Jeff Bellerose: Tunnel, 2015*
I DON’T HAVE A PILL FOR THAT
It scares me to watch
a woman hobble along
the sidewalk, hunched adagio
leaning on —
there’s so much fear
I could draw you a diagram
of the great reduction
all of us will soon
be way-back-when.
The wedding is over.
Summer is over.
Life please explain.
This book is nearly halfway read.
I don’t have a pill for that,
the doctor said.
~ Deborah Landau
Oriana:
I’ve been noticing a lot of poems about aging lately. It’s funny in a sad way: we all know that people age and die, but it’s astonishing and disconcerting when it happens to us: when we see we can’t run as fast as we used to, and eventually can’t run at all; when our eyesight deteriorates, and our memory “isn’t what it used to be”; and so on — this list could continue for many pages. And the doctor could indeed say “I don’t have a pill for that.” (But that may change — see the last article in this blog.)
Right now the best we can do is slow down aging. Drugs such as metformin and rapamycin do indeed slow down aging and make people live longer. Berberine is even better than metformin, and doesn’t require a prescription.
But that’s of course not what the poem is about. Why do we have to age at all? Why can’t we stay young and vigorous — and immortal? “Life please explain.” And life, meaning the scientists who speak in its name, explains that dying is good for the species: it allows for evolutionary change, to mention just one reason. No, no, no, the poem says. It protests against the universal fate. It’s a cry of the heart: I want to live.
Or, as Woody Allen observed, life is like a cafeteria. The food is lousy, but what we want is bigger portions.
*
SENTENCE
Many — many — years ago, in the godawful 1983, if memory serves me (it may not), back in Leningrad, in another lifetime, at an unofficial art exhibit one afternoon in a popular and also semi-clandestine basement cultural club in the heart of the heart of the city, I had a random encounter with a rather elderly and visibly inebriated man from the GDR (some may still remember that unlovely acronym), a fellow underground writer's acquaintance, I believe, who walked with a limp (due, as he would later cheerily volunteer, to one of his legs being shorter than the other by a few centimeters since birth) and spoke fairly good (if slightly halting and understandably slurred) Russian (having started studying it right after the fall of Berlin in 1945 — first on his own and then at state-run language courses — in order, presumably, to... oh, I didn't care enough to ask; to, like, maybe read Dostoyevsky in the original?); and he told me, in an entirely unbidden and inappropriately unironic revelation (but then, again, he was drunk), that although he had lived in Germany under Hitler and was keenly and constantly aware of the ineradicable dark stain of (granted, an absolutely ineluctable one, because what could one realistically do and not be disappeared on the spot, that wasn’t even a question, we don't choose the times or some essential circumstances of our lives and all that; but still) mute subservience to the ugliest evil in documented human history which lay forever as a result on him and millions of the still-living Germans like him (the dead, the lucky bastards, were blessedly guilt-free), he wanted and needed me to know, for some inexplicable reason, that every single day during those terrible interminable twelve years of Nazi rule, usually in the dead of night, without fail, his hand to god, in a strictly ritualistic fashion, he would write, in a feverishly hurried blind scrawl, by candlelight or in pitch-darkness (was he married? did he have children? what did he do for a living? was he perhaps an accountant? an engineer? why hadn’t he been conscripted by the Wehrmacht?.. ah, yes: his short leg), with his heart pounding away in the hollow of his ribcage, an impromptu prose poem (yes, really… if that’s what it was supposed to be called) about Hitler's imminent and extremely painful death, prophesying and visualizing and describing the infernal creature’s final agony in the soul-wrenching minutiae of gory details, and concluding each of those cathartic cursive eruptions with the same desperate invocation: "Die, you beastly animal, die!" — and then, immediately thereafter, dizzy with momentary lightheadedness, striking a match (over an ashtray, presumably, or else perhaps in the toilet?) to set that little piece of notebook paper trembling in his hand on fire, liberating it from itself and himself from that tortured text, to put it literarily, every single night for all those years, yes, imagine, dear comrade — and I... suddenly and unaccountably feeling queasy with an onset of burning shame (for him? for myself? for all of us?.. I couldn’t tell), filled with unfocussed disgust, I only nodded silently, curtly (strike that: sympathetically), avoiding his pitiful swimming eyes, and hastened to remove myself from his presence. ~ Misha Iossel
Joyce Kornblum:
I can imagine you burning what you've written here, and each day writing it anew. One day, you think, I'll extend this to a fuller story, but every day the short version reminds you it's complete, and you offer it to the flames.
Oriana:
This idea strikes me as straight out of Borges: an author secretly writing exactly the same text every night, and then burning it. Not out of fear for his life, as in Misha’s story, but maybe as a spiritual practice, a purification.
*
THE SADDEST TRUTH ABOUT RUSSIA (Misha Firer)
~ I took this photo earlier today. Illegal, spontaneous sales points are becoming a thing in central Moscow after making a comeback to the unpaved and badly paved streets of every Russian village and town.
Do it fast. Pay in cash.
In the wake of unprecedented round of sanctions, Putin legalized “parallel import.” You’re allowed to import merchandise of the companies that stopped doing business in Russia and sell them to whoever you like. That in turn emboldened black market tradesmen — now they technically fall into the same category.
A new business of “shuttlers” fly to Dubai, buy luxury items, stuff suitcases, and sell online or through a network of friends.
Dean of Moscow State University Mikhail Lobanov took a trip to Armenia where hundreds of thousands Russian citizens hide from mobilization and in protest of criminal war in Ukraine.
While in Armenia, Lobanov’s competitors spread false information that he immigrated and “Wagner’s sledgehammer can reach him anywhere.” The message was simple: don’t come back or you’re dead. They also spray-painted swastika Z on Lobanov’s front door.
The Dean of MSU, top university in Russia, is a lucrative position to take bribes from students for passing entry and interim exams and from rich students who don’t want to attend lectures. A whole racketeering network to shake down students can be organized and run by an intelligence service agent or two.
In his 23rd years in power, Putin metastasized KGB Paradise for all of his subjects: steal whatever you want while living a life of fear that competitors or enemies might denounce you to the state any moment and you lose money, freedom, or life. Or all of the above.
Alexey VasilievAlexey Vasiliev, a host of Fashionable Judgement stole the idea for a makeover show from Queer Eye. Vasiliev has a darned bad taste in clothes but millions of desperate women stuck with drunk husbands, dead-end jobs in shitty towns thinly spread across the terrain the size of Pluto couldn’t care less.
Then suddenly the dude disappeared. Overweight, unloved, unnoticed, abused Russian matrons desperately wanted to know what’s happened to their chubby idol.
They should’ve checked out on YouTube.
Vasiliev’s been busy posting scathing videos with such clickbait titles as “Russia Gave Me Nothing,” “Borsch is One Hundred Per Cent Ukrainian Dish,” “Russia is Sick With Virus of Slavery,” “Russia Will Suffer Badly and For a Long Time Because of This Special Operation.”
The political and business elites are dying to record videos like that on YouTube, especially about Russians being slaves, but they still have to be here in order to suck those slaves dry. Maybe next year after they wrap things up they can be candid and unbiased.
Ski slope in Pavlovskaya Poyma, wedged between Krasnogorsk and Moscow, is the densest populated area in Eastern Europe with over 80,000 people living within one square mile.
The website of the local administration admits, “The area has very compact development of high-rise residential buildings, which require recreational areas for comfortable living and leisure of the families.”
That still didn’t stop them from slating to demolish the beloved ski slope, the only public entertainment and sports facility they got. It’s been disconnected from power. In its place, several high-rise buildings from 22 to 72 floors will be built to accommodate additional 18,000 residents.
100,000 residents per 1 square mile in the largest country in the world that right now is fighting a bloody war with Ukraine for living space.
Russians, nobody gives a damn about you!
Not your Putin. Not your TV hosts. Not your politicians. Not your business elites. They covertly or overtly loathe and despise you. ~
*
DIMA VOROBIEV: RUSSIA’S FEARS ARE BASED ON HISTORY
~ Ukraine sailing up as a recalcitrant neighbor in our backyard has a hugely worrying parallel in our history. Few people outside Russia are aware of it.
The thing is, modern Russia is a product of a very unexpected development. Ours is a story of a minor, impoverished, insignificant periphery of an old empire that gobbled up its previous masters.
It’s Muscovy swallowing the decomposing body of the Mongol empire.
Our heartland is originally the forests between the Baltic sea and the vast Cumanian prairies to the north of the Black sea. In the 16th century, the province of the crumbling empire of Joche (a.k.a. the Golden Horde) situated here started a slow but relentless process of lopping off more and more bits of the Chingizide possessions in the south and east.
Ivan the Terrible annexed the Golden Horde’s fortresses along the Volga River and appropriated their trade routes to the Caspian Sea and the Silk Road.
In the 17th century, we annexed the Siberian Khanate and the former Mongolian possessions along the northern frontier of China.
In the 18th century, we took the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai prairies to the north of the Caucasian mountains.
In the 19th century, we took the last bits of the former Mongolian empire in Central Asia.
Deep in our national psyche, the Ukrainians, with their defiant nationalism, stir some very uneasy associations. Historically, threats to Russia always came from the west.
West, that’s where Ukraine is.
So far, the Ukrainians don’t seem to have an expansionist agenda. But neither had Muscovy with respect to the Mongolian legacy. There’s a conspicuous absence of an anti-Golden Horde narrative in our chronicles. There’s no “manifest destiny” to trace in our history preceding the conquest of Siberia, the Far East, and Alaska.
That conquest, it just happened.
Who said Ukraine isn’t going to do the same to us?
First, Crimea, then the prairies of Kuban and Stavropol. These were initially settled by the Ukrainian Cossacks, after all. Then, St. Petersburg, once a thorn of Western influence in the body of Imperial Russia. Then, Novgorod and Pskov reviving their lost glory as wealthy Hanseatic cities?
What’s next? Belgorod and Kursk, trying to break loose from the sanctioned wasteland of the Russian economy? Moscow, the rat nest of liberalism and Western idolatry?
It surely won’t end until they take Vladivostok. Ukraine, a part of the Pacific Rim?
Now, you see why the war in Ukraine is supported by the entire political class in Russia?
*
Below, a painting by nativist Andréi Kliménko from Ukraine. The title is “Oleg’s Dream.”
Oleg was a Varangian [Viking] chieftain that extended the punch of ancient Rus far east to the banks of the Volga River. It’s a half-mythical figure whom both Russians and Ukrainians claim as their hero. Here, he sees in his sleep Slavic god Perún riding through the sky in his chariot.
Seen from Russia, there are several troubling symbols in this.
Oleg is sporting the signature Varangian mohawk, oseléts. The Ukrainians made it their ethnic hairstyle.
This is a patently pagan universe. For us in Russia who pinned our cultural identity on righteous Greek Orthodoxy as opposed to sinful European Papism, this is controversial, to say the least.
Oleg served the House of Rurik, whose symbol was a trident. Nowadays, the trident is on the banner of the forces that keep killing our soldiers in Donbas. [Reminder: Even though he's been living in the West for several decades now, Dima remains a Russian patriot]
The clothes and the chariot of the god Perún are obviously European. Even though Slavic folklore mentions “Perun traveling in his chariot” as the cause of thunderbolts, this is suspiciously un-Russian. The thing is, in the era of Rurikids, our land had almost no passable roads. We lived in the midst of thick forests and traveled by river. Our Perun’s chariot most certainly had no wheels.
*
Below, a statue “Motherland is calling.” This enormous monument celebrates our victory in the Stalingrad battle in 1943. President Putin just held a fiery patriotic speech there.
What few people seem to realize, the stone woman with the sword is placed with her back to the west and front to the east. In other words, this amazon leads some invisible armies toward the Ural mountains. Further east is Siberia and the Far East.
Is this a coded message about the core of our civilization? Or is it a dire warning about the fate that is going to catch up with us after the coming rise of hostile Ukraine? ~ Quora
David Bo Jensen:
With all due respect. Drawing parallels to what happened centuries ago seems far-fetched. Living in a small country once at war with Sweden, England or Germany, I should be terrified of our neighbors every day, and I am not.
Peter Simpson:
That’s nonsense, Russia is the aggressor here. Russia signed an agreement relinquishing influence over Ukraine. There were no Nazis, there never was any threat from Ukraine, it’s all about the Kremlin’s greed and Ukrainian’s resources.
Sophia Dora Weiler:
And if your stoney Amazon calls you eastward: go do it. Build roads, make Siberia a great country and embrace China. You’re free to do so. But not steal Ukraine. It’s not yours anymore. Germany had to give away Prussia. Shit happened. Russia signed away Ukraine. Love it and leave it. Not yours to destroy or identify with.
Milton Muster:
Which way should the statue face? It can't face both ways. Russia will continue to have this dilemma until East and West are reconciled.
I think they already are reconciled, in the person to person familiarity of the internet. Politics lags behind culture.
Rastislav Galia:
Some thought for you: your “typical Russian” is completely unable to fancy any other form of successful Russia other than superpower one. Being superpower is perceived by him necessary both psychologically (personality of “typical Russian” was built around the superpower concept) and economically (line of thinking is: “the west is eager to take our mineral resources from us unless our state is invincible”).
“The typical Russian” seriously believes that subjugation of Ukraine is “condition sine qua non” for Russia’s superpower status to re-emerge.
Sophia Dora Weiler:
Yeah. Ukraine and the west are coming to get you. Boo! Your young are looking West. They are going into the future and Putin with his FSB cronies are trying to walk backwards to the glory of Stalin and his gulags. Old Russia will die or accept a future. Peter the Great wasn’t that great. Time of Putin and his babushkas is over.
Oriana:
It would be amazing if Russia, with its huge land area and relatively large population, were afraid that its much smaller and weaker neighbor would invade “all the way to Vladivostok.” If true, then the paranoia revealed in Dima’s post is just spectacular.
Of course some version of the argument “If we don’t kill Ukrainians in Ukraine, then Ukrainians are going to kill us in Russia” is a familiar pretext for invasion in world history. But Ukraine has never shown any intention of invading Russia (it would be sheer insanity). The truth is the ugly imperialist greed for annexing an impressive colony, famous for its fertile “black soil” and newly discovered resources such as natural gas in the Donbas.
But the era of colonial conquests is long over. As Modi said to Putin, “This is no longer the time for doing that.” The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of colonial expansion are long over. Alas, Putin clings to the glories of the past and has no vision of the future — other than the restoration of the Russian empire at its peak of being the “prison of nations.”
Mary:
The observation that Putin cannot see a future but as a return to the past, to the return of Soviet "glory" as a superpower, one that defeated the Nazi invasion and stood as principal antagonist and rival to the one other great superpower , the US, may actually reveal the fault that will bring him, and Russia, down. Trying to repeat, recreate and reinstate the past is a dead end game, no matter where you play it. It is a self defeating project, because conditions have changed, and the old rules, the old plans, won't work anymore.
For instance, the idea of simply overwhelming the other side with sheer numbers of sketchily trained, criminal, or mercenary troops, doesn’t work as well against modern equipment and strategies — ones that can track movements, for instance, because the Russians are using ordinary cell phones that the Ukrainians can listen in on. In the past Soviet technology could rival or match the West's, but corruption has eviscerated the Russian armory, neglecting upkeep, not maintaining functionality...thus the rusting tanks carted off by Ukrainian farmers.
Putin, living in his obstinate dream of past glory, did not realize Russia's military might was so debilitated, and proceeded like a real, and not a paper, tiger. I am sure he has been surprised and infuriated by the dissonance between his ideas and the events of this war...but also, he refuses to accept them.
It is terrible to see how little value is granted to human life in the Russian cultural climate of lies and denials. Imagine people so unaware of what happened in Chernobyl they choose to set up camp there and dig trenches. Even warnings from the opposing troops went unheeded, and the danger not admitted until soldiers were suffering the effects of radiation sickness and dying.
There are lies that can make you losers in so many ways. Think of the soldiers stealing washers and refrigerators...astonished at such ordinary treasures, and seemingly unaware the stolen things would be no good without electricity and indoor plumbing...still unavailable to many Russians.
Oriana:
It’s still difficult for us in the West to grasp the notion that Russia is not really a European country. True, the major cities could be called European — though we shouldn’t forget that the great majority of the apartments in those beehive-like apartment blocks are very small: one room and a kitchen and bathroom. But even that is fabulous compared to the communal apartments that were the reality for most during the Soviet times. Imagine one bathroom shared by three or four families.
But the disparity in the standard of living pales in comparison with the difference in values. Even someone like India’s Modi pointed out to Putin that “this is no longer the era for that” — meaning invading one’s neighboring countries. Some indeed have pointed out that Putin behaves like a Mongol khan, and that Russia has never repudiated the Mongol system of being a colonial empire. The Mongols respected only power. To value a human life would seem a sign of weakness.
*
“THE FACE OF FEAR”
Two Soviet people, Alexey Grigoryevich Nezhdanov and his wife Elizaveta Konstantinovna (nee Sokolova), photographed here in 1937.
1937.
The face of fear.
Russian history goes around and around its vicious circle, inescapably, like an angry lonesome wolf in a zoo cage. ~ Misha Iossel
*
WHY THE SOVIET UNION DIDN’T INVADE WESTERN EUROPE AFTER WW2
~ During the rare time of openness in Russian archives (like 1994–2005), Tony Judt spent months pouring over internal memos and documents from the Stalin Regime. It turns out, these things were true:
Stalin & the military leadership knew they had the US bested in materiel but were worried about American nukes and long rang bombers. And the nukes was something they (wisely) really worried about.
The Soviets (their people, their leaders) were exhausted. It’s a tired meme that Stalin was a psychopath. Different forms of megalomania allow for empathy. It turns out that Stalin really did worry about all the dead children from war. He wanted it ended.
3. The Soviets had spent dozens of millions of lives on a war to fight an Empire that was a third as strong as the US. By the end of the war, the US technological and industrial output was truly massive and the Soviets knew the matchup was not as favorable for a long term war.
4. Stalin was genuinely worried about what happened during World War One. The protracted war led to a revolution. He was worried about the people revolting.
5. Soviet leaders knew they had spent a generation of breeding people. A much longer war could’ve sent the Soviet Union down a death spiral after two generations lost their breeding youth.
6. Stalin truly believed in the Communist revolution. He really believed the world would end up Communist. He honestly thought that through NKVD/KGB manipulation and aid, the world would one day end up communist, so sacrificing another generation to get there wasn’t seen as a wise thing to do.
7. Stalin and Soviet leadership were totally content with their holdings. They wanted that huge buffer zone between the West and them. And they had it. So there was no reason to spend that buffer zone getting more territory they really believed would become communist within time.
The only European nation Stalin wanted to invade was Yugoslavia. Stalin’s memoirs are clear. He, just like DeGaulle, went to his grave worrying more about a revanchist Germany than an American invasion. ~ Dan Bradbury, Quora
Will Scathlocke:
Geopolitically, Stalin was, to phrase it pejoratively, myopic — or, to attempt to put a positive spin on it, he conceived only such plans as had limited and realistically achievable goals. He was not averse to wars of territorial expansion (viz. invasion of Poland in 1939), but such wars were strictly limited in their scope and aimed at a swift, easily realizable territorial gain. Stalin never thought in terms of vast wars of conquest, but rather small, limited ones (viz. the “Winter War” — and that one proved exceedingly difficult to win, a bit of a warning against any grander designs).
At Yalta and in the months thereafter Stalin’s chief concern was to set up a string of buffer states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) along the Soviet border. Sure, he took the opportunity to make some territorial gains (half of East Prussia, a lot of eastern Poland, Bessarabia, a bit of eastern Czechoslovakia) — but, again, just quick and easy gains. And beyond that — buffer states as protection against an invasion from the West. It was a very cautious, very conservative geopolitical strategy. Myopic even.
Again, Stalin was never someone for grand, sweeping designs when it came to geopolitics. A large-scale war of conquest was the very last thing that he would have conceived. So a grand invasion of western Europe was simply not in the cards — but an invasion of Yugoslavia, if the right circumstances had presented themselves, might well have been.
*
PUTIN’S GAZPROM WARS
~ Vladimir Putin has waged a series of Gazprom Wars in Syria, Donbas, Ukraine to keep international competitors out of his turf.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions become refugees, cities have been bombarded into oblivion to stall natural gas pipeline from Qatar, to ensure natural gas fields in Donbas remain undeveloped, and throw a wrench into Ukraine becoming energy independent.
On federal TV, Gazprom is advertised as ‘national treasure.’ Has Putin pursued national interests to benefit people of Russia?
According to Navalny’s Team investigation, Gazprom has been Putin’s personal piggy bank, which he has used to enrich his friends and family, and himself.
In the 1990s, the future Gasprom’s CEO Alexey Miller, worked as Putin’s deputy at the committee of external relations, in Saint Petersburg city hall. Informally, Miller was known as ‘cashier.’
Alexey Miller, Gazprom CEO aka Cashier
Putin struck dodgy deals with organized crime bosses, details were jotted down, and money were handed in to Miller.
In 2001, Putin appointed Alexey Miller as CEO of Gazprom for the cashier job. However, this time, Putin handed him notes with instructions, and he paid out from Gazprom coffers to private needs of Putin, his friends and family.
Main stakeholders, Victor Chernomirdin and Rehm Vayhirev were shouldered out, and Gazprom began to bleed assets that wound up in the hands of people close to the president.
In 2008, Gazprom sold five construction companies for 8 billion rubles to Putin’s judo buddy Arcady Rothenberg, and he collated them into “Stroygazmontazh.” Construction of gas pipelines to Europe and China are all corruption schemes of self-enrichment to Putin’s friends. In that regard, Nord Stream 2 has already been highly profitable.
In 2019, Rothenberg re-sold Stroygazmontazh that in was in the red back to Gazprom for 75 billion rubles, although Gazprom stock had lost half of its value in that period of time. Cashier Miller just signed a blank check.
It’s unclear how much money the Cashier transfers to his Master. However, I don’t think any monetary transactions are required. With a flick of fingers Putin can have anything he likes and not worry about its cost. Putin is a tsar, not a president.
One of Putin’s palaces
European leadership continue to pour billions of euros, well, trillions of rubles, into Gazprombank accounts to subsidize tsar’s royal court and destruction of Ukraine that stood in the way of Putin’s embezzlement schemes. ~ Misha Firer
*
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT 70% OF RUSSIANS SUPPORT THE WAR WITH UKRAINE? (Vladimir Kokorev, writer)
~ A bit of background. My family emigrated from Russia in the 90s. In the mid-2000, I wrote and published two books: inoffensive YA stuff by all standards, mildly successful because Russian writing about growing up in Europe.
I visited Russia several times for promotion. Also, curiosity and the typical "who am I?" soul-searching of an immigrant. I briefly hung out with publishers, editors, and other writers. They were older, more experienced, and way more successful than me, so I was a bit like a fly on a wall. I also got in touch with some old friends, went on a few dates, and just walked around Moscow and St. Petersburg. All in all, I went about three or four times, a week or two each over three years (I had a regular job, too, so those were my holidays).
I do not remember the exact moment I realized I didn't want to go to Russia again.
I mean, from the very beginning, it was a country and culture I barely recognized, but that was natural — I grew up in the Soviet Union, and left a few years after it collapsed — when everything was in flux. I was a foreigner and acknowledged as such in any meaningful interaction. But being a foreigner everywhere I go, I'm used to that, and it doesn't prevent me from enjoying another culture. I liked the Russian energy, sense of humor punctuated by lack of PC, and a certain toughness and resilience especially contrasted with western snowflake-ness.
The Europeans I knew had a slumbering quality, while Russians seemed awake and alert.
But there were red flags, tendencies I found puzzling, then off-putting, unbearable by the end:
DOUBLE THINK
A school teacher defined it like this:
"I see myself having a social contract with my government. I agree to see certain things in the way my government sees them, although I know they might be not completely true, in exchange for, you know, all this not being the chaos of the nineties.”
At first, I thought it was just ordinary hypocrisy; that's pretty common everywhere, in particular in arts, academia, and corporate circles I was used to in Europe. So I gathered it was similar to the Russian literary world, where you don't say — exactly — what you think because you don't want to piss off the wrong person. But double-think goes way further.
It's an almost nihilistic view that perception, not facts, shapes reality. And if most people — except a few deviants here and there — agree on ONE AND ONLY truth, no amount of evidence will prove it's a lie. At the same time, it's a game of make-believe: because wink-wink, nudge-nudge, your interlocutor gives you a hint — most likely after a few drinks — "I'm not an idiot; I know that it's not really true.”
The biggest game of make-believe back then was the second Chechen invasion. There was evidence that the terror attacks, supposedly carried out by Chechens, were planned and executed by the FSB. The media station that aired those suspicions was taken down by the FSB and purged of unloyal elements. From then on, any televised news was curated or created by Kremlin. Many people I talked to remembered this and privately admitted their belief that persons close to Putin (never Putin himself) organized the attacks to justify the invasion and thus make an emergency in which he raised as a capable and determined problem-solver. But this did not conflict with their conviction that Putin was a competent leader and Russia's savior.
MEDIA AGNOSTICISM
It goes like this: "I'm aware that state news is propaganda, but every news outlet has an agenda and is, therefore, unreliable. Ultimately, we don't know the truth.”
This idea that truth is not just elusive but unreachable synergizes well with double-think: you can literally believe one thing today and the opposite tomorrow — without any internal conflict since it doesn't really matter.
I have to say that I found that cynicism regarding the media attractive at first. I've known my share of journalists and news editors, and — yes — like the rest of us mortals, they can be biased, ignorant, imprecise, or corrupt. Knowing this, however, I try to consume MORE news, from different political spectra and contrasting opinions, rather than encapsulate myself in one source or just ignore them all and create a reality of my own. But I know many people — in the West — who partake in media agnosticism, which could be a sign of successful export of Russian culture.
UNBRIDLED PATRIOTISM
"Since everybody is lying, why not believe something that benefits our motherland?”
The next — sort of logical — step of "the truth is mutable." As famously defined by Karl Hungus, people who believe in nothing are nihilists. But those with an ethos are productive members of society. If you adopt the point of view of your country (represented by your government or a supreme leader), you're contributing to its greatness.
Westerners are doing that, too. When I told people: "I literally know nobody who does that," they replied: “because you Westerners are all nihilists.”
SELF-FLAGELLATION, PARANOIA, DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR
"Why can't we be like the normal people?" this, again, usually after a few drinks in a soul-to-soul conversation.
Everybody is corrupt and thieving: starting from the highest (but usually not the supreme leader himself — he's beyond suspicion) public officials and ending with your car mechanic.
Tremendous waste in every industry, horrible living conditions, medical care, and life expectancy. Every piece of technology is malfunctioning; every building has a structural flaw. Everybody is smug, aloof, and rude; nobody has manners; everybody is a sad alcoholic. Life is one shitty occurrence after another.
This torrent of misfortunes leads to:
"No wonder everybody hates us," supposedly referring to all non-Russian inhabitants of this planet.
"Relax, nobody gives a fuck about you," I tried to argue.
Sometimes they believed me, maybe for a second, but more often argued that Russians were impossible to ignore:
"How can anyone not give a fuck about such a great nation as ours?”
It doesn't matter — any soul-to-soul conversation after a couple of drinks is as mutable as the truth.
RACISM
OK, this particularly ugly trait is NOT something I've encountered in every Russian I've met. But I've seen too much of it, in different guises, to ignore. And ultimately, that was what did it for me. My editor was a native of Azerbaijan, and on my last visit to Moscow, he got pulled twice by the police, who asked him (rudely even by Moscow police standards) for his permit to live in the city. They didn't ask for mine. As he explained to me later, because of "all these bad people from the southern Republics who committed terror acts," there was a — sometimes official, sometimes unofficial — policy to "clean" Moscow from all the not-entirely-white looking Russians.
It then clicked with me, like in a climax of a mystery movie, that ethnic origins were too often a part of a conversation, like "so and so is only half-Russian," and "that writer is not Russian at all," because they're half-Jewish half-Uzbek. And the street slogans of "Russia for Russians" suddenly started to make sense, too. I do not remember whether I heard the concept "Russian World" back on those visits or later — when Putin used it to justify the invasion of Crimea and Donbas.
Just like the "Denazification," the "Russian world" is an infinitely mutable concept. In truly Orwellian fashion, it can have whatever meaning the supreme leader chooses at any given moment; and the rest of his subjects agree to accept it as their shared collective reality. ~ Vladimir Kokorev, Quora
Andon K:
For points 1) and 2): a couple of trolls, quite seriously “explained” to me that they are better informed than I am, because they know that official Russian propaganda is lying, so they don’t believe it, while I’m stupid enough to believe the Western media which is brainwashing me and I’m not even aware of that. Because of that, they even kind a felt morally superior to me, the poor gullible dumbass.
I couldn’t explain that although we have Western medias of all kinds, from unprofessional, dumb, and biased ones to deliberately lying, there is one huge difference: there is not one command center that directs what the media will publish, so we have a choice to reject the media that look to us as unprofessional, dumb, biased and/or deliberately lying.
For point 3): they serve us examples of this every day: that is why they call Russian setbacks and defeats “feints” and “planned regrouping”.
For 4): This is reflected in their BS about Russia being “self-sufficient” and “sanctions have no effect on Russia”
For 5) I don’t know about other non-Russians, but the quantity of sick racist hatred they express for Ukrainians and the complete lack of any compassion for Ukrainians prove this point more than convincingly!
Jack Steffen:
What really gets me how Russia can actually believe it is some sort of great country when it’s obviously not. This Ukraine War just ripped the mask off of all of that. When I see videos of Russian soldiers stealing washing machines and looting convenience stores that tells me who the advanced people really are and aren’t. It’s basically an oversized Third World sh!thole that oppresses it’s people Stalin-style.
FYYAZ23:
The late West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl described Russia as “Upper Volta with nuclear weapons”. (Upper Volta is presently Burkina Faso). Most citizens, having never been abroad and nor exposed to anything other than what the government wanted them to know, believe in the concept of Russian Exceptionalism, believe that Russia is a great country because it’s a huge country (for now, anyway, until the Chinese have completed their take-over of Russian territories East of the Ural Mountains).
Tom George:
I suspect the trolls here are actually paid Russian operatives. The highest ranking member of the Soviet bloc to ever defect to the US, Ion Mihai Pacepa, claimed that Russian Intelligence Agencies had more people dedicated to spreading misinformation all over the world than soldiers they had in their military. I figure he should know; he was part of it at a very high level.
Nikolay Ivanov:
What really scares me is that I can observe this same type of “truth relativism” in the West as well. If it was just Russia -- “meh, forget about them”. When I see it in other post-communist countries, like my own -- “oh, well, it’s our communist legacy, it will go away eventually”. But when I see it gaining ground in the West as well, then I get really worried. Yuri Bezmenov warned the Americans about this subversive demoralization campaign decades ago, but it seems no one took him seriously enough, and now it’s bearing fruit. And it’s infecting everyone.
John Newey:
Your analysis makes sense of Russia now, and Nazi German ideology in the last century. To me, Russia now is a Nazi state that speaks Russian. It must be remembered that all states that tread that path end up in the same way eventually. Destroyed. [Oriana: Misha Iossel was the first one, a few years ago, to point out that the Soviet Union was never a Communist country. It was always a fascist country.]
Alan Taylor:
Nietzsche rightly predicted that nihilism would be the inevitable result of the failure of socialist idealism (the dominant, intellectual fancy of his day, to which he, as an aristocratic radical, was vehemently opposed).
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WIDOWS AND FUR COATS
~ Widows of the soldiers from Luhansk killed in Ukraine pose with fur coats brought to them by representatives of a group of Moscow War Z activists.
The video was recorded as a proof report to the higher-ups that women received treasured possessions.
A few days later, Valya, the woman on the left, complained on social network.
“We can’t calm down with all of my family. Those fur coats were taken away from us right after the video was recorded.
“We thanked Olga Vasil’eva but then she probably called the film crew and they took away fur coats from us.
“Some women managed to run away with their fur coats. I don’t know their fate, but me and three other women had to give them back.
“We were promised to get other fur coats because these ones were of high quality and a mistake was made. I suspect that they use the same fur coats to make videos and widows do not get any.”
Fur coat traded for husband Brutalsky way! ~ 
Widows pose with fur coats
Oriana:
A mink coat used to be a status symbol way, way back . . . But you need an elegant fur cap to go with it, and elegant leather boots. What was high-class in the nineteen-fifties New York looks ridiculously out of place now.
Lilith:
The bitterness of impossible riches!! The story of the war widows and the fur coats both shocks and affirms what we already know. What is a life worth?? Here, a fur coat. But, no, you don't really get to keep it, just pose with it for photos we can lie with to others about how we value your sacrifice.
When everyone lies, when every gift is a denial, when a nation is trying to repeat a victory from an old war, with an old script and intent to return to the dynamic of power held in that old world, then the sense of reality suffers, becomes more and more tenuous and hard to maintain. In a world so brutal, where nothing can be believed, nothing has worth unless it can be stolen, and you must never be seen denying the official lies, there are few choices. Share the official fantasy. Accept and practice Doublespeak. Stay and accept official lies as truth, keeping your denials private. Annihilate the pain by annihilating yourself in drink or suicide. Escape the country, if you can bear it, or find a way out.
Oriana:
Russia gave us the concept of the “Potemkin village” — the façade built just for show (“na pokazuchu”). Even the Soviet space exploration, so suddenly cut short, seemed to be propaganda more than anything else. “How many of their astronauts died?” my mother asked. “Of course they will never admit.” As schoolchildren, we were amazed by the willingness of the United States to admit to a failed rocket launch or any other costly failure.
Thus, the story of furs and widows makes a lot of cynical sense to those of us who grew up during the era of Soviet domination, which was also the Era of the Lie. Anything the government said was automatically assumed to be a lie — I speak from my Polish experience, but I’m sure it holds for any other Eastern European country with a Moscow-controlled puppet government. It was difficult to growing up in such a cynical atmosphere. Cynicism creates its own specific kind of stress, very hard on children who naturally want to believe what they hear on the news and what teachers tell them in school.
“THE BRUTAL TRUTH ABOUT THE UK”
~ I am writing down ten brutal truths I faced while coming to live in UK from India:
Air: This was the most brutal thing that these Brits do to you. They have deviously kept the air clean and clear with very little pollution. Back home my town felt like a gas chamber. Here my asthma got “cured” and they save money on health expense.
Ambulances: The biggest shock I received was when a neighbor had a fall in the bathroom. She just calmly called the hospital and two very kind and competent paramedics came, gave her first aid and took her to the hospital. Within ten minutes. And it's free. For everyone. Even visitors. Even illegals, even immigrants… Brutal!
Schools: Education is free for everyone. They are world class and you actually see brutality in action when you see teachers spend hours doting on your kids, giving them personal care and making sure they become normal, kind, decent human beings.
Football (Soccer to American readers, not the football Americans call football) is the most widely practiced religion in this country. Cricket is a distant second. The people here follow their religion to the letter; they even dress weirdly in striped t-shirts at their weird religious ceremonies, which are held in huge stadiums.
Sport: People here are lazy and just not interested in outdoor sports like Christianity or Islam etc. But yes, sport is a sport but these guys just aren't sporty.
Decency: The most brutal truth about the UK is that here the people are genuinely decent. Not pretending to be decent, but actually decent, kind and helpful. If you ask a police officer on the road a question, chances are that they may actually spend half an hour explaining the whole thing in brutal detail.
Ducks: Every water body has hundreds of fat cute ducks quacking and preening around. It's a scary sight for nature lovers!
The NHS: It's free, it's massive, and covers every aspect of a patients life; including home care. It's the best state run health care in the world, period. I repeat the best in the world.
Trains: Trains run on time, most of the time.
Greenery: it is very, very green and beautiful with pretty small houses with flowers and trees and bees. The countryside is like a painting and the small town's like postcards.
Guys and girls, these are the brutal truths about this country. There are many many more but I don't want to insult my brutal hosts any further.
EDIT: So OK trains aren't as good as in Japan, but still very well maintained and almost always on time. Also I'm glad we have to pay high taxes to make the NHS and schooling free. I feel my tax money is well spent if it goes to treat a sick patient or educate a child. ~ Faiz Ahmad, Quora
Oriana:
Also, the British love animals.
THE RUMORS OF THE UPCOMING CHINESE CENTURY ARE VASTLY EXAGGERATED
~ China had it all — rapid growth, second fastest industrialization in history, rapid moving up the value chain and more. Yet, much of that was Potemkin growth, which was partially uncovered by the Covid epidemic.
Quick quiz, is an increase in debt to GDP from 47% to 102% in six years good or bad? Well, so long as you can service that debt and get something economically useful out of it it might not be crippling. That’s the best I can say at any rate. This is the situation China found themselves in between 2016 and 2022, doubling of the national debt — as a portion of GDP no less.
The problem is China now arrived at a situation where this debt can no longer be serviced. Much of the debt is owned by local governments, whose hands are tied when it comes to new sources of income. Real estate market is deflating, it has been for over a year, and their largest single source of revenue were land sales to new developers. Now that the bubble has popped (or collapsed), attracting new sources of investment isn’t going to cut it, China needs new sources of funds.
This is not to say China will face an economic meltdown. While that is a possibility if the climbdown were sufficiently mismanaged, I believe the CCP is competent enough to stave off a collapse in economy. What will happen instead is a slow and painful restructuring as the country begins their transition to modernity, starts collecting taxes on income like a normal country and pays their bills by something that isn’t a Ponzi scheme.
If they pull it off, and I see no reason why they couldn’t, the next several decades will be characterized by mediocre growth and slowly deteriorating living standards for a large majority of Chinese. Their economy won’t collapse, but the era of easy prosperity and bright future is over. Maybe they’ll attain it in the next century, but we’ll be halfway through this one before Chinese economy restructures and by that time the demographic time bomb will have ticked its last tick and go kaboom, leading to even more misery for several more decades.
Maybe things will look better from 2100 onwards, who knows. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Yannick Chevalier:
I agree with the first part. But note that you could have written the same piece on the USA at the end of the 1920s (before the stock market collapse): bubble everywhere and unserviceable debt. What matters is not that there will be a downturn, but how this downturn, or even depression, will be managed.
In the USA, they decided under FDR to increase the commonwealth (social security, etc.) to change the economic model into one that brought prosperity until the 70s (and its dismantlement by neo-liberals). Will China’s leadership try to protect those who profited during the bubble at the expense of everyone else (e.g. by using nationalism to divert from economic issues), or will they try to overhaul the economic system to direct it towards a better growth?
Tomaž Vargazon:
The prosperity was brought over by several factors. Massive federal spending was one such factor yes, but so was the utter destruction of main industrial powerhouses of the world, leading to a period of vastly reduced global competition. Marhall plan helped too; it was specifically designed to interconnect European and American economies, to provide USA with additional customers.
Plus a whole lot of highly educated people left their ruined home countries to start anew in USA.
China can do exactly none of those. American national debt in 1929 was 16% of GDP. China is already drowning in debt. The prerequisite for others is a World War which China wins (or is on the winning side) essentially unscathed. That’s not going to happen either.
To answer your question, China has been pretty clear it will use nationalism to divert attention from economic issues.
Jeff York:
China is emphatically not going to “reach the top.” Last year I read Peter Zeihan’s latest book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: The Collapse of Globalization. In it he makes a convincing case for the collapse of China within the next ten years, due in large part to collapsing demographics, but also their flawed economic model, and the end of globalization.
Carol Ebert:
The CCP is far more inept than most democracies. The simply hide their troubles until it is too late.
Carlos White:
Not to mention the demographic collapse that is coming.
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WHY YOU SHOULDN’T USE THE WORD “WHY” IN CONVERSATION
~ Because, and it's the same for its equivalent in all languages, the word why will put your interlocutor on the defensive -- even for mundane things.
"Why didn't you ask for your raise?"
Even in a soft and sincere tone, the word why sounds accusatory. He asks to justify himself.
It is best to say in a tone that shows that you sincerely ask yourself the question (no sarcasm or rhetorical questions):
"What stopped you from asking for your raise?"
It is much more subtle, and leads to exchange and cooperation. You no longer ask for a justification, you put yourself on the side of your interlocutor and understand that there must be a good reason why he has not done anything yet.
He feels listened to, and responsible for his choice.
This will unlock him emotionally and he may really wonder what is stopping him, and draw a sincere answer from it rather than the phony excuses he repeats to himself and others.
He will thus be much more likely to have the courage to ask for an increase.
"Why did you eat alone with your colleague?" becomes:
"How did you end up eating alone with your colleague?"
"Why didn't you do your homework? " becomes:
"What prevented you from doing your homework?"
Do you feel how these questions will give a different outcome to your initially confrontational conversation by allowing you to get more sincere answers as well as the cooperation of your interlocutor?
You will realize that you use the word why a lot, and that questions that are not offensive put some of your interlocutors on the defensive. This prevents you from moving situations or conversations in the right direction.
I really realized this when I first tested the principle.
It was with a friend of the susceptible kind. He was telling me about a decision he had made about his job (rather messy, I learned later that he had argued with his family about it).
As he told me about it, I knew he was going to get defensive as soon as I opened my mouth. But I did it anyway, because I wanted us to be able to continue the conversation as usual: debating his idea until I did or didn't change my mind.
And I was very surprised to get there so simply.
Instead of asking him "why did you do that?" In a soft and least accusatory tone -- which would still have put him on the defensive, as always -- I asked him:
"How did you come to make that decision?"
And there, he explains to me "that he does not know but that he was fed up and that he had been stupid”...
In short, quite the opposite of what I expected, namely a debate where I put myself in the unpleasant position of the guy who tries to subtly point out things that titillate him emotionally, and where he more or less braces for a while before maybe listening to me and changing his mind.
Instead of half an hour of emotion and effort, it took the time for a simple question.
I was amazed.
Here are the advantages of not using the word why and using a tone of sincere questioning:
Makes you more enjoyable.
Allows you to obtain more information, especially valuable information, to unblock a conflict situation.
Allows you to be perceived as someone you trust, to whom you can say things without being judged.
Allows you to change your interlocutor's mind.
Allows you to get more sincere answers (like with my friend who immediately "defused" himself and confessed to himself things that stung him emotionally).
Allows you to let your guard down.
Allows you to make your interlocutor cooperate.
(It's not for nothing that it's used by FBI negotiators)
Your interlocutor feels more listened to and understood.
Allows you to make your interlocutor feel responsible, especially when you start your question with "that", "how" and "what/who".
Allows you to get a passage to action, a commitment.
I have probably forgotten other benefits, but you will experience them yourself.
You may realize that there is someone around you who uses the word why very little, and that you have always appreciated him for his quality of conversation, his kindness, his good advice and his empathy.
Otherwise, know that it may take a little time to stop saying "why". This is normal, and it will come.
If you miss a "why", feel free to rephrase the question (whether you got an answer or not) and you will still get positive effects.
I hope you will do wonders with this advice. I'm sure you're going to be amazed at the responses and behaviors you'll get in return – and how much time you'll save with your children, say. ~ Abhishek Ambad, Quora (who writes: "I learned this from a former top FBI negotiator, now head of a negotiation consulting firm, Chris Voss")
Oriana:
The most annoying question I am often expected to answer is "Why did you come to America?" It immediately puts me on the defensive, and also makes me feels dumb, since my first impulse is to say, "I don't really know." Who knows all the reasons, the most important of which are probably unconscious? But if someone started with "What led you to . . . " I could immediately start answering: "An opportunity arose that might never open up later" and so on.
Or imagine if someone asked you, "Why did you marry your husband?" Perhaps mainly because you were young and foolish . . . but now the conversation becomes awkward. Almost any other way of phrasing this question would be better.
Often, people asked why questions simply don't know how to answer, but they don't want to come across as dumb and ignorant.
It is somewhat mysterious, but I agree that "why" is a confrontational word, somehow implying that the interlocutor is in the wrong. Maybe that's why we often say, "I don't know why, but . . . "
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AMERICANS WORK HUNDREDS OF HOURS MORE THAN WORKERS IN OTHER COUNTRIES
~ American workers spend more time on the clock than employees in other developed countries, and it adds up: U.S. workers typically put in 400 more hours on the job every year compared to our counterparts in Germany.
A new report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), which is a U.N. agency, finds that the average number of working hours per year was higher in the U.S. than in six developed countries used in the study’s comparison: Australia, the U.K., Sweden, Belgium, France and Germany.
For much of the 21st century, Australians worked more than Americans, but that switched several years ago. Of these countries, Germans work the least — a total of about 1,350 hours per year, on average.
In the U.S., workers clock an average of about 1,750 hours per year, the ILO report shows. That figure has declined over time: In the ‘50’s and ‘60s, average working hours per year were closer to 2,000 in the U.S., according to the report. Even so, the average 40-hour-per-week employee in the U.S. is working 400 more hours annually — the equivalent of 10 more weeks — than employees in Germany.
However, the study shows employees in several major countries the U.N. classifies as developing, including China, India, and the Republic of Korea, work more than Americans. In China and India, average working hours are above 2,100 per year, and those numbers have increased in the past five decades, which is not the case for any of the other countries in the study.
Overall, work-life balance is best in Europe and North America. "Average hours of work per week were clearly the longest in Asia and the Pacific, particularly in Southern Asia and Eastern Asia," the report says. "In contrast, the shortest average hours of work per week are found in North America and Europe and Central Asia, particularly in Northern, Southern and Western Europe. The other regions of the world lie somewhere between these two extremes.”
The comparison only includes four developing countries, the last being Brazil, where employees work less than they do in America. It’s also important to note that the report may not exactly reflect the current situation because the study uses pre-pandemic data.
At the global level, the ILO report argues that far too many people are working excessively long hours, even though average working hours in many developed countries have been trending downward.
More than a third of all workers are on the job at least 48 hours per week, the report found. “Regular long hours of work remain a serious concern in most of the world today,” the report says.
"Overemployed" workers often struggle with work-life balance, and "overemployment" is associated with more health issues, alcoholism, family conflict, etc., according to the ILO.
In developing countries, workers are putting in these long hours because wages are low and they’re trying to make ends meet, the report says.
While that’s also certainly the case for many workers regardless of the location, the report states that in developing countries, many salaried employees have to work these hours because their jobs require them to take as long as needed to complete the tasks in front of them. Many overemployed workers say they'd prefer to work less, even if that would mean earning less income.
The report identifies underemployment as another serious problem.
Underemployment puts people at higher risks of living in poverty, lacking benefits and having irregular schedules.
A fifth of workers globally have less than 35 hours of work per week, and a third of these workers are getting paid for less than 20 hours per week. Oftentimes, these workers want more hours but struggle to find opportunities, according to the ILO.
Preliminary data that looks at labor during the pandemic shows there was a minor increase in the number of people who were underemployed in 2020, though the levels fluctuated as economies reopened or reenacted restrictions. Likewise, the number of people working more than 48 hours per week decreased early in the pandemic, but then trended up again as the world recovered.
While the pandemic brought about an increase in remote jobs, giving workers more flexibility, it did not cause a major change in the length of the average workweek, according to the report.
“The decrease in long hours of work was not as steep as might be expected given the situation, perhaps in part because some products were in high demand,” the report says.
https://money.com/americans-work-hours-vs-europe-china/
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WHY MYTHOLOGIES ARE SIMILAR
~ As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss notes in “The Structural Study of Myth,” there is an “astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions.” From the city-states of ancient Greece to the hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon rainforest, cultures everywhere have preserved suspiciously similar stories about heroes slaying monsters, talking animals playing tricks on each other, and jealous (usually male) siblings fighting to the death.
Especially common in world mythologies are stories about world-ending floods and the chosen individuals that managed to survive them, like the biblical Noah and Utnapishtim, the ark builder in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a text thought to be even older than the Abrahamic religions. In Aztec mythology, a man named Tata and his wife Nena carve out a cypress tree after being warned of a coming deluge by the god Tezcatlipoca, while Manu, the first man in Hindu folklore, was visited by a fish that guided his boat to the peak of a mountain. The list goes on.
This all begs the question: Why is there such astounding similarity between the oral traditions of geographically separated peoples? Anthropologists, psychologists, and archaeologists have spent years looking for an answer. To this day, however, there still isn’t a theory that everyone agrees with.
Some argue that these similarities are evidence of cultural transmission in the distant past before human migration really got underway. Others maintain that they developed independently as the result of comparable experiences. Others still believe that it has something to do with the way our brains work. Which of these, if any, is correct?
THE WORLD’S OLDEST FLOOD MYTH
Archaeological research suggests that our species originated in Sub-Saharan Africa, then spread to the rest of the world via the Middle East. This means cultures that are geographically separated at present would have been able to exchange beliefs and practices back when they lived in roughly the same area. Therefore, patterns in world mythology could help us better understand patterns in early human migration and vice versa.
There is no shortage of research on this topic. Anna Rooth, author of “The Creation Myths of the North American Indians,” analyzed small narrative details in more than 300 Native American creation myths and found that many of those details also showed up in myths from Eurasia. This led her to the conclusion that, “because of the special combination of detail-motifs, these myths must be considered to have a common origin.”
In “Oedipus-type Tales in Oceania,” William Lessa writes that legends resembling the famous Greek tragedy are distributed across a “continuous belt extending from Europe to the Near and Middle East and southeastern Asia, and from there into the islands of the Pacific,” but are entirely absent from central and northeastern Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, suggesting a lack of cultural transmission between these regions.
It has been argued that flood myths have a common origin as well. The oldest myth we know of comes from Babylon and is mentioned by Eusebius Caesarea, a historian of early Christianity who mentions the lost works of the Babylonian historian Berosus, who in turn talked about lost Babylonian records that allegedly dated back to the empire’s founding at the dawn of civilization itself.
According to Berosus, a great flood took place during the reign of Xísouthros, a Sumerian king who supposedly lived sometime around 2900 BC. Warned of the deluge by a god, Xísouthros built a ship for his family, friends, and various animals — motifs that should sound familiar. Considering he also used birds to locate land after the rain had ended, it’s not unlikely that this legend was the basis for Gilgamesh and Noah.
YU THE GREAT
But the Babylonian template does not apply to every flood myth around the world, and as the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn writes in his article, “Recurrent Themes in Myths and Mythmaking,” ethnographers have been “careful to discriminate explicitly between those that may have this derivation from the oldest and most influential flood myths from the Near East and others that seem definitely ‘aboriginal.’”
Because the aforementioned flood myths of India and Mesoamerica resemble their Mesopotamian counterparts only insofar as they involve gods, boats, and heavy rainfall, it’s been argued that they developed independently of one another. Any similarity between them, the argument goes, is due to the fact that they are based on comparable but nonetheless separate historical events. In other words, while the story of Xísouthros was inspired by a flood that took place in Mesopotamia, the Aztec and Hindu versions were probably inspired by floods that took place elsewhere.
This hypothesis has been picking up steam in recent years as modern research has improved our understanding of the ancient world and its geology. As recently as 2016, for example, a study in Science presented evidence that a landslide in China’s Jishi Gorge would have sent over half a million cubic meters of water down the Yellow River per second, placing much of the country under water.
What’s notable about this study is that it proposes that this particular catastrophe — which the researchers estimate happened around 1920 BC — served as the inspiration for several Chinese flood myths that emerged during the same time period.
This would explain why one myth involving the legendary founder of the Xia dynasty, Yu the Great, is fundamentally different from other flood myths. Whereas Noah, Utnapishtim, and Tata — to name just a few — build their vessels to avoid drowning, Yu relies on his ingenuity to stop the flood itself, draining the lowlands and turning chaos back into order all by himself, without the help of a god.
MYTH AND MIND
A more questionable theory holds that myths resemble one another not because they originated in the same place or were inspired by similar events, but because — on a subconscious level — every human brain makes sense of the world in the exact same way.
This theory was popularized by depth psychologist Carl Jung, who took issue with the still largely unchallenged notion that myths are metaphors used to explain physical processes. Jung felt that using gods and spirits to represent rising tides and growing crops would have been too big of a leap in logic for primitive humans. “Humans,” Robert Segal writes of Jung’s ideas in his book Theorizing about Myth, “must already have the idea of god within their minds and can only be projecting that idea onto vegetation and the other natural phenomena they observe.”
“Anything psychic,” Jung himself further clarifies in Psychology of the Unconscious, “brings its own internal condition with it, so that one might assert with equal right that the myth is purely psychological and uses meteorological or astronomical events merely as a means of expression. The whimsicality and absurdity of many primitive myths often makes the latter explanation seem far more appropriate than any other.”
Regardless of which theory is true — perhaps there is some truth in all of them — distinctions between the myths are not trivial. Instead, they are what allow anthropologists to discern how one ancient culture might have differed from another in terms of their belief systems, social structures, and family dynamics. Ultimately, they shed light on the beliefs we all share today. ~
https://bigthink.com/high-culture/flood-myth-origin/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
The reasons for similarities in mythologies are probably to some degree explained by contact and proximity, and by commonalities in human psychology and experience. However it may be impossible to find a time "before our migrations." Archeology finds more and more evidence that we were travelers from the start, crossing great distances , going out, coming back, a tangled map of paths converging, crossing, separating...constant movement across continents and between them. Those who did not travel make up a small population in Africa, the Khoi San people...who seem to be the first to diverge from the most recent human predecessor. Their "click consonant" languages may be the oldest ever, and studies of their Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA reveal them as the most diverse, the oldest, ever found. All the rest of us are a mash up reflecting journeys, meetings with other groups and the resulting generation of variation in our DNA..where we carry genetic traces of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and perhaps other as yet unknown human strains.
I think some of these mythologies may actually be cultural memories. Memories as old as the last ice age, preserved in oral histories by indigenous peoples. Such a circumstance was encountered with the Australian indigenous peoples who had a detailed story about land they used to occupy and use, built fish traps on, left drawings on etc. That land was still there, under water. It had been inundated at the end of the ice age, when glaciers melted and the seas rose. The oral tradition preserved accurate knowledge of this land and its loss for millennia...all there for modern scientists to discover.
It's a fascinating, tantalizing thought.
WHY ATHEISM IS NOT A SYSTEM OF BELIEFS
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WHEN BRAIN FUNCTION IS OPTIMAL
~ Over the last few decades, an idea called the critical brain hypothesis has been helping neuroscientists understand how the human brain operates as an information-processing powerhouse. It posits that the brain is always teetering between two phases, or modes, of activity: a random phase, where it is mostly inactive, and an ordered phase, where it is overactive and on the verge of a seizure.
The hypothesis predicts that between these phases, at a sweet spot known as the critical point, the brain has a perfect balance of variety and structure and can produce the most complex and information-rich activity patterns. This state allows the brain to optimize multiple information processing tasks, from carrying out computations to transmitting and storing information, all at the same time.
The same sense of a critical brain being “just right” also explains why other tasks should be optimized. For example, consider information storage, which is driven by the activation of groups of neurons called assemblies. In a subcritical network, the connections are so weak that very few neurons are coupled together, so only a few small assemblies can form. In a supercritical network, the connections are so strong that almost all neurons are coupled together, which allows only one large assembly. In a critical network, the connections are strong enough for many moderately sized groups of neurons to couple, yet weak enough to prevent them from all coalescing into one giant assembly. This balance leads to the largest number of stable assemblies, maximizing information storage.
Despite the ubiquity of this phenomenon, it is possible to disrupt it. For example, when one eye of a rat is covered, its visual cortex is pushed away from the critical point and transmits information more erratically. (The cortex seems to adjust to this change and spontaneously returns to the critical point after two days.) Similarly, when humans are sleep deprived, their brains become supercritical, although a good night’s sleep can move them back toward the critical point.
It thus appears that brains naturally incline themselves to operate near the critical point, perhaps just as the body keeps blood pressure, temperature and heart rate in a healthy range despite changes to the environment. This insight is important for understanding neurological health: New research has suggested that brain diseases like epilepsy are associated with failure to operate near the critical point or to return to it once pushed away.
Early critiques pointed out that proving a network was near the critical point required improved statistical tests. The field responded constructively, and this type of objection is rarely heard these days. More recently, some work has shown that what was previously considered a signature of criticality might also be the result of random processes. Researchers are still investigating that possibility, but many of them have already proposed new criteria for distinguishing between the apparent criticality of random noise and the true criticality of collective interactions among neurons.
Meanwhile, over the past 20 years, research in this area has steadily become more visible. The breadth of methods being used to assess it has also grown. The biggest questions now focus on how operating near the critical point affects cognition, and how external inputs can drive a network to move around the critical point. Ideas about criticality have also begun to spread beyond neuroscience. Citing some of the original papers on criticality in living neural networks, engineers have shown that self-organized networks of atomic switches can be made to operate near the critical point so that they compute many functions optimally. The deep learning community has also begun to study whether operating near the critical point improves artificial neural networks.
The critical brain hypothesis may yet prove to be wrong, or incomplete, although current evidence does support it. Either way, the understanding it provides is generating an avalanche of questions and answers that tell us much more about the brain — and computing generally — than we knew before. ~
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-physical-theory-for-when-the-brain-performs-best-20230131/
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SUPERSLOW BRAIN WAVES MAY PLAY A CRITICAL PART IN CONSCIOUSNESS
~ Every few seconds a wave of electrical activity travels through the brain, like a large swell moving through the ocean. Scientists first detected these ultraslow undulations decades ago in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people and other animals at rest—but the phenomenon was thought to be either electrical “noise” or the sum of much faster brain signals and was largely ignored.
Now a study that measured these “infraslow” (less than 0.1 hertz) brain waves in mice suggests they are a distinct type of brain activity that depends on an animal's conscious state. But big questions remain about these waves' origin and function.
An fMRI scan detects changes in blood flow that are assumed to be linked to neural activity. “When you put someone in a scanner, if you just look at the signal when you don't ask the subject to do anything, it looks pretty noisy,” says Marcus Raichle, a professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and senior author of the new study, published in April in Neuron. “All this resting-state activity brought to the forefront: What is this fMRI signal all about?”
To find out what was going on in the brain, Raichle's team employed a combination of calcium/hemoglobin imaging, which uses fluorescent molecules to detect the activity of neurons at the cellular level, and electrophysiology, which can record signals from cells in different brain layers. They performed both measurements in awake and anesthetized mice; the awake mice were resting in tiny hammocks in a dark room.
The team found that infraslow waves traveled through the cortical layers of the awake rodents' brains—and changed direction when the animals were anesthetized. The researchers say these waves are distinct from so-called delta waves (between 1 and 4 Hz) and other higher-frequency brain activity.
These superslow waves may be critical to how the brain functions, Raichle says. “Think of, say, waves on the water of Puget Sound. You can have very rough days where you have these big groundswells and then have whitecaps sitting on top of them,” he says. These “swells” make it easier for brain areas to become active—for “whitecaps” to form, in other words.
Other researchers praised the study's general approach but were skeptical that it shows the infraslow waves are totally distinct from other brain activity. “I would caution against jumping to a conclusion that resting-state fMRI is measuring some other property of the brain that's got nothing to do with the higher-frequency fluctuations between areas of the cortex,” says Elizabeth Hillman, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute, who was not involved in the work. Hillman published a study in 2016 finding that resting-state fMRI signals represent neural activity across a range of frequencies, not just low ones.
More studies are needed to tease apart how these different types of brain signals are related. “These kinds of patterns are very new,” Hillman notes. “We haven't got much of a clue what they are, and figuring out what they are is really, really difficult.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superslow-brain-waves-may-play-a-critical-role-in-consciousness1/
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LIFTING WEIGHTS JUST ONCE A WEEK CAN CUT HEART DISEASE RISK IN HALF
~ For the longest time, experts said you had to do aerobic exercise for heart health and strength training to protect your muscles and bones.
Now, new research published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise shows that even if you do no actual “cardio,” pumping iron will strengthen your most important muscle—your heart—and protect you from having a cardiovascular event like a heart attack or stroke, or even dying from it.
For the study, researchers sieved through survey and medical data from the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study (ACLS), which included 12,591 men and women with average age of 47. The participants had completed extensive lifestyle and exercise surveys and came in to the Cooper Clinic for at least two preventive health examinations between 1987 and 2006.
After crunching the data, the researchers found that even a little bit of strength training went a long way for preventing heart disease. They found that as little as one session a week, or less than an hour of pumping iron, cut the participants’ risks of heart disease and dying from a cardiovascular event by 40 to 70 percent, even if they didn’t get the recommended amount of aerobic exercise every week.
Strength training was also linked to a lower body mass index (BMI), which is also associated with better heart health.
More research is needed to back up these findings and to further understand how resistance training can improve heart health. But it’s possible that resistance training’s effects on calorie expenditure, physical function, and mood—it’s been shown to reduce anxiety and depression, both of which can take a toll on your ticker—may help explain the reduction in heart risks. ~
https://www.bicycling.com/health-nutrition/a24475008/strength-training-prevents-heart-disease/
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AN APPEAL BY A MEDICAL SCIENTIST FOR A WIDESPREAD USE OF RAPAMYCIN AGAINST AGING
(Note from Oriana: I have removed references and reference numbers in the interest of making the text more reader-friendly. I have also largely eliminated the introductory portion of the original article dealing with the safety of rapamycin.)
mTOR:
Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a protein regulates cell
proliferation, autophagy, and apoptosis by participating in multiple
signaling pathways in the body. Studies have shown that the mTOR
signaling pathway is also associated with cancer, arthritis, insulin
resistance, osteoporosis, and other diseases. Signaling through
mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is activated by amino acids,
insulin, and growth factors, and impaired by nutrient or energy
deficiency. mTOR plays key roles in cell physiology. High-protein diets
activate mTOR. Caffeine, resveratrol, curcumin, cruciferous vegetables,
and exercise are among the means to inhibit mTOR. Metformin and
berberine also inhibit mTOR.
“If you wait until you are ready, it is almost certainly too late.” ~ Seth Godin
~ In one short-lived mutant strain of mice, the mTOR inhibitor rapamycin (known in the clinic as Sirolimus) extends maximum life span nearly three-fold. Albeit less spectacularly, rapamycin also prolongs life in normal mice as well as in yeast, worms and flies, and it prevents age-related conditions in rodents, dogs, nonhuman primates and humans.
Rapamycin and its analog, everolimus, are FDA approved for human use and have been used safely for decades. In 2006, it was suggested that rapamycin could be used immediately to slow down aging and all age-related diseases in humans, becoming an “anti-aging drug today.”
Does rapamycin suppress aging and extend lifespan by preventing diseases, or does it prevent diseases by slowing aging? Actually, both reflect the same process.
By 2006, an extensive body of work from several independent fields all pointed to rapamycin as an anti-aging drug. According to hyperfunction theory, aging is an unintended (not programmed but quasi-programmed) continuation of the developmental growth program, driven in part by mTOR.
In two dozen studies using different strains of mice, rapamycin extended life span. Starting from a thorough study by Harrison et al and followed by nearly simultaneous studies by others, the anti-aging effects of rapamycin have been confirmed many times. Importantly, rapamycin and everolimus are indicated in most, if not all, age-related diseases, from cancer to neurodegeneration.
Conventional drugs as anti-aging agents
Several conventional drugs used to treat age-related diseases (e.g., hypertension, ischemic heart disease, diabetes, cancer, prostate enlargement) can be viewed as somewhat anti-aging drugs. First, these drugs extend lifespan in the same model organisms. For example, metformin extends lifespan not only in mice, but also in the worms, which do not suffer from human diseases. ACE inhibitors prolong life not only in hypertensive rats, but also in healthy normotensive rats. If these drugs were not ordinary drugs for human diseases, then gerontologists would call them anti-aging agents.
Second, these drugs prevent or treat more than one disease. For example, metformin is indicated to treat type 2 diabetes as well as pre-diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and polycystic ovary syndrome. Aspirin not only reduces inflammation (a hallmark of aging), it also reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, thrombosis and cancer. Low-dose aspirin prevents one-third of colorectal, gastric, and esophageal cancers. PDE5 inhibitors such as Sildenafil and Tadalafil, which are widely used for erectile dysfunction, are also effective against benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and pulmonary arterial hypertension in humans and suppress inflammation-driven colorectal cancer in mice. Aging is the sum of all these age-related diseases.
Given that humans and animals die from age-related diseases, life can be extended by treating multiple pre-diseases and diseases. Rapamycin and these drugs may complement each other in an anti-aging formulation by further extending life and/or by mitigating each others possible side effects. For example, metformin may counteract rapamycin-induced hyperglycemia.
Not taking rapamycin may be as dangerous as smoking.
Strangely, the fear of tobacco smoking is less intense than the fear of rapamycin. But whereas smoking shortens both the healthspan and lifespan, rapamycin extends them. Smoking increases the incidence of cancer and other age-related diseases. Rapamycin prevents cancer in mice and humans. Heavy smoking shortens life expectancy by 6-10 years. In other words, simply not smoking prolongs life by 6-10 years. In middle-aged mice, just 3 months of high-dose rapamycin treatment was sufficient to increase life expectancy up to 60%. When taken late in life, rapamycin increases lifespan by 9-14%, despite the dosage being suboptimal. This possibly equates to more than 7 years of human life. By comparison, smokers who quit late in life (at age 65 years), gain between 1.4 -3.7 years.
Considered in those terms, one could say that in the elderly, not taking rapamycin may be even more “dangerous” than smoking.
Finally, rapamycin may be especially beneficial to smokers and former smokers. While the carcinogens from tobacco cause lung cancer in mice, rapamycin decreases tobacco-induced lung cancer multiplicity by 90%.
Diet and rapamycin
Calorie restriction (CR) and intermittent fasting (IF) extend both the lifespan and healthspan in diverse species. However, CR is of little benefit when started in old age. Fasting inhibits the mTOR pathway in young but not old mice. By contrast, rapamycin strongly inhibits mTORC1 at any age.
It extends lifespan, whether started late or early in life, even if used transiently. So, whereas CR is more beneficial early in life, rapamycin may be indicated later in life. In addition, the beneficial effects of rapamycin and CR may be additive, given that they are exerted through overlapping but distinct mechanisms. Intermittent rapamycin and CR (24-48 hours after) can be combined, to avoid potential hyperglycemia. Physical exercise may be most beneficial starting immediately after rapamycin use, to take advantage of rapamycin-induced lipolysis as a fuel for the muscles. By itself, chronic rapamycin treatment does not compromise muscle endurance and even prevents muscle loss.
Despite the metabolic side effects seen in some mouse models, mice treated with rapamycin live longer and are healthier. Humans also may want to live longer and healthier lives, regardless of whether one calls the means unsafe. Some basic researchers believe that rapamycin cannot be routinely used to treat aging in humans because of its metabolic effects and call for the development of safer analogs. First, rapamycin and everolimus are FDA-approved drugs, safe for human use. Since 1999, rapamycin has been used by millions of patients with no unexpected problems. One may suggest that rapamycin/everolimus are safe enough for very sick patients, not just for healthy people.
First, healthy elderly people chronically treated with rapamycin or other mTOR inhibitors showed no ill effects (e.g. hyperglycemia). Logically, more threatening adverse effects could be expected in cancer and transplant patients, who are often heavily pre-treated and terminally ill than in healthy people. Second, there are no truly healthy people among the elderly; otherwise, they would be “immortal”, given that all humans die from age-related diseases, not from healthy aging. And the sooner they would be treated with anti-aging drugs, the longer they would remain relatively healthy.
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Rapamycin is a natural anti-fungal antibiotic produced by soil bacteria of Eastern Island. The patent on rapamycin has expired, and pharmacological companies have developed other rapalogs such as everolimus. (I use the term rapalogs to encompass both rapamycin, everolimus and any other analogs). At equipotent doses, rapamycin and everolimus exert almost identical therapeutic and adverse effects; although, everolimus is weaker and has a shorter half-life in the organism compared with rapamycin.
All current rapalogs exhibit the same side effects as rapamycin and everolimus. Their real side effects are mTORC1-dependent. Inhibition of mTORC1 decreases cell proliferation and function, which is manifested as lower blood cell counts and insulin levels, especially when rapalogs are chronically administered at high doses. We could develop weaker rapalogs, which would have no side effects if used at the same dose as rapamycin. But then why not just use a lower dose of rapamycin? (I will discuss elsewhere how safer rapalogs are probably weaker rapalogs.)
Given to mice at the same doses as rapamycin, weaker analogs would have neither side effects and no therapeutic effects. Consequently, their metabolic effects would be diminished and so would their therapeutic effects. However, the same negative result can be achieved simply by decreasing the dose of rapamycin. While waiting for silver bullets, we need to use the currently available rapalogs, such as rapamycin and everolimus, to live longer. When “safer” rapalogs are clinically available, we may use them too.
The time is now unless it’s too late
The overwhelming evidence suggests that rapamycin is a universal anti-aging drug – that is, it extends lifespan in all tested models from yeast to mammals, suppresses cell senescence and delays the onset of age-related diseases, which are manifestations of aging. Although rapamycin may reverse some manifestations of aging, it is more effective at slowing down aging than reversing it. Therefore, rapamycin will be most effective when administered at the pre-disease, or even pre-pre-disease stages of age-related diseases. For example, Carosi et al. suggested that mTOR inhibitors could be useful in Alzheimer disease, but only in the earliest stages.
In addition, rapamycin and everolimus are more effective for preventing cancer than treating it. They may also be useful for treating osteoporosis, though not a broken hip after an osteoporotic fracture. Rapalogs may slow atherosclerosis, thereby preventing myocardial infarction, but they are unlikely to help reverse an infarction. In other words, anti-aging drugs extend the healthspan and are most effective before overt diseases cause organ damage and loss of function.
So, is it too late to take rapamycin once aging reaches an unhealthy stage? Actually, it is not too late. Even if one or a few age-related diseases renders aging unhealthy, other potential diseases are still at pre-disease stages, and anti-aging drugs may delay their development. And they may slow down further progression of existing overt diseases.
In addition to rapamycin/everolimus, the anti-aging formula includes metformin, aspirin, ACE inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers and PDE5 inhibitors, each of which can prevent or treat more than one age-related disease. Note that I mention only clinically-approved drugs because they can be used now. Later, perhaps, we may be able to consider further life extension through the use of low doses of pan-mTOR, mdm-2 and MEK inhibitors, lithium, as well as next-generation rapalogs.
There is currently no consensus around the short-term markers of anti-aging effects. Therefore, rapamycin trials should be focused on its potential side effects rather than anti-aging effects. We must be sure that the therapy is safe. In the future, the treatment should be conducted as a life-long phase I/II trial, with dose escalation of rapamycin/everolimus until the side effects are reached in an individual patient. The tailored optimal dose should be determined individually for each patient and may vary widely. Doses and frequencies should be limited by the side effects: stomatitis/mucositis, anemia, thrombopenia, leukopenia, edema, and pneumonitis. To be safe, even mild hyperglycemia should be avoided or mitigated with metformin. Treatment is intended to be life-long, unless discontinued due to side effects.
Self-medication (even by physicians themselves) should be avoided and strongly discouraged. Instead, we need anti-aging clinics that implement the entire anti-aging recipe, including a complementary low carbohydrate diet and life style changes. Blood levels of rapamycin should be measured, as the rapamycin concentration in blood varies greatly among individuals taking the same dose. Doses of rapamycin should be tailored: personalized dosing and schedules. There is no shortage of potential patients who unfortunately already employ self-medication with rapamycin, but there is a shortage of physicians to treat them.
Fortunately, a prototype clinic already functions in the USA, demonstrating that it is feasible from a regulatory standpoint (see Alan Green’s practice, Little Neck, NY). We cannot wait for results from others if we want to live longer and healthier ourselves. The time is now. ~ Mikhail V. Blagosklonny, MD, PhD, professor at New York Medical College
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6814615/
Perhaps the most important statement here is that we don’t die as a result of damage caused by free radicals, as was theorized some decades ago. We die of aging-related diseases such as heart disease or cancer. These diseases tend to involve too much signal to “grow and multiply.” Eating a high-protein diet is one way to shorten one’s life expectancy.
Fortunately we are witnessing an increased interest in extending healthy lifespan. It's becoming clear that inhibiting the growth-promoting protein called mTOR is an effective way to prevent or delay the diseases of aging. I realize that few people have open-minded physicians who'd prescribe rapamycin and/or metformin simply for anti-aging (thank God for berberine!). But we are beginning to discover that easily accessible means of delaying aging are abundant, including berberine, coffee, curcumin, and exercise.
ending on beauty:
In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat.
~ John Ashbery's The Explanation
(Yes, tomatoes are fruit.)
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