Yes, we're in superbloom! Here is a bee inside a California poppy.At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
~ T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
*
LOVE COMES BACK IN ANOTHER FORM
(I thought I was too familiar with this story to be moved by it anymore; I was in for a surprise.)
~ At the age of 40, Franz Kafka, who never married and had no children, was strolling through a Berlin park when he met a young girl who was crying because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll without success.
Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back for it.
The next day, when they still couldn't find the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll that said, "Please don't cry. I have taken a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures.
So began a story that continued until the end of Kafka's life.
During the meetings, Kafka read the doll's carefully written letters with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.
Finally, Kafka brought her the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.
"It looks nothing like my doll," the girl said.
Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote, “my travels, have changed me.” The girl hugged the new doll and brought it home all happy.
A year later, Kafka died.
Many years later, the girl, now an adult woman, found a little letter inside the doll. In the little letter signed by Kafka, it said:
Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end love will come back in another form.
~ Jefferson Arce, Quora
*
T. S. ELIOT’S STILL POINT
~ Addressing the Friends of the Irish Academy on the subject of W. B. Yeats in 1939, the year after the Irish poet’s death, T. S. Eliot proclaimed that Yeats “was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.” In making this point, he celebrated Yeats’s work for its expression of the man’s “unique personality.”
This may have sounded strange to Eliot’s audience, who would have known his single most influential critical statement, made two decades before. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot had announced the “impersonal theory of poetry,” which held that poetry “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
Yeats was indeed an “impersonal” poet, Eliot explained, but by this he meant that, “out of intense and personal experience,” Yeats was “able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol.” This was not an obvious claim. Yeats’s dreamy and melancholy early work had seemed already antiquated to the poets of Eliot’s generation. His concerns with Irish culture and politics were provincial. His mature poetic vision was in turn eccentric and gnostic, the doctrine of a church to which only he could belong. What Eliot intended by this remark, however, was Yeats’s continuous growth over his long career. The poet indulged and then shook off the misty tastes of the nineteenth century, before striving to find a mode of expression suitably “hard” for an age of disillusion and violence, of the machine and total war.
A more likely candidate to join the ranks of those poets whose history was the history of their times was Eliot himself. His career displayed all the restless struggle with form and expression that Yeats’s had. Indeed, the literary critic Malcolm Cowley spoke for many when he observed that Eliot “never repeated himself and never . . . persisted in any attitude or technique: once having suggested its possibilities, he moved on.” But where Yeats’s work remained, to the end, a romantic and, at times, even juvenile celebration of the ecstasy of violence and the poetic fruitfulness of conflict, Eliot’s poetry, from the very beginning, considered violence and conflict a nightmare from which one struggled to wake up.
By violence here, I do not primarily mean world wars, Anglo–Irish conflicts, or the ideological contests that reshaped Europe during Yeats’s and Eliot’s lifetimes. I mean rather something more fundamental. The history of their times was of course bookended and shaped by massive military conflicts. But violence was also the deep psychological undercurrent of the era. Modern materialists had proposed that all reality could be explained by the collision of object with object and the resultant force. Marx had argued that history was the story of class conflict. Freud had argued that the self was a mere product of an ongoing interior conflict.
Modern German philosophy, including that of Nietzsche, portrayed the human being as trapped within a suffocating subjectivity, even as it introduced the possibility that one might escape the walls of the interior by a violent assertion of the will. These distinctly modern views all suggested that violent conflict might constitute not simply the tumult of nations but every aspect of reality down to the interior life of the person. The self might be a bundle of fragments at war with one another, no less than was social life or political life. “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,” wrote Eliot in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), but by these words he did not mean sophistication, but rather, as he put it elsewhere, an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy.”
Eliot’s life, including his poetry criticism, shows his restless, ongoing attempt to give poetic expression to this distinctly modern anxiety that everything may be a series of violent collisions. Early on, he wrote of his own poems to his friend the poet Conrad Aiken, “I know the kind of verse I want, and I know this isn’t it.” In the decades ahead, he repeated the complaint, including in his last important poem, Four Quartets (1943), where he sighs with the somewhat retiring modesty of an old master:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
These different kinds of failure were in part driven by a sense of the continuous conflict and instability that were history, but they were also informed by a quest of sorts. Was there any condition, any reality, that stood apart from the violence of history? A place where force was not simply met by competing force, but where stillness, silence, and peace might reign?
Last year marked the centenary of Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922). There can be little doubt that the poem gave expression to the history of Eliot’s time. Its first readers, including those who could not understand it, sensed as much. It also shaped that history, leading many of those same readers to see their time on Eliot’s terms. The significance of Eliot’s poem as a psychological record of its time, as a historical landmark, is well established.
The major work just barely suffices to provide points on a narrative arc that leads us, poem by poem, on a journey through the violence and solipsism of history that Eliot felt and feared. It gives us his long analysis and lamentation of its causes, and it leads on to a moment of conversion, after which the poems begin to explore the possibility of a truth and a peace in history and yet also beyond it. This, I say, is the story the poems unfold for us, but it was also the story of Eliot’s life. Despite the impersonal theory of poetry, Eliot seldom wrote about anything beside himself, in his poetry or his prose. That has had the effect of making his literary criticism provocative but inconsistent and often untrustworthy regarding its nominal subjects, but it also made Eliot just the kind of poet he proclaimed Yeats to be. Eliot’s life and poetry are the history of his time, he its representative figure, his work its “general symbol.”
In Eliot’s day, the reduction of human life and the world to what Nietzsche called “the will to power” was a dominant idea that drove the ideologies of communism and fascism and haunted the life of the liberal West. In our day we see that, for the mainstream of our intellectuals and the broader population as well, the possibility that life could consist of anything other than power and its abuse seems nearly unimaginable. The story of Eliot’s life and work, in this regard, seems a salutary reminder that genuine peace is possible, even if it is a peace “not as the world gives.”
On Gordon’s reading, Eliot is a belated transcendentalist on the model of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his life is a private spiritual project in search of the silence briefly known on that city street. Such a portrait is incomplete. The Eliot of the poems and the biography, as Crawford has now shown, is above all the figure of “St. Sebastian,” subject to violent passions and cultivating those passions in search of an experience of ecstasy. In this regard, he is very much a part of the modern world. It is only through the exploration of violent ecstasy that he discovers its insufficiency and is surprised to learn that it is possible to pass beyond it, to find a silence and peace that may not be snatched by the power of the will but in which one may be enfolded.
That this was the path of Eliot’s life and the drama recorded in his poems is not much in dispute. His London contemporaries witnessed the continual conflict between Eliot and his wife Vivien Haigh-Wood. Vivien’s behavior was almost continuously hysterical and made Eliot miserable. She was concerned she dominated him, and he concerned he dominated her. And yet they remained together for seventeen years before Eliot filed for legal separation. At the most intimate level, his life was riven by continuous strife.
But then, almost without warning, his life took a decisive turn with his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. Eliot’s contemporaries, like recent critics such as Rasula, saw a certain radicalism in the avant-garde energies of “collage” that appear to give shape to The Waste Land. For many, it hardly seemed to anticipate entrance into the staid national Church. But indeed the violent wretchedness of the world revealed in The Waste Land was precisely the condition he wanted to escape and believed he could escape only by what that poem calls an act of “surrender/ Which an age of prudence can never retract.”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” presents to us the rambling thoughts of its protagonist, a young bourgeois man much like Eliot in his Harvard years. Prufrock’s interior monologue shows him to be well-fed on the stuff of romance but incapable of realizing such ideal forms in action. He would be a prophet, like “Lazarus, come from the dead,/ Come back to tell you all . . .” He would be deep and heroic, like Prince Hamlet. But he has nothing to say and is no hero; he is at best “an attendant lord, one that will do/ To swell a progress.”
Most of Eliot’s lines were composed not syllabically but in iambic feet, such that a plurality of the lines in the whole of Prufrock are iambic pentameters, as are these famous lines from the “Love Song”:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
What is most striking in Eliot’s first great poem is the way it shows the garments of romanticism as just that—as costume meant to dress up the banal. We see poor mediocre Prufrock trying on the costumes and realizing that they do not fit. Conscious of this, he finds himself impotent and without resources, struggling to speak. He is bottled up in himself and the only available means of ecstasy, of self-assertion, are the romantic tropes he now finds unbelievable or at least too great for him. He would assert himself by violence if only he could. Instead, he cowers in fear of rejection, lest the debutantes of Boston notice the bald spot on his head or his spindly arms and legs and mock him. If he were to approach one, he fears she would reply with incredulity, “That is not what I meant at all.”
Incapable of action, he can only fantasize of the ultimate inaction, death. And this he does, dreaming in romantic fashion of walking on the beach and hearing “the mermaids singing, each to each.” But fantastic mermaids are no less scornful than Boston ladies: “I do not think that they will sing to me.” To be startled from this fantasy, and from all fantasy, is to be restored from the world of mermaids to the properly human world, but this Prufrock experiences as death: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
The other poems in Eliot’s first book are dwarfed by comparison. “Portrait of a Lady” is told from the perspective of a Prufrockian narrator, but its mockery is turned outward, at the domineering bourgeois lady who would dominate her young male companion with her effusive and pretentious conversation (the wit of “Prufrock,” by contrast, lies entirely in the dissection of his self-conception).
Other poems capture urban scenes with restraint or, as in “The ‘Boston Evening Transcript,’” enact fantasies of aristocratic revenge on the mediocre culture of early twentieth-century America. The poems flirt with the possibility that human life is reducible to material conditions and our behavior as mechanical creatures, emotionally needy wind-up toys. The only alternative is the assertion of a knowing sensibility, a civilized hauteur that condemns the modern age as barbaric and its romantic fantasies as mere sentiments.
In the years that followed, Eliot’s criticism attempted to imagine that life had once been more than the banal violence of machines and the impotent fiction of terrible fantasies. He borrowed a historical theory from the German Romantics, that human beings had once been organic wholes but were now divided, as only material things can be divided, into parts that think and parts that feel, but never the both together. “Gerontion,” which opens Poems (1920), was his first attempt to offer this account in verse. The poem famously depicts the West as an old man “Being read to by a boy.”
The book the boy reads is history itself, and it is a story of entropy and decline. The inmates of the modern West, such as Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, and Madame de Tornquist, attempt to distract themselves from the boredom that comes with living on the long downward slope of history, by means of anxious movements or the violence of decadent and eccentric rituals. They try to “Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,/ With pungent sauces,” as Eliot puts it near the end of the poem. Prufrock did not dare to act, so he drowned. These characters act, but they cannot stop history’s decay. The wheel of history turns, sending “fractured atoms” out into the abyss. There is nothing else, it seems, beyond history but more history.
“Gerontion” is a poem of despair.
*
The poems collected with “Gerontion” merely replay different versions of the same scenes of decadence. When The Waste Land appeared in 1922, it also seemed to its first readers a poem of despair, one that repeated the depiction of history in “Gerontion” as a spinning cycle of disintegrating atoms. This was not, however, quite correct. The Waste Land is fragmented, even more so than Prufrock’s thoughts or the old man’s history, and among its last lines is the despairing “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
We see desperate acts of self-assertion and violence to escape from that condition. Among these we might note the repairing to superstitions (the tarot readings of Madame Sosostris) and the St. Sebastian–like sexual encounter between a young typist, worn down and as incapable of feeling as her typewriter, and the “young man carbuncular,” who “makes a welcome of indifference” as he pushes himself upon her. The poem is filled with generalized scenes of death-in-life, from the workers crossing London Bridge to Phlebas the Phoenician, “a fortnight dead” and drifting endlessly in the whirlpool of history.
But from the beginning, the poem flirts with the possibility of violence and the rebirth that may come from it. That “April is the cruelest month” we all know by now; the agony of birth may restore life to the dead land. We see other fragmentary signs of life, a vision of light, the toll of a church bell, the laughter of fishermen, but it is the final violence of a thunderstorm out of the East that seems most elusive yet most promising. In the closing section of the poem, Eliot fantasizes of a new revelation, a new gospel, that would restore water, life, and order to the historical world.
“What the Thunder Said,” as that part is called, is a gospel of action: to give, to sympathize, to control. Eliot’s language sounds as if it were a recipe for a more confident and directed violence than was the capricious searching after sensations of ecstasy he has depicted earlier in the poem. But, and I think this is the crucial development, this recipe is a thing given from above. It comes not because Prufrock suddenly gets his nerve together, but because an unspecified voice in the thunder, the divine voice of Revelation 10:1–7, declares it.
Eliot subsequently depicted modern persons as “hollow men” in the poem of the same name (1925), incapable of great violence and thus unworthy of the eye of the pagan heroes or Christian saints who long ago crossed “to death’s other Kingdom.” In “Sweeney Agonistes” (1926), he imagined modern man once again as a squalid, lustful city slicker whose only dream of ecstasy, to free himself a moment from the thought of “birth, copulation, and death,” is the prospect of doing “a girl in.”
“Sweeney Agonistes” has two epigraphs, one from the Oresteia of Aeschylus and one from St. John of the Cross that speaks of the possibility of the soul being “possessed of the divine union.” Nothing could frame more starkly the choice Eliot came to see about human life. Either life is a natural tragic cycle of violence and revenge, which we may enact but never escape, or we must surrender “self-possession” and allow ourselves by supernatural grace to be possessed. Only complete abstention from action can allow divine grace to lead us beyond history and its busy motions to the “Peace which passeth understanding” (to use the words of St. Paul quoted in the notes to The Waste Land).
Eliot made his decisive choice, in 1927, when he was baptized into the Anglican Church. The realization in poetry took somewhat longer. Having made his poetry out of the violent desire for ecstasy and its failings, how was he to represent peace? In the near term, he did not. Rather, he dramatized the violent rapture of conversion as a tragic event. “Journey of the Magi” and “A Song for Simeon,” the first poems he published after his conversion, show the revelation of Christ as the incarnate son of God as costly knowledge, leaving those who experience it aliens in both the old world and the new.
His next poem, the sequence “Ash-Wednesday” (1930), moves beyond tragedy but remains a poem about the event of conversion. The poet prays, “Teach us to sit still,” lest he be “separated” from the divine will. The poem begs for what is not yet attained.
Given how chancy the origin of the Quartets was, it is remarkable that it became the poem that completed Eliot’s work as a lyric poet and most perfectly expressed human life as a pilgrimage through the violent tumult of the world toward peace in the contemplation of God. “Burnt Norton” begins with a mystical vision in a garden. The rest of the poem wrestles with the effort to describe that vision of “the still point of the turning world,” which is God, the unmoved mover of history, and with the further effort to understand the point of life, of our experience in history, if its meaning lies categorically beyond it in the absolute. Is every moment outside communion with the absolute a mere “waste sad time”?
This was an especially pressing question in the years Eliot composed three of the four Quartets. The Second World War had begun, and England was enduring the evacuation at Dunkirk and the Nazi aerial bombardment that came to be called the Blitz. Eliot, who served as an air raid warden, composed the poems as a meditation on how we shall live in time but for the sake of what lies beyond time. “We must be still and still moving,” he writes at the end of “East Coker.” We “are only undefeated/ Because we have gone on trying,” observes “The Dry Salvages”; therefore, “fare forward, voyagers.”
If the Quartets sometimes sounds like Winston Churchill, Crawford indicates, the effect was not unintended. The Waste Land sold a few hundred copies in the first few years after its publication. Four Quartets sold in the many thousands. It became the great English national religious poem of the Second World War.
But Four Quartets is more than a national poem. It is, as Eliot himself hoped, almost more than a poem. It is a work of art that invites its readers into the desert of the Christian fathers, into the darkness and the stillness of contemplation. In its verses, Eliot attempts to describe and enact prayer, but he also reflects on the art of poetry in itself. Poetry and prayer both involve a kind of failure, but they are also reminders that there is a stillness and a peace beyond the violence of time and that the human mind can know it even within the explosions of a restless and turning history.
Eliot struggled to maintain that vision of peace in the decades ahead, as he attempted to live as a Christian and maintained his long correspondence with Emily Hale. She loved him and wanted to marry him. Eliot held her at bay. Like Vivien before her, Hale had a dominant personality, and while we will never know Eliot’s true intentions, it seems likely that an epistolary romance allowed for a peaceful and purely spiritual relationship. The convening of their flesh would have reintroduced the violence of living he had sought to escape.
Although Eliot’s career as a lyric poet was finished, his work in verse drama suggests a long struggle to bring the peace of Christian faith into the life of the body—an aim he realized within his marriage to the young Valerie Fletcher in 1957 and the composition of his last play, The Elder Statesman, in 1959.
The drama that takes place across the span of Eliot’s poetry seems more vital than ever. It reckons with the vanity of worldly ambition, the banality of the mechanical routines of work and recreation, and the drugs and superstitions with which we try to allay our fear of the emptiness of life. If we are tempted to think there is nothing in this world that can still our hunger, Eliot’s poems tell us we are correct. But his poems open onto another world than this one, the enclosed world of the work of art, the eternal world of the spirit. The heavy, brooding cadences of Four Quartets in particular draw us out of ourselves and, in the words of “Burnt Norton,” “Into our first world.” ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/4/t-s-eliots-still-point
*
"I wanted to look up words. I wanted to look up velleity and quotidian and memorize the fuckers for all time, spell them, learn them, pronounce them syllable by syllable — vocalize, phonate, utter the sounds, say the words for all they're worth.” ~ Don DeLillo, Underworld
Oriana:
Once in a great while, I come across a startlingly accurate description of myself. (Btw, "velleity" has nothing to do with a veil or the lifting of veils [i.e. an apocalypse]. It means a weak wish, a tepid volition.)
*
IF TROTSKY AND NOT TOOK STALIN POWER AFTER LENIN
~ “Trotsky—the satanic “Bronstein of Russian anti-Semites”—was deeply offended whenever anyone presumed to call him a Jew. When a visiting Jewish delegation appealed to him to help fellow Jews, he flew into a rage: “I am not a Jew but an internationalist.” He reacted similarly when requested by Rabbi Eisenstadt of Petrograd to allow special flour for Passover matzos, adding on this occasion that “he wanted to know no Jews.”
At another time he said that “the Jews interested him no more than the Bulgarians.” He was a renegade. This did not help him to make a successful career in the party. He was resented as a Jew as well as someone who during the decade preceding the Bolshevik power seizure relentlessly criticized Lenin and his followers. His prickly personality also was of no help, contrasting with Stalin’s joviality during the years the two struggled for power.
In view of the murderous paranoia of Stalin, it is tempting to gloss over Trotsky’s own ruthlessness and to depict him as a humane counterpart to his rival. This is quite unwarranted. Without a question, Trotsky was better-educated than Stalin and was altogether a more cultivated human being. But his radicalism was not much different than Stalin’s.
Let us scrutinize briefly Trotsky’s views on such key issues as forced labor, terror, and concentration camps—the outstanding features of the Stalinist regime. On forced labor, Trotsky had this to say in 1921:
“It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nation-wide economic plan.” If Stalin was present at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, at which Trotsky made these remarks, he must have nodded in agreement. In view of Trotsky’s own sentiments, it is likely that if he had succeeded Lenin, we would have witnessed in the Soviet Union much the same oppression of labor as he did under Stalin.
Trotsky had no qualms about introducing political terror into Soviet Russia. Barely two months after the Bolsheviks had seized power, he said:
“There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class. This is its right. You are indignant … at the petty terror which we direct at our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine.”
Trotsky demonstrated that this was not empty rhetoric during the rebellion at the Kronshtadt naval base in February 1921. The sailors of Kronshtadt were early and prominent supporters of the Bolsheviks, helping them in October 1917 to seize power in Petrograd and later to defend that city from the Whites. But the sailors gradually became disenchanted with the new regime. In March 1921 they formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and refused to obey Moscow’s orders.
Though the fact is little-known, it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who introduced into Soviet Russia the concentration camp, an institution that under Stalin developed into the monstrous Gulag empire. Trotsky did this in May 1918 in connection with a rebellion of Czech ex-prisoners of war
who, en route to the Far East to sail to the western front, rebelled when an attempt was made to disarm them. In August of that year, to protect the railroad line running from Moscow to Kazan, Trotsky ordered a network of concentration camps to be constructed to isolate “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators” who were not executed or subjected to other penalties. Lenin fully agreed with these measures. By 1919, concentration camps were established in every provincial capital. In 1923, Russia had 315 concentration camps with 70,000 inmates.
My own (Pipes) judgment of Trotsky coincides with that of George Orwell, made in 1939 when Trotsky was still alive and cited in this book:
“Trotsky is probably as much responsible for the Russian dictatorship as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind. The essential act is the rejection of democracy—that is of the underlying values of democracy; once you have decided upon that, Stalin—or any rate someone like Stalin—is already on the way.”
I totally agree with George Orwell. Rejection of democracy is the key. Look at the current development in the world circa 2023, specifically the turn to despotism in Russia and China and their satellites. Once again, the democracy is facing an existential challenge.
Leon Trotsky had zero chance to become a ‘vozhd’ of Soviet Union, and he knew it. But in some alternative universe, where Trotsky came to the top of the party pyramid, he would be overthrown in a short time by the new communist bureaucracy class, which Stalin managed to create and relied upon. ~ Richard Edgar Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 2011.
Lytiek Gethers:
If Leon Trotsky had defeated Stalin to become the sole leader of the Soviet Union, history likely would have unfolded quite differently:
~ likely less extreme purges and repression. Trotsky was fierce in opposition to perceived enemies of revolution, but not as ruthlessly paranoid or cunning as Stalin. He may have used less violence and repression to consolidate control. There likely would have been fewer secret police, gulags, show trials, and mass purges; possibly less aggressive collectivization and industrialization. Trotsky also favored rapid industrialization, but perhaps at a less breakneck and coerced pace than Stalin's policies. Collectivization in particular may have been less extreme and rapid under Trotsky.
~ likely less cult of personality and propaganda. Trotsky was an enthusiastic revolutionary propagandist, but not one to craft a cult of personality around himself like Stalin did. Propaganda may have focused less on glorifying the leader and more on ideals.
~ possible alliance with the West. Trotsky initially favored world revolution, but later stressed that communism could succeed in the USSR alone before spreading. He may have been more willing to form alliances with Western powers against Fascism, avoiding full-scale isolationism and hostility. The Cold War may have been milder or shorter.
~ probable earlier move towards reform and liberalization. Khrushchev's reforms and "Thaw" likely would have come sooner, as Trotsky seemed open to a softer, reformist brand of communism in his later years and exile. Gorbachev-like reforms may have emerged decades earlier under Trotsky.
Dima Vorobiev:
Trotsky was a loner. He was too full of himself to build alliances and win political friends. Much like Hitler, he believed he could overcome this by hyperactivity (he was a very high-energy guy) and brilliant speeches.
This really could carry the day for him for quite a while. He was instrumental, on par with Lenin, in securing the victory of Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg in 1917. After Lenin concluded the separate peace with Germany in 1918, Trotsky built the Red Army from scratch and won the Civil War of 1918–1921. His role as the savior of Communist Revolution against all odds was so acknowledged that he didn’t bother to do much and secure himself as Lenin’s heir when the man died in 1924.
He was sure he had the military in his pocket, as a guarantee against anyone who tried to muscle him out as a front-runner in the race. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" is a Mao’s quote that is universally applicable to any radical Socialist project. As a brilliant speaker and debater, and skilled theorist of Marxism, he was sure he could outperform anyone in the party debates.
But Trotsky underestimated the role of Party as the backbone the Communist society. He ignored Stalin’s silent, but huge reshuffling of party cadres in order to have Stalin’s supporters at the right places the day the definitive battle begins.
Trotsky was foolish enough to gear down at the critical moments in the internal power struggle. Hypochondriac as he was, he spent too much time away from his power base. He didn’t put too much effort in courting possible allies. And he underestimated the degree of hate against his Jewish ancestry that permeated the younger Party members from the worker and peasant classes.
As a result, Stalin robbed Trotsky of his support in the military through the Communist cells in the troops. At the height of the power struggle in 1924 he found himself without any powerful allies who could defend his position as the defense minister. During 1925 he completely lost the military, and therefore it was game over for him.
*
In the parallel universe, where Trotsky won the fight for the Kremlin in the 1920s and eliminated Stalin, one of the most probable changes to the course of history would be Hitler not coming to power in Germany.
The ill-fated Soviet march on Warsaw in 1920 showed that Soviet Russia didn’t have the resources and military to wage revolutionary wars on its own. Trotsky’s answer to that in power would likely be not going it alone, like Stalin did, but rather finding allies. German Social-Democrats would be the top pick.
Hitler’s grab of power in 1933 was a direct consequence of Stalin ruining an alliance between the Communists and Social-Democrats. He was afraid that the leftist Germans would rob the role of torch-bearers of revolutionary flame from the impoverished, disorganized, isolated USSR. Trotsky was so full of himself that he didn’t consider this a challenge. Accepting the red Germans as equals seemed little risk to the brilliant, turbocharged Bolshevik: “I’m sure I can turn them around when I need to.”
From Germany turning in 1933 red, not brown, arises a clear chain of events:
~ Germany takes over the role of the genie that sets afoot the Soviet military-industrial complex—the role played by the US in our reality
~ Political elites in Britain and France would find the new Red Axis of Germany and Russia a much more clear and present danger than the far-right nationalists. Several tactical alliances between them and soulmates of Mussolini and Franco would take shape around Europe
~ This, in turn, would drastically increase the level of confrontation along the Cordon Sanitaire and probably some places in the Mediterranean.
~ Which is why I suppose we would have experienced a few more revolutionary wars in Europe around the time of the economic crisis of 1929–1933, and in the wake of it.
The poster below from 1919 shows Lev Trotsky striking the serpent of bourgeois counter-revolution.
John Cate:
There is a perception, because Stalin was such a totalitarian ruler who was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions, that Trotsky was somehow a “moderate” who would have followed a less totalitarian and less brutal path. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
The main difference between Trotsky and Stalin was in their central philosophy—Trotsky’s was “Permanent Revolution,” and Stalin’s was “Socialism in One Country.” To explain further:
Permanent Revolution was the doctrine that the Soviet state should endeavor at all times to further the spread of Communism to other parts of the world; to its advocates, Communism was basically a religion and they were its jihadists.
This was already in evidence in the aftermath of World War I, where the Bolsheviks did all they could to help people like Bela Kun in Hungary and the Spartacists in Germany, and nearly established lasting Communist states in both places. Trotsky was a firm believer in this idea, and was willing to countenance another war at any time to establish world Communism; he plainly said he didn’t care what kind of destruction it wreaked, or how many people died. He’d have had the whole world either Red or dead.
Socialism in One Country is the doctrine that the Soviet Union should first establish a working, functional Socialist USSR (true Communism requires a large number of nations, if not the world) before seeking to spread Communism elsewhere. Even at that, the main goal of the Soviets in establishing other Communist states wasn’t semi-religious fervor; when Stalin took over Eastern Europe and Communized it after WW2, he did so only to establish a massive buffer zone between the Soviet Union and any potential future enemies.
This is just the traditional Russian defensive mentality at work, not a desire to expand Communism; after Sigismund III, Charles XII, Napoleon and Hitler had all devastated Russia after starting an invasion right from the border, Stalin wanted to make sure the next war started hundreds of kilometers from Russia.
With that out of the way, what if Trotsky had won the power struggle?
It wouldn’t have been pretty. First of all, Trotsky was as brutal in his ideas about forcibly imposing his philosophy and suppressing dissent as Stalin was, or as Robespierre was, if you want to go back further in history. There would have been a Soviet Terror under Trotsky just like there was with Stalin. Trotsky might not have cooked up a Ukrainian genocide just to solve a perceived ethnic problem, and he wouldn’t have listened to Trofim Lysenko’s crazy ideas, and he (probably) wouldn’t have killed off all his best generals—but he still would have been brutal.
But the biggest problem would have been the doctrine of Permanent Revolution. We have no reason to believe Trotsky was anything other than a “true believer” who would have done exactly as he said. At some point, likely between 1928 and 1932, he would have started a very different World War II, probably after fomenting one too many Communist uprisings overseas and pissing someone off too much, or simply by outright invading someone in the name of holy Communism.
I’ve already written about what I think might have happened, and it would have dramatically changed the historical perception of a very famous world leader, and not Trotsky. There was one leader of a Great Power state who fully expected the doctrine of Permanent Revolution to lead to an early World War II—Benito Mussolini. He had rearmed Italy with updated WW1 ordnance and equipment in the 1920s, planning to lead the struggle against a Trotskyite Soviet Union. Imagine, if you will, the alternative history scenario of the bombastic Benito Mussolini, the sage who was the only man to realize the danger to Western Civilization, and its defender from Communist tyranny!
Make Trotsky win the power struggle, and Mussolini is a hero and Churchill is a footnote to history.
It very well could have happened…
Trotsky in exileOriana:
If Trotsky had become the head of the Soviet Union, there would have been WW2? That's a giant, staggering assertion. Of course there can never be evidence. Still, it's plausible that there would have been global consequences -- but still ruthless murder within the USSR.
*
SOME OF STALIN’S VICTIMS CONTINUED TO WORSHIP STALIN
Sgt. Carey Mahoney:
~ It is hard to explain, but my grandma, who spent 17 years in GULAG and whose husband was executed in purges, came back from the camp as committed Stalinist as she ever was. Later I learned that it was very common — communists who served time in GULAG mostly came back as committed Bolsheviks as they come.
The wife of the Stalin’s deputy Molotov, Polina Molotova-Zhemchuzhina, was arrested for treason in December 1948, consequently being forced into an unwanted divorce from Μolotov. She was convicted and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. After the death of Stalin in March 1953, she was released from captivity by L. Beria and reunited with her husband. Her first question upon her release was "How's Stalin?" Upon being told he had died only days before, she fainted.
Later, the term “Stockholm Syndrome” was invented. Maybe that’s what it was? Who knows? There’s nobody alive to ask.
Jiri Novacek:
Those people see their personal suffering as necessary sacrifice for the “better future” and “greater good”, they see it as part of the required effort and struggle to establish communism, the paradise, the dreamworld.
Thomas Canfield:
It may be due to the Great Man Syndrome, a mentality that the leader can do no wrong. This was prevalent during the years of monarchy. When Stalin came in, he set up himself as a czar figure, and by eliminating all possible rivals he could present an image of perfection. The members of the first great purge blamed Yezhov but not Stalin. The later purges were blamed on Beria. Stalin was supposed to be working for the good of the country and may have been too busy to see the abuses in the system. Someone once pointed out that the last thoughts of a Stalinist in front of a firing squad were likely, “What can the Great Man be thinking?”
Stanley Lieberman:
Polina Molotova was arrested and sent to prison for a very simple reason: as a Jew, she became very friendly with a then-Israeli ambassador to Moscow — Golda Meir.
Benzion Inditsky:
My uncle, later math professor, was a young communist head of students in Moscow university and arrested in 1937. He was released in 1955 and violently opposed anti-Stalin reforms in 1956.
My father hated this and asked him: but you were 20 years in gulag!!!
I was the only righteous one. Others were true enemies.
Philip Greisman:
Some Chinese who were executed during the Cultural Revolution cried out ‘Long Live Mao Tse Tung’ before dying. Many believed it was not Mao’s fault, but the cadres working under him.
Barmi Aron:
One possible explanation I heard a long time ago is that people simply did not want to believe that Stalin knew anything about their (or their family members’, friends, acquaintances, or anyone’s) sad plight in those times. They were absolutely sure that Comrade Stalin was infinitely good and benevolent, so much so that it seemed perfectly rational to them to suppose that it must be inconceivable, impossible that he knew about anything bad happening to his compatriots and yet did not try to stop it immediately and for good. Rather, they concluded that it must be the case that his advisors, the members of his innermost circle carefully concealed these things from him.
Joseph Jakobs:
Everyone justifying the GULAG should imagine him/her-self falsely accused and thrown in jail. Be well.
Shadow Cobra:
Go read the Gulag archipelago: it explains in great detail what went on in those camps. I'm a good way through it and it's horrifying. And yes even after all that many came out indoctrinated because of course there was indoctrination in the camps.
Revetastogne:
Why not? They all were using a very basic human instincts:
Desire to be free of the burden of free will and obey to a strong authority
Desire for unlimited brutal power over other human beings
Dream about higher destiny and supernatural sense of life (religious fanaticism=communist fanaticism)
Primitive Neanderthal sense of justice through equalizing of everyone and robbing of those who are more wealthy.
All those motives are present in every society, in every group (and a little bit in every personality, including myself). But the responsible societies establish a social systems which limit and control these destructive motives, while communist regimes, on the contrary, encourage and impose these motives. As a result, they gain a lot of support from the corrupted people, and corrupt those who are not so firm. And they kill those who resist corruption.
In short, communism turns a person into a well-fed battle slave, and for many, many people it is a very attractive life.
Pieter Steenkamp:
Cynics may argue that Stalin only acted the preserve his own power but what he and Lenin did was actually revolutionary; genocide as per Nazi ideology was by no means a new idea or practice.
Ozan Simiçiler:
Stalin also applied collective punishment for various peoples. Like deportation of Chechens, Karachay/Balkars, Tatars. Just before his death, he was arranging a mass deportation of Jews to Siberia.
Claudia Cotter:
Until the late 40’s Stalin was actually very good to the Jews and had Kaganovich and Litvinov as proof. Vitally Grossman was another. Synagogues were not touched under him nor rabbis executed like the Orthodox Church and its priests. Then the war ended and he found another group to go after. It was the Jews he had basically left alone.
John Munro:
Actually Stalin seemed to have a major hatred for Poles and Ukrainians and it was based on some ethnic/national hatred. He could be pretty racist and was almost certainly working up to some anti-Semitic purges just before he died.
Den Valdron:
They were all bags of shit.
It’s like talking about pedophiles.
“This guy, sure he kidnapped thirty children, and raped and murdered them and buried the bodies in his basement. On the other hand, he was President of the Local Community Improvement Association, he got us the swimming pool, pioneered the charity toy drive, and talked me through my marriage breakdown. So yeah, he did good and bad things. People have to be fair when they judge.”
Hundreds of thousands and millions of dead, tortured, imprisoned, looted. Cities flattened, nations laid waste, the world burned.
But hey, Hitler created the Autobahn, so he wasn’t all bad. You got to take into account the good as well as the bad.
Stalin saved the USSR and the world from Hitler… After he proved himself to be a genocidal monster first, after he got in bed with Hitler for Molotov-Ribbentrop, after he partnered in the rape of Poland and invaded Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland, after he ignored evidence of Hitler’s plans and bungled Barbarossa and screwed up everything he touched. F*** Stalin.
Lee Anderson:
Pol Pot believed in pursuing the pure essence of Marxism. Pure communism, not compromises like Lenin or Stalin or especially Vietnam. If this meant murdering millions, so be it, if the dozen or so remaining were pure.
T Michael Lucas:
We used to understand that objective truth was a thing and that logic was universal. Marx came up with the idea that it was class based.
Reality Duke:
I think we should be asking why authoritarian leaders and systems are revered. Mass murder is not a communist phenomenon.
*
WHO WAS THE WORST COMMUNIST LEADER: STALIN, MAO, KIM IL-SUM, OR POL POT?
If you look at pictures of people living under the Khmer Rouge, you’ll notice one thing:
None of them have anything other than a neutral expression.
Under Pol Pot, if you smiled, you were “remembering your bourgeois past”. If you showed sadness, you were “dissatisfied with the proletariat present”. Both are capital offenses.
As a result, the Khmer Rouge was an entire country of deadpans for 13 years, during which millions of people were executed. You often hear that Pol Pot was Mao’s protege but in this case, the student has truly exceeded the master by over a thousandfold.
Pol Pot wins this race, undoubtedly. ~ C.Z., Quora
Mary:
The great mass murderers of Revolution all had certain basic things in common. Stalin, Mao, PolPot, and likely Trotsky if things had worked out better for him, were all not only ready to "sacrifice/eliminate" millions to see the idea of revolution realized in their particular states, they probably thought it was necessary.
Marx's theories were developed for systems already capitalist, with actual large working classes in industrial societies. Russia, China, Cambodia...the masses were not industrial working class, but farmers and peasants in societies with scarce industrial development. Those masses had to be forced into the template set for Revolution, bent into something that might approximate the position of a working class in an industrial society.
This wasn't an easy fix. Peasants are not Marx's Proletariat. The old rules, the old expectations, obligations and rewards had to be eliminated and new ones put in place. This led to all kind of mayhem, including wiping the slate with programs of mass murder. The craziness involved wild and painful campaigns full of "five year plans" and "great leaps forward." Revolutionary leaders and ideologues dedicated to the realization of that perfect communist ideal pursued it with the rabid ferocity of religious fundamentalists. It was worth all the violence it might take to achieve.
So much of this looks like religious mania, with its prayers and precepts, saints and martyrs, and of course, holy wars. The dedicated revolutionary insists on purity of thought and purpose, has the means to punish or eliminate the fallen and apostate from its ranks, and certainly from any position of power. Prisons, gulags, mountains of skulls, famines, campaigns to find and eliminate enemies....all tools of the state. None of this should surprise us. We've seen it before, in other revolutions, that rise to overturn and transform, followed by the devolution into murder and execution by the new revolutionary leaders.
Oriana:
The analogy between Marxism and authoritarian religion definitely works. Communism as an altruistic ideal is basically Christianity pushed to an extreme. This can actually work in a monastery! — especially if the monastery is financially endowed.
But the failure of Marxist regimes is not to due to the differences between workers and peasants. I don’t think it mattered that Soviet-style socialism started in countries which were agrarian rather than industrial — unless in the sense that the poorer the country, the easier it is to subjugate by an despotic government. I keep coming across this argument — the claim that Marx was right, and if only it happened to be industrial workers they would make the experiment work. Anything to whitewash Marx (and even Stalin). Marx was wrong in pretty much everything he said, except his critique of boom-bust cycles in capitalism.
While capitalism must be regulated to protect the workers and consumers, we have plenty of examples of successful capitalist countries with all kinds of “socialist” benefits, e.g. universal health care and paid maternity leave, free public education (in most European countries, this includes college), some form of retirement income, and more. The US is behind on some of these fronts, and it’s indeed very sad to see the word “socialism” used by the right wing to as a scare tactic.
In countries where socialism was taken to mean no private ownership of the means of production, i.e. you can’t have even small private enterprise, the failure of that idea took on a horrific form. Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and now, still, North Korea, are examples of the amount of terror it takes to impose a wrong-headed ideology on millions of people.
The thing to ponder is that in spite of the dictatorship China and Vietnam returned to capitalism, and began to thrive. Russia would by now thrive as well, but corruption (begun during the Soviet era, but apparently never as bad as now) has resulted in looting. Putin is basically the Thief-in-Chief.
At this point it seems clear: neither "pure" capitalism nor "pure" socialism can work. There needs to be a balance between wealth-producing capitalism and good social services. That's sometimes called a "mixed economy." I prefer the term "regulated capitalism" -- meaning there is a good social-safety net.
*
MULTIPLE STRESS-RELATED AILMENTS AND INCOME INEQUALITY
~ Stress is a strangely diffuse concept that everybody thinks they understand. The word stress is used loosely to cover a broad array of feelings, perceptions, circumstances, and physiological reactions. What any one of us deems stressful is influenced by our individual personalities and life histories, and is also partially a matter of how the social groups we are part of define stress.
For example, the stress of juggling the demands and deadlines of one’s professional job—whether an accountant or a zoologist—with the needs and expectations of one’s children is qualitatively different from the stress of being a soldier on a battlefield. But upper- middle- class working parents who perform that juggling act every day identify their constellation of personal and professional responsibilities as stressful, and they understand one another when they call this “stress.”
The stress of being “crazy busy” like those parents, within the context of having many options and resources, is also different from the stress experienced by parents working multiple minimum-wage jobs while battling with their landlords to fix the heat in their apartments and sending their children off to under-resourced, physically toxic school environments. And it is different from the stress a bereaved Erica Garner described experiencing as she felt compelled to take on the mantle of a leader in the struggle to end police brutality.
How much of a toll such experiences of stress take on the body, both in the short and long term, and how they cause weathering, is the focus here. But this chronic physiological stress is very different from stress in the age-washing perspective, which views it as something largely within our control, if only we learn how to handle it.
Part of the age-washing narrative is about stress. We are told that the key to a long life is not just to make the right lifestyle choices—to eat well, move more, and get a good night’s sleep—but to stress less, and have a positive attitude. In a 2013 article on a site called the Guardian Liberty Voice, a reporter presented the statistical findings that stress in a woman’s thirties is associated with Alzheimer’s disease in her later years. So the prescription for avoiding Alzheimer’s, she writes, is to “place your demons in a box, embrace your midlife crisis with a smile and high heels, and try to make amends with stress, for the less he visits you, the better.”
Challenges, setbacks, and tragedies may be nonnegotiable parts of life, we are told, but how we face them is within our control. “The toll stress takes, research has shown, depends on how it is viewed,” says the issue of Time magazine with the potentially 142-year-old baby on the cover. “The 70‐year- old will always be 10 years older than the 60‐year- old. But if you’re talking about how many years both of those people have remaining, put your money on a happy, active 70 over a cynical, sedentary 60.”
Based on this description, we would certainly put our money on Kate’s longevity. Yet, how representative is she of the baby boom cohort? My research shows that many baby boomers died or became disabled by age 50. They didn’t get to experience old age, let alone redefine it.
So how well would Kate’s decision to “worry less,” and the Guardian Liberty Voice’s advice to put your demons in a box, smile, and make amends with stress, serve Beverly, a Black woman living in a Yonkers, New York, housing project who has experienced lifelong poverty and long bouts of unemployment? A New York Times Magazine article that profiled her as she, too, was approaching 50, paints quite a different picture of what middle age looks like.
According to journalist Helen Epstein, Beverly had asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, gout and an enlarged heart, and her blood has a dangerous tendency to clot spontaneously. She is 48, and she had her first heart attack in her late 20s. One of her brothers died of heart failure at 50, and another died of kidney failure at 45, as did a sister who was 35. A young cousin recently died of cancer. In the past three years, at least 11 young people she knows have died, most of them not from gunshot wounds or drug overdoses, but from disease.
Do we really believe a positive attitude or the decision to become more adventurous and learn West African dance would cure—or prevent—what ails Beverly? Being sick with such a litany of ailments is not unusual for low-income Black women. In a nationwide analysis, my colleagues and I found that 60 percent of all working- and reproductive-age Black American women suffer four or more stress-mediated chronic diseases by age 50.
In her ethnographic study on welfare, children, and poor families in three cities, the sociologist Linda Burton found that 60 percent of the primary caregivers in the study suffered multiple morbidities, despite the fact that the vast majority of them were younger than 39 years old.
For example, Barbara, age 37, suffered from a range of chronic health conditions that included diabetes, back injuries, kidney problems, high cholesterol, migraines, hernias, depression, and anxiety. Thirty-two-year-old Amanda had Sjögren’s syndrome (an autoimmune disease), severe dental and gum disease, arthritis, acid reflux, and hypertension. Francine, age 30, had stomach cancer. Even 23-year- old Hazel had gastric ulcers, asthma, liver disease, emphysema, dental and gum disease, and diverticulitis, and was clinically depressed.
The mothers of many of these women were sick enough to require care. Many of the grandmothers had already died by their early fifties of cardiovascular disease, strokes, or cancer. This was an additional source of distress for their adult daughters as well as a window into their own futures.
One 19- year- old who lived in the same Yonkers neighborhood as Beverly reportedly lost so many loved ones to disease and accidents that whenever she thought about it, she was stricken with panic. “My heart beats so fast, and I can’t breathe, and there’s just death going through my mind the whole time.”
And in the three-cities study, Burton and colleagues found that in the most distressing of circumstances, cycles began to appear between parent and child, in which the chronic conditions of one exacerbated the conditions of the other. Fiona, whose 10- year- old son was diagnosed with depression, said: “He’s depressed and worried about my problems and I feel guilty that he has taken my problems to heart.”
The idea of living to age 95 or 100 must seem mythical to these women; and their male counterparts have even shorter life expectancies, on average. Not that there are no “old old” (over age 85) people in the communities I’ve studied, whether in Central Harlem, Eastside Detroit, the South Side of Chicago, or the Watts area of Los Angeles—they’re just comparatively rare.
So which children in high- poverty urban or rural areas can expect to make it to age 85, 95, or even 100? My research shows that prior to the pandemic a 16-year-old Black girl in Eastside Detroit had a 29 percent chance of living to age 85; for a boy in the same circumstances, the likelihood dropped to 9 percent. For whites in high-poverty areas of Detroit, the odds were nearly as bad, with 30 percent of girls and 12 percent of boys likely to make it to 85. Poor whites in Appalachian Kentucky fared a bit better than their urban counterparts, with 36 percent of girls and 16 percent of boys expected to live to 85, but these figures are still far below nationwide averages.
For kids in any of these areas, even reaching retirement age—65—is an achievement. In Watts at the dawn of the twenty- first century, fewer than one out of two 16-year-old Black boys and two out of three 16-year old Black girls could expect to survive through middle age. To put this into perspective: The average national odds of reaching age 65 are four out of five for 16-year-old boys and eight out of nine for sixteen-year-old girls.
If these grim statistics conjure up tabloid images of homicide deaths or drug overdoses, think again. Almost 50 percent of all early deaths among Black residents of the South Side of Chicago could be attributed to circulatory disease or cancer. Only 6 percent of early deaths among women and 14 percent among men were lost to homicide. That said, homicide is a significant cause of death for Black males aged 15 to 24 on Chicago’s South Side. But, importantly, the largest disparities in mortality between white and Black people, and between the poor and non-poor, occur not among youth, but among those ages 25 through 65.
We also found that Black residents of disinvested high-poverty neighborhoods who did survive to middle or old age—poor and middle- class alike—were more likely to have health-induced disabilities than white individuals across the nation who survived to the same ages. In fact, the differences between these groups in terms of healthy life expectancy—defined as the number of years of life lived without any health-induced disabilities—were huge. In one study, we found that 28 years of healthy life expectancy separated Black teenage boys living in high-poverty areas from white teenage girls living in more affluent areas.
Among Black people in high-poverty areas of Chicago, the proportion of people who were likely to survive to age 50 without a health-induced disability was only 50 percent. For whites in Appalachian Kentucky, the proportion was similarly small. As some of these statistics show, weathering is not all Black versus white.
While I focus on specific racial populations in this book—Black Americans in particular—it is essential we remember that weathering is a universally human physiological process. It just occurs more to members of oppressed and exploited social identity groups, who are often subjected to severe conditions of material hardship, toxic environments, social and cultural disruption, mis‐recognition, or erasure, and need to engage in high-effort coping to survive day‐to‐day.
Indeed, since the 1990s, life expectancy has stagnated among the least-educated white Americans while continuing to grow to varying degrees for other groups, including low-socioeconomic- status whites in other Western nations. The most widely publicized interpretation of excess deaths among less-educated US white people is an increase in opioid overdoses, a cause that allows the age- washed perspective to consider their deaths preventable exceptions.
But, horrific as the scourge of opioids has been, it is not the main cause of premature death in less-educated white people—just as homicide and drug overdoses are not the main cause of premature death in the inner city, despite what the tabloids would have us believe.
Excess deaths of poor and working-class whites occur, in the main, as a result of chronic circulatory disease and cancer—diseases that are mediated by our stress response. And I don’t mean the kind of response where we meet the stresses of our daily life with a smile and a deep breathing routine, but rather physiological stress responses that are activated automatically.
Stress in the context of weathering refers to underlying and automatic biological processes that respond to lived experience. In the right measure and circumstances, these processes are protective and health-promoting. But when such responses are excessive and prolonged, they can cause damage. And since these physiological stress responses are indeed automatic, set in motion spontaneously by our bodies in response to various stimuli, they are not under our conscious control. ~ Arline Geronimus, Weathering
Mary:
Mary:
The idea of "weathering" and its evidence is a powerful demonstration that poverty kills. In the face of these stories, the histories of chronic illness and early death, generation after generation, the advice to "reduce your stress" can only come from a position of privilege. The condition of poverty itself confines you and keeps you in a kind of prison of continual and unrelenting stress.
You don't have the time or space or leisure for Tai Chi when you work several low paying jobs and have a family to care for. Worry is constant. The threat of disaster is constant. Even your best and most hard-working efforts can be subverted in a flash ...an accident, an unexpected injury or illness, there is no cushion to absorb these threats. Your house can collapse without much warning and without mercy. Even the "bad habits" that threaten your health can be part of the situation of poverty. All your pleasures may be small and guilty... may even be attempts to counter stress and anxiety...like smoking and drinking and an unhealthy diet, part of the culture and environment of poverty.
The statistics speak volumes, volumes of tragedy that can follow generations. The facts presented are shocking, because we are so used to thinking of individuals separate from their social conditions — thinking that an individual can escape poverty with determination and hard work, that we are ultimately responsible for our health if we care enough to do all the right things. The opportunity to do all those Right Things is simply not available to those living in poverty, those in situations it makes us uncomfortable to see.
Oriana:
There is indeed much room for improvement when it comes to the so-called Social Safety Net as it’s practiced in the U.S. There are Catch-22 situations, e.g. can’t make money above a certain amount or you won’t qualify for medical benefits — but the relatively decent-paying job you’ve finally landed still doesn’t pay enough to enable you to get a good medical insurance. You can’t afford a car, but without a car you can’t get to the place of employment, and there is no good public transportation. These are gigantic problems.
Also, what about the homeless? The state of Utah seems to have managed (in the main; there is no ideal solution because problems such as addiction and mental illness are so overwhelming). But the state of Utah was seriously dedicated to the goal of eliminating homelessness. It actively provided affordable housing, using the slogan “Housing first, services later.” Services include drug and alcohol treatment. Reading about the program, I got the impression that the homeless were treated with unconditional dignity — they didn’t have to prove they were alcohol-and-drug free in order to qualify for housing. Shelter was regarded as a human right.
There are many services for the poor — some run by the state, others by religious charities. There are 12-step programs. Once in a while you see a dysfunctional family where one sibling manages to escape the generational curse (I’ve personally witnessed that); factors behind that child’s success should definitely be studied. All this takes not just money but genuine dedication. It’s dedication that’s probably the limiting factor (but then we are lucky that anyone even wants to be a social worker).
As for the cost of not doing anything, this article provides ample illustration. Early-onset chronic illness causes not only all kinds of misery; it is also expensive for society. It’s a lose-lose game. Perhaps more clarity about values would be one of the first steps toward changing attitudes.
*
Life is short, and we have but a brief time in which to explore, to learn, to experience, and to create. Let us make the most of that time, and let us burn brightly, like meteors across the night sky, leaving behind us a trail of light and inspiration for those who come after us. ~ Jack London
*
“HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE” — PEOPLE WHO WERE ABUSED LATER TEND TO ABUSE OTHERS
Abusers abuse others because of lack of emotional control as well as impulse control.
Abuse victims feel anger at the loss of control.
Abuse victims were overpowered by the abuser.
Abusers that were abused now need to feel powerful.
The unfortunate part of abuse?
That most abusers are not held accountable for their abuse!
Why do abused people abuse others?
The abusers can get away with abusing others!
The abusers suffer from uncontrollable rage.
The abusers suffer from narcissistic personality disorder.
Abusers don't have a conscience.
Empaths Do!!
~ Oliver Sacks (?? I’m not sure if this is an accurate attribution)
*
“…a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, 'Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?' to which Beckett answered, 'I wouldn’t go as far as that.’”
*
MISHA IOSSEL ON THE LIKELY CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE
~ There are some historical mistakes of such magnitude that they cannot be corrected or reversed in hindsight.
In the easily foreseeable immediate future, it probably is going to become impossible for most people to leave Russia. The majority of able-bodied men will be rounded up and forced to go and kill and be killed in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian people will have to die for Russia's putrid fantasy of imperial glory, before this senseless war is over and Russia, comprehensively defeated, is defanged and deprived of any future possibility of threatening its neighbors and the rest of the world.
Most people in Russia, thoroughly brainwashed, either still support this insane war or prefer not to think about it at all, as though it were happening in some other, distant part of the world. But there are still tens of millions of people there — 25-30%? more? — who are starkly and staunchly opposed to it. There is nothing they can do stop it, and they cannot overthrow Putin's regime, for they would be liable to be thrown in jail just for an incautious public statement against it, but they are there, cooped up inside that giant cage of a mortally wounded, dying fascist state. Those people have my sympathy.
Some Russian immigrants in the West, comfortable in the safety of their enviable life circumstances, have fallen into the habit of berating and chiding and lecturing those anti-war people in Russia, suggesting they should be doing more, doing nothing else but think about the war constantly, all the time, depriving themselves of any ordinary activities that give one pleasure in life (theater, museums, lectures, et al.) and do nothing but protest against the war instead, organizing, marching, chanting... My message to those unbidden immigrant scolds, if they were to hear it, would be this: what you are dong is wrong. You haven't earned the right to lecture those less fortunate than you. It is unseemly and immoral. Please just stop.
***
"The law provides for electronic military summonses with bans on draftees leaving the country, making it possible to quietly sweep up thousands more men to fight — even as the Kremlin is denying plans for a controversial new mobilization.”
Taras Roik:
Let them continue to believe that their government cares about their soldiers. There is no need to show them satellite images of Russian cemeteries. There is no need to show them videos from drones on which Russian soldiers kill Russian wounded. They don't need to know that Prigozhin made a video where he showed the Russian losses per day in one city:
Russian dead in Ukraine
Oriana:
You may be wondering who stripped some of the bodies. The most probable answer is the surviving Russian soldiers. A Ukrainian would not want/dare to put on Russian military garb.
MORE FROM MISHA:
*
WHAT LESSONS DID WE LEARN FROM THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION?
~ Reflecting on it from my perspective as an American who had grown up in the 60's and 70's and reached adulthood on the early 80's, I still regard it as the most seminal and unforgettable global historical event of my time.
Indeed, looking back almost 35 years ago to the collapse, I am reminded of something a beloved mentor, an undergrad speech communication professor and debate team coach, reiterated time and again: that “things are not always as they seem.”
How spot-on that observation has proven to be!
I recall as recently as the 70's commentators and other public intellectual placing the Soviet Union in the seat that was subsequently occupied by Japan throughout most of the 1990's and China in the present day: as the economic behemoth that soon would overtake and supplant the West.
That never happened, of course, and what we learned after the Soviet Union's collapse confirmed many of the arguments that diehard anti-communists had posited for decades: namely, that the Soviet Union was far removed from the narrative, the generally sympathetic one, that some on the left had created.
Even in the 1970's a full generation after Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes, a few leftists still asseverated that the Soviet Union, despite a few palpable shortcomings, embodied a few attributes that the United States, in particular, lacked, such as unimpeded access to health care, full employment and a decent standard living guaranteed for all.
What we discovered in the years following the collapse was a society predicated on a fallacy that was nonetheless spun into an endearing narrative by a multi-generational parade of leftist intellectuals who had been duped and, frankly, that are still being duped, by a version of the Marxist narrative.
Even so, the notion of riding the crest of some irrepressible historical tide is alluring to many Western progressives, and the image of a social order enlisting the tools of the 18th century Enlightenment to transform a feudal society hampered by religious superstition, notably a Christian one, into a literate, technological behemoth simply proved irresistible.
Yet, what was so remarkable to me in the end was how closely the real Soviet Union resembled the most plaintive warnings of its most implacable critics, including a number of defectors.
Looking back across the veil of time why was any of this surprising? The Soviet experiment was envisioned only as a sideshow in the first place, even by its instigators — a catalyst that would inspire Western European revolutionaries to take to the streets and ultimately to tip the scale toward a global workers’ revolution.
Indeed, while serving to underscore my old prof's warning about illusion, the Soviet Union also ended up serving up quite a bit of irony. Following the failed revolutions in Europe, the Soviet Union soldiered on under the banner of “socialism in one country,” striving, despite its neo-feudal underpinnings, to present itself as a beacon of the bright socialist future. Yet, to the very end it remained essentially a developing Third World country whose leaders had employed appallingly inhumane methods to choreograph the illusion of sweeping scientific and technological progress across a few highly visible fronts, notably nuclear arms and space exploration. For a time, this left the West quaking in fear.
And all the while, many Soviet citizens lacked access to many of the basic consumer amenities taken for granted in the West. ~ Jim Langcuster, Quora
Rob Ford:
All true, but it's also understandable that lefties were looking for a champion, with capitalism creating very unequal societies. Unfortunately, as you point out, the Soviet Union was far from being worthy of being their champion. But originally it was imagined by Marx as a more equal society. It's just a pity that the Soviet experiment suggests how hard it is to create a just, equal and humane society, human nature being what it is.
Dima Vorobiev:
From the long observation of news reports, this is the wisdom Putin has learned from the collapse of USSR:
Never ever try penny-pinching on the military and police, before you’ve shaved the budgets on everything else.
Do not fix things that work. Reforms is something you don’t do before you hear shooting going on inside the Garden Ring. Reforms make people suppose there is something wrong about you ruling the country. Worse, reforms tip the balance, rock the boat and piss off your power base.
Make sure the military and the secret police do not make friends with each other. Heck, make sure even the departments within the secret police are at each other’s throats.
Have a lot of other well-armed bodies in the capital, or close to it, in case the siloviki
go to bed with each other anyway.
Never run out of cash. USD 100 billion (6 month imports), untouched, is your lifeline. Otherwise, you find yourself handing Crimea to the West, or mortgaging Baikal to China, in order to get out of the hole. Loans are murder.
Never admit you did something wrong to the country. This is weakness, and the weak gets eaten, always.
Have a firm grip on the media at all times. The nation must know in detail that when things go bad in Russia, it’s always the dark foreign forces who do that to us.
If you run out of money, before you pull your troops out of somewhere in Europe or Middle East, take a deep breath. Put your finger on the Red button for everyone to see. Maybe they blink and give you money. You’ll be remembered as a hero who saved the world on the brink of nuclear war.
Soviet poster showing dedicated workers. The sign at the top says, "We shall fulfill the Party's task."
*
HITLER AND STALIN: FROM ALLIES TO MORTAL ENEMIES
~ Stalin actually brought Hitler to power by splitting the anti-Nazi forces within Germany prior to 1933. There was to be no popular front opposing Nazism, because Social Democrats were designated as the “Class Enemy” and Communists were forbidden to work with them. Why did Stalin order this? Because he wanted to foment a war between Germany and the Western allies, that he thought would end in an exhausted stalemate, with the Red Army poised to tip the scales whichever way would be to the benefit of global Communism; in a policy of more ruthless and intelligent Trotskyism. The goal was always world-wide Revolution and damn the casualties.
Russian support of pre-1933 Germany was colossal, from secret military bases (Lipetsk for Panzer and Luftwaffe trials, etc.) to nickel, manganese, chromium, grain and nitrates. British troops with their backs to the sea on the Dunkirk beaches, faced shells and bullets clad with Russian nickel, and bombs filled with Russian nitrates and perchlorates. Stalin brought Hitler to power, miscalculated the rapidity with which Blitzkrieg tactics would eliminated France, and was rewarded with Barbarossa and a score or so million dead. ~ Kim Cornish, Quora
Dmitry Floridskiy
Military science stipulates that number of casualties is usually 3:1 for attacking and defending sides respectively. While Nazis were the attackers their total loss count is about 10 million solders while the Soviets lost up to 30 million on the battlefields and another 15-20 to deprivation and destruction. Everybody in the USSR knew (but kept their mouths shut) that Stalin won the war by drowning Germans in the blood of his own citizens.
[Oriana: The number of Soviet casualties seems to vary widely depending on the source.]
Boyd Grandy:
The victims were the millions of dead Russian boys who were sent to soak up Nazi bullets because Joe had gutted his military leadership via purge in the 30s.
Stalin left no one alive that knew he’d fled to his country dacha [during the Battle of Moscow]. The man of steel was desperate to hide his cowardice, and he was indeed a murderous coward.
Les Lopinot:
A brutal monster like Stalin would of course be willing to sacrifice thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand lives to preserve himself. He, a Georgian, was much less interested in saving Mother Russia than in saving himself and his autocracy. He paid the price of bargaining with (and underestimating) his counterpart, Hitler. He set up the Soviet Union for grand failure with his paranoid, homicidal purge of the military in the years preceding Operation Barbarossa. Under-trained, under-armed, poorly led troops were pushed into the front lines and used like so much cannon fodder against the Wehrmacht. That so many would cut and run from the onslaught is a testament to Stalin’s leadership failures and delinquencies. Order 227 [establishing the “barrier troops” order to shoot any soldiers attempting to retreat] presented a simple calculus to retreating soldiers: Sure Death if they retreated at the hands of Stalin’s enforcers or Probable Death if they stood and fought the Germans.
Azamat Kardanov:
This political officer was killed in the same battle. The photo was taken a few moments before his death.
This is the same "evil commissar" who conducts political propaganda, and in any Hollywood movie walks in a leather jacket from behind and shoots his soldiers in the back.
Only this is not Hollywood propaganda — this is reality. A political officer is responsible for the morale of soldiers, so that they know what they are fighting and dying for. And he can't sit in the rear — he has to be in front, with his fighters, to lead them forward. It is the political commissar who gets up first and goes on the attack, ahead of the soldiers. And dies first — but fulfills the task.
Marcel Svitalsky:
I remember memories of a German soldier from 1942 I’ve read years ago, words like “wave after wave came against us […] barrels of our machine guns were terribly overheated…” Damn Stalin!
Boris Ivanov:
We had a problem with artillery shells at the time. Too many war factories were lost in the first months of the war. And artillery was the real king of WWII. It was hard to fight against the artillery dominance and without enough artillery of our own. It got better when our military production got better.
Julian Osterhaus:
Revisionists from Putin’s world pretending to know what happened! The few old men still alive from the Patriotic War will tell a different tale. Of machine gun nests killing thousands of young farm boys who had to share rifles and had almost no ammunition. Stalin was a monster and his order was psychotic.
Bob Krohn:
How can anyone defend Stalin? One of, if not the worst, savage, brutal, heartless murderous man in all history. He murdered tens of millions of his own citizens before the war. He was allied with the Nazis in attacking other Eastern European countries. He wasn’t fighting to protect Soviet citizens, he was having millions die to protect HIMSELF. Large numbers of Soviets volunteered to join the Germans in hopes of ridding themselves of Russians.
I live in the US. One of my neighbors was born in Kiev and was a young adult when the German Army occupied that region. As the tide of war changed and the Germans left, her family was able to escape too. They made their way to Germany and after the end of the war to the US. She once told me “thank God for Adolf Hitler”. Shocked, I asked how she could say such a thing. She replied “If it hadn’t been for him I never could have escaped Russian Communism and made it to the bastion of freedom and liberty… the United States.” I understood what she meant. In that regard I can also thank Hitler for killing off so many Russians and keeping them from overrunning all of Europe. Stalin and the Russian Communists are a dark stain in World History.
Carlos Villoria:
The first catastrophic disasters of the Red Army at the beginning of Barbarossa where caused by Stalin's incompetence. Even so I don’t say he was a coward… much worse he was a monster, specially skilled in assassinating his own people.
Stuart Jarman:
You also have to bear in mind that the Red Army of WWII had no Military Police branch at all. There was a traffic control department, but security functions were handled by the NKVD ‘internal troops’. The blocking detachments [aka “barrier troops”] were simply personnel from the normal divisions that were detailed to perform a task that was done by the MP companies in other armies.
Chaim Magal:
My grandfather was a military medic and was killed in that war. My father volunteered at the age of 16 and was lucky to return home, but badly damaged both physically and mentally. He only lived for 20 years after the war, he died at the age of 41. Both fought in Red Army. As for the contribution of the allied nations, even Stalin and Zhukov themselves admitted that without it Soviet Union would not be able to win. It’s very sad that the humongous loss of life is seen in Russia as a source of pride and not a reason to get mad with those who let it happen!
Doug Voss:
Between Stalin and the commissars, that must have increased fear exponentially in some troops that were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The Soviet Union was fighting a determined Nazi war machine that wanted Stalingrad real bad. Between Order 227, and Stalin's keeping Russians in Stalingrad, the Soviet Union’s troops outlasted the Nazis. Also, can’t forget Marshal Zhukov’s leadership. Everything worked, but at the cost of about 27 million Soviet Union citizens, 9.5 million were Soviet troops, which was the highest casualty numbers of any nation in WWII by far.
Zhukov’s tactics are studied in the US as well. The Soviet Union Doctrine was to overwhelm the enemy with men and war machines. Keep at the enemy’s armies, and outlast them if they dare come onto Soviet Union soil. I’m not a fan of Stalin, since his ethnic cleansing decimated the Soviet Union’s populations, and let us not forget Lenin’s ethnic cleansing either.
**
“Tracks of this tank have been stolen.” ~ Misha Firer, Quora
*
GARRY KASPAROV REMEMBERS
Garry Kasparov recounts an incident where he was invited to the White House in 1990. He met with the head of the National Security Council and the head of the Soviet Desk (Condoleeza Rice).
Of the security team, he said:
“The meeting was a great disappointment to us both. Growing up in the Soviet Union, we had this idea that the CIA, you know, they knew everything.
“They asked me what was happening in the Soviet Union. I told them what was obvious to everyone in Russia — that there were uprisings in the national republics, that the Soviet Union would not last too long. They were shocked.
“They asked about Gorbachev. I said that Gorbachev’s star was fading and that Boris Yeltsin would be elected president of the Russian Republic the next year. They said, “Yeltsin? But he’s a drunk and a loose cannon.” I said, “But you didn’t ask me about his character, you asked me about his political future.’”
~ Luke Hatherton, Quora
Oriana:
Though I can’t boast of having predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union (and I wonder if Kasparov is entirely honest about his clairvoyance), when I arrived I was surprised that ordinary Americans seemed to think the Soviet Union was a great threat to the U.S. I tried to tell them that the U.S. is many times stronger, richer, truly powerful rather than a mere façade — to no avail. No one believed me.
“Russia would never invade America,” I tried to reassure them. They didn’t believe me.
Then I realized that many Americans have never been abroad. They thought that other countries were pretty much like America. In Milwaukee, I frequently got asked how Thanksgiving was celebrated in Poland. When I explained that this was an exclusively American holiday, they were shocked. The question that followed was “And Christmas?”
Many also thought that people in various European countries normally spoke English, just with a funny accent, as in the movies. So how were they to know that American military forces were an exception, and most of the other countries in the world did not have the wealth it takes to be armed to the teeth?
*
THE LEAKED SECRET FILES
What to make of the dozens of classified US Defense Department documents — maps, charts and photographs — now circulating on the internet?
Complete with timelines and dozens of impenetrable military acronyms, the documents, some of them marked "top secret", paint a detailed picture of the war in Ukraine.
They tell of the casualties suffered on both sides, the military vulnerabilities of each and, crucially, what their relative strengths are likely to be when Ukraine decides to launch its much-anticipated spring offensive.
How real are these printed pages, unfolded and photographed, possibly on someone's dining room table? And what do they tell us, or the Kremlin, that we did not already know?
First things first: this is the biggest leak of secret American information on the war in Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion 14 months ago. Some of the documents are as much as six weeks old, but the implications are huge.
Pentagon officials are quoted as saying the documents are real.
Information on at least one of them appears to have been crudely altered in a later version, but out of a dump of as many as 100 documents, that seems a relatively minor detail.
BBC News has reviewed more than 20 of the documents. They include detailed accounts of the training and equipment being provided to Ukraine as it puts together a dozen new brigades for an offensive that could begin within weeks.
It says when the brigades will be ready and lists all the tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces that are being provided by Ukraine's Western allies.
But it notes that "equipment delivery times will impact training and readiness”.
One map includes a "mud-frozen ground timeline", assessing ground conditions across eastern Ukraine as spring progresses.
After a winter that has tested Ukraine's air defenses to the limit, there's also a sobering analysis of Kyiv's diminishing air defense capability, as it seeks to balance its limited resources to protect civilians, critical infrastructure and its frontline troops.
Ukrainian soldier in training
Not only do the leaked documents say a lot about the state of Ukraine's military — they also talk about some of Washington's other allies. From Israel to South Korea, the documents reveal internal debates those countries are having about Ukraine and other sensitive issues.
Some of the documents are marked top secret, others to be shared only with America's closest intelligence allies.
HOW MUCH OF THIS IS NEW?
A lot of the detail here is familiar. There's just a lot more of it, and it's all in one place.
Take casualty figures. It comes as little surprise to learn that the US estimates that between 189,500 and 223,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded.
The equivalent figure for Ukraine's losses — between 124,500 and 131,000 — is also in line with ballpark figures briefed to journalists in recent weeks.
In both cases, the Pentagon says it has "low confidence" in the figures, due to gaps in information, operational security and deliberate attempts, probably by both sides, to mislead.
Tellingly, this is the one place where attempts have been made to alter the documents to make it look as if Ukraine is experiencing the worst casualties.
A version which appeared on a pro-Russian Telegram site took the number of Ukrainians "killed in action" ("16k-17.5k") and put those on the Russian ledger, while flipping the numbers on the Ukrainian side so they read "61k - 71.5k”.
All of which brings us to the question of who leaked the documents, and why?
The story of how the documents found their way from the messaging platform Discord, to 4Chan and Telegram, has already been told by Aric Toler of the investigative open source intelligence group Bellingcat.
Mr Toler says it has not yet been possible to uncover the original source of the leaks, but charts their appearance on a messaging platform popular with gamers in early March. [Oriana: At this point we know about Jack Teixeira.]
On 4 March, following an argument about the war in Ukraine on a Discord server frequented by players of the computer game Minecraft, one user wrote "here, have some leaked documents", before posting 10 of them.
It is an unusual, but hardly unique form of leak.
In 2019, ahead of the UK general election, documents relating to US-UK trade relations appeared on Reddit, 4Chan and other sites.
At the time, Reddit said the unredacted documents had originated in Russia.
In another case, last year, players of the online game War Thunder repeatedly posted sensitive military documents, apparently in an effort to win arguments among themselves.
The latest leak is more sensitive, and potentially damaging.
Ukraine has zealously guarded its "operational security" and cannot be happy that such sensitive material has appeared at such a critical moment.
Ukraine's spring offensive could represent a make-or-break moment for the Zelensky government to alter dynamics on the battlefield and set conditions for peace talks later.
In Kyiv, officials have spoken about a possible disinformation campaign by Russia.
Other military bloggers have suggested the opposite: that it is all part of a Western plot to mislead Russian commanders.
Crucially, there is nothing in the documents leaked so far that points to the direction or thrust of Ukraine's counter-offensive.
The Kremlin ought to have a pretty good idea already of the scope of Ukraine's preparations (although Moscow's intelligence failures have been much in evidence throughout the war), but Kyiv needs to keep its enemy guessing about how the campaign will unfold, in order to maximize the chances of success. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65225985?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Ukrainian little girl next to her killed mother
*
A GOOD PERSON: BUT IS IT A GOOD MOVIE?
~ There are times when casting really does matter and A Good Person is an excellent example. Made with two lesser leads, this might have been no better than a Hallmark TV movie about addiction, recovery, and renewal. However, the participation of Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman, both in top form, transforms this from a middling weeper into a deeply felt meditation about the ravages of drug addiction.
At its best, A Good Person is challenging. Freeman brings elements of quiet dignity and desperation to a role that’s more nuanced than it initially seems to be. Pugh is wrenching as Allison, a woman whose future is eclipsed by a tragedy resulting from a few seconds’ ill-advised decision.
For roughly two-thirds of its running length, Zach Braff’s screenplay provides an effective backdrop for the actors. The movie’s last act (beginning with a club scene set in New York City) forces the characters to play second fiddle to the manipulations of the storyline. I understand why Braff opted for a less destructive arc for his characters – few films are equally as powerful and unwatchable as Requiem for a Dream – but the final 30 minutes of A Good Person seem like they belong to a more conventional motion picture. Still, when I think about Allison (Florence Pugh) and Daniel (Morgan Freeman), it’s with tremendous empathy – empathy that results from the alchemy of the actors’ performances and Braff’s workmanlike direction.
The movie opens with an optimistic scene set at the engagement party of Allison (Florence Pugh) and Nathan (Chinaza Uche). But that flash of happiness proves to be fleeting. While driving on the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to look at wedding dresses, Allison spends too long glancing at the traffic app on her phone. She is unable to stop in time to avoid a backhoe in a construction zone. The resulting crash leaves her badly injured and kills her passengers (Nathan’s sister and brother-in-law). She awakens in a hospital room to the news.
A year later, Allison’s life is in shambles. She has broken up with Nathan and lives with her mother, Diane (Molly Shannon). She is reliant on the oxycontin prescribed by her doctor for pain management and, when her mother flushes her remaining pills down the toilet, she demeans herself at a local bar in exchange for a hit. Meanwhile, Nathan’s orphaned niece, high school athlete Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), has understandably had trouble adjusting to a life with no father or mother.
She lives with her grandfather, ex-cop Daniel (Morgan Freeman), who is having trouble navigating the waters of being a caregiver in the 2020s. A recovering alcoholic (ten years sober) who was abusive toward Nathan as a child, Daniel is doing what he can to make amends by caring for Ryan. His form of personal therapy is an extensive basement train set that recreates the world as he wishes it was. Stress in his relationship with Ryan sends Daniel back to AA, which is where is “reunited” with Allison, who has just started. Although he blames her for the crash, he tries to put the feelings of anger and resentment behind him and help her on her personal journey of redemption.
One captivating aspect of A Good Person relates to the elaborate train set that absorbs a great deal of Daniel’s time. Building tiny worlds like this is largely a hobby of the past (alongside such other once-popular avocations as stamp and coin collecting) but it’s fascinating to get a glimpse into how sophisticated such setups could be. Although Braff uses this as a metaphor for control, it’s more arresting in its concrete form.
Although narrative aspects of A Good Person occasionally veer into areas that are either cliched or artificial, many individual scenes are effective (at times powerful). Braff has a gift for dialogue (something that endeared his debut, Garden State, to many viewers) and having his words delivered by two gifted actors elevates character interaction. Had the movie entered theaters in the October-November time period, performances like those of Pugh and Freeman (and possibly Celeste O’Connor) might have had the “Oscar-worthy” characterization appended to their names. As a March release, however, they will be long forgotten by December. That doesn’t diminish their capacity to affect an emotional response or their strength in dramatizing the rigors of addiction. ~
https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/good-person-a
A HIT-AND-MISS VEHICLE FOR TWO MAJOR STARS
~ “A Good Person,” which earned a token, desultory release from MGM, is more than its novelty of being a film that Florence Pugh made for her then writer-director beau, Zach Braff, prior to breaking up.
It’s a see-saw of emotions, tones, dull tropes mixed with novel twists, and carried along for much of its excessive run time by a couple of great performances.
If all Braff had gotten out of it was another shot at recapturing his elusive “Garden State” sensitive indie character-study-in-Jersey mojo, this might be a write-off. But writing a wonderful part for Pugh, an addict lost in pills and lost in West Orange thanks to the crippling guilt of surviving a car accident that killed her prospective in-laws, and giving the great Morgan Freeman a role that — while “cuddly,” his late career brand — has enough edge to be worthy of him makes “Scrubs” icon Braff worthy of our thanks.
Pugh plays Allison, a lively pharmaceutical saleswoman whom we meet at a gathering celebrating her engagement to Nathan (Chinaza Uche). Pounding away at the piano and singing along, she is the tipsy life of that party. Later, there’s a little something extra to take the edge off the evening.
The next day, she’s driving her future sister-and-brother-in-law (Nichelle Hines, Toby Onwumere) into “the city” to shop for wedding dresses and catch a TKTS discounted play and there’s an accident.
One year later, Allison’s unemployed, hooked on Oxy and living with her co-dependent Mom (Molly Shannon, superb). It gets so bad that she finds herself quasi-blackmailing a fellow pharma rep and hitting up a couple of lowlifes from her high school days for a fix.
“I didn’t think I was better than you,” she explains to the deadenders/street-dealers. “I knew it.”
Her self-medicating mom tries to push her in the same direction as a stickler pharmacist.
“Rehab” might be off the table for the uninsured. But 12 steps? That could be her lifeline.
Wouldn’t you know it, it’s the same AA group that her embittered, estranged, almost father-in-law (Freeman) is in. He’s been driven back towards the bottle thanks to having to raise the granddaughter (Celeste O’Connor) orphaned in Allison’s accident.
Braff has always leaned towards music he described as “sensie” pop — a tad too hip to be maudlin — and is at his best writing and telling a story about characters who fit that description in a film scored by the likes of Odessa, Cary Brothers and Angelo de Augustine tunes.
Pugh and Freeman have terrific chemistry. His sweet-spot, almost lost in years of sentimental pap, was emotional but with a scary edge. Ex-cop Daniel may philosophize and voice-over narrate this tale in model train metaphors, but we can figure out he knows the truth about the wreck and he’s never really going to forgive it.
Braff’s tendency to undercut emotion with easy laughs — a hallmark of the TV series that formed him as an actor and writer-director — works for and against “A Good Person.” The terrible cost this accident has had on granddaughter Ryan is never dismissed, but it is given its cute put-downs.
“I need a dog crate the size of a teenager,” Daniel quips. Oxy? “It’s heroin in a pretty little dress.”
There’s an entirely too abrupt “Let’s be friends” turn in the Allison/Ryan relationship. The kid knows how her parents died and who did it, after all.
And the film shows evidence of Netflix editing — that slack tendency to leave in scenes and characters who don’t advance to plot and make the pace plodding, tailor made for streaming over the course of a long, rainy afternoon.
But Pugh has never been better than she is here, utterly immersed in the character’s accent and world-shrinking despair. And Freeman lends some flint and fire and sparkle to this simple redemption tale that touches, amuses, overreaches and overstays its welcome. ~
https://rogersmovienation.com/2023/03/30/movie-review-a-good-person-a-hit-and-miss-star-vehicle-for-pugh-and-freeman/
Oriana:
A backhoe that backs out into high-speed traffic, since no lanes have been closed in the construction zone? That is highly unrealistic, but let us accept the premise: the heroine has caused an accident that took the lives of two of her passengers but merely injured her. Her physical recovery is eventually complete; her emotional pain continues, and she tries to find escape in oxycontin. Alcohol would be a more realistic choice, especially since her mother is an alcoholic (not an abusive one), and alcohol is legal and easy to get. But let’s not be too picky. Opioids are the trendy addiction, and getting a supply of oxycontin is what Allie’s life revolves around, even a year after the accident.
Morgan Freeman as Daniel is not to be missed. He plays an alcoholic Vietnam veteran and retired policeman with masterful credibility. He goes to AA meetings and typically stays sober, sadly remembering the times “when the darkness would come.” In one of those alcoholic episodes of darkness, he hit his son on the side of his head so hard that the the child lost hearing in one ear. That son is Nathan, who at the beginning of the movie is engaged to Allie. He tells her he was born deaf in one ear — but secrets have a short half-life in this movie, which throws a lot “heavy stuff” at the viewer. All the significant characters have proverbial heavy baggage.
With the exception of Allie and her mother, and one very minor character) they are also black — but nothing whatsoever is made of the racial difference. The issue simply doesn’t exist, for which the movie needs to be praised. “A Good Person” is perhaps the most “color-blind” movie I’ve ever seen. The characters are simply human, and their problems are human problems with no racial overtones. An interracial marriage is taken for granted. This may not be realistic, but it is a relief from the emphasis on race and/or gender that we often see in the media.
Only in retrospect, thinking about my favorite scene (a comic one, involving a character I've already called "very minor) I realized that the young man who is the protagonist in it had to be white — or else it would be judged as politically incorrect. The black teenage girl, Ryan (whose parents died in the accident caused by Allie’s inattention) is found in bed with a young white man. Daniel, who makes the discovery, is furious. The young man flees the house in only his underwear. A neighbor, a conservatively dressed older woman, rushes out after him, shouting, “He is a fuck boy! Get out of this neighborhood, fuck boy!” And she turns her water hose on him.
Those of us who are, ahem, not young, realize that decades ago it would have been a black actor (interracial sex was too sensitive), and very likely the N word would have been used, particularly in conjunction with “Get out of this neighborhood!” The scene would have been a racist episode, not a comic one. But the times are different now, and I think most audiences are grateful for that.
The movie has a happy ending, with redemption and reconciliation for all the characters in need of those. Allison goes into rehab, and emerges as a new person; her former fiancé seems delighted with his pretty new girlfriend; Daniel dies a natural death off-screen, but first manages to write a sweet letter to Allie and ask her to play a kind older sister figure to Ryan; Allie, moved by Daniel’s letter, seems delighted to comply. The opioid pills are long forgotten and all is well.
The contrived plot takes too long to work itself out, and there are just too many characters and details. It’s over-elaborate, like Daniel’s model train and the whole model town he builds around it (although that has a certain charm). The acting is admirable. Ultimately, however, “A Good Person” is not quite a good movie. 
*
THE CASE AGAINST PET OWNERSHIP
~ Before the cat dads and dog moms come for me, know this: I am one of you.
I’m an “animal person,” having spent half my life advocating for, and now reporting on, their welfare. I’ll always share a house with a rescued dog or cat. But Evvie’s needs, and my constant inability to meet them, have led me to question the whole endeavor of pet keeping.
As much as my partner and I lavish her with treats, walks, tug-of-war, playtime with other dogs, enrichment games, and less than legal off-leash romps in the woods outside our home in Silver Spring, Maryland, she spends much of her days with nothing to do but look out the window. We both work from home, which means there’s a fair amount of commotion and engagement to keep her stimulated. But despite that, Evvie is inevitably left to herself for much of the day — and she seems quite bored, with her extended periods of sleep followed by barking at me for attention (which she stops as soon as we play or go on a walk). And Evvie is comparatively lucky: in 2011, the average pet owner spent just about 40 minutes a day with their supposed family member.
Scientists have set up cameras to see what dogs do when home alone all day, and it turns out there’s a lot of yawning, barking, howling, whining, and sleeping — signs of anxiety and frustration. Charlotte Burn, a biologist and associate professor at the Royal Veterinary College in London, thinks our pets could also become bored when left alone for hours at a time.
“For most of us, [boredom is] a transient thing, and we can do something about it,” Burn told me. “But when you cannot do anything about it, it’s incredibly distressing. … Sometimes it’s thought of as a kind of luxury problem for animals, but actually, it may not be so luxurious if [an animal] can’t do anything about it, and it might be actually a massive welfare issue.”
Burn says there are two main animal responses to boredom. The first is drowsiness, brought on by an animal not having enough to do to stay awake, which looks to humans like staring into space, yawning, or sighing, even if the animal isn’t tired. The second is restlessness, even engaging in behaviors to help them stay awake. “They’ll try and escape their situation,” she says. “They’ll take risks, they’ll explore things even if they don’t like them, just basically to try and almost wake themselves up and make something happen.”
When we think about our pets, we naturally think about the brief time we spend with them — not their quiet, dull hours while we’re occupied with work, child care, friends, or errands while they’re cooped up. They might be excited when we come home not necessarily because they’re so delighted to see us, but because there’s finally an end to the silence that fills so much of their day.
“I think dogs are very adaptable, and become accustomed, often, to their lack of choices and autonomy,” said Alexandra Horowitz, a leading expert on dog behavior and head of the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, over email. “But I think that it’s not a good situation for them.”
Just how uneven the relationship is between pets and their human owners was demonstrated during the pandemic when, lonely and stuck at home, one in five households adopted a new pet.
As new pet owners returned to work, however, their newly lonely pets struggled with the sudden change, showing high rates of chewing, digging, barking, escaping, pacing, hiding, and indoor urination and defecation.
Our pets might not be so bored if they just had some autonomy, but having a pet means regularly denying it. If Evvie’s hungry, she can’t grab a snack from the fridge. If she wants to play with another dog, I have to schedule it, or take her to the dog park (which for some dogs can be a blast and for others, overwhelming or dangerous, with some dogs dominating others, leading to stress and injuries). If she wants to explore the great outdoors, she has to wait until I have the time to take her for a walk — and even then, she’s tethered to a pesky leash, which I gently pull whenever she does something so harmless as stray too far into a neighbor’s yard to smell something that interests her or race ahead to greet a nearby dog or human.
As good as Evvie has it compared to most pets, she’s still a dog living in a world built for humans, and that means a life of constantly thwarted desires. The ability to meet her basic needs is entirely dependent upon someone else. Pets as we own them live in our worlds, not theirs.
What about cats? Cat behaviorists say they too can get bored. Few issues in the pet community spark as much debate as to whether cats should stay indoors or be given the freedom to come and go as they please in order to meet their needs for exercise, mental stimulation, and hunting, especially when that hunting results in the mass death of wildlife. (A 2013 paper estimates that cats in the US kill 1.3 to 4 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion small mammals annually, while wind turbines are estimated to kill a few hundred thousand birds to north of a million, each year).
The estimate has been contested, but even if it’s grossly off-base, it’s still a whole lot of death that’s a direct result of humanity’s semi-domestication and breeding of a once-wild animal. It’s also another example of a complicated ethical issue in which the welfare of pets is in conflict with the welfare of other animals (like killing animals for meat to feed pets).
So if we’re keeping more pets than ever, but many of the dogs are unhealthy and bored, the cats are either bored or cute little wildlife hunters, and the pet fish and birds are cruelly confined, what do we do about it? Some leading animal welfare experts say we ought to shrink the pet population and shift pet ownership from a casual hobby to a serious responsibility.
A WORLD WITHOUT PETS — OR WITH HAPPIER PETS?
Starting in 1979, Bob Barker of The Price is Right signed off each episode with a public service announcement: “This is Bob Barker reminding you to help control the pet population — have your pets spayed or neutered.”
1979 was a different time for cats and dogs in America; by one estimate, 7.6 to 10 million of them were euthanized annually around that time. While the national pet population has grown considerably in the years since, the number of shelter cats and dogs euthanized — while still depressingly high — has fallen to an estimated 920,000 per year. There are a lot fewer strays, too. For example, in the mid-1980s New Jersey had 160,000 cats and dogs roaming the streets, which fell to 80,000 in 2014.
The dramatic reduction came about as a result of increased pet sterilization at veterinary clinics, a rise in shelters and animal welfare organizations, and PSA campaigns like Barker’s and others from animal welfare groups — such as “Adopt, don’t shop” — all contributing to a cultural shift in how we get, and treat, our pets. But while 30 to 40 percent of cats and dogs are acquired from animal shelters, many of them — especially dogs — are still the product of breeding: whether at large-scale puppy mills, in which dogs are raised and sold more like livestock than family members, or from more informal, small-scale home operations.
But what if every prospective dog and cat owner were to actually follow the “adopt, don’t shop” motto and Barker’s plea to spay or neuter their pet? It would be a Children of Men situation for domesticated pets. The pet population would rapidly shrink before virtually disappearing altogether, ushering in a world unimaginable — perhaps not even worth inhabiting — for the most diehard cat and dog lovers.
Would that be so bad? For pet-loving humans, definitely. My relationship with Evvie is deeply enriching (for me, at least). I’m excited to see her each morning, to watch her run full-speed through the forest, roughhouse with other dogs, and wag uncontrollably each time I walk through the front door. Life without dogs would be far duller.
But keeping pets shouldn’t only be about me or you — it’s a relationship, and one in which humans arguably take much more than they give. And by continuing pet keeping as it’s done now — by breeding millions of new puppies, kittens, fish, and other animals each year — we’re making the decision that all the overt abuse and lower-grade cruelty and neglect is more than made up for by the joy wrought by the human-animal bond. I’m no longer so sure it is.
Gary Francione and Anna Charlton, a firebrand animal rights couple who teach law at Rutgers University, don’t think it is and have advocated for the abolition of pet ownership.
“Domesticated animals are completely dependent on humans, who control every aspect of their lives,” they wrote in a provocative essay for Aeon in 2016. “Unlike human children, who will one day become autonomous, non-humans never will. That is the entire point of domestication — we want domesticated animals to depend on us. They remain perpetually in a netherworld of vulnerability, dependent on us for everything that is of relevance to them.”
Because pets are property under the law, they argue, welfare standards will always be too low. We need to care for the ones in existence, but stop breeding new ones.
“I love living with dogs, but even I think that owning dogs can easily be considered morally questionable and may change in the future,” said Horowitz, the dog cognition expert.
I relate to Horowitz’s doubts, and find Francione’s and Charlton’s arguments persuasive, though given the popularity of pets — and the ancient human-animal bond — abolishing pet ownership is a political and cultural nonstarter. What might be more realistic is to radically rethink how we acquire and treat them, and just what we owe them.
When I asked Marc Bekoff, an ethologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who’s co-authored books with Pierce (and Jane Goodall), about whether we should phase out pet ownership, he said it’s perhaps a few thousand years too late to ask that question.
“In the best of all possible worlds, we wouldn’t have evolved to where we are now with dogs, because so many of the problems with dogs come down to selective breeding by humans deciding which traits they find cute or appealing,” he said, pointing to flat-faced dogs like the French bulldog.
He’d like to see puppy and kitten mills phased out amid a major cultural shift wherein people would only get a dog or cat if they have the time, money, patience, and energy to give them a good life. The motto would be: fewer pets with better lives. “You’re dealing with a sentient being who has very specific and enduring needs, and if you can’t fulfill them,” you should think twice, he said.
Pierce, a parent herself, has written about the importance of families with children thinking twice about getting a pet. Kids can be excited about a new pet one month and move on to another interest the next month — or just fail to take good care of the animal in the unique ways the pet needs (because they’re a child!). Families with children can also be more prone to neglecting their pets because child care, understandably, comes first.
While a lot of people call their pets “fur babies,” we’d be wise to think of them more as actual dependents, because they are. For most of human history, childhood wasn’t really a thing — children existed, at least in part, in service of their parents as additional labor. That has, of course, changed drastically over the last few hundred years, and with it, attitudes and habits around how we treat children.
As part of that shift, though, the expectations for parenting rose as well, so much so that those expectations have become a major reason why people are having fewer or no children. Perhaps the same should happen for pets in the future. While the average pet probably has a much better life today than they did just 50 years ago, there’s still much room for improvement, but the demands would be such that fewer people would be in a position to become pet owners.
WHAT PET OWNERS SHOULD KNOW
If you do decide to get a cat or dog, it’s imperative to adopt so as to prevent one more euthanasia among the millions of animals languishing in shelters, living lives that are likely worse than what they might experience even with a generally neglectful owner. And experts say it’s critical to understand that a good life is subjective — every individual animal is different — but it goes far beyond the basic requirements of sufficient food and water, protection from injury, and a walk here and there.
When surveyed, people are motivated to acquire a pet to fulfill their own emotional or practical needs: companionship, love, and affection, someone to greet them, property protection, or help while hunting. But taking a more animal-centered approach to keeping pets — focusing as well on what the human can give in the relationship — would go a long way to improving their quality of life.
For example, it doesn’t just mean taking the dog on a walk but letting them direct the route and giving them as much time as they’d like to smell, which is how they make sense of the world around them. For Bekoff, it also means ensuring they’re not left alone all day while their human is at work.
“Some people I know just leave their house at seven in the morning, they go to work, they go work out, or they go out for dinner, so the average dog is just going to be alone all day,” he said. “And then they get home and they’re tired, and they don’t walk them and they give them crappy food. Those people should not have a dog.”
While most veterinarians oppose letting cats free to roam outdoors, largely to prevent more cats from becoming roadkill, only six out of 10 are kept entirely indoors. Whichever side of the indoor-outdoor debate you choose, there are ways to give cats more of what they need. If your cat does have outdoor access, try giving them a colorful collar, which catches birds’ attention, gives them time to fly away, and can drastically reduce the avian body count. You can also try taking your cat for a walk on a leash (even if your neighbors might give you a double take).
“If you decide to keep a cat indoors, then you really have to work hard to compensate for what you’ve taken from them,” Pierce said. “[Your house] should look like a house where a cat lives, with perches and highways that they can walk across high up above the floor.” She recommends the book — this is the real title and author name — Total Cat Mojo: The Ultimate Guide to Life with Your Cat by Jackson Galaxy, whose YouTube channel includes videos on how to cat-ify one’s home.
Pets could benefit from more diverse diets, and there are also plenty of “enrichment” toys for cats and dogs. More importantly, enrichment games can be played with dogs to put their innate scavenging and sniffing skills to work. Good starting points for more animal-centered pet keeping include applying concepts like positive reinforcement training and cooperative care, and studying material from experts like Pierce, Horowitz, Galaxy, Bekoff, and anthrozoologist and cat expert John Bradshaw.
It’s harder for me to conceive of how one could ethically keep smaller animals, like birds, reptiles, rodents, fish, and amphibians. Unlike cats and dogs, these are naturally wild, undomesticated animals who are social and meant to fly, swim, or move great distances in a single day. As pets, they suffer in isolation and intensive confinement. It might be time we stop breeding them (or taking them from the wild, as some are actually trafficked wildlife). We should give as good a life as possible to the ones who remain, through larger and more enriching enclosures, and eventually phase out of keeping them as pets.
For the animals we do have in our homes, we need to bring an attitude of give and take to the relationship, and we’re going to have to give a lot more than we’re currently taking.
“You’re really still asking these dogs or cats or other animals to live in a human-dominated world,” Bekoff said. “Cutting them some slack and giving them more choice and control or agency over their lives is a win-win for everyone.”
When my partner and I adopted Evvie six months into the pandemic, like so many others, I figured that a brisk walk or two a day, occasional playtime with other dogs, and brief games of tug-of-war between work meetings was enough to give her a good life. I’ve come to realize that’s the bare minimum.
I think a world with far fewer pets is a better one, though I know Evvie won’t be my last, so long as there are animals in need of adoption from shelters. But rescuing a dog or cat is just the start. Those who are mildly interested in acquiring a pet need to think long and hard about the steep responsibility that lies ahead, and us self-described animal lovers ought to do much more to live up to our stated values. ~
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/4/11/23673393/pets-dogs-cats-animal-welfare-boredom
Oriana:
Some excellent points here. Years ago I noticed more and more young couples turning to having pets rather than children. While no one is a perfect parent — or a prefect pet-parent — this is a disquieting situation.
Should people stop having pets? We know this is not going to happen. Pets are much less demanding than small children; some would argue that pets are also more rewarding. I seem to witness more loving human-pet than parent-child interactions. I confess I too see puppies and kittens as more adorable than a drooling or screaming baby — but woe to any society that takes the easy way out and refuses to make sacrifices for its children.
Charles:
People would go crazy without pets.
Oriana:
I realize that for some it’s the only source of love in their lives.
*
HOW COLD WAS THE ICE AGE?
How cold was the Ice Age? While one can imagine layers of ice covering everything around the world, that’s not exactly what happened. In fact, researchers identified the temperature of the Last Glacial Maximum, from about 20,000 ago, to be about 46 degrees Fahrenheit (7.8 C).
This, of course, was the average global temperature – not the extent of how cold it really got in some places. The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was a very chilly period, when glaciers covered about half of North and South Americas, as well as Europe and parts of Asia.
Overall, the new paper found that the world’s temperatures were about 11 degrees Fahrenheit or 6 degrees Celsius less warm than today. If you’re comparing, the average global temperature was 14 C (57 F) in the 20th century.
The study’s lead author, Jessica Tierney, associate professor at the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences, addressed that this may not sound like a big deal to some but was, in fact, monumental.
“In your own personal experience that might not sound like a big difference, but, in fact, it’s a huge change,” explained Tierney. “In North America and Europe, the most northern parts were covered in ice and were extremely cold. Even here in Arizona, there was big cooling. But the biggest cooling was in high latitudes, such as the Arctic, where it was about 14 C (25 F) colder than today.”
This corresponds to climate change models, which show that high latitudes get warmer at a faster rate than low latitudes. This means, according to projections, that this process of “polar amplification” will make it warmer and warmer over areas like the Arctic which are more sensitive to climate change.
Tierney’s team calculated that every time the amount of atmospheric carbon will double, global temperatures should go up by 3.4 C (6.1 F). Carbon levels during the Ice Age were about 180 parts per million, then rose to about 280 parts per million during the Industrial Revolution, and have by now reached 415 parts per million.
How did the scientists reach their conclusions? The team used models that connected data from ocean plankton fossils to sea-surface temperatures. A technique called data assimilation, used in weather forecasting, was then employed to link the fossil data with climate model simulations of the Last Glacial Maximum.
“What happens in a weather office is they measure the temperature, pressure, humidity and use these measurements to update a forecasting model and predict the weather,” Tierney shared. “Here, we use the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research climate model to produce a hindcast of the LGM, and then we update this hindcast with the actual data to predict what the climate was like.”
The findings will help climate scientists evaluate how today’s rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide influence the average temperatures around the world.
“Six degrees of global average cooling is enormous. The world would have looked much different during the last glacial maximum,” said Poulsen, adding “The northern portions of North America, including here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, were covered by kilometers of ice.”
You can read their paper published in Nature.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/just-how-cold-was-the-ice-age-new-study-finds-the-temperature/#Echobox=1681446790
MILANKOVITCH CYCLES
Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The term was coined and named after Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. In the 1920s, he hypothesized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession combined to result in cyclical variations in the intra-annual and latitudinal distribution of solar radiation at the Earth's surface, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth's climatic patterns.
The Earth's rotation around its axis, and revolution around the Sun, evolve over time due to gravitational interactions with other bodies in the Solar System. The variations are complex, but a few cycles are dominant.
The Earth's orbit varies between nearly circular and mildly elliptical (its eccentricity varies). When the orbit is more elongated, there is more variation in the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and in the amount of solar radiation at different times in the year. In addition, the rotational tilt of the Earth (its obliquity) changes slightly. A greater tilt makes the seasons more extreme. Finally, the direction in the fixed stars pointed to by the Earth's axis changes (axial precession), while the Earth's elliptical orbit around the Sun rotates (apsidal precession). The combined effect of precession with eccentricity is that proximity to the Sun occurs during different astronomical seasons.
Milankovitch studied changes in these movements of the Earth, which alter the amount and location of solar radiation reaching the Earth. This is known as solar forcing (an example of radiative forcing). Milankovitch emphasized the changes experienced at 65° north due to the great amount of land at that latitude. Land masses change temperature more quickly than oceans, because of the mixing of surface and deep water and the fact that soil has a lower volumetric heat capacity than water.
Oriana:
This gets petty technical. You can read the rest here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
It seems that we should be now heading toward the cooling period, but human activity has sufficiently increased the greenhouse gases to cancel the next ice age.
Gary Collins:
We are up a full degree, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, 6 degrees in the arctic.
Per the Milankovitch cycle we were heading back toward the ice age since the end of the Roman Empire, or to put it another way the peak of the warm period was also the peak of the Roman Empire. We are already back to those levels of 2000 years ago in less than a century, and its accelerating. The last time this planet had a runaway greenhouse was in the Permian. It's referred to as the great dying, since 95% of the land and sea life died out. That was caused by volcanos belching out CO2, and the CO2 levels then were not as high as now.
The Milankovitch Cycle explains why should be heading into the next ice age, but instead we are accelerating toward a global melt down.
*
THE DOCTRINE THAT EVERY WORD OF THE BIBLE IS THE WORD OF GOD
~ The Reformation placed Protestantism on the road to what is known now as scriptural inerrancy, and this is not not surprising given Martin Luther's so-called Tower experience — his dramatic solitary encounter with God, which deeply influenced his doctrine of sola fideism.
Luther's jarring experience, by its nature, worked to erode the church's role as an intermediary between the individual believer and God, but it also forced Luther to search for another source of authority to replace the institutional authority of the church that had been so significantly eroded by sola fideism.
This led to strong Lutheran emphasis on Sola scriptura: that scripture as the basis on which the church derives its authority. This would come to distinguish most of the Protestant faiths, though not all of it, as some branches, Anglicanism and its principality, Methodism and some of its offshoots, for example, adopted a more qualified view.
Over time, some expressions of Protestantism became even more deeply invested in Sola scriptura doctrine.
American Evangelical Protestantism is a faith that is, comparatively speaking, singularly invested in sola scriptura and also in inerrancy — factors stemming from the faith's deep commitment to what many of their pioneer forebears regarded as New Testament Christianity, which they perceived as bereft of the creeds, confessions and episcopacies that characterized expressions of Christianity in Europe and, for that matter, the largely discredited “tory” Church of England that ultimately was reorganized as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.
This frontier vision tended to evince a natural affinity for sola scriptura — actually, in most cases, an exceedingly strong one, because in the face of weak church institutions and the absence of creeds and confessions, scripture provided the necessary bulwark of authority. But this was complicated by the strong emphasis on lay interpretation of scripture in what became evangelical Christianity — the conviction that any literate believer could, through prayerful dedication and conviction, be guided a personal reading scripture.
This led many leaders in what became known as evangelical Christianity to improvise a doctrine of inerrancy, steadfastly maintaining that all scripture, as it is inspired by God, does not run counter to fact.
This view has proven increasingly hard to sustain in the 21st century, an era in which most members of denominations and congregations associated with inerrancy are able to investigate these claims via the Internet. Even so, many evangelicals remain vocal proponents of inerrancy, viewing it as the only safeguard against inquiries that, if pushed to the extreme, could undermine all of the scriptural claims of Christianity. ~ Michael Tracy, Wikipedia via Quora
*
Oriana:
What was Luther’s “Tower Experience”? It was his coming to the conclusion that god was not the punitive monster described by medieval theologians, the kind of deity whose main occupation was the punishment of sinners. Luther admitted that he hated the god who punishes the unrighteous. But while struggling with the text of the New Testament, he had the insight that god freely gives salvation to all who believe in Jesus. It was salvation through faith rather than salvation through works (good deeds).
Having this insight is called Luther’s “Tower Experience” because it happened in the tower of the heated room of his study at the Augustinian Monastery where Luther resided before deciding that monasticism was nonsense.
http://www.trinitylutheranms.org/MartinLuther/TowerExperience.html
*
~ “I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, “Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?” This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.
“I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: “The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written: ‘The just person lives by faith.'” I began to understand that in this verse the justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive justice, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: “The just person lives by faith.” All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates.” ~ Martin Luther
Oriana: HATING THE GOD OF PUNISHMENT
I admit I admire Luther’s honesty in admitting that he hated the God of Punishment. So did I, but I tried to strangle that emotion. The closest I came to expressing it was in my complete inability to see god as good. Though I kept it a secret, I never perceived god as good. I saw him as evil, much more evil than Hitler. Eventually, though at that point I had already rejected religion, I stated to myself that god out-Hitlered Hitler, and that to worship him (should he actually exist) was degrading.
*
EPA COULD SAVE LIVES BY TIGHTENING RULES ON FINE-PARTICLE POLLUTION
~ Given the deadly risks of soot, especially to communities assaulted by polluting industries and vehicle exhaust from highways and heavy trucking, there’s nothing fine about the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) recent proposal to clamp down on fine-particulate pollution.
You don’t have to be a scientist to understand why.
The soot particles in question are known as PM 2.5 for particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers or smaller. This fine particulate often comprises a toxic brew of carbon, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide created by several sources, including combustion in fossil fuel power plants, factories, and from car and truck emissions.
It is both fascinating and maddening to consider that a single particle of this soot is so tiny that 30 of them could fit inside the diameter of a single human hair. As New York’s State Department of Health noted, “several thousand of them could fit on the period at the end of this sentence.”
That microscopic size allows these particles to travel deeper into lungs and allows them to build up as time bombs in our lungs and blood streams. And the ambient air is filled with these particles. An international team of researchers said in Nature Communications last year that PM 2.5 is the “world’s leading environmental risk factor.”
Globally, fine particulate pollution kills at least 4.2 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization, and perhaps as many as 5.7 million a year, according to a study last year led by Canadian researchers.
According to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, PM 2.5 results in 2.2 years of life lost on average, more than from cigarette smoking, alcohol and drug use, or polluted water.
And the Lancet Commission on pollution and health last year warned that rising global deaths from ambient air pollution are offsetting public health progress made in lowering mortality from household air pollution and unsanitary water. “Since 2017, there has been strikingly little effort in most countries to act on these recommendations or to prioritize action against pollution,” the commission said.
That includes the United States. PM 2.5 prematurely kills between 100,000 and 200,000 people a year, according to several studies involving researchers from the University of Minnesota, the University of New Mexico, the University of Washington, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Illinois, the University of Texas, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Brigham Young. Even the lower end of these estimates is equivalent to more than the deaths from guns and car crashes combined.
Chronic White House waffling on science
The US federal government has never sufficiently grappled with the gravity of this situation, largely because it has never fully embraced the counsel of its own scientists.
During the George W. Bush administration, the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) recommended that polluters should emit no more PM 2.5 in their operations on an annual basis than 13 or 14 micrograms per cubic meter, “to provide increased public health protection.” Bush, beholden to industry, kept the standard at 15 micrograms, which had been established by the Clinton administration. In a highly unusual move, the CASAC even explicitly said it “did not endorse” keeping the standard at 15 micrograms.
The Obama administration lowered the standard to 12 micrograms per cubic meter, but only after being sued for dragging its feet by the American Lung Association, the National Parks Conservation Association and 11 states that Obama won both times, including California and New York. Even then, many public health experts said the federal standard was still insufficient.
The American Lung Association, in a joint report with the Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice, said that the 12 microgram per cubic meter level might save 12,000 lives a year. But they also said tightening by just one more microgram to 11 micrograms would have avoided 35,700 premature deaths a year. It would have also avoided an annual 1.4 million cases of aggravated asthma, 2,350 heart attacks, and 2.7 million days of missed work or school.
The EPA of the Trump administration, run by coal and chemical industry hacks, clung to the 12- micrometer standard even though it admitted in its own analysis that such air quality would result in between 16,000 and 17,000 annual heart disease deaths from the narrowing of arteries. The Trump EPA also ignored a major study of people on Medicare that found that just a one microgram tightening of standards would save 12,000 lives. At that time, the government’s own scientists said a standard of 9 micrograms could save anywhere from 9,050 to 34,600 lives a year.
The Biden administration came into office promising to restore science to its proper place in guiding environmental health policy and elevating environmental justice as a priority.
Many studies show that communities of color and low-income neighborhoods disproportionately breathe in PM 2.5 pollution and thus suffer more than their fair share of sickness and death. The Medicare study, conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, found that the risk of death to Black people from PM 2.5 is triple that of the general population. Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American people also face elevated risks.
In a partial recognition of this, the Biden EPA announced early in January that it plans to lower the PM 2.5 standard down to between 9 and 10 micrograms per cubic meter. The agency said that would avoid up to 4,200 premature deaths a year. EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the proposal “is grounded in the best available science.”
While tightening the standard is surely welcome, the problem is that, in the decade since the Obama EPA set the standard at 12 micrograms, air pollution research continues to outstrip policy. The latest research points to the need for even lower limits and the ultimate elimination of such emissions. A University of Wisconsin study last year estimated that if this nation eliminated the emissions of fine particulates, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide from the power sector, transportation, industry, and buildings, that would avoid 53,200 premature deaths a year and $608 billion in savings from illness and death.
That study directly connected the elimination of particulates to the fight against climate change. Given that “many of the same activities and processes that emit planet-warming greenhouse gases also release health-harming air pollutant emissions. . . Transitioning energy production away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner sources can produce health benefits from improved air quality in the near term while also providing climate benefits in the longer term.”
The 53,200 avoided deaths would more than fill Yankee Stadium. “These results offer a clear rationale for mitigating climate change on public health grounds,” the Wisconsin researchers said.
The Biden EPA has put out its proposal for public comment until March 28. While signaling its intention for a standard of between 9 and 10 micrograms, the agency said it would hear arguments for as high as 11 micrograms and as low as 8.
Who will the EPA listen to?
In the current debate, it’s no surprise who is arguing to keep the standard at 12 micrograms. Invoking the worn-out rhetoric of job-killing regulations, US Chamber of Commerce executive Chad Whiteman said tighter standards would “stifle manufacturing and industrial investment.” Never mind that the corporate profits from unregulated industry surely comes at the cost of chronically ill workers and consumers who head to hospitals instead of shopping malls.
Conversely, many public health experts, overburdened community members, and environmental groups are making a case for 8 micrograms that should be impossible to ignore.
A report published by the Environmental Defense Fund agrees with the Biden EPA that a standard of 10 micrograms might avoid 4,800 premature deaths. But it notes that a standard of 8 micrograms could save 19,600 lives – four times more.
Once again, the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee has sent strong signals in favor of tighter standards. Most of the expert committee said an annual range of 8-to-10 micrograms would be “appropriate” to achieve “meaningful risk reductions,” given the “strengthened” science of “adverse health effects” at current levels. It is also strongly suggesting to the Biden administration that the EPA tighten regulations on daily emissions, as annual standards may not adequately account for the kind of concentrated bursts of pollution that smother fenceline communities living next to industrial facilities. Such communities that are disproportionately of color or low-income.
Perhaps to avoid getting industry too riled up about monitoring emissions around the clock, Regan proposes to leave the daily limits in place, although the EPA will take comments on tightening it. Despite Regan claiming that the EPA’s proposal will protect “the most vulnerable among us,” his own advisory committee said, “It is important to note that risk disparities across racial and ethnic groups remain substantial with the focus on an annual standard.”
Environmental justice advocates are strongly displeased with the status quo on daily emissions. Beverly Wright of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice flatly said the EPA’s proposal, as it stands, “does not address this racially disproportionate pollution burden.”
That means the burden once more is on the EPA to catch up to the anger in fenceline communities and to the analysis of its own expert advisors. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost over the years because regulations for PM 2.5 were one, two, three or four micrograms per cubic meters higher than they should be. The Biden administration has the chance to save lives with limits set exactly where the science says they should be.
*
BRAIN WAVES DURING THE PROCESS OF DYING
For the first time, scientists have captured the brain activity of a person during their death.
The study occurred by accident. The researchers were analyzing the brain activity of an epilepsy patient when he unexpectedly died.
The findings may shed light on what occurs during near-death experiences.
For the first time, scientists have captured the brain activity of a person during their death — and it may explain what’s happening biologically when people see their lives “flash before their eyes” during near-death experiences.
The challenge: Near-death experiences are a strange phenomenon shared by millions of people across cultures and history who almost died but ultimately survived.
Though the specific vary, most of these people report feeling a calm wash over them at the moment death seemed imminent. Often, they report feeling like they left their bodies or saw their entire lives flash before their eyes before returning to reality.
The fact that so many people report such similar experiences suggests that our brains might all react in similar ways just prior to death, but studying near-death experiences is incredibly difficult as it’s all but impossible to predict when someone is going to have one.
Researchers at the University of Tartu, Estonia, weren’t actually trying to study near-death experiences when they recorded the brain activity that’s now helping scientists understand them.
The patient behind these brain waves had epilepsy, and the doctors were recording his brain activity using continuous electroencephalography (EEG) in the hope it would help them detect upcoming seizures. Unfortunately, the man just happened to have a heart attack and died during the recording.
After the man’s death, the Estonia team partnered with scientists in the U.S., Canada, and China to analyze the recorded brain activity, publishing a study on it in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
“We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,” study organizer Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, said in a press release.
The brain wave patterns they saw in that minute the heart stopped beating are usually involved in high-cognitive functions and activities such as dreaming, memory recall, and meditation.
Zemmar speculated, “[T]he brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences.”
The really big picture: This is just one case study, and the patient had previously suffered from seizures as well as brain injury and swelling, so it’s hard to say how much his brain activity is reflective of the “norm” in humans.
Zemmar hopes to study more cases in the future, but at least we now have a glimpse at what’s happening in the brain during death — and it suggests that people’s serene near-death experiences might not be so different from actual death experiences.
“Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives,” Zemmar said.
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/near-death-experiences/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1YvColSQNZ1A5J-RCfWcxZ9mw1f9GEu3B4MqTdbCvaHSvQURWMr_TIVUs#Echobox=1681481667
*
CAN YOU BE AWARE THAT YOU HAVE DIED?
The moment when the heart stops is considered by medical professionals to be the clearest indication that someone has died.
But what happens inside our mind during this process? Does death immediately overtake our subjective experience or does it slowly creep in?
Scientists have studied near-death experiences (NDEs) in an attempt to gain insights into how death overcomes the brain. What they’ve found is remarkable: A surge of electricity enters the brain moments before brain death. One 2013 study, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found that the rodents entered a hyper-alert state just before death.
Some scientists are beginning to think that NDEs are caused by reduced blood flow, coupled with abnormal electrical behavior inside the brain. So, the stereotypical tunnel of white light might derive from a surge in neural activity.
Dr. Sam Parnia is the director of critical care and resuscitation research, at NYU Langone School of Medicine, in New York City. He and colleagues have investigated exactly how the brain dies.
In previous work, Dr. Parnia has conducted animal studies looking at the moments before and after death. He’s also investigated near-death experiences. “Many times, those who have had such experiences talk about floating around the room and being aware of the medical team working on their body,” Dr. Parnia told Live Science. “They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working and they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them.”
Medical staff confirm this, he said. But how could people who were technically dead be cognizant of what’s happening around them? Even after our breathing and heartbeat stop, we remain conscious for about two to 20 seconds, Dr. Parnia says. That’s how long the cerebral cortex is thought to last without oxygen. This is the thinking and decision-making part of the brain. It’s also responsible for deciphering the information gathered from our senses.
According to Dr. Parnia, during this period, “You lose all your brain stem reflexes — your gag reflex, your pupil reflex, all that is gone.” Brain waves from the cerebral cortex soon become undetectable. Even so, it can take hours for our thinking organ to fully shut down.
Usually, when the heart stops beating, someone performs CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). This will provide about 15% of the oxygen needed to perform normal brain function. “If you manage to restart the heart, which is what CPR attempts to do, you’ll gradually start to get the brain functioning again,” Dr. Parnia said. “The longer you’re doing CPR, those brain cell death pathways are still happening — they’re just happening at a slightly slower rate.”
Other research from Dr. Parnia and his colleagues examined the large numbers of Europeans and Americans who have experienced cardiac arrest and survived. “In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of ‘love,'” he said, “we’re trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we’re all going to have when we die.”
One of the objectives is to observe how the brain acts and reacts during cardiac arrest, throughout both the processes of death and revival. How much oxygen exactly does it take to reboot the brain? How is the brain affected after revival? Learning where the lines are drawn might improve resuscitation techniques, which could save countless lives per year.
“At the same time, we also study the human mind and consciousness in the context of death,” Dr. Parnia said, “to understand whether consciousness becomes annihilated or whether it continues after you’ve died for some period of time — and how that relates to what’s happening inside the brain in real time.” ~
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/after-death-youre-aware-that-youve-died-scientists-claim/
*
DIETARY GLYCINE IS RATE-LIMITING FOR GLUTATHIONE SYNTHESIS AND MAY HAVE BROAD POTENTIAL FOR HEALTH PROTECTION
~ Glutathione is a key scavenging antioxidant that opposes the proinflammatory signaling of hydrogen peroxide. Boosting cellular glutathione levels may have broad utility in the prevention and treatment of disorders driven by oxidative stress. Supplemental N-acetylcysteine has been employed for this purpose. Could supplemental glycine likewise promote glutathione synthesis?
When glycine availability is too low to sustain a normal rate of glutathione synthesis, the consequent rise in tissue levels of gamma-glutamylcysteine leads to an increase in urinary excretion of its alternative metabolite 5-L-oxoproline. The fact that urinary excretion of this metabolite is elevated in vegetarians and others consuming relatively low-protein diets strongly suggests that dietary glycine can be rate-limiting for glutathione synthesis in normally fed humans. Moreover, supplemental glycine has been reported to increase tissue glutathione levels in several animal studies.
Glycine is a biosynthetic precursor for porphyrins, purines, creatine, sarcosine, and bile salts; is an agonist for glycine-gated chloride channels and a co-agonist for N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors; inhibits protein glycation; and increases hepatic production of pyruvate, an effective scavenger of hydrogen peroxide. Supplemental glycine may have the potential for improving endothelial function, preventing cardiac hypertrophy, aiding control of metabolic syndrome, preventing the complications of diabetes, dampening inflammation, protecting the liver, and promoting effective sleep.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5855430/
Oriana: IF YOU EAT CHICKEN, BE SURE TO EAT THE SKIN
I’ve settled for the least expensive glycine and NAC supplements, both from NOW. And yes, I can feel the results. I have a built-in inflammation gauge — pain in my left knee. Less pain and the ability to walk a longer distance, with or without my beloved walker, indicate less inflammation. And yes, the NAC and glycine combo seems to have reduced inflammatory symptoms. My previous wave of improvement came with berberine and Omax curcumin; the “new wave” is the addition of NAC and glycine. Berberine is still my #1 most important (lab-verified results) supplement; NAC and glycine closely follow.
Food sources of glycine include fish (especially salmon), meat (especially turkey), dairy, seeds, nuts, and legumes. Glycine deficiency may be a problem with low-protein vegetarian diets.
If you already take a collagen supplement, you are probably getting enough glycine.
If you eat chicken, be sure to consume the skin.
~ When it comes to anti-aging foods, chicken skin might seem like an unlikely candidate. However, it’s full of an amino acid called glycine that’s been shown to significantly increase collagen production. By consuming 100 grams of chicken skin, you’ll get about 3.3 grams of glycine that’ll contribute to keeping your skin and muscles healthy and strong over time.
Even better, chicken skin also contains heart-healthy unsaturated fats. ~
https://www.womansworld.com/posts/anti-aging/chicken-skin-collagen-benefits
*
Ending on beauty:
A Ukrainian word
is ambushed: Through the broken window of
the letter д other countries watch how the letter i
loses its head, how the roof of the letter M
falls through.
The language in a time of war
can’t be understood. Inside this sentence
is a hole—no one wants to die—no one
speaks. By the hospital bed of the letter Й
lies a prosthesis it’s too shy to use.
~ Lesyk Panasiuk, former inhabitant of Bucha
No comments:
Post a Comment