Golden pectoral from the Tovsta Mohyla burial mound; Museum of Historical Treasures, Kyiv
*
BREAK, BREAK, BREAK
Break, break, break,
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break
Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
~ Alfred Tennyson
*
~ Alfred Tennyson
*
In this famous poem, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) laments the death of his 22-year-old friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, in 1833. It was probably written in 1834 (some sources give 1835). Hallam is the subject of the long elegiac meditation In Memoriam, which occupied Tennyson for a number of years, but Break, Break, Break can’t be considered a trial run for In Memoriam. Tennyson had begun to write some of the quatrains for the latter poem a few days after the loss of his friend. It’s to some extent a distillation of emotion, a sharply anguished keen rather than a meditation, but it contains themes and images in microcosm that are more spaciously considered in In Memoriam – “the touch of a vanish’d hand”, the sea – important because it bore Arthur Hallam’s remains home from Italy – and the vision of “the tender grace’” of a particular day.
Tennyson and Hallam met at Cambridge and shared literary, philosophical and political interests. In the summer of 1830 they set off for Spain, planning to deliver money and messages to the revolutionaries plotting the overthrow of the king. They became disillusioned with this aspect of their jaunt. Landscape and loving friendship were revolution enough. For Tennyson, the Pyrenees – in particular the valley of Cauterets – became the “soul-landscape” of many later poems. This is how, in Canto 71 of In Memoriam, he re-lives the unfolding of the relationship with Hallam:
Tennyson and Hallam met at Cambridge and shared literary, philosophical and political interests. In the summer of 1830 they set off for Spain, planning to deliver money and messages to the revolutionaries plotting the overthrow of the king. They became disillusioned with this aspect of their jaunt. Landscape and loving friendship were revolution enough. For Tennyson, the Pyrenees – in particular the valley of Cauterets – became the “soul-landscape” of many later poems. This is how, in Canto 71 of In Memoriam, he re-lives the unfolding of the relationship with Hallam:
While now we talk as once we talk’d
Of men and minds, the dust of change,
The days that grow to something strange,
In walking as of old we walk’d
Beside the river’s wooded reach,
The fortress and the mountain ridge,
The cataract flashing from the bridge,
The breaker breaking on the beach.
The “breaker breaking” brings us back to the current poem and the question of its setting. The English seaside resorts Mablethorpe and Clevedon have both been proposed. But, according to an autobiographical fragment by the poet quoted here it was composed “in a Lincolnshire lane at 5 o’clock in the morning”. The suggestion of a constructed setting drawn from memory and imagination seems persuasive. Those crags in the last stanza could easily belong to the landscape of a “day that is dead” - when Tennyson and Hallam were walking in Cauterets.
In her invaluable analysis of Tennyon’s aestheticism in the volume On Form, Angela Leighton points to the strategic placing of the comma after the third “break” in the first line: “it changes the meaning of ‘break’, from ‘break on’ to ‘break,’ which thus, visibly and aurally, curtails its arrival on the shore as well as its arrival at the real object of breaking: ‘the touch of a vanished hand’.”
The harsh consonants of “break” are emphasized by the triple repetition in the first and last stanzas. It’s not a sea-like sound, even if sizable waves are imagined, and inevitably suggests the crueller metaphorical breakage – the heartbreak of impossible love and death-broken friendship.
In her invaluable analysis of Tennyon’s aestheticism in the volume On Form, Angela Leighton points to the strategic placing of the comma after the third “break” in the first line: “it changes the meaning of ‘break’, from ‘break on’ to ‘break,’ which thus, visibly and aurally, curtails its arrival on the shore as well as its arrival at the real object of breaking: ‘the touch of a vanished hand’.”
The harsh consonants of “break” are emphasized by the triple repetition in the first and last stanzas. It’s not a sea-like sound, even if sizable waves are imagined, and inevitably suggests the crueller metaphorical breakage – the heartbreak of impossible love and death-broken friendship.
In an earlier poem, The Ballad of Oriana, (admired by Arthur Hallam in his introductory essay to Tennyson’s early poems) the following line occurs: “O breaking heart that will not break, Oriana!” This too is echoed in the current poem and in its compellingly angry resistance to the ordinary business of living – the fisherman’s children at play, the singing sailor and the ships going safely into harbor. One of the thoughts, in Tennyson’s words, “half revealed and half concealed”, is that the poet’s own life still stretches wearily ahead of him. In the intensity of grief, the stillness of death might seem preferable to the onward flow of the waves.
Oriana (not from the ballad):
Tennyson is a modern poet's guilty pleasure. He is musical, and we don't dare to be musical and, let's face it, "beautiful." Personally I enjoy the beautiful effects he accomplishes, without sacrificing meaning:
And the stately ships go on
*
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
For me, this is timeless and universal. And, yes, beautiful.
SPEAKING TENNYSON
A sybaritic evening listening to Haydn's Op 76 Quartets 1-3 then reading Tennyson aloud. I know Eliot deprecated Tennyson intellectually, but heavens that man could produce the most wonderful sounds on the lips in poems that now seem buried in a dreamy romantic and sentimental- sensuous past.
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.
For sheer sound that is luscious, the mouth embracing its voluptuousness.
Or this:
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
A sybaritic evening listening to Haydn's Op 76 Quartets 1-3 then reading Tennyson aloud. I know Eliot deprecated Tennyson intellectually, but heavens that man could produce the most wonderful sounds on the lips in poems that now seem buried in a dreamy romantic and sentimental- sensuous past.
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.
For sheer sound that is luscious, the mouth embracing its voluptuousness.
Or this:
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
and from the same poem a little later:
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
Saying these things aloud reminds me of the pleasure of saying.
I used to quote odd lines from Tennyson to beginners, encouraging them to feel language moving around their bodies.
It's not that Tennyson is unique in this; all poets have an ear for such things though they may not indulge it to the extent Tennyson could.
With him it is like hearing language in a hypersensitive narcotic dream. No wonder he felt at home among the Lotos-eaters.
Do any poets read Tennyson now? Do young poets? Or is today so mesmerized by today everything must be happening NOW? ~ George Szirttes (My thanks to Kerry)
and from the same poem a little later:
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
Saying these things aloud reminds me of the pleasure of saying.
I used to quote odd lines from Tennyson to beginners, encouraging them to feel language moving around their bodies.
It's not that Tennyson is unique in this; all poets have an ear for such things though they may not indulge it to the extent Tennyson could.
With him it is like hearing language in a hypersensitive narcotic dream. No wonder he felt at home among the Lotos-eaters.
Do any poets read Tennyson now? Do young poets? Or is today so mesmerized by today everything must be happening NOW? ~ George Szirttes (My thanks to Kerry)
Oriana:
Never mind my diamond-hard atheism — this is my favorite Tennyson:
CROSSING THE BAR
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
~ Alfred Tennyson
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
~ Alfred Tennyson
*
MISHA IOSSEL: I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING MORE SHAMEFUL
Russia today is something indescribable: a terrible huge yawning black hole of absolute triumphant immoralism and extreme meanness in the world space of human society. It is hard for me to imagine what it must be like for many ordinary normal smart and decent Russians to live and survive now in this deadly poisonous atmosphere. I think that for many, life there is now incompatible with life.
Russia today is something indescribable: a terrible huge yawning black hole of absolute triumphant immoralism and extreme meanness in the world space of human society. It is hard for me to imagine what it must be like for many ordinary normal smart and decent Russians to live and survive now in this deadly poisonous atmosphere. I think that for many, life there is now incompatible with life.
The late Soviet Union, the "stagnation period," was, of course, a depressingly heavy, dark, hopeless swamp with lead clouds hanging over it — but today's Putin's Russia is even more monstrous.
Back then, the authorities had degenerates, and today they are the most real vampires of the hurricane spillway.
I have never seen anything more shameful in my life — and I did not expect I would.
Back then, the authorities had degenerates, and today they are the most real vampires of the hurricane spillway.
I have never seen anything more shameful in my life — and I did not expect I would.
*
Putin, who is a pathological liar, lied about the 1999 Kashirka apartment building bombings, 2000 Kursk submarine disaster, 2004 Beslan school siege, murders of Politkovskaya in 2006, Magnitsky in 2009, Nemtsov in 2015, Navalny in 2024, and many others among his critics and opponents, Russian "polite green men" occupying Crimea, the downing of MH17, and his plans to invade Ukraine... the list could go on for a long time. And now, without a scintilla of evidence, in an effort to rile up and motivate more Russians to die in his insane criminal war against Ukraine, he is desperately trying to link Ukraine and "the global West" to the ISIS terrorist attack near Moscow. The world can see right through him. ~ M. Iossel, Facebook
Putin, who is a pathological liar, lied about the 1999 Kashirka apartment building bombings, 2000 Kursk submarine disaster, 2004 Beslan school siege, murders of Politkovskaya in 2006, Magnitsky in 2009, Nemtsov in 2015, Navalny in 2024, and many others among his critics and opponents, Russian "polite green men" occupying Crimea, the downing of MH17, and his plans to invade Ukraine... the list could go on for a long time. And now, without a scintilla of evidence, in an effort to rile up and motivate more Russians to die in his insane criminal war against Ukraine, he is desperately trying to link Ukraine and "the global West" to the ISIS terrorist attack near Moscow. The world can see right through him. ~ M. Iossel, Facebook
*
To be young is not to believe in miracles but to experience life as miraculous ~ G.K. Chesterton
*
The U.S. is the least racist country in the world. For one, just look which way the traffic goes at our border. ‘Systemic racism’ is the biggest of all the big lies ever (congrats from Doctor Goebbels). The king is naked — I know it and you, left-brain neo-commie liars know it, too. ~ Henryk Grynberg
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The U.S. is the least racist country in the world. For one, just look which way the traffic goes at our border. ‘Systemic racism’ is the biggest of all the big lies ever (congrats from Doctor Goebbels). The king is naked — I know it and you, left-brain neo-commie liars know it, too. ~ Henryk Grynberg
*
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BIBLICAL CANAAN?
canaan burial
A burial jar containing the remains of an ancient inhabitant of the Canaanite city of Sidon. This individual was one of five whose DNA was sequenced to reveal the ancestry of the Canaanites.
The people of modern-day Lebanon can trace their genetic ancestry back to the Canaanites, new research finds.
The Canaanites were residents of the Levant (modern-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine) during the Bronze Age, starting about 4,000 years ago. They're best known from the Old Testament of the Bible, in which they're described as the cursed descendants of Canaan, blighted by God because Canaan's father dishonored his own father, the patriarch Noah. The Canaanites were often in conflict with the Israelite tribes that wrote the Hebrew Bible. In fact, the Book of Deuteronomy features Yahweh (God) ordering the Canaanites to be exterminated.
In part because the Canaanites kept their records on easily degradable papyrus rather than clay, little is known about their side of the story. But now, ancient DNA reveals that the Canaanites were the descendants of Stone Age settlers and the ancestors of the Lebanese.
"Canaanite ancestry was widespread in the region," study researchers Marc Haber and Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom wrote in an email to Live Science, "and several groups who were probably culturally different shared the same ancestral background.”
Genetic investigation
Haber, Tyler-Smith and their colleagues extracted ancient DNA from the bones of five Canaanites who died in the ancient city of Sidon (an area now in Lebanon). The skeletons dated from between 3,750 and 3,650 years ago. The researchers then compared the genetic sequences of these ancient Canaanites with those of 99 modern Lebanese people, as well as with ancient DNA sequences of more than 300 other people from an ancient DNA database.
The findings revealed broad overlap between Canaanite genetics and the sequences of modern-day people from Lebanon. Researchers even found some ancient gene variations that suggested the Canaanites probably had similar coloration in skin, eyes and hair as Lebanese people do today. It was surprising, Haber and Tyler-Smith said, to find such continuity in the Canaanite line, given all of the conquests and expansions into the Middle East from outside groups since the Bronze Age.
The Canaanites themselves descended from Stone Age settlers who mixed with newcomers from what is now Iran about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, the researchers said. This mixture could be explained by the expansion of the Akkadian Empire, a Mesopotamian empire that peaked around that time, the researchers wrote.
After the Bronze Age, the Canaanites did mix a little bit with their neighbors. Modern-day Lebanese populations are largely Canaanite, the DNA showed, with a bit of Eastern hunter-gatherer and Eurasian Steppe influence that got added to the mix some 3,000 years ago, the researchers said.
Historical gaps
Understanding the Canaanite's genetic history is important, Haber and Tyler-Smith said, because so few written records of the group's story remain.
"Genetics has the power to fill these gaps," the two told Live Science. The Near East is a key place for these sorts of studies, the researchers said, because it was such a central location in human history.
The next steps are to study "more samples, different places and different time periods," Haber and Tyler-Smith said.
The researchers reported their findings online in The American Journal of Human Genetics.
https://www.livescience.com/59967-canaanites-were-ancestors-of-lebanese.html
canaan burial
A burial jar containing the remains of an ancient inhabitant of the Canaanite city of Sidon. This individual was one of five whose DNA was sequenced to reveal the ancestry of the Canaanites.
The people of modern-day Lebanon can trace their genetic ancestry back to the Canaanites, new research finds.
The Canaanites were residents of the Levant (modern-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine) during the Bronze Age, starting about 4,000 years ago. They're best known from the Old Testament of the Bible, in which they're described as the cursed descendants of Canaan, blighted by God because Canaan's father dishonored his own father, the patriarch Noah. The Canaanites were often in conflict with the Israelite tribes that wrote the Hebrew Bible. In fact, the Book of Deuteronomy features Yahweh (God) ordering the Canaanites to be exterminated.
In part because the Canaanites kept their records on easily degradable papyrus rather than clay, little is known about their side of the story. But now, ancient DNA reveals that the Canaanites were the descendants of Stone Age settlers and the ancestors of the Lebanese.
"Canaanite ancestry was widespread in the region," study researchers Marc Haber and Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom wrote in an email to Live Science, "and several groups who were probably culturally different shared the same ancestral background.”
Genetic investigation
Haber, Tyler-Smith and their colleagues extracted ancient DNA from the bones of five Canaanites who died in the ancient city of Sidon (an area now in Lebanon). The skeletons dated from between 3,750 and 3,650 years ago. The researchers then compared the genetic sequences of these ancient Canaanites with those of 99 modern Lebanese people, as well as with ancient DNA sequences of more than 300 other people from an ancient DNA database.
The findings revealed broad overlap between Canaanite genetics and the sequences of modern-day people from Lebanon. Researchers even found some ancient gene variations that suggested the Canaanites probably had similar coloration in skin, eyes and hair as Lebanese people do today. It was surprising, Haber and Tyler-Smith said, to find such continuity in the Canaanite line, given all of the conquests and expansions into the Middle East from outside groups since the Bronze Age.
The Canaanites themselves descended from Stone Age settlers who mixed with newcomers from what is now Iran about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, the researchers said. This mixture could be explained by the expansion of the Akkadian Empire, a Mesopotamian empire that peaked around that time, the researchers wrote.
After the Bronze Age, the Canaanites did mix a little bit with their neighbors. Modern-day Lebanese populations are largely Canaanite, the DNA showed, with a bit of Eastern hunter-gatherer and Eurasian Steppe influence that got added to the mix some 3,000 years ago, the researchers said.
Historical gaps
Understanding the Canaanite's genetic history is important, Haber and Tyler-Smith said, because so few written records of the group's story remain.
"Genetics has the power to fill these gaps," the two told Live Science. The Near East is a key place for these sorts of studies, the researchers said, because it was such a central location in human history.
The next steps are to study "more samples, different places and different time periods," Haber and Tyler-Smith said.
The researchers reported their findings online in The American Journal of Human Genetics.
https://www.livescience.com/59967-canaanites-were-ancestors-of-lebanese.html
*
FOREIGN MINISTER OF UAE WARNS EUROPE ABOUT ISLAM AND TERRORISM
Minister of Foreign Affairs of UAE Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan says:
There will come a day that we will see far more radical, extremist and terrorist activities coming out of Europe because of lack of decision-making trying to be politically correct or assuming that they know the Middle East or Islam and they know other things far better than we do.
Minister of Foreign Affairs of UAE Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan says:There will come a day that we will see far more radical, extremist and terrorist activities coming out of Europe because of lack of decision-making trying to be politically correct or assuming that they know the Middle East or Islam and they know other things far better than we do.
And I am sorry, but that's pure ignorance.
**
Let’s briefly revisit this familiar terrain — America's secret weapon — with some new specifics
*
THE SHOCK AND AWE OF AMERICAN AND CANADIAN SUPERMARKETS
Years ago, my friend’s family tried to get a husband and wife out of the USSR, specifically Ukraine. It took 10 years because the man had been a colonel of paratroopers and when he applied to leave when he retired they had to wait 10 years for his operational knowledge to become stale dated.
THE SHOCK AND AWE OF AMERICAN AND CANADIAN SUPERMARKETS
Years ago, my friend’s family tried to get a husband and wife out of the USSR, specifically Ukraine. It took 10 years because the man had been a colonel of paratroopers and when he applied to leave when he retired they had to wait 10 years for his operational knowledge to become stale dated.
But eventually they were given permission to leave and the family brought him to Canada. Back in those days, the only flight from the USSR to Canada was a Moscow, Montreal, NYC flight, but their final destination was Winnipeg.
His family was asked to meet them at the airport in Montreal and guest them for a few days so that they could rest from the long uncomfortable flight and work through some of their jet lag. They were a lovely dignified couple. My friend’s mom asked him to go to the store and get some last minute items. The wife asked to come along and she dragged her husband along.
So, we went to the store and were walking through the fresh produce section and the old man turned on us and called us liars and propagandists. We looked at him in surprise, but he went on to state that as a colonel of paratroopers he knew there was no way we could afford to ship in tangerines from Morocco and melons for Mexico. He said this must be a fake store like they had in Moscow & Kyiv that they used to dupe visitors. His certainty was based on his military experience and he actually knew a lot about moving stuff by air.
His wife gently tugged his arm and said, wasn’t this store one of the reasons they left the USSR.
My friend told his three times removed by marriage uncle that there were 3 other grocery nearby and he’d drive Uncle to visit them.
So, we did. As we we did, the wife’s smile became bigger and bigger as her hopes were met and exceeded. The old colonel though just grew gloomier.
Later that night, when we were a few glasses into the Stoli and Crown royal, the old soldier muttered: “I knew we were behind but not this much behind. I knew the party lied to us, but this much?”
They lived the rest of their lives, very happily in Winnipeg. ~ Wayne Wallace, Quora
Jim Hill:
In the ’90s I was working in the Bay Area, neighbors were Russian émigrés, they had a visitor, I showed her the city one day. We got to the sea lions sunning themselves on the benches on the wharf, with the Golden Gate for a backdrop, she drank that in for a bit, looked at me and said “they told us this was an ecological disaster area.”
Jo Canfield:
It wasn't so much a question of poverty. It was a shortage of consumer goods. Soviets citizens couldn't buy anything, not because they lacked money, but because there was nothing to buy.
By the nineties, China was well past the Great Leap Forward, when they nearly starved themselves to death, and had moved into its To Be Rich Is Glorious phase.
Jim Cook:
Back in the late 70s I knew a guy from Riga, Latvia. His girl friend told me he cried when he went into his first Canadian chain store. He'd been lied to all his life. He was in the Moscow Circus and had traveled extensively throughout the Soviet Union and his biggest complaint was that he was always hungry.
Ruth Lafler:
There’s a story about the wife of the first Soviet player in the NBA being taken to the grocery store, where she started to load up her cart with meat. The players’ wives who had taken her asked why she was doing that. She told then that you had to buy meat when you saw it, because it wouldn’t be there tomorrow. They assured her that it would be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
Elena Gold:
Putin is spending USD $300 million per day on the war in Ukraine.
Putin is spending USD $300 million per day on the war in Ukraine.
For $300 million, in Russia it would be possible:
Build 20 new modern schools, each for 1.5 thousand students (1 day of the war).
Build 2 ultra-modern hospitals, literally the best possible (1 day of the war).
Build 148 kilometers of a 4-lane road of the highest quality (1 day of the war).
In 2020, Russia’s Ministry of Construction stated that urgent repairs and replacement of 30% of all heating connections in Russia are required. This could be implemented for the budget of only 10 days of the war.
Meanwhile, Russia has become a gas station with nukes — with no gas.
Russia began importing fuel from Belarus, after it lost about 1/7 of its production capacity after attacks of Ukrainian drones.
At the same time, the share of financially unstable Russian households (those with no savings or the ones taking another consumer credit to close the previous one) increased from 56.4 to 62.4% in the last 6 months.
In the last year in Russia:
Prices for food, drinks, household chemicals, medicines, and clothing increased by 23.2%.
Rent in Moscow went up by 36%; in Sochi — by 29%, in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg — by 24%, in Novosibirsk — by 22%.
Prices for used commercial vehicles in Russia increased by 46%.
Prices for tires went up by 32%.
Prices for funeral services went up by 22%.
Philip Hawkins:
Imagine for a second, living in a place that is so hard up, that people resort to stealing butter…
Michael O’Shaugnessy:
These numbers don’t reflect NATO gains from Finland and Sweden, and Russian battlefield losses. So the playing field is tilted even more.
Imagine for a second, living in a place that is so hard up, that people resort to stealing butter…
Michael O’Shaugnessy:
These numbers don’t reflect NATO gains from Finland and Sweden, and Russian battlefield losses. So the playing field is tilted even more.
And Russians pay attention….the more Putin spends on war the greater the sums that will be skimmed off to line his vile pockets and those in the group of thugs around him. All this while your lives and those of your children and grandchildren and all their futures are squandered in pointless death and misery. You truly are cursed while you tolerate this creature.
Oriana:
The problem is that Russians have been propagandized that the West is to blame for everything. So instead of blaming Putin and his disastrous war, they blame the West and NATO.
*
RUSSIA AND PAGAN SYMBOLS
Soviet-Russian avant-garde rock band Picnic has dabbled in the occult and demonology for decades that has led to dangerous consequences.
The problem is that Russians have been propagandized that the West is to blame for everything. So instead of blaming Putin and his disastrous war, they blame the West and NATO.
*
RUSSIA AND PAGAN SYMBOLS
Soviet-Russian avant-garde rock band Picnic has dabbled in the occult and demonology for decades that has led to dangerous consequences.
Just don't cry, executioner
Don't dull the ax
The world loves evil blood
The world is about to be destroyed
Don't dull the ax
The world loves evil blood
The world is about to be destroyed
Edmund Shklyarsky sings in his hit song from the album “Merry and Evil” that came out in the year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Shklyarsky was about to perform this and other bloodthirsty songs at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow suburb when four gunmen broke into the music hall and opened fire at the fans which left at least 137 dead.
In 2009, Shklyarsky was awarded the “Certificate and Honorary Badge of St. Tatiana” signed by Metropolitan Vladimir of St. Petersburg and Ladoga.
Russian Orthodox Church is no stranger to summoning heathen demons, blessing the mass destruction and killing of fellowmen.
On the fence of the Church of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Moscow, poster prints depict patriotic scenes of the unholy union between military and church: Patriarch Kiril sanctifying high caliber guns on a warship, a priest blessing soldiers before they go into battle to kill fellow Orthodox Christians.
Currently, the Russian Orthodox Church is openly and proudly serving three creatures from hell: Satan, Mammon, and the KGB.
In 2000, Picnic followed their “Harakiri” album with “Violet-Black” borrowing the imagery of the mythical creature from Mikhail Vrubel’s famous painting “Flying Demon” on display in the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow.
Yes, today everything is allowed
Why are you destroying yourself so enthusiastically?
See, I'm circling over you.
It's me who's purple and black...
This song was recorded in the year when Vladimir Putin ascended to power. To suppress secular independent movements in Transcaucasia, Russia’s southern regions that buffer it from Turkey and NATO, he waged a proxy, asymmetrical war against radical Islamists.
The strategy of misdirection for the media manipulation of the masses would be applied to Crimea, which Putin annexed purportedly as the reunification of the Russian lands (nonsense), but in reality as a knee-jerk reaction against Ukraine’s revolution of Dignity. Consequently, FSB stirred up trouble in the Donbas eastern regions to draw Ukraine into a proxy, asymmetrical war and thwart independence from Moscow diktat.
The Russian state has been engaged in a perpetual warfare against encroaching liberal democracies, and Putin as a KGB officer has established himself from the start as an obedient vassal to the cause.
And yet, paradoxically, the leadership of the Russian state has always preferred to have their families settled in the West because of the high standards of living and the rule of law there, which they deny vehemently to their compatriots.
*
“Ginger” was Picnic’s album released in 1996. “And it boils in your blood, ginger juice.”
“Ginger” was Picnic’s album released in 1996. “And it boils in your blood, ginger juice.”
It introduced, for the first time, the iconography of the Hindu buffalo demon, a deceitful shape-shifter, a sexual aggressor the Picnic band has fallen in love with. In the photo, Shklyarsky adorned his demon-shaped guitar strap with the Nazi Iron Cross, for good measure.
Picnic’s popular theme is that of dancing with demons as the world is burning, and it’s the forces of evil that always triumph over good because its powers are greater, and even love is helpless to defeat them.
Moscovsky Komsomolets reported that it was not a coincidence that the terrorists chose the concert of the Picnic band as their target after deciding not to strike at the concert of the nationalistic singer and the icon of the special military operation Shaman on March 8 due to heightened security after the U.S. embassy warnings.
Edmund Shklyarsky openly supported the special operation and helped soldiers and humanitarian workers on the front line.
Zakhar Prilepin, nationalist writer and ardent supporter of the invasion of Ukraine who recently survived an assassination attempt spoke about Shklyarsky’s help:
“...Rock legend, leader of the Picnic group Edmund Shklyarsky donated the necessary funds for repairs constantly breaking worn-out transport for our humanitarian workers.”
Vladimir Putin has not yet visited the site of the tragedy in the Crocus City Hall. He didn’t send his body double, either. Russians know that the terror attack was the result of his invasion of Ukraine. The blood of the victims of the attack is on his hands.
And if he’s so antagonistic to the West, then why all of his friends have mansions and yachts out there and their children all still have citizenships of the US, UK, and France?
These are the questions that Putin cannot answer, and so instead he traveled to Tver Oblast, where his ancestors are from. Specifically, he visited the school for combat helicopter pilots in Torzhok.
I was in Torzhok, a town that straddles the federal highway M10, a year and a half ago. I found Tver Oblast roads in awful condition although it’s a region right next to Moscow and the reason is the sheer enormity of the landmass — the Netherlands can fit twice within Tver Oblast, but the population is only 1 million 300 thousand. My friend and I drove for hours on bumpy roads with potholes and barely covered the central part of the region.
We saw huge cemeteries, depopulated villages, crumbling churches, and towns where every house is a ruin, with few work prospects for the morose residents.
Tver Military Helicopter Pilot Training School.
For many men career path in the army is the way out of poverty. But for the economy they produce nothing, and it’s just another burden on the budget that reduces the number of schools, hospitals, doctors, and teachers. Russia is a mine and soldiers protect the perimeter, no different from Iraq. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Malcolm:
So the concert was trying to invoke demons, and it worked! Somebody's surprised?
Prijevodi:
All this BS with devil is just BS. The Devil is Evil in the human head, and nothing else. Nature is beautiful, animals are beautiful, plants too….. so, the only source of negativity is human being. And when they praise, adore, admire some fictional devil while having Putler as the president, they make me laugh.
So the concert was trying to invoke demons, and it worked! Somebody's surprised?
Prijevodi:
All this BS with devil is just BS. The Devil is Evil in the human head, and nothing else. Nature is beautiful, animals are beautiful, plants too….. so, the only source of negativity is human being. And when they praise, adore, admire some fictional devil while having Putler as the president, they make me laugh.
*
HOW PARENTS’ TRAUMA LEAVES A BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE IN CHILDREN
After the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, in a haze of horror and smoke, clinicians at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan offered to check anyone who’d been in the area for exposure to toxins. Among those who came in for evaluation were 187 pregnant women. Many were in shock, and a colleague asked if I could help diagnose and monitor them. They were at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD—experiencing flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbness or other psychiatric symptoms for years afterward. And were the fetuses at risk?
My trauma research team quickly trained health professionals to evaluate and, if needed, treat the women. We monitored them through their pregnancies and beyond. When the babies were born, they were smaller than usual—the first sign that the trauma of the World Trade Center attack had reached the womb. Nine months later we examined 38 women and their infants when they came in for a wellness visit. Psychological evaluations revealed that many of the mothers had developed PTSD. And those with PTSD had unusually low levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol, a feature that researchers were coming to associate with the disorder.
Surprisingly and disturbingly, the saliva of the nine-month-old babies of the women with PTSD also showed low cortisol. The effect was most prominent in babies whose mothers had been in their third trimester on that fateful day. Just a year earlier a team I led had reported low cortisol levels in adult children of Holocaust survivors, but we’d assumed that it had something to do with being raised by parents who were suffering from the long-term emotional consequences of severe trauma. Now it looked like trauma could leave a trace in offspring even before they are born.
HOW PARENTS’ TRAUMA LEAVES A BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE IN CHILDREN
After the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, in a haze of horror and smoke, clinicians at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan offered to check anyone who’d been in the area for exposure to toxins. Among those who came in for evaluation were 187 pregnant women. Many were in shock, and a colleague asked if I could help diagnose and monitor them. They were at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD—experiencing flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbness or other psychiatric symptoms for years afterward. And were the fetuses at risk?
My trauma research team quickly trained health professionals to evaluate and, if needed, treat the women. We monitored them through their pregnancies and beyond. When the babies were born, they were smaller than usual—the first sign that the trauma of the World Trade Center attack had reached the womb. Nine months later we examined 38 women and their infants when they came in for a wellness visit. Psychological evaluations revealed that many of the mothers had developed PTSD. And those with PTSD had unusually low levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol, a feature that researchers were coming to associate with the disorder.
Surprisingly and disturbingly, the saliva of the nine-month-old babies of the women with PTSD also showed low cortisol. The effect was most prominent in babies whose mothers had been in their third trimester on that fateful day. Just a year earlier a team I led had reported low cortisol levels in adult children of Holocaust survivors, but we’d assumed that it had something to do with being raised by parents who were suffering from the long-term emotional consequences of severe trauma. Now it looked like trauma could leave a trace in offspring even before they are born.
In the decades since, research by my group and others has confirmed that adverse experiences may influence the next generation through multiple pathways. The most apparent route runs through parental behavior, but influences during gestation and even changes in eggs and sperm may also play a role. And all these channels seem to involve epigenetics: alterations in the way that genes function. Epigenetics potentially explains why effects of trauma may endure long after the immediate threat is gone, and it is also implicated in the diverse pathways by which trauma is transmitted to future generations.
The implications of these findings may seem dire, suggesting that parental trauma predisposes offspring to be vulnerable to mental health conditions. But there is some evidence that the epigenetic response may serve as an adaptation that might help the children of traumatized parents cope with similar adversities. Or could both outcomes be possible?
In the Aftermath
My first encounter with intergenerational transmission of trauma was in the 1990s, soon after my team documented high rates of PTSD among Holocaust survivors in my childhood community in Cleveland. The first study of its kind, it garnered a lot of publicity; within weeks I found myself heading a newly created Holocaust research center at Mount Sinai staffed largely by professional volunteers. The phone was ringing off the hook. The callers weren’t all Holocaust survivors, though; most were the adult children of Holocaust survivors. One particularly persistent caller—I’ll call him Joseph—insisted that I study people like him. “I’m a casualty of the Holocaust,” he claimed.
The implications of these findings may seem dire, suggesting that parental trauma predisposes offspring to be vulnerable to mental health conditions. But there is some evidence that the epigenetic response may serve as an adaptation that might help the children of traumatized parents cope with similar adversities. Or could both outcomes be possible?
In the Aftermath
My first encounter with intergenerational transmission of trauma was in the 1990s, soon after my team documented high rates of PTSD among Holocaust survivors in my childhood community in Cleveland. The first study of its kind, it garnered a lot of publicity; within weeks I found myself heading a newly created Holocaust research center at Mount Sinai staffed largely by professional volunteers. The phone was ringing off the hook. The callers weren’t all Holocaust survivors, though; most were the adult children of Holocaust survivors. One particularly persistent caller—I’ll call him Joseph—insisted that I study people like him. “I’m a casualty of the Holocaust,” he claimed.
When he came in for an interview, Joseph didn’t look like a casualty of anything. A handsome and wealthy investment banker in an Armani suit, he could’ve stepped off the pages of a magazine. But Joseph lived each day with a vague sense that something terrible was going to happen and that he might need to flee or fight for his life. He’d been preparing for the worst since his early 20s, keeping cash and jewelry at hand and becoming proficient in boxing and martial arts. Lately he was tormented by panic attacks and nightmares of persecution, possibly triggered by reports of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.
Joseph’s parents had met in a displaced-persons camp after surviving several years at Auschwitz, then arrived penniless in the U.S. His father worked 14 hours a day and said very little, never mentioning the war. But almost every night he woke the family with shrieks of terror from his nightmares. His mother spoke endlessly about the war, telling vivid bedtime stories about how relatives had been murdered before her eyes. She was determined that her son succeed, and his decision to remain unattached and childless infuriated her. “I didn’t survive Auschwitz so that my own child would end the family line,” she’d say. “You have an obligation to me and to history.”
We ended up talking to many people like Joseph: adult children of Holocaust survivors who suffered from anxiety, grief, guilt, dysfunctional relationships and intrusions of Holocaust-related imagery. Joseph was right—I needed to study people like him. Because those who were calling us were (in research-speak) self-selecting, we decided to evaluate the offspring of the Holocaust survivors we had just studied in Cleveland. The results were clear. Survivors’ adult children were more likely than others to have mood and anxiety disorders, as well as PTSD. Further, many Holocaust offspring also had low cortisol levels—something that we had observed in their parents with PTSD.
Fight, Flight—or Freeze
We ended up talking to many people like Joseph: adult children of Holocaust survivors who suffered from anxiety, grief, guilt, dysfunctional relationships and intrusions of Holocaust-related imagery. Joseph was right—I needed to study people like him. Because those who were calling us were (in research-speak) self-selecting, we decided to evaluate the offspring of the Holocaust survivors we had just studied in Cleveland. The results were clear. Survivors’ adult children were more likely than others to have mood and anxiety disorders, as well as PTSD. Further, many Holocaust offspring also had low cortisol levels—something that we had observed in their parents with PTSD.
Fight, Flight—or Freeze
What did it all mean? Unraveling the tangle of trauma, cortisol and PTSD has occupied me and many other researchers for the decades since. In the classic fight-or-flight response, identified in the 1920s, a threatening encounter triggers the release of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. The hormones prompt a cascade of changes, such as quickening the pulse and sharpening the senses to enable the threatened person or animal to focus on and react to the immediate danger. These acute effects were believed to dissipate once the danger receded.
In 1980, however, psychiatrists and other advocates for Vietnam War veterans won a prolonged struggle to get post-traumatic stress included in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). It was the first official recognition that trauma could have long-lasting effects. But the diagnosis was controversial. Many psychologists believed that its inclusion in DSM-III had been politically, rather than scientifically, driven—in part because there were no scientific explanations for how a threat could continue to influence the body long after it was removed.
Complicating matters, studies of Vietnam veterans were generating perplexing results. In the mid-1980s neuroscientists John Mason, Earl Giller and Thomas Kosten, then all at Yale University, reported that veterans with PTSD had high levels of adrenaline but lower levels of cortisol than patients with other psychiatric diagnoses. Because stress usually causes stress hormones, including cortisol, to rise, many researchers, including myself, were skeptical of these observations. When I joined the Yale laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow a year later, I studied a different group of veterans using other methods for measuring cortisol. To my astonishment, I replicated the finding.
I still couldn’t believe that the low cortisol levels had anything to do with trauma. Surely the Holocaust was as terrible as the Vietnam War, I reasoned—and growing up as a rabbi’s daughter in a community full of Holocaust survivors, many of them my friends’ parents, I’d noticed nothing out of the ordinary about them. I was sure that they didn’t have either PTSD or low cortisol, I told my mentor, Giller. “That’s a testable hypothesis,” he responded. “Why don’t you study that, instead of conjecturing?”
In 1980, however, psychiatrists and other advocates for Vietnam War veterans won a prolonged struggle to get post-traumatic stress included in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). It was the first official recognition that trauma could have long-lasting effects. But the diagnosis was controversial. Many psychologists believed that its inclusion in DSM-III had been politically, rather than scientifically, driven—in part because there were no scientific explanations for how a threat could continue to influence the body long after it was removed.
Complicating matters, studies of Vietnam veterans were generating perplexing results. In the mid-1980s neuroscientists John Mason, Earl Giller and Thomas Kosten, then all at Yale University, reported that veterans with PTSD had high levels of adrenaline but lower levels of cortisol than patients with other psychiatric diagnoses. Because stress usually causes stress hormones, including cortisol, to rise, many researchers, including myself, were skeptical of these observations. When I joined the Yale laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow a year later, I studied a different group of veterans using other methods for measuring cortisol. To my astonishment, I replicated the finding.
I still couldn’t believe that the low cortisol levels had anything to do with trauma. Surely the Holocaust was as terrible as the Vietnam War, I reasoned—and growing up as a rabbi’s daughter in a community full of Holocaust survivors, many of them my friends’ parents, I’d noticed nothing out of the ordinary about them. I was sure that they didn’t have either PTSD or low cortisol, I told my mentor, Giller. “That’s a testable hypothesis,” he responded. “Why don’t you study that, instead of conjecturing?”
So my team of five people landed in Cleveland, along with a centrifuge and other equipment. We stayed in my parents’ home, walking door to door to interview people by day and returning to test blood and urine samples in the evening. When the results came in, they were clear: half the Holocaust survivors had PTSD, and those with PTSD had low cortisol. There was no question about it—even if the traumatic experience happened long ago, PTSD went hand in hand with low cortisol.
But why? And which came first? An important clue came from a 1984 review by the late Allan Munck and other researchers at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. They noted that among stress hormones, cortisol played a special, regulatory role. High levels of stress hormones, if sustained for a long time, harm the body in multiple ways, weakening the immune system and increasing susceptibility to problems such as as hypertension.
But in a context of acute trauma, cortisol may paradoxically also have a protective effect. It shuts down the release of stress hormones—including itself—reducing the potential damage to organs and the brain. Such a trauma-induced feedback loop could conceivably reset the cortisol “thermostat” to a lower level.
I picked up another piece of the puzzle and placed it. In the early 1990s we’d shown that Vietnam veterans were more likely to develop PTSD if they’d been abused as children. Slowly a shape was emerging that connected intense childhood adversity—a period of “freeze” because a child usually cannot fight or flee—with low cortisol and the possibility of future PTSD. We studied people who’d been raped or who’d been in auto accidents when they came into emergency rooms, finding that those with lower cortisol levels were more likely to develop PTSD after the attack or accident.
But why? And which came first? An important clue came from a 1984 review by the late Allan Munck and other researchers at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. They noted that among stress hormones, cortisol played a special, regulatory role. High levels of stress hormones, if sustained for a long time, harm the body in multiple ways, weakening the immune system and increasing susceptibility to problems such as as hypertension.
But in a context of acute trauma, cortisol may paradoxically also have a protective effect. It shuts down the release of stress hormones—including itself—reducing the potential damage to organs and the brain. Such a trauma-induced feedback loop could conceivably reset the cortisol “thermostat” to a lower level.
I picked up another piece of the puzzle and placed it. In the early 1990s we’d shown that Vietnam veterans were more likely to develop PTSD if they’d been abused as children. Slowly a shape was emerging that connected intense childhood adversity—a period of “freeze” because a child usually cannot fight or flee—with low cortisol and the possibility of future PTSD. We studied people who’d been raped or who’d been in auto accidents when they came into emergency rooms, finding that those with lower cortisol levels were more likely to develop PTSD after the attack or accident.
Could low cortisol levels have been present before the event that brought them into the emergency room? I wondered. If someone with low cortisol was subjected to a traumatic experience, we reasoned, the cortisol levels in their bodies might be too low to tamp down the stress reaction. Adrenaline levels might then shoot way up, searing the memory of the new trauma into the brain—from where it might later surface as flashbacks or nightmares. Perhaps low cortisol marked a vulnerability to developing PTSD.
The study of Holocaust offspring supported this conjecture. Children of Holocaust survivors with PTSD tended to have low cortisol even if they did not have their own PTSD. As we’d suspected, low cortisol seemed related to vulnerability to PTSD.
The study of Holocaust offspring supported this conjecture. Children of Holocaust survivors with PTSD tended to have low cortisol even if they did not have their own PTSD. As we’d suspected, low cortisol seemed related to vulnerability to PTSD.
The Feedback Loop
But what mechanism connected trauma exposure to low cortisol to future PTSD? We began a series of studies to answer this question. Significantly, we found that Vietnam veterans with PTSD had a greater number of glucocorticoid receptors. These are proteins to which cortisol binds to exert its diverse influences. That suggested a greater sensitivity to cortisol: a small increase in the hormone’s concentration would precipitate a disproportionate physiological reaction. But it wasn’t until we looked more closely at the molecular underpinnings of cortisol functioning—in part by examining epigenetics—that we understood how exposure to trauma might reset the cortisol feedback loop.
In the 1990s scientists were realizing that the output of our genes is sensitive to factors not written directly into our genetic code. Genes provide the templates for producing proteins. But much like cakes baked using the same ingredients may turn out differently depending on variations in the oven’s temperature, how much of those proteins gets produced, or “expressed,” depends on the environment. The discovery gave rise to epigenetics, the study of what influences gene expression and how. It proved crucial to understanding both the neurobiology of PTSD and the intergenerational effects of trauma.
Epigeneticists explore the switches that turn gene expression on and off. One such mechanism, called methylation, involves a methyl group—a methane molecule that is missing one of its four hydrogen atoms, leaving a chemical bond free to attach to another atom or molecule. Methylation is a process by which, in the presence of specific enzymes, methyl groups attach to key sites on a strand of DNA or within the complex of DNA and proteins known as chromatin. By occupying these sites like roadblocks on a highway, methyl groups can alter transcription, a basic step in gene expression where a piece of RNA is made from a DNA template. Increased methylation generally impedes RNA transcription, whereas less methylation enhances transcription. These changes are enduring in that they survive normal cell division and require specific enzymes for their removal.
In 2015 our group became one of the first to pinpoint epigenetic changes on stress-related genes of veterans with PTSD. These alterations partially explained why trauma’s effects were so persistent, lasting for decades. Specifically we observed reduced methylation in an important region of NR3C1, a gene that encodes the glucocorticoid receptor, likely increasing the sensitivity of these receptors.
This epigenetic modification suggests a potential explanation for how trauma might reset cortisol levels. The body regulates the stress response through a complicated feedback mechanism. A rise in cortisol levels will prompt the body to produce less of the hormone, which may drive up the numbers and responsiveness of glucocorticoid receptors. Given the epigenetic and other changes occurring with sustained responses to trauma, the feedback loop might become recalibrated. In people who have already endured trauma, their stress systems might be sensitized and their cortisol levels diminished—increasing their adrenaline response to further trauma and leading to PTSD.
Epigenetic Inheritance
Could some of these epigenetic changes in trauma survivors also be found in the children of trauma survivors? Finding low cortisol in the 9/11 babies back in 2002 had told us that we’d been thinking about some things all wrong. We’d assumed all along that trauma was behaviorally transmitted: Joseph’s problems seemed to result from the stressful, bereaved atmosphere in his childhood home. But now it looked like the uterine environment also played a role. So did the sex of the traumatized parent.
In our early studies of Holocaust offspring, we had selected only those people with two parents who were Holocaust survivors. We redid the studies to figure out if the sex of the parent mattered—and it did. Those whose mother (or both parents) had PTSD tended to exhibit lower cortisol levels and showed evidence of more sensitive glucocorticoid receptors. In contrast, those whose fathers, but not mothers, had PTSD showed the opposite effect.
Taking a closer look, we again discovered lower methylation within the glucocorticoid receptor gene, NR3C1, in Holocaust offspring whose mothers, or both parents, had PTSD. These changes mirrored what we’d observed in the maternal survivors themselves. But in offspring with only paternal PTSD, we observed more methylation—the opposite effect. These findings raised the possibility that PTSD in mothers and fathers might lead to different epigenetic changes on the glucocorticoid receptor in children.
In a second series of studies beginning in 2016, we examined methylation within another gene, FKBP5, which encodes a protein involved in regulating the ability of the glucocorticoid receptor to bind cortisol. The findings showed related methylation patterns within the FKBP5 gene in both Holocaust parents and their children. But because of the small number of participants in that study—by this time it was difficult to find many living Holocaust survivors who could participate with their offspring—we couldn’t examine how factors such as the parents’ PTSD status might contribute to FKBP5 methylation.
We were able to replicate and extend this work in a substantially larger sample of just the Holocaust offspring, however. In 2020 we reported lower levels of FKBP5 methylation in the adult children whose mothers—and not fathers—were exposed to the Holocaust during childhood. This effect was independent of whether the mother had PTSD. It suggested that trauma might have affected the mothers’ eggs decades before her children were conceived, while she was herself a child.
Given the obvious difficulties in studying generations of people, scientists often resort to animal studies to explore epigenetic transmission. In 2014 Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler, then both at the Emory University School of Medicine, reported an intergenerational epigenetic pathway that ran through sperm. They gave a male mouse a mild electric shock as it smelled a cherry blossom scent, stimulating a fear response to the odor. The response was accompanied by epigenetic changes in its brain and sperm. Intriguingly, the male offspring of the shocked mice demonstrated a similar fear of cherry blossoms—as well as epigenetic changes in their brain and sperm—without being exposed to the shock. These effects were passed down for two generations. In other words, the lesson the grandfather mouse learned, that the cherry blossom scent means danger, was transmitted to its son and grandson.
In a study published in 2020, my colleagues and I experimented with genome-wide gene expression, a tool that can identify links between protein expression and specific conditions across the entire human genome. With this approach, we again observed distinct patterns of gene expression linked with maternal and paternal trauma exposure and PTSD.
In the Womb
Apart from altering the eggs and sperm that encapsulate our genetic inheritance, sometimes decades before conception, trauma also seems to influence the uterine environment. Meticulous studies of the offspring of women who were pregnant during the Dutch Famine—a six-month period during World War II when the Nazis blocked the food supply to the Netherlands, causing widespread starvation—provided an early indication of in utero effects. Researchers discovered that the combined effects of extreme stress and nutritional deprivation, such as deficits in metabolism and susceptibility to cardiovascular illness, depended on the trimester of exposure.
The 9/11 babies were also impacted in the womb, with those in the third trimester having significantly lower cortisol levels. What this condition meant for their future development I sadly never found out. At the wellness visit, mothers who had PTSD (and low cortisol) were more likely to report that their nine-month-olds were unusually anxious and afraid of strangers. But we didn’t get the funding to follow the babies into adulthood.
How might the uterine environment leave a trauma trace in the offspring? Our work on Holocaust survivors and their adult children provided some clues. The story is again complicated, and it involves an enzyme known as 11-beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2 (11β-HSD2). Holocaust survivors had lower levels of the enzyme than those who hadn’t lived through the Holocaust—and such effects were particularly pronounced in those who were the youngest during World War II.
The enzyme is normally concentrated in the liver, kidneys and brain. Under conditions of food deprivation, however, the body can lower levels of 11β-HSD2 to increase metabolic fuel in the interest of promoting survival. In adults, the enzyme level will return to what it had been originally when there is no more starvation, but in children, the level may remain low. Our findings suggested that 11β-HSD2 levels might have been altered during childhood when Holocaust survivors were exposed to long periods of malnourishment; the change persisted well into old age.
In the children of women who were Holocaust survivors, however, we saw quite the opposite: 11β-HSD2 levels were higher than in Jewish control subjects. The result might seem contradictory, but there is a logic to it. During pregnancy, 11β-HSD2 also acts in the placenta, protecting the fetus from exposure to circulating maternal cortisol, which can be toxic to the developing brain. The enzyme, which is particularly active in the third trimester, converts maternal cortisol into an inactive form, creating a kind of chemical shield in the placenta that protects the fetus from the hormone’s harmful effects. The high levels of this enzyme in the offspring of Holocaust survivors may thus reflect an adaptation, an effort to protect the fetus from the lowered 11β-HSD2 levels in their mothers.
All of this means that offspring are not always passive recipients of their parents’ scars. Just as a parent was able to survive trauma by means of biological adaptations, offspring can sometimes adapt to the biological impact of their parents’ trauma.
How traumatized parents interact with their children, of course, also influences their development. One of the most powerful nonfiction accounts of growing up with Holocaust survivor parents was Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus; serialized between 1980 and 1991, it broke through a cultural barrier, helping others to open up about their suffering. Many psychologists and neuroscientists have examined the traumatized family, finding ever more subtleties, and the story will continue to unfold for decades to come.
An important question is whether epigenetic alterations in stress-related genes, particularly those reflected in the offspring of traumatized parents, are necessarily markers of vulnerability or whether they may reflect a mechanism through which offspring become better equipped to cope with adversity. This is an area we’re actively exploring.
It is tempting to interpret epigenetic inheritance as a story of how trauma results in permanent damage. Epigenetic influences might nonetheless represent the body’s attempts to prepare offspring for challenges similar to those encountered by their parents. As circumstances change, however, the benefits conferred by such alterations may wane or even result in the emergence of novel vulnerabilities. Thus, the survival advantage of this form of intergenerational transmission depends in large part on the environment encountered by the offspring themselves.
Moreover, some of these stress-related and intergenerational changes may be reversible. Several years ago we discovered that combat veterans with PTSD who benefited from cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy showed treatment-induced changes in FKBP5 methylation. The finding confirmed that healing is also reflected in epigenetic change. And Dias and Ressler reconditioned their mice to lose their fear of cherry blossoms; the offspring conceived after this “treatment” did not have the cherry blossom epigenetic alteration, nor did they fear the scent. Preliminary as they are, such findings represent an important frontier in psychiatry and may suggest new avenues for treatment.
The hope is that as we learn more about the ways catastrophic experiences have shaped both those who lived through those horrors and their descendants, we will become better equipped to deal with dangers now and in the future, facing them with resolution and resilience. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-parents-trauma-leaves-biological-traces-in-children?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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WHY AMERICANS ARE NOT AMONG THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE
Key points:
The United States does not score high on international rankings of happiness.
Scandinavians are consistently at the top of the list.
The United States' competitive society is not ideal for seeding the possibility of happiness.
The new World Happiness Report numbers are in and, for Americans, they’re not pretty: The United States fell from 15th to 23rd place in the international rankings of happiness, with Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden taking the top spots.
The logical questions are being asked: Why do Americans possess unimpressive levels of happiness? What are Scandinavians doing to consistently rank high? Most important, how can we become happier people?
As I showed in my Happiness in America: A Cultural History, the hard truth is that Americans have never been a particularly happy group. Our perpetual search for happiness indicates widespread dissatisfaction and discontent with life in general, making the image of Americans as a happy-go-lucky people more mythology than reality.
Our competitive and comparative American Way of Life has not proven to be an especially good formula for happiness, I argue, with external signs of success unlikely to produce appreciably happier people. Rather, happiness has more often come from being in and appreciating the moment, an idea that has major implications for how all of us might approach our lives in the future.
The Pursuit of Happiness
The pursuit of happiness—a phrase penned by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence—has served as a primary ambition for many Americans. Chasing something and catching it are two very different things, however, which is the root of the problem. Our expectations for happiness have far exceeded its realization, suggesting our way of life rooted in consumer capitalism has major flaws in terms of emotional fulfillment. In a nutshell, happiness has proven to be an elusive and often futile pursuit in this country, something that has held true across the social divisions of race, gender, and class.
Paradoxically, perhaps, Americans’ uneasy relationship with happiness has escalated over the last century, with our more affluent society and bountiful marketplace not leading to a nation full of happy people. In fact, the broader desire for the good things in life has fueled greater disappointment, discontent, and dissatisfaction when happiness didn't result from wealth, power, or some other externally defined, other-directed measure of success.
Not surprisingly, many have over the years capitalized on Americans’ perceived happiness deficiency by offering advice on how they could become happier people. Happiness has represented a major segment of the how-to and self-help business, although there is little evidence to suggest that any particular approach has actually worked. Marketers, too, have seized Americans’ deep desire to be happy by positioning their products and services as agents of happiness.
Much attention has been paid to the relationship of happiness to another thing of great interest to most Americans: money. It has been generally believed that happiness is strongly correlated with prosperity, both personal and national, but this, too, has turned out to be a generally false assumption. A different set of challenges emerges with upward mobility, as anyone who has experienced it can tell you, with much evidence to suggest that both wealth and success may improve one’s quality of life but are not likely to produce a happier person.
Given all this, one has to question Americans’ inclination to work harder to make more money in order to become happier. Happiness is no doubt a very American idea, but the ways in which most of us pursue it are not very well suited to creating it. Our system of free market capitalism (the American Way of Life) and aspirational ethos (the American Dream) may actually be better designed to generate stress than happiness, with the pressures of modern life not conducive to promoting a state of well-being. Our competitive society is at best not ideal and at worst fundamentally flawed in terms of seeding the possibility of happiness, something that more communitarian Scandinavians can attest to.
Truths About Happiness and Its Sources
Given all this, how can we become happier people? Findings from the abundance of research in the field lead us to some fundamental truths regarding happiness and its sources:
Stay positive. Optimism—accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative, if you like—has always been strongly correlated with high levels of happiness.
Find purpose. Having a sense of direction, the setting and reaching of goals, and taking pride in accomplishments are all woven into the fabric of happiness.
Reside in the present. Living as much as possible in the moment, rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, is a guiding principle of happiness.
Face reality. Regular reality checks help one manage one’s expectations and keep the ups and downs of life in perspective.
Appreciate what you have. Taking pleasure in and being grateful for what one has chases away common scourges of unhappiness like envy and disappointment.
Embrace humbleness. Being fully aware of your limitations is, oddly enough, a prime way to feel really good about yourself.
Emanate kindness. Adopting a philosophy of and approach to life simply around being kind is a powerful source of happiness for oneself and others.
Be generous. Enabling the well-being of friends, family, and complete strangers has proven to be a winning formula for personal happiness.
Strive for patience. An awareness of the vicissitudes of time and the imperfections within us all serves as a valuable tool in achieving happiness.
Remain curious. Viewing life as an endless opportunity to learn and/or experience things is a literally wonderful path to happiness.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychology-yesterday/202403/why-are-americans-a-not-very-happy-group-of-people
Oriana:
The Pursuit of Happiness
The pursuit of happiness—a phrase penned by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence—has served as a primary ambition for many Americans. Chasing something and catching it are two very different things, however, which is the root of the problem. Our expectations for happiness have far exceeded its realization, suggesting our way of life rooted in consumer capitalism has major flaws in terms of emotional fulfillment. In a nutshell, happiness has proven to be an elusive and often futile pursuit in this country, something that has held true across the social divisions of race, gender, and class.
Paradoxically, perhaps, Americans’ uneasy relationship with happiness has escalated over the last century, with our more affluent society and bountiful marketplace not leading to a nation full of happy people. In fact, the broader desire for the good things in life has fueled greater disappointment, discontent, and dissatisfaction when happiness didn't result from wealth, power, or some other externally defined, other-directed measure of success.
Not surprisingly, many have over the years capitalized on Americans’ perceived happiness deficiency by offering advice on how they could become happier people. Happiness has represented a major segment of the how-to and self-help business, although there is little evidence to suggest that any particular approach has actually worked. Marketers, too, have seized Americans’ deep desire to be happy by positioning their products and services as agents of happiness.
Much attention has been paid to the relationship of happiness to another thing of great interest to most Americans: money. It has been generally believed that happiness is strongly correlated with prosperity, both personal and national, but this, too, has turned out to be a generally false assumption. A different set of challenges emerges with upward mobility, as anyone who has experienced it can tell you, with much evidence to suggest that both wealth and success may improve one’s quality of life but are not likely to produce a happier person.
Given all this, one has to question Americans’ inclination to work harder to make more money in order to become happier. Happiness is no doubt a very American idea, but the ways in which most of us pursue it are not very well suited to creating it. Our system of free market capitalism (the American Way of Life) and aspirational ethos (the American Dream) may actually be better designed to generate stress than happiness, with the pressures of modern life not conducive to promoting a state of well-being. Our competitive society is at best not ideal and at worst fundamentally flawed in terms of seeding the possibility of happiness, something that more communitarian Scandinavians can attest to.
Truths About Happiness and Its Sources
Given all this, how can we become happier people? Findings from the abundance of research in the field lead us to some fundamental truths regarding happiness and its sources:
Stay positive. Optimism—accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative, if you like—has always been strongly correlated with high levels of happiness.
Find purpose. Having a sense of direction, the setting and reaching of goals, and taking pride in accomplishments are all woven into the fabric of happiness.
Reside in the present. Living as much as possible in the moment, rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, is a guiding principle of happiness.
Face reality. Regular reality checks help one manage one’s expectations and keep the ups and downs of life in perspective.
Appreciate what you have. Taking pleasure in and being grateful for what one has chases away common scourges of unhappiness like envy and disappointment.
Embrace humbleness. Being fully aware of your limitations is, oddly enough, a prime way to feel really good about yourself.
Emanate kindness. Adopting a philosophy of and approach to life simply around being kind is a powerful source of happiness for oneself and others.
Be generous. Enabling the well-being of friends, family, and complete strangers has proven to be a winning formula for personal happiness.
Strive for patience. An awareness of the vicissitudes of time and the imperfections within us all serves as a valuable tool in achieving happiness.
Remain curious. Viewing life as an endless opportunity to learn and/or experience things is a literally wonderful path to happiness.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychology-yesterday/202403/why-are-americans-a-not-very-happy-group-of-people
Oriana:
The contrarian in me strongly desires some of these answers to be wrong. I used to perversely enjoy being unhappy. Weren't more intelligent people less happy, given their ability to see the negative side of everything? Didn't the biblical Preacher (Ecclesiastes) warn that with much wisdom comes much sorrow? Didn't various writers, including Hemingway, describe again and again that the most intelligent were also the most unhappy? Weren't pessimists famous for their accurate predictions?
Against this stood a single sentence written by Abraham Lincoln: "Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be." This threatened my whole worldview. I couldn't dismiss Lincoln as an example of low intelligence and immaturity. Also, a little voice in my head (oh, how I hated that little voice!) whispered that Lincoln was right: happiness was largely a choice. A lazy, selfish (if you're a woman, you may hear this accusation whenever you choose self care), and indecent or sinful choice (lapsed Catholics will understand what I mean), perhaps, but still a choice. It was only when I was able to translate happiness into mental strength, a quality I revered, that I was able to choose to be strong — not to be depressed by adversity, refusing to indulge in a crying fit — and happiness (or at least a sense of contentment) gradually followed.
I want to stress that I didn't choose to be happy — only "not to be unhappy." That meant not indulging in unhappy thoughts and behaviors. It felt strange at first, but practice makes perfect. And I had to prove my strength. I don't know if that would work for others, but for me it was very important to focus on something I admired: strength, courage, persistence. I also discovered that living from my stregths rather than from my wounds made the wounds less and less relevant. I am happy (yes!) to report that this pragmatic, minimalist approach worked for me. And because I did it in a way that allowed me to be my own boss, I felt all the more validated, empowered, and — for lack of a better word — happy.
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WHEN LIFE SEEMS MEANINGLESS, TRY TO LIVE WITH INTENTION
Some of the ways to deal with feelings of life being meaningless include:
1. Live with intention
When you live with intention, you recognize why you do what you do. You’ll consider each aspect of your life to see if it aligns with your vision or goals. Living with intention is the practice of structuring your day-to-day life based on your core beliefs and values.
The journey of intentional living can be challenging as you begin to define your personal values and beliefs. It may be helpful to practice positive self-talk and disconnect from distractions, such as social media, during this time.
Consider exploring your feelings to delve into what you want and need to live intentionally. The following questions may help you get started:
What brings me feelings of joy?
What passions and interests would I like to explore more of?
What drives me to succeed?
What does success mean to me?
2. Practice gratitude
Research suggests that feeling and showing appreciation for what you have in your life is a way to embrace the good around you. It can help guide you toward the life of your dreams and help you find a purpose in your day.
Research also suggests that gratitude writing can help people positively reframe their circumstances, decrease stress, and improve mood.
You can integrate gratitude into your daily life by:
writing letters to someone who’s had a positive impact on you
creating a list of things you’re grateful for
taking time to pause in moments when you feel thankful
expressing gratitude during prayer
3. Discover things that give life meaning.
Watching for things that bring meaning to your life can help you find positive aspects. Sometimes, it’s the things that seem mundane that bring the most meaning, including a beautiful natural sight or an unexpected blessing.
Dr. Noelle Nelson, clinical psychologist and author, explains that “To do something with meaning involves giving that act significance and value.”
Nelson provides the following examples on how to find meaning in your day-to-day life:
setting your alarm in the morning to give yourself adequate time to get ready for the day without feeling rushed, hugging your spouse, not because it’s routine, but because you want to express how much you appreciate them
You may also consider trying the “coffee mindfulness” exercise which involves bringing awareness to your five senses while drinking a beverage of your choice, such as coffee, tea, or water.
4. Focus on positive connections
Spending time with positive people is a sure way of finding meaning in your life. The best relationships to engage in are the ones with those who offer support and positivity while encouraging you on your journey.
Dr. Noelle Nelson, clinical psychologist and author, explains that “To do something with meaning involves giving that act significance and value.”
Nelson provides the following examples on how to find meaning in your day-to-day life:
setting your alarm in the morning to give yourself adequate time to get ready for the day without feeling rushed, hugging your spouse, not because it’s routine, but because you want to express how much you appreciate them
You may also consider trying the “coffee mindfulness” exercise which involves bringing awareness to your five senses while drinking a beverage of your choice, such as coffee, tea, or water.
4. Focus on positive connections
Spending time with positive people is a sure way of finding meaning in your life. The best relationships to engage in are the ones with those who offer support and positivity while encouraging you on your journey.
You may also consider making space for nostalgia by reminiscing with family and friends, listening to music that reminds you of joyous times, or creating a scrapbook for important life events.
According to 2022 research, spending moments in nostalgia can help people find, maintain, and restore meaning in life.
Research also suggests that nostalgia can increase your sense of belonging and acceptance, even when you’re faced with challenges in life.
It’s important to note that not everyone has a positive past on which to reflect. If you don’t have a positive experience with nostalgia, consider identifying a person or experience that carries more positive or enjoyable memories for you.
5. Seek professional help
The journey to finding meaning in life can be difficult, but you don’t have to do it alone. Consider speaking with a therapist or psychologist for help with coping and finding meaning in life.
Let’s recap:
Your reasons for feeling as though life has no meaning may differ from other people’s, and your coping methods will vary, too. But you’re not alone.
Trying self-help tips, such as practicing daily intention and gratitude, building healthy relationships, or adding value to mundane moments may help you cope.
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Oriana:
I'm still tempted to say that happiness is irrelevant, but I can control myself and choose not to alienate readers (though deep down I suspect my most loyal readers are those who find happiness irrelevant, especially the kind of "for show" happiness as it tends to be defined by "experts.") For me, this is an area in which your own quirks rule. Wallow in the bliss of being your own boss. The secret is not in self-help books, but in lived experience. Life (Nature, Tao) will teach you almost everything you need to know. Life and great books and great movies.
Positive and enjoyable connections and memories? It seems that these days people rely on their pets. No need to be judgmental about that, though I feel uneasy about the future of the country when I see a dog in a stroller instead of a baby. Dogs provide reliable unconditional affection, and have soulful eyes.
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WHY HUMANS DON’T HAVE TAILS
Approximately 25 million years ago, an ancestor of both humans and apes genetically diverged from monkeys and lost its tail. No one had identified the genetic mutation responsible for this dramatic change in our physiology — until now.
In a new study published in the journal Nature, researchers identified a unique DNA mutation that drove the loss of our ancestors' tails. It's located in the gene TBXT, which is known to be involved in tail length in tailed animals.
The impressive discovery began when first study author Bo Xia, formerly a graduate student at New York University who is now a principal investigator at the Broad Institute, injured his tailbone and became interested in the structure's origin.
"Bo is really a genius because he looked at something that thousands of people, at least, must have looked at before — but he saw something different," said Itai Yanai, scientific director of the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratories at NYU Langone Health and a senior author of the study.
Jumping genes and "dark matter”
Over millions of years, changes in DNA allow animals to evolve. Some changes involve only a single rung in DNA's twisted ladder, but others are more complex.
So-called Alu elements are repetitive DNA sequences that can generate bits of RNA, a molecular cousin of DNA, that can convert back to DNA and then insert themselves randomly into the genome. These "transposable elements," or jumping genes, can disrupt or enhance a gene's function upon insertion. This specific type of jumping gene exists only in primates and has been driving genetic diversity for millions of years.
In this latest study, the researchers found two Alu elements in the gene TBXT that are present in great apes but not in monkeys. These elements aren't in the part of the gene that codes for proteins — the exons — but rather in introns. Introns are DNA sequences flanking exons that have been referred to as "dark matter" of the genome because they were historically assumed to have no function. They are removed, or "spliced," out of the sequence before an RNA molecule gets converted into protein.
In this case, however, when cells use the TBXT gene to generate RNA, the repetitive nature of the Alu sequences causes them to bind together. This complex structure still gets cut out of the larger RNA molecule but takes an entire exon with it, thereby changing the final code for and structure of the resulting protein.
Researchers found two Alu elements in the gene TBXT that are present in great apes but not in monkeys.
"We did a lot of other analyses of other genes implicated in tail length or morphology. And, of course, there are differences, but this was like a lightning bolt," said Jef Boeke, director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health and a senior author of the study. "And it was noncoding DNA [introns] that was 100% conserved in all the apes and 100% absent in all the monkeys," he told Live Science.
In human cells, the researchers confirmed that the same Alu sequences appear in the TBXT gene and result in removal of the same exon. They also found that the related RNA molecule can be cut in a variety of ways to generate multiple proteins from the same gene. By comparison, mice make only one version of the protein, so having both versions seems to prevent the formation of tails, the team concluded.
This way of making different proteins from the same gene is called "alternative splicing," and it is one of the reasons human physiology is so complex. But this is the first time Alu elements have been shown to cause alternative splicing.
"Mutations like this have often been thought to be of limited consequence in evolution. Here the authors show that such a mutation has had a profound impact on our species," said Kirk Lohmueller, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of human genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not involved in the study.
"It is exciting to think of how many other complex mutations like this could have generated important traits throughout human evolution," Lohmueller told Live Science in an email.
Bipedalism and birth defects
The researchers experimented with inserting these same jumping genes into mice, and they found that the mice lost their tails.
Notably, evolutionary biologists hypothesize that the loss of the tail allowed humans to become bipedal, according to a 2015 review. "We are the only paper that has ever put together a plausible scenario for how it happened," Yanai told Live Science.
"We're now walking on two feet. And we evolved a big brain and wield technology," he said. "All from just a selfish element jumping into the intron of a gene. It's astounding to me.”
Interestingly, the researchers found that the mice that had lost their tails showed a greater prevalence of spina bifida, a birth defect that affects the neural tube, an embryonic structure that gives rise to the spinal cord and brain. The condition affects approximately 1 in 1,000 human births, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"It may be a sort of unintended consequence that TBXT deficiency gives you a short tail … but it makes it more likely that you don't get that complete neural closure," meaning a hole is left in the neural tube, Boeke said.
"No one ever thought that, by just following our curiosity, we would make a mouse lose their tail by putting in the same mutation … and then we see the mouse also has a neural tube defect," Yanai added.
The discovery of this type of alternative splicing will likely influence the whole field of genomic analysis in the future.
"I think there's going to be more of them out there," Boeke said of these influential Alu elements. Therefore, he added, there's probably alternatively spliced proteins out there that are actually the root cause of some evolutionary change in our traits.
https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/we-finally-know-why-humans-dont-have-tails
PDJ:
I was born with a little tail about 5”. I can only imagine my parent’s reaction. The doctor just snipped it off and said “it happens”. I’ve Googled it and it was interesting about side effects, etc. I can truly say that “I was born this way.”
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HUMAN BRAINS SEEM TO HAVE INCREASED IN SIZE
Human brains appeared to be getting bigger, temporal trends showed.From the 1930s to 1970s, brain volumes and cortical surface area of people who had neither dementia nor stroke became progressively larger, reported Charles DeCarli, MD, of the University of California Davis in Sacramento, and co-authors in JAMA Neurology
When researchers compared people born in the 1930s with those born in the 1970s and adjusted for age and sex, they found (all P<0.001):
Intracranial volume was 6.6% greater (1,234 vs 1,321 mL)
White matter volume was 7.7% greater (441.9 vs 476.3 mL)
Hippocampal volume had a 5.7% greater value (6.51 vs 6.89 mL)
Cortical surface area had a 14.9% greater value (1,933 vs 2,222 cm2)
Overall gray matter volume did not increase significantly. Cortical thickness was thinner by 20.9% (2.34 mm vs 1.85 mm) over the same period.
The larger brain volumes indicate larger brain development and potentially greater brain reserve that may explain the declining incidence of dementia, the researchers hypothesized.
"The decade someone is born appears to impact brain size and potentially long-term brain health," DeCarli said in a statement. "Genetics play a major role in determining brain size, but our findings indicate external influences — such as health, social, cultural, and educational factors — may also play a role."
The researchers used MRI to assess the brains of 3,226 Framingham Heart Study participants born from 1930 to 1970. Participants had a mean age of 57.4 years when they were scanned, and 53% were women.
An earlier report showed that among Framingham Heart Study participants, the incidence of dementia had declined over the course of three decades.
"Brain health, reflective of a wide spectrum of factors, including early brain development and environment influences, lifestyle, and education levels, may be one of the key pathways explaining this decline in dementia risk," noted Prashanthi Vemuri, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, in an accompanying editorial.
Although the new Framingham Heart Study research "is exciting and will bring attention to secular trends in brain health, much work is yet to be done to validate and replicate these findings and, more importantly, understand the mechanistic basis of these trends," Vemuri observed.
"Given that dementia risk is multifactorial, thorough consideration of multiple factors and biological measurements in different birth cohorts will be needed to understand these trends," she pointed out. "Do these secular trends in improvement of brain health underlie the decrease in dementia risk? The jury may be still out, but the authors are commended for investigating new avenues."
In the new Framingham study, about half (46%) of participants had achieved some level of college education. No participants had prevalent dementia, stroke, or other significant neurological disorders at the time of MRI.
People's height increased over the decades: people born in the 1930s had a mean height of 66 inches, compared with 67.6 inches for those born in the 1970s. Trends in intracranial volume remained significant after adjusting for height.
In a sensitivity analysis, the researchers evaluated a subgroup of participants with similar ages at MRI born in the 1940s and the 1950s and found that larger intracranial volume, hippocampal volume, and cortical surface area were associated with the 1950 birth decade.
The Framingham Heart Study cohort is predominantly white, healthy, and well educated, and not representative of the broader U.S. population, DeCarli and colleagues acknowledged. The cross-sectional design of the study is another limitation.
"Longitudinal analyses showing secular differences in rates of regional brain atrophy would further support evidence of increased brain reserve through resilience to age-related atrophy," the researchers wrote.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/dementia/109410?xid=nl_mpt_Cardiology_update_2024-03-29&mh=788a5203e5c46eefe40bc9dd2371f76b?xid%3Dnl_mpt_Cardiology_update_2024-03-29&mh=788a5203e5c46eefe40bc9dd2371f76b&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Automated%20Specialty%20Update%20Cardiology%20BiWeekly%20FRIDAY%202024-03-29&utm_term=NL_Spec_Cardiology_Update_Active
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WHY URINE IS YELLOW
Scientists discovered that urine is yellow due to the action of a specific enzyme made in the gut.
We're told to watch out for color changes in our pee, as the loss of its normal, yellowish hue could be a sign of a medical problem — but what actually makes urine yellow in the first place?
Scientists previously knew that urine's yellow color stems from how the body disposes of old blood cells. When red blood cells reach the end of their life cycle — usually after around 120 days — they are degraded in the liver. One of the byproducts of this process is a bright orange substance called bilirubin, which is secreted from the liver into the gut. Bacteria within the gut convert bilirubin into a colorless substance called urobilinogen. This substance then degrades into urobilin, a yellow pigment that gives urine its color.
Until now, though, scientists couldn't identify the specific bacterial enzyme responsible for converting bilirubin to urobilinogen.
The authors of the new study say that the discovery could have potential health implications. Namely, it could improve our understanding of the role of the gut microbiome — the community of microbes in the gut — in conditions such as jaundice, the yellowing of the skin and eyes, or inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), chronic inflammation in the digestive tract. Jaundice develops because of a build-up of bilirubin in the blood, while people with IBD have been observed to have lower levels of urobilin than adults without the condition.
"It's remarkable that an everyday biological phenomenon went unexplained for so long, and our team is excited to be able to explain it," Brantley Hall, the lead study author and an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland, said in a statement.
Previous research into the color of urine was conducted before genomic sequencing technologies became widely available, which made it difficult to identify which strains of bacteria were actually present in urine samples, the authors wrote in the paper.
In the new study, the researchers compared the genomes of species of human gut bacteria that can convert bilirubin into urobilinogen and those that lack this capacity. In this way, they identified the gene that encodes bilirubin reductase. They then tested whether the enzyme was able to facilitate this conversion in the model organism Escherichia coli, better known as E. coli.
By searching for the gene in all gut bacterial species, they discovered that the enzyme is mainly produced by species belonging to a large group known as the Firmicutes, which dominate the human gut microbiome.
The team then genetically screened the gut microbiomes of 1,801 healthy adults, hunting for the pee-coloring gene. They found that 99.9% of the people had gut bacteria that carried the gene for bilirubin reductase.
They also looked for the gene in the guts of more than 1,800 adults with IBD and of about 4,300 healthy infants and found it was much less prevalent. Only 68% of people with IBD appeared to carry the gene, along with 40% of babies less than 3 months old, who are at a heightened risk for jaundice.
More research is needed to explain this association and how an absence of bilirubin reductase could contribute to jaundice and IBD, the authors noted.
"Now that we've identified this enzyme, we can start investigating how the bacteria in our gut impact circulating bilirubin levels and related health conditions like jaundice," Xiaofang Jiang, co-senior study author and investigator at the National Institutes of Health, said in the statement.
Urobilinogen is excreted mostly in the feces, but a small fraction is absorbed from the colon, enters the portal circulation, is removed by the liver, and is secreted into the bile. That which is not removed from the portal blood by the liver enters the systemic circulation and is excreted by the kidneys.
https://www.livescience.com/health/finally-we-know-why-pee-is-yellow
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THE PROBLEM OF TWO GODS: GOD OF LOVE VERSUS THE GOD OF PUNISHMENT
The notion of god of love vs god of punishment is of course the problem of two gods that arose with the advent of Christianity. Yet in spite of the message of the Gospels, most of the “faithful” believe in the god of punishment, according to the polls.
The Gnostics rejected the god of punishment and proclaimed that Jesus was a messenger from the real god, the god of love. The Gnostics were massacred for their ideas.
The whole problem disappears once we see that it was man who created god in his own image. Humankind saw an evolution from god as an sadistic all-powerful asshole to the soft version of liberal protestantism of an accepting, merciful deity.
As culture evolved, a more merciful concept was born. Introduce stress, and there is regression to hellfire for all infidels. Robert Wright traced it in his "The Evolution of God."
Even Catholicism has gone soft in a lot of ways, and priests were instructed to start saying "god loves you." When I was growing up, no way." Then it was beating your chest, saying, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" (my fault, my fault, my great fault). Imagine eight year old children kneeling on the cold tiles, beating their breasts and saying this out loud — just one vignette of my Catholic childhood. The god of punishment was a terrorist. His kingdom was based on eternal damnation in hell, the true foundation of his glory.
It was also easy to easy the god of punishment as a totalitarian dictator like Hitler and Stalin. Considering that this god was based on the concept of everlasting hell, this is not an exaggeration. On the contrary, during my believing childhood and early teens, it seemed to me that god out-Hitlered Hitler. There was some small chance of escaping from a gulag or a Nazi concentration camp — but there was no escaping the god of punishment, who could read your thoughts. Since he dwelled everywhere, including your head, he knew your “iniquity” better than you did. The invasion of privacy was "out of this world." ~ Oriana
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PAUL TILLICH, THE UNBELIEVING THEOLOGIAN
Paul Tillich was raised in the 19th century to conservative parents in a walled medieval village in Brandenburg, Germany. His father was a Lutheran pastor and Church administrator, born and educated in Berlin. His strict parents tried to imbue the young Paul with traditional religious values. They failed.
Tillich lived through great social, political and technological change driven by two world wars, the wild freedom of the Weimar Republic and the fateful beginnings of the Nazi regime. After fleeing to the US, he lived through the Second World War, the McCarthy era, and then the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement, student unrest and the emergence of psychedelic drugs. Turning down an opportunity from Timothy Leary and his own assistant, Paul Lee, to try LSD while at Harvard, Tillich told them he was from the wrong era for such experimentation.
He considered himself a boundary thinker between philosophy and theology, the Old World and the New
During the First World War, Tillich was awarded the Iron Cross for courage and military contributions in battle, after surviving a four-year stint as a chaplain in the German army. His traumatic experiences at Verdun and elsewhere on the Western Front led to two nervous breakdowns. These experiences along with his postwar life in Weimar Berlin, his open marriage with Hannah Tillich, and his political and philosophical engagements with socialist academic colleagues, artists and writers shattered the 19th-century worldview and traditional religious conceptions of God and faith taught by his conservative parents and drove him to redefine his philosophical outlook.
Paul Tillich in 1933 in Berlin.
While actively participating in intellectual circles, Tillich cultivated friendships with other key thinkers. As a philosophy professor at the University of Frankfurt, he helped establish a chair in philosophy to bring Max Horkheimer to the faculty. He also supervised Theodor Adorno’s doctoral dissertation (habilitation thesis). While not formally affiliated with Horkheimer and Adorno’s neo-Marxist Institute for Social Research, Tillich maintained lifelong relationships with both men. Other friends and acquaintances included Mircea Eliade, Erich Fromm, Adolph Lowe, Hannah Arendt, J Robert Oppenheimer, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney and Rollo May.
Tillich considered himself a boundary thinker between philosophy and theology, religion and culture, the Old World and the New. His lectures ranged far beyond the usual theological ones, and included secular topics such as art, culture, psychoanalysis and sociology. His interdisciplinary thinking encompassed the enormous social, political, technological and intellectual change and conflict through which he lived. He didn’t easily fit within existing categories.
In the 1920s and ’30s, while still in Germany, Tillich regarded himself as a ‘religious socialist’ and a strong opponent of Nazism. Written in 1932, his book The Socialist Decision provided an alternative vision to the extremes of the nationalist Right and the communist Left that were tearing his homeland apart. He envisioned a unified harmonious socialist community inspired by Christian ideals, justice and political equality, believing, somewhat naively, that the collapse of the Weimar Republic could be a ‘Kairos’ moment (the ‘right time’ for a historic change) that might provide an opportunity for this breakthrough.
According to Tillich, nationalist authoritarianism relies on the origin myth of a culturally and racially pure society in some idealized, romanticized past, a description that encapsulates many modern populist movements. Tillich’s religious socialism combined Christianity with politics and culture, offering a Leftist humanistic conception of Christian teachings. This was his attempt to unite Christian and Social Democratic ideas against Nazism and its myths of origin, blood and soil. Tillich wrote presciently that:
If. . . political romanticism and with it, militant nationalism, prove victorious, a self-annihilating struggle of the European peoples is inevitable. The salvation of European society from a return to barbarism lies int he hands of socialism.”
His Frankfurt colleagues Horkheimer and Adorno were also to leave Germany within a year. At Reinhold Niebuhr’s invitation, Tillich joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, where he became a professor of philosophical theology at the age of 47. While he initially struggled to learn English, he gradually developed into a charismatic and sought-after lecturer.
Defying the traditional notion of a theologian, Tillich worked across the fields of philosophy, theology and culture, focusing on the personal search for answers to ultimate questions. He examined the human quest for meaning, but without theorizing about the nature of God. God, he thought, could be discussed only symbolically and never literally.
His thought was founded on the conception of humans as finite and separate individual mortal beings. While limited by their finitude, humans are always searching for meaning, purpose and justification, concepts that refer to the infinite Universe beyond themselves. As finite beings, humans can never reach or grasp the infinite, but remain deeply concerned with and driven by the ultimate questions of meaning and purpose in their lives.
In understanding Tillich’s theology, it is important to begin with his two key concepts: faith and God. Tillich considered faith not a belief in the unbelievable, but the ‘state of being grasped by an ultimate concern’; and he conceived of God not as a being, but as ‘the ground of being’. Both concepts are consistent with secular humanist as well as religious conceptions of the Universe.
The ‘ground of being’ could mean the Big Bang, the Universe itself or a universal God
Tillich considered himself a boundary thinker between philosophy and theology, religion and culture, the Old World and the New. His lectures ranged far beyond the usual theological ones, and included secular topics such as art, culture, psychoanalysis and sociology. His interdisciplinary thinking encompassed the enormous social, political, technological and intellectual change and conflict through which he lived. He didn’t easily fit within existing categories.
In the 1920s and ’30s, while still in Germany, Tillich regarded himself as a ‘religious socialist’ and a strong opponent of Nazism. Written in 1932, his book The Socialist Decision provided an alternative vision to the extremes of the nationalist Right and the communist Left that were tearing his homeland apart. He envisioned a unified harmonious socialist community inspired by Christian ideals, justice and political equality, believing, somewhat naively, that the collapse of the Weimar Republic could be a ‘Kairos’ moment (the ‘right time’ for a historic change) that might provide an opportunity for this breakthrough.
According to Tillich, nationalist authoritarianism relies on the origin myth of a culturally and racially pure society in some idealized, romanticized past, a description that encapsulates many modern populist movements. Tillich’s religious socialism combined Christianity with politics and culture, offering a Leftist humanistic conception of Christian teachings. This was his attempt to unite Christian and Social Democratic ideas against Nazism and its myths of origin, blood and soil. Tillich wrote presciently that:
If. . . political romanticism and with it, militant nationalism, prove victorious, a self-annihilating struggle of the European peoples is inevitable. The salvation of European society from a return to barbarism lies int he hands of socialism.”
His Frankfurt colleagues Horkheimer and Adorno were also to leave Germany within a year. At Reinhold Niebuhr’s invitation, Tillich joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, where he became a professor of philosophical theology at the age of 47. While he initially struggled to learn English, he gradually developed into a charismatic and sought-after lecturer.
Defying the traditional notion of a theologian, Tillich worked across the fields of philosophy, theology and culture, focusing on the personal search for answers to ultimate questions. He examined the human quest for meaning, but without theorizing about the nature of God. God, he thought, could be discussed only symbolically and never literally.
His thought was founded on the conception of humans as finite and separate individual mortal beings. While limited by their finitude, humans are always searching for meaning, purpose and justification, concepts that refer to the infinite Universe beyond themselves. As finite beings, humans can never reach or grasp the infinite, but remain deeply concerned with and driven by the ultimate questions of meaning and purpose in their lives.
In understanding Tillich’s theology, it is important to begin with his two key concepts: faith and God. Tillich considered faith not a belief in the unbelievable, but the ‘state of being grasped by an ultimate concern’; and he conceived of God not as a being, but as ‘the ground of being’. Both concepts are consistent with secular humanist as well as religious conceptions of the Universe.
The ‘ground of being’ could mean the Big Bang, the Universe itself or a universal God
Tillich’s thought fused religious and secular ideas of morality by refusing any fixed moral ideology and by rejecting traditional notions of an authoritarian, top-down ‘God rules Man’ and ‘Man serves God’ religious approach. He conceived of love and justice as the unifying social forces in the face of the fundamental anxiety created by human mortality and separateness.
For Tillich, religion, morality and meaning come from humans, not from God. He focused on the experience and feelings of upward-looking humans searching for meaning rather than on a religious superstructure of a downward-looking God. This is as much a psychological approach as a religious one. Tillich’s approach promotes acceptance of our humanness, our mortality, our finite being, and of the differing ideas, meanings and morals that we each develop for ourselves. His openness to the existential uncertainty confronting all people in considering questions of ultimate importance was rare in theological circles during his lifetime.
Paul Tillich at his desk in Harvard c1955
His key philosophical terms recast nominally religious elements in a manner that expands their relevance beyond Christianity. Tillich’s radical approach to faith as an expression of ‘ultimate concern’ eliminates the importance of narrow denominational religious orthodoxies. His idea of God as not a being, but the ‘ground of being’ and Man as a finite being, means that God is beyond the intellectual grasp of humans, and religious statements about the nature of God can never be taken literally.
This broad conception brings together religious faith and secular and scientific concerns regarding the origin of Man and the Universe. For Tillich, the ‘ground of being’ could mean the Big Bang, the Universe itself or a universal God. He rejected the traditional theistic notion of God as a being that moves around the Universe doing great things and worrying about, interfering with and scolding human beings. Rather, Tillich conceived of God as a symbolic object of the universal human concern for ultimate questions of meaning and purpose. God is thus outside our Universe and is a symbol for the answers to our deepest questions, but the answers always elude our grasp.
One of the most difficult aspects of Tillich’s thought is the ambiguity that characterizes much of his writing. Among the most puzzling and paradoxical ideas in his Systematic Theology (1951) is his statement that ‘God does not exist’ and that ‘to argue that God exists is to deny him.’ Tillich goes on to state that the word ‘existence’ should never be used in conjunction with the word ‘God’.
These assertions fit with the idea of God as a symbolic object that is a repository of ultimate concern, but not a being. Tillich scholars have disagreed on the meaning and significance of these passages. Does Tillich mean that, since God is ‘beyond essence and existence’ and exists outside of time and space, God is not part of existence? Or is Tillich implying that God really doesn’t exist and is not required to do anything in the Universe?
Certainly, in Tillich’s theology, God is an abstract and somewhat inactive concept. The action all comes from the human side through faith. God is the unreachable object of our ultimate concern. This illustrates some of the difficulties of interpreting Tillich’s intentionally paradoxical and deliberately ambiguous assertions as he tries to avoid discussing the literal nature of God.
Tillich describes faith as an ecstatic ‘centered act of the whole personality’, but insists that faith always includes doubt and can include demonic or idolatrous elements that are not ultimate concerns. He wrote that uncertainty is inherent in faith (and apparently sometimes in reading Tillich), and that human courage is essential to overcoming the risks of the unavoidable uncertainty and doubt regarding our ultimate concern, ‘be it nation, success, a god, or the God of the Bible.’
The risk of this uncertainty is a loss of faith that breaks down the meaning of one’s life. This loss of faith has happened many times with the collapse of utopian ideologies, states and empires from those of communism and fascism, to monarchies and failed democracies.
The point here is simple. As humans, we share many varied belief systems, any of which may be false or may ultimately collapse, evolve or disappear entirely. This is the risk of faith. Yet humans cannot live without it. We always have faith, whether or not we acknowledge it, because we always have ultimate concerns. Faith is a response to the finiteness of human existence. Our faith in ultimate meaning takes us beyond our finitude to something infinite that might answer ultimate questions of meaning and purpose, yet answers always lie beyond our grasp. Tillich’s humanistic and existentialist theology analyzed the path of each person in their individual struggle with and community approach to faith and God. And Tillich was above all else a humanist, although he recognized that liberal humanism was also a secular quasi-religion.
Faith based on utopian or populist political ideals could become an idolatrous quasi-religion
This radical redefinition of faith as a concern for ultimate questions broadened the meaning of faith beyond religion to the universally shared human effort to address spiritual, social, political and aesthetic concerns – humanity’s search for meaning. He recognized that any belief system could be a source of ultimate or at least ‘preliminary’ concern. For example, faith in extreme nationalism risks turning the nation itself into an authoritarian god. But nationalism was a false, idolatrous and demonic god. Tillich, of course, had in mind the example of Nazi Germany as the embodiment of a demonic national state.
He recognized that the ultimate concerns of humans are many and varied, and are not necessarily religious in nature. But he also warned that faith based on utopian or populist political ideals could become an idolatrous quasi-religion when directed at narrow concerns. The state in authoritarian ideologies is always a false idol that encourages and absorbs faith and presents a false object for worship; a utopian, nationalistic ideology and myth that harms rather than benefits humanity. Tillich applied this logic even to the Church, writing that ‘no church has the right to put itself in the place of the ultimate.’
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Tillich describes faith as an ecstatic ‘centered act of the whole personality’, but insists that faith always includes doubt and can include demonic or idolatrous elements that are not ultimate concerns. He wrote that uncertainty is inherent in faith (and apparently sometimes in reading Tillich), and that human courage is essential to overcoming the risks of the unavoidable uncertainty and doubt regarding our ultimate concern, ‘be it nation, success, a god, or the God of the Bible.’
The risk of this uncertainty is a loss of faith that breaks down the meaning of one’s life. This loss of faith has happened many times with the collapse of utopian ideologies, states and empires from those of communism and fascism, to monarchies and failed democracies.
The point here is simple. As humans, we share many varied belief systems, any of which may be false or may ultimately collapse, evolve or disappear entirely. This is the risk of faith. Yet humans cannot live without it. We always have faith, whether or not we acknowledge it, because we always have ultimate concerns. Faith is a response to the finiteness of human existence. Our faith in ultimate meaning takes us beyond our finitude to something infinite that might answer ultimate questions of meaning and purpose, yet answers always lie beyond our grasp. Tillich’s humanistic and existentialist theology analyzed the path of each person in their individual struggle with and community approach to faith and God. And Tillich was above all else a humanist, although he recognized that liberal humanism was also a secular quasi-religion.
Faith based on utopian or populist political ideals could become an idolatrous quasi-religion
This radical redefinition of faith as a concern for ultimate questions broadened the meaning of faith beyond religion to the universally shared human effort to address spiritual, social, political and aesthetic concerns – humanity’s search for meaning. He recognized that any belief system could be a source of ultimate or at least ‘preliminary’ concern. For example, faith in extreme nationalism risks turning the nation itself into an authoritarian god. But nationalism was a false, idolatrous and demonic god. Tillich, of course, had in mind the example of Nazi Germany as the embodiment of a demonic national state.
He recognized that the ultimate concerns of humans are many and varied, and are not necessarily religious in nature. But he also warned that faith based on utopian or populist political ideals could become an idolatrous quasi-religion when directed at narrow concerns. The state in authoritarian ideologies is always a false idol that encourages and absorbs faith and presents a false object for worship; a utopian, nationalistic ideology and myth that harms rather than benefits humanity. Tillich applied this logic even to the Church, writing that ‘no church has the right to put itself in the place of the ultimate.’
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Tillich was clear that God could not be a being in the Universe, else God could not have created the Universe. As we have mentioned, for Tillich, God was outside the Universe and beyond space and time, existence and essence. This broad and somewhat inchoate conception of God led other thinkers to accuse him of atheism, pantheism and even panentheism. But Tillich rejected all these labels. Instead, he continued to assert that we can speak of God only symbolically. Humans lack the knowledge and capacity to speak directly and literally about what God is.
Instead, Tillich interested himself in the human relationship to the understanding of God as an object of ultimate concern. His perspective is always that of the finite human looking up toward the infinite. Religious symbols for Tillich are earthly finite things, but they point toward the infinite and the unreachable Universe beyond human understanding. They cannot define or describe God, but only point to Him, and thus to our most fundamental concerns.
Faith always includes doubt and an element of courage to sustain one’s faith in the face of such doubt. Tillich spoke of the social expressions of faith as a community of faith. But a community of faith (ie, shared ultimate concern) is always vulnerable to authoritarianism and must be ‘defended against authoritarian attacks’. By enforcing ‘spiritual conformity’, Church or scholarly authorities can turn faith into authoritarianism. The inclusion of doctrines of infallibility in the Church is an example of the kind of authoritarianism that Tillich resisted. For him, no one is infallible and all doctrines are subject to uncertainty and doubt.
To avoid the almost inevitable tendency toward institutional authoritarianism, Tillich writes that ‘creedal expressions’ of faith (ie, specific denominational beliefs, rituals and sacraments) must never be regarded as ultimate, but must always make room for criticism and doubt. Analogously, Tillich defined morality, not as a system of religion-inspired rules, but as the free expression by an individual of whom he or she is, as a person. He rejected rigid ‘moralism’ as coming from rules outside the individual. Instead, he conceived of morality as arising in each of us based on our feelings of love and justice for others in our world.
Instead, Tillich interested himself in the human relationship to the understanding of God as an object of ultimate concern. His perspective is always that of the finite human looking up toward the infinite. Religious symbols for Tillich are earthly finite things, but they point toward the infinite and the unreachable Universe beyond human understanding. They cannot define or describe God, but only point to Him, and thus to our most fundamental concerns.
Faith always includes doubt and an element of courage to sustain one’s faith in the face of such doubt. Tillich spoke of the social expressions of faith as a community of faith. But a community of faith (ie, shared ultimate concern) is always vulnerable to authoritarianism and must be ‘defended against authoritarian attacks’. By enforcing ‘spiritual conformity’, Church or scholarly authorities can turn faith into authoritarianism. The inclusion of doctrines of infallibility in the Church is an example of the kind of authoritarianism that Tillich resisted. For him, no one is infallible and all doctrines are subject to uncertainty and doubt.
To avoid the almost inevitable tendency toward institutional authoritarianism, Tillich writes that ‘creedal expressions’ of faith (ie, specific denominational beliefs, rituals and sacraments) must never be regarded as ultimate, but must always make room for criticism and doubt. Analogously, Tillich defined morality, not as a system of religion-inspired rules, but as the free expression by an individual of whom he or she is, as a person. He rejected rigid ‘moralism’ as coming from rules outside the individual. Instead, he conceived of morality as arising in each of us based on our feelings of love and justice for others in our world.
Tillich believed that love infused with justice, not ideology, was the source of all morality and the unifying force to bridge the ontological separation that we experience as individual beings. He rejects the idea of a frozen concrete moral content: rules are merely a collection of current social wisdom about how to live and are not morality. Blind obedience to rules is mere submission to an authoritarian master. Morality comes from within.
Shock of the non-existence of a religious God strengthens knowledge of the power of your own being.
When I think of my grandfather’s work, I always come back to the centrality of doubt to his thought. He concluded The Courage to Be (1952) with a much misunderstood final sentence perhaps inspired by his horrific experiences in the First World War:
“The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”
When the God of theism has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt, what appears is the God above God or the power of one’s own being. I take this to mean that when you confront the shock of the non-existence of the religious or theistic conception of God, you become strengthened with the knowledge of the power of your own being, a power that is above and beyond theistic conceptions and is in fact the source of all of those religious conceptions.
This interpretation has Tillich crossing the boundary of religious faith into the existentialist belief in his own personal courage and power as a being. And this, after all, is the purpose and conclusion of all philosophical thought that must always come back to the self, the human being trying to understand the Universe, but always returning to itself and its own subjective interests that ultimately create the only world we can live in, that of our own being.
https://aeon.co/essays/my-grandfather-paul-tillich-the-unbelieving-theologian?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=d56f6e5645-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_03_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Shock of the non-existence of a religious God strengthens knowledge of the power of your own being.
When I think of my grandfather’s work, I always come back to the centrality of doubt to his thought. He concluded The Courage to Be (1952) with a much misunderstood final sentence perhaps inspired by his horrific experiences in the First World War:
“The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”
When the God of theism has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt, what appears is the God above God or the power of one’s own being. I take this to mean that when you confront the shock of the non-existence of the religious or theistic conception of God, you become strengthened with the knowledge of the power of your own being, a power that is above and beyond theistic conceptions and is in fact the source of all of those religious conceptions.
This interpretation has Tillich crossing the boundary of religious faith into the existentialist belief in his own personal courage and power as a being. And this, after all, is the purpose and conclusion of all philosophical thought that must always come back to the self, the human being trying to understand the Universe, but always returning to itself and its own subjective interests that ultimately create the only world we can live in, that of our own being.
https://aeon.co/essays/my-grandfather-paul-tillich-the-unbelieving-theologian?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=d56f6e5645-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_03_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Mary: HUMAN VALUES, NOT IMPOSED FROM ABOVE
Paul Tillich's thinking on religion, philosophy and morality could only come from one living through the experiences of the twentieth century — especially the living hell of the two world wars... the experiences which were also the root of existentialism. Good and evil are no longer personified and projected outward as supernatural beings, God and Satan, engaged in eternal struggle for the souls of men, but recognized as human qualities and potentials in humanity itself.
Good and evil are not separate and outside, powers to be petitioned, obeyed, worshiped or denied, but have their origins in ourselves — small, separate, brief, creatures, in search of meaning from the chaos of experience. Morality, goodness, ethics, come from humanity, as do the worst imaginable evils. God as the "ground of being" becomes the possibility of those potentials, the freedom to choose, to create, to realize meaning...that thing we are always searching for.
This is an enormous step forward from the primitive concept of God as a person, watchful, judging, busy dealing out punishments and rewards, ourselves as children, there to obey and be saved, or rebel and be punished. It seems a more mature, adult concept, possible when you recognize that evil "has a human face.” Evil has our stench, our signature, inescapably visible in the horrors of WWI, WWII, the rise of fascism, the modern efficiency devoted to genocide in the Holocaust. The "ground of being" may be incomprehensible, but it is what we stand on, that potential to create, to choose, to become the face of Good, of kindness, justice, inclusion and equality. Human values, not imposed from above, but discovered in our own hearts and minds, there despite the potential for the selfish opposite.
Good and evil are not separate and outside, powers to be petitioned, obeyed, worshiped or denied, but have their origins in ourselves — small, separate, brief, creatures, in search of meaning from the chaos of experience. Morality, goodness, ethics, come from humanity, as do the worst imaginable evils. God as the "ground of being" becomes the possibility of those potentials, the freedom to choose, to create, to realize meaning...that thing we are always searching for.
This is an enormous step forward from the primitive concept of God as a person, watchful, judging, busy dealing out punishments and rewards, ourselves as children, there to obey and be saved, or rebel and be punished. It seems a more mature, adult concept, possible when you recognize that evil "has a human face.” Evil has our stench, our signature, inescapably visible in the horrors of WWI, WWII, the rise of fascism, the modern efficiency devoted to genocide in the Holocaust. The "ground of being" may be incomprehensible, but it is what we stand on, that potential to create, to choose, to become the face of Good, of kindness, justice, inclusion and equality. Human values, not imposed from above, but discovered in our own hearts and minds, there despite the potential for the selfish opposite.
Oriana: "THEOLOGIANS DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD"
While Tillich's idea of a non-traditional, non-vengeful god is more attractive than the standard carrot-and-stick religion, why not get rid of the concept of god altogether? Why this certainty that most people are emotionally and intellectually weak and need religion or else they'd be without a moral compass and terribly depressed at the prospect of dying? Are most people we know really so weak and helpless? So morally benighted? So enthralled by the archaic? Is our deepest identity the knowledge that we are sinners in need of salvation? What if we dared to believe that we are good and strong, and acted accordingly?
Morality need not be rooted in religion. For me, the Golden Rule is a sufficient primary law. There is also the guidance of empathy: we feel bad when we make another person suffer, and feel happy when we've made someone else happy. As for questions about the Universe, science presents us with greater mysteries than any religion. And let's face it: we enjoy mystery. We don't get depressed because we can't explain the essence of gravity.
On the other hand, I vaguely understand the need for something that could be classified as religion. It would be wonderful to have a supportive Mother/Father in the sky. But such a deity would have to be personal and anthropomorphic. It would have to be capable of granting our wishes (how much nicer than always reaching for a cause-and-effect explanation). It would be the kind of supernatural best friend who is always on our side. (The New Age writers think the Universe is on our side and grants our wishes. However, they don't try to explain earthquakes, floods, or avalanches; I suspect that deep down they'd be embarrassed to explain a tsunami, say, as a result of negative thinking. They don't insist that there are so many negative thinkers in Bangladesh as to unleash a landslide.)
There is indeed such a superfriend, and that's our own inner wisdom, connected to the collective wisdom of humanity. Call it our Deepest Self or the Buddhist "witness," the "Christ Within," or anything else: there it is, not in any church, but within us. We don't need any complicated theology. We need to live deeply, think deeply, feel deeply. And we need to cultivate our garden. Any connection of that garden with paradise is a free bonus.
I don't have the slightest need for god as the "ground of being." What I want is the connection with my own inner wisdom, which is inextricably connected with collective wisdom (we can call it Logos to make it sound more grand).
And I'll always remember a convoluted discussion of theology on Facebook, several years ago, when religion was for some reason a big subject of debate. One of the participants actually happened to have a degree in theology (or was it "Divinity"?). He said: The first thing you need to understand is that theologians don't believe in God."
This makes perfect sense, since ultimately religion is not intellectual, only emotional. Luther was right when he repeatedly expressed a fear of reason, calling it a "whore." He knew that reason could refute any argument for God's existence. But one could just as easily argue that reason was intellectual honesty and courage to face the void. It was religion that could more plausibly be called a whore, ready to sell the right to question and think for oneself in exchange for attractive promises of heaven, unsupported by any evidence. It was religion, that great shape-shifter, that could weasel out of any discussion that exposed it as outdated mythology and wishful thinking.
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FROZEN, CANNED, OR FRESH — WHICH KIND IS THE MOST NUTRITIOUS?
Many of us are taught to believe that when it comes to fruit and vegetables, nothing is as nutritious as fresh produce.
By reaching for canned or frozen versions, are we doing a disservice to our health?
When answering this question, it’s important to remember that food is most nutritious at the point of harvest, says Fatima Hachem, Senior Nutrition Officer at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Fresh produce starts degrading as soon as it’s picked from the ground or tree, because that ground or tree is its source of nutrients and energy.
“Vegetables destined for cooking fresh might lose some of their nutritional value if they stay for long on the shelves,” Hachem says.
Once picked, that fruit or veg is still using its own nutrients, breaking them down in order to keep its cells alive. And some nutrients are particularly vulnerable. Vitamin C, which helps the human body absorb iron, helps reduce cholesterol levels and protects against free radicals, is also especially sensitive to oxygen and light.
Refrigerating produce slows down the process of nutrition degradation, although the rate at which nutritional value is lost varies from one product to the next.
In 2007, Diane Barrett, a former food science and technology researcher at the University of California, Davis, reviewed numerous studies looking into the nutritional content of fresh, frozen and tinned fruits and vegetables. She found that spinach, for example, loses 100% of its vitamin C content in seven days if stored at a room temperature of 20C (68F); it loses 75% if refrigerated. But carrots, by contrast, only lose 27% of their vitamin C content when stored for a week at room temperature.
Carrots lose 27% of their vitamin C when stored at room temperature – but that’s much better than other kinds of produce.
“Spinach is very thin, so there’s more loss of moisture and exposure to heat and oxygen compared to, say a carrot, which is denser,” says Barrett.
But all other vegetables in Barrett’s research lost significantly less vitamin C when they were frozen. That included spinach, which only lost 30% of its vitamin C when frozen.
This is because freezing pauses the process of oxidation, which is one reason that produce can start to turn brown after being harvested.
Speed freeze
Freezing produce on a mass scale is a relatively new innovation for the food industry.
Take the humble frozen pea. Today, the pea can be harvested, transported to a factory, washed, blanched and frozen in just over two hours. In the 1970s, it would have taken days.
“Compare that [timescale] to fresh vegetables – most of which are harvested, sent to a packing plant, packed, graded, shipped to retailers, then put in the consumer baskets,” says Richard Harrow, chief executive of the British Frozen Food Federation, the frozen food sector’s trade association in the UK. “About 99% of time, this process takes longer than the time taken to harvest, process and freeze peas.”
Speed is crucial in the frozen food industry: as soon as produce is taken from the ground, it’s a nutritional race against time. Technological innovation has shortened the process of freezing foods over the last few decades, including peas, which are individually quick frozen, Harrow says, using a metal trough that opens at both ends and has a grate on the bottom. Underneath the trough, high-speed fans blow cold air up towards peas, which are “suspended in a cushion of air”. They’re then placed in cold storage until they’re put into packaging. Most other vegetables follow a similar process.
There’s an important caveat. Before produce is frozen, it’s blanched, which involves heating the food up for a few minutes at high temperatures. This is to inactivate unwanted enzymes that work to degrade texture and color during frozen storage, Barrett says.
But it also reduces nutrient content.
Canned content
However, this nutritional loss pales in comparison to the amount of heat that produce is exposed to when it’s tinned. The more intense heat treatment used on food that’s destined for a metal can shows a greater reduction in nutrients than frozen food, Barrett says.
But as with fresh food, different nutrients in different kinds of produce degrade at different rates.
In her review, Barrett found that foods with mostly water-soluble nutrients, including vitamin C and B vitamins, retained nutrients differently than those with mainly fat-soluble nutrients, including vitamins A and E. The paper concluded that fresh food is often best for vitamin C content, as this vitamin is highly sensitive to heat – as long as it undergoes minimal storage.
Foods with more vitamin E and A, however, which are found in high amounts in canned carrots and tomatoes, fared much better during heat treatment.
But canned food can also have some less desirable contents.
“While there’s no reason to be worried about using frozen or canned food, there’s a preference for frozen because of the amount of added salt [in canned], and some canned fruits have added sugar,” says Hachem.
Still, canning also can improve the safety of foods, particularly those prone to harboring pathogens.
“The good thing about canned foods is the process used to sterilize them,” says Barrett. “It results in greater nutrient loss, but once the produce is in the can it can be pretty stable for years, and you can be sure it’s safe because it’s gone through a process that kills all microorganisms.”
Fresh take
What’s most important is to have a diverse diet, says Hachem, which, a lot of time, requires a variety of fresh, frozen and canned.
“You can have a balanced meal by cooking vegetables from frozen or in a can, but this doesn’t replace the importance of having fresh salads,” Hachem says.
“If we can manage one salad on a daily basis, with cooking from frozen or canned, we’re not risking nutritional intake – on the contrary, it’s a good way of diversifying.”
Some experts also advise that buying local and organic also help ensure the fresh fruit and vegetables on your plate are as nutritious as possible. A number of studies have found that the content of phenolics – healthy compounds found in high amounts in red wine and tea – is higher in organic crops than conventionally grown ones.
There isn’t enough research to know for certain why this is, but it could be because organic crop systems don’t use pesticides. In order to survive, Barrett says, organic crops produce more phenolic compounds, which repel insects and disease more than conventional crops.
Organic farm. Some research shows that organic produce retains more nutrients.
But buying local and organic, like buying fresh, isn’t something that everyone is able to do.
And that doesn’t have to be a barrier to overall nutrition, experts say. Whether frozen, canned or fresh, they agree that the most important takeaway is simply to eat fruit and vegetables, however they’re prepared. According to the UK’s NHS, for example, either fresh, frozen, canned or dried fruit and vegetables all count towards your five-a-day.
“You should eat fruit and vegetables whether they’re fresh, frozen or canned, or dried or fermented; any one of these forms is nutritious,” says Barrett.
“The most important thing is to not stop eating fruit and vegetables.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200427-frozen-fresh-or-canned-food-whats-more-nutritious
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VEGETABLES ARE LOSING THEIR NUTRIENTS
A process called biofortification puts nutrients directly into seeds and could reduce global hunger, but it’s not a magic bullet.
In 2004, Donald Davis and fellow scientists at the University of Texas made an alarming discovery: 43 foods, mostly vegetables, showed a marked decrease in nutrients between the mid and late 20th century.
According to that research, the calcium in green beans dropped from 65 to 37mg. Vitamin A levels plummeted by almost half in asparagus. Broccoli stalks had less iron.
Nutrient loss has continued since that study. More recent research has documented the declining nutrient value in some staple crops due to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels; a 2018 study that tested rice found that higher CO2 levels reduced its protein, iron and zinc content.
The climate crisis has only accelerated concerns about crops’ nutritional value, prompting the emergence of a process called biofortification as a strategy to replenish lost nutrients or those that foods never had in the first place.
Biofortification encompasses multiple technologies. One involves genetically modifying a crop to increase its nutritional contents, which allows for the rapid introduction of new traits. Another, agronomic biofortification, utilizes nutrient-rich fertilizers or soil amendments to concentrate particular minerals in plants. Lastly, selective plant breeding can produce new varieties, though it can take a decade or more to yield a single variety.
Biofortification is an alternative to fortification, which has been part of the US industrial food system since the 1920s, when the nation began boosting table salt with iodine to reduce conditions related to mineral deficiency, such as goiter. Biofortification puts nutrients directly into the seed, as opposed to fortification, which adds nutrients into food once it’s grown. On the global stage, international stakeholders such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have deemed the development of nutrient-enhanced biofortified crops as one of their leading goals in achieving food security.
Prateek Uniyal, program lead at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), explained that “because of climate change, iron and zinc have been dipping by 30-40% due to excessive rainfall, cold and physical damage”.
HarvestPlus is an organization under IFPRI, and it provides global leadership on biofortification evidence and technology. It is currently working with governments in more than 30 countries, and its biofortified varieties have been planted by more than 10 million farmers across the world, predominantly in developing countries. By 2030, the organization estimates, 1 billion people will be benefiting from biofortified foods. “We’re about 20 years into a 40-year program,” said Jenny Walton, head of commercialization and scaling at HarvestPlus. “We’re trying to revolutionize staple food systems.”
While malnutrition demonstrates the urgent need to increase the nutrient density of crops globally, Benjamin Cohen, professor of environmental studies at Lafayette College, points to biofortification as a Band-Aid, rather than a solution to the problem.
“My concerns are about funders, based on policymakers, choosing to invest in biofortification instead of supporting more enduring smallholder models of farming that could be more efficient and resilient than large-scale systems,” said Cohen. “Promoting biofortification suggests solving a problem that should not exist if not for large-scale, capital-intensive agriculture. It’s likely that those same agricultural processes would only be further entrenched with biofortification.”
HarvestPlus sees plant breeding as the most sustainable way of biofortifying; it relies on existing plant genes. The organization works exclusively with staple crops and is developing them to contain higher amounts of vitamin A, iron and zinc, three micronutrients identified by the WHO to be the most deficient in diets globally. That approach means that in places such as Pakistan, where diets are wheat-heavy, fortifying that grain could make population-level change.
HarvestPlus has already released 400 varieties of staple crop; none of them are patented.
But there are other concerns that nutrients are being lost at a broader scale than biofortification can replace.
Davis, who led the original University of Texas study demonstrating dwindling nutrient value in crops, said: “A limitation of biofortification is that it focuses on one or possibly two nutrients per plant, whereas nutrient decline tends to affect many nutrients simultaneously.”
And then there’s the hurdle of accessibility. Walton noted that there’s not yet a consistent supply of biofortified seeds. HarvestPlus also intends for its biofortified seeds to cost less than traditional seeds. But those lowered costs are the result of government subsidies. For example, India has partnered with HarvestPlus to make biofortified food available for children, in a country with a high rate of malnutrition stunting youth’s growth.
The government partnership model may pay off in low- to middle-income nations where malnutrition is common and businesses are working directly with the smallholder farmers growing biofortified varieties, rather than at industrial scale because the seed supply can’t yet reach that volume.
Cohen pointed out that while the need might be greatest in less industrialized countries, such countries may have fewer mechanisms to resist policies originating in better-resourced countries. They may have fewer regulations about genetically modified, biofortified crops, such as the controversial golden rice, which was altered to produce beta-carotene and, as a result, vitamin A. While golden rice was bred to help alleviate vitamin A deficiencies, Cohen has written that this strategy adopts “technical fixes to problems that could be addressed in ways less dependent on mono-cropped environments”. Essentially, if we plant diversified crops that have the vitamins a given population lacks, the same nutritional outcome could be achieved.
He said: “Powerful nations dictated the shape of food systems in other countries, left them in the position of more malnutrition, and now because those countries don’t have enough power to form their policies on a global market, the same powerful nations can now go back and intervene in their dietary systems.”
In addition, the industrial agriculture system also favors chemical fortification, said Peter Kelly, CEO of Grow Further, a philanthropic organization that invests in early-stage, scalable agricultural innovations in developing countries. He stated that “there’s not much interest in biofortification for the US domestic market. Some US food companies are supporting international work to improve nutrition. But it’s not really necessary in our current [US] food system because it can be done with chemical fortification.”
Kelly suggests pairing biofortification with other seed changes – perhaps breeding them to be more drought resistant – to further encourage stakeholders to invest in crops that better fit local growing conditions.
“All of our work is about adapting to climate change in some sense,” said Kelly. “Carbon dioxide levels can affect the nutrient levels in plants; we have to do this plant breeding just to keep up. Enhancing fruits, veggies and beans is one approach, but if that’s the only approach from the public policy perspective, it’s kind of idealistic.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/28/vegetables-losing-nutrients-biofortification
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EARLY-ONSET CANCER IS ON THE RISE
Earsly-onset cancer, which is defined as happening in adults under 50 years of age, is no anomaly. In fact, it is part of a rising global trend in which newly diagnosed cancer patients are getting younger. Further, it deflates the myth that cancer is the preserve of older people.
During the past week alone, I saw a 37-year-old with breast cancer that had already metastasized to her lymph nodes, bones, lung and liver. In the room next door was a 45-year-old with colon cancer that had spread so diffusely throughout the liver that it had become packed and enlarged with the tumors. Both patients had stage IV cancers that can potentially be controlled for a finite time but are no longer curable.
The global incidence of early-onset cancer increased by 79.1% and early-onset cancer deaths rose by 27.7% from 1990 to 2019, a 2023 study in the journal BMJ Oncology found. More granular data on this uptick published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that from 2010 to 2019 in the United States, breast cancer accounted for the highest number of cases in this younger population, while rates of gastrointestinal cancers were rising the fastest.
This jarring increase in gastrointestinal cancers alone captures the implications and risks associated with a person’s birth year. As Dr. Kimmie Ng, a medical oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told The Boston Globe last year, “People born in 1990 have over double the risk of getting colon cancer compared to those born in 1950. And quadruple the risk of getting rectal cancer.”
As these cases of early-onset cancers mount, there is added urgency to identify why this rise in cancer among younger people is unfolding and who is at heightened risk. At least part of the answer appears to be found in the changes to nutrition and lifestyle that took hold in the middle of the last century.
Notably, the population’s underlying genetic risks haven’t changed in the past several decades, bolstering the case that environment and lifestyle have a greater role in these cancers than our genes. Culprits may include ultraprocessed foods, sugary drinks, red meat, smoking, alcohol, sleep alterations, obesity and physical inactivity. Alone and especially in concert, these factors can alter the internal processes of our bodies by upsetting metabolism and ratcheting up inflammation.
Further research efforts are underway examining whether changes in the gut microbiome, the trillions of microbes that reside inside us, are increasing our bodies’ vulnerability to cancer. This community of microbes is a crucial contributor to health, affecting digestion and the immune system. Poor diet, excessive antibiotic use and certain medicines can cause an upheaval in this microbiome, which could then play a role in facilitating cancer.
Because cancer is a disease understood to develop over decades as changes in DNA accumulate and spawn tumors, a person diagnosed at a younger age may have been exposed to risk factors as a baby or in utero. Research is also focused here currently, with studies associating greater risk with cesarean delivery in females and a synthetic form of progesterone used to prevent premature labor.
But as I have seen regularly in my own cancer clinic, obesity and lifestyle alone cannot account for all the young patients being diagnosed. Many whom I am treating are healthy, eat judiciously and exercise regularly. And so causation for their diseases still remains beyond science’s grasp.
As Dr. Suneel Kamath, a gastrointestinal medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute and member of the newly launched Center for Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer at the Cleveland Clinic, told me, “The short answer is we really don’t know.”
The one certainty at this moment, however, is that underdiagnosis of these early-onset cancers is prevalent and consequential. Primary care physicians need to be educated on the rising presence of cancer in those younger than 50 and why age should not be used to downplay a presenting patient’s symptoms.
On the other side, people should not neglect persistent symptoms of any kind and be cognizant of a family history of cancer. Often, young patients will have to advocate aggressively for themselves since it can take multiple appointments before a cancer diagnosis is made.
And because early-onset cancers are often diagnosed at advanced stages, they were once thought to be biologically different and more pernicious than their older counterparts. Often, these are simply found late and metastasized because of a delay in diagnosis and not due to any particularly aggressive quality.
Once treatment starts, the stakes are also different for those in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Cancer drugs can cause cardiovascular issues and secondary cancers years after treatment. Younger patients may be pregnant at the start of therapy or worry about the effects on fertility. Further, there are concerns about long-term cognitive damage after chemotherapy, especially as people return to work.
“It is disconcerting talking to people about missing class for college and parental responsibilities while getting chemotherapy,” Kamath added. “These people should not be dealing with this.”
This unsettling phenomenon in cancer care will necessitate a redoubling of our collective efforts for funding, further research, education campaigns and revision of screening guidelines.
Already, much of this is in motion. In a notable move, the US Preventive Services Task Force, a volunteer panel of experts in disease prevention, now recommends that colorectal cancer screening should start at age 45 for people at average risk of the disease.
Even as considerable advances have been made in cancer outcomes, true progress can’t be declared if certain age groups are worryingly falling behind. The Princess of Wales’ public disclosure of her cancer is a reminder of the work left to do.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/opinions/young-cancer-kate-catherine-princess-diagnosis-baig/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc
Oriana:
Let's not forget the ubiquitous microplastics. We eat microplastics, we breathe microplastic-laden air. I am reminded of the times when lead was blithely added to gasoline, as if we didn't know anything about lead toxicity. And yes, we know a lot about the carcinogenic properties of various types of plastic. Plastic bags are a wonderful convenience; what we don't yet know is the long-term price.
With more and more carcinogens, some of them in the "forever" category, in our air, water, and food, we obviously need better treatment. The article below, on the paradoxical effects of stimulating cancer growth until the cancer cells are exhausted, points to the importance of testing unorthodox therapies.
As for nutrient deprivation, one well-researched cancer therapy is fasting and/or keto diet. It's interesting that you can starve the cancer, but you can also "overfeed" it, meaning force it to grow too fast and reach exhaustion. Please read on.
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BEATING BY OVERHEATING: NEW STRATEGY TO COMBAT CANCER
Paradoxical activation of oncogenic signaling shows surprising results
~ Many new drugs inhibit the processes that cancer cells need to divide rapidly, so as to inhibit the cancer as a whole. But cancer cells have all sorts of workarounds to get around that effect. As a result, the tumor becomes unresponsive to treatment.
That's why researcher Matheus dos Santos Dias is taking a completely different approach. He had to convince some colleagues before he could start working on this quite surprising idea. After all, you're not going to give cancer cells a boost, are you? "We're going against the prevailing view that you can only fight cancer cells by inhibiting them," he knows. "But we had strong evidence that it also works if you overstimulate and exhaust them."
Everyone makes inhibitors
And so he set out to find a drug that stimulates cancer cells, as well as a perfectly suited partner drug that can then finish the job. By doing so, he wants to upset the balance in cancer cells to the point where they can no longer save themselves. "Compare it to the engine of a racing car: if you crank up the RPM and then turn off the cooling, it's bound to crash. This is exactly what we are trying to do with the drugs.”
Tricky though: "Activating drugs are not that common, almost everyone makes inhibitors. But we did find one we could work with," he says. That drug acts on the protein PP2A. In a large-scale experiment with all kinds of drug combinations, he and his colleagues then found a WEE1 inhibitor to be the best partner in crime. That inhibitor targets overactive, stressed cells and keeps them from functioning properly.
Higher gear
Cancer cells and mice with patient tumors respond well to the drug combo. And, not insignificantly, the side effects seem manageable. Dos Santos Dias: "This obviously does not mean it will not have side effects in humans. But we suspect that normal cells can defend themselves against this activation much better than cancer cells, which of themselves are already in a higher gear.”
Resistant & less malignant
”Resistance is a huge problem with existing treatments: cells no longer respond and usually become even more aggressive than they already were. So we also looked at what happens when cells stop responding to our treatment. Surprisingly, resistant cells actually seemed less malignant: they grew less quickly, or not at all.”
"This research makes you think about cancer very differently," says internist-oncologist Neeltje Steeghs. She heads the Clinical Research Unit at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, where the very first patients receive new treatments within clinical studies.
Paradoxical approach
"I don’t know whether this new combination will work in patients. The reality is that many of these kinds of early studies are not successful. But the current treatments doctors have access to did start there as well. And when you've done all you can in the lab, the only step you can and must take is: testing in patients." The researchers hope to have started the first study in patients by the end of this year.
"In the beginning, doctors and researchers still had questions about this concept, but now the support is incredible," says Dos Santos Dias. "Scientifically, the concept is hard to refute. I hope that other labs will now also start testing this paradoxical approach, including other drugs as well.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1039146
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ending on beauty:
NADIA
I first saw you against monumental
statues of workers and peasants
red flags and posters hammers and sickles
Marx’s beard in a blizzard
and you a miracle
In winter I’d cross
into your language
snowdrifts of Nadia Nadia Nadia
snow marbled our shoulders
jeweled eyelashes
Nadia here there are no blizzards
the world doesn’t turn
blank as paper
we live in a postcard Nadia
in a botanical garden
Here the roads end in eroding cliffs
the sky rarely sails
long ships of clouds
the wind doesn’t carry dry leaves
illegible letters from home
In permafrost of forgotten dreams
after the black ice of years
I remember your name means Hope
refugee of memory
ghost and guest of my mirrors
~ Oriana
