To hope is to give yourself to the future — and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. ~ Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
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BUTCHER SHOP
There are knives that glitter like altars
There is a wooden block where bones are broken,
~ Charles Simic
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CAROLYN FORCHÉ REMEMBERS CHARLES SIMIC
~ In memory we are standing in the kitchen of the Treman Cottage at Breadloaf. It is late afternoon in the summer of 1976 and I have brought my copies of Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk and Dismantling the Silence for Charles Simic to sign. He is slouching a bit, leaning against the counter, and seems genuinely touched that I had carried the books, deeply penciled and dog-eared, all the way from home.
As he leafed through them, I blurted out that my family was from Czechoslovakia, and of course because it was a country that had been cobbled together in 1918, conjoining several parts of former Austro-Hungary, he wanted to know precisely where my ancestors had lived. I told him Slovakia, in Bardejov, in the eastern part of the country, in one of the oldest towns. “So you are Slovak!” he said, “and we are both peasants!” He laughed, then scrawled in his book with a fat pen: “Now that the Serbs and Slovaks have learned to read and write, look out world! Yours, Charlie.”
That day I gave him a copy of my first book, Gathering the Tribes, that had just been published. I had signed it in advance, rather formally, to a poet I admired greatly, and from whom I had learned much, most especially from poems that hinted at historic darkness, such as “The Butcher Shop” which I had committed to memory with its light in which the convict digs his tunnel and its great continents of blood.
But the poet is merely stopping in front of a store at night, as a poet would in a Hopper painting, and nothing happens except that he looks inside to see what he can, and finds in this simple small-town shop a portal to the darkness of a century past in Europe, or that is what it seemed to me, whose only portals had been moments in childhood with my grandmother, Anna, and most of those, too, had to do with food and other ordinary things.
Over time, and as I matured (he was a dozen years old than me), we talked about many things: European poetry and history, the wars that destroyed former Yugoslavia, the magic of Joseph Cornell’s mystical boxes, and in the end, our compulsion to keep little notebooks, jotting down images as they came to us, making quick sketches.
When he showed me his current notebook, over a long lunch in Bogotá, Colombia, I was stunned at how similar his were to mine: not only did we both write in brown paper-cover Moleskins, but we both wrote in pencil and reserved the back pages for such things as telephone numbers, addresses and notes to ourselves.
Not long after we met, I visited Serbia, where Charlie had arranged for me to meet Vasko Popa in Belgrade. He was courtly and kind, and he signed a copy of his poems translated by Charlie. For an hour, I was his guest at the Writer’s Union, and then spent several days in Zlatibor, visiting a poet who had fought with the partisans during the war. From that poet’s wife, I learned to make an apricot tart.
At night I slept under a duvet, which we did not yet have in America. I felt that I was glimpsing, however briefly, something of Charlie’s earlier life—not the war, but the orchards. Not flight from aerial bombardment, but lunches under linden trees. I was also, however tenuously, discovering the filaments connecting me to my ancestral Europe: nothing was strange to me here. Every room resembled the rooms in my grandmother, Anna’s, house. The field flowers were those that grew to my waist in the fields Anna set fire to late in summer.
In Charlie’s poetry, I saw Central European darkness and humor of the sort I grew up with in my extended family’s immigrant community in Detroit. While it had seemed strange to my American peers to write about “the old country,” it did not seem strange to Charlie, and so as a very young poet in America, I no longer felt alone. ~
https://lithub.com/in-memory-of-a-poet-carolyn-forche-remembers-charles-simic/?fbclid=IwAR1cr81xtDOr0qy0Z3_92Thf96teEejJoHyBIcHCdVKHwluR5rtPiWN_DB4
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‘Heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.’ ~ Catherine Earnshaw, Wuthering Heights
Haworth Parsonage, home of the Brontë sisters
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Yorkshire Moors *
SOME CAUSES OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE THAT WE DON’T OFTEN HEAR ABOUT
~ The reasons for Putin’s war in Ukraine are obviously far more subtle than the random false pretexts and propaganda presented by Kremlin, i.e. denazification, genocide, the “coup”, historical territory, etc.)
1. Superpower nostalgia. Russia is a power/empire in decline (for a variety of reasons), but many (especially Putin and siloviki) still hanker after the Soviet glory days. Hence the reinvention of Stalin as a national hero, among other things. It also has dysfunctional relationships with most of its neighbors and still seeks to dominate them, as well as a huge resentment about “losing the Cold War”. There’s little intent to collaborate. “Might is right” in russkiy mir [“Russian world”].
As it stands now, Russia is willingly committing slow suicide in the pursuit of an impossible dream.
2. Aversion to liberal democracy and “Western” culture, for example the rights of the individual. “Gayropa”. A corrupt, reactionary society dominated by “strong MEN” and oligarchs (and now warlords like Prigozhin and Kadyrov), one whose affairs of state are excessively influenced by religious dogma (the anti-Christ Patriarch Kirill). USA be warned.
3. Domestic affairs. And of course the invasion is not only about Ukraine but about the future of Russia as a nation, low birthrate, cronyism, endemic corruption, the Russian economy, Putin’s own popularity and power, etc etc. Putin failed to diversify the Russian economy during the oil price boom 20 years ago.
Above all, it’s the fact that Kievan Rus’ (founded by Scandinavians) doesn’t want to be dominated by Moscow anymore and is fighting to the death for a permanent divorce. Putin is taking that divorce personally and destroying Ukraine out of spite. ~ Eddie Storey, Quora
Oriana:
“Superpower nostalgia” speaks the most to me. It makes me admire the UK all the more. It’s possible that Margaret Thatcher did say, “It’s time to put ‘great’ into ‘Great Britain’ again” — but if so, that didn’t inflame the British to start a war to retake Ireland, for instance, or any such nonsense. Britain moved on . . . if only all countries had such wisdom.
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WHY PUTIN FEELS HE CAN’T BACK DOWN
~ Because Moscow has been exposed. Revealed. The facade has been removed. The country the world once thought was a great military power has been revealed as weak. Inept. Corrupt.
Misguided. A joke to many.
Now that it has happened, Putin feels he cannot back down. He must show the world that Russia is not inept or a weakling. But the longer he presses the war, the more apparent Russia’s weaknesses become. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Elena Gold:
The problem for Putin is that his propaganda-nurtured ultra-patriots who don’t want Russia to quit and demand raising the stakes. Putin is now wary of them more than those who are anti-war.
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RUSSIA’S GRANDIOSITY AND OTHER POWERS
~ Czar Ivan III was the first to break the ground of grand visions for Russia as an enhanced version of some other great power—only with an Orthodox monarch at the helm and his trusty boyars at his beck and call. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, he proclaimed “Moscow is the Third Rome”. The idea didn’t fly because Muscovy at the time was in a tributary relationship to the descendants of Mongols, who in turn became Ottoman dependencies.
Barely a century later, Peter the Great got a much better idea. He wanted to modernize the country and started to shape it as a bigger, colder, more magnificent version of Holland. After him, Caterina the Great perfected the vision of her empire as a bigger, better France. Her son Pavel had more taste for it shaped in the image of Prussia. His legacy was revived by Bolsheviks who made the 1917 Communist revolution inspired by a grand Marxist vision of Russia as an industrialized, clockwork-effective, sanitized, socialized Eurasian rendition of Germany.
The epic rise of America in the XX century eclipsed all the previous fantasies. The conception of post-Stalinist Soviet rulers of America as the only nation worthy of comparison with our country has survived until the day today. Hence, the Putinist vision for the future Russia. It’s the economic might, military muscle and global dominance of America, with better, smarter, stronger people at the helm: President Putin and his patriotic oligarchs.
The poster below “Building of Socialism” from 1927 shows the USSR as a Manhattan-like place booming with industrial energies and creative spirit, inspired by Communist ideology. Both Stalin and Lenin were big fans of Ford’s production philosophy and his conveyor belt. No wonder Stalin chose American contractors to create and supply in the 1930s the industrial backbone of the Soviet military-industrial complex. ~ Dima Vorobiev
Adam Wojtowicz:
This poster is more like the scenes from the German film Metropolis.
Also German German technological transfers were conducted to Soviet military industry since 1925. These facilities were particularly focused on advances in chemical and biological weapons, airplanes and tanks.
Pete Prokopowicz:
Henry Ford’s personal architect, Albert Kahn, designed hundreds of factories in the Soviet Union.
Alisher Orynbek:
Gorbachev once suggested that “we should build something like Swedish socialism”. I think it was in 1989, during “later Perestroika”. “Where you gonna find so many Swedes?” — was the popular public reaction.
William Lebotschy:
I think Russia has always seen itself as an industrial might, rather than a consumer based economy. It has achieved neither. This is the normal curse of a country endowed with great mineral riches, as it’s far easier for the governments to just keep exporting minerals.
Matthias Heinze:
The Soviet Union envisioned itself as only comparable to the US! That was it.
The leaders were megalomaniacs and did not understand the complexities of modern industrial societies. In their mind a bigger Bonsai tree was a better Bonsai tree.
They pretend to be on par with the US when in fact they barely achieved parity with Italy (Soviet statistics were not just inaccurate, they were intrinsically skewed).
Ron Huybrechts:
Russia now seems to be living in the past — perhaps it senses it doesn’t have much of a future.
Johari Salim:
And philosophically Russia's greater ambition is not communism anymore. Putin is following Alexander Dugin’s “The Fourth Political Theory” of strange and weird Eurasianism. Here communism is not their ideology anymore — instead they opt for a Eurasian culture with Russian Orthodoxy.
Liberalism of the west and the “communism” of China is not their model of a greater vision. A new Eurasianism with Russia at the apex of its power and culture gradually will cover a land over Europe and Asia as far as Oceania. Russian goal is a total rejection of the West and communism, perceived as failed ideologies over history of mankind’s modernity, creating an alternative new world order.
In The Fourth Political Theory written by Dugin in 2009, Time in relation to modernity over the history of mankind is reversible, so Putin wants to go back to the time of Peter the Great and start fresh again from that moment in history. It’s equivalent to year zero concept in communism of Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia in 1975.
Now you see Russian Orthodox Church has been playing part and parcel of the war, supporting the war with holy mantra of dying in the war for Russia is ticket to eternity of heaven and blessed the soldiers and the missiles that will kill the Ukrainian, military or civilian targets seems as the supporter of sin of decadent Western values.
Kirill, the great Satan, the patriarch of Moscow is an ardent supporter of Putin and his war over Ukraine and conquest ambition, even stated categorically that Putin is the man sent forth by God for Russia and literally killing of the innocent, unjust war, unprovoked invasion, terrorism, barbarism, raping, pillaging, ethnic cleansing and any sort of war crimes are admissible and Carte Blanche in the name of Russia, whereby the Russian claimed by the Russian Orthodox Church, ultra nationalists and Putin to be “clean and Godly”.
In eight months, 65,000 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine overtaking the US army death in Vietnam over the eight year war. Kirill’s God must be crazy! [update: Russian casualties are estimated at 200,000 killed, wounded, and missing]
China won’t support this newly adopted from Dugin of Putin’s ideology. They are still Maoism communism at its core, using “The Red Book” of quotations from speeches and writings by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), the founder of communism in China, as their guidance. Maoism communism is a derivative of Marxism communism where religion (or any set of belief in a higher being other than human) in whatever form and flavor, is not part of their system.
JustAnotherHuman:
Dugin's book foundations of geopolitics also mentions that for Russia to become a global power it needs to defeat China and remove it from the equation and for Russia to extend all over Asia and when it comes to Europe he sees Russia up to Lisbon (so basically all of Europe and Asia to become Russia).
If that’s the path Putin is following it is a clear path of clash with the Chinese interests since for sure they wouldn’t want being taken over by the Russians.
But judging how “good" Russia is doing in Ukraine they don’t have a chance against the Chinese army in reality.
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BIGGEST DIFFERENCES BETWEEN USSR AND RUSSIA
~ The biggest change is that in the Soviet Union, the state was fighting mafia, and in Russia, mafia owns the state. Mafia owns Russia.
The group led by an FSB colonel seized the Kremlin and other government institutions 23 years ago and established an oppressive regime.
The USSR was an oppressive state under Stalin but immediately after his death (5 March 1953), already within days the country started to change.
Within a week, at Stalin’s funeral, Beria mentions peasants without the epithet "collective farm workers", and reminds the intelligentsia about the rights written in the Constitution.
Immediately after the funeral, Beria orders return of Molotov’s wife from Siberia where she was sent by Stalin.
Within 2 weeks, the name of Stalin disappeared from newspaper headlines.
Within a month, an amnesty was announced and over a million of prisoners who had less than 5 years on their sentences were pardoned.
Within 2 months, mentions of Stalin completely disappeared from the newspapers. First of May Labor Day rallies had no portraits of the leaders at all.
The powerful and cruel Stalin’s system immediately began transforming with readiness and swiftness, as soon as the axis was removed from it.
A year after Stalin’s death, Soviet writer Ehrenburg published a novel titled “The Thaw" (“Оттепель“). The title became the symbol of the whole era. The multi-million Soviet nation started transforming like the nature after a long cold winter.
Already in 1956, the American troupe ‘Porgy and Bess’ toured triumphantly in Moscow and Leningrad, and 3 years later Nikita Khrushchev met in America with Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra.
On the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev stunned members with a speech denouncing Stalin’s “cult of personality.”
The cruel Stalin’s era was replaced with “socialism with a human face” (real name used in the USSR).
The mass repressions against millions were replaced by targeted cases against a few dissidents, who, instead of a shooting squad, faced compulsory psychiatric treatment in a hospital. People weren’t completely free, but they were much freer.
Communist leaders of the USSR enjoyed some perks, but they weren’t even close to the things that a low level bureaucrat in Putin’s Russia owns outright.
In Putin’s Russia, you can’t be part of the system, unless corrupt: you have to pay up, which you won’t be able to do unless taking bribes and stealing from the budget.
The Soviet Union would probably be still alive if it didn’t invade Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan and western economic sanctions that followed shattered the USSR’s economy.
When the USSR had to reform and the Politburo appointed Gorbachev to make changes, KGB enforcers from Moscow saw an opportunity to take more power into their hands. They were happy to destabilize the situation via national conflicts to score more powers; they just didn’t expect “the loss of territories” (the collapse of the USSR into 15 independent republics).
Even as president Yeltsin, the first president of Russia, was deciding on his successor, all candidates in consideration were from KGB/FSB. He picked Putin.
Putin, within 23 years, created an autocratic regime, looking at Stalin as his inspiration. But as opposed to Stalin, who demanded radical honesty and transparency, Putin built his system on loyalty through corruption.
Both Stalin’s and Putin’s states view people like serfs and use oppression to keep them subdued. Constant search for external and internal enemies, no freedom of speech, no freedom of association, and – sooner or later – a war to grab more territories to rule them over. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Misha:
The International Criminal Court charges against Putin are a warning to all Russian commanders and officials: Putin cannot protect you -- not any more than Hitler could protect his minions after WWII. You will all be found guilty if you commit war crimes in Ukraine, and you will face criminal charges and a lifetime of living in fear of being arrested.
Oriana:
While I am thrilled by this official denouncement, I realize that we (the West) have to settle for symbolism rather than action. But insofar as certain high-placed Russian "commanders and officials" enjoyed vacationing abroad, they may now ponder if they dare go to their Mediterranean villas, say, from where they might indeed to be deported to the Hague.
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PUTIN’S RUSSIA IS RETURNING TO ITS “ORIGINAL VALUES”
~ This “original Russia,” roughly speaking, is Europe without Reformation and Enlightenment. These two incepted in the end that ugly baby called “liberal democracy”.
This is what Putin hails when he speaks about us taking the fight for “traditional values.” (He never really defined what precisely these are).
Russia stands for the Judeo-Christian civilization vacuumed clean of the venomous spores of progressivism. That’s the banner of Putin’s troops.
The bunch in the ivory tower
In our neck of the woods, ever since the first modernizing attempts of Ivan the Terrible and the House of Romanov, the anti-progressives never have had a real chance. The reason was the ruling aristocracy. These haughty guys have been infected with European influences to the end of times.
During the imperial era, and especially during Communist rule, our mighty State carried this progressivist bug. It worked a bit like herpes, most of the time dormant—yet present—but sometimes breaking out in virulent bursts of reforms and revolutions. Peter the Great, Yekaterina the Great, Alexander II, and finally the Communists.
You know the story.
Blut und boden
Stalin was probably the last great progressive in our history. The rulers since him were just self-important plumbers trying to fix the sewage leaks.
Our literary classic said that our government is the only European in Russia. President Putin, superb as he always has been in riding the waves and catching the wind in his sails, greatly capitalized on that. He said to the nation, “I’ll free you from the yoke of the progressives”. The Ukraine war is his seminal, albeit much-miscalculated step. And his message has obviously resonated with something in the hearts of a great majority of Russians.
Check out all the guile and venom that true Russian patriots on Quora are pouring on the rootless, gay-loving, immoral Europeans and Americans these days. It’s just a tiny fraction of what we have inside the perimeter. It’s a humongous anti-progressive rave party, 24/7/365, coast to coast.
A man of 70 years, our beloved President has zero faith in the future. It’s the place where he has zero control, ruled by people who don’t have the insight into the heart of things that he possesses.
In his declared crusade against the progressives, he intends to lay as many roadblocks for the future as he can. Essentially, this is what the Ukraine war is about. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
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IS THE WAR IN UKRAINE ABOUT PUTIN’S RESENTMENT?
~ Resentment is one of the most powerful human motivations. Humiliation is one of the strongest causes of resentment.
That Putin is prosecuting this war out of resentment is the thesis of Grigory Yudin, a Russian sociologist who was one of the few to predict Putin’s unprovoked attack against Ukraine in February of 2022. As Yudin sees it, many Russians connect with their leader at a psychological level, because both wallow in “resentment — monstrous, endless resentment.”
Yudin sees this mental universe of bitterness and grievance as what makes Putin and his Russian supporters uninterested in nurturing productive and positive relationships with other countries. Putin and the Russians, according to Yudin, resemble “a young child who gets deeply offended and then hurts those around him,” the sociologist says. “The harm grows greater and greater, and at some point, he seriously begins destroying others’ lives, as well as his own.”
Where does Yudin think that this resentment comes from? Much has been said about the humiliation many Russians felt when the Soviet Union collapsed, the event that Putin has called “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.” Seemingly overnight, their country, Yudin believes, went from one of two superpowers to something resembling a developing third world country.
The worst part, according to Yudin, was that efforts by the US and Europe — “the West” — to include Russia in international institutions and help it prosper. This instead came across to Russians, including Putin, as lecturing. And nobody likes to be lectured, especially if you consider yourself a great power. The result was more humiliation. And Putin, being short in stature, does not like to be humiliated.
This humiliation was allowed fester. It grew as Russia failed to flourish economically, and as countries formerly in Moscow’s orbit threw themselves enthusiastically into the arms of the West by joining NATO and the European Union. If Ukrainians had been allowed to go that way too, the shame in Putin’s mind would have been unbearable. So, Yudin believes that like the surly boy in his analogy, Putin began destroying.
Resentment of the West would explain his shifting, confused and often outright bizarre war aims. Putin has claimed (falsely) that he was compelled to attack because ethnic Russians were under threat in Ukraine, and because the Ukrainians are Nazis and Satanists, not to mention marionettes of the real enemy in Washington.
Yudin isn’t the only scholar to see resentment as a primal force driving history. Most famously, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that ressentiment — he used the French term in his German writings — provided the creative energy that led to ethical systems such as Christianity, which he called “slave morality.”
In morally pristine cultures like ancient Rome, Nietzsche thought, people called “good” whatever was strong, healthy, powerful, noble or beautiful. They deemed bad (but not yet “evil”) whatever was weak, sickly, impotent, common or ugly. The masses who fit that latter description felt humiliated. So, according to Nietzsche, they began nurturing that same monstrous, endless resentment Yudin talks about.
At its heart is a craving for revenge and its simultaneous frustration. The response is an evasive maneuver that Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values.” Finding strength in numbers, the aggrieved simply turn reality upside down. Whatever was strong or noble is redefined as sinful, what used to be weak becomes virtuous. And a new concept shows up: evil. It’s them, not us. Does this sound familiar?
Putin and his propaganda machine have also been busy “transvaluing,” or flipping reality on its head. Ukrainian heroes defending their nation become Nazi Satanists. Russia’s own unprovoked and genocidal aggression becomes an apocalyptic kind of self-defense against an ever-hostile West. Perpetrators become victims, and vice versa.
The truth is that resentment is one of the most powerful emotions, and often wins out over hopes and ideals. This has frightening implications. One is that Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West, as long as Putin is in power, has no discernible end.
This is an interesting theory. If true, rational thought or discussion will not work. Logic is out of the question. It is perceived good vs. perceived evil. And perceptions are difficult to change.
~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Mary: TRADITIONALISTS ARE OPPOSED TO THE FUTURE
Anyone touting a "return to traditional values" raises alarms for me. These are the folks who are opposed to the future, who fear in that future they will be the losers, left behind and powerless. They long to retain or re-establish a "glorious past" of authoritarian dominance, patriarchal order and rigid class divisions, dominance of a theocracy supporting that conservative power structure, and the power, both legal and military, to enforce the divisions and controls necessary to keep all in line. They want a world where everyone knows their place and stays there.
This necessitates repression of all progressive elements, which are demonized, outlawed, punished and oppressed. The "traditionalists" find equality and freedom for those pushing against the "traditional" definitions of sexuality particularly noxious and threatening. All those uppity modern women and the whole rainbow of LGBT people must be Stopped, Controlled, Silenced or Eliminated from the public community.
We are in the middle of this struggle blatantly going on, and can see the politics of resentment, revenge and repression in the news every day. Women who demand body autonomy are being criminalized and their freedoms curtailed with brutal abandon. The rights of LGBT folks are under attack, and their very existence denied...it's simply a perverse lifestyle choice or a product of some devilish indoctrination.
Putin and Trump and DeSantis are all politicians of resentment and revenge. The drive to revenge particularly strong in them even if they cause self destruction as well in its fulfillment. We can't assume that extreme actions will be avoided even if they cause great harm to their actors — for them a vengeful triumph may be worth dying for. And this is also why reason can't dissuade them, they can't give up without further humiliation and even more intense motivation for revenge.
Oriana:
The unnerving thing about the future is that we won’t be there to see that our wishes are respected. Once Putin is gone, he won’t matter more than a dead mosquito. If a person is engaged in some worthwhile work, there is no mental space to try to somehow manipulate the future.
What makes Putin’s claim to fame as a “traditionalist” peculiar is that there is good reason to think that he’s bisexual, or basically gay. His judo instructor, a farther figure, was apparently his first lover. Medvedev and certain other top Kremlin figures are also gay — meanwhile dispensing “traditionalist” anti-gay propaganda. Does the Russian public suspect anything? No one will risk speaking up — not as long as gay rights are “pure Satanism.” (Odd, how it seems that God is dead, but Satan is thriving anywhere the traditionalists look.)
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A HIGH-RANKING NAZI WHO DEFECTED TO THE RESISTANCE
~ Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence, was probably the highest-ranking defector.
He started out as a firm supporter of Hitler, and did sterling work as head of the Abwehr from his appointment in 1935, but in 1939 he visited the front in Poland, and was appalled by the destruction.
Canaris’s efforts to delay, mitigate or complain about the brutal activity of the regime were not unnoticed by it, and he was soon marked as politically unreliable. He went on various clandestine missions to seek out on what terms the Allies wanted peace, and Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, regarded him as a man genuinely opposed to the regime, who was willing to put himself in danger if it meant shortening the war.
Canaris met his nemesis in the form of SD (SS security service) chief Reinhard Heydrich, a man vastly less principled and much more ruthless. Heydrich wanted total control of the German intelligence network including the Abwehr, but Canaris dragged his feet about handing it over. Meanwhile, Canaris was issuing permits to get Jews out of occupied Nazi territory, including five hundred Dutch Jews in 1941.
Admiral Wilhelm CanarisHimmler finally decided that Canaris was unreliable. The Abwehr was abolished and Canaris was arrested in 1944. After months of interrogation, Canaris was executed in April 1945, only weeks before the end of the war, along with his subordinate and fellow anti-Nazi Hans Oster, and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was an Abwehr agent who’d used his position to convey information to the allies.
Because one of the Jews that Canaris saved was Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, the movement has campaigned to have him recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Person, for his courageous work in saving Jews from being killed. ~
Patrick Marshall, Quora
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GORBACHEV’S SOVIET MILITARY AND PUTIN’S MILITARY
~ I spent a decade (late 70s to late 80s) as a Russian analyst and linguist. The Soviet Union had a massive army that dwarfed anything the West could put up. At least on paper. In truth, the maintenance required to maintain such a huge inventory of military equipment was prohibitively expensive without even taking into account the lack of discipline/motivation/training on the part of the maintenance crews. A significant percentage of the equipment was nonfunctional and many that were functional were marginally reliable. Not the best equipment to take into a rugged military environment.
We have seen a repeat of this in the Ukranian campaign. The Ukrainians have proven themselves to be better at repairing captured Russian equipment than the Russians are at maintaining them. What the Russians excel at is the complete lack of concern for the lives of their infantrymen (as shown during WW2 and the Ukranian war). To them, they are just cannon fodder. If they throw enough men into the fray, sooner or later they will break through. They have displayed this in both wars by using blockade brigades behind their troops. They do this to catch deserters as well as “encourage” the troops to obey semi-suicidal orders.
So in short, yes, overall (a few soldiers the exception) they were and are inept. And overcome this by carelessly sacrificing their infantrymen. ~ Martin McQueen, Quora
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ARE THE WAGNER MERCENARIES MORE EFFECTIVE?
The majority of Wagner’s core troops were comprised of veteran military personnel who were better trained, paid, and aware of severe consequences for not following orders or showing proper initiative/skill (As examples: A Wagner's trooper who had surrendered and was traded back had his head promptly/publicly bashed in with a sledgehammer. Or the Wagner officer who was wounded, most of his unit wiped out with most of the remaining soldiers deserting, being taken out of the hospital and executed.) They have gone from 8000 troops in April 2022 to over 50000 by December 2022. This very much dilutes their overall combat effectiveness.
But I suspect they are more effective when compared to a conscript who receives a handful of days training and is poorly equipped. ~ Martin McQueen
Dennis Largess:
In regards to the Soviet army around 1976. At AF South in Naples, Italy, my ship received an intel briefing. During it, the question was raised: could the Soviets drive through Germany and France to the Atlantic ocean?
The very no-nonsense chief replied, “Not a chance, all their trucks have tires that are f++cking bald.”
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RUSSIA’S DESPERATION: FEMALE CONVICTS
~ The Ukrainian military added: 'Last week there was a movement towards the Donetsk region of a train with reserved seats for transporting prisoners. One of the carriages [was for] convicted women.’
The push for female prisoners as soldiers for Putin's struggling war effort comes as 1,009 Russian soldiers were killed on Saturday 3/4/22 in the deadliest day on the battlefield since the war began.
In addition, there were reports that Russia had moved women convicts to Kuschevka in Krasnodar region, close to the war zone.
Male prisoners have been recruited in Russia in their tens of thousands. They were offered a deal which cancels their sentences if they serve for six months at the front. Most served with the Wagner Group. It is reported that the ranks of male prisoners willing to serve has been depleted.
But Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed last month that his group will no longer recruit prisoners to fight in Ukraine. It was reported that Putin cancelled the contract allowing him to recruit male prisoners. Apparently Putin wanted to recruit them himself. There is now evidence that the Russian defense ministry is directly signing up convicts.
Heavy losses on the battlefields has also forced Putin to empty museums in Russia to pull out antique war tanks for use in the war with Ukraine.
Footage was released showing aging Soviet-era T-62s being 'modernized' in a round-the-clock factory in Chita, Siberia.
Many of the tanks being revamped at the 103rd Plant are thought to be 60 years old, dating from the time Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were ruling the USSR.
'It is sad that the number of exhibits of military museums will be reduced,' said one report. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
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DIARY OF A RUSSIAN OFFICER CAPTURED NEAR VUHLEDAR
March 1: 100 soldiers undertook an assault; 16 remained.
March 3: out of 116 soldiers 23 remained.
March 4: out of 103 soldiers 15 remained.
March 5: out of 115 soldiers 3 remained.
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SLUMS IN CHINA
There are many slums in China, you may be surprised to learn.
Below is a photo of an ‘Urban village’ in Shenzhen.
Since the Chinese communism is like ‘Dictatorship’, people can’t say no, the government can build anything whatever, wherever they wont. They don’t have to negotiate with the people living in that region or anything. The people cannot say no, they can’t vote or anything. They have to listen what the government says.
Shenzhen 20 years ago used to look like this:
Also many migrant workers flood to the villages, illegally living and making them like slums.
The Chinese government have been demolishing these slums for rapid expansion of the city. The people will have no where to go.
This all is kept a secret, tourist and foreigners are not aloud to enter and film them.
The housing is also very expensive; the ex-residents of the broken down slum-villages can’t afford to live there. ~ Adrien Froster
Modernity suggests a positive correlation between severity of punishment and violent crimes. The countries with “sissy prisons” and no capital punishment like Scandinavia score low on violence. ~ Dima Vorobiev
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MAIN ENEMY
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TOP NAZIS NEVER DENIED THE HOLOCAUST
~ We caught a whole lot of Nazis right after WW2. We caught a whole lot more in the decades following WW2.
We caught the commandant of Auschwitz
We caught the commandant of Treblinka
We caught dozens of the highest-ranking SS commanders at these camps
We caught hundreds of regular guards for the SS and Gestapo that worked at these camps
We caught the commandant of Majdanek
We caught many of the doctors that worked at these camps
In other words — we caught a lot of the top Nazi brass involved in the Holocaust. We caught those who helped plan it and though who physically carried out the Holocaust on the ground.
Yet, not one of them ever denied the Holocaust. Not one of them said they were just “deporting Jews East”. Not one of them said Jews were kept in “humane” conditions and only died from typhus.
These Nazis didn’t deny the Holocaust in their trials, nor did their lawyers. They didn’t deny it happened in their memoirs or in interviews they gave to writers or the press. Many lived on for decades after WW2 and yet still, even on their deathbeds they never denied it.
TO A MAN they all said 1 of 3 things
I was just following orders
I deeply regret what I did but I was afraid to go against orders
I am glad we did it
It’s ironic that deniers, who love the Nazis, disagree with even them. Even hardcore “I shook Hitler’s hand” Nazis would think Holocaust deniers are dumb and wrong. ~ Alex Mann, Quora
M. P. Myers:
They seemed proud of their actions. They were evil, but honest. It's almost a complete surprise, but the original Nazis had a misplaced honor in a way. However, they embraced their evil, which made them terrible people. The kind that deserved no redemption or forgiveness.
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HOW TO STOP AN ARGUMENT
~ Arguments start to take off when one partner begins to get defensive. So, therapist Lauren Consul shared her relationship-saving tip to "stop an argument in its tracks" when one partner goes into self-preservation mode.
"The next time you and your partner are talking, and your partner becomes defensive, I want you to do this: Pause, and say, 'I want to understand what happened there. What did you hear me say?'" Consul says in her TikTok video with over 42,000 views.
"This question is key because it does one of two things," she continued. "First, it can allow for clarification. A lot of times when we've become defensive, we've interpreted something our partner has said incorrectly. We've run it through a filter, we've told ourselves a story about it, it's triggered something... So we're not actually hearing what our partner says, and it allows for clarification.”
"The second thing: If your partner did interpret what you said correctly, it gives you an opportunity to slow things down and understand what is happening for them and address the underlying issue, rather than get caught in a spiral of defensiveness," she continued.
Consul's advice for stopping arguments before they explode is helpful because it clears up any potential misunderstandings. The key is to remember the tactic in the heat of the moment to prevent things from getting out of hand. ~
https://www.upworthy.com/how-to-stop-an-argument?mc_cid=293dcab393&mc_eid=362fe951ca
Oriana:
This is sound advice, along with the classic kind: try to find common ground. See where you and the other agree, and build from there.
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WHAT ABOUT THE BELOVED DEMOTED SAINTS, LIKE SAINT CHRISTOPHER?
~ Many of the early Catholic saints probably never existed. Saint Christopher, who supposedly carried the baby Jesus across a river and was astounded at how heavy Jesus was (the result of Jesus carrying all the sins of the world) is scarcely likely to have been a real person.
Saint Brigid was probably based on the pre-Christian Irish goddess of the same name.
Even among biblical characters, there is no extra-biblical evidence for Saint Stephen, whose name means ‘crown’, which seems more like an epithet than a real name. Fr. Raymond E. Brown says, in An Introduction to the New Testament: We can never verify the existence and martyrdom of Stephen.
There are numerous other early saints and martyrs for whom no evidence can be found, and whose stories are so stylistic as to suggest fiction. Numerous virgin saints supposedly accepted martyrdom rather than marry pagans, but their stories only seem to have appeared centuries after they supposedly lived. ~ Dick Harfield, Quora
Ken Jacobsen:
Rome, 1969: Two of the best-known saints in the Roman Catholic Church, Valentine, patron of sweethearts, and Christopher, patron of travelers, were dropped from the official liturgical calendar in a sweeping change that removed more than 200 from the list of saints whose feast days are celebrated by the whole church.
Eric Christian Hansen:
Joan of Arc’s saints Catherine of Alexandria and Margaret of Antioch are not historically supported as having come to earth to live a human life, yet they appeared often in human flesh form to Joan of Arc.
Oriana:
I think this is a situation where historical evidence simply doesn’t matter. If people find a legend inspiring, or beautiful for any reason (I always enjoyed the idea of the Child Jesus growing heavier and heavier while being carried by St. Christopher (= “Christ-Carrier”), who discovers that it’s because he’s carrying all the sins of the world. This is clever, at the very least, and of course symbolic rather than literal.
I’ve never prayed to St. Christopher, not even before getting on a train, and certainly not before getting into a bathtub — apparently this was once perceived as a perilous situation, perhaps by analogy with traveling on water — but I still appreciated the legend. The official papal announcement that St. Christopher never really existed made me ponder the foolishness of Pope Paul VI — really now, what else would we have to toss out? The animals that were present at the birth of Jesus? Did the pope realize how much this would alienate children?
Even as a “lapsed Catholic” (I love the term), I can still enjoy the magic of Catholicism — the wilder, the better. 
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APOLOGETICS: “NO FAITH WITHOUT REASON”?
~ The important thing to know about Thomas Aquinas (and those who have followed in his footsteps over the centuries) is that he was an apologist for Christianity. That meant he devoted his entire life to apologizing* for the fact that there was is no actual evidence to rationally support a belief in the particular God that he was indoctrinated from a young age to believe in. And he did this by attempting to come up with logical arguments (mostly borrowed from ancient Greek philosophers who were decidedly not talking about the God of Christianity) and other justifications for why it’s actually perfectly OK that there is no such evidence.
It is all smoke and mirrors, though. Rest assured that whenever you meet somebody who claims to have a logical or philosophical “proof” of the existence of whichever deity they personally believe in, you can take it as an admission on their part that they cannot provide any actual evidence to support their belief. Because, of course, if they actually had any evidence, they wouldn’t need philosophical arguments in the first place.
The words “apologist”, “apologetics” and “apology” all come from the same Greek word that meant “defend.” But that doesn’t get apologists off the hook for merely “defending” their faith and not “apologizing” for it in the modern sense of the word. After all, the whole reason they have to apologize for (or “defend,” if you prefer) their faith is specifically because there is no objective evidence to support it. If there were objective evidence, there would be no need to apologize for (or defend) it since it would be obvious to everybody. ~ Barry Goldberg, Quora
Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 1467
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HANDEDNESS AND BRAIN SPEECH CENTER
~ “Sahara is too little price / to pay for thy Right hand,” Emily Dickinson wrote in a poem. “The right hand = the hand that is aggressive, the hand that masturbates,” Susan Sontag pondered in her diary in 1964. “Therefore, to prefer the left hand! … To romanticize it, to sentimentalize it!” The human hand has long carried cultural baggage, and we still struggle to unclutch from it the myths and reveal the realities.
David Wolman writes:
In the Western world, left-handedness has long been associated with the worst of the worst: sin, devil worship, Satan himself, and just an all-around bad position with God. Catholic schoolteachers used to tell students that left-handedness was “the mark of the Beast,” the Scots say a person with terrible luck must have been baptized by a left-handed priest, and orthodox Jews wrap their left arms in the leather strap of tefillin as if to say, in the words of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner: “Here I am, standing with my dangerous side bridled, ready to pray.”
The Bible is full of references to hands, and usually they are about God doing something benevolent and holy with his right hand. I’ll spare you the run-through and stick to a token example, like this one from Psalms 118: “The right hand of the Lord is exalted. The right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly.”
The question of why some humans are left-handed — including such notable specimens as Plato, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, Debbie Millman, Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, and Albert Einstein [the last one possibly mixed-handed rather than strictly left-handed] — has perplexed scientists for centuries.
While Carl Sagan once hypothesized that the cultural link between left-handedness and badness arose due to the left hand’s use for hygiene purposes in nonindustrialized countries, Wolman points out that the association has much deeper roots, including the very etymology of the word “left”:
The Anglo-Saxon lyft means weak or broken, and even modern dictionaries include such meanings for left as “defective,” “crippled,” “awkward,” “clumsy,” “inept,” and “maladroit,” the latter one borrowed from French, translated literally as “bad right.” Most definitions of left reduce to an image of doubtful sincerity and clumsiness, and the Latin word for left, sinister, is a well-known beauty. From this version springs my favorite term for left-handedness, “the bend sinister,” which Vladimir Nabokov used for the title of a book that has nothing to do with handedness.
Even today, our understanding of handedness is muddled by misconceptions. While it’s currently estimated that 10-12% of the human population is left-handed, the very definition of handedness is cause for confusion:
The left and right sides of the brain are physically quite distinct. The brain is made up of two mostly separate halves, each composed of billions and billions of neural connections. Yet despite popular notions to the contrary, left-handed people do not think in the right hemisphere of the brain, nor do right-handers think in the left hemisphere. The motor cortex, that part of each hemisphere cross-wired to control the other side of the body, is only one relatively minor aspect of this dizzyingly complex organ, and it says nothing or nearly nothing about a person’s thoughts or personality.
Nearly 99 percent of right-handers have language located in the left hemisphere, and about 70 percent of lefties do. A different proportion, yes, but hardly the opposite; most lefty brains are like righty brains, at least as far as speech function is concerned. The rest either have language in the right hemisphere, or have it distributed more evenly between the two sides of the brain.
The approximate 90 percent predominance of right-handedness in the human population sets us apart. All other animals have a 50-50 split between righties and lefties. According to Annett’s model, handedness in nature rests on a continuum, ranging from strong left, through mixed, and then to strong right-handedness. But for humanity the distribution of preference and performance is dramatically shifted to the right. Human bias to the right, Annett explains, was triggered by a shift to the left hemisphere of the brain for certain cognitive functions, most likely speech. . . . That momentous shift was caused by a gene.
Of course, that question had perplexed generations of scientists since Darwin, a lefty — who, by the way, was a victim of the confounding heredity of handedness: his wife and father-in-law were lefties, but only two of Darwin and Emma’s ten children were. But Annett’s Right Shift Theory was the first systematic explanation for the genetics of handedness. Still, Wolman observes the complexities of genetics:
In many ways, the genes-versus-environment dichotomy is a misleading one because so often the two work hand in hand. Say, for instance, a gene or genes instructs for a certain amount of testosterone in the womb. If the level of that hormone varies and somehow influences the development of the fetus, should traits affected by the level of testosterone be dubbed genetic or environmental? One could argue that the biochemical conditions in the womb--the fetus’s surroundings--qualify as environmental factors, but those conditions are shaped by genetic instructions. Yet within the DNA of every cell of that newborn baby, there will be no information specific to the child’s conditions in the womb. Can we call that a genetic trait?
Luckily, Annett’s theory supposes a less ambivalent role for a gene, or possibly a few genes. Inside the nuclei of nearly every cell in the body are left-twisting bundles of DNA that either do or do not contain what Annett has dubbed the “Right Shift factor.”
Hemispheric asymmetry itself may lead to more decisive and controlled action, and perhaps a better ability to organize hierarchical processes, as in language, manufacture, and theory of mind. Those individuals who lack cerebral asymmetry [a.k.a. increased symmetry] may be more susceptible to superstition and magical thinking, but more creative and perhaps more spatially aware.
On the magical ideation scale — the measure of belief in such phenomena — lefties tend to score higher than righties. And yet, Wolman points out, “anecdotal evidence that lefties are highly represented in low-bullshit-tolerating professions such as journalism and science doesn’t exactly support this notion,” suggesting instead that the magical ideation hypothesis is best “recalibrated as a degree-not-direction descriptor.”
What makes this theory intriguing, however, isn’t its verifiability or lack thereof but what it reveals about our culture’s beliefs about creativity and mental illness, or cognitive abnormality. Wolman writes:
The magical ideation line of thinking loops back to creativity when we consider findings indicating an increased proportion of left-handers who suffer from such disorders as schizophrenia. With due acknowledgment once again to Corballis for synthesis of this idea, it’s plausible that schizophrenia and magical ideation sprout from similar neurological roots. Research demonstrating connections between mixed-handedness and either of these two conditions advances that plausibility.
[…]
Consider for a moment that there’s a thin, perhaps blurred line between genius and mental illness. What if some types of genius stem from the same aspect of the brain — or influence on the brain — as, say, magical ideation and schizophrenia, and that subtle variation in the arrangement of certain brain circuits determines the difference between the next da Vinci, the next graphology believer, the next Hendrix-like guitar god, or the next schizophrenic?
Wolman points to Kim Peek, the autistic “megasavant” on whom the film Rain Man is based, and perhaps most notably Albert Einstein, celebrated as “the quintessential modern genius”:
Examination of his brain after death showed unusual anatomical symmetry that … can mean above-normal interhemispheric connections. Then there’s the fact that Einstein’s genius is often linked with an imagination supercharged with imagery, a highly right hemisphere-dependent function. It was that kind of imagination that ignited questions leading eventually to the Theory of Relativity: what does a person on a moving train see compared with what a person standing still sees, and how would the body age if traveling near the speed of light in a spaceship compared to the aging process observed on Earth?
Is it such a stretch to speculate that Einstein landed on the fortunate end of the same brain organization spectrum upon which other, less lucky individuals land in the mental illness category? And what if handedness too is influenced by this organizational crapshoot?
The investigation is ever-ongoing, but Wolman offers a wealth of other pause-giving findings and theories in the rest of A Left-Hand Turn Around the World.
* Einstein’s handedness is somewhat a matter of debate. While he is often cited among history’s famous lefties, laterality scholars have surmised that he was mixed-handed — which is not to be confused with ambidextrous: mixed-handed people use the right hand for some things and the left for others, whereas the ambidextrous can use both hands equally well for most tasks.
Paul Broca, a pioneer brain anatomist
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ARS GRATIA ARTIS, VITA GRATIA VITAE
“Ars gratia artis—art for art’s sake. What’s wrong with life for life’s sake?” ~ B. Lynne Zika.. My joy when I found this reminded me that I didn't seem to think I deserved to live unless I produced, produced, produced! But just the elemental joy in existence is enough.
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HOW LONELINESS SHAPES THE BRAIN
~ The Neumayer III polar station sits near the edge of Antarctica’s unforgiving Ekström Ice Shelf. During the winter, when temperatures can plunge below minus 50 degrees Celsius and the winds can climb to more than 100 kilometers per hour, no one can come or go from the station. Its isolation is essential to the meteorological, atmospheric and geophysical science experiments conducted there by the mere handful of scientists who staff the station during the winter months and endure its frigid loneliness.
But a few years ago, the station also became the site for a study of loneliness itself. A team of scientists in Germany wanted to see whether the social isolation and environmental monotony marked the brains of people making long Antarctic stays. Eight expeditioners working at the Neumayer III station for 14 months agreed to have their brains scanned before and after their mission and to have their brain chemistry and cognitive performance monitored during their stay. (A ninth crew member also participated but could not have their brain scanned for medical reasons.)
As the researchers described in 2019, in comparison to a control group, the socially isolated team lost volume in their prefrontal cortex — the region at the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, that is chiefly responsible for decision-making and problem-solving. They also had lower levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that nurtures the development and survival of nerve cells in the brain. The reduction persisted for at least a month and a half after the team’s return from Antarctica.
It’s uncertain how much of this was due purely to the social isolation of the experience. But the results are consistent with evidence from more recent studies that chronic loneliness significantly alters the brain in ways that only worsen the problem.
Neuroscience suggests that loneliness doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions. Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.
It’s clear that the physical and psychological toll of loneliness across the globe is profound. In one survey, 22% of Americans and 23% of British people said they felt lonely always or often. And that was before the pandemic. As of October 2020, 36% of Americans reported “serious loneliness.” ~
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-loneliness-reshapes-the-brain-20230228/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
On both handedness and loneliness, the crux is in the way the physical and behavior and consciousness interact. I think we will find more and more that they are mutually reflexive, that there is a dynamic relationship of interactions, cause and effect not reducible to one or another, but on a continuous interactive journey. We are not clockworks, but many faceted organisms in a continuous web of organisms and environments that constantly interact and shape each other.
What a wondrous adventure it will be to explore these complexities!! We are barely at the beginning! I think we can expect more discoveries like h.pylori as cause of gastric ulcers...surprising and enabling new treatments...even when the puzzle may be more complicated, like the relationship between herpes simplex and schizophrenia.
When politics encourages worry and even despair, science inspires joy, at least for me, its beauty splendid and enchanting as great art.
Oriana:
I doubt that one day I'll wake up to read the headline: Mystery solved: Herpes causes schizophrenia! After all, the Epstein-Barr virus has also been implicated, but we haven't heard anything further on the matter. Perhaps the actual cause of neuroinflammation doesn't matter; what matters is the overzealous immune response that causes the loss of neural tissue. Thus, it's not surprising that one school of thinking about schizophrenia describes it as an autoimmune disease.
But if it were, we'd expect a female prevalence. But it turns out that schizophrenia has a slight male prevalence, and that female schizophrenics tend to have later onset and milder symptoms. Estrogens seem to have a protective influence -- but the role of sex hormones in brain function and brain diseases is a whole other complex matter here.
Again, what excites me is seeing how firmly schizophrenia is now established as a brain disease. We've come a long way since schizophrenia was regarded as demonic possession. Perhaps the crucial question is whether we can lower neuroinflammation. Drugs like haloperidol are immunosuppresants, and that in itself is an interesting clue -- not just for schizophrenia, but also for Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia.
What about the microbiome? Does schizophrenia start in the gut? Perhaps. Fecal transplant from a schizophrenic? No thanks. For me moment, I'm not even going to go there. Things are complicated enough as is.
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Nothing that happens
has a reason
unless we supply it.
~ Anonymous1, 1949 (a former sailor and millionaire now living in Panama)
“Things have the value which we ourselves have the capacity to give them.” ~ Nikos Kazantzakis.
Not just “Things have the value which we give them” but “have the capacity to give them.” That capacity can include education, health, our life experiences which are both unique and universal — basically our whole life dictates whether we value X more than Y.
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“OBESITY PARADOX” DEBUNKED?
~ Conventional wisdom, along with boatloads of scientific evidence, point to obesity being universally unhealthy, leading to diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and many more problems. But in recent years, that conventional wisdom has been challenged by a “U.”
That “U” appeared on graphs charting the link between body-mass index — a common but imperfect gauge of whether or not someone’s weight is healthy, calculated simply by dividing their mass by the square of their body height in meters — and their risk of death. Numerous epidemiological studies have found that people in the “overweight” category (BMI 25-30) surprisingly have the lowest mortality risk, while those categorized as “obese” (30-35) have little or no increased risk over the “healthy” (18.5-25). At the extreme ends of the BMI spectrum, both the “underweight” (less than 18.5) and the extremely obese (35+) have a greatly increased risk of death. Furthermore, numerous studies also have suggested that obesity might lower the risk of death for older people and patients with various chronic diseases.
Considering what we know about the health pitfalls of increased body fat, one would expect a mostly straight line of rising mortality risk as one goes from a BMI of healthy to obese. That’s why the “U-shaped” mortality curve has been dubbed the “obesity paradox.”
But in recent years, that paradox, and the studies that created it, have come under fire. Critics chiefly contend that BMI is a flawed way to determine whether someone has obesity. That’s because it does not measure the composition of one’s body mass — that is, how much is fat and how much is muscle. Nor does BMI measure where fat is located, which can make a big difference. Visceral fat jammed among internal organs is much worse than subcutaneous fat stored just beneath the skin. For example, an extremely fit and muscular individual could easily make it into the obese BMI category. At the same time, a “skinny” individual with a lot of body fat nestled dangerously around their mid-section could be categorized as “healthy.”
Why has BMI been so frequently used in epidemiological studies? Because it’s convenient, readily calculated based on self report. On the other hand, measuring body fat requires subjects to take a trip to a lab or to conduct the measurement on themselves, which can be quite difficult for a layperson to do accurately.
Replace BMI with body fat
In a review article published in 2020, researchers from Sapienza University in Italy noted that excess body fat should be used to measure obesity instead of BMI.When a team of researchers adjusted BMI to take muscle mass into account back in 2018, then associated this corrected measure with mortality risk, they found that the “U” mostly transformed into a straight line. Extremely obese individuals went from having only a marginally increased risk of death compared to healthy individuals to about a 70% increased risk.
More recently, Ryan Masters, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, tried to resolve the obesity paradox by taking more confounding variables into account. He examined nearly 40 years of data from almost 18,000 subjects, and he not only considered subjects’ distribution of body fat, he also tallied the amount of time that they spent at a high or low BMI.
“I would argue that we have been artificially inflating the mortality risk in the low-BMI category by including those who had been high BMI and had just lost weight recently,” he explained in a statement. “The health and mortality consequences of high BMI are not like a light switch,” he added. “There’s an expanding body of work suggesting that the consequences are duration-dependent.”
Obesity paradox debunked
After accounting for the potential biases in the data, Masters found that obesity boosts one’s risk of death by as much as 91%, vastly more than previous studies suggested. The U-shaped curve disappeared, and the paradox along with it. He further estimated that about 1 in 6 U.S. deaths are related to excess weight.“Paradoxes should be met with skepticism,” a pair of public health experts wrote in a 2017 op-ed in the International Journal of Obesity. “Counterintuitive results should be discussed with colleagues and collaborators with different areas of expertise. The only ‘paradox’ we can see here is why researchers continue to claim to have evidence of a paradox without careful consideration of potential methodological explanations.”
https://bigthink.com/health/healthy-obesity-myth/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2RwdzosRSBJmNJo65NC645MF18j__GQaDHnUF6xmM33p07P0qV6SFQxqk#Echobox=1678630404
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IT MIGHT BE A J CURVE INSTEAD
~ Higher body fat, whether determined by percentage, fat mass, fat mass index or visceral adipose tissue, was associated with higher risk for mortality among adults, according to study data.
“Accurate technology, such as CT and DXA, or alternative methods representing an indirect estimate of body fat content, such as bioelectrical impedance analysis or validated equations, can present more accurate estimation of body fat stores,” Ahmad Jayedi, MD, of the Social Determinants of Health Research Center at Semnan University of Medical Sciences and the department of community nutrition at the School of Nutritional Science and Dietetics at Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran, and colleagues wrote in International Journal of Obesity.
In this systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis, researchers searched PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science for prospective studies published through June 2021 about the relationship between body fat percentage and risk for all-cause mortality in the general population. Researchers identified 35 prospective cohort studies with 923,295 participants and 68,389 deaths.
For every 10% increment in body fat, risk for all-cause mortality increased by 11% (HR = 1.11; 95% CI, 1.02-1.2) in the general adult populations. In addition, risk for all-cause mortality increased by 6% for each 5 kg increment in fat mass (HR = 1.06; 95% CI, 1.01-1.12) and 11% for each 2 kg/m2 increment in fat mass index (HR = 1.11; 95% CI, 1.06-1.16), and 17% for each 1 standard deviation increase in visceral adipose tissue.
Researchers observed a J-shaped association between body fat percentage and fat mass and risk for all-cause mortality. The lowest risk for all-cause mortality was at a body fat percentage of 25% and a fat mass of 20kg.
Researchers also observed little evidence of between-subgroup heterogeneity. Positive associations between fat and mortality were greater in studies with longer duration, those that excluded participants with prevalent cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline and those that adjusted for smoking or included only never smokers in subgroup analyses. These associations were less pronounced in studies that adjusted for potential mediating factors. This suggested an impact of reverse causation, confounding and overadjustment in some studies, the researchers wrote.
“Further studies with longer durations of follow-up and larger sample size are needed to clarify potential residual confounding by smoking and reverse causation,” they wrote. ~
https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20220831/higher-body-fat-percentage-confers-higher-mortality-risk
Oriana:
For me this is the crucial statement: “The lowest risk for all-cause mortality was at a body fat percentage of 25% and a fat mass of 20 kg.”
Here is a brief indication of the range:
~ The normal amount of body fat is between 25 and 30 percent in women and 18 and 23 percent in men. Women with more than 30 percent body fat and men with more than 25 percent body fat are considered obese. ~
https://www.pennmedicine.org/for-patients-and-visitors/find-a-program-or-service/bariatric-surgery/who-is-a-candidate/weight-loss-and-obesity-facts
So 25% body fat would be the beginning of normal for women, but slightly overweight for men.
However, with men it’s muscle mass that seems to be critical, according to several studies (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25833973/).
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MUSCLE MASS OF ARMS AND LEGS AND MORTALITY
A closer look highlighted these results:
~ Researchers studied a group of 839 men and women over the age of 65 for about four years, recording their body composition with bone density scanning over time. They looked at “appendicular muscle mass,” meaning the arms and legs, as well as subcutaneous fat and visceral fat.
The results, published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, found that women with low appendicular mass were 63 times more likely to die early compared to those with more arm and leg muscle mass. Men with low appendicular mass were 11 times more likely to be at risk for early mortality.
The appendicular lean mass was the key factor, as opposed to the fat types,” said lead researcher Rosa Maria Rodrigues Pereira, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Sao Paulo’s Medical School in Brazil. ~
https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a28680003/health-benefits-of-muscle-study/
Oriana:
So strong arms and legs are the key. Even so, this seems astonishing: “women with low appendicular mass were 63 times more likely to die early.” Differences of this magnitude are not normally found in biostatistics. I’m wondering if perhaps it’s “63 percent more likely to die early.”
This study goes on to discuss fragile bones and falls — some of the mortality here may be due to falls, notoriously more frequent among the elderly.
And in men and androgenic women, skinny arms and legs may go together with abdominal obesity, aka "pot belly." If you develop a pot belly, your life expectancy may be cooked.
HERPES SIMPLEX-2 AND SCHIZOPHRENIA?
~ Various factors have been implicated in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. Evidence for an infectious cause includes the 5-8% increased risk among those born in the winter-spring months, when infectious diseases are more prevalent and at times when other infections (measles, varicella, poliomyelitis) show increased activity.
Herpes simplex virus (HSV) has been implicated in schizophrenia as it has a tropism for the nervous system and is capable of replication in the brain. Although post-mortem studies of brain tissue of schizophrenic patients have failed to detect the virus, these studies have been hampered by the unknown cellular localization of HSV genomes and by attempting to detect the virus years after the symptom onset.
A more recent, nested, case-control study evaluated pregnant women between 1959 and 1966 and identified 27 surviving offspring who were later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Analysis of stored blood samples showed an association between high levels of maternal antibody to HSV-2 and subsequent development of adult psychosis. No association was found between HSV-1 infection and psychosis.
There is also evidence that human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) may play a role in schizophrenia, as antibodies to these agents have been found at a greater frequency in the sera of affected individuals compared with controls. This is supported by the presence of reverse transcriptase, a retroviral marker, at levels four times higher in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of people with recent onset schizophrenia compared with controls, and by its elevated presence in long-term schizophrenic patients. Further research to investigate the relationship between virus infection and schizophrenia is warranted. ~
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15319094/
Oriana:
At least we are actively searching for answers. I remember when schizophrenia, and all mental illness in general, was blamed on the mother ("Sometimes the mother isn't really fully present," was the explanation I vividly remember). Now we at least seem to understand that it's a brain disease, having something to do with genetics (people in previous centuries seemed to understand that "madness runs in the family"). Other causal factors being investigated are infections during pregnancy, environmental toxins, inflammation, dopamine-serotonin imbalance, childbirth complications, early trauma, and more.
Gastric ulcer used to be a puzzle, and was generally blamed on stress. Then it was discovered that a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was the cause, and treatment shifted to antibiotics. I don't dare expect that the cause of schizophrenia could turn out to be as simple as one particular virus, but then it might be something equally unexpected.
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ending on beauty:
THE WEIGHING
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
~ Jane Hirshfield
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