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PERSEPHONE TEN YEARS LATER
Mother, I was never raped.
I was waiting for him.
Lilies shivered, the narcissus dazzled
with a hundred blossoms.
Inside my head your voice
grew enormous with warnings.
I liked living with you, the two of us
like girls, laughing at old stories,
keeping house. You continued
with the hard, ordinary tasks; I tried
new dishes, exotic spices.
Now like you I keep
to the proven and the best.
My arms embrace
your gestures, my mouth
shapes around your speech.
I scold my husband as you would;
I see your face in my mirror.
Before, I saw only my own.
~ Oriana
Detail from Rust by Nyk Fury
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JOHN MILTON’S PRUDISH CENSORSHIP
John Milton’s handwritten annotations have been identified in a copy of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a vital source of inspiration for the Paradise Lost poet. The discovery, made in the Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix, Arizona, makes this one of only three known books to preserve Milton’s handwritten reading notes, and one of only nine books to have survived from his library.
The findings, detailed by three researchers in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), include Milton censoring Holinshed by crossing out a lewd anecdote about the mother of William the Conqueror, Arlete.
Spotted while dancing by Robert I of Normandy, and summoned to his bed, Arlete refused to let him lift up her smock and instead tore it herself from top to bottom, explaining that it would be immodest for her ‘dependant’ garments to be ‘mountant’ to her sovereign’s mouth.
In the margin, Milton dismisses this anecdote as inappropriate and told in the style of a pedlar hawking wares on the streets. In Milton’s exact words, it was: "an unbecom[ing] / tale for a hist[ory] / and as pedlerl[y] / expresst”.
“The adverb ‘pedlerly’ was quite rare in writing at the time so we are seeing Milton really stretching language to express his contempt,” said co-author Prof. Jason Scott-Warren, from Cambridge University’s English Faculty, who was consulted to confirm that the handwriting was Milton’s.
“Milton is renowned as an enemy of press censorship,” Scott-Warren said, “but here we see he was not immune to prudishness.”
Milton crossed through the passage with a single, light diagonal line so the words beneath remain fully legible.
The discovery was made thanks to the Arizona Book History Group, a research forum at the Phoenix Public Library organized by Assistant Prof. Brandi Adams and Prof. Jonathan Hope, both from Arizona State University’s Dept. of English. Adams and Hope raised funds for four visiting scholars to study books in the library’s Alfred Knight Collection. In March this year, these researchers included the two other authors of this study: Dr Aaron Pratt, Curator of Early Books & Manuscripts at University of Texas; and Claire Bourne, an associate professor of English at Penn State. Holinshed's Chronicles, bound in two hefty volumes, was among a number of books that the researchers requested to see.
On 1st March, Dr Pratt noticed a surprising little “e” in notations added to the book. “I was like, ‘God, there’s no way in hell this is true, but it kind of looks like this stupid way Milton writes ‘e’,” Pratt said.
Intrigued, Pratt kept looking and started seeing scratchy brackets with notations in the margins, brackets that looked very similar to those found in one of the two other known books with Milton’s handwriting, Shakespeare’s First Folio, which Bourne and Scott-Warren found in 2019 in the Philadelphia Free Library.
Bourne started to compare the annotations in Holinshed’s Chronicles with those in the Shakespeare Folio. “We’re kind of going back and forth, like, is that double ‘l’ similar? Is that double ‘s’ similar?” Bourne said.
Bourne then texted photos of the handwriting and brackets to Jason Scott-Warren, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College.
In 2019, Scott-Warren identified Milton as the annotator of a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio in the Free Library of Philadelphia, building on Bourne’s research. Academics and media reports called this one of the most important literary discoveries of modern times. Since then, the pair have employed research assistants to look for other surviving books from Milton’s library, with no luck.
Bourne wasn’t sure how Scott-Warren would respond to the Holinshed notations, describing him as “very conservative” when it comes to reaching such verdicts. But his reply was rapid and enthusiastic: “Wow. Bingo!”
The researchers believe that the discovery opens up new perspectives on his engagement with a major source for his writings, including Of Reformation (1641) and The History of Britain (1670). He would have been working on both around the time—or shortly after—he was reading the Chronicles.
Several of Milton’s notes cite other books known to have been in his library. These include John Stow's Annales, another key source of historical information. Milton also marked out Holinshed quoting Giovanni Villani's Chroniche di Firenze (Chronicles of Florence), a book which Milton included in the curriculum he developed for his nephews in the 1640s.
The notes also emphasize Milton's interest in continental poetry. Under Holinshed's assertion that Richard the Lionheart was "not very notorious," Milton added: "the booke of Provenzall poets numbers him in / the catalogue, telling of his poetrie, and his Provenzal / mistresses". The researchers believe this book refers to Jean de Nostredame’s Les vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (Lyon, 1575), which discusses Richard's poetry and mistresses.
Scott-Warren said: “This discovery also serves as additional confirmation that the Shakespeare First Folio belonged to Milton. Both books feature the same swooping brackets, and they display closely comparable annotative practices. And they remind us of just how voracious he was as a reader.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1044497
Oriana:
And no doubt everyone reprimanded him: “Stop reading so much! You’ll ruin your eyes!”
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“DR. STRANGELOVE” REMAINS RELEVANT
Sixty years ago, Columbia Pictures released the first of two black-and-white movies with the exact same premise: what if American planes with hydrogen bombs were inadvertently ordered to drop their payload on targets in the Soviet Union, potentially triggering an all-out nuclear war that wipes out humanity? The Cuban missile crisis had pushed the superpowers to the brink of conflict less than two years earlier, and film-makers were unusually eager to face their cold war nightmares head on.
The release dates were like a reversal of Karl Marx’s famous line about how history repeats itself, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce”. The farce, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, came first. Then the tragedy, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, arrived in October. There was a lot of messy legal fallout over the common origins of the two films, but they complement each other beautifully, with only a slight difference in perspective on our inability to manage weapons of such god-like destruction.
The message of Fail Safe: human beings are fallible. The message of Dr Strangelove: human beings are idiots.
On balance, Kubrick’s message is more persuasive. Dr Strangelove remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of the cold war, with two saber-rattling superpowers escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation. There’s absolutely no question, for example, that the top military and political brass have gamed out the catastrophic loss of life in a nuclear conflict, just as they do in the war room here. Perhaps they would even nod sagely at the distinction between 20 million people dead versus 150 million people dead. All Kubrick and his co-writers, Terry Southern and Peter George, have to add is a wry punchline: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.”
Part of the genius of Dr Strangelove is how deftly it toggles between the satirical and the silly without losing any of its power. You can picture the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team behind Airplane! snickering and taking notes over funny names like Brig Gen Jack D Ripper and Col “Bat” Guano, or the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff taking a call from his lover in the war room. (“Look, baby, I can’t talk to you right now. My president needs me.”) At the same time, the film doesn’t need to put that much spin on the ball. Is there really much of a difference between Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launching a nuclear strike over fears of the Russian tainting “our precious bodily fluids” and the QAnon fantasies of the former lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who occupied a much higher position as Donald Trump’s national security adviser?
Kubrick knows when to pull back, however. Dr Strangelove doesn’t try to be a laugh-a-second spoof, because plausibility is its most important weapon. Nothing in the set-up is any funnier than Fail Safe: B-52 bombers with a nuclear arsenal are flying a routine airborne patrol two hours from Soviet targets, awaiting the usual code to return to base. Instead, their superior, Gen Ripper, issues the code for “Wing Attack Plan R”, which not only leads them into the USSR but reduces communications to a three-letter code known only to Ripper. At the war room in the Pentagon, the ineffectual president, Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), summons the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen “Buck” Turgidson (George C Scott), and other military luminaries to deal with the crisis. How could this happen? And what, if anything, can be done to stop it?
The straightforward premise is a lesson in the importance of structure in satire, which is established here not only in the solid parameters of the plotting but in black-and-white photography that presents its own rigorous deadpan. The obsessive precision of a Kubrick production doesn’t stifle the comedy in Dr Strangelove but liberates it, much like Buster Keaton holding a stone face while chaos erupts around him. Because we believe that the “Wing Attack Plan R” code would set up a top secret protocol like the one Major TJ “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) carries out on his B-52, we can laugh when his survival kit includes prophylactics, lipstick and three pairs of nylon stockings. (“Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”)
The casting is impeccable, starting with Sellers in a triple role as Lionel Mandrake, an RAF officer who tries fecklessly to talk Ripper down; President Muffley, who exchanges hilarious banalities with the Soviet premier while gently informing him of the situation; and Dr Strangelove, a wheelchair-using former Nazi who can’t control his saluting hand. Hayden and Pickens play to type as a towering madman and an amiable yokel, respectively, and Scott, who would play George Patton only six years later, takes the stuffing out of such military honchos as Turgidson, playing this lusty buffoon with wild eyes and belly-slapping gesticulation. There’s no error too monumental for him to minimize.
Dr Strangelove reserves a special contempt for the notion of deterrence, which it has the Nazi explain as “the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear of attack”. To that end, the Soviets have created a “doomsday machine” that would automatically retaliate to a nuclear attack with such force that it would render the Earth uninhabitable for 93 years. The idea is that humans are absolved from making a world-ending decision, but as it’s pointed out to the Soviet ambassador, it doesn’t work if you don’t tell anyone about it.
“It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday,” replies the ambassador. “As you know, the premier loves surprises.”
Watching Dr Strangelove today, in light of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, is to recognize all the more acutely the human flaws that are baked into weapons of mass destruction, starting with the chief architect of the atom bomb. Some of the best bits in the film barely have to reach for a joke: Kubrick merely has to point out the folly behind modern man’s greatest fear. Hubris may kill us all, but we can get a good laugh out of it first.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/29/dr-strangelove-stanley-kubrick-anniversary
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OCTOBER 7TH WAS NOT AN ABERRATION
We have to stop looking at October 7th as an aberration. Can we start with the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan. His stated reason was Kennedy's support for Israel. Robert Kennedy brother of JFK — that was a national trauma. He was the leading Democratic candidate for president but instead we got Nixon.
I remember the massacre at the 72 Olympics. I remember when they tried to kill the entire Jordanian royal family. I don't remember every hijacking there are too many it's well over a hundred. I do remember them beating a marine to death who was on leave. This after the plane crew had hid his documentation which I think got some of them killed. I remember Leon Klinghoffer and American who happened to be Jewish and was elderly in a wheelchair. Terrorist assholes took his Mediterranean cruise ship and when they found him they wheeled him off the deck, wheelchair and, all to his death. I am aware of many of the terrorist attacks they have committed in Egypt. I have come to realize that Egypt and Jordan won The Six Day War by ridding themselves of the Palestinians.
Today what I find galling necessitating the gloves coming off. There are actual protests on US soil in favor of terrorists who slaughtered civilians committed mass rape, displaying the dead naked bodies of their rape victims so they could be spat on, kidnapped hundreds more to be used as human shields.
The straw that breaks the camel's back is that this same organization raped and murdered Americans and are currently holding Americans as human shields. Fuck them. To make it even worse, fellow Americans. Truly just kids themselves are being threatened and intimidated in their pursuit of an education by these terrorist supporting assholes. In the 50s when this happened to black students Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort these students to their classes. You will not intimidate Americans in America. ~ Tim Brennan, Quora
Mark Pagano:
Where has enlightenment gone? These kids believe that every atrocity you mention was done in the name of liberation and freedom from a oppressor. Meanwhile if you look back in 1947 this area was a wasteland. There were some Jews, Christians and Muslims sparsely populating the area. Hard Jewish work turned the desert into arable land. Land that gives life from a desert. Now they want to say it was there home? Meanwhile travelers from the time will tell you it was barely inhabited. It wasn't Palestinians that made this land livable — it was Jewish hard work!
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JEWS ARE AMAZING
We Jews are amazing!
👀 we are both dirty brown people AND white supremacists
👀 we are both worthless rats AND control the entire world
👀 we are both semites AND from Europe
👀 we are both non-indigenous to Israel AND killed Jesus (by remote space laser evidently)
👀 we managed to build our temple BELOW the Al-Aqsa mosque to fool the world we are indigenous
👀 we both occupy Gaza AND left Gaza at the same time
👀 thanks to us, Gaza has been a terrible open air prison AND paradise on earth at the same time
👀 we make miracles happen! Electricity and fuel in Gaza are about to run out within 48 hours, for over six months now!
👀 by blocking aid, we managed to create an obesity problem among Gazans
👀 don't mess with us! If we genocide you for 75 years, your population will grow by 400%
We Jews are amazing! ~ Baruch Cohen, Quora
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IRELAND AND PALESTINE; UNITED BY PARTITION?
The conflict in Israel and Palestine raises strong feelings across the world, but particularly in Ireland. The Republic of Ireland is among the most pro-Palestinian countries in Europe. In Northern Ireland, Israeli flags can be seen in unionist or loyalist neighborhoods, while Palestinian colors fly in republican and nationalist areas. The events of 7 October 2023 and their aftermath appear to have done little to change these dynamics.
Reasons for these allegiances are complex and rooted in shared experiences of imperialism.
The parallels between the situations in Ireland and Palestine were most obvious in 1937 and 1938, as British officials published plans to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in much the same way Ireland had been divided along sectarian lines decades earlier. The Government of Ireland Act (1920) designated six of the island’s 32 counties as Northern Ireland, passing through Parliament without a single Irish vote in its favor. A year later the Anglo-Irish Treaty formed the remaining 26 counties into the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within the Empire. A civil war ensued in the Free State, and Northern Ireland saw intercommunal bloodshed as nationalists and republicans attempted to undo the partition and Treaty settlements.
By 1936 Ireland was largely quiescent, but the British faced a challenge in Palestine. In what became known as the Great Revolt, Muslims and Christians, described collectively as Arabs, attacked British authorities and Jewish settlers, who responded in kind. Attempting to garner support, British officials promised the region to both local Arabs and Zionist Jews.
The 1922 League of Nations mandate granting the British Empire governance of Palestine codified the promise to Zionists, while stipulating that the establishment of a Jewish homeland must not ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’. In 1919 there were approximately 58,000 Jews in Palestine, with ‘non-Jewish communities’ constituting 91.7 per cent of the population, but statistical realities did not guide decision-making. In fact, some officials were completely ignorant of them. Lord Curzon declared himself ‘absolutely staggered’ by the figures. By 1937 the Jewish population had risen to 386,084, comprising 27.9 per cent of the total.
Peel and partition
The violence in Palestine subsided in 1937, while a British Royal Commission chaired by Lord Peel investigated grievances there. The Peel Commission report recommended partition. Northern and coastal areas were to become a Jewish state within the Empire, while the remainder would be attached to the British protectorate of Transjordan. The report used Irish partition as a model, referring to ‘the impossibility of uniting all Ireland under a single parliament’ and insisting ‘the gulf between Arabs and Jews in Palestine is wider than that which separates Northern Ireland from the Irish Free State’. Ireland was at that time the most prominent territory in the Empire to have experienced partition; reactions there were often conditioned by this context.
Many newspapers with nationalist roots condemned the Peel plan unreservedly. Dublin’s Irish Independent wrote: ‘Partition is the Englishman’s favorite way out of a difficulty. But it is in itself a confession of failure.’ The Cork Evening Echo declared: ‘The tragic blunder of partition is being repeated.’ Nationalist organs in Northern Ireland were even more scathing. According to the Derry Journal, ‘Britain cares not a fig for the welfare of either Jew or Arab, any more than for Catholic or Protestant Irishman, except in so far as the one can be played off against the other for purposes of Imperial policy’.
Eamon de Valera, President of the Free State’s Executive Council, denounced the Peel plan at a League of Nations meeting in September 1937: ‘Partition of their national territory was the cruelest wrong that could be done to any people.’ Arab activists also drew parallels between Palestine, Ireland and other imperial territories. The Syrian politician Ihsan Al Jabri insisted that the British must negotiate with Palestinian Arab leaders, just as it had with Ireland’s Michael Collins and de Valera, Egypt’s Saad Zaghloul and India’s Mahatma Gandhi.
It might be assumed that Northern Ireland unionists would support partition on principle, but their mouthpieces were initially divided. The Belfast News-Letter argued in October 1937 that the British should focus on restoring order in Palestine, not conciliating the Arab rebels that, the paper insisted, were inspired by the Irish separatists. Other newspapers were more circumspect. The Belfast Telegraph remarked that partition was better than civil war, an argument that British and Irish unionists had employed decades earlier. The Northern Whig called partition a ‘counsel of despair’ that ‘foreshadows political and racial strife in an intensified form’.
But most unionists had coalesced around support for Palestinian partition by 1938 for two reasons. Firstly, the revolt revived following the Peel report, prompting unionists to escalate their imperial, law-and-order rhetoric. Secondly, de Valera had struck a deal in April to transfer the ‘Treaty ports’ – naval installations on Ireland’s west coast under British control – to his government. Unionists feared this was a step towards undoing the Treaty settlement altogether, including partition. James Craig, Lord Craigavon, Northern Ireland’s unionist prime minister, assured his constituents that British plans to divide Palestine showed they were committed to partition. By June 1938 the Northern Whig completed an about-face, approving partition on the grounds that a Jewish state would strengthen the Empire and provide ‘a safeguard for the Jews against Arab aggression’.
‘Our own activities’
Though antisemitism was not as obviously pervasive in Ireland as elsewhere in Europe, a generally racialised view of the controversy was evident. Dublin’s Evening Herald described Jews and Arabs as incompatible, one clearly superior to the other: ‘Since the influx of Jews to Palestine after the Nazi purge, that part of the country which they occupied has developed to an amazing degree … They have outclassed the Arabs in industry and enterprise.’ Speaking to a Belfast audience after visiting Palestine, Presbyterian minister W.A. Montgomery said Jews were ‘literally making the desert bloom as the rose’, but ‘Arabs were conservative and lazy’.
Ireland’s small but active Jewish population contributed to the debate. A visit to Dublin from Maurice Perlzweig of the World Zionist Organization in March 1938 became a forum on partition. Arthur Newman insisted ‘they must not barter away one inch of Palestinian territory’, as it was needed for refugees from Europe. Bernard Shillman disagreed, arguing there were ‘seeds of the growth of Jewish sovereignty and independence in the offer of partition’. Such comments are reminiscent of arguments concerning the Anglo-Irish Treaty almost two decades earlier. Abraham Gudansky echoed Irish nationalist rhetoric when he blamed ‘the perfidy of the British Government’ for disagreements among Jews.
Meanwhile, the revolt intensified. News from Palestine was reminiscent of recent Irish history, as ambushes and assassinations proliferated. As the Cork Evening Echo remarked: ‘We, at least, cannot condemn the Arabs without indicting our own national activities.’ British methods of ‘official reprisals’, such as blowing up houses and bombing towns, also sounded familiar. The nationalist Ulster Herald called these operations ‘phases of tyranny that we in this country experienced to the fullest not so many years ago’.
On 9 November 1938 a new British-appointed body issued a report that changed the future of Palestine again. The Palestine Partition Commission recommended that partition be abandoned. The Evening Herald encapsulated the effect with the headline: ‘Partition is Dead – In Palestine.’ The British did abandon the Peel plan, and the next idea to divide Palestine emanated from the United Nations in 1947.
A lasting partition
Today it is easy to stereotype support for either Israel or Palestinians, particularly in Northern Ireland. Political parties reflect these divisions, often explaining their sympathies through local experiences. Brian Kingston, a legislator with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), told the press: ‘We see Israel as having suffered terribly from terrorism over the years just like we have.’ Mary Lou McDonald, leader of nationalist party Sinn Féin, called for the Republic of Ireland to expel the Israeli ambassador and support prosecutions of Israel for war crimes at the International Criminal Court.
Decades ago, these recognizable affiliations were not as clear-cut. News organizations, politicians and members of the public formulated their opinions based on their perceptions of empires, nations, races and how international events might affect local issues. Even in the tense atmosphere of the 1930s, Irish commentators asserted that it was possible to condemn antisemitism while also refusing to support the victimization of Palestinian Arabs. Irish people had actually experienced partition, and their predictions – initially from nationalists and unionists – that dividing Palestine was unworkable, proved prophetic.
Their reactions show that it would be a mistake to see the Peel plan as a precursor to the ‘two-state solution’ of contemporary parlance. While that phrase suggests the idea to place both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on equal footing in the modern international system, Irish people saw in the partition idea the imposition of an imperial strategy, devised by outsiders to meet their objectives – not to lay the foundations for a lasting peace.
a Haganah fighter, Tel Aviv, 1948
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/ireland-and-palestine-united-partition?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Mary: ISRAEL IS NOT A COLONIAL EMPIRE
The problem that results in things like demonstrations in the US in support of terrorists, and Irish support of Palestinians is not so much antisemitism, though that is part of the mix, but the result of seeing everything through a single lens, one that is inappropriate to the item analyzed. These terrorist sympathizer, anti-Israeli groups are reading the conflict as part of an Imperialist hegemony, ordered by the conflict between Oppressor and Oppressed. Great Britain, an Imperialist Empire, "solved" situations in Ireland and in the Middle East through partition, but Israel is not and was not an Imperialist state, seeking to conquer and profit from colonies. To impose that lens — oppressor/oppressed, white/black, empire/colony on the Arab Israeli conflict is to misunderstand and misrepresent it.
To characterize the Oct 7th attack as an act of Resistance is a gross misunderstanding. What Hamas did was an act of terrorism, brutal, monstrous and inhuman, with no redeeming qualities, and no excuse. These terrorists were in no way freedom fighters. They committed atrocities on the innocent and celebrated their own evil with demonic glee. That is an essential fact that Palestinian supporters refuse to face or remember, so eager to see only an act of resistance rather than an act of terror. They have gone so far as to deny what happened — even in the face of celebratory videos filmed and posted by the terrorists themselves.
This is another instance of distorting reality to fit a pattern fixed in your own ideology...a pattern you insist on no matter how poorly it fits. It's like categorizing the Israelis as "white supremacists" when Jews were not considered "white" historically, and the Jews in Israel are a "racial" mix, from Europe, Ethiopia, the Semitic populations of the Middle East, and elsewhere. "Racial" categories are not helpful in understanding this situation.
Much of these distortions serve to obfuscate the real heart of the problem, which is the hatred of the Hamas Muslims and their openly stated primary goal...to kill and eradicate every Jew and destroy the state of Israel. They are the ones openly admitting their dedication to genocide. This dedication is based in their own holy book...no matter who or how many want to deny it. Liberal thinkers don't want to be accused of "Islamophobia," out of a sense this would be unjust.
But such "hands off" uncritical acceptance allows horrible cultural practices to continue unchallenged and unchanged. Honor killings, female genital mutilation, child marriage, the confinement of women in the house, in full body black sheets; the confinement of a woman’s vision to a tiny screened opening, the confinement of her will to the dictates of father, husband, brother, the confinement of the mind to learning only through memorizing an ancient text, no questions or challenges allowed. Islam not only is dedicated to murder as a religious practice, but to refusing any progress from the attitudes and mores of a medieval world.
Sympathy for Hamas can't happen without ignoring its own self description, intentions, and acts. And it's also crucial to remember that all those "civilians" were celebrating the horrors of Hamas's acts with dancing, singing, throwing candy in the streets, and spitting on the naked violated bodies of victims that Hamas raped, murdered, and dragged through Gaza.
Oriana:
Islam horrifies me. Sure, historically speaking, Christianity has its own trail of blood — but religious wars and burning people at the stake stopped centuries ago. This or that verse in the New Testament can be accused of being antisemitic, but it’s nowhere near the what we find in the Koran in regard to the Jews: “Kill them wherever you find them.” That is indeed genocidal, and helps explain the Arab countries’ admiration for Hitler and the Nazis.
Religion has a way of creating a delusional view of history. Crazily enough, we have the Evangelicals in the US giving uncritical support to Israel because according to their beliefs Israel must exist as a country for the Second Coming to take place; and, in the Islamic world, we have the opposite, the Koran’s commandment to kill all Jews.
Here is a quotation from a recent Times of Israel article: “Asked by the interviewer whether he would “visit Israel with a Palestinian visa,” the [Egyptian] minister said: “This is premature. Let’s wait until it happens. However, we hope that the words of the Prophet Muhammad will be fulfilled: Judgment Day will not come before the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the rocks and the trees, but the rocks and the trees will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him — except for the gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/egyptian-minister-quotes-koran-verse-on-killing-jews/
Is it really already the twenty-first century? Religion at its worst tries to prevent any progress toward greater peace and well-being. It doesn’t want people to be prosperous and happy. Prosperous, happy people have little need of religion — or of ethnic hatred. 
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RUSSIA AND THE US: TOUGH LOVE?
No, not at all. Russia and USA have very different attitude to each other. Very different to the point that it probably isn't comparable.
Let's start with USA. Russia bears no weight at all in the life of an average American. An average American absolutely never thinks about Russia and Russians. Even people in the USA, who are interested and engaged in politics, never really think about Russia. To Americans, Russia is invisible, meaningless, nobody cares about Russia or Russians.
It's a totally different picture in Russia. An average Russian has USA always on their mind. They keep comparing themselves to USA, they are desperate to find and illuminate every possible niche, where the comparison is favorable. And more than anything else, they crave recognition. And they aren't getting it, so they are acting like a woman, who dressed up and went out to seduce a man, and the man didn't give her as much as a look. They engage in all sorts of attention seeking behavior, hoping that with attention they will also get a little bit of recognition, perhaps a smile, a courteous opening of a door, something. And they aren't getting it.
And they are pissed off and throwing tantrums to the point of ridiculousness. Every Russian knows at least a few things about the USA, and every Russian craves to somehow beat the USA in something, while they are silently aware of their massive and glaring inferiority.
That's why you have prominent Russians throwing absolutely ridiculous tantrums, like that Medvedev guy, a former warmer of the presidential seat in Russia, and nowadays the laughing stock of the world, the object of many-a-meme, and the author of Friday night drunken telegram posts, that make the world circle somewhere between laughter, dismay and disgust. The laughter being of the laughing-at type, not the laughing-with.
When I see Russians today, I see a poorly aged 3 out of 10 woman, all dressed up and plastered with tons of makeup, walking around the singles bar screaming something like
look at me! look at me! I'm so pretty! Why don't you tell me I'm pretty, look how pretty I am, why didn't you open the door for me, you opened the door for that woman, why not for me, c'mon, buy me a drink, you won't buy me a drink? You bastard, you male chauvinist pig white privilege male privilege asshole I hate you, look how pretty I am and you treat me like this I deserve better I am so pretty! *Throws a glass and misses the nearest guy, spilling people nearby with wine* You are a bastard, all men are bastards, I hate you all and I hate you even more than the rest of them! Look, we started on the wrong foot, will you buy me a drink? Have this dance with me? Look, I'm so pretty. Still no?!! You bastard male scum pig…
It's pathetic, and it would have been laughable, if it wasn't for so many people getting killed over their pathetic tantrums. ~ Rok Ruzič, Quora
James Carey:
What really breaks my heart about what Ukraine is currently having to go through is the destruction to the cities and infrastructure. All they need to stop it is effective air defense.
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DID LENIN REALLY BELIEVE MARXIST IDEAS?
Lenin, the prominent leader of the Bolshevik Party and the architect of the Russian Revolution, is often portrayed as a revolutionary ideologue who genuinely believed in the principles of Marxism. However, it is crucial to examine the historical context and Lenin’s actions to fully understand his beliefs and motivations.
First and foremost, Lenin’s commitment to Marxist ideology cannot be denied. He dedicated his life to studying and promoting the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, viewing their theories as a blueprint for achieving a classless society. Lenin firmly believed that the working class should overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish a socialist state, paving the way for communism.
However, it is essential to acknowledge that Lenin pragmatically adapted Marxist ideas to fit the unique circumstances of Russia at the time. Recognizing that Russia had not yet reached the advanced capitalist stage envisioned by Marx, Lenin developed the concept of a “vanguard party” to spearhead the revolution on behalf of the proletariat. This notion allowed for a centralized leadership, which Lenin argued was necessary to guide the masses towards revolution.
Lenin’s actions during his time in power also shed light on his commitment to his ideological convictions. After the Bolsheviks successfully seized power in October 1917, Lenin implemented a series of radical policies aimed at transforming Russia into a socialist state. The nationalization of industries, land redistribution, and the establishment of workers’ control over factories were just some of the measures undertaken to fulfill the Marxist vision.
However, Lenin faced numerous challenges and compromises along the way. The Russian Civil War, which erupted shortly after the revolution, forced the Bolsheviks to adopt more authoritarian measures to maintain control and defend the fledgling Soviet state. These measures, such as the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the suppression of political opposition, led some to question whether Lenin was using Marxism solely as a tool for consolidating power.
While Lenin certainly made decisions that deviated from some aspects of classical Marxism, it is crucial to understand the context in which these choices were made. The Russian Revolution occurred in a time of immense turmoil and uncertainty, with external threats from counter-revolutionaries and intervention by foreign powers. Lenin’s actions can be seen as pragmatic responses aimed at ensuring the survival of the revolution and protecting the gains made by the working class.
In contrast to Stalin, who manipulated Marxist ideology to consolidate his personal power and establish a totalitarian regime, Lenin’s actions were driven by a genuine belief in achieving a socialist society. Despite the challenges and compromises he faced, Lenin consistently advocated for workers’ rights, equality, and the elimination of social classes. ~ Patrick S., Quora
Richard Enders:
Patrick S presumably regards Lenin as the genuine article and Stalin as something entirely different, ie an opportunist who was not entirely committed to either Lenin’s beliefs or Marxism, and as such simply dismisses him.
Bill Hozy:
Give me a break. Totalitarian control without opposition inevitably leads to personal power agendas and corruption. USSR was a bloated, moribund organized crime syndicate that served only those in positions of authority. The only thing workers gained from this failed model was a heavy load on their backs.
Aldo Rovinazzi:
Lenin idolized his older brother who was executed on orders of the Czar for his revolutionary activities, hence he swore he would dedicate his life to avenging his family and to destroying the Russian state.
He found a pseudo-religion (Marxism) that justified and even commended his blood-thirstiness and cruelty. Being smart and hard working, he amended the vague and universalistic religion to serve his immediate personal needs (Marxism-Leninism).
When some blue-eyed fellow travelers proposed abolishing the death penalty he went apoplectic and threatened to have them tortured to death. He openly advocated for terrorism and was completely uninterested in sparing the innocent, in fact he praised the deliberate killing of infants to achieve his goals.
Does anyone believe that this kind of person was remotely interested in bringing heaven to earth, as Marxism posits?
Mark White:
He was a Communist murderous thug.
Wayne Roth:
Lenin was a blood thirsty psychopath. His “programs” were designed, in his own words, “to break the will of the Russian people.” His policies led to a horrendous famine. It would have been worse had the US not sent food aid. That is a little known fact.
American Bolshevik sympathizers who went to Russia came home disillusioned.
The Anarchists of the time, who were also sympathetic to a revolution, attempted to assassinate him for betraying the revolution. He survived despite taking two bullets.
“Workers’ rights, equality” sound nice. As a matter of fact, the French Revolution called for “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Isn’t it interesting how both descended into murderous, hate-filled enterprises? They were both philosophically corrupt at the core.
Prithvi Jagannath:
As Stephen Kotkin has shown, Stalin was absolutely a true believer, it's what drove all his actions. His intervention into the dispute between the linguistic schools of N. Marr and Chikobava give proof to the degree of his ideological obsessions and pedantry.
Aydin Chaloupka:
And yet Lenin did things like reinstate one man management in factories and quell workers Democracy. He was attacked by many ranging from Gavril Miasnikov (who led the Worker's Group and was an industrial worker and the first to be kicked out from the Bolshevik party) to Peter Kropotkin (who attacked him for betraying every ideal he pretended to hold). It's important to note that Marx and Engels specifically said that only the workers could liberate and rule themselves and that this couldn't be done on their behalf by a vanguard (people also forget that Marx wrote the manifesto when he was around 30 and later branched out and became critical of things he'd said earlier).
And yet Lenin did things like reinstate one man management in factories and quell workers Democracy. He was attacked by many ranging from Gavril Miasnikov (who led the Worker's Group and was an industrial worker and the first to be kicked out from the Bolshevik party) to Peter Kropotkin (who attacked him for betraying every ideal he pretended to hold). Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto when he was around 30 and later branched out and became critical of things he'd said earlier).
Hans Schjormann:
Lenin was not the architect of the Russian revolution. He jumped on a wagon already moving.
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THE REPATRIATION, SOMETIMES FORCED, OF SOVIET POWs
25th May 1945, The exchange of Russian POW’s for U.S. and British POW’s begins at pre-arranged points in Germany.
As part of the Yalta agreement of 1945, Soviet prisoners of war liberated from German camps by British or American troops were returned to Russia, just as American and British POWs liberated by the Russians were returned to their respective countries. But unlike British and American prisoners, many of the Soviet prisoners did not want to return and with good reason.
Some of the Soviets had donned German uniforms and committed unspeakable atrocities. The complexity and numerous ways in which these individuals willing collaborated is open to debate. Many had been recruited from the German Pow camps, the choice between starving to death or joining the Germans would have seemed simple. Some had willingly opposed Stalin and believed that working for the Germans might be a way in which some sort of self-determination, post Stalin, could be crafted out.
The repatriation of Russian POWs turned out to be a ghastly and grisly process. Some of the men simply committed suicide rather than return. Information was suppressed, and the POWs were repatriated, forcefully it not, depending on the given situation.
The world hardly knew what was happening, though details managed to trickle out here and there.
Operation Keelhaul was not confined to Europe, where most of the Russian prisoners were; it was also carried out on American soil. About 200 Soviet nationals were among the prisoners of war at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in mid-1945; they had been in German uniform when Americans captured them. They were taken prisoner with the solemn promise that under no circumstances would they be repatriated to the Soviet Union, where they faced certain death. That promise was betrayed so that the American president might be faithful to Uncle Joe.
These men, according to historian Julius Epstein, “had already experienced the determination of American military authorities to violate the Geneva Conventions [an international declaration pertaining to the treatment of prisoners of war] and the traditional American right of political asylum.” Epstein was referring to an incident in Seattle in which these men had been ordered at gunpoint to board a Soviet ship. When the prisoners offered intense resistance, the decision was made to ship them to Fort Dix for the time being.
At Fort Dix another attempt was made to return the men to the Soviet Union by force. They were tear-gassed and forced aboard a Soviet ship, at which point the stunned men fought with all their strength, and even began to damage the ship’s engines to the point at which the vessel was no longer seaworthy. Finally, a sergeant came up with the idea of drugging the prisoners, which he did by spiking their coffee with barbiturates. In the comalike sleep that the drugs induced, the men were finally returned to the Soviet Union. ~ onlyme, Quora
John Lunbeck:
Don’t mislead readers here about the much greater crime. Most Soviet POWs NEVER collaborated with its enemies, and yet on repatriation were still fed into the Gulag rather than being allowed home, for either having surrendered rather than letting themselves be killed by Nazis, or simply having seen too much of the West to enable the return to solid Soviet citizenship.
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RUSSIANS AND ECONOMY
Russians are not interested in Putin's war in Ukraine.
The reality is that Russians can no longer stand to see inflation increase and no longer be able to eat enough every day. I am talking about the majority of Russians, those who live outside the palaces of Moscow or St. Petersburg. The one who suffers the martyrdom of Putin's choices.
For 2024, it will be even worse for the Russians, since Putin has increased the defense budget by +64% to the detriment of social, education, and health spending.
Russians live in extremely difficult conditions, and things are not going to get better in 2024. Putin is ready to sacrifice everything to win the war of attrition that he intends to wage in Ukraine.
Russians will still have to put up with the tyrant Putin without hope of a better tomorrow because don't expect Putin to seek to reform the Russian economy to improve the future of his people.
Putin will continue to strengthen the system of corruption he has put in place for two decades to constantly strengthen his absolute power. ~ Sylvain Saurel
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It suddenly hit me, in response to Putin's statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, that actually it's the other way: the creation of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe. But perhaps the experiment had to be done, or else we'd be forever wondering if communism would be better.
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THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
I’m sitting in the sun on one of the first mild days of the spring of 2018, talking with a modern-day flintknapper about the origins of human language. His name is Neill Bovaird, and he’s neither an archaeologist nor a linguist, just a 38-year-old bearded guy with a smartphone in his pocket who uses Stone Age technology to produce Stone Age tools. Bovaird has been flintknapping for a couple decades, and as we talk, the gok gok gok of him striking a smaller rock against a larger one punctuates our conversation. Every now and then the gokking stops: A new flake, sharper than a razor blade, breaks off in his palm.
I’ve come to see Bovaird, who teaches wilderness-survival skills in western Massachusetts, because I want to better understand the latest theories on the emergence of language—particularly a new body of research arguing that if not for our hominin ancestors’ hard-earned ability to produce complex tools, language as we know it might not have evolved at all. The research is occurring at the cutting-edge intersections of evolutionary biology, experimental archaeology, neuroscience, and linguistics, but much of it is driven by a very old question: Where did language come from?
Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence of being human?” And he has proposed a provocative answer. In a paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kolodny argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools—hijacked the capacity for language from themselves.
To understand what Kolodny’s getting at, I ask Bovaird to walk me through the history of Stone Age technologies. He starts by smashing an irregular, grapefruit-size stone between two larger rocks. He picks through the resulting fragments, looking for a shard with an excellent cutting edge. This is simple Oldowan technology, he tells me—the first stone tools, used by our hominin ancestors as far back as 2.5 million years ago.
Next, he flashes forward a million years to the technological revolutions of Homo ergaster. No longer did toolmakers simply knock stones together to see what they got; now they aimed for symmetry. Bovaird holds up his work in progress, a late Acheulean hand ax—the multi-tool of the middle-to-lower Paleolithic, good for cutting meat, digging dirt, smashing bone. The blade of this ax has a zigzag edge, with tiny, alternating flakes removed from each side of the cutting surface. To achieve this level of serration, Bovaird explains, he needs a precise understanding of how the stone works, as well as the ability to plan his work many steps in advance.
Somewhere on the timeline between the long run of the Oldowan and the more rapid rise of Acheulean technologies, language (or what’s often called protolanguage) likely made its first appearance. Oren Kolodny and his co-author, Shimon Edelman, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, say the overlap is not a coincidence. Rather, they theorize that the emergence of language was predicated on our ancestors’ ability to perform sequence-dependent processes, including the production of complex tools.
Kolodny’s arguments build off the groundbreaking experiments of Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory University. A flintknapper himself, Stout has taught hundreds of students how to make Acheulean-era tools, and he’s tracked their brain activity during the learning process. Stout found that his students’ white matter—or the neural connectivity in their brains—increased as they gained competence in flintknapping. His research suggests that producing complex tools spurred an increase in brain size and other aspects of hominin evolution, including—perhaps—the emergence of language.
But language couldn’t just pop out fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. “Every evolutionary process, including the evolution of language, has to be incremental and composed of small steps, each of which independently needs to be beneficial,” Kolodny explains. Teaching, he says, was a crucial part of the process. When hominins like Homo ergaster and Homo erectus taught their close relatives how to make complex tools, they worked their way into an ever more specialized cultural niche, with evolutionary advantage going to those individuals who were not only adept at making and using complex tools, but who were also able—at the same time—to communicate in more and more sophisticated ways.
Kolodny points out what might seem like a contradiction in this notion: Many species of ape use tools in sequence-dependent ways and also have highly developed levels of communication. But the order in which those apes produce their utterances doesn’t make much difference to their meaning, Kolodny explains. “The question becomes not ‘How did language arise only in humans?’ but ‘Why did it not arise in other apes as well?’ And the answer is, the qualitative difference between us and other apes is they don’t have the communication system coupled to those temporal sequencing structural capabilities.”
That “coupling” is where the hijacking comes in. The technical term is exaptation, a word coined by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to describe an evolutionary event in which a biological function is repurposed for an alternate use. Kolodny and Edelman argue that the neural networks required for complex, hierarchical, sequence-dependent tool production were exapted by our brain’s communicative apparatus, which is why word order and sentence structure make such a difference to meaning.
Rudimentary language, which evolved in the context of toolmaking and teaching, was ultimately able to break away from its immediate contexts—this is the hijacking part—eventually employing those original cognitive pathways for its own unique purposes. The result, as Monty Python viewers have appreciated for decades, was our modern, turbo-driven faculty for language.
In order to go along with Kolodny and Edelman’s theory of linguistic hijacking, you have to agree that language-related structures (like syntax) and action-related structures (like the sequential steps to making a tool) are similar enough to be driven by the same neurological mechanisms. But many scientists—including Noam Chomsky, the most influential of all modern linguists—aren’t willing to swallow that pill.
Chomsky has been notably reticent on the subject of language evolution. On numerous occasions, he’s called the question either irrelevant, unsolvable, or both. A surprise came in 2014, when Chomsky, Robert Berwick, and other titans in the field weighed in substantively on the topic of evolution for the first time, arguing in a series of jaw-dropping papers that language basically did show up on the scene like a fully formed Athena, syntax-driven shield in hand. “The language faculty is an extremely recent acquisition in our lineage,” these authors wrote, “and it was acquired not in the context of slow, gradual modification of preexisting systems under natural selection but in a single, rapid, emergent event.”
Berwick, a professor of computational linguistics at MIT and the co-author with Chomsky of Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, sees little merit in the stone-tool-based theories proposed by researchers like Stout and Kolodny. “The Stout business doesn’t work,” Berwick wrote to me in an email. “The experimental findings show that, to the contrary, verbal language DOES NOT FACILITATE toolmaking.” Berwick calls the purported connection between toolmaking and language a useful metaphor, at best.
Chomsky’s position is such a brazen refutation of known evolutionary processes that Kolodny, Stout, and many of their colleagues aren’t sure how to engage with it. Stout claims that Berwick’s refutation of his research misses the mark entirely. Ultimately, Stout tells me, he expects the positions of Berwick, Chomsky and other formalist linguists to find a sort of synthesis with his own views on language, but he doesn’t see agreement occurring anytime soon.
Luckily, the flintknapper Bovaird and I don’t need a synthesis of theories of language evolution in order to sit in the sun and talk. Birds are singing, a woodpecker raps its head against a dead trunk, and Bovaird is “pressure-flaking” a fine, serrated edge on a symmetrical obsidian blade. He’s way past the Acheulean now, demonstrating the refined techniques used by the essentially modern Homo sapiens of the upper Paleolithic. Picking up a rounded tool made of antler—he’ll use it as a hammer—he compares flintknapping to a sophisticated game of chess, in which the order of every move is of supreme importance. It’s an observation that either has everything to do with how language got here, or—if you’re in a Chomskyan frame of mind—has nothing to do with language evolution at all.
“The stone has rules, and you can’t break the rules,” Bovaird says. Then he leans over the blade, flexes his wrist, and strikes. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-sneaky-theory-of-where-language-came-from?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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THOMAS MIDGLEY, A DISASTROUS INVENTOR
~ Facing a crowd of journalists, inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. poured a lead additive over his hands and then proceeded to inhale its fumes for about a minute. Unfazed, he said, “I could do this every day without getting any health problems whatsoever.”
Soon afterward, Midgley needed medical treatment. But the act would have dire consequences beyond his own well-being.
The year was 1924, and Midgley, then a chemical engineer for General Motors, had pulled the stunt to support his most recent, lucrative finding: a lead compound called tetraethyl lead. Added to gasoline, it solved one of the biggest problems the automotive industry faced at the time — engine knocking, or tiny explosions in car engines due to the low quality of gasoline that resulted in an annoying sound and potential damage. Lead helped, but at great expense, because the substance is highly toxic to humans, especially children.
A lead compound called tetraethyl lead was marketed under the brand name Ethyl and became a commercial success. Algeria was the last nation to halt the use of leaded gas in 2021.
Midgley would go on to leave his mark in history with another destructive invention, also a solution to a problem: the need to replace the noxious and flammable gases used in refrigeration and air conditioning. He found that CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, were an ideal substitute and harmless to humans. However, they turned out to be deadly to the ozone in the atmosphere, which blocks dangerous ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancers and other health problems, as well as harming plants and animals.
One hundred years after that stunt before the press in 1924, the planet is still recovering from the ill effects of both of Midgley’s inventions. The ozone layer will need another four decades to heal fully, and because leaded gasoline was still sold in parts of the world until 2021, many continue to live with the long-term effects of lead poisoning.
Yet Midgley — whose story will be told in an upcoming movie developed by the writer of the 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street” — was hailed as a hero for decades.
Born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1889, Midgley had a penchant for finding useful applications for known substances early on. In high school, he used the chewed bark of the slippery elm trees to give baseballs a more curved trajectory, a practice professional players would later pick up.
He was known to carry with him at all times a copy of the periodic table, his main tool in the search for the substance that would mark his breakthrough invention.
The task of addressing the issue of engine knocking fell to Midgley while he was working at General Motors in 1916.
“It was the dawn of the automobile era in the United States, and Ford had developed the Model T, which was not very powerful,” said Gerald Markowitz, a history professor at the City University of New York. “GM joined with Standard Oil and DuPont to try to develop more powerful engines, and in order to do that they needed to solve the problem of the engines knocking with the fuel that they had at the time.”
Under the direction of Charles Kettering, another influential American inventor and head of research at GM, Midgley worked his way through thousands of substances — including arsenic, sulfur and silicon — in a quest to find one that reduced knocking when added to gasoline. He eventually landed on tetraethyl lead, a lead derivative that was marketed simply as Ethyl. Leaded gasoline first went on sale in Dayton, Ohio, in 1923 and eventually spread throughout the world.
Lead is highly poisonous, with no safe level of exposure, and can impair development in children, causing decreased intelligence and behavioral disorders, according to UNICEF. An estimated 1 million people a year still die from lead poisoning, according to the World Health Organization.
The toxicity of lead was already well-known when Midgley added it to gas, but that didn’t stop Ethyl from becoming a commercial success.
“There were alarms that were raised, because lead was known as a toxin,” Markowitz said. “But the position of the industry was that there was no proof that lead coming out of the tailpipes of cars was going to injure people. And it was that lack of proof that ultimately led the surgeon general not to take action after a public health conference in 1925.”
However, workers in Ethyl manufacturing quickly experienced ill effects.
“It was really the fact that the people working in the labs producing tetraethyl lead were getting sick that created a crisis,” Markowitz said. “They would literally go insane as a result of their exposure to lead.”
Midgley went as far as pouring Ethyl over his hands and inhaling it during that 1924 news conference in an attempt to quench fears.
But in reality, he was also getting poisoned.
“He definitely wrote in a letter in January of 1923 that he had a touch of lead poisoning, and he did have lead poisoning for the rest of his life,” said Bill Kovarik, a professor of communication at Radford University in Virginia. “It doesn’t really go away when you get that much lead in your body. It is a serious, long-term disability.”
PUNCHING A HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER
Just years after the invention of Ethyl, Midgley — again spurred by Kettering — turned his attention to developing a nontoxic, nonflammable alternative to refrigerant gases such as ammonia, which were used in appliances and air conditioners at the time, leading to a series of fatal accidents in the 1920s.
He came up with Freon — a derivative of methane, composed of carbon, chlorine and fluorine atoms — the first CFC. In another public demonstration, in 1930, Midgley inhaled the gas and blew out a candle with it, a move designed to show its safety.
Freon, as well as subsequent CFCs, became commercial successes, and made air conditioning adoption shoot up in the United States. After World War II, manufacturers started routinely using CFCs as propellants for all sorts of products, including insecticides and hair spray.
It was the mid-1970s, three decades after Midgley’s death, before the damage from his two inventions became publicly known. CFCs had punched a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica; if left unchecked, the hole would have expanded to the point of eventually threatening all life on Earth.
As a result of continued industry pressure, leaded gasoline was not phased out in the United States until 1996 and slowly thereafter throughout the world. The last nation to get rid of it, Algeria, still sold it until 2021, and lead additives continue to be used in aviation fuel. A 2022 study estimated that half of the current US population had been exposed to dangerous levels of lead in early childhood, but the damage to the world’s collective health is harder to quantify.
In 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed to phase out CFCs from 1989 until 2010, after which they were banned. (CFC emissions have been rising again recently, a sign that they may still be produced illegally.) The hole in the ozone layer is on the mend and will likely heal in the next half–century in a rare environmental win.
“The very sad truth is that we don’t know especially the number of children who have been adversely affected,” Markowitz said. “There is no safe level of lead in a child’s body. We’re talking tens of millions of children, hundreds of millions of children over a half-century or more that have been affected adversely, their life chances diminished from lead dust as a result of the exhaust gases that got into the ground or into the streets.”
A tragic death
Midgley’s life ended under tragic circumstances. After contracting polio in 1940, he became severely disabled and devised yet another invention: a machine that would lift him out of bed and into a wheelchair autonomously, via strings and pulleys. But on November 2, 1944, he became entangled in the machine and died of strangulation.
For a long time, it was believed to have been the ultimate irony — the inventor dying by his own invention. But the reality may be even darker, according to Kovarik.
“The official cause of death was suicide,” he said. “He had a tremendous sense of guilt. The industry told him he was brilliant. But he did stuff that in hindsight was pretty irresponsible. The lead poisoning could have contributed to his psychosis.”
Midgley received several awards and honors in the late stages of his life. The Society of Chemical Industry awarded him the Perkin Medal in 1937; the American Chemical Society gave him the Priestley Medal in 1941 and elected him as president in the year of his death.
A biographical memoir from the National Academy of Sciences, written by his mentor Kettering in 1947, contains nothing but praise and ends by saying that Midgley left behind “a great heritage to the world from a busy, a diversified, and a highly creative life.”'
History has other examples of inventions that turned out to be unwittingly deadly, such as TNT, which was originally developed for use as a yellow dye and not used as an explosive until decades later. Midgley is unique in having developed two such inventions, but although it’s tempting to see him as an environmental villain, experts say his role was more akin to a cog in the machine.
“He was just an employee,” Kovarik said.
Markowitz agrees. “This was corporate-sponsored research,” he said. “Had it not been Midgley, I’m sure it would have been somebody else who would have come up with these solutions.”
Striving for growth and innovation at all costs was reflective of the conception of progress in the first half of the 20th century, Markowitz added. “Only with the environmental movement that started in the 1960s and 1970s did we begin to consider what the consequences of technological progress could be,” he said.
“That has had a really sobering effect, but up through the 1950s there were very few voices questioning the idea that progress was our most important product.” ~
Oriana:
We should also mention the names of two men who made the public aware of the dangers of lead: the Caltech chemist Clair Patterson, and Dr. Herbert Needleman, who studied the effects of lead in children.
Clair Patterson
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Dr. Herbert Needleman
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SPOTTED EAGLES CHANGED MIGRATION ROUTES TO AVOID THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Eagles changed their migration routes across Ukraine to avoid fighting and because their habitats were likely damaged or destroyed by war, say scientists.
The researchers believe the Greater Spotted Eagles skirted around dangers including artillery fire, jets and tanks as well as buildups of troops.
They fly through Ukraine every Spring on their way from Greece and The Sudd — a large wetland in South Sudan — to breeding grounds in Belarus.
The scientists studied GPS data from tagged birds in the months after the February 2022 invasion, a time of heavy fighting in northern Ukraine as Russia tried to take Kyiv by sending troops south from Belarus.
The researchers from the Estonian University of Life Sciences and the British Trust for Ornithology reported their findings in the journal Current Biology. The war in Ukraine has had a devastating impact on people and the environment. Our findings provide a rare window into how conflicts affect wildlife," said lead author Charlie Russell, a postgraduate researcher at the University of East Anglia.
Classified as a vulnerable species, the Greater Spotted Eagle is a large, brownish-colored bird of prey.
Researchers started following them using GPS tracking devices in 2017 but didn't expect to be monitoring them through an active conflict zone five years later.
As a result, they traveled farther, about an extra 52 miles (85km) on average.
For migrating birds, stopover sites are essential places to get food, water, and shelter.
These changes delayed the birds' arrival at the breeding grounds and likely made them use more energy, to damaging effect.
"No doubt about it. I think the take-home story is that the conflict in Ukraine is fundamentally disrupting the migratory ecology of this species," said Dr Jim Reynolds, Assistant Professor in Ornithology and Animal Conservation at the University of Birmingham, who was independent from the study.
“For a vulnerable species like this, anything that disrupts breeding performance is a major problem. As a conservation biologist, you worry about that in a massive way.”
Despite all the tagged birds surviving, researchers believe their experience may have affected their ability to breed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c88z0p33413o
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SOLZHENITSYN: ONE DROP OF TRUTH
~ Russian anti-communist dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies.”
Solzhenitsyn who spent eight years in the forced labor camp in Gulag for talking out of line, had many memorable quotes related to the honorable pursuit of truth at your own expense.
What he didn’t tell you is that truth is that like beauty, truth lies in the eye of the beholder. In Russia, it has a tenuous relationship with reality and a multi-level structure. Solzhenitsyn barely scratched the surface.
In Kislovodsk, a health resort town in the south of Russia where Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born and grew up, there’s a four meter tall not counting the pedestal statue dedicated to him.
The statue built in 2018 is located on Chaliapin Street in Kislovosk, Russia. Fyodor Chaliapin was a famous Russian opera singer with a deep bass voice that allegedly shattered chandeliers in the rooms where he performed, and had his dacha on the other side of the street. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Chaliapin escaped the unruly mob of peasants and workers to salons and tree-lined boulevards in Paris.
If you keep walking up Chaliapin Street and turn left (I recommend stopping to catch a bite at a canteen on the corner) you’ll see another statue.
The statue stands taller due to a more massive pedestal, and it is of Felix Djerzhinsky, founder and first head of the secret police Cheka and Joint State Political Directorate, the precursor of KGB in the early years of Communist Russia.
The architect of the statue is Ivan Fomin who designed Red Gates metro station in Moscow that I use every day as it’s the closest to my place.
If you take the exit to the headquarters of the Russian Railways built in the shape of a locomotive that was also designed by Fomin in a brutalist style reminiscent of Bauhaus, you’ll see the statue of Mikhail Lermontov. This Russian 19th-century poet with Scottish roots was born a few hundred meters away but his family house was destroyed by the Bolsheviks to widen up streets.
Lermontov served as a military officer in the North Caucus and participated in the campaign to capture the mountainous lands where Kislovodsk was later founded.
A statue of Lermontov is at the end of the trail of the natural reserve in Kislovodsk. Young Lermontov in officer uniform with a thin mustache is sitting hunched up and dreamily takes in the scenery from the top of a mountain that must have reminded him of his ancestor's lands.
Felix Dzerzhjinsky designated the headquarters of the new repressive organization on Lyubyanka Square in Moscow, a short walk from the Red Square, which currently houses the FSB, federal security services from whose academy Vladimir Putin graduated.
You can reach it by foot if you exist at Red Gates Metro Station and walk up Meat Street, the oldest in Moscow that the first Russian emperor Peter the Great took on his way to Lefort Park designed by his Dutch friend Le Fort, with canals, dams and grottos.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, Polish-Russian Bolshevik politician and revolutionary, architect of Red Terror, founder of secret police Cheka and JSPD, the precursor of NKVD and KGB.
It was erected in 1957, the same year when Solzhenitsyn was “rehabilitated” and allowed to walk free from the place of his incarceration.
“Iron Felix” is timeless like the idea of the Russian state that he selflessly served. He stands majestically on a pedestal and looks into the distance. His iron and firm gaze is impossible to break.
Iron Felix had created a system of mass repressions that Solzhenitsyn dedicated his life to end.
The two men are thesis and anti-thesis, light and darkness, freedom and slavery, life and death, and their statues would be staring at one another if not for the apartment buildings that obstruct the view.
So why the monument of Iron Felix has not been toppled to make way for Solzenitskyn’s truth? Because Iron Felix’s truth has just as much right to exist as Solzhenitsyn and objectively it’s of a higher order.
Dzerzhinsky’s secret police and Gulag force labor camps were in the service of the state whose truth is far greater than Solzhenitsyn could have ever fathomed.
Iron Felix built a new world, and Solzhenitsyn dedicated his life to ruining it.
A Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn can cast his truths at Iron Felix for all he likes, he won’t break his gaze and change his mindset.
Years went by and thoughtcrimes have made a comeback. They must be punished because there’s a higher truth than any findings documented in the Archipelago Gulag can ever reveal.
At Russian State Saint Petersburg University, a student during a lecture, decided to argue with the professor if there was a need for Stalin’s repressions, and as a result, the professor kicked him out of the classroom.
Later the teacher complained about the student to the dean’s office. The dean evicted the student from the dorm. He was expelled under the pretext of absenteeism, although the student attended most of the lectures.
Since his deferment was rendered invalid, military registration and enlistment office rounded him up and he’s now being dispatched to serve in the army.
There is your truth of low order and then there’s the higher truth of the state order.
Solzhenitsyn and Dzerzhinsky contend and complement representing a warden and an inmate, a master and a slave, an individual and a society.
The eternal contradictions of the tyrannical Russian state. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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“In Russia, the future is always bright and the past uncertain.” ~ Alvaro Pacheco da Silva
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THE GREAT SEAL AND THE BUG
The Thing aka the Great Seal Bug. On 4th August, 1945, a group of Soviet school children presented to W. Averell Harriman (The US Ambassador to the USSR) with a carved US Seal as gesture of friendship. It hung in his office for 7 years before discovering it contained a listening device.
Oriana:
A typical Soviet behavior. It took the West years to learn to check for bugging and other dirty Soviet tricks. Alas, it’s not over . . .
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SUPPOSE TROTSKY SURVIVED HIS ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
Stalin was firmly in control. Trotsky was a threat to Stalin only in Stalin’s mind. No European country wanted him. There was no evidence of any alliance with Germany or Japan. There was no evidence of any plot by Trotsky against the Soviet government.
Trotsky’s only threat was in his pen. He wrote that the Soviet state had become a "degenerated workers' state "controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy, which would eventually either be overthrown via a political revolution establishing a workers' democracy, or degenerate into a capitalist class.
If Trotsky survived the ice axe in the head on August 20, 1940, he would have faded into obscurity. The Soviets would be invaded in less than 12 months. No one would care whether the Soviet Union was a degenerate workers state or not, only if the would be able to hold out against Hitler. He would have had no traction for his writings. The war gave Stalin an even firmer grip on the Soviet Union.
The threat that Trotsky posed to Stalin was in Stalin’s paranoid mind. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Car Ott:
I think Stalin's primary motivation for killing Trotsky, who was hiding out in Mexico City away from the political centers of the world, was to convey his power and resolve to any would-be detractors. “I don't care how how little of a threat you are to me, if you ever cross me, I will get you no matter where you are hiding.”
Nick Korotya:
“The threat that Trotsky posed to Stalin was in Stalin’s paranoid mind.”
Only in hindsight, when we know how things happened.
Back then Stalin probably hoped USSR will be able to make commie states in Americas and Europe w/o terrible WWII losses. (They were pretty serious with World Revolution ideas). In that case Trotsky would be a dangerous opponent, leading potential useful idiots astray from “one true commie faith.”
Edgar McDonald II :
Agree. Ordinary workers were swept up at random, if you happened to be out for a walk. Stalin issued quotas, not names. “Arrest 400, then execute.” If Stalin was killing people at random, Trotsky had to be a gigantic threat in Stalin's mind. Stalin executed anyone with the standard charge “Trotskyite!”
Charlie Devnet:
The nature of Trotsky’s threat to Stalin was not that he would return to Russia and seize power but that Trotsky exercised influence over the worldwide Communist movement. He founded the Fourth International as a rival to Stalinist-type ‘socialism in one country.” Trotsky was seen more as a revolutionary that a politician. As such, he had a romantic allure similar to that of Che Guevara a few decades later. The danger was that Trotsky would become the standard bearer —spiritually and perhaps even physically of the worldwide socialist movement thereby diminishing Stalin’s appeal to and control of Communists outside the USSR.
Victoria Aldrich:
Interestingly, Trotsky was correct. The Soviet state was the ultimate bureaucracy, much of it focused on domestic surveillance and rendition which directly lead to an actual workers’ revolution that replaced it with a Wild West bloodbath of a capitalist economy.
One run by….ex-KGB profiteers.
Which so far, has been such a carefully maneuvered shitfest that the populace very quickly embraced a return to both fascism and communism. I remember the day the USSR formally dissolved that several tv anchors connected to political think tanks made statements that it would take 30 years for Soviet reformation.
Aldo Rovinazzi:
Russia does not have a capitalistic economy (free enterprise, free internal trade).
Russia is a patrimonial state. Everything belongs to the Supreme Boss and his ruling elite; they apportion all assets amongst their friends.
Nickolas Qqshin:
Trotsky had many followers. Have you ever heard of Comintern-4?
In the USSR under Stalin, the most common accusation was the so-called Trotskyism.
But Trotsky did have an important role to play as an opponent of Stalin. Because of Trotsky, Western politicians seriously believed that Stalin had refused to penetrate Europe.
This activity was very useful to Stalin until Trotsky blamed Stalin for Lenin's death.
Aldo Rovinazzi:
Stalin was a stout believer in the Christian heresy called Marxism-Leninism.
This creed postulates that man has no free will, he is just a byproduct of its society and that the future is already written; the only possible outcome is a communist society. This will happen as the “Chosen Ones" (the vanguard of the proletariat) grab power through violence and deceit and liquidate all opposition mercilessly.
Heaven on earth and the end of history.
Oriana:
I read somewhere that Stalin was at one point evaluated by a psychiatrist in a face-to-face interview. After the interview, someone heard the psychiatrist whisper “Paranoia!” The psychiatrist was never heard from (or seen) again.
Hitler was said to be clinically narcissistic, with delusions of grandeur, a pathological need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
This also sounds very much like Stalin, except that Stalin “specialized” in paranoia.
In fact, even today the Russian collective psyche could be characterized as a combo of narcissism and paranoia.
Such evaluations raise the persistent question if people with mental illness should be allowed to hold positions of great power. (Yes, one can be paranoid (in the clinical sense) without being a paranoid schizophrenic.) But since both Stalin and Hitler were dictators, there was no way to remove them except through assassination (Stalin was likely poisoned) or suicide.
Of course each century has its Hitlers or Stalins — state leaders who are known for extraordinary cruelty and self-aggrandizement. How such men get to the top and retain power is almost beyond comprehension.
But where are psychiatrists when we really need them? It’s too late in the game of power, and their diagnosis is not taken as a serious warning. The fans of dictators shrug their shoulders, dismissing the diagnosis as either enemy propaganda or irrelevant in the face of national interests.
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RUSSIANS DON’T THINK OF THEMSELVES AS POOR
People in Russia don’t think that they live in poverty. For these who live outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, it’s all just normal.
Just a normal apartment building.
Just a normal scenery of a factory on a normal working day.
Just a normal store with normal metal bars, protecting the cashier.
Poverty? What poverty?
In Russia, it’s middle class. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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RONALD REAGAN, ONE OF THE WORST PRESIDENTS EVER
Here is an Onion article (February 21, 2011) that explains how I feel about my most detested president, the only one I loathe at a visceral level (I once saw him up close, from two-three feet away: thick pancake make-up, pink lipstick, hair dyed an unnatural black — everything about him felt phony).
Embarrassed Republicans that They’ve Been thinking of Eisenhower the Whole Time They Were Praising Reagan
WASHINGTON—At a press conference Monday, visibly embarrassed leaders of the Republican National Committee acknowledged that their nonstop, effusive praise of Ronald Reagan has been wholly unintentional, admitting they somehow managed to confuse him with Dwight D. Eisenhower for years.
The GOP's humiliating blunder was discovered last weekend by RNC chairman Reince Priebus, who realized his party had been extolling "completely the wrong guy" after he watched the History Channel special Eisenhower: An American Portrait.
"When I heard about Eisenhower's presidential accomplishments—holding down the national debt, keeping inflation in check, and fighting for balanced budgets—it hit me that we'd clearly gotten their names mixed up at some point," Priebus told reporters. "I couldn't believe we'd been associating terms like 'visionary,' 'principled,' and 'bold' with President Reagan. That wasn't him at all—that was Ike.”
"We deeply regret misattributing such a distinguished and patriotic legacy to Mr. Reagan," Priebus added. "We really screwed up.”
Following his discovery, Priebus directed RNC staffers to inform top Republicans of the error and explain that it was Eisenhower, not Reagan, who carefully managed the nation's prosperity, warned citizens of the military-industrial complex's growing influence, and led the country with a mix of firm resolve and humble compassion.
"Wait, you're telling me Reagan advocated that trickle-down nonsense that was debunked years ago? That was Reagan?" Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said upon hearing of the mistake. "I can't believe I've been calling for a return to Reagan's America. I feel like an asshole.”
According to sources, millions of younger Republicans have spent most of their lives viewing Reagan a stalwart of conservative principles, and many were "horrified" to learn that the former president illegally sold weapons to Iran, declared amnesty for 2.9 million illegal immigrants, costarred in a movie with a chimpanzee, funneled aid to Islamic militants in Afghanistan, and suffered from severe mental problems.
In the wake of the GOP's revelation, Congress has passed bills to rename Reagan National Airport and the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier in honor of Eisenhower. A number of potential 2012 Republican presidential contenders have also rushed to reframe their agendas in terms of "Eisenhower ideals" while distancing themselves from Reagan.
"It's absolutely mortifying to suddenly realize that the man you had long credited as a champion of fiscal conservatism actually tripled the national debt and signed the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, adding that he was ashamed to learn that the man he once called his hero stood by silently while the AIDS epidemic exploded. "Frankly, I can't even believe that fucker had the balls to call himself a conservative."
"But we must move beyond this mess and look ahead toward our country's future, a future much like the one envisioned by the great Ronald Reagan," Gingrich added. "Oh, sorry—force of habit.”
The misplaced adulation of Reagan has reportedly affected more than just Republican rhetoric, and seems to have had an impact on policy. Former president George W. Bush told reporters he "honestly thought" everyone wanted him to follow in Reagan's footsteps, which led him to emulate the 40th president's out-of-control deficit spending, fealty to the super-rich, and illegal wars.
While the GOP's error has gone largely unnoticed by the American public, a number of citizens admitted to having been puzzled by Republicans' slavish celebration of Reagan during recent years.
"I never understood why everyone elevated him to the level of a party icon," said 89-year-old Nancy Reagan. "Ronnie was certainly sweet and I loved him very much, but let's face it, he was a terrible president.”
https://www.theonion.com/embarrassed-republicans-admit-theyve-been-thinking-of-e-1819572284
Oriana:
The problem is that some voters are so in need of a right-wing idol that they will “see no evil, speak no evil” about President Reagan who cared nothing at all about them, unless they were his donors — rich and growing richer. Down with protections and regulations! Bring back capitalism as the Wild West. Let the rich grow richer.
It is of course terribly sad that he developed Alzheimer’s. I think that Donald Trump’s dementia is a different, though equally disabling kind. What’s most worrisome to me is that the nation does not seem to be bothered to be led by a demented head of state. True, there are those who are embarrassed, but they feel helpless.
Speaking of Nancy, we may feel sorry for her, especially as her idol’s dementia progressed, but let’s not idolize her either. Her slavish worship of Ronnie and her covering up for his “forgetfulness,” as released later, felt like a step backwards for women.
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RUSSIA’S PREFERENCE FOR THE WEST RATHER THAN EAST
Misha Firer: For as long as I remember, Russia has been looking up and striving at least to be like Europe. We have imitated its culture, food, education, inventions, clothes. Russians sent their children to study in schools and universities. They never considered of sending them to China. Or to buy real estate in China. Or go there on a vacation.
I don’t have anything against the Chinese. I really don’t. I think they are a hardworking people who make wonderful products that last a few days quite well before falling apart, but we in Russia have been nurtured in the belief that we are looking towards the West where our ancestors had come from rather than the east, the origin of the bloodthirsty Mongol invaders.
My student has returned from a trip to France and he said that it’s full of Russian tourists. My other student’s mother regularly travels to China but only for work. She prefers to spend her vacation on the Baltic Sea.
When I type visas in the Yandex search engine , all the results are for Schengen visas. There are excellent visa arrangements for Global South countries that are so enamored with Putin, a tireless fighter against Western hegemony.
And yet no, Russians don’t want to go Asia or South America except for a beach vacation or to partake in Ayahuasca ceremony or cross the border into the U.S.
There are thousands of articles detailing how to increase chances of getting a Schengen visa in the new realities of war.
Despite all the sanctions that Collective West has flung at the Russians and supporting Ukraine with military aid to make their lives more miserable than they had ever been since the 1990s, they still cling to the ideal of Europe, a shining city on the hill that regardless of its internal corruption hasn’t lost any of its luster.
Vietnamese cafe are widespread in Moscow yet they enjoy limited interest and have few customers. Rebranded McDonald's are always so busy there are no vacant tables at almost any time and the display breaks down unable to keep up with high inflow of orders.
Indian cafe that I went to the other day had only one Russian couple and the rest of the clients were Indian and Arabic expats.
A Mexican restaurant with decent food and live music demands upfront deposit payment because it’s empty. In an Italian restaurant with overpriced dishes, no live music and bad service right next to the Mexican one, have no free tables until tomorrow.
The central streets are rows of European style coffee shops and cafes because office plankton and businessmen want to pretend like they’re in Paris rather than Beijing.
They don’t buy into the fact that Europeans enjoy Indian and Mexican restaurants because they live in a multi cultural milieu.
No, straightforward and simplistic Russians want the full European experience. In its traditional format as they remember reading about and watching old movies when they were kids.
Europe and the West in general are undergoing seismic changes but Russians are stubbornly clinging to the past and the image of Europe that they remember and passionately want to recreate and be enchanted with. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Janne Tapio:
Look, Europeans still mostly eat European food. Italians mostly eat Italian food. Finns mostly eat Finnish food. And so on.
There’s plenty of ethnic restaurants and international cuisine is readily available and popular, BUT it’s not an everyday thing for most of us.
In Finland I’d say that Italian, American and Mexican (or “Texmex”) cuisine are the most popular after Finnish food. And Middle-Eastern in terms of Kebab.
Russian cuisine is not popular nor readily available in most cities.
Elena Gold:
For decades, Russians nurtured this image of Chinese being backward as compared to Russia.
It’s a hard pill to swallow that Russia is now second-grade compared to their neighboring South Asian empire.
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THE MOST STARTLING PLACE IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION
This is the surreal panorama of Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, an immense area of 18,000km2 known as "The Polygon" located south of the Irtysh river valley in Kazakhstan, where in the period between 1949 and 1989 the former Union The Soviet Union tested the explosion of 496 nuclear devices, 113 of which detonated above ground. The Soviet Union's first hydrogen bomb (RDS-37) was also successfully tested here in 1955.
Among the images it is possible to see an "oasis" of water inside a crater. This is the result of Chagan's underground test carried out in 1965, triggering the detonation at a relatively limited depth with the aim of exploring the possibility of using the power of a nuclear explosion for civil engineering purposes. As expected, the force of the detonation displaced tons of soil forming the visible crater which, subsequently filling with water, will be nicknamed Atomic Lake as it represents one of the most radioactive areas of the Polygon.
Currently more than 30 years after the last explosion and with a radioactive level 400 times higher than the maximum recommended value, The Polygon is a highly restricted and dangerous area. Without a specific permit it would be officially forbidden to carry out any type of activity within the perimeter of the site, but the area is totally accessible and this does not prevent people from entering, especially shepherds from the region and curious people. Among the activities authorized within the site are mineral extraction operations, a typical example where the economics of labor outweighs concerns about radiation.
The consequences of the experiments carried out non-stop for 40 years are still visible today in the malformations of the population in the city of Semej (Semipalatinsk) located 100 km from the site and in general in north-eastern Kazakhstan.
Richard DeWitt:
The “polygon’’ looks‘a like a Dali surrealist painting. Was there a message in his landscapes?
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HARMFUL FUMES FROM KITCHEN GAS BURNERS
A consumer watchdog group is suing a manufacturer of gas stoves for allegedly failing to warn people that its appliances can produce harmful air pollution.
On Thursday, the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund sued a company called Haier U.S. Appliance Solutions in the District of Columbia Superior Court. It says the manufacturer is violating a consumer protection law in Washington, D.C., that prohibits “deceptive and unconscionable business practices.” Haier bought General Electric’s GE Appliances business in 2016.
The burners on gas stoves release pollutants including nitrogen dioxide, a key element in smog that can irritate airways and may contribute to the development of asthma, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Researchers at Stanford University recently found that cooking with gas and propane stoves may be contributing to the deaths of approximately 19,000 adults in the United States annually, as well as around 200,000 current cases of childhood asthma. Stanford University researchers have also found that gas stoves can emit benzene, which is linked to cancer.
“There's a growing body of evidence that cooking with gas poses real health risks for everyone, and particularly for children. And nobody's doing anything about it, unfortunately, in terms of policy,” says Abe Scarr, program director for energy and utilities at the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund.
The watchdog group says it tested two models of GE Appliances gas stoves this year and found that they produced nitrogen dioxide pollution that exceeded standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for outdoor air. The EPA does not have standards for indoor nitrogen dioxide levels.
A spokesperson for GE Appliances did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Thursday.
The watchdog group wants Haier to warn D.C. consumers that GE Appliances gas stoves produce harmful air pollutants, and to provide information about how people can protect themselves.
Medical experts recommend people open windows and use exhaust fans when they’re cooking with gas stoves indoors.
“Much more needs to be done to give consumers factual, accurate information about the risks of cooking with gas, and what they can do to mitigate those risks,” Scarr says.
Last year, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission asked the public for information about the “chronic hazards” associated with gas stoves, as well as potential solutions.
Environmentalists who are pushing to limit climate change have tried to leverage the growing health concerns about cooking with gas to build support for eliminating the use of gas in buildings. Colorado-based RMI's building electrification webpage prominently features a report on gas stoves.
An industry group called the American Gas Association (AGA) says residential gas stoves are a “minor source” of nitrogen dioxide. And it notes that no federal agencies have chosen to regulate the appliances for indoor air emissions.
Asked about the Haier lawsuit, Emily Carlin, a spokesperson with the AGA, pointed to a study that found the risk of asthma from cooking with gas "was potentially exaggerated" in studies that didn't give enough consideration to other possible factors, like exposure to tobacco smoke and outdoor air pollution.
The study that the AGA cited did find that cooking with gas, rather than electricity, results in "a small or modest increase in risk" for pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The gas utility industry, including the AGA, worked for years to convince consumers and regulators that cooking with gas is as safe as cooking with electricity, according to an investigation by NPR and documents uncovered by the Climate Investigations Center, a research and watchdog group.
Reporting by NPR found that industry-backed research generated doubt and controversy over the health effects of stoves that affected policymaking around protecting people's health.
Presented last year with NPR’s findings, Karen Harbert, the AGA’s chief executive, said there is not “sufficient or consistent evidence demonstrating chronic health hazards from natural gas ranges.”
Scarr says the lawsuit that his organization filed against Haier could set a national precedent.
“Hopefully, this would lead to much more widespread consumer notice about the risks of operating a gas stove,” he says.
Lawmakers in California are considering legislation that would require labels on gas stoves warning that they can release harmful air pollutants.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/23/nx-s1-4975635/lawsuit-gas-stoves-air-pollution-nitrogen-dioxide-health-risks
Oriana:
I’ve used an electric cooktop for over thirty years. You couldn’t pay me to go back to gas.
"Los Angeles recently voted a gas appliance ban for new construction, requiring electric stoves, water heaters, furnaces, and clothes dryers. Similarly, San Francisco regulators approved a ban on new home furnaces and water heaters that rely on gas fuel."
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AIR TURBULENCE IS WORSENING WITH CLIMATE CHANGE
Our skies are getting bumpier, making the need to understand and predict turbulence increasingly urgent. Researchers propose birds could provide clues.
Andean condor can reach altitudes of 21,300ft (6.5 km)
When you look up, the sky may seem calm – still even – but air is always on the move. Fluid, it flows like water, with eddies and currents, sometimes smooth and serene, sometimes tumultuous and violent. Turbulence is one of the most unpredictable of all weather phenomena. And research shows that severe turbulence is becoming more likely as the planet warms.
If an aircraft strikes it, the most turbulent air can cause injuries or even death, as well as structural damage to planes. On Tuesday, a Singapore Airlines flight from London encountered severe turbulence: 31 people were injured, and one died. Passengers aboard the Boeing 777-300ER told the BBC the plane began to tilt and shake, before dropping suddenly, and "people and objects were thrown around the cabin”.
Could there be better ways to predict and cope with turbulence? Some researchers believe that answers lie in the animal world.
Birds often encounter choppy skies. While only a few species reach the height of a cruising commercial aircraft, studying how they respond at lower altitudes could help meteorologists build better models to predict turbulence, says Emily Shepard, an expert in bird flight and air flow at Swansea University in Wales.
pigeons in turbulent airAnd that's not all we could learn from our avian friends: some species have adapted to deal with "extreme turbulence", she says. Analyzing how they exploit it to their advantage could inform aircraft design, especially in urban environments where smaller aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly.
Stormy weather is easy to spot, but clear air turbulence is harder to predict
According to a 2024 study, aircrafts encounter moderate to "severe-or-greater" turbulence 68,000 times every year. Turbulence is defined as "an irregular motion of the air" caused by eddies and vertical currents, and is associated with weather events such as fronts, wind shear and thunderstorms. Turbulence can cause a few uncomfortable bumps – or throw an aircraft out of control, inducing "chaotic rolls, pitches and yaws".
Modern aircraft are equipped with sophisticated weather radar systems that pilots use to identify and navigate around areas of turbulence. "We can successfully predict around 75% of turbulence up to 18 hours ahead," says Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading.
However, there are many types of turbulence – and some can be harder to spot. The severe turbulence that struck the Singapore Airlines flight is often caused by invisible "clear air turbulence". This can strike without warning, and is one of the biggest causes of weather-related aviation accidents.
Clear air turbulence occurs at high altitudes, where aircraft cruise in seemingly calm blue skies. It can't be seen by the naked eye and is undetectable by onboard sensors. Even satellites can't see this kind of turbulence, only the structure and shape of the jet stream which may hint at its presence. Pilots often have to rely on any aircraft flying the same path ahead of them of them to report clear air turbulence, so they can adjust their path.
Climate change is making clear air turbulence more common, says Williams, who has studied the rise. "In simple terms, climate change is increasing the temperature difference between the warm and cold air masses that collide to form the jet stream in the upper atmosphere," he says. "This effect is making the jet stream less stable and allowing more turbulence to break out.”
Meteorologists are now seeking to develop better methods of forecasting all types of turbulence, using computer modeling. However, one source of data that's gone untapped until recently are the creatures we share the skies with: birds.
Previous studies have shown that animal movements can help us determine the strength of thermal updrafts, wind direction and wind speed.
Now researchers from Swansea University say birds' experience of the winds could help provide predictions of turbulence. Birds often migrate for thousands of miles – with wind speed, direction and turbulence all dictating the route they travel and the amount of energy they have to expend. And when you're running on reserves at the end of an epic trip half way around the world, catching the wrong winds can mean the difference between life and death.
While most species don't fly alongside cruising commercial jets, some get extremely high. Take frigate birds, for example. Their flight is a "roller-coaster", says Shepard. They rely on thermals and wind to stay aloft for months on end and can fly at extreme altitudes, as high as 13,000ft (4km/2.5 miles) above the ground. To reach this great height, they often catch strong updrafts in mountainous cumulus clouds.
"They gain altitude within these really, really turbulent cloud systems," says Shepard. "You get monstrous updrafts and downdrafts. They are operating in incredibly turbulent environments – and we know so little about how they are able to maintain flight control.”
By studying how such birds respond to turbulence, Shepard and her colleagues at Swansea University's Laboratory for Animal Movement aim to "visualize the invisible", and to map what the air is doing.
Sometimes that even involves flying alongside the birds. From 2018 to 2019, Shepard's team flew an ultralight aircraft alongside a flock of homing pigeons. Using GPS, barometric pressure and acceleration data loggers attached to the birds – over 88 flights – they measured the turbulence levels during the journeys the birds took to return to their lofts.
"You're pretty exposed up there," says Shepard. "You're open to the elements. It's a very direct experience." The team flew in a variety of conditions; early morning when there was little ground heat to cause bumpy convective currents, later in the day when the thermals were stronger, and at different times of year.
"There were several occasions when the pilot was forced to land or decided he wasn't going to fly again that morning, because the turbulence was so strong and it was affecting his ability to maintain flight control. It was too bumpy for him," says Shepard. "But the pigeons returned to the loft with no problem. So, pigeons can deal with high levels of turbulence – more so than the ultralight. They clearly have mechanisms of coping with this turbulence.”
The Swansea University research suggests the possibility of using bird-borne sensors to shed light on air turbulence, much like the seal-borne sensors used to measure salinity and sea temperature.
"People are already equipping animals with tags for lots of different reasons and in lots of different environments," says Shepard. "They're effectively sampling in the environment all the time."
Birds could act as meteorological sensors on the move, she says, continuously collecting data about the turbulence they're experiencing along their flight paths. This, she adds, would be cheaper than using sensors fitted to aircraft, plus birds can fly in conditions that planes can't.
In another 2020 study, Shepard and her colleagues followed the flight of Andean condors, the world's heaviest soaring birds. They documented when and how individuals gained altitude, and recorded each and every wingbeat.
The data revealed the lowest levels of flapping flight recorded for any free-ranging bird, with the condors spending an incredible 99% of all flight time in glide-mode – without flapping at all. One bird even remained airborne for more than five hours – covering over 170km (100 miles) – without a single flap. This research provides insight into the way soaring birds exploit thermals, knowledge which could potentially feed into the programming of autonomous flying vehicles.
Investigations into how gulls soar above buildings could also help when it comes to planning flight paths for UAVs and drones in urban landscapes, says Shepard. In a similar way to birds, wind gusts and turbulence affect UAVs far more than larger aircraft, making flying at low altitudes in close proximity to terrain and buildings challenging.
"Urban environments are very turbulent. You've got all of these obstacles which disturb the flow. So, it's an ongoing challenge, thinking about how you can operate safely, particularly close to buildings where there's a risk that gusts could blow an aircraft towards a building and cause a crash.”
Urbanization too, says Shepard, is contributing to more turbulent skies. "We are modifying the substrate dramatically – and that is affecting the aerial environment above. Yet, we haven't really thought about urbanization in terms of how it affects the costs and the abilities of animals to fly through that.”
"There are still so many questions about turbulence," says Shepard – but one thing is for sure, our airborne travels across the globe are set to become rougher. Perhaps birds can teach us a thing or two about how to master the skies.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulence-climate-change-singapore-airlines
CLEAR AIR TURBULENCE happens around the jet stream, a fast flowing "river" of air that's typically found at 40,000-60,000ft.
You can easily have 100mph speed difference between the air in the jet stream and the surrounding air, he says. The friction around the jet stream between the slower and faster air causes turbulence. This is always there and it moves, making it difficult to avoid.
Aircraft are designed to take the worst that turbulence can throw at them, says Mr Gratton, associate professor of aviation and the environment at Cranfield University.
It’s "unlikely" turbulence will ever destroy an aircraft, he adds.
Experts say that in extreme scenarios, turbulence can cause structural damage to a plane because of how strong the winds can be.
Severe turbulence can be dangerous to air passengers because of the violent motion it can cause, which can throw anyone who is not wearing a seatbelt across the cabin.
The US's National Transportation Safety Board said there were 163 "serious turbulence injuries" on US-based airlines between 2009 and 2022 — an average of about 12 per year.
Last year, scientists at Reading University in the UK found that severe turbulence had increased 55% between 1979 and 2020 on a typically busy North Atlantic route.
They put the increase down to changes in wind speed at high altitudes due to warmer air from carbon emissions.
Oriana:
It’s one of those frustrating articles that we expect to reveal some specifics about how the birds deal with air turbulence — and then reveal nothing, only repeating and repeating that we need to study how the birds do it. “Perhaps birds can teach us a thing or two about how to master the skies” — yes, yes, we agree. No need to keep saying it.
To me the interesting part is the turbulent air in urban environments with tall buildings. Rodin said to Rilke, “There is always a wind around great cathedrals.” Skyscrapers also create air turbulence, presenting an obstacle to air flow.
As for the recent air turbulence that made the news (people injured, one dead), please click here:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw55192rd9lo
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A BREAKTHROUGH IN RECYCLING CEMENT
Scientists say they've found a way to recycle cement from demolished concrete buildings.
Cement is the modern world's most common construction material, but it is also a huge source of planet-warming gas emissions.
That is because of the chemical reactions when you heat limestone to high temperatures by burning fossil fuels.
Recycling cement would massively reduce its carbon footprint. Researchers say that if they switched to electric-powered furnaces, and used renewable energy like wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, that could mean no greenhouse gases would be released at all.
And that would be a big deal. Cement forms the foundation of the modern economy, both literally and metaphorically.
It is what binds the sand and aggregate in concrete together, and concrete is the most widely used material on the planet after water.
It is also a major driver of climate change. If cement was a country, it would be the third biggest source of emissions after China and the US, responsible for 7.5% of human-made CO2.
The problem is the material’s uniquely polluting chemistry.
It is made by heating limestone to up 1600 Celsius in giant kilns powered by fossil fuels.
Those emissions are just the start. The heat is used to drive carbon dioxide from the limestone, leaving a residue of cement.
Add both these sources of pollution together and it is estimated that about a ton of carbon dioxide is produced for every tonne of cement.
The team of scientists, from Cambridge University, has found a neat way to sidestep those emissions.
It exploits the fact that you can reactivate used cement by exposing it to high temperatures again.
The chemistry is well-established, and it has been done at scale in cement kilns.
The breakthrough is to prove it can be done by piggybacking on the heat generated by another heavy industry – steel recycling.
When you recycle steel, you add chemicals that float on the surface of the molten metal to prevent it reacting with the air and creating impurities. This is known as slag.
The Cambridge team spotted the composition of used cement is almost exactly the same as the slag used in electric arc furnaces.
Flames emerge from the top of an arc furnace as the material that will form the slag is added to the molten steel
They have been trialling the process at a small-scale electric arc furnace at the Materials Processing Institute in Middlesbrough.
The BBC was present when the first high grade, or “Portland”, cement was produced.
They are calling it “electric cement” and described the event as a world first.
The lead scientist, Cyrille Dunant, told the BBC it could enable the production of zero-carbon cement.
“We have shown the high temperatures in the furnace reactivate the old cement and because electric arc furnaces use electricity they can be powered by renewable power, so the entire cement making process is decarbonised,” he said.
He said it also makes steel recycling less polluting because making the chemicals currently used as slag has a high carbon cost too.
Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at University College London, described the way the Cambridge team have combined cement and steel recycling as “genius” and believes, if it can be made to work profitably at scale, it could lead to huge reductions in emissions.
“Can it compete against the existing infrastructure that is very unsustainably going to keep pumping cement into our lives”, he asks.
“Cement is already a billion-dollar industry. It’s David and Goliath we are talking about here.”
The hope is electric cement will be cheaper to manufacture because it uses what is essentially waste heat from the steel recycling process.
Spanish company Celsa will attempt to replicate the process in its full-scale electric arc furnace in Cardiff this week.
The Cambridge team estimate, given current rates of steel recycling, their low carbon cement could produce as much as a quarter of UK demand.
But the use of electric arc furnaces is expected to increase in the future, potentially allowing more “electric cement” to be produced.
And, of course, the process could be duplicated all over the world, potentially cutting the emissions from cement dramatically.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxee01m5yero
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IS HUMANITY DOOMED TO PERPETUAL WARS?
“The story of the human race,” Winston Churchill wrote in 1924, “is War.” The pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher Heraclitus went even further. “War,” he wrote, “is the father of all things.” John Kerry had apparently not received those memoranda. It was while Kerry served as Barack Obama’s secretary of state in 2014 that Vladimir Putin invaded and annexed Crimea. Kerry was dumbfounded. “You just don’t in the twenty-first century,” he sputtered, “behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.”
We are not sure why Secretary Kerry skipped over the twentieth century, which after all was replete with such kinetic incidents—as, truth be told, has been the still-young twenty-first. Indeed, it seems to us, reflecting on the situation in Ukraine circa 2024, that Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, is rather more au courant than John Kerry. “War is no longer a concept from the past. It is real, and it started over two years ago. The most worrying thing at the moment is that literally any scenario is possible. We haven’t seen a situation like this since 1945.” Since Russia possesses some six thousand nuclear warheads, “the situation” in question is more than usually fraught.
We offer these melancholy thoughts by way of introducing Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation (Basic Books). Regular readers will know that Hanson, a classicist and prolific military historian at Stanford University, is a frequent contributor to these pages. Since he is also a visiting critic at The New Criterion, we do not propose to review his new book. Rather, we shall endeavor to lay out some of the main lessons he draws from his survey of four famous wars of annihilation: Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes in 335 B.C.; Scipio Aemilianus’s obliteration of Carthage in 146 B.C.; Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest of Constantinople on “Black Tuesday,” May 29, 1453; and Hernán Cortés’s siege and ultimate annihilation of Tenochtitlan, the seat of the Aztec empire, in 1521.
There are, Hanson notes, many ways in which a city, a people, an entire civilization can be brought to an end. Nature herself is a mighty extinguishing angel. But Hanson concentrates on certain man-made catastrophes. His subject is not the sort of conflicts that the Sybil foresees and warns Aeneas about—Bella, horrida bella,/ et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno: “I see wars, horrible wars, and the Tiber frothing with much blood.” Nor is his subject the various genocides, pogroms, and exterminations that have punctuated with grim regularity the story of mankind’s adventure in time. It is not even the mind-boggling, industrialized slaughter of the modern age—the twenty-odd million killed in the First World War or the seventy-some million who perished in the second.
Hanson concentrates on a handful of events in which not just cities but entire cultures are obliterated. When Alexander razed Thebes in 335 B.C., he brought to an end not just a proud Greek city—home of Pindar, Hercules, Cadmus, Oedipus, and so many other central characters in Greek history and mythology. He also certified the end of the entire system of independent Greek city-states. Similarly, when Scipio Aemilianus brought the Third Punic War to an end in 146 B.C., he did more than fulfill Cato’s demand that Carthago delenda est: “Carthage must be destroyed.”
He also ended one of the two great cultures in the western Mediterranean. Carthage had been among the richest cities in the classical world. Even after its humiliating defeat in the Second Punic War, it remained vital and prosperous. When the siege of Carthage began in 149 B.C., the city boasted a population of about 500,000. When the Romans were finished, only 50,000—one out of ten—remained. All but Hasdrubal, their leader, were sold into slavery. He alone bargained immunity from Scipio. Neither his wife nor his children were saved. After being paraded through the streets of Rome in Scipio’s triumph, Hasdrubal was allowed to live out his life in Italy at ease among the destroyers of his civilization, his culture, even his language.
Hanson’s main point in these vignettes is admonitory. The story of “how civilizations disappear” (the title of his introduction) is not of historical interest only. It is just as pertinent to us now in the twenty-first century. When Thebes rebelled against Macedonian rule, it had not bargained on Alexander’s ruthlessness; it had assumed other city-states would come to its aid; this “naïveté” (one of Hanson’s favorite words of disparagement) was its undoing. “The continual disappearance of prior cultures,” Hanson writes, “should warn us that even familiar twenty-first-century states can become as fragile as their ancient counterparts, given that the arts of destruction march in tandem with improvements in defense.”
It is difficult for us in the modern West to attend to that warning. We are so rich. We are so comfortable. How could all that surrounds and supports us simply vanish? Hanson quotes a famous passage from Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. “How did you go bankrupt?” one character asks another. “Two ways,” was the response: “Gradually, then suddenly.” The same calculus can apply to annihilation. One major lesson in these episodes concerns the suddenness and velocity of apocalypse. The “transition from normality to the end of days,” Hanson writes, “could occur rather quickly. A rendezvous with finality was often completely unexpected.”
A second major lesson has to do with the continuity of human nature. “The more things change technologically,” Hanson notes, “the more human nature stays the same.”
The gullibility, and indeed ignorance, of contemporary governments and leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising. The retreat to comfortable nonchalance and credulousness, often the cargo of affluence and leisure, is predictable given unchanging human nature, despite the pretensions of a postmodern technologically advanced global village.
Our culture is not surrounded by towering walls thirty feet thick, as was Constantinople. Our defenses are far more sophisticated. Unfortunately, so are the weapons of our likely opponents. There is an irony in the fact that the seeds of our peril lie in the very power we command. “Even as humanity supposedly becomes more uniform and interconnected,” Hanson notes, “so too our world grows increasingly vulnerable and dangerous, as the margins of human error and misapprehension in conflict shrink—from Ukraine to Taiwan to the Middle East.”
Hanson takes his introduction’s epigraph from the sestet of Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias.”
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
That monument to the progeny of hubris casts its light over the whole of Hanson’s argument.
“We should,” he cautions, “remember that the world wars of the last century likely took more human life than all armed conflicts combined since the dawn of Western civilization twenty-five hundred years prior. And they did so with offensive weapons already obsolete, and all too familiar destructive agendas that persist today, unchanged since antiquity. As for the targets of aggression, the old mentalities and delusions that doomed the Thebans, the Carthaginians, the Byzantines, and the Aztecs are also still very much with us, especially the last thoughts of the slaughtered: “It cannot happen here.”
https://newcriterion.com/article/locked-in-war/
Thomas Cole: The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1836
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WHY MOSQUITOES PREFER TO BITE CERTAIN PEOPLE
Blood type
Not surprisingly—since, after all, mosquitoes bite us to harvest proteins from our blood—research shows that they may find certain blood types more appetizing than others. One study found that in a controlled setting, mosquitoes landed on people with Type O blood nearly twice as often as those with Type A. People with Type B blood fell somewhere in the middle of this itchy spectrum.
Additionally, based on other genes, about 85 percent of people secrete a chemical signal through their skin that indicates which blood type they have, while 15 percent do not, and mosquitoes are also more attracted to secretors than nonsecretors regardless of which type they are.
Carbon dioxide
One of the key ways mosquitoes locate their targets is by smelling the carbon dioxide emitted in their breath—they use an organ called a maxillary palp to do this, and can detect carbon dioxide from as far as 164 feet away. As a result, people who simply exhale more of the gas over time—generally, larger people—have been shown to attract more mosquitoes than others. This is one of the reasons why children get bitten less often than adults, on the whole.
Exercise and metabolism
In addition to carbon dioxide, mosquitoes find victims at closer range by smelling the lactic acid, uric acid, ammonia and other substances expelled via their sweat, and are also attracted to people with higher body temperatures. Because strenuous exercise increases the buildup of lactic acid and heat in your body, it likely makes you stand out to the insects. Meanwhile, genetic factors influence the amount of uric acid and other substances naturally emitted by each person, making some people more easily found by mosquitos than others.
Skin bacteria
Other research has suggested that the particular types and volume of bacteria that naturally live on human skin affect our attractiveness to mosquitoes. In a 2011 study, scientists found that having large amounts of a few types of bacteria made skin more appealing to mosquitoes. Surprisingly, though, having lots of bacteria but spread among a greater diversity of different species of bacteria seemed to make skin less attractive. This also might be why mosquitoes are especially prone to biting our ankles and feet—they naturally have more robust bacteria colonies.
Beer
Just a single 12-ounce bottle of beer can make you more attractive to the insects, one study found. But even though researchers had suspected this was because drinking increases the amount of ethanol excreted in sweat, or because it increases body temperature, neither of these factors were found to correlate with mosquito landings, making their affinity for drinkers something of a mystery.
Pregnancy
In several different studies, pregnant women have been found to attract roughly twice as many mosquito bites as others, likely a result of the unfortunate confluence of two factors: They exhale about 21 percent more carbon dioxide and are on average about 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than others.
Clothing Color
Mosquitoes use vision (along with scent) to locate humans, so wearing colors that stand out (black, dark blue or red) may make you easier to find, at least according to James Day, a medical entomologist at the University of Florida, in commentary he gave to NBC.
Genetics
As a whole, underlying genetic factors are estimated to account for 85 percent of the variability between people in their attractiveness to mosquitoes—regardless of whether it’s expressed through blood type, metabolism, or other factors. Unfortunately, we don’t (yet) have a way of modifying these genes, but…
Natural Repellents
Some researchers have started looking at the reasons why a minority of people seem to rarely attract mosquitoes in the hopes of creating the next generation of insect repellents.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-do-mosquitoes-bite-some-people-more-than-others?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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NEW DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE CEREBELLUM
In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the Latin for “little brain,” which is situated like a bun at the back of the brain. This is no small oversight: The cerebellum contains three-quarters of all the brain’s neurons, which are organized in an almost crystalline arrangement, in contrast to the tangled thicket of neurons found elsewhere.
Encyclopedia articles and textbooks underscore the fact that the cerebellum’s function is to control body movement. There is no question that the cerebellum has this function. But scientists now suspect that this long-standing view is myopic.
Or so I learned in November in Washington, DC, while attending the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the largest meeting of neuroscientists in the world. There, a pair of neuroscientists organized a symposium on newly discovered functions of the cerebellum unrelated to motor control. New experimental techniques are showing that in addition to controlling movement, the cerebellum regulates complex behaviors, social interactions, aggression, working memory, learning, emotion, and more.
A Crack in the Dominant Wisdom
The connection between the cerebellum and movement has been known since the 19th century. Patients suffering trauma to the brain region had obvious difficulties with balance and movement, leaving no doubt that it was critical for coordinating motion. Over the decades, neuroscientists developed a detailed understanding of how the cerebellum’s unique neural circuitry controls motor function. The explanation of how the cerebellum worked seemed watertight.
Then, in 1998, in the journal Brain, neurologists reported on wide-ranging emotional and cognitive disabilities in patients with damage to the cerebellum. For example, in 1991, a 22-year-old female college student had fallen while ice skating; a CT scan revealed a tumor in her cerebellum. After it was removed surgically, she was a completely different person. The bright college student had lost her ability to write with proficiency, do mental arithmetic, name common objects, or copy a simple diagram. Her mood flattened. She hid under covers and behaved inappropriately, undressing in the corridors and speaking in baby talk. Her social interactions, including recognizing familiar faces, were also impaired.
This and similar cases puzzled the authors. These high-level cognitive and emotional functions were understood to reside in the cerebral cortex and limbic system. “Precisely what that cerebellar role is, and how the cerebellum accomplishes it, is yet to be established,” they concluded. Despite these clues from clinical studies that conventional wisdom was on the wrong track, leading authorities still insisted that the function of the cerebellum was to control movement and nothing more.
“It is kind of sad, because it has been 20 years” since these cases were reported, said Diasynou Fioravante, a neurophysiologist at the UC Davis, who co-organized the conference symposium. Other neurologists have noticed neuropsychiatric deficits in their patients all along, said the neuroscientist Stephanie Rudolph of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who co-organized the symposium with Fioravante. However, there was no hard anatomical evidence for how the cerebellum’s unique neural circuitry could possibly regulate the reported psychological and emotional functions, so the clinical reports were overlooked.
Now, a better understanding of the cerebellum’s circuitry is proving those case studies right and dominant wisdom wrong.
Precision Wiring
The wiring pattern in the cerebellum is precisely organized and compacted to concentrate three-quarters of the brain’s neurons into a 4-inch lobe. The principal type of neuron in the cerebellum, called the Purkinje cell, is widely branching like a fan coral, yet flattened and nearly two-dimensional. The fan’s blades are the neuron’s dendrites, which receive incoming signals. These flat neurons are arranged in parallel, as if millions of fan corals were stacked atop each other in a tight bundle. Thousands of tiny neurons run axons—the brain’s transmission cables for electrical impulses—perpendicularly through the stack of dendrites, like threads in a loom. Each axon connects with the dendrites of tens of thousands of Purkinje cells.
This level of interconnectivity gives the cerebellum’s 50 billion neurons an astonishing capacity for integration. This circuitry, unique to the cerebellum, can crunch enormous amounts of incoming data from the senses to regulate body movement. The fluid movement of a ballerina leaping across the stage requires the cerebellum to rapidly process information from all senses while tracking the changing positions of limbs, maintaining balance, and mapping the space through which the body is moving. The cerebellum uses that dynamic information to control muscles with precise timing, and to do so in the right social context, driven by emotion and motivation.
Fioravante and Rudolph told me that neuroscientists are now realizing that the powerful neural circuitry in the cerebellum that integrates information for body movement also equips it to handle complex mental processes and behaviors. “For example, right now,” Rudolph explained as we talked before the symposium began, “you ask questions, and we give answers. That is a complex behavior.” She needed to comprehend my speech, formulate a response, and then use muscles to produce words. She also had to take in my body language and other subtle signals. “You are nodding right now, for example, so from this I can conclude that you are listening and interested,” she said.
I had not fully appreciated the complexity of the motor control required for speech. The physicality includes not only the intricate gymnastics of tongue and lips—to produce sound as well as adjust pitch and volume—but also gesticulation. Our words are timed so we don’t talk over the other person, and they are regulated for the social context: infused with the proper emotion and driven by motivation, thought, anticipation and mood.
Coordinating these diverse functions requires tapping into nearly everything the brain does—from regulation of heart rate and blood pressure, performed in deep brain regions, to the processing of sensory and emotional information, performed by the limbic system. It also requires engaging with the highest-level cognitive functions of comprehension, inhibition and decision making in the prefrontal cerebral cortex.
For the cerebellum to do that, it would have to have connections that span the entire brain. Until now, evidence for that was lacking, but new techniques are uncovering these pathways.
A Hub of Sensory Input
Mere decades ago, when neuroanatomists mapped the brain, they couldn’t find any direct connections from the cerebellum to brain regions that control emotion and cognition, such as the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. That led them to believe that the cerebellum was somewhat isolated and uninvolved in these higher cognitive functions. But just as bandits might evade a tracker by changing vehicles, neural signals can leap from one neuron to the next. This undercover action threw neuroanatomists off the cerebellum’s trail.
New methods have enabled neuroanatomists to trace those pathways from the cerebellum across relay points, following them across the entire brain. Researchers can, for example, plant rabies viruses in neurons to see precisely which other neurons they contact. They’ve genetically engineered fluorescent proteins to flash when a neural impulse fires so they can see the flow of traffic in neural circuits. They can also track footprints left behind by neuronal traffic: The appearance of proteins produced when a neuron fires can help identify all the cells communicating in a neural network when a specific behavior is performed.
At the symposium, researchers shared a flurry of fascinating new findings revealed by these new methods that demonstrate their evolving understanding of the cerebellum.
Jessica Verpeut of Arizona State University reported data describing the intricate and expansive network of cerebellar connections that are activated throughout the brain in mice when they socialize or learn to negotiate a maze.
Rudolph shared experiments showing that maternal behavior, studied in female mice caring for their pups, was affected by hormones acting on the cerebellum, especially the hormone oxytocin, which promotes maternal bonding. When this mechanism was disrupted experimentally, the mother no longer cared for her pups. Yi-Mei Yang of the University of Minnesota showed that when she disrupted certain cerebellar neurons, mice lost interest in engaging with unfamiliar mice introduced into their cage.
However, they had no difficulties interacting with and remembering novel inanimate objects. This indicated a deficit in complex social-recognition memory, similar to what autistic people experience.
In fact, the cerebellum is often smaller in autistic people, and Aleksandra Badura from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam presented new data suggesting that the cerebellum is involved in autism because it is a hub of sensory input, especially for signals related to social contexts.
These new, groundbreaking studies show that in addition to controlling movement, the cerebellum regulates complex social and emotional behavior. To achieve this global influence, the cerebellum must be a data-crunching hub with connections throughout the brain. No wonder it has so many neurons. To accomplish this high-order command and control on its own, it must be, in fact, a little brain. ~
https://www.wired.com/story/cerebellum-brain-movement-feelings/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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GUT BACTERIA CHANGE AS WE GET OLDER, AND MAY ACCELERATE AGING
In the study, published in Cell Reports on September 28, 2021, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles sampled bacteria from the small intestines of 251 people between the ages of 18 and 80 who were undergoing upper endoscopies, when a doctor sticks a small probe down the throat and past the stomach. Usually, researchers study gut bacteria through stool samples. But those microbes, coming from the very end of the bowel, can be quite different from bacteria in the small intestine, closer to the stomach. That’s where most digestion and nutrient absorption occurs. “All the magic happens in the small intestine,” says study co-author Mark Pimentel, a gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai.
After analyzing the samples, the researchers found that aging was linked with changes in bacterial populations. Older people had more bacteria from the families Enterococcaceae, Lactobacillaceae, Enterobacteriaceae and genus Bacteroides, “and those are all groups of bacteria that can cause disease in humans,” says Heidi J. Zapata, an infectious disease specialist and immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
E. coli bacteria, which belong to the Enterococcaceae family, for instance, can cause diarrhea and urinary tract infections. Overall bacteria diversity also declined as people got older, going down as people headed towards age 80. Low diversity has been linked to health problems too, Pimentel says. Studies have found a relationship between low bacterial diversity and Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome and colorectal cancer, among other conditions. It is not crystal clear how changes to the microbiome might drive aging, or if they really do.
Research in rodents has shown that disruptions to gut bacteria can make it harder for intestinal stem cells to regenerate. This could affect metabolism as well as the overall health of the intestinal barrier; problems with that barrier have been tied to aging and age-related conditions such as liver disease, metabolic diseases, inflammatory bowel diseases, and lung and brain problems. The microbial changes that occur later in life may also create a more inflammatory environment in the gut, helping to drive the aging process. When researchers transplanted gut microbes from older mice into younger germ-free mice in a 2017 study, the young mice developed inflammation that is indicative of aging.
Because the new study only found associations, it does not prove that these changes cause aging. Instead, gut bacteria might change after people get older. “We really don't know the chicken or the egg here, but we need to find out,” Pimentel says. He hopes to tease out answers in future studies, including additional experiments that transplant “older” microbiomes into young animals to see if it makes them age faster or become ill. It would also be interesting, he says, to study the microbiomes of healthy centenarians and identify differences that could play a role in healthy aging.
It’s also unclear just how broadly applicable the findings are, though, because the patients were undergoing upper endoscopies—and “endoscopy is not something people happily volunteer for,” says Elena Biagi, a researcher who studies the microbiome at the University of Bologna in Italy, who was not involved in the study. These people may have had underlying medical issues that prompted them to get endoscopies, so their gut bacteria may not have been representative of normal, healthy individuals.
The researchers were also able to figure out that medication use and the presence of disease affected the small intestine microbiome, separate from aging. They found, for instance, that the more medications people took, the more Klebsiella bacteria they had in their intestines—but that the abundance of Klebsiella was unrelated to their age or the number of diseases they had. Klebsiella can cause hospital-associated infections including pneumonia, surgical site infections, and meningitis, and these bacteria are often antibiotic-resistant.
They also found that people with underlying conditions, regardless of their age or medication use, tended to have more Clostridium bacteria in their intestines, which can cause dangerous C. difficile infections.
If, in future studies, researchers do show that microbial changes drive the aging process rather than the other way around, then protecting the microbiome through healthy lifestyle choices or targeted medical interventions may keep people healthier for longer. Pimentel says eating well and exercising almost certainly help.
Zapata encourages people to also be judicious in their use of antibiotics—to avoid taking them when they aren’t needed, and to take targeted antibiotics rather than drugs that kill off a broad array of bacteria. After treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics, gut bacteria tend to grow back with less diversity, she says, and more unhealthy kinds of bacteria can thrive.
“An unbalanced microbiota can definitely lead to infections and disease,” she says. “It is important to understand these changes that happen as we get older to try to see if we can improve the aging process.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/gut-bacteria-change-as-you-get-older-and-may-accelerate-aging?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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ending on beauty:
ALL NIGHT LAST NIGHT
All night last night I awoke
to the sound of rain and fell
asleep to the sound of rain.
Dreams came slightly askew
of the streets of Morgantown
and a stranger I’m destined to meet.
In the morning I became one
cricket singing
in the cold wet grass.
~ Sutton Breiding
