*
AT THE WIND HARP
At the Marina, listening to the wind harp,
its rainbow of harmonic moans,
I felt a light touch
above my left wrist —
pale skin, pale aqua eyes —
like a pretty ghost child.
She was just beginning to smile,
her finger pointing: “You.”
*
In gilded medieval light, I stood
on a sand dune overlooking
the city of Prague —
zlata Praha,”golden Prague”
with its stony-ribbed cathedral,
castle of a thousand windows,
and the crooked yellow hope
in the crooked street below,
The Alchemists’ Lane —
and the legend of the Golem:
on the giant’s clay forehead
the word Emet, meaning Truth.
When the Golem grew dangerous,
Rabbi Liwa erased the first letter,
leaving Met, meaning Death.
And the Golem fell back to dust.
*
I started across the sand, but it bled
into the flat suburban streets, the dream
fled. I lay thinking, Will I ever
reach the golden city of Prague?
I thought of Kafka in the cold
cathedral, its moan of echoes,
prayers denied, denied, denied.
I thought of classes never taught,
of the ghost poems I wrote:
would they vanish like the night
into night? Then your image
returned — you returned,
child at the wind harp,
and with a touch as light as one
letter, you changed the word
from death to truth.
~ Oriana
*
MAYBE EMILY BRONTE WAS NOT SO ODD AFTER ALL
~ Two hundred years after her birth Emily Brontë is still remembered as an oddball, a people-hater and the weirdest of three weird sisters.
But a recent book aims to rehabilitate the reputation of the author of Wuthering Heights, one of the greatest novels ever written: she may have been shy and reserved but she was not strange and should be seen as a woman ahead of her time, the academic Claire O’Callaghan argues.
O’Callaghan said Brontë’s reputation was entirely carved out by others, a lot of it based on the writings of Charlotte, who was responding to criticism of her sisters Emily and Anne.
“She adopted the strategy of appealing for pity by presenting her sisters as a bit weird and a bit strange, people who did not really know what they were doing,” said O’Callaghan.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte embellished the stories even further. “Those founding images have been extended and reworked and dramatized and amplified, they have become mythic up until the present really.”
O’Callaghan said Emily had been portrayed in many ways, usually negative. Sometimes she was “a staid, old-fashioned, people-hating spinster who roamed about the Yorkshire moors alone with her dog” or “a painfully shy and socially awkward girl-woman who was sick whenever she left home” or “she’s a stubborn and defiant woman who willingly withheld assorted physical and mental ailments, or an ethereal soul too fragile to endure the real world”.
She said the myths were damaging. “They perpetuate this idea she was weird and different and strange and other in a way that is quite hostile.”
O’Callaghan said it was true Emily was shy, or reserved, and craved solitude and enjoyed getting out the house walking on the moors with her dog Keeper, a large mastiff. But this did not make her odd.
O’Callaghan’s book also explores how Emily might fit in today, arguing she would be more at home in a more accepting, tolerant, feminist society.
Brontë’s only novel was Wuthering Heights, the violent and passionate story of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff.
O’Callaghan said the novel was still seen as a love story and that too needs re-examining. “I think it is about a lot more and I think that love story is quite a damaging one … I think it can be read as a cautionary tale against damaging romance and violent romance.”
Heathcliff is clearly a horrible man “yet he is often read as the archetypal anti-hero. I really question that word hero. He is just vile from the outset.”
In the era of Time’s Up and #MeToo, O’Callaghan, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University, said it was a good time to re-evaluate. “Maybe the time’s up on Heathcliff … we need to take off the romantic blinkers and we need to look at him more critically.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/14/withering-slights-emily-bronte-was-no-oddball-author-argues
Mary:
Whether Emily Bronte's personality has been misread due to distortions by Charlotte and Mrs Gaskell can be argued for, I suppose, but I am certain we have long misread Emily's only novel. Rather than seeing it as a romantic love story, with Cathy and Heathcliff as ideals of passionate and tragic love in the Romantic sense, and Heathcliff as kind of a Miltonic Satan figure, beautiful and misunderstood, the novel can actually be seen as a cautionary tale about the dangers of that Romantic ideal itself. When Cathy tells Nelly "I am Heathcliff," she reveals their love as akin to something like Possession, a merging of selves that is exclusionary, violent and destructive...a kind of curse rather than a blessing. Cathy and Heathcliff don't so much fulfill as destroy each other, their connection doesn't make them more fully human but inhumane and cruel, using others lives to work out their own passions and revenge.
The novel doesn't end, like the Hollywood version, with the end of Cathy and Heathcliff, it continues through the next generation, the children, made to suffer cruelly as the pawns of their parents' devouring passion and mistaken choices. This generation pays for that imbalance and excess, and only after suffering through punishment, and the death of one of them, do the remaining two begin to form a relationship with the chance to heal, to outlive the poisonous and almost of demonic influence of their parents' romantic passion. Alice Hoffman's book, "Here on Earth," is a modern depiction of that same kind of destructive, claustrophobic, obsessive romantic relationship we are too often apt to imagine as ideal.
Oriana:
For me one big clue about what's wrong (besides Heathcliff's astonishing cruelty — maybe it wasn't all that astonishing back in 1840s when the novel was written) is the fact that we perfectly understand Cathy's exclaiming, "I AM Heathcliff" — but we can't imagine Heathcliff's ever saying, "I AM Catherine." A "real man" could never say it. He could not equate himself with an inferior being (as defined by the culture of the times).
He couldn't say it because a man is supposed to have plans, ambitions, pursuits — what these days we call simply "having a life." But a woman could become disastrously preoccupied with love and romance because that was the only important thing going on in her life. Her whole sense of self-worth and fulfillment depended on it. It's simply too much to expect.
*
“Do we create form or does form create us? We think we are the ones who construct it, but that’s an illusion, because we are, in equal measure, constructed by the construction. Whatever you put down on paper dictates what comes next, because the work is not born of you—you want to write one thing, yet something entirely different comes out. Parts tend to wholeness, every part surreptitiously makes its way toward the whole, strives for roundness, and seeks fulfillment. It implores the rest to be created in its own image and likeness.” ~ Witold Gombrowicz, "Ferdydurke"
*
An immature narrator is some sort of candid narrator; even he who flaunts what is usually hidden. What he is not is a “sincere” narrator, sincerity being one of those ideals that make no sense in the world of candor and provocation. “In literature sincerity leads nowhere . . . the more artificial we are, the closer we come to frankness. artificiality allows the artist to approach shameful truths.” ~ Susan Sontag, preface to Ferdydurke
COMPARING THE DEVELOPMENT OF CZECHIA AND RUSSIA
Czechia: GDP per capita nominal- $31,368
Russia: GDP per capita nominal - $14,403
The Czech Republic has one of the most diversified economies in the world — based on services, manufacturing, and innovation. Russia has an economy entirely dependent on mineral extraction and overwhelmingly non-innovative industry.
The 7th position in the Complexity index for Czechia and the 45th for Russia.
Human Development Index: the Czech Republic the 32nd position, Russia the 52nd position.
The average life expectancy in the Czech Republic is 77.37 years, a relatively low number for a developed country. By comparison, in Russia it is 69.37 years. Average Czech life almost a decade more than average Russian (The last results are influenced by the pandemic)
The Czech Republic is the 18th happiest country on the planet according to the Happiness Index. Russia 79th.
The infrastructure is seriously incomparable in the Czech Republic in its extent, quality and density.
I could continue like this for hours… ~ Voyta Rod, Quora
*
WAS STALINIST DYSTOPIA AVOIDABLE IN THE SOVIET UNION?
~ The problem is that for it to be imposed, Marxism-Leninism required the use of brutal, unremitting violence — otherwise, people resorted to market mechanisms simply in the course of daily living. Indeed, if the collapse of communism demonstrated one thing, it’s that markets really are the the natural order of things. People barter and trade out of necessity, as it provides the most efficacious means of addressing human needs.
Lenin arguably acknowledged this hard reality with the implementation of his New Economic Policy, a market reform born out of desperation to get food supplies moving again. This makes for some very interesting speculations in alternative history. If Lenin had survived or, at the very least, if someone, such as Bukharin, had managed to ascend to power to carry these reforms over to the next decade, it's conceivable that the Soviet Union would have morphed into something far removed from the Stalinist dystopia.
What emerged possibly would have been touted as Marxist-Leninist but it likely would have taken on some of the traits of fascism, with party elites — “the heirs of Lenin” — operating some variant of state capitalism while extracting their share of the proceeds to live in comparative opulence.
Bear in mind, too, that imposing the sort of totalitarian state required to ensure the implementation of a full-blown Marxist-Leninist state is hard, demanding and tiresome work for which few individuals can summon the discipline.
Stalin was one of those singular few. And the hardest of hardcore Stalinists — the few of them still around today — are right to argue that he saved Marxist-Leninism. Without his laser-beam focus and uncompromising cruelty, the Soviet experiment would have been set adrift. Relatively speaking, what ultimately supplanted it would have functioned relatively more efficiently and far more humanely than Stalinism.
One the other hand, what emerged would have placed the country at a relative disadvantage to much of the rest of Europe. Like Portugal, the Soviet Union or whatever it ended up being called would likely have been regarded as “a sick man” of Europe.
Moreover, it never would have become a superpower. That was one if the fascinating dichotomies bound up in Stalin's version of Marxism-Leninism: Central planning, backstopped by appalling levels of brutality, created one of only two postwar superpowers.
To be sure, this superpower amounted to one of history's greatest anomalies — Upper Volta with nuclear missiles, as the late German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt so brilliantly characterized the Soviet Union — but, despite its appalling inefficiencies, it nonetheless amounted to a remarkable feat. ~ Jim Langcuster, Quora
Markets ARE the natural order of things and despite unlimited State power, unlimited focus on one idea, and the absolute willingness to do what needed to be done to make it all work, Stalin and his USSR remain the singular shining example.
Leftists and State-loving Socialists in the West avoid Stalin’s USSR like the plague.
When I say, “Stalin DID make it work!” they accuse me of setting up a “straw man.”
When it's pointed out he killed a lot of his own workers the response is, “Well he didn’t kill THAT many.”
That’s it, no other defense.
Al Breight:
Though the moniker “superpower” was applied to the USSR, it really wasn’t a superpower.
The term “superpower” came into use after WW2 to describe the United States and was also applied to the USSR after it developed a significant nuclear capability. But the USSR was never a “super”, or even a “great” economy. It merely had a large number of nuclear weapons and the associated delivery capability.
*
LOVE FOR THE FÜHRER WAS LIFE-LONG FOR SOME GERMANS
~ Being German myself and having spoken to many people who lived during the Nazi era, I can say that many of them did not see him as a criminal, although no one denied the Holocaust and everything else.
When asked, excuses came to mind: “It was the war they forced on him that made him aggressive”, “If the war hadn't happened, what could this man have done for the country”, “Hitler was good, but his subordinates were evil.” Hitler was considered a talented politician. They liked the way the Nazis did a "short trial." Not wanting to ask much, they just let “the scum” face the wall and shoot.
It was not until 1962 that West Germans, when asked which regime they preferred, named post-war Germany, rather than Nazi Germany, as their top priority.
Many of the "Nazi generation" retained their fundamental love for the Führer until their death.
Despite his crimes against humanity many “kept a place in their heart” for Hitler. ~ Uve Zimmer, Quora
Max Stange:
The same way some East Germans show nostalgia for the infamous DDR regime and their lives within walls and iron curtains despite all the bad we know now and the high prices the people paid for the “Happy Meal” they got from the SED. It even has a name in German: “Ostalgie”.
Ben David:
I knew a man in our neighborhood in Chicago who was German. He had been in the Hitler Youth and served in the German Army during the last year of the war. He loved Hitler and believed that he saved Germany from Bolshevism. You couldn’t tell him that Hitler was bad.
*
RUSSIA AND HUMAN RIGHTS
1. There is no opposition in the country.
2. Rallies and pickets are prohibited.
3. It is forbidden to discuss some moments of history.
4. No independent media. Only pro-government.
5. You can be sent to war at any time.
6. You can't say the world is good. This is a crime in our country.
7. You can't say anything about officials or the army. It is a crime.
8. You can go to jail for commenting on local social networks.
~ Saran Zoriktuyev, Quora
*
Let’s not forget that Russia has never experienced de-Sovietization. The man in this T-shirt seems to have no idea that Stalin was a mass murderer, and that the hammer-and-sickle emblem can be seen as an equivalent of a swastika.
*
MORE VICTIMS OF THE RUSSIAN SUDDEN DEATH SYNDROME
~ The glamorous Russian daughter of an ally of Vladimir Putin was found dead in her apartment after reportedly saying she felt unwell. Natalia Bochkareva was discovered after the concierge in her building, in Presnensky District, Moscow, raised the alarm. Police officers forced the door open on Tuesday before coming across her body.
The concierge said the 44-year-old had reported feeling unwell the day before. According to preliminary reports, there were no signs of a violent death. Her death is the latest in a long line of high-profile Russian figures to suddenly die in mysterious circumstances. Ms Bochkareva was the daughter of the late Vasily Bochkarev, who governed Penza Oblast from 1998 to 2015. A year after leaving office, the 67-year-old, who belonged to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, died from lung cancer. Ms Bochkareva managed the family’s lumber-processing and bakery businesses after her father’s death.
Two years ago she hit headlines for falling for scam. It’s reported she sent a self-styled fortune teller 16 million rubles (£136,000) to remove a curse. But after receiving the money, the fortune teller broke off all contact with Natalia and, according to Ms Bochkareva, failed to fulfill her part of the agreement. The police ended up getting involved. According to some reports, Natalia suffered from heart problems.
Other recent deaths of Russia’s elite include that of 28-year-old Kristina Baikova in June. Ms Baikova, a vice-president at Loko-Bank, allegedly fell from her 11th floor apartment in Moscow. In February Russian defense official Marina Yankina, 58, also fell from an apartment window and died. As head of the financial support department of the Ministry of Defense, Ms Yankina was a key figure in the funding of the war. Her death was reported as a suspected suicide – although this is common in Russia before any investigation is carried out or when facts are unclear.
Meanwhile in May, Russia’s deputy science minister, Pyotr Kucherenko, thought to be a critic of the war, died suddenly after falling ill on a flight back to Moscow after a work trip in Cuba, the Daily Mail reports. In April, Igor Shkurko, the deputy general director of Russian energy company Yakutskenergo, was found dead in his prison cell.
The 49-year-old was a member of the pro-Putin United Russia political party but his membership was suspended following a bribe accusation.
https://www.emmanuelsblog.com.ng/2023/07/putin-allys-daughter-found-dead-in-apartment-in-latest-russian-mystery-death.html
From another source:
In December, the creative director of an IT company, Grigory Kochenov, plunged from his apartment balcony and fell to his death while Russian authorities searched his apartment.
The same month, a Russian sausage tycoon fell to his death from a hotel window in India just two days after his friend, also from Russia, died at the same hotel. A Russian real estate tycoon also took a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs while in the French Riviera in December.
And earlier this month, a federal judge, Artyom Bartenev, fell 12 stories from his apartment building and was pronounced dead at the scene.
https://nypost.com/2023/06/30/russian-bank-vp-kristina-baikova-plunges-to-her-death-from-moscow-apartment-window-report/
*
I BET RUSSIA NEVER THOUGHT SUCH PICTURES WOULD BE SEEN ABROAD
Russia, the country that gave us the concept of the Potemkin village, is definitely conscious of its image abroad. After all, if you keep claiming to be the greatest country in the world, you should also look like one. And not only in a handful of cities, but also in the countryside. 
In the Soviet era, all media were strictly controlled, and the photographer would have ended up in a Gulag. But in a world in which it’s become so easy to take a picture and then post it on social media, can the secret “real village” remain unseen for long?
A good road with solid buildings on each side would cost much less than the war with Ukraine — a proverbial drop in the bucket. But heads of state make crazy choices, particularly if their own residences (residences plural; Putin allegedly owns twenty villas) look like this:
*
DO RUSSIAN CONSCRIPTS HAVE TO BUY THEIR OWN AMMUNITION?
~ What they receive upon mobilization is … uneven. They get a uniform and a rifle pretty much everywhere, but from that point on things become complicated. They have to supply their own boots, body armor, sleeping bags, medical equipment, even food. However these don’t really capture the depth of Russian military corruption, the most extreme — but documented — case is the recruits having to buy their own bullets.
You’re sending untrained men off to war and you ask them to buy their own ammunition? This is not because the army doesn’t have ammunition for its AKs, it’s not like that’s for sale for civilians anyway and there isn’t a different source than Russian military production. This happens because a commanding officer needed a bit more dough and decided to shake the conscripts and their families down for money. No matter how you feel about fighting in Ukraine, you don’t want to go there with an empty rifle, so you’ll do what you can to procure bullets, enriching the CO in the process. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Bruce Edwards:
Soviet Mig-25s, deployed to the front lines, were routinely grounded because the ethanol used to cool their avionics was diverted to the immediate needs of their ground crew.
Valerie Mellon:
The condition of current Russian conscripts brings to mind the movie “Enemy at the Gates”.
The movie depicts the later days of the defense of Stalingrad in WWII. A nightmare of unfathomable horrors.
Depicts the shipment and landing of Russian troops under heavy fire. Each man with a rifle was given 3 bullets. The lucky groups of untrained “soldiers” received 1 rifle for every 2 people. 3 bullets per rifle. Many had nothing at all. Krushchev (brilliantly played by Bob Hoskins) is Stalin’s hand picked commander sent in to take over the defense of Stalingrad and the Russian propaganda machine of the time.
“Enemy at the Gates” is said to be based on historical fact. The snipers existed, both German and Russian. Fascinating to watch.
The once-dreaded Mig-25 turned out to be a Potemkin fighter jet. For one thing, it was made of stainless steel instead of titanium, which allows a plane to achieve greater supersonic speeds.
*
THE CHINESE ARE QUIETLY SETTLING IN SIBERIA
Sayan Zoriktuev: I live in Siberia.
I see the Chinese presence and gradual introduction.
They lease land for 49 years.
They buy sawmills, build agricultural enterprises.
Engaged in metal and minerals.
They are everywhere.
But few people know that China is coming in with soft power.
Because Russian propaganda is silent about it.
(The government is silent on this issue). ~ Quora
Siberian taiga
Francis Murphy:
If Russia’s ancestral claim to Crimea is valid then what does it mean if China were to claim their old lands which Russia had annexed as result of Japan invasion of China in WW2?
Bruno Waldheim:
Can’t be much worse than being part of Russia. If I had to choose between China and Russia as someone in Siberia, I don’t think it would matter. At least neither is as restrictive as North Korea, yet. More Chinese influence might mean more jobs. You won’t get paid by either, but the Chinese will at least stop many of your brethren from getting killed by Ukraine Forces or dying of alcohol poisoning.
Siberia Sayan Mountains
*
RUSSIAN HARDLINE NATIONALIST JAILED
Russian authorities have detained outspoken pro-war blogger Igor Girkin, a hardline nationalist critic of Russia's flagging military campaign in Ukraine, also known as Strelkov.
His wife said he was taken from their Moscow flat while she was away.
He later appeared in court accused of appealing for extremist activity, and could face five years in jail.
Strelkov, a former FSB intelligence colonel, played a key role in Russia's 2014 landgrab of Crimea.
He went on to lead Russia's proxy army in the ensuing war in eastern Ukraine.
Igor Strelkov was one of three men convicted in absentia by a Dutch court last November of murder for his role in a missile strike in 2014 that downed a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over the conflict area, with the loss of all 298 people on board.
He went on to lead Russia's proxy army in the ensuing war in eastern Ukraine.
But as the full-scale invasion of last year became increasingly bogged down, Strelkov's criticism of military failings and the commander in chief, President Vladimir Putin, became more vociferous.
"We have already lost," he told social media followers last year.
A few days ago he called the Kremlin leader "a nonentity" and "a cowardly waste of space", says BBC Russia editor Steve Rosenberg.
Strelkov's lawyer, Alexander Molokhov, confirmed he had been detained and said his flat had been searched.
He later appeared at Meshchansky district court in the north-east of the capital, where the judge rejected his request for the hearing to be held behind closed doors, Ria Novosti agency reports.
The war-blogger has been allowed free rein to criticize the president and the military for a long time, so it is unclear what led Russia's investigative committee to charge him at this point with using the internet to appeal for "extremist activity”.
Ever since the start of the war, opponents of Russia's so-called special military operation in Ukraine have been handed lengthy jail terms for far milder remarks.
For many years Strelkov, 53, had been considered untouchable, says BBC Russian's Ilya Barabanov.
That was partly because of his previous role as a colonel in the FSB security service, but also because he was identified as a suspect and later convicted of downing flight MH-17 while he was commander of Russia's proxy force in occupied Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
Russian investigative website Agentstvo suggested that authorities had revised a previously unspoken rule allowing pro-war bloggers to vent their anger as much as they liked.
Commentator Tatiana Stanovaya said this was a moment that many among the siloviki — the president's inner circle — had eagerly awaited.
Strelkov had long ago "overstepped all conceivable boundaries", she said, but the failure of mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin had left the army command with greater leverage to quash its opponents.
Prigozhin's Wagner group has had its powers cut since the botched mutiny last month, and the warlord himself has held back from his earlier expletive-laden tirades against the defense minister and army chief.
This week he appeared in a video, apparently filmed in Belarus, welcoming his fighters and saying that Russia's campaign in Ukraine was a "disgrace we want no part of”.
Reports say that of the estimated 25,000 Wagner mercenaries, 10,000 are heading for Belarus while the others are going "on leave". One independent report said that Vladimir Putin had made a final decision that Wagner would cease to exist in Russia itself.
Ukraine's main intelligence directorate welcomed Strelkov's detention as a sign that those inside the Kremlin were approaching an "active phase of internal confrontation”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66265892
Oriana:
The situation in Russia appears to be tense. There are all kinds of details we don’t know and may never know about the Prigozhin Mutiny (to settle on one of the names used to describe it). And now we learn about the Angry Patriots, who perceive Putin as “soft on Ukraine.”
As for those who oppose the war, they are either in exile, in jail, or staying silent, not wanting to risk jail. Given the right conditions, would people turn out en masse and march in the streets? Or are we in for ten more years of this brutal ugliness? We simply don’t know.
*
MISHA IOSSEL ON UKRAINIAN GRAIN
* * *
THE COMPLEXITIES OF ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
~ It was the early hours of 16 July 1945, and Robert Oppenheimer was waiting in a control bunker for a moment that would change the world. Around 10km (6 miles) away, the world's first atomic bomb test, codenamed "Trinity", was set to proceed in the pale sands of the Jornada del Muerto desert, in New Mexico. [“Jornada del Muerto” translates as “Dead Man’s Journey”]
Oppenheimer was a picture of nervous exhaustion. He was always slender, but after three years as director of "Project Y", the scientific arm of the "Manhattan Engineer District" that had designed and built the bomb, his weight had dropped to just over 52kg (115lbs). At 5ft 10in (178cm), this made him extremely thin. He'd slept only four hours that night, kept awake by anxiety and his smoker's cough.
That day in 1945 is one of several pivotal moments in Oppenheimer's life described by the historians Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin in their 2005 biography American Prometheus, which provided the basis for the new movie biopic Oppenheimer, released 21 July in the US.
In the final minutes of the countdown, as Bird and Sherwin report, an army general observed Oppenheimer's mood at close-quarters: "Dr. Oppenheimer... grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed…”
The explosion, when it came, outshone the Sun. With a force matching 21 kilotons of TNT, the detonation was the largest ever seen. It created a shockwave that was felt 160km (100 miles) away. As the roar engulfed the landscape and the mushroom cloud rose in the sky, Oppenheimer's expression relaxed into one of "tremendous relief". Minutes later, Oppenheimer's friend and colleague Isidor Rabi caught sight of him from a distance: "I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car... his walk was like High Noon... this kind of strut. He had done it.”
In interviews conducted in the 1960s, Oppenheimer added a layer of gravitas to his reaction, claiming that, in the moments after the detonation, a line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, had come into his mind: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In the following days, his friends reported he seemed increasingly depressed. "Robert got very still and ruminative during that two-week period," one recalled, "because he knew what was about to happen." One morning he was heard lamenting (in condescending terms) the imminent fate of the Japanese: "Those poor little people, those poor little people." But only days later, he was once again nervous, focused, exacting.
In a meeting with his military counterparts, he seemed to have forgotten all about the "poor little people". According to Bird and Sherwin, he was instead fixated on the importance of the right conditions for the bomb drop: "Of course, they must not drop it in rain or fog… Don’t let them detonate it too high. The figure fixed on is just right. Don’t let it go up [higher] or the target won’t get as much damage." When he announced the successful bombing of Hiroshima to a crowd of his colleagues less than a month after Trinity, one onlooker noticed the way Oppenheimer "clasped and pumped his hand over his head like a victorious prizefighter". The applause "practically raised the roof”.
Oppenheimer was the emotional and intellectual heart of the Manhattan Project: more than any other single person he had made the bomb a reality. Jeremy Bernstein, who worked with him after the war, was convinced that nobody else could have done it. As he wrote in his 2004 biography, A Portrait of an Enigma, "If Oppenheimer had not been the director at Los Alamos, I am persuaded that, for better or worse, the Second World War would have ended... without the use of nuclear weapons.”
The variety of Oppenheimer's reported reactions as he witnessed the fruition of his labors, not to mention the pace with which he moved through them, might seem bewildering. The combination of nervous fragility, ambition, grandiosity and morbid gloom are hard to square in a single person, especially one so instrumental in the very project provoking these responses.
Bird and Sherwin also call Oppenheimer an "enigma": "A theoretical physicist who displayed the charismatic qualities of a great leader, an aesthete who cultivated ambiguities." A scientist, but also, as another friend once described him "a first-class manipulator of the imagination”.
By Bird and Sherwin's account, the contradictions in Oppenheimer's character – the qualities that have left both friends and biographers at a loss to explain him – seem to have been present from his earliest years. Born in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer was the child of first-generation German Jewish immigrants who had become wealthy through the textiles trade. The family home was a large apartment on the Upper West Side with three maids, a chauffeur, and European art on the walls.
Despite this luxurious upbringing, Oppenheimer was recalled as unspoiled and generous by childhood friends. A school friend, Jane Didisheim, remembered him as someone who "blushed extraordinarily easily", who was "very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy...", but also "very brilliant". "Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and superior," she said.
By the age of nine, he was reading philosophy in Greek and Latin, and was obsessed with mineralogy – roaming Central Park and writing letters to the New York Mineralogical Club about what he found. His letters were so competent that the Club mistook him for an adult and invited him to make a presentation. This intellectual nature contributed to a degree of solitude in the young Oppenheimer, write Bird and Sherwin. "He was usually preoccupied with whatever he was doing or thinking," recalled a friend. He was uninterested in conforming to gender expectations – taking no interest in sports or the "rough and tumble of his age-group" as his cousin put it; "He was often teased and ridiculed for not being like other fellows." But his parents were convinced of his genius.
"I repaid my parents’ confidence in me by developing an unpleasant ego," Oppenheimer later commented, "which I am sure must have affronted both children and adults who were unfortunate enough to come into contact with me." "It’s no fun," he once told another friend, "to turn the pages of a book and say, 'yes, yes, of course, I know that’."
When he left home to study chemistry at Harvard University, the fragility of Oppenheimer's psychological make-up was exposed: his brittle arrogance and thinly-masked sensitivity appearing to serve him poorly. In a letter from 1923, published in a 1980 collection edited by Alice Kimbal Smith and Charles Weiner, he wrote: "I labor and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk… I make stenches in three different labs…I serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.”
Subsequent letters collated by Smith and Weiner reveal that the problems continued through his post-graduate studies, in Cambridge, England. His tutor insisted on applied laboratory work, one of Oppenheimer's weaknesses. "I am having a pretty bad time," he wrote in 1925. "The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything." Later that year, Oppenheimer's intensity led him close to disaster when he deliberately left an apple, poisoned with laboratory chemicals, on his tutor's desk. His friends later speculated he could have been driven by envy and feelings of inadequacy. The tutor didn't eat the apple but Oppenheimer's place at Cambridge was threatened and he kept it only on condition that he see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed psychosis but then wrote him off, saying that treatment would do no good.
Recalling that period, Oppenheimer would later report that he seriously contemplated suicide over the Christmas holidays. The following year, during a visit to Paris, his close friend Francis Fergusson told him he had proposed to his girlfriend. Oppenheimer responded by attempting to strangle him: "He jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap," Fergusson recalled, "and wound it around my neck... I managed to pull aside and he fell on the ground weeping.”
It seems that where psychiatry failed Oppenheimer, literature came to the rescue. According to Bird and Sherwin, he read Marcel Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu while on a walking holiday in Corsica, finding in it some reflection of his own state of mind that reassured him and opened a window on a more compassionate mode of being. He learned by heart a passage from the book about "indifference to the sufferings one causes", being "the terrible and permanent form of cruelty".
The question of attitude towards suffering would remain an abiding interest, guiding Oppenheimer's interest in spiritual and philosophical texts throughout his life and eventually playing a significant role in the work that would define his reputation. A comment he made to his friends on this same holiday seems prophetic: "The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.”
He returned to England in lighter spirits, feeling "much kinder and more tolerant", as he later recalled. Early in 1926, he met the director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, who quickly became convinced of Oppenheimer's talents as a theoretician, inviting him to study there. According to Smith and Weiner, he later described 1926 as the year of his "coming into physics".
It would prove a turning point. He obtained his PhD and a postdoctoral fellowship in the year to follow. He also became part of a community that was driving the development of theoretical physics, meeting scientists who would become life-long friends. Many would ultimately join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.
Returning to the US, Oppenheimer spent a few months at Harvard before moving to pursue his physics career in California. The tone of his letters from this period reflect a steadier, more generous cast of mind. He wrote to his younger brother about romance, and his ongoing interest in the arts.
He described himself as a "difficult" teacher at first but it was through this role that Oppenheimer honed the charisma and social presence that would carry him during his time at Project Y. Quoted by Smith and Weiner, one colleague recalled how his students "emulated him as best they could. They copied his gestures, his mannerisms, his intonations. He truly influenced their lives.”
During the early 1930s, as he strengthened his academic career, Oppenheimer continued to moonlight in the humanities. It was during this period that he discovered the Hindu scriptures, learning Sanskrit in order to read the untranslated Bhagavad Gita – the text from which he later drew the famous '"Now I am become Death" quotation.
It seems his interest was not just intellectual, but represented a continuation of the self-prescribed bibliotherapy that had begun with Proust in his 20s. The Bhagavad Gita, a story centered on the war between two arms of an aristocratic family, gave Oppenheimer a philosophical underpinning that was directly applicable to the moral ambiguity he confronted at Project Y. It emphasized ideas of duty, fate and detachment from outcome, emphasizing that fear of consequences cannot be used as justification for inaction. In a letter to his brother from 1932, Oppenheimer specifically references the Gita and then names war as one circumstance that might offer the opportunity to put such a philosophy into practice:
"I believe that through discipline... we can achieve serenity... I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances... Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war... ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.”
In the mid 1930s, Oppenheimer also met Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist and physician with whom he fell in love. By Bird and Sherwin's account, Tatlock's complexity of character equalled Oppenheimer's. She was widely read and driven by a social conscience. She was described by a childhood friend as "touched with greatness". Oppenheimer proposed to Tatlock more than once but she turned him down. She is credited with introducing him to radical politics and to the poetry of John Donne. The pair continued to see each other occasionally after Oppenheimer married the biologist Katherine "Kitty" Harrison in 1940. Kitty was to join Oppenheimer at Project Y, where she worked as a phlebotomist, researching the dangers of radiation.
In 1939, physicists were far more concerned about the nuclear threat than politicians were and it was a letter from Albert Einstein that first brought the matter to the attention of senior leaders in the US government. The reaction was slow, but alarm continued to circulate in the scientific community and eventually the president was persuaded to act. As one of the preeminent physicists in the country, Oppenheimer was one of several scientists appointed to begin looking more seriously into the potential for nuclear weapons.
By September 1942, partly thanks to Oppenheimer's team, it was clear that a bomb was possible and concrete plans for its development started to take shape. According to Bird and Sherwin, when he heard that his name was being floated as a leader for this endeavor, Oppenheimer began his own preparations. "I’m cutting off every communist connection," he said to a friend at the time. "For if I don’t, the government will find it difficult to use me. I don’t want to let anything interfere with my usefulness to the nation.”
Einstein would later say: "The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves [something that] doesn’t love him – the United States government." His patriotism and desire to please clearly played a role in his recruitment. General Leslie Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Engineer District, was the person responsible for finding a scientific director for the bomb project. According to a 2002 biography, Racing for the Bomb, when Groves proposed Oppenheimer as scientific lead, he met with opposition. Oppenheimer's "extreme liberal background" was a concern. But as well as noting his talent and his existing knowledge of the science, Groves also pointed out his "overweening ambition". The Manhattan Project's chief of security also noticed this: "I became convinced that not only was he loyal, but that he would let nothing interfere with the successful accomplishment of his task and thus his place in scientific history.”
In the 1988 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Oppenheimer's friend Isidor Rabi is quoted as saying he thought it "a most improbable appointment", but later conceded it had been "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves”.
Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves examine the remains of the steel tower at the Trinity test site
At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer applied his contrarian, interdisciplinary convictions as much as anywhere. In his 1979 autobiography, What Little I Remember, the Austrian-born physicist Otto Frisch recalled that Oppenheimer had recruited not only the scientists required but also "a painter, a philosopher and a few other unlikely characters; he felt that a civilized community would be incomplete without them”.
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After the war, Oppenheimer's attitude seemed to change . He described nuclear weapons as instruments "of aggression, of surprise, and of terror" and the weapons industry as "the devil's work". At a meeting in October 1945, he famously told President Truman: "I feel I have blood on my hands." The President later said: "I told him the blood was on my hands – to let me worry about that.”
The exchange is an arresting echo of one described in Oppenheimer's beloved Bhagavad Gita, between Prince Arjuna and the god Krishna. Arjuna refuses to fight because he believes he will be responsible for the murder of his fellows, but Krishna takes away the burden: "View in me the active slayer of these men... Arise, on fame, on victory, on kingly joys intent! They are already slain by me; be you the instrument.”
During the development of the bomb, Oppenheimer had used a similar argument to assuage his own and his colleagues' ethical hesitations. He told them that, as scientists, they were not responsible for decisions about how the weapon should be used – only for doing their job. The blood, if there was any, would be on the hands of the politicians.
However, it seems that once the deed was done, Oppenheimer's confidence in this position was shaken. As Bird and Sherwin relate, in his role at the Atomic Energy Commission during the post-war period, he argued against the development of further weapons, including the more powerful hydrogen bomb, which his work had paved the way for.
These efforts resulted in Oppenheimer being investigated by the US government in 1954 and having his security clearance stripped, marking the end of his involvement with policy work. The academic community came to his defense. Writing for The New Republic in 1955, the philosopher Bertrand Russell commented that the "investigation made it undeniable that he has committed mistakes, one of them from a security point of view rather grave. But there was no evidence of disloyalty or of anything that could be considered treasonable... The scientists were caught in a tragic dilemma.”
In 1963, the US government presented him with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation, but it wasn't until 2022, 55 years after his death, that the US government overturned its 1954 decision to strip his clearance, and affirmed Oppenheimer's loyalty.
Throughout the last decades of Oppenheimer's life, he maintained parallel expressions of pride at the technical achievement of the bomb and guilt at its effects. A note of resignation also entered his commentary, with him saying more than once that the bomb had simply been inevitable. He spent the last 20 years of his life as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, working alongside Einstein and other physicists.
As at Los Alamos, he made a point of promoting interdisciplinary work and emphasized in his speeches the belief that science needed the humanities in order to better understand its own implications. To this end, he recruited a raft of non-scientists including classicists, poets, and psychologists.
He later came to consider atomic energy as a problem that outstripped the intellectual tools of its time, as, in President Truman's words, "a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas". In a speech made in 1965, later published in the 1984 collection Uncommon Sense, he said "I have heard from some of the great men of our time that when they found something startling, they knew it was good, because they were afraid". When talking about moments of unsettling scientific discovery, he was fond of quoting the poet John Donne: "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”
John Keats, another poet Oppenheimer enjoyed, coined the phrase "negative capability" to describe a common quality in the people he admired: "that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." It seems as though it was something of this that the philosopher Russell was getting at when he wrote of Oppenheimer's "inability to see things simply, an inability which is not surprising in one possessed of a complex and delicate mental apparatus." In describing Oppenheimer's contradictions, his mutability, his continual running between poetry and science, his habit of defying simple description, perhaps we are identifying the very qualities that made him capable of pursuing the creation of the bomb.
Even in the midst of this great and terrible pursuit, Oppenheimer kept alive the "tear stained countenance" he had foretold in his 20s. The name of the "Trinity" test is thought to have come from the John Donne poem Batter my heart, three-person'd God: "That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend/Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new." Jean Tatlock, who had introduced him to Donne, and with whom he is thought by some to have remained in love, had committed suicide the year before the test.
The bomb project was marked everywhere by Oppenheimer's imagination, and by his sense of romance and tragedy. Perhaps it was overweening ambition that General Groves identified when he interviewed Oppenheimer for the job at Project Y, or perhaps it was his ability to adopt, for the time required, the idea of overweening ambition. As much as it was the result of research, the bomb was the product of Oppenheimer's ability and willingness to imagine himself as the kind of a person that could make it happen.
A chain smoker since adolescence, Oppenheimer suffered bouts of tuberculosis during his life. He died of throat cancer in 1967, at the age of 62. Two years before his death, in a rare moment of simplicity, he drew a distinction that marked out the practice of science from that of poetry. Unlike poetry, he said, "science is the business of learning not to make the same mistake again”. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230712-robert-oppenheimer-manhattan-project-nuclear-scientist-atomic-bomb
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NO END IN SIGHT FOR HOMELESSNESS
Advocacy groups and researchers say a big driving force is the decline of affordable housing, a problem decades in the making but one that has grown significantly worse in the past few years. Here are a few ways it's playing out
1. More people than ever are being housed — but an even higher number are falling into homelessness
About a third of the U.S. homeless population is in California, and the state faces mounting questions about why billions of dollars spent in recent years hasn't reduced the number of people living in cars and encampments. A bipartisan group of lawmakers has asked the state auditor to investigate. A key program in Los Angeles to move people from hotels into permanent housing appears to be struggling.
CalMatters reports that officials across the state are asking how they can do better, even traveling to Texas for guidance.
And yet, those in California and other places around the country can also argue they are helping more people than ever. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority says it has placed more than 20,000 into permanent housing for five years in a row — a significant boost from a decade ago — and that it's doing this faster than it has in the past. Nationally over that time, the inventory of permanent housing available has increased 26% — and it's more than doubled since 2007.
"We've done a lot" to improve how people are placed into housing, says Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. But he says that's only half the equation. "The other half is people losing their housing ... and we have not had any kind of extensive or organized effort on that," he says.
The upshot is that, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, even as record numbers of people are being housed, a greater number of them are falling into homelessness.
Berg says one key reason is that only 1 in 4 Americans who qualify for a federal housing subsidy actually get it, and that's been the case since he was in law school decades ago. The vast majority of low-income renters must rely on market-rate housing, but the U.S. hasn't built enough housing for more than a decade, since the market crash of 2008. And the shortage is most acute for the lowest income renters — by more than 7 million units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
That tight market, combined with the worst inflation in a generation last year, has led to double-digit rent spikes in many places around the U.S.
2. Rents are out of reach for many, and millions of affordable places have disappeared
A landmark new report surveyed thousands of people in California about how they came to be without housing, and researchers conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of them. For most, high rental costs were crucial.
"People just ran out of the ability to pay, whether it happened quickly or slowly," says lead investigator Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco.
Some said they'd had their work hours cut. Others lost a job because of a health crisis. Many crowded in with relatives or friends, who were also likely to be poor and struggling. "And we found that those relationships, when they fell apart, fell apart quickly," Kushel says. "People only had one day's warning" to leave. Even those with their own lease had on average just 10 days to move out.
Their median monthly household income in the six months before they became homeless was $960, she says. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in California is $1,700. Around the country, Kushel says, homelessness rates are highest in places where there is both poverty and high housing costs.
That gap has been growing for decades, as rents have risen faster than wages. Nationally last year, the share of renters spending at least 30% or 50% of their income on housing reached a record high. And some markets have seen a major share of their low-cost rentals disappear.
Over the past decade, the number of rentals under $600 fell by nearly 4 million, according to an analysis by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. The losses happened in every state, because either rents increased, the units were taken off the rental market or buildings were condemned and demolished. Among slightly higher priced rentals, up to $1,000 a month, some 2.5 million more units were lost.
Even with inflation cooling, rents remain too high for many — and are continuing to increase in some places.
3. Zoning laws and local opposition make it hard to build housing for low-income renters
Voters around the country approved spending for more affordable housing last year, and a record number of apartments are under construction. More places are also loosening zoning laws — some of which date back to segregation — to allow more multifamily buildings in residential neighborhoods. Housing experts say all this is needed to help ease the tight market and bring down prices over time.
With a shortage in the millions of units, though, that could take a very long time. And in most places it's still a major challenge to build affordable housing. "Neighbors will say, 'We don't want low-income people living here,' and they'll stop the housing from being built," says Berg, with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Even housing that does get built and is billed as affordable, he says, isn't always cheap enough for those who need it most. "It's really about having enough deeply affordable housing so that people with the lowest incomes can move into the housing," Berg says. "And if they lose that housing, they can find another place to live.”
4. Pandemic aid programs that helped keep many people housed are winding down
An annual count last year did find a pause in the relentless rise of homelessness. Biden administration officials, among others, credit the sweeping array of pandemic aid programs that limited evictions, helped people pay rent and boosted other financial supports.
Princeton's Eviction Lab calculates such policies cut eviction filings in half.
Those programs have largely ended in many places and are winding down in others. Beyond having to pay current rent, it means some people also may be expected to pay down rental debt that accumulated during the COVID-19 emergency. Many link the end of such protections to a recent rise in evictions, well above pre-pandemic levels in some places.
Of course, there are other reasons. Some 19% of those surveyed in the UCSF study became homeless after leaving institutions such as prison, and finding employment and housing with a criminal record is difficult. Advocates say there's also need for more addiction and mental health treatment, though it's most effective once someone is safely housed.
But again, the overriding problem, they say, is the dire lack of places low-income people can afford to live.
"There's really no way to solve homelessness without seriously addressing this," says Kushel, the UCSF researcher. "Otherwise, we're going to be compelled to continue to spend huge amounts of money managing an increasingly out of control crisis.”
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/12/1186856463/homelessness-rent-affordable-housing-encampments?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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At the start of the Great Depression. $100 was worth a lot more back then, but still . . . 
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MULTICULTURALISM — A MISDIRECTION?
~ I was involved in a good many campus and culture wars for almost a decade, in the late Eighties and early Nineties when I was at Stanford. I started a conservative student newspaper, The Stanford Review, back in 1987. Four years is an eternity in a college context, but we managed to keep the paper going for all that and more—it’s still intact, thirty-five years old or so at this point. Of course there was ample craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness on the college campus for us to report on.
Some of that craziness, however, had a much greater and more cosmic resonance. One of the very big debates at Stanford in the late Eighties was about the “Western Culture” course. This was a sort of formational program, a year-long course all Stanford freshmen were required to take. Jesse Jackson led a protest at Stanford with the famous chant, Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go. This was a commentary on the course and the particular books studied, but then also on the entire civilization covered by the course—somehow a very local and a very universal thing at the same time.
I thought I might start with a reading from the book that David O. Sacks and I wrote a few years after this, The Diversity Myth (1995). The first chapter talks about the abandonment of the great books at Stanford and describes one of the titles chosen to replace them in the wake of the protests. It is a play by Aimé Césaire called A Tempest, a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which Caliban becomes a kind of revolutionary hero. The magician Prospero is portrayed as an evil imperialist. The book culminates in a tirade by Caliban, and I’d like to read a few lines because I think it captures the temper of those times, which seem at once like a long, long time ago and not even yesterday: “And I know that one day my bare fist, just that, will be/ enough to crush your world. The old world is falling apart!// And by the way . . . you have a chance to get it over with: you can fuck off.”
So the conceit that my friend David and I had in The Diversity Myth—and we ran with it for 250 pages—was that all that’s needed is to describe what’s going on in the ivory tower, that to reveal the dangers will be enough to defuse them. Our readers could ask for themselves: Well, how does this compare with Shakespeare? Is this a step up? Is this a great book? Is this really multicultural? Is it really about non-Western cultures? Or is it just sort of a tendentious left-wing anti-Western crusade? You would present these kinds of arguments, the idea went, and that would somehow be enough to win the debate. You just speak the truth to power, and it will unravel the whole mess.
And of course, a lot of The Diversity Myth just documents incredibly silly stuff: an assignment to make an Aztec newspaper from the year 1524; the shift in curriculum requirements to include courses like “Issues in Self-Defense for Women” and “The American Drinking and Drug Culture,” the latter culminating in a capstone “class party” where students were encouraged, of course, to drink and do drugs; student-life initiatives like the “Condom Rating Contest,” where prophylactics were scored in categories such as “taste” and “sense of security”; or the refusal of the Stanford administration to cover over the “glory holes” cut into bathroom stalls in the library and cafeteria.
We put so much work into rehashing these insanities that the project came to resemble shooting fish in a barrel. One of my smarter liberal friends said, “Maybe it’s all true, but isn’t it kind of pornographic, Peter? You just give us a bunch of pornography here, and it doesn’t really change anything.” And there’s something to that. Part of the challenge was to explain why anybody who didn’t go to Stanford would want to read this book. The somewhat canned answer was, well, ideas have consequences, and these ideas are going to spread from the university to the rest of society. If you don’t pay attention here, the genie’s going to get out of the bottle.
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But there was always a secondary meaning to the title, in which you put the stress on the word “myth.” Rather than dismiss “diversity” out of hand, let’s just accept that we have no idea what it means. It’s like a shibboleth, some kind of idol or false god that our society worships. It’s extraordinarily hard to pin down—in fact, the Stanford administrators tasked with defining “multiculturalism” in the 1990s did so in the vaguest terms imaginable, as if protecting cult mysteries. What is clear is that we are encamped at the altar of diversity, venerating and honoring it as the highest thing.
I want to suggest that, at least on a public-policy level, all these debates about diversity, identity politics, multiculturalism, the woke religion, etc., should be treated like debates about homelessness. Homelessness is a mess. It’s a problem. And at the same time that it is a very real problem, it is a giant machine to redirect attention from all the other problems across America toward a narrow aspect of big-city dysfunction. When homelessness is forced into every policy conversation, it leads to circuitous, dead-end reasoning—We’re never going to fix homelessness until we fix the schools, but we’re never going to fix the schools, the police, or even the roads until we fix homelessness. It becomes an all-purpose excuse for ignoring what’s really going on.
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A few years after The Diversity Myth came out, a Stanford physics professor, Bob Laughlin, got a Nobel Prize. And he began to suffer from the supreme delusion that, now that he had a Nobel Prize in physics, he also had academic freedom and could investigate anything he wanted. Now, there are a lot of controversial topics in science. You could have a heterodox view on stem-cell research, or you could be a skeptic of climate change or Darwinism.
But Laughlin hit on a topic that was far more taboo than any of the above. He had the idea that most of the scientists were doing no work at all. They were actually stealing money from the government, just creating all these fraudulent grant applications. Laughlin had done a lot of work studying the physics of super-high temperatures (superconductivity and the like), and he once told me that, of the roughly fifty thousand papers written on the subject, maybe twenty-five of them were any good at all.
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If we drill a little deeper, we might conclude that inequality in the United States has largely been driven by real-estate interests and corrupt land-use agreements—in short, mismanaged cities of one sort or another. If urban slumlords have benefited from citywide diversity initiatives to the tune of trillions of dollars, shouldn’t the Marxists be asking questions about how it all worked out?
A thought experiment might flesh this crazy theory out just a little bit more. If you were sitting here in Manhattan back in 2007, or in San Francisco, and you told me the average rent would double in the next sixteen years, I would say that’s completely impossible. People would just move. They’d figure out some other place to go. But maybe you countered, well, let’s say rent is going to double anyways—and then asked, how would that be possible?
Of course, real-estate interests can’t be the sole driver of this phenomenon. Think of all the woke corporations embedded in New York’s economy. Was their capitulation to DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity] a form of insanity? Or was the woke tax the relatively lesser cost for them to pay? Focusing on the economic consequences of the diversity agenda—the real-estate analysis is only the tip of the iceberg—may be reductionist, but it is revealing.
Beyond science and economics lies the question of wokeness as a religion. On one level it is a distraction from religion: God is the biggest thing there is, it might be observed, and thinking about diversity makes us forget about God. This is true as far as it goes, but on a deeper level the multicultural agenda is very entangled with the Judeo-Christian tradition. That tradition is strongly identified with the side of the victim; much of the Bible presents moral reversals in this vein, in a sort of antimythological move. The Cain and Abel story, in which the murderous Cain is duly punished for the sin against his brother, is the flipside of the story of Romulus and Remus, in which the slayer Romulus is celebrated from the point of view of the city he goes on to establish. The Jews are the marginalized people in the desert. Christ, of course, is the ultimate victim.
In responding to the religious woke impulse, there’s a kind of Nietzschean, anti-diversity move that I find incredibly tempting in an emotional sense. It boils down to a strongman argument—think of Bronze Age Pervert and other internet types—that says, well, the West may in fact be chauvinist, racist, sexist, and all the other things it’s accused of being, but we should embrace that rather than apologize for it.
It’s a very Nietzschean argument, as I said, but there’s also a very Nietzschean counterargument, perhaps more biographical than philosophical. At the end of his life, when Nietzsche was going insane, he said something along the lines of, “God of the Jews, you have won.” By this remark he meant that the modern West would be a world ruled by the victim.
In one sense Nietzsche’s intuition was correct. When modern man stares into the abyss, it’s the abyss of the unforgettable victim, now barely clinging to its Judeo-Christian heritage. But was the development Nietzsche foresaw inevitable? Or did it depend on the tacit acceptance, on some level, of certain distortions to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which Nietzsche and his successors fundamentally misunderstood?
My goal here has been to concretize all these concerns, not with the aim of providing answers, but simply of asking questions. I’m not saying that my Henry George–inflected real-estate analysis is the absolute truth, but we do need to ask how much of college “tuition” is diverted to real-estate interests.
So in conclusion—and this is a simplification, perhaps a distortion, but I think you know what I mean—it would be healthier that, whenever someone mentions DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], you just think CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. ~ Peter Thiel
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/6/the-diversity-myth
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EARLY CHRISTIANS, MAGIC, AND DEMONS
~ Christianity developed in a world with a well-articulated understanding of a multilayered and hierarchical universe that was, above all, animated. Most inhabitants of the ancient world envisioned cosmic energy as alive, meaning that the essence of physicality, spirituality and ethics rested in a host of supernatural sentient beings. Among those beings were demons who dwelt in the space between the earth and the Moon.
In the mid-2nd century CE, Justin Martyr explained the role of demons in Christian thought. The sons of God succumbed to intercourse with human women, and they begot children called the Nephilim (meaning giants). The progenies of the Nephilim were demons. These demons enslaved the human race, sowing wars, adulteries, licentiousness and every kind of evil. All the pagan gods, Justin warned, were, in fact, demons who haunt the earth. The North African bishop Augustine offered a different genealogy. He identified demons as the rebel angels who fought alongside and suffered the same fate as Lucifer (also known as Belial, Beelzebub, the Devil, Satan, and the ‘Day Star’) whom God cast out of heaven after he mounted a failed rebellion.
Both pagan and Christian ideologies envisioned demons in prominent roles but, for pagans, demons could be both good and bad. They resembled deities in that they shared in their immortality, but they were also subject to obnoxious, irrational cravings.
Demons were positioned between humans and gods, and could act as guardian angels.
Demons were corporeal, though of a material much lighter than, and superior to, the human form; they could move faster than mortals, read thoughts, and slip in and out of spaces impossible for the human body to occupy.
Augustine was the most instrumental of the Church fathers in articulating the theology governing the relationship between human beings and demons. Miracles are allowed by God and wrought by faith, not by incantations and spells. Marvels not performed for the honor of God are illicit sorcery accomplished by the deceitful tricks of malignant demons. Magic took place when humans trafficked with demons in order to carry out particular deeds such as divination, casting spells, love magic, raising storms, and astrology.
Demons feasted on the smoke, incense and odor of blood rising into the clouds from animal sacrifices. They craved blood, so, in order to lure demons, people mixed gore with water or offered up burnt sacrifices. This exchange created a contract by which humans could enlist demons to do their bidding. Feasting on sacrificial flesh in cultic ceremonies was not the only way to attract demons. Any ritual activity that resembled pagan worship, such as honoring idols, casting spells or worshiping in the outdoors – regardless of intention – was magic. The Christian clergy had to be ever vigilant that the people under their care were not inadvertently interacting with demons.
In its attempt to distinguish itself from the many cults and belief systems that formed a veritable mosaic in the ancient world, early Christians had to confront demons, the magic they facilitated, and the contumely of other religionists. That was an awesome task because magic was ubiquitous. One of the earliest undertakings of Christian apologists was to counter slurs against Jesus and his apostles that they were nothing more than charlatans taking advantage of the superstitious disposition of the ignorant. Pagans slung insults at Christians for passing off tricks as miracles. The 2nd-century pagan philosopher Celsus referred to Christian miracles as masquerades for scandalous ‘trickery’, less impressive than the stunts of jugglers who performed in the marketplace.
The foundational metaphors of Christianity and paganism differed and conflicted with one another. The importance of place emerged for Christians as they crafted a new identity and a way to express it through ritual. Pagans looked to the natural world for meaning. Christian identity, on the other hand, was manifest in human-made consecrated structures such as churches and shrines. The new place of worship had to be one where demons did not feel welcome.
When Christians established consecrated sites (the settings of ritual), they were often competing with pagan holy places that abounded in the world of nature – spots near lakes, beneath trees, at hallowed rocks, and in forests. Although Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions were temple-oriented with a sophisticated concept of enclosed ceremonial, the common person did not, as a rule, enter the hallowed domain, and most popular ritualistic, religious activity took place in the fields or outside the temple precinct – in short, out of doors.
Christians created a new kind of space where demons dared not tread and in which continuity with old rites and the worldview they stored were thwarted. These churches provided a clean slate on which Christians could write in the language of ritual. The building became a symbol for the new religion. It was more than just a different location from those frequented by pagan celebrants and inhabited by their demonic deities.
It was a new concept of place particular to Christianity – cleansed of demons, consecrated to that special creator god who does not inhere in his creation (trees, rocks, springs) and should not be worshiped through it. Nothing filled demons with dread and kept them at bay like a sanctified church. The motif of demons fleeing in terror from a consecrating bishop was familiar in late antiquity when the fight against idolatry was a matter of openly confronting pagan cults. In the 3rd century, Gregory the Miracle-Worker prayed at the local temple, and the next morning the temple warden could not induce a lingering demon to enter. Christian structures were fortifications against demons.
Christian and pagan symbols also diverged in regard to shrines of the dead found in cemeteries outside the city walls. Christian and pagan approaches to death differed starkly. For pagans, the grave was a feared, polluted and haunted space from which the living recoiled. Early Christians fashioned a new kind of hallowed place where the dead and the living commingled, and these shrines were protected from the infiltration of the insidious demonic powers swirling around the tombs because they were protected by the supervision of the Church. In his 4th-century Life of Constantine, Bishop Eusebius advocated that pagan temples built over Christian holy sites be demolished and replaced by Christian shrines. He lamented that the emperor Hadrian and ‘a tribe of demons’ had defiled a Christian sacred place by building a temple to ‘impure’ Aphrodite over Christ’s tomb and had proffered ‘foul sacrifices there upon defiled and polluted altars’.
The distinctive Christian approach to death emerged as a central feature in the competition with pagans for cultural dominance. Despite the radical differences in pagan and Christian notions of mortality, there were also similarities, and these frustrated the new religion in its effort to establish itself as unique.
Necromancy in the ancient world pertained to the practice of calling the dead back to life for the purpose of learning the future. Pagan works portray contact with the dead as ghoulish and repugnant, but, if approached gingerly and undertaken for desirable ends, it was justified. Revivification of the dead was a major feat that required concentrated syncopation with cosmic powers, and such collaboration was realized and made safe through carefully executed rituals. For example, in his novel The Golden Ass, the 2nd-century pagan philosopher Apuleius relates a story of the corpse of Thelyphron, whom the Egyptian prophet Zatchlas temporarily revivifies so that the deceased can solve a mystery regarding his sudden demise.
Thelyphron had recently married, but he died shortly afterward. As his funeral procession winds through the streets of a city in Thessaly, the rumor goes out that his wife had killed him by the use of poison and the ‘evil arts’. She protests, and the crowd settles the matter by asking Zatchlas to recall the spirit from the grave for a brief time and to reanimate the body as it was before his death. Zatchlas agrees.
He begins the resurrection by placing an herb on the cadaver’s mouth and on his chest. Then the priest turns to the east and prays silently to the majestic sun, asking that the corpse be granted a momentary reprieve. The irritated dead man comes to life and complains that he was already being ferried over the river Styx; he asks why he had been dragged back among the living and begs to be left to return to his rest. The shade then confirms that his wife murdered him. In this case, the motive for interaction with the dead was worthy and accomplished with a careful, simple rite and a silent prayer.
A different and chilling case of pagan necromancy comes from the 1st-century Roman historian Lucan. In this story, Lucan describes the craft of Erictho, a medium who summons a spirit from the grave to reveal to the consul Pompey (who’d died in 48 BCE) the outcome of his impending battle with Julius Caesar (who’d died in 44 BCE). Lucan writes:
[S]he chose a corpse and drew it along with the neck noosed, and in the dead man’s noose she inserted a hook … Then she began by piercing the breast of the corpse with fresh wounds, which she filled with hot blood … [Erictho mumbled:] ‘I never chant these spells when fasting from human flesh’ … She raised her head and foaming mouth and saw beside her the ghost of the unburied corpse … [T]he dead man quivered in every limb; the sinews were strained, and he rose, not slowly or limb by limb, but rebounding from the earth and standing erect at once.
The tale of Erictho captures the pagan horror of necromancy and the repulsion they felt toward not just magic but mortality. The scene bespeaks the ugliness of death, which Romans found anathematic and polluting. This dread shaped pagan views of Christians, who seemed to savor the dead. They frequented burial grounds, celebrated death days, held up martyrs as role models (cherishing their body parts), and circulated stories of Jesus as a heroic figure because he could bring the deceased from the grave. This pursuit of intimacy with the dead repulsed pagans. They suspected that initiates to the new religion engaged in eating human flesh when, during the Eucharistic ritual, they consumed the body and blood of the dead Jesus. To pagans, Christian practices seemed mordant and cannibalistic.
Many people in late antiquity saw Jesus and his followers as necromancers. This perception brought forth persistent denials from some of the best minds of the Patristic era. In one respect, pagans were right, Jesus had redefined death, and Christians did approach the deceased differently than their polytheistic neighbors. Whereas most pagan cults dreaded, shunned and burned the dead, Christians formed tender and mutually beneficial relationships with the spirits (and, in some cases, the material remains) of those who ceased to exist on a mortal plane. Rather than ostracizing the dead beyond the city limits, by the 2nd century, Christians sought out the remains of their loved ones.
The idea that the dead could live again was a central tenet of Christian belief. Following his resurrection, Jesus assured humanity that they could have eternal life. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus invests the disciples with the power to emulate his miracles, including resuscitating the dead. In the Gospel of John, Jesus revivifies Lazarus who had been gone for four days:
[He] cried with a loud voice: ‘Lazarus come out.’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them: ‘Unbind him; let him go.’
For Christians, it was easy to distinguish between Jesus reviving a dead man for purely charitable purposes and the practice of fiends such as Erictho dragging a slain soldier back from Hades for mantic designs, revenge and personal gain. Erictho brought the soul back to the world against its will, not for its own benefit but to assuage the fears of those who engaged her services. The work of Erictho was avaricious, bloody and unnatural. The shade shrank from its former body and entered it only when threatened, and then with great pain.
The unfortunate soldier did not receive the gift of life, but an agonizing and bitter jolt back to an unwanted consciousness. The resurrection Jesus undertook was unguarded, altruistic, loving and selfless.
The Healing of the Blind Man and the Raising of Lazarus, first half of the 12th century, Spain
Erictho used rituals involving plants, poisons, cannibalism and spells, while in John’s gospel the rite is a simple, controlled word formulation. The same could be said of the ritual performed by Zatchlas, however a distinction can be drawn between Jesus’ revivification and that by the pagan priest. Zatchlas brought the dead man to life for the purpose of telling the future, and the motive was just, but, by Christian reckoning, the act was demonic in that the priest was seeking information beyond human ken. Jesus’ favor to Lazarus, on the other hand, was a miracle done by the Lord – Jesus expected nothing in return. Magic is antipodal to miracle because of the source of power that actualizes each. However, distinctions between miraculous resurrection and necromantic revivification were not clear-cut.
Accounts of non-Christian revivification plagued Christian religionists. Stupendous miracles constituted a vital component of Christianity’s claim to authenticity, and the fact that many pagan holy men claimed to bring people back from the grave fed into the rivalry between the fledgling faith and dominant pagan cults.
In the early 4th century, a provincial governor named Hierocles, seeking to defame Jesus and the Christian movement, wrote a treatise about Apollonius of Tyana, a Pythagorean magus who lived in the 1st century and was reputed to have miraculous powers to heal the sick, predict the future, and raise the dead. Hierocles compared Apollonius and Jesus, to Jesus’ disadvantage. He cast Jesus’ miracles as conjuring and cheap stunts – the kind any street magician could pull off.
In his treatise, Hierocles describes a resurrection by Apollonius that closely resembles Jesus’ miracle. On one occasion, Apollonius revives a maiden who is being borne to the grave, simply by touching her and speaking a few words, very similar to the way in which Jesus raised the lifeless Lazarus. Neither Apollonius’ nor Jesus’ acts required grandiose rites or ritual substances such as saliva, blood or hairs. Jews and pagans routinely represented Jesus as a magician, and non-Christians commonly compared the marvels of Apollonius with those of Jesus. As late as the 4th century, Augustine alluded to the fact that some praised the miracles of Apollonius along with those of Christ. The sting in the comparison was that Christians considered Apollonius’ powers to be demonic and Jesus’ to be miraculous.
Talitha cumi -- Maiden, arise!
Early Christians bristled when others censured them for necromancy, certainly because the efficacy of the necromantic art rested on demons of the lower air, but also because they sought to distinguish themselves from the many other religions and belief systems in the ancient world. Christian authors worked tirelessly to defend Jesus specifically and Christians generally against accusations of maleficium (malignant magic). Throughout the Early Middle Ages (c500-1000), Christian writers insisted that the power of their holy men and women rested not on demons that lurked between the Moon and the earth, and not on elaborate rites, but on faith, simple Christian rituals, and ultimately on God alone. Elaborate rituals equated to demonism.
In an early Christian text called the Recognitions, the apostles repeatedly find themselves in situations where they are forced to defend Jesus and themselves against charges of magic. According to one story in the text, James sends Peter to Caesarea to refute the magician Simon Magus who is claiming to be Jesus Christ. The character Niceta questions how it is possible to distinguish between Jesus’ miracles and claims to divinity as put forth in the Gospels from those that Simon Magus and false prophets generally proffer. The answer to Niceta’s question emerged from an unexpected quarter.
In Matthew and Luke, the virgin birth demonstrates Jesus’ preeminent and singular authority over other itinerant preachers and healers. According to the Patristic interpretation of these two gospel passages, the virginity of Mary was the critical sign that Jesus was not just another prophet, but the Christ called Immanuel. That Jesus was born of a virgin, thus fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, was the most demonstrable evidence of his godhood. Christians promoted this argument, at least in part, because the ancient world was full of holy men, prophets and magicians who could perform wonders, including raising people from the grave; this was in no way a unique claim. But the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy involving a virgin birth separated religion from common sorcery.
Christians walked a tightrope on the issue of revivification. The earliest Christian theologians were univocally in harmony with their pagan neighbors on the evils of using (or trying to use) the deceased either for dealings with reanimated corpses involved the worst sort of traffic with demons. Yet Jesus and his closest male followers resuscitated the deceased, and all Christians honored the spirits and bodily remains of departed saints and fostered friendly relationships with these special dead. In the end, through sermons from the pulpit and private correction in the confessional, Christian intellectuals were able to convince converts that Christian resurrection was different from necromancy.
At the same time that the clergy expressed ambivalence about ritualism because of its association with paganism, the Church was developing its own vocabulary of pious rites that all Christians could employ in place of those pagan customs that flirted with the demonic. Tracing the sign of the cross, baptism and exorcism all had the specific virtue of keeping demons at bay.
One of the symbols that was easiest to manipulate was the ritual signing of the cross. In keeping with the general prejudice of the early Church against elaborate rites, signing with the cross was simple and employed casually. Crossing as a sign or symbol was a referent to the resurrection of Christ and the salvation of humankind, and it left no room for demonic infiltration like other signs might, in fact quite the opposite; the act of signing with the cross was meant to ward off demons. Beginning with the earliest Church literature, Christians were enjoined to ineffectuate evil and ensure the protection of persons and property by signing with the symbol of the cross instead of employing other superstitious apotropaic procedures. In his On the Military Garland, the 3rd-century Tertullian writes:
At every step and movement, at every entering and exiting, in dressing, in putting on shoes, at the bath, at the table, while lighting candles, when lying down or sitting, whatever we are doing, we mark our forehead by the sign [of the cross].
The basic initiatory rite of Christianity was baptism, which acted as a foil to demonic infiltration and was rich in evocative and introspective rituals. It is a good case study for seeing how the early struggle for identity was waged on the field of ritual. A central component of the ‘rebirth’ inherent in baptism was renunciation of devils. Demons resided in water and frequented watery places, so the purifying power of the font challenged demons head on.
The baptismal sacrament incorporated an exorcism, an explicit renunciation of Satan, and a command that ‘all evil demons depart’. The repudiation amounted to an abandonment of wrongheaded ritual; the catechumen was to say: ‘I renounce you, Satan, and all your service [displays or rituals] and all your works.’
Rather than drawing on demonic power, these Christian usages combated it. They were palliative and a counter to magic-ridden pagan rites, while exorbitant ceremony and complicated machinations with gaudy objects (all absent from baptism) were offensive to early Christians’ sense of the proper approach to God.
In Latin, the word ‘health’ (salus) can also mean salvation, and, since soundness of the body and the soul were interwoven, spiritual and physical wellness continued to be expressed in the language of healing. The clergy and the saints were thought to administer the most effective medicine in the form of prayers, blessings and miraculous cures. Secular physicians were a suitable second choice, but magic was never an acceptable option for healing. To receive bodily cures from magic imperiled the soul and was ultimately self-defeating, even if it worked in the short run.
The early Church was particularly sensitive about pagan facility with medicine because pastors felt it was critical for their flocks to understand that, although other gods (demons) could heal the body, only Christ, working through his designated vicars, could make the whole person sound – body and soul – and perpetuate that wellness into the next world.
The earliest Christian writings use the discourse of healing to describe the benefits of the new religion and cast Jesus or the Church as ‘physician’. In some contexts, this characterization was metaphorical, but it was just as often literal. Prayer, penance, supplication of saints and pious living were thought to be genuinely curative. Augustine wrote:
Just as physical medicines, applied by humans to other humans, only benefit those in whom the restoration of health is effected by God, who can heal even without them.
He submitted that both the mind and the body can be ‘cleansed’ best by Christ, who is a better physician than doctors or sorcerers. The very name of Jesus, when spoken, vanquished demons and ensured healing. Tertullian affirmed that all mastery and power over demons came from naming the word ‘Christ’.
In the field of therapeutics, the Christian struggle against magical superstitions was long-lived. It was not easy for the new religion to suppress age-old remedies that were generally applied in intimate and quasi-private settings: the home and the monastery. The time-honored feel of traditional pagan cures and the texts that transmitted them added legitimacy to the rites that had kept people safe for generations.
The Church’s sought-after ownership of health provoked a rivalry with pagan cults, because certain of the deities had always been healers. The most renowned of the healing deities was the Greek god Asclepius. Of all the healing cults, his sect posed a particularly competitive challenge to Christians in the fierce rivalry over healing. Justin Martyr maintained that demons introduced the ‘myth’ of Asclepius to challenge Jesus’ prowess as a healer. Justin claimed that the Devil so feared Jesus’ popularity that the ‘Evil One’ brought forth Asclepius to imitate the gospels and cheat men of their salvation.
Christianity was ultimately successful at establishing itself as the only legitimate religion in the Roman world. However, the struggle for supremacy was protracted and hard fought. The Church was met with the challenge of facing down an ancient, finely chiseled and much beloved cultural system of which demons and magic were a part. Christianity’s success was due, in part, to the development of a new and thoroughgoing system of rituals responsive to its own worldview. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/early-christians-struggled-to-distinguish-themselves-from-pagans?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6fbc1c3318-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_07_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Mary:
Christianity's long hard fight to distinguish itself from pagan "magic" with its demons and necromancy is interesting because the eventual result was to replace "their magic" with "our magic," "their rituals," with "our rituals." Whatever theological arguments are given can't change the way these acts and symbols are perceived and used. The sign of the cross, the crucifix, holy water, scapulars, prayers, novenas, lighting candles, taking communion, all magical objects, acts and rituals whose intent is protection, healing, and the granting of wishes. Think of how all these are part of the mythical defense against those demonic creatures..vampires. Resurrection of the dead, necromancy, is forbidden, a power allowed only to god and his holy disciples. Even so, I wonder that it is thought the resurrection of Lazarus was a good thing, and not evil in the ways of raising a zombie ...surely Lazarus brought death with him back into the world, an abomination rather than a blessing...what kind of conversation could he have with those still alive and ignorant of death's transformations?
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OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCES AND ANTERIOR PRECUNEOUS
~ Dr. Josef Parvizi remembers meeting a man with epilepsy whose seizures were causing some very unusual symptoms.
"He came to my clinic and said, 'My sense of self is changing,'" says Parvizi, a professor of neurology at Stanford University.
The man told Parvizi that he felt "like an observer to conversations that are happening in my mind" and that "I just feel like I'm floating in space.”
Parvizi and a team of researchers would eventually trace the man's symptoms to a "sausage-looking piece of brain" called the anterior precuneus.
This area, nestled between the brain's two hemispheres, appears critical to a person's sense of inhabiting their own body, or bodily self, the team recently reported in the journal Neuron.
The finding could help researchers develop forms of anesthesia that use electrical stimulation instead of drugs. It could also help explain the antidepressant effects of mind-altering drugs like ketamine.
Finding the seat of the physical self
It took Parvizi's team years of research to discover the importance of this obscure bit of brain tissue.
In 2019, when the man first came to Stanford's Comprehensive Epilepsy Program, Parvizi thought his symptoms were caused by seizures in the posteromedial cortex, an area toward the back of the brain.
This area includes a brain network involved in the narrative self, a sort of internal autobiography that helps us define who we are. Parvizi's team figured that the same network must be responsible for the bodily self too.
"Everybody thought, 'Well, maybe all kinds of selves are being decoded by the same system,'" he says.
A series of experiments on the initial patient and eight other volunteers pointed toward a different explanation.
All the patients had severe epilepsy and were in the hospital as part of an effort to locate the source of their seizures. The process requires placing electrodes in the brain and then waiting for a seizure to occur.
These electrodes can also be used to deliver pulses of electricity. So Parvizi's team was able to stimulate different areas of the brain to see whether they affected a person's sense of self.
When the team stimulated the anterior precuneus, "Lo and behold, everybody has changes in their sense of what we call the bodily or physical self," Parvizi says.
In other words, the stimulation produced an out-of-body experience. People felt detached from their own thoughts and no longer anchored in their own bodies.
The finding was surprising because the anterior precuneus is separate from the brain's system for maintaining a narrative self. Instead, it appears devoted to the sense that something is "happening to me," not another person, Parvizi says.
"We think this could be a way for the brain to tag every experience in the environment as 'mine,'" he says.
A shift in perspective
That role for the anterior precuneus makes sense, says Christophe Lopez, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France.
Lopez has done research suggesting that our sense of a physical self comes in part from the inner ear, which detects motion and monitors the body's position in space. And the results from Parvizi's team suggest that signals from the inner ear are processed by the anterior precuneus.
"When they stimulate the anterior precuneus, you can evoke that the body is floating or the body is falling," Lopez says.
That means the brain has to make sense of conflicting information: For example, signals from the inner ear may say the body is falling while signals from the eyes say it's stationary.
As a result, Lopez says, the brain may try to cope by taking a different perspective.
"Sometimes the best solution which is found by the brain is to think that you are somewhere else, out of the body," he says.
The brain may face a similar conundrum when people take drugs like ketamine, which affect the anterior precuneus.
"Ketamine seemingly is producing this artificial rhythm [in the brain] that is disrupting function of that area," says Patrick Purdon, an associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School.
That slow rhythm is similar to the one that Parvizi's team saw when it stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients, Purdon says.
That could mean it will someday be possible to use electrical pulses in place of anesthetic drugs like ketamine, he says.
"You could get the specific brain areas that you want without having to cause a brainwide and systemwide effect that might carry with it a lot of side effects," Purdon says. ~
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/07/05/1185868647/brain-out-of-body-experience
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INFLAMMATORY BOWEL DISEASE AND INCREASED RISK OF STROKE
~ Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) were 13% more likely to suffer a stroke than the general population, even decades after their diagnosis, according to a large national cohort study.
The study included all biopsy-confirmed IBD patients in Sweden from 1969 to 2019, representing approximately 85,000 individuals. The incidence rate of stroke in these patients was 32.6 per 10,000 person-years, compared with 27.7 for matched controls (HR 1.13, 95% CI 1.08-1.17), Jiangwei Sun, PhD, of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and colleagues reported in Neurology.
The risk remained elevated 25 years after diagnosis and corresponded to one additional stroke per 93 IBD patients. "Our study is the largest with the longest follow-up so far to investigate stroke risk in IBD patients," the researchers wrote. "These findings highlight the need for clinical vigilance about the long-term excess risk of cerebrovascular events in IBD patients.”
The excess risk was mainly driven by ischemic stroke (HR 1.14, 95% CI 1.09-1.18) rather than hemorrhagic stroke (HR 1.06, 95% CI 0.97-1.15), and was significantly higher across IBD subtypes. The risk increase was 19% for Crohn's disease (95% CI 1.10-1.29), 9% for ulcerative colitis (95% CI 1.04-1.16), and 22% for unclassified IBD (95% CI 1.08-1.37), the study found.
Possible underlying mechanisms for stroke risk in IBD patients, the researchers said, include chronic systemic inflammation and a shifted microbiota-gut-brain axis. Chronic inflammation induces endothelial dysfunction, promotes plaque formation as well as platelet activation and aggregation, and contributes to atherosclerosis and arterial stiffness, the team explained.
Furthermore, disruptions in the microbiota-gut-brain-axis have been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, and stroke through various processes including modulated blood-brain barrier formation, myelination, microglia maturation, and neuroinflammation. Finally, IBD patients can be at higher risk for blood clots due to surgeries, immobilization due to fractures, and steroid therapy, the researchers noted.
The study found a higher relative risk for stroke in women with IBD (HR 1.20, 95% CI 1.14-1.27) than in men (HR 1.06, 95% CI 1.01-1.12). This could be explained by differences in risk factor profiles, sex hormone-dependent mechanisms, and stroke pathophysiology, the researchers said.
Sun and colleagues also reported a much higher relative risk of stroke in younger patients. For those with IBD onset at age 17 or younger, the risk was more than doubled (HR 2.35, 95% CI 1.52-3.62). Risk gradually decreased with age, suggesting that in older patients traditional cardiovascular risk factors become more prevalent and may outweigh the risk associated with IBD. In addition, more severe disease activity in younger-onset IBD patients could contribute to this trend, the study authors said.
Regarding implications, the team explained, “screening and management of traditional stroke risk factors in IBD patients could be more urgent than in the general population to prevent fatal CVD complications.”
In addition, "for individuals with traditional CVD risk factors, optimal anti-inflammatory therapy aiming at clinical response and remission or even endoscopic healing but with less adverse cardiovascular effects should be encouraged to reduce the excess risk of ischemic stroke," Sun and co-authors advised.
They identified biopsy-confirmed patients with IBD in the ESPRESSO (Epidemiology Strengthened by histoPathology Reports in Sweden) cohort. The team also identified stroke patients and analyzed medical records data in the Swedish National Patient Register. The researchers matched the IBD patients with up to five reference individuals randomly selected from the general population.
The primary outcome was incident overall stroke; secondary outcomes were ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke. The researchers estimated hazard ratios with flexible parametric survival models, adjusting for factors including hypertension, diabetes, obesity, dyslipidemia, chronic kidney disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The investigators also performed an analysis comparing stroke risk in the IBD patients with their IBD-free siblings, in order to assess any familial factors. The sibling comparison confirmed the main findings, Sun and co-authors said.
Study limitations, the team said, included that there was a lack of complete data on lifestyle factors that can contribute to stroke risk, such as smoking and alcohol use. The diagnostic criteria for IBD and stroke also changed during the study period, which may have affected associations. In addition, the study lacked information on inflammatory markers such a C-reactive protein. The researchers also cautioned that the findings may not be able to be extrapolated to other settings due to differences in the incidence and prevalence of IBD and stroke across countries, regions, and ethnicities and the fact that the Swedish healthcare system offers universal access "practically free of charge.” ~
https://www.medpagetoday.com/gastroenterology/inflammatoryboweldisease/105011?xid=nl_mpt_Cardiology_update_2023-06-16&eun=g2215341d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Automated%20Specialty%20Update%20Cardiology%20BiWeekly%20FRIDAY%202023-06-16&utm_term=NL_Spec_Cardiology_Update_Active
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IS EXTRA BODY FAT BENEFICIAL FOR OLDER ADULTS?
~ Millions of people enter later life carrying an extra 10 to 15 pounds, weight they’ve gained after having children, developing joint problems, becoming less active or making meals the center of their social lives.
Should they lose this modest extra weight to optimize their health? This question has come to the fore with a new category of diabetes and weight loss drugs giving people hope they can shed excess pounds.
For years, experts have debated what to advise older adults in this situation. On one hand, weight gain is associated with the accumulation of fat. And that can have serious adverse health consequences, contributing to heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and a host of other medical conditions.
On the other hand, numerous studies suggest that carrying some extra weight can sometimes be protective in later life. For people who fall, fat can serve as padding, guarding against fractures. And for people who become seriously ill with conditions such as cancer or advanced kidney disease, that padding can be a source of energy, helping them tolerate demanding therapies.
Of course, it depends on how heavy someone is to begin with. People who are already obese (with a body mass index of 30 or over) and who put on extra pounds are at greater risk than those who weigh less. And rapid weight gain in later life is always a cause for concern.
Making sense of scientific evidence and expert opinion surrounding weight issues in older adults isn’t easy. Here’s what I learned from reviewing dozens of studies and talking with nearly two dozen obesity physicians and researchers.
Our bodies change with age. As we grow older, our body composition changes. We lose muscle mass — a process that starts in our 30s and accelerates in our 60s and beyond — and gain fat. This is true even when our weight remains constant.
Also, less fat accumulates under the skin while more is distributed within the middle of the body. This abdominal fat is associated with inflammation and insulin resistance and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and stroke, among other medical conditions.
“The distribution of fat plays a major role in determining how deleterious added weight in the form of fat is,” said Mitchell Lazar, director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “It’s visceral [abdominal] fat around the waist, rather than peripheral fat in the hips and buttocks that we’re really concerned about.”
Activity levels diminish with age. Also, with advancing age, people tend to become less active. When older adults maintain the same eating habits (energy intake) while cutting back on activity (energy expenditure), they’re going to gain weight.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 27% of 65- to 74-year-olds are physically inactive outside of work. That rises to 35% for people 75 or older. For older adults, the health agency recommends at least 150 minutes a week of moderately intense activity, such as brisk walking, as well as muscle-strengthening activities such as lifting weights at least twice weekly. Only 27% to 44% of older adults meet these guidelines, according to various surveys.
Concerns about muscle mass. Experts are more concerned about a lack of activity in older adults who are overweight or mildly obese (a body mass index in the low 30s) than about weight loss. With minimal or no activity, muscle mass deteriorates and strength decreases, which “raises the risk of developing a disability or a functional impairment” that can interfere with independence, said John Batsis, an obesity researcher and associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.
Weight loss contributes to inadequate muscle mass insofar as muscle is lost along with fat. For every pound shed, 25% comes from muscle and 75% from fat, on average.
Since older adults have less muscle to begin with, “if they want to lose weight, they need to be willing at the same time to increase physical activity,” said Anne Newman, director of the Center for Aging and Population Health at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.
Ideal body weight may be higher. Epidemiological research suggests that the ideal body mass index (BMI) might be higher for older adults than younger adults. (BMI is a measure of a person’s weight, in kilograms or pounds, divided by the square of their height, in meters or feet.)
One large, well-regarded study found that older adults at either end of the BMI spectrum — those with low BMIs (under 22) and those with high BMIs (over 33) — were at greater risk of dying earlier than those with BMIs in the middle range (22 to 32.9).
Older adults with the lowest risk of earlier deaths had BMIs of 27 to 27.9. According to World Health Organization standards, this falls in the “overweight” range (25 of 29.9) and above the “healthy weight” BMI range (18.5 to 24.9). Also, many older adults whom the study found to be at highest mortality risk — those with BMIs under 22 — would be classified as having “healthy weight” by the WHO.
The study’s conclusion: “The WHO healthy weight range may not be suitable for older adults.” Instead, being overweight may be beneficial for older adults, while being notably thin can be problematic, contributing to the potential for frailty.
Indeed, an optimal BMI for older adults may be in the range of 24 to 29, Carl Lavie, a well-known obesity researcher, suggested in a separate study reviewing the evidence surrounding obesity in older adults. Lavie is the medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at Ochsner Health, a large health care system based in New Orleans, and author of “The Obesity Paradox,” a book that explores weight issues in older adults.
Obesity physicians and researchers offered several important recommendations during our conversations:
Maintaining fitness and muscle mass is more important than losing weight for overweight older adults (those with BMIs of 25 to 29.9). “Is losing a few extra pounds going to dramatically improve their health? I don’t think the evidence shows that,” Lavie said.
Unintentional weight loss is associated with several serious illnesses and is a danger signal that should always be attended to. “See your doctor if you’re losing weight without trying to,” said Newman of the University of Pittsburgh. She’s the coauthor of a new paper finding that “unanticipated weight loss even among adults with obesity is associated with increased mortality” risk.
Losing weight is more important for older adults who have a lot of fat around their middle (an apple shape) than it is for people who are heavier lower down (a pear shape). “For patients with a high waist circumference, we’re more aggressive in reducing calories or increasing exercise,” said Dennis Kerrigan, director of weight management at Henry Ford Health in Michigan.
Maintaining weight stability is a good goal for healthy older adults who are carrying extra weight but who don’t have moderate or severe obesity (BMIs of 35 or higher). By definition, “healthy” means people don’t have serious metabolic issues (overly high cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, and triglycerides), obesity-related disabilities (problems with mobility are common) or serious obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes or heart disease. “No great gains and no great losses — that’s what I recommend,” said Katie Dodd, a geriatric dietitian who writes a blog about nutrition.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/14/health/older-adults-excess-weight-kff-partner-wellness/index.html
Oriana:
Confusing, isn’t it? The trouble with the body mass index is that it can’t differentiate between fat and muscle. A muscular person may have a rather high body index, since, unlike fat, the muscle tissue has a high density. And it’s possible that the advantage of higher (but not extremely high) BMI is muscle mass:
~ Muscle mass correlates with a decrease in all-cause mortality. Simply put, the more muscle mass you have, the lesser the risk of dying from a chronic disease than some of your peers. It turns out that just one hour of resistance exercise each week leads to a decrease in all-cause mortality risk. One hour!
Our muscle tissue accounts for more than 50% of our body mass. Our muscles are essential from a metabolic perspective. Loss of a highly metabolically active tissue can have dramatic consequences for adults. Muscles help us control our glucose levels, use glucose as fuel, and have a role in insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Loss of muscle mass contributes to poor health outcomes, fatigue, loss of function, disability, fall risk, frailty, and death.
https://www.howardluksmd.com/muscle-mass-strength-and-longevity/
CENTENARIANS AND BMI
Do we have any data on centenarians and BMI? Michael Lustgarten reviewed the available studies:
“In these 11 studies that included 1075 centenarians, the BMI range was between 19.3-24.4 kg/m2, with an average BMI of 21.8.”
https://michaellustgarten.com/2015/05/25/bmi-whats-optimal-for-longevity/
Oriana:
I tend to favor the muscle-mass hypothesis: muscle tissue is a lot more beneficial for the body than fat, especially abdominal fat, which predominates at older age. Also called “visceral fat,” it has been linked to increased risk of heart disease and stroke, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, fatty liver, and depression.
Centenarians, while not extremely lean, are not overweight either, and far from obese. There is no escaping the fact that there are no obese centenarians.
Mary:
On weight and its effects...certainly we know the down side of obesity and visceral fat, but there does seem to be some bit of protection of extra weight for people with cancer...it either gives more resources to endure the rigors of treatment, or prolong the period before the ultimate cachexia that comes at the end. People with some extra weight may last longer. Cachexia itself kills about 30% of cancer patients. But some extra weight can't really be a great incentive when it means a longer period of suffering.
Oriana:
The counterargument to that is that if those individuals managed to stay lean, maybe they would have avoided cancer. Excess body fat indicates high levels of insulin and other growth-related factors. High insulin also leads to inflammation, which is involved in many diseases.
By increasing the load on the joints, obesity may lead to chronic pain, especially in the hips, knees, and spine. As obesity increases, so does chronic pain.
When cancer is already present, there are the "let them eat cake" oncologists and "starve the cancer" oncologists. Again, there are too many variables involved to make predictions about individual cases.
~ Research from Sanford Burnham Prebys and the Osaka International Cancer Institute has shed new light on the anti-cancer properties of mannose, a sugar that is crucial to many physiological processes in humans and is also known to inhibit the growth of cancer cells.
The findings, published in the journal eLife, suggest that mannose could be a helpful secondary treatment for cancer.
“This sugar could give cancer an extra punch alongside other treatments,” says study co-author Hudson Freeze, Ph.D., director of the Human Genetics Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys. “And because mannose is found throughout the body naturally, it could improve cancer treatment without any undesirable side effects.”
Mannose is a sugar that the body adds to proteins to stabilize their structure and help them interact with other molecules. This process, called glycosylation, is essential for life; and malfunctions in glycosylation are associated with rare, but often life-threatening, human diseases.
“Until now, the most promising therapeutic use for mannose was to treat congenital disorders of glycosylation, diseases that can cause a wide range of severe symptoms throughout the body,” says Freeze. “But we believe that there may be ways to leverage mannose against cancer and other diseases as well.”
Mannose has already been shown to inhibit the growth of several types of cancer in the lab, but scientists don’t fully understand why this happens. To learn more, the research team turned their attention to an unusual property of mannose observed in an unlikely subject: honeybees.
“It’s been known for more than a century that mannose is lethal to honeybees because they can’t process it like humans do—it’s known as ‘honeybee syndrome,’” says Freeze. “We wanted to see if there is any relationship between honeybee syndrome and the anti-cancer properties of mannose, which could lead to an entirely new approach to combat cancer.”
Using genetically engineered human cancer cells from fibrosarcoma—a rare cancer that affects connective tissue—the research team re-created honeybee syndrome and discovered that without the enzyme needed to metabolize mannose, cells replicate slowly and are significantly more vulnerable to chemotherapy.
“We found that triggering honeybee syndrome in these cancer cells made them unable to synthesize the building blocks of DNA and replicate normally,” says Freeze. “This helps explain the anti-cancer effects of mannose that have we’ve observed in the lab.”
While leveraging honeybee syndrome could be a promising supplemental cancer treatment, the researchers caution that because the effect is dependent on vital metabolic processes, more research is needed to determine which types of cancer would be most vulnerable to mannose.
“If we can find cancers that have a low activity of the enzyme that processes mannose, treating them with mannose could give just enough of a nudge to make chemotherapy more effective,” says Freeze. “Many people assume that you always discover treatments in response to the disease, but sometimes you find biology that could be useful for treatment and then have to find the disease to match it.”
In the meantime, the study speaks to the broader potential of glycosylating sugars for cancer treatment, which is still an emerging area of research.
“The glycobiology of sugar metabolism within cancer cells is still an unexplored frontier, and it could be an untapped treasure trove of potential treatments just waiting to be discovered,” adds Freeze. ~
https://sbpdiscovery.org/news/sugar-kills-honeybees-it-could-also-help-fight-cancer
Oriana:
Mannose is familiar to many women as the sugar found in cranberries. It is available as a supplement, and is helpful against urinary infections, presumably by preventing certain bacteria from sticking to the walls of the urinary tract.
Best food sources of mannose include black currants, red currants, gooseberries, cranberries, tomatoes, apples, peaches, oranges, blueberries, and certain vegetables.
gooseberries
*
Ending on beauty:
So I won’t have power, won’t save the world?
Fame will pass me by, no crown, no tiara?
Did I then train myself, myself the Unique,
To compose stanzas for gulls and sea haze,
To listen to the foghorns blaring down below?
Until it passed. What passed? Life.
Now I am not ashamed of my defeat.
One murky island with its barking seals
Or a parched desert is enough
To make us say: yes, oui, si.
~ Czeslaw Milosz, A Magic Mountain, translated by the author and Lillian Vallee
below: Milosz's house in Berkeley
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