World's Oldest Intact Carpet Ever Found, Woven 2500 Years Ago And Found Frozen In A Kurgan In Altai Mountains In Central Asia
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I CAN BE A POET ONLY IN ENGLISH
Because the words might mean anything.
If you told me that table means
chair, I’d sink into a cushioned
table and lean back, on the deck
of The Titanic, which means
luxury before a fall —
Iceberg happens, but who could deny
that merde might mean
the highest grade of emerald?
In Polish “to cross yourself”
sounds almost like “to say goodbye.”
How could I write in a language
where you cross yourself before
you travel, step into water,
or commit suicide —
as if it’s not enough
to lose the future tense,
intended only for the young.
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The Germans panicked when after the war
they got parcels from America marked
GIFT. In German, Gift means poison.
The Old Germanic root of English “gift”
is giftu, poison.
Did the frost-bound Anglo-Saxons
guess, like the marble Greeks
with their pharmakon,
that a little poison could be a cure?
— though Socrates may have gone
too far, toasting the gods with hemlock,
saying death is no misfortune.
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When a friend tells me, I’ll drop
you off, it sounds — Splat! —
like a misfortune, but it is a gift. Even
when we pray, A gift is God in action,
we can know if it’s a gift or poison
only later, from the vanishing point.
As we step into the dangerous
waters of memory, having failed
to cross ourselves,
let us remember the primordial
meaning of “gift” was bride-price.
That’s why we toast To Life,
that dazzling and expensive bride —
a cup of kindness or poison
to cure us of this constant vanishing.
~ Oriana
THE STORY BEHIND CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
~ For many in the West, Fyodor Dostoevsky is the most “Russian” of Russian authors. His work teems with holy fools, holy prostitutes, nihilists and revolutionaries. Crime and Punishment, his best-known novel, radiates a dark chaos and apocalyptic sensibility. Its murderous antihero, Raskolnikov (from the Russian raskolnik, “dissenter”), embodies a violent ideology of redemption through suffering that Vladimir Nabokov, for one, found distasteful. (“Dostoyevsky is a third-rate writer and his fame is incomprehensible,” he judged.)
For all that, Dostoevsky remains a quasi-divine figure in Russia.
His Slavophile bias and Orthodox-heavy chauvinism endeared him to Stalin’s propagandists, who tailored his image to fit Soviet ideology.
He is a difficult quarry for biographers, though. With his appetite for affliction and self-torturing asceticism, he was a casebook of neuroses. Joseph Frank’s celebrated five-volume biography, published between 1976 and 2002, devoted more than 2,500 pages to the life of a man who was dead at the age of 59 from untreated epilepsy and a gambling addiction (also untreated). Rowan Williams’s scholarly Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction concentrated instead on the novelist’s tormented Christian messianism.
The radical politics and anti-tsarist personalities that fed into Crime and Punishment are the subject of Kevin Birmingham’s excellent biographical study, The Sinner and the Saint. As Birmingham shows, Dostoevsky was exposed at an early age to tragedy when, in 1839, his landowning father was murdered by his own serfs. Unsurprisingly, Dostoevsky was left with a bewildered awareness of human cruelty.
Later, inspired by a reading of the gospels, he espoused a proto-Soviet socialism that sought to abolish serfdom and return Russia to a state of original Slav holiness. In St Petersburg in the 1840s, he fell in with a circle of intellectuals who preached French utopian politics and the redemptive possibilities (as they saw it) inherent in the Russian peasant soul. Tsar Nicholas I’s secret police were watching: opposing serfdom was a “clear threat to the throne”, Birmingham writes.
In 1849 Dostoevsky and his co-conspirators were arrested and interrogated by General Nabokov, the great-great-uncle of the novelist. Subjected to a gruesome mock execution, the 28-year-old graduate engineer was afterwards deported to Siberia. His four years of hard labor in the “Asian side” of the Ural mountains convinced Dostoevsky more than ever that Christ was alive in Russian lands. Even the most degraded of convicts showed a readiness for penance and redemption, Birmingham suggests. The book that emerged from Dostoevsky’s Siberian ordeal, The House of the Dead, pretty well created the gulag genre in Russia and remains a work of unsparing lucidity and documentary realism. (“I don’t know a better book in all modern literature,” Tolstoy enthused.)
Released from Siberia, Dostoevsky seemed to court disaster and illness. Epilepsy was associated in the popular mind with demonic possession and visitations from the beyond. It left Dostoevsky in permanent dread of the next convulsive onset. His growing discontent with the west stemmed in part from its betrayal (as he saw it) of Russia’s Christian cause in the 1854-6 Crimean war. France and Britain had sided with the Ottomans against Russia to defend their imperial interests and thus ensured the “crucifixion of the Russian Christ”.
Dostoevsky’s anxiety about national character — what does it mean to be Russian? Are Russians even European? — contained a streak of xenophobia and antisemitism that surfaced during the trips he took abroad in the 1860s to avoid gambling debts back home. Mid-Victorian London represented the “soullessness” and “hard-nosed mercantilism” of capitalist western life. Crystal Palace appalled Dostoevsky with its thousands of tons of glass and iron — “like something out of Babylon.”
Crime and Punishment, published in installments in St Petersburg in 1866, was partly inspired by the sensationalist story of Pierre François Lacenaire, a Parisian murderer-poet whose trial Dostoevsky followed avidly. Lacenaire’s influence on the creation of Raskolnikov had been explored by Frank, but Birmingham goes further and braids Lacenaire’s story with that of Dostoevsky. A dandified fop, Lacenaire set French society ablaze with his catalogue of gratuitous, unmotivated crimes. He appeared to kill simply in order to act (or perhaps to alleviate boredom). His motiveless murders would be mirrored in Raskolnikov’s axing to death of an old moneylender and her sister. Nothing — no inkling of anger, or rage, or hatred— apparently has the power to shake Dostoevsky’s existentially disaffected creation.
The notion that Raskolnikov is moved to repent and find God is, Birmingham writes, one of the aspects that “nearly everyone gets wrong about Crime and Punishment”. Raskolnikov does eventually confess his crimes, but without obvious remorse. Killing for the nihilist sake of killing is the theme that runs like the black line in a lobster through Crime and Punishment — and behind it all lay the bizarre figure of Lacenaire. In pungent, well-researched pages, Birmingham reveals the “secret” background behind Dostoevsky’s great murder novel — the gambling debts, the epileptic seizures, the Tsarist police surveillance.
Crime and Punishment might have been accused of promoting nihilism and even tsaricide (an attempt was made on Tsar Alexander II’s life just as a chapter went to press). Fortunately for us, it was not successful. A model of luminous exposition and literary detection, The Sinner and the Saint can be recommended to anyone interested in the dark twisted genius of “Dusty”, as Nabokov (with a touch of mockery) nicknamed the ill-fated Russian maestro. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/15/the-sinner-and-the-saint-review-the-story-behind-dostoevskys-and-punishment
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A BIT MORE ABOUT LACENAIRE
Pierre François Lacenaire was dubbed “The Don Juan of Murder.” He sparked not just terror, but fascination — and also a classic work of literature, writes Kevin Birmingham In his new book, “The Sinner and The Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece.”
On December 14, 1834, Lacenaire (along with his axe-wielding henchman Victor Avril) knocked on the door to the apartment where Jean François Chardon lived with his widowed mother, Anne Marie Yvon Chardon, in Poissy, France.
Jean François was a supposedly gay conman rumored to possess 10,000 francs — more than $200k in today’s money. After he welcomed the two men into his apartment, Lacenaire stabbed Chardon but allowed Avril to finish him off with a blow from his axe. Meanwhile, Lacenaire entered the bedroom, where the invalided widow lay, and repeatedly stabbed her in the face and eyes until his knife snapped.
Lacenaire found just 500 francs, but later, claimed the money meant little to him. Painting himself as a Robin Hood figure, he declared, “I come to preach the religion of fear to the rich, for the religion of love has no power over their hearts.”
Remarkably, when he was put on trial for the murders in 1835, women flocked to the courtroom. One periodical was shocked at the number of “beautiful ladies!” who filled the benches to watch his testimony, dressed in eye-catching silk gowns and pink bonnets. Some sent him poetry on perfumed paper; others delivered food and chocolates. At least one grande dame begged for his autograph.
Unlike most murderers, who were considered the dregs of society, Lacenaire came from a well-off family who had lost their money after making bad investments in the silk industry. Educated and well-bred, he also wrote his own romantic poems imploring, “immortal virgin, wait for me in heaven.” The 30-year-old was also a stylish dresser, turning up to court in a spiffy blue frock coat that showcased his curly black hair and well-groomed mustache.
He may have been cultured but he was also callous. After he killed the Chardons, he went to a comedy show, and claimed it was “a great day for me.” When asked what he would do with a dead body at the trial he whistled cheerfully and suggested he would cook it as a stew and eat it. “Killing without remorse is the greatest happiness,” he declared.
Lacenaire, however, may not have been as eager to sleep with the ladies as they were with him. He was thought to have “infamous habits” (aka homosexual tendencies) and, at his trial, there was much reference to the fact he shared a bed with his accomplice Avril. His victim Chardon may have been, Birmingham writes, a man who “reminded him just a bit too much of himself.”
The trial lasted only two days, after which Lacenaire and Avril were convicted of the murders and sentenced to death by guillotine.
On Jan. 9, 1836, about 600 people came to watch his execution, many of them simply hoping for a glimpse of the man. He did not disappoint. As he walked to the scaffold, he wore the same stylish blue suit he’d sported at his trial, looking desirable right up until the moment he lost his head.
More than two decades later, in 1861, novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky learned about Lacenaire after he read about his case in Armand Fourquier’s “Causes Célèbres de Tous Les Peuples,” which detailed famous crimes of the past. Dostoevsky marveled at the tale, declaring it “more exciting than all possible novels.”
“Crime and Punishment” was released in twelve monthly installments in 1866 and as a complete novel the following year. Dostoevsky’s book became a literary classic that “demolished the assumption that criminals are fundamentally different from everyone else,” Birmingham writes. In the end, the novelist created an even more famous and indelible character than Lacenaire himself. ~
https://nypost.com/2021/11/13/meet-the-killer-poet-who-inspired-crime-and-punishment/
Oriana:
“Raskolnik” means “dissenter”? I suppose it could be understood that way, once we stop thinking of the modern Russian political dissenters such as Navalny. Historically, “raskolnik” means a “schismatic” — a member of one of the Old Believer sects such as the Dookhobors. They split off the Russian Orthodoxy in the 17th century in protest over the reform of liturgy; hence they are also called “Old Ritualists.” Oddly enough, they do get mentioned in the novel. One of the Raskolnikovs falsely confesses to having committed the murders, the startled real perpetrator learns from the shrewd police inspector who is not averse to the play on words.
But I always understood the name based on its similarity to Polish verb, since that makes emotional sense to me. I’d translate “raskolnikov” as “one who breaks open a a circle or link” (in a chain, for instance). Dostoyevsky’s protagonist wants to break away from “herd morality” in favor of rules that apply only to exceptional individuals.
Why does he have such a high opinion of himself? First of all, I’ve noticed that a lot of men, not necessarily young, seem to have an unduly high opinion of themselves in spite of absence of any achievement or anything else that would make them exceptional. “Their mothers spoiled them,” a friend of mine suggested as the cause of this fairly common male exceptionalism.
But that’s not where Dostoyevsky’s interest lies. He wants to explore not the origin but the consequences. What happens to an individual who, to prove his exceptionality and his theory of morality dares violate a strongly held social norm? Stained with murder, how can he live with himself? Will guilt drive him to try to end the psychological agony and confess? Will he turn to religion and try to do penance?
Dostoyevsky produced a psychological thriller that continues to amaze millions of readers. The human soul may indeed be a dark forest, but we have a powerful guide in this “third-rate writer,” in the words of nymphet-obsessed Nabokov. Nabokov may be a Humbert-Humbert type literary stylist, but next to Dostoyevsky, alas, it is he who is sadly third-rate.
To be a great writer you need to have great seriousness and the courage to ask great questions. No amount of stylistic cleverness can substitute.
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MARGARET THATCHER AS A “STAR” IN MOSCOW
Below, British PM Margaret Thatcher getting a warm reception from Soviet citizens during her visit to Moscow in March 1987. She became an instant star across the whole nation after her triumph in the televised discussion with three heavyweights of Soviet propaganda. Thatcher came across as a hard-nosed anti-Communist and nationalist. That night, it dawned on the whole nation: we need someone like this woman. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Margaret Thatcher in Moscow
Oriana:
Thatcher was a brilliant woman and an excellent debater. Even those who didn’t agree with her political views seemed to perceive her brilliance. But then Lenin was supposed to be a brilliant debater as well, and enjoyed great popularity — even now people line up to view his mummy. But there is only so much that even the most charismatic leader can accomplish. The whole system needs to be right, checks and balances being of utmost importance.
Meanwhile, while not greeting Margaret Thatcher, ordinary Russian citizens faced these daily ordeals:
I have recently found this irresistible visual comment on Putin:
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THE TSAR WITH A DRAGON TATTOO
~ A lot has been written about Tsar Nicholas II and his supposed incompetence. Truthfully, I don’t think Kaiser Wilhelm II was all that more competent. The British King, likewise, was just another ruler like any other. French generals were notoriously incompetent, British generals were a disaster. Russian generals were no different. As far as leaders go, Nicholas II had bad luck.
He had bad luck, because his country was essentially a medieval hellscape. It wasn’t organized well at all, it’s military tactics were outdated and a lot of it just boiled down to “lets throw some human waves at the enemy until fatigue sets in”. This was the general tactic everywhere. Even a man who later became widely acclaimed, Sir Winston Churchill, had some massive failures during his service in WWI and failed to turn the tide of war, although he did get involved in the development of what later became the tank. Before that, at Gallipolli, well… the less is said, the better.
So no, I would not say the Tsar or the Russians in particular were uniquely bad. In a lot of ways, believe it or not, Nicholas was fairly modern. In fact, surprisingly so — he was one of the first royals, for example, to have tattoos, famously sporting a large tattoo of a dragon on his arm. He was a fitness nut and demanded the Russian soldiers be fit as well. He respected his wife and daughters, was well-read and spoke several languages. He wasn’t some useless nonce and didn’t deserve the fate he’d later meet at the hands of the Bolsheviks and their bayonets in some dark and dusty cellar alongside his undeserving wife and children.
Tsar Nicholas II was an old navy man himself. He had served his country, albeit in limited capacity. He tried to pass certain reforms and was reasonably open-minded about the need for change, although badly equipped to bring about said change. ~ Jean-Marie Valheur, Quora
Jean-Marie Valheur:
Tsar Alexander the Third, father of Tsar Nicholas the Second
Santosh Kumar:
While the compotency wasn't different, their powers were. Tsar Nicholas had more control over Russia than King George had over Great Britain or Kaiser Wilhelm II over Germany. He declared mobilization and he assumed personal control over the war. Thus he was held personally responsible for the war and the defeat.
Jonathan Campbell:
if Russia was a “medieval hellscape”, the Tsars were largely to blame for that. Though that's probably an insult to medieval societies.
Sebastian Katz:
In a way yes but notice that Russia was the fastest growing economy in Europe between 1900–1914.
Leonard Kahlin:
Why the tattoo? Nicholas had been to Japan in his earlier years (more than a decade before the Russo-Japanese war), liked the culture and decided to get a tattoo there.
Dima S:
He thrust Russia into a war with the world’s leading industrial superpower, not even a decade following Russia’s disastrous defeat at the hands of Japan. A wiser man would have stayed his hand.
EconomistReader:
Russia was pretty successful when fighting the Austrians or Turk, but not the Germans. Eastern battles in WW1 were much more interesting than the Western front. The boundaries were much longer and there was possibility of maneuvering.
Daniel Clayton:
With respect, I think you are being too generous to Czar Nicholas. He was extremely rigid in his views about autocracy, and he was definitely not modern in his views on government, tattoos not withstanding. He very nearly lost his throne in revolution of 1905 that was brought about by a disastrous war against Japan, and the only reason he agreed to any form of representative government at all was because he was forced to. He went back on the reforms almost immediately and essentially gutted the Duma of any real power by the time WWI broke out.
A large part of his reasoning for reimposing autocracy was due to his strong religious view that the authority of czar was handed down by God. He took this so seriously that when the 1917 revolution broke out he was literally at the battlefront acting as the field marshal directing the military operations personally despite having no qualifications as a general. He was categorically unqualified to run a government, and yet he refused to delegate any authority.
George Wender:
Yes, Nicky was incompetent. He firmly believed that the Tsar, so in this case he, was Russia itself. God said so.
Joseph Fox:
He wasn't a bad leader — he just wasn't an exceptional leader. And exceptional times require exceptionalism.
Jerome Sassani:
Knowing Conrad Von Hostendorf led the Austrian Army, he probably thought the whole rotten fence would cave in with a kick.
R. Kumar:
The worst bad luck Nicky had was he was placed in charge of a FEUDAL country, not a modern Capitalist one.
No matter who was on the throne, if the king failed to bring his subjects out of feudalism even in the 1900’s, then sooner or later a revolution was guaranteed.
Nicky was one of the most incompetent, dumbest leaders in history. He never even tried to rule. 100% deserved what happened to him.
Lucas French:
Germany in WW1 achieved what Napoleon and Hitler didn’t: defeated Russia. But they did so using trickery: they financed and infiltrated Lenin to ruin Russia and sue for peace, and it worked like clockwork. Lenin overthrew the liberal government and signed an humiliating peace deal with Germany just months before their side had achieved victory. The fallout of Lenin's ruinous rule is still felt in Russia to this day.
It's no wonder Germans believed in the stab in the back theory, they did it themselves.
Alexei Strife:
The guy may not have been a babbling buffoon, but he was still extraordinarily autocratic even by conventional standards and wished for the deaths of his enemies and out of pride refused to compromise, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Arthur Majoor:
The British Royals had actual military service under their belts, although they were wise enough not to try to control the conduct of the Imperial war effort, but served with distinction (the Future King George VI served aboard a battleship during the Battle of Jutland, for example).
The Kaiser, although he was styled as the supreme warlord, generally bungled his personal interventions (German wargames in the pre war era needed to be rigged so his side won). Unfortunately for the Germans in the long run, there was a true professional military staff which was exceedingly capable and kept the war grinding on until 1918, when conditions were so bad in Germany that the nation threatened to collapse in revolution and civil war.
Russia had the worst of both worlds — the Tsar wasn’t particularly adept as a military leader, but then again, neither was the Imperial staff. When the Tsar decided to intervene personally, he inherited a situation which even a Napoleon level genius would have had a hard time extracting himself from, much less turning around.
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MISHA IOSSEL: NATO SHOULD INTERVENE IN A MORE FORCEFUL FASHION
Russia is losing its insane, genocidal war against Ukraine. Now, filled with helpless, impotent fury, it has resorted to destruction for the sake of it. Unable to create, it ruins, wrecks, annihilates. It is at war with life itself. I believe the time has come for the free world to intervene in this monstrosity in a more direct and forceful manner. Enough is enough.
And no, Putin will not use nuclear weapons.
Misha summarizes the news: “Panicked, demoralized Russian occupiers in Ukraine exploded the giant Kahovka damn on the Dnieper earlier today, causing perhaps Europe’s largest technological disaster in decades, mortally endangering the lives of many thousands of people, completely flooding their own lines of defense, and leaving the Russian-annexed Crimea without water supply.”
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Misha: A dog holds on to a Ukrainian rescuer who saved it from drowning after Russia destroyed the Kakhovka dam.
Those eyes.
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CHAOS IN THE RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
~ As Russia’s forces struggle in the endless quagmire, brazen drone strikes against Moscow and numerous incursions into the Russian homeland have been psychologically debilitating for Russia. It’s a reminder of the scale of the ongoing disaster for Russian society, as civilians are evacuated en masse from border regions, left to fend for themselves by the Kremlin.
Putin’s fantasy of a nonexistent Ukraine has gone up in phosphoric flames, along with much of the Russian military, which has lost an estimated 250,000 casualties in its failed bid to break Ukraine. It’s an astonishing cost, paid out to sustain what is the worst geo-strategic reversal for Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As Kyiv prepares to go back on the offensive, menacing cracks are appearing in the Russian facade. Vladimir Putin’s war machine is beginning to cannibalize itself, as vicious factional infighting threatens to unravel the entire system from within. With a devastating war still claiming countless Russian lives, and no victories or prizes beyond the seizure of an obliterated Bakhmut, Russian commanders are beginning to turn inward, along with their heavily armed formations.
Russia’s constellation of armed factions are escaping Moscow’s grip, and the bickering internecine disagreements are mutating into violent clashes and deadly altercations. These are the seeds of a Russian civil war.
As the historian Timothy Snyder writes, “The initiation of major war opened the way to violent politics inside Russia.” The failed war in Ukraine is boomeranging, producing violent reverberations in Russia, an unpleasant reality for the Putinist regime, which appears to be stunned into paralysis.
Indeed, it has been a week filled with indications that Russian forces are splintering, if not disintegrating, as Ukraine begins to unleash its long awaited counteroffensive, designed to pierce the Russian lines in NATO-style combined arms attacks, and with the ultimate goal of pushing the Russians out of Ukraine entirely.
Ukraine began testing the Russian lines, carrying out probing assaults, and reconnaissance in force to gauge the depth of Russia’s defenses, in what is clearly the beginning of an expansive offensive operation. As Ukraine’s offensive begins, the Russian infighting is increasing its tempo and brutality.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary outfit Wagner Group, and perhaps Russia’s most able and publicity-hungry commander, has further raised the stakes of his conflict with Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD), and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Prigozhin accused Russia’s MoD of planting antitank mines on the road out of Bakhmut, laying a trap designed to kill and maim his fighters as they withdrew from that destroyed city. There have also been numerous lethal clashes between Wagner fighters and Russian regulars, resulting in substantial casualties.
And that conflict is only worsening.
In response, Prigozhin brazenly captured the commander of Russia’s 72nd mechanized brigade in eastern Ukraine, a lieutenant colonel serving in the Russian army. He published a grim grainy video in which that commander, quite possibly after being tortured, confessed to ordering drunken attacks on Wagner units, The episode represents a nadir in the poisoned dynamic between Wagner and the Russian MoD, and the relationship remains in free fall.
With Russian regulars and Russian mercenaries actively killing, torturing, and kidnapping one another, outright civil war is very much in the air.
To complicate matters further, there’s been significant static between Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s Chechen puppet, and Prigozhin, after the latter criticized Akhmat (Kadyrov’s Chechen militia, officially part of Rosgvardia, the Russian national guard service) for staying out of the worst fighting in Bakhmut. Previously, the two warlords were allies in the feud between Wagner and the MoD over scarce supplies of ammunition and weapons.
The bumbling Russian Ministry of Defense released an absurd statement yesterday, along with a poorly fabricated video, claiming Russia destroyed 28 tanks (including 8 Leopards), 109 armored vehicles, and killed 1500 Ukrainian soldiers. Prigozhin ridiculed these bogus claims in an interview, referring to “Baron Von Munchausen,” and flatly saying the MoD’s claims were “insanely fictional.”
It’s difficult to say what’s making the Kremlin more nervous, the idea that Prigozhin is kidnapping and killing Russian officers at will, or the way he’s cruelly taunting Russia’s wartime leaders, reducing them to the incompetent stooges they actually are. In any case, Prigozhin shows little inclination to shutting his mouth now that he’s opened it this widely. In the dangerous game of amassing political power in wartime Russia, Prigozhin’s going all in.
~ Brett Kriger, Quora
Alan Back:
Prigozhin has apparently asked the Russian MoD for 200,000 troops. He says to “protect the Motherland". Hmm, Prigozhin gets 200,000 troops and probably heads straight to Moscow?
James Carey:
Go Priggy go ! ! !
Oriana:
I felt a wave of love toward the English language after seeing that one can turn “Prigozhin” into “Priggy.” That horrible criminal mug lost its power to scare me. For all his thuggish machismo, I can see the mournfulness in that face. I suspect he was an abused child.
Prigozhin spent 9 years in prison for theft. He seems to have absorbed the brutality of the prison culture.
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THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION HAS WORKED FOR THE RICH
~ Most people have a view on the sexual revolution of the 1960s but, to borrow an adage about the impact of the French Revolution, its consequences continue to unfold. In his book Between Sex and Power (2004), on the family in the 20th century, the sociologist Göran Therborn says the sexual revolution brought entirely new conceptions of romantic love and marriage. We can see its changes in how intimacy and romance now emphasize maximizing pleasure. People today often seek out partners to satisfy their deeper emotional needs first and foremost. In her book The End of Love (2019), the sociologist Eva Illouz defines this new type of intimacy as one in which people look for partners who will ‘alleviate anxiety, increase their (emotional) performance, and make investments in uncertain futures.’
The reality is that the ludic [playful] demands of the sexual revolution have been realized, but on terms dictated by the market, not by the libertines who pushed for communal living, abolition of the family and more liberated sexual expression. Marriage and family remain highly popular. In a 2019 survey, more than 84 per cent of LGBT people hold that love is a ‘very important’ reason to get married (versus just 46 per cent of the same cohort who said the legal benefits of marriage are very important). The most common reasons cited for divorce now tend to be ‘emotional’ considerations, and in a study of a large, statistically representative sample of young women in the United States, both single and married, more than 80 per cent stated that they value a husband’s capacity to express his feelings over his capacity to provide as the most valuable trait of a would-be partner.
For men, this change in the norms of intimacy tends to mean that marriage and the possibility of starting a family is no longer about realizing values of masculinity through providing for a woman and children. Rather, a new intimacy has fused with market terms so that a contractual logic centered on protecting one’s self-worth, self-esteem and dignity governs modern marriage. Illouz points out that romantic relations for couples in the US and Europe, whether they be in heterosexual, homosexual or non-normative relationships, are all set on the goal of securing each subject’s self-worth.
At first blush, these new norms of intimacy and marriage seem to indicate a more egalitarian structure for marriage and family norms. They seem to point to an environment that has moved beyond and overcome some forms of gender hierarchy and masculinist power dynamics that socialist-feminist scholars have long criticized in the patriarchal, middle-class family.
The new intimacy based on self-worth is egalitarian seeming but its promises are not widely experienced. Since the late 1970s and accelerating up to the present, the prospects of marriage and family have receded for many people, especially for the working class. Marriage now follows a pattern known as ‘assortative’, which means that people tend, at a greater rate, to marry partners from a similar class background.
We can see the problem of the new intimacy of self-worth another way too: concurrent with the rise of assortative marriage, national data for the US points to a ‘divorce divide’ between classes. Since the 1970s, divorce has increased among the working class while at the same time it has significantly decreased among highly educated men and women.
Marriage requires that couples pool their incomes, that both partners work full-time, and that they invest heavily in their children’s development. These economic demands weigh heavily on couples with lower education and on working-class families, and prevent the prospect of starting a family or making a family work in the long run. The benefits of marriage – from sharing income and accruing assets, to the sense of dignity and purpose that family and children bring – are growing more distant for working-class Americans.
To understand these changes a little better, it is helpful to look at macro-social policies in the US over the past 40 years. ‘Neoliberalism’ is a term that can help us understand these new class divides and conflicts. Neoliberalism is a political movement that gained traction in the late 1970s, one that elevates the market as the primary vector of self-making and self-discipline. Following the global recession of 2008, the neoliberal order entered a new stage of rule, which the historian William Davies describes in the following way:
The ‘enemies’ targeted now are largely disempowered and internal to the neoliberal system itself. In some instances, such as those crippled by poverty, debt and collapsing social-safety nets, they have already been largely destroyed as an autonomous political force. Yet somehow this increases the urge to punish them further.
Neoliberalism also means the return of an older form of class rule that penalizes citizens – especially the working class – by emphasizing personal responsibility, typically backed up by the interests of private finance, across social life. The economist Thomas Piketty has shown that neoliberal policies have been driven by what he calls the effects of wealth over the effects of income. This means that a family’s accrued wealth is a greater determinant of how class distinctions are seen to operate than is gauging inequality by income.
College in the US offers an example of how this inequality by wealth shapes access to higher education and often determines the college experience for young people. Today, just under half of Americans hold some sort of college degree, but those who pursue college do so with profound risk over the prospect of having to shoulder long-term debt. For those who enter college with financial support from parents, it comes not from the parents’ incomes but more by family inheritance.
While neoliberal policies have fused with some libertine ideals of the sexual revolution to create a new intimacy-centered conception of romance, they’ve also led to new forms of institutional paternalism. In the early days of 1960s campus radicalism, student activists protested the introduction of in loco parentis laws on campuses. Students opposed these strict moral enforcement protocols that sought to exert a conservative paternal authority on youth who were eager to escape the moral structures of their families. As the scholar Melinda Cooper has pointed out, the student protests of the late 1960s came at a time when general public funding to colleges and universities filled young people with a sense of independence and a positive degree of entitlement.
By the dawn of the neoliberal policies of the Ronald Reagan era from the late 1970s onwards, we find in loco parentis laws making a return to campuses. This time, however, that comes with a private finance and student loan system designed to punish poor and working-class youth. This new formation of in loco parentis has not provoked protest, as it did in the 1960s; rather, it has helped shape a distinctive campus political culture in which tort law, personal grievance and private injury are more and more the approach to issues of social justice.
This indicates a new type of social paternalism, one that is more insidious than the sort encountered on campuses during the mid-20th century. Its subject struggles to address the root of authority within institutions and instead individualizes revolt and injustice. The paternalism that students encountered at the dawn of what would become the sexual revolution in the 1950s was able to be worked through and contested, whereas today’s paternalism is more difficult to transcend.
Punitive neoliberal social policies affect a particular sense of self that is manifest in changes in college life, and these changes are also, not surprisingly, evident in the new norms of marriage and family. In her study of working-class American Millennials (young adults aged 24-34 at the time), Jennifer Silva found that marriage no longer represents a stable and clear marker of adulthood. For the working class, marriage and family have grown more unstable. Indeed, the prospect of starting a family is perceived as too risky.
In addition, the working-class young people of multiracial and multiethnic background that Silva interviews in her book Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in a Time of Uncertainty (2013) express a longing for more traditional gender roles and family obligations. Silva’s study shows exactly the dynamics whereby a new type of class conflict is emerging on the terrain of the ideals of marriage and family.
However, the biggest force exerting directional change on the marriages of the well-to-do and the working class is not ideas about gender but simple material realities. Having to depend on another person and share legal and financial responsibilities has simply become too risky for working-class people. Of the young people Silva spoke to in her study, only a handful had decided to marry.
To compensate for the greater challenges and impediments to marriage, working-class Americans are embracing therapeutic culture to prepare for relationships where strong emotional resilience is called for. Therapy culture is part and parcel of the turn to self-worth in the new norms of intimacy. It calls on individuals to cultivate deeper emotional maturity through self-help literature and constant self-improvement regimens.
Because there is no large-scale cultural or social recognition for the experience of class in the US, working-class people struggle to account for the psychic turmoil they face in their lives. The dire situation has recently led Barbara Jensen, one of the founders of the field of Working-Class Studies, to write that, ‘with working-class life decaying so profoundly’, we need to ‘find ways to publicize the dramatic and community-wide psychological consequences of the so-called “gig” economy.’
The middle-class family, from the 19th century up to the post-Second World War era, put forth the promise of itself as what we might call ‘a safe space’, ie, the family was to be a private space sheltered away from society. Importantly, the ideal of the private sphere of the family has never been an evenly distributed promise. Zaretsky shows that the class antagonisms implicit in capitalist society led to a situation in which the proletarian family made what little they were given of the family into a radical and liberating experience. It was a place within which the individual could be valued ‘for itself’.
In a somewhat paradoxical way, the family was a political site for the proletariat working class as the only space exempt from the subjugation to constant work. For the working class especially, the family was the primary, if not the only, place where the self could be valued as its own thing.The family is now called upon to absorb roles formerly served by the state.
This has contributed to the present situation, in which the egalitarian ideals of the sexual revolution have blended within a market culture that encourages their exploration among the rich but where they simply cannot be realized by large swaths of the working class. So, while both the older bourgeois family and the sexual revolution’s newer intimacy norms contain an egalitarian promise, it is a different kind of opportunity. Our political economy has influenced middle- and working-class families very differently: as Jensen writes, comparing their experiences now ‘seems almost frivolous’, because working-class life is ‘decaying so profoundly’.
If working-class individuals are, due to economic precariousness, simply abandoning the family altogether and are, in lieu of the family, seeking out deeper, emotionally fulfilling relationships, what does this tell us about the political function of the family today? Perhaps we need to assess the family from the outside, to redefine the family and what it ought to promise by revisiting ideals of the family as a shelter from wage labor. But this is a prospect that, at this point, only significant political change can make possible. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/on-class-and-the-perils-of-the-new-norms-of-intimacy?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=51fc7cab6e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_06_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-e7995480d9-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Mark Ford:
I think this interesting essay would be helped by being more explicit about why working class Americans are choosing not to get married. The general argument seems to be that neoliberal policies have made them worse off, and marriage has costs related to it which, as a result, they are less able to bear than before.
The key passage appears to be “the biggest force exerting directional change on the marriages of the well-to-do and the working class is not ideas about gender but simple material realities. Having to depend on another person and share legal and financial responsibilities has simply become too risky for working-class people. Of the young people Silva spoke to in her study, only a handful had decided to marry.” But this does not specify why depending on another person is so risky.
Two obvious issues come to mind. The first is that you might break up and potentially go through an expensive divorce. The second is that your partner might end up freeloading — either intentionally or due to bad luck — and you are saddled with more expenses than you would have as a single person but no additional income. Having children together, and a partner not pulling their economic weight, would be a form of this as well.
Since economics, rather than changes to markers of adulthood or gender roles, seems to be the main point of the essay, it would be helpful to have these issues (and any other relevant ones) fleshed out, and some evidence for their relative importance given.
Anita Spinks:
Looking at the phenomenon through a female lens, I’d suggest working class men are the ones opting out of the marriage ideal. I think it is they, who see a wife and children as a ‘millstone’ whereas working class women still hold onto idealized notions of finding ‘the one’. Middle class men, on the other hand, see the possibility of combined incomes as furthering their progress through life in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed.
The factor that seemingly differentiates my status now (as a widow of almost ten years), from many of my contemporaries, is the fact that we stayed married through thick and thin and resolved problems as they occurred. Sometimes this was very, hard but our problems were not insurmountable. The economic benefits of having stayed together will in turn be passed onto our children and then grandchildren when it comes to my demise.
Oriana:
Only 2% of widows remarry, by contrast with 20% of widowers. On the whole, men seem to get more out of a relationship than women do. In spite of the cultural evolution, women are still likely to see themselves as givers, with men being the takers. And the servant role is less and less appealing to women, particularly to educated women. But then educated women prefer to marry educated men, who are more likely to have egalitarian views of marriage.
I also wonder about one of my mother’s statements about marriage, apparently common in her generations: men can be divided into the lover types and the husband types, and woe to the woman who confuses the two categories. Now that women are older when they marry — if they marry — they are also more likely to be experienced enough to wonder if a dating relationship would be preferable, especially if they happen to enjoy living alone. After tasting the freedoms and pleasures of living alone — in a way, being your own boss — they may be too “spoiled” to consider giving up those pleasures.
I also remember an article in the New York Times that discussed the male preference for marrying women with service-type jobs, who are presumably used to “taking care” of others.
It’s also telling that it’s typically women who file for divorce. Asked if they plan to remarry, they may reply, “Never again!” Their women friends are not surprised.
True, society needs marriage and children — but the perception of marriage and childbearing has changed greatly over the last hundred years, and will keep on changing. Let’s hope that a new balance will ultimately emerge, a more egalitarian one. That egalitarianism will never be perfect, since each marriage develops a balance of power unique to it. An outsider can usually quickly identify which partner is the dominant one — sometimes at a glance.
As I see it, the beauty and dignity of marriage lies in its being what I call a “covenant of non-abandonment”: for richer, for poorer, in sickness as in health. You don’t abandon your spouse when he or she loses their job. You don’t abandon your spouse when he or she receives a cancer diagnosis. And you certainly don’t abandon them for more trivial reasons. 
Married couple, 1850. The wife is looking at her husband, but he doesn't return her gaze. He also seems to be the happier of the two.
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Marriage has evolved to meet the ideals of the well-educated and left too many Americans unwed and insecure. ~ Kay Hymowitz
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THE EFFECTS OF TRAUMA CONTINUE FOR DECADES
~ Exposure to moderate or severe trauma significantly increased the risk of premature death, immune-mediated disease, or cancer as compared with a twin sibling not exposed to trauma, a large matched-pair study showed.
During follow-up for as long as 20 years after the traumatic incident, twins exposed to trauma had a 33% greater risk of death or developing an immune-mediated disease or cancer. Separate analyses of the primary components of the composite endpoint also yielded statistically significant HRs [mean, median, central tendency] for the trauma-exposed versus unexposed twins.
The results suggest that exposure to severe trauma significantly increases risk of death or serious illness not only close to the trauma but for years afterward, reported Trine O. Eskesen, MD, PhD, of Rigshospitalet Copenhagen in Denmark, and co-authors, in Jama Surgery.
"Long-term mortality is increased for trauma patients compared with the general population, and our study adds to this body of evidence," the authors wrote of their findings. "Still, our study differs from other studies by including a twin population and thereby having the best-matched control for the trauma population with long follow-up period.”
"Sensitivity analyses of male, female, monozygotic, and dizygotic twins, respectively, provided similar results," they added.
The "striking" results not only are informative but suggest questions to explore in future studies, wrote Timothy A. Pritts, MD, PhD, of the University of Cincinnati, in an accompanying trial.
"The findings of a lack of association of monozygotic compared with dizygotic twinning suggests that there are likely many factors in addition to purely genetic ones that are important to long-term outcomes," Pritts stated. "In addition, the investigators found that increased Injury Severity Score [ISS] was associated with decreased hazard ratios for reaching the composite outcome. This is highly counterintuitive and should be the subject of further investigation.”
"Furthermore, the median follow-up period of 8.6 years allows substantial room for future study of this population to determine the lifetime effect of trauma on outcomes. Taken together, there is much to be learned — now and in the future -- from tales of trauma in twins.”
Studies have shown that mental and physical trauma may increase the risk of other diseases later in life, including evidence of an association between specific organ injury and subsequent cancer diagnosis, the authors noted in the introduction to their findings. Another study showed a significant association between physical/mental stress in childhood and certain autoimmune diseases in adulthood.
Although more research is needed, identifying an appropriate non-traumatized control group is challenging, the authors continued. A population of same-sex twins offers several advantages, such as same age, sex, genetic factors, and household environment.
Eskesen and colleagues hypothesized that exposure to moderate/severe trauma would be associated with an increased risk of death, immune-mediated disease, or cancer, beginning 6 months after the trauma. Using data from the Danish Twin Registry and the Danish National Patient Registry, investigators identified 3,776 twin pairs with discordant trauma exposure, born from 1895 to 2000 and alive and still living in Denmark as of 1994. The median age at the beginning of follow-up was 36.4, and 61% of the twin pairs were male, while 33% were monozygotic twin pairs. The median IIS was 16.
The primary outcome was the composite of death or one of 24 predefined immune-mediated diseases or cancer. Data analysis included 2,290 twins. The remaining twins were excluded because one or both twins had a prior diagnosis of one or more of the outcomes.
Investigators identified the primary composite outcome in 1,268 twin pairs. The twin exposed to trauma reached was the first to reach the primary outcome in 724 twin pairs (32%) compared with 544 (24%) twin pairs wherein the co-twin reached the outcome first. The difference translated into an HR [average] for the composite outcome of 1.33 for the trauma-exposed twins versus the co-twins (95% CI 1.19-1.49).
An analysis limited to death as the outcome yielded a HR of 1.91 for the trauma-exposed twins (95% CI 1.68-2.18). When immune-mediated disease or cancer was the outcome, the trauma-exposed twins had a HR of 1.28 versus the co-twins (95% CI 1.14-1.44).
The finding of an increased mortality hazard in association with trauma added to an existing body of evidence, but the twin pairs provided the best matched control population for a comparison of discordant trauma exposure. The authors speculated that the increased risk of immune-mediated diseases or cancer might have originated from rapid activation of the immune system by trauma.
"At the genomic level, the response to trauma has been referred to as a genomic storm as most of the genome of circulating leukocytes is affected with activations of the innate and suppression of the adaptive immune system," they wrote. "This may leave an immunological imprint that could be part of a potential causal link between trauma and development of immune-mediated disease later in life.” ~
https://www.medpagetoday.com/surgery/generalsurgery/104556?xid=nl_mpt_morningbreak2023-05-18&eun=g2215341d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBreak_051823&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_Daily_News_Update_active
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LOW POPULATION DENSITY TIED TO SUICIDE RISK
CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics calculated age adjusted suicide rates by state. Here are the 10 states with the highest suicide rate:
10. Oregon: 15.2 suicides per 100,000
9. Utah: 15.4 suicides per 100,000
8. West Virginia: 15.9 suicides per 100,000
7. Arizona: 16.1 suicides per 100,000
6. Colorado: 16.4 suicides per 100,000
5. Nevada: 18.3 suicides per 100,000
4. Montana: 19.4 suicides per 100,000
3. Wyoming: 19.7 suicides per 100,000
2. New Mexico: 20.4 suicides per 100,000
Alaska: 22.1 suicides per 100,000
This has given rise to the hypothesis that suicide rate is linked to population density, and that explains why it’s higher in “sparsely populated hinterlands.” I dare say those are incredibly scenic “hinterlands.” But what I’d call the “frontier mentality” makes you either a winner or a loser. Even if your expectations of success collapse, in a city you constantly run across people who are doing worse than you are. Likewise, a city provides more venues for making a significant contribution, relieving that “useless” feeling that’s tied to a suicide risk.
The average rate across the whole country was 12.6 per 100,000 (2015 data)
Wyoming experienced the highest increase in suicide rate in the last ten years.
Some of these states have the highest gun ownership, but there are exceptions.
Nevada and Arizona also have a very high homicide rate (Louisiana is #1).
Edouard Manet: The Suicide (Le Suicidé), 1881
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Françoise Gilot: DOOMED TO BE REMEMBERED ONLY AS PICASSO’S MISTRESS?
Françoise Gilot had just finished dinner at Le Catalan, a Left Bank bistro in Paris, when Pablo Picasso approached her table with a bowl of cherries. He was 61, a master artist who had already reinvented himself several times over. She was 21 and, like the friend accompanying her that night in May 1943, starting out as a painter.
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day,” Picasso told the two elegant young women upon learning they were artists. “Girls who look like that can’t be painters.”
In fact, Gilot’s work had just appeared in an exhibition for the first time; one of her canvases was a veiled swipe at the city’s Nazi occupiers, showing a taxidermied hawk with the Eiffel Tower rising in the background.
She would continue to paint through the tumultuous years that followed, as she became Picasso’s mistress, model and muse, the mother of two of his children and, by his account, the only woman who ever left him.
Ms. Gilot, who was 101 when she died on June 6 at a hospital in Manhattan, achieved a distinguished career as a painter, with her work shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Centre Pompidou in Paris.
She also published graceful, incisive memoirs and poetry collections, even as she spent decades battling with those who sought to define her by the men in her life, including Picasso, her friend Henri Matisse and her second husband, American virologist Jonas Salk, who helped eradicate polio.
Those men certainly influenced and inspired her, Ms. Gilot said. But there was no reason to view her as a supporting figure rather than a leading one. “Lions mate with lions,” she told Mirabella magazine. “They don’t mate with mice.”
The only child of a wealthy agronomist, Françoise Gilot was born in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on Nov. 26, 1921. As a child, she borrowed paintbrushes from her mother, a homemaker who worked with watercolors and ceramics. Her father, who pined for a son and dressed Ms. Gilot in boys’ clothing, pushed her toward international law.
Gilot graduated from the Sorbonne at 17, in 1938, with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. She was studying law when the Germans invaded France in 1940. “After that,” she told TV interviewer Charlie Rose, “I thought, ‘Well, you know, I don’t know how long we will remain alive. So I’m going to do what I want.’ ”
She dropped out of law school at the Sorbonne, an event that marked the beginning of a years-long estrangement with her father, and was studying at the Académie Julian art school when she began visiting Picasso’s studio in 1943 after their initial encounter at the bistro.
By then, Picasso had separated from his first wife, Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, and taken up with photographer Dora Maar. He soon abandoned her for Ms. Gilot.
Their relationship, she wrote in a best-selling memoir, “Life With Picasso” (1964), was “a catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid” — a passionate romance that was intellectually and artistically fulfilling but marred by episodes of physical and emotional abuse.
The couple lived together for nearly a decade, spending much of their time at a Riviera villa known as La Galloise, where Picasso introduced Ms. Gilot to friends including the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the filmmaker and artist Jean Cocteau, and the painters Georges Braque and Matisse.
The latter “acted like a visa on my passport to the realm of art,” Ms. Gilot said. Picasso incorporated Gilot and their two children, Claude and Paloma, into sculptures, paintings, ceramics and lithographs. But Gilot’s own work drew more from Matisse, whose brightly colored, emotionally reserved style she preferred over Picasso’s expressionistic technique.
When their work was exhibited together in 2012 at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan, Picasso biographer John Richardson declared that “Picasso took from her rather more than she took from him.”
Reviewing her 1965 solo exhibition at the Findlay Gallery in Manhattan, New York Times art critic Stuart Preston wrote that Ms. Gilot “is an artist very much in her own right …
"Without any self-indulgent interest in sensuous or ‘interesting’ textures, she has a feeling for the quality of paint itself and for the mysteriously effective relationship of color and shape that lends her paintings, large and small, a genuinely authoritative air.”
In 1970, she married Salk, perhaps the most famous physician in the world for his work on polio two decades earlier. He was running a lab in San Diego when a mutual friend introduced him to Ms. Gilot.
Salk knew next to nothing about painting; she knew little of science. The couple remained together until his death in 1995.
Gilot eventually sold all the Picasso works she owned, including “La Femme-Fleur,” because of the “bad luck” that seemed to trail him — including the suicides of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, his wife Jacqueline Roque, and his grandson Pablito.
Gilot chaired the fine arts department at the University of Southern California. She also wrote books including “Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art” (1990) and “About Women” (2015), with Lisa Alther, and was appointed an officer in France’s Legion of Honor in 2009.
Despite losing vision in her left eye, she continued painting into her 90s. ~
The Washington Post, June 6, 2023.
Françoise Gilot: My Grandmother, Anne Renout
~ On June 6, 2023, Artist Françoise Gilot died at 101. Born on November 26, 1921 in Neilly-sur-Seine, France, was a painter of the Post-World War II School. At the age of 21 she met Pablo Picasso, and the two embarked on a ten-year relationship. Gilot is considered by some to have been his muse, and though her work during this time was influenced by Picasso’s Cubism, her paintings are characterized by a preference for organic forms over Picasso’s use of sharp angles. In 1953, Gilot left Picasso, taking with her their two children, Claude and Paloma, and 11 years later, published the best-selling book Life With Picasso describing their intimate family life and artistic collaborations. Gilot went on to maintain studios in La Jolla, New York, and Paris, with her later paintings featuring saturated color relationships and structured compositions. Over time, her practice has expanded to include printmaking techniques such as monographs and aquatints. ~
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JESUS SAVES (FROM WHAT?)
Did God sacrifice Himself to Himself to appease Himself and save us from Himself? No. That’s not the Gospel and it’s not what the crucifixion is all about.
~ After reading and re-reading the New Testament, I’m now fully convinced that our view of salvation isn’t what the authors of the Gospels or the Epistles had in mind when they used this term.
“He saved others but he cannot save himself” was spoken about Jesus as he was hanging on the cross. But those Pharisees couldn’t have meant “Jesus helped others get to heaven, but he cannot help himself get to heaven.” That would be ridiculous. Instead,
the obvious meaning of “He saved others” is about a very different type of salvation; a very practical form that involves escaping death or suffering in this life [not the next one].
I’ve also noticed that there are numerous examples in the Gospels and the other New Testament documents where people often ask “What must we do to be saved?” and while I once assumed that this question must be about “how do I get to heaven after I die?”, I now realize that it was probably a question about how to escape a very practical danger that these people felt was coming soon.
For example, why is it that no one ever asks anyone this question in the Old Testament scriptures?
Why is it that everyone suddenly needs an answer to this question once Jesus arrives but they didn’t worry about it beforehand?
I asked this very question on my social media recently and the responses I received ranged from ludicrous to just plain sad. Most assumed that the question must have been about how to get to heaven after they died, but that begs my question: Why didn’t anyone seem to care about getting to heaven BEFORE Jesus arrived on the scene?
Answer: It’s not about getting to heaven. It’s about being saved from something in the here and now.
The question “What must I do to be saved?” often comes immediately after the preaching of the coming Day of the Lord which was prophesied by the prophet Joel and referenced by other Old Testament prophets. Jesus refers to this coming Day of the Lord in his Olivet Discourse. Peter also mentions it in Acts chapter 2. Paul refers to it in his writings as well.
Once people hear that this Day of the Lord is coming in their lifetimes, the most obvious question is: “What must I do to avoid getting killed in that?”
That’s what is meant by the question: It’s about avoiding the destruction prophesied by Joel and confirmed by Jesus and the Apostles. So, being “saved” in this context is not about getting to heaven. It’s about surviving an apocalyptic event.
The mistake made by later Christian theologians was to spiritualize this question and reinterpret these passages as if the whole point was to get to heaven and avoid hell in the afterlife. It’s also why terms like “The Kingdom of God” get reframed as “Heaven after we die” rather than what Jesus says it is: A new reality we can enjoy in this very moment.
Rethinking the way we view salvation is key to understanding Jesus and his mission and message.
Maybe that’s why he starts out his ministry by warning us to “Think Differently” [metanoia]? We need new eyes and fresh perspectives to unlearn all the religious garbage we’ve inherited from our parents and pastors.
If “What must I do to be saved?” isn’t about getting to heaven, then it’s also not a question about whether or not we’re already loved, or forgiven, or accepted by God. The scriptures declare over and over again that God was in Christ, NOT counting our sins against us but reconciling the World to Himself. We are already loved. We are already forgiven. There’s nothing we need to do to unlock it or activate God’s acceptance. It’s ours right now.
What must I do to be saved? Nothing. You’re already saved, treasured, beloved and accepted by your Abba.
Rest in that. ~
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/keithgiles/2021/03/jesus-saves-from-what/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH
Oriana:
An additional support of this viewpoint comes from the fact that Judaism is not particularly concerned with the afterlife. In some schools of Judaism, there is no afterlife.
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Religion lessons forced me to engage in doublethink. Sometimes, however, straight thinking broke through. I indelibly remember the time when I was perhaps 10 or 11, and my mother said, "There is no hell. God wouldn't be so cruel." I was disturbed by her heresy. "But of course he would be," I thought but didn't say it out loud.
Later I realized more fully that hell was the foundation of Christianity.
No hell means no need for posthumous salvation and thus no need for the Savior.
Right from the first religion lesson, on Adam and Eve, it was plain to me that god was evil — but since he was all-powerful, even more powerful than Hitler or Stalin, it was obvious that silence was the best policy. At the same time you were indoctrinated to think that god was watching you non-stop and could read every thought in your sinful head, so yes, hell was inevitable for the vast majority of humanity, especially according to the doctrine that you must accept Jesus as your savior, or else burn for eternity.
"And no, being a good person doesn't count," a young evangelical woman enlightened me.
But thinking that you were such a wretched sinner that you couldn’t be saved was a sin against the Holy Ghost, “which would not be forgiven.” More agony without an exit, unless you chucked the whole thing: creation in six days (because on the seventh god “rested” — was he tired?), Adam first looking for his helpmeet among the animals, but finally being given Eve, made from one of his ribs; Moses parting the Red Sea, but not being allowed to enter the Holy Land because, having been born in Egypt, he was not “pure” enough; and more, much more that you were required to accept without questioning, much less taking it for granted that god was evil and indifferent to anything other than receiving non-stop praise (and animal sacrifices, later morphed to various personal sacrifices).
Why would humans create such an unappealing deity? In their own image . . . in their own image. And that image goes back to the Bronze Age and Iron Age, eras known for cruelty and cruel gods in general.
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LOVE DOESN'T CO-EXIST WITH FEAR
That's why I could never love god, which made me feel doomed to hell anyway (and feeling doomed was itself a "sin against the Holy Ghost, which shall be not forgiven"). Dan Barker puts it well: I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being. ~ Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith
TAURINE: THE NEW ANTI-AGING MIRACLE?
Taurine, an amino acid found in meat and shellfish, is a popular supplement added to energy drinks that are touted to promote sharper brain function. While those claims are unproven, new research suggests the nutrient may help with healthy aging.
Low levels of taurine can speed the aging process in several species of animals. Now scientists report that supplementing with the nutrient may slow that process down, leading to longer, healthier lives in animals — and maybe humans, too — an international group of researchers reported Thursday in Science.
“This is a really exciting time,” said study co-author Vijay Yadav, an assistant professor of genetics and development at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, the medical school for Columbia University in New York City.
That’s because researchers are now exploring specific molecules, such as taurine, that might improve health and lead to longer life, Yadav said.
Yadav and his colleagues showed that taurine levels declined dramatically with age in mice, monkeys and humans. No one knows yet why levels of the nutrient decline as much as 80% with age, Yadav said.
In experiments with mice and monkeys, the researchers found that supplementing middle-age animals led to better health.
In mice, the supplementation led to less weight gain, increased bone density, improved muscle endurance and strength, reduced insulin resistance, a better-functioning immune system and a 10% longer lifespan, which in humans would be about seven or eight years.
In monkeys, supplementation prevented age-related weight gain, improved fasting blood sugar levels, increased bone density and led to healthier livers and improved immune system function.
Yadav was quick to point out that it doesn’t look like supplementation is reversing the effects of aging. [But some research points to actual reversal and rejuvenation.]
“It’s hitting the brakes on aging, not putting things in reverse gear,” he said at a news briefing Tuesday.
While there haven’t yet been trials in humans, data suggests that the findings in animals might be applicable.
Examining data from the University of Cambridge's EPIC-Norfolk study — which from 1993 to 1998 tracked health, diet and physical activity of 30,000 men and women ages 40 to 79 — the researchers found that, overall, people with higher taurine levels were healthier, had lower levels of inflammation and were less likely to have Type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure or to be obese.
EXERCISE MAY BOOST TAURINE
In another intriguing finding, the researchers discovered an association between the amount people exercise and their taurine levels. Scrutinizing data from the EPIC-Norfolk study, the researchers discovered that taurine levels rise with exercise.
The next step is to run a clinical trial to determine whether similar benefits can be seen when humans receive taurine supplements, Yadav said, adding that he couldn’t recommend that people try to boost their taurine levels without such data.
Fortunately, the European Food Safety Authority has deemed doses of taurine in humans similar to what was given to the mice to be safe, said Henning Wackerhage, a co-author of the study and a professor of exercise biology at the Technical University of Munich.
Levels of taurine added to energy drinks would be safe, but Wackerhage expressed concern about the levels of caffeine in the beverages.
As for higher doses, Yadav said no one knows whether there would be safety issues.
FOODS HIGH IN TAURINE
While the human body can make small amounts of taurine, an amino acid, people mostly get it through food.
Shellfish (scallops, clams, shrimp, oysters), as well as dark chicken and turkey meat, contain the highest levels of taurine. Other meats contain moderate amounts of taurine, while dairy products, such as milk and ice cream, also have taurine, although less of it. [Eggs do contain taurine; I eat the yolk and discard the white part since I’m somewhat allergic to egg white.]
One of the first hints that taurine might be an important but underappreciated nutrient came in the 1970s, when scientists discovered that a rash of cases of blindness in cats could be explained by the lack of the amino acid in popular cat foods. Cats can’t make taurine on their own. When pet food manufacturers changed their formulations to include higher levels of the nutrient, the blindness resolved.
A short time after, researchers discovered that the lack of taurine in pet food was also causing a severe heart problem called dilated cardiomyopathy in cats.
Since then, researchers have associated taurine deficiency with a host of age-related diseases in humans.
IS TAURINE SAFE?
Neuroscientist Charles Mobbs called the research “extraordinarily thorough.”
“It’s very credible and is consistent with many of the things we already know about taurine and aging,” said Mobbs, who specializes in endocrinology and geriatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “This research brings it to the next level.”
Mobbs would like to see future research explaining why taurine levels decline with age and how the nutrient works.
“Because the study is so thorough, it’s likely that the results will be replicated,” said Mobbs, who wasn’t involved in the new research.
When it comes to giving people taurine as a supplement, Dr. Toren Finkel, a cardiologist, is concerned that “if you scale the dose given to the mice to a human dose, it would be 5 to 6 grams per day.”
“Many pills people take are 100 milligrams,” said Finkel, the director of the Aging Institute of the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC. “A dose of 5 grams would be 50 times that. So that’s a lot.” [One gram capsules are also available.]
The equivalent of 5 grams would be about 1 teaspoon.
“One really nice part of the study is that they saw declines in taurine in multiple species,” said Finkel, who isn’t part of the study. “And if you intervene with taurine supplements, it appears to reverse a lot of aging issues in multiple species. These are very intriguing results.”
The new study “provides one more piece of evidence that dietary alterations can have an impact on aging and aging-related pathologies,” said Dr. Douglas Vaughan, the chair of medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who isn’t associated with the new research.
While the researchers used supplements to boost taurine levels, people can reach the same goal by consuming foods that are high in the nutrient, Vaughan said.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence. Columbia University has applied for patents for medical uses of taurine, a spokesperson for the university said in an email. ~
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/taurine-aging-energy-drinks-protein-food-study-rcna88259
Oriana:
Twenty years ago there was a lot of excitement about acetyl-L-carnitine; we’ve seen this excitement come and go. We’ll see if there is still interest in taurine a few years from now.
Body builders often take taurine, so the positive association with a nicely ripped body already exists in the collective mind (I personally am more interested in the sleep-improving properties of taurine). And since there is more interest in anti-aging now, who knows, taurine may hold its stellar position longer than carnitine. Of course the benefits of carnitine and its acetylated form are still the same (burn belly fat, improve brain function)l; I’m bringing it up only to illustrate the faddishness in the alternative health industry. (But then there is faddishness in mainstream medicine as well; not so long ago, it was all about anti-depressants.)
FOOD SOURCES OF TAURINE
Scallops are the richest food source of taurine, along with yellow-fin tuna. Dark turkey meat also provides a hefty dose.
But what about vegans, who refuse to eat even eggs?
Fortunately, there is one good plant source of taurine: seaweed. Is seaweed the secret of Japan’s having the highest life expectancy in the world? (Of course seaweed provides many valuable nutrients besides taurine.)
Brewer’s yeast (yuck!) also provides some taurine — as do peanuts, hazelnuts, and almonds.
Milk, yogurt, and cheese are sources of taurine. Human milk has more taurine than cow’s milk, indicating that human babies have a high need for taurine.
Peas,
beans, and other legumes (peanuts seems to be an exception), as well as
potatoes and sweet potatoes, interfere with taurine function. Taurine
seems more compatible with a low-carb diet.
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Leg cramps can be an indication of taurine deficiency.
Taurine acts as a GABA agonist, so there is reason to think that taking up to 3 g of taurine at bedtime may improve sleep. The standard practice with any supplement to start at a relatively low dose, monitor the results, and raise the dose as needed.
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Here’s more about the recent study that caused the surge of interest in taurine, led by Vijay Yadav at Columbia University.
~ Taurine first came into Yadav’s view during his previous research into osteoporosis that uncovered taurine’s role in building bone. Around the same time, other researchers were finding that taurine levels correlated with immune function, obesity, and nervous system functions.
“We realized that if taurine is regulating all these processes that decline with age, maybe taurine levels in the bloodstream affect overall health and lifespan,” Yadav says.
First, Yadav’s team looked at levels of taurine in the bloodstream of mice, monkeys, and people and found that the taurine abundance decreases substantially with age. In people, taurine levels in 60-year-old individuals were only about one-third of those found in 5-year-olds.
“That’s when we started to ask if taurine deficiency is a driver of the aging process, and we set up a large experiment with mice,” Yadav says.
The researchers started with close to 250 14-month-old female and male mice (about 45 years old in people terms). Every day, the researcher fed half of them a bolus of taurine or a control solution. At the end of the experiment, Yadav and his team found that taurine increased average lifespan by 12% in female mice and 10% in males. For the mice, that meant three to four extra months, equivalent to about seven or eight human years.
To learn how taurine impacted health, Yadav brought in other aging researchers who investigated the effect of taurine supplementation on the health and lifespan in several species.
These experts measured various health parameters in mice and found that at age 2 (60 in human years), animals supplemented with taurine for one year were healthier in almost every way than their untreated counterparts.
The researchers found that taurine suppressed age-associated weight gain in female mice (even in “menopausal” mice), increased energy expenditure, increased bone mass, improved muscle endurance and strength, reduced depression-like and anxious behaviors, reduced insulin resistance, and promoted a younger-looking immune system, among other benefits.
“Not only did we find that the animals lived longer, we also found that they’re living healthier lives,” Yadav says.
At a cellular level, taurine improved many functions that usually decline with age: The supplement decreased the number of “zombie cells” (old cells that should die but instead linger and release harmful substances), increased survival after telomerase deficiency, increased the number of stem cells present in some tissues (which can help tissues heal after injury), improved the performance of mitochondria, reduced DNA damage, and improved the cells‘ ability to sense nutrients.
Similar health effects of taurine supplements were seen in middle-aged rhesus monkeys, which were given daily taurine supplements for six months. Taurine prevented weight gain, reduced fasting blood glucose and markers of liver damage, increased bone density in the spine and legs, and improved the health of their immune systems.
The researchers do not know yet if taurine supplements will improve health or increase longevity in humans, but two experiments they conducted suggest taurine has potential.
In the first, Yadav and his team looked at the relationship between taurine levels and approximately 50 health parameters in 12,000 European adults aged 60 and over. Overall, people with higher taurine levels were healthier, with fewer cases of type 2 diabetes, lower obesity levels, reduced hypertension, and lower levels of inflammation. “These are associations, which do not establish causation,” Yadav says, “but the results are consistent with the possibility that taurine deficiency contributes to human aging.”
The second study tested if taurine levels would respond to an intervention known to improve health: exercise. The researchers measured taurine levels before and after a variety of male athletes and sedentary individuals finished a strenuous cycling workout and found a significant increase in taurine among all groups of athletes (sprinters, endurance runners, and natural bodybuilders) and sedentary individuals.
“No matter the individual, all had increased taurine levels after exercise, which suggests that some of the health benefits of exercise may come from an increase in taurine,” Yadav says.
Only a randomized clinical trial in people will determine if taurine truly has health benefits, Yadav adds. Taurine trials are currently underway for obesity, but none are designed to measure a wide range of health parameters.
Other potential anti-aging drugs—including metformin, rapamycin, and NAD analogs—are being considered for testing in clinical trials.
“I think taurine should also be considered,” Yadav says. “And it has some advantages: Taurine is naturally produced in our bodies, it can be obtained naturally in the diet, it has no known toxic effects (although it’s rarely used in concentrations used in this study), and it can be boosted by exercise.
“Taurine abundance goes down with age, so restoring taurine to a youthful level in old age may be a promising anti-aging strategy.”
The study, titled “Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging,” was published in Science on June 8, 2023. ~
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/taurine-may-be-key-longer-and-healthier-life
It obviously should say "prevents neurological disorders."
Oriana:
Note that taurine helps eliminate tinnitus (ringing in the ears), and helps prevent hearing loss. Its ability to prevent macular degeneration may appear to be a greater benefit, but taurine's ability to protect hearing is just as important. Hearing loss means a greater risk of dementia.
Even if taurine did nothing more than participate in the production of bile salts (essential for the digestion of fats), regulate calcium and increase bone health, as well as help balance electrolytes, it would be reason enough to consider supplementation, stating in the middle age. But taurine has many other benefits besides.
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WHY IS TAURINE ADDED TO ENERGY DDRINKS?
~ This week, scientists revealed that the amino acid taurine, which is often added to energy drinks, appears to have impressive life-extending and health-boosting properties in some mammals. Although the findings have yet to be replicated in humans, it is hoped that they might be soon.
But why is this supplement added to energy drinks in the first place? And could drinking more of them be beneficial?
A forgotten hero
Taurine is an amino acid commonly found in meat, fish and eggs – it is rare in plants, but it has been found in smaller amounts in algae, bacteria and fungi. It's also sometimes sold as a supplement, which is popular with bodybuilders and athletes, who believe it may help them to control their body temperature and reduce muscular fatigue during exercise.
While taurine is not actually used to build proteins in the body, as other amino acids are, it has a range of roles, particularly in the central nervous system – where it regulates the amount of calcium in nerve cells and controls inflammation, among other things. In fact, taurine makes up around 0.1% of the body weight of animals. It was first isolated in the 1820s, from the bile of European cattle (Bos taurus), from which it derives its name.
For the most recent study, an international team of researchers tested the effects of a daily dose on middle-aged mice and rhesus macaques – they were 14 months old and 15 years old, respectively, at the time of the trial. The amount of taurine in the blood of mice, monkeys and humans naturally decline with age, so the team was curious whether an extra dose of the amino acid might be beneficial.
The results were striking. The animals that received taurine appeared significantly healthier and more youthful – their muscles, brains, and immune systems and other organs were functioning better – than those that did not get the amino acid supplement. Crucially, the lifespan of mice treated with taurine increased by 10 to 12%, with the monkeys experiencing a similar boost. If taking extra taurine in later life has the same benefits in humans, it could be equivalent to almost an extra decade.
"I thought this is almost too good to be true," Henning Wackerhage, a senior lecturer in molecular exercise physiology at the Technical University of Munich and one of 50 co-authors of the study, told the BBC.
For middle-aged monkeys, taking a daily taurine supplement leads to a longer, more youthful life.A long shot
The first energy drink was launched in the US in 1949. Branded "Dr Enuf", it was invented as a healthier alternative to soft drinks, and came in a lemon-lime flavor with added B vitamins and caffeine. But it wasn't until 35 years later, when an Austrian marketing executive stumbled upon a Thai brand – Krating Daeng – during a business trip, that taurine entered the scene.
In addition to the typical ingredients, this non-carbonated drink contained inositol, a kind of sugar found in the brain, and taurine. It was sold as a hangover cure. Together the two men tweaked the original formula and added bubbles to create Red Bull. The modern energy drink had been born.
The original logic for adding taurine isn't clear, and today many companies don't have a clear justification either, beyond loosely pointing to its role in the heart, brain and muscles. However, there has been some research on its possible effects. For example, one study found that the combination of ingredients in Red Bull, including taurine, improved people's aerobic and mental performance.
Could energy drinks help people to live longer?
In the recent taurine study, the greatest health and longevity benefits were seen in mice given 1,000mg (0.03oz) of taurine per kg of body weight per day. Based on a method for converting doses from animals to humans using the surface area of the body, this works out at around 6g per day for the average adult – equivalent to the amount found in six cans of Red Bull, or the same number of cans of Monster (other brands are available).
This is not something to be recommended. For one thing, it hasn't yet been established whether taurine supplementation would have the same benefits in humans, and it may have some risks. The lead author of the taurine study wouldn't reveal to the BBC if he is taking taurine, in case he influences others. [I don't have a laugh emoji, or I'd place at least three here.]
That's not to mention the unhealthy effects of consuming the other things contained in almost 1.5 liters (2.6 pints) of Red Bull or 3 liters (5.3 pints) of Monster (the cans are twice the size) in a single day. For the former, this would include more than three times the recommended daily limit of sugar, around 32 teaspoons — or double this amount for the latter. According to guidelines set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), adults should aim to consume no more than 10% of their daily calories from added sugar, which amounts to roughly 12 teaspoons per day for an adult on a typical 2,000 calorie diet.
So, it's probably not a good idea to stockpile energy drinks. While the taurine they contain might just give you a microscopic boost, we'll need to wait for more research to find out if this is really the case. Just don't bet your skateboarding dog on it. ~
*This article was updated on 12/06/23. The original calculation of the equivalent human dose of taurine was based on an outdated method of conversion.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230609-why-is-there-taurine-in-energy-drinks
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RAPAMYCIN FOR DOGS?
~ Rapamycin has a really interesting backstory. It is produced by bacteria called Streptomyces hygroscopicus that was found in the soil on Easter Island, which is also called Rapa Nui. That's where it gets its name.
It was initially studied for antifungal and anticancer effects because when researchers put rapamycin on either yeast cells or mammalian cells in culture, it was a potent antiproliferative. In other words, it shuts down the cell cycle. Researchers next wanted to figure out its biochemistry and found that it inhibits a protein called mTOR. The protein was actually named after the drug: mTOR stands for mechanistic target of rapamycin [It started out as “mammalian target of rapamycin” — but later the mTOR protein was found pretty universally, not just in mammals].
This was all 25 to 30 years ago. In the intervening couple of decades, we have learned that mTOR is a central regulator of growth, development, and reproduction. As far as we know, it’s in every eukaryotic cell. In all of these species, it plays this same role of sensing the environment and helping the cell or the organism make a decision about whether the environment is appropriate to begin to grow and reproduce or if it should shut down growth and become stress resistant. Rapamycin turns down mTOR by indicating that the environment is a poor environment for reproduction.
How this affects aging varies between different animal models. Even in mammals, different downstream processes might be most important in different tissues and organs. In mammals, many of the healthspan benefits from rapamycin probably come from its ability to re-establish immune homeostasis in an aged animal. We often talk about how immune function declines with age, but that's really only half of the story. The immune system loses the ability to respond appropriately to external pathogens, like viruses and bacteria, but at the same time, there is an increase in immune activity towards self.
Autoimmune activity is one of the most consistent features of aging in every person. It turns out that rapamycin is quite good at knocking down that sterile inflammation. I speculate that knocking down that sterile inflammation allows the immune system to restore homeostasis.
Our first study was a ten week, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, to test for safety. The dogs were treated with two different doses of rapamycin. We also measured heart function, using the same three echocardiographic parameters that had improved in mice treated with rapamycin.
In the echocardiograms, we saw statistically significant improvements in two of the three parameters in dogs treated with rapamycin. The big outcome of that study was that we found no evidence for side effects in dogs treated with the drug. Also, the owners reported an increase in activity in the dogs that had received rapamycin.
The second clinical trial was at Texas A&M University and lasted for six months. We used half of the lower dose that was used in the first trial. In the second trial, we didn't see any changes in the echocardiograms. We did still have an owner reported increase in the dogs’ activity. Again, we saw no evidence of any significant side effects.
We’re working on the third clinical trial, which is the largest one. It’s called Test of Rapamycin in Aging Dogs, or TRIAD. This is a study of 580 dogs. Half will get the placebo; half will get rapamycin for one year, and we’ll follow up for two years afterward. The primary endpoint of this third clinical trial is lifespan.
The length of the trial, the number of dogs, and the size and weight of the dogs will give us the statistical power to detect a nine percent change in lifespan.
We had just started this trial when the pandemic hit and all the veterinary clinics shut down except for emergencies. But now we're back up and running. I really hope that by the end of this calendar year, we'll have all 580 dogs randomized in the trial. In a year, we’ll finish the treatment period; then in two more years, we will unblind and find out all of the answers. ~
https://www.drugdiscoverynews.com/aging-dogs-provide-insights-for-human-longevity-15670
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NATURAL MIMETICS OF METFORMIN AND RAPAMYCIN
~ Metformin, a common type 2 diabetes drug, and rapamycin, a common immunosuppressive anti-rejection drug, have both been shown to have substantial anti-aging and anti-cancer effects in a variety of model organisms. However, both compounds have known side effects and are regulated drugs for existing disease indications, factors that problematize their off-label use as healthspan extending drugs.
In this study, the researchers applied deep-learned neural networks to profile the safety and gene- and pathway-level similarity of more than 800 natural compounds to metformin and rapamycin, in an effort to identify natural compounds that can mimic the effects of these anti-cancer and anti-aging drugs while remaining free of the adverse effects associated with them.
"Earlier this year we launched Young.AI, a comprehensive system utilizing the recent advances in deep learning for tracking a variety of aging biomarkers. I hope that the consumers using the Longevity A.I. will start using it. One of the goals of our group is to identify the combinations of molecules that achieve the desired effects" said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, co-author of the study, founder of Insilico Medicine and Chief Science Officer of the Biogerontology Research Foundation.
Their analysis identified many novel candidate metformin and rapamycin mimetics that have been previously unreported as such. In particular, they identified allantoin and ginsenoside as strong mimetics of metformin, epigallocatechin gallate and isoliquiritigenin as strong mimetics of rapamycin, and withaferin A as a strong mimetic of both. Additionally, their analysis also identified four previously unexplored natural compounds as fairly strong mimetic of rapamycin.
"Aging is not recognized as a disease [meaning that mainstream doctors will not prescribe metformin and/or rapamycin for anti-aging], so we need strong potential geroprotectors of natural origin on the market — supplements that slow down aging, affecting the key mechanisms of aging at the molecular and cellular level" said Alexey Moskalev, PhD, a co-author of the study.
These findings are significant because, as naturally occurring compounds, such nutraceuticals are not subject to regulation by the FDA and other regulatory bodies. Furthermore, because the researchers introduced a deep-learning based classification of the safety profiles associated with these compounds, the novel candidate mimetics the study identified are likely to have less adverse effects than metformin and rapamycin, though this needs to be further validated by clinical testing.
"This study is significant not only for the identification of novel candidate mimetics of metformin and rapamycin, which as natural compounds are not subject to regulatory bodies like the FDA and which have higher-scoring safety profiles as indicated by our deep-learned safety profile classification analysis, but also for demonstrating particularly powerful screening methods that can be applied to the identification of novel and safe mimetics of other known anti-cancer and healthspan-extending drugs and compounds" said Franco Cortese, co-author of the study and Deputy Director of the Biogerontology Research Foundation. ~
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/897033
Oriana:
It's funny that the article does not mention berberine, which not only mimics metformin but also does amazing things to one's cholesterol profile.
Epigallocatechin gallate is the main catechin found in green tea.
When it comes to ashwaganda (or rather its main active ingredient, withaferin A), identified in this article as a "strong mimetic of both meformin and rapamysin," I wonder if we have here a situation similar to curcumin. Anything that says “turmeric” is useless. I wonder if ashwaganda might turn out be like turmeric; you need to get the active compound, withaferin A, and not just the powdered root. Time will tell.
On the other hand, perhaps ashwangandha as a simple powder of roots (primarily) and leaves does have at least one noticeable effect: it makes one sleepy. Having experienced this sleepiness, I’m wary of taking ashwagandha in daytime, but will gladly take it near bedtime.
Note the Latin name of the herb: Withania somnifera. “Somnifera” means the bringer of sleep.
As for extending life span, yes, ashwagandha has been shown to extend the life span of C. elegans by around 20%. In vitro, it has shown the ability to maintain telomere length by enhancing the activity of telomerase.
berry of Withania somnifera
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Ending on beauty:
From Blossoms
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