Sam Szafran: Escalier 54 Rue de Seine, 1990*
I CAN BE A POET ONLY IN ENGLISH
Because the words might mean anything.
If you told me that table means
chair, I’d sink into a cushioned
table and lean back, on the deck
of The Titanic, which means
luxury before a fall —
Iceberg happens, but who could deny
that merde might mean
the highest grade of emerald?
In Polish “to cross yourself”
sounds almost like “to say goodbye.”
How could I write in a language
where you cross yourself before
you travel, step into water,
or commit suicide —
as if it’s not enough
to lose the future tense,
intended only for the young.
*
The Germans panicked when after the war
they got parcels from America marked
GIFT. In German, Gift means poison.
The Old Germanic root of English
“gift” is giftu, poison.
Did the frost-bound Anglo-Saxons
guess, like the marble Greeks
with their pharmakon,
that a little poison could be a cure?
— though Socrates may have gone
too far, toasting the gods with hemlock,
saying death is no misfortune.
*
When a friend says, I’ll drop
you off, it sounds — Splat! —
like a misfortune, but it is a gift. Even
when we pray, A gift is God in action,
we cannot know if it’s a gift or poison
until later, from the vanishing point.
As we step into the treacherous
waters of memory, having forgotten
to cross ourselves,
let us remember the primordial
meaning of “gift” was bride-price.
That’s why we toast To Life,
that dazzling and expensive bride —
a cup of kindness or poison
to cure us of this constant vanishing.
~ Oriana
*
YESENIN WAS LIKELY KILLED
~ Yesenin's was likely killed: Among facts to support the assassination hypothesis were: 1) At the time of his death, Yesenin was actively working on his collected works. He was not drinking after his departure from Moscow and was enthusiastic about leaving the capital and working on other new texts. A project he was dreaming about was close to success: to start editing a literature magazine of his own. Most of his manuscripts were missing from his hotel room and had never been discovered (including his recently announced novella known under the work title When I was a boy… and his winter poems from the last months). Yesenin preferred to be well ordered in his work; but his hotel room was in extreme chaos, with his things scattered on the floor and with signs of a fight. 2) Yesenin had a fresh wound on his shoulder, one on his forehead and a bruise under one of his eyes. A few weeks before his death, many of his friends claimed that he had been carrying a revolver, but this weapon was never discovered. His jacket was missing, and he had to be covered with a sheet from the hotel. The ligature with which he purportedly hanged himself, made from a belt that later disappeared, was reportedly not a hanging one: it was only holding the body to one side, to the right. Nevertheless, no further investigations were documented to have been made in this direction. The room where he died was also not examined. 3) The photos of the hotel room and the body were not made by a police photographer. None of his close friends (e.g. Klyuev, Valerian Pravduhin, Ilya Sadofiev) was taken to see the room. Neither were they officially interrogated, while Ehrlich reportedly did not seem aggrieved by the events (Ehrlich was sentenced to death and shot in 1937). The work known as his last poem is sometimes considered as written in 1924 and dedicated to the fellow poet Viktor Manuilov. 4) The medical documentation does not include the supposed hour of death. Later experts considered it careless and point out that the language is uncharacteristic for an experienced doctor like the one involved, Alexander Gilyarevsky, who died in 1931. 5) The fact that Yesenin remained in the Hotel Angleterre, where there was a regular strong police presence, is still unexplained, given the poet’s late negativism towards the authorities and his persistent feeling that they were following him and threatening him, shared with friends on various occasions. Moreover, he was not registered in the hotel, as well as his friend, the writer Georgy Ustinov, which may be interpreted as a sign that the visit may have already been prepared and planned by others. (Georgy Ustinov also reportedly killed himself in 1932.) ~
(Wikipedia: Sergei Yesenin, reference 24; my thanks to Kerry Shawn Keys)
Oriana:
Russia (under any other name) and staged “suicide” . . . I don’t know specifically about Yesenin, but being harassed by the security police as he was, seeing his friends arrested and executed, that alone might have driven a person to commit a genuine suicide . . .
*
MISHA IOSSEL’S SUMMARY OF PUTIN’S SPEECH
~ Putin's “long-awaited” “state-of-the-nation” speech to so-called “general assembly,” in a nutshell: “Welcome to the Titanik, the West is bad, we're good, the West wants us to suffer, the West wants to destroy us, I know you know I don't believe a single word I'm saying, the West made us invade Ukraine, we're innocent it was all the West's fault, I know you know I'm in a hole and still keep digging, them bad us good, f*ck the West, the West is a decadent and gender-neutral hellhole, I know you know I am a hopelessly weakened ruler of a failing state, this war will never end never end, nuclear weapons nuclear weapons nuclear weapons, everybody is bad we're good, f*ck everybody except us.”
There, now you know and don't have to watch it yourself. Saved you 1 hour and 45 minutes' worth of time-travel to early-seventies' USSR.
Dictators’ speeches usually are boring. ~
More from Misha:
~ How did Russia manage to transition, with a stunning back-sliding acceleration, from the hopeful nascent, fledgling democracy of the early 1990's to full-blown fascist state it is now? The answer -- admittedly, a somewhat simplistic one -- can be boiled down to two closely interconnected impulses that for centuries have dominated the collective Russian psyche: the burning envy of, and concomitant bitter resentment toward, the West. ~
Biden and Zelensky
Oriana:
Again, I’m reminded of the story of how a visiting Russian woman government official, a committed Communist, as part of her sight-seeing, was taken to a supermarket — and burst into tears when she saw the abundance of food.
Moscow 1993FIVE VISITS THAT MADE HISTORY
~ Five visits that have defined European history most in the post WWII era: Kennedy in Berlin, Brandt in Warsaw, John Paul II in Warsaw, Reagan in Berlin and Biden in Kyiv. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
*
GORBACHEV AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION: ANOTHER LOOK
~ Gorbachev knew that the so-called Soviet experiment was in serious trouble. On the day of the Politburo vote that elevated him to General Secretary, he admitted to his wife that the Soviet Union could not carry on as it had.
His primary priority at first was neutralizing hardcore opposition so that he could undertake sweeping reform. Much to his surprise, he managed to kick the hardcore Andrei Gromyko from foreign minister to Chairman of the Presidium, which made him head of state, though only in a ceremonial role.
He also began surrounding himself with reformers, notably Alexander Yakovlev, his newly appointed senior advisor, former ambassador to Canada and a noted scholar of North America, who stood the very cusp of radical reform and who had determined that the Soviet Union was in a terminal state years earlier. Early in his Kremlin tenure, Yakovlev composed and circulated a memo that called for radical economic reforms and even a multi-party democratic system. He was a closeted social democrat who chose to invoke Lenin's revolutionary strategy first as a means of destroying the vestiges of Stalinism in the Soviet system, followed by the inner layer of Leninism before undertaking a wholesale transformation of the Soviet Union into a social democracy.
Gorbachev perceived the country’s economic state as as dire, plagued by a dysfunctional agricultural sector and lacking the hard currency to purchase the grain to offset Soviet production shortfalls. Yet, to complicate matters, the Soviet Union was investing millions upon millions of rubles funding overseas socialist struggles and also subsidizing Eastern European client states, which, if not in open rebellion against the Soviet Union, were asking why their populations weren’t afforded the amenities and conveniences of Western European countries.
Many dissidents in these countries also were invoking the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords and deriving valuable rhetorical capital from this, notably through Western media coverage. This was an effect that the Soviet leaders never saw coming, assuming the signing of these accords with Western countries would benefit them by recognizing the post-war status quo in Europe.
Complicating matters was that all of the Soviet client state with the exception or Ceausescu’s Romanian, were deeply in debt to Western countries, and there really was nothing the Soviets could do to mitigate this.
Gorbachev perceived that one of his first orders of business must be dismantling much of the Soviet nuclear complex so that more money could be freed up to reform the Soviet economy. Yet, like many Soviet elites, even reform-minded ones, he had serious misgivings about President Reagan and the hardliners around him and had pegged the President's Star Wars as an aggressive effort veiled in rhetoric to render nuclear weaponry obsolete.
Even so, he pressed ahead, proposing one-third cuts in the nuclear arsenals of both nations.
At the urging of Yakovlev, he also signaled to Eastern Europeans that they were on their own in reforming their own socialist systems and that the Brezhnev Doctrine was revoked, meaning that that Soviet Union would not intervene in the internal affairs of these countries no matter how they chose to undertake reforms.
History regards this as a lofty-minded decision and the only realistic one given the dire situation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Yet it raised some troubling questions regarding Soviet internal affairs, such as the status of the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union by Stalin shortly before the outbreak of World War II.
If the Eastern European states were entitled to run their own affairs, then why not the Baltic states - and, for that matter, the Soviet republics in general, given that all were granted the right of secession?
This ended up placing Gorbachev into a tangled web from which he never was able to extricate himself. ~ Jim Lancaster, Quora
*
For decades, it was the official policy of the Soviet Union to deny the existence of the secret protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact.
At the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yakovlev headed a commission
investigating the existence of such a protocol. In December 1989
Yakovlev concluded that the protocol had existed and revealed his
findings to the Soviet Parliament. As a result, the first multi-party
elected Congress of Soviets since 1918 "passed the declaration admitting the existence of the secret protocols, condemning and denouncing them". (~Wiki)
*
IN RUSSIA, A CLASH OF GENERATIONS OVER THE WAR WITH UKRAINE
~ Uliana is weeping as her brother's coffin is lowered into the ground.
The 37-year-old actress is attending the funeral of Vanya, a Russian soldier killed on the front line in Ukraine. "They said he died a hero," says Uliana of 23-year-old Vanya. "I thought, 'What does it mean, like a hero?' It's absurd. I don't want a dead hero for a brother.”
But her father Boris, though also stricken with grief, is proud that his son Vanya died fighting for his country.
His view is that the conflict is a battle against "a government that preaches fascism". This claim echoes the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who says he is helping to de-Nazify Ukraine and that its government has carried out genocide — a claim for which there is no evidence.
"Before this happened with Vanya, we didn't discuss the war," says Uliana describing her relationship with her father. "But after he died we had some awful fights about it.”
It is hard to get an accurate picture of exactly how people in the country feel about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, given legislation which outlaws any comments deemed to discredit the military, or which refer to the military action as a war rather than a "special military operation”.
But a survey published in November 2022 by an independent Russian research group suggests it is dividing generations - 75% of respondents aged 40 and over said they supported the war, compared with 62% of those aged 18-24.
Russian filmmaker Anastasia Popova says this chimed with her own perception as she traveled round the country to shoot the documentary.
"I observed lots of different ruptures between families. Their children were mostly against the war, and their parents — the generation brought up during the Soviet Union, who watched [state-run] TV day and night — supported the war. I have the same rupture within my family," she adds, saying her father supports the military action.
Relying on state TV for news means absorbing the official narrative of the Russian government day after day. Uliana, and others of her age group, are more likely to get their news from other outlets, such as YouTube and social media.
"'Sorry' can't come close to expressing the grief I feel inside," says Uliana.
She says the war has changed people.
"I watch people on the metro [in Moscow]. They read the news, then look away. They've stopped looking each other in the eye.”
Popova stresses that outside the big cities, support for the war is greater, regardless of the demographic. She says this became clear while she was filming Vanya's funeral in their home village of Arkhangelskoe, 60 miles [97km] outside Moscow.
Uliana speaks of this moment of recognition too.
"When I was watching those people, it came to me that they really believed the words that they were saying," she says, "[which were] that Vanya died like a hero, a true patriot who defended his motherland.
"I know that something is wrong. Who are we supposed to be saving there? What are our boys dying for? I never imagined in my life that my brother would be brought to me in a zinc coffin."
Vanya was the youngest of four siblings, and the only son.
"He was a golden boy," Uliana says.
"He had a broad upbringing," Boris explains. "Art school, music school, sport… I put everything I dreamed of into him.”
After leaving home, Vanya joined a literary institute in Moscow to study creative writing and also acted in experimental productions, including at the Bolshoi Theater.
Boris says this led to heartbreak for Vanya, who fell in love with a girl who didn't want to get married.
"This is the theater world. With its own views of life. Its own ethical and moral criteria. In place of family values, they have open relationships between men and women," says Boris.
Uliana says Vanya seemed extremely happy in the theater, but his father suggests that it provoked some kind of crisis in his son.
"He was not satisfied with their view of the world, that they are always negative about Russia; that Russians are nobody to them; that their ancestors, the whole history of Russia is full of nonsense. He understands that he's not like that. We talked about it. What should he do?”
So, Boris says, he and Vanya agreed that he should join the military.
"For a life in the creative arts.. you need life experience," says Boris. "Where can you find it? We decided he should follow in the footsteps of the great writers. That's the army.”
Vanya joined the army as a conscript — and then, wanting more interesting challenges, took a military contract. He was a marine based in the city of Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea when Russia launched its major assault on cities across Ukraine in February last year. He was told to call his family to say goodbye before being sent to the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
"We talked for a long time, over an hour," says Uliana. "He had tears in his eyes. I said: 'Vanya, show me what you have there.' He showed me a machine gun. Like he used to show me toys as a kid.”
Boris shows a clip of Vanya's video message to him. "Our cause is just," Vanya is saying. "Hello to everyone. I'll write when I get there. Hugs and kisses.”
"Those were his last words," Boris says.
He was killed near the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol on 15 March.
His death brought Uliana's and Boris's different views on the war into sharp focus.
Boris tells Uliana that she is too young to remember what he refers to as the "brotherhood" of the Soviet Union republics. He argues that its fall "broke the psyche of many generations to come, drumming into their heads that the Russians were their enemy”.
His language is reminiscent of President Putin, who has called the fall of the Soviet empire the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] Century". Ukraine declared independence shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
The Russian president also puts blame for the war at the doorstep of Nato and the West, which he argues is trying to weaken and ultimately destroy Russia. Boris follows this narrative too.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64640183
*
“NEVER SAW SUCH HELL” — RUSSIAN SOLDIERS’ CALLS FROM UKRAINE
~ One Russian soldier tells his mother that the young Ukrainians dead from his first firefight looked just like him. Another explains to his wife that he’s drunk because alcohol makes it easier to kill civilians. A third wants his girlfriend to know that in all the horror, he dreams about just being with her.
About 2,000 secret recordings of intercepted conversations between Russian soldiers in Ukraine and their loved ones back home offer a harrowing new perspective on Vladimir Putin’s year-old war. There is a human mystery at the heart of this conversations heard in intercepted phone calls: How do people raised with a sense of right and wrong end up accepting and perpetrating terrible acts of violence?
The AP identified calls made in March 2022 by soldiers in a military division that Ukrainian prosecutors say committed war crimes in Bucha, a town outside Kyiv that became an early symbol of Russian atrocities.
They show how deeply unprepared young soldiers — and their country — were for the war to come. Many joined the military because they needed money and were informed of their deployment at the last minute. They were told they’d be welcomed as heroes for liberating Ukraine from its Nazi oppressors and their Western backers, and that Kyiv would fall without bloodshed within a week.
The intercepts also show that as soldiers realized how much they’d been misled, they grew more and more afraid. Violence that once would have been unthinkable became normal. Looting and drinking offered moments of rare reprieve. Some said they were following orders to kill civilians or prisoners of war.
They tell their mothers what this war actually looks like: About the teenage Ukrainian boy who got his ears cut off. How the scariest sound is not the whistle of a rocket flying past, but the silence that means it’s coming directly for you. How modern weapons can obliterate the human body so there’s nothing left to bring home.
We listen as their mothers struggle to reconcile their pride and their horror, and as their wives and fathers beg them not to drink too much and to please, please call home.
[The mother of one of the soldiers contacted by AP] declined to listen to any of the intercepts: “This is absurd,” she said. “Just don’t try to make it look like my child killed innocent people.”
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-intercepts-2b14732d88b3f58d4a9d0b2b562bdb28
Oriana:
The article goes into some drastic details. I regarded them as too gruesome to be quoted.
*
WHY THE REMOVAL OF SOVIET MONUMENTS ANGERS RUSSIA
~ Because for Russia, these monuments are markers of territory. Colonial status markers.
Like a male predator, Russia marks territory, to later use these marks to claim it as their own. They hope to gather strength some day to re-occupy all Eastern and Central Europe, which they controlled after WWII. The statues of Soviet soldiers, Lenin, Stalin and other similar monuments, manufactured in USSR with industrial methods as clones, typically having no cultural or art values, were always placed in central location to mark it USSR colony, dominion, or vassal state.
Destroying these, the nations deny Russia any rights to claim their territory in the future.
The core Russians are enraged because their dominion is shrinking. Destruction of these milestones is an obvious sign of it.
After 2014, Ukraine has demolished our share of Lenins, renamed Lenin and May Day avenues and streets around the country, according to the Decommunization Act. Now our nation decided to get rid of Russian names not directly associated with the communist occupation, such as Pushkin, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And Russian imperial legacy. So far, it happens on the initiatives of local councils — they have the right to alter toponymics of their domain. Frequently, they make opinion polls to add credibility to their decisions.
The reason is: how are these figures related to Ukrainian town of Letichiv or Radekhiv? Did they live there, create their works? If so, it is a valid exception. But generally, they were named to show Russian culture supremacy. As you would not find a street named after William Shakespeare or Robert Burns, or J. S. Bach, but only of all these Russian writers and poets Ukrainians were forced to study at schools. At the same time, Ukrainian names only appeared in suburbs.
We in Ukraine have a lot of our own poets, writers, historical figures, scientists, composers, artists, etc — to name streets after them. Especially now, we have fallen heroes who deserve their names to be carved in stone in their hometowns, at least.
This is Russian colonialism. The West has condemned colonialism more than 50 years ago. ~ Timofey Vorobyov (lives in Lviv, Ukraine), Quora
*
US HAS TO DEAL WITH BOTH RUSSIA AND CHINA ON UKRAINE
~ President Joe Biden’s trip to mark the anniversary of the war in Ukraine is highlighting an even more grave challenge – a new era of simultaneous and sometimes intertwined US confrontations with nuclear rivals Russia and China.
Biden’s dramatic visit to Kyiv Monday amid wailing air raid sirens and his soaring speech in Warsaw a day later reinforced the West’s remarkable support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia and directly repudiated President Vladimir Putin.
But Putin issued his riposte in an annual address, framing the war in Ukraine as a wider existential battle against the West. After Biden vowed the US will be with Ukraine for as long as it takes, Putin’s speech underlined just how long that may be, raising the possibility of more years of war that will stretch the commitment of Western governments and populations to the cause.
China is meanwhile injecting its own strategic play into this widening great power brouhaha. It sent its top diplomat Wang Yi – his ears ringing with US warnings not to send Russia arms to use in Ukraine – to Moscow for high-level talks, even as a Sino-American spy balloon feud simmers.
This week’s developments do not mean that the future national security threats to the US from Beijing and Moscow are the same. The war in Ukraine has often exposed Russian weakness while worries about China’s rising power will preoccupy Washington for much of this century. And the two US foes are not locked in a formal alliance against the US, even if both see ways that they advance their aspirations to harm American interests and power working together.
But this moment finds the United States negotiating worsening foreign policy crises at the same time – with its former Cold War adversaries in the Kremlin and its belligerent new superpower rival led by Xi Jinping. Both these rivals are openly challenging the international rule of law and rejecting norms that have underpinned the international system for decades.
The idea of a global contest between democracies and autocracies seemed theoretical and intangible when Biden voiced it while running for president. Now it is all too real.
And this new and complicated foreign policy picture is not just a problem for American diplomats. Rising challenges abroad as well, as the depletion of US and Western weapons stocks as arms are sent to Ukraine, pose questions about military capacity and whether current defense spending is sufficient. Key Republicans meanwhile are accusing Biden of snubbing voters facing economic and other problems, even as he tries to position Democrats as the protectors of working Americans as the 2024 campaign dawns.
In terms of presidential stagecraft, Biden overshadowed Putin this week, with his daring overnight train journey into Kyiv and speech in the Polish capital, a location chosen for its role on NATO’s frontline. Putin’s address to the Russian parliament was a staider affair, sprinkled with his now familiar nuclear threats and conspiracy theories about the West.
Biden often seemed to be talking directly to the Russian leader, trying to expose him to Russians, Europeans and Americans as a tyrant responsible for disastrous blunders and inhumanity in Ukraine a year after his invasion. He listed strategic consequences of the invasion that drew Kyiv closer to the West and strengthened NATO – exactly the opposite of Putin’s war aims. He mocked the former KGB colonel over how his aggression has led to one Scandinavian state whose national sovereignty was once dominated by the Soviet Union but now wants to join the western alliance: “He thought he’d get the Finlandization of NATO, instead he got the NATOization of Finland … and Sweden.”
And Biden vowed, “President Putin’s craven lust for land and power will fail, and the Ukrainian people’s love for their country will prevail,” he added.
“Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.”
To Western ears, Putin seems to be living in an alternative reality. And Biden contradicted his claims of Western imperialism, saying, “I speak once more to the people of Russia. The United States and the nations of Europe do not seek to control or destroy Russia. The West was not plotting to attack Russia, as Putin said today.”
But dismissing Putin’s conspiratorial claims and sense that the West is engaged in a long campaign to topple him would be a mistake. While conventional victory may be beyond Russia, Putin may be able to live with a long grinding war that inflicts devastation on more Ukrainian cities, kills more Ukrainians, ends up costing Western governments billions and gradually hikes pressures on leaders in the US and Europe to pull back.
The Russian leader will likely be watching rising opposition to Biden’s involvement in the war among conservatives in the US. On Monday, for instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hinted – on the very day that Biden was standing with Ukrainians in Kyiv – that the future of Ukraine would not be priority should he win the White House.
“The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that, and steamrolling, that has not even come close to happening,” DeSantis said on Fox. “I think they have shown themselves to be a third-rate military power.”
Comments by DeSantis and other Republicans like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has warned against a “blank check” to Kyiv, show that while Biden can promise the US is with Kyiv for “as long as it takes,” he cannot guarantee it. The 2024 election may be as crucial for Ukraine as it is for the United States.
AN ALMOST TOTAL SHUT DOWN BETWEEN THE US AND RUSSIA
Biden’s trip also demonstrated that the estrangement between the US and Russia – a factor that will shape global politics for years – is almost complete.
Putin, for example, announced Tuesday that Russia would suspend participation in the New START nuclear treaty with the United States. It was not clear what practical impact this would have since Moscow has stopped fully implementing the deal.
Given that its economy is struggling, and its conventional forces are under extreme pressure, Russia also lacks resources to ignite a new nuclear arms race with Washington. But the collapse of one of the last building blocks of a post-Cold War thaw between Russia and the US exemplifies the almost total lack of communication between the rivals.
The Biden administration’s accusation last week that Russia has committed crimes against humanity ensures there will be no return to normality between Washington and Moscow even if the Ukraine war ends.
Any time the top two nuclear powers are not talking is dangerous — one reason why US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday Washington was willing to discuss the nuclear situation with Russia no matter what else was going on.
That may be the case. But Putin made clear in his speech that there was no prospect of the war ending soon. In telling Russians the conflict was critical to their own nation’s existence and part of an effort by the West to attack Russia, he set the stage for months more bloodshed and narrowed even further already distant avenues for some kind of face-saving exit if Russia does not prevail.
“I want to repeat: It was they who unleashed the war,” Putin said. “And we used and continue to use force to stop it.”
BEIJING IGNORES WASHINGTON’S WARNINGS
Even as it confronts Russia in Ukraine, the US is seeking to dampen its latest crisis with China – over what Washington says was a Chinese spy balloon that wafted over the continental US earlier this month. The two showdowns came closer to a linkage this week as the US warned China not to supply Russia with arms that it could use in the war in Ukraine and as Wang headed to Moscow.
Russia and China agreed on a friendship with “no limits” before Russia’s invasion last year, playing into long term US fears of a united front between Moscow and Beijing. The Chinese foreign ministry bristled that Washington, which has sent a stream of high-tech weaponry into Ukraine, was in no position to lecture China on the issue.
Any effort by China to supply arms for the Ukraine war would not shift the strategic balance of the battlefield – but it would be a grave and hostile new front for the US-China rivalry.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield warned on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that such a step would cross a US red line but did not specify what consequences could result.
There is no public evidence yet that China, while offering rhetorical support for Russia over Ukraine, has supplied lethal arms for the conflict. And the idea of a formal alliance against Washington by Russia and China still seems unlikely – given the power imbalance between Beijing and Moscow in China’s favor.
China, which has its own economic problems, may be unwilling to risk US sanctions that could result from sending arms to Moscow. But Beijing may also have an interest in the war being prolonged in the belief that it could distract the US and its military resources from Biden’s growing efforts to respond to China’s dominance in Asia.
A long-dragging conflict could also drive divides between the US and Europe – further playing into China’s foreign policy goals. And it could further incite political dissent in Washington, weakening Biden’s capacity to fulfill his foreign policy goals on the global stage.
So, there are many reasons why China – which has long seen the war in Ukraine through the prism of its rivalry with the US – may not be in a hurry to see the war in Ukraine end.
That’s yet another nettlesome foreign policy problem that Biden must confront. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/politics/president-biden-vladmir-putin-china-ukraine/index.html
*
WHAT QUEEN ELIZABETH THOUGHT OF PUTIN
~ David Blunkett had a story which he told in the week after The Queen’s death. He has been blind all of his life and whilst a Government Minister and MP had a series of guide dogs. He was standing next to The Queen when Vladimir Putin was being introduced down the line. His guide dog growled and barked when Putin came close — this is really out of character for any guide dog and that particular dog had never done it before. As Putin went down the line, The Queen quietly remarked “Dogs have such interesting instincts, do they not?” ~ Jackie Pearcey, Quora
*
ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE INVASION, SOME STATISTICS
~ To begin with one of the most important statistics, which remains among the most elusive: casualties on either side. There is a vast gulf between the reporting from Russia and Ukraine, but Western intelligence agencies estimated recently that some 200,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded since the war began. The Ukrainian toll is believed to be lower — but still more than 100,000 dead or wounded troops. These are staggering figures for both countries; beyond the grief and loss, the numbers have raised questions about how long the two armies can sustain this pace of fighting. In Russia, the losses have led to the deeply unpopular mobilization of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the deployment of former prisoners, freed for the express purpose of being dispatched to battle.
The official toll of Ukrainian civilian deaths is at least 8,000; even the United Nations, which keeps these figures, acknowledges that the actual toll is far higher. These are only the dead whose identities have been confirmed; in many of the more active theaters of the war, such identification has been difficult if not impossible. Independent assessments have put the civilian toll closer to 100,000.
A statistic that has proved easier to keep — and it’s another staggering one: Some 14 million Ukrainians have fled their homes — either to other countries or other parts of their own country. Poland has absorbed far more refugees than any other nation — according to the U.N. refugee agency, Poland was at one point sheltering nearly 5 million refugees of the war; today, more than 1.5 million people from Ukraine are living in Poland.
Meanwhile, a large number of Russians have left their country — somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million, depending on the source. It’s only a fraction of the numbers in the exodus from Ukraine, but it’s particularly high given than no one in Russia is fleeing missile strikes or bombardment. As Grid has reported, these are people leaving either because of the mobilizations, the economic situation, or because they are against the war and fear retribution for their views.
On the subject of retribution: An estimated 20,000 Russians have been arrested for protesting the war, though the number of such protests has dropped as the war has dragged on.
We have used the word “staggering” twice here already; it’s worth using a third time to describe the levels of Western military and financial aid delivered to Ukraine in the past year. The United States has never given so much military assistance to a nation that wasn’t home to U.S. forces fighting a war; one year in, the figure has eclipsed $100 billion. European Union contributions have totaled over $58 billion since last February.
The economies of Russia and Ukraine have suffered in different ways. Ukraine’s GDP took a 30 percent plunge in 2022; Russia’s 2022 losses were only 2.1 percent — a surprisingly low figure, for which the Russians have China, India and other trade partners to thank — and the Russian economy is actually expected to grow slightly in 2023. The good news for Ukraine in this area is that along with the military aid, there have also been robust efforts from the International Monetary Fund and several Western nations to provide relief.
Lastly, a data-driven note about the Ukrainian president. It’s believed that he has given roughly 350 addresses to his nation — one per day, almost — since the war began. In his efforts to win international support, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spoken to more than three dozen houses of parliament, and on two occasions he has left his country — his December visit to Washington and this month’s European trip that took him to London, Paris and Brussels.
https://www.grid.news/story/global/2023/02/23/ukraine-war-in-data-a-year-of-casualties-violence-and-displaced-ukrainians/
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THE BRAIN REACTS DIFFERENTLY TO THE NATIVE TONGUE
~ Most people will learn one or two languages in their lives. But Vaughn Smith, a 47-year-old carpet cleaner from Washington, D.C., speaks 24. Smith is a hyperpolyglot—a rare individual who speaks more than 10 languages.
In a new brain imaging study, researchers peered inside the minds of polyglots like Smith to tease out how language-specific regions in their brains respond to hearing different languages. Familiar languages elicited a stronger reaction than unfamiliar ones, they found, with one important exception: native languages, which provoked relatively little brain activity. This, the authors note, suggests there’s something special about the languages we learn early in life.
This study “contributes to our understanding of how our brain learns new things,” says Augusto Buchweitz, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, who was not involved in the work. “The earlier you learn something, the more your brain [adapts] and probably uses less resources.”
Scientists have largely ignored what’s going on inside the brains of polyglots—people who speak more than five languages—says Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led the new study. “There’s oodles of work on individuals whose language systems are not functioning properly,” she says, but almost none on people with advanced language skills. That’s partly because they account for only 1% of people globally, making it difficult to find enough participants for research.
But studying this group can help linguists understand the human “language network,” a set of specialized brain areas located in the left frontal and temporal lobes. These areas help humans with the most basic aspect of understanding language: connecting sounds with meaning, Fedorenko says.
To find out how the brain processes five or more languages, Fedorenko teamed up with Saima Malik-Moraleda—a graduate student at Harvard University and a polyglot herself—and a team of other researchers. They scanned the brains of 25 polyglots, 16 of whom were hyperpolyglots, including one who spoke more than 50 different languages. They used a brain imaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures blood flow in the brain, to map out these language networks.
Inside the fMRI machine, the polyglots listened to a series of 16-second-long recordings in one of eight different languages. Each recording was selected from a random chunk of the Bible or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which they or other groups had previously translated into 25 and 46 languages, respectively. The eight languages included each participant’s native language, three others they learned later in life, and four unfamiliar languages. Two of the unfamiliar languages were closely related to the participant’s native language—for instance, Spanish for a native Italian speaker. The other two unfamiliar languages came from unrelated language families.
The researchers found that when participants heard any of the nine languages, blood always rushed to the same brain regions. Instead of using different parts of the brain, the participants’ brains appeared to use the same basic network as monolinguals to try to make sense of the sounds, regardless of which language they heard.
The activity in the brain’s language networks fluctuated based on how well participants understood a language. The more familiar the language, the larger the response. Brain activity particularly revved up when participants heard unfamiliar languages that were closely related to ones they knew well. This might have happened as brain areas worked overtime to puzzle out the meanings based on similarities between the languages.
There was one exception to the rule: When participants heard their native tongue, their language networks were actually quieter than when they heard other familiar languages, the researchers reported last month in a preprint uploaded to the server bioRxiv, which hasn’t been peer reviewed. This trend held even when participants were fluent in their other familiar languages, suggesting less brain power is needed to process languages learned early in life.
That could be because expertise reduces the amount of brain power needed for a task, the researchers note. Previous studies have shown similar results in birders and used car salespeople asked to talk about familiar and unfamiliar topics. “When you become a specialist at something, you use fewer resources,” Malik-Moraleda says. The study suggests reaching peak cognitive efficiency may be more likely when it’s learned at a young age.
No previous study has studied so many polyglots. “It’s a very significant piece of work about polyglots,” Buchweitz says. But because the results are purely descriptive, any conclusions about the work are still tentative.
Many polyglots and hyperpolyglots deny any talent for language learning, Fedorenko says. Still, she wants to investigate how polyglots’ brains pull off a trick that so many others find next to impossible, and whether they have an innate talent or just an interest or opportunity.
Understanding what it takes for a brain to learn languages, she says, could one day lead to better tools to help people relearn languages more easily after a stroke or brain damage.
https://www.science.org/content/article/your-native-tongue-holds-special-place-your-brain-even-if-you-speak-10-languages
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THE RESTING RICH FACE
~ Your neutral expression may tell people how well-off you are, according to a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Nicholas Rule and Thora Bjornsdottir of the University of Toronto. They assert that eventually the expressions we make most often become etched in our faces, and that others see a positive-looking resting face as signifying a lifetime of wealth and satisfaction. Certainly a case could be made that the opposite — anxiety and worry — would leave telltale signs behind.
The study “indicates that something as subtle as the signals in your face about your social class can actually then perpetuate it,” Bjornsdottir tells the University of Toronto’s Medical Xpress. “Those first impressions can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s going to influence your interactions and the opportunities you have.”
Their study involved two sets of students. For the first, they separated students into economic brackets based on their annual family incomes. They were most interested in the faces of students either definitively above or below a median income of $75,000. They gathered students with family incomes under $60,000 into one group and students from families with incomes over $100,000 in another. The researchers then took portrait photos of each group’s students posing as expressionlessly as possible.
A second set of students was then asked to say whether each of the photographs showed a “rich or poor” student. About 53% of the time, a higher percentage than random chance would predict, they got it right. The researchers say that race and gender were not found to be a factor, nor was how quickly or slowly the students made their assessments. Bjornsdottir explains that, “People are not really aware of what cues they are using when they make these judgments. If you ask them why, they don’t know. They are not aware of how they are doing this.”
Rule tells MedicalXpress, “There are neurons in the brain that specialize in facial recognition. The face is the first thing you notice when you look at somebody. We see faces in clouds, we see faces in toast. We are sort of hardwired to look for face-like stimuli. And this is something people pick up very quickly. And they are consistent, which is what makes it statistically significant.”
If the findings are correct, it’s disturbing to think how little our carefully designed demeanor and appearance may help, and how early in life we may be marked as belonging to a particular economic class. “What we’re seeing is students who are just 18–22 years old have already accumulated enough life experience that it has visibly changed and shaped their face,” says Rule, “to the point you can tell what their socio-economic standing or social class is.”
“People talk about the cycle of poverty, and this is potentially one contributor to that,” Rule suggests, noting that where you come from may not be as easy to fake as you think: “Over time, your face comes to permanently reflect and reveal your experiences. Even when we think we’re not expressing something, relics of those emotions are still there.”
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/resting-rich-face/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2Iaw_YgOaj3vrwELcCSJ1Fzp-1vlvPxmIr75Q7-V9lga-nXLKJ4oz7dxY#Echobox=1677007281-1
Oriana:
53% correct guesses — that’s not an impressive figure. But I’d be willing to bet that if the faces were those of 40 -50 year-olds, the results would be more pronounced.
I was struck by this when I began to shop at Albertsons’s, in a working-class area. I could read worry and anxiety in the faces of the white shoppers there, especially the middle-aged and older crowd. The shoppers at Ralphs, by contrast, looked fairly happy and relaxed. Even the cashiers at Ralphs looked happier — perhaps because they rarely had to deal with somebody’s credit card being rejected — or simply because their relaxed, polite customers transmitted what in California we call “good energy.”
When I was growing up, my mother constantly reminded me not to sulk “because your face will stay that way.” I imagine she heard that from her mother. And there is something to that. A lifetime of ease will have different effects than a lifetime of struggle. Experience sculpts our faces.
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Oriana:
It's given me the answer to the question I've had for years: if a time comes when I can no longer write — not even comments on Facebook — will I still have a will to live. As long as I can still experience — or even just remember — beauty, yes. I could live on if in some form I could still absorb the beauty of the world. (Thank you, Toni Morrison.)
Beauty has kept me alive all the years of my adult life. Even the simple play of sunlight and shadow. If not for the inexhaustible beauty of the world, the suicidal impulse might have won the live-die struggle.
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TREE ROOTS MAY HAVE SET OFF A MASS EXTINCTION
~ More than 360 million years ago, during the Devonian period, life was flourishing in spectacular fashion. As fish and invertebrates populated the seas, the first trees emerged on land. But by the end of the Devonian, more than half of all Earth's species had disappeared in a series of mass extinctions. New research shows how tree evolution could have contributed to these extinction events.
As land plants diversified, “they started to grow more complex root systems that were able to reach farther [down] to grab water,” says U.S. Naval Academy oceanographer Matthew Smart, lead author of the new study in the Geological Society of America Bulletin. One type of tree, a proto-evergreen called Archaeopteris, even clustered into primitive forests. Deep tree roots drew crucial minerals such as phosphorus out of the bedrock and then eventually decayed, forming mineral-laden soil. Periodically, large quantities of this soil washed into the seas and lakes—where the sudden phosphorus influx triggered harmful algal blooms that pulled oxygen from the waters below.
Fossilized Archaeopteris leaf’
The researchers tracked this deadly pattern in five prehistoric lake beds in Scotland and Greenland. They measured a gradual phosphorus decrease in sediment layers from the middle to late Devonian, punctuated by sudden spikes of the mineral with evidence of corresponding oxygen depletion.
University of New Mexico planetary scientist Maya Elrick, who was also not involved in the study, says that while the oxygen depletion incidents coincided with extinctions, it is unclear how much of a role tree roots played. Phosphorus levels did gradually decrease overall as trees evolved, but she says this reduction may have already been occurring: “If it's a trend that was happening prior, you can't blame it on the plants.”
Other hypotheses link the Devonian extinctions to massive volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts or disrupted ocean currents. Next, Smart's team plans to test its results using computer models to see whether terrestrial plants could have caused ocean-wide oxygen depletion and corresponding extinction—analysis that could also help predict modern algal blooms' impact.
Harmful blooms are on the rise in places such as the Gulf of Mexico, where agricultural fertilizers run off into the water. This leads to “dead zones” devoid of dissolved oxygen. “Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” Smart says. “In this case, we're studying history that's 400 million years old, but it can still teach us the same lessons.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tree-roots-may-have-set-off-a-mass-extinction/
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TRYING TO MAKE OLD CLASSICS POLITICALLY CORRECT
~ Changing words in old books — Roald Dahl's, in this case — to align with today's language norms and modern sensitivities, is just plain wrong. It's censorship, pure and simple — undemocratic and unacceptable.
And it is, at bottom, cultural vandalism. The essential part of classic literature's value is that its language, its very choice of words tells us about the past, the time it was written. Every piece of the literature of the past is a historical record. Censoring, "cleaning up," sanitizing old books means erasing the past and, inevitably, impoverishing our own lives.
Think the books aged poorly? Don’t read them. Or change some words as you’re reading to your kid -- that ultimately is up to you. But don't take the originals away from others.
PS: Also, parenthetically: in the last example, those "sensitivity readers" decided to get rid of Conrad and Kipling but keep Hemingway? That's kind of funny. And what's wrong with the lovely “olden-day"?
Unbelievable. ~ Misha Iossel
Lori Beth:
There is a history of altering and softening children's literature to fit contemporary sensibilities. Disney is probably the leader in this field. For example, how often do you read about Cinderella's sisters cutting off their toes so that their feet fit into the glass slipper? I'm not defending it, just mentioning that it didn't start with our era.
Gennady Kozlov:
Agree. Trying to modify the old books it’s like modern graffiti on an ancient monument. An old book may be full of stereotypes and be generally offensive to the modern reader, but that’s history and need to be preserved. Instead of messing up with the text itself, a preface should be written, saying that this book has some aspects that are too ignorant and bigoted, but, otherwise, the book is valuable.
Mary:
Rewriting old books to fit whatever is "politically correct" at the time is censorship at its most damaging. This is true whether you want to erase words and statements reflective of the prejudices and injustices of the past, or remove anything that is considered by some groups to be unacceptable now. The censorship can come from the Right or the Left, and no matter the politics of the censor, our knowledge of history, the possibility of learning from it, of having a solid ground for understanding it, is damaged and diminished.
One small example of a learning experience I had rereading a science fiction novel I first read and enjoyed as a young teen. It was a brief phrase in dialogue that hit me like a slap. One character says to another in appreciation: "that's very white of you." A world of racism in that one phrase...and that made me stumble...but also made me realize that in my initial reading, decades before, that phrase did Not stop me dead, did not shock me, it was invisible to me. This is systemic racism, so reified in the system it can become invisible to those who may benefit from it. Those who haven't been, in that state so maligned by the Right and the Christofascists, Woke.
You don't want to erase this kind of thing....You want to see it, learn from it, understand more about the world and yourself, the past and the present. Bowdlerizing a text, whether a work of art or science, history or philosophy, not only damages that work, it steals the opportunity to understand and grow. It undermines the foundation from which we choose our own actions, cripples the ability to change and create a better world. Censoring the evils of history will actually result in their preservation, denying the Holocaust, chattel slavery, genocides. It's like denying a rape happened, it gives evil an advantage and justice a penalty.
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THE SHIPPING ERROR THAT STARTED THE MODERN CHICKEN INDUSTRY
~ Some archaeologists believe that when future civilizations sort through the debris of our modern era, we won’t be defined by the skyscraper, the iPhone, or the automobile, but rather something humbler: the chicken bone.
The reason? We eat so many chickens. So, so many. In 2020 alone, people around the world consumed over 70 billion of them, up from 8 billion in 1965. Just this Sunday, Americans will likely eat a record-breaking 1.45 billion chicken wings as they watch the Eagles take on the Chiefs at Super Bowl LVII. And that makes it all the more astonishing that, according to chicken industry lore, the system that makes it possible for us to eat so much chicken in the first place originated with a minor clerical error.
The story begins 100 years ago in 1923, with homemaker and farmer Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware. Steele, like many other rural Americans in her time, kept a small flock of chickens that she raised for eggs and waited to slaughter them for meat once their productivity waned. But one day by accident the local chick hatchery delivered 500 birds, 10 times more than the 50 Steele had ordered.
Five hundred hens was a lot — bigger farms at the time had only 300. Returns weren’t really an option in these pre-Amazon days, so she kept them anyway, feeding and watering the chicks by hand in a barn the size of a studio apartment — 256 square feet — that was heated by a coal stove. Four and a half months later, over 100 of the original 500 chicks had died, but she still made a sizable profit off the 2-pound survivors — almost $11 per pound in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation — and began to ramp up her operations.
By today’s standards, a 10,000-chicken farm is tiny — a single industrial-style chicken barn will now house upward of 40,000 birds at a time, and farmers usually own several barns apiece. But in Steele’s day, her operation was massive. And the hatchery accident occurred at a fortuitous time — it was the Roaring ’20s, a decade of immense economic growth in the US, which meant Americans had more money in their pockets to eat more meat. Simultaneous advancements in agricultural refrigeration and transportation, along with the rise of chain grocery stores and the expansion of agriculture financing, made that meat more plentiful.
Around this time there were also seemingly small advances around nutrition that had huge implications for mass agriculture. One was the discovery of vitamin D in 1922, according to Emelyn Rude, author of Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird. Chickens would often die of rickets when kept indoors during cold winter months (rickets is caused by a lack of vitamin D, stemming from lack of sunlight). That helped cap the number of chickens that could be raised at any given time, especially in cooler climates. But once farmers began fortifying chicken feed with vitamin D, they could suddenly raise them in larger numbers indoors and year-round.
Not only was Steele’s timing lucky, but so was her location. The Delmarva Peninsula, where Steele’s farm was located, was also the perfect place for large-scale chicken farming to take off. There was cheap, abundant land a relatively short distance from the hungry consumers of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.
Steele’s accident set off the chicken revolution as we know it. In the first half of the 20th century, chicken accounted for well under 20 percent of meat consumption in the US. Today, it’s about 44 percent. Over time, chicken benefited from perceptions that it was healthier than red meat, and became cheaper to produce, thus cheaper for consumers. Today grocery stores charge $4 to $10 a pound for beef and pork, while chicken can cost as little as $1.80 a pound. Bacon and steak may take center stage for meat lovers, but when it comes to what’s for dinner, the answer is more often poultry.
Through a mix of coincidence and ambition, Steele set off a race to put chicken at the center of the American plate, changing the face of agriculture forever. In the process, we bent the chicken to our will, pushing the species to its biological limits, polluting waterways and our lungs along the way, all to supply a growing population with cheap protein.
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There’s disagreement over when and where humans first domesticated the spry, tropical, multi-colored red junglefowl of South and Southeast Asia — the ancestor of modern-day chickens — but the latest research estimates it occurred over 3,000 years ago in what is now Thailand. Over the following centuries, humans brought the species through China, India, the Middle East, Northeast Africa, Italy, Britain, and up to Scandinavia, and at some point it was likely cross-bred with India’s gray junglefowl. Chickens have been in the Americas almost as long as Europeans, first setting foot on what is now the Dominican Republic in 1493, on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage.
As prevalent as chicken is today, archaeologists believe they were first domesticated for cockfighting, not farming — the ancient Greek city of Pergamum even built a cockfighting amphitheater. And even up until the 1940s, chickens played a small role in agriculture compared to beef and pork. That all changed, due to Steele and other pioneers in the 1920s and 1930s, but also sophisticated breeding techniques in the decades that followed, which transformed the chicken from a small egg-layer into a giant meat-producing machine.
In 1946, two decades after Steele demonstrated how to raise thousands of chickens for meat indoors, a legion of scientists, government employees, meat producers, and volunteers launched a nationwide contest — called The Chicken of Tomorrow — to design a bigger bird. At the time, chickens were bred to lay a lot of eggs, but the grocery chain A&P wanted a chicken that could provide as much meat as possible. And that meant a bird with a big breast.
Out of 40 final contestants, California farmer Charles Vantress came out on top. Vantress cross-bred two varieties — the New Hampshire Red and the Cornish — to create a hybrid bird that, most importantly, converted feed to muscle more efficiently than his competitors (judges scored chickens on 18 criteria in total). For his achievement, Vantress was celebrated with a parade through Georgetown, Delaware — a 40-minute drive from Cecile Steele’s farm — replete with a Festival Broiler Queen (the industry calls chickens raised for meat “broilers”).
Vantress went on to dominate the field of poultry genetics, eventually selling his breeding lines to chicken giant Tyson Foods in 1974. Twelve years later, Tyson merged his company with a breeding competitor called Cobb to form Cobb-Vantress and by 2016, almost half of the world’s chickens raised for meat were the “Cobb 500” breed.
Around the same time, there was also a leap forward in animal feed. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, a class of antibiotics that revolutionized modern medicine. Two decades later, American scientists discovered that feeding the antibiotic aureomycin to farmed animals made them grow much faster, a revelation that sparked the rapid adoption of antibiotic use on the farm (one that public health officials, worried about growing antibiotic resistance in humans, have been trying to reverse for decades, with little success).
Human health concerns played a role as well: By the 1970s, public health professionals had increasingly linked consumption of dietary fat to rising rates of heart disease, culminating in a 1977 Senate report — “Dietary Goals for the United States” — that advised Americans to “decrease consumption of animal fat, and choose meats … which will reduce saturated fat intake.”
They recommended chicken, turkey, and fish instead — and for once, Americans listened to experts’ medical advice. Between 1970 and 2019, US beef consumption per person fell 28 percent, while poultry consumption has increased by 173 percent. (Pork consumption per person, despite the industry’s efforts to mimic the success of chicken with the “other white meat” ad campaign, remained largely unchanged over the decades.)
Soon food companies got to work. The chicken nugget was invented in 1963 by an American poultry scientist as a frozen, breaded “chicken stick,” but it wasn’t until the 1983 national launch of the McNugget, which was concocted by a French chef, that it shot into the stratosphere. Stores quickly sold out amid long lines, and 40 years later it’s still a top earner for the company. In 2019, Americans ate an estimated 2.3 billion servings of chicken nuggets.
Chicken has also undergone a cultural makeover. Emelyn Rude, author of Tastes Like Chicken, notes that chicken was long considered feminine, while beef was considered masculine. According to the humorism system of medicine developed by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, chicken “was mainly just considered a weak and delicate food suitable for weak and delicate people,” Rude said.
But over time, chicken has changed into the meat of choice for bodybuilders and Paleo dieters, due in part to the rise of nutrition science, which classifies foods by their constituent parts — protein, fat, and carbohydrates. “Chicken contained protein, so it was like other meats, but less fat, so it was superior to them, according to dietary guidelines published in the 1980s,” said Rude. “You can still see this sort of idea of red meat and masculinity. … But chicken has definitely made a lot of inroads.”
As much as the chicken has come to be an affordable source of protein, breeding over 9 billion of them for meat in the US each year has proven to be an environmental, labor, and animal welfare catastrophe. We’ve changed them, and in turn, they’ve changed us — and the planet.
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If you went inside one of the industrial barns that are home to America’s 9 billion chickens, you’d find most of them sitting down in their own waste. It’s not because they’re lazy, or that they like to hang out in manure. It’s because most of them simply can’t walk.
The Chicken of Tomorrow contests of the 1940s gave way to a new breed of bird so top-heavy that their skinny legs can easily buckle under the weight of their enormous body. Back then, it took 84 days for chickens to reach their “market weight” of three pounds; today, it takes almost half the time to grow more than twice as big.
A now-famous study by Canadian poultry researchers illustrates just how far poultry companies have pushed chickens’ biology. The researchers took breeds from 1957, 1978, and 2005, and fed each bird the same diet for 56 days. At the end of the experiment, the 1957 breed had reached 2 pounds, the 1978 breed reached 4 pounds, and the 2005 breed reached a gigantic 9.2 pounds.
Making chickens grow bigger and faster may be good for the consumer (and the poultry companies), and counterintuitively, today’s rapid-growth model has a smaller carbon footprint than slower-growing, “heritage” breeds. But the rapid-growth model of today is awful for the chickens, saddling them with a long list of health problems. And as we’ve covered at Vox, the societal shift of replacing beef with chicken means we’re killing far more individual animals for food. Because chickens are so small, you have to kill about 100 of them to get the same amount of meat you would from one cow.
And over the last 50 years, despite a growing US population, the total number of cattle raised and slaughtered for beef each year has actually declined by a few million. Meanwhile, the number of chickens killed annually has increased by 6 billion. Another way to think about it: In 1970, around 16 chickens and one-fifth of a cow were slaughtered for each American. In 2020, it was 23.5 chickens and less than one-tenth of a cow. And while conventionally raised cattle hardly have it great, chickens suffer far more.
Raising and slaughtering chickens is dangerous, precarious work, too. Most chicken farmers work on contract and take on huge amounts of debt to start their farm; the margins are razor-thin, leaving some to say they feel more like a serf than a farmer, while slaughterhouse work is considered to be one of the most dangerous jobs in America.
Simply living near a chicken farm or slaughter plant can be bad for your health. That much is apparent in Steele’s home state of Delaware which, despite making up less than 0.1 percent of the US land mass, raises 6 percent of the country’s 9 billion birds. Over 500 million are raised in the Delmarva Peninsula alone each year.
Sacoby Wilson, a professor of applied environmental health at the University of Maryland, said pollution from chicken manure comes in many forms: Nitrates can contaminate wells, ammonia can cause respiratory issues, and “poultry dust,” or particulate matter, can cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems. Last year, the Environmental Integrity Project — a nonprofit that advocates for stronger enforcement of environmental laws — found that Delaware and Maryland were the only states where 100 percent of their estuaries were impaired with pollution, in large part due to the high amounts of chicken manure that leaks into streams near farms.
“Chicken waste is hazardous waste,” Sacoby said. “It needs to be treated the same way we treat other major industries.” But animal farms are largely exempted from air and water regulations.
When Cecile Steele took a chance a century ago and raised 500 birds instead of 50, she had no idea of the long chain of events she set off, and she died many years before chicken took over our plates. But she sparked a wholesale transformation of our farming and food systems, our air and water, and the chicken itself — a transformation that made meat more affordable than ever, but with a high cost diffused throughout society and the environment.
It occurred at a time in American history when such costs could hardly be conceived of, a time when people had suffered immense poverty and hunger for years during World War I. But in the 100 years since, we’ve overcorrected, valuing abundance and affordability over public health and environmental sustainability while pushing over 9 billion chickens — and hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers — to their limit.
And there’s seemingly no relief in sight. “The problem is we have this food system geared towards incredibly efficient meat production, so it just keeps going and keeps increasing,” Rude said. “There’s no indication that global meat consumption will decline.”
But over this next century, we may witness another overhaul of our food system. Late last year, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first chicken made directly from animal cells, known as “lab-grown” or cultivated meat. One hundred years from now — if artificial intelligence hasn’t put journalists out of work — a future writer might regale us with the story of the next Cecile Steele. Instead of a farmer, she could be a scientist in a lab somewhere, cooking up the chicken-free chicken of 2123. ~
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/2/10/23589333/cecile-steele-chicken-meat-poultry-eggs-delaware?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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MEGATONS TO MEGAWATTS: DISMANTLED NUCLEAR WEAPONS CAN PROVIDE ENERGY
Just a decade ago, one in 10 American lightbulbs was powered by dismantled Russian nuclear weapons.
That was made possible by the Megatons to Megawatts program, an agreement negotiated after the collapse of the Soviet Union to convert uranium from Russia’s nuclear weapons stockpile into fuel for US nuclear power plants. The unconventional policy was first proposed by MIT physicist Thomas Neff in a 1991 New York Times op-ed. By the time Megatons to Megawatts ran its full course from 1993 to 2013, it had eliminated about 20,000 nuclear warheads and stood out as a point of shared pride in the often jaded arms control and disarmament field.
“Nearly every commercial nuclear reactor in the United States received nuclear fuel under the program,” then-US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz remarked when the final uranium shipment left St. Petersburg for Baltimore 10 years ago. It was, he said, “one of the most successful nuclear nonproliferation partnerships ever undertaken.”
Megatons to Megawatts was diplomatically deft, reducing the risk of nuclear catastrophe while providing zero-carbon energy. It took advantage of a unique political moment with the USSR’s dissolution in 1991, which opened a door through which arms control agreements moved with remarkable speed.
For me, a designer working on system transitions in complex problem spaces, the beauty was in the transmutation of bombs to lightbulbs, military to civilian, swords to plowshares. It was political alchemy. When it comes to intractable issues like nuclear risk and climate change, the status quo is relentlessly sustained by political, economic, cultural, social, and technological forces. It’s a challenge to make meaningful progress in any of these arenas, much less implement an intervention that multitasks so elegantly.
Yet despite widespread acclaim, the program was never extended, expanded, or replicated elsewhere. “The initial agreement was so quick and successful that I would have hoped we built more upon it,” Douglas Shaw, senior adviser at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and professor of international affairs at George Washington University, told me. Upon learning about the program, my immediate reaction matched his conclusion: there should be more where this came from.
Especially now. The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic measure of our proximity to global man-made catastrophe, currently reads 90 seconds to midnight — the closest it’s ever been since the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists started counting in 1947. International norms against nuclear weapons use are eroding, thanks in part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The only remaining arms control treaty between the US and Russia is on shaky ground, and experts fear an unfettered arms race if it goes unrenewed. “Geopolitical crises with grave nuclear undertones are spreading fast, from the Middle East, to the Korean peninsula, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres from Hiroshima last summer.
Megatons to Megawatts can’t simply be copy-pasted into a geopolitical context so different from 1991. Dismantling another country’s nuclear weapons for our own energy needs is unlikely to happen without a destabilizing shift in international power on the order of the Soviet Union’s collapse. But we can apply the program’s lessons domestically, thereby reducing the risk of nuclear catastrophe and gaining low-carbon energy — right here in the United States.
From a 2023 perspective, the model has even more obvious benefits. The emissions-saving aspect of nuclear power wasn’t an explicit selling point back when Megatons to Megawatts was negotiated, but it’s important now in a world that’s scrambling to meet climate goals and contend with ongoing energy crises. The possibility of a ready-made uranium supply is also hugely appealing, given that mining fresh uranium ore comes with considerable environmental and human rights costs, particularly for Indigenous communities.
National security incentives for the US to maintain its nuclear stockpile consistently outweigh its incentives to disarm, but we could tip the scale toward disarmament by linking it to climate mitigation and energy security. Although Megatons to Megawatts is a relic of the past, it had lasting impacts on international energy supply: the program helped Russia build a monopoly on nuclear fuel exports, which ironically may become off-limits to the US due to the war in Ukraine.
As we face the challenge of rapidly building a cleaner and independent energy supply, we have to expand a conception of national security that still focuses narrowly on military supremacy. We can turn our own nuclear bombs into energy, and simultaneously address nuclear threat and climate change as twinned existential risks.
MEGATONS TO MEGAWATTS
Formally known as the US-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, the Megatons to Megawatts deal kickstarted the conversion of 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the kind used in bombs, into low-enriched uranium (LEU), the kind that fuels nuclear power plants. That uranium generated 10 percent of US electricity over the course of 20 years.
At the time the program was created, the civilian energy was seen as just a nice bonus. Its main purpose was to address America’s national security concerns by whittling down the enormous Russian arsenal and securing nuclear material that experts feared might end up in the hands of terrorists or other rogue actors after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. For Russia, the exchange offered billions of dollars in revenue for its collapsed economy, integration into international institutions, and development of its nuclear industry into the global player it is today.
Symbolically, it demonstrated that the Cold War as we knew it was over, and that the two countries possessing over 90 percent of the global nuclear stockpile were acting on their legal commitment to disarmament and the peaceful use of nuclear technology.
Obviously, the US-Russia relationship isn’t what it was in the early 1990s. Though undoubtedly successful at preventing proliferation, cooperation with former Soviet states had not been born out of goodwill and charity but out of fear and urgency. By 2012, Russia decided not to renew the Cooperative Threat Reduction program — a plan designed to assist the dismantling and securing of nuclear materials in former Soviet states — their Ministry of Foreign Affairs calling it “not consistent with our ideas about what forms and on what basis further cooperation should be built.” In 2014, Russia faced international condemnation for its annexation of Crimea, resulting in sanctions and suspension from the G8. Given today’s ongoing war in Ukraine and Putin’s threats of nuclear retaliation against the West, it’s safe to say that Moscow won’t be signing onto another Megatons for Megawatts deal any time soon.
But implementing a similar policy in today’s America doesn’t need to be contingent on a geopolitical Goldilocks moment with Russia or any of the seven other nuclear states. In fact, the current moment provides its own rationale for focusing on the stockpile at home.
The war in Ukraine, now nearly a year old, triggered an energy crisis that has sent prices way up as Europe scrambles for alternatives to the Russian gas that constituted much of its imported supply. High prices are taking a toll on consumers around the world, but a potentially positive consequence is the incentive for countries to invest in renewable and low-carbon fuel alternatives.
In the US, the crisis has throttled our ability to build new nuclear power plants because of Russia’s stranglehold on the necessary fuel. Next-generation nuclear power plants, known as small modular reactors (SMRs), are considered an important transitional technology in the race to meet net-zero emissions goals due to their smaller physical footprints, flexible modular designs, and built-in safeguards. But they require high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, which is available almost exclusively from Russia at a commercial scale.
Overcoming our dependence on Russian HALEU will require investing in alternative enrichment facilities, and in the meantime, establishing a domestic weapons-to-energy pipeline of the sort that Megatons to Megawatts modeled. The US government already did convert a scant seven of its more than 585 metric tons of bomb-grade HEU into nuclear fuel between September 2013 and March 2016, according to the most recently declassified documents. We have the capability and infrastructure to do more, but it would require that we consider uranium to be more valuable in our nuclear reactors than in our bloated nuclear arsenal.
WHY IT’S SO HARD TO LET GO OF NUKES
Though America has reduced its arsenal dramatically since the Cold War, it clings to a disproportionately costly military-industrial complex and holds the second-highest number of warheads in the world after Russia. Even taking the view that our nuclear arsenal is a “necessary evil” in a world where multiple countries still possess weapons of mass destruction, the US could realistically maintain its deterrence with a far smaller number of warheads.
Of the estimated 5,244 nuclear warheads in the US arsenal, 1,536 are retired and scheduled for dismantlement. But dismantled weapons don’t necessarily result in surplus HEU for dilution into LEU — called downblending — and civilian use. The disassembled components of retired nuclear bombs, as the New York Times recently reported, are often destined for “a maze of bunkers and warehouses ... a kind of used-parts superstore from which new weapons can — and do — emerge.” This kind of weapons-to-weapons Frankensteining is a common, expensive practice in stockpile modernization programs — and only consistent with the concept of “retirement” in the way that a disgraced CEO resigns publicly with sacrificial fanfare and quietly starts a doubly profitable venture firm.
The technical conversion of bomb-grade HEU to nuclear fuel is pretty easy, and the HEU is already there, burning a hole in our pocket. Up until 10 years ago, the US was doing this at scale with Russian uranium. But right now, national security forces consider it too high-stakes to reroute HEU for non-military purposes — particularly in light of the war in Ukraine and American fears about the possibility of Russia using a tactical nuclear weapon. It’s bad optics for the US to reduce its nuclear arsenal while Russia threatens to use theirs.
“Those speculative scenarios keep US nuclear requirements high,” Shaw says. “How many weapons, what kinds do we need? What hedge for the future do we need? And if we end up with surplus material, by all means, let’s recover the commercial value from it.”
As an actionable step toward disarmament, this is sensible and satisfying. We should do this right now. But if the ideal future is a world free from the constant threat of nuclear disaster, there’s a philosophical limit to the risk reduction approach because designating something as “surplus” assumes that the remainder is absolutely necessary. We should question whether it is necessary. The ideal size of our nuclear stockpile isn’t determined by some objective mathematical calculation, but rather by the human judgment of a select few. That includes factors like, Shaw told me, imagined worst-case estimates of our adversaries’ military forces.
Enforcing more risk reduction measures, like taking missiles off hair-trigger alert or establishing clear lines of communication in the event of an attack, is crucial for rendering the current nuclear weapons system less likely to cause disaster. But such measures also end up reinforcing the status quo precisely because they make the system marginally safer to keep around and therefore easier to justify. While they are a step toward disarmament, they may paradoxically keep the concept of elimination at arm’s length. It’s a bit like focusing on climate adaptation (like building flood-resilient infrastructure and engineering drought-resistant crops) while neglecting climate mitigation (like transitioning away from fossil fuels and preventing deforestation).
That’s why it’s crucial that we challenge the parameters by which we think about nuclear risk in the first place. Our government tends toward hoarding and upgrading its weapons because at the core of all its game-theory complexity and purposefully obscure statecraft, its model says: we will be less secure if we have fewer nuclear weapons. This conclusion runs counter to all our best human instincts, common sense, and popular opinion — and it’s why groups like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons are advocating for abolition rather than accepting that we’re stuck with nukes that could incinerate humanity as we know it. “I see real value in policies that are risk reduction aims,” Emma Claire Foley, a researcher for the nuclear abolition movement Global Zero, told me. “But if you’re talking to almost anybody about this, you get a real intuitive, ‘Obviously, they should not exist.’”
THE CASE FOR CONFRONTING NUCLEAR RISK AND CLIMATE RISK SIMULTANEOUSLY
Public concern about climate change and energy policy is increasing in the meantime, but that largely hasn’t been reflected in national security policy. “The idea that climate is a national security issue has begun to expand a little bit, but the policy mechanisms and the bureaucracy to support that are still way behind,” Laicie Heeley, founder of the foreign policy magazine Inkstick, told me.
The government shores up what it defines as a national priority, whether that be nukes or corn or airlines. If climate change took up more space in that club, we’d see the wisdom in freeing up even a fraction of the cost for nuclear forces, which is currently projected to total $634 billion over the period from 2021 to 2030. The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act increased the Pentagon’s 2023 budget to $858 billion and boosted spending on nuclear weapons.
Megatons to Megawatts offers a rare glimpse at the immediate material trade-off that happens upon giving up weapons to gain energy. Both literally and conceptually, it committed to building a new world out of the old. It’s proof of concept for the daunting systemic transition we must now make: moving away from a security solely dictated by military preparedness against perceived foreign threat, and toward a security driven by action against ongoing planetary change.
For my work in systems design, I’m trained to conjure creative approaches to sprawling, complex problems. My colleagues cross-pollinate among disciplines from linguistics to geophysics to community organizing. Both in and outside the arms control field, there are universities and municipalities and Twitter users churning out imaginative interventions for a vast range of issues. But you need the right political moment for an idea to mature into implementation. “I had the right idea at the right time,” as Neff told me in an email exchange about the Megatons to Megawatts program.
Even so, I’d challenge the notion that we need some perfect opportunity to act. That complacent disposition suits the status quo and fails to account for what we already control — factors like moral clarity or stubborn determination. For Neff, good timing still required him to remain the go-between, orchestrating the unlikely common denominators that made the Megatons to Megawatts deal appealing to all its signatories. “I compare it to having a child,” he said. “Easy to produce but hard to raise ... It took roughly 18 years of my life.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t use militaristic metaphors to promote disarmament, but this one is too pertinent: the effort to reduce risk of nuclear disaster and the effort to mitigate climate change are two battles in the same existential war. As author Jonathan Schell put it in his book The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, “Both are the fruit of swollen human power ... Both threaten life on a planetary scale. Both require a fully global response. Anyone concerned by the one should be concerned with the other. It would be a shame to save the Earth from slowly warming only to burn it up in an instant in a nuclear war.”
Among disarmament advocates, there can be a sense that climate and nuclear nonproliferation agendas are vying for congressional goodwill and philanthropic dollars. There’s also a legitimate concern about “fear fatigue” — that the public doesn’t have bandwidth to be anxious about so many existential threats at once. With a weapons-to-energy policy, we wouldn’t need to play these zero-sum games. By making disarmament part and parcel of climate mitigation, we can build the political will to do both. ~
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23593348/build-nuclear-energy-from-nuclear-bombs-ukraine-war
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EARTH’S INNERMOST CORE IS A 400-MILE WIDE BALL OF IRON
~ Scientists have long wondered what lies at the very center of the Earth, and the latest research is putting weight behind a theory that our planet has a distinct ball of iron within its metallic core.
Beneath the outermost crust, the mantle and the molten-liquid outer core lies the Earth’s solid metal center — which actually has a hidden layer, or an “innermost inner core” within, according to a new study.
The monumental finding suggests the Earth has five major layers instead of four, and offers new details scientists could use to help unlock some of the oldest mysteries about our planet and how it was formed.
Geoscientists first suggested that the Earth’s core might have an additional, imperceptible layer about 20 years ago, according to a news release. Now, using new data sets collected by measuring the seismic waves of earthquakes as they passed through the Earth’s center, researchers have finally detected that innermost core, the new study said.
Seismic waves are vibrations that run within or along the surface of the Earth and through its inner layers as a result of earthquakes, volcanoes or other means.
“In this study, for the first time, we report observations of seismic waves originating from powerful earthquakes traveling back and forth from one side of the globe to the other up to five times like a ricochet,” study coauthor Dr. Thanh-Son Phạm, a seismologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra, in an email.
The reason this layer had not been previously observed in more detail is because its composition is so similar to what lies above it, Pham said. Both this newly detected center — which the study reports is likely a 400-mile-wide (644-kilometer-wide) ball of metal — and its outer shell are made of iron-nickel alloy, with trace amounts of other elements.
“Additionally, the transition from the innermost (solid) ball to the outer shell of the inner core (also solid shell) seems rather gradational than sharp,” Pham said. “That is why we cannot observe it via direct reflections of seismic waves from it.”
Using instruments that detect the vibrational waves, researchers found the innermost inner core has a distinct anisotropy, which is a property of a substance that allows it to take on different characteristics depending on the angle from which it’s approached. An example of an object that’s anisotropic is a piece of wood: It’s much easier to hack a piece of firewood apart by hitting it along the direction of its grain than against it.
It is that feature that distinguishes the innermost core.
When it came to assessing the Earth’s core, researchers looked at how fast seismic waves traveled through it in different directions, and they found the innermost inner core changed the speed of those waves in a different way than the layer above it, the center core’s outer shell.
Detecting the new layer more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) beneath our feet is significant. The presence of a distinct innermost core could give scientists a better understanding of Earth’s magnetic field, how it has evolved and will continue to do so.
The new finding also “gives us a glimpse of what might have happened with other planets,” Pham said. “Take Mars as an example. We don’t understand yet why (Mars’ magnetic field) ceased to exist in the past.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/world/earths-core-iron-metallic-core-scn/index.html
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THE POWERFUL APPEAL OF DOOMSDAY
"Despite fire, death and destruction, the god of apocalypticism is a god of order, not chaos.”
The thousands of failed doomsday predictions throughout history are no match for what Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal, calls the "apocalyptic worldview."
"It's a very persistent and potent way of understanding the world," DiTommaso told LiveScience.
According to DiTommaso, the apocalyptic worldview isn't uncommon. At the extreme end are people like Camping or Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult that carried out sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. But doomsday appeals to the secular and well-adjusted as well, through books such as Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (Knopf, 2006) and movies like "The Terminator" (1984). Meanwhile, economic hard times and crises like Japan's earthquake and tsunami have spiked interested in survivalism and "prepping," or stashing food and supplies in preparation for a coming collapse.
Apocalyptic beliefs have been on rise for the past 40 to 50 years, said DiTommaso, who has been researching doomsday believers for an upcoming book, "The Architecture of Apocalypticism." What ties these disparate groups together is a sense that the world's problems are too big to solve, DiTommaso said.
"Problems have become so big, with no solutions in sight, that we no longer see ourselves able as human beings to solve these problems," DiTommaso said. "From a biblical point of view, God is going to solve them. From other points of view, there has to be some sort of catastrophe."
The apocalyptic worldview springs from a desire to reconcile two conflicting beliefs.
"The first is that there is something dreadfully wrong with the world of human existence today," he said. "On the other hand, there is a sense that there is a higher good or some purpose for existence, a hope for a better future."
Viewing the world as a flawed place headed toward some sort of cosmic correction reconciles these two beliefs, DiTommaso said.
And because believers are certain that their sacred text can never be wrong, failed doomsday predictions only convince them that their own interpretations were flawed, opening the door to new predictions. Historically, those who have predicted doomsday, including the early Christians, have been persecuted and oppressed, so the prospect of a final judgment is comforting, DiTomasso said.
"Despite fire, death and destruction, the god of apocalypticism is a god of order, not chaos," DiTomasso said. "That's the reassurance."
*
Unlike Camping, [the secular apocalypticist] Rawles and his readers aren't preparing for the end of the world; they're preparing for TEOTWAWKI, survivalist shorthand for "the end of the world as we know it." The end might come in the form of an economic collapse, a giant solar flare, a nuclear attack or climate change, but the end goal is the same: to be ready for anything.
"There's a great deal of satisfaction in saying, 'Oh boy, I'm ready when the bombs go off/the environment collapses/the Arabs invade/the magnetic poles reverse,'" said Richard Mitchell, an Oregon State University sociologist who spent years getting to know survivalists for his book "Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times”.
Survivalists have gotten a reputation as fringe-dwellers, Mitchell said, but viewing them as crazy is "totally incorrect." For one thing, they're everywhere: Mitchell described one man, a suburban engineer whose garage was filled floor-to-ceiling with detergents and hand wipes and toilet tissue. The man's job specialty, Mitchell said, was water systems engineering, and his concern was a loss of sanitation after a disaster.
People who are into survivalism and prepping enjoy telling stories about the world turning upside-down, Mitchell said. Society's collapse is a challenge, and the reward is coming up with scenarios in which you survive.
http://www.livescience.com/14179-doomsday-psychology-21-judgment-day-apocalypse.html
St. John of Patmos, writing the Apocalypse (Revelation)
Oriana:
Jorie Graham commented on that strange and powerful attraction to the end of the world. She said people have a deep desire to know how the story ends, and the ultimate story is the story of humanity.
Mary:
The Apocalyptic worldview can go in different directions: the world is gone beyond our ability to save it, so god steps in, or some cataclysm destroys it. Believers anticipate the End because they see it as justifying. They will be raptured up by god, and all the sinners punished. A perfect dream of an ending, one they can't wait to see. For others the possibility of catastrophe is everywhere, from a nuclear holocaust to lethal climate change. These are the "preppers" who try to get ready to survive whatever catastrophe comes.
This group doesn't put hopes in god to resolve things, they see survival as a human project. There is a whole sub genre of post apocalyptic literature imagining different possibilities for living after “the world as we know it” comes to an end. The grandfather of these stories is Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, where the lone survivor of a shipwreck has to find a way to survive all by himself on an uninhabited island. Crusoe kind of recapitulates the matters of civilization in his efforts, and he does so by salvaging what he can from the shipwreck itself. A sort of cheating, of course, but this is mirrored in the literature — the survivors of global collapse always have a lot of rubble to salvage from. Maybe they repeat all the old mistakes, maybe they do better, or at least differently. Such speculation can lead to very interesting narratives. What would be best to save? What would be impossible? What's better left behind??
I'm rationing my news consumption because it is so agonizing, so much so terrible it is hard to maintain hope and not succumb to fear and despair. It's the day-to-day business that seems the worst, the endless violence, the threats, the lies. From the smallest area of the personal to the world stage — this seems a dark time to be alive. But I feel self indulgent to complain in the face of so much others are suffering.
Oriana:
Yes, when I think of the war in Ukraine and what it must be like under a missile attack, I don’t know how people manage to live on. Just the sudden ringing of the phone always jolts me — I can’t imagine air-raid sirens. Yet my parents and grandparents lived through that and worse (Auschwitz, the Warsaw Uprising). I saw PTSD up close, though there was no label for it.
And to think that I naively thought that humanity now lived under the umbrella of “never again.” Sure, now I see how I was pushing all kinds of news out of my consciousness — especially anything involving genocide. At least it wasn’t happening in Europe, right? Well, Bosnia, but that was such a small region . . . It took Ukraine, so close to Poland, to hit home.
Once I went to a lecture entitled, “What causes war?” The excellent speaker examined various theories, including “male rage,” the product of testosterone and stress hormones. But ultimately no theory fit all the facts. We left without an answer . . .
Steven Pinker gave me hope for a while, with his “Better Angels,” which showed again and again how violence has decreased over the centuries. But then, a year ago, Russia invaded Ukraine, that very fact being a triumph of evil. Witnessing Ukraine’s heroic resistance has been uplifting — except for pondering the horror, the horror . . .
*
HOW THE INTERNET HASTENS SECULARIZATION
~ The internet brought unabashedly nonreligious texts, ideas, and — most importantly — acquaintances and friends into millions of Christian homes. Some people, naturally, went looking for this stuff: the kinds of teens with prior reasons to go in search. And, thanks to there already being a vibrant atheist activist presence online since well before AOL brought dial-up internet to the mainstream, there was no shortage of websites, message boards, and new friends out there to be found.
For many others, however, it’s likely that “something they saw on the internet” — something, that is, they wouldn’t have seen had it not been for the internet — ended up sparking, or otherwise contributing to, a gradual path of nonversion [also called “de-conversion” — ceasing to be religious, joining the ever-growing category of “nones”].
Naturally, the kinds of online social dynamics we’re dealing with can work both ways. If it’s possible to find one’s tribe via Usenet’s “alt. atheism,” Reddit’s “r/ exmormon,” or Twitter’s “#EmptyThePews,” one can equally do so via one of the internet’s endless variety of pro-religious websites, groups, and YouTube channels. But here’s the thing. Prior to the internet, while Americans had a limitless supply of the latter’s offline equivalents, the vast majority of them had almost none of the former’s.
Sure, they existed alright — campus secular alliances, humanist chapters in major cities — but just think how many more, and better funded, religious competitors there were. So the growth of home internet suddenly brought new nonreligious possibilities where there had been few or none before. Remember, too, that this most affected a generation with markedly less resistance to the idea of nonreligion than their Cold Warrior parents and grandparents had.
The impact of the internet is not, we might add, only evident in those who ended up falling in with the “none” crowd. There are vastly more nonreligious Millennials and Generation Zs than could possibly have been deeply involved in one or other of these groups, no matter how prevalent they are. Obviously then, they weren’t all nonverted in this way. However, there are reasons for thinking that the internet, and social media especially, might be having a subtler but much more widespread secularizing effect on American society.
For all the attention given to online “echo chambers” deepening participants’ commitment to a shared view and collectively pushing them to ever great extremes, I suspect for most users social media has a net relativizing effect. In general, worldviews are strongest when they present themselves as “givens” and can thus be taken for granted. It’s easier to be an evangelical if everyone you know, or at least everyone whose opinions you care about, are evangelicals, too. But a person’s Facebook or Twitter feed likely includes many “friends,” or people one chooses to follow, with a whole range of positions on all manner of topics. It’s possible to police one’s network very carefully to prevent this from happening, but I’m not sure very many people are sufficiently committed to ideological purity to bother.
In the past, our social circles were much smaller (though likely deeper), and focused largely on where we lived and worked, plus a very select few people we actively kept in touch with at further distances. These were chiefly relatives, though perhaps with a couple of old school friends or college roommates in the mix too. Now it’s common to be aware, on a daily basis, of the doings and thinkings of a diverse collection of far-flung relatives, people you barely spoke to even when you were in the same room at school together, colleagues you met once at a conference, and all manner of others, many of whom you’ve never met once in person. You probably know a good deal more about what’s going on in the lives of many of them than you do about your own next-door neighbors or co-workers (unless they’re also Facebook friends).
Given how much more willing people are to talk about religion and politics online than they are in person, you’re therefore probably exposed to all manner of different viewpoints.
Sometimes, maybe one of these makes you think differently about a political policy or religious doctrine — or even if not, it makes you a little less sure about it than you used to be. Given the sheer amount of time many people tend to spend on social media platforms, it’s not hard to imagine that the cumulative effect of all this might well be to chip away at lots of hitherto unexamined convictions. And that this, combined with other factors, might help nudge a good number further along the path away from religion — and to shove a few of them down one or another shortcut to Advance Directly to Go(dlessness). ~
https://bigthink.com/thinking/ex-christian-america-nonverts-atheists/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0fWG1eNQD66w8QFzSIQOwkNSHy_6eQeFR1fJKigY8mmWZI-RIEv2Aanqo#Echobox=1676916983-1
Oriana:
Having grown up in a pre-Internet era in a non-Western, monolithically Catholic country, I still found it relatively easy to drop out of religion. Government propaganda had nothing to do with it — for one thing, I can’t remember a single instance of anti-church government propaganda. The state was rather careful not to annoy the church, which remained a major power, its own propaganda machine vastly superior to the government’s clumsy efforts.
If anything, the church was actively trying to retain young people in its ranks, while not a single teacher or anyone else (including my atheist parents) ever engaged me in a discussion of religion. But there were books — fascinating books about paleontology and mythology, for instance. And novels, too, and movies, in which religion simply didn’t exist. I was surrounded by a sea of secularity. Yes, church bells rang several times a day, every day, a sound I loved — but it was an esthetic rather than a religious delight. Likewise, I loved stepping into churches between services. Their cool dusk was irresistible. I continued to enjoy these pleasures long after I lost the belief in god.
My knowledge of mythology proved to be of particularly critical importance when it came to questioning the existence of the supernatural. If Zeus and Wotan didn’t exist, or the myriad Hindu gods, why would Yahweh be an exception? And why should the myth of creation presented in Genesis be superior to other creation myths? Once I fully understood what mythology was, it was only a natural step to see the bible stories as only another mythology.
The fact that at that point the Catholic doctrine held that only Catholics could enter heaven (usually after a long period of suffering in Purgatory — the cult of suffering didn’t escape my attention), while Protestant and Orthodox Christians and of course “pagans” — Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems — went straight to hell, never mind if they had been wonderful human beings — also bothered me. Gandhi in hell? No, I couldn't accept it.
I had a Jewish friend in elementary school, and it did bother me that her father survived a concentration camp only to be eventually tossed into hell fire as his destination for eternity. I couldn’t believe that a god of love would create hell for all non-Catholics. I simply couldn’t force myself to believe that god was good — on the contrary, he was a monster far surpassing Hitler.
As for the argument that god was indeed the monstrous Catholic deity, love it or leave it, it’s better to worship him in order to avoid hell, I felt such fear-based faith was repulsive. Far from Pascal’s insistence that you have nothing to lose by believing, I felt that a life praising a tyrant out of fear wasn’t one I could bear. I admit that now and then the fear of hell would grip me like a recurring nightmare, even once I understood that hell was invented for the sake of social control.
That was the part of religion that proved the most resilient — the fear of eternal damnation. 
*
REGULAR COFFEE DRINKING LINKED TO LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE
~ A new study published in the journal Nutrients reports that drinking three or more cups of coffee daily was associated with lower peripheral and central blood pressure.
According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Arrigo F.G. Cicero, associate professor in the Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences at the University of Bologna, peripheral and central blood pressure are markers of arterial stiffening and aging.
In older adults with high blood pressure, the large arteries tend to be stiffer, leading to higher systolic blood pressure (the top number of the blood pressure reading) and wider pulse pressure (the difference between the top and bottom numbers).
The authors note in their report that the effects of coffee on blood pressure are still under debate, primarily because it is known that the caffeine content of coffee can raise blood pressure in the short term.
However, these effects may be ameliorated by the antioxidants found in coffee which can help blood vessels dilate as well as protect cells against free radicals.
Cicero and his team wanted to investigate just how the interaction between caffeine and other compounds found in coffee would influence the incidence of blood pressure.
To conduct their study, Cicero’s team examined a sample including 720 men and 783 women who were participants in the Brisighella Heart Study.
This ongoing study, which first began in 1972, includes a randomized sample representative of a rural Northern Italy town called Brisighella.
The researchers looked at participants’ blood pressure and coffee-drinking habits, as well as a selection of other data relevant to cardiovascular health.
Upon analysis of the data, they found that coffee consumption was associated with lower blood pressure.
“The trend seems to be positive from 2 [cups of] coffee per day,” said Cicero. “So, coffee drinking should not be a priori forbidden in current coffee drinkers, if the fear is that coffee could increase BP levels.”
Megan K. Rhoads, PhD and postdoctoral scholar, Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, said there are a few mechanisms through which coffee consumption could lower blood pressure, some of which have been demonstrated in animal studies.
“Coffee contains caffeine, which can both raise and lower blood pressure in acute settings, but it also contains antioxidants and bioactive compounds which may be responsible for the blood pressure lowering effect,” she explained.
Rhoads offered chlorogenic acid as an example of a compound that can lower systolic blood pressure in rats.
“When processed by gut microbiota, chlorogenic acid is broken down into metabolites that can increase nitric oxide bioavailability and lower blood pressure.”
Dr. Debabrata Mukherjee, chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine and professor of internal medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, further explained: “Even though caffeine could increase BP levels (especially in individuals who usually do not drink coffee), the amount of other bioactive compounds in coffee counterbalance this effect with a final neutral-to-positive effect on BP.”
Chlorogenic acid, which is present in the highest concentration in coffee beans, is believed to be one of the main compounds in coffee that lower blood pressure, according to Mukherjee. Quercetin may also play a role.
Dr. Jim Liu, a cardiologist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, said that while this study is small and focuses on a specific population, its findings are consistent with prior knowledge about how coffee affects blood pressure.
“Coffee can increase blood pressure acutely after consumption, but there really has not been any consistent evidence to show that moderate amounts of coffee consumption lead to long-term issues with high blood pressure or heart disease in general,” he noted.
“For patients with hypertension who consume moderate amounts of coffee, this study provides some more reassuring data that it’s OK to continue drinking moderate amounts of coffee and that it won’t negatively impact blood pressure. If anything, moderate coffee consumption may help with blood pressure,” said Liu.
Mukherjee added that moderate consumption would be equal to about four or five cups of coffee, although it’s not advised for people with existing severe hypertension.
The American Heart AssociationTrusted Source notes that people are advised to avoid drinking “too much” coffee because of its ability to raise blood pressure. It can also cause problems sleeping, heart palpitations, and anxiety. ~
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/hypertension-3-cups-of-coffee-a-day-may-lower-blood-pressure?utm_source=ReadNext#What-does-that-mean-for-people-with-high-blood-pressure?
Oriana:
Caffeine is also a good antioxidant, three times as potent as Vitamin C.
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COFFEE WITH MILK TWICE AS GOOD AT FIGHTING INFLAMMATION
~ Can something as simple as a cup of coffee with milk have an anti-inflammatory effect in humans? Apparently so, according to a new study from the University of Copenhagen. A combination of proteins and antioxidants doubles the anti-inflammatory properties in immune cells. The researchers hope to be able to study the health effects on humans.
Whenever bacteria, viruses and other foreign substances enter the body, our immune systems react by deploying white blood cells and chemical substances to protect us. This reaction, commonly known as inflammation, also occurs whenever we overload tendons and muscles and is characteristic of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.
Antioxidants known as polyphenols are found in humans, plants, fruits and vegetables. This group of antioxidants is also used by the food industry to slow the oxidation and deterioration of food quality and thereby avoid off flavors and rancidity. Polyphenols are also known to be healthy for humans, as they help reduce oxidative stress in the body that gives rise to inflammation.
But much remains unknown about polyphenols. Relatively few studies have investigated what happens when polyphenols react with other molecules, such as proteins mixed into foods that we then consume.
In a new study, researchers at the Department of Food Science, in collaboration with researchers from the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, at University of Copenhagen investigated how polyphenols behave when combined with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The results have been promising.
"In the study, we show that as a polyphenol reacts with an amino acid, its inhibitory effect on inflammation in immune cells is enhanced. As such, it is clearly imaginable that this cocktail could also have a beneficial effect on inflammation in humans. We will now investigate further, initially in animals. After that, we hope to receive research funding which will allow us to study the effect in humans," says Professor Marianne Nissen Lund from the Department of Food Science, who headed the study.
The study has just been published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Twice as good at fighting inflammation
To investigate the anti-inflammatory effect of combining polyphenols with proteins, the researchers applied artificial inflammation to immune cells. Some of the cells received various doses of polyphenols that had reacted with an amino acid, while others only received polyphenols in the same doses. A control group received nothing.
The researchers observed that immune cells treated with the combination of polyphenols and amino acids were twice as effective at fighting inflammation as the cells to which only polyphenols were added.
"It is interesting to have now observed the anti-inflammatory effect in cell experiments. And obviously, this has only made us more interested in understanding these health effects in greater detail. So, the next step will be to study the effects in animals," says Associate Professor Andrew Williams of the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, who is also senior author of the study.
Found in coffee with milk
Previous studies by the researchers demonstrated that polyphenols bind to proteins in meat products, milk and beer. In another new study they tested whether the molecules also bind to each other in a coffee drink with milk. Indeed, coffee beans are filled with polyphenols, while milk is rich in proteins.
"Our result demonstrates that the reaction between polyphenols and proteins also happens in some of the coffee drinks with milk that we studied. In fact, the reaction happens so quickly that it has been difficult to avoid in any of the foods that we've studied so far," says Marianne Nissen Lund.
Therefore, the researcher does not find it difficult to imagine that the reaction and potentially beneficial anti-inflammatory effect also occur when other foods consisting of proteins and fruits or vegetables are combined.
"I can imagine that something similar happens in, for example, a meat dish with vegetables or a smoothie, if you make sure to add some protein like milk or yogurt," says Marianne Nissen Lund.
Industry and the research community have both taken note of the major advantages of polyphenols. As such, they are working on how to add the right quantities of polyphenols in foods to achieve the best quality. The new research results are promising in this context as well:
"Because humans do not absorb that much polyphenol, many researchers are studying how to encapsulate polyphenols in protein structures which improve their absorption in the body. This strategy has the added advantage of enhancing the anti-inflammatory effects of polyphenols," explains Marianne Nissen Lund.
The research is funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark and conducted in collaboration with the Technical University of Dresden in Germany.
Polyphenol Facts
Polyphenols are a group of naturally occurring antioxidants important for humans.
They prevent and delay the oxidation of healthy chemical substances and organs in our bodies, thereby protecting them from damage or destruction.
Polyphenols are found in a variety of fruits and vegetables, tea, coffee, red wine and beer.
Due to their antioxidant properties, polyphenols are used in the food industry to minimize the oxidation of fats in particular, as well as the quality deterioration of foods, to avoid off flavors and rancidity.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230130090347.htm
Oriana:
So interesting about the combination of proteins and polyphenols.
The same should also hold for tea with milk -- the tea polyphenols bind to the milk proteins (it used to be thought that this renders the polyphenols useless).
Just be sure not to consume too much protein. Eating excess protein is just as harmful (in some of the same ways, e.g. a rise in insulin resistance) as eating too many carbs.
ending on beauty:
