The Abbey Church of Sainte Foy in Conques, France, 11th century. Doorway carving detail.*
BRAIDS
According to the Talmud, God braided
Eve’s hair for her wedding. He served
as Adam’s groomsman, too, though I doubt
he made any ball & chain jokes—before the Fall
at least…. And yes, if they had a garden
wedding, there must have been a steamy wedding night—
every position given a made-up name that endless night
by Adam, with Eve’s input, of course. He unbraided
her hair slowly, as if each strand was a garden
snake released, there not to destroy but to serve
the cause of love, the abyss they so easily fell
into. The Talmud expresses no doubt
about this. Put aside all those doubts
about immodesty, decency, lady-of-the night
attire and fashion, the judgment that will fall
upon you, if you adorn yourself or braid
your hair. You do not serve
that master, who never halted mid-day in the garden
to note the sunlight dripping through the garden
leaves, splashing over, eradicating doubt
that this moment is in the service
of all others. That this night
beginning with two tight French braids
which swing in the breeze and fall
effortlessly down her back and will fall
along with her to the damp garden
floor. And the tips of those braids,
curling like question marks of doubt
will soon unravel—a way to prolong the night.
I remember, when we first met, how undeserving
I felt in her presence, how all nature served
our cause and how quickly I fell
in love, perhaps that very night
as we strolled, sloshing through the village gardens,
flooded that summer. The one thing I didn’t doubt,
as I touched and took in the bound-in scent of her braids.
~ Leonard Kress
CHARLES DICKENS: THE SIX THING HE GAVE TO THE MODERN WORLD
Oliver Twist asks for more
Charles Dickens is one of the most important writers of the 19th Century. But his influence goes far beyond just literature. Many of his phrases, characters and ideas have engrained themselves in modern culture.
Two centuries on, what are the things still seen today that Dickens first offered us in his writing?
A white Christmas
Modern commentators have described Dickens as "the man who invented Christmas". Not obviously the religious festival, but the wider popular culture phenomenon that surrounds it.
While Prince Albert is often credited with the revival of Christmas and the introduction of the Christmas tree, many believe that Dickens's popular depictions of the festive period became a blueprint for generations to come.
Specifically, the idea of a white Christmas — which was and still remains a relatively uncommon occurrence in much of the UK — appears in A Christmas Carol as if it happened each and every year.
In his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd wrote: "In view of the fact that Dickens can be said to have almost singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas, it is interesting to note that in fact during the first eight years of his life there was a white Christmas every year; so sometimes reality does actually exist before the idealized image.”
Writer and renowned Dickens expert GK Chesterton perhaps best summed up how the great author's romantic view of Christmas has permeated throughout the world.
"Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us," he wrote.
One of the things Dickens cared about most was those at the bottom. He was one of the first to offer an unflinching look at the underclass and the poverty stricken in Victorian London.
Poorhouses were designed to punish people for their poverty
And this was an area in which he had some experience.
His father had little skill in financial management and this eventually put him and all of his family in a debtors' prison for six months.
The young Dickens worked in a cousin's shop, pasting labels on blacking bottles for six shillings a week.
After he became famous, Dickens helped popularize the term "red tape" to describe the bureaucracy in positions of power that particularly hurt the weak and poor.
"Dickensian" has now become the easiest word to describe an unacceptable level of poverty.
In 2009, when president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers wanted to talk about the deprivation in some areas, it was not described as terrible or horrific but as "life mirroring the times of Dickens".
This less than perfect England was described by other authors like Benjamin Disraeli and Mrs Gaskell but it is Dickens's view that has really resonated through the ages.
Dickens's live readings were said to be filled with humor and performance, with Dickens himself taking on the accents and mannerisms of the characters he was portraying.
And it is the way the characters speak that often brings a smile from the reader.
"Quite a lot of the time, if you were simply to describe the plot situation of one of the set pieces that you find very funny, it's not very funny at all," says Prof John Mullan, of University College London.
"But it is very funny. The extraordinary thing he does introduce to the novel is the comic potential of the way people talk.”
And some in the industry think that Dickens has done even more for the current crop of comedians.
"We're put off by this notion we have of Charles Dickens as this great Victorian novelist because it implies that he's serious," says writer and comedian Armando Iannucci.
"In fact, I think he's the finest comedian we've ever produced. Much comedy today is conditioned by the way Dickens wrote it in the 19th Century and comedy writers today owe a huge debt to him.
"It's that sense of the rhythms, the colloquialisms and the way we speak. In reality, we don't finish our sentences and we all interrupt each other.”
While everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Miss Piggy has taken a role in a film adaptation of Dickens's work, many argue that he was as instrumental in creating the conventions of cinema as he was for inspiring the content itself.
Ron Moody as Fagin in Oliver Twist
Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein said that important aspects of cinema were created by the influence of Dickens on pioneering film director DW Griffith.
He argued that Dickens invented, among other things, the parallel montage where two stories run alongside each other — and the close-up.
"The idea that Dickens invented cinema is obviously nonsensical but he was a key and important influence in its development," says Prof Graeme Smith, who wrote Dickens and the Dream of Cinema.
"Once film arrived, his work inspired an extraordinary amount of early cinema.”
The BFI says that there were around 100 versions of Dickens's work recreated in film in the silent era alone. And those adaptations continue to this day.
This is in large part because of the visual way Dickens wrote, creating painstaking depictions of places.
Prof Theodore Hovet, of Western Kentucky University, has argued that Dickens's influence stretches further than just adaptations in modern cinema, actually providing themes and techniques that are still used today.
For example, he says, the film Dirty Pretty Things' depiction of London pays "homage to a model established by Dickens's compulsive wanderings of the city”.
The development of the characters in Dickens is often heralded as one of his greatest achievements.
The Dictionary of British Literary Characters lists 989 named characters in his work, including everyone from Pickwick Papers' Arabella Allen right through to Our Mutual Friend's Eugene Wrayburn.
While characters in many novels before had used symbolic names, what Dickens did differently was refine the practice to suggest character traits and their role.
Some are obvious — Mr M'Choakumchild, the teacher in Hard Times, or ambitious lawyer CJ Stryver in The Tale of Two Cities — but others are less so.
In Great Expectations, Magwitch has a number of different interpretations — from a magpie representing theft to Magi, a Biblical reference to the wise men.
This technique has since been used by everyone from James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon to F Scott Fitzgerald and Martin Amis.
A couple of the most famous characters have become so recognizable that they have entered the language as nouns — somebody mean-spirited or lacking generosity being described as a Scrooge, for example.
But one phrase that does not come from a name is "What the dickens?”
Rather than coming from the author, it is believed to be a slang term for the devil and though its actual origins are unknown, it first appeared prominently in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, over 200 years before Dickens was born.
Bleak House, taking place as it does in the Court of Chancery before legal reforms in 1870, is a thinly veiled attack on the judicial system of the time. The current view of lawyers — less than a quarter of people in the UK trust them — seems to be at least partly inspired by characters such as the novel's Mr Tulkinghorn.
"No two books outside the bounds of technical law are more worth reading for law students than Pickwick Papers and Bleak House," Zechariah Chafee Jr once wrote in the Harvard Law Review.
"Even a trained trial lawyer, however, is puzzled by some of the legal points brought up by Dickens, because they have fortunately passed forever out of the realm of living law.”
Legal historian Sir William Holdsworth noted the importance of Dickensian record in a lecture given in 1927.
"The treatment by Dickens of various aspects of the law and the lawyers of his day is a very valuable addition to our authorities," he said.
"Not only for that period, but also for earlier periods in our legal history.”
But how much do the issues that Dickens highlighted still remain today?
"Central to it, actually, is something that remains a problem," says senior barrister Anthony Arlidge QC.
"Very often, particularly with small civil claims, the cost of the legal proceedings is bound to exceed the damages that are obtained.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16184487
Oriana:
To me, one of the most striking things about Dickens is his frank and frequent portrayal of child abuse, though because of Victorian conventions he could not mention the sexual abuse of children. His portrayals of cruelty and greed are heart-breaking, though it's "safer" to see him as specializing in depictions of eccentric spinsters. Who can ever forget Miss Havisham? My favorite, though, is the savior of young David Copperfifeld, Aunt Betsy Trotwood.
Mary: HIS THEATRICAL CHARACTERS
Dickens readings were theatrical experiences, and so were his novels. His people reveal themselves and inhabit our imaginations through characteristic speech, as noted, and actions that economically reveal character and personality in particular and unforgettable ways. Quote any character's lines and they immediately come to mind, fully imagined, in all their particulars. That his characters are often eccentric only intensifies the effect. What is described as cinematic I would call theatrical, and Dickens was both a great lover of theater and a wonderful performer. As an author he is also a stage master and director with an exact sense for the dramatic or comic moment.
While we may find his sentiment at times mawkishly Victorian and a bad fit for modern sensibilities, his comic and dramatic senses are exquisite. And his heart is in the right place...champion of the poor and neglected, critic of societies obstinate self satisfaction and comfort with a status quo that relentlessly grinds the lives of the poor, especially poor children, under its blind and indifferent machinery. He is not afraid to name evils the world feels complacent in ignoring. And his comedy is irresistible.
I think in many ways Great Expectations is his masterpiece. Social and class criticism, deep understanding of human passions and how they both direct and distort both understanding and action, the exploration of love, deception, betrayal, and fidelity through many characters and on many levels. What does it mean to be a parent, a friend, a lover ? How do we deceive others, and most crucially, ourselves, about our own actions and desires? All done in telling an absorbing story, full of fascinating characters, that can be deadly serious and hilariously funny in the most seemingly natural way. We don't just enjoy these people, we believe in them, we recognize them.
Like a stagemaster, Dickens uses props to great effect. Joe's hat becomes a character in a kind of slapstick comedy that underlines his simple goodness, Pip's false sophistication, and the obstinacy of objects. Think also of Wemmick's castle/home, and, of course, Miss Havisham's grotesque bridal cake, decaying in the darkness of the stage set for her wedding. All of these theatrical abilities are essential to Dickens enchantment of an audience far removed from his place and time. It is his stagecraft that makes his work so suitable for cinema.
Oriana:
Totally agree with you. Dickens is about characters more than anything else. And it's the ability to create unforgettable characters that makes Dickens a great writer. Yes: theatrical characters and theatrical settings. Dickens is forever relevant, forever new -- because his characters, no matters how grotesque or otherwise exaggerated, are indeed irresistible.
I also agree that Great Expectations is Dickens's masterpiece, more complex than Oliver Twist, say, or David Copperfield, his other boyhood-centered novels. What a dark and powerful tale of growing up, of good and evil.
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WHY ISLAM IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE MODERN WEST
Blasphemy ( Not Compatible )
Polygamy ( Not Compatible )
Child Marriages ( Not Compatible )
Sharia law ( Not Compatible )
Female mutilation ( Not Compatible )
Forced Conversion ( Not Compatible )
Honor killing ( Not Compatible )
Sexual Slavery ( Not Compatible )
Female Infanticide ( Not Compatible )
Forbid female education (Not Compatible)
Intolerance to other religion ( Not Compatible)
Murder in the name of allah ( Not Compatible )
Intolerance to pork, alcohol ( Not Compatible)
Intolerance to music ( Not Compatible )
Triple talaq ( Not Compatible ) *divorce by a man's saying Talaq (release) three times
Nikah halala ( Not Compatible ) * a marriage for the purpose of making something forbidden permissible
Barred from dating ( Not Compatible )
Turning public places and famous tourist attractions into mosques ( Not Compatible)
Hijab, Burqa, Niqabs, abaya ( Not Compatible )
Mosque noise ( Not Compatible )
Morality police for enforcing hijab laws (Not Compatible)
I don't need any reminders that some of these is not practiced or to be more precise “banned”.
For if it has to be banned it has to be practiced in the first place.
It was banned because it was deemed to be bad and and the people who practiced it don’t deemed it to be bad, hence it was banned.
What's worth mentioning is that “ MUSLIMS THEMSELVES SAYS THAT ISLAM IS THE SAME EVER SINCE IT HAS EXISTED” and there has been no change. So whatever inhumane and bad practice mentioned would still be practiced if it wasn't banned.
*Talaq — the right of the husband to divorce his wife by saying the word “talaq” (release) three times.
(Source: Quora)
Hamas fighter dragging a dead body behind a motorcycle
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Champalal Mali:
Israeli Morgue Worker:
“We saw many women with bloody underwear, with broken bones, broken legs, broken pelvises.
They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied, particularly round their underwear, and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them.
Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died.”
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OCTOBER 7TH HAS NOT CHANGED THE MIDDLE EAST
~ Hamas’ pogrom against Israel on 7 October has not changed the Middle East, nor its fundamental political dynamics. Neither has Israel’s devastating military retaliation in Gaza. Neither has the explosion of anger worldwide.
This apparently is a counter-intuitive point for those who assume events of such deafening noise must contain a signal. Observers claim an historic inflection point is at hand. Allegedly, the upheaval leaves ententes and settlements between Israel and its former adversaries in tatters. The outrage of everyone from Palestinians to the governments of the Middle East, we hear, will change the rules, prevent normalization and wreck America’s plans. Yet despite declarations to the contrary, the evidence of the first fifty days suggests an undercurrent of continuity beneath the tumult. A disaster can be lethal without being transformative.
True to their repertoire, the regimes of Arab-majority states walk a tightrope. Thus far, Egypt plays a double game. It allows but limits expressions of protest. President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi refuses to open the border with Gaza, brands Hamas as terrorists and stays tight with Washington. In line with tradition, Cairo ruthlessly pursues its independent interests. Saudi Arabia condemns the warring parties, but signals its determination to resume its rapprochement with Israel once the crisis recedes. Other Gulf monarchies follow suit as parties of the Abraham Accords, seeking to build ties with Tel Aviv against Tehran.
Turkish President Recep Erdogan denounces Israel and praises the ‘mujahideen’. Yet he continues to allow the transport of oil shipments to Israel. In common, these regimes choreograph their responses to preserve the status quo, limit their liability and deflect or contain public rage. Israel’s adversary and Iranian proxy over its northern border, Hezbollah, thus far keeps a free hand and limits cross-border skirmishes with its nemesis. Eyeing Lebanon’s economic plight and fearing all-out conflict, a movement infamous for its apocalyptic rhetoric calculates carefully.
Beyond rulers, there is little sign of bottom-up, paradigm-changing revolt, let alone a revolutionary wave. Close observers speak of populations both incensed yet moderate in their protest, mostly unseduced by Hamas and its ilk, renouncing indiscriminate violence and opting for peaceful mobilization. There seems little appetite for further attempts at toppling their own rulers.
As for Washington, there is a familiar pattern: embracing Israel but exerting limited leverage. President Joe Biden’s ‘bearhug’ of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu – a leader who boasts of his ability to manipulate America – yields few tangible gains. Even if America embraces Palestinian statehood, that cause is ever more remote. The superpower stays and brings its weight to bear mostly around the margins, to be cajoled and hectored by partners while its garrisons suffer missile attacks from Iranian-backed militias. Does this look like change to you?
All this inertia has several sources. Firstly, there is the hollowness of rulers’ pan-Arabism. Despite their rhetoric, the powers of the neighborhood don’t care enough about Palestinians to bleed for them. This is an old political reality. Most practitioners of politics in the area regard the Palestinians as expendable. Governments in this volatile neighborhood will not obey the dictates of blood, kinship or ‘civilizational’ unity, any more than many Europeans are minded to fight a war of cultural solidarity for Ukraine.
Israel’s neighboring regimes did not gain power and survive upheavals by following a cultural script that dictates who to align with, or fight against. When it suited Egypt, it betrayed its allies and Palestinians to agree the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978. Pan-Arabism, like the call to pan-Islamic mobilization, has continually disappointed.
When Syrian president Hafez al-Assad massacred perhaps twenty thousand people in the town of Hama in 1982, potentates and clerics of nearby lands replied with silence. In 1990, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, trying to rally the region as the new Saladin against ‘crusader’ Americans. The Gulf rulers demurred and joined the US-led coalition. Against stereotypes of Arabs as cultural dupes, there is a rich history of cold Realpolitik.
Just as governments have fine-tuned their techniques to hold mass discontent in check and divert it in safe directions, their subjects seem not to want a clash with their states in the first place. Many remember the violent destabilization that followed the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ over a decade ago. They are aware that replacing despots with either anarchy or Islamist theocracy is a cure worse than the disease. This pattern holds despite the mounting deaths, maimings and displacement in Gaza. Such a measured response also favors the status quo.
The most consequential recent development in the region remains not the catastrophes in Israel and Palestine, but Iran’s power-projection via its own hand and proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, its growing nuclear program and its cold war with the Saudi bloc. Iran’s adversaries are anxious to make detente with Israel to contain Iran, even as they try to ease tensions with it. They refuse to hold everything hostage to the agony of Gaza.
Second, Washington’s posture in the Gulf may be strained, but has not altered. The United States values other things too much and is too frightened of alienating so-called friends, to stake everything on resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Wisely or not, the superpower stands sentry in the region because of things it is not willing to sacrifice for the sake of Palestine, including oil, counter-terrorism, countering Iran, and a habitual faith that it must not leave.
The Biden administration preaches rules-based order and human rights, but the US also values alliances and partnerships with authoritarian regimes that violate these values as ends as well as means. Across presidencies, the world’s leading superpower fears eviction from the Middle East more than its client-states fear American abandonment. Indeed, they exploit America’s fear of being seen to abandon their friends, and being supplanted by other powers.
The former Director for Egypt and Israeli Military Issues at the US National Security Council put it this way: ‘Egypt is ultimately too important to US interests to antagonize by withholding military aid, coupled with skepticism regarding American ability to pressure Egypt. If Egypt is critical to the United States and coercion is unlikely to change those Egyptian policies with which Washington disagrees, the thinking goes, the only logical policy is to provide Egypt with unquestioning support.’ So ‘any deviation’ from providing annual military assistance ‘entails an unnecessary and unacceptable risk to US interests’.
As long as Washington is reluctant to coerce, the tail-wagging-dog dynamic will endure. A second Trump presidency, judging by the last one in most of its dealings with states from Saudi Arabia to Israel, will be more indulgent. Too scared to leave, too scared to coerce partners, the superpower loiters like a pitiful giant, its aid, diplomatic support and arms earning it complicity with little influence.
Finally, fundamental change is a long way off because there are no two willing parties committed to breaking the Israel-Palestine deadlock. This is the heart of the problem. The difficulty lies not in the lack of a workable formula or the need for a strong outside broker. Rather, the politics of both parties will not carry any compromise resolution of the conflict. This continues the tradition of Madrid, Oslo, Camp David and Annapolis.
Hamas has now forced its captive population into collective, permanent jihad. Israeli ultra-nationalists wield enough power domestically to spoil dreams of a compromise settlement, and some Israeli officials’ overt ambition for ethnic cleansing further poisons the well. Arguments that Gaza proves the West must try harder to solve the Israel-Palestine impasse overlook this reality. Efforts to reheat the old, hubristic line that the west must ‘sort out’ the issue echoes one of the oldest traditions of all, a Whiggish naivety better left behind.
https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/7-october-has-not-changed-the-middle-east/
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WHY IS IT NECESSARY TO DESTROY HAMAS?
To end WWII, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. I have no idea how many Japanese babies, children, women, old folk that died in those attacks. The allies bombed the hell out of Germany, almost leveling Dresden. Estimates were that 80,000 civilians died in those bombing runs. That doesn’t count the other German cities that were bombed.
The Americans and the Allies did not start those wars and the intent was not to wipe out Germans and Japanese, but to cease their war efforts.
War is not a nice thing.
Hamas began a war. Hamas needs to be destroyed. You cannot negotiate with militant muslims. They are driven by a perverted sense of toxic religious doctrine.
If you feel that what Israel is doing is evil, then you should put on your fatigues and travel to Gaza and you take out Hamas. You show Israel how to win this war. You do it. You go in and kill Hamas members only. We will stand back and watch you.
Hamas and the Palestinians are so toxic that the other Arab countries will not let them cross their borders. Egypt will not let them into Egypt. Jordon will not allow them into Jordon. Saudia Arabia will not let them into Saudia Arabia. ~ Jamie Daney, Quora
Civilians burned alive by Hamas
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THEORIES OF EVERYTHING
~ Ten years ago, French economist Thomas Piketty wrote a book trying to explain the fundamental economic forces that shape the world. Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an unlikely bestseller, introducing to the book-buying masses such themes as the capital-income ratio, modifications to the Kuznets curve and the elasticity of substitution of labour. For a while, this unassuming Frenchman became a rock star akin to Jean-Paul Sartre (the mood of whose 1945 lecture Time magazine’s caption writer captured thus: “Philosopher Sartre. Women swoon”).
Nobody swooned at London’s Peacock theatre when Piketty gave a lecture there one summer’s evening nine years ago, but there were queues around the block. Piketty had a message people wanted to hear: economics should be used for good rather than evil, to effectively redistribute wealth.
Piketty sought to convince readers that the 20th century had been unusual: rapid, unrepeatable population increases that helped accelerate growth, combined with shocks (two world wars, the Great Depression) that reduced the value of capital and so kept inequalities low. These are exceptions in human history rather than the rules. The 21st century, he argued, won’t be like the 20th. If we don’t act, the accumulation of capital in the hands of the very few will resemble the norms in the early 19th or 18th centuries.
It seems clear, as we live through a new cost of living crisis presided over by a millionaire prime minister, that Piketty’s message didn’t get through. But one thing that did take hold in the wake of Capital’s unexpected success was the phenomenon of the “theory of everything” book.
**
“Though an heir to Tocqueville’s tradition of analytic history, Thomas Piketty has a message that could not be more different: Unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions. With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital, and inheritance coming to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, a new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was…Perhaps with this magisterial book, the troubling realities Piketty unearths will become more visible and the rationalizations of the privileged that sustain them less dominant. Like Tocqueville, Piketty has given us a new image of ourselves. This time, it’s one we should resist, not welcome.” ~ Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Prospect
**
“One of my favorite literary genres is what I like to refer to as The One Thing That Explains Everything or Tottee” says economist Michael Muthukrishna. Examples of the genre, which has mushroomed since Capital was published in 2013 (and translated into English in 2014), include the 704-page The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021), Peter Frankopan’s 636-page The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) and the Oxford professor of global history’s latest The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (published this year, at 736 pages), Sarah Bakewell’s 464-page Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist, Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, and every book Yuval Noah Harari has ever written, but especially his 512-page Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, which was published in English in 2015.
Now add to these Muthukrishna’s A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, published in September. His book begins with a story told by the late American novelist David Foster Wallace about two fish swimming along happily when they meet an older fish. “Morning, boys,” says the latter. “How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on and then one asks the other: “What the hell is water?” That’s one of the purposes of Tottee for Muthukrishna – to show us something that is so fundamental to our lives that we don’t see it.
Such books often have grand ambitions to turn our complacent worldviews upside down. In The Silk Roads, Frankopan attempts nothing less than a major reassessment of world history, in which the usual occidental characters are not center stage. So too do Graeber and Wingrow in The Dawn of Everything, in which they effectively mobilize Gandhi’s remark about western civilization (“It would be a good idea”) in a takedown of the purportedly rational Enlightenment west.
The synoptic book is not a new invention, of course. George Eliot skewered its pretensions in her 1871 novel Middlemarch, describing the dry Rev Casaubon’s unending research for a tome called A Key to All Mythologies. His less deluded wife Dorothea comprehended what he did not: that recent German scholarship made his life’s work a waste of time. More recent examples have had different problems. One of the bestselling nonfiction volumes of the last millennium, Stephen Hawking’s 1988 A Brief History of Time, was once dubbed the most unread book of all time. In 2014, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg even devised the “Hawking Index”, to measure how far people will, on average, read through a book before giving up. Brief History averaged 6.6%, while Donna Tartt’s epic novel The Goldfinch averaged 98.5%.
The publishers’ dream then is to marry the profundity of Hawking with the readability of Tartt, to create the book that everybody with two brain cells to rub together wants to find in their Christmas stocking.
For Casiana Ionita, publishing director at Penguin, the appeal of these books is that academic experts can give us something we don’t otherwise get in our post-truth era of self serving, inegalitarian mendacious politicians. “After decades of our main narratives being defined by traditional economics and neoliberalism, people feel the need for alternatives. There’s something very encouraging about this interest in experts after years of politicians saying we don’t need them.”
But Ionita would say that: she’s the editor responsible for some of the best recent nonfiction by academics supplying big ideas to mass audiences – Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, Albanian political scientist Lea Ypi, Russian-American complexity scientist Peter Turchin and Canadian sociologist Michèle Lamont. “I think there is significant reader appetite for books that offer a new lens to understand the upheaval of the last few years – Brexit and Trump, the pandemic, climate change, war,” she says.
So who reads these books? Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration might give us a clue. One of his key ideas is that of the surplus elites produced by neoliberal capitalism. Turchin argues that there is a large class of disgruntled wannabes, often educated and highly capable, who feel shut out. Essentially the western world seethes with humanities graduates with low status, working in the kind of professions the late anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”.
The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin argues: When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.
In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late. ~ Amazon
Surely these frustrated elites are the perfect target for books that purport to explain how the world works? But, as Muthukrishna argues, these books rest on an imposture. “You and I know – and so too do the authors of these books – that the world is complicated. Arrows of causality point in multiple directions, and even feed back on each other. No one thing explains everything.”
This is a truth that Hawking, who literally wrote a book called The Theory of Everything, realized after appreciating the full ramifications of Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, whereby in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved. And yet we carry on regardless.
Finding a theory of everything – explaining all the forces and particles in the universe – remains the holy grail for some physicists. Though you’d think the fact that so many professors have their own theories of everything suggests that there isn’t just one, but many contenders, all jostling in the marketplace of ideas. ~
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And here’s one additional book whose description I found seductive:
~ In the West, the ultra-rich control almost everything. They fund politicians and exert strong influence on government spending. Mastodont private companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear and who we vote for. They are the owners of social media, the mainstream media and the entertainment business.
Yet, it would be impossible for the billionaire class to amass this wealth into their own hands, without the active use of socialist repression. The Marxist attack on historic Western values has weakened the very core of our culture, destroyed social stability, quenched free speech and silenced the people - and thereby removed the obstacles for the billionaire class to gain centralized control.
Marxism has been the perfect tool to destroy the traditional system of trust, personal responsibility and equality regardless of race, class, or gender. Read the story of how Marxism
was used to curb freedom.
“Hanne Nabintu Herland has written another important book in which she explains the consequences of the control exercised over the entire Western World by a handful of giant American investment companies who have no commitment to freedom and morality.” Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, leading American political economist.
"A keen observer of current trends, Herland connects the many global dots to expose the war of subversion the Marxist Left is waging against civilization in her latest must-read book.” ~ Best-selling author, Middle East expert, Raymond Ibrahim.
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LENIN AMONG THE MOST OVERRATED HISTORICAL PERSONAGES
Lenin would rank quite high on the Most-Overrated list.
It’s true that he had an extraordinary energy level and IQ that made him a star among revolutionaries. He was instrumental in swaying events his way at many critical forks. He had a powerful vision—mostly delusional—that made him a towering figure among millions of confused, disillusioned Russians when Imperial Russia collapsed in 1917.
However, an extraordinary revolutionary turned out to be a lousy statesman. On his watch, in a matter of a couple of years, Russia was reduced to a smoldering ruin, with millions who fled the country, and possibly as many as 10–12 millions dead in the Civil War. Add to his body count the catastrophic famine at the end of his rule.
He implemented the entire Ten-Point Action Plan of the Communist Manifesto, but rolled it back in the early 1920s. He introduced a slipshod version of State Capitalism that ran aground a few years later, and Stalin had to dismantle it altogether.
Lenin’s contribution to Marxism was modest. If you look into the collection of his publications, it’s rarely more than another eloquent explanation of how whatever he was doing is entirely in line with the Marxist theory. The teachings in Lenin’s works of how to take and hold power are profound but not particularly Communist. They are up for grabs by anyone dead-bent on becoming a ruler, no matter left-wing or right.
Nothing came out of Lenin’s attempts to establish a Communist grassroots oversight over the Soviet bureaucracy. Almost everything we associate with Bolshevism and the USSR was the product of others (mainly Stalin, but also much of Trotsky).
The man left no apparent ideological successors and no kids. The revolution he started ran out of steam even before he died. The state he founded collapsed after a mere 74 years of existence.
He wanted to be buried in St. Petersburg beside his mother. His comrades ignored him and his wife. They gave his dead body to taxidermists and then laid it out for public display at the foot of the Kremlin wall. Where it still is, primarily because of a fear of public disturbance if it were moved.
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Below, the Lenin statue at the Finland railway station in St Petersburg, vandalized by anonymous performance artists in 2009.
Gulag was a colonization and modernization project. Lenin didn't have the capacity for that. Soviet rule under Lenin was all about keeping the head above water.
Andy Wiskonsky:
Lenin’s policy of korenizatsia (emphasis on the languages and cultures of the ethnic republics within the soyuz) might have solved the ethnic issues within the Soviet Union and lea to some level of decentralization of economic and political power from the Moscow Kremlin.
Stalin reversed those policies and eventually embraced Great Russian imperialism over the entire Soviet Union. The rapidity of the Soviet collapse was well illustrated during the Belovezha Accords where Russia, Ukraine and Belarus dissolved the Soviet Union with no inputs from the lame duck Gorbachov.
Paul Reinke:
Without a doubt the most accurate homage to the man’s character and impact.
Simon Henrik:
Not to mention he was a homicidal terror maniac.
Chris Kerhovjac:
To be fair to Lenin, he led the FIRST successful Marxist revolution. And thus he was the FIRST to learn that it was all bullshit. None of that shit actually works when you try to implement it in the real world.
And from then on, for Lenin and his successors, it was just trial and error to figure out how best to move forward and hold onto power, without anyone admitting that they were wrong (and that Marx was wrong). 74 years of painting lipstick on a pig and pretending everything was great, killing or imprisoning anyone who disagreed, until it finally rotted out from under them and collapsed.
Ion Muraru:
Never underestimate the political leaders’ love for their people!
PS And the opposite, looks like somebody raped the ass of that statue.
Mike Mike:
Just a bad case of gas.
Mike Sisley:
He did warn them about the next guy [Stalin].
Alexander Angel:
Lenin’s ‘Collected Works’ we’re the Soviet bloc Bible. Lenin was considered a Christ-like Messiah. Marx wasn’t mentioned that much. His portrait was only prominent in East Germany and North Viêt Nam. Nikita Khrushchyëv could be overrated. Fídel Castro Ruz (somewhat more Marx than Lenin) and Nicolas Čeaušescu could be quite overrated by the late 1960s.
Oriana:
Lenin’s portrait was very prominent in “socialist” Poland. It hung in every classroom. Giant portraits of him were carried in every May First parade. Part of our education was to make us adore Lenin and, at least marginally his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. I didn’t learn that Lenin had a mistress, Inessa Armand, until my adult years.
Saint Lenin having an affair! It would be like learning that the Pope had a very active sex life.
Krupskaya in her twenties.*
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TEACHING ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST
Here's an interesting viewpoint. The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper. It doesn't take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of Europe, and possibly to the rest of the world.
~ "I walked down the streets in Barcelona and suddenly discovered a terrible truth: Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a group of people who represented culture, thought, creativity, talent.
We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who made great contributions to the world, and thus changed the world.
It is now approximately seventy years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This post is meant to serve as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, twenty million Russians, ten million Christians, including nineteen-hundred Catholic priests, who were murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated. Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming The Holocaust to be “a myth,” it is imperative to make sure the world "never forgets.”
We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.
What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.
Recently, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it “offends” the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet.
However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving in to it.
And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the diseases of racism and bigotry, Europe opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.
They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.
It is now approximately seventy years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This email is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, twenty million Russians, ten million Christians, and nineteen-hundred Catholic priests who were murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated. Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming The Holocaust to be “a myth,” it is imperative to make sure the world "never forgets.”
How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center “NEVER HAPPENED” because it offends some Muslim in the United States?
If our Judeo-Christian heritage is offensive to Muslims, they should pack up and move to Iran, Iraq or some other shithole Muslim country. Please do not just delete this message; it will take only a minute to pass this along. We must wake up America, England, Australia and Europe before it's too late.
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"If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.” ~ David Thomas, Quora
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MISHA FIRER ON THE LACK OF LOGIC IN RUSSIA
~ Westerners are looking for logic in Putin’s actions, but he’s Russian and he ain’t got none.
What are the consequences of this war and the record number of sanctions two years after the invasion ? All the residual things that simmered below in Russia have bubbled up to the surface — bigotry, rage, superstitions, backwardness, militarism.
The most viewed TV series today is about youth gangs “Word of the Pal” that proliferated in Russia in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yesterday, I wrote that instead of manufacturing cars, Russia produces kamikaze drones. I thought it was a turn of speech but it’s literally so!
Vladimir Putin meets with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in the Kremlin and makes an agreement with him about a new Russian production of Iranian Shahed drones: they’ll be assembled from ready-made Iranian parts in the Samara SEZ Zhigulevskaya Valley instead of Zhiguli cars.
There’s a growing number of incidents involving malfunctioning passenger planes that had to make emergency landings. It is a direct result of lack of maintenance and original parts (sanctions, again).
A passenger plane made an emergency landing at Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport due to a fire in the engines. This is such a common occurrence now that it has its own term “to land with a spark.”
There were 176 people on board the Boeing 737. While ascending, sparks and flames suddenly flew from both engines.
Engine. The most sophisticated part of the plane that Russians cannot understand how to make nor maintain. It’s always the engine that goes up in sparks and flames.
The crew requested a landing from the dispatcher, after which they were able to successfully land the airplane.
Russian men have a tendency to wait till the last moment to fill the gas tanks of their cars. Meter says the tank is empty but the driver observes flippantly, “Oh, there’s still enough gas for at least three miles. Don’t worry about it. I’m sure there’s a gas station just around the corner.”
Airbus A320 after emergency landing in the wheat field in Novosibirsk Oblast, Russia. Pilot Sergey Belov: “We ran out of fuel because we flew to another city by mistake.” They calculated fuel to Omsk but flew to Novosibirsk.
In September, 2023 Ural Airlines pilots had to make an emergency landing in the wheat field of the same Novosibirsk region because they incorrectly calculated the amount of fuel.
PILOT: “Eduard, we’re out of fuel. I thought we are flying to Omsk and had to change the course. We need some fuel otherwise we gonna stall. Do you see any gas station below where we can fill in the tank?”
CO-PILOT: “Sergey, there’s one by the wheat field.”
PILOT: “Great. I’m gonna park our plane in the field and you run to the gas station with a canister. Charge it to the Ural Airlines.”
The investigation concluded that like any self-respecting brutalsky men the two pilots waited till the last moment to fill in the tanks. They also first flew to the wrong city. It’s the air hostess’s fault — she served them too much vodka.
“You had to think about whether you had enough gasoline when you decided to fly to another airport,” the investigator castigated hapless pilots.
You don’t say. Calculate? Not in Russia. Nobody does any calculations. EVER. You wing it and let the chips fall where they are.
Do you think Eduard and Sergey feel any remorse for putting their passengers through this terrible ordeal?
Pilots refused to write letters of resignation. They believe they did nothing wrong!
The mother (!) of one of the pilots, Sergei Belov, complained about Ural Airlines to the Kremlin because the airline was “confused” and her son always drives with empty tank and manages to make it to a gas station.
And besides he’s a hero because he landed the plane safely and nobody died.
The field around the plane was plowed — it was harvest time, and there’s a runaway, but the plane could not take off.
In the end, the Airbus plane was dismantled for parts and written off as scrap. Oh charge it to Sergey Belov. He’ll pay it off after 4,600 years of work. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
James Urie:
Having no replacement brake parts has forced some Russian carriers to land without brakes and using thrust reverse to slow the aircraft down. Flying in Russia a new version of Russian roulette.
Pericles Bacchus:
I recall when the USSR collapsed, way back in the late 80’s. There was such a palpable sense of exhilaration. It was all over the media of the times. In music etc. Then I read a piece by a journalist, I forget the name, but the thrust of it was this: what is going to replace the Soviet regime in Russia? That there was a very real danger of mob rule. Organized crime would likely fill the vacuum of the country that has no leader, nor workable system to keep it functioning. It would seem there was more truth in these words than most thought at the time.
Hamsini Sitini:
What happened to the Soviet aviation products like Tupolev etc? I saw one in Fat Kim’s DPRK, still functional.
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KUDA, RUS'? WHERE IS RUSSIA HEADING? (Dima Vorobiev)
Russian future defies linear predictions. Any answer based on past experience most likely would point in the wrong direction.
Consider the following:
At the start of the 17th century, it appeared like Muscovy was on track to become an aristocratic democracy based on the laws of the Zemsky Sobor, modeled after Poland, and possibly even with a Polish/Swedish dynasty on the throne.
At the start of the 18th century, it looked like Russia was poised to conquer the Ottoman Empire and become the dominant power in the Eastern Mediterranean, with its capital city in Azov or even in Constantinople.
At the start of the 19th century, it appeared like Russia was destined to become a playground for a Francophone Russian-speaking Prussian aristocracy, forever allied with Britain as the main market for its colonial goods.
As late as the 1880s, it looked like Russia was set to partition Central Europe and, in the longer term, even the Balkans all the way down to the Straits, in partnership with its new powerful ally, the united German empire.
Right before WW1, Russia appeared poised to become a constitutional monarchy after the British model, potentially pioneering what later became known as Fascism (and possibly even Nazism).
After the 1917 revolution and the civil war, the Soviet Union appeared to be headed for a long period of internal conflict. A state-controlled oligarchy was about to form, similar to modern-day China.
Following World War II, the USSR emerged as a powerful force, expanding into the African and Asian territories of colonial powers France, Britain, and Portugal.
By the 1970s, the USSR had achieved strategic parity with NATO, thanks to its newly acquired petroleum wealth from West Siberia. We had all the money in the world. We used it to amass giant tank armadas, ready to roll on Western Europe, which was demoralized, suffering from oil shortages, plagued by stagflation, and torn by social tensions and peace movements.”
As recently as the mid-1980s, when some prescient souls predicted that the USSR would not survive into the 1990s, people just rolled their eyes.
At the start of the 1990s, anyone who predicted that Russia would buy entire political parties and business lobbies in the West and even influence Western elections would have been met with ridicule.
Nothing of that came true.
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The picture below depicts a futurist projection from 1960, based on extrapolation of current trends. The artwork is called "Cosmonauts on the Moon" and was created by artist Vyacheslav Khovayev. The statue in the image represents Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union."
As we know now, if someone sometime were to construct a massive statue on the moon, it would not be of Lenin.
Misha Firer:
11 planes of Russian airlines made emergency landing within 8 days of December 2023. There’re still 23 days left till new year…
Tim Orum:
Russia is the perfect example of a nation owned and operated by social engineers serving their own interests in their own lifespan rather than the long-term interests of the Russian people and the nation. We should all learn the lessons of Russia before it’s too late.
Dima Vorobiev:
Post-Soviet Russia isn’t a project of social engineering. It’s a purely commercial enterprise by President Putin and his trusty oligarchs, through and through.
In many ways, the same can be said about Imperial Russia. The major difference might be that the House of Romanov didn’t have our President’s business acumen and his grasp of political technologies.
Tony Jazdec:
Any attempts at predicting Russia’s future seem futile given how it is impossible to predict even its past.
Well, technically, Russia’s past is, in defiance of causality, dependent on its future, so the two problems are in fact just one.
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Neil Armstrong was once asked, if the Lunar Module engine wouldn’t work, they were stranded on the moon, and they only had 2 hours of oxygen left, what would he do with those last 2 hours of his life?
Armstrong answered “I’d try to get the engine fixed.”
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REMEMBERING HENRY KISSINGER AND DOCTOR RUTH WESTHEIMER
George Packer recounts an exchange he witnessed between Henry Kissinger and Dr. Ruth Westheimer at a dinner with Angela Merkel.
Derek Thompson: In a new article in The Atlantic, you write, “[Henry] Kissinger is a problem to be solved: the problem of a very human inhumanity. Because he was, undoubtedly, human—brilliant, insecure, funny, gossipy, curious, devious, self-deprecating, cruel.” Before we dive into Kissinger’s complex legacy, I want to start with a very personal anecdote from your piece that reflects on this very human inhumanity, as you call it. You’ve met Kissinger several times, including one dinner in 2015 with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the sex columnist Dr. Ruth [Westheimer]. Tell me about that dinner and the surprising showdown between Henry Kissinger and Dr. Ruth.
George Packer: I was surprised to see Dr. Ruth there. I didn’t know why she had been invited. It turned out that she and Merkel were friends. I was not surprised to see Henry Kissinger there. Henry Kissinger had a way of showing up at all sorts of high-flying, elite events, including dinners at the German consul’s residence for the German chancellor. This was in the middle of the migrant crisis, when Germany was announcing that it would admit a million or more Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi and other refugees from war, to sort of the shock of the rest of the continent, because the other countries were in varying degrees of resistance to letting them in.
Henry Kissinger, over dinner, sitting on the other side of Merkel from Dr. Ruth, began criticizing this decision and speaking in rather apocalyptic terms in that baritone of his and saying, “This will alter German civilization.” He didn’t say “destroy,” but it seemed to be something close to that. “I can understand letting in a few refugees, you know, as a humanitarian gesture, but a million is like the Romans opening the gates of the city to the barbarians.” And we were all listening to this, and Merkel was quietly taking it in, and to my right and Merkel’s left was this tiny figure, Dr. Ruth, who—both of them, Dr. Ruth and Dr. Kissinger, were in their [late 80s to] 90s.
Dr. Ruth was so small that I had to push in her chair a little bit so that she could eat her soup. She began to tell us that when she was 10 years old, she lived in Frankfurt. It was 1938, and the gestapo came to her house shortly after Kristallnacht and took her father away. And the last she saw of him was waving to her as she stood looking out the window as he was bundled into a police van. Shortly after that, she was put on a train to Switzerland in what was called the Kindertransport, which [was] a rescue of some German Jewish children just before the start of the war. And she spent the war in Switzerland. She never saw her father or her mother again. Both of them died in the camps.
Dr. Ruth as a child
And she told us that ... just before Kristallnacht, there had been a conference in Geneva, or near Geneva, called the Évian Conference, where the world’s countries debated what to do about Jewish refugees. And, essentially, no countries, including ours, expressed any willingness to take in Jewish refugees except the Dominican Republic. And she said, “So nothing came of that conference. I hope more will come from this dinner, where it concerns the Syrian and other refugees, than came from Évian when I was a little girl.” And she said, “If it had not been for the Kindertransport, I would not be here today to talk to you.”
I was looking at Kissinger while she was finishing this story, and I was realizing, “Uh-huh, now I know why Dr. Ruth is here,” and this seems to be a way of telling a man who was very close to her age and who also was a German Jew in the ’30s and who also escaped and came to this country, “You don’t seem to remember what it means to be a refugee, but I still remember.” And that was it. She didn’t even say that much. But you didn’t need to hear it. It was pretty stark and dramatic, and there was this silence, and then the topic moved on. And she had hardly spoken before, and she hardly spoke after. That was what she was there to say.
THE DOWNSIDE OF A CASHLESS SOCIETY
Four centuries ago, a woman named Else Knutsdatter was executed in Vardø, a small coastal town in Norway. She was accused of having used witchcraft to raise an ocean storm that claimed the lives of 40 men. She wasn’t the only one to fall victim to 17th-century folk who – in the absence of other explanations – could be convinced that disasters were conjured by malevolent sorcerers. Ninety others were executed for conspiring to produce the same storm.
Today, we know that physics and atmospheric pressures produced those storms. So, in the realm of weather, we’ve moved to systemic thinking, where bad things don’t need to be explained with reference to bad actors. When it comes to descriptions of politics and economics, the progress is not so unequivocal. Do bad things like climate change, conflict and corporate greed happen because powerful politicians and CEOs construct it like that, or do they emerge in the vacuum of human agency, in the fact that nobody’s actually in control? This is a question that confronts me in the campaign to protect the physical cash system against the digital takeover by Big Finance and Big Tech.
For more than eight years, I’ve advocated for the protection and promotion of physical notes and coins. I wrote a book called Cloudmoney: Why the War on Cash Endangers Our Freedom (2023). In that book, I point out that the public has swallowed a false just-so story that says we are pining for a cashless society. All over the world, public and private sector leaders claim that ‘our’ desire for speed, convenience, scale and interconnection drives an inevitable digital transition. This is supposed to bring a ‘frictionless’ world of digital payment-fueled commerce, done at the click of a button or scan of the iris. The message is: keep up or else face being left behind.
The fact that so many leaders recite this script triggers some folks into thinking ulterior motives are guiding them, and it is true that the finance and tech sectors, for example, gain massively from the digitization hype. Over the past few decades, they’ve launched various top-down attacks against the cash system, something I chronicle in my book. Physical cash is issued by governments (via central banks), whereas the units in your bank account are basically ‘digital casino chips’ issued by the likes of Barclays, HSBC and Santander.
‘Cashless society’ is a privatization, in which power over payments is transferred to the banking sector. Every tap of a contactless card or Apple Pay triggers banks into moving these digital casino chips around for you. It gives them enormous power, revenue and data. They can share that data with governments but, more often than not, they’re using it for their own purposes (such as passing it through AI models to decide whether you get access to things or not).
By rejecting the story that cashless society is driven primarily from the bottom up, I sometimes get accused of being a conspiracy theorist. It’s not hard to imagine the outlines of a ‘conspiracy’ when you look at who benefits most from payments privatization. Not only are Visa, Mastercard and the banking sector big beneficiaries, the fixation on digitization also extends the power of Amazon and other corporate behemoths that are moving beyond the internet into the physical world via smart devices and automated stores that plug into digital finance systems. It’s a small jump to imagine how governments can piggyback on this digital enclosure to spy on us, or manipulate us.
For centuries, the capitalist system has been underpinned by nation-states that have fostered the growth of large firms. For a long time, cash helped that system to expand and accelerate. In the 1950s, corporations were more than happy to have adverts featuring people using cash to buy their products, but in the contemporary moment firms are turning against it. Cash is hard to automate. It cannot be plugged into globe-spanning digital infrastructures. It operates at human scale and speed within a system that increasingly demands inhuman scale and speed. It’s creating ‘friction’ at a systemic level, so even if you like cash at a local level, you’ll gradually find yourself coerced away from it.
When it comes to money, though, the battle lines get more confusing, because the monetary system is a public-private hybrid. Physical cash is government money, but it has properties – like anonymity – that appeal to some anti-government libertarians. Privacy-invading card-payment systems, by contrast, have historically been run by the private sector, so those pro-business libertarians who are concerned by surveillance are forced to accuse banks of being phony ‘crony capitalists’ collaborating with controlling governments.
This collaboration can be seen in the case of the 2022 anti-vax ‘Freedom Convoy’ truckers, whose bank accounts were frozen by a Canadian government order. Libertarians rallied in support of the truckers, but there’s many variations of these alliances between states and payments firms.
For example, the US government agency USAID has funded programs like Catalyst: Inclusive Cashless Payment Partnership, pushing Visa as a tool of empowerment in India. In its 2017 annual report, Visa talks about doubling its market penetration into India after it ‘worked closely’ with Narendra Modi’s government in its ‘demonetization’ efforts in 2016, during which time certain banknotes were outlawed. The Indian prime minister’s open attacks on the public cash system also drew fawning praise from Indian digital-payments firms.
Because at scale it’s cheaper to push billions of people through a handful of centralized players, almost every industry in the world is dominated by oligopolies of large firms. Those firms will inevitably build political connections, while smaller firms get relegated to the periphery. Oligopolistic firms fluctuate between collaboration and competition, but the evolutionary logic of our economic system is always towards greater automation. Corporate executives benefit if they nudge everyone in this direction, and they have a niggling insecurity that, if they don’t, competitors will leave them behind.
The problem is that many people don’t love digital acceleration, and it takes a considerable effort over time to erode their resistance. This is why big retailers like Tesco start by tentatively testing cashless stores in certain locations to set a precedent. It took years for the airline industry to make it feel ‘normal’ to refuse cash, but that norm is still not universal.
Even last year, I found myself seated next to a man on a flight who was humiliated and flustered when the attendants refused his banknote. The man wasn’t a frequent flyer and came from a working-class background, pointing toward an important fact: when a capitalist system is resetting to a state of higher speed and automation, it often does so first through social elites. In London, a hipster barber targeting yuppies may very well refuse cash, but a hair salon targeting working-class immigrants will almost certainly ‘still’ take it. Words like ‘still’ are loaded, because they imply that whoever is still doing the thing has yet to go through some evolutionary upgrade.
Digital payments giants like Visa invest heavily in presenting ‘going cashless’ as a grassroots triumph for the small entrepreneur who wants to cut costs. In reality, this alliance between Big Finance/Big Tech and small and medium-sized enterprises applies only to businesses with middle-class customers. A decade ago, many of those customers didn’t even perceive cash as particularly inconvenient. Even now, they would prefer choice (the fact that I sometimes use my card doesn’t mean I asked a shop to remove its cash till).
It’s businesses that remove our payments choice, but they rely on the fact that most middle-class people simply adapt their expectations and edit their memories to forget those old days when cash felt totally normal. Once new cultural norms are established, it compels compliance. Eventually, you get discriminated against if you insist on being that guy who complains that the London bar won’t accept your coins.
The fact that people fall into line and begin displaying a preference for card payments is read by politicians as a signal to support the transition. They too are worried about being ‘left behind’. This pressure to go along with the transnational automation drive means that the average UK Labour Party politician doesn’t challenge cashless society. Rather, they call for a slight slowdown in the imagined ‘race’ towards it, to give cash-dependent communities a chance to ‘catch up’.
So, capitalism has inherent trends, but it also has inherent contradictions. Here’s one of them. Our cashless card payments rely upon ‘digital casino chips’ issued to us by banks, but – as anyone who has been to a casino knows – such chips have power only because you believe they can be redeemed for cash. In the total absence of cash, there could be a collapse in the public’s belief in bank-issued digital money. Banks and corporations make private decisions that erode our cash infrastructure, but in doing so they are undermining the public basis of confidence in their private systems.
This was accelerated by the outbreak of COVID-19, which gave companies a convenient cover to fast-track their automation plans. It’s easier for a retailer to announce they don’t accept cash because of COVID-19 than to admit that they’re trying to shave a percent off their costs. For example, Visa entered a deal with the US National Football League to promote cashless Super Bowls. Signed in 2019 and piloted in 2020, it went public in 2021 during the pandemic, with attendant media coverage presenting it as a measure of public hygiene. Cashless pubs in London allow hundreds of unmasked people in their establishments while claiming to refuse cash to protect their employees from any coronavirus that may be stuck to the notes (a contention that is scientifically inaccurate).
In 2020, such scaremongering, along with the fact that so many of us were forced into online shopping during the pandemic, caused a precipitous drop in transactional cash use. This raised the possibility of a financial stability problem, because cash psychologically (and legally) backs our cashless digital casino chips. This puts central banks in a bind. They know that the trajectory leads to a crisis-prone bank-dominated version of cashless society. So they think about how to maintain public access to government money without upsetting the transnational automation agenda. One way they are trying to resolve this is with a new form of ‘digital cash’ – central bank digital currency (CBDC).
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In May 2020, my mother was sent a video by her friend on Facebook. It claimed that Bill Gates had orchestrated COVID-19 to microchip us via vaccines and to usher in a cashless society where our every economic move could be monitored. Her friend was very excited to announce that ‘Your son is in this! You must be so proud.’ Sure enough, there was a clip of me (used without my permission), in which I was describing how financial institutions engage in a war on cash. It was followed by a clip of an evangelical pastor warning that ‘the Bible clearly links the mark of the beast with the emergence of a cashless society’.
How is it that I end up in a video like this? Conspiracy theorists happily take my work out of context in order to push their version of events. Rather than analyzing the logic of capitalism, many of them have decided that behind digital innovation-speak lie satanic overlords, pedophiles, Marxists, Jews or caricatured banksters smoking cigars.
Ironically, it’s central banks’ response to the corporate attack on cash that has really spurred the new wave of pro-cash activism. The possibility of a state-controlled digital pound or digital euro replacing the battered cash system has galvanized the imagination of libertarian activists. Libertarians have always faced a tension when complaining about the surveillance that accompanies cashless society. This is because digital payment systems are pushed by private sector fintech entrepreneurs, and libertarians are supposed to be pro-entrepreneurialism. CBDC has enabled them to escape this bind. It allows them to rework the story of cashless society as being driven by an oppressive digital state.
The cashless system is run by transnational corporations, and the actually existing examples of payments control often concern welfare recipients: for instance, the Australian ‘cashless welfare card’ was a Visa card system that blocked Indigenous Australians on benefits from buying non-approved goods in non-approved stores. These systems not only limit choice, but can be used to push people’s business to big retailers, rather than small ones.
Farage and his contemporaries don’t focus on the payments censorship of Indigenous welfare recipients. They fixate on conservative fears, like the hypothetical blocking of transactions for guns and meat. This is causing me problems, because moderate progressives – who previously would have expressed some concern about corporate power – have started associating a pro-cash stance with reactionaries, and to a broader suite of ideas that they espouse.
In Germany, I’ve even been accused of being aligned with the neo-Nazi Reichsbürger movement, purely on the basis that they too are pro-cash. I’ve seen digital payments promoters use this disorientation to their advantage. They can suggest that critiques of their industry are the realm of crackpot antisemites. If conspiracy theorists are the ones leading the charge against digitization, surely it must show the concern is built from the wild fantasies of paranoid Flat-Earthers.
Rather than fight cashless society, then, they suggest we should promote corporate financial inclusion: give a helping hand to all those people who have yet to be absorbed into Big Finance. Get them accounts. Help them become corporate consumers. cashless society.jpg An anti-cashless society propaganda leaflet .
Cashless society authentically sucks. It’s a world where your kid cannot sell lemonade on the side of the road without paying Mastercard executives in New York. It’s an attack on privacy, autonomy, local independence and casual informal interactions in favor of surveillance, dependence and centralization of power in large institutions. I frequently interact with people who have very real concerns about it, but who – like our 17th-century folk who lost loved ones to a storm – have been steered into reactionary ideas about it.
Our struggle to see large-scale systemic processes gives oxygen to conspiracy theorists. I frequently get asked to go on Right-wing media channels, such as GB News, to be interviewed by anti-woke libertarians or Christian evangelists. Many of them imagine capitalism to be the realm of the small individual, and present elites as being malevolent actors who attack the system from above. It’s an easy story to tell.
But the reality is that elites are a by-product of our system. The invisible hand likes tapping the contactless card, regardless of whether you as an individual do, and the role of the elites in the war on cash is to simply unblock resistance to that. More often than not, they’re examples of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. They’re just people ‘doing their job’, serving a system that wants to commodify any aspect of our lives that remains un-commodified and un-automated.
The dominant tendencies in capitalism pull upon all of us but it’s possible to demand space for other values. It’s been done before. There was a time when the automobile industry seemed ascendant, and bikes were pushed off the roads, but we built a cultural movement to demand bicycle lanes. That’s why we should see cash as being like the public bicycle of payments, and support efforts across the political spectrum to protect and promote it.
Digital bank systems are the private Uber of payments: they may appear convenient, but total Uberization unleashes demons that cash historically kept in check – surveillance, censorship, digital exclusion, and serious resilience and financial stability problems. The point isn’t to argue that everyone must always use the ‘bicycle’. It’s to ensure that we don’t get totally ‘Uberized’ in private and public life. We need to promote a healthy balance of power between different forms of money in the system, and that’s within our collective political abilities. ~
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The car has become a secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine to the self, his mobile Walden Pond. ~ Edward McDonagh
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A GLANCE AT THE JFK ENIGMA
Now that 35 years have passed [this article goes back to 1993], Robert Block can occasionally chuckle when recalling the short Orange County tour of duty of 19-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald.
Block was only 29 himself when, as a Marine Corps captain, he supervised the young Oswald and about 35 to 40 other enlistees as part of Air Control Squadron Nine at the Tustin air base. After more than a year on duty in the Far East, Oswald arrived back in Orange County late in 1958 and stayed until the following September, when he made up a story about needing a dependency discharge to take care of his mother.
Block said he was surprised later to discover that Oswald lied about the reason for wanting a discharge and that he had moved to Russia almost immediately afterward. “It was just that, being a Marine, you think that, ‘Once a Marine, always a Marine,’ ” Block said. “You’re a very patriotic person, and for him to essentially lie that he had a hardship at home to get out of the Marine Corps and then to appear in Moscow . . . I was quite surprised.”
That all happened in the fall of 1959. Four years later, on that November afternoon in 1963, Oswald would write himself into the history books as the accused assassin of John F. Kennedy. It was his Marxist leanings that the public heard most about, and it was Oswald’s left-leaning tendencies that Block remembers, some of which bordered on the near-comic.
Block, who retired from the Marines in 1966 and now owns an insurance agency in Garden Grove, said the FBI interviewed him three days after President Kennedy’s assassination but that he hasn’t been interviewed since. He said he has a clear memory of Oswald, although his Tustin performance was only adequate and not marked by any particular trouble.
“I can recall one time when we had a locker inspection. It was a surprise, you might even call it a search. Those were pulled quite frequently. When we opened his locker, we found copies of the Daily Worker (a communist newspaper) in there. Everybody was kind of surprised, and yet it was blown over because at the time the Marine Corps was trying to indoctrinate Marines as to what communism was and who their adversary was. They were actually holding classes on communism.” Oswald used that rationale when confronted with the newspapers, although his barracks mates already had been teasing him about his Marxist sympathies.
Several examples of that have reappeared in a new book entitled “Case Closed.” Written by Gerald Posner, the book focuses on Oswald and Jack Ruby and concludes that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy and that Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald.
Block, now 64, chuckled as I read passages from the book in which Oswald’s fellow enlistees joked about his communist leanings. One Tustin air base acquaintance said Oswald often answered with “da” and “nyet,” used red pieces when playing chess to represent the Red Army and greeted fellow Marines with “Hello, comrade.” Block said he hadn’t heard some of those stories, but he laughed when recalling that Oswald was often called “Oswaldskovich” by other Marines.
“Oswald was an introvert,” Block said. “He would never have won any popularity contests and I think he had one or two close associates and that was only because he lived close to them” in the barracks.
Block was in a barber’s chair when he heard about the assassination. “Shortly thereafter they said they had captured the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and I damn near fell out of the chair,” Block said.
Block went back to his unit headquarters. “Everybody was talking about Oswald. Everybody’s first thought was, ‘No way,’ ” Block said. “It was a disbelief that he would have been able to accomplish something like that and even further disbelief when the mechanics of it were broadcast. I don’t care what kind of rifle he had. I don’t think it would have been within his capability.”
Oswald’s marksmanship has been a key part of the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination. His Marine rating was “sharpshooter,” and while that is the middle range of three levels of expertise, Block said, “Really, you see a sharpshooter badge on a Marine — I’d be ashamed to have it on my chest.”
Many argue the fatal shots were well within Oswald’s capabilities, but Block disagrees. “You’ve got a moving target there, and when you’re talking about hitting somebody in the head from that distance and that angle, it just boggles my mind that he would even have that capability. I don’t know where he could have practiced, whether in the woods or remote areas or in Russia, but you’ve got to come up with some pretty good marksmanship to carry off something like that.”
The issue, however, has not haunted Block over the years. “I can recall many times when this would come up about President Kennedy, at social events or whatever, and I would mention that I knew Oswald. People would say, ‘What? You really did?’ I said, yeah, I was his officer-in-charge for about a year.”
It seemed to Block that people wanted to talk to him about Oswald, as if that would put them closer to the historic event. “I don’t tell people about Oswald unless it’s brought up, unless they talk about the assassination and blame Oswald,” he says. “Then I say, ‘Hey, I don’t think Oswald did it.’ They ask why I think that, and I say, ‘Well, because, because and because.’ Then they’re in doubt. Immediately I place them in doubt that he had the ability to do it.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-11-21-me-59498-story.html
Oriana:
It seems that the story only gets more muddy as time goes on. It’s also strangely addictive — you start reading and keep on reading the opposing opinions. The car was moving very slowly. Some claim that for an ex-Marine sharp-shooter, the shot did not present much challenge.
Strangely enough, back in 1963 I wasn’t all that shaken by the news of JFK’s death. What DID shake me up was Ruby’s killing of Oswald. I instantly saw that the point was to silence Oswald, and I was frightened that it was so easy for Ruby to shoot at point blank in the presence of all the police on the scene.
Everyone in Poland (well, most likely everyone) thought it was the dirty work of the Soviet Union, the masters at eliminating people they didn’t like. My mother thought it was revenge for the Cuban missile crisis humiliation. And later what stayed in my mind was this: “In 1967, CBS hired 11 professional marksmen to replicate Oswald’s marksmanship [using the rifle he used] – again, NOBODY NOBODY could replicate what Oswald supposedly did on 22 November 1963.”
And Dorothy Kilgallen, the brilliant woman reporter who had interviewed Jack Ruby, also died a mysterious death. Did she find out too much? Ruby remarked that the truth could not be allowed to be known to the public because it involved individuals at the highest levels of power.
Who in a position of power hated JFK? Possibly the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.
Allegedly Hoover was afraid that JFK would fire him. And the former CIA director Allen Dulles likewise supposedly despised JFK.
Allen Dulles and JFK
At least one of JFK’s mistresses also died mysterious deaths. Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot twice at close range in Georgetown. The case remains unsolved.
M and the Kennedy brothers in the only known picture of all three on May 19, 1962, after Monroe sang Happy Birthday to JFK at Madison Square Garden. Less than three months later, she would be dead.”
The death of Marilyn Monroe was declared to be a “probable suicide.” There are questions to which we may never have answers.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR IS CONVINCED IT WAS THE CIA
~ Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, is blaming the CIA for his uncle's assassination in 1963. The controversial Democratic presidential candidate made the bold remarks during an interview Sunday with John Catsimatidis on his WABC 770 AM show Cats Roundtable."I think there is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder," Kennedy, 69, said of the Dallas, Texas, assassination of JFK. "I think it's beyond a reasonable doubt at this point." "The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder and in the cover-up," he told Catsimatidis, 74.
On Nov. 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, then 46, was struck by two bullets — one in the head and one in the neck — while riding through the streets of Dallas in an open-topped motorcade with wife Jackie Kennedy by his side. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, was charged with the murder, and the Warren Commission later found that the gunman had acted alone.
Despite the official conclusion, JFK's assassination has fueled conspiracy theories for decades — a prominent one being that the CIA was involved.
Kennedy has previously expressed doubts about JFK's assassination, suggesting in the past that he was unconvinced Oswald acted alone. Prior to his recent, more direct comments on Cats Roundtable, he was already known for courting controversy, particularly for promoting dangerous anti-vaccine conspiracies.
Ahead of the document release, Kennedy spoke with PEOPLE, expressing his frustration. "They should just release the records. It's been 58 years," he said at the time. "Are they trying to seriously tell us they haven't had time to read them? ... And the White House is saying they haven't had time to read them in three generations. It just makes people think that government lies, and it makes Joe Biden look like a liar.
He's doing the same thing Trump did: He promised to release them and now he's saying no, the same as Trump."
In April the former environmental lawyer and son of late U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run as a Democratic candidate for president in 2024. His father was assassinated in the same position, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.
https://people.com/politics/robert-kennedy-jr-cia-involved-jfk-assassination/
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MICROPLASTICS CAN AFFECT CLOUD FORMATION
~ Microplastics are turning up in unusual places increasingly often as they filter into nearly every facet of life on Earth. They’ve been discovered in drinking water, food, air and even in blood. Now, scientists have found that these tiny particles might even be able to influence the weather.
Recently researchers reported they detected microplastics in a majority of cloud samples taken from a mountaintop in China, in a study published in the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
The study traced how the microplastics ended up at their final location and discovered that they could play a role in cloud formation.
The authors of new study found microplastics affect cloud formation, and clouds are of huge importance to the weather we experience.
Clouds produce precipitation in the form of rain, snow and everything in between. They also block sunlight, and less solar radiation means cooler temperatures.
In order for a cloud to form, water vapor – a gas – needs to turn into water droplets – a liquid. Then, many water droplets need to come together to become a cloud.
Water droplets form when water vapor interacts with tiny solid particles in the atmosphere, like dust, ash or salt from the ocean. According to the study, microplastics can now be added to that list.
These particles are hydrophilic, which means they are attracted to water. Once the first water droplets cling to microplastics and other tiny particles, more water droplets are pulled together and clouds form.
The process is akin to how a single spark can eventually set an entire field ablaze: One tiny particle in the atmosphere can set into motion a process that becomes something much bigger.
According to the study’s authors, further research must be completed to fully understand the extent to which microplastics influence cloud formation.
Could a greater concentration of microplastics lead to more clouds? Will an increase in clouds lead to more precipitation or larger swaths of cooler conditions? These questions remain unanswered.
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FLEXIBLE VERSUS INFLEXIBLE BELIEF SYSTEMS
Evolution applies not just to organisms, but also to belief systems. The key to survival is adaptation to changing conditions; the “trash panda”, aka the raccoon, is omnivorous, and can adapt to a wide variety of diets and environments, whereas the actual panda is very sensitive to changes in its environment and diet, and at one point, came very close to extinction, whilst the trash panda has become a successful invasive species in Germany, to which it is not native.
As with organisms, belief systems are in competition with each other, and those which are excessively rigid, and lack the ability to adapt in a manner conducive to survival, will tend to be less successful. A relevant comparison might be the respective attitudes of the Japanese and the Islamic world: the Japanese cherry picked Western ideas that they believed would be of benefit to them, and as a consequence, became a world power in the 20th century; they took it too far by adopting the Western model of imperial expansion, and when this failed, they adapted and became a huge economic power.
By contrast, the Islamic world, in general, briefly flirted with Western style modernity, then rejected it, and decided that returning to the fundamentals of Islam was the solution to their problems. The consequence of this attitude is that the Islamic world is currently a civilizational backwater; the only wealthy Islamic countries are those with important natural resources which were discovered and exploited with Western technology.
The poorest states in the US are in the “Bible Belt”, whilst the richest state in the union is the “Sodom by the Sea” known as California. There are religious people here, but religion has almost no influence on public life, and California is a refuge for “deviants” who are attracted to the same sex, enjoy recreational drug use, and value the right to an abortion. It’s not that California lacks problems, however, its laissez faire attitude towards religion and “alternative” lifestyles means that it attracts the most intelligent and creative people in the world to live and work in the state, with the consequence that if it were a sovereign nation, its nominal GDP would be higher than that of India.
Religious fundamentalism is an evolutionary dead end; fundamentalists may have more children in general, but due to the closed mindedness most of these children inherit, they will be less productive and influential than their non-fundamentalist peers, and a society in which religious or ideological fundamentalism prevails cannot compete with those societies in which open debate is valued. By analogy, imagine a bout between two boxers: one has voluntarily confined himself to a straitjacket for a year, and the other has been sparring and pumping iron for the same length of time: who wins?
America is resented worldwide for its outsized influence and power, but America’s puissance is a consequence of the victory of the enlightenment values of the Founding Fathers over the fundamentalist values of the Pilgrim Fathers. The authors of the US Constitution made some difficult, and even heinous compromises to ensure the survival of the Republic, but in the end, their gamble paid off. The ultimate victory went to the trash pandas. ~ Philip Husband, Quora
Oriana:
The U.S. remains a fascinating battleground between enlightenment and fundamentalism. The country was founded equally by the religious nuts on Mayflower and various other exotic Christian sects, and the radical (for the times) liberals (think of the genius of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson). Then came the American brand of Catholicism. The country has always been a giant social experiment.
San Miguel Chapel in New Mexico goes back to 1610.
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BLOOD TEST MAY BE ABLE TO TELL WHICH ORGANS SHOW ACCELERATED AGING
About one in five healthy people ages 50 and older had an organ that was aging at an accelerated rate, which may increase mortality and signal organ-specific disease, a study of nearly 5,700 people suggested.
In an analysis of blood samples for proteins originating from specific organs, 18.4% of people 50 and older had one organ with accelerated aging and 1.7% had aging in multiple organs, reported Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, of Stanford University in California, and co-authors.
When the biological age of an organ was much greater than the chronological age of the person, there was a 20% to 50% higher risk of mortality and organ-specific diseases, they noted in the journal Nature.
For instance, people with accelerated heart aging had a 250% increased risk of heart failure, while accelerated brain and vascular aging predicted Alzheimer's disease progression as accurately as plasma phosphorylated tau 181 (p-tau181), a high-performing Alzheimer's biomarker. Accelerated aging in kidneys was associated with diabetes, obesity, hypercholesterolaemia, and hypertension, and accelerated aging in muscles was linked with gait impairment.
Notably, heart attack and Alzheimer's disease, among other diseases, were associated with accelerated aging in "virtually all organs," while others were only associated with aging of one organ or a subset of organs.
Particularly significant at the population level were aged kidneys. Hypertensive individuals had kidneys that were, on average, a year older than their same-age peers, while people with diabetes had kidneys that were about 1.3 years older. People with atrial fibrillation had hearts 2.8 years older, and those who had a heart attack had hearts that were 2.6 years older.
"If we can reproduce this finding in 50,000 or 100,000 individuals, it will mean that by monitoring the health of individual organs in apparently healthy people, we might be able to find organs that are undergoing accelerated aging in people's bodies, and we might be able to treat people before they get sick," Wyss-Coray said in a press release.
The researchers measured 4,979 proteins from participants' blood samples. They then mapped the putative organ-specific plasma proteome and used that to train machine learning models to guess people's age based on those protein levels. Eleven key organs, organ systems, or tissues were assessed: heart, fat, lung, immune system, kidney, liver, muscle, pancreas, brain, vasculature, and intestine.
After finding that 15% of the proteins could be attributed to a specific organ, "we basically had now a list of proteins that, in a way, gave us organ-specific information in the blood and then we used this for each organ to make a biological clock," Wyss-Coray told MedPage Today, adding that "we don't age in synchrony across our whole body.”
The study included data from the Covance, LonGenity, Stanford Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Stanford Aging Memory Study, and Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center cohorts. The researchers used SomaLogic SomaScan to quantify proteins in plasma and the Gene Tissue Expression Atlas human tissue bulk RNA-seq database to identify which genes and plasma proteins were organ-enriched, defined as being expressed at least four times higher in a particular organ; the highest number was in the brain.
Using machine learning, they estimated biological age using the plasma proteome and then calculated the organ age gap. The researchers also developed the feature importance for biological aging (FIBA) algorithm, "which uses feature permutation to generate a per-protein importance score for both chronological and biological age," to investigate how proteins contributed to brain aging.
Because the study focused on a subset of organs, it is unknown if these findings apply to all organs. Wyss-Coray and team also noted that they observed "many instances of nonlinear dynamics in the plasma proteome and in aging phenotypes," urging caution in extrapolating the results to people younger than 50. They also suggested that the research be conducted among more ethnically and geographically diverse populations, since the participants were majority white and entirely American.
Wyss-Coray added that he hopes future studies will assess multiple blood samples from patients across time to see how organ aging changes. "We may gain new insight into the biological mechanisms that lead to that heart aging," he said.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/107709?xid=nl_mpt_Cardiology_update_2023-12-08&mh=788a5203e5c46eefe40bc9dd2371f76b?xid%3Dnl_mpt_Cardiology_update_2023-12-08&mh=788a5203e5c46eefe40bc9dd2371f76b&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Automated%20Specialty%20Update%20Cardiology%20BiWeekly%20FRIDAY%202023-12-08&utm_term=NL_Spec_Cardiology_Update_Active
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NAVY BEANS HELP PREVENT COLON CANCER
While colorectal cancer is highly treatable at its earliest stage, most cases are found when it is more advanced.
Between 7% and 29% of people who receive treatment for colorectal cancer experience recurrence within five years.
Certain lifestyle changes, such as a healthy diet, can help prevent colorectal cancer.
Researchers recently found that adding navy beans, also known as haricot beans, to the diet of colorectal cancer survivors helped improve their gut microbiome, which could aid in both cancer prevention and treatment.
Colorectal cancer — which affects the large intestine, including the colon and the rectum — is the third most common cancer in the world.
Colorectal cancer is highly treatable — and in some cases even curable — when caught early enough.
However, colorectal cancer does not always show symptoms at an early stage. Only about three to four out of 10 are diagnosed at its earliest stage, where the disease is localized.
If treatment is successful for colorectal cancer, recent research shows that despite improvements in treatment between 7% and 29% of people may have a recurrence of the condition within five years of treatment, depending on site and stage.
Although it is not possible to fully prevent colorectal cancer, past studies show regular physical activity, keeping a healthy weight, and making certain nutritional choices can help.
Now, researchers from The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has found that adding navy beans, also known as haricot beans, to the diet of colorectal cancer survivors helps improve their gut microbiome, which could potentially aid in both cancer prevention and treatment.
Why choose navy beans?
While other dry beans, peas, and lentils have nutritional profiles that are also likely to stimulate the gut microbiome, Dr. Carrie Daniel-MacDougall, associate professor of epidemiology at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and lead author of this study told Medical News Today she was particularly inspired by promising findings in early preclinical or mouse model studies specifically testing the effect of navy beans on the combination of obesity, inflammation, and colorectal cancer.
“These studies, including my own, were also inspired by the Polyp Prevention Trial (PPT),” Dr. Daniel-MacDougall said.
“This large study showed that the participants with the biggest increase in bean consumption — daily or close to it — had a lower risk of advanced colorectal adenoma recurrence — a type of precancerous and high-risk polyp that is very likely to progress to colorectal cancer if not caught promptly upon colonoscopy and completely removed,” she continued.
“At the time of the PPT, pinto, navy, and black beans were the most commonly consumed beans and varied in popularity by U.S. region. Here in Texas, I knew navy beans would also be ‘new’ to participants and have a mild/adaptable taste, making them well-suited to test in a controlled and consistent manner over eight weeks,” she added.
How gut health is tied to colorectal cancer
Dr. Daniel-MacDougall said it is important for colorectal cancer survivors to have a balanced gut microbiome because it directly interacts with the colon epithelium where colorectal cancer develops.
“This ‘cross-talk’ between human cells and microbes is tightly linked to the immune system that can either prevent or drive inflammation, as well as the development and progression of cancer,” she continued.
“Having made it through the difficult journey of cancer, survivors certainly want to avoid other major and debilitating health issues,” Dr. Daniel-MacDougall added.
Previous research has also shown the gut microbiome’s important role in colorectal cancer. A study published in July 2023 suggested the gut microbiome may be a target for microbial therapeutics against colorectal cancer.
A study published in June 2020 found that personal modulation of a person’s gut microbiome through diet may help prevent the development and progression of CRC and improve the efficacy of antitumoral therapy.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/eating-more-navy-haricot-beans-may-help-colorectal-cancer-prevention-treatment#How-gut-health-is-tied-to-colorectal-cancer-
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ending on beauty:
THE NOSTALGIA OF PIGEONS
Here I console myself
But it wasn’t the beauty —
it was
his coming,
unasked, home.
~ Oriana
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