Marc Chagall: Time is a River Without Banks
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A LULLABY FOR EINSTEIN
Einstein said that clocks
stop at the speed of light.
“Don’t think about it, child;
I knew a physicist once
who went out of his mind
trying to figure it out,”
my father warned,
looking at his watch.
But that’s what keeps me sane,
seeing in my mind
that silent starfall of time.
In an ecstatic vision
I see a flock of clocks —
grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks,
school clocks and office clocks;
great railroad clocks,
tyrants of train stations,
four-faced like ancient gods —
From cathedrals,
from city squares,
London, New York, Moscow —
millions and millions of clocks
mutely sweeping through cosmic dust,
their pointing, merciless hands
going nowhere at last
at the speed of light.
That’s what eternity means.
I heard it the other night:
no more ticking or chiming,
cuckooing, beeping or bonging.
All that racket is over.
Good night, sweet Albert,
good night.
~ Oriana
Chagall: Clock with a Blue Wing
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GEORGE ELIOT’S UNEASY RELATIONSHIP TO FEMINISM
Middlemarch is such a classic that characters like Dorothea, Casaubon, and Rosamund seem to have been not so much invented as discovered. They have an afterlife in our minds. Dorothea, especially.
But when I was writing my novel about George Eliot, researching her notebooks, letters, diaries from her Middlemarch period, I got a shock. I couldn’t find Dorothea. And then I realized—for the first 18 months of writing Middlemarch, there was no Dorothea. Eliot had one protagonist only during that time—Lydgate.
I became fascinated by this delay. How strange, that what read so naturally, with such aliveness and seeming rightness, had been arrived at with such difficulty, and after such a prolonged block. My book about Eliot is a story (her story) in its own right, but within that, another story was demanding my attention, too.
What was this delay? I looked for clues as I read Eliot’s letters, combed through the chronology of her days, thought about who she’d seen and written to, what was going on at home and more generally in her life. Gradually I began to see a shadowy evolution—something in the nature of a feminist awakening.
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George Eliot’s personal history, and her achievements, meant that she was a feminist icon for her peers. She’d defied the double standards of the day by living openly with George Lewes, who was married (though separated), but who couldn’t legally get a divorce. Marian Evans, or Marian Lewes, as she called herself, had become instantly notorious, until her books brought her forgiveness and acclaim.
Lewes had three sons from his marriage. The spring that Eliot was brewing Middlemarch, in 1869, Lewes’s middle son Thornie was due to come home from the British colony of Natal (now called Kwa-Zulu Natal, part of South Africa), as he’d fallen ill. Thornie arrived six weeks earlier than expected—just when Eliot had hoped to get down to her book. Terrifyingly emaciated, Thornie had lost four and a half stone. Henry James records visiting them where they lived in Regent’s Park, finding the white-faced Thornie writhing on the drawing-room floor, with a distracted, frightened Eliot in charge, Lewes having dashed out (on a Sunday) to try to find morphine. Thornie had tuberculosis of the spine, undiagnosed.
Thornie’s presence thrust George Eliot back into her role of stepmother, a role that brought with it a variety of tensions—not least, the need to “do her duty.” The mother’s role is an important one in Eliot’s thinking, deeply informing her response to one of the great issues of the day—the position of women. But in spite of being a feminist icon herself, she disappointed her progressive peers (many of whom were her friends) when it came to her views. Eliot was conservative politically—she didn’t think women should have the vote, for instance.
I mean that as a fact of mere zoological evolution, woman seems to me to have the worse share in existence, But for that reason I would the more contend that in the moral evolution we have “an art which does mend nature”—an art which “itself is nature”. It is the function of love in the largest sense, to mitigate the harshness of all fatalities. And in the thorough recognition of that worse share, I think there is a basis for a sublimer resignation in woman and a more regenerating tenderness in man.
She saw women as having a special power to nurture—”that exquisite type of gentleness, tenderness, possible maternity suffusing a woman’s being with affectionateness, which makes what we mean by the feminine character”—and she saw feminism as threatening this character. “There is no subject on which I am more inclined to hold my peace and learn, than on the ‘Women Question.’ It seems to me to overhang abysses, of which even prostitution is not the worst.”
But now Eliot was being tested on precisely this nurturing territory. She was trying to write Middlemarch, and the periods of concentration and quiet, essential for work, were interrupted by Thornie’s illness, sometimes by his screams. The days were broken “into small fragments.” “We are not only kept at home but kept also from any consecutive occupation by a sad family trouble” she wrote.
Having been close to her (as it were) through her letters, and witnessed how difficult it was for her to hold her confidence as she wrote, it was impossible to feel that her reactions to Thornie would have been unmixed. We can perhaps catch this ambivalence in the following letter to her younger friend Emilia Pattison. She begins by apologizing for her effusiveness (they were still getting to know each other, and Eliot worried she’d been over-familiar):
~ But in proportion as I profoundly rejoice that I never brought a child into the world, I am conscious of having an unused stock of motherly tenderness, which sometimes overflows, but not without discrimination. ~
I hear the veiled note of exasperation in that “profoundly rejoice.” She’d been writing Middlemarch for six weeks, with her Lydgate-only cast, and was beginning to lose steam. (Incidentally here, maybe, we glimpse a seed of the future heroine. Emilia Pattison happened to be unhappily married to the scholar Mark Pattison, 27 years older, who happened to be writing a biography of the Renaissance scholar, Isaac Casaubon…)
Thornie’s troubles continued through the summer. Eliot’s grip on her book faltered. In October she put the manuscript aside and gave herself to her stepson. He died on October 9th. There is no mistaking her sincerity:
Dearest Barbara
Thanks for your tender words. It has cut deeper than I expected—that he is gone and I can never make him feel my love any more. Just now all else seems trivial compared with the powers of delighting and soothing a heart that is in need.
His death hit Eliot hard, in spite of any frustrations she might have experienced. A desolate autumn, spring and summer followed. Middlemarch was fairly paralyzed. But a process had been kickstarted.
In the early summer she heard news of a friend who had been bereaved, Lady Lytton. Eliot wrote to her:
My dear Mrs Lytton,
I know from what your dear husband has told us, that your loss is very keenly felt by you—that it has first made you acquainted with acute grief, and this makes me think of you very much. For learning to love any one is like an increase of property,—it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.
At present the thought of you is all the more with me, because your trouble has been brought by death; and for nearly a year death seems to me my most intimate daily companion.
I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity,—possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.
We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life—some joy in things for their own sake.
It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed—because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defense against passionate affliction even more than men.”
These are some of the most beautiful lines Eliot ever wrote. And it’s her first, passionate feminist plea. Thornie’s death has taught her something critical about the mother-role: that the dependence of others, in a family, can take you over, with an undreamt-of emotional intensity. The life of the mind is needed, both for its own sake, and as a “sort of defense against passionate affliction”.
Following Thornie, her impregnable mental fencing-off of a certain reality, about women’s lives, has splintered. She’s allowed herself to take this reality into her feeling, actively questioning the wisdom of women being defined by the function of nurture alone. And by acknowledging that reality out there she is able, at the end of the summer, to turn her gaze inward. She writes Armgart.
Armgart is the one fully dramatic poem Eliot wrote. It’s a drama with four voices, in which Eliot plays out, with great compression, arguments about female ambition.
Armgart, the eponymous heroine, is a prodigiously gifted singer—Eliot’s avatar. Eliot is revolving the dilemmas facing women at a deep urgent level now; and it’s as if she hasn’t time to play out these issues in the long characterologically complex way that the form of the novel demands: she wants the arguments out there, at their baldest. Thus, Armgart’s suitor, called Graf, offers Armgart marriage—provided she gives up her art.
It’s a stark either-or set-up, the roles of wife and woman-artist mutually exclusive.
Graf argues that a woman’s rank “Lies in the fullness of her womanhood.” Through Armgart, Eliot rebuts this, more fiercely, more directly, than anywhere else in her work.
“Yes I know That oft-taught gospel: Woman, thy desire shall be that all thy superlatives on earth Belong to men, save the one highest kind, To be a mother.” But, she argues, the same Nature that gave women the ability to bear children, gave her her artistic talent, her voice, and her ambition too. Having aired Eliot’s private manifesto, Armgart plays out her most pressing creative concerns. Graf argues that given that Armgart has shown what she can do as a great artist, she had best stop here, in case she fails.
Armgart rebuts this: “True greatness ever wills—It lives in wholeness if it lives at all, And all its strength is knit with constancy.”
(Writers, take note. Keep going, in other words.)
Graf goes on to say that “high success has terrors when achieved”—not least, the fear of failing; “You said you dared not think what life had been Without the stamp of eminence; have you thought How you will bear the poise of eminence With dread of sliding?”
Eliot’s getting very confessional here. Her fear of failure is deep and frightening. But something else is getting outed too: her desire not to be ordinary, her desire to be great. She answers Graf through Armgart: “I accept the peril. I choose to walk high with sublimer dread Rather than crawl in safety…”
I love what Armgart shows us about Eliot. She is daring to confront herself. She doesn’t just explore her fears, including that she’s finished as a writer (as she’s so paralyzed writing Middlemarch); she airs her intense pleasure, her triumph in being a great artist, and her view that an artist like herself—she clearly had the measure of herself—deserved fame, “That sense transcendent which can taste the joy Of swaying multitudes, of being adored For such achievement.”
Eliot’s candor is startling. She’s savoring the joy of being adored by swaying multitudes. It contrasts wonderfully with her super-modest persona in her letters, where the rule of thumb is to be desponding, anxious, despairing, when talking about her writing. Although there’s no doubt she did suffer from agonizing self-doubt, it’s also clear, she preferred presenting herself this way, in line with traditional modest femininity. It’s the flip side of the true elephant in the room—ambition.
“I feel that my besetting sin” she writes, age 19, “is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them all, Ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow-creatures.”
But here’s the thing. The book she was trying to write, Middlemarch, was about ambition, the desire to do something in life, and it cried out for female treatment, with women denied education and opportunity. Conceiving her theme through Lydgate, Dorothea was not going to appear until the ghostly obstructive presence of Eliot’s egotism and ambitiousness had been given shape, as it is in Armgart.
“Shall I turn aside From splendors which flash out the glow I make, And live to make, in all the chosen breasts Of half a Continent? No, may it come, That splendor! May the day be near when men …And new lands welcome me upon their beach, Loving me for my fame. That is the truth Of what I wish, nay, yearn for. Shall I lie? Pretend to seek obscurity—to sing In hope of disregard? A vile pretense!”
Now, Eliot is not just talking about the thrill of making great art (“the glow I make”); she’s talking about that more worldly phenomenon — fame, the exalted sensation of being celebrated, even worshiped, and her love of it. She’s voiced that hot, dangerous area — the moment of triumph that can bleed into self-importance, self-love, pride, ultimately hubris.
Middlemarch‘s theme touched too directly on her own suppressed sense of self-exaltation, and the tense matter of being in a different sphere to other women. Eliot writes and talks many times about her dislike of people writing mediocre books, adding to that useless pile of “bad literature.” Regarding women and education, she says to Barbara Bodichon, “No good can come to women, more than to any class of male mortals, while each aims at doing the highest kind of work, which ought rather to be held in sanctity as what only the few can do well.”
Eliot, though, does do the “highest kind of work.” The true, problematic nature of her position regarding “the women question” could be summed up by this: the power of nurturing is a precious addition to humankind, and this is women’s primary special function—unless, that is, you are a genius like me.
And in Armgart, mining herself with liberating honesty, she brings that immodest self into the light.
It’s no accident that this block happened with Middlemarch. Not only was the theme right on the money (women and ambition), she was herself upping her game. She was about to write a book that was nothing if not ambitious. Her notebooks for that time, the Folger and Berg, are thrilling, dizzying in their range, their fragments of cultural reference, ancient, medieval, modern, in Greek, Latin, German, Italian, French. Her thematic aim was large: to say that our written histories are not the only way to take account of the past, the big known deeds are only part of the story.
Those unhistoric small invisible acts, that permeate our lives, matter too.
She wrote Armgart in September. In November, though, she began writing a story. It featured a young woman called Dorothea Brooke, and it flowed easily. She didn’t connect it with Middlemarch. But in the following spring the penny dropped; the themes matched, they belonged together. She joined the two parts, and Dorothea took center-stage. From that point, Middlemarch was written at a very good pace. ~
https://lithub.com/on-george-eliots-uncertain-relationship-to-feminism/
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THE KREMLIN DRONE STRIKES
After Kremlin Drone Strike, riot police on guard received a pair of theater binoculars each to spot drones from a distance and loudspeakers to notify troopers with slingshots. ~ Misha Firer
Oriana:
Don’t these riot policemen look strangely like the robot army in Star Wars?
Seriously, this was probably the work of the Russian partisans -- the opposition group in Russia who fight against Putin in their special way. They know that marching in the street is futile, but they apparently know how to manufacture a drone. This is a tremendously "interesting" situation that hints at a civil war . . . no, that's probably beyond them. But we do live in interesting times: one surprise after another. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, I understood that anything -- anything once thought unimaginable -- could happen.
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RUSSIAN CASUALTIES IN TERMS OF ETHNIC GROUPS
~ Basically, for every reported casualty from Moscow, there were 87 from Dagestan, 275 Buryats and 350 Tuvans, so you can see the lengths they're going to to insulate Muscovites from losses, by taking the vast majority of conscripts from Asian areas. Of course, Muscovites miss their McDonalds, but Buryats never had them anyway. (Quora)
Peter Pangritz:
That's the way colonizers act: let the colonized die for you in your wars. Russia today is a 19th century colonial empire with all the bad attitudes of such an empire. But one should note: the people in Dagestan and the other colonies are fed up.
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RUSSIA’S ETHNIC MINORITIES ARE DYING IN PUTIN’S WAR
~ Vladimir Putin values the life of a conscript soldier at US$1,398. Putin began making monthly payments of 100,000 rubles to families whose father, brother, or loved one was taken to war. But the families of the fallen value them more than the Kremlin.
18-year-old Anastasyia who, like many Russians, has left the country, has stated that Russians are outraged. “Everyone is demanding that he return their loved ones to them instead of trying to bribe them with money,” she continued. “My two cousins were taken from me to the war, and their mother, my aunt, is very concerned about her boys, worrying that they would be killed. It is extremely stressful for parents whose children have been taken away.”
In late September, the Kremlin issued a conscription order calling for 300,000 men to report for military service and fight in Ukraine. Almost immediately, young men began fleeing the country.
Nearly 80,000 Russians poured into Georgia, while at least 40,000 turned up in Mongolia and about 100,000 in Serbia. Kazakhstan reported the arrival of a whopping 300,000 Russians.
Valeria, a 15-year-old new arrival in Ulaanbaatar, told a story which is becoming increasingly common, “We came because of the mobilization — I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about this, but my father received a summons from the army. They wanted to take him, but he didn’t want to go.”
Even though the conscription orders are nationwide, the draft is heavily skewed toward ethnic minorities. Russia is home to roughly 160 different ethnic groups, comprising about 20 percent of the country’s population. Even during times of peace, ethnic and religious minorities suffer repression.
Many minority peoples have fled to countries where they have ethnic or linguistic connections. Thirty-nine-year-old Vechaslav who left Russia because he had friends who had already died in the war said that a large percentage of people opposed the war, but dare not say anything for fear of government reprisals. “A lot of people are talking about how they are anti-Putin, but no one expresses it publicly. You could be sent to prison for exercising your freedom of speech.” The reason he chose Mongolia was because he already had relatives there, as is the case for many Buryat Mongols, Tuvans, or people from Altai.
Ochir, a Buryat Mongol, said that the mobilization and sanctions were driving people out of Russia. One of the reasons why the ethnic minorities are feeling the pinch of sanctions more than other Russians is because of wealth disparity. The average standard of living in Russia is well below that of the US or western Europe.
Ethnic minorities are also dying in disproportionate numbers. Poorer ethnic regions are being ordered to send large numbers of their sons to war. Yakutia, located in Russia’s Far East, is home to just under 1 million Yakut ethnic people, yet the conscription quota was set at 4,500 men. Violent protests broke out in the Muslim-majority republic of Dagestan in opposition to the draft, resulting in 100 Dagestanis being arrested. As of November, 345 Dagestanis have been killed in the war, compared to a total population of only 3 million people.
The Free Buryatia Foundation, which advocates for the rights of ethnic Mongols, called the conscription “one of the most terrible nights in its history”, as officials went from house to house banging on doors forcing conscription notices. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), Buryatia is the region which has suffered the highest casualty rate so far, with 353 deaths from a total population of under 1 million By some accounts, as many as 40 percent of the total casualties in the war have been non-Slavic.
By contrast, the lowest mortality rates were from Moscow and St Petersburg. However, Bessudnov conceded that it is unclear if the disparity was caused by economic rather than ethnic factors, as these are also extremely poor regions where local ethnic people might view the military as a steady job. Consequently, whether Putin is violating the human rights of conscripts because of their ethnicity or because of their poverty is unclear.
However, one thing is clear — it’s the ethnic minorities of Russia who are fighting this war for a country that treats them like second-class citizens.
https://mercatornet.com/russias-ethnic-minorities-are-dying-in-putins-war/82368/
Rhona:
Putin reminds me of US politicians who supported the Vietnam War back in the sixties, which also disproportionately affected ethnic minorities in the armed services. Same mentality, similar propagandistic aggrandizement, different futile pointless war. Or, I imagine, the USSR's Afghanistan quagmire in the eighties for exactly the same reason.
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FROM THE DIARY OF A RUSSIAN OFFICER CAPTURED NEAR VUHLEDAR:
March 1: 100 soldiers undertook the assault; 16 remained.
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AMERICAN LEND-LEASE WAS ESSENTIAL FOR VICTORY IN WW2
~ During 1942 it was American aid and a lesser extent UK aid that saved Russia, i seen the figures before and was amazed at the % of armor and mechanized support the allies sent to Russia. In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: "People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. ~
What’s the breakdown?
What these figures mean when broken down into specific items may be seen from the following statistics on the Soviet Union.
By the end of June 1944 the United States had sent to the Soviets under lend-lease more than 11,000 planes; over 6,000 tanks and tank destroyers; and 300,000 trucks and other military vehicles.
Many of the planes have been flown directly from the United States to the Soviet Union over the northern route via Alaska and Siberia, others were crated and shipped to the Persian Gulf, where they were assembled and flown into Russia.
We have also sent to the Soviets about 350 locomotives, 1,640 flat cars, and close to half a million tons of rails and accessories, axles, and wheels, all for the improvement of the railways feeding the Red armies on the Eastern Front. For the armies themselves we have sent miles of field telephone wire, thousands of telephones, and many thousands of tons of explosives. And we have also provided machine tools and other equipment to help the Russians manufacture their own planes, guns, shells, and bombs.
We have supplied our allies with large quantities of food. The Soviet Union alone has received some 3,000,000 tons. Lend-lease has contributed about 10 percent of Britain’s over-all food supply. This, together with a great increase in agricultural production in the British Isles, has helped to feed the British civilians and armed forces. Bread, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and other common vegetables have been available to the British from their home gardens and farms. The United States has provided a high proportion of such foods as bacon, eggs, cheese, and fruit juices. ~ Karl Power, Quora
SAVING WESTERN EUROPE FROM THE SOVIETS
There is another interesting saying: In World War II, the Americans didn’t save Western Europe from the Nazis; they saved Western Europe from the Soviets.
There is a very high probability that the USSR would have won the war with or without American troops. But without the Americans being present in Europe, Stalin would have surely taken over much of Western Europe, like he did Eastern Europe. Most of Europe would have become communist. ~ Scott M. Stolz
Mark Ford:
The Germans were a spent force before the bulk of the aid arrived. Otherwise the sixth army at Stalingrad would have been rescued. The best men and equipment was wrecked at Kursk at which point Allied forces landed in Sicily.
So failure to take control of objectives set out in Barbarossa, mainly seizure of the Caucasus oil fields, spelled the end because of the fact that Stalin supplied Germany right up to the invasion date 3 to 4 months of fuel which Hitler used up. Game over and most definitely after Stalingrad whatever supplies Stalin received. Try finding statistics and quotes from Germany which by the way were also getting American aid!
Patrick Morrisey:
Failure to take Stalingrad and the Caucasus Mountains and even the defeat at Kursk doesn't automatically translate into a Soviet victory. Without additional fronts in France, Italy and not to mention the 300,000 German soldiers that were stationed in Norway until the very end of the war, things would have gone a lot differently on the Eastern Front. Lend lease played a huge part in order to keep the Soviets going and drive the Germans all the way back to Berlin.
The Soviets had pretty much stopped producing trains after 1941. Lend lease provided over 60,000 railcars and locomotives to the Soviets. More than 300,000 trucks and other vehicles were also provided to the Soviets through lend lease. Thousands of those trucks were turned into Katyusha rocket launchers which was very effective against German infantry.
There was also over 6,000 tanks and more than 11,000 aircraft provided to the Soviets through lend lease. Germany had to produce all of their own railcars, locomotives, aircraft, tanks, artillery and trucks as well as provide for their Axis allies. The Soviets could concentrate production on keys things like tanks, artillery and aircraft while lend lease made up for other areas. Something that tends to get overlooked is that 65–70% of the Luftwaffe was destroyed on the Western Front.
About 1.5 million Germans were dedicated to just AA duty manning ten of thousands of AA guns mainly inside Germany to keep American and British bombers away from
German industrial centers. That's 1.5 million men that could have been conscripted to fight on the Eastern Front and thousands of AA guns that could have been made into artillery and tanks instead.
Germany had to continue to build hundreds of submarines each year to keep up the fight in the Atlantic. Over 220 in 1942 alone. The cost of that many submarines is around 800 million Reichmarks. The same amount of money could have been used to produce 8,000 tanks. The Germans would go on to build more than 1,100 submarines throughout the war. The Soviets never had much use for their navy during the war. All of these different aspects played an essential part in Germany's defeat.
Tony Cowards:
Without lend lease trucks and trains the Soviets would not have been able to move production and factories to the Urals.
Without lend lease the Soviets wouldn’t have had the tanks, guns, artillery etc to delay the Germans so they had time to move the factories.
Without lend lease it’s likely that the Soviets would have been defeated and reduced to partisan and guerrilla warfare.
Why can’t people accept that the defeat of Germany and the Axis powers was a joint effort? Each Allied country played a vital part, Polish code breakers, Canadian shipbuilding and navy (oh and they’re own beach on DDay), Czech airmen, Aussie and Kiwi soldiers, the Indian army (the largest volunteer army the world has ever seen), the South Africans, Norwegian merchant sailors, etc, etc.
David Bradley:
Stalin, Khruschev and Zhukov all are on record as saying that without materials supplied by the western Allies and especially the US, the Soviet Union would not have been able to resist the Germans. A really important "for instance" was the supply of the chemical precursors required to produce the gun powder and explosives needed by the Red Army, by late 1941 the Soviets were pulling artillery units back from the front lines due to not having any shells left to fire from their guns and no prospect of organically producing enough to hold off the expected German offensives sure to come in the spring and summer of 1942. Then consider all the food and vehicles, without those supplies… The Soviets would have folded.
Mark Ford: THE WORST WINTER IN 100 YEARS
The fuel that Stalin supplied Germany right up to the invasion date would give Hitler 3 to 4 months of high combat mobility. After that the only fuel he could get was either from the Ploesti oil field in Romania, which unsurprisingly was bombed and crippled, and the synthetic oil plants which were also targeted. Fuel for the war machine was drying up fast.
And let's not forget winter came early. The worst winter in 100 years. No winter clothing and very little shelter. Thousands froze to death. Machine guns froze solid truck tires shattered and tanks had to be running constantly or they would never start again. The only German to see Moscow were prisoners. The following desperate struggle to reach the oil fields bled them white and sent them fleeing for their lives. By 1942 fuel delivered to the Germans was mere fraction to the previous year. American aid was helpful but it definitely would not have changed the course of the war.
Oded Ben Josef:
From Wikipedia: The Americans supplied the Soviets with one-third of the trucks in the Soviet Red Army, and 18,000 fighter planes. Almost equivalent to half the entire production of the Germans in fighter planes for the entire war (53,215)
Victory without U.S. industrial and agricultural might, which was out of reach for axis powers to strike? impossible. The axis powers would have eventually surrounded Russia, forcing it to come to terms with them (not necessarily surrender — an arrangement of “spheres of influence”, for example), and so would Britain. The war would have lasted much longer, as you wrote, but this means that the Germans would have had much more time to subjugate the industries and resources of their conquered territories (a severe disadvantage of the German “Blitzkrieg” tactic, which quickly outstretched their forces without a comparable logistical increase in supplies).
Also they would have had a better shot at developing their secret weapons (rockets, jets, nuclear fission) none of which had worthy counterparts amongst the allies (except the U.S. and British efforts in the atomic project and — see the “Tube alloy” comment below ). The Germans might even have conquered the Middle East and reached its badly needed oil, since the British victory in the 2nd battle of El-Alamein, North Africa, also made use of 250 American Sherman tanks (12 regiments).
“More of the British armored units in North Africa were converted to increasingly-larger quantities of Shermans over time from their successful outcome at El Alamein, including the addition of Sherman IIIs (M4A2s)” Lend-Lease Sherman tanks - Wikipedia
This does not mean that the U.S. won, or could win, World War II alone.
Barton Chandler:
And what enabled the Russians to continue to fight? American industry. This is what we shipped them: U.S. deliveries to the USSR amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, 11,400 aircraft and 1.75 million tons of food. Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US.
Oriana:
That’s the answer I heard a few years after coming to the US, and never forgot: What was the main reason the Allies won WW2? It was the American industrial potential.
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HITLER WAS A “LITTLE MAN”
Before the Nazis seized control of Germany, American journalist Dorothy Thompson described Adolf Hitler as a “little man.” She said he was impossible to talk to because he spoke as if he was addressing a crowd. “… a hysterical note creeps into his voice, which rises sometimes almost to a scream.”
Hitler did not forget Thompson’s portrayal when he became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. He personally ordered her removal from the country the next time she visited.
Dorothy Thompson, the journalist who described Hitler as a "little man"
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WHY THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSED, BUT NOT CHINA AND NORTH KOREA
~ China abandoned Communism in time (1978), not waiting for a catastrophic event to force their hand, like we did in the the USSR. Their main advantage was the absence of clear ethnic fault lines that increasingly were tearing up the Soviet Union from 1986 onwards.
In the USSR, when Gorbachev ran out of money toward the end of 1980s, he already had painted himself into a corner. Because of the Perestroika, he deprived himself of the North Korean option of drowning the national unrest in blood. His fundamental blunder was diverting the dwindling stash of currency and gold reserves from the military and secret police into keeping the populace fed and clothed, and binding his hands with his concept of “New Thinking”.
As a result, the military and secret police abandoned him when he badly needed their support against the Communist hard-liners during the summer and fall of 1991. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Piers Sutton:
The constituent republics of the USSR were not Russian people, and had a history of their own (and country) before the USSR formed. The money running out is probably the most important catalyst in the disillusionment of the USSR, but the republics not being historic provinces/counties of Russians cannot be overlooked.
The Sam Show:
The Soviet Union was a collection of different countries all enslaved by Russia … all longing to be free. They hated Russia then. They hate Russia now.
China was and remains a single country with a sense of nationalism. And, with more than a billion peasant farmers looking to survive, a job in a factory for low wages was their priority, not making sure they had the freedoms that come with democracy. That will be next.
Time will tell … but, the Chinese regime may have doomed itself by its coverup of the coronavirus.
Frederic:
The collapse of USSR was triggered mostly by three republics (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) that were all historical part of Russian Empire. It’s true that three Baltic states started the movement, but they barely mattered if those big three had remained loyal to USSR.
Piers Sutton:
Belarusians are a distinct ethnic group. The fact that Russian’s controlled them at various times is important history, but does not diminish their own ethnicity, culture, territory, and so on. Ditto Ukraine. The fact that a country once had an empire and took over various countries and people’s is not an argument against said peoples having their own ethnicity, language, territory, culture, etc.
Scott Morrison:
At least Gorbachev was compassionate enough to try to keep the people fed.
Dima Vorobiev:
Yes. Everyone agrees that Gorbachev was not a true Communist.
Stalinism is the only way. No other way has worked.
Peter Herz:
It does not speak well of what a true Communist is.
Tony Dubrick:
So sad that feeding the people has to be considered a political mistake.
George Despotov:
You're forgetting about one of the main, fundamental reasons why the USSR failed — the uravnilovka [egalitarianism, leveling] — which completely demotivated people to work decently. Deng Xioapin realized this and introduced genuine market principles and reforms, Gorbachev didn't. He simply lacked the brains, knowledge, and vision. He was a talking head.
The paradox in all socialist countries was that the people had money, but nowhere to spend it??!
In a nutshell, if market principles had been introduced in the 1980s, i.e.salaries and remuneration were tied to the real results of performance, then things would have developed differently.
William Lucas:
A collapsing gerontocracy and ethnic strife were inherent within the make up of the Soviet Union and eventually this would have occurred along Christian-Muslim lines anyway. You cannot have a multiethnic country without tolerance or with suppression by a government that is not perceived to be elected by the people. This is especially true in the modern era of mass communications when the poor look through the window and see what they are missing in the outside world.
Paul Kuhn:
I would add the following. Marx said that Regimes begin to collapse when the Elites splinter. And I think that is what happened in the Soviet Union. The Elites saw that their society wasn’t working any more. Yeltsin thought the Soviet Union was finished when he went to Houston and saw the grocery stores there. Gorbachev who traveled widely before becoming General Secretary also had the same experience. Increasing the elites of Soviet Society saw that it wasn’t working anymore. And they were in no mood to defend it.
Oriana:
A typical American grocery market is the best argument for capitalism. For someone from the Eastern bloc, walking into a supermarket felt like entering an enchanting palace. I will never forget my first time — nor the story of a high-ranking Soviet woman who burst out weeping when she saw all that abundance.
Which brings me to this:
THE SUPERMARKET VISIT THAT CHANGED HISTORY
In 1989, a very high level delegation of USSR leadership visited Johnson Space Center for a tour. They made an unscheduled pit stop at Randall’s. Randall’s was a supermarket chain local to metro Houston. The photo below is of Boris Yeltsin in said store.
~ Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in
amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage
that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw
the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
Shoppers and employees stopped him to shake his hand and say hello. In 1989, not everyone was carrying a smart phone in their pocket so Yeltsin "selfies" weren't a thing yet.
Yeltsin asked customers about what they were buying and how much it cost, later asking the store manager if one needed a special education to manage a store. In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops.
"Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev," he said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him. Little did he know there countless stores just like it all over the country, some with even more things than the Randall's he visited.
The fact that stores like these were on nearly every street corner in America amazed him. They even offered him free cheese samples.
According to Asin, Yeltsin didn't leave empty-handed, as he was given a small bag of goodies to enjoy on the rest of his trip.
About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin's next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn't stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
In Yeltsin's own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall's, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia.
Maybe you can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops he's seen marveling in those Chronicle photos.
"When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people," Yeltsin wrote. "That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."
The leader himself stepped down on the last day of 1999 after years of trying to bring a new system to Russia. The cronyism in place only managed to stifle Yeltsin's dream for his country. Corruption and perceived incompetence plague his final years in office. Leaving the Kremlin voluntarily is said to have kept him from criminal prosecution.
Yeltsin died in 2007 at the age of 76.
The Randall's he visited, just off El Dorado Boulevard and Highway 3, is now a Food Town location.
Mary:
*
THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION AND NATIONALISM OF THE REPUBLICS
~ We must go back to 1913, four years before Bolshevism cemented itself in Russian history. Nationalism is on the rise across Europe and old empires like the Habsburgs and Ottomans find themselves struggling to keep everyone in check.
European Socialists are also divided on a common strategy dealing with this abrupt growth of nationalism. Most leftists in the early years of the century favored Otto Bauer’s and Karl Renner’s view of the matter, which was that to grant ethnic minorities a right to an education in their native languages and allowance of semi-autonomy within major empires.
However, one socialist revolutionary, an exiled Russian whose name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov but who was better-known as Lenin, rejected Otto’s and Karl’s formula out of hand. He believed that federalization would only split the working class further, and that assimilation was the only way to achieve cultural harmony. However, Lenin also knew that assimilation was a tactically unacceptable slogan as it would alienate the Bolsheviks from one half of Russias population.
His solution? To take self-autonomy a step further and allow all ethnic groups complete independence from Russia whether they be Crimean Tatars or Poles.
Central Asians in their ethnic clothing celebrating the first of May during the 70s. Lenin originally advocated for complete autonomy for all ethnic groups under communist influence.
When his followers objected that his program would Balkanize Russia, Lenin responded with two arguments. First being that no ethnic group would reasonably want to leave Russia, and secondly that the Bolshevik government would be able to bring them back under Russian control if needed. Thus, an extremely liberal policy on the nationalities promised substantial advantages — the support of ethnic groups, without carrying any risks.
Yet, the realities of the Russian Revolution and Civil War four years later in 1917 came as a nasty shock to Lenin's plausible view of ethnic liberation.
Not only did Russia’s nationalities want to leave the crumbling empire and did so, but the Bolsheviks were unable to bring them back. Lithuania, Finland, Ukraine, Estonia, Transcaucasia and even Siberia escaped Soviet rule and found allies with foreign or interstate parties that protected them from Bolshevik influence. For example, when Lenin advanced on Kiev in January-Febuary 1918 to reunite Ukraine with Soviet Russia, his forces were repelled by Germany who sought to keep Ukraine as a German puppet state.
What was Lenin going to do? Obviously self-autonomy had failed, but forced assimilation was also out of the question because of the fear that it would threaten support from ethnic minorities. Lenin now had to fall back towards a modified version of Otto’s and Karl’s federalism if his regime wanted the return of Imperial territories without losing support from locals.
It was modified because Lenin's federalism wasn't genuine. These member states didn't have endowed powers within their territories, but rather a peculiar species of pseudo-federalism whose power came directly from Moscow rather than local areas. This ideological shift in nationhood proved adaptable to keeping Soviet nationalities in line. Once countries were reconquered and reincorporated into the Soviet Union, they could be given the semblance of statehood and their governmental institutions, all while being controlled directly by Russia’s Communist Party.
This type of federalism also (or at lest supposedly) avoided the feeling of being occupied by Russians as each major ethnic group had their own “nation” and local Soviet government. Thus, rebellion and lack of cooperation from non-Russians was less likely to happen as long as the locals didn't feel too much like they were conquered people. In fact, the Soviet communist party purposely wasn't divided along ethnic lines to satisfy the aspirations of various Bolshevik nationalities.
It is this model that Lenin adopted and in 1922–1924 incorporated in the constitution of the new state, the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics, that lasted until 1991. For little more than half a century, this type of pseudo-federalism did prove itself a capable system of ruling over various ethnic groups who had often nothing in common between them.
So, in conclusion: the reason why the Soviets created republics within the USSR was because not only was it the best decision when assimilation and self-autonomy failed, but also because it allowed Soviets to dominate over ethnic minorities without alienating them.
~ Alex Foster, Quora
Joe McCan:
It was not FEDERAL — It was a continuation of the Mongol style rule of Muscovy which had learned how to control many people with a few! Certainly, one might argue that there were GREAT changes throughout its history, BUT, for the captured nations was there a real difference or not?—Rule by the Kremlin of Muscovy (Muscovian Empire) or of the Soviet Empire?—new names, new faces—still corrupt torturous rule!
In fact the Mongols pretty much ruled through confederalism. They were content with subject peoples and nations ruling themselves, naming themselves, having their own kings and dynasties (that the Mongols would approve and sometimes intermarry with) — as long as they paid tribute once a year and sent some military help if needed.
Kievan Rus’, the medieval-era Russian state, before the Mongols, ruled itself in much the same way. It was a federation, or even confederation of principalities, with one of them being the seat of power (Kiev), but with the principalities all ruling themselves, and sometimes even warring with each other or with Kiev to install their own rulers.
The Soviet Union was too centralized to be described as federalism in the same way.
But nevertheless these republics did all exist, they did have their own national elites, who Moscow listened to and took the arguments of into account if needed. They also had the mandates to carry out some of their own policies and goals on their own territory. At the same time though Moscow was capable of utterly overruling them and installing its own approved leaders if anyone threatened to get out of hand. Overall it was more of a centralized state, with good measures for ethnic equality and some national autonomy. Russia today is closer to federalism than the USSR was.
Abhinav Prasad:
It seems like much of communism and the Soviet Union’s history can be described as “I didn't expect that to happen”.
Oriana:
We can be sure that Marx would be utterly astonished by all that happened to the “communist project.”
Andrew Chang:
It's the same with the Magna Carta, Oliver Cromwell, independence of the 13 British colonies, the First French republic — all unexpected events that had profound consequences.
Aldo Rovinazzi:
USSR and Marxism-Leninism were deterministic experiments by quasi-religious fanatics who firmly believed they knew the absolute truth and that the final outcome was guaranteed. Despite overwhelming evidence that human nature was biologically incompatible with their assumptions, ideology and aspirations, they kept pretending that their short term fixes would be rectified in the near future.
It was hubris and attachment to their lie, rather than unintended consequences…
Marshall Reed Kuefl:
Joseph Stalin first came to Lenin's attention by writing on the nationalities issue. Stalin later formulated the policy adopted by Lenin. Free nations and independent governments on paper, the Bolshevik party holding power over both.
Rustvan Ruzsy:
Lenin's federalism wasn't genuine. These member states didn't have endowed powers within their territories, but rather a peculiar species of pseudo-federalism whose power came directly from Moscow rather than local areas.
Here you are failing to comprehend that there used to be “two Moscows”, the one being the capital of the USSR, the other being the capital of RSFSR. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic may have been de facto dominant in the USSR, but de jure it had the same level of autonomy within the Union as Ukrainian, Estonian or Tajik Soviet Socialist Republics — or even less! — since the RSFSR was the only USSR constituent republic that did not have its own Communist Party.
Alex Foster:
The Russian Soviet republic may have been on paper equal to that of Estonia and Latvia as you state which is true, but the RSFSR itself was the power house of the Soviet Union rather than Ukraine or Belarus.
This is for many reasons: first being that pretty much all of the Soviet bureaucracy was found in the RSFSR and that almost all of the secret services HQs, police units HQs, military HQs, and government institutions (e.g university of Moscow) was found in Moscow- and this is not a coincidence, the RSFSR was meant to dominate the Soviet empire and had been from the start. After all, what was called the Soviet Union later on was first called the RSFSR. The RSFSR expanded and changed names to the Soviet Union when it regained control over various former Tsarist states and didn't want to alienate non-Russian populations.
The RSFSR population was the dominant rulers of the USSR — that being the Russians who were considered the loyalists of the Soviet power and of course made up most of the Soviet institutions and government offices later in the Stalinist era. Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia were all Russified for a reason, and it wasn't because of equality, but rather that the Soviet rule wanted direct assimilation to enforce RSFSR control over the regions.
Also Moscow was the head state of USSR for a reason — its ethnic population was the loyalist and that the RSFSR and was always meant to have control over the ethnic states for the reasons above and, if you want — I can add in other reasons too.
The Soviet Union may have had two Moscows officially — but in reality it was just tomato tomāto. Both were intertwined with each other and there really wasn't any difference. If the Soviet Union wanted to have a different capital all together they would've chose something more visible like Petrograd [Leningrad, now St. Petersburg), not Moscow.
The RSFSR never had a communist party because its communist party was basically already the entire Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There’s no reason to give themselves a communist party when they already controlled the entire Soviet bureaucracy and the party itself. Thats why it was based in Moscow, rather than in Kiev or Riga.
Joe McCan:
Has anything really changed, other than changes in name, leadership, and technological progression?—The same tsars, of the same Kremlin, ruling over the same peoples, who have the same limited freedoms and wealth, and who suffer the same cruelties—other than, of course, accounting for the technological differences of modern times!
To many, Muscovy, controlled by the khan, is the same as the Muscovy controlled by the Khan-President! (or getting there).
Joe McCan:
Technology seriously affected parts of the propaganda control mechanism. Short wave radios had existed for a long time but advances made them better, smaller, and easier to hide. The biggest blow came from the photocopier. It was illegal to own, but it allowed people a much faster way to reproduce samizdat publications which used to be hand copied. Also in order to profit from foreign currency some tourists were allowed (although with many restrictions)— in any case, uncontrolled information and news devastated the mind controlling propaganda of previous times.
Gorbachev realized that there was not that much point in forcing people to hold leaking umbrellas, and so proposed Glasnost! Without the control of information, and with the army refusing to shoot its own people, the jig was up!
Trianglewhip:
If you want an empire, you have to make your subjected regions feel they are ALLIES not subjects. Alexander Great and Rome most of the time understood this very well. But Napoleon and Hitler failed to apply that more and their empires fell real quickly…
~ main entry: Alex Foster, Quora
*
IMAGINE BEING SENT TO A GULAG FOR BEING LATE TO WORK . . .
~ You are an ordinary worker in the government owned and run (as everything in the USSR) factories in 1938. You have to wake up at 6:00 every morning, six days a week, be at the bus or streetcar terminal by 6:30 and make it to the factory gates by 7:00. One day, your alarm clock stopped at midnight, and you missed your schedule by 30 min.
You catch the next bus or tram and run to the factory gates, and it is 7:31 on the dot. You make an attempt to enter, but instead, you are arrested on the spot, taken to the local NKVD dungeon and by the end of the day sentenced to 5 years of hard labor, and promptly dispatched to the far North, to one of the hundreds of GULAG archipelago camps to cut wood, dig the gold or coal in the permafrost and fulfill the quota on 1,000 calories a day.
After a month, you loose 50 pounds, can’t deliver the quota, and selected, along with another dozen of strugglers, for quick bullet in the back of your head. You are buried in one of the thousands of shallow , unmarked graves. Your are promptly replaced by a new arrival. You can still go to those places and find whitened bones scattered all over Siberian tundra and taiga. Do you know that GULAG was the largest enterprise in the USSR at the time? Just one example out of hundred of thousands: A worker named Ivan Trusov was arrested in 1938 and accused of being a "wrecker" for being late to work and failing to meet production quotas. Trusov was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp.
In 1937, a group of workers at a textile factory in Leningrad were arrested and accused of being part of a Trotskyist conspiracy. Among the charges against them was that they had been late to work on multiple occasions. The workers were found guilty and executed.
Execution, Soviet-style (the victim here looks like a Polish officer)
One of a few ways to avoid this was to become a security guard in one of the GULAG camps, and many made that choice. That’s the people who survived the purges, they and the executioners (quite in demand) and whose descendants run Russia today. I see some of them learned enough English to leave nasty comments on my posts. They love Stalin and all he stands for, support the war and their only regrets are that Russian Wagner mercenaries don’t kill enough Ukrainian children. ~ Sgt Carey Mahoney
Alexey Lotman:
The only thing to add is that even being on the side of the murderers/executioners did not necessary guarantee survival: in addition to millions of innocent people the system killed thousands of its own. No, keeping low did not guarantee survival.
*
RUSSIAN CITIZENS WHO ARE AGAINST THE WAR
~ This is not entirely about me, but rather about my dad, who still lives in Russia, St Petersburg. I am sorry for the long read, but the topic is overwhelmingly hard to discuss..
My dad, Vladimir, is over 70 year old, a well known musician, pianist, professor of Conservatory of Music. He is the one who was truly terrified back in 2000, when Putin took over the power in Russia. He said back then — nothing good happens when a KGB guy takes the power, especially one with USSR school of thought.
These days he is basically confining himself at his dacha (a cabin outside of the city) — just because how disgusting it is to walk the cities these days — you see banners with huge Z, you see cars with war symbolic, you hear what people say and all that. He comes to work, and he says it is truly horrible how the whole crowd in Conservatory (intelligent people, allegedly) have turned into the cattle supporting the unthinkable.. Except for a few who are different..
He doesn’t protest loudly, he doesn’t come out to streets as he knows what will happen right after — people protesting are captured within minutes. He never voted for Putin, he is a bigger democrat than me, and he says well USSR came back too quickly. Because in fact after the USSR fell and when Putin came, exactly the same people who ruled USSR took the power again, just under a different name.
I left Russia in 2012. I started looking for a job outside of the country when I learnt Putin was going to come back for the 3rd term. it sounded like a big scale scam, so I briefly joined the white lines opposition protests in 2011, and then went ahead with the new born baby and other kids and wife to Europe. Where we have lived ever since, DREAMING of never getting back to Russia and having whatever different passport but Russian.
Then Crimea, Boeing, and Donbass happened after Ukrainian Maidan. I was openly supporting Ukrainian side, I traveled a lot to Kyiv and Lviv, and I know what I saw with my own eyes — all the BS that the Russian media had been spilling about language discrimination, and discrimination against Russian people, was simply nonsense, fully made up lies. There were friendly Ukrainian people, fluent in both languages, welcoming to everyone.
Fast forward to Feb 2022… As for many Russians who think as I do, the war, especially during the first days, was something that I simply could not find appropriate words to speak about. They literally got stuck in my throat. Few days later, I went online and started posting / creating — at that time I was actively releasing music and curating a few large Spotify playlists. So for a month or so I had been posting music videos supporting Ukraine, signing petitions, going to protests in Geneva where I lived back then, creating playlists with only Ukrainian artists, etc.
And then I received a call from my mom (who has lived in Germany for many years, they are divorced with my dad but talk frequently). And she says, hey, I understand your drive and yes you do the right thing, but I talked to your father and you know, if you do something THEY don’t like, THEY will come for your dad.
So I said, OK I will shut up online. But I could not find any reason for myself to post about anything else. Cat videos or a nice piano picture seemed totally irrelevant given the situation. So I completely stopped composing, recording music, and being active on social media.
And this is where we are. I have to say I feel privileged in the current situation, as most of my friends and family do not support this Armageddon. We now live in Slovenia, a beautiful country which is equally hosting Russians and Ukrainians who left their homes because of this bloody MF Putin.
My kids go to British school, and in the drop-off area every second car has either Ukrainian or Russian plate number… My son studies piano with an amazing Ukrainian teacher, my wife is doing yoga in a mixed group of Ukrainians and Russians. Normal people live together in peace and friendship, not in war and tears.
My dad came here to visit last year, and we are planning to host him this summer, too. My dad is also an amazing photographer, as a hobby, and he traveled to the most beautiful places in the world — but now it is getting progressively more expensive and long to travel anywhere.
Picture — my dad says Kindness, Free Choice, and Humanism will eventually win!
PS. Just a few weeks ago my daddy was in St Petersburg, and speaking with my mom on the home line phone (she was calling from Germany, as always). After 30 minutes, I swear, the police showed up at his doorstep. Who were you talking to, they asked. He explained and they left quickly.
*
HOW EVIL IS PUTIN COMPARED TO OTHER DICTATORS? (Misha Firer)
Propagandist Solovyov and the rest of the media presented footage of the destroyed nine-story building in Uman, a city in central Ukraine as "shelling of Donbass by Ukrainian militants.”
It’s interesting how the Russian media and KGB that comes up with and controls this whole narrative want to be seen as good guys, protectors of Ukrainian civilians from evil Ukronazis.
However, children who get brainwashed at school with military marches, Kalashnikov assault rifle assembly and Nazi-like Lessons About What’s Important have been brought up not to feel any empathy for human beings. They’re told it’s their right to abuse the weak.
Here’s a recorded dialogue between two Russian girls and a Ukrainian gamer.
“Hello, uncle. Why are you not hiding in a basement?”
“Why are you asking this cheerfully, happily?” responds the Ukrainian gamer.
“My father has gone to war to bomb you,” giggles the girl on the right.
“Why?”
“Just for fun.”
“Does your dad like to kill civilians?”
“Yessss! It’s so gooood.”
Then she explains her position.
“Because our Putin is so much better than your Zelesnky. Zelensky is a clown. Putin doesn’t get caught walking naked in a supermarket. And now go to basement. You might die. Goodbye.”
*
The most popular name of the dead Russian soldiers in the Battlefield Ukraine is not Ivan. It’s Alexander.
There are at least 1795 dead Alexander the Great of Macedonia wannabes who have failed to conquer world. Get more Alexanders to the rescue!
Defenders of mankind, that’s what the name means in Greek. But Greek is all Greek to Brutalsky (Misha’s nickname for the Russians) even though their religion has come from the craggy shores of post-Hellenistic Greece.
Alexander is also the name of the early 19th century Afro-Russian native French-speaking poet Alexander Pushkin popularized by communists for his anti-Tsarist position.
Of course, Pushkin was against despotism in any form, but communists took him at face value — they minted symbols to uphold their violent grab of power as legitimate.
“Pushkin is our everything. He hated the tsars as only a Frenchman could that he was. That’s what makes him a true one hundred percent Russian poet because Russian people can’t stand tsars and dictatorship.”
Communists didn’t see themselves as dictators and their rule as despotic although they officially called their one and only political party “dictatorship of proletariat.”
Every autocrat thinks of himself as a democratic leader, a fighter for the rights of common man, no different from his Western colleagues.
Third most popular dead mobik name is Alexei. Short for Alexander and Alexei is Alex.
Alex is the new Ivan. Ivan was terrible and formidable. Alex is irresponsible and heartless.
Second most popular name of the dead Russian soldiers is Sergey. The name is related to the word Sargent, soldier and protector.
Ivan is only at number 9th and Vladimir, which means the ruler of the world, is at number 7th.
This gives hope that militarized megalomania is the thing of the past, but recall that the most popular Russian boy name belongs to a person who once said, “I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity.”
A short glorious life leaves ruins for those who’d rather bring up children and build a comfortable life for them. Operating room, toilet and a patient room in a Birabidjan children’s hospital.
operating room*
Patient's room
*
Toilet at the hospital*
WILL PUTIN ANNOUNCE THE END OF THE “SPECIAL MILITARY OPERATION” ON MAY 9?
According to Roman Svitan, Colonel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, there's a high probability Putin may announce the end of his Special Operation in Ukraine May 9th. The Colonel made the comment during a live interview today on Espresso TV.
"Putin will try to declare his victory on May 9. He will talk about the seizure of Ukrainian territories and the land corridor. Putin will try to switch the so-called special operation, which has fulfilled its tasks, to another regime," Svitan said. “The Russian military and political leadership will then try to be in the defensive crouch. By constantly rotating the military leadership, Putin is trying to shift the responsibility for the failures in Ukraine to the generals.”
Izzy Luggs:
I'm not sure what to make of the Colonel's statements. He's obviously in the know. But then again, these are bold predictions. Coincidentally, May 9th is the date Ukraine has warned all Russians to stay away from military bases, war equipment and “war criminals”. Something may be afoot.
Roman Svitan
*
WAS GENERAL PATTON CORRECT WHEN HE SUGGESTED THE US TAKE ON THE THE SOVIETS RIGHT AFTER WW2?
Patton suggested we shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin, and kept on going until Moscow. His ideas were disregarded.
Americans, despite not having to shoulder the same burdens of the Soviets and the British — and, for that matter, the Poles, French, Dutch and Czechs — were nonetheless war weary.
Moreover, Americans at the time — the vast majority of them — were very much ensconced in and comforted by a more traditional notion of America and its place in the world. The country's involvement in World War II, much like the previous world war, was regarded as an extenuating circumstance, something in which America had to become involved because of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany and Italy's subsequent declaration of war in the United States.
There was still a widespread view in America that the country would return to its longstanding tradition of neutrality and strict nonalignment. Any post-war challenges could be resumed by the British, whose navy had long kept the peace.
It would take a few more years before the United States finally resolved to become embroiled in alliance building and to function as the bedrock of efforts to prevent Soviet expansion. And these events were put into train only after the British threw up their hands after the post-war struggle against communist insurgency in Greece and affirmed to the Americans that they no longer could function as the sole global policemen.
Moreover, Americans in 1945 still harbored a generally favorable opinion of the Soviets and Stalin and what they regarded as their heroic struggle against Nazi aggression. Many among American elites still regarded Stalin as a benevolent dictator who had adopted cruel tactics of repression only to drag his country into modernity.
This was only reinforced by the horrendous discoveries of concentration camps, which only served to show millions of Americans, soldiers and civilians alike, that while the Soviets weren't perfect, they weren't Nazis — or so it seemed at the time — and aside from that they had played an indispensable role in defeating them.
While Patton's post-war experiences with the Soviets had placed him ahead of the curve in terms of understanding ultimate Soviet intent, the Truman administration was fully aware that the vast majority of American citizen-soldiers were ready to return home and to resume their lives.
There was no getting around that at the time. ~ Jim Langcuster, Quora
*
HOW WERE OLD PEOPLE IN THE NINETEEN SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES DIFFERENT FROM THE WAY THEY ARE TODAY?
A good deal of the difference is made by the generation they were born in. Let’s say that 75 is the age benchmark we are looking into.
London children in 1890. jpg
A person who was 75 in 1970 was born in 1895. They had a high likelihood of being illiterate (especially if women) or minimally educated, probably grew up in a small town with little intellectual excitement. They were approximately 20 at the time of the First World War (if males they probably had to take part to the conflict) and 45 at the time of the second world war, so they experienced the two wars. Besides, youths of their time hardly ever had a generation conflict with their elders. They tended to espouse their morals and worldviews, maybe just softening a bit some corners.
A person who is 75 now was born in the post-war years and were youth in the 1970’s. Let’s see what this entailed:
Wealthier families and changed laws made sure all children had at least 8 years of schooling and increase access to high schools and universities, which produced a better educated and more interested in culture and art generation.
The girls wanted clothing by Mary Quant and Pierre Cardin instead of long skirts and formal clothes.
They protested on the streets.
Effective and available contraception changed the approach to sexuality.
1970’s youth listened music that set them apart from their seniors.
Actually they looked for music that set them apart from their seniors that just ten years later this happened: Sex Pistols.
As a result, people who were 75 in the 1970’s though of themselves as of being close to death, while people who are approximately 75 now are like this:
~ Alice Twain [lives in Italy, 1971 - present], Quora
David Ward:
I don’t know which country you are from, but here in the UK someone born In 1895 would have been required to go to school to age 14, I believe. And part of that education would have been that Britain ruled the largest empire that had ever been, and children should be proud to be British/English. That part of the syllabus, and being proud to rule an empire, had disappeared by the time I was in school in the 1950s.
At my youth club we had a talk from a leading light in the “League of Empire Loyalists” in the early 1960s; we thought he was a rather silly old duffer. Most of us had heard from our parents about being bombed during WWII, so the superiority of Britain was not so obvious to us!
Eloise Hellyer:
When I was growing up, they said that anyone who lived past 70 years was living on borrowed time. You certainly don’t hear that anymore!
RJ Holland:
I’d like to give a hug to those little guys at the top and give them a few bucks. Tough life but they are smiling.
Michael Cooke:
Hang on a sec. It's true that people live longer than they did in the 60s and 70s but let's not go overboard. Life expectancy in the UK for example is about 81 I think but for men it is about 78. But then there is healthy life expectancy. This takes into consideration the decline in health most people experience before they die. In the UK for instance men on average do not live independently and healthily from about the age of 73. And these averages have fallen over the past decade or so.
Well it was probably the bit about people aged 75 nowadays being athletic and vigorous like Bruce Springsteen or Samuel L Jackson as opposed to being ‘close to death’ as in previous generations. ‘As a result, people who were 75 in the 1970’s though of themselves as of being close to death, while people who are approximately 75 now are [more healthy and active].
James Romanow:
Roughly 70% of the cohort both sexes can expect to see 85. about 50+% will make it to 90…
RiDi:
“Youths of their time never had a conflict with their elders.”
Uh, wrong! Older people calling younger people “soft” and “corrupted” is a continuous generational cycle. There was a journalist in 1921 who complained about high-schoolers of the time—that they are “soft, careless, have intellectual decay, “show off their cars”, etc, etc, etc—mind you, this guy was talking about people born between 1905 and 1908. And then there was this this from 1926.
1895 was literally when flappers were born.
And it goes back further than that. In Ancient Greece, Socrates said this: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
Oh yeah and Aristotle said this: "[Elderly men] have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business....They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefore suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly....They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive. They are not generous, because money is one of the things they must have....They are cowardly, and are always anticipating danger; unlike that of the young, who are warm-blooded, their temperament is chilly…"
Mary:
Oriana:
When the retirement age of 65 was first introduced, the expectation was that most of the labor force would not live long enough to actually retire . . .
But I've also witnessed the disappearance of the phrase "the golden years." Those were supposed to be the years of trips to Disneyland and abroad. And of course cruises. This may be true for some people, but ill health starts catching up with many some time in their late seventies, or mid-eighties for the luckier ones. Trouble is, the process of aging accelerates at some point, and not that many make it past ninety, much less one hundred. Unfortunately we have a biological clock that can be somewhat slowed down, but not eliminated. And we understand that a typical human life has a badly written "last act."
Let's hope that medicine will keep us healthier than the previous generations. But there is also a point when what people really wish for is a quick death, not an agonizing slow dying of cancer. That's what makes me understand why some people cling to religion. But belief is not easy any more, since modern society is very different from the biblical times.
*
WHAT IT WAS LIKE FOR A RUSSIAN JEW TO ESCAPE TO ISRAEL IN THE NINETEEN NINETIES
My first thought about this was: “Escape? Not the word that we were using to describe it back then... but not entirely wrong in retrospect.”
And my second thought about this was: “Why haven’t I ever written this whole thing down? This is my life story, there are a million more like it, but this one is mine.”
*
Jews in Russia were barely distinguishable from Russians. We spoke the same language, we ate the same food, we read the same books and newspapers, we watched the same television shows and movies, we studied in the same schools. Most of us didn’t care about any religion, or ever visited a synagogue.
The closest that most Jews ever got to Judaism was eating matza. However it was not a part of a proper Passover seder, but simply “Jewish biscuits”. Some Russians ate it, too. We never had it at our home, but I remember occasionally eating it when we visited my father’s sister. Neither us nor her family kept kosher; we ate pork and lard like all Russians without ever giving it any thought.
What was Jewish in us, then? For most people, it was the non-Russian last name and the “Ethnicity” field in the passport (национальность). It was a weird thing to bear. It’s not like there was violent antisemitism and discrimination everywhere, but some cultural antisemitism was constantly around. People would say a little “hmm” about your last name or about your passport. I was too young to experience it first-hand, but Jews complained about being denied certain jobs and admission to universities. I did suffer direct physical, verbal and psychological violence as a child. Much of it was just usual bullying, the kind of which nerds like me suffer all over the world; it’s a horrible, horrible thing, but not all of it was antisemitic. However, enough of it clearly was.
In 1985 my father decided to stop being overweight and started dieting and getting into shape. He loved it so much that he wrote a letter about it to the USSR’s biggest sports newspaper, and it was published. A few years after that he found out that by law, people whose letters were published by a newspaper are entitled for some payment. So on a nice spring day in 1990 he went to the newspaper office to collect it and took me along.
And so it happened that Moscow’s synagogue was on the same street. He never visited a synagogue before, so he went in out of curiosity. It was open, but mostly empty, except a guy who sold some calendars, yarmulkas and booklets about Judaism in a tiny store.
After some time a young woman came in, and my father talked to her a bit. Immigration to Israel came up, and she said that it’s fairly easy to submit the request to the Israeli consulate. That was the first time it ever came up.
A few months later I went to a summer camp in Crimea. A bully there kicked me so hard that I landed in a hospital. My father flew to me from Moscow a day later. After a few hours he casually told me: “Oh by the way, remember that woman from the synagogue? I submitted the immigration papers to the consulate like she suggested”.
I don’t remember whether we ever mentioned it in our conversations back then, but it was clear that we all had enough of this bullying, enough of which was antisemitic. We can’t change our ethnicity, and Russia can’t change the way it treats people who aren’t Russian in the foreseeable future. It was time to leave for a place that we could really call a “home”.
Like everything else in the Soviet Union, emigration out of it was insanely bureaucratic. The amount of paperwork for getting a visa that allows one to leave the USSR is incredible: You had to submit letters, forms and reports to the police, the education offices, the labor organization authorities (in communism, all labor is controlled by the state), notaries, the bank (there was only one), and so on and so forth. I was a curious child, and I followed it. It took many months.
Probably the funniest piece of it all was an “Invitation letter”. You are supposed to have a reason to leave the Soviet Union—after all, who would want to leave the most wonderful country on Earth? A legitimate reason is an invitation from a relative, but we had no direct relatives in Israel. The government of Israel knew about this nonsense, and had an easy way of providing sham invitation letters from “relatives” to Jews who wanted to immigrate. I’m pretty sure that the Soviet authorities knew that it’s a sham, and I guess that running this bureaucratic freak show was more important to them than actually running the country.
I remember the day when this “invitation letter” arrived. In an unusual foreign air mail envelope, the kind of which is rarely seen in the USSR; with a big menorah in the background—it was the first time I saw how the coat of arms of Israel looks like; with a very dry and legalese text; and with the very important words “immigration for permanent residence in Israel.” I was full of joy and wonder. I still remember the name and address of this “relative.”
The months it took to prepare for leaving the Soviet Union were useful for studying Hebrew. Luckily, language is the thing that I am most curious about, so it didn’t feel boring or difficult at all. A thing that gave me even more motivation is the short article about the truly incredible and inspiring life story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, which appeared in the beginning of one of the first textbooks from which I learned.
I started taking Hebrew classes in December 1990, and by the summer I already knew the basics. My father took these classes, too, but it’s harder for older people in general, and he was busy with other things, so I quickly became more advanced.
In June 1991 it was time to move. We packed. My father’s friends from work were outstandingly nice—they organized a little good-bye party and a little bus to help us get to the airport.
There were no direct flights from USSR to Israel back then. We took the Hungarian MALEV airline to Budapest, paid by the Jewish Agency. In Budapest there was a long wait, but everybody on the plane was going to Israel and people waited patiently. We took our dog with us, and I remember that the Hungarian flight attendants were very nice and let us carry our dog on board and brought her food and water.
The flight was rather uneventful. But when the plane was approaching the destination, and the coastline of Tel-Aviv became visible, the whole plane went ecstatic. People were screaming with joy, applauding, hugging. People who never met before or after that day, but who were connected through this common thing called Aliyah, or, as it was often said in Russian, Repatriation. Somebody shouted “I congratulate you all upon arrival!”, and somebody else corrected him: “Upon the return to our historical homeland!”
This may sound like too much drama, but it was real.
In the airport, nice Russian-speaking people from the Jewish Agency helped us with the initial immigration paperwork. It took a few hours.
From the airport we were supposed to go to some actual, but very distant relatives whom we never met, for the first few days until we would get our own place to live. We only had their address in Jerusalem. We gave it to the lady from the Jewish Agency, and she booked a taxi for us. While we were waiting outside for the taxi, she ran to us and said that they called her and told her that they can’t actually host us, and that she organized a hotel room for us in Haifa. We didn’t have a choice, so we went to Haifa. We never met these people. I’m not angry at them, though from time to time I do wonder who they are.
Here’s the complete list of the possessions with which we came:
Suitcases with some clothes and bed sheets.
A box of soap. For some strange reason my parents thought it would be hard to get soap in Israel. They were wrong, of course.
A collection of Soviet special-issue coins that my father very meticulously put together over many years.
A collection of stamps that I very meticulously put together as a child.
A crate of Russian books.
300 U.S. dollars in cash.
A dog.
Knowing that Jews are coming from Russia with very little, the Jewish Agency provided us with a few thousands of shekels to start out the life in the new country. I am deeply grateful for this.
We spent the first few days in that cheap rundown hotel. I remember the first things we bought in a grocery store: a Lahit soft drink (similar to cola), cottage cheese and sliced bread. I particularly recall how proud I was when I managed to read the “cottage” label in Hebrew—half a year of ulpan studies in Moscow did pay off.
We desperately needed every penny, and after getting my agreement, my father sold my stamps collection to somebody for a few hundred shekels. I was never actually into proper philately—I just liked looking at the foreign languages on the stamps, and now I had more than enough texts in a new language to read, so I agreed easily.
After a few days in the hotel, we went to look for an apartment. Somebody offered us a very bad, cheap one-room apartment for free to see whether we want it. It was awful, but cheaper than the hotel. We stayed there for a couple of weeks, until my father managed to get us into a program that lets new immigrants live very cheaply in a kibbutz, and in July we moved to Hahotrim, a kibbutz near Haifa. We stayed there in a mobile home, which was clearly very cheap, but surprisingly suitable for living.
In the first few weeks, while my Hebrew was still far from perfect, I sometimes resorted to English, which I knew better—I had learned it in a good school in Moscow (see Amir E. Aharoni's answer to What was the best thing about living in the Soviet Union?). Kind people in the kibbutz helped me with some private Hebrew language lessons for free. (I am deeply grateful for that, too. Some day I should return there and say thank you in person.)
By the time I went to school in September, I was fluent enough. My parents went to study Hebrew in an ulpan: My mother came to Israel without knowing a single word of Hebrew, but in the ulpan lessons she started catching up quickly, and my father found a job at a factory in the kibbutz, and his Hebrew studies became patchy after some time, but eventually he caught up as well by watching football and reading a lot of newspapers, and somewhat surprisingly, a bilingual Bible.
In any case, my Hebrew was much more advanced than my parents’, so I helped them a lot with chores and paperwork, especially when it required language knowledge. We also got a TV, and I interpreted films and news for them. (Many years later I learned that children helping adults is a very common pattern in immigrant families.)
After a few months, we settled in. And after two years we took a large mortgage and bought an apartment. Even though I was only fourteen, I did most of the mortgage paperwork.
Getting integrated into Israeli life, or as they say here, absorbed, was not without challenges.
My parents struggled with shitty jobs for several years until they found decent careers.
I was still a nerd, so I suffered bullying in Israel too, but at least it wasn’t antisemitic. Very rarely it was anti-Russian. There’s one time I remember, when somebody called me “a stinking Russian”. I got very angry and replied: “I may be stinky, but I’m not Russian.” I have nothing against Russians, even though some of them have something against me; but I am not Russian.
In 1998, soon after I started my military service, my ID card was stolen, and I used the opportunity to change my name from Alexei Aharonson to Amir Elisha Aharoni. “Amir” comes from Amir Kertesz, an Israeli musician that I love; “Elisha” comes from “Alyosha”, the diminutive version of my Russian name Alexei; and “Aharoni” is a more Hebrew-sounding version of Aharonson. By that time I was fully fluent in Hebrew and absorbed, and I had some fun with my friends in the army as they were getting used to the new name.
In 2002, I started dating a young woman who was born in Israel to parents who immigrated from Iraq in the 1950s. We got married in 2006, our son was born in 2014. I speak Russian to him, she speaks Hebrew. He calls her “máma”, which is the Russian word for “mom”, and he calls me “ába”, which is the Hebrew word for “dad”.
Because I loved languages for as long as I remember, I studied General Linguistics and Hebrew language in the university. I now know the Hebrew grammar better than an average Israeli. Thanks to this and to some experience with programming that I acquired in the army, I eventually found a job developing language-related software for Wikipedia. Given Wikipedia’s general multilingual and multinational nature, and my position’s particular multilingual focus, I made a lot of friends around the world, some of them from Russia. My family members still call me Alyosha, but Russian friends that I made since then call me Amir.
I follow Russian news every day. Though I am not Russian, I still care about that country very much. Amusingly enough, thanks to the Internet I learned much more information about Russia since I left it than I did when I was living there, but the feeling of living there cannot be learned from Wikipedia or Quora, so occasionally I find myself being a sort of cultural ambassador of Russia, hopefully a good one.
I make software to improve Russian language support in Wikipedia despite the complicated history of Jews in Russia. I make software to improve the Hebrew language support in Wikipedia despite not having Hebrew as my mother tongue. Quite often I think about these curious cultural conundrums, but really it’s about the decisions you make in your life; to immigrate from one troubled country to another troubled country, to study a language, to pick a new identity without discarding your old one, to choose a less-than-obvious career path, to do something that you care about even if people don’t expect it.
I get to travel abroad quite a lot in the last few years for work, and I still get emotional every time the plane approaches the coast of Tel-Aviv. ~ Amir E. Aharoni, Quora
Tel Aviv residential streetDiana Dubrawsky:
My Russian friends left earlier, in the 80s, as soon as they started allowing Jews to leave. They were given a couple of weeks to dispose of their belongings and settle their affairs, and had to renounce their Russian citizenship and relinquish their passports.
Aaron Endelman:
It's a wonderful story!
Your observation about children educating their immigrant parents also rings true for me. My paternal grandparents came from Poland and Bessarabia at the beginning of the 20th century. They spoke Yiddish but no English. My dad, born in 1925 in New York City, was among the millions of children of immigrants educated in the NYC public school system during the “Americanization” era. There, the children learned English, which they then taught to their parents.
Larry Rivetz:
Russia's loss is Israel’s and the United States’ gain. Did anyone notice Israel's emergence as a technological leader began in1990 and mirrored the start of Russia's decline?
Tel Aviv at night
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Misha Iossel: NO NEW TERRITORIAL GAINS FOR RUSSIA
~ There will be no new territorial gains for Russia anymore. (And it will end up being expelled from Ukraine altogether.) Total failure.
*Russian forces in Ukraine are so degraded they cannot mount any significant offensive moves and are focused for now on consolidating control of occupied territory, the U.S. intelligence chief said Thursday.
As Ukraine prepares for its own offensive in the coming months, Russian President Vladimir Putin still likely aims to prolong the conflict until Western support for Kyiv wanes, said Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
"Putin probably has scaled back his immediate ambitions to consolidating control of the occupied territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, and ensuring that Ukraine will never become a NATO ally," Haines told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.*
About the drone attack on the Kremlin (described by Moscow as an American attempt to assassinate Putin):
“I don't think it was a false-flag operation: military drone over the Kremlin. It's an unheard-of humiliation for Putin, an enormous slap across his botoxed, surgically altered face.
He is cornered. The war is being lost, and likely is going to be lost irrevocably in a matter of months, if not weeks. He will lash out in one final fit of fury, in a bout of sheer desperation, I'm afraid.”
THE UPCOMING "VICTORY DAY" (Misha Firer)
On May 9, Russians will be celebrating Hatred Day aka Victory in World War Two with military parades.
This is the ideological basis of Stupidism, on which the crooked regime had spent most of the available resources they haven’t invested in superyachts, mansions and golden visas in the West to keep the populace forever backward dwelling on the glorious past.
Why build a decent country at home when you can steal and live in a decent country and leave the suckers behind?
It’s weird to celebrate Victory against the very countries that have fared so well:
GERMANY
#4 world’s economy and economic power house of EU. Their social system is still intact while Russians gutted theirs. Russian patriots drive German cars and used to line their pockets with billions of euros from selling natural gas to Germany.
JAPAN
#3 world’s economy and second largest economy in Asia. A technological miracle and a highly developed nation with high standards of living.
ITALY
#8 and the EU’s third largest economy , a permanent member of G7. This is where Russian crooks and propagandists used to buy villas and called their second home.
Fascist Nazis? What Fascist Nazis? It’s all about pleasant climate, culture, traditions and slow life under the pine trees, sipping wine and munching on delicacies.
*
Not bad for the defeated foes. And what about allies’ contribution to the victory? Do they count for something?
Not at all. 66% of recently polled Russians believe that Stalin would have achieved victory over the Axis powers without lend lease or participation of the Allies.
Two thirds of Russians think this way! One would assume that by sacrificing additional 8 million peasants. Or 16 million. Or everyone.
As such, it is revealed that Stupidism is End of Days religion and Victory in WW2 is The Rapture that has proclaimed to its acolytes that they are going to heaven while their enemies head straight to purgatory (at best).
Therefore, if Russia loses in Ukraine, ungrateful humanity must be wiped out to leave a clean slate for the righteous Russians, great grandchildren of victors to inherit.
*
The WW2 Allies haven’t fared all that badly, either.
AMERICA has become number one economy and global superpower.
FRANCE is the seventh and EU’s second largest economy. CANADA is ninth. Meanwhile every country that Soviet Union liberated in order to occupy has lagged behind greatly economically, from Poland to Baltic States.
UNITED
KINGDOM is the fifth economy. This is where Russian crooks used to send
their offspring to study and where they lived in mansions pretending to
be royals and lords.
And what about Russia? A pariah state importing stuff illegally, an exporter of natural resources for it has learned to produce nothing else, where the vast majority of the populace is still impoverished. What a victory to celebrate!
One of the main reasons for special military operation in Ukraine was Russia’s sweet dream that once Putin conquers the whole world he will force every country to celebrate Hatred Day on May 9th with military parades and zwastikas and little boy-tanks, the ultimate triumph of evil over good, Hitler’s ambition achieved by those whom he viewed as Untermensch.
In 2023, military parades are being canceled all across Ruzzia over the fears of Drone Attacks (the number two army has no means to shoot down cheap drones).
A paper house is what KGB created with their Church of Victory. All that cardboard construct is being burned on the battlefields of Bakhmut, reduced to dust in the steppes of Southern Ukraine.
This is a kindergarten in Sakhalin, just across the strait from Japan, revving up for Hatred Day.
“My name is T-34 Ivanov,” says the boy in the middle. “When I learned to walk I was baptized T-57. My dream is to become Armata Tank one day and then shortly after Jack-in-the-Box. I want my jacked off head to fly up high into the sky as my soul arises into Valhalla!”
“Oorah! Kill the Ukro-Euro-Afro-Americano-Russian-Political-Opposition Nazis!” his friends shout into the wind calling for more wars and devastation.
Unpaved roads throughout the island. And nobody pays any attention to the fact that they can’t live well because their minds are clouded, enraptured by fantasies of everlasting victories that should take them to heaven but in reality turn earth into hell. ~
Susanna Viljanen:
In the future, Fascists will call themselves Anti-Fascists. ~ George Orwell
Aidan Stenson:
How sad that a celebration of the defeat of fascism is now celebrated by people living under fascism.
*
WHAT IT’S LIKE TO MOVE FROM THE U.S. TO THE UK
~ It is a very demanding move to make. Just because people speak English, do not be deceived. It is an utterly alien place from America culturally and I found (and still find) the adjustments frustrating and still can get furious by the difficulties.
One of the biggest realities is the drop in the material standard of living. British wages are generally not as high as in the US and things are more expensive. Obviously, this impacts on lifestyle.
Houses are very expensive and you will live in a property half the size you would expect in the US, often attached to your neighbor and with a one car garage — if you are lucky. There are no basements, so you feel cramped and everything is cluttered. I've never seen a walk-in closet to date. You will cram everything into a 'wardrobe' the size of your coat closet.
My friends living like this include high flying professionals in London, teachers, engineers, journalists — graduates from top-flight universities. There are of course higher levels up from this, but it is generally those connected to the City, oil executives or the like. Doctors will live higher up the scale but not to American standards. Pharmacists have low five-figure salaries even though they hold chemistry degrees — a huge disparity, same with nursing.
You will eat sandwiches in your office, not go out for lunch as is done daily in the US. You will not have a garbage disposal and will be expected to hang your laundry out to dry, fighting the rain the whole time (having to check weather reports, can you believe?). Household work is more time consuming as the conveniences built into newer housing just aren't there.
But there are pubs! Pubs are an Englishman's refuge and the place where you meet up with mates for a quick pint as a routine part of 'friend maintenance.’
Our groceries are ordered on the internet and delivered to our front door — as is typical for all supermarkets. We live on the 'High Street' in our village — bakeries, cafes, barber, grocery store and bus stop are located there, and three pubs of course. The train station to London is an 8-minute walk.
My daughter is fourteen and has 11 subject areas: Latin, Greek, French, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Advanced Maths, History, English, English Lit and Music (theory, performance and composition). She anticipates fluency in French at 17. The education system is exam based; there is no such thing as a GPA. She wants to study medicine; the course begins freshman year and she has already begun pre-med coaching sessions at school.
Brits get a lot more time off — 5 weeks as a rule — and travel is a priority. The cultural aspects of the country are fascinating. Tiny it may seem but it takes a lifetime to know this place and with Europe at the back door opportunities are expanded even further.
A massive advantage of living here is the National Health Service. If an American could understand it, they would be amazed by its scale and the overall quality of service provided to every single citizen of the realm.
In this past week I have seen an ENT consultant surgeon and have surgery scheduled in a few weeks' time. There was no direct cost to me.
Tonight my GP (family doctor) rang at 8pm to check in on another health issue. She is chasing a consultant to authorize a new medication and will ring me back next week. Her services did not cost me a penny.
So three doctors and one medical procedure without a form to fill in or a bill to pay. Pretty damn impressive stuff. Yes I know it is in our taxes, but the system works well. It is 'cradle to grave' care all woven together into one service. The ambulance ride, GP appointments, in-patient hospital and hundreds of offshoot services (such as mother and baby home visits by nurse-midwives) are included. There are all kinds of synergies created by such a system. It is to be deeply respected, emulated and not feared. And if you have any doubts about its quality, then consider this, a tearjerker . . . http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jan/18/intensive-care-ill-baby-heart-defect
— and remember this did not cost the parents a penny out of pocket.
Another advantage is the lack of gridlock in politics. We are being spared the current ugliness in the US and the greater degree of safety nets in employment law, disability rights and family leave are reassuring.
The infrastructure of the country is in a much better state... I never see derelict buildings or crumbling roads. There is greater acceptance and less stigma in being a racial minority (although still far from easy). Gay marriage has been in place since July 2014 and is culturally a non-issue, no angst.
And best of all: the deeply inbuilt intellectualism — world-class museums, theaters, concerts, bookshops, lectures everywhere across the land. I have lived fifteen years in the county of Sussex and have yet to exhaust its cultural offerings, never will.
People jump to conclusions about Brits being unfriendly but this is simply an American reaction to the British cultural norm of avoiding relationships that are superficial. Once you are a friend it is sincere, and has a depth and permanence that has outlasted many of those I had in the U.S.
I do miss the affiliation to college sports, homesick when my friends all gather for all the big football games at our university and have a great party. There is no equivalent here. There is the Premier League for football, and indeed it has a massive following but it is geared as a professional sport just like the NFL. Wimbledon is a delight, however, and when the World Cup rolls around it is the same thrill as the Super Bowl.
I would give my right arm for an American washer and dryer, and you won't understand this unless you've seen the laundry situation here. As I type this our laundry is hanging in the family room damp and when dry will need to be ironed to get to American dryer-only standards. British life features ironing as a core task. My good friend’s husband spends two hours every Sunday tackling it for his family. This is a personal 'I hate Britain' pet peeve for me. No place is perfect, I know. But attempting to dry clothes outdoors in February? Infuriating.
In spite of this Britain is a place that you can come to love as your own. The countryside is stunningly beautiful and I am grateful for the hours I spend driving in it. Bunnies hop, pheasants fly and foxes dash around me every day. Yet London remains close at hand.
The Brits have extremely strict zoning restrictions and there are no 'strip malls' — not anywhere. So you drive for an hour straight and won't see a petrol (gas) station or any commercial building sticking out like a sore thumb.
There is a deep love and care for the countryside that makes it compelling, and you can never tire of it. It is the work of a thousand years — a landscape built by humans, layer by layer. A masterpiece.
When you watch Downton Abbey, you are seeing the actual house and landscape of an aristocratic family in Hampshire — one hour from where I live. Just look at the size of those cedar trees outside the front of the house. All the rooms and lands you are seeing are real without alteration (except for the studio built downstairs servant quarters).
I live minutes from Petworth House — a house of equal magnificence, built in the Palladian style with a 1000 acre deer park. It is breathtaking to behold, landscaped by 'Capability' Brown. The inside is just as amazing, filled with paintings by Turner, Van Dyke and endless architectural treasures. These houses span across the countryside and are open to the public.
Petworth House
There is so much of which the British are rightly proud. The subject of 'the War’ has an awesomeness all of its own. Brits are stubborn and would rather die than be beaten — the Nazis discovered that one!
A few ugly cement blocks plonked around my village’s main street are legally protected as important ‘heritage’ relics and shall forever remain undisturbed. Leftovers of a brave resistance plan to block Hitler’s Panzer tanks as they raced towards London, it represented typical British resolve even when the odds were deeply against them. The military has a proud heritage and is so highly regarded that the Royals feel a deep attachment to it — including Princes William and Harry.
The weather... it does drizzle off and on here but it doesn't get very cold. People get on with cycling, hiking, and the like quite stoically but it can mess up summer weddings. It certainly is not a Californian sun zone. For that people hop over to Spain, Portugal and Greece.
I found the financial drop in living a lot harder than I thought it would be. The differences between me and my American friends in terms of material possessions is significant. They replace their furniture and cars quicker than I can. Their financial goals seem easier for them to achieve. However, a lot of this feeling about financial difference has been lost to me over time. I now tend to reference my life against my British peer group and am comfortable to be living in a less materialistic way.
When we go back home there is a massive shock and whoops of laughter at the bigness of everything. Yes, I do envy those closets and everything on sale at deep discount. Yet it also brings awareness of the wastefulness of American culture: those gallon size soft drink containers and hundred other excesses are fun for a few weeks of holiday but then we've had enough. Being in England teaches carefulness with resources (gas $8/gallon), and I am happy my children live within these constraints.
To make a move here you should be fully prepared for how expensive it is, the lower wages, and the resulting drop in your (material) standard of living. If this is not of concern to you, and you want all the gains outlined above, then living here is quite good.
Britain has afforded me a window into a world beyond my wildest Midwest imagination. For this I am grateful. I don't know if I could happily reintegrate into America now. Perhaps on the coasts. Saying that, I hold America dear and defend it daily. It was once explained to me by another ex-pat that I am 'mid-Atlantic' . . . caught in the middle of the ocean, no longer able to decide which direction is home. I love both countries dearly. ~ Dawn Marchant, Quora
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ONE OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE US AND THE UK
The following picture demonstrates a normal event in the USA that is both illegal in Britain and would probably end with the woman being shot by police:
Why would anyone want a rifle in a supermarket. Madness.
Edit. Thank you to the many Americans who pointed out this is a shotgun not a rifle. Kind of proves my point seeing I have never been close enough to either to know the difference.
I love the good ol’ boys’ claim that this picture represents ‘liberty’. Liberty to carry guns means other people have the liberty to carry guns, which in turn means you have the liberty to be shot or your family to be shot. Here in Britain we want the liberty not to be shot. To let our kids go to school and know they aren’t coming home in a body bag. Or the shopping mall, church or wherever. To us that is liberty. We choose not to have guns. We choose life over potential death. Now how much more liberty can you get than that?
~ Harry Gaffing, Quora
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MALE CHIMPS MAY TORTURE OTHER CHIMPS
~ They are one of the only animals that will not just kill but actively and intentionally torture their victims. Their victims usually end up being castrated, having their face mutilated and their hands torn off. The kicker, chimps are one of the smartest animals, so they know what they're doing. They're also one of the only animals where at most zoo's the policy if they escape is to kill it immediately not try to recapture it since they're just too dangerous and aggressive, and tranquilizers just make them angrier. And as shown above, they have no qualms victimizing members of their own troop if they decide they don't like them anymore.
Additionally chimps are one of the only animals that have been observed engaging in tribal warfare against other troops of chimps, and even against gorillas, often ending with one troop being slaughtered by the other. People think chimps are cute since they look like us, but the scary thing about them is that they act like us too.
If you're still not convinced look up Charla Nash and you probably will be afterwards. ~ Sam Millward, Quora
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And here it was a pet chimp, Travis, who attacked his owner:
In February 2009, Charla Nash was viciously mauled by Travis the Chimp, leaving her clinging to life and in need of a full face transplant.
In an attempt to lure him back into the house, Nash held out his favorite toy — a Tickle Me Elmo doll. Though Travis the Chimp recognized the doll, Nash had recently changed her hair which may have confused and scared him. He attacked her outside the home, and Sandra Herold [the chimp’s owner] had to intervene. Jul 1, 2022
Nash, now in her late 60s, spends her time listening to audiobooks and music, but she is still blind from the attack (doctors also had to remove her eyes because of a disease transmitted by the chimp). She may not have lost her life, but the woman she was is all but gone — she even wears another person's face entirely. Nov 7, 2022
https://allthatsinteresting.com/charla-nash
Another chimp attack:
James and LaDonna Davis were attacked by two young male chimpanzees, Buddy and Ollie, who had escaped their enclosures. LaDonna Davis lost her thumb, and St. James Davis was brutally mauled, resulting in permanent disfigurement and missing extremities. [the “missing extremities” include the man’s testicles]
You may read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Davis_chimpanzee_attack
Oriana:
Chimps never struck me as particularly cute. After reading the articles, I know that if the species becomes extinct, I won't shed a tear.
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SOME COLD-BLOODED ANIMALS LIVE A VERY LONG TIME
~ Jonathan the Seychelles giant tortoise recently turned 190 years old, claiming the title of “Oldest Living Land Animal” from Tu’i Malila, a tortoise that died in 1965. However, both were practically youngsters compared to Adwaita, an Aldabra giant tortoise. Based on unconfirmed reports, Adwaita was born at the peak of the Little Ice Age and died at the ripe old age of 255 in the year 2006 after a crack in his shell led to an infection.
Tortoises aren’t the only cold-blooded animal blessed with a curiously long lifespan. The tuatara, a lizard-like reptile with a line of spikes running down the length of its spine, can live well over a century, and the blind cave salamander, an amphibian with nearly translucent skin and very poor eyesight, can live past 70.
“Anecdotal evidence exists that some reptiles and amphibians age slowly and have long lifespans, but until now no one has actually studied this on a large scale across numerous species in the wild,” said David Miller, a professor of wildlife population ecology at Penn State. “If we can understand what allows some animals to age more slowly, we can better understand aging in humans, and we can also inform conservation strategies for reptiles and amphibians, many of which are threatened or endangered.”
To determine which factors influence rates of aging, Miller and an international team of 113 scientists conducted the most comprehensive study of aging and longevity to date, comprising data collected from 77 species of wild reptiles and amphibians over 60 years. The team found that the slowest aging animals had protective traits that defended them from predators. Amazingly, animals with hard shells (i.e., turtles and tortoises) barely aged at all, challenging the idea that aging is evolutionarily inescapable.
Miller and his team tested a popular explanation for the rate of aging called the thermoregulatory hypothesis, which suggests that animals with a faster metabolism age more rapidly. According to this hypothesis, warm-blooded animals age quicker due to their high metabolism, which they rely on for generating heat. Cold-blooded animals, on the other hand, soak up heat from their environment (by sunbathing, for example), which means their metabolism is often lower and so they age more slowly.
“People tend to think, for example, that mice age quickly because they have high metabolism, whereas turtles age slowly because they have low metabolism,” said Miller.
The team’s findings, however, reveal that rates of aging among cold-blooded animals are far more diverse than previously thought. On one hand, some cold-blooded animals (including most turtles, a handful of frogs and salamanders, and one species of crocodile) didn’t seem to age at all. In other words, the likelihood of dying did not increase as the animals got older, which is a trait found in only one warm-blooded animal, the naked mole-rat.
On the other hand, a dozen of the cold-blooded species aged four times faster than the impala, one of the fastest aging warm-blooded animals. This suggested that the difference in rates of aging between species is based on more than just body temperature regulation.
TURTLE POWER
To unravel this mystery, the researchers explored the protective phenotype hypothesis, a lesser-known hypothesis that proposes that animals with protective traits — such as a shell or venom — have slower aging. Beth Reinke, the first author of the study and expert in evolutionary biology explained, “These various protective mechanisms can reduce animals’ mortality rates because they’re not getting eaten by other animals. Thus, they’re more likely to live longer, and that exerts pressure to age more slowly.”
The researchers considered two categories of protection: physical (armor and shells) and chemical (venom and skin toxins). Comparing just cold-blooded animals, species with physical protection aged five times slower than species with neither form of protection, and species with chemical protection aged twice as slow.
This finding is unlikely to lead to anti-aging cream that makes you grow a shell like a tortoise. However, it does paint a more comprehensive portrait of aging across animals, which can help scientists identify traits related to human aging. ~
a turtle hatching
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LOBSTERS DON’T DIE FROM OLD AGE; THEY DIE FROM EXHAUSTION
~ One of the oldest pieces of epic literature we have is known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s easy to get lost in all the ancient mythology — talking animals and heroic battles — but at its heart lies one of the most fundamental and universal quests of all time: the search for immortality. It’s all about Gilgamesh wanting to live forever.
From Mesopotamian poetry to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, from golden apples to the philosopher’s stone, humans, everywhere, have wanted and sought after eternal life.
And yet, perhaps the secret to immortality is not as elusive as we might think. Rather than holy objects or science fiction, we need only look to the animal world to see how nature, that most magical of places, might be able to answer one of the oldest questions there is.
ETERNAL CRUSTACEANS
If you ever find yourself at Red Lobster or about to munch into a lobster roll, take a moment to consider that you might just be eating a clue to perpetual youth. To see why, we have to know a tiny bit about aging.
As you get older, it’s impossible not to notice how everything creaks a little more, how easy jobs now require great effort, and how hangovers are no longer a laughing matter. Our bodies are designed to degrade and wear away. This deterioration, known as “senescence” in biology, occurs at the cellular level. It’s when the cells in our body stop dividing, yet remain in our body, active and alive. We need our cells to divide so that we can grow and repair.
For instance, when we cut ourselves or lift weights in the gym, it is cell division that replaces and rebuilds the damage done. But, over time, our cells just stop dividing. They stay around to do the best they can, but like the macroscopic humans they make up, cells get slower and more error-prone — and so, we age.
Fountain of Youth, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546
But not lobsters. In normal cases of cell division, the shields at the end of our chromosomes — called telomeres — are remade a bit smaller, and so a bit less effective after each subsequent cell division at protecting our DNA. When this reaches a certain point, the cell enters senescence and will stop dividing. It won’t self-destruct but will just carry on and wallow as it is. Lobsters, though, have a special enzyme (unsurprisingly, called telomerase) which makes sure that their cells’ telomeres remain as long and brilliant as they’ve always been. Their cells will never enter senescence, and so a lobster just won’t age.
However, what evolution giveth with one hand, it taketh with another. As crustaceans, their skeleton is on the outside, and having a constantly growing body means they are always outgrowing their exoskeletal homes. They need to abandon their old shells and regrow a new one all the time. This, of course, requires huge reserves of energy, and as the lobster reaches a certain size, it simply cannot consume enough calories to build the shell equivalent of a mansion.
Lobsters do not die from old age but exhaustion (as well as disease and New England fisherman).
The jellyfish that reverses its life cycle
Although lobsters might not have perfected immortality, perhaps there’s something to learn.
But there’s another animal that does even better than the lobster, and it’s the only creature recognized to be properly immortal. That’s the jellyfish known as Turritopsis dohrnii. These jellyfish are tiny — about the size of a fly at their biggest — but they’ve mastered one ridiculous trick: they can reverse their life cycle.
An embryonic jellyfish starts as a fertilized egg before hooking onto some kind of surface to then grow up. In this stage, they will stretch out to look like any other jellyfish. Eventually, they will break away from this surface to become a mature, fully developed jellyfish, which is in turn ready to reproduce. So far, so normal.
Yet Turritopsis dohrnii does something remarkable. When things get tough — like the environment becomes hostile or there’s a conspicuous absence of food — they can change back to one of the earlier stages in their lifecycle. It’s like a frog becoming a tadpole or a fly becoming a maggot. It’s the human equivalent of a mature adult saying, “Right, I’ve had enough of this job, that mortgage, this stress, and that anxiety, so I’m going to turn back into a toddler.”
Or, it’s like an old man deciding to become a fetus again, for one more round.
Obviously, a fingernail sized jellyfish is not immortal as we’d probably want the word to mean. They’re as squishable and digestible as any animal. But, their ability to change back to earlier forms of life, ones which are better adapted to certain environments or where there are fewer food sources, means that they could, in theory, go on forever.
WHY DO WE WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?
Although the quest for immortality is as old as humanity itself, it’s surprisingly hard to find across the diverse natural world. Truth be told, evolution doesn’t care about how long we live, so long as we live long enough to pass on our genes and to make sure our children are vaguely looked after. Anything more than that is redundant, and evolution doesn’t have much time for needless longevity.
The more philosophical question, though, is why do we want to live forever? We’re all prone to existential anguish, and we all, at least some of the time, fear death. We don’t want to leave our loved ones behind, we want to finish our projects, and we much prefer the known life to an unknown afterlife. Yet, death serves a purpose. As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued, death is what gives meaning to life.
Having the end makes the journey worthwhile. It’s fair to say that playing a game is only fun because it doesn’t go on forever, a play will always need its curtain call, and a word only makes sense at its last letter. As philosophy and religion has repeated throughout the ages: memento mori, or “remember you’ll die.”
Being mortal in this world makes life so much sweeter, which is surely why lobsters and tiny jellyfish have such ennui. ~
https://bigthink.com/thinking/lobsters-jellyfish-foolish-quest-immortality/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3F-Wxv3WZlvDIE4XBFX3GkCI2hxTA_llxw46LlJX_f54J1wdEAaaI21uo#Echobox=1682063260
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ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE THAT CAN WITHSTAND EARTHQUAKES
~ The powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6 killed almost 50,000 people, most of whom died under rubble.
The tragedy falls in a decades-long history of outsized death and destruction from recent earthquakes: The 1999 İzmit earthquake near Istanbul killed at least 17,000 people; the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India killed upward of 20,000; and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan killed more than 87,000 and left some 3.5 million people unhoused. The immediate cause of the human tragedies was not the shaking ground itself, but the buildings people were in, most of which were constructed of reinforced cement concrete, a relatively quick and cheap building method.
Earthquakes don’t have to be so deadly, say scholars who study this issue. Many traditional buildings have stood the test of time in regions that have endured high seismic activity for centuries.
In Japan, people had long built earthquake-resistant structures mostly from wood. But a different tradition shows that even stone buildings can withstand vigorous shaking—if they are built with clever physics and architectural adaptations, honed over the centuries.
In the mountainous region of Himachal Pradesh in India, near where the Indian Plate is colliding with the Eurasian Plate, many structures built in the kath kuni style have survived at least a century of earthquakes. In this traditional building method, the name, which translates to “wood corner,” in part explains the method: Wood is laced with layers of stone, resulting in improbably sturdy multi-story buildings.
Kath kuni construction technique
Built along the natural contours of the hills, kath kuni buildings typically get their signature corners from giant deodar cedars, which grow upward of 150 feet tall and 9 feet across in the Himalayas. These wooden beams layer between dry stones, which create walls. A single wooden “nail” joins the beams where they come together.
As the ponderous-looking structures rise vertically, usually up to two to three stories, the heavy stone masonry reduces, giving way to more wood. The overhanging roof typically has slate shingles resting on wooden beams. “The structure is like a body with heavy base, the projecting wooden balconies are limbs, and the heavy slate roof is like a head adding stability to the structure,” says Jay Thakkar, a faculty member at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology University in Ahmedabad, India, who co-authored the book Prathaa: Kath-kuni Architecture of Himachal Pradesh.
The buildings stand free of any mortar or metal, which makes them more capable of shifting and flexing along with torques in the ground. This brilliance of mobility even continues underground. They are built over a trench at least a few feet deep filled with loose stone pieces that works as a flexible plinth. While a building constructed out of what seems almost like rubble to begin with might seem a strange defense against earthquake damage, it works. The gravitational force of the structure itself holds the stones in place.
“Unlike the cement brick wall, which becomes a single solid mass, the dry stone masonry is flexible,” Thakkar says. “Staggered joints allow the external forces like tremors of earthquakes to be dispersed through the masonry thus preventing cracks in walls.” He adds, “The wooden pin at the corner joint of two beams also allows movement. So when an earthquake hits, the structure sways and shakes but doesn’t collapse.”
Despite centuries of visible evidence of these traditional structures’ soundness, people have turned more and more to reinforced concrete construction. By the early and mid-20th century, reinforced concrete was taking hold across Asia and quickly gained popularity because of its substantially lower labor costs. As such, it became the default method for much new construction, including any government-funded buildings.
But “for reinforced concrete construction, poor quality construction in this material has so often produced buildings that are more dangerous than the traditional unreinforced masonry buildings they replaced, despite the promises made about concrete buildings,” wrote a team of researchers studying traditional timber and masonry buildings in Turkey.
Indian architect Rahul Bhushan, who works toward reviving traditional construction methods in the Himachal Pradesh region, says, “the kath kuni style of architecture, while being still used in temple construction, had kind of paused for other structures due to the advent of reinforced concrete as building material. As a result, gradually, the traditional expertise declined.”
Bhushan’s group, which is called NORTH, has been training masons and construction laborers in traditional methods. Their workshops are generating renewed attention for earthquake resistant architecture rooted in these ancient techniques. He is hopeful this momentum will continue. “People are gradually showing interest toward kath kuni and other traditional constructions like dhajji dewari again.”
The onus now lies on practicing architects and researchers to convince government agencies to support the traditional system of construction, which could help contain destruction the next time an earthquake rocks the region, which, as the geologic plates continue to collide, is only a matter of time.
https://bigthink.com/the-past/earthquakes-architecture/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR10iuc2g2bxVvr2N3E6SjmykXs1waeEPISMfdsgBaunfv0FKMM2J_M_Igg#Echobox=1683046218-1
Greek ampitheaters are another examples of anti-earthquake architecture. Their structural pattern cancels seismic waves.
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WHY CHRISTIANS CAN EAT PORK
~ This was decided quite early, in the first congregation in Jerusalem.
Paul wanted to spread his faith all over the Roman world, but realized that it would be difficult to get people to obey the rather complicated dietary laws of Judaism (it’s not only about pork, there’s lots of foods you are not allowed to eat, or which you are only allowed to eat in some combinations), so he advocated for abandoning them. The more traditional Jews would have none of it.
After some infighting, they reached a compromise: anyone who converted to Christianity from Judaism was expected to follow the dietary laws, while converted pagans didn’t have to. This is actually in line with mainstream thinking in Judaism: Jews have to follow hundreds of rules to be righteous, but non-Jews are righteous if they follow a handful of simple rules, which can be summarized simply as “don’t be an asshole”; they’re just not expected to know any better.
You can read about this in Acts. ~ Mats Andersson, Quora
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SCIENCE CANNOT REPLACE PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
~ For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of the biggest existential questions we could formulate. How did humans come into existence on planet Earth? What are we made of, at a fundamental level? How big is the Universe, and what is its origin? For countless generations, these were questions for theologians, philosophers, and poets.
But over the past few hundred years, humanity has discovered the most compelling and convincing answers we’ve ever had to those questions and many others. Through the process of performing experiments and making observations, we have increased our definitive, scientific knowledge tremendously, enabling us to draw conclusions rather than merely to engage in unprovable speculations. Yet even with as far as we’ve come from a scientific perspective, philosophy and religion will never become obsolete. Here’s why.
For all of the questions that science has answered and all of the lessons it’s taught us, it does not teach us everything. Every scientific theory, no matter how robustly supported by the entire set of knowledge compiled by humanity over our history, only has a limited range over which it is demonstrably correct. Even our most vaunted ideas have their limitations.
Evolution explains how traits are inherited and gives a mechanism for how populations of organisms change over time, but does not explain the origin of life.
The Big Bang explains how the Universe arose from an early, hot, dense state, but doesn’t explain how it emerged with those conditions.
General Relativity explains how matter and energy cause spacetime to curve and gravitation to occur, but does not explain what occurs at the singularity inside a black hole.
In other words, no matter how far we’ve come in our scientific understanding of the world and the Universe, there is always a place where our established scientific understanding ends. Once we have definite knowledge of a phenomenon and a detailed understanding of the processes that underpin it, we can securely place that phenomenon within the realm of science.
But there are many questions that we can pose that do not — at least not yet — fall within the scientist’s purview. Sure, we can speculate as to what scientific ideas might eventually wind up solving these puzzles, but this is predicated on extending our current scientific knowledge into a realm where it has not yet arrived. Many of today’s most exciting mysteries, from the origin of life to extraterrestrial intelligence to quantum gravity to the puzzles of dark matter and dark energy, currently lie beyond the realm of what’s scientifically well-understood.
Theology. There are religious and ethical conceptions that we have about the Universe, which is typically what we understand as the realm of theology. Whatever your personal religious views may be, theology in general deals with questions such as purpose, right and wrong, and an authoritative source that sets forth some tenets that must be accepted as incontrovertibly true.
Science attempts to answer questions that start with “how,” venturing to explain and predict what the outcome (or sets of possible outcomes) of a physical system, initially set up with certain conditions, will be. On the other hand, theology attempts to answer questions that ask “why,” pondering questions that surpass definitive knowledge and offering confident — albeit controversial to many — answers to those inquiries.
It’s true that many questions that were once considered to fall into the realm of theology, where we lacked definitive knowledge, have now become scientific questions that have definitive answers. Scientifically, we now know how planet Earth emerged during the formation of our Solar System some 4.5 billion years ago, how life evolved and various plants and animals emerged throughout the ages on planet Earth, how recent and ancient events shaped our planet’s geological, atmospheric, and hydrological history, and how the stars, galaxies, and larger structures in our Universe formed and grew up from a more uniform, smaller, denser, hotter past.
Yet in between the interface of these two fields, science and theology, beyond our definite knowledge but without an appeal to an authoritative source, lies philosophy.
Philosophy. This is, in some sense, the ultimate warzone. Encroaching on the interface — and the limits — of both science and religion, philosophy seeks to probe questions that science cannot (yet) answer. However, unlike religion, philosophy approaches these questions with appeals to reason and logic, and attempts to use these tools to explore questions whose answers are not yet known, but may someday be knowable.
Where our scientific knowledge is insufficient and where theological answers fail to compel and convince us, philosophy remains a useful endeavor. Questions concerning consciousness, the purpose of the Universe, whether reality is objective or is observer-dependent, of whether the laws of nature and the physical constants of the Universe are unchanging with time or whether they are mutable, etc., are all realms where philosophy may be of use to the intellectually curious.
For every well-posed question that we can ask, the ultimate goal should be to eventually find a scientific answer: to bring an investigation whose outcome is unknown to a satisfying conclusion based in definitive knowledge. If we could create life from non-life in a laboratory setting, discover a way to test various interpretations of quantum mechanics against one another, or measure the physical constants across cosmic distances and times, we would be well-justified in drawing scientific conclusions.
But until we do, we must admit our own ignorance. Our best scientific theories are only well-established over a certain range of validity; outside of that range, we do not know with any certainty where and how those rules break down. We can explore scenarios, run simulations, and model the behavior of systems based on certain assumptions. Without enough relevant data to learn the definite answer, however, we can only employ the tools at our disposal.
This is where philosophy has its real opportunity to shine. By coming up to the scientific frontiers — and by understanding what the current body of scientific knowledge is and how we obtained it — we can peer over the edge and explore a variety of speculative ideas. The ones that lead to logical inconsistencies or impossible conclusions can be ruled out, enabling us to favor or disfavor ideas even without definitive, scientific knowledge.
However, this is by no means an easy task. It requires the philosopher to understand the relevant science as well as a scientist does, including its limitations. It requires that we understand the logical rules the Universe plays by, which can run counter to our common experience. Notions like cause-and-effect, the idea that a × b = b × a, or that particles that are placed in an unopened box remain in the box are ubiquitous, but are not true in all circumstances.
No matter how large our body of scientific knowledge grows, there will always be questions that are beyond the realm of science to adequately answer. The number of particles contained within the observable Universe is finite; the amount of information encoded in all the Universe is finite; no matter how much we learn, the amount that we know will always be finite. Beyond all definite knowledge, there will always be room for philosophy. And when it comes to questions of purpose, meaning, or ideas that are in principle unable to be physically investigated, religion will always have a place as well.
This doesn’t necessarily imply that all philosophizing done at the frontier is useful, interesting, or worth listening to, however. Philosophy that is ignorant of science, or of the bizarre and arcane logical rules that science actually follows, will lead even the most brilliant of thinkers astray. To the speculative, curious mind, however, what is known today will never be satisfactory. Until science makes those critical advances, philosophizing will be a necessary tool for gazing beyond today’s frontier, while there will always be room for religion to play a role in people finding their personal meanings to existence. Science is remarkable, but far from all there is.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/science-philosophy-religion-obsolete/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2AMxdy08goqCPVyGrNoqgQBYndBynORDplBE5KSa8g7kibFTh4TOZiEo4#Echobox=1682531330-1
Vu H Nguyen:
Philosophy is about asking more unanswerable questions, while religions is always about “STFU and believe” and lastly science is very very often about “Is this falsifiable, demonstrable, provable? Any evidence and math to back this up?”
Mike Pirozzi:
Science will never stop people from being afraid of dying. When/ if it does, religion will die.
Oriana:
Interestingly, NDEs are supposed to extinguish the fear of death. Alas, it’s not possible to arrange having an NDE unless you are willing to take the chance of actually dying.
It may also help to think of dying as joining the greater Universe, the starry night sky.
What works for me is the use of memento mori as a reminder to spend each day productively.
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A BLOOD TEST THAT DETECTS BREAST CANCER
We will soon (perhaps as soon as 2024) have a blood test that can detect breast cancer.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=new+breast+cancer+test#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:9c304c19,vid:3r3uFLNbbE0
On the other hand, I remember an insider telling me, “Hospitals have invested a lot of money in mammography machines, and they are not going to switch to another way of testing until they have made even on their investment.”
and this: https://www.syantra.com/for-patients
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CAN DIET LOWER THE RISK OF DEMENTIA?
Across three prospective cohort studies and a meta-analysis, adherence to the MIND diet was associated with a lower risk of incident dementia in middle-aged and older adults, reported Changzheng Yuan, ScD, of Zhejiang University School of Medicine in China, and co-authors.
In the meta-analysis, the highest adherence to the MIND diet was tied to a 17% lower risk of dementia compared with the lowest adherence (pooled HR 0.83, 95% CI 0.76-0.90), the researchers reported in JAMA Psychiatryopens in a new tab or window.
The MIND diet — a hybrid of the Mediterranean and DASH diets — emphasizes plant-based foods, limits intake of animal-based foods and those high in saturated fat, and promotes eating berries and leafy green vegetables.
The diet has been linked with slower cognitive decline, but few large studies have investigated its relationship with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. One analysis showed a significant relationship with lower dementia risk only in the first 7 years of follow-up, not afterward.
Yuan and co-authors analyzed data about middle-aged and older adults in three large prospective studies: the U.K.'s Whitehall II cohort and, in the U.S. They also conducted a meta-analysis of 11 observational studies.
Participants were dementia-free at baseline. Food frequency questionnaires at or before baseline were used to assess MIND diet scores, with higher scores on the 15-point scale indicating better adherence to the diet.
Whitehall II had about 8,400 participants (69% male) with a mean baseline age of 62. The Health and Retirement Study had about 6,800 participants (59% female) with a mean baseline age of 67; while the Framingham Offspring study had a sample size of about 3,000 (55% female) with a mean baseline age of 64.
Mean baseline MIND diet score was 8.3 in Whitehall II, 7.1 in the Health and Retirement Study, and 8.1 in the Framingham Offspring study. Median follow-up durations were 12.9 years, 5.0 years, and 10.7 years, respectively.
Over 166,516 person-years, a total of 775 people in the three cohorts developed incident dementia. A higher MIND diet score was associated with lower risk of dementia, with a pooled HR of 0.83 (95% CI 0.72-0.95, P for trend=0.01) for every 3-point increment.
Associations were significant in the two U.S. cohorts but not in Whitehall II. Potential contributors included a higher consumption of green leafy and other vegetables, berries, nuts, olive oil, and beans, and lower consumption of red meat and meat products.
The meta-analysis of 11 studies included 224,049 participants with 5,279 incident dementia cases. The association between the MIND diet and dementia risk showed moderate heterogeneity across studies (I2=35%). No single study substantially affected the pooled results.
The researchers couldn't determine whether their results were linked with any specific dementia subtype. The analyses relied on self-reported food intake and, despite relatively long follow-up periods, the findings may be subject to reverse causality.
More work is needed clarify whether a causal relationship exists between the MIND diet and dementia, Yuan and colleagues said.
"Meanwhile, to which extent a healthy diet intervention could reduce dementia risk in specific populations and the optimal intervention time window for this intervention remain largely unknown," they noted. The randomized MIND diet clinical trial may provide more answers soon. ~
https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/dementia/104321
Shawn O:
Do we really need to keep doing poor quality epidemiological studies in which healthy user bias is a major possibility? They also fail to measure biomarkers that may be far more useful, such as inflammatory markers, oxidized LDL, and metabolic syndrome. If we're going to rely on observational studies, let's also consider this:
~ A new study examining food consumption in 158 nations found that a higher consumption of fat and animal proteins was associated with decreased risk of heart disease. Meanwhile, more carbohydrates—especially more wheat and cereals—were associated with higher rates of cardiovascular death.
In this latest study, a team of Czech researchers analyzed the consumption of 60 food items in 158 countries around the globe between 1993 and 2011.
The study found that the risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease was lower with higher intake of total fats and protein, animal protein and fat, meats, fruits, coffee and cheese. Moreover, “regardless of the statistical method used, the results always show very similar trends and identify high carbohydrate consumption (mainly in the form of cereals and wheat, in particular) as the dietary factor most consistently associated with the risk of cardiovascular diseases.”
Other study findings:
High cholesterol was inversely associated with CVD deaths in most countries.
Glucose from cereals and starches was more strongly associated with raised blood glucose than refined sugar.
Total fat and animal fat consumption were the most frequent factors to be inversely correlated with cardiovascular outcomes (Translation: the more fat and animal fat eaten in a country, the lower the rates of poor cardiovascular outcomes).
The food that most consistently correlated with poor cardiovascular risk was sunflower oil, followed by wheat, potatoes, and milk.
https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/2018/4/9/healthy-countries-consume-more-fat-more-animal-protein-fewer-carbs-new-study-finds
Oriana:
Cardiovascular risk is closely related to dementia risk.
I’d love to know if it was high HDL cholesterol that correlated with lower risk. Oxidized LDL cholesterol sounds like a disaster.
I am not surprised that sunflower oil was consistently correlated with cardiovascular risk. Seed oils in general are known to be one of the worst thing one can consume. Traditional sources of fat such as grass-fed butter and olive oil seem to have withstood the test of time.
One potentially confounding variable that I see in this study is the difference in income levels. Richer people tend to live longer; animal protein is more expensive.
There may also be dietary factors not mentioned in the study. For instance, coffee (up to four cups a day is perfectly safe) lowers the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and dementia. Another wonderful finding tells us that dark chocolate decreases insulin resistance and the risk of dementia.
As for milk, I wonder if milk from strictly grass-fed cows would be a risk factor. Cows that are fed corn and soy may produce less healthy milk. (I prefer goat milk.)
Overall, it's not surprising that ketogenic diet has shown promise in prevention of dementia — and again, it's richer people who can afford a quality ketogenic diet. Macadamia nuts, walnuts, dark chocolate, coffee, berries, good quality olive oil, grass-fed beef and grass-fed butter, and similar items, are not cheap. To a degree, money can buy better health. So when we read that the difference in life expectancy between the top one percent and the bottom one percent can be over fourteen years, we shouldn't be surprised.
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LION’S MANE MUSHROOM REALLY WORKS!
I now speak from experience. And if something can quickly get rid of those itchy, prickly sensations, then it’s potent stuff! Only my toes were affected, but even so — I was amazed at the quick relief. I can think of no other supplement that has the ability to reverse neuropathy.
Here is a convenient chart of the benefits of this amazing nerve-growth stimulant.
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ending on beauty:
PASTERNAK [rege = moment]
I remember Pasternak: the earth of his forelock
in fresh Moscow snow. A red scarf around his neck, as
if Pushkin had just walked in and taken over. The
snow was still on the ground.
His hand in mine, as if entrusting his key
of fingers to me. His face opposite mine — frightened and
strong. “Go on. I understand the words . . .sounds.” The
snow was still on the ground.
I was reading my embers snatched from hell. “A rege
iz gefaln vi a shtem.” “A rege fell like a star.”
He followed me but couldn’t grasp the Hebrew, rege.
The snow was still on the ground.
That rege was shining like a star in his pupils
of black marble — moist and polished. Suddenly, the Russian
poet wearing a yellow patch. The snow
was still on the ground.
~ Avrom Sutzkever, tr. Richard Fein
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