Snow near Los Angeles, 2-26-2023; photo: Charles Sherman. Residents of Los Angeles County want to experience snow, some of them for the first time in their life.*
UMBILICAL
I was taught to address you
otherwise, how could you
my name is a mirror
but I
the long and thick
umbilical hair
I thought I unburdened
but even invisible
we spent three years together
Two cold coins
Our fields are our sea
sailing
Far from the snow-choked fields
~ Julia Cimafieyeva, Motherfield, translated from Belorussian by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraquib
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THIS IS WHAT RUSSIA DOES
~ This is hard to look at, but the world must not turn away from it.
This is what Russia does. This is what what Russian occupation looks like.
And when people say that the world should stop arming Ukraine in order to force Zelensky to negotiate with Russia, this is what they are asking Ukrainian people to tolerate and accept.
***
Exhumation completed in Izyum:
194 male bodies
215 female bodies
(22 military bodies)
5 baby bodies
11 - unidentified
Many bodies have hands tied and/or limbs missing, head and chest injuries, genitals missing, stab wounds, ropes around the neck, bullet wounds.
Mary: MORE GENOCIDE THAN WAR
It is astonishing to think that Russian culture is largely focused on criminal culture, with criminals as heroes, and the criminal world with its own language, organization, systems of control, and economy. It is in many ways like the Mafia, though perhaps less centrally organized, and certainly in the US we have organized crime, racketeering, gangs and gang culture, and a criminal culture fostered in and by prisons and prisoners. The discussion of how this works in Russia makes it seem more pervasive and normative than a sub-culture.
For instance, if the economy consists of primarily exchanges based on corruption, and the market is primarily the black market...criminal action becomes the center, the heart of things, not something on the periphery. In the US we have the operation of for profit prisons, and laws that make sure there are many prisoners to fill them and make human incarceration a growth industry. Prisons in Russia are engines of fascist control, elimination of opposition and enforcement of the hegemony of the state. Prison culture is criminal culture, ordered by violence, power and threat.
A big difference between the prison system and criminal culture here and that in Russia is that prisoners here will never be used as military forces. It is unimaginable. And Russia's use of such forces, with no training and no real discipline, no sense that there are any limits or rules in combat, results exactly in the war crimes that left so many civilian bodies behind, with so much evidence of torture and gratuitous violence, murders and executions outside actual combat. In Izyum, over 400 bodies, and only 22 military. This is more genocide than war.
Oriana:
I’m pondering the word “largely” — could it be true that any country’s culture is “largely focused on criminal culture”? But just because it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around it doesn’t mean that the statement can’t be true. Humans are incredibly adaptive, and if non-stop lying is required for survival, they’ll perform as required. I can’t deny that I grew up in a lying-based environment . . . And bribery was certainly commonplace. And it’s not good for children to grow up around cynicism.
And that’s the slippery slope toward a more and more crime-based culture, with an erasure of the sense of right and wrong. Alas, the Russian Orthodox Church is headed by a totally corrupt patriarch, and does not seem to have any moral authority, the way that the Polish Catholic Church had enormous power and moral prestige during the Soviet era in Poland.
Prison culture is probably very similar all over the world — based on fear and violence. It’s toxic masculinity squared.
The US military, especially the Marine Corps, tries to cultivate certain ideals so that any member of the system is proud to be a Marine, for instance. It stands for a high order of ethics. I know exceptions exist, but at least those are exceptions, not the prevalent order.
As for genocide, or at least mass murder: I thought that I grew up without any illusions about Russia, but . . . I still wasn’t ready for the atrocities in Ukraine. And I was never in the camp that would shrug and say, “Oh, Russians, they are not European, they are really Mongols” — though Germans were undeniably European and just as capable of committing horrific massacres and more.
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RUSSIA AFTER BEING ABSORBED BY CHINA (Misha Firer)
Letter to schoolchildren from Serg Sob Yan-In, Mayor of Mosike (former Moscow), Tier Two City, Capital of Éluósī Province (former Ruzzia). Shangdi bless Our Emperor Xi.
September 1st, 4721, Year of the Rabbit.
~ Ni hao, boys and girls!
Bless be supreme deity Shang-ti and Our Emperor Xi. May you live in interesting times!
You may be wondering why your parents who used to be teachers, policemen, doctors, engineers, office plankton are now working for one yuan an hour in sweatshops stitching Nike sneakers and laboring in rare-earth mines to source parts for Tesla and Apple, Inc?
It all began in the Final Year of Scruffy Bear when he invaded Europe.
Your parents were then servants of Death Cult had volunteered as cannon fodder and manual trench candle makers to prove their loyalty to Botox Face Man in exchange for knockoff Fiat with 10,000 mile warranty, prosthetics limbs, and free burial.
Sponsored by Huawei. Ivans and Natashas, solve this maths problem. “20 battle tanks T-74 were sent to Ukraine. 10 tanks were broken and nobody knew how to fix them because all the mechanics had been killed. Turrets were catapulted from 8 tanks. How many battle tanks state-controlled television claimed have remained?”
Correct answer: 78. If you got this easy maths problem wrong you are punished with three month labor intensive internship at the new Huawei factory in Ka Zan to improve your fine motor skills.
After your fathers were thrown out of Europe, Botox Face Man traveled to Beijing in trepidation.
He fell on his knees and begged Our Emperor Xi to have his nation absorbed into China in exchange for saving his life. Although Botox Face Man had sent hundreds of thousands of your parents into a meat grinder, he himself deeply treasured his life and didn’t want to die.
Botox Face Man said, “Russians would forgive me anything — mass extermination of males in Ukraine, depopulation, no Coca Cola and McDonald’s, a quarter of the populace using outhouses and not knowing that natural gas is used for heating and cooking, stealing trillions of dollars from them, forcing the future generation to live in 1945, turning them into angry zombies from second-rate TV series on AMC — but they would never, ever, ever, ever, ever forgive me losing war!”
Sponsored by Alibaba-Gasprom-Rosneft-Lukoil. And now a question for your pensioner grandparents. Who was the founder of Russia?
Correct answer: Genghis Khan founded Mongol Empire and Russian Empire.
Grandparents of Ivans and Natashas, if you got this easiest of answers wrong, chain of fentanyl factories FenZen insists that you come over to the nearest post office to lick stamps and hand package fun products for mail deliveries overseas.
This year you will learn to speak Mandarin and eat with chopsticks.
You will go on field trips to Novosibzhou and Ufakhai where population have quadrupled in six months. Bring your single mother along for matchmaking events.
Emperor Xi built more roads in two days that Botox Face Man built in 23 years.
You will travel on a new super-fast Trans Siberian Express train from Yongmingcheng (former Vladivostok) to Mosike in four hours flat instead of seven days.
Reeducation camps open its doors (once) for underachievers and slow learners.
Welcome to CPR, your Homeland!
Serg Sob Yan-In, Mayor of Mosike
~ Misha Firer, Quora, February 28, 2023
“The Dragon Killing Saint George” is the new coat of arms of the second-tier city Mosike, Capital of Éluósī Province (also known as North China).
Oriana:
What I like most is Genghis Khan as the founder of the Russian Empire, and of course the dragon killing St. George. High time to provide an alternative narrative!
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DID THE RUSSIA MAFIA EXIST IN THE SOVIET UNION?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: no, but also yes. If by Russian mafia you mean the mafia that exists now, then it mostly did not exist during the Soviet times (although at least some of its founders and major movers had been corrupt Soviet officials). In a broader sense, however, there was a mafia (or mafias, plural) in the Soviet Union, and to the extent that most of them were Russian-speaking and culturally Russian, I guess they were a “Russian mafia” of sorts.
The word “mafia” can mean a couple of different things. It can be used a shorthand for “organized crime” in general. And indeed, there was a lot of organized crime in the Soviet Union. You might even say the country practically ran on organized crime. There was certainly a culture of corruption pervasive in all institutions, and corruption is, of course, organized crime. To that extent, virtually every Soviet citizen was an accomplice — you couldn’t survive in the Soviet Union otherwise.
However, unlike what most people in the West today call “mafia”, Soviet Union’s organized crime was very decentralized and consisted of small groups, often consisting of just a handful of individuals, operating a limited criminal network. It was quite common for high-ranking officials at manufacturing plants operated within the state’s planned economy to salvage or steal raw materials and run extra, illegal shifts, manufacturing unaccounted-for products that were then sold on the black market.
To my knowledge, no one was ever brazen enough to manufacture cars or major appliances this way, but there were many groups pumping out illegal apparel. A big scandal in the 1970’s involved the so-called “fur mafia”, whose members stole hides and repurposed discarded strips to make illegal fur coats — ever popular with Russian women. (Fun fact: illegally manufactured items lacked the ubiquitous ГОСТ label, which you would otherwise see on every single product made and every food item packaged in the Soviet Union.
There were small networks for stealing materials and products, for doling out favors and preferential treatment, for advancing people on waiting lists. Fencing was a big business in the Soviet Union as well.
People involved in trade in the planned economy were understood to be more or less criminal by definition. Officials operating farmers’ markets routinely illegally charged vendors extra for better stalls or for the privilege of selling their produce unmolested. As to that last one, this was the benign predecessor to classical racketeering, which came later, in the 1990’s. A Soviet-era market director didn’t want much — a crate of your best produce as a “gift” would do; if you were stingy, you’d fail your health inspection, and that would be it. Protection rackets, however, were the next level of crime; those people wanted cash, and they wanted a lot of it, and refusal to pay would lead to fractures and occasionally murder.
There was even organized crime where you wouldn’t necessarily expect it in the West. My grandfather, a Sochi police detective, told me Sochi pickpockets worked as an hierarchical organization with a “king” at the top and a remarkably structured training program (and a competitive admissions process). What happened if you tried picking pockets without being a subject of the King? They’d make sure you got caught. And beaten. Until you left.
Parenthetically, professional pickpockets took pride in returning sentimental items and hard-to-replace documents to their victims. The Soviet Post Office had a service where you could mail something for free, with the fee charged to the recipient upon pickup. My father once had his wallet stolen when it contained his military ID, which would have put him in a world of trouble; but after an agonizing couple of days, he got a notice from the local post office to come pick up an envelope “charged to the recipient”, which turned out to contain his ID and had no return address. And I knew many other people growing up that something like this had happened to.
And then the Roma, they had their own thing, but perhaps the less is said about it, the better.
The word “mafia” can also mean “criminal subculture with its own sense of identity, restricted membership, mythology, etc.” The Soviet Union had that too. Those people were called “воры в законе”, which translates rather awkwardly (but literally) into “thieves in law”. The reason for the odd term is that the “law” referred to a sort of informal honor code that career thieves were supposed to follow. Another term was “авторитетный вор”, which I would translate as “distinguished thief”; it referred to a thief-in-law who was widely recognized and respected by other thieves. Thief-in-law was, I guess, the Soviet equivalent of “made man”.
Because thieves-in-law were understandably secretive, it’s difficult to find definitive information about any rituals associated with becoming a thief-in-law, like what the Italian mafia has for made men. Like the rest of USSR’s organized crime culture, thieves-in-law did not have an organization as such, so generally speaking, being one amounted to being recognized as one by other thieves-in-law. I have, however, come across some mentions about thieves-in-law being “crowned” as such, so one would assume some ritual practices revolving around the title.
Despite their lack of centralized organization, thieves-in-law were clearly a subculture, with their own mores, traditions, strong identity, songs, folk stories and fandoms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKQ5fJCqeKk&t=1s
Fenya is not slang — it is a different language, such that Fenya and conventional Russian are not mutually intelligible. It used (uses?) Russian vocabulary and some non-mainstream Russian-sounding words (some borrowed from other languages), as well as Russian grammar, but to a Russian speaker outside this subculture, Fenya sounds like an incomprehensible word salad.
Every word in Fenya that actually has a meaning in conventional Russian language means something else in Fenya, and much of its vocabulary consists of words that sound Russian, but you won’t find them in a Russian dictionary and their meaning is unknown to ordinary people.
Even the meaning of the name of the criminal patois itself — Fenya — is obscure and a subject of considerable debate among language scholars. Some Fenya words have trickled into Russian slang, despite all the secrecy, such as:
Shmon, meaning “search”, or shmonat’, “to search”. This is one of those words that kind of sound Russian, but in fact aren’t and have obscure etymology. It is NOTHING like the conventional Russian word for “search”.
Musor means “garbage” in conventional Russian, “cop” in Fenya. “Musora” is plural for a word that, in conventional Russian, just like in English, isn’t supposed to exist, because “garbage” is innumerate — so “musora”, with the accent on the final “a”, means “garbages”. For instance: “The garbages confiscated my car, can you believe it?”
Rediska, means “radish” in conventional Russian, “bad person” in Fenya.
Malina, means “raspberries” in conventional Russian, “lucrative enterprise” in Fenya.
Shukher, not a word in conventional Russian, means “shit, the garbages are here, abort, abort” in Fenya.
Here is a line from a popular thieves’ chanson called “Murka”:
Original: “Ты зашухарила всю нашу малину, а теперь маслину получай.”
Literal translation: “You shukherized all our raspberries, so now receive an olive.”
What it really means: “You compromised our whole operation, so now you get shot in the head.”
Fenya ostensibly developed to frustrate eavesdropping by law enforcement and to prevent infiltration by undercover agents. However, it became a real patois of the criminal underworld, where people use it even when there is no danger of detection or secrecy to what they are saying.
And, of course, central to thieves-in-law was the “law” that they were thieves “in”, that is to say, the Thieves’ Code. Like any informal code, its provisions vary depending on who you ask, but in broad strokes, it goes as follows.
General principles of Thieves’ Law
Rejection of conventional societal norms, especially the authority of the State.
Ban on any kind of cooperation with the law enforcement or other agencies of the State, including serving as an informant or admitting guilt in a criminal proceeding.
To be recognized as a proper “thief in law”, one must have at least one criminal conviction.
Ban against serving in the military or having any kind of government employment. Ex-military and former government officials (including corrupt cops) can never become “thieves in law”. (There was a real, and violent, disagreement among thieves-in-law during World War II as to whether the Nazi atrocities on USSR’s soil, and the existential threat to the population of the country, justified an exception to the no-military-service rule. Nazi cruelty in Odessa, thieves-in-law unofficial cultural capital, was the tipping point for many.)
Treating other thieves honorably and respecting criminal hierarchies.
Commitment to enforcing Thieves’ Law against rule-breakers, even employing violence, if necessary.
Ban on conventional gainful employment (even as a cover).
Ban on taking administrative jobs during incarceration, such as clerk, librarian, cook, crew foreman, etc.
Rejection of marriage, avoiding long-term romantic relationships or maintaining close relationships with family (because family can be used as a weapon against the thief). This principle is the one most loosely followed, as plenty of women became long-term companions, accomplices and even wives of thieves-in-law. The term for such a woman is bandersha, which I guess best translates as “moll”.
Scrupulous indifference to politics and social issues. This is all part of thieves-in-law’s rejection of conventional social structures and avoiding personal investment in society.
Skill at playing games of chance (especially cards) and scrupulous commitment to timely payment of debts incurred playing such games.
Ban on violence, including homicide, except as necessary to defend thieves’ honor and to enforce Thieves’ Law. (Such as what happens in the song Murka, when its titular heroine is discovered to be an informant.)
Ban on homicide as a form of criminal entrepreneurial activity. Although thieves-in-law may avail themselves of the services of hired killers, hitmen themselves can never become thieves-in-law and are actually considered to be on the bottom of the criminal hierarchy.
Ban on sexual assault and child molestation.
And for our last number, here is a modern rendition of Murka, albeit in Russian translation. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find the song performed with original Fenya lyrics. (I DID mention it’s a secret language, right?) Anyway, enjoy (Oriana: the way one enjoys The Godfather movies):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9feU0iZecg
Timofey Vorobyev:
The modern Russian culture is largely centered on the cult of crime. Criminal ethics co-exist with the society. Thugs and bandits are seen on TV, and not as outcasts, but heroes, while the police mostly mimic their traits to the point of no distinction. Pop music has two very popular subgenres glorifying the criminal life: chanson de-russe (aka blatnyak) and Russian gangsta-rap (for the younger generation).
Wikipedia:
Organized crime in Russia began in the Russian Empire, but it was not until the Soviet era that vory v zakone ("thieves-in-law") emerged as leaders of prison groups in forced labor camps, and their honor code became more defined. With the end of World War II, the death of Joseph Stalin, and the fall of the Soviet Union, more gangs emerged in a flourishing black market, exploiting the unstable governments of the former republics.
REASONS FOR THE GROWTH OF FAR-RIGHT POPULISM
~ The same factors as between WWI and WWII.
1. The fast pace of social and economic transformation that makes many people feel like losing in the game.
2. The onset of mass politics. Between the wars, it was the disintegration of the aristocratic world order of Belle Epoque, followed up by huge masses of people yanked out of their old way of life and social habits by the war. Now, it’s the groundbreaking effect of the Internet and social media. They made it possible for you and me to connect with our soul brothers and sisters, even if the ruling elites, mass media and other gate keepers try to prevent it.
The triumph of far-right ideologies between the wars was thrown off the track by a huge, fat, hairy Black swan called the Bolshevik revolution. Now, with Communism defeated and deeply discredited, no other populist ideology seems to be able to challenge that.
For the time being, the power shift from “Labor” to “Capital” (in Marxist terms), or from “national sovereignty” to “globalism” (in the terms of nationalists), or from “the social state” to “neoliberal world government” (in the terms of non-Marxist lefties) appears to find its only worthy opponent in the nativist, conservative and far-right ideologies.
Putin himself is not a far-right politician. A far right agenda would blow up the fragile multi-ethnic arrangement in Russia. But the far right likes to think he’s secretly one of them.
The most noisy part of Putin’s loyalists are the right-wingers who support his actions under the hardcore “blood-and-soil” banners of “The Russian World”. In the picture, a loyalist rally in the vicinity of the Kremlin celebrating the defeat of the Poles outside Moscow in 1612. The procession carries the striped orange-and-black banners of our loyalist vigilantes, headed by all Russia’s patriotic babe Maria Katasonova.
Alfredo Perozo:
Tch. They are down to celebrating victories from 400 years ago. Poor things.
Kingofturves:
Putin has for a long time funded Far Right and Right wing political parties across Europe and the USA, from mainstream Brexit supporting Conservatives in the UK, people like Arron Banks, Donald Trump to Far Right Populist parties in France, Italy, Germany, etc.
He also supports Russian Ultranationalist groups at home.
He has been critical of Lenin and admires Tsars like Peter the Great. He has no love of the USSR beyond Russia being great and powerful.
His later terms in power have been characterized by leaning towards Conservatism, Nationalism and Reactionary Authoritarian politics.
His political stance, like that of Trump, has been one of Fascism. Wanting to make their country ‘great again’.
Although Putin has been more trigger-happy with murdering rivals.
He is a petty Tyrant who has surrounded himself with yes men/sycophants who dare not criticize him, lest they end up being pushed out a window.
Panicz Godek:
“Between the wars, it was the disintegration of the aristocratic world order of Belle Epoque, followed up by huge masses of people yanked out of their old way of life and social habits by the war. Now, it’s the groundbreaking effect of the Internet and social media.”
I think that, back then, the nascent mass media (namely cinema and radio) were playing an analogous role to social media today. And while of course there are many important differences (social media are much more participatory, while cinema and radio are unilateral), what is remarkably similar is the lack of criticism in their reception. (Back then, it was unimaginable to people that the official media could be telling lies, and now it’s very easy to doubt that they could be telling the truth, which makes it easier for people to accept conspiracy theories).
Benedicto Cid:
Nationalism is far from a spent force. It has a few more centuries to ride. Especially with the ability through social media to circulate personal opinions and testimony. As with selling consumer goods, authentic-sounding personal testimony can be a far more powerful persuader than a mass media advertising message, or a speech by a politician.
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PUTIN’S GOLDEN ROOM
The Golden Room in Putin’s mansion in Valdai (midway between Moscow and St. Petersburg) features golden walls, golden ceiling, golden chandelier (from which guests can pick a petal of gold leaf as a souvenir), golden table and golden chairs.
3-story high gold chandelier encrusted with rubiesMary:
Putin's golden room, with the golden walls and ceiling and the 3-story gold and ruby chandelier is certainly on a par with Trump's vulgar displays, though rather than the chandelier Trump has his golden toilet. Putin would be Tsar, Trump would be King. But the time of Tsars and Kings is gone, they can only achieve the rank of Petty Tyrant, at once dangerous and ridiculous.
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HOW GRIEF SHAPED JOE BIDEN
~ Joe Biden has spoken in the past about significant losses that he’s suffered, including the 1972 car accident in which he lost his wife and young daughter and his son’s death following a battle with brain cancer in 2015. According to a 2019 profile on Politico, grief may have even become his “superpower.” So how could grief have shaped Biden as a person and a leader?
The loss of a child is one of the most profound losses and feels out of step with the natural course of life, says psychiatrist Ravi Shah of Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Research has suggested that people who have lost a child are at more risk of depression than people who have lost a spouse or a parent. One study found that focusing on restoration instead of loss was associated with better adjustment.
It’s difficult to fully understand Biden’s grief without speaking to him directly as a health professional. Everyone differs in terms of how they experience something, says Florida-based psychologist Marsha Brown. You can’t know exactly what they’re going through because you’re not that person.
“Your circumstances are different, your loss was different,” Brown adds. “But you can imagine or you can put yourself in that position or you can empathize more so with other people.”
Biden’s losses may have made him better able to relate to others, especially those he serves as a politician. “For some people losses like that can make it very difficult to open themselves up to other people,” says Brown. “Some people though, when they experience grief, or they experience loss…it helps them to be more empathic to other people.”
Empathy can help build trust, like Biden’s exchanges with Mark Barden, who lost a child in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, according to Politico.
People who haven’t experienced a significant loss may think that, once time passes, it’ll feel more like a tragic memory. But that may not be the reality for people going through the loss. “Tragedies like the loss of a loved one, whether it’s parents, a child, a spouse, whatever the case may be, it never goes away. It’s never something that just is…a distant memory,” says Brown. “There’ll always be something missing.”
The person may be able to function again, but the loss will always be with them.
Biden has been able to move on after his losses, and he’s found family and success in his career, something that can provide inspiration to people who also have lost loved ones. The fact that he has been open about his grief at times makes grief more accessible and could be helpful for people who are suffering through something similar.
If you have a friend or relative who is going through a period of grief, it’s important to listen to them, says Brown. Let them know that you acknowledge what they are going through and pay attention to cues to know if they want to talk about it or if you should give them space, says Shah.
Remember that feeling sad is a normal emotion, and people need the time and space to get through the grieving process. ~
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/mental-health/487095-how-joe-bidens-grief-may-have-shaped-the-leader-he/
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WAS STALIN RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ULTIMATE DOWNFALL OF COMMUNISM?
~ Only partly.
The defeat of Communism was the result of cumulative factors. Looking back, it was a chain of choices at important forks that logically led Communism to what it was by the start of perestroíka in 1985.
Stalin’s main contributions to this result were:
1. Expedited industrialization
By the end of the 1920s, Stalin subscribed to Trotsky’s view that the USSR must prepare itself for a new continental war. He dismantled the New Economic Policy because it didn’t ensure the build-up of the Soviet military industrial complex at the speed he needed. The resulting model of mobilization economics sped up the industrialization at the expense of colossal waste of resources and human lives.
This model was upheld until the end of the Soviet rule. As long as there was access to plentiful internal and external resources, it worked. (China hit the wall already in the late 1950s). But with shrinking of input factors, the Soviet economy ground to a halt by the late 1970s, and bankrupted itself a decade later.
2. Rotation of power elites through purges
Stalin also silently agreed with Trotsky on another central point. The Socialist one-party state necessarily leads to stagnation, and in longer term to transformation of the state bureaucracy into agents of a Capitalist restoration (as it happened in 1978 in China). In order to prevent that, a forced rotation of elites is needed. In the absence of political competition, regular purges are a necessary tool for that.
It ultimately became obvious that in the XX century, to conceal the truth about the scope and methods of these purges was impossible. More and more of the classified information leaked and ultimately damaged the attraction of Communist ideology beyond repair.
3. Strict hierarchy in the international Communist movement
Stalin also abolished the rests of formal equality of Communists in different countries. His model of Communist empire-building on a global scale, first through through Comintern, and after WWII through the International Department, antagonized more and more Communists abroad, leading the world to the verge of nuclear standoff between USSR and PRC at the end of 1960s.
The pre-WWII poster below shows the major components of Stalin’s model, implemented in almost all Communist countries after the war: the supreme leader with unlimited power, militarized economy, oversized state that keeps the society on a war footing. “Hail great Stalin!” is written in Russian and Azerbaidjani:
Stalin didn’t ruin Communism more than Mussolini and Franco ruined Fascism. He was what would best be called a “pragmatic Communist”.
The early years of the Soviet power demonstrated that almost none of what Marxists had imagined about the ideal path to a classless society seemed to work. Consequent cycles of experimentation and failure ultimately led to a fork in the late 1920s where the Bolsheviks had to make a choice between reverting to a “Deng Xiaoping Socialism” (i.e. a state-oligarchical nationalism painted in Communist colors) or aggressively going for Trotskyist concept of rippling out to other countries through waves of revolutionary wars.
Stalin came up as a man of the golden middle: a Statist concept of totalitarian Marxism for a single country. He successfully concluded the Civil War against the 100-million strong private peasantry of Russia and used the spoils of war to buy technology from the West for industrializing the country. This not only delivered results (a victory in WW2, the A-bomb, the space program, the strategic parity with NATO), but also was replicated in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and a few other countries.
The strength of Stalin was in his ability to ditch failed Marxist assumptions. He fully abandoned the concept of self-governing economic units, proletarian solidarity and the Marxist faith in an inbuilt human altruism that was corrupted by private property. Instead, he masterly recycled the old Russian imperial Statism, Machiavellian power techniques, and the Leninist toolset of vanguard party for the era of mass politics.
The ultimate defeat of Communism in the USSR, China, Vietnam and Europe happened only because inbuilt inefficiencies of the Communist economies coincided with a unique combination of global factors after WW2 like the rise of Pax Americana and the creation of nuclear weapons.
The picture below shows what we can call ruins of the Stalinist empire. This is the porch of a countryside resort built during Stalin’s era for government employees, now repurposed as a warehouse and falling into disrepair. The Classical style was all the rage at the time, in order to stress the eternal imperial quality of the USSR. Putin’s Russia today in many ways is running on the remains of the Soviet project.
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The many tales of how Soviet citizens virtually fainted when seeing Capitalist grocery shops for the first time give you a glimpse of how much choice we had in everyday life. ~ Dima Vorobiev
A Christian Dior model in Moscowand another one
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USSR AND THE PRICE OF OIL
~ What most people often fail to see is that the fortunes of USSR were always closely connected to oil price. Every time oil price was high, USSR was flying high and would become more aggressive. Every time oil price was low, we would get food shortages, etc.
Also, people sometimes say Yeltsyn and Gorbachev were bad leaders, while Putin is great. Well, Yeltsyn and Gorbachev had to rule the country in the times of very low oil prices (1984–2000). And the moment Putin came to power, oil prices started to head north. Right place, right time, nothing more. ~ Vitali Zagorodnov, Quora
Leonid Jacobs: LIFE IN THE SOVIET UNION
Most people who live now have no idea on what the Soviet Union really was. Under Stalin’s rule, it was a giant prison. There was a joke back in 1952- Question: How is life in our country? Answer: Life is like in a street car during the rush hour — half of the passengers are sitting, the other half are shaking. Note for non-Russians: ‘sitting’ in Russian street language means serving time in jail.
Life in big cities was more or less tolerable: bread, some meat, vodka were available. Life in small towns was harder: people could get just bread and vodka from the state. People could have their vegetable gardens to get vegetables. People in villages were actually serfs: they were bound to their villages, had to work the fields almost for nothing and feed themselves from their small plots of land and a few farm animals they owned, exactly like in serfdom. People in cities and towns could not terminate their employment or change their place of work on their own volition.
Discipline at work was enforced through criminal punishment.
After Stalin’s death, people got some freedom in choosing employment. Serfdom and criminal punishment for pure work law violations were abandoned.
However, new problems arrived: waste of materials and labor on unimaginable scale.
Hundreds of billions of dollars obtained from the sale of oil and different raw materials were wasted on the production of heavy weapons which nobody needed except for “friendly” states which received those weapons practically for free.
Hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted on automation of industries because the automatic control equipment manufactured in the Soviet Union broke down after several hours of operation.
Huge amount of expensive equipment imported from Western Europe and Japan rotted for years left under open skies until it became unusable.
If you add to that epidemic theft of the state property, embezzlement, corruption, lack of responsibility, it is not difficult to understand why the Soviet Union collapsed.
Milenko Markovic:
Russia has a problem that all exporters of raw materials have: cyclic prices. That caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Soviet math education was best in the world, it failed to produce a knowledge-based economy.
*
UKRAINE: WW3? MORE LIKE WW1 AND WW2
~ Almost from the moment the first Russian soldiers crossed into Ukraine, the warnings came: Putin’s invasion had nudged humanity to the brink of World War III.
NATO forces and the Russian army were just a few hundred miles from one another. Before long, NATO was pouring sophisticated weaponry into Ukraine and advising the Ukrainian resistance; Turkish drones, American HIMARS and British anti-tank missiles were being used to kill Russian soldiers. On more than one occasion, Putin raised the specter of using his nuclear arsenal.
In the war’s early days, the former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin voiced the fears of many when he warned of a NATO-Russia collision: A Russian missile might stray into NATO territory; there might be a Kremlin “provocation” against a NATO nation or a Russian cyberattack against countries in Western Europe.
“On so many of these things, we’re in new territory,” McLaughlin told Grid. “You know, we haven’t had anything comparable to this experience since the Cuban missile crisis.”
The nightmares haven’t been hard to imagine — and it hasn’t helped that Kremlin propagandists have taken to wild, hyper-nationalist rants on various media platforms, with ample talk about a looming “World War III.”
The nightmares may yet come, but one year in, they haven’t — even though the West has crossed many of Putin’s supposed “red lines” (on the day of the invasion, Putin warned that any nation that interfered would meet “consequences you have never seen.”) As Grid Global Security Reporter Joshua Keating wrote last week, it may be that the gradual nature of the West’s support — one weapons system at a time rather that an all-at-once deployment — has tempered the Russian response.
Meanwhile, the world wars that keep coming to mind are the two that have already been fought.
World War II — because Putin and his propagandists invoke it constantly. For Russians, it is still the “Great Patriotic War,” Stalin’s heroic victory over the Nazis. One year ago, Putin called his “special operation” necessary to root out Ukrainian “Nazis,” and just two weeks ago, when it came time for a national address to rally the nation, Putin went to Volgograd — better known to Russians as Stalingrad, where the Soviets fought a brave and brutal battle that turned the tide of World War II.
It’s “unbelievable but true” that Russia is again being threatened by German tanks, Putin said in a speech marking the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. “Now, unfortunately, we see that the ideology of Nazism, already in its modern guise, in its modern manifestation, again creates direct threats to the security of our country.”
His argument was nonsense, but Putin’s bigger problem is that the current war has been a yearlong slog. Stalingrad was also a terrible slog, but it finished in triumph; the battles in eastern Ukraine — most recently the close fighting in and around the small city of Bakhmut — have evoked not triumphal World War II campaigns but the horrors of the first World War.
Christopher Dougherty, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the war in Ukraine serves as a reminder that even in this modern, high-tech era, such old-style battles are still being fought.
“The most important lesson of Ukraine,” Dougherty told Grid, “is that major conventional war between developed nations is possible — even under the shadow of nuclear weapons — and that it’s as brutal as it’s always been.”
“The most important lesson from the war in Ukraine is also the simplest,” Kevin Rudd, the president of the Asia Society and former prime minister of Australia, told Grid. “The tragic reality of war, death and destruction on an industrial scale. It’s also the hard truth — previously lost on far too many nations — that large-scale war is by no means an impossibility in our modern, globalized world.”
LEADERS MATTER
Perhaps not surprisingly, military leaders Grid spoke to stressed the importance of wartime leadership. Asked to name a single lesson of the past year, a pair of former U.S. commanders answered without hesitation: A good leader — or a bad one — can make all the difference.
“There is no substitute for positive, galvanizing leadership and well-trained, disciplined soldiers,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. Hodges was referring to Zelenskyy, but he also credited Ukraine’s battlefield commanders — whose performance, he said, has stood in stark contrast to their Russian counterparts.
Gen. David Petraeus, who has held the top jobs at U.S. Central Command and the CIA, agreed. Petraeus told Grid that “the most important lesson of the war in Ukraine is that strategic leadership — that is, leadership at the very top — really matters.”
Petraeus has written about what he considers the four essential qualities for successful leaders: getting the “big ideas” and strategy right, communicating these clearly and effectively, overseeing their implementation (or in this case, throughout a government, army and entire nation), and being agile in refining the big ideas as circumstances warrant.
Zelenskyy, Petraeus said, “has performed each of the four tasks brilliantly and led the total mobilization of his country in a positively Churchillian manner and achieved very impressive results.” On the other side, Petraeus said, “We have seen abysmal strategic leadership demonstrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has failed miserably at the first task by repeatedly making catastrophically bad decisions and then been appalling in performing the other three tasks as well.”
“This war has shown how ineffective a dictatorship can be on the battlefield,” said Stanislav Kucher — not a military man but a former Russian TV journalist. “The only institution that has proved to be effective and indispensable in Putin’s Russia is the state propaganda system that has turned the Russian people into a society ready to support an attack on their ‘brotherly neighbors.’”
And that, Kucher said, is a lesson the world has learned about Putin’s regime: The propaganda machine is one of the few things that is working — and it is working well.
“THE WILL TO FIGHT” IS UNDERRATED
Many of the people Grid spoke with for this story offered a simpler, less tangible lesson of the war: The “will to fight,” as one said, is underrated.
Zelenskyy has cast the war in David-versus-Goliath terms, and while Ukraine’s “David” has obviously benefited from both the Western support and frequent Russian ineptitude, many believe something else is in play.
The war, said McLaughlin, the former CIA leader, has provided an “affirmation that the elusive ‘will to fight’ trumps almost everything else in battle. The Ukrainians obviously have overflowing amounts of this — attributable to the rightness of their cause and to superior leadership — as in, ‘I don’t need a ride. I need ammunition!’ [Zelenskyy’s famous phrase on the day of the invasion]. In contrast, Russian troops’ will to fight was anemic due to an ill-defined cause, shameful logistics, awareness of corruption in upper ranks and poor treatment by superiors.”
“We have learned that the power of a whole nation united against an invader is an enormously important factor that cannot be overlooked,” said Graeme Robertson, director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina. “Military might alone, without any semblance of soft power, is very limited in what it can achieve.
The former finance minister of Ukraine, Natalie Jaresko, believes the world underestimated this factor.
“We underestimated the yearning and value of freedom,” Jaresko told Grid. “That, as much as any weapon, has made the difference.”
BUT THERE ARE ALSO NEW WRINKLES TO CONSIDER
For all the Western support for Ukraine, Russia is now receiving military assistance of its own: weaponized drones (and perhaps more) from Iran, and this weekend the U.S. warned that China may be poised to provide military aid to the Kremlin. In Washington, meanwhile, a new Republican Congress may put brakes on Biden’s “as long as it takes” pledge of support for Ukraine. And in Moscow, there is the question of whether that monstrous propaganda machine that Putin has unleashed — and which now rails often at the military for its poor prosecution of the war — may ultimately aim its criticism at the Kremlin itself.
Perhaps Fix, from the Council on Foreign Relations — whose main “lesson” of the war involved the dangers of conventional wisdom — deserves the last word for her cautionary note about conventional wisdom.
“The war is more likely to produce surprises instead of continuities,” Fix told Grid. “And it would be wise to also prepare for exactly the opposite scenario than the one which seems most likely now.” ~
https://www.grid.news/story/global/2023/02/22/what-the-world-has-learned-from-a-year-of-war-in-ukraine/?utm_source=Quora&utm_medium=Paid&utm_campaign=Quora-Paid-One-Year-Later-Ukraine
*
REVIEW OF “EMILY” (MOVIE ABOUT EMILY BRONTË)
~ Frances O’Connor has made a really impressive debut as a writer and director with this study of Emily Brontë, intelligently played by the Franco-British star Emma Mackey. It’s beautifully acted, lovingly shot, fervently and speculatively imagined, although Mackey’s portrayal, excellent as it is, may be smoother around the edges and less windblown than the real thing.
This is a sensually imaginative dive into the life of the Wuthering Heights author: it is a real passion project for O’Connor, with some wonderfully arresting insights. The film conforms to time-honored biopic tradition by starting with Emily on her deathbed, and a waspish, querulous final exchange with her sister Charlotte, played by Alexandra Dowling, whom the film mostly – and perhaps unfairly – sees as mean-minded and envious. Then we go back to her intense young womanhood at Haworth parsonage, under the care of her widower clergyman father Patrick (Adrian Dunbar) in the wild beauty of Yorkshire.
The drama shows Emily’s creative path to writing her masterpiece as a matter of coming to terms with, and surmounting, the two great loves of her life. First is her brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), a witty and artistically inclined young man frittering away what minor talent he has with dissolute behavior. And then there is William Weightman, high-minded assistant curate to Emily’s father, played here with saturnine handsomeness by Oliver Jackson-Cohen. Biographical evidence points to a possible platonic tendresse between William and Emily’s younger sister, Anne, (who doesn’t register much here). But O’Connor gives Emily and William a passionate sexual affair which brings William to the brink of madness and which is to be betrayed by Branwell, involving an ingenious, if elaborate, plot complication involving a letter.
In real life, the small matter of contraception or the lack of it might have made itself felt in the case of Emily and William’s grand passion. (And incidentally, the published copy of Wuthering Heights which Emily finally holds in her hands would not have been credited to “Emily Brontë” but “Ellis Bell”, because of the patriarchal world of publishing.) But everything is presented here with conviction and Mackey and Jackson-Cohen are absolutely believable lovers; their sexuality carries the drama. You can imagine that Emily thought about it, at the very least. There is also a plausibly managed friendship between William and Branwell, and when the troubled brother goes missing and William goes looking for him, yelling “Bran … well!” across the landscape, O’Connor cleverly allows us to see how this might have inspired a famous fictional moment for Emily.
Most strikingly of all, O’Connor expresses all of the sisters’ imaginative life in the mask that Patrick did own in real life, encouraging role-play games. Emily uses it to channel the spirit of their departed, longed-for mother; it is a disturbing, séance-like scene that hints at something unearthly and occult in her creativity and perhaps all creativity. Had he lived to see it, this is a movie scene that I think Yorkshireman Ted Hughes would have loved. It is a real achievement for O’Connor. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/12/emily-review-love-passion-and-sex-in-impressive-bronte-biopic
from another source:
Words to live by, and Emily lived by them in her tragically short life. But what do we know about her, really? Charlotte described her as “a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove.” Emily rarely left home (and when she did leave home, it usually ended badly). This means we don't have a voluminous correspondence from Emily in the way we have from Charlotte, who went away to school and work, writing multiple letters a day.
Much of what we know about Emily comes from Charlotte, the sole surviving sibling after the catastrophic one-year period (1848-1849), where sisters Anne and Emily and brother Branwell all died. Given the spotty record, speculation about what might have been going on fills the void. Frances O'Connor's "Emily" engages in some really wild speculations, some of which I've heard, others which are new to me, but it's all in an attempt to get close to the most mysterious Brontë, not just as a person but as an artist.
In this, O'Connor has a perfect partner in Emma Mackey, who plays Emily with sensitivity and freedom. She's not held back by an imposed "conception" of this woman. She's let loose. Her Emily is joyous, sulky, troubled, paralyzed with anxiety, rebellious, and passionate. There's reason to believe all of this is true. The local villagers referred to Emily as "the strange one," and without overplaying it, Mackey suggests why. She can't make eye contact with people. She shrinks from interactions with non-family members.
When Michael Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), Mr. Brontë's new assistant curate, enters the family circle, he disturbs the waters. His sermons are the opposite of Mr. Brontë's fire-and-brimstone declarations. Weightman speaks of a ge
ntle, almost thoughtful God. The Brontë sisters listen enraptured, and they also can't fail to notice he's easy on the eyes. Emily responds to him combatively, at first, poking holes in his arguments, refusing to concede ground. Naturally, he's drawn to her the most.
There are a number of extraordinary sequences, speculative in nature, but which make so much sense thematically and emotionally. "Emily" goes deep. (Surface events are minimal, anyway. A similar issue arises with Emily Dickinson, whose life was not crowded with outer events. But look to "the results." It's possible to never leave home and live a dramatic inner life. This is what Frances O'Connor explores wonderfully well.)
There's a scene where Emily, goofing around with her siblings and Weightman, puts on a ceramic mask. At first, it's part of a game until Emily transforms, the mask providing her the anonymity necessary to express the grief beneath the surface, all as a storm rises outside. The scene is an incredible work of imagination, anchored in what we already know and what we can guess at, considering Wuthering Heights. It evokes—without underlining the connection—the book's terrifying opening scene, with the ghost rattling at the window frame, imploring to be allowed inside out of the storm.
The relationships are all in flux. Sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) looks at wild Emily with concern. Sister Anne (Amelia Gething) is an ally at first but eventually moves out of reach. This leaves Branwell (Fionn Whitehead). One can only imagine what it must have been like to be the only brother to these three majestic Weird Sisters. He had an artistic sensibility but lacked drive and discipline. He led a dissipated scandalous life. The relationship between Emily and Branwell is the heart of the film—the two rebels supporting each other, for better or worse, shared by the mirroring relationship between Emily and Weightman.
What "Emily" does so well is establish a mood. The mood is flexible enough to contain multitudes. Nanu Segal's cinematography is sparked with energy and drive. There are times when the camera hurtles through the rooms or across the fields, chasing after Emily, careening around corners, almost like it's going to crash into a wall. The romantic scenes between Emily and Weightman shiver with a passion so forbidden—and so foreign to Emily—you worry for her. You know the end. "Emily" takes place before the sisters all started getting published. But work is growing in them.
The question has dogged critics for two centuries now: How on earth could a woman who grew up in virtual isolation come up with a story as feral as Wuthering Heights? Jane Eyre has its madness (Mr. Rochester dressing in drag! The lunatic woman trapped in the attic! Mr. Rochester calling to Jane across the space-time continuum!), but Wuthering Heights makes Jane Eyre look tame. Wuthering Heights takes place in a world of godless chaos. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote of the book in 1854, "The action is laid in Hell—only it seems places and people have English names there." There's nothing soft in Wuthering Heights. How could someone with no life experience think up such a story?
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There have been charges of historical inaccuracy thrown at "Emily." (The ending of the recent "Corsage" is a fascinating example of total lack of historical accuracy. It didn't happen that way at all. But what does it provide us imaginatively, speculatively, about the Empress?) It's long been thought that Anne was the one in love with Weightman, that something happened between them. People point to passages in her novel that seem to correspond. That's fine. It's possible. But it's still just speculation. What if it were Emily?
We'll never know why Branwell painted himself out of the portrait he did of his three sisters, creating the strange effect of a golden pillar of Branwell-shaped flame between Emily and Charlotte. We don't know if he even did paint himself out. Maybe he didn't paint himself out at all, maybe he painted his sisters over another work. Maybe we're way off about all of it. We weren't there. But guessing is how we get closer to what matters: Who was Emily? How did she make sense of life? How did this go into her work? We know Emily by her results. The rest is silence. And imaginative leaps like Frances O'Connor's “Emily.” ~
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/emily-movie-review-2023
and a negative review is in order:
~ Emily Brontë smokes cigarettes, takes opium and has sex with the local curate in “Emily,” a biopic of sorts that fills in every blank in the reclusive author’s biography with either sex or drugs. Count it as a mark of restraint on the part of writer-director Frances O’Connor that at no point does Emily shoot somebody.
What is the value of such a movie? Entertainment?
“Emily” is entertaining, probably more entertaining than Brontë’s true life story might have been. Also, it gets Brontë’s name out there, which can’t hurt book sales, just in case somebody wants to read something by an opium-taking 19th century libertine. But what about insight into the mind of the woman who wrote “Wuthering Heights”? The movie doesn’t offer any.
As played by Emma Mackey (“Death on the Nile” and the forthcoming “Barbie”), it’s hard to believe that Emily could have written anything. Mackey goes through the movie big-eyed and blank-faced, occasionally smiling furtively, seeming like an oddball — and not a tortured oddball but a preening oddball who wants you to notice.
Yet before we blame Mackey, consider what she’s being asked to do. O’Connor, an actress (“The Importance of Being Earnest,” “Kiss or Kill”) making her directorial debut, calls upon Mackey to evoke and embody Emily Brontë while furnishing her with a life and personality entirely different from that of the famous author. This is an impossible task. Forget about writing “Wuthering Heights”; I don’t believe this Emily could read it. ~
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/movies-tv/emma-mackey-emily-bronte-frances-o-connor-17794066
Oriana:
I agree with the last review. Yes, we do get a portrait of a “wild woman” in the movie, but that woman is not Emily Brontë. Or perhaps any woman in 19th century England — but most certainly not a clergyman’s daughter. I couldn’t see the Emily on the screen as a writer, much less the kind of exceptional writer whose work will live on for centuries. Writing doesn’t just take passion — it takes tremendous ability to work in solitude. Writing a novel is notoriously exhausting. It takes all you have. It can be agonizing. There will be many times of wanting to give up in despair.
And the woman on the screen is much more interested in wild pleasure, including sex, than in the solitary drudgery of writing a complex novel with multiple unreliable narrators.
Yes, Emma Mackey is entertaining to watch, but she doesn’t come close to what reclusive, shy Emily might have believably been like. The real Emily would not have dared to seduce the curate. Just because there is sexual tension in Wuthering Heights doesn’t mean that Emily didn’t die a virgin. She might have imagined wild romances, she no doubt read many romance-based novels, and yes, she probably knew what it’s like to be in love — but to actually let herself go and risk unwed pregnancy? To ruin herself and become a “fallen woman”? No, that’s too unrealistic.
Thus, the movie lacks authenticity. Still, I do recommend it to all who are interested in the amazing Brontë sisters. We get gorgeous shots of the Yorkshire moors, and lots of stormy weather. We get lots of stormy drama as well. Authenticity isn’t everything. We’d feel cheated if all we got of romance was furtive glances. There is much to be said for wild imagination. Enjoy!
Mary:
I want to see O'Connor's "Emily," but not as history or biography. I think the best way to approach it may be as a "re-imagination" of an author who has become a Romantic icon through the wild, and yes, feral, romanticism of her one great work, but who must really remain mostly a mystery.
We simply don't have a lot of facts about her, and what little we have is largely through her sister Charlotte. We do know that the Brontë children led a pretty isolated and insulated life — they were their own best and constant companions.
Two things we know above all — they engaged from an early age in an intense imagining of countries and characters they invented, and then spun long histories and stories peopled by these characters. They recorded these narratives in miniature hand-made books, hand written in very tiny script. These imaginary worlds were intensely involving, the center of their activities, and sustained through childhood and adolescence. Second, their engagement with the outside world was almost universally painful.
Charlotte gives a clear picture in Jane's time at Lowood school of the stark experience they had at school, a place crushing to the spirit and dangerous to their health. The stifling and inferior position of governess seemed the only one open to them, never pleasant, never warm, never secure. Of all the Brontes Emily was least able to tolerate life outside her home environment.
How did all this result in Emily's wild and disturbing novel? Cathy and Heathcliff are no gentle lovers, their story is passionate and destructive...they consume each other...without forgiveness, leaving a legacy of spite and suffering behind. It takes another generation to restore balance, civility, simple human kindness and connection. It is this whole section of the story that the classic movie omits, leaving us with the image of the two wild lovers, now ghosts, together on the moors.
To ignore how Emily brings her novel to its resolution is to do her as much of a disservice as to imagine her as an opium using, rebellious version of Cathy. There may be autobiographical elements there, but Emily is also there in those unreliable narrators, and in the author who fashions a resolution that restores the moral balance.
Sorry I've gone on too long...but the Brontës are particular favorites. And I do want to see that wild countryside in the film!
Oriana:
No, never too long. It’s marvelous to be reminded of the novel’s resolution — the restoration of kindness and trust. It’s true that that we get fixated on the “wild children” and not on the wiser second generation that seems miraculously, intuitively committed to not hurting others. By contrast, Heathcliff is the archetypal “bad boy,” or even a “demon lover” — with posthumous Cathy a ghostly demon lover calling to her former companion.
*
HOW ONE HIGH-STATUS MAN WITH A LOUD VOICE CAN INTIMIDATE MANY
~
In the 1970s, Cynthia Page was a young copywriter working in Manhattan
and living in New Jersey. One night, after missing the train home, she
found a phone booth in the train station and called her husband. When
she hung up and turned around, she saw that the phone booth was
surrounded by a group of tall, threatening-looking men.
"I don't know what these people would have done," Page recalled. "But I was legitimately frightened.”
Just
as she was wondering what she would do, she heard an angry, booming
male voice come through the train station – directed at her. The man was
shouting about how they were going to miss their train.
"It's
like the red sea parted," Page said. "This sea of these great big men
sort of parted and marching through came this well-dressed, well-suited
man.”
The man opened the phone booth door, grabbed her by the
arm, pulled her out, and moved her through the station. As they walked,
he continued to talk loudly and complain about almost missing their
train, as if he knew her. He waited with her for another train, and once
he saw that she was safe, he disappeared.
"I don't know where he went, I didn't see him again," Page said. "But I've remembered it forever.”
More than 50 years later, Page still wonders what would have happened if that stranger hadn't come to help her.
“I
think it does remind you what kind of kindness there is out there,"
Page said. “It reminds you of the connection that we all have together
at some very deep-rooted level. And it is a wonderful feeling.” ~
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/21/1158423229/she-found-herself-cornered-in-a-train-station-then-a-stranger-came-to-her-aid
Oriana:
Note
that the man was tall and well-dressed, which probably helped. He
looked like a high-status alpha male. The men who surrounded the woman
in the phone book were likely low-level employees.
And the man
immediately claimed the woman as “his” female — wife or sister or
daughter. She was his property. He emphasized this by continuing his
domineering, possessive behavior: pulling her out of the booth, talking
to her loudly, chiding her for risking missing the train.
This
was of course an act, a display of dominance meant to protect the woman;
he acted in an unpleasant way out of kindness. And it worked. This fits
right with the studies of chimps and baboons: an alpha male keeps
subordinate males away from his mate. Tough, we are apes, and sometimes
this is on full display.
Cynthia Page when she was a young copywriter:
*
WHY GIANT PREHISTORIC ANIMALS GOT SMALLER
~ There are good reasons why invertebrates are as small as they are – ecology and environment keep them in check. But there was a time when insects were as big as crows. What happened to those lost giants?
One hypothesis for how the insects of the Permian grew so large is that atmospheric oxygen levels were higher than they are today (they were as high as 30% in the Permian, compared to today's 21%). Insects breathe through spiracles – openings in the sides of their bodies – which lead to a network of tubes containing fluid, into which oxygen diffuses and then is taken up by the muscles.
"This is an inefficient way of breathing compared to the way that we breathe," says Tim Cockerill, a broadcaster and entomologist at Falmouth University in the UK, holding aloft a giant tropical fruit beetle from West Africa in the palm of his hand. "This is pretty much the size limit of most insects [today]. If insects were bigger than they are now, they just wouldn't be able to breathe in the same way (in 21% atmospheric oxygen).”
Might the environmental conditions have been just right for giant Permian insects? "If we look at that wiggly graph of oxygen levels going up and down over time, corresponding almost exactly is the size of the largest insects around that time as well," says Cockerill. But atmospheric oxygen levels alone might not be the only reason for the difference in insect sizes. The abundance of small prey and absence of birds (who were yet to feature in the tree of life), might also have allowed invertebrates to flourish.
Giant dragonfly, Meganeuropsis permiana; it was the size of an eagle
The fossil record is full of examples of other prehistoric animals that would dwarf their modern relatives. Another such example is Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, a giant arthropod which grew to 2.5m (8.2 ft) long (picture an oversized woodlouse or pill bug with some vicious-looking claws) and existed in the Devonian period – about 100 million years before the Permian.
J. rhenaniae is sometimes called a ''sea scorpion'' because its long, segmented body with large claws at one end and a thin tail at the other gave it a passing resemblance to its modern relatives, which also include crabs, lobsters, spiders, millipedes, bees and ants. Unlike today's scorpions, which grow up to 20cm (8in) long, J. rhenaniae and its giant relatives were aquatic, which might be a clue as to how they were able to grow so large.
The largest modern arthropods are all marine-based, with the Japanese spider crab being the biggest, reaching 3m (10ft) from toe to spindly toe. Arthropods have exoskeletons – hard outer shells, which protect them from predators. They grow by shedding these exoskeletons to reveal a new, soft shell underneath. For larger species it can take hours or days for the new exoskeleton to harden, leaving the animal floppy and vulnerable.
On land, this limits how large an invertebrate can grow. Too big, and the new shell will deform under the effects of gravity. In water, however, the soft body is supported, allowing invertebrates to grow larger before their bodies become too unwieldy.
Vertebrates, like mammals and dinosaurs, are also limited in how large they can grow by physical forces. Being large makes moving harder, and takes more energy to generate the blood pressure needed to circulate blood through their systems. Even taking a breath becomes harder due to the effort needed to inflate lungs under the strain of a larger body.
While the most massive animals on land are African elephants, the aquatic mammals are many times larger again. An adult blue whale, the largest animal to ever live, weighs around 180,000kg – or the same as 40 elephants. That size could only be achieved in water where movement is supported. Without the buoyancy of water, their organs can quickly be crushed by their own body weight.
Modern and prehistoric giants – such as elephants and the long-necked sauropod dinosaurs – all tend to be herbivorous (with the notable exception of whales, which are carnivores). In part, this is because of body heat and metabolism. Larger animals have a bigger surface area to volume ratio, meaning that an elephant, for example, has more volume compared to the surface area of its skin, whereas a mouse has far less volume compared to its surface area.
This means larger animals retain body heat far more effectively than smaller ones, which is one reason why mammals with a lot of volume, like elephants, rhinos and hippos, are relatively hairless and must cool themselves by other means, like mud baths.
Another reason is that their plant-based diet releases a lot of energy as heat during digestion. "Elephants are essentially giant walking fermentation vats, a giant dinosaur is basically a walking brewery, so they generate a lot of heat," says Kate Lyons, assistant professor of biology at the University of Nebraska, USA.
Sauropod dinosaurs – which include the colossal Argentinosaurus and Diplodocus – have air sacs along their skeleton like modern birds. "This does two things for the dinosaurs – it allows them to dissipate the heat that they're producing, and it also allows them to have lighter bones, but still have enough support for their mass," says Lyons. They evolved to their massive size because they were able to control the heat produced by digestion.
“But if you tried to take a sauropod dinosaur and make it the size of a shrew, it wouldn't survive," says Lyons. "And vice versa. If you tried to take a shrew with their metabolism and make it the size of an elephant or a dinosaur, it wouldn't work, because it just wouldn't get enough energy to survive.”
The environment plays a role, too. Woolly rhinos and woolly mammoths, whose range stretched from northern Europe, through Siberia to North America during the Pleistocene ice age (2.5 million years ago to 11,000 years ago), needed their shaggy coats to cope with the cold temperatures. The fossil records show that numbers of megafauna like these peaked during the transitions between cold and warmer periods. At these times, food was more plentiful but it hadn't grown too warm for these large beasts. The Pleistocene also featured giant mammals that lived in warmer climes too, such as the giant ground sloth (6m/20ft from head to toe) from South America.
Why animals are the size they are has a lot to do with the environment, the food available to them, and the predators that surround them. But, what would happen if we played with those sizes? Hypothetically, if the size tables turned again, who would come out on top? Could giant invertebrates once again rule the planet?
When my colleague Amy Charles posed this question, one of the first things we wondered is what would happen to all the poo. If all the small animals were made bigger, would we soon be inundated with feces?
But it's not just toileting that might descend into chaos. In the video, we venture into a world where all animals are the same size, to see how quickly our carefully balanced ecosystems would collapse.
One of the first things Cockerill wrestled with is whether a human-sized flea could jump over the Empire State Building. "There is something universal about the physics of animal sizes and the physics of muscles," he says. "As a muscle gets bigger it gets, relatively speaking, less powerful. So, the larger an animal, the less powerful its muscles for its body size. If we supersize a flea to the size of a kangaroo, it would probably only be able to jump as far as a kangaroo.”
This is because the proportion of the power of a muscle is relative to its cross sectional area – or the area of the muscle when sliced in half. No matter how big a flea could grow, there would be a limit to their jumping ability.
While there are some fundamental reasons that animals are the size they are, there is still some flexibility. One animal might end up growing much larger or smaller than another animal from the same species just a few kilometers away. This is sometimes described as the "island rule", where large animals become smaller on islands and smaller ones larger.
It might be the case that smaller animals — which tend to be lower on the food chain — are liberated on islands in the absence of their usual predators and grow larger than their mainland counterparts. Meanwhile larger animals, restricted by the lack of things to feed on, shrink.
Gargano peninsula, which forms the spur on the back of Italy's boot, provides several examples in its fossil record. From the late Miocene to early Pliocene eras (around 5.3 million years ago), when the Mediterranean sea level was higher, Gargano was separated from mainland Italy, and the island was overrun with giant critters.
Hairy hedgehogs (also known as moonrats) dwarfed their mainland counterparts. One species, Deinogalerix koenigswaldi, had a 20cm-long skull. There were also giant hamsters (Hattomys gargantua), massive otters (Paralutra garganensis) and gigantic owls (Tyto gigantea, bigger than the largest species found today).
Elsewhere, a species of human – Homo floresiensis – is a possible case of island dwarfism. Dubbed "the hobbit" because of its diminutive size, the first example of a H. floresiensis was found on the Indonesian island Flores and is thought to be 95,000 years old. One theory is that H. floresiensis is a pygmy descendant of H. sapiens, or perhaps a dwarfed H. erectus. While its origins are unclear, these small humans seemed to thrive on only this island for thousands of years.
But, the evidence for the "island rule" is patchy (the biologist who first proposed it only suggested there are more examples that fit the rule than exceptions, but did not say it always applies). While it is a neat idea, it might just be the case that there is more flexibility in the size animals grow than we realize.
Just look at humans. In the tallest nation, the Netherlands, men reach on average 184cm (6ft) and women 170cm (5ft 7in), while in the shortest nation, Timor Leste, men stand at 160cm (5 ft 3in) and women 153cm (5ft). Diet and environment play a large part in why the Dutch have added 20cm (7.9in) to their average height in the past two centuries, but a big part is also played by sexual selection. Being tall in the Netherlands is more attractive, and so the Dutch keep getting taller. (Learn more about why the Dutch are the tallest people in the world on BBC Reel.)
Our H. floresiensis cousins, who were a tiny 106cm (3ft 5in), might be the result of the island rule — short because there was less around for them to eat. Or, they might be so small because being short was attractive to them. Or both, or neither.
While there is some flexibility in the size that humans can grow, let's be grateful that biology and physics keep things mostly in check. The topsy-turvy world that Lyons and Cockerill showed us might be a little too chaotic for me. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230123-why-prehistoric-giant-animals-got-smaller
GOD BEYOND LOGIC (NATURAL THEOLOGY)
~ The first thing I learned about natural theology was that it was wrong. The idea that God’s existence could be proven by simply observing life on Earth – that divine presence could be found in human eyes, the wings of bees, the order of orchids or the movements of the planets – seemed archaic in a secular world where science reigned.
And by the late 20th century, even those who rejected this secular world had started to turn away from natural theology: in the United States, evangelical Christians and other groups looked to the Bible, not nature, to justify their values. The very grounds of natural theology became something worthy of parody. I remember the British author Douglas Adams’s depiction of the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). This improbable living creature could provide instant universal translation to anyone who placed it inside their ear canal. For Adams, its existence served as the definitive disproof of a deity:
The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Adams’s fantastical parody of the design argument came at a time when natural theology was increasingly regarded as both obsolete and absurd. Just under a decade later, Richard Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker (1986), which also took aim at arguments that God was revealed through the natural world. Dawkins wrote that there was compelling evidence and logic behind the natural theology arguments of previous centuries – particularly those made popular by the British clergyman and philosopher William Paley in 1802 – but that these arguments had been rendered obsolete by Charles Darwin’s accounts of living creatures that were not designed. Instead, they had ‘evolved by chance’.
By the early 1990s, even antievolutionists were latching on to a version of this argument. These groups, including evangelical Christians in the US, claimed that the fault was not in natural theology’s inherent logic, but in the out-of-date scientific examples that informed its argument. All of this came to a head in 2005, during the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District court case in the US, which determined whether intelligent design could be taught in a Pennsylvania school’s biology classes.
The opposing sides in the courtroom could agree on only one thing. The central question of natural theology, they affirmed, was this: Can a God, creator, or ‘Intelligence’ be proven to exist? This is the version of natural theology we inherit today. The problem is, reducing natural theology to a question of proof loses much of what it stood for. If the first thing you learned about natural theology was that it was wrong, the second should be that you didn’t really learn about natural theology – you learned a truncated version rooted in historical misunderstanding.
During the past millennium, the arguments for natural theology were about much more than proving God’s existence. Natural theology advocates were not writing to merely dissuade atheists; their foils were other religious believers whose doctrinal or denominational differences might be arbitrated by the public evidence of empirical science. Natural theology was never about ‘proof’ as we have come to understand it. We see this in the writings of the Italian friar Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century; in the works of the English naturalist John Ray and the clergyman Paley in the 17th and 18th centuries; and among myriad other texts, including the eight Bridgewater Treatises, commissioned in 19th-century England to document the ‘goodness of God as manifested in Creation’.
For natural theologians, the specific line of reasoning used to arrive at a ‘proof’ of God determined the kind of answers one could reach about moral and political questions, about the nature of salvation, the toleration of other faiths, and the validity and interpretation of scripture.
Natural theology was never exclusively about proving God’s existence through the complexity of the natural world. And yet, our contemporary rejections of natural theology have focused almost exclusively on this argument. Natural theologians and philosophers were instead motivated by a search for answers to the pressing moral and political questions of their day, and their arguments were as much about considering the epistemological grounds of proof, as they were about finding God in nature.
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The erasure of the psychological and rhetorical complexity of natural theology – that is, its recourse to embodied knowledge – has had a damaging effect on religious philosophy in recent decades. It’s contributed to the persistence of a so-called Intelligent Design movement, which, for years, has focused on trying to prove the existence of an intelligent agent without fully acknowledging or seeming to care that specific approaches to such proofs have implications for theology, politics or ethics. At the same time, the reduction of natural theology into a kind of logical proposition has allowed those who reject its repackaged proposition – such as the ‘New Atheists’ – to assert that the disproofs of God and the secular science that they claim to be doing are value-neutral, apolitical and objective.
On the surface, it appears that Intelligent Design and New Atheism fundamentally disagree about the nature of biological evolution. However, the erasure of their shared intellectual history has allowed both movements to converge on more fundamental questions about the ethical and political nature of science. And often, they’ve done this without acknowledging either their own biases or the ways that these arguments are inseparable from the cultural uses to which they are put. To get past the senseless duality that these two movements offer us, we may have to follow Law and Barrow, recalling that, in the synthesis of religion and science, ‘we even touch and feel it with our senses’. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/for-natural-theologians-proving-god-was-beside-the-point
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WHY THE OLD TESTAMENT MENTIONS OTHER GODS WITHOUT CALLING THEM “FALSE GODS”
~ The Abrahamic God started as just one god of a small Canaan pantheon (well, one or two — he may be a merger of the aspects of a couple of gods). And of course, that pantheon accepted other pantheons existed.
Over the centuries he got revised to first being the only god of the Jewish people, to being the supreme god over all others no matter which people's they were, to being the one and only God, period. But a lot of the earlier stories are from before this revision, so they often contain elements of the earlier belief systems. ~ David Johnson, Quora
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TO UNDERSTAND HOW SEROTONIN WORKS, LOOK TO THE GUT
~ If you are driving home from work along a road you’ve traveled numerous times before, your mind is likely to wander. You might become absorbed by a great conversation on the radio, or start rehearsing for an important meeting the next day. You steer your car down your usual route in a largely automatic way, without having to pay deliberate attention to the steering wheel, the subtle movements of your feet on the pedals, or the ever-changing traffic conditions around you. Yet if you encounter a sudden cognitive challenge, such as an unexpected road closure, you are quickly able to shift gears, identifying a new route home via a side street that you rarely use.
This kind of shift toward more deliberate thinking happens in a variety of different situations: for instance, when you have to carefully search for the solution to an especially tricky crossword clue, or think of a new way to frame an argument to change a stubborn friend’s mind. How the brain balances between the cognitive modes involved in these scenarios – relatively automatic processing and more deliberate processing – remains poorly understood, which suggests we need new ways of thinking about it.
It’s instructive to start by considering the kinds of features in our brains that might help us handle challenging multitasking situations. Firstly, we need to be able to learn all the ins and outs of a particular challenge – otherwise, how might we anticipate the next step in a complex sequence, like driving along a road occupied by other cars and pedestrians? We also need to be able to process all the information related to the task at hand, without it seeping over into another process we’d like to run in parallel – otherwise, we might allow a crescendo on the stereo to affect whether we swerve our car’s steering wheel into oncoming traffic. In addition, we’d like to be alerted when any process we’re allowing to run on its own goes awry. Deprived of this control, we’d plow right through a red light or fail to notice a pesky detour sign.
None of these complex functions are controlled by a single neural structure. Rather, they are emergent properties of the interactions among widespread regions in the nervous system. There is ample evidence that coordinated interactions between the cerebral cortex and the thalamus allow us to link opportunities for action (such as a steering wheel and pedals) with goals and plans (driving a car to get to the store). However, these two major neural systems don’t work alone. For instance, both structures are strongly connected to the cerebellum, a massive structure at the base of the brain. The cerebellum creates a high-resolution copy of the actions that we take in a given context, and then learns to recombine features of the situation and our planned action into the best response for what to do next in that situation. In contrast, inhibitory circuits within the thalamus and cerebral cortex are better suited for ensuring that different sequences (eg, steering the car and listening to music) don’t blend into one another.
The ability to control the balance between automatic and deliberate processing is well suited to the neuromodulatory arousal system. This system is made up of nuclei (collections of nerve cells) that project widely throughout the brain, wherein they release neurochemicals that change the way that different regions interact. Based on their widespread connectivity, these structures provide modulatory control of all of the other processes. For instance, the neurochemical noradrenaline controls key features of arousal, whereas dopamine is more important for motivation.
With this perspective in mind, which neurochemical system is the most crucial for controlling the balance between more automatic and more deliberate cognitive processing? Based on previous research, my colleagues and I had a hunch that the serotonergic system might be a good place to look. Serotonin is released into the brain from multiple different nuclei, including the raphe nuclei and the medullary reticular formation. Once released, serotonin has an extremely complex set of effects, as there are a wide range of different serotonin receptors that can turn the presence of the neurochemical into different cellular outcomes. In fact, researchers have struggled to produce simplified explanations for the system that capture all of its inherent complexity.
My collaborators and I found a new way to tackle both the serotonin and cognitive-mode problems. We started from an interesting fact: more than 95 per cent of the serotonin in the body is actually used by the gastrointestinal tract. Serotonin released in the gut controls peristalsis, the involuntary muscle movement that pushes along the contents of the digestive system. So, we wondered: what if we use the gastrointestinal system as an analogy for how the brain uses serotonin? Instead of digesting (ie, processing) food, what if serotonin was being used by our brains to digest information – that is, to process information flow between the distributed circuits of neurons required to identify, decide and act?
Any time there is a problem to be solved or a decision to be made, our brains must figure out which resources to deploy to meet the challenge. It stands to reason that the brain would like to use tried-and-tested approaches as a first pass. When you reach for a mug of coffee on the table, you use a normal grip that is consistent with the shape of a typical mug. If this simple approach works, you’ve freed up the rest of your brain to focus on other tasks (such as talking to a friend). The cerebellum, which is responsible for executing well-learned actions such as this one, is absolutely doused in serotonergic inputs that increase its ability to provide rapid, precise feedback to the cortex. In the cortex, serotonin also acts to inhibit cortical output via inhibitory 5-HT1 receptors – effectively signaling that the cerebellum can digest the information without any cortical help.
Through these processes, serotonin helps the brain continue with an automatic or habitual approach to a situation when that seems to be working well. This is analogous to digestion: if the food you eat can be broken down easily, serotonin will help to ease its passage through the typical digestive process.
Sometimes, however, the in-built approach fails. Maybe the mug is oddly shaped, or turned away from the easy reach of your grasp. Or, going back to the driving example, your usual route home is closed off. In these instances, excitatory 5-HT2A receptors in the cortex are poised to take over. These receptors – which are activated by serotonin – coat excitatory pyramidal cells in the cortex and boost context-specific inputs to the cells.
In this way, serotonin increases the range of different cortical cells that can be used to solve the problem at hand – for instance, to figure out a way to grasp the mug or to make your way home. This idea maps on to the situation in the gut. If there is a blockage (perhaps caused by overindulgence at a fondue party), then the gut can turn up the peristalsis to deal with it. We envision an analogous situation with cognitive problems: if there is a blockage (eg, your initial approach doesn’t work), then you need to create new options for solving the problem.
Why should serotonin play this role in cognitive processing, and not some other neurotransmitter? The answer, like many in evolutionary neuroscience, is difficult to pin down, given how much time has passed since the events that catalyzed this putative function. There’s nothing particularly special about serotonin compared with other neuromodulatory chemicals, such as dopamine and noradrenaline.
They each arise as metabolites of food products and use similar types of cellular mechanisms to enact change in the nervous system. Simply put, they were likely the kinds of fodder that were around when animals (or perhaps single cells) needed a means for conveying a simple message (eg, We just ate, it’s time to digest) to a complex system of interconnecting parts. What was striking to my colleagues and me, however, was just how cleanly the idea of digestion and satiation mapped on to the language of cognition, and how fitting the new framing seemed to be for thinking about what serotonin might do (and not do) when the system is pushed to its natural extremes.
This perspective could help to make sense of some other effects of serotonin. For instance, the active component of many psychedelic drugs is the activation of the excitatory 5-HT2A receptor, albeit in ways that alter the typical timescales upon which the receptors normally act. The effect could be a bit like the brain acting as if previously learned solutions to problems aren’t feasible, and doing so in a manner that is mismatched to the current situation – you could be sitting quite comfortably on your couch listening to music, but experience altered visual perceptions induced by the sounds you hear, causing you to process the song in a completely new way.
This viewpoint is consistent with a range of recent imaging and modeling projects showing that psychedelic agents heighten coordinated activity around the brain, helping to explain the integration of sensory experiences across different modalities.
Similarly, our perspective could help to reframe long-standing problems in psychiatry. For example, individuals who compulsively focus on negative thoughts might be viewed as suffering from a state akin to cognitive ‘constipation’. One possibility is that liberating serotonin in their brains (via commonly prescribed SSRIs) may contribute to a state of information-processing flux that opens up a set of possible options, potentially allowing individuals to reappraise situations that they had otherwise responded to relatively automatically. (It’s worth noting, though, that conditions such as depression have complex causes and are not due simply to low levels of serotonin.)
In contrast, chronically heightened levels of serotonin in the brain might be conceptualized as cognitive ‘diarrhea’ – even when all the problems (food) have been digested, there might still be a high amount of functionally unnecessary cogitation (peristalsis) that leads to dysfunctional brain states.
Rather than attempting to solve these complex psychosocial problems, my colleagues and I simply hope that this novel perspective on the function of the serotonergic system opens up avenues for new ideas and treatments. For now, you might use it to reframe how you think about your own brain. The next time you’re driving home or sitting down to enjoy a meal, spare some thought for the ways in which the neurochemical soup in your brain mimics your gut: helping you to digest complex patterns of information as you navigate the intricacies of your daily life. ~
https://psyche.co/ideas/to-grasp-how-serotonin-works-on-the-brain-look-to-the-gut?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=23a2f87a3f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_01_03_02_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-23a2f87a3f-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
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BODY MASS AND MORTALITY CONTROVERSY: BEING OVERWEIGHT (BUT NOT OBESE) LINKED TO LOWER MORTALITY
~ In the 1990s, epidemiologist Katherine Flegal and her CDC colleagues published some of the first reports of a national increase in the proportion of people categorized as overweight based on body mass index (BMI), a ratio of weight and height. The upward trend in BMI alarmed public health officials and eventually came to be called the “obesity epidemic.” But when Flegal, along with other senior government scientists, published estimates on how BMI related to mortality — reporting that being overweight was associated with a lower death rate than having a “normal” BMI — she became the subject of intense criticism and attacks.
Flegal and her coauthors were not the first to publish this seemingly counterintuitive observation, but they were among the most prominent. Some researchers in the field, particularly from the Harvard School of Public Health, argued that the findings would detract from the public health message that excess body fat was hazardous, and they took issue with some of the study’s methods. Flegal’s group responded with several subsequent publications reporting that the suggested methodological adjustments didn’t change their findings.
The question of how BMI [Body Mass Index] relates to mortality, and where on the BMI scale the lowest risk lies, has remained a subject of scientific debate, with additional analyses often being followed by multiple Letters to the Editor protesting the methods or interpretation. It’s clear that carrying excess fat can increase the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some types of cancers, but Flegal’s work cautioned against tidy assumptions about the complex relationship between body size, health and mortality.
Katherine Flegal: In 2005, when we wrote an article estimating deaths associated with obesity, the CDC itself had just published a similar article the year before with the CDC director as an author, which is fairly unusual. That paper said that obesity was associated with almost 500,000 deaths in the US and was poised to overtake smoking as a major cause of death, so it got a lot of attention.
In our paper, we used better statistical methods and better data, because we had nationally representative data from the NHANES, and my two coauthors from the National Cancer Institute were really high-level statisticians. We found that the numbers of deaths related to obesity — that’s a BMI of 30 or above — were nothing as high as they found. But we also found that the overweight BMI category, which is a BMI of 25 up to 29.9, was associated with lower mortality, not higher mortality.
We had this wildly different estimate from what CDC itself had put out the year before, so this was an awkward situation for the agency. The CDC was forced by the press to make a decision about this, and they kind of had to choose our estimates, because they couldn’t defend the previous estimates or find anything wrong with ours. The CDC started using them, but they were tucked away. It was really played down.
We embarked on a systematic review and found that these results pretty much agreed with what we had already found. We published that, and there was a lot of criticism, another symposium at Harvard, and just a lot of attacks. The chair of Harvard’s nutrition department, Walter Willett, went on NPR and said that our paper was so bad that nobody should ever read it, which is a pretty unusual thing for a scientist to be saying.
There’s a whole school of thought that there are all these confounding factors like smoking and illness. For example, maybe people are sick, and they lose weight because they’re sick, and that will affect your results, so you have to remove those people from your analyses. People raised all these criticisms, and we looked at all of them and published a whole report looking at it every which way. But we didn’t find that these factors made much of a difference to our results.
Is part of the issue that BMI is not a great proxy for body fatness? Or that the BMI categories are kind of arbitrarily drawn?
Well, they are very arbitrary categories. I think the whole subject is much more poorly understood than people recognize. I mean, what is the definition of obesity? It ended up being defined by BMI, which everybody knows is not a good measure of body fat.
And there’s other research that suggests body fat is not really the issue; maybe it’s your lean body mass, your muscle mass and your fitness in other ways. That could be the case, too. I don’t really know, but that’s an interesting idea. BMI is just so entrenched at this point; it’s like an article of faith.
When you look at how much your work has been cited, and how much influence it had, it seems you had quite an impact.
I think I did, but it really wasn’t what I expected or set out to do. I got into this controversial area pretty much by accident. It caused all this brouhaha, but I don’t back down.
We were all senior government scientists who had already been promoted to the highest level. In a way, it was kind of lucky that I was working for CDC. Writing those articles, it was a career-ending move. If I had had anything that could have been destroyed, somebody would have destroyed it. I think I wouldn’t have gotten any grants. I would have become disgraced.
But this stuff is serious. It’s not easy, and everybody has to decide for themselves: What are they going to stand up for? ~
https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2022/obesity-research-controversy-woman-scientist
Oriana:
What is most important here is that those study results have been replicated.
And being “overweight” because you have a lot of muscle is of course different than being overweight and having low muscle mass.
But here another quirk needs to be reported: one study found that it’s not muscle mass per se, but muscle strength. Tiny old Japanese women, who have the longest life expectancy in the world, do not have muscular bodies — but I’ve heard them described as rushing up temple steps as if they were still much younger. They also drink a lot of tea. And small size in itself plays a role in life expectancy, as we discovered looking at small versus large breeds of dogs.
When you dive into the topic, you find gems like this: "In one study of type 2 diabetes patients, those with normal weight when diagnosed were more likely to die than those who were overweight or obese. And a 2013 meta-analysis of 97 studies found that being overweight was associated with lower risk of death than having a normal BMI — a surprising finding that echoed a 2005 study by the same researchers.” ~
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-healthiest-weight-could-actually-be-overweight-huge-study-finds
Oriana:
And we know that those diabetics who take metformin outlive non-diabetics. (The supplement that works even better than metformin is BERBERINE.)
Another confounding variable that has occurred to me is that overweight people literally lift/carry more weight when they move; thus, it could be argued that they get more exercise throughout the day.
But the biggest problem with using the body-mass index is that it doesn't indicate FAT DISTRIBUTION. Fat on buttocks and thighs does not seem to present health risks; it's the abdominal fat -- the notorious "pot belly" -- that leads to health problems and higher mortality.
Obviously the issues of morbidity, mortality, and longevity are very complex. When it comes to longevity, all we can say with certainty is that smoking is bad. Even there, we find centenarians who used to smoke — they just happen to have fabulous detoxifying genes, and yes, they tend to stop smoking when they reach the age of ninety or so, while health nuts may die of pancreatic cancer before the age of sixty. The man who started the running craze died of a heart attack. It’s all much more complicated than it seems.
Speaking of centenarians, you come across headlines like this one: “Higher Blood Pressure Associated With Higher Cognition and Functionality Among Centenarians in Australia.” But let’s stay away from this, at least for now. Examined closely, everything turns out to be more complicated than we thought.
TOO MUCH SALT, TOO LITTLE WATER — SURPRISING NEW FINDINGS ABOUT THE CAUSES OF OBESITY
~ As an educator, researcher and professor of medicine, I have spent more than 20 years investigating the causes of obesity, as well as related conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and chronic kidney disease.
Throughout my many years of studying obesity and related health conditions, I’ve observed that relatively little is said about two significant pieces of this very complex puzzle: lack of hydration and excessive salt intake. Both are known to contribute to obesity.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM A DESERT SAND RAT
Nature provides a clue to the role these factors play with the desert sand rat Psammomys obesus, a half-pound rodent with a high-pitched squeak that lives in the salty marshes and deserts of Northern Africa. It survives, barely, by eating the stems of Salicornia – the glasswort – a plant that looks a bit like asparagus.
Although low in nutrients, the glasswort’s fleshy, succulent sap is filled with water that’s rich in salt, at concentrations as high as what’s found in seawater.
Recent studies have provided new insights into why the desert sand rat might crave the salty sap of glasswort. Although this has not yet been proven specifically in the sand rat, it is likely that a high-salt diet helps the sand rat convert the relatively low amount of carbohydrates it’s ingesting into fructose, a type of sugar that occurs naturally in fruits, honey and some vegetables.
This helps the animal survive when food and fresh water are sparse. This is because fructose activates a “survival switch” that stimulates foraging, food intake and the storage of fat and carbohydrates that protect the animal from starvation.
However, when the rat is brought into captivity and given the common rodent diet of about 50% carbohydrates, it rapidly develops obesity and diabetes. But if given fresh vegetables low in starchy carbohydrates, the rodent remains lean.
My research, and the research of many other scientists over the decades, shows that many Americans unwittingly behave much like a captive desert sand rat, although few are in settings where food and water are limited. They are constantly activating the survival switch.
FRUCTOSE AND OUR DIETS
As mentioned, fructose, a simple sugar, appears to have a key role in activating this survival switch that leads to fat production.
Small amounts of fructose, like that found in an individual fruit, are not the problem – rather it is excessive amounts of fructose that are problematic for human health. Most of us get our fructose from table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Intake of fructose accounts for approximately 15% of calories in the average American diet.
Fructose encourages people to eat more, which can lead to weight gain, fat accumulation and prediabetes.
Our bodies also make fructose on their own – and experimental studies suggest it may be enough to trigger the development of obesity.
Since fructose is made from glucose, production of fructose increases when blood glucose levels are high. This process happens when we eat a lot of rice, cereal, potatoes and white bread; those are carbs that rapidly release glucose into the blood rapidly.
And notably, fructose production can also be stimulated by dehydration, which drives fat production.
FAT PROVIDES WATER
Fat has two major functions. The first one, which is well known, is to store calories for a later time when food is unavailable.
The other major but lesser-known function of fat is to provide water.
To be clear, fat does not contain water. But when fat breaks down, it generates water in the body. The amount produced is substantial, and roughly equivalent to the amount of fat burned. It’s so significant that some animals rely on fat to provide water during times when it’s not available.
Whales are but one example. While they drink some seawater, they get most of their water from the foods they eat. And when they go for extended periods without food, they get their water primarily by metabolizing fat.
HOLD THE FRIES
The role of dehydration as a contributor to obesity should not be underestimated. It commonly occurs after eating salty foods. Both dehydration and salt consumption lead to the production of fructose and fat.
This is why salty french fries are especially fattening. The salt causes a dehydration-like state that encourages the conversion of the starch in the french fry to fructose.
What’s more, studies show most people who are overweight or obese don’t drink enough water. They are far more likely to be dehydrated than those who are lean. Their salt intake is also very high compared with lean people’s.
Research shows that people with obesity frequently have high levels of vasopressin, a hormone that helps the kidneys hold water to regulate urine volume.
But recent studies suggest vasopressin has another purpose, which is to stimulate fat production.
For someone at risk of dehydration or starvation, vasopressin may have a real survival benefit.
But for those not at risk, vasopressin could drive most of the metabolic effects of excess fructose, like weight gain, fat accumulation, fatty liver and prediabetes.
DRINKING MORE WATER
So does this mean drinking more water can help us lose weight? The medical community has often scoffed at the assertion. However, our research team found that giving mice more water slowed weight gain and the development of prediabetes, even when the mice had diets rich in sugar and fat.
There is also increasing evidence that most people drink too little water in general, and increasing water intake may help people who are obese lose weight.
That’s why I encourage drinking eight tall glasses of water a day. And eight is likely enough; don’t assume more is better. There have been cases of people drinking so much that “water intoxication” occurs. This is particularly a problem with people who have heart, kidney or liver conditions, as well as those who have had recent surgery or are long-distance runners.
For the desert sand rat, and for our ancestors who scavenged for food, a high-salt and limited-water diet made sense. But human beings no longer live that way. These simple measures – drinking more water and reducing salt intake – offer cheap, easy and healthy strategies that may prevent or treat obesity. ~
https://bigthink.com/health/salt-obesity/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3tfd3f3XT5cUBp4lkOxNssV6mfDOSEOM3kdExH1eqpayTHNrXj0tpvfSs#Echobox=1677648361
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ending on beauty:
LAST OF THE PARTISANS
The last of the partisans died here
as if there is a “last”, but that’s
what the updated road sign says.
I’m not even sure what country this is.
There is a plaque, but the letters are worn out.
Acid Rain. There is an idea to make a statue,
bones in bronze, and the statue will talk
in whatever language you input,
if a scream or silence is a language.
It’s interactive so you can reply,
and say you’re sorry or Why,
or ask for its name, not her or his.
Who knows, it might be your name,
but I doubt it, I doubt it. Try it.
~ Kerry Shawn Keys
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