*
A LULLABY FOR EINSTEIN
Einstein said that clocks
stop at the speed of light.
“Don’t think about it, child;
I knew a physicist once
who went out of his mind
trying to figure it out,”
my father warned,
looking at his watch.
But that’s what
keeps me sane,
seeing in my mind
that silent starfall of time.
In an ecstatic vision
I see a flock of clocks —
grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks,
school clocks and office clocks;
great railroad clocks,
tyrants of train stations,
four-faced like ancient gods —
From cathedrals,
from city squares,
London, New York, Moscow —
millions and millions of clocks
mutely sweeping through cosmic dust,
their pointing, merciless hands
going nowhere at last
at the speed of light.
That’s what eternity means.
I heard it the other night:
no more ticking or chiming,
cuckooing, beeping or bonging.
All that racket is over.
Good night, sweet Albert,
good night.
~ Oriana
*
PROUST: “PLEASURE IS LIKE PHOTOGRAPHY”
~ What we take in the presence of the beloved object is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred us so long as we are with other people. ~ Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2
*
JOAN DIDION: “GRAMMAR IS A PIANO I PLAY BY EAR”
Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:
I
I
I
In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstractions. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the Bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the Bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.
All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.
Just as I meant “shimmer” literally I mean “grammar” literally. Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene:
It tells you.
You don’t tell it.
https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/ (excerpt)
Joan Didion died in December 2021.
Mary:
I have only one short note on Didion's statement that she wrote to find out what she was thinking — that was exactly the process I went through, and still encounter, in my own writing...the process of writing uncovers, discovers, and surprises you with your own unexpressed, unrealized thought processes....and can be quite a revelation.
Oriana:
I think that’s what the writing process is like for all serious writers. Writing comes from the unconscious, and its wonderful reward is the discovery, the surprise — the unexpected emerges. And you learn to guard against cliches, and thus probe in greater depth. As Nietzsche observed, "To improve one's style means to improve one's thinking." This includes a keener perception of feelings as well as external images — though nothing is complete external.
*
DO CHILDREN NEED AMBITION?
I’ve only ever asked my son once what he might want to do when he grows up, and he very quickly and firmly told me he doesn’t ever want to be an adult or get a job. Last summer, while he was chatting with an older kid, a second grader, about going into first grade, my son learned about homework, a concept he’d been totally unaware of until that moment. She assured him first grade would be fun but gave an ominous warning about how different it was from kindergarten; she mentioned math and tests.
I laughed it off — how hard could a first-grader’s homework be? — but my son froze, and when the playground cleared out, he burst into tears. He didn’t want to, “grow up, do work, and then die,” he told me. I comforted him, reminded him he gets to be a carefree kid for a very, very long time and that it’s really not so bad being a grown-up either. But the voice in the back of my mind agreed with him: Do I even want to be an adult or have a job if I could choose otherwise?
As both my young children get older, and parents around me are signing their first graders up for countless extracurriculars, I’ve been thinking a lot about the intense pressure to succeed that I began to feel even at their age. And I get the sense I’m supposed to be putting my own children under that same stress to become something I’ve imagined for them, instead of just being kids.
From preschool, parents are told we should be making decisions about our barely out-of-toddlerhood children’s futures. Are they going to the best school? Are they in the right activities? Should I hold them back so they can be the oldest and, therefore, the most advanced in the class?
According to the CDC, anxiety and depression in kids ages 3 to 17 has increased over the last 15 years. High school teachers contend with teens who have high levels of stress. When I was in my senior year, I remember feeling like the entirety of my future rested in the decisions I was making at that moment. My potentiality seemed tied up in my youth, and if I fucked it up then, my whole life would be a disaster from that moment on. I didn’t hear stories about later-in-life career changes or diverting paths of success; my peers, parents, and teachers told of bright, young futures that rested on the choices of us adolescents.
In my own community, I see 8-year-olds stressed about keeping up with school work and worried about how their grades now will affect them down the road. I know many parents who, despite not speaking the language themselves, are losing sleep over whether to put their 5-year-old in French immersion, anxious about what it’ll mean for their future job opportunities rather than the joys of learning another language or whether the kid themselves wants to do it.
This style of ambition-focused parenting is hard on both kids and parents. A carefully curated, packed schedule of classes designed to rear the best and brightest leaves caregivers feeling stretched, overwhelmed, and resentful over the lack of time. Kids end up with little space for the kind of unstructured boredom that often leads to them discovering what hobbies and activities excite them. It was in those days of meandering freedom that as a kid, I found myself and my love of writing. I value that kind of mental space and want my kids to have the same opportunities to get lost in themselves, outside of external influences.
As adults we’ve been reckoning with how we work since the pandemic, yet from speaking with other parents, that same existential shift isn’t making its way down to how we view achievement when it comes to our kids. So much of what we’re told to focus on with kids is based on an ideal of career success that, honestly, doesn’t even exist now, let alone will be true for them in 10 or 20 years.
Working in media, I’ve seen it firsthand, having spent the entirety of my career watching my industry crumble. Entire outlets have come and gone, giants of publishing have folded, and any sense of job security was long gone by the time I got my first real job. I’ve lived through countless layoffs and restructuring, buyouts, and new owners, all for fluctuating pay that was often demeaning. The burnout from years of this triggered my own breakup with the kind of ambition that was pushed on me in childhood.
So having realized, in my own life, that a certain kind of ambition can leave you feeling fried, frustrated, depressed, and without anything more or better to show for it, how could I ask my own children to follow in those same footsteps?
Before having kids, I’d imagined I’d want to be involved in their career success in ways my own parents weren’t. I thought fixating on a certain kind of achievement would make their lives easier than mine was. In the years since having them, it really doesn’t matter to me what they want to do or accomplish when they’re older.
I’m more focused on the kind of person they want to be. Are they empathetic and aware of others’ feelings? Do they take care of the environment around them and understand that they’re connected to a community bigger than just themselves and their family? Do they feel safe expressing themselves wholly and sharing that with the people around them? Are they kind?
When I wrote last year about losing my ambition, I talked about embracing the idea of mediocrity, letting go of a compulsion for exceptionalism, never being satisfied with the life in front of me. Now it’s true of my approach to parenting too. It’s not that I don’t want the best for my kids — it’s just that I have a new understanding of what “the best” looks like. It’s not about raising the ideal employee with an overstuffed resume thanks to an overstuffed schedule, but a loving, aware person, who understands there are many ways to feel fulfilled and successful.
Meanwhile, my son hasn’t had any homework yet, but by allowing him to focus on what he enjoys now, in giving him ample room to be a child without worrying about what lies ahead, he does actually think first grade is pretty great.
https://www.thecut.com/2023/09/do-kids-need-ambition.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Mary:
Programming ambition into children at a very young age can do many negative things...perhaps the worst is to steal their opportunity to play. Unstructured free play is not only the essential joy of childhood, it is also integral to learning and development. If all of childhood's free inventive play is replaced with programmed adult-sponsored activity, that child's independence and growth, both intellectual and emotional, will be severely curtailed. What is being served is the adults' ambition, forcibly fitted onto the child, like a too tight suit that prevents freedom of movement.
Ambition focused parenting creates enormous pressure on both parents and child, generating stress about the present and future that can be not only painful, but crippling. All this dedicated preparation can also, as noted, come to naught, in a rapidly changing and evolving world where work and careers no longer have the same shapes and requirements we may have so earnestly prepared for. In a world where old skills and knowledge may shift and become obsolete, adaptiveness and flexibility, and intellectual curiosity rather than rigidity, become the most useful qualities for success...and survival.
I have always been profoundly lacking in ambition. I never had any sort of map or plan for the future, either self generated or imposed. I knew I had more interest, more Fun, learning, reading and thinking than just about anything else. Far from being directed toward college, my parents sadly thought there was no chance for that. At the time it was easy to get scholarships and grants, and teachers suggested I apply. I was in luck, but had no plan of how college would lead to a career...I never thought about careers at all. I never had stress over school or the future — if I thought about it at all. There was nothing I was working toward.
In fact I simply enjoyed the act of learning, exploring, playing with ideas...it was all, not tedium, not work, but play, fun. I lived in this very enjoyable present world with no thought of where or how it would end. Graduate school seemed not another step on a ladder, but simply a way to keep doing what I loved. Even exams were fun...like entertaining games. I took the Masters exams not because I planned to, but because they were offered and some fellow students were going. Did PhD work with no real idea of an academic career, but simply because it was the next usual step.
I'm not really recommending my ambitionless approach. I had no idea what to do past graduate school… I am simply remarking that my whole time at school was an incredibly rich and satisfying time lived in the moment, with no pressure or anxiety about the future. And when the future came, with health and life changes, I, like many others, switched direction and trained for something new that I hadn't been planning on, and that pursuit was as engaging and enriching as what came before.
My approach to the future was haphazard perhaps, but remarkably happy and stress free, like childhood play.
Oriana:
I envy you. I blamed myself for being chaotic, directionless, lost. The people I admired most were those who knew their vocation already in childhood.
Not that I didn't show a clear talent -- the gap between my score on verbal ability and math ability was profound. But I would have preferred it the other way, reaping the rewards of those who have the socially preferred STEM bend. Only later I saw the the pleasure of being more versatile, being able to shift between literature and the sciences the way a bilingual person shifts between languages. The latter was a particular pleasure, but I could also attend a medical conference, or one in the biosciences, and feel sheer bliss reading about fungi, for instance, or the mysteries of marine biology. But I couldn't accept that versatility. I felt like a failure, my depression shifting between chronic and acute. I sobered up when I realized that no longer had all that much life left, and it was too late to be depressed. And the result was, would you believe it, this very blog, which I started in 2010, and which allowed me to indulge my many interests. Proust in the morning, plate tectonics in the afternoon -- I loved it all, and finally accepted myself as intellectually promiscuous, without feeling guilty about it.
*
THE STARTLING LIFE EXPECTANCY GAP IN THE U.S. BETWEEN THOSE WITH A COLLEGE DEGREE AND THOSE WITHOUT
~ When people talk about the difference between the haves and the have-nots, they're typically thinking about wealth. But in America there's another metric that divides the two: longevity.
As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton show in their new research, the gulf in life expectancy between people with and without a college degree has widened dramatically since the 1990s. As of the end of 2021, there was a shocking 8.5-year age gap between the two cohorts, with the life span of Americans without a college degree trending sharply downward in recent years.
It is this grim trend of shortening life expectancy among Americans without college degrees that explains why the U.S.'s mortality rate is a stark outlier among rich nations, far lower than countries such as Japan and Switzerland. "If all Americans had the life expectancy of those who are college educated, the United States would have been one of the best performers among the rich countries in terms of life expectancy, not the worst," wrote Case and Deaton in a recent op-ed explaining their findings in The New York Times. "It is the experience of those without college degrees that accounts for America’s failure.”
That failure is an enormous one, and it should prompt introspection about the American promise. It shows that social inequality isn't just leading to diverging quality of life for people in different social strata. It's killing us. Nearly two-thirds of Americans don’t have a college degree, which means a solid majority of Americans are seeing their prospect of a long life dimming.
Case and Deaton's dataset shows that in 1992, the life-expectancy gap between those with and without a college degree was about 2.5 years. Notable, but not huge. That gap began widening by the 2000s and after 2010 the two sets really diverged, as life expectancy for those with a college degree continued to rise, while life expectancy for those without one declined. Both groups experienced a downturn during the pandemic, but for college-educated Americans it slipped about a year, while for noncollege-educated Americans it slipped by 3.3 years.
By 2021, at the age of 25 a college-educated American could expect to live, on average, more than 58 more years (that is, to live to be over 83), while those without college could expect to live less than 50 more years (that is, not reach 75). Case and Deaton note that they've found no precedent for this college divide in modern history except "in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union."
There are a lot of potential mechanisms that explain the strong correlation between college degrees and longevity. Case and Deaton spotlight, among other things, that the college-educated have more access to a wider array of jobs and higher wages. Their counterparts without degrees are disproportionately likely to live in communities without jobs or to have been affected by the opioid epidemic. The cost of health care is prohibitive for many people with lower wages.
Lest one think that it's "natural" for this kind of longevity gap to emerge between people who could loosely be thought of as the working class and the professional class, remember that other rich countries are not seeing these kinds of sharply different fates for their people.
There are a number of potential explanations, but among other things, many rich countries have more robust social safety nets than the U.S., particularly when it comes to health care. And many are more hospitable to worker organizing and input into the political economy, which in turn affects the way wages are distributed.
Another way the U.S. might be an outlier is the huge variation in the distribution of social services and public health measures in blue states and red states. A new Washington Post investigation explores the differing premature death rate between three adjacent counties along Lake Erie in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and finds that Ohio's higher death rates may be attributable to its lack of more progressive public health measures, such as seatbelt laws and cigarette taxes.
It's hard to think of a clearer marker of second-class citizenship than the likelihood of having predictably less time to live than a more well-off set of people. There are always going to be huge parts of the nation's workforce that don't require a college degree. There are always going to be communities where it's unfairly difficult to obtain a college degree. And even if demand grows there will always be a relatively limited number of high quality degrees. It's one thing to say that people without a degree have fewer job options. But it's another thing altogether to say they have fewer years on Earth. ~
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/college-degree-life-expectancy-rcna118571
Men in the top 1 percent of the income distribution can now expect to live fifteen years longer than those in the bottom 1 percent. For women, the difference is about ten years—an effect equivalent to that of a lifetime of smoking.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20180817.901935/
Oriana:
None of this is surprising. The rates of obesity and smoking have long been associated with lower social status. This is due in part to higher stress.
Alcohol consumption presents a more complex picture. There is more drinking as social status goes up, but it tends to be moderate drinking rather than heavy drinking or binge drinking. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201202/are-rich-people-heavy-drinkers
*
IQ AND LIFE EXPECTANCY
~ In my article about neuromyths, I debunked the commonly-held belief that IQ tests results only represent your ability to take IQ tests. In reality—and despite their flaws—IQ tests are predictive of many things. And, in particular, IQ tests can help predict your chances of dying.In a cohort study conducted in 2009 with almost a million Swedish men who took a mandatory IQ test during their military service when they were around 18 years old, researchers followed-up with participants during 20 years after they took the test to see who was still alive and who had died. The graph below speaks for itself.
One million people of the same gender and the same age, and an almost perfect correlation between IQ and risk of death. But researchers decided to take it a step further, and to check if this result was mediated by other factors such as blood pressure, body mass index, or cigarette smoking. And they found that it wasn’t. All things made equal, individuals in the study tended to live longer if they were considered smarter as measured by the IQ test they took when they were 18.
The link between intelligence and longevity
The researchers admit in their paper that while the correlation is pretty clear, the actual causes aren’t. But there are a few hypotheses as to why smarter people tend to live longer.
Being smarter improves your quality of life. It may mean a better job, which could come with better quality healthcare, and living in a nicer area. Basically, more money means a better lifestyle.
Being smarter in general means being smarter with your health. For example, IQ is negatively correlated with smoking and getting into car accidents (as you will see if you click these links, most large-scale studies have been done on Swedish men during and after their military service). You’re less likely to put yourself in danger. You take better care of yourself, so you live longer.
A lower IQ can be a sign of a bad childhood. It can be a signal that things haven’t gone well for you as you developed. Maybe you’re from a deprived background, or you had malnutrition or an illness as a child. This may have affected your IQ by stopping your brain from developing to its full potential, and it also might as a result affect your life expectancy.
The genes that affect your brain may also affect the rest of your body. Some luckier people may just have better-built systems. The genes that build a healthier brain may also build healthier hearts, lungs, and so on.
But you don’t need to know why to start using this correlation to your advantage. The great news is that IQ is not fixed, and there are many science-based ways to increase it, even as an adult.
Four ways to get smarter
One of the reasons why many people are against IQ tests is because they believe IQ is supposed to be a fixed measure of intelligence. It’s not. It’s just a snapshot of one’s intelligence taken at a specific point in life. Anyone can get smarter by stimulating their brain in the right way. And no, listening to Mozart won’t work. Unfortunately, raising your IQ will take a bit more effort than that.
Meditation. Many studies have shown that meditating has positive effects on cognition. You can start seeing these effects with as little as 20 minutes of daily meditation. If you’re struggling to build a meditation habit, try an app such as Headspace or Calm and go through their introductory meditation course.
Playing an instrument. Research by the University of Zurich showed that becoming proficient in a musical instrument can raise the IQ of both adults and children. And I’m not talking about insignificant gains. Playing music can raise your IQ by 7 points or more.
Learning a new language. You know how hard it is to learn a new language? It’s because it’s actually changing the fundamental connections inside your brain. By navigating a new set of complex rules, learning a new language forces cortical thickening and increases the volume of your hippocampus. The great thing is that it also helps you with other language tasks like reading, negotiating, and problem-solving.
Sleeping. Ha, finally one that doesn’t require too much effort. Research from the Loughborough University’s Sleep Research Centre found that every hour less than eight hours of sleep a night can knock off a full point from your IQ. In fact, not sleeping enough can make people perform at work at the same level as someone with a learning disability.
Other tactics you can use to increase your IQ include playing chess and exercising. Next time someone tells you IQ tests are bullshit, remember: they are just a snapshot of how well you’re taking care of your brain, right now. Put another way, IQ tests are a measure of your current intelligence. Intelligence is not fixed, and it can be fostered with the right strategies. Anyone can get smarter—and live longer. ~
https://nesslabs.com/iq-death-smarter-people-live-longer
*
SOCIAL CLASS IN THE U.S. IS NOT ABOUT MONEY
~ While there are social classes in the US, it’s erroneous to say that they’re all about money. Social class in the US has more to do with perceived status/influence, not money. The two concepts often go hand in hand, but not always, and we see this in expanding divisions between red and blue states, urban and rural Americans, those who live on the coasts versus those who live inland, those who have advanced degrees versus those who do not, and those who work in white-collar professions versus those who work in farming or industry.
Just to use one of the example, there are plenty of truck drivers right now who are earning as much or more than college professors, but I can assure you that neither trucker nor prof are likely to see each other as occupying the same social class. There are many farmers who are worth 7 or even 8 figures on paper, but they’re probably not perceived as being in the same class as government lawyers living with roommates in cramped apartments in “important” places like Washington or New York. American class is a lot more complicated than just the size of one’s bank account.
When it comes to socializing, Americans are a friendly, egalitarian people, and are generally willing to interact with people from all walks of life. But in order to befriend people, you have to come into contact with them regularly. In answering this question, I thought long and hard about my own life: the people in my circle of friends are largely other lawyers, white-collar energy executives, bankers/financial advisors, doctors, entrepreneurs, and academics. I didn’t choose to be friends with any of them on account of what they did for a living, but they are people I’ve generally met through school, work, or my neighborhood.
I’m friendly with some people who drive trucks and work construction through my gym, but in all honesty, I chose a no-frills health club whose lower fees attract a broader clientele. If I were to spring for something fancier, no doubt I’d run into plenty more lawyers and bankers.
Economic segregation is increasing in the US, so while your typical lawyer or doctor would be happy to socialize with a truck driver or roofer, the opportunities to do so are increasingly rare. ~ Ty Doyle, Quora
AJ:
Paul Fusel wrote a book called Class. One thing he wrote that stuck with me: “Upper Middle Class is where you want to be.” Tongue-in-cheek like everything in the book, but his point was that group actually dresses the best and has the creature comforts relatable to most people, while the really rich tend be be more reclusive, live spartan, let fine clothes look shopworn, and have conversations and hobbies that would likely bore most people.
I laughed because one time I was at Thanksgiving with an old-money family with a recognizable name. The dinner conversation was mundane, the family house peeling, the rooms drafty, the clothing obviously well-made but smelling of mothballs. Fussel nailed it.
Jimmy Lee:
People need to get out and see America. Many of those guys in the plaid flannels and jeans are driving pickups that are way pricier than a BMW sedan. They own RVs and boats and real estate. Their construction businesses dwarf a doctor or lawyers salary many times over.
Aurel Kola:
Yes and they associate with people like themselves, that's what the author is stating because those are the circles they run into. On the other hand, for every wealthy construction worker or farmer, there are a thousand wealthy doctors.
Sarah Peterson:
The top percentile of lawyers are multi billionaires. The top percentile of “construction businesses” by construction workers are mid six figures… the starting salary for a good lawyer. The numbers speak for themselves. There are some construction conglomerates owned by professionals/VC firms/investors in the multi billions but those are not your plaid shirt guy. That guy is an illiterate, low IQ, low skill worker who is working a huge number of hours, breaking his body and will die/be disabled by middle age. The only reason he is able to make above minimum wage is because of a labor market that is economically protected by national labor force unions that block free market labor. The professionals compete on the international level and out-compete the best talent and still win.
Clipperz:
I take great offense in the “illiterate, lowIQ” horse dung you sling. Lawyers are smart with words, construction people are smart with doing things (reading blueprints, applying codes, engineering application, commanding others, etc etc.)
Amy Chai:
Because I came from extreme poverty and land of the hillbillies and fundamentalists and racial minorities, I totally feel more comfortable in these groups than I do in groups of my economic and social class “equals.”
I am completely chill with the underclass because I am one of them. You can dress me up and give me money but I am still the same person I always was.
Frederick Dolan:
In the U.S., social class is thought to be solely “about money” only by people in the middle and lower classes. The higher up the class ladder, the less important is money, at least in purely quantitative terms. How you acquired it, and what you’re doing with it, matter more.
But to answer the question, medical doctors and lawyers earning $300,000 per annum are in the middle class, which is the class most afflicted with status anxiety. For that reason, they tend to avoid truck drivers and roofers no matter how much money they earn.
The truck drivers and roofers, for their part, avoid the professionals except while working for them. This is due to what Ian William Miller calls “upward contempt.”
Addendum
In light of some of the comments, a fuller exposition of class in the United States may be in order. I favor Paul Fussell’s metric for class:
[H]ow much built-in resistance you have to being pushed around by shits.
He adds that income and social status also play a role, as well as things like style and taste.
In America, according to Fussell, we have nine classes:
Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle
Middle
High proletarian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian
Destitute
Bottom out-of sight
As for the stylistic and otherwise visible markers of class divisions, Fussell suggested a few. Those who fall for the “college swindle,” for example – the notion that a degree from a third-rate university will give you much of an advantage in terms of income or anything else
– are in the lower classes. Proletarians have “goofy collections of things [Bobbleheads, Beanie Babies, Cracker Jack prizes] they think might be worth money someday.” Low proletarians will take an old tire, turn it inside out, and use it as a planter.
A reproduction of any Picasso artwork indicates that you are in a middle class home, as well as the presence of any item alluding, even remotely, to Tutankhamen. A bowling-ball carrier is mid-proletarian. An original drawing or lithograph by an internationally recognized artist is upper middle; original paintings point towards upper. (In my youth, a successful dentist might have a Jim Dine or a Lichtenstein lithograph; a lawyer or academic with family money would exhibit an Oldenberg soft ashtray or even a Warhol.)
Keke:
Can being “middle class” be defined by ones attitude toward money? I grew up in a family that struggled for many years (eating cold cereal for dinner, one pair of shoes a year, buying glasses was a hardship). Situational poverty (divorce of parents) as it were. BUT we also were raised to value having a savings account and to not be in debt. I worked in a community of migrant workers and I observed generational poverty. A way of life handed down that included NOT having a savings account and living a life heavily in debt to acquire consumer goods. I considered my family” middle class” even though we may have had the same disposable income (for an extended time) as the immigrant population of the community I worked in as an adult.
Fredrik Johansson:
In Sweden, there is a divide between the middle class and working class for various reasons. One is historical, one is because of living in different areas (big house vs apartments) and third is that they have different jobs so they don't meet, and fourth is a difference in cultural interests, e.g. working class watch other TV programs.
We use the terms working class, middle class, and upper middle class as euphemisms. We often do attach rough monetary values to these “classes”, but they’re about lifestyle, opportunity, and career trajectory.
No truck drivers or roofers earn the kind of money you’re talking about from driving a truck or nailing shingles. Some business owners do, but many are not up on the roof or in the cab, and those who are will earn more from others doing the same work.
As for how people socialize, in the US, socialization is often tied to work peers or longterm friends (since childhood). There are complex reasons for this, but it’s nonetheless true, and increasingly so.
Most of my friends have PhDs. Not all, but most. Most of the rest have master’s degrees or other professional degrees. I have one very close friend who never went to college, but he’s the unusual one in his social circle; he mostly socializes with people with degrees. His current partner, his ex, and all of his kids have college degrees.
I didn’t set out to have a friend group like this, but when I move across the country (and it’s a big country), the people I meet are the people I work with.
Rob S:
Most people self segregate. It's human nature. We like to be around people like us, and we feel uncomfortable (and usually judgmental) about people different from us. So people who work with their hands, even ones who make very good incomes such as welders and electricians don't generally feel as comfortable around people that work at desks, and vice-versa, even if the welder actually makes more money. That's why the common slang for the first group is "blue collar" and the slang for the second is "white collar" which is about the type of clothes they wear to work which indicates how they work, not the amount of money they make.
But ... and here's the cool part ... that is all up to the individual. Depending on where you live and your own attitudes, some people socialize widely across class, while others are very much bound to it.
Mark Gist:
Social class in the US has to do more with education than money. Doctors and lawyers tend to socialize with each other and with other white-collar, college educated people.
*
RUSSIAN EUPHEMISMS FOR WAR (Misha Firer)
~ Russians authorities have always given wars of aggression funny terms.
First Chechnya War was “Operation to restore constitutional order in Chechnya” while Second Chechnya War was called “Counter-terrorism operations in the North Caucasus region.”
Afghan War that lasted ten years and broke Soviet economy was “military conflict” and “international duty.” Likewise, Ukraine war is a “special military operation.”
It’s because the Russians as any other people in the world loathe wars. Humans by and large wanna live. They don’t wanna die.
Additionally, in Russia, there’s a strong association of war with invaders coming from the west that are being fought against, with wasteful peasant body count then buried necessarily in common graves, on the Russian territory.
When there’re no invaders like in Chechnya and Afghanistan and populace is not convinced that there should be a military intervention, government tells them that it’s not a war. It’s a special military operation.
This deception is so ingrained in Russian collective psyche that when Putin invaded Ukraine , my coworkers at the office wouldn’t discuss it , and outright respond that they won’t talk about events in Ukraine — and that was before censorship kicked in!
Effectively every single person in the office self-censored without any cue from television. Remember that the best herder of the sheep are the sheep themselves.
Now I believe that this time the result of “international duty” won’t be any different from Afghanistan. Is it because democracy always prevails over authoritarian regime? Light over darkness and stuff like that?
Morale does count for motivation and to elevate spirits, but I think the bottom line is the West is banally much stronger than Russia, in economic war and more advanced in military hardware. Russia is by every count the weaker side in the conflict.
That’s all there is to it.
When Putin invaded Ukraine he believed he’s fighting a weaker enemy but he’s now thrown against the strongest group of countries in the world and got no allies on his side except for fellow pariah states . Which brings us to nukes.
As it’s becoming obvious that America will stay with Ukraine through thick and thin and won’t back down, it is also becoming clearer that Putin will go down in flames. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Tim Orum:
Putin may not even need nukes and may be more clever than thought. Through Ukraine, Putin is draining billions from the West and distracting attention away from their serious domestic issues while his allies in China destroy the US and Europe from within by sowing division and compromising politicians into doing their bidding. It’s a multi-prong approach to taking down the West.
*
THE SOVIET UNION WAS LESS POWERFUL DURING THE COLD WAR THAN THE US BELIEVED
The Red Army abolished professional NCO corps in 1960s.
The key to maintaining a capable army is preserving institutional knowledge. Experience is invaluable in an army and unless you’re the Silastic Armorfiend from Striterax, only a portion of your armed forces will ever experience combat. As wars end the number of soldiers that saw action begins to decline almost immediately. Within four years of the end of the war most grunts never saw combat.
NCOs are the best way we know of to preserve this valuable experience. An army that seeks to retain some portion of their experienced personnel and uses them to train the next generation will retain institutional knowledge much better than armies who do not have such a program. The Red Army was superbly experienced after World War 2 and as capable as anyone else in maneuver warfare and logistics that came with it.
This lasted probably into 1960s, when they were still retaining older soldiers who had experience and using them to train the new generations. After that this knowledge began to decline rapidly. Worse still, with no older soldiers to keep order, discipline collapsed and brutal hazing became prevalent. Within a few years the once feared Red Army became a band of scared boys with big guns and little in the way of leadership or discipline. We saw how well an army like that fights last year near Kyiv.
The Soviet Union had a massive nuclear arsenal and this made them dangerous. However the Red Army was a paper tiger from perhaps 1970 onwards and we all know how well their economy worked. Science and technology too fell behind by that time. You can’t progress without cooperation and for that you need openness. From about 1970 onwards (give or take a couple of years) the Soviet Union was certainly a mere shadow of the behemoth it presented itself as. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Charles Catt:
Basically a collection of thugs a rapists. Same as they are now. Good riddance. Clean them from the world and start fresh.
Ronald Mills:
And really it was portrayed as a world superpower second only to America when more accurately it was a European land superpower with nukes and little to no means of projecting forces very far from its borders.
*
THE UKRAINIAN “I WANT TO LIVE HOTLINE” HAS BEEN A SUCCESS
~ I can only speculate why almost 10,000 Russians have surrendered through the “I Want to Live” hotline, but from what I have read:
Well-being — being a soldier in Russia is fairly awful. Conscripts are treated poorly, are ill equipped, barely trained, possess no autonomy whatsoever (instead they are expected to blindly obey orders given by people who only hold their rank through corruption, cronyism and political favoritism), and are often subject to being sexually abused by their superior officers (who insist this is not a homosexual act, by the way, just how discipline is done in the Russian military). There are untold numbers of complaints seen from Russian soldiers — on video, in letters, phone calls, and interviews — about how poorly they are equipped and the depredations they are suffering for a wide variety of reasons.
Safety concerns — most Russians, especially those recently conscripted, don’t actually want to die in a foreign land to satiate Putler’s thirst for power and empire. They have families and children they would rather live to support than to become fertilizer for sunflowers, and they know they lack the training and equipment to have any appreciable chance of doing anything other than dying. The hotline may appeal to Russian soldiers who have grown weary of the conflict and fear for their own safety, and surrendering through the hotline may be seen as a safer option than continuing to fight or being captured on the battlefield. Besides, even with Russia’s revisionist take on history, they all know how the battles of WWII were won, and that their commanders haven’t learned any new tactics since. Better to surrender than be shot in by your own comrades when retreating from an untenable position.
Humanitarian concerns — the hotline's name, "I want to live," suggests a focus on the human toll of the conflict. Ukrainian authorities may be hoping that Russian soldiers will be moved by this appeal and more willing to surrender. Those who haven’t been utterly blinded by propaganda will know that they will be treated far better by the UAF as a POW than they were by their own military.
Propaganda/PsyOps — Ukrainian authorities have launched targeted campaigns to spread the word about the hotline, including through social media and related efforts, which has increased the hotline's visibility and made it more appealing to Russian soldiers who may be looking for a way out of the conflict that doesn’t involve a (usually empty) casket. By offering a hotline for surrenders, Ukrainian authorities effectively undermine the morale of Russian troops by making them question the legitimacy and chances for success success of their “3-day Special Military Operation” that has been going on for over a year now.
Immunity from prosecution — Ukrainian authorities may be offering amnesty to Russian soldiers who surrender and provide truthful accounts of their actions, which could be a powerful incentive for those who fear prosecution for the war crimes being committed by Russians in Ukraine.
Overall, there are a variety of likely overlapping contributing factors, but
mainly it comes down to exactly what the hotline is named: they want to live, and the Russian army is not famed for placing more value on the lives of their soldiers than they do the lives of their enemies. They are happy to sacrifice 10 of their own just to kill one of the enemy, and if you’re not an utterly brainwashed zealot looking to die for glory of Mother Russia, this probably doesn’t strike you as great odds or a worthy use of one’s own life. ~
*
PUTIN’S “CAPITALISM”
While China has been working towards becoming global leader in science and technology, Russians were stuck in the past worshiping war victory cult.
Undergrad students at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Russia’s MIT) will study Chinese as a second compulsory subject.
It will not be possible to choose a language other than Chinese and English in the first year. The measure is due to the fact that 27% of scientific articles on physical and technical topics are written in Chinese.
And there you have it , the real pivot to the East when you do it not out of whims of the tsar but because you can’t stay relevant in your field of studies and profession if you don’t.
I worked for a Russian pharmaceutical company that exemplifies everything what’s wrong with Putin’s “capitalism.”
The founder and CEO of the company who takes care of day to day business is a linguist who hasn’t studied chemistry nor understands anything about it.
His partner is a banker.
His deputy is an economist.
Looking at his office you would see grim chemists sitting in the open space while private rooms for the privileged employees are occupied by the CEO’s nephew with no formal education who did corruption schemes in Ukraine before war put an end of it; a woman who buys subpar APIs from India and China; a financial director and her friend who specializes in avoiding paying taxes; a public official dude (ironically the only medical doctor on the premises) who eases red tape; and an accountant.
A professional chemist with a master’s degree in chemistry from MSU who does new drugs registration and takes charge of research and development lives in a 18 square meter prison-cell size studio in a working class apartment complex while the woman who tricks VAT payments wears Gucci and Dolce Gabana and lives in a luxurious apartment for the upper class.
From the onset the only conclusion you would draw is that these people are in money-making business. Drugs are a sideshow to facilitate money transfers to the top dogs’ bank accounts.
The whole thing enjoys a high level KGB/FSB protection and as I soon realized are heavily involved in mutually arranged embezzlement schemes, but I wouldn’t wish to go down that particular rabbit hole.
In any Western country this outfit wouldn’t last a week crushed by competition from professional pharmaceutical companies.
Not in Russia. Putin’s law gives privileges to Russian drug companies in drug procurement schemes to state hospitals and pharmacies.
If there’s just one Russian company competing against any number of Western drug companies in a tender, the hospital is under legal obligation to purchase from the Russian drug company even if their price is higher and quality is lower, which is always the case as Russia makes far inferior drugs for higher costs due to inefficiencies and backward scientific base.
In Putin’s system, the bosses of Russian pharma companies can never lose. He ensured that they rake in money while Russian citizens who already live less than Syrians and Africans would be dying in droves from legal poison.
Russian pharma hasn’t been investing in R&D to create original drugs because it’s prohibitively expensive and waiting time for ROI is too long hey expect profits next year or the year after the next at the latest — and yet time and again they’re rewarded for it. The less you do the more money you make.
If in the past, this pharma company purchased APIs (substances) from Europe to make meds, due to sanctions they switched to India while keeping the prices as high. Fake and substandard drugs are pouring in from India to Russia without any notifications to the patients.
Perhaps the best example of the current state of affairs is that this former boss would buy meds only from Western Europe to treat himself and his family while continuing to sell dangerous crap to locals.
As his friend and a former owner of drug company once told him, “I was selling Russians the kind of meds that I wouldn’t give my dog.”
This confession has stayed singed in my memory for many years. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
J Lewis:
I suppose that if this is indicative of the general state of Russian industry and therefore, by deduction, the likely trajectory of the wider Russian economy, it's a question of “when” not “if” the Russian economy collapses 1991 Soviet style.
A purely extraction economy with failing manufacturing and services is not tenable in the long run.
Let's just hope that Ukraine is the ultimate beneficiary.
Cal Greg:
Is everything corrupt in Russia? everything to be scammed? No one cares at all about the country, but of course they say they are patriots, as long as they can scam everyone. It sounds so depressing and corrupt. No wonder there can be no long term change for the best. Everyone is so out of touch with these realities or they just don’t care because they know it can never change. How do you spell hopeless…
Daniel Lunsford:
“From the onset the only conclusion you would draw is that these people are in money-making business. Drugs are a sideshow to facilitate money transfers to the top dogs’ bank accounts.”
That’s actually not much different than the U.S.; just replace “oligarchs” with “corporate board of directors”. Often in the U.S., the BoD elected by the major shareholders have just as little practical background. As one example: ZeniMax Media, whose BoD was composed of a venture capitalist, multiple attorneys, and a retired baseball star. The only guy who actually had background in game development was forced out of the BoD early on…
*
HOW A VISIT TO AN AMERICAN SUPERMARKET WAS A FACTOR IN THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION
~ If Boris Yeltsin, Member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, hadn’t visited the USA in 1989, the history of the world could have taken a different path.
If Yeltsin hadn’t stopped at an American supermarket on the way to the airport, he might have never become the President of Russia, and never initiate the dissolution of the USSR.
That one trip to America — and the fateful spontaneous stop at Randall's, made such an impression on Yeltsin, he became disillusioned with the very idea of communism.
In September 1989, Boris Yeltsin arrived on his first unofficial visit to the United States.
He wasn’t the president of Russia, just one of the top Communist Party officials of the Supreme Council of the USSR — one of 500+ of them.
So, he was just like a regular member of State Duma today.
During his short stay in America, Yeltsin hadn’t been to any grocery stores. So, he decided to check one on his way to the airport, before flying back home.
The bus stopped at an ordinary American supermarket in Houston, TX.
The store shocked Yeltsin. He was flabbergasted. At the age of 58, he never seen anything like this in his life.
And Yeltsin wasn’t a commoner. He was heading one of strategic federal regions for a decade, before becoming the head of Moscow city. He was even put on the list to become one of the members of the almighty Politburo. He was bona fide member of the Soviet Communist elite. But such abundance of food and goods in a regular store genuinely shocked him.
Yeltsin kept throwing up his hands in surprise. He said that even members of the Politburo do not have such abundance. Even Gorbachev didn’t, Yeltsin said.
Later, on the plane, Yeltsin went silent for a long time. He sat with his head in his hands, and the struggle of feelings was clearly visible on his face.
Some Soviet people, after returning from western countries back to the USSR, were falling into deep depression. For there was an insoluble psychological conflict between how a person lived his entire life — and how he could have lived if he had been born in another country.
When Yeltsin came to his senses, he said bitterly: “What our poor people had been brought to.”
“All my life I’ve been telling fairy tales, my whole life I’ve been trying to invent things. But everything in the world has already been invented," lamented Yeltsin.
**
This is how Yeltsin's aide described it:
“When we were already returning to the airport, the devil pushed us to take a look at a typical American supermarket.
It was called Randall's Supermarket. From our group, only Boris Nikolaevich and I had never been to this kind of trading establishments.
Moreover, this was not a metropolitan, much less a New York store and, according to our standards, a very “ordinary” provincial one. If, of course, Houston can be considered a province.
Getting off the bus, I began to look for a crowd of people and something similar to our queues. However, there was no queue — neither around nor in the store itself.
It was a one-story building made of light metal structures. Naturally, none of the service personnel knew about our arrival and therefore there could be no talk of any “showing off”. An ordinary day, an “ordinary” assortment, “ordinary” visitors…
I was immediately struck by the abundance of light. And in general, the color scheme of everything was so bright and impressive that it felt like we were descending into the depths of a kaleidoscope.
The abundance of flowers was also mesmerizing — juicy, vibrant, as if just cut from a flower bed. Moreover, the flowers were not for sale, but as a decorative element.
As soon as we entered the supermarket, they called someone from the administration. From somewhere in the belly of the utility rooms appeared a very handsome young man in a snow-white shirt, neatly combed and, of course, smiling. It was the chief administrator. We introduced ourselves and said that we would like to find out about the work of the store.
No problem: the administrator invited a young saleswoman to assist us, and she led us through the aisles.
The main thing that interested us was the assortment. And in this regard, Yeltsin asked questions of the store employees.
The figure they named literally shocked us, and Boris Nikolayevich even asked again: did he understand the translator correctly? And the administrator repeated once again that the range of food products at that time actually amounted to approximately 30 thousand items.
When we walked along the rows, our eyes didn’t know where to stop. I could guess different things, but what I saw in this supermarket was no less amazing than America itself.
Some of us started counting the types of hams. We lost count.
I remembered our sausage shop on Krasnaya Presnya, where back in 1963 you could buy “Brunswick”, “Stolichnaya”, “Tambov”, “Uglich”, “Krakov” and a few other types of sausages.
At that time, I thought this [the variety of sausages] was the top of human dreams and that the first signs of communism hatched. To be fair, over the years, the store’s shelves began to empty and now only memories of its bright past remained. I remembered that Soviet store and compared it with this one in Houston, and realized that the abundance to which Khrushchev promised to lead us to had passed us by.
At that moment (in Houston), all 300 Soviet research institutes and departments whose job was to point to the advantages of socialism over capitalism could be trying to convinced me, but their efforts would be pointless.
The American reality, for example this supermarket, looked 100 times more convincing than any Soviet theories. Sure, not by bread alone a man lives... Not by sausage alone, not by cheese alone…
By the way, have you seen red, brown, lemon-orange cheese? How many types of cheese do you think we've seen in Houston? What about ham? All this unimaginable delicacy that everyone can try right in the store and decide — is it worth spending dollars on?
We couldn’t count the names of sweets and cakes, couldn’t grasp their variety of colors and their appetizing attractiveness with our eyes.
And although I am trying to convey my impressions, I understand that this is just a pathetic attempt, because the word is powerless before the reality of what that American store could offer.
Occasionally, I glanced at Yeltsin and noticed that it was a difficult test for him. And when a woman with a cart caught up with him, on top of which a little boy was sitting, Boris Nikolaevich, apologizing, began to question her.
Does she often go to this store? It turned out, only on Saturdays.
Is your family big? 3 people: she, husband and child.
What is your family income? The woman explained that she was temporarily not working and lived on her husband’s salary, $3,600 a month.
Yeltsin asked how much she usually spends on food? It turned out that this family was spending about $170 on food for a week. From Saturday to Saturday. She still paid rent, insurance…
In the vegetable section, we were literally shocked by the quality of the produce.
A radish the size of a large potato was illuminated by bright light, and water was scattered onto it from small “sprinklers.”
Radishes were literally dazzling, and next to them were onions, garlic, eggplants, cauliflower, tomatoes, cucumbers.
You want smoked eel — here.
Would you like lamprey? Or is your liver accustomed to sturgeon and oysters? Pineapples, bananas…
And at the confectionery section, one can could stand for hours: it probably surpasses Hollywood in terms of entertainment. A huge cake representing a hockey arena awaited the customer on a stand. The player figures were made of chocolate. A real work of art, and most importantly — accessible, quite accessible.
In general, this was a hypertensive topic. For Boris Nikolaevich and me, visiting the supermarket was a real shock.
As I am writing this book, my wife today (September 1991) went to the store to buy milk at 7 am, but there were queues. Queues are everywhere: you have to stand for 2 days to buy sugar. And this is here — in Moscow, in the second half of the 20th century, 73 years after the Great Revolution. At the time, when, according to Khrushchev’s calculations, we should all already be living under communism. Or maybe what we had built in the USSR is the true communism?
At the exit from the American supermarket, the girl sitting at the cash register didn’t not have to count anything. In her hands, she held a small device that resembled a hair dryer, which she quickly ran over the price code on the packages. After this operation, the price appeared on the computer cash register screen, the customer paid and could freely pass through the electronic turnstile. Well, what else could be simpler and smarter than such a system?
When we left the supermarket, the administrator gave us a present: a huge plastic bag with the packs of food from this store.
I fully believe that it was after Houston (after visiting the supermarket), on the plane, that Yeltsin’s last faith in his Bolshevik way of thinking finally collapsed.
Perhaps, in those moments of spiritual turmoil, the decision to leave the Communist party and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia irrevocably matured in him.”
It was then that Yeltsin realized that all the stories of “international journalists” about American workers who allegedly were dying in hellish poverty and dreamed only about moving to the USSR, all these stories were nothing more than propaganda. Even the party “elites” did not know that.
Based on the book by Lev Sukhanov (Boris Yeltsin’s assistant), "3 years with Boris Yeltsin."
*
After his visit to America, Yeltsin managed to become the first ever President of Russia.
It is in the status of the president of Russia that Yeltsin negotiated and signed the agreement to dissolve the USSR together with newly elected presidents of Ukraine and Belarus. Just the 3 of them destroyed the state that millions of communists were building for over 70 years. ~ Quora
Pat McCormack:
I drove across Ukraine and Russia and on to Almaty in the spring of 1997. It was shocking.
Later I worked in Siberia and from there Moscow might have well been Mars.
Despite the lovely trees in Tashkent the Soviet system failed utterly.
Alexander Yeletsky:
And 1997 was much better than 1990–92.
Giorgio Bellini:
The USSR nostalgia we so often read on Quora is exactly the nostalgia of what?
Elena Gold:
Free apartments, guaranteed jobs, no crime, free education, free medical care. Stability. Predictability. Youth of those who still remember the USSR.
Son of Peace:
Some people attach their self-worth to that of their country. The Soviet Union had power and accomplishments in spite of how terrible it could be.
Despite all the crimes against humanity, there are those who saw a benefit. The Russian language was once privileged across the Soviet Union. Today Ukrainian, Estonian, Kazakh and most of the others are on the rise.
Some might even see this independence as a threat to their pride. Russia is only a shadow of the Soviet Union. She is smaller and weaker. It doesn’t surprise me that such people prefer the past.
Jay Bazzinotti:
There is a story of how, in the 1960s, a Russian journalist was finally able to move to the West Berlin Bureau and when he got there and saw the abundance in the grocery store of ordinary Germans he exclaimed, “But WE won the war!” because he realized the Russians had nothing despite winning the war.
Son of Peace:
It might sound silly that a simple supermarket took out a superpower. But considering the history I am not sure it could’ve ended any other way.
Tom Bellinger:
The thing people don’t think about in concrete terms about communism was its promise of utopia, that the poverty and deprivation and totalitarianism was claimed to be temporary, a step on the road to a post-scarcity world where man could live in peace and harmony and nobody would want for anything.
Oh, sure, Internet kiddos will tell you they never achieved true communism like that’s an actual argument in its favor, but nothing about the generations that grew up under repression and shortages realizing the utopia would never come, realizing this is all there is.
*
UKRAINE’S BIRTH RATE AT A RECORD LOW
~ Birthrates in Ukraine have fallen by 28% in the first half of 2023, compared to the same period prior to the war, marking the most significant drop since Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 25.
Before the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukraine's birth rate was already among the lowest in Europe. Now, Ukrainian demographers predict it could become the world's lowest. In a worst-case scenario, Ukraine's population could drop to 30 million over the next two decades, down from 43 million before the invasion, says demographics expert Oleksandr Gladun from the Kyiv-based Ptoukha Institute for Demographic Studies.
In 2014, following the Russian occupation of Crimea, Ukraine's birth rate started to decline, with annual births dropping by 12%.
When Russia launched the war in 2022, Ukraine's fertility rate, according to experts, fell to approximately 1.2. This is nearly twice as low as the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population.
Due to the ongoing war, millions of Ukrainian women with children were forced to leave the country, while men aged 18 to 60 were prohibited from leaving. As a result, many couples were physically separated, while others delayed starting families, the report says.
In the first half of 2023, there were 96,755 children born in Ukraine. Since 2013, the country's fertility rate has been dropping by approximately 7% per year.
In early 2023, Ella Libanova, the director of the Ptoukha Institute, predicted that by 2030, Ukraine's population will become one of the oldest in Europe and will be approximately 30-35 million.
https://english.nv.ua/nation/birth-rates-in-ukraine-could-drop-to-world-s-lowest-level-news-50356055.html
Oriana:
Speaking of fertility rates, Chinas’s is 1.09 — or, depending on the source, 1.28. This is still higher than South Korea and Singapore.
Replacement rate is 2.1.
*
Russian conscripts have been getting older
*
THE USE OF HORSES IN WW2
Oriana:
Yes, it really is WW2 — horses weren’t used as extensively as during WW1, but several million horses were indeed used.
I imagine the common soldiers loved the horses, and brushing them and taking care of them was probably a wonderful escape from the misery of wartime. Officers may have felt that taking care of a horse was beneath them, and thus deprived themselves of effective therapy.
"Many of the soldiers loved their horses very much and did their best to care for them but food was scarce for both people and horses. There were some soldiers that even gave up their blankets so they could put them on their horses to help keep them warm in the cold rainy nights."
Yes, more horses (and donkeys and mules) were used in WW1 (there was still actual horse cavalry at the beginning of the war, but tanks replaced it).
"How many horses, donkeys and mules died in WW2? Unlike the 8 million figure for WW1, there is no definitive answer to the question of how many equines died in WW2. Estimates vary between 2-5 million.” (wiki)
Horses used in battle — millennia of tradition. But WW1 was pretty much the end of it. WW2 was getting more and more mechanized, but Germans apparently still relied on horses for supplies and some troop transport.
Not many people know that the greatest use of horses in any military conflict in history was by the Germans in WWII: 80% of their entire transport was equestrian.
German were stunned to see American troops completely motorized. I wonder to what extent it would be accurate to say that WW2 was about oil. Germany had no oil, and thus was motivated to try to conquer the Russian Baku fields in Azerbaijan.
https://www.flamesofwar.com/hobby.aspx?art_id=2486
Considering that 600,000 horses were needed to carry supplies in Operation Barbarossa, what issues did Germany have that prevented them from having a fully mechanized army in World War 2?
Germany actually relied even more heavily on horses than that — at various stages in the war, they used more than one million horses for military logistics. Also, a motorized army — let alone a mechanized one, as the question suggests — is very different from motorized logistics. Even had they replaced the cumulative millions of horses they used with trucks, the German soldiers would still have marched to battle on foot.
The reasons why motorized logistics, let alone a mechanized army were beyond Germany’s reach start in the 1920s and early 1930s.
At the start of the Nazi rearmament scheme in 1934, Nazi Germany had a few assets inherited from the Weimar days. This included the foundation for its military industry and a small, but overtrained army of 100,000 men. It was not so much an army of 100,000 men as much as 100,000 officers, NCOs, and specialists waiting for an army to lead.
But despite Germany’s great total industrial output, its economy on the whole was already not nearly as mechanized as the UK, the US, or even France. It had very little military materiel and hardly any reserves of trucks, ammunition, etc.
Over the course of the war, Germany (2.75 million) and the Soviet Union (3.5 million) together employed more than six million horses. The logistical role of horses in the Red Army was not as high as it was in the German Army because of Soviet domestic oil reserves and US truck supplies.
Building An Army is Cheap; Using it is Expensive
While analyses of military production during WWII tend to focus on tanks and planes, planes are only a plurality of military production and tanks are almost cheap. The hundreds of thousands of armored fighting vehicles of WWII represent something like 10–15% of all industrial production.
Germany and the Soviet Union together used more than six million horses throughout the war; the largest land armies in Europe never came close to motorizing their logistics. But even the partial motorization of their logistics, together with motorized Anglo-American logistics meant that motor transport production dwarfed tanks throughout the war. Motor vehicles were in turn dwarfed by ammunition manufacturing.
Building a model army is easy. Moving the tanks more than a few hundred kilometers from the factories is harder, and supplying an army for prolonged operations is even harder than that.
Spending Too Much Too Fast — Still Not Enough
If the Nazis wanted to run a balanced budget and build a powerful, well-rounded military on the order of the Imperial Army of 1914, they could not have had it any sooner than 1950. This is obviously incompatible with the promises that got them into office and the basic goals of Nazi ideology, so they did not run a balanced budget nor did they build a well-rounded military.
They undertook a vast, organized scheme of financial fraud and cut corners so they could preempt the other combatants with an “All guns, no butter” army. On the financial side, Nazi Germany averaged budget deficits of 180% for five years straight. Despite stealing Austria and Czechoslovakia’s gold reserves, Nazi Germany was on the brink of bankruptcy prior to invading Poland.
Fit for Battle, But Not for War: 1939–1940
As for corner-cutting, the Nazis spending the German economy to oblivion only got them so much to show for it. The Heer had priority and got its share of shiny toys, but as of 1939, it was impossible to also adequately provision it with motor transport, rail stock, and deep reserves of ammunition and materiel. The Kriegsmarine, well — the U-boat fleet was still modest, and compared to the Royal Navy, the US Navy, or even Italy’s Regia Marina. The surface fleet was a punchline.
Building a large army in such a time was only possible thanks to Hans von Seeckt and the army he built for Weimar Germany, which went on to be the core of Hitler’s army. The speed of the German buildup meant that quite a few divisions were hastily trained, unused to operating together, and consisted of middle-aged men.
However, the excellent quality of the NCO and junior officer corps meant even these units had reasonable combat value. Likewise, the best units of the Heer were undoubtedly excellent and well-led at all levels. These men could work little miracles on the battlefield, which their skilled commanders could often turn into great operational successes. But no matter how skilled they might be as soldiers, their logistical foundation was remarkably shaky.
Brilliant Soldiers Still Need Ammo
Even the brief invasion of Poland cost Germany almost 20% of its artillery ammunition stocks, despite how relatively little heavy fighting occurred. Had more cautious, realistic figures in the Polish government and military prevailed in Poland’s defensive planning, the German logistical system may have collapsed during the invasion of Poland — especially since Polish resistance lasting longer would have bought time for the planned French September offensive into the Saarland.
Likewise, Germany was only able to defeat France with little heavy fighting because the French Commander-in-Chief gambled on committing all of France’s reserves to a mobile battle in Belgium. This was not necessarily a stupid decision, but was much more risky than the situation would have recommended.
While he might not have been able to fully know that Germany was at the apex of its strength and would only weaken without new conquests, he would have known that the French and British had effectively only just begun their mobilizations and would be much stronger as time went by. Yet, he did not appreciate that France’s mission was first and foremost to survive the danger of the summer of 1940 so that Germany could be outproduced to oblivion in the spring of 1941.
Had his deputy, the more sensibly cautious and acute Alphonse Georges been in command, the French would have occupied safer dispositions and kept a healthy strategic reserve. As a consequence, the rapid French collapse would have been impossible and the Heer [army]would have ultimately exhausted itself.
This is not my own armchair generalship, but the opinion of the German generals who planned the operation themselves. The victory condition for the Manstein Plan was nothing more or less than the total, premature commitment of France’s strategic reserve.
Why Germany Could Never Motorize Its Logistics
Germany’s logistics and motorization efforts were hampered by chronic shortages of oil, to be sure. But the most fundamental truth is that Nazi Germany’s economy was utterly inadequate to provide the Wehrmacht with what it needed to win a long war. Germany would have been helped quite a lot if it had infinite oil, but its air and naval forces would remain woefully inadequate, the vehicles to fully motorize its logistics could never be built, and the soldiers would still labor under vast logistical difficulty in either North Africa or the Caucasus.
The whole war was strategically unsound from the beginning and relied on operational miracles to compensate. It reminds one of a famous Sun Tzu maxim:
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
When Hitler encountered a nail, his only hammer was the mass, skill, and aggression of the Heer and its ability to execute quick, decisive, war-winning battles.
That this could not overcome the distances and logistical trials of Russia and North Africa is only slightly less obvious than the fact that it could not overcome the waters of the English Channel.
Not only were they incapable of the impossible feats that defeating the USSR demanded, but attrition would put all of Han von Seeckt’s core of miracle men in the grave by 1943.
~ Robert Hansen, Quora
Mary:
Horses in WWII — WOW... That really surprised me.
Oriana:
An American reaction — by now also a pretty universal one in the developed world. But during WW2, only the US, the birthplace of the automobile, had a fully mechanized army.
But America had its own romance with the horse — the cowboy and his faithful steed.
Benedict Miller:
Germany had many problems that prevented it such as a shortage of oil, a shortage of rubber, the allies conducting a bombing campaign to destroy synthetic fuel production and the production of ball bearings… and that is just the things that come to mind immediately. If you couple those things with the fact that as you pointed out Germany was busy trying to produce weapons and ammunition more than trucks and it also begins to show other bottle necks in the quest to mechanize/motorize the army itself since to support that army they also needed a more robust logistical system as you mentioned… because while it is somewhat true that horses could live off the land to some degree, trucks cannot.
Therefore, until the logistical apparatus that supported the army could be robust enough to supply the needs of the military as it stood (without the additional fuel and parts requirements) it certainly couldn’t supply the needs of a mechanized army which would require so much more of everything than Germany had available. Germany just didn’t have enough time, oil, fuel, factories to produce the things they needed, manpower, production capacity to do it in the time they had, ball bearings, etc.
For Germany to succeed, the same as Japan, relied on a series of very quick victories that so demoralized and weakened its enemies that they simply withdrew or capitulated. If that strategy failed, then it was merely a matter of time until Germany lost and the degree to which its logistical support could improve was more or less hampered once several things occurred (the entrance of the US into the war which allowed for more bombing campaigns, the invasion of the USSR which closed off transport of resources from Japan to Germany through the USSR, the inability to force Britain to exit the war, failure to dominate the shipping routes between the US and Britain, etc).
Sebastian Mehler:
I read that Hitler was often envious of Imperial Germanys army of 1914 and that many senior officers expressed the opinion that the imperial army of 1914 was in a much better shape than the Wehrmacht of 1939 — which of course infuriated Hitler.
Robert Hansen:
It’s quite remarkable to think that all the powers were more or less shells of their former selves in the run-up to WWII — but that Germany was the one positioned and motivated to devour the power vacuum created in Central and Southeastern Europe.
When the two world wars are taken together, Germany “won” the first insofar as shattering the Entente and weakening its enemies far more than it was itself weakened. Even the loss of the navy and colonies was an imposed gift of sorts — the Nazis couldn’t have had nearly the army they did if they were paying for maintaining those, as well.
Albert Hall:
One of Germany’s problems was that they did not have the necessary logistics, being mainly dependent on the HORSE in the 3rd Echelon supply chains.
Robert Hansen:
The Depression-era tariffs are a great tragedy for how they disproportionately hurt Japan and Germany, being nations that lacked private access to vital resources. Germany and Japan’s crimes cannot be “blamed” on tariffs, of course — they made their own decisions.
But it was one of many factors preventing them from being integrated into/creating the modern, global economic system until they were crushed militarily and forced to prosper peacefully.
The failure of Yeltsin-era Moscow and Washington to overcome the same sort of problems is a large part of how we got so much misery in the Caucasus over the past 30 years, as well as the rise of Putin and his criminal war in Ukraine.
Douglas Williams:
Talk about “biting off more than you can chew.” Strategically, that is.
The real secret of Nazi Germany’s initial success lay in the battlefield miracles individual commanders like Rommel, Hoth, Guderian, and von Rundstedt were able to create, given the logistics they had to work with.
But winning battles was all that concerned Adolf Hitler—not whether his troops had dry socks or canned beef!
Cliff Sweeting:
That’s a pretty sound analysis. Germany was never going to win a war of attrition. Churchill understood this in 1939. All he had to do was get the Americans on board.
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THE PROFOUND EFFECTS OF AMERICANS LIVING LONGER LIVES
Despite a recent dip in life expectancy, more Americans than ever are living into their 90s. How they spend their money and time is altering the workplace, real estate, philanthropy, and more.
Thanks to lifestyle changes and the miracles of modern medicine and science, the number of people living into their 90s and beyond is growing every year, even with a slight dip in life expectancies due to the pandemic. Today, more than one third of all Americans are over 50. Every day 10,000 Americans are turning 65 and by 2030, one in five of us will be 65 or over, including the first Gen Xers. The 50-plus age group has already begun to reject the traditional retirement script of the previous generation, and in doing so are reimagining work and life choices that will pave the way for new kinds of lifecycles.
The question is: how will we use this incredible gift of time in a meaningful and productive way?
Some of us are opting out of our careers early, as we are seeing with the Great Resignation. The pandemic has led to an uptick in the number of retired Americans, according to a Pew study, fueled in part by rising household wealth, a result of strengthening home values and historic stock market gains. Others are staying in their jobs beyond age 65, out of desire or financial need, while demanding changes to accommodate schedules and work rhythms that suit them. They are beginning to understand the leverage they have as companies scramble to fill a resulting talent vacuum from those leaving.
Yet, according to a PWC study, only eight percent of corporations include age as a component of their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, which affects everyone regardless of gender, race, or religious beliefs and needs to change for all of us. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that at age 60, most people reach the pinnacle of their potential, and then ride that wave into their 80s.
Some “Reimagineers,” as I call them, are refiring into second careers, like Randy Boyd, a former businessman who is now the president of the University of Tennessee, a job that he stepped into at 60 (with only a bachelor’s degree) or Stephanie Young, who became a medical doctor in her early 60s after a long career as a book editor. According to a 2016 Kauffman Foundation study, the fast-growing cohort of entrepreneurs are people aged 55 to 64 years old, who account for 25 percent of total entrepreneurs (vs. less than 15 percent in 1996).
Boomers continue to be fit and active in ways that will push past the boundaries of how our bodies can perform as we live longer. When I ran the Toronto marathon in 2011, I watched in awe as Fauja Singh crossed the finish line at age 100—the oldest person to ever do so. At 68, I’m still running marathons, skiing, and hiking mountains and hope to do so for many more years, as a role model for those who come after me.
We are also defying the marketing belief that people over 50 are brand loyal and locked into our younger-years preferences. Just ask any Tesla dealer who their primary customer is.
Often ignored by marketers, older Americans have $15 trillion in spending power, which represents nearly double digits growth from 2010, according to the Global Coalition on Aging. To disregard this group is to miss out on a generation of vibrant and dynamic spenders who are offended by the outdated images of older consumers walking into the sunset in most advertising and marketing messages. We’ll force a reckoning on this front, too, demanding to be portrayed as active, tech-savvy and curious.
Another market we are upending: housing. More of us are choosing to move to inter-generational neighborhoods, as opposed to senior living communities. We don’t want to move to Florida, we want to age at home. We don’t want to stay alive at all costs and will pioneer new ways of living that generations after us will refine, as they have with other trends that we have started.
It has been much reported that over the next 20 years, the Boomers will deliver the largest transfer of generational wealth in the history of the world, an estimated $60 to $70 trillion dollars in assets that will either be accessed by them or passed on to the next generations.
Perhaps this is how we can make the biggest statement of our generational legacy.
For those of us who are financially fortunate, we can make a massive impact on the philanthropy world, addressing climate change, social justice, mental health, and more. We have the opportunity to create social impact by funding new initiatives that drive meaningful change, bringing us full circle to our earlier days as activists in the 60s and 70s.
For those of us who are financially fortunate, we can make a massive impact on the philanthropy world, addressing climate change, social justice, mental health, and more. We have the opportunity to create social impact by funding new initiatives that drive meaningful change, bringing us full circle to our earlier days as activists in the 60s and 70s.
Yup, we boomers are at it again. This time, however, it will be how we blow up what we are supposed to do as we live longer and construct new ways of living our lives that will lead to more possibilities for us and the next generations.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-profound-effect-of-americans-living-longer-lives?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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“WHAT? TWO THOUSAND YEARS AND NO NEW GODS?”
Collective imagination, collective psyche. Joseph Campbell was often asked why myth-making has ceased (and let’s not forget Nietzsche’s pretend outrage: “What? 2,000 years, and no new gods?”) Campbell would point to movies like Star Wars as an example of modern myth-making, but he also admitted that in the sense of myths becoming a religion, those times seem to over. The conditions aren't right for it (though certainly new cults are born — they just don't seem to last very long). I suspect the main condition for “sacred” myth making is that the culture has to be pre-scientific, and better yet, pre-literate.
In addition, perhaps Julian Jaynes is right, and people’s mentality needs to be such that they experience their thoughts as external voices — or at least enough of them do, becoming revered as prophets, with others willing to be guided by the prophets’ hallucinations. But once we “owned” our thoughts and dreams, we became our own gods. Dawkins said about Jaynes: “It is one of those [theories] that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.”
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THE MADONNA OF TENDERNESS
Painted around 1130 in Constantinople, now in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, The Madonna of Vladimir is also known as "Our Lady of Tenderness.” It is an example of a type of icon known as the Eleusa — a depiction of the Virgin Mary in icons in which the Christ Child is nestled against her cheek. In the Western Church the type is often known as the Virgin of Tenderness.
The root of “Eleusa” reminds me of the part of the Catholic mass known as “Kyrie.” It’s very simple. The priest intones: “Kyrie eleison” — Lord, have mercy — and the response is Christe eleison — Christ have mercy. This is repeated in a special pattern. Perhaps because of the simplicity, this was my favorite part of the liturgy. Now I’m taken aback by the idea that life must have been pretty miserable for the faithful to be constantly begging for mercy.
What especially delighted me was that we were suddenly using Greek (I loved languages).
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THE HAPPY MADONNA
Commenting on the Madonna of Tenderness, a friend said that Mary looks unhappy. I replied that Christianity is not a happy religion, with a suffering god (as opposed to the happy Buddha — some statues show him as fat and laughing).
Still, I tried to find a happy Madonna, and — success! She's in Toledo, Spain. She is officially called the SMILING MADONNA. Some say her smile looks like the archaic smile of early Greek statues.
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WHY DEVOUT CHRISTIANS SUPPORT TRUMP
~ I live in a society (Australia) where religion is not a common topic of conversation, so I was initially perplexed that a man with Donald Trump’s apparent character flaws could be elected as President of the United States with considerable support from strongly religious constituents. I now find that psychology research has shown that these characteristics may be typical of the strongly religious members of society (although this may not be true of moderately religious constituents). In other words, apart from religiousness, Trump seems more typical of many devoutly religious people than they would care to admit.
David M. Wulff reports, in Psychology of Religion 2nd ed., 1997):
More than a half century ago, social scientists began exploring the relationship of religiousness to a variety of moral and humanitarian concerns. What they uncovered was disturbing, especially to those who were religious themselves. Abraham Franzblau (1934), for example, found a negative relation between acceptance of religious beliefs and all three of his measures of honesty. Furthermore, religious belief bore no relation to his test of character …
Hirschi and Stark (1969) discovered that children who attended church regularly were no less likely to commit illegal acts, according to their own estimations, and Ronald Smith, Gregory Wheeler, and Edward Diener (1975), in a quasi-experimental situation found that religious college students—including a group of Jesus people—were no less likely to cheat on a multiple-choice test and no more likely to volunteer to help mentally retarded children than atheists and other "nonreligious" persons. The religious subjects in Russell Middleton and Snell Putney's (1962) investigation even reported a higher frequency of cheating on examinations than did the skeptics.
Rokeach (1969) found his religious subjects to be preoccupied with personal salvation and relatively indifferent to social inequality and injustice.
There you have it. According to this research, devout Christians are not as concerned with “Christian values” as they would like us to believe. ~ Dick Harfield, Quora
Lee Coppack:
There seems to be a strong element of credulousness among religious fundamentalists and, in the US, Trump supporters and the far right. This seems to circumvent the negative credibility of the object of their beliefs It would be interesting to know if there are particular areas of the brain involved.
Laura Streeter:
Trump is similar to the televangelist pastors his followers see on TV and his rallies are almost interchangeable with the mega church gatherings that his devotees attend every Sunday. It’s all an enormous spectacle with Trump standing in the center of his stage soaking up the adulation of his cult followers like he’s a giant narcissistic orange sponge. He stirs up their racism, fear of immigrants, vengeance against gay people, or anyone else they are uncomfortable with or hate. And because his followers have no critical thinking skills, he has become their god-like authority and they figure it gives them permission to attack others.
In 2021, a year after he left office, presidential historians across the board from conservative to liberal ranked him 4th from the bottom of all US presidents. This was before the 91 criminal charges against him. If he is convicted of any one of these charges he will most likely be ranked as the worst president in US history. ~ Quora
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NEURONAL SCAFFOLDING PLAYS A SURPRISING ROLE IN CHRONIC PAIN
~ Neuroscientists, being interested in how brains work, naturally focus on neurons, the cells that can convey elements of sense and thought to each other via electrical impulses. But equally worthy of study is a substance that’s between them — a viscous coating on the outside of these neurons. Roughly equivalent to the cartilage in our noses and joints, the stuff clings like a fishing net to some of our neurons, inspiring the name perineuronal nets (PNNs). They’re composed of long chains of sugar molecules attached to a protein scaffolding, and they hold neurons in place, preventing them from sprouting and making new connections.
Given this ability, this little-known neural coating provides answers to some of the most puzzling questions about the brain: Why do young brains absorb new information so easily? Why are the fearful memories that accompany post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) so difficult to forget? Why is it so hard to stop drinking after becoming dependent on alcohol? And according to new research from the neuroscientist Arkady Khoutorsky and his colleagues at McGill University, we now know that PNNs also explain why pain can develop and persist so long after a nerve injury.
Neural plasticity is the ability of neural networks to change in response to experiences in life or to repair themselves after brain injury. Such opportunities for effortless change are known as critical periods when they occur early in life. Consider how easily babies pick up language, but how difficult it is to learn a foreign language as an adult. In a way, this is what we’d want: After the intricate neural networks that allow us to understand our native language are formed, it’s important for them to be locked down, so the networks remain relatively undisturbed for the rest of our lives.
This means that after a critical period, neural networks become resistant to change, and PNNs are a major reason why. They form over neurons and lock neural network wiring in place at the end of the critical period. This happens most often between the ages of 2 and 8, but PNNs also form on neurons in adulthood in association with behaviors that are hard to break, or in the formation of long-term memories. If we could delay the closure of critical periods, or somehow reopen them later in life, this would restore youthful neural plasticity, promote recovery from injury and undo difficult neurological disorders that are resistant to change.
Recent research shows that this can indeed be done, simply by manipulating PNNs. For example, keeping an animal in complete darkness slows the development of PNNs on vision neurons, keeping open the critical period for neural plasticity to correct vision problems much longer. Chemical agents and genetic manipulation can also degrade PNNs and reopen critical periods, and researchers have done this to make mice forget memories that caused them PTSD (in their case, memories of an electric shock administered right after they heard a tone).
It’s also possible to stimulate the growth of PNNs. This happens when someone drinks alcohol to excess, which results in the formation of these nets on neurons involved in addiction. The coating is believed to protect neurons from the chemical toxicity of the alcohol, but it also locks in the thought process that triggers an overpowering urge to drink.
Perineuronal nets (in red) surround neurons in a mouse brain (with nuclei stained blue). New research shows similar nets in the spinal cord also help regulate how a brain perceives pain.
While neuroscientists have learned about these aspects of PNNs over the past few decades,
the influence of PNNs on chronic pain was an unexpected recent discovery. This work, which further extends the nets’ influence beyond critical periods, not only improves our understanding of the basic science of pain, but also gives us a better picture of PNNs themselves.
Chronic pain, which persists long after an injury, reflects a change in neuronal circuitry that can be difficult to overcome. When something hurts, our whole body gets involved. Specialized pain neurons throughout the body transmit neural impulses into the spinal cord, where they are relayed to the brain. This means the spinal cord plays a major role in our sense of pain; indeed, doctors often manage the pain of childbirth by administering an epidural, which involves injecting anesthetics into the space surrounding the lumbar spinal cord, blocking neural impulses from reaching the brain.
Now imagine if instead of suppressing neural transmission at this point, a nerve injury made those neurons hypersensitive. Even a gentle touch in the affected area would cause a barrage of neuronal impulses to travel up the spinal cord, registering as intense pain. Previous research identified several mechanisms that can cause such hypersensitization, but no one expected PNNs to be involved.
A few years ago, however, Khoutorsky saw a paper reporting that PNNs were coating certain small neurons in a brain region where pain information is transmitted. These “inhibitory interneurons” form synapses on the pain neurons, suppressing their ability to transmit pain signals. Khoutorsky wondered if PNNs might be doing something similar at the critical pain relay point inside the spinal cord, and he asked his graduate student Shannon Tansley to look into it. “At that time nothing was known,” Khoutorsky said.
Tansley did indeed find that PNNs were encasing certain neurons in the spinal cord where it relays pain signals to the brain. The neurons have long axons (the “tail” that sends signals to the next cell in line) that point up the spinal cord to the brain. They also have a set of inhibitory interneurons attached to them through small holes in the PNN, and the inhibitory neurons can squelch the firing of the long projecting neurons, shrinking the signal reaching the brain and blunting the sensation of pain. Tansley discovered, to her surprise, that only these inhibitory neurons in the spinal cord relay point were coated with PNNs.
This finding inspired Khoutorsky’s team to undertake experiments on laboratory mice to determine if these nets were somehow involved in chronic pain after a peripheral nerve injury. They cut branches of a mouse’s hind leg nerve, known as the sciatic, while it was under general anesthesia. This mimics sciatic injuries in people, which are known to cause persistent pain. Days later, Khoutorsky’s team measured the mouse’s pain threshold with non-harmful tests, such as timing how quickly it recoiled from a warmed surface. As expected, the team saw the mouse display sharply increased pain sensitivity — but they also noticed that the PNNs around the projecting neurons had dissolved. Just as the brain’s changes during critical periods affects PNNs, the abrupt changes after nerve injury in the mouse had modified the PNNs in its spinal cord’s pain circuit.
The team then figured out what was causing the nets’ destruction: microglia, the brain and spinal cord cells that initiate repairs after disease and injury. To test the connection between microglia and pain, the team turned to mice with virtually no microglia (made possible with genetic engineering) and performed the same operation. In these mice, the PNNs remained intact after the sciatic nerve surgery and, remarkably, the mice did not become hypersensitive to painful stimuli. To confirm the connection, the team used various means to dissolve the nets, which raised the mice’s sensitivity to pain.
This proved that the PNNs were directly suppressing pain sensitivity. By measuring synaptic transmission with electrodes, Khoutorsky’s team even found out how it works. Degrading the PNNs caused a chain reaction that resulted in increased signaling from the projecting neurons that send pain signals to the brain: When the microglia responding to the nerve injury dissolved the PNNs, this weakened the influence of the inhibitory neurons that normally dampen the firing of the brain-projection neurons. Losing their inhibitory brakes meant runaway neural firing and intense pain.
Microglia release many substances that cause pain neurons to become hypersensitive after nerve injury, but their unexpected action on PNNs has a major advantage: specificity. “Usually what perineuronal nets do is they lock plasticity, and they also protect cells,” Khoutorsky said. “So why are these nets only around these pain relay neurons, and not around other cell types [nearby]?” He suspects that it’s because this pain relay point in the spinal cord is so important that these neurons and their connections need extra protection so that their control of pain transmission is strong and reliable. Only something as dramatic as a neural injury can disrupt that stability.
“The beauty of this mechanism is that it is selective for specific cell types,” Khoutorsky said. The substances microglia release to increase neural firing and cause pain after neural injury affect all types of cells in the vicinity, but the PNNs encase only these neurons precisely at the critical relay point in the spinal cord.
Research is underway to better understand this new mechanism of chronic pain. If researchers can develop methods to rebuild PNNs on these neurons after injury, it could provide a new treatment for chronic pain — an urgent need, considering that opiates, the current solution, lose their potency over time and can become addictive or result in a fatal overdose.
What goes on inside neurons is fascinating and important to understand, but neural networks are formed by individual neurons linked together, and here it is the neglected cartilaginous cement in the space between them that is vital.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/neuronal-scaffolding-plays-unexpected-role-in-chronic-pain-20220728/
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BEING A VEGETARIAN MAY BE PARTLY IN YOUR GENES
~ From Impossible Burger to "Meatless Mondays," going meat-free is certainly in vogue. But a person's genetic makeup plays a role in determining whether they can stick to a strict vegetarian diet, a new Northwestern Medicine study has found.
The findings open the door to further studies that could have important implications regarding dietary recommendations and the production of meat substitutes.
"Are all humans capable of subsisting long term on a strict vegetarian diet? This is a question that has not been seriously studied,"said corresponding study author Dr. Nabeel Yaseen, professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
A large proportion (about 48 to 64%) of self-identified "vegetarians" report eating fish, poultry and/or red meat, which Yaseen said suggests environmental or biological constraints override the desire to adhere to a vegetarian diet.
"It seems there are more people who would like to be vegetarian than actually are, and we think it's because there is something hard-wired here that people may be missing.”
Several genes involved in lipid metabolism, brain function
To determine whether genetics contribute to one's ability to adhere to a vegetarian diet, the scientists compared UK Biobank genetic data from 5,324 strict vegetarians (consuming no fish, poultry or red meat) to 329,455 controls. All study participants were white Caucasian to attain a homogeneous sample and avoid confounding by ethnicity.
The study identified three genes that are significantly associated with vegetarianism and another 31 genes that are potentially associated. Several of these genes, including two of the top three (NPC1 and RMC1), are involved in lipid (fat) metabolism and/or brain function, the study found.
"One area in which plant products differ from meat is complex lipids," Yaseen said. "My speculation is there may be lipid component(s) present in meat that some people need. And maybe people whose genetics favor vegetarianism are able to synthesize these components endogenously. However, at this time, this is mere speculation and much more work needs to be done to understand the physiology of vegetarianism.”
The study will be published Oct. 4 in the journal PLOS ONE. It is the first fully peer-reviewed and indexed study to look at the association between genetics and strict vegetarianism.
Why do most people eat meat?
Religious and moral considerations have been major motivations behind adopting a vegetarian diet, and recent research has provided evidence for its health benefits. And although vegetarianism is increasing in popularity, vegetarians remain a small minority of people worldwide. For example, in the U.S., vegetarians comprise approximately 3 to 4% of the population. In the U.K., 2.3% of adults and 1.9% of children are vegetarian.
This raises the question of why most people still prefer to eat meat products. The driving factor for food and drink preference is not just taste, but also how an individual's body metabolizes it, Yaseen said. For example, when trying alcohol or coffee for the first time, most people would not find them pleasurable, but over time, one develops a taste because of how alcohol or caffeine makes them feel.
"I think with meat, there's something similar," Yaseen said. "Perhaps you have a certain component -- I'm speculating a lipid component -- that makes you need it and crave it."
If genetics influence whether someone chooses to be a vegetarian, what does that mean for those who don't eat meat for religious or moral reasons?
"While religious and moral considerations certainly play a major role in the motivation to adopt a vegetarian diet, our data suggest that the ability to adhere to such a diet is constrained by genetics," Yaseen said. "We hope that future studies will lead to a better understanding of the physiological differences between vegetarians and non-vegetarians, thus enabling us to provide personalized dietary recommendations and to produce better meat substitutes.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/10/231004150529.htm
Oriana:
One interesting statistic about vegetarianism is that “In the majority of the Western world, female vegetarians seem to outnumber male by about 2 to 1.” (Quora)
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MOTHER’S LONGEVITY PREDICTS LONGEVITY IN DAUGHTERS
The mother’s life span can determine how long daughters will have and whether they will suffer from cancer, diabetes or heart disease, says a new study.
Women whose mothers live up to the age of 90 are more likely to have increased lifespan, without suffering from any serious illnesses like cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, a study has found. The study, published in the journal Age and Aging, also found that if the father lived to 90, it did not correlate to increased longevity and health in daughters.
However, if both the mother and father lived to 90, the likelihood of the daughter achieving longevity and healthy aging jumped to 38%, researchers said. “Our results show that, not only did these women live to age 90, but they also aged well by avoiding major diseases and disabilities,” said Aladdin Shadyab, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California — San Diego in the US.
The study analyzed data from about 22,000 postmenopausal women participating in the Women’s Health Initiative, a large, national study in the US investigating major risk factors for chronic diseases among women. Shadyab and colleagues believe a combination of genetics, environment and behaviors passed to subsequent generations may influence aging outcomes among offspring.
“We now have evidence that how long our parents live may predict our long-term outcomes, including whether we will age well, but we need further studies to explore why. We need to clarify how certain factors and behaviors interact with genes to influence aging outcomes,” Shadyab said.
The women in the study whose mothers lived to at least 90 were more likely to be college graduates, married with high incomes and incorporated physical activity and a healthy diet into their lives, researchers said.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/fitness/mother-s-life-span-determines-how-long-daughters-will-live-how-healthy-they-will-be/story-ugq4WkQbLl3LxO0BNhoE7L.html
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PREGNANCY PERMANENTLY REWIRES THE BRAIN
Pregnancy leads to a permanent rewiring of neurons, according to research that gives new insights into the influence of hormones on behavior.
The research, in mice, revealed that their parenting instincts were triggered by changes in the brain that occur in response to estrogen and progesterone late in pregnancy. Similar changes are likely to occur in the human brain, according to scientists, who said the work could pave the way for fresh understanding into parenting behavior and postpartum mental health.
Dr Jonny Kohl, who led the research at London’s Francis Crick Institute, said: “We know that the female body changes during pregnancy to prepare for bringing up young. One example is the production of milk, which starts long before giving birth. Our research shows that such preparations are taking place in the brain, too.”
The findings are consistent with brain imaging research in women showing changes to brain volume and brain activity that endure long after pregnancy. Kohl pointed out that “parenting is obviously a lot more complex in humans”.
The studies were carried out in mice, which undergo a dramatic shift in behavior, with virgin females showing no interest in pups, and mouse mothers spending most of their time looking after young. Previously it had been widely assumed that the onset of this behavior occurred during or just after birth, possibly triggered by hormones such as oxytocin. However, the latest research puts the change at an earlier stage and also suggests that the changes may be permanent.
The scientists used miniature devices attached to the heads of the mice to record directly from a population of neurons in the hypothalamus, which had already been linked to parenting behaviors.
Brain recordings showed that estrogen reduced the baseline activity of these neurons, but made them more excitable in response to incoming signals. Progesterone rewired their inputs, causing the formation of more synapses so that these neurons were more densely connected up to other parts of the brain – and these changes appeared to be permanent.
“We think that these changes, often referred to as ‘baby brain’, cause a change in priority – virgin mice focus on mating, so don’t need to respond to other females’ pups, whereas mothers need to perform robust parental behavior to ensure pup survival,” said Kohl. “What’s fascinating is that this switch doesn’t happen at birth – the brain is preparing much earlier for this big life change.”
When the mice were engineered so that the neurons were insensitive to the hormones, they failed to show any switch to parental behavior even after giving birth, suggesting that there is a critical window in late pregnancy when these hormones take effect.
In humans, hormonal changes are not the only, or even necessarily the primary influence on parenting behavior. But understanding the changes taking place in the brain could provide new insights into the influences on parental bonding and conditions including postpartum depression and psychosis.
Prof Robert Froemke, of NYU Langone, who was not involved in the research, said: “There is still so much we don’t understand about parenting and hormone signaling in the body and brain – these results are a solid step in that direction. Parenting is among the most complex and difficult set of behaviors we and other animals engage in, and there’s not a lot of room for ‘trial and error’ especially in the earliest days postpartum when infants need a lot of care.
“The hormonal changes documented here seem to help prime the parental brain to respond to infant needs right out of the gate, so that parental rodents, much like new human parents, can do a good job and be sensitive to their babies as soon as possible,” Froemke added.
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ending on beauty:
Not knowing when the Dawn will come,
I open every Door,
Or has it Feathers, like a Bird,
Or Billows, like a Shore —
~ Dickinson
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