seems to be justified. The only truly positive character in this movie is Liz, Charlie’s Chinese nurse. Only Liz appears to feel compassion for Charlie — though he also frustrates her and angers her.
The movie makes it seem that a normal man became morbidly obese in the span of several years, due to the trauma of his lover’s suicide. Trauma certainly makes people more susceptible to self-destructive behavior, including overeating. But getting to the point of morbid obesity takes a lifetime (and a particular set of genes that cause greater susceptibility to addiction). Often the mother is obese and has gestational diabetes, giving birth to an oversize infant, who will become obese already in childhood. Of course the diet has a lot to do with it; the widespread consumption of junk food has resulted in a much greater percentage of obese children than ever before. It takes a perfect storm of several factors — and we still don’t fully understand it, or have effective treatments (bariatric surgery is major surgery and has its critics).
The movie doesn't enlighten us about any of this, but I think it succeeds in making us see the daily struggle involved in being morbidly obese. These people suffer. Saying that they brought it on themselves, or that the culprit is their genes, doesn't absolve us from having to consider whether they might indeed be helped. Overeating isn't all that different from alcoholism and drug addiction. And we don't really have effective solutions.
"Whale" is definitely not a feel-good movie, but it's not a movie I regret seeing. It helps to humanize the morbidly obese. Charlie's soulful eyes remain in my memory.
FRITZ HABER — MONSTER OR BENEFACTOR OF HUMANITY?
~ Did you realize that one-third of the nitrogen atoms in your body did not come from nature? That the food that we eat contains amino acids, that nitrogen originally came from fertilizer, and most of that fertilizer, almost all, came from chemical factories? They, in turn, extract that nitrogen from the atmosphere using a process called the Haber Process – so the fact that we and billions of other people are not starving to death is a direct result of the invention of the Haber Process.
So who was Fritz Haber? Fritz Haber was a German chemist. He was born in the kingdom of Prussia before Prussia became part of Germany. He was born to a prominent Jewish family, but attended schools that were of mixed religious backgrounds, both Jews and Catholics and Protestants. He was conscripted and served in the military – as was traditional, he served his year of military service.
In 1894, he converted to Lutheranism, and whether he did that out of personal convictions or to advance his career is not clear. But throughout his life, he identified himself as more German than Jewish. So he identified very much with Germany. And in 1909, he completed work which began with studies of the physical chemistry of gases, with the discovery of the Haber process. He also developed the Born-Haber reaction cycle, which is used for understanding a variety of theoretical and practical and chemical knowledge, which led him to become, probably, the premier chemist in Germany from about 1910 to about 1930, and his laboratory, the Kaiser Wilheim Institute for Physical Chemistry, to be the greatest physical chemistry laboratory in the world.
He was instrumental in helping lure Albert Einstein to take an academic position in Germany. And he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development of the Haber Process.
So why is nitrogen so important? Well, there’s a problem with nitrogen. 70% of the air is nitrogen. And nitrogen is essential for what? Amino acids that make up protein. That’s part of us. So the graphic I have shows the natural processes for the atmosphere for the nitrogen fixing bacteria that exists in the rhizomes of some plants that take the nitrogen and turn it into compounds of nitrates and nitrates and ammonia.
But to do that is a very difficult process. It requires a lot of energy to break the double bond of nitrogens. So microbiota have to work very, very slowly. And if you want the fertilized crops, you have to have nitrogen to grow. You need to add fertilizer. And until early 1900’s, really the only source of fertilizer was nitrate oxide, essentially fossilized bird poop. And so that was the agricultural view [before Haber].
So along came Fritz Haber. Haber used the principles of entropy and energy that were first established by Chatelier in 1884 to determine that there should be a way to take hydrogen and nitrogen, and get them to combine to form ammonium, as the base process for fertilizer. He studied for several years and eventually discovered that the rare metal osmium should have been a good catalyst, and was able to catalyze the reaction. And in his tabletop laboratory, he was able to, drop by drop, turn air into ammonia, about 125 grams a day. That process was then taken over by Carl Bosch at the BASF, and they scaled it up enormously, so that instead of just sitting there and drip by drip, they’re able to make tons of it. And those tons were able to be turned into useful chemicals for the world and that process, the Haber process, the Haber-Bosch process, remains fundamental to the chemical world today.
In 2018, 230 million metric tons of ammonia were produced that year. That’s a lot of fertilizer. The production of fertilizer consumes about 3-5% of the world’s total natural gas output, because natural gas is used as the feedstock for the nitrogen, and to produce the heat needed for the process. This is how the world avoids starving – is from the Haber process. And there’s a picture of that chemical plant in Oppau, which was the first large scale producer.
Nitrates and nitrogen are for more than just fertilizer. All the explosives that we know we use today, all the common ones at least, also use nitrogen, mostly in the form of nitrates. And the German chemists, by the time that Haber’s process had been industrialized, had methods for taking the ammonia, turning it into nitrates, and turning those nitrates into explosives like nitroglycerin, dynamite, TNT, and also very much into ammonium nitrate, which is the primary fertilizer which is still used in the world today. If you have enough ammonium nitrate in any one place and it gets dry, it can explode on its own. The most common explosive used in the world today, ANFO, is ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.
It’s also dangerous to store large amounts of it. In 1921 the Oppau chemical plant blew up. 4,500 metric tons detonated. It killed about 600 people in the worst industrial disaster ever in Europe. For those of you who keep track of current events, there was a ship docked in Beirut a few years ago filled with ammonium nitrate. It blew up and killed several hundred people in Beirut. It was a tremendous explosion – this is dangerous stuff.
Haber was motivated not just by the need Germany had for fertilizer, but also the need Germany had for explosives. And Haber’s process is what kept Germany’s guns firing during World War I, and made sure that Germany – who couldn’t get the nitrates – they were embargoed by the British – could still continue to manufacture explosives. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the amount of explosives that were used during the First World War, Great Britain alone fired over 100 million artillery shells.
So who was Fritz Haber? Well, he was more than just the developer of this chemical process. He was also the father of chemical warfare. He was an enthusiastic proponent of Germany’s entry into World War I; he was one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, and he actively recruited physicists and chemists to work on the war effort. He basically rededicated the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to war work during the time that Germany was at war.
And a key portion of that was the development of poison gas. Prior to the war, the chemists in Germany had developed hundreds upon hundreds of new chemicals for dyes and for perfumes and for industrial use. Under Haber’s direction, the chemists went back and looked to find out what was toxic, what was the most toxic, and how could it be used.
He developed the Haber equation, which was used to determine how much of a given poison gas would need to be delivered into a given area to achieve a given level of the balance. Germany was very grateful to him, the Kaiser himself promoted Haber into an Officer, which was not possible while he was serving earlier. And even after the war, Haber was still involved in the development of chemical agents, although under the cover of developing fumigants and other insecticides. And Haber’s central statement: “During peacetime,” he said, “a scientist belongs to the world, but during wartime, he belongs to his country.”
So how did we get into this situation with chemical warfare? Because it appears to be prohibited by the Hague Conventions, to which Germany was a signatory. Well, the process was a slow one. The French and the Germans both had begun to use tear gas. And other chemists, notably the Nobel chemist Walther Nernst, thought that saturating the trenches with poison gas would be a way to get a quick end to the war. And so I have a quote here from Nobel Prize physicist Otto Hahn, who was recruited by Haber to do war work, and he says:
“When I objected that this was a mode of warfare violating the Hague conventions, Haber said that the French had already started, although to not too much effect, by using rifle ammunition built with gas. Besides, this was a way of saving countless lives that meant that the war could be brought to an end sooner.”
So there was this idea that chemical warfare would end the war. By the way, it turned out that after the war, Haber himself investigated the claims of the French using chemical warfare prior to Germany’s use of it. And what he determined was that what the soldiers were smelling and being asphyxiated by was the remains of the explosive that was being used in front shells. It was a low quality explosive, and they were they were smelling picric acid.
So at that point, Germany committed to chemical warfare, with Haber leading the charge.
The first use was at the Second Battle of Ypres, and on the evening of the 22nd of April to May 1915, Haber was at the front with several other future Nobel Prize winners, with 6,000 canisters of chlorine gas (chlorine gas is a liquid at about 30 degrees) and specially trained combat engineers, who Haber had led the training for. And they released 168 tons of chlorine gas, which was blown by the wind into the trenches of the allies. 5,000 men died directly as a result. There were another 10,000 allies [who suffered serious casualties].
But this success was not followed up. The German high command thought this was an experiment, and they weren’t prepared for a success. Within a week, the breach in the allied lines had been sealed, and the end result had been a lot of death and a lot of agony, but no real motion in the war.
I have here a description of what it was like to suffer that first chlorine gas attack:
“…dropping with breasts heaving and agony and the slow poison of suffocation mantling their dark faces. Hundreds of them fell and died; others lay helpless, froth upon their agonized lips, and their wracked bodies powerfully sick, with tearing nausea at short intervals. They too would die later – a slow and lingering death of agony unspeakable.”
Germany continued to develop other chemical weapons – the list is very long. The most deadly of those weapons was phosgene carbonyl chloride, which was responsible for about 85,000 deaths in total during the First World War. About 100,000 of the 6 million deaths in the war were caused directly by poison gas.
Perhaps the gas that caused people most pause was the use of mustard gas. This was a blistering agent which blinded people and left them with horrible blisters and left them horribly maimed, even if it didn’t kill them, and would linger on the battlefield for months after the gas had been fired. Haber rationalized the use of chemicals in the following quotation. He said:
“The disapproval that the knight had for the man with the firearm is repeated in the soldier who shoots with steel bullets towards the man who confronts him with chemical weapons. […] The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing.”
While Haber is certainly correct that men were horribly maimed and mutilated by the artillery, which was the primary killer of people during the First World War, plenty of people were maimed by gas attacks as well.
So who was Fritz Haber? After the war, he was still a German patriot. Germany had crushing war remunerations to pay, and he looked to provide his physical chemistry to extracting gold from seawater. There had been an estimate that gold was of enough quantity in seawater that it could be probably extracted and used to take pay its war debt. He spent much of the 1920’s doing that, in addition to being the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the President of the German Chemical Society, and a variety of honorary posts.
So he led Germany’s work through the 1920s, he watched with increasing alarm the growth of the Nazi Party, even though he himself was immune from any of the formal edicts because he had served in the military at the front, and because he had converted from Judaism. Nonetheless, he felt a fellow feeling for his Jewish compatriots. So in 1933, the Nazis promulgated a law, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which required all civil servant servants who were of Jewish parentage to be fired from their positions unless they had actually served on the front during the war. Haber was immune, but he refused – he resigned his position and he left Germany forever. Before he resigned, he did everything he could to help find work for his Jewish employees.
He went to Basel, Switzerland and eventually went for several months to England – at the invitation of some of the generals and military men who had been his former enemies. He worked in Manchester for a while, and then was invited by Chaim Weizmann to take up the directorship of the institute in Rehovot in Mandatory Palestine that we know today as the Weizmann Institute for Science. He was on his way there, in Switzerland, when he died in 1934.
So he was a German patriot, he was the founder of fertilizer that enables us to eat our meals today, and he was also the father of chemical warfare. We’re left with the question: is science morally neutral? The Haber process could be used to make fertilizer to feed the world, or it can be used to make explosives to kill people. The poisons that Haber developed – many of them have peaceful uses today. A lot of the basis for modern insecticides came from the work that Haber was doing while he was researching poison gases. Scientists throughout the world recognized that there may be an enormous moral cost. And the question is: are we working for the betterment of humanity, or are we working for our own self-interest?
One of the people who I mentioned earlier was Chaim Weizmann. For those of you who aren’t familiar with that name, Chaim Weizmann was the first president of Israel. But before he was the first president of Israel, he was a PhD chemist. And he had determined that England was a key place that he should be. He was working ostensibly to try to discover synthetic rubber in England just prior to the war. What he discovered was something that came to be known as Bacillus Weizmannia, a bacterium that could be used to produce acetone. Acetone is a critical ingredient for cordite, which is the material used to fire artillery shells, and which the Munitions Ministry of England had a desperate need for. Lloyd George, who later became Prime Minister, was the head of the Ministry at the time, and Weizmann was one of the key figures who kept England’s guns firing during the war. So there is some evidence that the kindliness with which the British government viewed the Balfour Declaration is in part a reward to Weizmann for his work in keeping Britain’s guns firing during World War I.
A second aside, which we could talk about more, is Haber’s wife, Clara Immerwahr. She was the first female chemist in Germany. She had a variety of chemical developments, married Haber, and then he would basically have her reduced to being a wife and mother. She was a pacifist, and she argued very strongly that Haber’s work as a chemist working on war work polluted the purity of science.
After one of these arguments, just before he was to go to the front to supervise another chemical warfare attack, Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide under suspicious circumstances.
It’s an open question: would chemical weapons have been deployed if Haber had not embraced Walter Nernst’s initial idea? So there is still a mixed legacy. And as a final comment, artificial fertilizers are now a source of pollution. There are dead zones in the ocean which are dead because the fertilizer has caused microscopic plants to grow and keep the lower levels of the oceans dead. Is Haber part of that?
Fritz Haber
And finally, if we do not use artificial fertilizers, then the yields of essential crops would be cut perhaps as much to one-eighth of what they are today. And I would ask a question of whether one is wasting useful land: is it morally mandated to use fertilizers to fertilize your fields in order to feed the world? ~
https://sinaiandsynapses.org/content/is-science-morally-neutral-the-curious-case-of-fritz-haber/?fbclid=IwAR10nyexSEs9X6VsU457gLKdr5vNGkTfm69hIlG2p-fGwh35T8Yy7ai0L_I
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THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL
"Believers in free will always, in another mental compartment, believe simultaneously that volitions have causes. They think, for example, that virtue can be inculcated by a good upbringing, and that religious education is very useful to morals. They believe that sermons do good, and that moral exhortation may be beneficial. Now it is obvious that, if virtuous volitions are uncaused, we cannot do anything whatever to promote them.
To the extent to which a man believes that it is in his power, or in any man’s power, to promote desirable behavior in others, to that extent he believes in psychological causation and not in free will. In practice, the whole of our dealings with each other are based upon the assumption that men’s actions result from antecedent circumstances. Political propaganda, the criminal law, the writing of books urging this or that line of action, would all lose their raison d’etre if they had no effect upon what people do.
The implications of the free-will doctrine are not realized by those who hold it. We say “ why did you do it ? ” and expect the answer to mention beliefs and desires which caused action. When a man does not himself know why he acted as he did, we may search his unconscious for a cause, but it never occurs to us that there may have been no cause.
It is said that introspection makes us immediately aware of free will. In so far as this is taken in a sense which precludes causation, it is a mere mistake. What we know is that, when we have made a choice, we could have chosen otherwise — if we had wanted to do so. But we cannot know by mere introspection whether there were or were not causes of our wanting to do what we did. In the case of actions which are very rational, we may know their causes. When we take legal or medical or financial advice and act upon it, we know that the advice is the cause of our action. But in general the causes of acts are not to be discovered by introspection; they are to be discovered, like those of other events, by observing their antecedents and discovering some law of sequence." ~ Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (1935), Ch. VI: Determinism, pp. 164-5
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Background: The question of whether free will it exists or not and its subsequent questions and implications are some of the longest running debates of philosophy and religion.
Free will in Western philosophy is generally conceived as the ability to act outside of external influences or wishes. Free will is on the whole understood to be the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events. Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with a libertarian model of free will.
Free will is closely linked to our cultural, political and religious understandings of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and judgements which apply only to actions that are seen as freely chosen. Free will is also closely connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame.
However, defining 'free will' in both philosophy and science has proved difficult. Any definition often revolves around the meaning of phrases like "ability to do otherwise" or "alternative possibilities”.
This emphasis upon words has led some philosophers such a Ludwig Wittgenstein to claim the problem is merely verbal and thus a pseudo-philosophical problem. In response, others point out the complexity of decision making and the importance of nuances in the terminology.
The 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is known as a harsh critic of Judeo-Christian morality and religions in general. One of the arguments he raised against the truthfulness of religious doctrines is that they are based upon the concept of free will (a false premise), which, in his opinion, does not exist. To Nietzsche, while everything in this world is an expression of "will" that will is in fact, a will to power. He held "freedom of will" was invented by Judeo-Christian priests in order to master the process of human thinking and control the weak – and nothing more. ~ The Antichrist, 26 & 38
Karl Marx argues that History itself is pre-determined and all are inevitably proceeding towards the final state of communism. Still Marx believes human beings to be essentially different from other animals. "Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like." However, in the 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon, Marx famously writes “men make their own history, but not as they please.”
Contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennett consider the language used by neuroscience researchers. He explains that "free will" means many different things to different people (e.g. some notions of free will believe that free will is compatible with hard determinism, some not). Dennett insists that many important and common conceptions of "free will" are compatible with the emerging evidence from neuroscience.
Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris believes that we are mistaken in believing the intuitive idea that intention initiates actions. Harris is critical of the idea that free will is "intuitive" and that "careful introspection" can cast doubt on free will.
Sam Harris argues: "Thoughts simply arise in the brain. What else could they do? The truth about us is even stranger than we may suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.”
Bertrand Russell himself held that any human activity which is understood as "free will" is likely the emergent result of a set of rigid, deterministic laws but which are at present too complex for both philosophy and science to appreciate and comprehend. Stating in Religion and Science p. 167:
"It may seem as though, in the present chapter, I had been guilty of an inconsistency in arguing first against determinism and then against free will. But in fact both determinism and free will are absolute metaphysical doctrines, which go beyond what is, for the moment, scientifically ascertainable.”
Bertrand Russell lectures at UCLA, 1940.
LUCK RULES (YES, AGAIN. BECAUSE WE HATE TO BELIEVE IT)
~ I have spent my entire career studying the psychological characteristics that predict achievement and creativity. While I have found that a certain number of traits -- including passion, perseverance, imagination, intellectual curiosity, and openness to experience -- do significantly explain differences in success, I am often intrigued by just how much of the variance is often left unexplained.
In recent years, a number of studies and books--including those by risk analyst Nassim Taleb, investment strategist Michael Mauboussin, and economist Robert Frank--have suggested that luck and opportunity may play a far greater role than we ever realized, across a number of fields, including financial trading, business, sports, art, music, literature, and science. Their argument is not that luck is everything; of course talent matters. Instead, the data suggests that we miss out on a really importance piece of the success picture if we only focus on personal characteristics in attempting to understand the determinants of success.
Consider some recent findings:
About half of the differences in income across people worldwide is explained by their country of residence and by the income distribution within that country.
Scientific impact is randomly distributed, with high productivity alone having a limited effect on the likelihood of high-impact work in a scientific career.
The chance of becoming a CEO is influenced by your name or month of birth.
The number of CEOs born in June and July is much smaller than the number of CEOs born in other months.
Those with last names earlier in the alphabet are more likely to receive tenure at top departments.
The display of middle initials increases positive evaluations of people's intellectual capacities and achievements.
People with easy to pronounce names are judged more positively than those with difficult-to-pronounce names.
Females with masculine sounding names are more successful in legal careers.
The importance of the hidden dimension of luck raises an intriguing question: Are the most successful people mostly just the luckiest people in our society? If this were even a little bit true, then this would have some significant implications for how we distribute limited resources, and for the potential for the rich and successful to actually benefit society (versus benefiting themselves by getting even more rich and successful).
In an attempt to shed light on this heavy issue, the Italian physicists Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda teamed up with the Italian economist Alessio Biondo to make the first ever attempt to quantify the role of luck and talent in successful careers. In their prior work, they warned against a "naive meritocracy", in which people actually fail to give honors and rewards to the most competent people because of their underestimation of the role of randomness among the determinants of success. To formally capture this phenomenon, they proposed a "toy mathematical model" that simulated the evolution of careers of a collective population over a worklife of 40 years (from age 20-60).
The Italian researchers stuck a large number of hypothetical individuals ("agents") with different degrees of "talent" into a square world and let their lives unfold over the course of their entire worklife. They defined talent as whatever set of personal characteristics allow a person to exploit lucky opportunities (I've argued elsewhere that this is a reasonable definition of talent). Talent can include traits such as intelligence, skill, motivation, determination, creative thinking, emotional intelligence, etc. The key is that more talented people are going to be more likely to get the most 'bang for their buck' out of a given opportunity (see here for support of this assumption).
All agents began the simulation with the same level of success (10 "units"). Every 6 months, individuals were exposed to a certain number of lucky events (in green) and a certain amount of unlucky events (in red). Whenever a person encountered an unlucky event, their success was reduced in half, and whenever a person encountered a lucky event, their success doubled proportional to their talent (to reflect the real-world interaction between talent and opportunity).
What did they find? Well, first they replicated the well known "Pareto Principle", which predicts that a small number of people will end up achieving the success of most of the population (Richard Koch refers to it as the "80/20 principle"). In the final outcome of the 40-year simulation, while talent was normally distributed, success was not. The 20 most successful individuals held 44% of the total amount of success, while almost half of the population remained under 10 units of success (which was the initial starting condition). This is consistent with real-world data, although there is some suggestion that in the real world, wealth success is even more unevenly distributed, with just eight men owning the same wealth as the poorest half of the world.
Although such an unequal distribution may seem unfair, it might be justifiable if it turned out that the most successful people were indeed the most talented/competent. So what did the simulation find? On the one hand, talent wasn't irrelevant to success. In general, those with greater talent had a higher probability of increasing their success by exploiting the possibilities offered by luck. Also, the most successful agents were mostly at least average in talent. So talent mattered.
However, talent was definitely not sufficient because the most talented individuals were rarely the most successful. In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.
Talent loss is obviously unfortunate, to both the individual and to society. So what can be done so that those most capable of capitalizing on their opportunities are given the opportunities they most need to thrive? Let's turn to that next.
STIMULATING SERENDIPITY
Many meritocratic strategies used to assign honors, funds, or rewards are often based on the past success of the person. Selecting individuals in this way creates a state of affairs in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (often referred to as the "Matthew effect"). But is this the most effective strategy for maximizing potential? Which is a more effective funding strategy for maximizing impact to the world: giving large grants to a few previously successful applicants, or a number of smaller grants to many average-successful people? This is a fundamental question about distribution of resources, which needs to be informed by actual data.
Consider a study conducted by Jean-Michel Fortin and David Currie, who looked at whether larger grants lead to larger discoveries. They found a positive, but only very small relationship between funding and impact (as measured by four indices relating to scientific publications). What's more, those who received a second grant were not more productive than those who only received a first grant, and impact was generally a decelerating function of funding.
The authors suggest that funding strategies that focus more on targeting diversity than "excellence" are likely to be more productive to society. In a more recent study, researchers looked at the funding provided to 12,720 researchers in Quebec over a fifteen year period. They concluded that "both in terms of the quantity of papers produced and of their scientific impact, the concentration of research funding in the hands of a so-called 'elite' of researchers generally produces diminishing marginal returns.”
Taking these sort of findings seriously, the European Research Council recently gave the biochemist Ohid Yaqub 1.7 million dollars to properly determine the extent of serendipity in science. Coming up with a multidimensional definition of serendipity, Yaqub pinned down some of the mechanisms by which serendipity in science happens, including astute observation, "controlled sloppiness" (allowing unexpected events to occur while tracking their origins), and the collaborative action of networks of scientists. This is consistent with Dean Simonton's extensive work on the role of serendipity and chance in the evolution of creative and impactful scientific discoveries.
Building on this work, the Italian team who simulated the role of luck in success went one step further in their simulation. Playing God (so to speak), they explored the effectiveness of a number of different funding strategies. They applied different strategies every five years during the 40 year worklife of each agent in the simulation. Without any funding at all, we already saw that the most successful agents were very lucky people with about average levels of talent. What happens once they introduced various funding opportunities into the simulation?
The least effective funding strategies are those that give a certain percentage of the funding to only the already most successful individuals. The "mixed" strategies that combine giving a certain percentage to the most successful people and equally distributing the rest is a bit more effective, and distributing funds at random is even more efficient. This last finding is intriguing because it is consistent with other research suggesting that in complex social and economic contexts where chance is likely to play a role, strategies that incorporate randomness can perform better than strategies based on the "naively meritocratic" approach.
With that said, the best funding strategy of them all was one where an equal number of funding was distributed to everyone. Distributing funds at a rate of 1 unit every five years resulted in 60% of the most talented individuals having a greater than average level of success, and distributing funds at a rate of 5 units every five years resulted in 100% of the most talented individuals having an impact! This suggests that if a funding agency or government has more money available to distribute, they'd be wise to use that extra money to distribute money to everyone, rather than to only a select few. As the researchers conclude,
"If the goal is to reward the most talented person (thus increasing their final level of success), it is much more convenient to distribute periodically (even small) equal amounts of capital to all individuals rather than to give a greater capital only to a small percentage of them, selected through their level of success — already reached — at the moment of the distribution.”
The results of research on luck and talent strongly suggest that luck and opportunity play an underappreciated role in determining the final level of individual success. As the researchers point out, since rewards and resources are usually given to those who are already highly rewarded, this often causes a lack of opportunities for those who are most talented (i.e., have the greatest potential to actually benefit from the resources), and it doesn't take into account the important role of luck, which can emerge spontaneously throughout the creative process.
The researchers argue that the following factors are all important in giving people more chances of success: a stimulating environment rich in opportunities, a good education, intensive training, and an efficient strategy for the distribution of funds and resources. They argue that at the macro-level of analysis, any policy that can influence these factors will result in greater collective progress and innovation for society (not to mention immense self-actualization of any particular individual). ~
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/
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CHIMPANZEES MAY HELP US UNDERSTAND WHY HUMANS WALK UPRIGHT
~ Humans are unique in the way that we walk. And, as such, scientists are incredibly invested in understanding how and why our ancient ancestors acquired their strange, upright strut.
Among anthropologists, the traditional theory holds that the hominins tumbled from the treetops and transitioned to the open terrain between about 7 and 4 million years ago, becoming fully bipedal during that time.
But a study in Science Advances draws on observations of our closest living relatives — the chimpanzees — to challenge this theory. It suggests that these humans likely walked on two legs while they were still living amongst the trees.
HUMANS WALKING UPRIGHT THROUGH TREETOPS
There's an assortment of ideas as to when, why and how our ancient ancestors started to strut on only their hind legs. But these ideas tend to share the assumption that the shrinking of the thick, tropical forests around 8 to 4 million years ago motivated human species like Sahelanthropus tchadensis to spend less time in the trees and more time in the open terrain, on two feet instead of four.
“To date, the numerous hypotheses for the evolution of bipedalism share the idea that hominins […] came down from the trees and walked upright on the ground, especially in more arid, open habitats that lacked tree cover,” says Fiona Stewart, a study author and anthropologist at University College London, in a press release. “Our data do not support that at all.”
In fact, by observing the chimpanzees living in the thin, patchy forests of Tanzania’s Issa Valley, Stewart and a team could investigate whether the openness of the ancient terrain brought on the transition to bipedalism among our ancestors.
Their investigation showed that the Issa chimpanzees, in spite of their open surroundings, spent the same amount of time in the trees as chimpanzees living in thick, fully tropical forests. On top of that, their investigation also found that almost all of the fleeting instances of upright movement among the Issa chimpanzees — around 85 percent — occurred far above the forest floor.
“Because so many of the traditional drivers of bipedalism — such as carrying objects or seeing over tall grass, for example — are associated with being on the ground, we thought we’d naturally see more bipedalism here as well. However, this is not what we found,” says Alex Piel, another study author and anthropologist at University College London, in a press release. “Instead, trees probably remained essential to its evolution.”
All in all, the study authors say that it is likely that the hominins learned to walk on their hind legs in the trees instead of the open terrain, with improved foraging abilities, in all likelihood, inspiring the transition.
CLUES OF WALKING UPRIGHT IN ISSA
As one of the first teams to investigate the tangible impacts of thinning forests on terrestriality and bipedalism, the authors arrived at their conclusion after accumulating almost 14,000 observations of physical activity in 13 adult chimpanzees, including around 3,000 observations of climbing and walking.
Using these observations, the authors compared the frequency of movements that occurred in the trees to the frequency of movements that occurred on the ground and found that the chimpanzees in Issa were not any more inclined to moving over the open terrain.
Moreover, the additional analysis of the chimpanzees' bursts of brief, bipedal movement strengthened the team's conclusion that our ancient ancestors' full-time bipedalism could have been born amongst the trees.
“What we need to focus on now is how and why these chimpanzees spend so much time in the trees,” Stewart concludes in a press release. “That is what we’ll focus on next on our way to piecing together this complex evolutionary puzzle.”
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/chimpanzees-could-answer-why-humans-evolved-to-walk-upright?utm_source=acs&utm_medium=email&utm_email=ivy333%40cox.net&utm_campaign=%20News0_DSC_221229_SLV1000_0000000&eid=ivy333%40cox.net
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INTERMITTENT FASTING CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION
~ Numerous studies have shown health benefits of time-restricted eating including increase in life span in laboratory studies, making practices like intermittent fasting a hot topic in the wellness industry. However, exactly how it affects the body on the molecular level, and how those changes interact across multiple organ systems, has not been well understood. Now, Salk scientists show in mice how time-restricted eating influences gene expression across more than 22 regions of the body and brain. Gene expression is the process through which genes are activated and respond to their environment by creating proteins.
The findings, published in Cell Metabolism on January 3, 2023, have implications for a wide range of health conditions where time-restricted eating has shown potential benefits, including diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer.
For the study, two groups of mice were fed the same high-calorie diet. One group was given free access to the food. The other group was restricted to eating within a feeding window of nine hours each day. After seven weeks, tissue samples were collected from 22 organ groups and the brain at different times of the day or night and analyzed for genetic changes. Samples included tissues from the liver, stomach, lungs, heart, adrenal gland, hypothalamus, different parts of the kidney and intestine, and different areas of the brain.
The authors found that 70 percent of mouse genes respond to time-restricted eating.
"By changing the timing of food, we were able to change the gene expression not just in the gut or in the liver, but also in thousands of genes in the brain," says Panda.
Nearly 40 percent of genes in the adrenal gland, hypothalamus, and pancreas were affected by time-restricted eating. These organs are important for hormonal regulation. Hormones coordinate functions in different parts of the body and brain, and hormonal imbalance is implicated in many diseases from diabetes to stress disorders. The results offer guidance to how time-restricted eating may help manage these diseases.
Interestingly, not all sections of the digestive tract were affected equally. While genes involved in the upper two portions of the small intestine -- the duodenum and jejunum -- were activated by time-restricted eating, the ileum, at the lower end of the small intestine, was not. This finding could open a new line of research to study how jobs with shiftwork, which disrupts our 24-hour biological clock (called the circadian rhythm) impact digestive diseases and cancers. Previous research by Panda's team showed that time-restricted eating improved the health of firefighters, who are typically shift workers.
The researchers also found that time-restricted eating aligned the circadian rhythms of multiple organs of the body.
"Circadian rhythms are everywhere in every cell," says Panda. "We found that time-restricted eating synchronized the circadian rhythms to have two major waves: one during fasting, and another just after eating. We suspect this allows the body to coordinate different processes."
Next, Panda's team will take a closer look at the effects of time-restricted eating on specific conditions or systems implicated in the study, such as atherosclerosis, which is a hardening of the arteries that is often a precursor to heart disease and stroke, as well as chronic kidney disease. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230103133742.htm
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BEER HOPS MAY FEND OFF ALZHEIMER’S
~ Previous research had suggested that hops — the plant added to most brews to give them a variety of bitter, aromatic and sometimes fruity aromas, depending on the variety — counteract some of the chemicals that may cause Alzheimer’s.
So, in a study published recently in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, Cristina Airoldi and Alessandro Palmioli from the Milan Center for Neuroscience took a closer look at the chemical compounds that make up different kinds of hops.
The researchers tested a variety of different hops in their research. These included Saaz hops, a variety often used for crisp Czech pilsners; Tettnang, a Germany variety used in lighter lagers and ales; Cascade, a fruity and aromatic variety used in many American pale ales and IPAs; and Summit, another American bitter variety often used in IPAs.
One of the ways that Alzheimer’s likely causes damage is through the clumping of amyloid beta proteins in human nerve cells. Airoldi, Palmioli and their colleagues have now found that the antioxidants within the hops they tested inhibit this clumping of amyloid beta proteins.
The compounds also had antibiotic properties, helping the body to remove neurotoxic and misfolded proteins. “We observed that some hops components were able to kidnap these toxic [molecules] and trigger protective cellular processes,” say Airoldi and Palmioli.
If you prefer lagers and ales, you’ll be happy to learn that an extract from the Tettnang hops was the most effective of the four varieties tested.
In the next step of their research, the team tested the Tettnang extract on the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. The genomes of these worms are similar to those of humans in important ways, making them a good substitute in lab experiments — particularly when studying degenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as the aging process, say Airoldi and Palmioli.
The researchers found that the Tettnang extract lightly protected the roundworms from Alzheimer’s-related paralysis; this protective effect was similar to that produced by doxycycline, they explain, a drug that has been shown in other research to prevent some of the negative effects of Alzheimer’s (such as memory impairment and neuro-inflammation).
But these preliminary discoveries don’t mean that you should go out and drink as many Tettnang-hopped beers as you can in the name of Alzheimer’s defense. For one, the research was conducted on worms — not humans.
Though Airoldi and Palmioli’s team have performed some preliminary research on beers that were brewed with different varieties and quantities of hops, and found that some of these nutraceutical compounds are preserved in beer after brewed. “We found a correlation between the content of hop and the protective effect against [amyloid beta]-induced neurotoxicity in the same human cell line used in the study on hop extracts,” they say.
And they’re also testing these extracts against the proteins that cause some of the negative effects related to Parkinson’s disease and Machado-Joseph, a rare degenerative disease that causes a lack of muscle control. ~
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/beer-hops-may-fend-off-alzheimers
Oriana:
This is certainly exciting news to beer drinkers. But all of us should be happy to know that tea and coffee are both protective against Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s. And, unlike beer, they are not fattening — in fact they are appetite suppressants.
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CAN TOOTH DECAY BE REVERSED BY DIET?
~ A study performed across a sample of 62 children with cavities was conducted, the young patients were divided into three dietary groups. Group 1 was prescribed a regimen of standard food like oatmeal – which is rich in phytic acid. Group 2 was prescribed their normal everyday diet and supplemented with vitamin D. Group 3 was prescribed a grain-free diet and also supplemented with vitamin D.
The results noted that children from Group 1 showed an uptick in cavities. Group 2 exhibited minor improvements to existing cavities. Group 3 – children who consumed vegetables, fruits, meat and milk [but no grain] – saw the greatest improvement to existing cavities.
Studies like this suggest our relationship with tooth decay is not perfectly understood – researchers still have much to learn about cavities in teeth. The study also suggests understanding the link between diet and tooth decay potentially holds the key to addressing the rising amount of patients developing decay.
Not surprisingly, the worst offender among diets is sugar. Though we crave it, sugar is the substance that fuels oral bacteria and prevents a healthy flow of dental fluids. Its high concentration of acidity inevitably decalcifies the protective enamel of the tooth.
Dairy products have been shown to assist in the healthy dental fluid flow. Products like goat’s milk, cheese and organic yogurts can literally ward off infection from developing. The added minerals also help to strengthen teeth and maintain their proper function.
https://www.mytempesmiles.com/can-tooth-decay-be-reversed-by-diet/
Oriana:
The trouble with phytic acid is that it chelates micronutrients, lowering their absorption. The biggest offenders are beans, seeds, nuts, and grains (including oatmeal). Thus, it’s classified as an anti-nutrient.
However, soaking and cooking lower the levels of phytic acid. If you are a purist who won’t touch canned beans (already pressure-cooked), soak your beans for 24 hours, and then, ideally, pressure-cook them (Instant Pot is genius; I use it practically every day.
While the worst offender is sugar, grain isn’t far behind. No one really needs a piece of bread or a dinner roll with a meal. It will raise your blood sugar and insulin, and is bad for your teeth on top of that.
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DARK CHOCOLATE IS GOOD FOR TEETH
~ New studies show that dark chocolate (at least 70%) is effective at fighting cavities, plaque and tooth decay.
Dark chocolate is a good source of polyphenols, natural chemicals that can limit harmful oral bacteria. They are also able to neutralize microorganisms that cause bad breath and prevent some bacteria from turning sugar and starches into acid, which love to wreck havoc on your teeth.
Antioxidants in dark chocolate have been shown to fight periodontal disease. And research suggests it might be better at fighting tooth decay than fluoride. There’s also a compound found in chocolate called CBH that could be used in mouthwashes and toothpaste someday. ~
https://summitdentalhealth.net/dark-chocolate-is-good-for-your-teeth/
Oriana:
After eating dark chocolate, you should wait 30 minutes before brushing your teeth.
Dark chocolate and hard cheese are my favorite foods when it comes to dental benefits. Tea, both black and green, is also beneficial. That’s my typical mini-breakfast: tea, chocolate, and a slice of cheese (or a gob of goat cheese). True, chocolate and tea can stain your teeth, but I consider it a small price to pay given all the positives, and not just for the teeth.
Xylitol chewing gum is also beneficial. The same goes for having ample saliva in your saliva. Many medications cause dry mouth. To counteract this, you need to drink more water and chew gum.
Finally, let me recommend Vitamin K2 (the Gouda cheese is a good source). It’s essential for directing calcium to the teeth. I take a lot of K2 because I suspect that next to berberine and curcumin it may be the most important supplement.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF STAYING HYDRATED
~ "The results suggest that proper hydration may slow down aging and prolong a disease-free life," said Natalia Dmitrieva, PhD, a study author and researcher in the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, in a news release.
The researchers looked at the link between sodium levels in blood and certain health markers — and explained that blood sodium levels increased when fluid intake decreased.
Adults who had serum sodium levels at the higher end of a normal range were more likely to die at a younger age.
They were also more likely to develop chronic conditions and show signs of advanced biological aging, compared to those whose levels were in the medium ranges, the NIH report said.
A normal serum sodium range should be between 135-146 milliequivalents per liter (mEq/L), according to the NIH release.
The study's authors explained that hydration plays a role in serum sodium levels.
The NIH release indicated that the team found that serum sodium greater than 142 mmol/l for those who are middle-aged is associated with a 39% increased risk of developing chronic diseases — and up to a 64% increased associated risk for developing dementia and chronic diseases such as diabetes, stroke, atrial fibrillation, heart failure, and peripheral artery disease.
Staying well-hydrated was also associated with better health, fewer chronic conditions and longer life, the study said.
The researchers also found that participants with serum sodium levels above 144 mEq/L had a 50% increased risk of being "biologically older" than their actual age — while those around the 142 mEq/L mark had up to a 15% increased risk, compared to those who had ranges between 137 and 142 mEq/L.
Adults with levels between 144.5 and 146 mEq/L presented a 21% increased risk of premature death compared to those with ranges between 137-142 mEq/L, the NIH report also said.
The study's authors found that adults with serum sodium levels between 138-140 mEq/L had the lowest risk of developing chronic disease.
The NIH release, however, noted that the researchers' findings do not prove a causal effect — and that randomized, controlled trials are needed to determine if the optimal amount of fluid intake can help prevent disease and promote healthy aging.
The researchers said the correlations found in the study can be helpful in guiding an individual’s behavioral habits and be informative to clinicians.
"People whose serum sodium is 142 mEq/L or higher would benefit from [an] evaluation of their fluid intake," Dmitrieva said in the NIH release.
People can increase their fluid intake with water as well as with juices, vegetables and fruits with high water content, she said in the release.
Bhatt cautioned, "Older adults or those with some degree of dementia … may lose their sense of thirst — and in those situations, more scheduled water consumption can sometimes be useful."
Bhatt, who is also a professor of cardiovascular medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System, pointed out that the investigators examined sodium levels — and it was not a direct study of the amount of daily water intake.
"To prove that drinking more water actually improves health would require a gold-standard, randomized trial," he said.
The current guidelines from the National Academies of Medicine suggest women should drink 6-9 cups (1.5-2.2 liters) daily and men should drink 8-12 cups (2-3 liters) daily, according to the release. ~
https://www.foxnews.com/health/healthy-aging-drinking-water-fascinating-findings-new-study
ending on beauty:
WHAT CAME FIRST
What came first
before Eve and Adam
in the Garden, thirsting
for what can’t be known.
What before the cunning
of tireless men building
towers of tales time and again
in search of lost Heaven.
What first, lilacs in bloom
or the musty lilac perfume
that seeped from my grandma
bosoming me, each of us in awe
of what is, of what we knew
without any question to be true.
~ Kerry Shawn Keys
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