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ASPHODEL
When the darkness seized me,
the great love of my youth,
when I dared to reach for the most
magnificent narcissus,
the earth opened and horses
rearing like black smoke
carried me off to marry
the Invisible Lord —
so my song would be both
ravishing and true.
Because love has two flowers:
narcissus and asphodel.
A hundred-headed narcissus!
We grow of many minds.
A hundred wishes, ten thousand —
and echo has the last word.
Narcissus — flower of youth,
rippling into departure.
Asphodel swaying in no wind,
in twilight memory of sun,
you have no scent except
in the mind that remembers.
Asphodel, flower of soul,
of love at the ripe hour:
the ancients understood
the soul feeds on flowers.
Even in hell,
a life filled with flowers.
After trails of sunny narcissi,
I walk in mothlike meadows.
~ Oriana
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~ Time wounds all heels but it doesn't heal all wounds, instead it turns the wounds into vaguely painful empty spaces within us, it makes us older, it makes us weaker, it makes us sadder and weepier, it makes us lonelier and ever more in need of love, it makes us maudlin and sentimental, soft and uncertain and gullible, brittle and frail, the slow-walking gluttons for life's punishment... but in the end, as its sole act of kindness, it slips away quietly and leaves us alone, face to face with its eternal opposite — timelessness. ~ Misha Iossel
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AN ARAB-AMERICAN VIEWS GAZA
Qassem Ali on his rooftop balcony in Gaza
With few journalists on the ground and frequent phone and internet blackouts, it has been hard to get a clear picture of what life is like for people in Gaza.
It is becoming a little more clear now that some foreign nationals have been allowed to cross from Gaza into Egypt. One of them is 65-year-old Qassem Ali.
Ali grew up in the northeast Gaza village of Beit Hanoun and worked as a journalist. He studied in America, and in 1997, got U.S. citizenship.
Over a Zoom call, he told NPR he was visiting his 90-year-old mother in northern Gaza — about two miles from the border with Israel – when, on Oct. 7, Hamas insurgents crossed into Israel, killing more than 1,400 people and taking more than 200 others hostage.
The morning the war began, Ali was on the rooftop garden of his family home.
"I love gardening, so I have a nice rooftop," he said. "I hear the missiles ... and, you know, [as a] former journalist, I start filming.”
His video shows a lush garden full of plants. There is a sunrise and the sounds of birds chirping, and then — explosions. One after another. And close.
"I figure it will be serious," Ali recalled. "So I decided to take a shower before the Israelis — I know it's crazy but that's the reality — I took a shower quickly because I don't want to be dying while I'm naked, you know?”
He and his mother fled to his sister's apartment in Gaza City. The missiles from Israel followed them there, so they fled again. The days started to blur together.
"You don't know days, my friend," he said. "You don't know if it's Monday or Friday, all the days are the same. If you ask me now what's the day, I don't know. That's the life of war. Especially this war.”
"I have been covering all the wars in Gaza ... but this is different. This is not just a war. This is more than a war.”
In the four weeks since the conflict began, more than 10,000 people have died in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health.
Despite all this — despite the violence, despite not knowing what day it is, despite being a U.S. citizen — Ali said he didn't think about trying to leave. Not at first.
"I wanted to stay with my sister and my mother," he said. But then he managed to talk to his 13-year-old daughter Nadia, who lives in Canada.
"And I couldn't die without seeing her. So then I decided to leave," he said.
Ali said he didn't hear anything from the American government, even after he registered as a citizen trying to leave. But it was his American passport that eventually got him out — through the Rafah crossing into Egypt this past Friday.
He said those who crossed were put on a bus and they traveled for hours through checkpoints and searches until they eventually arrived at a hotel in Cairo Saturday morning.
“The only thing I wanted to do is just go have a shower," he said. "For 26 days, you don't even wash your face or brush your teeth, and [you are] in the same clothes. And it's hot during the day, and you're sweating.”
Ali spoke to All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly on Sunday from Cairo, where he said he was preparing to move on to Malta.
Qassam Ali: I have to leave tomorrow morning, because they give us 72 hours. I don't understand why. I have a house in Cairo, I have a farm in Cairo. [The U.S. officials say] "You'll have to leave." So I decided to go to Malta and just spend some time there to see and then to think [about] what I'm going to do after I've recovered.
Mary Louise Kelly: So where is your mother now? Where is your sister?
Ali: My mother and my sister and my niece and nephew are still there in Gaza. They refuse to leave. They decide if we're going to die, let's die in our house. Of course, this is why I'm not happy leaving, because I'm worried about them. My mother, she raised us, seven kids, by herself — [we] got the best education. So I love my mom, and now I am leaving her.
People think I'm happy to leave. No. Usually, I travel a lot in my life out of Gaza, and always I feel Gaza is a prison. When you get in, you get in the prison. Always you need permission to leave and always I am happy to get out of Gaza ... But this time I don't feel I am free. I don't feel I am safe. Because part of me is still in Gaza.
Kelly: Do you think you'll ever go back? Do you think you'll see Gaza again in your life?
Ali: I don't know. I love Gaza. I am addicted to Gaza. You know, I have a chance to live comfortably all over the world, but I always come back to Gaza. I don't know. If my mother stays alive, I will go. Even if nothing is for me there after all of this destruction ... I don't like to die without seeing Gaza again.
Kelly: You said you feel angry now. At who? Who do you blame for what's happening to your home, to your family?
Ali: Israelis and the Americans. And really I'm angry at Mr. Biden.
Kelly: Even though the U.S. helped you get to safety? Even though the U.S. helped you get out?
Ali: Oh, no no no. No no no. Take me to safety? No no. Not at all. When they're helping in the destruction of your own people? I think the American government, even with this situation, they were cheap. When they put us in the hotel and they tell us, "You have to leave in 72 hours. If you want to go to the States, you have to organize the ticket.”
This is the American government which is giving Israel $14 billion, and they are not capable of taking charters for their own citizens to the United States and told me I have to be thankful for the American government? Why? There is a duty to protect and to help their own citizens, no matter what their background is – they are Palestinians or Israelis or Europeans, or anywhere. All United States citizens are from immigrant origins. Why this discrimination?
As for what's next, Ali said he wants to see his daughter in Canada — and his other kids — but not right away. He said he needs time, psychologically and physically, and he wants to protect his kids from what he has experienced.
He doesn't want to bring the war to them. He just witnessed so many kids in Gaza who have no choice but to live through it. ~
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/06/1210847774/gaza-americans-israel-hamas-war-middle-east
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THE DEATH TOLL IN GAZA
~ More than 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military offensive nearly a month ago, the Hamas-controlled health ministry in the Palestinian enclave said Monday.
Israel declared war on Hamas after the Islamist militant group launched a brutal attack on October 7, killing 1,400 in Israel and kidnapping more than 240. Israel retaliated by launching an air and ground offensive on Gaza, vowing to eliminate the militant group.
Ashraf Al Qudra, spokesperson for the ministry, said 10,022 Palestinians in the enclave had been killed by Israeli strikes, including 4,104 children, 2,641 women and 611 elderly people. Those numbers suggest about three-quarters of the dead are from vulnerable populations. The ministry also reported 25,408 injured.
It’s unclear how many combatants are included in the total. CNN cannot independently verify the numbers released by the ministry in Gaza, which is sealed off by Israel and mostly sealed by Egypt.
Thousands more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in the last month than those who died in conflicts with Israel spanning over the last 15 years.
At least one child is being killed in Gaza every 10 minutes as a result of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, according to CNN calculations based on the latest numbers released by the Gazan health ministry.
More than 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military offensive nearly a month ago, the Hamas-controlled health ministry in the Palestinian enclave said Monday.
Israel declared war on Hamas after the Islamist militant group launched a brutal attack on October 7, killing 1,400 in Israel and kidnapping more than 240. Israel retaliated by launching an air and ground offensive on Gaza, vowing to eliminate the militant group.
Ashraf Al Qudra, spokesperson for the ministry, said 10,022 Palestinians in the enclave had been killed by Israeli strikes, including 4,104 children, 2,641 women and 611 elderly people. Those numbers suggest about three-quarters of the dead are from vulnerable populations. The ministry also reported 25,408 injured.
The latest violence has caused more than 1,400 deaths in Israel and at least 10,022 in Gaza as of Nov. 6, according to authorities on both sides.
It’s unclear how many combatants are included in the total. CNN cannot independently verify the numbers released by the ministry in Gaza, which is sealed off by Israel and mostly sealed by Egypt.
Thousands more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in the last month than those who died in conflicts with Israel spanning over the last 15 years.
At least one child is being killed in Gaza every 10 minutes as a result of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, according to CNN calculations based on the latest numbers released by the Gazan health ministry.
The international charity Save the Children said last month that the number of children reported killed in the enclave during Israel’s campaign had surpassed the annual number of children killed in armed conflict globally in each of the past four years. The UN has described Gaza as a “graveyard” for children.
The United States has backed Israel’s campaign throughout the war, saying it has a right to defend itself. It vetoed a UN Security Council resolution for humanitarian pauses to deliver aid into Gaza on October 18, but President Joe Biden on Wednesday said that he was supportive of a humanitarian pause to allow for the release of more hostages held in Gaza.
Washington has also warned Israel that support may wane if the carnage in Gaza doesn’t stop.
Israel’s operation in Gaza has triggered protests across the world and prompted warnings of a potential intervention from Iran-backed militants in the region, which have already been engaged in skirmishes with the Israeli military.
Israel is, however, yet to show any signs of backing down, saying its operations in Gaza are only expanding.
Nearly 1.5 million Gazans have already been displaced in the 140-square-meter strip, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday, with thousands sheltering in crammed schools and hospitals with dwindling food, water and power. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/06/middleeast/gaza-10k-deaths-intl/index.html
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THE HAMAS BILLIONAIRES
The Hamas terrorist billionaires live in marble-floored mansions and luxury hotels as they decry Gaza poverty after profiting from misery and terror.
Estimates suggest some of Hamas's leaders have a net worth in the billions.
Israel and other critics accuse the group of spending money on luxuries instead of helping the people of Gaza.
Conditions in the Gaza Strip have long been dire, with the territory referred to by some as the world's 'largest open air prison’.
Even before the outbreak of war in the wake of Hamas's October 7 terror attack on Israel, half of Palestinians living in Gaza depended on food supplied by the United Nations.
Those conditions have deteriorated over the last month, as Israel continues its bombardment of the 140-square-mile Strip in its mission to destroy the Hamas terror group.
But as the territory's 2.3million people suffer, several hundred millionaires are registered in the coastal Strip.
And while the majority of citizens in the densely populated territory — which is a quarter of the size of Greater London — languish in poverty, a select few live in marble-floored mansions and luxury hotels.
According to the Embassy of Israel in the US, three of Hamas's most senior leaders — Mousa Abu Marzouk, Khaled Mashal and Ismail Haniyeh — have net worths of more than $3billion each. The embassy also claims that Hamas's annual turnover is $1billion and suggests the group is second only to ISIS as the world's richest terror group.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (far right) is seen on a private plane with other senior Hamas officials
Hamas is best known for its military wing, with reports that 40,000 terrorists wear the group's badge, thousands of whom took part in the October 7 attack. They are armed to the teeth with rifles and rockets, and have vowed to destroy Israel.
But the group is also the de facto authority that governs over Gaza, running organizations including its healthcare system, social services and the media.
It took power in 2006, with its political leader Ismail Haniyeh assuming the role of prime minister that year. It remains in control of the territory and — having called no elections since — is essentially an authoritarian regime.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (center) pictured in a luxury hotel with two of his sons
In the years since taking control, the group's leaders have profited off the misery of the Gazan people.
The Embassy of Israel in the US accused the group of using its funds for building tunnels and arming its fighters rather than building vital infrastructure such as wells and water treatment.
A study from 2021 suggested that about one-quarter of disease spread in the territory is caused by water pollution, and 12 per cent of deaths of young children are due to infections related to contaminated water.
'While Gazans are deprived of basic needs, Hamas uses aid and funds to line their own pockets,' the embassy said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Israel has also said Hamas continues to attack across the border without building civilian bomb shelters, knowing the Israeli military will retaliate.
Instead, Israel says Hamas's leadership hoards its wealth, uses Palestinians as human shields and allows the population it claims to govern go hungry.
According to German news outlet Bild, there are four Hamas officials who have grown particularly wealthy over the years — the trio of Abu Marzouk, Khaled Mashal and Ismail Haniyeh — as well as a fourth named Younis Qafisheh.
Haniyeh is believed to be the richest of the three — despite once vowing to live only on olive oil and za'atar spice.
A 61-year-old father of 13 children, Haniyeh has been in hiding since 2019, living the high-life in luxury hotels in Qatar and Turkey.
German tabloid Bild reports that he often jets between Tehran, Istanbul, Moscow and Cairo in his private jet to meet leaders in friendly nations, and two of his sons Maaz and Abdel Salam are often seen in Instagram posts lounging on hotel beds in Istanbul or Doha.
Maaz, who is a very wealthy real estate mogul in his own right, is known on the Gaza Strip as the 'father of houses'. When he's in Turkey, he is often seen in the company of attractive women and alcohol, despite his Islamic faith.
His brother Abdel Salam, meanwhile, was disgraced after being found to be siphoning off money in his role as sports ambassador for Hamas's 'Shura Council' (Politburo), Bild says.
The publication estimates his net worth to be $2.5million, while the Israeli embassy to the US suggested it was as much as $3.2billion. Another publication, i24News, wrote last month that his wealth could be as high as $5billion.
Khaled Mashal, 67, is the former head of Hamas's political bureau.
He fled Damascus to escape the Arab Spring in Syria and, like Haniyeh, is now living in Qatar. From there, he handles real estate and financial transactions for Hamas.
When he fled Syria, Bild reports, he is said to have taken $1.5 billion from Hamas's headquarters in Damascus. Israel's US embassy puts his net worth at $4billion.
Mousa Abu Marzouk, 72, is another Hamas high-flyer. He is considered the second in command within the group, and is a foreign minister of sorts.
After spending 14 years in the US — where he was in 1995 arrested for activities supporting terrorism and deported after two years — he moved to Jordan, then to Syria and then to Cairo in 2012.
Despite his arrest, he kept hold of his money, and today Bild reported his fortune is estimated at $2billion, while the Israeli embassy to the US puts it higher, at $3billion.
Younis Qafisheh, 67, is a fourth Hamas official highlighted by Bild for his immense wealth.
He is one of the terror group's most important financial managers, and has been on the US sanctions list since 2022 on account of being 'involved in directing Hamas operations and [holding] key positions in several Hamas-controlled companies, including Sudan-based Agrogate Holding and Turkey-based Trend GYO.’
Trend GYO, which is also on the US terror watch list, reported a 2022 net profit of 57.8million Turkish lira (around two million euros).
However, according to i24News, the wealth accumulated by Hamas's very top officials is just the tip of the iceberg.
The online outlet suggests that hundreds of Hamas leaders are sitting on millions thanks to the taxation of goods brought into the territory and through international donors, mainly from Qatar.
While some estimates of Hamas's wealth are more conservative, there is no question the group leaders have amassed huge fortunes.
In May 2022, the US Treasury Department sanctioned a Hamas finance official as well as other financial facilitators.
It said: 'Hamas's Investment Office, whose leadership oversees this network, held assets estimated to be worth more than $500million, including companies operating in Sudan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and the United Arab Emirates.’
And according to documents obtained by German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, the group has a financial empire outside of the Gaza Strip worth nearly $750million (£600million).
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But how has Hamas accumulated its wealth?
On account of it being a terror group, Hamas is cut off from assistance from the likes of the United States and the European Union that both provide support to the Palestine Liberation Organization in the West Bank.
Historically, Palestinian expats and private benefactors in the Middle East provided much of the group's funding, in addition to some Islamic charities in the West.
Israel has in the past also allowed Qatar to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to the authorities in Gaza, while other foreign aid comes through the Palestinian National Authority and United Nations aid groups.
But Hamas has also been able to raise its own revenue, taxing goods that move through a sophisticated network of tunnels that avoid the Egyptian border crossing in the south, bringing in food, medicine, fuel and cash, and also arms.
Egypt also allows for the entry of some commercial goods. As of 2021, Hamas reportedly collected upwards of $12million per month in taxes raised on Egyptian goods imported into Gaza, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Today, Iran is one of Hamas's biggest donors. The country — a sworn enemy of Israel — contributes funds, weapons and military training to the group.
According to CFR, it provides some $100million per year to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups designated as terror organizations.
Turkey has also been a backer of Hamas and a critic of Israel. Though Ankara says it only supports the political wing of the group, it has also been accused of funding Hamas's terrorist activities through aid diverted to the group's military wing.
Despite its accumulation of wealth, however, Hamas has avoided responsibility for building infrastructure and protecting the citizens of Gaza.
In fact, just last week, Abu Marzouk declared that the political bureau of the terror group is not responsible for protecting the coastal strip's civilians amid the ongoing Israeli bombardment of the territory.
'We built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being killed in airstrikes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels,' he said.
Passing the buck further, he added: 'Seventy-five per cent of the population of Gaza are refugees, and it is the UN's responsibility to protect them.’
According to the Times of Israel, he then went on to claim that it was Israel's obligation to provide for the needs of Gazans under the Geneva Convention.
While all the sources of Hamas's income may remain unknown, one thing is certain: the group will not be diverting its funds to help the civilians of Gaza, who with each passing day are slipping deeper and deeper into a humanitarian crisis. 
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12706715/Hamas-terrorist-billionaires-live-marble-floored-mansions.html
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IS ZIONISM “RACIST”?
"...towards the end of the nineteenth century, one aspiration turned into a necessity. Sanctuary. Well before the Holocaust, Jews were being massacred in their tens of thousands in every corner of Eastern Europe. The Dreyfus Affair in France proved that even where Jews had lost the look of tinkers and passed into the higher ranks of society, they were not safe. Without their own country they would forever be regarded with suspicion and hate — their very rootlessness the proof that they were an accursed people. Of the savage libels to which Jews have been subject for centuries, one of the most preposterous, far-reaching and despicable, is that by fleeing racism they become racists themselves.
That very claim lies at the heart of the anti-Zionist mantra that Zionism is a *racist endeavor*, and it is why I will not accept that anti-Zionism distinguishes between a State and a people and so cannot be anti-Jewish. After the Hamas massacre of October 7 not a shred of that distinction remains. What the terrorists were applauded for was the rape, dismemberment and slaughter of *Jews*. Oh happy day! Now kill more of them.
<...>
We could have been in the Middle Ages. But we weren’t. We were here and now, in citadels of higher learning in modern high tech cities.” ~ Howard Jacobson, in "The Death of Tragedy”
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“I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us.” ~ Eric Hoffer, author of The True Believer, writing in 1968
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Hoffer outlines the basic definition of a mass movement by emphasizing the call for self-sacrifice as a central element: The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. https://fs.blog/eric-hoffer-creation-fanatical-mass-movements
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Theodore Herzl and the Jewish intellectuals were driven to Zionism by the humiliations heaped upon millions of Jews in Russia, and by the calumnies to which the Jews in the rest of continental Europe were subjected toward the end of the nineteenth century. To a degree the nationalist movement which forced the British rulers out of India had its inception in the humiliation of a scrawny and bespectacled Indian man of words in South Africa. ~ Eric Hoffer
The reason for the tragic fate which almost always overtakes the intellectual midwives of a mass movement is that, no matter how much they preach and glorify the united effort, they remain essentially individualists. They believe in the possibility of individual happiness and the validity of individual opinion and initiative. But once a movement gets rolling, power falls into the hands of those who have neither faith in, nor respect for, the individual.
And the reason they prevail is not so much that their disregard of the individual gives them a capacity for ruthlessness, but that their attitude is in full accord with the ruling passion of the masses. ~ Eric Hoffer
Joe: Is Zionism racist?
To think that Zionism leads to bigoted attitudes against Palestinians, a person must believe that Zionists are a monolithic bloc. They are not, and a cursory study of modern-day Zionists shows they agree and disagree with their beliefs. The different types of Zionists range from the liberal to the ultra-conservative.
The liberal Zionists believe in pluralism, equality among all citizens, and more normal relations with Palestine and surrounding Middle Eastern countries. They are in favor of a Two State Solution, unlike the ultra-orthodox, who believe The Gaza Strip and the West Bank belong to Israel. They do not believe in the Two State Solution and want Jerusalem to be a holy site only for Jews.
Since Zionists fall between the most liberal and the ultra-conservative, it is impossible to refer to them as one uniform block. It is common knowledge that bigotry crosses political boundaries, and an inoffensive term can evolve into ethnic or racial slurs. Labeling all Israelis as Zionists leads to Zionists becoming an antisemitic label.
Creating a euphemism for any group leads to violence. We saw this when President Raegan took the accounting label, Welfare Mothers, and made it a euphemism referring to single, African-American mothers. Within forty years, we saw young black children shot on the street and by the police without justification.
Today, the Republican House of Representatives censured Rashida Tlaib for her comments on the Palestinian-Jerusalem War. In their TV interviews, Republicans ignored the statements, leading to her indictment. They refer to her as a Muslim, meaning terrorist. On Right-Wing radio, the host and the callers use the terms Muslim and Zionist to mean Arab and Jew, creating a new ethnic slur.
Netanyahu complicated the issue by refusing to listen to a call for a cease-fire by the American, German, French, English, and the UN. DW News reports that the Israeli Institute wonders about Netanyahu’s motives. They questioned why he sent his son to America. On social media, his son, Yair, posted pictures of himself socializing with David Duke and the KKK on the Florida beaches.
Why is his inner circle socializing with Holocaust deniers? This question received no response from Netanyahu, and in Israel, anger is growing against him for his handling of the war. To ask if 2,000 years of oppression turned Zionists into a racist philosophy is the wrong question. A better one is: how do we discuss the war without turning our words into anti-Muslim or antisemitic euphemisms?
A fiddler on an armored vehicleSTALIN’S ELDEST SON (by his beloved Georgian wife, Kato)
In 1941, German troops captured Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili as a PoW. They offered Stalin to trade him back. Stalin refused and disowned him. He was later killed trying to escape a PoW camp. After Stalin heard of his death, he said he was a real man.
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WHY THE SOVIET UNION DIDN’T MANAGE TO BRING COMMUNISM TO THE MIDDLE EAST (Dima Vorobev)
We tried. The thing is, our model didn’t work in societies with strong vestiges of tribal culture, such as in Africa and the Middle East.
The closest call was Israel. But there, too, we had to pin our hopes on the Ashkenazis, who are essentially Semitic Europeans, in many ways more Westernized than us.
We tried to export Communism to the Middle East in three attempts.
Attempt one: Export revolutionaries. We supported the establishment of the state of Israel.
We funded left-leaning Jews who were instrumental in the Zionist movement.
We ran a massive undercover operation that transferred a lot of WWII trophy weapons to Israel that helped them to crush the Arabs in the 1948 war.
The Israeli Air Force was founded on our training fields in Czechoslovakia.
We voted for them in the UN on 29 November 1947. The famous Soviet foreign minister Andrey “Mr Nyet” Gromyko was central in the diplomatic cover for the whole arrangement.
Afterward, the Israelis showed more loyalty to their state than to the cause of the Communist revolution. That was a mighty shock to Stalin.
His revenge was terrible. He had several central Czechoslovak Communists of Jewish nationality executed. The same happened to the members of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee who, during WW2, secured a lot of goodwill in the United States and other countries for the Soviet Union.
In 1953, a major purge against Jews was in the making, comparable to what Stalin did to Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and other “treasonous” nationalities. His death averted it.
Attempt two: Export revolutionary technologies.
After Stalin, Khrushchev put the entire international revolutionary project on hold. But after his sacking, the Kremlin made a bet on radicals in the Middle East. Together with the Romanian intelligence service, the KGB infiltrated PLO. Its first chairman, Ahmad Shukeiri, was allegedly a KGB agent, with his PLO program authored in Moscow.
The KGB also established its foothold in the leftist Kurdish organizations, much thanks to the activity of Evgeniy Primakov, who later became foreign minister of the Russian Federation. However, the Kurds were found to be too unmanageable and ineffective for serious political work as well.
Attempt three: Engage Nationalist parties.
Communist parties in the Middle East didn’t manage to make of themselves something more than small discussion clubs living off Soviet funding.
Meanwhile, the Soviet model of a one-party state that owns the vital and most profitable sectors of the national economy hugely impressed Arab nationalists. Several influential aristocratic families and ambitious military commanders embraced it to grab power from old tribal and monarchical elites.
Herding cats
The Soviet attitude to Pan-Arabic Socialism has long been ambivalent because of its combative nationalism. The thing is, Communism is inherently adversarial to all nationalism. The Chinese and Korean experiences from the 1950s confirmed to the Kremlin that nationalism precludes effective Comintern-style management of foreign revolutionary activities.
However, the rising influence of the US after the Six-Day War of 1967 required action. For lack of effective alternatives, the Kremlin decided to shift the focus to the nationalist parties of “Socialist orientation.” Closer political ties, covert infiltration, and development of their economic potential, in the long term, would bring about some sort of political class with dependable Communist credentials. That was the idea. This is where Russia’s affinity with the Assad clan, as well as the toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, took their origin.
Below, a Soviet poster: “Freedom of the Arab people is impossible to strangle!”. A dark-skinned man sheds predatory hands marked by the USD and British Pound signs. Wearing gloves in warm Middle Eastern climate looked absurd to us. Here, this carries a strong message: “Possibly, not entirely human.”
The freedom-loving Arab in the picture has a generic skin color, headgear, clothes, and facial features that say “anyone between Hindustan and Morocco.” This catches the depth of our understanding of how these societies really worked at the time.
Rick D:
So Stalin supported the creation of the state of Israel because he assumed that they would go Communist? Very interesting.
Maybe it was because of the kibbutzim already there? They seemed like they were based on the Communist ideal, except without dictators in charge.
Dima:
Early Israel was rather leftist. Mayve even too leftist to Stalin’s taste—but he cherished the thought they see the light of true Marxism.
Abcd Efg:
Quite many (later purged) politicians of the early Communist Party were Jewish. Perhaps Stalin overestimated the popularity of Communism within the Jewish population based on this experience.
Matt Wilson:
Also, Stalin was trying to break up the British Empire in the Middle East. The Mandatory Palestine was run by the British as just another colony, despite the League of Nations mandate to establish the Jewish homeland. Contrary to the characterization of Israel's enemies, Israel actually had to overthrow a European colonial regime in order to establish its country. Supporting the founding of the State of Israel was part of the Soviet Union's strategy to co-opt Third World liberation movements.
Matt Wilson:
Ilya Ehrenburg was one of those members of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He was the one the Soviet authorities utilized to pen a dismissive article about Israel (which also subtly warned off Moscow's Jewish population) when Golda Meir's presence as Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union drew huge crowds of admirers.
Oriana:
The reverse side of the banknote is based on a photo of Golda thronged by a crowd of admirers in Moscow.
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ARE RUSSIANS COLD-HEARTED?
Russian culture greatly emphasizes privacy and strong boundaries between the public and the private. Your personal life is like a cocoon, almost completely opaque and closed off from strangers. Your first loyalty is to your immediate family. Your second loyalty is to your friends.
I should pause here to explain that friendship — true friendship — is treated differently in Russian culture than in its Western counterpart. The Russian language distinguishes between friends and acquaintances, with the vast majority of one’s milieu falling into the latter category.
Friendship is a close, intimate, emotionally fraught relationship in Russian culture — basically, like romantic love, minus the sex. One generally has one friend, possibly two, maayybee three, but that’s it. Everyone else is an acquaintance, a co-worker, a neighbor or a stranger. These are fairly strict categories in Russian culture. In short, Russians form strong emotional attachments to only a tiny handful of people; they don’t spread the love.
Empathy and commiseration are rarely extended beyond the cocoon. Even Russian churches, unlike Western ones, do little to forge a support network for people who don’t have one, and any Orthodox priest will angrily tell you the purpose of a place of worship is to worship God, not to create social clubs.
The result is a general atmosphere of indifference and a lack of empathy in Russian society, and it goes a long way back. Personally, I believe it’s the result of centuries of repressive authoritarian governments that have forced people to be hyper vigilant about what they said or displayed in public, and to retreat repeatedly into private life — but whatever the reasons are, the general “feel” of the Russian world is decidedly chilly and colored by mistrust.
In a related fashion, there are also norms that have to do with decorum and how one behaves in public. Any public display of emotion is considered inappropriate or “fake”, which is what is behind Russians’ frequent complaints that Americans “smile too much”. The only appropriate way for a dignified person to act is like you’ve got a giant stick surgically implanted in your backside.
When I first moved to the US, I was shocked by what seemed to my Russian mind a habit by Westerners to engage in naked emotional voyeurism and exhibitionism; the kinds of private details that people were willing to share with casual acquaintances and even strangers. It is something I still do not accept — I am a deeply private person, and that’s the Russian in me — but I at least understand after living here for 30 years that intimate details are a kind of currency in Western cultures, that people use as a way to bond.
Bonding is extremely important in the West. In Russia, not so much. Russians don’t want to bond, they want you to not encroach on their space; and so wherever you are, you are much more likely to hear a rude comment about the spread of your elbows than friendly banter about how dilated someone’s wife was when you could finally see the head.
So, cold-hearted? In many ways, I’d say yes. But as far as how Russians are portrayed, I’d say Russians are probably depicted in Western media as being friendlier than they actually are.
~ Kate Stoneman, Quora
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THE PORTRAYAL OF THE ALLIES IN THE SOVIET PROPAGANDA
During the war, the Soviet propaganda inside the country largely ignored the topic of aid delivered by the US.
No choice but support us
The general message was that the entire humankind was on our side, and America was among them. Occasional reports in the papers told how American workers and “common people of good will” watched with fascination the struggle of the Soviet Union. The “Capitalist” nature of our allies was omitted for the occasion.
When the war was over, the Allied effort was presented in the USSR as supplementary and largely self-serving. The fact of them helping us was also ascribed to their workers who “firmly required” of the ruling classes to support the USSR. Faced with this class-based solidarity, the rulers had no choice but heed.
Act of nature
Canned beans and especially spam were well known among fighting troops. British boots were very valued. But the food and equipment in transit to be distributed among troops were stripped as much as possible from foreign signage right after offloading in Soviet ports.
Otherwise, for commoners, lend-lease was a non-subject. They knew the allies were sending us assistance, but the scale and value of it had never been widely advertised.
My father who fought in the war told me they had perceived the shoes, food, tanks and trucks from the Allies just like an act of nature—just like the Sun breaking through the clouds for you to dry your soggy uniforms and boots a little bit. You don’t talk about it much, you simply pull off your things and hang them out in the sunshine.
Risk assessment
Generally, talking about America and Britain was not a very safe topic. Someone could be listening. Memories were still fresh how before the war a lot of people suddenly disappeared. People who worked with the Americans and Germans who built our industries and infrastructure kept disappearing. Those who praised their machines publicly were often arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda, “groveling” before the Capitalists, and “denigrating” the Soviet equipment and management.
Discussing the help was of course much less risky among the troops who used a lot of foreign machines and equipment, e.g. in the air force and tank forces. The American Shermans played an important role in taking Berlin, for example.
Politically correct
Before the D-Day, political commissars talking to the soldiers and officers made a big point of the absence the Allied troops fighting Germans in Europe. The “second front” that took too long time to come was hot topic. The fact of Britain fighting the Nazis long before the USSR joined the war was ignored. The Allied bombings and the African operations were not considered relevant, and almost never mentioned.
“Where is that frigging second front already?” was the recurring complaint that met much understanding among soldiers and civilians. The commissars used to present the Allies as cynical players who waited for us to bleed dry fighting the Nazis, just to jump in at very end, and grab the spoils of victory.
After the war
By the start of 1947, our censors had effectively banned publication of all pictures and texts that showed Allied weapons and other items in use by our troops during the war. The ban was lifted first in the end of the 1980s.
When I went to school, the lend-lease was usually mentioned in one sentence or two in connection to the role of our Western allies in WW2. No statistics that could give an idea of the volume of help were given, apart from the number of shipments and sometimes the total value of help in US dollars. However, the bravery of British sailors dispatching the help across the Atlantic was given more place. The tragedy of the Convoy PQ 17, along with the D-Day, became one of the most known episodes among our public.
Until today, there’s a widespread belief that Lend-Lease happened on commercial terms, and we had to pay for it “in gold”.
*
Our posters showing the Allied support preferred flags instead of faces, as well as weapons or items of lend-lease. Below, stylized jackhammers with the flags of the Allies are destroying the pillar of German might.
Below, an abstract hand of the Allied forces is pounding Hitler. The title: “A coordinated strike hits the same target!”.
The start of the Great Anti-Fascist march of the Red Army into Europe, 25 years after the first attempt to bring liberation to the proletarian masses west of the Soviet Union, marked the start of depicting our Allies in their human shape. Below, the poster “Paris is liberated!”
Worth to mention that Allied soldiers were consistently painted more dispassionate (sometimes even confused) than our own soldiers. Their clothes were too neat, weapons not too scary, and in the case of the American GI in the poster below, downright toy-like. Interestingly, the artist caught the American habit not to tie the helmet straps under the chin, several month before the mass of our troops saw their first living American with their own eyes.
Paris liberated.Ahead of the summits in Yalta and Potsdam, the depiction of the Allies in our propaganda became more and more liberal. Below, the Allies in action at par with our own soldier. “Let’s finish off the beast in its own lair!”:
Finish the beast in its lair
Jeffrey B. Popper:
I’ll say this much, the boys at Dunkirk sure could’ve used a “second front” rather than a stream of essential Soviet raw materials which helped the Nazi’s circumvent Britain’s blockade.
Ra Smallwood:
Another comment, I know, but a bit of a different intrique… I'm curious to know what you think of the following assessment by another American academic, Dr. Hiram Mason, in his answer to the question here on Quora, “Did the Soviet Union really win WWII?” As follows:
If we ignore the fact that WWII officially started with the invasion of Poland, and that while the Germans attacked from the West, a certain country (who shall remain nameless), assisted by invading from the East end helping the Third Reich by carving up Polish territory, then we should let the words of the Soviets themselves, as discovered in Russian documents declassified and discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union, answer this question!
According to research by a team of Soviet historians, the Soviet Union lost a staggering 20,500 tanks from June 22 to December 31, 1941. At the end of November 1941, only 670 Soviet tanks were available to defend Moscow. However, 466 tanks delivered by Britain, via the port of Archangel, were placed into immediate service. The bulk of these tanks were present and necessary for the cessation of the German advance to Moscow at the Volga River by Soviet Forces.
A general disarray of Soviet industry related to the German advance, meant factories which weren't destroyed, were being moved to the Ural Mountains. The British convoy PQ-12 alone provided 312 machine tools for metal cutting, as well as machine presses and compressors, many of which could not be produced by the Soviets themselves, were necessary to begin production of Soviet tanks.
From the United States itself, the USSR received a total of 44,000 American jeeps, 375,883 cargo trucks, 8,071 tractors, 14,000 U.S. airplanes, and 12,700 tanks. Additionally, 1,541,590 blankets, 331,066 liters of alcohol, 15,417,000 pairs of army boots, 106,893 tons of cotton, 2,670,000 tons of petroleum products and 4,478,000 tons of food supplies were provided.
Beyond this, according to the American Lend-Lease Program and subsequent programs after its entry into the war, American provided goods, supplies, products and materials “destroyed, lost or used during the war” were not subject to repayment.
And perhaps most poignantly and best stated, "Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war… We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with." ~ Soviet General Georgy Zhukov
I hope that definitively answers the question as to whether the Soviets “really won WWII!” Yes, they were crucial. Yes, they had manpower and the grit to fight on. However, the largest force one could ever assemble in a time of total war is impotent if it has no explosives, gunpowder, ammunition, steel for tanks, or even trucks to transport the material and artillery to the battlefield. That's not my opinion… that is the opinion of the Soviets themselves!
Not to mention, I imagine that the United States would have had an easier time developing a slew of larger, better tanks, such as the T-34, had someone else provided almost 13,000 tanks to do the fighting in the meantime.
Jan Janiczek:
You forgot this amazing poster
Dima on the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact:
As a law-abiding Russian citizen, I will never claim that the USSR was de-facto an ally of Nazi Germany [the infamous non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin].
As for our propaganda in 1939–1941, WW2 was treated as a conflict of two “Imperialistic powers”, where the USSR was no more than a concerned observer who supported attempts of Germany to achieve piece with the Allies, whenever these would come.
Oriana:
Few people seem to realize to what extent Orwell's 1984 was based on the Soviet Union – especially the erasure of history. And the lies keep marching on.
Peter Woodier: THE SOVIETS WERE NO BETTER THAN THE NAZIS
The Nazi war against the Soviets was a rude interruption to the pacts that were drawn between them. The Soviets were no better than the Nazis, the only difference was that the USSR wasn’t invading Western Europe at the time. Stalin didn’t even believe British intelligence that was telling him those tanks and infantry were lining up to invade him. They got a bloody nose because of their bloody-minded thinking.
The Soviets were ashamed to take war aid from the West, so they tried to hide it from their people. There was nothing Churchill and Roosevelt hated more than trying to talk to the Russian government. They were impossible to deal with. They weren’t our friends and had no intention of giving that impression to anyone. The poor Soviet people bore the greatest losses of blood, and Stalin cared no more for them than Hitler did.
Oh, and our brave sailors received terrible treatment at Soviet ports. Sometimes they wished they’d docked in a German one.
Barry Blessed:
And in the US, Russia’s role has largely been written out of our popular history. We won the war for the world. You’re welcome.
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MORE ON THE GERMAN USE OF HORSES DURING WW2
The German military killed 2.7 million horses in WW2 and effectively denuded the continent of horses for years. By the end of the war, even circus horses were being drafted to pull guns. For every 3 working horses, 2 were needed to pull the feed wagons — and that was just for the horses. The men and their supplies needed horses to draw their stuff too. And then more horses were needed to pull the ammunition. The average infantry division required 6000 horses; as the war went on, this fell to 4300 simply because there were not enough horses.
During the brutal winter of 1941 the Germans lost 180,000 horses outside Moscow alone, along a wide front. The result was significant lost equipment. Hitler was told by his generals that there was enough space on the trains going to the front for only one of three critical items: food, clothing or ammunition. Hitler chose ammunition. Very little food was sent for the men, let alone the horses when at the time at least 1/3 of the cargo space on trains was allocated for horse fodder and grains, leather for harnesses and saddles and even feedbags. Feedbags were critical because horses that eat from common troughs spread disease to each other. After the invasion of Poland, a major horse disease struck the German army and nearly derailed the German’s plans for Russia and only the news that the same disease struck the Russian horses, but a little later, calmed down the high command.
The Germans lost 44,000 horses in the D-Day invasion and the month following it and an additional 80,000 horses during Operation Bagration. By that time, the Germans were raiding draft animals from farms, circuses and horse breeders. When Prussia was lost, all the stud farms and horses were lost also.
Another factor not often mentioned was the loss of leather for harnesses and the harness makers as well. The German artillery harness did not change much from WW1 but still required significant amounts of quality, flexible leather. As the war progresses, there wasn’t even enough leather for the boots of German soldiers let alone leather for harnesses. The types and quality of harnessed declined; the first thing to go was the horse saddle. Even horses that weren’t for riding, such as draft animals, had rudimentary saddles for saddlebags and equipment the horse could carry while pulling the guns. As this disappeared, the need for what they carried did not and horses got sores and infections.
Horses were increasingly requisitioned from the farms to the point where women and children were forced to pull the plows to farm the fields. In 1944 Albert Speer reported to Hitler that the war would most certainly be lost by 1946 by simple starvation alone. There were no horses to plow; no horses to bring in the harvest; no horses to bring the harvest to market or processing centers and there certainly was no gas for tractors.
A horse goes into heat every 21 days but it takes a pregnant horse a year to deliver a foal and 18 months to achieve the kind of maturity needed to do any kind of work; 24 months for hard work like pulling a cannon. And horses have to be trained to ignore gunfire and explosions. The Germans employed tens of thousands of soldiers as hostlers, farriers, leather workers, harness makers, vets — and butchers. Because when a horse dies, by any method, it ends up in the stew pot. The Germans moved entire massive herds of cattle behind the armies to feed them; at first they also moved sheep and goats as well, but those animals provided too little benefit so they were eliminated early, and cattle were hard to move quickly.
So horses, which rendered 700 rations versus 1000 for a head of cattle, were turned into food by the butchers. It didn’t pay to get attached to your horse, not at all, because in six weeks you would be eating it.
When the Germans invaded Russia they came across an unfamiliar beast, a small, shaggy horse called a “Panje”. It was the horse the Russians used. They were unfit for riding, usually and had stubby legs and the Germans laughed at them but they were perfectly suited for the Russian winters with their long fur and manes and they were incredibly strong. It wasn’t long before the Germans were rounding them up wherever they could. Their European horses were dying in droves from the cold alone.
Panje horsesThe only benefit of horses, if it could be called one, was that at that time, the horse was still a widely used tool in Europe and so there were many horses to be had. Even after the war, people could be seen with starving nags pulling their possessions from the battlefields and ruined cities.
In the US, the horse was disappearing from America so quickly that the government predicted extinction of the horse by 1955. The current number of horses in America is 4 million, down from its peak in 1917 of over 50 million. America mechanized much faster than the rest of the world.
The Russians were still using horses to tow artillery or supplies until 1960.
~ Jay Bazinotti, Quora
Al Caron:
If there was a country that shouldn’t have gone to war (let alone starting it), it was WWII Germany… only 20% of the German war machine was ever mechanized… the rest was all REAL horsepower…
Mary:
*
BILL MAHER STANDS UP FOR WESTERN VALUES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnl243DjsUE
Bill Maher at his best.
I was especially struck by “the world would be a better place with more Israels.”
Yes, imagine if all those small Arab countries like Aden and Qatar became like Israel, with human rights, women’s rights, labor safety laws, independent judiciary, no child marriage, no women dressed like black tents, and so on. And desalination plants providing plentiful life-giving water.
And Jordan and Egypt too. And Afghanistan and the like. Imagine an Afghani scientist winning the Nobel Prize. And I don't mean someone of Afghani origin living in the US. (Immigrants are not representative of the population they left, or sometimes actually fled from for their lives.)
Freedom of speech!! Due process! Women's access to education. No little girls taken out of school and forced to marry middle-aged men. No cruel and unusual punishment. No throwing gay men from the roofs.
And I hope that is indeed the future, but Islam is in the way.
The Arab culture was once the most advanced for the times, but the religious nuts won, and ruined everything.
Dutch colonizers in Indonesia
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WHY MILLENIALS AND GENERATION Z ARE NOT HAVING CHILDREN
~ A new survey reveals that only 55% of Gen Z and millennials plan to have children. One in four of those surveyed, aged between 18 and 34, has ruled out parenthood entirely, with the most common reason cited being “wanting time for themselves”.
Why this increasing need for more “me time”? A likely reason is that young people are now navigating an era of “extended adolescence”.
In recent decades, various shifts, from the rising cost of living to the expansion of higher education, have led to both millennials and Gen Z reaching traditional milestones much later than their predecessors. Millennials are living at home, as well as delaying marriage and procreation, in record numbers.
Meanwhile, members of Gen Z are less likely to have experienced adult activities like going on a date, working for pay, learning to drive, or having sex, compared to teens in the preceding five decades. Given that many young adults still feel like children themselves, it’s no surprise that they are delaying or rejecting parenthood, choosing instead to extend their “me time”.
Modern culture also continually facilitates and encourages this extended adolescence. In our materialistic and individual-centered age, the pursuit of personal desires and self-discovery is often valued above all else, with traditional bonds seen as constraints.
Research by Professor Jean Twenge and her colleagues has examined the values of high school seniors from 1976 to 2006. They discovered that millennials are increasingly driven by extrinsic concerns such as money, fame and image, while moving away from intrinsic concerns like community and affiliation. These increasingly individualistic values likely contribute to younger generations’ adoption of a “slower life strategy”. Twenge observes that contemporary early adulthood now involves taking more time for self-exploration in one’s twenties, a pursuit not common in traditional collectivist societies.
Corporations, educational institutions and popular culture reinforce this cultural shift, capitalizing on our prolonged adolescence. Take, for instance, the rise of therapy culture and a rapidly expanding trillion-dollar wellness market, which constantly encourage us to spend more money on ourselves, prioritize “me time” and cater to our “inner child”. Our infantilization is indulged and commodified across various industries, from universities providing students with coloring books, bubbles and Play-Doh to the booming market for childlike activities and products such as “kidult” toys and adult Happy Meals.
While we now enjoy more freedoms and opportunities than previous generations, delaying adulthood and focusing on ourselves also come with significant consequences. Women especially face limited choices if they wait too long to have children. But delayed adulthood also comes at a cost for young men, many of whom feel increasingly lost and depressed with modern life. Contemporary culture keeps us all straddling a strange, intermediate state in which we face the pressures of adult life but are encouraged to cling to and prolong our “selfish years” as long as possible.
Yet with record levels of mental health problems, and a deepening sense of nihilism and disillusionment, perhaps what young people need is a culture that encourages responsibility, personal sacrifice, and commitments that stretch beyond self-indulgence and endless “me time”. Notably, numerous studies show that meeting the needs of others can better fulfill our psychological well-being than focusing solely on ourselves.
Not everyone needs to have children, but younger generations are being failed by a culture that places excessive emphasis on the individual, treats them like perpetual teenagers, and glamorizes living in a liminal state of prolonged adolescence. As many of us flail through our twenties and thirties, trying to find meaning in the limitless freedoms and indulgences of modern life, some might one day realize, with regret, that we focused too much time on ourselves. Then, we’ll wonder what we may have missed.
https://unherd.com/thepost/why-doesnt-gen-z-want-children/
Michael Cavanaugh:
Helen Mirren: “I love children, they are so funny and sweet, but I never wanted my own, I have never had a moment of regret about not having children. Well, I lie. When I watched the movie, Parenthood, I sobbed for about 20 minutes. I realized I would never experience that, and for about 20 minutes, I sobbed for the loss of that and the fact that I never experienced it.
Then I got over it and I was happy again.”
Oriana:
I especially identify with Helen Mirren’s response. When it became obvious that it was too late to have the great adventure (be it at a high price) of parenthood, I did have a good cry — yes, for about twenty minutes. And then I was done.
You can’t have everything. My circumstances were such that I couldn’t have afforded help. And trying to cope by myself seemed a an impossible task. In any case, what I wanted most was solitude and quiet. Again, you can’t have it all. I bowed to reality, “with the politest helplessness,” to quote Wallace Stevens.
And yes, I counted my blessings and was happy again. But there are still moments of sadness. I wrote a poem about it:
THE WOMEN WHO DON’T WANT CHILDREN
want children. They comb the sun-silk
of their babies’ hair, tuck a blanket around them
like a cloud. But I, I asked myself,
what could I give to my child?
Not the shiny, uncut ribbon of the river, the toy
blocks of bridges. Not bells of vespers,
that huge humming suspended in the sky.
Not a cascade of lit candles, the glow
bowing down as the organist made the pillars
shake. Not that harsh world I fled. Wasn’t it
too gray? And the story I was tired of,
how a cousin – I had ten –
came to welcome me, a newborn babe.
Asked: “Does she have a teddy bear?”
Told no, he disappeared for hours,
returned triumphant with a green-beige
teddy bear, not from a store, stores empty,
the bear perhaps from before the war –
his plush worn, but his glass-bead eyes
the first jewels to my dazzled sight.
The bear went with me everywhere, sat
on the bookshelf wherever we lived,
his stiff arms stretched out to me.
The Gypsy was right, I didn’t know
I was loved. Love was the winter
barley soup, my father’s giving me the first
slice of dark brown bread,
so warm it steamed like living breath –
“We are all déclassé, we can’t give
our children what we had,” a friend said.
But it wasn’t about barley soup.
I was too poor to send my child
to a good school, and though I had
no child, my heart would spasm,
stabbed with the knife of that thought.
Yet in pine woods, when I was twelve,
a cuckoo told me I would have
children beyond all count.
I had to travel thousands of miles
through oceans, deserts, continents of life
to learn that they would be
the children of my mind.
I recognize those stubby, held out arms
in their drab camouflage —
the sepia of autumn fields, of mud.
Look how they want to be held,
how their eyes want to shine
honey-green, like a forest in the sun.
~ Oriana
Doug Pingel:
As an octogenarian I bump into some of my ‘cohort’ who watch me waving-off my son and grandsons and wished they could do the same. Kids are not for everybody but many have been too selfish timewise and are now reaping the sorrow of childlessness. It’s often very hard work with little or no thanks and it’s great being able to hand the grandkids back at the end of playtime. If they are not careful I could be watching over my first great, bundle of “joy and sorrows” very soon. I’ve got something worth looking forward to in my upper-middle-age.
Robert Hochbaum:
“Why is it that people with children think being child-free is some kind of problem to be solved?”
Does it concern you at all that we seem to have created a society over the last several hundred years that is un-breeding itself out of existence? Birth rates across the western world are below replacement rates and falling.
Does it concern you that your attitude regarding reproduction seems to indicate an attitude of what our ancestors created just doesn’t seem to be worth maintaining?
And, yes – immigration from rapidly reproducing regions of the globe can replace physical persons. But, as an American, I worry about the philosophical ideas that my country was founded upon. Primarily, the importance of a written constitution guaranteeing each individual’s rights. Like a religion, the philosophical underpinnings of a society are only maintained by the people who feel a connection to its tenets, who understand the importance of rights and limitations of governments or kings or sheiks.
I put it to you – do you believe the freedoms and rights we enjoy as westerners, if not Americans, will survive the importation of millions of people from places that think something like the idea of free speech – from what I can tell is only guaranteed via a written constitution in America – is something worth preserving?
I think you are not thinking far enough forward regarding this dilemma which I call the West un-breeding itself out of existence.
John Riordan:
Raising children is ruinously expensive and anyone who embarks on it without a good idea of how to afford it is a fool. And yes I know that many people jump right in without a thought because they think the government will pay for it all, but firstly they’re wrong, it doesn’t, and secondly even if it did the rest of us would be disgusted at the attitude of entitlement anyway.
So anyway, let’s not have this be one more thing we’re heaping on the heads of people under 35. They’ve enough to cope with already.
William Shaw:
Half of all women under 30 are now childless and 20 percent are childless at 45, i.e. permanently. Current trends predict almost half of all women will be permanently childless by the end on this decade, just 7 years from now. Mental illness, depression and loneliness among 45 year old women with no children and another 45 years to live is expected to rise exponentially.
Mustard Clementine:
As a woman who just turned 40 without any desire to have kids (and partnered with someone who never did, either) – it’s not something I regret in the slightest.
I see my brother with kids and his life seems hellish to me (largely because he has a very severe case of OCD which he imposes tyrannically on everyone around him, but I digress).
I love living in a peaceful, pleasant environment with my partner. It’s just not something I pontificate much about. It may be that people who regret their choices tend to talk about them more than those who are simply content – so you end up hearing from them more often.
Maybe I just don’t associate family life with happiness (that’s why my partner and I moved in together quite young) – and having now built a life I am pretty happy with, adding another person (and possibly upsetting the balance) has never felt necessary or desirable to me (or said partner whose family life was much worse than mine).
Anyhow – the rhetoric of sad childless women with empty lives does not resonate with me at all. I am also not too keen on the push to convince more people into parenthood who may regret it, given my experience with unhappy families.
Rachel S:
Really sick of reading this kind of judgmental, moralizing nonsense. There is nothing selfish, infantile or individualist about not having children you can’t afford. Seems to me the same people sneering at young adults for “selfishly” not cramming babies into their 1 bed rental while struggling to afford groceries are the same people who’d be sneering about “benefits scroungers” with “too many children” a few short years ago.
Monica:
Since not having children became not only a possibility, but an acceptable choice, you’d have to work hard to convince people that it’s worth doing. It should come as no surprise that many people don’t see the attraction when they actually think about it – instead of just doing what they were supposed to, as our forebears had always done.
Mike Downing:
I think that, as with so much else, this goes back to the counterculture of the 60’s and a rejection of everything that went before it. We’ve just been going through repeated cycles of this. Now is like a re-run of the 70’s in some ways but each reiteration wears away more of the foundations. Surely everything will collapse in the end. Wasn’t that the original idea ?
David Morley:
This has been a long time coming. It’s really with the 60s that youth came to be preferred over adulthood, and the activities of youth over those of being grown up.
It’s not wholly bad. It has perhaps removed some of the stolid resignation over aging. If older people are being active, keeping fit and enjoying life, that’s great.
But an increasing number seem to be just reverting to teenhood once their own children have left. It’s the only vision of the good life they seem to have. It even seems to play a significant role in divorce – returning to dating and disco in your 50s and 60s not as adults but as born again teens.
Michael Walsh:
The phrase “Too posh to push” , comes to mind.
Stacy T:
Michael, obviously you’ve never had to push a watermelon out of your vagina, you absolute nitwit.
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DO PEOPLE ACTUALLY REGRET NOT HAVING CHILDREN? POSSIBLY NOT
~ New research suggests people who are childfree by choice are pretty happy with their decisions, while some parents are not. ~
"You’ll regret it if you don’t"
You’ll be lonely. Nobody will look after you when you get old. You’ll miss out on life’s greatest joy. You won’t ever be truly fulfilled. Your life will be meaningless and shallow. Everyone will pity you. If you choose not to have children then you’ll end up regretting it forever.
Pretty much every woman who has ever been on the fence about having kids has heard variations of the above. Either from other people or from a little voice inside their own head. There is, to state the obvious, an intense societal pressure for women to become mothers.
But do people actually regret not having children? New research suggests they don’t. Last summer researchers from Michigan State University found that one in five adults in the state, or about 1.7 million people, didn’t want to have children. This was followed up with another study which looked more deeply at people who are childfree by choice.
Turns out they’re all pretty happy with their decisions. “[W]e found no evidence that older child-free adults experience any more life regret than older parents,” Jennifer Watling Neal, the co-author of the study, said in a statement. “In fact, older parents were slightly more likely to want to change something about their life.”
This isn’t the first study to suggest that it’s the people who have kids who might be the ones who end up regretting their life choices. YouGov data from 2021 found that one in 12 British parents (8%) say they currently regret having kids. Younger parents aged 25 to 34 (one imagines the most sleep-deprived group) were the most likely to feel regretful, while those aged 55+ were the least regretful. Similarly, a 2013 Gallup survey found that around 7% of American parents older than 45 wouldn’t have any kids if they “had to do it over again”.
And parents seem remarkably unhappy in Germany: a 2016 YouGov study found 19% of German mothers and 20% of fathers say that if they could decide again, they would not want to have any more children.
Saying that you regret having kids is still massively taboo but, in recent years, it has become a more prominent topic of conversation and the subject of regular newspaper features. There’s a Facebook group called “I Regret Having Children” which has 59,000 followers and an increasing amount of scholarship on the subject. In 2015 Israeli sociologist Orna Donath caused a number of headlines with a book called Regretting Motherhood: A Study, based on interviews with 23 women.
You’ll notice that a lot of the coverage on parental regret is really about maternal regret. That’s largely because men are not deemed quite as freakish if they don’t want kids. And it’s also, of course, because much of parenting still falls to women in heterosexual relationships – parenting is a hell of a lot easier when you’re not doing the bulk of it. Which goes to the heart of the issue: parental regret, for the most part, isn’t caused by people spawning little monsters and hating their kids; it’s caused by social structures which make raising children difficult and eye-wateringly expensive. It’s a cliché but it’s true: it takes a village. But instead of villages most of us have nuclear families and childcare which costs as much as a mortgage.
Ultimately the takeaway from all this isn’t that having kids is good or bad – it’s that there is no one way to live a happy and fulfilled life. Parenthood isn’t for everyone and it should always be a choice. And yet Republicans across the US are doing everything they can to take that choice away. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/22/adult-happiness-kids-children-childfree
Mary:
MEANWHILE IN RUSSIA . . .
~ For over a decade, Russia has been in the top ten countries losing population to emigration and also in the top ten countries with the highest immigration, accepting migrants.
With peculiar specifics: Russia is losing predominantly the educated population born in the European part of Russia, and bringing in migrants from the former republics of the USSR — mostly Muslim Asian republics.
It is mostly these migrants that support the Russian demographics by giving birth to 3–4 children. Sociologists say that if the current trends continue, by 2060 Russia will become a predominantly Muslim country.
That’s why Russia is stealing Ukrainian kids (presidential administration reported that 700,000 children had been deported from Ukraine to Russia). It was also the reason why Putin was in a hurry to announce the semi-occupied regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson annexed and include them in Russia’s constitution in full (although Russia doesn’t control in full any of the 4 regions, and doesn’t control 2 regional centers — cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia).
It is also why Putin’s regime overwhelmingly sends men of national minorities — Buryat, Yakut, Chuvash, Tatars, etc. — to the front in Ukraine, to be used in the “meat attacks”. It is also why the current angle of forcible mobilization is on rounding up migrants who recently got Russian passports.
Russia is quickly becoming a third world country. But it still has ambitions to identify as a superpower. Putin hopes that his dream of the Russian “Eurasia” from Vladivostok to Lisbon can still be achieved in his lifetime.
Russian troops just need to take Avdiivka first. They’ve been trying to do it since 2014.
And this means, the kids of today will be fighting the future battles — for as long as Putin is alive. ~ Quora
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“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick." ~ Mikhail Bakunin, Russian anarchist
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WHY THE NETHERLANDS LEADS IN NEWBORN CARE
~ To new parents processing the shock of delivery and swimming in hormones, newborns can feel like a tiny, terrifying mystery; unexploded ordinance in a crib. “We were totally unprepared,” says Odilia. Neither she or her husband had ever changed a nappy and had no idea the baby needed feeding every three hours.
“If you’re a new mom or dad, you have no idea,” recalls Anouk, a new mother. “I’m a doctor,” says Zarah, another new mother, incredulously. “So, you would expect that I’d know something, and I knew some things, but you really don’t have any clue.” For Giulia, an expat living far from the support of family and friends, a traumatic birth left her physically and mentally reeling. “I was running on adrenaline for days and days,” she recalls. The delicate process of caring for her premature son could easily have become overwhelming.
The difference for these new parents, compared to the rest of us, is that they gave birth in the Netherlands. That meant help was instantly at hand in the form of the kraamzorg, or maternity carer. Everyone who gives birth in the Netherlands, regardless of their circumstances, has the legal right – covered by social insurance – to support from a maternity carer for the following week.
These trained professionals come into your home daily, usually for eight days, providing advice, reassurance and practical help. It’s a different role than midwives, who continue to monitor women and babies after the birth in the Netherlands; the maternity carer updates the midwife on the mother and baby’s health and progress as well as supporting the parents as they come to terms with their new child.
If you’ve had a baby pretty much anywhere else in the world, this sounds little short of miraculous: exactly what many of us wished we could have had. I had my first baby at 27 and was discharged the next day to a top-floor flat far from family without the slightest clue what to do. My baby was given basic health checks but no one examined me, ever – not even at my six-week check (the GP just asked if I was OK and if I had considered contraception – I lied yes to both).
A maternity carer in the Netherlands, explains Betty de Vries of Kenniscentrum Kraamzorg, the organization that registers maternity carers, “takes care of the woman the first week, advises her on breastfeeding and bottle feeding, hygiene, gives advice … everything to do with safe motherhood and a safe baby. She is there for the whole day most of the time so she can see how they are doing.” Her colleague, director Esther van der Zwan, adds: “It’s a lot of responsibility.” To prepare, maternity carers train for three years – a combination of academic and on-the-job placements – and have regular refresher training in everything from CPR to breastfeeding support.
For most new parents, the maternity carer is an incredible comfort and relief (“Kind of a luxury,” says Zarah), but it can be far more than that. An experienced pair of eyes and ears around the house can be crucial in preventive care, spotting potential health or well-being issues with mother, baby or family setup or warning signs of abuse or domestic violence.
Josette Veerman can tell, she says, the minute she walks into a home how the week will go. “You know it’s going to be a nice or a hard week, or: ‘Oh my goodness, what’s happening here?’” She has been a kraamzorg for 15 years. Before that she worked in a bank. “I came home and told my husband: ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve done today, I quit my job,’” she tells me, laughing on a video call. Now she has been present for the delivery of about 600 babies (“All a miracle”) and spends her life slotting into families at one of the most intense times of their life.
“Maybe they could have done without me,” she says of some new parents. But where families aren’t coping, it’s a different story. “You can’t make right in a few days what’s already gone wrong for years, but you can open up the discussion.” That can mean tough conversations with families around sensitive topics – good communication is key.
Her presence can also mean families “feel seen” and get the help they need – another part of her job is liaising with other parts of the maternity care system to ensure families get that support. “That’s what makes it so special and important.” She worked right through the pandemic, supporting new parents when no family members could visit them, and even now, if someone in the household has Covid she still works, in full PPE (though shifts are limited to three hours).
How did the Netherlands get this so right? Women there have historically given birth at home – the rate of home births is still much higher than in other European countries (almost 14% according to the most recent figures), though it has declined in recent decades.
The maternity-carer system grew out of the informal networks of postnatal carers that existed to support home birth. From the turn of the 20th century, concerted attempts were made to try to educate these informal carers in the new science of hygiene. Since the 1920s, an official registration system required maternity carers to train in order to receive a badge allowing them to work. By the late 1940s, the system was further professionalized so only certified maternity carers could care for mothers and babies at home. It was around the same time that a universal period of maternity care was covered by the Dutch social security system.
These days, the number of hours a family is entitled to has fallen – originally the maternity period lasted 10 to 12 days; now the legal entitlement is between 24 and 80 hours, though the majority of families receive a standard 49 hours. Parents pay a contribution – currently €4.80 an hour – towards the cost of the maternity carer’s time.
The actual experience will vary depending on the individuals and organizations involved (you can get a maternity carer through agencies or hire one independently, although what’s available may depend on your supplementary insurance cover and women also swap tips when they find one they really like). Some maternity carers clean the house and do the laundry (“The house was never so clean; the washing machine was going every hour,” recalls Zarah). One woman told me her kraamzorg even stayed over one night to support her when her partner was very sick. But whatever the specifics, the level of appreciation for the system and gratitude for the women who make it work is huge.
For Giulia, Zarah and Odilia, being able to go back to bed and rest for a few hours when the maternity carer arrived in the morning was particularly precious. “She took care of our son when I was resting, which was essential for me,” says Giulia. For Anouk, whose elder daughter was a toddler when she gave birth, “she was really helpful playing with her so I and my husband could have some quality time with the baby”. She had a home birth, and the maternity carer supported and advised her when her baby’s temperature dropped overnight, recommending she take her into hospital.
Giulia’s maternity carer arrived the night she was discharged from hospital, traumatized and “in really bad shape” after a very difficult birth. “She got it immediately, and really understood how to handle the situation,” she says. “Ours came in the morning and we were so happy,” says Zarah who was discharged from hospital late on the day she gave birth. “She was really helpful, especially with breastfeeding. She was very calm and made me more relaxed.” There were little things that made a difference, too: expert tips on swaddling techniques and skin-to-skin contact, helping out with the first bath and explaining the warning signs of mastitis.
For an outsider it seems potentially quite stressful to have a stranger in your home – would you not worry about them finding your mess, or judging your parenting style? “She’s suddenly in your house – it’s pretty crazy,” says Zarah. For Odilia, the relief far outweighed any potential misgivings or awkwardness. “I was really happy somebody was going to come.”
Anouk’s experience was very positive but she has a friend who found it “a bit too much”, she says. “You have quite intimate contact and I don’t think everybody is really open to that.”
Being accepting and open-minded is a crucial part of her job, Veerman says. “You’re a kind of chameleon. You work with every kind of person: highly educated people who can’t read or write, other languages, refugees, very different cultures.” One of the important skills, she says, is “being able to adapt and understand that people have such different perspectives. You have to find the way in between, because it’s not wrong what they’re doing, it’s different ...” Some families stay with her, inevitably, she says. Sometimes there are tears. But usually, she and the parents are ready to move on when the week draws to a close. “They’re happy you’ve come, but I always say that it’s healthy at the end of the week that they’re happy I will leave. It’s a good sign – they have that confidence.”
That chimes with what the new parents I speak to say. What they most appreciated was the reassurance the maternity carer offers: expert encouragement that they are doing a good job, building their confidence, assuring them that everything will be OK. Who wouldn’t want that?
“It’s really nice if someone who’s more experienced in working with babies tells you you’re doing great now. You know that when she leaves, you feel like, OK, I’ve got this, we can do this,” says Anouk. Not everyone is quite as philosophical when the week is over. “I cried, I really cried,” says Odilia. But, she says, the kraamzorg told her: “I would not leave if I didn’t think you could handle it yourself.” Anouk’s maternity carer said exactly the same. “I was panicky,” says Giulia. “But then you’re fine.”
The kraamzorg system is the envy of much of the world; in the UK, David Cameron floated the idea of introducing an equivalent in 2008; the idea seems to have been quietly shelved by the time he became Prime Minister in 2010.
It’s not a perfect system, though. Some vulnerable families struggle to make the personal financial contribution required and end their maternity care period earlier as a result, while staffing shortages mean it’s currently under acute pressure. There are about 9,000 maternity carers currently working in the Netherlands (Kenniscentrum Kraamzorg has 9,500 on its books, but it’s likely not all are active at any given time); the government says that 11,000 more are needed. But pay levels are low (a maximum of €19.83 an hour, according to the professional body for the maternity care sector, Bo Geboortezorg), and as van der Zwan says: “It’s a tough job; it’s a lot of responsibility.” “It doesn’t earn you much, so you have to have a special feeling for taking care of babies and mothers,” says de Vries.
You also need to have “a big heart” says Veerman. I ask her what advice she would give new mothers in other places who don’t have the benefit of the kraamzorg system: “Follow your instinct and listen to your body,” she says. “Delivering a baby is like running a marathon without any training. You have to recover.”
The women of the Netherlands have help to make that recovery a reality and those that I speak to are very conscious of their good fortune. “It’s a fantastic system, we’re very lucky,” says Odilia. “Speaking from the position of someone who was in pretty bad shape, I think in terms of mental health it can really make or break how you recover,” says Giulia. She’s conscious nothing similar would have been available if she had given birth back in Italy. “It was fundamental to get that support. It was a brilliant service.” Zarah agrees. “I don’t know how they do it in other countries. You just need a little help.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/25/a-home-help-for-eight-days-after-giving-birth-why-dutch-maternity-care-is-the-envy-of-the-world
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GENTLE PARENTING
~ Parents who practice positive discipline or gentle parenting use neither rewards nor punishments to encourage their children to behave.
By “no rewards” I mean they don’t use charts or “bribes” such as lollies or toys. Many don’t even say “good girl/boy” or “good job”.
And by “no punishments” I mean they don’t use time-outs, smacking, shaming or yelling. Forget the naughty step, forget the sticker chart, let’s take a journey into the world of gentle or positive discipline, which aims to teach children empathy, self-control and calmness.
What is Discipline?
Discipline has come to mean many things in our culture. When we are discussing child rearing, we understand it to mean reprimanding a child for “bad behavior”. The word discipline comes from the word disciple and means to teach.
The discipline advocated by gentle parenting families is internalized. They argue that to offer rewards and punishments overrides a child’s natural inclination to try. It teaches them to behave in certain ways for a reward, or to avoid punishment.
Advocates of gentle parenting say that rewards and punishments do not encourage children to internalize good behavior for its own sake.
Here are a few steps that parents take to encourage a partnership with their children:
They start from a place of connection and believe that all behavior stems from how connected the child is with their caregivers.
They give choices not commands (“would you like to brush your teeth before or after you put on your pyjamas?”).
They take a playful approach. They might use playfulness to clean up (“let’s make a game of packing up these toys”) or to diffuse tension (having a playful pillow fight).
They allow feelings to run their course. Rather than saying “shoosh”, or yelling “stop!”, parents actively listen to crying. They may say, “you have a lot of/strong feelings about [situation]”.
They describe the behavior, not the child. So, rather than labeling a child as naughty or nice, they will explain the way actions make them feel. For example, “I get so frustrated cleaning crumbs off the couch.”
They negotiate limits where possible. If it’s time to leave the park, they might ask, “How many more minutes/swings before we leave?” However, they can be flexible and reserve “no” for situations that can hurt the child (such as running on the road or touching the hot plate) or others (including pets). They might say: “Hitting me/your sister/pulling the dog’s tail hurts, I won’t let you do that.”
They treat their children as partners in the family. A partnership means that the child is invited to help make decisions and to be included in the household tasks. Parents apologize when they get it wrong.
They will not do forced affection. When Uncle Ray wants to hug your child and s/he says no, then the child gets to say what happens to their body. They also don’t force please or thank you.
They trust their children. What you might think of as “bad” behavior is seen as the sign of an unmet need.
They take parental time-outs when needed. Before they crack, they step away, take a breath and regain their composure.
BENEFITS OF THE GENTLE APPROACH
There are many sites that claim benefits to this approach. For example, Attachment Parenting International argues that the child is more sensitive to others’ needs because they have learnt to expect that their needs will be met, they will be treated with respect and they are equal partners in the family.
Others argue that it may take more effort, but is more effective, because punishment and rewards are only short-term solutions. As Alfie Kohn argues, using rewards and punishments is about doing things to, not with children. Taking a gentle parenting or positive discipline approach invites children to partner with their parents to learn how to live in the community as productive members.
PROBLEMS WITH THE GENTLE APPROACH
The problems people may see with this style of parenting generally stem from a problem of definition. Gentle parenting is not permissive parenting. Permissive parenting means never saying no, not provoking tantrums or crying and always wanting to please the child. This style of parenting is the antithesis of gentle parenting.
Sometimes parents who practice gentle parenting are described as sanctimommies. The term is meant to imply they are sanctimonious. However, the issue is generally with that individual parent, not their parenting style.
Gentle parenting requires parental self-control, because you have to take a step back, think and ask, “What is my child’s behavior communicating in this moment?” and, “What can I do differently to prevent this behavior next time?” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/gentle-parenting-explainer-no-rewards-no-punishments-no-misbehaving-kids
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THE EARTH’S LOST SISTER PLANET
THEIA:
An ancient planet named Theia
collided with Earth some 4.5 billion years ago and left large amounts
of its iron-rich material embedded in our planet, according to a new
study. Researchers first identified the material by studying seismic
waves, which travel more slowly in the denser material.
~ Scientists widely agree that an ancient planet likely smashed into Earth as it was forming billions of years ago, spewing debris that coalesced into the moon that decorates our night sky today.
The theory, called the giant-impact hypothesis, explains many fundamental features of the moon and Earth.
But one glaring mystery at the center of this hypothesis has endured: What ever happened to Theia? Direct evidence of its existence has remained elusive. No leftover fragments from the planet have been found in the solar system. And many scientists assumed any debris Theia left behind on Earth was blended in the fiery cauldron of our planet’s interior.
A new theory, however, suggests that remnants of the ancient planet remain partially intact, buried beneath our feet.
Molten slabs of Theia could have embedded themselves within Earth’s mantle after impact before solidifying, leaving portions of the ancient planet’s material resting above Earth’s core some 1,800 miles (about 2,900 kilometers) below the surface, according to a study recently published in the journal Nature.
If the theory is correct, it would not only provide additional details to fill out the giant-impact hypothesis but also answer a lingering question for geophysicists.
They were already aware that there are two massive, distinct blobs that are embedded deep within the Earth. The masses — called large low-velocity provinces, or LLVPs — were first detected in the 1980s. One lies beneath Africa and another below the Pacific Ocean.
These blobs are thousands of kilometers wide and likely more dense with iron compared with the surrounding mantle, making them stand out when measured by seismic waves. But the origins of the blobs — each of which are larger than the moon — remain a mystery to scientists.
But for Dr. Qian Yuan, a geophysicist and postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and the new study’s lead author, his understanding of LLVPs forever changed when he attended a 2019 seminar at Arizona State University, his alma mater, that outlined the giant-impact hypothesis.
That’s when he learned new details about Theia, the mysterious projectile that presumably struck Earth billions of years ago.
And, as a trained geophysicist, he knew of those mysterious blobs hidden in Earth’s mantle.
Yuan had a eureka moment, he said.
Immediately, he began perusing scientific studies, searching to see whether someone else had proposed that LLVPs might be fragments of Theia. But no one had.
Initially, Yuan said, he only told his adviser about his theory.
“I was afraid of turning to other people because I (was) afraid others would think I’m too crazy,” Yuan said.
INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Yuan first proposed his idea in a paper he submitted in 2021. It was rejected three times. Peer reviewers said it lacked sufficient modeling from the giant impact.
Then he came across scientists who did just the type of research Yuan needed.
Their work, which assigned a certain size to Theia and speed of impact in the modeling, suggested that the ancient planet’s collision likely did not entirely melt Earth’s mantle, allowing the remnants of Theia to cool and form solid structures instead of blending together in Earth’s inner stew.
This rendering shows Theia colliding with the early Earth. The combination of high-resolution giant impact and mantle convection simulations, mineral physics calculations, and seismic imaging suggests that the lower half of Earth’s mantle remained mostly solid after this impact, and that parts of Theia’s iron-rich mantle sank and accumulated atop Earth's core nearly 4.5 billion years ago, surviving there throughout Earth’s history. (Image: Hernán Cañellas)
“Earth’s mantle is rocky, but it isn’t like solid rock,” said Dr. Steve Desch, a study coauthor and professor of astrophysics at Arizona State’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. “It’s this high-pressure magma that’s kind of gooey and has the viscosity of peanut butter, and it’s basically sitting on a very hot stove.”
In that environment, if the material that makes up the LLVPs was too dense, it wouldn’t be able to pile up in the jagged formations that it appears in, Desch said. And if it were low enough in density, it would simply mix in with the churning mantle.
The question was this: What would be the density of the material left behind by Theia? And could it match up with the density of the LLVPs?
The researchers sought higher-definition modeling with 100 to 1,000 times more resolution than their previous attempts, Yuan said. And still, the calculations lined up: If Theia were a certain size and consistency, and struck the Earth at a specific speed, the models showed it could, in fact, leave behind massive hunks of its guts within Earth’s mantle and also spawn the debris that would go on to create our moon.
“That was very, very, so very exciting,” Yuan said. “That (modeling) hadn’t been done before.”
Desch added that, in his view, “this work is compelling. It makes a very strong case.” It even seems “sort of obvious in hindsight.”
Dr. Seth Jacobson, an assistant professor of planetary science at Michigan State University, acknowledged that the theory may not, however, soon reach broad acceptance.
“These (LLVPs) — they’re an area themselves of very active research,” said Jacobson, who was not involved in the study. And the tools used to study them are constantly evolving.
The idea that Theia created the LLVPs is no doubt an exciting and eye-catching hypothesis, he added, but it’s not the only one out there.
One other theory, for example, posits that LLVPs are actually heaps of oceanic crust that have sunk to the depths of the mantle over billions of years.
“I doubt the advocates for other hypotheses (about LLVP formation) are going to abandon them just because this one has appeared,” Jacobson added. “I think we’ll be debating this for quite some time.” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/03/world/earth-moon-theia-collision-llvps-scn/index.html
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NDEs REVISITED
Sci-fi author Brian Herbert once wrote, “The only guarantee in life is death, and the only guarantee in death is its shocking unpredictability.” These words ring true to researchers who investigate what happens in a person’s final moments — and the frustration that comes with these studies. One big problem almost always gets in the way: How do you ask people what dying feels like when they’re no longer here?
Because we haven’t yet figured out how to communicate with the dead, the best-case scenario is talking to people who have had a close brush with death. They often mention seeing bright lights, their life flashing before their eyes, or visions of deceased loved ones. Some have even reported spotting the Grim Reaper by their bedside. It’s a paradoxical situation, says Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky: A few perceptions are common—a shining light, for instance—but the near-death experience is unique to each individual.
There’s still a lot of mystery when it comes to the cause, but the field is progressing thanks to people who have allowed scientists to study their brains in these situations. People who have survived these close calls say the encounter can be life-changing. One thing is certain: medical experts say near-death experiences are not a figment of the imagination.
And figuring out the mechanisms behind this phenomenon goes beyond general curiosity. One goal is to better understand how cardiac arrests happen. It could also potentially save lives, because doctors would have more knowledge for when to continue resuscitations after a patient’s heart stops.
“The research not only benefits our understanding of consciousness, but also in understanding the importance of the heart, lung, and brain in our everyday physiology,” says Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Sci-fi author Brian Herbert once wrote, “The only guarantee in life is death, and the only guarantee in death is its shocking unpredictability.” These words ring true to researchers who investigate what happens in a person’s final moments—and the frustration that comes with these studies. One big problem almost always gets in the way: How do you ask people what dying feels like when they’re no longer here?
Often, though, people with cardiac arrest will recall near-death experiences. “About a quarter of people who suffer and survived cardiac arrest have memories about some aspect of near-death experience, Borjigin says. This is because people with cardiac arrest have decreasing blood pressure, she says. With the heart unable to pump properly, oxygen is unable to travel to the rest of the body, which is essential for every single cell in your body to survive. When a brain is alerted to a sudden decline in oxygen, your brain undergoes certain changes that contribute to the perceptual distortions that accompany a near-death experience.
ELECTRICAL SURGES IN THE BRAIN
Ten years ago, Borjigin and her team observed that rats in simulated cardiac arrest still had fully active brains even 30 seconds after their hearts stopped. What’s more, their brains increased in electrical activity. To confirm whether this happens in humans, Borjigin recently tested the brains of four people who were critically ill and removed from life support.
When these comatose patients were taken off their ventilators, they could not breathe on their own. But, using EEGs, Borjigin noticed two people showed a surge in gamma brainwaves as their bodies started shutting down. Gamma brainwaves are usually a sign of consciousness, because they are mostly active when someone is awake and alert.
“We’ve shown the brain has a unique mechanism that deals with a lack of oxygen because oxygen is so essential for survival that even an acute loss massively activates the brain and could lead to a near-death experience,” Borjigin explains.
The boost in gamma waves occurred in a brain area called the temporo-parieto-occipital (TPO) junction. This is responsible for blending information from our senses, including touch, motion, and vision, into our conscious selves. It’s impossible to know if the increased brain activity was related to any visions they may have had, because, sadly, the two patients died. But Borjigin suggests activation of this area suggests people may likely pick up sounds and understand language. “They might hear and perceive the conversation around them and form a visual image in their brain even when their eyes are closed.”
HIDDEN CONSCIOUSNESS
In one of the largest studies of near-death experiences, an international team of doctors has linked the surge in brain activity to what they called a hidden consciousness immediately following death. In the study, people who were brought back to life through CPR after cardiac arrest could recall memories and conversations while they were seemingly unconscious.
Between May 2017 and March 2020, the team tracked 567 people who underwent a cardiac arrest. They used EEGs and cerebral oxygenation monitoring to measure electrical activity and brain oxygen levels during CPR. To study auditory and visual awareness, the team used a tablet showing one of 10 images on the screen, and five minutes after, it would play a recording of fruit names: pear, banana, and apple, for another five minutes.
Only 53 people of the original 567 participants were successfully resuscitated. Initially, they showed no signs of brain activity and were considered dead. But during the CPR, the team noticed bursts of activity. These spikes included gamma waves and others: delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves—all electrical activity that signals consciousness.
Twenty-eight of those 53 patients were cognitively capable of having an interview. Eleven people recalled being lucid during CPR, being aware of what was happening or showing perceptions of consciousness like an out-of-body experience. No one could recall the visual image but when asked to randomly name three fruit, one person correctly named all the fruits in the audio recording—though the authors note this could have been a random lucky guess.
The study authors also included self-reports of 126 other survivors of cardiac arrests not involved in the study and what they remembered from almost dying. Common themes included the pain and pressure of chest compressions, hearing conversations from doctors, out-of-body experiences, and abstract dreams that had nothing to do with the medical event.
The findings debunk the idea that an oxygen-deprived brain stays alive for only five to ten minutes. They also raise the question whether doctors can save people already determined to be dead. “These patients were actually alive within, as seen in the positive waves on the EEG, but externally they were dead,” says Chinwe Ogedegbe, an emergency trauma center section chief and coauthor of the study.
Beyond the brain’s resilience to the lack of oxygen, the authors propose an alternative “braking system” that could explain the distorted perceptions of consciousness. The brain normally filters and inhibits unneeded information when you’re awake. In this unconscious state, however, the braking system is gone, which could allow dormant brain pathways to activate and access a deeper realm of consciousness containing all of your memory, thoughts, and actions. “Instead of being hallucinatory, illusory or delusional, this appears to facilitate lucid understanding of new dimensions of reality,” the authors write in their paper.
Unfortunately, with only a small number of participants surviving their cardiac arrest, it’s unclear whether this altered consciousness is more visual or auditory. Ogedegbe is working to increase the number of participants in the next trial to 1,500. Doing so will give researchers a better idea of the type of brain activity that goes on when someone is at death’s door, and potentially provide comfort that their loved ones can sense them in their final moments.
https://www.popsci.com/health/near-death-experience/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spot_im_redirect_source=pitc&spot_im_comment_id=sp_yZz9S9cM_575374_c_2W65lrTdAgiGryYehUyvcYWH45y&spot_im_highlight_immediate=true
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Even the rise of religions or nations that promote peace came with tremendous bloodshed. ~
https://fs.blog/eric-hoffer-creation-fanatical-mass-movements/
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IS ISLAM A RELIGION OF PEACE?
Regarding Islam, historical context is to blame for anti-Semitism. Islam itself is white-washed as a “tolerant religion of peace.”
The white-washing of Islam has a history. In Islam in History, Bernard Lewis wrote that even when Islam was at its most tolerant "the golden age of equal rights was a myth … invented by Jews in 19th-century Europe as a reproach to Christians – and taken up by Muslims in our own time as a reproach to Jews … if tolerance means the absence of discrimination, then Islam never was or claimed to be tolerant, but on the contrary insisted on the privileged superiority of the true believer in this world as well as the next.”
People familiar with the Rhineland Massacres are not generally familiar with the 1033 Fez Massacre, when Muslims massacred an estimated 6,000 Jews, took Jewish women as sex slaves, and stole Jewish property. Jews were again massacred in Fez in 1438 and 1465. In 1066, Muslims crucified a Jew in Granada, and massacred the city's Jewish population. In 1941, Muslims in Baghdad massacred Jews.
In 1817 in Morocco, Sol Hachuel, a 17-year-old Jewish girl and a renowned beauty, was beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam. In nineteenth century Morocco, Jews were required to walk barefoot when outside the ghetto. In the ninth century, Muslims forced Jews and Christians to wear identifying badges – donkeys for Jews, pigs for Christians. Periodic decrees, stretching across centuries, in Muslim North Africa and the Middle East ordered the destruction of synagogues.
Also periodically Jews were ordered to convert to Islam or be killed. In 1909, a British observer wrote, "The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed." These facts are not adduced to prove that it was all bad all the time for Jews under Islam. I mention them because they complicate powerful propaganda whitewashing Islam as "tolerant" and “peaceful.”
Hamas describes itself, not as a political entity, but as a religious one. Hamas speaks of Israel in Islamic terms, as a "waqf," that is territory once inhabited by Muslims and that, therefore, according to Islam, must never again be allowed to be anything but part of Dar al-Islam. "Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day" reads the Hamas covenant.
Islam, not historic context, creates and perpetuates violent hostility between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially Jews. Focus on any increase or decrease in settlements or any other political question will not end conflict. Applying distorted paradigms and wrong assumptions about Christians or Christianity to Muslims and Islam is a deadly mistake. ~ Danusha Goska, Facebook
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WHAT BACTERIA CAN TELL US ABOUT HUMAN EVOLUTION
To discover our species’ deep history and to shape its future health, we should learn from the microbes that accompanied us on our evolutionary journey.
It is human nature to want to know where we came from. Individually, we investigate our family lineages to discover ancestors lost to history. Collectively, scientists examine data from a vast array of sources, ranging from ancient fossils to current genomes, to determine where humanity itself originated, and how we came to be who and where we are as a species today.
In the past decade, studies in this area have been revolutionized by the plunge in gene sequencing costs. The human genome project began in 1990 and cost about $2.7 billion — roughly $100 million per sequenced genome. Today, a genome can be sequenced for approximately $1,000 to $2,000, and we’re nearing a longstanding goal of the $100 genome.
While much of the genomic work carried out to date has focused on genetic risk factors for health and disease, we can also use genetic reconstructions to examine the history of our species. But our own genes don’t necessarily tell us the whole story of our travels and migrations as a species or of the risks to our health.
For that reason, in recent years, researchers have paid much more attention to our “second genome”: that of our microbiota. Our microbiota are all of the microscopic organisms that live on and in us, playing a role in our digestion, training our immune system to correctly respond to pathogens, manufacturing key vitamins and taking up space that could otherwise be exploited by pathogens. Gut microbes are the “worlds within worlds” that have evolved alongside us, their hosts, as our early human ancestors moved from place to place, ate new foods and encountered new animals and environments. Our current microbiome (the collective genetic material of our microbiota) reflects some of that deep history.
Extreme Symbionts in Our Cells
We can glean information about human history from those organisms within us in several ways. One is by using the parts of our own cells that are, in essence, microbial: our mitochondria. These organelles can be considered “extreme symbionts”: They are remnants of microorganisms that once lived free but are now integral parts of all eukaryotic (complex) cells, producing energy and regulating metabolism.
Mitochondria retain their own DNA, separate from that of the cell’s nucleus. For many types of research, this mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is preferable to nuclear DNA as an object of study. Unlike our nuclear DNA, it isn’t a mixture of our parents’ genetic material. Because mtDNA is inherited exclusively from the egg and passed down through generations of the maternal lineage, it’s more akin to a clone of your mother (and her mother, and her mother and so on). And while eukaryotic cells have only one copy of nuclear DNA in their singular nucleus, they have many mitochondria and therefore multiple copies of each mtDNA gene. Because the mtDNA genome is much smaller than nuclear DNA (containing only about 37 genes instead of 20,000 or so in humans), it is also simpler to analyze.
Analysis of mtDNA in the 1980s led to the conclusion that humanity originated in Africa, dating back to a common maternal ancestor somewhere around 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Though widely accepted today, this declaration was controversial at the time, as some biologists and anthropologists thought that modern humans evolved as a collective from diverse but interbreeding populations of archaic humans scattered throughout the Old World (the “multiregional hypothesis”).
Microbes in our bodies can also help elucidate humanity’s ancestral journeys, because they too are inherited within families and have long been associated with human populations. One example is Helicobacter pylori, a stomach bacterium that can cause ulcers and gastric cancer, but which can also be carried without symptoms in many individuals. H. pylori is transmitted from person to person, probably by saliva (oral-oral route) or contact with feces (fecal-oral route), and possibly by contaminated food or water. Other Helicobacter species colonize the guts of mammals, which suggests a lengthy co-evolution between these types of bacteria, humans and our relatives. In the past, H. pylori likely colonized a very high percentage of humans, but its prevalence has decreased in many countries over the past century because of improvements in sanitation and hygiene.
Studies during the past 15 years have examined the evolution of H. pylori by collecting and sequencing strains of the bacterium from individuals all around the world. Researchers found that H. pylori collected in Africa contained the most genetic diversity (just as human populations from East Africa do), and that one could retrace basic human migrations out of that continent and around the globe by examining the genetic makeup of this bacterium. Genomic analysis also pointed to the bacterium having co-evolved with humans for approximately 60,000 years — since close to the time when modern humans began migrating out of Africa, and carrying H. pylori and other bacteria along for the ride. We can therefore use the genome of H. pylori to figure out the evolutionary history of some human populations.
Retracing Our Past in Their Genes
Why do this when we can look at human bones or genomes to get that information? For one, it’s a powerful confirmation of the correctness of a hypothesis when genomic data from two different organisms tell the same story, especially when those organisms are as different as a human and a bacterium are. In addition, sometimes the data from one genome can fill in gaps that the other data set can’t resolve. Data from H. pylori genomes were able to differentiate two ethnic communities in Ladakh, India, for instance, when the available human genetic markers at the time could not.
Today, rather than looking at a single variety of microbe, looking at the massed collection of all of them may better inform our knowledge of where we humans have been as a species, and where we may be going. The idea of the holobiont — the host and all its associated microbes, analyzed as a single hologenome — is taking shape as we’re starting to understand the thousands of microbial species that can live in and on our bodies.
Our microbiota do not just reflect human evolution — they affect it: Through our associated microbes, we can acquire abilities that are beneficial to populations. A 2010 study, for example, found that many individuals from Japan have a gene in their gut microbes that allows them to produce an enzyme that helps to break down carbohydrates from seaweed more efficiently. This gene is absent from the guts of people from North America, where (unlike in Japan) seaweed is not a dietary staple.
The gene may have been acquired by a human gut bacterium, Bacteroides plebeius, possibly from the marine bacterium Zobellia galactanivorans. Zobellia could have been ingested long ago by individuals in Japan, entering their gut either as a whole bacterium or in pieces, including as free DNA. Because bacteria can acquire genes through a process known as horizontal gene transfer, Bacteroides may have picked up this gene in the gut environment. The gene could then have benefited both the bacterium and the host by opening up an additional source of nutrition, and as such would have been maintained in the population by natural selection.
Microbial Mismatches
As we begin to grasp the interactions between our microbes and our ancestors since time immemorial, we may be able to use these deep symbioses not only to interpret our history, but also to shape our future health outcomes. H. pylori can be a cause of gastric cancer, but its propensity to promote cancer development appears to be a function of how well the bacterial strain “matches” its host. In a study examining gastric cancer and H. pylori in Colombia, researchers found that African strains of H. pylori were more likely to cause cancer in the Colombian population — but those same strains were not frequently carcinogenic in Africans. This observation points toward the possibility of preventing gastric cancers on an individualized basis by minimizing the risks from mismatches between hosts and their bacteria.
Now that we are moving to a deeper awareness of the presence and function of our indigenous microbes, we are starting to see how these long-term symbioses have contributed to who we are today. Recent research has confirmed that for the microbiome as a whole, closely related organisms have a more similar microbiome makeup than those more distantly related. The microbiome as a whole could one day help us understand evolutionary relationships among species.
Although the power of the microbiome to aid our understanding of disease-related conditions is frequently touted, the idea that our microbes may be able to inform us about ancestors lost in history may be its most intriguing application.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-bacteria-can-tell-us-about-human-evolution-20171205/
ending on beauty:
~ Grzegorz Wróblewski
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